Lechi and "Hebrew Christians" in 1948

In this source, "Operation Mercy on the Eve of the Establishment of the State of Israel – The “Exodus” of Jewish Disciples of Yeshua from the Land of Israel in 1948" by Gershon Nerel, the English translation of his Hebrew article published in Iggud – Selected Essays in Jewish Studies, Vol. 2 – History of the Jewish People and Contemporary Jewish Society, ed. Gershon Bacon, Albert Baumgarten, Jacob Barnai, Chaim Waxman, and Israel J. Yuval (Jerusalem: The World Union of Jewish Studies, 2009), 83–109, I found a quite astonishing claim:

there were a few Hebrew Christians who were arrested and interrogated by the so-called “Stern Gang” (known in Hebrew as LEHI, an acronym for Israel Freedom Fighters), the most militant of the pre-state underground groups, who suspected that as Christian agents they were spies and collaborators with the British enemy. Some of the LEHI members suspected that the regular religious association of “the baptized Jews” with the English in joint meetings in their churches was nothing more than a guise for an espionage organization

In the Hebrew version, there is an assertion based on a R.G. Allison that one member of the community was executed.

I had never read such a claim in any Lechi publication or in other research works. I asked Aryeh Eldad who recently published a history of Lehi in its last year in Hebrew.

I will investigate.

P.S. Palestine Post, June 17, 1948

^

Why Did England Turn to the UN in 1947?

Einat Wilf, together with Adi Schwartz, has just had a new book published.  Entitled The War of  Return, it seeks to explain, as its subtitle reads: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace. It seems to be an important contribution to the pushback against the maliciousness and malignant misrepresentations of Arab propaganda.

An excerpt can be found here.

There is a typo which caught my eye which reads that

the Mandate, which was given to Britain in 1920 by the newly created League of Nations

That should be, arguably, 1922. True, the Mandate was decided upon in 1920 by a decision of the Supreme Council of the League of Nations at its conference in San Remo but it was phrased in general language, that “a Mandatory” be responsible for putting the Balfour Declaration into effect but without formally naming Great Britain. It was only in 1922 that the British Mandate, with all its 25 Articles, came into force voted upon by the full plenum of the League of 50 countries.  There is even an opinion that it was only in 1923 that the mandates administrating the countries evolving from the vanquished Turkish Ottoman empire came into force. 

But what caught my brain was this

The violent intercommunal struggle between Jews and Arabs, which started almost at the outset of British rule in the 1920s, eventually exhausted Britain, which decided to refer the question of Palestine to the United Nations 

That surely is wrong.

Between August 1939 and August 1947, there was no “intercommunal conflict” between Jews and Arabs. The Arabs had already gained their political goals in 1939 with the publication in May of the infamous White Paper which unilaterally altered the terms of the 1922 Mandate from reconstituting a Jewish National Home to establishing a state in Palestine, restricted land purchaces and severely curtailed Jewish immigration.

As stated therein:

Palestine was not to be converted into a Jewish State...His Majesty's Government...objective is self government, and to see established ultimately an independent Palestine State. It should be a State in which the two peoples in Palestine, Arabs and Jews, share authority in government in such a way that the essential interests of each are shared. 

There was, of course, normative Arab acts of murder, rape, theft and property damage against Jews but not in any organized fashion nor as part of acts conducted at the direction of a political command.  

The May 15, 1948 British White Paper is clear on who caused them to turn to the United Nations in early 1947:

a campaign of terrorism waged by highly organized Jewish forces equipped with all the weapons of the modern infantryman. Since the war, 338 British subjects had been killed in Palestine, while the military forces there had cost the British taxpayer 100 million pounds. 

That is, the underground war declared by Yair and the Lechi beginning in 1940, the revolt of the Irgun declared by Menachem Begin in 1944 and the United Resistance Movement of the Palmach and Hagana when they joined the Irgun and Lechi during 1945-1946.

I look forward to reading the book in its entirety.

^

The Other Tale or What Matti Friedman Missed

Makor Rishon published an interiew-review with Matti Friedman now that his new book has been published in Hebrew. The book, `Spies of No Country` is based mostly on the reminisces of four former members of the pre-State Palmah`s “Arab Section”. It was first called the `Mista’arvim Unit` which engaged in intelligence gathering and sabotage operations both in the territory of the Palestine Mandate and in Arab countries.

The story is important, even if a Forward reviewer thinks negatively of  Friedman`s book (it avoids the `moral` question of killing and links up with the current `political` question) although he did express appreciation of the book. In fact, two of the protaganists have already published their memoirs, one almost 30 years ago and another 18 years ago.

I have not read the book (but commented on it briefly). But from what I have read, I do not think Friedman related to the issue of Jews spying and operating in Arab neighborhoods and countries, disguised as Arabs but simply the Shachar Unit of the Palmah.

If, indeed, that is the case, I would wish to make sure that the other two pre-State undergrounds also had their own Jews-as-Arabs agents.

On July 26, 1938, five years prior to the establishment of the Palmah unit, the Irgun sent Yaakov Raz, 

dressed as an Arab porter into Jerusalem`s Old City market area on a reprisal mission following Arab terror attacks on the Jewish population.

He took part in attacks against Arabs in reprisals for attacks against Jews, and in his last operation, he was suspected by Arab passersby who grabbed him and dumping his vegetable basket, revealing a bomb. He was severely wounded when they fell upon him nd stabbed him repeatedly. Arrested by the British, he was subjected to constant interrogations and at the beginning of August, he felt he was too weak to prevent an accidental divulging of secret information he was party to while delirious, and so, under the covers, removed his bandages and undid his stitches thus bleeding to death. Israel`s national poet Uri Zvi Greenberg wrote a poem in his honor:
  
...Does anyone know how his face shone in the Jerusalem dawn?
I know, I know his face, for I shine in its light
He was sent forth from Lachish and Betar
A single man, enemies felled by his might.
So once walked, in the early hours of Jerusalem...
...Among demeaned Jews, among Jewish slaves
The lone hero and most beautiful person.
As the attackers circled and pierced him through
Taking their meals or stretched out in bed,
The Jews of Zion, the listless Jews,
Did not know whose body fell dead.

Another Irgun fighter was Rachel Ohevet-Ami (Havshush), born of Yeminite and Moroccan parents. On June 9, 1939, she was given a 15-kilogram food basket with the bomb hidden underneath to be brought to the entrance of the Central Jerusalem Prison on the day it was full of Arabs coming to visit the Arab gang members imprisoned fpor anti-British and anti-Jewish terror. She donned traditional dress including a veil. It being too heavy for her, she requested a young Arab to help her. After being paid, he went to a guard and told him there was something suspicious as the girl`s Arabic was not local, the basket was unduly heavy and it contained Jewish-style bread. She was arrested despite a struggle. A British demolitions expert defused the time mechanism (a few days later, another Irgun bomb at the Central Post Office killed him as he dattempted to defuse it)

In a 1964 photograph

At her trial, the judges accept the testimony that she was not yet 18 years old and instead of the gallows - Emergency Regulations had supplanted normal legal procedures at this time - she was sentenced to life imprisonment.

