Total number of comments: 97 (since 2011-01-03 14:28:41)
simoned
A Palestinian academic. A progressive internationalist with a wholly secular outlook. Meticulously pacifist and a militantly anti-reactionary perspective. An interest in progressive advocacy spanning gay rights, refugee rights.
Yes, it's going to be two vetos (two no's from permanent members). But the nice thing is that contrary to the rubbish published in Haaretz, Nigeria is a definite YES.
I disagree with Rabbani on one issue. I Don't think the Hamas government in Gaza has any legitimacy. While I think, unfortunately,
Abbas has all the legitimacy at present; that legitimacy was passed to him by Arafat.
Now of course I wish we had real democracy in the PLO and not Arafat's "democracy of the gun," but the PLO remains our only achievement and venue for any sort of national movement.
This is the actual actual text of the declaration sent to the UNSC
"Declaration
In connection with the application of the State of Palestine for admission to membership in the United Nations, I have the honor, in my capacity as the President of the State of Palestine and as the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine
Liberation Organization, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, to solemnly declare that the State of Palestine is a peace-loving nation and that it accepts the obligations contained in the Charter of the United Nations solemnly undertakes
to fulfill them."
This is from the letter accompanying the declaration:
"Palestine's application for membership is made consistant with the rights 0f the Palestine refugees in accordance with international law and United Nations resolutions, including General Assembly resolution194 (111) (1948), and with the status of the Palestine Liberation Organization (P LO) as the sole legitimate
representativ of the Palestinian people."
Both of these are missed in the Haaretz statement and apparently by Omar.
What is wrong with English language Palestinian advocacy? Why is it intent on undermining the PLO?
Here is the actual actual application:
link to un.int
It is insistant that the PLO is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, several times.
Omar,
Do you have the actual application? because I think it does contain something about the PLO.
I agree with you Inanna,
I would like to see Mahmoud Abbas retiring soon and a general election being held for the chairmanship of the PLO. An that hopefully covers all the camps in and out of Palestine. I would also like to see the PLO taking over all the activities of the PA. Not dismantling the PA but consolidating it within the PLO. In particular the PNC should supplant the PA parliament (so Fayyad, the should be out too as well as hanniyeh.)
I would like Hamas to join the PLO.
What is likely to happen however is Abbas will remain at the helm till he starts shaking like poor old Arafat. But there are ways to prevent this.
No one will walk out. That's my bet. No one representing the west has an ounce of morality in the UN.
There are degrees of sovereignty. Recall that here we are talking about the Palestinians who have never enjoyed real sovereignty and in fact in our refugee camps in the first few decades we were simply prisoners in Lebanon as well as Jordan.
So at this stage the ability to mount non-negligible self defense is a degree of sovereignty and I'm hoping for in the west bank.
The hope is that eventually we will be able to secure the same kind of sovereignty that Italy enjoys.
I am very pessimistic about the possibility of getting anything significant in terms of broad support from the American Jewish community.
The main reason is the apparent solidarity with Israel as though it is a friend, a relative, a brother. Rather than simply a state. The solidarity is solid and the use of instruments such as charges of anti-semitism, or self hatred, are very effective in maintaining this solidarity.
Further, there is an underlying acceptance of colonial thinking. Look at J-Street for instance. I was approached by two Israeli Arab parties in 2009 about the possibility of full Arab representation in the J-Street meeting. After all it was a meeting about Israel and many Jewish representatives of Israeli political parties were participants.
I approached J-Street and was told either NO, or that if they do participate it can only be in committees about internal Israeli issues and not Israel foreign affair, or Israel's relation with the American Jewish community, or Jewish issues which include israeli defense.
Of course, we didn't go.
Also, of course I am affected by the recent events on a democratic forum, and the bullying that Palestinians received from almost the whole of the community there. The racism and vilification was unbelievable. It was as though we were living on the edge of an extremist settlement in Hebron. And look at the solidarity within that forum's community with the decision to decimate Palestinian advocacy there.
We never looked to Israel for our rights and we should have never trusted the Americans in this regard. Indeed, as we saw from Obama's speech there is little that is different between the "left" in the US and the extreme right in Israel.
Our only hope is to achieve self determination unilaterally not because of but despite the US and Israel. Further, the Arab world has changed and no ethnic cleansing on any scale is going to happen again in Palestine (to either side).
