Arab collaboration with the Zionist Movement took the form of facilitating the sale of land to Jewish settlers, the provision of vital security intelligence, political propaganda and even military assistance. It is no exaggeration, in the light of these many revelations, to assert that without the invaluable cooperation with dissident Arab elements opposed to the mainstream Arab Executive Committee, the Zionist movement would not have been able to achieve the goal of a Jewish state. Such a claim undoubtedly both surprises and shocks those who take an interest in the Middle East and claim to be familiar with the conflict, a struggle that has generated an ocean of ink but left untouched the subject of Cohen’s research. What is even more amazing is that Palestinian Arab cooperation came almost entirely from conservative and traditional rural Muslim circles.

Cohen makes clear why both the official Palestinian nationalist and Zionist sides have kept this information confidential and have been reluctant to see it exposed. History is always written by the victors. In this particular case, the official Arab side led by the Grand Mufti, Haj-Amin al Husseini, presented their case to world opinion as an entirely unified opposition by their community to Zionism, Jewish immigration, and the British Mandate authorities. Likewise, the Jewish Zionist narrative has preferred to exclude most references to that part of the Arab community willing to cooperate in the spirit of compromise. The Hebrew slogan “Eyn Breyrah” (there is no alternative), was used effectively to rally support for the Zionist goal of a Jewish state as a life or death issue, portraying the Arab side as a united front of total rejection to any compromise.

This book is a “MUST READ” not only for the general public but most of all for the thousands of reporters, commentators and “pundits” teeming over Israel, the disputed territories and the entire Middle East with absolutely no knowledge of the original languages, documents, first hand accounts and archives that tell the full story of the conflict. The book is meticulously footnoted to original sources, the authenticity of which are not in doubt. Often, the purveyors of popular images only promote and enhance stereotyped and endlessly repeated hackneyed banalities that dominate the media. Practically every page of this book contains information that will shock, confuse and challenge their basic assumptions.

Those who are familiar with other historical conflicts should know better than to accept versions of the past from the vantage point of hindsight. All Americans have heard of Benedict Arnold, but most prefer to avoid any in-depth analysis of the extent to which American opinion on the eve of the Revolution was divided. Most historians today agree that roughly one third of the American population favored independence, another third was steadfastly loyal to the crown and in between were those hoping to maintain neutrality and avoid any decision until the outcome was determined.

Cohen deals with this relative view of history in a chapter entitled “Who is a Traitor?”  The change in core identity from religion to the European idea of a nation, posed anomalies, contradictions and conflicts that were deepened in Palestinian Arab society by the growing confrontation with the dynamic Zionist movement. A minority of mostly well-to-do rural and traditional Muslims were challenged by new choices that could not be papered over by the Arab Higher Committee that delegitimized any opposition to their leadership. For this minority, the Jews appeared less threatening than local Christian Arabs who, in the past, had relied on the European Christian powers and their churches to help secure material benefits and advantages. The idea of a “Palestinian Nation” as expressed by the Palestinian Nationalist Movement under the Mufti uniting Christians and Muslims appeared strange and unnatural to many Arabs who were pressured to mouth the platitudes expressed by their leaders but retained their own parochial loyalties and interests.

Another important element of cooperation between Palestinian Arabs in urban areas, especially Haifa was the Histadrut—The Jewish Federation of Labor that won the sympathy of Arab workers in the affiliate organization, The Palestine Labor League. Arab workers benefited from the higher wages that prevailed in the labor market due to continued Jewish immigration. The Histadrut maintained close relations with Arab workers through its newspaper in Arabic, Haqiqat al-Amr.

During the Mandate, the clear preponderance of hooligan and criminal elements operating as “nationalists” ready to commit mayhem utilized by the Mufti, created enormous resentment among the more educated and upper class Muslims and Christians as well, who feared that these elements so easily mobilized by the Mufti in the struggle against the Jews could be turned against them. The same fears persist today both in the “West Bank” and even in Gaza and refugee camps in Lebanon among a silent moderate element of the Arab population unable to openly challenge the violent militias of Hamas and Hezbollah.  The high quality and quantity and intelligence gathered by Israel’s security agencies have allowed pinpoint accuracy of many strikes against high ranking terrorist operatives and are due, in considerable measure, to Arab collaborationists.

What makes the split within Palestinian society qualitatively different from the divisions among Americans at the time of the Revolution is the enormous gap between words and deeds. Although almost always strenuously denied, Arabs agreeing to cooperate with the Zionist program made rational decisions based on inter-clan rivalries, the prospect of increased economic wel lbeing and deeply valued motives of revenge and pride. The frequent official denunciations against ‘traitors’ was a central and persistent feature of the Palestinian Arab press and public meetings where frequent use of extremist religious rhetoric damned all those cooperating with the Jews. Violence, blackmail and threats of beatings, deportation, the denial of religious burial in Muslim cemeteries and even calls for wives to abandon their husbands were all used with only mixed results.

Nevertheless, prominent Arab personalities with little sense of a nationalist identity saw in the growing strength of the Zionist movement, a potential ally, the traditional recourse to the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This was proven time and time again even during the major riots of 1929 and the general Arab uprising of 1936-1939, as well as in Israel’s war of Independence and the two intifadas that have captured world headlines. It is true today, in the continued inter-Arab violence and competition for power between the Fatah and Hamas movements. In all of these struggles, the number of Arabs killed and wounded by other Arabs, exceeds the count of Jewish victims.

As early as July, 1921, no less an authoritative Arab political figure than the mayor of Haifa and head of the traditional Muslim National Association, Hasan Shukri sent the following telegram to the British government as a reaction to a Palestinian delegation setting out for London to protest the implementation of the Balfour Declaration:

“We strongly protest against the attitude of the said delegation concerning the Zionist question. We do not consider the Jewish people as an enemy whose wish is to crush us. On the contrary, we consider the Jews as a brotherly people sharing our joys and troubles and helping us in the construction of our common country, We
are certain that without Jewish immigration and financial assistance there will be no future development in our country as may be judged from the fact that the town inhabited in part by Jews such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and Tiberias are making steady progress while Nablus, Acre and Nazareth, where no Jews reside, are steadily declining.”

Shukri’s fate was sealed from that moment and although he enjoyed immense local prestige and authority among the Arab population of Haifa, he was the target of a failed assassination attempt in May 1936 just weeks after a successful one ended the life of his brother-in-law and former mayor of Haifa, Ibraham Bey Khalil, a member of one of the richest families in the city. These distinguished leaders were part of the major opposition element among Palestinian notables who feared the Grand Mufti, al-Husseini. They were labeled as the “Nashashibi opposition” whether or not they were actually members of that clan.

