Only in Haaretz: Here is Zeev Sternhell, victim of attempted murder, saying that the rise of "colonial Zionism" –i.e., violent, religious settler movement–has hastened the arrival of a binational state. "Apartheid is already here," he says, in Hebron. (Not a precise quote; I'm running)
So I say to my fellow civil-rights/human-rights progressives, including many Jews, in the U.S.: Is this how you imagine a modern state? Can you help Israel and Palestine find a better way by leading rather than following their dismal cycle of violence? Is not Jimmy Carter our leader on human rights issues? And is colonial Zionism the endpoint that Zionism has found for itself, as Communism found Prague?
"The feeling I had 60 years ago when I entered the Zionist movement is essentially the same feeling I have today … I hoped that this nationalism would not follow the path of others a beginning with a great hope and degenerating later to become a sacred egoism, daring, even like Mussolini, to proclaim itself sacroegoismo, as though collective egoism could be more sacred than individual egoism. When we returned to Palestine, the decisive question was: Do you want to come here as a friend, a brother, a member of the community of people of the Middle East or as the representatives of colonialism and of imperialism?
"The contradiction between the end and the means to reach it divided the Zionists: some wanted to receive political privileges from the Great Powers, others, especially the youth, wanted to be allowed to work in Palestine with their neighbors, on behalf of their life together, and for the future.
"ALL WAS NOT ALWAYS PERFECT IN OUR RELATIONS WITH THE ARABS, BUT THERE WAS, IN GENERAL, GOOD NEIGHBORLINESS BETWEEN JEWISH VILLAGERS AND ARAB VILLAGERS.
"This organic phase of establishment in Palestine lasted until the time of Hitler.
"It was Hitler who pushed the masses of Jews to come to Palestine, and not an elite who came to carry on their lives and prepare for the future. Thus, a selective organic development was replaced by a mass immigration requiring a political force for its security … The majority of Jews preferred to learn from Hitler rather than from us … Hitler showed that history does not follow the path of the mind, but that of power, and that when a people is quite strong, it can kill with impunity … This is the situation that we had to combat … To "Ihud" we proposed … that Jews and Arabs not only coexist but cooperate … This would make possible an economic development of the Middle East, thanks to which the Middle East could bring a great essential contribution to the future of humanity."
Martin Buber; SOURCE: "Jewish Newsletter," June 2, 1958.
"We speak of the mind of Israel and we believe that we are not like other nations … But the mind of Israel is nothing more than the synthesis of our national identity, nothing more than a justification of our collective egoism … transformed into an idol. We have refused to accept any prince other than the Lord of the Universe. While we are like all other nations and we drink with them from the same cup that intoxicates them. The nation is not the supreme value … Jews are more than a nation: they are the members of a community of faith.
"Jewish religion was uprooted, and this is the essence of the disease whose symptom was the birth of Jewish nationalism around the middle of the 19th century. This new form of desire for land is the cornerstone of what modern Jewish nationalism has borrowed from modern nationalism of the West."
"What does the idea of 'chosen' have to do with all that? Being 'chosen' does not indicate a feeling of superiority, but a sense of destiny. This feeling does not originate from a comparison with others, but from a vocation and responsibility to accomplish the task of which the prophets keep reminding us: if you brag about being chosen, instead of living in obedience to God, you commit a felony."
Evoking this "nationalist crisis" of political Zionism, which is a perversion of the spirituality of Judaism, he concludes:
"WE HOPED TO SAVE JEWISH NATIONALISM FROM THE MISTAKE OF MAKING AN IDOL OUT OF PEOPLE. WE HAVE FAILED."
-Martin Buber, Addressing the 12th Zionist Congress in Kaarlsbad, September 15, 1921,
Thanks for posting those, higginslads. Buber is my kind of Jewish zionist.
Weiss now regularly draws parallels between Communism and Zionism, with the decisive Jewish role in Communism correctly implicit in the comparison. Others compare Zionism to Nazism. My take is that is a watered-down combination of the two, which takes the racial ethnic fundamentalism of Nazism, and combines it with the advanced argumentative and propaganda techniques of Communism, which always managed to find “human rights” and “social justice” rationales for all of the murders it committed for decades, just as the Zionists have been able to get away with their atrocities for decades by saying they are essential to saving or protecting the Jews.
