None Too Sharp

One of the more interesting anti-Israel bloggers I’ve come across in my scrounging in the back-alleys of the internet is a fellow named Ellis Sharp. He claims to be a “radical novelist” (indeed, I’ve encountered some of his books on amazon.com) and he operates a handful of blogs, in particular, The Sharp Side. Sharp’s Marxist ideology influences his perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As one can expect, he adopts the Arab narrative. Rarely have I come across “commentary” as shrill as his. In fact, he makes most other anti-Israel bloggers look like Likudniks.

One tic noticeable throughout his comments is the rather hysterical use of adjectives. For instance, he often refers to Israel as a “racist”, “sectarian”, "bellicose", "colonialist" state state established by “violent” Jews. His views on the status of the Jewish homeland can be summed up in this article, in which he excoriates Harold Pinter (of all people) and other left-leaning Jews for suggesting that Hamas recognise Israel’s right to exist:

This links up with a letter signed by prominent British Jewish artists and intellectuals, including Harold Pinter, which appeared in the Guardian on July 10. Most of it was unexceptional stuff, calling for “imaginative understanding of the hopes and fears of both sides.” But one demand placed on Hamas by Pinter and his co-signatories was “recognition of Israel.”

Now of course in one obvious sense Israel exists. But as anti-Zionist bloggers have repeatedly asked: which Israel is to be recognised? The Israel defined by the United Nations in 1948, which handed over land held by a majority Arab population to European Jews? The Israel of 1949, when the first major phase of ethnic cleansing had been completed, and Palestinians had not only been driven out of the U.N.’s defined Jewish state but a huge area of land on top of that? Or should it be Israel in 1967, when within Israel yet more ethnic cleansing had been surreptitiously carried out, and when the rest of historic Palestine was occupied? Or Israel in 2006, which has flouted innumerable UN resolutions and grabbed even more occupied land from the Palestinians? Israel 2006, presumably.

I’m not sure what Sharp means by Israel conquering a “huge” area of land (or "phases" of "ethnic cleansing"), but, then again, he is not above hyperbole. In Sharp's account, the 1948 war was nothing more than a straightforward campaign of ethnic cleansing against peaceful Palestinian communities by racist Jewish hordes. The invasion of the reborn Jewish state in 1948 by five Arab armies (the cause of the Arab refugee crisis) and any mention of Arab violence against Jews in the region are conspicuously absent from his account. He also forgets that "historic Palestine" originally included the country now referred to as Jordan (and most of what was left of the Mandate was state land that passed from the Ottomans to the British; it was not "held by a majority Arab population", as I have shown elsewhere).
It’s a little odd, for a person so apparently intelligent, to ignore such crucial historical facts in favour of, not a nuanced version of events, but a totally black-and-white villains vs. victims narrative. Palestinians are cast as the ideal Victim – not accountable at all for their own misdeeds (Sharp often goes out of his way to justify Palestinian terrorism) – while Israelis are the ideal Villain – militaristic, religious, racist, colonialist, aided and abetted by the “imperial powers” of the USA and Britain (indeed any doctrinaire Marxist’s idea of a villain).

As far as Sharp is concerned the Jews just barged their way into Palestine for little reason except to establish a “racist”, “sectarian” theocracy at the expense of the Arabs who lived there. The only Jewish settlers Sharp mentions on his blog are those from Europe and America – subtly suggesting the “colonial” or “imperialistic” nature of the Zionist enterprise (roughly half of Israel’s population are Jews from the Middle East, Asia and Africa). Sharp seems oblivious to the suggestion that Jews may have resettled in the Levant because they, as descendents of the scattered original inhabitants of that land, were seeking to reclaim it. He parrots Arab propaganda talking points almost exactly: the Jewish settlers (or modern Israelis) in Palestine/Israel have no connection whatsoever with the Middle East (which puts them in contrast to the “indigenous” Palestinians - indeed, Sharp emphasises the "indigeneity" of the Palestinians ad nauseum) and that if Jews from Europe have no connection with the Middle East, their arrival must have been solely religiously motivated (and religious nationalism is a no-no, hence the epithet “sectarian” when applied to Israeli Jews, despite the fact that the majority of the early Zionists, as well as most modern Israelis, are secular). His perspective of Israeli Jews as nothing more than foreigners can be best summed up in his article on Ankie and Andre Sprinkler.

