The Jewish connection of the Battle of Beersheba and Anti-Israel bias in one of America’s biggest newspapers matters By Jonathan S. Tobin and 'From the River to the Sea’: Hamas Explains What British Students WantBy Colonel Richard Kemp
Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.
'From the River to the Sea': Hamas Explains What British Students Want By Colonel Richard Kemp
photo Credit: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash 90
Ismail Haniya (L) kisses Yahya Sinwar after his release in the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal
"Free, free Palestine — from the river to the sea." I was met, as so often elsewhere, by this ubiquitous chant from the standard-issue protesters when I arrived at the University of Essex in the UK to give a talk last week. What river? What sea? I doubt many of them knew. Most of these students are fed such slogans when they are coaxed to come out and demonstrate by the campus rabble-rousers — a little bit of animation to distract from the monotony of student life on an autumn evening.
Their distraction comes at a cost. Not to me: I've seen and heard it all many times, often belted out with a bit more gusto and venom. The cost is to the Jewish students on campus who, even if they are not Israeli, are the real targets of Israel Apartheid Weeks and constant agitation against the Jewish state and anyone who supports it. The Jewish students have heard it all before too, but they have to live their lives alongside fellow students and sometimes professors who are demanding an end to the Jewish national homeland.
Anti-Israel bias in one of America's biggest newspapers matters
It's not true that biased reporting about the Middle East has no impact on Israel. In the last week, a New York Times feature about a road trip taken by two of its staff through the small country generated a surge of interest on Twitter from Israelis. The 5,000-word article paints a dismal picture. Just about everyone they met as they traveled from the northern border with Lebanon to the southern port of Eilat was dissatisfied and disillusioned with the country. The Israel they depicted was dysfunctional, deeply divided and generally miserable. It was all summed up by one elderly Israeli quoted in the piece who said if his father, who had helped found one of the nation's kibbutzim in the pre-state era, were to look at the country now, he'd say, " 'This wasn't the child we prayed for.' And then he'd return to his grave."
While most Israelis will tell you they don't read or care about foreign press coverage, this story generated a mass response. While few would deny that their nation has a lot of problems and that its politics are pretty crazy, they also take pride in the fact that surveys have consistently shown that it is also one of the happiest places on earth. Measuring happiness is complicated, but when you take into account responses about people's satisfaction in their lives, pollsters have come up with a fairly objective standard. And it shows that Israel ranks 12th in the world (up from 13th the year before) in the happiness index of its citizens, ranking only below some Scandinavian and European countries, as well as New Zealand.
So to show the Timesand its readers their contempt for this sort of shoddy agenda-driven writing, a Twitter hashtag was createdcalled #SadSadIsraelin which Israelis posted pictures of them enjoying their lives from north to south and everywhere in-between. Scanning those posts actually provides readers with a much better picture of what life in Israel really looks like.
Why did the Times writers come up with such a different picture? Call it confirmation bias or just prejudiced reporting; the result was perfectly in line with the paper's general tone of coverage of Israel. Their journey was intended to produce exactly what they pre-ordained. They went looking for a particular idea about the country, and that's what they found.
The same applies to a subsequent articlein the upcoming issue of the Times Sunday Magazinewith the portentous title of "Inside the Unraveling of American Zionism." It focuses on the 93 rabbinical and cantorial students who signed a lettercondemning Israel during the fighting with Hamas last May. Subsequently published in the Forward, the letter was a disgraceful and self-important rant filled with virtue signaling and pseudo-religious contempt for Israel that displayed the signers' tunnel vision about the conflict and lack of understanding of the dilemmas faced by the Israeli people.
The piece, by former Tablet writer Marc Tracy, wasn't wrong to link their views to anti-Zionism. The students didn't merely disdain Israeli policies; they called for an end to U.S. military aid to the Jewish state. Even worse, they fully embraced the Palestinian nakba ("catastrophe") narrative about the illegitimacy of Israel's creation. They also went full-bore intersectional by endorsing the comparison between the Palestinian war to destroy Israel with the struggle for civil rights in the United States. In so doing, they validated the toxic myth that Israel is a function of "white privilege," and, whether intentionally or not, gave a permission slip to American anti-Semites on the left to demonize Israelis and American Jews.
