Today’s Times performs the great service of describing the separate road system that Israel has built for Arab and Jew in the West Bank. Bless the editors, a stark 4-column photo at the top of page 1 shows us the divided highway system with its concrete barrier between carriageways. There are of course different exits for Israelis that the Palestinians can’t use; and the Times quotes an Israeli lawyer who sees the roads as creating "an ominous map of the future" in which settlements will proliferate around Jerusalem creating a Jewish "cordon" between the Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the Palestinians in the West Bank. So much for a viable Palestinian state.
A year ago a South African I met in Hebron told me that conditions in the West Bank were worse than under apartheid. "In Johannesburg we had access to all the roads; they do not have that here," he said. "There were times we couldn’t use the roads but those were exceptional occasions. We did not have these checkpoints…"
No, apartheid Israeli-style is not utterly racial; Israel proper has Arab citizens, who will be able to use these bypass roads. But the West Bank infrastructure is in practice almost entirely racial, and call it segregation or apartheid, or a response to suicide bombing, it is an effort to separate "each tribe," as the Times’ Steven Erlanger thankfully states at the top of the article.
I relate as an American, and think of the damage done to American Jewish youth: Young Jews are recruited by Jewish leadership in a campaign to justify this system of oppression half a world away. AIPAC gives out copies of The Case for Israel (by Alan Dershowitz) at Hillels on college campuses, stating that the book should "bolster the confidence and effectiveness of pro-Israel student activists engaged in efforts to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship" (so reads the AIPAC sticker in my copy of the book). I.e., they are to use the book to argue with the left. So young Jews are being scripted to say that this apartness is right and necessary. When any normal person looking at the Times recoils in outrage.
This seems to me one of the great unspoken prices of the Israel lobby and alongside it, the official construction of Jewish identity: the effect on the young Jewish mind. Back in the 60s, Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld celebrated the "revolutionary" spirit of young Jews who went to the South to try and break up desegregation. They took their power. They did not listen to the southerners’ rationalizations of that system, they were moved by a moral horror, and they acted. Today young Jews are being told not to respond innocently and prophetically to an outrage, but to study it and accept it; and then to argue that black is white.
The Jewish brain is one of the great gifts of civilization. Freed, it can do amazing things. And look what it has been reduced to.
Related posts:
- a mind is a terrible thing to waste (Columbia/Barnard edition)
- Jewish Leader Says American Jewish Community Is ‘Directed’ by Israeli Foreign Ministry
- Israelis Use the A-Word. Can Americans?
- Even for a Liberal American Jewish Journalist, the Occupation Is a Family Matter
- Rabbi Saperstein, if you have nothing to say on Gaza, why should the world pay you any mind on Darfur?
{ 28 comments }
"'… each tribe,' as the Times' Steven Erlanger thankfully states."
But is tribe the right word for the Palestinian people, or is the NYT trying to create a false impression of symmetry?
"High Court bars Gazans from studying in W. Bank"
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/892184.html
By Tamara Traubmann, Haaretz Correspondent
"The High Court of Justice on Tuesday rejected a petition by a group of Palestinian students from Gaza against Israel's policy of barring students from the Gaza Strip from studying in the West Bank, even when there is no evidence that they pose a security threat to the state.
The decision was made by a panel of judges chaired by Justice Elyakim Rubinstein.
The petition was submitted in 2005 by a group of occupational therapy students from Gaza who had enrolled at Bethlehem University because the university of Gaza did not have an occupational therapy program.
The Israel Defense Forces and the state claim that the students belong to a 'risk group,' and that the decision to collectively bar them from studying in the West Bank is part of the broader government policy regarding the Palestinian Authority since Hamas' ascension to power in Gaza. The students had asked that the army review their requests individually, and then decide if they pose a security risk.
In the verdict, Justice Rubinstein recognized the need for the formation of a bureaucratic mechanism that would view such cases on an individual basis. But he stipulated that "the bottom line is that situation between Israel and Gaza has deteriorated to an all time low, and issuing a court order that sets aside would not fit in with the present dire reality."
No comment needed.
Must-read article from the London Review of Books by Henry Siegman:
"The Middle East Peace Process Scam"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n16/sieg01_.html
That Siegman article is a good one, Alan. Thanks. Highly recommended.
