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What if the Times had sent Rudoren to Selma in 1965?

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Ayelet Shaked

Even I was surprised by Jodi Rudoren’s latest piece in the New York Times, a profile of the Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked that portrayed a woman who has endorsed genocide against Palestinians as feisty and principled. Rudoren brags that she got the first interview with Shaked, but I couldn’t help imagining what Rudoren would have done as a reporter if the Times had sent her to Selma, Alabama, in 1965, and she’d met, say, Betty Jones, a leader of the Daughters of the Confederacy who had just announced for Congress.

Real Rudoren in the Times today:

For Ms. Shaked, a former computer engineer, the main thing is “to strengthen the Jewish identity” of Israel, “to have a democratic, Jewish, strong state.”

Imaginary Selma Rudoren:

For Mrs. Jones, a former bookkeeper, the main thing is “to strengthen the white identity” of Alabama, “to have a democratic, white, strong state.”

Real Rudoren:

Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian leader among the throngs who fulminated over Ms. Shaked’s new role, said it “is not only a threat to peace and security, but generates a culture of hate and lawlessness.”

Imaginary Selma Rudoren:

Martin Luther King Jr, a black leader among the throngs who fulminated over Mrs. Jones’s new role, said it “is not only a threat to peace and security, but generates a culture of hate and lawlessness.”

Real Rudoren:

Ms. Shaked said her best friend has described her as a “robot,” and her husband calls her “the computer” because of her methodical approach. “They say that I’m very calculated and not very sensitive,” Ms. Shaked explained in an interview, her first since her recent rocket rise.

Imaginary Selma Rudoren:

Her husband describes her as an adding machine because of her methodical approach, Mrs. Jones said, in her first interview since her meteoric rise. The Times could not obtain interviews with Lester Maddox, George Wallace, and Bull Connor, but maybe after this article, they will change their minds.

Real Rudoren:

A flash point came last June, when Ms. Shaked posted on Facebook a never-published article by a settler activist who had died. It described the entire Palestinian people as “the enemy,” called youths who become “martyrs” while attacking Israelis “snakes,” and said their mothers should “go to hell” with them.

Bloggers accused her of promoting genocide….

“It was a mistake,” Ms. Shaked said in the interview, a day before her swearing-in. “I’m doing a lot of mistakes, like every human being.”

Imaginary Selma Rudoren:

A flashpoint came when Mrs. Jones wrote a letter to a local Alabama paper endorsing the Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls and the Philadelphia, Mississippi, lynching of three civil rights workers as the only way for white people to work out a future with black people.

Mrs. Jones says her letter may have been a mistake, and she’s made a lot of mistakes, like every human being.

Real Rudoren:

To call her a lightning rod seems an understatement. But unlike other headline-grabbing, flame-throwing politicians, Ms. Shaked is disciplined, a doer.

Imaginary Selma Rudoren:

To call Betty Jones a lightning rod seems an understatement. But in stark contrast to the politicians who grab headlines by standing in schoolhouse doors or provocative activists who burn crosses on front lawns and chant Death to Negroes, Mrs. Jones is disciplined, a doer.

Real Rudoren:

Erez Eshel, who met Ms. Shaked at Tel Aviv University . . .  recalled going to see her during Israel’s 1999 election campaign. . .

“She said, ‘Erez, don’t talk, let’s do action,’ and we simply went out and removed all the signs of the Labor Party from the streets of Tel Aviv. From 11 until 4 o’clock in the morning,”

Imaginary Selma Rudoren:

Mrs. Jones is a person not of words, but of hard work. Friends say that last week she walked through the streets of the black neighborhoods of Selma all night long, removing posters calling for a peaceful march for voting rights.

Real Rudoren:

Ms. Shaked asked to be asked about Arab citizens. She said they “should be an integrated part of the Israeli society,” denied they face discrimination and said more spots should be created for them to do national service in lieu of the military.

Imaginary Selma Rudoren:

Mrs. Jones denied that black people face discrimination. There are plenty of opportunities for them all over Alabama. They need to know their place is the issue, she said.

Real Rudoren:

She danced ballet, was active in the Scouts and excelled at math.

Imaginary Selma Rudoren:

She danced ballet, was active in the Scouts and excelled at math.

 

James North

James North is a Mondoweiss Editor-at-Large, and has reported from Africa, Latin America, and Asia for four decades. He lives in New York City.

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177 Responses

  1. just on May 15, 2015, 1:46 pm

    Well done, James North!

    (Have a 2nd look at this: Imaginary Selma Rudoren:
    To call Betty Jones a lightning rod seems an understatement. But in stark contrast to the politicians who grab headlines by standing in schoolhouse doors or provocative activists who burn crosses on front lawns and chant Death to Negroes, Ms. Shaked is disciplined, a doer.”)

    • James North on May 15, 2015, 1:59 pm

      Thanks. Fixed it.

      • Krauss on May 15, 2015, 4:07 pm

        Let me heap praise, even if one is aware of the fact intellectually, reading the two versions side by side really jolts you in a visceral way.

        You really start to understand just how shocking NYT’s embrace of Jewish apartheid is. But of course, because it is so common in the MSM you have kind of assimiliated it. The flashback to 1965 is vital and in many ways, the opposition to MLK and the rest was actually more moderate than the outright pro-Genocide Shaked.

        I wonder if Rudoren would have described those who attacked neo-Nazis who preached genocide on the Jews as “fulminating”. I doubt it.

    • John Douglas on May 15, 2015, 8:42 pm

      There is one way to write the truth and a thousand ways to write lies. Jodi Rudoren writes lies. Of all the forms of lying, the one I hate most is lying through the use of loaded language.

      She writes, ‘Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian leader among the throngs who fulminated over Ms. Shaked’s new role, said it “is not only a threat to peace and security, but generates a culture of hate and lawlessness.”’

      “Throngs” = Crowds, but crowds that are uncontrolled, overcome, crowds that are not fully human. This is racist.

      “Fulminate” = Charges that are not rational, not coming from a full human being. Racist.

      Has anyone ever heard Hanan Asharawi fulminate? She is smart, elegant, dedicated and rational. Rudoren doesn’t come close. She prostitutes her profession to function as a shill for the Likud.

      • James North on May 16, 2015, 2:51 pm

        John Douglas: You and Krauss are absolutely right. Saying that “throngs” “fulminate” is racism, and the Times editor(s) that let the words through have a lot to answer for.

      • just on May 16, 2015, 3:10 pm

        +1, Krauss, John, and James.

        Thank you.

      • Maximus Decimus Meridius on May 17, 2015, 4:44 am

        The use of the words ‘fulminate’ and ‘throngs’ really struck me too. In one way it was far from the most offensive part of this puff piece on a wannabe ethnic cleanser, but it sums up Rudoren’s attitude. It’s classic anti-Arab racism, really – Arabs, not like nice civilised Jews like Shaked, are irrational, emotionalistic creatures who live by mob rule. In fact, as you say, Ashrawi is highly educated, articulate and cool-headed. I would also say she is moderate to a fault. She’s about the last person you can imagine ‘fulminating’. Which is more than can be said for Shaked and most of the Likud nutters.

  2. JeffB on May 15, 2015, 2:07 pm

    @James

    Ayelet Shaked is a sophomore. She ran in the Jewish Home primary against seated members of the cabinet and kicked their asses. She’s a very talented politician and well liked. Jewish Home is well liked by the NYTimes readership. The NYTimes reflects the position of its readership and its readership is well to the right of you. The American population is even more to the right of you on this issue than the NYTimes readership.

    Your “Imaginary Selma Rudoren” is to right of where the American people were in 1965, especially in the NorthEast. Legal equality had a substantial majority support in the North a century before Selma. Most of the northern states never even had anti-miscegenation laws. If you want an analogy you want to pick a southern newspaper on civil rights or an issue in which the NYTimes would have been in favor of the discrimination. Say something like their coverage of the animal rights movement or abortion where they do believe in discrimination. And you will find them being quite comfortable with pro-choice or anti-animal rights politicians. Or go further back and pick an 1765 paper in the North on the Indian wars: that’s a far better analogy because there you have an indigenous ethnic group refusing to assimilate into the now dominant society. The vast majority of northern papers are going to be extremely hostile to England’s attempts to hold back the colonists from western expansion.

    The NYTmes accurately described her positions: That translates, in policy terms, into promoting Israeli annexation of most of the occupied West Bank and ousting African asylum-seekers. It means curtailing the power of the Supreme Court, giving politicians more sway over judicial appointments and prohibiting foreign funding of advocacy groups — which could put the main internal critics of Israeli actions out of business. And it entails a “nationality bill” that many see as disenfranchising Israel’s Arab minority, about 20 percent of the population. They didn’t harp in a negative way and try and demonize her, because don’t hate Israelis and Jews. They want to cover her like they would a popular politician from a rightwing party because they consider Israeli a country like any other and Jews a people like any other. You don’t and so…

    Finally on genocide. They even mentioned the post you are focusing on. But politicians are allowed to retract. People speak hastily. Isn’t that your whole point about Steven Salaita that his teaching shouldn’t be judged by his equally genocidal tweets, which he incidentally did not retract? She made statements in the heat of war, they either were misunderstood or she thought better of them, and then retracted them. She’s stated her well thought carefully considered positions many times and those are the positions of her party.

    • Donald on May 15, 2015, 3:01 pm

      “They didn’t harp in a negative way and try and demonize her, because don’t hate Israelis and Jews. They want to cover her like they would a popular politician from a rightwing party because they consider Israeli a country like any other and Jews a people like any other. You don’t and so… ”

      She’s a rightwing racist, and should be treated like they would treat a rightwing racist politician in any other country, such as the politicians in the South who supported Jim Crow. It’s interesting how you think it is demonizing a rightwing Israeli Jew to compare her to a rightwing American racist. I’ve seen this before. I know how racist “my people”–southern whites– can be , but I never thought that southern white racists were demons or inhuman. They were people with a very serious moral flaw. To some degree maybe we’re all racists, but some of us try not to be, while others embraced it. Guess what? There are a fair number of Jews in both Israel and in the US who have exactly the same moral flaw. Being Jewish doesn’t make someone inherently better or free from racism and comparing racist Israeli Jews to bigoted Southern Jim Crow supporters is not “demonizing” them, unless you are of the opinion that Southern white racists are inherently more demonic than Israeli Jewish racists.

      And JeffB, I often find your comments interesting and worth thinking about (in a good way) when you don’t touch on moral issues–when, for instance, you merely try to analyze where people fall on a given spectrum. But when morality comes into it you write and talk like someone for whom universal moral values are some foreign language you never learned, or some branch of math you never studied. Shaked is a racist. But to you she represents Israel and the NYT readership and therefore everything is fine. Bull Connor had supporters too.

      You may think you are defending the NYT and Israel, but your post is, if anything, a harsher assessment than North’s. The funny thing is that you don’t realize this.

      • JeffB on May 15, 2015, 4:19 pm

        @Donald

        You may think you are defending the NYT and Israel, but your post is, if anything, a harsher assessment than North’s.

        2 points on that one! I was making the point she was mainstream. You are quite correct that you can turn that around and make a far harsher critique of Israel off the fact that she is mainstream.

        I really wasn’t trying to make much of a moral point on Shaked just a point as to where the median voter and median NYTimes reader was.

        But I will address morality in my response. I don’t consider her a racist. Like most Zionists, Israeli is the Jewish state in the same way France is a French state and she is unapologetic about that the same way that a Frenchmen would be unapologetic that France is French. It is IMHO racist to deny Jews equality not assert that they should be equal. She applies this notion of equality to Palestinians. So for example, while she opposes a two state solution she’s assert that if there is going to be a two state solution that Jews in Palestine should be have the same status as Arabs who live in Israel. http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/politics/140130-habayit-hayehudi-mk-goes-against-bennett-on-settlements

        I’d consider that anti-racist not racist. I think she is a universalist in an Israeli context. This is the commercial from her first campaign for American-Israelis (English speaking)
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiWvN-Jr_Js
        and you can see the obvious message of inclusion and universality. Her lines, “it doesn’t matter how you dress or where you live” clearly pointing away from the ethnic and class parties that characterized the last generation of Israeli politics and that’s trying to move away from. That’s not the sort of campaign a racist would run on. They wouldn’t be trying to remove ethnic differences. Since that campaign she’s been strong supporter of outreach to rightwing Mizrahi who are after all the same race as Palestinians.

        I find the BDS position that Jews are unworthy of a country racist. I find the BDS position that Jews can never enjoy full equality racist. I think rejecting that is rejecting racism not siding with it. The core of your problem is that the “universal rights” to which you claim to believe conflict with the racism of anti-colonialism. You can believe in universality or you can support in anti-colonialism but not both.

      • Donald on May 15, 2015, 5:13 pm

        If she opposes a 2SS then she should support 1 man, 1 vote for Palestinians in a 1SS. And yes, Jews or members of any religion or ethnicity should have equal rights in a state of Palestine, but settlers who were part of Israel’s illegal settlement project took advantage of the situation–equal rights in this context might mean they have to make restitution or give back land which didn’t really belong to them and if they put out their own money to acquire property under Israeli law, then the Israeli government should compensate them.

        I had never heard of Shaked until recently, but if she were a genuine non-racist I somehow doubt she would have made the “genocide” mistake. I gather there are a few interesting people on the Israeli right who seem to favor annexing “Judea and Samaria” and giving the Palestinians citizenship and equal rights. Is she one? Highly doubtful. Not that this position is without problems, as it leaves out the Gazans and Palestinian refugees elsewhere.

      • JWalters on May 15, 2015, 5:48 pm

        “I find the BDS position that Jews are unworthy of a country racist.” – JeffB

        Let’s stipulate that Jews are as “worthy” in every respect as any other ethnic group, that they are no worse than the rest of humanity. It does not follow that Jews can force massive injustice on innocent people in order to have a Jewish country. There is simply no logic there. Specifically in this instance, Jews’ “worthiness” level is not a valid justification for the massive crimes committed in establishing Israel.

        Further, most people objecting to Israel do not claim Jews are “unworthy” in any way. So your premise is also false.

        Your rationality is probably being derailed by your emotions, the usual cause of derailed rationality. Perhaps you grew up subjected to the standard Zionist campaign of deception and emotional manipulation.

      • JeffB on May 15, 2015, 11:55 pm

        @JWalters

        “I find the BDS position that Jews are unworthy of a country racist.” – JeffB

        Let’s stipulate that Jews are as “worthy” in every respect as any other ethnic group, that they are no worse than the rest of humanity. It does not follow that Jews can force massive injustice on innocent people in order to have a Jewish country.

        You are doing precisely what I was complaining about. Applying a standard uniquely to Jews. The injustice already happened, though I’m not willing to grant the “innocent” part. If we are talking about the past here then why should the Franks have been able to force a massive injustice on the Visigoths to have a French country? No one talks like that. Destroying the Jews for failing to meet a standard that virtually every other country fails to meet is not applying universal morality it is ignoring universality.

        The original inhabitants of this planet are anaerobic bacteria. Everyone else got here through 10,000 waves of murderous settlement. Either we give the anaerobic bacteria their planet back or we accept that we don’t reverse of murderous settlements. Humans are a migratory species. The migrate in mass as conditions dictate and those mass migrations change the cultures of pieces of land. Happens all over the planet, every country is a result of it. Moreover, well over 1/2 the countries that that exists today will likely be destroyed over the next 1000 years as a result of mass migrations. I see no reason to treat the Jewish mass migration any different than the rest.

        There is simply no logic there. Specifically in this instance, Jews’ “worthiness” level is not a valid justification for the massive crimes committed in establishing Israel.

