Total number of comments: 19 (since 2010-06-09 14:29:37)
ariehzimmerman
Allow me please, to point you in the direction of my blog. American born 1937, Aliyah to Israel 1967. Member of kibbutz Zikim,served in the IDF during three wars. Just about as left-wing as one can get before becoming confused.
How to make friends and influence people.
I have been receiving groups from the Inter-Faith Peace Builders in my kibbutz for some time now, but have never been asked what I know, or if I knew that this sort of foolishness was what "suspects" went through. I suppose that the people thought I probably did not know, if so, they would be correct.
But I know now, and am somewhat ashamed that I should have guessed but did not. There is, of course another Israel; tens of thousands of Israelis belong to NGOs and other groups which attempt to ameliorate the harsh reality of the government's, (but not only the government's), treatment of ordinary Palestinians. Most Israelis would rather not know,' hear no evil, see no evil', etc,.
The intemperate right, as a percentage of the total Jewish population, is in all probability no greater than in most other countries; the difference is that here, they are in control to a worrying degree. A national paranoia exacerbated by the last few right-wing governments makes it easier to bedevil the general public.
The result, as I see it, is that informational tourism, (there must be a better description), ends with disillusion, dismay, and anger with Israel and Israelis. The result of that, again from my point of view, is instead of finding ways to aid the Israeli peace movement and political left, what I think I can call a positiver reaction, the now enlightened tourists, later in their own countries, make it easier for the Israeli right to maintain power by lumping all Israelis together as being beyond help.
As I reread what I have just written, I think that many will call it "special pleading". Perhaps it is, I cannot pretend to be completely objective, but I cannot and do not wish to lie.. the article by Ms. Durkay established the inadvisability of that.
It is clear that all you wish to do is to flame. No only are you not a decent Jew, as your alias would seen to suggest, but more importantly, you are evidently pretty much a failure as a human
being as well.
Will not respond again.
I suggest that you have never been in Israel, nor in Palestine. I strongly suggest that you do not have as many Palestinian friends as I do. I suggest even more strongly that my government and its policies is more repugnant to me than to you.
I will resist the nagging desire to correct your mistakes as to do so would seem to have me defending the Israeli crimes against a far weaker opponent, which is what you are fishing for, are you not?
Obviously that is not logic, and is not logical. Every kind of politician,of whatever nature and nation, and any form of government has manipulated the "great beast" with consummate ease to do what he, or they, want the beast to do.
They, (including my current leaders), thump their swelled out chests, cry danger, and brand the enemy as immoral evil doers.
The lumpen proletariat will drink down any poisonous swill it is given. In this, the Israeli masses are no different than any other.
Sasha-Polakow-Surnansky presents conclusions which are disputed by other scholars; I suggest that you have decided which of them are correct without doing any research of your own, no matter how good a student you think you are or how bad a student I, in truth, may be.
No we don't manage, as your reply so amply demonstrates. Nor should we, if the accusation is accurate.
As for your argument that "all Israelis" are to blame for the actions of their government. It is a stupid position to take and you cannot show any evidence to show it's accuracy.
If you want to learn about the Israeli left, (the real left, not the sad parody presented by the the Labor Party as it is now constituted), a few minutes on the internet will show you your mistake. If you are not willing to do even that, your condemnation of all Israelis is only ignorant hot air, or worse.
This is too simplistic. In the real world the Jews faced discrimination or even death at the hands of their neighbors too many times, in too many places, during the past two thousand years. It could be expected that some degree of paranoia would be the justifiable result.
Does this fact justify the actions of too many Israeli governments' intolerable treatment of an enemy so much militarily and economically weaker? No, of course not.
I cannot know your background, HollyTree, and it might in the end be irrelevant, but you may be assuming far more than good sense should allow. It is undeniable that current right-wing Israeli politicians and apologists manipulate, or attempt to manipulate the Israeli public into further paranoia in order to further the immoral goals of the Hill Top settlers. But from that to conclude that "Israelis", that is, all Israelis, are guilty of their government's actions is inaccurate, and ill thought out.