A third Irgunist was Baruch Mizachi. 

Born a Moslem Arab in Safad, he became a member of Betar, converted and joined its fighting ranks. He was detained and flown off to Eritrea where he was wounded by gunfire from the guards. He had insisted that he be allowed to take his tallit and tefillin with him to exile. 

Upon his return, he was sent on April 18, 1948 on an intelligence mission to Jab`a, a village near Jenin, the site of the headquarters of the Arab Liberation Army whose commander, Fawzi al-Qawuqji, led during 1936 the Army of the Arab Revolution in South-Syrian Palestine. At a roadblock he was identified, taken to a cave near Jab`a and executed, his body found only after 1967 and reburied.

A Lechi fighter, Elisha Ivzov, was also operating in Arab districts disguised as an Arab. On January 4, 1948, he drove a lorry loaded with with explosives into Jaffa and parked it in an alley adjacent to the Sariah Building, headquarters for the Arabs military units attacking Tel Aviv and its environs. Dozens died and scores were injured in the blast.

On March 5, another truck was loaded with a ton or so of explosives and Elisha drove off 

to Jab`a to eliminate the ALA command center. At the Tannin roadblock, like Mizrachi after him, he was stopped. His guide gave him away. Two British Army deserters who had prepared bombs for the Arabs in Jerusalem, attempted to defuse the bomb but it went off, killing them and others. Elisha was then summarily shot dead and buried in nearby Kuffeir. In 1950, his body was exhumed and returned to Israel.


And so, there is another story to tell. Palmah undercover agents were not the only, and, indeed, not the first to so operate. 

^

Countering An Arab Propaganda Claim

It is difficult at times to counter Arab falsification of history.  Other times, a bit of research will solve the difficulty.

For example, here, where it is claimed:

The Deir Yassin massacre followed in 1948. A join contingent, containing the Tsel, Irgun, and Haganah, assaulted the 600-person village near Jerusalem. A cistern alone was found to contain 150 mutilating bodies and the full death toll remains unknown. Irgun leader Menachem Begin falsified the Red Cross’s reports, ironically labelling it the fabrication by anti-Semites. [3]

We'll ignore the misspelling of Etzel. Or whether actually 150 bodies, mutilated (all?), were found (Bir Zeit University claims maybe 110 were killed*). Well, I went to the source quoted.

There, on page 297, I found this:

How could he falsify the reports of the Red Cross? Did the writer mean he misrepresented them? Or that he quoted from them what they did not contain?

So I went to Begin's memoir as Commander of the Irgun, The Revolt, and on page 164 I found this footnote:

and as I presumed, Begin insisted not that the battle did not took place but that there was no "massacre". The charge of a "massacre" is a lie. That claim is correct as Eliezer Tauber's new Hebrew-language book details (see here). He also used "Jew-haters", not "anti-Semites" if we are to be exact in quoting someone.

And he certainly did not "falsify" the Red Cross reports. In fact, "Red Cross reports" are not mentioned at all by Begin.

Were those reports false? That is another issue.

They claimed that there was "great savagery"; that "Woman and children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by automatic firing"; that "survivors have told of even more incredible bestialities"; and that those "who were taken prisoner were treated with degrading brutality".

Those claims are false.

______________

*
Here:

In 1987, the Research and Documentation Center of Bir Zeit University, a prominent Arab university in the territory now controlled by the Palestinian Authority, published a comprehensive study of the history of Deir Yassin, as part of its "Destroyed Palestinian Villages Documentation Project." The Center's findings concerning Deir Yassin were published, in Arabic only, as the fourth booklet in its "Destroyed Arab Villages Series." The purpose of the project, according to its directors, is "to gather information from persons who lived in these villages and were directly familiar with them, and then to compare these reports and publish them in order to preserve for future generations the special identity and particular characteristics of each village."88 The Bir Zeit study's description of the 1948 battle of Deir Yassin began with the hyperbole typical of many accounts of the event, calling it "a massacre the likes of which history has rarely known."89 But unlike the authors of any other previous study of Deir Yassin, the Bir Zeit researchers tracked down the surviving Arab eyewitness to the attack and personally interviewed each of them. "For the most part, we have gathered the information in this monograph during the months of February-May 1985 from Deir Yassin natives living in the Ramallah region, who were extremely cooperative," the Bir Zeit authors explained, listing by name twelve former Deir Yassin residents whom they had interviewed concerning the battle. The study continued: "The [historical] sources which discuss the Deir Yassin massacre unanimously agree that number of victims ranges between 250-254; however, when we examined the names which appear in the various sources, we became absolutely convinced that the number of those killed does not exceed 120, and that the groups which carried out the massacre exaggerated the numbers in order to frighten Palestinian residents into leaving their villages and cities without resistance."90 The authors concluded: "Below is a list of the names and ages of those killed at Deir Yassin in the massacre which took place on April 9, 1948, which was compiled by us on the basis of the testimony of Deir Yassin natives. We have invested great effort in checking it and in making certain of each name on it, such that we can say, with no hesitation, that it is the most accurate list of its type until today." A list of 107 people killed and twelve wounded followed.91 

^

The Economic Aspect of the Irgun and Lechi Resistance

Quite plain:

^

The Other Spies and Agents of Zionism

Alerted by this piece, I learned there's a new book out: ‘Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel’.

It treats the interesting chapter of Jews from Arab lands who enlisted in the Palmach's Shachar Unit. The unit was

the successor to the former Arab Platoon, sent, after the UN Partition Plan of November 29th, 1947, a number of teams behind enemy lines. Their goal: to gather intelligence in real time as to the future intention of the Arab neighbors.The unit was active inside Arab nations, as well as within Arab-controlled sectors within Israel.

One of the four spies Friedman deals with has described his childhood experience, when he was 12, that led him on his path

One day, in 1936, while I was working during the summer holiday in the Montefiore neighborhood, I saw three Arabs passing through a nearby field and a Jew walking in the opposite direction. They proceeded to stab him to death and as I watched the entire incident, I screamed my head off," Yakuba recounted about an incident that had a profound effect on him as a child.

I have blogged previously about one of his early operations, before the period which Friedman deals with, summarized here:

In 1943, Yakuba took part in the first operation in which the Arab Squad participated, which came to be known as "The Surgical Operation". It was a reprisal operation the objective of which was to castrate an Arab youth who had raped a Jewish girl. "The rape was shocking and the punishment also sounds shocking today. We were briefed by a physician in Afula, but encountered difficulties trying to anaesthetize the subject and the business became really nasty. Luckily, the 'operation' was successful and eventually the fellow even managed to recover," recounted Yakuba at the time. During the operation, he was assigned to guard the subject's family, while two of his comrades in arms, Yohai Bin-Nun (who subsequently became the commander of the IDF Navy) and Amos Horev (who later became the President of the Technion) "handled" the subject. Later on, Yakuba was involved in tracking, kidnapping and eliminating a sheik from Safed who had been accused of raping a mother and her daughter in Rosh-Pina.

But my point is that there were others, members of the Irgun and the Lechi, who also assumed he identities of Arabs to spy and even engage in offensive operations.

