Total number of comments: 2590 (since 2009-11-18 22:41:33)
MHughes976
I'm retired after teaching philosophy for some decades. I am a secular Christian, very interested in biblical scholarship, with decent Greek but must learn some Hebrew. Rather obsessed with ancient multiculturalism and belief that Palestine was always multicultural and multiracial, while Jewish cultural influence in the wider ancient world was greater than is supposed.
And more ugh.
The idea of 'white identity and interests' produces the same focus on race rather than individual as does the Zionist interpretation of Judaism and is misleading to the same degree.
We shouldn't be concerned for the rights of the Palestinians because of how they Palestinians and Jews relate on a racial basis but because all are human beings.
There are interpretations of Judaism other than the Zionist one, I am sure.
However, I can't deny that Goldstein's having any vociferous admirers can only cause horror.
I've generally thought of myself as centre-left, but it was the centrism and belief in moderation that misled me for many years. I kept thinking that if only the moderates on both sides of the ME dispute could gain power in Israel and Palestine there would be a friendly agreement that would be in everyone's interest and all would be well. After Oslo I thought it was only a matter of time.
I should have known that when it comes to a clash between two whole human groups whose general wills are in conflict moderates, in the sense of those ready to make concessions that threaten the all the plans and purposes of the group, never gain power, unless perhaps they are installed by an illegitimate process. And in that case they claims to speak for the group carry no conviction.
Zionism and anti-Zionism have led a complex double life on both sides of the standard left-right divide. The existence of right-wing anti-Zionists isn't inherently surprising.
I'm not sure that it's possible to trace a distinctively Jewish stance on immigration to Western societies, which as marc says, has surely been determined mainly by considerations of available work, wage levels and workforce quality.
In the UK when immigration first became a big issue in the 60s a few right wing politicians were particularly vocal in their opposition to it, and one of the most prominent of these, noted in Michael Dummett's book on immigration to the UK, was Sir Gerald Nabarro, who was Jewish.
Much more recently Geert Wilders has won big triumphs a week or so ago in the Dutch local elections based on anti-Muslim campaigning. Our 'UK Independence Party' pals around with him.
A picture worth, in a way, a thousand words. How extremely insincere the professions by American politicians of profound affection for Israel must in general be. I remember how Condi Rice seemed to shrink from the overenthusiastic embraces of Israeli politicians as she arrived at airports during the Lebanon War. But it's of little use until they start talking freely, adding captions to the pictures.
I think I saw it reported that Biden responds to this brutal treatment by declaring his love for Israel. Politicians forced into all this inappropriate, undignified gushing must in the hearts feel something entirely different from love.
If the Martians were knocking 50 kinds of hell out of the Venusians and the Venusians were landing a few rockets on Mars, blocking some economically vital canals for a few days and indirectly causing deaths, we would of course send Goldstone and Finkelstein to report. Goldstone would devote 50 pages of magisterial prose to the Venusian breaches of interplanetary law and 450 to the Martian ones. Finkelstein, being rather more emotional, might spin round the solar system in a fast flying saucer denouncing Martian cruelty and injustice and proclaiming Venusian sympathies. Both might be doing a service, in some respects the better service might be Finkelstein's.
Sometimes the overriding moral duty is to call for concentration on the greater evil, particularly in the face of counter-rhetoric one of whose major methods is to deflect attention and at all costs turn the discussion to something else. If you refuse to be deflected the subject is changed so that it becomes your state of mind, whose faults (of which refusal to be deflected will be certainly counted as one) suddenly become more interesting than blood and tears in the actual world.
I too see no reason to defend Hizb and Ham at every turn and the last thing they are is romantic. Still, complaining that Finkelstein should be talking about H and H when he is engaged on pointing out certain things about Israel, whose truth and importance is not explicitly denied, seems to me like a classic example of the rhetoric of deflection.
If some things are absolutely forbidden but actually done then all these deeds should attract condemnation. An absolute prohibition is one that is not withdrawn on any condition, such as equally bad deeds by the other side. If we see two sides both doing absolutely forbidden things two rules apply, I think: a) if one side is doing the greater proportion of the forbidden things, that is the side that we should especially confront, since the greater mass of forbidden actions must call for the greater effort of condemnation; b) if we identify with one side we should make a point of calling on that side to desist and to take only permitted actions. Anyone calling on another to comply with b) as well as with a) must show that (s)he too complies with b) and is not trying to disrupt and distract.
As to Western Europe as the area where Israel's arguments are not accepted (anti-Semitism under the carpet) there is an incisive article by Yonatan Mendel in London Review of Books for March 11.
I don't want to see anyone dumped unless there is a reasonable ground to suppose that they are intent on disrupting rather than contributing to the discussion.
And I don't think that psycho is raving. I think that his 'difficult to articulate' point is something to do with mutual alienation and suspicion between human groups and the moral confusion that results.
Knacht was a moment of state-sponsored terrorism and abandonment of the rule of law. All such moments are a threat both to domestic security and to international peace.
So the invitation to genocide is issued, and in God's name.
Well, I think that there is a genuine theological dimension to ethics, ie one can have a meaningful ethical discussion in which theological terms and theological traditions are used.
The ME debate is haunted by the theory of divine donation, which sometimes takes solid and angry form and sometimes is a sort of intangible presence in the background, never quite forgotten.
My own belief is that there is no divine donation of sovereignty except through the processes recognised as just by rational human thought. My study of the Bible leads me to think that there was a strong element of multiculturalism about ancient Palestine in many of its epochs, accounting for its religious creativity.
There's a report in 'The Christian Post' of Feb.23rd, or was it 24th? It actually names only one organisation, that is the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The others seem to have left the Presbies to be voices crying the wilderness.
If we manage some similar reaction to Kairos in the UK - we've ignored it to the point fo sin - I'll hope to attend. I read that the US Presbyterian Church, host of the conference attended by annie, has angered 'Jewish human rights groups' by announcing that Biblical Israel and modern Israel 'are not the same' and that the Bible should not be used to determine Israel's boundaries. This fights rather shy of the more important question of whether the Bible should be used to justify Israel's existence but it may be a start of more significant and painful theological reflection.
'Philistine' and 'Palestinian' seem to be the same word. 'Hebrews' is generally taken to be the same word as 'Apiru', a name which appears in the Amarna Letters and other second millennium documents referring to armed groups who disturbed the peace.
Jonathan Tubb of the British Museum tells us in his book about the Canaanites that the name 'Canaan' comes either from an Indo-European word meaning 'blue cloth' or a Semitic word meaning 'to be subdued'. The latter and more likely etymology suggests that 'Canaan' means something like 'conquered' or 'occupied territory' (of the Egyptian Empire?), which would be amusing in a grim sort of way.
There are lots of ways in which things don't change, aren't there?
