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  • Israeli report on al-Dura case is vengeful and 'surreal,' says Haaretz -- but 'NYT' treats it as gospel
    • tree May 21, 2013 at 2:53 am

      …. and so on

      ...but you left out the most important part. All of these people did what they did because they are all anti-semites and just wanted to make Israel look bad. And that goes for that F***** Jew-hating boiler!

    • tree May 21, 2013 at 2:49 am with 2 replies

      Be careful, David. You know how hard it is to carry off satire. ;-)

  • Video: Soldiers aim guns at fallen boy's head outside West Bank settlement
    • tree May 19, 2013 at 5:28 pm

      Cliff, you can access up to 10 Haaretz articles per month with a simple registration, no payment necessary. If you don't want to register I can understand that, but as long as you don't try to access more than 10 articles a month, there is no "pay wall".

      Essentially the story comes down to the fact that the final few seconds of the film show Al-Durra's hand move, which the Israeli's have run with to claim that he wasn't killed, wasn't shot, and didn't die, despite the fact that a dead little boy that looks exactly like al-Durra was photographed in the morgue with fatal gunshot wounds.

      Shmuel's "cliff-notes" (pun-intended) were spot on.

  • Abulhawa declines to 'balance out' several Israelis in 'Al Jazeera' forum on Nakba
    • tree May 21, 2013 at 6:34 am

      Of course, it’s up to the victims of the Nakba to decide what they want to discuss with whom and when. I am merely saying that refusing to talk to any Israeli is a bad and unfair decision

      You keep misstating her point. Susan ISN'T "refusing to talk to any Israeli". She's refusing to go on a program that she believes is putting the wrong emphasis on the problem. She doesn't have to accept that, and she doesn't have to be a party to a forum she disagrees with just to "be nice". And clearly, part of the program was giving a voice to an A--hole who denied the Nakba, and blamed the Palestinians for their own misfortune. If you really believe that people will only believe Jewish Israelis and not Palestinians then it is pointless for her to go on anyway. Let the Jewish Israelis hash it out. She's not being ""unfair". She's make a choice about where and when to spend her time and energy. Having seen the program it seems obvious to me that it would have been a complete waste of her time.

    • tree May 21, 2013 at 2:35 am

      GL

      I agree. I didn’t say that Palestinians should accept it. But they can’t do anything to change it. They need non-Zionist Jews to get their message across and to build trust. Also, refusing to participate in a TV discussion with any Israeli or Jew will just make them unlikeable. Besides, the Nakba discussion will then possibly take place without ANY Palestinian. That would be even worse.

      Your paragraph above does say that they should accept it. Can't you see that? And I think you are missing the point. Susan is obviously objecting to the form and content of the AJ discussion, and not, as you claim ,"discriminating against supporters based on citizenship and ethnicity". You don't seem to understand the concept behind "permission to narrate".

      I watched the program and a couple of things stood out to me. First off, Bar-Yoshafat was identified only as a lawyer, with no mention of his connection to the Jewish Agency (whose policy of expelling Arab non-Jews from their land goes back 100 years), or his connection to the WJC. Second the show was too short, and too choppy, going from guest to guest, to really provide any useful information. And three, Bar-Yoshafat in his "one important point" managed to deny the Nakba, spout 5 or 6 other Israeli myths, connect the Palestinians with the Nazis ( and anti-semitism) profess that the Jews were of course the real victims here, and claim that his name, Bar-Yoshafat, proved he had a long connection with the "land of Israel" . My suspicion is that either he or his parents or grandparents changed their names, much as Netanyahu's family did. According to his bio both sets of grandparents were Holocaust survivors.
      Bar-Yoshafat's "one point" was the last substantial comment made in the program, with no chance for the well-deserved rebuttal to his heaping scoop of hasbara. I didn't stick around for the "after-show". It seemed pointless.

      I think Susan was correct to avoid the show. It shed no light, and I see no reason why she had to be subjected to Nakba denial from a Jewish Agency spokesperson, no less, for a program that went nowhere.

      Also, I found it "interesting" that it seemed to imply that "Israelis" is another word for "Jews". They weren't talking about how all Israelis view the Nakba, just how the Jewish ones view it.

  • Church of Scotland's revised 'Promised Land' report has softer edges but thrust is unchanged
    • tree May 19, 2013 at 3:45 am

      RJL,

      Ira is Jewish. Your assumption skills are as misguided as your intellectual skills. You seem incapable of thinking for yourself. Your regurgitating of shopworn hasbara, even the most ridiculous versions that have been jettisoned decades ago, is almost comical in matter, if not for the fact that such thinking has been responsible for such oppression and violence for nearly one hundred years.

  • 'If I had to choose between the wealth of the world and going home, I would go back'
    • tree May 17, 2013 at 4:39 pm

      Thanks for that link, gingershot. A long but fascinating piece. I found two tidbits especially interesting. One, that Israel has recently reclassified many documents from that era that had been previously released, and that most documents were never declassified.

      The Israeli censor’s observant eye had missed file number GL-18/17028 in the State Archives. Most files relating to the 1948 Palestinian exodus remain sealed in the Israeli archives, despite the fact that their period as classified files − according to Israeli law − expired long ago. Even files that were previously declassified are no longer available to researchers. In the past two decades, following the powerful reverberations triggered by the publication of books written by those dubbed the “New Historians,” the Israeli archives revoked access to much of the explosive material. Archived Israeli documents that reported the expulsion of Palestinians, massacres or rapes perpetrated by Israeli soldiers, along with other events considered embarrassing by the establishment, were reclassified as “top secret.” Researchers who sought to track down the files cited in books by Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim or Tom Segev often hit a dead end. Hence the surprise that file GL-18/17028, titled “The Flight in 1948” is still available today.

      And the other is that the Kennedy Administration was placing pressure on Israel to allow return of hundreds of thousands of refugees.

      Contemporaries who had ties to the government or the armed forces obviously knew that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been expelled and their return was blocked already during the war. They understood that this must be kept a closely guarded secret. In 1961, after John F. Kennedy assumed office as president of the United States, calls for the return of some of the Palestinian refugees increased. Under the guidance of the new president, the U.S. State Department tried to force Israel to allow several hundred thousand refugees to return. In 1949, Israel had agreed to consider allowing about 100,000 refugees to return, in exchange for a comprehensive peace agreement with the Arab states, but by the early 1960s that was no longer on the agenda as far as Israel was concerned. Israel was willing to discuss the return of some 20,000-30,000 refugees at most.

      As for Ben-Gurion, I suspect he was a pathological liar. Anyone who would go on national television and baldly lie that absolutely no Israeli military personnel were involved in the Qibya massacre would be capable of lying about everything and anything.

  • Washington Post's racism map omits Israel
    • tree May 16, 2013 at 3:09 pm with 1 replies

      Israel is not listed because it is not a racist nation.

      The rankings were listed according to what percentage of people would not want to live next to someone of another race. According to this Ynet article citing the Israel Democracy Institute (linked in Phil's post),

      Almost half of Israeli Jews – 46% – wouldn't want to have Arabs as neighbors, a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute indicated Tuesday.

      Meanwhile, 39% of the participants said they would not want to live near migrant workers and mental patients in rehabilitation, while 23% said that the ultra-Orthodox would make the most difficult neighbors. A quarter of the participants consider gay neighbors the least desirable.

      Israel would be a bright red on that map if it was included in the survey.

      And on the same page as the above article there was a link to this:

      The State Prosecutor's Office ordered police on Sunday to investigate the distribution of fliers against Safed's mayor and the city's Arabs.

      The fliers took aim at Mayor Ilan Shohat because, they say, his support of the establishment of a medical school in the city will attract secular students.

      Mayor Shohat wants to "found a refugee camp and a shelter for sadistic, deranged Arabs" in the city, the fliers say.

      If found, distributors of the fliers are expected to be charged with incitement to racism and insulting a public figure.

      Meanwhile, an indictment was filed with the Nazareth Magistrates' Court against a 17-year old boy who allegedly called out "Death to Arabs" and "Stinky Muslims" during a protest held two weeks ago in the city, after rabbis called on its residents not to rent apartments to Arabs.

      The indictment charges the teen with incitement to racism, rioting, and destruction of property, saying he threw stones at apartments being rented by Arab students. The prosecution has also called for a restraining order keeping the teen out of Safed until the termination of legal proceedings against him.

      Racism is rampant in Israel.

  • Clashes break out across the West Bank as Palestinians mark the Nakba
    • tree May 16, 2013 at 3:30 pm with 1 replies

      What about these people?

      Ultra-Orthodox Jews threw rocks on Wednesday in Beit Shemesh at a woman who was about to take her baby out of her car.

      Two women, also ultra-Orthodox, helped the woman and her 7-month-old infant to safety in a nearby store. No one was injured during the incident, but the car's windows were damaged.

      Vered Daniel, 34, lives in a nearby community. She had come to buy baby products at a store where she is a regular customer, near the ultra-Orthodox part of town.

      "I had taken the baby carriage out of the car when two or three Haredi men suddenly started throwing big rocks, at me, with my daughter in the car," Daniel told Haaretz, adding that they shouted at her that she was not dressed modestly.

      link to haaretz.com

      or these:

      Thousands of strictly Orthodox teenagers have attempted to stop the Women of the Wall from holding a service at the Western Wall.

      Early on Friday morning, a police barricade stopped protesters from attacking the women who were given the legal right to pray at the wall in April. According to sources, the men were throwing rocks, water bottles and other items.
      “They’re doing this to provoke us, and it’s an insult to Judaism,” said one protester.

      link to thejc.com

      Just google "orthodox Jews throwing stones". You'll find numerous instances like these, targeting civilians as well as police.

  • Dershowitz should stop lying about Tutu's record
  • Beinart's challenge, Beinart's fear
    • tree May 16, 2013 at 4:07 am

      And there is also this:

      ....Shirlee’s gut analysis is interesting against the backdrop of a survey conducted for Haaretz by the market-research firm Meida Shivuki C.I., under the management of Noam Raz and Merav Shapira. The survey found that 37 percent of Israelis are considering a move to a different country at some time in the future. At the same time, it’s noteworthy than only 2 percent of those surveyed said they are certain they will leave Israel -- it’s only a matter of time.

      The primary reason the potential emigrants cite is the difficulty of getting ahead economically in Israel -- cited by 55 percent of those considering emigration. Raz terms this notion a “fantasy.” “We want to think we have a way out of here, but only 2 percent really intend to leave,” he explains.

      Fantasy or reality, the fact cannot be ignored that many Israelis want, at some level, to live elsewhere. The tendency to consider leaving is most prominent among voters for center and left-of-center parties; the 30-49 age group; secular, salaried individuals; as well as among inhabitants of the south of the country and the Greater Tel Aviv area.

      It’s important to point out that both the research for the article and the survey were carried out before Operation Pillar of Defense in the Gaza Strip last month, though the military escalation in the south was already intensifying and the winds of a potential war against Iran were blowing strong.

      Equally important, however, is the fact that, according to various data, most of those who are thinking of leaving are not motivated by the security situation -- in fact, it’s the exact opposite. When the security threat mounts, the Israeli public views leaving as treason, and few emigrate at such times. Indeed, according to the researchers, few Israelis leave for ideological reasons, such as the occupation, antidemocratic legislation or even the emergency call-up orders, which have been widespread in recent years.

      According to the State of the Nation Report for 2011-2012, published last month by the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, the situation of the country’s young working families has worsened in the past five years (not taking into account Arab and Jewish ultra-Orthodox families, whose situation has been even more aggravated).

      more at link:

      link to haaretz.com

    • tree May 16, 2013 at 3:56 am with 2 replies

      Stephen,

      The first thing I noticed when searching around for emigration numbers was that the immigration numbers from jon's Ministry of Immigrant Absorption(MOIA) link are different from those listed by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics(CBS).

      Jon's MOIA link lists 18511 immigrants in 2012, 19020 for 2011, and 18755 for 2010 but I ran into a Haaretz article from March of 2013 that listed immigration numbers from Israel's CBS as 16577 in 2012, 16892 in 2011, and 16633 in 2010.

      The rate of immigration to Israel has steadied in recent years, because Diaspora Jews face less pressure to leave their home countries for security or economic reasons, demographers say.

      A total of 16,577 people immigrated to Israel in 2012, according to recently released figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics. Among them, 3,545 or 21% came from the Russian Federation, 2,432 or 15% from Ethiopia and 2,290 or 14% from the United States. The most popular place to settle was Jerusalem, followed by Haifa, Netanya and Tel Aviv.

      The 2012 figure represents a slight dip from the previous year’s tally of 16,892, and from 16,633 the year before that. An average of 16,535 immigrants have moved to Israel each year during the past seven years.

      link to haaretz.com

      I confirmed these lower numbers ( slightly over 10% lower) cited by Haaretz by checking the CBS figures directly from its website. I couldn't find the 2012 numbers but the numbers that Haaretz cites for 2010 and 2011 are exactly the same as CBS numbers, and at odds with the MOIA numbers.

      link to cbs.gov.il

      My reasoning would be that the CBS numbers would be more accurate, as that bureaucracy would have less reason to inflate the numbers than the governmental agency that sees immigrant absorption as part of its mandate.

