This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
Hurricane Sandy is past us here but the Northeast is being hitting hard. At the Cape, we’re used to the anxiety before storm hits and the clean up after. Hurricane weather is part of the charm of living on the coast in Florida. Hurricanes combined with Northeasters aren’t charming in any geography.
Storms are bad enough but when storms combine, its worse. Like life, sometimes weather comes in devastating bundles. If you survive you pick up the pieces and move on.
What pieces are left to pick up in Israel/Palestine? Yesterday I Skyped with a friend who reads my commentaries. Our chat began with my understanding of Noam Chomsky’s place in Jewish history. We then explored my take on Amos Goldberg’s (storm cancelled) lecture on the place of the Holocaust and the Nakba in contemporary Israeli-Palestinian life.
From our conversation, I understand that part of my thinking on Chomsky has been misunderstood. Chomsky’s ‘absent’ Jewishness touched a nerve. Apparently, there are those who think Chomsky’s absent Jewishness is disingenuous. They see it as a disguise. By disguising his Jewishness, he pretends to have an unbiased viewpoint in the Israel/Palestine debate.
People can believe what they want. I believe Chomsky is totally honest in the way he presents himself. His ‘absent’ Jewish is his Jewish ‘presence.’ Chomsky’s absent/presence isn’t a trick of the trade. It’s central to modern Jewish prophetic.
How else to embody the prophetic in the post-modern age? Appeals to God and tradition have lost their credibility. Though Chomsky’s force comes from both, in our time they’re hidden from view. I believe they are hidden from Chomsky, too.
Chomsky is best understood as a Jewish prophet. To be so acclaimed is the greatest honor possible. Chomsky will be remembered as a prophet within the folds of Jewish history. I think he will remembered in Palestinian history in the same way.
I tried to write a cautionary introduction to Goldberg’s thinking about the ‘mutual’ suffering of Jews and Palestinians. Again, I may have been misinterpreted. I don’t seek to minimize Jewish suffering in history. Likewise, I don’t think Jews are reducible to an ethnic, power hungry or lobbying for Israel group. Jews have real concerns for their wellbeing because of an extensive and recent history of defamation and assault. What I oppose is the use of that history, including the Holocaust, to oppress another people.
Mutual suffering in the past is one piece of the Israel/Palestine puzzle. With other pieces in place that might make possible a ‘mutual’ future for Jews and Palestinians. Left to itself, however, it’s a non-starter. The justice piece is more promising. Yet justice is only human if it is directed to individuals who live in real time.
Conceptual justice is important to think through and propose. When imposed, conceptual justice is a disaster.
Left to itself, justice is a non-starter. It isn’t only the Israel/Palestine situation that makes justice alone problematic. Look at our world and the conflicts around the globe. Justice is part of their solution. It isn’t the only part.
Much depends on how justice is defined. A complicating factor in many disputes is how far justice reaches into the past. It’s better if justice is oriented to the present. When our concentration is focused on who is impacted and how, our actions are illumined and limited by the human face.
Of the various theoretical and practical definitions of justice that exist, the definitions and pathways we choose are crucial. In most ‘resolved’ conflict areas, satisfied constituencies are rarely sizable. In the best of agreements, previously unlivable space is made livable.
New life is carved out within the shattered remnants of past conflict. Individual grievances are rarely addressed. Agreements create a place where individual grievances are superseded through a creative future.
This is a basic and debilitating truth about factions in the Israel/Palestine debate. Whatever resolution is worked out, the idea that individual grievances will be redressed is illusory. So, too, is the idea that historical wrongs will be overturned entirely. The best we can hope for – and this is very far away – is the creation of a new entity that allows Jews and Palestinians to embark on a journey toward justice and equality.
This journey will commence in the ruins of Palestine, the place where Jews and Palestinians now live. It will also be played out in the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas.
