Mike Desch, of Notre Dame, is in town for the annual meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. He told me about a neocon friend who said to him, "We [Israel] should have just pushed all the Arabs out in 1948, that was the answer."
Desch and I talked about the fact that David Ben-Gurion and recently Benny Morris have expressed the same attitude. I then brought up an idea I have heard from time to time: the great liberal democracy of the United States was built on genocide/ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans during the second half of the 19th century. At least one Israeli I know feels that they are excused--by western history--against similar criminal accusations against them in the 20th century.
Desch gave me a two-part response, one pragmatic, one moral.
If Israel had pushed out all the Palestinians in '48, it would have created two Lebanons on its border. One in Lebanon, one in Jordan. Imagine the trouble Israel would have if it had not just one society destabilized by refugees--Lebanon--but two.
Morally, he said, the whole idea of the Jewish state as proposed and ratified by U.N. Partition flowed from the Holocaust, the extermination of European Jews. What moral ground would there exist for Israel if it perpetrated such acts...
We didn't get into international law post-WW II, or Gaza. But you get the point.
"I've got mine!" "Never again!" will Israel worry about championing the rights of the oppressed and downtrodden.
Hitler, a feverish reader of cowboy and indian potboilers (Old Shatterhand's adventures), as a kid, justified his POV on that basis, and also on the later basis of "Who remembers the Armenians?" Nice to know some Jews justify Israeli activity over the years on the same basis, especially after the hangings at Nuremberg and progeny international laws regarding crimes against humanity, wars of aggression, etc. So where's the light to the gentiles? Seems more like intentional disregarding of gentile light for the darkness…. Bottom line, the world has learned nothing at the point in time if it does not see the core problem as viewing others as naturally sub par, compared to the viewer group. Feeling chosen over others for whatever reason is the recipe for inhumane evils.
Phil, all Israeli and ZIonist apologetics is based on four axioms. And maybe they aren't axioms, but here they are: 1. Israel Rocks! 2. Arabs Suck! Now, that's pretty self-evident, but this is where it gets tricky: 3. You Suck! And if they still don't buy it, you go all existential on their ass:http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2008/07/ho... 4. The Whole World Sucks! (or, inverted Panglossism) "America was founded by wiping out the Indians, (So why can't we wipe out the Palestinians?)" is a combo, a No.3 and a side of No.4. For a full explanation by the originator of this "Quartet" system, see: http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2008/07/ho...
I have thus far completely avoided complaining about the comment system. I will continue to use it without kvetching or retching, but I tell you this, Mondoweiss: It won't be easy!
And I ask you, does a Jew have anything to complain about in this Goldenah Medina when his spel-chek recognises kvetch? Yinglish is the kind of Zionism I could really get behind,( especially if I could push it off the roof)
Citizen, in this world of dizzying contradictions and absurd paradoxes, which threaten to wrest our tenuous hold on reality from us each and every day, there is one thing you can be sure of, a shibolleth to which you may cling: Neither Hitler, nor Eichmann, nor any of the ranking Nazis, no matter what their pretensions to culture, could play the Hammond organ.
This is sort of a test because, on the few occasions that I can even *see* comments in the past and have tried posting a couple, none have gotten through. So at any rate if this *does* get through here's to *continuing* to kvetch about it. So far as I can see the only advertised up-side is sorting replies, but all a person had to do before was note who he or she was responding to and, if specific, quote what they were responding to specifically. Hardly difficult with cut and paste. And with this system you often have to go back and re-read the post being responded to anyway because people *don't* quote what in particular they are responding to. A pathetic piece of geekdom junk is what this new comment system is, designed—and apparently succeeding to read some of the posts here—to get people to "subscribe" or whatever to it, for God knows what reasons that I'd bet they won't even tell you.
So, I was never moved by the Beach Boys? True. Who do you think can play the real piano? Do you prefer synthetic music? Please explain your comment. Thanks.
Is this your Hammond organ, or the real piano?
I expect Israelis to mention the Indians, but when Ameircan Jews justify wiping out the Palestinians because of America's treatment of its natives, I have to roll my eyes. If I'm to take the argument seriously, I have to believe that all Jews came to the United States to live as natives, and that no Jews were involved in, or profited from, the dispossesion of the Indians. And always implicit in the argument is that only white Protestant Christians were involved in, and profited from, the dispossession of the Indians, and naturally only their descendants are to be singled out for consant derision. A good message for the Israelis (and any of their allies) is that an American wrong does not put Americans of any era on the hook for supporting Israel's actions philosophically, materially, financially or in any other way. Americans have enough to deal with, without having Israel's sins heaped on us.