        OK. And what was the justification that the Palestinians used when they took territory from the Byzantine nation that existed there previously. What about those “crimes”?

        Further, most people objecting to Israel do not claim Jews are “unworthy” in any way. So your premise is also false.

        Of course they do. They refuse to treat Jews just like any other people. You did it in this very post repeatedly.

        Your rationality is probably being derailed by your emotions, the usual cause of derailed rationality. Perhaps you grew up subjected to the standard Zionist campaign of deception and emotional manipulation.

        Yeah that’s probably it. You got me. It is definitely my lack of rationality that causes me not to buy into your contradictions and historical lies.

      • RoHa on May 16, 2015, 12:00 am

        “Israeli is the Jewish state in the same way France is a French state”

        In what way is France a French state? “French” means “originating in, related to*, or attributed to France”. Thus we say “French wine, French intellectual, French foreign policy, French letter”. (Occasionally we even say “Frenchman”, as an abbreviation for “bleedin’ Froggy bastard”.)

        But it would be absurd to say that France originates in, is related to, or attributed to itself. So how is France French?

        “I find the BDS position that Jews are unworthy of a country racist.”

        But, as far as I can tell, the BDS position does not include “Australian Jews are not worthy of Australia” or anything similar for Jews of any other country.

        “I find the BDS position that Jews can never enjoy full equality racist.”

        But, as far as I can tell, the BDS position does not include “Australian Jews can never enjoy full equality with other Australians” or anything similar for Jews of any other country. Where Israel is concerned, full equality for Jews is the aim.

        (*By any relationship other than strict identity. The whole point of the adjective is to inform us of other relationships. Identity we take for granted.)

      • eljay on May 16, 2015, 12:22 am

        || JeffB: … Israeli is the Jewish state in the same way France is a French state … ||

        Nope. Israel as an Israeli state is the same as France as a French state.

        Israel as a “Jewish State” is a religion-supremacist construct.

      • JWalters on May 17, 2015, 5:27 pm

        JeffB,

        Your reasoning is:
        1. Israel’s injustices were in the past, like the Franks and Visigoths.
        2. Other countries have injustices in their pasts, and people today don’t try to correct those.
        3. So people should stop complaining about Israel’s injustices as they have stopped complaining about those others.

        Claiming the injustices are in the past in the same way as injustices toward the Visigoths by the Franks is incorrect in two relevant ways. First, there is a pattern of major Israeli crimes ongoing today. Today’s crimes are not in the past in any meaningful sense. Today’s pattern of crimes is an extension and part of the pattern begun with Israel’s “founding” crimes. You claim the “founding” crimes should be consigned to an irrelevant past, like the case of the Franks and Visigoths. This brings us to the second error.

        Today there are Jews trying to recover art taken by the Nazis. Thus, Jews have claimed that possessions taken within this time window should be legally recoverable. Their loss to the Nazis occurred BEFORE the residents of Palestine had their land taken by the Zionists. So their time window includes the Palestinians’ loss of land. Therefore the Palestinians should have the same right of recovery as the Jews working to recover their lost art. These Jews are not saying, “My art was stolen in the past, so I’ll just drop the case.” And neither should the Palestinians have to. Jewish legal actions have established that the statute of limitations does not yet apply to crimes within that time window.

        On a related point, if the injustices to the Visigoths by the Franks should be dropped due to time passage, then the injustices to the Jews by the Romans should certainly also be dropped, since it was much farther in the past. This eliminates all claims by Jews on the land lost to the Romans. That is, all legal claims to “Biblical” Israel are null and void.

        More generally, the argument that “other people have gotten away with the same crime in the past” is not a legitimate defense in a court of law.

        Finally, you addressed none of the points in my previous post regarding your claim about the “worthiness” factor.

    • Mooser on May 15, 2015, 3:07 pm

      “But politicians are allowed to retract.”

      Why are you making excuses, “JeffyB”?
      I thought you had a ‘justification’ for everything. Don’t back down.

    • amigo on May 15, 2015, 3:43 pm

      “Ayelet Shaked is a sophomore” jeff N

      You mean she is going to get worse .Or better, in your view , as in a more finely tuned racist and bigot.

      I notice she did not mention a “strong democracy” .

      “But politicians are allowed to retract” .

      Sure they are Jeffy boy.Unless they are Iranian or Palestinian or any politician who rightfully calls Israel to task for it,s crimes against the People of Palestine/Lebanon/Syria et al.

      Why do you equate Israel with all Jews , Jeffy Boy. Surely you are not suggesting “All” Jews are responsible for the actions of the so called “Jewish ” state. You would never be caught doing that , would you. I mean , that would be anti semitic , would it not.

      • Shingo on May 16, 2015, 9:34 pm

        You mean she is going to get worse .Or better, in your view , as in a more finely tuned racist and bigot.

        You took the words right out of my mouth Amigo.

    • Rosebud on May 15, 2015, 3:55 pm

      JeffB: “People speak hastily. Isn’t that your whole point about Steven Salaita that his teaching shouldn’t be judged by his equally genocidal tweets, which he incidentally did not retract?”

      Salaita’s tweets may have lacked “civility” but I do not recall them as being “genocidal.” Please share one of tweets in which he was advocating genocide.

      • JeffB on May 15, 2015, 4:21 pm

        @Rosebud

        This one for example: https://twitter.com/stevesalaita/status/479805591401922561

      • andrew r on May 15, 2015, 5:17 pm

        That’s not a genocidal tweet because the West Bank settlers are, well, settlers. They are the ones involved in a potentially genocidal enterprise. Their govt. can subsidize their exit from the occupied territory as easily as their illegal squatting.

      • JeffB on May 15, 2015, 5:35 pm

        @Andrew r

        ‘Its not genocide because those are bad people who deserve it’ is being an apologist for genocide not an opponent of genocide. If you are in favor of genocide for people you don’t like, you are in favor of genocide as a policy tool. No one ever favors genocide for people they do like.

      • andrew r on May 15, 2015, 6:18 pm

        Let’s try a thought experiment – when the German civilian settlers were removed from Poland in the closing days and immediately after WWII, was that genocide? This question pertains only to nationals of the Third Reich who were from Germany or Austria before 1 Sept. 1939 or those from the Baltic states who were imported into Poland, and excludes Polish citizens of German descent.

      • andrew r on May 16, 2015, 1:16 am

        Me personally I’d like to dismiss national claims to land for groups since I think they are racist crap.

        In other words, goodbye Zionist movement and the Jewish state it produced. Why didn’t you just say you were against that racist settler movement? Would have saved a lot of people the trouble of arguing with you.

        Edit: Ugh.

      • oldgeezer on May 16, 2015, 1:19 am

        @JeffB
        “@Andrew r

        ‘Its not genocide because those are bad people who deserve it’
        – See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2015/05/times-rudoren-selma#comment-146579”

        Except he didn’t say that Jeff. He clearly said
        “Their govt. can subsidize their exit from the occupied territory – See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2015/05/times-rudoren-selma#comment-146579”

        I don’t think your intellectual dishonesty is a sign of anything other than a complete lack of intellect and character.

        For someone who has made a day of bigoted posts you can’t sink much lower. That said I know you will as you always do.

      • Mooser on May 16, 2015, 12:25 pm

        “I don’t think your intellectual dishonesty is a sign of anything other than a complete lack of intellect and character.”

        “JeffyB” is sociopathy’s most ardent proselytizer! Did you ever see anybody so proud of it?

        I will always love the part where JeffyB brags about being completely hypocritical towards his own religion, an “atheist” “preservationist”!
        Of course, you can easily see how ‘preservationist’ religion works: The less you believe, the more credit you can give yourself for going through the motions, and disparaging those who don’t. Now, that’s the spirit which will save Judaism!

      • JeffB on May 16, 2015, 9:50 pm

        @Shingo

        She also supports the ethnic cleansing of areas to make those areas larger and persevere a Jewish majority.

        The areas are already fixed and the number of Palestinians in them don’t threaten the Jewish majority.

        Rubbish. She supports the occupation, which means that those areas are also subject to Israeli laws exclusively aimed at non Jews. So like you, she supports apartheid.

        No she does not support the continuation of military rule. You are simply making stuff up.

      • Shingo on May 16, 2015, 11:49 pm

        The areas are already fixed and the number of Palestinians in them don’t threaten the Jewish majority.

        Fixed according to whom? Israel keeps expanding those areas.

        No she does not support the continuation of military rule. You are simply making stuff up.

        Yes she does support the continuation of military rule. You are simply lying and in denial.

      • JeffB on May 16, 2015, 9:52 pm

        @oldgeezer

        Except he didn’t say that Jeff. He clearly said
        “Their govt. can subsidize their exit from the occupied territory – See more at: link to mondoweiss.net”

        I don’t think your intellectual dishonesty is a sign of anything other than a complete lack of intellect and character.

        I addressed a line away from the part you quoted. Which means you saw it and pretended not to. If you want to see intellectual dishonesty look in the mirror.

      • andrew r on May 17, 2015, 12:09 am

        JeffB: I addressed a line away from the part you quoted.

        See, that in itself is the intellectual dishonesty oldgeezer was talking about as my entire post, which was only three sentences long, clarified the settlers can disappear from the West Bank (As Salaita wished for) without violence. Their govt. can simply recall them back inside the Green Line and reverse its standing violation of international law by settling civilians in occupied territory. In contrast to the unpublished article Shaked reproduced which unabashedly called for specific actions against civilians.

        The fact is, wishing people who settle in occupied territory would disappear from said territory is not genocidal. It is they who are taking part in what could be a genocidal process. The 4th Geneva Convention forbids civilians of the occupying power from being transferred to the occupied territory because it may be part of the process of destroying the native population.

    • andrew r on May 15, 2015, 5:23 pm

      http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-lawmakers-call-genocide-palestinians-gets-thousands-facebook-likes

      Note that Shaked’s controversial post was actually quoted verbatim from another writer: This is an article by the late Uri Elitzur, which was written 12 years ago, but remained unpublished. It is as relevant today as it was at the time. (From the Hebrew)

      So we are to believe in the “heat of war” she just happened to find an unpublished rant from 12 years ago and approvingly copied it to her FB. And she spoke hastily in saying it was relevant both now and at the time it was written. Give me a break.

      Edit: Supposed to be a response to Jeff B’s first post in this talkback.

      • MHughes976 on May 16, 2015, 4:18 pm

        I think that Donald is right that the likes of us will continually be described as anti-Semites but very rarely will that remark be accompanied by a statement of what ‘anti-Semite’ means to the person who uses the term. Under certain definitions we are anti-Semites, as under the morally trivial ‘opposed to certain activities of certain people who are Jewish’. The triviality of this can be seen by the fact that Israel must be solidly anti-Semitic in this sense, in that all Israelis must find themselves opposed to some activity by some of the Jewish people around them – in the same way England would have to be the capital of Anglophobia.

    • JeffB on May 15, 2015, 5:34 pm

      @Donald

      If she opposes a 2SS then she should support 1 man, 1 vote for Palestinians in a 1SS.

      Well she doesn’t want either a 1SS or a 2SS based on the 1967 maps But she supports 1 man, 1 vote for Golan, Area-C and Jerusalem. She wants 1 man, 1 vote in any area subject to Israeli law. In areas not subject to Israeli law, the inhabitants get to decide amongst themselves with essentially no interference by Israel how they choose to decide on what laws they want. That can be an Arab dictatorship, a Muslim dictatorship, a democracy… whatever they want.

      but settlers who were part of Israel’s illegal settlement project

      There you go trying to sneak racism in. The UN is anti-colonial. “Illegal” in this context is endorsing racism not opposing it.

      In most countries the government is considered eligible to determine what is “legal” or “illegal” not some uninvolved 3rd party. Part of granting Jews equality is granting them the same status as any other governing community. So for example when Utah was an independent self governing territory the fact that the USA didn’t agree with their laws didn’t make the Mormons illegal. They were following the law of the place they lived. When Utah wanted to became part of the United States then and only did the USA’s opinion matter. And that was resolved by the territory of Utah and the government of the USA.

      If there is a 2SS the settlers are inhabitants. If the Palestinians wants to pursue property claims which predate the existence of the Palestinian state then the Jews likewise can and all of Palestine is Jewish taken “illegally” by the Romans.

      I gather there are a few interesting people on the Israeli right who seem to favor annexing “Judea and Samaria” and giving the Palestinians citizenship and equal rights. Is she one?

      Yes she is one of those right-wingers. She’s on record again and again and again in detail. You get an incredibly distorted perception of Israel from MW.

      • Mooser on May 15, 2015, 7:15 pm

        “You get an incredibly distorted perception of Israel from MW.”

        Funny, isn’t it JeffyB, that some people who have never heard of Mondo get the same “distorted” picture of Israel on a Birthright tour? Now, why do you suppose that happens. Could it have anything to do with what’s going on in Israel? Those kids seem a little young for apostate trouble.

      • johneill on May 15, 2015, 7:24 pm

        “The UN is anti-colonial. “Illegal” in this context is endorsing racism not opposing it.”
        “So for example when Utah was an independent self governing territory the fact that the USA didn’t agree with their laws didn’t make the Mormons illegal.”
        Colonialism is founded by racism. The white settlers of Utah were on a genocidal project against the Native American tribes living there. Israel is a party to the UN, and a colonial-settler state. I don’t see how your comparison to Utah serves your purpose. (Also, unrelated, didn’t the Jews displace the ‘seven nations of canaan’ there before them?)

      • Donald on May 15, 2015, 9:58 pm

        The Jewish claim going back to the Romans is idiotic, JeffB. Nobody keeps track of where all their ancestors were living 2000 years ago.

        As fo Shaked wanting to give Palestinians in the WB the vote, permit me some skepticism–the same person who made the ” mistake” of urging genocide last summer seems an unlikely person to genuinely support a 1ss with equal rights for all.

      • JeffB on May 15, 2015, 11:42 pm

        @Donald

        The Jewish claim going back to the Romans is idiotic, JeffB. Nobody keeps track of where all their ancestors were living 2000 years ago.

        You are the one who wanted universal values. If they standards are going to be applied under universal values they need to be applied equally to all. If settlement is illegitimate it was illegitimate 5000 years ago. If there is some obligation to reverse settlement that passes through generations then those 1 generation removed and those 100 generations removed are equal.

        Secondly, the question is not ancestors the question is nation. The Palestinians are making a national claim not an individual claim. Individually the Palestinian claim is terrible since huge numbers of them migrated 1880s-1930s. The Nabka involved very few people all of whose great grandparents were from Palestine. We know where the Jewish nation lived 2200 years ago.

        Me personally I’d like to dismiss national claims to land for groups since I think they are racist crap. Instead I’d just go by individual rights: that everybody should live in freedom where they were born. That to me is universal values. It also goes completely against the whole Palestinian narrative that their race owns Palestine. If you don’t like national claims you disagree with the heart of their case. If you do like national claims then what is applied to the Jews of Israel can easily be applied to the Palestinians.

      • Donald on May 16, 2015, 1:22 am

        “If there is some obligation to reverse settlement that passes through generations then those 1 generation removed and those 100 generations removed are equal.”

        This is bull and you know it. But let me have some fun with it. Go back 20 generations and theoretically, ignoring inbreeding, I have one million ancestors. Go back 30 and it would be a billion, which is probably more people than were alive 30 generations back. So inevitably there is inbreeding as generations pass, but obviously if you go back 100 generations, if you have any ancestors from a given region you are probably related to virtually everyone in that region back then. I’ve joked before that probably half of my ancestors oppressed the other half. Go back further and people of European descent are about 4 percent Neandertal, or so I’ve read. So I should claim I have been driven out by those dastardly Cro-Magnon genocidal killers and take Europe back on behalf of my Neandertal ancestors.

