Total number of comments: 89 (since 2010-04-12 03:05:01)
notatall
Resides somewhere in North America, history professor by trade, revolutionary by devotion — anti-capitalist and anti-Zionist
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- Resume builders: Be a broken record on Iran, cheer authoritarians … 1
- UN Committee: Israeli system ‘tantamount to apartheid’ 0
- Slater on Beinart 0
- And we live on… 0
- US official — we went to Israel first 3
- Israel lobby’s favorite senator tries to erase Palestinian refugee status … 23
- Israel takes 30 dunams of land near Salfit ‘for security … 4
- Aaron David Miller: After a short ‘peace process,’ look … 38
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- BDS victory: South Africa strips Ahava’s ‘made in Israel’ label 713
- Video: Israeli mob demands all African refugees be deported from … 475
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- Neverending Nakba: Israel breaks lull, attacks Gazan farmers 413
- ‘This is not fair play’: Mahmoud Sarsak’s family demands his … 389
- March of the Flags 345
- Neocons in Washington Post: Military strike on Iran would ‘calm … 323
- Nabi Saleh’s Bassem Tamimi convicted by Israeli courts based on … 293
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- The Messiah’s Donkey: Settlers fire on Palestinian villagers as the … 235
- Aharon Appelfeld’s rage at the German language (and Arendt’s need … 156
- US to differentiate between ‘personally displaced’ Palestinian refugees and their … 129
- March of the Flags 127
- Affirming a Judaism and Jewish identity without Zionism 110
- Feeling the hate in Long Island 97
- Israeli judge to issue verdict in Rachel Corrie case 94
- WaPo’s Walter Pincus says US is ‘going above and beyond … 87
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Harry's comment underscores the point that race is not necessarily about color. In Ireland (and Liverpool) "Protestant" and "Catholic" functioned as racial categories, just as do "Jew" and "Arab" in Zioland. Color is often the marker of racial standing, but it is not essential; there can be others.
Why the surprise or the attempt to treat this outbreak as an exception? Zionism has been an ideology of race from the start.
"And we know which state decided the 2000 election."
Small correction: the Supreme Court decided the 2000 election, and the unwillingness of the Dems to carry to struggle into the streets (which would have been the case in many other countries). People would do well to remember that.
sciri21: "I hope Obama is doing it only for political purposes..."
RoHa: "Meh. A politician’s promise in an election year."
Rightwing Republicans hope that their candidates mean what they say. “Progressive” Democrats hope that their candidates do NOT mean what they say. Which are more principled? Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.
Didn't the term "ethnic cleansing" originate in the Bosnian War as a euphemism for "population transfer," which was a euphemism for forcibly expelling people from their land, which was a euphemism for .... ?
Elliot,
There used to be courts in the U.S. to determine who was "white" -- until the whole rotten edifice came down. The same should happen in the so-called Jewish state, and better sooner than later.
Elliot: "Israel is all-Jewish (well, except for the Palestinians…)"
Depends on what you mean by Jewish. The religious groups, yes. As for the rest, including the couple of million Russians, Romanians, etc. (the products of decades of assimilation) and the mostly secular Ashkenazis, what is "Jewish" about them except that they can be counted on to police the Palestinians?
Intermarried? I know, Phil, because you have said so, that you are married to a woman. What greater intermarriage could there be than that between a man and a woman? Moreover, I have always believed that the fundamental conflict in the world is between me and The Others, and I assume I'm not alone in my view. Compared to that, the conflict between Jew and gentile is trivial. It's all a matter of perspective.
I have always accepted the claims of WW2 Germans that they did not know about the camps, but thought the reason they did not know (since anyone who wanted to know could find out) was that they did not want to know, that they found it more comfortable not to know. I think you could say the same about most "Jews" in Palestine. The hardcore racial supremacists are another story, and they make up a larger proportion of the population in "Israel" than they ever have elsewhere, including Nazi Germany. The closest parallel was the Indian-haters on the American frontier.
I agree with Mooser. The problem is the “us.” Tell me which “us” you think you are part of and I will tell you what you think (most of the time). The problem is that so many “Jews” think of themselves as Jews first and human beings a distant second. In my classes on the US Civil War I show opposing views of the War, and ask students how they decide which is right. The answer comes down to who the students think they are.
wondering jew: "But survival of the Jewish group in some form that carries on the past into the future, that is pretty basic..."
Although there have been Jews in Persia, in al-Andalus, in the Pale, etc., there is not now, nor has there been since the days of the Biblical Hebrews, any such thing as the “Jewish group.”
Many Ashkenazi Jews emigrated to the U.S., where they were so thoroughly transformed by modern American life as to be unrecognizable to a resident of Bialystock in 1910 (or 1940). Are they part of the "Jewish group?" Some of those who survived Nazism went to Palestine where they and their descendants became a privileged caste with nothing, not even language, in common with their east European ancestors. How are they part of the "Jewish group," except that Zionist law says so?
In an episode of The Sopranos Tony and his boys were beating up an Orthodox Jew, who was determined not to give them whatever it was they wanted. He said that for centuries people had persecuted the Jews, and asked, “What happened to the Romans?” “You’re looking at them,” replied Tony, hitting him again. The joke (at least to me) was that Tony and his boys were no more Romans than the person they were beating up was an Old Testament Hebrew.