There even was an Arab from Tzfat who eventually converted to Judaism and fell in the line of duty. He was Baruch Mizrachi.

The Lechi hero, Elisha ("Shmuel") Ivzov (Hebrew resource) was killed in March 1948 on his way driving a truck bomb to the headquarters of the Arab Liberation Army led by Fawzi al-Qawuqji.

Their stories, and thos of others, deserve a good literary treatement.

^

Moyne Not An Anti-Zionist?

I hope to read an academic article soon. The subject is the fall-out from the Lechi assassination of Edward Guiness.  It is "Politics and Ideology: Lord Moyne, Palestine and Zionism 1939–1944" by Ronen Yitzhak published in Britain and the World, Aug 2017, vo. 10, No. 2 : pp. 155-169.  It is not his first treatment of the subject.

From the abstract it claims it

refutes the claim that Lord Moyne was anti-Zionist in his political orientation and in his activities and shows that his positions did not differ from those of other British senior officials at the time. His attitude toward Jewish immigration to Palestine and toward the establishment of a Jewish Brigade during the Second World War was indeed negative. This was not due to anti-Zionist policy, however, but to British strategy that supported the White Paper of 1939 and moved closer to the Arabs during the War.

So, in other words, Moyne wasn't that bad, he just went along with anti-Zionism because...?

Because why?

Lord Moyne displayed apolitically pragmatic approach and remained loyal to Prime Minister Churchill. He therefore supported the establishment of a Jewish Brigade and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in the secret committee that Churchill set up in 1944. Unaware of his new positions, the Zionists assassinated him in November 1944. The murder of Lord Moyne affected Churchill, leading him to reject the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

I wonder, if I injure someone because I am loyal, say, to my friend, am I liable for the consequences? Does this not apply to Moyne?

Are not politicians to be moral and independent thinkers?

But am I to think that the 1939 White Paper of 1939 which fundamentally altered the idea of a reconstituted Jewish homeland, and actually negated it completely, and moving closer to the Arabs during the War are not deep anti-Zionist elements rather than simply "policy"?  A politician would have to be anti-Zionist to adapt to those positions.

That later Churchill sought to alter them, however inadequately - and let us not forget the four-year delay in establishing the Jewish Brigade, not to mention the refusal to bomb the railways to Auschwitz or the camp itself, horrific anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish decisions - should not lessen Moyne's own personal proclivities which some think anti-Semitic.  In his first article cited above, Ronen claims

Lord Moyne was not anti-Semitic, and he did not support Zionism. 

Yitzchak Shamir, one of the Lechi commanders who ordered the assassination continued to believe until his last lucid days that Moyne was anti-Semitic, although that did not intrinsically affect the decision to kill him.  And in that interview, Joanna Saidel writes

British Foreign Office documents confirm that a plan for partition was set for proposal. It is questionable whether the plan would have been accepted. According to Eban the motives for the plan were pro-Arab but would, nonetheless, serve the Jewish cause. Winston Churchill’s November 4, 1944 memorandum to Chaim Weizmann noted that Moyne had come over to the Zionist cause, albeit for pro-Arab motives...As unclear as the plan was there is no doubt that Moyne’s motivation was not to further the Jewish plan for statehood. Even Eban agreed, telling me: “He (Moyne) did this for Arab reasons. In other words, he said that unless the British were able to stop immigration, which they were not able to do, then the only way to save anything for the Arabs was by seeing that some part of Palestine was reserved for them. So he reached what I would call a Jewish State solution for anti-Jewish reasons, namely that otherwise the Jews would take over the whole of the country, and, therefore, partition was a sort of defense of the Arab position.”

Here is from Moyne's speech on June 9, 1942:

If a comparison is to be made with the Nazis it is surely those who wish to force an imported régime upon the Arab population who are guilty of the spirit of aggression and domination. Lord Wedgwood's proposal that Arabs should be subjugated by force to a Jewish régime is inconsistent with the Atlantic Charter, and that ought to be told to America. The second principle of that Charter lays down that the United States and ourselves desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned; and the third principle lays down that they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of Government under which they will live.

Surely it is time for the Zionists to abandon this appeal to force, and to seek a settlement with the Arabs by consent. The Zionist leaders expect about 7,000,000 Jews to be surviving in Eastern Europe at the end of the war, and they reject the policy of re-establishing Jewish communities under civilized conditions in Europe... I hope the Government will give serious consideration to the possibility of negotiations with the neighbouring States of the Levant to take part in re-settling the Jews. It is obvious that the fear of political domination by immigrant Jews will be decreased if they can be spread over a wider area and shared among different Administrations. A Federation of the Northern Arab States might well assist such a solution, but federation may be long in coming, and we ought at once to discuss with the Governments concerned to what extent and under what conditions they could admit Jewish immigration without swamping their own nationalities and independence.

Did Moyne compare Zionism to Nazism in there?  

Again:

If a comparison is to be made with the Nazis...those who wish to force an imported régime upon the Arab population who are guilty of the spirit of aggression and domination

By the way, Lord Josiah Wedgewood had little compunction when describing the Mandate Administration and its supporters as being anti-Semitic:

My Lords, before I begin to lose your sympathy I should like to say a word...now that we are discussing a question which relates to Palestine.I think that the whole gist of the speech of my noble friend Lord Davies points to one self-evident truth, which is that the Administration in Palestine is Anti-Semitic. I think that all our troubles in connexion with that country have come from this constant Anti-Semitic bias of the Palestine Administration. The evidence of that Anti-Semitism has been given in the speech of my noble friend, and, in addition to the things which he mentioned, I should like to refer to certain other facts. I will quote as evidence the toleration shown by the Administration to the Arab side in the riots of four years ago, and the escape of El Fawzi and the Mufti from that country when the riots were suppressed and their capture could have been effected. Then there was the question of the imprisonment of those Jews who dared to drill. They attempted to drill with the rifles that had been issued to them. It was against the law. They were all sent to prison, with sentences which range up to seven years' imprisonment for merely drilling in order to learn how to defend themselves. Some of them are still in prison. That, I think, is evidence of Anti-Semitism.

Can't wait to read it.

^

It Was Another Terror that Established Israel

As Tom Suarez intimated he will give a talk at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Sept 18, 7:00 PM, I'm rushing this. [It will be held at the Integrative Learning Center, Comm Hub, 3rd floor, on the UMass Amherst Campus, will be co-sponsored by Jewish Voices for Peace, Interlink Publishing, Media Education Foundation and Students for Justice in Palestine.]

He is the author of "State of Terror: How terrorism created modern Israel", published by Olive Branch Press, Northampton, Massachusetts, 2017, p. 417:

"Zionist Terror" is a basic theme among those who are uncomfortable with Jewish nationalism. The victims of it are either the British, the Arabs or both as well as peacefel Jews. Some people have even gone to extremes. Like Robert Fisk.

On August 30, 2002, Robert Fisk published in the UKIndependent, and reposted it at Counterpunch a few days later, a column asserting that British troop loses in Mandate Palestine were “A Conveniently Forgotten Holocaust” and that the British Army's 1945-48 campaign in Palestine “has been 'disappeared', sidelined and forgotten”.

