-
-
- Netanyahu govt to impose fines on mayors of cities that … 0
- Resume builders: Be a broken record on Iran, cheer authoritarians … 1
- UN Committee: Israeli system ‘tantamount to apartheid’ 0
- Slater on Beinart 9
- And we live on… 1
- US official — we went to Israel first 4
- Israel lobby’s favorite senator tries to erase Palestinian refugee status … 24
- Israel takes 30 dunams of land near Salfit ‘for security … 4
-
- BDS victory: South Africa strips Ahava’s ‘made in Israel’ label 713
- Video: Israeli mob demands all African refugees be deported from … 475
- Day after pogroms, Likud MK calls for internment camp for … 427
- Neverending Nakba: Israel breaks lull, attacks Gazan farmers 413
- ‘This is not fair play’: Mahmoud Sarsak’s family demands his … 389
- March of the Flags 345
- Neocons in Washington Post: Military strike on Iran would ‘calm … 323
- Nabi Saleh’s Bassem Tamimi convicted by Israeli courts based on … 293
-
- The Messiah’s Donkey: Settlers fire on Palestinian villagers as the … 235
- Aharon Appelfeld’s rage at the German language (and Arendt’s need … 156
- US to differentiate between ‘personally displaced’ Palestinian refugees and their … 130
- March of the Flags 127
- Affirming a Judaism and Jewish identity without Zionism 113
- Feeling the hate in Long Island 97
- Israeli judge to issue verdict in Rachel Corrie case 94
- WaPo’s Walter Pincus says US is ‘going above and beyond … 87
-
Recent Comments
click link to see last 100 comments- Slater on Beinart (9)
- radii: the train has left the station and a few like Beinart have noticed but think they can still run and catch it...
- Citizen: This is all tempest in a Jewish identity teapot because Congress just gave Israel $4 Billion dollars for...
- Krauss: Have you all noticed how the real liberal Zionists, even with warts and all, keep getting more and more...
- US official — we went to Israel first (4)
- HarryLaw: According to RT, Netanyahu and Barak refused to meet Wendy Sherman when she arrived in Jerusalem to brief...
- Resume builders: Be a broken record on Iran, cheer authoritarians in Gulf (1)
- Annie Robbins: Having recognized its weakness, the US knows that it will be the UN that takes the lead in Syria and...
- American Zionist responses to Tel Aviv riots– largely indifferent, but some outrage (41)
- German Lefty: “Israel’s (and the general Jewish) view and claim that they are unique, exceptional, one of...
- Did Israeli Eurovision contestant watch too much Juliano Mer Khamis? (55)
- German Lefty: I know. That’s why I wrote that there’s no “I/P-related definition of PEP”.
- Annie Robbins: GL, urban dictionary has PEP, just no explanation of progressive except for palestine....
- German Lefty: Annie, it looks like you got infected with the Eurovision virus. Great. The more fans, the better. The...
- Israel lobby’s favorite senator tries to erase Palestinian refugee status for millions (24)
- DICKERSON3870: P.S. ALSO SEE: Three congressional challengers very worth supporting, by Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com,...
- Slater on Beinart (9)
Our Writers
More WritersBlogroll
The War of Ideas in the Middle East
Avi Issacharoff is arguably the best journalist in Israel. He has spent decades on one rather narrow beat, gaining an enormous amount of knowledge about it. He speaks perfect Arabic, of course, and maintains excellent personal relations with Palestinians of all walks of life and diverse political persuasions. When Fatah and Hamas don't talk to each other, members of both groups always talk to him. His politics lie to the left side of Israel's political map, but he never allows his politics to interfere with his reporting.
If you don't know Arabic yourself, the second best way to understand what's going on in Palestinian society is to read Avi Issacharoff.
Anyone interested in the lives of the Palestinians should go listen to him if he's in your neighborhood, no matter who is offering him the platform. Assuming one is interested in the reality, not the slogans, of course.
Tape, Annie? Huh? Was there some evidence released in 2009 that suddenly clarified to the Israeli voters that Netanyahu had been fooling them back in 1999? I get the impression that you (and also Phil) think that Israeli voters gather their information about their own situation from the same sort of online sources (in English) that you like to visit. I assure you this is false. Israelis glean their information from the wide plethora of sources which present themselves to anyone who lives in their own society; online sources in a foreign language are way down at the bottom of the list.
The same is true of Palestinians, of course. And Russians. And Malaysians. This is one of the many reasons the readers at Mondoweiss have such an odd view of the situation, a view mostly unrecognizable to any of the locals.
Citizen -
Your opinion of the ability of more than 200,000,000 American voters to think for themselves - or rather, your conviction that they can't - is offensive in the extreme.
You know, woody, I wonder if you've ever met living Israelis, and made an honest effort to understand their relationship to Palestinians. And I wonder if you've ever met living Palestinians, beyond the ocasional activist who makes it out to wherever you are, and made an effort to understand their relationship to Israelis. Because there's precious little hard evidence for the sort of sentiments you attribute to them so thoughtlessly, and mountains of contradictory evidence. This isn't to say there isn't a real conflict - of course there is. But it's largely a conflict between two groups who recognize the other side as flesh-and-blood people, not cardboard images; and it's a conflict populated by large numbers on both sides who recognize the complexity of the reality they live in, even as they firmly reject fundamental positions of the other side.
You're right that it isn't Annie. But the reason isn't that no-one forces it onto the agenda, rather the opposite. For decades the Israel-Palestine issue was the defining line of division in Israeli politics. Eventually, the political left convinced a large majority of Israelis they had to end the occupation and make peace with a sovereign Palestine. A few years later, the right and the Palestinians themselves convinced a large majority of the Israelis that partition wouldn't work. So, having spent decades (literally) focusing obsessively on the issue, the Israelis decided early in the previous decade that it was not possible to resolve it, and they moved on. No external pressure will force them to change their mind. Would you change your mind about an existential matter because someone on the other side of the world demanded it of you? Or would you write off that faraway foreigner as hopelessly confused?
Why do you think that Israeli voters decide who to vote on based on any American figures, presidential or otherwise? And do you seriously think large numbers of American voters decide who to vote for based on what Israelis tell them?
I always thought the main issue for American voters is the economy, certainly in an election year such as this one; and the issues for Israelis are Israeli issues, not American ones. The fact that Israel's economy sailed unscathed through the world's economic crises is surely vastly more important to Israeli voters than anything Peter Beinart might have to say, no? Especially as almost no Israelis beyond the very small readership of Haaretz have ever even heard of Beinart, and Remnick or Perlman: who are they?
Finally, you seem to assume that the liberal elite in New York sees the situation in Israel with clearer eyes than the Israelis themselves. This is unlikely, but even were it true, it only reinforces the certainty that the Israelis (the ones who can vote for or against Netanyahu) will do so according to how they understand the world, not the way the outsiders see it.
I expect the same goes for American voters. They vote according to what they see and understand, not what outsiders tell them.
Is there any problem with Jews doing the Vatican's finances?
Always one for civility, aren't you Shingo.
I read it, I wrote about it, and the report consistently claimed that the evidence it had collected must demonstrate Israeli intentions. That was the lynchpin of the entire war-crimes pronouncement. Without proven intent there can be no war crimes.
Sumud -
I've read the entire report, all 575 pages of it, slowly and carefully. One of its many weaknesses is that it purports to know what the IDF intended, without having any access whatsoever to the decision-making process in Israel. True, Israel didn't offer the information, but still, the fact remains that the commission didn't have it. Lacking this information, there is no logical grounding for many of the pronouncements of the commission - and perhaps, for all we know, no factual basis, either.
