Weiss asked annie, who often posts here, how she came to the Israel/Palestine issue:
well, my i/p connection came about strickly because of my introduction to the internet. in 2003, i was heading off to thailand/india/europe w/ my son and wanted a cheap way to contact people back home and heard email addresses were free so i got one thru msn.com which we already had because my son was on the internet. then i took a little class at the neighborhood community center in ballard (seattle) which was attended by mostly people over 70 because everyone else in seattle was already on the internet.
so, in class i found the msn homepage and typed my name in the search to find my email account. imagine my surprise when my gallery appeared with photos of my art on it. i was in shock. i already had an internet presence. within a matter of days my friend told me i could read the nyt online (because i was a news junkie, but only seattle times and seattle post intelligencer or local papers wherever i was on the planet. i don't get my news from tv). that first day upon learning i could read the nyt for free i discovered paul krugman. a little googling of his name landed me on atrios (blogger) who linked to billmon. my first day on the internet!
it was thru reading billmon and other linked blogs/commenters ravenously those next few years israel first came into my radar. it was thru those blogs i first was linked to mondoweiss. i blogged about the iraq war for years. it was cheney and the neocons and their attention towards all things israel that put israel on my map along w/billmon and some jewish/arab posters at that site. i didn't even know who what where palestine was before any of that.
i knew nothing, that's how quiet israel was in my world for most of my life. when i was a teen i heard about the kibbutzes and thought it would be so cool to go live on one. i had no idea there was another people there. when i finally got to israel/gaza/WB w/code pink (the trip i introduced myself to you in the basement of that hotel in gaza, you probably don't remember) was actually the first time on that trip, if you can believe this, i ever actually grokked there were as many palestinians in is/palestine as there were jews. i thought they were a minority before that.
LRC.com / Antiwar.com / Counterpunch / AmCon leads to Glenn Greenwald / Uri Avery / Philip Giraldi / Pat Buchanan / etc. leads to Mondoweiss.
Mostly from doing google news searches on information about Ron Paul, who woke up millions of Americans by hammering foreign policy and backs it up by voting nay in 400+ to less then 5 cheerleader resolutions in the house . Go figure.
do you mean the last presidential campaign chris, or before that. are you a newbie too?
yes. I became curious after 9/11 and started to wake up after listening to Alex Jones on NPR and going to infowars, which introduced me to people like Lew Rockwell and Paul Craig Roberts which led to Antiwar.com, etc. I had never even heard of Zionism until some time in 2004 when Infowars created a myspace page and some people flooded the comments with a bunch of weird stuff about numerology and Zionism, accusing him of being a Zionist shill and whatnot. It was quite… strange.
There are/were folks on Glenn Greenwald’s blog who helped immensely when it came to providing me with educational materials wrt I/P, e.g. Mooser, plus the constant swatting down of Reich Wing Israel-first trolls by other regular posters.
Annie,
Are you saying that like Phil you are a relative newbie to the issue, 2003?
Those that came of age in the issue in the 90′s, saw the hope of Oslo (as a great hope), and the militants’ (both Zionist and Palestinian) disruption of that hope by murder and terror.
Those were formative to us. In spite of the horror of the late 90′s and great escalation in the second intifada, we retained hope.
The breach in consciousness is as large as the breach between the Kennedy liberalism that regarded the anti-communist domino principle as justifiable, Vietnam, and the Bobby Kennedy clarification that regarded Vietnam as not a cold war issue.
Netanyahu, likud, Israel Beitanhu, Shas are easy to identify as corrupt.
The existence of Israel and the ideology of liberal Zionism are not as susceptible and represent the right balance of identity and humanity.
i wasn’t politically aware during either of the intifadas witty, nor did i know what intifada meant. if you’d asked me what i thought of ramadi or ramallah i might guessed they were middle eastern dishes. i didn’t know about our sanctions on iraq either. of course i knew about the gulf war, i knew it happened and i opposed it but i couldn’t have told you why we went to war. i had no idea iraq and iran were in a war for 8 years. i didn’t know anything about the middle east nor could i have pointed israel out on a map. basically a typical american. my favorite section of the paper for most of my life was ann landers.
