‘Israel: No One Belongs Here More Than You’…Unless You’re Palestinian « Tikun Olam-תיקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

‘Israel: No One Belongs Here More Than You’…Unless You’re Palestinian

Israel: no one belongs here more than you...except for 700,000 expelled Israeli Arabs

Those wonderful folks who bring you Israeli hasbara have invested $6-million in a new advertising campaign in the aftermath of that rather nasty and inconvenient little war in Gaza. The Israeli tourism commissioner for North American was interviewed in the Canadian Jewish News:

He said Israeli tourism officials had forecast an “even better” year in 2009 [than 2008], but the war in Gaza and the global economic downturn have dampened expectations. Now, Sommer said he’d consider the year a success if there was only a 20 per cent drop in tourism this year…

Sommer also spoke at length about how the Canadian market is expanding due to recent, local public relations campaigns that paint Israel in a new light as a safe and fun travel destination.

…On another front, Sommer said Israel has also increased its trips for journalists to Israel in order to increase the country’s positive exposure in the worldwide media.

It is unfortunate what a dirty little war does to a nation’s tourism image, isn’t it? As for “safe,” that depends on your perspective doesn’t it? If you asked residents of Gaza about that question they might have a few ideas of their own to add. Do you think that all the journalists in the world giving Israel “positive exposure” could mend the image conveyed by 1,400 dead Gazans? Rhetorical question–you don’t need to answer.

The campaign (shall we call it “Operation Cast Gold?”) is designed to cast Israel in the most favorable light possible and it’ll really make your skin crawl if you have any sensitivity to the ironies in the ad copy:

Today in Israel

Children are playing, people are smiling, and visitors from around the world are enjoying restaurants, the hostels, the ancient sites, and the endless wonders of today’s Israel. In other words–today is another beautiful day in Israel, where everyone always has a warm and friendly “Shalom” for you. Today is a perfect day for you to plan your trip to Israel.

Israel: No One Belongs Here More Than You

They tried pretty much the same thing about a year ago in preparation for the spring-summer tourist season, a campaign I skewered here. My post drew a sharp scolding from the resident Comment is Free Anglo-Israeli progressive, Seth Freedman, no doubt influenced by the fact that Alex Stein, his best friend, protested my approach sharply. I thought it was rather unfortunate that Seth used his CiF bully pulpit to fight his best friend’s battle for him.

Returning to our subject, why is it that Israelis believe the answer to a horrific, blood-curdling war is a pretty ad campaign? No, don’t answer that. It was just a rhetorical question. Oh hell, give it a shot–answer it if you like.

I encourage my readers to have as much fun with the ad copy as possible (fun in the darkest sense of the word, of course). Let’s talk back to these hasbaraniks. Here’s my contribution:

Today is another beautiful day in Israel, where everyone always has a warm and friendly “Shalom for you”…unless you’re a dirty stinking Palestinian.

Yes, it’s grim. I know. You can do better. So give it a shot.

Tags: hasbara

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 1:02 AM and is filed under Mideast Peace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

51 Responses to “‘Israel: No One Belongs Here More Than You’…Unless You’re Palestinian”

Suzanne says:

April 10, 2009 at 7:34 AM

I just want to leave a quick reply to Arie Brand and Miles Stuart ( I agree with you completely, humanity is poorer) intending to say something further after reading the Adam Shatz.

Thank you first for the details and the subject of Mizrachi Jews exodus from Arab lands. I am all for myth-busting especially since a certain version of it has been invoked constantly by some that I and others argue with (including in my family) vociferously. In and of itself this is a very interesting issue anyway for me. I want the truth. The history should not get to be told in only one way- especially since the conflict is not settled and this is a part of it ongoing. But I am also aware that in the process, which is necessary and healthy, there may be too much of a swing in the other direction, conclusions too quickly drawn about the whole picture based on more information coming out, in order to correct the way this has been painted by partisans in order to make their case or achieve their ends.

