I would also like to invite you to confront Ralph on the notion of "Iran's overt hostility." There is no such thing. Iran is obviously just attempting to defend itself from the aggressor Israel and its U.S. ally, having seen what they've done in Iraq and elsewhere, and surely having read Israeli policy documents on what they intend to do in the future for their "security," such as those written by Richard Perle et al for Netanyahu back in '96, which eerily came to fruition once said men rose to power in the U.S. Iran is targeted in these Israeli plans, and they obviously won't take such things lightly, given the evidence of Iraq.

Also, I wonder if Ralph is one who feels that there is an "anti-semite gene," as some Jewish academics have actually had the gall to suggest. The persecution complex certainly comes through in his writing. I understand, of course, that this is a sensitive issue, and I'm always left to wonder where the personal history begins and ends versus the beginnings and manifestation of the Zionist ideology. I think that's one of the toughest things to ascertain in these discussions, and as a "non-Jew" (is that a kosher way to describe myself?) I wonder if I should even be tackling the subject. But since Zionism has such an impact on my life as an American – the tax dollars I pay, the wars fought in my name, etc. – I feel like I must confront these issues.

Now Jewish students make up 20 to 30 percent of the students at the 8 Ivy leagues. I don't know the statistics about professors, but from my experience they probably comprise 30 to 40 percent of the professoriate.

I wonder when people like Ralph will be satisfied with Jewish power and dominance, and will finally abandon their persecution complex? Will it be when Jews comprise 50 percent of the student body at Harvard? What will it take to admit that you are the single most powerful ethnic group in the US?

And when will you admit to yourself that growing resentment of Jewish dominance in this country is driven by economic and class resentment, not ethnic animus, the same economic reasons as resentment toward the WASPS of the past?

WASPS don't exist anymore as a coherent ethnic group, and given the horrible misallocation of wealth during the wars of the 20th century, I sometimes say to myself, "good riddance." I personally can't wait until Jews cease to exist as a coherent ethnic group in this country, because their effect as the power elite has been just as bad, if not worse. I hope I live to see the day, that Jews are as embarrassed for their past exclusiveness, their warmongering, their elitism as the WASPS have become.

Additionally, I would like to say that the US never owed the Jewish refugees from Europe anything, any more than it owed the refugees from India, from Africa, from Asian countries anything. Stop your balling about supposed US callousness to Jewish needs. The US needs to learn, has always needed to learn, to live within its borders, and part of learning that lesson is attending to the needs of US citizens, not the persecuted citizens of other countries.

Its as if the resolution of the conflict (long-term) to a mutual good, is irrelevant, that the short-term irritations are more important to you.

You want to make the difference between Alterman and you, or I and you, whether some settlers should be permitted to perfect title on the land that they currently reside, then STICK TO THAT.

Its a resolvable question.

Expansionist Zionism is at odds with progressive values. Zionism itself is an expression of it.

Do you advocate for the dilution or unjustness of US sovereignty, because we are no longer fundamentally threatened in the world?

I don't hear that. I hear you touting Walt/Mearsheimer's contention that supporting Israel is not in US interests, as if US interests were synonomous with goodness.

It sickened you that progressive Zionists were very angry with Hezbollah or Hamas for shelling Israeli civilian towns, and conducting abductions as hostage taking for vicious murderers.

It sickened us progressive Zionists, that the left ignored the actual events of terror, abduction and shelling, in favor of the "resistance".

That is emotional now. If we came to understand a common set of facts (real ones) maybe we'd agree more. But, you don't consider that the facts that you interpreted weren't (or might not have been).

The conflicts that you identify as the polar ones, aren't any more.

The most important point that I took from the Alterman article was the degree that Israel (like Europe, like the US) is fundamentally cosmopolitan commercial. (Not cosmopolitan social.)

In picking your fights, I think you pick the wrong ones.

And, this one is an attack on liberals, in the attempt to be a "radical". And, then like the neo-orthodox Kahanist movement that regards occupying the land as the primary commandment instead of the 10 (including "thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's possession"), you also selectively criticize.

WHERE is your criticism and remedy of empire US for example? WHERE?

When those that are at war seek to justify their cause, they use the term "justice". "We demand justice for OUR people".

When those that are in conflict seek resolution and peace, they also use the term "justice". "We seek justice for ALL people."

Peace is NOT constructed from justice, but from mutuality.

