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Lamed-E A Quarterly Journal of Politics and Culture

Selected and Edited by Ivan Ninic ________________________________________________________________________

Autumn 2019 Number 44

The Mirage of an International Jerusalem How the idea of Jerusalem’s status as an “international city” became embedded in

countless UN resolutions and foreign policies, and why it is utterly baseless.

By Michel Gurfinkiel The United States decision on December 6, 2017 to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to transfer the American embassy there from Tel Aviv was one of the more momentous acts of diplomacy ever undertaken by a U.S. administration in Middle Eastern affairs. So much so that nobody believed President Donald Trump would actually do it, until he did. When he did, most Israelis and most pro-Israel Americans approved or were positively delighted. By contrast, the American political class, Republicans and Democrats alike, was stunned—even though the president had merely fulfilled a legislative mandate, the Jerusalem Embassy Act, that had been passed near unanimously by both houses of Congress during the presidency of Bill Clinton 22 years earlier in 1995, only to be repeatedly deferred by successive White Houses for over two decades. Veteran Near East Arabists in the Department of State, for their part, put on a stern face and obeyed. What came next was no surprise. The “international community,” from the United Nations General Assembly to the European Union, not to mention the Arab League and the World Islamic Conference, stridently rejected the American initiative. Two weeks after the decision was announced, 128 of the 193 member states of the General Assembly approved a resolution—ES-10/L.22—drafted by Turkey and Yemen and demanding that “all states comply with Security Council resolutions regarding the Holy City of Jerusalem and do not recognize any actions or

measures contrary to those resolutions.” Only eight countries, including Israel, sided with the United States. This international condemnation relied on a venerable notion: that the legal status of Jerusalem—does it belong to Israel? To the Palestinians? To both? To neither?—was a settled matter, and that the answer to those questions was “none of the above.” Instead, international law and legal precedent had carved out the city as an international ward. There is, indeed, a long legal history, built of many resolutions and agreements, to just that effect. But there are two problems with this settled conviction. First, its roots in law have been egregiously misrepresented. Second, the claim that Jerusalem actually belongs to the state of Israel rests on strong legal, moral, and demographic foundations. Let’s start with the law.

I. What International Law Is

What is international law? It’s easy enough to doubt, if not to mock, the idea that there is such a thing—that is, a universally recognized corpus of legislated rules binding the behavior of nations. Nevertheless, for our purposes, let’s posit that international law exists, that it enjoys an impressive pedigree, and that it compels or should compel the assent of the civilized world. Today, it is commonly assumed that international law is decided mainly by the United Nations and adjudicated, if disputing countries consent, by the UN’s wholly owned arm, the International Court of Justice. Thus, almost every argument raised against President Trump’s decision on Jerusalem cites various UN resolutions saying that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel. Particularly prominent is Security Council Resolution 470, passed on August 20, 1980, which condemned the enactment by Israel’s parliament of a constitutionally binding law enshrining Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and called on the governments that had already established embassies in that city to withdraw them. Resolution 470 largely rested, in turn, on previous Security Council resolutions from 1967 and 1968 that denied Israel any right to change

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Jerusalem’s “status” as a result of the June 1967 Six-Day War. But does the United Nations possess authority to legislate through such resolutions? After all, it is no more than an association of sovereign countries that, ultimately, remain free to abide by UN resolutions or to ignore them. And if the UN is not asupergovernment, what of its resolutions? As is well known, these are of two types. Resolutions by the General Assembly—like, most recently, ES-10/ L.22—are passed by a majority of members. According to the UN Charter, they are not legally binding. Rather, they testify to a political view held by a majority of countries at a given moment that can change over time. Thus, the infamous Resolution 3379 of November 10, 1975, determining, by a majority of 72 to 32 votes with 32 abstentions, that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” was revoked sixteen years later by Resolution 4686 of December 16, 1991, by 111 votes to 25 with 13 abstentions. Yet, while unauthoritative in themselves, General Assembly resolutions sometimes give rise to Security Council resolutions, some of which are formulated as “decisions” that are legally binding on all UN member states. Under Chapters VII and VIII of the UN Charter, such Security Council resolutions can impose economic or military sanctions on a rogue nation. All Security Council resolutions require not only a majority of the Council members but the acquiescence of the five permanent members, each of whom is invested with veto power. So much by way of quick background. Even if one questions the UN’s legal authority out of hand, as many do, it is one thing to reject on those grounds its case against the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel; it’s another thing to vindicate Israel’s case. As it happens, however, there is ample documentation of the Jewish people’s special relation to the Holy Land and thus to the city of Jerusalem. First, that special relation was implicit in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917 and in the various ensuing documents that referred to it, including the San Remo Conference resolution of April 25, 1920 and a joint resolution of the U.S. Congress on September 21, 1922. The claim was explicitly recognized by the June 3, 1922 British White Paper on Palestine, and in the preamble to the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine of July 24 of that year, which begins: “Whereas recognition has . . . been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country. . . .” Second, Jerusalem was from 1920 to 1948 the seat of Palestine’s administrative government. True, the November 1947 UN plan to partition Palestine

between the Jews and the Arabs proposed converting Jerusalem into an entity (corpus separatum) separated from both states—an issue to which we’ll soon return. But that plan, though endorsed by the UN General Assembly, was never more than a proposal. The Arab states and Palestine’s Arab leadership rejected the proposal, and it was never implemented. As Jerusalem was Palestine’s seat of government before Israel came into being, so it remained for the Jewish state after independence in 1948. In addition, whatever may be the legal status of the 1993 Israel-PLO arrangement known as the Oslo Accords, that arrangement pointedly left the Jerusalem issue to a further stage in the peace process. Arguably that implicitly validated the status quo—Jerusalem as the capital of Israel—in the interim. Third, those nations that engage in bilateral relations with the state of Israel also recognize Jerusalem de-facto as its capital, since their leaders or representatives regularly go to Jerusalem to meet Israel’s leaders or address the Israeli parliament there. Under international law, de-facto recognition is as valid as de-jure recognition for at least as long as the de-facto circumstances prevail. In other words, it is both a gross inconsistency and a breach of the accepted rules of international relations for the many UN member states that recognize Israel and whose leaders or representatives visit Israel’s leaders and legislators in Jerusalem—a list that among the major EU powers includes Germany, France, and the UK— to denounce President Trump’s decision as legally inadmissible.

II. The Half-Life of an International Jerusalem

Why, then, if such long-established precedent exists for regarding Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, has the “international community,” including in some instances the United States, so strenuously disregarded Israel’s rights in the city? The answer can be expressed in terms of a metaphor: just as it takes particular isotopes a certain amount of time for their radioactivity to fall to half of its original strength, and then more time to decay completely, so some political facts or understandings enjoy a similarly ghostly “half-life” long after they have been swept away by real-world circumstances—especially when their survival serves the interests of a variety of parties. This brings us back to the 1947 UN plan for the partition of Mandatory Palestine and especially its provisions regarding Jerusalem. The partition plan was drawn up by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). The UN General Assembly’s two-thirds majority vote in favor of the plan on November 29, 1947 was

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celebrated by Palestinian Jews (the yishuv) and by Jews abroad as a vindication of the Zionist dream. Even today, its anniversary is a national holiday of sorts in Israel. Palestinian factions and the Palestinian Authority remember the date mournfully as part of the unfolding of their national “catastrophe” (nakba) of those years. In one respect, the UN plan was decidedly pro-Jewish and pro-Zionist: it explicitly provided for the creation of a Jewish state. But the plan was also deeply flawed, and its context has been grievously and often willfully misunderstood by the international community. At the time of the plan’s passage in 1947, any authorized international support for a Jewish state was an asset that the Zionist movement could not turn afford to down, whatever the actual nature of that support and whatever the proposed state’s shape or size. No doubt most members of the special committee, like those who worked to get the plan approved, fully understood what was at stake and were mindful not only of the international community’s failure to rescue European Jewry during World War II but also of the plight of hundreds of thousands of stateless Holocaust survivors still confined in DP camps. The drafters thought that a territorial partition, for which precedents existed earlier in Ireland and very recently in India, was a step toward approval of a Jewish state by Britain, the United States, and the international community as a whole. But the flaws, to repeat, were many and deep. The two-state plan, as enunciated in UN Resolution 181, gave more land to the Arabs than was envisioned by the Jewish and British fathers of the Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate. Moreover, each of the two states envisioned by the plan consisted of a few largely disconnected enclaves that were strategically unviable and economically bereft of federal or confederal arrangements—in turn implying the need for international supervision and perhaps limitations on both states’ sovereignty. Last but hardly least, by severing Jersualem from the Jewish state and creating a corpus separatum for that predominantly Jewish city, the plan incorporated ideas that belittled the Jews’ historical connection with Jerusalem and impugned their ability to safeguard the holy sites of all religions there. One may understand, accordingly, why some (mainly right-wing) Zionists rejected the partition plan from the outset. But the official leadership, dominated by left-of-center parties, believed that the main political gain—a UN-endorsed Jewish state—outweighed any shortcomings: better a state through partition than no Jewish state at all. In fact, Jewish leaders in Palestine had floated their own partition plan a year earlier that included an international zone in Jerusalem.

There was also a deeper reason for the Jewish leadership to be open to a compromise scheme: chances were that, at the end of the day, any such scheme would not really matter. Once a Jewish state was created, its actual shape would no longer be determined by any pre-established UN plan but rather by facts on the ground. In the speech he delivered to the central committee of the Jewish labor movement on December 3, 1947, the essence of which he would reiterate in the May 1948 deliberations over the text of Israel’s declaration of independence, David Ben-Gurion hinted at this logic: Clearly, the UN resolution mutilates our ambitions and infringes the international promises delivered in the wake of World War I. Quite obviously, it reduces the Jewish country’s area. One cannot fail to notice that Jerusalem is to become an international city, . . . that almost all the mountains have been taken away from us, . . . and that the Jewish state’s borders are bizarre, to say the least. For all that, I think that this is the greatest asset ever granted to the Jewish people throughout its entire history. So long as such a state is born and thrives. . . . Besides, a sovereign Jewish state would instantly absorb hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants and become strong enough either to fight if, as was likely, the Arab side opted for war, or to negotiate on more favorable terms. Even many UNSCOP members, including the committee’s chair, Sweden’s Emil Sandström, admitted that partition could not be implemented “without resorting to force.” Also, in secret negotiations, the Hashemite kingdom of Transjordan made clear that it would both go to war and lay claim to the Arab-populated areas in Cisjordanian (roughly, “West Bank”) Palestine, thus in effect ensuring that the Palestinian Arab state controlling the West Bank would be Transjordan and not a new Arab state. If this explains why a partition of the land could be endorsed by the Zionists, at least as a tactical and temporary move, the same reasoning applied, mutatis mutandis, to their willingness to forgo an argument over Jerusalem: the place that, by any measure, was the most Jewish entity in the whole country. In strategic terms, the Jews were much weaker in Jerusalem than elsewhere. The Holy City was comparatively isolated from the bulk of Jewish Palestine, which lay on the Mediterranean coast and in Galilee. The large ultra-Orthodox community in the city had for decades remained apart from the main organizations of the yishuv, and its residents were largely unfit for military or paramilitary training. Complicating matters further, although some Jews in Jerusalem had in fact joined self-defense networks, they tended to favor the units associated with the Jabotinskyan wing (Etzel and Leḥi) rather than the

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pro-leadership units (Haganah and Palmaḥ) that were in charge elsewhere; coordination between the two was far from easy. Under such circumstances, a corpus separatum was a sensible temporary option. And “temporary” is again the key word. Were a Jewish army to take and hold ground in Jerusalem, the corpus-separatum idea might be forgotten as part of a partition plan that never came into effect. Were the Jews to fail there, the corpus-separatum scheme might allow Jewish leaders to win some international protection for Jews remaining in the city. In the meantime, showing a willingness to compromise was an important diplomatic asset.

