Seham writes:
In the last 48 hours:
Palestinian home and olive tree destroyed by settlers in At-Tuwani
Israelis On Horseback In West Bank Fire Raid
Israeli forces raid Bil’in, arrest member of Popular Committee
VIDEO: Another invasion of Bil‘in – 5:30 am Sunday 19 July
Group intervenes on behalf of boy held without charge since 2008
Report: Israel arrested 12,000 Palestinian women since 1967
IDF prevents Palestinian youth from trip to sea
I prefer being given religious reasons for why Israel gets to occupy the Palestinians, it’s a bit less gross than hearing Israel defended on the basis of it being a democracy. Because really, if you’re a Palestinian being oppressed and occupied it doesn’t matter whether it’s being done by a democracy, a military junta or a dictatorship–it’s all the same. Decades of Israeli democracy never brought an end to the land theft, war crimes, illegal detentions, collective punishment, starvation or extra-judicial assassinations.
Related posts:
- Now That the Religious Right Is History, Let’s Talk About the Religious Left (Which Claims to be Secular)
- Specter hops from religious right’s party to the religious left’s
- Seham: Two cheers for the American Jews making pilgrimages to Palestine
- Seham: How can I be positive when I see the conditions of Palestinian life right now?
- Seham: What Palestinians say is meaningless unless a Jew of conscience signs off on it first (ugh)
{ 88 comments }
It matters. If you believe in self-governance, then you support a democratic form, in Israel and in Palestine. You work for clarity, for reason, for integration, for mutual acceptance.
What the hell are you talking about Witty? Can you speak like a normal human being anymore? You keep masking the crimes of Zionism with all that pretentious bullshit verbiage. "You work for clarity, for reason, for integration, for mutual acceptance." Enlighten us. Since you're an expert in clarity and integration and mutual acceptance. Tell us how this should go about and what each side has to do to blah blah blah blah blah blah. And are you saying the Palestinians oppressed by the Occupation should accept they are being oppressed by a Jewish democracy? What fucking difference does it make, Witty? That's the point. It doesn't make any fucking difference. Palestinians have no rights. Zionism institutionalizes the dehumanization of Palestinians. Everything you say is meaningless. You don't even talk about the issues. You keep side-stepping everything and just regurgitating the same garbage hasbara over and over. Fuck you.
Please don't take the claim of being democratic too seriously. Democratic is often a code for a claim to distinguish a population that claims to be civilized from one that the alleged civilized population considers barbaric. The German Nazis often argued that they were democratic. After they stripped the franchise from those considered racially unfit, they often held plebiscites. Eastern European fascists were generally far less opposed to democratic forms that those of Central and Western Europe. Please read Jewish Political Diversity at the Fin de Siècle (Nineteenth Century). Note that I did not identify any of the political elites as democratic although the Bundists were generally less opposed than the others.
Report: Israel arrested 12,000 Palestinian women since 1967. That is less than 300 per year. Prostitution? Either the have a very small problem or the police are lax.
The entire anti-religious (other than Judaism) left-liberal establishment wants to hear that the problem is religion. It allows it to scapegoat religion in general, religion as an entity, for the fascist behavior of the Jewish establishment, with whom the left-liberals routinely collaborate, and have since the Communist Revolution financed in part by mainstream Jewish American liberals like banker Jacob Schiff. Crass materialist “Christians” on the Right like G.W. Bush go through elaborate psychological rationales for their collaboration with anti-Christian Judeofascists, and so do crass materialists in the liberal establishment. The only difference is that each should theoretically feel guilty for different reasons: the former, because they are betraying Christianity; the latter, because they are betraying humanity. Of course, most establishment atheist-materialists like these don’t feel guilty at all because they are utterly without conscience, only adopting an affectation of conscience between sips of lattes.
80 years of Arab violence and rejectionism. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB12469368242390403... "For over 80 years, as Morris notes, Palestinians have "persuasively demonstrated" that they do not want any Jewish state in the region, regardless of the boundaries, and regardless of the settlement policy pursued by this Israeli government or that one. The Palestinian rejection of any Jewish state has not merely been the recurring theme of the conflict, but the dominant one. Thus, in the 1930s, the Palestinians rejected a proposed two-state solution that would have created a Jewish state in less than 20 percent of Palestine. In the 1940s, the Palestinians rejected the United Nations partition plan which created a Jewish state on less than half of the arable land in Palestine.
