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Total number of comments: 440 (since 2009-10-18 23:35:01)

andrew r

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• Liberal Zionists are afraid their parents will reject them if they come out
  • andrew r May 11, 2012 at 8:24 pm with 1 replies

    My dad in his role as as president of the Holocaust Museum in Dallas has expanded the content of that museum from the the persecution of Jews in World War 2 to include the persecution of African Americans in Texas. I’m very proud of that.

    It must be safe to assume that her parents don't view any action against the Palestinians at any stage of the conflict as persecution. Their focus on segregation in the Old South is just a feel-good trip so they can support a regime that segregates in their favor, while pretending to anti-racism. You might as well campaign against porn while keeping a stash of Hustler in the crawlspace -- the hypocrisy is no less blatant.

    The biggest failure of liberalism in the US is that it's taboo to come out in favor of apartheid or Jim Crow, but you can make a career justifying racial exclusion for the sake of Zionism, and, of course Indian removal.

    I have not wanted to go there, to disappoint them, to make them sad, to make them want to reject me.

    That's infuriating. I don't know what to tell her, except there are no compromises. Anything that threatens to disown one's offspring for turning against it can't be all that defensible.

    I love Israel the way you do when you’re 16 and you’re free from your parents' grasp for the first time and go on a team tour and you get to go out and experience things on your own.

    Now this whole paragraph seems disrespectful to anyone who was forcibly relocated to make Palestine become and remain a Jewish state. For propriety's sake she could keep thoughts like this to herself. Of course, she's not talking to Palestinians here.

    I'm not an expert on this issue at all. Everybody who will speak here this weekend will be more an expert than me. I have probably already belied my stature by some of the language I've chosen to use in this talk.

    If you want to become an expert, or better informed at least, you simply have to learn the facts of the Zionist movement that supporters of Israel in general do not seem to know and those who do would rather not talk about. Not only what it's done to Palestinians; what it's done to certain Jews as well, however far down the memory hole that's been flushed. Like I said about Bradley Burston -- Liberal Zionism is the art of saying a whole lot of nothing. In the time it takes you to admit Israel might've gone overboard, you could have more fun riding a glacier.

    But I cant be silent anymore, because I understand that in order to secure the future of Israel so that my nieces can go back and create the kinds of memory-- experience the magic of floating in the Dead Sea and the power of watching the sunrise over Masada-- we cannot continue with the status quo.

    Israel hasn't been able to ride roughshod completely unscathed and now you want to try the carrot. It's not going to happen.

• Feminist scholar Katherine Franke refuses to be pawn in Oren's equality game
  • andrew r May 6, 2012 at 6:03 pm

    Jewish gays have rights. Israel does not specifically persecute Palestinians for being gay but that's not going to do you a whole lot of good if you can't build a house.

• 1200 rabbis threaten an end to interfaith harmony if Methodists support divestment
  • andrew r April 22, 2012 at 6:36 pm

    Any religious definition is going to veer towards being observant. Zionist colonization had to ignore some basic tenets like keeping the Sabbath and fasting on high holy days. This was possible because the Zionists adopted the attitude that Jews are a nation irrespective of religious practice, and that idea could only have formed in Europe where the uneasy mix of intolerance and emancipation affected Jewish identity.

  • andrew r April 21, 2012 at 6:29 pm with 2 replies

    I don't think anyone said there is no link between Zionism and Judaism. However, Zionism is still a secular racial ideology that assumes the existence of a biological Jewish identity regardless of how observant you are. There's no way that came from Rabbinical Judaism.

  • andrew r April 21, 2012 at 4:40 pm with 2 replies

    Link to the letter with signatories
    link to engage.jewishpublicaffairs.org
    link to rabbis-letter.org

    This is a very fascinating letter. Runs the gamut of hypocritical to just plain illogical.

    Yet quite honestly, were American Christian denominations to indict only Jews and Israel for the conflict with the Palestinians, they would justify the violence perpetrated against Israeli civilians – including children – as the unfortunate result of Israel’s unilateral guilt. In other words, Israeli victims would be responsible for their own suffering. Frankly, such a representation is anything but an expression of friendship and common purpose, and it would replace the closeness and comfort the Jewish community feels in existing relationships with distance, distrust, and disappointment.

    Anyone like how the above paragraph totally forgets that Israeli civilians include Palestinians who are 'present-absentees' and frequently suffer their communities demolished? And for that matter, what were the signatories doing the whole time Cuba was embargoed, Iraq was under sanctions and Gaza was (and still is) under siege? What BDS proposes will not inflict near as much damage on Israel. If anything, Israel is the only country they would defend from a consumer-led boycott.

• When is someone going to lose his job for calling someone an anti-Semite?
  • andrew r April 13, 2012 at 7:56 pm

    It was really creepy how the students kept having to watch footage of dead bodies, even through a hanging monitor on the bus. Jewish funerals don't even show the person.

• When Mike Wallace questioned Israeli story of '90 massacre, he got called into the owner's office
  • andrew r April 12, 2012 at 1:01 pm with 1 replies

    I keep saying that I want to change American Jewish identity because we won't change American policy without changing the Jews; Jews are just too powerful in American establishment.

    Just once I'd like remarks along this line to be accompanied by some comparative study: How powerful are Italians, Irish and other immigrant communities who at one point were not considered "white" for the purpose of immigration quotas? Last time I checked Rupert "Billionaire Tyrant" Murdoch (a US citizen since 1985) wasn't Jewish. How many bad things about Israel can you say on his network?

• Hasbara in 1988: 'despite difficulties, South Africa is a vital, progressive state with much to admire '
  • andrew r April 10, 2012 at 3:04 pm

    "Israel differentiates in those who are peaceful and those who are not."

    Oh man, this is just not worth the effort. It can be refuted by reading most of the articles here.

  • andrew r April 10, 2012 at 1:57 pm with 1 replies

    * In SA whites where not indigenous to the country. They arrived on boats from Europe. Jews, on the other hand, have always lived in the land now called Israel and have long standing, legitimate rights.

    This might've had a speck of merit except the Zionist colonies made distinctions between Oriental Jews and Ashkenazim. Even among Jews the colonial pattern of reserving the most menial and least-paying jobs for the natives (and paying them less for the same work for that matter!) while settlers were in more comfortable positions replicated itself. This is a section from 'Land, Labor' by Gershon Shafir (p. 105) to get an idea of how segregated the moshavim were.

    Upon their arrival, Yemenite Jewish immigrants could "choose" to live in either cow-sheds or stables, under the open sky, to erect wooden huts or, if they were lucky, to move into temporary shelters such as cellars, depots, etc. Between 1912 and 1914, the JNF, in cooperation with the PO, financed the construction of more durable homes. These consisted, according to Druyan's painstaking research, of either tiny single-dwelling houses, some in fact built by the immigrants themselves, or of long wooden barracks, that contained eight to ten rooms. All of these accomodations, Druyan sums up, sufficed for no more than 30% of the Yemenite immigrants in the colonies. The houses were built in separate quarters, at some distance from the existing moshavot: Shaarayim near Rechovot, Machane Yehuda near Petach Tikvah, Nachliel near Hadera, Nachlat Yehuda near Rishon Letzion. (63) These quarters, or shall we call them slums, were built either from the donations of various philanthropic bodies, or with the monies of a special drive for the construction of the Jemenitenhauser. Some of the money collected for the express purpose of building homes for the Yemenite Jewish workers, was diverted to other purposes for both YJ and Ashkenazi workers though, occasionally, Ruppin also spent money on construction prior to its authorization from Cologne. The YJ residents were forced to pay either monthly or yearly rents. (64) When the dimensions of the housing shortage were revealed, the heads of the WZO in Germany refused to spend much of the very limited budgets of their, at the time, objectively poor movement on philanthropic aid. They were willing to spend money on the YJ only commensurate with their "value" for the overall colonization goal of the Zionist movement.

    And of course the Kibbutzim were created for the express purpose of barring Mideasterners, even if they were Jewish, from competing with the Ashkenazi workers.

• Israel bars Gunter Grass from entry under law barring former Nazis
  • andrew r April 10, 2012 at 4:13 am

    A good indication that Gaza's independence is a fiction would be the ease with which Hana Shalabi was deported there. Don't forget that many Hasbarists claim the PA is independent in the West Bank (Read: Palestinians under PA jurisdiction are not under occupation) yet she was arrested in Area A (Jenin) so Israel deported a person from one independent entity to another. Obviously it would not be possible for one state to behave that way vis-a-vis two other states even if they don't have bilateral relations.

• The liberal Zionist predicament
  • andrew r April 9, 2012 at 11:29 am

    A last P.P.S. only because I've a nagging feeling about the response to Nobody whom Atzmon talks about identifies as a “Jewish Marxist.” That is a category he imposes on them.

    Of course there probably are people who simultaneously identify as Jewish and Marxist. It's the charge of putting their humanity second, and using the compound term to define them as such, that is racist against Jews as a whole. "Jewish" is a complex, fluid identity like religious identities are. Any compound use of the term in a pejorative way is almost certainly going to be racist.

  • andrew r April 9, 2012 at 10:55 am

    P.S. I wouldn't consider "Jewish supremacy" to be a racist formulation given the supremacy is actually there. It would still be racist against Jews to assume their belief system ipso facto is the source of that supremacy without accounting for external factors. And I don't understand what makes that point so obscure after listening to the likes of Nonie Darwish, et. al about Jihadists and the Koran. Like you said Tree, same shit, different identity.

  • andrew r April 9, 2012 at 10:42 am

    Clarification: That is a category he imposes on them. That would not necessarily be racist if not for

    The act of imposing a category in a social critique is not necessarily racist. The category he does impose on them still is.

  • andrew r April 9, 2012 at 10:27 am

    Tree: Of course there is. If I am talking about the KKK and upper class white snobs, those are two subsets of whites. They are not the sum total of all whites, and Atzmon has no more said that his two categories are the sum total of all Jews than you or I would say that the KKK and upper class white snobs are the sum total of all whites. Atzmon ties the two, tribal Marxists and Zionists, together through their sense that their “Jewish” identity puts them on some higher plane, moral, intellectual, or spiritual, than their individual identities as human beings. A subset of whites, a subset of Jews. Same shit, different “identity”.

    First off, while it is fair to say the KKK and/or UCWS are the equivalent to Zionists, "Jewish Marxist" is a nebulous term that says nothing at all. Atzmon doesn't get a pass to label people "Jewish Marxists" because they put their Jewish identity over their humanity. That's an antisemitic formulation on the face of it. Not because Jews have been persecuted on the basis of being a race of potential communists. Because 1) Nobody whom Atzmon talks about identifies as a "Jewish Marxist." That is a category he imposes on them. That would not necessarily be racist if not for 2) Were a non-Jewish Marxist to put his ethnicity/religion/nationality over his humanity, would Atzmon call them a 'Tribal Marxist' or a Marxist with some other prefix? If he has, do point it out.

    To put not too fine a point on it, "Tribal Marxist" is a category reserved for Jews. When Atzmon uses it, it will never refer to White Marxists, Arab Marxists, African Marxists, Nigerian Marxists, Russian Marxists, Christian Marxists, etc. etc. nor will he ever denigrate other Marxists who put their ancestral identity over their humanity with an ethnic prefix.

    It's pretty cut and dry to me that using "Jewish" as pejorative prefix in any context is going to be racist. Also goes for "Arab" or "Muslim" or "Black" or, you get the idea.

    Of course, this begs the hypothetical, what if Atzmon did exactly what I'm accusing him of not doing... freely denigrating Marxists with their own ethnicity? There's a reason it is a hypothetical... the history of linking Jews and Marxists in antisemitic discourse is the inspiration for Atzmon's category. So in fact, if he were to call Frantz Fanon a "Black Marxist," that would simply be racist against Blacks. Racist discourse can spread to any category like a broken silo of paste. That's how today's Islamophobes recycle what was said about Jews in the 19th century.

    Also, my point linking Atzmon and Churchill might need some elaboration. Regardless of the distinctions they make, Jews in general are their target. A phrase like "Judaic spiritual and religious heritage" is going to signal that much louder than any qualifier. It's not that he says all Jews are Zionists or Marxists. It's that Jews may become Zionists or Jewish Marxists and this is a result of that Judaic heritage as opposed to any historical process where people who aren't Jewish might be involved.

    But the same can be said about whites, you might argue. True, and it would make some sense in the case of white supremacy because Jewish communities have had a complex interaction between each other and the broader societies they lived in, and that is only the first step to explaining where Zionism and Marxism came from. To explain these two ideologies as the product of a linear Jewish history stemming from the Holy Texts is a regressive understanding of history that makes the force behind a supremacist ideology to be Jewish supremacy itself. And that is where I call antisemitism - the belief that Jews are embedded in gentile society for a sinister purpose. Atzmon's many formulations make Jews the carriers of bad things for gentiles.

    Where has he not exonerated anything other than "Jewishness" as the cause of Zionism? This section in 'Tribal Marxism For Dummies' would have been vigorously argued against if a hasbara troll brandished it here:

    Machover’s reading of Zionism is pretty trivial. ‘Israel’, he says, is a ‘settler state’. For Machover this is a necessary point of departure because it sets Zionism as a colonialist expansionist project. The reasoning behind such a lame intellectual spin is obvious. As long as Zionism is conveyed as a colonial project, Jews, as a people, should be seen as ordinary people. They are no different from the French and the English, they just happen to run their deadly colonial project in a different time.

    However, as much as Machover is desperate to divert the attention away from the Jewish question, Jewish tribal politics and the Jewish identity, his entire premise can be demolished in a one simple move. If Israel is a ‘settler state’ as he says, one may wonder, what exactly is its ‘motherland? In British and French colonial eras, the settler states maintained a very apparent tie with their ‘motherland’. In some cases in history, the settler state broke from its motherland. Such an event is a rather noticeable one. The Boston Tea Party may ring a bell. However, as far as we are aware, there is no ‘Jewish motherland’ that is intrinsically linked to the alleged ‘Jewish settler state’. The ‘Jewish people’ are largely associated with the Jewish state, and yet the ‘Jewish people’ is not exactly a ‘material’ autonomous sovereign entity. The lack of material Jewish motherland leads to the immediate collapse of Machover’s colonial argument.

    Moreover, native Hebraic Israeli Jews are not connected culturally or emotionally to any motherland except their own state. As an ex-Israeli, I can testify that neither my parents nor myself or any of my fellow expatriates have ever been aware of our ties to any other (mother) state except Israel. Accordingly, it may be true that Zionism carries some colonial elements and yet, it is not a colonial project per se, for no one can present a material correspondence between Jewish ‘motherland’ and a Jewish ‘settler state’. The Jewish national project is unique in history and as it seems it doesn’t fit into any Marxist materialist explanation.

    link to gilad.co.uk

  • andrew r April 8, 2012 at 10:27 pm

    How students are educated in a country usually matches how the country explains and justifies its actions. Atzmon isn’t just describing how Israeli students are being educated, he’s describing how Israel justifies itself. That’s exactly what Atzmon was upfront about.

    This I'm not sure about: "After reading Moses’ oratory we may have to confess, the Jewish nationalist project that is supported by the vast majority of Jewish institutions around the world is an attempt aiming at robbery of the indigenous Palestinians following a cultural and religious heritage that is overwhelmingly documented in the Judaic Bible"

    Even though Israeli Jews are doing the dirty work, I haven't found anything to indicate it's limited to them. And of course the first category Atzmon attacks are Zionists and neoconservatives, who are understood to be Americans. At the same time, I can accept that he's attacking identities that were forced on him growing up in Israel. That still doesn't do much service to anyone who wants to understand Zionism.

    He’s also not describing “Jews as a group”, but subsets of Jews, who have supremacist attitudes which they feel are justified by Judaic religious texts.

    My last response to Danaa goes for this more or less. There's no meaningful distinction between Jews as a group and subsets of Jews divided into categories as imposed by him. This is similar to the point I just made about the Churchill oped from 1920 that divides Jews into Zionist Jews, International Jews/Bolsheviks and Jews who regularly take part in their home countries. An antisemite like Hitler would never acknowledge the last grouping, so in that way Churchill's antisemitism was more liberal. Yet in his imagination, Jews as a peculiar group are still a source of antagonism to their host societies, and that is it by definition.

    Any grouping of people into a subset needs to be accompanied by some insight into their social relations. There are histories of Zionism that touch on intra-Jewish relations, between Ashkenazim and Mizrachim/Sephardim, between German and Pale of Settlement Jews, between plantation owners/managers and vagabond workers... and that's just Gershon Shafir in 'Land, Labor'. After being exposed to the insights of Shafir and Etan Bloom, what use have I for categorizing Jews as Zionists, Marxists and cosmopolitans and tracing their behavior to Moses? These categories as used by Atzmon do not explain any relation between Jewish communities or between them and the broader societies they lived in. And all three stem from "spiritual and religious heritage" which tells me diddly squat.

