By Moshe Phillips
The official journal of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has just published an article depicting the Jewish National Fund (JNF) as a colonialist exploiter of the Palestinian Arabs. The article was authored by Amy Weiss, a young Holocaust scholar from New Jersey. It appears in the latest issue (Fall 2019) of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the museum’s official journal, which is edited by Richard D. Breitman.
Weiss accuses the JNF of secretly plotting in the 1930s to plant more pine trees and fewer olive trees in its forests, thereby “alter[ing] a Palestinian landscape to resemble a European one more familiar to Jewish pioneers and Holocaust survivors.”
According to Weiss, the JNF continued this European-colonialist conspiracy after the 1948 war, too. “Erecting JNF forests where Palestinian villages and olive groves once stood promised to erase the connection to that land of the former residents who had fled or been expelled,” she writes.
The hook for Weiss’s article is an obscure episode from the 1940s in which some American Christians planted a small forest in Israel to commemorate child victims of the Holocaust. But that isn’t what Weiss wanted to bring attention to; she concentrates her firepower on depicting the JNF and its forestry work in as negative a light as possible.
Weiss mocks the JNF’s claim that its aim was to revive the Land of Israel. She calls it “the myth of ‘making the desert bloom,’” and dismisses the centuries of Arab neglect of the land as the “purported languishing” of land. According to Weiss, Zionist leaders concocted this “environmental degradation narrative” in order to “justify” the JNF’s land-grab policy.
“While publicly speaking of environmental improvement and jobs, in actuality [the JNF] strove for Jewish colonization,” Weiss asserts, suggesting the JNF was disingenuously advancing a secret and sinister agenda. After Israel’s War of Independence, “JNF pine trees figured in the planting over of ‘abandoned’ Arab villages,” Weiss writes.
Notice the quotation marks around “abandoned.” Weiss clearly doesn’t believe they were abandoned. In fact, when she refers to Palestinian Arabs who emigrated during the war, she calls them “700,000 people [who] either had been forcibly driven from their homes or voluntarily fled.” Weiss’ wording is apparently intended to create the impression that the number who were expelled and the number who fled is roughly equal.
Yet even Benny Morris – the king of the so-called “New Israeli Historians” who bash Israel’s founding fathers – has acknowledged that a large majority of Palestinian Arabs chose to flee in order to get out of the way of battle areas. Only a tiny number were expelled, and even they were only expelled because of specific wartime emergencies, not as part of any Zionist plot to get rid of the Arabs.
For Amy Weiss, however, the work of the JNF is clothed in sin. It was carrying out what she has described in her lectures as a “politicized land reclamation project to secure land” for the Zionist movement and Israel. It was trying to “erase” Arab villages and replace them with a “European” model. And she alleges that the JNF caused “devastating damage” to the environment, to boot.
In Weiss’s distorted version of history, the Jews are alien, land-grabbing, desecrators of the ecology while the Palestinian Arabs are the noble indigenous planters of olive trees. “The planting of olive trees consequently became a symbol of struggle for Palestinians,” Weiss asserts.
That’s an ironic statement, considering how often Palestinian Arab terrorists set fire to the land for which they are “struggling”; just the November 2016 arson wave alone destroyed nearly 5,000 acres of forests, brush, and open land throughout Israel.
Why did Richard Breitman, the editor of the museum’s Holocaust journal, decide to publish Weiss’s harsh attack on a venerable and respected Jewish institution as JNF? Why did he permit a journal that is supposed to showcase legitimate Holocaust research to be used to present such a twisted version of history?
Do the leaders of the Holocaust Museum endorse Breitman’s action? If not, what are they going to do about it? The public – which funds the museum through its tax dollars – has a right to some answers.
It is not difficult to understand why the US HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM published such antisemitic nonesense. Look at what they publish about their staff: https://www.ushmm.org/professionals-and-student-leaders/meet-the-staff –
Not ONE mention of ANY Jewish background or involvement – so how should these people know that the paper by Weiss is merely antisemitic falsehoods?
I DO think it is entirely proper that non-Jews should be in charge of teaching non-Jews about the Holocaust, as it is entirely fitting that Christians should study the SOURCES of the crimes Christians committed, to understand how Christians – Catholics and Protestants – became such murderous monsters, what is wrong with their culture that enabled such development. BUT I do not undestand where the Holocaust Memorial Museum management thinks if their business to publish ANYTHING regarding the JNF. Such publication can only reflect on the general education of people who are educated in normal American schools and colleges – gentile or Jew: they are educated to antizionism = antisemitism.
The people who are responsible for the publication are those who did not ensure that people who know the facts are on the editorial staff. The “Council” is responsible for the management. The “COUNCIL” has many Jews. They are the people who must take responsibiliy and correct all that needs correction.
This exemplifies one of the reasons why I am skeptical and unimpressed when liberal elites respond to atrocities against Jews with vows to fund more “Holocaust Education” which, as we have seen, can mean anything or worse than nothing, aside from the fact that it doesn’t do anything to protect this generation from fully formed antisemites.
I’m surprised that horrid woman didn’t also write that instead of building synagogues throughout Israel, mosques should have been built.
Which Holocaust Museum?
Very ropey ex post facto political argument as pines mature quickly – in tree “years” context; olives do not grow well in every soil of the Holy Land; and since the 70’s at least, JNF has made efforts to grow more than the local Aleppo/ Jerusalem pine because mixed forestry is not only prettier, but also more resistant to pests and diseases..
As to the Arab villages it is a case of damned if you do and if you don’t. The US has not been drawn over by the hot rake of war since 1865 so prim pious and unpragmatic comments are literally impertinent and the US could usefully be replanting some of the forestry logged since Lewis and Clark’s expedition.
Nobody leaves war damage lying fallow and traditionally fallow land is so for the livestock to manure and fertilise it.. I grew up in blitzed London and the bombsites were cleared and rebuilt in the 50’s as soon as money and consents were raised for 50’s purposes and not those of the Victorian or Georgian original builders. Israel too either rebuilt or built over villages as its towns expanded or if not; planting forestry was useful return on the land in question in the still desperate effort the Israel of the 50’s and even 60’s to house Jewish refugees and new couples and to get an economy going. Where exactly did the Jordanians etc pitch the camps and later build the suburbs for the Arab refugees of 1948? and did they pay the landlords?.
It is time the Arabs and their “friends” – show me your friends and I shall tell you who you are – realised there is a price for their preference for procrastination, obstruction and sermons. They did not have to open the 1948 war and they did not have to refuse to make peace for thirty years and more. They have made their bed…
This is a pathetic example of ‘Jewish Derangement Syndrome’ !
I’d really like to see a picture of Weiss just to correlate the ugliness of her writing with how I envisage the way she looks.
Apart from that, the most important thing this ignoramus failed to think of while writing her whiny diatribe was the Lebanese flag. The coniferous tree that’s on it grows throughout the entire MidEast and Europe. Also America, north and south plus Australia. Siberia too. Anyway, I know exactly what should occur between that tree (a very large specimen thereof, please) and the undoubtedly huge and ill-shaped posterior of the noisome and traitorous Ms. Weiss.
I’m sure if that one were interned in a concentration camp, she’d not only survive, she’d gain weight.