The Israeli Army’s Sword Brigade

Two non-Jewish minority communities in Israel, the Druze (a deviant Shi’a Muslim group) and Circassians (Sunni Muslims whose ancestors were exiled to Palestine from the Caucasus), are subject to mandatory conscription to the IDF. Additionally, members of several Bedouin tribes volunteer as well as individual Muslim and Christian Arabs. The decision of the first two groups to accept obligatory service in the Israeli military forces was made at their own request. As early as the summer of 1948, after years of intense pressure by the Palestinian Higher Arab committee to join in the fight to prevent a Jewish state, units of the three groups defected and switched sides to fight with the Jews.

The designated unit for them was attached to the Oded Brigade and fought in Operation Hiram in October 1948. Since then, it has fought with distinction in every war. Today, the unit is also the natural choice for a growing number of Christian and Muslim Arab volunteers.

Originally, a special minority unit, known since 1987 as The IDF Sword Battalion (Hebrew: גדוד חרב‎, Gdud Herev, Arabic: كتيبة السيف‎), was formerly called Unit 300 or The IDF Minorities Unit. Since the 1980s however, Druze, Circassian and individual Arab and Bedouin soldiers at their own request have joined regular combat units, attaining high ranks and commendations for distinguished service.

Those who are familiar with other historical conflicts should know better than to accept simplistic versions of the past that are corroborated only by hindsight. 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. In Palestine during the period of the Mandate, Arab support and aid to the Jews was always carefully hidden but not insubstantial.

Before examining the distinguished record of non-Jewish volunteers in Israel’s military annals who have added another chapter to that of the Christian volunteers in MAHAL (see Berdichevsky, NER June 2015), three remarkable books are worth mentioning that provide a valuable source of information to explain the background of the old adage that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Drawing on original sources in both Arabic documents of the “Arab Executive Committee” (the leading political body of the Palestinian-Arab Nationalist movement), Supreme Muslim Council and the Arab press as well as numerous memoirs, and Hebrew (Central Zionist Archives, Hagana Archives, Hebrew press and personal memoirs), the three books trace the heretofore largely unreported history of Palestinian/Arab collaboration with the Zionist movement during the period of the British Mandate.

They are: 1. Palestine Betrayed by Efriam Karsh, Yale University Press, New Haven. 342 pages. 30 photos, appendices, notes, 5 maps. 2010. (Berdichevsky, NER, September, 2012.)

2. Army of Shadows; Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948 by Hillel Cohen (Berdichevsky, NER February, 2009.)

3. Good Arabs; The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-67 by Hillel Cohen (translated by Haim Watzman, University of California Press. 2010. This work also includes considerable information on the first twenty years of Israeli statehood from 1948 to 1967.

The Arab collaboration took the form of facilitating the sale of land to Jewish settlers, the provision of vital security intelligence, political propaganda, arms smuggling, military assistance and eventual conscription in the IDF.

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 might 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 has traditionally paid no attention to nuances. What is even more amazing is that Palestinian Arab cooperation with Jewish settlers during the Mandate came predominantly from conservative and traditional rural Muslim circles, attracted by economic opportunities, employment, new markets, agricultural techniques, medical care, city life, Jewish girlfriends or simple bribery.

Both the official Palestinian nationalist and Zionist sides have tended to keep this information confidential and have been reluctant to see it exposed. The 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.

These books are 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.

It effectively wipes out the oceans of ink spilt in convincing much of present world opinion and hypnotizing the present generation of Palestinian Arabs that the nakba (disaster) that befell them was inevitable or the fault of Jewish design, intransigence, or duplicity. The “Betrayal” in the title of Karsh’s book was self-betrayal by the Palestinian Arab leadership who led the people they claimed as their charge into a dead end. The leadership is condemned by its own archives and eye-witnesses in tens of thousands of documents released by the British Foreign Office that serves as the source material for much of the three books.

It was the Palestinian Higher Arab Committee which willfully misguided, misinformed, and inflamed a large section of public opinion among the Arab community that there could not be any compromise and all who spoke or acted on its behalf were “traitors.” These traitors who all worked for Jewish-Arab cooperation include such luminaries as the Arab mayor of Haifa. This year is the 75th anniversary of the death of Hasan Bey Shukri, the first mayor of modern Haifa. Shukri was born in 1876 in Jerusalem to a family in the highest levels of Ottoman officialdom. His family moved to Haifa when he was young, and the Turks appointed him mayor in 1914.

Throughout his tenure as mayor, Shukri displayed a positive and conciliatory attitude toward the Jewish community in the city, and gave them senior posts in the municipality as well as recognizing Hebrew as an official language of the city administration alongside of Arabic in 1927. In 1933, he opened up city tenders to Jewish contractors as well as Arab ones.

Hassan Shukri was targeted by Arab assassins numerous times. Labor leader Sami Taha and many lesser Arab officials and politicians as well as village chieftains (all assassinated by agents of the Mufti) worked closely with the Histadrut and refused to cooperate with the many strikes called by the reactionary and extremist leadership within HAC headed by the Grand Mufti, still revered by the current Palestinian Authority leadership as the “Father of the Palestinian Nation.”

Many friends of Israel are unaware of this past history or that the Druze, Circassian and Bedouin veterans of the IDF have suffered casualties and fatalities in excess of the Jewish population as a percentage of their relative populations. For more than a decade, the leader among Israeli settlements with the highest per capita casualty rate was the Druze village, Beit Jann in the Galilee. (The village holds another enviable record. Its high school students have the highest rate of successfully completing the “bogrut” – matriculation for automatic acceptance into an Israeli university.)

According to IDF statistics more than 80 percent of Druze and Circassians serve in the army, almost 400 have been killed in combat operations since 1948. In May 2015, the IDF published plans to disband the Sword Battalion, after research revealed the vast majority of recruits would rather integrate into the rest of the army.

The “Arab” Communities

In 2012, the official number of Arab residents and non-Jews in Israel was almost 1,600,000 people – almost 20 percent of Israel’s population of eight million. This figure includes approximately 300,000 Arabs in East Jerusalem, under Israeli control since 1967. About 82.6 percent of the Arab population in Israel is Sunni Muslim (with a very small minority of Shia), another 9 percent is Druze, and around 9 percent is Christian (mostly Oriental Orthodox and Catholic denominations).

Clearly, the three “minority within a minority” communities of Druze, Circassians and Bedouins had ample reasons to seek alliances with the Jews to afford themselves a counterweight against pressure from the Sunni Arab majority. Strong rivalries among and within clans, regions, villages, religions (Muslim and Christian) and political interests persisted during the Mandate.

The growing expansion of Arab industry and agriculture, especially related to the prosperous cultivation of citrus, olives, cereals, and grapes, led to fear by the conservative and moderate religious leadership that extremist politics would jeopardize this prosperity. The Muslim effendi class resented the extremist Muslim forces of the Husseini clan and their jockeying for power by using the ideology of Pan-Arab nationalism.

The more moderate Nashashibi clan who were not so rabidly anti-Zionist and often demonstrated loyalty and moderation to the Mandatory authorities but were constantly rebuffed by the British who were intent on mollifying the most extreme nationalist and Muslim religious voices. Scores of Arab villages signed non-aggression agreements with neighboring Jewish settlements, kibbutzim, and towns not to permit their homes to be used as bases for attacks. Many of the Arab villages where the population objected strongly to the presence of foreign Arab military forces who tried to press-gang them into joining in the hostilities, ejected them or even provided Jewish settlements with important information.

The Druze

The Israeli government designated the Druze a distinct ethnic community in 1957 at the request of its communal leaders. They number about 140,000 and constitute 2% of Israel’s population. Before the establishment of the State of Israel, the Druze were not recognized as a religious community. They were regarded as a deviant sect by the majority Sunni Muslim religious authorities. They live mainly in the north of the country. Many Druze have attained top positions in the military, Israeli politics and public service, although initially when conscription was first accepted by the community’s leadership in 1956 for regular army service, there was considerable opposition. Since then, the “Blood Brotherhood” between Jews and Druze as Comrades in Arms has grown substantially.

In 2007, Nabiah A-Din, a Druze mayor objected to proposals by Arab politicians in the radical Adalah Group that Israel be declared a multicultural state and argued that: “The state of Israel is Jewish state as well as a democratic state that espouses equality and elections. We invalidate and reject everything that the Adalah organization is requesting,” he said. According to A-din, the fate of Druze and Circassians in Israel is intertwined with that of the state. “This is a blood pact, and a pact of the living. We are unwilling to support a substantial alteration to the nature of this state, to which we tied our destinies prior to its establishment.”

In a survey conducted in 2008, Ephraim Ya’ar of Tel Aviv University found that more than 94% of Druze youth classified themselves as “Druze-Israelis” in the religious and national context. A growing number of Israeli Druze join elite units of the military, leaving the official Druze battalion understaffed. Several have even qualified as combat pilots in the Air force.

The obvious signs of brutality and the violation of human rights and continual inter-communal fighting in Gaza by Hamas, in Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen where the “Arab Spring” triumphed and the growing instability in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan have not been lost on Israel’s Arab population who have begun to critically rethink their role in the country following a near collapse of Arab nationalism.

The specter of a triumphal Islamism and the stated goal of restoring the caliphate are hardly embraced by many large segments of the Israeli Arab population who understand that cooperation and coexistence in Israel is an essential and inevitable part of any desirable future peaceful scenario. Among the Druze in both Syria and Lebanon, there is a growing awareness that their brothers in Israel are natural allies with whom a future alliance is desirable and likely.