        There are no serious moral claims regarding events that occurred that long ago because the world has changes so much in the intervening millennia. There are moral claims regarding events that happened within a few generations, especially if the original conditions still prevail. Without claiming that the Nakba is on the same level as the Holocaust, nobody thinks the Holocaust is remote history and that we should no longer care about justice or reparations to the extent that reparations can be paid. People are still put on trial and there are reparations paid and sometimes stolen property is returned.

        As for Israelis, I agree that Israelis born in Israel have the right to be there. It’s the only home they’ve got. What their parents or grandparents might have done isn’t their fault. But if they continue to oppress Palestinians, claim the right to move into the WB and not allow Palestinians to move into Israel, and continue to profit by this, then they aren’t innocent.

        Incidentally, I realize I’m spending far too much time responding to you. When you get into moral questions, everything is twisted to make Israel right in some fashion. I’m wasting time trying to convince you of anything.

      • oldgeezer on May 16, 2015, 1:26 am

        “There you go trying to sneak racism in. The UN is anti-colonial. “Illegal” in this context is endorsing racism not opposing it. – See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2015/05/times-rudoren-selma/comment-page-1#comment-768402”

        Yes and we all know black is white.

        Sure roll back international law jeff. That would include the laws that determined actions such as the holocaust were illegal. let’s go back a few hundred years when genocide was not only legal but frequent.

        The actions of Israel and it’s settlers are illegal. No amount of trying to argue what was done in the past will change that. It may make you feel good but no doubt all criminals, even them most vile, rationalize their actions.

        To the extent you do rationalize them you find common cause with the worst of humanity.

      • echinococcus on May 16, 2015, 2:10 am

        Donald,

        There is one more short passage in your post worth discussing further:

        As for Israelis, I agree that Israelis born in Israel have the right to be there. It’s the only home they’ve got.

        Even though “What their parents or grandparents might have done isn’t their fault”, as you so well say, the question is not one of fault: do we know the basis for citizenship to be adopted in a future Palestinian state –underline: independent and sovereign Palestinian state? Citizenship by place of birth is not a universal principle, however much admired it may be. It’s not the fault of thousands of little Germans who only have Turkish passports but couldn’t live a single day in Turkey if they were born to Turkish emigrants, but that’s how the basis for citizenship was established by the law there. Same in other places.
        There is no Palestinian state except for a collabo-traitor administration set up by the invader; whatever they say on any subject has as much legitimacy as any statement by Pétain or Quisling in 1942. We cannot foresee what happens in the equivalent of 1945, and it would be a good thing not to, given that the precedents, Ottoman law and the related customary local law, based on the millet system, do not exactly favor jus solis as a general principle.
        Then the statement that “It’s the only home they’ve got”. Let’s be serious, please. If you said that for Nepalese or Pakistanis you’d be mostly right. But “Israelis”? I’d be interested in knowing the percentage that cannot get another passport. Seriously. Add to it the percentage of those who cannot get easy admission as a resident to the US, and accessorily to any Western European country. I suspect that the number of Israelis who cannot legally emigrate will be infinitesimal.
        Besides, why so much pessimism? Who says they will all want to leave?

      • Donald on May 16, 2015, 11:23 am

        Echo– I don’t agree. If Israelis want to emigrate, fine, but they have been there for generations now, many came as refugees or in good faith, not necessarily intending to oppress anyone under laws which allowed them to move there. I think it’s a really bad idea to start assigning collective guilt to groups and then saying people lose the right to live in the land where they and a few generations of their ancestors were born. Also, if we claim to support a 1ss with equal rights for all and then start saying Israeli Jews have no right to live in Israel, then we are contradicting ourselves.

        The settlers in the WB are a different case–they are people who have consciously chosen to benefit fro apartheid going on right now. And of course it is wrong that any Jew anywhere has the right to live in Israel when Palestinians don’t.

      • Mooser on May 16, 2015, 12:28 pm

        All men may not be our brothers, but any number of them may be our brothers-in-law.
        I do believe that almost any two people on earth, will be no further from each other then fifth-cousins. Yes.

      • echinococcus on May 16, 2015, 5:45 pm

        Donald,

        Of course you don’t agree; I knew that already. The question is, are you empowered by the Palestinians (as their official “representatives” obviously are not) to decide in their name what citizenship rules to adopt? I personally do agree with those who think that one’s citizenship should be decided by one’s place of birth but then I don’t represent anyone.
        As for “if we claim to support a 1ss with equal rights for all”, I personally do support it as the only satisfactory way out but again, in the unlikely possibility of this happening “peacefully” (for the oppressors) as in the South Africa miracle the Palestinian people will probably agree to admitting all illegal immigrants. Again, not that we know for sure or are authorized to accept.

      • Shingo on May 16, 2015, 9:44 pm

        She wants 1 man, 1 vote in any area subject to Israeli law.

        She also supports the ethnic cleansing of areas to make those areas larger and persevere a Jewish majority.

        In areas not subject to Israeli law, the inhabitants get to decide amongst themselves with essentially no interference by Israel how they choose to decide on what laws they want

        Rubbish. She supports the occupation, which means that those areas are also subject to Israeli laws exclusively aimed at non Jews. So like you, she supports apartheid.

      • Shingo on May 16, 2015, 9:54 pm

        The UN is anti-colonial

        Colonialism is racism of the worst kind, so no one is sneaking racism into it. it’s already there.

        “Illegal” in this context is endorsing racism not opposing it.

        Typical Zionist anti intellectualism at play here. Anti racism is racist according to JeffB.

        In most countries the government is considered eligible to determine what is “legal” or “illegal”

        You are such a crack pot. Apartheid was legal in South Africa. Did that make it legitimate?

        And every member of the UN is subject to criticism of it’s human rights record by the UN. The UN just issued a scathing report about the US and has criticized Australia too for it’s treatment of asylum seekers.

      • RoHa on May 16, 2015, 10:28 pm

        ” any number of them may be our brothers-in-law. ”

        How did that happen? I haven’t got any sisters, and my wife hasn’t got any brothers.
        Whoever these guys are, I am not going to lend them my power tools.

      • Mooser on May 17, 2015, 1:16 am

        Okay, the brother-in-law thing I just threw in. But I believe no two people on earth are any further from each other than fifth cousins. On average.
        So maybe I didn’t share a bunk-bed with all of mankind growing up (I had two sisters) but all humans are related. No separate creation for anybody.

      • Donald on May 17, 2015, 2:34 pm

        Echo–

        It’s silly to argue about this, since Palestinians are the ones lacking basic human rights, but since you wish to talk about some hypothetical universe where Palestinians had all the power and decided who got to stay, I would be opposed to the forcible expulsion of Israeli Jews from Israel– two wrongs don’t make a right.

      • echinococcus on May 18, 2015, 5:16 am

        Donald,
        It’s not silly at all: a lot of the outcome will depend on public opinion across the world about who has the exclusive right to decide the future of Palestine, and on US public opinion.
        This is not like the US or Canada, and the South African miracle being a miracle won’t be repeated. We are looking at either successful genocide of the Palestinians, with international complicity, or more of the horrendous war. What you or I think is the nice thing to do in nice, peaceful conditions remains pointless, as the Palestinian people will have to insist on the exclusive right to decide. Are you too young to remember Algeria?

    • Atlantaiconoclast on May 18, 2015, 10:36 am

      JeffB, as a native Southern American, I don’t have the privilege of being able to explain away the sins of my forefathers, or the even bigger sins committed by Southern elites. As a Jew, you have privilege, and don’t have to hear your people demonized at every turn, even though many of your people, unlike today’s Southerners, are involved in crimes against another people. I can assure you that even politicians like George Wallace NEVER advocated for genocide against Black people. In fact, Wallace was angry with local authorities who used violence against the Selma protestors. The vast majority of Southern racists were not in the Klan, did not support the Klan, and certainly did not advocate for violence or genocide against Blacks. Yet, despite this, its my people who continue to be demonized, while you enjoy the privilege of not having to see the members of your people who actually are acting like demons and real racists/supremacists, demonized.

      • JeffB on May 18, 2015, 12:06 pm

        @Atlantaiconoclast

        as a native Southern American, I don’t have the privilege of being able to explain away the sins of my forefathers, or the even bigger sins committed by Southern elites

        I gotta tell you something. Everybody’s forefathers committed horrific sins. All of them. You should look at the history of Africa 500-1500. The forefathers of the slaves, while not as bad as the forefathers of the slavers, were pretty awful. Winning the DNA race to make it to 2015 means having been involved in competition and cooperation.

        As a Jew, you have privilege, and don’t have to hear your people demonized at every turn. The vast majority of Southern racists were not in the Klan, did not support the Klan, and certainly did not advocate for violence or genocide against Blacks. Yet, despite this, its my people who continue to be demonized, while you enjoy the privilege of not having to see the members of your people who actually are acting like demons and real racists/supremacists, demonized.

        Surely you are kidding? You really don’t want to compare what gets said about American Southerners to what gets said about Jews. The lies told about you all aren’t even close. You get no sympathy for having your society destroyed in the 19th century. We get blamed for being the cosmic force of evil secretly manipulating the world towards every tragedy.

        In all seriousness though… I’m not sure what you are driving at. Are you classifying yourself with the Southern Racists and saying you don’t deserve the associations with the Klan. Or are you saying you don’t deserve to be thought of as genocidal. Or what? I’m not sure if I get the complaint.

        . I can assure you that even politicians like George Wallace NEVER advocated for genocide against Black people

        Agreed. You can argue the clearing of Kentucky or Tennessee was genocidal the rest of the black experience in America was clearly not genocidal. Southerns didn’t hate blacks, they always were part of their society. The American south was dependent on black labor they wanted discrimination. One of the reasons the analogy is poor between Israel and America is that:

        a) The Israelis have repeatedly walked away from the economic of Palestinians labor.
        b) Blacks in America have always insisted on an American identity not an African one. Things like Liberia were failures because Blacks sought to live as Americans.

        Potentially if the West Bank were still Jordanian and Gaza still Egyptian the Israeli Arabs might have evolved into a minority subgroup providing vital labor and identifying fully as Israeli. There might have been a civil rights struggle and a liberal Israel which was secularizing would have gone more in that direction and today there wouldn’t be any legal or even much social discrimination. But instead we got a dozen wars, a huge influx of Palestinians from the newly conquered territory and the Israeli Arabs are in a much more politically complex situation than American Blacks were.

        If you want me to say I think the American South and Israel are bad analogies I’d agree completely. It is the rest of your MW compatriots who make this stupid analogy. The West Bank 1967-1987 could have been a lot like the Northeast of the 1960s. That’s probably the closest you can get where the two systems crossed over.

        Ultimately the Israelis really want the Palestinians to leave. Ultimately the southerns wanted the blacks to work for cheap. Totally different objectives.

  3. a blah chick on May 15, 2015, 2:47 pm

    “She made statements in the heat of war, they either were misunderstood or she thought better of them, and then retracted them.”

    What about when she alleged that Arabs in Jaffa torched a Jewish cemetery? Was that also in the heat of the moment? Or is she simply incapable of getting her facts straight before pronouncing sentence? Great instincts for a “justice” minister.

    She’s a fascist and Israel deserves her.

  4. Nevada Ned on May 15, 2015, 4:15 pm

    Hat’s off to James North.

    While Rudoren can’t entirely deny that Ayalet Shaked is a racist, she (Rudoren) can and does try to minimize it.

    One important difference between the plight of the Palestinians now and the plight of African-Americans in the Jim Crow south:

    The Palestinians are much more segregated than African-Americans were. Southern whites had more contact with African-Americans than Israeli Jews and Palestinians do now. Some jobs (bad jobs) were reserved for Afro-Americans in the south. For example, many white families had black domestic servants. This didn’t mean racial equality, but there was contact.
    In contrast, Israeli Jews and Palestinians today have very little contact.

    A full discussion would include the role of religion. Southerners – black or white – were nearly all Christians, while Jews and Palestinians adhere to different religions.

    The language barrier between Hebrew-speakers and Arabic-speapers is a big problem for anyone trying to organize across racial lines.

    Iin the Jim Crow south, white southerners did not actually hate African-Americans.
    White southerners respected and even liked any blacks who were willing to accept a position of inferiority. White southerners really did hate anything that smacked of racial equality.

    Finally, Ayelet Shaked and people like her clamor to expel the Palestinians. Very few southern whites called for that, because the Southern economy needed black labor.

  5. DaBakr on May 15, 2015, 4:25 pm

    I love when the editors/contributors of MW use constant analogies to -among others-the US civil rights movement but consistently accuse Zionists of ‘whataboutism’ whenever they make their own anologies to the hypocrisy in the i/p conflict. Always legitimate when its against Zion and never legit when its defending Israel. Got it.

    • JeffB on May 15, 2015, 4:56 pm

      @DaBakr

      The real problem is how bad their analogies are. The whole BDS movement is based on a few similarities that most fall apart under inspection between South Africa and Israel. But when one tries to look at the case of South Africa and notice how truly dissimilar the two cases are then suddenly out come the curse words and insults and analogies don’t matter. I’ve tried again and again to walk through the actual history of the anti-Apartheid movement and show how the dissimilarities between the South African and Israeli case were in areas absolutely crucial to the “success” of the anti-Apartheid struggle.

      The civil rights movement is even a worse analogy. American blacks argued forcefully to be allowed to become fully American and join American culture. If the Palestinians would do what the blacks did there would’t be an I/P conflict. The analogy would be if American blacks insisted because their ancestors had gotten to North American before most of the immigrants they should be entitled to special black laws and have full equality under all the other law and the right to import all of Africa into America and the right to chop off huge chunks of America to create a black only country.

      • Donald on May 15, 2015, 5:28 pm

        “I’ve tried again and again to walk through the actual history of the anti-Apartheid movement and show how the dissimilarities between the South African and Israeli case were in areas absolutely crucial to the “success” of the anti-Apartheid struggle. -”

        The biggest difference is that the analogy between SA and the Jim Crow South was seen as a close one and it was easy for American liberals to criticize and even mock white southerners and Boers as stupid racists, but there has been a type of political correctness which stops many liberals in their tracks when it comes to pointing out racism in Israel and its American supporters. That’s a misguided liberal reaction to anti-semitism. I’ve seen people gladly bash the Christian Zionists, because they are in their comfort zone, ridiculing conservative white gentile Americans (often white southerners) who seem really reluctant to take the next step and criticize Israel’s Jewish supporters. I’ve even seen idiots feel sorry for Israel because they have the Christian Zionists in their corner, as though poor little Israel must feel deeply embarrassed at having such uncouth supporters.

        The best analogy is between Israel and other settler colonial states, as a recent post pointed out. The Palestinians are the Native Americans. The main difference is that disease wiped out the vast majority of Native Americans, so there aren’t a few hundred million of them forced to live in 20 percent or less of the US.

        But all analogies fail on one point or another. The similarity is in the way human rights are violated and in the way those violations are rationalized.

      • JWalters on May 15, 2015, 6:04 pm

        “But all analogies fail on one point or another. The similarity is in the way human rights are violated and in the way those violations are rationalized.” – Donald

        Exactly right, and very important. The purpose of an analogy is merely to highlight a key similarity. It is not a logical or factual proof. Arguing about irrelevant dissimilarities is a distraction. Attention should proceed from the analogy to the specific facts of the case.

      • Mooser on May 15, 2015, 7:08 pm

        “Arguing about irrelevant dissimilarities is a distraction. Attention should proceed from the analogy to the specific facts of the case.”