III. A Christian-Ruled City

One reason for compromising over Jerusalem was this: at the time, “internationalization” was a code word for the continuation of, specifically, a Christian presence in both Jerusalem and the Holy Land; in turn, Jewish acquiescence in such a continued presence was necessary for Christian agreement to, or support for, a Jewish state. This crucial but often overlooked point merits a brief summary. For about a century since roughly the 1850s, a steady Christian revival had taken place in Jerusalem. While weaker than the Jewish revival in demographic terms, it was much more visible, and spectacularly so, in terms of institutions, buildings, and property. Under the Ottoman Land Property Act of 1857, most Christian sects and communities were allowed to buy as much land as they could afford, including large tracts of desert or semi-desert outside the Old City’s walls, either in order to protect existing Christian shrines or buildings or to create new neighborhoods. So much land was accumulated that from the 1920s on, Christians began leasing property to the Jewish National Fund or private Jewish developers. Much of this Christian activity increased after 1917-18 when the British conquered Palestine from the Ottomans in World War I. For various Christian denominations and for Christian-oriented Europeans, this development looked very much like a long-delayed opportunity to repair the humiliating defeats incurred in the Crusades, especially (after the creation of a predominantly Christian country in Lebanon) Europe’s defeat at the hands of Saladin in the 13th century. With that in mind, no wonder that, in the early post-World War II years, the Christians of Palestine and their allies abroad now feared that the imminent British withdrawal from the country would jeopardize their world-historical opportunity. A predominantly Arab Palestine would be a predominantly Muslim Palestine, with little patience for Christianity; for some, a Jewish Palestine raised similar concerns. Such

concerns needed to be calmed, even if at a high cost—hence the significance of a Jewish willingness to turn Jerusalem into an “international” enclave. Recall that this was still 1947: a decade before the final dissolution of the European colonial empires. The United Nations and the “international community” remained largely dominated by Christian countries. An international Jerusalem was thus expected to be, for all practical purposes, a Christian-ruled city. Factored into these calculations were, in addition, the ongoing negotiations between the Jewish leadership and the Catholic Church in particular. Until 1944, the Holy See had adamantly opposed both Zionism and Jewish immigration to Palestine. In the immediate postwar years, however, Pope Pius XII took a more nuanced position. Meeting with an Arab Palestinian delegation in early August 1946, the pontiff preached peace and deplored “the persecutions that fanatical anti-Semitism” had unleashed on the “Hebrew people.” He made sure his words were reported in the New York Times, seen by the Church as the supremely influential “Jewish paper” in America. Following discreet talks between the Holy See and Jewish and Zionist representatives, and the latter’s evident readiness to entertain the idea of international rule in Jerusalem, the Vatican dropped its anti-Zionist stand and professed neutrality in the dispute over Palestine. In June 1947, Monsignor Thomas MacMahon, the American prelate in charge of Christian Arab affairs at the United Nations, confided to UNSCOP: We are completely indifferent to the form of the regime which your esteemed committee may recommend, provided that the interests of Christendom, Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox, will be weighed and safeguarded in your final recommendation. One month later, Brother Simon Bonaventure, a Franciscan representative of the Custody of the Holy Land, using exactly the same argument, set “the protection of Christian services” as his order’s sole concern. In turn, the Holy See’s “indifference” or neutrality made it easier for UNSCOP and the representatives of Catholic countries at the UN, especially Latin American ones, to support the partition plan. This Christian angle also explains why the corpus separatum, as envisioned by UN Resolution 181, was extended geographically well beyond the Mandate-era borders of the Jerusalem municipality. It aimed to put under “international”—that is, Christian—control as many Christian communities and holy sites as possible, including Bethlehem and Bayt Jalla.

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By the same token, however, outlying Muslim communities were also to be included, with the effect that the Jewish majority in the new “international Jerusalem” would be diluted from its then-60 percent of the municipality’s populace to 49 percent—still a majority in relative terms but short of the absolute demographic dominance in the city which Jews had enjoyed since the 1870s. But here we are getting ahead of ourselves. In the event, the Jewish leadership’s tactical calculations proved correct, and the corpus separatum was never implemented. The war, which started immediately after November 1947 as an intergroup conflict and then, after the British withdrawal in May 1948, developed into a full-fledged international war between the new state of Israel and seven neighboring Arab countries, was largely won by the Jews. The ceasefire lines, agreed upon by early 1949, gave 75 percent of Mandate Palestine to Israel. And the country’s demographic balance also changed overnight as more than a million Jewish immigrants, mostly Holocaust survivors, poured in while over a half-million Arabs fled to the Arab-controlled areas of Palestine or other Arab countries. As foreseen, the most difficult fighting took place in Jerusalem, but at the end of the day Israel managed to retain most of the prewar Jewish city. The one glaring exception was the Jewish neighborhoods of the Old City. These had been pounded by the Jordanians at the inception of hostilities, and in May 1948 their 2,000 Jewish inhabitants had been forcibly removed. Israel did manage to keep Mount Scopus, the first seat of the Hebrew University, as an enclave in northern Jerusalem, and Mount Zion as a second enclave just outside the walls of the Old City. It also managed to link the Israeli sector in Jerusalem to the rest of the country. But the Old City’s Jewish holy sites, including its 35 synagogues, were either destroyed or, in the case of the Western Wall and the cemetery on the Mount of Olives, left in Arab hands. Several Jewish settlements outside the municipality’s boundaries, including Atarot, Neveh Yaakov, and the five Gush Etzion communities, had likewise fallen to Arab forces. In fact, as defined by the 1949 ceasefire lines, Israeli Jerusalem was encircled by hostile forces on three out of four sides; only the western side was open, linked to the rest of the country by a corridor less than ten kilometers wide. After the war, sporadic terrorist incursions, shelling, and sniper fire would occur not only on the Israel-Jordan and Israel-Syria ceasefire lines but also in the Jerusalem area. Veteran Jerusalemites still remember the large no-man’s-land and buffer zones, complete with barbed wire, that for two decades separated the Israeli sector in Jerusalem, or “West Jerusalem,” from the Jordanian-held sectors.

All of this would of course be transformed by Israel’s spectacular victory in the Six-Day war of 1967.

IV. Descending into Fantasy

As we’ve seen, the main legal consequence of the 1947-1949 war and the ensuing ceasefire agreements was the death of the 1947 partition plan, including its special provisions for Jerusalem, which Israel’s Arab neighbors had rejected. Nevertheless, officials of various countries argued illogically that the plan’s Jerusalem provisions somehow still remained alive. Of this descent into fantasy, the Catholic Church, eager to ensure the preservation of Christian power in Jerusalem, was the prime promoter. On October 24, 1948, in the wake of an Israeli operation to enlarge the western corridor out of Jerusalem, Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical “commending” a special regime for Jerusalem and the neighboring areas, to be “grounded in international law and guaranteed by international law.” A second encyclical, issued in April 1949, three months after the Israeli-Jordanian ceasefire, called again for an “internationally guaranteed regime” in the Holy City. Notably, neither in the first nor in the second instance did the Holy See claim the partition plan’s provisions to be still valid as such: it just demanded that, whatever the final outcome of the Arab-Israeli conflict, some kind of international control or supervision be retained in greater Jerusalem. Over the following eight months, the Vatican lobbied intensively at the United Nations to reinstate the corpus separatum—and actually succeeded. Resolution 303 (IV), passed by the General Assembly on December 9, 1949, boldly called for the city to be “established as a corpus separatum under a special international regime” and “administered by the United Nations.” No less boldly, it delineated the corpus separatum’s borders to include “the present municipality of Jerusalem plus the surrounding villages and towns, the most eastern of which shall be Abu Dis; the most southern, Bethlehem; the most western, Ein Karim (including also the built-up area of Motsa); and the most northern, Shua’fat.” This extravagant petition ignored both the legal implications of the 1947-1949 war and the resulting facts on the ground; no subsequent UN resolutions would ever quote it verbatim. Seen at the moment as a diplomatic triumph for the Vatican, Resolution 303 (IV) would in the longer run prove a non-starter for Catholics and other Christians. Jordan hardened its anti-Christian stance in Jerusalem and its environs until the area was taken by Israel in 1967; Yasir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas would follow the Jordanian example when, under the 1993 Oslo

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Accords, the PLO became entrenched in the West Bank and Bethlehem. Nevertheless, the fantasy created in 1949 would grow and increase as Resolution 303 soon became the main inspiration for the doctrine, endorsed by the U.S. Department of State until 2017 as well as by almost every other foreign ministry in the world, according to which even “West Jerusalem” was not part of Israel. Diplomacy is based on routine, repetition, and cross-reference. Once a resolution has been voted, it can be constantly mentioned or quoted in further resolutions—or in the discussions that lead to their writing. The more a resolution is mentioned or quoted, the more untouchable it is assumed to be. As soon as it has been embraced by one international organization, others are likely to endorse it, as are their ever-multiplying branches and subsidiaries. General Assembly resolutions are cited by resolutions of the Security Council and of UNESCO, WHO, other UN agencies, the EU, the African Unity Organization, the Arab League, the World Islamic Conference, the Non-Aligned Movement, and every “progressive” NGO under the sun. Diplomats and law professors then claim that the resolution has become “international law,” even if it stands in blatant contradiction to longstanding principles of international law. The claims are further amplified through political networks among like-minded parties who call themselves the “international community.” For most of the cold-war era, the United Nations and its agencies grew enormously, accreted dozens of recently established states, and departed from the largely Western and democratic political culture of its founding members. As a result, General Assemblies and other councils or commissions were increasingly dominated by anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Israel majorities. More often than not, they have encountered no other check than an American veto at the United States Security Council. Worse, there are instances when the United States itself, inadvertently or deliberately, does not employ its veto and lets things pass. Thus, on July 4, 1967, less than one month after the Six-Day War, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 2253 (ES-V). It read: The General Assembly, deeply concerned at the situation prevailing in Jerusalem as a result of the measures taken by Israel to change the status of the city, (1) considers that these measures are invalid; (2) calls upon Israel to rescind all measures already taken and to desist forthwith from taking any action which would alter the status of Jerusalem. When asked what the “status of Jerusalem” was, UN experts and other commentators cited both the Israeli-Jordanian ceasefire of 1949, which had been

superseded by the June 7, 1967 Israeli-Jordanian ceasefire, and Resolution 303 (IV) of 1949. Both of the two latter actions negated the terms of the 1949 ceasefire. But the UN experts knew what they were doing. Till today, many foreign-ministry officials, including in the UK’s Whitehall and the French Quai d’Orsay, still claim both that the 1949 armistice line in Jerusalem—the “green line” that till 1967 divided Israel from Jordan—is an “international border” even though it merely marks the 1949 ceasefire lines. They also inconsistently claim that the part of Jerusalem on the Israeli side of that armistice line did not belong to Israel. By and large, officials of the U.S. State Department similarly subscribed to that inconsistent position. For one reason or another, the U.S. representative at the UN abstained from the vote on the 1967 resolution. Ten months later, on May 21, 1968, that resolution served, among other texts, as a precedent for Security Council Resolution 252, which employed stronger language against Israel on the Jerusalem issue: The Security Council . . . deplores the failure of Israel to comply with the General Assembly resolutions mentioned above, [and] considers that all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel . . . which tend to change the legal status of Jerusalem are invalid and cannot change the status of Jerusalem. Once again, the United States abstained. But this time, it was a Security Council resolution. Building on both resolutions, more Security Council resolutions on Jerusalem were passed in 1969, 1971, and 1980, without being checked by Washington. The upshot: “international law” was continually invoked to Israel’s disadvantage, so much so that, for many years, Israeli diplomats or jurists avoided serious discussions about it, even when (or especially when) its absurdities were egregiously evident.

