Israel, Palestine and the Australian media. Review of 'My Life as a Jew' by Michael Gawenda.

 

Has anyone read Why the Germans, Why the Jews? by Götz Ali? If you haven’t read it, you need to before reading My Life as a Jew. 

Why the Germans, Why the Jews? charts the normalization of intellectual antisemitism in Germany in the decades before World War 2 which facilitated the Holocaust. A similar normalization has been happening in literary, journalistic, educational and artistic circles across Australia, not forgetting the Labor left and the Greens. It is the hatred of an ethnic minority, a secularized diabolism (1), and one that I feel is gradually building up. 

My Life as a Jew is a fine book, personal and in places deeply harrowing. It is easy to read and I found the Yiddish culture fascinating. I devoured the whole lot in about eight hours from one afternoon to the next morning. 

In the days of my innocence, I used to wonder how the Australian media could justify publishing press releases from the Gaza Ministry of Health, because isn't that rather like reporting on the Battle of Britain by sourcing your information from Nazi Germany? Well, after Chapter One, I don't wonder anymore.

The chapter describes the presuppositions regarding Israel and Palestine that members of the Australian media are expected to hold and how these had been reinforced just in time for the October 7th 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas terrorists. Two years earlier, a booklet was commissioned for Monash University Publishing. Written by John Lyons, at the time the ABC senior news executive, it was a rant against the Israel lobby in Australia. Before the booklet was commissioned, 400 Australian media personnel signed a letter relating to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Gawenda continues: 

What this letter calls for, what it urges editors and executive producers to do, is refuse space and a voice to journalists and others who do not accept the black-and-white position of the signatories to this letter - that Israel is the villain that launches savage and unprovoked attacks on the Palestinian people in Gaza, on the powerless and the helpless victims of Israeli villainy.

What does it mean that journalists and media workers who work for the ABC and SBS signed the letter?

In the more political chapters of the book (and I say this to distinguish them from the personal ones in which a bias is less evident), Michael Gawenda too writes about the Israel and Palestine conflict from a similar starting point to these journalists - that Israel is the tyrant. Yet, there is so much more to be understood if you are a nobody like me and can write whatever you like without having to fend off attacks by an irate literary community. 

As a Christian, I say that antisemitism exists because, in the words of Jesus: ‘Salvation is from the Jews’. This is the reason, no doubt, that the Koran and the Hadith dismantle anything about Judaism and Christianity that relate to God’s plan for the salvation of a troubled world, even to threatening hell fire for a Muslim who believes that the Messiah is the son of Mary. (The many kind and motherly Muslim women I have met are unaware of this, I’m sure.) Edward Flannery (1) insists that the conflict cannot be understood without a knowledge of the Koran and this belief is echoed in the works of Richard Landes, Ayann Hirsi Ali, Narbeel Qureshi and Derek Prince among many others. I have read the relevant verses in the Koran and they are not encouraging. If imams continue to preach what it says about Jews and Muslims, then there will never be peace in the Middle East. 

If you’re an atheist, as I’m told journalists are, then what do you do with the salvation question? How do you explain the infiltration of the Jewish problem into all levels of our society? 

Meanwhile, the catastrophic effects of British colonialism in the Middle East are forgotten or ignored. Churchill splitting Kurdistan between three countries, making the Kurds an ethnic minority in their own land and opening the path to their persecution. British oil exploration and exploitation in the Middle East between 1908 and WW2. The British Mandate of Palestine. The British Mandate of Mesopotamia. Britain creating Iraq. Churchill giving 75% of its Palestine Mandate to create Transjordan to please the Arabs and protect British oil supplies. The UN creating Israel out of the dregs of what remained amidst threats of Arab oil embargoes. Britain abstaining from the vote to partition Palestine in 1947. Britain arming the Arabs in the Jewish war of Independence.

Why obsess over Israel? 

Because religion is at the heart of the matter and this is a stumbling block for atheists who lump all religions into the one basket, toss it in the trash and look for a logical, Western solution to the problem. Not finding any, they blame Israel, and I doubt whether this attitude is actually helping the people of Gaza. To quote Hamza Howidy whose article is listed below, 'If their heart bleeds for Gaza, why are they not outraged at all of the violence that Gazans face—including the violence of Hamas? The sad truth is, when Israelis aren't involved, no one is interested in advocating for the Palestinian rights they claim to care about so deeply.'

Some knowledge of the history of nineteenth and twentieth century Palestine might help Australian journalists. They could discover what Palestine was once like by reading about the famous visit of Mark Twain in 1867 The Innocents Abroad, or research the origin of the term Al Nakba (the catastrophe) in Daniel Szeftel’s A History of the ‘Settler Colonialism’ charge. They could pinpoint who has actually lived in Palestine during the last century, by reading The Smoking Gun: Arab immigration into Palestine, 1922 to 1931 by Fred M. Gottheil. Richard Landes might explain to them how eliminating Israel will restore the honour of Islam that its foundation has shamed in Why the Arab World is lost in an emotional nakba. And how we keep it there. Or they could be really radical and discover how the Palestinians feel themselves in Why Does the Media Ignore Hamas' Crimes Against Palestinians? by Hamza Howidy. 

But back to the book.

The definitions of an anti-Zionist, and even of a Jew, that consumed Gawenda did not consume me, but I was quite rivetted by his observations of what is antisemitism and what it isn't according to the judgements of contemporary society. Fueled by the media, we are directed to the conclusion 'that it is not antisemitic to compare Israelis to Nazis', page 103. 

Those of us who are old enough to remember Yasser Arafat might find page 201 as strange as I did. I thought Gawenda was harsh to blame Israel for 'some of' the suffering of the Palestinians without mention of either Arafat or Hamas. In 2004 as Arafat lay dying, Ed O'Loughlin of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote about 'the corrupt and self-serving political elite which has prospered from the donor-funded Palestinian Authority while the common people suffer economic and political strangulation under occupation.' (I have the clipping.) It should be remembered that Gaza and the West Bank are not modern welfare states, and that the governments who profess to lead them can best be compared to the House of Lords at the time of the First Fleet. 

