The Nation magazine’s shameful history of aiding ethnic cleansing in Palestine

Rania Khalek Media Watch 19 May 2015

The Nation published an article blaming Palestinians for Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza.

Anne Paq ActiveStills

In 2005, Palestinian civil society implored people of conscience around the world to stand up for justice by honoring its call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. A decade later certain segments of the US left are still debating whether this Palestinian request for solidarity is a worthy enough cause.

The Nation magazine, a bastion of progressive journalism, has been at the forefront of indecision on this issue, regularly hosting debates on whether the indigenous non-Jewish inhabitants of historic Palestine merit equal rights in their native land. 
 
Last year, following my criticism of The Nation’s unwillingness to take a stand, I was assured by multiple sources inside the magazine that there would be an editorial meeting to discuss endorsing BDS. In the end, The Nation’s leadership decided against supporting boycott.

And so The Nation continues to hold debates on BDS, despite the growing urgency for Palestinians, whose lives are at the mercy of an increasingly fanatical regime led by people who openly promise to slaughter civilians and incite to genocide. 

While The Nation celebrates 150 years as a progressive magazine committed to social justice and advocacy journalism, its record is tainted by the refusal of its leadership to take a decisive moral stand against Israeli ethnocracy, a pattern that dates back to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, in which The Nation was deeply complicit. 

Indeed, The Nation assisted in Israel’s foundation as a Zionist settler state, which the magazine’s current editor-in-chief, Katrina vanden Heuvel, boasted about to the Forward, saying, “[W]e have a great history … lobbying Truman, the UN, for the creation of the state of Israel.”

Freda Kirchwey, The Nation’s former publisher and editor, not only lobbied the US government and United Nations for the creation of a Jewish settler state in historic Palestine, she mobilized the full weight of her magazine to justify the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 indigenous Palestinians in 1948  — what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe — while agitating against their right to return. 

Campaigning for Zionism

A review of The Nation’s coverage during the period leading up to Israel’s creation reveals a drastic shift from the inclusion of somewhat reasonable, albeit Orientalist, news reports and analyses in the 1930s to exclusively fanatical support for Zionism in the 1940s. 

In 1936, for example, renowned writer Albert Viton reported from Palestine on the “Arab anti-imperialist struggle” against “reactionary” Zionists who want to establish “a Jewish state in which the Arabs, the indigenous population, will live as a minority.”

“But if a national state is to be founded here, I believe the Arabs have the most right to it. They have been living here for the last 1,200 years,” wrote Viton (“A solution for Palestine,” 26 December 1936).

Such honesty about the impacts and aims of Zionism on the ground in Palestine is totally absent from The Nation’s coverage in the subsequent decade.

In all fairness, The Nation was not alone in propagandizing for Zionism. As John Judis explains in his book Genesis, most American liberal publications at the time supported Zionism, viewing it as a morally appropriate response to the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Combined with Western anti-Muslim and anti-Arab tendencies, denying the humanity and basic rights of Palestinians was a no-brainer, especially with the Jewish Agency — the de facto representative of the Zionist project in Palestine — stage-managing the propaganda. 

The Nation’s Kirchwey, in particular, “regularly exchanged information with Jewish Agency representatives in New York,” explains Judis. “These relationships were not those between journalists and sources, but between political allies.”

These relationships were reflected in the propaganda that saturated The Nation’s coverage. 

Kirchwey juxtaposed what she viewed as “the leavening effect of Jewish enlightenment and social ferment in the vast lump of Arab misery and ignorance” (“The Palestine inquiry,” 12 January 1946).

Jewish contributions to “sparsely settled” and “backward” Palestine were nothing short of miraculous, according to Nation writer Philip Bernstein, who favorably likened European Jewish settlers to “the frontiersmen who cleared the wilderness and built the first settlements on the North American continent” (“The Jews of Europe: The case for Zionism,” 6 February 1943).