      All that being said, I found one article which listed emigration from Israel in 2010 at 15600, according to the CBS.

      Emigration from Israel is at its lowest in 40 years, according to figures released by the Central Bureau of Statistics on Monday.

      During 2010 a total of 15,600 Israelis left to live abroad, of whom 94 percent were Jewish and six percent Arab. The figure compares to 15,900 who left in 2009. The emigration rate is now 0.7 for every 1000 citizens, the lowest it has been since 1973.

      CBS experts theorize that the global economic crisis is responsible for the overall slowdown in emigration figures.

      link to timesofisrael.com

      So if we take 15600 from 2010 for emigration from Israel and multiply that by .94 (the percentage of Jewish emigrants) we get 14644. Taking the 2010 Jewish immigrants, 16633, minus the 2010 Jewish emigrants, 14644, we get a net immigration of less than 2000; 1969 to be exact.

      I would hazard a guess that the 2012 net immigration is in the same range as 2010, around 2000 net immigrants.

      And then of course there is this:

      Over more than six decades of statehood, successive Israeli governments have repeatedly stressed the centrality of Jewish immigration and the Law of Return of all Jews to Israel for the well-being, security, and survival of the nation. Yet while much is published on Jewish immigration to Israel, considerably less information is available about Jewish emigration from Israel.

      Government estimates of the numbers of Israelis residing abroad vary greatly due mainly to the lack of an adequate recording system. Consequently, scholars and others have questioned the accuracy of government figures. Besides the statistical and methodological shortcomings, the number of Israeli expatriates is open to considerable debate and controversy because of its enormous demographic, social, and political significance both within and outside Israel.

      link to mideast.foreignpolicy.com

  • Washington state bus-ad campaign dares to state: 'Equal rights for Palestinians'
    • tree May 15, 2013 at 3:00 am

      Think about it – in California, someone who lives 25 yards from the border with Mexico lives under a completely different legal system from someone living 50 yards away in Mexico! Doh.

      Faulty analogy,Tony. If we were to make the situation equivalent using the US and Mexico, then a US citizen could live IN MEXICO under a US civilian legal system, while a native Mexican would be subject to a harsh military system controlled by the US. Doh, yourself.

      Sumud is talking about two separate legal systems, both controlled by Israel, that treat residents IN THE WEST BANK under two different sets of rules, based on whether the resident is an Israeli Jew or a Palestinian. The Israeli resident has the benefit of a lenient civil legal system, while the Palestinian is controlled by a much harsher military justice system that does not provide the rights guarantees that the Israeli civil system does. Its an apartheid judicial system, run by Israel.

  • Glenn Greenwald brings facts and reason to 'Real Time', ruins Bill Maher's night
    • tree May 12, 2013 at 4:01 pm

      All three dismiss anything about it which does not support the grand theory and focus on any aspect that does.

      Not true on the part of Greenwald. He has no beef with legitimate criticisms of Islam or any other religion. But he abhors the bigotry and hypocrisy involved in the rantings of Harris and Maher.

      Let's first quickly dispense with some obvious strawmen. Of course one can legitimately criticize Islam without being bigoted or racist. That's self-evident, and nobody is contesting it. And of course there are some Muslim individuals who do heinous things in the name of their religion - just like there are extremists in all religions who do awful and violent things in the name of that religion, yet receive far less attention than the bad acts of Muslims (here are some very recent examples). Yes, "honor killings" and the suppression of women by some Muslims are heinous, just as the collaboration of US and Ugandan Christians to enact laws to execute homosexuals is heinous, and just as the religious-driven, violent occupation of Palestine, attacks on gays, and suppression of women by some Israeli Jews in the name of Judaism is heinous. That some Muslims commit atrocities in the name of their religion (like some people of every religion do) is also too self-evident to merit debate, but it has nothing to do with the criticisms of Harris.

      Nonetheless, Harris defenders such as the neoconservative David Frum want to pretend that criticisms of Harris consist of nothing more than the claim that, as Frum put it this week, "it's OK to be an atheist, so long as you omit Islam from your list of the religions to which you object." That's a wildly dishonest summary of the criticisms of Harris as well as people like Dawkins and Hitchens; absolutely nobody is arguing anything like that. Any atheist is going to be critical of the world's major religions, including Islam, and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that.

      The key point is that Harris does far, far more than voice criticisms of Islam as part of a general critique of religion. He has repeatedly made clear that he thinks Islam is uniquely threatening: "While the other major world religions have been fertile sources of intolerance, it is clear that the doctrine of Islam poses unique problems for the emergence of a global civilization." He has insisted that there are unique dangers from Muslims possessing nuclear weapons, as opposed to nice western Christians (the only ones to ever use them) or those kind Israeli Jews: "It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of devout Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence." In his 2005 "End of Faith", he claimed that "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death."

      This is not a critique of religion generally; it is a relentless effort to depict Islam as the supreme threat. Based on that view, Harris, while depicting the Iraq war as a humanitarian endeavor, has proclaimed that "we are not at war with terrorism. We are at war with Islam." He has also decreed that "this is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with millions more than have any direct affiliation with Al Qaeda." "We" - the civilized peoples of the west - are at war with "millions" of Muslims, he says. Indeed, he repeatedly posits a dichotomy between "civilized" people and Muslims: "All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the earth."

      ......

      When criticism of religion morphs into an undue focus on Islam - particularly at the same time the western world has been engaged in a decade-long splurge of violence, aggression and human rights abuses against Muslims, justified by a sustained demonization campaign - then I find these objections to the New Atheists completely warranted. That's true of Dawkins' proclamation that "[I] often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today." It's true of Hitchens' various grotesque invocations of Islam to justify violence, including advocating cluster bombs because "if they're bearing a Koran over their heart, it'll go straight through that, too". And it's true of Harris' years-long argument that Islam poses unique threats beyond what Christianity, Judaism, and the other religions of the world pose.

      Most important of all - to me - is the fact that Harris has used his views about Islam to justify a wide range of vile policies aimed primarily if not exclusively at Muslims, from torture ("there are extreme circumstances in which I believe that practices like 'water-boarding' may not only be ethically justifiable, but ethically necessary"); to steadfast support for Israel, which he considers morally superior to its Muslim adversaries ("In their analyses of US and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. . . . there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah"); to anti-Muslim profiling ("We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it"); to state violence ("On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right. This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that 'liberals are soft on terrorism.' It is, and they are").

      link to guardian.co.uk

    • tree May 12, 2013 at 2:47 pm

      I did a quick google search using the term "Guatemala coup Israel" and came up with several hits. Here are two:

      link to merip.org

      link to nacla.org

      Even Wikipedia has a paragraph or two about Israel's involvement:

      The Guatemalan military also maintained strong ties with Israel, which began selling and delivering weapons to the Guatemalan military during the Kjell Laugerud presidency.[178] Military items delivered to Guatemala by Israel between 1974 and 1982 included automatic weapons, light transport aircraft, and armored cars. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, Guatemalan troops were primarily equipped with several different configurations of the 5.56×45mm NATO Galil assault rifle and limited numbers of the 9mm Uzi submachine gun, both manufactured by Israel Military Industries (IMI). Israel was also the principle supplier of military hardware to Argentina from late-1978 onward after the United States suspended aid to the Argentine military junta. The government in Argentina also supplied quantities of Israeli-manufactured weapons and hardware to the Guatemalan military on several occasions.[179] In addition to supplying arms to Guatemala (directly and indirectly through Argentina), Israel also provided intelligence and operational training to Guatemalan officers. Technical support was also given to the Guatemalan counterinsurgency by the Israelis, including a computer system located in an annex of the Presidential General Staff (EMP), behind the presidential palace in 1980. This computer system incorporated a data analysis system developed during the "Dirty War" in Argentina, and passed on by Argentine advisors, which was used to monitor electrical and water usage to pinpoint the coordinates of guerrilla safe-houses.[180] A total of thirty guerrilla safe-houses were infiltrated in 1981. In 1981 the chief of staff of the Guatemalan army said that the "Israeli soldier is the model for our soldiers". After the March 23, 1982 junior officers coup, Efraín Ríos Montt told ABC News that his success was due to the fact that "our soldiers were trained by Israelis." There was not much outcry in Israel at the time about its involvement in Guatemala, though the support was not a secret.[181] Despite public praise for Israel by Guatemalan authorities, many Guatemalan officials were also critical of Israel. General Hector Gramajo stated in an interview, "Maybe some Israeli's taught us intelligence but for reasons of business...The hawks (Israeli arms merchants) took advantage of us, selling us equipment at triple the price."[182]

      link to en.wikipedia.org

    • tree May 12, 2013 at 2:33 pm

      Greenwald started off as an independent blogger and then moved to Salon.com, where he wrote a nearly daily column for many years before moving on to the Guardian. You can read his Salon.com era writings here:

      link to salon.com

      And his archived earlier blog posts are here:

      link to glenngreenwald.blogspot.com

      He's a treasure.

  • Dershowitz calls Hawking an 'ignoramus,' a 'lemming,' and likely an anti-Semite
    • tree May 10, 2013 at 6:20 pm

      yrn, if your family has been in Palestine for 9 generations, and you claim that there was no peaceful coexistence among religions before the Zionist came, why do you only cite instances of riots that happened after Zionism, after the Balfour Declaration, after the Zionist institution of "conquest of labor", after decades of Zionist expulsion of Palestinian tenant farmers from their lands? And why do you quote from Wikipedia that "10 people were killed" and not mention that at least 4 of those killed were Arab non-Jews? And that 39 Jews were among the 200 arrested for participating in hostilities after the violence erupted?

      Here is the King Crane Commission Report recommendations on the situation in Palestine in 1919:

      E. We recommend, in the fifth place, serious modification of the extreme Zionist programme for Palestine of unlimited immigration of Jews, looking finally to making Palestine distinctly a Jewish state.

      (1) The Commissioner began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its favour, but the actual facts in Palestine, coupled with the force of the general principles proclaimed by the Allies and accepted by the Syrians have driven them to the recommendation here made.

      (2) The Commission was abundantly supplied with literature on the Zionist programme by the Zionist Commission to Palestine; heard in conferences much concerning the Zionist colonies and their claims; and personally saw something of what had been accomplished. They found much to approve in the aspirations and plans of the Zionists, and had warm appreciation for the devotion of many of the colonists, and for their success, by modern methods, in overcoming great natural obstacles.

      (3) The Commission recognised also that definite encouragement had been given to the Zionists by the Allies in Mr. Balfour's often quoted statement, in its approval by other representatives of the Allies. If, however, the strict terms of the Balfour Statement are adhered to-favouring "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine" - it can hardly be doubted that the extreme Zionist programme must be greatly modified. For a national home for the Jewish people is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission's conferences with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete disposition of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase. In his address, of July 4, 1918, President Wilson laid down the following principle as one of the four great "ends for which the associated peoples of the world were fighting": "The settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or of political relationship upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned and not upon the basis of the material Interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery." If that principle is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine's population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine-nearly nine-tenths of the whole emphatically against the entire Zionist programme. The tables show that there was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine were more agreed than upon this. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted, and of the people's rights, though it kept within the forms of law. It is to be noted also that the feeling against the Zionist programme is not confined to Palestine, but shared very generally by the people throughout Syria, as our conferences clearly showed. More than seventy-two percent-1.350 in all the petitions in the whole of Syria were directed against the Zionist programme. Only two requests--those for a united Syria and for independence had a larger support. This general feeling was duly voiced by the General Syrian Congress in the seventh, eighth and tenth resolutions of the statement.

      The Peace Conference should not shut its eyes to the fact that the anti-Zionist feeling in Palestine and Syria is intense and not lightly to be flouted. No British officer, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist programme could be carried out except by force of arms. The officers generally thought that a force of not less than 50,000 soldiers would be required even to initiate the programme. That of itself is evidence of a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist programme, on the part of the non-Jewish populations of Palestine and Syria. Decisions requiring armies to carry out are sometimes necessary, but they are surely not gratuitously to be taken in the interests of serious injustices. For the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a "right" to Palestine based on an occupation of 2,000 years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.

      There is a further consideration that cannot justly be ignored, if the world is to look forward to Palestine becoming a definitely-Jewish State, however gradually that may take place. That consideration grows out the fact that Palestine is the Holy Land for Jews, Christians, and Moslems alike. Millions of Christians and Moslems all over the world are quite as much concerned as the Jews with conditions in Palestine, especially with those conditions which touch upon religious feeling and rights. The relations in these matters in Palestine are most delicate and difficult. With the best possible intentions, it may be doubted whether the Jews could possibly seem to either Christians or Moslems proper guardians of the holy places, or custodians of the Holy Land as a whole.