Well, maybe some doubt. Or so it appears from Wikipedia and suchlike. It is thought that the Egyptian 'Peleset' of c.1175 is a transliteration of the name rather than an abusive nickname. Moreover Herodotus (who does not notice the Judaeans, as far as I know) refers to them under a version of the same name, meaning that they were still there in the fifth century. Surely this would be the name they used for themselves and it's hard to think that they would for 600 years have called themselves marauders or robbers. An Indo-European name doesn't seem too unlikely, particularly as some Philistine personal names also seem to be IE.
I recently went to a lecture wittily entitled 'All you need is Luvian' about the relationships between these very ancient languages: similarity between 'Goliath' and the Lydian 'Alyattes' was taken seriously.
For the benefit of us foreigners, what is the orange money machine?
The platform speakers sound, to use an analogy from Christian history, rather like a Chidren's Crusade coming up against more numerous and better trained fighters. But these organised disruptions cannot, for all their temporary successes, really appeal to any fair-minded observers.
I don't really think that it's a question of 'knowing facts' but of knowing how to package factual assertions - and every factual assertion in this world has the potential to be misleading - to rhetorical effect.
As an ancient world obsessive I haven't heard before of Zionists' claiming that 'Philistine' is a Latin word, when in fact it appears in a twelfth-century Egyptian inscription, four centuries before Rome even existed. Some Zionists say it is a Semitic word meaning 'marauders', but I think no one calls themselves marauders or robbers. So I think 'Philistine' is a Greek word, with the rather nice meaning of 'people of the hearth'.
As Professor Walt has remarked, this is asymmetrical conflict and one wins by staying in the game. I'm hoping to get to a similar event in London and will see how it goes.
I have some doubts about this. 'Lucrum' for instance is Latin for 'gain'. But then there are many words which spread around the Indo-European languages. The Hittite for 'water' is 'water'.
If 'existential threat' = 'likelihood of unprovoked nukes' then it exists no more than do dodos.
But in a more significant sense a change in the strategic balance does amount to an existential threat because it would force Israel to negotiate seriously with the Palestinians, thus ending the 'live without a solution' situation on which Israel's existence as a political entity embodying Zionist ideas does indeed depend.
The law has not been changed and mere statements on Gordon Brown's part can't change it. We'll see what happens after the election, due in May/June. The Conservative lead has narrowed considerably, so there is a possibility of a coalition government in which the Liberal Democrats would be play a part - and they might be reluctant to give automatic immunity to those whom the UN suspects of war crimes.
I attended a Gaza protest demo in Trafalgar Square last year. The first speaker was a young man of about 11, very articulate - it didn't seem inappropriate at the time, since children were so prominent among the victims of Gaza.
Still, I share some of annie's sentiments, at least about involving children as activists in political campaigns. Maybe there's a dilemma - either you exercise careful control of what they say, which may seem manipulative, or you let them loose, in which case they may say things that they may not quite understand and that you'd regret.
Just to whistle in the dark for a minute - threats from Israel against Iran have been coming thick and fast for many years and have repeatedly been amplified by sympathetic journalists and academics. Why didn't they do act when Bush would, even if he had not cooperated with them, been quite likely to give them encouragement? Bibi may be fool enough to go for broke if he has per Shingo cast-iron assurances from Washington. But for all our doubts about Obama, we surely know both that he would never give these assurances and that other forces in Washington are not united and powerful enough to sweep the President of the United States, the most powerful man on earth, aside? I shudder with doubt as I write this - am I wrong?
Israel must know that a point will come at which endlessly reiterated threats without action begin to be treated by the other side as a sign of weakness. I think that the Iranians suppose that that point arrived a year or two ago and won't change their minds unless they see Obama lining up behind Bibi.
On the Keller & Karsh thread there was reference to an article by George Friedman of Stratfor arguing very strongly that an attack on Iran would be utter folly. I whistled a bit louder when I read that. But I admit that it's a dark March night.
Well, I would think that there was definitely some Jewish influence on the emergence of liberal Europe before and after WW1. This has to be set in the context of a general movement towards demythologised versions of religion - universal ethics, an overall feeling of faith without embittered dogmatism as advertised by Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and others. As Christian Europe increasingly accepted Jews it was increasingly moved in this undogmatic, liberal direction. Jews were naturally more ready to be critical of the bourgeois institutions which they had not had so much responsibility for constructing, naturally more ready to call for acceptance of outsiders. They also promoted an ethos of professionalism based on merit rather than on inherited privilege, merit implying dedication to public service. Freud argued that the benefits of Jewish presence flowed outwards into the Christian population, though paid for inwardly (Moses' fault) by a terrible sense of guilt in Jewish minds, from which sentiment there emerges, like pearl from grit, mighty artistic and intellectual achievement.
Without committing myself to this somewhat exotic idea, I think that Jews have something to be proud of - that is if playing a distinctive part in the formation of liberal Euro was a good thing. But perhaps there was a Hegelian dialectical trap in waiting: if (IF) Euro liberalism creates a morality in which everyone should be proud to share, the maintenance of a distinctive identity by any group within liberal Europe moves from being essential to being first redundant and then harmful.
Laor's 'Myths of Liberal Zionism' seems to bring out how much Israeli intellectuals hark back to, still really belong to, Europe - implying that their alliance with American fundamentalists, whom they must in their hearts despise, is utterly unnatural.
Sorry, I meant the above as a reply to Shmuel and MRW on the comparative weakness of Zionism among Jews in the WW1 era.
Yes, I concede that I used excessively strong words. I haven't studied all the machinations leading up to the Declaration but I suppose that Balfour, Milner and Lloyd George must have had an eye on their chances of getting the United States, the one hitherto uncommitted great power, into the war. So don't you think there was, despite majority dissent, some sort of critical mass behind US Zionism even then? I'd assumed - I know much less about all this than you 2 do - that the other (highly understandable) source of enthusiasm for Zionism was among pogromised Russian Jews.
Thanks for comment, Dickerson! My country must indeed accept its share of warguilt.
And there may have been a time when Zionism was more of an Anglo-American Christian than a Jewish craze, with support from zealots like Scofield and at the opposite end of the spectrum from those like George Eliot whose Christianity had become so progressive it was scarcely Christianity at all.
The Balfour Declaration made a pretence of even-handedness - I believe that there are documents proving that Balfour was consciously disingenuous at this point. But one can't ignore the fact that this was because Balfour and his class had been worked upon for years by Zionists like Weizmann with a mixture of religious propaganda and promises of imperial cooperation. It surprises me that Zionism was already so strong amid Jewish people worldwide, but it was.
Sorry to have been slow replying to this very pertinent question.
I mentioned how Siegman prompted me to ask myself questions I found rather dismal. Another prompt came from Pope Ben reviving the question asked by Emperor Manny about the historical and contemporary value of Islam. I didn't think that it was wrong to ask that question of other people so long as we also asked it of ourselves - what of British imperialism? Yet another and more recent prompt from Y.Laor on the Myths of Lib Zionism - Jews were a major force in the emergence of European modernity, for which a debt of gratitude is owed. This of course chimes in with admiration for many Jewish individuals, past and present.
