H.D.S Greenway’s Hallucinatory Flashback
In a piece entitled “Flashbacks of a Lost Cause” (July 17, 2007), Boston Globe columnist H.D.S. Greenway recounts the history of British entanglement in Mandate Palestine’s “civil war” as follows:
First came the Arab revolt of 1936-1939, which was marked by cruelty and torture of Arab prisoners – including simulated drowning. Later on, even before the end of World War II, came terror from the Zionist side.
Greenway has made a career out of condemning Israel, often by touching up or ignoring facts. But even by Greenway’s standards, this rendering of history, which portrays Arabs only as victims and Jews only as aggressors, is outrageous.
First of all, the Arab revolt of 1936-39 was neither the “first” conflict between Arab and Jew nor the first clash between Arabs and British authorities in Palestine. In 1929, for example, Arab rioters stirred up by the anti-British and anti-Jewish Mufti of Jerusalem massacred 133 Jews across the land. In its effort to stop the pogrom, the British police killed 110 Arabs rioters.
In describing the Arab revolt of 1936-39 as being “marked by cruelty and torture of Arab prisoners,” Greenway again ignores Arab acts of violence. Perhaps the “simulated drowning” of Arab prisoners, perpetrated by the British authorities, is worth mentioning. But what about the Aug. 13, 1936 bombing of a Jewish home that killed a Jewish father and his three children; or the Aug. 17 attack that killed two Jewish nurses and a young Jewish girl; or the Sept. 19 bombing that killed a 7-year-old Jewish child; or the bomb attack on a Jewish school that injured 9 children; or any of the other Arab attacks that claimed 80 Jewish lives in the spring and summer of 1936 alone?
In light of these attacks, and other Arab attacks that claimed the lives of British policemen, why does Greenway only specifically name “the Zionist side” as being guilty of terror?
(A minority of Jewish extremists did commit acts of terror, which were condemned by the mainstream Jewish leadership.)
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