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Steven- Say It Isn't So
By Gerald A. Honigman
July 11, 2005
Steven, we're about the same age, you and I.
So we were both born just after the Holocaust and at about the very same moment in history when the Jewish nation was resurrected...Ezekiel's Valley of the Dry Bones miraculously materializing almost exactly as the Hebrew Prophet saw it happening some 2,500 years ago.
Listen, Steven, to Ezekiel, Chapter 37...
The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones,
And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.
And He said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest.
Again He said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD.
Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live:
And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.
So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone.
And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.
Then said He unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.
So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.
Then He said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts.
Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.
And ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves...
Wow, if the above was not referring to the phoenix of Zion arising out of the ashes of Auschwitz, then what a coincidence! I know you've become sort of an expert on Jewish ashes, so it's the phoenix part and the lessons of the Holocaust that I now worry about.
Steven, you're an amazing film maker. You don't need me to tell you this. I know.
Who isn't a fan of yours?
But I fear that what you are about to do will be a travesty. I'll turn to this shortly.
Search where you may among the realm of man and his actions, and I dare you to find perfect justice.
Don't demand this of Jews either. Your friend, Tony Kushner, whom you've chosen to write the script for your next movie, does. And that movie has the potential to be very important, indeed, to both Jews and the Jew of the Nations.
But before I get into this in more detail, please let me tell you a little bit about my own credentials. You need to know that my "opinions" are well founded.
I've done extensive doctoral studies in Middle Eastern Affairs but had my academic career nipped in the bud by the tenured chief honcho at Ohio State almost three decades ago.
My crime was truly believing in academic freedom and asking that the lenses not be changed when studying Israel and the rest of the neighborhood in which it lives. Guess who never got a Ph.D. dissertation advisor--despite being the most advanced doctoral student in his class--as a result? There was no Campus Watch in those days.
I subsequently had one of my research papers published in the heavily Nobel Laureate-sponsored academic journal, the Fall 1981 Middle East Review (an almost unheard of feat for "just" a student back then), when I realized the hatchet job being committed against me.
By the way, the name of the above article was "British Petroleum Politics, Arab Nationalism, and the Kurdish Struggle For Independence." It can be found on recommended reference lists of leading universities, including Paris' famed Sciences Po. Today, my work can also be found in hundreds of print and web publications all over the world--including moderate Arab and Muslim ones. My professors rarely, if ever, mentioned Kurds in all the years of my studies. But they were all experts on Israel's alleged original sin.
You see, Steven, even though Arabs claim the whole region as "purely Arab patrimony," most of the almost two dozen states they already possess were conquered and forcibly Arabized from native, non-Arab peoples. Kurds, Berbers, Copts, Jews, Black African Sudanese, and others as well either submitted to this subjugation or were killed. For Arabs, imperialism is only nasty when they themselves are not indulging in it.
Has your friend, Tony, who is so worried about Israel's moral shortcomings, ever discussed any of this with you?
The few Jews on staff while I was being victimized in academia were either too scared to get involved or were on staff precisely because they shared the same views as Carter Findley and, unfortunately, the man who is now writing the script for your film about Israel's attempt to bring to justice the murderers of its Olympic athletes, Mr. Kushner.
Borrowing a Kushner quote from Jason Maoz's July 8th FrontPageMag.com article, "I think the founding of the State of Israel was for the Jewish people a historical, moral, political calamity.... I wish modern Israel hadn't been born," I must say that I'm shocked. And he has a long history of such attitudes--so you can't claim ignorance here.
It's bad enough that we have Tony Kushner (and others like him) saying such things. But I can't believe that Steven Spielberg will turn out to be just another Jewish Michael Moore as well.
Certainly, Steven, you know the power of film today--especially a Spielberg film. Is this really what you want to accomplish?
