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HISTORY

The Significance of San Remo Eugene Kontorovich thinks that the 1920 San Remo conference sits at the foundation of Israel’s legal legitimacy. Martin Kramer disagrees. Who’s right?

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/israel-zionism/2021/02/the-significance-of-san-remo/

In December 2020, the historian and regular Mosaic contributor Martin Kramer asked whether those recently celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 1920 San Remo Conference were justified in seeing it as a cornerstone of Israeli sovereignty. In particular, he found that the historical case for San Remo’s importance was overstated, even as he sympathized with the celebrants’ impulse to strengthen Israel’s legitimacy. Below, we present an exchange between Eugene Kontorovich—another Mosaic contributor and a frequent commentator on international law as it applies to Israel—who writes to dispute Kramer’s argument, and a last word in response from Kramer himself. —The Editors

Eugene Kontorovich: The San Remo Treaty Sits at the Foundation of Israel’s Legitimacy in International Law

This spring, I was among those arguing that the centennial of the San Remo conference—where the League of Nations assigned the mandate for Palestine to Great Britain—should be celebrated as a milestone in Israel’s pre-history, and remembered alongside the more widely-known Balfour Declaration and the UN General Assembly’s stillborn 1947 partition proposal. Martin Kramer recently criticized this stance, contending that the conference did little to advance the Zionist project of establishing a sovereign state in the Land of Israel. As he mentions with particular disapproval my suggestion that a street in Jerusalem currently named in honor of the UN resolution should be redubbed to commemorate San Remo, I thought I’d respond. At stake is more than street signs and civic commemorations festivals. Such engagements with the past, along with the work of careful scholars like Kramer himself, together amount to the reconstruction of Zionism’s legal and political history.

Kramer’s disagreement centers on the fine points of historical emphasis. He does not claim that the League of Nations’ actions were unimportant. Rather, he claims that San Remo was a disappointment relative to the other events.

But first, let’s summarize these key events in order. On November 2, 1917, the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, issued his famous declaration that “His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” At that moment Palestine was still part of the Ottoman empire, although parts of it had been occupied by Britain, which would go on to conquer the rest in the remaining year of World War I. But only at the April 1920 San Remo conference would the victors in the war—by this time acting under the supervision of the newly created and broadly-based League of Nations—award the territories west of the Jordan River to the United Kingdom. The text of the corresponding “mandate” included phrases from the Balfour Declaration about establishing a Jewish national home there. Finally, in 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted in favor of dividing parts of the mandatory territory into Arab and Jewish states. The Arabs rejected the suggestion, Israel declared independence, and the rest, as they say, is history.

1689 or 1776? The Enlightenment Era did begin in 1689 and America is the quintessential Enlightenment nation, but 1776 is still the right choice for America’s founding year. By Robert Curry

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/08/1689-or-1776/

K. S. Bruce has written a thoughtful and informed commentary urging America to adopt the “1689 Project” in place of the 1619 Project. 

As you probably already know, the 1619 Project is an ugly attempt by the Left to persuade the uninformed that America was founded as a slave nation and is still today a systemically racist one. Bruce proposes 1689 instead because that year marks the beginning of the Enlightenment Era. The year 1689 misses the target, however, as surely as 1619 does. The Enlightenment Era did begin in 1689 and America is the quintessential Enlightenment nation, but 1776 is still the right choice for America’s founding year—which means President Trump’s 1776 Advisory Commission picked the correct year for its report to the nation. 

Because the Enlightenment Era began in Britain, 1689 marks the beginning of the British Enlightenment—but the American Enlightenment was a far cry from the British Enlightenment, and by 1776 the differences were deep and wide. 1689 might be a good pick for the year the British should rally around, but let’s leave that decision to them. 

Enlightenment thinking spread from Britain, but its fate was very different wherever it traveled. The French Enlightenment took a significantly different direction than the British one, and the American Enlightenment took yet another direction from both the British and the French. Voltaire in France was as different from John Locke in England as Thomas Jefferson was from either one of them.