i sat next to a palestinian on a plane once when my son was a baby. we had a conversation but it went in and out of my head. i recalled it many years later and wished i could go back and talk to him more. it just didn’t sink in. if only there were more of us back then maybe we could have made a difference.
annie i dont get this. the change must have been much larger in your life than just the internet. your sensibilities must have changed. to go from one sort of interest, ann landers, to such international concern. you must have had int’l concerns before? phil
Why? Why is this so hard to get? For me, for my own revelation, it was watching America’s sick and twisted relationship with the Middle East through the prism of the Bush Administration, and that was insight that was only possible to get from the internet because during the vast majority of the Bush Administration, mainstream news was on total jingoism lockdown mode.
For me it was having grown up during the Oslo Accords and then seeing their effective conclusion being Arafat rewarded for his efforts by being besieged in Israeli gunships, machine guns and bulldozers near the end of his life while voracious settlers colonized the West Bank at an unprecedented rate, fully funded by the Israeli government, in total violation of any sense of decency. And this was after Israelis murdered their own Prime Minister.
It was images of the wall, then images of Lebanon being razed while a horrified international community was beat back with a stick by the Bush Administration so that the charnal house could go on and on.
I would have learned none of this if I was constrained to traditional media. Why is it so hard to understand the just being able to see what is going on, in actual visual evidence, is all that is enough for most people?
i was interested in civil rights phil. and the vietnam war. i was very aware my grandfather was a racist growing up and used to have fights w/him as i did my rightwing uncle. i was proud the history of certain members of my family wrt the abolitionist movement. i read about the economy and had an understanding of nuclear energy and how corporations screwed us over. i was aware the cards were stacked against minorities and poor people. the first time i ever saw my mother cry was in an argument w/a neighbor about compulsory sterilization for black people. i had no idea what they were talking about but after she left my mom explained it to me, how some people wer e racist. i was around 5.
i was fairly unaware of the extent of our transigence in south america. i didn’t start reading the papers til moving to arizona around the early 90′s and i’m just not recalling the arizona daily star covering the middle east much if at all. i had an awareness of american politics but that didn’t extend to our friendship w/israel. during my twenties i was totally in another reality wrt our involvement in the world. very uninformed. living in taos i was politically aware of the dumping ground of nuclear waste. it wasn’t like i wasn’t political, it just didn’t extend to the middle east. i knew about oil, it just wasn’t my focus.
i got hooked on ann landers as a kid. she was very fair, much better than her sister. i always tried to guess what she would say before reading her responses. everything she said seemed very logical to me. as i kid, my dad read the paper everyday and i would just read ann, it became a habit. that’s why i said most of my life. i was hooked on ann by 7 or 8. she actually made a huge influence on my life oddly enough. moral values and all that.
another thing phil, i was a psych major at one of the only humanistic psych departments in the county. we were hippies living on communes studying ritualistic peyote ceremonies and participating in sweat lodges and things like that. israel was completely off my radar. in SF i fell in w/a gay crowd and aids was a very powerful force in my reality because i lot of my friends died. watch the movie harvey milk, where’s israel? it’s not like we weren’t political.
Wow! Is the lack of knowledge down to poor reportage of world news in the US? I can’t imagine not being aware of all the wars and conflicts! We had middle eastern students locally, friends and family who dated Iranians, Libyans, etc, such that when US bombed Libya I took a call from Tripoli telephone exchange to pass on info that sister’s then b/f”s family were ok. That call was so clear it could have been next door. Wonder if that was due to the nearby “spy base”?
OT, but not really. MJ Rosenberg comment to another about 20 minutes ago below his HuffPo article.
That’s why Truman crossed out the adjective “Jewish” characterizing the state he was recognizing in the letter–he substituted “Israel.”
Yes, the internet. Pre-WWW. Usenet. Where I first became aware of the Zionist bots trolling for any mentions of Israel, of the USS Liberty, so they could jump in with their hasbara (a word I didn’t yet know.) Where I recognized that so much effort to cover up the truth must be hiding something I needed to know.
Where I first became aware of the Zionist bots trolling for any mentions of Israel
talk about red flags. how could anyone blogging in those early days not notice the radical personalities types defending israel. the discourse was so off the charts, still is of course but now it’s expected, or something.