From 1948 to 1967, when Israel had no presence in Gaza, the West Bank or East Jerusalem, the Arabs created no Palestinian state. After the 1967 war, when Israel accepted the land-for-peace formulation in UN Resolution 242, the Arab world, including the Palestinians, rejected it. In 2000, when Israel supported a plan put forth by President Clinton that would have created an independent Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem comprising all of Gaza and virtually all of the West Bank, the Palestinians rejected this too, instead commencing a campaign of bombings that left 1,100 Israelis dead and, not incidentally, 4,000 Palestinians dead as well."
dhummi, yawn. the hasbara manual has been updated since last your talking points were used. please see this blog for more details.
Many nasty sovereign entities over history believed in their own self-governance. So have many nasty individuals, Ed Gein, Charles Manson, Leopold and Lobe (sic?), Jeffrey Dahmer; every serial killer who ever lived, just to make the point. Madoff too. No one is an island, as the English poem goes, each is part of the Main. No right is unlimited. That's like Law 101 hornbook, first page. And on the same page: All rights come with responsibilities.
Israel has been on the top of the list for white goy slavery for decades. Any reader can easily check this out on the internet.
Yep. Frat rats have always been like that. The yous have outdone the old WASPs.
129 years of Jewish colonialism and ethnic cleansing. It's all on the record.
The arab states never had the leverage during that time at the UN to create a Palestinian state; they still don't. They have no Veto like the big guys. Further, arabs are citizens of their respective arab states; all arabs don't look or act alike. Compare Jewish diaspora and Israel as to much more uniform actions.
After the 1967 war, when Israel accepted the land-for-peace formulation in UN Resolution 242 Bullshit. Never Happened.: Google it. And stop copying IFM talking points and dropping them here.
Decades of Israeli democracy never brought an end to the land theft, war crimes, illegal detentions, collective punishment, starvation or extra-judicial assassinations. Good point, Seham.
They didn't need leverage. They had the land. They could simply have given it the local Arabs and let them declare a nation. Since such a nation was already part of the U.N. partition plan, the U.N. had already approved it. Furthermore, the Arabs in Palestine were never members of a separate state. They have been part of this empire or that since they showed up.
Israel is the most democratic country in the world. They have proportional representation. In the USA if 10% of the voters, uniformly scattered, support a party, they win zero elections and get zero representation. In Israel if 10% of the voters, uniformly scattered, support a party, they get 10% of the Knesset. That is why there have been Arab MPs in every Knesset since Israel's founding. Just because Israel (along with every other nation in the world) doesn't give non-citizens the same rights as citizens doesn't mean it isn't democratic.
the point being that democracy is meaningless if the people that participate in it opt to continue to oppress and subjugate people, thom. a look at how good arab-israelis have it. i know, i know, they should just be grateful that the women are allowed to wear bikinis in israel and all that stuff. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1082965.html http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1082965.html http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1082965.html http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1082965.html http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1082965.html
Ooh, its a twofer! Racist and sexist. What a fine example of Zionist thinking.
The Palestinian leadership was essentially crippled by a combination of Zionist targeted assassinations and British brutality between 36-48. Then the mostly rural population of the West Bank had to deal with the refugees, who had been stripped of all their movable and immovable assets by racist murderous genocidal Zionist invaders, interlopers, and thieves. Obviously, the rational priority for the Arab and Islamic world was regrouping and modernization in order to gather the strength to destroy the Zionist (ethnic Ashkenazi Nazi) infestation in accord with Nuremberg Law, International Humanitarian Law, and the International Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. To create a Palestinian state after the 47-48 Zionist genocide would not have solved the problem of the refugees and would only have provided Zionists with a fig leaf for the atrocities and heinous crimes of the previous 50 years of Zionist invasion and aggression.
By the time Palestinians were beginning to recover, Zionists launched a criminal aggressive war to conquer the remnant of Palestine and began subjecting Palestinians to a new round of ethnic cleansing and genocide: Summary: Holocaust and Ashkenazi Genocidalism. If the USA had fulfilled its international obligations by aiding Palestinians instead of subsidizing Zionist criminals, the US and world economies almost certainly would not be in a shambles today: Herzl and Normalizing Jewish Power.