The Circassians

The Circassian community numbers approximately 5,000 and resides primarily in two Galilean villages, Kfar Kama and Rehaniya. Nowadays, the Circassian community in Israel is well integrated into Israeli society, speak their ancestral Turkic language Adyghe (in addition to learning Hebrew, Arabic and English in elementary school), while cultivating their unique heritage and culture.

The Israeli Circassians have had good relations with the Jewish community in Israel since the beginning of the pre-state Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel due, in part to knowledge of the Russian language shared with many of the First Aliyah immigrants from Russia who settled in the Galilee. They also helped the illegal migration of Jews from Lebanon and Syria into Mandate Palestine. Many in Israel are employed in the Israeli security forces, including in the Israeli Border Police, the Israeli Defence Forces, and the Israeli Prison Service. The percentage of the army recruits among the community in Israel is particularly high.

Hebrew – The Key to israel’s Success

Video on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtmn2hqnxis go to 23 minutes after start

The Key to Israel’s Success

By 2030, a majority of the world’s Jews will probably be Hebrew speakers living in Israel and the divergence of interests and outlooks between many Jews in the Diaspora, particularly in the United States and the people of Israel, will be even greater than today. The difference in language will contribute to this trend, just as a growing proximity with a shared homeland and language will draw the Israeli citizens who have been branded in their identity cards as “Arabs” or Muslim or Christians closer to their Jewish compatriots. This was not possible in 1948 or 1967 when a triumphant Israel faced an internal cowed “Arab minority”, very few of whom were able to communicate across the language divide and appreciate the benefits of living in a state with guaranteed rights, or called upon to shoulder the burden of shared obligations.

In 1880, Hebrew was not the daily habitual vernacular of anybody. In 1900, it was the first language in habitual or primary use of no more than several hundred families in Palestine, and by 1930 of several tens of thousands of Jews accounting for no more than 3% of the world’s Jewish population. By 1950, it was the first language of the successful defenders of the country from the invasion of six Arab armies when the Hebrew speaking Jews of Israel constituted no more than 8 % of the world Jewish population. Today, it is approximately 45%.

Jews in Israel now confront a minority that has already been able to use the mirror of the Hebrew language to make them more aware of how legitimate grievances as “Israeli citizens” need to be negotiated. In 1949, the remnants of the “Arab” population who remained in the State of Israel barely constituted 12 % of the population. They are 20 % today. For many of them, especially the Druze, Circassians, and most notably among the Christians and the Bedouins, the reality of their prospects is that Arab nationalism and the promise of a “Palestinian State” is less attractive than ever before due to the acrimonious and nearly constant armed conflict between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and the instability of neighboring Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq with their large number of Palestinian refugees.

Appreciation of Israel’s growing strength, newly discovered immense resources of natural gas, oil and shale reserves and vastly increased attraction for trade, tourism, investment as well as closer strategic relations with India], China and Russia will all serve to make the goal of equal citizenship a more attractive alternative for the country’s minority population. The Hebrew language continues to exercise an immense appeal, charm and fascination in enabling Israelis to simultaneously identify with both the Biblical past’s well-known scriptures and the most modern achievements in modern science and technology.

Nevertheless, a barrier remains. Muslim and Christian Arabs, like the Russians who are the children and grandchildren of “mixed marriages”, are largely shut out of sharing in the sense of common nationhood. This ideal can never be mediated with the ultra-Orthodox for whom the only reality of identifying as a Jew are the rulings of the Halacha (religious law as determined by the rabbis) , for whom Israel can only be a “Jewish State”, not a “State of the Jews” as envisioned by Herzl.

Knowledge of Hebrew, literacy and a greater opportunity as well as equal treatment before the law will not by themselves entice or convince many Arabs to become a loyal minority. The same language has not prevented civil war in dozens of countries. It must be combined, as was the civil rights movement in the United States, with a commitment to non-violence. Another intifada and threats of violence will only confirm the hard line expectations of many Jewish Israelis that Israel must preserve its religious character, but this in the long run would be self-defeating.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and some of his predecessors, particularly David Ben-Gurion, frequently demanded from Palestinian counterparts that they recognize Israel as a “Jewish State”, the combination of a red herring and straw man tactic that does not equate loyalty and good citizenship with the behavior of the individual citizen but links it to membership in a category strictly determined by birth.

A “Hebrew Republic” would continue to be the political expression of three thousand years of Jewish history and like the Republic of Slovakia, an ethnic state, a democratic one to be sure, but one that demands equality before the law with equal rights and obligations for all citizens. Those Arabs and others who feel that this is a denial of their group identity should be helped to emigrate as should those ultra-Orthodox who refuse to accept the same equality of shared citizenship.

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, while still a student in Paris in 1880 undertook a brief sojourn in Algeria for his health (he would later die of tuberculosis in 1923). While there, he was outraged to read in what was the leading periodical in Jerusalem, ha-Shahar, an editorial rejecting the possibility of making Hebrew into a living language capable of serving as the vehicle of a modern nation. He wrote with incredible prescience:

“Today we may be moribund, but tomorrow we will surely awaken to life; today we may be in a strange land but tomorrow we will dwell in the land of our fathers; today we may be speaking alien tongues, but tomorrow we shall speak Hebrew.”

Ben-Yehuda rejected categorically the notion that the Jews are a “spiritual people” (i.e. a religious community), an assertion ascribed to by many in the Diaspora. He asserted that it was no wonder that many Jewish youth were abandoning both the faith and Hebrew language of their ancestors. He despaired because their identity had no representation on the world political stage.

“Despite exile from its homeland, the Jewish people will survive, for its spirit and Torah remain with it; it will live as long as the spirit itself…If this is so, then all our efforts to make them appreciate the importance of the language to us, will be of no avail. …Only a Hebrew with a Hebrew heart will understand this and such a man will understand even without our urging. Let us therefore make the language really live again. Let us teach our young people to speak it and then they will never betray it….Let us increase the number of Jews in our desolate land; let the remnants of our people return to the land of their fathers, let us revive the nation and its tongue will be revived too!…the land of our fathers is waiting for us; let us colonize it and by becoming its masters, we shall again become a people like all others.”

Had a Jewish state been proclaimed in 1937 or 1938, it might well have been a haven for the many trapped Jews of Europe that included several hundred thousand fluent and near fluent Modern Hebrew speakers in the Zionist youth movements, Tarbut schools and training farms, and supporters of the militant New Zionist “Revisionist” Organization supporting Jabotinsky, mostly young people. These were precisely those Jews most convinced of the futility of remaining in Europe and who most strongly believed in the objective and personal need for the near total transformation of Jewish society in order to create a Hebrew state in Palestine. Their numbers would have easily doubled or tripled what was the total Jewish community there by the time of the outbreak of World War Ii in September, 1939 not just numerically, but in the Zionist-Hebrew and largely secular character of the Yishuv.

Ben-Yehuda’s amazingly accurate prediction was made in the face of derision and ridicule. His firm conviction that the language would live again when the land was restored and a Jewish majority was its master was echoed by the testimony delivered by Ze’ev Jabotinsky to the Palestine Royal Commission in 1937 when he, practically alone, warned of the coming Holocaust. He argued that only a Jewish majority state was the key to survival of the Jews as a nation and one that could offer equality of rights and obligations to an eventual Arab minority.

His logic was unassailable and all the more accurate in hindsight that in the case of two rights for Palestine and a state on both sides of the Jordan there was ample room for all the inhabitants living in Palestine at the time and the expected 3,000,000 – to 4,000,000 Jews in Europe clamoring to escape impending doom. He and his spiritual successor in the Revisionist movement, Menachem Begin, maintained the same position of the inherent right of every people to a state of their own and that the Arab peoples would in the future have multiple states with which to realize their national potential while for the Jews there was only one possibility – just as envisioned by Ben-Yehuda.

The Third International Brigade MAHAL When Israel was the Darling of the Left

For the third time in the mid-twentieth-century, an international cohort of idealistic volunteers without thought of personal compensation, or safety formed an International Brigade in an unequal battle. These were the volunteers of those who rushed to the aid of the embattled State of Israel in the face of seven invading Arab armies in 1948-49. Known as Mahal [Hebrew: מח”ל‎, an acronym for Mitnadvei Hutz LaAretz (Hebrew: מתנדבי חוץ לארץ‎), literally, Volunteers from Outside the Land of Israel].

They were both Jews and Christians who participated in combat or had earlier helped in breaking the British naval blockade preventing the arrival of Jewish immigrants to Mandatory Palestine. About 4,000 volunteers from all over the world came to fight on the Israeli side and helped stem and reverse the tide of battle and secure Israeli independence. They followed the noble ideals of the two previous International Brigades of Volunteers for Republican Spain (1936-39) and Finland (1939-40); (See Berdichevsky NER, February 2009 and May 2015 and Capshaw, NER, May 2015).

The world has since been inundated with a tsunami of Arab propaganda and crocodile tears shed for the “Palestinians” who have reveled in what they refer to as their Catastrophe or Holocaust (“Nakba” in Arabic). 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.

This is totally false – the opposite was true. The Arab states who invaded Palestine to prevent the establishment of a Jewish State had been equipped, trained and financed for over three decades by the two leading European Imperialist Powers – Britain and France.

The fact is that President Truman eventually decided against the overwhelmingly pro-Arab “professional opinion” of his Secretary of State, General George Marshall and the career Arabists of the State Department in order to vote for partition. He managed to accord diplomatic recognition to the new Jewish state but never considered active military aid. Truman’s memoirs reveal a bitter contempt for the professional “striped-pants” boys of the eastern Ivy League Colleges and State Department..

