The Centenary of the Jewish Legion

By Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Jewish Legion.

The story of the Legion, officially the 38^th, 39^th and 40^th Battalions of the British Royal Fusiliers, began with two Russian-born Zionists, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Josef Trumpledor. 

Jabotinsky, one of the leading Zionists in Russia at the start of the war, went to Alexandria, Egypt in December 1914 as a war correspondent for a Moscow liberal daily, Russkiya Vedomosti. 

He found in Egypt thousands of foreign-born Jews deported from Palestine by the Ottoman government, including Trumpeldor, a decorated Russian veteran of the siege of Port Arthur, where he lost an arm, during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.

Working for the Zionist cause in Istanbul for several years had convinced Jabotinsky that little could be expected from the Ottoman Empire.

In March 1915, a delegation led by the two men was received by British General Sir John G. Maxwell, where they presented a plan to raise an infantry unit from these deportees to fight the Ottomans in Palestine. 

But the government opposed the use of Zionists in the campaign in Palestine because the liberation of Palestine was not yet a diplomatic goal.However, the ongoing Gallipoli campaign against the Turks provided a solution: service against the Ottomans on a different battlefront. 

So the Zion Mule Corps was formed, commanded by Lt. Col. John H. Patterson, with Trumpeldor as the second in charge. 

It fought at Gallipoli until the end of that campaign, returning to Alexandria on Jan. 10, 1916. The unit was officially disbanded on May 26. 

Meanwhile, Jabotinsky, who had not been involved, had gone to Britain to lobby the Jewish community for help with raising another fighting unit. 

Once the Zionist movement was behind the plan, it gained momentum quickly. On August 23, 1917, when the British cabinet was already preparing the Balfour Declaration, the formation of a Jewish regiment was officially announced in the London Gazette.

Canadian Jews had first begun to hear of the idea of a Jewish Legion in early 1916. Captain Isidore Freedman of Montreal, a Jewish officer in the Canadian Army, called for a Jewish company to be created, and on July 18, 1916, he raised an Infantry Reinforcement Draft Company. 

It left for Britain in March of 1917, but was there absorbed by the non-Jewish 23^rd Reserve Battalion.

By the spring of 1918, however, Fort Edward in Windsor, Nova Scotia, had become the site where the North American recruits of the new Jewish Legion began their training. 

Among the volunteers were two future Israeli prime ministers, David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol; the father of a third future prime minister and Nobel laureate, Yitzhak Rabin; a future president of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi; and the first Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Force, Yaakov Dori. 

Young recruit David Ben-Gurion arrived in Windsor to train with the Jewish Legion on June 1, 1918. 

He wrote to his wife Paula that “Ben-Zvi is a real soldier already. His face is tanned from the sun, and I can hardly recognize him.” 

Ben-Gurion described the reception given the Legionnaires in Windsor: “When our whole crowd goes into the YMCA you would think it was a Jewish wedding. The boys dance and make merry, sing Jewish songs and behave as if they were in the old country and not in Canada. It is as if it is the non-Jews who are in the Galut here.

He later remarked that “In Windsor one of the great dreams of my life -- to serve as a soldier in a Jewish Unit to fight for the liberation of Israel (as we always called Palestine) became a reality, and I will never forget Windsor, where I received my first training as a soldier, and where I became a corporal.”

On July 1, 1918, as the town of Windsor celebrated Dominion Day, the Jewish Legion trainees were invited to take part, and the “Jewish flag” flew alongside the Canadian and British flags.

They were soon afterwards sent to the Middle East to take part in the fight against the Ottomans in Palestine, with the promise from the British government that an Allied victory would lead to the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.

When the 38^th Battalion arrived in Palestine, it was immediately deployed to the Jordan Valley north of Jerusalem to counter Ottoman attacks.

Besides various skirmishes, it, along with the 39^th Battalion, participated in the Battle of Megiddo in mid-September 1918, widely considered one of the decisive victories on the Ottoman front.

With Hebrew as the language of command, and a menorah with the Hebrew word “kadimah” (forward) as its insignia, the Legion gave the symbolic appearance of an independent Jewish military presence fighting with the Allied Powers to conquer Palestine.

The saga of the Canadian contribution to the Jewish Legion, including some 400 volunteers, important and impressive in its own right, was also another step in the road leading to unity in the Jewish community.

There was a commemoration of the centenary of the Canadian part of the story of the Jewish Legion at Fort Edward National Historic Site in Windsor on Sept. 23, 2018. Its place in this country’s Jewish history is secure.