The emergence of Arafat and the 1969 Cairo agreement had to do with the massacre of Palestinians in Jordan and dually with the defeat of the Arab armies in 1967.
1974 had far more to do with the entrenchment of the PLO in a troubled Lebanon.
List of vetoed applications to UNSC (mostly membership applications)
link to undemocracy.com
Actually, tens of countries got UN recognition after Israel. Including Italy, Finland, Austria, Portugal, Japan, Libya, and Jordan. The USSR vetoed all of them except for Israel.
u kamen, soy za3lani li'ani said good things about 3arafat ;-)
A random ambassador was telling me how chaotic the situation was a seven months ago and how it just appeared simply that the diplomats decided to do this on their own and Abbas et. al. were sucked in. Tail wagging dog. So for instance the trip to Brasil, did Abbas know what he was doing? Or discussions with the Portugees?
I said you'll fail. He said in-sha'a-allah we will succeed decisively and in-sha'a-allah we will fail well.
One possibility is for Israel to harden its position and for the palestinians to leverage the Arab Spring and international support and appropriate an independent out of the occupation.
That is create an environment that is entirely unsustainable for Israel domestically and internationally.
In other words Soy
The real question is Will Abbas follow through or will he buckle this week.
We want a UNSC decision this week. Even a rejection is positive for us.
Two issues:
1) Security cooperation. Yes indeed that is the main question about how we react after the vote. Civil society has to compel Abbas to end security cooperation with Israel. It is up to the Palestinian people to compel Abbas to take the correct measures following the vote. But the vote and going to the UN is the right thing to do.
2) The move to the UN was prepared by the diplomatic corp of the PLO. Though they have been recently modernised and professionalized, my sense is that this is not Abbas' initiative entirely. He fell into it and became bound by it. Palestinian governance is chaotic, and I bet Abbas is regretting going down this road at the moment. In fact I bet that most of the lobbying at present for ending this move is coming from Saeb Erakat and associated fat cat stooges; who benefit from the VIP status that they get from the occupation.
Regardless of what the honorable gentleman representative of Palestine in Lebanon says, should a Palestinian state be established that is independent and sovereign all Palestinians will have a right to take up citizenship in that state.
Now regarding the refugees. We need to transition to away from UNRWA.
It's time to a have a sovereign independent home for these refugees. We simply cannot allow yet another generation to grow in the refugee camps, stateless. Nothing can mitigate their legal rights of return to Israel or their right to their properties in Israel, even citizenship in a mini Palestinian state.
I have great disdain for the apparatchiks in the PA. And I see great advantages of getting rid of it. But this is a move in the UN by the PLO. It is bound to bring down the PA and the whole bilateral negotiations dynamic.
This well reflects my experience in US based advocacy for Palestine. In the end the most vehement opposers of Palestinian rights are liberal Zionist, many of whom are reform Jews. I could never understand why.
"We Jews are no longer all ghetto Jews. We don’t walk in the gutter when the non-Jew walks by. We don’t; tremble in fear when non-Jews come at us as they have for centuries."
I have never met a Jewish person like that in my life. In fact, I've been active with very leftist humanists Jews in Israel and they were tough. Tougher than anything I've ever seen. And many of the tougher ones where non-Zionists. Amazing group of leaders in the Palestinian civil rights movement.
There is no Question that should Marwan Barghoutti be released he will be well equipped in terms of popular support to lead the Palestinians.
Though I have to say that Mahmoud al-Zahar seems to be happy being in charge of a blockaded, quasi-independent, Gaza.
Hamas has lost a lot electorally. And sure outside the US where you have parliamentary systems there are many centers of power.
Hamas sees Gaza as the model for the West Bank.
It's a strategy that has found universal acceptance among Palestinians.
It just does not make sense to bargain over things without having clear property rights.
The right to self defence is sacrosanct right?
You mean the language of Hamas and the language of Fateh?
انتزاع
was difficult. in the context I liked liberate better because the meaning is to grab by force.
Of course, if the opportunity arose to open Haifa or Jaffa to their original inhabitants, I'm not sure any Palestinian would bulk at that or hesitating in grabbing that particular opportunity.
What is important here is that Hamas sees the 1967 borders and a state within those borders a strategic priority. So do most Palestinians.
