David Bromwich writes:
President Obama in his Cairo speech mentioned and named the "unprecedented Holocaust" suffered by European Jews in the years 1933-1945. He also mentioned the sufferings of Palestinians, from the dispossession of 1948 to the life under occupation that continues today. He clearly evoked these afflictions as instances of human suffering for which all are responsible who permit them to occur. He suggested no comparison between the two, in kind or in degree. The resemblance lay rather in the fact of suffering itself. Where it could have been prevented, it was not prevented. Where it can now be stopped, it has not yet been stopped.
Some Israelis, strongly identified with the anti-two state policy of Binyamin Netanyahu, have seized on the idea that Obama was asserting a false "moral equivalence" between Jewish and Palestinian sufferings. And many of their American allies--including the large remnant of the neoconservatives still honored in the mass media--have taken up the cry. The placement of the word Palestinian beside the word Jew in the context of human suffering is supposed to be a calculated insult or a sign of defective judgment. Paul Wolfowitz and David Brooks, for example, took this line in the New York Times today--Brooks in his column, Wolfowitz in an "expert" comment cited in a news article.
The attack will go on. The war party in the Middle East are searching for the weak point in an important and courageous speech by an American president on foreign soil. With "moral equivalence," they think they have found it. And they are fortified in that assumption by memories of the success of the attack on Jimmy Carter for his supposed assertion of moral equivalence between the wrongs committed by the United States and the wrongs committed by Soviet Russia. The slander, they recall, worked then. May it not work now?
We will have to say this again and again: nothing is the moral equivalent of anything else. Jewish suffering in the mid-twentieth century was without parallel, and was inflicted with a premeditation that has no parallel. It is in the past but it should matter to us in the present. Palestinian suffering is in the present; and something can be done about it by people who are alive. Memory of the former is not an excuse for failure to remedy the latter. Indeed, the more vivid the memory is, the harder it presses on us now to avert the visiting of a catastrophe of any size or scale on any people at all.
I agree that there is no moral equivalence between the holocaust and what is happening to the Palestinians. The Germans, having dazzled the world with the most spectacular achievements in art, science, literature and music, briefly descended into a 12 year cycle of murderous psychosis and barbarity. The Israelis, existing as pathetic inferiors to diaspora jews and having offered mankind absolutely nothing but insolence, stupidity, and religious lunacy, immediately set about a 60 year cycle of murderous psychosis and barbarity that has no end in sight. Definitely, not comparison.
Except there are no religious police ready to enforce these practices like in many Muslim countries. If you don't tow the line in these repressive, backward, failure states you can wind up in prison or dead.
E.g., what about the *tens* of millions of Christians (or Slavs if you want to focus on ethnicity) worked to death in the arctic or elsewhere or otherwise murdered by the Bolsheviks? Or the other ethnics such as the Chechens or etc. that Stalin turned his eyes to? Or the Ukrainians starved by him? If anything even more premeditated than the Holocaust. The exploitation, working people to death surely has parallels under the Nazis. In Buchenwald the outdoor facilities for the production of missiles, partly under Werner von Braun, had the highest dead numbers of all the facilities of the camp. More precisely: Mittelbau Dora and Ohrdruf, the outdoor facility Obama's uncle witnessed as part of the US army freeing it. http://www.ausstellung-zwangsarbeit.org/index.php... http://www.ausstellung-zwangsarbeit.org/index.php... http://www.ausstellung-zwangsarbeit.org/index.php... But the industrialized extinction, including the "vision" of killing all Jews on European ground hadn't. There were no gas chambers in the gulags.
nor do police stop the orthodox goons from attacking women who attempt to pray at the wailing wall )forbidden by lunatic judaism) or a wheelchair bound man trying to get around on the sabbath (as these 2nd century troglodytes forbid the use of electricity on those days, so the man was beaten)
As a matter of fact, there are squads of haredi thugs who beat up 'immodest' women for money — usually, what this means is that the woman has left her husband, and he pays to have her accused of 'immodesty' and beaten up for it. There have been several cases reported in the English-language edition of Ynet.
The comments don't always appear for me on this blog, or they do, but when I go back I can't get them again. Anyway, somebody mentioned (I think it was Mooser, but maybe not) Thomas Jefferson as an example of human moral complexity–I think it was on the thread involving some Irish American Catholic guy's Jewish American platonic girl friend who risked her career for humanistic causes but was oblivious how much of a racist she was when it came to Israel, the I-P or Arab thing. Here's an interesting essay on Jefferson's moral ambiguity, including facts about his life and letter excerpts of his in context–it indicates Jefferson viewed his people as superior and the slaves he had as part of his extended family, sort of like a jewish company owner I knew who treated his non-Jewish low wage employees well, especially his house help and business staff help because they were the most precious part of his human capital. He was always proud of his "extended family," of which he felt he was the benign patriarch. Jefferson much favored black females as they reproduced his workers while the black males would just get used up. He only sold slaves when he felt he had to just to get out of debt and continue his life style. He never partook in slave buying and selling as a business.
