May 19, 2008
John Minto is a columnist for The Press who made his ‘name’ by opposing the apartheid regime in South Africa. He has also been called ‘a professional activist and stirrer (meddler) and a master at propaganda, distortion and omission’. In his Christmas Eve column (Previous Posts, Dec. 24, 2007), no doubt influenced by his ‘success’ in South Africa -which he later disowned), he called for similarly tearing down the Jewish state of Israel. In this latest column (‘New Zealand should take up the cause of the Palestinians’ ‘this latest column’), he repeats his attack on Israel and calls on New Zealand to support the replacement of Israel by ‘a secular, unitary state which respects all peoples, races and religions’, knowing full well that Arabs would then become a majority and the Jewish state would be destroyed. KBRM submitted the following article that was published in The Press on June 11, with a changed headline (from ‘How to help the Palestinians’), the insertion of a sub-headline, and some deletions (shown in red). Letters written by KBRM members are shown following the article.
How NZ can help
New Zealand should encourage Palestinians to stop fighting Israel, write RODNEY BROOKS and MICHAEL SEDLEY
Many New Zealanders who supported John Minto with dedication and enthusiasm when he campaigned for political changes in South Africa are aware of his well-publicised disillusionment with the outcome of those changes. They should bear this in mind when he calls for New Zealanders to "take up the cause of the Palestinians.
That much of the Palestinians' situation is miserable is without question. Equally without question is the reason: their own refusal to accept the United Nations Resolution 181 of November 1947, which would have created a Jewish state and an Arab state side by side.
The Jews accepted this proposal; that is why the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel was celebrated recently.
The Palestinians and Arab states rejected it; that is why today the Palestinians are still without a state. Instead they did all they could, violently, to kill the newborn Israel. They also rejected other offers of statehood, including a partition offer from the British in 1937 (the Peel Commission report) and the Barak-Clinton offer at Camp David/Taba in 2000-01. That was their grievous mistake - their catastrophe (nakba).
Minto wants us to believe that the Palestinians are blameless, suffering through no fault of their own. He ignores their mistakes, their terrorism, and the continuous animosity of surrounding Arab and Muslim countries against Israel and Jews.
Minto even uses outright falsehoods. He says ‘the Palestinians lost sovereignty"’, although they never had sovereignty. They lived 400 years under Ottoman Turkish rule, which was thrown off by the British (including New Zealand forces) in 1917, then 31 years under the British Palestine Mandate. From 1948-1967, Gaza and the West Bank were occupied by Egypt and Jordan. The truth is that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank today have more autonomy than ever before.
Similarly, Minto's claim that ‘the local people. were never asked what they thought of a segregated land’ is false. The UN Special Committee on Palestine consulted both Jews and Arabs between May and September 1947 before reporting back to the UN (New Zealand International Review, current issue).
Minto says, ‘millions of Palestinians were driven from their homes,’ but in The Press (10 July 2006), he wrote: ‘hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homes and villages.’ The figure seems to grow each time Minto writes about it.
What he does not say is that the 711,000 (UN estimate) who fled, with few exceptions, left of their own volition, at the urging of Arab leaders, to escape a war started by the Arabs. In fact, it was the Arabs who tried with all their might to eject the Jews - and in some places, e.g., Jerusalem's old city, succeeded!
Minto ignores the fact that the misery of Palestinian refugee camps is being deliberately perpetuated by Arab states as a political tool. There are no refugee camps in Pakistan or India, despite the 1947 partition that saw 15 million people transferred. Nor are there refugee camps in Germany, which absorbed 12 million Germans expelled from East European countries after World War 2 (many because of the readjustment of Poland's borders).
But Arab countries (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan) have deliberately kept Palestinian refugees and their descendants in camps instead of absorbing them (although Jordan, alone, has granted them citizenship).
Instead of giving them a proper standard of living and working towards reconciliation, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have deliberately kept their people in squalor, funded by foreign states (including New Zealand), based on the unrealistic promise that they will be able to return one day to live in Israel.
Minto also ignores Israel's valid and vital reason not to allow the immigration of over 4 million Palestinians. Apart from questions of loyalty and subversion (which are serious), the fact is that the sheer weight of numbers would inevitably lead to the elimination of the Jewish state. No state should be compelled to commit national suicide by immigration.
Dividing a land between two groups is not a catastrophe; it has happened all over the globe. Minto's concerns about space and viability are hollow — Singapore flourishes with 4.6 million people on 12% of Palestine's area.
We agree that New Zealand should ‘take up the cause of the Palestinians’, but the way to do it is not to destroy Israel. It is to encourage the Palestinians to abandon their warfare and focus instead on building a Palestinian state. If after 60 futile years they could just accept Israel's existence, there is no limit to what miracles of growth and development could occur. We should say to the Palestinians, enough is enough; stop focusing on past perceived injustices (which differ on each side). Let us work together to build a better tomorrow where Palestinians and Jews can live side by side in peace and prosperity.
Rodney Brooks is Chairman of Kiwis for Balanced Reporting on the Mideast
Michael Sedley is a technical writer from Lower Hutt who now lives in Modi in, Israel.
The following letter was submitted as a letter to the editor by a KBRM member but was not published:
What a warped sense of history John Minto presents in his recent article for The Press (19 May 2008).
I don't argue that Israel has always been right and that the Palestinian's always wrong. Yet surely, all things considered, it must be time when even reasonably informed editors refuse such writings from Mr Minto, based solely on the fact that its readership should not be exposed to historical fantasy
Mr Minto's increasing bias would make a Palestinian blush.
The following letter was sent to the Senior Editor and Managing Editor. To date no reply was received.