Bruce notes a key distinction between the British Enlightenment and the American Enlightenment in this way:

Locke’s own writings described “life, liberty and the pursuit of property,” which the American Framers adapted to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

‘The Queen’s Gambit’: The Accelerated Polgár Variation Joe Dolce

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/01/the-queens-gambit-the-accelerated-polgar-variation/

EXCERPTS

When Walter Tevis’s novel The Queen’s Gambit came out in 1983, it slipped past the mainstream media, but everyone I knew in the Melbourne chess world was familiar with it. Little did anyone at the time suspect that Tevis’s fantasy about a female chess prodigy would be incarnated in the true story of the three Hungarian-Jewish Polgár sisters, who emerged in the mid-1980s, the eldest, Susan, becoming in 1986 the first woman to qualify for the World Championship.

The closest the world of chess has come to the tale in The Queen’s Gambit is in the true story of the Hungarian-Jewish Polgár sisters, Susan, Sofia and Judit, who were raised from birth as chess prodigies by their father, Laszlo Polgár. Polgár’s father survived Auschwitz but his father’s first wife and five children were murdered there. Laszlo Polgár believed that geniuses were made, not born, and that if children were taught a single intellectual activity from early childhood, they would master it. He used his three daughters, and chess, as his grand experiment in child-rearing psychology.

Polgár and his wife Klára were both teachers. They home-schooled the girls, developing a regime of early morning sports, including high-velocity ping-pong, for the girls’ physical stamina, before six to eight hours a day of chess training, lasting until well after dark.

Polgár created a card catalogue system, assembled from chess magazine clippings, with over 200,000 games cut and pasted onto index cards, the “cartotech”, for the girls to use during their study. This was the biggest chess archive outside the USSR.

When a Far-Left, Female-Led Domestic Terrorism Group Bombed the U.S. Capitol Forgotten in the wake of January 6.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/when-far-left-female-led-domestic-terrorism-group-lloyd-billingsley/

In the furor over the January 6 riot, which Sen. Mitt Romney called an “insurrection incited by the president of the United States,” a more serious assault on the Capitol has been overlooked. For those who weren’t around or may have forgotten, here’s what went down on the evening of November 7, 1983.

“Listen carefully, I’m only going to tell you this one time,” a caller from the “Armed Resistance Unit,” told the operator at the Capitol switchboard. “There is a bomb in the Capitol building. It will go off in five minutes. Evacuate the building.” A Senate document, “Bomb Explodes in Capitol,” describes what happened.

The caller warned that “a bomb had been placed near the chamber in retaliation for recent U.S. military involvement in Grenada and Lebanon.” At 10:58 p.m. “a thunderous explosion tore through the second floor of the Capitol’s north wing.” The device, hidden under a bench at the eastern end of the corridor outside the Senate chamber, “blew off the door to the office of Democratic Leader Robert C. Byrd.  The blast also punched a potentially lethal hole in a wall partition sending a shower of pulverized brick, plaster, and glass into the Republican cloakroom.” The adjacent halls were virtually deserted, so “many lives had been spared.”

Later than night, the Armed Resistance Unit called National Public Radio and proclaimed, “Tonight we bombed the U.S. Capitol.” The bombers “purposely aimed our attack at the institutions of imperialist rule rather than at individual members of the ruling class and government. We did not choose to kill any of them at this time. But their lives are not sacred and their hands are stained with the blood of millions.”

Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol is the title of the 2020 book by historian William Rosenau. In a Smithsonian magazine article headlined “In the 1980s a Far-Left, Female-Led Domestic Terrorism Group Bombed the U.S. Capitol,” Rosenau outlined the group’s back story.