I believe that any solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict will see the growth of both Diasporas rather than their diminishment. This growth will be voluntary. This should give us pause about elements of the conflict itself. If both the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas would grow voluntarily with a settlement, what indeed is the conflict about? The typical answers – land and power – are obvious. Still, there are other issues at stake. Those ‘other’ issues are crucial. The conflict in Israel/Palestine isn’t only about justice.
Most conflicts are resolved through an imposition of a new order. Sometimes that imposition comes from the warring parties. Other times it comes from outside interventionist forces.
This was yet another part of my Skype chat. I find it amazing how those against outside foreign intervention in principal and practice can, in certain situations, argue for the same intervention they oppose. In the case of Israel/Palestine, the argument for outside intervention is carried mostly by those who usually oppose it, especially when conducted by Europe and the United States.
The truth is more complex. Who on the political Left doesn’t pray for the day that Europe and the United States pulls the plug on Israel’s occupation? Would they oppose an American military intervention, even under the flag of the United Nations, if it pushed Israel back to its 1967 borders?
The concern isn’t about intervention per se, since Europe and the United States (not to mention the former Soviet Union) have been huge interventionist players in Israel/Palestine from the beginning. The issue is what kind of intervention is to occur. But, then, looking at the facts on the ground, is a more positive intervention by Europe and the United States already too late?
The need for international intervention has never been more clear. Left to itself, Israel has been flooding (“Sandy” reference) people and infrastructure into occupied Palestine and has for many years said (especially to Israelis and their supporters, thereby creating psychological resistance to peace-making) that the settlements that exist (and more exist day by day) are permanent, especially in “Jerusalem” (as territorially unilaterally remapped by Israel).
It is necessary, but also unlikely, because the tail of the AIPAC stranglehold on the USA wags the dog of the USA, which (as another tail) in turn muscles (wags) the (dog of the) whole world into flaccidity w.r.t. I/P.
Some bravery somewhere is necessary. Let’s keep working.
A lot of words, but some negation of logic.
If a compromise is meant, there won’t be justice but, well, a compromise.
If justice is meant, the shitty little occupation states is totally undone and disappears.
So a “just” resolution, by definition, is not in discussion.
The Palestinian diaspora includes people who have settled comfortably in other countries and so may well choose not to return except for visits, but the bulk of it still consists of people living in miserable conditions in refugee camps and often with very limited rights in their countries of residence. They still want to return and that is their right. But for most of them return will be a real and not just a formal option only if adequate provision is made for their livelihood in Palestine. That will require an enormous program of resettlement, restoring where feasible old Palestinian villages and neighborhoods, and will have to be staged over a period of years — and somehow financed.
By contrast, the Jewish diaspora will certainly expand as many Jews leave Palestine, either with the positive motive of restoring their old communities in other countries (under conditions negotiated by Palestine with those countries) or for the negative reason of no longer wanting to live in Palestine once there is no longer a “Jewish state” there. A Jewish minority will remain in Palestine, consisting mainly of those who identify with the country and its indigenous people rather than with Zionism, although there will also be some who remain reluctantly because for one reason or another it is impossible for them to return to their countries of origin. (For instance, who knows when conditions in Iraq will permit the restoration of the ancient Jewish community there?)
Anyway, these are my guesses about what might happen under the most optimistic scenario.
“The Palestinian diaspora includes people who have settled comfortably in other countries…”
Thank God they live for the moment, and don’t have the ability to worry about those unable or unwilling to move. I guess maybe it’s for the best.
World Net Daily:
Could ‘Frankenstorm’ be a sign from God?
‘When we put pressure on Israel to divide their land, we have record-setting events’
…
A message from God not to divide the land (or Jerusalem)?
Maybe. Or, of course, a message that God (at long last) has some decency, sir, and is tired of Israel’s cruelties, and is telling the world that it is time to pull up its socks and read Israel the riot act.
One never knows with God. But when Israel has been out of Palestine, God has sometimes acted to bring her there. And when Israel is misbehavingly present in Palestine, God sometimes shakes his fist (or so the prophets seemed to say).