From the very beginning of the Mandate, the Zionist movement sought out Arab leaders willing to cooperate offering a variety of rewards that would tempt collaborationists, running the gambit from bribery, raising the general standard of living, manipulating inter-clan rivalries and providing convincing arguments that Zionism could not be extirpated and that an accommodation would be a much more farsighted policy than the eternal confrontation offered by the Mufti. By the late 1920s, David Ben Gurion and Moshe Shertok (later known as Moshe Sharret who later became Israel’s second Prime Minister) rejected the approach of offering “carrots”. They believed that however real the material benefits enjoyed by the Arab population as a result of Zionist activity, a policy of cooperation would inevitably be doomed to failure.

No moderate Arab segment of public opinion could openly confront the extremists for whom terror, blackmail and threats rather than elections or policy debates were the established way of dealing with an opposition. The only hope lay rather in convincing extreme Arab nationalist currents that confrontation would ultimately lead to an Arab defeat. Among those Arabs who did openly express opposition to the Mufti, many eventually had to flee the country and felt abandoned by their Jewish allies.

They had cooperated due to a variety of motives. Many were land owners who cared for their tenants (fellahin) and made decisions to sell mostly marginal and poorly drained uncultivated land in areas with a scant and dispersed population. Some were speculators who acted solely in their own selfish interests while others truly tried to derive maximum benefit for their loyal followers. The income from these sales enabled prominent rural families to live a more comfortable and secure existence in sharp contrast to the past and to cement the loyalty of their followers and tenants in clan rivalries.  A few had married Jewish women and were regarded with suspicion by both sides, others had welcome the medical, agricultural and economic benefits provided for their villages due to close proximity and cooperation with Zionist settlements while there were others who had been attracted to the social and intellectual horizons offered by the new metropolis of Tel Aviv. 

The legacy of almost thirty years of coexistence within the British Mandate left many ties between the two communities in areas that brought tangible benefits to many Arabs in technical and agricultural assistance, trade union activity, transportation, medical treatment and employment. These were not simply jettisoned to satisfy the demands of the power hungry and corrupt leadership of the Palestinian Nationalist movement

Inter-Arab rivalries took on larger proportions as a result of the 1936-39 uprising against the British instigated by the Grand Mufti and his supporters.  A large part of the Arab public was appalled by the vicious terrorist tactics and wholesale purges carried out by the rebels to force them into cooperation. Many supplied information against the terrorists to the British authorities and Jewish settlements. The most fascinating segment of the book deals with the smuggling of arms by Arabs to the Jewish underground forces including the Irgun and the “Stern Gang” (also called the FFI – Fighters for the Freedom of Israel or by the acronym in Hebrew as “Lehi”).

The participation of a few Arabs in the Jewish underground movements as “brothers in arms” in attacks against the British authorities on the eve of partition is fact and not fantasy no matter how strange it appears today. During Israel’s War of Independence, many Bedouin and the entire Druze community switched sides to join the Jews in opposing the invasion by the regular Arab armies. The war also conclusively demonstrated the considerable apathy or outright refusal of a large part of the Palestinian Arab population to take up arms and fight the Jews for control of the country. The invading Arab armies took the major brunt of the fighting and were often looked on with mistrust by the Palestinian civilian population.

The leader of the most prominent Palestinian fighting force, Abdel Qader Husseini, district commander of Jerusalem and the Mufti’s close relative, found most of the population indifferent, if not hostile, to his repeated call to arms much as many French peasants avoided conscription into Napoleon’s Grand Army. He was unable to recruit volunteers for the salaried force he tried to raise in Hebron, Nablus, Tulkarm, and Qalqiliya, all towns reputed to be hotbeds of radical Muslim sentiment and Palestinian opposition to Zionism. In Beit Safafa, his forces were driven out by angry residents protesting the misuse of their homes for anti-Jewish attacks.

What is the significance of this historical research for today? Is it of more than purely academic interest?  First of all, the total disinterest of the media in presenting an accurate account of inter-Arab rivalry and the multiple motivations for cooperation by Arabs with Jews and the Zionist movement in Palestine only serves to expand the already grossly distorted picture created by many Left Wing “activists” of good guys vs. bad guys that comes across on television screens (where pictures are supposed to be worth 10,000 words) showing the Palestinian civilians as humble underdogs and the outmatched victims of a super aggressive arrogant Israeli military machine. The same bias operated throughout our involvement in Iraq and for quite some time was oblivious to the 1400 year old dissension within Islam between the Sunni and Shi’a divisions.

Several recent polls have demonstrated that the prospect of any border change that would involve the loss of their Israeli citizenship in favor of a new one as a result of a territorial exchange with The Palestinian Authority is adamantly rejected by a large majority of Arabs living in border areas.

Finally, whereas there existed real moderates on the Arab side during the mandate who actively promoted collaboration that envisioned a future coexistence, the much misnamed “moderate” Palestinian leader Abbas, the darling of today’s international media and European “statesmen” is a transparent sham whose record of Holocaust denial would have embarrassed any Western head of state immediately after World War II no less than the pro-Nazi Palestinian leader, the Grand Mufti.

Contemporary events thus bear out the central thesis of Cohen’s research and it is this: The version of Palestinian Arab Nationalism as envisioned first by the Mufti during the Mandate and today by the PLO (Yasser Arafat and currently Mahmud Abbas) or the extremist religious organizations of Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah, all have expected their followers to unconditionally submerge their personal, regional, religious identity within the concept of THE NATION, a view they hold as indistinguishable from their leadership. Any other loyalty that challenges total subordination is regarded as intolerable and is the equivalent of treason; thus, the spectacle of Hamas “warriors” throwing PLO supporters off the roofs of some of the tallest buildings in Gaza and recent confirmed reports of the “round up and punishment of collaborators”, by Hamas. It is no wonder that now as well as then (period of the Mandate and Israel’s War of Independence), Jewish forces could count on an “Army of Shadows”.

The desire to restore “Al-Andalus”, an Arabic corruption of the land they conquered that had previously been ruled by the Germanic Vandals (hence al–Andalus as “Land of the Vandals” in Arabic) and Visigoths has persisted to this day. Extremist support for the atrocious terrorist bombing of the Madrid Train Station on March 11, 2004 is viewed by some Muslims today not simply as just punishment for the pro-American government of former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar but as the first step in the re-conquest of what is still considered along with “Palestine” as land that must be returned to Muslim dominion.

Renewed Theological Debate

In Medieval Spain, numerous theological debates were held to discuss the relative merits and claims of the three monotheistic religions. Even though many centuries have passed, there is still a fundamental division among them. Jews who first discovered a path towards salvation, believed they were setting an example by serving God as a nation, demonstrating their way of life to other nations. This continued to be possible even after the destruction of the Temple and loss of Jewish independence in 70 AD. Christians, on the other hand, believed that this was possible on a purely individual level and could be achieved by anyone through the agency of the church no matter what his or her nationality, race or sex.

