Shelby Tucker
Letter Published September 25, 1978 in The Memphis
Commercial Appeal after the author threatened a law
suit. Still worth reading and pondering some thirty
years later (sadly things have only become worse and
since then over 40,000 Palestinian civilians and tens
of thousands of Lebanese were murdered by Israel not
to mention the accelerated ethnic cleansing of the
1980s and 1990s)
Dear Sirs
Rabbi Grossman's letter, printed in the Aug. 27th
edition of The Commercial Appeal, rather exceeds the
bounds of fair criti cism of the points I had made in
my earlier letter, printed on Aug. 14th. Perhaps, in
view of the extreme language which has been used about
me ("customary innuendos ... scurrilous anti-Semitism
parallels the words of Hitler's propaganda chief ...
insults Judaism as well as Christianity . . . This
slip‑shod theory ... used ... by the Nazi hordes")
and printed under the words in bold print, "It Was An
Insult To Judaism", you will grant me the courtesy of
your columns for this rather long reply.
Before implying that I write from motives of racism
and accusing me of ignorance of the Bible and history,
Rabbi Grossman would do well to consider the
following.
The full text of Leviticus 19:18, which Rabbi Grossman
quotes partially without citation in his letter, is:
"You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge
against the sons of your own people, but you shall
love your neighbor as yourself." (RSV) The verse
appears not as benevolence towards humanity but as a
safeguard of tribal solidarity against the world. Does
this learned gentleman really insist that the
perception of God as expounded in 1 Samuel 15:1-3
"This is the very word of the Lord of Hosts: I am
resolved to punish the Amalekites for what they did to
Israel, how they attacked them on their way from
Egypt.. Go now and fall upon the Amalekites and
destroy them, and put their property under ban. Spare
no one; put them all to death, men and women, children
and babes in arms, herds and flocks" and II Kings
19:35 "That night the angel of the Lord went out and
struck down a hundred and eighty- five thousand men in
the Assyrian camp� is a perception of a universal
God of Love?
Whatever the utopian hopes of some early Zionists
regarding the economic benefits that Jewish capital
would bestow on "backward" Arabs, in the event, the
Zionist movement has resulted in the expulsion of the
greater part of the native population of Palestine
(Arabic falastin) from four-fifths of the land
(pre-1967) and (since 1967), as regards the remaining
fifth of the country, in the subjugation of more than
a million Palestinians to all the humiliation and
horrors of an alien military garrison—house
searches, summary arrests, arbitrary imprisonments,
demolition of houses and even entire villages,
beatings and torture and collective punish ments.
Anyone disposed to believe that the Israeli
garrisoning of the West Bank has been a benevolent
occupation should read the reports of Amnesty
International, Torture of Arabs under Israeli Rule,
March 1970, and Report on the Treatment of Prisoners
under Interrogation in Israel, April 1970; the report
of breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention protecting
civilian populations published by the International
Committee of the Red Cross, International Review of
the Red Cross, Nos. 113 and 114; the report and
recommendations con tained in Search for Peace in the
Middle East, published by the Ameri�can Friends
Service Committee (Quakers), 1970; the report of the
demolition of homes of some seventy Palestinian
families in the village of Halhul published by The
Times (London) on 26 October 1969, and the more
general report by the foreign editor of that paper two
days later; The Unholy Land, published in 1971 and
written by the editor of the United Church Observer in
Toronto, Dr Al Forrest; the report of the demolition
of the upper part of the village of Beni Samwil
published in June 1971 by La Civilta ; and two reports
by Time Magazine of "rough treatment" apparently
intended to discourage "unrest".
"... troops rolled up in trucks and surrounded a
school ... The troops ordered the pupils, all in their
early teens, to close their windows, then hurled
beercan-size canisters of US-made CS anti-riot gas
into the packed classroom. One student . . . was
studying . . . in a second-floor classroom when a
soldier appeared, ordered the windows shut and added
"Don't be afraid." Two CS canisters then went off. The
students in second-floor classes were so frightened
that they leaped 18 ft to the rocky ground below. Ten
. . . were hospitalized with fractures; several,
according to the head of the local hospital, will have
lifelong limps . . . at nearby Beit Sahur, where . . .
a similar assault occurred, the schoolchildren were
luckier; their school had no second floor, so no
students were injured as they tried to escape the gas
fumes. (Time, Europe edition, Apr. 3. 1978, at p. 18.)
