The Wicked Myth of Jewish Moral Superiority

When I initially considered writing this paper it was not my original intent to use the unusually strong term wicked in the title. Then I realized that without such a decisive adjective the title could give the wrong impression that perhaps only an intellectual error had been made about the supposed Jewish moral superiority over the supposed moral inferiority of Arabs. Therefore, I decided that my title needed to convey a message that was uniquely morally decisive. So it needed to convey a moral equivalent to such evil phenomena as needlessly sacrificing the lives of innocent children or needlessly killing innocent civilians or callously sending innocent young military men and women off to die in a needless war of choice and definitely not a necessary war.

When you explicitly force yourself to face the very unpleasant reality that it is virtually impossible for a woman or man to become an elected official in the U.S. government such as president, or vice president, congress person or senator, without publicly leaving the strong impression that the person believes that the Jewish citizens of Israel are morally superior to the morally inferior Palestinians or to Arabs in general. This is obviously a travesty of justice. Therefore, the fact that persons must publicly present themselves as decidedly pro Israel, has extensive and weighty moral implications. This is due to the harsh reality that it is no small matter that each and every U.S. political leader is forced by the extensive power of the Jewish lobby and its supporters. So the nation which has at its disposal the most awesome military-industrial complex ever assembled in the history of the human race, favors Israel and so by logical extension implicitly disfavors Palestinian Muslims. It is a sad irony that Arab Palestinians are automatically recognized by the U.S. as Israel's enemies and persecutors than as Israel's exploited victims.

The evidence that will be cited in order to support my desire to demonstrate that Israel's Jews are not morally superior to Muslim Arabs and therefore are not automatically entitled to such lop-sided favor, is from one book review published in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs. (This is a reputable journal published by the U.S. Counsel on Foreign Relations.)

My relatively brief paper will contain a number of documented conclusions, observations and quotations that are mainly from two respected Jewish scholars plus no more than four other political or military leaders who are cited in the book review.

Benny Morris, the feared and usually respected Jewish scholar and author has written several books. The one which will be mainly referred to in this paper is "1948 – A History of the First Arab – Israeli War." This was the war in which the Israeli's and the military of several Arab nations fought over the limited amount of land that the U.N. awarded to the Palestinians of what had been the land that they had lived in and the larger amount that was awarded to the Israelis of what the Palestinians had once considered to be their land.

The other Israeli scholar whom I will mainly reference in Shlomo Ben-Ami, the reviewer of Morris' 1948 book who had been Israel's Foreign Minister in 2000-2001. From my perspective both of these Israeli scholars deserve all of our appreciation for honestly exposing so much of what I will term the moral depravity of so many Israeli political and military leaders for their disproportionate, despicable crimes against those Palestinians who were often murdered during the process of driving them from even the land that had been awarded to them by the U.N. Significantly, the small title that is printed on the cover of this Council of Foreign Relations journal had the three appropriate words, Israel's Original Sins.

This paper will contain a number of what I consider to be relevant comments from this book review which from my perspective validate my conviction that it is quite unfair and wrong to reach the illegitimate conclusion that Israeli Jewish leaders are morally superior to mainly Muslim Arab leaders. Significantly, many persons in addition to myself believe that this wrong conclusion about who is moral has much to do with an unfair attempt by the West to compensate for deserved Western guilt for having immorally allowed the holocaust in Europe to savagely slaughter so many European Jews. But that is a separate issue and it should be obvious that the Arabs should not be forced to pay for the unconscionable complacency of the West in allowing the horrible slaughter of millions of innocent Jews. So it has been the innocent, callously expelled and often ruthlessly slaughtered Palestinians who have been mostly the innocent victims of the immoral policies of the amoral Israeli leaders. But it should be exceptionally obvious to supposedly educated American leaders that being the innocent victims of the Jews' savage crimes against them does not result in the Palestinians being morally inferior to the Jews. Nor does it make the Jews morally superior to the Palestinians for punishing the Palestinians for the major crime of the West for sitting on its hands and being complacent while a major crime was openly being successfully perpetrated against the Jews.

