BACKGROUND:
Following talks I gave at London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the House of Lords in late 2016, two well-known London saboteurs acting on behalf of the Israeli state began planting fabrications about me in the media, and lodged formal complaints against me with SOAS, the House of Lords, and the Charity Commission.
SOAS and the CC dismissed the complaints outright, whereas the HoL launched a three month investigation. and in March 2017 printed a formal report dismissing the complaints as altogether unfounded.
When the saboteurs continued planting false stories in the media, at my request the UK's Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPOSO) launched a detailed investigation of the reporting in the worst offender, the Jewish Chronicle, and after a year ruled in my favor, reprimanding the JC and requiring it to print corrections.
The same saboteurs produced a 59-page PDF alleging to critique my book about terrorism and the creation of the Israeli state, as well as me personally, and disseminated it widely among venues, academic institutions, and faculty.
What follows is my rebuttal to that "report".
A BRIEF RESPONSE
to David Collier's and Jonathan Hoffman's
"Hate and Errors",
a critique of my book, State of Terror
Tom Suarez, May, 2019
David Collier and Jonathan Hoffman continue to circulate a pseudo-intellectual 59 page PDF critique, entitled "Hate & Errors" (here) of my 2016 book, State of Terror.
Rather, their efforts to discover actual flaws in State of Terror has instead vindicated my work. Indeed Collier and Hoffman could have saved themselves some trouble had they first checked my errata, which I began when the book was first published and which I always ask readers to check (ask anyone who has heard me speak). Aside from the few points repeated from my errata — all corrected in the Arabic, French, and future English editions — "Hate & Errors" (henceforth H&E) is farcical even on the level of its own internal logic.
The Collier-Hoffman weaponization of antisemitism
The authors use the allegation that my book is academically unsound to label it, and me, as antisemitic. Their critique's abuse of antisemitism extends to insinuating Holocaust denial:
“He [Suarez] even questions truth of survivor of Mengele’s Nazi experiment - her story’s awkward for him!"
To be clear: My book makes no reference whatsoever to Mengele or his experiments. And the tweeted "evidence" they illustrate (left) has only to do with the UN's 1947 Palestine committee UNSCOP, but is reproduced just blurry enough to hope that the reader takes on faith that it is relevant.
In H&E, however, they do cite specific "proof": endnote 247 in my book, relating an exchange I had with Israeli professor Yosef Grodzinsky regarding contradictory records about IDF Major General Yossi Peled.
Here are a Tweet from Hoffman repeating the "Mengele" invention, and my endnote 247, his & Collier's "evidence", in full:
The background: Collier-Hoffman claim that Peled's mother was a survivor of Mengele’s experiments, whereas according to Professor Grodzinsky (who documented the issue back to the 1950s), both parents perished in the war. To be sure, Prof Grodzinsky's study is far more substantive than the claim of Collier-Hoffman — but Peled's family history is not the issue. The issue is that Collier-Hoffman have grotesquely twisted my exchange with Prof Grodzinsky in order to smear me as a Holocaust denier.
Endnote 247, they conclude, “best highlights the disdain Suarez has for the Holocaust and Jewish life in general,” a theme they continue with their online advertisements for H&E.
I ask the reader to compare my endnote and their verdict.
They continue: My book
- “is dripping with racial hatred against Jews ... the authors [sic] hatred of Jews runs through the book. Like blood in an animal, the book has no life without it ... [Suarez is a] rabid little man, motivated by hatred ... The message that is screaming from the pages as you turn them is that this is an author who has issues with Jews... This book has an antisemitic stench from the very first page to the very last... Suarez even included in this libel Jews who wanted a bi-national state.* It is inhumane, racist, and against Jews...”
(* RE libelling Jews who wanted a bi-national state, this, too, is invention. The only Jewish proponent of a bi-national state whom I discuss is Judah Leon Magnes, whom my book presents in a wholly favorable, almost heroic light.)
Collier goes so far as to issue a veiled threat: “We see you. We know what you are.”
Book Launch ?