Preemptively excusing the ethnic cleansing to come, Bernstein added, “even if some displacement of the Arabs were necessary, this would ultimately be justified in the face of the desperate Jewish need. For there is no Arab problem in the sense that there is a Jewish problem. Fifteen million Arabs inhabit a region nearly half the size of Europe.” 

Painting Arabs as Nazis

As early as 1939, Kirchwey was one of 27 writers to sign a letter condemning the British White Paper that year. Recognizing Jewish settler-colonialism in Palestine as a source of unrest, the White Paper called for limiting Jewish immigration and abandoning ethnoreligious partition in favor of a binational democratic state that secured the rights of both Jews and Arabs.

The appeal to which Kirchwey signed her name accused the British government of rewarding “Arab terrorism and gangsterism … bought and paid for by Italian fascism and German Nazism” and urged the US government to reject the paper. 

Kirchwey would go on to link Arabs to Nazis and fascists at every opportunity thereafter, most notably in reports produced by the Nation Associates, a nonprofit group formed by Kirchwey to fund and publish the magazine.

Headed by Lillie Shultz, a former chief administrative officer at the pro-Zionist American Jewish Congress, the Nation Associates produced 12 widely circulated reports from 1947 to 1954 that campaigned for Zionist positions at the United Nations and the Truman administration. (Shultz went on to found a public relations firm whose primary client was Israel.)

Authored primarily by Kirchwey, the reports echoed Zionist propaganda and sought to cast Arabs as responsible for the Nazi Holocaust. The purpose of such baseless claims, according to Judis, was “to discredit Arab testimony at the United Nations.”

In the lead-up to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the Nation Associates submitted a 133-page report to the UN with an entire section devoted to painting Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and a leading figure in the Palestinian national movement, as an all-powerful agent of European Nazis and fascists. The authors went so far as to allege that the mufti was a “full partner” in the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews and was the primary inspiration for Adolf Hitler’s extermination campaign (“The Palestine problem and proposals for its solution,” April 1947).

Though none of these arguments withstand scrutiny, they feature prominently in Zionist propaganda against the Palestinian cause till this day. 

The report also accused the Muslims of Europe and the Middle East of orchestrating mufti-directed sabotage campaigns against the Allied powers. This, of course, has no basis in reality, as the vast majority of Muslims who participated in the Second World War fought on behalf of the allied powers, including 8,000 Palestinians. 

The report went on to caution against the “democratic appeal” of a binational state with equal rights for all, arguing “the Jewish population, progressive and industrialized, would be at the mercy of a backward and antagonistic Arab majority.” (Today’s liberal Zionists issue similarly racist warnings about the “demographic threat” posed by Palestinians absent a two-state solution.)

In May 1948, as mostly defenseless Palestinian towns and villages were being systematically wiped off the map by Zionist massacres and expulsions, The Nation circulated another report to the UN, this time alleging a British conspiracy to assist surrounding Arab armies in attacking Jewish settlers. So consumed were “excitable” Arab men by their “bitter hatred of the Jews,” “the killing of Jews” had become their “sole raison d’être,” warned The Nation. 

Weeks later, Kirchwey credited The Nation with pressuring the Truman administration into recognizing the State of Israel.

Ethnic cleansing as “fitting and just”

The Nation’s contribution to the Zionist project did not end with Israel’s foundation.

Soon after Palestine was emptied of its non-Jewish natives, Kirchwey embarked on a reporting trip to the region, where she published a series of dispatches that celebrated the new State of Israel and rejoiced in the removal of the land’s indigenous inhabitants.

Kirchwey was enamored with all facets of the new settler state, including the country’s first Israeli army spokesperson, Moshe Pearlman, who quit his job as a journalist for The New Statesman to run the Israeli press office. Kirchwey credited her old friend with “the creation … of a freely functioning, intelligent information service run by people who respect the virtue of facts” (“Israel at first glance,” 27 November 1948).

Reporting from Jaffa just months after Zionist militias expelled nearly all of the coastal city’s Palestinians, driving many into the sea where they crowded onto fishing boats for Gaza — Kirchwey acted as a propaganda mouthpiece for the conquerors (“Why did the Arabs run?,” 4 December 1948).

