All 3 Monotheisms Have Had "Conversion by the Sword", Including Judaism

Anti-Islamic xenophobia has once again brought into vogue the accusations that Islam is spread by the sword and inherently violent and blah blah blah. The quick rejoinder from Muslims is "hey boys, Christianity has plenty of experience in spreading by the sword too". From Middle Age Crusaders eating the flesh of Muslims in Syria and Palestine, to Reconquista baptism-death-or-exile choices (or sometimes a combination) in Iberia, to the only slightly more subtle attempts to weld modern colonialism and mostly Protestant evangelizing in the 19th and 20th centuries, Christianity ain't free from the charge either. Truth is, one can point to episodes of both violent and peaceful spread of Islam and Christianity over the centuries, and in speaking in the broadest possible definitions of those religions, neither has a clean record. Both have examples of people of the most vile persuasions and other people of the purest hearts spreading their faiths.

Largely left out of this discussion however is Judaism. The assumption most have is that Judaism is not and never has been a proselytizing faith therefore any discussion of whether it is/was spread by the sword is moot. I'll admit, this was always my back of the mind assumption as well. However, I've been back to reading and finding all sorts of juicy tidbits as books often do. This time, a friend has persuaded me to read Shlomo Sand's "The Invention of the Jewish People". A book I had heard about but frankly somewhat dismissed and never intended to read because the hypothesis inherent in its title struck me as over the top even if the author was an Israeli and not some non-Jewish anti-Jewish racist. I'm a bit over halfway through right now and the book has its strong and weak points, but fundamentally it does what a good book should: it makes the reader really think.

So, I'm not doing a full book review here, but I want to address this question of spreading religion "by the sword", which Sand shows actually has happened in Judaism as well. One might argue that with the secular religion of nationalism (in Israel's case Zionism, but one might apply similar arguments to any virulently nationalistic society) having in many ways replaced traditional religion, perhaps Israel is still engaged in this with its wars aimed at getting neighboring countries/societies to accept ethnic nationalism (with all its inherent racism) as an acceptable basis for regional states despite the fact that the era of such has long since passed in most even moderately successful and stable countries of the world. However, that's far too esoteric and problematic a debate to get into here, and instead what Sand shows is that there are direct examples of spreading Judaism by the sword in the "traditional" manner. Nor are we speaking of the Biblical accounts of Joshua's destruction and occupation of Canaan by the Hebrews (which Sand in any case doubts ever happened based on his reading of the archaeological and textual history). That would perhaps be something more comparable to the Crusades and less to the Reconquista. Rather, we're speaking of the era of the Hasmonean Judean kingdom.

Sand goes into a discussion of the mixture of Hellenistic and monotheistic influences in the era, arguing that the two were much more symbiotic and not nearly as antagonistic towards each other as Zionist historiography has since tried to claim. That in turn leads him to a discussion of (1) how the era marked a major growth in the numbers of Jewish converts throughout the eastern mediterranean, far outnumbering the inhabitants of Judea and any diaspora communities of Judeans, and (2) how spreading the size of the Hasmonean realm involved conquering and forcibly converting neighboring kingdoms to their beliefs.

From here, I'll let a few pages of Sand's book speak for itself, and just close with this reminder: when people start arguing that this or that religion is inherently more or less violent than another, you can know they are standing on thin ice. Virtually every religious or cultural group that gains a position of power, has had experiences of abuse of that power, as well as the peaceful spread of influence and ideas. Certainly that is the case for Islam, Christianity, and Judaism (if I knew more about the eastern religions I'm sure we could start adding lengthy examples there as well). It is *not* the religion - its doctrines or culture - that creates problems or solutions, it is what people choose to do with it. The Bible is full of ideas which - even if one believes they are divine in origin - if carried out today would be nothing short of murderous. If a Christian wants to accuse the Qur'an of having such, then that Christian needs to stare the Bible full in the face and acknowledge it as well. And the same goes for Judaism obviously with the shared Torah/Old Testament heritage as Christianity, and as shall be shown below, a historical period - in Sand's argument, the most important historical period in all of Judaism in terms of ensuring that the number of Jews in the world to this day numbers in the millions and not the mere hundreds or thousands such as the few remaining Samaritans - in which spreading the religion by the Hasmonean sword was considered ordinary and acceptable alongside the more peaceful spread of the religion in places like Egypt and Syria.

Anyhow, I blabber on yet again, here's the text from Sand (pp. 157 - 160). Apologies for the lack of footnotes which in many cases actually add some very good corroborating evidence, sources, quotes, and anecdotes, for that you'll have to read the book yourself:

*****

In 125 BCD Yohanan Hyrcanus conquered Edom, the country that spread south of Beth-zur and Ein Gedi as far as Beersheba, and Judaized its inhabitants by force. Josephus described it in Antiquities of the Jews:

• Hyrcanus took also Dora and Marissa, cities of Idumea, and subdued all the Idumeans; and permitted them to stay in that country, if they would circumcise their genitals, and make use of the laws of the Jews; and they were so desirous of living in the country of their forefathers, that they submitted to the use of circumcision, and of the rest of the Jewish ways of living, at which time therefore this befell them, that they were hereafter no other than the Jews.

Thus did the ruling Hasmonean high priest annex an entire people not only to his kingdom but also to his Jewish religion. Henceforth, the Edomite people would be seen as an integral part of the Jewish people. At that time, joining the religion of another group was regarded as joining its people--its cult community. But it was only the progress of monotheism that made attachment to the faith as important as the traditional association with origin. This was the beginning of the slide from what we might call Judeanity--a cultural-linguistic-geographic entity--towards Judaism, a term denoting a broader kind of religion-civilization. This process would evolve till it reached its height in the second century CE.

Who were the Edomites? There are several sources. The important Greek geographer Strabo, who lived at the time of Augustus, erroneously stated, "The Idumaeans are Nabataeans. When driven from their country by sedition, they passed over to the Jews, and adopted their customs." Ptolemaeus, an obscure historian from Ascalon, was probably more accurate when he stated, "The Idumaeans, on the other hand, were not originally Jews, but Phoenicians and Syrians; having been subjugated by the Jews and having been forced to undergo circumcision, so as to be counted among the Jewish nation, and to keep the same customs, they were called Jews." Their number is not known, but it could not have been insignificant, since their territory was about half the size of the kingdom of Judea. Needless to say, the Edomite peasants and shepherds probably did not all become good monotheists overnight. Nor, presumably, did all the Judean farmers. But it is almost certain that the higher and middle strata adopted the Mosaic religion and became an organic part of Judea. The converted Jews of Edomite origin intermarried with the Judeans and gave Hebrew names to their children, some of whom would play important roles in the history of the Judean kingdom. Not only Herod came from among them; some of the disciples of the strict Rabbi Shammai and the most extreme Zealots in the great revolt were also of Edomite descent.