Suspicions of American Intelligence

American intelligence continued to buy the myth from 1947 to 1951 that the new Israeli state might be pro-Soviet because of the large presence of the Socialist-Zionist political parties and the proven success in combat of the Hagana and Palmach, units with a large participation of leftwing kibbutz members. 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!” This alarmed the State Department that had been warned by British intelligence of possible Soviet infiltration or influence among the Israeli forces.

Overwhelming Support for Zionism and Partition from the American Left

The most well established, highly respected and veteran organ of the Left in the United States (celebrating its 150th anniversary this year), The Nation, enthusiastically editorialized in favor of partition and supported the creation of a Jewish State more so than any other American journal of opinion or media outlet. Freda Kirchwey, The Nation’s publisher and editor-in-chief wrote and spoke that the struggle for a Jewish Palestine was nothing less than the sequel and parallel of the Spanish Civil War, the other struggle to which she had dedicated much of her career. Spanish Republican exiles remembered with much emotion and gratitude the outstanding contribution Jewish volunteers had made to the International Brigades in Spain. Estimates of their participation range as high as 20%.

In this, she was undoubtedly correct, for her words were echoed by Dolores Ibarruri, “La Passionaria” the Basque Communist leader in the Spanish Cortes before and during the Civil War in Spain, followed by a long period of exile in Moscow. She issued a proclamation in 1948 from Moscow saluting the new State of Israel and compared the invading Arab armies to the Fascist uprising that had destroyed the Spanish Republic. Just a few months later, the hero of the American Left, the great Afro-American folk singer, Paul Robeson sang in a gala concert in Moscow, electrifying the crowd with his rendition of the Yiddish Partisan Fighters Song.

Kirchwey’s father had been dean of Columbia University Law School, President of the American Peace Society (a sponsor of the journal) and a leading pacifist spokesman. In 1918, Freda joined the staff of The Nation, eventually becoming its editor in 1933 and its publisher from 1937 to 1943. After her death, the New York Times editorialized that Kirchwey enjoyed a “unique combination of personal charm and militant principle” and lauded her for being “a cheerful crusader.”

Her most important crusade was waged on behalf of the Jewish State. She attacked the State Department and the Aramco Oil Company for their unholy alliance with the Saudi regime and appealed to President Truman to escape their clutches.

Kirchwey and her board decided that the magazine should concentrate its efforts on the issue of Palestine. They believed that the plight of Holocaust survivors languishing in Europe’s displaced-persons camps “presented a problem which challenged the conscience of mankind and the ability of civilization to make some restitution.” The overwhelming majority of Jewish refugees wished to go to Palestine to rebuild their shattered lives.

Kirchwey’s pro-Zionist sentiments were cemented during a trip to Palestine as The Nation’s correspondent in the spring and summer of 1946. Her impressions of the Jews, the Arabs, and the British were typical of almost all on the Left and held by many of the members of the various international commissions dispatched to Palestine. She was impressed with the achievements of the Jews in Palestine and their rehabilitation of the Holocaust’s survivors and contrasted their accomplishments with the poverty and what she called the backwardness of the Arabs. She also harshly criticized the role played by the 100,000 British troops stationed in Palestine.

Czech Weapons and Airplanes Turn the Tide of Battle

It was also a source of concern to the British and Americans that the Jews were receiving aircraft and heavy weapons from the East Bloc countries with Soviet support. In the summer of 1947, the leaders of the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine), 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 Prime Minister 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.

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. For more than three months—May 1948 to August 1948—Czechoslovakia loaned Israel its Zatec air field. It became virtually an Israeli installation and was used for refitting planes, training pilots, and shipping point for guns and ammunition.

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. The volunteers for Israel (Mahalniks) were mostly World War II veterans from American and British armed forces. In various circumstances, they were invited, or heard of the Jewish state’s struggle for independence and volunteered. In some cases those who enlisted had no prior military experience. They included both ideological supporters of Zionism and mercenaries.

The Ha’apala movement, also called “Aliyah Bet,” which attempted to evade the 1939 and 1948, British naval blockade restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine, was assisted by 236 Mahal former servicemen of the Allied navies as crews of ten clandestine Jewish refugee ships, out of the sixty-six participating vessels.

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War saw a veritable “International brigade” of foreign volunteers from 58 countries among the Jewish forces. A total of 123 Mahalniks were killed in battle (119 men and 4 women). The most prominent senior Mahal officer was Mickey Marcus, a Jewish United States Army colonel who assisted Israeli forces during the war and became Israel’s first Brigadier General. His wartime experience was vital in breaking the 1948 Siege of Jerusalem and his exploits served as the basis for the dramatic film starring Kirk Douglas, Cast a Giant Shadow. Other outstanding Mahalniks were Canadian officer Ben Dunkelman, U.S. pilot Milton Rubenfeld and Major Wellesley Aron, MBE, an English-born Palestinian Jew who had commanded a unit in the British Army during World War II.

The IAF

The largest presence of the American and British Mahal volunteers was felt in the Israeli Air Force (IAF), comprising nearly two-thirds of its personnel, so that that English temporarily overtook Hebrew as the most widely used operational IAF service language.

Mahal cargo flights transported vital weapons and supplies to Palestine from Europe, and thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and the East Bloc countries. These newly arrived Jewish immigrants were vital reinforcement help for the outnumbered Israeli forces and made up for manpower in the civilian economy.

During the Egyptian Army siege of the Negev region in 1948, Mahal pilots airlifted thousands of tons of supplies to Jewish settlements behind enemy lines. They often made night landings of converted airliners on makeshift, unpaved sand runways, hand-lit by oil lamps.

Occasionally there were tensions resulting from superior pay and service conditions given to the volunteers over resident or native Israeli soldiers, mainly in the air force. It was also an issue for some that more than a few volunteers were adventurers with little commitment to Zionism, non-Jews or individuals who had had previous problems with a rigid, disciplined hierarchy.

Logistic support for the IAF was provided by various diaspora groups which procured planes in the critical months of 1948-9. The IAF scored an impressive victory just hours before the final cease-fire on 7 January 1949. A flight of four British RAF Spitfires on a reconnaissance flight over the Israeli border were attacked by a pair of Israeli Air Force Spitfires, resulting in three of the British planes being shot down. The Israeli Spitfires were flown by Mahal volunteers “Slick” Goodlin (USA) and John McElroy (Canada). Both were former US Army Air Forces and Royal Canadian Air Force pilots, veterans of World War II.

George F. “Buzz” Beurling, of the Royal Canadian Air Force was the top Canadian combat air ace in World War II, with 31 Nazi planes to his credit. He was one of 34 Christian pilots from the U.S. and Canada to volunteer for the IAF. Beurling, only 26, at the time of his death, and his Jewish co-pilot, Leonard Cohen of England, were both killed while attempting to ferry a plane from Italy to Israel on May 20, 1948.

Rudy Augarten, an American combat pilot and Harvard graduate had shot down two German ME-109s while flying a P-47 during World War II. In Israel’s War of independence, he downed four Egyptian aircraft while flying a Czech ME-109 (a former World War II German aircraft), a British Spitfire and an American P-51. He was one of only six Americans awarded “ace” status by combining victories in two wars. He returned to Israel in 1950-52 to become commanding officer of Ramat David Air Force Base.

After the end of the war in 1949, the majority of the Mahal returned to their home countries but several score remained to live in Israel. The village of Kfar Daniel near Lod was founded by Mahal veterans from North America and the UK.

According to then Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion “The Mahal Forces were the Diaspora’s most important contribution to the survival of the State of Israel.” A memorial honoring the Mahal volunteers was erected near Sha’ar HaGai on the road from Tel Aviv.

It may be said that among the three International Brigades, the Mahal volunteers and the aid they provided were a much more effective contribution to the victorious cause they served than the efforts of the valiant foreign volunteers on behalf of the Spanish Republicans and the Finns.

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Norman Berdichevsky is the author of The Left is Seldom Right and Modern Hebrew: The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language.

The Second International Brigade, Finland

The Left in all its various shades – Marxist, New, Romantic, Dogmatic, Innocent continues to wistfully pine in nostalgic innocence over the memorabilia and songs of the Spanish Civil War. This was supposedly “THE Good Fight” of all time pitting the good guys of the Republican Left against the evil forces of reaction in the Spanish Catholic Church, General Franco, the Spanish Falange Movement and military aid from both Hitler and Mussolini.

My book The Left is Seldom Right (New English Review Press, 2011) provoked numerous letters to me from former Leftists who praised it and did not avoid confronting the reality that Nazi Germany and the USSR were close allies for 22 of the 57 months of total combat time in World War II (ca. 37%, see chapter 15) but quite a few still took exception – that I had stepped on sensitive toes of many who still regard the Spanish Civil War as the ultimate “good fight.” By comparing it with the now forgotten International Brigade of volunteers for Finland in the 1939-40 “Winter War,” (chapter 17), it comes out looking a bit shabby.

The heroism and idealism of those who joined the International Brigades in Spain cannot be faulted or disparaged. Nonetheless, their naïveté and inexperience, and their ignorance of Spanish conditions allowed them to be brutally exploited and often sacrificed to protect more politically loyal hard core cadres of the Spanish Communist Party. Practically none of them had any knowledge of the complexities of Spanish politics, the rival unions and parties on the Left or the complex regional and linguistic picture in Spain in which Catalan and Basque national sentiments often ran higher than political ideologies.

