Tag Archives: Israel

2024 in review 12

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October

When you post on social media or a blog like this it often feels as if you are writing on water. Down the memory hole your post goes — if you’re lucky to have an afterlife with new readers arriving via internet searches, but in most cases not. This one I have chosen because it really is needed more than ever now.

Unfortunate looseness with the facts of history

Posted on  by Neil

Remind ourselves of the particular evil of what happened during my childhood but far away

Looking back through my own archive triggered this

BBC – History – Historical Accuracy and the Making of ‘Auschwitz’

14 Oct 2005

I saw the third episode of this outstanding series last night. The sheer evil of those times is breathtaking; if ever a series deserves to be compulsory viewing, this is the one. If ever you doubted that Holocaust apologists or deniers and neo-Nazis deserve utter contempt, watch this series.

BBC – History – Genocide Under the Nazis

20 Oct 2005

Tonight on ABC-TV in Sydney this brilliant and thoroughly documented series deals with Dr Josef Mengele. Compulsory viewing in my opinion. Brazil, to its shame, sheltered this monster, as earlier had Argentina and Paraguay. He died, would you believe, in 1979.

Of particular interest to Mengele were twins; beginning in 1943, twins were selected and placed in special barracks. Almost all of Mengele’s experiments were of dubious scientific value, ignoring the lack of ethics involved, including attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children’s eyes, various amputations and other brutal surgeries, and in at least one case attempting to create an artificial conjoined twin by sewing the veins in two twins together; this operation was not successful and only caused the hands of the children to become badly infected. Subjects of Mengele’s experiments were almost always murdered afterward for dissection, if they survived the experiment itself.

I learned today that my colleague Betsy B’s mother-in-law and one sister survived Mengele in Auschwitz. Six degrees of separation… Less in Betsy B’s case.

And there are my classmates of the Sydney High Class of 1959

Alfie van der Poorten (16 May 1942 – 9 October 2010)

Van der Poorten was born into a Jewish family in Amsterdam in 1942, after the German occupation began. His parents, David and Marianne van der Poorten, gave him into foster care with the Teerink family in Amersfoort, under the name “Fritsje”; the senior van der Poortens went into hiding, were caught by the Nazis, survived the concentration camps, and were reunited with van der Poorten and his two sisters after the war. The family moved to Sydney in 1951, travelling there aboard the SS Himalaya.

Van der Poorten studied at Sydney Boys High School from 1955 to 1959, and earned a high score in the Leaving Certificate Examination there. He spent a year in Israel and then studied mathematics at the University of New South Wales, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965, a doctorate in 1968 under the joint supervision of George Szekeres and Kurt Mahler, and a Master of Business Administration. While a student at UNSW, he led the student union council and was president of the University Union, as well as helping to lead several Jewish and Zionist student organisations….

Clive Kessler

I am a child of World War II. I was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1942. My earliest childhood memories are of my mother’s parents, German Jews who had managed to escape from Europe before the war broke out. For my first three years of life, I lived in the midst of the dark cloud of hope, fear and doubt in which they were constantly enveloped: hoping that their many relatives still in Germany would somehow survive the war; fearing (as the war went on and news began to emerge of the dreadful happenings there) that they would not; and doubting whether other people could, in any way, imagine, or even cared about, their anguish.

By war’s end, it became clear that none of their large extended family in Europe had survived. As a child I grew up in the aura of their awful pain and I somehow absorbed into myself their terrible loss – a loss for which there were then no words and no name. Now it is called the Shoah, the holocaust.

But my grandparents had some relatives who, in the mid-1920s, for a mixture of religious and political reasons, had gone to live in Palestine. From time to time, amidst the wartime gloom and in the years immediately after 1945, we would receive letters – I still remember their fascinating postal stamps, picturing a domed building, and bearing Arabic as well as English and Hebrew characters – that also provoked mixed feelings in my grandparents: a mixture of relief and hope, of anxiety and fear, as well as some gratitude that others had somehow survived the slaughter in Europe. After 1945, the tempo of my life, following theirs, began to be set by the daily radio broadcasts detailing the collapse of the British Mandate in Palestine, the declaration of Israel’s statehood, and the subsequent 1948 war. In many ways, I was formed by those experiences….

