Once ‘Daniel in the Lion’s Den’, Finkelstein Comes Into the Mainstream on Israel/Palestine!

I'm glad that he adopted the two-state solution.

I agree that when Israel was offered confident peace (sort of) in exchange for Palestine at the green line (or consented modifications), Israel should have and should jump on it, do it.

There is no good reason for occupation.

The Jordan River now sites early warning radar to alert Israeli cities of missiles from formerly Iraq, and now prospectively Iran, which they could contract to retain, if they formed a confident peace.

A nuclear strike (even just material, not necessarily an explosive) would harm Palestinians nearly equally, especially if levied at Jerusalem, and have an interest in early warning as well.

“absolutely consistent with Joel Kovel saying the other night that all the Zionist hecklers of yesteryear have crawled off under a flat rock.”

This reminds me of a scene Scorsese’s brilliant “Last Temptation,” when the angelic siren who has been steadily working on Jesus to abandon his destiny and live a “normal” life (poof!) disappears into the ether once Jesus embraces his fate.

Diaspora Jewish Zionists are, at heart, cowards, which is why they dwell in the diaspora instead of putting their money where their mouths are and moving to Israel. Once seriously challenged, they, too, will disappear.

This is why I support the existence of Israel: it separates the Jewish Zionist men from the boys, and clarifies for those that don’t already know it that someone who is a Jewish Zionist but not living in Israel should be ignored as a craven, gutless, coward. Had that simple truth not been suppressed by the Marxist/Capitalist construct of political correctness, the mostly Jewish Zionist Neocons never would have gotten traction, 4,000 US soldiers and about a million Iraqis would still be alive, and America would still be semi-respectable.

America’s problems run far deeper than gutless diaspora Jewish Zionists. The entire edifice is rotten from top to bottom.

The political stand of requesting and receiving compensation to perfect title to properties with ambiguous title is an application of the rule of law, a good proposal.

It will be fought, but if the argument is confidently framed as security, peace, rule of law in both states with minorities experiencing equal due process, it will be convincing.

It will call the US and Israeli right's bluff.

But only if sincere. Opportunism and shifting positions won't cut it.

Phil, I disagree with you about Finkelstein's description of Miller as an "imbecile." I probably wouldn't call him an imbecile myself, but you yourself admit in that same paragraph that Miller is "an Establishment type" and that his book "lacks big ideas." To a courageous academic intellectual activist like Finkelstein, your statement probably translates as "he's an idiot and his book is worthless," hence his description of Miller. He's simply imposing a much higher standard than you are.

This is a type of difference of views that I've had to deal with in my own life. I've sometimes tried to be respectful and considerate of people who I thought were intelligent and well-meaning even though I also thought they were wrong and weren't looking at things in a sufficiently profound way. Other friends of mine dismissed these people as idiots, and over time I came to realize that, yeah, they kind of are. They're book-smart in some ways, but they're ineffectual and their track record shows they'll never get to the real meat of an issue or deal with it effectively, so in a very real sense, their intelligence, such as it is, is wasted. I suspect Finkelstein would agree that that's true of Miller.

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"The other fascinating thing about this interview is Finkelstein's new line supporting the two-state solution and financial compensation to extinguish the right of return of Palestinian refugees. Finkelstein says that the two-state solution has a lot of political support right now, all over the world, and who can fight those politics. (Well Finkelstein fought them for many years)."

That's part of what Finkelstein said, in the context of what's politically possible. However, as the interviewers noted, Finkelstein wrote in "Image and Reality" that the inevitable future is a unitary state. And his views have not changed:

"NF: Well, basically the Palestinian state will be such a piddling state, and the Jordanian state is barely viable, and I think the point that Meron Benvenisti makes; he's all along claimed this two-state idea is a chimera. Because, he says, Palestinians and Israelis share everything, that Palestine is an integral whole. They share the water, they're on the same electricity grids, the geography is, to break it up, would be artificial, and I recognize that. So at some point this artificially fragmented whole – assuming people can get along – will peacefully integrate.

"The demographics are such that it's hard to imagine these ethnically-pure states – especially there – being viable. So for material reasons as well as demographic reasons, it seems to me that Benvenisti is right, that the two-state quote/unquote settlement is very makeshift, is jerrybuilt, and is fundamentally artificial."