But neither Spitzer nor her husband were born in Israel, or had any prior connections with the Middle East. Andre Spitzer was originally from Romania. Ankie was Dutch. They emigrated to Israel (Spitzer as an 11 year old with his mother, Ankie with her adult husband) under the sectarian privileges accorded to Jews by the so-called ‘Law of Return’. Any Jew anywhere in the world has the “right” to supposedly “return” to a place they have never been, while the indigenous Arab population, expelled in huge numbers in 1948 [Evan: Um, no they were not], has no right of return at all, and to this day rots in squalid refugee camps in Lebanon and other states bordering Israel. What does Ankie Spitzer think about that pitiless [Evan: ooooooh] injustice? Does she think it wrong that she enjoys her racist and sectarian privileges at the expense of Arabs? We don’t know because no one thinks to ask her. Questions like this lie outside the Orientalist frame of discourse. Israelis are victims and innocent; Arabs are aggressors and guilty.

The quoted text above is also indicative of Sharp's own fancified history of Israel and Palestine. He takes liberties with the record, reimagining situations and contorting history to suit his chosen narrative of Israeli evil-doing. In the above article, for instance, he takes issue with some of the terminology used by the Jewish settlers in question:

...Those “roving bandits”, for example. They wouldn’t by any chance be dispossessed Palestinian Arabs violently expelled from their homeland by Jewish racists? And that enigmatic “group of derelict buildings”. Not by any chance one of the innumerable Arab villages and homes ethnically cleansed in 1948?

Of course, this is all guesswork. It is doubtful that Sharp knows exactly who the bandits or what the buildings were, but he nonetheless makes the brazen assumption that the former were "violently [so that we don't forget] expelled" Palestinians and that the latter were part of an ethnically cleansed village (and no, they were not "innumerable").
Also in fantasy mode, he makes the following "observation" in a poisonous screed against the Israeli Holocaust survivor-novelist Aharon Appelfeld:

And of course it is almost never remembered that one-third of the Zionist army in 1948 comprised Holocaust survivors. The Holocaust survivor as a racist thug, a murderer or a rapist, is not a figure you will ever encounter in Western constructions of the Jewish identity or historical experience."

It's a figure one doesn't encounter because it's a figment of Sharp's overheated imagination. In fact, it is common knowledge that Holocaust survivors made up a significant portion of Israel's army in 1948: many were literally fresh off the boat and found themselves fighting for their lives against Arab armies bent on genocide. Sharp's blanket characterisation of them as evil aggressors is tantamount to libel.

Once more, in his vile attack on Amos Oz, he even seems to rejects the notion of “the Land of Israel”:

For a flavour of Amos Oz’s rhetorical strategies I recommend Chapter 39 of his acclaimed memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness. It’s in the biography section of most corporate bookstores and you can stand there and read it for yourself in a couple of minutes or so (pp. 293-5).

It begins with a lyrical landscape description, which includes “the smell of the Land of Israel from time immemorial”. (An impressive odour, for a state which has only existed for 58 years.)

Is he serious?

Sharp doesn’t want his villain-victim dichotomy blurred, so he ignores the historical persecution of Jews (and how this would have influenced the desire for a Jewish homeland). See, if Jews are to be portrayed as evil-evil, their cause cannot in the slightest way appear just (hence his unwillingness to even concede that there had been a Land of Israel). It is this in this vacuum that Ellis Sharp spouts his invective.
He blasts Israelis for enjoying a "racist", "sectarian" privelege by living in the region's most ethnically and religiously diverse country. He often slanders prominent Zionist Jews, comparing them with Nazis, and attempts to "expose" Israeli authors who do not acknowledge their country's supposed heritage of ethnic cleansing as little better than Nazi propagandists and Holocaust-deniers. Hence Amos Oz and David Grossman, two prominent left-wing Israeli authors are compared to Goebbels and David Irving respectively.
He has also likened Zionism’s founder, Theodore Herzl, to Hitler - claiming that he "laid out his dream of expelling the Arabs just as explicitly as Hitler set out his desire to exterminate Jews". Sharp undoubtedly has in mind a particular entry in Herzl's diary; an entry that, once taken out of context, has been interpreted by Israel-haters like himself as being a rationale for ethnic cleasning. However, as David Meir-Levi wrote in response to another writer, Herzl intended nothing of the sort:

