Back to the Future: NPR Rewrites Israel’s War of Independence


National Public Radio, presumably a non-partisan show, has acquired the reputation of consistenly misleading the public, intentionally or through incompetence, on just about all matters relating to Israel and the conflict with its Arab neighbors. Here, again, NPR is taken to task with illustrations of their distortions and bias.

National Public Radio’s look back to the beginnings of the Arab-Israeli conflict moved in its third installment to the 1948 period, centering on Israel’s War of Independence, and like the first two segments, this one was marred by grave errors and omissions. For example, in discussing British restrictions on Jewish immigration, NPR mentions only the postwar period, when displaced persons and Holocaust survivors were confined in European camps. But NPR ignores the hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims who died during World War II solely because Britain barred Jewish immigration to pre-state Israel, the only place willing to accept Jews in those desperate days. NPR listeners might have better understood the history supposedly being covered had this segment mentioned, for example, the British government’s opposition in 1943 to a plan to evacuate Jews from Rumania and France for fear they might end up in Mandate Palestine. As an official British memo put it:

... the Foreign Office are concerned with the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued from enemy occupied territory. ... They foresee that it is likely to prove almost if not quite impossible to deal with anything like the number of 70,000 refugees whose rescue is envisaged. (David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews)

With no country willing to accept these people, many, like the refugees on the steamer St. Louis, died in Nazi death camps after they were forced back to Europe. Others, such as 768 passengers on the Struma, died when their unseaworthy vessels foundered.

Unfortunately, NPR’s version of history obscured from view the callousness and cynicism of the pro-Arab British Foreign Office during the war, and left mysterious the quite natural reaction of the leaders of pre-state Israel. Instead of explaining any of this, NPR’s Mike Shuster informed listeners that, “Once it was certain that Hitler’s Germany was defeated, the Zionists turned on their erstwhile allies ...” But the British had not been allies, erstwhile or otherwise.