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BethlehemOlivesRedeem

father poet human-rights activist teacher profeminist family and men's counselor

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• 'We must expel Arabs and take their place': Institute for Palestine Studies publishes 1937 Ben-Gurion letter advocating the expulsion of Palestinians
  • BethlehemOlivesRedeem April 11, 2012 at 4:19 am with 3 replies

    Baffling all the ink spilled in lyinzionist claptrap pretending BenGurion and the other founding father terrorists of terrorist regime Israel weren't intent on tranferring all "Arabs" from socalled eretzyisrael.
    Just read Benny Morris, who quite carefully documents this plan, in Ben-Gurion's words, in Herzl's words, etc. Just take, for instance his chapter in The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, edited by Eugene L Rogan and Avi Shlaim, with afterword by Edward Said.
    In "Revisiting the Palestinian exodus of 1948," Morris quotes BG at length, also noting where and when BG or other Jewish Agency leaders chose to muffle his words for public consumption when his frankness could trigger bad PR for the Zionist cause. See esp. pp. 39-48, which renders moot the debate. A couple of excerpts might clarify:
    Morris writes: "The controversy here is really about the nature of Zionism and about the degree of Zionist premeditation in what occurred in 1948." He cleverly uses the intransitive verb "occurred" to avoid explicit naming of the agents of the "occurrences." Essentially Morris quotes Ben-Gurion's diary entries at length in which BG waxes poetic about the gift the Peel Commission's July 1937 publication has put in the Zionists' lap. A careful psychoanalysis of BG's language would reveal how thrilled he is to lean on the excuse that the UK, and not Zionists, came up with the idea and so, if the Zionists carry out the transfer of Palestinian Arabs from Palestine into other Arab territories, it's really the UK that bears responsibility and not the Zionists. It's a kind of childish fantasy he articulates. He insists on overcoming any qualms about wholesale transfer, on the urgency of grasping this "historic opportunity that may not recur. The transfer clause in my eyes is more important than all our demands for additional land. This is the largest and most important andmost vital additional 'area'... We must distinguish between the importance and urgency of our different demands. We must recognize the most important wisdom of any historical work: The wisdom of what comes first and what later.
    "There are a number of things that [we] struggle for now [but] which we cannot achieve now. For example the Negev. [On the other hand,] the evacuation [of the Arabs from] the [Jexreel] Valley we shall [i.e., must] achieve now -- and, if not, perhaps we will never achieve it. If we do not succeed in removing the Arabs from our midst, when a royal commission proposes this to England, and transferring them to the Arab area -- it will not be achieveable easily (or perhaps at all) after the [Jewish] state is established, and the rights of the minorities [in it] will [necessarily] be assured, and the whole world that is antagonistic towards us will carefully scrutinize our behavior towards our minorities. This thing must be done now -- and the first step -- perhaps the crucial [step] -- is conditioning ourselves for its implementation."
    A month later, at the Twentieth Zionist Congress convened in Zurich "specifically to consider the Peel proposals... Ben-Gurion once again posited transfer in no uncertain terms: 'We do not want to expropriate,' he said.
    "'[But] transfer of population has already taken place in the [Jezreel] Valley, in the Sharon [Plain] and in other places. You are aware of the work of the Jewish National Fund in this respect. [The reference is to the sporadic uprooting of Arab tenant farmer communities from lands purchased by the JNF.] Now a transfer of wholly different dimensions will have to be carried out. In various parts of the country new Jewish settlement will not be possible unless there is a transfer of the Arab fellahin. . . It is important that this plan came from the Commission and not from us. . . The transfer of population is what makes possible a comprehensive settlement program. Fortunately for us, the Arab people have enormous desolate areas. The growing Jewish power in the country will increase our possibilities to carry out a large transfer. You must remember that this method [i.e., possibility] also contains an important humane and Zionist idea. To transfer parts of a people [i.e., the Arabs] to their own country and to settle empty lands [i.e.. Transjordan and Iraq]. . .'"
    Morris notes that although BG "had seen fit to speak of it [transfer] in the plenum of the Zionist Congress, the subject was still very sensitive," evidence for which is found in the fact "that the Jewish press reports about the Congress' proceedings generally failed to mention that Ben-Gurion or anyone else had come out strongly in favor of transfer or indeed had even raised the subject."
    In addition to quoting other Yishuv leaders, Morris quotes BG: "I support compulsory transfer. I don't see in it anything immoral." Interesting that he would feel the need to assert its moral status, when elsewhere he is quoted as affirming entitlement of Zionists to "ruthless compulsion" and insisting "the Druze, several of the Beduin tribes in the Jordan Valley and the South, the Circassians, and perhaps also the Matawalis [Shi'ites of northern Galilee]" would "not mind being transferred, under favourable conditions, to some neighbouring country." Complete transfer of Arabs would of course demand "ruthless compulsion." Post-WWII settlement in Europe, "he envisioned," writes Morris, "would include massive population transfers. But the Zionists must take care not to preach openly or advocate compulsory transfer, as this would be impolitic and would antagonize many in the West. At the same time, Ben-Gurion reasoned, the Zionist movement should do nothing to hamper those in the West who were busy advocting transfer as a necessary element in a solution to the Palestine problem." By 1944 BG was able to state unequivocally: "Transfer of Arabs is easier than any other type of transfer. There are Arab states in the area. . . and it is clear that if the Arabs [of Palestine] are sent [to the Arab countries] this will better their situation and not the contrary. . ." Also at that Jewish Agency Executive meeting, soon-to-be Israel's first Interior Minister Yitzhak Gruenbaum declared "It is the function of the Jews occasionally to make the Gentiles [goyim] aware of things they did not until then perceive. . . If for example it is possible to create artificially in Iraq conditions that will magnetize the Arabsof Palestine to emigrate to Iraq, I do not see in it any iniquity or crime. . ."
    Morris also quotes JA immigration director Eliahu Dobkin: "There will be in the country a large [Arab] minority and it must be ejected. There is no room for our internal inhibitions [in this matter]." Werner David Senator said "I do not regard the question of transfer as a moral or immoral problem. . ."
    A month later, BG proposed bringing a million Jewish immigrants "immediately" to Palestine's shores, but cautioned: "I am opposed that any proposal for transfer should come from our side. I do not reject transfer on moral grounds and i do not reject it on political grounds. If there is a chance for it [I support it];. . . But it must not be a Jewish proposal."
    In short, the historical development of the transfer question (ethnic cleansing, in our postmodern, post-Yugoslavia international-law terminology) in the minds of Zionist founders of the state of Israel became decisively something about which they could speak honestly amongst themselves, but dishonestly to the rest of the world. Morris writes that before 1937 Zionist thinking about transfer was "haphazard," but "from 1937 on" there was "virtual consensus in support of the notion" and that this consensus 'conditioned the Zionist leadership, and below it, the officials and officers who managed the new states civilian and military agancies, for the transfer that took place."
    Of particular interest is the fact that Theodor Herzl doesn't mention transfer in his books Der Judenstaat [The Jews' State] and Altneuland [Old-New Land]. But he does write in his 12 June 1895 diary these words: "We must expropriate gently. . . We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country. . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."
    Morris comments: "Given that the vast majority of Palestine's Arabs at the turn of the century were 'poor,' Herzl can only have meant some form of massive transfer. But he realized that discretion and circumspection must accompany any such enterprise.
    "This discretion and circumspection was to characterize Zionist references to the idea of transfer during the following decades."
    In short, the Zionists agreed that non-Jews are not entitled to be dealt with honestly by Zionists intent on God's work of redeeming Eretz Yisrael. The end must justify the means. And the tens of millions of Arabs must be expected to grant Jews their prophetic scriptural inheritance, the little plot of land between the river and the sea and let the Jews prod the local residents to pack up and leave.
    Well, gosh, wishful thinking doesn't make something so. But to avoid cognitive dissonance, BG and his gang of Jewish mafia dons decided it wasn't bad of them to choose to bully the indigenous Palestinians out of their inherited lands.
    So they decided to lie, agree to whatever UN membership conditions, international covenants are required to gain full legitimacy as a member of the Euro-American civilized club of nationstates calling themselves 'democracies' and then break the covenants whenever it suits their superior Jewish souls, goyims be damned.
    Morris has lots of examples of how lying became official foreign policy for Israel, if anyone cares to examine his extensively-researched books. And he's a good source for pro-Zionist readers, since he believes Israel "should have finished the job [of ethnic cleansing] in 48".