2. “Theodor Herzl suggested to spirit away the Arabs”: Odd that she equates Herzl’s one diary entry with an entire Zionist plot. Herzl did muse about this possibility - a peaceful relocation of Arabs into Transjordan onto land the Zionists would buy from them. But that is as far as his idea got - a momentary musing in his diary. He never brought this idea to the Zionist leadership, nor did it ever appear in any Zionist agenda. Far from being any sort of “Zionist plot” to ethnically cleanse the Holy Land of its Arab inhabitants, this reference in his diary demonstrates exactly the opposite. If the single most influential leader of the 19th and early 20th centuries’ Zionist movement did not bring this momentary musing to his followers, it is because either he himself rejected it or he knew his Zionist followers would. In short, there was never any Zionist plot to dislocate and/or relocate Arabs.

In short, Sharp's comparison of Herzl to Hitler only serves to highlight his shameful ignorance of the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict. In his Appelfeld piece, Sharp seems to think Herzl's desire to modernise Jerusalem (as jotted down in his diary) entailed "[getting] rid of the dirty Arabs":

The musty deposits of two thousand years of inhumanity, intolerance, and uncleanliness lie in the foul-smelling alleys… If we ever get Jerusalem and if I am still able to do anything actively at that time, I would begin by cleaning it up. I would clear out everything that is not something sacred, set up workers’ homes outside the city, empty the nests of filth and tear them down, burn the secular ruins and transfer the bazaars elsewhere.

A more detailed selection of Herzl's diary entries on Jerusalem can be found here. The image one receives is of a man upset at the squalor of a purportedly great city. While one can accuse Herzl of cultural chauvenism, it would take a leap of imagination to claim, from reading this passage in which he derides the dirt and destitution has has witnessed (he has some unflattering things to say about the Wailing Wall too), that he wants to rid Jerusalem of "the dirty Arabs". Furthermore, it appears Sharp has fallen into the trap of thinking that Palestine prior to the Zionists' arrival was exclusively Arab. What he probably doesn't know is that Jews made up a majority of Jerusalem's population in the 1890s, and were the majority up until the 1948, when the Old City was cleansed of its Jewish population by the Jordanians. One wonders what Sharp thinks of this "pitiless injustice"?

Finally, in a bizarre review of Stephen Spielberg’s film Munich (a sickening piece of moral equivalence in which he reimagines the 1972 hostage-taking, Israeli's response the the production of the film taking place in a "parallel universe"), he delights in the opportunity to compare Israel with Nazi Germany, Jews to Aryans and Palestinian terrorists to Jewish activists - despite the fact that nothing remotely like Jews taking German athletes hostage ever happened (and that it didn't happen should give pause). Sharp may argue otherwise, but this is hate-mongering bordering on anti-Semitism.

Is Ellis Sharp unaware that Zionism – far from the religious, white-supremacist ideology he portrays in his comments – is a national liberation movement similar in many ways to the third-world national liberation movements he would no doubt support? Yet his blog entries rest on the assumption that the Jews are not a “people” in the way the Palestinians are, and hence cannot have nationalism. Or perhaps Sharp just needs a “colonialist state” to demonise, and has adapted the Jewish state to that role.

Unlike Sharp, I am leaving my comments box open. Feel free to share your thoughts.