For Islam, the world is divided between two hostile camps, and it is incumbent upon Muslims to subject the other camp to its will. More than a matter of personal submission to the will of Allah, subjugation (the deeper meaning of “Islam” usually confused with salaam meaning “peace”) requires the dominion over territory. The struggle for Islam requires a continual appraisal of a chess-board like map of what part of the world has been subdued and placed under Muslim rule FOREVER (no retreats or “do-overs” are allowed). The subdued territory is Dar-al-Islam while the remaining territories are ideologically still in the camp of the unbelievers. The other camp is labeled the “Camp of War” (Dar-Il-Harb) and must ultimately be conquered. In this regard, territories such as Israel, Spain, Chechnya, Kosovo or Albania, that were once submitted to Allah, cannot be allowed to return to the Camp of War.

Moderate Muslims may want to live in harmony with their neighbors, but this theological sword and the pressure it exerts, suggest that the more militant strain will gain the upper hand.

It is more than six years since Al-Qaeda forced a change in Spain’s foreign policy with a terrorist bombing, it is questionable whether European domestic policies will be able to remain free from the aims and goals of Islamic radicals.

The Original Conquest of 711-716

The Islamic Civilization of medieval Al-Andalus endured in various parts of the Iberian peninsula from a few decades to 700 years. It left its mark primarily in Castile andAndalusia and provided Spain, and to a lesser degree Portugal, with a colorful and illustrious but also violent past that marked the history, language, architecture, art, music, food, place names and society of the country long after the last Muslim had departed.

The Muslims did not constitute anywhere near a majority of the population that numbered approximately 7 million Christians and Jews at the time of the first conquest in 711-716. By the beginning of the tenth century it has been estimated that the Muslim population of Berbers, Arabs and Muladies (Christians who had converted to Islam) was approximately 2.8 million out of a total of more than 7 million. By the beginning of the twelfth century, the number of Muslims had almost doubled but were just a bare majority of the total population of the peninsula. (source: “Judios, Moros y Cristianos; tres pueblos, ritos y costumbres” by Pastora Barahona, editorial Libsa, Madrid; 2004.) There was a hierarchical pecking order in spite of the lip service that all believers were equal.

Arabs stood at the top, Berbers provided the majority of the shock troops and hewers of wood and drawers of water followed by converts and at the very bottom were the infidel Jews and Christians no matter how significant their contribution to the arts and sciences.

The Muslim conquest of Spain was greatly aided by internal divisions among the Christians, especially the land-owning class of Visigoth nobles. The Muslim Conquest of Spain was accomplished in the short space of five years but society did not change abruptly. The newly won territory was given the name Al-Andalus with its capital in Cordoba and became a dependency of the Omayyid Caliphate of Damascus. Just prior to the conquest, much of the original Christian population demonstrated little stake in continued Visigothic rule and, even among the Visigoth ruling class, several clans found it expedient to cooperate with the Muslim rulers in order to preserve their property and privileges.

These Germanic rulers were still considered “foreigners” by many ordinary native Spaniards and their formal conversion to Catholicism from the Arian heresy that rejected the idea that Jesus was co-equal or co-eternal with God the Father(contesting the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity and that Christ was both human and divine). Their “conversion”had only been an initial step designed to appeal to the Catholic majority and integrate the different elements of the population into one society. The harsh anti-Jewish measures adopted by the last Visigothic king were made to appeal to Christians and unite the kingdom in the face of the Muslim invaders who were originally welcomed by the Jews, initially regarding them as liberators.

The tolerant Spain of The Three Great Monotheistic Religions (often referred to as Las Tres Culturas) gradually contracted and was eventually extinguished as a result of repeated invasions of the peninsula from North Africa by severe Muslim-Berber tribes people who brought with them a fanaticism reminiscent of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Only later did a resurgent Christian-Hispanic reaction begin to imitate this intolerance. The term “Golden Age” of Muslim Spain most correctly applies to a relatively short period from the eighth to the mid-eleventh century and is even more accurate when applied to the Christian North of the country for a period of more than three hundred years. (1050-1390).

The Berber-Arab Division

From the very beginning of the Muslim domination of Spain, a considerable antagonism existed between a minority of Arab overlords and their predominantly Berber followers who had joined the Muslim crusade after their conversion to Islam. The majority of these Berbers lived in Morocco and Mauretania and for this reason were referred to asMoros (Moors), a term that continues in use today and is more prevalent thatmuselmanes(Muslims) or árabes (Arabs) in contemporary Spanish.

Many of the Berbers had remained pagan or converted to Byzantine Christianity before accepting Islam and had long been in contact with the south-eastern corner of Spain separated from the Moroccan coastline by the narrow strait of Gibraltar. They provided the majority of the manpower for the invasion but were regarded with contempt by an Arab ruling class who felt a racial superiority and purity of faith connected with the Caliphs in Damascus and later in Baghdad

Collapse of Muslim Spain into Chaos

Muslim Spain, nominally subject to the rulers (caliphs) in Damascus and Baghdad, eventually broke free from any foreign subservience. Around the years 930-1000, Cordoba excelled as the most cultured city in Europe under a stable and prosperous rule, especially during the reign of Abd-al Rahman III (proclaimed Caliph in Cordoba in 929). This enlightened ruler built a sumptuous palace, Medina Azahara, named for his favorite wife Azahara. Its magnificence in ivory, jade, ebony and alabaster rivaled or exceeded that of the Taj Mahal and yet it was totally destroyed and sacked not by the “barbarian Christians” attacking from the North but by the fanatical Muslim Berber invaders in 1010. They left hardly a stone standing.

During a few months in 1009, five different rulers succeeded each other and lost control of much of the provincial territories. A rebellion against loyalty to the Omayyid dynasty led to civil war and the descent of Muslim Spain into chaos. Within a generation, approximately 40 independent Muslim mini-kingdoms or emirates calledtaifasproclaimed their independence and enabled the Christian kingdoms to organize and make major advances in the reconquest of the peninsula.

The Native Jewish population of Spain (many and perhaps most Sephardi Jews were native born converts rather than migrants), always a barometer of tolerance, quite clearly preferred the Christian North to the Muslim South from the beginning of the 11th century. Severe anti-Jewish disturbances began first in Granada and the Muslim South under the Almoravids and Almohades. The great palaces, artistic achievements and part of the sophisticated irrigation works of the Omayyids and Abbasids were largely destroyed by the new invaders. By the time of the final conquest of Granada – the last remaining Muslim kingdom in 1492, almost no Jews resided there whereas more than 225 Spanish towns had their distinctive Jewish quarters (juder√≠as) still intact on the eve of the expulsion.

The Reconquest

The Reconquest (La Reconquista) by the Christian kingdoms eventually took on the dimensions of a religious crusade in which there could only be one winner. The Christians would have won and evicted Muslim rule much earlier had it not been for the arrival of fresh forces brought with the Berber incursions during the 11^th and 12^thcenturies. The gains of territory achieved by the rival Christian kingdoms did not originally contribute to cementing a sense of religious unity or a crusade (“Christendom”). It was early beset by national, dynastic and linguistic rivalries (Castilian, Catalan, Leonese, Aragonese, Valencian, Portuguese and Navarran-Basque). Fortunately for them, the Muslim opposition was even more fragmented. The many small feuding taifas were to fall one by one to the conquering Christian princes and their armies.