Some would say that Zionism is Jewish culture in inauthentic and perverted form. But how much comfort can we draw from that? How much less do I antagonise Paraguayans by saying 'Paraguayan culture used to be splendid but now look at it!' rather than by saying 'Paraguayan culture has always been awful'? Somewhat less, perhaps, but is that enough?
I see Siegman as someone whose major motivation is religious rather than political. His position since about 2000 seems to be that the famous 2-state solution would be right but that Israel does not, never has had or as far as he can see never will have, the slightest intention of agreeing to this. An unstable position but not entirely a dishonourable one - sorry if I sound patronising, you know what I mean. He complains of having lost touch with most of his family - and I take this as very genuine, not theatrical - for his change of views. He does not seem to have taken many people, family or not, with him.
He dwells much on the Dayan formula of 'living without a solution'.
He got to me especially by the question 'Is this to be the outcome of Judaism?' or words to that effect in a London Review of Books article. 'This' being the current behaviour of Israel.
I found myself wanting to see Siegman's question discussed substantially rather than asked rhetorically. It was at that moment that I began to think that the shield that I, like thousands of anti-Zionists, had raised against accusations of anti-Semitism - 'I have always admired many Jewish people and you, if you accuse me, should remember that there is a long tradition of anti-Zionism within Jewish thought' - was inadequate. Siegman was opening, perhaps unintentionally, the question of whether there is something in the logic or spirit of Judaism or of authentic Jewish culture that Zionism, even to the great regret of many Jewish people, captures. If there is, then I seem to be opposed to something inherent in Jewish culture and where does that leave me? Am I naked and unshielded before accusations of anti-Semitism? This shouldn't happen to a liberal-minded British person.
I've bored you with this hang-up of mine before - couldn't resist mentioning it again in the Siegman context. I've been making various efforts to patch up my shield with the help of other contributors to Mondo Weiss.
If anyone can advise me on financial contributions to MW from outside the USA I'd be grateful. I don't seem to able to make paypal work. And I don't think my credit card's maxed out.
I shared Psycho's view that Friedman's article was written in the cold-hearted, ultra-calculating rhetoric of a certain kind of militarism, and became so complicated (particularly the bit about Turkey) that any political leader trying to follow Friedman's advice would likely tie himself in knots. But I also share MRW's view that there was substantial reason in what he said and that the choice of rhetoric was probably the right one given the people he wanted to convince, not the likes of us but military/industrial calculating types.
I've rarely seen such a succinct explanation of why war with Iran would be a nightmare, why Western power has to be withdrawn from the ME and why we cannot be moved by Israel's rage. George Bush himself must have followed similar advice, since he somehow resisted very intense Israeli pressure to attack Iran.
I'm not so sure that there has been such radical change in the power structure in my dear country since mid-Victorian times. Are the neo-liberals of today really so different, in economic convictions or educational background from Victorian free-market conservatives?
Is the following argument valid -
1. Anti-Semitism is not fair-minded.
2. So anti-Semitism is a form of prejudice.
3. Prejudice is, by common consent, a way of thought dependent on refusing to question at least one premise of an argument.
4. Iggy-style rules of thought amount to the demand that 'Israel is not to be condemned wholesale' never be questioned, 'now or ever'.
5. Iggy demands ways of thought that amount to prejudice.
6. So those who reject Iggy's rules are - unless we know something to their discredit beyond the fact that their objections to Israel are 'wholesale' - rejecting, not expressing, prejudice.
7. So those who object to Israel 'wholesale' are not necessarily anti-Semites and Iggy-style rhetoric is vicious and unfair.
- ?
I hope to get to one or two of the London lectures and will be interested to see what sort of audience gathers as well as in what the speakers have to say. I'm sure that Pamela Olson is basically right in saying that some appreciation of the reality of the ME is spreading from the tiny ghetto that it once was, though I'm still feeling the disappointment I experienced at seeing the rather miserable attendance at an exhibition of rather moving children's art from Gaza that a friend helped to organise.
I agree with Piney that a strong Conrad-style case against the Belgian Congo can be made. I even think that colonies, including the Euro colonisation of America, have good as well as bad effects.
Any realistic programme for solving the problem by withdrawal from the OT would sound like good news, I can't deny. But a 'realistic programme of that nature' now seems to me like something impossible, 'round square' style. It is the Israeli gains of 48 rather than of 67 that are at the problem's real heart.
There's a certain beauty about the idea of 'human life as diaspora'. And I suppose that the Feast of Purim assures us non-Jews that if we 'delight to honour' the Jewish people in our midst they will delight to bring us benefits and wisdom. Perhaps this balance was nearly struck in belle epoque Europe before everything went wrong.
I meant to refer to, rather than endorse, Simic's view, which is not so far from yours, Keith, except for thinking that Milosevic was guilty of some crimes and excesses. I hadn't had time to evaluate what Simic said - you have certainly thought the matter through more rigorously than I have. I don't look back with any pride on my country's participation in that campaign. Robert Fisk was the best commentator on the matter at the time in the UK press. To my shame, I remember being unconvinced by him.
I thought that Tanya Reinhart, who died sadly young, had actually moved to the US.
I understand that while the sinister rhetoric of the Protocols has some originality, to be ascribed to the never-detected final author, and is certainly anti-Semitic, the basic argument about the ruthless use of the press to obtain political power, of which Reinhart was presumably thinking, is known to have been plagiarised from a pamphlet attacking a quite different (French imperial) target. So to say 'this kind of thing can really happen' is to borrow not from an anti-Semitic but from a liberal and anti-imperialist source.
How shall we do that, Polly?
The cash flows both ways, I think and has a sort of perpetual motion quality. In the UK - just to show that America is not alone - we have 'Labour Friends of Israel' and 'Conservative Friends of Israel' making sure that both main political parties know which side their bread is buttered.
The Vatican was aligned with Israel I think, being anxious to restore an independent Catholic state to the Balkans - and I recall how in the UK the Thatcherite machine was intent on dismantling another commie rogue state. The Serbs never stood a chance against this massive ideological and religious constellation - not that that justifies, according to Simic's plausible-seeming argument, their resort to the intransigent Milosevic regime.
'Garden variety' suggests something bred or cultivated on purpose by comparison with wild variants of the same growth. I would think that Herzl-style Zionism and Nasser-style 'Arab nationalism' were indeed cultivated things in comparison with Serbian nationalism, at least at the stage when Serbian nationalism was or even seemed to be a peasant movement against a religiously alien overlord. But Cole's implied comparison between garden and hedgerow nationalism doesn't fit will with his 'not different in any way'. Again, he fails to remark that Zionism has been consistently acquisitive, aggressive and contemptuous of the rights of 'non-nationals' in a way that the others he mentions have rarely been. On recent Serb nationalism there is a somewhat demystifying and de-demonising article by Charles Simic, reviewing Mark Danner, in the Feb.11 New York Review of Books.