    I agree with Dana for the most part that his use of the word “Jewish-ness’ is problematical from a logistically point of view. His use of the term “third-category Jew” was a bit more accurate but clunky nevertheless. He’d probably get his points across better if he used the term “Jewish supremacist” or “Jewish exceptionalist” when describing the behaviors he’s critiquing.

    Of course, if Atzmon does not want to be called antisemitic, he'd do well to stop throwing around terms like 'Jewish Marxists' and 'cosmopolitan'. "Jewish supremacist" is still problematic because secular Zionists do not think Jews are superior to gentiles; they view themselves among those who are superior to Orientals. So that still falls short of explaining the origins of Zionism, not that he's shown any particular desire to do this.

    And, again, I think its perfectly fine to criticize him for his failings in his writings. Even say you think his writing is anti-semitic if you believe it, but to ban him or shun him is wrong. It gives the impression that, yet again, overt racism towards Arabs is allowed in polite society, but the mere suggestion or “whiff” of anti-Jewish racism is a banning offense, thus reinforcing the idea that despite the fact that anti-Arab racism is killing tens or hundreds of thousands of Arabs, saying something negative about Jews is so much worse. It isn’t.

    Agreed on the last point. However, I don't understand how shunning him creates that impression because anyone who is overtly racist against Arabs has already been shunned by default.

    Of course you realize my interpretations of Atzmon are informed by other writings of his that for reasons of sanity are going unmentioned. This time.

  • andrew r April 8, 2012 at 4:33 pm

    "Were the rest of us to do what you do on everything every last one of us would be a proven “anti-semite”"

    Somehow I doubt that. How many of us write about "Jewish Marxists and cosmopolitans" as a category?

    "combine the two as “proof” that Atzmon was talking about “all” Jews. Is that the essence of your case?"

    Yes and no. The essence of my case is that the Atzmon article I've been picking at has no clear point and is an unfocused mess, unless you unite the disparate themes into being about Jews in general, as he does in the last paragraph. He already combined the two for me. The job is redundant.

    For that matter, there's nothing I learned about Jewish history or identity from Atzmon. Had he used his Israeli background as a springboard to research Jewish history more in-depth, his writing might've had some value. Instead, he mixes scattershot generalizations with some basic facts about Zionism that can be learned in greater detail elsewhere (The paragraph referencing the 'Absentee Property' law is the only real content in that article and even that has the silly "Moses' call to theft" line). If I stopped accusing Atzmon of antisemitism, he would still be an intellectual blackhole.

    And we're back to yet another point I already made, that he's getting some leeway on here that is just not granted to anti-Jihadists. G.W. Bush himself could never qualify as a racist in a million years if he were granted the breathing space you're showing Atzmon. At the end of the day, the enemy of the good is sourced from either Jews or Muslims.

    For reference, 'Zionism vs. Bolshevism' by Churchill is antisemitic despite making distinctions between differing groups of Jews, OR, because it does make such distinctions. In Churchill's mind Jews were the source of an egregious political movement and the key to fighting it. Of course, Palestinians, not Jews, were ultimately the victims of his racism which encompassed both.
    Linking to a Google search because I can't find it reproduced on non-kooky sites.
    https://www.google.com/search?q=zionism%20vs%20bolshevism

  • andrew r April 8, 2012 at 12:02 pm

    Mainly because of the very last line in 'Swindler's List': Would the Zionists be open to the notion of brotherhood, they would be empathic to the Palestinian right of return. Would the Jewish Marxists and cosmopolitans be open to the notion of Brotherhood, they would give up on their unique exclusive banners and become ordinary human beings like the rest of us.

    The whole act of bringing "Jewish Marxists" into the picture doesn't exactly indicate Atzmon is only talking about Zionists and neoconservatives.

  • andrew r April 8, 2012 at 9:14 am

    "How can he be any more clear that he is talking about the “Israeli experience”?"

    When I said Atzmon needs to be upfront that he's talking about the Israeli experience, that was a direct response to this part from Danaa:

    The way he talks about the continuum from Deutoronomy to present day Israel is an all too true description of the Israeli experience (even if it may not be the Jewish experience outside Israel). A continuum, straight from the bible, and through endless centuries of Jewish achievement interspersed with unrelenting of “irrational” persecution, and bingo, softly land into the modern Judaen experience, is precisely what one takes away from the bloody-mindedness of the full-bodied Israeli educational system.

    In other words, Danaa took Atzmon's writing that I am calling antisemitic to be about how Jewish Israelis are educated, and in no way does he set out to explain that.

    "But that is exactly what Atzmon is saying, and you dispute this by calling it anti-semitic."

    What I'm calling anti-semitic is that Atzmon explains Jewish behavior with reference to the Torah the exact same way Islamophobes explain Muslim behavior with reference to the Koran. Look at the paragraph under which I called him a nutjob: Zionists and neo-conservatives are very familiar with the different immoral teaching within the Judaic spiritual and religious heritage that matured into Zionist looting. Foolishly, they try to project it on to Islam and Muslims.

    This can't be any more straightforward. He's not talking about the factual history of Zionism anymore. He's saying that peculiar Jewish traits can explain the behavior of Jews as a group. And the "Judaic spiritual and religious heritage" is one of those traits. It's one thing to point out that Zionist figures have used the Torah as a justification. It's another thing altogether to tell us Islamophobes are projecting when they say the Koran is the cause of terrorism, and would be correct if only they made the same argument about the Torah and the theft of Palestine.

    Like I said before, if the Torah can explain the actions of Zionists - And that is a different task altogether than pointing out they use the Torah as a self-justification - Atzmon needs to explain why political Zionism started in Basel instead of Baghdad. That he doesn't bother is only one example of why he can not write seriously on the subject.

  • andrew r April 7, 2012 at 9:29 pm

    Danaa, although you might find some deconstruction of Israeli society in Atzmon's writing, there is nothing in 'Swindler's List' as a whole to suggest that. If he's going to write about the educational system in Israel, if that bit about the continuum between Deuteronomy and Israel is supposed to be about the Israeli experience, he has to be upfront about it. James Joyce can get away with vague writing... not him.

    Given that I'm wrong about the purpose of Atzmon's article ("casting aspersions on any given political expression by Jews" like I said above), it has no clear purpose. There's got to be an alternate explanation for why he jumps from criticizing anti-Muslim scaremongering to Jewish Marxists.

    "there can be absolutely no doubt that zionism did intend to “rob the land” so they can “work the land” and in doing so found justification in both jewish and socialist texts"

    Nobody disputes this. None of what Atzmon writes that I find objectionable has anything to do with the factual history of Zionism.

    Of course Atzmon doesn't write about Jews for the same reason as, say, Houston Stewart Chamberlain or Heinrich von Treitschke. Whatever his personal motivation, however he got to this point, the end product stinks. If he's going to lay out how Israel turns you into a goy-hating drone, he should just shut up and do it instead of insulting all his anti-Zionist critics. But somehow it doesn't seem like he's really interested in that, either.

    Speaking of which, you don't think calling As'ad abu Khalil an "Anti Zionist Zionist" was libelous?

  • andrew r April 7, 2012 at 6:40 pm

    I already took on this article in a long discussion about Atzmon last year -- and ended up arguing with the man himself. Everything in that article leading up to Israel Shahak's name misrepresents what he wrote in 'Jewish History, Jewish Religion', because Shahak's purpose was to explain how the Medieval Rabbinic tradition led to the radical settler movement. His Talmudic citations were not meant to analyze the root causes of antisemitism and Atzmon should not have presented him in that light. That summarizes what I said below.

    link to mondoweiss.net

    Atzmon thinks scholars should look for "the root causes that may well have led to an antisemitic event, ideology or text" and what's his idea of a root cause? "The considerable body of anti-gentile views", "Jewish cultural supremacy" and "Jewish political lobbying". This is one example of how I find him manipulative: He pretends to care about deconstructing antisemitism as a historical phenomenon, yet his idea of such is to look at Jewish traits or behavior that invited the hostility on themselves.

    Once again, I've never seen any discussion on racism around MW that would suggest the behavior of the target can be a source of explanation. If someone came around suggesting Israelis should be afraid of a Palestinian return because of Arabs killing each other in Syria or Iraq, that would be called racist and rightly so.

    So what is Atzmon saying here, if not what I just laid out?

  • andrew r April 6, 2012 at 3:15 pm

    If you didn't already find them in the letter signed by As'ad Abu Khalil, I'm not terribly inclined to go looking for more Atzmon to read so as to find more quotations that weren't cited in the letter. Not to mention I already cited an example above that's not in the letter, so that knocks it down to two statements.

    So if you don't mind all three statements coming from the same article, here's a hackjob on 'Swindler's List':

    Needless to say, so far these recurring attempts have been futile if not actually counter-effective. Not a single Western politician, Zionist campaigner or neo-conservative think tank has managed to establish a comprehensive case against Islam. The reason is simple: in spite of the clear fact that some terrible atrocities have been committed in the name of Islam and in the name of jihad, these acts were performed by disparate, radicalized and isolated cells

    This is okay, so far. There's always room for one more good debunking on Islamophobia. However, Atzmon takes a peculiar turn from here...

    Since the collective incrimination of Muslims stands at the premise of neo-conservative philosophy and global Zionism, and since both Zionists and their neo-conservative twins are doing poorly on that front, I have decided to dedicate this paper to a pedagogic cause and try to help them out. I will give here a crash course in rhetoric. I will try to enlighten our foes and show them, step by step, how to establish a case based on a continuum between the holy scripture and merciless collective barbarism.

    Now, this could be satirical. And he leaves enough wiggle room to claim as much if he's called on it, at least in this paragraph. However, he does not devote any space to explaining why anyone needs to, "establish a case based on a continuum between the holy scripture and merciless collective barbarism." Instead, he goes on to do exactly that without a trace of irony.

    In fact, there are many other ways to save the Judaic God from being the logos behind contemporary Israeli plundering, yet it is not that easy to save the Israelites from being presented as robbers and plunderers, especially in the light of their spiritual, cultural and religious heritage. In short, it is actually impossible not to see the continuum between Deuteronomy 6:10 and the crimes against the Palestinian people that are committed by the Jewish state in the name of the Jewish people.

    Now here is an example of how after endless condemnation of the behavior of Zionists, Atzmon is still one himself. The idea that there's a continuity between present-day Israelis and the Ancient Israelites is Zionism 101. Again, this could be a satirical point to show how bigoted Islamophobes are. That's what I'd like to believe. However, the thickness with which he lays on this point and his anti-Marxism leads me to conclude he's earnestly asserting the Torah can explain the actions of Jews in modern history.

    It seems obvious: the recurring failure by Zionists and neo-conservatives to defame Islam and Muslims is actually nothing more than a banal projection. Zionists and neo-conservatives are very familiar with the different immoral teaching within the Judaic spiritual and religious heritage that matured into Zionist looting. Foolishly, they try to project it on to Islam and Muslims. After reading Moses’s oratory we may have to confess that the Jewish nationalist project that is supported by the vast majority of Jewish institutions around the world is an attempt to rob the indigenous Palestinians in line with a cultural and religious heritage that is overwhelmingly documented in the Judaic Bible.

    And there we have it. The money shot. The proof that Atzmon is a nutjob. Instead of making a point against religious bigotry, he is saying in no uncertain terms the Zionists and neoconservative campaigners against Islam would be correct if they spoke about Judaism. It's not possible to find satire or irony in his thesis at this point. He's seriously telling us the actions of the Zionists in Palestine can be explained by Judaic scripture. And just for good measure:

    On the face of it, robbing the rich, confiscating their homes and grabbing their wealth is seen as an ethical act within the progressive discourse. As a young revolutionary I myself took part in some righteous parades. I was ready to grab my sword and to join the hunt for a Tsar, a capitalist or any other enemy who may cross my way. But then the inevitable happened: I grew up. I realized that such vengeance towards an entire class of wealthy goyim is no more than an extension of Moses’s oratory of Deuteronomy, Chapter 6.

    Now he's on a completely left-field anti-Marxism kick that disrupts the flow of his article, or it would if the point was to deconstruct anti-Islamic rhetoric instead of casting aspersions on any given political expression by Jews.

    Now, the Bundists were anti-Zionist in general. So much they formed a different group in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Moshe Olgin for example referred to the Palestinians as the established inhabitants of Palestine who were there hundreds of years before the arrival of the Zionist settlers. The fact that Atzmon could boil down socialism to "robbing the rich" only shows he has a belligerent misunderstanding of the term - socialists do not want to steal what the rich have, they want to destroy the basis of their wealth so no one can have it. The fact that he places Marxism as an extension of "Judaic spiritual and religious heritage that matured into Zionist looting" shows he's antisemitic no less than any given ruling class figure from Marx's time.

    And for good measure, the three statements are in bold. "the different immoral teaching within the Judaic spiritual and religious heritage that matured into Zionist looting." - This is yet another formulation of his that is flatout antisemitic on its own without the extended quote.

    Oh, on the off chance anyone thinks the whole article is satirical, that can only mean Atzmon himself is 100% full of satire.

  • andrew r April 6, 2012 at 7:29 am

    "Jewish people would have pressured a group of Palestinian writers to dismiss Atzmon precisely because he a Jewish problem – for them. And don’t think they lack the wherewithal to do it."

    Either that, or Ali Abunimah, Omar Barghouti, Joseph Massad, et. al decided by their own cognitive reasoning that Atzmon is damaging to their cause based solely on their own reaction to his writings and not how Jewish people react to them. Now, it's just me, but it doesn't seem very respectful to assume off the bat they caved in to Jewish pressure.

    What is so amazing about Atzmon he gets a pass to call anti-Zionist Jews "tribal" for identifying as Jews; an Arab anti-Zionist a "Sabbath goy" and an ally of "Jewish marxists"; portray the Jewish holy texts as the cause of anti-semitism ("if we are to even begin to understand the roots of anti Semitism, then primary attention must surely also be dedicated to the considerable body of anti-gentile views expressed within the Torah, Talmud")... That is complete filth, not scholarship.

    I haven't seen one Mondoweiss poster defend Nonie Darwish. She grew up in Egypt and speaks about jihad. She's readily recognized as a racist even though she's also an Arab. The fact that Atzmon is a self-described ex-Jew who's racist against Jews should not even be controversial and it doesn't take more than the comment quoted above to realize it.

  • andrew r April 6, 2012 at 6:57 am

    "The rejection of Atzmon was probably to some extent the result of white (and Jewish) people telling the Palestinians who they should and should not associate with."

    The exchange between Atzmon and Asad abu Khalil should blow that out of the water. If Atzmon calling him an "honorary Sabbath goy" and "Anti Zionist Zionist" does not show he's a total moron, what will it take? Look at how he made fun of Prof. abu Khalil, someone he owes a great deal of atonement, and tell yourself he's not an arrogant ass.

    link to angryarab.blogspot.com

• Rockets are collective punishment
  • andrew r March 22, 2012 at 12:35 am

    "Collective punishment and intentional attacks on civilians are wrong, no matter who practices them or why."

    If that's the case, Burston should turn against Zionism in toto. This is nauseatingly hypocritical as he's not really rejecting intentional attacks on civilians as a matter of principle. He's rejecting attacks that do not expand the Jewish and demographic state and only add to its delegitimization.

    Sadly, I have to link another Burston oped.

    "In return for my acquiescence, the settlement movement blackened Israel's democracy and its very name. We gave them Yitzhak Rabin and they gave us Avigdor Lieberman."

    In 1949, Rabin gave the order to demolish Iraq al-Manshiya and al-Faluja despite an explicit promise to protect these villages in an annex to the armistice with Egypt. As defense minister, he's famous for the savage beatings of demonstrators during the first intifada.
    link to mondoweiss.net

    "Settlement has long been, and remains, the fuel for the fire of de-legitimization of Israel, the basis of charges of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. It undermines the foundation of the idea of a Jewish state. It turns the very word settlement into an obscenity."

    Uri Davis' work demonstrates that Israel is an apartheid state in the 1949 armistice boundary, nevermind the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Non-Jewish citizens of Israel can not lease land held by the govt. or the JNF, which is 93% of the land in the Green Line. A Palestinian-Israeli, Adel Kaadan, had to wage a ten year legal battle just to live in a small Jewish town. Even though he technically won, the result only applied to him and was not a general ruling against segregating Arabs from Jewish towns. Even though Burston will probably not have a problem with challenging this situation, it's in place because of the Zionist state he supports.