I don't really buy Desch's arguments. Pragmatically speaking, two Lebanons on the borders of Israel would probably be easier to deal with than the situation in the occupied territories today. The task would then be one of allowing and encouraging those populations to stabilize and establish functional states within their own borders. The moral argument, meanwhile, ignores the pre-Holocaust portion of the movement towards the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine (the Balfour Declaration, etc.). The Holocaust certainly gave a strong impetus to finally do something about it, but the intention had been there for some time. There is actually a legitimate historical parallel between the European colonists conquering the American tribes and the European Jews invading Palestine to establish Israel. BUT! The post-WW2 world is not the same as the world of 1492 or 1776 or even 1880. We now have international law and standards of universal human rights did not exist during the establishment and spread of the USA across North America. We cannot go back in time and undo all the conquests of the past; we are not going to give America back to the native tribes, nor Australia to the aborigines; nor do reasonable proponents of a sovereign Palestinian state suggest that the Jews of Israel should pack their bags and go back to Europe. But the wrongs of the past are no excuse for wrongs in the present, and to argue otherwise is a dangerous path for the Israelis to go down, considering the genocides and other crimes documented in the Tanakh. Do the massacres committed by the Israelites justify the Holocaust? Do we really want to open that can of worms?
Jordan was destabilized but returned to stability via a genocide of the Palestinians. Or did you forget black september?
Amen.
Ali Baba, don't you know? There could have been no genocide in Jordan. The Palestinian population is increasing there. So naturally, we can't ever surmise King Hussein might've attempted to eliminate all Palestinian refugees in his dominion.
It works everytime!
What is the point of your long-winded post? That past injustices don't justify current crimes…or that they do?
Your history is really faulty. Jordan defeated a PLO coup. There was no genocide. Apparently, you are confusing Jordanian and Israeli history.
Stalin purged all Jews from the Soviet leadership and no, he wasn't Jewish.
Here we go with the Indian excuse again. Let's roll out the statistics — once again: There are one thousand (1000!) times as many Palestinians per square mile in what is left of their territories as there were Indians in the 1850s American Midwest. American Indians were semi-nomadic hunter gatherers who mostly attached them selves to no particular plot of land. The Palestinians live (lived?) in a modern economy complete with roads, schools, town centers, shopping centers, factories, farms and orchards. Wikipedia world population density chart pegs Palestinian territories at 14 out of 238. Add 1850 American Indians to the chart and their territory would come in at 237 out of 239, just ahead of the Falkland Islands and Greenland..
'There is actually a legitimate historical parallel between the European colonists conquering the American tribes and the European Jews invading Palestine to establish Israel. BUT! The post-WW2 world is not the same as the world of 1492 or 1776 or even 1880. We now have international law and standards of universal human rights did not exist during the establishment and spread of the USA across North America' Exactly. Too late Israel – bad luck, stiff shit etc. The rest of us sitting in air-conditioned colonial comfort two hundred or more years after the sins of our forefathers must seem to Eretz Israelers the acme of hypocrisy, but the fact is all that happened under the ancien regime, which a minor skirmish called WW1 fatally wounded and it's successor killed off altogether. The UN was set up partly to negotiate this post-colonial world full of nascent self-determination, but right from the outset there was this niggling exception, one driven by sympathy and not a little guilt, of the Jewish question. The main problem with the idea of allowing one last landgrab was that, while three were some claims of Jewish connection with the land, these were dwarfed by those of the native resident population, who should always by rights have been the beneficiaries of any self-determination in that part of the world. Watching it unfold in so ugly a fashion for so long is an uncomfortable window into what our own forebears' arrogant exceptionalism must have been like, but that's no reason for us to accept having a recrudescence of 19th century racial imperialism advance under our good auspices.
Look, I just think a whole lot of tsimmes, sturm, and dreck could have been avoided if Hitler had taken organ lessons. Instead, he oil-painted. Case closed!
I ain't subscribing to nothin until the Statute of Limitations runs out.