I was moved by the unfortunate employee of the Anne Frank Museum who was asked to replace his kippeh with a baseball cap. Gawenda pours vitriol on those who would de-Jewify the Holocaust, as this example illustrates, transforming 'it into a universal metaphor for the capacity of human beings to do terrible things to other human beings', page 94. He criticizes Hollywood and popular Auschwitz literature, rightly so as the child of Holocaust survivors, born in a Displaced Persons camp in Austria. (I must add, Mr Gawenda, that I have read Exodus by Leon Uris twice, but I have never seen the movie.) 

As I left the supermarket yesterday morning with a loaded bag and my library copy of My Life as a Jew sitting under the bananas, a woman handed me a pro-Palestinian flyer. ‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘I pray for Israel, and also for the people of Gaza and an end to the hostilities.’ She just stared at me as if she couldn’t understand my attitude.

1 The Anguish of the Jews, Flannery E.   Cambridge University Press 1985.

Margaret Walker - War in the Balkans: The Anguish of the Jews -- book review and reflections

 

POWERFULLY PROTECTED - the Ustasha in Australia

I was a political child. In 1972 during the campaign that toppled twenty-three years of Australian Liberal governments, I wore my It's Time badge faithfully to Sunday School every week - It's Time For A Change. I rejoiced when in December Gough Whitlam and the Labor Party roared into office and, even today, I can still sing the song that encapsulated that exciting time in Australian politics. 'The Adventures of Edward Gough Whitlam. Dinki Di tales of an Aussie Boy.'  

From 1952 to 1978 Whitlam held the safe Labor seat of Werriwa in southwest Sydney which contained a substantial migrant community from the former Yugoslavia. 

Unlike their Liberal predecessors, the new Labor Government was not frightened of the Yugoslav communist government or communism in general. They did not permit the freedom of terrorist groups in Australia merely because they weren't communist and therefore not considered a threat. One such group that they banned were the Croatian terrorists, the Ustasha. 

Who were the Ustasha?

They were fascists, which means right wing ultra-nationalists, the opposites and opponents of communism. Fascism flourished in Europe in the interwar years under Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, the Ustasha in Croatia and many others. 

In my 1915 atlas (right) there is no Croatia. It forms part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Various factors, including the fear of land claims from Italy, resulted in Croatia being incorporated into Yugoslavia in 1918 under a Serbian monarchy. The Ustasha were founded in 1929 with the aim of achieving Croatian independence. 

Following the German invasion of Yugoslavia 6th April 1941, Hitler put the Ustasha in charge of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) which included Bosnia and 1.8 million ethnic Serbs (5). The Croatian historian, Slavko Goldstein (2) acknowledges that, although the Serbian monarchy had been guilty of the suppression of Croatia, the punishment the Ustasha meted out to the Serbs was out of all proportion to the crimes.

Estimates of the genocide of Serbs by the Ustasha during World War 2 vary. Hubert Butler (3), the Irish essayist who lived in Croatia before and after the war quotes half a million, while other sources suggest even more. Marcus Tanner (4) writes 'the figure of 600,000 Serb deaths in the NDH is probably much too high as it does not tally with the ethnic composition of Croatia and Bosnia after the war...[but] there is no doubt that the NDH intended to exterminate the Serb population and failed only because it lacked the means.' The Ustasha also killed 75% of the Jews, all the Gypsies, any antifascist who crossed their line of vision, and a cousin of my mother's.

In an attempt to explain the fanatical hatred with which the Ustasha slaughtered Serbs, that even shocked the Nazis, Goldstein quotes the commander of Jasenovac death camp, Ljubo Miloš, 'I know I will burn in hell for what I have done, but I will burn for Croatia.' (2)

The Ustasha find protection in Australia.  

'Like many refugees from countries in Eastern Europe who had collaborated with Hitler and Mussolini,' writes Gough Whitlam, 'and who therefore could not return to their countries of birth, the Ustasha formed close ties with the Liberal Party.' 

'In 1954, I had brought to the notice of the Minister for Immigration [Holt] the distress which had been caused to many migrants in my electorate by a program on a Sydney commercial radio station on the Sunday nearest to 10th April to celebrate "the Croatian National Day" This was the anniversary of the establishment of the Ustasha puppet regime under Ante Pavelić in 1941.' (1)  

In September 1963, the following article appeared in the Tribune (6), the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia.

The Wodonga incident had been staged by the Ustasha, filmed then splashed across the world to demonstrate the 'help' they were receiving from Australian authorities. An embarrassed Minister for the Army 'pleaded that the officer commanding was not aware of the composition of the [Ustasha] 'picnic group' and had merely regarded them as potential recruits'. (1)  

Some selected Ustasha bombings                 Quotes are from (1) unless otherwise stated.

1964 May, Sydney - a supporter is seriously injured by his own bomb. 

1965 February, Geelong - Yugoslav dance.

1967 April, Melbourne - two separate residences.

1967 January, Sydney - Yugoslav Consulate-General.

1967 November, Richmond VIC - Yugoslav function.

1968 November, Melbourne - bombs thrown into a residence.

1968 November, Sydney -    Yugoslav Consulate-General.

1969 April, Sydney - residence. 

1969 June - Yugoslav Consulate-General.

1969, October, Canberra - USSR Embassy.                                         

1969, November, Canberra - Yugoslav Embassy.

1970, October, Melbourne - Yugoslav Consulate-General.

1971, January - USSR consulate.

1971, February, Sydney airport - bomb threat against Yugoslav musicians.

1971, November, Sydney - Yugoslav agency.

1971, December, Suburban Sydney - Yugoslav film show. 
1972, February, Canberra - Serbian orthodox church. 

1972, April, Melbourne and Canberra - residence and an exhibition.

1972, September, Sydney -- Yugoslav premises. 

The Tribune was not impressed. 