    "Every morning the settlements expand, the democratic and Jewish character of Israel is undermined, Israel's standing as a member of the community of nations is called further into question, and the support of this country's indispensible American ally is clouded, casting a shadow over the security of everyone here."

    This tells you pretty well what Burston really cares about. The whole decision to create a Jewish state in Palestine was not democratic to begin with as it excluded the Palestinians who should have been able to live in and build their own country instead of being expelled en masse at gunpoint. Burston will not condemn that action because it was necessary for the demographic (not democratic) and Jewish character of Israel.

    "Like many a bigot, I truly have no quarrel with the vast majority of the Jewish residents of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But I do not want them to force the majority of Israelis, myself included, to live in a new Arab country which retains the name of Israel. I have no problem at all with Arab countries. But I didn't come here to live in one."

    Hint: 50% of Jewish Israelis are of Arab background which would make Israel an Arab country as it stands. Now, of course many will disavow that Jews from Morocco, Yemen and Iraq are Arabs, yet they spoke Arabic there, so that would raise the question as to why Muslims and Christians from the same regions who speak the same language are Arabs, but not Jews. The separation of Jew and Arab into mutually exclusive identities is a racist trope that was brought on by European colonialists, Zionists as well as their British and French backers.

    I really get the impression that had the West Bank been cleared of Arabs quickly after 1967, fast enough so that his generation didn't have to protect the settlers, Burston would be outspoken about as much as he is on 1948. His concern is for protecting the hard-won gains of 1948 which are threatened by the settlements expanding the boundary line to include more Arabs.

    link to haaretz.com

• Responses to Toulouse murders from Palestinian orgs and Jerusalem mourners
  • andrew r March 22, 2012 at 1:16 am

    That we're civilized and they are bloodthirsty fanatics, even the ones who are killed themselves. Because obviously that's what you think.

• As I read this, I cringe
  • andrew r March 21, 2012 at 8:52 pm

    Had I grown up in the Zionist Entity, I would definitely be stained with an IDF service, just as I'm stained by not resisting the non-existent draft you have to register for. Once you send in that selective service card, you can't unsend it.

• When victims retaliate: A response to Bradley Burston
  • andrew r March 15, 2012 at 1:20 pm with 4 replies

    Burston says a whole lot of nothing so it seems like he's critical of Israel though not really. Look at this navel gazing trash.

    link to haaretz.com

    “”God protect you from us, and from your own people. You will be scoffed at even as you are shot at. There are people on both sides for whom non-violence causes a sense of unease, a sense of being, forgive me, emasculated.

    Teach us to grow up.

    Teach us what we have lost. Our sense of shame.”

    There's two ways to read that. He either knows the IDF can kill civilians deliberately, as in, not collateral damage, or he thinks there's no real danger for non-violent resisters, so he's making fun of them. This guy exists only to give Israeli media a sense of soul-searching. His kind think it's really cute to act like they're in and out of rehab only instead of drinking they shoot civilians. Engaging with him is a complete waste of time because he's the kind of bullshit artist as only Zionism with a liberal face can bring you. If he's reading this, what can I say? Yeridah for Israel, Bradley.

• The myth of Israel's favorable treatment of Palestinian Christians
  • andrew r March 17, 2012 at 9:08 pm

    I would think twice before relying on Bridgett Gabriel as a source on Lebanon.

    "For anyone like me who grew up in a civil war context, I will tell you her first big lie. She claims that during the civil war in Lebanon she lived for seven long years in a bomb shelter. As those of you who grew up in Lebanon, you know that people never stay in the bomb shelter for more than a few days because wars don't go on uninterruptedly but they go through periods of intense fighting, then lulls, then cease-fires then temporary peace and then more fighting and so on. So this in itself is the biggest lie of the book. I have run into many liars from Lebanon, but her lies are by far the biggest ones."

    link to angryarab.blogspot.com

    "I have read nothing in this topic to contradict the conclusion that Christians are under serious threat in every Arab country, whilst Christians in Israel relatively speaking are many times better off, despite the intolerances that do exist and Michael Oren admits that."

    There are few Christians in Israel to threaten in the first place. Palestinian Christians were certainly under serious threat during the British Mandate and the 1948 war from Zionists. This is really cute. You cite the depopulation of Lebanese Christians as a sign of Muslim intolerance, yet their expulsion from Palestine is proof that Israel is a liberal, tolerant, modern blah blah blah.

• Palestinian and Palestine-solidarity activists issue critique and condemnation of Gilad Atzmon
  • andrew r March 17, 2012 at 5:46 pm

    "Very intriguing comment Atzmon made in discussion with Mezvinsky — Atzmon said “Jews have no ethics. Their code of conduct is the rules from Moses, the Covenant, so that if they obey those rules, they are obeying god. But there is no Jewish system of ethics, to evaluate right from wrong.” He elaborated. "

    This contrasts heavily with Shahak in 'The Weight of 3000 Years':

    From the ethical point of view, classical Judaism represents a process of degeneration, which is still going on; and this degeneration into a tribal collection of empty rituals and magic superstitions has very important social and political consequences. For it must be remembered that it is precisely the superstitions of classical Judaism which have the greatest hold on the Jewish masses, rather than those parts of the Bible or even the Talmud which are of real religious and ethical value. (The same can be observed also in other religions which are now undergoing revival.)

    You can't read Shahak and come away with the impression that there's a "Jewishness" as Atzmon pushes it. Shahak actually cared about religious practice as it evolved (or degraded as he'd put it) based on social conditions and the demands of circumstance.

    And the 'Wandering Who' passage quoted above doesn't take into account that Weizmann and his ilk saw Jewishness as a national grouping irrespective of religious practice (Though their views on the sacred text is a complex subject in itself). This is from the era where it was common for men of science to postulate the biological characteristics of national groupings - what we call eugenics - and that's the context for the rise of political Zionism. Does Atzmon deal with that at all? If not, he's a charlatan.

  • andrew r March 15, 2012 at 2:41 am

    First, a full disclaimer, I've argued with Atzmon here before, basically explaining how he and Israel Shahak are not alike.
    link to mondoweiss.net

    "Doesn’t messianic and xenophobic ethnic nationalism lie at the heart of the Jewish tradition — in the Torah, Old Testament and Talmud? The vision of a long succession of conflicts and wars against “the nations” (other ethnic groups), culminating in the triumph of Moshiach over the unchosen nations?"

    This begs the question why political Zionism originated in Basel and not Baghdad or Jerusalem. Of course Atzmon can't answer that and wouldn't give a damn about it anyway because where historical knowledge fails him, he falls back on prejudice.

    In all my attempts to read him, I saw no evidence that he seriously researched the history of any Jewish community anywhere in the world or the Zionist movement for that matter. Or that he has any sort of framework for how Jewish tradition and political behavior inform each other. Shahak did, though I think he was too Eurocentric in linking the chauvinistic texts with the radical settler movement. So does Etan Bloom whose thesis on Ruppin touches on how Jewish traditional roles became secularized, yet still diffused into Zionism. Atzmon rehashes cliches about "Jewish Marxists". His target is one undifferentiated mass called Jews and nouns preceded by the adjective "Jewish". There's nothing specific about his critique. There's no reason to listen to him anymore than Nonie Darwish or Walid Shoehat.

    He may or may not know this much: The early settlements in Palestine did not behave as if Jews were superior to the goys. They behaved as if white Europeans were superior to orientals, and it showed not only in their shabby treatment of Arabs, but also in their shabby treatment of oriental Jews. The founder of the kibbutz movement, Arthur Ruppin, expected them to die of natural causes for the weakness of their race, and did not want them as part of the Zionist movement, though he acceded to recruit a handful for menial labor. You have to be kidding me to assert that came from Judaism. Ruppin got that from the eugenics movement in Germany. There's a lot more baggage attached to that than Atzmon would bother to unravel. Etan Bloom did some of the work.

    And it's out and out ignorant to portray Zionism as the natural outgrowth of the Torah, Talmud... Herzl himself was uneducated on Jewish religion. For God's sake, the guy expected dueling (as in, take ten paces, turn, fire) to be regulated in his Jewish state. That would not be possible in a Jewish theocracy. Herzl, Ruppin, Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, and virtually all the figures who were important in creating the Usurping Entity were atheists and turned their backs on rabbinical education. And they hated haredim. Yet Ben-Gurion did giveaway important state functions to the two chief rabbis, namely education and conversion, though notably not legislation. The Zionist movement's relationship with religion is a lot more complicated than ten-cent analyses about chauvinism in the texts.

    I too am amazed that people who'd know better than to say something like "9-11 came from the Koran" would go around saying Israel is caused by Jewish tradition. That right there is in agreement with Zionism, not calling out Atzmon's barenaked bum.

• "Didn't we learn anything from 1938?' Wasserman Schultz's opposition says Palestinians belong in Jordan
  • andrew r January 12, 2012 at 11:43 pm

    "“I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre[10] or the Crusader wars."

    Well, it's interesting to find out the original source of this quote, but it's still silly to claim Azzam Pasha or any given Arab leader had a genocidal intent based on it. The whole extended quote leaves the impression that he expects a lot of fatalities on both sides as opposed to a one-way slaughter. In any event, the idea that he is inciting Arabs to emulate the behavior of the Crusaders is just... weird. Who the hell tries to motivate their soldiers by telling them to kill the same way their ancestors were killed? It doesn't follow that he planned for Arab soldiers to wantonly slaughter as the Crusaders did.

    Also, he sounds like a typical Western colonial agent with this line, "war gives the Bedouin a sense of happiness, bliss, and security that peace does not provide! …" Uh-huh, riiiight.

• How a comic book healed the wounds of normalization
  • andrew r December 14, 2011 at 1:54 pm

    tokyobk -

    Many early Zionist figures referred to what they were doing as colonialism. A famous example is Jabotinsky in his "Iron Wall" article, which disingenuously claimed the Palestinians would not have to be expelled for settlement, yet posited an "iron wall of bayonets" to make them accept the Jewish settlers. Another case is Aharon Eisenberg whose company Agudat Netaim developed farms on moshavot for private ownership. (See Land, Labor by Gershon Shafir)

    The third president of the WZO, Otto Warburg, belonged to the Prussian Colonization Company and worked as a land surveyor for German settlement of Poland. He was the one who gave Ruppin the mandate to form a WZO office in Jaffa. And building settlements in Palestine was just one of his projects; he proposed a railroad from Germany to Baghdad running through Anatolia with Jewish colonies on either side of the tracks (Of course this didn't go anywhere). Ruppin himself viewed the PCC as a model for settling Palestine with the exception of Hebracizing the natives (It was policy of the PCC to Germanize the Polish as Ruppin was).

    The most significant indicator of Zionism's colonial nature, and something that needs to be acknowledged when you talk about 'historic connection to the land', is that like most colonial settlers the European Zionists despised the natives they found in their colonies, and the Old Yishuv was no exception. When Yemenite Jews arrived just before WWI, they had to live in barracks built for them away from the moshavim they worked at. Only Ashkenazim were allowed in a kibbutz.

    "The historic connection to the land" was for European Jews and only European Jews. Arab Jews were a source of imported labor. That's how they were treated by the developing colonies before 1948 and that's how Mideastern Jews were treated after Palestine was made into a Jewish state.

    Now, although the settlers didn't arrive in the name of a mother country, the Zionist project itself was integrated into or spun-off from other colonial projects, including the above-mentioned PCC. Some technical experts from Algeria joined the moshavim, the German embassy protected the Yishuv from Turkish hostility until almost before the British took Jerusalem, and of course Ben-Gurion and others formed a Jewish Legion carrying the British flag. Few of the settlements in Palestine before WWI were profitable and the British takeover was needed to make the Yishuv a force that could conquer Palestine.

    What really makes Zionism colonialist, in my view, is that like the Puritans and Quakers who settled North America, Jewish settlement in Palestine was backed by imperialists who detested Jews and saw this project as a way to get rid of them and solve their socialist revolutionary problem. And that's how Herzl pitched the idea to the European statesmen he met.

• The liberal Zionist inability to confront the right of return
  • andrew r November 28, 2011 at 10:32 pm

    Morris couldn't even get a job in the mid-90's without the intervention of Ezer Weizmann. And only after an interview where Weizmann flat out asked if he supports Israel's right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. I skimmed through '1948' and while the material on Deir Yassin from 'Birth' is outright recycled, details like the Haganah raids on Balad as-Sheikh and Wadi Nisnas with orders to kill adult males didn't seem to be in there. No big surprise.

• Praise the 'NYT' for exposing an American Jewish family's argument over Israel/Palestine
  • andrew r November 28, 2011 at 9:13 am

    On one hand, it was an interesting story -- Then again, why does it take a Jewish activist to relate settlers shooting farmers? Why couldn't a Palestinian write about it directly? Probably the same reason the editorial on 'pinkwashing' only talked about the Brand Israel PR offensive without going into what homosexuals actually face in Israel if they aren't Jewish.

    But when Tayseer does make it from Gaza to Israel via the West Bank, his story is one of fear of being expelled just for being Palestinian. The rest of what Klein Halevi describes of lives of such Palestinians is homelessness, prostitution, fear, alienation, compromise and violence regardless of the status of the Israeli-controlled territory where they are. Palestinian men live on the streets of Tel Aviv and work as prostitutes. Israeli Jews are their clients, benefactors, friends and even partners.

    link to electronicintifada.net

• Israel's threat to attack Iran-- will Obama capitulate to that as well?
  • andrew r November 14, 2011 at 4:49 pm

    Okay, this is a serious question now: Has Iran provided Hezbollah with the hardware necessary to fight a conventional war or even overfly Israel? Does H possess Iranian fighter jets? So how likely is Iran to hand out nukes in the event of producing any?

  • andrew r November 14, 2011 at 4:37 pm

    Let's see here...

    -In the states we honor our martyrs on Memorial Day. Of course we call them fallen instead of martyrs.

    -Hezbollah is not the NSDAP and Lebanon is not Germany. Newsflash: Hezbollah is not an invading army. It defends its country from invasion. Newsflash: Hezbollah hasn't advocated any anti-Jewish measures in Lebanon. Maybe I should start killing art school dropouts one-by-one. There's no reason to believe they'll become another Hitler, but with the survival of the Jews at stake, can you really afford to take that chance?

• US Freedom Riders woke a nation. Palestinian Freedom Riders must wake the world
  • andrew r November 13, 2011 at 5:28 pm

    I was going to argue with ymedad using this table but then noticed he already pooh-pooh'd it on his blog.

    link to btselem.org

  • andrew r November 13, 2011 at 5:00 pm

    "just remind me about the comparison with the civil rights movement, when were Southern blacks using terror tactics which obligated a stringent ecurity apparatus which led to oppression?"

    In other words, had blacks responded to lynching by killing whites, the segregationist measures that were already in place would be justified on security grounds. And those struggling against segregation through non-violent tactics would be completely discredited in the eyes of, well, those who imposed it on them to begin with.

    Also, the segregation itself isn't a sufficient cause for Palestinian attacks. It's backing up the segregation through military offensives on civilians. You need to feign a lot of cluelessness to cast the segregated people as the bad guy.

• Bellow: Diaspora Jews support Israel because it restored our 'manliness' after the Holocaust
  • andrew r November 7, 2011 at 5:50 pm

    "What I am saying is that if Israel would have been formed before the war it could have helped the Jews."

    You are ignoring everything that had to be done to establish Israel. No nakba, no Israel.

    "It is a judgement call, and in my judgement and in the judgement of many others, a Jewish state would have been able to save many Jewish lives."

    Then explain the logistics. Moving many Jews to one location isn't going to save them ipso facto. "Israel" circa 1939 could have been a glorified de facto concentration camp, depending on how the war turned out. And it would have been 100% dependent on Britain for defense.

    "They were not going to replace anybody unless they were attacked."

    An internal WZO memorandum in 1907 (Written by Ruppin) called for a Jewish majority in Palestine. The Zionist leadership made their intentions explicit, if only to themselves, to replace the Palestinians that early.

    "You are against saving several hundreds of thousands of Jews because you think they had the intent of remaining in Palestine and evicting the Palestinians."

    Actually I can not establish the intent of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Other the other hand, the intent of the political leadership of the Zionist movement can be established. And the point is that the Zionist leadership chose a Jewish state over rescuing Jews. That's not my "position," it's what happened. During the 40 years preceding 1933, the Zionist movement could have put its efforts into creating refuge for Jews all over the world instead of colonizing Palestine. They were hellbent on Palestine regardless if it would save Jews or not.

    Oh, and you said this above, "You are a low life taking what I said out of context," yet you did the same with my argument. Not that I'm bothered (I don't expect any better from you), but if no one tells you you're acting like a childish idiot, how will you know?