Indeed. There is a coarseness, a callous soullessness internalized by the atheist-materialist set — be they money-worshippers, government worshippers, Judeofascists or nihilists. It’s as if their humanity gets turned off, and they become mere replicants, going through the motions of human existence, but clouded in deceit, artifice and superficiality. Tom Wolfe did a good job skewering these post-modernist, shark-like creatures and their core emptiness in Bonfire of the Vanities, although he really only scratched the surface of the depths of their sickness and depravity.
Don't you understand? The absence of the modifier "the" in the English version of the Resolution allows Israel to keep taking more and more land while demanding "peace". Peace is defined as complete acquiescence to the continual dispossession of the Palestinians. Doesn't make any sense? Of course not, but thats hasbara for you.
And what has that to do with the fact that only 12,000 palestinian prostitutes have been arrested in over 40 years?
Facts and truth bore you? Too bad.
By your reasoning then Apartheid South Africa was likewise "democratic". If the indigenous peoples are treated as non-citizens by the government that rules over them, then that government is NOT being democratic.
Excuses, excuses. The truth is that the Arabs didn't care about the Palestinians and still don't. To the rest of the Arab and Muslim world they are a vehicle for attacking Israel, nothing more. The Palestinians didn't think of themselves as a single people (as opposed to Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians, and just Arabs) until after the 6-day war.
Palestinians didn't want foreign immigrants to set up a state and displace them. In the last two centuries Palestinians accepted settlers and/or refugees who were Armenian, Circassian, Bukhari, Bosnian, Assyrian,German, and American, among others. None of these claimed ancestral ownership of the land on the basis of being distantly related to the religion of one of several civilizations that resided in the land millenia previously or tried to set up their own state at the expense of the people already there. If Druids had immigrated and then tried to set up their own state at the expense of everyone else there the Druids would have been opposed too. OK, there's some interesting buzz out of Israel regarding disgruntlement in the Negev over groups of resettled Arab collaborators, African refugees, and black American syncretic "Hebrews" who are becoming prominent in their numbers. Jewish Israelis are not amused by these people. If these odd new settlers started publicly claiming the land for their own future state with plans for displacement of the Jews, – well, the reaction of the Israelis might give a clue as to how it was that Palestinians objected to immigrants claiming the land for their own state.
Israel has a parliamentary system just like Britain and Canada and a bunch of other former British colonies. Big deal. What's your point? That the parliamentary system trumps ours for democracy?
Pretty funny coincidence, that "criminal aggressive war" in which the Arab armies of four nations were massing on the borders, swearing to destroy Israel and drive the Jews into the sea, and had called up half a million troops to do it. That's what I hate about the anti-Israeli forces. Before the war they are all macho about how they are going to exterminate the Jews, then when they get their asses handed to them suddenly, they are all "invasion, what invasion, we were just going for a heavily armed stroll on the border, after kicking out the U.N. peacekeepers and prematurely celebrating our imminent extermination of the Jews in Israel when for no reason the Jews attacked." Not bad enough you are genocidal maniacs, but you are sore losers as well. You are pathetic.
Facts and truth don't apply to you? The record shows nothing about ethnic cleansing 120 years ago. As for colony, mere immagration.
Bullshit. It did happen. But that makes your poor little head spin too much.
The Jews had all the advantages that come with being networked to the Western Goy establishment and the USSR establishment at the time in question. The arabs have never had such an advantage; this has always translated into 1st World versus 3rd World–as much as the Jews rail against the Goy West, or Stalin's hand, they have always taken advantage that comes with both. The Arabs had all they could do to stay intact in the regions the 1st world blue inked across the Middle East since WW1. WW2's aftermath, that is, the Nuremberg trials for new crimes against Humanity render Israel a rogue state. To say otherwise is to agree with Goering: Might makes right. Happy?
Neither did it stop 129 years of Arab terrorism.
It did happen. If you had a head it would be spinning.
I do agree with you that Israel has a more representative system than the USA's practically speaking two-party either/or system. It more directly shows the breath of the populace; on the other hand, despite this USA flaw in proportional representation, the USA somehow manages to give ALL its citizen much better core civil rights protection. Why is that, Thom? How can a de facto two party system reap more equality before the Law than a coalition system reflecting many political parties? I submit it's because the framework of the USA law is egalitarian, while the framework of Israel is racist.