Picts, Jutes, Manx, Bretons, Occidentales, Provencales, Etruscans, Latins, Laodiceans, Phoenicians—these are just a few of the groups, named off the top of my head, that used to exist and no longer do as discrete groups. Some of what they created was absorbed and refashioned and transmitted to later generations, some we read in translation or see in museums. And so it goes. One might as well try to stop the tide as to stop assimilation.
What does it say about American politics that a maggot like Adelson may get to determine whether the U.S. goes to war with Iran?
It came out during the fuss over the BDS Conference at Penn that Cohen is Chairman of Penn's Board of Trustees.
Didn't it come out during the fuss over Penn's BDS Conference that Cohen is on Penn's Board, or am I thinking of someone else?
Tokyobk: You write that only nonviolent protest is legitimate; I challenge your right to tell others how to protest and you respond by accusing me of preferring war. I write that George Washington was not nonviolent and you respond by pointing out that GW was a slaveholder and an Indian killer. This is the sort of thing that leads me to doubt the assertion that man is a rational animal.
Tokyobk: "Go ahead and boycott, its a nonviolent tactic which is your right."
Where do you get off, telling people they can only protest if they are nonviolent? Was George Washington nonviolent? Is the regime they are protesting against nonviolent?
Thanks, Robin, from an old friend.
The Hasbara Buster: “A 1ss would not destroy the polity currently called Israel, but expand it to accommodate the new geopolitical and demographic reality of two peoples increasingly intermingled within a single natural region west of the Jordan river.”
Reminder: The whole of Palestine has been under a single state since 1967. The problem is that it is not democratic.
Inanna: “a people who were oppressed…”
Oppressed? Who? Except for the years 1938 to 1945, for over a thousand years it was on the average better to be a Jew in Europe than a peasant. The myth of continuous Jewish victimhood is one of the weapons in the Zionist arsenal, and it must not go unchallenged.
From the standpoint of biology, race is a fiction. No scientist has ever provided a definition of a race that includes everyone he wants to include and excludes all others. Socially race exists whenever governments confer a special status on people based on their descent (real or ascribed). In Israel “Jews” constitute a race, no less (and no more) than did the “whites” of Alabama or South Africa—that is, so long as discrimination exists. The Zionists took people from fifty countries, of different physical types, speaking different languages and practicing different religions (or no religion at all), and defined them as a single people based on the fiction that they, and only they, are descended from the Biblical Abraham. The claim is so patently false that only Zionists and Nazis even pretend to take it seriously, yet in the “Jewish state” it has the force of law. In the U.S. “Jewish” has no legal standing (although some might wish it did). Absent the force of zionazi-law, claims of a Jewish race collapse into absurdity (as eljay’s story about the Chinese Jew illustrates).
Before I read Nepon's exercise in Jewish identity politics I had kind thoughts about NJA. They put out a poster starting with the usual zio-bullshit that "our homeland has fallen into disrepair, it is time for Jews all over the world to return to their ancestral lands to make the desert bloom, blah, blah. Accordingly, we call upon the Jews of NYC to return to the Lower East Side, the Jews of Pittsburgh to return to the Hill District, the Jews of Boston to return to Mattapan, and so forth." I still have that on my office door.
"I was experiencing heartbreaking anti-Semitism on the Left including a local forum about the 2001 World Conference Against Racism which devolved around the topic of "Zionism = Racism" as did the international gathering."
What is wrong with the statement "Zionism = Racism" and why is it an example of anti-Semitism?
It was The Goose Step, not The Brass Check. Sorry. "You could not tell a chart of the University of Pennsylvania from a chart of the United Gas Improvement Company."
In The Brass Check, a study of who controlled major universities, Upton Sinclair called Penn the University of the United Gas Improvement (the utility company). Follow the money.
U. Penn Board of Trustees
as of January 1, 2011
David L. Cohen, Esq., Chair
Mr. David M. Silfen, Vice Chair
Mr. George A. Weiss, Vice Chair
Scott L. Bok, Esq.
Mrs. Judith Bollinger
Mr. David Brush
Gilbert F. Casellas, Esq.
Mrs. Susan W. Catherwood
Dr. Raymond K. F. Ch'ien
William W.M. Cheung, DMD
Hon. Thomas Corbett, ex officio
Pamela Daley, Esq.
Susan F. Danilow, Esq.
Mrs. Lee Spelman Doty
Mr. William P. Egan II
Mr. David Ertel
Mr. Jay S. Fishman
Mrs. Sarah Fuller
Mr. Robert A. Gleason, Jr.
Perry Golkin, Esq.
Mr. Joel M. Greenblatt
Mr. James H. Greene, Jr.
Mr. Vahan H. Gureghian
Dr. Amy Gutmann, ex officio
Dr. Janet F. Haas
Mr. Andrew R. Heyer
Osagie O. Imasogie, Esq.