This is an especially sensitive and emotional issue for the Jewish Left. It is estimated that almost 20% of all the volunteers in the International Brigades, who came to Spain to fight Fascism were Jews and in the case of the Americans, perhaps as many as 38%. Their heroism and experiences have been vividly recorded. Their struggle shaped the view of Franco as a close ally of Hitler, but a more objective view would regard Franco as primarily an opportunist, a fervent anti-communist who represented conservative Spanish traditions and aspirations. General Franco, however, did not personally employ antisemitic themes in his rhetoric, although several extreme right wing parties had labeled prominent personalities of the Republic on the political left as “secret Jews.”

The distinguished British historian of Spain, Raymond Carr, had this to say of Orwell’s experience and the Stalinist Left’s distortion of the truth:

The Spanish Civil War produced a spate of bad literature. Homage to Catalonia is one of the few exceptions and the reason is simple. Orwell was determined to set down the truth as he saw it. This was something that many writers of the Left in 1936-39 could not bring themselves to do. Orwell comes back time and time again in his writings on Spain to those political conditions in the late thirties which fostered intellectual dishonesty: the subservience of the intellectuals of the European Left to the Communist ‘line’, especially in the case of the Popular Front in Spain where, in his view, the party line could not conceivably be supported by an honest man. “Only a few strong souls,” … and Orwell among them, could summon up the courage to fight the whole tone of the literary establishment and the influence of Communists within it.

Arthur Koestler quoted to a mixed audience of Communist sympathizers and independents, Thomas Mann’s phrase, ‘In the long run a harmful truth is better than a useful lie’. The non-Communists applauded; the Communists and their sympathizers remained icily silent….It is precisely the immediacy of Orwell’s reaction that gives the early sections of his book Homage to Catalonia its value for the historian.

The Other Cause – Finland and the Other International Brigade

At the end of 1939, as the remnant of the International Brigade sought to reintegrate into national life back in their homelands following the Spanish Civil War, another spontaneous movement of idealistic and dedicated volunteers from many countries vainly strove to join another cause, one of a thoroughly democratic state and proud people who had been brutally invaded by the Soviet Union after failing to surrender sufficient territory to satisfy Stalin’s desire for a major “border revision” to protect Leningrad in the event of a European war.

Volunteers for Finland

These young men, unlike the volunteers for Spain enjoyed no support or subsidies and travel aid from an international political network as did the Leftists who flocked to Spain. When the USSR invaded Finland at the end of November, 1939 the assault was condemned widely. Although public opinion was entirely favorable to Finland outside the communist parties’ apparatus, none of the western democratic governments was ready to provide military aid or send regular troops to intervene in the conflict. There was no time even to design beautiful recruitment posters as in the case of the cause of International Brigades fighting in Spain. In December, 1939 the Finnish government decided that volunteers would be accepted only from those countries definitely friendly to the Finnish cause such as the neighboring Scandinavian states, Britain, France, Estonia and Hungary (distantly related by language to the Finns). No German or exile Russian volunteers were permitted. Only a few months earlier as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, Hitler and Stalin were close allies and had already cooperated in the field by attacking Poland and dividing her territory between them.

Owing to the shortage of military equipment, the volunteers were required to come with their own arms and basic military gear. They were also to come as organized, trained units with their own officers. In January 1940, after heavy losses among Finnish troops, this decision was modified so that all able-bodied men were henceforth to be accepted at the discretion of Finnish embassies.

The Allies Support Finland with Words

Both the French and the British made contingent plans to come to the aid of Finland although this risked enlarging the conflict they faced in Europe in order to ensure that Germany be denied the supplies of Swedish iron ore crossing Finnish territory. The planned expeditionary force did not materialize as the conflict ended too soon in April, 1940 just before the great offensive of the German Army in the West that defeated France in May-June.

The French even discouraged any potential volunteers for Finland from among the Polish troops who had been able to reach France after their defeat in September, 1939 since it was thought that all able-bodied men were needed in the French army.

The Various National Contingents of Volunteers

Swedish Volunteers

The largest single nationality group was understandably Swedish. Close to 8000 men served in different formations. The most important unit was the Swedish Volunteer Corps (Svenska Frivilligkåren) with three battalions, all formed in Finland, since the Swedish government did not wish to send volunteers from Swedish territory as a unit. This also shows how careful the government was in not taking an official position that could draw Soviet and/or German criticism.

Norwegian and Danish Volunteers

About 700 Norwegians volunteered, but since their government would not release any senior officers, they were enrolled together with the Swedish Volunteer Corps. When it disbanded, the Norwegians returned home and most of these men saw action against the invading Germans. About a thousand Danish volunteers reached Finland and were sent to training in Oulu in the central region, however, they were not ready for front-line duties when the war ended. Several dozen of the Danish volunteers later helped initiate the resistance movement in Denmark against the German occupation. They were active in the group led by Arne Sorensen known as Dansk Samling (Danish Unity), characterized before the war as a “Far-Right” Party (see The Left is Seldom Right, Chapter 16).

Hungarian Volunteers

Only Hungary sent volunteers as an organized unit. It consisted of 346 officers and men with one month of training in Hungary. These men reached Finland on March 2nd and were stationed to Lapua for further training. Their commander was a right-wing activist with experience from the fighting that ensued when Hungary occupied parts of Slovakia in 1938.

British and Estonian Volunteers

When the war ended there were only 13 British volunteers in Finland but many more had volunteered, including 214 men who reached Finland one week after the war had ended. There were an additional 750 volunteers waiting to be shipped to Finland, but the armistice came on March 13th, too late for their arrival. According to the initial British plan, the British volunteers were to fight in a single unit under the command of Colonel Kermit Roosevelt, a son of former US President Theodore Roosevelt. Estonians, closely related by language to the Finns provided the next largest group of approximately 60 men who had volunteered although their government was under intense Soviet pressure.

American and Canadian volunteers

In spite of immense difficulties and the problems of distance and transportation as well as the cost of outfitting volunteers to serve in a European war, about 350 Americans and 250 Canadians, mainly of Finnish birth, were also sent for training in Oulu.

This “Other” International Brigade received enormous encouragement and good will in their countries of origin from just about every domain of the political spectrum outside of Neo-Nazis and Stalinists. Their idealism and readiness for self-sacrifice compares favorably in every way with those who volunteered to fight in Spain but the difference lies in the simple fact that they have been forgotten, yet a look at the chronicles in American, Canadian and British newspapers reveals the tremendous enthusiasm these men evoked. They were fighting for freedom against an evil tyrant as menacing as Hitler.

Who were the Finnish-American and Canadian Volunteers?

Between 1870 and 1930, many tens of thousands of Finns migrated to the United States and Canada. The motivation for this migration was both economic and cultural. It attracted a large number of families who had despaired of acquiring sufficient farm land to support themselves at home and feared the growing foreign presence and threat to Finnish identity under Czarist rule in what was the Russian possession of the “Grand Duchy” of Finland. New migrants sent letters home, describing their life in the New World in very positive terms and professional recruiters, or “agents,” employed by mining and shipping companies were also active and helped provide funding for the voyage. During the period 1900-1914, 150,000 new Finnish migrants arrived in North America.

The regions preferred by most Finnish immigrants bore a similarity to the landscape they were familiar with back home, especially in the Upper Midwest although several pockets of Finnish settlement appeared in New England and the Pacific Northwest as well. The heaviest levels of Finnish settlement were seen in an area known as the Finn Hook, which includes Northeastern Minnesota, Northern Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

The Two Brigades From Today’s Perspective

Both International Brigades were the product of a noble idealism, the desire of free men to defend the values of civilization against tyranny. The major difference is that for many among the Spanish Civil War Veterans, their devotion was tarnished by the excesses and lies of Stalin’s henchmen and the Far Left that served him across the globe. For those who tried to aid Finland, there are only the fond memories of world solidarity.

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Norman Berdichevsky is the author of The Left is Seldom Right and Modern Hebrew: The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language.

When Israel Was the Sweetheart of the Left and African-Americans

Norman Berdichevsky

American intelligence bought the myth from 1947 to 1951 that the new Israeli state might be pro-Soviet because of the large presence of the Socialist-Zionist political parties and the proven success in combat of the Hagana and Palmach, units with a large participation of leftwing kibbutz members. 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!” This alarmed the State Department that had been warned by British intelligence of possible Soviet infiltration or influence among the Israeli forces.

Overwhelming Support for Zionism and Partition from the American Left

The most well established, highly respected and veteran organ of the Left in the United States (celebrating its 150th anniversary this year), The Nation, enthusiastically editorialized in favor of partition and supported the creation of a Jewish State more so than any other American journal of opinion or media outlet. Freda Kirchwey, The Nation’s publisher and editor-in-chief wrote and spoke that the struggle for a Jewish Palestine was nothing less than the sequel and parallel of the Spanish Civil War, the other struggle to which she had dedicated much of her career. Spanish Republican exiles remembered with much emotion and gratitude the outstanding contribution Jewish volunteers had made to the International Brigades in Spain. Estimates of their participation range as high as 20%.

Kirchwey’s father had been dean of Columbia University Law School, President of the American Peace Society (a sponsor of the journal) and a leading pacifist spokesman. In 1918, Freda joined the staff of The Nation, eventually becoming its editor in 1933 and its publisher from 1937 to 1943. After her death, the New York Times editorialized that Kirchwey enjoyed a “unique combination of personal charm and militant principle” and for being “a cheerful crusader.”