Stevieb -
The discussion is about legal proceedings, not emotions. Legal proceedings must start with empirical evidence that will plausibly convince a court, and they end once the court (or the top level court if there are appeals) rules as to whether the evidence was convincing or not. Not only are emotions such as bereavement or a relationship to the victims not acceptable, judges who have them are expected to recuse themselves.
In cases where the judges find insufficient evidence to convict, no-one will be convicted and certainly nooe will be punished, no matter how heinious the original action may have been.
Would you wish to live in any orther sort of country than one that operated by such rules?
Huh, Sumud? The UN report came out in 2010, and the IDF investigation was completed just recently, in 2012. It rejects previous findings - go read the item at the top of this thread. That's the whole point of the discussion, isn't it?
Sumud,
The present decision of the IDF comes after the Goldstone report, and represents precisely such a claim. You may choose to dislike it, but you can't say no such claim was made.
Shingo -
You've just rejected the fundamental principles of the laws of war. These postulate two separate issues. Jus ad Bellum deals with the justification for being at war, while Jus in Bello deals with the behavior while at war. Theoretically a country can be at war for justifiable reasons or unjustifiable ones, while behaving in what is defined as a just or unjust manner - and there's no necessary connection between either.
The consensus at Mondoweiss is that Israel is never justifiably at war, since its very existence is regarded as unjust and unaceptable. Even so, the test of particular actions is a distinct matter, to be tested empirically. Which means, that even the Mondoweiss community must accept that the determination of the legality or illegality of a specific IDF action has nothing to do with the justness of Zionism, ad everything to do with the specific details of each particular event.
If you reject that, you've rejected the entire underpinning of international humanitarian law - which is not what most Mondoweiss writers seem eager to do.
To the best of my knowledge, the only entity so far which has investigated the specific details with legal tools is the IDF. One may dislike their findings, but the only way to discredit them is to follow the same path and present either contradictory facts, or legal considerations as to why the facts ned to be interpreted differently.
I've repeatedly suggested similar things, but have never even recieved a response. I even suggested doing it using my real name. There was no interest, for whatever reason.
I believe the Mondoweiss community is at least partly sincere in its perspective. When you focus like a laser on every possible blemish, including the ones that are misconstrued; and you resolutely block out any and all other parts of the story; and you spend lots of time in echo chambers where everyone agrees with you; well, eventually you construct yourself a narrative of reality which is extraordinary compelling to you, but radically odd to everyone else. So then, to explain everyone else, you've got to take the next step and construct explanations about how all the others are blind, or have been hijacked by the evil forces you're railing against, and of course your convictions build on themselves and look like the only possible explanation for reality.
Most of the Palestinians I know - and I dare say I know more of them than most people in the Mondoweiss community - don't ascribe to the narrative routinely presented here, and have a far more nuanced understanding of the Israelis. Even the Palestinians. Of course, I may know only Uncle Tom Palestinians, but that would be a rather surprising statistical circumstance.
The reality presented at Mondoweiss isn't totally wrong, only mostly wrong.
David Hazony points out that there's a growing chasm between America's Jews and Israeli ones, and that if it isn't addressed the American Jews are cutting themselves out of the Jewish conversation. Oddly, this means that right-wing Hazony, left-wing Beinart and Phil Weiss all agree on the fundamental trajectory. Israel is ever more detached from America's Jews
link to forward.com
Daniel Gordis says that Beinart's problem is with the fundamental characteristic of Judaism which sees itself as a tribe; Beinart can't live with that concept.
link to jpost.com
(Though the Palestinians could, as well as the Russians, the Greeks, the Baluchies, the Turks, Armenians, Kurds, Irish, Argentinians, and most other national groups in the early 21st entury).
The one place where Gordis and Hazony part from Phil Wiess is the significance of all this for Israel. The Israelis (probably about 85% of them) aren't even noticing the growing distance from America's Jews, because they're no longer a central part of their world. Beinart thinks his opinions and those of his (non-Orthodox) fellow American Jews are central to the well-being of Israel. Phil hopes, fervently, that a rift between American Jews and Israel will profoundly effect Israel.
Annie -
None of this is speculation, or the stuff of blogs and media. It is solid history, which has been fully worked through decades ago. There were ordinary Germans, there were members of the party, and there was the SS. The Waffen SS wasn't as totally horrible as the Enisatzgruppen, perhaps, or the Sicherheitspolizei, but that's very faint praise indeed. Membership in the Waffen SS as a 17-year-old wouldn't have killed a man's reputation forever in Germany, but preaching and sermonizing while hiding it for six decades is pretty odd. Since I doubt you read German I won't link to the uproar his admission caused in the German press in 2006, but here's an article about it from the New York Times
link to nytimes.com
The point being that Grass, it turns out, isn't in the position to do much moralizing towards anyone; penning a long poem about actions of the Jewish State which haven't happened is, how to put it: rich.
Something like 15 million men served in the German Army (Wehrmacht). About 2 million served in the Waffen SS. The Wehrmacht was bad by the standards of the 20th century, but the Waffen SS was far worse, and everyone knew it at the time. Most men in the Waffen SS were volunteers. Someone as young as Grass could indeed have been a conscript, but since there's no way of knowing, we only have his word. Since he spent six decades preaching, moralizing and sermonizing, before ever letting on about his own past, his word isn't very convincing. The denials over decades were what so damaged his reputation, not the original story itself.
One way or the other, the facts are that as a young man he served in a murderous criminal unit, then spent 61 years forgetting to mention it, and as an old man he's damning Israel for something which hasn't yet happened and probably never will.
There has never been a dearth of prominent public figures in Germany who criticise Israel. Grass himself has done so more than once. Since his Nazi past was unveiled a few years back, however, after he'd covered it for more than 60 years, his moral weight was rather diminished.
Indeed, astonishing. If one subscribes to the standard Mondoweiss narratives. If one doesn't, not so very astonishing.
The question is what the author and commentors will now do with the astonishing fact. Will they ask themselves how to fit it into the narrative? Might they ponder if there's a flaw in the narrative? Or will they simply go silent on this point, and carry on in the future as if this crack never appeared in the wall?
The IDF just evacuated the settlers, too.
link to haaretz.com
Thought experiment: Imagine the leaders of any country except Israel are convinced their country faces an existential threat: say, Pakistan, or Saudia, or France or the UK. They also understand that pre-empting the threat might cost American lives - hundreds, maybe even thousands. Would anyone expect them not to pre-empt the existential danger out of consideration of the Americans?
I'm not saying Israel faces such a threat. I'm questioning the logic that demands that even if it is, it may not defend itself out of consideration of America.
And no, the American support for Israel doesn't weaken the question. Look at it in its fullest starkness, with no ifs or buts, and then answer.
Annie -
Doctrines are large things. When they exist, they create large amounts of diverse types of traces (also called documents). There's the documentation created as the doctrine is formulated. There's the documentation created as it's implemented, adapted, revised, re-examined, and of course there's the documentation of how it's funded. There are the speeches, the analysis, the learned tomes. And much more.
No-one has every produced any of this pertaining to the doctrine you seem to be referring to. If memory serves, the entire thesis was based on a handful of media interviews which may or may not have been fair representations of what the interviewees said.
Then there's Karl Popper's rule. Popper, an important philosopher as you know, asked himself how historians (or economists, or pundits) might go about proving anything, when they after all cannot create laboratories to test their hypotheses. His answer was that they can't, but they do have a second, weaker option: once they've collected all the evidence they can find to bolster their interpretation of events, they must then set out to seek contradictory evidence. The longer they try to find evidence which disproves their thesis without finding it, the more plausible their thesis becomes, even if it can never be regarded as scientifically proven.