Phil is right to describe many aspects of the way Palestinians are treated as a one-way street, an oppression. My sense is that Ralph agrees with that.

But, it is certainly NOT exclusively a one-way street. Terror on civilians does occur. Intent to remove Israel from the map of sovereign nations does occur. (By states and militias).

It is irrational to ignore.

The rooting for the underdog is appealing still, but an element of it is adolescent relative to seeking the goal of full maturity as a nation.

Israel is valid in the foreseeable future for its prospect of becoming a just society, an example of universalism expressed through the particular. Its not there yet. It takes work and backbone to get there. It does not get there by potshots or hatred.

There is the journalism of the great effort actually towards accomplishing it, not only the journalism of the injustice.

It is my sense that Phil is NOT invested in improving Israel, maturing Israel.

I don't even get the sense from his choice of articles, that he is invested in the project of maturing the US, just addressing irritating slivers (as we all do by virtue of living only at one place at one time).

I'm so sick of these types of statements – what I call "academic obfuscation" – and Zionists and their sympathizers are experts at it. I mean, what the hell does that mean exactly? Palestinians are being slaughtered and treated like animals (the animals that Zionists think they are) and we're supposed to ignore that as an "adolescent appeal" and look towards the "full maturity of a nation?" You don't have to be Noam Chomksy to see the illness in this statement (Noam practices his own brand of Zionist sympathizing, but that's another can of worms altogether). Despicable, Richard.

if the memory of the lives taken due to the holocaust from the world jewish community is to be honored, then when are jews going to hold the zionist movement responsible for not having allowed the immigration of jews into places other than palestine and then the only ones that seemed to be allowed in were the young and the strong.

how truly pathetic for a people to continnue to bow to such a group and movement.

http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/rabbi_quotes/weissmandl.cfm

Excerpts from Awake my Glory (Chapter: The Leaders of Israel)

757. On Dec. 17, 1942 both houses of the British Parliament declared readiness to afford temporary residence for endangered persons, but on Jan. 27 a spokesman for the Zionists stated that the Jews opposed the motion because Palestine was omitted.

758. The New York papers (Feb. 16, 1943) publicized Rumania’s offer to the 70,000 Jews of Trans-Dniestria at the price of $50 each. On Feb. 24, Stephen Wise the president of the American Jewish Congress and leader of U.S. Zionists publicly denied the authenticity of the offer and declares that no collection of funds “would seem justified”. The Jewish Agency in England also ridiculed the news of the Romanian offer. But Undersecretary of state A. A. Berlo affirmed privately that the Rumanian government had actually made such an offer to the State Department. Some time later, when all the Jews who could have been rescued had been annihilated, the facts of the offer were confirmed by Bartley Crum, an expert on affairs of the Near East, who declared that the 70,000 Jews could easily have been transported through Turkey by a few days travel in trucks, but the State Department had refrained from publicizing the news of the offer due to Jewish (Zionist) pressure.

760. In 1944 the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People called upon the United States to establish a War Refugee Board. Stephen Wise came before an especial committee of Congress to object to this proposal.

761. In 1948 President Roosevelt planned to open gates of America to 150,000 refugees, and Great Britain agreed to follow suit. When Roosevelt’s emissary Morris L. Ernst came to England, the Zionist leaders declared: “This is treason. You are undermining the Zionist movement”. As a result, Roosevelt informed Great Britain that the project must be abandoned: “We cannot put it over because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership won’t stand for it”.

762. In 1947 Congressman William Stratton sponsored a bill to grant immediate entry to the U.S. of 400,000 displaced persons. The bill was publicly denounced by the Zionist leaders, and it was therefore not passed.

763. On Feb. 23, 1956 J. W. Pickergsill, the minister of immigration was asked in the Canadian House of Commons: “Would we open the doors of Canada to Jewish refugees?” He replied: “The government has made no progress in that direction, because the government of Israel… does not wish us to do so”.

764. On July 15, 1971 the Zionist leaders, through Herman Weissman the president of the Zionist Organization of America, successfully opposed an effort in the U.S. Congress to allow 30,000 Russian refugees to enter the United States.

766. Had Jews in America, Canada, England, Australia, South Africa and Switzerland and elsewhere followed the Torah-leaders, the story would have been entirely different. Rabbi Weissmandl of Nitra poured out his heart’s blood in the effort to save Jewish lives, but the “reform” (assimilationist) and Zionist leaders of the deluded Jewish masses in the free countries turned a deaf ear to his impassioned entreaties.