Kirchwey mobilized a board of influential progressives, which included such outstanding personalities as Philip Murray, president of the CIO; outstanding Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebhur; James G. Patton, president of the Farmers Educational and Cooperative Union; left-wing radio commentators Frank Kingdon and Raymond Graham Swing; playwrights Lillian Hellman and Eugene O’Neill; and writer Thomas Mann.

Kirchwey’s pro-Zionist sentiments were cemented during a trip to Palestine as The Nation’s correspondent in the spring and summer of 1946. Her impressions of the Jews, the Arabs, and the British were typical of almost all on the Left and held by many of the members of the various international commissions dispatched to Palestine. She was impressed with the achievements of the Jews in Palestine and their rehabilitation of the Holocaust’s survivors and contrasted their accomplishments with the poverty and what she called the backwardness of the Arabs. She also harshly criticized the role played by the 100,000 British troops stationed in Palestine.

In a series of articles she wrote about her trip, Kirchwey stated how “overpowering” the British military presence had become and how biased against the Jews, concluding that the British were inviting an Arab revolt and encouraging the Arabs to conclude that through blackmail, the “Western powers can be frightened into sacrificing the Jews just as they have already abandoned the Christians in Lebanon.”

In an editorial comment Some Proposed Solutions”, She reviewed possible alternatives for Palestine and flatly rejected the creation of a bi-national state coming from liberal Jewish intellectuals such as Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, I. F. Stone, and Hannah Arendt. She argued that it would not “satisfy the needs of the Jews to migrate to Palestine—particularly in view of the consistent opposition of the Arabs.” If such a state were created, she predicted, “conflict would inevitably develop between two peoples whose cultural and industrial development is so different”.

No amount of rationalizations conjured up by spokesmen for the Left’s current position regarding the 1948 war for Israeli independence can obscure the fact that the Jews enjoyed the collective support of those forces in the West who identified with the Left.

Black-Jewish Alliance in Support of Israel

For at least four decades Black-Jewish relations have soured and whatever platitudes may be uttered by recognized leaders of both groups, the rank and file often hold aggressive and condescending views of each other. Few remember or care to celebrate the heyday of the close, cordial and fraternal relations that differed from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s because it was an authentic two way street relationship. In fact, African-Americans, took the lead among gentile supporters of rescuing Jews from the Holocaust and creating a Jewish state.

This forgotten alliance was linked to political action campaigns undertaken in the 1940s by what many liberal Jews today regard as “, The Far Right” of the Zionist movement. It was identified with so called underground “dissident movements” in Palestine – The Irgun and the Stern Gang (known by the acronym of LEHI) and managed in the United States by Peter Bergson, a Zionist emissary from Jerusalem. The group challenged the official position of moist of the establishment Jewish organizations in the United States who were reluctant to voice any criticism against President Roosevelt and won the support of a wide array of members of Congress, Hollywood celebrities and intellectuals, including many prominent African-Americans.

Initially known as the Committee for a Jewish Army, the Bergson group it sought to create a Jewish armed force that would fight alongside the Allies against the Nazis. While many Jewish leaders balked at the idea of any Jewish separatist front that might make them appear as having “special interests”, some of the most dynamic and “radical” Black personalities supported the idea from 1940 to 1943. These included labor union leader A. Philip Randolph, president of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and W. E. B. DuBois, the leading African-American intellectual of his era.

Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, two of the most well recognized and honored Black writers and intellectuals were sponsors of the Bergson group’s July 1943 Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe. The conference, held in New York City, challenged the Roosevelt administration’s claim that rescuing Jews from Hitler was physically impossible or would be detrimental to the overall allied war effort and that only by defeating the Nazis on the ground, could a Jewish remnant of survivors be rescued with full victory.

More than 1,500 delegates at the Conference heard panels of experts on military matters, relief proposals, escape routes and transportation logistics discussing practical ways to save Jews from genocide. One of these speakers was Walter White, executive director of the NAACP. The noted singer, actor and political activist Paul Robeson was one of the stars of a Madison Square Garden “Show of Shows” (a name copied later by Jewish American comedian Sid Caesar for his successful comedy show) organized by Bergson in 1944 to raise money for his campaign to rescue Jewish refugees.

Full-page newspaper ads, a Congressional resolution urging the creation of a US government agency to rescue refugees, and a march by over 400 rabbis to the White House just before Yom Kippur embarrassed the Democratic administration and compelled FDR to establish the War Refugee Board, a proposal originally suggested by his wife Eleanor which helped save an estimated 220,000 lives during the last fifteen months of the war.

After the war, Bergson established the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation and the American League for a Free Palestine, which played a crucial role in mobilizing public support and in Congress for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. During the same closing years of the war, the NAACP worked closely with the Bergson group to help bring about the desegregation of theaters in Baltimore, which restricted African-Americans to less desirable seats. In 1946, Ben Hecht, one of the most prominent leftwing screenwriters in Hollywood, and Bergson ally, authored a Broadway play called “A Flag is Born”, in support of partition and Jewish statehood.

Among the most prominent Black supporters of Bergson’s Jewish statehood campaign were noted actor Canada Lee, and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of Harlem — the first African-American to represent New York in the US House of Representatives. Together along with Paul O’Dwyer , an Irish-born American politician and lawyer and the younger brother of Mayor William O’Dwyer, they rallied an audience with their appeals for Jewish-Black-Irish solidarity against the British and collected $75,000 from the crowd that night.”

These facts are either never mentioned or frantically denied by those who wish to rewrite history. The legend that the U.S. was responsible for enabling Israel to survive in 1948 and that the Arabs were the victims is almost universally accepted in almost all political debate today on the Left and by many ultra-Liberal American Jews who believe they have to criticize Israel to ingratiate themselves with the Left..

Lincoln’s Controversial Foreign Policy Record

The consequences of perceived American weakness for the Middle East and the entire world are already apparent after years of retreat, surrender, meaningless red lines and sell out deals of America’s real friends and allies. Much has changed since the mid 19th century but the last 200 years have repeatedly verified the need for the United States to exercise a leading role in world affairs backed by far reaching military power.

To those who continue to wring their hands because of the fanatical insurgency in Iraq or the misuse of power in Vietnam, let them look at the consequences for Britain, Spain, Ukraine, Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands or Canada and Australia for failing to prostrate themselves in paying allegiance to Muslim extremism or Russian pressure. Support for American policy has grown in these countries as well as Australia, the Czech Republic, the Baltic States and Germany as awareness grows of the consequences of what a weak America would portend for them.

Much heated discussion and debates followed in the wake of the conflicts in Vietnam, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan with considerable criticism directed toward the preponderance of American military power from erstwhile “friends” and “allies” of the United States but they do not differ significantly from the views of the social elites and ruling classes in Europe of more than 200 years ago when the United States had no overseas possessions or imperialist ambitions. The following quotes date from the period of 1861-65 (not the 21st century)

“No one with his qualifications would ever become prime minister of England let alone a county court judge. “

“The President is a rough Westerner of the lowest origins and little education”.

“He has not shown any talents to compensate for his ignorance of everything but the village politics of his home state…you would never say that he is a gentleman.

“Neither the president nor any one in the cabinet has a knowledge of foreign affairs.”

Most of those who opposed the invasion of Iraq (both times) would guess these were remarks made about Presidents Reagan or the two Bushes yet they all refer to Abraham Lincoln and appeared in the editorial comments of the Times of London, most of the so called establishment press of European countries, and in the private notes of many diplomats, foremost among them, Lord Lyons, Britain’s ambassador to the United State, Prime Minister, Viscount Palmerston and Foreign Minister Lord John Russell during our Civil War. They were just as ill founded as more recent comments in the same vein against current American leaders and policies.

French views of Abraham Lincoln and the ability of the Union to survive the Civil War were even more aggressive. La Patrie, The French newspaper on the same level as The Times of London editorialized with glee that …”The Union is completely dissolved and in our opinion can never be restored.”

Most Americans rightly find European criticism particularly unjust and misplaced. They regard the role of their country as a 20th century power as something that was forced upon the United States by the circumstances of European imperialist rivalries. The issue currently enjoying a considerable degree of hypothetical speculation holds that the “world” would be a safer or better place with less American military power. This view would certainly have been embraced by the German Kaiser and Hitler as well as the Japanese warlords who launched world wars on the assumption that basic isolationist sentiment and anti-militarism then prevailing in the United States would help ensure American neutrality.

The historical lesson of our country’s turmoil and weakness on the international stage between 1861 and 1865 demonstrates how nations would likely behave in a world in which the United States withdraws into isolationism, leads “from behind”, is disarmed or is faced with a grave internal crisis. It is quite illuminating in spite of the passage of time and a much changed world. In the run-up to the Civil War, anti-slavery moves were popular with the more democratic political forces in much of Europe but were not regarded primarily as a moral issue elsewhere except in Great Britain among the broad mass of the people. The upper class British view was colored by a pronounced sympathy for the South and its aristocratic traditions of great landed estates. Moreover the political realists of that day regarded American cotton in the same terms as Middle Eastern oil today.

The French and Spanish governments were involved in expansion abroad, either recovering lost colonies or acquiring new ones. They were pleased that the American government was weakened and its reach by naval power drastically reduced making enforcement of the anti-imperialist “Monroe Doctrine“ impossible.

In Mexico, the French put their puppet, the ultra-conservative Austrian Archduke Maximilian on the throne and recognized Spain’s maneuver to reestablish full control over Santo Domingo (the present Dominican Republic), an even more blatant violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Even the normally reticent British were enlisted in the European colonial adventure in Mexico due to that country’s defaulting on debts. The British, French and Spaniards were allied for several months against the democratic forces of Benito Juarez, a full-blooded Indian, Mexico’s legal President, and a great friend of President Abraham Lincoln. None of these maneuvers would have been conceivable if the United States had not been torn asunder by the Civil War.

