This morning Michael Oren was on NPR’s "Morning Edition," speaking of Israel’s achievement, and Renee Montagne asked him what he hoped for in the next 60 years. Oren said, he wants an Israel at peace with its neighbors and at peace with itself. By peace with itself, he said he meant that it contained considerable diversity and that he hopes that it can reconcile that diversity with its own identity as a Jewish and democratic and Middle Eastern state. (That’s pretty close; I’m paraphrasing because I don’t want to have to listen to him a second time.) Montagne asked whether that meant a Jewish state. Oren said, Well I would "prefer" a Jewish state, as would most Jewish Israelis.
Two things leap out at me from the interview. First, Oren, who works at the Shalem Center in Israel, said he preferred a Jewish state, i.e., he was not absolute on this score. This seems to me a significant reflection of where things are going today. Even this Zionist, who moved from the U.S. to Israel, who has fought for Israel, as has his son, who has helped confuse the borders between Israel and the U.S. with all his work, and who has distorted U.S. history with a superficial book claiming that the U.S. has been religious and pro-Israel from the start, thereby claiming that these two countries are joined at the hip–even Oren is reduced to saying, I prefer. This is the Obama Effect. The world is moving past tribal distinctions, the western world is.
The other thing that leaped out was, Not a word about Palestinian self-determination in all his hoping. Not a word about a Palestinian state, not a word about the dignity of the Arabs under occupation, not a word about the futures of the people living in Gaza. No, Israel has not had peace for "a nano-second" since its founding, Oren said; and so presumably anything that befalls these people is their own fault. His indifference to Palestinian statehood was so stark in these comments it suggested that he still hopes for a Greater Israel.
The other day a pro-Israel paper (Canada’s National Post) likened Israel/Palestine to India/Pakistan in historical terms–partition and bloodletting–and then stated that, Ha!, there was far more bloodshed and ethnic cleansing in India/Pakistan than during the Nakba. Maybe this is true; I should study that question. But as I have said before here, for 60 years Pakistanis have had a state, and for 60 years since the U.N. called for statehood, the Palestinians have had none. They’ve been disqualified for countless reasons, even as Israel gobbles land. What do I hope for? I hope that a stateless people who have no meaningful political representation be represented democratically, in a state that respects minority rights. Without that, there will be no peace.
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i "prefer" that these damnable israelis, from the "evolved and decent" to the knuckle draggers, get raptured, along with their monkey "christians", back to hell.
In http://members.aol.com/ThorsProvoni/JudoniaComplete/JudoniaCompleteA.htm#_Toc198421678 , I mention the close association of Nasser with crypto-Jewish members of the Egyptian elite.
In Six Days of War, Oren claims that the Israeli government did not understand Nasser's intentions, but Israel might have had a conduit right into Nasser's closest confidants and used this information source to manoeuvre Egypt into a confrontation in which Israel would be able to conquer territories for which it had lusted for over a decade.
Abdullah (Mark) Schleifer follows such a line of thought in his book entitled The Fall of Jerusalem. See http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2008/01/anti-war-1960s-versus-2000s.html .
If anyone is interested, I have put up complete versions of Judonia Rising on my web site. They can be found via the blog entry at http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2008/05/israel-lobby-and-american-society.html .
A lot of my analysis was inspired by discussions on this blog.
There was far more bloodshed in the India-Pakistan partition, but that's mostly because there was a far larger population involved.
The history of Partition between India and Pakistan is an interesting one, and it's easy (though completely false) to make a comparison with the Nakba because they happened at the same time. To make a long story short, Partition unleashed an enormous wave of communal bloodshed across the entire subcontinent, but primarily in Punjab. A rough estimate is that 10 million people were displaced and 1 million were killed outright.
If one still wants to make the comparison, Pakistan is actually a closer kin to Israel, because Pakistan was created as a "national home" for Muslims, whereas India is a state of all its citizens. Even though Muslims are discriminated against in India, they are not excluded by definition from being "Indians" because of their religion.
I think the only just comparison that can be made is that the British were ultimately responsible for both tragedies due to their long history of colonial divide-and-rule policies.
"This is the Obama Effect. The world is moving past tribal distinctions, the western world is."
Phil's mantra has a grain of truth. It is, exclusively, the western world that is moving this way. But we ignore the fact that the East is not at our peril.
I agree with Mansoor. It is only the West that has been, and is, moving beyond tribalism. Where else? Japan? China? Columbia?
"In Six Days of War, Oren claims that the Israeli government did not understand Nasser's intentions,".
