IsraCampus.Org.il

The rewriters, like Benny Morris, Ilan Pepe and Baruch Kimmerling, mostly publish first in English to gain the praise of the West's "justice seekers." Their works are then quickly grabbed for translation into Arabic and displayed in marketplaces in Damascus, Cairo and Tunis. Their conclusion is almost uniform: that in practise Zionism amounted to an evil, colonialist conspiracy to exploit the people dwelling in Palestine, enslave them, steal their land, and disinherit them. … Such calumny is not new: the doctrine that Zionism is a colonialist movement serving imperialism by exploiting and enslaving Arab peasants and laborers was formulated and disseminated in Soviet propaganda organs since the 1920s, embellished with "scientific" terms from the Marxist-Leninist lexicon. … Ze'ev Sternhal, Yigal Eylam, Yehoshafat Harkabi and many other academics, slavishly imitated by journalists and politicians, regard stressing religious, cultural and emotional affinity to the land - the most important rationale for our existence here - with sheer contempt. They see it as contaminated by nationalism, fundamentalism, fetishism ("a pronounced national fetish, like the Land of Israel," wrote Eylam) - and even fascism.

ONE-WAY TRIP ON THE HIGHWAY TO SELF-DESTRUCTION
Author: Aharon Megged
Jerusalem Post Jun 17, 1994

Israeli historians gleefully prove that our defensive wars were really wars to destroy another people.

ZIONISM appears to be entering a stage of Spenglerian decline. And, as it approaches this stage, it seems to be propelled by a latent biological urge to self-destruct.

Worrisome signs of such decline are evident on both the mundane and intellectual planes. In the conduct of the peace negotiations with the Palestinians, for example, some steps seem animated by a subconscious suicidal drive.

If the Palestine National Council had canceled its Charter which calls for Israel's destruction and the establishment of an Arab state in the entire area of what was Mandatory Palestine, and had it proclaimed this to the world - not just in English or in Hebrew, but in Arabic, thus giving it theoretical and practical significance - then we should agree not just to autonomy but to an independent Palestinian state. Such a state would exist within borders and conditions which would ensure Israel's security and the safety of Jewish settlements.

But as long as the Charter has not been annulled, any additional concession to the Palestinians by way of withdrawal from the territories can only advance their goal, explicitly stated in the Charter: the annihilation of Israel.

Arafat pledged to annul the Charter in his letter to Prime Minister Rabin of September 9, 1993. But all Palestinians continue to cleave to the Charter with all its clauses. And they regard autonomy as but the first stage in the "doctrine of stages," the plan for Israel's destruction which derives from the Charter.

Their spokesmen - when not troubling to use diplomatic language - announce this openly. In reply to friendly wishes by the IDF commander in Jericho, the Palestinian Police commander asserted: "This is the first step toward the restoration of Jerusalem and the entire occupied land to their owners."

Two weeks later, he spoke about "three types of weapons," which included "weapons we sanctify, aimed at the occupation." He added: "The door is open to the agreement's opponents who wish to escalate the armed struggle."

Arafat's call in Johannesburg for a jihad to liberate Jerusalem ("our capital, not theirs!"), and his assurance that signing agreements with Israel is like the Prophet Mohammed's pact with the Kureish tribe (implying "our vow is not a vow, our oath is not an oath") provide a true expression of the aspiration in every Moslem's heart.

The subsequent crafty efforts to excuse the felony, by Arafat himself and by Arab and Israeli commentators, recall Orwell's "newspeak."

THE REVIVAL OF THE OLD ANTI-ZIONISM

Yet it is in the intellectual rather than the political sphere that the drive for self-destruction is primarily evident.

For two or three decades we have been witnessing a frightening spectacle, the realization of the ominous prophecy of Nathan Alterman's powerful short poem: "Then did Satan say: 'How will I conquer this beleaguered one? He possesses courage, ingenuity, resourcefulness and tools of war.' And then he said: 'I'll not rob his strength, nor bridle him, nor rein him in, nor enervate his hand. But this I'll do - blunt his mind, till he forgets his cause is just.' "

Hundreds of our society's leading writers, intellectuals, academics, authors and journalists, joined by painters, photographers and actors, have been unceasingly and diligently preaching that our cause is not just. And this, they say, is true not only since the Six Day War - the beginning of that inherently unjust "occupation" - nor just since the establishment of our state in 1948, which as one prominent scholar put it, "was born in sin," but since the beginnings of the Zionist settlement at the end of the last century.

What is happening before our very eyes is the rewriting of Zionist history, a rewriting in the spirit of its adversaries and foes; and it is being done while active participants in this history are still around - people who created it, experienced it, remember it, dedicated their lives to it.

And they tell us that all the fine concepts on which we and our children were brought up for two or three generations - redeeming the soil ... the conquest of labor ... ingathering of exiles ... the Hagana, etc. - were nothing but hypocrisy and eyewash, euphemisms for a foul plot.