      The reason is this: The places which are most sacred to Christians those having to do with Jesus-and which are also sacred to Moslems, are not only not sacred to Jews, but abhorrent to them. It is simply impossible, under those circumstances, for Moslems and Christians to feel satisfied to have these places in Jewish hands, or under the custody of Jews. There are still other places about which Moslems must have the same feeling. In fact, from this point of view, the Moslems, just because the sacred places of all three religions are, sacred to them, have made very naturally much more satisfactory custodians of the holy places than the Jews could be. It must be believed that the precise meaning in this respect of the complete Jewish occupation of Palestine has not been fully sensed by those who urge the extreme Zionist programme. For it would intensify, with a certainty like fate; the anti-Jewish feeling both in Palestine and in all other portions of the world which look to Palestine as the Holy Land.
      In view of all these considerations, and with a deep sense of sympathy for the Jewish cause, the Commissioners feel bound to recommend that only a greatly reduced Zionist programme be attempted by the Peace Conference, and even that, only very gradually initiated. This would have to mean that Jewish immigration should be definitely limited, and that the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish commonwealth should be given up.

      There would then be no reason why Palestine could not be included in a united Syrian State, just as other portions of the country, the holy places being cared for by an international and inter-religious commission, somewhat as at present under the oversight and approval of the Mandatory and of the League of Nations. The Jews, of course, would have representation upon this Commission.

      link to hri.org

      Current Zionist difficulty with understanding how others could react negatively to the loss of their own sovereignty and civil and political rights only points to the racism inherent within Zionism.

    • tree May 10, 2013 at 5:55 pm

      Dershowitz isn't just "crying wolf". He is making negative stereotypes about non-Jews --i.e. that criticism of Israel by gentiles is ipso facto anti-semitism. That's bigotry on Dersh's part. Bigotry that conveniently allows Dersh to ignore the validity of the criticism.

    • tree May 10, 2013 at 5:48 pm

      While we are at it, let's not pretend that individual Mexican immigration to Arizona or elsewhere in the US, is the same as organized Jewish immigration to Palestine, which had the clearly stated goal of dispossessing the native population and subjugating them to Jewish rule and oppression.

  • Israeli right-wing flys off the deep end following Hawking boycott
    • tree May 9, 2013 at 3:25 pm with 5 replies

      Commenter Harry Law provided more information on an early post about Hawking:

      The i7 was designed by Intel’s architecture design team in Hillsboro Oregon. The claims the i7 was designed in Israel are also lies.

      For the i7 in particular, the Sr. Principal Engineer’s name is Ronak Singhal. He is an Indian. The design team does not consist of Israelis and is not located in Israel.

      Hawking’s sentence construction software, EZ Keys, was designed and built by an american company, Words Plus, which was based in Palmdale, California. Hawkings speech synthesizer, NeoSpeech, is produced by a company based in Fremont, California and backed by Voiceware Co of Korea. It has nothing to do with Israel either.

      Hawking’s laptop which ran the software used AMD chips. This was an embarrassment to Intel. Intel’s CEO at the time Gordon Moore (now retired) personally negotiated with Prof. Hawking to participate in a marketing arrangement where Hawking would use Intel provided off-the-shelf laptops sothat they could claim he used Intel equipment. The financial details of this arrangement are private, but it is a marketing expense for Intel. Intel’s Portland team flies out to England each year to check on things. Because they kept asking Hawking if they could build him something custom for this (since none of the software or hardware was actually made by Intel, the laptops were built in China), they designed and built a small audio amplifier that was louder than the one he used previously. This could also have been replaced with an off the shelf amplifier as well, but it is the basis for Intel’s claims to have contributed custom hardware. None of the Portland team that visits Prof. Hawking is Israeli either.

      link to mondoweiss.net

    • tree May 9, 2013 at 3:20 pm

      I wonder if any of them mentioned a few notorious cases of the IDF's treatment of civilians in wheelchairs? And no, I don't mean Sheik Yassin, who was killed by an Israeli missile along with 9 Palestinian civilians. I'm talking about this, from the IDF attack on Jenin in 2002:

      Fifty-seven year old Kamal Zghair, a wheel-chair bound man, was shot and then run over by IDF tanks on April 10 as he was moving in his wheelchair -equipped with a white flag - down a major road in Jenin. Thirty-seven-year-old Jamal Fayid, a quadriplegic, was crushed to death in the rubble of his home on April 7 after IDf soldiers refused to allow his family to remove hum from their home before a bulldozer destroyed it.

      From Human Rights Watch
      link to books.google.ca

  • US Jews are so 'polarized' over Israel they can't talk about it to each other, 'Jewish Chronicle' reports
    • tree May 10, 2013 at 3:50 pm

      The problem is, that Phil really rebelled and rebels against all things Jewish except that which meets his approval...

      From your first paragraph it appears that Zionism "without Torah" has exactly the same exclusionary attitude that you ascribe to Phil. Its just that Zionism doesn't approve of justice or equality among all of humanity, whereas Phil does. Or are you saying that Judaism itself doesn't approve of those things? And if you are, then aren't you just as exclusionary yourself?

      Whatever happened to Rabbi Hillel's “Do not do unto others that which you hate done unto yourself – that is the entire Torah,"? Isn't that a part of Judaism?

      Come to think of it, was Hillel being exclusionary in summing up Torah in this manner? Doesn't everyone take from religion that which they find useful or meaningful and disregard the rest?

      ....Which leads me to remembering one of my favorite Simon and Garfunkel songs.

      I am just a poor boy
      Though my story's seldom told
      I have squandered my resistance
      For a pocket full of mumbles such are promises
      All lies and jests
      Still a man hears what he wants to hear
      And disregards the rest

  • 'The policy of the present Israeli government is likely to lead to disaster': Stephen Hawking pulls out of conference hosted by Shimon Peres, backs academic boycott of Israel (Updated)
    • tree May 9, 2013 at 3:28 am with 1 replies

      No one in my neck of woods suggested it was a false story until Cambridge issued the statement denying Hawking endorsed a boycott.

      You do realize that you just confirmed Pamela's point with that statement of yours, right? Cambridge U ( you know, the "higher-ups" she was referring to), denied it had anything to do with BDS, without checking with Hawking.

    • tree May 8, 2013 at 4:08 pm with 6 replies

      Shmuel, you're slipping. You forgot rationalization #6. "He was threatened by Palestinian Islamofascists."

      Thankfully, Sassan has corrected your oversight, and in record time.

      BTW, its a pleasure to "see" you back here.

    • tree May 8, 2013 at 4:03 pm

      Sassan, one sign of an intelligent man or woman is the ability to question oneself and one's beliefs. It appears from your comments here that it is a quality you find difficult to possess. Try it. Its so much more enlightening than the puerile rationalization you just posted.

  • Colbert lumps opposition to Palestinian freedom with opposition to marriage equality
    • tree May 8, 2013 at 4:16 pm

      Colbert:"I don't see race... I've evolved beyond that....I just pretend everybody's white... and its all good."

      Colbert is a hoot. And he totally nailed it with the "second Israel" in Lebanon.

  • The three whoppers of Alan Dershowitz
    • tree May 8, 2013 at 3:11 pm

      Thanks, David (and James, too.)

      I should mention that I always look forward to your posts here, David. I always learn something from them, and I admire your ability to layout your argument so clearly.

    • tree May 8, 2013 at 3:54 am

      From what little I can glean from the few tidbits of page 13 and 14 of Korn's book that is available on Google Books, East Jerusalem and Gaza were immediately subtracted from the Israeli list of "returnable territories". ( And Israel redrew and greatly expanded East Jerusalem's municipal boundaries and annexed it just 10 days after the Cabinet meeting in June.) The rest of the West Bank was still in dispute among the various Israeli Cabinet members at the time of the "peace proposal".

    • tree May 8, 2013 at 3:27 am

      I also note that on page 330, which Dershowitz cites as his proof that Israel offered to return all conquered territories for peace, Morris also said:

      "The resolution did not mention the Gaza Strip, implying that Israel would keep it, and ... " This passage is right before David's quoted passage "...postponed a decision concerning the West Bank, about which the ministers disagreed." So Israel never offered to return Gaza and only later did they offer to return to Jordan a portion of their captured territory, cut off from the rest of Jordan by Israel's "security belt", and completely vulnerable to the whims of Israel for access.

      So Israel didn't even agree to return all captured Egyptian territory. It planned to keep Gaza. And it couldn't even agree on a plan to "return" a rump version of the West Bank to Jordan. No doubt this was an early example of the "generous offers" Israel has become famous for.

    • tree May 8, 2013 at 2:56 am

      I've got the paperback copy. Footnote 120, for chapter seven, page 330 lists "Korn, p.14-15". In his Bibliography Morris lists one book by Korn, David. "Stalemate: The War of Attrition and Great Power Diplomacy in the Middle East, 1967-1970. Boulder, CO. Westview Press, 1992.

  • Shared values?
    • tree May 7, 2013 at 2:03 pm

      Your ignorance of what goes on in Israel is showing yet again, miriam.

      Facility 1391. Israel's Guantanamo. Except that its been around longer than the US's shameful use of Guantanamo as a political prisoner holding pen.

      The men under the black hoods all have the same question once the blindfolds and manacles are off: Where am I? A voice filtering through a narrow slit in the steel door told Sameer Jadala he was "in Honolulu", Raab Bader that he was "in a submarine" and "outside the borders of Israel", Bashar Jadala that he was "on the moon". None of them imagined it at the time, because only a handful of the political and security establishment knew such a thing existed, but they were prisoners in Israel's Guantanamo: Facility 1391.

      "I was barefoot in my pyjamas when they arrested me and it was really cold," says Sameer Jadala, a Palestinian school bus driver. "When I got to that place, they told me to strip and gave me a blue uniform. Then they gave me a black sack. They told me: 'This is your sack. You need to keep it with you. Any time someone comes to your cell, you must put it on your head. Any time they deliver the food, you must put it on your head. You must never see the soldiers' faces. You do not want to know what will happen if you take it off.' Sometimes I thought I would die in that place and no one would ever know."

      Facility 1391 has been airbrushed from Israeli aerial photographs and purged from modern maps. Where once a police station was marked there is now a blank space. Sometimes even the road leading to it has been erased. But Israel's secret prison, inside an army intelligence base close to the main road between Hadera and Afula in northern Israel, is real enough. For 20 years or more it has been housed in a large, imposing, single-storey building designed by a British engineer, Sir Charles Taggart, during the 1930s as one of a series of garrison forts designed to contain growing unrest in Palestine. Today, the thick concrete walls and iron gates are themselves protected by a double fence overseen by watchtowers and patrolled by attack dogs.

      The prison has held Lebanese abducted by the Israeli army as hostages, Iraqi defectors and a Syrian intelligence officer who tried to defect but was accused of spying and chose to remain in another prison rather than return home and face a firing squad. More recently, scores of Palestinians were incarcerated in 1391 for interrogation, which finally led to the almost accidental disclosure of a prison the state decreed did not exist.

      Those who have been through its gates know it is no illusion. One former inmate has filed a lawsuit alleging that he was raped twice - once by a man and once with a stick - during questioning. But most of those who emerge say the real torture is the psychological impact of solitary confinement in filthy, blackened cells so poorly lit that inmates can barely see their own hands, and with no idea where they are or, in many cases, why they are there.

      "Our main conclusion is that it exists to make torture possible - a particular kind of torture that creates progressive states of dread, dependency, debility," says Manal Hazzan, a human rights lawyer who helped expose the prison's existence. "The law gives the army enough authority already to hide prisoners, so why do they need a secret facility?"

      Unlike any other Israeli prison, the International Red Cross, lawyers and members of the Israeli parliament have been refused access. One leftwing MP, Zahava Gal-On, describes Facility 1391 as "one of the signs of totalitarian regimes and of the third world". The Israeli government declines to discuss the secret prison other than to issue a standard response: "Facility 1391 is situated on a secret military base. The base is used by the security services for various classified activities and thus its location is kept confidential."

      .......

      Raab Bader, a 38-year-old accountant and father of two, was also in the cells, although the two men had no contact. He too had been detained in Nablus, though he was convinced he had nothing to hide. "I was held like a blind mole, except for the prolonged hours that an [intelligence] agent interrogated me," he says.

      Bader was variously told that he was on a submarine, in space or outside the borders of Israel. He was pushed into a windowless cell, 6ft square. A fan high in the ceiling drives air into the cell, but inmates say the noise is deafening.

      "The cell walls were painted black. I never saw the ceiling. When I looked up, I saw only darkness. Light no stronger than the power of a candle penetrated in a peculiar way from one side of the room," he said in an affidavit.

      The bed was a thin, damp mattress on a concrete slab a few inches above the ground. The toilet was a bucket, emptied every few days. Water to the cell came out of a hole in the wall, controlled by the guard. "On the ninth consecutive day in the stench-filled cell, one of the soldiers was supposed to come and take me out. He almost vomited and rushed out of the cell," Bader says. "I spent many days in that solitary confinement cell and in others like it, and hour after hour I would talk to myself and feel that I was going crazy, or find myself laughing to myself."

      link to guardian.co.uk

      Read the whole article, miriam. It makes Guantanamo look like a summer camp in comparison. And Facility 1391 PRE-DATES Guantanamo by two decades.