Let each nation trot out its favorite haruspex to pronounce on this timely question. And lets see if Jews living in low-lying parts of NYC beat a quick path to Israel.
Leander an earthquake an angels whisper felt in israel on the 19 th october then a wave.chomsky could wear his hawaian shirt and surf
Go back in the archives and look at wes comments
“Whatever resolution is worked out, the idea that individual grievances will be redressed is illusory. So, too, is the idea that historical wrongs will be overturned entirely. The best we can hope for – and this is very far away – is the creation of a new entity that allows Jews and Palestinians to embark on a journey toward justice and equality.”
So, you think, basically, behind all the equivalence and equivocation, we can get away with it? There’ll be a little compromising (for Israel) on the road to the I-P peace horizon (if you’ll excuse the interpolation), but basically, we get away with it?
“I believe that any solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict will see the growth of both Diasporas rather than their diminishment. This growth will be voluntary. This should give us pause about elements of the conflict itself. If both the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas would grow voluntarily with a settlement, what indeed is the conflict about”
What on earth? The Jewish Diaspora, as far as I know, has absolutely nothing to do with the Palestinians. The Palestinians diaspora, on the other hand….
I hope you know what you just said.
Below Chomsky from:
link to tabletmag.com
“”The word “prophet” is a very bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word, navi. Nobody knows what it means. But today they’d be called dissident intellectuals. They were giving geopolitical analysis, arguing that the acts of the rulers were going to destroy society. And they condemned the acts of evil kings. They called for justice and mercy to orphans and widows and so on.”"
My question is why can’t Chomsky choose to be seen as an Intellectual with Jewish DNA, versus Chomsky is a Jew and anything he does or thinks must come after “he is a Jew?”
My question is why can’t Chomsky choose to be seen as an Intellectual with Jewish DNA
or just an intellectual. it matters not at all to me what his dna is, although it may matter to some. i can’t recall ever thinking about chomsky being jewish til i read mark ellis. maybe that’s because i am not jewish. when i read “understanding of Noam Chomsky’s place in Jewish history” the first thing i thought was ‘who cares, his place in history is much more important.’
and when i read “His ‘absent’ Jewish is his Jewish ‘presence.’ “ it occurs to me that beauty, like most things of value, is in the eye of the beholder. if something is absent, accept it as such. if the absence of jewishness becomes jewish ‘presence’ (absence=presence) it is no different than claiming jewishness is ‘presence’ or jewishness is existence. and if that’s the case then anyone else who’s in ‘presence’ is jewish. you might as well just define jewishness as being ‘in presence’.
i sense something proprietorial wrt the attachment to ethnic ( jewish) identification of chomsky by others, an attachment that does not emanate from chomsky himself. therefore, since he doesn’t emanate it, the claim becomes his quality to ‘lack of emanation’ is defined as what’s jewish. so what part of the man is allowed to be identified by what he emanates? can he chose his own self identification? can one choose one’s own self identification? and if one is going to place a value on something, is it more valuable to be identified as a jewish scholar, or a scholar? a prophet or a jewish prophet? or does he even have a choice in the matter? if chomsky identifies as a scholar and you identify him as a jewish scholar than who are you defining? you. it speaks to the viewers values. so, i don’t think of him as jewish. it is not the absence that defines him unless one defines both ‘absence’ and ‘presence’ as jewish.
I noticed it first in a list about antisemitism, and then during the discussion about the Lobby. For the first group Chomsky was a scapegoat comparable to Hannah Arendt, which is another self-hating Jew. For the people discussing the Lobby, it was of utter importance that he was Jewish. It seemed to explain why he resisted the Lobby theory. Now one could argue it doesn’t fit into his theory, but that was never considered. The main point was always that he obviously must resist it since he is Jewish. He didn’t consider that fiction could turn into reality. Now, he is a linguist, not a scholar of literature. Had he been the second he may well have been better prepared.