Mr. Robert S. Kapito
Mr. Michael J. Kowalski
Mrs. Andrea Berry Laporte
Mr. William P. Lauder
Mr. Charles B. Leitner III
Mr. Robert M. Levy
M. Claire Lomax, Esq.
Mr. Howard S. Marks
Dr. Deborah Marrow
Mr. Edward J. Mathias
Mr. Marc F. McMorris
Ms. Andrea Mitchell
Mr. Marshall H. Mitchell
Mr. Daniel S. Och
Mr. Simon D. Palley
Mr. Ronald O. Perelman
Mr. Egbert L. J. Perry
Mr. Richard C. Perry
Mrs. Julie Beren Platt
Mr. Andrew S. Rachleff
Mrs. Ann Nolan Reese
Mr. James S. Riepe
Mrs. Katherine Stein Sachs
Marie A. Savard, M.D.
Mr. John P. Shoemaker
Dr. Krishna P. Singh
Ms. Carol Elizabeth Ware
Mr. Mark O. Winkelman
Mrs. Ehsan El-Tahry Zayan
About time someone took on the demigod. Chomsky has said some good things, but when it comes to the Middle East he is blinded by his sentimental attachment to the Zionism of his youth, to which he is loyal no matter how many times it has disappointed him. That is why he goes into deny mode at any mention of Zionism or the Lobby and can’t even bring himself to support BDS. The same is true of his disciple Finkelstein.
“national interests of the United States”—I don’t recognize the concept. I understand my own interests (more or less), the interests of my friends and family, even the interests of my working-class sisters and brothers around the world—but the “national interests”?—sorry, I don’t get it.
Apart from having no wish to defend Israeli interests, I also question the attachment to what some call American interests. I remind people of the words of a German sage, "The workers have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got."
"The danger is that young Jews will not only check their Zionism at the door, but their connection to all things Jewish."
Why is that a danger?
patm: "racists masquerading as liberals"
That is it, exactly. When I spoke of “the soft Zionism of Jewish peoplehood” I had no idea that the group you cited actually existed, but they prove my point: the very belief in Jewish peoplehood (capitals or lower-case) is an expression of racial ideology. Who would ever be so ridiculous as to assert the existence of Methodist peoplehood?
Patm: “Our battle is not with Jews, it is with Zionists of all stripes.”
I agree, but what about “the soft Zionism of Jewish peoplehood,” which expresses itself, among other ways, in groups addressing the Palestine issue set up for Jews only, which by their names relegate others to second-class standing? What would you have thought of a group that called itself Whites Against Apartheid, or individuals who stressed their whiteness in opposing racial oppression?
Patm: “The word “tribe” seems to be important to a lot of secular Jews. The answer to your question may lie within its meaning, notatall.”
Tribes were relevant in the days when one band of hunter-gatherers differed from another in important ways, including the languages they spoke. Today tribes are anachronistic, at best futile efforts to overcome alienation. The solution lies not in attempting to recreate outmoded forms but in building a new world in which, as Marx wrote, “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
I am continually astonished by the sight of otherwise reasonable people twisting like racing touts in the dock at dimadok’s perfectly simple question, What makes a non-religious, non-Zionist American a Jew? I can see that someone who practices the Judaic religion is a Jew. Someone who lives in Israel and avails himself of the state privileges associated with being identified as Jewish is a Jew. But for the life of me I cannot understand why secular Americans who enjoy hotdogs, pizza, basketball, blues music, etc. and whose daily lives differ in no way from the lives of their non-"Jewish" countrymen insist on identifying as Jews. I suppose if someone wants to call him- or herself a Jew, then others should respect that. But why someone would do it is beyond me. Years ago the African-American comedian Dick Gregory said that when he was drunk he thought he was Polish. The difference is, he meant it as a joke, and everyone who heard him took it that way. By the way, is a Zionist of non-Jewish ancestry also a Jew, if he says he is?
Reply to Diane Shammas: I taught Humanities at the American University of Beirut a couple of years ago. I recall a discussion in which my students, mostly Lebanese, told stories of being denied housing or employment because of the religious group they belonged to, and recounted how potential employers or landlords would identify their group by their name or their mother’s name, etc. All deplored the confessional system. I let them go on for forty-five minutes, and then asked, What about the Palestinians? Their universal response was, That’s different, they are foreigners. This was shortly after Carlos Slim, the cellphone multibillionaire of Lebanese ancestry had just been welcomed in Beirut as a prodigal son. Let me get this straight, I said, Carlos Slim, born and raised in Mexico, who speaks no Arabic, has never before been in Lebanon, is Lebanese, and the Palestinians are still foreigners after three generations? They shrugged their shoulders. The confessional system in Lebanon is the rough counterpart of ethnicity in the U.S. a hundred years ago, when political positions, jobs, housing, and social services were channeled through ethnic societies. It is deeper in Lebanon than it was in the U.S. because it is formally institutionalized, which it never was in the U.S., but the parallels are there. The situation of the Palestinians fits the classic definition of racial oppression, a system in which identity is inherited and imposed independently of place of birth or residence, language, culture or even religious belief—just like the racial regime immediately to the south.
Finkelstein at Occupy Boston
Norman Finkelstein spoke in November at Occupy Boston. He gave one of the most miserable performances I have ever witnessed, an appeal not to get ahead of public opinion. He gave as an example his own willingness to give up his shirt to the homeless sleeping out-of-doors in the cold, but added that if anyone asked him to give up a spare room in his apartment he wasn’t ready, and so it would be a mistake to ask him. Evidently he identifies with those who have warm clothes and homes rather than those who lack them, and it obviously never occurred to him that the movement is not about asking but about taking.
