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From
1 - http://antiwar.com/hacohen/pf/p-h012302.html
2 - http://www.antiwar.com/orig/horowitz2.html
1}}}>Begin
Letter From Israel
by Ran HaCohen
Antiwar.com
January 23, 2002
David Horowitz Rewrites the Past
An American Jew, David Horowitz, wrote a 5,000-word article "proving"
that "...Israel Is The Victim And The Arabs Are The Indefensible
Aggressors In the Middle East." I always enjoy reading the work of an
American Jew who defines himself as non-Zionist, but who is
nevertheless ready to sacrifice my life in his hatred towards Arabs.
I sometimes have the feeling that some American Jews see Israel as
their colonial army: they provide us with weapons and money, and we
in return should gratefully kill and die, giving our sponsors both
entertainment and something to be proud of. And just like the West
was more interested in good fiction (books, films) on the colonies
than in their actual situation, so these American Jews seem to be
more interested in their own imagined Israel and its fictitious
history than in the actual Mid-Eastern realities. It's a safe game
they are playing. And a nasty one.
The general scheme of Horowitz's argument is too trivial to analyze:
the Jews are always good; the Arabs are always bad. Racism is
inherent: "the Palestinians are a community of suicide bombers," he
writes shamelessly. Some of his arguments are simply repulsive, like
the manipulative use of Israel's peace camp: "There is no Arab 'Peace
Now' movement, not even a small one, whereas in Israel the movement
demanding concessions to Arabs in th
e name of peace is a formidable political force." The Israeli peace camp would be very
grateful to Mr. Horowitz for using its very existence as an argument against peace.
Like official Israel, Horowitz offers no explicit solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, but he hints again and again at Jordan being the Palestinian state. And like
official Israel, Horowitz does have an implicit
solution, clearly legible between the lines, as well as between Sharon's battle-lines:
ethnic cleansing, either by deporting the Palestinians to Jordan, or by direct
genocide, or by a combination of both. Israel is waitin
g for the right moment to do that, and is meanwhile preparing the ground in terms of
international public opinion; Horowitz's article is part of this campaign to prepare
the hearts for genocide � not "the Palestinians' ge
nocidal agenda for the Jews," as Horowitz demagogically writes, but an Israeli
genocidal agenda for the Palestinians, materializing day after day in front of our
blindfolded eyes. Israeli generals hint at it when they rep
eatedly talk of the present period as "the second part of 1948" � the year he first
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was launched.
But above all, it is Horowitz's use of history that deserves attention. Several
readers rejected my earlier claim, that distracting the discussion from the present to
the past is an ideological strategy. Horowitz's articl
e is an excellent demonstration of what I meant.
As Antiwar.com columnist Scott McConnell observes in his "open letter," Horowitz does
not use the word "settlements" even once in his entire article. This is symptomatic:
the present situation, in which three million Pale
stinians live under a most murderous Israeli occupation, with no political and human
rights, their homes bulldozed at Israel's will, the women giving birth in Israeli
checkpoints, scores and dozens of them killed every mo
nth, even the wretched infrastructure left by decades of occupation systematically
destroyed, an entire people pushed into starving reservations, cut off and surrounded
by tanks and barbed-wire, and hundreds of Jewish set
tlements that control and dispossess � all these are simply swept away under the heavy
carpet of a fairy-tale about "3,700 years" (sic!) of Jewish history.
"History contains a myriad of details," I wrote in an earlier article; "you can always
find some detail that will embarrass your opponent. If not, invent one � who can
check?" Well Horowitz is a master in inventing such d
etails, too many for me to check. I hope the following few will suffice to make the
point.
Just A Few "Mistakes":
Horowitz counts "more than 1,000 Israelis killed as a result of Palestinian attacks"
between 1993 and 1999. Numbers of victims are always an effective argument, but they
should be handled with care: by miscounting the de
ad the writer may undermine his own rhetoric, as he himself may look more interested
at making a point than in human lives. The true number of victims, as counted by an
Israeli right-wing site not suspected of a bias down
wards, is 395.