I must admit to being 66. I’ve tended to think of myself as a moderate in most things.
Through the veil of memory I think that I was a 2-stater for decades. I wasn’t that ill-informed, at least by British middle-class standards, but I entertained the fantasy that it was just a matter of the moderates on both sides coming to power.
The 82 invasion of Lebanon made me more opposed, quite strongly and steadily opposed as I remember, to what Israel was doing, but I fancied that it was just a misfortune that the Likud was in power or when not in power still too powerful. But somehow I couldn’t talk about it without seeming pro-terrorist or anti-Semitic, so didn’t talk about it much.
In the 90s Oslo came along and I remember celebrating the event with a Jewish colleague – the end was in sight! What was the point in getting too involved with a problem that was on the verge of settling itself? They were ‘doomed to agree’.
I voted for Blair in 97 and let myself, to my great shame, think (I tell myself that I wasn’t too vociferous) that there might be some validity in his project of ridding the Muslim world of its fearsome tyrants and promoting a more consensual atmosphere, still hankering I suppose for moderates to talk to moderates. It was only when all this broke down over Iraq that I saw how terrible had been my mistake, that in my desire for a moderate world I had made no protest against extreme injustice done to Araby by the West, to the Palestinians especially. My desire to be objective and calm, as moderates (you know) are, betrayed me into illusion and injustice.
I think we all owe much to those good people who are Jewish and who have enabled us to talk about these things without the accusation of anti-Semitism having too much power.
Since I was, in 1968, a poor Jew, with no connections, it all seemed pretty simple to me. The US wanted to draft me so I could die in VietNam (or go nuts) at the behest of a demented white southerner, or I could go to Israel and die (or go nuts) for the purposes of crazy Jews.
As I saw it, Zionism had two uses for American Jews without money or connections: cannon fodder or criminal-religious nut (settler).
Perhaps that isn’t fair, but that’s the way I saw it.
Besides, about that time I saw films of Israeli “folk-dancing” and I knew any ideology which made people do that was intrinsically evil.
In case anyone is worried, don’t. In the ensuing years I have managed to work my way up from poverty to complete indigence. It wasn’t easy, but I did it.
i loved the folk dancing. mrs goldsmith was our folk dancing teacher in elementary school. we had may day dances around a maypole. we dressed up as peasants every year in the spring and put on performances. i loved it! that’s probably more than anyone needs to know about me. lol
“i loved the folk dancing.”
No way! To see it and to hear that Habla Nagila (or whatever) could drive me nuts..The sheer obscenity of a triumphant colonial, satisfied he had conquered..As irking as a chest-thumping Tarzan ullulating over some animal’s corpse..
like i said, i was unaware. just a little girl learning a dance for a spring faire.
The US oliarchy has two uses for American males without money or connections: cannon fodder and income tax payers.
“about that time I saw films of Israeli “folk-dancing” ”
Was that what made you become a Muslim, and change your name to “Musa”?
Besides, about that time I saw films of Israeli “folk-dancing” and I knew any ideology which made people do that was intrinsically evil.
;-)
Annie,
My request to you is that you read much further, imagining what your sincere impressions would be if you came to it 1993 rather than 2003, or 1983 or 1973 or 1963.
Israelis experience AND Palestinians.
2003 without candid study is too late to gain a coherent and accurate picture.
Actually, Annie, as I know you know now, an accurate picture begins with a study of the Balfour Declaration and how it came to be, right down to the present. If time is short, begin with 1947 over there.
“when i was a teen i heard about the kibbutzes and thought it would be so cool to go live on one. ”
I could never understand why kibbutzes are such a big draw for Israel. What is so great about digging irrigation ditches in the desert with a machine gun strapped to your back? Fresh fruit is only a walk to the grocery store away…and if you want to plant your own trees, there’s plenty of land to do it right here in the USA. Do kibbutzes have a mystique because everyone working there is Jewish(which isn’t really true-local Arabs are hired to do the hard work I heard)? There are lots law firms, fabric wholesalers, and other businesses I know of that are all or predominately Jewish-and one word I don’t associate with any of them is “mystique”. Not only am I not attracted to the Kibbutz or Zionism(right or left), but I can’t understand why anyone else is.
