A few impressions of being in the company of the settler movement last night in New York:
The meeting's in the basement of a rich stone synagogue. The crowd aren't rich people, they're cause people, rough around the edges, a little like myself. A woman in front of me has an old backpack and a small Dean and Deluca bag, explains that it was her big indulgence, buying a little goat cheese for herself for dinner. A guy next to me has a motheaten IDF Soldier baseball hat. The people are sort of old, 50s, 60s. A grayhaired woman bent by age passes around a cheap legal pad for us to write our names on. An older guy cries out about the radio show he lost because of his weekly appeals for the JDL.
Like other cause people, they all know one another. There are about 80 people in the room, and the woman next to me, a little glamorous, a little the worse for wear, wearing a lot of rings, gives me a suspicious look. "I haven't ever seen you at one of these." One of these means meetings of Americans for a Safe Israel, obviously a fringe group, but like the Israeli settlers themselves, gaining support from the body of Jewry. The copy of Outpost magazine the grayhaired woman hands me, with a smile, evangelizing, has a piece by former Pentagon under secretary Douglas Feith. He always hid his fervent Zionism in public, as other neocons did; but it's all through that piece.
A few people speak in a revivalish way, and the crowd is responsive. Whenever they mention Gaza, people cry out "Terrorists." The star is Nadia Matar of Women in Green. She's skinny and dressed in military outfit, dark green jacket, olive green pants, with a scarf around her neck. She wears a tight brown Buster Brown hat, with a big brown button on the front of it and her hair tucked under. She looks like she could be in the Stern Gang. Androgynous, but a mom, she begins by invoking the Jewish patriots who died in '47 and a settler killed more recently. "May God avenge his blood."
She has an excited breathless manner but some charm too. She shows a movie of the settler movement colonizing a crucial hill east of Bethlehem in Palestine, and in the movie she's hooking a strap up to a concrete barrier so that she can drag it away with her car's trailer hitch.
"If you don't have a man, be the man!" she cries. Great expression.
Almost everything she says is longwinded and racist. She runs down Islam and Arabs endlessly. The Palestinians should have been cleansed long ago, because "It's our land, God gave it to us." That's her mantra. She also says "Boruch Hashem," a lot, which means, Praise God, but her talk isn't religious. She doesn't seem to be that religious, more nationalistic. Her most compelling story is about shoveling the earth of the land where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob walked and holding it up to her face. She says the Arab desire for Eretz Israel is as fiendish as someone who owns a football field trying to take away a box of matches at one end.
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is Matar's story about fatherland. The feeling of everything she says is that we're in the Warsaw ghetto. She refers often to Hitler and the Nazis. She imitates Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French fascist, issuing fascist decrees, and seems to approve his prerogative to move Jews out of Paris--because France belongs to the French and we're not French. It's that old intimacy of Zionism and antisemitism, the dependence. Her politics exude persecution. The media are against her, the politicians are against her, most of Israel is against her, and American Jewry too.
All the adversity excites her. She likes that spot. She shows a hill in Palestine that they turned into a thriving colonial village. "Dagan Hill." Again and again they were thrown off the land by the army but they kept going back, and they won. That kind of battle thrills her, would seem to satisfy Holocaust-shaded feelings of redemption through force. Again it shows that the most important trope about Israel is Avrum Burg's statement that the Jews pardoned the Germans too fast, and put all that rage onto Arabs.
I wonder what most societies do with narrowminded radicals like her, how it can sequester their matchbox energies. The problem with Israel is that it calls to these types. She was born in Belgium in 1966, moved to Israel in '87. And every racist thing she's done has been tacitly licensed by the government, because it must hallow the raging spirit of Jabotinsky.
The meeting goes on too long. I'm glad to get out of there. The spirit of it is anachronistic, reeking of pre-WW2 European nationalism, but preserved, canned, lovingly coddled, so it's our bad dream.
"I wonder what most societies do with narrow-minded radicals like her, how it can sequester their matchbox energies. The problem with Israel is that it calls to these types."