It seems significant that the Foreign Affairs editors chose to introduce its book review section with this large and bold quotation from its review of the book, 1948. It does not seem to be only a coincidence that the quotation which they chose to feature was from the first Prime Minister of the new state of Israel which was planted on land which was virtually stolen from the Palestinians by the U.N. with especially the collusion of Great Britain. So the large, bold quotation from the New Israeli Prime Minister reads:

"In October 1948, David Be-Gurion declared, 'The Arabs of the Land of Israel have only one function left to them – to run away.' And they did."

The former Israeli Foreign Minister, Ben-Ami observed, "When the war was over the Palestinian problem practically disappeared from public debate or was conveniently defined as one of "refugees" or "infiltrators." It was as if there were no Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Palestinian people. As Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously put it in 1969, "They did not exist."

Ben-Ami states the following about his respect for the author of 1948, Mr. Morris.

"But it was Benny Morris who addressed the most sensitive issue of all: the refugee crisis. "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949," in 1987, remains the single most important work on the thorniest moral and political issue underlying the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum. It recounts the often violent expulsion of 700,000 Arabs as Jewish soldiers conquered villages and towns throughout Palestine. For bravely and masterfully advancing a new narrative of Israel's birth, he paid a heavy price. Denounced as an "Anti-Zionist" after the publication of his 1987 book, Morris was denied tenure by practically every department of history in the country."

Ben-Ami further states that "Morris spares no Israeli founding myth, especially not the notion of Israel's purity of arms… The atrocities and evictions suffered by Arab communities took place sometimes in the storm of battle, sometimes as the Yishuv's forces battled to secure roads linking Jewish settlements, and frequently in response to explicit orders from generals on the battlefield. Morris shows that the Zionists committed more massacres than the Arabs, deliberately killed far more civilians and prisoners of war, and committed more acts of rape. The Arabs, he claims, were responsible for only two large massacres: the December 1947 killing of 39 Jewish workers at the Haifa oil refinery and the Kfar Etzion slaughter of 150 Jews in May in 1948. With painstaking detail, Morris exonerates what others have called a massacre."

"Morris found that far more Palestinians were expelled in explicit orders from commanders in the field than fled for fear of military attacks. And in some cases, Ben-Gurrion personally authorized such orders without informing the government."

Ben-Ami states "that the idea of population transfers had a long and solid pedigree in Zionist thought. The evictions in 1948 stemmed from ideological predisposition in the Jewish community and a cultural and political environment that made military commanders feel comfortable initiating or encouraging the mass eviction of Arabs. Zionist leaders differed on many issues, but they generally agreed, as Morris points out on the benefits of "transfer" - a euphemism for "expulsion." He states that, "The idea of forced transfer was explicitly endorsed by the British government's 1937 Peel Commission on Palestine, and Jewish forces began to implement it in the storm of battle in 1948."

The review also points out that after Ben-Gurion declared that the Arabs only option was "to run away," that they were "panic stricken, as they fled in the face of massacres in Ein Zeitun and Eilabun just as they had done in the wake of an earlier massacre in Deir Yassin."

The review stated that, "Operational orders, such as the instruction from Moshe Carmel, the Israeli commander of the Northern front "to attack in order to conquer, to kill among the men, to destroy and burn the villages," were carved into the collective memory of the Palestinians, spawning hatred and resentment for generations."

These kind of orders "to attack in order to conquer, to kill among the men, to destroy and burn the villages," certainly do not appear to reflect the moral high ground that would demonstrate that Israeli Jews are morally superior. These massacres along with other documented massacres of Arabs, I believe strongly disprove the myth of Jewish moral superiority. These numerous massacres along with the documented commitment that the Jewish leadership had to force expulsion of innocent victims from their own land appears to demonstrate an exceedingly low standard of morals. Thus, except for the Osama Bin Laden type terrorists, the Muslim Arabs have not demonstrated toward the Jews or toward anyone else such as a low standard of morality as the Zionists.

For those who would suggest that both Hezbollah and Hamas demonstrate that Arabs have an inferior morality, there is an obvious and reasonable objection to that conclusion. For it has been the obvious unjust policies and oppressive activities toward Palestinians which has generated the births of both of these radical organizations of Hamas and Hezbollah. Furthermore, both of these groups have at their core a legitimate desire for justice which was an emphatic and consistent theme of the Hebrew Prophets which is heavily documented in the Jews own Old Testament Scriptures.