Obviously, you have not spent much time among Arabs or Muslims. The theft of Palestine is an injustice that practically all Muslims feel intensely without even knowing the history of Jewish criminality and atrocities in Europe and the Czarist Empire since the 1850s. However Palestinians may have viewed themselves, as the native population and the majority, Palestinians had the right of democratic self-determination by US and International Legal Principles. Zionists by any reasonable standard are racist, murderous, genocidal invader, interlopers, thieves and usurpers, who have consistently lied and misrepresented themselves to Americans. Because Zionists have manipulated the USA into expending about $6 trillion dollars (the immediate whole in the US economy) under false pretenses, patriotic Americans should open a discussion of the most efficient way to clawback these funds from American, International, and Israeli fraudsters.
As soon as the Zionist leadership fraudulently claimed to accept the 1947 Partition Proposal, they began ethnic cleansing of the native population with the assumption that important media Jews would cover up Zionist crimes just as the NY Times covered up Jewish Bolshevik crimes during the 1920s. Arab states responded to Zionist crimes, atrocities, ethnic cleansing and genocidalism in a legitimate humanitarian intervention as they properly announced. The USA should have joined with the Arab armies to remove the criminal Zionist (ethnic Ashkenazi Nazi) infestation, The political and economic state of the world would be far less dangerous today. Unfortunately Truman surrendered to the Zionist plutocracy and intelligentsia (the cacocracy) and introduced Shabbesgoyism into the US political system with the result that today the USA has become an intimidated and dependant state within the Zionist imperial system.
Do you have any figures on prostitution rates amongst Palestinian women, bluebeard? Why don't you do that before you go rambling on about nothing. It wouldn't mean a whole lot anyway, but it'd be better than what you've got now…
Of course he doesn't. He's implying that the 12,000 Palestinian women arrested by Israel were all prostitutes. Give him a chance and I'm sure that he'll claim that all the Palestinian men arrested by Israel were pimps. He's a vulgar racist.
Not "129 years of Arab terrorism" but "129 years of jewnazi barbarism"….
Actually, the Israeli system gives much more weight to most fringe parties than their support in the population would warrant, since in order to control a majority of Knesset seats a major party often has to enter into a coalition with fringe minor parties and acquiesce to some of their demands. This is actually anti-democratic, as the voice of the few on some issues overrules the voice of the many. I use the term "most" fringe parties rather than all because for all of Israel's history it has never had a coalition government that included the Arab parties. Of course Arab parties were not allowed to form until the 1990s, a good 40 years after Israel's formation (and the Arab Israeli citizens themselves were only freed of Israeli military rule in 1966.) Arab parties have never been asked to help form a coalition government in Israel by any major Israeli party, due to the bigotry that places Jewish concerns well above Arab ones. In fact, during the Likud incitement against Rabin before his assassination, it was wildly bandied about that Rabin was not really the true prime minister of Israel because his path to power relied on the votes of some non-Jewish Arab citizens. It was equivalent to US racists who dismiss the voters' choice of a candidate, claiming that if you eliminate the votes of blacks, the other candidate would have won.
Funny thing, that missing "the". The Soviets tried to get it put in, the Americans said "no". It is not a coincidence or an oversight, it was a debated point. Debated for exactly this reason. Because the agreed upon resolution was that the land to be handed over depended on what the parties agreed, it was not automatic. Maybe they didn't think that the Arabs would be this intransigent about making peace. The Palestinians have a long history of turning down offers and fighting instead, only to end up worse off than if they had taken the offer. They "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity" -Abba Eban. Hate to break it to you, but when you are at war, like the Palestinians are at war with the Israelis, the people you are at war with are probably going to do warlike things to you until you make peace. In other words, until a deal is agreed to by both sides, the Israelis are free to keep settling. The Palestinians probably should have thought of that before turning down Gaza, 97% of the West Bank, and East Jerusalem over the issue of an unlimited right of return to Israel, which anyone who knows about the situation knows is never, ever going to be granted.
