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#don't ask me what the transcript had for that Dutch part
gaygentdanvrs · 1 year
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someone really wants him to be flemish (plot twist, it’s me in that writers room)
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wingsfreedom · 4 months
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"Lehi carried out 42 assassinations, more than twice as many as the Irgun and the Haganah combined. Of its politically-motivated assassinations, over half of them were carried out against other Jews." @abla-soso
Well, this made me recall something. I was reading in "The Road to Mecca" book by Muhammed Asad (an ex Jew) in one page he mentioned a conversation he had with one of his Jewish friends, Jacob de Haan:
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Transcript:
"I now had many friends in Palestine, both Jews and Arabs. The Zionists, it is true, looked upon me with some sort of puzzled suspicion because of the sympathy for the Arabs which was so apparent in my dispatches to the Frankfurter Zeitung. Evidently they could not make up their minds whether I had been 'bought' by the Arabs (for in Zionist Palestine people had become accustomed to explain almost every happening in terms of money) or whether I was simply a freakish intellectual in love with the exotic. But not all Jews living in Palestine at that time were Zionists. Some of them had come there not in pursuit of a political aim, but out of a religious longing for the Holy Land and its Biblical associations. To this group belonged my Dutch friend Jacob de Haan, a small, plump, blond-bearded man in his early forties, who had formerly taught law at one of the leading universities in Holland and was now special correspondent of the Amsterdam Handelsblad and the London Daily Express. A man of deep religious convictions - as 'orthodox' as any Jew of Eastern Europe - he did not approve of the idea of Zionism, for he believed that the return of his people to the Promised Land had to await thecoming of the Messiah. "We Jews," he said to me on more than one occasion, "were driven away from the Holy Land and scattered all over the world because we had fallen short of the task God had conferred upon us. We had been chosen by Him to preach His Word, but in our stubborn pride we began to believe that He had made us a "chosen nation" for our own sakes - and thus we betrayed Him. Now nothing remains for us but to repent and to cleanse our hearts; and when we become worthy once again to be the hearers of His Message, He will send a Messiah to lead His servants back to the Promised Land ..." "But," I asked, "does not this Messianic idea underlie the Zionist movement as well? You know that I do not approve of it: but is it not a natural desire of every people to have a national home of its own?" Dr. de Haan looked at me quizzically: "Do you think that history is but a series of accidents? I don't. It was not without a purpose that God made us lose our land and dispersed us; but the Zionists do not want to admit this to themselves. They suffer from the same spiritual blindness that caused our downfall. The two thousand years of Jewish exile and unhappiness have taught them nothing. Instead of making an attempt to understand the innermost causes of our unhappiness, they now try to circumvent it, as it were, by building a "national home" on foundations provided by Western power politics; and in the process of building a national home, they are committing the crime of depriving another people of its home." Jacob de Haan's political views naturally made him most unpopular with the Zionists (indeed, a short time after I left Palestine, I was shocked to learn that he had been shot down one night by terrorists). When I knew him, his social intercourse was limited to a very few Jews of his own way of thought, some Europeans, and Arabs. For the Arabs he seemed to have a great affection, and they, on their part, thought highly of him and frequently invited him to their houses. As a matter off act, at that period they were not yet universally prejudiced against Jews as such. It was only subsequent to the Balfour Declaration - that is, after centuries of good-neighbourly relations and a consciousness of racial kinship - that the Arabs had begun to look upon the Jews as political enemies; but even in the changed circumstances of the early Twenties, they still clearly differentiated between Zionists and Jews who were friendly toward them like Dr. de Haan."
When I read this page, I was shocked and confused who the terrorists were. From Muhammed's phrasing it implies they were Zionists. If the Lehi was targeting Jews of the likes of Dr. de Haan, I wouldn't be surprised. After all the commander of the group, Shamir (who later became Israeli seventh PM) during his justification of using terrorism to win statehood he talked about "wretched brethren" and "shakes the Jewish population out of its complacency" [article here]
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