      Israel also had a similarly notorious prison/torture facility that pre-dates Guantanamo. It was set up in Lebanon during Israel's occupation of Southern Lebanon, Khiam Prison, open from 1985 to 2000, when Israel withdrew from Lebanon.

      link to news.bbc.co.uk

      Guantanamo is an abomination, as was Abu Ghraib, but it is, in fact, one instance where the US and the Israelis have come close to having "shared values", and it isn't a case of Israel mimicking US actions but instead its the US taking on Israeli "values".

      link to counterpunch.org

  • Sen. Boxer is on the defensive over legislation OK-ing Israeli discrimination against Arab-Americans
    • tree May 7, 2013 at 3:14 pm with 2 replies

      From the Haaretz article:

      Three days after Herzl wrote the letter to his American colleague, U.S. Secretary of State John Hay officially protested to the Turks about the implicit discrimination against Jews. In reply, the Ottoman Empire clarified that the restrictions on Jews staying in Palestine applied only to those who try to come “in great numbers,” but did not prevent entry of individual tourists.

      Obviously the Ottoman Empire was trying to discourage Zionism, not prevent Jews from visiting Palestine on a short term basis. That happened over one hundred years ago, and still what the Ottoman Empire did was less restrictive than what that "light unto the nations" does today. And the US condones the Israeli attitude, while it protested the less onerous Ottoman restriction back then.

  • Syria wrap: Grumbling This won't be easy, NYT's Bill Keller suits up for another Mid-East war
    • tree May 6, 2013 at 4:14 pm

      The UN court denied the motion for comtempt proceedings against Del Ponte in Feb 2012. I didn't personally know anything about this subject before today, I just Googled and came up with the PDF of the Court's decision, here:

      link to icty.org

  • Israel strikes Syria, explosions rock Damascus like 'an earthquake'
    • tree May 6, 2013 at 4:46 pm

      March 20, 2013 at 9:38 am
      I could care less that Christian killed Christians in endless intraChristian wars.

      Yup, that's our hophmi, although I'm sure he meant to say. "I couldn't care less." Putting the "hip" in hypocrisy.

      Twenty one Jewish Israelis were killed by Hezbollah rockets in the 2006 Lebanon War. Eighteen Palestinian Israelis (almost half of the total of Israeli civilian casualties) were likewise killed by those rockets, but only the Jewish lives lost count to Hophmi. And we know that Hophmi cares not a whit about the 1000 plus Lebanese civilian casualties killed by Israel during the 2006, nor does he care about the hundreds of Lebanese civilians killed or injured in the ensuing years by Israeli cluster bombs dropped in the final hours before the 2006 cease fire took effect.

      link to antiwar.com

      link to electronicintifada.net

      Note: The official Israeli civilian casualty list is 43, but 4 of those are listed as heart attacks. I didn't count those in my totals. None of the eighteen Palestinian Israeli casualties were caused by heart attacks.

    • tree May 6, 2013 at 3:46 am

      Swarthy, unshaven, wild-eyed, fanatical, Jew-hating, Palestinian suicide-bomber terrorist chickens, remember.

      If only those hateful terrorist chickens had loved their chicks more than they hated Israel, the IDF wouldn't have been forced to make chicken hash out of all of them. The poor IDF soldiers probably weep every time they bite into a Chicken McNugget these days, thinking about how traumatized they were by the violence they were forced to commit.

    • tree May 6, 2013 at 1:16 am

      Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but my understanding is that one of the ways that "Allahu Akbar" is used is similar to the context in which we in the US might say, "Jesus Christ!", which might likewise sound strange to a foreign being who only understood Jesus Christ to be one aspect of the Christian deity.

      In other words, if you could understand how "Jesus Christ!" could be uttered in response to an aerial assault, you should be able to understand the use of the phrase, "Allau Akbar" in a similar instance.

  • Fayyad warns Obama: 'A state of leftovers is not going to do it'
    • tree May 7, 2013 at 4:50 pm

      Prior to 1967, I think a negotiated peace based upon pre-1967 borders would have been acceptable to US Zionist Jews. Not now. I continue to believe that the center of Zionist power is the US, and that US Zionist Jews have an agenda for Israel which they believe benefits them.

      Your first statement makes no sense, since "prior to 1967", the only "borders" that existed were "pre-1967". In any case, Israel itself clearly didn't accept its pre-67 borders; otherwise it would not have captured and occupied the West Bank and Gaza. So what "US Zionist Jews" would have accepted was irrelevant. The power to determine what Israel did was located firmly within Israel, and that power remains there. I'd also posit that the change in what US Zionists will accept is merely a parroting of whatever the prevailing opinion is in Israel is, sufficiently watered down so as not to appear so utterly racist as the Israeli position truly is.

      And AIPAC's origin began in 1948, with founders who had deep contact with Israel and Israeli intelligence. It wasn't a creation of 1967, and it had nearly 20 years of continuing growth prior to then. It's power emanates from its connection to Israel. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't somewhat of a huge Ponzi scheme. Money from US coffers, given to Israel, probably finds its way back to AIPAC which doles it out to strong arm politicians into voting to send more money to Israel. AIPAC's power in the US comes from its ability to steer massive campaign contributions to those that follow its desires, and steer it away from those who oppose it. It has nothing directly to do with US imperial interests, but rather is almost entirely built on USdomestic politics. It is built on the US's corruption of politics by money, as well as on its fading ability to smear anyone who opposes it, or opposes Israel. It has showed no power to influence Israel in any significant way. Such a showing would be necessary in order to rationally claim that the "center of Zionist power is in the US".

      As for "Israel’s massive victory and the destruction of Nasser and Pan Arabism served to establish Zionist bona fides as imperial supporters", the 1967 war was not one that was urged on Israel by the US, and the US was aware prior to the war that Israel would win such a war, predicting that it would last less than one week, so Israel had nothing to prove. US intelligence forces in 1947-8 also predicted that Israel would most likely win the 1948 war.

      Israel had, since 1948, shown its propensity to do things contrary to the interests and wishes of the US, and well before 1967 it was apparent that any actions the US took against Israeli belligerence would generate domestic opposition. This happened in the 1950's, and only Eisenhower's stature and independence from domestic political parties prevented him from succumbing to that pressure. Israel's power in the US was not dependent on kowtowing to US "Imperial" wishes, but came from its ability to game the domestic political system through US Zionist organizations. Again, those organizations have shown little to no ability to influence Israeli domestic politics and foreign policy and a highly significant ability to influence US foreign policy through gaming US DOMESTIC politics. You've got it exactly backwards.

    • tree May 6, 2013 at 2:23 pm

      "...ordering the dissolution of the IZL and LHY-looks like suppression to me."

      He ordered their dissolution but melded its members into the IDF. And the IDF committed some of its worst massacres and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians AFTER the Altalena incident. Ben-Gurion wanted full command over his forces while they attacked Palestinian civilians and drove them out of the newly declared and expanding Jewish State. It wasn't "progress towards peace"; it was the aglomeration of various Jewish fighting forces under one command at a time when Israel clearly had the upper hand in its move to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its non-Jews.

    • tree May 6, 2013 at 1:54 pm

      Haaretz called it the Jewish Lobby. Another example of what can be said in Israel cannot be said in the US.

    • tree May 6, 2013 at 3:25 am

      The problem was you referencing a quote I made of Finkelstein to illustrate that US Zionist Jews have worked to shape Israel into a Middle East Sparta because that helps them in their power seeking objectives.

      The problem I have with this sentence is that it ignores the history of Zionism and Israel. Israel was ALWAYS a Middle East Sparta, and was always intended to be so by Zionism's founders long before "US Zionist Jews" had any say in the matter and long before the US was Israel's benefactor and co-dependent facilitator. No one from outside had to "shape" Israel. Please read some early Israeli history. Israel, in the person of PM Ben-Gurion, was pitching aggressive wars against Lebanon and Syria to the French and British in the 1950's, before their mutual 1956 Sinai Invasion, after which the US and Russia both strong armed a full withdrawal. Ben-Gurion wasn't doing this crap to benefit anyone other than his own militaristic view of Spartan Israel, certainly not the US, nor "US Zionist Jews", and not even the French and British, who thought his grand plan for Lebanon was over the top. This is but one example; there are many more.

      A question, though, are you arguing that "Empire" = "US Zionist Jews"? You've never gotten specific about who is "Empire", but in your sentence above you seem to be equating it with your oft-used "Empire", thus your phrase "their power seeking objectives".

      My take would be different. US Zionist Jews have endorsed Israeli objectives both because they have an attachment to Israel, and because endorsing Israeli objectives is what adds to their own "power seeking objectives". Going against Israel has proven to be one of the quickest ways in the US to lose political power.

  • When will the discourse of the 'two state solution' finally change?
    • tree May 4, 2013 at 7:32 am

      Most of the Spanish settlers were men. Therefore, they married, or dallied with, ( or raped,) native women, accounting for the higher number of mestizos in South and Central America. Its as simple as that. It certainly didn't mean that the Spaniards settlers treated the native population with any greater respect. They didn't.

  • Ezra Nawi needs a truck
    • tree April 30, 2013 at 5:47 pm

      I wish him well. He is non-violent; and you got to admire a colorful gadfly – even when you disagree with him.

      So what do you disagree with in this:

      Ezra's Toyota has traveled to every Palestinian village and grazing ground south of Bethlehem. It has been used to transport young children who were afraid to walk to school because settlers had attacked them the day before. It has escorted Palestinian shepherds, who had been terrorized by the settler hill youth. And it has carried blankets and warm clothes for scores of Palestinians whose homes had been demolished.

      Do you disagree with Ezra trying to protect and defend the people who are being ethnically cleansed from the Hebron Hills? I take it from your attitude that you see nothing wrong with ethnic cleansing, or oppression and discrimination and land expropriation on the basis of ethnicity. Do you find nothing wrong with the occupation? Do you even disagree with the settlements there? It doesn't sound like any of that bothers you at all.

  • In photos: Greek Orthodox Christians celebrate Palm Sunday in Gaza
    • tree May 2, 2013 at 3:01 am

      I watched the episode and its actually quite good. I suspect Mayhem's too indoctrinated to realize that it doesn't portray Israel in a bad light, nor does it portray Gazans in a bad light. (That's assuming he even watched it himself. He may have simply read the article about it that he posted.)

      According to the TV show, the boom has everything to do with the fact that Gaza is under siege, and that Israel has destroyed so many buildings there. There are tunnel millionaires because tunnels are the only way that construction materials can get in. There are areas that are high priced because, for instance they are near to UN quarters and its assumed they won't be bombed by Israel in the future, and there are inexpensive areas that people would prefer not to live in because they feel its likely that Israel will bomb the same areas again in the future. Near to the border with Israel, or close to the beach in some places, are considered dangerous areas to live, and so those prices stay down. The population is growing but limited to a small area, and people who's house have been destroyed need new places to live, plus the tunnels have made a few millionaires, so thus the boom. As the blurb on the you-tube video says, "In war-torn Gaza, 'Location, Location, Location' means finding an apartment in one of the highly sought-after areas that are usually not shelled or hit by missiles."

  • 'FT' runs valentine to religious people dancing to techno on a tank during a war (you know where)
    • tree April 28, 2013 at 7:19 pm with 1 replies

      What tanks? I saw a van, but no tanks.

      May you should have read as well as looked at the picture. From Phil's except of the piece:

      "Some of my friends even took their van into the fighting zone during the 2006 Lebanon war. They jumped on an Israeli tank, started dancing on it, put Na Nach beanies on the soldiers’ heads and stickers on the tank.

  • Gideon Levy: It's time for a 'one person, one vote' movement to end Israeli oppression
    • tree April 27, 2013 at 2:52 pm

      The Arab countries have already gone on record as willing to accept any Arab Jew who wishes to return. This was done decades ago, at the request of the PLO, which asked the Arab governments to issue such statements.

      Morocco for one is actively encouraging its Jews to return.

      link to aljadid.com

      link to jweekly.com

      Some of the difficulty in such a return is caused by the endogamous nature of many Jews groups. Without a large enough population in residence to begin with, further immigration is difficult to obtain, because of worries about a lack of community and lack of enough suitable marriage partners. Of course, the Arab antagonism to the violence that Israel, which claims to represent all Jews, dishes out to Palestinians and Arabs in general, is another obstacle that has to be overcome.

    • tree April 27, 2013 at 5:09 am

      Palestinians are not immigrants, so therefore they are not subject to immigration rules. They are the indigenous inhabitants who were ethnically cleansed from their homes and land.

  • U.S. ambassador to UN says 'huge part' of her work is defending Israel
    • tree April 27, 2013 at 5:14 am

      Unless you have some poll showing that US citizens want their UN representative to spend a "huge amount" of her time defending Israel, which you don't, then the ambassador is NOT "speaking for the people of the US". I'd bet that the vast majority of Americans are pro British, but that doesn't mean that they want their ambassador spending most of her time defending Britain.