Napoleon III was aware that a Union victory would doom his project of French prestige in Mexico and was eager to recognize the Confederacy, support its navy by having French shipyards supply it with warships and float loans on its behalf with cotton as collateral. Smaller loans were also raised in Britain by private means. The French pressed the British unsuccessfully to send a joint fleet to break the Union blockade of the Confederacy, a step that would have created an international war on a grand scale.

It was clear to both Americans and the British that the French sincerely hoped for a weakening of the United States that would aid them in their attempt to achieve a world-wide balance of power. Relations with Canada and the United States became very problematic. Ambitious Canadian politicians schemed with Confederate agents to embroil the U.S. and Britain in conflict. Although public opinion in Canada had been predominantly against slavery, anti-American sentiment was whipped up by Confederate agents and refugees who played on old Canadian fears of being absorbed by the United States. A Confederate raid launched against St. Albans, Vermont in October, 1864 almost brought about a hot pursuit policy and resulted in stricter British supervision of Confederate agents and their Canadian sympathizers.

The systematic violation of the Monroe Doctrine by the European powers was not simply an act that damaged American interests. It was violently opposed by the native peoples who had previously won their independence and honestly looked only to the United States for protection from the voracious appetite of European imperialism. With a Union victory and growing local resentment against the French and Spanish adventures, the reestablishment of American military power able to project its strength abroad resulted in the collapse of the European interventionists like a pack of cards.

The consequences of American military weakness in 1861-65 for Mexico, the Caribbean Basin and all of Central and South America would have been entirely negative and have only encouraged further European adventures. A Confederate victory and permanent division of the Union would have encouraged European ultra-conservatives everywhere that America’s militant democracy which promised universal white male suffrage followed by liberation of the slaves was no longer a long-term threat to their rule. Public opinion in Europe among the working classes continued to be strongly pro-Union and the North was looked upon as a democratic model.

To their credit, Lincoln and his Secretary of State William Henry Steward agreed on presenting an aggressive front threatening war with the British and French over the issue of recognition of the Confederacy or attempts to break the union naval blockade to strangle the South. They had immense foresight and conveyed the powerful conviction that only a united nation, powerful military and aggressive foreign policy could avoid further pressures from their European rivals. The Union victory and expansive military power convinced the Russians to sell their great colonial possession in Alaska rather than risk a naval confrontation with the United States in the future and the Danish ambassador approached President Lincoln on the eve of his second inaugural address to enquire about the sale of the Danish West indies (Virgin Islands) . Clearly, the writing was on the wall for the heyday of European colonialism, a fact that the Spaniards would belatedly realize.

What You Need to Know about The Biased Media and Their Political Correctness

normberd

Norman Berdichevsky

All the media today but primarily television, with its penchant for visual representation of the “news” prefers to provide macabre entertainment highlighting blood and mayhem like dozens of Hollywood Grade C horror movies. The reason I s that unlike the traditional and now old fashioned radio and antiquated newspapers, t.v. has as its top priority what they call a “story” which is often remote from the actual events that occurred or understanding the motive behind them. The time deadline is the most compressed to “get out a story”. Given a choice between two types of news events;

1. Where television cameras are present for on the spot visual coverage OR

2. A spontaneous unplanned event in which reporters happen to be present but without the visual coverage needed by television; The Unwritten Law of modern media journalism is always to give Type 1 PREFERENCE, no matter how artificial, contrived, and intentionally designed…

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See The Sound of Music for Entertainment and Insight into European History

On March 27th the stars of the Sound of Music reunited in Hollywood to celebrate the milestone of the 1965 musical that has become an enduring classic, kicking off the TCM Festival and featuring a screening at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Julie Andrews, now 79, told The Associated Press that she couldn’t pinpoint the overriding reason that the film has been so popular for so many years, but added, “They all came together to make, I guess, a joyous family film, that’s the best way I can describe it.” In honor of the anniversary celebration, a five-disc Blu-ray DVD collection has been released along with the soundtrack’s re-release and four new books about the film. The movie opens in over 500 theaters in April.

I believe the actual reason is a much deeper one – no other film that is so entertaining also reveals the mentality of support and opposition to the Nazis and demolishes many of the liberal myths about the Left and the working class.

The story of how Hitler’s only major diplomatic defeat prior to World War II was handed to him by the close alliance between two fascist leaders, Mussolini and Dollfuss, sheds further light on how shallow the Right/Left model of politics is. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was shattered as a result of World War I and the Versailles Peace Treaty, most observers believed that the tiny new Austrian Republic could hardly survive. With the establishment of Austrian independence in 1919, it was often referred to as “the state nobody wants” and expressly forbidden by treaty to unite with Germany.

The Nazis were handed their first major political defeat by the resistance of Austrian Christian and Social Democrats, who together accounted for 77 percent of the popular vote in the national elections of 1930. Both parties stood unequivocally for national independence and against Nazi-inspired racial antisemitism. Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss outlawed the Austrian Nazi Party and confiscated all its assets in June 1933. Dollfuss admired Mussolini, and imitated various aspects of the Italian fascist system yet both these fascist leaders initially adamantly refused to be bullied by Hitler and the Nazis.

Austria’s Catholic traditions and strong links with the Vatican had made it a more humanized Germanic state than the Prussian militarist heritage that Hitler appealed to in fomenting his nationalist doctrines. Mussolini originally considered Nazi racism and antisemitism both repugnant and primitive. He had a Jewish mistress (Margherita Sarfatti) who for thirteen years guided him both intellectually and in foreign affairs urging a pro-British line until early 1933. She had been one of the planners of the “march on Rome” that enabled Mussolini to gain power and was even nicknamed by many observers as “The uncrowned Queen of Italy.” Italian Jews were equal members of the Fascist Party, in fact they were proportionally over represented in the higher echelons of the party. Sarfatti’s son Roberto died in action in World War I, only eighteen years old in 1918 and posthumously awarded Italy’s highest decoration for valor.

Both Mussolini and his Foreign Minister Ciano made numerous mentions in their diaries of opposition to introducing anti-Semitic laws in Italy until forced in July 1938 under extreme pressure to do so by Hitler as part of the price of an alliance of the two Axis powers. The view that “Right-wing” or conservative or nationalist parties are necessarily antisemitic or that the liberal Left is necessarily philo-Semitic (or at least anti-antisemitic) is contradicted by the experience of Italy, several other European nations, and in the history of the various “populist” and antisemitic movements in the United States but persists as a self-evident, unchallenged cardinal point in the arguments of many American (especially Jewish) liberals.

Extremist elements on the political Left among the Austrian socialists (Social Democrat Party) organized into their own armed militia (The Schutzbund) threatening armed insurrection in Vienna’s working class housing projects in February 1934. Dollfuss put down the revolt at the cost of critically weakening the ability of Austrians to later stand united against the Nazis. Stalin welcomed the orphans of those Austrian workers in the Schutzbund who had been killed in the insurrection and Pravda described Dollfuss and his government as “Christian Fascists” (referred to in the foreign communist press as “Clerico-Fascists”).

Although Dollfuss later successfully employed Austrian troops against militant Nazis in a putsch attempt (July 1934), which also cost him his life, the country eventually lost the promise of Italian support as a result of the policies of the British and French. Their governments later felt it necessary to condemn Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 and expel it from the League of Nations while doing nothing to stop German aggression and expansionism. Dollfuss was killed while his wife was a guest of the Italian dictator, an event that horrified Mussolini. Italian troops were rushed to the border in the summer of 1934 and full support given to the government by the Heimwehr, a national militia more reliable than the tiny Austrian army and led by the patriotic Prince Starhemberg. The Nazis were crushed and Hitler totally abandoned his proclaimed Anschluss policy for a time until Austrian resistance and Italian backing could be worn down or outmaneuvered.

In September 1934, a joint British-French-Italian declaration “guaranteed” the independence and integrity of Austria. This was followed by a meeting at the Italian resort city of Stresa in April 1935, condemning any violation of the Versailles Treaty. The Christian Democrats who originally had inherited an antisemitic policy from the days of the old Austrian Empire evolved under Dollfuss to reject the Nazis’ open racism, street violence, hostility towards the Catholic Church and attempts to subvert Austria’s independence. Both Nazis and the Communists were outlawed and the Christian Democrats and other conservative groups were transformed into the “Fatherland Front” pledged to Austria’s continued independence and rejection of Anschluss. For the next four years, Dolfuss’s successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, withstood Hitler’s personal appeals and threats and defended the humanistic strain that Austria had long contributed to German culture. Schuschnigg was an arch-conservative, devout Catholic with a Jesuit education and had always favored a restoration of the Hapsburg dynasty.

When Austria finally fell victim to extreme pan-German nationalism, the country had been weakened internally. The events of 1938 contributed to the mistaken view that union with Germany had been “inevitable,” and minimized the willpower, pride and patriotism of many Austrians and the prospects of it ever regaining its independence.

Background to the Sound of Music

Catholic-Aristocratic-Monarchist-Conservative Opposition to the Nazis

Schuschnigg inevitably caved in with the growth of Hitler’s power and influence following Munich in 1938, the willingness of the British and the French to continue to appease German power and Mussolini’s about-face. The Italian dictator abandoned what principles he had and accepted Austria’s demise when assured by Hitler that the Nazis would not use their pan-German nationalism to demand a revision of the Austrian-Italian border. Hitler willingly abandoned the cause of the German speaking minority in the South Tyrol region to cement the Axis alliance with his Italian co-part.

