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CounterPunch
September
3, 2002
The British
in Palestine, 1945-48
A Conveniently Forgotten Holocaust
by Robert Fisk
The
Independent
In the years that followed the Second World War,
Lord Beaverbrook's old Sunday Express would regale its readers
with the secret history of the 1939-45 conflict: "What
Hitler would have done if England was under Nazi occupation";
"How Ike almost cancelled D-Day"; "Churchill's
plans for using gas on Nazi invaders." Often--though not
always--the stories were true. After war come the facts. It's
not so long ago, after all, that we discovered that Nato's mighty
1999 blitz on Serbia's army netted a total of just 10 tanks.
But it took Eric Lowe of Hayling Island
in Hampshire to remind me of the inversion of history, the way
in which historically proven facts, clearly established, come
to be questioned decades later or even deleted from the record
for reasons of political or moral weakness. Eric runs a magazine
called Palestine Scrapbook, a journal for the old British soldiers
who fought in Palestine--against both Arabs and Jews--until
the ignominious collapse of the British mandate in 1948. In
Mr Lowe's magazine, there are personal memories of the bombing
of British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem--a
"terrorist" bombing, of course, except that it was
carried out by a man who was later to become Prime Minister
of Israel, Menachem Begin.
Dennis Shelton of the King's Royal Rifle
Corps writes a letter, recalling an Arab attack on a British
Army lorry in Gaza. "We opened up on them, the ones who
could still run away. We found two [British] army bods under
the wagon, both badly wounded. I went in the ambulance with
them to Rafah hospital. I was holding the side of one's head
to keep his brains in. I often wondered if indeed they recovered."
Mr Lowe has asked for information about the soldier whom Dennis
Shelton tried to save.
But he's probably wasting his time, because
the British Army's first post-World War Two war--the 1945-48
conflict in Palestine--has been "disappeared", sidelined
as something that no one wants to remember. According to Mr
Lowe, many of the British campaign medals for Palestine were
never issued. Dennis Peck, of the Sherwood Foresters, only
realised he'd been awarded one in 1998. Until two years ago,
the campaign was never mentioned at the Armistice parade in
London. There's not even a definitive figure for the British
troops who died--around 400 were killed or died of wounds.
And it took over 50 years for British veterans to get a memorial
for the dead: in the end, the veterans had to pay for it from
their own pockets.
But in the late Forties, all Britain
was seized by the war in Palestine. When Jewish gunmen hanged
two British sergeants, booby-trapping their bodies into the
bargain, Britons were outraged. The British, it must be added,
had just hanged Jewish militants in Palestine. But now-- nothing.
Our dead soldiers in Palestine, far from being remembered at
the going down of the sun, are largely not remembered at all.
So who are we frightened of here? The
Arabs? The Israelis? And isn't this just a small example of
the suppression of historical truth which continues over the
20th century's first holocaust? I raise this question because
of a recent and deeply offensive article by Stephen Kinzer of
The New York Times. Back in 1915, his paper--then an honourable
journal of record--broke one of the great and most terrible
stories of the First World War: the planned slaughter of 1.5
million Christian Armenians by the Turkish Ottoman government.
The paper's headlines, based in many cases on US diplomats in
Turkey, alerted the world to this genocide. By 16 September,
a New York Times correspondent had spoken of "a campaign
of extermination, involving the murdering of 800,000 to 1,000,000
persons".
It was all true. Save for the Turkish
government, a few American academics holding professorships
funded by Turkey and the shameful denials of the Israeli government,
there is today not a soul who doubts the nature or the extent
of this genocide. Even in the 1920s, Winston Churchill himself
called it a "holocaust". But not Mr Kinzer. Over the
course of the past few years, he's done everything he can to
destroy the integrity of his paper's brilliant, horrifying,
exclusive reports of 1915. Constantly recalling Turkey's fraudulent
claim that the Armenians died in the civil unrest in Asia Minor
at the time, he has referred to the genocide as "ethnic
cleansing" and treated the figure of 1.5 million dead as
a claim--something he would surely never do in reference to
the 6 million Jews later murdered by the Nazis.
Recently, Mr Kinzer has written about
the new Armenian Genocide museum in Washington, commenting artfully
that there's "a growing recognition by advocacy groups
that museums can be powerful tools to advance political causes".
In other words, unlike the Jewish Holocaust museum--and the
Jewish Holocaust itself, which would never be used by Israel
to silence criticism of its cruel behaviour in the occupied
territories--there might be something a bit dodgy about the
Armenian version. Then comes the killer. "Washington already
has one major institution, the United States Holocaust Museum,
that documents an effort to destroy an entire people,"
Mr Kinzer wrote. "The story it presents is beyond dispute.
But the events of 1915 are still a matter of intense debate."
Are they hell, Mr Kinzer.