Nations at war--especially those which are forced to fight daily for their very lives--often make mistakes. Israel tries its best not to. Hafez al-Assad of Syria killed ten times more Arab opponents in a month than Israel did in years of intifada. A little more perspective, please...Will Tony Kushner be the person to provide this?
Nations which have their kids and other innocents deliberately targeted and disemboweled are forced to take measures to stop the murder. Many nations, for example, which dwarf Israel have erected security fences to help keep danger away. And rare, indeed, is the nation which faces the murderous rejectionist barbarism that Israel faces.
Poll after poll taken among Arabs still reveal that even if Israel was to consent to return to its 1949 U.N.-imposed, 9-mile wide armistice line existence, most Arabs would reject its right to exist anyway...as they did when starting several wars before Israel was ever in Gaza, Sinai, the Golan, Judea and Samaria, etc.
Steven, please keep in mind that the "moderate" Mahmoud Abbass--the darling of so many of your colleagues--denies that the Holocaust of Schindler's List ever took place. He also openly ran on a platform for Israel's destruction...but by other means, and refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. And he's the "good guy."
Nations have fought wars over their own alleged security interests thousands of miles away from home. Not including our own country, remember the Falkland War--as just one of many examples? So, how can any reasonable person not understand the problems Israel must deal with right in its own backyard. Have you ever tried to find Israel on a map of the world without a magnifying glass? Is the Arab-Jewish conflict really about territory?
Steven, your buddy Tony--into whose hands you are about to place Israel's reputation among many millions who will see your film--does not believe Israel has a right to exist. He has unabashedly said so.
Kushner expects Israel to behave as no other nation could or would and holds Israel to a suicidal code of conduct.
Yet any fair assessment of Israel's actions would show that the Jewish State really has shown amazing restraint. Non-combatant Arabs killed and wounded have been used by their own "heroes" as human shields--against the Geneva Conventions, by the way. They have not been targeted in their cars, homes, buses, restaurants, and such. Or at the Olympics. And the Jews have bent over backwards to offer fair and just compromises to those dedicated to their destruction.
Too much of this has been repeated over and over and over.
But the Arabs thrust their same charges at Israel over and over and over. And they get the Tony Kushners (and the Steven Spielbergs?) to believe and endorse them. So, like it or not, they must be answered. The hope is that reasonable minds which were not previously aware of the facts will then better understand. The assertions Arabs use against Israel regarding their alleged victimization by the latter especially come to mind since they're likely to be ammunition for someone with Kushner's proclivities to use against Israel in your film.
Right from the getgo, Arab nationalism was awarded some 80 % of the original April 25, 1920 territory of the Mandate of Palestine when Colonial Secretary Churchill created Transjordan--today's Jordan--in 1922.
Arabs later rejected the 1947 partition plan which would have given them about another 10 %... 90% of the total. So much for Arab claims that Jews got all of the land. And I won't get into the suicidal concessions--contrary to Resolution 242's call for Israel to finally get "secure and recognized borders" to replace the '49 Auschwitz /armistice lines--that Prime Minister Barak (at President Clinton's prodding) offered Arafat at Camp David and Taba in 2000 but were rejected as well. A Jewish State, regardless of size, is rejected by the vast majority of Arabs. This has always been the problem.
Steven, now ask yourself this question: What compromises have Arabs offered their own perceived national competitors? The latter yielded or died. Yet in your script writer's eyes and words, it's the sole, tiny resurrected state of the most persecuted people this planet has ever known which does not deserve to exist. Only they should willingly bare the necks of their kids and cave in to all that those who aim to destroy them demand. And only Jews are expected by Tony to beat their chests and endlessly recite Al Chait Shechatanu for their very existence in a land in which they have over three thousand continuous years of history.
Nothing short of Israel consenting to its own suicide will, unfortunately, be enough for its enemies. Steven, is this what you subconsciously want too? Do you also buy into the claims that the Zionists are the new Nazis? Will your new film thus aim to balance your Schindler's List? I can't believe this. Yet think about what someone of Kushner's rabidly anti-Zionist inclinations are bound to do with this new film of yours...