V. The French Example

Thus has the Church’s intervention on behalf of “internationalizing” Jerusalem lived on—even in the minds of those who aren’t aware of it and would consider themselves well past such parochially religious concerns. I am speaking here of the European countries and in particular of France. French support for the Zionist cause ran high in the 1945-1948 years, and it is no coincidence that so many covert activities, including the tragic 1947 odyssey of the SS Exodus bearing 4,500 Holocaust survivors to British Palestine, only to be denied entry and returned to France, were masterminded in Paris or operated on French soil. In the 1950’s, France and Israel became close strategic partners; Israel’s military

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victories in 1956 and 1967, both of which owed much to state-of-the-art French armaments, were celebrated as French victories by proxy. Even in later years, after the alliance lapsed, large sectors of the French public retained sympathy for and curiosity about the Israeli experience. Aside from its achievements in security, science, medicine, and high-tech, Israel is still praised in the French media, and even by the political class, as in many ways a model country. Indeed, on July 1 of this year, Anne Hidalgo, the socialist mayor of Paris, had no qualms inaugurating a Place de Jérusalem (“Jerusalem Plaza”) in front of the city’s newly built Jewish European Cultural Center, thus underscoring the Jewish character of the Holy City. Attending the ceremony as an honored guest was Moshe Leon, the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem. For all of that, however, the French foreign ministry in particular has been so utterly obstinate in its denial of Israel’s legitimacy, especially when it comes to Jerusalem, as to arouse suspicions of institutional anti-Semitism. Some observers have half-seriously wondered whether the secret agenda of the Quai d’Orsay, more or less in line with 19th-century European fantasies, is not to wage a ninth crusade in the Holy Land, almost 800 years after the failure of the French-led seventh and eighth crusades—this time not against the Saracens but against the Hebrews. Old habits of mind die hard. Even more rigidly than did the Obama State Department, the Quai d’Orsay insists both that the 1949-1967 “green line” is an international border and, contradictorily, that Jerusalem is an entity unto itself, separate from Israel. Visiting French officials are warned not to set foot in “East Jerusalem” and above all not to come near the Western Wall. (Not all of them comply.) French citizens in Israel voting in French elections are divided geographically between those residing “in Israel” and those residing “in Jerusalem.” There is only a single French consulate-general in the city, squarely in the West Jerusalem sector, which works essentially as an embassy to the “State of Palestine” while reluctantly also catering to the general populace and to the overwhelmingly Jewish French expatriate community. What’s going on in these weird passive-aggressive slights becomes clear when you consider the Quai d’Orsay’s insistence that France should play a special role in Jerusalem as the protector of holy sites. Many of these sites happen, of course, to be Catholic, but one that has recently come to wider public attention is not: the Tombs of the Kings, located in the “East Jerusalem” neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrakh. An intricate and beautiful complex of rock-cuts tomb, the site is believed to be the ancient burial place of Queen Helene of Adiabene and her sons, a royal

family in northern Mesopotamia who converted to Judaism in the 1st century CE. Jerusalem Jews regarded it as a holy place even before it was fully excavated, and there were always groups of people praying or reciting Psalms there; Muslims did not interfere. In 1863, Louis-Félicien de Saulcy, a French adventurer, numismatist, and amateur archaelogist, unceremoniously stole the sarcophagus of Queen Helene, bones included, and presented it to the Louvre. The bewildered Jewish community in Jerusalem appealed to the chief rabbi of France, who in turn requested the help of Amélie Bertrand, a rich Christian lady of Jewish origin who was known to be concerned with Jewish issues. Through the French consul in Jerusalem, Bertrand bought the site in the early 1880’s and, as a marker attests, entrusted France “to allow the Jerusalem Israelites to pray there.” After Jerusalem was reunited in 1967, the French consulate declined to re-open the tombs to Jewish worshippers and instead renamed the site as an “East Jerusalem Palestinian landmark.” going so far as to allow a Jerusalem Festival of Arab Music there in 1997. A 2000 issue of Palestine-Israel Journal, a militant pro-Palestinian publication, lauded the event for “developing burgeoning cultural links between Palestine and the rest of the Arab world.” A Jerusalem foundation dedicated to the Tombs of the Kings has challenged France not just on the issue of the Tombs proper—which the French closed for renovation in 2010 and only now have grudgingly re-opened —but also on the sarcophagus and bones illegally “donated” to the Louvre. Ironically, the same Quai d’Orsay that is so highmindedly devoted to alleged “international decisions” regarding Jewish Jerusalem turns adamantly parochial when it comes to perceived French interests, especially where its relations with Arabs are concerned. But then, France has no monopoly on hypocrisy; its example is all too representative of its main EU partners as a whole, thereby providing us with yet another reason to dismiss arguments—putatively on the basis of international law—against Israel’s possession of Jerusalem. Moreover, as I mentioned earlier, there are still other other grounds on which to base the claim that Jerusalem is Israel’s. To these we can now turn.

VI. The Jewish Jerusalem

The apportioning of territory and the delimitation of borders are intricate matters under international law. As it happens, many territorial disputes have been decided instead by referenda on self-determination citing facts on the ground, preeminently including demographic facts on the ground, or by bilateral or

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multilateral agreements taking such realities into account.

This is true of cities as well as of extended territories: one precedent is the incorporation of the culturally Italian city of Trieste into Italy under the London Memorandum of 1955 and the Treaty of Osimo in 1975. By this important precedent, how does Jerusalem stack up? The first-ever reliable demographic survey of Jerusalem was conducted in 1845 by the Prussian consul Ernst-Gustav Schultz. Out of a total population of 16,410, living mostly in the old walled city, he found 7,120 Jews, 5,000 Muslims, 3,390 Christians, 800 Turkish soldiers, and 100 Europeans. In other words: well before the modern onset of Zionist-inspired immigration, the Jews, at 43 percent of the population, already formed the single most populous group. Twenty-three years later, in 1868—about the time of Mark Twain’s famous journey to the Holy Land narrated in Innocents Abroad—the Jerusalem Almanack, a publication intended for Western visitors, divided the population evenly between Jews (9,000 inhabitants out of 18,000) and non-Jews (5,000 Muslims and 4,000 Christians), with Jews once again being the single most populous group. During the 1870s and 1880s, Jerusalem started to develop, outside Sultan Suleiman’s walls, along Jaffa Road to the west, Nablus Road to the north, and Jericho Road to the east. Rings of new neighborhoods were built, along with many public facilities. In the process the city took on, as we’ve seen, a more pronounced Christian character with impressive new buildings including churches, convents, and hospitals funded by the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant powers. But the city’s demographic expansion owed essentially to the Jews. By 1889, out of 39,175 inhabitants, Christians numbered 7,115 (18.1 percent), Muslims 7,000 (17.8 percent), and Jews 25,000 Jews (63 percent). The growth of Jerusalem as a chiefly Jewish-inhabited city continued apace until World War I. While, according to the historian Martin Gilbert, “the population of Jerusalem nearly doubled between 1889 and 1912,” the Jewish population almost tripled. One of the most revealing sources in this respect is the Guide de Terre Sainte (Guide to the Holy Land) published in the early 20th century by Father Barnabé Meistermann, a French Franciscan friar, under the aegis of the Custody of the Holy Land. A monument of religious, historical, and aesthetic erudition, the work offers a detailed, practical report on the various entities involved: the Holy Land proper, which is to

say present-day Israel and Jordan, plus Italy, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Asia Minor, and Constantinople. According to the Guide’s first edition, published in 1907 and quoted by Gilbert in his Jerusalem: Illustrated History Atlas, there were at that time 58,900 inhabitants: 10,900 Christian Arabs (18.percent), 8,000 Muslim Arabs (13.5 percent), and 40,000 Jews (67 percent). An updated edition, scheduled for release in 1914, was suspended at the outbreak of World War I and was afterward edited to reflect the geopolitical consequences occasioned by the fall of the Ottoman empire and the end of eight centuries of Muslim control in Jerusalem and the Land of Israel. Regarding the population of Jerusalem, the second edition cites a later prewar survey conducted in 1910 by the German statistician Davis Trietsch. Out of the city’s 92,000 inhabitants, Trietsch recorded 17,000 Christians (18.4 percent), 13,000 Muslims (14.1 percent), and 62,000 Jews (again at 67 percent). Broadly speaking, this early-20th-century ratio between Jews and Arabs (about two-thirds/one-third) remains a demographic reality to this day, despite both strong Jewish population growth on the one hand and repeated episodes of violence on the other hand, the latter including anti-Jewish riots and pogroms, wars, terrorism, and forced migrations of both Jews and Arabs. Thus, in 1944, according to a British census, there were 97, 000 Jews in Jerusalem out of 156,980 inhabitants (61.7 percent); in 1967, when the city was reunited under Israeli rule, there were 195,700 Jews out of 263,307 inhabitants (74.3 percent); in 2017, 564,897 Jews out of 882,652 inhabitants (64 percent). If one were to consider “greater” Jerusalem as a metropolis rather than a municipality, the ratio would still hold. Such a metropolis would include, in addition to the present Israeli municipality of Jerusalem, the pre-1967 Israeli municipalities of Mevasseret Zion, Motza Ilit, Tzova, Even Sapir, Ora, Abu Ghosh, Ma’aleh Haḥamishah, and the post-1967 Israeli municipalities of Ma’aleh Adumim, Pisgat Ze’ev, Gilo, and the Gush Etzion area, as well as the Palestinian Authority municipalities of Ramallah, Birah, Abu Dis, Bayt Jalla, Bayt Sahur, and Bethlehem—in all, a population of roughly 1.2 million. Of these inhabitants, Jews would number 764, 000 (63 percent) and Arabs 450,000 (37 percent). If one were to exclude the 150,000 Arabs in the PA municipalities but include those in the pre- and post-Israeli municipalities, the Jewish proportion would stand at 72 percent and the Arab proportion at 28 percent. The impressive demographic strength of Jerusalem Jews, in absolute as well as relative terms, is the result of both migratory influxes (including immigration

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from foreign countries) and high birthrates (especially among the Orthodox and ḥaredi communities). The demographic resilience of Jerusalem Arabs rests on similar trends: on the one hand, relatively high birthrates; on the other hand, migration from other Middle Eastern countries until 1947, then an influx of refugees from other parts of Palestine after the 1948 war, followed by economically or politically induced migration from Arab Palestinian villages and semi-nomadic Bedouin tribes in the West Bank from the 1950s on. This is true at least of Muslim Arabs in particular; it does not take account of the great demographic change that has occurred within the Arab population of Jerusalem. Until the early 1920s, Christian Arabs outnumbered Muslim Arabs, but they have steadily declined ever since. By 2015, there were only 12,400 Christian Arabs in Jerusalem as against 307,300 Muslim Arabs (3.8 percent of a total Arab population of 319,700 or 1.4 percent of the total Jerusalem population of both Arabs and Jews). Even in an enlarged Jerusalem metropolis encompassing the mainly Christian municipality of Bayt Jalla and the formerly Christian but now predominantly Muslim municipality of Bethlehem, there would be no more than 30,000 Arab Christians in all (2.4 percent). More than demographic factors alone (e.g., lower birthrates and lower rates of inmigration) have been at work here. From 1949 to 1967, as we noted earlier, Jordan’s Hashemite government ruling the Arab sector in eastern Jerusalem steadily enforced a policy of Islamization. Quite naturally, Arab Christians, fearing for their future, began to emigrate en masse, their numbers dwindling by almost two-thirds from 1944 to 1967. Under Israeli rule from 1967 onward, the numbers of Christians have stabilized but not improved, especially as similar hardships have been inflicted since 1993 in areas under the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority. Indeed, the declining Christian population under Jordanian and Palestinian Authority rule suggests that only the Jewish state can effectively protect the Christian minority. And so to return to the Jews and to sum up: Israel’s claims to Jerusalem are supported not only by the moral and legal considerations we’ve reviewed earlier but by compelling demographic data showing that, for nearly two centuries, the Holy City has hosted a Jewish plurality, and for the past century and a half an absolute Jewish majority.