Escorted by an unnamed “man from the Israel press office,” she toured the ethnically cleansed city, heaping praise on Zionist pillagers for their supposed restraint and parroting lies about Nazis fighting alongside Palestinians:

He waved his arm at the damaged shop fronts. “What can you expect,” I asked, “especially after what went before? This was a clash between people that hated each other. Suppose the Arabs had swept into Tel Aviv? You think only a few streets of deserted small shops would have been smashed and looted?” He didn’t answer the last question. He said, “I expect Jewish soldiers to act like civilized human beings. They had captured the town; they should have protected it. They’ve done so in most places — protected both property and life.” I was more impressed by his severity than I was shocked by the damage done by the soldiers. I was later told, not by him but by someone else, that a good part of the looting in Jaffa was the work of assorted Europeans fighting in the Arab ranks — Nazis, Chetniks from Yugoslavia, and Balkan Moslem soldiers — who lingered after the defeat long enough to do some profitable marauding.

Next, Kirchwey reasoned that the removal of Palestinians was a noble endeavor because their homes were replaced with more deserving Jews.

“A good many of the undamaged houses in Jaffa and elsewhere are now being used for newly arrived Jews; so the Arab refugees unwittingly helped make a place for the Jewish refugees their leaders were so determined to keep out. This means hardship for individuals; collectively it is obviously fitting and just,” wrote Kirchwey.

As for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees forced from their ancestral lands, Kirchwey propagated the Zionist myth that their displacement was the fault of Arab leaders who advised them to flee. Palestinians had only themselves to blame, she reasoned. 

Past haunts the present

Last summer, as the descendants of those refugees were obliterated by merciless Israeli bombardment, the first piece to appear at The Nation blamed Palestinians for their “suicidal” insistence on armed resistance to ghettoization and massacre. 

Three years after the Nakba, the Nation Associates, along with several allied organizations, delivered a memorandum to the UN General Assembly agitating against the right of Palestinian refugees to return (“The Arab refugee problem: A plan for its solution,” 29 December 1951).
   
“Palestine Arabs fled from their homes at the behest of their leaders,” stated the document, which added that the Haganah — the precursor to the Israeli army that carried out the ethnic cleansing — “made every attempt to prevent the Arab exodus and pleaded with the populace to stay. These pleas were not heeded.”

The report continued, “The presence of a large Arab minority, which would be more responsive to the sentiments of the surrounding Arab states than to that of Israel, would render Israel insecure.”

In April 1954, as Palestinian refugees languished in squalid camps across the Middle East, periodically subjected to massacres by Israel and shot dead for attempting to return to their homes, the Nation Associates and allied organizations issued another report urging that development aid to the Middle East be conditioned on the acceptance by Arab states of blame for the Palestinian exodus and the forfeiture of the Palestinian right to return.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation’s current editor-in-chief, recently embraced her magazine’s “great history” of lobbying for Israel’s creation, highlighting a 2008 article by neoconservative ideologues Ronald and Allis Radosh in World Affairs that detailed The Nation’s ultra-Zionist past while bashing the magazine’s present-day anti-occupation position. 

In response to an email query from The Electronic Intifada, vanden Heuvel defended Kirchwey, writing, “Yes, former Nation editor Freda Kirchwey, like so many in the progressive community in the 1930s and ’40s, lived in the shadow of Nazism and the Holocaust. She devoted much energy to saving Europe’s most beleaguered community, the remnants of which were desperately seeking safe harbor after the worst genocidal killing in modern human history.”

Quoting from her own response to the Radoshes’ article, vanden Heuvel added, “When Kirchwey was writing, Israel was fighting for its survival; it was not engaged in a self-destructive occupation that even Israeli conservatives believe will eventually undermine its character and security.”

After some prodding, vanden Heuvel conceded that “[Kirchwey’s] views on the question of Palestine were one-sided and don’t represent what The Nation believes today, or indeed what it has believed for decades.”  