Also, the American and European Left was instrumental in helping the Communists get away with their atrocities for so long by aping the Communist human rights/social justice rhetoric, just as left-liberals have been instrumental in helping the Zionists get away with theirs by aping the Zionist line (with the corrupt GOP offering no resistance on the issue).
I don’t see how American left-liberals, which already have so much Palestinian blood on their hands, are very credible critics today. They’ve done a masterful job of enabling Zionist atrocities thus far, and will continue to do so under an Obama presidency. There are too many Jewish Zionists on board with the Obama campaign and in the Democrat establishment and brain trust to ever allow in real headway on the issue, and too many cowardly, servile and politically correct gentile Democrat party-line thinkers to ever confront them without completely retreating once the first accusation of anti-semitism is thrown out.
On Buber's belief that Hitler created the will-to-power racist Zionist mindset of today: Stalin and the Jewish Bolsheviks created Hitler's will-to-power mindset in the decades leading up to WWII and the Holocaust. And probably his racist outlook, too.
Ed, did you post this?
For all the sympathy I feel for my fellow warriors against zion, I have to draw the line at celebrating Rachel Corrie. Anyone who's spent anytime among progressive upper-middle class circles knows her type. She would have lied down in front of a tractor to stop the INS from stopping illegal immigrants in New Mexico (As she encouraged others to do). Palestine was her cause for reasons that have everything to do with her ex boyfriend (against whom she sought revenge) and, of course, mommy and daddy.
We stretch the limits of credulity by pretending we care about cunts like her.
Posted by: ed | October 08, 2008 at 08:07 PM
or was it someone caricaturing you?
Re: the roots of Hitler’s racism, Joachim Martillo has an interesting post today:
“Before German Nazism gave racism a bad name, most of the early Zionist leaders were overt racists. Max Nordau, who was second only to Herzl developed Zionist eugenic theory and was probably at least as influential on German Nazism as he was on Zionism, which is ethnic Ashkenazi Nazism.”
http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2008/10/ajc-attacks-ignatiev-congratulates.html
Re: Rachel Corrie No, I didn’t write that. One must admire the courage of her convictions, even if her apparent left-wing perspective was misguided. Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that someone like Rachel Corrie would have been completely dismissed as an anti-Semite per the vernacular of the Left. Opposition to Communism was once deemed as partially motivated by anti-Semitism due to the high concentration of Jews amongst Communists. And the Zionists of course migrated the same accusation to critics of Israel.
What does that say about the intellectual honesty of the Left?
I lost all faith in the ideological Left once I recognized its willingness to collaborate with Judeofascism. The same thing happened with the ideological Right. At that point, one must conclude that the nature of political ideology makes it inherently corruptible, hence the imperative of libertarianism.
US economic aid to Israel finances Israel's colonialism. US military aid to Israel empowers Israel's colonialism. US immigrants to Israel settle in its new colonies.
End all US aid to Israel and prosecute US settlers in the Palestinian Territories with the same laws used to send John Walker Lindh to prison. Israel must return and remain within its legal borders, which the US can and should defend, to regain US economic aid. Israel must become a much better neighbor to ensure its long term viability, but it needs the US to stop subsidizing its aggression first.
Committee for Historical Accuracy: When I read the faked Ed. email, I thought: SOG/Bill Pearlman's.
This this plainly SOG's logic:
Palestine was her cause for reasons that have everything to do with her ex boyfriend (against whom she sought revenge
This is simply not the way Ed, would argue.
LeaNder, could you f****** read your mails before you post them. I am tired today.
lol. You guys are hysterical.
'Re: Rachel Corrie No, I didn’t write that. One must admire the courage of her convictions, even if her apparent left-wing perspective was misguided.'
Well I'm glad you didn't say that, but what you did say bothers me a bit. Just as the Zionists cannot approach anything without that poisonous filter warping their view, you I'm afraid have this left/right thing happening in extremis Ed. Really, that filter had only limited usefulness years ago and has five eighths of fuck all value now.