See the problem with the "you wiped out the Indians" schtick is that Zionists end up arguing against any form of social or political justice, cause they (the ZIonists) haven't yet made full use of injustice and force, and it's unfair to ask them to do so! Under that system, you can't criticise the ZIonist until they methodically gas and machine gun a couple million people, or wipe out entire peoples.
Thors, I am going to report that comment as anti-Semitic. And you know damn well that it is that, and nothing more.
The relationship between the American settlers and the Indians is important. We are beneficiaries of the displacement of the Indians. And, the vast majority of individuals that settled in the New World were simple working people, not particularly devious or malicious, maybe many were opportunistic. In 1948 the justification for displacement was arguably for necessity. In 2009, that's not the case.
I know that lots of Jews make this claim but we can now look at the records, and the party seems to have become more Jewish at the upper ranks after the purges not less.
You can take it up with some of the scholars that have written extensively about the issue.
I just reported you for a false and libelous accusation of anti-Semitism:
The scholarly mainstream like Slezkine and Harshav seems to agree with me. The disproportionate terrorism, violence, and criminality of pre-Revolutionary Russian Jews is quite well documented. Authors like Sholem Aleichem wrote quite a few short stories relating to such behavior.
I just reported you for justifying genocide. There simply was no justification for ethnically cleansing Palestinians except that fanatic Jewish racists were unwilling to live on terms of mutual respect and equality with the native Palestinian population. Rafael Medoff supports this conclusion in his book Baksheesh Diplomacy: Second Great Zionist Fraud.
This analogy is silly, for reasons other commenters have noted. American Indians are citizens and have the same civil rights as anyone else. If Israel dealt with native occupants of the land they seized as we did, then they would have already have reached a single state solution.
The Holocaust was not a moral justification for stealing Palestine. It was a response to Jewish financial criminality, Jewish white slaving, Jewish radical violence, Jewish sabotage, Jewish targeted assassinations (including the three defining political murders in Russian history), Jewish mass murder, Jewish ethnic cleansing and Jewish genocide. Without this context, discussing the Holocaust is meaningless: Haaretz Confirms: Two Separate Holocausts.
I'm not endorsing Thors' post, but just so you know Stalin purged Jews *after* the mass murders of the 1930s, in which some Jews, unfortuantely, had played prominent roles. If you had asked a Nazi in the late 30's why they were putting the Jews in concentration camps he might have given a similar justification. Of course, the deeds of Communist Jews is no moral justification for the Holocaust, any more than the Holocaust is moral justification for the treatment of the Palestinians. Both, however, were *used* as justification.
I have trouble with this argument. It seems to say that the European displacement/dismemberment of Indian societies (note the plural, there were hundreds at least) in North America was justified or at least morally "complicated." But the numbers don't matter. The vast majority of Indian societies were wiped out, put in camps, and treated in beastly fashion in any number of ways. It is fair to say that the overall effect was genocidal in scope. Comparisons with Palestine/Israel are only useful as a way to understand what happened then or now. It is foolish and invalid to use such comparisons to justify one or the other events. From any reasonable moral standpoint, what happened in North America and in Palestine are beyond the pale. Both should be condemned and both should be made right. From a moral standpoint, the crime against the native populations of North America should be recognized and Indian societies should be compensated and treated as equals (which I do not believe they are). The same goes for the situation in Palestine. Because the US has materially aided Israel's dispossession of the Palestinians and the violence against them, we should be bound to do what we can to create justice there and to withdraw military support as well as any other assistance that sustains the occupation.
Desch and I talked about the fact that David Ben-Gurion and recently Benny Morris have expressed the same attitude. This is factually inaccurate.He may have toyed with the idea, but Ben-Gurion did not advocate any such thing. As Benny Morris noted in the 2004 Ha'aretz interview conducted by Ari Shavit, he faulted Ben-Gurion for not following through with the complete ethnic cleansing of all Palestinian Arabs.
You deleted this just to repost it? Well it is accurate except for one minor amendment, add imagined to the start of that laundry list.
David, Israeli Arabs are citizens and have been so since 1948. They also received full rights in 1966 when the military administration was lifted (although they did, for example, have the right to vote before then). By way of contrast, native Americans were only granted citizenship in 1924 – some 148 years after US independence and 60 years after the emancipation of the slaves.