Horowitz claims that, "During the same period 1993-1999 Israelis were so desperate for
peace that they reciprocated these acts of murder by giving the Palestinians in the
West Bank and Gaza [...] 95 percent of the territo
ry their negotiators demanded." In fact, the Palestinian negotiators consistently
demanded what all UN resolutions did: the territories occupied in 1967. Horowitz
surely knows that they have been given a Bantustanian auto
nomy not in 95 percent, but in approximately 13 percent of these territories.
Horowitz assures us that "when a deranged Jew goes into an Arab mosque and kills the
worshippers (which happened once) he is acting alone and is universally condemned by
the Israeli government and the Jews in Israel and e
verywhere, and he is punished to the full extent of Israeli law." In fact, the
"deranged Jew" he refers to, Baruch Goldstein, found his death during the massacre he
committed, so he was not punished at all. Israel regular
ly punishes dead Palestinian fighters by destroying their family home or by punishing
the entire village; but Goldstein's house was left untouched, and his settlement, 400
Jews who terrorize the entire Palestinian city of
Hebron, was not dismantled, though such a measure enjoyed an overwhelming support in
Israeli opinion polls after the massacre. Most Israelis indeed condemned the crime,
but "acting alone" can hardly be said of a murderer
whose municipality built a large memorial park for his followers,
who come to pray at his grave, or for the hero of the biography
titled Praised be the Man, a popular book in extreme right-wing
circles.
Horowitz mentions "three Arab leaders assassinated by other Arabs for
making peace with the Jews." In fact, the only Arab leader who made
peace with Israel and was assassinated was Egypt's President Sadat.
Even this assassination (by Moslem radicals) had very little to do
with the peace treaty he had signed. Actually, the only leader in the
region who was unambiguously assassinated because of peace talks was
Yitzhak Rabin, murdered by a Jew; Horowitz has "forgotten" this case.
Horowitz claims that in 1978, "under the Camp David accords that
Sadat signed, Israel returned the entire Sinai with all its oil
riches. This act demonstrated once and for all that the solution to
the Middle East conflict was ready at hand. It only required the
willingness of the Arabs to agree." Not exactly: it also required the
willingness of Israel to agree. In fact, President Sadat had offered
peace to Israel under the same conditions back in 1971; Israel
rejected the offer, Egypt and Syria launched the 1973 war, and only
after that (and after 2,500 Israeli casualties) did Israel accept the
very terms it had rejected earlier.
Horowitz claims that "At the moment of Israel's birth [...] there
were 800,000 Arabs living in Israel alongside 1.2 million Jews,"
implying that Jews were a majority. As every Israeli knows, the
number of Israeli Jews at the time was just 600,000. This means that
ethnic cleansing had to take place in order to create a Jewish
majority; and it did. Saying that the Arab refugees who had fled the
Israeli slivers "did not return" is an impressive euphemism for the
Israeli policy of shooting dead thousands of refugees who tried to
return, thus creating the refugee problem. The Palestinian insistence
on the right of return for them is hardly a "newly created demand,"
as Horowitz claims: actually, it is the very demand of Security
Council Resolution 194 dated 11 December 1948.
Horowitz claims that "Israel had every right to annex these
territories captured from the aggressors � a time-honored ritual
among nations." Both the alleged right and the "honored ritual"
reside exclusively in Mr. Horowitz's excited imagination, reflecting
maybe the laws of the jungle or of the Wild West, but not
international law and custom. I challenge Mr. Horowitz to find an
international law that allows a nation to annex territories it has
taken by force (the "aggressor" label is ridiculous: every nation in
history defines its enemies as such), or to give even a single
example since World War II of a nation anywhere on the globe that
moved its international border by force even by a single inch and got
away with it.
THE PRICE OF DEFENDING CRIMES
These are just a few examples. They are all biased the same way:
portraying Israel as the good guy, Arabs as the bad guys. They
accumulate to turning reality upside down: the victimizers become
victims, the victims � victimizers. In trying to defend Israel,
Horowitz first ignores the present, with which he cannot cope, and
while turning to the past he is forced to invent a fairy-tale full of
intentional distortions. As Israel's crimes intensify, the price of
defending it is bound to rise: more force will have to be used to
oppress the Palestinians, more truths will have to be suppressed and
more lies be propagated to convince us that wrong is right.