I once heard one of the big civil rights leaders speak at a rally in Harlem. When he finished, Malcolm X stood up and said, “The biggest thing we have to watch out for is these Uncle Tom preachers.” After hearing Finkelstein last night I think I know how Malcolm felt. When question time came I referred to that occasion, and asked Finkelstein how he reconciled his commitment to ordinary politics with his support for the Occupy movement, whose greatest strength was its rejection of ordinary politics. He responded by saying he had always thought of himself as a leftist, so how could he be a moderate, and if he was so moderate, how come he had been dismissed from jobs.
Later that evening, Finkelstein spoke at Boston University. A report from someone in attendance:
At Boston University he gave one of the most hypocritical, delusional and offensive talks of his career as well. I think he's boycott material at this point.
As a Zionist, he's terrified that an occupy movement may bring along not just a shift in opinions about Israel and US policies, but also actions and demands to bring an end to the racist system represented by a Jewish state in Palestine, and that's why all his warnings at his Occupy Boston talk about not becoming a 'cult' continued in his BU talk: the cult in this case is anyone who demands anything but the fictional two-state solution. He says, maybe a single state is more moral but claims that it's unrealistic to expect it to happen, thus fighting for it will only prolong the suffering.
If he really believed that a one-state solution is more moral, wouldn't this be the time to push for it? Instead he shrieks in fear of any real and just resolution.
At a moment when history is being made and people are looking to not accept the norms (no pun here), he claims one possibility: political resolution along lines dictated by institutions that failed and are still failing to bring any resolution or justice.
At BU he started with a lot of identity politics about being Jewish. I understand he's addressing an audience with many young Jewish students, but I can't stand this crap. When does a Jew become just a human being and not a privileged Jewish human being?
He presented nothing, absolutely nothing, about challenging systems, which is what people with vision hope the occupy movement will embody.
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Summary: Finkelstein's logic is the same on Palestine and Occupy Boston: He denounces those who fight for justice not because he thinks they are wrong but because those in power will not accept it. Malcolm X understood his type.
"If there is going to be a civil war inside Israel, these are the new fronts."
Much to be desired.
MRW,
We are talking about the same tract. Napoleon sold it to Jefferson because he had no use for it once he lost Saint Domingue. Some day people may study U.S. growth as part of Haitian history.
“How many black people did you see among these “liberals,” or really anywhere on the Vineyard? Right, ZERO.” – DAN CROWTHER
While I applaud your spirit, Dan, and share your desire to base antizionism in the working class, I must point out that there are, in fact, many black people on Martha’s Vineyard in the summer: Oak Bluffs has long been a popular resort among African-Americans of a certain social class. Obama has vacationed there for several years, including this past summer, as befits his (and others’) status, no longer as tokens but as full participants in making policy for the ruling class.
Actually, the credit (?) for U.S. possession of Louisiana should go to Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian revolutionaries. As MRW points out, France had intended Louisiana as a breadbasket to feed the laborers (slaves) in its Saint Domingue sugar colony. After the revolutionaries (and disease) wiped out the French army and ruined Napoleon's plan to restore slavery in the colony, Napoleon had no further use for Louisiana, and sold it to Jefferson at a yard-sale price.
On September 11, 2001 I was delivering a lecture in my first-year survey class in U.S. history. Since it was near the beginning of the semester I had only got up to the seventeenth century and the wars between the Puritan settlers of New England and the various indigenous peoples, wars that led to the elimination of the indigenous peoples from that region. A colleague poked her head in the door and informed me that someone had just flown an airplane into the World Trade Center. Uh huh, I said, and continued with my lecture. A few minutes later, someone came around and told me that the school was being closed. I ignored her: What better use could I make of my time, I asked myself, than to provide students with some history that might explain why someone would want to attack the World Trade Center? However, a few minutes later one of the senior administrators entered my classroom and ordered me to leave immediately. I bowed to authority, and dismissed the class.
On my way home from work I found myself on the subway sitting across from two black women. They were discussing the morning’s events. “I knew when they walked out of that conference there would be trouble,” said one, referring to the UN Conference Against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa, from which the U.S. and Israel walked out after the conference voted to condemn Zionism. “In this world,” she continued, “you better not mess with the minorities.”
Walking home from the subway I met a neighbor, also sent home early, wearing a brightly colored orange dress. I complimented her on how nice she looked. She smiled and thanked me.
Those are my memories of “nine-eleven.” I did not avail myself of the “grief-counselors” considerately supplied by my employer, at taxpayers’ expense. (‘Tis an ill wind that blows no good, I thought, having in mind the battalions of unemployed psychology graduates who would now be sucking on the public teat.)
Now, ten years later, the emotion industry is operating full power: marine bands and color guards, their National Anthem preceding and interrupting the sports events I and millions of others are trying to watch, leaving not a single jaw unclenched or a single tear unjerked.