Rubbish. Moshe Dayan in his autobiography claimed the Israeli government knew very well Nasser was not going to attack. But Oren's regurgitation of Israeli propaganda in his book is so revered amongst the zionist lobby in America, as it propagates the myth of Israeli defending itself from Arab hostility(as it steals more land) Oren was also front and centre in the propaganda drive during the assault on Lebanon two years ago.
No doubt on Witty's and Gideon's top 10 list…
What Phil studiously ignores is that as America becomes more racially diverse:
1.trust and social capital decline per the Putnam report (Putnam "Bowling Alone" Harvard liberal).
2. boom in home and private schooling k1-12. There are 200K Jewish kids in Jewish schools. When you include the Jewish kids in other private schools e.g. Phillips Andover tyhen you can see how isolated the kids of th elite are from the unfolding debacle of 3rd world immigration. (If this immigration is so good then why dontthe elites send theor kids to the schools full of the 3rd world immigrants? Answer: they lknow that it's not good for their kids. perhaps the elite is alittle less racially based. But its sense of exclusion results in ZERO noblesse oblige for the struggling white middle class who are taking the brunt of hurt from the disastrous finance-based policies, immigration and "endless wars for peace" that the neoCons love.
If Obama is elected President of the USA, it will send a huge signal to the rest of the world. Yes, merely because he is half-black, and his father was born Muslim.
It's like having a string of Jews appointed to the US Supreme Court, or a black.
It doesn't even matter what they really will do on the issues.
Well, actually it does, but the role, the iconic model offered, nobody is condemned by accident of birth, is the value to everyone around the globe.
This is the strongest force in history over the long haul.
It means the USA will remain the global spiritual force, despite its warts, its best attempts at being like the rest over history
Rubber-stamping the Israel regime is a losing proposition no amount of pure force can make up.
I'd like to see W & M tackle Saudi Arabia next.
That's another losing proposition.
I'm willing to pay more at the pump, just to ween us from another tribal regime that doesn't even have the Shoah to cover its ass.
"But its (the American elite's) sense of exclusion results in ZERO noblesse oblige for the struggling white middle class who are taking the brunt of hurt from the disastrous finance-based policies, immigration and "endless wars for peace" that the neoCons love."–john
I think this is a true observation. As the years roll on, the gentile white middle class (currently everybody working and white under or at the social security tax cap), its numbers steadily dwindling from illegal and legal immigration de facto policies and intermarriage, will at some point rise up in sudden resistance.
Nobody likes paying for the sins of the fathers forever.
What David wrote earlier is a position I sort of agree with – both Pakistan and Israel were founded to give a particular religious group a nation of its own. There are a couple of differences – Israel has done a far better job in developing civic institutions than Pakistan has, its economy is in better shape. But, whereas Israel was largely designed as a haven for European Jews who no longer felt safe in Europe, Muslims from other lands did not settle into Pakistan. You saw migration in Punjab and Bengal provinces, but Muslims in other parts of India largely stayed put.
Also, whereas Israel a has a sizeable albeit disenfranchised Arab Muslim minority, there are few Hindus left in Pakistan, especially once Bangladesh gained its independence.
Careful with talk like this the Israeli Ambassador might call you a bigot.
Liberal White Boy Challenges Apartheid Israeli U.N. Ambassador To Dual
http://homo-sapien-underground.blogspot.com/2008/05/liberal-white-boy-challenges-apartheid.html
Zionism is just selfish? That doesn't wash! But even if it were the case, it wouldn't make the outcome any more acceptable than if race were the motive.
What if the Palestinians don't want the one or two-state solutions on offer? What if they don't buy the "minority rights" talk, and don't plan on being anyone's minority?
And while we're at it, does it ring true for someone who constantly talks of his pride in his people to preach "diversity" to the rest of us? Something isn't right about this.
Palestinian terror is defeating the Zionist venture. But the failure of Zionism is far more dramatic. Not only has Israel not stopped anti-Semitism, if anything, the devastating inhuman crimes that are daily committed by
Israel 'in the name of the Jewish people' make anti-Semitism into a legitimate philosophy. No doubt the next Jewish disaster is going to be a reaction to Zionism.
(It is important to note again that Zionism is consciously enthusiastic about anti-Semitism. Here we face a vicious circle initiated by the Zionists: Israel deliberately commits inhuman crimes in order to initiate anti-Semitic acts that will supposedly lead Jews towards the realization that Zionism is the one and only solution for the 'Jewish problem'.)
