Rael Jean Isaac

Mainstream publisher Simon and Schuster has now published a revisionist narrative of World War II, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization, novelist Nicholson Baker’s foray into writing a pacifist’s history of World War II. Up to now this has been the one sacrosanct conflict, “the Good War,” whose moral necessity was challenged only by kooks of the Holocaust-didn’t-happen stripe. Baker states he was attempting to answer three questions: “Was the war necessary? Was it a ‘good war’? Did waging it help anyone who needed help?” The message of the book is that the answer is “no” to all three.

How does Baker manage to do this? In his review of the book (New York Sun, March 12) Adam Kirsch observes that Baker, whose book stops at the end of 1941, ”does not even attempt to make a consecutive argument based on knowledge of all the relevant sources, the sine qua non of historical writing.” Instead he provides “disconnected factoids,” a “collage or montage”—drawing on newspapers of the day, diaries and correspondence from those on both sides of the conflict. This enables him to serve up uncritically the most cynical Nazi propaganda—for example to present the Nazi’s deportation of Jews from Hanover “to the east” (code word for extermination) as “compelled” by a shortage of housing caused by British bombing. Baker even uses Goebbels as a source on Churchill’s character: “His face is devoid of one single kindly feature. This man walks over dead bodies to satisfy his blind and presumptuous personal ambition.”

And so it goes. As Baker presents it, writes Kirsch, Nazi aggression would have ceased if Britain had only made peace with Hitler in 1941; Roosevelt connived to get us into war on behalf of the arms merchants (and probably knew about Pearl Harbor in advance); in Japan’s invasion of China, China was the aggressor. By omission and false juxtapositions, by distorting the real sequence of events, by reversing cause and effect, Baker manages to make Churchill, not Hitler, seem most responsible for the war.

Only time will tell if this book is an aberration or starts a trend in morally upending the story of World War II. (Lest we be too complacent on this score, Kirsch notes that a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times praised Baker for “demonstrating that World War II was one of the biggest, most carefully plotted lies in modern history.”) But at least for now, the true moral narrative of World War II is still so ingrained that the vast majority will be repelled by Baker’s pacifist revisionism. We know that Hitler was a monster, hatred of Jews his ruling passion, who mobilized his countrymen to fulfill his dream of taking over the world and massacred millions in that effort. We know he was finally beaten back at tremendous cost by reluctant democracies and the Soviet Union and that for many months England, with Churchill its heroic leader, fought the Nazi juggernaut alone.

But there’s another equally compelling moral narrative that has already been successfully turned on its head, with the evil ones morphing into oppressed noble victims, the heroes into Nazi villains. Indeed the inversion of reality has become so pervasive that most have forgotten the original–and true—narrative.

I speak of the story of modern Israel: its religious and historical roots, its pioneering hardships, its birth, its vigorous democracy, its continuing wars for survival, its determination to maintain the highest moral standards despite the ever mounting barbarism of its Arab enemies. What we have here is a morality tale every bit as white and black as that of the Allies versus Hitler, indeed in some respects even more so. This is because the narrative of World War II has its moral clouds: the dependence for victory on Stalin, scarcely less monstrous than Hitler (indeed in a non-aggression pact with Hitler until he invaded Russia), the massive bombing of cities (some of it of questionable value in advancing victory), the cruel refusal of Western countries to admit desperate Jews, the slamming shut of the doors of Palestine (even though, under the League of Nations Mandate, Britain was obligated to make it the Jewish National Home), the refusal of the Allies to so much as bomb the train tracks to the Nazi murder camps, the rewarding of Stalin at the close of the War at the expense of the freedom of Eastern Europe.

The moral narrative of modern Israel is straightforward, free of all such clouds. Victims of persecution in the Christian and Moslem world, Jews returned to the ancient homeland they had never abandoned (although as a result of repeated expulsions and oppression their numbers in Palestine dwindled) and to which they prayed daily to be restored. As Samuel Katz writes in Battleground, “Time after time a wave of hope surged through the ghettos of Europe at the news of some new would-be Messiah. The Jews’ hopes were dashed and the dream faded, but never for a day did they relinquish their bond with their country.”