Arabs, and others like Tony, want Jews to say that they were wrong for wanting something beyond their perpetual scapegoat and whipping post existence in the Diaspora and admit to original sin for desiring in one tiny state the same rights and dignity that Arabs demand for themselves in some two dozen of their own.
As I have had to write too often before, Steven, do Arabs acknowledge original sin for denying 30 million truly stateless Kurds the one best chance they had at independence after World War I, when British petroleum politics colluded with Arab nationalism to abort previous promises made to the Kurds? Or when they gassed and slaughtered Kurds by the hundreds of thousands over this past century for keeping those dreams alive?
Do Arabs acknowledge that they sinned when they outlawed the majority Berber population of "Arab" North Africa their culture and language and murdered those who wouldn't be Arabized? Or when they oppress and intimidate Copts in Egypt?
And do you know what the civil war in Lebanon was really all about?
While the world seems to have finally opened its eyes --if ever so slightly--to the Arab genocidal atrocities in the Sudan, I see no Arabs beating their chest over this catastrophe either...Or easily a dozen other examples of actual sin which Arabs think absolutely nothing of.
And I don't hear any comments about any of this from your script writer either...the guy whom you've now chosen to pass judgment on Israel. Do you really want someone with such hypocritical double standards vis-a-vis the Jew of the Nations wielding such power?
Steven, I expect this kind of behavior from Michael Moore and the (all-too-many) Woody Allen-type Jews. The latter join him because they would rather thrive on victimization and the world's sympathy for dead Jews than demand empathy for live ones...Pretty pathetic. But I thought the Prince of Egypt's creator knew better.
And regarding those "Palestinian" Arab refugees whose suffering Tony uses to vilify Israel, who suffered their nakba (catastrophe--i.e. Israel's rebirth) because six Arab nations attacked a nascent Israel which was to emerge on about 10% of the original 1920 Mandate and their attempt backfired, hold onto your seat...
When the United Nations Relief Works Agency--UNRWA--was set up to assist Arab refugees, so many alleged "native Palestinians" were recent arrivals themselves into the Palestinian Mandate that UNRWA had to adjust the very definition of the word "refugee" from its prior meaning of persons normally and traditionally resident, to those who lived in the Mandate for a minimum of only two years prior to 1948. Do you understand what this is saying?
Now also keep in mind that for every Arab who was forced to flee the fighting that Arabs started, a Jewish refugee was forced to flee Arab/Muslim lands (where they were commonly known as kilab yahud, "Jew dogs") into Israel and elsewhere... but with no UNRWA set up to assist them. Half of Israel's Jewish population consists of these people.
As just a few of many other examples, greater New York City alone now has tens of thousands of Syrian Jewish refugees and their descendants. Most of France's post-Holocaust Jewish population consists of these Jewish refugees from "Arab" lands as well. You, undoubtedly, know some of these folks.
Ready for more "native Palestinians?"
Arafat himself was born in Cairo, Egypt.
Scores of thousands of other Arabs came from Egypt earlier in the 19th century with Muhammad Ali and son's Ibrahim Pasha's armies and many, like Arafat later, settled in Palestine. Hamas' patron saint, Sheikh 'Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, was from Latakia, Syria... a neighbor of those Syrian Jews. The Sheikh made his name by butchering Jews during the early Mandatory period. A true hero for Hamas...that's why they've named their "military wing" and their newest weapon of terror after him, the Qassam Brigade and rocket.
After World War I, the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission recorded additional scores of thousands of Egyptian, Syrian, and other Arabs--with one of the world's highest birthrates--entering into Palestine and settling there. It is estimated that for each one of these incoming Arabs who were recorded, many others crossed the border under cover of darkness to enter into one of the few areas in the region where any economic development was going on because of the influx of Jewish capital. They would later become known as "native Palestinians" while hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from those same "Arab" countries--Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, and so forth--would be branded settlers.