VII. The Myth and the Reality

What does this history teach us? It rebuts the widely held idea that Jerusalem’s status is the subject of an international “agreement.” That idea is nothing but a

myth—a myth that serves the political purposes of certain interested parties. Those parties argue that Zionism was an interloper in the city, a newcomer throwing chaos into the mix of a calm, stable, mostly Arab-Muslim town that for centuries had existed sometimes under Christian control, at other times with a heavily Christian element. None of this is true. The truth is that, even in earlier times, Jerusalem was always in ferment, a kind of Wild East in which all major groups, not just arriviste Jews, were scrambling to build something for themselves. As for the modern proposal to “internationalize” the city, it was first and foremost a device to please the Catholic Church, then in itself a formidable world power and a foreign one in the Holy Land. In this context, the idea of Jerusalem as an “international city” is a piece of Western “colonialist” history, while the Jewish connection to Jerusalem is ancient and indigenous. Fortunately, the global drumbeat of condemnation had no effect on the White House decision. The United States embassy was effectively transferred on May 14, 2018 (the 70th anniversary of Israel’s independence according to the Gregorian calendar) from the Tel Aviv seaside promenade where it had been located since 1966 to a large compound in the Arnona neighborhood in Jerusalem that had been used for a couple of years as a consular facility. The older consulate in Jerusalem, which had hitherto functioned as the de-facto U.S. mission to the PLO, and reported not to the American ambassador in Tel Aviv but directly to the Secretary of State, now also, like almost all U.S. consulates everywhere, reports to the State Department through the local U.S. ambassador. In line with this policy of normalization and recognition of reality, the administration has also recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and the U.S. ambassador has acknowledged that Israel will someday incorporate into itself the major Israeli West Bank settlements. What is more, the administration’s example soon inspired other nations, even some who had voted for the UN resolution condemning the move. In its aftermath, smaller countries like Guatemala and Moldova emulated the American initiative. Several EU countries—Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania—have spoken about deciding similarly, and have also blocked a newly drafted statement reiterating the EU’s denunciation of the American embassy transfer. Larger countries like Brazil and Australia have said they might consider moving their embassies in the future, or if not their embassies then at least some diplomatic offices: measures that, if not always bold—diplomatic habits of caution die hard, too—are at variance with the judgment of People Who Matter.

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Even more significantly, the 2017 decision failed to generate a backlash against President Trump’s Middle Eastern policies, as Mahmoud Abbas and other anti-Israel hardliners had expected, or to prevent Arab or Muslim countries from getting involved with the Trump administration’s “peace plan” and upgrading their own economic, cultural, and/or strategic ties with Israel. In this context, the American recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel should not just be praised as a contribution to the Jewish state’s vital interests and as an innovative approach to the Middle East’s problems. Groundbreaking as those achievements are, they also remind us of the need to remain alert to how the international order came about and whom it was designed to serve; what exactly is the role of international law and how it should be approached; and, when it comes to the history and destiny of Israel and the Jewish people, what is the irreplaceable value of optimism, grit, leadership—and numbers. Tuesday, July 9, 2019: Some passages in this essay have been updated for clarity and precision since its publication on Monday, July 8.—The Editors.

Michel Gurfinkiel is the founder and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think-tank in France, and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum. His “You Only Live Twice,” on the contemporary situation of European Jews, appeared in Mosaic in August 2013.

This commemorative scarf celebrates the first Yom Kippur observed by the military in 1870 in Germany

UNESCO wants to stop archaeology

in Ancient Jerusalem

In a series of resolutions, UNESCO has threatened the future of archaeological

discovery in one of the world’s most important cities.

By Brent Nagtegaal Often while working just below the Southern Wall of the Temple Mount over the past few years, I’d look up from the dirt and notice a camera crew setting up. They did not seem to be Jews, but rather reporters from Palestinian news crews. Unlike most others who walked past the dig site, these journalists would rarely ask questions about what we were finding or what we were doing digging there. Instead, they would simply set up their cameras in a particular location. There, with one simple pan upward, they could tape the excavation site along with the black dome of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the background. After a few more minutes and a few more shots, they’d pack their gear and head back up the street. There wasn’t any need to ask questions or to investigate further; they already had their story: The Jews are trying to undermine Al-Aqsa. Thus the myth of Israeli atrocities against an Islamic site was further perpetuated. For most people who are at all familiar with the situation, the thought of the Israeli government directly supporting the destruction of Islamic history in Jerusalem seems a little far-fetched. However, that’s not the case for the world’s foremost body charged with the protection of such historical sites. In the past two weeks, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has approved two shocking resolutions that condemn Israel (identified not-so-subtly as “the occupying Power”) for egregious violations against the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Haram al-Sharif. The resolutions refused to employ the better known term of “Temple Mount” to describe the area, as that would ascribe historical validity to both Jewish and Christian claims that this was once the site of the first and second temples of Israel and Judah. In fact, UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova had to release a follow-up statement in which she conceded that the location was also sacred to the Jews. She wrote that “the Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram al-Sharif, the sacred shrine of Muslims, is also the Har

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HaBayit—or Temple Mount—whose Western Wall is the holiest place in Judaism.”‘ There was some outcry to the resolution and its conspicuous omission of the phrase “Temple Mount,” but there is a far more worrying aspect of this resolution, and it has been mostly overlooked. Section five of the October 13 UNESCO resolution reads, [UNESCO] Deeply deplores the failure of Israel, the occupying Power, to cease the persistent excavations and works in East Jerusalem particularly in and around the Old City, and reiterates its request to Israel, the occupying Power, to prohibit all such works in conformity with its obligations under the provisions of the relevant UNESCO conventions, resolutions and decisions …. Notice that the resolution is not just for protecting the Haram al-Sharif itself, but for preventing the “persistent excavations and works in East Jerusalem, particularly in and around the Old City.” UNESCO and its Arab sponsors are resolved to shut down all archaeological excavations in and around the Old City of Jerusalem. This is critical. Because just outside the walls of the Old City, south of the Temple Mount in an area that is technically part of East Jerusalem, some of the most important archaeological digs in the world are underway. Especially for those interested in biblical history, these excavations could not be more significant. In fact, almost all of ancient Jerusalem—the city of the biblical Melchizedek, King David and King Solomon—is located on the half-mile-long hill immediately south of the Temple Mount wall. This location is where the very earliest settlement of Jerusalem is found. It would be convenient for ancient Jerusalem to be located in West Jerusalem, which is considered by most (at least at the time of writing) as sovereign Israeli territory. Yet, much to Jewish and especially Arab chagrin, the location where the most significant archaeological discoveries testify to an ancient Jewish presence (more than 1,000 years before Mohammed was conceived) are located in East Jerusalem. This is why in 1968, just one year after the Six-Day War ended and leaving Israel with control of East Jerusalem, a massive dig began just outside the Temple Mount. Led by Dr. Benjamin Mazar of Hebrew University, these excavations continued for a decade, performed by local Israelis and by hundreds of volunteers from around the world. At last, the most ancient part of Jerusalem was open for Israeli-led excavation. Israel certainly desired to excavate inside the Temple Mount, but it was deemed too sensitive to even touch with a spade or trowel.

Instead, in an act of extreme benevolence, Israel allowed Jordan (the defeated power) to maintain day-to-day control of the Temple Mount. Since that time, no Israeli excavation has taken place on the Temple Mount, or the al-Haram al-Sharif. The Israelis haven’t excavated on the Temple Mount, but that is not to say it hasn’t been excavated. In the late 1990s, the Jordanian body charged with the protection and maintenance of the site allowed a massive “excavation” in order to create the El-Marwani Mosque to the east of the Al-Aqsa mosque inside the Temple Mount. Instead of performing painstaking archaeological procedures, the Jordanians rolled in diesel-powered excavation equipment: bulldozers, front-end loaders and dump trucks. These excavators hauled out truckload upon truckload (400 in all) of some of the most important earth on the planet. This complete disregard for antiquity was not perpetrated by Israelis, but rather Palestinians. It was left to a handful of Jewish archaeologists to locate where the Temple Mount earth had been dumped, so they could start sifting the material in an attempt to salvage as much knowledge from the finds as possible. If ever there was a time for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to speak out, it would have been then. Even so, the years of sifting that discarded Temple Mount earth has produced a wealth of artifacts that would have been otherwise lost. Muslim artifacts have been found, such as an 18th-century seal of the prominent Muslim Qadi (Judge) Sheick ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Tamimi, who was also the grand mufti of Jerusalem. But Jewish artifacts have also been discovered—dating to 2½ millennia earlier. Artifacts have been dated to the lifetime of King Solomon onward: thousands of pottery fragments, the seventh-century B.C. Hebrew seal of “Immer” (potentially the same personality found in Jeremiah 20:1), many half-shekel coins from the Second Temple period, a potsherd from 2,000 years ago bearing an engraving of a menorah, and a multitude of other items. All of these overwhelmingly confirm a Jewish connection to the Temple Mount—and prior to the Muslim periods. However, as noted earlier, UNESCO and its supporters are not just interested in disregarding the Jewish attachment to the Temple Mount, but also the Jewish history of all Jerusalem. This would include the excavations in the City of David as well, where King David’s palace is being slowly unearthed. The Palestinians have long coveted their own capital in East Jerusalem. Archaeological digs proving a prior Jewish claim to the area only make that harder to achieve. And so, they have marshaled UNESCO to push the claim of Israeli destruction of Muslim sites in an effort to shut down these excavations.

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These come at precisely the same time that more and more evidence of the Jews’ attachment has come to light. Since 2006, the organization behind the Watch Jerusalem has sponsored its college students and graduates to travel to Jerusalem and excavate these exact areas directly the south of the Temple Mount. Working with Benjamin Mazar’s granddaughter, Dr. Eilat Mazar, students from Herbert W. Armstrong College located in Edmond, Oklahoma, have put their hands in the dirt to rediscover ancient Jerusalem. These areas are rich in artifacts that not only testify to a Jewish presence spanning three millennia, but also, time and again, confirm the historicity of the Bible. Watch Jerusalem, November 30, 2016 Brent Nagtegaal is a Middle East writer for @watch_jerusalem,

What really happened at Masada?

The desert fortress has become a powerful symbol of Jewish resistance. A new book

examines the evidence to see how much of the story, including the famous mass

suicide, is true.

By Matti Friedman

If you’ve read the popular account of the Masada dig by the famed Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin, published in 1966, you probably remember the scene where the author finds three skeletons in the ruins of Herod’s desert palace “upon the steps leading to the cold-water pool.” One skeleton, lying by the remains of military armor and a prayer shawl, was a young man, “perhaps one of the commanders of Masada.” The second was a young woman remarkably preserved in the dry climate: “Her dark hair, beautifully plaited, looked as if it had been freshly coiffured,” and by her head was a stain that looked like blood. The third was a child.

“There could be no doubt that what our eyes beheld were the remains of some of the defenders of Masada,” Yadin wrote. The three, in his unforgettable account, were victims of the final battle and mass suicide for which the site is renowned. But were they? The flat hilltop on the western shore of the Dead Sea remains one of Israel’s top tourist sites and the subject of fascination. Everyone knows Masada, everyone hikes the Snake Path or takes the cable car to the top, and everyone knows what’s supposed to have happened. But outside the world of archaeologists, few know what we really know. To the rescue comes Jodi Magness in her new book, Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth. Magness, a prominent archaeologist and a professor at the University of North Carolina, studied when young with the great Yadin and now oversees the fruitful, though less famous, dig at Huqoq in Galilee. The Masada story, as it’s generally known, goes like this: Herod the Great, famous for colossal building projects (and for murdering his own relatives) built a grand winter palace there around 31 BCE. Nearly a century later, in 66 CE, when the Jews revolted against their Roman overlords, a contingent of rebels known as the Zealots fled to the palace and held out as the rest of Judea succumbed.