Gilad Atzmon
Why do liberal diaspora Jews insist on clinging to that faith when nearly everything about it contradicts their professed political beliefs? Just as is Israel, Judaism is racialist, argumentative, intolerant of dissent, bigoted, authoritarian, patriarchal and anti-democratic. Liberal diaspora Jews profess to embrace the opposite of those closed-minded characteristics, yet they stubbornly refuse to leave the faith.
This has two implications: 1) liberal diaspora Jews don’t really believe what they preach to the rest of the world (as Todd above put it: ‘does it ring true for someone who constantly talks of his pride in his people to preach "diversity" to the rest of us?’
2) liberal Jews buy into the elitist Judaic mindset that there should be one set of societal operating principles for goys, and another for the “chosen.”
In many ways, liberal Jews are worse than conservative ones, because their hypocrisy is deeper and they are far more dishonest: liberal in public, conservative in private.
Of course, there is a long liberal tradition in diaspora Judaism because Jews have historically been a minority nearly everywhere, and liberalism is obviously much more amenable to minorities than is conservatism. (Israel, where they are a majority, illustrates Judaism's true essence). So liberalism has really been embraced by diaspora Jews as a survival tactic as opposed to any fundamental dedication to liberal principles. No wonder many ostensibly liberal Jews are so easily co-opted by the worst elements of conservatism when they attain power and feel comfortable showing their true faces (ie Joe Lieberman).
In defense of Phil, he is much more consistent in his beliefs, and is married to a gentile, so he has indeed embraced diversity, literally. Now if “liberal” Jews were intellectually honest, there would be a lot more of them in the Philip Weiss vein. So far, I count only one.
Since Obama is leading the world past "tribalism", I am looking for the Palestinians, who we all know are saintly people, unlike the nefarious Jews (right, Gilad Atzmon?), so I am sure that they will be the first to embrace the "progressive" ideas Obama is trumpeting. As a result, I expect them the give up their demand for an independent Palestinian state, since such a thing is "tribalistic" (just like Zionism, right Gilad Atzmon?). Thus, the Palestinians will lead mankind to its utopian, universalistic, anti-parochial, anti-nationalist future. No Palestinian state=Paradise. I can sign on to that!
Of course, in a properly globalized world, Jewish ethnic cleansers, genocidists, and their supporters will be sent to the ICC for trial, conviction and imprisonment while Jews, who materially aid Zionist terrorism, will be interrogated, tried, convicted and imprisoned under US law.
Anyway, since we celebrated 60 years of Zionist genocide yesterday, it is worth asking what exactly Palestinians are supposed to have rejected in 1947-8.
In Baksheesh Diplomacy Medoff documents that the Mufti offered "Our Crowd" (i.e., wealthy New York Jews) a compromise in which there would be a single democratic state with Jewish immigration up to 45% Jewish).
There were 1.2 million native Palestinians in Palestine.
There 600,000 Jewish immigrants in Palestine.
There were approximately 600,000 Jewish DPs in camps in Europe.
If all of they came, it would have meant 50% Jewish 50% non-Jewish in Palestine, but actually only 300,000-400,000 emigrated to Palestine, which was more or less what the Mufti would have accepted in a single unpartitioned state.
The Zionist leadership, the Cousinhood, and Our Crowd were in desperate fear that the US and the UN might force Israel to repatriate the refugees. Hence the sudden push to force Iraqi Jews to emigrate to Palestine to guarantee a Jewish majority if that should come to pass.
WHO REALLY STARTED THE 1967 ARAB-ISRAELI WAR?
PARIS – One of the primary causes of the epochal 1967 Arab-Israeli War has been largely forgotten or ignored.
In the months before the June, 1967 conflict, Israel and Syria fought increasingly violent clashes along their border as Israeli paramilitary settlers pushed into the demilitarized zone separating the two states.
Hawkish Israeli generals, led by Moshe Dayan, sought to provoke a limited war with Syria in hopes of grabbing water resources around Lake Tiberias. Palestinian `fedayeen’ were staging raids across Israel’s borders.
As tensions surged, the Soviet Union, then Egypt’s close ally, urgently warned Cairo and Damascus that its spy satellites were detecting Israeli armored formations massing to attack Syria. The Arabs had no independent means of verifying Moscow’s warnings, but could not ignore them.
Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, believed an Israeli invasion of his close ally Syria was imminent and came under intense pressure from Damascus and his own generals to counter Israel’s threat. Egypt’s rivals in the Arab World heaped scorn on Nasser for timidity, demanding Cairo take action to defend Syria.