Once again, Steven, perfect justice is indeed a rarity among the realm of man.
It wasn't present when scores of millions of people became refugees when the Indian subcontinent was divided into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India (look what's happening over Kashmir today), or when millions of Greeks, Bulgars, and Turks exchanged populations, or when half of Israel's 5 million Jews mentioned above fled Arab/Muslim lands around the same time Arabs were fleeing in the opposite direction during Israel's war of independence. They're the other side of the Middle East refugee problem few ever talk about. I'm sure Tony doesn't.
All of the above examples--and many more not mentioned--represented imperfect attempts to arrive at compromise solutions so that the rights of both parties to any given conflict could be addressed.
So, any 22nd state that Arabs might eventually get--and second, not first, one in "Palestine--must not be born at the expense of the security of the sole state of the Jews. That means that Arabs will not be able to get all that they want in the disputed--not "purely Arab"--territories. Israel must not be forced to return to its absurdly vulnerable rump state status, setting it up for the last part of the Arabs' well-known destruction in phases plans. Arabs must finally learn that--despite the power of their oil-- others, besides themselves, are entitled to a share of justice in this multiethnic region.
In contrast to the Arabs' largely self-inflicted nakba, forced conversions, being branded the deicide people or killers of prophets and being treated accordingly, inquisitions, demonization, dehumanization, ghettos, blood libels, massacres, expulsions, the Holocaust, and existence as perpetual stranger in someone else's land became the plight of the "Wandering Jew"... his own perpetual nakba. But not of his own making.
Would that he had possessed some two dozen other states like Arabs have, there would have been no need for the rebirth of Israel. But the Jew did not possess even one state, let alone almost two dozen. And yes that state is imperfect...as are all others.
Once again, as I have also written too often before, the sad reality is that the Arab nakba occurred because Arabs insisted that the millennial nightmare of the Jews should continue unabated. No compromise was feasible with "their" kilab yahud Jew dogs in the Dar ul-Islam.
In contrast to the millennia-old plight of the Jew, the Arab nakba was largely born of their own conquering, oppressive, and racist attitudes which continue to declare none but themselves--even fellow Muslims, but non-Arabs--fit to rule in any part of "their" region. A reading of Ismet Cherif Vanly's The Syrian 'Mein Kampf' against The Kurds (Amsterdam, 1968) would be enlightening here. As would interviews with Kurds in "Arab" Iraq as well who are still uncovering mass graves of their people. And as would the work of the Egyptian Jewess, Bat Ye'or, on dhimmitude.
Or, how about sending Tony to the Sudan, before he writes his script and to gain a bit more perspective, to check things out...where Arabs have killed, maimed, enslaved, and turned millions of black Africans into refugees over this past century?
You see, Steven, the Arab-Jewish conflict is really not as complicated as many make it to appear to be.
Had Arabs been willing to grant Jews (or Kurds or Berbers, etc.) a small slice of the same human dignity and justice that they themselves so forcefully demand, their own nakba could have been resolved decades ago. And there would be no fence, no checkpoints, or whatever either.
Also keep in mind that the alleged "moderate" Arafatians of Abbass' camp are only playing a game of good cop/bad cop along with Hamas & Co. to win as many one-sided concessions as possible from the Jew of the Nations. Go to the "good cops'" websites, textbooks, television and radio programs, and such if you don't believe this. They offer Israel, in exchange for giving away the store, only a temporary respite--a hudna.
So, Steven, Tony Kushner is not the man to write the script for this next very important film of yours.
Can him.
Eleven Jewish athletes died at the Munich Olympics the same way thousands of other Jewish innocents were deliberately maimed and murdered in schools, at Bar Mitzvah celebrations, Passover Seders, in teen night clubs and pizza parlors, and so forth.
Please don't leave your audience with any message of "moral equivalency" here...There isn't any.
None at all.
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