Journalism: An Increasingly Dangerous Craft

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

When I was in Washington earlier this year, I visited the “Newseum,” a seven-level, 23,000 square-metre museum featuring fifteen theaters and fifteen galleries about the history of the media.

One of the most dramatic exhibits is its Journalists Memorial, which pays tribute to reporters, photographers and broadcasters who have died reporting the news.

The gallery features photographs of hundreds of the journalists whose names are etched on the memorial’s glass panels of the soaring, two-story structure, as well as kiosks where information on every journalist on the memorial can be accessed.

Each year, the Newseum selects a representative group of journalists who lost their lives on the job in the preceding year. Their names are added to the memorial to illustrate the dangers faced by journalists around the world.

On June 4, the names of 18 journalists were added to the memorial to represent all those who died in pursuit of the news in 2017, bringing the total to 2,323, dating back to 1837.

 “All the journalists recognized on this memorial this year faced unprecedented dangers as they worked to report the news, often in countries where press freedom is imperiled or nonexistent,” said Cathy Trost, executive director of the Freedom Forum Institute.

This month, a well-known Saudi Arabian journalist appears to have been murdered.

Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on Oct. 2 to get paperwork to get married, but never came out.

He has not been heard from since, with Turkish authorities announcing they think he has been killed.

“We believe that the murder was premeditated and the body was subsequently moved out of the consulate,” a Turkish official told the Reuters news agency.

They think a 15-person Saudi team flew to Turkey, killed Khashoggi, and brought with them a bone saw to dismember him.

The Saudi consul in Istanbul, Mohammed al-Otaibi, rejected the accusation, asserting that “the citizen, Jamal Khashoggi, is not in the consulate or in Saudi Arabia.”

A regular Washington Post contributor, the Saudi journalist was known for criticizing the kingdom’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in columns for the American newspaper.

In “The Silencing of Jamal Khashoggi,” published Oct. 3 by Karen Attiah, the paper’s Global Opinions editor wrote that “we are extremely disturbed to have had no contact from Jamal since he was last seen visiting a Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Tuesday. At the time of this writing, we have not been able to reach him.

“We have inquired about Jamal’s whereabouts, and expressed our deep concern, to both Turkish and Saudi officials.”

The Post also put out a blank column in its Oct. 5 edition after his disappearance. The empty column was titled “A Missing Voice” and carried Khashoggi’s byline.

Jamal Khashoggi has a had a career spanning three decades. Born in Medina in 1958, he studied journalism at Indiana University and began his career as a correspondent for the English language Saudi Gazette newspaper.

Khashoggi is best known for coverage of the events of Afghanistan, Algeria, Kuwait and the Middle East in the 1990s.

In recent years his position became more precarious. In December 2016 Saudi authorities banned Khashoggi from writing in newspapers, appearing on TV and attending conferences.

This came after Khashoggi’s remarks made at a Washington think-tank the previous month, where he was critical of Donald Trump’s ascension to the U.S. presidency.

Khashoggi turned against the Saudi government after deciding that achieving democracy “from the inside” was not possible, according to Yahia Assiri, a former Saudi air force officer living in exile who met with Khashoggi in London late last year.

There’s a very good chance he will join the other murdered reporters on the “Newseum” memorial wall next year.

The Passing of a Great Historian

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal

When I was a university student, many moons ago, few courses in modern history were without a book, or at least a number of scholarly articles, by Walter Laqueur, assigned as part of our readings. Laqueur, who died Sept. 30, at the age of 97, was a giant in his field.

A German Jew who fled Adolf Hitler’s Germany, he was part of an era when historians wrote on a broad range of topics and countries. All these issues and places in one way or another had affected his own life.

At the time of his death, Laqueur was a retired professor at Georgetown University and chairman of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. 

He was born in Breslau, the city that is today Wroclaw, Poland, on May 26, 1921. He was 17 in 1938 when he left Germany days before the Nazi-led Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews and managed to gain entry to the British mandate of Palestine as a student. His parents perished in the Holocaust.

Laqueur worked as a journalist in Israel before moving to London in 1955, where, along with another eminent historian, George Mosse, he founded and edited the Journal of Contemporary History and other publications.

From 1965 to 1994 he was director of the London-based Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, a leading archive and repository of documents.

Some of Laqueur’s works will remain classics, including his 1972 A History of Zionism and A History of Terrorism, published in 1977. Both remain in print and are as relevant as the day they were published.