I quote you:, "Either Israel is mentally healthy or they aren’t (which is obvious)".
Notice please, that your language segues from 'Israel' to 'they' with no more justification than when Israelis say "they", meaning all Palestinians, rather than specifying who exactly within the Palestinian citizenry they ought to mean. 1,500,000 Palestinians in Gaza are not terrorists; 6,000,000 Jewish Israelis are not racists or quite so fearful as you assume. It is always, always a mistake to generalize about millions of people, any people.
With all due respect for Les, a short look into Wikipedia will prove him wrong. We Jews can be blamed for much, but not for apartheid.
It may be that you are missing a point; what frightens me is not the Hamas, (though if you have had had a qassam burst in your front yard, you might not think it a minor affair) , but that the Bibi/Avigdor axis is finally going to do something so horrible, that even thoughtful and fair people will will hold all Israelis accountable.
At this moment I can argue that all Israelis are responsible for the ill considered actions of the present government exactly to the degree that all Palestinians are responsible for the thoughtless actions of the Hamas.
The result of the actions of both are normally the opposite of what they intended to accomplish, consequently stupid.
Bur given the absolute military and economic superiority of the Israeli side, a convincing argument can be made that Israel attacks, even when it defends, but that the Hamas defends, even when it attacks. Not a well balanced equation perhaps, but in the modern world, an almost inevitable consequence of beating your foe, then kicking him when he is down.
As a representative of sane Israelis, if I may label myself, I disagree. Granted, that the 'sane' are not in control for the moment, your percentages are skewed. It is always a mistake to generalize so arrogantly about a population of millions.
Just an addendum. Tribalism predates the Nazis by a few hundred thousand years. Tribalism is the human equivalent of herd instinct, or since we are omnivores, pack instinct, expanded and intensified to allow for the greater mass of our brains.
Nowhere do I say that Israel and Palestine are equally guilty. If Israel did not exist, Palestinian history would be completely different.
Is is not the Israelis stealing the land that state their abiding thirst for peace, they laugh at peace and at the government. It is the clowns in the government who make the illegitimate claim that they want peace while supporting the hill top crazies.
My reasons for stating the obvious is that they are obvious; I have no secret agenda.
As for the "range and contempt", do you think that he really feels it, or his he using it only to justify his insults?
Well, you had me going for a while. But then I asked myself who is this troll? He reviles others but does not reveal anything about his own opinions regarding the struggle between Israel and Palestine. He writes, "You don’t know me or what I do, so spare me all your nonsense." True enough, but he offers nothing that would enable anyone to know anything about him. He asks questions, but ignores all questions asked of him.
Avi, (is that his real name), poses as a radical and spurns the thoughts of those he seems to think are not radical enough.
Yet, is he truly a radical backer of the Palestinian cause, or is he only adopting the pose in order to troll internet sites and flame those who realize that peace is the ultimate goal and is worth more than land, trade ideas?
So then I considered the possibilities.
1) He is a Palestinian with genuine cause to distrust anything
an Israeli might say. In which case, one might expect
the nature of his comments to contain more explicit
reasons for his flaming.
2) He is in reality one of the hill top gentry who reject
anyone expressing any degree of support for the ordinary
Palestinian who has suffered unfairly from Israeli
bigots.
3) He is a stressed out psychology major looking for a theme
for a term paper, possibly, "So called Liberals are
not liberal when flamed on the internet".
4) He is a poor sad soul with nothing to do but interfere
in activities which in reality mean nothing to him at
all.
So, pseudo-Avi, unless you can identify the impetus for your insults, unless you can give a reason for flaming those who prefer peace to dirt instead of the bigots and lovers of blood and guts, the is my last response to your counterfeit angst.
right! ok, you win this truly intellectual debate. Only you have access to truth and only you are ethically pure.
stay well
Well now, I don't want to know you, and you sure as hell don't know me.