October 28th 1970 - 'There appear to be several flocks of guardian angels watching over the Ustashi. Firstly, there are the Liberal and Democratic Labor Parties. Top Liberals, including Gorton, McMahon and Snedden, have either praised them or defended them. Liberal politicians such as Federal Minister Mr W C Wentworth and NSW Parliamentarian have appeared and spoken at their rallies.  Apparently, the fanatical anti-communist and anti-labor attitudes of the Ustashi make them a valued ally.' (7)

Gough Whitlam agreed. 'The Ustasha had enjoyed immunity under [successive Liberal prime ministers] Menzies, Holt, Gorton and McMahon...If communist rather than anti-communist organizations had been thought responsible for [the terrorist incidents in Australia] all the Liberal Attorneys-General would have been active in pursuing and prosecuting the perpetrators.' (1)

But was it only to do with the fear of Communism? 

While I might rant and rage at the injustice of allowing a persecuted ethnic group to enter Australia only to permit the persecution to continue here, it is true that post war Australia was essentially British and not concerned about migrants it didn't understand and whose language it couldn't speak. 'By focusing their attacks on the Yugoslav community, the Ustaša avoided provoking general outrage and public censure,' writes Kristy Campion (8). 'The violence was considered a Yugoslav migrant problem. It was not until the tourism centre bombings injured sixteen random civilians that decisive political action was taken.'  She notes that contributing factors were the fear the victims had of retribution and the fear of deportation back to the communist Yugoslavia they had left.  

It is fortunate that Gough Whitlam held an electorate with a Yugoslav community. With the Labor party at last in office, the long run of government permissiveness to the Ustasha came to an end and the community had a few short years of peace until the breakup of Yugoslavia during the wars of the 1990's. Writing many years after he was an eyewitness to the Ustasha crimes, Slavko Goldstein concluded that Ustasha intellectuals believed that 'if you loved Croatia very much, you must be forgiven completely even if in its name... you persecuted people, drove them into prisons and camps, killed them, or had them killed on a massive scale. If you have expressed remorse with a few general phrases, you have been “purified" and you will receive the honour that you deserve.' (2)

Sources

(1) Whitlam, Gough     The Whitlam Government 1972-1975   Penguin Books 1985

(2) Goldstein, Slavko    1941: The Year Tthat Keeps Returning  NY Review of Books 2007

(3) Butler, Hubert   The Balkan Essays.  Irish Page Press 2016.

(4) Tanner, Marcus     Croatia   Yale UP 1997.

(5) Nationalities and Minorities in the Independent State of Croatia | Nationalities Papers | Cambridge Core

(6) 18 Sep 1963 - "Poem" for terrorism - Trove

(7) 28 Oct 1970 - Powerful protectors of the Ustashi bomb terrorists - Trove

(8) The Ustaša in Australia: A Review of Right-Wing Ustaša Terrorism from 1963-1973, and Factors that Enabled their Endurance Kristy Campion.

researchoutput.csu.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/29095069/28757579_Published_article.pdf/

The Holy Land - from old maps and literature.

The modern Middle Eastern crisis began, in part, because Turkey was on the losing side in World War 1. For six hundred years the Ottoman Turks had supported Islam across North Africa, through the Levant and into Europe where their wave of success was finally brought to a halt at the gates of Vienna in 1683 – note the date, September 11th. The long slow decline had begun. The red, green, black and white 'Flag of the Arab Revolt', replicated in many forms throughout the Middle East today, originated in 1916 when the Arabs were trying to leave the failing Empire. Instead, they found themselves in a more dismal situation. By the time the Ottoman Empire was finally dissolved in 1922, two of the victors of World War 1 had claimed much of its remaining territory, France in Syria and Lebanon, and Britain in Iraq, Jordan, Kurdistan, Israel and the territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

I am the proud possessor of a 1915 Australian Atlas, and an AMP Map of the World published shortly before the outbreak of World War 2. I am including them in my blog 'War in the Balkans' because the task of reconstructing the Middle East following the anticipated fall of the Ottoman Empire was a problem much considered by the West throughout the nineteenth century and particularly after the First and Second Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913. Why the West should have embraced it as their problem says a lot about the thinking of the time. It was also due to the discovery of oil in the Middle East in 1908 by the British and their establishment of oil fields during the 1920's and 30's. 

        The Middle East in1915

   

1939

The Middle East in 1939

The British Mandate of Palestine 1920 - 1948

Palestine compared with Tasmania, Australia

In 1922, Winston Churchill gave away 75% of the British Mandate of Palestine to create the modern Arab nation of Jordan.

In 1948, the remaining land was partitioned to create the State of Israel. 

In 1867, Mark Twain made his famous visit to the Holy Land

A fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour. I do not know how else to make one understand how small it is… The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants...The nice shades of nationality comprised in the above list, and the languages spoken by them, are altogether too numerous to mention. It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem. Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic assail you on every hand. To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here


Herodotus – The Histories (c. 446 BC)

The Syrians of Palestine (and the Phoenicians) have a tradition that in ancient times they lived on the Persian Gulf, but migrated to the Syrian coast where they are found today. This part of Syria, together with the country that extends southward to Egypt, is all known as Palestine…They practise circumcision…[and] the custom is evidently a very ancient one.

 Suetonius – The Twelve Caesars

An ancient superstition was current in the East, that out of Judea at this time would come the rulers of the world…The rebellious Jews read it as referring to themselves, murdered their Governor, routed the Governor of Syria when he came down to retore order, and captured an Eagle. To crush this uprising the Romans needed a strong army under an energetic commander…The choice fell on Vespasian (66AD).

Pliny the Elder – Natural History (AD 23 – 79)

On the west side of the Dead Sea, away from the cost, lives the solitary tribe of the Essenes…Below them was the town of Engeda (Joshua 15,62), second only to Jerusalem in the fertility of its soil and in its groves of palm trees but now, like Jerusalem, another heap of ashes

SOME DAMN FOOLISH THING IN THE BALKANS - how Britain, Germany and Austria started World War 1

GAVRILO PRINCIP is famous for Gavrila Princip Street in Belgrade, home to my favourite restaurant Zavičaj's, where I have enjoyed three times now the best craft sausage, roast potatoes, cabbage salad, mustard and a memorable house red.