UPDATE (3 August 2006): In a recent post, Sharp casually links Israeli measures in Gaza and Lebanon with Nazism, invoking the Arab propaganda myth that Zionism and Nazism were in support of one another:

Instead of a prisoner exchange, the infrastructure of Gaza was levelled – quite simply, a war crime – and some 140 Palestinians have now been slaughtered. The state best known for committing these kinds of atrocities against civilians in retaliation for attacks on its soldiers was, of course, the Third Reich. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that back in 1933 Hitler’s regime was sympathetic to Zionism: Anton La Guardia in his book Holy Land, Unholy War [2002] mentions that long forgotten piece of Nazi memorabilia “a special commemorative medallion with a swastika on one side and the Star of David on the other”. (p. 163)

This is a crude attempt to equate Israel with Nazi Germany. Here again, Sharp takes facts out of context to misrepresent history. He implies that two racist regimes were hand-in-glove from the start. But the truth is, the Nazis wanted the Jews out of Germany, and Zionists in Palestine were willing to welcome Jewish refugees (i.e. Zionism "collaborated" with the Nazis in the context of saving Jews from persecution).

As for the medal Sharp mentions, J Boas in his book German-Jewish Internal Politics under Hitler 1933-1938 puts it in its proper historical context:

Two trump cards held by Zionism facilitated its rapid rise. One was Palestine; the other was the "most-favoured-nation treatment" accorded it by a Nazi officialdom appreciative of its unsparing efforts on behalf of Jewish emigration 85 . Of the 138,000 Jews who had left Germany by the summer of 1938, 38,000 had opted for Palestine, the majority with the indirect assistance of the Haavara (Transfer Agreement), the special arrangement worked out in August 1933 between Nazi Germany and the agencies of World Zionism. (The agreement permitted Jews who wished to leave Germany for Palestine to transfer their money in German goods, thus circumventing the prevailing restrictions on the export of capital; they were to be reimbursed in British pounds upon arrival in Palestine 86 .) The idea of a national home for Jews in the Middle East was bound to appeal to a certain type of Nazi-"idealists", scrupulous constructionists of National Socialist glosses on Volk and Raum , who were wont to identify with the national aspirations of the Jewish people 87 . Well aware of this particular current in Nazi thought, the ZVfD in the spring of 1933 commissioned Kurt Tuchler, a member of the Juedische Volkspartei on the Berlin Executive, to fire the imagination of such broad-minded Nazis for the Jewish enterprise in Palestine. Tuchler found an interested party in Baron Leopold Itz von Mildenstein, the Judenreferent in the S.S.; and later that spring the two men, accompanied by their wives, embarked on their Palestinian jaunt. Upon his return the Baron, who also dabbled in journalism, persuaded the editors of Der Angriff, Goebbels's newspaper, to devote a series of illustrated articles to this curious fact-finding journey. Having learned a little Hebrew, von Mildenstein also brought back with him a collection of records from Palestine; to Tuchler's astonishment, strains of familiar Hebrew folk songs greeted him on entering the Baron's office in 1934. To commemorate the voyage of a Nazi to Palestine, Der Angriff even had a medal struck showing the Swastika on one side and the Star of David on the other 88
.

But Boas is careful to note the distinction between Nazism and Zionism:

Needless to say, German Zionism held no brief for National Socialism. If both agitated for a Jewish exodus from Germany, they did so for radically different reasons and purposes. It should hardly need repeating that Zionist principles differed from those of National Socialism as night differs from day. Zionism believed in the existence of different races, but not in the superiority of one race over another.Zionist nationalism, as elaborated by the ZVfD, harked back to an earlier period, the Mazzini-type conception of nationalism as a liberating force leading, ultimately, to the harmonious coexistence of all the world's peoples. And although Zionism, like National Socialism, repudiated individualism, rootlessness and decadence, unlike National Socialism it never lost sight of the individual human being independent of race. Nor did the sanctification of the soil as the mainspring of spiritual and national well-being, preclude Germany's Zionists from advocating the peaceful coexistence of Arab and Jew in a Palestinian bi-national state

On the other hand, the Palestinian Arabs (indeed much of the Arab world) have long been sympathetic to Nazism - the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini even played an active role in the Holocaust. Is Sharp aware of this, I wonder?

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