Frankly, it's a disgrace that several dozen students at the non-Orthodox seminaries could be mobilized to sign such a document at a time when more than 4,000 rockets and missiles fired by Hamas were raining down on Israelis, and while anti-Zionist rhetoric on the floor of the House of Representatives helped incite anti-Semitic violence on the streets of American cities. It's also evidence of the way some have fully embraced the fashionable ideologies of the left, even if it places them in opposition to basic principles of Judaism, such as the importance of the land of Israel or even the right of Israelis to self-defense against terrorism and would-be terrorists.
Relishing an authentic Israeli-Arab meal, part of a social-media campaign called "#SadSadIsrael." Source: Twitter.
On the other hand, to treat 93 extreme leftists as somehow representative of the complete "unraveling" of American Jewish support for Zionism is neither a serious analysis nor good journalism.
It's true that the American Jewish community has changed since the heyday of support for Israel in the post-Holocaust period that stretched from 1948 to the Yom Kippur War. As Tracy pointed out, after that, many highly assimilated Jews began to revert to the pre-World War II position of many in the community that was not sympathetic to Zionism. And it's indeed a stretch to consider 93 students and their spiritual mentor, the appalling writer Peter Beinart, as thought leaders. Beinart, who in a few years went from posing as the avatar of liberal Zionist to endorsing the Palestinian "right of return" and the destruction of the Jewish state, may be the poster child for such disillusionment, but to pretend that he is representative of Jewish opinion is simply untrue.
After all, polls continue to show that although an overwhelming majority of American Jews are loyal Democratic voters and aren't fans of recent Israeli governments, most say that Israel is important to them and they consider Israelis family. Other surveys demonstrate that nine out of 10 American Jews back Israel over the Palestinians.
The point here is that to treat a feature about a six-month-old letter that did nothing to shape Jewish opinion about Israel as a harbinger of the end of Jewish support for Israel was irresponsible. It was also not original. The Times has been publishing similar pieces predicting the end of American Jewish Zionism for 50 years, giving Israel's opponents the same sort of sympathetic and out-of-proportion coverage in previous decades that they've given the current batch of anti-Zionists.
Overlooking magnificent views, part of a social-media campaign called "#SadSadIsrael." Source: Twitter.
The newspaper of record has a long history of hostile coverage of Israel and indifference to Jewish suffering dating back to its editorial policy of ignoring the Holocaust as it was happening. In the last decade, however, it has grown worse. Whereas in the decades after the Second World War, the paper's editors didn't give platforms to those advocating for the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet and hosted a number of pro-Israel columnists on its op-ed page, today the Times considers such advocacy to be fair comment and employs several writers who regularly take that line. The dropping of even the pretense of objectivity in most of its news coverage on just about any topic in recent years has also led to more anti-Israel bias.
The question is, does this matter? Some pro-Israel activists and most Israelis will say "no."
Israelis have always considered worrying about international opinion to be not in keeping with their goal of making their actions more important than what other people say about them. American friends of Israel say they stopped reading the Times years ago and that doing so is a waste of time.
Still, it's a mistake to ignore what remains one of the most widely read publications in the world.
While the trend that Tracy's article inflates into an "unraveling" is discussing the opinion of only a small minority, the support it gets from the newspaper that is still viewed by liberal Jews as the flagship of journalism can only strengthen it. Undermining Israel's image by negative articles serves to help those trying to transform the Democratic Party from one with an increasingly vocal anti-Israel element to one in which that faction dominates.
Sipping hot cocoa on a mall, part of a social-media campaign called "#SadSadIsrael." Source: Twitter.
That's why it's important that the calumnies of the Times never be allowed to go unanswered. If that answer can be in the form of mass mockery, as is the case with #SadSadIsrael, then all the better.
Ignoring the danger of allowing the "apartheid Israel" lie to gain traction in popular culture or even in Jewish forums is folly. Nor should Jewish organizations be shy about speaking up in condemning the sorts of actions that the seminary letter represents since it is providing cover for anti-Semites elsewhere.
