Norman Berdichevsky

On this fifty-seventh anniversary of its birth, the state of Israel, despite (because of?) its stunning achievements, reels under worldwide obloquy, with the most venomous attacks coming from those who consider themselves "progressive" and "morally sensitive," e.g. the mainline churches, university faculty, the media elite, those on the left side of the political spectrum. In an exercise similar to that of Stalin's staff of photographers, who could skillfully subtract Bolshevik leaders who had been purged from old photos, many of these same "progressives" proclaim that the birth of Israel was fostered primarily by the United States and it was American support for Israel which has inflamed the Moslem world since 1948. In fact the entirety of what was then called "enlightened public opinion" rallied behind Israel's struggle. In contrast, the U.S. administration's support for Israel was, at best, half-hearted.

The major Arab armies invading Palestine in 1948 were either British-led, trained and supplied (Egypt, Iraq and Trans-Jordan) or French equipped (Syria). Israel's victory owed much to heavy equipment mostly provided by the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia (including the rifles the Czech army would have used to defend the homeland had Czechoslovakia not been betrayed by the Munich agreement). In contrast, the American State Department declared an embargo on all weapons and war material to both Jews and Arabs in Palestine -- but not to the Arab states which sent in their forces to crush the Jewish state. The embargo substantively affected one side -- those sympathetic to the Zionists who were forced to smuggle weapons to the beleaguered nascent Jewish army.

There was nothing "progressive" about those who supported the Arab side. The acknowledged leader of the Palestinian Arab cause was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had fled from Palestine to Iraq to exile in Berlin where he led the "Arab office," met with Hitler whom he called "the Protector of Islam," served the Germans in Bosnia where he was instrumental in raising Muslim volunteers among the Bosnians to work with the SS. At the end of the war, the Yugoslav government declared him a war criminal. Palestinian Arabs still regard him as a heroic leader. Lending active support to the Arab war effort were Falangist volunteers from Franco's Spain, Bosnian Muslims and Nazi renegades who had escaped the Allies in Europe.

Ranged on the side of the Jews of Palestine were such colorful personalities as Dolores Ibarruri, the lively Basque woman communist delegate to the Cortes (Spanish Parliament), known as “La Pasionaria,” who had gone into exile in the Soviet Union. In 1948 she issued a proclamation saluting the new State of Israel and comparing the invading Arab armies to the Fascist uprising that had destroyed the Republic. Just a few months earlier, the cultural hero of the American Left, the Afro-American folk singer Paul Robeson, had electrified the crowd at a gala concert in Moscow with his rendition of the Yiddish Partisan Fighters Song. The crowd was in an ecstatic mood due to the support of the Soviet Union for the new state of Israel.

No more ringing Zionist declaration was ever given than by the Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko, who in his famous speech to the U.N. General Assembly on May 14, 1947 (a full year before the Israeli declaration of statehood), asserted the right of "the Jews of the whole world to the creation of a state of their own," declaring "It would be unjust not to take account of this fact and to deny the Jewish People the right to realize such aspirations." Taking a lead from Moscow, the Palestinian communist organizations merged their separate Arab and Jewish divisions and established the Israeli Communist Party which gave unconditional support to the war effort and urged the Israel Defence Forces to "drive on toward the Suez Canal and hand British Imperialism a stinging defeat."

Apart from a few states with large Muslim minorities (e.g. Yugoslavia and Ethiopia), in the UN vote the Arabs managed to wheedle support only from the most corrupt non-Muslim states. Cuba was the only state without close links to the Muslim world to vote “no.” Mexico, anxious to parade its anti-American credentials, abstained, as did Chile and Argentina, the two Latin American states that had been pro-Axis at the outbreak of the war and only declared war on Germany in the war's closing weeks. The rest of Latin American countries, most of them democracies, enthusiastically voted for partition.

All the West European nations (except Great Britain) voted for partition as well. No other issue to come before the U.N. has had such unanimous support from the European continent or cut across the ideological divide of communist and western sectors. The Jewish state was even supported by Richard Crossman, a member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine who had been handpicked by Britain’s anti-Zionist Prime Minister Ernest Bevin. Crossman, taking a principled stand, refused to endorse the Labor Party Line. He had visited the Displaced Persons camps in Germany where Jews who had sought entry into Palestine were being detained. He realized that their sense of desperation derived from a world with no place which they as Jews could truly call home. He wrote that when he started out he was ready to believe that Palestine was the “problem,” but his experiences made him realize that it was the “solution.”

Up to 1956, Israel's closest ally was France, which was also its major military supplier. When, together with Great Britain, the Israelis and French sought to turn back Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal, it was the United States under President Eisenhower that forced an Israeli, French and British withdrawal. In 1967, American pressure prevented Israel from rolling on towards Damascus. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Americans prevented the Israelis from closing their siege of the Egyptian Third Army. Despite this the myth persists, and is constantly reinforced, that Israeli owes its existence and military superiority to the United States which unlike the "Europeans" has never followed an "even-handed" policy in the Middle East.

What can account for this startling transformation of attitudes, opinions and views of the conflict as portrayed both by the media and the political Left? One could call it a mass psychosis, a delusion of crowds, turning both the history and current reality of Israel on its head. To take a small example: Israel’s top football club, which won the Israel Cup last summer and participated in the Uefa Tournament, is Bnei Sakhnin (after a small Arab village in Galilee). The team is made up largely of Israeli Arabs but also includes a number of Africans, while the manager and several key players are Jews. No other country has a national team in which Whites and Blacks, Christians, Jews and Muslims are represented. Had such a team represented any other country, media giants like CNN or the BBC would have outdone themselves in holding up the team as an example for the civilized world to follow. But because it was an Israeli team, instead there were a few isolated and grudging references in the media laced with sarcasm, denigrating the team as “renegades” or “puppets”. Such is the media in a world where those who consider themselves moral arbiters have become moral madmen.

Norman Berdichevsky is a geographer, writer and translator.