Israel's system is not "just like Britain and Canada". In both Britain and Canada, the members of parliament are elected by geographic regions, like Congress in the U.S. If you have 10% of the vote in each of these areas (called consituancies) in the UK. You get no representation in the British Parliament. In Israel, you vote for the party, not in a separate area. So, if you have 10% of the vote, your party gets 10% of the Knesset seats, even if your vote isn't concentrated in one area. That also means that there is no way to gerrymander a "safe" district for one party or another. The upside of this is that much smaller minorities are represented. The downside is that instead of having two major parties, you get coalition governments which produces instability as the minor parties in a ruling coalition have to be placated or they leave. I didn't say it was better, just more democratic (rule by vote) as opposed to the US and the UK which are more republican (representatives of the people rule, not the people directly). Truth is there are no pure democracies, democracy is a system in which the people vote on everything, every law, etc. Athens tried that (though only about 10% of the population could vote).
Dershowitz does this too. He tries to hold a monopoly on the two-state solution, on the meaning of "human rights", indeed on the definitions of just about everything in greater academic and political discourse, and then as they pertain to the Israel-Palestine issue. Then he lords over you the fact that you'll find multiple discrepancies in his definitions, and uses that to declare you an enemy of the two-state solution, of human rights, of democracy, et cetera. Richard's lines "If you believe in self-governance, then you support a democratic form…" and "You work for clarity, for reason, for integration, for mutual acceptance" are pretty much right out of the Alan Dershowitz, Esquire playbook. The curious part is that Richard doesn't make the requisite follow-ups, declaring us all enemies of "mutual acceptance", "integration", "reason", and so on. Perhaps this is because on the MondoWeiss forum, he's dealing with a considerably more well-informed and probably more intelligent audience than those his spiritual leader usually proselytizes to. That and, of course, we all have more time to refute his nonsense than a one-hour lecture with a thirty-minute Q&A which is likely to be shut down for "security reasons".
The entire anti-religious (other than Judaism) left-liberal establishment… Ed, if your opinions were mainstream, you'd get flamed as badly as RW.
Anti-Zionist parties are legally barred from running. Anti-American parties aren't. They won't win, of course, but they can run.
"…the people you are at war with are probably going to do warlike things to you until you make peace." Wonderful, you've just justified everything that the Nazis did to the Jews before and during WWII with a line like that. After all, some Jews were at war with Germany, so I guess they just got what they deserved, right? What a sorry excuse for an argument. Or do you only apply this disgusting standard to Palestinians? Yet another example of that sterling double standard that Zionists always apply.? I do commend you however on the honesty of your admission that Israeli settlements are a form of war that Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinians. This has been going on since '67 and the Palestinians in the West Bank didn't react violently for nearly 20 years. What was your comment, again? "When you are at war,.. the people you are at war with are probably going to do warlike things to you until you make peace. " I suppose that means that you totally understand how, after 20 years of Israel making war on the Palestinians through occupation and settlements, some Palestinians reacted with violence and suicide bombs. Or did I just point out another double standard of yours? Israelis are justified in continuing to war against Palestinians but the Palestinians don't have any right to "war" back at them. As for your "generous offer" hasbara, even the Israeli negotiators admit that was merely a line of bull, that they would not have accepted the Israeli offer that was presented if the tables were turned, and that Barak was the one that called off the negotiations.
The USA doesn't do significantly better than Israel at giving its citizens core civil rights. On some issues it does, but Israel is better about civil rights for its citizens than most countries in the world. The framework of Israel is not racist. There are Jews there of every race and color. Israeli-Arabs and other non-Jewish citizens of Israel have equal rights. Though it is a bit unfair to the Jews that the Jews are required to serve in the IDF but the non-Jews aren't required to (though they can volunteer). A ranking of countries by level of freedom shows that Israel is the freest country in the Middle East, both politically and in terms of civil rights. This in a country that has experienced the equivalent of dozens of 9/11 attacks in just the last 10 years. How free would the U.S. be now if the 9/11 attacks were a continuing event, rather than one incident? http://www.mherrera.org/freedom.htm
Below is a footnote from Israel's Sacred Terrorism. And of course the Lebanese Army prevented the PLO from attacking Israel before the civil war. And no major Palestinian attacks against Israel ever originated from Syria, which was hostile to any PLO faction it did not sponsor. -At the end of 1953, the Egyptian administration of Gaza reported to the War Ministry in Cairo on arrests of infiltrators and actions to block their access routes to the border. At that same time police and army troops were employed in refugee camps attacked by Israel to disperse demonstrators asking for arms and protesting plans to settle Palestinian refugees in an area near Al Arish. A special civil guard force was created at the end of 1953 to control the Palestinian refugee camps. In 1954 this force was reinforced. In that year, the Egyptian representative in the Mixed Armistice Commission replied to a complaint by Israeli representative Arie Shalev in regard to infiltrations: "We are not sending them, and as far as we are concerned, you can kill them." http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/essays/rok...