SENATOR HIRAM REVELS (R- MISSISSIPPI) 1870

A Republican from Mississippi, Hiram Revels took office on February 25, 1870. He became the first Black senator a mere three weeks after Black men gained the right to vote with the 15th Amendment. During his time in office, Revels fought for Black Americans’ civil rights and education.

Herbert Hoover And The Jews By Saul Jay Singer

https://www.jewishpress.com/sections/features/features-on-jewish-world/herbert-hoov

Before serving as our 31st president (from 1929-1933), Herbert Clark Hoover (1874-1964) led the Commission for Relief in Belgium, served as the director of the U.S. Food Administration, and served as the third U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

When the United States entered World War I, President Wilson appointed Hoover, who became known as the country’s “food czar,” to lead the Food Administration. After the war, Hoover led the European Relief Council, which was charged with restoring Europe’s civilian economy and feeding the starving multitudes of Europe. Known as “the Great Humanitarian,” he is credited with saving literally millions of lives, including countless thousands in Jewish communities across Europe.

Hoover’s role administering European food relief brought him in contact with Europe’s Jews and sensitized him to their suffering from both severe economic distress and harsh anti-Semitic persecution. Moreover, a common interest in humanitarian work cemented friendships and political partnerships between Hoover and leading members of the Jewish community, particularly Bernard Baruch.

After Poland’s declaration of statehood in 1918, the Polish army began a campaign of terror against Polish Jews, including the April 5, 1919 summary execution of 37 Jewish residents of Pinsk by a Polish firing squad. Polish leader (and later first prime minister) Ignacy Jan Paderewski persisted in his claim that no Polish pogrom against Jews had ever been perpetrated, until Hoover secured his cooperation with blunt threats to withhold much-needed American support.

Hoover’s food aid to Poland was at the root of the Pinsk Massacre because the murdered Jews were reportedly meeting to discuss how to distribute Hoover’s aid when they were rounded up and shot. According to Lewis Strauss – whom Hoover put in charge of ensuring the equitable treatment of minority groups in the distribution of American aid (more on him below) – Hoover was “the only U.S. Government official to effectively press Poland and its prime minister to act against the pogromists.”

1776 Commission Director: Abolishing the Commission Won’t ‘Get Rid of These Principles’ By Samuel Allegri

https://www.theepochtimes.com/1776-commission-director-abolishing-the-commission-wont-get-rid-of-these-principles_3677164.html

“The commission, in some form, will carry on.You could abolish the commission, but you can’t erase history, you can’t get rid of these principles. That’s what we’re dedicated to. And that’s what we will continue teaching and working to defend,” Spalding said at the conclusion of the interview.

Dr. Matthew Spalding, a professor of constitutional government and Dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College was interviewed by The Epoch Times’ program American Thought Leaders. He was the executive director of the 1776 Commission, created by executive order by former President Donald Trump.

The host of the program, Jan Jekielek, asked him some key questions highly relevant to the current intense political zeitgeist, allowing Spalding to cast lucidity on the partially forgotten, at least for the younger generations, ideals of 1776.

The new Biden administration has abolished the 1776 commission, a history-centered, patriotic education program that calls for remembrance of and upholding the nation’s founding principles.

Spalding spoke about the clashing points that juxtapose the New York Times’ controversial “1619 Project” and the United States’ founding history, along with the ideological and theological ramifications.

Civic Virtues as Moral Facts: Recovering the Other Half of Our Founding The 1776 Series by Daniel J. Mahoney

https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2021/01/27/civic_virtues_as_moral_facts_recovering_the_other_half_of_our_founding_656930.html

This essay is part of RealClearPublicAffairs’s 1776 Series, which explains the major themes that define the American mind.

Until a half century ago or so, there was a moral consensus, however fraying, that informed and shaped the exercise of freedom in the Western world. The self-determination of human beings, of citizens in self-governing political orders, presupposed a civilized inheritance that allowed free men and women to distinguish, without angst or arduous effort, between liberty and license, good and evil, honorable lives and dissolute and disgraceful ones. Few would have suggested that liberty and human dignity could long flourish without a sense of moral obligation and civic spirit on the part of proud, rights-bearing individuals.