In their pretentiously-labelled “Executive Summary”, Collier-Hoffman repeat an old lie: “The book [State of Terror] was honoured with a launch inside a meeting room in the House of Lords” (which would have been illegal). They know this is untrue: Hoffman had already filed the allegation with the HoL in late 2016. The HoL's Committee for Privileges and Conduct investigated and proved what those of us present already knew: not only was my talk at the House of Lords not a book launch, but there was not even a copy of the book at the event (HL Paper 142, 15 March 2017).
The Quakers
They then repeat another of their inventions: that Jesus Lane Quakers cancelled a talk I was to give at the Friends Meeting House in Cambridge because they agreed with Hoffman's condemnation of my book. This is extraordinary manipulation, as it was Mr. Hoffman himself who created the situation that caused the cancellation which he then mispresents and exploits. Hoffman ignored requests from Jesus Lane Quakers to stop spreading falsehoods in their name, leading Jesus Lane to issue a formal statement:
Elders of Jesus Lane Friends Meeting (Quakers) are concerned at the continuing misrepresentation by Jonathan Hoffman and others regarding the decision made by Cambridge Jesus Lane Quaker Meeting to cancel a talk by Tom Suarez in May 2017 ... some of us have attended the talk by Tom Suarez, which was relocated, or watched a recording of it. Some have purchased the book and read it. Friends (Quakers) who have read the book or seen the video recording of Tom’s talk have no reservations about Tom Suarez or his work.
Yet Collier & Hoffman persisted. In 2018 the Jewish Chronicle, relying on Hoffman and the Board of Deputies, repeated the lie that I was "banned" by Jesus Lane — this time causing the JC a formal rebuke by the Independent Press Standards Organisation, which mandated that the JC issue a correction.
The "Pillars"
"The Suarez book ‘State of Terror’ is built on nine pillars", we learn in H&E, though they then seem to set out fourteen "pillars". "Some of these are truly absurd". Following are the 14 (9+5) allegedly false and antisemitic "pillars", with my responses:
• 1. That my book was built on diligent research. (Nothing to comment here.)
• 2. That Zionist terror was the reason for Partition. Zionist terrorism was, yes, the reason for Partition; but to be clear, "Partition" was not the goal, but the means to a Zionist state in as much of the region as the Zionist forces could usurp. My evidence for this runs throughout much of the book. But Collier-Hoffman "disprove" me by changing a key British document's phrase “intensification of Jewish terrorism” over that already tearing Palestine apart should Partition not be approved, to “civil disobedience”. This is nothing short of comical.
• 3. That Zionist actions were part of a ‘master plan’, rather than a reaction to events. Yes indeed, though I never used the term "master plan" that H&E alleges. The evidence is incontrovertible that the Zionist expropriation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine was the project all along, not “a reaction to events”. The proceedings of private meetings since 1917 and through to the 1940s could not be more blunt. Key leaders like Weizmann and Ben-Gurion explicitly and consistently state that they plan to take all of Palestine and ethnically cleanse it; and they put the mechanisms into effect to accomplish it. History vindicates this: that's what they did and continue today to refuse to undo.
• 4. That Zionists and Jews were two different groups, with little or no intersection. Here I am not sure what they mean. Zionism is a political movement. There is of course "intersection" between Jews (and non-Jews) and Zionism, just as there is "intersection" between Jews (or anyone else) and, say, vegetarianism, communism, or any other -ism. What is the issue here?
• 5. That Zionists had no respect for human life, least of all that of Jews. This is caricature. Nothing to comment.
• 6. That between 1933 & 1949, the Jews of Europe had somewhere to go, other than Palestine. Here Collier-Hoffman are upset about Morris Ernst’s first-hand account of the Zionists' sabotage of Ernst's and President Roosevelt’s resettlement plan for a half million refugees, of which three hundred thousand would be split between the US and UK. The absurdity through which they attempt to refute this is so farcical as to warrant quoting directly. The bold emphasis is original:
Suarez asserts that Roosevelt ‘provisionally secured safe haven for half a million Displaced Persons’. He never did ‘secure’ anything like this. He did try (see Laqueur, op cit*) but it was never likely that his own country - the US - would accept: opposition to large-scale migration (eg from the trade unions) was just too strong. So ‘Zionist leaders’ could not have ‘sabotaged’ an offer that never existed! (*Note that “Laqueur” is not my source for this or anything else.)
