Prejudice and Propaganda
How the UN is following the antisemitic path of Europe
In response to questions from readers, I attempted to write a simple history of the conflict in the Middle East and show examples of biased, anti-Israel writing.
But I quickly realized that this is impossible for me. To understand—and to be fair to some of the players in this drama—one needs to be aware that Jews and Judaism were so reviled in Europe for so many generations that the Jewish culture was largely ignored in the universities where, then as now, important concepts were incubated and developed.
Judaism’s Place in History
Judaism as a player in the development of the West has been virtually eliminated in the body of current knowledge. In other words, our role in the history of the world has been ignored. This is despite the fact that much of our culture, including the moral and legal principles of Christianity upon which Western values are based, comes directly from the Jewish tradition.
One very quick example is etymology: the study of the development of words. Although throughout the ages many European theologians studied Hebrew in order to understand Jesus’s beliefs and the New Testament, this education did not apparently spill over to etymologists. Hebrew as a possible source of word roots was ignored in spite of the presence of Jews in Europe from very early times. Many words that clearly have Hebrew roots are attributed, through convoluted and fantastical jumps of reason, to other languages.
The word “jewelry,” for example, supposedly comes from the word “jou,” the French word for play. From the time of Betzalel in the Biblical Book of Exodus, jewelry-making has been a high art of the Jews. I personally know of four distinct families of jewelers who said, “We have always been jewelers.” One was a silversmith in the Israeli city of Tzfat (Safed), who said his ancestors in Yemen, who have always been jewelers, were directly descended from Betzalel. Three others were Americans whose families came from Europe.
Doesn’t it make more sense that the word “jewelry” comes from the Jews who practiced the art and craft of fine metalwork, rather than from the French word for “play”?
Some words that appear to be related to Hebrew were attributed by the German etymologists of the late 1800s to Canaanite—but when have you ever heard of Canaanite literature?
Google
Google has continued this tradition of avoiding or hiding Jewish attribution. In the last few years, many if not most articles and sources written with a positive Israeli slant have been buried by Google’s algorithms deep in the list of sources so that finding them is extremely time-consuming and frustrating.
With this background, let me dissect a U.N. document, taken directly from the U.N. website.
The United Nations and The Question of Palestine
The first paragraph of the UN document, “The Question of Palestine,” includes this sentence:
During the Mandate, from 1922 to 1947, large-scale Jewish immigration, mainly from Eastern Europe, took place, the numbers swelling in the 1930s with the Nazi persecution.
Because this statement has no historical context, it is very, very easily misunderstood. In fact, without the Mandate’s anti-Jewish laws, many more Jews would have come. No mention is made of the Jews who tried to escape Hitler but were denied entry to other countries and died, or, after the war, concentration camp survivors who were housed, by the British, from 1945 until the establishment of Israel in 1948 in more camps with atrocious living conditions.
It is true that about 130,000 Jewish refugees entered the land between 1933-1936. However, the UN ignores two important facts which, if widely known, would turn the current narrative on its head.
Four hundred years of inattention from the Ottoman rulers and development of an almost feudal system had created, (1) an emigration from the land to more developed countries such as Egypt and Turkey where the Arabs could live a better life; (2) a handful of very rich Arabs who controlled the land and methods of production; and (3) a disspirited peasantry. The emptiness of the land was described by both Mark Twain and a Morman named Orson Hyde. Jews, located primarily in Jerusalem and in small, ancient communities throughout the land, were generally very poor.
But then, in the 1880s, Jews began fleeing the Russian Empire due to massacres sponsored by the government. The Jews brought a strong work ethic and immediately began building communal farms that produced more food than had been available. They also began draining malarial swamps, work which caused thousands of Jewish deaths. But with the threat of malaria reduced and the presence of Jewish nurses beginning in 1912, the general health of the region increased. Because of this, vast numbers of Arabs began moving into the area from Egypt and the Islamic nations to the east of the land.