GAVRILO PRINCIP is also famous for assassinating, in Sarajevo Bosnia, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and starting World War One.

"Assassinate" is too strong a word. I believe he was provoked. 

The underdog is the eternal scapegoat, and Gavrila Princip was a Bosnian Serb, an excellent example of the species because he and his friends were poor, passionate nationalists in a world of rich, arrogant empires. Had he been British or German or even a disgruntled Austrian or Turk, would the notion that one young man could be the cause of such a cataclysmic catastrophe have been quite so popular with our history books?

Serbs had lived in Bosnia for thirteen hundred years and at the time Gavrila fired the fatal shot (or shots, actually, because he killed the Archduchess as well) there were 800,000 Serbs living in Bosnia out of a population of 1.9 million.

Why were the Balkans the underdogs, and why Bosnia in particular?

To answer that question, here is what the Germans thought of the Balkans.

“One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans” -

Otto von Bismarck 1888, founding Chancellor of Germany and wealthy aristocrat.

And here is what the British thought.

"All these Balkan peoples are trash" -

Alexander Cadogan 1941, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and wealthy aristocrat.

I haven't tracked down the originator of the phrase describing the Balkans as "the powder keg of Europe" but it would have to have been a member of one of the many empires that taxed them, exploited their natural resources and used their populations for military service - the Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Ottoman Turks, Venetians, Italians, the British or the Russians - and who discovered the hard way that the Balkans didn't appreciate being exploited. 

Here is what Gavrila Princip thought. "I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free from Austria."

Why did Austria get control over Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in the first place?

[In April 1877] Russia went to war with the Turks...Such a general conflagration was just what European Diplomats feared. It was the dreaded Eastern Question, or what to do with Turkey's European possessions once the [Ottoman} Empire collapsed...At the Congress of Berlin in 1878...the Balkans states were not invited to participate beyond presenting their views. The decisions of the Congress were to have tremendous historical impact...In a great blow to Serbia, the provinces of Bosnia and Hercegovina were given to Austria-Hungary to adminsister...[This occupation] contained within it the seeds of the First World War. (2)

Those seeds were fertilized and watered with the connivance of Britain and Germany.

In the war of 1877 Serbia allied with Russian against the Turks, during which the Serbs 'reoccupied the whole of Southern Serbia . [but] the agreement that had been reached by the Russians and the Turks ...did not suit Britain or Germany, who feared that they would mean Russian control of the Balkans through a puppet state in Bulgaria. [So] at the Treaty of Berlin Serbia and Montenegro acquired almost complete independence from Turkey but Bosnia and Herzegovina were handed over to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. ...Bismarck insisted on this to offset what he regarded as the undue support for Turkey given at the Congress by the British Government. The Austrian garrisons stationed throughout the territories were bitterly resented by the Serbian population...as was the separation of Serbia and Montenegro ...by a fortified strip of territory under Austrian control.'(3)

Bosnia is a country of three faiths but two of these have strong ties to Croatia and Serbia. Austria's actions in Bosnia only amplified Serbian and Croatian nationalism.

'In 1878 the Austro-Hungarian Empire occupied Bosnia...until it was formally annexed in 1908. Fearing general unrest, Austria initially maintained the Ottoman laws, including the agrarian privileging of Muslim landholders. Gradually, however, the new colonial government began establishing control over the three religious communities [Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox] with the aim of curbing political and ideological ties between Bosnia and the neighboring Croatia and Serbia...It tried to promote a sense of unified Bosnian identity [and] it tried to cut off religious ties with the immediate neighbours [Croatia and Serbia]. As education and literacy among the local populations improved, so did their ties with national movements in Serbia and Croatia.[There was a] zeal of national awakening pouring in from Serbia and Croatia.(4)

And then in 1914 on the 28th June, the most sacred day in the Serbian calendar, Archduke Franz Ferdinand chose to parade Austrian imperialism through the streets of Sarajevo.

'Why ever did the royal visit take place on Vidovdan, a great day of mourning for the defeat of the Serbs by the Turks in the fourteenth century?...Was the visit a provocation? Did the Vienna government want some incident to occur that would give an excuse for the subjugation of Serbia?' (1)

I would like to say that Empires have the best interests of their territories at heart but that would be naive. Empires want resources and here are just a few examples of many.

Immediately after it took control in 1878 Austria began to construct a narrow-gauge railway system in BiH to transport Bosnian timber, bauxite, coal, iron ore, zinc and lead. Although the country in World War 2 was supposedly divided by the Vienna Line into Croatian and Italian sections, Hitler helped himself to the bauxite mines near Mostar for aeroplane manufacture. 'In 1900, [in] the rural economy of Croatia-Slavonia 56% of the direct taxes … went to Hungary' (6) and countries under Ottoman Turkey were so heavily taxed that whenever people could leave, they did. Most couldn't, and in Serbia the Ottomans harvested local boys every five years, forcing them to convert to Islam and using them as troops called Janissaries. Between the wars Britain posted mining engineers in Belgrade to help Britain, not Serbia, and was widely believed to have manipulated Serbian politics in order to precipitate the coup d’etat that led to the disastrous invasion of Belgrade in 1941.

After World War 2 a political agitator from Jerusalem named Al Husseini was wanted by Tito’s Yugoslav government as a war criminal, so it is worthwhile taking a look at Britain’s relationship with the Arabs. A day after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, five Arab states invaded in a joint land grab. The evangelist Derek Prince was living in Jerusalem when ‘a fragment [of a shell] flew through an open window…When it was cool enough to handle, I picked it up and examined it…Neatly imprinted on it were the words “Made in Britain”’. (7)

That the British Empire was a cruel colonizer is well known but it seems to have enjoyed better relations in the Middle East. The explanation can be long and convoluted but, put simply, it was due to oil. Britain had established oil supplies in Iraq and Iran during the 1920’s and 30’s, having discovered oil in Iran in 1908. 'Iranian popular opposition to the ... royalty terms [where Iran received only 16% of the profits] was widespread and created political discontent throughout the country' (5). In 1921 Britain gave two thirds of the Holy Land to Jordan in order to protect British interests and the British oil pipeline that ran through it. The action pacified the Arabs alarmed by the arrival of Jewish settlers from Europe. In the remaining land west of the Jordan River, Al Husseini incited violence against the Jews and in 1921, Britain made him grand mufti of Jerusalem in the hope of calming him down. Instead, it made him more violent and, as the official leader of Muslim Arabs he later moved to Berlin to assist Hitler in carrying out the Holocaust. In BiH he formed three SS divisions of Muslim soldiers who committed atrocities against Jews and Serbs, and attracted the ire of Tito.

