Commenter Profile

Total number of comments: 19 (since 2009-08-09 18:44:49)

Helena Cobban

Website: http://justworldnews.org

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  • Turkish harbormaster let 11 of us sail (and 25 are left behind)
  • The night refuge
    • Helena Cobban June 2, 2011 at 10:10 pm with 2 replies

      Ashkenazic Jewish Israelis have known for a long time (no surprise here) what an overwhelming proportion of their own number have either hung onto their or their foreparents' passports of origin or, since the fall of the Warsaw Pact/Soviet Union, have been able to go back to Poland, Hungary, etc and renew their family's citizenship in those countries.

      I was blogging about this in 2009, after my conversation with Yossi Alpher about it...

      Which raises some interesting questions. Including (1) the fact that so many Palestinians remain stateless-- i.e. they have zero passports and the protection of zero states in this present, state-dominated world-- while so many Jewish israelis now have two or more?? (2) Israelis love to claim that it's unreasonable for Palestinians to cling to citizenship/property rights from 1, 2, or 3 generations back... But then they themselves are still extremely eager to do so! (3) Among Jewish israelis, it's the Ashkenazis, by and large, who have this privilege and opportunity. Most mizrachim would find it far harder to 'reclaim' the citizenship of their or their foreparents' lands of birth.

      But of course, it is also easy for all Jewish israelis (but not for Palestinians) to immigrate to the U.S...

  • Flotilla massacre all over again? Israel kills 8 Nakba demonstrators at borders
    • Helena Cobban May 15, 2011 at 12:05 pm with 11 replies

      Phil, you and everyone should know that (contra what you write in your headline) these events did not take place at Syria's border with Israel. They took place at the disengagement line between the occupied Syrian Golan and unoccupied Syria. Golan is NOOOOOT Israel! (Even though, as with occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem, the Israeli Knesset passed an annexation bill years ago-- i this case, 1981. But that has zero weight under international law.)

  • 'This should only happen in response to genocide' (two leftwingers argue over Libya)
    • Helena Cobban March 21, 2011 at 3:46 pm with 4 replies

      Phil, have you ever lived in a country wracked by war? I have. I lived in Lebanon for the first six years of the civil war there, and could tell you so many stories... Bottom line: War is by its nature anti-humanitarian, and any act of warfare that's justified on the grounds that it's being undertaken "for humanitarian reasons" nonetheless ends up inflicting an amount of harm on civilian populations that's greater than what they would have suffered had there been no war.

      There are myriad other ways that atrocities can be prevented or, if already underway, suppressed. In the present case, many respected leaders from African Union countries, Turkey, etc were, after the passage of UNSCR 1970, actively preparing urgent missions to negotiate a peaceful resolution between Qadhdhafi and the Libyan insurrectionaries that would, presumably, have included the introduction of monitors and other measures to ensure no further atrocities would be committed by either side. (And both sides have committed them.) But the western countries "intervened" with enormous haste to launch acts of war instead.

      War is also, by its nature, quite unpredictable. How will this one end? We absolutely cannot tell. But it is almost certain that it will not end well for the Libyan people...

      Did you read what I blogged about this Saturday?

      Why could you not have have supported concerted action by non-Libyan governments to help Libya's people resolve their own differences through peaceful means? I truly can't understand how you imagine the military attacks by western nations has any chance of making things better.

  • ‘Light a Candle for Gaza’ –the rabbis’ piece the Washington Post refused to publish without major changes
    • Helena Cobban March 3, 2011 at 9:51 am with 1 replies

      Thanks to MJ for finding the New York mag piece on Breindel! This is deep inside it, from the account of Breindel's time at Harvard: "He was mysterious," says classmate Philip Weiss, who writes for the New York Observer. "He was sophisticated, he had a private life, he had girlfriends. And he had people who loved him. There were many people who were fiercely attached to him."

      Hey, Phil, we think you're sophisticated! You have people who love you, and are fiercely attached to you!

  • Resolved: Noah Feldman should be open about his views on the two-state solution
    • Helena Cobban October 26, 2010 at 7:22 am

      Noah Feldman, aged about 13 years old, got to write and impose a whole new constitution for occupied Iraq! He must ipso facto be a brilliant guy, right? (not.)

      And look at the guy's ridiculous, childish bragging as reported in the description of the Minow/Su/Feldman discussion linked to in the main post here: "there are established forms of legal thought that are not accessible to general reasoning." Gimme a break!

  • I bring a guide to the Middle East
    • Helena Cobban September 10, 2010 at 8:39 pm

      Phil, your "some of the people here must be the children of refugees..." Well, duh. First of all, "children of refugees" are themselves refugees. And their children, and their children's children. People don't lose their claim to place, home, or nationality by being forced to be born away from them. Second, a majority of Jordanians are Palestinians-- a majority of the people you meet are probably Palestinians. Talk to them. Ask them their family stories? Even if your Arabic is not so hot, for the majority of them their English is probably pretty good. Tell us much more about them.