This is not the Mondoweiss method, of course, where damning evidence against Israel is avidly collected,but contrary evidence is written off as hasbara lies. Yet a careful attempt to prove or disprove Israeli efforts not to harm civilians would have to look at the army's orders; it's training efforts; it's internal deliberations; it's battlefield recordings; the photographic evidence in its entirety; the forensic evidence; the types of ordinance used according to circumstances; the chain of command required to use such ordinance, and so on and on and on.
I don't think you've done that, nor do I think you know anyone who has. So I stand by my original statement; I also dare you to produce credible evidence that that doctrine ever even existed, and if it ever did that it still does.
Seafoid -
I'm not going to get into the full discussion, because too often my comments get deleted for no reason I can discern; I certainly stay away from any form of foul-mouthed language which indeed could be plausibly censored. So the full discussion can take place only at a website beyond the MW moderators.
To your first question, however, the response is simple, and is written in the law books of any civilized society. It is the distinction between murder and manslaughter, which itself is based on intention. The Jewish children in Toulouse were intentionally killed. The children killed by any army which is engaged in war while taking reasonable precautions not to kill them are tragic victims of violence, but they weren't murdered.
There is a large body of literature - legal, philosophical, literary, psychological and more - which deals with this. None of it was invented by Zionists, though Israelis participate in the discussion. But the discssion goes back many centuries.
Ah, just to be clear: There have been cases where Israelis have murdered Palestinians, of course. They aren't as widespread as the discourse at MW suggests, but Israelis who intentionally take the lives of innocent people are as guilty of murder as anyone else. Just as Palestinians who do so are murderers, and Americans, and Chinese, and Iranians, and indeed anyone who commits the act of murder, irrespective of nationality or ethnicity.
The story of Max Singer's fallen soldier son can be read in two diamtrically opposed ways. There's the standard Mondoweiss way, typified by Seifoid's response, which essentially sees the Israelis as monsters, who shrug off the deaths of their own sons and are totally impervious to any consideration of anyone else's lives.
Then there's the opposite explanation, whereby Israelis, familiar with death and violence from close up, are continually seeking ways to control it and to limit it. They know that it can't be made to disappear, but they are determined to reduce it to a bare minimum on all sides of the conflict.
There is endless documentation to prove this second explanation. But I doubt the denizens of Mondoweiss are open to seeing it. Still, Phil Weiss does have an inkling: he's puzzled by Max Singer.
Does anyone know what proportion of Israel's economy is based on the West Bank? I don't know the number, but it's very very small. Which means, a boycott of the settlers would be largely a symbolic gesture. You can boycott Israel, or not boycott Israe, but there's no real middle way.
Meanwhile, over in Israel, there aren't 0.1% of Israelis who have ever heard of Beinart. I doubt 1% have heard of BDS. The total number of Israelis affected is in the hundreds, if one counts all the humanities professors whose papers may have been rejected in European publications, even as the EU pours gigantic research funds into Israeli science departments.
In thousands of court cases in West Germany during the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, there was not a single case in which any court accepted this line of defense for criminal behavior during the Nazi era. The reason is simple: there are no recorded cases in which German soldiers or SS men were killed for refusing to participate in the murder of Jews.
Got to keep our priotities straight here. A nuclear Iran or smooth olympic games in London? Which is of greater historical importance?
If memory serves, during the Olympic games of 1972 it was Israelis who were murdered.
Annie - Have you ever seen a Grad rocket? It can't be acquired nor operated by an angry frustrated individual. An angry frustarted indivudual can stab someone, or throw rocks at cars. In order to launch Grad rockets, not to mention barrages of them, one needs all the trappings of an international corporation. Which is what the Palestinian organizations are of coure - and they're proud of it. Go visit their websites and see how the present themselves.
Funny bottle rockets which are produced in China or Iran, have a range of 25 miles, can be aimed precisely, and carry a payload of 100-200 lbs.
link to en.wikipedia.org
OK, I admit: I don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about.
I'm not following your logc, Annie. Clearly not all violence can be written off as the result of prior injustice, since that would mean all violence must be regretted but none of it can be condemned. If it's an instinctive natural response, there's no moral problem, no matter who commits the violence. Even Israelis.
Furthermore, you accept that not all injustice generates violent responses.
So the connection between injustice and violence is not particularly strong, and there is an element of choice involved. Violence which can be controlled, where its agent determines when to commit it and when not to, is clearly influenced by choice.
Choice being the fundament of morality, of course. Which brings us back to Burston. His thesis was that people who support the (im)moral choice intentionally to perpetuate violence on civilians are themselves immoral.
Is it really human nature? If you read lots of history you'll find that there's no correlation between the level of persecution, even of suffering, and the level of violent response. The slaves in America suffered more and longer than the Palestinians, but rarely responded with violence. The long-suffering populace of North Korea likewise. South African blacks under Apartheid. The downtrodden 99.9% of the European population most of the Middle Ages. The Jews between 137 BCE and the early 20th century. And the list could go on and on.
Violent responses to suffering are generally a sign of a degree of freedom of movement, thought, and organization, among other causations.
It's easy to say that any source which supports a Palestinian narrative is reliable, and any source which supports an Israeli one is dishonest, propaganda, hasbara, and repugnant.
But what to say when the Guardian, perhaps the most anti-Israeli mainstream newspaper in the English language, gives casualty numbers which are almost the same as the hasbarist numbers?
link to guardian.co.uk
Allison -
Where do you get the idea Vashti was put to death? The Bible doesn't say this. I just checked.
The accident was tragic, and it aches to think of the pain the families are going through.
The facts portrayed in this article, however, are not accurate.
1. The Palestinians of Shuafat, like all Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, are the only group who can move freely throughout Israel and the West Bank. The Jews aren't allowed into Area A (including Rammallah), and the West Bankers are not free to move into Israel. (Some of the resident of Shuafat are Israeli citizens, the rest are permanenet residents, and they all enjoy the same freedom of movement).
2. Which means that the school children of Shuafat could have taken whatever road they (or their driver) chose to take.
3. The reason they took the longer route should be immediately clear to anyone who has ever driven in, say, Los Angeles: roads through residential areas are often slower, even if shorter, than freeways. Highway 437 is longer but goes through an empty rural area, and takes less time to drive on. Remove all Israelis from Israel and replace them with Palestinians and a reasonable driver going from Shuafat to Rammallah would still likely take route 437.
4. The readers of this website will be familiar with the thesis that the Israelis build fine roads for the settlers and narrow backroads for the Palestinians. Route 437 in its present form is one of these roads, and was built for the settlers so that they wouldn't go through the congested area from Beit Hanina northwards. Since the onset of the 2nd Intifada in 2000, it serves as the main route for all settlers going north from Jerusalem.
5. Of course, Palestinians use route 437 also, as in the case of this doomed schoolbus, but not because it's a rural road through nowhere, but for precisely the opposite reason: it's a fine road and travel on it is swift.
I sent Rudoren a note asking if she'd lke to read a book I once wrote on I/P. She immediately replied that, Yes, She'd be very interested. Which indicates that at this stage she's interested in learning and knowing more than she does. I'm not a thought police, I can't force her to listen to me, and my ability to sway her in any direction will be based exclusively on the power of my words, the persuasiveness of my arguments, the fairness of my presentation.
Compare that to the derision I often garner here on MW (when I don't get deleted completely), and you begin to se why the MW community is destined to remain forever a fringe phenomenon: calm discussion of arguments on their merits are not the coin of the realm here. If the arguments promote the anti-Israeli agenda, they're welcomed; if they do the opposite, they're either shouted down or simply deleted.