Another good background article, this one on some of the ideas behind the one-state solution, is this by Leila Farsakh–
http://mondediplo.com/2007/03/07binational
Having read Siegman's piece I have only one comment — on Israel's oh-so ironic claim that the Palestinians are not ready for a state. The Palestinians already had a state before the Israelis showed up. The Palestinians did not drop out of the sky on Israel — the Israelis dropped out of the sky on Palestine!
For a guy who is a proponent of Jews assimilating themselves out of existence and the destruction of Israel it strikes me has ironic that Phil is so exercised about the future of the "Jewish mind" Sounds a little racist to me
If it wasn't for that road the Palestinians would have donkey path. They should be thankful that they are getting a road built.
BP seems to have a jaundiced view of PW's attraction to the transcendance of endogamy. Jewishness would not be assimilated 'out of existence' but would presumably contribute to a culturally more vibrant strain.
I think PW is confronting the clash between Jewry's herculean contribution to civilisation and its damning contribution to evil in the construction (and continuning support from without) of the Israeli state, born and reproduced on the principle of racial superiority and ethnic cleansing.
Many have queried how German civilisation could have produced the Nazi regime; the same could be asked of Jewry.
The lamentable insertion from 'SNoopy' is a minor vignette of the moral decay.
"The Jewish brain is one of the great gifts of civilization."
Phil, I don't know how to interpret this statement.Bill Pearlman reformulated it as "Jewish Mind" and even then smelt a whiff of racism here.I am inclined to agree. And this whiff becomes a pungent smell when you talk about the "Jewish brain".
However, since you see this precious organ as a "gift of civilisation" once can assume that you are not referring to anything physical here.
YOU ARE TYPICAL OF THE NEUSEATING LEFT-WING/PROGRESSIVE SELF HATING JEWS ,ONE WHO IS FOR THEIR ENEMY INSTEAD OF THEIR OWN!
Rather than commenting on the raucous shout in the last post I will elaborate further on what Evanj wrote in the one before that.
Indeed, the "Jewish brain" seems to have gone AWOL in Israel – which suggests that it only flourishes in certain social-economic conditions. Power is toxic to it.
To be insider-with-a-distance seems to enhance it. Amos Elon has written on the amazing cultural productivity of German-Austrian Jewry, especially in the time of the Weimar Republic. Stefan Zweig's "Die Welt von Gestern" (translated as "The World of Yesterday") makes clear to what extent it was immersed in German culture.
Peter Pulzer wrote: "In the midst of the First World War, in a manifesto directed at the Jews of the then still neutral United States, the celebrated neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen asserted that 'the Jews of the Occident [...] all have an intellectual and spiritual link with Germany [...] Every Jew of the Occident has, in addition to his political fatherland, to recognise, honour and love Germany as the motherland of his religiosity, of his fundamental aesthetic strength and therefore the centre of his cultural convictions'."
Others spoke here scathingly of a "one-sided and unreciprocated love affair". Indeed, insiders-with-a-distance, kept at a distance that is.
Incidentally, Hermann Cohen's appeal to especially American Jewry provides a better understanding of the British war cabinet's eagerness to "oblige" the Zionists with the Balfour Declaration.
Two things Arie: You really have to stop getting so worked up about this stuff. You going to give yourself a heart attack. Second, the Balfour declaration was a move to prempt something that the Kaiser was leanign towards doing. Personally, If Germany had won WW1 think of the implications. Hitler would have stayed a house painter, France would have been a German province. Not Communism in Russia. Alot of things would have been better if Von Kluck hadn;t screwed up in 1914. But here is the thing, you guys got rid of the Jews in Europe for the most part. Your just going to have to live with us in America and Israel. We've learned
The Jewish fore brain may have been sucked in by the Jewish mid brain (the seat of murky human motivations) — in the case of illegal settlements anyway.
I have written elsewhere, a bit tongue in cheek, that Jews have not had a country of their own for so long that they do not know what you are supposed to do with one, now they have one: that all can they think in terms of after 2000 years is NEIGHBORHOODS — their states away from their state.
(Bear with me if you have read this aleady — I will get to the new point eventually) Having been away for two thousand years I speculated they may have missed all important geo-psychological developments coming in two hundred years ago: the railroad and the telegraph — which tied countries into much tighter instinctive territory packages: how the medium was the message in the nineteenth century.