Jewish historiography has always been ill at ease about the forced conversion and assimilation practiced by the Hasmoneans. Graetz condemned the acts of Hyrcanus, asserting that they were catastrophic for the Jewish people. Dubnow, in his gentle way, sought to soften the history and depicted the Edomites as "tending to cultural assimilation with the Jews," and Baron remained laconic in his treatment of the "problematic" issue. Zionist and Israeli historiography was divided. Klausner, the proud nationalist, saw the conquest of Edom and the conversion of its inhabitants as righting an old injustice, since the Negev had been part of the kingdom of Judah during the First Temple period. One of the later historians of the Hasmonean kingdom, Aryeh Kasher, went out of his way to show that the mass conversion of the Edomites was voluntary, not imposed by force. He argued that the Edomites had been circumcised before the conversion--and that everyone knows Jewish tradition has always opposed forced conversion.

Urban Edomites had long been under Hellenistic influence and were probably uncircumcised. Moreover, though the rabbinical tradition did in fact renounce any attempt to force people to change religion, it only did so much later--after the Zealot uprising in the first century CE, when forced conversions to Judaism were no longer feasible. Under the Hasmonean rulers of the late first century BCE, it was a regular feature of Jewish policy, and Hyrcanus was not the only one who implemented it. In 104-103 BCE his son Judas Aristobulus annexed the Galilee to Judea and forced its Iturean inhabitants, who populated the northern region, to convert to Judaism. According to Josephus, "He was called a lover of the Grecians; and had conferred many benefits on his own country, and made war against Iturea, and added a great part of it to Judea, and compelled the inhabitants, if they would continue in that country, to be circumcised, and to live according to the Jewish laws." In support, he quotes Strabo, who wrote, "This man was a person of candor, and very serviceable to the Jews, for he added a country to them, and obtained a part of the nation of the Itureans for them, and bound them to them by the bond of the circumcision of the genitals."

Judeans probably lived in the Galilee earlier, but it was populated and governed predominantly by the Itureans, the center of whose kingdom was in Chalcis in Lebanon. Their origin is obscure--probably Phoenician and possibly tribal Arab. The territory annexed by Aristobulus stretched from Bet She'an (Scythopolis) in the south to beyond Giscala in the north--that is, most of today's Galilee minus the coast. Masses of Itureans, the original inhabitants of the Galilee, assimilated into the expanding Judean population, and many became devout Jews. One of Herod's associates was Sohemus the Iturean. It is not known if John (Yohanan) of Giscala, a Zealot leader in the great revolt, was of convert origin like his comrade and rival, Simon Bar Giora.

Aristobulus's brother and successor, Alexander Jannaeus, also sought to convert the people he conquered, but he conducted wars mainly against the Hellenistic trading coastal along the borders of Judea, and was less successful in converting their inhabitants. The Hellenists, who were proud of tehir culture, might have been willing to convert to Judaism of their own free will, as indeed some of them did in the countries around the Mediterranean. But it appears that they were not willing to accept the forced Hasmonean conversion, which would have meant losing the political and economic privileges granted to them by the poleis--the city-states. According to Josephus, Alexander destroyed the city of Pella in Transjordan "because its inhabitants would not bear to change their religious rites for those peculiar to the Jews." We know that he totally destroyed other Hellenistic cities: Samaria, Gaza, Gederah and many more.

Judas Aristobulus's father, Hyrcanus, had to deal with a complicated problem of conversion. When he conquered the region of Samara in 111 (or 108) BCE, he could not forcibly convert the Samaritans, who were in part descendants of the ancient Israelites. They were already monomtheists--they avoided pagan customs, observed the Sabbath and practiced circumcision. Unfortunately, it was forbidden to marry them, their liturgy was slightly different, and, moreover, they insisted on holding their ceremonies in their own temple. Hyrcanus therefore destroyed Shechem (Nablus), the main Samaritan city, and obliterated the temple on Mount Gerizim.

A long Jewish tradition marks the twenty-first day of the month of Kislev, the day when the Samaritan temple was destroyed, as a propitious day in the Hebrew calendar, on which it is forbidden to fast or mourn the dead (see the Tractate Ta'anith). The national memory, too, honors the figure of Yohanan Hyrcanus, the Jewish Titus, destroyer of the Samaritan temple. Today in Israel, many streets proudly bear the name of this victorious Hasmonean priest.

Middle Eastern Misogyny's Western Roots

Anyone who knows me or who has been reading my blog knows I have little (read no) tolerance for simplistic arguments pinning blame for the world's ills on religion and belief systems.   Yes, religion is a player in the complex systems of life and society and can have positive and negative impacts, but it is one player among many and in most cases where people try to pin the blame on religion I see little more than brainless reductionism.  That's why I put Bill Maher Religulous-type ranting in the same category as Salafist and Puritan and Kach-type extremism.  It's a reflection of blindness to complexity, an unwillingness to even try to understand difficult issues in favor of dumbing things down.  Yes, sometimes we need to cut through the fog and call a spade a spade, but it turns out that most of the world really is grey and we are far too eager to declare things black and white than reality would dictate.

So, along those lines, I get sick of hearing people blame the misogyny and oppression of women in the Middle East on religion.  I could go into how almost identical modes of oppression can be found in many non-Muslim societies in the Mediterranean (Egyptian Coptic Christian or Serbian Christian "honor" killings of women for example).  But without going into all the modalities of the present, I've been reading a very good book about early Christianity that has a section discussing the role of women in the ancient Mediterranean that is very enlightening.  While right-wing kooks who rage against "Islamofascists" (without knowing pretty much anything about either Islam or fascism) talk about Islam supposedly being the source of many of the misogynistic problems they rail against (only among Muslims of course, they are pretty much blind to the presence of the severe violence against women that still exists in their own societies), the author of this book shows quite clearly how many of these practices really have their roots in ancient antiquity.  And not even in ancient Middle Eastern societies like Persia or Mesopotamia, but in traditional Greco-Roman western societies of antiquity and in Mediterranean Jewish society (which lets remember had an extensive presence throughout the Roman world and not just in the lands of ancient Israel).

Enough of my rantings, now for the extensive quotations.  The book is called "Introducing Early Christianity: A Topical Survey of Its Life, Beliefs & Practices" by Laurie Guy who is a "lecturer in church history at Carey Baptist College, Auckland, New Zealand, and he is lecturer with the School of Theology at the University of Auckland."  The parts I am quoting are only in regards to this topic of the ancient western and Judaic roots of misogyny, but if you are interested in the broader topic of the first centuries of Christianity, I heartily recommend the book as a good introduction.  He clearly takes an apologist's view towards his version of Christianity, but his scholarship is honest, making frequent reference to primary sources and he makes it easy enough to distinguish his interpretory (is that a word?) conclusions from his good attempts to review and present the broad topic.

Read on and note the many misogynistic practices which long pre-date Islam.  And for anyone who wants to say "oh but we wonderful westerners have overcome all that unlike those backwards Middle Easterners", I'll invite you to [1] go look up the statistics on domestic violence and murder of women in your own countries, or count the ratio of male to female political and business leaders in your countries, and [2] start reading up on Middle Eastern feminist thought and history and compare the pace at which those trends have been developing compared to the pace it took them to develop in your own countries.  In any case, I think you'll find the following discussion all the more fascinating in that it shows practices that sound familiar today in parts of the world, but were issues in Muhammad's time, Christ's time, and Julius Caesar's time.  Regardless of religion - pagan, Christian, or Muslim.  The source of the problems lie elsewhere beyond religion (even if religion does then often jump into the mix and become part of it), as do most of the solutions.

