He can barely hide his contempt
Hard Leftist Tom Segev attended a lecture by Sir Martin Gilbert (pictured) at Tel Aviv University this past week, and from reading this account, I got the impression that Segev resents the fact that Gilbert is so strongly pro-Israel. Gilbert, 75, has written more than 80 books, which makes him one of history's most prolific historians. He authored Winston Churchill's most comprehensive biography and a number of other important books. He and Crossman met at the Weizmann Archive in Rehovot, related Gilbert, telling another story he heard from him: In one of the DP camps, two of the Anglo-American commission members saw a Jew from Poland tearing up a U.S. immigration certificate. He was afraid the Holocaust could repeat itself there too, he said.Read the whole thing.
Crossman believed most of the camp inmates were interested in settling in the Land of Israel, but he also asked himself what the refugees would decide if the United States were an option. America had not invited them; they had to choose between Palestine and their countries of origin, including Poland, which had become a communist and anti-Semitic state. They preferred Palestine. Crossman's question has remained open; Gilbert did not mention it.
It was a fine lecture, organized in chronological order. In the conflict between his country and Zionism seven decades ago, Gilbert is on Zionism's side. This is not a black-and-white story, he noted, and he quoted certain British officials who evinced sympathy for the Zionist alternative, including the British ambassador in Poland in the 1940s. However, most of his references reflected great hostility to Zionism and even to the concentration camp survivors. Those of the latter who wound up under British occupation in Germany and Austria were put into detention camps and their food rations restricted, as though they were not victims of the Nazis but rather captive enemy soldiers.
Many years later Gilbert met the British diplomat George William Rendel, who wanted to deliver a confession. "There is something I regret," he said. Gilbert pricked up his ears. "I regret I didn't do more to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel." Gilbert did not say that the British officials' hostility reflected anti-Semitism: Apparently they simply preferred Arab oil.
Ultimately the British left Palestine, in response to growing Arab terror. Gilbert did not mention the Arab Revolt, which had already given the British their fill of the Land of Israel at the end of the 1930s, as though it had no part in this story.
Gilbert's criticism of his country was very bitter. In Britain, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe is speaking in a similar tone, but he is attacking Zionist policy there. The difference between the two is this: Many Israelis consider Pappe to be a self-hating traitor. Sir Martin received a noble title from his queen and among those present at his lecture this week was Matthew Gould, the United Kingdom's first Jewish ambassador to Israel.
Labels: British anti-Semitism, Ilan Pappe, Jewish anti-Semitism, Martin Gilbert, Tom Segev
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:34 AM
1 Comments:
I got the impression that Segev resents the fact that Gilbert is so strongly pro-Israel.
No. Segev is right in a way. Sir Martin Gilbert has been criticised for his work and books about Israel and for using such nefarious sources as Ba'at Yeor, an Islamophobic consipiracist whose own book about "Eurabia" sold few copies in Europe.
Gilbert's book, "In The House Of Ishmael: A history Of The Jews In Muslim Land" was little more than history revising, criticised by many of his peers.
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In The House Of Ishmael: A history Of The Jews In Muslim Land, By Martin Gilbert
Reviewed by Robert Irwin
The subtitle to Martin Gilbert's new book (his 81st?) is a little misleading. This is not really a general account of the fortunes and misfortunes of Jews under Muslim rule from the seventh century until the present day. The early centuries are rushed through and, although Gilbert is aware of the magnificent and fabulously detailed account of Jewish life in medieval Egypt provided by SD Goitein's five-volume A Mediterranean Society, he makes little use of it.
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Gilbert has so much material and such a strong case that it should not have been necessary to stack the deck. Yet it seems to me that he has done so and his use of sources is sometimes questionable. For his account of how the Jews in 13th-century Basra were forced to wear clothing that marked their lower status he cites a Jewish traveller, Jacob of Ancona, who allegedly travelled from Italy to China. But when in 1997 the purported narrative of Jacob's travels was published by David Selbourne as The City of Light, the Sinologists Jonathan Spence and Tim Barrett, the Jewish historians David and Bernard Wasserstein and myself all challenged the authenticity of the text. Since then no original manuscript has turned up. It would have been safer to have relied on Goitein's material.
Gilbert's notes cite Bat Ye'or with approval several times. When, in 2002, her book Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide appeared, I reviewed it and then threw the book away. Bat Ye'or is not an academic and her books are poorly ordered assemblages of facts, real or alleged, that relentlessly show Islam and Arabs in an unfavourable light.
She believes that there is an Islamic conspiracy to turn Europe into something she calls "Eurabia". Those interested to get a fuller sense of the dementedly Islamophobic polemics of this woman should consult the website www.loonwatch.com.
When Gilbert discusses what was happening in Palestine during the British mandate, he quotes Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine to back up his assertion that more Arabs than Jews entered Palestine as immigrants in the 1930s. But when that book was published in 1984, critics swiftly demonstrated that its use of archives and statistics was seriously flawed and substantially misleading. Yehoshua Porath, professor of Middle East History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, denounced the book as "sheer forgery".
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In the House of Ishmael, full of vivid accounts of Jewish sufferings in the Middle East, did not need the testimony of false friends to pad its grim story out. Its account of the slow-burning tragedy of the extinction of Jewish communities in the Arab world is moving and important. It should be read.
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I'm curious to know something..Is it possible for anyone to be "strongly pro Israel" without history revising and lying?
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