• Vice PM Moshe Ya’alon: Regime change in Ramallah will ultimately be necessary for peace talks to progress
  • BethlehemOlivesRedeem October 1, 2011 at 3:28 am

    I recently saw this 1858 painting in an art book and imagined the woman (as Abbas) is saying to the arrogant man (Netanyahu) grabbing her, "Bibi, i told you on your last visit, i will not be your strumpet. Maybe i wasn't clear about it then. But I really mean it now." The painting is titled "The Awakening Conscience":
    link to en.wikipedia.org

• The Norway massacre and the nexus of Islamophobia and right-wing Zionism
  • BethlehemOlivesRedeem July 25, 2011 at 6:02 pm with 1 replies

    People should consider at least two things about this massacre:
    1. It is the psychosocial product of the anti-Muslim soap-box orators ranting in the MSM about "Islamo-fascism" while themselves fomenting racist fascistic actions and policies (see NYTimes quote below, too), and
    2. The percentage of Norwegians murdered on Utoya Island was 0.002%, two times greater than the percentage of Americans (0.001%) who were killed on 9/11. (93 Utoya victims out of 4,827,038 Norwegians is 0.001926%, whereas 3,185 WTC victims out of 307 million is 0.001037%, using 2009 www.google.com/publicdata population figures for Norway and the United States). It will be interesting to observe how different Norway's cultural, social and political response will be from our crass militaristic, war-mongering, rather than crime-solving approach -- and how many rightwing pundits in the USA will try to coopt and distort the massacre's meaning, as if none of them had any blood on their hands for their chronic hate speech and stupid apologetics for the Bush-Obama continuum of unitary executive usurpations and Congressional abdications of the people's voice to the corporations' illegitimately Supreme-Court-sanctioned oligo-dictatorship.

    Today's New York Times has several illuminating stories on the bombing in Norway. Scott Shane's Killings Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S." is fairly good reporting. On the latter page of his frontpage story he quotes a former CIA officer, Marc Sageman who "said it would be unfair to attribute Mr. Breivik's violence to the writers who helped shape his world view. But at the same time, he said the counterjihad writers do argue that the fundamentalist Salafi branch of Islam 'is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged. Well,'" said Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist who ["saw no overt signs of mental illness in Mr. Breivik's writings"], "'they and their writings are the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged.'
    "'This rhetoric,' he added, 'is not cost-free.'"

• Helen Thomas will cover Move Over AIPAC conference, doesn't want to speak at it
  • BethlehemOlivesRedeem May 3, 2011 at 4:42 am

    forgive me my bad analogy or metaphor. please don't waste your time trying to dignify my attempts at communication when they prove graceless or grossly inept. you have better ways to spend your time, annie. thanks

  • BethlehemOlivesRedeem May 3, 2011 at 4:37 am

    i had a feeling my comment about dress was "off-color" - no pun intended. it was completely irrelevant to the issue under discussion and you were wise -- and kind -- to ignore it.