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After subduing the province and torching the Jerusalem temple, Roman soldiers marched into the desert to besiege this last fortress. As the troops advanced inexorably uphill, the rebels decided on death instead of surrender and slavery. At a final council, they drew lots to decide who would kill whom. The last one standing killed himself, and, aside from the briefly successful Bar Kokhba revolt in 132-136 CE, Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel was snuffed out for nearly two millennia. In Zionism’s early years, that story helped turn Masada into a powerful symbol. But it’s been a rough few decades for Zionist symbols, and for the Masada mythology. Many scholars now doubt that a mass suicide of Jewish defenders actually occurred; despite Yadin’s best efforts, the archaeological evidence remains ambiguous. The only source for the story is Josephus Flavius, the Jewish rebel commander turned Roman historian who described the event in rousing, gory detail in his The Jewish War. He left us a precise number—967—for the men, women, and children who died on the hilltop as the legions broke through. But no mass grave has ever been found, and no other account has come to light. In Masada, Magness does an admirable job of explaining to a general audience where current scholarship stands: an especially valuable service to a reader who, like me, might know the story but couldn’t quite tell you where the line runs between evidence and wishful thinking. Magness comes neither to mythologize nor to myth-bust, but rather to explain what she and her colleagues have actually found in the soil, what can reliably be said to have happened, and what will have to remain unresolved. From the start, the Masada story was never solely about scholarship. “The example of Jews putting up a heroic resistance to the death instead of going meekly to their slaughter had a great appeal in the wake of the Holocaust and at a time when Israel’s population felt embattled,” Magness writes. And Yadin wasn’t just an archaeologist but also a Zionist leader and an army general whose Masada dig was as much about symbolism as it was about science. Youth groups used to hike up the hill for inspiration. Army recruits were sworn in near the ruins. For a while, before Israelis became queasy about glorifying mass suicide, the slogan “Masada Will Not Fall Again!” was popular. Yadin wasn’t the only one with motivations beyond pure research. Josephus, who preceded Yadin as chronicler of the site (but who seems never to have been there), may well have had his own reasons for telling things the way he did. The dramatic suicide elevated not just the Jews, his people, for their religious and national ardor, but also the Romans, his new patrons, who could thus be portrayed as

prevailing against a fanatical enemy. The suicide made everyone more heroic. If you come to the site assuming that the Josephus account is true, as Yadin did, you’ll find evidence—like those three dramatic skeletons by the pool—to support it. But if you discard that account you might conclude, like another archaeologist, that the skeletons were just a jumble of bones dragged into a corner of the palace by hyenas. If you think the suicide happened as Josephus describes, with the rebels drawing lots, then ceramic shards inscribed with Hebrew names will seem like those lots. But if you’re a skeptic you might conclude that the shards had to do, more prosaically, with the distribution of food. Magness weighs the evidence and reaches a responsible conclusion: “I am often asked if I believe there was a mass suicide at Masada,” she writes, “to which I respond that this is not a question that archaeology is equipped to answer.” Despite the desire for a tale of heroic sacrifice, such a tale might be an invention or an exaggeration. And yet, despite the modern fashion for debunking anything that smells like heroism, it could also be true. Equally memorable, in Magness’s book, are the insights unconnected to the controversy. For example: although the Masada rebels are usually referred to as Zealots, the Greek term for one Judean faction, the dominant party on the hill was actually the Sicarii (Latin for “daggermen”), a nastier group whom Magness, channeling Josephus, describes as “urban terrorists.” This rebel sect didn’t fight only the Romans. In 68 CE, about five years before the fortress finally fell, Josephus recounts, they massacred hundreds of their fellow Jews in a raid on the nearby town of Ein Gedi. The Sicarii were part of the internecine fighting that tore Jerusalem apart before the Romans even breached the city walls, in a civil war between competing gangs of Jewish extremists that killed and starved thousands. This has been played down in the official story, it seems, to make the rebels more sympathetic and the narrative simpler. (For some readers, learning this might actually have the effect of encouraging a certain sympathy for Rome.) What stands out most for me is the human details that have been gleaned in digs over the years, small fingerprints adding up to a vivid picture of the chaos at the doomed fort. We learn, for example, that Jewish refugees fleeing to Masada subdivided Herod’s royal suites into hovels as the palace became a warren of squatters. A reception hall next to the throne room was turned into a shop for manufacturing arrowheads. Another room became a bakery. Once the king’s food stores were used up, the rebels ate simple bread, oil, beans, and lentils, and also rotten dates and figs that (as we know from forensic

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tests) were infested with insects and larvae. Concerned with ritual purity, they built mikvehs, ritual baths, in accordance with the same religious regulations still in use today. They also fled to Masada with their scrolls, including the familiar biblical books of Genesis, Leviticus, and Psalms. Refugees who might have been Essenes from nearby Qumran came with one of their extra-biblical texts, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice. Among the Jewish women taking refuge on the hill, we learn from ceramic shards, was a certain Shalom the Galilean, as well as “the daughter of Domli” and “the wife of Jacob.” They wore hair nets that seem to have been dyed to match the color of their hair. As the end approached, a couple named Joseph and Miriam somehow found time to get divorced; the religious paperwork, or get in Hebrew, was found in a cave nearby. A child left a sock. More detail comes from the Roman army camps, their outlines still visible beneath the hill, built by Tenth Legion soldiers and auxiliaries commanded by Flavius Silva: hobnailed military sandals, the cheek-guard of a helmet, bronze scales from armor worn by light infantry, triple-pointed arrows. Potsherds inform us of the presence of legionnaires named Aemilius, Fabius, and Terentius. A grunt named C. Messius of Beirut left behind a military pay slip. One papyrus fragment tells us that someone was reading Virgil’s Aeneid. In other words, although the suicide story inevitably draws much of the attention around Masada, it might be a distraction: there’s more than enough drama if we just stick to what we know for sure. It seems to me that the most important finds are the evocative traces left by both sides, reminders that it was humans not very different from ourselves who were overtaken by the tragedy at Masada 1,946 years ago, whatever the precise details of that tragedy may have been. Jodi Magness has gone to the trouble of making these traces accessible to readers beyond the small world of professional scholars. All those interested in the site, or planning a visit, will find their understanding enriched by her clear and readable guide. Matti Friedman is the author of a memoir about the Israeli war in Lebanon, Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War (2016). His latest book is Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel (2019). Mosaic

Aloysius Stepinac and the Holocaust

By Predrag Ilić There is no doubt that among many controversies related to the life and work of the former Archbishop of Zagreb, Alojzije Stepinac (Aloysius Stepinac), the question of his attitude towards the Jews and the Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia - NDH (1941-1945) is among the most significant ones. His biographers and hagiographers, as well as the historians of the Roman Catholic Church in former Yugoslavia are mostly divided into two large groups on this issue: those indiscriminately praising his attitude and the others heavily and excessively criticizing it. There are hardly any completely neutral or unbiased documents surrounding Stepinac. This book seeks to redress this and increase the number of objective papers. Before moving on to the conclusions on the attitude of Archbishop Stepinac towards the Jews and the Holocaust in the NDH, we should recall the tragic death toll of the Holocaust there. Out of 38,000 to 39,000 Jews who lived in the territory of the Ustasha NDH, only about 9,000 survived the Holocaust, which accounts for 20% - 25% of the pre-war Jewish population in that territory. Before the war, there were about 12,000 Jews in Zagreb while about 9,000 or 73-74% of them perished. Although, without a doubt, these figures are really appalling, they do not speak enough about the drama and tragedy which befell the Croatian Jews. Today, the true account of the scope and atrocities of this disaster can be grasped from credible historical studies on this subject and witness accounts of the small number of the Jewish Holocaust survivors.

As for the attitude and conduct of Archbishop Stepinac towards the Jews and the Holocaust in the NDH, first and foremost, it should be stressed that they reflected the official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church on Jews, as well as the church’s position on Holocaust in Wold War II, on the one hand, and his own attitude towards Nazism and Fascism, on the other. As a deeply religious man and subsequently a priest and bishop of the Roman Catholic Church, he rigidly upheld the teachings of his church and was steadfastly loyal to its highest authorities. He was especially impressed by the former Cardinal State Secretary Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII (from 1939 to 1958). On the basis of his conduct in general, it would appear that he sought

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to faithfully mimic that Pope among his own flock, as a Croatian Pius XII of sorts. On the other hand, he criticized Hitler and Nazism for their hostile attitude towards the Roman Catholic Church and for his extreme racism. Still, he had great affinity for Nazi anti-liberalism, anti-masonry and particularly his anti-communism. Like other conservative prelates of his time, he had great hopes that Hitler's campaign against the USSR will be a success, expecting that communism in that country and all over the world will soon come to an end. It was that hope that made him ignore many of the evident flaws of Nazism, including its anti-Semitism. The attitude towards Nazism will largely be reflected on his attitude towards the Ustashi and their regime in the NDH, too. Having carefully studied the relevant historic documents on Archbishop Stepinac’s attitude towards the Jews and the Holocaust, I came to the following conclusions.

Archbishop Stepinac grew into a young man and eventually priest of the Roman Catholic Church attending Catholic schools in which traditional Roman Catholic Anti-Judaism and religious antisemitism prevailed. The most important clerical role models of Archbishop Stepinac were known to hold anti-Jewish, that is, anti-Semite beliefs: Bishop of Djakovo Josip Juraj Štrosmajer, the Zagreb Archbishop Ante Bauer, Cardinal Pacelli / Pope Pius XII. The vast majority of bishops and other prelates of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia were anti-Semites. On the other hand, he grew up in a conservative social environment of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire in which political antisemitism was a frequent phenomenon and from a political point of view, he had become a typical Central European and South European right-wing anti-Semite. So, Stepinac became the Zagreb Archbishop – “coadjutor” (deputy Archbishop with the right of succession), with firmly entrenched anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic beliefs.

From 1935 through 1945, the diary of Archbishop Stepinac abound in anti-Semitic views and statements. Apart from murdering Jesus Christ and exhibiting hostility towards the Christianity, he accused the Jews for committing illegal abortions in Croatia, for dissemination of pornography and immorality in newspapers, indecent films and fashions, liberal capitalism and corruption, exploitation of Croatian workers and peasants, the rise of masonry and communism, as well as for attacks on the holy sites of the Croatian people and erosion of its inner fibre.

The Catholic press under the control of Archbishop Stepinac ("Katolički List"/,,Catholic

Newspaper”/, "Hrvatska Straža"/“Croatian Guard”/ - daily and weekly editions and ,,Hrvatski Glas”/ "Croatian Voice"/) carried a number of anti-Semitic articles and other texts during the times of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In addition to a number of serious theological and sociological-political treatises on Jews and Judaism, a number of articles of surprisingly low intellectual and theoretical quality were published; a truly miserable ideological concepts came to the fore in these texts: some accusations levelled against Jews are quite illogical (they are blamed for liberal capitalism and communism/Bolshevism; collusion with both communists and communists persecutors, etc.). Such press largely contributed to the spread of anti-Semitic views and options among the Zagreb Archdiocese congregation, the largest Catholic diocese in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

From the Diary of the Archbishop Stepinac, as well as from the Catholic press under his control, it can be concluded that during the time of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, he felt that it was necessary to limit civil and political rights of the Jews to a large extent. He was no stranger to the idea that the Jews should be banned from certain areas of social life and that their economic power, political and cultural influence should be in a way limited. He welcomed the introduction of the first discriminatory measures against the Jews in Yugoslavia, although he was aware that those were introduced under the pressure of Hitler's Germany.

Stepinac was enthusiastic with the proclamation of the Ustasha NDH, on April 10, 1941, while Yugoslavia still waged a defensive war against the Axis powers (Berlin-Rome). He thus broke his oath to King Alexander I Karađorđević and the Yugoslav state. He pledged allegiance to the new state before it was even twenty days old and urged his clergy and believers to help develop and safeguard it. Until the end of the Second World War, he was personally engaged in consolidating and preserving the NDH, even though that state from the very beginning revealed its undemocratic and totalitarian face. In April and May of 1941, the Serbs and Jews were subjected to a virtual genocide soon to be joined by Roma. Truth to be told, he would occasionally criticize the atrocities committed by the regime, mostly not publicly and always with caution and consideration, with no intention of harming either the Ustasha regime or its monstrous state.