“The Nation has repeatedly criticized Israeli militarism and illegal occupation and has supported the right of Palestinians to statehood. Those views have been expressed in countless unsigned editorials, as the voice of the magazine, as well as in numerous articles and essays by contributors and columnists,” replied vanden Heuvel.

It is true that The Nation has staunchly opposed Israel’s occupation for decades. And the magazine does occasionally publish anti-Zionist critiques of Israel that identify Zionism as a toxic settler-colonial ideology underpinning the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

But it also provides a platform for anti-Palestinian bigots and Nakba revisionists to absolve Zionism of responsibility for fueling Israel’s ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. In a recent print feature for The Nation, liberal Israeli Zionist Bernard Avishai, who lives in the stolen home of a Palestinian expelled in 1948, attributed the premeditated mass expulsion of 50,000 Palestinians from Lydd and Ramla during the Nakba to “the fog of war” and labeled David Ben-Gurion, an architect of Palestine’s ethnic cleansing, an “admirably pragmatic” leader.

The Nation, as far as I can tell, does not publish Holocaust revisionism. Why is Nakba revisionism any less repulsive? 

While it would be unfair to hold The Nation’s current leadership responsible for the transgressions of their predecessors, the magazine at the very least owes a historical debt to the Palestinians whose permanent displacement it so enthusiastically supported. Prevented from returning home by an ideology that seeks their erasure, those refugees and their descendants today live in shipping containers in Gaza and struggle to survive Bashar al-Assad’s barrel bombs and ISIS beheadings in what’s left of the Yarmouk camp in Damascus.

So long as The Nation magazine dithers on BDS while tiptoeing around the root cause of Palestinian suffering, the past will continue to haunt its present, a condition Palestinian refugees, waiting to return, know all too well. 

Update, 21 May 2015

Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation’s editor-in-chief, has written to me, taking issue with my characterization of her comments, quoted in The Forward, in which she embraces her magazine’s “great history” on Israel and apparently cites as evidence the Summer 2008 World Affairs article by the Radoshes.

Vanden Heuvel writes that “The Forward garbled that quote from me. The paragraph in your piece makes it sound like I was praising the Radoshes’ article in World Affairs, when in fact — as you know, because I explained it to you in our correspondence — I was not.”

Indeed, in earlier correspondence, vanden Heuvel also asserted that the quote had been “garbled.” But it was in the same email message that vanden Heuvel defended former Nation editor Freda Kirchwey’s record, words which I quoted. As I also noted in my post, vanden Heuvel quoted her own response in World Affairs to the Radoshes piece: “When Kirchwey was writing, Israel was fighting for its survival; it was not engaged in a self-destructive occupation that even Israeli conservatives believe will eventually undermine its character and security.”

In other words, vanden Heuvel endorses the view that from its founding Israel was righteous and innocent and in a “fight for survival” and that its behavior only became problematic after its 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This view not only completely erases the Nakba — the mass, premeditated ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias that began in 1947 — but the decades of Zionist colonization and terrorism preceding it.

It also erases the fact that from 1948 until 1966, Palestinian citizens of Israel — those who survived the Nakba and remained in what became Israel — lived under military rule. This was a brutal occupation — during which, among other crimes, Israel expelled thousands of Palestinians to Gaza in 1950 and committed the 1956 Kafr Qasim massacre — that vanden Heuvel might not see as “self-destructive” to Israel, but was devastating to the Palestinian communities affected. It is also notable that vanden Heuvel continues to frame criticisms of Israel in the context of what is “self-destructive” to Israel and good for its “character and security,” rather than centering them on concerns for the rights of Palestinians and the destruction Israel has caused to their society.

While vanden Heuvel may say that The Forward garbled her quote — and there is no way to determine that — the words she has written elsewhere confirm that the views of the current editor of The Nation on Israel’s founding have much more in common with her avowedly Zionist predecessor than perhaps she would like to admit.

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Comments

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Jerry J replied on

I find it quite interesting that the 1936 article in The Nation never refers to a "Palestinian." It refers to Arabs in Palestine, however. Why is this? Is that there was no Palestinian national identity (at that time)? (Note that I have yet to find a pre-1948 newspaper or magazine article that refers to "Palestinians" as being a specific people. Sometimes, recent Jewish immigrants are referred to as "Palestinians," Why is that?