Feiglin says the whole thing is a hoax, and has called for the police to investigate and uncover the culprits. The Police, meanwhile, have blocked him from entering the Temple Mount. link to ynet.co.il
The Temple Mount Faithful call on God to remove the mosques, not on Israeli authorities. And they've got a few dozen supporters at most; the rest of society regards them as a bad joke.
You're right, Annie. No serious Jewish halachic authority would even permit Jews to enter those mosques or approach them; the idea of destroying them so as to build a Jewish Temple is far outside the pale. There was once, in the 1980s, a fringe group which seriously toyed with the idea, but they didn't manage to find a single recognizable rabbinic authority to support them; once they were uncovered by the police they were all jailed.
There is indeed the concept that the construction of the Third Temple will be a miraculous act of God. One way or the other, no rabbinic authorities, from any branches of Judaism, actively call for the destruction of the Mosques. Whenever you hear someone saying the Israelis are planning to do so, you can be certain someone's spreading a hoax, or purposefully lying. As in this case, too.
Tree -
I don't see why disparaging my education is a mode of civil discussion.
You're right about the city-dwellers-vs-rural-population. But you miss the point. Prior to 1948 most Palestinians were rural, and the ones who remained in Israel were ususally entire communities, not old people allowed to remain; all of which means, as I originally noted, that Khalidi's thesis is suspect.
It's very likely Israel invested next to nothing in the education of its Arab citizens before 1961. It was swamped by large numbers of destitute refugees from Europe and the Arab world, and was doing its best to successfully move them out of refugee camps, even as its neighbors were doing the opposite with their refugees. By the early 1960s, however, Israel reversed its policy - which means, 50 years ago.
Ten of thousands have applied for Israeli citizenship and have gotten it. But I doubt the moderator will allow this to be published - in the past I've ben blocked for pointing this out.
Tens of thousands. How can that be? Why do they want it?
No, American, that's actually not what I'm saying. I'm not making any claims about anyone being superior. That's you, projecting. What I'm saying is that the typical process of reasoning common here at Mondoweiss is profoundly flawed. There is an incessant focus on negative aspects of Israeli society and policies, and a resolute determination never to see any other parts of the picture. Since the reality, however, is far more nuanced and complex than the Mondoweiss community is willing to recognize, there's a dissonance between the reality and its protrayal here. Every now and then even someone here recognizes this, and is then forced into a convoluted excersie to explain away the disparency.
Specifically on the matter of Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, or those who are permanent residents in Jerusalem, their lives are far better than the readers of Mondoweiss imagine. They aren't perfect, and they leave much to desire, but they are vastly better than you'd think. More important, the overall trajectory is positive - again, a fact you'd be very hard pressed to glean were Mondoweiss and its sort your only source of information.
Annie -
If I have, say, 10 years of schooling, I will still have those ten years for the rest of my life no matter what happens to me. So a statistic about how many years of schooling a group has, cannot be reduced by administritive fiat or any other discriminatory measure.
Here's an example: the median number of years of education among Jews and Arabs in Israel in 1961 was respectively 8.25 vs 1.5. Which means Khalidi's thesis is suspect, since in the 13 years between 1948 and 1961 there's no way Israel could have erased the number of years learned. Had most Palestinians been well educated in 1948, there's no way they could have become mostly uneducated 13 years later.
In 2007 the respective numbers were 12.6 for the Jews, and 11.5 for the Arabs. If one assumes the illiterate young adults were still illiterate in old age, the narrowing of the gap is even more impressive.
I appologize that my source isn't online, but I've copied it from a publication of the Avraham Foundation, a philanthropic group which invests in improving the conditions of Israel's Arab population.
Anyway, we're left with the original question Mya posted: If things are as awful as she says they are, there ought to be a Bedouin Intifada - yet there isn't. She supplies an answer, and I suggest a more fundamental one: that the methodology commonly used at Mondoweiss of endlessly focusing on the negative while purposefully disregarding the positive is, at the end of the day, not a very useful way of describing reality, as Mya implicitly recognizes. The philosopher Karl Popper wrote about this at length, by the way, and I recommend reading his various books.
Here's another possible answer to the question about the lack of a Bedouin Intifada: Mya's depiction isn't true. Or rather, even if most of the facts may be, the larger picture is carefully ommited. The fact that literacy among Israel's Arabs, Bedouin included, has skyrocketed since 1948, the life expectancy even more so, as well as the wealth per capita. Infant mortality is very low, especially when compared with most Arab societies. Career options are much better than they were in the "good old days". There has to be a reason that large numbers of Israeli Bedouin men voluntarily serve in the IDF, including many who serve in career capacities.
Nah, I'm much more serious than that.
Dear Moderator: I see you've deleted me yet again. You might wish to take into account that I'm documenting all my comments, and if I ever decide to publish a full-scale review of Mondoweiss and its pathologies, the deletions will be a part of the evidence: that MW is not interested in dialogue, even less in facts; it's interested in creating a community where people who hate Israel will feel comfortable, with a carefully controlled sprinkling of contrarian voices to give the crowd something to feed on.
Of course at some point you'll totally ban me, but then, presenting the pathologies doesn't really require commenting: that's merely an additional tool.
Have a good day.
I wonder if the many organizations who have employed him or invested in his work these past 30 years or so would agree that he's not a documentary maker nor a journalist.
I don't think he's complaining. I think he's making a point.
There's a pro-Israeli blogger who claims he has refuted each one of the BDS claims, over here
link to pennbds-oy.com
But he has also invited supporters of BDS to respond to him. Someone might wish to rise to the challenge.
There's no mystery to the lack of support in Israel for these men: their thesis, whereby if Israel evacuates Arab land it will then live in peace, has been empirically tested and refuted time and again: in 1956, in 1985, in 1997, 2000, and 2005. The only successful case, in 1979-81, has been cast in serious doubt by the events of 2011.
Tne more interesting part about your post, Ira, is the resounding silence with which it has been greeted here at Mondowiess. If one assumes the IDF are brutal, bloodthirsty monsters, as many of the local commenters openly say they do, there's no way they'll warm to a post which describes good IDF men.
A previous comment I left here was blocked, so I"ll try again. Would you people please look at the pictures, and then go look at the whole series which is up at al-Jazeera, and ask yourselves how it's possible that the man has no mud on the legs of his jeans if he was just run over (notice the mud on the wheels). And notice that he's lying in front of the wheel, not behind it. Then ask yourselves how come the many Palestinians who are standing around are all looking at other things, while no-one pays any attention to the guy whom, so you seem to believe, is the center of the story. Then look at the whole series and you'll observe that in some of the pictures there are IDF men kneeling over the man, but in none of the pictures are the Palestinians crowding around him, carrying him off, nor is there any sign of an ambulance.
Than ask youself what all this might mean. I won't offer any conjecture, so as not to give the moderators any reason to block me. I'm simply looking at the pictures and asking questions, while hoping that a website which wishes to encourage discussion will allow questions to be raised.
There's a daily program called Daf Yomi in which one learns 2 pages of the Talmud everyday, and completes all of it in 7.5 years. I've done about 5.5 of the years so far. it's a lot of work, yes, but there's nothing secret about it. As far as one can tell, there are anywhere between 150,000 and 300,000 people participating in the course at the moment.
I don't think a war is in anyone's interest. An Iranian-instigated war wouldn't be in anyone's interest, either.
I have no idea where he gets his talking points from. Perhaps he thinks them up on his own: some people can do that, you know. To the best of my knowledge, no Israeli official has ever said Israel might use nuclear weapons. If anyone here has solid evidence that Israel gave this fellow talking points, I'd be interested in seeing it. Until then, the assumption looks to me like the standard fare of commenters on this website: any allegation against Israel is acceptable, and any questioning of the allegations means the person doing the questioning is from "hasbara central", where-ever that may be.