But why should we be surprised at this
classic piece of historical revisionism? Israel's own ambassador
to present-day Armenia, Rivka Cohen, has been peddling more
or less the same rubbish, refusing to draw any parallels with
the Jewish Holocaust and describing the Armenian Holocaust
as a mere "tragedy". She is, in fact, following the
official Israeli Foreign Office line that "this [Armenian
Holocaust] should not be described as genocide".Israel's
top Holocaust scholar, Israel Charney, has most courageously
campaigned against those who lie about the Armenian genocide--I
advise readers to buy his stunning Encyclopaedia of Genocide--and
he has been joined by many other Jewish scholars. But with
Turkey's alliance with Israel, its membership of Nato, its possible
EU entry, and its massive arms purchases from the United States,
the growing power of its well-paid lobby groups has smothered
even their efforts.
Which raises one last question. Armenian
academics have been investigating the identity of those young
German officers who were training the Ottoman army in 1915 and
who in some cases actually witnessed the Armenian Holocaust--whose
victims were, in some cases, transported to their deaths in
railway cattle-cars. Several of those German soldiers' names,
it now transpires, crop up again just over a quarter of a century
later--as senior Wehrmacht officers in Russia, helping Hitler
to carry out the Jewish Holocaust. Even the dimmest of us might
think there was a frightening connection here. But not, I guess,
Mr Kinzer. Nor the modern-day New York Times, which is so keen
to trash its own historic exclusives for fear of what Turkey--or
Israel--might say. Personally, I'd call it all a form of Holocaust
denial. And I know what Eric Lowe would call it: cowardice under
fire.
Today's Features
Nabil Amro
Leadership
& Legitimacy:
An Open Letter to Arafat
Robert Fisk
A Forgotten
Holocaust:
The British in Palestine
Uri Avnery
The Return
of the Dinosaurs
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- War Talk As White Noise:
Anything to Get Harken and Halliburton
Out of the Headlines;
- First Hilliard, Then
McKinney: Jewish
Groups Target Blacks Brave Enough to Talk About Justice in the
Middle East; Intimidation
is the Name of the Game; Smearing
"Insane" McKinney As Muslims' Pawn;
- The Missing Terrorist?
Calling Scotland
Yard: "Where's Atif?"
- They Never Booed Dylan!:
Tape Transcript Shows
Famed Newport Folkfest Dissing of Electric Dylan Not True. The Catcalls were for Peter
Yarrow!
- New Shame from the Liffey
Shrike
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September
3, 2002
Nabil Amro
Leadership
& Legitimacy:
An Open Letter to Arafat
Robert Fisk
A Forgotten
Holocaust:
The British in Palestine
Uri Avnery
The Return
of the Dinosaurs
September
2, 2002
Francis Boyle
Flashback:
US War Crimes During the Gulf War
Lou Cohan
Confessions
of a Downloader
Philip Farruggio
Labor
Day Antidote to Apathy
William Blum
Cuban Political
Prisoners
in the US
September
1, 2002
Dave Marsh
No Surrender:
Springsteen's The Rising
August 31,
2002
Gavin Keeney
Return to the
Charterhouse of Parma
David Vest
Porkland:
Confronting Republicans & Police in Portland
Ralph Nader
The Highway
Lobby
M. Shahid
Alam
CNN Reporting
(poem)
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Subjugation Strategy
Dr. Susan
Block
The Gangbang
Asthete
The Sexual Life
of Catherine M.
Kurt Nimmo
Clueless
at the State Dept.
August 30,
2002
Alexander
Cockburn
American
Journal:
Hitchens, Kissinger, Springsteen, Haggard & Elvis
August 29,
2002
Chris Floyd
The Secret
Sharers:
The CIA and the Murder of Frank Olson
August 28,
2002
William Ring
War on Iraq:
The Brightest Scenario
August 27,
2002
Sam Bahour
The Violence
of Curfew
Wenonah Hauter
From Johannesburg:
Pacts with the Devil: Public-Private Partnerships and the Global
Environment
Jerre Skog
Wanted:
"Our Kind of Guy"
in Iraq!
Uri Avnery
Letter
to a Pilot
August 26,
2002
Sami Al-Arian
Fighting
for the Right of
Dissent and Due Process
Ruebner /
Turaani
What
is Israel Hiding?
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
and the IMF:
Democracy and Emerging Market Liberalism
Robert Fisk
War Crimes:
Reporters Aren't Prosecutors
Douglas Valentine
Phoenix,
CIA and Maj. Gen. Bruce Lawlor: From Vietnam
to Homeland Security
August 24
/ 25, 2002
Susan Davis
Proverbial
Wisdom:
Of Clogs and Enron
Falk / Krieger
No War
Against Iraq
Ceylon Mooney
Fasting
for Iraq
Jonathon
Wright
Police
Brutality in Atlanta
Ralph Nader
Congress's
Pay Raise Scam
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Chainsaw
George
Alexander
Cockburn
Alterman
Cheapens Holocaust
August 23,
2002
Dave Marsh
Selling
Out?
Anthony Gancarski
Super-Duper:
Oil, al-Qaeda and a West African Adventure
William Hughes
Lieberman's
Conflict
of Interest?
Kurt Nimmo
The Lapdog
Conversion of CNN:
They Didn't Want to "Criticize" a Popular War
Sean Donahue
Hardline
in Colombia
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