Can someone please get dumb dhimmi to shut up – do you have any idea how many times these lies have be handled? I refuse to do it again, you're like the damn brown shirts at a rally.
And then there's the bizarre trope that Arafat didn't make a counter offer. Uh, was he supposed to offer Umm el-Fahm (i.e. taking that extra demography off their hands) or what?
Correct about the fringe parties, with one caveat, only the ones in or willing to join a ruling coalition. You are either misinformed or just a liar. Israel has had Arab parties right from the beginning. Even the very first Knesset had an Arab party, the Democratic List of Nazareth, which was in the coalition government. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_List_of_N... If you have a link to something that says there is a ban on Arabs forming political parties in Israel, aither before, during, or after the 1990s, then post it. So basically, because some extremists said some stupid stuff, you condemn Israel, the freest country in the Middle East. Nice.
The essential point you neglect to mention is that Jewish political parties have not included Arabs in a ruling coalition since then. Israelis Jews made a half-ass (read Thom’s link) effort in the early years, then shut Palestinians out. That was sixty years ago!
Jewish parties may knock-down drag-out compete amongst themselves, but they are utterly unified with respect to preventing Arab political power. Is this not racist? Readers, Palestinians are free to vote for Arab parties, but those parties are powerless to influence fundamental state policy. The fact that Palestinians can vote is just a fig leaf to cover the ugly reality that racism against Arabs is institutionalized throughout Israeli society. Read the Israeli press, especially Haaretz, to learn more about Israeli politics and society. Note that while Israeli political reporting and analysis about Israeli issues is far and away superior to European and (especially) American ‘efforts’, there is still a lot of bs to wade through. God gave you a brain and free will so that you can think and decide for yourself. Use it.
http://www.haaretz.com/
The Palestinians aren't indigenous any more than the potato is indigenous to Europe just because it grows there now. They aren't citizens, the Arabs that stayed in 1948 became citizens, the ones that left, didn't.
That’s a lie of course and you know it. Palestinians are the decendensts of the Hebrews, Canaanites and Philistines. They were there long before Israel existed. Just because a state was artificially erected around them doesn’t make them aliens.
And Arabs that were allowed to stay in 1948 have been citizens. Of course, if the other 800,000 had been allowed to stay, there probably would not be a state of Israel.
Gee, what a victory for civil rights, and how many jewish females have been arrested since 1967?
Yep. He barely scratched the surface. Same with his The Painted Word. Another Madoffesque enterprise.
And the Israeli Jews aren't indigenous just because they like a book written by L Ron Hubbard, oops, I mean anonymous ancient Jewish scribblers.
Israel ranks very low in terms of civil rights compared to any Western white country or the USA. You can't continually tell the American masses that Israel shares our values, and/ or Western Civilization's, when it obviously does not. Since the Middle East is comprised of countries nobody in the US or Europe has ever claimed is a worthy standard, why are you doing so? http://www.mherrera.org/freedom.htm BushCo did all it could to take away American civil rights, using 9/11 as an excuse; the neocons continue to chip away at our civil rights in the name of protection against "Islamofascism." Obama is not doing much about it. So I agree, BushCo did all it could to copy Israel' s terrible record on civil rights when it's record is compared to "white countries." I hate it here, as I hate it in Israel.
I am relying on my study of Israeli history from books on the subject, including Ian Lustick's, "Arab's in the Jewish State: Israel's Control of a National Minority",written in 1980. Lustick is an American professor of Jewish background (with an ability to read Hebrew) with a Ph.D. in political science from Berkeley. As your wikipedia entry states, the Democratic List of Nazareth was "sponsored" by Mapai (today's Labor Party). It was not an independent Arab party and it had no independent existence outside of election time. It was one of the "affiliated lists", as they were called, under the control of Mapai in this instance. They were merely vote catching devices for Mapai, and their lists were always subject to Zionist approval. From Lustick, page 112: "However, after 1948 the Arabs comprised one of the largest blocs of uncommitted votes in the new state. The Zionist parties competed for these votes in Knesset elections and later in Histadrut elections, BUT NOT BY OPENING UP THEIR RANKS TO ARAB MEMBERS and their associated institutions to Arab participation. Rather they sponsored " affiliated lists" of Arabs, lists supported and funded by the various Zionist parties and committed to their sponsors–The General Zionists, Herut,the Labor Party, etc. Nor have these lists maintained an independent institutional existence between campaigns." You obviously didn't understand the significance, or lack of same, of the "affiliated lists", otherwise you would not have attempted to call it an Arab party. You ought to read the book. Although outdated now, it is gives a good historical overview of the political treatment of Israel's minority citizens.
