The Media Accountability Project  

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Dear Financial Post editorial team:

I’m writing to you on behalf of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East to critique Gwyn Morgan’s astonishingly ignorant piece from last Friday, “We should put ourselves in Israelis’ shoes.”

The torrent of nonsense makes it hard to know where to start. First, Morgan asserts that it was “only logical” for Jews to go to Palestine after World War II. It was certainly understandable that Jews needed a safe haven after centuries of Western antisemitism culminated in a horrific genocide in which six million of them were murdered, but there was nothing “logical” about a group of Europeans imposing their own state on a thriving indigenous population of Muslims, Christians and non-Zionist Jews who had been living there for many centuries.

Indeed, private correspondence, diaries, meeting minutes and other sources confirm that numerous Zionist leaders including David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Moshe Sharett, Yosef Weitz, Zeev Jabotinsky, Menachem Ussishkin and others had long understood that, in order to establish a Jewish state, those whom they referred to as “the natives” would need to be expelled beyond Palestine in order to make way for the people they referred to as “colonists.” The only real debate was whether it would be sufficient to send them to Syria and Transjordan, or if that could imperil future expansion and they should instead be banished to Iraq. These basic facts have been thoroughly documented by historians such as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe and Nur Masalha (whose work, The Expulsion of the Palestinians, is conclusive on the matter).

Morgan also states that on May 8, 1948 (presumably he means May 15), Palestine was split into an Arab state and a Jewish state. In fact, as again documented by historians, the Zionist leadership accepted the partition plan only as an interim step to taking control of the entirety of Palestine. The demand for a Jewish state throughout Palestine had been openly expressed since at least the Biltmore Conference in 1942, and they would accept nothing less. The problem was that even after 60 years of Zionist settlement, in 1947 the indigenous Palestinians still constituted two-thirds of the population and would be almost half the population even in the Jewish state. Zionist leaders knew that they could not consolidate an unassailable Jewish majority except through ethnic cleansing, and that is precisely what the Yishuv began to do shortly after the partition plan was adopted (as documented by, among others, Rosemarie Esber in her masterpiece, Under the Cover of War). History records that Israel’s Arab neighbours were reluctantly dragged into war at the last minute by popular opinion, which was outraged at the atrocities committed against their Palestinian brethren before partition became effective (of which the Deir Yassin massacre is only the most famous example).

Morgan’s next baseless statement is that Israel had “only untested militias and limited weaponry [and] little chance of defeating these countries’ well-equipped armies.” I would suggest that Morgan read any credible history book on the subject. Whereas the Arab armies, used as they were largely for domestic policing and under the ultimate control of colonial powers, were poorly led, equipped and trained, the Haganah was made up of battle-hardened, British-trained officers and soldiers who would soon be equipped with high-quality Soviet weapons from Czechoslovakia. Throughout the war, the Israeli military outnumbered and outgunned the Arab armies, which were also saddled with poor coordination given the bitter rivalries between their leaders. Far from “miraculous,” Israel’s victory was exactly what contemporary military and intelligence experts anticipated.

Having invented a fictional history of Israel, he then presents an alternative-world version of its present. It is simply untrue that Israel is a “tolerant” democracy; both international and Israeli human rights organizations have documented the extensive, legally-enshrined mistreatment of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, which last year the International Court of Justice found constitutes a breach of the prohibition against racial segregation and apartheid under Article 3 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Quite understandably, Morgan does not even attempt to defend the open apartheid regime in the West Bank, where ethnicity determines whether one enjoys full freedom and a high standard of living, or suffers under a brutal occupation that routinely closes or even demolishes entire villages, allows settlers to murder Palestinians with impunity, severely curtails free movement, arbitrarily cuts off access to healthcare, education and employment, rations access to water, holds people (including children) indefinitely without charge, and generally makes life unbearable.

Presumably due to space constraints, Morgan makes only a few brief (and ridiculous) claims about Israel’s destruction of Gaza over the past two years. He correctly notes that the hostages were starved, without mentioning that Israel deliberately cut off food, water and electricity to Gaza in an openly-admitted effort to starve the population into submission. He claims that Israel did its best to avoid civilian casualties, which given the wide international and Israeli expert consensus that there has been a genocide in Gaza, no one could possibly argue with a straight face. He makes claims about “human shields” without a shred of evidence, ignoring the fact that, for decades, Israeli forces have been extensively documented using Palestinians for exactly that purpose.

I commend Morgan for the empathy he shows Israelis and would invite him to extend it further by giving frank consideration to what it must feel like to be a Palestinian. His family would almost certainly have been expelled from its home decades ago, through no fault of its own. He would be suffering from poverty, with no hope making a better future for himself, living as he would at the mercy of a state that simply wants him gone. He would almost certainly have personally experienced brutality at Israel’s hands. Perhaps it would be the form of having his door broken down in the middle of the night and his home seized for military use. Perhaps it would be through a lockdown in which he cannot even approach his own windows under fear of being shot (as happens repeatedly in Hebron). Perhaps it would be having endured one of Israel’s rounds of “mowing the lawn” – their term for the repeated bombardments of Gaza in 2006, 2008, 2012 or 2014 that killed thousands. Most of all, he would know that Israel’s police, military and citizens can do anything they want to him or anyone he cares about, at any time, with absolute impunity. He would know these things if he were to visit the occupied territories and not limit himself to Israeli government-controlled tours.

If the Financial Post purports to be a serious media outlet, then it should immediately withdraw this shameless, paint-by-numbers recitation of the canon of fact-free hasbara repeated by propagandists for almost 80 years. Any media outlet worthy of the name must have a non-negotiable policy of printing only the truth. It should also give voice to Palestinians, who have endured unimaginable suffering for generations, so as to give Western audiences a dose of reality that they so desperately need.

Sincerely,

Adam Allouba

Media Advocate
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East