Not a holocaust, just ethnic cleansing.

Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat the lead story on the
six o'clock news. Nowhere is this paradigm of contemporary media commentary
more apparent than in the case of the Middle East, where historical memory
seems to extend no further back than 1994.

For a range of commentators, Palestinian attacks on Israel are
inexplicable, given the offers of land for peace that are, or were, on the
table. The continued campaign of terrorism and resistance can only be
traced back to antiJewish feeling, as proved by a new wave of attacks on
synagogues across the world. Western solidarity with Palestinians is more
about a freefloating hatred for Israel and authority than it is positive,
and so on.

Such charges are profoundly and often wilfully ignorant of the complex
history of the region, and one has grown accustomed to hearing them
expressed by sections of the proIsrael lobby. But how widespread is this
lack of understanding? To judge from Age columnist Pamela Bone's article
("It might be an ugly war, but a Palestinian holocaust it is not," on this
page yesterday) it is extending well into the hinterland of political
comment.

Bone revisits the main charges against those who support Palestine in a
manner that strikes me as tendentious in the extreme. But the centrepiece
of her argument is that no matter how bad Israel's current actions, no
Israeli government has ever intended to "wipe out" the Palestinian people.
You can honestly believe there has been no attempt to drive them out, but
you have to stay scrupulously ignorant of history to do so.

The plain fact is that one wing of Zionism - the socalled "revisionist"
wing - founded itself on the notion that the Palestinian people would have
to be driven out of the land of both Palestine and Transjordan (today's
state of Jordan) and that, if they weren't willing to go, they would have
to be subjugated as a permanent minority within a Zionist state, or forced
to leave by any means necessary.

Revisionism's founder, Vladimir Jabotinsky, laid down the basis of the
argument in the 1920s. To clear Palestine of Arabs he wanted a Jewish army,
and he founded a series of Zionist youth militias across Europe - groups
which leftwing Zionists charged had more in common with farright militias
than with the Zionist project. Jabotinsky made some efforts to discipline
his more effusive followers (though he never expelled those such as Abba
Achimeir, who suggested that Hitler's "renewal" of the German people was
something Zionists could follow by example), but by the 1940s they had
blossomed into the Irgun and the Lehi. These gangs terrorised Palestinians
after World WarII, rolling bombs into Arab markets and massacring people in
villages such as Deir Yassin.

The strategy was ethnic cleansing, pure and simple, and it worked - it
turned nearly a million Palestinians into refugees. The Irgun hoped they
would simply keep on going into wider Arabia. The Arab world, which was
well aware of the strategy, has had other ideas.

Jabotinsky's follower, Menachem Begin, became prime minister in 1977 and
accelerated phase two of the plan - land theft in the West Bank and the
creation of Jewish settlements, to ensure that Palestinians became a
powerless minority within expanded borders. Because this was an ongoing
military campaign, Begin made a former general his minister of housing -
Ariel Sharon.

The world has forgotten this history. The Palestinians remember it, and
that is part of the reason they fight with such desperate ferocity, with a
strategy - terrorism - that had hitherto been so successfully turned on
them. "We would not go down into the ditch again," Begin said, remembering
his terrorist years in his memoirs. Clearly, the Palestinians have come to
the same resolution - they will not be disappeared, cleansed or permanently
subjugated as secondclass citizens.

International communiques that "this is not the Holocaust" are correct,
given what we know of the Holocaust. But it's probably more difficult to
make that distinction when your family is killed because someone in your
refugee camp was a suicide bomber, especially if you're there because your
family fled there in terror decades earlier.

Ignore this complex history and you soon end up in total historical
ignorance. Bone, for example, cites the "dislike of Jews that has long been
close to the mainstream in some Arab countries" as if this was some sort of
explanation for the present conflict.

In fact, it was the relatively peaceful relations between Jews and Arabs in
Palestine - as compared with the violent antiJewish feeling across Eastern
Europe and Russia - that convinced the early Zionists that the project was
practicable in the first place. Yes, the past 50 years has produced extreme
antiJewish feeling in sections of the Arab press, just as social tension in
Australia has given rise to the shockjock culture. But Bone wouldn't want
to be judged by the opinions of Stan Zemanek and I suggest she extend the
same courtesy to the Arab world.

And yes, you can always find antiJewish nutters on the Internet, attaching
themselves to the Palestinian cause. But antiJewish nutters attach
themselves to a lot of causes. I suspect the League of Rights, for example,
would heartily endorse attacks made on the global banking system by a
certain Pamela Bone.

It's easy to be blinded by guilt by association, even where some
associations exist. But if Bone and others don't keep a clearsighted view
of the issues they'll end up hopelessly confused and saying things that are
manifestly silly - that criticising white South Africans during the
apartheid years was merely "another form of racism", for example. At which
point, even the proIsrael lobby might start to wish they'd turn their
attentions elsewhere.

arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)