| May 12 |  |
Editor says, we're not celebrating Israel's anniversary was a letter published in the Guardian Newspaper on April 30th 2008 by sixty prominent Jewish personalities with the preface ~ "As Edward Said emphasised, what the Holocaust is to the Jews, the Naqba is to the Palestinians". We explore the validity of those claims but in a very different context (a pun), by choosing the accidental death of Mickey Marcus as a change of fortunes for the Palestinians assuming that at that stage the Palestinians were undefeated (in fact, a ceasefire had already been declared by then). Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the author's own viewpoints.
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In 1949, on this day the State of Palestine submitted an application of admission for membership of the United Nation at the two hundred and seventh plenary meeting held at Flushing Meadow, New York (also submitted was an urgent request for humanitarian assistance to resettle the seven hundred and fifty thousand Arab refugees who had fled the country during the recent conflict).
A Challenge IgnoredIt would be a busy day for the President of the plenary meeting, Mr Herbert Vere who received a third application in the form of a quasi-legal challenge signed by the surviving members of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, led by Chairman David Ben-Gurion.
In fact all of these leading Zionists were fugitives from Palestinian justice, charged with genocide by the the authorities in Amman. Because Ben-Gurion was the architect of the failed Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine known as Plan Dalet (or simply, Plan D) which destroyed four hundred Arab villages and displaced eighty percent of the pre-war population. Yet a single death would ruin the whole Zionist plan.
On June 11th their inspirational General, the American Colonel David "Mickey" Marcus (pictured) was accidendally shot in front of Central Front headquarters by an eighteen years old Palmachi Eliezer Linski because he failed to respond to a Hebrew security challenge. Click 
to watch Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) Part 10 Ben-Gurion suspected that elements in the Palmach conspired to kill Marcus so he would be replaced (the Haganah was comprised of several factions whose lack of consensus over strategy and tactics was one of the reasons for Marcus's appointment as commander for Jerusalem).
Yet members of World Jewish Congress placed the blame for the Zionist misadventure on Ben-Gurion himself. President Nahum Goldman wrote of Ben-Gurion ~ "I have often asked myself why this clever, brilliant man, ... why a man like that failed to see that without an agreement with the Arabs, Israel would have no long-term future .. Ben-Gurion is the man principally responsible for the anti-Arab policy, because it was he who moulded the thinking of generations of Jews".
The dispute would rage for decades. Right up until the time of his death in 1973, Ben Gurion would persist in his denial of the holocaust.
Entry posted by Todayinah Editor
© We're not celebrating Israel's anniversary, The Guardian, Wednesday 30 April 2008Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Alternate Nations Source: Wikipedia Labels: David Ben-Gurion, Israel, Palestine, 1948, Naqba. Editor says, Wikipedia ~ a few hours before the cease fire, Marcus returned to his Central Front headquarters. He and his commanders were billeted in the monks' quarters of the abandoned Monastere Notre Dame de la Nouvelle Alliance in Abu Ghosh. Shortly before 4:00 a.m., a sentry, Eliezer Linski, eighteen years old, and a one-year Palmachi veteran, challenged a figure in white. When the man failed to respond with the password, Linski fired in the air and the man ran towards the monastery. He fired at the man, as did one or more fighters in a nearby sentry post. Marcus was found dead, wrapped in a white blanket. As a mostly assimilated English-speaking American Jew, Marcus knew very little Hebrew and failed to understand the Hebrew challenge, and Linski did not understand Marcus who responded in English. Marcus wore no rank, although officers had been recognized by a ribbon pinned to their uniforms. As Marcus's body was removed from Abu Ghosh, a ribbon was found and placed on his casket.
His body was returned to the United States for burial, accompanied by Moshe Dayan and his wife Ruth, Yoseph Harel, and the wife of his aide de camp, Alex Broida.
Ben-Gurion was suspicious of the initial report that Marcus had been shot accidentally. The Haganah was comprised of several factions whose lack of consensus over strategy and tactics was one of the reasons for Marcus's appointment as commander for Jerusalem, and Ben-Gurion suspected that elements in the Palmach may have conspired to kill Marcus so he would be replaced. On the same day Marcus was shot, Ben-Gurion summoned Yaakov Shimshon Shapira - later Israel's Attorney General - and asked him to investigate the incident. Shapira's investigation was cursory. Despite conflicting reports concerning the number of shots fired, how many wounds Marcus suffered, whether the fatal wound could have been caused by Linski's rifle, and how and why Marcus may have been outside the monastery, he concluded that Linski shot Marcus in the line of duty. The report has never been made public.
~ You're incredibly brave to be taking on something this touchy...
~ I'd guess that the reaction to the outcome of this war in the US would be interesting, in the Chinese sense of the term. Truman commented to his State Department wallahs, when they urged him to go easy on his support for the Zionists, that he had hundreds of thousands of constituents who were anxious for the success of Zionism; he didn't have hundreds of thousands of Arab constituents.
Would Truman lose his renomination or re-election over this issue?
~ Difficult to say whether this would lead for a more or less violent Middle East...
~ One might have seen both Ararb and Jewish terrorists running around blowing up one another's homes and so forth, turning the Middle East into even more of a cauldron of rage than it is.
And if so, this could have had important negative consequences for Jews elsewhere. The sympathy they received as victims of the Holocaust might have eroded swiftly if they were no longer perceived as innocents.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