Such calumny is not new: the doctrine that Zionism is a colonialist movement serving imperialism by exploiting and enslaving Arab peasants and laborers was formulated and disseminated in Soviet propaganda organs since the 1920s, embellished with "scientific" terms from the Marxist-Leninist lexicon.

Except that this time around, the Israeli academics and columnists propagating this material do not belong to that school. Paradoxically, in an era when Soviet theories and slogans have gone up in smoke, leaving nothing but ashes, it is these anti-Zionist theories and teachings that are resurrected - and in Israel.

What, then, is the gospel preached by these "new historians," and emulated by journalists whose words are avidly consumed with masochistic enjoyment by thousands of Israeli seekers of "justice and truth"?

The message is that most of the verities forged in our consciousness and experience are false. You, whose parents immigrated here from Poland and settled in a small, arid moshav, worked hard and produced a small farm by their house - you thought they had come to fulfill the dream of creating a new life "in the land beloved of our forefathers," a life of labor and Hebrew culture, free of the fear of pogroms and dependence on the Gentiles. But you were mistaken! You were naive! They were "colonialists" whose hidden wish was to exploit the Arabs in the neighboring village.

You, who after completing your studies went to work in orchards, construction, the harbors: you thought you were "conquering labor," translating to deeds what you read in Borochov, Brenner and A.D. Gordon about the need "to reverse the Diaspora pyramid" and transform the Jewish People into a nation living by the sweat of its brow. But they fooled you and you fooled yourself: you did this to displace the indigenous Arab laborer!

And when you joined the Hagana and went out at night on guard duty, when Jews were being slain in ambushes every day and night, and orchards and plantations were destroyed and fields set alight - and you exercised self-restraint to avoid hurting innocent Arabs - you thought you were obeying a moral law you learned at school and in the youth and labor movements ... But no: you were just following the path of oppressive, imperialist colonialism.

HISTORY WITHOUT PEOPLE

Defining Zionism as "a colonialist movement" is not merely an unscientific distortion of facts and a total disregard of the ideology which animated Zionism; it is crude propaganda in the old Kremlin mold.

For in diametric contrast to any colonialist movement - British, French, German and Dutch - Zionist ideology, as expressed in the writings of its thinkers, in articles, stories and poems from the tim of the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement to the rise of the state, was never aimed at setting up huge estates and factories to exploit the cheap workforce of natives, steal their land and enslave them by depriving them of their rights as individuals and as a community.

On the contrary, it aimed at creating an independent economic and cultural system alongside the Arab system, without either depending on it or exploiting it; the intention of the Labor Zionist movement was to develop and advance the Arab system.

It is impossible to imagine colonialism without colonialist awareness by the settlers and their leaders. Yet the history written by "the new, post-Zionist historians" is devoid of people. From their ivory towers they proclaim: "It never happened that way!"

"Nonsense!" they say to the moshav and kibbutz members in the Hefer Valley, today a lush garden. "Not by right do you dwell in these lands; you stole them from the poor wretches who lived on them, and Zionist leaders lied to the Mandatory inquiry commissions when they proved all Arabs were compensated and their situation improved." (Lewis Finch, a pronounced anti-Zionist sent here by the British Colonial Office in 1931 to check the truth of Arab allegations, found that in the 13 years of Mandatory rule the number of displaced Arabs as a result of Jewish land purchases totaled 624. )

"Lies!" say these writers to the men of the Hagana and Palmah who were taught that "purity of weapons" and the sanctity of life were supreme values, and who shared a passion for the brotherhood of nations. And lies, too, they say, are the stories of our brave stand in the War of Independence, of few against many. The heroic deeds of the defenders of Deganya, Mishmar Ha'emek, Negba and Kfar Darom, who fought almost with bare hands against armed soldiers and armor, are debunked.

What is it that moves Israeli scholars to distort and uglify the Jewish national liberation movement, whose only desire was to realize the 2,000-year-old hope to return to Zion, where both individuals and the people would "together be resurrected," as the poet Mane put it?

Even if this movement did make mistakes and cause injustices, the fact is that there has never been another national liberation movement in human history which so strove to attain its goals without violence, so endeavored to guide its steps by moral principles.

What is it that impels them to present it to the world as a movement founded on conspiracies to enslave and oppress? Are they really merely seeking the "scientific" truth, are they truly acting out of pure conviction? Or is some other drive, another ideology, propelling them against themselves and their kin?

As every historian knows, not only is historiography not objective, but there are no objective statistics; and even the ostensible appearance of truth is tendentious. All historians select from that "pile of detritus of past facts" what suits their object, obscuring the remainder.

A history of World War II could be written focusing on the suffering of Germans from Allied bombings and invasions - and it would all be based on facts, for the Germans really did suffer terribly. All one need do is distort proportions.

Thus, with "pure and noble" intentions, some Israeli historians now gleefully prove that our defensive wars were really wars of aggression for the destruction of another people; that the Israeli soldier, whom we know well as our own flesh and blood, has the appearance and mentality of Nazi Stormtroopers.