So, go to Sarajevo and stand in the footsteps of Gavrilo Princip, but don't blame him for starting World War 1. As Tito said: foreign land we don't want, our land we don't give.

1. Balkan Essays of Hubert Butler. The Irish Pages Press 2016

2. The Serbs by Tim Judah

3. Conflict in the Balkans by Malcolm Booker. Catalyst Press Sydney 1994.

4. Good People in an Evil Time by Svetlana Broz. Other Press, New York 2004. 

5. The Discovery of Oil in the Middle East | World History

6.  Rural Women in Croatia/Slavonia in 1900 Elinor MURRAY DESPALATOVIC   14421755.pdf 

7. The Key to the Middle East by Derek Prince. Thomas Nelson 1982. 

A Slave in My Family

 

Creative commons, author unknown

U tom stubu, kaže se, ima velika soba, mračna dvorana u kojoj živi crni Arapin.

In this pillar, it is said, there is a large room, a dark hall in which lives the black Arab.

from 'The Bridge on the Drina' by Ivo Andrić

Nobel Prize for Literature 1961

Ivo Andrić was a Bosnian Serb who wrote his prize-winning novel about the 16th century Turkish Bridge spanning the River Drina at Višegrad. From the moment I read it I needed to know, who was the mysterious Arab that lurked within a stone bridge and what was he doing in Bosnia? 

Amin al-Husseini, an Arab born in Jerusalem, was indicted for war crimes in Bosnia by the post-war Yugoslav government, but it wasn't him. Modern Arabs travel to Bosnia to reach a Muslim haven in the heart of Europe, but it's not them. Ivo Andrić's Black Arab was not even an Arab, he was African.

The knowledge that Africans may have lived in the Balkans snuck into my life the back way and like many alternative routes began with a subjective decision. 

I had my DNA tested. 

What a wealth of suffering that simple sentence has revealed! 

The genetic testing company 23andMe provided my DNA results in Confidence Levels on its Chromosome Painting page. The 50% Confidence Level is termed Speculative. (This is the one you see when you open the email.) At this level I have 0.3% Congolese and SE African genes. On the chromosomes themselves this is demonstrated by a tiny splodge of pink on chromosomes 2 and 3. At 60% Confidence the same splodges change to 0.3% Broadly Sub Saharan African. At 70, 80 and 90% confidence the splodges are still there but now they fall into a group termed ‘unassigned.’

0.3% is about one part in 250 or a 6X great grandparent. My great great grandfather Martin Mikatović was born in Tar in 1822, a village in the region of Istria in modern Croatia. A 2X great grandfather gives me 1/16 of my genes. A 6X great grandfather gives me 1/256 or 0.39%.

But which year is this?

Allowing 20 – 30 years per generation gives us 80 – 120 years before Martin's birth. My African relative, therefore, was most likely born between 1702 and 1742. That is a little over a century after the Mayflower sailed to America and Oliver Cromwell decapitated Charles 1. 

Not that long ago. 

If you were African in the 18th century and your DNA has turned up in a person whose ancestors came from a country within the Turkish Ottoman Empire, then you were a slave. And not a Pliny-the-Younger-type-well-looked-after-slave either. The Arabs sold black and white slaves but the black ones were on the lower rung and, like their brothers in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, frequently died as a result of cruel treatment. 'Some 10,000 slaves, black and white, were brought into the Ottoman Empire every year' and my relative most likely came from Kenya, Nigeria, Zanzibar or Sudan (1). In the mid-18th century, the demand for specifically black African slaves increased. (4)

The famous Turkish cotton industry required African slaves, and their descendants live in Turkey to this day. There they 'are often called “Arabs”... they also refer to themselves as Arabs...[and] this has led to a situation in which “Arab” means “black.” (1) 

It is significant then that a little less than one eighth of my family came from Montenegro, a country that had belonged to the Ottoman Empire for most of the 1500’s and 1600’s and was semi-autonomous until its liberation in 1878. In addition, I have the same amount of Greek Anatolian genes as I do African. Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire and it is an easy leap to say that in those days a country like Bosnia, that was also incorporated within the Ottoman's vast domain, might have seen African slaves, although it wouldn’t have been the peasants who owned them. The Ottoman Empire collapsed a few years after World War 1, having expanded, declined and fragmented over its 600-year history and made very few friends in Europe during that time.

The history of humanity is the history of slavery, and I use a literary device when I say that ‘for over a millennium’ there was a thriving Arab slave trade in the East that sold men, women and children to the Ottomans and any others with the money to pay, including Europeans. This reign of misery was certainly longer than a thousand years and it is probably not known exactly when the Arab slave trade started although most sources link it with the rapid spread of Islam from the seventh century. In a true human spirit of self-justification, arguments rage on the internet about which slavery was worse, European or Arab. No question here. All slavery is an obscenity or, in the words of the great Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, ‘I don’t buy and sell human beings.’

Novigrad 2018 M Walker

 

‘See that wall? That’s to keep the Turks out.’ 

So said Silvana, my birth mother, pointing at my photograph of the 6m high Venetian wall in the port of Novigrad in Istria. 

She was born in nearby Tar in 1920, two years before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, near enough historically to grow up with stories of marauding Turkish pirates. ‘Slaves [were] brought by pirates’ (3). Silvana called them Turks but history calls them the Barbary Pirates and they worked for the Ottomans around the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. 