Richard Witty talks a lot about self-governance. If by this he means self-governance by tribe i think his definition is stuck in the last century.
The Christian Peace Makers Teams efforts to expose what is really going on for the Palestinians has been consistent and remarkable. Dear Friends Art and Peggy Gish and their work with CPT Art Gish http://www.cpt.org/participate/donate Peggy Gish and her work with CPT in Iraq http://www.cpt.org/participate/donate If you can afford please donate to CPT's work donate to CPT http://www.cpt.org/participate/donate
I'm engaging with new forms. My wife and I were examining the Chinese Terracotta Army exhibit at the Houston museum. They look fearsome, I said. Like HAMAS! What do they say about those with clay feet? I've forgotten much of what I learned about history, but I can still make the best martini in our assisted living community. If you're not busy being ANTI something, then you could already be FOR something, including a better world where our energy resources are conserved and where people of all colors can learn the meaning of kindness and Jewish superiority. NOT THAT WE'RE BETTER THAN ANYONE. It would be wrong to think that. Still, there are security issues. I say, let the Mossad decide everything, in conjunction with local custom and what's best for EVERYBODY. If Nasrallah were here, he'd probably punch me in the nose. Which is no way to make progress toward peace. Pine sap got all over everything today!! Thank you for reading my post! ..Richard Witty
1000 of those have never been charged and 400 are children. That's what's wrong.
I'm engaging with new forms. My wife and I were examining the Chinese Terracotta Army exhibit at the Houston museum. They look fearsome, I said. Like HAMAS! What do they say about those with clay feet? I've forgotten much of what I learned about history, but I can still make the best martini in our assisted living community. If you're not busy being ANTI something, then you could already be FOR something, including a better world where our energy resources are conserved and where people of all colors can learn the meaning of kindness and Jewish superiority. NOT THAT WE'RE BETTER THAN ANYONE. It would be wrong to think that. Still, there are security issues. I say, let the Mossad decide everything, in conjunction with local custom and what's best for EVERYBODY. If Nasrallah were here, he'd probably punch me in the nose. Which is no way to make progress toward peace. Pine sap got all over everything today. Thank you for reading my post! ..Richard Witty
You mean the US left-liberal establishment isn't Judeophile/philosemitic? Is that why 20% of Dems in the US Senate are Jewish Zionist? Is that why the Israel lobby has used the Democratic Party as its primary power base via guys like Joe Lieberman? Is that why national Democrats take so much of their money from Jewish donors, upwards of 50% by some reports– because the liberal establishment doesn't like Jews? The liberal establishment loves Jews as much as it hates Christians. The liberal establishment is Jewish-owned, and the more Jewish-owned it has become, the more it has bared its fangs towards Christianity and average Americans.
"Israel is the most democratic country in the world." Well done Thom, always begin a debate with a joke. Democracy is the and Jewish nationhood are completely at odds on every level. Any state that grants privileges to one ethnicity or religion over another is by definition, not a democracy, but borderline theocracy. Israel not only denies non-citizens the same rights as citizens, it grants non citizens of a particularly religion privileges over citizens of a different religion. Israel is an apartheid state, not a democracy.
Ohhhh, you think the dems are leftists. My bad. Carry on.
And It wo'nt stop thom.It took 200 years to kick the last of the crusaders.we ca wait.But you know you can always live with us peacefully.
Here is what I think of the Israeli "historic" hasbara – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W_obKqqD4w It is just as advanced and informative as the above illustration.
joachim, you said a mouthful. Cuba has the best literacy in latin America and a far better human rights record that the blood spattered "democracies" of honduras, nicaragua, el salvador etc
yeah man
That's right. You're a REAL Lefty. And like all the other REAL Lefties, you still don't know (or refuse to acknowledge) that the Jacob Schiff-financed Communist coup was just another Judeofascist power grab.