  • andrew r November 7, 2011 at 4:12 pm

    "You guys always make me laugh because even in 1938 you would have been against a Jewish state. So what if several hundreds of thousands of Jews could have been saved you would argue, it should never be done at the expense of the Arabs in Palestine."

    Eee, it's very easy for you to write this crap because you base it on nothing except emotion. Some people like to critically think before they put an argument together. Instead of asking us if we would have supported a Jewish state in 1938, why don't you ask how an Israel in 1938 was going to take care of several hundred thousand more Jews without dispossessed Palestinian property and reparations from the FDR. Don't forget, the Zionist Organization did not accept the Peel Commission plan; it was to be the basis for further negotiation (Ben-Gurion wanted to accept it, though).

    In the real world, after the Palestinians were expelled and Jewish immigrants from the Middle East arrived, Israel needed an austerity measure to take care of 1 million Jews. There's no way it would have been food self-sufficient in 1938. Germany could still have invaded "Israel" or cut-off food imports through submarine warfare. Your arguments take for granted that "Israel" would have saved many additional Jews when that wasn't a guarantee.

    To really deal with your last, silly sentence, no one objects to several hundred thousand people taking refuge in a country. But the Jews who would have fled to Palestine were not just going to sit out the war and go home; they were going to replace the people already living there. There's no way they could have accepted that. If anything, relentlessly pursuing a Jewish state in Palestine made it untenable for Jews to take refuge there.

  • Page: 4
• Strategic asset or rogue state? Israel's threats to Iran 'concern' Pentagon
  • andrew r November 7, 2011 at 5:51 am

    "Goyim kill goyim and blame the Jews" - Begin on Sabra and Shatila

  • andrew r November 5, 2011 at 12:31 pm with 1 replies

    "Both scenarios are horrific, but the Iran-nuking-Israel is actually the lesser of the two evils when you think about it."

    And the best part, Palestine will be open for the refugees to return. Sure the country will be irradiated and may never grow anything again, but you can't make an omelet without sprouting a few mushrooms.

• JTA wonders why 'Jewish influence' is so 'pervasive' in our politics
  • andrew r November 4, 2011 at 8:26 pm

    "The nature of this conflict is such that the democratic will of the Palestinians conflicts with that of Jews. That usually leads to war as in this case."

    Let's chew over this Orwellian claptrap for a minute. You might as well change 'war is peace' to 'war is democracy'. War is about as authoritarian, anti-democratic and disdainful of the individual as it gets. The Zionist settlers chose an aim that would lead to war. Had the Palestinians fled their country without even an ineffective attempt at fighting back, which was the minimum necessary to avoid conflict with the settlers, there still would have been war on them. This was not a clash of democratic wills. It was a clash of racist tyranny on the part of the Zionists vs. the natural right of the Palestinians to remain in their country.

    The fact that the Yishuv at large was willing to be conscripted as the foot-soldiers of such tyranny does not make it democratic. It only means they submitted the basis for their livelihood to an authoritarian structure. It's like arguing Assad has a democratic mandate because many in Syria still support him.

    Zionism started as an aggressive proto-fascism that can not by definition respect anyone's democratic will. It will only claim a democratic mandate, as you attempt here, to legitimate expulsion, thus denying other people their rights.

  • andrew r November 4, 2011 at 4:06 pm

    "what most Jews agreed to democratically"

    How dare Rosa Parks went against what most Americans agreed to democratically.

    You don't really care about democracy. Otherwise you would respect the democratic will of the Palestinians to return to their country. Democracy is supposed to protect other people's rights, not your right to take away theirs.

• Goldstone sugarcoats persecution to try to save Israel
  • andrew r November 1, 2011 at 9:15 pm with 10 replies

    dimadok, here's a list of individuals you should know about:

    Azmi Bishara - Former Knesset member who was charged with 'support for a terrorist organization' after visiting Syria; yet Lisa Goldmann has not been in trouble for using her second passport to visit Lebanon.

    Mahmoud Darwish - Harassed by the military governor of the Galilee for reciting poetry until he left Israel

    Adel Kaadan - Could move to a Jewish town only after ten years of litigation

    Fatina and Ahmed Zabeidat - Needed a high court order to obtain a plot of land in Rakefet

    Manhash al-Baniyat - Bedouin tracker whose house in an unrecognized village was demolished after he was KIA.

    And the fact that several Israeli Palestinians attained what sound like impressive positions on paper doesn't mitigate a few facts: The High Court of Justice is less powerful than the army which can blow off its rulings; The president of Israel doesn't have any formal powers (briefly acting, like, wow); Majadele could only join the cabinet as a member of the Labor party; As someone pointed out here, Arab parties have never been represented in the cabinet and the cabinet has the real power to decide if Israel goes to war; Most of all, no one is impressed that the IDF use Bedouin as trackers and border guards. It's not uncommon for a regime that persecutes a certain group to recruit some agents from that group (See below).

    Saddam's deputy prime minister was Tariq Aziz, a Chaldean Christian. Would you seriously believe Saddam did not persecute Iraqi Christians on that information alone? The Iraqi army under Saddam also had Shiite officers, so how can you possibly argue Saddam had anything against Shiites?

    The Bahraini ambassador to the US is a Jewish woman. Are you going to start praising Bahrain's treatment of minorities now?

    You want to talk about minority rights? The current defense minister of Syria is a Greek Orthodox.

    So even for the sake of argument you pretend Israel is a liberal democracy with an Arab minority instead of a colonial-settler state ruled by a minority that has forcibly displaced and disenfranchised the majority, a handful of people in what sound like important stations does not tell you how the minority really fares under the government.

• Abunimah: Palestinian focus should be on attaining rights, not statehood
  • andrew r September 21, 2011 at 2:18 pm

    "The idea that all that happened in 1948 was that the good Palestinians were expelled by the bad Jews is a distortion of the history, not a universally accepted idea in the academy (the way, say, gas chambers are) and is basically a partisan narrative."

    This paraphrase is an example of vested interest congealing into self-pity. Like "the good Africans were enslaved by the bad Portuguese" or "the good Indians were starved by the bad Britons" or "the good Ukrainians were collectivized by the bad Stalinists." Crimes have victims and perpetrators, get over it.

    Next, although there are arguments about the extent of how far back the Haganah planned the nakba and the extent of what they intended to accomplish, there is no argument about what actually happened. No one in "the academy" accepts the Palestinians fled en masse on orders from the Arab League or AHC. No one in "the academy" accepts Deir Yassin was not a masacre and so forth.

    However, although it hasn't been proven conclusively that Ben-Gurion planned decades in advance military operations to ethnically cleanse Palestine, it's very simple to establish the motive among him and other Zionist leaders. Ruppin, who created the Palestine Office which became the governing body of the Yishuv, wrote a memorandum in Dec. 1907 laying out the steps to achieving statehood in Palestine: "1. The creation of a Jewish majority in Palestine; 2. The purchase of most of the land; 3. The unwavering ambition to achieve Jewish autonomy." So he called for a Jewish majority on most of the land in Palestine and is on record proposing transfer of peasants evicted by JNF purchases. Since mass immigration did not accomplish a Jewish majority, it'd be disingenuous to argue his followers were not getting exactly what they wanted when the Palestinians fled.

    To portray the expulsions and refusal to permit return as a reaction to Palestinian belligerence is to ignore the history of segregation mandated by various yishuv projects, especially the Kibbutzim, also created by Ruppin. Ben-Gurion consistently called for separate employment of Jews and Arabs and wanted all Jewish enterprises employing only Jews (His sole exception was the Directorate of Public Works, and even here Arabs would still have a separate sick fund and kitchen). Weizmann also made it known to the British that a Jewish majority in Palestine was the goal.

    It would take some major gullibility to assume the Yishuv was going to live in peace with the Palestinians who need only have vacated their land when asked nicely and were only expelled because they tried to fight a foreign invasion. Only the fellow travelers of Zionism are that dumb.

• 'I prefer to live with Jews': A liberal Zionist argument for the two-state solution
  • andrew r September 20, 2011 at 7:36 am

    Much as Yoffe is repugnant here, the right-wing fellow is following an established tradition of Jabotinsky-ite discourse. Ze'ev wrote in "The Iron Wall" that no Arabs need to be expelled, yet Etzel followed the Haganah's lead in Jaffa and elsewhere. Of course DBG said the same thing at points, the difference being that he would not demand lands not readily available and preferred to build up in land already under Zionist possession. Yoffe's friend above is simply using bi-nationalism as an excuse to possess all the land; when it comes down to the "Arab question" he'll be on the side of expulsion, that's a promise.

• Arab Sources: Hamas on UN bid
  • andrew r September 19, 2011 at 12:28 pm

    "The Jews took what was given. And Palestine was given because of the Judeo-Christian tradition that identifies the Jews with Palestine."

    eee, on the off chance you learn to care about facts, here are some:

    -90% of the second aliyah (1904-1914) did not remain in Palestine

    -Most of the children of the first aliyah emigrated back to Europe or the States

    -According to J. Goldstein in "The Attitude of the Jewish and the Russian Intelligentzia to Zionism in the Initial Period (1897-1904)" (Cited in Etan Bloom's thesis on Ruppin), 60,000 Russian Jews identified with Zionism with no more than 8,000 directly active and only a small fraction of that immigrating to Palestine. 3-4% of all Jews who left E. Europe before WWI went to Palestine with 2 million going to the US.

    -Of course the British also offered Uganda which was shot down by the WZO, but don't let that get in the way of your "Judeo-Christian" nonsense.

    -The Palestine Office/Jewish Agency screened out potential olim for physical prowess and enthusiasm. Jewish laborers were often sent back if they fell ill and only their immediate families could go with them. The first aliyah moshavot were not intended as a refuge, either; their owners did not care if the Jewish workers returned from whence they came.

    Even if the Zionist program succeeded on its own terms before 1933, there's no reason to believe it would have openly taken in as many European Jews as possible. Weizmann himself only expected to settle a million Jews there in 20 years after the British occupation.

    While you are correct that the Zionists wanted to get Jews out of Europe, what you need to realize is that they only wanted to populate Palestine with a select subset of Jews whom they saw as capable of restoring the Jewish volk to its ancient soil, which means they were not interested in saving European Jewish communities as such. In other words, they wanted to save an abstract Jewish people from dying in Europe as opposed to physically saving each and every last individual. The Palestine Office/Jewish Agency/MAPAI leadership did not care what happened to the Jews they left behind.

  • andrew r September 19, 2011 at 11:59 am

    First of all, I'm not saying Jews should have stayed in Europe and faced certain death fighting the Nazis. Since we're on the subject, evacuating all European Jews was not a Zionist objective, either. Israel proponents like you use the Holocaust as a justification for Zionist attacks on Palestinians, yet the Zionists did nothing to rescue Jews in Europe on a mass scale nor was there anything they could have done.

    The question is, before the Nazis were around, what did Zionists do to fight their enemies in Europe? The answer is not much of anything. Their goal was creating a new society for a select group of Hebrews in Palestine. That required replacing the people already living there with an Ashkenazim majority and thus conflict with them, a fact recognized as early as the early 1910's by the press of Poalei Tzion and Hapoel Hatzair.

    Any Palestinian attack on the Zionist project becomes a pogrom or attempt at extermination and thus, you can hallucinate fighting your persecutors in Europe even though this project is the aggression in Palestine and is the persecution that should be fought.

  • andrew r September 19, 2011 at 11:00 am

    "In fact, when people like you attack us, we fight and we fight to kill."

    LLI, allow me to ask a question you are 100% guaranteed to ignore: Did Zionists attack the enemies of the Jews in Europe, outside of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which did not involve any mainstream (i.e. Labour or Revisionist) leadership? Or did they just go to Palestine and kill Arabs with the British? Maybe you can show me one paramilitary struggle against anti-semites in Europe led by Zionists.

    It could be you know of such an event. As far as I know, Zionists struggled to colonize Palestine and set up their armed activities in a place from where no one went to Odessa and Kishinev to kill Jews. They were not interested in defending Jews in Europe. And they couldn't have, because all Zionist leaders sought the backing of imperial powers - it would've been beyond the pale for Britain and Germany to back armed struggle by Jews in Tsarist Russia.

    You disagree with this version of events, show me I'm wrong. Until then, Zionists have always been cowards who can only hit defenseless targets.

  • andrew r September 19, 2011 at 10:45 am

    "We Jews are no longer all ghetto Jews. We don’t walk in the gutter when the non-Jew walks by. We don’t; tremble in fear when non-Jews come at us as they have for centuries."

    I don't know if it's still common among Zionists to say, "like sheep to the slaughter," but LLI reminded me of that slogan. Basically, he's blaming the extermination of the European Jews on their own weakness. That's not only anti-semitism, it's the equivalent of Nazi thinking that the Jews were destined to suffer "historical death" due to their weakness.

• Ismail Khalidi seeks to rewrite the American understanding of Palestinian identity
  • andrew r September 18, 2011 at 7:59 am

    From reading "One Palestine Complete" the significance of the title "Tennis in Nablus" struck me offhand. That's right up there with playing a violin at gunpoint and cutting off a beard.

• Arab Sources: Bishara on Palestine's UN bid
  • andrew r September 17, 2011 at 12:37 pm

    "This propaganda by anti-Zionists had been debunked by Martin Gilbert the famous British historian:"

    Who the hell is going to shell out on Amazon just to make sure you're right? Post a blockquote or link to a page on Google if you want anyone to take the bloody book seriously. Of course, anything trying to pass off Zionism as a liberation movement from Dhimmitude can not be taken seriously by anyone with a functioning brain.

    I read "Churchill and the Jews" by Sir Gilbert and remember it fondly as it was my first real exposure to the casual anti-semitism of the British ruling figures who supported Zionism. Good example of a book that buries Zionism even as it tries to be sympathetic.

  • andrew r September 17, 2011 at 12:11 pm

    "The one who is repulsive is you, since you want to deny Jews the “justice” you demand for Palestinians."

    Oh yea, more playing "ha-olam kulo negdeinu." Because obviously you have a link to a mondoweiss comment where Sumud came out against Polish Jews reclaiming their property and simply forgot to post it.

    What is this crap supposed to accomplish? And is there someone who can defend Israel without failing to read/pretending to read something that isn't there?

  • andrew r September 17, 2011 at 9:07 am

    Sumud: "Just that somewhere in the past some of your tribe were wronged and you want someone to pay the price – and it doesn’t really matter who."

    The best way for eee, "David Ben-Gurion" (DBG), hophmi, et. al to defend the Zionist project is to stop trying to defend the Zionist project.

  • andrew r September 17, 2011 at 5:24 am

    eee says: "1) Jews immigrated to Palestine because the sovereign allowed them to do so. They were not compensated for anything nor did they push anyone from their home. They bought or rented the land they resided on pre-1948."

    While that last sentence is technically true, the previous two sentences don't hold any water. In fact, Ottoman Palestine legally permitted only Ottoman Jewish subjects to buy land and later forbade them from buying it altogether. However, the purchasing agents were able to circumvent the restriction because the Certificate of Protection given to European nationals concealed their faith.

    (By the way, if you think I'd be in favor of such measures in the name of anti-zionism, this wasn't the only way Ottoman Palestine was colonized. By the late 1800s European finance capital controlled all but one of the big banks in the Empire plus shipping, mining and railways. The Ottomans in their feeble attempt to stave off Zionist colonization took to a prototypical racial profiling because their economy at that point was based on foreign ownership.)

    More importantly, due to the murky nature of land privatization under the Tanzimat reforms, it was typical of the landowners to sell more land than they were really entitled to. And dispossession of the peasants on a small scale began from almost day one.

    Finally, additional conflicts were rooted in dispossession, real or intended.

    All these factors, in their multifarious entanglement, were present in the first mass attack on a Jewish moshava, directed by the Arab villagers of Yahudiya, in March 1886, against Petach Tikvah. The 14,200 dunams of this colony were purchased from Anton Bishara Tayan and Salim Kaser, two Christian Orthodox merchants and moneylenders from Jaffa, who acquired the land and retained its owners - the villagers of Umlabess and Yahudiya - as tenant farmers, when their land was sequestered by the authorities for being in arrears in the payment of taxes. Given the crude character of the tapu, the Ottoman land register, parts of the purchase were disputed: the Arab tenant farmers very likely were legally entitled to the possession of 2,600 dunams, though Tayan claimed to have sold the whole area to its new owners. But even the rest of the area could not be registered in the tapu because of the opposition of Rauf Pasha, the Mutasarrif of Jerusalem, who conscientiously enforced Ottoman restrictions on Jewish settlement. As long as the Jewish settlers cultivated only part of the land themselves and subleased other parts to its previous cultivators these animosities did not break into the open. This situation lasted a number of years, since the early settlers of Petach Tikvah, who came from the traditional Old Yishuv in Jerusalem, abandoned the colony and its settlement was renewed only upon joining a group of First Aliya immigrants from Bialystok.