        There is a definite value to “JeffyB” and Hophmi and especially “Jon s”. They show us exactly what level of argument has been, up til now, considered sufficient to justify Zionists to themselves and others. And the level of control they wish to obtain over Jews is easily seen, let alone the harm they intend toward Palestinians.

      • Shingo on May 16, 2015, 10:29 pm

        The real problem is how bad their analogies are.

        No the real problem is the one you are dealing with because your justifications, distortions and denials are so pitiful

        The whole BDS movement is based on a few similarities that most fall apart under inspection between South Africa and Israel.

        That’s odd, because Ben Gurion, Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, as well as a slew of Israeli ministers, not to mentions former South African prime ministers don’t seem to think so. Maybe you should try your “inspection” by them and point out the errors in their ways.

        But when one tries to look at the case of South Africa and notice how truly dissimilar the two cases are then suddenly out come the curse words and insults and analogies don’t matter.

        That’s an interesting argument. All those who have been responsible for acts of genocide should take a leaf out of your book and argue that what they did was not in fact genocide because they never employed gas chambers.

        I’ve tried again and again to walk through the actual history of the anti-Apartheid movement and show how the dissimilarities between the South African and Israeli case were in areas absolutely crucial to the “success” of the anti-Apartheid struggle.

        What does the anti-Apartheid movement have to do with apartheid in Israel? Are you suggesting that because the anti-Apartheid movement is not identical to the BDS movement that this somehow disproves Israel has implemented an apartheid regime?

        No wonder you have been forced to try and try again with such a failed and incoherent line of argument.

        The civil rights movement is even a worse analogy. American blacks argued forcefully to be allowed to become fully American and join American culture. If the Palestinians would do what the blacks did there would’t be an I/P conflict.

        Really? You might try explaining that to Deputy President of the Supreme Court, Justice Elon , who ruled in an elections commission case that Arab citizens merely have an equal right to recognize that Israel is the state of the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people:

        The principle that the State of Israel is the state of the Jewish people is Israel’s foundation and mission [yessoda vi-yeuda], and the principle of the equality of rights and obligations of all citizens of the State of Israel is of the State’s essence and character [mahuta ve-ofya]. The latter principle comes only to add to the former, not to modify it;there is nothing in the principle of the equality of civil rights and obligations to modify the principle that the State of Israel is the state of the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people.
        See Ben-Shalom v. Central Election Committee 1988, 272

        So please JeffB, do explain how the Palestinians are to become part of the Jewish people, seeing as nothing less would enable the Palestinians to become fully Jewish and join Jewish culture.

    • Donald on May 15, 2015, 5:18 pm

      Actually, go right ahead and make analogies. Some might be legit and some not. There isn’t any analogy that can excuse Israel’s conduct and the US is implicated in Israel’s crimes, but you might be able to find some other situation which is as bad and which also implicates the US.
      Or you can point to other situations which are worse, such as that in Syria. Again, this doesn’t get Israel off the hook.

      People tried to get the Jim Crow South or apartheid SA off the hook by pointing to other places which were allegedly worse. It didn’t work–that type of argument is stupid.

      • JWalters on May 15, 2015, 6:08 pm

        People also tried to get slavery off the hook by quoting the Old Testament / Torah.

      • JeffB on May 16, 2015, 11:06 am

        @Donald

        A non-sequitur. You can be well-educated and a racist

        Let me quote the key point from your line line: American liberals to criticize and even mock white southerners and Boers as stupid racists Your point was that the same characterization was not being used against Jews. My point was the stupid would be a problem against someone more educated. Same argument as I would have made about your “uncouth” characterization if they were going after business class Republicans who are socio-economically well ahead of liberals.

        They can’t use the uncouth, stupid… line of attack because they are outgunned educationally. (On stupid. On uncouth it is a tossup. The average non-Jewish American Liberal probably has a better pedigree than the Average American Jew but there is a also a socio-economic aspect to uncouth).

      • Donald on May 16, 2015, 11:47 am

        The point about the stupid uncouth words is that liberals are sometimes guilty of stereotyping in how they judge who is or is not a racist. But in reality racists can be highly educated and intelligent people. They may even be secular liberals on most subjects. It is easy for liberals to mock the rednecks and the fundamentalists, even educated ones, but bigoted Israel supporters are often secular liberals, members of one’s own tribe, and on top of that if you criticize them they will call you an anti-Semite. Consequently we have these discussions where the Israel supporters go on the offensive, calling the critics of Israel “anti-Semites”‘ when they are the ones who defend a country which practices apartheid and commits war crimes.

      • Mooser on May 16, 2015, 1:21 pm

        ” But in reality racists can be highly educated and intelligent people.”

        It was only a few years ago (and the era isn’t over yet) that racism was considered the forefront of scientific anthropological knowledge and a proper handling of the “races” key to mankind’s future. And that view was so prevalent among ‘educated’ people we still can’t get past it.

      • Shingo on May 16, 2015, 10:14 pm

        People tried to get the Jim Crow South or apartheid SA off the hook by pointing to other places which were allegedly worse. It didn’t work–that type of argument is stupid.

        So did apartheid South Africa. As Hostage pointed out a while ago,

        The very first case of apartheid that was referred to the International Court of Justice involved an illegal regime imposed upon all of the citizens of the State of Namibia by the neighboring government of South Africa in order to deny them self-determination and independence. They used the same lame-assed excuse about the occupation and the claimed the members of SWAPO were their enemies.

        See: http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/566%281985%29
        *Legal Consequences for States of the Continued Presence of South Africa in Namibia (South West Africa) notwithstanding Security Council Resolution 276 (1970)
        http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/index.php?p1=3&p2=4&code=nam&case=53&k=a7&p3=0

    • justicewillprevail on May 15, 2015, 5:49 pm

      You really haven’t got it at all, have you. No need to demonstrate it with such an asinine comment.

    • eljay on May 15, 2015, 6:42 pm

      || DaBakr: I love when the editors/contributors of MW use constant analogies to -among others-the US civil rights movement but consistently accuse Zionists of ‘whataboutism’ whenever they make their own anologies to the hypocrisy in the i/p conflict. Always legitimate when its against Zion and never legit when its defending Israel. Got it. ||

      DaBakr, you really are a bad joke. The point of comparing two (similar) types of injustice and immorality is not to use one as justification for the other. It is to highlight the fact that both are unjust and immoral and must be condemned and eliminated.

      • Bornajoo on May 15, 2015, 7:22 pm

        “The point of comparing two (similar) types of injustice and immorality is not to use one as justification for the other. It is to highlight the fact that both are unjust and immoral and must be condemned and eliminated.”

        Very well stated Ejay!

      • DaBakr on May 15, 2015, 10:32 pm

        @ej

        got it. and when a Zionist makes a similar analogy-its ‘whataboutism’. you get to decide whats a ‘just’ analogy. i guess your right-that is a bad joke.

      • eljay on May 15, 2015, 10:47 pm

        || DaBakr: got it. and when a Zionist makes a similar analogy-its ‘whataboutism’. you get to decide whats a ‘just’ analogy. i guess your right-that is a bad joke. ||

        Jeezus, man, do you make an effort to be this dense or does it come naturally?

        Comparing Jewish supremacism to white supremacism to show that both are bad and that neither form of injustice and immorality should exist is not whataboutism.

        Comparing the injustices and immorality of “Jewish State” to those of Saudi Arabia, Mali and African “hell-holes” in order to defend and justify the former very much is whataboutism. And it’s what Zio-supremacists like you do regularly and consistently.

        Or did I miss your recent condemnation of Jewish supremacism in/and a supremacist “Jewish State”?

        I didn’t think so.

      • DaBakr on May 17, 2015, 8:39 pm

        there is no such state of :”jewish supremacism” except in your own wild and bigoted interpretation of Israel. And comparing Shaket to the US conditions in Selma circa 60s is absurd but then anything is possible in the mid-level mindset of the anti-Zionist true believers. After all-you guys think G.Levy is like the modern Ezikiel when he’s more like Ezra Pound

      • echinococcus on May 17, 2015, 11:05 pm

        Very few Zionists in relatively good working order are left to man the propaganda keyboards. Time was when you’d get someone still able to pretend to be a civilized human being, when the new generation strains even at pretending to be human beings.
        Now calculate that this is Mondo Weiss, i.e. where they are supposed to send the best: after all, this is where the part of the Jewish youth still perplexed after 70 years of official abomination is supposed to come read and get some info.

        And look what we get, even on such an upscale site: a guy who can look you in the eye and say, as if we were some Modern Hebrew Zionist kindergarten,

        there is no such state of :”jewish supremacism” except in your own wild and bigoted interpretation of Israel

        I mean, is this Sleeping Beauty or the magician who could unmake your pissing in the bed?

        And comparing Shaket

        –no, Shaked, like Shaked not Stirred–

        to the US conditions in Selma circa 60s is absurd

        Oooh, now let’s hear why this one.
        No why:

        but then anything is possible in the mid-level mindset of the anti-Zionist true believers.

        I imagine that the “absurd” judgment refers to the fact that in the US, Jim Crow was a piece of cake compared to Zionism with their Fundamental Law.

      • eljay on May 18, 2015, 9:14 am

        || DaBakr: there is no such state of :”jewish supremacism” … ||

        There shouldn’t be, but hateful and immoral Zio-supremacists like you keep doing everything in your power to uphold it, justify it and defend it.

        || And comparing Shaket to the US conditions in Selma circa 60s is absurd … ||

        There is nothing absurd about comparing two types of injustices and condemning both. There is something thoroughly offensive about comparing two types of injustice and using one of them to justify the other. That’s what hateful and immoral Zio-supremacists like you do on a regular basis.

      • Mooser on May 18, 2015, 2:06 pm

        “58% of Jews are college graduates, including 28% who say they have earned a post-graduate degree. By comparison, 29% of U.S. adults say they graduated from college, including 10% who have a post-graduate degree.”

        Plus, Jews never lie, say anything self-interested, and always tell the truth about non-Jews. And American society is, by law, divided into “Jews” and “non-Jews”, oh, and don’t forget, “Jewish apostates”.
        Hey, it’s a natural thing for a religion to get old, have low Torahrahrahsterone levels and get apostate trouble. It happens.
        JeffyB, you simply must get around to dealing with those “apostates” one day. They haven’t got the proper “preservationist” spirit, and are no use in keeping up the ‘justifications’. You know, so the “Christian World” pays off.

    • JeffB on May 15, 2015, 11:19 pm

      @Donald

      The biggest difference is that the analogy between SA and the Jim Crow South was seen as a close one and it was easy for American liberals to criticize and even mock white southerners and Boers as stupid racists, but there has been a type of political correctness which stops many liberals in their tracks when it comes to pointing out racism in Israel and its American supporters. That’s a misguided liberal reaction to anti-semitism. I’ve seen people gladly bash the Christian Zionists, because they are in their comfort zone, ridiculing conservative white gentile Americans (often white southerners) who seem really reluctant to take the next step and criticize Israel’s Jewish supporters. I’ve even seen idiots feel sorry for Israel because they have the Christian Zionists in their corner, as though poor little Israel must feel deeply embarrassed at having such uncouth supporters.

      Let me start with a quick comment. Of all the political demographics in America social liberal who are economic liberal; the ones who are most likely to identity as “liberal” are by far the most educated. Liberals are especially well educated relative to income. But their demographics in terms of education pales in comparison: 58% of Jews are college graduates, including 28% who say they have earned a post-graduate degree. By comparison, 29% of U.S. adults say they graduated from college, including 10% who have a post-graduate degree. And given that Jews skew older and education levels have been increasing I suspect the numbers are even more striking age adjusted. Liberals incidentally skew younger. It is going to be hard to play the stupid ignorant racist card against Jews, the average liberal is well outgunned by the average Jew especially their own age.

      I also think Jews care about Israel too much. You see the same kind of caution among moderate and conservative Democrats on the gun issue. The gun nuts oppose the position of 90+% of Americans, but they gun nuts are willing to shift from Democrats to Republicans over the gun issue (example Colorado 2014) while the anti-gun Republican women aren’t generally willing to vote Democratic on the gun issue at current levels of gun violence and thus compensate.

      Jews will walk away from the Liberal coalition over Israel and I think most Liberals (though not the anti-Zionists) know that.

      • Donald on May 16, 2015, 1:02 am

        “It is going to be hard to play the stupid ignorant racist card against Jews”

        A non-sequitur. You can be well-educated and a racist. One of my best friends as a child was deeply racist–his father was a doctor and a former naval officer. Again, this feeds into my point–quite a few people have this stereotype about who can be a racist and who can’t, and this stereotype includes the notion that racists are all uneducated rednecks, when the reality is that intelligent people often just use their intelligence to rationalize their bigotry or their irrational beliefs on some issues. I don’t usually play the Nazi card as I think people on all sides bring them up far too often, but they do illustrate the fact that an educated society can be capable of extreme racism.

        I think you know this at some level. It might be hard to “play the racist card” simply because people have this unconscious (and btw, bigoted) notion of what a racist is supposed to be like. The reality is often quite different.

    • Shingo on May 16, 2015, 10:17 pm

      I love when the editors/contributors of MW use constant analogies to -among others-the US civil rights movement but consistently accuse Zionists of ‘whataboutism’ whenever they make their own anologies to the hypocrisy in the i/p conflict. Always legitimate when its against Zion and never legit when its defending Israel. Got it.

      I love it when Israeli apologists try to deny realities that even Israeli prime ministers have admitted in moments of candor, from Ben Gurion to Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak to former South African prime ministers who glowingly referred to Israel as an apartheid state as early as 1961.

  6. Bornajoo on May 15, 2015, 6:07 pm

    This is really well done James North. Many thanks

  7. CitizenC on May 15, 2015, 6:10 pm

    North’s article needs to be transposed to a lower register, like Rudoren in Nazi Germany. The Palestinians, including the 1948 Palestinians, are not in the position of the civil rights movement in the South, appealing to a lawful if sluggish federal government over the heads of state racists, but in the position of Jews in Nazi Germany. See for instance my article on Haneen Al Zoubi’s recent tour of the northeastern US.

    Invader of the Jewish State
    http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/invader-of-the-jewish-state/

    The title is how Al Zoubi was addressed in the Knesset by an Israeli minister.

  8. just on May 15, 2015, 6:47 pm

    Joe Catron’s new and relevant piece:

    “Netanyahu’s ‘Genocidal’ Cabinet Promises More Conflict, Isolation For Israel

    Members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s new cabinet have previously called Palestinians “beasts” and their children “little snakes,” warned of the “cancer-like attributes” of Palestinian society, and celebrated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, among other atrocities. …

    …The cabinet to which he belongs, blogger and investigative journalist Richard Silverstein told MintPress, is “the most extremist in Israeli history.”

    “The new government will strengthen the BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] movement and set up further confrontation between pro-Israel forces and pro-Palestinian activists around the world,“ he said. “Expect criminalization of BDS inside Israel and efforts by the Israel lobby to do so outside Israel. Also, expect renewed efforts by the PA to bring statehood to the U.N. ”

    “Someone who kills you while grinning”

    Middle East researcher and publisher Helena Cobban sees the new government as a sign of transparency.

    “The cabinet choices signify mainly that Netanyahu feels he has zero need anymore — if he ever did — to try to ‘present a civilized face’ for the Zionist project,” she said.

    With Israel’s policies of displacement, separation, and settlement, along with periodic military offensives, holding steady across successive governments, this one may herald few actual changes.

    “No Israeli government has ever been good to Palestinians,” Refaat Alareer, of the Islamic University of Gaza, said. “The difference is between someone who kills you while grinning and someone who kills you while pretending to be sad. All Israeli leaders have blood on their hands. All Israeli leaders have built settlements and worked to harass, humiliate and push Palestinians out of their land. For Palestine it means more settlements, more laws, more land grab, a tighter noose on Gaza, and more settlers’ attacks on Palestinians.”