*****

[From Pages 166-169]

Women in Greco-Roman society.  Marked diversity appears within this category.  One legacy of classical Greece largely kept Eastern women veiled and in the home, without formal education.  The tendency for women to remain in the home had become much more relaxed, however, by the time of the early church.  Many women remained veiled, but many others, especially from the upper class, were starting to go about unveiled.  In some ways, rural and lower class women were freer in their movements than urban and upper class women, for example, in drawing water and trading in the marketplace.  On the other hand, high-status women, Greek and Roman alike, might sometimes transcend gender in determination of social role.  So occasionally, women owned brick factories, became philosophers and acted as barristers.  A few achieved public prominence, but they seldom filled roles that would require their speaking in public.

The Roman world restricted women's movements within the wider society less than did Hellenistic society, and wealthier women had access to education up to age twelve or so.  At the same time, women might sometimes hold public office in the East, Cleopatra being an obvious example.  This was not so in the Roman West, where they could not vote or hold public office; at most they could act as the power behind the throne.

Though variations existed, the overall structure of society was patriarchal.  Men dominated.  Apart from exceptions such as the Vestal virgins and Sibylline prophetesses, women basically had no leadership roles in Greco-Roman religion.  A sharp distinction between the public and the private spheres of life enforced the separate roles: the man's sphere was the public space, the woman's the private place.  Women were created for domesticity.

With regard to marriage, until recently historians agreed that women in the Mediterranean would normally enter marriage somewhere around ages twelve to fifteen.  More recently B. D. Shaw has persuasively argued that this conclusion comes from faulty interpretation of the data and that women in both halves of the empire typically married in their late teens.  Shaw's perspective still indicates, however, that women married at a young age, a factor that would encourage submission to their older husbands.  Moreover, even if a majority of women married in their late teens, quite a number married earlier.  In the Christian community, Melania the Elder was married at fourteen, Melania the Younger at twelve, and Macrina was engaged at age eleven.

Roman culture (though not Greek culture) viewed women as under the tutelage of men.  The father held unlimited power over his household, even that of life and death.  At marriage the daughter usually passed from the hand (manus) of her father to that of her husband.  This practice reinforced a sense of women's inferior nature.  Devaluing of women can also be seen in the common practice of infanticide, which typically meant the exposure of female infants.  This was justified on the basis of an alleged law stemming from Romulus, requiring a father to raise all male children, but only the first-born daughter.  This resulted in a great gender imbalance, with perhaps one-third more men than women.  A study of 600 families based on inscriptions at Delphi has shown that only six of these families had raised more than one daughter.

The hierarchical nature of Roman society and the low status it gave to women is likely evident in Trajan's food distribution programs for children in Italy in the early second century.  According to inscriptions at Veleia (Elea), a town in southern Italy, the monthly allowance was sixteen sesterces for boys, twelve for girls, twelve for illegitimate boys and ten for illegitimate girls.  Of the 300 recipients only 36 were girls.  This sort of data points to a perception of women as inferior, of less value, subject to a dominant man, and with no public role in life.  Exceptions occasionally occurred--through wealth, through connections, through outstanding strength of personality--but they were exceptions.  It was fundamentally a man's world.

Women in Judaism.  Though details differed, the lot of Jewish women overall was not unlike that of their Gentile neighbors.  They had no public role.  As the first-century Jewish writer Philo explained:

• Market places, and council chambers, and courts of justice, and large companies and assemblies of numerous crowds, and a life in the open air of actions relating to war and peace, are suited to men; but taking care of the house and remaining at home are the proper duties of women; the virgins having their apartments in the centre of the house within the innermost doors, and the full-grown women not going beyond the vestibule and outer courts; for there are two kinds of states, the greater and the smaller.  And the larger ones are really called cities; but the smaller ones are called houses.  And the superintendence and the management of these is allotted to the two sexes separately; the men having the government of the greater, which government is called a polity; and the women that of the smaller, which is called oeconomy [household management].
  

Along with the rest of the Mediterranean world, Jewish girls married in their teenage years.  Marriage may have had greater honor among Jews, but divorce was not uncommon.  In addition, in contrast to Roman law, Jewish law vested the right of divorce in men only.

Women had no significant role in public worship.  While women were subject to the negative commands of the law (the "thou shalt nots" in the Torah), they were not subject to its positive commands (keeping the festivals, reciting the Shema, prayers at meals, etc.).  Most pronouncements on the matter asserted that women were not to be taught the Torah (though other statements indicated that it did happen--rhetoric and reality often differed in relation to women).  About A.D. 90, Rabbi Eliezer asserted, "If a man gives his daughter a knowledge of the law, it is as though he taught her obscenity."  In praising God for the opportunity to learn the law, a male pray-er in Rabbinic Judaism expressed the sorry plight of women: "Praised be God that he has not made me a gentile; praised be God that he has not made me a woman; praised be God that he has not created me an ignorant man."

Regulations concerning access to the great temple at Jerusalem limited women to the Gentiles' court and the women's court.  Their insignificance in worship is indicated in the fact that they could not be counted as part of the quorum of ten necessary to form a worshipping synagogue congregation.

Pervasive negativity toward women can also be seen in the way Jewish sources regularly viewed the birth of a daughter as a disappointment.  Several Talmudic sayings mark this perspective: "It is well for those whose children are male, but ill for those whose children are female"; "at the birth of a boy all are joyful, but at the birth of a girl all are sad"; "when a boy comes into the world, peace comes into the world; when a girl comes, nothing comes."  The diminished value of women stands out starkly in the fact that they were commonly not acceptable witnesses in court proceedings.  Josephus urged, "Let not the testimony of women be admitted because of the levity and boldness of their sex."  Jewish women shared the low status of women generally in the pervasively patriarchal Mediterranean world.  Within such a world Christianity began.

"Occupation 101" - Essential Viewing

I always struggle to know where to point people who just want a basic background on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  I have reams and reams of books, websites, articles and such I can point them to, but they're either too complex, too over-simplified, too specialized, too de-personalized, assume too much knowledge, or otherwise don't really do the "101" job of explaining things with the right balance of providing sufficient information while not overwhelming.

Well, I think I finally found a good one.  An hour-and-a-half documentary, apparently around a year old, called Occupation 101.  Click that link for the film's website and if you want to order DVDs (I'm going to have to order one).  But somebody (for now at least) has also put it up on YouTube, broken up into 11 roughly 8 minute chunks.