How tongue in cheek? It just now occurs to me that since the television era, countries that used to be considered sacred in the former print world — the next thing below God — now feel a little bit more like my "dog run" v. your "dog run" — now when the main impression is the physical sight of land. You still protect your own but the pledge of allegiance is beginning to look a little over done.
(Today's point, at last.) Thus, the television era's, countries-are-not-so-sacred-after-all psychology, may, aid and abet the NEIGHBORHOOD RATIONALIZATION of Zionists: that invading a next door nation is nothing more serious than moving into a neighborhood where you are not wanted.
So my "neighborhood theory of Israeli geo-psychology" may hold a little more water than I thought at the time.
Realistic geo psychology:
Ever hear of "Jewish angioplasty" (my intentions only humorous here — I think I'm in the Bronx in 1960), circa 1949: that's where you take 78% of a territory and the other guy gets 22%. You do not get to move in on the other 22% — especially when the other guy has as many people in his 22% as you have in your 78%. PS. Invasion — especially followed by settlements! — just reinforce the old sacred feelings; the Palestinians are never going away.
The way the human brain is set up: the fore brain works to satisfy the needs of the mid brain (a.k.a., pea-sized limbic system). The way it works: the more intelligent the fore brain, the better it is at rationalizing what the mid brain wants to feel.
By most odd coincidence, in the post just above, Phil applauds the author of the seminal book on the evolution of instinctive animal behavior, Sociobiology: E.O. Wilson.
Dennis. I'm truly astounded by your analysis.
The brilliance is like the sun. Perhaps you should lecture and publish
Apologists for Zionist racism like to claim that Israeli Palestinians can drive the Israelis-only roads in the Occupied Territories, but it is not true. An Israeli needs permission to drive those roads, and Israeli Palestinians are almost never granted permission.
I was interviewed by Hisham Tillawi on Current Issues TV last Thursday. You can look at it at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1249709804991099371 . Sorry the audio quality is low. I was on vacation and had to use my cell phone. I talk about some of the experiences that led me to conclude Oslo was a scam.
I did not give a good answer to the Holocaust question. I should just have said that the Nakba and subsequent treatment of Palestinians is a much purer example of genocide within the Lemkin and International definitions of genocide than either the mass murder of Jews during WW2 or the mass killings of Armenians during the last days of the Ottoman Empire. The former case has many elements of collective revenge and fears of Jews for their association with the Russian Revolution and subsequent Soviet Crimes while the latter case is intertwined with the Czarist threat against the Ottoman Empire.
I have been reading "The Pity of It All" by Amos Elon. It is fun to read, but it is bad as a history of German Jews. It starts with Moses Mendelsohn's entry into Berlin (1743). Why? 1648 would have made more sense. Then Elon could have explained the economic mess of the German countryside during the 18th century.
One would never have know that the Kulturkampf took place from reading the book. It had immense effects on German Protestant-Catholic-Jewish relations.
Elon never discusses how the Prussian government effectively created a Jewish economic elite by its policy of only allowing the most entrepreneurial of Polish Jews to immigrate into Prussia or Prussian-ruled territories, and practically all important claims about Czarist anti-Semitism are tendentious or flat-out wrong.
Elon leaves out all discussion of the development of Modern Orthodoxy and its relationship with Zionism. Shimshon Rafael Hirsch and Isaac Breuer definitely deserved some mention. Breuer is very much a Tariq Ramadan-like figure in terms of reconciling Western philosophy and religion. He became an important political figure in Israel, but unlike Tariq Ramadan was a member of governments that pursued ethnic cleansing and the murder of unarmed women and children.
Bill,
I just want to get elected president so I can send the Marines into the West Bank (at the request of the Palestinians of course) to open up the exclusive roads and close down the checkpoints — all without a shot being fired.
Then it will be time for the settlers to move out without touching a hair on one of their heads (no instant hurry; I take the Palestinians to be the easiest folks in the world to get along with if they have any chance for normalcy at all) or PAY — big — big in third world terms anyway, which may not be too much for first-worlders to suffer.