This is not to say that there should not be a "2 state" solution.

-JJ

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Ted replied on

I find it quite interesting that zionists continue to ask questions that imply that Palestinians do not now or ever existed.
But that is the reality and true nature of an exclusive colonial-settler state based on a religious and ethnic orthodoxy and founded through the displacement and dispossession of the people present living on the land.
There will not be a viable contiguous independent Palestinian state as long as the zionist entity exists backed unconditionally by US imperialism.

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Larry Saltzman replied on

Palestine has been a geographically defined place since the Romans. It is inhabited by Semitic people who can trace their ancestry straight back to the ancient people of Canaan including Judeans. The people called the Palestinians are the indigenous people of Palestine. They were invaded, as has happened in the past by conquerors from Europe, in this case the Zionists. Zionists were from Europe and were not indigenous to the area. They stole Palestine from the Palestinians. Parsing words about whether the Palestinians had a "national identity" pre-Zionism is an irrelevant and hypocritical argument. It is time to end the Zionist colonial enterprise and reunite historic Palestine back into a single country. Israelis will become a minority in that country and will have to end their racism and start behaving themselves, but that is a good thing.

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tom hall replied on

"Note that I have yet to find a pre-1948 newspaper or magazine article that refers to "Palestinians" as being a specific people. "

Well where have you been looking- or more to the point, not looking? You can't have consulted Arabic language sources. Filastina, published in Jaffa beginning in 1911, always referred to the Palestinians as a people having national rights and aspirations distinct from others in the region. There are countless books, articles, documents of all kinds dating from the early twentieth century, which explicitly identify Palestine and Palestinians from a geopolitical vantage. Most happen to be written in Arabic. I hope that doesn't disqualify them in your eyes.

Frankly, it looks like you're peddling a variant of the old canard that Palestinians don't exist (Golda Meir), never did (Newt Gingrich) and never will (name a current Israeli minister).

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Larry Saltzman replied on

Tom, that was an excellent response to the tired and untrue cliché that the Palestinians never existed.

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Ian Berman replied on

While it is ludicrous to deny Palestinians the name corresponding to the land where they have lived for millennia, let's assume for argument's sake they are not "Palestinians."

So what? They had lived there continuously under different conquerors, but it is still the land to which they are connected. Once the world had reached a place that imperialism and colonialism are no longer acceptable, these people had a right to live where they had been with self-determination.

There is no basis for Zionists to say, "well, you weren't REALLY a nation, so we're going to take this land and push you out to make sure we have an ethnic majority." Nor does Israel have the right to continue their policies of settlement building, land grab, home demolition, military occupation and settler violence and destruction with impunity.

So call them the Arab Mouseketeers for all anyone cares. It doesn't change the legality or morality of Israel's crimes against humanity.

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Peter Loeb replied on

Thanks and well-said Ian B. My similar response is printed below.

---Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA

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karen replied on

the worn tactic of questioning the existence of Palestinians is almost too pathetic to respond to!
indigenous people of Palestine existed more than 6,000 years ago. sometime between then and now (far less than 6,000 years ago), a religion was invented that claims to own everything because "god" gave it to them... talk about an invented people!! I can't even believe this has to be pointed out to educated people. zionists brag that they drained rivers and aquifers making an English country garden out of the "uncivilized" land of Palestine, yet they don't even believe in evolution? liars.
today's problem sure looks like a unity between various white people who happen to dominate the planet at the moment and deny human rights to others. "Jerry J" is racist, and apparently proud of it.

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lidia replied on

To let Zionist colonizers perpetuate their colonization of Palestine?
Should be there be a "2 state" solution in SA? That is, Bantustans?
It is very nice to worry about somebody not admitting 1936 the existence of Palestinians, while in the same time supporting Bantustans for Palestinians NOW!