While the vast majority of Americans remain steadfast friends of Israel and are generally unaffected by media bias, the one group that is impacted by it—and especially, at the Times—are American Jews. Fighting for Jewish opinion in this country means that no one who cares about Israel can afford to not care about what the Times publishes, no matter how wrongheaded or biased it might be.
was a significant turning point in world history. The outcome of that battle led to Israel's establishment, and it was achieved with the active synergy of Christian and Jewish Zionists.Beersheba was the opening battle in the Palestine Campaign of World War I, a battle won by the extraordinary cavalry charge of Australian and New Zealand horsemen who turned defeat into victory. By spring 1917, in the context of the war, Britain was losing 5-0 against their German and Turkish enemies.t
British forces were bogged down in the muddy trenches of France with thousands of dead and little signs of a breakthrough. The Turks had defeated Britain in the Dardanelles, forcing Winston Churchill to resign as 1st Lord of the Admiralty. The British army had surrendered after the Turks put them to siege at the Battle of Kuts in Iraq, and had lost two battles in Gaza with losses of up to 17,000 men. Gaza was an unmitigated disaster and Gen. Archibald Murray, commander of the British Expeditionary Forces, was ordered back to London.So where are the Jewish connections?A Jewish chemist living in Manchester became close friends with a British prime minister, a friendship that changed history.Chaim Weizmann was working on the synthesis of rubber in the Trafford Park industrial area when he was asked to find a formula to synthesize and produce acetone and cordite in large quantities. Britain was running out of ammunition. Weizmann made that scientific breakthrough, a success which earned him respect in high places. Weizmann was also a dreamer. He dreamed about a Jewish state in its ancient homeland. But he was more than that. He visited Jerusalem in 1907 where he was instrumental in establishing the Palestine Land Development Company which bought land to build Jewish homes including in an area called Shimon HaTzadik, later renamed Sheikh Jarrah following the occupation of major parts of Jerusalem in the 1948 war by Jordan.
Weizmann also used his new influence to set the foundations of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem even though Palestine was under Turkish governance. Weizmann's vision was a Jewish homeland based on development and higher education. Arthur Balfour, a former prime minister who represented the East Manchester Parliamentary ward, got to know Weizmann through his contribution to the British war effort and, as Britain's foreign minister from 1916, tried to persuade Weizmann to accept his offer of establishing an immediate Jewish homeland in Uganda rather what appeared to be unattainable dream of Palestine at that time.
BEERSHEBA, 1917. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)In their discussion, Weizmann asked why Britain did not build their capital in Saskatchewan. A puzzled Balfour answered that Britain always had London, to which Weizmann replied: "Precisely, and we lived in Jerusalem when London was a marsh."The point was not lost on Balfour, who became the prominent advocate for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," the cornerstone of the Balfour Declaration and British foreign policy.IN
SPRING 1917, British prime minister David Lloyd George made the decision to open up a new front in an attempt to outflank the Germans.
He ordered Gen. Edmund Allenby to take charge of the Palestine Campaign, with his personal request to take Jerusalem by Christmas.When Allenby arrived in Cairo, his General Staff appraised him of their plans for a third attack on Gaza. Everything in the quest to drive out the Turks and Germans from Palestine, they said, ran through Gaza. A lesser-ranked but famous soldier advised Allenby to outflank the enemy by taking the eastern route on the other side of the Jordan River and head straight up to Damascus with less resistance. That man was Lawrence of Arabia, who claimed to have Arab mercenaries to handle the job. Then Allenby met a Jew, a non-military one, and things changed.Aaron Aaronsohn was an agronomist who knew every nook and cranny of Palestine like a lover knows the contours of his mistress.Aaronsohn told Allenby to ignore Gaza and concentrate the full force of his opening attack on Beersheba. When Allenby asked why Beersheba, Aaronsohn replied: "Because that is where the water is and you cannot conduct your campaign with all your men, machines, horses and camels without sufficient water, and I know where that water lies."Allenby was a Bible student, but not in the religious sense. He was familiar with the battles and now he was about to launch a major military campaign in the same arena. Allenby was intrigued when Aaronsohn told him that Richard the Lionheart's Crusaders failed to reach Jerusalem not because they fell victim to Saladin's sword, but to mosquitos and malaria in the swampy marshlands of the coastal belt that decimated his army.Allenby saw in Aaronsohn a man who knew the topography better than his senior officers and could map out a route that would avoid many unforeseen pitfalls. Aaronsohn had one other advantage. While developing his agricultural research throughout Palestine, he had established a network of spies who were trying to deliver vital intelligence to the British HQ in Cairo. Having left Palestine in order to persuade the British to accept his NILI spy ring, he had handed the operation to his younger sister, Sarah Aaronsohn, the only woman ever to lead a major espionage network, literally under the noses of the enemy, during wartime. (The story of her motivation and dedication can be found in my book, A Tale of Love and Destiny.)