    The new settlers, however, demanded in 1886 that the Arab tenant farmers of Yahudiya vacate some of the fields to which they claimed ownership. The latter invoked the traditional right of having already completed the first part of the two-year crop rotation and expected to be allowed to plant the fields with economically more valuable winter crop.
    (Shafir, Land and Labor, 200-201)

    So there you go: Some prima facie evidence that even the earliest settlers demanded removal of peasants from their land.

  • andrew r September 16, 2011 at 12:08 pm

    Life isn’t fair = Might makes right

• Liberating the Palestinian voice
  • andrew r September 9, 2011 at 4:41 am

    "What if the Arabs and Palestinians in 1948 had decided to make peace with Israel and found a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza?"

    Sheikh Muwannis and the other Jaffa-area villages; Deir Yassin; and the Faluja pocket villages are some examples of villages that made peace with the Yishuv and were still attacked. Ashkelon al-Madjal was continually depopulated during 1950. You can find out as much reading Benni Morris. Only someone with a vested interest in downplaying the belligerency of Zionism's basic intent would buy this crap. Like Morris himself.

    Put it simply, the Zionists planned to be the majority in Palestine as early as the early 1900s, before any significant violence against the settlers. Ethnic cleansing is built into Zionism and was not a necessary response to Arab belligerency. The kibbutzniks came to Palestine wanting those Arabs gone.

    The fluff about Egypt and Jordan creating a Palestinian state is also a straw issue because travel between Gaza and the West Bank was totally impossible after the armistice. It's a weak attempt at mocking the two-state solution at a place where nearly everyone views it as an excuse for continued apartheid.

• Read the post for which Derfner was fired: 'The awful, necessary truth about Palestinian terror'
  • andrew r August 29, 2011 at 8:05 pm

    Derfner is going through the same thing Benni Morris did - He wrote the plain truth of how Israel establishes/maintains itself as a Jewish state and, facing censure, finesses his words to get back in good with the family. And like Morris, he didn't actually mean to explain how Israel remains a Jewish state. He simply wants Israel to not shoot itself in the foot.

    But hey, Israel still respects freedom of thought enough not to tie him to a chair and beat him on the stomach. They only do that to Palestinian kids so they can finger their own relatives. So it's still the most free society in the middle east, and stuff.

• Libyan triumph exposes the west's double standard for Palestine
  • andrew r August 21, 2011 at 11:45 pm

    But on that occasion, where were all the Canadian-born experts on the Middle East, those vociferous and selfrighteous moralists, who come out of the woodwork every time Israel appears to be in violation of some UN resolution or strikes back against an outrage like the killing of the bus passengers on Thursday near Eilat?

    How many times have I read this article, about 20000? And the hypocrisy is still breathtaking.

• Eilat deaths count
  • andrew r August 21, 2011 at 11:30 am

    Dimadok, if you can name one conflict where the aggressor targeted civilians without at least some reciprocation from the other side, you might have a point. Sorry to say, the Zionist project made it inevitable when it chose an already populated country for settlement. Every civilian death in this conflict must be laid at the feet of Israel and the groups that established it because it can not be a Jewish state without killing civilians.

• Benny Morris says he was pursued by 'bearded, caftaned Muslims' in London-- like Brownshirts in Berlin
  • andrew r August 15, 2011 at 5:32 pm with 1 replies

    Who does not think this is a racist remark?

    "As I walked down Kingsway, a major London thoroughfare, a small mob—I don’t think any other word is appropriate—of some dozen Muslims, Arabs and their supporters"

    Only an Arab could think the creation of Israel's demographic majority through mass expulsion could be an injustice, and only an Arab would be irritated with someone who tries to defend the actions of the Haganah/IZL/LHI especially when they ought to know better. And if you think that way and aren't an Arab? You're an Arab supporter.

• State Department awards $200,000 to Elliott-Abrams-led thinktank repeatedly cited by mass murderer Breivik
  • andrew r August 12, 2011 at 4:15 am

    "(Even at the height of the Algerian war, Arabs did not vilify the French people as they do the Jews, though that was a far more protracted and brutal conflict against a much more powerful enemy.) "

    Did Pipes conduct a survey of Arabic media from that period or is there a survey he can cite? There's more than one way to express hatred and the notion above at a glance is unprovable. It would be more concrete to say, "Arabic Anti-French media didn't recycle popular European stereotypes of the French" and I think that's what Pipes would have said if he really knew what he was talking about.

    I'm not Angry Arab but he'd probably tell you what sustained Arab opposition to Israel are the invasions, bombings, massacres, and so on.

• The nightmare of the Jewish soul
  • andrew r August 9, 2011 at 8:31 am

    Jonah, your reading of Teveth's book fails the self-serving test. The fact is, actions speak louder than words to most people. Take this for example: "bridges had to be built to the Arab worker who, though still a politically negligible force, would one day emerge triumphant..." Instead of throwing this quote around, expecting it to prove Ben-Gurion wanted to co-exist with the Palestinians on equal terms, maybe you can explain what he actually did to affect such co-existence. Because Arabs could not live on a kibbutz and couldn't join the Histadrut, so it sure wasn't found in the public sector of the Yishuv.

    In fact, there was a certain incident in 1927 were Ben-Gurion led a protest in Nes Zioniyya, a first aliyah plantation, against employing Arab workers. This is from 'The Global Political Economy of Israel' (Can be found in pdf)

    Take the famous 1927 ‘battle’ for Hebrew work in the orchards of Ness Ziona,a small township on the coastal plane, in which the Histadrut fought the citriculturists to have them employ Jews in lieu of Arabs. In the Zionist mythology, this was a defining moment in the fight between labour and capital. The reality, though, was more of a showoff, a spectacle staged by Ben-Gurion and Katznelson of the Histadrut as part of their effort to gain control over the Jewish Agency. A little earlier, a committee of ‘experts’ set up by the Agency recommended that the organisation cut its funding to the ‘inefficient’ Histadrut, in favour of private enterprise and ‘free’ labour. Unlike today, when most labour leaders would find themselves powerless in the face of similar IMF dictates, Ben-Gurion retaliated swiftly, sending the unemployed of Tel-Aviv to ‘conquer’ Hebrew work at the orchards of Ness Ziona. The ensuing chaos, in which plenty of heads were cracked open by the British police, put the Jewish Agency’s board, many of whom were themselves private investors, in the awkward position of undermining Zionism. They retreated hastily, and the citriculturists were forced
    to accept the Histadrut as their exclusive supplier of workers (Tevet 1980: 436).

• What does secular mean? 'J Street' official says American Jews 'ideally' want the whole 'land of Israel'
  • andrew r August 1, 2011 at 3:36 am

    So you take for a fact statement from one person, one State department release for 1949 (I didn’t realize that State Department bears much credibility here till now), and wait, wait-there it is: the final party with full objective response, the one and only the Brits!

    You know the last two sentences of that post were my commentary, right? You are comprehending them in the opposite way they were written. I think Britain supported removing Iraq's Jews. Iraq's economy was owned by Anglo-Iranian/BP until the Qassim coup.

    The Farhud took place the day after the British reoccupied Iraq.

  • andrew r August 1, 2011 at 3:10 am

    And I'm supposed to care about a street named after Rav Kook because...? There's a street in Tel Aviv named after Chaim Arlosoroff. How many in primary school know he negotiated the Haavara agreement? And that was a more significant development in creating Israel than anything a rabbi might have done before 1948.

    You can count the WZO delegates who conceived "Israel" as a homeland for Jews regardless of background on one fist. Herzl, Nordau and Pinsker conceived the Jewish homeland as a dumping ground for the unwashed eastern masses and below men of (German) culture. Ruppin and Aharon Eisenberg (Founder of Rechovot) considered the Yemeni Jews as a labor source to displace the local Palestinians and do the menial work Ashkenazim were too highly-paid for.

    Put it another way, you can't keep pulling out these cheap rationalizations for Israel and put them before someone who's done some homework expecting it to take.

  • andrew r July 31, 2011 at 7:24 am

    Probably one of the better studies on the Jewish flight from Iraq is 'The Other Exodus' by Moshe Gat. It can be partly read on Google. These are some notes I took from the sub-heading, "Iraq, Israel and the Zionist Underground":

    "No evidence that Iraqi govt. took action against Jews not members of the underground (p. 55); Brits and US report 36 Jews arrested in Nov., 4 women, not 2000 as Israel claimed;

    On 1 Nov., state dept. said to press only Jews who violated Iraqi law were arrested, and in smaller numbers than reported; NYT 2.11.49

    Brits saw Iraqi govt. tolerant to Jewish minority and were acting restrained under the circumstances; maintaining law & order to prevent a repetition of July 1941; Israel was charging Iraq with persecution; "
    ---
    So either Israel over-exaggerated the persecution of Iraqi Jews or the US and Britain had an interest in downplaying it. These are both likely scenarios.

  • andrew r July 31, 2011 at 7:01 am

    dimadok, virtually everyone who got Zionism off the ground in the early 20th century had little use for the Torah or the Mishna. Just about every major Zionist leader you can name: Herzl, Nordau, Ruppin, Weizmann, Ben-Gurion... abandoned traditional Judaism and detested religious Jews.

    So I tend to glaze over while someone goes on and on about rituals and scripture, conveniently sweeping away the baggage of the Zionist movement itself. The reasons for the above mentioned seeking a Jewish state had little to do with Jewish tradition and everything to do with their internalizing and self-applying anti-semitism. Their primary motivation was to transform Jews into their own version of the Aryan superman as they absolutely bought into the stereotype of the weak, craven diaspora Jew. In fact, when you read an examination of the administrative practices of Ruppin's Palestine Office, saving them from persecution wasn't a goal anymore than obeying that 120 mitzvot that can only be obeyed in the aretz.

• Curb your racism
  • andrew r July 31, 2011 at 3:36 am

    Silverman doesn't even merit offensive. She's just incredibly tedious and unfunny.

    I don't see humor as the kind of medium for making people aware of the occupation; how many late-night TV viewers are going to start caring about Palestine because of some half-hearted mention on Comedy Central? So it's pretty assholish to use the subject as gag fodder.

    This is like an Israeli sitcom called 'Arab Labor' which spoofs relations between Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel. One episode has a Jewish guy and Palestinian lady in a quaint argument about the occupation.

• Routine humiliation of Palestinians is now part of the global Israeli brand
  • andrew r July 27, 2011 at 7:33 am

    Oh, so there are people who look like terrorists, okay. I think it's safe to assume these particular Israelis got taught a lesson which probably would not diffuse through their thick skulls.

• The great Renee Fleming, brought to you by the Jewish Agency and its West Bank colonization project
  • andrew r July 22, 2011 at 10:58 pm

    "What if Fleming disagrees with that view? What if her performance is just a performance? Is that possible?"

    Racial segregation is distasteful. Indulging the privileged group encourages more segregation. That's what any performer entertaining in Israel does. Actions speak louder than words.

    "I only wish she would do more Wagner, my very favorite composer."

    I've never heard anything by Wagner and don't plan to. If I heard Wagner's music, liked it, then found out it was Wagner, I'd stop listening. "When beauty meets abuse..." as Tom Verlaine said in "Torn Curtain."

• Israeli ship attacks international solidarity boat crew off Gaza coast
  • andrew r July 14, 2011 at 6:02 pm

    eee,

    Hopefully, no one full of love and support for Israel turned against it on hearing about the Liberty. I'm more interested in what that segregationist state does day-in day-out.

  • andrew r July 14, 2011 at 2:58 pm

    Does anyone else find it demagogic to make murdering Americans (Or otherwise siding against America) the line you shouldn't cross? And the barracks was a military target; here's a live example of the CIA targeting an apartment building in Beirut.

    link to en.wikipedia.org

    (Oh, and that "off the books" remark at the end is really adorable, as if anyone got the chopping block over it.)

    Plus, why do you think the marines were in Lebanon to begin with? To secure the presidency of Amin Gemayel, someone who never turned his guns on other Lebanese.

• Israel is unable to cope with non-violent Palestinian activism
  • andrew r July 14, 2011 at 4:43 pm

    Everytime I hear that kind of talk, I think of how Palestine would have been invaded during WWII if the British didn't halt the advance at El Alamein. It is yet to be proven that a Jewish army will rescue Jews from persecution; right now all it does is enforce segregation.

• Boycott debate-- in which a young, cosmopolitan, liberal-leaning Jewish man twists and writhes under the weight of half-truths and wispy contradictions
  • andrew r July 13, 2011 at 3:01 pm

    eee,

    Six million Jews were killed in the holocaust. I'm Jewish. I'm entitled to do anything I want to others without incurring the consequences.

    When you start whistling a different tune, feel free to pm me. Hey, this comment software doesn't have a pm feature. Oh well.

• Angry Arab describes new ambassador to Israel as 'Zionist fanatic,' and you gotta wonder--
  • andrew r July 11, 2011 at 3:00 am

    Yeah, nice try Green. Thought using a Yiddish name would throw us off the scent, didn't you.

• Do you deny Israel's right to exist in a lowcut red dress?
  • andrew r July 8, 2011 at 12:23 am

    I wouldn't say all Zionists are dumb. Callously self-centered, frothingly racist, and/or dumb, yes. Just not all dumb all the time.

• Atzmon and Jewish identity
  • andrew r July 1, 2011 at 4:25 pm

    That's really for those working with Shapira to decide. If Atzmon is going to show here, the least someone can do is ask him what the hell he did in Lebanon. At the same time, I would hope any ex-IDF soldier isn't embraced just because he grew a conscience without more scrutiny.

  • andrew r July 1, 2011 at 3:34 am

    Just so you know Gilad, I have an extremely low bullshit tolerance. A remark along the lines of, "if we are to even begin to understand the roots of anti Semitism, then primary attention must surely also be dedicated to the considerable body of anti-gentile views expressed within the Torah, Talmud" is going to set off a red flag. When I evaluate someone's writing, I start with the lowest common denominator and extrapolate from there. So you can't tell me you aren't associating Shahak with this garbage.

    Of course, you didn't write explicitly that Shahak viewed Jewish holy texts as a source of antisemitism. All you did was suggest good research on antisemitism should go into such a topic, then a few paragraphs down mention Shahak as an example of a scholar who looked "for the root causes that may well have lead to an anti Semitic event, ideology or text."

    Of course Shahak, as you put it, assumed "that, perhaps, anti Jewish feelings might well have root causes which could be rational, and could be explained and understood — yet not justified — in terms of causality and reason." What he did not do was dedicate primary attention to the "considerable body of anti-gentile views expressed within the Torah, Talmud" as a way of explaining gentile antisemtism (He wrote on the Talmud for different purpose).

    Your article creates the impression that he did. All it does is paint Shahak as an accomplice to antisemitism as others have done before.

    By the way, if we are to understand Arab/Muslim hatred of the USA, maybe we should start by reading the Koran. That wouldn't fly for 2 minutes around here. I usually don't give the time of day to someone who suggests the Jewish holy texts can help us "understand the roots of antisemtism" anymore than someone who insists the Koran is the cause of terrorism.

  • andrew r June 30, 2011 at 11:29 pm with 5 replies

    "primary attention must surely also be dedicated to the considerable body of anti-gentile views expressed within the Torah, Talmud, and within contemporary Jewish ideology and politics (Zionist and Jewish anti-Zionist alike)."

    This would explain why historical anti-semites considered Jews a menace when they gave up their religion and attempted to assimilate into gentile society. Did I mention they gave up their religion, as in, had no Jewish education and would not know what's in the Talmud, and they were still suspected of attempting to destroy gentile nations?

    Yet the contents of the Torah and Talmud itself are enough to explain eugenics. And the Torah was good enough to be part of the Christian holy book -- why would Atzmon consider that a source of antagonism to gentiles?

    Also, he is dishonestly abusing Israel Shahak in that article. Shahak never suggested the Jewish holy texts were a cause of anti-semitism. That was not the point of his work at all. I bet Atzmon would really like this, "Modern racism (of which antisemitism is part) although caused by specific social conditions, becomes, when it gains strength, a force that in my opinion can only be described as demonic." Isn't the point of his writings that antisemitism is a rational reaction?

    And it figures that Max Nordau would "provide some adequate answers to questions regarding the origins of anti Semitism." When Nordau himself detested the weakness of European Jews and wanted to shape them into Aryan supermen, albeit they'd be called Maccabean instead of Aryan.

  • andrew r June 30, 2011 at 11:13 pm with 3 replies

    Say, I like how my message pointing out Gilad Atzmon is an ex-IDF soldier who served in Lebanon didn't go through. This is a fact he's acknowledged in public.

    link to arabnews.com

  • andrew r June 30, 2011 at 11:00 pm

    When I listen to native American activists, they aren't demanding a state. What they want is their old way of life back, before the invading settlers.