So Nasser ordered four Egyptian divisions into Sinai. They were deployed in defensive formations in the middle of the peninsula, well away from Israel’s border.
In reality, Israel was not massing troops to attack Syria. Moscow’s warnings to Cairo and Damascus of an impending Israeli attack were false. In late 1990, the US used similarly doctored satellite photos to fool the Saudis into believing Iraq had massed troops on its border and was about to invade.
Moscow’s disinformation lit the fuse that ignited the second major Arab-Israeli war. Syria, knowing its military forces were useless, was gripped by panic and pleaded with Nasser to deter the imagined Israeli attack by making some powerful demonstration.
Israelis were gripped by panic, believing deployment of Egyptian divisions into Sinai heralded a war that would destroy their young state.
Israel’s hawkish military establishment seized upon popular panic to pressure the government of Golda Meir to activate a long-planned campaign to seize the West Bank and Golan Heights.
Meanwhile, Palestinian spokesman Ahmad Shukairy and other windbags thundered, `we will drive the Jews into the sea.’ Such empty threats won worldwide sympathy for Israel and provided it with a perfect pretext to launch what it called a `self-defensive war of survival.’
As pressure on Nasser intensified, he made a fateful error. Nasser had no intention of going to war. But he desperately sought to dissuade Israel from the attack Moscow warned was coming. Nasser ordered UN troops in Sinai to withdraw, and closed the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Withdrawing UN troops was mistakenly seen by the outside world as the beginning of an Egyptian offensive into Israel. So did closing Israel’s access to the Red Sea.
Israel’s hawks finally convinced PM Golda Meir a major Arab offensive was imminent. She authorized surprise attacks on the Arab states. Nasser had fallen right into a trap. But who had set it?
Two hundred Israeli warplanes quickly destroyed the air forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Satellite information covertly supplied by the United States allowed Israel to evade Egypt’s air defense system. Attractive Israeli female spies had seduced Egyptian pilots into revealing the times when their defenses would be most vulnerable.
When the Israeli air attack were launched, Egypt’s supreme military commander, Field Marshall Abdul Hakim Amer, who had assured his old friend Nasser that Egyptian forces would crush any Israeli attack, was flying towards Sinai, reportedly smoking hashish.
Arab land forces, caught in open terrain without air cover, were slaughtered. In six short days, the Arab forces were totally crushed in one of modern military history’s most humiliating routs.
A US intelligence vessel, the USS `Liberty,’ off the Sinai coast monitoring the war and Israel’s preparations to attack Syria, was repeatedly attacked by waves of Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats and reduced to a burning wreck. Israeli warships even machine-gunned the Liberty’s’ survivors in the water. President Lyndon Johnson ordered the Israeli attack covered up.
Moscow’s false warnings to Cairo and Damascus that triggered the June, 1967 war remain one of the Cold War’s great abiding mysteries.
Did Moscow believe its Arab allies could actually defeat Israel? Or did the Soviets think a major defeat might drive the Arabs ever deeper into their embrace? Did pro-Israel KGB officers send the false data. Whatever the case, it was the worst Soviet strategic miscalculation until the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, and a disaster for all concerne
That article from "Samuel Burke" was an interesting piece of fantasy.
I still remember the radio broadcasts from the time period. The Israeli Prime Minister was Levi Eshkol and not Goldah Meir.
Nasser requested a redeployment of forces so that he could move troups on the way to Yemen. The UN decided to remove its troups. Nasser requested no removal.
And I suspect that Israel had a direct conduit into Nasser's thinking via Nasser's cryto-Jewish associates, but the idea of pro-Israel moles in the Soviet intellegiance apparatus is interesting and corresponds to some of my thinking about the Jewish identity of the most Soviet ethnic Ashkenazi government officials in the USSR. See http://members.aol.com/ThorsProvoni/JudoniaComplete/JudoniaCompleteA.htm#_Toc198506583 .
The main reasons for the attack were the following:
1) the threat of US mediation and
2) the realization that Israel could knock out Egypt's most important forces and win quickly.
In short the State of Israel wages criminal aggressive war in 1967.
Israel simply channeled Goering.
Hitler actually won the spiritual war, and with it, the course of human history. He's a much bigger figure than Moses post 1945, and continues to grow. Maybe somebody should write a new bible–wait, I'm not sure that's needed. I guess you could use the same narrative, just change the players about?
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