Writing from Jerusalem on Tuesday as rioting left dozens injured, Bradley Burston said:
Hamas has designated this day, in this place, its Day of Rage. Why, then, the smiles on the faces of Mahmoud Zahar and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
Perhaps it’s because after more than 22 years of costly trial and error, Hamas has finally come upon the secret of how to bring down the Jewish state:
Let the ship sink itself.
This month, down here in the engine room of the Titanic, a single coherent order continues to sound from the officers shrouded in fog on the bridge: “More power!”
To the delight of Mahmoud Zahar and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel’s homemade weapons of mass destruction – pro-settlement bureaucrats with conflicts of financial and ideological interest – have done in one meeting what Israel’s foes have sought for generations: driving a stake through the heart of Israel’s relationship with the White House.
We should have known. But in the swamp of anomaly and impossibility that is Jerusalem, you can easily lose sight of, and belief in, the basics:
One of the curses of endless war, is the tendency to become one’s own worst enemy – in every sense.
A self-conception grounded in the notion that one is an object of enmity, whether this be within the self-identity of an individual or a nation, is no basis upon which a constructive relationship with the world can be formed. The world is seen as otherness and engagement with such a world becomes equated with annihilation. This is indeed the definition of a nihilistic outlook.
“no nation can endure when built on hatred.”
Ephraim Sneh, who introduced to Knesset in 1999 (six years before Ahmadinejad’s election to presidency) the notion that Iran’s nuclear development was an “existential threat” to Israel, recently was asked to comment on the reports on the behaviour of IDF troops in Gaza.
Here’s Sneh’s response:
Israel goes about the region censoring the textbooks and education of Palestinian and even Iranian children, but it emerges that Israeli children are learning in their schools to hate Arabs. Mandatory military service ensures that these hate-oriented young people will be issued weapons and taught how to use them — to express their hate with violence.
link
link to israelpolicyforum.org
In that interview Sneh says that Ehud Barak has the authority to freeze settlement activity as Defense Minister. That’s certainly not what Barak has been saying.
That’s certainly not what Barak has been saying.
It’s the same claim made by Netanyahu (or will be made) this week. According to Haaretz (Hebrew version) Netanyahu will declare that he has no authority over the colonial expansion.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. The Guardian is reporting that Obama got his settlement freeze after all. link to guardian.co.uk
‘No nation can endure when built on hatred’
YES! this is precisely correct! This is very much applicable to ALL NATIONS. Look how many nations have already changed governments violently many times?
Iran, Iraq, Gaza, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Sudan… many more! Regretfully these are all heavily Islamic influenced countries. Has modern Israel already passed this violent process since established in 1967? None yet!
zamaaz, I hate to disappoint you, but non-Muslim countries have a habit of violently changing their government’s, too. No, really! Ever heard of the French Revolution? And the Russian? and the American? And there were similiar events in England and Germany and almost everywhere else.
Hard to believe anybody except Mulims go in for violent change, but it’s true.
‘A self-conception grounded in the notion that one is an object of enmity, whether this be within the self-identity of an individual or a nation, is no basis upon which a constructive relationship with the world can be formed. ‘
Yes, this is a wise notion…that is why we have to learn to stop wallowing on unexplainable hatred or anger, so that we can see both sides and start agreeing reasonably and meaningfully….In Palestine conflict, it seems Israel thrives on Islamic Arab/Palestinian hatred against the Jews [I too, as a matter of automatic reflex against such multitude of accusing, cursing, attacking people sides with the Israelis] without even knowing the complete facts) seemed felt safer with that hatred, because Ive ‘lived up with it’)…I felt I am more troubled with Palestinians with wisdom…
In dealing with Palestinian men of wisdom i will be obliged to be reasonable, pragmatic, and worst of all – kind…
‘One of the curses of endless war, is the tendency to become one’s own worst enemy – in every sense.’
Are we sure this will be applicable against Israel? or against the pro-Palestinians, Israel-bashing, anti-semitic governments and militants…Justice has no sides….it works against anybody who never realizes themselves…
“Censoring” or “censuring” other nation’s educational materials? I censure (reprimand) Israeli education, politics, etc., but surely have no power to censor them.