The legal definition seems to be set up for political manipulation. Taken literally it would make a drunken brawl in which a Belgian is assaulted, maybe with lethal intent, and someone shouts 'One Belgie less would be good!' as genocide, but then you seem to have two political options. First of saying that violence on such contemptible terms does not share in the grand wickedness of Armenia 1915 or Rwanda 1994, second of saying that even in brawling, even in angry verbiage, the seeds of something quite terrible lurk.
Both views are defensible but the fact that both are available allows people to make a rather cynical, politically motivated choice - 'polemical rather than analytical' indeed.
As to the elements of crime, the one thing that to me does not seem in doubt when an academic figure calls in cold blood for a clear policy clearly aimed at reducing the numbers of a human group, we would have to say, at least were the policy enacted, that this was more like murder than like manslaughter, malice aforethought rather than negligence.
But then I'm worried about the whole idea of 'genocide' since it gives the idea of race rather than of individuality such an absolutely cardinal position in moral discourse.
I don't think I chose my words about Harlow very well and didn't clearly separate his views and topics from mine.
Harlow's point is that the Hebrew Bible was, on the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the process of being revised and reedited, along with its Aramaic and Greek counterparts, well into the first century of the Christian era. So the account of ancient times, going back to the 2oth century before Christ, that we find in our Bibles is influenced by the theology and general beliefs of that later time. This was the time when the people who considered themselves to be Jews were reacting both positively and negatively to western cultural influence and also exercising some cultural influence on the wider western or Greek world.
Harlow doesn't mention archaeology except for the DS Scrolls and has no anti-Palestinian agenda as far as I know. I was saying for my own part that I think there's good scientific reason for promoting the term 'Palestinian archaeology' and for reminding people of certain facts, including that the first non-Biblical mention of the Philistines/Palestinians (among the Sea Peoples) is dated to around 1175, little more than 30 years later than the first non-Biblical mention of the Israelites in the Stela of Merneptah of around 1205.
In my less scientific and more politically motivated moments I would like to find some evidence for the clear but otherwise unsupported statements in Genesis 20-21 that the Philistines were there even before Abraham, taking them all the way back to the 20th century before Christ. Netanyahu could put that in his pipe and smoke it.
If you say that this is all a bit of a distraction and that the situation in the 21st century of this era cannot depend in the situation in the situation in the 20th century of the previous era I would not argue. Still, my mind does tend to be full of old things.
On the problems of 'minimalism' and the formation of the Old Testament there is an article which I consider very informative in the (fairly conservative) Eerdman Bible Commentary on 'The Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls' by Daniel Harlow of Calvin College, showing how this formation took a long time and more than one language.
If we promote the term 'Palestinian archaeology' it might become easier to inform the public of how ancient, according to scientific and literary evidence, the Philistine/Palestinian presence, starting in at least the twelfth century, is.
Beyond that I have an distressingly unscientific wish that some historical foundation will be found for Genesis 20-21, where the Philistine presence predates even Abraham and so would go back to the twentieth century. Netanyahu surely wouldn't like that.
American guilt might be limited by noting that the UK and Euro press seems to be no less restricted to an essentially Israeli point of view. You rightly say that the result is partiality. Another effect is to make the Palestinian world not only alien but obscure: we can find out, if we wish to, about the intricate factionalism of Israeli politics but it's near impossible to find out how factions and ideologies are faring on the Palestinian side of the fence, I should say wall.
I'm off for a couple of weeks to Panama, where there are said both still to be traces of old-fashioned can't-join-our-club anti-Semitism and growing Israeli influence.
I share that sentiment! - I also agree with the suggestion that for Jews to react to Euro anti-Semitism by leaving was and is to give the anti-Semites a great deal of what they wanted - all of what they wanted if their complaint was that Jews were foreigners and should not be citizens or residents of Euro countries. The Nazi manifesto was designed to appeal to people who thought like that.
Avishai mentions Popper, saying he shows that it can be hard to adhere to the rules of evidence. My impression of Popper is that he thought that any scientific enquiry had to be - or it would not be scientific at all - marked by the fact that the scientist at very least makes predictions that are clearly testable and falsifiable. A Popperian journalist might form hypotheses like 'Goldstone is rubbish' but should then ask 'What might show that this idea is wrong? Are there testimonies that I might believe?' If he refuses to contemplate changing his mind he is being unscientific, not really caring about the facts.
As one who thinks that Goldstone has a point I'd say that I'd be swayed if any evidence of his ever saying or implying that Zionism was indefensible or that Israelis were in general not to be trusted would sway me. I'd bet that there isn't any solid evidence to this effect, though it's harder to bet that there are no stories of questionable truth or no reports that could with a sufficiently hostile glance be interpreted as anti-Israel. An anti-Popperian would say that you get into an indefinite regress of interpretations of evidence and never manage to falsify anything finally, and that it's all a question of a clash of Kuhnian paradigms or general ways of looking at things.
Kuhn's view as I remember is that paradigms go through a period of being culturally, perhaps violently, enforced, but the effort behind all this enforcement becomes counterproductive and the paradigm collapses. This is a less rational procedure that the Popperian collapse of a hypothesis under the weight of falsifying evidence. But the paradigm whereby Israel can do no wrong seems to be a prime candidate for eventual collapse, after a lot more cultural enforcement, on both understandings.
Julius seems to mistake Judt's fluent style of writing, free as it is even when he is such dire straits of all the bitterness that clogs Julius' own, for frivolity. Martin Kramer's even nastier comment (does this man really have to have the same name as me?) does remind us that Jews must on his showing must, in order to have survived so long, have received a great deal of the good will on which they were 'utterly dependent', with Muslims very much included among the 'others' who provided it over many centuries. Considering the implications of 'utterly' and considering how many centuris are in question, some reciprocation might be in order.
Perhaps 'extended to deter a resumption of rocket fire' after Israel had conveyed its refusal to loosen the abominable blockade, directed against the only genuine expression of Palestinian self-determination - the blockade in itself being a deadly weapon.
Very amusing in a grim sort of way! What I said about the UK press was only to say that I don't think we are that much ahead of you in the US. Though it comes back to me during the 06 war in Lebanon the BBC deployed a reporter called Fergal Keane who really annoyed Zionist opinion by reporting from Qana with, as one of them said, a lump in his throat, rather I suppose than with a voice of steel.
Thanks for the reminder about the Superbowl, I'd better time my call to the family in New England so as not to interrupt.
If the NYT has an Arab-American (also Muslim?) correspondent in Gaza I think it's already well ahead of most of the UK press in presenting an important point of view on the region, though we do have Robert Fisk, who is no catspaw of Israel.
The 67 border is the result of the injustice of 48, a partition which should not have happened on any terms actually made on terms that were and are outrageous. I think that even if Palestinians sign up to them through some discredited leaders everyone will know that they don't mean it and that the signature of Abbas or whoever is a worthless inkspill. So there's no form of acceptance of the 67 border by the Palestinians that Israel could trust.