The experience brings to my mind the days following the Kennedy assassination: I was at work in a factory in New York City when the first news came that the President had been shot. His condition was not yet known. One of my fellow workers, an Irish-American, sidled over and said, “Do you know how they can tell if he’s dead? Hold a glass of whiskey under his nose, and if he doesn’t reach for it, he’s dead.” Irish humor. Malcolm X spoke for me and millions of others. The tears came later, along with the spectacle, and initial feelings were repressed altogether and later denied.
I do not consider myself an unfeeling person. A few days after the World Trade Center attack I was on a bus riding through a black working-class area. Looking out the window I saw four young men with baseball bats beating a fifth lying on his back in the street. What to do? I was paralysed. I thought of getting off the bus and trying to intervene. But what if they turned on me? I did nothing. One of the other passengers told the bus driver, who called it in on his radio, I presume to the police.
That incident, far more than the attack on the World Trade Center, captured for me the horror of life in America. Here were five young black men, the hope of the country, killing each other over drugs, or a woman, or territory, or a verbal insult—in short, over the miserable totality of their lives. And as you read these words, such events are taking place by the thousands all over the country, a World-Trade-Center-a-day. And there are no bands playing, no flags flying.
"In noticeable parts, and as one might expect, Bin Laden's letter is both anti-Jewish (a.k.a anti-Semitic) and fanatical. "--Matthew Taylor
Fanatical, maybe, though that's a judgment call. But what is there anti-Semitic, at least in the quoted part? The use of the word "Jews"? Who was Palestine handed over to?
Sorry to take so long getting back to you. "Scots-Irish" refers to the Scottish Presbyterians and their descendants who were settled in Ireland during and after Cromwell's wars of conquest to provide a social base for the oppression of the native Irish. It is ironic that many of them, finding themselves impoverished, emigrated to America, settling mainly in Appalachia, where they were used to enforce white supremacy in the same way that in Ireland they had enforced Protestant Ascendancy.
“For much of the Diaspora, Jews were a separate group from the others amongst whom they dwelled apart, held together by the Judaic religion” (Keith).
Yes, but what held together the Judaic religion? “Let us not seek the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us seek the secret of the religion in the real Jew” (Karl Marx).
In medieval, non-commercial Europe, the special attachment of Jews to commerce and activities linked to it underlay their existence as a separate group. The French Revolution tore down the basis for Jewish separateness: wherever Napoleon’s armies went, the ghetto walls came down, strengthening tendencies toward assimilation.
Zionism replaced commerce and the ghetto as the glue. Without it, Jews would not exist as a separate group.
I don’t know when the term first began to be used, but I have always suspected it was an attempt on the part of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants from Europe, including you-know-who, to exempt themselves from responsibility for America’s shameful record toward American Indians, blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, etc: It wasn’t us “ethnics,” the term implied, it was the “WASPS.” By the twentieth century that posture lost whatever plausibility it may have had. Moreover, the term conveniently “forgets” the rednecks and hillbillies of English and Scots-Irish descent in the Low Country and Appalachia, the dustfarmers of Oklahoma and Texas, the “pitchpine Yankees” of New England and upstate New York all the way to Iowa, and the “losers” who sought refuge in the West. A graph of the ups and downs over time of various groups in the U.S. would show that the curves for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and for African-Americans resemble each other more than they do the curves for various immigrant groups from Europe.
A guy is walking along a street and sees a storefront window with a display of watches. He goes in and says to the man behind the counter, "I'd like to leave my watch for repair."
The man behind the counter says, "I'm sorry, we don't repair watches. We perform circumcisions."
"Why do you have all the watches in the window?" asks the puzzled man.
"What am I supposed to put in the window?" asks the man behind the counter.
A June 10 piece in the Forward reported that residents of New Square, a town of 7,000 in Rockland County, must walk streets strictly divided by gender, with women on one side and men on the other, as dictated by Yiddish signs posted on telephone poles lining those streets. Women are not allowed to drive. Students at New Square yeshivas who wish to travel outside the town must obtain permission from the yeshiva — not just from their parents — before doing so.
According to the New York Post of March 21 some NYC Hasidim fear that a gentile-owned company might take over the private bus company that operates from Borough Park to Williamsburg and run routes on Saturdays, fail to separate men and women riders, and stop giving discounts to yeshiva students, as has been the case up to now.
Of course these protests are to be welcomed, but U.S. history offers lots of examples of protests and even powerful movements among less well-off members of the favored race that left the system largely intact, with them still under the heel of the ruling class, because at the crucial moment they chose whiteness over freedom.
I just watched “Love Comes Lately,” a film based on three short stories by I.B. Singer. Although the principal characters are Jewish, the film is not about Jewish themes. At one point a man and woman, thinking about hooking up and realizing they together have a good deal of money, discuss what they should do with it, and one suggests they buy an apartment in Israel. As it turns out, that does not happen, but what is most significant is the naturalness of it: of course they would consider moving to Israel. No mention of Zionism, or anything “political.” The episode underscores Phil’s point that for American Jews, geography is destiny, as well as point he makes elsewhere, that they are not going to be able to get out of this cul-de-sac by themselves. That is one reason I oppose “Jews for Peace” and similar groups: by their very names they reinforce the idea that colonialism, racial oppression, apartheid and genocide are Jewish questions when they involve Israel, and devalue the contributions of those who are not Jews.