“What is so great about digging irrigation ditches in the desert with a machine gun strapped to your back?”
Just make sure you get the right ammunition. It’s too easy to put the 30.o3 or 30.05 in a gun chambered for 30.06. They will fit in the clip, but will fire inaccurately, or more likely, jam, just when the Arabs attack.
joer, it was the idea of communal living. there was a resurgence in northern california in the 60′s early 70′s. i suppose other parts of the country too. lots of people ‘dropping out’. the idea of the kibbutz seemed romantic. for me it wasn’t because they were jewish, jewish was a non issue to me because i hadn’t met any jews that were noticeably different than anyone else i knew. it was more the idea of an organized established communal experiment that appealed to me. it didn’t occur to me i would be rejected for not being jewish.
That’s because being rejected for not being jewish is not part of our history lessons, nor does that narrative occur in our Entertainment Industry products.
Aw come on, just recall the romance at Spahn Ranch.
Tony Judt explains:
“The essence of Labour Zionism, still faithful in those years to its founding dogmas, lay in the promise of Jewish work: the idea that young Jews from the diaspora would be rescued from their effete, assimilated lives and transported to remote collective settlements in rural Palestine—there to create (and, as the ideology had it, recreate) a living Jewish peasantry, neither exploited nor exploiting. Derived in equal measure from early-nineteenth-century socialist utopias and later Russian myths of egalitarian village communities, Labour Zionism was characteristically fragmented into conflicting sectarian cults…
…But all were agreed on the broader moral purpose: bringing Jews back to the land and separating them from their rootless diasporic degeneracy. For the neophyte fifteen-year-old Londoner encountering the kibbutz for the first time, the effect was exhilarating. Here was “Muscular Judaism” in its most seductive guise: health, exercise, productivity, collective purpose, self-sufficiency, and proud separatism—not to mention the charms of kibbutz children of one’s own generation, apparently free of all the complexes and inhibitions of their European peers (free, too, of most of their cultural baggage—though this did not trouble me until later).”
link to nybooks.com
Joer..
Many, especially on the left, were taken by the “mystique” of the Kibbutz entreprise..I remember French Uni students who used to talk about it with a tremolo voice but that was then..No more now..The truth is out and the fooled are few. Not to mention that the Kibbutz phenomenon is dead anyway..Not much left of the defunct left in Israel..It’s a right to far right country now..It’s all about who grabs a hilltop first, while they can..The Bible/Torah as a substitute to ‘Das Capital’ (or whatever “socialist” ideology)..
I thought the main attraction of the kibbutz was that boys and girls showered together.
Allegedly.
I was Israel-friendly some years ago. For me, awakening was two-fold:
1. Lebanon war 2006
2. Gaza massacre 2008/09
And then – as I was outraged – I started research and I saw it all.
I was introduced to the conflict in the most natural way..my dad, who was in the Lebanese army, fought the Israelis (and won their battle of Malkiyyeh) in 1948..After that it was hard to miss his account of how he got to have a missing toe to his left foot every time he pulled off his socks..
wow
Annie..You’re an artist? That makes 3 on this blog (that I know of). You, Chaos and I…
yes, i am a ceramic artist.
I just got given a beautiful light blue ceramic bowl, japanese style, hand made by my kiln-firing friend. It’s so soft and delicate and calming that I’m displaying it on my coffee table and have taken to referring to it as “my bowl of dreams”.
TGIA ~ I’m also; (loosely) photography based. I do some paid work but my interest is firmly at the art end of the spectrum.
Seems (some) artists remain the avant-garde.
I didn’t know that Sumud..Welcome to the club..
what medium thankgodimatheist?
Thank you TGIA :-)
someday sumud i’d love to see them.
I’m not exhibiting @ the moment annie, not sufficiently happy I’m in my groove. By the time we have that big Mondoweiss party, I’m sure I will be and we can all share :-)
;)
sounds great, i look forward to it.
I liked the romance of the Islamic world when I was young (too much Khayyam) but I didn’t understand the position on Israel until I read Childer’s “The other exodus” (reprinted in a journal; the New Statesman, I think) in around 1967.
However, I have always supported the use of capital letters.
