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Total number of comments: 6 (since 2010-05-22 14:53:17)

tony greenstein

Jewish anti-Zionist

Website: http://www.azvsas.blogspot.com

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• BDS interview fallout: Finkelstein 'showed his own fear of the paradigm shift in discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict'
  • tony greenstein February 20, 2012 at 10:05 pm with 1 replies

    Thank you for your kind comments. However you believe I've been too categorical in my criticism of Norman Finkelstein. Let me explain why I disagree.

    Firstly we need to identify what the problem is in Israel/Palestine. According to the most dishonest Labour Zionists, best represented by the Union of Jewish Students and Peace Now, the problem is a psycho-personal one. Jews and Arabs just don't get on hence why they must separate. And two states provides the answer.

    The right-wing Zionists were always more honest. A Jewish state means expelling the Arabs or confining them beyond the Iron Wall. That this logic is now suffusing through the mainstream of Zionism is exemplified by this posting on the Jewish Chronicle blog today.

    link to thejc.com

    The two state solution, a solution that only imperialism can create, in reality a state and a reservation policy, because no one imagines a Palestinian state will be independent in anything but name, will provide the ideal opportunity for people like Clive Wolman to implement another 'transfer' - this time of the bulk of Israel's 1.5 million Arab citizens. And sooner or later there will be another 'transfer' - this time across the Jordan when circumstances and a war permit.

    Partition in Ireland, also seen as a practical solution at the time by Republican leaders like Michael Collins, in retrospect paved the way for a coercive confessional state in the South and a police statelet in the North for 50 years and a war for nearly 30 years after 'the troubles' in 1969. And in Ireland, the Unionists power had already started to wane. Not because of a demographic time bomb as Wolman states, but because of the diminishing importance of the Loyalists of the North of Ireland to Britain's geo-strategic and economic interests.

    By way of contrast the Palestinians are weak and Israel is strong, hence why a 2 State solution is unattainable, except in the most abstract of forms. Yet now is the time that NF devotes his lecture tours to arguing the case for 2 States, using maps that are ludicrous as his stage props, simply ignoring that the settlers control 60% of the West Bank and are not going to be dislodged. And as part of this act, NF belabours and attacks the movement for BDS - much to the delight of last week's Jewish Chronicle amongst others.

    Ireland and Palestine have followed a very similar path. The first Military Governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, in his auto-biography 'Orientations' called Jewish Palestine 'a little loyal Ulster amidst a sea of hostile pan Arabism.' Churchill was the Colonial Secretary who presided over Partition and the rise of the Mandate.

    If a United Ireland is a precondition for peace in Ireland, as opposed to the sticking plaster of the Good Friday Agreement, then that is doubly true in Palestine. Without dealing with the cause, the ethno-Jewish nature of the Israeli state, with all the consequences of apartheid, discrimination etc. which follow, then all 'solutions' are mere palliatives.

    Indeed I would go further. 2 States is not on the horizon nor will it be. But even if it were I would be opposed. It would create a yet more racist Zionist state on one side and an even more repressive Palestinian statelet than the current junta in Ramallah presides over. There would no justice for any Palestinian beyond the current business mafia. Torture would continue to be the norm in the jails of the PA. There would certainly be no liberation. That was the false dawn of Oslo and it should not be repeated because that led to the Palestinians policing themselves at israel's behest, which is exactly what I predicted nearly 20 years ago now.

    NF may be a brilliant scholar but he disregards the importance of Zionism, as the founding ideology of the Israeli state. Whereas the nationalism of the 19th century at its most progressive was integrative - to the Jews as individuals everything, to the Jews as a nation, nothing (Conte de Clermont-Tonnerre), nationalist political movements, Volkish and racist, grew up whose goals were an ethnic-nationalism. Just as Edouard Drumont conflated Catholicism with French nationalism, so others saw 'race' and nation as indistinguishable. Zionism was of this ilk and today Jews are defined by the rabbis as a race with the consequent privileges.

    To NF, none of this matters. Pragmatism is all. But the price for NF's pragmatism will be paid by the Palestinians as NF makes it clear that he is growing old and weary and impatient.

• Israel isn't good for the Jews anymore
  • tony greenstein December 8, 2011 at 7:11 pm with 1 replies

    A very good and interesting article. A few comments. Zionism is a political system and ideology. It serves a purpose. Herzl wrote words to the effect that it would be a European outpost on the ramparts of Asiatic barbarism.

    Israel is the guard dog and protector of western interests in an area that is vital strategically. It is a stable settler-colonial state and the $3 billion it receives is cheap at the price. And it has fractured Arab politics, both directly against Nasserism and indirectly in support of the most reactionary forces in the Arab world whose anti-Israeli rhetoric covered their own collaboration.