"Makeshift" — "jerrybuilt" — "artificial." Hardly a ringing endorsement of the two-state solution. At best, he's calling it a necessary but doomed stepping stone on the way to an eventual unitary state.

Looking at this from a left-zionist point of view, I have to say that you are doing finkelstein a disservice by associating him in any way with Joel Kovel, who really IS an unimaginative marxist. On that score, incidentally, you should read gramsci, who gave full weight to the power of belief without becoming any sort of irrationalist – this is a problem not unique to marxist, anyway, it is a general problem having to do with the rational examination of the irrationality – or seeming irrationality, if you don't understand political psychology.

Gramsci's "The Modern Prince" has been pulled from marxists.org because of the publisher's copyright on the translation, but you can still find it at:
http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/gramsci/editions/spn/modern_prince/index.htm

My criticism is his saying this, without making any mental effort to define what he means by "Jewish" :

"the Russian Jews, which was a million (although one third weren't even Jewish)"

every time anybody does this, they hand the decisive power back to the rabbinate.

Philip,

Two articles from MacLeans in Canada:

"The Macleans.ca Interview: John Mearsheimer"
http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=20080425_114727_2004

And

"Why Israel can't survive"
http://www.macleans.ca/world/global/article.jsp?content=20080423_11237_11237

.

From the article "Why Israel Can't Survive," linked above by MRW:

————

[Nadia Matar's] presentation ends with a photograph of her extended family, all of whom were murdered at Auschwitz. This, she says, is why Israel cannot give up land in Judea and Samaria. "The new Nazism today is Islam. And they want to do it to me first, and you next. We have to do to them what the Americans did to the Nazis. Kill all their leaders. Kill all the collaborators. Then, we'll find those willing to make peace."

Matar is opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state and believes Israel must annex the West Bank and Gaza. When she is asked how Israel could continue to exist as a Jewish state if Muslim Arabs were the majority, she looks genuinely surprised by the question. "I'm not going to give them voting rights," she says. "I will give them the basics of basics and do everything to make them want to leave."

————

Kill, kill, kill. The irony-proof Mrs. Matar probably doesn't realize that her surname means "to kill" in Spanish. Freakin' ziotard …

Witty says "Temporarily they will accept, but with very specific and difficult conditions, presented by a sworn enemy, unconditionally."

and is this the sentence with the missing object to the transitive verb Jim alluded to. Is that the only problem here?

Returning to more consensual matters, I have to say that the following statement is a crock of shit:

'The number of settlers in the West Bank has grown over the last 15 years, despite various peace initiatives proposing a freeze. In addition to government-approved settlement blocks, there are dozens of illegal "outposts" that are typically established on hilltops deep in the West Bank by particularly devoted settlers with trailers, portable electrical generators, and water tanks. Where possible, they tap into the water and electricity supply of a nearby settlement; soldiers are sent to protect them; and the outpost becomes a fact on the ground. Only a handful have ever been dismantled. "I know we still have much to do, but this government has moved more to curb growth of settlements than any other Israeli government," Mark Regev, the prime minister's spokesman, told Maclean's. "We are not happy with our performance on it," he added, referring to these outposts. "We're not proud of our performance, and we have to do more."'

The author has no excuse for not being familiar with the recent historical reseach, in English, showing in detail that all of the supposed 'wildcat' or 'unauthorised' settlement activity is nothing of the sort. In other words, this is pure, lying propaganda.

Gramsci's the man, I already said that. Just to tie up the loose ends, let me remind you that Ian Lustick, who I hope most of you know, consistently uses a Gramscian framework of analysis, and it seems to be good enough for the CFR, of which he is a member.

yes, richard, I agree, 'tribalistic' is just a meaningless insult. Also, although this is difficult to prove, I think that the internal dynamics of zionism are such that it thrives on, and indeed welcomes, hatred. I do not however jump to the limp conclusion that one has to love them instead, in some sanctimonious christian way. I can think of much more interesting things to do.

Check this little video, its freakin' awesome:
http://niqnaq.wordpress.com/2008/04/26/weirdest-clip-so-far/

Rowan Berkeley
Thanks for the video reference. You're right. I'd call it "INSIDE THE BROWN BAG"

On the enlightened treatment of Jews in Islamic states.

Its a relative falsehood.

Anyone read the novel, "The Septembers of Shiraz"?