The "Holocaust" he refers to is actually that of the Armenians but a not-too sophisticated reader would, I presume, be confused.  As for the British Army's campaign being sidelined, there is at least one very well stocked web site devoted to it, another of the Palestine Police Old Comrades Association, a roll of honour, dozens of books like "Military Resistance in Late Mandatory Palestine: The Activities of the Jewish and Arab Military Organizations as Reflected in the Reports of High Commissioner General Sir Alan Cunningham" and "Jewish Terrorism in Israel", and studies as well as research on British anti-Arab terrorism and on specific British units. You can even find Bruce Hoffman's PhD thesis from 1985, "Jewish Terrorist Activities and the British Government in Palestine 1939-1947" which morphed into "Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947". Issa Nakleh had an active encyclopedia of material, now a book, which also reviews Foreign Office telegrams from Palestine, the material that Suarez uses. Here's the PDF of the 1977 "Jewish-Zionist terrorism and the Establishment of Israel", by John L. Peeke. 

Already in 1949, "Cordon and Search" was published and has been reissued. It is the official history of Britain's 6th Airborne Division in Palestine from 1946 to 1948 and includes charts of actions of Jewish resistance guerrilla operations. The High Commissioner's official and personal correspondence is researched by Motti Golani, himself quite unsympathetic to the Irgun and Lechi.  We can add J. Bowyer Bell's 1978 Terror Out of Zion and David A. Charters' 1989 "The British Army and Jewish Insurgency in Palestine, 1945-47".  

Some of these studies, all more rigorously researched that that of Suarez, are listed in his bibliography. Too many others, not.

For example, Menachem Begin's "The Revolt" is not nor Shmuel Katz's "Day of Fire". Except for Yosef Kister's listing of Irgun operations, no source from within the "Zionist terror" commanders or operatives did I find.  None in Hebrew.  This is not a serious approach to study such a subject.

In other words, Suarez is fooling his readers as to his academic competence and ability to deal with "Zionist terror".

In Suarez's blurb, we read of a

...meticulously researched book...the violent takeover of Palestine by Zionism, a European settler movement hailing from the era of ethnic nationalism.
Tapping a trove of declassified British documents, much of which has never before been published, the book details a shocking campaign of Zionist terrorism in 1940s and 1950s Palestine that targeted anyone who challenged its messianic settler goals

Such language is not one of a neutral or objective scholar and Suarez's book, praised by make-up historian Ilan Pappé, and a sloppy one, and the anti-Semitic-tainted Baroness Jenny Tonge, certainly is not such a scholarly volume despite the material he includes.  (As for "never before published", I find such a claim baseless and see the partial material I listed above). To borrow a phrase from Benny Morris, Suarez has an aversion to Zionism.  And he had that before writing this book. This book is not the result of quality research but of his aversion too anything connected to Zionism, even legitimate self-defense.  It is tainted in addition to be lacking in historical perspective, the presentation of a comprehensive perspective of the history of the British Mandate for Palestine period, the actions of the Arabs and the actual events which resulted from the violence perpetrated by Jews.

Tom Suarez has complained that "a Zionist campaign of distortions" has interfered with his speaking tour to promote "State of Terror".  Audiences, he decries,  are being deprived of learning of his research conclusions. Suarez, a professional violinist, seems to have been more engaged in cacophony than harmony in writing his book but that I have to prove.

The use of terror by Jews in Mandate Palestine has been rigorously and academically treated as I noted.  In 2012, Professor Eliezer Tauber published "Military Resistance in Late Mandatory Palestine, The Activities of the Jewish and Arab Military Organizations as Reflected in the Reports of High Commissioner General Sir Alan Cunningham". The book meticulously covers the activities of the Jewish and Arab military organizations in Mandate Palestine from early 1947 to mid-May 1948 using telegrams with the detailed daily reports sent back to London. A portion of these telegrams, although destroyed by the British after they had left Palestine, was recovered especially for this edition.  I mentioned above a first-hand British source, "Cordon and Search", and there is a dedicated web site of the Sixth Airborne Division.

Back in 1993, Nachman Ben-Yehudah published "Political Assassinations by Jews". Other books on the subject include the 1979 "The Palestine Triangle: The struggle for the Holy Land, 1935-48"  by Nicholas Bethell, "Resistance and Tradition in Mandatory Palestine" by Hilda Schatzberger, "Havlaga u'Tguva" (Restraint and Reprisal) by Yaakov Shavit and many more, both in English and Hebrew. Issa Nakhleh uploaded years ago in four chapters the daily House of Commons reports and Foreign and Colonial Office announcements in his "Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem" which has been embellished over the years.

True, Suarez does include new material.

For example, on page 158, he reprints a caricature for an Irgun mouthpiece in England, The Jewish Standard, a journal of that time ignored by researchers.  Unfortunately, while I am sure he reads music being a professional violinist, he seems unable to comprehend the cartoon.  

He claims that it shows the "British are the Nazis" by portraying English troops in Europe "send[ing] Jews to a gas chamber".  It is not hard to see that the troops are actually simply keeping the Jews in camps, after they have escaped the gas chambers, detaining them and preventing them from reaching Palestine.

Suarez sees fascism and Nazism in everything most Zionists think and do.  Zionism itself is predicated on "blood descent - race" and it "expropriate[s] all of Palestine for a 'Jewish' settler nation", p. 8. Besides being scientifically incorrect, in the strict sense of the terms he employs, such strident and rabid terminology makes continued reading a ludicrous chore. The theme of 'Israel - Founded By And Living On Terror' is all over the internet and in many Arab propaganda tracts and pseudo-academic books. One reviewer wrote that Suarez's subject was

violence to the Palestinians, modelled on the antisemitic pogroms in eastern Europe

Jews, in other words, learned from the Jew-haters and then turned around and treated Arabs in the way in which they had been treated.  And that is a perverse reversing of history. And with Suarez being praised by Ilan Pappe, how can he expect to be taken seriously?

My suggestion is that indeed, terrorism did create modern Israel. However, it was the terror that was executed, carried out and wreaked on the Jews returning by right to their historic homeland by Arabs - and Arab terror inflicted on fellow Arabs - that, as much as any other factor, assisted in the creation of the modern state of Israel.

In addition, the adoption by the Mufti of a pro-German Nazi policy at least as early as 1933 as well as exploiting Nazi ideology and propaganda themes and then serving Hitler during World War II in Baghdad and Berlin, contributed to the mass murder of European Jewry. Not terror but a Holocaust participant.

All of the above, along with errors of research and presentation, is at the root of this book.

What follows is a selection of highlights of the many items I found while reading the book with my comments.  There is no other way to illustrate how evil this book is (see other documents here) except by delving into the seemingly inconsequential, minor and even bothersome details.