. . . Earlier this year, Ramallah Journalist, Raymonde
Taweel, 36, wife of a banker and mother of five, was
taken from her home after midnight and held for six
weeks in "administrative detention". No charges were
ever lodged against her, but during lengthy
interrogations she was repeatedly asked why foreign
journalists came to talk to her. "Who are you?"
screamed one Israeli guard at her. "You are an animal"
Then, Mrs Taweel claims, he spat in her face and
struck her in the nose. 'You feel so humiliated,'
she recalls. "I felt that if only I would not cry, I
would show them. But I couldn't help it. It was so
horrible." (Time, Europe edition, June 19, 1978, at p.
19.)
Perhaps Rabbi Grossman would like to state why
opposing such outrages is an "insult to Judaism". An
important point made in my previous letter and ignored
by him is that Zionism is a political, and not a
religious, movement. Did Jeremiah "insult Judaism"
when he wrote, "Jerusalem . . . the city whose name is
licence, oppression is rampant in her. As a well keeps
its water fresh, so she keeps her evil fresh. Violence
and outrage echo in her streets; sickness and wounds
stare me in the face. Learn your lesson, Jerusalem"?
(Jer. 6:6-8; NEB) Is opposing a "Christian" government
for defoliating large areas of Vietnam an insult to
Christianity? The books of the Old Testament reveal a
wonderful development of thought away from a narrow
conception of God as a wrathful deity protective of a
chosen family of tribes, and arguments which would
justify the invasion of modern Palestine by Russians,
Poles, etc., on the basis of the promises made to
Abraham in Genesis 15 and Moses in Numbers 34 seem to
me to be pure political propaganda. In any case, it is
Jews themselves who have been the most insis tent
critics of Zionism. They are numerous and prominent
and their pleas for decency to their follow mortals
will sing in the memory of their people long after
Messrs Begin, Dayan and Sharon are so many grim
shadows of the past. Let me quote from the writings of
three of them.
Asher Ginsberg who wrote under the name of Ahad Ha'am
(Hebrew "One of the people") went to Palestine from
his home in Russia in 1891. On his return to Russia he
published a report entitled, "The Truth from
Palestine", pointing out that the simple inhabitants
of that land should be treated with courtesy and
respect by Jews who wanted to settle there.
"Yet what do our brethren do in Palestine?" he asked.
"Just the very opposite! Serfs they were in the lands
of the diaspora and suddenly they find themselves in
freedom, and this change has awakened in them an
inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with
hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights,
offend them without cause and even boast of their
deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and
dangerous inclination."
In 1953 the Knesset passed a Land Requisition Law to
legalize the expropriation of Arab lands. An old man
named Moshe Smilansky, one of the early Zionist
"pioneers", wrote an article about it which was
published shortly before his death.
"Where are you, Jews?" he asked. "Why do we not at
least, with a generous hand, pay compensation to these
miserable people? Where to take the money from? But we
build palaces . . . instead of paying a debt that
cries unto us from earth and heaven . . . And do we
sin only against the refugees? Do we not treat the
Arabs who remain with us as second‑class citizens? .
. . Did a single Jewish farmer raise his hand in the
parliament in opposition to a law that deprived Arab
peasants of their land? . . . How solitary, in the
city of Jerusalem, sits the Jewish conscience!"
It was a Palestinian Jew who wrote in 1959, in answer
to an apologist for Israel's treatment of the
Palestinians:
"If Rabbi Kaplan really wanted to know what happened,
we old Jewish settlers in Palestine who witnessed the
fight could tell him how and in what manner we Jews
forced the Arabs to leave cities and villages . , .
some of them were driven out by force of arms; others
were made to leave by deceit, lying and false promises
. . . We came and turned the native Arabs into tragic
refugees. And still we dare to slander and malign
them, to besmirch their name. Instead of being deeply
ashamed of what we did and trying to undo some of the
evil we committed . . . we justify our terrible acts
and even attempt to glorify them."
Rabbi Grossman states: "The truth is that land in
Israel was never expropriated." The best brief account
of such expropriations is perhaps that contained in
chapter 15 of How Israel lost its Soul, written by
Maxim Ghilan, an Israeli journalist, and published by
Penguin Books, 1974.
In 1948 and 1949, 250 Palestinian villages were
demolished, after the expulsion of some of their
inhabitants and the exodus of the others - often no
farther than to an adjoining village . . . I myself,
as a member of the Haganah . . . participated in the .