After later experience, especially a time living in Israel and seeing what the lives of Palestinians were like, Clive by 1989 was expressing this view:

I had wept to read of the destruction of the many Jewish communities, large and small, of Central and Eastern Europe, and was entitled to do so. Now I wept, too, to read of the expulsion, in 1948, of the Palestinians from Lydda and from Ramleh. I was entitled and also obliged to do so. This is not to equate Lydda and Ramleh in 1948 with the Warsaw Ghetto of 1943 – all such events are unique and, in some sense, incomparable – but we can find, and must recognize in them (despite their differences of time and place and circumstance), some common human themes, moral lessons and imperatives.
As new maps were drawn to reflect these newly created “facts on the ground” in Israel/Palestine, legitimization was incrementally given to processes for which the world has since coined the ominous and chillingly appropriate term “ethnic cleansing.” This process – of possession, of new map-creation, and of the framing and legitimization of new triumphalist, national narratives on the basis of those newly drawn maps, with all their renamed towns and villages – happened, not once, but twice (the immediate historical events don’t matter here) in 1948 and again in 1967.

Yes, I too deplore the injustice and relentless killing that mar the story of the State of Israel

But I beg all of us to examine very carefully all glib and loaded parallels between present events and the events this post has dealt with from the world into which I was born at a safe distance, and others I have known at a rather smaller distance. This applies to parallels drawn by both sides today. Those events deserve special abhorrence, a special place in the sad story of humanity’s worst crimes.

And I commend too this earlier post: Rant warning! Yes, I sounded off on FB again…

The amazing man who was the Prosecutor at Nuremberg, probably the first person ever to use the word “genocide”, and a champion of the International Court of Justice where in his 90s he was given the honour of summing up the very first prosecution case.
A Jew born in Odessa. 1920 – 2023!

2024 in review 8

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June

Most read items in June

The ones with the highlight were posted in June.

Browse June

This one I selected for its ongoing relevance.

Gaza from 3,500 BCE to yesterday

Posted on  by Neil

The Useful Charts series is excellent and rooted in genuine scholarship

And I 100% endorse his endorsement of Ground News!

I cannot recommend this Canadian treasure too strongly. There are so many over-simplified, twisted and just plain wrong accounts circulating online on both sides of the argument about Israel/Palestine! This sweeps ALL of them off the table and gives you an idea of what the past of this area really has been. It does not take sides, but certainly laments from the historian’s viewpoint the awful damage the Israeli military has wrought, not forgetting the human cost. In the last minutes the compiler expresses his own opinions as a Jew opposed to the current actions of the Israeli government but through the entire presentation he has to that point been scrupulously dispassionate.

This is a shameful time and much of that shame rests with Israel and their more mindless supporters — but not only with them.

Again I say, watch this and be disabused of some of the awful disinformation that chokes the internet at the moment.

Mosab and his many friends

Such GOOD NEWS on Facebook overnight!

And what a back story is there! In my January 2024 post Keeping your balance in this polarising world I said:

I share many of Mosab’s posts because they are so often gems — but also they keep us grounded in the reaity of Gaza/Palestine. I otherwise select carefully what I share in this space, preferring things which seem to me well considered or made by people whose expertise and experience command attention. I make a point of avoiding the purely propagandist on either side, or those who curate otherwise useful material selectively and for propaganda purposes. I admit my choices are fallible, but I hope what I DO share is useful.

Mosab — a sampling

10 hours ago: Whenever I post about the killing of our children in Gaza, some inhumane people comment, asking H*a*m*a*s to surrender.

How shameful!

The problem is not only about this logic.

What about us in Palestine? Are the I*srae*lis the only people who have the right to exist and show the brutal power to protect their state?

Even if there was no H*a*m*a*s or Fatah, would Palestinians have a free state?

What parties did we have before 1948?

My choice has been to avoid many of the memes and tropes some use, including even at times Mosab, which provide horrific images and stories of dead or mutilated children and other examples of the crimes that all wars bring. Just as powerful, in my mind, are these two images, the second one provided by Mosab in the past couple of days.

In December 10, 2023 I shared this from Mosab:

Breaking, my heart is broken, my friend and colleague Refaat AlAreer was killed with his family a few minutes ago.

Refaat is a university professor and writer and editor of Gaza Writes Back.

I don’t want to believe this. We both loved to pick strawberries together. I took this photo of him this summer.

This is very brutal….

This year, there are no strawberries, no books (my destroyed library in the second photo), no English literature, no sea, no Refaat.

Please Refaat, come back!

Now we read on Facebook:

I just found this photo of Refaat, where he was carrying some olive oil he could salvaged from his family’s bombed house, days before he got murdered in an air strike.

If you look at the photo I shared of Refaat with the strawberries and then look at this picture, you will realize how much Refaat went through even before his murder.

RIP, loved one!

For Mosab’s story see this from PBS — there is a warning but I urge you to see this. It cannot be seen too often.

2024 in review 5

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March

With the Class of 1959 Reunion coming up in April I posted a series “My Own Private Sydney High”. There were other posts reprising pics from various March photo posts over the years, and Footy Tipping started. Some good food posts too. But the serious business of the world, especially the Middle East, was never far away. Oh, also some Russia vlog catch-ups.