The 1943 quotation at the beginning, frontispiece (?), from the words of Wolfgang Yourgrau, that fascism is growing in Palestine lacks the information that Yourgrau, while Jewish, was mainly active with the Socialist Labor Party of Germany (SAPD), was a non-Zionist, promoted socialist anti-fascism and published The Orient. He was described as belonging to "the group of disaffected left-wing socialist emigres" and see Adi Gordon's work and his book. He was never truly at home in Palestine, was an anti-Zionist and anti-Hebraist, assumed an 'outsider' posture and in 1948 left for South Africa.

p. 13 - to absolve the Arabs of Mandate Palestine of any responsibility or their refusal to adopt a diplomatic resolution of the conflict by the UN, the Partition Proposal Resolution 181 is simply "a scam". What that has to do with the book's subject is odd.

p. 23 - the Hebrew usage of the therm "Third Temple", HaBayit HaShlishi, by the 99.9% of Zionists at the time had nothing to do with the Temple per se but was a synonym for a renewed Jewish Commonwealth in a secular frame.

p. 29 - Jews living on the land are engaged in the "extranationalization of land, resources and labor, excised from the shared Palestinian inheritance". Besides silly verbiage, the use of "Palestinian" by Suarez is exclusively in reference to Arabs, not Jews even if they were born there and had lived there centuries prior to Arabs.  I think that is racism.

p. 29 - his quoting of the German not-quite-pro-Zionist Jew Paul Nathan's usage of Zionist "terror [against Palestinians]" is misleading. Nathan came to review the preferred use of Hebrew as a teaching language rather than German in the schools his association supported as he promoted. This developed into the Language War affair, and Nathan had referred to attempts by local teachers, not Arabs, to keep him from properly reviewing the pupils and institutions to which the Hebraists responded to his charge of "terrorism":

That terrorism! If the large majority of the Jewish population refuses to sacrifice the spirit of its culture, if the teachers refuse to betray their ideals, to act contrary to their convictions  by teaching the children who love and trust them in a non-Hebraic spirit — that is terrorism...To give an idea of the terrorism he [David Yellin] preaches, we will here print the appeal that he addressed to the Jewish population of Palestine at the opening of the Hebrew schools...The representatives of the Hilfsverein tried to turn public opinion against us by talking of wild agitation, incitement, terroristic acts, disorder, disturbance of the peace, and similar things... 

Even the NYTimes noted

And a few days later, interviewed him in Berlin, where he said:

BERLIN, Jan. 22. -- "All hope of repeopling Palestine with the persecuted children of Israel, exiled in other lands, must be abandoned as utterly impracticable," said Dr. Paul Nathan, President of the German Jewish Relief Association, in an interview with the NEW YORK TIMES correspondent.

In other words, Nathan is talking about apples and Suarez wants you to believe he is referring to pears and we'll ignore the "impracticable" aspect and what happened to German Jews 20 years later. The "terror" was not at all the "terror" he is presenting in his book.

This dependence on classic anti-Zionist myths which very few can detail a rebuttal is a constant tool of the book as well as a plain falsification of the historical narrative.

p. 49 - over and over Suarez writes of "racially segregated statehood".  That Jews belong to multiple races means nothing to him.

- He writes that the Zionist establishment "rejected the [Peel Commission's 1937 Partition] plan". It did not. It negotiated it even until it became official British policy in May 1939.  The Arabs rejected it from the outset.  The Jews were seeking more amenable territorial configurations.

p. 50 - all of a sudden, without much context, an "uprising" occurs in 1936, that includes "Palestinian terror" (that "Palestinian" means "Arabs" is another of Suarez's tricks. That Palestinian nationalism was the the result of the Mandate for the Jews, Article. 7 and note this).

Was there terror previously? Before 1920? In April 1920? May 1921? August 1929? October 1933? And in between? Unlike the "Zionist gangs", did the Arab terrorists really not enjoy protection of villagers? 

- On p. 52 we learn that three Jews were shot on April 15, 1936 and two died. That's it? No further details?  But what did a newspaper report?

Izz ed Din? This person?

In 1930 or 1931, al-Qassam had recruited numerous hand-picked followers and organized them into about a dozen different circle...al-Qassam saw it as a priority to fight...He also saw the brewing conflict in Palestine as a religious struggle...The guerrilla bands became known as the Black Hand...The Black Hand's ensuing campaign began with the ambush and killing of three members of Kibbutz Yagur on 11 April 1931, a failed bomb attack on outlying Jewish homes in Haifa in early 1932, and several operations that killed or wounded four members of northern Jewish settlements. The campaign climaxed with the deaths of a Jewish father and son in Nahalal, from a bomb thrown into their home, on 22 December 1932...

p. 53 - the Irgun "attacked what it called 'mob rioters'".  What were they?  Peace activists? Demonstrators demanding higher wages? What happened in Jaffa in mid-April?

The Irgun violence was totally divorced and disconnected from Arab violence? That Arab violence did not initiate a reaction?

p. 55 - Suarez is so adept at leaving out information or misleading the less-than-knowledgeable reader if he thinks that in any way a negative opinion could be expressed in relation to Arab behavior.  He writes that Arabs "handed [Irgunist Yaakov Raz] over to the British". Just like that? Or as it really happened:

he aroused the suspicion of the Arab bystanders. His basket was overturned and when the mine was found, Raz was repeatedly stabbed. The Arabs then fled, leaving him for dead. Yaakov Raz was severely injured

Did he, perhaps, not wish to portray Arabs stabbing and slicing a person as that might reflect negatively?

And notice the comprehensive balanced reportage here, with both sides, Raz on left, Arab terror on right:

and according to this, he wasn't "handed over":

Oh, and in the same day's paper, see what terrorist Arabs were doing to their own:

p. 62 - he employs language that is disconnected as in "ethnic tensions" in Haifa. There was an attempt by Arabs, yet another, to violently reverse the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate decision. It was either political or religious but not ethnic (there are Ashkenazi/European Jews and there are Mizrachi/Oriental Jews).  And further down the page, "Palestinians" (again, Arabs; Jews are never Palestinians) can understandably "retaliate" but Jews cannot in his terror litany.

p. 63 - at page bottom is a list of Jewish actions but no parallel Arab incidents. No balance in the simple factual chronicles of the period.  Over 500 Jews were murdered, not to mention injured, raped and beset upon.  Fires, pillaging, uprooting.  No mention.

p. 65 - the Sinbad sinking is unidentified as to its perpatrators. It was the Hagana.

p. 66 - one of Suarez's favorite techniques is to quote someone, a correspondent, a British official, an anti-Zionist, who refers to Zionists as Nazis, Nazi-like, etc.  Like on this page where the Irgun "is formed on Nazi lines".  Meaningless, especially as it is pre-WW II.

p. 68 - and on the other hand, he doesn't call Arabs terrorists. There are Arab "robber gangs" who happen to kill.

p. 78 - without proof or foundation, he asserts that the voluntary enlistment by Jews into the British Army in WW II was so that they would not be "as equal soldiers in the common front".

p. 84 - the Irgun, Suarez claims had six "Commandments", one of which encouraged "people to have more children...but only ethnically pure children" and this "presage=ing the 'purity of blood' laws of the Israeli state.  Here are the Irgun's Commandments:

There are ten and not one of them encourages people having children.  In two of them, the Irgun member acknowledges he must be ready to sacrifice his life in battle.  There is a footnote, 157, which directs the reader to the Irgun's broadsheet, Herut, No. 59, July 1946. So I checked that and sure enough, there is an article entitled, "Mitzvot for This Time"

And the sixth 

reads:

[this one] has never been more important, more sacred and more necessary for the existence of the nation and to assure its future, now more than ever, when one-third of the nation's living beings has been erased in a nightmare and it is: to progenate.

