THE BLOG OF DISQUIET :Qweir Notions,an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since2008.
Saturday 11 November 2023
Armistice Day 2023.
The British and the French commemorate the end of the First World War in Western Europe. But it never ended in 'the Middle East'; it just 'developed' through the land-grabs of the British and the French.
On the other hand, Jonathan Freedland wrote in today's Guardian that there is a false "assumption that Israeli lives are “white lives” – when in fact about half of all Israeli Jews are not white by any definition, but Mizrahi, with roots in north Africa and the Arab world, most of them the descendants of refugees pogromed out of their homes in Iraq, Yemen, Morocco or beyond in the aftermath of Israel’s creation in 1948.
"That’s one reason why seeing Israel as a construct of European imperialism doesn’t work. But how many of those now branding Israel as a settler-colonialist entity – the better to fit their ideology – know that by the late 1940s, the push for Israel’s establishment came in armed defiance of the British empire, to the extent that plenty of British leftists and anti-imperialists were marching back then not against Zionism but for it? How many know that far from enabling the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine, as it had promised in 1917, the British empire did much to thwart it, all but blocking Jewish emigration to Palestine in 1939, at precisely the time it was needed most – when Jews were desperate to flee Nazi-occupied Europe?"
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On the other hand, Jonathan Freedland wrote in today's Guardian that there is a false
"assumption that Israeli lives are “white lives” – when in fact about half of all Israeli Jews are not white by any definition, but Mizrahi, with roots in north Africa and the Arab world, most of them the descendants of refugees pogromed out of their homes in Iraq, Yemen, Morocco or beyond in the aftermath of Israel’s creation in 1948.
"That’s one reason why seeing Israel as a construct of European imperialism doesn’t work. But how many of those now branding Israel as a settler-colonialist entity – the better to fit their ideology – know that by the late 1940s, the push for Israel’s establishment came in armed defiance of the British empire, to the extent that plenty of British leftists and anti-imperialists were marching back then not against Zionism but for it? How many know that far from enabling the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine, as it had promised in 1917, the British empire did much to thwart it, all but blocking Jewish emigration to Palestine in 1939, at precisely the time it was needed most – when Jews were desperate to flee Nazi-occupied Europe?"
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