ZE'EV JABOTINSKY wearing the uniform of the Jewish Legion of the British army, with sisters Bela and Nina. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)MY FOURTH example of courageous Christian-Jewish synergy begins with a question. Name the Christian British army officer buried in a Jewish cemetery in Israel?Ze'ev Jabotinsky's epiphany into Zionism began by witnessing the bloody antisemitism of Russian pogroms in places like Kishinev (then the capital of Bessarabia and today the Moldovan capital of Chisinau). He penned a dramatic poem that expressed his anger."Once, in that town, under a heap of garbage, I noticed a piece of parchment. A fragment of the Torah. I picked it up and carefully removed the dirt.
Two Hebrew words stood out: 'b'eretz nokriya' – in an alien land. I nailed this scrap of parchment above my door. For in these two words, is told the entire story of the pogrom."The searing sight of defenseless Jews caused him to call on the Jewish youth to defend themselves. He created slogans such as: "Better to have a gun and not use it than need a gun and not have one," and the even more forceful: "Jewish youth! Learn to shoot!"His passion led him to the inevitable conclusion that Jews would only be able to defend themselves in a Jewish state.He was elected as the Russian delegate to the 1903 6th Zionist Congress in Basel but, on his return to Russia, he was angered by Russian Jewish organizations attending events honoring the antisemitic Russian
leadership.In 1914, Jabotinsky moved to Egypt after hearing that thousands of Jews had been deported from Palestine by the Turks. There, together with the handsome, one-armed former Russian war hero, Joseph Trumpeldor, they began to train the male refugees, inspiring them that they would be the first Jews to take up arms and liberate the Jewish state in Palestine.Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor traveled to Cairo to persuade the British General Staff to recruit their refugee conscripts into the British army. They were scoffed at by officers who told them that Britain had no plans to invade Palestine.Not to
be outdone, the two displaced Zionists sailed to England and began
banging on the doors of Whitehall until they were invited to recruit
their volunteers as mule haulers in the Dardanelles carrying ammunition
and supplies to the fighting men at the front, and carrying back the
wounded and dead to Gallipoli.It wasn't helpful that, in 1915, the Zionist Organization abroad officially objected to Jabotinsky persuading the British into recruiting a Jewish force to fight on the side of the Allies. They were gravely concerned for the safety of German Jews of such a force taking arms against Germany. In a personal attack against Jabotinsky, they wrote as a matter of record that "the Zionist Organization has nothing to do with any scheme conceived by one of its own irresponsible firebrands who, as a member of the Zionist Organization, has been guilty of an absurdity, as well as a disloyal act."