Therefore it is impossible for Israel, even if most Israelis would like to find a way, for Israel to accept any Palestinian presence in Palestine as legitimate, since a legitimate presence would imply that there are injustices which the 67 borders would not correct but would set in stone. So the idea of peace is, as the lady says, a Nessie, a fabulous pre-historic illusion.
For outsiders this is all a terrible nuisance and they keep trying to create sightings of Nessie, just like the Inverness tourist industry does. For the Saudis it's more than a nuisance,indeed a threat.
O mi god, is she? Since I read Sunstein on the planned team of cognitive infliltrators I've been wondering if some of them, giving themselves away by lack of cognition, are appearing on this site.
When I said 'Guatemala' I meant Honduras and the recent coup. I'm off to Panama later this week, where I have family and where there are plenty of great powers seeking influence and providing cash.
And indeed the first significant appearance of political Islam, its violence forgiven or praised because it was then on our side. So that we once had high hopes of Hamas.
And in addition to Guatemala then there is the less atrocious but fundamentally as dangerous recent action in Guatemala, which seemed to me to be a monstrous event organised by Hillary Clinton.
It's the optimism that keeps me wanting to revisit this site.
If Samantha P is bold enough to say that there should be 'a strategic response' (whatever that is) she really means to say, through her code, that she and Obama are perfectly well aware of the truth. Is this a solemn statement that they must and will eventually act on what they know? Or is it just a preliminary to Power's resignation from a government one of whose principal members she regards as a monster, partly I suppose because of her attitude to Middle East matters.
I've just had a look at an article by Shamindra Ferdinando for a paper called 'Sunday Island' published through 'the Official News Portal of the Government of Sri Lanka', making it clear that President Rajipaska managed to obtain military hardware from the United States and built up a coalition of willing supporters ranging from Israel (who else could have made the SL army so effective?) to Iran. He silences human rights protests from the US by threatening to get closer to China, from India by threatening to get closer to Pakistan. If Israel becomes uneasy he sends a greeting card to Ahmedinejad. What a politician!
Ferdinando remarks that SL politicians and military men will not be setting foot in the UK until the unpleasantness over Livni is resolved, since the Tamil diaspora is without many guns but still has plenty of lawyers.
Not that the Tamil Tigers were nice people.
Not 'everyone ex-US': I assure you that 'nigger' would not go down at all well in many middle class areas in England. The childhood phrase 'nigger in the woodpile' once came to me during a workplace discussion and drew a reprimand.
I think censorship is justified only when there's a clear effort to disrupt the discussion or when there's plain abuse - as if someone said to me 'All you Brits are xxx***!*' But perhaps if someone said 'All you Brits are xxx-responsible for the situation in the Middle East' I should live with that.
I think hardline Zionists should have their say, offensive and cruel as I find every word they utter. The voice of the Muslims outraged by Israel really should be heard too. We can't understand the situation if they can't say what they think.
It's a rather different matter to say that the opinion that we cannot fully distinguish between contemporary Zionism and the wider and more historic forms of Jewish culture also needs to be heard. I must say that something to this effect comes across to me in some of Phil's own remarks about his family and 'tribe' and also in some more academic work like Piterberg's 'Returns of Zionism', which forges elaborate links between Sabatianism and Zionism.
It's this opinion expressed with raw Muslim anger, tinctured I admit with something like racism, that we find in rehmat. It's better to correct him that silence him. Contrary to his opinion the United Kingdom has not fallen under Jewish control, though Zionism is held in far more respect than it deserves.
Antonia Fraser's bio of Cromwell does as I remember attribute quite an influence to Ben Israel, though I think that Cromwell's admirers (never really liked him myself) tend to overemphasise the idealistic or visionary element in what looks to me more like a politician's effort to deal with a middle-sized problem without letting it have any big effects.
Part of Ben Israel's argument reappears in Freud on Moses (a favourite book of mine) with the religious ideas hovering to good literary effect in the background.
Just to add that Blair was fairly typical by British standards in his attitudes until he became Bush's confidant and had heady experiences like being saluted as 'America's Ally!' by Fox News. At the same time British middle class opinion moved the opposite way, against Bush - a movement which, along with ideas escaping from academia, made a serious critique of Zionism acceptable in this kingdom as it had never been before. An attack on Iran would be received with horror and fear.
I can't pretend that I was ahead of the curve or have any reason to feel personally righteous. I voted for Blair several time. It took the disaster of Iraq to open my eyes.
I'd say that the attitudes of our former PM may be in small part due to taking Jerusalem gold but are in greater part due to the attitudes normal in those of his age, class, background and experience, at least of those who did not make their careers in universities. Jews were part of civilisation, Arabs were outsiders - formerly terrorists motivated by forms of Marxism that we didn't take seriously, latterly religious maniacs.
I don't know the chronological relationship between anti-Semitic 'blood-libel' popular ballads like 'Hugh of Lincoln' and the Expulsion, but there was obviously some connection.
Thomas Aquinas had written a few decades earlier to the Duchess of Brabant, that dutiful feudal figure, urging the policy of punitive taxation on the Jews to compensate for their usurious habits. There was a great deal of bad faith and surreptitious racism behind the objection to usury.
Cromwell in the 1650s did not make any grand break with the exclusion policy. He called a conference of lawyers, merchant and clerics. The lawyers seem to have taken the view that a royal edict issued before the period of constitutional government had not created a permanent law. The other two groups didn't want Jews back, so Cromwell just told his Jewish contacts that everything had to be informal and low key. By 1664 the restored King Charles II, again in low key fashion, informed protesters that he would not take any action against increasing numbers of Jews, and this led to the foundation of the first London synagogue, Bevis Marks, in 1670. Part of the basis of all this was, I understand, that Jewish finance houses in Amsterdam had financed both sides in the Civil War, another part was the emergence of Christian Zionism. This may in part have been a form of enlightenment, in part a form of anti-Semitism: we don't want them here, so we can send them there. But the first hint of British assistance in Jewish recolonisation of Palestine, with all its potential and terrible consequences, had been dropped.
Convenient ways of mixing enlightenment and anti-Semitism continue to be found. As you may have noticed, I'm unconvinced by the standard replies that we - me very much included - who consider ourselves enlightened and humane anti-Zionists give to the accusations of anti-Semitism.
I'm impressed with Koshiro's moral argument but I suppose one of the deepest human ideas is that we can bring good out of evil.
Wiesel 'excommunicates' because he is really a theologian (he might agree with that) and he has stood for the dark morality/theology whereby suffering leads to a purer world, the sign of purity being Israel's existence. Any negative comment on Israel is blasphemy and apostasy - 'perfidus ille Deo!' All unconditional support for Israel by non-Jews entails Wiesel's (enlightened humanity's) fullest benediction and blotting out of sin, very much welcomed and desired by many Christians. They do not see that it is an unaccpetably, even monstrously, politicised version of moral law, moral purity and forgiveness.
