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Review :: Israel / Palestine |
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Alan Dershowitz's Genocide Libel |
Current rating: 0 |
by David Green
Email: davegreen84 (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified!)
Phone: 217-840-3979 |
13 Jul 2005
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In The Case for Israel, Dershowitz has given us not only a shabby but a truly wicked book that merits comparison to classics of 20th century racism (such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) in its relentless and provocative defamation of the Palestinians, and in its gross distortion of the entire history of Muslim-Jewish relations. |
ALAN DERSHOWITZ’S GENOCIDE LIBEL
In The Case for Israel, Alan Dershowitz seems in each chapter to outdo his penchant for malicious mendacity. My personal favorite is Chapter 7, “Have the Jews Exploited the Holocaust?,” in which the author’s attempt to answer in the negative leads with unintended if predictable irony to an emphatic affirmative, and indeed adds a new wrinkle. To wit, (p. 56):
“Although it would be unfair to hold the Palestinian people responsible for the murder of European Jewry (thanks, Alan), its official leadership was certainly far from blameless in the Holocaust. The grand mufti of Jerusalem was personally responsible for the concentration camp slaughter of thousands of Jews. In one instance when he learned that the Hungarian government was planning to allow thousands of children to escape from the Nazis, he intervened with Eichmann and demanded they reverse. They did and the children were sent to death camps.”
Such is the product of Dershowitz’s effort in this book-length slander against the Palestinians to match the anti-Semitic claim that Jews use the blood of gentile children in the manufacture of matzos. One is astonished to learn not only by the obedience of German functionaries to Hitler, but to a representative of a distinctly Semitic race. Was the Fuhrer himself taking orders from the mufti?
Even though Dershowitz’s claims in this book generally defy an explanatory framework, there is a context regarding the history of how the Nazi holocaust has been exploited, taking us back to the trials of Rudolph Kastner (1954) and Adolph Eichmann (1961), both political show trials, and forward to recent efforts like Dershowitz’s, as well as those of Abraham Foxman, Phyllis Chesler, and Gabriel Schoenfeld. In short, the equation of Arabs to Nazis has concurred with the end of the Cold War and the advent of the “war on terror.”
As discussed by Lenni Brenner (http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/ch25.htm), Kastner was not only the leader of the Hungarian Jewish community, but an ardent Zionist who, in negotiation with Eichmann, bartered the lives of hundreds of thousands in order to save himself and 1,600 of his family members, friends, and associates.
As summarized by Baruch Kimmerling, (http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050110&s=kimmerling):
“To accomplish this goal, Eichmann needed Jewish collaborators like Kastner, since he was understaffed, with an SS team of 150 men and only a few thousand Hungarian soldiers at his disposal. Eichmann knew that the Jews would not go voluntarily to the so-called resettlement areas at the behest of the Nazis or the Hungarian authorities. The only people they would trust were their own leaders. Here, Kastner played a major role. He and his staff had to make sure that the Jews were not informed of the real destination of the trains. Misled by Kastner and others like him, the Jews showed up dutifully at the trains in the belief that they were merely being resettled. Some even made efforts to get on the earlier trains in order to have a better choice of housing in the new settlements. In exchange for Kastner's help, Gruenwald alleged, the Nazis gave the gift of life in June 1944, organizing a special rescue train for him and 1,600 Jewish notables, including Kastner's relatives and friends.”
The sensational but largely forgotten 1954 trial pertaining to this affair in Israel was actually provoked by Kastner’s charge of libel against one of his critics, Malkiel Gruenwald, and was partially motivated by a Revisionist (right-wing) agenda to associate Ben Gurion’s government with Jewish collaborators. According to Leora Bilsky (Theoretical Inquires in Law, July 2000):
“The trial thus became the focus of a much larger public debate, not only about the behavior of the members of the Jewish Councils during the Holocaust and, in particular, their cooperation with the Nazis, but also about what meaning Israelis should give to the Zionist revolution and to its promise to create a New Jew. Thus, what originally began as a trial of past events soon became a trial about the present and the future and then evolved into a struggle about the collective identity of the Israeli people. The political tension culminated when the trial judge, Benjamin Halevi (later a judge during the Eichmann trial), found Gruenwald not guilty on most counts and condemned Kastner for collaborating with the Nazis during the Holocaust, proclaiming, in a phrase that became notorious, that Kastner had sold his soul to the devil."
This Zionist distinction among resisting and collaborating Jews, however useful it may have been through the 1940s in promoting the need for a heroic rather than submissive Jewish state, was now threatening to Ben Gurion and the Israeli leadership-- especially because Kastner not only was a Zionist, but had risen to prominence in Ben Gurion’s Mapai Party subsequent to his arrival in Palestine/Israel. Moreover, the dichotomy that needed to be emphasized for the ideological purposes of the late 1950s was not just between Jews and Nazis, but Jews and Arabs; thus the vilification of Hannah Arendt (and to a lesser extent, Raul Hilberg) for raising the issue of Jewish leaders and councils (and Kastner specifically) in her coverage of the Eichmann trial.
Kimmerling, in his review of Idith Zertal’s Death and the Nation, concludes:
“(Zertal) reinforces the link she makes between the Kastner trial and the extraordinary trial that followed it, that of Adolf Eichmann, whose capture by Israeli agents in Argentina Ben-Gurion announced in the Knesset in May 1960. According to Zertal, there were several motives behind Ben-Gurion's decision to bring Eichmann to trial in Israel. The first and most immediate was to correct the impression left by the Gruenwald-Kastner trial, namely that the Jewish leadership in Palestine failed to undertake any serious rescue efforts on behalf of their European brethren during the Holocaust. Second, in spite of his initial discomfort with the subject and his insensitivity toward survivors, Ben-Gurion sought to turn the Holocaust into the central pillar of Israeli identity and to use it as the main basis upon which to legitimize the Zionist project. Third, the Eichmann case could be used as a tool to equate Israel's Arab enemies with the Nazis. Fourth, the trial helped cast Israel as the representative and savior of world Jewry.”