ISRAEL POSTAGE stamp celebrating Chaim Weizmann's role in the Balfour Declaration, 1967. (credit: Karen Horton/Flickr)This moment of Zionist infamy set back the advancement of a Jewish fighting force for almost two years.The British need for additional manpower won the day. They gave command of this Jewish force to an officer named Patterson, a man with a controversial past.Col. John Patterson was a dashing officer serving in Africa who famously killed two lions that broke into an army compound, slaughtering Indian workers serving in the British army. His exploits led to a book and a movie in which Gregory Peck played the role of Patterson. But this was followed by an embarrassing incident. Patterson was escorting a young British lord and his young wife on a safari into the African bush in
which, it was claimed, the man committed suicide. Patterson had him
buried in the bush rather than bring his body back to base camp. Press
gossip had it that the lord killed himself after finding his wife in the
arms of Patterson. Despite Patterson's denial he was dispatched back to
London, which is where he met a Jew named Jabotinsky that developed
into a lifelong friendship.Under
Patterson's command, Jabotinsky's men took to the task of pulling pack mules, often under heavy fire, with stoic courage that earned them recognition for their service.THE ZION Mule Corp was disbanded on December 31, 1915, its duty in Gallipoli done. With Patterson in ill health, suffering from a debilitating illness, it rested on Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor to spend more than a year pressing British officials to reinstate their Jewish unit into the British army.The profound moment came at a meeting in which Lord Derby, the war minister, invited the Palestinian Jews to a special meeting during Passover 1917. Hard-pressed for manpower, the lord asked if they were able to recruit large numbers of volunteers. With an eye on the impending Palestine Campaign and knowing the favor of both the British prime minister and foreign minister to the establishment of a Jewish homeland, Trumpeldor answered: "If it is to be just a regiment of Jews, perhaps. If it will be a regiment on the Palestine front, certainly. If, together with its formation, there will appear a government pronouncement in favor of Zionism, overwhelmingly."The new Jewish force was promoted as a unit of the Royal Fusiliers within the British army. The Star of David was stitched onto the uniform sleeve of every soldier and their unit became popularly known as the Jewish Legion, as they trained and paraded before being shipped off to join the fighting force in Egypt preparing to participate in the Palestine Campaign.The emotion of a Jewish unit about to help liberate the ancient land of Israel was etched in the diary of Patterson, who wrote: "A Jewish unit had not been known for 2,000 years, not since the days of the Maccabees, those heroic sons of Israel who fought so valiantly, and for a time so successfully, to wrest Jerusalem from the Roman Legion. It is curious that Gen. [John] Maxwell should have chosen me. He knew nothing of my knowledge of Jewish history and my sympathy for the Jewish race. I never dreamed that, in a small way, I would become the captain of a host of the Children of Israel."MEANWHILE, in Cairo, Aaronsohn struggled against an antisemitic military elite who were reluctant to assist his NILI spy ring, courageously operated by his dedicated sister, Sarah – to the point that, against their best interest, the British rarely provided the naval frigate required to sail up the coast to pick up Sarah's intelligence reports from their Agricultural Experimental Station at Atlit.Sarah excelled at recruiting new secret agents. They reported to her from Beirut and Damascus, recorded troop movements at train stations and logged the flights of German aircraft at airbases inside Palestine. She even had a spy inside the Turkish military base at Beersheba. But, in the absence of the British frigate Sarah was forced to send much of her intelligence by carrier pigeon, and this led to her discovery, torture and death. Sarah died on October 9, 1917. The Battle of Beersheba was fought on October 31.
COL. JOHN HENRY PATTERSON gravesite, at the cemetery at Avichail, a moshav founded by many of his Jewish soldiers (credit: Wikimedia Commons)It must be noted that Lawrence of Arabia's Arab mercenaries never crossed to the west bank of the Jordan River to fight the enemy. On the other hand, the Jewish Legion did venture across the river to open the way for Gen. Edward Chaytor's ANZAC cavalry unit to cross and attack the Turks at es-Salt on the Moab mountaintop now located in Jordan. The Jewish soldiers followed the ANZACs as the supporting force and they escorted hundreds of captured Turkish soldiers back across the river.After the victory, Chaytor sent a complimentary letter to Patterson, writing that "so few people have heard of the Battalion's good work, or the remarkable fact that we hope to have finally reopened Palestine to the Jews. A Jewish force was fighting on the Jordan, a very short distance from where their forefathers, under Joshua, first crossed into Palestine."As a result of the heat, exhaustion and dehydration, the force was decimated with malaria and required immediate hospitalization in Jerusalem. However, the British had foolishly transferred most