A History of Zionism traced the movement from its beginnings, with the emancipation of European Jewry in the wake of the French Revolution, to 1948, when the Zionist dream became a reality. 

In A History of Terrorism Laqueur described the trajectory of political terror from nineteenth-century Europe to  the operations of various Middle Eastern and other groups today. 

The book was a companion to Guerrilla Warfare, published that same year, which sought to provide a critical interpretation of guerrilla theory and practice throughout history.

He wrote dozens of other books, on a wide array of subjects, including antisemitism, Communism, fascism, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, the Cold War, and the Soviet Union. 

When the USSR disintegrated in 1991, Laqueur predicted the emergence of “an authoritarian system based on some nationalist populism.” And this indeed came to pass.

Putinism: Russia and its Future with the West, published in 2015, explained how three long-standing pillars of Russian ideology -- a strong belief in the Russian Orthodox Church, a sense of Eurasian “manifest destiny” and a fear of foreign enemies -- continue to exert a powerful influence on the Russian people. 

Laqueur’s last book, The Future of Terrorism: ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Alt-Right, written with Christopher Wall, was published this year. There, he cautioned that the Islamic State’s short-lived successes in creating a caliphate demonstrated that “true believers now have a model that they can hope to achieve and acquire, because it has been done.”

When he visited his boyhood home after the Second World War, he wrote in his 1992 memoir, Thursday's Child Has Far to Go, “the world I had known as a boy no longer existed, and as I tried to remember the people I had known when I was 16, I realized that most of them had died a violent death.

“Some were killed in the ruins of Stalingrad,” he added, “others in Auschwitz, some in 1948 in the battles for Palestine.”

No one could call Walter Laqueur a starry-eyed idealist. In his long and productive life, he had lived through too many historical tragedies to assume that there was a “right side of history” and that the world was becoming a more just and peaceful place. 

In one of his last works Laqueur called himself a “veteran pessimist” We will miss his steely-eyed insights into politics and human nature.

Brazil Taking Hard Turn to Right

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph Journal

Brazil, South America's largest country in land and population, has become a political basket case. Formerly governed as a military dictatorship before 1985, it has always been marred by corruption and economic dysfunction – problems that are only growing worse.

In the past decade, billions of dollars' worth of public contracts have been awarded on the basis of kickbacks for elected officials. Crime is out of control, with 175 murders a day. And the man who governed the country for most of this century, Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, has been jailed for influence peddling and bribery.

It's little surprise, then, the country finds itself in political turmoil during the current election season. Many international observers are sounding alarms about the possible victory of Jair Bolsonaro of the Social Liberal Party, which takes a populist conservative stance and pledges to bring the country significantly to the right.

Bolsonaro served in the army for 17 years before going into politics in 1988 and has praised the former military dictatorship. Since 1991, he has served as a congressman for the state of Rio de Janeiro, winning re-election six times.

Critics have accused him of inciting sexism, homophobia and racism. He says he “loves” U.S. President Donald Trump and has vowed to "drain the swamp" in the capital, Brasilia – language common from populist leaders in many countries who vow to take power back from out-of-touch elites.

The Social Liberal Party's slogan is "Brazil Above Everything, God Above Everyone."

Like France, Brazil has a two-stage process for electing the president. There is an open field in the first round and, if no candidate earns more than 50 per cent of the vote, a "run-off" second round between the top two finishers is held.

Voting in Brazilian elections is compulsory.

Round 1 was held Sunday. Out of a pack of 13 candidates, Bolsonaro emerged with 46.1 per cent of the vote, despite spending a large part of the campaign in hospital after being stabbed at a rally in September.

Sao Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad, representing the Workers’ Party, which governed from 2003 to 2016, was a distant second at 29.1 per cent.

Bolsonaro seems poised to cruise to victory in the second round on Oct. 28, given his strong showing last weekend. To defeat him, opponents will have to rally a coalition to the Workers' Party, which many see as responsible for Brazil's malaise.

Certainly, Bolsonaro is a divisive figure. He has demonized his opponents on the left as corrupt and inept radicals. Until early August, he did not even have a running mate because traditional parties and politicians found him too extreme.

But that's all changed now. He emerged as the front-runner in this race because his pledge to crack down on crime and political corruption resounded with millions of voters. In this, he is striking a common note for populist candidates in many of the world's democracies.

The next three weeks will be fierce. Brazil seems on the precipice of another period of political volatility.