Medieval Spain

Medieval Spain was the scene of a unique encounter among the three great civilizations of Roman Christianity. Arab-Berber Islam and Sephardi Jewry. The multi-cultural synthesis that emerged following the Muslim conquest left behind a stunning legacy, but one that was uneven, sporadic and marred due to political fragmentation, intermittent warfare, religious intolerance and eventual excessive religious zeal that ended in the eventual expulsion of the Jews (1492) and Muslims (1609) or their forced conversion as a step in the consolidation of political unity.

Only in Andalucia, was Muslim rule in Spain continuous for a long period of time. Elsewhere, it was limited and endured for a much shorter lengths of time, notably in Galicia, Asturias, the Basque country, Aragon and much of Catalonia. A good indicator of the Muslim presence is the large number of sites that bear Arabic place names (toponynms) starting with either the article “al” (the) or the prefix “Beni” (sons of). These sites show a strong concentration in the south of Andalucia and along the Mediterranean coasts of what are today the provinces of Murcia and Valencia.

Las Tres Culturas

There is abundant evidence of social coexistence and considerable cultural interchange between members of all three religions in the early period of Muslim rule in the south and later in the Christian North, participation in holidays (even Christmas) and celebrations such as weddings and baptisms across religious lines. Noted Spanish historian Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, in his classic essay Las Tres Culturas en la Historia de Espana, put it this way:

Conversion to Islam had not eroded the taste of many for good wines, the woman’s veil had not yet become a widespread custom (such a requirement does not appear in the Koran) and the happy sensual and cultivated environment that has always characterized the peoples of the South of Spain was not compatible with a rigid interpretation of the Koranic precepts.

The Cosmopolitan and Tolerant Christian North of Spain (1050-1390)

It is noteworthy that the most successful Christian rulers during the greatest advances made in the Christian re-conquest were also the most tolerant. Their kingdoms derived particular benefit from the active cooperation and participation of their Jewish communities. Alfonso VI, known as “The Brave” (1072-1090) appointed a Jewish minister and treasurer. The “philosopher king” Alfonso X (1252-1284) collaborated on many projects with Jewish scholars and translators and proclaimed them as valuable citizens, specifically forbidding th
e use of force to bring about conversions to Christianity. Jaime I, the conqueror of Valencia, was an enlightened king who promoted his Jewish subjects to positions of prestige and influence. As a sign of special favor, he offered a distinct part of the town for Jewish residence in 1239 at their own request.

Under Muslim rule, especially following the arrival of the Almoravids and the Almohades,both Christianity and Judaism were scarcely tolerated and regarded as decidedly “inferior” religions. Their adherents were either forced at sword point to convert or paid exorbitant tribute to remain “protected peoples” (dhimmis), who possessed a divinely inspired book of revelation. They had to pay a “head tax” from which Muslims were exempt. The Jews, being more literate and whose Hebrew closely resembled Arabic, felt much more able to adapt to the new State at once and began to specialize in those activities and professions that Arabs regarded as “beneath them” (especially trade and tax collecting), administration, or onerous and “defiling” (working with leather).

The Three Sources of Hispanic Civilization

The arts, sciences, technology, literature, architecture, navigation, map making, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy and art that flourished in Medieval Spain are often credited to Islam but this is a distortion of the role played by adherents of all three religions. The United Visigothic kingdom of Spain prior to the Muslim invasions had inherited five centuries of Roman civilization and had made use of the achievements of the Greeks and earlier Carthaginians as well as the Assyrians in agriculture, irrigation, mathematics, time keeping, the calender,mining, architecture, road building, mosaic art, pottery, jewelry, law and civic responsibility. The Muslim conquerors who arrived in 711 had inherited these same arts and sciences on their path of conquest across the Byzantine empire, the Near East and Christian-Roman North Africa. Christian and Jewish artisans and scholars made major contributions enabling the Muslim conquerors to make use of these achievements. The Schools of Translation established in Granada and Toledo by Muslim and Christian rulers respectively relied heavily on Jewish scholarship.

Spain’s View of their troubled Past Relations with the Muslims

Due to a long troubled history, Spanish involvement in the affairs of Morocco and the religious fervor generated by the Re-conquest, the Crusades and the Counter-reformation, a problematic legacy has been inherited by many Spaniards who maintain a kind of love-hate relationship with their past and with their Muslim neighbors to the South. From the eighth century to the present day, stereotypes have dominated Spanish attitudes and relations with the Arab states and Muslim civilization no less than with Israel, Judaism and the Jewish Diaspora. Since the 1970s, Islam has re-emerged as a major factor in Spanish society and since then the continual flow of cheap migrant labor and illegal immigration from Morocco has resulted in the rapid growth of the Muslim community.

From the time of the expulsion of the last “Moors”, the term moros has been used in Spain and applied indiscriminately to everything connected with Islam. Due to Spain’s involvement in Morocco, a large Army of Africa was created. In the 1930s, it was commanded by General Francisco Franco and its troops came to play a major part in the suppression of a revolt by anarchist miners and other workers in the northern province of Asturias in 1934, and then in the uprising to overthrow the Republic that culminated in the Civil War (1936-39). In spite of General Franco’s frequent use of the theme of “rescuing” Spain’s Christian heritage from “barbarism”, the use of Muslim troops brought with him from Morocco earned him a reputation for brutality. They were hated and feared by ordinary Spaniards wherever they fought.

Spanish Civilization is indeed indebted to both its early Iberian-Carthaginian-Roman-Greek-Germanic-Celtic origins and the invaluable contributions of both Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages. The “Golden Age” was due originally to a wise policy of coexistence but was short-lived and followed by centuries of chaotic condition of fanaticism and fratricidal conflict due to the extremist Berber sects who followed a policy similar to that of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda of today. The Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Christian Kingdoms of Castile, Aragon and Portugal attracted Jews to these lands from the feuding Muslim taifas in the South and initially followed a policy of tolerance towards the remaining Muslims (known as Mudejars). Unfortunately, the bitterness of almost seven centuries of war between the Christians and Muslims for domination eventually resulted in Spain’s liberation and unification (1492) that was marred by the triumph of a religious crusade, fed by the excessive zeal of the Church and monarchy bent on the consolidation of state power and the realistic fear that the Muslims would continue to raid and pillage Spain’s Mediterranean coast in preparation for a new invasion. During the period from the 16^th century until the suppression of the Barbary Pirates by American sea-power, Muslim pirates kidnapped and enslaved several hundred thousand Christians and held them in captivity and the harems throughout the Ottoman Empire and the lands of its North African allies.