  • BethlehemOlivesRedeem May 3, 2011 at 4:32 am

    Truman also told the Freedom Riders to the racist JimCrow South -- almost precisely 50 years ago today (anniversary coming up later this month) -- to mind their own business and stay home. He integrated the U.S. military, but that was pragmatism, not principle at play. Black nonviolent resistance was a major factor in that shift. But that fact went unwritten in the history books in our arrogant "Leader of the Free World" land.

  • BethlehemOlivesRedeem May 3, 2011 at 4:25 am

    annie,
    two things:
    1. "zionist power relies and depends on the ILLUSION everyone is behind them and most american support them and that is an illusion we empower by imagining them as millions of organized people. we have to visualize our power as equal to theirs because in all the important ways we wield the most power. our weapons are stronger because we have truth on our side, we have the global community on our side, we know it and they know it. and do we visualize ourselves as equal to them? for the most part no, we don’t. we need to visualize ourselves as huge with the wind on our backs. when i say ‘empower equality’ i mean our own. "

    very well stated. i'm beginning to better understand your perspective.

    2. "but i don’t think you would understand that the way i do because you’ve completely passed the mantel of what defines jews in our society over to the zionists. hey, why stand up and be counted when you can shrink to the point of not even counting yourself as part of a community.

    “the lobby” has hoarded the term “the jewish community” so effectively that it IS COMMON SENSE IN AMERICA to imagine Jews are for israel and critics of Israel are antiJew racists.

    common sense eh? way to throw all our jewish allies under a friggin bus. we have completely opposite views on this. i am visualizing a fast growing non zionist youth (believe me reut is visualizing it too and they are scarred) with strong powerful leaders. i envision ‘the jewish community’ as teaming with human rights activists. i visualize them, i empower them and i regard many of them as leaders. you? you’ve already given up on them as jews."

    you misunderstood me; i failed to speak clearly. by "common sense in america" i was referring to the success the hasbarah campaign has had so far in convincing Americans to see or look no further than Paul Newman's blue eyes in Exodus, or the later award-winning Schindler's List, combined with the unpublicized contracts "the lobby" has extorted from virtually all our Congresspeople, the refusal to sign for which Cynthia McKinney got, as you love to say, thrown under the bus -- and later nearly murdered when the idf navy pirates rammed the Free Gaza movement's boat in international waters, the Dignity, three times on Dec. 30, 2008. Mondoweiss wouldn't exist and be such a treasured online resource, for me as well as for you, if the "commonsense American" perception of which i speak weren't such a huge and tragically murderous fact for Palestinians 24/7/365, now, would it? It would be unnecessary. Mondoweiss exists, i thought, BECAUSE the "commonsense" understanding of the "I/P issue" in the USA is so f'ing WRONG, COSTLY, DEADLY, IMMORAL AND COUNTERPRODUCTIVELY DANGEROUS TO THE ENTIRETY OF HUMANITY. So, yes, i agree that your visualizing a more egalitarian Jewry in America becoming the predominant nature of Jewishness, self-identified, is a good idea. But we aren't there yet, by a long shot. Israeli leaders felt so comfortable and confident about their domination of public opinion, not only in the U.S. but in the EU as well, to have a trained killer openly execute six of the 9 people slaughtered on board the Mavi Marmara. That kind of blase butchery in international waters proved a pretty good calculation for the perpetrators in Israel's rightwing cabinet ministries, at least in terms of how well-trained their dogs in the U.S. Congress are concerned -- and that is again what i'm talking about. Yes, more and more self-identified Jews are stepping up. Good. The supertanker of history is turning away from that deadly waterfall of doom at the flatworld's edge. But it's still by and large headed for the fall. I am terribly worried for the people on board the next flotilla -- terribly worried ! ! The kind of cynical monsters at the helm in Israel have a largely well-trained circus audience for citizens; the vocal and effective critics are about as effective as PETA activists in steak-eating McDonald'sLand, to date. So i'mless sanguine than you, perhaps, about the Audacity of Hope sailing safely into Gaza Port, or what's left of it. I do hope I'm wrong, of course. But, only one member of Knesset had the courage to be a FreedomRider for Gazans in the first flotilla. And look how they've pilloried her.

    I do hope the big wheels who will be aboard the next flotilla have enough influence the chickenhawks of Zionville will refrain from replaying their Cowboy movie of last May. We'll just have to wait and see, and keep plugging away at getting the truth better and better broadcast than the lies have so far been.

  • BethlehemOlivesRedeem May 3, 2011 at 3:53 am

    The right to express, and the right to hold, an opinion is the right to individual self-determination, to freedom from the tyranny of a majority, and it precedes "epistemic duties" just as the rights listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights indicates, basically on the premise that we are all equally entitled to the basics of life support and "pursuit of happiness", including freedom of association without having to answer to any "higher" material, better-armed authority.

    Duty is something especially pooh-poohed in our era of what Marcuse called "repressive desublimation." Hadn't you heard? We're entitled, if we're scientists, for example, or curious simply, to devise deadlier and deadlier toxins and weapons of mass dest-ruction simply because WE CAN ! ! ! Isn't that what makes FREEDOM so damned exciting and ALL-AMERICAN, BY GOD?
    Nietzsche really anticipated Americanism more than any other "post-you-name-it" advocate. Eternal return of the same seems to indicate the real meaning of that old saw that 'man's reach must exceed his grasp or else what's a heaven for?' -- i.e., we can see our tragic nature, but ultimately are stuck with it... no matter what we try to do to transcend it.... and, as long as we keep telling each other, we in the mightier societies, that we "are chosen", then we can be comfortable dividing ourselves into those who are crassly opportunistic, like Israel's leaders always have been, and those who have a sense of noblesse oblige, who feel the ?White ?Man's Burden includes compassion and mercy towards our inferiors.