To repeat their logic: The reason the Zionists forcefully sabotaged Roosevelt's efforts to provide safe haven in the US, UK, and elsewhere, for Jewish survivors — even throwing Ernst out of parlors and accusing him of treason for the attempt — is that he and Roosevelt might not succeed.
Again, the logic itself is farcical, indeed comical, on the face of it.
The reason, the only reason, Roosevelt "never did secure" the safe haven he had provisionally set up, and for which Ernst had already secured British equal participation, is that the US Zionist establishment was outraged and blocked it. That Collier-Hoffman lie and cite "trade unions" betrays how desperate they are on this issue, because it lays bare they core truth of Zionism; and nor was Roosevelt's the only documented example of such Zionist violence against Jews. Collier-Hoffman go through comical loops to fudge the simple fact that the Zionists did not want displaced Jews to have any option but Palestine. Zionism was, and remains, the denial of Jewish self-determination.
• 7. That the British were impartial observers. The British, in their non-public intra-governmental communications, did usually record clinically (this happened, that happened... this person said, that person said...). This is separate from their candid comments, where they expressed their feelings. As far as “impartial” (a word I did not use), it must not be forgotten that the British were the ones who jump-started the entire Zionist project, continued to enable it through to 1948, and still continue to do so today even to the extent of suppressing its own citizenry, and its democracy, on Israel's behalf. So to suggest that Britain was or is biased against the Zionists seems odd in the extreme.
• 8. That 1948 was not a civil war, but rather "Zionist aggressors picking a fight with peaceful Arabs". Ignoring H&E's sarcastic imagery, yes, the point is correct: From the beginning of WWII through to the summer of 1947, virtually all of the terrorism in Palestine was Zionist; and once the reality of the Israeli state was assured (which in practical terms came upon the announcement of the UNSCOP recommendations, months before Resolution 181), the Zionists began redirecting their violence from the British to the Palestinians in order to assure an "Arab threat" from which they would have to "defend" themselves (i.e., justify ethnic cleansing and land theft). Palestinian anti-Jewish violence did resurface to some extent in the summer of 1947 with the all-but-assured reality of a Zionist state and Palestinian dispossession; but contrary to H&E's allegation that I cherry-picked evidence, my book pushes up the beginnings of this resurgence of anti-Jewish violence months earlier than previously documented.
• 9. That the Hagana secretly supported the actions of the Irgun. This cooperation is abundantly illustrated, ebbing and flowing with circumstances. As a defence summary put it, “the Hagana will have a lot of its dirty work done for it, without carrying any responsibility”. But here, finally, Collier-Hoffman stumbled across an actual error in my book: I quote from an interview with Teddy Kollek, and from a British document, but as a result of a bad eleventh-hour rewrite (not on the advance review copy), the Kollek quote was orphaned into the next sentence with the British quote, thus misidentifying them. Secondly, a confusing phrase "there can be no question [etc]", I interpreted as followed by "that" rather than "of". Both were on my list of errata, and neither changes the issue at hand: many terror attacks were Hagana-Irgun or even Hagana-Irgun-Lehi collaborations. Collier-Hoffman are wrong, however, in their claim that I paint too general an image of this inter-gang cooperation. The opposite is true: I refute the common idea of a specific period that began and ended, documenting a far more fluid reality.
Five H&E criticisms of State of Terror not counted in its "nine Pillars":
• Rabbi Herzog. Collier-Hoffman are unhappy that I document an anti-Jewish kidnapping trip by the Jewish Agency's Rabbi Herzog in 1946. They dismiss it with an obfuscatory device that Hoffman overused in his 2016 complaint to the House of Lords: they cite a page in my book where I merely refer to this issue, and falsely treat it as the proper section of the book where it is addressed, thus enabling them to claim that I cite no evidence. When my actual source — Rabbi Herzog's record — does comes up, they depict his actions in contradiction to what Herzog wrote, which I have made available online.