Throughout entire existence of the NDH, Stepinac's press glorified the state and its criminal dictator leader Pavelic, despite the genocide against three peoples and the crimes against

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communists and other anti-fascists which took place on a daily basis. Although it already lent a powerful support to the Ustasha regime, the press also became an extremely vocal and influential generator of national, religious and racial intolerance and hatred. It was particularly aggressive in promoting Serbo-phobia and anti-Semitism on a par with the official Ustasha press and opinion journalism. After some of the press outlets closed in 1941 and 1943, almost all of their editors and journalists joined the Ustasha newspapers, occupying the highest positions there. A large part of the moral and political responsibility for their chauvinistic activities and fomenting fratricidal civil war propaganda in the NDH has to be attributed to their mentor and role model - Archbishop Stepinac.

As a devout anti-semite, Stepinac had nothing against the adoption of anti-Jewish laws in the NDH. He only asked the Ustasha authorities to carry them out "in a humane manner" (?!?). He was silent when a terrible propaganda campaign against the Jews began in the Ustasha press (immediately after April 10, 1941 the entire Catholic press in Zagreb joined in). He did not react even after he learned of the first extreme anti-Semitic measures against the Jews in the NDH. Although all of the Croatian revisionist historiography and opinion journalism unjustly claim that Stepinac was a great friend to and protector of Croatian Jews, the historical fact is that throughout the entire 1941, he sought to protect only the Jews who converted to Catholicism, protecting in the first place the interests of his church and Catholicism. It was not until 1942 that he sporadically offered protection to Jews and non-Catholic Jews. As of 1943 he did it more often and more fitting to his capabilities and demands of the political climate at the time. However, it was hardly as important as it would have been in 1941. It should also be noted that even in the face of most atrocious crimes against the Jewish population in the Ustasha Croatia in mid-1943, Archbishop Stepinac has not essentially changed his negative attitude towards the Jews, although paradoxically it would appear that he acted humanely on many occasions on their behalf. There is an explanation for this pseudo paradox and ambivalent behaviour of Archbishop Stepinac towards the "resolution" of the so-called "Jewish question” in the NDH: an undisputed anti-Semite, Stepinac, however, was not in favour of a radical solution to the "Jewish question", as the Nazis embraced and the Ustashe carried out in the NDH. The physical annihilation of the Jewish population was simply detrimental to the interests of the Roman Catholic Church, since it would end up with less Jews

potentially converting to their faith. The church needed them alive, not dead. That is why neither Stepinac nor the other prelates of his church were supporters of the so-called exterminatory anti-Semitism. For this and other reasons, he was, without any doubt, startled by the scope and monstrous nature of the Nazi-Ustasha "final solution". During the first days of the pogrom against the Jews in NDH, Stepinac did not question whether registering and dispatching them to concentration camps was proper, feeling that this was just a preparation phase to limit their power and influence, which he deemed necessary and justified. When he ultimately realized in which direction this was heading, he tried to stop anti-Semitic hysteria or at least to channel and control it. But that was no longer possible. The torrent could no longer be curbed obliterating in its wake all Croatian Jews who did not move out of the way in time. In such situation, Stepinac had only two options. The first was to appeal to Pavelic and his ministers to mitigate terror and somehow spare from the pogrom at least the Jews who converted to Catholicism. Also, he provided shelter to some Jews and along with his clergy helped them escape from the NDH. The other option was to disobey the newly-created racist state and threaten taking harsh clergy measures against anyone acting contrary to the fundamental principles of the Christian moral code and the rules of the Catholic Church. Obviously, he consciously chose the first option, although he could have assumed that it would not be able to stop the Holocaust. He appealed cautiously and constructively to Pavelić and Artuković, taking advantage of the presence of two papal representatives in Zagreb (Abbot Markone and the Honorable Masuchi) to augment these appeals. Only briefly and too late, he preached against violence, racism and intolerance. He hid some Jews in archbishop premises, etc. He managed to save some Jews, Jewish orphans and members of the Jewish Old People Home. He strongly supported and helped the activities of the Jewish religious municipality in Zagreb. For these efforts, he received gratitude and recognition from the Jewish side. He painstakingly recorded and duly informed the Vatican about these efforts, aware that at some point it could be an important evidence of "Judeophilic" and humanitarian efforts. With all this in mind, it must be noted that the numerous claims by Stepinac's successors and sympathizers to the effect that his response to the Holocaust (and other two genocides) in the NDH, that he allegedly boldly expressed his disagreement and protested publicly, that he not only distanced himself from the Ustasha regime for the crimes but also publicly and unequivocally condemned them, etc, ring

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false. The evidence that I have presented in this book, to my mind clearly demonstrates that Stepinac's response to the Holocaust in the NDH was not in proportion to the magnitude of the terrible war crimes and inadequate in terms of his role, position and possibilities. This response, to the misfortune of the vast majority of Croatian Jews, was too slow and too late, too lukewarm and accommodating to the Ustasha regime and mostly not public. No surprise then that it did not yield any significant outcome or results. He simply failed to take advantage of the tools available to him which would certainly have yielded better results. From the point of view of Christian and secular moral code, Stepinac's played a double "game" with Jews, both during the time of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the NDH, which is highly problematic. Although he has always been and remained a fervent anti-Semite until the end of his life, he almost never demonstrated it in public. He even boasted that he was committed to fundamental rights and interests of the Jews, (allegedly of all other nations, religions and races). On the other hand, I trust that it is evident from my book, that he allowed the press of his archdiocese, which he effectively managed and controlled, to constantly attack and portray the Jews and Judaism in bad light. Throughout the NDH existence, it turned into fuelling of unfettered hatred against the Jews and, like it or not, served to lay groundwork for and justify the Ustasha and Nazi Holocaust. This two-faced and cunning behaviour suggests that Archbishop Stepinac was not a highly moral and "pure" individual - as all Croatian and Catholic revisionists claim - but a cunning political manipulator and hypocrite. A proof of that is obvious scheming to keep record of his own humanitarian activities that may be of great importance in subsequently assessing the attitude that he and his church took at the time. His statement from October 31, 1943, that the Roman Catholic Church "did not fail in its task" (to protect justice and vulnerable individuals, groups and nations) and that "it stands tall and with peace of mind" facing the future, can be construed as an inception of present-day revisionist theories and practice. It is no wonder then that Batelja, Krišto and Gitmanova, Haris and many other Croatian and international authors take this statement into account in dealing with this period. In the end, something should be said about the claims of his prophetic and holy abilities, circulated by some of his hagiographers, sympathizers and supporters of the beatification of Stepinac. Not being a Catholic and not a religious person myself, I am not qualified to speak of prophets or saints, but still I allow myself to say that as an ordinary layman this claim sounds pretty strange and illogical. Without further ado, I beg

the question: if Archbishop Stepinac really had prophetic abilities, how come he had not predicted the killing of six million Jews, at least at the beginning of the Second World War? Among them, there were about 30,000 from his Croatia. And that he did not see it coming is clear from his surprise by the drastic measures taken by the Nazis and the Ustashi against the Jews. On the other hand, if Archbishop Stepinac really possessed prophetic abilities, would it not be only natural if in the face of the terrible plight of the Jewish people, he decided to take more radical measures of protest and protection of the Jews? For example, to stand in front of a train crammed with frightened Jews from Zagreb and demand from the Ustasha policemen to be deported together with them to Jasenovac, if not to Auschwitz. Or to stand in front of the synagogue in Praska Street on the day its demolition was announced and say something like: "Only over my dead body!" Or to try to publish an illegal edition of the “Catholic Paper”, sending a message to his believers that NDH is a criminal state, or to state this in a sermon in the Zagreb cathedral. Had he done any of the above, it would be a proof of his true love and concern for the unfortunate Jews and other fellow human beings. There is, of course, no doubt that it would have been very risky for him. However, this begs a very important question: are not readiness to take risks, true martyrdom and death some of the holiest concepts in entire Christendom? The Saints are said to have been enormously brave, paying no heed to any threat of torture or death. Whether Archbishop Stepinac fits into this narrative is a question for those who have been persistently advocating his canonization for decades. Of course, also for Pope Francis or his successor, who should make a decision on this issue. The descendants and fellow nationals of the Jews that perished, the Serbs and Roma in the NDH have no dilemma on this issue. The very mention of the possibility that Stepinac be beatified is not only inappropriate, immoral and hideous, but may be a dangerous precedent for future inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and in many other parts of our persistently turbulent world. Prof. Predrag Ilić is the author of Stepinac i Holokaust u NDH published by Albatros Plus.

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Was B. Traven Jewish? The mystery of the author of

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre remains unresolved

By Paul Berman Was B. Traven, the proletarian writer with a much-disputed identity, a German Jew? And not just any German Jew, was his name Moritz Rathenau, and was he the illegitimate son of Emil Rathenau, the creator of the German electrical company and one of the principal industrialists of Germany at the turn of the 20th century? Was he the half-brother of Emil’s legitimate son, Walther Rathenau, the distinguished intellectual and foreign minister of Germany in 1922, whose assassination by anti-Semites marked a step into catastrophe? Was B. Traven someone, then, who ran away not once, but twice—from his origins in the upper pinnacle of the upper bourgeoisie, and from his life in Germany to a new and clandestine existence under a nom de plume in Mexico, as the prolific and mysterious author of The Death Ship, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and the Jungle Novels, among other distinguished works, adored by hippies and anarchists everywhere? The Mexican magazine Letras Libres figures as one of the principal literary and intellectual journals in the Spanish-speaking world, and, in the May issue, it published an article making that case. I have studied the article up and down. And I can say that, at the very least, the article conforms faithfully to the inspirations and style of what is by now the second literature of B. Traven—not the literature composed by the man himself, whoever he was, but the multiple volumes and essays composed by other people speculating about his identity: a curious and obsessive literature, journalistic, scholarly, and imaginative, sometimes annoying, sometimes tantalizing. And now, for the first time, there is a Jewish claim. The author is a British banker in Mexico named Timothy Heyman, and he speaks not only for himself but also, as he makes clear, for his wife, who is Traven’s step-daughter, Malú Montes de Oca Luján. Heyman does not claim to possess some previously unknown document or piece of hard evidence. He explains, instead, that it is 50 years now since Traven’s death, and 100 years since he escaped getting executed in Germany, and, on the occasion of those anniversaries, he and his wife have wished to announce publicly their firm belief in a story that was

told by a friend of the family, long gone now, who knew Traven intimately. The friend was Gabriel Figueroa, a well-known cinematographer in Mexico, who heard the story from his cousin, Esperanza López Mateos, who was likewise Traven’s friend (or closer than a friend, according to the gossip) and was his business partner, too—and happened to be, as well, the sister of Adolfo López Mateos, president of Mexico. According to Figueroa, Traven himself told Esperanza López Mateos that he was Moritz Rathenau, the illegitimate son of Emil. And she accepted it. Heyman reports that, in 1990, Figueroa recounted the story to the French newspaper Libération and, in indication of how seriously he took it, recounted it again in his posthumous memoirs. The story failed to attract attention. Traven’s most thorough biographer is a professor of German studies at Harvard named Karl S. Guthke, who has explained in his B. Traven: The Life Behind the Legends that he knew the story. But Guthke had failed to come across any evidence in its favor. His conjecture was that Traven may not even have known his parentage, which might explain why he was able to make up so many stories about his origins without ever accidentally saying anything true, which would have led to some kind of corroboration. But Heyman in Letras Libres insists that he and his wife do think Gabriel Figueroa’s story is true. Their reasons for thinking so appear to rest on the wife’s childhood memories of Traven, and on her memories of Figueroa as a friend of the family, and on instinct, and not on anything firmer. Heyman remarks that he paid a visit to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, at the Center for Jewish History, which houses an archive of German Jewry, but he does not say that he discovered anything there. He emphasizes, instead, a secret-cipher logic that appears in all of the literature on Traven’s identity. Traven was born in in 1882 in Germany, or perhaps in Poland, or perhaps in the immigrant zones of the United States. And, in his young years, he was (it is generally thought) an actor and an anarchist revolutionary in Germany under the name of Ret Marut. He published an anarchist journal called Der Ziegelbrenner, or The Brickburner, which promoted the abrasive philosophical doctrines of Max Stirner. He participated in the Bavarian revolution of 1919, the Munich Council Republic (which, if he was actually a half-Rathenau, would not have pleased Walther or the rest of the Rathenaus). The revolution was crushed, and he was sentenced to death. He escaped. He survived underground. He continued to publish Der Ziegelbrenner somehow (his ability to publish an anarchist journal during those years in Germany has been cited by a variety of Travenologists as evidence that somebody in a