Or, can anyone explain how states would willingly expel 800,000 Jews in the early 50's, take their property, harass them, on the basis that there was a Jewish state, and still call themselves "protecting" the Jewish minorities.

Naeim Giladi, an Iraqi Jew and a former Zionist is the author of "Ben Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated Jews".

In his book, Ben Gurion's Scandals, Mr. Giladi discusses the crimes committed by Zionists in their frenzy to import raw Jewish labor. Newly-vacated farmlands had to be plowed to provide food for the immigrants and the military ranks had to be filled with conscripts to defend the illegitimately repossesed lands.

Mr. Giladi couldn't get his book published in Israel, and even in the U.S. he discovered that he could do so only by personally funding the project.

The Giladis, now U.S. citizens, live in New York City. By choice, they no longer hold Israeli citizenship. "I am Iraqi," he told The Link, "born in Iraq, my culture still Iraqi Arabic, my religion Jewish, my citizenship American."

The Link, honored in 1998 by the International Writers and Artists Association, is published by Americans for Middle East Understanding (AMEU).

In the [?] edition of The Link, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe looked at the hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians whose lives were uprooted to make room for foreigners who would come to populate land confiscated by the Zionists. Most were Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. But over half a million other Jews came from Islamic lands. Zionist propagandists claim that Israel "rescued" these Jews from their anti-Jewish, Muslim neighbors. One of those "rescued" Jews, Naeim Giladi, knows otherwise.

Naeim Giladi: "I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first Prime Minister of Israel called 'cruel Zionism'. I write about it because I was part of it."

What are Obama/ Finklestein approaching, the past as future? Joachim Prinz, a Berlin Rabbi, applauded Hitler's rise since it signaled a rejection of modernity and Jewish assimilation. "We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A State built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honoured and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind…." [Italics in original] Incidentally, Rabbi Prinz escaped the slaughter of the European Jews and would eventually lead the American Jewish Congress. He immediately preceded the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. at the podium before the historic "I have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC in 1963, where Prinz's remarks were not exactly congruent with his earlier words.

Historically, Western societies have typically attempted to convert and assimilate Jews before excluding them indicates that Western societies, unlike prototypical Jewish cultures, do not have a primitive concern with racial purity. Rather, concern about racial purity emerges only in the late stages of Jewish-gentile group conflict and only in the context of a concern about the asymmetrical gene flow from the Jewish to the gentile gene pool.

Humans are "flexible strategizers" in pursuit of evolutionary goals. These strategies don't always succeed in their aims. Rather, unsuccessful strategies are likely to be replaced in a trial-and-error process, and there will be a continual search for new strategies to encounter new, perhaps unforeseen, difficulties.

A group strategy that reliably results in hostility is like a widely dispersed fleet of ships attempting to navigate hostile waters: different ships in the fleet encounter different local problems and must develop their own solutions. Moreover, different members of one ship may fractionate and pursue their own solutions by in effect constructing their own ships (e.g., Reform, Conservative, Neo-Orthodox, secular, and Zionist solutions to the assimilatory pressures resulting from the Enlightenment).

Different sub-groups of Jews may develop different and incompatible strategies for confronting anti-Semitism or attempting to change the wider society to conform to Jewish group interests.

Since the process is contingent only on the group being a group, we can compare this with the various strategies devised by American blacks since the end of slavery, right up to Pastor Wright. In fact, it would be easy to show that specific black leaders (e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcom X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.) adopted different strategies at different points in time.

Iceland and New Zealand pull their own weight, and are relatively straight nations.

No Richard, calling "tribalistic" perjorative is just your way of dodging the question. Check out the dictionary definition:
"1. the customs and beliefs of tribal life and society.
2. strong loyalty to one's own tribe, party, or group."
My point was that the tacit assumption that Israel should exist may have roots in a kind of Jungian collective consciousness…among Jews.
If that's too irrational a reson for you fine. But your refusal to give any reason
seems to make my point. (As if someone has to have a key to the gate, before this question can be discussed).

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Miller served in a capacity where he was supposed to represent America not Israel. Not only was his overriding concern as an American diplomat to push forward what was "good for the Jews"- he cultivates his smugness at the expense of the Palestinian's misery and the safety of the American people he was obliged to care about. If that's not an "imbecile" – then no one is. Finkelstein is blunt. That's a far cry from "vicious".