David Horowitz Answers Ran HaCohen
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End<{{{
2}}}>Begin
Ran HaCohen Distorts My Position on Israel
by David Horowitz
FrontPageMag.com
January 23, 2002
I never enjoy reading the attacks of people who begin by lying about what I said and
insulting me based on their lies. HaCohen � without evidence or citation � accuses me
of hating Arabs and being ready to sacrifice his l
ife to satisfy my hatred. No one who has actually read my article on Israel could have
failed to notice its concern for the Palestinian Arabs living on the West Bank who
have been abused for fifty years by the rulers of t
he Arab world. So HaCohen begins, so to speak, on two left feet (and goes rapidly
downhill from there).
Thus, I don't see Israelis as America's "colonial army" (the comic-strip fantasy of
the political left) and made this unmistakably clear in my original piece by treating
America's support for Israel strictly as an act of
humanity. It was only in response to Scott McConnell's claim that America had no
self-interest in defending Israel that I came up with an argument that it did.
To butt into a discussion that has been hitherto civilized and respectful and start
out with a series of vicious ad hominem smears is nasty indeed. The character
assassination continues even after HaCohen has finished his
throat clearing. My argument is "too trivial to analyze" (so why are you bothering?);
it is "shameless," "repulsive" and "racist," even "genocidal." Why does this all feel
so Leninist to me?
Five paragraphs into his "argument" HaCohen finally gets to a point. I didn't mention
the settlements, he charges. True. There was a reason. First because the Jewish
settlements in the Sinai were disbanded after Egypt sig
ned a peace settlement with Israel. So there is no particular reason to think they
would be an obstacle to a serious Palestinian interest in peace. Second because even
if the settlements are not disbanded, there is no rea
son to suppose that they would remain part of Israel after a peace was signed. In
fact, the only reason the settlements are an issue is that the Arabs will not
contemplate a Jewish presence in Arab lands. Whereas a millio
n Arabs are settled in Israel. This alone should make honest third parties consider
whether there are really two sides to these issues.
Now for HaCohen's specific claims:
The number of Jews killed by Arabs from 1993 to 1999. I cited my source, which is
taken from the official figures of the Israeli Defense Forces (i.e., the government).
It is available at www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org (Myth
s and Facts of the Middle East). I'll stay with this number, but it doesn't really
matter. Even one Israeli killed by PLO terrorists is a violation of the Oslo Accords.
The Accords were a deal: Israel would create a Pales
tinian authority, arm a Palestinian police force and turn over lots of land in
exchange for one thing: the Arabs would renounce violence as a means to achieving
their goals. Hence even one dead Israeli is too much, let al
one 395 or 1,000 or whatever. As for the 95% figure, I never claimed that this is what
the Palestinians have now. As is clearly stated in my article, it is what Barak
offered and the Palestinians refused.
The reason the Israeli government did not destroy Goldstein's home is that, as HaCohen
concedes, "most Israelis indeed condemned the crime" � which was the point of the
passage in the article HaCohen thinks he is demolish
ing. By contrast the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian community en masse
support the suicide bombers, whose families are officially rewarded. One effect of
destroying their homes is to neutralize the material inc
entives offered by Arafat to would-be killers. The entire of town of Tulkarm was in
the streets celebrating after an agent of Arafat's Fatah invaded the Bat Mitzvah of a
thirteen year old and gunned down 6 innocent Jews.
My sentence about assassinated Arab leaders probably should have read "who attempted
to make peace with the Jews." The two other assassinated Arab leaders were King
Abdullah of Jordan, and Bashir Gamayel of Lebanon. Abdul
lah was in the process of making peace, Gamayel had made one. The difference between
the assassination of Rabin and the other assassinations is that behind Rabin were
Peres and Barak and many others like him. In fact all
Israeli leaders, including Sharon, have shown that they will accept a reasonable peace
(as at Camp David).
