Thursday, January 27, 2005

Reacting

I found a Baruch Kimmerling piece in The Nation and, after dealing with him in the Jerusalem Post, I figured I'd continue the whacking.

Baruch Kimmerling's review, "Israel's Culture of Martyrdom", contains several errors which need correction, I wrote.

In discussing the Kastner affair, he claims that Malkiel Greenwald, Shmuel Tamir and Binyamin Halevi were all members of the Lehi underground. In fact, only Tamir was an anti-British resistance fighter and he belonged to the Irgun. Media professor Elihu Katz's term "medurat hashevet" he puts as "tribal campfire". Kimmerling mistranslates here. The word "shevet" does mean "tribe" but it refers to the basic unit of a youth movement, especially the Scouts. There is nothing sinister in the phrase.

And despite his downplaying of the Arab Mufti's role during the Holocaust and his sympathies for Nazi ideology, not only to he launch a Muslim unit in the Balkans to fight alongside German troops but he had two of his lieutenants parachute into mandated Palestine to poison water sources in 1944 and during the 1936-39 revolt, the Mufti extensively exploited Nazi symbols and anti-Semitic frameworks.

1 comment:

YMedad said...

As for the document, it is true that Yair Stern made an appeal to gain support for a Jewish State from Nazi Germany, and he erred, but not out of ideological identification with that regime rather based on a misreading of what Germany was really all about.

He wanted to save Jews - not kill them. He wanted to break through the barriers Gt. Britain set up to immigration - not leave them behind in camps, even if he was unaware of the mass killings.

Yes, both the Mufti and Stern "developed" contacts with Germany but for totally different reasons and goals.

How can you compare the two? The Mufti achieved political goals through the three year terror campaign, the 1939 White Paper - and then moved off to get more from Hitler. Has any Arab condemned the Mufti's course of action then, as almost all Jews, including me, do vis a vis Stern?