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Total number of comments: 22 (since 2009-09-21 06:02:54)

David44

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• New Migron bill could lead to massive Israeli land grab in the West Bank
  • David44 April 17, 2012 at 2:47 pm with 11 replies

    You're missing something pretty important in this story, Allison. The Migron deal with the government was voided a month later by the High Court (see link to haaretz.com
    ). So the settlers do not have two extra years there: they have to be out by the beginning of August. As for the proposed law, even if it is passed, it is not clear that it would be accepted by the High Court as applying to Migron either (see
    link to haaretz.com
    ).

    Of course, the High Court may act for the settlers and against the Palestinians - it wouldn't be for the first time; and even if it protects Palestinian rights in Migron, you are right to warn against the possibility that the law would allow a broader land grab. But one needs to consider the serious possibility that the law won't pass, or will be ruled invalid by the Court. And in any case you certainly need to describe the current legal situation correctly: what you have here is highly misleading.

• Is the Pope also barred from entry into Israel?
  • David44 April 10, 2012 at 3:53 pm with 15 replies

    As I said, I agree with you in general about the wrongness of refusing Grass (and the other people you mention) entry to Israel. I also agree with you about the mitigating circumstances for his military service. Just one factual correction (which doesn't affect your main argument): tank divisions of the SS were in general certainly involved in war-crimes - see e.g. link to en.wikipedia.org
    (which did not involve Grass's division, just to be clear).

    But my basic point remains (this is also a reply to Citizen and Woody Tanaka below). For all of the perfectly good points that you and they make in defence of Grass, there is still a distinction between Grass and the Pope, partly in the considerably greater reluctance with which the latter served, and partly because of the extensive involvement of the Waffen-SS in war crimes. Again, to be clear, this does NOT make Grass a war-criminal by association; but it does mean that a former member of the Waffen-SS, however personally untainted, is always going to be viewed differently from a person who served in ordinary divisions of the Wehrmacht.

    Hence Caroline's suggestion that the logic of Israel's actions over Grass means that they ought to ban the Pope too is a poor argument based on a weak analogy. There are plenty of perfectly good arguments to show why Israel is acting wrongly and stupidly here; we don't need to add bad analogies into the mix.

  • David44 April 10, 2012 at 12:51 pm with 24 replies

    While I saw nothing wrong with Grass's poem, and think it is ridiculous to ban him from visiting Israel, there is a substantial difference between his case and that of the Pope. The Waffen-SS was - unlike the regular divisions in which the Pope served - an elite force which was broadly implicated in war crimes. The fact that Grass was conscripted of course makes a big difference to his personal responsibility, since he did not (as far as anyone knows) commit war-crimes himself; but it still looks rather different from the Pope's case, especially since Grass, by his own account - and unlike the Pope - did actively volunteer for military service even while still below military age, albeit not for the SS in particular (see link to faz.net
    ).

• Defense lawyer Lichtman says Palestinians have a 'culture of death'
  • David44 December 19, 2011 at 6:05 pm

    I suspect that many people here disagree, not least because of the illegitimate slide in his argument: he says that "the Palestinians" have a culture of death, but his evidence for that is that 'radical Islam" has a culture of death. Even if we accept the truth of the latter, it does not entail the former, since Palestinians who practise "radical Islam" are still a minority within Palestine as a whole.

• The Department of Corrections: Ben-Hur, the LA Times & a place called Palestine
  • David44 October 2, 2011 at 12:29 am

    "References to Palestine or Palestinians appear in Pliny, Ovid, Tibullus, Statius, Jerome, the Vulgate, and the Historia Augusta".

    "It’s ridiculous to refer to Ben Hur as a “Palestinian” ... A Roman in the time of Jesus called the place Judea."

    But Pliny, Ovid, Tibullus and Statius WERE all "Romans of the time of Jesus" (approximately - Tibullus wrote a couple of decades before him, Ovid around the time of his birth, Pliny and Statius a couple of decades after his death but well before Hadrian"). Hence your statements are contradictory.

    The reason for your confusion is that you fail to distinguish the question of the official name of the province (which was "Judaea" until Hadrian changed it) from the question of what names were popularly used for the region (one of which was "Palestine"). For a particularly neat example of the latter, you might note that Jesus' Jewish contemporary Philo is one of those who refers to the region as "Palestine" (e.g. "Life of Moses" 1.163).

• Border anxiety in the West Bank
  • David44 September 26, 2011 at 10:05 am

    "I don’t recall any of you making a fuss when ISM hosted two Brits who killed 3 and wounded 50 in Mikes place in Tel Aviv."

    There are two reasons you don't recall any of "you" making a fuss.

    First, Mondoweiss didn't even exist at the time (it was founded in 2006), so I'm not sure how you think you can identify what the commentators on Mondoweiss were saying or doing in 2003.