    And its vocal extremism may simply indicate the prevailing trends in Israeli politics, Alareer added.

    He continued:

    “I am personally not surprised that some of the cabinet members have bluntly called for genocide against Palestinians, because I know quite well that hating Palestinians and working hard to humiliate and kill them are two important things for Israeli politicians to win more votes and support. I have always said that Israeli elections are basically a contest in which Israel choose the politicians with more Palestinians blood on their hands.”

    The most significant changes ahead may lie in clashes the new government is likely to inspire in both diplomatic relations and popular opinion.

    “Broadly speaking, this Israeli cabinet is going to have trouble keeping support for Israel strong in many places around the world, including Europe and the formerly colonized countries,” Cobban said. “So that creates many opportunities for Palestinians to build support.”

    “The key question is how the Obama administration will act, and whether it will continue ‘covering Israel’s back’ with Security Council vetoes,” Silverstein said. “The new cabinet will give further credibility to BDS and project it as one of the few movements that actually presents a formidable alternative to occupation and Israel’s other policies depriving Palestinians of land and justice.””

    Read the rest @ http://www.mintpressnews.com/netanyahus-genocidal-cabinet-promises-more-conflict-isolation-for-israel/205647/

  9. just on May 16, 2015, 11:08 am

    OT, but racism anyway. I read about this from Imraan Siddiqi last night, and waited to see if it was true.

    https://twitter.com/imraansiddiqi/status/599401419355992064

    Apparently, it is. I found this today via Max B. @ https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/599575681668935680

    “A Tennessee man, who made a failed bid for Congress last year as an independent with extreme right wing beliefs, has admitted in federal court to planning an attack on a Muslim community in New York.

    Robert Doggart, 63, was recorded on a wiretapped phone talking about his plan to travel along with members of a private militia to an area near Hancock, New York, known as Islamberg, to burn down a mosque, school and cafeteria, while gunning down anyone from the community who tried to stop them.

    “Our small group will soon be faced with the fight of our lives. We will offer those lives as collateral to prove our commitment to our God,” Doggart said in a Facebook post, according to court documents. “We shall be Warriors who will inflict horrible numbers of casualties upon the enemies of our Nation and World Peace.”

    Doggart was arrested April 10 by the FBI on charges that he solicited others to violate civil rights, attempted to damage religious property because of the religious character of the property and made threats through interstate communication.

    Two weeks later, Doggart pleaded guilty to interstate communication of threats. A judge has not yet signed off on the plea agreement. He was released on bond to home confinement after the agreement was made and faces between 0 and 5 years in federal prison, along with a possible fine of up to $250,000.”

    http://heavy.com/news/2015/05/robert-doggart-tennessee-congressional-candidate-islamberg-new-york-anti-muslim-islam-attack-arrest-court-documents-photos-charges-plea-patriot/

    So, we only hear about this now… this Islamophobe gets a plea deal and maybe between 0-5 years and a ‘possible’ fine. Wall to wall coverage of TX and the inspirational Islamophobe Geller, and literally nothing about this that happened on April 10th (!) til yesterday.

    Yeah, I get it.

  10. RobertHenryEller on May 16, 2015, 12:21 pm

    “It was a mistake,” Ms. Shaked said in the interview, a day before her swearing-in. “I’m doing a lot of mistakes, like every human being.”

    I wonder what Shaked thinks is her mistake? Believing what she believes, or too carelessly publicizing what she believes?

    I guess the new Israeli “Justice” Minister will soon be answering my question.

  11. just on May 16, 2015, 12:39 pm

    “Israel named its new cabinet (Hebrew) yesterday and the names are a Who’s Who of the most rabid, racist, brutal and cruel politicians in the nation. The only one who rivals them and is missing from the show is Avigdor Lieberman, who’s bowed out for political reasons of his own. In the past, nations of the world have isolated individual leaders of nations and refused to visit or meet with them because their ideas are so noxious that they fall outside the consensus of international discourse. Kurt Waldheim and Jorg Haider are examples of this. The time has come to put the Israeli government in herem. You can pick your poison among them as to which deserves special ostracism.

    Several other publications have covered this story. But you won’t find a more thorough list nor accounting of their Greatest Hits of Hate than here:…

    …This is not just a government of hate, but a government of war. My prediction is that if it lives out its full term there will be two wars: one against Lebanon and another against Gaza. Further prediction: at least 5,000 civilians will be murdered in total. The world might want to contemplate how many more Israeli wars it can tolerate before it says, Dayenu (“enough”).

    The governments of the world might want to begin considering how to justify maintaining contact with individuals holding views that range from genocide to mere homicidal impulses.

    This is a government that is not only undemocratic, it abhors democracy–for non-Jews.”…

    Read the rest of Silverstein’s humdinger @ http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2015/05/15/israeli-cabinet-most-racist-extremist-in-history/

  12. JeffB on May 16, 2015, 3:15 pm

    @Donald

    I’m going to outdent this one since it is an often repeated point of mine and you are actually addressing it. I’m also going to respond out of order. You make a point at the beginning which is factually false, and the discussion of it is complicated but I don’t know that we need to go down that side track.

    There are no serious moral claims regarding events that occurred that long ago because the world has changes so much in the intervening millennia… There are moral claims regarding events that happened within a few generations, especially if the original conditions still prevail

    Well first off before you were proposing universal morality. A morality that applies regardless of state to situations. What you are now proposing is not a universal morality but rather a situational morality based on a policy of non-reversibility. You don’t spell it your principle but seem to be meaning something like: if a situation cannot be reversed it should be allowed to stand but that evils should be reversed as long as they are possible to reverse.

    The problem with introducing that in addition to it undermining your claim to universality is that under that criteria Israel doesn’t qualify. Before the Zionists got to Palestine it was a malaria ridden dirt poor Turkish colony with a migrant serf farming population from the Levant. Neither the Jewish people who evolved into Israeli nor the Levant people who evolved into Palestinians existed as nations in the proper sense prior to Zionism. There were no Palestinians then. There were no Israelis then. Hebrew was not a social language. The Christian Palestinian minority was thriving and about to become even more socially empowered because of the Germans and Russians… How do you return to that?

    Or get even more specific, take something basic like farming and the population. The Eastern European Zionists in the Kibbutzes in the 1920s engage in a massive operation of clearing swampland and redirecting the flow of water. They raising the carrying capacity of the land by something like 400-500 undoing 1000 years of neglect and mismanagement in a decade. The population explodes in that generation as Palestine moves from having a starvation problem to being a large food exporter. What does putting things back mean, try and regrow the swamps? That means dropping the carrying capacity of the land by something 90%, what do you do with the population that lives their now once you reverse the food production system?

    Your answer is going to be we let the Palestinians keep it. Well then if we are reversing the changes, how do we unkill the many Jews who gave their lives to malaria or damaging their their bodies forever so that future generations of Jews live in what is today an agriculturally rich environment? How do we change the culture of the Jews of Israel that evolved in the 1940s from their collective sense of togetherness and ownership that comes from having watched their parents and their parent’s friends giving their lives for this land? How do you reverse that? Those children of the 1940s, the ones who grew up on those farms literally paid for by their parents blood and livers, were the Nabka generation, the founders of the state of Israel. They are the ones who don’t want to hear from al-Husseini how because his followers came out of the right vagina their parents died for nothing; which is your reverse policy. They passed that attitude (which amounts to a rejection of BDS’s claims against them) along to the millions of Jews who came from all over the world. That rejection and assertion that Israel is Israeli became core to Israeli culture, part of the public myth. How do you reverse that to make those Jews today understand that should’t own the carrying capacity they created in favor of the descendants of the people who neglected the land and created the poverty in the first place?

    In what sense does anything like the original conditions still prevail? If your entire claim hangs on reversibility, being able to prove reversibility is not a small issue you can waive off. It is pretty obvious that the change is irreversible (at reasonable cost, everything can be done at some cost). All BDS proposes to do is destroy one existing nation to help another imaginary one it wants to create over it. That’s not reversing an evil (even if I were to grant that Zionism were an evil) that’s just revenge.

    You can complain about how I’m “twisting morality” but I’m doing is just pointing out how flimsy your claims to morality are. Last post it was universal, now it is a situational morality. You are not going to convince me with error laden self contradictory moral claims like this, and you shouldn’t be able to convince me with such claims. Once you take BDS out of your little cultist circle the case is going to be examined. And anyone who examines the case fairly is going to see that Israel is just another country which doesn’t get along well with an indigenous minority. Nothing unusual at all. The issue is going to resolve the way these things normally resolve:
    1) The indigenous minority comes to terms with the existence of a new society on top of their old one, reduces their demands to a level the dominant society can accept and then merges with the dominant society to become part of the new nation over a period of generations.
    2) The indigenous minorities leave and merge with another nation becoming part of that nation over a period of generations.

    Seeds grow into seedlings grow into saplings grow into adults who die to become snags and decompose into debris. There is nothing immoral about that at any phase.

    Without claiming that the Nakba is on the same level as the Holocaust, nobody thinks the Holocaust is remote history and that we should no longer care about justice or reparations to the extent that reparations can be paid.

    For the reparations you are talking about. I do for one. I don’t care about some dead German’s family give some life insurance policy to some dead Jew’s family. Or if some dead German’s family returns a piece of art or not. I find the whole idea disgusting of trying to buy off 6m murders with a few art pieces. That’s not justice or reperations. We aren’t talking 3 deaths. We are talking the equivalent of 3 deaths per hour every hour 24x7x365 from the 1940s till the year 2200. No you don’t get to pay a small sum and call that “reperations”.

    The reparations that were on par with the crime was giving us Judaea back — Israel is the reperations. Claim is settled by Israel not by art or some life insurance. The Christian proved themselves unable to handle a Jewish minority and they paid reparations in the late 40s. Germany in particular in the 1950s helped Israel absorb the Mizrahi Jews, and get off the ground economically which was a huge benefit. Today mainly all the Christian world needs to do is not welch on the deal.

    This is bull and you know it. But let me have some fun with it. Go back 20 generations and theoretically, ignoring inbreeding, I have one million ancestors. Go back 30 and it would be a billion, which is probably more people than were alive 30 generations back. So inevitably there is inbreeding as generations pass, but obviously if you go back 100 generations, if you have any ancestors from a given region you are probably related to virtually everyone in that region back then.

    Now the nitpick. Not to the same degree. Family wealth, really matters long term in terms of genetic reproduction Having lots of grandchildren of standing compounds generation after generation The wealthy in times past had more children who lived and those wee wealthier and thus a higher percent chance of their children living to reproduce. Some people as you go back really are vastly more successful at the DNA game than others. So for example Charlemagne may have had 100k as many 10 generation descendants as a typical peasant. After that it probably evens out, but he starts 100k ahead. Thus you are vastly more descended from him than anyone else alive at this time especially the bulk of the “everybody in the region”.

    So your relatives who were the oppressors probably are disproportionately represented.

    As for Israelis, I agree that Israelis born in Israel have the right to be there. It’s the only home they’ve got. What their parents or grandparents might have done isn’t their fault. But if they continue to oppress Palestinians, claim the right to move into the WB and not allow Palestinians to move into Israel, and continue to profit by this, then they aren’t innocent.

    I’d agree. Israel has to be humane where they can and more equal. Obviously if Israel is going to have huge chunks of their population live in the West Bank then it is best should annex it. But that’s of course going against International Law. Yet another example of how the UN’s positions undermine the ability to crete humane solutions. Israel is doing poorly in some respects and deserving of some criticism on human rights. I have no problem with moves to reform Israel, they are human and fallible. There is always room for improvement. But a desire to improve Israel has nothing to do with the nihilism and race hatred that is BDS.

    • Mooser on May 16, 2015, 5:49 pm

      Just like the movie JeffyB!

      “The reparations that were on par with the crime was giving us Judaea back — Israel is the reperations. Claim is settled by Israel…”

      Yeah, yeah Jeffy, and “the Holocaust justifies the Nakba completely”, too. Yeah, we get it. And the whole list of what makes a good “preservationist” “atheist” Jew.

      Not to put to fine a point on it, you’re nuts. Nuttier than the proverbial lavatory rodent. I should consider filing an ADA claim in your behalf.

      • tree on May 18, 2015, 1:22 am

        For anyone interested in an informed view on the condition of the Palestinian economy right before and during the beginning of the first Zionist immigration to Palestine, rather than listening to Jeffb’s racist blather, I would suggest reading from the Israeli book, “Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period”, particularly the chapter written by Gad Gilbar, head of Haifa University’s Middle Eastern History Department, entitled,” The Growing Economic Involvement of Palestine with the West, 1865-1914″.

        https://books.google.com/books?id=XgRDT9wMUhYC&pg=PA188&dq=the+growing+economic+involvement+of+palestine&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ulxZVen9EdHToAS_u4CYBQ&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=the%20growing%20economic%20involvement%20of%20palestine&f=true

        Quote:The late 1860s mark the beginning of a new period in the economic and social development of Ottoman Palestine. During the 45-50 years prior to World War I Palestine’s economy underwent a process of modernization and growth surpassing both in force and scope anything it had experienced during the first seven decades of the 19th century and perhaps ever since the Ottoman conquest of the country. Nor did Palestine lag behind other economies in the Middle East, such as those of Syria, Anatolian and Iran, in the thrust of the economic changes that it underwent during the period under discussion.

        The modernization and growth that resulted from the increase in inputs of the factors of production, including technological changes, were not only expressed in an increase in the national product, but in important structural changes as well in the sectors of agriculture, manufacture and services, in the patterns of consumption and savings, and in the distribution of capital and incomes. These economic processes helped to generate a number of important social changes, the most outstanding of which was the emergence of a new layer among the elite of the Palestinian Arab society.

        At the root of these economic and social developments was a factor that was exogenous to the economy and society of Palestine. It was not Ottoman reforms, nor Templar settlement, nor the first Jewish waves of immigration, nor even foreign activity in Palestine in general that had caused them, but the fact that at the time Palestine’s economy became increasingly linked to the world economic system, and particularly to the economies of Europe (see Tables 1 and 2). The connection exposed Palestine’s economy to the influence of the changes taking place in the economies of Europe, and generated new forces and processes within it. However though the moving factor was external, the bearers of this growth were primarily local Arab-speaking Muslims and Christians. End quote

        The chapter goes on to detail the exponential growth in the citrus, olive and sesame export markets starting in the later 1800s. Of the three, only the citrus market had any appreciable Jewish ownership, and the vast majority of that came after the local Arab Palestinian citrus industry had shown itself capable of producing significant profits, thus creating a considerable Zionist interest in purchasing land capable of supporting citrus growth.Significant Jewish ownership of orange groves didn’t occur until the early 1900s. By 1929 Zionist Jews owned half of the citrus groves in Palestine, and yet just prior to Israel’s confiscation of Palestinian property in 1948-50, Palestinian Arabs still produced over half of the orange crop in the country. Certainly this indicates that Jewish groves were not significantly more productive than non-Jewish ones.

        As Mark Levine points out in “Overthrowing Geography:Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine”:

        QuoteAn extensive 1902 study of the Jaffa orange trade by two Zionist officials pays tribute to the growth of the industry, the various Arab owners, and the wide reach of its markets (with England, followed by Turkey and Egypt grouped as one unit, and, well below them, Austria-Hungary as the primary markets).