Few [Americans] would have suggested that liberty and human dignity could long flourish without a sense of moral obligation and civic spirit on the part of proud, rights-bearing individuals.

Since this moral consensus could be readily presupposed, Americans (and other free peoples) could – and did – abridge the language of politics to give priority to rights over duties, choice over the content of what was chosen, and the pursuit of happiness over the pursuit of truth and virtue. But this was precisely an abridgement because the other half of the equation was always more or less presupposed. The American Founders, for example, were in no way moral relativists, let alone moral nihilists. Rejecting religious sectarianism and the forceable political imposition of religious truth, they nonetheless appealed to honor, civic virtue, and the “honorable determination” of a free people to govern themselves. Facile relativism or easygoing nihilism, where all “values” are created equal, would have appalled them. The idea that moral judgments are utterly arbitrary, that distinctions between right and wrong, and better and worse ways of life, are wholly subjective, was completely alien to them. Almost all of them spoke of a human “moral sense” without which freedom degenerates into moral anarchy and despotic self-assertion.

Jewish revenge in post-WWII Europe By Marion DS Dreyfus

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/jewish_revenge_in_postwwii_europe.html

It was sometime in the 1990s, at a conference, when I met a film director with whom I became friendly, especially when he told me he had been a fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto.

In his vigorous 70s, Moshe Mizrahi detailed for me some of the experiences he had undergone fighting the Nazis during the all-out valiant battle in the Ghetto uprising.  

Mizrahi later invited me to his home in the “five towns.”  He introduced me to his maid, a woman with a discernible Polish or Hungarian accent.  She had been, she revealed without any sign of reluctance or regret, a qualified doctor in Europe during the war.  The director, whose name took some effort to recall, told me his conscientious housekeeper preferred working as a domestic in the United States to working in post-war Europe as a physician, with all the privations, widespread poverty, and rancor.  Plus low wages, absence of benefits, shortages.  

Walking me around his home, Mizrahi remarked in an aside that she made more money, and had more comfort, as a domestic in the U.S. than as a physician in post-WWII Europe.  

Among other recollections, the director told me that after the war, he, and others who had survived the life-and-death fight against the Nazi juggernaut, roamed at will through towns and outlying areas of war-torn former Nazi strongholds.  He told me in undramatized terms that he had entered homes at will, taking whatever he saw that he wanted, with quiescent and obviously terrified inhabitants not muttering a peep when he came through, he plainly furious on whatever revenge he could wrest from the burghers.  

What Should We Submit To? Harold F. Callahan

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/16/what-should-we-submit-to/

Ministers, “watchmen on … the wall of liberty,” according to Franklin Cole, editor of “They Preached Liberty,” were among America’s greatest revolutionary influences. The most influential was Boston Congregationalist minister, Jonathan Mayhew.

Declaration of Independence signer Robert Treat Paine called Mayhew America’s “Father of Civil and Religious Liberty.” Especially important was his Jan. 30, 1750, address, which was widely printed and read. Given for the centennial of Charles I’s execution, Mayhew argued that obedience was not due oppressive governments, because such tyranny violated the divinely-instituted purpose of government to benefit the people. And if rebellion against Charles I for eviscerating British liberty was justifiable, the same arguments applied to the American loss of liberty under George III.

As we commemorate Mayhew’s birth, reconsider his argument for our liberty, which is safe only when we recognize its fundamental importance, an argument so important John Adams called it “the spark that ignited the American Revolution.”

Such as really performed the duty of magistrates would be enemies only to the evil actions of men … But how is this an argument that we must honor and submit to … such as are not a common blessing, but a common curse, to society … If magistrates are unrighteous … the main end of civil government will be frustrated. And what reason is there for submitting to that government, which does by no means answer the design of government?