    Second, and much more importantly, you don't recall people making a fuss because it never happened. It was a smear put forward by the Israeli government, based on the fact that the terrorists in question, prior to doing the bombing, turned up for 15 minutes at a social event in the apartment of an ISM activist. See link to electronicintifada.net
    and link to electronicintifada.net
    . Needless to say, ISM, which is a wholly non-violent movement, knew nothing about what these terrorists were planning, and neither encouraged nor supported them to the slightest degree.

    That you can claim that a brief social contact of that sort is in any way parallel to the JDL working directly with the violent settlers suggests only how desperate you are to find anything, however tenuous, to discredit your non-violent opponents.

• Zygmunt Bauman: Palestinian persecution echoes the Shoah, which began with discrimination, ghettoes and pogroms
  • David44 September 6, 2011 at 12:03 pm

    Bauman may be wrong, but he is not an idiot, and you demean yourself by using the term of him. He is one of the great scholars of our time: check his Wikipedia page - link to en.wikipedia.org
    - not merely to see what he has done himself, but also for his influence on others (look at the number of books written about his sociological thought). As such, if he makes a comparison of this sort, one should not (of course) automatically accept its truth (even a great scholar can be wrong); but it is worth taking it seriously enough to consider what he might have in mind, and whether the comparison might have more validity than your knee-jerk response indicates.

    In this particular case, the key question is (as Cliff indicates) whether the route (e.g. Qalqilyah) and functioning (e.g. humiliating practices at checkpoints) of the security barrier is compatible with its being primarily a protective mechanism rather than a mechanism to imprison Palestinians and keep them from their land. I submit - as I suspect Bauman would as well - that the strong evidence from these is for its being rather less benign than would be implied by the official Israeli justification which you are repeating.

  • David44 September 5, 2011 at 11:24 pm with 1 replies

    Just to say that if you don't know Bauman's remarkable book, Modernity and the Holocaust (see link to amazon.com
    ), you should definitely read it. It is the most compelling account I know, both as an explanation of how the Holocaust came about, and an exposition of its moral significance for modern society. Even if you feel that you have read and seen too much about the Holocaust to learn anything truly new and significant about it, you should read this: I will pretty well guarantee it is like nothing else on this topic that you have ever read.

• Imagine the Brookings Institution having a forum on the Future of the South in 1964 and inviting no black people
  • David44 December 18, 2010 at 8:31 pm with 2 replies

    To be fair, the conference ISN'T on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It's on US-Israel relations. While a Palestinian perspective on this might have been interesting, is it really so reprehensible that all the invited guests on this topic are mainstream Israelis or Americans?

• Inside the bubble
  • David44 November 21, 2010 at 8:04 pm

    The 19 men who hijacked the planes, obviously. They were the ones who did the killing, and no (alleged) provocations by Israel or the US mitigate their guilt.

    Now a parallel question for you. Who is more to blame for the 1000+ people killed in Gaza in Cast Lead? Israel, who did the killing, or the people of Gaza who (allegedly) "provoked" the Israeli attack?

• Cold Turkey
  • David44 October 15, 2010 at 6:22 am with 1 replies

    The issue is not the justification or otherwise of Turkish behavior in Cyprus: we can all agree they have behaved appallingly there (though "annexation" isn't quite right: Northern Cyprus, in Turkish eyes, is an independent state, not part of Turkey - though this is not accepted by the international community). The issue is that Turkish wrongdoing in Cyprus has been a problem for 36 years, but it was ignored by the Israel lobby until this year. They "discovered" it only when relations between Israel and Turkey chilled.

• How to raise a Jewish child: Step 1. Get Israeli flag; Step 2. Wrap child; Step 3. Repeat
  • David44 October 7, 2010 at 5:10 am

    "They don't wear crosses or other special clothes".

    Um - since when don't (some) Jews wear special clothes? In my community, quite a lot of male Jewish kids wear kippot. A lot of them wear tsitsit as well (admittedly not always visibly). Showing a boy with a kippa would make the point quickly and effectively, with no political overtones. The ONLY reason to show the Israeli flag is to indicate that to raise a child Jewish is (inter alia) to have them support Israel. I have heard countless sermons making precisely this point; and it is the obvious context in which to interpret this image.

• The borders of the Palestinian 'state' come into focus
  • David44 August 13, 2010 at 9:33 am

    But my point was that in this case not even the superpower agrees with the supposed "consensus". No one does outside Israel, as far as I can see.