Oops, now I can't find the comment I just posted about Thomas Jefferson. I forgot the link in case somebody can read my prior post: http://www.oah.org/pubs/magazine/earlyrepublic/fe...
In the sands of time, there will be no Israel. In the lifetime of treaties, the US will stand by Israel relative to any military threat. The lifetime of treaties (except to Native Americans), is in centuries. It is unlikely that any US politician on any foreseeable prospect will lie outside of the centrist range. No right-wing politician (Ron Paul) or left-wing politician (Ralph Nader) or anyone that adopts their perspectives and politics, will be US president in any foreseeable future. Obama is likely close to as far left as any American politician will be elected, and he has stated CLEARLY, that the civil, diplomatic, military relationship between the US is intimate and firm, if not Siamese (you know twins sharing an abdomen or spine).
OK, I read it. It's really brillant and reminds me of Ella Habiba Shohat: http://www.forgetbaghdad.com/index.php?topic=shoh... I am sorry, Joachim, my prejudice was stronger. I should have at least taken the time to read it to the end. Maybe I still haven't forgiven you the hard judgment of Martin Buber. I don't know: Don't mess with Zohar, but I have to admit that his essay suggests an approach to a phenomenon that puzzled me for quite a long time. The use of highly sexualized vulgarities against perceived enemies of the Jewish state. A recurring phenomenon I watched over almost a decade now. But I think there must be deeper sociological roots to this. After all it shows in early Romanesque anti-Semitic sculptures just as it is present in the anti-Arab discourse now and/or critiques of Israel. Thanks for the note. Films are a very good approach to measuring the pulse of changing cultural attitudes. And I see that he carefully separates the general cultural trends and the specific use of the Israel/Palestine conflict Israel versus the diaspora and the anti-Arab discourse. Sorry, again Joachim. I will be more careful with my judgments from now on.
The "defined" Armistice Line did not bring peace because Israel continued to prevent starving homeless people from returning to their homes. It really is incredible that some Israelis can be so unfeeling as to expect that human beings will not try to return to their homes, and that people in dire straits will not rise up. It all gets subsumed instead into to an Israeli fantasy :<Jews are hated solely because we are Jews, and even though, because of what we do and have done, there is an understandable urge to hate us for our actions, everyone really just hates us for who we are. So therefore it doesn't matter what we do or how badly we treat people, they will hate us anyway. So lets go ahead and treat others badly and then we can kvetch some more about how those people really hate us because we are Jews.> It is a self-perpetuating fallacy. Jews who have befriended Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza are treated with respect , friendship and admiration, but of course you are sure that Palestinians are simply being patient, waiting to chop their heads off at the nearest convenient moment. If the Palestinians had been one tenth as blood-thirsty and bigoted as you claim, Zionism in Palestine would have died in the 1880s in an orgy of blood.
The jews have an awesome PR apparatus. They beat the holocaust into children everywhere, who for the most part learn nothing else about world history. as Edward Hoagland wrote recently: "5 million Congolese died in civil wars sandwiched between the Rwanda and Darfur genocides, with only negligible coverage." Only Jewish suffering matters. That's always the incessant, take-home message.
The holocaust museum in New york has steadfastly refused exhibits portraying the suffering of Non-Jews in the holocaust.
The holocaust has been taken over as a Jewish brand…something like Hammaker Schlemer
Have you read the book, LeaNder? I have not, but I have read David Stannard's contribution to it, "Uniqueness as Denial" which makes many points with which I agree. You can find his piece, in part, at Google books. Although all incidences are unique in their own fashion, I don't see anything in the Holocaust that makes it "uniquely" worse than numerous other incidences of genocide over the ages. I would be interested in your take on his piece. As per Poland, my understanding of Nazi German intentions is that they were interested in using Poland as the Third Reich's breadbasket and using Poles as the menial or slave labor to supply those foodstuffs. Jews, not being considered important to that function by the Nazis, met the same fate as Polish intelligentsia and leadership, which was annihilated. I have a very vivid memory of reading a book on Nazi propaganda during my junior high years(sadly, decades ago) and being totally shocked at how racist and hateful the Nazi propaganda was towards all Slavic peoples.
