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This is cross posted by Diana Muir Appelbaum at Jewish Ideas Daily
What made Greece, long a pro-Arab country with a history of anti-Semitism and a notoriously soft line on terrorism, stop political activists from sailing a flotilla to Gaza? What led Greece to rush fire-fighting helicopters to the Mt. Carmel fire? Why do many observers expect to see more Greek-Israeli cooperation not only in defense and diplomacy, but also in culture, tourism, business, and development of solar and water-saving technology?
Part of the answer is that Greece would like to become less dependent on Arab oil by buying natural gas from Israel, and it is the obvious partner for a pipeline to bring Israeli natural gas to profitable European markets.
But the surprise is how much deeper the friendship could become, as a look at Greece’s history and culture reveals a number of striking parallels with Israel.
Like Israel, modern Greece was created by romantic nationalists able first to imagine, and then to achieve, independence because of the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire. Both countries were populated by victims of vicious and sometimes genocidal ethnic cleansings.
When Greece achieved independence in 1828, it was a tiny statelet with borders that ended just north of Athens. The overwhelming majority of ethnic Greeks lived outside the Greek state, and historic Mt. Olympus and Constantinople, with hundreds of thousands of Greek residents, were outside its borders.
Among the many promises made by the British government during World War I—when the Ottomans fought alongside Germany—were the establishment of a Jewish homeland (the Balfour Declaration), and a promise that the ethnically Greek areas of coastal Anatolia (also then outside the Greek state) would be given to Greece. With the Ottoman Empire crumbling, the 1919 Paris Peace Conference authorized Greece to move into Smyrna. Unwisely, the Greek army pressed past the Greek-populated areas into the interior of Anatolia, where the Turkish army decimated it.
Massacres and ethnic cleansings of Anatolian Greeks had begun in 1914 but accelerated in 1919, and are remembered for their scale, brutality, and genocidal intent. The outcome of the Armenian massacres was even worse, since when the two campaigns began, Greek Christians had an independent state to flee to as the Armenians did not. But in both cases, no one intervened. Instead, the world sent Ernest Hemingway to file moving reports about the ranks of starving Greek refugees trudging toward the border and safety.
Only after the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians and the 1,400,000 Greek Christians of Anatolia was largely complete did the great powers meet in the Swiss city of Lausanne, where they worked out partial compensation for the Greek victims. The remaining Christians in Turkey were obliged to move to Greece, and the 300,000 Muslims in Greece (except for those of Thrace) were required to depart for Turkey, with their homes converted to housing for Greek refugees. A Greek Christian community was allowed to remain in Istanbul in 1923, but it was driven out during the Cyprus crises.
One result was that well over a quarter of the population of the Greek state, which numbered a mere four-and-a-half million people, was suddenly made up of refugees. Only in the Jewish state have refugees comprised a larger proportion of the population.
Even after this enormous ethnic cleansing, large Greek communities remained in the Soviet Union, Egypt, French Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere. The Greek law of return was designed to provide citizenship for ethnic Greeks who might need it. They have needed it often—in large events, like the Nasser-era policies that forced a substantial Greek community out of Egypt, and small but dramatic ones, like the 1993 Greek Army operation that rescued ethnic Greeks from war-torn Abkhazia.
The challenges of integrating these recurring waves of refugees have been enormous. As in Israel, they arrived stripped of their property to a country with little demand for their skills, speaking mutually unintelligible variants of Greek or entirely foreign languages.
Greece has never been perfect; it has been violent and, despite decades of European Union-funded prosperity, has not figured out how to build an economy. And yet it has offered something valuable to its citizens. Whether they are the descendants of refugees driven from their distant homes or of peasants exploited by arrogant overlords, all Greeks are now members of a national community. As citizens, they have a voice in their own government and the right to national self-determination and self-defense.
If Greeks often seem unreasonably prickly or stiff-necked to EU officials, their Balkan neighbors, or Turkey, it is because the memory of not having had these rights is so vivid. But the lives of nations are not static. The Muslim citizens of eastern Thrace no longer live as peasant farmers. The young move to Thessalonica and Athens where they join a growing community of illegal immigrant workers from poor countries including Egypt, Pakistan, and Albania. Some Muslim Albanians agitate for the right of return that Greece law gives to ethnically Greek Christians. They descend from the large community of ethnic Albanians expelled by Greek partisans late in World War II following their widespread collaboration with Italian and German occupation forces.