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Paul Larudee replied on

The Nation is morally compromised if not totally blind. It opposed a racist state in South Africa but supports one in Palestine. It supports the maintenance of an overwhelming (80%) Jewish majority in a Jewish state, which means opposing implementation of the Geneva convention right of refugees to return to their homes, the suppression of the numbers of Palestinians in "Israel" and sufficient ethnic cleansing activity to maintain the Jewish religious and ethnic majority. It's time to dump The Nation and its hypocrisy.

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tom hall replied on

I keep getting ludicrous emails from the editor of the Nation, asking for donations, subscriptions, support of any kind. I'm also importuned to pony up for luxury Caribbean cruises in the company of key figures at the Nation.

When they turn that big boat around and head for Gaza, that's the day they can look for my contribution.

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Peter Loeb replied on

Thanks as always to Rania Khalek for her courageous journalism.

Those who insist on their goodness need comfortable support such as that
provided again and again by publications such as "The Nation".

Incidentally, the arguments about whether there was or was not a "Palestine"
are not only specious but a distracting. Perhaps the invading settler
colonists wish to preserve this totally fabricated myth. Anyone who has
read about the history of area or seen any maps from milennia gone by
would not find these myths persuasive to the many nations who went to
gruesome medeival war to control "Palestina". Take Egypt for example.
But the name per see is almost irrelevant.

Under any name, the cruelty of Zionism would have no excuse. No more than
the brutalities of other examples of settler colonialism. (See Michael Prior,
THE BIBLE AND COLONIALISM for an in-depth analysis and discussion
of several examples only one of which is Zionism).

------Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA

----Peter

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Paras Sanghvi replied on

Give the refugees Monetary compensation and re settle the refugees in America

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lidia replied on

1) Expell PS from PS' home and country
2) Give PS compensation as I see fitting
3) Re-settle PS where I see fitting
(Irony alert)

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Nader N. Chokr replied on

Rania. Thanks for a carefully researched and substantiated piece about The Nation's shameful past and present complicity with the Zionist, colonial and racist project. Even so-called 'progressives' have blind-spots, or should I say, especially of the American variety.

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karen replied on

this really is a great piece of journalism!
Rania Khalek does it again...

I've read issues of The Nation in the past, and didn't get what's so great about it. I never liked the name, either. what 'Nation'???

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John replied on

Rania Khalek has the facts on her side when she writes that in the 1940's and 1950's, The Nation supported Israel. Support for Israel was very widespread. Many Jews, including left-wing Jews, bought the whole Israeli package.

Rashid Khalidi has discussed the great difficulty he and others had in the 1960's attempting to gain a foothold for the Palestinian narrative.

The Nation has grown more critical of Israel over the decades. In the 1980's, Alexander Cockburn was a reliable critic of Israel and champion of the Palestinian cause, and Cockburn had a column in The Nation. Cockburn was one of the very few journalists who were willing to take on the Israeli lobby.

Cockburn, writing in The Nation, hailed the Electronic Intifada, writing that it was very difficult to find out what was actually happening to the Palestinians.

An important recent turning point (in my opinion) came in fall 2013 when Max Blumenthal published his important book, Goliath. The book was published by The Nation books, so the magazine was in effect endorsing Blumenthal's book. The Nation ran a long excerpt for the book, much longer than a typical book review. The article can be found <a href="http://www.thenation.com/artic....

Eric Alterman tried to attack Blumenthal's book, in an <a href="http://www.thenation.com/artic... entitled "The Israel-Hater's Handbook".
In the subsequent debates, Alterman was very isolated.

There has been a sea-change on the I/P issue, from the 1940's and 50's, when the Israelis and their supporters controlled the pubic discussion, to the 1980's and more recent times, when the Israeli myths have started to collapse. (The myths haven't collapsed, but they have started to collapse).

Still, there's a long way to go. I'm sure the present editors and writers at The Nation are embarrassed at the exposure off Freda Kirchway's positions a half century ago.

Rania Khalek

Rania Khalek's picture

Rania Khalek is an independent journalist reporting on the underclass and marginalized.