    But there's that inconvenient third category of folks who defy polarities and declare all humans must have their equality defended against all state interference, all intrusions and impositions by self-selected elites, even those of which one is a born member. That's the group of Jews I as a nonJew trust -- but only so far. As they say in the marketplace, buyer beware. That saying doesn't make you anti-capitalist of course. But you're immediately labeled by the powers that be, MSM or whore politicians in Congress and state capitals, as anti-semitic, or a "self-hating Jew" when a similar self-protective hedge is voiced concerning the questionable trustworthiness or intellectual integrity of Jews who think Israel "has a right to exist as a Jewish state" -- in other words, Jews who approve of Israel's founders using intentional terrorist tactics in military operations against civilians in order to create such a state (and declare it a democracy! while developing an internal legal system similar in its ethnocentric viciousness and hypocrisies to Jim Crow in the southern USA and Apartheid in South Africa)

    Anyway, as for Jews booting a Lebanese American off the speaking platform of the MoveOverAiPAC event, it's perfectly logical really, since those Jews are trying to tell their fellow (unhumble and thus non-self-hating) Jews, as family member to family member -- Look, the world is wondering why victims of the Shoah are perpetrating a slow-motion Shoah against a people totally innocent of that first Shoah, and that world is getting wise to the fact that the Jews perpetrating the (slow-motion) Shoah (ethnic cleansing as defined in the successful case against Milosevic) against Palelstinians are mostly NOT those who suffered under the Nazis, but the Jews (like Rabin, Peres, Dayan, Ben-Gurion among other Founding Fathers) who exploited Hitler's existence in order to guilt-trip the West, with its namby-pamby anti-Semitism (limited quotas for Jewish immigrants from Nazi Germany) and its gratitude and debt to those Jews who did escape in time to help "the Allies" win WWII -- Einstein, et al. -- as well as the Jewish intellectuals and activists who indeed participated in numerous progressive causes (Buber, Heschel et al) , probably not anticipating the murderous ethnic cleansing terrorist regime and master of international infiltration and mass hypnosis Israel proved so adept at being from 1947 to the present, or from the 1890s to the present.

    It is good that progressive Jews are at last finding the collective courage to stand up to "the lobby" publicly, although having spent some time in Marin County in recent years, I am appalled at how voiceless such Jews remain -- even to the point that the anti-Iraq war "marin peace and justice coalition" mpjc.org has suppressed pro-Palestinians and anti-colonialist Jews from holding public events the mpjc would host or defend against -- you might be surprised, or not -- even Methodist, feminist ministers who'd demand either a police presence and/or the "necessary balance" of including a Zionist Jew to present "the other side of the issue" if she or her congregation were to permit the "I/P issue" to be discussed from a Palestinian perspective.
    Which is why it would be great if Mark Braverman (read his book Fatal Embrace!) were to speak at the MoveOverAIPAC event, since he has made astutely clear how delusional Christians are who imagine "balance" exists in the "I/P issue," in which a U.S.-backed-funded, massively armed with WMDs, colonialist-racist (oxymoronic hedonistic-Spartan-narcissist) regime is oppressing a basically weaponless, occasionally kitchen-pipe lobbing (at illegal occupiers of their own Nakba-fled homes in so-called Sderot) and stone-throwing -- but mostly completely nonviolently -- Jim-Crow/apartheid resisting indigenous people.

    So, as for your visionary ideal-type linking indissolubly any "freedom of" or "right to" opinion-voicing with a corollary or twin-like universal ethos of epistemic duty, keep on dreaming, my friend. I agree with American we do have the right to have stupid opinions and to voice them. That's why people with good ideas have to work really hard to get others to think carefully enough to recognize those ideas as good or better than the opinions they'd learned earlier to hold. Nothing good comes easy, though it feels good when in moments it seems to.

  • BethlehemOlivesRedeem May 1, 2011 at 7:49 pm

    you're right, it wasn't phil, it was the three authors of the Medea, Rae, Shaden piece that Phil quoted at length, or that he presented i guess. In fact, the fact that Medea said it, and not Phil, makes my point all the more relevant.

    your impolite characterization of my lengthy note as "turning this into a rant against medea" totally misses the point... you said, "hindsight is hindsight, i think it is always better to go forward." i think such jargon is actually typical from White House pressmen trying to shut up MSM reporters trying to get at inconsistencies in the Fuehrer's rhetoric and actions, it comes from apologists for empire like Ari Fleischman and other cronies of the US-Israel axis of evil .... Like the adulterer or wife-beater who said during the divorce, 'why are you picking on me about the past, past is past. We should be moving on here.' Well, i am with the Native Americans who insist the past is present, not strictly past. When somebody has wounded another, that past deed doesn't vanish until that other is healed and freely forgiven the perpetrator. We in the Judeo-Christian tradition, according to psychotherapists working with perpetrators of child molestation, for example, are far too inclined to forgive perpetrators when their victims are still reeling and disoriented with fear, shame, alienation, self-doubt, confusion, inability to focus or feel safe. When a movement leader takes an action that dismays, shocks, hurts, outrages more than just a few of her allies, but many -- including those among her staunchest admirers -- it behooves fellow activists to have the grace and intelligence to patiently consider the ramifications of that -- especially if she takes another, similarly unilateral decision, albeit one with perhaps less immediate consequences to those most likely to suffer unanticipated repercussions from those in power.