Browse March

Sorry to interrupt my octogenarian reminiscences…

Posted on  by Neil

But some things annoy this retired teacher of History

Like really batty versions of the history of Palestine in the time of Christ! I mean, having also studied Latin, and having led an Ancient History class through the relevant Julio-Claudian period, and having read among others Tacitus and Suetonius…

Bit of a clue here as to the nature of the population of Palestine in AD 70… Which does not for a moment justify the actions of the Netanyahu government or the settlement program on the West Bank or the land grabs since 1948 — but neither should we encourage some of the less likely versions of Ancient History that have been doing the rounds.

Go to Rome for yourself and gaze upon the Arch of Titus.

And we even have a blow by blow description of these events from one Flavius Josephus. Have you heard of him?

Flavius Josephus (Greek: Ἰώσηπος, Iṓsēpos; c. AD 37 – c. 100) was a Roman–Jewish historian and military leader. Best known for writing The Jewish War, he was born in Jerusalem—then part of the Roman province of Judea—to a father of priestly descent and a mother who claimed royal ancestry.

He initially fought against the Roman Empire during the First Jewish–Roman War as general of the Jewish forces in Galilee, until surrendering in AD 67 to the Roman army led by military commander Vespasian after the six-week siege of Yodfat. Josephus claimed the Jewish messianic prophecies that initiated the First Jewish–Roman War made reference to Vespasian becoming Roman emperor. In response, Vespasian decided to keep him as a slave and presumably interpreter. After Vespasian became emperor in AD 69, he granted Josephus his freedom, at which time Josephus assumed the Emperor’s family name of Flavius. — Wikipedia

I have Jewish Antiquities and The Wars of the Jews in my eBook Library on Calibre.

Now as soon as the army had no more people to slay or to plunder, because there remained none to be the objects of their fury, [for they would not have spared any, had there remained any other work to be done,] Caesar gave orders that they should now demolish the entire city and temple, but should leave as many of the towers standing as were of the greatest eminency; that is, Phasaelus, and Hippicus, and Mariamne; and so much of the wall as enclosed the city on the west side. This wall was spared, in order to afford a camp for such as were to lie in garrison, as were the towers also spared, in order to demonstrate to posterity what kind of city it was, and how well fortified, which the Roman valor had subdued; but forall the rest of the wall, it was so thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left nothing to make those that came thither believe it had ever been inhabited. This was the end which Jerusalem came to by the madness of those that were for innovations; a city otherwise of great magnificence, and of mighty fame among all mankind.

But Caesar resolved to leave there, as a guard, the tenth legion, with certain troops of horsemen, and companies of footmen. So, having entirely completed this war, he was desirous to commend his whole army, on account of the great exploits they had performed, and to bestow proper rewards on such as had signalized themselves therein. He had therefore a great tribunal made for him in the midst of the place where he had formerly encamped, and stood upon it with his principal commanders about him, and spake so as to be heard by the whole army in the manner following: That he returned them abundance of thanks for their good-will which they had showed to him: he commended them for that ready obedience they had exhibited in this whole war, which obedience had appeared in the many and great dangers which theyhad courageously undergone; as also for that courage they had shown, and had thereby augmented of themselves their country’s power, and had made it evident to all men, that neither the multitude of their enemies, nor the strength of their places, nor the largeness of their cities, nor the rash boldness and brutish rage of their antagonists, were sufficient at any time to get clear of the Roman valor, although some of them may have fortune in many respects on their side. He said further, that it was but reasonable for them to put an end to this war, now it had lasted so long, for that they had nothing better to wish for when they entered into it; and that this happened more favorably for them, and more for their glory, that all the Romans had willingly accepted of those for their governors, and the curators of their dominions, whom they had chosen for them, and had sent into their own country for that purpose, which still continued under the management of those whom they had pitched on, and were thankful to them for pitching upon them. That accordingly, although he did both admire and tenderly regard them all, because he knew that every one of them had gone as cheerfully about their work as their abilities and opportunitieswould give them leave; yet, he said, that he would immediately bestow rewards and dignities on those that had fought the most bravely, and with greater force, and had signalized their conduct in the most glorious manner, and had made his army more famous by their noble exploits; and that no one who had been willing to take more pains than another should miss of a just retribution for the same; for that he had been exceeding careful about this matter, and that the more, because he had much rather reward the virtues of his fellow soldiers than punish such as had offended.