So go take a flying jump...
So tell me Avi, what do you do for PEACE?
Where is it written in my blog that I say there is no partner?
An Invitation: supposing you to be in Israel, and not flaming from some safe haven far away, come to kibbutz Zikim, July 8, about 6pm, (South of Ashkelon, and North of Gaza, to listen to a talk by a man who is doing as much as anyone in the world for the normal citizens of Gaza, Mr. John Ging. UNRAW's chief operations officer in Gaza. Afterwords we can determine why you think you can criticize a person's motives from afar, and just what it is you think your are contributing to the mix. A hint: read carefully first, then flame.
I would not say that I am afraid of my own government; admittedly the inept clownishness of the Natanyahu/Lieberman axis is dangerous to the entire Mid-East and further, and that what they are doing to the future of Israeli Palestinian relations is anything but funny, but I am not amused or afraid; I am enraged.
There is a tide of what must be accepted as understandable paranoia that runs through Jewish sensibilities. The government's cynical cultivation and enrichment of that mind besetting poison is working on the herd mentality that exists in every culture and every society, mine as well as that of anyone else.
Picture it! 250,000 otherwise normal German citizens gathered in a great crowd flinging up their arms in simultaneous and synchronized ecstasy, bellowing, "Sieg Heil! Seig Heil! Sieg Heil!... What percentage of that crowd, say in 1934, could have been expected to be there if not already susceptible to brain washing?
I do not, and would not compare the German mind set of that time to any but the most extreme hill top settlers, the smallest minority even of the most red necked hard hatted denizens of the far right-wing underworld. My point is that any accomplished rabble rouser already has a good percentage of any population in his pocket before he starts.
I had thought, naively, that my people, given what they have experienced in the past, were beyond such stupidity.
None the-less, I still believe, in spite of anything I've written, that the present panic and formless fear besetting so much of Israel's Jewish population, is not incurable. That is why American Jewish organizations, in concert with the American government, should divest itself of, not material, not necessarily military, and not social ties with Israel, but with blind expectations that things will get better without outside help. In my reading of the situation, the chance that BDS, by itself, will convince my leaders to desist from poisoning the whole system, is zero. If anything it will bind the frightened masses that much closer to our current rulers.
If Israel and Palestine have not managed since 1967 to come to terms with the fact the the other side has no place to go, that we are stuck with each other, and that peace is preferable to increased acreage of dirt soaked in our mingled blood, then it is time that a nanny is sought to bring peace to our infantile struggle.
Which side is blameless? Is peace of greater advantage to one side than the other? Israel is by far so much stronger than its partner in pain that it can, and should make the first significant steps towards sanity; if it does not, it should be encouraged to do so.
As an Israeli and a Jew, I think perhaps too much attention has been paid to a 89 year old woman's last pledge to her own lineage.
Please understand that I believe the we Israelis are here to stay; it also is more than obvious that the Palestinians will remain here as well. That being the case, a little bit of slack can be cut for those who cheer for their own.
It is enough that both sets of leaders are leading their followers into a cul-de-sac of blood and pain; not all of us need contribute to the insanity.
ariehzimmerman
It is too bad that the very thing rightfully condemned in Israel society appears also in generalizations of the Israelis by others.
"The Isarelis", "they", "them" , sound to me no different than "The Arabs", "they", "them" when mouthed by the right-wing admirers of the Natnayau/Lieberman axis.
I ask for no special consideration for right-wing Israelis, than were allowed for racist South Africans, Southern Whites, or Turkish haters of Armenians. I remember all to well, myself in my teens, sure that any white South African was a bigot, but knowing nothing of Helen Suzman or Alan Paton or many others.
It doesn't take a hell of a lot of Googleing to see that millions of Israelis reject the stupidity and racism which guide the last few of our governments.
So, leave me out of "they" and "them", and I'll try to not to remember that Americans voted for Bush twice.