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Saif Ammous on Squaring Progressive and Zionist
My friend Saif Ammous had this response to Ralph Seliger's faith that progressivism and Zionism are not mutually exclusive:
Jack is a British Christian who believes in the value of Christian peoplehood, culture and/or religion, as Ralph Seliger "believes in the value of Jewish peoplehood, culture and/or religion". Jack comes to America with billions of dollars in order to bring about, in America, the same scenario that Ralph Seliger wants to see as a "solution" to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, with American Christians standing in for Israelis, and American non-Christians standing in for Palestinians. What would be Ralph Seliger's reaction to Jack's plan? Could it in any way be similar to the reaction of a Palestinian to American citizens telling him that they know that Zionism is the right solution for Palestine/Israel? And if he supported Jack's Plan, would he still call himself a "Progressive"?
(I'll certain post Ralph's answer to this challenge, if he's game...)
Posted in Israel/Palestine
I don't get it.
What is being said?
Saif,
Ethics is looking at yourself.
If Jack adopted YOUR plans, would that be progressive?
Sincerely. (Please don't rest on the easy to rationalize. Actually bother to look.)
Phil,
If you sincerely regard the two-state solution as most appropriate, why the absence of backbone on it?
Why is it stated as relevant as the choice of fish or chicken for dinner?
Have you not thought about this enough to actually put your weight into a goal?
Why would you so vehemently savage Seliger for caring about Israel AND Palestine?
Rich, I really hate to sound repetitious but you just don't want to see your friend Phil for what he really is. A Jewish anti-semite in the classic sense. We've always had these people and we probably always will. Here is a guy who is an advocate of assimilation out of existence and the destruction of Israel. And embraces his popularity among out and out Jew baiting anti-semites. And if that isn't the correct term for a guy like Martillo then Yassir Arafat didn't like to fuck young boys.
.. had to read it twice too.
Saif asks Ralph Seliger, if Ralph would support Jack, a British citizen & firm supporter of Christian religion & culture, in his endeavor to separate Christian Americans from non-Christian Americans and if he would still define himself as a progressive, if he did.
I don't feel very comfortable with the paradigm. It pushes Ralph into a corner with almost no room to move. It's basically a rhetorical question.
But yes Saif: it is odd that American Jews with no apparent relation to Israel beyond religion have more rights in Israel and the occupied territories, including the right to discuss its future without any outside interference, than the people who once lived there and their descendants.
What we are talking about is USA with gated communities exclusively for Christians – right?
With USA ID documents and car number-plates identifying Christians and non-Christians at a glance.
And with USA
law that allows Christians to marry and bring their brides back to America, but denying this to non-Christians.
And of course, allowing ALL Christians, anywhere in the world to settle in America with no questions asked, and the state allocating them resources to build on any non-christian land they choose for themselves……..
And then drafting Army to protect the Christians only…
Very progressive vision indeed.
And, in Palestine currently?
Lebanon? (Do Palestinian children born in Lebanon have Lebanese citizenship?)
Eva,the flaw in your stunningly stupid analogy is htath the United States is a country where people aren't trying to kill Christians at every opportunity. BTW How did your family make out at Jedwebne. Or whatever village where they turned in their Jewish neighbors to the Germas.
And how many Poles or Ukrainians did SOG's Soviet Jewish commissar relatives shoot, send to Siberia or starve?
Auden's poem has some problems, but it is hard to argue with:
Any Soviet "Jew" that shot anybody did so as Soviets.
Only racialists would say they did so as "Jews", whether those racialist (fools) were Russian, Polish, Nazi, or "American" revisionist.
You and your "they deserve to be hated" line.
Just to follow up on SOG's reasoning.
Even if Eastern Europeans were "trying to kill [Jews] at every opportunity," Jews could have asked for asylum and succor, which Arabs were more than willing to give but certainly did not have the right to plunder, kill and exile the native population as Zionists planned from the 1880s onward.
In any case Zionism was not a response to the suffering of E. European Jews — a false rationalization because on the whole in the 19th century German Jews and E. European ethnic Ashkenazim had higher incomes, more education, and longer lives than coterritorial non-Jews.
When one reads the primary sources, which unfortunately for the most part have not been properly translated into English, one finds on the part of the Zionist intelligentsia a naked desire for status, wealth and power to the benefit of the Zionist intelligentsia and the Jewish plutocrats, who were to fund the movement. The rest of European Jewry would do the heavy work and maybe get some scraps from the table. See Introduction: The Virtual Colonial Motherland as Political Innovation and, of course, all the blowback if the mission went awry.
Typical racist Jewish Zionist hypocrisy from Witty.
I suppose he believes that any German Nazi that shot a Jew did so as a Nazi and not as a German.
The disproportionate role that Russian ethnic Ashkenazim played in overthrowing Czarism, consolidating the Soviet Union and in Soviet crimes against humanity results from internal Jewish politics and history.
Jews have to start owning the crimes that result from their politics just as they expect non-Jews to own the crimes that result from non-Jewish politics.
In any case, nowadays there is a lot of scholarly work on the nature of the Jewish identity among the Soviet Jewish political and bureaucratic elite.
A lot of the most brutal Soviet policies toward Jews and non-Jews seem to have been an expression of Soviet Jewishness which persisted and reexpressed itself in a particularly brutal form of Zionism associated with the Soviet refusenik movement and then after 1991 with aliyah to Israel when the Soviet part of Soviet Jewish identity no longer made any sense.
I will try to get something up on my blog on this topic.
Bullshit Martillo.
Your interpretation is ludicrous.
I'm glad that so few regard you seriously.
Can't wait Martillo, you and your psycho wife are just a paragon of rational thought.