Silvana's family name, Mikatović, means the son of Saint Michael and is derived from the Greek for the Archangel Michael, Michali Taxiarhis, or Michael the Brigadier. The earliest reference to the name Mikatović I have been able to find was about 1720 in the Poreč area near Tar but there may easily be earlier ones. The church books from the seventeenth century that are displayed on FamilySearch.com are written with thick quills and ink in abbreviated Latin and, if I am in the wrong mood, scrolling through a hundred pages defeats me. 

I ought to try harder.

Politicians like Mussolini who tried to divide these old regions into modern political entities and to impose a single national language on them forgot that the residents had long memories. Greek, Turkish, Slavic, Austrian and Italian eras intermingle and are remembered in place names, family names and local dialects. As Silvana said to me, 'you only speak the same because you have television and radio. We didn't have any of that.' 

A case could easily be mounted that my African relative was a woman. More women were deprived of their freedom in the East than men whereas the reverse was true in the West (2). Perhaps she was a beautiful black concubine in an Istanbul harem or a nursemaid to a wealthy Turk. Perhaps she was a spinster, endlessly spinning cotton thread to weave the sails of the Ottoman fleet.

Although I am adopted, I have a lot of information about my birth family which helps makes sense of my genes but, having said that, a chronological issue remains. The academic papers relating to the settlement of Tar, my family’s village, state that the area was settled from Venice’s possessions in the south in the late 1500’s and 1600's, not the early 1700's when my African relative was born. These emigrants were mostly Slavs but not always. A whole range of ethnic groups from the south needed to escape from the marauding Turks at this time and Venice wanted to repopulate Istria which had been ravaged by the plague. 

How do I feel about all this?

I am inspired to compose the Romantic Version. That's how I feel.  

Around the year 1700 a baby girl called Mercy was born to a couple in Kenya. The baby was black and very beautiful and, as she grew towards young womanhood, she attracted attention wherever she went.

Mercy's village was close to the Indian Ocean and one tragic day when she was only twelve she was playing on the beach with other children when she caught the attention of a pirate ship. They captured Mercy, placed her aboard their reeking vessel and sailed her first to an Arab slave market in Aden, Yemen. From here she was transported to Cairo in Egypt in the belief that as a concubine she would fetch a high price. 

However, the ill treatment and privations of the voyage took a heavy toll on her beauty, and she was purchased instead by a Turkish cotton grower. He set her to work in his fields near the Anatolian coast irrigating the cotton in the hot summer months and harvesting the fluffy pods as they matured in the late autumn.

Separated from everything she loved, Mercy began to die of grief.

One day, the cotton grower looked at the beautiful girl properly for the first time and, moved by a strange compassion, asked her why she looked so sad. Mercy could not speak his language and was unable to reply but, seeing that she had dexterous hands and fine fingers, the cotton grower removed her from the harsh fields and brought her into the long rooms where dozens of women sat all day spinning thread on drop spindles.

Their kindness and affection nursed Mercy's wounded spirit and she did not die, yet death remained present in her eyes for she could see no other way to be restored to her family and her culture. She often dreamed that she would die, in the same way that other people look forward to a joyful event.

After several years, the owner's son chanced to visit the spinning rooms bringing with him his Greek friend Dimitri. At this time Turkey was a multi-ethnic country and many Greeks lived there. Dimitri saw the beautiful girl spinning her everlasting cotton thread. Mercy lifted her head and their eyes met.

Dimitri was smitten and that night he could not sleep. His heart pleaded for the opportunity to look upon Mercy a second time. His soul begged him to free her. 

But haggling over a price with the cotton grower was no easy matter and Dimitri, being a Christian in a Muslim state, did not have much money. However, that night the cotton grower had a dream in which he saw Dimitri and Mercy standing together with an angel by their side. He placed great store by dreams and was persuaded to agree on a lower price that was within Dimitri's limited means.

By now Mercy was sixteen, the age at which most girls married. When Dimitri explained that he wished to marry a black girl who had been a slave on a cotton farm, Dimitri's father was too shocked to reply. Dimitri remained defiant and, as he was over twenty-one, little could be done to stop the marriage. Nor would Dimitri lose his inheritance because Greeks who had not 'turned Turk', as converting to Islam was then called, were very poor.

In desperation, Dimitri's father paid a visit to the Turkish cotton grower who, realizing that he'd been manipulated out of a valuable slave by his own wayward emotions, was furious. He chased Dimitri and Mercy across the sea to the powerful city-state of Dubrovnik. He should have known better because not only were the magistrates of Dubrovnik rich they were also men-of-the-world and had managed alone out of all the countries in the Balkans to successfully bargain with the Ottomans to retain their independence. They simply stone-walled the unfortunate cotton-grower who left for his farm in a high temper vowing never to pay attention to his dreams again.

However, the Great Earthquake of 1667 had flattened the noble streets of Dubrovnik taking much of its fine architecture with it and, in the year of Mercy's birth, the city's magistrates had granted to the Ottomans a piece of coastal land only twenty kilometres to the north. By this means the Empire of Venice, that had for a long time looked on Dubrovnik with greedy eyes, would be forced to defeat the Ottomans before attempting to take it over in its weakened state. This was a very astute move by the magistrates, effectively guarding their city as it was being rebuilt, while simultaneously placating the Turks and frustrating the Venetians. Today the land still belongs to Bosnia. 

And so, amidst the scaffolding, Dimitri and Mercy were married, but they did not feel safe in Dubrovnik with the Ottomans a mere twenty kilometres away. They decided to migrate further north to the Istrian peninsula. This was an area of great ethnic diversity and considerable Greek influence. Here Dimitri met the influential Mikatović family who over a century before had travelled north from Montenegro, another country with a strong Greek background. He noticed immediately that they had a Greek/Slavic name. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship and intermarriage between two families.

Sources and extra resources 

(1)    Turks with African ancestors want their existence to be felt (archive.org)

(2)   The Arab slave trade (ourhistory.org.uk)

(3)    Memory of Vanished African Community Lingers in Montenegrin Town | Balkan Insight

(4)    Only Memories and Emptiness Remain: The History of Ulcinj’s Afro-Albanian Community in Montenegro - Lefteast

(5)    The story of the black African families who lived in Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina - Face2Face Africa

(6)   39321 LES CIUTATS MEDITERRANIES.indb (iec.cat)

VINČA, Serbia - Europe's First Civilization

 

Link to my prehistory blog.