The ideological perspectives of Hamas and Fateh and the other groups of course differ and share this old notion of striving for justice for the Palestinian people.
I take the opportunity of extending the prohibition on Lashon Hara to this Barghoutti.
I'm not impressed by him. Though usually I am not impressed by individuals. I like institutions/political parties/groups. For instance there isn't a single activist in the US that can be more impressive than say al-awda.
But the more we have of independent thinking individuals willing to criticize the better.
link to english.aljazeera.net
organizing protests as we speak.
First a majority of Palestinians seem to support the UN bid
link to maannews.net
Look imagine that you are negotiating over anything and the ownership of that thing is disputed. WHo get's what in that case? It's not clear. What this UN bid is doing is defining ownership as Palestinian. This way any future negotiations will be on that basis. Each inch of land Israel wants to keep has a price.
If you were Israel would you want clarification who who owns the occupied territories before we begin negotiations? Certainly not.
well it accepts that a state of Palestine be established in the 1967 borders. That this be done without negotiations, and that sovereignty be imposed by Palestinians.
The idea is that negotiations in the future happen between two states and not between a state and an occupied peoples. I think that much of Fateh agrees with this. That is bilateral negotiations while occupied are useless. There is a need for sovereignty and then we negotiate.
But there is a consensus on the borders.
I think that it is very important that this kind of language regarding AIPAC and other lobbies become acceptable in polite company, and in public advocacy.
This article by Friedman is kind off useful now from a pedagogical point of few. But its usefulness in public advocacy will be far more pronounces by the end of this week when the Palestinian UN bid fails it.
But here's the problem. From a sectarian perspective these Christian right winger (I guess the Lebanese forces) hate the Sunnis more than the Shiites because the Sunni's are such an overwhelming majority in the Syrian region.
My guess is if there is a civil war in Syria between western backed Sunnis and the other sects, these Christian militias will turn their guns on Sunni neighborhoods and sunni refugee camps.
the news is from DEBKAfile. Not to be taken seriously.
Perhaps the most interesting news of the day is Tayyip Erdogan's visit to Tripoli today. What does this tell us about Turkey's attitude to Syria now?
Is anyone taking Abbas' call for malioniyeh (million person march) next Friday seriously?
I think that democracy will emerge in Egypt and Tunisia.
The hope is that it one day emerges in Israel/Palestine. But that would require a dramatic shift in sectarian attitudes.
Is Israel hostile to Germany? Was it hostile to Germany when survivors and their families were demanding reparations?
We have rights, we have properties, we still own them.
I agree. I hope it all goes to pot.
No Walid,
We all talk about it. And every ambassador that I've met has been scared stiff to say anything out of line regarding the right of return. Though there is one from Nablus in random country I'm presently trying to get fired on this issue (honestly)
The right of return is sacrosanct politically in Palestine. Afterall, we are all refugees.
link to dailykos.com
A link on this.
But I don't think the Saudis are impressed by Erdogan. Too much democracy etc.,
Shabat Shalom, I think there will be a few more years of occupation. But I do hope it falls appart quickly and unexpectedly. Like it did in Egypt in Tahrir square (I was so pessimistic to the last second).
It's more of a late night conversation. I really like the setting. We can't have boring Azmi talking to himself like those religious Saudi lecture programs on tv.
I think that the present government of Israel is concerned about any non-Israeli sovereignty in any part of Palestine.
As for Turkey, I am very surprised by its transformation. And I don't think the Saudi monarchy is actually impressed by this transformation. The Arab people however are cheering them on.
The right of return is an individual right of return of refugees. No Palestinian can or will negotiate it away. That is impossible. The establishment of a Palestinians state does not negate it.
The right of return of Palestinian refugees can be an issue discussed between the two states, Palestine and Israel, if the refugees want the Palestinian government to act as their representative.
It really depends on whether there is an uprising following the vote. If there is an uprising, then the PA/PLO will be compelled to take a more determined stand. I'm not sure what the PA will do if there is no uprising but there is a positive vote.
Off topic. al-akhbar English is amazing so far and so is MW.
I don't generally read the New York Times on Palestinian issues. But I appreciate how important it is on the topic.
"What is your take on Matzpen? "
When you see him next tell him to give me back my packet of cigarets.