And yes, for all the efforts to discredit this part of the narrative, near the end of the 19th century the pioneering Zionists came to an empty country. A series of warring imperial dynasties had devastated the land—which had never been an independent state for any but Jews—and the ruin had been made yet worse by revolts of local chieftains, civil strife and intertribal warfare. Bedouin raids from the desert finished off whatever was left. The Jews who remained were forced to subsist largely on the charity of Jews abroad. Katz quotes Alphonse de Lamartine who described conditions in 1835. “Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw indeed no living object…a complete eternal silence reigns in the town, on the highways, in the country…the tomb of a whole people.” Three decades later, in 1867, nothing had changed. Mark Twain, traveling the length of the country, wrote: “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action.” Palestine, he wrote, “sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies….Palestine is no more of this workday world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition, it is dreamland.” Saul S. Friedman’s title says it all: Land of Dust.

It was Zionist settlement and Jewish investment that revived Palestine economically and made it a beacon of economic opportunity. Large numbers of Arabs from neighboring countries joined the small native Arab population: they would become the famed Arab refugees who had supposedly been there “from time immemorial” (the title of Joan Peters’ book exposing the falsity of this claim).

After the British assumed the Mandate for Palestine, they almost immediately began to renege on their obligations. British army administrators in Jerusalem were intensely hostile to Jewish aspirations, to the point Zeev Jabotinsky, then a lieutenant in the Jewish Legion which he had founded, wrote “Not in Russia nor in Poland had there been seen such an intense and widespread atmosphere of hatred as prevailed in the British Army in Palestine in 1919 and 1920.” (Battleground, p.61) As the situation in Europe drastically worsened in the 1930s, the Jews were prepared to accept anything that was offered, a mindset that would continue up to the present. As former Jerusalem Post publisher Tom Rose and Gary Bauer note in Human Events “There is not a single internationally accepted program of diplomatic settlement (no matter how ill advised) proposed since 1917 that Israel has ever rejected, while there is not a single internationally accepted program of diplomatic settlement proposed since 1917 that the Palestinians have ever accepted.”

Even after Israel’s stunning victory in 1967 the national unity government immediately offered to give up the land it conquered for peace agreements (and that included the supposedly hawkish Menachem Begin). Its offer was met with the three nos of Khartoum, no to negotiations, no to recognition, no to peace with Israel. Subsequent efforts to make peace have been no more successful. The treaty with Egypt turned out to be a sham. As a consequence of the ill-advised Oslo Accords with Arafat, while the Arab (indeed Islamic) goal of destroying Israel has remained unchanged, Israel has become more vulnerable to the mounting barbarism of its enemies, with their shaheeds detonating bombs full of nails in buses and cafes, their “police” indiscriminately firing rockets into Israeli communities, their political leaders threatening Israel with nuclear annihilation. Through it all Israel has remained committed to its doctrine of purity of arms, often sacrificing the lives of its own soldiers in its commitment to minimize the danger of killing civilians.

As for Israel’s supposed “guilt” for the Arab refugees, despite the attempts at revisionist history, yes, most did indeed leave at the instigation of Arab leaders who told them victory was certain (after all, seven Arab states were invading) but it would be quicker and easier if the local Arab population was temporarily out of the way. As Katz points out (Battleground, p. 13) in the three months during which the major part of the flight took place—April, May, and June 1948—the London Times, at that time openly hostile to Zionism, published eleven leading articles on the situation in Palestine in addition to extensive news reports and “in none was there even a hint of the charge that the Zionists were driving the Arabs from their homes.”

Because Israel integrated the Jews driven from their homes in Arab countries, while the Arabs refused to absorb fellow Arabs, the obvious fact that there was a population exchange has been ignored. Nonie Darwash, whose father commanded “fedayeen” operations against Israel from Gaza in the 1950s, reminds us of the role taken by the Arab League, which passed special laws all Arab countries had to implement. “Even if a Palestinian married a citizen of an Arab country, that Palestinian could not become a citizen of his or her spouse’s country. A Palestinian can be born, live and die in an Arab country, but never gain its citizenship…..It is difficult to find a similar situation in human history: the intentional creation of a refugee status for a million and a half people [the refugees and their descendants] sustained for 60 years.”