Seliger's historical summary is misleading. The vast majority of German and Austrian Jews were able to leave, and the United States took in a very large number despite the Great Depression, and as I remember up to the beginning of WW2 the Zionists never filled the quota alloted to them for entry into Palestine because Jews preferred living in E. Europe to emigrating to Palestine.

Before the Mufti tried to work with Hitler — relatively unsuccessfully as far as I can tell, the Zionists were quite openly allied with Hitler because they shared compatible goals and a similar ideologies.

The mass murders of Jews started with Operation Barbarossa (invasion of the Soviet Union).

I have often wondered why while I looked at archival data.

I believe that the Germans expected the UK to negotiate a cease fire after the German Nazis conquered the continent. Instead the British media and the British government took an increasing hard-line. Without some sort of settlement, there was no way for Jews to leave E. Europe.

The German Nazis blamed Jews in the media and the Cousinhood for the refusal to negotiate a settlement, and they saw a conspiracy between wealthy Jews, the Zionists and Jewish communists in what looked like an attempt to surround Germany and steal the victory that the Germans had just won.

The hitherto pro-Jewish Nazis that worked with the Zionists had no counterargument, but the Germans still had no plan for Eastern European Jews until they saw the willingness of liberated Soviet nationalities to kill Jews without compunction as collective revenge for the crimes of Soviet Jewish leadership.

So was there a way to rescue the Jews of E. Europe? If there had been a peace settlement between the UK and Germany sometime before the invasion of the Soviet Union, evacuation of Eastern European Jews would have become possible.

Why was there no settlement sometime in late 1940? In October 1940 Stalin was arguably a much more evil dictator than Hitler. Hitler had always wanted an alliance with the UK against Stalin. Why didn't it happen? If it had, Jews might have been able to leave E. Europe practically unscathed.

Obviously, the UK had had a long term policy of preventing the unification of Europe under any power whether it were Napolean or Hitler, but was it really worth the number of British lives it cost especially when Hitler was generally much more responsive to his allies than to his enemies?

Hitler even at times showed an ability to express concern and care for Jews. During the Anschluss, Hitler made sure that his late mother's Jewish doctor was protected in one of the best hotels in Vienna.

So were the anti-Jewish Nazis unreasonable in their suspicions?

If I look at 1938 German Nazi and Zionist writings about Jews in Europe, there is much more scorn and animosity in the Zionist literature than in the German Nazi publications.

Had desire for the negation of the Diaspora turned into a desire for negation of a good portion of the Diaspora population that had so stubbornly resisted Zionist ideology about emigration to Palestine?

Is this feeling expressed in the harsh anti-Nazi political line of Zionist Jews in the media even though a continuation of the war after Dunkirk practically guaranteed the deaths of large numbers of Jews? (Probably the Zionist leadership did not expect the mortality to be as large as it ultimately was.)

Anyway, I could almost agree with Mafish Palestine, for the debate is almost irrelevant.

I have to echo the first Clinton campaign.

It's All About the Economy

Before the Iraq War, the State of Israel had probably cost the USA something around $2-3 trillion in constant 2000 dollars — in total and not just for aid.

In their recently published book entitled The Three Trillion Dollar War, The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, Columbia Professor Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Professor Linda Bilmes calculate the cost of the Iraq War, into which the USA was manipulated by Neocons acting as a Jewish Zionist special interest, at over $3 trillion dollars in 2008 dollars.

This amount must be added to the cost of Israel to the USA.
[Read the Entire Article!]

Zionists were NEVER allies of the nazis. The United States did NOT take in a "large number" during the depression. They took in a trickle and strictly according to racist originating quotas by geography, and Jews were a minority of the immigrants from each country at the time. Mass murders of Jews occurred long before the invasion of the Soviet Union.

You are a lame revisionist, Martillo.

Higginslads,
You don't have a clue what I'm talking about, but you ridicule anyway.

You seem to apply the South Africa/Israel parallel, but it isn't.

The lack of sovereignty of the Palestinians is unjust. The lack of due process as to title claims within Israel and the West Bank is unjust. The pass requirements and roadblocks are unjust.

Zionism is not that. The Zionism that you oppose is a single flavor of it, a flavor that does not resemble the country as a whole. Israel is an unusually cosmopolitan commercial culture currently. (The degree of COMMERCIALISM is it largest flaw, one that America shares.)

That is a single response to a very difficult pre-existing AND exasperated situation.