Yes I think I know/knew them all.
link to youtu.be
my favorite from the same lot who photoshopped the alsan photo
I don't like to get involved in these things but it is a Rambam menora. That is the Menora sketched by Rambam.
"Poets and poetry is nice, but one has to be familiar with Palestine poetry to advocate for Palestine freedom and statehood or even an end to the Israel occupation or they are ‘pro colonial”?"
I don't get how one can be a participant, not know Palestinian poetry, and not be pro-colonial. Palestinians poetry is not just something that is nice.
"Huumm…well I don’t see myself as part of the Palestine identity because I’m not Palestine and it would be presumptuous of me to try to claim a identity that doesn’t belong to me. "
It is not an identity passed from mother to child or from husband to spouse. It is far broader an identity than that of the refugee falahin. It is a welcoming identity that was shared by the likes of Vittorio Arrigoni; I don't know many Palestinians who didn't see him as being Palestinian.
Do we agree that the Palestinians will be no worse off from the upgrade?
I've always wondered about Gold. How the hell did he rise so high. He is talentless as far as I can tell.
My views are colored by the history and ignominy of the Jewish left in Israel (the real left not the Avoda, Meretz type). there were some debates on these things from the foundation of Israel. In the end Palestinian intellectuals dominated that debate.
There is a history associated with the Israeli communist party and the intellectual debates regarding Zionism that saw schisms, splits, and the emergence and dominance of Palestinian intellectuals and their perspective.
This history, which speaks to much of what we are all interested in desperately needs writing. Some of it has been written in Hebrew, some in Arabic, but it desperately needs a synthesis in English.
My agenda? We have our intellectuals.
The Palestinian cause is owned by the Palestinians. No
one represents us aside from our own. That is the nature of all
colonial liberation movements. And advocacy for an end of colonialism
from within the colonial communities inevitably degenerates into
pro-colonial advocacy.
My advice to non-Palestinians who advocate for Palestine is the
following: Who are the intellectuals that you respect? If the list
does not include Palestinians, then your advocacy is pro-colonial.
What Palestinian poetry do you know? If you are not familiar with
Palestinian poetry, then your advocacy is pro-colonial. Who do you
debate with? If it is not with Palestinians and against Palestinians,
then your advocacy is pro-colonial. Who are the Palestinians? If you
do not see yourself as part of the Palestinian identity, then don't
advocate for us because your advocacy is pro-colonial. Separatism,
sectarianism, are pro-colonial.
Well Walid first we have to agree that it is colonialism and this is an anti-colonialism struggle. Then we identify the interests that drive and protect the colonialism.
Those that refuse to see it as colonialism on the left essentially view it as a sectarian civil war. A war of ideas within the Jewish community, and a civil war in Palestine.
Who cares about the particular dynamics within the US? Follow the money, the power, the might that maintains the colonialism.
But do you agree it is colonialism? Let's begin with that and we can explore the source of the colonialism after.
Yes I saw that. In fact all of this is the scholarly output of that Ariel university.
These guys are a joke and a source of much humor. Nothing will come out of this particular group.
It has always been colonialism in Palestinian leftist literature. In fact, it was identified as colonialism early on by Palestine's premier political writer/thinker Nichola Jabber (who dies in the 1970's). I think that much of the Jewish left even anti-Zionists are reluctant to see it as colonialism. There is a tendency to want to view the colonialism in Palestine as a great battle for the Jewish soul, a battle for Jewish humanism. An internal unique battle within their community.
No this is about Palestine. This is about European style colonialism. Of course, how does the US fit in this. There was a time when I would have agreed about US imperialism. But not now. I view it as American colonialism. Of course, it is driven by a special dynamic within the US, special interests, peculiar ideologies. Of course, it is not universally supported by the US.
But from a Palestinian perspective, it is US colonialism and dissecting the mechanism of this colonialism is interesting by not a priority.
We are presently at a point where the influence of the US as an empire has almost disappeared. It simply does not have the cash to bribe those it needs to bribe and to impose hegemony on the Middle East. What it has is colonialism in Palestine, and it is fighting hard to maintain that colonialism.
Azmi Bishara, the Palestinian analyst a few days back, said that he hopes the US vetos the resolution upgrading the status of the PLO in the UN. The idea is that the anti-colonial struggle in Palestine becomes understood as being a struggle against US colonialism, a fading empire, and not an ethnic or sectarian struggle between Jews and Arabs.
watch this for a bit of madness
link to youtube.com
"i swore a sacred oath on the bible to protect israel."
