Clown Coinage

Oh dear! Clownish it might be, but it's getting past a joke, this  ignorance – genuine or feigned – bedeviling the propaganda spewed out by the brainwashed westerners of the anti-Israel movement in their efforts to brainwash others.

We saw recently that Mick Napier, head honcho of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, is using a Mandate-era coin as propaganda.

Now, from another opponent of Israel, whose name I'll leave out with the observation only that he seems to be a Kiwi (no doubt some Aussies would say "Not so much a Kiwi, more a galah!"), comes another Arab propaganda piece featuring a Mandate-era coin, introduced as a prize exhibit for the absurd argument that there was indeed a sovereign country called Palestine and, by implication, for promoting the view that Israel should be replaced by a single state for Jews and Palestinian Arabs, including the Arabs who left their homes during Israel's War of Independence and the descendants of those Arabs.

We all know what that scenario would portend.

Do these western propagandists really think that interwar Palestine, or Eretz Israel as many Zionists prefer to term it, was devoid of Arab hostility towards Jews?

Have they not heard, for instance, of the Hebron Massacre of 1929?

Let's remind them of the words of an eyewitness:

‘I remember that I went up in the afternoon on the Friday [23 August] to serve the milk; I used to go on the road to Jerusalem on the main highway; nothing happened when I was walking, but when I was walking back I saw these little groups ... of about ten Arabs here and there, talking. And as I was nearing home, one of them threw a stone at me and hit me in the cheek, and of course I started screaming and ran to the house, and as I ran up the stairs my father opened the door, dragged me in and shut the door again quickly. “We are leaving, we are going to our [i.e. her] grandparents,” he said, which was only down the road actually...

We took few belongings; we didn’t have time.... [M]y father said we were going to the hotel, and sure enough we went through the back way and ran through the different yards, and got to the hotel and there were already different people there. There was an elderly couple that came on holidays ... and the doctor was upstairs, he was staying there; and a few of our friends came and then later I found out there were 33 souls staying there, my aunties and Uncle Sholem and his wife, and so on, and some friends. I’ll never forget, we locked all the doors, and they said we would be safer upstairs, so we all walked upstairs ...

There we were, Esther [her sister] and I, standing at this big window, upstairs in the hotel, and when we were looking out to another house not very far at all, and it was called the Yeshiva School... where Orthodox young men were learning the Torah ... that’s the house where they stayed, where they lived.

And ... we could see the Arabs – they had hardly any guns but there were these long swords – screaming “Kill the Jews, kill the Jews” in Arabic.

And first they opened the doors, and a few minutes later they came out and ... we could see the blood ... on those swords ... Anyway, the next thing, all of a sudden, the Arab who was the owner of the hotel – my grandparents were just running it, of course – and this wonderful man, this Arab, who was in his vineyard with his two wives ... heard apparently of the massacre that was going on, and came running up with his wives ... and said: “Come on, you are not safe here. Come down quickly.” He took us down the back steps to his home. It was one big room and off it were the bedrooms (and whatever other rooms), but we, all 33 of us, went into this room and sat down; and he locked the doors and put his two wives on guard outside the door....

[Eliezer Dan] Slonim was the bank manager [the local branch of the Anglo-Palestine Bank], and he had all these people working for him, and amongst them was a friend of his, an Arab, a great friend of his, working there with him. And these Arabs were running up the steps to his home and he came up and saw his friend and he said: “Thank G-d it’s you. Now I feel safe.” And the fellow took a gun and shot him.

Then the others ran in and they stuck a sword down his wife’s throat. The couple had two boys, so they killed one of them, but the other one miraculously survived. They had a neighbour, a very big fat woman, wearing these big, big clothes that were hanging down, and she lay down on top of the other child. His name was Binyamin Slonim, and he is still alive today, somewhere in Israel...

These Arabs went around and killed and killed and massacred. Our baker, our poor darling baker; they lit the primus stove, and they put his head on it, and another was found upside down in the toilet. The toilet was just a hole in the ground; and they just did atrocious things....

[W]e saw bodies lying in different parts of the road. We saw bodies lying on the ground and being picked up, and when we came to the big square in front of the police station, there were so many dead lying around and so many people sitting next to them howling, crying, moaning, holding their heads. It was a terrible picture: there were bodies and blood everywhere, and one poor woman, whose husband was on a stretcher, was on her knees and her dress was all red with blood and she was crying for her husband and the scene was just absolutely shocking.’

  (In the following video the name Slonim has been misspelled):

Have they (the western propagandists?) not heard of the Arab riots (with attendant atrocities) of 1936-37?

It seems they have swallowed the Arab narrative hook, line, and sinker.

Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer pointed out here that unlike 'the Jewish narrative – which dates the "Jewish-Arab conflict" as having begun in 1880', 

'The Palestinian Arab narrative [starts] its narrative from 1948 by characterising the conflict as the "Israeli-Arab Conflict"– thus allowing such narrative to completely ignore a host of critical events that occurred between 1917-1947, let alone the centuries before that.

This rejectionism is clearly evident in article 20 of the 1968 PLO Charter:

"Article 20: The Balfour Declaration, the Palestine Mandate, and everything that has been based on them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of their own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong."

The Palestinian Arab narrative conveniently ignores the fact that the two-state solution was first suggested in 1922 and actually proposed and rejected by the Palestinian Arabs in 1937, 1938 and 1947.

The Palestinian Arab narrative has no memory or remorse for the Arab riots in 1920 and 1929 that targeted and slaughtered Jews or the 1936-1939 Arab revolt which wrought similar havoc on Jews living in Palestine during those turbulent years.

Starting from 1948 the Arab narrative can avoid confronting the reality that Winston Churchill told a delegation of Palestinian Arabs leaders in 1921 urging him to halt Jewish immigration to Palestine:

"It is manifestly right that the Jews,who are scattered all over the world,should have a national centre and a National Home,where some of them may be reunited. and where else could that be but in the land of Palestine, with which for more than three thousand years they have been intimately and profoundly associated?"

The flawed Arab narrative also avoids accepting responsibility for the Arab pressure put on Great Britain to severely curtail Jewish immigration to Palestine between 1939 and 1945 - resulting in hundreds of thousands of Jews perishing at the hands of the Nazis when their lives might have been spared had Great Britain ignored such inhumane Arab demands.

The Arab narrative has always rejected - and will continue to reject - the will of the international community expressed in the 1920 San Remo Conference and the Treaty of Sevres, the 1922 Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the 1945 United Nations Charter.' [Emphasis added]

Here, by the way, is a video that features Arabs who want to live in Israel (hat tip: Jean Vercors):