It is not an attempt to split the baby between Israelis and Palestinians.  It is a film that puts the facts together more or less correctly to identify what the real problems are.  It has a point of view, and a basically correct one with the facts to back it up.  It's got a wealth of basic key facts, interviews a good variety of Palestinian, Israeli, Arab, American, and other personalities (including at least one person I spent a bit of time with on the ground a decade ago).  I have little criticisms of it here and there (they should have interviewed more Palestinian academics/politicians, they should have spent more time showing how deeply engrained racism and ethnic cleansing is in mainstream Israeli society/education/government/politics/etc., they should have spent more time focusing on the 4+ million Palestinian refugees outside of Palestine, they should have showed more of the very very large number of Israeli deliberate massacres of civilians from 1948 to the present, they should have shown how almost every terrorist tactic used in the conflict was first introduced by Zionist terrorist gangs, etc.), but overwhelmingly it's a great film that I highly recommend for both those who need a 101 starting point, and for those who know the topic better but want a single film that can put together a bunch of the key history, facts, imagery, and context.  I am going to post it here, hopefully it stays up on YouTube.  Either way, support these folks and order a DVD from them as well:

Part 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SbjAanvUqs

Part 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV8N9J9gJ9c&feature=related

Part 3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM1ruYCS6JY&feature=related

Part 4:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg0ql9tA1-I&feature=related

Part 5:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-ZHRPHrOsI&feature=related

Part 6:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agn1dHqQlzY&feature=related

Part 7:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErOsqvO-qsQ&feature=related

Part 8:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIh8Kky541g&feature=related

Part 9:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWdwkmLIDfg&feature=related

Part 10:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv8mA4yGwIk&feature=related

Part 11:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqXwX9Fy9Uw&feature=related

A Few Righteous Among the Israelis

Jews around the world often refer to the Righteous Among the Nations, those good people who stood up for humanity and saved the lives of many Jews during the Holocaust. I count at least one of my European relatives among them, a man who in my childhood I remember proudly displaying the items he'd stolen from Nazi soldiers (a helmet, a radio, a boot - he didn't have it anymore, but even a motorcycle) and telling how he had helped Jewish citizens of his country escape to safety during the occupation years. These righteous may have been relatively few in a time of sheer madness, but their goodness and their sacrifice is worthily remembered today.

Palestinians and Arabs often realize as well that while their numbers may be few, there are Israeli and other Jews around the world who acknowledge the crimes of 1948 and subsequent ethnic cleansing by Israel, and who are working very hard as well for acknowledgement of the past and justice and reconciliation for the future including the Right of Return.  Now, I think we need to be clear who we're talking about.  I'm not talking about the Israelis who mindlessly participate in their massacres and then wake up feeling a twinge of remorse 20 years later and spend most of their time worrying about how slaughtering innocent people is bad for their own feelings.  These folks I'm sure help shrinks grow their practices a lot, but frankly such attitudes are all too little too late and if anything simply are another tool to perpetuate Zionist ethnic cleansing by spreading the false myth that somehow Zionism has a humanitarian angle in its roots.  It doesn't, and a handful of people engaged in what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe calls "shoot and cry" doesn't change that fact.  No, the people we are talking about are people who go much deeper, who realize that the founding sin of Israel is its open declaration that one group of people has rights based on ethnicity and all others have none, which is then enforced on pain of death or exile.  These people acknowledge this reality and are willing to say so even in the midst of the brainwashed, unnaturally-militarized Sparta society that Israel is.  These people get the root of the problem, and not just its latest manifestations in the headlines, and they are working to overcome it.

Of course, there is deep deep anger in the Arab world at Israel's decades of crimes and these few righteous often are forgotten in the heat of the moment (a heat that Israel's ongoing crimes ensures stays high most of the time), but just yesterday as Israel's latest Gaza massacres of civilians continue, Al-Jazeera was running a documentary featuring several of these Israeli Jews of conscience dissecting the anatomy of the occupation fact by fact.  Palestinian authors have for decades included in their writings characters of nuance and conscience among Israelis, and it fairly common for non-Zionist Jews (ranging from the Orthodox Neturei Karta folks to secular academics such as Ilan Pappe to crusading journalists and activists such as Meron Benvinisti) to be pointed to in Arab media and discourse as examples of conscience that show that Zionism and Judaism are not the same thing. It is these bridges that give hope for the future of a united country (call it what you want, Israel-Palestine, Canaan, Holy-Landistan, Kiryat Hummus, whatever) where people of all ethnicities will be able to live under a common set of laws and where people will be (to get MLKish heading into the long holiday weekend) judged according to the content of their character and not their creed.

Anyhow, I'm rambling on about this because I came across via the Palestine Remembered website an organization in Israel I hadn't been aware of called Zochrot that falls firmly in this category of Righteous Among the Israelis. They work hard to raise awareness of the Nakba among an overwhelmingly Nakba-denying Israeli populace, and to call for the Right of Return of all Palestinian refugees as a necessary requirement of peace. Zochrot's website is here: http://www.zochrot.org/index.php?lang=english

Here is a brief two minute video of some of the great work Zochrot does, leading a tour of Israelis and Palestinians of the ethnically cleansed village of al-Malha to raise awareness of what really happened (including a brief encounter with an Israeli who tries to deny to the face of a survivor of the Nakba that the local Jewish school was built on top of the Arab cemetery):



Good stuff, you can find more videos on their website.  Keep it up Zochrot and all people of conscience.

Let's talk about Sderot...or is it Najd?

So let's talk about Sderot, that town in Israel that the Israelis claim as the main symbol justifying starving 1.5 million dirt-poor civilian refugees in Gaza, murdering almost 1000 now (by the time I'm done typing maybe we'll be over that number) and wounding thousands more innocents while flattening entire neighborhoods and massacring entire families.  Sderot is a symbol for the Israelis, the poor innocent town getting rocketed for supposedly no reason.  But here's the thing: Israel wants us to believe that its cities and towns have no history before they supposedly showed up and made the desert bloom.  Well, allow me to disabuse that notion.

You see, Sderot isn't really Sderot.  Sderot is Najd (نجد), a village of Palestinian farmers.  In 1948, it was a farming village of 719 people.  The village and its agricultural lands occupied 3355 acres, 93.3% Arab owned, 3.6% Jewish owned (there were several Zionist collective farms in the area that were said to be on friendly terms with Najd and other area villages, though there was no one Jewish in Najd), and 3% public land.  Walid Khalidi in his seminal book "All That Remains" gives some historical background on page 128:

"The village stood on an elevated spot on the southern coastal plain, and overlooked the agricultural lands aroud it. Several secondary roads linked it to the coastal highway at points between al-Majdal and Gaza, as well as to the villages in the vicinity. Its name meant "elevated ground" in Arabic. In 1596, Najd was a village in the nahiya of Gaza (liwa' of Gaza), with a population of 215. It paid taxes on a number of crops, including wheat, barley, and fruit, as well as on other types of produce and property such as goats, beehives, and vineyards. [Hut. and Abd.:144]

Edward Robinson, an American biblical scholar who travelled in the area in 1838, noted that Najd lay south of a wadi. He observed the villagers winnowing barley by throwing it into the air against the wind with wooden forks. [Robinson (1841) II:371] In the late nineteenth century, Najd was a small village with a well and a pond [NAA Note: see the remains of the irrigation pool here and here]. [SWP (1881) III:260] As its population grew during the mandate period, it expanded northwestward. The village population was Muslim, and children attended school in the village of Simsim (see Simsim, Gaza District), 2 km to the northeast. The residents of Najd worked primarily in agriculture and animal husbandry. Fields of grain and fruit trees surrounded Najd on all sides. Fruit trees were concentrated on the north and northeastern sides--where irrigation water was available from wells--and in the beds of the wadis that crossed the lands. In 1944/45 a total of 10 dunums was devoted to citrus and bananas and 11,916 dunums were allocated to cereals; 511 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards. Khirbat Najd was located south of the village and contained rough, stone foundations of ancient buildings, vaults, and cisterns.