. . conquest of Jaffa . . . The people of Jaffa took
to boats . . . or streamed along the roads to
neighbouring villages or the Arab-governed countries
till the storm blew over. We marched into a
ghost‑town in which less than a tenth of its former
Palestinian population remained. They were
concentrated by the Israeli military authorities into
a series of blocks in the Ajami district, code-named
by the Haganah and Irgun "the Arab Ghetto". At first
barbed wire was put round this part of the town and no
Palestinians were allowed to leave. Later the
barricades came down. Nonetheless, many a citizen of
Jaffa wbo had not left was unable to return to his
former home, sometimes only a few hundred metres from
his new appointed living quarters in the "Ghetto". The
Custodian took control of all the houses and their
contents and at once started allotting them to new
Jewish immigrants, families of military personnel and
so on. Jaffa rapidly became a Jewish town, It happened
that at that particular time there was a wave of
Jewish immigration from Bulgaria. To this day Jaffa is
the capital of Bulgarian Jews throughout the world . .
." (At pp. 231-2.)
If Rabbi Grossman believes that modern Israelis are
racially descended from the bedouin tribes who invaded
Canaan via Jericho 3,100 years ago, perhaps he can
explain why Russian Jews resemble Russians, Moroccan
Jews resemble Moroccans, Indian Jews Indians,
Ethiopian Jews Ethiopians, and none of these resemble
the other. Sammy Davis Jr is a convert to Judaism, and
thereby he becomes entitled to immigrate to Israel. Is
he descended from the invaders of Canaan?
Rabbi Grossman lays great emphasis in his letter on
the sufferings of Jews in Eastern Europe in the 19th
Century and under the Third Reich, as though I were
coldly in different to the past unhappiness of these
people. But may I ask Rabbi Grossman precisely what
the sufferings of Jews at the hands of Europeans have
to do with the unoffending Palestinians? He had rather
ask himself why it is right to hijack a country but
wrong to hijack an airliner.
Rabbi Grossman does not dispute the accuracy of the
quotation in my letter of the entry in Theodor Herzl's
diary by which that Founding Father of Zionism
described his schemes for dispossessing the
inhabitants of the land to be seized for the Zionist
state, nor does he deny that the ancient Hebrews
"occupied a small portion of" modern Palestine "for a
brief moment in ancient history". He merely states
that "there was never a period in history when Jews
did not live in what is today called Israel" which, of
coarse, is true, in the way that Jews have always
lived in Egypt and Iraq. Jews comprised approximately
seven percent of Palestine's population in 1917 at the
time of the notorious Balfour Declaration by which
poli ticians in London decided to create a "home" for
Jews there, just as thirty-two years before other
politicians in Berlin had divided up Africa. Perhaps
Rabbi Grossman would like to say when, in the long
history of Palestine, Jews ever constituted a majority
of the inhabitants of the coastal plain where seventy
percent of the population of Israel lives today?
Rabbi Grossman states: "The existence of Israel is a
fact of necessity." A necessity to whom? To three
million Israelis who face a very real prospect of
annihilation? To Jews who prefer to live elsewhere? To
Palestinians whose land has been taken from them, or
the populations of neighboring countries now swollen
by nearly two million refugees? To Americans who risk
good relations with the entire Arab world and the
economic devastation of a renewed oil embargo? A moral
necessity which depends on lobbying politicians and
force of arms?
Rabbi Grossman states that it is an "abuse" of "our
precious freedom of speech and press" to allow me to
express my views, "be it all the way from England".
Does he want some specialist censorship over
interpretations of Scriptures common to Jews and
Christians? Should our newspapers, in deference to
past atrocities having nothing to do with the point at
issue, print only opinions partisan to one side in a
political debate? Do we ignore "Protestant" rule in
Northern Ireland because of past violence to
Protestants, such as the Massacre of St Bartholomew's
Day (Aug. 24, 1572), when fifty thousand Huguenots
were killed in Paris? I was born in Ripley, Tennessee,
and raised in Memphis, hold U.S., not British
citizenship" and, incidentally, once delivered papers
for The Memphis Commercial Appeal. I believe sir, that
it is my duty to speak out against horrors which my
Government sponsors by supplying Phantoms, cluster
bombs, napalm, CS canisters, tanks, etc., to the
Zionist forces garrisoning Palestine. This has nothing
to do with "anti-Semitism", "Jew-baiting", "Joseph
Goebbel's propaganda", or "Hitler". Rabbi Grossman is
equally entitled under the First Amendment to express
his views. However, he is not entitled to imply that I
am a Nazi.
Yours faithfully
Shelby Tucker, Jr.
N.B. For the quotations from Ahab Ha'am and Moshe
Smilanski at page 3, see the essay by Hans Kohn, "Zion
and the Jewish National Idea", printed in the Menorah
Journal, Vol. XVI, 1958, and reprinted in Zionism
Reconsidered (New York: Macmillan, 1970). For the
quotation from an unnamed Palestinian Jew at page 4,
see Nathan Chefski, Jewish Newsletter, New York, 9
February 1959.
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