You picked quite possibly my most favorite quote in the text, thus I can’t resist.
First let me admit I am a pretender, I try to look informed and well read while really being a nobody of no importance. But that you move beauty into the context of the quote is interesting. If e.g. the arts are about what humans in their respective times perceive as beautiful, Kant would contradict you, it’s not simply in the eye of the beholder, it’s deeply entangled in an underlying ethical system, a power beyond us, so to speak, something beyond our theoretical or practical means, and it is not in the eyes of the beholder. Ok, I am hesitant if he would still write this considering the art market, but there you go.
I read this phrase in its “beautiful paradox” as hinting at the fact that the “Jewish ethical” base may well have influenced the political Chomsky, even though his political work is not about religion. But religion is the earliest ethical base or system he ultimately relies on, according to Mark Ellis. I find nothing wrong with this statement.
Chomsky would not disagree, see that link above, he could have been a Rabbi, and he would most certainly have carried into his later years the influence of his early year’s education as we all do.
“Describe Mikveh Israel, the synagogue that you grew up in and where your father first taught.
Well, Mikveh Israel was actually Sephardic, so I grew up in the Sephardic tradition. It was kind of the elite synagogue in Philadelphia, like the Portuguese synagogue in New York. It was Sephardic because the original settlers were Sephardic Jews from Holland. So we had a Dutch, actually originally Portuguese, rabbi, and the hazan was from Morocco. We learned all the Sephardic rituals, and pronunciation and everything, even though everyone in the community was from eastern Europe. It was kind of the Jewish elite, but it was also the center of a Hebrew renaissance-oriented small society. The people were either teachers, rabbis, there were businessmen and others, but they all shared a passionate interest in Hebrew cultural revival. My father was the head of the school. My mother was running the Hadassah meetings.”
I happen to have a certain amount of “Jewish DNA”. And if nobody here wants to make me an offer, I’m putting it on E-bay. So don’t delay! If you schmooz instead of snooze, you’ll never lose!
Good work, excellent points, ole Noam would more than likely agree. I do not recall where I saw it, seems like it was an interview, but did I read it or view it can’t say
(link to tabletmag.com),
but he grew up steeped in his religion and could have been a Rabbi and\or a Jewish scholar. His place in history, for me anyway, is as an American Intellectual-Historian-Scholar-Writer, similar to a football coach either being a good coach or not such a good coach, or an average coach, not whether he is a Black coach Etc., matters not whether the individual is Black or Jewish or whomever, their merit should be judged by what they have accomplished. If Black or Jewish groups desire to honor their brethren then by all means please do so, but don’t hijack the individual and force undesired Monikers on them. Much of this alleged hijacking, and perhaps that is too strong a term, but much of it stems from pride in the individual\group, like pride in a family and a play on the word Pride, a family group of lions.
( link to en.wikipedia.org.
I. Kant
Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds for exemption from the examination by this tribunal, But, if they are exempted, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination.
While you’re busy sitting down and formulating for a “just” peace, israel just keeps gobbling up more Palestinian land and killing it’s unarmed civilians. Only a war can redress this “peace’ you claim to seek. And don’t blame the Palestinians or Arabs for starting this eventual war: they’ve been talking and talking and talking peace, while famished and watching the holy land “pizza” get eaten slice by slice by the zionists.
Now we’re on the last two and a half slices: Gaza, the West Bank, and the half being Jerusalem.
Did you ever notice, Taxi, that there are some people who simply cannot conceive of Zionism failing in a real major way, nor can they envision (and as you may know, “Where there is no vision, the people perish”, or so I’ve heard) any accounting for Zionists, nor anybody or anything who can make them take responsibility.
I wonder why that is?
Oh well, I shouldn’t carp or cavil, I find it impossible to envision or conceive of my own death.