I'm surprised--not necessarily disbelieving but surprised--to hear this about four people I have admired. Can you provide more information? Also, I wonder what Trillin's response would be to Phil's column? Can anyone send it to him, perhaps at The Nation?
One could start with the American abolitionists (perhaps the most successful revolutionists in history): 1) They rejected in advance no means of attaining their goal. Though most favored peaceful means, and some were pacifists in principle, they condemned no one who fought against slavery. Garrison declared, “As a peace man—an ‘ultra’ peace man—I am prepared to say: ‘Success to every slave insurrection at the South...’” Phillips said that John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry had abolished slavery in Virginia. 2) They understood that slavery was not an aberration in an otherwise healthy system, and hence saw all struggles for justice as linked. Phillips said, “Whether his voice cheered the starving Hindoo crushed beneath British selfishness, or Hungary battling against treason and the Czar, whether he pleaded at home for bread and the ballot, or held up with his sympathy the ever-hopeful enthusiasm of Ireland—every true word spoken for suffering man is so much done for the Negro bending beneath the weight of American bondage.” At this moment, support for striking inmates in California prisons is a blow against Zionism.
I hope this is helpful.
Thanks. My tastes run in other directions, toward the discussion of how to crush the infamy. To me, politics does not consist of arguing against those with whom one disagrees but of locating those with whom one agrees and acting on the agreement. But to those who enjoy poking holes in hasbara I say, have at it!
This site, and this thread in particular, shows a few hardcore Zionists—you know their names—whom words will never move. It is dismaying to see Dan, Annie and others arguing with them. What about assigning that task to Mooser, who seems to have a strong stomach and a talent for it, leaving others free to discuss how the struggle against Zionism fits with the overall struggle for a better world, the relation of Zionism and Jewishness, possibilities and limitations of electoral action, the relation of BDS to direct action, whether BDS should be limited to “the occupation” or should target Zionistan itself, the role of the Lobby, and other serious questions? (Of course I would not wish to exclude Mooser from other discussions in which he saw fit to intervene.)
“Jews that want to 'integrate' or assimilate are more than welcome. Jews that don’t want to 'integrate' have that option also. It is not either/or proposition and there is no need for a war between the two sides.”
On its face that would seem to make sense—until one remembers that for secular "Jews" preserving their distinctiveness always involves the “Jewish state,” by definition permanent war.
Every one of the states in the Middle East is the result of external military and diplomatic interference: a friend of mine in Beirut refers to herself as “north Palestinian.”
I keep insisting: the dispute is about neither religion nor ethnicity. I dealt with religion above. As for ethnicity, the Zionists took people from fifty countries, speaking different languages, with different cultures, practicing different religions (or no religion at all) and assigned them the status of "Jew"--based on the absurd fiction that they and only they are descended from the biblical Abraham. That has no more to do with ethnicity than "white" in S. Africa or Alabama. It is RACE.
annie, The words between quotation marks are from the essay. By "non-believing Arab" I meant a Palestinian Arab who does not believe in a religion. I guess that is the same as secular. I was trying to correct the writer's assumption that Arab equals Muslim.
I applaud the sentiments, but one correction: the dispute is not about "faith." Zionists are not seizing "the land of people of one faith for the exclusive use of the people of another." Many of the people certified as "Jews" in Israel are clandestine Christians (from Russia) or non-believers, and land is being seized from Christian and non-believing Arabs as well as from Muslims.
“You could have made the same argument that it was ok that the UN voted that Zionism is like racism.”
What else would you call an ideology that defines ownership of the state not by place of birth, language, religion or culture but by descent? If Zionism isn’t racism, the term has no meaning.
Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.
You left out the large number of “progressive Jews” who disagree on some points with those on your list but who share with them the belief that the essential criterion for judging a policy is whether it is “good for the Jews.” Such people suffer from what one scholar called “the Zionism of Jewish peoplehood” and serve ultimately to protect the hard Zionists from the righteous wrath of their victims.
In order to win the War and break the power of the slaveholders, Lincoln enlisted the aid of the slaves, who withdrew their labor-power from the plantation and enlisted in the Union Army. Their actions were decisive. Without the IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT among the propertied classes, they could not have won their freedom.
Is it possible to foresee comparable fissures in US society today that could offer an opening to those struggling for justice in Palestine?
US Middle East policy has provoked opposition from various quarters, including sectors of capital. Might those sectors seek to overturn the Zionocracy, which seems as solidly in power as did the slaveholders? Where would a modern Lincoln turn for support? General Petraeus made waves last year when he said that unequivocal support for Israel was endangering the lives of American soldiers. Read that as endangering US domination in the Middle East. The Army may be the only institution in American life today capable of going toe-to-toe with the Zionocracy.
Such a conflict among the powerful would transform Middle East policy from a question of interest only to those who feel a tie to the region plus antiwar activists and a few individuals of conscience into a concern of millions. It could even lead to a crisis on the scale of the Civil War, which would benefit those seeking justice in Palestine.
Are the organizers of this event concerned that the security guards who dispersed the flashmob were black—yes, I know, they were only doing their job—while the participants appeared to be entirely white—notwithstanding that the greatest well of sympathy for the Palestinian people is to be found among the black population?