Reply
Suzanne says:

April 13, 2009 at 10:18 AM

I have no idea if this discussion is still alive but if it is I would like a response to Lyn Julius criticism in the LRB
of the Adam Shatz article ( which I read as recommended by Arie Brand.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n23/letters.html

beginning (quote):

Letters
Vol. 30 No. 23 · Cover date: 4 December 2008
Iraq’s Jews
From Lyn Julius

Adam Shatz casts a spotlight on the destruction of one of the oldest Jewish diasporas, but his article contains errors and subtle distortions whose effect is to minimise the proximate cause of the Jewish exodus from Iraq: anti-semitism (LRB, 6 November). The rich man’s paradise Shatz evokes only really existed towards the end of the 19th century. Before the Ottomans were forced by the Western powers to emancipate their Jews and Christians, the Jews were despised, persecuted and never really secure; the Sassoons, Ezras and Kedouries fled the tyrannical rule of Daoud Pasha to make their fortunes outside Meso-potamia in India and the Far East. The Jews of Iraq petitioned for British citizenship not out of an ‘instant connection’ with Britain, but out of fear that Arab rule would be ‘politically irresponsible . . . fanatic and intolerant’, to quote Elie Kedourie. And so it proved.
The Jews did not leave because they were pushed by Zionist rumours or bombs. Bombs and murders in 1936 had not led to a mass exodus, and sixty thousand Jews had registered to leave before the only fatal bombing in January 1951. Until Iraq permitted legal emigration, Jews were being smuggled out at a rate of a thousand a month – because they were banned from higher education, could not travel abroad, were denied work and suffered restrictions in business. ‘But for these severe handicaps, Iraqi Jews would not have gone so far as to attempt large-scale flight from the country,’ the Jewish senator Ezra Daniel said, making his last futile appeal against the Denaturalisation Bill in March 1950.
Shatz implies that Israel encouraged the Jewish exodus, but already in 1949 the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Said, had floated the idea of a population exchange and threatened to expel the Jews as revenge for the Iraqi army’s defeat in Palestine. He schemed to bring Israel to its knees by dumping thousands of stateless and destitute Jews on Israel’s borders. The Jewish Agency could not cope with the influx and told the Zionist movement in Baghdad not to rush. It was only when Iraq passed a law in March 1951 freezing Jewish assets that Israel said it would be forced to confiscate the property of Palestinian refugees. Iraq reneged on its part of the exchange, accepting only fourteen thousand Palestinian Arabs, while Israel took in 120,000 Iraqi Jews.
The Iraqi Jews had every right to be bitter when they arrived in Israel, having lost everything. They were housed in dusty refugee camps for up to 12 years. …………..

Reply
- Richard Silverstein says:
  
  April 13, 2009 at 2:46 PM
  
  Lyn Julius is not exactly an unbiased source. In fact, she is an ardent pro-Israel apologist & anti-Muslim bigot. Since you’ve quoted her ltr. but left out Shatz’s reply I thought fit to add it:
  
  Adam Shatz writes: The evocation of Mesopotamia as a lost paradise can be found not only in Violette Shamash’s book but in countless memoirs by Iraqi Jews. Like all non-Muslim minorities, Jews experienced periods of difficulty and injustice, but if they had been persecuted to the degree Lyn Julius suggests, it’s not likely so many would have continued to describe themselves as ‘Ottomans’ long after the empire’s collapse. It was Shamash who said that Iraq’s Jews petitioned for British citizenship out of an ‘instant connection’ with their new rulers. And while Elie Kedourie cited the concern of Jewish notables that the Arabs would be fanatical and intolerant, he went on to deride the petition for British citizenship for its ‘pathetic caution’ and ‘anxiety to pay lip-service to the shibboleths of the age’.
  
  Julius cites Ezra Daniel’s protest against the Denaturalisation Bill, but she doesn’t quote his plea to ‘restore to Iraqi Jews their sense of security, confidence and stability’, and while Daniel was speaking out against the bill, the Israeli government and Mossad were doing everything in their power to speed its passage. Shlomo Hillel, Mossad’s man in Baghdad, makes no secret of the fact that in setting up Zionist cells, he had only one objective: to promote mass emigration. He collaborated covertly with the Iraqi government to co-ordinate Operation Ezra and Nehemiah (as Julius rightly calls it). ‘We are carrying on our usual activity in order to push the law through faster and faster,’ the Mossad office in Baghdad reported to Tel Aviv before the Denaturalisation Act was passed, according to Tom Segev in 1949: The First Israelis. Israel wanted to populate the land with Jews, and their emigration from Arab countries had the advantage of supplying a further alibi for denying Palestinians their right of return.
  