Some Answers to 50-Year Old Mexican Tragedy

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Fifty years ago, in October 1968, a massacre took place, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Mexico City, just days before the country was due to host the Olympic Games. 

The preceding months had seen ongoing confrontations between students – both those from the working-class polytechnic school, IPN, and the middle-class Autonomous National University – and the government's riot police, against a backdrop of authoritarian leadership and growing economic inequality. 

The government was determined to put an end to civil unrest, and on the evening of Oct. 2, gunfire broke out in the Plaza, with snipers, riot police, tanks and helicopters all taking part. 

Many students had already waged pitched battles to defend their premises. It had all started on July 22, when an incursion of riot police entered into two vocational schools to break up a fight.

Protests and marches escalated thereafter in response to police brutality – from indiscriminate beatings to arrests and torture.

Four days later, after “authorized” local protests, some more radical IPN students decided to push on to the main square and seat of government, merging with another march, led by pro-communist students, to commemorate the Moncada assault that had begun the Cuban revolution in 1956.

The revolutionary slogans alarmed President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, worried by the prospect of Communist-inspired disruption of the Olympic Games that would ruin the facade of a stable, prosperous Mexico.

Indeed, the major student concern was the lack of democracy and labour rights. While the elite and the PRI bureaucracy enjoyed an unprecedented economic boom, there was hunger, unemployment and deprivation, especially in rural and indigenous areas. An academic study in 1967 found that of a population of 47 million, five million went barefoot and 11 million were illiterate.

Student demands included freedom for political prisoners; the firing of city police chiefs and officials responsible for the repression; and compensation for the families of those killed or injured in the conflict up to that point.

Confrontation intensified in August, as students, workers and the unemployed took to the streets together.

Two massive marches on August 13th and 27th to the Zocalo, the main square in Mexico City saw upwards of 500,000 people participating. In response, Díaz Ordaz resolved to destroy the movement.

On Oct. 2, 10 days before the start of the Olympics, the 12,000 students and other civilians who had gathered in the Plaza that evening were attacked without warning.

The total number of deaths remains unknown. Some estimates are as high as 1,000, but most have settled on about 300.

For decades the PRI government stuck to its story that students, controlled by foreigners, had triggered the bloodbath, despite countless witnesses to the contrary. International media also played down the massacre.

After the PRI lost power to the conservative National Action Party (PAN) in 2000, the new president, Vicente Fox, instructed a Special Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the massacre. It concluded that the state had embarked on “a spiral of violence” that led it to commit crimes against humanity, including genocide.

It filed charges against former President Luis Echeverria, who as interior secretary in 1968 was in charge of policing, but a tribunal exonerated him in 2007.

On Sept. 24, for the first time, a Mexican government body acknowledged that the massacre was a “state crime.”

Jaime Rochin, head of the Executive Commission for Attention to Victims, said the government used "snipers who fired to create chaos, terror and an official narrative to criminalize" anti-government demonstrations.

The new Mexican president, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, a leftist not beholden to either the PRI or PAN, will take office in December.

Sergio Aguayo, a journalist and academic, said Lopez Obrador’s victory is a fulfillment of the hopes of the leftist student movement of the 1960s.

Perhaps he will finally provide Mexicans with more answers to what happened on that dreadful night 50 years ago.

It's No Longer Primarily About the Economy

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal

In the 1992 American presidential campaign, candidate Bill Clinton famously argued that “It’s the economy, stupid.”

He used the recession in the United States at the time as one of the means to successfully unseat George H. W. Bush.

But in in this November’s midterm elections, so-called identitarian politics, not economics, will be the major factor – despite the fact that the Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath has been much worse than previous downturns.

The Democratic Party’s base has increasingly become the home of people of colour and of women, while white males skew towards the Republicans. 

In the 2016 presidential election issues of identity -- race, religion, gender and ethnicity -- and not economics, were the driving forces that determined how people voted.

These are the findings of political scientists John Sides of George Washington University, Michael Tesler of the University of California at Irvine and Lynn Vavreck of the University of California at Los Angeles, co-authors of the new book Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America.

The two candidates stood further apart on identity issues than any major-party presidential candidates in 40 years, so this became more strongly related to how Americans voted in 2016 than in any recent presidential election, maintain the authors.

It’s not that economic issues didn’t matter. But racial attitudes “shaped the way voters understood economic outcomes.”

Bart Bonikowski, a professor of sociology at Harvard University, in “Ethno-nationalist Populism and the Mobilization of Collective Resentment,” published in the November 2017 British Journal of Sociology, argues that in the contemporary political climate, the fear of cultural disruption has become pervasive on the right.