The USA does do significantly better than Israel by recognizing that all men are equal, and deserving of liberty, regardless of ethnicity or religion. There is no question that the process is flawed, but the fundamental principal is flawless. Israel's laws and ethnocentricity is a fundamental flaw upon which democracy cannot be sustained or even exist for that matter. Everything else is secondary to this matter, because without revisiting the basic premise, there is no way to improve it. The framework of Israel is fundamentally racist, because it discriminates not by race, but by ethnicity and religion and what's more, it this discrimination is official policy, just as apartheid was in South Africa. Israel Arabs by definition, do not have equal rights, because they are not Jewish. Claiming that Israel is the freest country in the Middle East si nothing to boast about, because no other state pretends to be a democracy. Israel hasn't experienced anything close to a 911 attack, but the attacks it has suffered were the obvious consequence of Israeli policies. Like I always say, a rapist can't claim self defense when his victim tries to fight back.
The truth is that there are real democracies and there are faux democracies like Israel. Israel's democracy is a false democracy that is based on segregation and discrimination, just like South Africa under apartheid. South Africa too held elections, but no one regarded that state as a democracy until apartheid ended.
Basing a thesis on a fascist like Benny Morris, who believes that Israel's mistake was not finishing the job of ethnic cleansing in 1948, is not a great way to make an argument. Morris forgets that Ben Gurion had no intention of accepting the United Nations partition plan, when he wrote: “The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan; one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today. But the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.“ Davis Ben-Gurion, in 1936, quoted in Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle.”[1] Do facts bore you too thedhimmi?
No More Pickin on DIM.
It’s part of the NEW WAY, brother.
–anthony burgess: a clockwork orange
RE: I'd rather hear that the oppression is religious A GREAT ARTICLE: "Israel and the Nutbar Factor", by Justin Raimondo, 07/22/09 (EXCERPT) "…What we are witnessing in Israel today is the degeneration of a once liberal democracy into a militaristic theocracy, one armed with nuclear weapons – and quite conceivably willing to use them against those they consider less than fully human. And if that doesn’t scare us into cutting them off – financially, at the very least – then we ought to prepare ourselves for the consequences. Because it isn’t going to be pretty…" ENTIRE ARTICLE – http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/07/21/isr...
ANOTHER GREAT ARTICLE: "Cheney’s Inferno", by Jeff Huber, July 22, 2009 (EXCERPT) "…Cheney has a reach-around relationship with Israel’s hard-Right Likudniks. Sidney Blumenthal of Salon.com reported in August 2006 that Cheney and his henchmen were sharing National Security Association intelligence with Israel as part of an attempt to escalate the Iraq war into open hostilities with Iran and Syria. Many are convinced, as am I, that Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon was agreed upon at a meeting between Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu at an American Enterprise Institute conference in Colorado…" ENTIRE ARTICLE – http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2009/07/21/chen...
It's time to educate the thedhimmi AGAIN – or should I say, debunk his propaganda? Israel never accepted Resolution 242 and have never honored it. As for Camp David, what lie is so old is should be in a museum. Not only did the US act as Israel's legal team (as Dennis Ross later admitted) but the deal offered was so crappy that even Clinton realized what a non started it as and came up with a set of parameters which were discussed at the subsequent talks at Taba. Barak knew the deal was lousy because his people continues to talk to Arafat for another 6 months. At Taba, both leaders accepted the Clinton parameters and said they woudl have reached a political agreement had they more time. It was Barak who called off the talks at that stage because of the impending Israeli elections. Sharon won and as Dov Weislgass told the word, suspended the peace process in formaldehyde. Chew on what for a while.
No More Pickin on DIM.
It’s part of the NEW WAY, brother.
–anthony burgess: a clockwork orange
eitanbenshlomo believes massacres of civilians are justified
Why not also crush Israeli terror while we're at it?
There is an occupation in Palestine. The state of Israel is Jewish land. God is not a real estate agent.
The plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine of Palestinians got back to the 1800's. Theodor Herzl wrote about it..
eitanbenshlomo believes massacres are justified
There is an occupation in Palestine, which is not Jewish land. God is not a real estate agent.
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