    Enough said.
    My point is, Medea, in deciding for all the groups involved in MOAipac planning, did pretty much the same kind of snafu organizational communication-cum-decision-taking she pulled off in Cairo, claiming to make a decision that represented or respected the views OF A FEW without inviting the many to the table to discuss the issue and arrive democratically at a consensus.

    i don't have a problem with "people personalizing their views." Again, you have neatly [surgically?] excised part of my words from their fuller context. I don't think it is advisable or productive, especially for someone purporting to be serving, in a truly collaborative manner, a movement of diverse participants, to heed the complaints or concerns of a few and then make a decision affecting everybody without having consulted as many people as she could have. How that amounts to a "rant against medea," rather than a legitimate expression of concern about a person you repeatedly praise instead of sticking to the question of her specific performance in this or that specific action, past or present, escapes me. It seems as if you prefer 'activism lite', in which all of us sing kumbaya and have nothing negative or critical to say when somebody we trusted to act not only on our collective behalf but to refrain from acting thusly without first ensuring we all, or mostly, agree the action is the best path to take. You can personalize all you want til the cows come home, but don't dismiss point-specific arguments as "ranting." Doing so makes you sound more like the one doing the ranting, in a fit or frenzy of impatience with disagreement. Don't you know, disagreement is the heart of democracy?
    Why call it ranting? That sounds like patriarchal rhetoric to me, the sort of Reaganesque finger-wagging designed to silence what one doesn't want to hear or have others hear and maybe agree with, partly. i'd say you are much more believable when you stick to a focus of debate with discussing evidence or relevance reasonably. Saying you don't like my bringing something up or that it seems off-topic is one thing i can respond to sincerely trying to clarify my intent, but delegitimizing with a pejorative term just muddies the waters.

  • BethlehemOlivesRedeem May 1, 2011 at 6:15 pm with 1 replies

    i disagree with annie that clenchner made a "good catch" there.

    to imply or allege CitizenC's proposition that "Jewishness" is a form of privilege amounts to anti-Semitism is a leap i didn't make when reading him. does that make me and him both anti-Jewish racists?

    hardly. It would be friendlier, and more accurate of you both, annie and clenchner, to have asked CitizenC how you might avoid drawing such an unfriendly conclusion from his phrasing of his thoughts, rather than jumping down his throat, ganging up on him. The very act of having jumped on him struck me as a form of cultism, of pushing him out of the circle of acceptable talkers and hearers, itself a form of intolerance i was shocked to witness in annie, but not in clenchner, who from the start indicated an attitude of willingness to jump to the defense of "all Jews everywhere," to me a dead giveaway of Zionist proclivities...

    in fact, i think clenchner doesn't go far enough, nor does annie, in her:
    "framing the power of the lobby as ‘organized Jewish community’ is a cop out and a distortion. jvp is part of the jewish community. the jewish community is all over the map. i’m sick and tired of people putting them in a box and claiming the lobby rules the box."

    Twice, annie used "the jewish community" to refer to Jews who are opposed to the agenda of Israel and AIPAC/'the lobby'. The very phrase, "the jewish community" is dangerouly misleading when applied to Jews opposed to "the lobby" and the fascist colonialist regime of Israel.
    First, because "the lobby" has hoarded the term "the jewish community" so effectively that it IS COMMON SENSE IN AMERICA to imagine Jews are for israel and critics of Israel are antiJew racists. That's part of the problem, so don't blame CitizenC for such framing.

    Second, anti-Zionist Jews critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians and of Palestine, its land, water, trees, its inherent love of its millenia-present rightful stewards, presumably identify themselves by the nation-state in which they have lived and thrived, rather than by their "jewishness." A german Jew probably identifies herself as a German before identifying as a Jew, in common discourse locally or internationally, unless, that is, she is a "friend of Israel" i.e. an unqualified supporter of whatever the hell Israeli leaders decide to do to Palestinians and their other neighbors.

    My understanding as an American is that my status as a citizen, a taxpayer and voter in local as well as state and federal elections, and a holder of the U.S. passport, makes me primarily, in terms of my freedom, my rights and liberties, "an American" i.e. a person responsible to others on a multiplicity of levels that transcend any specific religious, economic, professional, ethnic or cultural "community" I may participate regularly in. I am of course a human being first, in principle, but in practical, relational, free-to-travel-wherever and think-and-say-whatever terms, I am an American, not a Christian or a Buddhist, not a teacher, a writer or a heterosexual. And while all those categories may fit an aspect of who i am, i am not going to freak and attack somebody who challenges any exclusive privileged entitlement members like myself of one or another category may falsely claim, or any offenses against others one or another Christian or group of Christians, or heterosexual males, has perpetrated. Audre Lorde didn't offend me when she wrote her brilliant essay on compulsory heterosexuality. She enlightened me. So, when somebody challenges the legitimacy of Jews as a privileged minority, maybe honest Jews aren't offended but actually examine the evidence, the history, for example, of how a political-economic-cultural elite of fork-tongued Jews, claiming the mantle of "True Judaism" or "God''s Chosen People" or whatever, "Zionists destined to rule over Eretz-Yisrael," have devised a global network of local and national organizations of self-proclaimed "Jewish Community centers" with which to blaspheme against Arabs, Muslims and Persians, lie about their love of blacks and God and truth and justice and peace, seize the "H"olocaust as theirs personally while secretly in Israel mocking and impoverishing the very survivors of that holocaust they exploit to squeeze more wealth out of guilt-ridden EuroAmericans, Jews and nonJews alike, and set about ethnically cleansing a piece of land they have no more right to than i do, robbing and humiliating, starving and jailing thousands upon thousands of innocent Palestinians, and killing anybody who interferes, even American military personnel, with weapons provided by the Pentagon no less.