I am writing to express my concern regarding John Minto's column, ‘New Zealand should take up the cause of the Palestinians’, published in your paper on 19 May and on-line on 22 May 2008. I did not write earlier as I hoped that your paper would have published a correction, an apology or a retraction of this column, or even a balancing opinion piece, but sadly this does not appear to have been the case.
Mr Minto's column contains multiple errors of fact, exaggerations, omissions and distortions. Even a cursory glance through the article reveals claims that are glaringly incorrect:
- ‘It's a celebration of independence, statehood and national identity after a 50-year campaign for a Jewish state.’
The campaign for a Jewish State was not ‘a 50 year campaign’ as Minto claims — it was more like an almost 2000 year campaign of hope, starting when the name Palestine was invented by the Romans in an attempt to erase the Jewish nations of Israel and Judea from history. The Jewish state was born, not in 1948, but thousands of years ago, by the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. There has been a continuous Jewish presence in the land since their times, despite the colonial aspirations of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Ottoman Turks. Throughout the Diaspora the exiled Jewish people and their descendants looked forward to the time when they could return to their own ancestral lands, not as tolerated dhimmi, but as rightful owners. In 1948 this hope became a reality. - ‘Millions of Palestinians were driven from their houses and villages to refugee camps around the Mediterranean and around the world.’
‘Millions’ of Arabs were not made refugees during the 1948 war, which was started by Arab nations invading Israel. The number of Arab refugees ‘driven in to refugee camps’ was less than 1 million. According to the last British census of Palestine in 1945, the total Arab population in all of Palestine was only 1.2 million — so much for the ‘millions of refugees’, when thousands of Arab Palestinians remained in Israel during and after the war. Mr Minto overlooks the fact that upon the founding of the modern State of Israel, hundreds of thousands of Jews were made refugees when they were expelled from the Arab nations where they and their ancestors had lived for generations. No doubt these Jewish refugees could also produce keys and titles to their former homes. - ‘For them it's the anniversary of their transition from indigenous people to refugees. They grieve for their lost homeland and lost sovereignty.’
A basic understanding of ancient history demonstrates that the Jewish people, rather than the Arab Palestinians, have the longest standing and greatest claim to ‘indigenous people’ status in the region. Even when Palestinian Arabs claim to be descended from the Philistines, they overlook the fact that the Philistines were a people who invaded the region from the Mediterranean Sea after the Jewish people had been established in the land.
A people called ‘the Palestinians’ have never had sovereignty over Palestine/Israel/Judea and therefore, despite Mr Minto's claims, cannot have lost sovereignty. Before 1917 the region had been under Ottoman Turkish rule for centuries and much of the local Arab population were the tenants or tenant farmers of absentee landlords - in the same way that the crofters of the Scottish Highlands were only tenants on their laird's lands and had no legal claim to the lands they had farmed for generations.
After the fall of the Ottoman Turkish empire, the region of Palestine had no fixed national ‘sovereign’ borders until the 1947 UN Partition plan, which Israel accepted and the Arab parties rejected. Furthermore, many of the Arabs who fled Israel in 1948, whom Mr Minto calls ‘indigenous people’, had only been living in the region since they migrated there in search of employment in the 19th and early 20th centuries - not the thousands of years as Mr Minto would have us believe. - ‘Israel was born after a campaign of terror waged across Palestine by Jewish paramilitary groups such as the Stern Gang and Irgun.’
No-one denies the actions of the Stern Gang or the Irgun, but neither does anyone celebrate or condone them. Their activities were denounced by the Jewish National Council and Israel was not born because of their activities, but rather in spite of them. Their ‘terror campaign’ primarily targeted British colonial forces, not Arab civilians, and Arab ‘paramilitary’ groups were also operating at the same time. Mr Minto omits to mention that 15 Jews were killed in the King David Hotel bombing. While thankfully the Stern Gang and Irgun are gone, Hamas, Hizbollah, Islamic Jihad and Fatah continue in their terrorist activities - but perhaps Mr Minto would consider their acts of terror against Jewish civilians wholly justified. - ‘The Palestinian struggle will continue, but now there is an emphasis on a fight for democratic rights in a secular, unitary state which respects all peoples, races and religions. It worked for thousands of years before and can do so again.’
Where in all of human history is this period of ‘thousands of years’ that Mr Minto refers to where there has been ‘a secular unitary state which respects all peoples, races and religions’? This is clearly utter nonsense.
These are just a sampling of the errors of fact and reason that make up Mr Minto's column. Mr Minto's rant is riddled with half-truths and lapses into fantasy, and doesn't even attempt to present a balanced or critical portrayal of events in recent Middle-Eastern history. I am bewildered that any self-respecting newspaper would have let this opinion piece pass through the editorial process and into print. A student rag desperately short of material could possibly be forgiven for publishing it — after all it does provide an insight into the thought processes of a full-time political "activist" who is evidently past his prime. But as a serious piece of political commentary it is lamentable, poorly written, demonstrably inaccurate and not worthy of publication.
It is my view that Mr Minto's opinion piece constitutes nothing less than anti-Semitic, anti-Israel propaganda. I am deeply disappointed and gravely concerned that a New Zealand newspaper would consent to be used as a platform for promoting such views at all. I am particularly concerned because there has been no clear attempt by The Press to correct the errors of fact presented by Mr Minto, or to balance Mr Minto's opinion with a contrasting, factual piece about Israel and its ongoing struggle against powerful Arab terror organisations who continue to work towards its annihilation.
I sincerely hope that The Press will take steps to rectify what I consider to be this unfortunate lapse in editorial discretion.