Avi Shlaim Quotes

While Arab governments and Palestinian leaders were willing to participate in a new and more reasonable UN peace initiative in 1948, the Israelis assassinated the UN peace mediator, Count Bernadotte, and rejected the suggestion of the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), a UN body, to reopen negotiations. This intransigent view would continue; Avi Shlaim has shown in The Iron Wall that, contrary to the myth that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss peace, it was Israel that constantly rejected the peace offers that were on the table.

The Zionist movement was in origin and in essence a European movement led by European Jews who wanted to create a Jewish state for European Jews.

bombings stopped suddenly in April 2004 as a result of a strategic choice by its leadership and a subsequent secret deal with Israel.33

Amnesty International reported that since the start of the second intifada Israel had destroyed 3,000 Palestinian houses in Gaza, throwing over 18,000 Palestinians onto the street. It damaged a further 15,000 houses, in addition to destroying hundreds of factories, workshops, greenhouses, wells, pumps, irrigation canals, and orchards. It uprooted 226,000 trees and

The British for their part were not only ready but eager to renegotiate their treaty with Jordan, not least because of budgetary constraints. After the dismissal of Glubb, the election of Nabulsi and the Suez débâcle, the subsidy had become a costly white elephant. The dilemma for the British was how to cut their losses without undermining the Hashemite state that they themselves had created in the aftermath of the First World War. The answer was to offer their ward up for adoption, and the most desirable candidate for parenthood was the United States of America. By a happy coincidence this was also the adoptive parent that Hussein had chosen for himself.

There was an acute sense of betrayal at all levels of society, from the king downwards, and the political fallout from the war was impossible to contain. On 1 November parliament passed a resolution calling for the severance of diplomatic relations with France. Only the fear of bankruptcy deterred it from calling for a break in diplomatic relations with Britain too. On 20 November, however, parliament unanimously passed a resolution calling for the abrogation of the Anglo–Jordanian treaty and of an exchange of diplomatic representatives with Russia and China. The treaty was clearly doomed, but there was as yet no agreement on how to replace the subsidy it provided. Nabulsi wanted to delay the termination of the treaty until Arab funding could be secured. Hussein, on the other hand, wished to avoid dependence on Arab allies and made a determined bid to secure American financial support for Jordan. His aim was not Arab unity against the West but the replacement of one external patron and protector by another. The first, secret approach to the Americans was made not by the king himself but by his chief of staff. On 9 November, Abu Nuwar requested from the American military attaché in Amman American economic and military aid to Jordan in “sufficient volume” to compensate for the imminent loss of British aid. If America put up the money and arms, Abu Nuwar said, communism would be prevented from dominating Jordan; he would dissolve parliament and take over the government: “I and the people of Jordan will follow US policies.

economy of Gaza. UN staff who assist the Palestinians

The Palestinians called Abdullah a traitor. He sold them down the river, they said. Yet, if Abdullah had not sent his army into Palestine upon expiry of the British mandate, it is likely that the whole of Palestine would have been occupied by Israel and an even larger number of Palestinians turned into refugees. There is thus at least a case to be made for viewing Abdullah not as a traitor but as a saviour of the Palestinians.32 The Palestinian retort is that Abdullah preserved a part of Palestine from being swallowed up by Israel, only in order to swallow it up in Jordan. Some arguments never end.

King Abdullah…was, in his innermost soul, as opposed to the alienation of any part of Palestine as any one else. But to him, moral judgement and personal beliefs were an exercise in futility, unless backed by viable and adequate power, in the broad meaning of the term.

As for the myth of the extended hand of peace, the documents show clearly an intransigent Israeli leadership that refused to open up negotiations over the future of post-Mandatory Palestine or consider the return of the people who had been expelled or fled. While Arab governments and Palestinian leaders were willing to participate in a new and more reasonable UN peace initiative in 1948, the Israelis assassinated the UN peace mediator, Count Bernadotte, and rejected the suggestion of the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), a UN body, to reopen negotiations. This intransigent view would continue; Avi Shlaim has shown in The Iron Wall that, contrary to the myth that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss peace, it was Israel that constantly rejected the peace offers that were on the table.

As the historian Avi Shlaim noted, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that” British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin “colluded directly with the Transjordanians and indirectly with the Jews to abort the birth of a Palestinian Arab state.