The old setter land titles will be torn up (have a familiar ring?) and the settlers will have to make any deal the newly and FULLY empowered Palestinians are willing to take from them. Or maybe the Palestinians could lease out the "former" settlements to Saudis or retiring Frenchies — up to the Palestinians. I predict most settlers staying — and paying — the neighborhood having a dangerous reputation.
Oh yah, the Palestinians are easy to get along with. Just a bunch of happy go lucky lads. Come on, even Joechem would have to laugh at that one and he's a freaking psycho
Bill,
I think you are projecting you own fears of your own inadequacies on Joachim and rejecting them.
The fact that BP has trouble with English might provide a clue as to why he can't get his head around what's going on in Palestine.
Can I support DD's suggestion – an invasion of the Occupied Territories posthaste to get the occupiers out. After all, Hussein was hardly in Kuwait for two minutes before the good guys swooped in to clear out the nasties.
I'm still trying to get my head around why some occupations are bad and others are good.
I could go into this ad infinitum with you guys but the fact is that the terrritories are disputed, not occupied. But if your looking to drop the marines in to break an occupation how about Tibet, Oh, wait, that doesn't involve the JEWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! so you don't give a shit.
Thanks for the opening Bill: I wrote this a couple of years back:
Imagine if Chinese-only roads crisscrossed Tibet….
Suppose America supported a China that crisscrossed Tibet, up and down, with Chinese-only roads; which roads Tibetans were permitted neither to travel upon nor to cross over: effectively fracturing Tibet into a 100 little cantonments?
Suppose America backed China as it inundated Tibet with settlers that ballooned to 10% of the population – which settlers, disdaining vacant land, favored evicting natives from ancient family homes and appropriating the choicest land and water resources for themselves?
Suppose – reminiscent of the Taliban shooting women for “religious offenses” – Chinese troops supplied with American weapons habitually shot Tibetan children for throwing rocks in protest?
If — all of the above – the world would be in a giant uproar and America might be ducking Buddhist terrorists. What most Americans fail to discern about Islamic terrorists is that they are not Red Brigades types who hate our way of life (they willingly accept infidel cash for oil). Rather, America is engaged in the latest Arab-Israeli war which, this time, we have taken the immoral (as in Israeli lebensraum) side of.
In four wars, 1947, 1956, 1967 and 1973, the Arabs attempted to push Israel into the sea – but after 1973 (a long time ago) relatively tame Egypt and Jordan abandoned that hope; and lone Syria could no way face Israel’s war machine.
Today’s clash is rooted in the aftermath of the 1967 war, at which time Israel began a population offensive, urging Jews from all the world to come settle the newly captured territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip – to come and push West Bank natives into the neighboring sands.
Ariel Sharon [president of Israel when I wrote this] has made a career of stating “Egypt is a Palestinian state” and “Jordan is a Palestinian state” – the implication being, that if native Palestinians don’t like Israel making living space for the Jewish people out of their homeland, they are free to leave.
The Palestinians have not taken the hint – nor have a billion-plus Islamic friends. One result: America has traded now skyscrapers for settlements.
My advice to Palestinians and their militant cohorts is to stop blowing up their own children and other people’s children in Pizza parlors and to stop dreaming about bombing downtown New York City – and pay a visit (with some Saudi millions?) to Madison Avenue. With the right message, Madison Avenue is potentially mightier than any Islamic sword — especially when most of Israel’s American friends, at present, don’t seem to have a clue to where the Islamic sword is coming from, or why.
America has reliably kept Israel from being pushed into the sea over the decades. But it was never our responsibility to finance and arm Israel’s manifestly undoable destiny.
Phil,
How's "Jewish brain" or "Jewish mind" terminology different from "Jewish science" and what have you smoked after dinner yesterday?
Breathes there a man with soul so dead …
who will not be cheered by this–
http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/2988
"Nasrallah featured on American Billboard!"
Martillo comments on Elon's very interesting account of the acculturation and assimilation of German Jewry. He rather disapproves of it, as I do of his comments.
So I will, for once, say something about a post of his – reluctantly I must say.
Martillo:
“I have been reading "The Pity of It All" by Amos Elon. It is fun to read, but it is bad as a history of German Jews. It starts with Moses Mendelsohn's (sic) entry into Berlin (1743). Why? 1648 would have made more sense. Then Elon could have explained the economic mess of the German countryside during the 18th century.”