So Najd was a thriving little agricultural village that had been around for hundreds of years, even if its education for the kids was sub-standard, but then that was a direct effect of the British authorities conscious decision to keep the native Palestinians poorly educated by under-funding their school system (read Ilan Pappe's "A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples" for more on that).  So what happened to Najd, why does no one hear of Najd in the headlines today, where did Sderot come from?  Let's turn to Khalidi (referencing the infamously racist advocate of more ethnic cleansing, but still meticulous, Benny Morris) and Israeli historian Ilan Pappe who describe the ethnic cleansing of Najd and the surrounding areas.  First Khalidi, again page 128:

The villagers of Najd were expelled on 13 May 1948, just before the establishment of the state of Israel. Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that the inhabitants of nearby Simsim were expelled at the same time by the Palmach's Negev Brigade.

And Pappe on page 146-7 of his "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine":

By the beginning of June, the list of villages obliterated included many that had until then been protected by nearby kibbutzim. This was the fate of several villages in the Gaza district: Najd [NAA's emphasis] Burayr, Simsim, Kawfakha, Muharraqa and Huj. Their destruction appeared to have come as a genuine shock to nearby kibbutzim when they learned how these friendly villages had been savagely assaulted, their houses destroyed and all their people expelled.  On the land of Huj, Ariel Sharon built his private residence, Havat Hashikmim, a ranch that covers 5000 dunams of the village's fields.

Despite the ongoing negotiations by the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte [NAA Note: later assassinated - because he insisted on trying to return Palestine's innocent refugees to their stolen lands - by Zionist 'Lehi' terrorists with the explicit approval of future Israeli terrorist Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir], to broker a truce, the ethnic cleansing moved on unhindered.  With obvious satisfaction Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary on 5 June 1948, 'We occupied today Yibneh (there was no serious resistance) and Qaqun. Here the cleansing [tihur] operation continues; have not heard from the other fronts.' Indeed, by the end of May his diary had reflected a renewed interest in ethnic cleansing. With the help of Yossef Weitz, he compiled a list of the names of the villages taken, the size of their lands and the number of people expelled, which he meticulously entered in his diary. The language is no longer guarded: 'This is the list of the occupied and evicted [mefunim] villages.' Two days later, he convened a meeting in his own house to assess how much money had meanwhile been looted from the banks of the 'Arabs', and how many citrus groves and other assets had been confiscated. Eliezer Kaplan, his minister of finance, persuaded him to authorise the confiscation of all Palestinian properties already taken in order to prevent the frenzied wrangling that was already threatening to break out between the predators who were waiting to swoop down on the spoils.

And so it went, ethnically cleansed villages, lands, and properties were being divided up by the mafia don and arch-terrorist David Ben Gurion.  Among which were the lands of Najd.  Back to Khalidi telling the fate of Najd, page 128 again:

Two settlements were established on village lands: Sderot (110103), founded in 1951 to the south of the site; and Or ha-Ner (112107), founded in  1957 closer to the site, to the northeast...The surrounding lands are cultivated by Israeli farmers.

And so it was, Najd was ethnically cleansed, its lands stolen by other farmers, the Israeli kibbutzim who were so sympathetic doing nothing to demand their former neighbors be allowed back, instead the Israelis divvied up the stolen property for themselves like the thieves they were.

But you say it was so long ago, its ancient history, we have enough problems now, why bring this up on top of it all?  Because friend, the Israelis may have tried to erase Najd with Sderot, they may have tried to pretend it never existed and get on enjoying their stolen property pretending it wasn't stolen, but...you see the people of Najd didn't cease to exist. Those 719 villagers from 1948 had had children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and as of 1998 they numbered an estimated 4400.  And in fact, the people of Najd are closer than you think to today's headlines.  The village elder (or Mukhtar in Arabic meaning "chosen") was Hajj Muhammad Ahmad Mahmud Jasir (you can see his picture here) and he was pushed out at gunpoint with his family by the Palmach terrorist gangs to the Gaza Strip, where impoverished and penniless they settled in the Jabalya refugee camp.  Jabalya, does that sound familiar?  It should, Jabalya refugee camp, a dirt-poor pit of Zionist-created misery in northern Gaza is now under non-stop Israeli bombardment and was the site of the latest infamous Israeli massacre of dozens of civilians at UN school that had been designated a safe site (after the Israelis dropped leaflets everywhere saying they intended to flatten these people's neighborhoods and refugee camps) and which the Israelis had specifically been given the coordinates of:

This is not just an irony of history, that the Israeli/Zionist terrorists first ethnically cleansed these people, stole their lands for themselves, pushed these people into squalid refugee camps just a few miles away, and now have begun to bombard these same poor people with the most advanced weapons on earth for the crime of resisting their oppressors.  It is not mere irony.  It is the key to the solution.  The Israelis you see feel stuck too.  They don't have a problem shedding the blood of Palestinians over and over and over.  And they don't have a problem ethnically cleansing people.  But the problem is, they've now pushed 1.5 million innocent people (including the few thousand of Najd) into a tiny little box, from which they don't know what to do with them.  They can't push them into Egypt because they have a Quisling collaborator there (Mubarak) whose rule they don't want to de-stabilize, and in any case they know the Egyptians who have a real military (even if pitiful compared to Israel's) would really fight back if they tried to do that.  No one else in the world will take these people in and in any case these Palestinians keep up with this stubborn notion that they want to stay in Palestine, even Gaza!

So they can't ethnically cleanse them again from the last little corner of Palestine they've held onto, and they don't quite feel up to the task of simply slaughtering all 1.5 million in one swoop because it wouldn't allow them to maintain (either to themselves or to others) the myth of their moral purity.  So instead, what do they do?  They just keep provoking the people in Gaza.  They cut them off from the sea and fishing livelihood, they cut off their fuel and electricity, they cut off their food, they cut off their medicine.  And then, facing starvation at the hands of Zionism and with the full acquiescence of the world who aids the Zionists, the Palestinians desperately fight back.  Which the Zionists then use as their excuse to kill more Palestinians.  If they can't kill them all at once, they can at least kill more than they used to.  And maybe just maybe the Israelis hope, they'll magically disappear.  They don't care how, die under US-supplied missiles or emigrate or just...somehow disappear.  For now, just kill as many as you can and claim the moral high ground of Sderot.  Which was never Najd you see.  And the people of Najd don't live in Jabalya you see, almost within eyesight of Najd.  Where the people of Sderot who stole their lands live claiming victimhood.