According to the “Liberal Bible,” all those who oppose fascism are naturally drawn from the political Left, i.e. liberals, socialists and communists. The Austrian case provides more evidence that this is much too simple an explanation and that several varieties of Austrian “Fascism,” “Socialism,” and “Conservatism” existed that, at one time or another, opposed Anschluss (annexation by Germany) and a common front with the Nazis.

The tragedy of the never realized anti-Nazi Front was the inability to overcome the disaster felt by them all that the Republic was a forlorn and economically hopeless fragment. Pre-war Austria-Hungary had been an Empire and leading power in Central and Eastern Europe unifying the huge hinterland of the Danube Basin. It was Catholic, conservative, multi-ethnic and multilingual with an identity quite distinct from Germany. Hitler offered a new radical departure. Himself, an Austrian, he held out the triple promise of a solid Germanic nationhood, economic recovery and a radical departure from the conservative and Catholic past that he detested.

Americans who have seen The Sound of Music were offered a sugar coated, romanticized and typically exaggerated Hollywood version of the country’s crisis but it did contain more than a grain of truth. Very few movie fans are aware that the main characters of the story – Captain Von Trapp and his family were real life figures. They belonged to a conservative, aristocratic, devout Catholic retired naval officer, is symbolic of those among the country’s social elite who held the Nazis in utter contempt as gutter rabble. The same people whom Stalin had referred to as “Christian Fascists” (Dollfuss, the Heimwehr and Prince Starhemberg), the very ones who had crushed the working class Social Democrats’ Schutzbund uprising in Vienna in 1934, were thpse who tried vainly to oppose the Nazis’ repeated sabotage and coup attempts to force union with Germany.

Even those Christian Democrats with previous antisemitic leanings had met Catholic refugees from Nazi Germany and become painfully aware of the pagan and anti-Christian elements of Nazi doctrine. For a brief time, these groups tried to formulate an alternative to the tiny beleaguered Austrian rump state. This would be part of a Greater Catholic Union of the Danube region in alliance with Mussolini that might ultimately embrace Bavaria, Austria, Hungary and the Czecho-Slovak and Italian areas of the old Hapsburg Empire. Such a vision however held out no attraction whatsoever for the Austrian Nazis or the working class supporters of the Socialists and Communists.

What is indeed accurate about The Sound of Music is not the tearful rendition of “Edelweiss” that rouses the Austrian patriotism of Captain Von Trapp’s neighbors (the song was composed by American Jewish composer Oscar Hammerstein), but the teenage working class neighborhood boy Rolf, in love with the captain’s eldest daughter, Liesl.

He becomes the most enthusiastic Nazi and turns the family in, out of his sense of duty and loyalty to Hitler. This has its counterpart in the other great musical film about the 1930s political situation, Cabaret, where the only individual seated in a park who does not rise to join in the enthusiastic singing of a Nazi anthem, “The Future Belongs To Us” (just as our 60s radicals believed), is an elderly man who had been through World War I.

Young people should be encouraged to see the film. They have the most to learn.

See also The Left is Seldom Right by Dr. Norman Berdichevsky, New English review Press, 2011

The Growth of an Indigenous Hebrew Slang and Profanity

An Introduction to Hebrew Slang – A Brief Excerpt based on Chapter 14 from my Book (Modern Hebrew, The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language; McFarland Publishing, 2014 ). Norman Berdichevsky

As in other culture and their respective languages, the favorite topics of Hebrew slang are differences in behavior between the sexes, dating, marriage, family relations, money, politics and politicians. Additional favorite topics in Israel for satire are exasperation with the bureaucracy and ultra-orthodox establishment, the kibbutz way of life, class differences and the income gap, crime, undesirable behavior in public places, and stereotypical images of Jews of different geo-cultural origins, Russians, Ethiopians, the Arabs, and the army experience.

Many of these terms, particularly profanity are still essentially Arabic, Yiddish, English and Russian stemming back to the beginning of the Mandate but there is more use of authentic and inventive Hebrew, a trend that will grow. For readers who cannot avoid the subject, what is most amusing is the growth of real native Sabra slang to reflect even the behavior of typical residents in specific geographic localities beyond Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem to include Beersheba and Giv’atayim where special slang terms are used to designate “dudes” (i.e. the local “cool” inhabitants); rabanim (normally used as the plural form of rabbi in a literal sense but used exclusively in Beersheba for the figurative meaning), and urdunim in Giv’atayim. “Let’s go to Haifa” may be an invitation to have sex so, be careful in planning your itinerary!

Another major development has been the growth of expressions base on authentic Hebrew words and the frequent use of new constructed words formed from abbreviations. More than fifty years ago, the constructed word sakoom was formed for cutlery or silverware. It was formed by taking the first syllables from the existing words for knife (SAkin), spoon (Kapit) and fork (Mazleg). A more recent example of the same technique of coining new indigenous Hebrew expressions is “Zabashka” represents the abbreviated form of the Hebrew words “ Zot ha baiyah shelcha “ (This is your problem).

Most of these slang terms have originated spontaneously without any planned intervention of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. In any daily conversation on the street, in a bus, or at the marketplace, one can hear Hebrew terms which have undergone a transformation, so that although the root meaning of the words may be recognizable, it is not immediately obvious how to interpret their usage or the implied connotations.

The following is intended as a “Guide to the Perplexed” for both Hebraists abroad, non-Hebrew speakers and those who intend to visit Israel and keep their ears open for expressions of Israeli humor. The etymology of three common idiomatic expressions illustrate how the social development of Jewish society in Mandatory Palestine to the modern state of Israel have changed the Hebrew language to adapt to a reality in a way that could not have been foreseen.

Israel is a society beset with many tensions and the terms “Davka” “Mah Pit’om” and “Kol HaCavod” are frequently resorted to as tension releasing devices. They are interjections or philosophical expletives to combat the daily frustrations for which no tourist guidebook or standard Hebrew language textbook, let alone Zionist sympathies, prepare prospective immigrants and tourists. Most short-term visitors are aware of the country’s “macro problems” – the constant threat of war and terrorism, massive taxation, the high cost of living and how to deal with religious extremism. The “micro problems” of everyday life (shoddy products, arrogant bureaucrats and the very low level of politeness and respect for public property and private space) are usually what unfortunately drive many immigrant-idealists from Western countries to return home after a few years.

DAVKA

In order to appreciate the “Davka mentality”, one must have lived in Israel for some time and have been exposed to the everyday frustrations and irksome situations which are common but do not make screaming headlines – endless frustrations in trying to wait in line – i.e. the everyday trivia of life which too often provoke intense conflicts, anger and frustration – the background to the tension releasing device of “davka”.

The etymology of the word is uncertain. It does not appear in the Bible but it is probably related to the root D-Y-K (to be exact or on time). It conveys the idea of precision and came into use during the time of the Talmud to indicate something appropriate to a particular time and situation.

Old time Hebraists may still encounter it or use it in its original sense and say something like “Davka, I fancy a cup of tea just now”. Its sarcastic connotations arise, however, in two, ostensibly opposite situations to mean “just when least expected” or “just for spite”. In fact, this last meaning of davka has become so common that it is frequently used, especially by children, as a verb “to davka someone”, meaning “to spite someone”.

The two situations which provoke usage are negative and positive: the negative – not being able to carry out what should be an everyday trivial task in spite of increasingly heroic but vain attempts to do so; the positive – actually being able to accomplish the task at hand against all the odds and the usually expected frustrations based on the overwhelming weight of precedence. If, contrary to all expectations, one does manage to accomplish the task at hand, this is cause for a “positive” davka – much rarer than the ordinary negative one. A positive davka is sure to evoke the admiration and hearty approval of bystanders.

But is this really specifically an Israeli phenomenon? Other cultures have their own colorful expressions for ironical and paradoxical situations – fate, Kismet, Karma, Fado, Destiny. These, however, by and large, deal with the great issues of human existence, Divine Retribution, life, death and honor and are often immortalized in great literature or opera. What makes the Israeli “Davka complex” special is its close linkage with the mundane, trivial commonplace experiences of the ordinary citizen.

The second cliché is “Mah Pitom?”, literally meaning “What, suddenly!?” In the Bible, pitom meaning “suddenly” is used to indicate an unexpected event that occurs very quickly. It is used twenty-five times but nowhere does it indicate a question. In contemporary Hebrew, however, the combination of the interrogative Mah (What?) with pitom is both a form of rhetorical question and exclamation on the order of “How can any serious person ask such a stupid question or really mean what he/she is saying”? As such it is favored by teenagers in reply to their parents’ questions. It is inherently sarcastic and can be translated as “You’ve got to be kidding!” or “You can’t really mean that”! It seeks no actual reply since the issue raised is not worthy of being discussed any further.

Shortly before the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, his wife Leah was asked in an on-the-spot interview by a journalist from the Israeli newspaper HaAretz: “Aren’t you concerned that your husband isn’t wearing a bulletproof vest?” Mrs. Rabin sarcastically answered, “Why all of a sudden (Mah Pitom?) a bullet proof vest? Is this Israel or Africa?”

The press used her remarks to call upon the public to do some soul searching. Mrs. Rabin’s blind overconfidence was similar to that which caused Golda Meir and the Israeli political leadership to discount the threat of an imminent Egyptian attack in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

“Kol ha Cavod” (All the Honor!) sounds more like Biblical Hebrew. Cavod means honor. The root C-V-D signifies “heavy” and the liver (the heaviest organ in the body). Cavod is often used in conjunction with God, His throne, and one’s parents. (The fifth commandment requires us to “Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you”).