  • David44 August 12, 2010 at 5:39 pm with 2 replies

    Ben:

    You're missing something very important here. Even if one leaves aside the illegality of Israeli settlements in any part of the West Bank, Netanyahu's (and the Jerusalem Post's) claim that there is "consensus" on incorporating Ariel or Maale Adumim into Israel in a two-state settlement is - bluntly - a lie by any account. President Bush PREVENTED Israel from extending the security barrier around Ariel, precisely because the US did NOT accept that Ariel would end up in Israel, given its location - see e.g. link to npr.org
    .

    And if even President Bush didn't accept that, I think we can safely say that no Palestinian negotiator has ever done so either. Netanyahu is trying to extend the concept of "consensus blocs" from border areas (like Gush Etzion, where - rightly or wrongly - a lot of people on all sides assume that it will end up in Israel via land-swaps) to smuggle in places way inside the West Bank that no one outside the Israeli far right thinks can ever be in Israel under a two-state settlement.

• What's the difference between incitement and patriotism?
  • David44 June 27, 2010 at 1:54 pm

    A few things:

    While I'm happy to refer to "targeting" (I see that you put that in your original definition; it's my fault for not picking up on it), I think you exaggerate the difficulty of determining that civilians are being targeted by aerial bombing. To pick a non-ME example, there is really little doubt that the bombing of cities (by all sides) during WWII was often aimed at the civilians in the cities, not at anything specifically military.

    "Israel rejects the distinction between the political and military branches of Hamas, and I understand why many would take issue with that, though it is very different from making the off-duty soldier argument, because that argument is context-specific and is taken much further by Hamas itself."

    First, you've misinterpreted my argument, which fell into two distinct halves. The "off-duty soldier" analogy was not compared to Israel's refusal to distinguish the political and military sections of Hamas, but to Israel's willingness to target members of Hamas (let's say, to clarify things, uncontroversially military ones) even when they are not engaged in militant activities (I used the example of "being asleep"). The fact that Hamas uses the off-duty soldier argument in an (even) more extended way does not show that a narrower use of the same argument is not pretty precisely analogous to Israel's willingness to attack Hamas members at all times. But I would regard even the narrower use of the argument as legally and morally wrong. Wouldn't you?

    I raised Israel's failure to distinguish Hamas' political from the military as a separate issue: in comparison to the hypothetical bombing of the Knesset, which you said (and I agreed) was a civilian target, not a military one. Since the Knesset is certainly involved in military policy and planning, this seems to me precisely the same issue as targeting the political branches of Hamas. I do not see how the one is more "military", and hence more legitimate to attack, than the other.

  • David44 June 25, 2010 at 1:46 pm

    Hophmi:

    First, let me thank you for the intelligence and courtesy with which you have engaged in this debate. It seems to me that the discussion is generating more light than heat, which is in my experience relatively uncommon in this forum.

    As to the issues you raise, your definition of terrorism isn't unreasonable in itself, and you do seem to be applying it consistently. But there are still a couple of problems with it. First, it doesn't take into account WHY people are so keen to apply the term broadly to their opponents: namely that it is a term whose evaluative overtones are uniquely strong. By which I mean that even if we may think - and indeed say - that a country dropping a bomb from an aeroplane on top of a group of civilians is just as bad as a non-state group planting a bomb underneath that same group of civilians, if we constantly apply the word "terrorism" to the latter and refuse to apply it to the former (or worse, if we call the latter "terrorism" and the former "war", with the license for violence that implies), we are implicitly making a moral distinction that will be perceived as such by our hearers, however vehemently we may deny such a distinction.

    In other words, faced with a term which has both narrow propositional content and unique evaluative overtones, it seems to me more important to extend the propositional content to ensure that the range of actions covered by it appropriately mirror the evaluation, than to use the term narrowly and to hope that the audience catches that no differentiation of evaluation is intended between the actions covered by the term and those not covered. (Or else it is better to eschew the term altogether, if one feels this circle cannot be squared.)

    Second (but not unrelated), it doesn't take into account the fuzziness of the concept of "civilian". For example, is an off-duty Israeli soldier a "civilian"? My own feeling is that he is, and hence is not a legitimate military target - but then I note that Israel appears to regard all members of Hamas as legitimate military targets at all times, even when asleep in their beds, and I find it hard to justify that distinction. Similarly, I would rather agree with you that a bomb in the Knesset would count as "terrorism", being an attack on a civilian target - even though the Knesset in many ways sets military policy and gives military orders. But then I note that during the Gaza campaign, Israel regarded the entire infrastructure of Hamas as a legitimate military target, even those parts not directly connected with Hamas's fighting capacities. Again, I have trouble making a moral distinction between these positions. And (to go back to my first point) if we use the term "terrorism" for the former, it is, in my view, a moral evasion to refuse to apply it to the latter simply on the grounds that one involves a state and the other does not.

  • David44 June 24, 2010 at 8:27 am

    I agree with you that the King David Hotel was a legitimate military target (though it is more controversial than you imply whether the warnings were sent to the right people and in enough time for them to respond).