  • andrew r June 29, 2011 at 11:13 pm with 6 replies

    Dumb sentence: "If ‘white privilege’ still rules, why did the ‘white’ countries ditch white apartheid thirty years ago, but still back Jewish apartheid to the hilt?"

    2011 - 1994 = 17 years

    Of course, that's not what makes it dumb. A little technical mistake does not make an argument dumb. What's dumb is the idea the colonial-settler states "ditched" apartheid at all. Last time I checked, the USA still has reservations.

• Britain’s denial of democracy and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine
  • andrew r June 24, 2011 at 6:09 am

    Blankfort: "There is also a difference between saying “the Jews” as opposed to “Jews.” Get it?"

    There's a difference between "Islam is a religion of evil," (generic) and, "Our enemy doesn't follow the great traditions of Islam. They've hijacked a great religion." (real quote)

    However, the guy who said this waged a brutal occupation on two Muslim countries. Even though Bush qualified himself, he still pandered to prejudice against Muslims in order to justify attacking anything that might have "terrorists." Someone from a Muslim community might hijack their religion, so it's still Muslim communities where you look for the enemy.

    I take seriously rooting a political problem in the ethnic identity of the agents. It can do no good and lots of harm. It is straight out of the playbook of the warmaking class. Same with the "dual loyalty" shtick that is often brandished against the hasbara trolls here.

    Hostage: "who use their money, media, or political influence on behalf of the “Jewish” people"

    That's exactly it. Just because they cast themselves as "the Jewish people" doesn't mean it must be conceded by the opposition. It doesn't mean "Jews" came from out of nowhere to buy off Congress and make America hated in Western Asia.

    In as much the Iraq war was caused by influential Jews, it's win-win for Netanyahu and Sharon. They get America to fight wars on their behalf and smear anyone who points that out as having read the Protocols. Or, maybe the Iraq war is an outcome of the United States' history as an expanding colonial entity and while Jews have attained the rank of honorary whites, they did not create the class of capitalist that would attain more power from regional wars and their effects on the production of oil. There are certain Jews who are members of this class and they get to bray loudly about their background because it helps to justify their role to other Jews who can play humanitarian while living vicariously through Israel.

    And frankly, what Mearsheimer and Walt hope to gain from defeating the Israel Lobby, a two-state solution where Israel remains a Jewish state in the 1949 line, is pretty insipid.

  • andrew r June 23, 2011 at 10:47 pm

    Apparently I've been way too general. So let's break it down. I'm Jewish. I work a menial job to pay the rent. I have no bloody influence in the press or govt. Therefore, I take exception to using "Jewish" as an adjective as that includes me and credits me for influence I don't have. Extrapolate this to other Jews who don't have that kind of influence, and they really exist. Do. You understand. The words. That are coming. Out of my mouth.

  • andrew r June 22, 2011 at 5:30 am

    It's a moving target, "The influence of the Jews." You can't identify who the Jews are. You can't describe what that influence is. You can't name who was influenced and what choices they made under said influence. In other words, anti-intellectual bile. That answer your question?

    I dropped some hints but you didn't listen. There's no question the Brits who supported a Jewish national home saw Jews as a revolutionary menace. What Lord Cavendish would cite to substantiate the belief of Jews pushing America into the war is far more important than the belief itself. We're talking about people who engineer concentration camps and mass famine as a career in case that's too small a detail to merit your notice. What they think of other people is not something to take at face value.

    Now the point I'm making here is that Jews by definition are unable to influence American and British warmakers in as such they would shoot themselves in the foot and hinder the ability of the empire to accumulate capital for its upper crust. This is why there was no significant lobbying of the US and British govts. to rescue Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe; the same Jewish bourgeoisie who might have helped secure Palestine would be overstepping their bounds. That's evident from what little attempt there was.

    Let's try an experiment. Give me 60 million dollars and I'll circulate a paper full of anti-war articles, maybe buy a member of congress or two, and we'll see how much Jewish influence I have then. Or maybe we'll just find out what you call 'Jewish influence' is really a particular group of settler-immigrants integrating themselves into the ruling group of a colonial-settler state and keeping their distinct identity.

    So the St. Louis was relevant: The events loosely called 'Jewish influence' were a bunch of Zionists prostrating themselves before their betters and achieving one more step on the way to emulating them. There's sweet F.A. the Zionists could have done about the St. Louis even if they wanted to. That was the point. 'Jewish influence' is a chimera.

  • andrew r June 22, 2011 at 12:56 am

    Oh ho, right, I'm a Zionist apologist for not believing the International Jew hoodwinked the US into WWI. I usually identify Zionist apologia as such: the Jews needed a refuge from pogroms, there were no Palestinians, Arabs have 22 states, ad nauseam. Weizmann represented a marginal political movement and had nothing to do with the vast majority of Europe's Jews. He told the imperial ministers what they wanted to hear. That's how the Zionists became fully mobilized and able to dispossess the Palestinians.

    Now to address the substance, if you're going to build a case for historic events on Jewish influence, you need to explain why the St. Louis was turned away from Cuba, why the western allies preferred fighting in Africa while the Final Solution was underway and why the Zionist paramilitaries received no direct help from the West in 1948. In other words, if the interaction between the Zionist movement and the Western allies turned on Jewish influence, you need to account for when that influence was utterly ineffectual.

    The Americans did not need Jews to get in WWI. The British had no vise on their necks for not issuing the Balfour decl. and certainly not if they went back on it. In fact, there are other cases of Britain using a disdained religious minority to colonize other lands. You might want to look them up when you get the chance.

    What exactly was Britain deviating from, how would they have acted that was so much wiser had the Rothschilds and Weizmanns not come along? They still would've been killing darker skinned people all along Africa and Asia. In that context, drawing on their prejudice against the Asiatics at home makes a lot more sense than some mystical Jewish influence claptrap.

  • andrew r June 20, 2011 at 7:22 pm with 13 replies

    I was going to post this transcript from One Palestine Complete by Segev anyway since it works as a complement to Nu'mann abd-al Wahid's article. Now it looks like I'm going to use it to argue with Blankfort.

    According to Edward Grey, Lloyd George had no interest in the Jews, neither in their past nor their future. What he really wanted was to keep the holy places in Palestine from getting into French hands. That wasn't the whole story, though. Lloyd George did indeed despise the French and had no intention of allowing them to control Palestine. But in his own way, he despised the Jews as well-or, to put it another way, he feared them.

    (...) he explained his support for the Zionist movement as an alliance with a hugely influential political power whose goodwill was worth paying for. The war had made such an alliance inevitable; the Zionists, he claimed, had in effect forced his government to support them. It was a distinctly antisemitic claim.

    "The Jewish race," Lloyd George explained in his memoirs, had world-wide influence and capability, and the Jews had every intention of determining the outcome of the World War--acting, he said, in accordance with their financial instincts. They could influence the US to intensify its involvement in the war, and as the real movers behind the Russian Revolution, they also controlled Russia's attitude toward Germany. The British feared that Russia would sign a separate peace with Germany, which would have enabled the Germans to direct all their forces to the western front.

    Lord Robert Cecil, undersecretary of foreign affairs: "I do not think that it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews."

    Ambassador in Washington: "The influence of the Jews is very great. They are well-organized and especially in the press, in finance, and in politics their influence is very considerable."

    ---

    I've read Blankfort's post twice and still eagerly await the point of it. It's interesting how Doreen Ingram's background lines up with Segev's, yet Jeffrey draws a completely different conclusion than Segev. Instead of paranoia at Jewish Bolshevism, it was paranoia at Jewish finance (If that's not the mechanism for helping bring the US into the war Jeffrey do tell).

    Also, Segev illuminates the hazard of analyzing historical events from the viewpoint of the actors: You can't take everything they say as fact. Balfour and Lloyd George thought they were appeasing a powerful, international movement which they would casually refer to as "world Jewry" or "the Jewish race." Weizmann almost literally represented no one but himself and the Balfour decl. came out of an internal conversation among Brit imperialists + Weizmann.

    In short, the decl. came from an inbred, antisemitic paranoia that Weizmann eagerly indulged that, while having no basis in reality, was the reaction of the British ruling class to the Bolshevik revolution. The fact they wanted to reduce Britain's Jewish content didn't hurt, either.

• Our demands (designing placards for a demonstration)
  • andrew r June 11, 2011 at 5:58 pm

    I agree with Clencher and Tree on this. Counterposing Christian and Black is a bit too sophisticated for its own good. How many people are going to know off the bat that Ethiopian Jews have to convert to their own religion? Or see it as a parody of southern racism?

    I'd rather hold a placard with a less obscure message: "Religious Segregation - It's good enough for our friend Israel." Or, "Jews can live here after they go to court. That's how Israel works with Arabs."

• Encountering Leonard Cohen in an L.A. pizzeria
  • andrew r June 9, 2011 at 3:46 pm

    WJ - I know it's boring and hacked out but I'm going to try the-shoe-on-the-other-foot approach. How would you feel about people fearing Jews, or only Israeli Jews, based on what they read in the paper (More likely a Palestinian solidarity outlet). What if people didn't want Israeli Jews arriving in their country after what they see of Operation Cast Lead?

    Well, I don't know how consistent you are with this fact-based fear idea, but if Israelis are afraid of Palestinians returning to their country because they perceive Arabs as a sectarian-killing horde, it follows that American parents should be afraid of Israeli expats taking a shot at their kids with an AR.

  • andrew r June 9, 2011 at 6:53 am

    Well, as long as you're not trying to prove the fear isn't racist. Because that would just not fly.

  • andrew r June 9, 2011 at 4:37 am

    It is a matter of mentality? No, it is a matter that the only two currently democratically elected governments that exist in the Arab world are Iraq and Lebanon.

    Funny you should mention that. Israel has an elected govt. and each successive govt. upholds the two mass expulsions committed in 1948 and 1967, in that no one expelled can return.

    So where do you get off telling us what Arabs do with democracy?

    P.S. Almost forgot to mention sectarian killing is a feature of Israeli politics.

  • andrew r June 9, 2011 at 4:33 am

    Wondering Jew:

    Between the Mongol invasion of the 13th century and 1917 how many Arabs ruled their own fate for how long? Egypt for about 100 years? What percentage of population and time does that consist of? This lack of history of self rule means nothing?

    How did the forced march from Lydda bring democracy to the Palestinians? Why is 1917 the cut-off point when the Levant was occupied by the Allied Powers?

    You're turning democracy into a white supremacist trope, although this is how we learn it in US pubic school. A gift bestowed by enlightened white men.

  • andrew r June 9, 2011 at 4:28 am

    Is that really LeFavour? Werdine may be unpleasant but his posts don't contain words like 'infantile' and 'diapers'.

• New White House page on Israel's security says nothing about settlements or occupation, but tons about Iran, Goldstone, slaughter of innocent Israelis, delegitimization
  • andrew r June 7, 2011 at 2:10 am

    Some standout bits:

    "you clearly fall into the category of what Gilad Atzmon describes as a Jewish tribalist, not just because you join the circle of wagons when Jews, collectively, are blamed for anything"

    "Defending the tribe is the best scenario I can come up with–I’ll leave the worst to others– and if you think that concept was invented by the Zionists and is a sham then you really don’t know Jewish history any more than you do that of this country."

    You speak way too loosely about the subject, Jeffrey. Blaming Jews collectively for anything is exactly what the ADL/AIPAC/CampusWatch want you to do. Those who want to stifle debate on the role of Jewish bourgeoisie in US policy need you to collectively blame Jews. You're playing into their hands. Handing them a propaganda card.

    Max said the "tribe" and the "people" are Zionist inventions. That makes me want to expand on the idea a bit. "The Jewish people" is external and internal Zionist propaganda. The Zionist movement as a whole does not treat Jews as one people. I probably don't need to remind you or the Israeli posters or anyone familiar with the demographics of Israel how the first Yemeni Jews to make aliyah were segregated from the Europeans, forced to live in special quarters away from the moshavim they worked at; how Arab Jews were placed in the most dangerous settlements (i.e. Sderot), forced to do the manual labor Palestinians weren't around for, the racism against Ethiopian Jews, etc. etc.

    By making "Jews" the target of an analysis, you cover that up. AIPAC is an establishment for Jews who fancy themselves white. And that's what Zionism was about from the beginning: Not the Jewish people, but European Jews joining the white race that continually rejected them. I already know there's a Jewish bourgeoisie throwing lots of money at US politicians; singling them out as Jews, making them an element foreign to the system raises more questions than answers. They're able to do this because the system will accept them as white people.

    "a big play designed to convince the Arab world and America’s European allies that the US has been serious about resolving the Israel-Arab dispute when its real goal was to maintain and encourage it because it kept the region unstable."

    I don't doubt the US wants to resolve the conflict... just not on terms that are palatable to anti-racism and anti-segregation. Reagan's plan was to federate the West Bank with Jordan. His peace plan contained this brilliant happy medium: "So the United States will not support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and we will not support annexation or permanent control by Israel. There is, however, another way to peace. The final status of these lands must, of course, be reached through the give-and-take of negotiations; but it is the firm view of the United States that self-government by the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza in association with Jordan offers the best chance for a durable, just and lasting peace."

    Basically a variation of what Yigal Allon came up with. That's not a peace plan -- that's a plan for protecting Israeli segregation out of the 1949 boundary and putting the Palestinians under the control of a police state (Of course those "give-and-take" negotiations don't rule out partial annexation). Your general thesis is that if not for the Jewish establishment buying congress, the US leadership would lay down the smack on Israel until it accepts some crappy peace plan.

    If looking for better analyzes makes you tribalist, call me a bloody tribalist.

• Netanyahu has nothing to worry about
  • andrew r May 22, 2011 at 4:49 am with 1 replies

    link to angryarab.blogspot.com

    Before you click on this and read the linked article, what do you think of Hariri?

  • andrew r May 22, 2011 at 4:39 am

    I'm telling you Robert, you don't have any real friends if you think siding with Israel makes you bourgeoisie. There's a big "stab here" sign hanging off your back. When mischlinge Arabs are deported, all those ADL, AIPAC, StandWithUs people you were hanging out with? They'll scatter in all directions from you. You'll be talking to their voicemail. You won't be worth the hair on their collective asses.

  • andrew r May 22, 2011 at 1:23 am

    I sometimes wonder how David and Annie would feel if they themselves had to actually live under the brutal jackboot of the Hamas regime, and not just observe it from the safety and comfort of their computers.

    Once again, Robert wrote a little black book of hypocritical (and recycled) bullshit. As if you don't support policies and actions that lead to civilian deaths from the safety of your own computer somewhere in North America. As if you don't side with a political movement that regularly kills to achieve its basic goal while depicting it as something humanistic. I used to think ignore buttons were immature; if you don't like someone, just don't read them. Except in your case it would be convenient so one doesn't have to take the effort to scroll past your claptrap.

• Flotilla massacre all over again? Israel kills 8 Nakba demonstrators at borders
  • andrew r May 15, 2011 at 5:53 pm

    Basically, if you expelled someone, you have the right to shoot them if they try to return.

• Israelis defy Nakba law on Independence Day
  • andrew r May 15, 2011 at 9:41 pm

    Yeah, nonchalance is pretty much what I got.

• 63 years of the Nakba
  • andrew r May 13, 2011 at 2:40 pm

    My elementary school counselor used to say a play fight turns into a real fight. That seems to work for playing dumb. It turns into very, very dumb.

    Your founding fathers expelled 750,000 people and you act like their right to live in their country is equivalent to Nazism, itself a principle that some people don't have the right to live where they are because of who they are. It's a very simple concept: Expelling someone from their home is bad regardless of who it's done to and who does it. In your worldview, it's bad when Jews are chased from their homes at gunpoint, but if Jews do it to someone else, they must be able to get away with it, else the problem is with their "very existence."

    Some actions are universally bad in any context and the way the Zionist paramilitaries achieved the demographics of Israel is bad. It should not have been done, if having a Jewish state means keeping the refugees' great-grandchildren out of the country that's rightfully theirs there should be no Jewish state.

    How does that translate to you not existing?

• The dangers of the nationalistic fever and bloodlust over Osama bin Laden’s death
  • andrew r May 4, 2011 at 7:53 pm

    All that happened was a mafia don killed a former underling.

    bin Laden's brand of Islamic terrorism was good enough directed at the Soviets and Afghanis (and Bosnian Serbs). Only when he turned against the USA did he become public enemy #1. He was killed for being a loose cannon while your collection of Bush/Obama smiling with Abdullah al-Saud pictures grows by the year.

• Khalidi says Palestinian humiliation is at the heart of the Arab revolutions
  • andrew r May 4, 2011 at 8:26 pm

    "Imagine what they would do to the Jews."

