Bearing Witness to the genocide - Israeli Academic Lee Mordechai

As for the disasters I have worked on- aeroplane crashes, hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes. Never have I had to attempt to identify who the bodies were while being bombed, shelled or prevented access to areas with bodies while working with no supplies, equipment, water, or electricity.

What the humanitarian workers and Gazan civil servants are up against just to provide a death toll within the usual bounds of accuracy is astounding.

Yes, this too. Entire families have been wiped out. Palestinian parents have been writing their child’s name on their arms and legs so that there is a chance they can be identified if killed.

And also there are reports of stray pets and rodents eating at the bodies. Feral dogs are digging up bodies in the mass graves and cemeteries. It isn’t just the people who are starving.

@IbisDancer women and children are also more likely to have been killed together and in airstrikes on domestic areas which cause bodies to lie trapped and decomposing under rubble. And if a child is killed along with their parent(s) or guardian, who is left to identify them...?

@Finallyloggedin good post
I have been observing the UN death toll dispute with increasing frustration. I don’t understand what the issue was. It seems manufactured to me.

The UN used to show the death toll of men, women, and children by the number of dead bodies they had counted.

The UN then did another death toll of men, women, children and elderly by the number of dead bodies that they have identified who they were- their name, sex, age and ID#

There was a propaganda push where people were supposedly confused and thought identifying a dead body, was identifying a body as dead instead of identifying, well their identity, who they were. So there was a big fake news about the UN cutting the death toll of women and children in half. Rubbish.

It has been somewhat clarified BUT some are still thinking that the ratio of men to women to children’s bodies identified as to who they were means the death toll ratios showing more women and children killed was wrong.

It wasn’t wrong, both are right and the reason why a higher % of men’s bodies have been identified than women’s bodies and a higher % of women’s bodies than children’s bodies is for one simple reason.

The bigger a human you are, the more of a body or larger pieces of a body there is left to identify who the body was when looking at the human remains post shelling or bombing or decomposition in a mass grave.

I worked on disaster recovery teams…this is the sad fact.

The less there is of a body, the longer it takes to identify who that body was.

Mens bodies are the biggest, so they are the easiest and fastest to identify- match to an identity of a man

Children’s bodies are the smallest, so they are the hardest and slowest to indentify- match to an identity of a child. In addition children usually have the fewest identity records on file unlike adults. This makes it even harder.

@Scirocco
Interesting you mention Mark Twain (pen name of Samuel Clements)
Are you aware of his ‘War Prayer’?

“ . . . O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells . . . help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst. . . .”

Thanks for sharing. The match was last night it was Palestine women's team against Bohemians which is a soccer club in Dublin and a massive support to Palestinians for years. It was in aid of Gaza and to mark the anniversary of the naqba. First time Palestine women's team have played in Europe. Some pictures on link below

www.thejournal.ie/bohs-v-palestine-6380966-May2024/

Sorry I meant the Palestinians. I think it was the reference to the university in Jerusalem that got me, knowing now how persecuted Palestinians are in the west bank and how little opportunity they have for personal advancement

Who did not know, Dulra?

Do you mean the 90% Palestinian population at that time, or the mainly European Jewish colonising settlers ( apart from the 2% indigenous Jews) who thought of this as their homeland from ancient times?

I was not quite clear from your post. I agree it is depressing as it seems all round disaster was inevitable.

I don't know why but given what was coming down the tracks I find this all so depressing. They had no idea what was going to happen to their homeland or their people

^When I remember thee in days to come, O Jerusalem, it will not be with pleasure. The musty deposits of 2,000 years of inhumanity, intolerance, and uncleanliness lie in the foul-smelling alleys... The amiable dreamer of Nazareth has only contributed to increasing the hatred.
... What superstition and fanaticism on every side!^

Theodor Herzl

(By, The amiable dreamer of Nazareth, I presume he meant Jesus?)

Thank you very much. That Mark Twain quote gives a very good insight to the attitudes towards the Palestinians then, as from what I have quickly read Herzl’s approach was from the point of view of someone who saw himself and like minded Jews as educated, civilised Europeans who would be bringing benefits to barbarians.

Even Herzl as a Jew suffering anti-semitism, was part of the same Western culture as Mark Twain.

in The Jewish State he envisions the Jewish homeland as ‘a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism’^
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/herzls-troubled-dream-origins-zionism

@ScrollingLeaves

Theodor Herzl even included descriptions of Palestine as "Arab-blighted" in his work, and from the early days of the Zionist movement there were conscious efforts made to erase the identity of Palestine, including maps in which Palestine was shown as essentially a blank space other than some Jewish settlements.

It wasn't solely the Zionist movement who de-humanised and used derogatory language in relation to Palestinians, though. Many people wrote horrendous things - Mark Twain, for example, wrote the following:

"Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. … It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land. … Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes."

(Of the people living there) "all abject beggars by nature, instinct, and education..." and "the ring of the horses' hoofs roused the stupid population, and they all came trooping out—old men and old women, boys and girls, the blind, the crazy, and the crippled, all in ragged, soiled, and scanty raiment."