In other words, Suarez takes a fairly innocuous suggestion, one quite understandable after millions of Jews were murdered and extirpated, including Begin's infant nephew, mother and father (the latter dumped in the Bug River with stones bound around his neck) and out of context, as if an "Irgun Commandment",  and turns it into a racist rant without any basis, using "pure" which isn't in the text. 

That is what I meant by this being an evil book.

p. 86 - he claims members of Lechi opened fire in a clubhouse of HaShomer Hatzair "in retaliation for that socialist party's favoring a binational state".

While HaShomer HaTzair was also a political party (it eventual merged into MAPAM) this was the youth movement's clubhouse. The Lechi members came to distribute pamphlets. They were physically attacked and one person drew his revolver and fired one shot into the air to allow them to escape. I know that person who is still alive.

Suarez is suggesting something nefarious such as intra-communal terror but that was not what happened, not as he would have us believe. And if any side was attacked, beaten and also handed over to the British, that was during the two Saison operations of 1944-45 and summer of 1947 (and see p. 98 below).

p. 87 - he quotes from a note attached to a memo written by a British official that Palestine will be made a "Jewish state" as if something in that is wrong or against the intention of the League of Nation rather than the reneging of the British on that intent.

p. 87 - footnoting "Kister 112", he lists the Irgun bombing government buildings in Jerusalem the evening of January 14-15, 1944.  I presume he means an attack on the Steel Bros. Garage in Jaffa, an independent unauthorized action by three Irgunists, impatient for the start of the Revolt, which began on February 1. Simply sloppy as he does compare details' veracity in other cases.

p. 88 - He characterizes HaTzofeh as "the then-popular paper". Without disparaging the paper, it was the party organ of Mizrachi, the National Religious Party, and while it might have been popular amongst that section of the populace, Haaretz, Davar, HaBoker and HaMashkif easily had more popularity.

p. 90 - For him, there exists "Zionism's 'blood ownership' of Jews". What this means, I do not know but can only surmise that he ties it to German and Nazi nationalism.

p. 95 - the moderate Chaim Weizmann is termed by Suarez as "relentlessly messianic"!  And on p. 114 he again employs "messianic" without any proof. On p. 157, the Irgun's US support group placed "messianic advertisements" in newspapers.  What does he mean exactly?  Or is he just besmirching? On p. 190, the Jewish Agency employed "bluntly messianic terms".

p. 98 - He times the start of the anti-dissident 'Saison' operation by the official Yishuv bodies as after the Lord Moyne assassination in early November 1944.  The first courses of the Palmach were in late September and the communique of the Haganah High Command is dated October 29, 1944:

p. 117 - he writes of an "open breach" of the 1939 White Paper, itself an open breach of the League of Nations Mandate in that it fundamentally altered what was the purpose of the Mandate, from a reconstituted Jewish national home to

the establishment within 10 years of an independent Palestine State...in which Arabs and Jews share government in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community are safeguarded...Jewish immigration during the next five years will be at a rate which...will bring the Jewish population up to approximately one third of the total population of the country...After the period of five years, no further Jewish immigration will be permitted unless the Arabs of Palestine are prepared to acquiesce in it.

even while paying lip-service to 

the special position in Palestine of the Jewish National Home

p. 117 - he intimates that at the end of 1945 the "Jewish Agency began referring to Palestine as 'Western Palestine'".  In other words, Palestine a la Suarez was distinct from Transjordan. There is an opinion that Jordan is not part of "Palestine".  But that has no basis in historical and political geography nor in the way the British administered Transjordan until 1946:

The position of Transjordan provided some difficulty, especially concerning the question of a Jewish homeland. It was agreed that the Balfour declaration should not apply to Transjordan, and that there should be a separate High Commissioner for Jordan although he should be the same person as the High Commissioner for Palestine.

Moreover, in 1950 Abdallah annexed territories on both sides of the Jordan because he considered both those regions as belonging to one geo-political unit. And as made clear here, despite that 

"Palestine" was for centuries a concept, not a fixed cartographic entity, so its political meaning was even more ambiguous than its borders...the East Bank always [was] a part of Palestine...When the Arabs conquered the area in 634, they inherited and kept the Roman divisions for over three centuries, so their provinces too straddled the river...Jewish soldiers fought on the east bank to wrest it from the Ottoman Turks...in 1919, the Zionists proposed to the Versailles Peace Conference that their future state's frontier extend deep into the east bank...the resolution of the thirteenth Zionist Congress, in August 1923 [reads]: "Recognizing that eastern and western Palestine are in reality and de facto one unit historically, geographically, and economically, the Congress expresses its expectation that the future of Transjordan shall be determined in accordance with the legitimate demands of the Jewish people."...the Jewish National Fund owned land on the east bank...for eight months in 1920-21, the British government placed Jordan's territory under the titular jurisdiction of the Palestine Mandate...[Minister for Colonies Winston] Churchill divided the Palestine Mandate into two parts along the Jordan River, creating the Emirate of Transjordan on the east bank and excluding Jewish immigration there [see Article 25]. Churchill offered this territory to Faysal's older brother, Abdullah...The Palestine Liberation Organization has often declared Jordan a part of Palestine, and occasionally lays formal claim to it. The eighth conference of the Palestine National Council (PNC), meeting in February-March 1971, resolved that "what links Jordan to Palestine is a national bond and a national unity formed, since time immemorial, by history and culture. The establishment of one political entity in Transjordan and another in Palestine is illegal."...[former Jordanian] Prime Minister Zayd ar-Rifa'i told an interviewer in 1975:
King Hussein asserted again in 1981 that "Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan."

Jordan is Palestine. They have never been ruled as two separate states except during the British Mandate. Before 1918 the two banks of the Jordan River were a single state. When they returned to being a single state after 1948, it was a matter of building on the earlier unity. Their families are one, as are their welfare, affiliation, and culture.