Ah, the “1967 borders”--words heavy with promise, and sure to lead to lasting peace, as the examples of India, Ireland and Cyprus (earlier attempts to divide a land based on descent) have shown...
“Who will appoint the Supreme Court and other judges?” and “Is Palin an acceptable alternative?”
Comments like the above reinforce my suspicion that the Republican Party's reason for existence is to persuade well-meaning people to vote Democrat. Are the Dems' past Court appointments better than the Republicans', and is the difference worth all one had to swallow? Is Obama an acceptable alternative to Palin? Acceptable to whom?
Cornel West needs to recognize that Obama is not a brother who has gone astray or been misled by clever whites (Jews) but the class enemy, as much as Donald Trump or Michael Bloomberg. How can anyone betray a cause he was never part of? It was their lack of a class analysis that led West and a lot of others to expect something else.
In Israel, “Jew” is a social identity. The Zionists took people from (Dan Senor says) seventy countries, of different appearances, speaking different languages, practicing different religions (or no religion at all), and assigned them the label “Jew” based on the fiction that they, and only they, are descended from the Biblical Abraham. The claim is so absurd that only Zionists and Nazis even pretend to take it seriously. The functional definition of “Jew” in "Israel" is someone who can be depended upon to police the indigenous people in return for official and unofficial privileges. (Even the Ethiopians, at the bottom of the “Jewish” pile alongside or slightly above the Russians, have access to privileges denied Palestinians.) The day the “Jews” of "Israel" (except for the religious minority who would be Jews in a particular, limited sense even without Zionism) decide to reject an identity based on the oppression of others, and learn to think of themselves as adoptive Palestinians, is the day they will begin to take part fully in the struggle for human freedom. If they can't do that, then, as Helen Thomas said, they should go back where they came from.
Thanks to those who replied. Please note, I said, "those who regard themselves, ABOVE ALL, as Jews"--which is, I take it, the rationale behind their identification with the "Jewish community" rather than the human community. Phil wrote, "I know that Jews in Israel will lose something, they should lose something." He is right. For many in the "Jewish community," support for Palestinian rights is conditional on the preservation of Jewish privileges, including the continued existence of the "Jewish state" in some form. It reminds me of the classic agenda of white liberalism: raise up black people without taking anything away from whites. Such people are gatekeepers, not solidarity activists.
Phil,
People do not change out of fear, but only out of hope. I admire what you do, and I understand why you focus your attentions on American Jews, but I think the self-defined Jewish community is the constituency least likely to join in breaking the stranglehold of zionism over US politics. Only those who identify with the oppressed will be able to renounce their privileges and take part fully in the struggle for humanity--and that will never happen among those who regard themselves, above all, as Jews.
From Wikipedia on the Dakota War of 1862:
In early December [1862, in the aftermath of the War], 303 Sioux prisoners were convicted of murder and rape by military tribunals and sentenced to death. Some trials lasted less than 5 minutes. No one explained the proceedings to the defendants, nor were the Sioux represented by a defense in court. Pres. Abraham Lincoln personally reviewed the trial records to distinguish between those who had engaged in warfare against the U.S., versus those who had committed crimes of rape and murder against civilians.
Henry Whipple, the Episcopal bishop of Minnesota and a reformer of U.S. policies toward Native Americans, urged Lincoln to proceed with leniency. On the other hand, General Pope and Minnesota Senator Morton S. Wilkinson told him that leniency would not be received well by the white population. Governor Ramsey warned Lincoln that, unless all 303 Sioux were executed, "[P]rivate revenge would on all this border take the place of official judgment on these Indians." In the end, Lincoln commuted the death sentences of 264 prisoners, but he allowed the execution of 39 men.
This clemency resulted in protests from Minnesota... Republicans did not fare as well in Minnesota in the 1864 election as they had before. Ramsey (by then a senator) informed Lincoln that more hangings would have resulted in a larger electoral majority. The President reportedly replied, "I could not afford to hang men for votes."
Even Ha'aretz sees through the modern Lincoln: "Obama murdered bin Laden for a fistful of votes"
link to haaretz.com
After spending ten years and goodness-knows-how-many millions of dollars, the omniscient US “intelligence” forces claim to have succeeded in tracking down and killing a six-foot-four-inch bearded Arab who moved around with an oxygen tank. What a triumph. Next we will be told that 9/11 was a victory because seven “terrorists” died.
Facts are stubborn things. If someone said that the organized Cuban community in Florida and elsewhere was a major barrier to the normalization of relations with Cuba, no one would object or accuse the speaker of "anti-Cubanism." Yet in the case of Israel...
Whoever asserted that U.S. foreign policy toward an entire region of the world was decisively shaped, against rational imperialist interests (let alone the needs of working people), by a well-funded and well-organized lobby based on a small ethnic group that wields political influence far out of proportion to its numbers and is sentimentally attached to one of the regimes in the region would immediately be accused of anti-Semitism—unless he was talking about the Caribbean and the Cuban exile community, in which case people could have a reasonable discussion examining the various forces that determine official policy. Yet in the case of “Israel,” that discussion is forbidden in what are called progressive circles, and whoever tries to raise it is hushed up.