Meanwhile King ‘Abdullah of Transjordan had his own ambitions to dominate as much as possible of Palestine, having done his best to come to terms with both the Zionists and his British backers over his plans for the country. As Avi Shlaim reports in Collusion Across the Jordan, his account of this era, extensive clandestine contact took place between King ‘Abdullah and Jewish Agency leaders (later Israeli prime ministers) Moshe Sharett and Golda Meir.30 As the United Nations moved toward partition of Palestine, the king repeatedly met with them secretly in the hope of reaching an accord in which Jordan would incorporate the part of Palestine to be designated for its Arab majority. The king confidently gave them his assurances that the Palestinians would come around and assent to his rule.* Thus ‘Abdullah, unlike Iraq’s Nuri, had no use for any form of independent Palestinian leadership or for a body like the Arab Office that would serve as their diplomatic arm.

Bar Kokhba was held out as a national hero although the revolt he led was crushed, Judea was devastated and its population was killed, exiled or sold into slavery. The lesson we were expected to draw from the history of this revolt was that it is more honourable to go down fighting than not to fight at all.

Brigadier General Israel Lior, Eshkol’s aide-de-camp, suspected that the never-ending chain of action and reaction would end up in all-out war: In the north a pretty heavy war was conducted over the water sources. The war was directed by the chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, together with the officer in charge of the northern command, David (“Dado”) Elazar. I had an uneasy inner feeling on this matter. All the time it seemed to me that Rabin suffers from what I call the “Syrian syndrome.” In my opinion, nearly all those who served along the front lines of the northern command … were affected by the Syrian syndrome. Service on this front, opposite the Syrian enemy, fuels feelings of exceptional hatred for the Syrian army and people. There is no comparison, its seems to me, between the Israeli’s attitude to the Jordanian or Egyptian army and his attitude to the Syrian army. … We loved to hate them.

Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, the representative of the Colonial Office in Iraq, proposed an alternative to direct rule: exercising British influence indirectly through a dependent and therefore loyal Arab political elite – an ‘informal empire’. As well as being persuasive proponents of this, Lawrence and Bell were also great fans of Prince Faisal.

France, however, was no less perfidious. The three-cornered dispute came to a head in July 1920 when French forces marched on Damascus, banished Faisal into exile, and took over the government of the country. This is how the modern state of Syria was created: with a republican regime, under French control, and on the ruins of the dream of a united and independent Arab kingdom led by the Hashemites.

Mesopotamia, recently renamed Iraq. Faisal’s ascent to the throne in 1921 had to be carefully stage-managed because he was an outsider with no local power base. To make matters worse, he was a Sunni in a country with a disenfranchised Shi’i majority – the Shi’is suspected that the British were sponsoring Faisal in order to further entrench Sunni rule.

British Treasury. Colonel T. E. Lawrence pointed out to his government that ‘The Arabs rebelled against the Turks in the war not because the Turk Government was notably bad but because they wanted independence. They did not risk their lives in battle to change masters, to become British subjects…but to win a show of their own.

Although he did not use the biblical phrase, the role he envisaged for Asian and African Jews in Israeli society was ‘the hewers of wood and the drawers of water’. The effect of his policy was to hold back the Mizrahim by restricting their access to higher education and to the ‘white collar’ and well-paid occupations that went with it.

force. Another quarter of a million Palestinians from the West Bank became refugees, some of them for the second time. Once again, as in the aftermath of the 1948 war, Israel refused to allow the Palestinian civilians to return to their homes. The occupation, said to be temporary, pending a political resolution of the conflict, became permanent. Formal annexation of the Palestinian territories was eschewed but creeping, de facto annexation never stopped. Prolonging the occupation, slowly but surely, turned Israel into an apartheid state. Some of Israel’s apologists maintain that the Zionist movement was derailed from its proper course by the military victory of 1967, that the Zionism of values was replaced by the Zionism of territory. But since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march.

force. Another quarter of a million Palestinians from the West Bank became refugees, some of them for the second time. Once again, as in the aftermath of the 1948 war, Israel refused to allow the Palestinian civilians to return to their homes. The occupation, said to be temporary, pending a political resolution of the conflict, became permanent. Formal annexation of the Palestinian territories was eschewed but creeping, de facto annexation never stopped. Prolonging the occupation, slowly but surely, turned Israel into an apartheid state. Some of Israel’s apologists maintain that the Zionist movement was derailed from its proper course by the military victory of 1967, that the Zionism of values was replaced by the Zionism of territory. But since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march. Either way, there could be no doubt that the Palestinians were and continue to be the victims of the ongoing Zionist project. What

the story of my family brought home to me, however, was that there was another category of victims of the Zionist project: the Jews of the Arab lands. Moreover, there was a link between the way that the Zionist movement treated the Palestinian Arabs and its treatment of the Arab-Jews. Both groups were a means to an end: the construction of an exclusive Jewish nation-state in the heart of the Middle East.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine created empty spaces, and these spaces had to be filled by Jews from anywhere they could be found, including Jews from the Middle East, even those who had no desire whatsoever to relocate to Israel. The same colonial institutions that displaced the Palestinians were tasked with absorbing the Jewish migrants from the Arab lands. And the same arrogant, Eurocentric, Orientalist mindset greeted the Jewish newcomers from the East.