And there's this

Britain administered the part west of the Jordan as Palestine, and the part east of the Jordan as Transjordan. Technically they remained one mandate...

and this:

The British appointed a resident to Transjordan, but he was effectively under instructions from the British High Commissioner in Palestine.

p. 120 - he has the Jewish Agency engaged in a campaign of "kidnapping Jewish children" from European DP camps, without a source, so as to bring them, supposedly against their will, from post-Holocaust Europe to a future Jewish state yet on the next page he writes of the DP's "fanaticism". On p. 122, vilely he portrays Chief Rabbi Herzog as kidnapping the children, who, by the way, were handed over to Christians and to Christian institutions for safe-keeping until the parents could return to reclaim them but being incinerated, they couldn't.  And on p. 124, following this theme through, he describes Rabbi Herzog as "gathering ethnically-correct human fodder for the settler nation".

p. 126 - he quotes a sum of money as "(P?)£6000".  Why the question mark? Does he not know that the currency of the Mandate was the Palestine Pound?

p. 132 - in the space of five lines, he names a bridge as both "Na'aman" and "Na'Amin". It's properly "Naaman".

p. 133 - he identifies the attackers on a British car park encampment on April 25 as being "Irgun operatives".  They belonged to the Lechi.

p. 135 - "settlers held up a cafe" thereby using language that would identify 1940s terror with "hilltop youth" et al.

p. 135 - Dr. Israel Eldad  of the Lechi is described as "a key assassin".  He never handled a gun, ever.

p. 139 - Suarez informs that late June 1946, "a new terror organization began appearing...Orsray Ha Magifa".  Not  a terror group but some youthful hot heads from within Neturei Karta (anti-Zionists) engaged in preventing and breaking up incidents of Jewish girls going out with British soldiers, targeting Jews.  Here's a column referring to them in Davar July 21, 1946, denouncing them:

p. 143 - Suarez claims, based on a British report, that the explosion at the King David Hotel on July 22, 1946 was "timed for when 'the maximum number of people were in the building'" (and on p.145, the Irgun "timed the bomb for when the area was most populated" and this based on his interviewer with a 'survivor').  All planning personnel from Begin, to Sneh, to Paglin, etc. all stressed that the choice of time - after breakfast clean-up and prior to the lunch crowd - was especially decided on to reduce any possible casualties. Warnings were multiple: calling to the Hotel, the nearby Consulate and the Police; throwing petards in the street (then, Julian Way); and a long delay of 30 minutes.  Nothing wrong in quoting the report but to bring the other side which is well-documented?

p. 144 - continuing with the King David Hotel bombing, he includes a fanciful "Irgun operatives...removed the reception clerk" that never happened.  Has he not read Thurston Clarke's book? From p. 111 here?

p. 145 - he continues his ignorance suggesting that only a day before, on July 21, did Begin, Friedman-Yellin, Sneh and Itzhak Ish-Shadeh meet in Tel Aviv and "drew straws" to decide which "gang" would carry out the operation.  This is so silly. The decision of the United Resistance Movement's Committee X was made on May 15. The go-ahead authorization was delivered to Begin on July 1.  Does Suarez really believe such an operation can be carried out in but one day's training and planning?

Oh, and Itzhak Ish-Shadeh was Yitzhak Sadeh.

p. 159 - in the October 31, 1946 bombing of Jerusalem's Train Station, a "girl [is] carrying three suitcases loaded with high explosives".  No. She, Simma Hoizman, didn't carry even one: other Irgunists disguised as Arab porters did. How could she carry over 100 kgs. of dynamite?

p. 160 - he quotes a source that "about twenty persons came from Palestine" to carry out the bombing of the British Embassy in Rome.  Actually, there were but two and one was Yaakov Tavin, who I knew.

p. 164 - the normative practice of most Jews at he time, including the very non-observant, all used the Hebrew calendar but for Suarez, the Irgun dating a report Tishrey, the first Hebrew month of autumn, is "Biblical pretense".

p. 167 - Suarez relates of British policemen losing "all discipline and rampaged in Tel Aviv resulting in an anti-British feast in the media". In truth, the result was a bit more violent as the Palestine Post reported on November 19, 1946 and the "feast" was well-deserved:

p. 191 - a tactic with a long history, placing explosive against a building, is approvingly quoted by Suarez as being "successfully used by the Germans in 1940".  Anything to tie Jews to Nazis.  Similarly, on the next page, the D-G of MI5 is quoted as estimating that Betar "bears a striking resemblance both in general structure and character to the Hitler Youth Movement".

Suarez ignores internal Arab terror. For example, the book avoids such information:

The first murder of a[n Arab-by-Arab] public figure occurred in 1929, near the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. Sheikh Musa Hadeib hailed from the village of Duwaimah, in the Hebron foothills, and he may have sold land to the Jews. But his chief sin was political: he spoke out in favor of the British Mandate, and he had once hosted the High Commissioner Herbert Samuel. He had also helped to found the Zionist-supported "Muslim National Associations" in the 1920s, as a counterweight to the Muslim-Christian associations that were hotbeds of anti-Zionist nationalist agitation;...The killing occurred in October, less than two months after the wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that swept the country--"the 1929 Disturbances," as the British (and the Zionists) called them, though in the collective memory of the Arabs they are known as the first "Arab Revolt"--which were triggered by Arab fears, methodically stirred up by Hajj Amin al-Husseini, that the Jews intended to "take control of" the Temple Mount, or al-Haram al- Sharif, and destroy the two sacred mosques in the compound, Al Aksa and the Dome of the Rock.

By the mid-1930s, the Husseinis had discarded all inhibitions (such as the traditional fear that a murder would spark an open-ended blood feud with the victim's clan). The first murder of a land speculator, or simsar, was recorded in November 1934, with the shooting of Saleh Isa Hamdan, of Lifta, outside Jerusalem. The killers are "people extremely close to Hajj Amin," the police reported. During the rebellion of 1936-1939, when Husseini assassinations of political opponents and anyone suspected of any type of collaboration crested, about 1,000 Arabs were killed by fellow Arabs, about 500 of them in 1938 alone. (By comparison, about 1,100 Arab rebels were killed in 1938 by British, Zionist, and anti-rebel Arab forces.) By 1939, the Husseinis were paying 100 Palestine pounds to operatives for the killing of high-level "traitors" and 25 pounds for lower-level "traitors." Killers of Jews earned only 10 pounds. Perhaps this partly explains why "only" some 500 Jews were killed in the course of the revolt.

p. 199 - at footnote 408 Suarez writes he could not find any reference to an 'Anti-Terror League' probably affiliated with the HaShomer HaTzair.  It took me 5 minutes to find an English-language reference (remember, Hebrew is not at all Suarez's forte):

and this, earlier, not from a party but from official Yishuv bodies conveyed by the major Jewish international news service:

p. 201 - weirdly, he claims that as early as January 1943 "the Jewish Agency's campaign to displace (!) North African Jews" began.  But then you must realize that he means displacing North African Jews from...North Africa.  In other words, the core principle of ascending to the Land, i.e., Aliyah, is really an act of displacing Diaspora-domiciled Jews (remember his "kidnapping" claim of Jewish European orphans?).  What would he say of the Tzuf Dvash, Rabbi David ben Shimon ninety years earlier?

Born in Morocco, in 1854, at the age of twenty eight, he moved to Jerusalem together with several of his disciples, and he quickly became a leading figure within the Moroccan Jewish community.

He established the Tzuf Dvash Synagogue in 1860, and participated in the establishment of Mishkenot Shaananim.  He decided to establish the separate "Edah HaMaaravit B'Yerushalayim" community. He settled in 1867 on a lot he had purchased outside the walls of the Old City, Mahane Israel, behind today's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where the 1868 restaurant is.  Two synagogues, several Batei Medrash (houses of study), and other institutions were built there. His Moroccan followers were soon followed by Jews from other North African countries.

p. 205 - again, a semantic sleight: he writes that Moshe Sharret "stated bluntly that the Jewish Agency would never accept equality ("unity") with the Palestinians, justifying the discrimination...denying the ethnic cleansing that he thought his audience...feared...".