Mooser,
Death of zionism is not death of judaism. And it’s them buggers who can’t tell the difference who’ll be begging for mercy at the Hague – or for opiates at the sanitariums of Odessa and Brooklyn.
The death of Zionism may well be the death of Judaism. Religions are supposed to provide services the markets won’t – such as defining the difference between good and evil.
Judaism can no longer do this.
“Now we’re on the last two and a half slices: Gaza, the West Bank, and the half being Jerusalem.”
Then I guess we don’t have long to wait for an Israeli celebration of Palestinian culture, along with enough poetic self-recrimination to choke a horse.
Once the job is done, the clean-up begins.
Mooser,
The zionist plan, Herzl’s plan, was to divide up the Arab neighboring countries into waring factions and bantustans, while israel prospered as the only unified, military and economic decider of the middle east. His plan was to divide large Arab countries into small chunks, smaller in area and demography than tiny israel. He thought that israel can only have longevity if israel itself was the largest and most populace country in the mideast. His aim was to turn the Arab sea into small dirty puddles that the israeli army can easily stampede over with only their boots getting a little wet.
He wanted the whole Arab world to become what Libya has become in the past year: fractured, lawless, unfocused, dissipating as a nationality.
And saudi arabia is helping with this plan – trying it out in Syria now but so far failing. Interesting to note the fact here that the self-appointed royal saudis, their lineage, their ancestors that is, used to be jews who converted to islam for the specific purpose of destroying islam from within. Their brand of islam, Wahabism, is singularly responsible for the fast deteriorating image of islam in both the east and the west – and is also a vile misrepresentation of islam.
Nobody cared much about islam till 9/11. The attack was fundamentally a saudi attack and it took ten years thereafter for islamophobia to grip europe and America.
How can the thinking man/woman not make a connection here between the overt zionism of israel and the covert zionism of saudi arabia?
“Interesting to note the fact here that the self-appointed royal saudis, their lineage, their ancestors that is, used to be jews who converted to islam for the specific purpose of destroying islam from within.” eh?
i’d check your sources again as i dont recall seeing this anywhere, well except in the rantings of nutters, for the specific purpose of destroying Islam from within, as if we need any help in that endeavour. Or you could just post your sources for this wild claim, Jews who converted to Islam were the backbone of the faith, and Christians and Pagans, the Marwanid princes did more to “destroy” Islam than anyone else in the opinion of many and Abu Sufyans’ heirs and the Umayya secured the empire and Islam went out of the window, thats the history i was taught, if you think about it, its not really feasible is it? unless you believe in historical conspiracies and malevolent “races” and religions.
As to wahhabism, well its history is interesting, as you know, he was anathematized by his brother and everyone else and driven out of Nejd, but his ideas were seized upon by Ibn Saud as they provided a legal avenue to revolt against the Sublime Porte, and with connivance of the British, from the very start, Arabia was prized from the Ottoman empire. The ideology of the Muwahhidun is distinctly modern and reductive and related as are most fundamentalisms with state building in the modern age, where religion becomes a national ideology, it is not unlike Zionism in its relationship with its parent faith.
The Zionists and Saudi’s are the main regional opponents of the ideologies of national liberation in the region, along with all the little monarchies etc. anyway as predicted by the Prophet Muslims lead the way in the destruction of Islam, that we will concede to no one.
It is and always has the been the Muslim view that the three faiths co-operate, the war of Abrahamic faiths is a distinctly European notion, read some Kuftaro, say, The Way of Truth, or
link to h-net.org
i know its weird but Muslims believe in Judaism and Christianity, its a requirement of the faith, and in Buddhism etc and all forms of inspired insight, there are none without guidance.
“And in their footsteps We sent Jesus the son of Mary, confirming the Law[Taurat] that had come before him: We sent him the Gospel[Injeel]: therein was guidance and light, and confirmation of the Law that had come before him: a guidance and an admonition to those who fear Allah.”