All this is not to say that Israel has been without serious moral failings, but they have nothing to do with the “intransigence” or “oppression of Palestinians” of which the world accuses her. On the contrary, the obsessive, reckless pursuit of an illusory peace by successive Israeli governments has led them to a series of betrayals, starting with the abandonment of the South Lebanon Army in 2000. In 2005 the Gaza communities were destroyed (although Jews had built up them up with the active support of every Israeli government, Labor and Likud). Most recently, the residents of Sderot and the southern Negev have been abandoned, left to their own devices as the rockets fall. The rule of law has been undermined as opponents of government policy are sent to prison on trumped up charges. In its never-ending effort to appease its enemies, the government even turns its back on Arabs loyal to the state. There is something very much amiss when, as Caroline Glick reports (Jerusalem Post, March 10), the family of a Bedouin officer killed by a roadside bomb asks that his name not be revealed for fear of Arab revenge attacks on family members (all of whose male members serve in the IDF), while at the same time hundreds line up openly at a mourning tent in Jerusalem to pay respects to the family of one of the murderers who massacred eight boys and young men studying at the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva.

So how has it come about that a state whose chief failing is an undue willingness to propitiate, to conciliate, to appease, so eager to create a Palestinian state it seems oblivious to the danger it will destroy the Jewish one, is seen in a 2003 European Union poll as the state posing the greatest threat to world peace? Many of the mechanisms are the same as those identified by Kirsch in his review of Baker’s Human Smoke. The media employ omission and false juxtapositions, distort the sequence of events, use sources without attention to their credibility (the Goebbels become the authorities on the Churchills), takes the propaganda of the evildoers at face value, present a “collage” and “montage” of incidents, endorse and propagate blatant lies.

The impact of all this is described in Bernard Harrison’s fine book The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion. The progressive left in Europe routinely compare Israel to Nazi Germany. But to use Nazi analogies to criticize Israeli policies, writes Harrison “is to disseminate the suggestion that Israeli policies are morally indistinguishable from Nazi policies and hence that the State of Israel is therefore in no way morally distinguishable from the Third Reich, from which, if true, it surely follows that the existence of the State of Israel has as little to be said for it as the existence of the Third Reich: which is to say nothing.” By representing Israel as carrying total responsibility and the entire guilt for the problems of the Middle East, the overwhelmingly leftwing media convey to the large numbers of people dependent upon them for information that “Israel when it comes down to it, is indeed ‘a satanic force’ and ‘the embodiment of evil.’” As Harrison points out, the obsessive focus on Israel as uniquely evil is the more absurd in a world “which presents, as ours at present does, a large unrelieved panorama of racism, genocide, religious bigotry and political despotism of every shade and political hue.”

Even President Bush, while not endorsing the falsehoods rife in Europe (and on American campuses), insists, against all evidence, that a peace-loving democratic Palestinian state lies just over the horizon, if only Israel provides the necessary territorial and other concessions. Condoleezza Rice clings to the fiction that the Palestinians are, in her words, “victims of Hamas.” But as columnist Walter Williams points out, “whether most people of a country are peace-loving or not is not nearly as important as who is calling the shots.” In the case of Palestinian Arabs, there is in any case no gap between leaders and public. A recent poll (reported in the New York Times of March 18) by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that Hamas would probably win in new elections, that 84% of the Palestinian public supported the March 6 massacre of students at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, that 64% supported the hurling of rockets into southern Israel and 75% wanted an end to all negotiations with Israel, in short that there was greater support for violence than had been uncovered in any previous poll. Presumably the endless indoctrination in hatred under the “moderate” Abbas and the sanctification of suicide bombers (developments to which the U.S. administration has turned a convenient blind eye) is having an effect.

The current dominant narrative of what Harrison calls the Saints (to whose ranks the Palestinian have been assigned) who can do no wrong and the Reprobate (Israel) who can do nothing else is so insanely wide of the mark that there is little chance it will be long sustained. But the damage this false morality tale is doing while it prevails is so great that there is a real question, when it is ultimately swept away, whether Israel will still be there.