Firstly, that "unity" meant that the Jews would not have an independent state.  Secondly, the "equality" Suarez prefers, combined with his use of "discrimination", is snarkly meant to convey a charge of racism, which it wasn't.  I mentioned the 1939 White Paper above and it read a state, not a Jewish national home, would be established "in which Arabs and Jews share government". In other words, the "equality" refers to the fact that Sharret opposed the establishment of yet another Arab state while Jews would not have a state of their own.

p. 209 - the death of Alexander Rubovitz is an "alleged murder" and in his footnote, 428, he admits that a book makes a "compelling case" that Roy Farran killed him after first torturing him and then smashing his head in with a rock. But that is what happened, admitted to by Farran.  Here's the official report:

p. 211 - without any sense of decency, Suarez quotes, seemingly approvingly and without any critique as to its reliability to what actually was the reality, a British report on the SS Exodus that was run by "quite a little Nazi organization - complete with muscle-men, group 'fuhrers', and capped by Hitler himself", referring to the ship's captain.

p. 219 - anti-Semitism does not exist independently of Zionism, Suarez claims, but, for example, an anti-Jewish pogrom in England after the hanging of the two sergeants in the summer of 1947 was "but one illustration of Zionism's self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating cycle of of anti-Semitism".  The Jews are guilty of causing hate to themselves, on purpose.

p. 220 - the Gan Hawaii Cafe (as he notes in footnote 446) he insists on calling the Hawari Cafe, perhaps to increase its Arab identity.  Why?  It was Hawaii:

By the way, he mentions the incident again on page 224 but does not identify it at all, not Hawari nor Hawaii.

p. 225 - Arab terror since 1920 is referred to as "indigenous resistance". On page 226, it is called acts of  "refusal to reward Zionist terror".

p. 228 - he notes the British adoption of the term "thugs" instead of "terrorists" as "terrorists" was being associated with...glamor.

p.  229 - the (infamous) Plan Dalet is described as an assault that would depopulate Palestinian villages.  It wasn't. And

There was no Zionist plan or blanket policy of evicting the Arab population, or of “ethnic cleansing”. Plan Dalet (or Plan D) of March 10 1948 (it is open and available for all to read in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Archive and in various publications) was the master plan of the Haganah – the Jewish military force that became the IDF – to counter the expected pan-Arab assault on the emergent Jewish state. That's what it explicitly states and that's what it was. And the invasion of the armies of Egypt , Jordan , Syria and Iraq duly occurred, on May 15 1948 (the date of Israel 's declaration of independence).

It is true that Plan D gave the regional commanders carte blanche to occupy and garrison or expel and destroy Arab villages along and behind the front lines and the anticipated Arab armies' invasion routes. And it is also true that mid-way in the 1948 war the Israeli leaders decided to bar the return of the refugees (those “refugees” who had just assaulted the Jewish community), viewing them as a potential fifth column and threat to the Jewish state's existence. I for one cannot fault their fears or logic.

p. 235 - Kermit Roosevelt's 1948 words that the "partition was refused acceptance as a final settlement by the Zionists" is odd.  After all, its text provides for a transitional period prior to independence. Second, the special regime for Jerusalem was to last but ten years. And third, the Arabs refused it the day it was voted on. The Jews did accept it but realized that with the Arabs not only politically refusing but militarily rejecting the plan there was no reason to be more holy than the...Caliph.  He continues in rewriting history on page 236 having us believe that partition was a capitulation.  In one sense it was, but in comparison to what was originally envisioned in 1917-1922, it was the Arab terror that forced Gt. Britain in 1939 to capitulate to it.  Suarez manages, again, to present things backwards and wrong.

By the way, Kermit visited Palestine and also the Dome of the Rock in July 1947, being termed a virulent anti-Zionist:

And then, at the bottom of page 236, asserts that there were "Zionist claims to much of the Levant".  Of course he doesn't discuss the concept of Greater Syria.  Its geography is

a hypothetical united Fertile Crescent state. The proclaimed area extends roughly over the medieval Arab Caliphate province of Bilad al-Sham, encompassing the Eastern Mediterranean or the Levant and Western Mesopotamia.

with no room for a Jewish state.  Why should he mention that? Would it implicate either the Syrians or the Hashemites in seeking to eliminate Israel in favor of a Greater Syria?

UPDATE: Kermit founded a CIA-sponsored anti-Israel NGO AFME.

p. 241 - he turns history on its head quoting without comment or doubt that "the Arab Higher Committee as a whole, and the Mufti in particular...wanted non-violent resistance" in the days after the UN vote when Arab shooting had caused numerous casualties already. In the second paragraph after this he insists that "peaceful Palestinian protest...marked the aftermath of the Partition vote".  Yet in note 483 he notes there were "major acts of Arab...violence in the first week of December.

p. 244 - a caricature critical of Arab behavior towards the Jews in Palestine is labeled as a "dehumanisation".

p. 246 - Not Mahan Market but Machaneh.

p. 253 - based on unreliable and inadequate sources, he writes of a Hagana agent injecting typhoid into the water system of Acre.

p. 253 - again, uncritically, he allows this: "The 'Jewish Army'...based on the German organization in the years 1935-1936 (!)".

p. 266 - he charges that Lechi's assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN negotiator, was with the "tacit blessing of the Israeli military".  It wasn't.

p. 268 - Deir Yassin village suffered an "extinction", he writes, going way further than a "massacre " and it wasn't that either.

p. 269 - in mentioning the "levelling" of Arab villages, the leveling and destroying of the Gush Etzion kibbutzim or Bet Haaravah or Neveh Yaakov or Atarot, Jewish communities erased is skipped over.

p. 275 - to his credit, he writes that the 'West Bank' was occupied by Jordan.

p. 276 - in addition to ethnic cleansing, Israel engaged in "natural selection" of non-Jews.

And Israel is "still expanding", he writes, this after withdrawal from Sinai, disengagement from Gaza, acceptance of Oslo Accord A and B areas.

There is more.

I surely do not agree that all is false in Suarez's book. But its direction, what it does get wrong, what it avoids and ignores, what it hides and more all indicate a propaganda broadside and and quite incomplete history not even supportive of his main reason for writing.  Suarez is engaged in trashing history and misrepresenting narrative and even altering facts.

Beware.  This is a dangerous book.

_____________

Now another response but I need to review it.

_____________

This was forwarded to me from England:

Statement from the Elders of Cambridge Jesus Lane Quaker Meeting

"...Jesus Lane Meeting has a long historical relationship supporting Palestinian refugees dating back to the early 1970's and we continue to engage on the issues in the Middle East...some of us have attended the talk by Tom Suarez, which was relocated, or watched a recording of it. Some have purchased the book and read it. Friends (Quakers) who have read the book or seen the video recording of Tom’s talk have no reservations about Tom Suarez or his work. 

The Meeting has now arranged for a public talk by a recently returned Human Rights Observer with the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel run by the World Council of Churches.  We look forward to learning more about the current situation as reported from a source we trust."

SignedJ. Jane WheatleyClerk to Elders

__________________________________

Tom Suarez responded.  Working on my reply.



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