The following three observations by the former Israeli Foreign Minster, the first of which is little known and therefore not generally appreciated, but each must be factored into the equation of who is morally superior and who is excellently playing the role of being morally and ethically inferior.

After the Arab defeat of 1948 Morris has informed us that, "conservative Arab regimes signed an armistice agreement granting legitimacy to Israel's 1948 borders. And between 1949 and 1952, they all attempted to reach permanent peace agreements with the Jewish state."

Ben-Ami also observes that, "Morris' scrupulous research shows how the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs was in no small measure driven by a desire among Israeli settlers, who grabbed it and then actively pressured the government to prevent the Arab refugees from returning to their villages."

Ben-Ami's third point is well known by the entire world community and is especially well known by both the U.N. and the U.S. but both immorally ignore this flagrant breaking of international law by Israel. "The Zionist tradition of support for settlements should be challenged on political grounds as well: after all, a normal state is not supposed to occupy land beyond its own legitimate borders." In my mind this latter criticism is a mountainous understatement.

Summary

In summary, it is imperative that U.S. leaders immediately escape from their muddled, immoral, unfair conclusion that Israeli leaders are morally superior to Muslim Arab leaders which consistently results in these U.S. leaders declaring themselves as pro Israel and by extension are anti-Palestinian. For it is not morally right for the Israelis to always be assured that the U.S. will always use its military might and pervasive influence to back up Israel's unjust policies.

As for the idea that since Israel is a democracy and the Arab nations are not, just look at the depravity that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have produced in the U.S democracy for eight long years. So it is wrong that democracy be used as the litmus test for moral superiority.

Since the wicked myth of Jewish moral superiority is the main factor, in addition to Israel being a reliable outpost for U.S. militarism in the Middle East, that motivates our leaders to be unanimously pro-Israel and by logical extension anti-Palestinian, this counter-productive and evil thought pattern is begging to be eternally buried. Despite the prevalence of illogical and non biblical theology that the Israelis have been chosen by GOD to be always right and never wrong, even the U.S. as well as Israel will have an improved relationship with God and be improved nations when they begin practicing true Justice toward the Palestinians.

N.Y. Anti-Arab Twins

If my memory serves me correctly, subsequent to 9/11, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York and former Republican Mayor of New York City, Rudy Guiliani, both made potentially racist statements similar to the following:

“There is no moral equivalent between the Muslim Arabs and the Israeli Jews.”

If that is indeed what these two U.S. officials said, it strongly appears that they both were correct. But significantly, they were both not correct in the way that either of these fiercely outspoken leaders intended to be correct.

For if Israeli historian Benni Morris and his book reviewer, the former Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, have been fair in their assessment of the two groups' respective conduct in the 1948 war, the evidence seems to be overwhelmingly conclusive. The leaders of the Jews openly demonstrated a far inferior moral standard than that exhibited by Arab leaders.

A Terrifying Warning

There is one last ominous message to be given to both Israel and to the U.S. from the pen of the ancient Hebrew Prophet, Habakkuk. Seven powerful words from this Prophet were used by GOD to change a monk named Martin Luther, who then himself had a major influence on changing the world. Habakkuk's world impacting words to Luther were: “The just will live by his faith.”

But now it is this Prophet's seven words about animals that should send mighty shivers into the heart and soul of every American and every Israeli leader. These seven words are: “Your destruction of animals will terrify you.” Habakkuk 2:17.

Yes! Please stop and consider this terrifying reality. Since GOD so notices the murder of innocent animals that he would inspire His Prophet to warn about the terror that these murdered animals will bring to those who destroyed them, then consider this terrifying reality. Since the lives of innocent Iraqis and innocent Palestinians are infinitely more precious to GOD than animals, how much greater will the terror be for those who needlessly murdered those precious human beings?

Qabil and Habil

Yes, the Scriptures empathically teach that the blood of the innocent Habil/Abel continued to cry out to GOD against his murderer, his brother, Qabil/Cain. So, also the blood of the murdered Iraqis and murdered Palestinians continues to cry out to GOD against their Israeli and American murderers.