        Even as the study complains about the “primitive” state of Palestinian Arab cultivation (Arabische Kulturmethode), the discussion of the costs involved for Arab versus European proprietors bears out the praise of Arab cultivation methods as much more cost-efficient than the supposedly more modern Zionist-European ones made two decades later by the founder of Zionist agronomy, Yitzhak Elezari-Valkani. End quote

        Lest one be still tempted to equate the burgeoning economic changes in late Ottoman Palestine with the arrival of the first Zionist settlers, you might want to read Yossi Ben-Artzi on “Changes in the agricultural sector of the moshavot, 1882-1914”. Besides delving into the alternate farming methods of the Arab Palestinians and the German Templer settlements and their positive influence on the Jewish farming methods, Ben-Artzi makes it clear that the early (first aliyah-1885-1903) settlements were primarily failures at farming, due mostly to their ignorance of farming methods, the local climate and soil conditions; a not surprising revelation due to the ideological rather than economic bent of the settlements. The limited success of the early settlements was in the production of wine grapes, which were tried after the German Templers had proved that wine grape growing could be profitable. However even this was later widely abandoned as unsuitable and unreliable. Regardless, the early settlements were almost entirely dependent on the financial hand-outs from Baron Rothschild, and had the motivation for the settlements been economic rather than ideological they would have been abandoned entirely within a few years for being economically unsustainable.

        See here

        :https://books.google.com/books?id=sdYUAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA141&dq=attempt+to+change+the+structure+of+Jewish+farms&hl=en&sa=X&ei=b3BZVemcG8jWoASzx4OICQ&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=attempt%20to%20change%20the%20structure%20of%20Jewish%20farms&f=false

        As for the draining of swamps, that had been done on a small scale prior to the arrival of the Zionists, by both Palestinian Arabs and German Templer settlers. As for the large scale draining of the Hula Valley by Israel in the 1950’s, that was later realized as an ecological disaster, and was partially undone in the 1990’s.
        “Israel Restoring Drained Wetland, Reversing Pioneers’ Feat”

        http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/05/world/israel-restoring-drained-wetland-reversing-pioneers-feat.html

        Quote:The drying of the Hula lake and marsh in the 1950’s freed some 15,000 acres of land for cultivation. But it also left behind a tangle of ecological problems so serious that planners are now preparing to reflood this area at the center of the drained basin. Now Unfit for Farming
        Dried peat soil from the bottom of the marsh has decomposed, burned and released pollutants that once were filtered by the swamp, leaving a wasteland unfit for farming.

        Draining the Hula, north of the Sea of Galilee, was a powerfully symbolic national enterprise, celebrated with patriotic fervor much as the space program was in the United States. It was expected to reclaim expanses of peat soil under the marsh that were considered to be both highly fertile and a source of fuel.

        Millions of gallons of swamp water previously lost through evaporation were to be channeled in canals to the Sea of Galilee, the national reservoir. And eliminating the marsh, officials said, would destroy a breeding ground of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

        Between 1951 and 1958, a network of canals was dug to drain the lake and swamp. According to press reports at the time, Agriculture Minister Kadish Luz declared, “Land had been redeemed from hostile nature, and water that had been a menace to health turned into a blessing.”
        Peat Was a Problem

        Although thousands of acres were brought under cultivation by neighboring settlements, problems emerged in large tracts of land with high concentrations of peat soil.

        The dry peat disintegrated, sank and burned in underground fires caused by spontaneous combustion. The fertility of the soil declined sharply, and it released nitrate pollutants that were washed by rains into the Sea of Galilee. As farmers stopped cultivating large areas, the land was overrun by mice and weeds, and peat dust whipped up by winds covered the region.
        The desolation contrasted sharply with the teeming animal and plant life that had filled the Hula marsh, situated at a meeting point of tropical and temperate climate zones. Several species unique to the swamp became extinct when it was drained, and even though a 750-acre nature reserve was set aside to recreate the lost wetlands, their rich diversity largely vanished.
        When the draining project began, destruction of this everglade environment was not deemed too high a price. There was little ecological awareness in the 1950’s, and those experts who warned of problems were overruled by the planners.

        Need for Land and Jobs
        Also, with waves of new immigrants arriving in Israel’s early years, the Hula project filled a pressing need for jobs and for agricultural land that could support farming settlements.

        “It was clear that agriculture and settlement were top priority, and it was considered obvious that swamps should be drained,” said Amotz Zahavi, an Israeli conservationist who had lobbied for preservation of some of the marsh. “No one imagined that you could say no to drying the Hula.”
        Azaria Alon, another conservationist, recalled: “The draining was deeply troubling to nature advocates, but it was difficult to talk about it, because anyone who spoke out was considered anti-Zionist. This was seen as a tremendous achievement, celebrated in writing and song.”

        “But it wasn’t thought through, and the result was ecological destruction,” Mr. Alon said. “I’m against such policies that enthusiastically promote all kinds of big projects that change the face of the land without a comprehensive assessment of their environmental impact.”End quote.

        It should be noted that during the time frame of the draining of the Hula, Israel was almost entirely financially dependent on reparations from Germany and the confiscated property of the ethnically cleansed Palestinians.

        So as usual, JeffB just pulls hasbara out of his butt and hopes you will swallow it whole just like he did.

      • Bornajoo on May 18, 2015, 2:48 am

        “So as usual, JeffB just pulls hasbara out of his butt and hopes you will swallow it whole just like he did.”

        Thanks Tree and thanks Shingo

        JeffB is like some hasbara robot. His own brainwashing and programming is so deep he simply cannot see that his whole argument on these issues is predicated on pure colonial racism instead of actual facts.

        In his world:

        The chosen people came, they brought agriculture and technology to the few dumb savages that lived there who are now all better off because of it. And because of the amazing skills and wonders of the chosen people other savages turned up to live on this ‘miracle’ in the desert and then tried to claim it for themselves because before the chosen people turned up those savages never really existed as a people or nation

        It’s Joan Peters all over again.

        Then he claims that criticism of the Zionists actions are actually anti semitic because loads of other countries have done the same but only the Zionist Jews have been singled out and highlighted. Incredible

        It’s an incredible mix of bullshit hasbara and extreme paranoia which are the two main ingredients of zionist brainwashing and his whole world view is based on it. Just like so many others including members of my own family.

      • Shingo on May 18, 2015, 2:58 am

        It’s Joan Peters all over again.

        It’s 19th century colonialism and orientalism all over again.

        As Chomsky points out:

        in areas where the English settled or where English is spoken today, the unwritten law in force in England was imposed. According to English law, the inhabitants of these lands didn’t have a right to them because they where hunter-gatherers rather than a sedentary people. This was completely false. And many other falsifications of events took place in order to render them compatible with the law. Up until the 1970s, for example, distinguished anthropologists informed us that we should reject archeological and documentary evidence which clearly showed that these were sedentary peoples and, by their own standards, relatively advanced civilizations. On the contrary, we were to pretend that they were hunter-gatherers and that, therefore, there were few people, maybe a million north of the Rio Grande, instead of 10 million or more, which was the real figure.

        And if the question is asked why for centuries these falsifications were made, the answer is, basically, that it was a matter of establishing the principle that the people who lived there had no rights over the land, given that they simply traveled across it in order to hunt, and so on. Therefore, there was no moral or legal problem in taking their land for the use of the Europeans. As far as the peoples involved are concerned, if they had no right to the land, it did not matter who they were, or whether they came from India or some other place.


        http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/198910–.htm

        Sound familiar?

      • just on May 18, 2015, 1:57 am

        Thanks, tree.

      • Shmuel on May 18, 2015, 2:04 am

        Thanks, tree. A good documentary on the subject — focusing on the citrus industry, but also on the self-serving colonialist/orientalist myths surrounding-justifying Zionism — is Eyal Sivan’s The Orange’s Clockwork.

    • Donald on May 16, 2015, 5:54 pm

      I agree you can’t do reparations for the Holocaust, But if survivors or their descendants want the art works, they should get them. But no, Palestine is not reparations for the Holocuast, except in the sense that guilty Westerners allowed Palestinians to pay the price for Western sins.

      As for draining swamps, I already said to someone else that I don’t want to expel Israeli Jews. It is, of course, disingenuous and inaccurate to claim that all of Palestine was a hellhole until the Zionists came–if we redid history without Western imperialism there would still be railroads built and technological advances and trade in all the places where people of European descent came–it would have happened in a different way, there would have been different politics and struggles and forms of oppression and so on, but to imagine that Zionist improvements made it okay to expel the Palestinians is nonsense.

      And your attempt to make universal morality into something absurd is an evasion. I’m not going to waste any more time with you on this, because no sane person would treat the ongoing issue of Palestinian rights with some idiotic comparison to what might or might not have been done to Jews 2000 years ago. You’re just playing sophomore level games and I’m not interested in playing along any further.

      • JeffB on May 17, 2015, 5:58 pm

        @Donald

        It is, of course, disingenuous and inaccurate to claim that all of Palestine was a hellhole until the Zionists came

        I didn’t say hellhole. I pointed to the signs of under development. Palestine was a pretty retched place. That’s why a small group of Eastern European fanatics led by Western European weirdos was able to setup a mini state. Its lack of political development, was why when the Ottoman empire fell it wasn’t freed like Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt… And of course it was far less developed in 1880 than in 1920.

        if we redid history without Western imperialism there would still be railroads built and technological advances and trade in all the places where people of European descent came

        If we redo history without imperialism all sorts of things change. You have no idea what happens and neither do I. The European West was formed by resisting the imperialism of the Muslims to the South, the Vikings to the North and the tribes to the east. Imperialism is not a Western invention.

        to imagine that Zionist improvements made it okay to expel the Palestinians is nonsense.

        I wasn’t the one who said that. You have the criteria of reversibility. If you consider your own criteria nonsense then that shows how you are contradicting yourself. The “Sophomore games” are pointing out that your morality conflicts with itself. You aren’t remotely consistent in your views. You arguments are convincing only to someone who already agrees to ignore consistency of approach.

        You are better than most MWers. But that’s a low bar. Far better is a totally consistent morality, what you original aimed for, a universal morality that applies to all people in all situations equally. And that comes from embracing the 19th century view of self determination. That all nations should aim to either merge with other nations until they have the the ability to stand alone and once that ability is achieved that ability grants them the right (and now in a meaningful enforceable sense) to form a state that governs in that nation’s interest. Human rights is then layered on top of that, how the nation-state treats individuals within it.

        A genuine universal morality and one that worked for centuries until Liberals in embracing anti-colonialism ended up absorbing 3rd world racism back into western Liberalism.

      • just on May 17, 2015, 6:30 pm

        “You are better than most MWers. But that’s a low bar.”

        Remind me again why you’re here. It would appear that it’s only to practice Zionist revisionist windbaggery.

      • Donald on May 17, 2015, 8:01 pm

        “You aren’t remotely consistent in your views”

        Coming from you JeffB, that means nothing at all. You are often interesting when you’re talking about something besides morality.

      • bintbiba on May 18, 2015, 4:16 am

        I thank you tree, Shingo, Bornajoo for your responses to JeffB !

        Shmuel , the Orange’s Clockwork , by Eyal Sivan, was such a powerful documentary on Al Jazeera a few years ago , I must have watched it 3 times! Thanks for the mention .

      • Shmuel on May 18, 2015, 5:26 am

        the Orange’s Clockwork , by Eyal Sivan, was such a powerful documentary on Al Jazeera a few years ago , I must have watched it 3 times!

        One of the things that struck me most about The Clockwork’s Orange is the “what might have been” aspect — the joint economy and de facto coexistence between Arabs and Jews in Palestine at the time. This “might have been” is doubly poignant, because it shows both that the Nakba was not inevitable and that had the refugees been allowed to return after the fact, the country’s social and economic fabric could still have been repaired and strengthened.

        Such an outcome becomes harder and harder to envision with each passing year, but it still offers an ideal — one of mutual respect and equal humanity — that may serve as the basis for the pursuit of any number of different solutions on the ground. Goodwill. So simple, yet so hard.

      • Maximus Decimus Meridius on May 18, 2015, 11:32 am

        ”Palestine was a pretty retched place.”

        And if there’s one thing I hate, ”Jeffy B”, it’s a ”retched place”.

    • Shingo on May 16, 2015, 11:22 pm

      Before the Zionists got to Palestine it was a malaria ridden dirt poor Turkish colony with a migrant serf farming population from the Levant.

      So many lies it’s hard to know where to begin, but JeffB is clearly channeling Jone Peters.

      Not all of Palestine had problems with malaria, but suffice to say, malaria was common in many parts of the world at the time and the Zionists did not fix the problem for another decade.

      Furthermore, Palestine was not a Turkish colony and there were no Turkish settlements. The claim that the population was a migrant population is based on the fraudulent and long since debunked thesis of Jone Peters. They were native to the land and largely land holder.

      What you are now proposing is not a universal morality but rather a situational morality based on a policy of non-reversibility.

      How so Jeff? Donald’s morality is perfectly consistent with the notion that those who are not responsible for the crimes of their predecessors should not have to pay the price.

      It seem you don’t understand the difference between justice and collective punishment, which is not surprise given you are such a rabid Zionist

      Neither the Jewish people who evolved into Israeli nor the Levant people who evolved into Palestinians existed as nations in the proper sense prior to Zionism.

      So what? The notion of nationhood is largely an artificial and tribal construct. International recognition of human rights is not contingent on people identifying with any nationhood.

      They raising the carrying capacity of the land by something like 400-500 undoing 1000 years of neglect and mismanagement in a decade.

      From Jone Peters to the hasbara BS that the Jews made the desert bloom. What a load of crap. Palestine was one of the most abundant and fertile areas in the region. The famous Jafa Oranges would never have been created if the land had been mismanaged. The fact that some areas were developed does not mean the existing population, which was entirely self reliant, neglected or mismanaged.

      This ties into yet another racist, solonialist and orientalist spin that that the Palestinians were too primitive and unevolved to look after themselves and that the Jews helped them to become civilized.

      You are so completely tone deaf JeffB that you have no idea how repugnant and racist you are.

      Well then if we are reversing the changes, how do we unkill the many Jews who gave their lives to malaria or damaging their their bodies forever so that future generations of Jews live in what is today an agriculturally rich environment?

      What an asinine and irrelevant line of argument!! Why don’t we ask how you can make your mother unfeel the pain she went through during childbirth?

      And anyone who examines the case fairly is going to see that Israel is just another country which doesn’t get along well with an indigenous minority. Nothing unusual at all

      Yes it is, because every other western democracy who has had a shameful past with regard to the indigenous minority has taken signioficant steaps to:

      1. Acknowledge and recognize those crime
      2. Acknowledge and recognize the identity and legitimacy of these indigenous peoples and their rights.
      3. Made significant steps towards reconciliation and rectifying those injustices.

      What makes Israel usual is that:

      1. Israel denies of justified those crimes
      2. Israel denied the identity and legitimacy of these indigenous peoples and their rights.
      3. Israel has not even considered making any steps towards reconciliation and rectifying those injustices.

      None of the indigenous populations in the US, Canada or Australia were ever required to:

      1. come to terms with the existence of a new society on top of their old one. They were never 2. reduces their demands to a level the dominant society could accept and or that merges with the dominant society to become part of the new nation over a period of generations.
      3. merge with another nation becoming part of that nation over a period of generations.

      So by your own admission, Israel in entirely unusual and different because those demands are unique to Israel. in fact, Israel even demands that the indigenous population accept that their conquerors have a greater claim to the land than they do.

      Seriously Jeff, the more you try to argue your case, the deeper the hole you are digging for yourself.

      • JeffB on May 17, 2015, 5:45 pm

        @Shingo

        Not all of Palestine had problems with malaria, but suffice to say, malaria was common in many parts of the world at the time and the Zionists did not fix the problem for another decade.