    When the British established their Empire they didn't say, we are coming to destroy the handlooms of India in order that we can create a cotton industry in England and turn the Indians into supplies of raw materials. They talked about 'civilisation' 'education' - it was the rhetoric of MacCaulay and Bentinck who railed against Sutthi, the burning of widows on the pyres of their husbands. Barbaric to be sure, but insignificant compared to the starving to death of 2.5 million in Bengal alone as the price of free market economics.

    Likewise the US ruling elites use the holocaust and 'anti-semitism' as the cover for their interests, just as the war in Iraq was fought for 'democracy'. So it is good to know that some US Jews and hopefully more as time goes by are distancing themselves from Israel and Zionism. But we are not living in the separate communities of feudalism behind ghetto walls. Today there is no material basis for the separate existence of Jewish communities. It is a fact that Jewish communities nearly everywhere bar Germany (ironically) are declining as half their Jews 'marry out'. This is a process of free choice not compulsion but Zionist and Orthodox leaders have compared the 'lost' souls of those who marry non-Jews to the victims of Hitler.

    But those with a sense of history will recall that Zionism was first and foremost a Christian Evangelical cause. It was the Lords Shaftesbury and Palmerstone, Disraeli and Ernest Laharanne (Napoleon III Secretary) and an assorted group of anti-Semites who were most in favour of Zionism. When Herzl wrote his 'Judenstaat' he took his pamphlet round to Eduard Drumont, editor of the anti-Semitic paper 'La Libre Parole' and an MP for Algiers. Drumont was the foremost anti-Semite and anti-Dreyfusard which gives the lie to the fairy story that Herzl was motivated by the injustice to Capt. Dreyfuss.

    Yes Israeli Jews are destined to part company with the rest of world Jewry. Their interests are different, especially American Jews. But they cannot form a nation of their own as the only reason for so doing would be to separate from Palestinian Arabs. Their fate is that of white South Africans which is to form one nation with those they have oppressed. True there will be 2 languages and culture and it is also the case, as with South Africa, that Israeli Jews will be more prosperous. And unlike South Africa there is already rough demographic parity between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. But the only solution which won't entrench existing racist privilege is a single nation on the common territory of Palestine between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river.

• Pappe on why Palestinian Israelis are 'second-rate citizens'
  • tony greenstein December 6, 2011 at 8:31 pm with 1 replies

    I think the title should be changed to -second CLASS' citizens. Second-rate implies that Palestinians are not as good citizens as Israeli Jews.

    Richard Witty suggests 'the rights are conferred parallel to the US GI bill following WW2'. Not so. Every right and privilege depends on this, but even so Druze and Circassians do not get equality e.g. they are still excluded from 93% of the land as the JNF/ILA do not accept them.

    I'm not sure Tree is right re it depends on eligibility rather than actual service. The reason I say this is that under the discharged soldiers amendment act 1968 Haredi ultra orthodox do not serve and are therefore not eligible for welfare benefits at a higher level BUT to ally this, since they have the largest no. of children, a special grant has always been made to the Ministry of Religion to cover the cost of paying the child benefit in question.

    Israel is the only state in the world to deliberately use what we would term indirect discrimination (where a neutral provision, criteria or practice applies to all equally, but affects one group more than another). The UK state, despite its racism, has attempted to eliminate racism in society via Race Relations/Equality Acts. Israel perpetrates racism and increases it.

• On saying that Israel has a right to exist
  • tony greenstein September 17, 2011 at 6:22 pm

    This is an excellent essay, not without its flaws and, dare I say it, a certain liberal wavering, as over whether states have a general or fundamental right to exist, but it is nonetheless very well constructed.

    A few comments.

    I'm pleased that the founders of IJV resisted the temptation to inscribe recognition of Israel in its founding statement of principles, because I know that I and many others would and could not have signed up.

    Of course the waving of the 'right to exist as a Jewish state' now is a bogus pretext for refusing to discuss Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and justifying the settlements. But what is really being asked is for the Palestinians to recognise the rightfulness of Zionism i.e. the rightfulness of their own dispossession, because that is what a Jewish state means in practice. Even a lemming doesn't rationalise its own suicide.

    But a sharp differentiation must be made between the rights of individuals and states. No state has any 'right' to exist, not the British or the US or the Colombian states. States are, in the last analysis, bodies of armed men. (Marx) A precondition of change in this society is the destruction of states.

    Individuals on the other hand do have the right to life and liberty and therefore the right to exist. That is a fundamental axiom of being a human being. But for Zionism the rights of Jews count for little when compared to the 'right' of the State. That is why historically Zionism has always collaborated with anti-Semitism and NEVER fought it. The number of Zionists, from Herzl onwards, who said that there was something good and productive and useful about anti-Semitism, because it made Jews emigrate to Palestine (although 98% of them wanted to go to the USA). Which is little different from that good Israel supporter, John Hagee, who stated that Hitler was god's messenger boy, come to drive the Jews to Palestine.