I wonder what effect all this is having on Goldstone himself. Is he still the Zionist he was?
I seem to remember that Marlon Brando was once forced to apologise for mentioning that negative portrayals of Jewish characters are near unthinkable in Hollywood, so the fact that Jews and non-Jews are of the same humanity is obscured. In the end, this whole practice, including the relentless demand for apologies, is very alienating. Sophia Loren played a good Muslim a mid-60's film called something like 'Arabesque' (which I found entertaining) but she had no particularly Muslim characteristics, not even the hint of a veil: there were also, of course, plenty of bad Muzzies even then, appropriately swarthy. We will wait a long time for a Muslim doing something good in popular television fiction because his/her religion calls for it. And we think we're an open society.
In today's Independent, the same part of the UK press for which Robert Fisk writes, there is an article by the horrible Lorna Fitzsimons, so vapid that I can't think how to reply to it. All will be well because a) Barak has claimed that a Palestinian state is vital for Israel's security b) the soi-disant Prime Minister of Palestine was warmly welcomed at the recent 'Defence and Security Conference'. You bet he was.
As one of the frequent computer-bashers I'd say that I appreciate this site because it has a tone that I appreciate, mixing the mundane and the personal with standard politics (if that's a clear term) and more academic things. I don't suppose we're moving the earth on its axis.
I do think that the main ideas that are at war - legitimacy, terrorism, 1948, divine donation - are discussed, even if we don't fully cover all their effects and applications.
The main proponent is the prolific Professor Bruce Chilton of Bard College. I'm just reading his lively and imaginative reconstruction of the life of Mary Magdalene.
Isn't 'mamzer' is the Hebrew word for the child of an unlawful relationship, roughly equivalent to 'bastard'? There are those who argue that Jesus was one such.
The name of Dersh is mentioned - perhaps it should not be mentioned in the same breath as Jesus - in at least loose connection with the legal threats to the British Universities and Colleges Union, of which I'm a member, that have so far stopped it from supporting BDS. It was when these threats first appeared that I first began to think that BDS might be a good idea.
I visited an exhibition of children's art from Gaza a few weeks ago. I know one of the organisers and was aware of the fearfulness and censorship she had encountered. The exhibition was in the end rather obscurely staged and ill attended. The exhibit I most remember was called 'Did he have a weapon?' and was a picture of a couple of dozen coffins.
What I hear of the settler children reminds me of the Midwich Cuckoos, the creation of the 1950s science fiction writer John Wyndham. They are children with strange, malevolently used powers based on their ability to think and feel as a group. As I remember they are described in very Aryan fashion, so the story seems like a satire on how what began as a bunch of deluded children became the irresistible German army of 1940. But totally shared thinking is not dangerous for one race only.
It seems a bit hard on B to treat him with a degree of suspicion, watchfulness or wariness if he has never given any specific sign of hostility, prejudice or unfairness. In general one should not be reserved or wary of people just because they let you see what manner of person they are or from what origin they come, unless there is some specific moral problem about their way of life or their manner of expressing themselves to which you can point. Being openly oneself is normally a good thing and a sign of trust.
Reservation and wariness can be catching.
Were one looking for an excuse viable in the United States then the fact that Israel has refused - rather contemptuously refused - to accept a stipulation that the United States very publicly made would seem like a pretty good excuse to be going on with.
But I don't think we should have much sympathy with Abbas, who is a usurper and something of a quisling. He's never had any alternative but to sign up to whatever he's told to in the end. The problem is more about finding to some way to give his signature some authority or plausibility.
Thucydides indicates that democracy can, no less than other forms of government, be brutal and irrational. I'm not sure that it even occurred to him that some might argue that a decision by one group to expropriate or massacre another is justified by the mere fact that the decision emerges from a democratic vote. Perhaps we don't see how outrageously absurd that argument is.
Does international war in any form provide a parallel for a conflict like that in the ME, which is about who among the residents of a place has the right to a share in sovereignty over that place?
We in the UK churches would be encouraged to think we could reach 10% regular attendance. At 30% we'd be rushing to Jerusalem to give thanks.
But it's extremely difficult to estimate the influence of religion. When religious leaders speak they get an audience. The Vatican has used its considerable influence to prevent Turkish EU membership.
Fisk quotes Lorna Fitzsimons, a former Member of Parliament who represents Blair-style Zionism in most unadulterated form. The UK is recognised as a battleground, though Fitzsimons assured her audience that foreign policy in our country is an elite issue, not one for the masses. Fisk demurs. But even if Fitz is right the key to elite opinion in the longer run is the universities, where Israel's position is weakening by the day for lack of reasonable arguments in its support. If you look at the bookshelves from which students might buy you see how hard it is to find pro-Israel tomes. One book I bought recently from one such shelf, Laor's 'Myths of Liberal Zionism', gives the impression that the Israeli cause is defended with more enthusiasm in France.
Fitz might have said 'never mind the pointy-headed intellectuals, the mighty masses in the UK are on our side' but I don't think that's really true either.
I'd say, as an English Protestant, that mindless anti-Irish racism and Protestant dogmatism were indeed strongly in evidence in the 70s and beyond, as in Ian Paisley's denunciation of the Pope as 'antichrist', though racism, dogmatism and intolerance were by no means absent on the other side. And Anglo-Irish relationships have had their better as well as their worse aspect. As to 'subhuman', I would have thought that this line of thinking belongs not to - or less to - old-fashioned religious sentiments, bitter and horrible as these can be, more to those forms of nationalism, like German anti-Semitism, that became entangled with Social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century.
The NI peace is still wobbly but for all that Mitchell has much to his credit. I think that the success was mainly due to the fact that none of the parties (official British, official Irish, IRA, Protestant hardliners) involved thought that they could really eliminate any other in the near term, that they could all survive regardless. They drew the conclusion that they had to live with each other, so they might as well settle. I guess that Obama thought that the situation was basically the same in Palestine and that all concerned had recognised this beneath their rhetoric. But the parties in Palestine can actually see their way towards the elimination of the other or at least cannot see a way to survive if the other is not eliminated. Obama is the sort of person whose whole life has been dedicated to coexistence and compromise and the whole situation is alien to him. Making compromises with powerful American individuals and with well-funded lobby groups is second nature to him.
It's true that the Israeli lobby is wildly, grotesquely powerful - but then the Irish Republican lobby was pretty powerful too. But maybe even the lobby would accept terms that were acceptable on the ground in the ME. But the phrase 'terms acceptable on the ground in the ME' looks like a contradiction in terms.
I remember Condi's body language as she was subjected to sticky embraces by male Israeli politicians as she shuttled around during the 06 war. There must be many who have to demonstrate undying loyalty to Israel as a condition of their own political existence and who feel the full force and ruthlessness of Israeli influence but in their hearts hate and resent being kept under such tight and undignified control.