CRIMES OF TAKING OVER THE LAND OF THE FATHERS

Another assault on Zionist legitimacy is the denial of the historic link of the people of Israel with the land of its forefathers. The right of Israel to exist at all is thus based purely on "the right of need."

Ze'ev Sternhal, Yigal Eylam, Yehoshafat Harkabi and many other academics, slavishly imitated by journalists and politicians, regard stressing religious, cultural and emotional affinity to the land - the most important rationale for our existence here - with sheer contempt. They see it as contaminated by nationalism, fundamentalism, fetishism ("a pronounced national fetish, like the Land of Israel," wrote Eylam) - and even fascism.

Some years ago, a book called States for the Jews by Eliahu Binyamini enumerated 34 territorial plans for settling Jews, whether in autonomous areas or states, in various parts of the world. The best known are Uganda, Birobidzhan, Argentina, the Kimberleys zone in Australia, New Caledonia and Madagascar.

These were meant, according to the territorialists, autonomists, communists and others, to solve the problem of Jewish "need." They all came to naught. Those that were begun, like Birobidzhan (which not only had Soviet support but financial backing from Jewish communists and their associates around the world) and Argentina, stagnated and deteriorated into nothing. They were doomed to failure.

The Zionist idea is the only one which came alive, in a wondrous way no historian could have foretold. In the Land of Israel, there arose a Jewish nation in a Jewish state. It revived the Hebrew language, created a Hebrew culture, and ingathered millions of Jews from all corners of the Diaspora.

If the "new history" had any grounding in life and human nature ("Historians should know how people who aren't historians behave," wrote E.M. Forster) it should have reached a simple conclusion, obvious to anyone with common sense: the reason for this achievement was the cultural, spiritual and emotional affinity of the Jews for the cradle of their faith and culture, their ancient homeland.

This link has never been severed since the Second Temple. Its religious expression (prayer, Talmudic texts, liturgical poetry, messianic movements, etc.) is well known. But since the Lovers of Zion era it has worn a mainly secular garb, as evidenced by thousands of poems, stories, articles and scholarly books.

Without this link, mentioned several times in our Declaration of Independence as granting us the "natural and historic right" to establish a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, we would not have come here. And we would have nothing to do here, in this small, disputed corner of the Middle East. For "need" alone, there are other, perhaps better, solutions.

'LOVE THINE ENEMY'

Our right to the land does not give us leave to rule inhabitants who have dwelt here for many generations, or to deprive them of their civil and national rights. It is understandable that there has been moral outrage in large segments of the Israeli public against acts of oppression and injustice inflicted on residents of the territories we occupied in a war forced upon us. ("Forgive us for winning!" as Ephraim Kishon quipped at the time. )

But since the Six Day War, and at an increasing pace, we have witnessed a phenomenon which probably has no parallel in history: an emotional and moral identification by the majority of Israel's intelligentsia, and its print and electronic media, with people committed to our annihilation; people who openly declare their intention to expel us from this land, branding us villains without a conscience, worse than British, French, Spanish imperialists.

Whoever researches the dimensions of this pathological phenomenon, possibly rooted in the Diaspora proclivity for self-abasement and sycophancy toward Jew-haters, would have to go through enormous quantities of material. There have been thousands of articles and reports in the press, hundreds of poems, hymns and satires, dozens of documentary and feature films, exhibitions and paintings and photos in which Israeli soldiers are made to appear like Nazis.

Cumulatively, these phenomena constitute a monstrous indictment of Israel, much more venomous and sophisticated than all the primitive Palestinian propaganda disseminated throughout the world.

The B'Tselem pamphlets alone, whether mostly accurate or sometimes false - as one B'Tselem leader recently admitted, claiming the organization had been "misled" - these charges of murder of children, demolition of homes, torture and other atrocities, are enough to place the State of Israel before a kind of Nuremberg court, in which the "Judeo-Nazis" would be condemned for eternity.

And the "Women in Black" decided in February of 1990 to wear the colors of the PLO, whose charter calls for the annihilation of Israel, that is - their own annihilation.

Millions of Moslems, from Iran in the east to Libya in the west, vow in their mosques, with raised fists and holy fervor, to redeem Jerusalem by the sword. They swear that the Jews, whom the second Sura of the Koran calls "sly, cruel and treacherous," will be driven out of the occupied land.

Six Arab countries across our borders neither recognize Israel nor acquiesce in its existence. In seven, 10 or 15 years a Palestinian state will undoubtedly rise, for reality demands it. But even if peaceful relations and cooperation prevail between us (as one would hope), there will always be strong extremist elements whose blood will seethe with the urge to wipe us off the map.

If the rising tide of self-doubt fails to subside, if the self-denial of our right to be here continues to enfeeble us, the "Satan" of Alterman's poem will triumph, and we shall lack the strength to resist dangers to our very existence.