It seems to me quite clear that Elon did not have the ambition to write a comprehensive history of German Jewry and compete with, for instance, the 4 volume history that was written under the aegis of the Leo Baek institute. His theme was the acculturation and assimilation (often through ‘conversion’) of German Jewry and his approach was biographical. This also explains his starting point because the life history of Moses Mendelssohn provided the first prominent case both of acculturation and assimilation. This ‘German Socrates’, as he was known, almost made it into the Prussian Academy of Sciences (he was blackballed by Frederick the Great). As far as assimilation was concerned: Elon relates how by the middle of the nineteenth century only four of the fifty six descendants of Mendelssohn were still Jewish by religion. When the last of those four died relatives who came to the burial made their first acquaintance with Jewish ritual.
Martillo:
“One would never have know that the Kulturkampf took place from reading the book. It had immense effects on German Protestant-Catholic-Jewish relations.”
Elon’s approach was, as said, biographical and his subjects were Jews. The “Kulturkampf”, apart from being a contest between two super size egoes, Bismarck and Pope Pius IX, had mainly to do with the separation between church and state. For Elon’s subjects it was merely a tangential issue.
Martillo:
“Elon never discusses how the Prussian government effectively created a Jewish economic elite by its policy of only allowing the most entrepreneurial of Polish Jews to immigrate into Prussia or Prussian-ruled territories”
Elon does discuss the privileges granted to ”Schutz-Juden” (Jews under special protection) who could provide financial assistance to Prussian rulers. He also relates the story of the Jews expelled from Vienna and Lower Austria by the Austrian Emperor Leopold I. They sought access to Prussia and Frederick I granted this privilege only to fifty of the richest among them.
Perhaps you have special information on the selective immigration of Polish Jews into Prussia. The Jewish Encyclopedia online knows apparently nothing about it, relates instead how. when Prussia shared in the partition of Poland in 1772, Frederick the Great was restrained with difficulty from expelling the Jews there.
Martillo:
“and practically all important claims about Czarist anti-Semitism are tendentious or flat-out wrong. “
That is to say not in accordance with your prejudices.
Martillo:
“Elon leaves out all discussion of the development of Modern Orthodoxy and its relationship with Zionism.”
That was not his theme – see above.
Martillo:
“ Shimshon Rafael Hirsch and Isaac Breuer definitely deserved some mention. Breuer is very much a Tariq Ramadan-like figure in terms of reconciling Western philosophy and religion. He became an important political figure in Israel, but unlike Tariq Ramadan was a member of governments that pursued ethnic cleansing and the murder of unarmed women and children.”
Hirsch was a prominent rabbi who gave a presentation of orhodox Judaism in German. He was definitely not an example of an assimilating Jew. Breuer is even too obscure for the Jewish Encyclopedia. Elon had bigger fish to fry.
I don't think Elon will be sorry that he didn't write the book Martillo wanted him to write. Neither am I.
Thank you very much for your thoughtful commentary Dr. Brand. Quite enlightening. I've read the comments of Mr. Martillo, but do not know enough about the subject to know if they are accurate in any way. Your analysis helps me to gauge the quality of his commentary.
Mr. Martillo – can you please explain the differences in practice between the Israelis and the other Middle Eastern states, tribes, and clans in regards to conflict resolution. While I understand that the European Jews had questionable ties to the land, since arriving there, how different are they than the clans in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq in protecting their own people from competing groups? When I read about the history of Lebanon, Hama in Syria, Black September in Jordan, Turkey and Amernia and Cyrpus, Iraq in Kuwait, and what's going on now in Iraq now between Kurds, Shiites, Sunnies, Yazihdis, and Turkmen, I see the Israelis as one of many brutal actors, but not unique. Even the Palestinians are capable of such monstrous behavior as we saw in Gaza earlier this summer. You keep writing of genocide, but I'm curious as to how that definition fits the entire region in regards to its handling of inter-tribe/clan conflict.
Fiona, this thread seems to have become inactive. Why don't you send me an email at ThorsProvoni@aol.com or search genocide on my website http://eaazi.blogspot.com .
Joachim Martillo
At least Jews HAVE minds to waste. The same can't be said for the followers of the Religion of Unpeace.
Liquid codeine.
Codeine.
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