If a rump state led by Hamas is so dangerous, how's it going to be any worse than now? They won't be able to wage a conventional war against you any time soon. And they gave Jeff Halper a passport despite his country declaring Gaza an "enemy entity." Probably because he's not self entitled to steal their land and actually works to prevent house demolitions. There's no evidence Hamas is planning a genocide. It's not even logical for no other reason than you kill so many of their leaders. Basically you have to keep killing Palestinians until they all like you. Maybe you should drop leaflets over Gaza with that message. Knock off the preaching where you talk about a victory over the Jews that can't happen anyway, and we'll stop killing you for real. Except Israel will kill hundreds of civilians when any one tries to resist exile in their own country, no matter how they speak about it. The PLO never used Hamas like rhetoric and that didn't stop them from being violent or Israel from killing thousands in the name of fighting terrorism. Do your peaceful Palestinian friends know you talk like this?
Well said, do u mind if i translate it (or portions of it) to arabic and post in my blog… i wrote some thoughts about the speech but it was more like "a stream of counsiusness" cause… well it was too late and i had too much to drink that evening. i wanted to write a followup however after reading this post i think you portrayed the picutre so clearly.
They were, but under the Turks there were ill-armed and starving bands of Palestinian brigands, and the Turkish deportation scheme of 1917 never came to pass. '47 actually almost brought the end of the Yishuv, after '38. The villages around Jerusalem which blocked the roads to West Jerusalem were cleared, those that did not contribute militias like Abu Ghosh remained in place. Deir Yassin, and Sheik Munis around Tel Aviv were notable "friendly" villages which were cleared anyway. It is questionable why Israelis would welcome back enemy irregular combatants, although 100,000 came back through infiltration. Israeli citizens who fled peaceful villages and were not allowed to return, such residents of 'Ayn Hawd, Bir'im, and Iqrit, were indeed hard done by by a government fearful of setting a precedent. For the rest, '49 was supposed to effect a reconciliation that might well have remained doubtful without a UNRWA effort to actually resettle refugees as citizens, Israel had no duty to resettle hostile irregular combatants within its borders, by rebuilding the villages from which the war was launched. Sorry. .
We pretty much know that under appropriate conditions we would be forced to kill each other or save each other, depending. It's kind of one of the problems of living in the Levant, as any Lebanese could tell you, you can only be certain of what YOU would do under duress, and sometimes not even that. Hezbollah acquired more and better rockets after the withdrawal, so I would actually expect a long period of peace followed by a rocket-laden death of a thousand cuts, as the world backs the boycott, blockade, and embargo of '49 Israel even with a peace treaty inked. Until there is some kind of protection against the rockets, any greater withdrawal is problematic, and really, '06 and '09 were low-level wars compared to '82. Israel could indeed try to normalize life in Gaza, at a cost of the expansion of the rocket threat to Hezbollah-like levels.
LeaNder22 wrote: "But the industrialized extinction, including the "vision" of killing all Jews on European ground hadn't. There were no gas chambers in the gulags." Hi LeaNder: As I said there's a difference between something being "unique" and something being without "parallel" and that's what I was getting at. E.g., Yes, there were certainly unique aspects what Hitler wanted and the way he pursued it. But certainly Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky and etc. had a "vision" of killing all the "kulaks" or all the "anti-social elements" as a class, and while they didn't use gas chambers there is not a doubt in the world that many many of the camps of the Gulag were extermination camps, pure and simple, with slave-labor work of the harshest sort being the mechanism deliberately used. Parallels enough, it seems to me.
So, then, if Israel has no clearly defined borders, it is not to be recognized as a viable state under International Law. That's one of the four elements of a "state". Her hand should be called on defining the borders, or she should lose recognition of statehood by the international community. How come she gets to break all the rules the other countries have to follow?
Heck, I won't accept Israel as a Jewish state either. It goes against everything I believe in regarding equality of all people regardless of gender, religion, race, creed or national origin. No other state bases its citizenship on the stupid terms Israel does. Wipe you out? So you actually believe homemade pea-shooters (10 " diameter) carried on donkey carts and with a limited budget is going to be a match for the world's most sophisticated U.S. made weaponry with Uranium and unlimited USD?
Great Journalism!!! Interview a bunch of drunk 18 year old students studying abroad for the year and then act all "horrified" by what they say…
Wouldn't it be great if the Stl Jewish Light talked about Ein Hawd and Deir Yassin once in a while. You have to wonder how far the American Zionist establishment would go if they were this candid. Otherwise it's gradually dawning on me that you're bragging. You're glad those villages were cleansed, even if they were "friendly." Because this all about the Jewish majority state, and the more gentiles gone, the better. You know the 1982, 2006, 2009 wars were Israel's choice, and the latest escalation in violence has always been Israel's choice as well. No one can use violence in return or they're genocidal. All Palestinians are either killers, would-be killers, or peaceful until the final apocalyptic war, even though almost all villages had minimal to no defense. By engaging with informed anti-Zionists, all you can do is give us a window to how depraved you are when you try to be honest. And the yishuv wasn't so threatened in the first half of '48 the Haganah couldn't spare a few sieges of its own.