Isn't 'Holocaust' essentially a theological, not a historical term, originally referring to an acceptable form of sacrifice? It doesn't say 'something terrible was done in the past' but 'something terrible is inherent in the difference (which is a difference in theological inheritance) between Jews and non-Jews'. You get traumatised and re-traumatised every time you use this word.
Are we to interpret those events as a meaningless horror, made yet more meaningless becaus those responsible were a grotesque minority, or as a sacrifice whose morally illuminating character helps to give meaning to history? The latter view, inherent in the word 'holocaust', emphasises in the sharpest possible way the difference between the race whose sacrifice was demanded and all of, not just a minority among, the deluded others. The implications are very great and almost too painful to spell out.
We have a great deal yet to understand about the crucial Ezra-Nehemiah/Elephantine period . The Oxford History of the Biblical World remarks that 'with the arrival of E and N in the mid- to late fifth century the boundaries between Jew and non-Jew began to be defined more narrowly'. A major development. My feeling is that there had 'always' been a monotheistic movement with elements in many parts of the ME and Egypt and that what was to become the increasingly 'narrowly defined' Judaism emerged by a slow process from the fifth century. When we find elements in many different societies that have a Jewish or Israelite aspect we need to know how far they were involved in this process: were they already like the Jews of the future, or perhaps more like other kinds of monotheist?
Interesting! But how would we understand 'Jewish' in sixth century terms?
The Achaemenid Empire certainly had an Aramaic-speaking official class to which the restorers of Jerusalem - or those who thought of themselves in this light - belonged - Nehemiah being the prime example.
By 399 we find Xenophon distinguishing himself in the Battle of Cunaxa. 'Cunaxa' is related, I believe, to the Aramaic term for what later became a 'synagogue', so suggests a Jewish majority in an area of Iraq.
But how any of these groups related in religion or race to what later became Judaism and Jewish people must be quite a problem.
What guilt is appropriate?
Few people now alive were in a position to do much of significance during the war years, so it isn't simple personal guilt for things personally done. We are heirs of the culture of those times but we have revised our inheritance, if necessary, in an anti-anti-Semitic direction.
How do we know when this revision has gone far enough? The single, simple test, say some, is unreserved and uncritical support for Israel: any reservation, unless perhaps a minor one, authorised by respectable and mainstream elements within Israel itself, amounts to a live element of anti-Semitism in our minds. But this is an inherently immoral demand to let our moral judgements be determined politically and not by our moral principles. It's an interactive process, even more destructive than Ms. Duisenberg says. To the extent that the demand is met every action by Israel, however bad, is accompanied by a chorus of approval, corrupting the morality of Israel's leaders more and more all the time.
In a wider sense, cultural exploitation of the Holocaust emphasises and deepens at every point the division between those who do and those who do not call themselves Jewish - not that there is any scientific objectivity about this distinction.
I have an edition of the Protocols by Stephen Eric Bronner (Oxford 2000), which points out, as I think many have done, that the source is an impeccably liberal but rather obscure pamphlet published by Maurice Joly, a French republican of Italian Catholic parentage, in 1864. He was neither Jewish nor concerned with Jews - he was satirising the rise to power of Napoleon III. Napoleon's police did quite a good job of keeping the pamphlet from wide circulation or public attention, so it was available as a literary resource to plagiarists and was taken up for anti-Jewish purposes by Russian police agents. In rather vivid language - 'like the god Vishnu my publicity machine will have a hundred arms' - Joly makes the pamphlet's main and most famous point, that the key to power in a society that is in any degree democratic is intensive infiltration and control of the press. So it is indeed a basic game plan for power seizure, quite a sensible one. Maybe the decline of the press and the rise of the internet have saved us? Ho hum.
The implication is that powerful publicity machines and dangerous conspiracies are rather hard to tell apart.
Do you recall a rather pretentious film of the seventies (I think) called 'Mr.Klein', which begins with the leading character, a Parisian, being examined by Petainist doctors who are doing absurd measurements of his face to decide whether he's Jewish? That's something I recall when I try to get the measure of traditional anti-Semitism, that it was about trying to make a reality out of a fictional construct.
Well, I see what you mean about getting involved in too much philosophical argument.
Nothing wrong with the Jewish myths, or other myths. But it must be dangerous when myth and science get confused with each other. I feel a vague speculation coming on - isn't blood and soil nationalism (could well be called BS nationalism, I suppose) at heart pseudo-science? Myth calling itself science?
I wish that that smear and sneer was not, as Polly notes, so damned effective.
You're absolutely right about the anti-Semite smear - and sneer and jeer too. We have to think this through. I think we have placed too much reliance on the point, true as it is for nearly all of us, that 'many of those we greatly admire are Jewish'. This point cannot cancel the fact that we are dispute with a moral position seemingly held with the utmost conviction by the great majority of those who call themselves Jewish - where 'we' includes people who set themselves on both sides of the Jewish/non-Jewish distinction. I think that we have to get people to see that you cannot really be 'pro' or 'anti' what does not exist and that this much-canvassed, death-dealing distinction is not objective or scientific. Shlomo Sand made a good start there.
Obama tried to seek cooperation from moderate opponents. That looked like the reasonable strategy at the time, I suppose, though it amounted to telling all his opponents that they could keep all their gains unless they were graciously prepared to give some of them up. We see how the whole array of them reacted.
In sunnier moments I think that the United States cannot surely stay so massively, wastefully militarised, so like Israel, for all that much longer, particularly not on borrowed money.
In darker moments I think that a glance at Honduras shows that if an elected politician steps out of line army officers and supreme court judges know what to do. The first signs of paranoia! I expect I'll soon be talking to myself on buses.
I thought you captured the inflated verbiage of the left very well in 'restoration of global comradeship' - maybe I could catch myself believing in that - and of the militaristic right in the 'liberty of the entire solar system is at stake'. How's the book coming along?
I'm sure that Obama, speaking so stiltedly, did himself no favours with the Israeli government and its cohorts any more than he did with Israel's critics. His remarks about 'security' sound - and are - half-hearted compared with the 'we stand with Israel'/'beacon of democracy' stuff, uttered in religious tones often with liturgical-sounding repetition, which Israel is used to demanding. Mind you, I suppose that the overblown rhetoric of a Clinton or a Pelosi sounds and is just as insincere in the end. It will be interesting to see how the rhetoric is pitched in our forthcoming election in the UK.
The employment of beautiful young women from whose lips poison drops certainly seems part of Rupert Murdoch's response to left-wing feminism.
Thanks for the information. I'll see if I can catch up with it.
Yes, very witty. (An unintended pun in this context, but I might as well stick to it.) I admire people who can remain poised and cool in the face of crazy talk.