      I'd even venture to guess that that Israelis don't want their ambassador to spend a "huge amount" of his time "defending the US".

    • tree April 25, 2013 at 5:15 pm

      Mexicans just can’t freely drive on American roads – so does that make America an apartheid state?

      So not only are you poorly informed about Israel, you don't know your head from a hole in the wall about the US. Any foreign citizen traveling in the US can legally drive here as long as they have a driver's license from their home country, and in some states there is a further requirement to have an International Driver's Permit, issued in their home country, which is merely a translation of one's original driver's license.

      So, yes, Mexican nationals can freely drive on US roads. What would be an equivalence to the situation in Israel/West Bank would be roads in Mexico which were designated as "US citizens only" roads, and Mexicans were not permitted to drive on them. There are obviously no such roads in Mexico.

      There are places and towns where Israeli Palestinians are expressly forbidden to live in Israel, and Israel has legalized this apartheid injunction.

  • Diaspora Jews must speak out against the Israeli Law of Return
    • tree April 27, 2013 at 2:12 pm

      goldmarx,

      The Israeli economy was not "humming" from 1948 to 1967. In the early years, the Israeli economy was dependent on massive reparations (3 billion marks) from Germany and proceeds from the confiscated land and businesses of the ethnically cleansed Palestinians.

      According to Wikipedia, German reparations to Israel were "decisive", accounting for 87.5% of Israeli state income in 1956. It was the major source of income to the state in those early years.

      link to en.wikipedia.org

      Israel's largest export at that time was oranges, with over half of the crop formerly owned by Palestinians prior to 1948, according to the British Survey of Mandate Palestine. Its third largest export was olives, which were 95% Palestinian prior to 1948. By 1954, 35% of Israeli Jews lived on land and/or property confiscated from Palestinians.

      From "The Case for Palestine: An International Law Perspective", by John Quigley:

      The provisional government used the Arabs' land, dwellings, and possessions for its Jewish population, and primarily for recent immigrants. Ben Gurion ordered that abandoned Arab housing be allocated to Jews. By April 1949, he reported to the Knesset, the government had settled 150,000 Jews in Arab housing.

      ...

      The government also took housing from Arabs who remained inside the armistice lines. In Haifa in July 1948 the IDF forced out Arab residents of the Carmel ridge area to make room for Jews. It forced Arabs from their homes in Acre into what became an Arab ghetto. Many "internal refugees" tried to return to their homes. Their land, like that of the Arab "external refugees", was considered "absentee" property and was controlled by the custodian of absentee property, who rented it to Jews-the rent money going to the government.

      .....

      The value of the land taken from the Palestine Arabs was estimated at 100 million Palestinian pounds. It included stone quarries, 10,000 acres of vineyards, 25, 000 acres of citrus groves, 10.000 business establishments, 95 percent of what became Israel's olive groves, and 50,000 apartments.

      .....

      The government took over fully equipped plants. In Ramleh, it distributed 600 shops to Jewish immigrants. In Lydda it seized 1800 truckloads of property, including a button factory, a carbonated drinks plant, a sausage factory, 7000 retail shops, 500 workshops, and 1000 warehouses. It confiscated cabinetmaking shops, locksmith works, turneries, ironworks, and tinworks, which it then leased and sold to Jews.

      ...

      The government sequestered as "enemy property" the bank accounts of expelled Arabs, saying it would release them only if the Arab states made peace with Israel. Under a program worked out by the UN Palestine Conciliation Commission, it returned a small percentage of these funds in the late 1950's and early 1960s.

      The funds of Palestinian companies were never returned. Only those of private individuals were partially returned. And as was learned about 10 years ago or so, the bank accounts of European Holocaust victims were also used by Israeli banks and the government with no attempts to return the funds to their rightful heirs.

      With all these capital assets confiscated from others, Israel cannot realistically claim that "their economy" was humming during this time. It was massively dependent on the capital of others, in this case it was German capital in the form of reparations, and the capital of the ethnically cleansed Palestinians.

      As to the 1960's, the German reparations ended in 1966. Israel saw one of its worst recessions in 1966.

      1966, the last year before Israel occupied territories, was terrible. Unemployment had reached a record 10%, there was a sharp recession and for the first time in the country’s history, migration from it was higher than that to it (aliya). Although military rule over 400,000 Arabs living inside Israel, in place since the 1948 war, was abolished in 1966, their situation remained tough as their lands were confiscated to build new Jewish towns and villages.

      The 1967 war changed all that. Everyone knows that afterwards Israel was considered a regional, if not an international, military superpower. What is less known is that the war changed economic history. The recession ended, unemployment decreased and the economy began to prosper. In 1967 gross domestic product per capita in Israel was only $1,500. By 2006 GDP per capita was $24,000, putting Israel in 23rd place in the UNDP’s Human Development Report. This is reflected in migration to Israel. More than 1.5 million Jews have arrived in the past 40 years and the population has increased from 2.4 million in 1967 to 5.5 million in 2006. No wonder that many consider the war was a turning point in the “Israeli success story”.

      link to mondediplo.com

      1967 was a boon for two reasons. One, it gave Israel a captive market for its goods in the West Bank and Gaza, and two, it was the start of the burgeoning US aid to Israel.

    • tree April 25, 2013 at 5:37 pm

      Dan,

      I agree with Donald and others here.

      According to the scientific interpretation of my mitochondrial DNA, my ancestors came from Africa, through the Middle East and into the Urals. (BTW, this is from the side of my family which has no known Jewish ancestors.) Do you think that gives me the right to set up a state comprised of people with similar DNA, and displace the people who live there now? I certainly don't, but that seem to be similar to what you are advocating.

    • tree April 23, 2013 at 4:52 pm with 16 replies

      After 2000 years of trouble, where the Jews have been persecuted, I doubt they will ever consent to being a minority population again.

      There are more Jews who are part of a "minority population"(ie. in the USA) BY CHOICE, than there are Jews who are part of a majority population in Israel. Your logic is flawed.

  • Double standard on killing collaborators
    • tree April 22, 2013 at 12:41 pm with 10 replies

      You probably missed this, miriam. Genetic studies have confirmed the Khazarian Theory with respect to the ancestry of Ashkenazim Jews.

      From ynetnews:

      Jews of European descent, often called Ashkenazim, account for some 90% of the more than 13 million Jews in the world today.

      According to the so-called Rhineland Hypothesis, Ashkenazim descended from Jews who progressively fled Palestine after the Muslim conquest of 638 AD.

      They settled in southern Europe and then, in the late Middle Ages, about 50,000 of them moved from the Rhineland in Germany into eastern Europe, according to the hypothesis.

      But detractors say this idea is implausible.

      Barring a miracle – which some supporters of the Rhineland Hypothesis have in fact suggested – the scenario would have been demographically impossible.

      It would mean that the population of Eastern European Jews leapt from 50,000 in the 15th century to around eight million at the start of the 20th century.

      That birth rate would have been 10 times greater than that of the local non-Jewish population. And it would have occurred despite economic hardship, disease, wars and pogroms that ravaged Jewish communities.

      Seeking new light in the argument, a study published in the British journal Genome Biology and Evolution, compares the genomes of 1,287 unrelated individuals who hail from eight Jewish and 74 non-Jewish populations.

      Geneticist Eran Elhaik of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, trawled through this small mountain of data in search of single changes in the DNA code that are linked to a group's geographical origins.

      Such telltales have been used in past research to delve into the origins of the Basque people and the pygmy people of central Africa.

      Among European Jews, Elhaik found ancestral signatures that pointed clearly to the Caucasus and also, but to a smaller degree, the Middle East.
      The results, said Elhaik, give sound backing for the rival theory – the "Khazarian Hypothesis."

      Backed by archaeological findings
      Under this concept, eastern European Jews descended from the Khazars, a hotchpotch of Turkic clans that settled the Caucasus in the early centuries AD and, influenced by Jews from Palestine, converted to Judaism in the 8th century.

      The Judeo-Khazars built a flourishing empire, drawing in Jews from Mesopotamia and imperial Byzantium.

      They became so successful that they sent offshoots into Hungary and Romania, planting the seeds of a great Diaspora.

      But Khazaria collapsed in the 13th century when it was attacked by the Mongols and became weakened by outbreaks of the Black Death.

      The Judeo-Khazars fled westwards, settling in the rising Polish Kingdom and in Hungary, where their skills in finance, economics and politics were in demand, and eventually spread to central and western Europe, according to the "Khazarian Hypothesis."

      "We conclude that the genome of European Jews is a tapestry of ancient populations including Judaised Khazars, Greco-Roman Jews, Mesopotamian Jews and Judeans," says Elhaik.

      more at link

      link to ynetnews.com

  • Remembering the Warsaw Ghetto uprising
    • tree April 20, 2013 at 4:50 am with 1 replies

      A further note from Bloodlands:

      In early August, as the Home Army failed to take the important German positions in Warsaw, its soldiers did register one victory. Officers gathered volunteers for a dangerous attack upon a heavily guarded position. On 5 August, Home Army soldiers entered the ruins of the ghetto, attacked Concentration Camp Warsaw, defeated the ninety SS-men who guarded it, and liberated its remaining 348 prisoners, most of them foreign Jews. On of the Home Army soldiers in this operation was Stanislaw Aronson, who had himself been deported from the ghetto to Treblinka. Another recalled a Jew who greeted them with tears on his cheeks; yet another, the plea of a Jew for a weapon and a uniform, so that he could fight. Many of the liberated Jewish slave laborers did join the Home Army, fighting in their striped camp uniforms and wooden shoes, with "complete indifference to life or death," as one Home Army soldier recalled.

      page 302

      Marek Edelman fought in the Warsaw Uprising as well as the Ghetto Uprising.

    • tree April 20, 2013 at 4:38 am with 2 replies

      Ethan, you might also be interested in this, from Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands", about the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 (not to be confused with the Ghetto Uprising in 1943).

      Polish soldiers in uniforms and armbands began their assault on on German positions in the afternoon of 1 August 1944...On this first day of the Warsaw Uprising, the Home Army secured a great deal of the downtown and Old Town of the city, but failed to capture most of the essential military targets. ... The inexperienced and lightly armed troops had an especially difficult time with guarded and fortified objectives. Nevertheless, the mood among the fighters and in the city itself was euphoric.

      When and where Polish power replaced German power in those early days of August 1944, surviving Jews emerged from their places of shelter among Poles. Many asked to be allowed to fight. As Michal Zylberberg recalled: " A Jewish perspective ruled out passivity. Poles had taken up arms against the mortal enemy. Our obligations as victims and fellow citizens was to help them." Other combatants in the Warsaw Uprising were veterans of the ghetto uprising of 1943. Most of these Jews joined the Home Army, other's found the People's Army, or even the anti-Semitic National Armed Forces. Some Jews (or Poles of Jewish origin) were already enlisted in the Home Army and the People's Army. Almost certainly, more Jews fought in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 than in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1944.

      "Bloodlands", page 301, or location 5592 in the Kindle Edition.

      This instance of Jews fighting alongside other Poles in Warsaw is never mentioned, even though, as Snyder says, more Jews were involved in this Uprising than in the Ghetto Uprising. It probably doesn't get any mention because it runs counter to so many Zionist myths.

  • Entering Gaza by 'subway'
  • Reflecting on bombings in Boston and Iraq
  • Investigation of Brooklyn College BDS event rejects charges of anti-Semitism
    • tree April 17, 2013 at 6:38 pm with 1 replies

      Guzman was not a "security official" in SJP. As far as I know they have no "security officials". According to the College report, he was a student at Hunter College since 2010, and the VP of the SJP chapter there in the Fall of 2012. According to the report, he was not an enrolled student in the Spring 2013 semester. However, the spring semester didn't start until January 28th, 2013, the event was planned since mid January, and the event was scheduled for February 7th, 2013, just 10 days after the start of the Spring term. To harp on the fact that Guzman was not enrolled in the Spring term seems quite petty to me under these circumstances. As does his use of the term "apparatchik" to describe Guzman.

      It appears from the report that the College put the onus of making decisions about how to handle any verbal disturbance at the event on the SJP organizers of the event, because the College was leery of being see as "sponsoring" the event if it provided direct intervention within the room. There was College security outside the room, but they were only to be utilized if there was a physical confrontation. Yonah does have a point about the College's mishandling of the event security, although it appears to be a result of fear of a backlash against the College for allowing the event. And he totally misunderstands the history of the college's decisions, most probably because he didn't read the entire report. He probably stopped after reading that Guzman was not a current student, which gave him his excuse to call Guzman an "apparatchik", akin to his calling Barghouti a Stalinist.

      One would think that yonah, after reading the report on the difficulties and errors of the registration process, would have been relieved to know that simply having his "Brooklyn College ID" (yonah never mentioned whether he himself was a current student or a former one, did he?) was not sufficient to get himself into the event. According to the requirements set up by the College Administration, the SJP was required to create a list which BC students had to sign up on in order to be assured a seat.