You do notice, I hope, that this is an American making the comment, not an Israeli. Just so that you don't go off on a tangent blaming Israel for what the man says.
You're right. I read the Weinberger document, since it's an original document, but not all the articles. Over the years I've found Hersh to be generally unconvincing, but in this case I indeed missed the part about the plea bargain.
Still, none of the links offer evidence about the Israeli-Soviet collaboration. The only type of evidence which could to that would be the testimony of a participant, or the documentation from one of the two agencies. At a stretch, documentation from a third agency intercepting the dicussions of the first two. When dealing with secret agencies, the ability of any journalist to know what's really going on (or went on) is essentially non-existent. Which leaves us with... conjecture, speculation and innuendo.
As for the tone you chose to use: well, it may be par for the course here on Mondoweiss, but it's not particularly civil.
MRW -
I see. Conjecture, speculation, innuendo. Nothing that would stand in court. And that's the point: the Pollard case was a court case, and went through all the relevant stages, where all sides were free to present evidence or try to refute it. Your sources are claiming that the court case was a cover-up, and didn't reveal the real extent of the story. You are of course welcome to your opinions, but perhaps you'll appreciate why most regular people who generally trust the courts and dislike conspiracy theories, may not be convinced.
The single true document you cite, by Caspar Weinberger, is a perfectly reasonable document making the sort of statement you'd expect from such a high official in such a case. It says nothing that bolsters your claim or that of Charon.
Charon - in all the years I've been folowing the Pollard story, I never heard he passed nuclear-related information to anyone. As for the allegation that in the early 1980s Israel was passing intelligence to the Soviet Union: is there any evidence of this? In those days the Soviet Union was Israel's greatest enemy, arming most of its neighbors, acting against it in all international forums, and disseminating anti-semitic propaganda.
Allison -
no normal person would defend Adler or condone his idiotic column. On the other hand, I watched only the first half of the interview and he apologized profusely and repeatedly. Is it possible we watched a different interview? I followed your link.
Look, Blake, if you say the sun rises in the west, it still rises in the east.
As for Sand, whose book I read very carefully and a number of times before I reviewed it, even he doesn't say what you're saying he said. But even if he had it would make no difference. He can't make the sun rise in the west, either, tho he does try valiantly.
Annie: no one was secular, in the modern sense, before modernity. Not Jews, not Christians, not Muslims, and probably not anyone else either though I won't hazard any guesses about Asian cultures I know nothing about.
Secularism was invented by men such as Voltaire (a crass Jew-hater) and Descarte (who seems not to have thought much about Jews). Remember Charles Darwin, dismantling entire chunks of religious belief, even as he himself continued to believe and was probably uneasy by the implications of what he was doing? In historical terms, Darwin was just yesterday.
Why, Shmuel? Jews regarded themselves as being in Galut - exile, even though most of them had no intention of returning to Jerusalem in any immediate way, and indeed, they didn't most of the time. This doesn't mean they were persecuted at all times. I never said that, and it's not historically true even if I did say it.
History, like any part of human life and the story of people, is complex. People can - actually, people almost always do - live with conflicting emotions, conflicting conditions, complications, incoherencies, inconsistencies, and so on. You can fully believe one thing, and also another not-compatable thing, and both will still be sincere convictions. So Jews yearned to return "home", and stayed at home, simultaneously, and managed to live with both concepts. And they lived among their neighbors, and didn't regard them as neighbors, all at the same time. They still do.
Michael Lerner, for example. But it would be intellectually honest to accept that people like him are unusual in the context of most Jews in the world today, and very much at odds with much of Jewish history - though of course he would say otherwise, which is his right.
Really.
Annie: there were no secular Jews prior to Spinoza, and only a handful of them before the 19th century. There were hardly any secular anybody else, either.
I sent you to the literature in a previous comment on this post. Or to the most famous sections of it, at any rate. The number of relevant books has been estimated at anywhere from 30-60 thousand.
Here's a potted history of Judaism, Annie. Judaism has always been grounded in books. The fundamental book, of course, is the Bible (Old Testament), which is mostly the story of the Jews in their land, and partially a story of Jews pining for their land (Izekiel, say, and Daniel). Then you've got the Talmud, a 5,500-page communal creation written over 500 years in the first five centuries after the destruction of Jerusalem. There is no book more central in Judaism. Written in a mishmash of Hebrew and Aramaic, with no punctuation and extreme brevity of wording, it must be studied, not read. I've done about 4,000 of the 5,500 pages so far, and estimate that the land of Israel is mentioned about every second page, on average, in one form or another.
Concurrent to the Talmud you've got the various forms of Midrash (hermeneutical literature). That's all about the land of Israel and the Jews' life on it.
The mediaeval literature (thousands of books) is all about the Bible (which took place where, you'll remember) and the Talmud (see above). The Kaballa is all about the Exile and Redemption.
Empty the land of Israel from Jewish liturgy and all you'll have left will be Swiss cheese.
As I've said above, in the 19th century some Europeans (not the majority in any country) but not the Muslims seemed to be offering the Jews a new path. The first important historical figure to do this was Napoleon, who insisted the Jews could be good Frenchmen if they gave up the nationalism of their Jewishness and parts of their outlandish tradition (from his perspective). Over the next 150 years a minority of European Jews tried to take him up on his offer, with mixed results.
So yes, to your question, Annie: for most of the three millennia of Jewish history, most Jews regarded Israel as their homeland, and spent part of their spiritual and cultural lives engaging with it. This isn't to say they all pined to move there at all moments, of course not. But the centrality of the land in Judaism cannot be denied. Even when things changed in the 19th century, at any given moment a majority of Jews always retained a version of the traditional position.
Habits die hard, and this one isn't dying. The Phil Weisses of this world may hope otherwise, but it's not going to happen. You can't create a sustainable version of Judaism which doesn't regard Israel as the homeland, and still call it Judaism. It has never been done (note my use of the word "sustainable"), and there's no sign it will happen anytime in the future.
And of course, an existential condition of all Jews everywhere for most of their long diaspora history. Or would you re-write Jewish history, Shmuel? Because that will take a lot of re-writing.
Indeed, the UK, Annie. And France is a no-brainer. (Sarkozy,by the way, isn't Jewish, doesn't regard himself as Jewish, and isn't regarded as Jew except perhaps by the antisemites. He had one Jewish grandparent, that's all).
Just to be clear about this, Annie, since it's pretty basic: for the millennia prior to the Enlightenment, Jews were ALWAYS distinguishable from their non-Jewish neighbors. Their legal status was different, and their social status even more so. At no point prior to the 18th century could anyone even have formulated the concept of being simply a regular citizen of the country one lived in. (Of course, the whole idea of citizenship was largely on freeze between the Roman era and Modernity). In the 19th and early 20th century there were some Jews who told themselves they were on their way to being just regular citizens, but their surrounding societies didn't concur. Even in the US, American Jews didn't reach the level of feeling at home and accepted as they do today until sometime in the 1950s or 1960, as the anguished story of the Jewish leadership's relationship to Roosevelt and American society as the news of the Holocaust seeped in, shows.
Even today, in the early 21st century, the level of self-confidence and feeling at home enjoyed by the Jews of the US is unusual. You can find Jews who feel totally French (not many) or totally Dutch, but in most cases this will be accompanied with the permanent feeling that they're also different, and perhaps not as secure as their neighbors. I personally have a relative who is a prominent elected politician in a West European country, secular, left-wing, committed to her country - but the idea that her being Jewish is simply a statistical data-point with no significance to her or to her voters would set her roaring with bitter laughter.
which is not to say Jews were always persecuted. But always diferent? Somehow outsiders? Of course!
You're right, Annie. It's not often I agree with you, but in this case you're spot on.