So, yes, large-scale Jewish immigration took place. At the same time, and ignored by the U.N., large-scale Arab immigration also took place because of changes in living conditions and economic opportunity largely wrought by the new Jewish presence.
While the Arab influx continued until Israeli statehood, the number of Jews permitted to enter dropped precipitously around 1939 when Great Britain, which controlled Palestine, blockaded the land and prevented refugee from entering. Between 1944 and the end of the Mandate, the British offered 1,500 visas per month to Jews. Meanwhile, about 250,000 survivors of the concentration camps were looking for new homes. Their original homes had been destroyed or taken over by others, and they did not want to return to places where their neighbors had turned them in to the Nazis.
The United States had strict immigration quotas in place. Once the quota was met—and it was met by non-Jews looking to leave communities that had been destroyed by war, as well as by Jews—immigrants needed sponsors. The Jews of Salt Lake City, for example, needed a kosher slaughterer; they sponsored an immigrant with those skills and his family, promising the government that they had work for him that would keep his family off the dole.
But most survivors were not so lucky. They had no place to go, but they and their ancestors had been praying for a return to the Holy Land for 2000 years.
Thousands tried to get to Palestine illegally by boat from Europe. The British sank several immigrant ships and turned back the others. Thousands of Jews were brought by the British to camps on Cyprus, where they were housed in tents at the seaside but with the shore fenced off. This meant that the children could look at the sea, but could not play in it. A smaller number of Jews were sent to camps on Mauritius, an island off the coast of eastern Africa. Thousands of Jews who had survived Hitler’s death camps were killed trying to enter the land of their forefathers.
The UN page continues,
One of the two envisaged States proclaimed its independence as Israel and in the 1948 war involving neighbouring Arab States expanded to 77 percent of the territory of mandate Palestine, including the larger part of Jerusalem. Over half of the Palestinian Arab population fled or were expelled. Jordan and Egypt controlled the rest of the territory assigned by resolution 181 to the Arab State.
This was not the first time the Arabs refused to accept statehood, but if you notice, this fact is glossed over. And the “77%” presented as an indication of lack of fairness ignores several fundamental facts. First, the original mandate was carved out of a huge area, the vast majority of which went to Arabs. Second, that mandate had already been cut down by more than half.
Also not mentioned, but visible on the map above, is that the vast majority of the “77 percent of the territory” was the Negev desert; the arable land went to the Arabs except for a tiny bit in the north, mostly in the mountains of Galilee. Judea and Samaria, the heartland of ancient Judea and Israel, the two Jewish lands, went to the Arabs.
At the same time, India was partitioned into India and Pakistan. Millions of Hindus were moved from what became the Islamic region, and millions of Muslims were moved from what became the Hindu region. Population transfer was approved to create safe, secure homes for both Muslims and Hindus in the Indian subcontinent. The UN did not approve or even suggest such a solution for the Jews.
The UN also writes that the Arab population fled or were expelled. The truth was that the Jews begged the Arabs to stay and live in peace. The Arab population of Israel today—20% of Israelis—who live free lives as doctors, teachers, judges, and everything else, are descended from those families that stayed. Arab leaders told the Arabs to leave, promising that as soon as the Jews were vanquished, they could return home.
Jewish Refugees
No mention is made in the UN document of the 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries, where they had resided for over 1,000 years. The vast majority went to Israel; the rest made their homes in the Americas, primarily in the USA. No United Nations funding went to relocate or support them. Rather, Jews, primarily from the United States and Canada—the only remaining large populations of Jews in stable living situations—donated millions of dollars to support them.
Conditions in Israel for the new immigrants were tough. In my community, Moroccans were bused from the port and basically dumped, in the middle of the night, on a barren hillside. Housing provided consisted of rows of one-room units, each perhaps 175 square feet, with a long, skinny garden behind where people could keep chickens, sheep or goats, plant fruit trees, and grow vegetables. I have friends who grew up in those tiny units together with six or nine brothers and sisters, parents, and grandparents.