These developments raise the question of what it means to be Greek, a particularly challenging issue because until recently, Greek ethnicity, membership in the Greek Orthodox Church, and the right to Greek nationality have meant more or less the same thing.
Most Greeks continue to regard Greek culture, history, language, and Christianity as inseparable from Greek nationality, even if they personally enter a church only to attend weddings and funerals. The memory of centuries of Ottoman rule during which Greek culture and literature declined, the repair of the roof on a church was technically illegal, and even those Greeks with great wealth and privileges had no rights makes nationhood precious.
This, then, is the deep commonality that prime ministers Papandreou and Netanyahu have discovered and set out to cultivate: the idea that in a large and diverse world, the right to exist of two small, distinctive nation states, one Greek and one Jewish, is eminently worth defending.
Diana Muir Appelbaum is an American author and historian. She is at work on a book tentatively entitled Nationhood: The Foundation of Democracy
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This is cross posted by Ciarán, who blogs at Impartial Eclipse
Destruction in aftermath of 27 day siege on Hama by Syrian government
Syria is a country in the Middle East of some 22 million people. It’s bordered by Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, Israel and Lebanon to the south-west and Turkey to the north. It’s western coast on the Mediterranean Sea is just under 200km long.
Syria was ruled by the Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 20th centuries after which it was occupied by French forces in 1920. The French used brutal methods to maintain a pre-eminent role in the country until after World War II when the Syrians finally attained independence.
The first two decades of independence were marked by instability despite rapid economic growth. The Sunni Islamic community that had been the elite since the time of the Ottoman Empire continued to dominate economically at the expense of other minorities. In 1963, a military coup brought the Ba’ath Party to power. The Ba’ath Party advocated Arab socialism and was dominated by the minority Alawite community. Alawites claim to be Muslims but are regarded as heretics and apostates by the more orthodox Sunnis.
The ideology espoused by the Ba’ath Party included amongst other things land reform and by the late 1960s, the estates of the Sunni elite were being broken up and expropriated. This added to the sense of resentment amongst Sunnis towards the Ba’ath regime and the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in Syria in the 1930s) became the focal point for Sunni resistance.
The city of Hama in west-central Syria is some 200km north of the capital, Damascus. It had for decades been known to be a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood. As early as 1964, there had been anti-Ba’ath riots in Hama which were brutally crushed. Resistance continued however and in the late 1970s, anti-Baath violence and resistance to the Alawite president, Hafez al-Assad, became ever more deadly. An attack on a military school in Aleppo resulted in the deaths of scores of mainly Alawi cadets and in the autumn of 1980, car bombs in Damascus caused the deaths of hundreds.
On the morning of February 3rd, 1982 a Syrian army unit carrying out a search in Hama came across the hideout of a rebel commander. The rebels attacked and alerted other insurgents in the city. Word was spread by radio and by mosque loudspeaker. By morning, the city was in open revolt and the homes of Ba’ath leaders and government officials were being attacked.
The government in Damascus responded quickly calling on the city to surrender and warning that anyone found within the city would be considered an insurgent. The attack started with the airforce bombing the city from the air to allow the entry of infantry and tanks through the narrow streets. Heavy artillery caused much devastation too. The city was then cleared of insurgents street by streets. Some reports say that poison gas was also used to exterminate anyone left alive in the rubble. All in all, the violence lasted for three weeks and estimates of those killed run as high as 40,000 and there is no doubt that huge numbers of civilians were indiscriminately slaughtered in the bloodletting.
Eyewitness reports speak of horrific atrocities that were committed against defenceless men, women and children. Some speak of people being lined up to be shot along trenches already half-filled with bodies. When that line of people was riddled with bullets and fell into the trench, a new line of victims was brought forward.
The end result was that the power of the Muslim Brotherhood was shattered in Syria. Most of its leadership fled abroad and acrimonious splits occurred amongst those who stayed in Syria. Others reached an accommodation with the Ba’athist regime. Open discussion is strictly suppressed in Syria. Everyone knows it happened but 29 years later, no-one dares mention the Massacre of Hama
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Guardian’s latest assault on Israel’s legitimacy includes more absurd charges of “ethnic cleansing”
October 6, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Bedouin, Delegitimization, Mawat, Negev, Ottoman Empire, Taleb el-Sana | by Israelinurse | 18 comments
On October 5th the Guardian published two items – an article by MK Talab el Sana and a letter signed by a number of well-known and prolific anti-Israel activists – on the subject of the Negev Bedouin. Due to their fact-free one-sided nature and the omission of any alternative perspective, as well as their being timed to coincide with a demonstration to be held the next day in Israel, both items can only be seen as co-operation with and enabling of a political campaign.