  • 'Constructive engagement' didn't work in South Africa, so why are liberal Zionists pushing it for Israel?
    • tree April 16, 2013 at 1:25 pm

      ... the ANC, to their credit, NEVER promoted hatred of whites, never pushed to seize white businesses or farms, made it clear they didn’t want a white exodus from SA, and those few black agitators who may have sought revenge were few and very sidelined. In either Palestinian area, the opposite is true.

      Your last line is correct, but you have the protagonists backwards. Zionist Jews in Israel have for decades promoted hatred of Palestinians and all Arabs, even to the point of stigmatizing those Israeli Jews who trace their ancestry back to other Arab countries. They not only "pushed" to seize Palestinian lands and businesses but have done so for over 60 years, and not only "made it clear" they wanted a Palestinian exodus but used violent means to create such an exodus. So why do you continually excuse such behavior when its Israeli Jews who are the responsible for injustice in this case? Why are you ascribing behavior to the Palestinians that are in fact the behaviors of Israeli Jews?

  • 'It is time to guard our house!': Nazareth Illit mayor promises to prevent a Palestinian school in order to 'stop the demographic deterioration' of the city
    • tree April 12, 2013 at 3:47 pm

      And of course, Upper Nazareth was built on land confiscated from the Palestinian Israeli citizens of Nazareth.

  • Palestinian-American boy, 14, locked up in Israeli military jail
    • tree April 12, 2013 at 3:10 pm

      I'm awaiting your links to similar cases where Jewish children in Israel who throw stones are subject to " arrests of children at their homes between midnight and 5:00 am by heavily armed soldiers; the practice of blindfolding children and tying their hands with plastic ties; physical and verbal abuse during transfer to an interrogation site, including the use of painful restraints; lack of access to water, food, toilet facilities and medical care; interrogation using physical violence and threats; coerced confessions; and lack of access to lawyers or family members during interrogation." There are no such cases because Jewish children are not subjected to the same incredibly harsh treatment that Palestinian children are. Any rational adult would think that the Israelis truly want the Palestinians to hate them. How would you feel if your child was treated that way solely because of his ethnicity or religion?

      That is what is newsworthy about this. The horrendous double standard that you and other Israelis excuse without a thought.

    • tree April 12, 2013 at 3:02 pm with 1 replies

      The army isn’t interested in jailing endless number of teens; they question many, release most, and prosecute only the worst offenders, those who really cause bodily harm.

      You have no idea what you are talking about, and you clearly didn't read the article.

      Ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized...

      The pattern of ill-treatment includes the arrests of children at their homes between midnight and 5:00 am by heavily armed soldiers; the practice of blindfolding children and tying their hands with plastic ties; physical and verbal abuse during transfer to an interrogation site, including the use of painful restraints; lack of access to water, food, toilet facilities and medical care; interrogation using physical violence and threats; coerced confessions; and lack of access to lawyers or family members during interrogation.

      Mohammed Khalek has already been punished severely even before he has been charged with any crime. This DOES NOT HAPPEN to Jewish Israeli children who are suspected of throwing stones, and there are plenty of Jewish settler children that do just that. Its atrocious behavior on the part of the IDF and the Israeli military courts and its highly discriminatory. Israeli Jews, even those settlers in the occupied territories, are not subject to the same harsh military "justice" that Israel metes out to Palestinian children accused of crimes.

    • tree April 12, 2013 at 2:52 pm with 2 replies

      No, the reason why is because he is Palestinian. Jewish children who throw stones, or who are accused of throwing stones (or molotov cocktails in the case below), are NOT treated in the same way. If stone throwing merits this kind of draconian punishment, I await gilad's linking of several articles from the JPost detailing this kind of punishment of Jewish children who are accused of throwing stones. He can't do it, because the punishment is determined not by the crime, but by the ethnicity of the accused.

      Defence for Children International - On 16 August 2012, two children suffer burns after a Molotov cocktail is thrown at the car they are travelling in. Three Israeli settler children are questioned by the police.

      Four-year-old Iman and five-year-old Mohammad live with their parents in the village of Nahhalin, about 12 kilometres southwest of Bethlehem. At around 4:30 p.m., on Thursday 16 August 2012, they took a taxi to go to the supermarket with their parents and their uncle. As they were passing by the Israeli settlement of Bat Ayin, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at their vehicle.

      “My husband was sitting in the front seat next to the driver. Hasan and I were sitting in the back seat with the children. Hasan was carrying Mohammad, and Iman was sitting next to me,” recalls Jamila, the children’s mother. “As we were passing by the settlement of Bat Ayin, something terrible happened. A Molotov cocktail was thrown at the car and came through the window, landing in front of Ayman. That moment was terrifying. The Molotov exploded a few seconds later and started a fire.”

      In the confusion, the driver lost control of the car and crashed on the left side of the road. When the car stopped, they managed to get out, but they were all injured. “We were all burnt before we managed to get out of the car,” says Jamila. “My husband and the driver were wearing their seat belts so it took them longer to get out. That is why their injuries were more severe, especially my husband's.”

      The family and the driver were taken to the Hadassah Ein-Karim Hospital for treatment. “I was hospitalised for 12 days, Mohammad for 25 days, and Iman for four days,” says Jamila. “My husband is still in the hospital. We all underwent surgery.”

      Jamila remembers seeing the attacker just before he threw the fire-bomb. “I saw a young settler wearing a small cap [kippah]… I saw him throwing the Molotov cocktail from behind a roadside barrier on the right side of the road.” Jamila adds: “Mohammad is still receiving treatment at home. We are giving Iman a lot of support because she is still scared.”

      On 26 August 2012, three Israeli settler children, aged between 12 and 13 years, were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the attack. One boy was conditionally released by a civilian judge on 29 August, and the other two were conditionally released the following day. This case highlights the discriminatory nature of the legal systems applied by the Israeli authorities in the West Bank. Whilst settler children are processed through Israel’s juvenile justice system and generally released on bail, Palestinian children accused of similar offences are prosecuted in military courts which deny children bail in at least 87 percent of cases, and have a conviction rate of 99.74 percent.

      link to councilforthenationalinterest.org

  • All that furor over Carter at Cardozo, and who shows up? Jews for Jimmy!
    • tree April 13, 2013 at 3:24 pm

      Wiki's hit and miss. However, it makes it clear that, while Welch removed Fisher from the Army-McCarthy hearing case because of his earlier membership in the NLG, he did not fire him from his firm. It seems likely that he recused Fisher from the hearings to avoid just what McCarthy did anyway, which was smear Fisher as a Communist and seek to get him fired. That was McCarthy's well documented modus operandi and it is on a whole other, more sinister, level than simply removing Fisher from that particular case.

  • Fear of democracy in the Jewish community
    • tree April 11, 2013 at 12:42 pm

      And so you quote from Mitchell Bard, who is a known liar and propagandist for Israel. Did you miss the part where Don asked for

      i.e. evidence that existed prior to the State if Israel’s founding…and evidence created by an historian without an “Israel axe to grind”, so to speak? ?

      Bard has a large Israeli ax to grind, and continually resorts to lies, omissions and distortions to do so.

    • tree April 11, 2013 at 12:32 pm

      Go ask the emigre community of Iranian Jews living in the US if this is true.

      Iranian Jews do however, whatever their emotional state, enjoy full citizenship and a seat in parliament, which is much, much more than the Palestinians in the West Bank "enjoy".

      Emigrant populations are by in large unhappy with their position in the country from which they've emigrated. That's one of the things that makes them emigrants. There are a lot of Cuban emigrants in the US that are unhappy with Cuba. And yet there are Cubans living in Cuba who are very happy with their country. Likewise, I'm sure, with emigrants from the US to other countries.

    • tree April 11, 2013 at 12:25 pm with 4 replies

      The Muslim Arab culture can, I believe, reach democracy, but it is in its infancy and to pretend that Israel’s resistance to democracy has more to do with rejection of democracy a la the USA rather than rejection of the lack of democracy in Syria, Egypt and Iraq, is to consider the debate over.

      You know, yonah, one could say the same thing about the Jewish Israeli culture. It hasn't reached democracy in all its 100+ years. One could truthfully say that Jewish culture in Israel has failed to understand or implement any of the responsibilities inherent in being a majority in a democracy. From the very beginning, the Zionists sought to make deals with outsiders, including those in Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad, as well as Europe, rather than deal with the inhabitants of the land they wished to rule. Early on, they refused to agree to a parlimentary body in Palestine, unless they, as Jews, were allotted half of its membership, despite their being a 10% of the overall population, and later when the non-Jewish Palestinians agreed to give Zionist Jews half the membership, although Jews were still only a third of the population, the Zionists still refused to accept such a bargain. Their first act of true power was to ethnically cleanse, and they also the remaining small population of Palestinians under military rule for 19 years, and continue to this day to confiscate land from non-Jews, refuse to allocate them their rightful share of public funds, discriminate against them, deny them their heritage and treat them as fifth columnists. None of these non-democratic actions within Israel have anything to do with fear of Cairo, or Damascus, or Baghdad. They have to do with the deficiencies of thought inherent in setting up an ethnocratic state. Likewise with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Frankly, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians there is merely a slow motion version of what they did to the Palestinians in the lands Israel claimed in 1948. And all of those actions could only serve to anger those in Cairo, et cetera, but the Israelis do them nonetheless, showing no fear of an understandable reaction in other Arab countries. And in fact Israel has attacked its neighbors numerous times, often without justifiable provocation. The fear of others promoted by the Israeli goverment is primarily used to excuse its own non-democratic actions, as well as its atrocities. You still have a lot of veils to uncover from your eyes.

      And on a related note, the discouragement from the mainstream Jewish community leaders of any real discussion of this reality in Israel also could be seen as a failure to embrace a real democratic outlook on the part of those leaders. You don't put someone in herem for exercising their right to free speech if you are embracing a true democracy.

  • Citing criticism from Zionists, NYRB's Silvers brags on 4 Israeli writers (and not a word about Judt)
    • tree April 12, 2013 at 1:37 pm

      For that matter, when did these attacks on innocent Palestinians and mosques start?

      There's a long history of Israeli attacks on innocent Palestinians and mosques that started many, many decades before the Fogel murders. Deir Yassin was in 1948, and before that there were numerous attacks by Jewish terrorist groups on innocent Palestinians in markets and cafes in the late 30s and into the 40s. Qibya was in 1953, Kfar Kassem was in 1956, Es Samu was in 1966, Sabra and Shatilla was in 1982. Jewish terrorists in Israel planned and instigated several violent attacks on Palestinians in the 1980's, including plots to kill Palestinian mayors, place bombs on public buses, a random and deadly gun attack on college students at Islamic University, and a plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock. A later group attempted to bomb a Palestinian elementary school. And there's the mass murders committed by Ami Popper in 1990 and Eden Natan-Zeda in 2005.

      And of course, there's Baruch Goldstein's 1994 mass murder attack on the worshipers at the Al-Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron. ( The first Palestinian suicide attack came in response to that massacre, BTW)

      And of course, Zionist Jews in Israel have been oppressing Palestinians everyday for over 100 years. If they really want the Palestinians to stop hating them, the easiest course to do so is to stop oppressing them and start treating them as equals.

      As for your excusing settler "price tag" attacks made collectively against Palestinians as a "response" to a murder committed by 2 individuals, it reminds me of the excuse for the Nazi German Kristallnacht, which was a violent "response" against Jews collectively because of the murder committed by one Jew. And to be correct about it the "price tag" attacks against Palestinians are often made, not in "response" to the acts of individual Palestinians, but because of legal IDF actions against the settlers.The settlers know that they can "retaliate" against defenseless Palestinians because the IDF will not defend Palestinians.

  • Hiroshima epiphany
    • tree April 9, 2013 at 2:00 pm

      Your response drips with vitriol. So I’d say it is some good evidence right there.

      Faulty reasoning again. MJ. Just because someone reacts angrily to YOU, doesn't mean that person is a "Jew hater" which is essentially what you called Cliff. Or do YOU think that you somehow stand for all Jews and if someone is angry with YOU it must mean that they are upset by all Jews? If so, then I think you need to look in the mirror at your own anti-semitism.

    • tree April 8, 2013 at 12:45 pm

      Apparently you think that questioning the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust means that you "hate Jews". Does questioning the uniqueness of Hiroshima or Dresden or American slavery likewise mean one "hates" the Japanese or the Germans or American blacks? None of those events were "terribly unique", not because they weren't horrendous but because horrendous acts are sadly far too common throughout human history. I guess you think I must hate nearly everyone, since most ethnicities can point to cruel and senseless murder by others as a part of their past. Really, you think that someone is a "Jew hater" unless he or she thinks that the Holocaust is unique among all genocides? Jews must be accepted as special victims or else one is guilty of "Jew hatred"? Jews can't be consider victims in this instance like every other victim of atrocity? You must think Jews are special, at least in their victimhood, or you are a "hater"? This is incerdibly sloppy thinking on your part, MJ.