Cavod and its many cognates appear several hundred times in the Bible especially in some of the most poetic verses in Psalms, and the Book of Isaiah. “Kol HaCavod” means that you are entitled by right to all the honors and recognition for your achievements. This phrase is the highest form of a compliment in modern Hebrew. It is, however, used by a much wider range of persons for much lesser achievements in keeping with the leveling tendency of Labor Zionism which sought to create an egalitarian society.

The Florida Panhandle, John Gorrie and air-Conditioning

The Florida Panhandle, John Gorrie and Air-conditioning

As a geographer, I have had many experiences visiting places about which I had read and studied a lot but always found something intriguing, deceptive, or inexplicable about places when actually encountering and observing them. Speaking to local residents and seeing their home environment often unleashes a stream of consciousness about how other people live and what might have been.

On the long drives where only a skilled botanist can discern all the different varieties of trees, we recently passed a cultural landscape in the florida Panhandle that makes the region truly a part of the Deep South – a density of Protestant churches unmatched anywhere in the country. Although Catholics make up the largest denomination in the entire state they are few and far between in the Panhandle away from the Coast. I couldn’t catch sight of more than three rather large and imposing structures compared to the 213 (after which I stopped counting) Baptist, Methodist, AME, Episcopal, “Victory” and other smaller denominations that I enumerated in my notebook. When I mentioned this to the Chief of Police in the town of Port St. Joe, he remarked that “You must have missed a few.” There were no Spanish language radio broadcasts, no Jewish synagogues except for a beautiful temple in the downtown area of Tallahassee. One Seventh Day Adventist billboard defiantly bravely proclaimed that Saturday is the Sabbath! During our drive we passed at least a dozen “correctional institutes” and often saw the inmates at work on outdoor projects. Scores of flatbed trucks hauling enormous logs zipped passed us with only a few inches of clearance, a sight we hadn’t paid attention to in other parts of the state.

It may well be the attraction of eccentrics undisturbed by the season following the careers of literary greats drawn to Florida such as Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston and Jack Kerouac. None of them however was attracted to the Panhandle!

Tiny Apalachicola and nearby Port St. Joe thrive on their natural scenic beauty, deep history and true southern hospitality. Having visited the region, I can concur that whether you are walking, shopping, swimming, fishing, dining or catching up on history, you’ll never meet friendlier people (both towns have roughly the same population today 3,000). They once vied for the state capital of Florida. Like Tallahassee, they lie roughly halfway between the early settlements of Pensacola in the West (capital of original Spanish settlement and later acquired by Great Britain and then returned to Spain until formally ceded to the United States) – and St. Augustine (oldest Spanish settlement in North America) in the East. Port St. Joe even was the largest city in the territory by 1840 until decimated by an epidemic of yellow fever.

Apalachicola features a beautiful antebellum home built in 1838 by Thomas Orman, overlooking the Apalachicola River and was used for both business and social gatherings. Orman was a cotton merchant and businessman from 1834 to the mid-1880s and a contemporary of physician and inventor John Gorrie. Orman helped the tiny town become one of the Gulf Coast’s most important cotton exporting ports. The magnificent home has been beautifully restored and features details of both Federal and Greek revival styles with pine floorboards, wooden mantelpieces, and molded plaster cornices. Nevertheless the most fascinating look at this period of history and an understanding of its society can be gained by a visit to the museum a stone’s throw away celebrating the life and work of Dr. John Gorrie.

John Gorrie, is a name I assume most readers (like myself) have never heard of. What the museum reveals is also a telling critique of the negative side of the oft repeated mantra of the so called “American Dream” – repeated ad infinitum and ad nauseum by politicians of all stripes declaring that if an immigrant or individual with no social standing or economic resources simply works hard, is honest and applies himself, he will inevitably “succeed.”

John Gorrie (1803 – 1855) was a physician, scientist, inventor, and humanitarian, born on the Caribbean Island of Nevis (then under British rule) to Scottish parents. He spent his childhood in South Carolina and received his medical education at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Western District of New York in Fairfield. Gorrie’s appearance was unusual – he had a “foreign air” about him due to his olive complexion and very dark hair and eyes. Rumor had it that his mother was born in Spain and had fled to the Caribbean.

In 1833, he moved to Apalachicola, was active in the community, being a resident physician at two hospitals, and serving as mayor (1837), a council member, Postmaster, President of the Bank of Pensacola’s Apalachicola Branch, Secretary of the Masonic Lodge, and one of the founding vestrymen of Trinity Episcopal Church. By the time the young John Gorrie arrived, the town was already flourishing as the third largest port on the Gulf (after New Orleans and Mobile). It harbored ships carrying cotton back to Europe and New England.

Dr. Gorrie was appalled at the poor sanitary conditions and how illness was aggravated by the region’s tropical climate of high heat and humidity. His medical research concentrated on the study of tropical diseases. Although the cause of yellow fever and malaria were unknown at the time, many ascribed the symptoms to bad hot humid air. He originally proposed draining swamps and the cooling of air in sickrooms. To achieve this, Gorrie hit on the simple idea of cooling rooms with ice in a basin suspended from the ceiling. Cool air, being heavier, flowed down towards the floor across the patient and could be conducted out of the room by a vent thus causing a circulation current. By 1845, he became so enthused by the idea of manufactured ice, that he gave up his medical practice to pursue refrigeration projects.

Gorrie invented a machine that produced ice by proposing the motive energy of either horses, water, wind-driven sails, or steam power that could drive a compressor. This machine lay the groundwork for modern refrigeration and air-conditioning. On May 6, 1851, he was granted Patent No. 8080. Although the mechanism produced ice in quantities, leakage and irregular performance sometimes impaired its operation. Gorrie went to New Orleans in search of venture capital to market the device, but met with the immediate opposition of what can today be called “The Ice Lobby.”

The international trade in ice can be said to have begun in 1806 when the New England businessman Frederic Tudor – the “Ice King” who shipped ice to the Caribbean island of Martinique, intending to sell it to well off members of the European elite there. In spite of the enormous wastage due to melting, the trade proved profitable due to the insatiable demand. Tudor quickly attracted competitors. During the 1830s and 1840s the “natural’ ice trade expanded further, with shipments reaching the American south, England, India, South America, China and Australia. Gorrie realized that if he could find an alternative and artificially manufacture ice, it would prove to be not only a boon to health but also establish a lucrative business.

The “Ice Trade” was a 19th-century industry, centering on New England that facilitated the large-scale harvesting, transport and sale of natural ice for home consumption and commercial purposes. Ice was cut from the surface of ponds and streams, then stored in “ice houses” wrapped in insulating material, sawdust or hay, before being sent on by ship, barge or railroad to its final destination around the world. Ice wagons were typically used to distribute the product to the final domestic and smaller commercial customers.

Gorrie never realized any return from his invention. The leading ice “harvesters,” notably Tudor, paid for a vicious press campaign against him as an eccentric and, a “foreigner” for his “insane notion” that humans could create ice. The New York Globe proclaimed that a “crank down in Florida thinks he can make ice by his machine as good as God Almighty.”

On July 14, 1847, Gorrie received acknowledgment for his project when the French consul Monsieur Rosan was celebrating Bastille Day, and guests were upset at the prospect of having to dink warm wine. Rosan gave his guests a surprise when waiters delivered cool wine that had been prepared with the help of Gorrie’s device.

Unreliable and expensive at first, manufactured plant ice began to successfully compete with natural ice only following his death but it was Gorrie whose research provided the initial catalyst. Although his efforts at winning the first patent in the United States were successful, he lacked the business acumen to make the idea a commercial success. His scientific articles on the idea and the original scale model of this are on view at the Smithsonian Institution. A three-quarters scale model of Gorrie’s ice machine can also be seen at the John Gorrie State Museum, in Apalachicola.

Gorrie was humiliated by the libel and criticism, financially ruined, and his health broken. He died in seclusion on June 29, 1855 and is buried in Gorrie Square in Apalachicola. A version of Gorrie’s “cooling system” was used when President James A. Garfield lay dying in 1881. Naval engineers built a box filled with cloths that had been soaked in melted ice water and forced hot air to blow on the cloths thereby causing a drop in room temperature by 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

What would have or could have happened had Gorrie secured major financial backing? There is no doubt that with the improvements in railroads and shipping the cost of both producing and transporting refrigerated fresh fruits and vegetables and ice would have declined significantly thus opening up a huge opportunity to a modern agriculture in the South not reliant on the crops of cotton, tobacco, rice and indigo tied to slavery and share-cropping. It would have raised health standards in the South and help prevent the deeply held prejudices of many in the South against innovative change by “foreigners” (or “Yankees”). It is also a sad reminder that the “American Dream” has sometimes stumbled against the harsh realities of powerful vested economic interests.

No one is more suitably remembered along the Florida Gulf Coast than this man – witness the John Gorrie Bridge across Apalachicola Bay, connecting Apalachicola with Eastpoint, the 1914 statue of Gorrie given by the state of Florida to the National Statuary Hall Collection, the John Gorrie Junior High School, John Gorrie Elementary School in Tampa The SS John Gorrie, a liberty ship, named in his honor; and the John Gorrie Award each year provided to a graduate of the University of Florida College of Medicine believed to be the “best all-around student showing promise of becoming a practitioner of the highest type.”

see also The Left is Seldom Right (New English Review Press, 2011) for additional works by Dr. Norman Berdichevsky