When and how? Really. I'm interested. You see when Lieberman wanted to introduce a loyalty oath for Arabs of Israel, it became quickly apparent to us that the best approach is that the loyalty oath be imposed on observant Jews too. We'll do it if the Rabbis permit their congregation to take "a sacred oath on the bible" for Israel. Of course, that can never happen for a huge number of reasons.
My understanding and the Palestinian (diplomatic) understanding of the demand that "Israel has a right to exist" is that it is a demand that Palestinians relinquish the right of Palestinian refugees who fled Israel to return to their homes.
I don't think that either Begin or Eban in the 1980's could have predicted that the day will come when Israel will be negotiating with the representatives of the refugees, who will be both unwilling and unable to relinquish the right of return for Palestinian refugees even at the price of getting 93% of the West Bank and an underground tunnel to al-Aqsa.
If one insists on the Palestinians permanently relinquishing the right of their refugees to return to Haifa and Jaffa, then the demand for Palestinians to recognize Israel's right to exist becomes coherent and paramount.
There is no distinction at all between demanding that Palestinians relinquish the rights of their refugees to return to their homes in Israel
and demanding that Palestinians recognize Israel's right to exist.
Of course, no Palestinian negotiator will ever relinquish those rights of Palestinian refugees. That puts some strategic meat on the bone, as it were, regarding the notion of recognizing "Israel's right to exist".
Lovely, just lovely.
This may be embarrassing in the comments section of a Palestinian post on Yiddish poetry. But nonetheless, I am presently madly in love with Leanne O'Sullivan, a poet from Cork county. Look her up. She doesn't write about colonialism but about normal life. My dream is that Palestinians one day have such a normal life that their female poets can write something like this:
ABOUT MIDNIGHT
In among these wet, melon skins
I sit with my back to the bar,
cross-legged, smiling my red mouth.
I’ve painted myself black and leather.
My eyes move quickly, circling
the high, loud limbs of the night.
In the centre of the dance floor
a lioness shrieks in her own bath.
Like red pearls, dry lips pucker
to the eager glass. I drink and blaze.
An animal going mad for the garland
of a woman rolls over to the end
of the bar like a devil’s tongue, red
and greasy, stoned on his own poison
and licking his lips. A man in love
spreads a flock of fingers on my thigh.
I undo them until he hates me
and raise a finger to his back.
The room is flooding, people float
as if on water and music. I stumble
onto my heels and drown with a wrong boy
while the moon turns onto her white belly
and is fed secrets by crippled mouths;
a boyfriend passed out, a glass shattered,
a woman tasted, a child coming to seed
with her legs wrapped around a man,
the night moistening the darkness
with its many breaths.
I'm not sure. The old people that I knew from that time were more comfortable speaking German than Yiddish and they had difficulty with Hebrew till the end.
However, let's not forget that hebrew came at the expense of Arabic much more than Yiddish. You had masses of Arab speaking/reading/writing Jews immigrate and lose their native language.
Arabic has always been as important a language in Judaism and Jewish culture and its development as German/Yiddish. The latter was devastated by the European genocide, the former was destroyed by the reintroduction of Hebrew as a secular language.
You do realize that unadikum was blaring in west Beirut during the siege in 1982, before the massacres.
I guess I like Hebrew because I'm familiar with it, but I have to say Hebrew poetry is still really bad to my ears.
I knew Tawfik Zaiad the best of all of the poets that I listed. At a very human level. He once spoke to us "young ones" and said "now you carry your books, but in the future you will carry something heavier." At the time the only job opportunities for Arabs were in manual labor, so I took it to mean heavy bricks. Other's more poetic than me understood it as the burden of the Palestinian tragedy. A few understood it as guns...
I'm presently exploring poetry from southern Ireland from the time of the rising. But I am more drawn to the new young poets of Cork city. They are fantastic and so many of them.
I recall in one of Isaac Deutscher's essays Ben-Gurion insisted that Deutscher address him in Hebrew and not Yiddish. Deutscher at the time had considerable fame as a Yiddish poet. I can't recall what Deutscher's attitude to that request was.
That said, I encourage my Palestinian students to appropriate Jewish history as though it is their own, and colonize the Jewish past as though it was their own return to Palestine.
