Israel

My subject being a booklet by one Neil Rogall. Seemingly published by the people at reference 1. He is also mixed up with the Socialist Worker (reference 2) and he appears to have been something in further education. The widower of Sherrl Grosse Yanowitz Rogall, from the US, who appears on various petitions and open letters about Israel, for example one put together by the chap at reference 3. Both of them are more or less invisible on the Internet otherwise, except through the Socialist Worker.

A 50 page booklet, quite smartly produced, picked up recently at the Raynes Park platform library. A booklet which might be characterised as a history of the original sin, of the theft of Palestine from the Palestinians, running from the Russian pogroms of the late nineteenth century through to the War of Independence of 1948. About how the Arabs of Palestine were made to pay for the sins of the Europeans, particularly those of the Germans and of the Russians, without which there would probably have been no Zionism. I pass over the casual anti-Semitism visible in much of the otherwise respectable writing of the inter-war period, for example that of Simenon – who, to be fair, also has something of a down on immigrants into France from central Europe generally – which is ironic, given that Simenon himself was a Belgian.

The occupation of Palestine by Jews from Europe is presented as the last gasp of European colonialism; the grabbing of a chunk of land only weakly held by its people. Presented as being very much in the tradition of grabbing of chunks of Africa. But with this grabbing taking place at a time when the rest of Western Europe was starting to withdraw from its remaining colonies, in Africa and elsewhere.

His story of Zionists moving onto Palestinian land reminded me of the clearances of the Highlands of Scotland of the nineteenth century, where the poor tenant farmers, most of whom were probably at or near subsistence level, were sold up and evicted by their landlords; absentee, chiefly and otherwise.

A story which struck me as reasonably accurate, if one-sided and occasionally intemperate in tone – I have omitted the booklet’s subtitle ‘the making of a racist state’ from the title of this post. But quite unhelpful, in that while it did indeed tell the story of the original sin, it offered nothing in the way of a solution, of a way forward, given that we are where we are.

Some other thoughts

Scant regard for the difficulties faced by the British Government, occupiers of Palestine during the crucial period, beyond noting their peculiar obsession with maintaining lines of communication via the Suez Canal to the about to be independent Indian subcontinent.

Scant regard for the difficulties faced by the Israelis of today, more than two thirds of whom were born in Israel/Palestine, in coming to an accommodation with the Palestinians of today. Gratuitous provocations on the West Bank notwithstanding.

No mention of the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War or the subsequent protests and worse from the Palestinian side. I was reminded that Israel detached the Gaza strip from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan after the first of these wars. A Gaza strip which had fallen to Egyptian administration and a West Bank which had fallen to Jordan in 1948 – an arrangement which gave Egypt some problems and Jordan most of the fertile lands of the rift valley.

No mention of the large scale movements of Poles, Germans and others at the end of the Second World War: that is to say the translation of Poland a hundred kilometres to the west and the expulsion of the Germans from Sudetenland. Movements which involved a good many more people than there were in Palestine at the time, but about whom we now hear very little.

I continue to wonder what throwing a lot more money at the whole sorry mess might do. The Saudis, for example, have plenty of both land and money. I also wonder about how all this is going to appear in Israeli school books in years to come. Will the Palestinians largely vanish from the story?

I am left with a greater understanding of why the responsible left has such a hard time keeping anti-Semitism out of its discourse – on social media and elsewhere. Given the increasingly Jewish nature of the state of Israel – think, for example, of the recent disenfranchisement of the Palestinians – it is all too easy to slip from reasoned and reasonable criticism of the Israeli state to racist commentary about the Jewish people – rather as many newspapers did in connection with Imperial Germany during the First World War – and to stir up old fashioned anti-Semitism, which continues to simmer under the surface.

PS: the illustration, taken from Wikipedia, was painted in Palestine by Holman Hunt in 1854-6, during the Ottoman tenure, which might, in some ways, be seen as having been more benign than what is going on now. Perhaps more tolerant of difference.

Reference 1: https://www.rs21.org.uk/.

Reference 2: https://socialistworker.org/.

Reference 3: https://www.richardsilverstein.com/.