    But here too the thing that leaps out is the Israeli hypocrisy - for Israel, exactly like Britain in 1946, habitually defines guerilla and bombing attacks against its own military as "terrorism". For example, the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, a uniformed soldier on active duty, may have been many things (and the conditions in which he is currently held are illegal), but it is certainly not "terrorism". Yet Israel insists on defining it as such (see e.g. link to mfa.gov.il
    ). Can we at least agree that Israel is wrong to do so?

  • David44 June 23, 2010 at 10:38 am

    Calling Raziel a "WWII hero killed by the Germans" is something of a stretch. He certainly supported the British against the Nazis, but not to the point of "heroism" (for details of his (brief) career as a British agent see link to etzel.org.il
    ). He was only "killed by the Germans" in the sense that he died during a German air raid in Iraq shortly after his arrival there to engage in covert operations. I can see no evidence either that his actions here to the slightest degree outweigh his role as a terrorist mass murderer of Arab civilians, or that it is because of them that he is so widely celebrated in Israel. He is famed for his major role as the leader of the Irgun, not for his minor role as a supporter of Britain during WWII.

    Your "in part" pretty well concedes that last point - but you do not seem willing to follow it through to the obvious conclusion. I agree with you that it is a problem that Palestinians celebrate suicide bombings as something to aspire to, but it is ALSO a problem that Israelis whitewash terrorist murderers and celebrate them as heroes of the state, because it is part of a still-existing pattern whereby the killings of Arabs are constantly excused, or else ignored as if they were something irrelevant. You seem to be concerned only by the former, and not the latter.

    Darwish may never have held political office, but he was an intensely political figure whose political writings are inseparable from the respect in which he is held among Palestinians. And he certainly has a far better claim to be considered "non-violent" than Rabin or anyone else mentioned here does.

  • David44 June 22, 2010 at 11:31 pm with 17 replies

    On Mahmoud Abbas condemning terrorism, it took me about 3 seconds to find this: link to telegraph.co.uk
    .

    As to what the "big deal" is, it's pretty clear (if you read the article linked to - link to jpost.com
    ) that the Israelis regarded the positive naming of a street after a Palestinian terrorist as the big deal, not some sort of metaphysical argument about the absence of streets named after other people. It's equally clear that, unable to defend Israel's hypocrisy on that score, you are simply switching the topic, to attempt to come up with some other distinction that will show Israel in a better light.

    But in any case your attempt fails, since we can easily see the Palestinians naming a street for someone non-violent - Arab culture is rich in non-violent figures who are widely celebrated. To pick one obvious example, an area in front of the cultural palace in Ramallah is named for the great poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died in 2008. Did you not know that?

    As for David Raziel, the condemnation, while it certainly happened, was pretty half-hearted, as is shown by the fact that a decade later streets and villages were being named in his honor - an awkward fact that I notice you didn't care to address. I for one do not regard a culture that celebrates a Jewish mass-murderer as morally superior to one that celebrates an Arab one. Do you?

  • David44 June 22, 2010 at 11:39 am

    The best illustration of the hypocrisy of the Israeli right wing with regard to the "naming after terrorists" complaint isn't people like Begin or Rabin (who are being celebrated less for their violent acts in the War of independence, and more for their subsequent lives as political figures). It's more people like David Raziel we should be looking at.

    Raziel was the commander of the Irgun in the late 1930s, and led the campaign of mass terror against Arab civilians in the summer of 1938, where (among many other atrocities) several bombs were placed in Arab market places, killing dozens of people. (See link to en.wikipedia.org
    ).

    Yet Raziel is honored throughout Israel. There is an entire village called "Ramat Raziel" named for him; pretty well every major Israeli town has a street called "Rehov David Raziel" or "Rehov Raziel". As long as Israel celebrates its own terrorists so warmly, I have trouble taking seriously its complaints about the Palestinians doing the same.

• All the nukes that's fit to print (cont'd)
  • David44 May 4, 2010 at 9:45 am

    Presumably the right thing to do would be to have a separate color for Israel altogether, as the one actual nuclear state in the region. It would still be misleading (albeit not as misleading as the version the Times actually produced) to color Israel the same as Iran and Syria, since, as you rightly point out, it is not merely a country where "construction has begun".

• 'Washington Post' prints forthright call for boycott
  • David44 April 29, 2010 at 10:11 am

    Phil:

    The person whom Gordon Brown referred to as a bigot was not an "anti-immigration activist", but an elderly supporter of his own party who had, in the course of a wide-ranging discussion with him, expressed mild concern about the number of (legal) East European immigrants coming to the country. Hence the widespread outrage in Britain at his comments - and hence also the weakness as an analogy to anything happening in Arizona.

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