Cif Watch has covered the issue of the disputes between Israeli Bedouin and the State many times in response to the plethora of previous Guardian articles on the subject. Some of those articles can be read here, here, here and here.
The published letter employs the highly inflammatory –and totally inaccurate – phrase “ethnic cleansing” and falsely suggests that the residents of the illegally constructed Bedouin encampments do not have access to Israeli hospitals. The letter’s writers also employ the now popular political tactic of describing the Bedouin as Palestinians, stating that “[t]he British government must condemn any move to evict the Palestinian citizens of Israel from their lands, which were documented under the British Mandate as privately owned Palestinian land – not ownerless as the Israeli state now claims.”
The facts are of course somewhat different than this emotionally charged letter would suggest. Dr. Thabet Abu Ras, a professor of political geography at Ben Gurion University and director of the Adalah Negev Project (also a member of ACRI and a former director of Shatil), has documented the actual sequence of events:
(emphasis added, Naqab =Negev)
In other words, the fact that many contemporary residents of the Negev cannot produce documentation in support of their claims to various lands is a result of the choices made by their ancestors. It should be made clear that all privately owned land (‘Tabu’) in Israel (whether owned by Jews, Arabs, Bedouin or any other section of the population) is exclusively land which was purchased and registered before the establishment of the state and that the government has issued compulsory purchase orders for lands privately owned by individuals in all sectors in order to facilitate town planning and development.
In his article MK Talab el Sana also promotes the myth of Bedouin ownership of most, if not all, Negev land and he too employs the term “ethnic cleansing”, as promoted by the Higher Steering Committee, and despite the fact that a contemporary population of 200,000 (more conservative estimates place the figure at 160,000) compared to 11,000 in 1953 would indicate quite the opposite. No-one is suggesting the removal the Bedouin from the Negev; in fact at the time of the return of the Sinai in the early 80s, many opted to remain in Israel under an offer made by the Israeli government rather than to return to Egyptian rule.
The Israeli government has made numerous attempts over the years to solve the disputes with the 40% of the Negev Bedouin population which does not currently live in one of the seven purpose-built towns. Additional new towns are planned, with offers of free land, a waiver on infrastructure development costs and financial relocation packages for those moving there from illegally constructed encampments. No other sector of Israeli society is eligible for these benefits.
Rahat – one of the seven Bedouin towns in the Negev
As anyone who has driven along the southbound road out of Be’er Sheva in recent years will appreciate, the much-used term ‘unrecognised villages’ in fact refers to an ever-expanding network of unauthorised shanty towns such as those pictured below. The provision of 21st century facilities and services to such a vast number of illegally constructed encampments is simply impossible.
In order to fully understand the issue of the disputes between successive Israeli governments and certain groups of the Negev Bedouin, (and why they are so difficult to solve) it is necessary to appreciate the political agendas of some of those promoting the subject both at home and abroad. That, of course, is essential background which the Guardian does not provide for its readers.
Talab el Sana, for example, is a member of the ‘Ra’am’ party, otherwise known as the United Arab List, which enjoys particularly strong support among the Bedouin. That party is dominated by the Southern Islamic Movement which, although more moderate than its Northern counterpart under the leadership of Raed Salah, does not recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state but takes part in the political process. Its ideology is closely related to that of its parent movement, the Muslim Brotherhood.
Another organization heavily involved in the promotion of the dispute between the Negev Bedouin and the Israeli government as a means of delegitimisation of the Jewish state is Adalah which calls for the replacement of the Jewish state with a ‘democratic, bilingual and multicultural’ country in which Jewish immigration would be limited to strictly humanitarian cases but Palestinian refugees and their descendants would be entitled to the ‘right of return’. The director of Adalah’s Negev Project, the abovementioned Thabet Abu Ras, is also a prominent member of the NCALC which constitutes the majority party in the High Follow-Up Committee. The joint manifesto of these two bodies calls for Israel to lose its Jewish identity and become a ‘state of all its citizens’. Ironically, Adalah is also involved in a legal campaign to remove Jewish residents from the Negev area.
In publishing both Talab el Sana’s markedly subjective article and the highly inaccurate and inflammatory accompanying letter from well-known anti-Israel activists, the Guardian has once more offered its services as collaborator with and propagandist for political organisations which, through exploitation of the Bedouin’s grievances, seek to delegitimize and undermine the state of Israel.
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