Today’s media never attempt to explain how it was Soviet and East Block aid and not American support that was the crucial factor in newborn Israeli state.

Their plight has been accompanied by unremitting criticism that the United States was the principal architect that stood behind Israel from the very beginning with money, manpower and arms. The fact is that President Truman eventually decided against the pro-Arab “professional opinion” of his Secretary of State, General George Marshall and the Arabists of the State Department. He accorded diplomatic recognition to the new Jewish state but never considered active military aid. His own memoirs recall how he felt betrayed by State Department officials and the American U.N. Ambassador, Warren Austin who pulled the rug out from under him one day after he promised Zionist leader Chaim Weitzman support for partition.

American Jewish voting in the 1948 Presidential election leaned heavily for President Truman but also cast a substantial number of votes for third party “Progressive” leader Henry Wallace who had spoken out even more strongly on behalf of American support for the Zionist position and aid to Israel. It was actually not until the administration of President John Kennedy in the early 1960s that the first American arms shipments were made to Israel.

Soviet Diplomatic Support

The struggle of the Jewish community in Palestine was endorsed completely by what was then called “enlightened public opinion,” above all by the political Left. Andrei Gromyko, at the UN, asserted the right of “the Jews of the whole world to the creation of a state of their own”, something no official of the U.S. State Department has ever acknowledged. Soviet support in the U.N. for partition brought along an additional two votes (the Ukrainian and Byelorussian Republics within the USSR and the entire Soviet dominated block of East European states. Taking (as always) their lead from Moscow, the (hitherto anti-Zionist) Palestinian communist organizations merged their separate Arab and Jewish divisions in October, 1948, giving unconditional support to the Israeli war effort and urging the Israel Defense Forces to “drive on toward the Suez Canal and hand British Imperialism a stinging defeat”!

World Wide Support from the Left

The most famous and colorful personality of the Spanish Republic in exile, the Basque delegate to the Cortes (Spanish Parliament), Dolores Ibarruri, who had gone to the Soviet Union, issued a proclamation in 1948 saluting the new State of Israel and comparing the invading Arab armies to the Fascist uprising that had destroyed the Republic. Just a few months earlier, the hero of the American Left, the great Afro-American folk singer, Paul Robeson had sung in a gala concert in Moscow and electrified the crowd with his rendition of the Yiddish Partisan Fighters Song.

Jewish Attempts to Buy Arms and Czech Approval

The major Arab armies who invaded the newly born Jewish state were British led, equipped, trained and supplied. The Syrian army was French-equipped and had taken orders from the Vichy government in resisting the British le
d invasion of the country assisted by Australian troops, Free French units and Palestinian-Jewish volunteer forces in 1941. In their War of Independence, the Israelis depended on smuggled weapons from the West and Soviet and Czech weapons.

The leaders of the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine), already in the summer of 1947, intended to purchase arms and sent Dr. Moshe Sneh (the Chief of the European Branch of the Jewish Agency, a leading member of the centrist General Zionist Party who later moved far leftward and became head of the Israeli Communist Party) to Prague in order to improve Jewish defenses. He was surprised by the sympathy towards Zionism and by the interest in arms export on the side of the Czech Government. Sneh met with the Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis, who succeeded the non-Communist and definitely pro-Zionist Jan Masaryk. Sneh and Clementis discussed the possibility of Czech arms provisions for the Jewish state and the Czechs gave their approval,

In January, 1948 Jewish representatives were sent by Ben-Gurion to meet with General Ludvik Svoboda, the Minister of National Defense, and sign the first contract for Czech military aid. Four transport routes were used to Palestine all via Communist countries; a) the Northern route: via Poland and the Baltic Sea, b) the Southern route: via Hungary, Yugoslavia and the Adriatic Sea, c) via Hungary, Romania and the Black Sea, d) by air, via Yugoslavia to Palestine.

At first, a “Skymaster” plane chartered from the U.S. to help in ferrying weapons to Palestine from Europe was forced by the FBI to return to the USA. By the end of May the Israeli Army (IDF) had absorbed about 20,000 Czech rifles, 2,800 machine-guns and over 27 million rounds of ammunition. Two weeks later an additional 10,000 rifles, 1,800 machine-guns and 20 million rounds of ammunition arrived. One Czech-Israeli project that alarmed the Western intelligence was the, so called, Czech Brigade, a unit composed of Jewish veterans of “Free Czechoslovakia”, which fought with the British Army during WWII. The Brigade began training in August 1948 at four bases in Czechoslovakia.

Czech assistance to Israel’s military strength comprised a) small arms, b) 84 airplanes – the outdated Czech built Avia S.199s, Spitfires and Messerschmidts that played a major role in the demoralization of enemy troops; c) military training and technical maintenance. On January 7, 1949, the Israeli air-force, consisting of several Spitfires and Czech built Messerschmidt Bf-109 fighters (transferred secretly from Czech bases to Israel), shot down five British-piloted Spitfires flying for the Egyptian air-force over the Sinai desert causing a major diplomatic embarrassment for the British government. According to British reports, based on informants within the Czech Government, the total Czech dollar income from export of arms and military services to the Middle East in 1948 was over $28 million, and Israel received 85% of this amount. As late as 1951, Czech Spitfires continued to arrive in Israel by ship from the Polish port of Gydiniya-Gdansk (Danzig). Since May, 2005 the Military Museum in Prague has displayed a special exhibition on the Czech aid to Israel in 1948.

In contrast, the American State Department declared an embargo on all weapons and war material to both Jews and Arabs in Palestine, a move that only had one effect in practice. There was no Arab community in North America to speak of and given the fact that a substantial and overwhelmingly sympathetic Jewish community in the United States was anxious to aid the Jewish side, the embargo simply prevented a large part of this intended aid from reaching its destination. The small trickle of supplies and arms reaching Israel from North America was accomplished by smuggling. The U.S. vote in favor of partition was only de facto reflecting the State Department’s care not to unnecessarily offend the Arab states whereas the Soviet vote recognized Israel de jure.

Even with Czech weapons and Soviet aid, Israel would undoubtedly have been unable to halt the Arab invasion without a massive inflow of manpower. The United States, Canada and Europe provided no more than 3000 volunteers, many of them combat hardened veterans from both the European and Pacific theaters of war plus a few hundred idealistic youngsters from the Zionist movements with no combat experience or training. But their numbers were a drop in the bucket compared to more than 200,000 Jewish immigrants from the Soviet dominated countries in Eastern Europe, notably, Poland, Bulgaria (almost 95% of the entire Jewish community) Romania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the former Baltic States and even the Soviet Union who emigrated to Israel arriving in time to reach the front lines or replenish the depleted ranks of civilian manpower. Without both the arms and manpower sent from the “Socialist Camp”, to aid the nascent Israeli state, it would have been crushed.