While we're on Iran - it is a bad sign that Tony Blair has used his evidence to the 'Chilcot' Iraq War enquiry in effect to urge war on Iran, the Saddam of our times if he is to be believed. Blair must still be in the confidence of important political circles in the United States and Israel. The effrontery of politicians of his stripe and the weakness and hesitancy of his questioners (in this case very British, painfully polite, far too like me) is rather an ugly thing.
Could you give me the title of these lectures, Psych? I've long suspected that it was a key event in world history when the younger Caesar, the future Augustus, replaced Cleopatra with Herod as Rome's principal ally in 'the region', then a frontier zone menaced by the Parthian Iraqis who had defeated a Roman expeditionary force.
I've been reading Roland Boer's 'Political Myth: the use and abuse of Biblical themes'. I'm not sure it was worth the £15 I paid for it, since it gets involved in some very heavy duty literary theorising, but it does contain the record some speeches by American politicians - H.Clinton, Rice and especially Pelosi - which make one's heart sink like a stone. One feature is the incantation-style repetition of phrases like 'we stand with Israel', 'blessed land', 'beacon of democracy'. They are mainly of 03-05 vintage. The only consoling thought is that by comparison they make Obama's recent remarks look quite balanced and objective.
The technique of disrupting discussion (ie smothering free speech) by sending multiple posts, often long, usually barely relevant, by throwing worthless weblinks around and by using a provocative tone that tempts people to reply - to feed the troll - is quite annoying. It's analogous to disrupting a public meeting by making long speeches about half-relevant topics. Sometimes the individuals - or groups pretending to be individuals - who resort to it seem to be political fanatics, sometimes persons in an unhealthy mental state. Firm moderation is called for, I think.
I think that Obama is fully aware - with his education and background how can he not be? - that the treatment of the Palestinians is unjust, but he also thinks that he can't put his domestic agenda into effect (perhaps he's now perceiving that he can't do this anyway) if he antagonises the powerful pro-Israel forces. I think that these forces give every indication of not trusting him an inch, so his efforts to please everyone lead to pleasing no one.
Nothing will ever be accepted as a renunciation of violence by the Palestinians unless it amounts to a recognition of the legitimacy of Israel, and even if they are induced to say such a thing we all know that they don't believe it. In the same way withdrawal of the demand for a renunciation of violence is withdrawal of unquestioning belief in the legitimacy of Israel and it will be a long time before that is possible anywhere in the West. We've just had Holocaust Day in the UK. It will be a long time before we have Nakba Day.
Since I am persuaded that Zionism is a false ideology, Zionists to me are other. To what extent can I respect otherness in the form of views and ideas that I cannot accept or in the form of people who advocate these ideas? The answer about the ideas and the answer about the people may be rather different, but both questions are tricky. It's equally tricky for those on the other side of the question, I suppose, but they tend to make things easy for themselves by calling the 'other' the 'anti-Semite'.
I fully agree. You describe me, for one, quite well. In the 90s, I thought to my shame that ME peace was inevitable, so why get too involved in talking about it? When I began to get involved through internet discussion it was only when I was exposed to the full blast of Zionism, its bad arguments and its terrifying, menacing style of argument (as now advertised by the Yale mob) that I saw what a mistake I had made.
As is mentioned by David Bromwich on this site today, it is not uncommon for humane people to have a blind spot. Perhaps Goldstone still has a blind spot about Israel before the latest outrages in Gaza.
The picture of mob rule at Yale is startling. I wonder what it would have been like in Oxford or Paris?
Are people saying that no one should agree to investigate the report of a crime unless sure that it is the worst crime on the books? Or that one does not do wrong if someone else is doing worse?
I rather agree with B/NOW that 'it's political' is an unduly weak reply to the question of why the matter of Gaza was investigated. I don't deny that there is and must be a kind of political process which determines how the world's resources of investigation and censure are applied, just as with the world's resources of disaster aid, just as with local police resources in different parts of the world.
However, the implicit argument that the sheer number of casualties is and should be the only determinant of concern is false. Concern may be roused quite rationally by the political power of the alleged criminal, by any dark ideological motivation, by any closeness to vital economic things. All these conditions apply: Israel is the United States' closest ally, is influenced by a religious/nationalist ethos which troubles many, is in a region that supplies lots of oil. Suffering is not only about casualties - if the problem arises from a long-term plan to humiliate and oppress there is suffering A
that goes beyond bloodshed but is still very important.
A political judgement expressing these kinds of concern is morally sound, not just (as Goldstone seems to have made it sound) a matter of deals and horsetradings.
1.To be systematic, you have (says Jessica) to be acting in a wilful and premeditated manner and without military justificaton. Let's look at this.
2. 'Wilful' surely applies - Israel's action was not involuntary, inadvertent or based on ignorance of which buildings were which or where they stood.
'Premeditated' surely applies - it was not on the spur of the moment.
3. 'Without military justification' - this could only mean that we have determined that the attack is the most efficient or (much better for our reputation, but much harder to prove) the only way to engage the enemy armed forces. But at this point the apparently justifying argument collapses anyway - if we have made these determinations the result must be an attack on the civil population that is systematic, ie essential to the system we are operating. That it is essential is exactly what we've just determined and decided and committed ourselves to.
4. So I'd put it to Jessica that the word 'systematic' cannot be exploited to let the Israeli government off the moral hook.
If punishment of war crimes is an aspect of justice then rejecting allegations because the person complained of rejects them - wholeheartedly and very vigorously rejects them, be in no doubt!! - and giving that person the formal role of saying what really happened is a sort of ludicrous, Orwellian and more than Orwellian, denial of the principle, known to Caesar and Herod, that no one should be judge in own cause.
As to whether civilian infrastructure and the civil population was systematically targeted, much will turn out to depend on what 'systematically' means. No doubt there was an intention to leave some of it in place.
As to whether anyone in Israel thinks so, I suspect that many non-Jewish Israeli citizens think exactly that. And they are not no one, though they are ever so quiet and effaced.
'Institute for Peace' does sound like someone's read Orwell and decided to make it happen for real. O mi god.
The presentation of all opposition to 'us' as infantile is highly infantilising and of course represents a kind of conspiracy to blind and deceive us.
It is true that the desire to be secure and esteemed is in us all from childhood to old age. Why we don't see the danger in heaping humiliation on Muslims and Arabs I don't know - perhaps the answer to Psygod's question is that they - the militaristic Peace Institutes and suchlike - do indeed all think that we're stupid and that so far their thought looks quite plausible.
It's perfectly reasonable for Jews to say that they want security and respect. I've just been reading Yitzhak Laor on 'The Myths of Liberal Zionism', which implies that Israelis know that they are still part of Europe and that the intense approval of anti-intellectual religious Americans isn't enough, they need the respect of secular Euros who read difficult novels and chew on metaphysics, especially from France, the real deep centre of modern intellectualism. Laor thinks that the French are doing all they can to oblige. Whether this is a deep insight or just a superficial tit-for-tat against the kind of pyschobabble they use in the Peace Institute I'm not sure. He certainly writes amusingly.