November 14, 2023

When Palestinian-American and Democrat Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib posted a video saying from the river to the sea, she was promoting a “rallying cry for the destruction of the State of Israel and genocide of the Jewish people.” This call for Jewish genocide was the same call the Nazis made. It’s disturbing to realize that many pro-Palestinian and, inevitably, antisemitic protesters know nothing about the history of the Jews and Israel. They have no sense that Jews, rather than controlling the world, have been its victims for millennia, enduring an incomparable history of persecution that has led to repetitive bouts of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and racist laws that make Jim Crow seem tame.

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In 1492, the Spanish monarchs’ Alhambra decree gave the Sephardic Jewish population, which had Iberian roots stretching back almost a millennia, four months to convert or be banished. Most migrated to Poland or the Ottoman Empire.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the descendants of those Sephardic Jews who had relocated to Poland found their new Russian overseers sanctioning or condoning pogroms. The Jews were being cleansed again. Many fled to the United States. Almost simultaneously, in answer to Theodor Herzl’s renewal of the Biblical precept that Jews should return to Zion, many Jews embarked on a First and Second Aliyah (incoming or, literally, “going up”) to lands that were then part of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans welcomed the arriving Jews, happily selling them land in a mostly barren desert or a swamp infested with malaria and yellow fever.

During WWI, the Ottomans were courted by the Allied Powers, but they chose to ally with the Axis Powers. After the war, per routine spoils of war protocol, the losing empires were dismantled, and the victors determined the recipients of the spoils. The Ottoman Empire was broken up into many future Middle Eastern nations but, first, they had to be prepared for nationhood. To that end, temporarily, they became protectorates or mandates of France or Britain.

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The Mandate for Palestine was the answer to halting the ongoing heinous history of racism against the Jews. The Jews would be given their own nation. The land chosen was not arbitrary. The Ottomans had conquered this land in the 16th century, and now the Allied Powers reconquered it and were returning it to the Jews who had lived their continuously since roughly 1800 B.C.

In 1912, Albanian lands that the Ottomans had seized in the 14th century were similarly returned to the Albanians as the spoil of another war. They, too, would have their own nation.

Image: Jewish cemetery in Ohio vandalized with swastikas. WKYC video screen grab.

The Mandate for Palestine supercharged Jewish hatred in the Middle East. Muslims had been content to have Jews living amongst them as a productive subordinate population but rejected their being equal with Muslims. At the same time, petty British bureaucrats feared Jewish threats to their power, so they also fomented anti-Jewish hatred amongst the Arabs.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Hitler was supercharging hatred for the Jews. The Nazi-led execution of over 6 million Jews from 21 countries was and remains the most heinous act of racism in history. Between WWI and WWII, the third through fifth Aliyah took place, and 368,000 Jews migrated from Europe and the Middle East to the Mandate for Palestine. Many more would have migrated, but the British restricted entry. Many Jews would have also fled to the United States, but FDR had to weigh saving Jews against appeasing his anti-Semitic constituents. The latter prevailed.

Responsibility for the Mandate for Palestine shifted from Britain to the UN in 1947. The UN decided that the mandated lands, which included Jordan and parts of would accommodate a Jewish and a Palestinian nation. Israel was supposed to be a place where Jews could live securely in peace. Some of the very people who rejected the presence of a Jewish state in the Middle East would now be Israel’s neighbors. The United Nations, by its charter, is committed to preventing future wars, but it set Israel up for war.

On May 14, 1948, Israel became an independent nation. The population of Israel/Palestine was 82.1% Jewish. On May 15, 1948, a coalition of Arab nations attacked Israel and leveraged the territories allocated for a Palestinian nation. Their hatred for Jews increased after suffering a humiliating loss to this fledgling nation of people that Muslims historically stereotyped as merchants—not soldiers. The violence against Jews in the Middle East was now ratcheted up, with Muslim Nations evicting 900,000 Jews, many of whom had lived in those lands since Roman times. Israel took in every refugee.