The About-Face of The Party Line on Zionism

Jewish Marxist theoreticians the world over including several high ranking Party activists, all dedicated anti-religious and anti-Zionist communists had followed the Party Line and even praised a vicious pogrom by Muslim fanatics carried out against ultra-Orthodox Jews in the town of Hebron in Palestine in 1929. The Party Line then was that the Arabs masses were demonstrating their anti-imperialist sentiment against British rule and its sponsorship of Zionism. In 1947, when Stalin was convinced that the Zionists would evict the British from Palestine, the Party Line turned about face. Following Soviet recognition and aid to Israel in 1948-49, both the Daily Worker and the Yiddish language communist daily in the U.S. Freiheit (Freedom) outdid one another to explain the new party line in that…. “Palestine had become an important settlement of 600,000 souls, having developed a common national economy, a growing national culture and the first elements of Palestinian Jewish statehood and self-government.”

A 1947 CP-USA resolution entitled “Work Among the Jewish Masses” berated the Party’s previous stand and proclaimed that “Jewish Marxists have not always displayed a positive attitude to the rights and interests of the Jewish People, to the special needs and problems of our own American Jewish national group and to the interests and rights of the Jewish Community in Palestine”. The new reality that had been created in Palestine was a “Hebrew nation” that deserved the right to self-determination. Remarkably, the Soviet propaganda machine even praised the far Right underground groups of the Irgun and “Stern Gang” for their campaign of violence against the British authorities.

Church Support in the U.S.

The Jewish cause in Palestine enjoyed the support of a large section of mainstream and liberal Protestant churches and not primarily the “lobby” of Protestant Fundamentalists as is often portrayed today by critics of Zionism. As early as February 1941 and in spite of the wholehearted desire of the American Protestant establishment not to risk involvement in World War II, Reinhold Niebhur spoke out convincingly through the journal he founded “Christianity and Crisis” and sounded a clarion call of warning about Nazism. Its final goals were not simply the eradication of the Jews but the extirpation of Christianity and the abolition of the entire heritage of Christian and humanistic culture. This is the only kind of “World Without Zionism” that the Iranian and Arab leaders long for. Niebhur based his views not on any literal “Evangelical” interpretation of Biblical promises but the essentials of justice for the nations and also called for some form of compensation to those Arabs in Palestine who might be displaced if their own leaders refused to make any compromise possible.

Nazi and Reactionary Support for the Arabs

There was nothing “progressive” about those who supported the Arab side. The acknowledged leader of the Palestinian Arab cause was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had fled from Palestine to Iraq to exile in Berlin where he led the “Arab office,” met with Hitler whom he called “the Protector of Islam,” served the Germans in Bosnia where he was instrumental in raising Muslim volunteers among the Bosnians to work with the SS. At the end of the war, the Yugoslav government declared him a war criminal and sentenced him to death. Palestinian Arabs still regard him as their original supreme leader. Lending active support to the Arab war effort were Falangist volunteers from Franco’s Spain, Bosnian Muslims and Nazi renegades who had escaped the Allies in Europe.

The close relationship between the Nazi movement and the German government under Hitler in courting the Arab Palestinian and Pan-Arab attempt to act as Fifth column in the Middle East has been thoroughly researched by Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers’ in their new book Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das “Dritte Reich”, die Araber und Palästina, (Crescent Moon and Swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs, and Palestine) It was published in September, 2006 and has yet to appear in English translation. It documents the Arab sympathies for Nazism, particularly in Palestine and German attempts to mobilize and encourage the Arabs with their ideology, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, and the forces around the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, in Palestine.

Nazi radio broadcasts to the Arabs between 1939 and 1945 constantly proclaimed the natural German sympathy for the Arab cause against Zionism and the Jews. German Middle East experts stressed “the natural alliance” between National Socialism and Islam. And such experts as the former German Ambassador in Cairo, Eberhard von Stohrer, reported to Hitler in 1941 that “the Fuhrer already held an outstanding position among the Arabs because of his fight against the Jews.”

Cüppers and Mallmann quote many original documents from the Nazi archives on this close relationship. From the late 1930s, the planning staffs dealing with the external affairs of the Reich in the Head Office of Reich Security (RSHA, Reichssecuritathauptamt, originally under the monstrous Gestapo-chief Reinhard Heydrich), sought to engulf the Arabian Peninsula and win control of the region‘s oil reserves. They dreamt of a pincer movement from the north via a defeated Soviet Union, and from the south via the Near East and Persia, in order to separate Great Britain from India.

Thanks to the counteroffensive of the Red Army before Moscow in 1941/1942 and at Stalingrad in 1942/1943, and the defeat of the German Africa Corps with El Alamein, the Germans never managed to actively intervene in the Middle East militarily although they helped spark a pro-Axis coup in Baghdad in 1941.

Britain and the Abstentions

In the vote on partition in the UN, apart from the states with large Muslim minorities (like Yugoslavia and Ethiopia), the Arabs managed only to wheedle a few abstentions and one lone negative vote out of the most corrupt non-Muslim states. These included Cuba (voted against partition) and Mexico (abstained) eager to demonstrate their independence of U.S. influence and Latin American countries whose regimes had been pro-Axis until the final days of World War II such as Argentina and Chile (both abstained).

All the West European nations (except Great Britain) voted for partition as well. No other issue to come before the U.N. has had such unanimous support from the European continent or cut across the ideological divide of communist and western sectors. The Jewish state was even supported by Richard Crossman, a member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine who had been handpicked by Britain’s anti-Zionist Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. Crossman, taking a principled stand, refused to endorse the Labor Party Line.

He had visited the Displaced Persons camps in Germany where Jews who had sought entry into Palestine were being detained. He realized that their sense of desperation derived from a world with no place which they as Jews could truly call home. He wrote that when he started out he was ready to believe that Palestine was the “problem,” but his experiences made him realize that it was the “solution.”

What Today’s So Called “ Progressive” Jews Have Forgotten or Ignore

Even many Jews in the Diaspora whose parents and grandparents rejoiced at the rebirth of Israel in 1948 and regarded it mystically as partial compensation for the Holocaust have been psychologically intimidated by the constant anti-Israel line of the media and of the torrent of bloody confrontations picturing enraged Muslim mobs ready for constant mayhem to avenge what they regard as the worst injustice in human history (i.e. the creation of the Jewish State rather than the failure to establish an Arab Palestinian state).

Some prominent Diaspora Jews, particularly among those who cannot escape the narcotic-like trance they have inherited as “progressives” and are essentially secular and ultra-critical of capitalism and American society with its underlying Christian values, have developed a new kind of psychological self-hatred to exhibit a disassociation from the State of Israel and their religious heritage. They are upset over the close Israeli-American friendship…. 

They easily see Israel’s many flaws (both real and imagined) among which, the worst is that Israel, like America is a “privileged” society enjoying wealth amidst a world of misery. They flatter themselves that they are the modern day prophets who see “the writing on the subway walls” (as Paul Simon sung). They have earned for themselves the justifiable contempt of most Israeli Jews (both religious and secular) for their moral duplicity.

