Nir Rosen is guestposting for Steve Clemons at the Washington Note. This is good, another attack on Efraim Karsh, a guest neocon at the New York Times, titled, "It’s Not about Islam & Judaism, It’s About Anti-Colonialism, Territory, Liberation, and Lives":
On Sunday, February 28th the New York Times published an outrageous oped by Efraim Karsh full of lies, distortions and mistakes….
Karsh mentions some sort of "100-year war between Arabs and Jews." There is no 100 year war between Arabs and Jews. There is a 100 year colonial struggle between Zionist Jews and the Palestinian people (and briefly the Lebanese as well).
Note that Rosen is saying this at a beltway thinktank, a respectable one, the New America Foundation. This would have been unheard of a decade ago.
But, that kind of framing is “counter-productive”.
You see, how else are Israel’s supporters supposed to deflect criticism if they can’t tie Israel with Judaism thus having the ability to use “anti-Semitic” accusations? How else is Israel supposed to appeal to Jews the world over and get their monetary donations and unequivocal political and moral support?
Nir Rosen’s framing is not politically beneficial so we can forget about Israel or the US adopting it.
The designated Zionist has duly showed up there to rant and render her cause ridiculous.
U.S./Israel does not see either Islam or Iran as how they actually are, but rather how they need to be perceived in order to justify actions/policy already decided upon based upon other considerations.
I would say Mr. Rosen just booted Karsh out of the arena. What I would encourage everyone to do is read the entire article and learn what a true view is of the present reality.
No truer words….VR.
One of my favorite quotes from the article –
“They assumed that there was some kind of microchip that makes Muslims tick and once you learn the cultural script, you could understand these people. This stems from the idea of ‘varying rationalities,’ that Muslims do not think in the same way we do, that you need to understand their own form of rationality and you do that through learning the language, the ‘culture’ and then you can decode them. But why are ‘Muslims’ a group to begin with?
This obsession with a term like ‘dar al harb,’ (house of war) keeps on coming up.
Sometimes I think that more Americans than Muslims know what it means. They assume that a medieval term somehow trickled into the ‘Muslim’ mentality and decides how they see the world. This assumes that all Muslims understand such a term in the same way, and that the term acts in a specific way not contingent on historic and contemporary conditions, both of which are untrue
This is Orientalism, America is never studied in this way, do we read the Bible to understand American ‘culture’?”
Rosen’s article is fabulous. A breath of fresh air. Dont miss it.
The first time I heard Nir Rosen speak was on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman. At the time, he was discussing the US invasion of Afghanistan. The guy sounded like he knew exactly what he was talking about, definitely more than Gen. Petraeus and other hacks. It’s good to see that he has a firm understanding of the geopolitical issues in that region, and that he’s standing up to the likes of Karsh.
From one of the comments to Rosen’s article:
To say further as he does that Islam as a religion, which in 1000 year war with the infidels and with Judaism, plays no role in a “100 year colonial struggle between Zionist Jews and the Palestinian people (and briefly the Lebanese as well)”—even if one accepts, which I don’t, that it is a “colonial struggle”—shows Rosen how out of his depth he is on the subject.
Some people don’t even know their OWN history. Last I checked, when Jews were getting kicked out of Spain by Christians 500 years ago, It was the Muslims who came to their aid. But, then again, since when do the Zionist intellectual midgets care about historical accuracy?
This one’s just downright delusional:
The NYT has published an endless stream of pro-terrorist op-eds and just plain silly and dangerous op-eds on the Middle East, like last weeks’ opine that it would be good for Mideast stability if Iran got nukes.
Every once in a while, they let a real historian like Ephraim Karsh in.
Certainly from the Palestinian point of view, considering Zionism to be a colonialist movement is the nearest category that fits their experience. But from the Jewish Zionist point of view this is hardly the case, certainly not at the time of Israel’s founding. Colonialism from the colonialist point of view is usually about exploiting resources for the sake of the mother country and the need of the Jews for a homeland had nothing to do with exploiting resources and nothing to do with a mother country.
It is valid to point out that much has changed in the relationship of Jews to their host countries and that the years 1948 to 2010 do not resemble the years 1917 to 1948. The inability of the Israelis to make peace or to resolve the occupation since 1967 cannot be totally blamed upon intransigence of the Arab countries or the Palestinians (as Karsh seemed to do in his op-ed). Still the circumstances of the birth of Israel should be kept in mind and the differences from other forms of colonialism should be noted.
Colonialism is colonialism.
The Settlers are embarking on a colonial adventure, they are fully supported by the Israeli state and steal water and other resources on behalf of the state of Israel.
Nonetheless, Israel was founded by a group of people who literally stole the land from the indigenous population in a manner that is very reminiscent of 19th century colonialism.
Anyway, I don’t really care what you call it, its still unfair, and Israel should not get a “get out of jail card” for its opening act.
“the need of the Jews for a homeland ”
The Jews did not need a homeland.
Most Jews had homelands they were born into.
Some Jews needed a safe place to live, but that is all.
There are three types of colonialism which are historically apparent, one is a remote non-settler state colonialism merely to exploit with a small cadre of people, another is the settler state type – like the US and Israel, peril of any type, survival, or freedoms (in Australia’s case it was a penal colony, the reasoning is legion and all say by necessity), and the third is systemic neocolonialism – contrary to WJ’s amnesia regarding histories of colonialism or plain ignorance.
There are unique elements in each colonial exploitation, but it is always disastrous for the indigenous population – to different degrees, in this factor all colonialism is the same. Israel is indeed unique, but it is not sui generis (as can be attested to by the founders of Zionism, that deliberated about many places they could go to and absolutely nothing religious about it), it is also similar in that there is the claim by all colonial’s that they are like no other.
Other similarities can be summarized as follows –
“The logic of both Israel and apartheid-era South Africa can be found in their common origins as settler states. In both cases, the settlers CREATED MYTHS, semi-religious or explicitly religious, including that GOD HAD PROVIDED THE LAND for them and that the land was unoccupied upon arrival, a very, very common theme in every settler state, whether it’s the United States, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc. In both cases, the settlers portrayed themselves to be VICTIMS against natives who were described as SEMI-BARBARIC OR INTOLERANT. Given the permanent state of siege, every settler state AGGRESSION came to be DESCRIBED as a DEFENSIVE ACT, an approach also common with the United States. By way of example, for South Africa, incursions into Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe or anywhere else always against alleged TERRORISTS were justified as alleged defensive actions.”