No, it was the Spectator, and first published in 1961. But I seem to recall seeing it as a pamphlet somewhere.
i liked the romance of the islamic world when i was young also. my dad had a copy of arabian nights (louis rhead illustrations) in his library, now in mine. my aunt traveled extensively in the middle east many decades ago (i don’t know when exactly, she was very old when i was a child) and i inherited her post card collection. they are amazing. w/painted photographs of baghdad and cairo.
i’m a fan of capital letters myself and use them when writing script. since i didn’t take up typing til i got on the internet i’ve never moved past the two finger approach. makes dealing w/that shift function laborious. hope it doesn’t bother you to much RoHa. there, i did it just for you.
Painted postcards would probably be worth a fortune to collectors. Get Christies to auction them off, and live in luxury.
Sorry, but the continuous lower case makes it very difficult for me to read your posts (yes, I’m an old fuddy-duddy who needs to find the instruction book if I ever want to send an SMS message) and, what is worse, creates a completely erroneous impression of simple-minded illiteracy. When I can struggle through your posts, I find them intelligent and insightful.
Maybe these will help a bit. (For once, I’m not being snarky, but genuinely trying to be helpful.)
link to powertyping.com
link to mrkent.com
link to typingweb.com
link to typingtutor.org
link to typefastertypingtutor.com
I was five years and traveling through Jerusalem with my parents when the ’67 war broke out.
I’m fifty years of age now.
It’s a depressing load really.
My whole family, both sides, are Palestinian sympathizers, always have been, always will be. All of us are beach-bum atheists.
I kind of came in through the back door. I grew up loving WWII documentaries and you can’t do WWII without the Holocaust. I had the impression that Jews were “Western” and that Arabs/Muslims/Palestinians were the incomprehensible “other”, prone to fanaticism, terrorism, and violence. Without investigating it much, I assumed that the Israelis were the “white hats” and the Arabs/Muslims/Palestinians were the “black hats” and all the memes in circulation reinforced that notion. I thought Israel was merely defending itself from aggressors.
Around 1998, I became the campus advisor to the student atheist group. I wanted to bone up on other faith views (I was raised moderately Catholic, attending a Catholic grammar school) and visited religious internet forums and chat rooms.
I was fairly well received across the board, though a common reaction to my questions and willingness to debate was that I was either there to “disrupt” or was “investigating” (considering converting). Despite a small handful of radical individuals present within any of the communities, the most pronounced (and often irrational) push back was from the Jewish forums. They were singularly the most intractable and would readily resort to underhanded tactics to try to gain any advantage (smears, threats, outing, harassment at work, etc.). Trying to discuss the Israel/Palestine conflict in any sort of balanced manner made you the equivalent of a “bomb thrower” and a target. People who had previously discussed issues rationally would become silent at the bullying as they agreed with the views, if not the tactics, of the bullies.
This ultra-defensiveness only furthered my own resolve to dig deeper. The ultimate result was that I saw how one-sided the narrative was, how outright lies were presented (and largely accepted) as truth, and that intimidation, banning, and other means of suppressing contrasting viewpoints were in full force and became apparent at almost every level of discourse, including of course, the political debate whether in the media or on Capitol Hill.
I have many fine individuals, authors, and progressive sites to thank for expanding my understanding, a good many of them Jewish ones (and boy does it help provide much needed support when being attacked as an anti-Semite for criticizing Israel, Zionism, or Jews – a hat tip to all you “self-haters” ;-). I also am wary of those many PEP sites and voices that will pretend to promote humanist principles but turn a blind eye towards injustices towards Palestinians due to Israeli/Zionist/Jewish exceptionalism. I have been banned from most of them for speaking more plainly and independently than their controlled narrative would allow. Uncovering those lies helped shine a light on all the other ways we are programmed to accept the prevailing narrative.
Bottom line for me was that the Hasbara hard-sell did just the opposite. I was secure enough in my work and online presence to stand firm in the face of their hectoring (what another poster here described as puppies nipping at your socks), even when a former IDF fanatic from Van Nuys, CA threatened (and called for) violence against me at work (I gave his name to DHS though I imagine their sympathies probably lie more with his views – considering who their leadership has been).
Thanks to all of you for sharing your own stories and histories. They are quite fascinating.