As long ago as 1958 this trend was clearly seen in the interviews given by Leon Uris, the author of the best selling novel “Exodus” in explaining why he wrote the book. He had in mind successful Jewish authors such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Bernard Melamud whom he called “professional apologists” (for being Jews). Uris set out to tell the story of Israel’s rebirth as the story of Jewish heroes rather than the psychological analyses of individuals who grew up damning their fathers and hating their mothers and wondering why they were born.

Uris unapologetically made a pro-Israel film only a decade after every Jewish movie producer had turned down making the film “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1947; starring Gregory Peck) about polite anti-Semitism. It was made into a film by the great Greek-American producer, Elia Kazan who was later turned on with vengeance for cooperating with the House un-American Activities Committee revealing communist influence in Hollywood. Uris himself has been in the front lines in Guadalcanal and Tarawa island and felt an immense respect for the Israelis who had defeated the invading Arab armies and defied the legion of pro-Arab diplomats in the British Foreign Office and the leadership of the Labor Party (a sin the British Left has never forgiven).

Today’s crowd of “progressive” Jewish actors and entertainers outdo even the writers Uris attacked fifty years ago…. 

They are sarcastically referred to by many in Israel as “beautiful souls” i.e., by those who reject their elitism of supposed high moral values so out of place in the Arab Middle East and as remote from the real world as were the great majority of the victims of the Holocaust whose Jewish values prevented them from attributing such evil to the Germans. ….

Whatever the differences between secular and religious Israelis, they pale before the monumental differences that separate life in the State of Israel with all its inherent promises, risks and dangers from the Diaspora’s ultra idealized concerns and sensibilities. This is as true today was it was in 1948. The Political Left today refuses to admit that it stood wholeheartedly behind Israel much like the exercise performed by Stalin’s staff of photographers who could surgically extract and obliterate old time Bolsheviks who had fallen out of his favor.

Convenient Amnesia

Today’s media never attempt (not even the History Channel) to explain how it was Soviet and East Block aid and not American support that was the crucial factor which brought both essential weapons and manpower to the beleaguered newborn Israeli state in 1948-49 and enabled it to turn the tide of battle and justifiably hand the Palestinian Arabs and their allies their “Nabka.” Soviet hopes that they might eventually pressure the new and profoundly democratic Israeli state to side with them in the Cold War were hopelessly naïve*. The Arabs cannot admit the truth of Soviet aid to Israel as it would rob them of their psychological advantage that they are victims who have the right to continually browbeat Western and especially American public opinion as responsible for their catastrophe. Amnesia is a common malady among politicians. … Even President Bush and his supporters seem to suffer from amnesia and were reluctant or incapable of setting the record straight about 1948.

* see Israel Between East and West; Israel’s Foreign Policy Orientation, 1948-56.

“We are being asked to perpetuate a narrative of victimhood that evades the central Jewish question of our age: the question of how to ethically wield Jewish power,” he writes. That power, for 45 years now, has been exercised over millions of Palestinians who enjoy none of the rights of citizenship and all the humiliations of an occupied people.

Beinart, a prominent liberal journalist, is right to invert the treacherous victimhood trope. This is not 1938 revisited, or even 1967. Israel is strong today, a vibrant economy and the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed state. Its unwavering ally, the United States, is home to a Jewish community that has never been more integrated or influential. Turbulent Arab states are focused on their own reinvention, not Israel; Iran’s principal regional ally, Syria, teeters on the brink.

Threats persist, of course. The annihilationist strain in Palestinian ideology, present since 1948, has not disappeared. Arab anti-Semitism festers, although at least in Tunisia it’s being debated. Hezbollah and Hamas have their rockets and missiles. Iran has a stop-go nuclear program. Terrorists can strike in New Delhi or Tbilisi.

Still, the greatest danger by far to Israel is that it will squander the opportunities of power or overreach militarily (Iran) through excess of victimhood, rather than that any imaginable coalition of its enemies will deliver a crippling blow.

Yet, as Beinart chronicles, major American Jewish organizations, their agendas often swayed by a few wealthy donors (like the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson), have in general made uncritical defense of Israel — rather than constructive criticism — the cornerstone of their policies and viewed deviation from the ever-refreshed victimhood narrative as unacceptable dissent. He quotes Abraham Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League: “Israeli democracy should decide; American Jews should support.”

Such prescriptions worked for an embattled little Israel and a generation of Holocaust survivors; they fall short today. “In their support for a halt to settlement growth and their comfort with public criticism of Israeli policy,” Beinart writes, “the mass of American Jews are to the left of the organizations that speak in their name, organizations that almost always oppose U.S. pressure on Israeli leaders and blame the Palestinians almost exclusively for the lack of Middle East peace.”

Blaming Palestinians — for disunity, for grandstanding, for seeking not the 1967 lines but Israel’s disappearance — is easy enough, although increasingly an exercise in misrepresentation of the major Palestinian shifts under Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

The blame game would, however, be far more credible if the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had shown the least interest in peace; it has not. Subsidized West Bank settlement expansion continues, a claim in concrete to the land Netanyahu calls Judea and Samaria.

Beinart notes (well-meaning Israeli diplomats who would “rebrand” Israel take note): “Israel does not have a public relations problem; it has a policy problem. You can’t sell occupation in a postcolonial age.” That occupation, prolonged in perpetuity, would mean, as President Barack Obama has put it, that “the dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled.”

What Netanyahu and major American Jewish organizations miss is that, in Beinart’s words, “the less democratic Zionism becomes in practice, the more people across the world will question the legitimacy of Zionism itself.” Israel, he states rightly, is a democracy within the green line “but in the West Bank it is an ethnocracy, a place where Jews enjoy citizenship and Palestinians do not.”

Some of the most fascinating pages of “The Crisis of Zionism” trace the ideological backdrop to the bitter clash between Obama and Netanyahu. Beinart demonstrates the strong liberal Zionist influence of Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf on Obama during his Chicago years. Wolf hated the idea of “an Israel besieged by anti-Semites;” his teaching was “interfaith” and “integrationist.” It cleaved to the liberal roots of American Zionism and the ethical teachings of the prophets who, as expressed in Exodus, commanded Jews not to oppress strangers “having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.”

The contrast with Netanyahu — raised in the Jabotinsky strain of Zionism by a father who viewed Arabs as “semi-barbaric” and rejected an “emasculating moralism” in favor of a new warrior breed of Jew — could scarcely be greater. Beinart paints a persuasive picture of a Netanyahu dedicated at his core — despite embracing two states late in the day — to the prevention of any viable Palestinian state. His portrayal of Netanyahu’s early friendship with Adelson and other right-wing American Jews is particularly intriguing — the very Adelson who of late has been funding Newt “an-invented-Palestinian-people” Gingrich.