I noted the major part played by the official policy of oppression and persecution in driving the Jews to migrate. But I also laid out the evidence I have unearthed about Israel’s involvement in the Baghdad bombs that hastened the departure of the Jews. I gave this as an example of ‘Cruel Zionism’, the terrorist tactics employed by Israel to promote Aliyah and of the harm it inflicted on the Jews of Iraq.

In my rendition, Operation Ezra and Nehemiah was not a noble rescue mission by the fledgling Jewish state but the self-serving instrument for the transfer of the Jews from their homeland.

The real reason for leaving, according to my mother’s later account, was that life in Iraq had become too dangerous by 1950, for the Jews in general and for our family in particular. Persecution of the Jews was intensifying, and it assumed many different forms. The government, the judiciary and the public became overtly hostile. Restrictions were placed on Jewish trade and commerce. Jews

community was placed under surveillance. Young Jews were barred from admission to colleges of further education. The police arrested, tortured, imposed arbitrary fines and extracted money from innocent Jews in what looked like a government-sanctioned campaign of harassment. On top of all of that came the series of bombs, described in the last chapter, that provoked real panic in the Jewish community and compounded the sense of insecurity. By the end of April 1950, over 25,000 Jews had registered to relinquish their citizenship and leave

. But the most serious charge contained in the report is that Israel’s emissaries turned their local Jewish followers into terrorists. Yusef Basri and Shalom Salih Shalom were hanged in Baghdad in January 1952, about half a year after the official conclusion of Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.

This was an Israeli false flag operation designed to create bad blood between the revolutionary regime headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Western powers. Israel’s military intelligence had recruited, trained and equipped the Jewish spy and sabotage ring. The arrest of one member led to the collapse of the whole ring, a well-publicised trial of its nine members, the execution of two of them and the capture of the Israeli officer in charge: Meir Max Binnet, the same Max Binnet who had directed the false flag operations in Baghdad a few years earlier. In 1954 he was a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence branch of the IDF. He committed suicide in the Cairo prison by cutting his veins with a razor blade after being tortured and hearing that the Iraqi authorities had requested his extradition. The intention behind Operation Susannah was to sour relations between Egypt and the West; its effect was to sour relations between the Egyptian people and the Jews who dwelt in their midst. The terrorist attacks seemed to confirm the suspicions of Egyptian Muslims that their Jewish compatriots owed allegiance to a foreign country and posed a threat to national security. As Stanford professor Joel Beinin put it, ‘The involvement of Egyptian Jews in acts of espionage and sabotage against Egypt organized and directed by Israeli military intelligence raised fundamental questions about their identities and loyalties.’31 The whole affair backfired disastrously on Israel. Pinhas Lavon was the minister of defence at the time and strenuously denied ever giving the order to military intelligence to activate the ring. He denounced the type of action in the affair that bore his name as stupid and inhuman and added that it had all started in Iraq.32 Lavon was forced to resign; ‘Cruel Zionism’, however, continued to characterise Israel’s conduct long after the ‘Lavon Affair’ had died down. The ‘Unfortunate Business’ may have started with the bombs that went off in central Baghdad back in 1950 but it probably had much deeper roots.

In 2013 an Iraqi journalist named Shamil Abdul Qadir published a book entitled History of the Zionist Movement in Iraq and its Role in the Emigration of the Jews in 1950–1951.

helpful. He informed me that the man who received the bribe from the Zionist underground to organise the bombing of the Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue was Salem al-Quraishi, a captain in the Special Division of the Baghdad City Police Directorate. Al-Quraishi later participated in the raids on the synagogues and the schools in search of the hidden weapons. He was transferred from service in the Special Division to a regular police station. After the 14 July 1958 coup, he was arrested and sentenced by the revolutionary court to prison with hard labour. Karkoukli was inaccurate on the back story of the bribe and the bombing of the synagogue. In most other respects, however, what he told me tallies with the rest of the evidence that I have been able to gather from other sources.

Some writers have claimed that the Israeli government was so desperate for people that it indicated that it would welcome the Jews even without their property. One, Avraham Shama, claims that ‘sometime in the spring of 1950, the Iraqi authorities reached an agreement with Jewish Agency representatives to allow Iraqi Jews to leave Iraq on a one-way visa to Israel, provided that they give up their Iraqi citizenship and leave their assets to the Iraqi government.’25 Karkoukli