• Ben-Gurion's oft-cited 1938 statement about preferring that Jewish children perish rather than be sent to Britain instead of Palestine. Collier-Hoffman claim that no one, not Ben-Gurion and not even the Nazis, knew that Jews might be massacred en masse over the next few years, and so accuse me of "falsely endow[ing] Ben Gurion with this foresight". Really? First of all, that Jewish children would be exterminated by the Nazis was the very premise of Ben-Gurion's statement. But in order to confuse this in H&E, Collier-Hoffman obscured the particularly damning timing of Ben-Gurion's pronouncement: it came after, and partially in response to, Kristallnacht. They fudge this by extracting the date July 1938 from one sentence and insinuate that it applies to Ben-Gurion's speech in the next sentence. But they know that the speech was in December — a month after Kristallnacht. I also cited Hagana member Hanna Braun, who knew firsthand that Ben-Gurion's was not a one-time statement, but that he repeated and meant it. Collier-Hoffman simply dismiss her.
• Reconstruction. From when Hoffman first disrupted a book talk of mine in November 2016, he and Collier were particularly outraged by my statement that the Jewish Agency was against Reconstruction. After I posted relevant source documents, they amended their claim slightly in H&E, now arguing that it was a minority view, not that of the leadership, and point out that particular wartime anti-Reconstruction statements of Ben-Gurion refer to Palestine, not Europe. (Why Ben-Gurion would seek to stop reconstruction in Palestine itself begs explanation.) But they ignore the reality that, as one report puts it, the Zionists "were not interested in Jewish rehabilitation in Europe. They were afraid that with the improvement of conditions in Europe the pressure on Palestine would subside." By the war's end, the British were reporting a general feeling among the settlements against improvement in Europe, since it would make the justification for a Zionist state more difficult.
• The destruction of the Iraqi Jewish community in the early 1950s. Fact: in the early 1950s, Israel ethnically cleansed over a hundred thousand Jews from Iraq. But in an effort to claim otherwise, Collier-Hoffman mix this proven false-flag operation up with an unrelated, unproven British false-flag operation involving anti-Jewish violence that rocked Iraq a decade earlier, in June 1941. So first I need to explain 1941: There is a well-supported theory that the 1941 "Arab" pogrom was a British operation to provide a pretext for their continued control. I introduce new inconclusive evidence from documents that I successfully got the British to declassify (CO 733/420/19). Collier-Hoffman fail to mention this, and morph it into the completely separate issue of the known Israeli false-flag operation that caused the flight of Iraqi Jews to Israel in the early 1950s. Here they ignore the discovery of the Zionist terror ring and the testimony of British witnesses and of a CIA agent. They ignore my additional evidence not to my knowledge previously published: that Israel refused any help in airlifting the tens of thousands of Iraqi Jews left homeless, cold, and hungry as result of the (obviously fake) "emergency", and threatened to impound any airplane that tried — while simultaneously claiming that Iraq's Jews were about to be massacred by their Muslim countrymen. The finally irony is that CO 733/420/19 interested me because it might reveal new evidence of the Mufti's connection to the fascists — yet Hoffman then falsely claimed to the House of Lords that my book does not even mention the Mufti's well-known meeting with Hitler.
• Citation method. Collier-Hoffman criticize my method of identifying documents within archives, and of the frustration it caused them in locating them (or failing to try). This is gratuitous: while some folders at Britain's National Archives consist of pages that are numbered in some organized fashion, others are collections of hundreds of loose, often unrelated sheets, that bear either no numbering at all, or several contradictory numbers, or duplicated numbers resulting from previous archiving. I strove to use the most visible, non-duplicated method of identifying any particular document. This is the nature of these documents, not a failure of my method. Specifically, Collier-Hoffman question a quote I (correctly) attribute to Sharret (Shertok), by saying “We attempted to check this file but it is massive. Without further location information, it’s not possible to find the document to which Suarez refers.” I did the experiment of locating it again based strictly on my citation in the book — It took me a few minutes, there as described.
Postscript :
Messrs. Collier and Hoffman are on a political crusade to shield the Israeli state, and Zionist ideology itself, from accountability. That is what this entire charade is about. The web of fabrications and distortions this charade requires can only be maintained by smearing any who challenge it. "Hate and Errors" is but one minor example.
© Thomas Suarez, 2017-2021