Sura 5:46 Al-Maeda
all the best and all that
gamal,
You think the House of Saud would allow any historian to write about them being a jewish Trojan Horse in the court of islam and live? You think these historians’ books would get re-prints and second and third editions?
I’m responding to this early in the AM and can’t fone my Arab writer friend who told me the horrible story of one such Saudi historian (house of saud arrested him and threw him out of a plane into the desert while alive). But I will write again when I get the historian’s name and the title of his book which caused his demise in the 1950′s at the hands of the Saudi family.
Many of the early jewish Arab tribes genuinely converted to islam – but some didn’t do it for the love of allah and Mohamad.
Just because YOU haven’t come across suppressed information about the House of Saud, doesn’t make it “nutty”.
Okay gamal,
The Saudi historian is called Nasser Al Saeed and his damning book was called ‘Al Saud’, for which he was horribly murdered.
I googled and got this as first up:
link to islamtimes.org
Also
link to socioecohistory.wordpress.com
Fruity or nutty – it’s up to you to discern truth from fiction.
Sometimes we lack the smoking-gun, but that does not mean that we out and out dismiss the plausibilities – open mindedness and all that.
There can be no justice without agreed law, a court to interpret it and announce a judgment, and a power to enforce the court’s judgment.
There may never be perfect justice. “Justice” is like that. Any lawyer can tell you that the job of a court, of a judge, is to end a conflict with some sort of semblance of fairness, not to create perfect “justice”. Many judges don’t even try (e.g., USA’s S/C and its dodging the Holy Land Foundation case).
But when judges do try to make “justice”, they try to use widely accepted definitions of the “law” and to depend for enforcement of their judgment on an adequate (administrative, police) force to impose their judgment.
In the I/P case, the international community has long seemed agreed on what the “law” is, but has been stymied (mostly by USA’s veto in UNSC) from acting to promote justice in a way that can be imposed on Israel.
When the UNGA asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) whether the Israeli wall in OPTs was legal, the ICJ resoundingly said it was not. And then its judgment went ignored, because of USA obstructionism and/or a lack of energy or commitment on the part of the nations which make up the UNGA.
BDS is the citizens’ attempt to impose justice based on widely accepted “law” (the illegality of the settlements, the occupation, the exclusion of the exiles from 1948, the anti-democracy of the social system within pre-1967 Israel).
Perhaps PLO and/or BDS can re-energize the nations to attempt concerted action (say in UNGA) even despite the USA’s obstructionism. Wish us all luck.
pabelmont October 31, 2012 at 9:24 am
“ICJ … And then its judgment went ignored”
I believe it was an opinion, not a judgement. However, their opinion was that; had they been asked for a judgement, they’d have favoured the Palestinians.
Its one of the characteristics of the discussion of I/P is that it often becomes a negotiation, whose aim is to postulate a solution with minimal justice, a whats the minimum that the Palestinians will accept to stop the conflict, as if they are the major drivers of it rather tha its powerless victims, leaving aside the other peoples of the region who also have profound connections with Palestine (part of my family come from Nablus we would love to look them up not having heard from them for longer than i have been alive) this seems to miss the point to me anyway. The first issue is not to decide how little restitution we can get away with, isnt the most crucial issue at this point to stop the slaughter and immisseration of Palestinians, and its concomitant disaster for Israeli society, a very reasonable objective surely.
Couldnt one imagine:
Granting Palestinians the same rights that all Western peoples take for granted and then allowing whatever processes, be they legal, social or economic to take their course, without any hard and fast notions of where they might lead, wouldn’t that be acceptable.
How would Israel be transformed by integrating into the region, by establishing relationships of amity not just with the regimes (which are all pretty dodgy) but with the peoples of the region, solutions that attempt to freeze the conflict will in the end only be temporary, Israel is in the middle east not Europe or the new world and will have in the end to develop a middle eastern perspective.