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position of power must have lent him support). He made his way to Mexico. And he began his new existence as the mysterious “B. Traven,” an instantly prolific novelist, who dropped hints about all kinds of identities under various names—e.g., an identity as a down-and-out American syndicalist, as in his early novel, Der Wobbly, which came out in English as The Cottonpickers. But Heyman in Letras Libres argues that, throughout his career, both in his early period in Germany and in his later period as an exile in Mexico, he consistently paid homage anagrammatically to his true identity as Moritz Rathenau. In the name “Ret Marut,” from his early career in Germany, Heyman detects an anagram for Moritz. In the name “Traven” itself, from his later career in Mexico, Heyman detects an anagram for Rathenau, with a few changes of letters. Heyman, in keeping with other commentators on Traven, sees various word games, with the name “Marut” meaning tempest in Sanskrit, which corresponds to the name of the publishing house that Traven and López Mateos founded in Mexico, Ediciones Tempestad, or Tempest Editions. And so forth. Heyman adds in support of these points that his wife, Malú, the step-daughter, recalls from childhood that her step-father did enjoy word games at home. More impressive is Heyman’s observation that Traven, after he had made his way to Mexico, lived in fear of the German community there, which was infiltrated by Nazis. In Heyman’s interpretation, it was fear that led Traven to spend a good amount of his time in Acapulco and in remote Chiapas (which became the landscape of the Jungle Novels), instead of in Mexico City, where the German expats gathered. And it was fear that accounted for his mania for anonymity—the fear that any German leftist would have felt, and especially a fear that was appropriate to someone from German Jewry’s most prominent family, whose brother had been famously assassinated. Such is the evidence. Only, it occurs to me that, if Traven was really a Rathenau, whose reasons for fear were political, wouldn’t the reasons have evaporated, once the Nazis were gone? And, in that case, wouldn’t he have explored the possibility of seeking compensation from the German government, given the scale of the Rathenau wealth? Surely a good lawyer could have found something to say on behalf of even an illegitimate black sheep Rathenau with crazy philosophical ideas. Then, too, if Traven was really a Rathenau, wouldn’t his old comrades in Germany from his days as Ret Marut have suspected something of the sort, and wouldn’t they have stepped forward in later years to comment on how remarkable it was? But there is no indication that Traven explored making a demand for

compensation, and no indication that anyone in Germany commented, in retrospect, on the peculiarity of Rathenau connections among the Munich anarchists. Nor do I see anything to suggest a Jewish soul lurking behind the disguises and pseudonyms. The first of the American writers to look into the mystery was Judy Stone, the sister of I.F. Stone, who, seemingly alone among journalists, had the good fortune to meet Traven and get to know him. This was in Mexico City in 1966, in the last years of his life. She published The Mystery of B. Traven in 1977, in which she explained that Traven’s wife, Rosa Elena Luján, introduced herself as “Mrs. Croves,” and a cantankerous Traven introduced himself as “Hal Croves.” And Hal Croves spoke to her at length about B. Traven in the third person, without exactly denying that Hal Croves and B. Traven were the same person—which is the behavior of a man in love with the mirrors and playfulness of his own mythology. But Judy Stone also explained that, in the course of researching the man, she looked into Der Ziegelbrenner, from his days as Ret Marut. And she was dismayed to discover that, while Ret Marut was, of course, an anti-racist, his anti-racism conformed to the anti-racist style that we have become accustomed to in our own day. He wrote that, for example, “the people who came closest to me in friendship were mostly Jews, but sadly I have to admit—and I stress the word sadly—I haven’t found any decent people among them.” Which, if I may add, does not sound like the anti-Semitism of a Jewish leftist in rebellion against his plutocratic family. Jewish leftists, when they lapse into anti-Semitism, feel furiously betrayed, they are anguished, etc., but never do they claim to be sad. Stone quoted a number of passages along those lines, less than friendly to the Jews. She observed that an East German author, in his own study of Traven, had suppressed the passages, and she noted that she herself had come under a bit of pressure to do the same. But she considered the passages significant and published them anyway. She did not mean to suggest that anti-Semitism was a life-long hobbyhorse of his. In conversation with her in Mexico City, Traven expressed a sympathy for the plight of the Jews in the Soviet Union. I would add that his novels, so far as I can remember, never touch on Jewish themes at all. But none of this suggests a Jewish awareness of some kind. Heyman in Letras Libres proposes that Traven was a “non-Jewish Jew,” in the phrase of Isaac Deutscher, but my own suspicion is that, on the contrary, he was merely non-Jewish. And there is another reason for skepticism. “Forget the man!” Traven told Judy Stone. “What does it matter if he is the son of a Hohenzollern prince or

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anyone else? Write about his works. Write about how he is against anything which is forced upon human beings, including communism or Bolshevism.” Which is a marvelous remark. It was a tease on Traven’s part, and it was meant to suggest, of course, that maybe he was, in fact, a Hohenzollern—indeed, was the illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Traven’s wife, aka “Mrs. Croves,” insisted on that point. Mrs. Traven told a reporter for Stern magazine in Germany that Traven had confessed to her that he was the kaiser’s son—though she denied later on having said anything of the sort. Mrs. Traven made the same claim to Judy Stone—only to explain, on a later occasion, that Traven was furious at her for saying such things, and she was afraid that her husband might leave her, even if he was elderly, and she hoped that Stone would not write anything about it. But that is not the half of it. The next American writer to try to penetrate the mystery was Jonah Raskin, who wrote not one, but two books on Traven, and, in the course of doing so, spent most of a year in Mexico, largely in the company of Mrs. Traven, a widow by then, going through Traven’s papers, and trying on his clothes, and typing on his typewriter, and meeting his friends and family. Raskin in those days was, as he has described in Tablet, a semi-aboveground figure in the Weather Underground, and the first of his Traven books, from 1978, was an extravaganza of New Left revolutionary romanticism in the form of a novelized memoir, faintly Kerouacian, dedicated “To Angela” (which the readers in those days could only have taken to mean Angela Davis, who had spent a while underground), called Underground: In Pursuit of B. Traven and Kenny Love—with “Kenny Love” being a stand-in for Abbie Hoffman, the Yippie leader, who, like everyone else, was on the lam. Underground attends to Raskin’s doings with Kenny Love a bit more than to his efforts to discover the identity of B. Traven. But, even so, the book conjures the Mexican scene and the Lancondón jungle, where Raskin went to live for a while. And he introduces us to Mrs. Traven, whom we meet in fuller detail in the second book, this one entirely devoted to the search for Traven’s identity, called My Search for B. Traven, from 1980—a gossipy book, juicy with rumors about the upper bohemia of Mexico City. Traven himself does not come off so well in this second book, not in regard to the Jews, anyway. Raskin met an old European Jewish lady in Mexico (though she seems to have denied being Jewish) who remembered Ret Marut and his propaganda in Germany. “He was an anti-Semite,” she told him. “He blamed the Jewish journalists for starting the war, then he blamed the Jewish bankers for trying to stop the revolution in Russia.”

The picture of Mrs. Traven is likewise not so attractive. Mrs. Traven seems to have been unhinged on the topic of Kaiser Wilhelm. She was a woman who, in Raskin’s estimation, “fabricated stories about her husband,” always in the hope of demonstrating an aristocratic grandeur. And, by extension, all of this—in the book by Judy Stone, and in the two books by Jonah Raskin—does not confer a large degree of credibility on the decision by Mrs. Traven’s son-in-law, Timothy Heyman, to announce on behalf of the step-daughter and himself that, instead of being a Hohenzollern, B. Traven was a Rathenau. Actually, the step-daughter herself does not look so great in the second of Raskin’s books, nattering on about Jewish power in the United States. So what are we to conclude? I think we should conclude that Traven was a man whose creative powers were sufficiently lavic that, 50 years after his death, puff clouds of ash are still rumbling up from the source. Traven’s comment to Judy Stone—“What does it matter if he is the son of a Hohenzollern prince or anyone else? Write about his works”—is, of course, entirely reasonable, or would be so, under normal circumstances. But it is just that, when someone hints that maybe he is, in fact, a Hohenzollern, and his family goes on, many years later, about the Rathenaus, it can be hard to write about the works. The works do have virtues. The spiky Max Stirner aggressiveness in his early books is not to my taste. But I used to love the Jungle Novels, all six of them, and I suspect that, if I had the opportunity to read them again, I would still find something to like. They are classics of the anarchist imagination, in a Teutonic Chiapas version. My favorite among his books was always his short novel The Bridge in the Jungle, which is still another tale of the Lancandón jungle and oppressed Indians and greedy oil companies—a tender book, sentimental and indignant at the same time. I read it more than 40 years ago and still remember a few lines. But nothing in those writings is as loopy as the author’s bio. *** To read more of Paul Berman’s political and cultural criticism for Tablet, click here. Paul Berman is Tablet's critic-at-large. He is the author of A Tale of Two Utopias, Terror and Liberalism, Power and the Idealists, and The Flight of the Intellectuals.

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New Dershowitz Memoir Is a Must-Read for Israel

Advocates By James Sinkinson

Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz. Photo:

REUTERS/Andrew Innerarity.

World-renowned author, criminal lawyer, Harvard law professor and civil rights defender Alan Dershowitz sets the tone for his support of Israel in the introduction to his new memoir, succinctly explaining the global injustice — based on unrelenting antisemitism — meted out against the world’s only Jewish state: No country faced with comparable threats can boast a better record of human rights, a higher regard for the rule of law, or greater efforts to reduce civilian casualties. Nor has any country in history contributed as much to humankind — medically, scientifically, environmentally, academically, culturally — in so short a time than has Israel in its relatively brief existence as an independent state. The memoir is an inspiring primer to all who advocate for Israel — especially those who support the Jewish state from a posture of liberalism: Passionate support for democracy and free speech, combined with uncompromising, often heroic opposition to bigotry in all its forms, especially antisemitism. For while Dershowitz is one of Israel’s most prominent and effective defenders, his support is strictly principled. He hasn’t hesitated, for example, to criticize Israel’s drift away from a two-state solution, but he just as indignantly condemns the racist hypocrisy of the American left for excluding pro-Israel Jews, unfairly characterizing Jews as privileged, colonialist white people. Defending Israel: The Story of My Relationship with My Most Challenging Client (All Points Books, 2019) is, like most of Dershowitz’s writing, a masterpiece of self-promotion — but it is also an ammunition locker filled with arguments against almost every attack on Zionism over the past 70 years.

