Seth Freedman, a former IDF soldier filing reports from Jerusalem for the Guardian in England, writes in "Front Line Thugs" that nutty settlers in Hebron have poured boiling water on visitors seeking to see what's going on. And he says these lawbreakers have been enabled by the Israeli government:
with rubber bullets, tear gas, and – often – live and indiscriminate
fire. But when it comes to clamping down on violence emanating from the
settler community, a different set of rules apply, and the authorities'
reeking hypocrisy is exposed as endemic to the way in which they view
the different strands of Israeli society.
I've witnessed the double standards for myself countless times, from the kid-glove treatment my platoon used when evicting the settlers of Homesh to the heavy-handed brutality meted out by the border police in the Palestinian villages of Bil'in and Nilin.
What is explained away as "necessary in the interests of security" in
one situation is turned on its head in another; softly-softly replacing
an all-out show of force, simply because the assailants in question are
religious Jews rather than Muslims. The longer the duplicity is
allowed to thrive in the military and political spheres in Israel, the
worse the violence will get on the part of the settlers' lunatic
fringe.
Perfect. Freedman's horror at the stuff before his eyes is further evidence of a trend I spotted more than a year ago: that non-Zionism is the new Zionism. It draws on the same prophetic redemptive strain in Jewish life as Zionism once drew upon in the shtetls of eastern Europe. Only the redemption now is from the occupation and all that goes along with it. I've seen this beautiful passion in Esti Tsal and Elik Elhanan, among others. When I made this point this last year, Richard Witty commented, "It is definitely possible to be simultaneously civilist and Jewish,
civilist and Zionist. Its like saying, 'I'm male and I'm human'". My response to that is Show me. Zionists are getting their rendezvous with history right now, they can save the two-state solution by showing respect for Palestinians, or they can fail in the negotiations. And then, non-Zionism will become a true fever among younger Jews.
"It is definitely possible to be simultaneously civilist and Afrikaaner, civilist and a supporter of Apartheid."
What a lot of horseshit. Seth Freedman's father is a prominent British barrister, who plays on the same amateur cricket team as the Chief Constable of the London Metropolitan Police, and his mother personally got me thrown off a hebrew language course, because she judged me insufficiently kosher to be allowed to talk directly to Jewish Israelis. After all, I might find something other than the delusory liberal hand wringing Phil and the Guardian do so well.
Rowan,
Could you explain what you mean? I'm not really following except that you are casting doubt on Freedman. A bit too inside baseball…but I want to know.
Yup. This is triangulation in action. The 'Jewish Right' and the 'Jewish Left' developed this technique a long time ago (i.e. before the Clinton team applied it domestically to US politics). You may have noticed that definitions of triangulation are often somehow unsatisfying, failing to communicate the true ingenuity and effectiveness of it?
many anti-NWO sites will talk of what they refer to (perhaps unfairly) as a 'hegelian' method. Constructed thesis, constructed antithesis, constructed synthesis, all coordinated behind the scenes to generate the desired vector sum of opinion figures as a policy outcome. The 'Jewish Right' started overcompensating or offsetting in advance the compromises with the 'Jewish Left' that would be entailed by this system, long ago, by exaggerating their own policy positions artificially so as to have planks to bargain away when deal with the 'Jewish Left'. I personally started noticing this in relation to zionism (and very quickly in relation to the USA too) in the early 1970s, I think, after the 1973 war.
I think what makes Jewish triangulation especially effective is that each side can claim to be conducting a transcendent rather than just an immanent critique of the other, or if you like each side can go 'meta-jewish' and appeal to supposed universalities. This makes it look as if they have much less in common "as Jews" than they actually do.
The British produced an effect a little like this during the decolonisation of India : many Indians were completely deceived by the enormous opposition of spirit that existed between the 'British Left' (Cripps, Atlee to some extent) and the 'British Right' (Churchill etc.) It was and still is hard to see that even the leftmost british decolonisers were still, in a subtler way, british imperialists too. At least, in comparison to anything the Indians might have conceived as real decolonisation, they were.
To make this into a worthwhile intellectual discussion I shall add a tentative definition of triangulation as i understand it.
(1) Fix your actual policy goal,
(2) Invent two equal and opposite distortions of or deflections from it,
(3) Wrap one in pink and the other in blue,
(4) Distribute them to your pink and blue propaganda teams.
um…
(5) once the population is completely frazzled, introduce the original policy, as formulated at stage (1), in the form of a deus ex machina.
Now, in return for all that, I have a favor to ask : can anyone get hold of a translation of Rami Fortis' 1990s song "Na'alaim"? It appears to go something like this:
"There is no god
But there are shoes
In the refrigerator
My king's over here
And my queen's over there
Shoes, brains, power, refrigerator" etc.
Other partial analogies:
1) Good Cop-Bad Cop routine (planned with goal in mind).
2) The marketing package of placing the product you really want to sell on the middle shelf ($99.99), the "higher end" product ($149.99) on the top shelf, the "lower end" product ($51.00) on the bottom shelf. (respectively few extras, nearly as many, least–the one most profitable is of course the middle one since Marketing does not expect to sell many from the top shelf in the first place and the bottom shelf is missing some valuable big trinkets on its product.
I think the whole triangulation theory works if it's a cohesive small group of party leaders, but is only a lame conspiracy theory when projected onto a population.
The "right" is of course going to move more right so their actual compromise is less, and the left will do their version of this as well but on much less of a scale due to philosophical differences. No collusion is required, it's logical and is what warring siblings do to manipulate their parents.
You're right, no colllusion is required–cops and marketing folks do not need collusion either. And yes, no logic is required; it's just part of the common–like cowboys and cattle. As to siblings, some do, some don't & more or less–depends on the character of the kids…
How about an only child during a divorce? If young, depends on
if custody is sole or equally shared?
It wouldn't work if it wasn't for the rather unusual degree of tacit comprehension that remains between Jews, irrespective of their surface disagreements. Again, consider the comparison I made to Britain's decolonisation of India. The Indians might have found it hard to imagine, given the venom of their speeches attacking one another on this question, but nevertheless, Cripps and Churchill (for instance) would have have had no hesitation whatever in uniting "as fellow Englishmen" against anything or anyone that actually threatened their shared sense of national moral superiority. It's exactly the same with Jews, but more so, because during the majority of Jewish history it has been somewhat dangerous to express feelings of general Jewish solidarity without checking the intricate politics of one's various host nations : hence my use of the expression "tacit mutual comprehension".
In case anybody wonders, I personally, sick of all these lies and self-delusions, have become a Muslim, so I shall probably find it easier to learn Arabic before I am able to return to learning Hebrew (which I shall certainly do eventually, if only to understand the lyrics of Rami Fortis' many marvellous songs.)