VINČA, Serbia - Europe's First Civilization (myprehistory.blogspot.com)

The Anguish of the Jews -- book review and reflections

‘The charge is pressed that the Zionist enemy has stolen Arab land, that they are duplicates of the Nazis and that their intent against Arabs is genocidal…A ubiquitous myth has taken root: an alien people (the Jews) have expelled an indigenous people (the Arabs) from their homes, forcing them to fester in poverty on the borders of their own homeland. The myth, incredibly, has been swallowed whole by many otherwise intelligent and fair-minded people without the least effort to verify any part of it…There are many who attribute Arab antisemitism exclusively to the present Arab-Israeli conflict. Actually, its roots run much deeper, going back through Arab and Islamic history to the Koran itself from which a twofold principle can be distilled: that the dhimmis (Jews and Christians) are not to dominate Muslims but be dominated by them, and that they are to be kept in a degraded state.’

Edward Flannery, the Anguish of the Jews, 1965.

If I said that this work was a resource to every expression of antisemitism in history, I would not be far from the truth. Its research is exhaustive and gives some understanding of why antisemitism seems to be the default setting of every age. I have added it to my blog War in the Balkans because of the Holocaust of the Jews in Croatia and Serbia during World War 2, and I will ask the question: to what extent can antisemitism be held accountable for the world’s response to the present Israeli Hamas conflict?

Edward Flannery was an American Catholic priest who published the work in 1965. On the subject of antisemitism, he doesn’t mince words. ‘The vast majority of Christians…are all but totally ignorant of…the immense suffering of Jews throughout the Christian era... because the antisemitic record does not appear in history books.’

I am a Christian and it grieves me to read that antisemitism, although present in ancient Rome and Ptolemaic Egypt (Maccabees 1 and 2), was cemented throughout the fourth century of the Christian era and into the early fifth century. It stemmed from ‘the full flowering of that theology which laid Jewish miseries to divine punishment to Christ’s crucifixion’. Neglecting St Paul’s exposition on God’s election and salvation of Israel in Romans 9 -11, the church fathers ‘turned upon the synagogue with the greatest vigour’. Indeed, the language of St John Chrysostom against the Jews reminds one of Hitler. Only St Augustine was faithful to St Paul. ‘Christians,’ he wrote, ‘have a duty to love Jews and to lead them to Christ,’ but ‘he is at the same time at a loss to understand their unbelief, this animosity towards Christians, and their unending misfortunes.’

During this same century, the centre of the Talmud was established in Babylonia and ‘It was forgotten or ignored that the Jewish dispersion began many centuries before Christ and that Palestine was never completely emptied of Jews.’

At this time, violence was perpetrated by both sides and some countries showed less tolerance than others. In Rome Pope Gregory the Great (540-604) respected the legal rights of Jews and ‘the Pauline teaching of special affection for Israel’. Under the Emperor Justinian (483-565), however, who reigned from Constantinople, rules restricting Jewish life were passed with liberality: what Jews could own, where they could be seen, the professions from which they were barred, where synagogues could be open or closed and where Judaism was outlawed.

From 1096, matters deteriorated in Germany, France, Austria and England, as the first Crusaders, eager to free the Holy Land from the Muslims, turned first upon European Jews. In what the author refers to as the ‘the superstitious zealotry of the mob’, Jews were offered baptism or death, and thus many were slaughtered. ‘From January to July of 1096 it is estimated that up to 10,000 died, probably one fourth to one third of the Jewish population of Germany and Northern France at that time.’ Once the Crusaders arrived in the Holy Land, the slaughter continued. ‘In 1099 at journey’s end in Jerusalem the soldiers of Godfrey de Bouillon found the Jews assembled in a synagogue and set it ablaze.’

With the onslaught of the Second Crusade in 1147, St Bernard was forced to condemn further antisemitism in Europe by again recalling St Paul. “Who is this man that he should make out [St Paul] to be a liar and render void the treasure of Christ’s love and pity?” In 1272 following incidences in the Rhineland and Bavaria, Pope Gregory X forbade forced baptisms and violence. Many Jews migrated to Palestine and, of those who remained, 100,000 throughout Germany and Austria were killed by mobs stirred up by noblemen.

The development of the Jews as usurers and money lenders was an outcome of the laws restricting their lives, and brought its own resentment from Christians. ‘By the end of the thirteenth century, Jews were expelled from France, England and most of Germany. In almost all cases, the expulsions found the origin in the business of usury.’ Yet the list of things they were accused of is a tribute to the Mediaeval imagination and the zealous peasant jumped at any excuse for murder and for the widespread burning of the Talmud. Jews were even blamed for the Black Death (1347-50). ‘Apparently, no enormity was too great to lay at the door of the Jews.’ In a chilling foretaste of the twentieth century, ‘the massacres were greatest in Germany’ and ‘by the end of the fifteenth century no more than three or four German cities still harboured a Jewish population… Most left Germany for Poland or Lithuania.’ Upon their failure to accept his teaching, Martin Luther also turned his fury against the Jews the following century.

Popes and Christian leaders condemned the atrocities. In 1418 Martin V ‘issued a decree which guaranteed protection [for the Jews] of their lives, rites, privileges and festivals [and] forbade forced baptism.’ St Bernadinus of Sienna (1380-1444) wrote, “As to the Jews, I say here what I say elsewhere: no one who has concern for his soul can injure the Jews, whether it be their persons or their faculties, or in any other way, for even to Jews, Christian piety and love must be shown since they possess a human nature.”

Only in Rome were the Jews never persecuted from the fall of the Western Empire until the close of the sixteenth century. ‘Jewish-Christian relations were intimate’ even to permitting intermarriage. Northern Italy had ample wealth and plenty of Christian usurers without them and they mostly benefitted from the friendliness of the Popes.