On the other hand, Jews in just about every single other country - with the exception perhaps of Australia and Canada - often do indeed recognize themselves to be not fully at home in the society they live in.
Phil,
It isn't Gorenberg who says that Israel is at the heart of Jewish identity. It's the entirety of Jewish life and creation until sometime in the 19th century, when for the first time in millennia some European Jews, first in France and then in Germany, tried to create a version of Judaism which would be disconnected from Jewish nationalism and the idea of the centrality of the homeland. This new concept had its run for a few generations during which a large majority of the Jews never subscribed to it; after the Shoah it was laid to rest. Here and there one can find small groups of Jews who would like to revive the idea, but this is mostly a lost case. Having wished for something for centuries, it will be hard to write it off now that it's here. As of 2012, a large majority of the Jewish people is Zionist in one form or another.
So far for the facts. Now, one can say that if the Jews support Israel they must all be racists and worse, as is often suggested here at Mondoweiss: that's one way of seeing it. Another is that the descriptions of Israel here at MW bear very little connection to reality, and most Jews in the world know perfectly well that there's no problem in being democratic, and humanist, and Zionist. Having lived among Jews in many countries, I think most of them disagree with the Mondoweiss portrayal, and are comfortable with a complex identity which recognizes tensions in reality wthout insisting on black-and-white dichotomies.
Yeah. Except that of course there's no truth to the statistic. If you wish to regard all the elderly Jews from the former Soviet Union who lived through WWII and then moved to Israel when they were in their 70s as Shoah survivors, then there maybe a noticable minority of survivors under the poverty line - but probably not. As for the 2-300,000 survivors who made their way to Mandatory Palestine or Israel between late 1945-1960, they mostly lifted themselves by their bootstraps and became the backbone of Israeli society. To use yourstruly's term, they became the Israeli juggernaut. Many are no longer alive, obviously, but most did not or still don't live below the poverty line. This is simply the kind of urban legend people like to tell themselves.
"70% of Shoah survivors in Israel live below the poverty line".
Huh?
"It was revealed" how? You don't have access to the Mossad documentation, no-one does. When Mossad killed that Morroccan fellow in Lillehammer it was possible to know what Mossad was doing even without their documentation because there was authoritative Norwegian documentation, but that was a rare case.
This isn't a specific Israeli issue, either. Covert actions by spooks of all nations are extremely hard to nail down, and often remain murky until the archival documentation is opened, which is why some countries - Britain springs to mind - have rules against opening it for an entire century. (Actually, some British document from the middle of the 19th century are still sealed, because they contain sensitive information).
As for what Lieberman said and connecting the dots: have you ever met the concept of politicians saying one thing for political consumption, and doing another thing behind the sealed doors of power?
Shingo -
As I've said, Mondoweiss isn't a source of information, it's a source of opinion. I feel no obligation to prove anything to you, and even if I tried, you wouldn't accept the proof. Earlier I cited a website which is full of evidence-based data, and no-one had much to say about it, though I expect someone will come by eventually to cast aspersion on the organisation, not its data.
No. The JPost, just like all media these days, regularly publishes speculation, innuendo and wild guesses. That's how the media operates. In the old days respectable outlets didn't publish stories without reliable third-side verification, but that was in the days of one edition per day when they had at least minimal time to do fact-checking. Nowadays no-one expects it of them, and as a general rule, I'd say that most reportage in most media outlets is uninformed at best, and I'm being generous.
I've noticed that you do lots of your research online using media sources, and it's indeed my opinion that this is an unreliable method for getting at the truth. It has the advantage that it can be done from the comfort of your home and with minimal expense, but it has the disadvantage of leaving you with almost no exposure to most of the relevant data, which can't be found on the Web.
This isn't a political position, by the way. It works in all directions, and I'd say the same thing to a similar operator of the opposite political persuasion.
Annie,
I haven't the faintest idea who they were, what they were doing there and why. That's the thing: the fact that I can use Google still doesn't give me access to most of human knowledge, which isn't on the Web. What I do know is that the Turks killed 35 people, apparently including teenagers (who are sometimes referred to as "chidren"), who were non-combatants even according to the Turks. It was all over the papers at the time, and the Turks weren't denying. Beyond that it's all speculation. The Guardian speculates one way, the Economist speculates another way, and, given the Turkish reaction to the deaths of 9 of their citizens on the Mavi Marmara, some Israelis speculate a third way. None of the speculators knows; they're all promoting their own pet theories and agendas. The best a body can do is look at the long-term record of the speculator and say "these guy are wrong often, these guys are wrong rarely, perhaps the patterns hold here, too. And perhaps not".
In any case, the fact that you've got 70 civilians walking through the mountains of Kurdistan in the night isn't a capital offence, in itself. Certainly not in an area well-known for its smuggler activity.
Annie -
I didn't hijack your thread today. I try to be civil.
I do hope you recognize that this entire story and thread is based on one Turkish report which offers no verification or evidence, and on lots of inuendo. At least the Iranians had that drone, and even the President admited it was real, even though he never admitted that it had been spying and his underlings claimed it actually hadn't been. The Turkish story, however, lacks even that. No Israeli kit, no films or photos, no documents, merely a claim. Coming a few weeks after Turkish forces killed those 35 Kurds, you have to wonder if the Turks have any reason to wish to direct attention away from their own actions in the area - tho here, I admit, I'm speculating just as much as you are, if in the opposite direction. My point being that none of us have any hard data or verifiable facts. (Except for the 35 dead Kurds: that's documented, and no-one is claiming it wasn't the Turks who killed them).
Shingo -
You don't have the faintest idea who I am: my gender, my nationality (or perhaps multiple nationalities), my domicile, education, age, profession, mother-tongue, and of course, my ability or non-ability to gather information. Nor do I know any of this about you.
I assure you that I feel confident about what I know when I'm confident, and I try to recognize when I'm being fed questionable information, and the opinions of the readership at this website about my knowledge is a matter of no consequence. Given what I know and how I know it, you don't come off as a well informed person, but perhaps that's just me. Then again, perhaps it's not just me. A possible reason this website is so far from mainstream is that its reporters and their readers are willing to accept as fact notions which most reasonable poeple would not be convinced by.
Either that, or the Zionist lobby has most people hoodwinked. That's the preferred explanation here when the Mondoweiss postion is demonstrably far from the mainstream one.
Anway, Israel is on the road to energy independance because of the large gas fields off its coast. And no, I don't mean the ones which are disputed by the Lebanese. I mean the larger ones which are undisputed. As for the water: read the data here:
link to water.gov.il
Unlike many websites, this one is run by the authority which is in charge of its topic, and thus has no need for speculation or media reports: it reports on its own actions, and offers transparency so that if you disagree, you know what to disagree about.
This is an example of how odd the discussions at Mondoweiss can be. eee, whoever she is, didn't say that, but even if she did, what difference does it make? An unidentified blogger makes a statement in a discussion thread, and this is then taken to be proof of a policy of a sovereign government. Huh? Let's say an identified Israeli, using their verifiable identity, comes out and says something about what their country does: does this make it true?
Actions of states are documented by states, and verified by carefully reading the documentation. When the documentation isn't available, a secondary method is to get the data directly from the authorities who have it. Historians use the first method, top-notch journalists use the second. Quality bloggers can do as well as journalists, if they're well-informed, but in the long run the historians are more trustworthy than the journalists, if you can wait, because they've got better access and a more robust methodology.
People chatting about matters they have no real information about are just that: people chatting.
Annie, here's the bottom section of the item in Haaretz:
"These unacceptable remarks surprised his colleagues in the working group, who were shocked to find them in the final version after it was published, after Israeli diplomats called their attention to them," Palmor said.