These thugs are a problem – but they are not legislated by the state as is the case in the GCC countries, nor are you talking about a mentality representative of the Jewish people and Haskallah. Face it, Muslim's don't have haskallah, and equivalence about a trully minority position in Judaism, and the majority of Islam which is chauvinistic, and sexist, is bullshit. You're producing chicken-poop mate.
Haredi women are not "required" to do anything. No one threatens or beats them into it. There are a few lunatics that try to take over busing in Israel, but the exception proves the case. To suggest there is even a parallel between the freedom's enjoyed by women in Israel, and the freedom's not enjoyed by women in the rest of the Muslim world reveals gaping ignorance. The wigs are now dowdy – and they are a perfec adaptation to modernity. Precisely what Jews are good at, and Muslims can't get their head around. So it's not hair hate, its finding a perfect balance. The day these women refuse to wear a wig, their husbands will be helpless, and the community won't be able to do anything. If any hareidy vigilante dares to raise his hand against such a women, he'll get a beating the likes of which he will never forget. I hope you rest sincere in your critique and admit that your parallel is a sheer fallacy.
Andrew, I fail to see how the regretful overinvestment in force by the State of Israel is "bragging", when like all natives and long-term residents, I have to deal with damage to my once and future neighbors, while you sign me up for governance by the autocrats currently making a hellhole of Gaza. If you can't see the tragic reality on the ground, you suffer from the kind of positivism that blithely whistles in the dark regarding the Jew-friendliness of a future Palestinian government of Israel. I'm far more familiar with the mixed Arab-Jewish Left than you, and I can tell you how efficiently it was done to death by the PFLP's decision to strike mainly at poor Moroccan Jews in Israel. The mobilization for war will be extensive enough that private links will be overwhelmed, as in Lebanon. So you are on the other side–fine. I'll remember how you lured my neighbors to their doom with your promise of "all of Palestine in place of Israel, and the Jews are dogs", if it comes to that. A reason to hate, instead of simple contempt for your simple solution.
Once again you make the logical leap from enjoying ethnic supremacy to being ruled over by reactionaries. Hamas doesn't even want a one state solution. They're not trying the subterfuge you rave about. And after ruling out every solution except dragging the status quo to its foreseeable end, you now blame those who happen to notice your ideology mandates perpetual war until the demographics are acceptable. Ironically, the end result of all your self-defense may be to lose your country just the same to mother nature, and this is why I don't take seriously your regret over Deir Yassin and Sheik Muwannis. There's no reason to believe all Palestinians disarming and accepting Israel as a Jewish state would stop the attacks on them. If they want no violence they're supposed to go away and forget about Palestine. It's no shirt off my back, you want to blame me for their failure to do.
"Israel will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, as it obliterated others before it."–Hamas Charter. Am I insane, or are you? I think it is you, who discount the written words of Hamas. Certainly it is as valid as all of these Ben-Gurion quotes. You ascribe a non-existent malice to Zionism while absolving Hamas, and your projection of "all Jews disarming and accepting an Islamic state", knowing that that would bring dhimmitude and slavery, onto the Jews as insufficient for Palestinians is patent. If the Palestinians inked a two-state solution, why would Hamas not follow it with Jihad until victory, as they did with Oslo? It is a pity, but I guess Palestinians are going to have to bet on the future under Israeli rule, as more of them try to GET IN to East Jerusalem, rather than Gaza Jihad and death. It's not MY fault they can't built a constructive nationalism.
Except Hamas doesn't have the British tutoring them in counterinsurgency, doesn't have the USA extending a huge line of credit on fighter jets, doesn't have France selling them nuclear technology. Like Norman Finkelstein pointed out, Israel devastated the Gaza strip with aerial bombs and not a single anti-aircraft was fired from below, because they don't have it. You cling to the premise that Hamas likes everyone being massacred from above. I don't think any of the people Phil met want to keep fighting a war they can't even bloody fight. You know what I meant by mother nature, right? Nobody said anything about you disarming. But then again, you don't really read what any one writes. Every thing is filtered through the prism of an Islamist-dhimmi conspiracy against you. It's malicious to say the Palestinians need to develop a better nationalism, considering the PLO had already accepted a rump state for several years when Israel invaded Beirut.
(cont'd) Here's an example of Hamas offering a two-state solution (please read the comments below before repeating their salient points). Considering there's no way to get conventional weapons, I think the ten year truce is just face saving. If 'Palestine' can live in peace, Hamas will be redundant. It took 38 years of occupation to make them widely accepted among Palestinians, after all. http://jta.org/news/article/2009/05/04/1004905/ha...
P.S. Every one who wrote the Hamas charter is dead. I don't think Israel would've gone too far if the Brits assassinated Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, Eshkol, Ben-Zvi, Begin, Sadeh, Dayan, Sharett, etc. etc. one after another.