Work was provided to the Jewish refugees from Arab lands: they planted trees on the barren hillsides. Men and women of all ages accepted this back-breaking work because it was what was available. But within a few years, Jewish determination, ingenuity, and the freedom of living under a government that was trying to build a country, the merchants opened shops here. In my town, the hardware, butcher, and grocery shops were first. Some are still run by the children and grandchildren of those intrepid merchants.
The old photos are from the city museum collection; the new one was taken by me.
Arab Refugees
Under the United Nations, Arab refugees, now called Palestinians, did not fare as well. UNRWA’s task was not to resettle them, but rather to return them home. To that end, UNRWA has educated the Palestinians to fight to return: In 1974 the General Assembly reaffirmed the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, national independence, sovereignty, and to return.
During the 6-Day War in 1967, Israeli soldiers who entered Arab refugee camps run by UNRWA were shocked at the terrible living conditions. Since the land was now under Israeli control, the government announced a plan to build proper towns for the Palestinians who were still living in refugee camps. The international community, with the U.N. at the forefront, prohibited this. Determined to do what it could to reduce suffering, Israel began providing sanitation and electricity to the Palestinians. It is written that Jordan, which had had nominal control of the region between 1948 and 1967, was responsible for the poor conditions. However, since UNRWA, according to its own information, is responsible for “infrastructure and camp improvement,” they were either terribly remiss or deliberately kept the so-called refugees in deplorable condition in order to create sympathy (and funding for their continued existence). Israel provided electricity and sanitation, built universities, and improved the schools.
UNRWA continued to provide textbooks and teachers—and to teach hatred.
Textbooks
As I have written here before, in 1968 I had occasion to see and handle an elementary-school level math book that had been picked up in a refugee camp by a soldier during the 6-Day War. I understood the word problems because of the illustrations. Where American math books illustrate problems use apples, bananas, cats and puppies, virtually every illustration in this book was of dead or dying Jews: If you have seven kibbutz children and you kill four, how many are left? If you have four Israeli coffins and add three more, what is the total?
I turned to the title page of the book. It had been published by UNRWA in the early 1960’s. The so-called occupation began with the 6-Day War in 1967. These texts predating the occupation prove that Arab hatred is not related to it.
During the present war in Gaza, soldiers found not only math books like this, but textbooks in other subjects that focused on killing Jews, all published by UNRWA.
UNRWA also runs the hospitals. In both schools and hospitals, Israeli soldiers found rockets, rocket launchers, and stockpiles of weapons.
Between 2015 and 2022, the UN General Assembly adopted 140 resolutions criticizing Israel and 68 against all other nations combined.[i]
It appears that since its inception, the UN has determined to finish what Hitler began, but to do it subtly, by demonizing Israel.
A Solution
Israelis are overwhelmingly opposed to a two-state solution unless one of those states is the present nation of Jordan, with the Palestinians repatriated there. Having a hostile state on our borders would mean continual war until we are eventually destroyed. With 1.9 billion Muslims and 15 million Jews, they have the advantage of numbers. We need secure borders.
Kicking UNRWA out of the territories and replacing them with total Israeli control would mean we could provide textbooks that promote peace, not war, and that instead of having police that provide terror, as many Palestinian Authority police do, the police could provide security for both Arabs and Jews.
I recently read a suggested solution of providing a limited citizenship to Palestinians: all the benefits of Israeli citizenship except the right to vote in national elections. This means equality in employment, education, healthcare, security, and control of their communities’ governments. Although their ancestors might have considered themselves our enemies, the vast majority of Israeli Arabs appear to be satisfied if not happy to be living in a free country where women as well as men have opportunities. With a generation or two of education, the Palestinians could as well.
One this is sure: we need the UN and UNRWA out of this playing field, we need international interference to stop, and we need a chance to resolve our own issues. Since this is not likely to occur, we need God’s help and the coming of the Messiah to usher in the age of peace.
[i] https://www.timesofisrael.com/un-condemned-israel-more-than-all-other-countries-combined-in-2022-monitor/