All this weeping over the fate of the settlers in the event of two states... It's a false issue. Why not a single state in all of historic Palestine, one person, one vote, with the people pushed out since 1947 allowed to return? Of course the result might be an Arab majority. Horrors! In that case, the settlers who can get along with their neighbors will stay, the rest will leave.
When did the fake-breezy "Have a good one" replace the slightly less objectionable "Have a nice day"?
First off, all measures of resistance taken by an oppressed people are moral, whatever their tactical strengths and weaknesses.
Second, it would help to clarify the ultimate goal of the resistance, whatever form it takes.
Third, what about a million-person march on the borders of the Zionist state, from Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, met by sympathizers from inside, with the aim of implementing the right of return and establishing majority-rule through direct action? Of course, that idea cannot be organized from New York.
Seeking the roots of zionism in Jewish tradition does not constitute Jew-hating. Shamir goes farther, blaming the Jews (or the “Jewish spirit” as he says) for evils that would and do exist even without Jews, such as war and colonialism. In addition, he plays a dangerous game by allying with Dave Duke, Kevin McDonald and various other white-race supremacists who, for tactical reasons, are harping on another string these days. Zionism is race doctrine, and can only be defeated by opposing all race doctrine. To the best of my knowledge, Atzmon has not fallen into either trap.
The Zionists brought people from fifty countries, speaking different languages and practicing different religions (or no religion at all), and defined them as a single people based on the fiction that they, and only they, are descended from the Biblical Abraham. All others are there on their sufferance. The presence or absence of physical markers is of little importance. One cannot tell an individual “Jew” from an individual “Arab” by appearance, but status is nevertheless assigned on the basis of inheritance. What is that but racial?
I keep asking the same question. The Judaic religion I understand. A strong attachment to Yiddish culture I understand. But what makes a secular American for whom baseball, pizza and jazz are far more important than the shtetl “Jewish”? Why not just give it up? Some have cited the need to oppose anti-Semitism. But I don’t get it. If you don’t need to be black in order to fight white supremacism, why do you need to be Jewish to fight anti-Semitism (which is hardly an immediate problem in the West anyhow)?
Another one "shot while attempting to escape."
I recently met a young man in Haifa who said he had been born in Israel and moved to Palestine, without changing his residence. He also said that if he ever became convinced that he could not struggle effectively against Zionism he would leave: “I would not stay here as a settler.” I found it significant that, while not denying his ancestry—that would be pointless—he did not identify as a Jew or an Israeli but as a Hebrew-speaking Palestinian.
"You will look long and hard to find a decent Jew ANYWHERE who does not regard the enthusiasm unanimously expressed in Israel for the massacre of civilian aid workers as a profound and dangerous psychosis."
I wish that what decentjew says were true. Unfortunately I find that nearly all of those who think of themselves as Jews feel a residual loyalty to the “Jewish state” and are therefore unable to look at it as a settler colony ("gangster state") with no moral right to exist. That is one reason I maintain that most westerners of Jewish ancestry (except for those with religious convictions) would find it intellectually and spiritually emancipating to cease thinking of themselves as Jews and begin to identify as Americans-without-hyphens, or French, or simply members of the human race.
Israel—too small for a country, too large for a lunatic asylum.
Again, the problem is the pronoun: Who is the “we?” For the people in question the Judaic religion is gone, there’s no common language, so all that remains of their Jewishness is Israel and Hitler. Israel is an abomination, and one need not be Jewish to abhor Hitler. So why don’t they lay their burden down and join the rest of humankind?
Unfortunately the rest of Judt's piece is not nearly as good as these excerpts.
For the irreligious assimilated people whose "Jewishness" is largely a matter of habit, dropping it is an emancipation.
My only disagreement with Phil turns on his use of pronouns. Who is this “we” he keeps talking about? Jews? But Phil has given up the Judaic religion and rejected the Zionist project—so what is left of his Jewishness? Chicken soup and a few Yiddish expressions? It is likely that as someone brought up in the U.S. he has more English or Afro-American elements in his makeup than Yiddish. (I say this without denying or deprecating the Yiddish component.) The choice of which “we” to identify with is perhaps the most important decision anyone can make, and it is a shame to make it out of mere habit. Take the last step: Come out from among them and join the human family, without reservation! You will find it emancipating.
A better analogy might be the killing of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman (especially the last two) in Mississippi 1964. James Forman, the brains behind Mississippi Summer, was reported to have said that nothing would change until some white people died. It took the death of white people to wake U.S. public opinion.
God exists. As I recall, about twenty years ago Dershowitz opened a kosher restaurant in Harvard Square that went broke after a few months.
The only place I can think of where ordinary "civilians" were as directly involved in atrocities was in the American "West" (including Puritan New England). Even in Nazi Germany the killings were mostly carried out by professionals, specially trained for the purpose.
Reminds me of the famous photo from the civil rights era showing a group of jeering young white toughs someplace in the south grabbing their crotches and raising their middle fingers in response to demonstrators.
Gorenberg’s reference to the 1948 Palestinian “exodus” reminds me of the history lesson given years ago at a Thanksgiving dinner in western Massachusetts: “There used to be Indians here, but they went away.”