God TV ran an excellent review of the anti-Semitism in Germany which led to the Holocaust. Excellent, that is, until it seamlessly moved to compare the suffering of the Jews in Europe then to what "poor" Israel is experiencing now.
The dishonesty of the TV programme producers was subtle and astonishing. If I hadn't been reading (not during the programme!) an Israeli historian's account of how the State of Israel was created, I would have been quite deceived and thought, Yes, the Jews are still suffering in the same way.
But this book shows that as far back as the early 1930's, the few Jews then in Palestine planned to clear the whole of Mandated Palestine of the native population. With the help of a British Officer, Orde Wingate, the Hagana was transformed into an effective fighting force, the aim of which was to ensure a totally Jewish state. At that time, only about 6% of the land was owned by Jews, but that didn't deter David Ben-Gurion who said, in 1938, "I'm for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it."
The book then outlines - remember this is an Israeli historian writing- the whole plan to ethnically cleanse the land. When the British left, the newly created Israeli Army used the Communist party's links with the Soviets to import heavy arms and ammunition from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union and set about clearing villages and dispersing the Palestinians - many were killed in the process.
What the newly self-declared State of Israel (quickly recognised by the Soviet Union and the USA) did, and continues to do, is quite illegal. Can Christians really support what we know to be wrong?
The writer compares this with the ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian War which rightly provoked outrage, intervention by NATO and trials in the Hague. But what happened in Palestine is shrugged off, and we are supposed to feel sorry for the perpetrators, not the sufferers.
The book is The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe.
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