I heard Yiddish a lot when I was a kid. But it has now almost entirely disappeared from the Hadar area of Haifa.
Yes Hamas in Gaza isn't but the Hamas forums are both pessimistic and supportive.
For Hamas, which can be understood as the Palestinian opposition, they are against the move because Abbas is for it and is likely to gain the most from it. Palestine is unruly in a democratic kind of way.
My view is the immediate priority is for the Palestinians to get a state in the west bank with Jerusalem as its capital. A place for the refugees of Lebanon and Syria to return to, and a place for Palestinians to live freely. Of course, following a state there will be a great need to negotiate a final settlement with Israel.
As for Palestinians being pessimistic about the UN moves, sure we are pessimistic but at the same time solidly supportive. In fact, there is even some gain to be gotten from a US veto in the UNSC.
ya hala, ya hala
I'm at a total loss regarding the motivations of Markos at Dailykos. We put so much effort into making that place a premier English language source for Arabic and Palestinian as well as Israeli news.
I feel like I waisted three years of my time there, writing poetry, analysis, and providing a unique experiential perspective. I was for a few days very hurt by the shutting down of Arab sources there. It can't be a business decision can it, we were kind off popular.
I just feel like we were used
I felt that Isaac Deutscher within a few years of the establishment of Israel lost his ability to see the suffering. He could not see the suffering of the refugees. He became protective of the "gains" that his community had made. He became inward looking and disoriented by history.
In the same way that the left in the west became disoriented by a perceived need to publicly defend the Soviet union.
Your question is like the introduction to a Monty Python skit.
In my capacity as an Israeli citizen the following is an outline of the most just and most reasonable solution for the I/P situations.
I did not choose Israeli citizenship, it chose me. The passport does not afford to me any new perspective on what is and what is not just, let alone the _most_ just among just solutions.
If you've ever driven in Israel you will know that I won't be able to talk about what is reasonable.
It's never been a situation or an I/P situation.
As far as I can tell. Markos has now banned all the active pro-Palestinian advocates on dailykos.
lol
funny thing is that in Palestine they would say in a hostile way on days they didn't like Mahmoud: so he walks around like he owns the world in Lebanon, smoking Marlboro.
As though the local brand was more "socialist"
yep, that's how it was transliterated
Hey,
You're here. Wonderful
Thanks Philip,
I'm very glad to be here.
The horor they had to put up with. That small group of African Americans. There was this new administrator who would go around telling them to stop being angry and "calm down Francis." Just undignified and lacking respect.
One of the reasons I chose MW is because I've been reading it for some time. I was also very upset about the smear campaign on DailyKos against MW.
Essentially the situation is that Markos has no idea about the personalities and dynamic of the African American community on DailyKos. So he went on a banning and punishment spree. He punished a writer by the name Robinswing. She is highly respected and a real leader in her community. He also banished, as far as I can tell almost half the regular African America writers that I paid attention to. Here is some info, which was followed up by many (DailyKos does not have a reverse citation search):
link to dailykos.com
this is what I sent Meteor Blades. Annie, I would appreciate it if you placed this message as an update at the bottom of the post.
Tim,
It is time for you to come out publicly about the assault on dailykos' Black
community by Markos' purge. It is not time for withdrawal. Make a stand for God's sake. You have a legacy on the site. Your voice needs to be heard.
The Black community on that forum has been devastate. far more than the Palestinian community. They have been purged of many of their strong voices.
This is not about the Palestinians or me. We Palestinians can take
care of ourselves and have a huge network of activists and support all over the US. We are organized. We also represent communities in the US that are well off economically.
Come out publicly against the decimation of the Kos Black community, for the sake of all of us who have labored for civil justice.
Simone
no it's gone big time now. two that complained about the purge and stood up to kos just got banned, trashablanca from black kos just got banned.
also, a very interesting guy Marcion a leftist Jewish identity on the site was also banned just now
The real story is not the banning of some Arab academic.
The real story is the purge of the small black representation on dailykos.
If I was Max Blumenthal I wouldn't be asking Markos why he banned a Palestinian Israeli academic, but I will be investigating the destruction of the black dailykos community in this recent purge.
I mean these are writers who have had to put up with racism that was far worse than what we put up with. Even recently an employee of dailykos shocked me by telling an upset black writer to "take it easy Francis" and why was that black writer upset, because of a tirade of racism.