Madness isn't it?  Zionist lunacy to live in such a violent, hate-filled world of stealing from the poor and killing them because they aren't of your religion.  It's insane.

But I said in the name of the village of Najd and Sderot built on top of it there is the solution.  And there is.  An insanely simple one.  Easy to do.  If one simple mental barrier is broken down.  A mental barrier.  Let the people of Najd...walk home.  It'll probably take a couple of hours granted.  And the people who call the place Sderot today, well they'll have to learn to share.  And accept that they live in a place that for hundreds of years was called Najd, and that its people today still call Najd.  And once they do that, the solution is there.  The rockets stop.  The people of Najd don't want to launch rockets at their own home town.  Nor do they want to kill anyone.  They just want to live.  They don't want to starve, they don't want to be bombed, they want to live, in the only homes they have.  In Najd.

You see, the solution is simple.  Treat everyone as an equal human being, and share.  It's a simple lesson I try to teach my kids every day.  Yo Israel, think you can teach your people that?  Or would you rather just go on murdering and starving innocent people and watching rockets fall on your people who now live in Najd?

Frustrated Musicians for Gaza (and against Quislings)

As in most rounds of Israeli massacres of Palestinians, Arab musicians are coming out singing for the victims and decrying the brutality, and - crucially - the impotence and acquiescence of the Arab rulers. There is a long tradition of Arab musicians decrying their leaders betrayal of the Palestinian people. Um Kalthoum (probably the single most famous Arab singer of all time for those not familiar with her) famously hosted some of the Egyptian officers that the British stooge King Farouk had sent into Palestine with broken rusty rifles and insufficient numbers, as a deliberate show of disdain for the rulers.

One can read this artistic impulse in a number of ways. On the one hand, the musicians tend to be far more reflective of popular sentiment. They show the disdain of their rulers, their anger at Israeli brutality, and above all their tears for the innocent victims of Palestine and sympathy with their struggle for freedom. They reflect the people far more than anything any Arab ruler or government does. On the other hand, they also reflect the impotence of the Arab people in their desires to help the Palestinians and stop the massacres and ethnic cleansing. The Quisling rulers often tolerate this sort of expression seeing it as a harmless relief valve that doesn't directly threaten their rule. Sort of like King Abdullah or Hosni Mubarak is saying "let them pour all their energy into making songs and banging their head against the walls, let them tire themselves out with that while we suppress with our secret police any real manifestations of dissent that threaten our own dictatorial powers". So you get these huge outpourings of public sympathy that artists reflect, but no ability to channel that sympathy into real action.

Here is one recent example, Egyptian singer Tamer Hosny sings for Gaza with a clip showing scenes from the latest events. The song and video clips are full of scenes not just of Israel's barbarous actions and Gaza's scores of innocent victims, but also of Arab leaders meeting and doing nothing, protestors around the Arab world saying "we have only ourselves" (i.e., why aren't we helping our brethren?), and a heart-rending cry from a man in Gaza shouting out in desperation "wayn al-'arab?!" ("Where are the Arabs?!"). Indeed, the title of the song itself (I believe it's the title of the song, it's at least an oft-repeated phrase in it) tells of this popular frustration in the inability to actually help - "ana mish a'arif a'amal Haaga" - "I don't know what to do". Worth watching for the imagery and emotion even if you don't speak Arabic:



One other clip I found via Laila Al-Haddad's "A Mother From Gaza" blog actually comes from our side of the blog. A guy named Michael Heart who looks like your typical struggling young musician in California, made a song and video for the people of Gaza called "We will not go down". The song artistically I think is forced lyrically, but the imagery and heart strike as genuine. I point it out because I think it is emblematic of something that US opinion polls consistently show: that despite politicians and media who are stacked up entirely on Zionism's side in the US, there actually is far more understanding out there than you'd think. I am reminded of some old friends of mine, a Mormon couple who I ran into a few years after our initial friendship again by chance. They were as conservative as Mormons come, old Iowa farmer types, super-conservative, and real just wonderful salt-of-the-earth people who anyone would want for grandparents. The second Intifada had broken out, they were watching headlines with that sort of vague notion that something tragic and scary was happening halfway around the world, but they knew I was interested and knew a lot about this stuff, so they asked me what I thought about what was going on. The wife, who was a young lady at the time of WW2 and so remembered it as a real event and not just the stereotyped "Greatest Generation" Tom Brokaw image we've since adopted (don't get me wrong, totally agree it was a necessary war and that right was on the Allies' side, but even a just war is full of ugliness), when I commented about how Israeli troops were not the lily-clean "most moral army in the world" they claimed, piped in about how disappointed she and others had been in WW2 about the sexual escapades of US soldiers abroad. The husband's response (the one this run-on paragraph is really about) I think reflected an attitude that many more Americans on the right than is commonly acknowledged feel but doesn't really get air time - he said he sympathized with the Palestinians because "if somebody parked a tank in my living room, you better believe I'd shoot back!" Now, there may be massive numbers of Americans who think the Bible means Israel can do no wrong, but this conservative man's attitude, the one that is reflected in the New Hampshire state motto "Live Free or Die!" and which he essentially called upon in saying he could understand Palestinian motivations, is also widespread if little publicized in the media in the US. Seeing Michael Heart's video is very much a reflection of this view. Those widespread feelings may not be enough to overcome AIPAC and the Christian right if they can't be translated into lobbying, grassroots action, and campaign fund-raising in the US system, but they are real feelings which remain far more widespread than I think many realize or acknowledge. Here's Michael Heart's video for Gaza:

Some notes on Al-Jazeera these days

So, I don’t get to watch much TV these days, but I do try to tune into Al-Jazeera every once in a while. There has been a lot of talk about the Saudi-Qatari political rapprochement and how this has supposedly led the channel to be less critical of both the Saudis and the Americans. Marc Lynch at Abu Aardvark thinks there’s not much to that argument, As’ad Abu Khalil of Angry Arab fame is convinced it is true. Personally in my snippets of watching, I tend to believe it is true, but that the thesis' applicability is only in certain spheres. They are much more circumspect in their Iraq coverage, tending to give more credence to Iraqi government and American officials and not as much to the various armed and unarmed opposition as they used to, and seem to be neutering their language/word-choice to American sensibilities. This is not absolute by any means, they did a groundbreaking interview with Muqtada al-Sadr just recently, but it does seem to me to be a trend that stands out. Removing the Sami al-Hajj irritant seen in this light could very well be an American olive branch attempting to get Al-Jazeera to be that much more compliant now that they sense the propaganda winds blowing in their direction.