  • Artist who lost eye to IDF sings, Palestinians are experiencing a holocaust
  • Supporting Iraq war was, and apparently still is, a good career move
  • Cartoonists get the story, even if MSM is muzzled
    • Helena Cobban June 20, 2010 at 10:45 am

      Hey don't forget Tom Toles in the WaPo, including today, and archived... and of course the matchless Ann Telnaes.

      I think the fact that so many of the cartoonists "get" it is really significant at the level of the general culture. (Thank G-d Herb Block retired a few yrs ago.)

  • Steven Cook of CFR works overtime to make sure US shares Israel's new enmity to Turkey
  • Under his breath, Richard Cohen whispers, 'Israel, beware'
    • Helena Cobban May 18, 2010 at 10:48 am

      Phil, I think going "crazy" is the wrong word to describe what Israel's assault on Gaza did to Erdogan (and others.) A sudden breakthrough to sanity and real clarity and understanding would be more like it?

      (Also, not kind to people with mental impairments.)

  • Inside the Lawfare Project: Netanyahu's attack on human rights NGO's comes to the US
  • Tom Friedman oversaw NYT's purchase of J'lem house with Nakba legacy
  • Joe Lieberman doesn't answer the only question
    • Helena Cobban November 20, 2009 at 12:53 pm with 7 replies

      Interesting. I deeply admire Amira.

      But let's look at some more asymmetries here. When will we see a reporter from a Palestinian newspaper getting to ask the first question at a news conference given in Israel by a high-ranking Palestinian-American Senator?

  • Oberlin students protest Benny Morris appearance Wednesday
    • Helena Cobban September 21, 2009 at 7:47 pm with 4 replies

      No, Potsherd, if you read Ilan Pappe it's clear the ethnic cleansing started in November '47-- right after the passage of the partition resolution but before the end of the Mandate; and that it included ethnic cleansing actions in areas the partition resn designated for the Arab state in Palestine. It was deliberate from the get-go and from long before the 'war' actually started at all.

  • The leopard cannot change its spots. But the dessert--
    • Helena Cobban September 10, 2009 at 9:38 pm

      Hey, quit messing with my heritage, will you?

      When i was at an English boarding school we had 'spotted dick' and 'boiled baby' as desserts. Both were steamed suet puddings. SD had currants (or 'sultanas', ha!) in it; BB had generic bright red jam that would come pouring out as you cut into the pallid, grey-colored suet pudding.

      Wonderfully descriptive names.

      And for breakfast there was a porridge that the girls used to call "boiled STs." (Don't even ask, if you don't know what that stands for.)

  • Imagine the 'Times' leaving out deaths of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman in a story on Mississippi protests!
    • Helena Cobban August 30, 2009 at 12:10 pm

      Bronner also 'reports' this: “Rioters hurl rocks, Molotov cocktails and burning tires at defense forces and the security fence,” the military said in a statement when asked why it had taken to arresting village leaders in the middle of the night ... but he makes ZERO atempt to authenticate that claim.

      I've been at Bil'in, and seen Palestinian boys and youths throwing stones, sometimes with slingshots. I've never seen either 'rocks', Molotovs, or burning tires being thrown. Don't you think if they had ever been thrown, the IOF would have video footage to prove it?

      Bronner really needs to start acting as (fact-sensitive) reporter, rather than just a govt stenographer.

  • Joel Kovel on Naomi Klein and Durban
    • Helena Cobban August 29, 2009 at 9:31 am with 9 replies

      On the role that the Z=R debate has played in interntional politics, I find it really helpful to remember that the concept of "race" (and thus by extensionalso "racism") is constructed quite differently in the US than in other English-speaking countries. In the US, "race" is function almost wholly of skin color-- no doubt because the US's historical issues regarding complexion-based discrimination, mass enslavement, etc. In all or nearly all other English-speaking countries, "race" is construed more or less along the lines of nationality or what the Americans call ethnicity". Hence, growing up in England, I certainly thought the French constituted a different "race" than ours.

      The effect of this in international politics is that when some people argue that Zionism is racism, mainly because of the ethnic/religious discrimination inherent in the whole Zionist movement, Americans hearing that say "No! Zionism has nothing to do with skin color, and any suggestion that it does is clearly motivated by anti-Semitism!" ... Back in the heyday of this argument in the 1970s, the international Zionist movement hurried to try to prove this by importing lots of black-complected Jews from Ethiopia into Israel and then rolling them out to "prove"-- to Americans-- that Zionism is NOT racist...

      So in any discussion of this issue, it is always helpful to take a step back and ask people who're arguing one side or the other what it is they think that actually constitutes racism.

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