Palestinian advocacy can take care of itself because essentially we are faced with an opposition that does not have centuries of bigoted history. I feel so sorry for black dailykos writers.
Well Newclench
Let's address the Nazi comparisons.
1) There is ongoing and outright justification of the colonialism in Palestine based using the memory of the European genocide of Europes's Jewish population. This is often used and even Obama used the rhetoric in his Cairo speech to the Muslim and Arab world. So when it benefits the colonial enterprise memories of the European genocide is permitted rhetoric. So for instance, the memory of Warsaw Ghetto uprising often becomes a tool for facilitating colonialism in Palestine. You hear it all the time in Israeli political advocacy, by Israeli members of the Knesset. And one hears it all the time in American political forums. I was willing to turn a blind eye to this kind of use of the European genocide and Jewish history in Europe.
2. There was also ongoing smearing of Arab Palestinians with the memories of the destruction of the Jewish community of Europe. As though European anti-semitism was the Arab Palestinian indentured farmer's fault. Or as though somehow the pre-state Zionists had cleaner hands than say the Arab communists in Palestine. This type of smearing cannot be tolerated. The only response to it is the response that we readily have in Israel when such nonsense is brought up. And that is, it was Jabotinsky's papers that were all excited about the emergence of Hitler in 1932. Our papers, the communist Arab papers had a call to arms waiting to fight the Fascists. It is the Arabs of Nazareth that have commemorated the liberation of Stalingrad for many decades and the fall of European fascism. Well before any other group in Israel. The defeat of fascism in Europe is equally our history.
3. When there was explicit use of Jewish history in Europe to justify the blockade of gaza, the only reasonable response is a clear NO! The European genocide is for us to use when protecting Gazan's from starvation and not for you to use when to justify this starvation.
I strongly disagree. I dont think that there is Zionism in the Democratic party, not in the sense that can be coherently understood. First, I really don't think that many actually understand what Zionism is, its history and its various facets, ranging from the views of Abraham Berge to those of Begin and Shamir.
Second, I simply can't see a role of Zionism in anyone's life if he or she has not by now immigrated to Israel. As a personal philosophy it seeks to end the galut, end the state of exile.
The Democratic Party to me is best described as utterly dysfunctional on issues related to the colonialism in Palestine. It supports and promotes the colonial enterprise.
If you want to label it and anyone else my preference is for the use of the term colonial party, pro-colonial discourse, promotion and support of colonialism. What is happening in Palestine is colonialism. The support that this colonialism is getting in the US is the same phenomenon that Aimé Césaire describe in his famous essay on colonialism and the mechanism in the colonial communities for supporting this colonialism.
I hate the term Zionist for anything happening outside Israel (anything that is not an Israeli political party). We should not render unwarranted uniqueness to run of the mill colonialism in Palestine and the typical suport that colonialism receives from the west.
Well if it is an arm of the Democratic Party, then there is a desperate need to get someone smarter than Markos. He's really not very bright nor is is aware politically about anything outside a very narrow community. For example, his recent book is outrageously anti-Muslim and by mear accident.
But I don't think that dailykos is well described as an arm of the Democratic Party. It is a place where many leftists and liberals have agglomerated by accident, and it is Markos' ambition that is driving it into being seen as a party institution. But he'll be unsuccessful in the medium to longrun. My view is that he will lose the left because my experience is that intellectually the left is brutally competitive. There is no way that a person of Markos' talent can remain at the helm of a leftist forum. Simply isn't sufficiently articulate or on top of things.
Thanks I will.
I know people who need it in Israel. I'll get the young one in haifa to take a look.
CTuttle
I have no idea what the lake is.
My priority at the moment is to find a home for arab sources. There is so much being written by the Arab left. I just need to dive in and start translating.
richb,
I tended not to read any of these accusations and smears. First there was no time. Second I was disappointed that no one was watching our backs. I don't know why Meteor Blades didn't stop the bullying. He dropped the ball and in my opinion was negligent in allowing the ongoing bullying of Arabs on dailykos.
The environment for Arabs and Muslims was hostile there, something I never experienced in Israel or anywhere else, that in the end the way I emotionally operated was to ignore all the slights, all the accusations against me, and even not read them.