  Writers often contrast Israel’s generous absorption of more than a hundred thousand Iraqi Jewish refugees with Iraq’s paltry acceptance of ‘only’ fourteen thousand Palestinian Arabs. But the situations are not symmetrical: Israel was determined to settle the Iraqi Jews in the Jewish state, while Iraq had no interest in settling Palestinian refugees (who for their part wanted to return home). And though Nuri al-Said flirted in 1949 with the idea of a population exchange, an idea that had been circulating in Zionist circles for two decades, the Iraqi government’s position was that Palestinians should return home or be compensated by Israel. It could not ‘renege’ on an agreement it had never reached with Israel.
  
  Restrictions on movement and employment, and the rise in anti-Jewish incitement and violence, certainly encouraged Jews to emigrate. But these developments were not unrelated to the British presence and the war in Palestine – or to the pressures exerted by Israel and its intelligence services. We may never know whether the bombs were laid by Zionist agents, but we do know that Mossad’s responsibility is taken for granted by many Iraqi Jews: Morad Qazzaz, a leader of the Iraqi-Jewish underground, was known as Morad Abu al-Knabel, or ‘Morad, Father of the Bombs’. Folklore or not, it’s an indication that Iraq’s Jews have long believed that Israel had a hand in their exodus.
  
  Reply
  - Suzanne says:
    
    April 15, 2009 at 4:58 AM
    
    Yes I read it and read responses to it. I also have done quite a bit of research since this topic peaked my interest and wish for a better place to enter so many other links that I have found with substantial information about the situation of Iraqi Jews prior to the formation of Israel. I am aware of how this issue is being used or abused.
    
    Everyone has a bias, including here, and my original conclusion was that one often promotes and cherry picks what one chooses to believe to fit a narrative. So let’s be more careful- or I will. That the opposing view may have some truth somehow is an affront. That should not be. It’s the truth, which even if a mixed bag, quite a mixed bag, we should accept. I find the more I read the more I feel that the story, because it is being used, is lost. Lyn Julius, though also a perhaps partisan, is not completely wrong because she is. Nor are those here, whose views by and large I share, completely right. I am dismayed by the conclusion drawn above ( as an example), not only about who was responsible for the bombing because it fits a story when there are others possibilities and other clever motives and liars all around in this story.
    
    Common sense: A happy people do not pick up and leave b/c of a bombing- not 124,000 of them. There was a lot happening and prior even if you only start with 1941 and the “Farhud” ( pogrom) of June 1941″
    
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhud#Farhud_.28June_1-2.2C_1941.29
    
    But as there were ups, there was also downs to recall if you were a Bagdhadi Jew, from a deep history. One looking for some truth cannot blame the Iraqi Jewish exodus on a single bombing even if it was the Mossad (unproven) and it fits a storyline (Jews were happy but scared into emigrating).
    
    What started me searching beyond was Arie Brand and then my check into my own library sources- including Howard Sachar ( yes biased, or rather proud, but an honest historian if there ever was one). Read him on this “The Ingathering and Struggle…” chapter of his 1000 page book ” A History of Israel…” ( a more detailed book on this subject I don’t know of) pages 398-99. He does not even mention the bombing- never mind that it was seminal. In fact he says what happened in Iraq had, in the end, theeffect of an expulsion.
    
    There are many more sources that I would link but this is not a forum. With an open mind one would have to conclude that there was indeed persecution, (and fear of it growing), that WW2 and the creation of Israel ( and Arabs humiliated and angry about losses) changed the atmosphere and picture for Jews in Iraq as well as elsewhere. They were not so welcome. But still it was a mixed bag of reasons that they left what finally made them leave.
    
    It’s common sense that people do not leave home so easily, especially a place that has been a home for centuries.
    
    Reply
    - Suzanne says:
      
      April 15, 2009 at 5:29 AM
      
      Apparently Lyn Julius’ parents fled Iraq in 1950. Richard I approached her writing/s with an open mind. I know nothing of her as anti-Muslim or a pro-Israel apologist. ( you can link for me evidence). I don’t think you mean to infer that you are anti-Israel. I know better. But making the world better place for me has also to do with trying to understand each other’s views better. This conflict is not so much about Jews vs Muslims/Arabs as those who prefer to hate and emphasize differences which surely we have ( and it’s usually about the past) vs those who would rather come together. If I feel that way- I have to try to understand another viewpoint and reject some labels and judgements in order to be free to make my own.
      
      Reply