HAMAS Admits They Are Cowards

[Penn]

The possible source hate, or one of them...

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ByLARRYPORTIS via verizon.net news

Larry Portis is a professor of American studies at the University of Montpellier, France and a founding member of Americans for Peace and Justice in Montpellier.

Between the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the creation of the United Jewish Agency in 1929, the evolution of political vocabulary in relation to ethnic groups in Palestine accompanied the emergence of an increasingly difficult geopolitical problem.

At the time, notions of nationhood were at the center of all questions of foreign affairs. Although touted as a solution to collective conflicts in general, national self-determination was at best a tenuous idea that tended to obscure the re-composition of empires or, at least, the transfer of their control from one powerful entity to another.

Spokespersons for the Zionist movement intervened actively in the US popular press during this period of transition between the defeat of the Turkish Empire (end of 1917) and the eventual implementation of the British Mandate in Palestine (April 1920). This journalistic activity was particularly important in the United States because financial donations from the large and relatively wealthy Jewish population in the US were vital to the Zionist project in Palestine.

Contrary to predictions of stability under the British Mandate, British control was inaugurated by riots caused by increased Jewish immigration. In July 1921, after one year of the new British administration, the Literary Digest noted that fears concerning the Zionist project were articulated in Palestine and also in neighboring countries and in the United States. Reviewing reactions to the events in Palestine in Arab-American publications, the Digest found, as did Arab newspapers in the Middle East, that there was a careful distinction drawn between attitudes concerning Jewish people and those concerning Zionism. In Al-Bayan, a Syrian newspaper published in New York, it was feared that there was much misrepresentation “as to the real ground of opposition in Palestine to Zionism”. This concern was echoed by the Meraat-ul-Gharb (New York) asserting that “the people of Palestine do not hate the Jews, but hate Zionism.” The Syrian Eagle (New York) found it ironic that it was the Palestinians who were being accused of religious fanaticism when it was the Zionists who were immigrating to Palestine out of “religious sentimental” motivations. The editorialist then asked: “Has it come to this, that we must plead with England for possession of our own country, and prove to a credulous world that Palestine really does not belong to the Zionists?”

Although it was never explicitly stated, confusion existed over how to refer to the members of different ethnic groups in Palestine. In an article in the Literary Digest of November 5, 1921, for example, reference is editorially made to “Arab Mohammedans”, “native Christians” and “Jewish colonists”. But this circumspection is in contrast to the ethnic characterizations of Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Congress, who in the same article referred simply to “Jew and Arab”, or to those the British High Commissioner for Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, quoted as approving “the legitimate aspirations of the Jewish race (my italics)”. Samuel (who was Jewish) tended to reduce the population of Palestine to “the Jew”, on the one hand and “the Arab”, on the other.