    The term "the jewish community" for a layman like myself has historically meant people who hold themselves primarily accountable to other Jews, and NOT primarily to their fellow human beings or fellow national citizens of USA, Germany, France, Mauritania, wherever, regardless of ethnicity.

    Gideon Levy not long ago wrote an essay about the worst anti-Semites on the planet, those running Israel. The recently deceased historian,
    Tony Judt perhaps said it best:
    “Israel's reckless behavior and its insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia.” (Reappraisals, p291)

  • BethlehemOlivesRedeem May 1, 2011 at 5:22 pm

    annie,
    three points:
    1. I agree with you that authentically egalitarian (anti-racist, anti-Eurocentric) Jews are rising to the occasion in sufficient numbers, finally (when Palestinians haven't been as decimated, so far, as American Indians were by the Protestant Reformation's heirs, from Hamiltonians to Jeffersonians, slaveholders and real estate speculators all, even those "freeing their slaves in their wills"), to force our crippled MSM to give a few column inches to their challenge of the dominant framing about "the Jewish people" that our post-UNCharter Zionist wanna-be-19th-century imperialists have managed to shove down our collective craws. Nevertheless, AIPAC/IL still runs the show, and more Palestinians' (and internationals') blood will spill in Palestine as long as Jews of conscience fail to marshall "their" (ethno-identified) numbers with greater effectiveness -- and that includes incarnating sufficient humility to gladly ride shotgun for or accompany a few steps behind, rather than insist on taking the wheel from Palestinians themselves. Anarchists Against the Wall, JVP and whoprofits are just three such strong Jewish activist groups that aren't about tooting their own horns. I don't see Medea NOT tooting her own horn yet, sad to say. I'd like to see more of Code Pink's grassroots activist decision-makers given more airtime than Medea, rather than this leader-fetish that plays right into the royalist, monarchical psyche of the Western world, in which the globe's sole superpower pretends to identify with its historical origins of defying King George when the last few White House occupants have, with Congressional blessing, aggrandized to the "unitary executive" totalitarian powers dwarfing those of past kings. Even the Civil Rights movement tragically subordinated its most important leaders, especially the women, to the MSM's "journalism 101" demand for "identifiable leaders" at the huge expense of delays in the maturation of entire generations of potential activists, but that's another discussion for YourBlackWorld. (Is it too late, by the way, to ask Mark Braverman to speak at MOA?)
    2. "do not be so judgmental" This isn't about judgment, but about activists with the greatest visibility being willing to demonstrate the greatest dignity, humility and honesty when it comes to accepting criticism for their shortcomings -- and having the grace to openly admit errors without diluting such admission with back-handed generalizations designed subtly to put critics on notice, as Medea did in the above lengthy quotation. Criticism includes self-criticism, and to react defensively, or to insist, "O we mustn't air our dirty laundry lest the enemy exploit our divisions" is and has been proved a counterproductive form of fatalism, of surrendering to fear and doubt, and ironically, it embraces divisiveness as unavoidable and therefore chooses to sweep it under the rug rather than deal with it. Like my Mom used to tell me when i didn't like something i had to do or endure in the tests life threw my way: Deal with it, child! If Medea is to be a worthy spokesperson across-the-board for whatever cause she steps up to a microphone to declaim, she has to get used to dealing with what goes with it, thick-skinned and warm-hearted through and through, especially when it comes to real egalitarian activism, which demands more tolerance of discomfort and inconvenience than patriarchy trains us to endure. Medea may earn, and re-earn, our respect; she is not entitled, because of her history with this or that good deed under her belt, to automatic respect. Effective and credible "leaders" follow the people's lead, and don't presume to rest on past laurels. "Leaders" are a dime a dozen. Heroes are something else, as which we all should be learning from attending closely to the nonviolent struggle of our Palestinian sisters and brothers.
    3. Annie, your voice is a good one to find online, and i think a lot of folks appreciate you but don't say so. i'd just caution you about letting your friendship with an activist, or your affection for this or that group, get in the way of your independent critical thinking as an activist in what is a painfully and exhilaratingly creative endeavor in refining our human and trans-species perceptions, conceptual framing skills and our diplomatic arts. "visualize and empower equality, and justice will follow" sounds like too much effort. Equality, as Jacques Ranciere has argued in book after book, should be as spontaneous to us as our next breath, or our heartbeat, and then all that is "personal" in our lives and all that is "political" will function simultaneously as what we are, as the Native Americans so beautifully put it, "all our relations," or as Thich Nhat Hanh says, "interbeing."