I'm afraid most societies do very little. Why is she able to enter the U.S. to recruit money for the "settler" movement? She was born in Belgium; I doubt she's an American citizen. Someone must have given her a visa to enter this country and fundraise for a cause that goes against our government's stated policy that the settlements must go and make way for a Palestinian state. And she is able to speak freely on behalf of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the killing of a foreign leader without being arrested by the FBI. Can you imagine a Muslim cleric speaking publicly in an American mosque in this way? And although the media frequently exposes the corrupt nature of other racists, such as the Nazis and the KKK, they won't touch Jewish racists with a ten-foot pole. Lots of people are asleep at the wheel, including us.
And although Israel "calls" to these types, it's Diaspora Jews, especially American ones, that keep feeding these radicals through their donations and political clout. They're evey bit as guilty as the soldiers in the IDF in the killing of Palestinian children.
Ths woman is insanely deep into the cult of zionism isn't she?
And now Israel has elected some leaders who plainly think like she and the 'settlers" do.
Listening to her reminds me of how the nazis incited the German populace against the Jews.
It will be a damn miracle if I-P doesn't end up with dual holocausting of the Palestines and the Israelis.
Inaccurate analogy, that matchbook thing. Analogizing the Middle East to an American Football field at 120 yards by 53.3 yards, Israel would be a bit smaller than a 4×4 yard square. Big for a matchbook.
Of course it is still pretty small compared to the whole field.
Arabs and/or Muslims control 3.5 million square miles of the Middle East, but they begrudge the Jews the 0.24% of it that is Israel. The Middle East is almost the size of the U.S. Israel is smaller than New Jersey (the fourth smallest U.S. state). But it is the Jews who are greedy for wanting about 8,000 square miles instead of nothing, not the Arabs and/or Muslims who are greedy for wanting 3.5 million square miles plus the 8000 square miles instead of just the 3.5 million square miles.
Put it like this, if a CEO complained that he only got $3.5 million in the last year and said that the janitor who got paid $8,000 should have got nothing so the CEO could have the extra $8,000, what would you say to the CEO?
words of a religious fanatic/her words… "It's our land, God gave it to us."
for one to say this, they must have one warped image of God, or being jewish or something, cause this is so out of whack it is beyond the pale…
Put it like this, if a CEO complained that he only got $3.5 million in the last year and said that the janitor who got paid $8,000 should have got nothing so the CEO could have the extra $8,000, what would you say to the CEO?
you must work for AIG!
Thom:
"Put it like this, if a CEO complained that he only got $3.5 million in the last year and said that the janitor who got paid $8,000 should have got nothing so the CEO could have the extra $8,000, what would you say to the CEO?"
If the CEO was chief executive officer of Israel, I would tell him to quit stealing Palestinian houses, quit cutting down their olive groves, quit humiliating them at checkpoints, quit stoning their kids on the way to school and to quit shelling them with white phosphorous as a way of showing them that they are "a defeated people."
That is the argument of the South African apartheid racists. Blacks have all these black countries; a whole continent. Why cant we have this tiny little Aryan paradise. You all are racists for objecting to our beautiful tiny little apartheid experiment.
Even the matchbox is too big for running race experiments.
PS. Mondo, this is some quality writing. This lady jumps off the page. Thanks
Most people are not aksing Israel to give up Israel. We are saying move back to the border established by the UN, move back to the 1967 border. Your are framing the argument within wrong dimensions.
Keep your Israel, but stop the occupation, stop the blockade, stop the killing, move the settlers out.
Why do people keep treating the Middle East as a monolithic region? Sure most of it is Muslim but and their culture looks similar to us but they are differnt poeple with their own distinct cultures, all of them, from Saudi Arabians to Egyptians to Moroccans, etc. etc.
Most of Europe is Christian, they are said to share the same "western" values but everyone still recognizes that they all have their own distinct culture within their own distinct nations.
Palestinians have a distinct culture of their own with their own history. Arabs are not a monolithic group of people. Their dislike of each other is one proof among many.