Rachel Corrie's words and actions should shame us all. She like Cindy Sheehan, another American hero (very thin on the ground in recent years) that I'm sure you'll cavil about, like the young Brit Tom Hurndall, like Ze'ev Sternhell himself, have done something more than wax somewhat less than lyrical on blogs and chatrooms.
Your reaction reminds me of Major Bob Bateman's take on Eric Alterman's site on the death of Marla Ruzicka in Iraq, another 'leftist', one he grudgingly admired for not sitting at a computer and moaning bravely in absolute safety.
First, we can't all up sticks and hop it to Iraq (and if we could, how welcome would we be?), and second, it seems strange that it's OK to mourn even a leftist if they come and help clean up the blood from our imperial messes, as Ruzicka did, but when such leftists attempt to stop such atrocities (a la Corrie or Ken O'Keeffe) they are fair game for the pillory.
Something is very wrong with a belief system that tolerates that. They aren't just leftists or right-wingers – they're people who do and say things more or less courageous, and more or less effective. Try that as your filter sometime.
Fact is, the opposition to our march thru the foothills of fascism comes from both, or rather all 'sides' – the Raimondos and Pauls and Buchanans every bit as much as the Kleins and Chomskys and Greenwalds.
Let me guess, Glenn. You have left-wing leanings. I seem to have touched a nerve.
My point was not that the value of Corrie's sacrifice was lessened by the fact that she was a left-winger, but rather that she might not have been a left-winger had she been aware that Christians had been terrorized and murdered on a far greater scale by left-wing Judeofascists and Stalinists in Soviet Russia than Palestinians have been by Judeofascists in Palestine.
I know the fact of the history of left-wing mass murder is inconvenient to contemporary leftists, who would rather sweep it under the rug into perpetuity; I just don’t care.
'Let me guess, Glenn. You have left-wing leanings. I seem to have touched a nerve.'
Nerve schmerve. I am in bed with the likes of Raimondo and Ron Paul, Paul Roberts and Paul O'Neill, the list goes on – and I am happy here, among the group of sensible people who oppose what Raimondo calls The War Party. I have often opined on how any saviour is more likely to come form the rump of the GOP Old Right than it is from the thoroughly debased Democrats, who are utterly under the sway of money, whether it's Lobby or MI complex, or anywhere they can get it. Some leftist I'd make.
There are bigger fish to fry right now than this obsession with delineating political ramparts that become less relevant with every passing day.
'I know the fact of the history of left-wing mass murder is inconvenient to contemporary leftists, who would rather sweep it under the rug into perpetuity; I just don’t care.'
It may well be true Ed, but I just don't care. You might think it crucial, most don't. We can't forget the past, but we can't live in it either.
The past is prologue. Particularly when dealing with ideologues, which is what most non-libertarian Leftists and Right-wingers are.
Although Judeofascists, Neocons and the Left have exploited it no end, nothing would have been gained by sweeping the German holocaust under the carpet. And largely ignoring the Soviet holocaust (and the Western Left’s role in it) has opened the door for “humanitarian” rationales for similar enterprises.
It is the continuing failure to acknowledge the murderous Left-wing framework and history of statist social engineering that led to the Iraq war, for instance. The Bushies and the Zionist coterie set out to remake the Middle East by using massive State power to smash it first (in the Communist tradition) and then re-engineer it by force into something more amenable to their own twisted ideologies, with Cheneyite fascists collaborating to get rich in the process.
I couldn’t care less, about short term tactics, which is what you are speaking to, Glenn. Pandering to short term partisan goals and looking the other way to reach them, combined with the typically American short-term memory, is another factor that got us into our current mess.
What I am speaking to is changing long-term principles by constantly rubbing the statist ideologues’ noses in the messes they have made around the globe and throughout modern history.
“Social engineering” is best left to the micro level of religions and families, not the macro level of ham-fisted governments and megalomaniacal ideologues. Defensive government may be necessary when any given religion becomes an existential threat to others, but defense should be the extent of it.
But the statists have turned government into the biggest existential threat out there. And more statism will only make matters worse.
Great posts, Glenn.
Here's a view by a Jewish American stating that Israel has three faces, Fascist, Communist, and Democratic:
http://www.jackbernstein.org/
I bet if he was alive today he'd have some interesting things to say
about the USA today also.