Hereupon Titus ordered those whose business it was to read the list of all that had performed great exploits in this war, whom he called to him by their names, and commended them before the company, and rejoiced in them in the same manner as a man would have rejoiced in his own exploits. He also put on their heads crowns of gold, and golden ornaments about their necks, and gave them long spears of gold, and ensigns that were made of silver, and removed every one of them to a higher rank; and besides this, he plentifully distributed among them, out of the spoils, and the other prey they had taken, silver, andgold, and garments. So when they had all these honors bestowed on them, according to his own appointment made to every one, and he had wished all sorts of happiness to the whole army, he came down, among the great acclamations which were made to him, and then betook himself to offer thank-offerings [to the gods], and at once sacrificed a vast number of oxen, that stood ready at the altars, and distributed them among the army to feast on. And when he had staid three days among the principal commanders, and so long feasted with them, he sent away the rest of his army to the several places where they would be every one best situated; but permitted the tenth legion to stay, as a guard at Jerusalem, and did not send them away beyond Euphrates, where they had been before. And as he remembered that the twelfth legion had given way to the Jews, under Cestius their general, he expelled them out of all Syria, for they had lain formerly at Raphanea, and sent them away to a place called Meletine, near Euphrates, which is in the limits of Armenia and Cappadocia; he also thought fit that two of the legions should stay with him till he should go to Egypt. — Josephus “The Wars of the Jews” Book VII Chapter 1

Written by someone actually around at the time!

Then of course with Easter coming up we might look at the Gospel of Mark.

So the soldiers led him into the palace (that is, the governor’s residence) and called together the whole cohort. 15:17 They put a purple cloak on him and after braiding a crown of thorns, they put it on him. 15:18 They began to salute him: “Hail, king of the Jews!” 15:19 Again and again they struck him on the head with a staff and spit on him. Then they knelt down and paid homage to him. 15:20 When they had finished mocking him, they stripped him of the purplecloak and put his own clothes back on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.

The Crucifixion

15:21 The soldiers forced a passerby to carry his cross, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country (he was the father of Alexander and Rufus). 15:22 They brought Jesus to a place called Golgotha (which is translated, “Place of the Skull”). 15:23 They offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. 15:24 Then they crucified him and divided his clothes, throwing dice for them, to decide what each would take. 15:25 It was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him. 15:26 The inscription of the charge against him read, “The king of the Jews.” 15:27 And they crucified two outlaws with him, one on his right and one on his left. 15:29 Those who passed by defamed him, shaking their heads and saying, “Aha! You who can destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, 15:30 save yourself and come down from the cross!” 15:31 In the same way even the chief priests – together with the experts in the law – were mocking him among themselves: “He saved others, but he cannot save himself! Let the Christ, the king of Israel, come down from the cross now, that we may see and believe!” Those who were crucified with him also spoke abusively to him. — Mark 15

Mark is usually dated through the eschatological discourse in Mark 13, which scholars interpret as pointing to the First Jewish–Roman War (66–74 AD)—a war that led to the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. This would place the composition of Mark either immediately after the destruction or during the years immediately prior. — Wikipedia (and just about every reputable New Testament scholar!)

The point being that it is pretty bloody obvious what the culture was in Palestine/Judaea in the Roman period, despite the historical revisionists that abound these days.

Then there are the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Was Jesus a Palestinian?

He was not, but there is a legitimate case for saying that he is!

And the case for? See Walid S. Mosarssa in Sojourners.

As a Palestinian Christian, I am proud to be a descendant of the world’s most ancient Christian community. My pride transcends the mere fact of belonging; it is rooted in the cultural legacy and global impact that our community has bestowed upon the world through nurturing and shaping Christianity from its earliest days until now. But this pride carries with it a solemn responsibility: I must be committed to preserving the integrity and values of this cultural and religious heritage, indigenous to my homeland, from being misappropriated to justify oppression, whether mine or someone else’s.

This is why I wear a shirt emblazoned with “Jesus is Palestinian” at protests I attend across the globe. My reason for wearing this shirt is beyond its provocative statement; it is a deliberate act of claiming Jesus as my ancestor to reclaim his identity as a Jewish subject under Roman occupation in first century Palestine. As a Palestinian in the United States, I know this assertion is a challenge to Christian hegemony, serving as a powerful reminder that Jesus was a disenfranchised imperial subject. For Palestinians like myself, Jesus is not only a historical or religious figure; he is a testament to our enduring heritage — an ancestor symbolizing both our deep roots and our ongoing struggle for justice and liberation.

But some Christians bristle at the assertion that Jesus is Palestinian. Why?…Sojo.net

One can indeed also say legitimately that Jesus is Ukrainian, or Koori, or Native American…. Mosarssa is not here using the language of the historian….

See my February post Feb posts get a good workout, and the brilliant Juan Cole.