Reluctantly abandoning the role of grammaticaster, YES, Israel (and its American cheering section) should admit that Israel’s educational system (news media, teachers, parents, religious teachers and officials, government officials, army, as well as–perhaps–textbooks) is teaching hate.
The mechanism leading to such hate is simple to explain–even if the explanation is wrong. My take is this. Israel exists on the basis of a self-declared “right” to create by force of arms a nation-state in Palestine–a “right” now but not originally declared as a “right to a predominantly Jewish state”–in an operation based, in part, on expulsion of the non-Jewish inhabitants. (One is tempted to say “native” inhabitants, but as many have noted, there were a fair number of Jews living in Palestine, especially in Jerusalem, for many generations during the Ottoman period who should qualify as “natives”. These were not expelled. The people expelled (and those who fled the war of 1948 before guns and bayonets were directly pointed at them at close range) wanted to come back to their homes. when the borders were sealed, some tried to cross the borders and were called “terrorists” and shot.
It is psychologically helpful to hate another people if you are going to dispossess them, expel them, and shoot them. If you teach yourself (by constant repitition?) that you have a “right” to an Arab-rein country, it helps to hate the Arabs if you are gearing up to use armed force to keep the place Arab-rein. If you are a soldier who actually shoots defenceless people returning to harvest their crops because they are “Arabs”, it helps to hate them to justify (in a psychological sense) shooting them. Victimizers are not like chess-players who try to win a “game” by following “rules”. Victimizers are not “game-players” at all. They throw out any rules and make up their own rules as far as they can. But they are also human beings and have to deal with whatever ethics and morals and so forth and so on they retain, and this “dealing” is greatly facilitated by hating the victims. We have even heard the specious argument offered that “the Arabs made us do it” (where “it” is some dreadful horror of which a decent human being would be ashamed and which in a better world he would not have done), again loading the blame on the victim.
By all of this I mean to suggest that hatred by Israelis is incurably entwined with the manner of the birth of Israel–a birth still continuing and obviously still interfering with any possibility of making peace along the territorial lines of May 1967, a peace re-dividing Jerusalem and re-dividing the precious and scarce water resources of I/P, a peace which ought to redress the justifiable claims of the refugees of 1948 and 1967.
The world (especially the USA) have acted as enablers for this hatred by permitting (again, enabling) the “birthing” process (the unnaturally prolonged occupation, the acts in furtherance of the so-called annexation of Jerusalem, and the settlements and wall which explain it or arise from these) to continue after 1967. As long as Israel is (psychologically) continuing to be “born” by acts of illicit seizure of territory belonging properly to others and by acts of excessive and illegal violence without ever attempting to make peace, it necessarily must base its actions on hatred and, of course, on fear of obviously justifiable retribution, even if, as here, its victims have no army capable of manifesting the retribution which Israel’s long-continuing “birth” by violent armed robbery continues. And one hates what one fears.
Those Israelis cleaver enough to recognize that the hatred of Arabs manifest in Israeli school kids is itself fearful, but unable to hate Israel (as Palestinians can) for producing it, will tend to have the Arabs (as they often say) for causing the kid-borne hatred.
So, although Israel may lose its hatred 50 years after the steady-state of peace has been achieved, as Americans no longer hate the Indians whom we slaughtered for resisting our taking their homeland from them, that day is being indefinitely delayed by the continuing “birthing” process.
As I have often done, I recommend that the US, etc., demand and require that Israel remove all the settlers and the wall, and formally abandon forever any claim to land or water of the West Bank or Gaza, thus ending forever the “birthing” process. It would also make sense (confidence building, anybody?) for the US to demand that the occupation be made as gentle and even helpful as possible. This should reduce friction and lead to peace. After 50 years it might also lead to an end of hatred, perhaps even for both sides.
Wanting restitution and justice is not “hatred”, don’t give in to the equivalency Hasbara.
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