I guess the more I think of it, the more it seems the point mostly is about Jazeera's Iraq, Saudi and American coverage. Outside of that (granted, those are big important topics not to be lightly dismissed), I don’t sense any backing down on topics such as Hizbullah, Hamas, Iran, and resistance to the Israelis or further American “projects” in the region (though their coverage of the deployment of American-trained Fatah security forces to Jenin today was more than a little irksome and uncritical). The broader Palestinian issue is particularly noteworthy. The 60th anniversary of the Nakba (“disaster” in Arabic, referring to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 and Israel’s independence) is being covered prominently with lots of historical notes on events of those times, interviews with the few surviving old men and women refugees, coverage of anniversary conferences (one today in Denmark of European Palestinians seeking their right of return to their homeland), and general discussion of Palestinians’ and their right to return home. Indeed, they are playing a very positive role in helping I think to refocus the Arab world’s attention on the key issue – that right of return. Americans, Israelis, and Abbas & co. are at best willing to talk about borders, settlements, etc., but they’re all perfectly willing to leave the 6 million refugees out in the cold and ignore their most fundamental human rights. That in many ways is what caused the collapse of peace talks in 2000 – the Americans and Israelis considered the topic forbidden to even bring up, Palestinians when push came to shove insisted their basic humanity represented in the right of return was the core issue and not for sale. Al-Jazeera is certainly reminding people of that basic human right these days and deserve a lot of credit for that since Arab regimes are so in cahoots with the Israelis and Americans in trying to bury it.

Anyhow, I am admittedly only an occasional viewer of Al-Jazeera these days, so if others are watching it more and disagree, feel free to chime in. That is my take from my limited sample these days.

[UPDATE: I forgot to mention something else I've noticed lately around the time of the Saudi-Qatari rapproachment. Suddenly Al-Jazeera's broadcast and website have more advertising than before. See, the Saudis being ticked at the Qataris for so long were able to basically enforce an advertising ban on the channel. Saudi Arabia is the biggest advertising market in the region, so anyone who put commercials on Jazeera would get blackballed in Saudi, so they didn't. The result was you typically only saw ads from Qatari state-owned companies. I mean, Rasgas and Qapco are cool and all in their own way, but let's face it, not many Egyptians or Moroccans or Palestinians are making dire household consumer choices over where the plastic in their kids toys comes from, and none of the above has ever likely consumed a drop of Qatari LNG. No offense, but in the face of the Saudi advert blackout, those were just Qatari state subsidies to the channel. Anyhow, it wasn't for lack of eyeballs, Jazeera obviously in a truly free market has the ability to capture huge advertising revenue. Well, now suddenly one does see international companies starting to advertise more and even Saudi and UAE (the Saudi's bestest buddies) events and companies a bit. The blacklisting is thawing along with relations, while meanwhile the coverage on some key issues (see above) is geting dumbed down.]

Israeli Mythbuster 1: Rape

So I've been doing more of that dangerous activity of reading. This time a recent book by Israeli academic Ilan Pappe entitled "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine". Excellent book, I really can't praise it enough for giving a carefully documented (from Israeli, Palestinian, and other sources) blow-by-blow account of exactly how the Israelis did in fact carry out a brutal, carefully planned ethnic cleansing in 1948 (which continues in more subtle forms to this day). You really cannot understand the conflict unless you properly understand the attrocities Israel committed in 1948 and how the Palestinians suffered then and since. The only fault I have with the book is that it should have more of the personal accounts of Palestinians so as to really bring home the trauma from their perspective. But these are not totally absent and certainly Pappe spends a lot of time using multiple sources that only corroborate Palestinian accounts that much more, and in any case one book cannot do everything.

So, what I would like to do in a series of posts is quote directly from the book in order to shatter some of the myths and lies Israelis tell others and believe about themselves. Education on history in Israel (both in schools and throughout the public sphere including aimed at tourists and outsiders) is a gigantic myth and sham, an exercise in propaganda, not truth-telling. Israelis are constantly harping on about supposed Palestinian brainwashing in their schools, when the truth is that while there are things that aren't good in Palestinian education, as usual they pale in comparison to Israeli lies and are in fact 99% reaction to what Israel has done and which Israel denies. While the scale of the ethnic cleansing of 1948 (known as the Nakba in Arabic) is certainly not at all comparable to the Holocaust, it was nonetheless a monstrous crime (all the more so considering that its perpetrators abused the sacred memory of the victims of the Holocaust - and in some cases even the Holocaust survivors themselves - in order to commit it) on the scale of the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia or Kosovo in more recent times and David Ben Gurion is proven through his own record-keeping to have been no hero like George Washington but in reality a monster akin to Slobodan Milosovic.

But ok, ok, you're listening to the rant, so I need to show some evidence. That's what the quotes from Pappe's book will be for. Hopefully I'm within fair use limits even with these long quotes, but if not I would imagine and hope that Pappe would just be pleased to see people learning more of what he has uncovered and systematically organized along with a generation of scholars willing to honestly examine the evidence of the founding sins that define Israel as the racist state it is.

Today's mythbuster topic: Rape. Israelis and their supporters recoil with horrified denial and may well accuse you of anti-Semitism if you suggest that Israeli soldier-heroes of their war of independence routinely engaged in the rape of innocent women. On pages 208-211 of his book, Pappe does away with this myth and shows that even with the efforts made to deny it and cover it up, it occurred and occurred regularly with David Ben Gurion himself keeping a running tally. The only thing I won't be able to reproduce here are all the footnotes, for that buy the book. Generally speaking his sources include Israeli military and archival records, journals of Ben Gurion and other Israeli leaders/war criminals, letters between the participants in the crimes, journalist accounts from the era (usually unreliable in their conclusions but often containing important details or hints at what was or wasn't actually going on), eyewitness accounts both Israeli and Palestinian, international organization documents from the era, and secondary citing of other academics who have also been instrumental in searching out primary sources. Any of my own comments are added in blue italicized brackets [].

Two general notes regarding rape. First, notice the way that several of the sources refer to it in an almost casual "oh and by the way about those rapes" manner. They are a strong sign of just how common they were, but unlike the carefully planned and documented demolition of Palestinian villages and homes, rape (and other crimes like looting, torture, beatings, murder of random innocents) were not specifically documented in most cases because they were both part of the general and not specific havoc which the Israeli leadership unleashed, and because they preferred that those dirty details be allowed to occur so that Palestinians would see and fear, but not promoted loud enough that an international audience's ears would perk up. And second regarding the relative paucity of rape survivors' testimonies: rape is always a crime that carries a huge amount of stigma with it. Even in the US most rapes go unreported. In Palestine 60 years ago (and especially rural Palestine), a society where female chastity was very important (overly so certainly to our modern feminist viewpoints), it was even more so. The Israelis certainly knew this just as war criminals in many wars have known it and as such it is that much more of an effective weapon. Rape in this context also becomes sexual blackmail of the extremely-violent variety which makes the victims and their relatives want to forget and hide all the more. It is a means of trying to silence the victims who were not outright murdered.

All of this means that the full scale of rape committed by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian women is not fully known. Comments indicating how unsurprising these cases are clearly show it was common and commonly known, but the murder of some victims and the silence of others living in fear and shame even 60 years later means we will likely never know the full scale of these attrocities, especially in a world where Israel and the United States have so completely and criminally sought to silence the voices of the victims.