The reason for this is that many Donald Trump supporters have long held strong ethnonationalist sentiments, but these have only recently become politically salient, as Trump, and other Republicans before him, “have actively stoked fears of demographic and cultural change and channeled them into powerful resentments toward minority groups.”

That’s why many academics are wary of identity politics, seeing it as a double-edged sword.

In his new book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, Francis Fukuyama, a professor of political science at Stanford University, deals with this issue.

“A lot of these recognition struggles flow out of the social movements that began to emerge in the 1960s involving African-Americans, women, the LGBT community, Native Americans, and the disabled,” he told the Chronicle of Higher Education in an Aug. 27 interview. 

“These groups found a home on the left, triggering a reaction on the right. They say: What about us? Aren’t we deserving of recognition? Haven’t the elites ignored us, downplayed our struggles? That’s the basis of today’s populism.”

Populist nationalism springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means, especially given the insecurity caused by economic disruption plus rather rapid cultural change.

While every single one of these struggles is justified, “the problem is in the way we interpret injustice and how we try to solve it, which tends to fragment society.”

In “An Anatomy of Radicalism,” in the Fall 2018 issue of the journal American Affairs, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein also acknowledges that modern theorists and practitioners of identity politics, at their best, “capture people’s actual experiences, and their keen sense of exclusion and humiliation. That can be helpful and even important, but it is hardly a basis for reform.”

It is not clear exactly what it does, he maintains, "aside from giving people a sense of having some kind of home. It is probably best understood as a plea, or a demand, for understanding and respect. That should not be diminished. But where exactly does it lead?”

Perhaps Fukuyama has the answer, when he suggests that “We need to get back to a narrative that’s focused less on narrow groups and more on larger collectivities.”

Libya's Violent Political Culure

By Henry Srebrnik. [Saint-John, NB] Telegraph Journal 

In the states of the Middle East, four types of regimes are on offer:

Theocracies such as Iran, which is governed by Shia clerics; rule by a strongman -- the Assads in Syria are an example; kings with a modicum of legitimacy, such as Abdullah II in Jordan; finally, fragile and – if history is any guide – short- lived democratic regimes, as in today’s Tunisia.

Should any of them collapse, the most likely outcome is a descent into anarchy and violence – witness today’s Libya.

The downfall of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya in 2011 produced, not democracy, but chaos, with conflicts along regional, tribal and linguistic lines.

Libya is now a failed state with rival groups battling for control of the country and its oil riches.

In August clashes between rival armed groups in Tripoli plunged Libya into yet deeper chaos, casting serious doubt as to whether the war-wracked country is ready to hold planned elections later this year.

On August 27, fierce fighting erupted in the capital’s southern districts after the Seventh Brigade, an armed group based in Tarhouna, southeast of Tripoli, launched a surprise offensive against rival militias.

By Sept. 23 at least 115 people had been killed in clashes between rival factions in Tripoli, Libya’s health ministry said.

The fighting pitted the Seventh Brigade against the Tripoli Revolutionaries’ Brigades (TRB) and the Nawasi Brigade, two of the capital’s largest armed groups.

The country now has two rival legislatures - the internationally recognised Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) and the eastern-based House of Representatives (HOR) in Benghazi. Each has its own central bank and national oil company.

The head of the GNA is Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj, while General Khalifa Haftar of the self-styled Libyan National Army runs the east.

While armed groups in the western part of the country technically have pledged allegiance to the GNA, that doesn't mean that they will heed civilian authorities’ instructions.

“Everybody is under the GNA government because the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defence pay out salaries but nobody takes orders from them,” remarked Tarek Megerisi, a political researcher specialising in Libya. They are all “vying for a piece of the pie.” 

Emadeddin Muntasser, a Libyan political analyst, concurs. “The GNA is a paper government with no influence of events.”  

Wolfram Lacher of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs has identified four groups that exercise disproportionate power in the GNA’s part of Libya: the TRB, the Nawasi Brigade, the Special Deterrence Force and the Abu Slim unit of the Central Security apparatus.

This has angered rival militias such as the Seventh Brigade, who feel like they have been marginalised and dealt with unjustly, as well as being at risk of losing access to state funds.

They stated that they “reject the rule of militias inside Tripoli.” So the fighting will, unfortunately, continue. And don’t hold your breath waiting for elections. Libya is destined to be a failed state for years, perhaps even decades to come.