Though Defending Israel is told in the first person, it is more accurately a history of Zionism — particularly the arcs of increasing then decreasing global public support for Israel, as well as political trends within Israel, from socialist leftism to capitalism and hard-line conservatism. Dershowitz relates a debate he had with Israel critic Peter Beinart: Beinart began by saying how much he admired me for the work I had done to help Soviet Jews immigrate to Israel. Then in the same breath, he condemned me for supporting Israel as it moved to the right. I pointed out the obvious contradiction in his two statements. It is the very fact that a million Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel that moved Israeli politics to the right. I asked him whether he would want to deport or disenfranchise the millions Soviet Jews so that Israel could move back to its traditional left-wing orientation. He laughed, but failed to respond to my deeper point — that Israel is a democracy in which the majority view prevails. In the course of the book’s 292 pages, Dershowitz regales readers with tales of his impressive public jousts with such Israel enemies as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Daniel Berrigan, and Desmond Tutu. But he also candidly reveals his ambivalence towards Barack Obama, whose presidential candidacy he supported but who in December 2016 engineered, then failed to veto a UN Security Council resolution that “perniciously changed the status of Jewish Jerusalem” — asserting that key Jewish parts of the city were illegally occupied by Israel and “a flagrant violation of international law.” Dershowitz writes of the incident: I wrote a scathing attack on Obama for changing long-standing American policy in order to exact revenge on [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and tie the hands of his successors. I urged the next president to immediately and officially recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move its embassy there. However, when President Donald Trump did exactly that, the Zionist advocate was distressed at some of the responses. Many left-wing Democrats — even some who had opposed President Obama’s decision to push the anti-Israel resolution through the Security Council and who had urged Obama to move the embassy to Jerusalem — thoughtlessly condemned the move without providing coherent arguments. For them it was enough that this was President Trump who had ordered the relocations of the embassy. If the same actions had been taken by a President Hillary Clinton … it would have been greeted with joy and approval. In the book’s penultimate chapter, Dershowitz takes on “The New Antisemitism” — from Black Lives

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Matter, the Women’s March, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and intersectionality to outright attempts to silence pro-Israel advocates, of which Dershowitz has often been a victim, primarily on college campuses. This fervent Zionist closes by describing an attempt to smear him with fantastically fabricated stories about his alleged sexual misconduct — and his defiance in the face of all lies. It doesn’t matter to Israel haters whether the allegations are completely disproved, struck, withdrawn, mistaken and made up — as they were in this case — as long as it negatively impacts my ability to defend Israel. I will continue to fight back against these anti-Israel motivated defamations. We who deal with the daily drumbeat of wild, baseless lies against the Jewish state can appreciate Dershowitz’s frustration in the face of such incessant unfair attacks — but we can also draw strength from his determination to stand tall against the haters. At 80 years old and still unbowed, may Dershowitz continue to provide such empowering inspiration for years to come.

James Sinkinson is president of Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME), which publishes educational messages to correct lies and misperceptions about Israel and its relationship to the United States. JNS.org www.algemeiner.com

Does Israel Have Rights—and Need—to Assert Sovereign Control over the Jordan

Valley?

Opinion: Why Arabs Hate Palestinians

You simply cannot burn pictures of the Saudi crown prince one day and rush to

Riyadh to seek money the next.

By Khaled Abu Toameh

Is it true? If so, why? Sadly, the Palestinians are known for betraying their Arab brothers, even effectively stabbing them in the back. The Palestinians, for example, supported Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait – a Gulf state that, together with its neighbors, used to give the Palestinians tens of millions of dollars in aid each year. This disloyalty is precisely how a growing number of Arabs, particularly those living in the Gulf states, have been describing the Palestinians for the past few years. In recent months, however, Arab criticism of the Palestinians, mostly aired through traditional and social media, has further escalated, and sometimes turned ugly. Some Arab writers and journalists expressed outrage over the Palestinians’ opposition to peace plans, particularly the US administration’s yet-to-be-announced “Deal of the Century.” They accused the Palestinians of losing countless opportunities and said that the “Deal of the Century” could be the Palestinians’ “last, best chance to achieve a state.” Khalid Ashaerah, a Saudi, denounced the Palestinians as “traitors” and expressed hope that Israel would be “victorious” over the Palestinians. The Arab attacks on the Palestinians reflect an intense and increasing disillusionment in the Arab world with the Palestinians and anything related to them. At the core of this deep sense of disillusionment is the Arabs’ belief that despite all they did to help their Palestinian brothers for the past seven decades, the Palestinians have proven to be constantly ungrateful toward the Arab and Muslim people and states. Such a widespread view as that now being expressed in various Arab states accuses the Palestinians of betraying their Arab and Muslim brothers. As an Arab saying goes, it accuses them of spitting in the well they have been drinking from. The image refers to the financial aid that Palestinians have received for decades from many Arab states. Until a few years ago, it was the Egyptians who were spearheading the anti-Palestinian campaign in the Arab world. Prominent Egyptian media personalities, journalists, writers and politicians seemed to be competing for a blue ribbon on who could attack Palestinians harder. The Egyptians focused their criticism against the Palestinian terror group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip — a coastal enclave that has a shared border with Egypt. The Egyptian critics, who are mostly affiliated with the regime of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, see Hamas — an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood

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organization now outlawed in Egypt — as a threat to Egypt’s national security and stability. These critics also seem incensed at Palestinian criticism of Sisi for having alleged good relations with Israel and the US administration. The Palestinians seem to believe that Sisi is conspiring against them, together with Israel and the US administration. They point out, for example, that last May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Sisi “my friend.” Netanyahu had thanked Sisi after Egypt sent two helicopters to help extinguish wildfires in Israel. “I would like to thank my friend the Egyptian president, Sisi, for sending the two helicopters,” Netanyahu announced. “Instead of defending their cause, the Palestinians are insulting Sisi and the Egyptian people,” a prominent Egyptian journalist, Azmi Mujahed, said. “I have a message to send to the Palestinian beggars who sold their land and honor: You are cursing Egypt and its army and president. You are a group of despicable folks. Whoever insults our president insults all of us.” The Egyptians’ attacks on the Palestinians reached a peak in 2014, when several prominent writers and journalists called on their government to expel Palestinians and launch a military strike against the Gaza Strip. The fierce attacks came amid reports that the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip were providing support to ISIS-inspired terrorist groups waging war on Egypt’s security forces right in its Sinai Peninsula. Egyptian writer Lamis Jaber urged the Egyptian government to expel all Palestinians and confiscate their property. She also called for arresting anyone who sympathized with the Palestinians. “We give aid to the Gaza Strip, and in return they [Palestinians] kill our children. They are dogs and traitors.” Jaber further pointed out that while Palestinian patients are being treated in Egyptian hospitals free of charge, the leaders of Hamas are enjoying themselves in “seven-star hotels” in Turkey and Qatar. Jaber is just one of several leading Egyptians who have been waging a campaign against the Palestinians in recent years — a move reflecting Arab disappointment with Palestinians’ “ungratefulness” and “arrogance.” The message the Egyptians are sending to the Palestinians is: We are fed up with you and your failure to get your act together and behave like adults. We are also fed up with you because after all these years of supporting you and fighting for your cause, in the end you are spitting in our face and offending our president.

Telling it Like it is

Now it seems that it is the Saudis’ turn to “tell it like it is” to the Palestinians. Like their Egyptian colleagues, many Saudi writers, bloggers, activists and journalists have taken to social media to denounce the Palestinians in an unprecedented manner. Some Saudis, for instance, are describing the Palestinians as terrorists and accusing them of selling their land to Israelis. These denunciations are coming not only from Saudis, but from a growing number of Arabs in other Arab and Muslim countries, particularly in the Gulf.

Like the Egyptians, the Saudis seem enraged by the recurring Palestinian attacks on the royal family in Saudi Arabia, especially Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In the past two years, Palestinians have burned Saudi flags and photographs of bin Salman during demonstrations in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza Strip. Why? The crown prince is seen by Palestinians as being “too close” to Israel and the US administration. Like the Egyptians, the Saudis feel betrayed by the Palestinians. Saudi Arabia for years has given the Palestinians billions of dollars in aid, but this has not stopped the Palestinians from bad-mouthing Saudi leaders at every turn. The Saudis are now saying that they, too, are fed up. Their outrage reached its peak last June, when Palestinians assaulted a Saudi blogger visiting the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem. The Palestinians spat in the face of the blogger, Mohammed Saud, and accused him of promoting “normalization” with Israel by visiting the country. Since that incident at the holy site, many Saudis and citizens of Gulf states have been waging daily attacks on the Palestinians, mostly on social media.

Defending Israel

Saudi blogger Mohammed al-Qahtani wrote: “To all those in Israel who are listening to our voice: We call for transferring the custodianship over Al-Aqsa Mosque from Jordan to the State of Israel so that the despicable assault on the Saudi citizen, Mohammed Saud, will not recur.” This is an extraordinary statement from a Saudi writer, and would have been totally unthinkable just a few years ago. A Saudi national is saying that he prefers to see an Islamic holy site under Israeli custodianship (rather than Jordanian custodianship) because only then will Muslims feel safe to visit their mosque. Other Saudis seem extremely unhappy with the Palestinians’ relations with Iran. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the two terror groups controlling the Gaza Strip, receive financial and military aid from Iran and political backing from Turkey. The Saudis and other Gulf states see Iran, not Israel, as the major threat to their stability. Because of that, these states have come closer to Israel in recent years. Israel and they have a common enemy: Iran. Remarkably, a Saudi writer, Turki al-Hamad, did what even many Western leaders refuse to do: he dared to condemn Hamas and other Gaza-based groups for firing rockets at Israel. Al-Hamad, denounced the Palestinians for allowing themselves to serve as puppets in the hands of Turkey and Iran. Commenting on a recent barrage of rocket attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip, he said: “Iran and Turkey are facing a crisis [an apparent reference to economic and political crises in Iran and Turkey] and the Palestinians are paying the price.” In other words, the Palestinians have chosen to align themselves with two countries, Iran and Turkey, that support the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremist groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.

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Another Saudi writer, Mohammed al-Shaikh, repeated the old-new charge in the Arab world that wherever the Palestinians go, they cause trouble. “Palestinians bring disaster to anyone who hosts them. Jordan hosted them, and there was Black September; Lebanon hosted them, and there was a civil war there; Kuwait hosted them, and they turned into Saddam Hussein’s soldiers. Now they are using their podiums to curse us.” In another comment on Twitter, al-Shaikh called for banning Palestinians from performing the Islamic hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. His comment came after a video surfaced showing Palestinians, during the recent hajj, carrying Palestinian flags and chanting, “With blood, with soul, we redeem you, Al-Aqsa Mosque!” The Saudis have strict rules banning political activities during the hajj. Al-Shaikh apparently viewed the Palestinians as using the pilgrimage to Mecca to stage a demonstration, stir up trouble during the hajj and embarrass the Saudi authorities. “The dogs of Hamas,” al-Shaikh said after viewing the video, “should be banned from performing the hajj next year because of their obscene behavior.” Fahd al-Shammari, a Saudi journalist, attacked Palestinians by calling them “beggars without honor.” He went as far as saying that a mosque in Uganda is more blessed than Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is a Jewish holy site.” Biting the Hand that Feeds You The Palestinians can only blame themselves for damaging their relations with the Arab states. Biting the hand that feeds you has always been a policy for which the Palestinians have paid a heavy price. Burning photos of Arab leaders and heads of state on the streets of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has proven to be a big mistake. You simply cannot burn pictures of the Saudi crown prince one day and rush to Riyadh to seek money the next. You cannot shout slogans against the Egyptian president one day and go to Cairo to seek political backing the next. Many people in the Arab countries are now saying that it is high time for the Palestinians to start looking after their own interests and thinking of a better future for their children. They no longer see the Palestinian issue as the main problem in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Arabs seem to be saying to the Palestinians: “We want to march forward; you can continue to march backward for as long as you wish.” What they see is Palestinian stagnation, mainly thanks to the Palestinian Authority and Hamas leaders, who are too busy poisoning their peoples’ minds and ripping each other to shreds to have time for anything positive. The Palestinians may just wake up one day to discover that their Arab brothers can truly no longer be duped. Ahmad al-Jaralah, a leading Kuwaiti newspaper editor, was even more blunt, saying: “The Palestinian cause is no longer an Arab concern. We fund the Palestinians, and they respond by cursing us and behaving badly. The Arabs and Muslims no longer applaud the Palestinians. We should not be ashamed to establish relations with Israel.”

Khaled Abu Toameh, an award-winning journalist based in Jerusalem, is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at Gatestone Institute. Sep 9, 2019

Content

Michel Gurfinkiel:The Mirage of an International Jerusalem Brent Nagtegaal: UNESCO Matti Friedman: What really happened at Masada? PredragIlić:Aloysius Stepinac and the HolocaustPaul Berman: Was B. Traven Jewish? James Sinkinson: New Dershowitz Memoir Khaled Abu Toameh: Why Arabs Hate Palestinians

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