You guys don't like Nadia's religious rhetoric? What do you think the Palestinians, and particularly HAMAS say? How are they any different?
Hamas says give us our land that you took by force, give us food, water and freedom as well as hope and dignity and we are prepared to consider long term truce with Israel in 1967 seven borders.
And don't take my word for it – some European parliamentarians brought this message from meetings with Hamas leadership.
Trying to bury this news is a hasbara priority no. 1.
Her comments are clearly self-talk.
I would say to her that the worst that a Jew can do is to rationalize criminality in the name of Torah.
Because a Jew is Jew before a human being, right Witty?
Notice how he is condemning this batshit Zionist as being a bad Jew. Not a bad Zionist. As if the Zionist project is detached from nutcases like Matar.
A great article by Phil. My question is: why doesn't the mainstream press report about these people, either here or in Israel/Palestine? The New York Times magazine sent Phil some years ago out to Idaho to report on an American nutcase, the right-wing survivalist Bo Gritz: why don't they ask him to repeat his work with these people? James North
I bet she could be a contributor on David Duke's web page. He's marginalized, rather than fawned over; he certainly is not ignored by the USA establishment, but rather is an icon of official unAmericanism; in contrast, she is ignored–and quietly supported.
"It's our land, God gave it to us."
All those that repeat this mantra most vigorously — Israeli settlers, American Zionist Jews, along with American and British Christian Zionists — conveniently forget, if they know them at all, two critical obligations to living on the "Land", according to Old Testament prophets: 1.) obey God's commandments; the basic 10 are a good start, and 2.) treat others who live on the land with respect. If not, off you go into exile. That happened twice, according to the Old Testament record; first by the ancient Assyrians, later by the Babylonians. Around 70 A.D. the Romans leveled Jerusalem to the ground which led to the an exile of the Hebrew people for almost 2,000 years.
If one believes God gave you the Land, then you gotta believe God was furious with the Hebrews in 70 A.D. Moral of the story: If you claim the land is yours, read the rest of the contract/covenant that allows you to live on the land. The Old Testament prophets –Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and the rest — are pretty clear about this, and they speak for God.
Weiss: "The problem with Israel is that it calls to these types."
From where I stand, that's not a problem. I wish the fanatics would go, and stay. The REAL problem is the Jewish Zionist "moderates" who don't go, pretend to be sane and sensible ("Zionism is all about Jewish self-determination") even as they funnel American tax dollars to people like this by the wheel barrel.
WITHOUT the moderate, sensible, good liberal Jewish American Zionist, people like these are just howling at the moon. WITH them as an American lobby, they're a well-financed army of neo-fascists operating under safe cover of progressivism provided by their allies.
"Oh, the Israelis can't be THAT bad," thinks the average American useful idiot. "Just look at how liberal and progressive American Jews are." Good camouflage, isn't it?
This is a truly excellent piece of writing, she does indeed jump from the page, even though I'm still not entirely sure she's worth the attention. In one way she is of course: it's worth exposing fanatics on both sides, considering many Zionists and their Jewish or non-Jewish supporters keep telling everybody that extremism (de Gamas! Teggog! Teggog!) is only found on the Palestinian side.
The argument about the relative sizes of Israel and 'Arabia' is one of the oldest and most ridiculous of all: size just doesn't come into it, no one can expect a Palestinian land owner to just politely make room for 'tiny Israel', not to mention the fact that for its size Israel is hardly overpopulated: much of Israel Proper is desert. Well, make that desert bloom, not someone else's.
Fritz Kuhn's spirit lives in Ms. Matar.
You guys have it wrong. The Zionist's credo is: "God, who doesn't exist, gave us this land"
So tell me, why are the liberal Zionists supporting these insane fascist freaks to continue to STEAL all of that land and militarize arabs even further into the zionist group of insanity?
Why indeed is the real question!!
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com
And the real problem is the Zionists get a blank check and a free pass, while the Arab Islamics don't get a free pass at all