At this point, Dershowitz’s own exploitation of the Nazi holocaust comes into clear view, pertaining to the role of the admittedly despicable mufti. Kimmerling evaluates this charge, which was made during Eichmann’s trial:
“One striking effort of the attorney general during Eichmann's trial was to equate the Arabs with the Nazis. This was achieved by inflating the role of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the prominent Palestinian political and religious leader (chairman of the Supreme Muslim Council and the mufti of Jerusalem) in the extermination of the Jews. In 1937, a year after the outbreak of the Arab Revolt, the British tried to arrest Husseini, among other Arab rebels, in the hope of quelling the uprising. Husseini escaped to Fascist Italy and then to Germany, where he offered his services to Hitler. There is no doubt that he saw in Nazi Germany an important ally against Zionism and, in at least one case, he tried to intervene to prevent the rescue of 10,000 Jewish children to Palestine.
"Husseini probably knew and approved of the Nazi plan to annihilate the Jewish people and hoped to receive a proper position in "liberated Palestine." He helped the Nazis form a collaborationist Muslim brigade in Bosnia, and to broadcast propaganda to the Arab world. However, the argument that he was a chief adviser to the Nazis on the "solution of the Jewish problem"--an argument on prominent display at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Museum--is preposterous. The Germans did not need Husseini's advice and in fact scorned the non-Aryan religious cleric.
“Since then, however, ‘the mufti’ has become one of the major assets of pro-Israel propaganda. The argument was and is as follows: The Arabs do not accept the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, therefore they are anti-Semites who want to annihilate all the Jews and to accomplish the Nazi program--the best example being the mufti's alliance with Nazi Germany. This social construction of reality ignores not only the complexity and the fundamentally different basis of the Israeli-Arab conflict but also some inconvenient historical facts. One such fact is that while assisting the Nazis, the mufti lost almost all his influence over the Palestinian Arabs, which he never regained. Another is that during the 1930s and '40s Palestine was the only country in the region (and perhaps in the whole world) where no Nazi party or organization was established. During the 1930s, some Arab, as well as some Jewish, leaders expressed admiration for fascist regimes, but this was before the racist bases of these regimes became clear. It was only much later that Arabs borrowed anti-Semitic literature and motifs from the Europeans and used them in their propaganda.
“It's true, of course, that the native Palestinian Arabs, as well as the Arabs of the region, did not like or welcome the European Jews who colonized Palestine. They perceived the Jewish claims of ownership over the land based on a distant and ambiguous past and on some holy scriptures as unjust and ridiculous. They opposed this colonization with all the means at their disposal, sometimes with indiscriminate violence and terror. The confrontation between Arab and Jew in Palestine was a conflict of mutually exclusive interests, much like any other ethno-national conflict. To be sure, there were some racist undertones and expressions on both sides. But it is dangerously misleading to regard the Arab resistance against the Jewish presence and the gradual conquest of the land as an expression of historical anti-Semitism. Ironically, the Zionist effort to ‘Nazify’ the Arabs--a strategy that began in the 1940s--ends up diminishing the extraordinary genocidal crimes committed by Nazi Germany.”
Dershowitz’s claim that the mufti sent Jewish Hungarian children to the death camps is referenced to Benny Morris’s Righteous Victims. It has already been established that Dershowitz not only relied heavily on Morris’s book, but on misrepresenting and misinterpreting it (http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3927.shtml)--as if Morris’s own problematic interpretations aren’t enough to address. He follows this pattern in the case of al-Husseini, about whom Morris wrote the following (p. 166):
“During 1943-44 Husseini wrote to Eastern European leaders asking that they bar the emigration to Palestine of hundreds of Jewish children and adults. In a letter to the Hungarian foreign minister, he suggested that the children be sent to Poland , under German supervision. Whether Husseini was fully aware of the Holocaust, approved of it, or directly aided the Nazis in its implementation, he had without a doubt ‘cooperated with the most barbaric regime in modern times,’ even in the understated words of his generally sympathetic Arab biographer.”
This quote merits careful comparison to that from The Case for Israel which begins this piece, which boldly asserts cause and effect far beyond Morris’ intent. In Dershowitz’s account, of course, Rudolph Kastner is nowhere to be found. Moreover, Dershowitz perversely concludes (p. 60), “The Arabs and Palestinians bore sufficient guilt for supporting the wrong side during World War II to justify their contribution, as part of the losing side, in the rearrangement of territory and demography that inevitably follows a cataclysmic world conflict.”
This argument prompts two obvious questions: Why should the Palestinians have paid a price in what is euphemistically called “rearrangement of territory” (which of course necessitated ethnic cleansing) that was not paid by Germany itself? And why should their descendants continue to pay that price as Jewish settlements expand into illegally occupied territory? Not only has Dershowitz made a genocide libel against exiled Palestinian leadership during the 1940s, he insists on punishing all of the Palestinians in perpetuity.
In The Case for Israel, Dershowitz has given us not only a shabby but a truly wicked book that merits comparison to classics of 20th century racism (such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) in its relentless and provocative defamation of the Palestinians, and in its gross distortion of the entire history of Muslim-Jewish relations, for which Dershowitz invokes—through a reference to Morris—Bernard Lewis. (For a discussion of the myth of the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, see http://psreview.org/content/view/16/70/).
It is most telling that Dershowitz continues to insist on calling himself a liberal while he proceeds to use the most egregious historical distortions to justify his rejection of international law and human rights. |
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