Joachim: Even if Eastern Europeans were "trying to kill [Jews] at every opportunity," Jews could have asked for asylum and succor, which Arabs were more than willing to give but certainly did not have the right to plunder, kill and exile the native population as Zionists planned from the 1880s onward.
On the surface a valid argument that surely has passed many brain waves, mine too.
The problem about this argument is that it misses the historical perspective. The masters of the area at the time were not the "Arabs" (…) but the British and the Ottomans, and both were approached among others. Could the Arabs under these conditions have given permission to anyone? Who was in charge of immigration rules/laws?
Joachim, I have a question for you. Yesterday there was an interesting ad-link here from the Half-Jewish network.
The for our larger topic most interesting part of their site is the complex discussion of how to handle half-Jews or kids from mixed marriages.
The Wannsee Conference Definition of who among the "Half-Jews" has to be exterminated.
If, as you suggest, there was such a deep anti-communist association in the Nazi's mind concerning the "Jewish Problem" why is the political outlook of the Jews and Half-Jews of absolutely no importance in the complex definitions of who they think should exterminated and who survive?
Until the 1930s relatively few of the Zionist intelligentsia were interested in settling in Palestine. Raising money from the Jewish wealthy class occupied most of the intelligentsia's efforts, but as far as I know, settling anywhere in the Ottoman Empire was fairly easy for anyone willing to become an Ottoman citizen with the exception that from the late 1890s onward to Ottoman government became suspicious of Zionist immigrants and sought to limit Zionist settlement in Palestine.
In general the Ottoman government allowed a lot of local autonomy, and sometimes local governments acted independently. When the Armenians were in need, Arabs tried to help, and in the case of comparable Jewish need, which did not arise until the 1930s, Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and Egyptian leaders were more than willing to help as long as the Zionists abandoned the effort to make Palestine into a Zionist state.
Nazi internal politics and theory on Jews was complex. Nazi scholars could not agree whether Jews constituted a Volk, a Nichtvolk or a Gegenvolk — rather like Zionist scholarship on Palestinians.
As I remember the Wahnsee Conference was a ninety minute meeting to which not a great deal of importance was assigned by most of the attendees.
One cannot assume that topics were covered in depth or with any sort of completeness.
I have the overall impression that Nazi policies with regard to defining who was a Jew generally maximized the amount of wealth the government might be able to seize.
So much revision.
As I remember the Wahnsee Conference was a ninety minute meeting to which not a great deal of importance was assigned by most of the attendees.
That no doubt is an amazing statement for central administrative coordination meeting for the Final Solution.
Maybe we should alert him to the spelling of the location: Lake Wannsee more precisely The Wannsee Villa/mansion.
Joachim keeps spelling it Wahn, which is German for illuion, delusion.
The extensive Planning and the high profile participants, do not exactly support minor importance.
I will be busy for a few hours, and I am sorry for misspelling. When I am tired, I confuse orthographies. Anyway, I know it is not the best of sources, but whoever wrote the wiki entry seems to agree with some of my observations — and I have not had a chance to look at the entry in detail.
We already know what is the progressive answer to the Christianization of America, from a real-life example. Bill O'Reilly said that Jewish Americans who don't like attempts to convert them to Christianity should get leave the US, and Media Matters immediately called him on it. (link at homepage).
Though you don't have be progressive to be offended by the idea: ADL complained about it too.
There is a certain irony about some Americans arguing for a Jewish state in Palestine regardless of the cost to the Palestinians, but being up in arms (and rightly so) at the idea of a "Christian America". It must be easier to argue for a sectarian state when you belong to the dominant sect, than when you belong to the minority that is being told to get out of your own country because you're the "wrong" religion.
We already know what is the progressive answer to the Christianization of America, from a real-life example. Bill O'Reilly said that Jewish Americans who don't like attempts to convert them to Christianity should get leave the US, and Media Matters immediately called him on it. (link at homepage).
Though you don't have be progressive to be offended by the idea: ADL complained about it too.
There is a certain irony about some Americans arguing for a Jewish state in Palestine regardless of the cost to the Palestinians, but being up in arms (and rightly so) at the idea of a "Christian America". It must be easier to argue for a sectarian state when you belong to the dominant sect, than when you belong to the minority that is being told to get out of your own country because you're the "wrong" religion.
In fact I think this subject sums up what this blog is about. Can we carry on using "Is it good for the Jews?" as the baseline for our thinking on Israel, if what we deem "good for the Jews" is a Jewish state in Palestine that can be brought about only by the destruction of the pre-existing non-Jewish majority. Is "Is it good for the Jews" really the paramount question in a situation where most of the people affected on the ground aren't Jewish at all? We never asked "Is it good for the people who already live there?", but took it for granted they should just be gotten out of the way. I think that is why Phil keeps going back to the Nakba as the defining issue in the conflict.
Joachim, read the German version it's slightly better. Obviously there is considerable debate. Matters were planned longer (mid 1941 – spring 1942) and Wannsee is only part of a series of administrative moves towards the Final Solution's dead machinery. A couple of post Wannsee events were necessary to inform the executive apparatus of its respective responsibilities.
Whatever part local cooperation may have played, if you want to deny the essential antisemitic racism of the Nazis and try to present them as not so bad anti-Communists you are distorting history.
I simply can't see how you want to help Palestinans with this.
Richard,
Yes. If he adopted my plans for Palestine to America, America would be a secular democracy where people's religions and race don't matter in front of the law. Which is progressive. Which is also good. Which is also very close to reality.
Sword of Gideon,
Hasn't it crossed your mind the reason non-Christian Americans aren't trying to kill American Christians is precisely BECAUSE Christians are NOT going all Zionist on present-day non-Christian Americans?
The Jewish American will take your goy kid for his or her own purpose. (Survival of the Jew at all costs–it's proven history)