  • BethlehemOlivesRedeem May 1, 2011 at 4:37 pm with 4 replies

    I was there in Cairo and Red's report is accurate about Code Pink leader Medea Benjamin's truly shocking unilateralism and piss-poor attitude toward cooperative decision-making and even judicious sharing of information and communications among the various organizations. The night before the buses to Gaza were scheduled to arrive, scores of us in a furnitureless meeting room of the hotel we used as the central planning location crowded onto the floor and listened to a surprisingly manipulative and belligerent Code Pink "facilitator" announce cloyingly to us CP's deal w/LadyMubarak, as if we were supposed to be thrilled with two buses instead of twenty or thirty buses required for all 1,400 would-be marchers - a deal that converted a political action for the Human Rights of Gaza's 1.5 million citizens into a Humanitarian Aide delivery and a Third-World Ghetto Tourism thing to soothe white consciences or to write home about. (The next morning was insane, with young and old "activists" standing in line with their luggage insisting they had a "right" to go on the bus, after Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein announced she was NOT going to go on the buses because the deal was a violation of the principles of solidarity the march was supposed to embody. I also found shocking to witness, of all people, Waldon Bello, yelling from the steps of the front bus that this was "a matter of individual choice, for each person to choose for themselves" whether to go on the bus or not, as if this were a Consumerist Movement! ! ! After i and several others sent messages to him on the bus, apparently he had a change of heart and stepped off the bus..) Anyway, at that crowded room, people spilling into two hallways and an adjacent room, the facilitator spokesperson for CP proceeded to call on people for their feedback, and then dismiss any criticisms of the decision, even going so far as to rudely snap at and ask for the credentials of one soft-spoken critic, "And who are you?", insulting the head of the South African delegation. I don't recall the facilitator's name but she told us all we could disagree or dislike the decision but that there weren't enough of the close to 1,400 activists present in the room to reverse the decision. (There were about 60 more of us in that crowd than were involved in the behind-the-scenes decision; apparently two or three CP activists are worth 20 or 30 times more than non-CP activists.) This was the level of logical consistency articulated by CP spokespeople/leaders, who seemed disproportionately pleased with their political effectiveness, as if they had pulled a fast one on the dictator's wife, and not the reverse. In that same meeting, Medea herself assured us all that "No Code Pink people will go on the buses," and that each international group could choose two members to go on the buses and list a few more contingent riders if one of the two didn't show up, or whatever. The ironic punchline to this tale is that over a dozen CP activists got on the two buses, and they tried everything they could to persuade the hundreds of people in the morning crowd to board the buses, and ended up themselves trying to fill the seats, finally departing with more than ten empty seats and a huge crowd of activists disappointed and wondering how the Gazans, who had telephoned asking people to not compromise with Mubarak, the Zionists' shill, would take all this.
    As if all that weren't evidence enough of Medea having a huge learning curve on not only this specific "I/P issue" but more basically how to take a leading role in helping to organize overseas intergroup actions without crossing boundaries and usurping power that nobody ever ceded to them. I spoke privately with several Code Pink members in Cairo who were also dismayed at Medea's and (co-founder what's-her-name's) unilateralism, and who spent much of the rest of that night, before the buses showed up, trying to get CP leadership to reverse if not reframe its decision. To top it off, last year Medea came out with a video featuring herself and a guy standing beside her making it sound as if Code Pink were responsible for some incredible successes in Cairo, when in fact it was groups like the Scottish and South African campaigns who with a lot of disciplined collective discussions and mini-actions and intergroup contacts, hammered out the excellent Cairo Declaration for global action against Israeli Apartheid.
    In short, it's great that CP and Global Exchange have done lots of wonderful work, yes. and continue to do so. Yes. But for Phil and annie to personalize this MoveOverAIPAC issue by prefacing it with personal praise of Medea is to bizarrely distort the lens through which to examine and analyze our collective decision-making critically and self-critically. Phil's claim that Helen "didn't want to talk" at MOA but just "wants to report" is like saying we 1,385 internationals didn't want to march arm and arm with the Gazans but were happy to stay in Cairo, warmly, fuzzily gratified in our hearts at Medea et al.'s bold and creative stroke of genius in managing to finagle two entire buses plus a supplies truck out of the First Lady of Egypt. It is to laugh.

  • BethlehemOlivesRedeem May 1, 2011 at 3:11 am with 8 replies

    I am so relieved you said something, iamuglow! ! !
    I agree totally, Helen Thomas, a NON-JEW, and a strong advocate for Palestinian rights, for decades longer than Medea and her crew have been on board this "I/P issue", is a far more credible PRESENCE, as well, than any of the Code Pink activists. She certainly dresses with more dignity, as well, a matter I think Code Pink should take under advisement if they wish to advance their credibility as serious players on the field of power politics. (The way Mubarak's wife suckered them into betraying the Gaza Freedom March, which was supposed to be a march of solidarity with the POLITICAL rights of Palestinians and not a CHARITY DELIVERY
    I find somewhat tasteless and tactless the pretence at apology by Medea and crew at Codepink, where they wrote
    "In reviewing the sequence of events, we realize that have erred in our communication with endorsing organizations and wish to apologize for this. We are relatively new to this movement for justice in Israel/Palestine and have much to learn from those of you who have been doing this work for decades. And we all have much to learn about how to work effectively, respectfully and in integrity with each other.
    Move Over AIPAC is a unique hybrid experience - CODEPINK is coordinating the conference, events and actions, and has asked for endorsements, most of which have been endorsements in name only thus far. We assumed that there was trust in groups that we could make decisions about speakers, workshops, actions. To date we've had two meetings in Washington DC, two conference calls, and have sent out numerous emails to endorsers inviting suggestions for speakers, performers, and creative actions. We are appreciative to the input we're received thus far, but we hoped there would be more engagement from groups willing to help outreach and organize.

    We hope that if there is something positive to come out of this, in addition to the clarity around Helen's wishes and her participation in Move Over AIPAC, it might be a renewed sense of interest in working together to make this event a success. So far we have only 130 registrants. We hope to reach 300 in the next three weeks and need everyone's help to reach that goal."

    First of all, for Phil in the intro to this thread to praise Medea and Rae, and fail to praise Alison Weir for raising a critical point about responsible and egalitarian communicating between and among activists is cloyingly absurd. Then annie and kathleen having a cuddlefest over how bright Medea is and how wrong CitizenC was, how "anti-semitic" he was, just floored me.
    Why is it that activist Jews admit they are new to "the I/P issue" and smugly rewrite the manner in which they reframed the MoveOverAIPAC event, unilaterally deciding to push aside a highly visible and courageously vocal critic of Zionist greed, deceit and brutality who is NON-Jewish, by the way, a Lebanese-American?

    What does it tell you about the level of solidarity of such activists with the Palestinian people when they continue to use the mainstream media phrasing of the issue of Palestinian sovereignty and Palestinians' fundamental unalienable rights as human beings easily the equal of any other national or ethnic group on the planet?