As to Chomsky’s Jewishness, I dont get it, every body is something, and dont prophets speak to God, how is he a prophet? the one thing that Islam seems to have got right is that there are no prophets anymore, we will have to work things out using our own meager mental and spiritual resources, God, whatever that means, is staying out it, perhaps a good thing in this day and age.
Perhaps this not the right place to say this but to me this whole notion of Jewish power seems both illusory and dangerous, Israel is not powerful but extremely fragile, threatened apparently by an Iran which is a very mediocre power indeed, even without the sanctions and international isolation. In that regard i would have say i accept Chomsky’s ideas that in the end Jewish and Lobby power is granted by the real nexus of corporate and imperial, which i would not really know how to characterize, but it surely isnt Jewish, transnational perhaps, but Jews it seems are being singled out as the cause of much mayhem and injustice i think this is really worrying in the medium term. it wont take much for Jews to sink to the status currently enjoyed by Arabs in the Western mind, some one is going to carry the can for the brutal transformation of society under way in the 1st world, and it wont be the 1%, which slogan seems to me to be designed to be misconstrued at some point in the near future, redounding to nobodies benefit.
I can remember reading your towards a Jewish liberation theology or something when i was a kid, cant remember too much but it did make me feel a bit thick, and as if i hailed from a different universe.
“Granting Palestinians the same rights that all Western peoples take for granted and then allowing whatever processes, be they legal, social or economic to take their course, without any hard and fast notions of where they might lead, wouldn’t that be acceptable.”
Sure, that’d be great! And just between you n’ me, where do you plan to stash all the Zionists, who are more than willing to use violence to prevent them having those rights?
“but Jews it seems are being singled out as the cause of much mayhem and injustice i think this is really worrying in the medium term. it wont take much for Jews to sink to the status currently enjoyed by Arabs in the Western mind”
My, what a tender concern you evince for the reputation of your Semetic brethren. Thanks.
“Sure, that’d be great! And just between you n’ me, where do you plan to stash all the Zionists, who are more than willing to use violence to prevent them having those rights?” no not stash defeat, its the only answer no one is willing to live as 3/4 of a human or less, yes rivers of blood later but that is what is coming, if not now then later, transform or die, is i think a Californian slogan isnt it,
anyway despite all the eternal fear and trauma bs Jews and westerners seem very complacent to me in a “It cant happen here” sort of way, its already happening here just not to people they hang with or in environments they frequent, between Omdurman and the Somme was barely a couple of decades
“My, what a tender concern you evince for the reputation of your Semetic brethren. Thanks.”
no just an observation most westerners leave me pretty cold, its the neuroses and tedious self obsession, give me Jamaicans any day and their “We run tings, tings na run we” attitude and if they are in short supply Karateka will have to do. Semetic bretheren, whatever those are, sounds contagious like pederasty, i wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.
Hasan Safadi was released from Israel’s prisons two days ago. He endured 164 days of hunger strike (73+61). He, Mahmoud Sarsak, Hana Shalabi, Khader Adnan, Samer Al Barq, and the hundreds of other hunger strikers are the prophetic. Whereas Chomsky has the comforts of an American academic, these Palestinians have nothing but their bodies, and they’ve forged a new path. They’ve exposed the incompetence Palestinian Authority and created a new leadership, demonstrating the power non-compliance and refusing normalization.
I don’t think English-language coverage has given enough credence to the growth of non-compliance and civil disobedience within Palestinian civil society. Its an incredibly difficult task. How can we log the changes of persuasion within Palestinian society? How can we – English-speakers – document for our own communities the ways in which Palestinian society changes ideological and practical formulations of resistance?
And another note:
The taxpayers of the United States pay more money in sum than Israeli taxpayers for the Israeli military. Unfortunately, this will not be a part of discussions in forging a just resolution, and there will be a scapegoating process, whereby American leaders escape accountability. Which ones? Who knows? That’s a long way down the road. We need to find some accountable though.
Here’s hoping that we’re planting the seeds of accountability in the minds of the many.