*****

We have three kinds of sources that report on rape, and thus know that severe cases of rape did take place. It remains more difficult to form an idea of how many women and young girls were victimised by Jewish trops in this way. Our first source is the international organisations such as the UN and the Red Cross. They never submitted a collective report, but we do have short and concise accounts of individual cases. Thus, for instance, very soon after Jaffa was taken, a Red Cross official, de Meuron, reported how Jewish soldiers had raped a girl and killed her brother. He remarked in general that as Palestinian men were taken away as prisoners [it was standard operating procedure as Pappe documents in many instances that when Hagana/Israeli soldiers took over an Arab village they would gather all boys and men between 10 and 50, execute on the spot those they deemed guilty of "crimes" such as belonging to a political party or having resisted Jewish takeover, and then throw the rest into open-air pens and prison camps. Note that age at the youngest: 10. The women, children, and elderly were thus left utterly defenseless and were sent walking with only what they could carry into exile], their women were left at the mercy of the Israelis. Yitzhak Chizik wrote to Kaplan in the letter mentioned above: 'And about the rapes, Sir, you probably have already heard.' In an earlier letter to Ben-Gurion, Chizik reported how 'a group of soldiers [had] burst into a house, killed the father, injured the mother and raped the daughter.'

We know of course more about cases in places where outside observers were present, but this does not mean women were not raped elsewhere. Another Red Cross report tells of a horrific incident that began on 9 December 1948 when two Jewish soldiers burst into the house of al-Hajj Suleiman Daud, who had been expelled with his family to Shaqara. The soldiers hit his wife and kidnapped his eighteen-year-old daughter. Seventeen days later the father was able to get hold of an Israeli lieutenant to whom he protested. The rapists appeared to belong to Brigade SEven. It is impossible to know what exactly happened in those seventeen days before the girl was set free; the worst may be presumed.

The second source is the Israeli archives, which only cover cases in which the rapists were brought to trial. David Ben-Gurion seems to have been informed about each case and entered them into his diary. Every few days he has a sub-section: 'Rape Cases'. One of these records the incident Chizik had reported to him: 'a case in Acre where soldiers wanted to rape a girl. They killed the father and wounded the mother, and the officers covered for them. At least one soldier raped the girl.'

Jaffa seems to have been a hothouse for the cruelty and war crimes of the Israeli troops. One particular battalon, Battalion 3 - commanded by the same person who had been in charge when its soldiers committed massacres in Khisas and Sa'sa [a massacre where Israeli soldiers dynamited houses with families still sleeping in them, murdering dozens of innocent men, women, and children], and cleansed Safad and its environs - was so savage in its behaviour that its soldiers were suspected of being involved in most of the rape cases in the city, and the High Command decided it best to withdraw them from the town [note: not punish, not bring to trial, not execute...just relocate. Shades of the Catholic pedophile priests, only with mass murder and ethnic cleansing thrown in for good measure]. However, other units were no less guilty of molesting women in the first three to four months of the occupation. The worst period was towards the end of the first truce (July 8) when even Ben-Gurion became so apprehensive about the pattern of behavior that emerged among the soldiers in the occupied cities, especially the private looting and the rape cases, that he decided not to allow certain army units to enter Nazareth after his troops had taken the town during the 'ten-day' war.

Our third source is the oral history we have from both the victimisers and the victims. It is very difficult to get the facts in the former case and almost impossible, of course, in the latter. But their storieshave already helped shed light on some of the most appalling and inhuman crimes in the war that Israel waged against the Palestinian people.

The perpetrators can only talk, it seems, shielded by the safe distance of years. This is how a particularly appalling case came to light just recently. On 12 August 1949, a platoon of soldiers in the Negev, based in Kibbutz Nirim not far for Beit Hanun, on the northern edge of today's Gaza Strip, captured a twelve-year-old Palestinian girl and locked her up for the night in their military base near the kibbutz. For the next few days she became the platoon's sex slave as the soldiers shaved her head, gang-raped her and in the end murdered her. Ben-Gurion lists this rape too in his diary but it was censored out by his editors [note a minor discrepancy here in Pappe's prior assumption: he mentioned earlier he thought Ben Gurion's diary only mentioned rape cases that were brought to trial at the time, this one was clearly not as can be seen next]. On 29 October 2003, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz publicised the story based on the testimonies of the rapists: twenty-two soldiers had taken part in the barbaric torture and execution of the girl. When they were then brought to trial, the severest punishment the court handed down was a prison term of two years for the soldier who had done the actual killing [note the similarity to US attrocities in Vietnam and Iraq such as the My Lai and Haditha massacres where at best a slap on the wrist and generally no punishments were meted out. The lives of the victims are seen as worthless compared to those of the criminals when "our" soldiers are involved no matter which army "our" represents].

Oral recollection also exposed cases of rape throughout the occupation of Palestine's villages: from the village of Tantura [where a major massacre of civilians was committed] in May, through the village of Qula in June, and ending with one story after another of abuse and rape in the villages seized during Operation Hiram [a major series of ethnic cleansing operations in the north of the country late in the war]. Many of the cases were corroborated by UN officials who interviewed a number of women from the villages who were willing to come forward and talk about their experiences. When, many years later, some of these people were interviewed, it was obvious how difficult it still proved for the men and women from the village to talk about nams and details in these cases, and the interviewers came away with the impression that they all knew more than they wished or were able to tell.

Eyewitnesses also reported the callous and humiliating way in which women were stripped of all their jewelry [note that in traditional societies in many places around the world of which Palestine and especially rural Palestine 60 years ago was very much one, a woman's entire life savings is often held in her jewelry. Stealing that jewelry is not only stealing precious memories, it is in fact robbing her of her life savings and any hope of independence should she be widowed or divorced. Israeli soldiers did not care, greed and a desire to humiliate were all they cared about], to the very last item. The same women were then harassed physically by the soldiers, which in Tantura ended in rape. Here is how Najiah Ayyub described it: 'I saw that the troops who encircled us tried to touch the women but were rejected by them. When they saw that the women would not surrender, they stopped. When we were on the beach, they took two women and tried to undress them, claiming they had to search the bodies.'

Tradition, shame, and trauma are the cultural and psychological barriers that prevent us from gaining the fuller picture of the rape of Palestinian women within the general plunder Jewish troops wreaked with such ferocity in both rural and urban Palestine during 1948 and 1949. Perhaps in the fulness of time someone will be able to complete this chapter of the chronicle of Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Video: Sinan Antoon on Charlie Rose discusses Iraq

Watch this, Sinan Antoon is one of the best Iraqi commentators on his own countries travails (not just since 2003), the meaning of it all for Iraqis, Americans, and humanity. Ali Fadhil makes a couple decent points, but he's clearly not as deeply versed as Sinan, though he shares some good personal experiences.



And here's another link if the embedded video above doesn't work for some reason:

http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/03/19/2/continued-discussion-about-the-war-in-iraq