The report, he continued, "was loaded with the language of vicious propaganda, far removed from any professional criticism with which one could argue intelligently." Moreover, the report's author omitted numerous facts and acted "with blatant tendentiousness."
"After embassy staffers pointed out the exceptional seriousness of the wording ... all the working group members disassociated themselves from [the report], including the chairman, who sent an official letter to the ambassador renouncing responsibility for the report's anti-Israel expressions," Palmor added.
Now we've got an interesting case. According to Haaretz, there exists a letter from the group of French investigators disassociating themselves from the report they themselves worked on, because it's not true. Haaretz doesn't show us this letter, and no-one claims it's to be found online. So the Internet may not be a good tool to test the veracity of the statement. Yet clearly, there is a true version and a false version of the story. Either such a letter exists, which means the entire French report castigating Israel is either false or very seriously flawed; or such a letter doesn't exist, and Haaretz has been reporting untruths.
One way or the other, trumpeting the item as proof of some Israeli crime seems to me rather problematic, which is the reason you introduced it to the discussion.
See my response to Shingo below, Annie. Also, please pardon me when I state that Mondoweiss is an interesting source for understanding the thought processes of a certain type of critics of Israel (and America), but is not a reliable source for getting at the facts of the region. I know you and your fellow readers think otherwise, but I must regrettably be adamant on this. The entire Internet isn't much of a source, come to think of it, but Mondoweiss is weaker than usual in the factual reliabilty section.
I do hope this comment gets published.
So what am I supposed to do, Shingo: accept the logic of your statements, or the reality I can see with my own eyes. The reality is that back in 2002 (I think it was) Israel porposefully set itself the goal of supplying all its private consumption (not including industry and agriculture) via desalination installations, and then started building them. Some of them are already there, and others will be completed, if I'm not mistaken, before the end of this decade. All the websites in the world won't change this - though of course the website I linked to above explains the opposite: how the project is progressing.
As for energy, Israel will be energy-independant by about 2014; someday, when the scientists figure out how to create electricity efficiently from sunlight, it will be ensured eternal independence on account of the Negev.
As for the one about Israel stealing water, I"m reminded of how the media used to claim that Israeli settlements stole 25% of the water in Gaza; then, in 2005, Israel left Gaza and the critics never said a word about how the evacuated water sources werre now serving the Palestinians because the whole story had always been a fabrication. The reality had been that in the 1993 Oslo agreements, Israel had agreed to supply the PA with water, but the PA never got around to building the pipelines to receive the water in. Unlike the Jordanians, who made a similar agreement with Israel in 1994, then built the connecting pipelines, and have been receiving water from Israel ever since.
Robert,
The National Water Carrier originates in the Sea of Galillee, as any schoolchild knows, and was built in the 1950s when the Golan was controlled by Syria. The map you link to is odd, in that it shows only water sources to the east of the lake, thus suggesting the areas to the north and west are desert, which, of course, is silly. Such lopsidedness is an easily identified indication that the source is not trustworthy.
Your statement about Maaleh Adumim is ever stranger. Next time you go there, see if you can see any water pumps. There aren't any. As for the reasons the town was put there, for that you'd have to read the documentation of the ministries involved. I doubt you've done that, and moreover, I doubt you'll be able to dig up any website which has - but perhaps you'll surprise me. In which case I'll follow their footnotes and go look at the documents themselves to check.
Although I've been making a living from Internet-related matters for years, I'm not of the opinion that it's the only source for facts. Rather on the contrary: a very large majority of human knowledge is still not on the Web, and thus can't be linked to. Still, if you're interested in a website which is chock-full of scientific, evidence-based data on Israel's water policies, you might start here:
link to water.gov.il
Finally, you might be interested in noting that Israel is one of the most advanced countries in the world in desalination, and that within a few years it will be the only country in the world where the entire supply of water for private consumption will come from desalination, making the entire thesis about how Israel needs Palestinian water irrelevant.
Did you read the Haaretz report all the way to the bottom, Annie? I recommend.
Evidence about the water? Evidence about the economy being based mostly in the occupation?
Allison,
A number of your fellow writers on this website, not to mention many commentors, are greatly in favor of BDS, but simultaneously attribute to Israel control over American foreign policy, American media, and much of America's political discourse. A recent post even seemed to be saying that Israeli covert actions are thwarting Iranian efforts to talk with the US; previous posts have speculated the Israelis are pulling the strings in Egypt and elsewhere.
In a way, your post also alludes to this subject.
My question is how to reconcile this idea with that of BDS. If Israel is weak enough that public pressure of the BDS sort can bring it to its knees, surely it can't simultaneously be powerful enough to manipulate the world's most powerful nation according to whim? If Israel controls the media, clearly BDS will never gain any hearing there? Isn't there a fundamental inconsistency here?
Well folks, this has been highly instructive and I'd like to thank you all for the forthrightness.
Offhand I can't think of any group of reasonable people who would meet a call for civility with anything other than agreement - or embarrassment, if they felt rebuked. Many of the responders to Donald's call, however, have responded with anything but civility. This is not because of some preference for brutal honesty over effeminate politeness, since there's nothing intellectually honest about a group which tolerates only the Party Line, and shouts down any deviation from it.
Some of the commenters have defended their ideological rigidity with the sentiment that they need, or enjoy, a place to share with like-minded ideologues. (Others claim they're persecuted or censored elsewhere and thus need the safe haven - which is roughly the same). Which is ultimately what Mondoweiss is: a club for fellow-travelers. The members like to tell themselves they're winning some important argument, but they can't even listen to one of their own members discomfort.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, the numbers seem to indicate that most young American Jews feel just fine with Israel. Not all of them, mind you, but a comfortable majority.
link to jidaily.com
Which is the way it has been since WWII, when a majority of the Jewish world swung firmly behind the Zionist project; prior to the war it had been only a plurality.
Not really. It raises the obvious question, If Mondoweiss is against long-term occupations, why does it focus only on one.
Actually, if you ask the Tibetans, the occupation of their homeland and the exile of many of their people began earlier than the Israeli occupation, which began in 1967. Also, parts of the Israeli occupation have in the meanwhile been ended; not so for the Tibetans.
Some Kashmiris would make a similar claim. The West Saharans and some of the Cypriots will tell you their occupation hasn't been much shorter.
I think not, Robert. This is a website which is stridently hostile to any concept of Jewish nationalism whatsoever, irrespetive of the borders of 1967. And it's an eager purveyor of of dark ideas about the devious power that Jews wield over the rest of the world. It's also a hotbed of conspiracy theories. It is full of irrational notions about Jews and their history, and its readership routinely reject any empirical evidence which doesn't fit their notions. All in all it's a fascinating website, but not for the "truth" it tells about the Israelis or the Palestinains, rather for the window it opens on a certain frame of mind which can be found on the fringes of contemporary America.
Not long ago a Palestinian friend of mine connected me with a friend of his, the mayor of one of the larger West Bank settlements, whom I had lost contact with more than 20 years ago. All three of us had a chuckle over that one.
There is nothing on this website to explain the possibility of such a story, and now that I've mentioned it, it will be explained away as irrelevant, insignificant, and untrue. Yet it is true, it did happen, and it's actually not as surprsing or unusual as you'd think. The reality in Israel/Palestine is much more complex, nuanced and subtle than the readership of this website is willing to contemplate.
Here's another one. A non-Jew from Australia who went to Israel and learned that things there are considerably better than the media had led him to believe.
link to realclearworld.com
It's possible the Israelis have the power to blind their visitors. It's also possible that the reality is actually not what the readership of this website believes it to be.