These sorts of views were widespread at the time, and have persisted.

I've included a link to an interactive encyclopedia. I can't make any personal guarantees about everything's veracity or potential affiliations of authors because it's a huge encyclopedia, but if people are interested, it might be a good read.

https://www.palquest.org/

Here is an interview with Alon :

Theodor Herzl is seen as one of the original pioneers of Zionism. You can read the original book that he wrote called "A Jewish State" in 1895 here: https://archive.org/details/herzlt1904ajs/mode/1up
It discusses the plans/hopes for Palestine. It also includes the alternative as Argentina was also considered as a potential Jewish state

Alon Mizrahi is an Arab Jew, Israeli after 1948, so a lot of what he writes is from the context of the discrimination that Arab Jews faced when European Jews came to Palestine and after the state of Israel was established.

Ibis dancer thank you for those census details.

So there were about 3.2 percent of Jewish indigenous people in Palestine in 1878 and 2 percent European born Jewish people.

So that sentence in Finallyloggedin’s posted article, alleging Jewish attitudes of dehumanisation towards Palestinians even before the first settlers, must be referring to attitudes within the Zionist movement at the end of the 19th and early 20th Century.

We would need to know more about what the leaders of that movement in Europe were writing and thinking about Palestinians to know if those allegations were true.

Paragraph from the factsheet
”Jewish emigration to historic Palestine grew over the first decades of the 20th century, especially during the 1930s. As the Jewish population in Palestine increased, the indigenous Arab population put pressure on the British government to control the immigration. Thus, in the 1920s, the British restricted Jewish immigration by fixing quotas and authorizing certain Jewish organizations to distribute immigration certificates as they saw fit. Nevertheless, with increased persecution of Jews in Europe, many Jews were not willing to wait years for immigration certificates. Thus, in 1934, the Vallos became the first chartered immigration ship to arrive in Palestine, carrying 350 Jews. By the time WWII had begun, tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants had arrived illegally in Palestine by ship. This illegal shipping of immigrants continued well into the 1940s. While the British intercepted some of the ships, almost all of the immigrants were eventually able to settle in Palestine.[6]
The Jewish community found other ways to emigrate to Palestine, exploiting loopholes in the Mandatory government’s immigration regulations. Students were not required to have immigration certificates to study in Palestine, so many enrolled at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and then remained in the country. Young women entered the country claiming fictitious marriages to Palestinian residents. Others arrived as tourists, and never returned to their former countries. In 1935 alone, almost 5,000 Jews entered the county illegally through these various means.[7]
In 1939, concerned with the rising tensions in Palestine due to the massive Jewish immigration – both legal and illegal – the British government issued Parliamentary Document 6019 (a.k.a the White Paper of 1939), slated to limit the Jewish population in Palestine to no more than one third the total. If economic capacity permitted, 75,000 Jews would be allowed to come to Palestine, after which “no further Jewish immigration will be permitted unless the Arabs are prepared to acquiesce to it.”[8] “

Sounds a lot like the small boats of refugees we have coming to the UK. As the Jewish settlers during the Palestine Mandate were clearly, imho, refugees fleeing persecution by Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, Lenin/Stalin…

This fact sheet hints at unease by the indigenous population during the 1920s-1930s at the uncontrolled immigration of Jewish settlers, forcing the British to set quotas and pass laws restricting immigration
https://www.cjpme.org/fs_007

Thank you. That is interesting and relevant to the article Finallyloggedin posted.

Re what Lily Greenberg Call says here:

“He is making Jews the face of the American war machine. And that is so deeply wrong,” she said, noting that ancestors of hers were killed by “state-sponsored violence.”

I had previously thought Biden was just trying to help Israel in its hour of need, but Lily Call who is Jewish herself, and religiously so too it would seem, must believe this strongly to have taken this stand.

There were many Jewish communities in Palestine all through history that were already there in the Palestine Mandate and after.

That was ee this sentence we are discussing:
Zionism had all its plans for Palestinians finalized years before the holocaust. It dehumanized them and had a deep disdain for their way of life and who they were even before the first Zionist settlers landed in Palestine

Thank you, Finallyloggedin that is an harrowing example of 1948 Jews in Israel dehumanising Palestinians during the Nakba, so as you say later than the period the article makes reference to.

An earlier example I have found, but where Jewish people are the victims, is of pre WW11 pogroms from 1918 - 21 in Ukraine:

In the early 1920s, thousands of Jewish child refugees flooded into Moscow from Ukraine, fleeing a terrifying series of pogroms. Legendary Jewish artist Marc Chagall remembered giving art lessons to some of the refugees at a Jewish orphanage outside the Soviet capital. He recalled the horrifying atrocities they spoke about — their parents murdered, their sisters raped and slain, and the children themselves chased out in the cold, threadbare and starving.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/20-years-before-the-holocaust-pogroms-killed-100000-jews-then-were-forgotten/

But we still haven’t found information either way to Jewish would-be settler attitudes to Palestinians (or Palestinian attitudes to Jewish settler or indigenous Jewish people) before the first settlers landed in Palestine

Will keep looking later.