I have a friend in Israel (for the sectarian among you, he is registered as Jew in Israel's population registry) who joins realEuropean facist sites to advocate against racism and promote a humanist perspective. In the end the environment at dailykos fits well with how he describes European facists receive Israeli leftists. I really blame the administration for allowing it to go so far and for not watching the backs of Arab writers.
dailykos however is not what it was once. Markos is no longer young and revolutionary, he has little talent that is obvious (bit dumb), and he has reconciled himself to the fact that his only claim to fame is the fact that he happened to setup the site in 2004.
Meteor Blades! well it seems to me it may now become apparent to him how even liberals in colonial societies are co-opted into pro-colonial discourse and how racism maintains itself within colonial Bourgeois culture the classes. I'm sure he now appreciates better how polite society in the US were able to turn their faces away from the suffering of Native Americans.
I insisted that Arab writers on dailykos put their energy into information and reasond arguments rather than waist their time collecting smear portfolios on the pro-colonialism advocates. In fact, Meteor-Blades asked us to write an anti-Islamophobia letter. I refused and insisted that other Arab writers refuse. We were not prepared to engage in that way.
The reason was simple. We don't have the numbers like they do. They have a number of writers who do nothing other than chase Arabs and monitor Arabs on that site.
The other reason is that dailykos is no longer not that important a forum. The internet is large for pro-Palestinian advocacy. Finally, we were bussy covering the Arab revolutions and really had no time to defend ourselves against smears. In my coverage I was on the phone for ours with relatives and activists in Egypt and Palestine and so were other Arabs. The smears by the people who wanted to shut us down were irrelevant to us as we witnessed our world transform.
Thanks Annie for this.
Dailykos was the only place in which I wrote in English. It seems that the administration of that site have confused 2011 for 2006 (the last time they banned their Arab writers).
I do think that it will be easy to find a new home for an Israeli Arab professor advocating from a leftist perspective and whose main hobby is translating articles written by Arab leftists into English.
The question was about whether or not to ban Shlomo Sand's book at dailykos. A book by a leftwing Israeli Professor who was active in Matzpen in the 1970's, and who I know personally. There was a move to ban that book because it questioned the essentially European notion of peoplehood altogether.
I reject repeatedly, openly, vocally, and publicly the idea of a Palestinian peoplehood. As I reject the European secular notion of Jewish peoplehood.
Of course, I am influenced by Nichola Jaber, the premier leftwing intelectual of Israel. However, on both I am influenced by Rambam's work, the first non-secular book I got a hold of in my coming-off-age. You will also notice that one of the ongoing charges of anti-semitism against me on dailykos was related to my insistance on defending Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the most important Halachic authority of our time. Further, I insisted on correcting wild ideas about Jewish traditions. In fact, I found that I got on best with observant Jews who happened on that forum. I mean these guys have no clue about anything to do with Judaism, Jewish customs, Jewish literature and traditions. It's like they came to dailykos armed on the one hand with that awful book "the case for Israel" and a short colorful pamphlet about Judaism.
Now I am a citizen of the self defined state of the Jewish people. I
am an Israeli intelectual. I have engaged that society, and come from a family that has been engaged in that society for generations. I grew up in the Jewish state, consuming Hebrew literature and Jewish religious writings. It is ridiculous to promote the perspective that I do not own and share Jewish culture and heritage. I own it as much as you do, despite the fact that Israel treats me as a second class citizen because I am not registered as a Jew in their population registry (there is some irony to the fact that the Daud clan of the Galilee is considered foreign in this state).
Now I'd like to point out that I am open about my active membership of Hadash, being part of the long history of rakah/maki, and heralding from a family that setup the communist party in Palestine. Indeed, if you saw my page and the icon that I use you would have recognized the provenance of my public advocacy. If you had read amy writing you would have recognized it.
But you didn't!
I am also familiar with people in Israel who whenever faced with chalenges to the colonialism that they support, rush to the refuge of made up engagement in Hadash. I see that a lot in accademia.
I'm calling bullshit on this one even if it is quoted by The Guardian.
How does one say
Fuck Israel, Fuck Hamas, Fuck Fatah
in Arabic? can't think of a thing. We don't say that.
also Fatah is the Israeli transliteration of Fateh. might as well have started with
Fuck Yisrael, Fuck chamas, Fuck Fatach.