This argument in respect to the Camp David peace misses the point entirely. The point
was that once a peace agreement was reached satisfactory to both sides, the Israelis
gave up what they had occupied, even though in thi
s case it meant giving up Sinai oil. In other words Israel is serious about peace. The
logical conclusion is that the reason there is no peace with the other parties
involved is because Arafat, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Ira
q do not want peace.
I gave the source of the 1948 figure for Jews in Israel. I stand by it. There would be
no Arab refugees if 5 Arab states had not attacked Israel at birth. The claim that the
Israelis ethnically cleansed the region is fals
e and does not square with the fact that the Israeli press at the time complained
about the Arab "fifth column" who fled "at the first sign of trouble" (i.e., when the
nation was attacked) or that the Israelis gave the Ar
abs who did not flee more rights than they have in any Arab state. HaCohen doesn't
mention the 600,000 Jews driven from their ancestral homes in the Arab Middle East who
wound up as refugees in Israel (and whom the Israel
is took care of in contrast to the Arab states including Palestinian Jordan who did
not take care of the Palestinian refugees). I am not going to engage in arguments
about whether the Israelis drove out thousands or not i
n 1948 because it is futile. This history has been rehashed many times. Readers who
are interested can consult the websites of the opposing camp. In this as in other
matters, I have relied on www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org
and the book Myths and Facts About the Middle East which is available on this site,
and which answers what looks like virtually every leftist myth about the Middle East
that HaCohen and his anti-Israeli friends have inven
ted.
The claim that a "right of return" is granted by the 1948 UN resolution misinterprets
that resolution and greatly exaggerates what its authors had in mind. The resolution
states that "refugees wishing to return to their h
omes and to live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the
earliest possible date..." There are few Palestinians today who would qualify as
wishing to live in peace with the Israelis. But it is 50
years, three wars and decades of government sponsored hate since this resolution was
devised. Among other things, the UN resolution did not contemplate a lasting refugee
problem entirely created, as I pointed out in my ar
ticle, by the Arabs' refusal to resettle the refugees. Or that the refugee population
would grow to ten times its original size through this Arab refusal (which spanned the
20 years that the West Bank was a part of Palest
inian Jordan) and through Arab procreation. To repeat: there are very few Arabs living
today who once lived in territorial Israel. On the other hand there are millions of
Jewish descendants of people in Israel who were fo
rcibly deprived of their homes in Europe and throughout the Middle East and who have
no hope of reclaiming their ancestral residences. If there is a claim of humanity in
the refugee problem as it exists today, that claim
needs to be made against the Arab states and the Palestinian authority who have spent
billions on war against Israel but nothing on making the lives of the Palestinian
refugees better.
HaCohen's last point takes the cake for stupidity. As I pointed out in the original
article, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan � just to name three relevant ones � are states
carved out of territory conquered by England and Franc
e from the Ottoman Turks. It would be truer to say that every nation in the world has
begun in a conquest than to make appeals to fantasies like "international law" � which
is a law of convenience, not of nature.
I realized when I read the first few sentences of HaCohen's attack that he would not
provide an analysis of my argument, let alone a refutation of its conclusions. In my
original article I deliberately avoided the particu
lar claims of atrocities on either side � of treaties broken, agreements abandoned
etc. etc. My intention was to provide an overview of how the present impasse in the
Middle East came to pass through events spanning almos
t a century. By viewing the patterns of this history � this was my claim � it is
possible to see beyond the particular claims and counter-claims to the larger picture.
It is this larger picture that indicts the Arab state
s and the Palestinian leadership.
Unfortunately � but not unexpectedly � HaCohen doesn't want to look
at this larger picture and thus to join the actual argument. Instead,
he prefers to wallow in his self- hatred as a Jew and as the
ungrateful and treacherous citizen of a western democracy that is
under assault in a hostile environment: the Islamo-fascist Middle
East.
Mr. HaCohen has wasted his time and mine. Perhaps, however, it will
not a waste of time for the regular visitors to this site,
particularly if they ask themselves what they are doing in bed with
the anti-Western left that HaCohen represents.
End<{{{
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