It is depressing that Netanyahu won. Obama, who started out saying settlements must stop, ended up vetoing a U.N. Security Council resolution to that effect. He had to shed his liberal Zionism for American political survival. There could not be a clearer demonstration of why Beinart’s book is so important
and timely for the future of Israel.

Source, NYT, 2/13/2012

We sold ourselves a pipe dream that everyone could get rich and no one would get hurt — a pipe dream that exploded like a pipe bomb when the already-rich grabbed for all the gold; when they used their fortunes to influence government and gain favors and protection; when everyone else was left to scrounge around their ankles in hopes that a few coins would fall.

We have not taken care of the least among us. We have allowed a revolting level of income inequality to develop. We have watched as millions of our fellow countrymen have fallen into poverty. And we have done a poor job of educating our children and now threaten to leave them a country that is a shell of its former self. We should be ashamed.

Poor policies and poor choices have led to exceedingly poor outcomes. Our societal chickens have come home to roost.

This was underscored in a report released on Thursday by the Bertelsmann Stiftung foundation of Germany entitled “Social Justice in the OECD — How Do the Member States Compare?” It analyzed some metrics of basic fairness and equality among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries and ranked America among the ones at the bottom.

I could write (and have written) ad nauseam about our woeful state, but it might be more powerful to see it for yourself. So here are some of the sad data from the report.

Source: NYT, 10/28/2011

One particular Obama move he found appalling above all the rest. “There is a provision in our Constitution that speaks to making sure that the United States meets its obligations,” the president had said, referring to Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, “and there have been some suggestions” — by Bill Clinton and various legal scholars — “that a president could use that language to basically ignore that debt ceiling rule.”

According to my Hollywood supernegotiator friend, Obama should’ve stopped right there — or, even better, followed up with that standard ambiguous saber-rattling line: “No option is off the table.” Raising the possibility of unilateral executive action would’ve strengthened his hand against the Republicans. Instead, Mr. Transparent and Reasonable instantly ruled it out in the weakest way possible: “I have talked to my lawyers. They are not persuaded that that is a winning argument.”

My friend recited the president’s surrender sentence incredulously, slipping an obscene seven-letter gerund in front of lawyers. Since the Republicans were threatening to go nuclear in unprecedented fashion, why didn’t the president at least threaten to use his unprecedented nuclear option to stop them?

In other words, it’s a pity Barack Obama isn’t more like Richard Nixon. I think of Nixon every year around now, as another anniversary of his resignation (Tuesday the 9th) rolls around. President Nixon famously tried convincing the Communists that he might literally go nuclear if they didn’t behave. “I call it the Madman Theory,” he explained to his chief of staff. “I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.”

Of course, a lot of us swooned over Obama partly because he seemed so prudent, straightforward and even-keeled. But now, with Republicans spectacularly applying the Madman Theory for the first time in domestic politics, Obama’s nonconfrontational reasonableness isn’t looking like such a virtue.

It’s frustrating. We’ve had presidents who were intelligent and progressive but also cynical and ruthless when necessary. Effective, tough-minded, visionary liberals such as F.D.R., Clinton … and Nixon.

In popular imagination, Nixon remains nothing but a great goblin — scowling bomber of Southeast Asia, panderer to fear and racism, paranoid anti-Semite, dispatcher of burglars — but the truth is, he governed further to the left than any president who followed him. The overreaching Euro-socialist nanny state that today’s Republicans despise? That blossomed in the Nixon administration.

Spending on social services doubled, and military budgets actually decreased. He oversaw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. His administration was the first to encourage and enable American Indian tribal autonomy. He quadrupled the staff of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, almost tripled federal outlays for civil rights and began affirmative action in federal hiring. He supported the Equal Rights Amendment and signed Title IX, the law granting equality to female student athletes. One of his Supreme Court appointees wrote the Roe v. Wade decision.

Nixon made Social Security cost-of-living increases automatic, expanded food stamps and started Supplemental Security Income for the disabled and elderly poor. It helped, of course, that Democrats controlled the House and Senate. But it was the president, not Congress, who proposed a universal health insurance plan and a transformation of welfare that would have set a guaranteed minimum income and allowed men to remain with their welfare-recipient families. It was Nixon who radically intervened in the free market by imposing wage and price controls, launched détente with the Soviets, normalized relations with Mao’s China and let the Communists win in Vietnam.

And, for good measure, the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts grew sixfold, by far the biggest increase by any president.

The idea of Nixon — Nixon? — as a de facto liberal provokes cognitive dissonance, especially among people over 50. Facts notwithstanding, they refuse to buy it, as if they’ve been fooled by a parlor trick. But the only trick involved is judging Nixon circa 1970 by the ideological standards of 2011.

My late mother, who voted for every Republican presidential candidate from Wendell Willkie through George H.W. Bush, became a Democrat in her 70s. “These black hats,” she said of the G.O.P. right, “have gotten as nutty as fruitcakes. Nothing they say shocks me anymore.” She voted five times for Nixon, whose Madman Theory was a tactical posturing to make the Communists think he was an unhinged, reckless fanatic itching to wreak havoc. But a national Republican Party dominated by actually unhinged, reckless fanatics itching to wreak havoc in America? I think that would’ve shocked her. I think it probably would’ve even shocked Nixon.

According to “The State of America’s Children 2011,” a report issued last month by the Children’s Defense Fund, the impact of the recession on children’s well-being has been catastrophic.

Here is just a handful of the findings:

• The number of children living in poverty has increased by four million since 2000, and the number of children who fell into poverty between 2008 and 2009 was the largest single-year increase ever recorded.

• The number of homeless children in public schools increased 41 percent between the 2006-7 and 2008-9 school years.

• In 2009, an average of 15.6 million children received food stamps monthly, a 65 percent increase over 10 years.

• A majority of children in all racial groups and 79 percent or more of black and Hispanic children in public schools cannot read or do math at grade level in the fourth, eighth or 12th grades.

• The annual cost of center-based child care for a 4-year-old is more than the annual in-state tuition at a public four-year college in 33 states and the District of Columbia.

Grim data, indeed. And there is no sign that things will get better anytime soon.

As a report issued last week by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out: “Of the 47 states with newly enacted budgets, 38 or more states are making deep, identifiable cuts in K-12 education, higher education, health care, or other key areas in their budgets for fiscal year 2012. Even as states face rising numbers of children enrolled in public schools, students enrolled in universities, and seniors eligible for services, the vast majority of states (37 of 44 states for which data are available) plan to spend less on services in 2012 than they spent in 2008 — in some cases, much less. These cuts will slow the nation’s economic recovery and undermine efforts to create jobs over the next year.”

We risk the creation of an engorged generational underclass born of a culture that has less income equality and fewer prospects for mobility than the previous generation.

It’s hard to see how we emerge from this downturn and its tumult a stronger nation if we allow vast swatches of our children to be lost. My fear is that we may not.

 Source NYT, /8/5/2011; Children’s Defense Fund

http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/state-of-americas-children-2011/