        Another decade from when. They stared fixing it immediately starting from the 1880s and were doing huge work on it during the early 1920s. Their agricultural work is what led to the citrus boom.

        Furthermore, Palestine was not a Turkish colony and there were no Turkish settlements.

        http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/OttomanEmpireIn1683.png/1920px-OttomanEmpireIn1683.png

        How so Jeff? Donald’s morality is perfectly consistent with the notion that those who are not responsible for the crimes of their predecessors should not have to pay the price.

        I’m not sure if he is consistent on that point. He has raised it. Certainly BDS in 2 of the 3 demands takes the opposite position.

        It seem you don’t understand the difference between justice and collective punishment, which is not surprise given you are such a rabid Zionist

        I agree with you. I don’t see a difference other than
        justice = stuff speaker agrees with
        collective punishment = stuff the speaker doesn’t agree with

        So what? The notion of nationhood is largely an artificial and tribal construct. International recognition of human rights is not contingent on people identifying with any nationhood.

        I don’t know what you mean attacking nations as an “artificial construct”. All of human society including law is mostly an artificial construct. The only natural constructs are those arising from geography in the most material sense.

        In any case if you want to make an argument about human rights and not national rights than don’t talk about how the Palestinians were wronged and have a natural right to rule. They might have a right to greater civil rights within Israel but that’s it. This entire argument by your BDS compatriots is about about blood guilt and racial claims to land.

        What an asinine and irrelevant line of argument!! Why don’t we ask how you can make your mother unfeel the pain she went through during childbirth?

        Childbirth would be another irreversible process. Donald’s original claim was reversibility was key. Citing another reversible process doesn’t prove anything.

        None of the indigenous populations in the US, Canada or Australia were ever required to: 1. come to terms with the existence of a new society on top of their old one.

        Of course they were! The Indian wars ended when the Native Americans agreed to recognize the authority of the USA government. With a few exceptions which often led to other much smaller scale massacred, they agreed to petition the government of the USA for redress of grievances rather than war against the USA. They now work within the American society as part of it. Similarly the Canadian indigenous. I don’t know the details of Australia but I suspect the Australians also wouldn’t tolerate their indigenous acting fully sovereign.

        Similarly as far as reducing their demands and merging. That is what they had to do.

        Your 3 points you are flat out wrong on.

      • Shingo on May 17, 2015, 7:34 pm

        They stared fixing it immediately starting from the 1880s and were doing huge work on it during the early 1920s.

        Rubbish. There were barely 8,000 Jews in Palestine at the time and only a tiny percentage of them were even immigrants, so there was no work being done until well after the 1940s.

        The citrus boom had nothing to do with any Zionist input.

        So tha’s lie #1.

        Furthermore, Palestine was not a Turkish colony and there were no Turkish settlements.

        Your map shows no Turkish colonies.

        So tha’s lie #2.

        I’m not sure if he is consistent on that point. He has raised it. Certainly BDS in 2 of the 3 demands takes the opposite position.

        Absolutel rubbish. You can’t even be bothered to list which of the BDS demands take the opposite position because of the egg that you would have on your face.

        That’s lie #3.

        I agree with you. I don’t see a difference other than
        justice = stuff speaker agrees with
        collective punishment = stuff the speaker doesn’t agree with

        It’s clear you don’t see the difference because as Donald has pointed out, you have no moral compas whatsoever

        I don’t know what you mean attacking nations as an “artificial construct”. All of human society including law is mostly an artificial construct.

        False again. Human society is based on the recognition that humans need to organise and exist in communities to survive.

        In any case if you want to make an argument about human rights and not national rights than don’t talk about how the Palestinians were wronged and have a natural right to rule.

        Stop with the phoney arguments and straw men. No one said anyone has a natural right to rule. The question is whether one population has the right to displace another and rule over them.

        They might have a right to greater civil rights within Israel but that’s it.

        What do you mean that’s it? If they become a majority, or if they were not expelled and were a majority and voted according to those demographics, would they not have the right to hold government? Or if in the future, the arab parties managed to form a majority coalition, would they not have the right to form a government?

        This entire argument by your BDS compatriots is about about blood guilt and racial claims to land.

        Umm not, you are confusing BDS with Zionism.

        Of course they were! The Indian wars ended when the Native Americans agreed to recognise the authority of the USA government. /blockquote>

        No, the wars ended when the populatio of the Native Americans was devasteated and they could no longer resist occupation.

        They now work within the American society as part of it. Similarly the Canadian indigenous. I don’t know the details of Australia but I suspect the Australians also wouldn’t tolerate their indigenous acting fully sovereign.

        In all the cases you listed, the indigenous population are recognised as the original owners of the land and given full citizenship. There is no distinctions between any race, religion or sop called peoplehood or nationhood. In fact, in all cases, the natives are granted additional privileges not available to those of European descent.

        So you are wrong on every point.

      • just on May 17, 2015, 6:53 pm

        About that “citrus boom”

        …”History Notes

        Jaffa Oranges were grown in Palestine and in the Jaffa area before the creation of Israel. The variety originated as a mutation of the Beladi variety of oranges, near Jaffa, around the mid-1800s.

        Jaffa became the main city for exporting the oranges grown in that area. The quality of the oranges was noted as early as 1886 (by the American consul in Jerusalem, Henry Gillman.)

        Development of the orange export industry was made possible by two things that came together at the end of the 1800s: the advent of steam ships, which could get the oranges to markets abroad faster, and the installation of motorized pumps for irrigation which allowed increased production to meet the demand.

        The oranges were wrapped in paper, and then packed in wood cases, about 120 to 150 oranges per case, weighing about 35 kg. Wood for the packing cases had to be imported from Europe.

        By 1892, the firm Goodyear and Co. was shipping 15,000 to 20,000 cases in season every 10 days to Liverpool, England. The oranges were admitted duty-free into the UK.”…

        http://www.cooksinfo.com/jaffa-oranges

      • bintbiba on May 18, 2015, 5:52 am

        Shmuel,

        Amen to that .

        Who knows …had it been possible then , we could have been neighbours…. and my family and people would have been all the better for that !

        NB . I am not in the habit of gushing !

      • JeffB on May 18, 2015, 6:37 am

        @Shingo

        I’m going to comment that you slipping back into your rather rude style of conversation where the ratio or insults to responses rises dramatically. There are places where it is possible to talk to you. There are places where you like to throw puss at the screen and hear from your amen corner how wonderful your puss is. The amen corner prefers the puss. But I see no reason to respond to it. You want to talk then you are going to have to try to exercising some basic manners.

        JeffB: They stared fixing it immediately starting from the 1880s and were doing huge work on it during the early 1920s.

        Rubbish. There were barely 8,000 Jews in Palestine at the time

        That is false. For most of the 1920s there were over 100k Jews. There was no point in the 1880s where there were 8k Jews. Jews were consistently 8% of the population increasing to almost 1/4 by the end of the land clearings. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/israel_palestine_pop.html

        and only a tiny percentage of them were even immigrants, so there was no work being done until well after the 1940s.

        The citrus boom was over by the 1940s (though of course it remained a part of Israel’s infrastructure) as your compatriots below clearly show. Your times are off.

        Furthermore, Palestine was not a Turkish colony and there were no Turkish settlements. Your map shows no Turkish colonies.

        What do you think the Ottoman empire was? It was Turkey. The same way that the Roman Empire was Roman or the British Empire was England.

        JeffB I’m not sure if he is consistent on that point. He has raised it. [those who are not responsible for the crimes of their predecessors should not have to pay the price.] 684Certainly BDS in 2 of the 3 demands takes the opposite position.

        Absolutel rubbish. You can’t even be bothered to list which of the BDS demands take the opposite position because of the egg that you would have on your face.

        Let’s disprove that one.

        1 — Return of refugees as understood by BDS makes a claim of racial inheritance. People who are born in Syria, Lebanon… are to get benefits from people not even alive in 1949. The people who were expelled and the people who expelled them are dead.

        2 — The expulsion of Jews from the settlements past 1967. Most of those settlements have been present for a full generation now. The people living there moved there because that’s where their parent’s (in a collective sense) lived. BDS is quite clear they deserve collective punishment for that. You for example were quite joyful abut “complete economic collapse” which is far more than Israel has done to Gaza.

        I don’t know what you mean attacking nations as an “artificial construct”. All of human society including law is mostly an artificial construct.

        False again. Human society is based on the recognition that humans need to organise and exist in communities to survive.

        That is not the reason there are separate nations. In what way does it assist humans to organize or survive that the French and the German language both exist? In what way does it assist humans or organize and survive that Christianity and Islam both exist?

        JeffB: In any case if you want to make an argument about human rights and not national rights than don’t talk about how the Palestinians were wronged and have a natural right to rule.

        Stop with the phoney arguments and straw men. No one said anyone has a natural right to rule. The question is whether one population has the right to displace another and rule over them.

        No it isn’t. The Jews have expressed no particular interest in ruling over the Palestinians consistently. Nor is BDS for equality.

        What do you mean that’s it? If they become a majority, or if they were not expelled and were a majority and voted according to those demographics, would they not have the right to hold government?

        They have the right to hold government (this is in Israel proper) now. Under Shaked even more of them would have the right to vote and hold government.

        Or if in the future, the arab parties managed to form a majority coalition, would they not have the right to form a government?

        They have that right today.

        JeffB: Of course they were! The Indian wars ended when the Native Americans agreed to recognise the authority of the USA government.

        Shingo No, the wars ended when the populatio of the Native Americans was devasteated and they could no longer resist occupation.

        That is how it happened. Your claim was it didn’t happen. You are contradicting yourself.

        JeffB: They now work within the American society as part of it. Similarly the Canadian indigenous. I don’t know the details of Australia but I suspect the Australians also wouldn’t tolerate their indigenous acting fully sovereign.

        Shingo: In all the cases you listed, the indigenous population are recognised as the original owners of the land and given full citizenship. There is no distinctions between any race, religion or sop called peoplehood or nationhood. In fact, in all cases, the natives are granted additional privileges not available to those of European descent.

        That is correct. They are given citizenship and allowed to participate in the new society after they acknowledged the victory of the new society over the old. Most Native Americans got their citizenship in 1924. 1924 was generations after their family had lost the Indian wars and they were mostly culturally assimilated. Your claim before was that they were allowed to continue to exist as full sovereign nations within America, Australia and Canada The United States does not recognize the indigenous rights to govern the land. As a matter of gift they grant them some tracks of self government and allow them to participate in USA society. Which if what Israel is doing.

        So your claim that Israel is somehow worse than the Indian wars is disproven. You are failing to understand what happened in the Indian wars.

      • Shingo on May 18, 2015, 9:18 am

        There are places where you like to throw puss at the screen and hear from your amen corner how wonderful your puss is.

        You are clearly oblivious to the puss that you spew every day through your vile racism.

        That is false. For most of the 1920s there were over 100k Jews. There was no point in the 1880s where there were 8k Jews.

        False.

        As Shlomo Ben Ami points out in his book, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, Jews were consistently 8% of the population.

        The citrus boom was over by the 1940s (though of course it remained a part of Israel’s infrastructure) as your compatriots below clearly show. Your times are off.

        In which case, that also blows up your claim that he citrus boom was due to the desert bloomism created by the Zionists.

        What do you think the Ottoman empire was? It was Turkey. The same way that the Roman Empire was Roman or the British Empire was England.

        The Turks did no build settlements in Palestine and expel the local population.

        Let’s disprove that one.

        Another hasbara fail.

        1. Where does the return of refugees as understood by BDS makes a claim of racial inheritance? The return of refugees as understood by BDS makes no such claim. If I inherit the property of my parents or grandparents, it has nothing to do with racial inheritance, it is based on the existence of property belonging to them that they have passed on to me due to the fact I am their progeny.

        2 What part of BDS advocated the expulsion of Jews from the settlements past 1967? And isn’t it interesting how you justify the presence of Jews in those settlements because that’s where their parent’s (in a collective sense) lived? Is that not racial inheritance?

        BDS does not advocate collective punishment of any kind. At the most, it calls for the government of Israel to end it’s occupation and for those settlements to return to Palestinian control, as would be the case if a Palestinian state were allowed to exist.

        for example were quite joyful abut “complete economic collapse” which is far more than Israel has done to Gaza.

        WFT are you babbling about? The UN has reported that Gaza will be unable to sustain life in another decade. That’s what Israel has done to Gaza. How could BDS come close to that degree of destruction?

        So as it turns out, you have failed miserably to disprove anything I said. You seem to believe hat by medley spouting BS, your argument on which it is based is somehow legitimate.

        In what way does it assist humans to organize or survive that the French and the German language both exist?

        The same way some tribes learn to fish while others hunt, through necessity. French and Germanic languages, like all languages, are hybrids of languages that preceded them. They were not created intentionally.

        No it isn’t. The Jews have expressed no particular interest in ruling over the Palestinians consistently. Nor is BDS for equality.

        Actually Israelis have expressed far more macabre and sadistic interests, to rule over the eland and get rid of the Palestinians entirely. So yes, BDS is entirelyfor equality which is why you haven;t even tried to argue the point.

        Under Shaked even more of them would have the right to vote and hold government.

        No. She wants them warehoused.

        They are given citizenship and allowed to participate in the new society after they acknowledged the victory of the new society over the old.

        No, they were given citizenship and allowed to participate without any requirement that they acknowledge the victory of the new society over the old. There was never any such stipulation made so your argument is false.

      • Shmuel on May 18, 2015, 6:55 am

        Who knows …had it been possible then , we could have been neighbours…. and my family and people would have been all the better for that !

        Gracious and kind as always, bintbiba. The privilege would have been all ours.

      • just on May 18, 2015, 9:38 am

        Amen, Shingo.

        (from the “corner” ;-)

        Thanks to Shmuel and bintbiba, too!

    • ckg on May 16, 2015, 11:53 pm

      JeffB says:

      Before the Zionists got to Palestine it was a malaria ridden dirt poor Turkish colony with a migrant serf farming population from the Levant.

      You’re a mite brief, JeffB. Let me help you out with some quotes from Exodus (as cataloged by N. Finkelstein in the footnotes of Beyond Chutzpah):

      Putting aside its apolgetics for Zionism, the sheer racism of Uris’s blockbuster bears recalling. The Arabs, their villages, their homes–to the last, they’re “stinking” or engulfed in “overwhelming stench” and “vile odors.” Arab men just “lay around” all day “listless”–that is when they’re not hatching “some typical double-dealing scheme which seemed perfectly legitimate to the Arab,” or resorting to the “unscrupulous ethics of the Arab…the fantastic reasoning that condoned every crime short of murder,” or “becom[ing] hysterical at the slightest provacation”…”There was little song or laughter or joy in Arab life.”…”In this atmosphere, cunning, treachery, murder, feuds and jealousies became a way of life” …Truth be told, not much has changed in official Zionist propaganda.

    • Bornajoo on May 17, 2015, 4:07 am

      “Before the Zionists got to Palestine it was a malaria ridden dirt poor Turkish colony with a migrant serf farming population from the Levant.” (JeffB)

      I thought we were done with this kind of old colonial racism. How fortunate for those poor lowly local savages that the chosen people turned up to conquer them and bring them civilisation and enlightenment!

      The lengths your deeply programmed mind can go to in order to justify israel’s human rights abuses and crimes is quite astounding.

      • Shingo on May 17, 2015, 4:51 am

        I thought we were done with this kind of old colonial racism.

        That’s impossible if you are a Zionist, as Zionism and colonial racism go hand in hand. Not only that, but racist colonialist Jeff contradicts himself. In this post he refers to Palestinians as a migrant population, in another he refers to them an native.