    Even on this website, maybe your fingers are tired from typing, but i find it disrespectful of you towards Palestinians to refer to their revolutionary liberation struggle as "the Israel/Palestine conflict", giving priority to the name of the oppressing regime that is dishonestly claiming entitlement to seize the resources and erase the history of Palestine. When I visited Palestine last year I showed one of my hosts a map of Israel and the occupied territories to discuss my itinerary, and he said to me calmly, "This map is wrong, you know." I said I didn't understand. He said, passing his hand over the whole of the map, "This is not Israel, this is Palestine."
    To refer to Israel as a respectable member of the United Nations and to refer to its treatment of Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and those in Palestine '48 who comprise one out of five of the citizens of the so-called "only democracy in the Middle East" is to collude in a form of political ethnocide that belies fidelity to the values of Judaism of which CitizenC so concisely spoke.
    The phrase "the I/P issue" while practical as speedy shorthand reveals an odd sort of prioritizing -- technospeed as more important than accuracy in discourse, and a discourse in most urgent need of precision and consistency on the part of those purporting to be wishing to help Palestinians.
    As an American citizen, i hate that my tax dollars paid for bullets that killed Vietnamese, Iraqis, and, yes, Palestinians, and that we are letting the tail of Israel wag the dog of history's most-destructively armed empire. The U.S.-subsidized racist colonialist project of Jewish political Zionists bent on stealing Palestinians' homeland should give writers on Mondoweiss pause about the jargon they casually sprinkle in these posts.
    Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the immoral basis of the so-called "Jewish state" of Israel

• Reider faults left for silence on murders of 5 settlers
  • BethlehemOlivesRedeem March 13, 2011 at 10:21 pm

    Chaos4700,
    Don't romanticize Rabin. He was no less a terrorist at the time of his death than when he was giving orders to murder Mandate British and Palestinian civilians when he was a leader of Irgun, or was it Stern? Palestinians and the world have been routinely -- that's ROUTINELY, as in STRATEGICALLY -- lied to by Israeli leaders of all brands. Recall Ehud Barak's victory in 2000 and his good-cop bad-cop game with Sharon to launch the Second Intifada through insulting all Muslims by marching their soldiers arrogantly into the Muslims' sacred space to trigger a pretext for further ethnic cleansing.
    "Zero" is the number you can give as answer to the question how many of Israel's civilian and military top ministers have NOT been racist and colonialist towards Palestinians?

    As for the question of what sort of killing an esthetic designer could design to elicit the maximum number of votes as a "professional killing," you may as well give up rational thought. Professionalism, like terrorism, is a matter of planning with the intent of having a specific impact that will further one's goals, including making a profit. Thus, every messy intrusion, break-in, execution, slaughter of innocent bystanders, ordered targeted killing is professional.
    And while we cannot yet -- and may never-- identify the perpetrator of this outrageous slaughter of an illegally land-stealing family, we do know the parents were adults and knew they were stealing others' land (a cardinal sin?) (even if they told themselves "God's on our side"), the most outrageous fact is clear as a bell:
    Israel has exploited this crime at such a rapid and total-governmental, top-dog level as pretext for more ethnic cleansing -- and more shekels filling up the ministries' cash registers -- only a credulous romanticizer of Israel as a state with some degree of legitimacy (whose word is its bond) would doubt this was a black-flag operation, a set-up job (and it wouldn't have been that difficult to find a ruthless and corrupt P.A. cop to pull it off) to further the Zionist agenda for "Eretz Israel."

  • BethlehemOlivesRedeem March 13, 2011 at 4:00 am with 1 replies

    The guy "Dimi Reider" is a Hasbarah front man, clearly. He claims, without any evidence, that the murder of the parents and two children in the colonial settlement was perpetrated by a "Palestinian terrorist," when even the Jerusalem Post reporter Yaakov only reported that some Palestinians who had been interrogated said Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade people claimed responsibility for the crimes. What would you say after being beaten and threatened at all hours of the night -- probably what you figured authorities wanted to hear so they'd leave you the f--k alone.
    Second point. This is likely a black flag operation. Israel doesn't mind having an occasional resident of Sderot killed by the random qassam rocket that actually lands on living persons, rather than the 99.99 percent of rockets that don't touch anybody. Since 2002, just over 20 Israelis have been killed by qassams fired from Gaza. In 2005, the US Pentagon offered its C-RAM anti-mortar/anti-shortrange rocket defense system to Israel, which said no thank you. It would have cost Israel nothing, and the U.S. taxpayers a few hundred million to install enough of the C-RAM weapons ringing Sderot and other nearby communities. But do you think that would have served israel's ethnic cleansing purposes? Without pre-emptive rationales for brutally removing Palestinians that having rockets fired at "defenseless" Sderoti civilians, Operation Cast Lead would never have been executed. This murder is part of another planned offensive, be sure of it; why is it timed just a few days before the March 15th Unity demonstrations?
    Why would top military brass of Israel be called into emergency session over a run-of-the-mill family murder that police are well-equipped to investigate and solve?
    It's for the Hasbarah of the Zionist state, which is readying another brutal assault with its preliminary excuses, its "pretexts of security" that Moshe Dayan and Ben-Gurion set as a strategic pattern of the ethnic cleansing policy of long-term Zionist state expansion. Otherwise, "murderer/s" would be a sufficient noun to attach to whoever killed these colonists, and not the word that is more charged than niggerbitchfaggot when it comes to U.S. foreign policy planners and their zionist pals: "terrorist/s". eSPECIALLY WITH THE ADJECTIVE 'PALESTINIAN' IN FRONT OF IT.

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