    There's a lot of white supremacy implicit in this kind of discourse, almost as if Europeans, at the end of the day, can be forgiven for encouraging Judeophobia since the state of Israel can do business with them, yet Arabs are a rival to occupying Palestine, and so any act of misbehavior must be played up as intrinsic to the Arab/Muslim character. 150 years ago, American Christians were butchering each other over an economic issue. Soon after that, the bloodiest war in history until then was launched by a Christian family feud followed by a war that yet eclipsed it in mass killing. Jews still live in most of the places they've been persecuted. There's no reason to believe Jews can't live anywhere in Asia.

• Arab spring: Fatah and Hamas reportedly reach deal for interim gov't, elections in a year
  • andrew r May 10, 2011 at 12:03 am

    The Palestinians have yet to prove with facts to be ripe for a democracy and pluralism.

    Israelis are the last people who should lecture anyone on democracy. Excluding the Palestinian refugees physically and legally from the country is about as anti-democratic as it gets.

    What's more, the idea that you brought more rights to the few who weren't expelled in 1948 than they would have in an Arab country is classic colonialism: The invader bringing civilized values to the primitive, unshaven people.

    Democracy is reduced to an empty buzzword here and it's clear that concepts like democracy and rights don't mean anything when brandished in this fashion except as a way for the colonial-settler to flaunt his superiority over the natives.

  • andrew r May 7, 2011 at 6:31 pm

    Tell me, more recently, did Rabin eulogize Baruch Goldstein as Arafat eulogized Yahya Ayash and countless other “martyrs”? Has any member of the Rabin-Peres-Netanyahu-Barak-Sharon-Olmert-Netanyahu Governments ever publicly or even privately offered a festive plaque commemorating Goldstein’s act of terror and mass-murder to his family? Please.

    Can I say it now? This Robert Werdine person is dumb. He's dumb because he writes dumb things and expects someone to swallow them. Most of all, he's dumb because he filibusters in order to make us forget the most simple adage we learn from birth: actions speak louder than words. Rabin could have condemned the Goldstein massacre and it wouldn't have mattered. What matters is what he did about it. And what did he do: Subjected the residents of Hebron to a curfew with Shuhada Street closed off to any Palestinian while Kiryat Arba, Goldstein's place of residence was subjected to no curfew. If this doesn't show Israel treats non-Jews the way Tsarist Russia treats Jews, what does?

    link to palestinemonitor.org

  • andrew r May 1, 2011 at 2:13 am

    I think, is that you look at the history of the conflict and see an attempt, motivated by racism and imperialism, by Jews to immorally build a state on the planned, deliberate dispossession of the Palestinians, and I believe that the historical record, looked at in an objective, non-ideological manner, simply does not. You look at the wars between Israel and the Arabs from 1948 to Cast Lead, as wars of Israeli terror, aggression, ethnic cleansing, and territorial expansion, and I do not. There is no bridging this disagreement and there is simply no getting around it.

    Can anyone spot the incoherency? Robert and David disagree, yet Robert is the one who came across his views by looking at the history in an objective, non-ideological manner. Robert's facts don't agree with David's opinion. You've observed that the major Zionist orgs (Jewish Agency, WZO) had no plans for colonization that would replace the natives like it was H2O = water. You claim to be of Lebanese descent and can say the Palestinian refugees, dispossessed at gunpoint, and the Israeli invasions of several Arab states don't show Israel to be an expansionist state.

    So what's with the backhanded respect for David's viewpoint, Robert? Would you talk to a Holocaust denier and tell him, "there is no bridging this disagreement"?

    And if people question your background, it's because claiming an Arab background and coming full hilt for Israel looks like being African American and favoring Jim Crow. Put your money where your mouth is and stay in Gaza or Lebanon for awhile, then you'll see the real face of the Jewish state.

    I don't know what you think you're getting by taking Israel's side but trust me, those people aren't your friends. They will just as easily write you off as collateral damage.

  • andrew r April 28, 2011 at 10:17 pm

    Plus, your willingness to trash whoever sides with the official enemies of America is cheap demagoguery anyway, as if the US govt. with its own bloody record is the arbiter of who's good to side with.

  • andrew r April 28, 2011 at 10:11 pm

    "They have had no Michael Collins, Anwar al Sadat, or Nelson Mandela. All they’ve had is Arafat and his rejectionist flunkies. And, of course, Hamas. "

    There's a few qualitative differences between Sadat on the one hand vs. Collins and Mandela.

    Sadat took a bribe (US aid) to free up Israel's southern front. I don't know as much about Ireland but off hand at least the Anglo-Irish treaty didn't free the British to occupy something else they coveted. Not to mention that the Irish free state didn't help the Brits occupy Northern Ireland while Sadat and Mubarak joined in imprisoning the Palestinians.

    It's most ridiculous with Mandela. He led a paramilitary that killed civilians, albeit not as many as the apartheid state. For him to be equivalent to Arafat, he'd have to accept apartheid in the Cape and just take the Bantustans. The Palestinian Mandela are people like, well, pretty much anyone who isn't leading Fateh or Hamas.

    "their leaders sided with the Germans in World War one, with Hitler in World War two, with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and Sadamm Hussein in the Gulf War."

    Another good reason not to take you seriously is the loose way you write about the Palestinian leadership regarding WWI, WWII, the Cold War and Gulf War I. Especially in WWII, what leadership, dude? The 1936 revolt decimated any leadership the Palestinians might've had; the Mufti was part of this and although he had whatever respect the old feudal class carried, he was not a leader in a popular sense.

    As for the Cold War, uh, the ANC was backed by the Soviet Union and a certain Muammar al-Qadhdafi. So on that score your counterposing of Arafat and Mandela is sorely lacking in coherency.

    The Irish Independence Movement sided with the Germans in WWI (By the way, which side did you root for, the Czar or the Kaiser?).

    Then there's the Gulf-War: Notice how you didn't mention who sided with Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war. Because that would involve questioning the simplistic worldview (Good Americans and Israelis vs. Bad Palestinian leadership) you're spreading around here.

  • andrew r April 28, 2011 at 1:46 pm

    Abba Eban also coined the phrase "no business like shoah business." Now if that's not a phrase I'd spout at a gathering of Holocaust survivors, I don't know what is.

• Pappe says belief in Zionism and in Goldstone Report are incompatible
  • andrew r April 6, 2011 at 5:20 pm

    Avi, Giladi's book would be a bombshell if true but I'm not that impressed by a book that has no footnotes other than a bibliography, especially when he discusses documents he illegally copied (p. 12) and can't cite. It seems like a mix of common knowledge bolstered by anecdotes and speculation. And he really needs more corroboration for this (p. 99):

    This convinced El-Souweidi, who also knew the intention of his master, Nouri El-Said. In addition, he had also been promised a handsome sum of money if the law to revoke the Jews' citizenship were to be enacted. Since it was also necessary to convince the minister of interior, Salih Jaaber, two Zionist agents who used to hold high ranks in the Iraqi administration
    (Moshe Shohat and Sassoon Abid) were sent to pay him a visit.
    A few days later, representatives of the two parties began to formulate a rough draft of the bill. It followed very closely the model suggested by Israel through its agents in Baghdad. There was permanent radio contact between Israel and its agents in Baghdad in addition to telephone communication between Baghdad and Tehran.

    In any case, the book's online.

  • andrew r April 6, 2011 at 3:17 am

    "But, I contest that those that simplistically believe that punishment of Israel or Israelis (rather than reconciliation) will improve the condition of Palestinians live in a crueler dream world, one of promises that will not be fulfilled."

    Witty, this is worth clarifying: No one wants to punish Israelis. When you punish someone, they already did the crime. Israelis are still doing it. BDS is one tactic to make them stop, albeit indirectly (I don't think BDS is expected to directly work).

    BDS is a form of protest and solidarity. Protest is meant to be coercive. It is not equivalent to blockading Israel.

    The rest of your post is platitudinal claptrap.

  • andrew r April 5, 2011 at 9:37 am

    You support a Jewish state, you support what must be done to achieve it. When you explain what gives the IDF and the pre-state militias the right to target civilians, your question to me will be redundant.

  • andrew r April 5, 2011 at 9:30 am

    I think the burden is on you to show me where the occupier has the same right.

  • andrew r April 5, 2011 at 9:24 am

    "Historical truth ALWAYS incorporates observations that support one’s predisposition and that conflict."

    Speak for yourself. Just because you have a stake in mass murder to achieve a racially pure society (the nakba) doesn't mean we all do.

  • andrew r April 5, 2011 at 9:18 am

    "And, unless you are horribly naive or entirely gullible, you will acknowledge that the Palestinian civil war and the Arab League war DID undertake material actions to forcefully remove masses of Jewish residents from their homes – ethnic cleansing – during that war."

    Well Mr. Witty, why don't you take a stab at my rationale for writing this: "In short, you wouldn’t be saying, well, in the few areas the Jews conquered, they expelled all the Arabs, or, the Palestinians had to do it, otherwise it would’ve been done to them"

    Maybe because I expected you to drudge out the Jewish Quarter?

    You obstinately ignore my point and confirm it: It's okay for Jews to commit expulsion in the name of defense, but not okay for the same to be done against Jews. This makes you a racist and blowing "war is hell" crap doesn't work as a distraction.

    By the way, I agree war was occuring and blame the Zionists for starting it. Because it did not start on 29 Novemeber 1947, it began when the British occupied Palestine and the Zionists joined them as an auxillary force. Occupied people have the unconditional right to fight the occupier.

  • andrew r April 5, 2011 at 8:33 am

    "Do you not agree with Morris’ contention that the setting was “kill or be killed”?"

    In Sheikh Muwannis and the other villages around Tel Aviv for example, it was not kill or be killed. These villages had non-belligerency pacts with the Haganah and did not quarter soldiers or contribute men to the Husseini militia or the ALA. The armistice agreement with Egypt specifically protected the villages of the Faluja pocket, al-Faluja and Iraq al-Manshiyya and Rabin ordered these villages demolished. The war was over before their people were expelled. al-Majdal Ashkelon took in refugees from other villages and was depopulated again during 1950.

    The overwhelming majority of the Palestinians were unarmed. This should be common sense. If they were such a threat, they wouldn't have been expelled so easily. It would've been more costly for the Yishuv and they would've lost more settlements. They were not facing a threat equal to what they inflicted.

    The refugees were a threat only in an abstract way. They were expelled because Palestine was invaded by European racists.

  • andrew r April 5, 2011 at 7:58 am

    It's too obvious.

  • andrew r April 5, 2011 at 6:16 am

    "It is war Donald. I hate that it got there. But it did. To fail to acknowledge the reality of the time, is just to revise history."

    I never read your posts Witty except the really short ones. And every time without fail you give me incentive not to read the longer ones.

    For one thing, if it was Jews who were cleansed from Palestine, you would not make these excuses. You certainly wouldn't accept the idea that the Palestinians were defending themselves from people who constantly discussed transfer when no one else was around.

    In short, you wouldn't be saying, well, in the few areas the Jews conquered, they expelled all the Arabs, or, the Palestinians had to do it, otherwise it would've been done to them. You'd be unreservedly indignant.

    Of course you and every other apologist for the nakba, the one instance of racial segregation liberals have to tolerate, otherwise they're racist themselves, will never being saying this: For the people of Palestine, Lebanon, the Golan and Sinai, it would've been all too good for them in the long run if the Arab armies occupied Palestine and deported any Jew who entertained the idea of a Jewish state. Aborting Israel in 1948 would've saved tens of thousands of lives over the next 62 years. This argument is good enough against Palestinians.

  • andrew r April 4, 2011 at 9:07 pm

    "I think he is against vilifying Israel for something he feels any nation would have done under similar circumstances, "

    Say what you will about Stalin, at least he had the gumption to deport the Volga Germans en masse and put some east Germans in labor camps. He only led the biggest country in the world for 30 years; at least one of his policies had to be for the best.

  • andrew r April 4, 2011 at 7:45 pm

    "Benny Morris was a refusenik during the First Intifada and has said that he would do the same if he had it to do over."

    While it's true that Morris doesn't see any worth in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, it's really hard to accept he's categorically rejecting the transfer of the Palestinians there when he retroactively supports it in 1948. I'm not interested in playing armchair psychiatrist so let's keep it simple: Any goodwill he bought was pissed away.

  • andrew r April 4, 2011 at 7:41 pm

    "there was NO ORGANIZED PLAN of ethnic cleansing as the anti-Zionist left repeatedly asserts, that Morris’s work has repeatedly been distorted and misquoted by others"

    Even if Morris doesn't like it, his facts will be used by people who draw their own conclusions. It seems to me while he didn't find a concrete, overall plan, the fact that transfer was discussed repeatedly and actually carried out should tell you the Yishuv leadership had a general, abstract plan, basically knowing it would be done somehow. Morris wants us to believe there would have been no transfer if the Mufti and his followers just sat back and accepted partition. I think the evidence he cites for that is flimsy.

    Morris has always complained about his work being used for anti-Zionism. That's tough cookies. There were other ways to learn about the nakba before he wrote 'Birth'.

    By the way, Morris had his reckoning well before 2004.
    link to washingtonpost.com

    "Despite his book's critical success, which came mostly outside the country, Morris could not secure a university post in Israel after its publication. He announced in a 1996 newspaper interview his intention to leave for the United States.

    Ezer Weizman, a hero of the 1948 war and Israel's president at the time, summoned Morris to his office that afternoon. He asked him if he supported Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. After receiving Morris's word that he did, the president arranged a post for him at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, where he lectures today. "

• 'Foreign Policy' runs piece describing Israel's 'carnival of hate' toward Palestinians
  • andrew r April 2, 2011 at 10:51 am

    Look at the date.

    Maaan, that almost got me. For a second I thought Goldstone was drawing equivalencies between Israel and Hamas.

• Israel's incitement problem
  • andrew r March 30, 2011 at 5:48 pm

    These stories spoon-feed images of Arab people as a farm from which terrorists grow out of. It's not much different from depicting Jews as carriers of Bolshevism.

    Making real Arab people invisible to Israeli children constitutes incitement.

• On land day, don't stop boycottin'
  • andrew r March 31, 2011 at 6:16 am

    "Are you by the way for the one state solution meaning making Mexico and the US one state?"

    You're asking an irrelevant question. People can still be dispossessed, ethnically cleansed and systematically killed in any solution. A one-state solution in Israel-Palestine could still result in no Palestinians left.

    I'm for a solution where everyone gets to live in their land and is able to live without interference including subjecting their daily life to corporate intrusion. Whether the border between the USA and Mexico is moved or eliminated altogether doesn't tell you what's what. Of course this point has been made before (Mostly by Tree) but you don't read so what the hell.

  • andrew r March 30, 2011 at 4:27 pm

    Also, you should find "Rise, Fall and Legacy of Apartheid" by Eric P Louw. Apartheid rationalized itself on autonomy for the Afrikaner and African peoples. DeKlerk had the gall to compare South Africa to the European Union.

  • andrew r March 30, 2011 at 4:15 pm

    The idea of an American saying "both peoples need autonomy" contradicts every thing I learned in public school: Not only is "separate but equal" an unsavory idea, I'm supposed to admire those who struggled against it.

    The British and Americans always opposed democracy in their imperial possessions. You come from a long line of overseas rulers.

  • andrew r March 30, 2011 at 4:00 pm

    When you look at the history of the Zionist movement before 1948, you'll find no reason to assume even a fully-established Israel would have rescued Jews from the camps.

  • andrew r March 30, 2011 at 3:28 pm

    As you probably know GF, Israel receives free gifts of military hardware and financial protection from the United States.

    www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf

    U.S. military aid has helped transform Israel’s armed forces into one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world. U.S. military aid for Israel has been designed to maintain Israel’s “qualitative military edge” (QME) over neighboring militaries, since Israel must rely on
    better equipment and training to compensate for a manpower deficit in any potential regional conflict. U.S. military aid, a portion of which may be spent on procurement from Israeli defense companies, also has helped Israel build a domestic defense industry, which ranks as one of the top 10 suppliers of arms worldwide.

    [...]

    For many years, U.S. economic aid helped subsidize a lackluster Israeli economy, [...]

    The Second 10-Year Plan: Proposed U.S.
    In August 2007, the Bush Administration Military Aid to Israel FY2009-FY2018 announced that it would increase U.S. military
    assistance to Israel by $6 billion over the next decade. The agreement calls for incremental $150 million annual increases in FMF to Israel, starting at $2.55 billion in FY2009 and
    reaching $3 billion by 2011. Under the terms of the agreement, Israel will still be able to spend 26% of U.S. assistance on Israeli-manufactured equipment.