    But of course it is a bogus demand for the reasons Brian gives at the beginning. Israel exists - unfortunately - as an apartheid state. The question is how to change or overthrow it. The demand itself focuses on something which is therefore meaningless since no one who exists demands the 'right to exist' so why should a state? It is really a call for the Palestinians to surrender, in which case they won't be wanting to return anyway!

• Protesters interrupted Passacaglia w/ Beethoven (more on Israel Philharmonic protest in London)
  • tony greenstein September 9, 2011 at 10:18 pm with 1 replies

    There is a very simple comparison with Krystal nact, but not the one that the stupid Tory minister Ed Vaizey made. It is that the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and its conductor, Wilhelm Furtwangler also toured abroad, as cultural ambassadors for Nazi Germany.

    Those who say we should not have disrupted the IPO are also saying that the BPO and Furtwanger were also not appropriate subjects for boycott, though the latter was lambasted after the war as a Nazi sympathiser for his cultural work on behalf of the Nazi state (he and the BPO were subsidised by Hitler's regime).

    the IPO perform a similar function, there are to my knowledge no Arabs in the IPO, and are equally deserving of such treatment.

    Of course Zionists don't agree. They didn't agree with a boycott of Nazi Germany. In fact they made a trade agreement, Ha'avara with the Nazis in 1933, which broke the labour movement's economic boycott of Nazi Germany.

• 500 protesters join boycott demo at Max Brenner store in Australia
  • tony greenstein August 4, 2011 at 2:32 pm

    MB (or Gilad Atzmon) says 'I know almost nothing about David Duke' but that 'however bad you assume Duke’s views and stance to be, at least he hasn’t robbed another peoples country, forced them off their land, beat, clubbed, tear gassed and harrassed them, as the people you support, the Israelis and Jews have done.'

    Presumably Atzmon (MB) hasn't heard of the March to Alabama and similar civil rights marches where the demonstrators were indeed tear gassed, had dogs set on them, clubbed etc.

    David Duke is a former Grand Wizard of the KKK, who of course lynched hundreds if not thousands of Black people in the South of the USA.

    But David Duke is also a great fan of Gilad Atzmon. In his 'Letter to the Courageous Former Israeli Gilad Atzmon' link to davidduke.com
    Duke begins his letter

    'Dear Gilad,

    As usual Gilad, you write such fine articles exposing the evil of Zionism and Jewish supremacism.'

    One neo-Nazi to a fellow soul.

    And on his main page Duke demonstrates where his politics are at when, underneath the extract of his letter to Atzmon he has an article
    'Teachers Pressured to Help Blacks Cheat in School
    link to davidduke.com

    Being a faithful son of the KKK, Duke doesn't like Black people either.

    As for Gilad Atzmon (or the various pseudonyms he uses - MB/Yocheved etc.) you can find all you need to know here in a short guide to some of Atzmon's finest writing:
    link to azvsas.blogspot.com

    You could try his essay 'Truth, History, and Integrity' where he makes it clear that the holocaust is a myth:

    ‘If, for instance, the Nazis wanted the Jews out of their Reich (Judenrein - free of Jews), or even dead, as the Zionist narrative insists, how come they marched hundreds of thousands of them back into the Reich at the end of the war?’ ‘If the Nazis ran a death factory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them at the end of the war? We should ask for some conclusive historical evidence and arguments rather than follow a religious narrative...’ ‘Why were the Jews hated? Why did European people stand up against their next-door neighbours? Why are the Jews hated in the Middle East.’

    See the sleight of hand. Jews were victims of anti-Semitism in Europe (little things like anti-Semitism being a useful safety valve for the different repressive regimes) and now they are hated in the Middle East. Except that Jews in Europe weren't colonisers, didn't drive anyone off the land. But to Atzmon it's all about 'Jewishness.'

    But people shouldn't be surprised. In his '1001 Lies About Gilad Atzmon' [everyone tells lies about this pure soul] he confesses that:
    'I must admit that I have many doubts concerning the Zionist Holocaust narrative. Being familiar with many of the discrepancies within the forcefully imposed narrative, being fully familiar with the devastating tale of the extensive collaboration between the Nazis and the Zionists before and throughout the Second World War, I know pretty well that the official Holocaust narrative is there to conceal rather than to reveal any truth. … '

    As for Duke doing no more than right-wing Israelis (in fact Zionism generally) in opposing assimilation/mixed marriages etc. There is of course a difference between a religion not wanting people within to marry other religions - Catholics used to be the same. What is wrong when it becomes state practice and defined by law or when, like Duke, you would want to institute a system of apartheid to enforce it.

    But regardless, as a Jew who did indeed marry out, I consider Zionist views about ethnic purity as obnoxious as Duke's. That is why Atzmon's views are detestable, whatever name he posts under!

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