Thanks for that. I didn't mean to imply Jews were uninvolved in Stalin's purges, only that it wasn't run by Jews qua Jews and that if it was how could they be purged? This is something Ed and Thors/Martillo overlook when they take Nazi paranoia at its word. Hitler often talked about the brutality of the bolsheviks, a cursory (can you blame me) view of his speeches would show.
The history of the various native american peoples is a study, tribe by tribe, context by context. The important question for me posed to dissenters is the question of blame. Some Native American tribes and bands, sought to remove European residents. Is that genocide as well? Native American tribes and bands fought with each, driving them out. the majority of deaths of Native Americans was from disease INADVERTENTLY exposing them to pathogens that they had never been exposed to and had no immunity to. Its the same as when a flu migrates from Hong Kong to the Europe. There were intentionally genocidal actions by some settlers, but the mass death of Indians was far more inadvertent than intentional. The common argument is that both Indians and Palestinians have alligned around the argument "we were always here", when both turn out to have been only relatively true, and ultimately untrue. An example in North America is the Lakota, that claim to have "always lived in the western great plains" when the fact is that the majority of Lakota formed up as a tribe from further east (Illinois/Iowa), but in a domino fashion migrated west and then drove other tribes west as well. And, there are similarities between the Indian description of "traditional" society and the Jewish, in that they were primarily tribal (community, "my wife is my home" rather "this place is my home") and Jewish community was primarily tribal and migratory more than place based. The big change for Israel, as the embodiment of the Jewish national state, is that it also has abandoned the social glues of migratory/ wandering orientation, in favor of either the neo-fascist "we were always there, you weren't" nationalist or the democratic "all have equal rights under the law" but within a geographic jurisdiction.
I was trying to fix the stupid link: http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2009/05/haaretz-confirm... . It is simply Jewish racism to deny the long history of Jewish criminality and violence in E. Europe. Without this history, it becomes impossible to understand Jewish criminality and subversion in the USA (both on behalf of the Soviet Union and the State of Israel) or Zionist genocidalism in the ME.
The correct link is http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2009/06/from-epistemic-... .
JES, you know damned well that Palestinian citizens of The Jewish State do not have the same rights as Jewish citizens of The Jewish State. And even you insist on calling them by a term the majority of them dislike.
There's not a whole lot to work with here.
Well, what do you know, Thors, (or is it Joachim? How many names do you post under, schmendrick?) your comment got deleted. Gosh, I wonder why. Now, Thors-Joachim-Martini-Provalone, why don't you take all that "primary documentation" ("documentation"? At any rate, I bet you've got lots certification) and e-mail to Phil Weiss? Please, go ahead. How else can you easily prove that you are right, and not just afflicted with a not-very-original form of anti-semitism? Actually, you should try to sell it on Craigslist. It's authentic, 1930's style stuff, personally given to you by Father Coughlin and Pat Buchanan, and they got it from Henry Ford and Linbergh. It's the real McCoy! I can't resent you for it. Just hearing it makes me feel young again!
I just reported you for justifying genocide. Good work, Thors, baby! Keep it up! "And, the vast majority of individuals that settled in the New World were simple working people" Yeah Witty, that's what indentured servitude was all about. For God's sake Witty, there's no need to show everyone you know less about your own country then you do about Israel.
He keeps on saying they have "full rights". Maybe JES could enlighten us on precisely what rights are guaranteed to Israeli "citizens" JES, it's real easy to "guarantee rights" in a country that has NO EXPLICATED RIGHTS IN ITS NON-EXISTENT CONSTITUTION!!! So please, JES, what are the "rights" of everyone in Israel? Please let us know.
"Some Native American tribes and bands, sought to remove European residents. Is that genocide as well?" Holy shit, are you stupid or just dense? Unbelievable! Gee Thors, I will have to look more closely at your contentions. If Witty is any guide, they all may be true!
Who wants to start a pool on how long the comments section lasts? I give 5 to 12 that they will end up eliminating it within 60 days. Who's on?
Hmm that would really suck. Please Phil, check out Richard Silverstein's solution: http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2005...
But it's hard to argue with Witty's other observations in that comment; especially that each tribe related with the incoming whites differently, e.g., the early trailblazers over the Louisiana Purchase area, the trappers who followed the Indian trails and eventually mapped it out in their heads by use of natural land markers, the condition precedent to later settling–some tribes traded with the trappers, others always tried to kill them.