Until the end of the fourteenth century Jews also flourished in Spain, when the power and wealth attained by a few and their relationships with the royal family eventually provoked a downward spiral of resentment and persecution. 50,000 perished in a single massacre and worse was to come. In the wake of the Reconquista came an intense desire to strengthen the Christian state, and a conversion campaign was aimed at the Jews. Antisemitism against both Jews and converted Jews increased over the course of the fifteenth century and contained a strong racist element. However, the biggest problem was the ‘compromisers’, those Jews who by nominally accepting Christianity grew to power and wealth by having, as it is said, a foot in both camps.

Enter the Spanish Inquisition.

‘In 1479…Ferdinand and Isabella untied the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon’ and in 1483 the ‘fanatical Torquemada was appointed Inquisitor General.’ He was the most brutal and the most feared inquisitor and his job was to ‘ferret out’ Jews. Beginning with the dodgy converts, he continued to all the other Jews in Spain. ‘In 1492 the monarchs issued the fatal decree. All Jews must leave the realm by July 30th under penalty of death’. 300,00 departed.

Writing in the twelfth century, Peter Abelard nevertheless sums up the entire Middle Ages. ‘To believe that the fortitude of the Jews in suffering would be unrewarded was to declare that God was cruel. No nation has ever suffered so much for God.’

The Age of the Jewish Ghetto in Europe commenced in the seventeenth century and many Jews moved east to Palestine, the Balkans, Turkey or Poland where life was safer. However, a series of attacks upon Polish Jews by Russians, Cossaks and Swedes during one decade in the second half of the seventeenth century killed between 100,000 and 500,000 Jews and destroyed 700 Jewish communities. ‘With the exception of the Nazi period…the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries constituted the [lowest point] of post-Biblical Jewish history.’

In France, the Enlightenment and the change in ideas swept in by the French Revolution brought some measure of emancipation at the end of the eighteenth century, but the racist antisemitism present in Prussia is considered to be the beginnings of Nazi antisemitism. (Note the difference between religious antisemitism and racist antisemitism.) ‘From this point Germany became the undisputed cultural centre of antisemitism and the source of an endless stream of antisemitic books and pamphlets.’ The German-born Karl Marx is an example of a Jewish antisemite.

As religious faith [in Europe] declined… and the spirit of rationalism and scepticism rose, the need to justify the segregation [of the Jews] in purely secular terms grew…If the plight of the Jews did not stem from the crucifixion, it came from themselves, their ethnic make up; Jews, in a word, were innately perverse.’

Here begins a section marked ‘rationalistic antisemitism’ in which the French writer Voltaire stresses the rationalist grounds of his ‘utter contempt’ for the Jews and Judaism. ‘Jews are… “the most imbecile people on the face of the earth, enemies of mankind, a people most obtuse, cruel and absurd, whose history is disgusting and abominable.”’ His ideas were echoed by the German philosophers Fichte, Hegel, Herder, Schleiermacher and Harnack, and studied later by Hitler.

Under the final two Czars, government-approved pogroms against Russian Jews shocked the world and led to the immigration of over a million. Not content with this, Russia published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a piece of badly-written nonsense blaming the Jews for every crime in the universe. Nevertheless, it was well-received and translated into the major European languages and Arabic. ‘When otherwise brilliant minds are so deceived and…even after irrefragable disproof, persist in believing, we are at grips with a collective psychosis, with a will to hate and destroy well beyond the pale of human rationality…a secularized diabolism.’

Thus ended the nineteenth century and we all know what happened in the twentieth.

 

A REFLECTION ON THE OCTOBER 7th ATTACKS ON ISRAEL AND THE PRESENT CONFLICT IN GAZA

In the middle of January 2024, I witnessed Marxist groups outside Newtown railway station in Sydney ardently collecting pro-Palestinian signatures. As there has always a Jewish presence in Palestine, why not collect pro-Israeli signatures, I wondered. It is antisemitism that governs the choice. Why do the Federal Greens refuse to condemn the Hamas attacks of October 7th? Why is the NSW Teachers Federation openly pro-Palestinian? Why does Sydney’s art and literary scene consider it appropriate to simplify the present complex situation in Palestine to Israeli attacks on Gazan children? Why are the two sides unequally reported in the media?

Because ‘hatred of Jews [is] a serious social and ethical problem,’ concludes Edward Flannery, and the Australians referred to above are following the tradition of mob mentality outlined in his book. History has established a culture in which it is acceptable to disbelieve Jews.

As an example, regarding the brutal Hamas rapes of Israeli women on October 7th 2023, ‘bone-chilling horrors – such as repeated gang rapes that were so brutal they left women and girls with broken pelvises and mutilated genitals’, I quote from Human rights groups’ hypocrisy on Hamas rape - opinion - The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com) 25th December 2023.

‘Amnesty International so far has issued 29 press releases entirely or mostly about Gaza since October 7. They, too, have been filled with baseless allegations about Israeli murders, “apartheid,” and the like. To this day, Amnesty still has not issued any statement about the Hamas rapes.’

And another article from Microsoft Why are feminists silent on Hamas's use of rape as a weapon of war? (msn.com) 20th January 2024.

‘The denial of widespread, preplanned mass rape and sexual violence on October 7 must therefore be treated with the same revulsion as Holocaust denial. Hamas has denied that the rapes occurred, despite overwhelming evidence. Speak up, an Egypt-based feminist initiative, inconceivably has launched a campaign to discredit Israeli victims, with coalition groups joining across the Middle East and a letter condemning The New York Times investigation into sexual violence by Hamas. Speak up boasts over 68,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter), and 250,000 Facebook members. Turkish public broadcasting has published an article claiming to debunk “outlandish Israeli claims of rape.” Unbelievably, their efforts have found sympathetic ears in Western academia…Ingrained antisemitism on the extreme Left leads to this moral failure.’

How else can we explain it?

Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. ‘He and the Israeli leaders Peres and Rabin received the Peace Prize for having opted for the olive branch by signing the so-called Oslo Accords in Washington. The agreement was aimed at reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.’ Yasser Arafat – Facts - NobelPrize.org

How quickly we forget.