of the doctors, nurses, even hospital beds to Cairo and, as the available beds were occupied by other soldiers, the Jewish soldiers had to sleep on the grass outside the hospital building in the pouring Jerusalem winter rain.Despite desperate telegrams sent to British headquarters in Cairo, and to the ar Office in London by Patterson about the dreadful condition, little was done.THIS TRAGIC news reached Britain, where a group of Anglo-Jewish women volunteered to come to Palestine to help as nurses. On their arrival they were prevented from serving the Jewish soldiers in Jerusalem and were transported to Cairo to tend to wounded soldiers at the General Hospital. Meanwhile, Jewish soldiers died of malaria and pneumonia.By the end of the Palestine Campaign, the Jewish Legion had been reduced from nearly 1,000 men to six officers and fewer than 150 men.On December 11, 1917, Gen. Allenby dismounted from his horse outside the Jaffa Gate and led his men on foot into the Old City of Jerusalem.He had not only liberated Jerusalem by Christmas, he had arrived on the eve of Hanukkah. Allenby was aware of this. He remarked in his diary that he entered Jerusalem 2,600 years after Judah Maccabee.While the battles were still raging in the north of Palestine, the World Zionist Organization received permission from the British government to lay the foundation stone to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on July 24, 1918. Gen. Viscount Allenby was an honorary guest at the ceremony.The Palestine Campaign ended on October 28, 1918. British military administrators were brought to Jerusalem from Cairo to govern Palestine.Instead of honoring British policy, namely "to establish in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people" and to "use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object," as written in the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917, some officers took it upon themselves to encourage the Arabs to rise up and demonstrate against the policy.By January 1919, Jabotinsky had written to his wife that "the Arabs draw encouragement from the fact that the British do not uphold their promises. The situation is bound to end up like Kishinev."By February, Jabotinsky had sent a letter to Allenby bewailing "the heavy burden of disappointment, despair, breached promises and antisemitism" of the Jerusalem-based British administrators.Allenby, a stickler for discipline and furious that a junior officer would question authority, immediately released Jabotinsky from military service.On April 2, 1920, the Arabs, aided by the colluding senior British officers, exploited the traditional Muslim Nebi Musa Festival, which included a march into the Old City.The Arabs were led by the notorious antisemite Haj Amin al-Husseini, who
incited the crowd into anti-Jewish violence within the Old City where
they began attacking Jews, raping women and destroying property.The
upper class, Jew-hating Arabist Col. Bertie Walters-Taylor, Allenby's administration chief of staff in Jerusalem who had befriended Husseini, absented himself from Jerusalem by driving with his wife down to Jericho for the day.THE ARAB riot left many Jews dead and injured. When news reached Jabotinsky, now a demobilized soldier, he gathered some friends and ran to the rescue of fellow Jews under assault. But they were initially prevented from entering the Old City by British soldiers. Not to be outdone, he demanded they be let in as medical orderlies.Ronald Storrs, the military governor of Jerusalem, ordered a search of the homes of Zionist Jews. They confiscated weapons and arrested Jabotinsky for illegal possession of weapons. The British searched for Husseini, but the Arab leader had fled Jerusalem. Jabotinsky was sentenced to 15-year imprisonment and penal labor, but world reaction affected his release.By spring 1940 the British had banned Jabotinsky from returning to Palestine. He could see that Europe was lost and that America was the last place where Jews were of sufficient numbers to be recruited to Zionism.On his retirement from the British Army, Patterson, with his wife, retired to America. There he was reunited with Jabotinsky and helped him address audiences and rally them to the cause.Benzion Netanyahu was Jabotinsky's deputy. He became a friend of Patterson, arranging his speaking engagements. When Netanyahu's first son was born, Benzion invited Patterson to attend the brit as godfather. The baby was named Yonatan, partly in honor and friendship of Patterson.Yoni Netanyahu fell in Israel's operation to rescue the Jewish hostages of the Air France flight held at gunpoint by Palestinian and German terrorists in Entebbe, Uganda.When Patterson died he was buried in California, but his grandson claimed that he always wanted to be buried alongside his soldiers of the Jewish Legion. The grandson made contact with Benzion's son, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and an arrangement was made that the bodies of Col. John Patterson and his wife were moved to Israel where they are now buried in Avihayil cemetery alongside Patterson's Jewish soldiers.This remains an everlasting testament to the bond between Christian Zionists and the Jewish people. Thewriter is senior associate at the Israel Institute for StrategicStudies and author of 1917 From Palestine to the Land of Israel and ATale of Love and Destiny.