      And you seem too ready to dismiss how this claim of "uniqueness" has been used to justify terrible acts on the part of Israel. The whole idea of "uniqueness would be a a dry academic question if the Holocaust wasn't continually used by Israel and its apologists to excuse their cruelty and denial of human rights to the Palestinians, as well as excuse their hatred of gentiles, and Arab gentiles in particular. The Holocaust was NOT unique in the general sense (nor were any other of the numerous historical atrocities through the ages) and it in no way justifies the mistreatment of others. Call me an "anti-semite" if you will but it only diminishes you to carelessly throw around such an epithet.

      People who carelessly and recklessly throw around the "anti-semite" slur do far more damage to the Palestinian cause that the "Jew hating" windmills you are tilting at. Think about it.

  • 'FEMEN' and the suppression of native voices
    • tree April 8, 2013 at 12:47 am

      Thanks, Roqayah.

      I, for one, as a Western woman, view FEMEN as a group of exhibitionist women with little respect for themselves or any real interest in feminism. They are appealing to the basest Western variety of sexism by capitalizing on the Western fetish for bare breasts, and doing nothing positive for Muslim women, or for Western women for that matter.

      I heartily agree with Mona Chollet's view that you so kindly posted with your piece.

      "Covering women's bodies seems to give Muslims a sense of virility, while Westerners derive their own from uncovering them", writes Moroccan essayist Fatema Mernissi in Scheherazade Goes West. The French media's excitement over figures like the Ukranian 'Femen' or Alia el Mahdi, the Egyptian student who in 2011 posted naked pictures of herself on her blog, once again underlines the truth of Mernissi's observation. To commemorate International Women's Day, France 2 aired a documentary on March 5 about the Ukrainian women's group, which has been based in France for more than a year now.

      So much for the thousands of women who have the poor taste to fight for their rights while fully clothed, or to put on a show that does not conform with the dominant standards of youth, slimness, beauty and bodily firmness. "Feminism is women on the march in the streets of Cairo, not the Femen," raged France Inter's Egypt correspondent Vanessa Descouraux on Twitter, on February 6. "But we never see documentaries about those women on television!" Feminist organizations in France these days are more likely to be asked their opinion of the Ukrainian women's group than about their own undertakings.

      If you show your boobs, I'll come back with the photographer

      Women: do you want to make yourselves heard? There is only one solution: take off your clothes! In October, 2012 in Germany, a group of refugees camped out in front of Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to protest their living conditions were having great difficulty attracting the attention of the media. At one point, an angry young woman protestor asked a journalist from Bild: "Do you want me to get naked?"

      'Yes', said the journalist, promising to come back with a photographer. Word spread among the other journalists, and voila, there was a mob of cameras around the women protesting in support of the refugees. The women did not in the end take off their clothes, but they didn't miss the opportunity to denounce the sensationalism of the media.

      The Femen on the other hand were more pragmatic. At their first demonstrations, in Ukraine in 2008, they had written their slogans on their backs, but photographers were only interested in their breasts. So, they changed the location of their slogans. Inna Shevchenko, importer of the Femen brand to France, has no regrets about how things evolved: "We know what the media need--sex, scandals and fighting--and that's what we give them", Shevchenko told Rue89 last December. "To be in the newspapers is to exist at all." Really? [...]

      The permanent reduction of women to their bodies and their sexuality, the negation of their intellectual abilities, the social invisibility of women who cannot please the male gaze: these are keystones of the patriarchal system. It is rather stupefying that a purportedly feminist 'movement' - there are no more than twenty Femen in France - cannot see this. "We live under male domination," Inna Shevchenko told The Guardian, "and nudity is the only way to provoke them, to get their attention." So, a feminism that bends to male domination: well, it had to be invented.

      Shevchenko not only accepts this order of things, she approves of it: "Classic feminism is a sick old woman, it does not work anymore. It is stuck in the world of conferences and books." She is right: death to sick old women, they are not even pleasing to look at! And books? They are full of words that cause headaches.

      In his excellent book on the use of bodies in politics, Claude Guillon said of Shevchenko's sick old woman: "Even the most charitable of readers would say that Shevchenko's statement expresses the presumption and the cruelty of youth. But we should also add: the greatness of its imbecility! The image of feminists as old ladies, cut off from the rest of the world - and if Inna read books she might have known this - is an abiding anti-feminist cliche. A pity to see it taken up by an activist who pretends to be renewing feminism." More recently, the group's members in France resigned themselves to publishing a book, of interviews. "In France, you have to publish something in order to be taken seriously," sighs one of the Femen in an interview in Liberation. Oh, the misery.

      ....

      Many feminists objected that instead of affirming the superiority of nudity, it might be better to defend women's freedom to dress the way they want. But the Femen have no doubts that they are right. "We are not going to adapt our discourse to all ten countries where our group is now present: our message is universal", said Shevchenko in an interview in 20 Minutes. This mixture of intellectual laziness and arrogance, this pretension to dictate the correct attitude to women from every disparate part of the world, has been met with a certain coldness. Researcher Sara Salem reproached Egyptian student Alia el Mahdi for her alliance with the Femen. "The fact that she posted naked pictures of herself on her blog could be perceived as a way of defying a patriarchal society, but the fact that she collaborates with a group that can be defined as colonialist is problematic", Salem writes. But why question oneself when all you need to get maximum audience is show off your breasts?

      link to internationalboulevard.com

  • Jewish space plays host to spirited debate over whether Israel is a democracy
    • tree April 9, 2013 at 6:04 pm

      The statute in question says nothing about “Jewish” communities.

      Wrong. You obviously didn't read the link in the article.

      The Knesset passed the law in March 2011, which allows 475 small communities in Israel (with less than 400 families) built on 'state land' (public land) to reject applicants who "do not suit the lifestyle and social fabric of the community." The law covers small towns in the Galilee and in the Naqab (Negev), or 46% of communities in Israel and 65% of all rural communities.

      [My note: Israel does not build Palestinian communities on "state land", aka confiscated private Palestinian land. It only builds Jewish communities on such land. NONE of the "Israeli communities that come under the provisions of the statute" are Arab villages.]

      In final arguments submitted to the Supreme Court today, Adalah Attorney Suhad Bishara emphasized that the admissions committee criteria specified in the law are vague and unclear. The law violates the principle of equality and the rights to dignity and privacy, and its core and basic idea is discrimination. Practically, Adalah pointed out that the law validates and legalizes all bases for exclusion by admission committees, which overwhelming bars Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel from living in these towns. Other marginalized groups, such as LGBT persons, the disabled, single parents, and Mizrahim are also often rejected. If the Supreme Court approves the law, it will give full discretion to admissions committees to exclude families on any premise, opening the door wide for blatant racism and discrimination in housing.

      In January 2012, the Attorney General asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the petitions on the grounds that they are premature and theoretical, as the law itself has not been used to bar any applicant from these small communities until now. The state added that the law permits the towns to screen applicants based on their "suitability to the community" makeup and whether they meet the social-cultural fabric of the town as it currently exists, failing to note that all towns that meet the law’s requirements are all Jewish communities.

      link to adalah.org

    • tree April 9, 2013 at 5:31 pm

      Israel is an ethnocracy, not a democracy.

    • tree April 9, 2013 at 5:27 pm

      So. hophmi, then by your logic,since you choose not to live in Israel, but instead live in the US, that must mean that Israel is a lousy country, right? It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that you have friends and family and ties to the US despite being surrounded by "anti-semites" as you are here?

      Your view shows your very Western tendency to project your views onto others.

      Pot.

      From the 2007 survey of Israeli citizens taken for the "Jewish-Arab Relations Index", as reported by Tikva Honig-Parnass in "False Prophets of Peace":

      "The state of Israel must stop being a Jewish state and become the state of all its citizens" -- Palestinians 91.3 %, Jews, 33.8%

      "The state must grant the Arab citizens an edequate expression in its symbols, flag and nationa anthem:-- Palestinians:89.3 %, Jews 16.6%

      "The state must recognize its responsibility for the Nakba which happened to the Palestinians in the 1948 war." Palestinians:90.9 %, Jews 11.3%

      "The state is obliged to receive the agreement of the leadership of the Arab citizens for any law or decision related to them." Palestinians:93.6 5, Jews 27.9 %.

      This survey is from the same time frame as your cited survey. Clearly the Palestinian citizens of Israel prefer to stay in their homes with their families and fight for their civil rights in Israel, rather than be ethnically cleansed once again, and live in a bantustan under the complete control of Israel.

    • tree April 9, 2013 at 4:48 pm

      That’s a silly argument. We do not elect the administration of the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of the Interior, or the Department of Housing in the United States. I guess we’re not a democracy, since the policies of those agencies are extraordinarily important, and we have no direct say in who runs them.

      But as Americans we have an indirect say in who fills those departments and they are not by law composed solely of Jews, nor organized by charter to benefit only Jews. The same cannot be said of the parastatal organizations in Israel, which by charter aim to benefit Jews, not all Israeli citizens. Palestinian citizens of Israel have no say in the WZO and the JNF which are parastatal organizations in Israel because they are not Jews. If the same kind of organizations, created solely for the benefit of Christians , had a parastatal status in the US you'd be rightly raising holy hell. But because its the Jewish State that does it, you obscure and excuse. That's why you have no integrity in your arguments.

  • Questioning Israel's 'international legitimacy,' Siegman says two-state solution would require Kerry to reject 'robbery' beyond '67 lines
    • tree April 5, 2013 at 10:53 pm

      Awaiting moderation on the above comment.

    • tree April 5, 2013 at 2:52 pm

      Proto-Likudites rejected it, there was not a universal acceptance among Zionist or even Jewish groups.

      Even the Jewish Agency (the prime Jewish governing agency in Palestine pre-1948) refused to accept the UN plan as outlined. Hostage ably made this point on another thread. I'll quote him here:

      "Here's how the State Department noted that the Jewish Agency's "acceptance" was really just a counter-offer of more discussions:"

      Abba Hillel Silver, on behalf of the Jewish Agency, appeared before the Committee on October 2. The summary of his statement, printed ibid., pages 12-19, set forth the approval of the Agency of the eleven unanimous recommendations of UNSCOP except for Recommendation VI on Jewish displaced persons, which the Agency did not disapprove. He also termed Recommendation XII unintelligible.

      Rabbi Silver deemed the minority report unacceptable; nor did the majority report satisfy the Jewish people because of the limited area of the proposed Jewish state and the exclusion of Jerusalem from that state. Nevertheless, the Agency was willing to accept the majority report since it made possible the immediate reestablishment of the Jewish State. This acceptance was made subject to further discussion of constitutional and territorial provisions (pages 15-17).

      link to mondoweiss.net

    • tree April 3, 2013 at 4:48 pm with 5 replies

      Actually, its not a fact that the Zionist accepted the UN partition plan. They merely accepted the idea of a Jewish state, not surprising since that is what they were pushing for all along. They would not have engaged in ethnic cleansing, which was totally in conflict with the parameters and protections of the UN plan if they had truly accepted it. The big lie is that the Zionist leaders accepted such a plan as the UN proposed. They didn't.

  • Rashid Khalidi on the Israel lobby
    • tree April 3, 2013 at 4:13 pm with 4 replies

      The same goes for the sale of a "major weapon system to Saudi Arabia" during the Reagan administration. In that instance, far more powerful lobbies than the Israel lobby prevailed-- the oil lobby and the aerospace lobby aligned with US policy makers, and the sale went through "without the slightest difficulty."

      Without the slightest difficulty???? Khalidi has to be smokin' somethin' to describe the sale thusly. The Senate specifically passed a bill outlawing the proposed sale, and Reagan was barely able to prevent the override of his veto of the Senate bill by one vote!

      From the Chicago Tribune article in 1986:

      WASHINGTON — The Republican-controlled Senate salvaged a crucial foreign policy issue for President Reagan Thursday, allowing him to proceed with a controversial arms sale to Saudi Arabia.

      But it was a victory with no votes to spare, and it came only after the weapons package was altered significantly and Reagan used all his powers of personal and political persuasion.

      The President needed 34 votes to sustain his veto of legislation that would have blocked the sale, and 34 votes was what he got. Sen. William Armstrong (R., Colo.) cast the deciding vote as time ran out in the dramatic roll call.

      Despite pleas by Reagan and administration foreign policy officials, who argued that the arms sale was a test of presidential leadership and a necessity if the United States is to play a role in the Middle East, 66 senators voted to override the veto and ban the sale.

      ....

      The razor-thin margin of victory came after Reagan unleashed what one White House aide called a ``full-court press`` that included private telephone calls to wavering senators, repeated public exhortations and a breakfast invitation to the White House Thursday morning for 75 lawmakers.

      While Reagan was savoring his win, opponents of the sale also were claiming victory because the package of sophisticated arms had been reduced significantly and because a strong congressional majority had sent the Saudis a signal to tailor policies closer to U.S. aims.

      ``The President won a 10 percent victory,`` said Sen. Alan Cranston (D., Calif.), who contended that the arms sale had been cut by 90 percent from its original price tag.

      Since only 22 senators voted to allow the sale in a vote last month, Reagan and Dole had to find 12 more votes.

      They also had to contend with election-year fears that pro-Israel voters would retaliate against senators who supported the sale.