Any chance this is a bit of wishful thnking? I mean, Max Blumenthal and Russian TV are hardly primary formulators of American public opinion, and in order for their report to be true you'd sort of expect some evidence to be forthcoming from the mainstream, since it's the mainstream they are reporting about. Pinpricks of dissatisfaction with Israel have been around since the State Department did its best to convince Truman not to recognize Israel in May 1948, but a sea-change - which is what you're looking forward to - needs to be seen clearly from every beach, so to speak.
Im not trying to squash BDS, Annie, and if I were this blog wouldn't be the place to do so, seeing how its hardest-core suppoters congregate here. No, as I've said already elsewhere, I'm here to understand. The community of this website has a pristine sort of Weltanschauung, which I've been following for a number of years; my questioning is merely an attempt to plumb their (your) thought patterns.
Isn't this an example of the futility of the BDS movement? How long will it take the BDS movement to inflict 1.6 billion $ worth of damage on Israel's economy, and doesn't the willingness of diverse countries to prefer business calculations undercut the entire project? As you yourself point out, the connection with the IDF seems hardly to faze countries looking for the best deal in military hardware if that deal is to be had in Israel.
According to the Guardian, the Iranians are blaming the US and UK, not Israel.
link to guardian.co.uk
Sorry folks, I have a life and don't spend most of it online. You might wish to start here
link to economist.com
which discusses the Brit, the Danes and the Dutch: "That sounds objective enough. Yet dig deeper into government consultation documents and speak to Whitehall insiders and something messier swims into view. The philosophical underpinnings of family migration policy are shifting, towards a belief that, even for British citizens, importing foreigners to create a family in Britain is a privilege that must be earned, not a right."
Take a train from Eastern Europe into Schengen and see the discrimination in action. Cruise the Medditeraenean south of Italy. Ride along the American-Mexican border and you'll see the same. Likewise in Australia. The idea that rich countries have created elaborate and costly measures, legal, police and military, to keep out people from poor countries is so banal it requires no proof. True, the specifics in Israel are different, but the specifics in each country are different. The principle of wishing to keep out people of different groups is the common thread.
It's also worth mentioning that none of the rich countries which keep out foreigners is threatened by the foreigners. Britain is not at war with Pakistan, Australia isn't at war with Indonesia, Germany hasn't been at war with the Ukraine for close to 70 years, Austria hasn't been at war with any Balkan entities for almost a century. Yet the fear that immigrants from those places or others will upset the demographic-ethnic order of things is a major theme of the politics in all the reciving countries. Not everyone agrees, and positions evolve over time in varying directions, but the idea of a fully open world in which individuals can choose to live in whatever country they'd like to is a chimera.
I stand by my original statement: Israel is in fine company on this issue. The determination to single it out as uniquely evil is irrational.
The British one is mainly against Pakistanis, according to the Economist. The article doesn't say which precise groups the rules are against in the other countries, but makes clear they're aimed at poor Asians, not rich Americans. In Amerca - well, you don't need me to know the answer.
A quick google search finds that Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands all have similar rules. The US does, too. Awful company Israel keeps.
Evidence abut the Israelis closing schools on a regular basis throughout the entire territory? Does this include Area A schools?
The British - reasonably good at democracy they - have files from the middle of the 19th century which are still sealed. They must open them immediately, otherwise we'll declare the worst about them, and blog about it too.
If what you're saying, Jeffrey, is that Israel invented all those methods, Israel is the world's primary purveyor of political assassination, and any assassination which doesn't explicitely have USSR/Russia written on it must be the handiwork of Israel, well, you're in the realm of the irrational and I can't convince you otherwise.
Meanwhile, back in the real-though-murky world of political skulldugery, if the events in Iran have any hallmark recognizable by uninformed outsiders (the 99.99%, to borrow a term), it's the hallmark of a concerted effort by a whole phalanx of agencies, each bringing its relative strengths to the joint effort.
I wonder how many of you will be willing to join me in admitting that we have no real information on this except innuendo and misinformation, and that the misinformation is probably part of the effort itself?
If we assume Israel did it, based on that kind of evidence, we've got to also assume Iran was behind the two mass murders of Jews and others in Argentina in the 1990s. Not to mention the certainty that Iran backs Hamas and Hizballah, two organizations which have often proudly trumpeted their glee at killing Israeli citizens. Isn't it reasonable, then, that Israel regard Iran as a lethal enemy?
Likewise, if you're going to travel with evidence as murky as that, there are ample amounts of it indicating that Iranians have been contributing to the deaths of Americans in Iraq for years, and perhaps elsewhere, too.
If the Iranians end up killing the American, it will be because the Iraninas decided to kill him. They aren't Israeli puppets, after all.
The link doesn't work for me, but I'll take your word for it. Still, may I ask that you walk me thru this, Allison? Because the story doesn't seem to add up.
Israel conquered the WB in 1967 - and so far as I know, there were no universities there at all (I could be wrong about this, if so correct me). More than 20 years later, a time came when the Israelis shut down the universities which had been set up during its rule, and also shut down lots of schools, I don't know for how long. Some time later - days? months? two years? - it allowed them to be reopened, and if I'm following you correctly, they've been open ever since, meaning another 20-some years. Which would seem to indicate that closing schools was the exception, not the norm. It doens't sound like an exception Israel has anything to be proud about, but if it's an exception one does wonder what caused it and why it ended.
Another point I need your help on, Allison, is how this fits into the BDS discussion today. When I first read your report on Bargouti's talk, I thought he (and you) were saying that Israel needs to be boycotted now because it shuts down Palestinian schools (among other things). That certainly seems to be the understanding of my fellow commentors, who talk about all this in present tense and as typical Israeli policy. Yet if I'm following you correctly, it isn't. It happened once in two generations, and that once was a generation ago.
Fascinating. I'd never heard the story of Israel shutting down all Palestinian schools and the Palestinian response of setting up a clandestine network. Where did the clandestine network operate? In private homes? Garages? How did the Palestinians manage to keep more than a thousand institutions with, one assumes, more than 100,000 children, secret from the prying eyes of the Israelis? Were the educators the same people from the shut down system, and if so, were the Israelis blind to the fact that the teachers weren't sitting idle at home, as was the Israeli intention, but rather... teaching, in those garages? Who paid their salaries? How long did all this go on?
It's even more intriguing given that the report Ms. Deger links to only says the schools were shut down for one week. Was the clandestine system set up that fast? And was it disbanded at the end of the week? And if it was, what is the ultimate point of the story?
Just trying to learn and understand, that's all. Like the one above about Israelis with dual citizenship et. al: never heard that one before. Do you have any evidence? I'd be interested.
The Economist has lists of economic indicators at the back of each issue. I was referring to them, not to a book.
Flying thru the Tel Aviv airport not long ago, I was struck by the difference. Back in the 1970s, the flights were all to Western Europe and North America. Nowadays the flights are to all over: Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, even some flights to South America. Jerusalem is mobbed with tourists from Nigeria, Poland, Korea, and all sorts of other faraway spots, and in numbers way beyond the imagination of Israeli tourism officials in, say, 1982. What can I say: it doesn't look like growing isolation to me.
I think it's closer to 2bn, for whatever it's worth. Most of it must be spent in the US, so in effect it's a job-creating scheme in which the Federal Government subsidises various parts of the American military industry. But yes, it would probably be better for all sides if the US government stopped presenting it as a subsidy for Israel, and instead Israel competed like anyone else for miltary tenders. If the European example is anything to go by, Israeli companies, research teams and so on would win large sums of American investment funds simply because they'd offer the best deals.
According to The Economist, Israel's economy is doing better than just about any other developed country's. I understand the fun of getting lots of like-minded people in one venue, but can BDS credibly be said to be achieving anything tangible?