    Given that background, it should be clear to you why there's a BDS movement. Because Israel literally can not go at it alone. It's aimed at governments and companies that support Israel as much as Israeli companies.

    In one real BDS victory, the Edinburg Council dropped Veolia from consideration in its ongoing attempt to privatize public services.

    link to alternativenews.org

    Council leaders also heard from leading law firm, Hickman & Rose, who warned that employing the French multinational could expose the local authority to "legal action for failing to take on board their obligation to recognise and comply with their duties and responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions and international law."

    And you should realize Palestinian orgs and civil society as a whole (But not Hamas or Fateh for some reason...) are calling for BDS. It's a way for the colonized to have an agency in their struggle against the occupier.

    link to bdsmovement.net

    There's no BDS movement against Lebanon because there's no call from any Palestinian movement or activist. It's up to the oppressed to liberate themselves; outsiders must take their cues from those inside the struggle, not make decisions for them.

• Rebranding
  • andrew r March 29, 2011 at 2:48 pm

    There's the old antisemitism which hates Jews for existing and the new antisemitism which hates Israel for being a segregationist state. Antisemitism is an ideology that calls for racial segregation; the reversal of separation policies can't be antisemitic.

    But if you think segregation is a good thing, let's try it with Jews in the United States. I'd love to be taken out of my apartment and placed in a ghetto because too many Jews aren't wanted in the county. That's what the Zionist state does to Palestinians.

  • andrew r March 28, 2011 at 11:55 pm

    Aye yi yi, your treatment of international law is so fraught with twists and turns it's like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. First of all, you have to participate in armed conflict in order to lose your civilian status. This was not armed conflict. It was a boat of civilians in international waters attacked by a state army. If reacting to an attack on your person by a soldier constitutes giving up your civilian status, cite the relevant convention. Put up or shut up. Likewise if you're going to argue the whole act of breaching the Gaza siege constitutes taking part in an armed conflict, which is what I'm expecting.

    The criteria for a legal blockade is in the San Remo Manual. Some things to keep in mind:

    "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger." - Sharon's office manager Dov Weissglass

    "It also confirms estimates were made of how many calories Gazans need, but says these were not used for policy-making. "

    102. The declaration or establishment of a blockade is prohibited if:

    (a) it has the sole purpose of starving the civilian population or denying it other objects essential for its survival; or
    (b) the damage to the civilian population is, or may be expected to be, excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from the blockade.

    "But Israel has never published a list of banned items, saying it approves requests on a case-by-case basis. "

    93. A blockade shall be declared and notified to all belligerents and neutral States.

    94. The declaration shall specify the commencement, duration, location, and extent of the blockade and the period within which vessels of neutral States may leave the blockaded coastline.

    In other words, Israel must specify what is blockaded, and keeps a comprehensive list under wraps.

    There's also the fact that most of Gaza's population has their normal place of residence in what is now Israel and Gaza is technically not Israeli territory because they are, in Ali Abunimah's word, unwanted surplus non-Jews. Israel is not blockading another country, it's laying siege to people who should be its own citizens and would be if it wasn't a segregationist entity. Israel's refusal to permit the people of Gaza free movement through their country violates the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.

    Article II

    For the purpose of the present Convention, the term "the crime of apartheid", which shall include similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practised in southern Africa, shall apply to the following inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them:

    [...]

    (c) Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognized trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association; [my emphasis]

    d) Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof;

    Of course the whole existence of Gaza as a separate entity from Israel is to violate art. II.c of the convention especially the underlined part. And since it's creation Israel has violated c) and d) with reckless abandon. Can Israel legally blockade Gaza when Gaza itself is the result of Israeli policy?

    link to news.bbc.co.uk
    link to www1.umn.edu
    link to icrc.org

  • andrew r March 28, 2011 at 9:56 pm

    "You still haven’t shown me where I said that all Israeli violence against civilians is justified"

    link to mondoweiss.net

    You're not as bright as you think you are.

  • andrew r March 28, 2011 at 9:43 pm

    I could go into a tedious historical romp, but instead there's a few concepts called democracy, human rights and rule of law. Israel exists on the basis of denying the Palestinian refugees their right to return. The refugees are still demanding their right. Israel has an obligation to honor this right, regardless of what the Hebrew population thinks, because the right to live in one's home is a fundamental right that the rights of another can not abrogate.

    It's easier to understand this rather than sift through the tit-for-tat who-did-what-when arguments. Jews and Palestinians should be able to live anywhere in historic Palestine. There's no need to segregate them.

  • andrew r March 28, 2011 at 9:27 pm

    "Sounds like he was risking his life by participating in such activity. Oh, well. I hope more young people don;t get such a stupid idea in their head."

    Do we have to keep this blog PG rated? Oh well, go *blank* yourself.

• Slater seeks to reconcile Zionism with justice for Palestinians
  • andrew r March 28, 2011 at 5:56 pm

    I doubt any outside power can demand Israel take back the refugees at this point (It would have worked in 1949, but then there wouldn't have been a refugee problem, a state of Israel or even a Zionist movement if the Brits, French and Americans were magnanimous enough to help people dispossessed as a byproduct of their own policy). What can happen is a weakening of the Zionist state from the outside; if the Egyptians can prevent another attack on Gaza, if Hezbollah can prevent another invasion of Lebanon, which did happen, even that is a weakening of Israel. Americans can weaken Israel through starving the defense industry. If Egyptians can gather in the millions and overthrow Mubarak, there' s no reason USians can't oppose policies that are making them poorer and getting their (expendable) people killed. Israel will be in trouble as a result.

    The last blow will come when the '48, '67 and diaspora Palestinians take back their country and the IDF is incapable of killing them all. I can't think of another scenario where the right of return is possible. What will make the IDF incapable I don't know. Israel can be an international pariah but it will still have the hardware and manpower to do the job.

  • andrew r March 27, 2011 at 4:01 pm with 3 replies

    "the world could not force Israel to accept them back."

    You make it sound like Israel had all the cards. In fact, no one tried to force Israel to take the refugees back because the western (and eastern) powers did not care about them. Britain and France were soon using Israel as a proxy to invade Egypt and later the USA was juggling arms sales to Israel and the Gulf states and using Israel as a waystation for weapons to other regimes.

    It's pretty childish how you keep asserting Israel is just getting stronger, like it was the Soviet Union or something. Hey, speaking of which...

  • andrew r March 26, 2011 at 3:48 pm

    "The Zionists, on the other hand, had survived the war with their leadership, base of operations, and organization intact, and with their strategy – in their eyes and in the eyes of “the world” – vindicated."

    Doesn't this beg the question as to why Zionism was respected in the west while "an Iron Curtain has descended over Europe"? It's a rhetorical question, natch.

  • andrew r March 26, 2011 at 4:22 am

    I left this comment on Slater's blog which turned into a synthesis of my preferred anti-Zionist arguments. Thought it would be a good idea to reproduce here.

    I'm a little surprised at the offense taken to your "gentiles of goodwill" remark. My problem is that you take too much of Zionism's own selling points at their own word. And the fact that most of your arguments boil down to legitimating the status quo created by the Zionist paramilitaries c.f. "However, so long as the Arab minority is not large enough to make Jewish sovereignty impossible, there is no necessary or inherent inconsistency between equal--or almost equal--civil, political, and economic rights for the Jews and Israeli Arabs." Palestine has an Arab majority and that doesn't change because half its population is in perpetual exile and disenfranchised by the Zionist regime.

    Getting back to taking the internal claims of the movement at its own word, you give it too much credit for wanting to save Jews from persecution.

    The first problem with the Zionist movement, historically, is that it posits Jews are one people with a certain interest and that it has their best interests at heart. Still, for all its pretensions at uniting Jews, Zionism has never actually done this, moreover, it deliberately inculcated ethnic and class divisions among Jews.

    Second problem is that when the movement was gaining more ground, literally, in Palestine and the settlement building acquired a political and ideological leadership with the resources to implement their own abstract ideals acquired in the Kaiserreich, it had nothing to do with rescuing Jews from persecution. This was the goal talked about in Europe; much is made of Herzl's wish to save the Jews from pogroms (See Howard Sachar for an illustrative example). Arthur Ruppin had something different in mind: Save the Jews from assimilation by moving the best specimens to their ancient soil, purify the race by combing the Semitic lice out of the Aryan cotton-fiber - Yes, he really saw Jews as a mixed Aryan-Semitic race with the Semitic component an impurity to be filtered out. His Palestine Office administration vetted potential olim for physical and mental prowess: Not only were people rejected, they could even be sent back once in the country. Here's a block quote I posted with more details, and if that's not enough find Etan Bloom's thesis in pdf and read the rest of that section.
    link to mondoweiss.net

    Similarly, for good measure, no one cared about rescuing Mideastern/North African Jews from Islamic oppression. I think maybe Hibbat Zion might have wanted the Arab Jews included in the Zionist project, but the Labour Zionists did not speak of them except as a solution to the problem of employing Arabs on the one hand while Ashkenazim refused to do real work.

    Next issue: Zionism was an alliance with antisemites. Winston Churchill wrote an article in 1920 called, "Zionism vs. Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of World Jewry." I hesitate to find a link because it will be on a white supremacist site, however it's quoted at length in 'Churchill and the Jews' by Martin Gilbert. In this article, Churchill slotted Jews into three categories: Zionists, socialists or regular citizens of their home countries, and advocated using the Zionists against the socialists. So he basically saw Jews as either potential carriers of revolution or proper nationalists. Although he qualifies himself, looking on Jews as potential socialist agitators is antisemitism of the vintage kind.

    Lord Balfour as PM supported the 1905 Aliens Act which limited Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. According to Gilbert, he believed the Declaration would persuade Russian Jewry to keep Russia in the war.

    Avi Shlaim also cites Tom Segev who believes David Lloyd George was the primary mover of the Balfour Declaration and was motivated by antisemitism ('One Palestine Complete' is a book I'm planning to read)
    link to users.ox.ac.uk

    Of course, Zionists overlooked these attitudes of their British patrons because they thought the same way. The most well-kept secret about this movement is that its founders agreed with antisemitism and wanted to fix European Jews of deserving it. As hinted above, Ruppin embraced eugenics and wanted to cure the Yiddish Jews of their mercantile instinct, which he associated with Semitic peoples. And the eventual leadership of Israel all hated socialism. Herzl never met a reactionary antisemite he did not pander to - flip to any given page of his complete diary, especially the letter to Otto von Bismarck in vol. I.

    These attitudes are relevant because whatever the original intention was, Zionism turned a handful of Jews into a colonial elite off the backs of other Jews, to say nothing of the Palestinian refugees. As I learn more, I grow more weary of crediting this movement for its failure to succeed where the world failed the Jews. And I don't award brownie points for blaming the British and Americans when it did nothing to challenge their own restrictions on Jewish entry. Because its energies were focused somewhere else.

    You'll probably argue whatever its past history, Israel today can not fail to take in any Jews persecuted elsewhere. However, it's been tested on that since WWII, in Argentina in the late 70's/early 80's. Well, we have a working case study on how Israel behaves when Jews are persecuted by one of its own allies.
    link to azvsas.blogspot.com

    link to haaretz.com

    That along with the collective snoring through John Vorster tells me Israel only cares about antisemitism if Arabs can take the blame.

    Some other comments:

    "Zionist ideology is not based on the belief that the Jews are superior to others--just more vulnerable, or potentially so."

    Actually, it's based on the belief that Europe is superior to the Orient and Ashkenazim, instead of being excluded from the masters of the world, deserve their rightful place among them. An example from Weizmann according to a Soviet official: "Oh, don't worry. The Arab is often called the son of the desert. It would be truer to call him the father of the desert. His laziness and primitivism turn a flourishing garden into a desert. Give me the land occupied by one milion Arabs, and I will easily settle five times that number of Jews on it." (quot'd in Birth by Morris)

    Although you may be right that a one-state solution won't work, the idea is to call for the refugees' right of return, because this right is unconditional and discounting it would green light more expulsions from Israel, plus it's a basic demand of the BDS movement.

    I'll leave it at that for now.

• 'NY Jewish Week' excommunicates 'J Street' for opposing settlement project
  • andrew r March 25, 2011 at 12:01 am

    See, I thought Israel took in Arab Jews in order to ring their outer frontier with human shields that would bear the brunt of Palestinian attacks (c.f. Sderot) and provide the Ashkenazi elite with cheap labor. But no, they were rescuing Jews from the consequences of colonial occupation which made the Zionist state possible to begin with. Thanks for the reminder.

• AP publishes calumny of Palestinian attitudes re Holocaust
  • andrew r March 25, 2011 at 4:59 pm

    Do you think Arabs under Axis occupation were passive bystanders that could leisurely pick from resistance or collaboration? 1/2 of all Libyans were killed or detained during the Italian occupation which lasted from 1911-1943. Algerians fought for the liberation of France.

    It's all too convenient to depict the Arab world as Nazi sympathizers to justify the Nakba. This Arabic article has some examples of Arabs who were put into concentration camps. (Excerpts from Google)
    link to alwasatnews.com

    This is what tried hard to shed light upon the German Middle East expert Gerhard hop who has lived in Berlin before he died recently. In recent years, tried to reveal the victims of the Arabs were thrown into Nazi concentration camps. And still put up such a topic for discussion is difficult as long as there is no official data and historical documents can be used for the detection of the victims were Arabs, who ruled Nazi [under Nazi rule?]. However, he could hop collected information shows that about 80 thousand detainees who were imprisoned in detention camps field because they were fighting with the French army. And left hop note is that almost all the prisons in which detainees were Arabs and Muslims the reasons for their detention ranged between belonging to the resistance and to participate in the Spanish Civil War. Did not differ from the Nazis treated them for the treatment of opponents of the Nazi-hop and got the names of 450 Arab prisoners, mostly from the Maghreb, but it is likely that the actual number was greater than said so much today.
    ...
    Unless preceded that happened in the past happened on the eighth of May day on the passage of 6 years on the surrender of Germany, which put an end to World War II when the systems 20 thousand people marched in the city of Setif of Algeria and revived the festival in my address systems at the end of the march commemorating the fall of more than forty thousand victim in Algeria Ojhzat them the French forces in various towns in the province of Constantinople in the eighth of May, General 0.1945

    For the first time has risen and the Algerian media with solutions sixtieth anniversary of the killings carried out by Europeans against Arabs to refer to these crimes and the role of the public in response to the appeal of the movement of the Algerian Liberation and then celebrating the victory over Hitler, as was the case in many cities around the world. Continues to mine the German army led by Marshal Rommel, explode even today in the Libyan desert and kill local citizens and causing serious injury.

    For the defeat of Nazism, it was very important to the Algerians. The victory achieved by the help of Algerian soldiers from North Africa did not mean for the Algerian independence movement to end the fighting in Europe only, Algerians believe that the fall of Nazi Germany was the last obstacle for Algeria's independence from French occupation.

    However, the French met with celebrations and parades popular at the time the massacre because the French colonialists and the police provoked the demonstrators, which led to acts of violence used by the French air force against civilians. Last February was only a formal recognition of those French massacres. Decades ago, the eighth day of May 1945 is the beginning of the Algerian war of independence against the French occupation. This information is very brief of the many hidden in the archives of European governments for the suffering of Arabs as a result of World War II.
    ...
    The book includes a certificate from a renowned Egyptian writer Edward Kharrat, who was sixteen years old when he arrived in the German Marshal Erwin Rommel the Nile and the country said: "I have been aware of the politically and culturally, you know that the advent of the Nazis occupied the coming of the Germans was to replace the British occupiers. It was clear to the majority of Egyptians that Rommel was a tyrant is a system that looks at the world racist. There is an urgent need to rewrite history and ignore the right of victims who who let the World War II

  • andrew r March 24, 2011 at 11:39 pm

    Even if Jews were expelled from Arab countries and went to Israel, it doesn't change the fact that every one has the unconditional right to leave and return to their country. So even if Iraqi, Yemeni, Moroccan Jews et. al don't wish to go back, it doesn't mean they can keep out Palestinian refugees until they are paid compensation by the Arab states.

    Also, the details and causes of the Jewish flight from each Arab state aren't interchangable. While Egypt and Iraq confiscated Jewish property and stripped their citizenship, Moroccan and Lebanese Jews still have their property and have no government restrictions on returning.

    In most of the places the Nazis occupied, there was some form of collaboration. Had they occupied America and Britain and set up concentration camps there, they would've been helped by at least a few locals. So the fact that some Arabs mistreated Jews in Tunisia doesn't mean the Arab world as a whole sympathized with the Nazis nor does it justify the nakba (And for that matter, you probably can't even name a Palestinian aside from the Mufti who collaborated with the Germans, because there was no organized pro-fascist movement in Palestine).

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