      Reagan managed to switch eight votes and picked up four of the five senators who were not present the first time.

      In Thursday`s vote, 29 Republicans and 5 Democrats supported the President, while 24 Republicans and 42 Democrats voted to override the veto. Six Republicans and two Democrats switched their votes.

      Of the 27 senators who are running for re-election, only 4 voted to allow the sale; 5 of 7 senators who are retiring after this year voted with the President.

      ......

      The original request for the sale included F-15 airplanes, tanks and helicopters, in addition to the Stinger ground-to-air missiles that many senators feared could fall into the hands of terrorists and be used against American airplanes.

      The $265 million package now consists of 1,666 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles and 100 Harpoon antiship missiles.

      link to articles.chicagotribune.com

      So we have a popular President trying to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, then having an overwhelming majority of Senators(78!) support a bill outlawing the sale, despite the fact that the sale was in the US interest, as well as the interest of the oil and armaments lobbies. Then the President vetoes the bill and has to exert all his considerable efforts to prevent an override, which he does by just one vote! And to do this he has to scale down the sale to a fraction of what it was originally, and this is an example of a sale "without the slightest difficulty"? I hesitate to guess what travails Khalidi would term a " slight difficulty".

      He's either being dishonest here to try to downplay the significance of the Israel lobbiy's opposition to the sale, or ignorant of the history. I suspect the former.

  • 'Do you know any Arabs in London?' Israeli airport authorities grill British photojournalist before kicking him out
    • tree April 7, 2013 at 1:48 pm

      Israel – the place where everyone but the anti-Zionists have a great time.

      Well everyone that counts, right? And Palestinians don't count, do they, hophmi?

      Kind of like Nazi Germany, where "everyone" but anti-Nazis had a great time.

    • tree April 7, 2013 at 1:45 pm

      Were you not paying attention last year, Obsidian? The Flytilla? People organized to fly into Ben Gurion and truthfully announce that they were intending to visit the West Bank. They were all deported. You want examples? They are numerous.

      link to mondoweiss.net

    • tree April 4, 2013 at 3:43 am

      Do you refer to all Muslims as Saudis or Arabs because Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam? I didn’t think so.

      No, but you've got the wrong equivalence yet again. Referring to all Muslims as Saudi or Arabs because Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam is equivalent to referring to Israel as the "homeland" of all Jews because its the birthplace of Judaism. That's exactly why Khazaria is mentioned here, because Israel is not the "historical homeland" of the majority of Jews; its simply the birthplace of Judaism.

    • tree April 3, 2013 at 6:11 pm

      Well, you won’t ID Hamas that way, and they’ve killed many more people through terrorism than Irgun did.

      Not true. According to Btselem, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinians, including civilians within and outside of the Green Line as well as Israeli security forces, totals 1097 over several decades. Obviously not all of these deaths were committed by Hamas.

      A partial list of terrorism deaths attributed to Irgun alone in the late 30s and into the 1940s stands at 680+. ( The plus indicates several attacks for which the number of fatalities are unknown. )The majority of fatalities were Arab civilians. Many of the Irgun were integrated into the Haganah during the war, and several Irgun leaders became part of the political mainstream in Israel after its independence. To insist that it was simply some marginal and extremist group is to lie. Its attack on Deir Yassin was cleared and coordinated with the Haganah. Its attack on the King David was done at the behest of the Jewish Agency, in order to destroy evidence that the Agency was secretly supporting the terrorist groups.

      An example of a few of the Irgun attacks:

      1937, March 2 Arabs killed on Bat-Yam beach. [12]
      1937, November 14 10 Arabs killed by Irgun units launching attacks around Jerusalem, ("Black Sunday") [13][14]
      1938, April 12 2 Arabs and 2 British policemen were killed by a bomb in a train in Haifa. [14]
      1938, April 17 1 Arab was killed by a bomb detonated in a cafe in Haifa [14]
      1938, May 17 1 Arab policeman was killed in an attack on a bus in the Jerusalem-Hebron road. [14]
      1938, May 24 3 Arabs were shot and killed in Haifa. [14]
      1938, June 23 2 Arabs were killed near Tel-Aviv. [14]
      1938, June 26 7 Arabs were killed by a bomb in Jaffa. [14]
      1938, June 27 1 Arab was killed in the yard of a hospital in Haifa. [14]
      1938, June (late) Unspecified number of Arabs killed by a bomb that was thrown into a crowded Arab market place in Jerusalem. [15]
      1938, July 5 7 Arabs were killed in several shooting attacks in Tel-Aviv. [14]
      1938, July 5 3 Arabs were killed by a bomb detonated in a bus in Jerusalem. [14]
      1938, July 5 1 Arab was killed in another attack in Jerusalem. [14]
      1938, July 6 18 Arabs and 5 Jews were killed by two simultaneous bombs in the Arab melon market in Haifa. More than 60 people were wounded. [14][16][17]
      1938, July 8 4 Arabs were killed by a bomb in Jerusalem. [14]
      1938, July 16 10 Arabs were killed by a bomb at a marketplace in Jerusalem. [14]
      1938, July 25 43 Arabs were killed by a bomb at a marketplace in Haifa. [14][18]
      1938, August 26 24 Arabs were killed by a bomb at a marketplace in Jaffa. [14]
      1939, February 27 33 Arabs were killed in multiple attacks, incl. 24 by bomb in Arab market in Suk Quarter of Haifa and 4 by bomb in Arab vegetable market in Jerusalem.

      List of Irgun attacks:
      link to en.wikipedia.org

    • tree April 3, 2013 at 4:31 pm

      Yes, I do. I don’t know any Jew who wishes to be referred to as a “Khazar” and both of us know the whole point is to make a political comment.

      Have you actually asked anyone, or are you simply speaking as the representative of all Jews, as is your wont? As I pointed out, most of the early Zionist Jews in Palestine acknowledged that Ashkenazi Jews had a geneology that different in some ways from the Mizrahi Jews. The "political point" actually goes the other way, by denying the Khazarian input into Ashkenazi geneology, in order to attempt to excuse a foreign element with colonial designs ethnically cleansing the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. Thus, in exposing the myth, one is correcting history, not just a "political point".

      If a Nazi German insisted he was of Aryan descent, was it simply a "political point" to correct him? Was it a slur to claim he wasn't "Aryan"?

    • tree April 3, 2013 at 4:22 pm

      the same could be asked about you hophmi.

      I think hophmi is very helpful to our cause, annie. That's not his intent, but like many of the other Zionist posters here, he illustrates the problem with Zionism so succinctly.

    • tree April 3, 2013 at 2:26 pm

      The commentators refer to Jews by slurs like “Khazar.”

      So you consider "Khazar" a slur? The Khazarian Empire was much larger and more significant than the tiny little backwaters of Judea and Samaria. My prediction is that, at some point in the future, most Ashkenazi Jews will learn to be proud of the Khazarian history. There's no reason not to be, except that it interferes with the "homeland" myth.

      Actually the early Zionist leaders acknowledged and promoted the fact that there were other genetic influences on Ashkenazi Jews than the purely Middle Eastern semitic ones. That's part of why they believed that Ashkenazis were genetically superior to Sephardic Jews, and why they discriminated against both Sephardic Jews and other non-Jewish semites in Palestine.

      As already mentioned, Ruppin claimed that the affinity, in ancient times, of the IndoGermanic-Jews (the forefathers of some of the Ashkenazim) to the Semitic race was mainly linguistic and cultural and not biological. Since language and culture were the only channels of contact, and since this contact had been lost many generations ago, most of the Ashkenazi Jews did not have any racial affinity with the Semitic race.

      As opposed to the Ashkenazim, many of the Sephardic and Oriental Jews (whom he defined as one group)148 spoke Arabic and had a deep connection to the ArabBedouin-Semitic culture. The claim regarding the interdependence of language and biological structure was very common at the end of the century and it was important to Ruppin to distance the Ashkenazi from what he considered the inferior Semitic languages and culture:

      “Semites are the nations who speak in Semitic languages. In the last thousand years, only a minor part of the Jews have spoken in Semitic languages (Hebrew or Arabic). The major language the Ashkenazi Jew has been using since the Middle Ages is, in its vocabulary and grammar Indo-Germanic” (Ruppin 1933, 29).

      and

      The Ashkenazi, according to Ruppin, is a kind of “poet and mathematician,” an attribute which corresponds to the ideal German enlightened model combined with the Darwinist concept of “liveliness” the primal “life force” (Lebenskraft) described above. The Sephardic-Oriental, on the other hand, is deficient in his intelligence, in his artistic talents and mathematical abilities and, most important; he lacks the vitality of the Lebenskraft. The two qualities that might seem positive: “a sense of reality” and “sharp observation,” if taken in the context of Ruppin’s vocabulary, imply traits belonging to the materialistic nature of the Semites.

      link to tau.ac.il

      Of course, this kind of racist attitude on the part of the "Father of the Jewish Settlements" in Palestine and other early Zionist leaders helps explain the disdain they felt for both the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews as well as the non-Jewish Semitic Arabs they encountered in Palestine. Nowadays, with so many Mizrahi Jews in Israel, and with the current and well-deserved negative attitudes toward eugenics and the "scientific racism" embraced the early Zionist pioneers, the myth has transformed into Israel being the biological and historical "homeland" of all Jews. Thus, the idiotic idea that "Khazar" is a slur.

    • tree April 3, 2013 at 1:53 pm

      Remember this?
      “Israel is no normal state, but one governed by the forging of Zionist system-logic into a Satanic ideology. . . .”-Joel Kovel

      That isn't an anti-semitic statement, anymore than a similar statement in regards to Naziism is anti-Germanic. Unless of course you think that Zionism is an essential and in-born belief of all Jews. I suspect that is the problem for many Zionist Jews. They think that Zionism is somehow a basic and genetic characteristic of Jews, so to say something against the ideology is to say something against Jews in their minds. But the anti-semitism is actually within the "beholder" in this case. Zionism is a learned ideology. No one ceases to be a Jew when they stop believing in Zionist ideology, any more than a German stops being a German because he/she does't believe in Nazism.

      The problem as I see it is that Zionism itself sees "Jewishness" as essentially different from the rest of humanity, rather than as an accident of birth, like every other ethnicity, or a set of religious beliefs like every other religion. Thus its hard for Zionist Jews to comprehend that criticism of the Zionist ideology or of individual Jews is not the same as hatred of all Jews. In other words, Zionist Jews tend to think that all Jews are, at root, the same, simply because they are Jews, so that, in their minds, criticism of any Jew is criticism of all Jews - hence anti-Semitic.

    • tree April 3, 2013 at 1:30 pm

      There's also a good book by Rachel Shabi, "We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel's Jews from Arab Lands".

      From the synopsis at Amazon:

      Middle Eastern Jews from Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, Yemen, and other Arab or Muslim lands—“Mizrahis”—make up nearly half of Israel’s population. Yet European or “Ashkenazi” Jews have historically disparaged them for looking like Arabs, speaking Arabic, and bringing with them what was viewed as a “backward” Middle Eastern culture. Journalist Rachel Shabi, who was born in Israel to Iraqi Jews and grew up in England, returned to investigate the subtle discrimination and tense relations that still exist between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews in Israel. She combines historical research, her own family’s story, and the heartfelt oral history of several other Mizrahis to make We Look Like the Enemy a stunning, unforgettable book.

      link to amazon.com

  • 'My surprise was even greater--' Israeli emboff pens Dickensian letter to Lancet justifying harsh treatment of children throwing stones
    • tree April 3, 2013 at 6:34 pm

      What! A study of textbooks limited itself to studying Textbooks! How "flawed"!

      Stupid point, mayhem. Not surprising.

  • Hat's off to Anthony Lewis, who in '99 understood that Israel wanted a Palestinian Bantustan
  • Obama gets it
    • tree March 24, 2013 at 7:25 pm

      if i were you i’d stay out of the psychoanalysis biz, not your bag. that’s my 2 cents.

      Its probably not my strong suit either, but here goes. I've always had the feeling that Obama was like Chance the Gardner in "Being There". Of course, not as dumb as Chance, but not really a big thinker or especially bright, but all through his life he's been treated as if he is something special, something different, and so he came to believe it. And whatever he does, there's a group of people that will believe that he is expressing some deeper meaning when he's not, and he's incapable of that deeper meaning, or deeper thought. But people project all this onto him and it goes to his head. He seems to have no strong core beliefs, no sense of what he wanted to accomplish by being President, as if the goal was always simply to BE President, and as in another famous movie, "The Candidate" its "What do we do now?" once he was elected. He's driven by his advisers.

      Essentially, Obama is an empty suit. He has no strong moral stands on anything of consequence, which is why he could so easily toss so many early supporters under the bus, rival Bush for trashing the Constitution and killing people, and why he'll say anything if it puts him in with the people who have money and influence, which makes him feel special yet again.

      I don't think he identifies with blacks or Jews, per se. He identifies with those that will bring him power and tell him he's special.

      Alright, end of hackneyed psychoanalysis. But I still think of "Being There' whenever I think of the Obama phenomenon.

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