      • bintbiba on May 17, 2015, 5:00 am

        +1 Bornajoo
        +1 ckg
        +1 Shingo
        +1 Donald
        +1 Mooser

        Thanks to all of you.

      • JeffB on May 17, 2015, 5:29 pm

        @Bornajoo

        I’m not sure what’s in that is racist. The Mizrahi Jews are the same race. Pro-Western perhaps.

        @Shingo

        There is no contradiction… The Levant people that exist were native to the Levant. There was migration within the Levant when the Jews started boosting the economy. Same as the car economy caused migration to Detroit, though Detroit wasn’t empty before and the relative decrease in American car manufacturing in Detroit has caused migration away from Detroit. People move where the jobs are within their society. The Levant was the Palestinians society for many of them (especially those not the south). More broadly, the entire Ottoman Empire and the places that had formerly been Ottoman was where migrants came from.

        Your problem is that you need borders that were far stronger than the ones history shows because you are trying to defend the notion that there was some country called Palestine.

      • Shingo on May 17, 2015, 7:42 pm

        There was migration within the Levant when the Jews started boosting the economy.

        There was no boost to the economy until the Europeans started arriving and what’s more, the Palestinians were not given any piece of the actions because the immigrant Zionists imposed a policy of Hafrada – meaning segregartion.

        though Detroit wasn’t empty before and the relative decrease in American car manufacturing in Detroit has caused migration away from Detroit.

        Nor was Palestine empty before the Zionists arrived. In fact, in 1905, the Zionist founders pointed out that every inch of arable land was being used and cultivated – so much for your racist claim that it was being neglected.

        More broadly, the entire Ottoman Empire and the places that had formerly been Ottoman was where migrants came from.

        That is demonstrably false given that the population did not migrate at all. Walter Lacquer pointed out that the problem the Zionists had was that the natural rate of growth of the Palestinian population was as great as the rate of Zionist immigration from Europe.

        Your problem is that you need borders that were far stronger than the ones history shows because you are trying to defend the notion that there was some country called Palestine.

        I don’t need to defend it at all. There would never have been a Mandate for Palestine has the country of Palestine not already existed. It is you that has the problem because you Zionists have tried desperately to argue that the Mandate for Palestine meant the Mandate for a jewish state.

    • bryan on May 18, 2015, 3:11 am

      Jeffy B – Your “racist blather” seems to be identical to the “ludicrous”, “worthless” and “fraudulent” narrative advanced by Joan Peters in her notorious “From Time Immemorial”. However hidden inside it there appear to be a gem of common sense:

      “The issue is going to resolve the way these things normally resolve:
      1) The indigenous minority comes to terms with the existence of a new society on top of their old one, reduces their demands to a level the dominant society can accept and then merges with the dominant society to become part of the new nation over a period of generations.
      2) The indigenous minorities leave and merge with another nation becoming part of that nation over a period of generations.”

      You have eloquently diagnosed two possible solutions of the conflict. The indigenous minority (i.e. those Jews who have been born and reared within Palestine) can either come to terms with with the numerically dominant society of native born Palestinians, and their exiled brothers and sisters (as I believe was the original intention in allowing Jewish immigration, as encapsulated by the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate) or there is an option of course for the minority to leave and return to their ancestral homelands in America, Africa, Europe and Asia, (as indeed many of the more sensitive souls who mistaken made “aliyah” have already done).

      You thus off two options – a one-state solution comprising a mixed Palestinian-Jewish population and a one-state solution without a Jewish component. You are surely not misguided enough to believe that Israel’s Jews are an indigenous majority of Palestinian society, but your analysis does have one fault – you totally ignore the third option – that the indigenous minority of Jewish Palestinians could settle for peaceful coexistence within the internationally recognized pre-1967 borders. Or is it far too late for a two-state solution?

      • JeffB on May 18, 2015, 9:47 am

        @Bryan

        Well first off I said dominant society not numerically superior. Long term numerical superiority is vital, the distinction between a nation and a ruling elite. Modern democratic societies are very good at pushing their culture. But at the time of a mass migration it is quite common that the dominant society is not numerically superior. They frequently take over the country and create a new culture.

        To pick an obvious example and one Shingo and I were discussing at the time of the revolutionary war the Native American society probably outnumbered the white’s 2::1. Throw in the few hundred thousands slaves and you still don’t drastically alter the numbers. But the Whites were unquestionably at that point the dominant society. The Whites had been winning the Indian wars when they had 1/20th of their current population.

        The example MHughes976 gives below of the Viking invasion of England is a good example in the other direction where a society establishes military dominance but is never able to establish cultural dominance. The Vikings are able to conquer and govern parts of England (primarily the South West http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/England_878.svg/988px-England_878.svg.png ) but they never conquered it all much less severed the cultural connection between England and the West. The English still 1600 years later still call themselves Britannia. You would have to imagine an alternative earth where the Viking expansion continues and Viking culture comes to replace Christian culture to have a comparable situation.

        As for the solutions you outline they would require that Israel be conquered by a superior force not merely outnumbered (if they are even outnumbered). And I’d agree. If the Jews were no longer the dominant society it is quite likely that the Jews would be absorbed into the conquering Muslim Arab society or killed off. Most likely killed off. When the Jews decided to stop being a walking corpse for Judaea and rejoin the world of the living as a normal country they accepted mortality as part of the price. Israel will live, likely for centuries, then die to join the many thousands of dead countries and thus Jews join the other dead societies that inhabited them.

        Everything that lives dies.

      • bryan on May 19, 2015, 8:06 am

        I suspect that Viking England is not a particularly good showcase for your military / cultural dominance hypothesis – and perhaps that you are not particularly well-informed on the subject (anyone with a modicum of knowledge would know, without even consulting Wickimedia, that Viking settlements and conquest affected the North-East of England, opposite the coast of Norway) and certainly not the South-West, which remained a stronghold of Alfred and the Wessex monarchs. Cultural dominance is difficult to demonstrate because of the paucity of archaeological sites, similarities in farming and architectural techniques, and the fact that the Scandinavian settlers were very soon converted to Christianity, just as before them the pagan Anglo-Saxons were soon converted. (The viking King Guthred was buried in York Minster after his conversion) Nevertheless there is good evidence that neither side had consistent military dominance, that peaceful coexistence (rather similar to what could happen in Palestine) was the eventual outcome, and also enduring evidence of persistent Norse cultural influence in England. Three elements are particularly evident: (1) the persistence of Viking words and terms within Northern dialects (at least 7% of West Cumbrian dialect words have been identified as of Norse origin); (2) the continuation of Norse placenames (esp -thorp and -by) in areas settled by Scandinavians; and (3) the huge influence of Viking settlement and trade in the city of York (called Jorvik by the Scandinavians) with trading contacts with the Baltic, Byzantium, Samarkand and the Red Sea. (see http://jorvik-viking-centre.co.uk/)

    • JeffB on May 18, 2015, 6:50 am

      @Shingo

      There was no boost to the economy until the Europeans started arriving and what’s more, the Palestinians were not given any piece of the actions because the immigrant Zionists imposed a policy of Hafrada – meaning segregartion.

      The economic segregation in the Kibbutz collapsed during the citrus boom. And I should mention the boycott came in reaction to the Palestinian ethnic cleansing of the early 1920s. It didn’t last long. The need for labor outstripped the Jewish population’s ability to provide it and there started to be economic cooperation. That is in 1927-1936 Israel was evolving in the direction of either a neo-liberal economic or classic colonialism (as opposed to settler colonialism). In 1937 Israelis switched back to dumping Palestinian labor.

      This BTW is one of the big problem BDS case. BDS oversimplifies. It doesn’t talk about “when” and thereby has things happening simultaneously that never did. The entire narrative of evil Zionists intent on stealing the land falls apart the moment you stay to a particular year.

      Nor was Palestine empty before the Zionists arrived. In fact, in 1905, the Zionist founders pointed out that every inch of arable land was being used and cultivated – so much for your racist claim that it was being neglected.

      I don’t see how there is a contradiction there. My claim was that huge chunks of potentially arable land were not available in 1905 because of 500-1000 of neglect. And that the land that was still being farmed wasn’t providing enough food. Your claim is that every inch of what remained of the arable land was being farmed. There is no contradiction there.

      That is demonstrably false given that the population did not migrate at all. Walter Lacquer pointed out that the problem the Zionists had was that the natural rate of growth of the Palestinian population was as great as the rate of Zionist immigration from Europe.

      The debate over migration vs. natural increase is going to require a when. Anything that broad is going to be false.

      JeffB: Your problem is that you need borders that were far stronger than the ones history shows because you are trying to defend the notion that there was some country called Palestine.

      I don’t need to defend it at all. There would never have been a Mandate for Palestine has the country of Palestine not already existed.

      There was no country of Palestine! It didn’t exist. That’s not even a question for debate. The administrative unites under the Ottomans didn’t even contain a single unit called “Palestine”: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Ottoman_Syria_1918.png

      • Shingo on May 18, 2015, 9:32 am

        The economic segregation in the Kibbutz collapsed during the citrus boom.

        No, the economic segregation of Israel continues to this day.

        And I should mention the boycott came in reaction to the Palestinian ethnic cleansing of the early 1920s.

        No you shouldn’t, because the the boycott came in reaction to the colonization of Palestine by Europeans at the expense of the Palestinians.

        The need for labor outstripped the Jewish population’s ability to provide it and there started to be economic cooperation.

        False. It was the need for a market that outstripped the Jewish population’s ability to provide it .

        This BTW is one of the big problem BDS case. BDS oversimplifies.

        No, BDS cuts through the Zionist bullshit which is why hasbara charlatans like you have to keep lying about what the declared aims of BDS are, and have to resort to halof truths and outright lies about what some high profile members of the BDS movement might have said.

        The entire narrative of evil Zionists intent on stealing the land falls apart the moment you stay to a particular year.

        WFT are you babbling about? What particular year did the Zionists stop stealing land?

        My claim was that huge chunks of potentially arable land were not available in 1905 because of 500-1000 of neglect.

        But that is clearly a lie. As the Zionist founders said, all the Arable land was already being cultivates, so how could it have been neglected? And yes, it clearly was providing more than enough food, otherwise there would not have been enough to export.

        You are caught in yet another lie.

        There was no country of Palestine! It didn’t exist. That’s not even a question for debate.

        False again. It it didn’t exist, there would have been no Mandate for Paletine. As Pierre Orts, chairman of Mandate Commission of the League Of Nations said:

        “The mandate, in Article 7, obliged the Mandatory to enact a nationality law, which again showed that the Palestinians formed a nation, and that Palestine was a State </b?, though provisionally under guardianship. It was, moreover, unnecessary to labour the point; there was no doubt whatever that Palestine was a separate political entity."
        – See more at: http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF
        /0/FD05535118AEF0DE052565ED0065DDF7#sthash.Njl4TjL6.dpufhttp://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/FD05535118AEF0DE052565ED0065DDF7

        You’re just channeling the old hasbara (orshoudlI say puss?) about land without a people for a people without a land.

        The administrative unites under the Ottomans didn’t even contain a single unit called “Palestine”

        Wrong again. The 19th century Jews certainly knew where Palestine was located. The documentary record proves that they repeatedly asked the US Consuls in Palestine and Constantinople for help in immigrating to Palestine. For example, The Ottoman Sultan had issued a firman permitting Jewish settlement in Syria that prevented Oriental and European Jews from settling in Palestine. Palestine was marked on most of the maps of the era. The first Jewish Aliya was carried-out in violation of that prohibition on mass Jewish immigration. In 1882, the American Consul summed up an immigration request from a group of Romanian Jews living in the Ottoman Empire this way:

        During the golden era of the Arab Caliphate Jund Filastin was an official military district with its own capital. The seat of government was initially located in Lod, was moved to Ramla, and finally ended up in Jerusalem. Wikipedia has an article about it.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jund_Filastin

        The United States has posted Consuls to the country of Palestine ever since the early 19th century and treated it as a formal jurisdiction. For example, the US Government addressed the Ottoman Pasha as “his excellency Raouf Pasha Governor of Jerusalem and Palestine”.
        http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS188889v01p2&isize=M&submit=Go+to+page&page=1546

        Annual reports on Trade and Commerce of the country of Palestine were submitted to the US Bureau of Foreign Commerce from the Consuls in “Jerusalem, Palestine”. See for example the report for 1884.
        http://books.google.com/books?id=M448AQAAIAAJ&pg=PA349#v=onepage&q&f=false

        Even the actual text of Basle Program of the First Zionist Congress did NOT use the term Eretz Israel, it used the term Palistina.
        http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/The_%27Basel_Program%27.jpg

        It’s amazing to most of us that you modern-day Zionists need finding aids and citations to locate Palestine. It’s fairly obvious that your ancestors knew about it, managed to find the place, and even corresponded with the government officials there without too much difficulty.

      • Mooser on May 18, 2015, 11:51 am

        “Shingo” I wonder if we are now seeing a great number of posts from, ah, certain commentors, that at one time would not have been accepted?

  13. Mooser on May 16, 2015, 6:05 pm

    “Today mainly all the Christian world needs to do is not welch on the deal.”

    Yeah, that mean old “Christian world” owes us! No wonder you are so picky about who is a Jew or an “apostate”, JeffyB, those reparations only go so far. Wouldn’t want undeserving people horning in on the deal.

    And here’s the money quote:

    “But a desire to improve Israel has nothing to do with the nihilism and race hatred that is BDS.”

  14. Boo on May 16, 2015, 8:03 pm

    “She said, ‘Erez, don’t talk, let’s do action,’ and we simply went out and removed all the signs of the Labor Party from the streets of Tel Aviv. From 11 until 4 o’clock in the morning”

    Petty vandalism, eh? Sounds exactly like something a drunk college freshman would do in the wee hours. Now she’s moved up the scale to a position where she can participate in rogue state violence.

  15. joecatron on May 16, 2015, 8:20 pm

    Selma, Alabama, not Mississippi.

  16. JeffB on May 17, 2015, 6:37 pm

    @JWalters

    I’m going to outdent because this is another good argument.

    Your reasoning is:
    1. Israel’s injustices were in the past, like the Franks and Visigoths.
    2. Other countries have injustices in their pasts, and people today don’t try to correct those.
    3. So people should stop complaining about Israel’s injustices as they have stopped complaining about those others.

    Claiming the injustices are in the past in the same way as injustices toward the Visigoths by the Franks is incorrect in two relevant ways.

    I’ll grant the summary.

    First, there is a pattern of major Israeli crimes ongoing today. Today’s crimes are not in the past in any meaningful sense. Today’s pattern of crimes is an extension and part of the pattern begun with Israel’s “founding” crimes.

    Your use of crime here is begging the question regarding those past events. We don’t consider the descendant’s of the Frank’s hold on France to be a “crime” we consider it to be history. In the case of Jews we consider it to be a crime. That is precisely the problem. You are trying to assert a principle that French people have rights that Jews do not. That is naked anti-semitism.

    As for a pattern established in the past. Same as other countries the Franks and then the French have a long pattern of defending French borders, the borders stolen from the Visigoths. WWI and WWII were them continuing the pattern of crime if we are going to apply the same language.

    You claim the “founding” crimes should be consigned to an irrelevant past, like the case of the Franks and Visigoths. This brings us to the second error. Today there are Jews trying to recover art taken by the Nazis. Thus, Jews have claimed that possessions taken within this time window should be legally recoverable. Their loss to the Nazis occurred BEFORE the residents of Palestine had their land taken by the Zionists. So their time window includes the Palestinians’ loss of land. Therefore the Palestinians should have the same right of recovery as the Jews working to recover their lost art. These Jews are not saying, “My art was stolen in the past, so I’ll just drop the case.” And neither should the Palestinians have to. Jewish legal actions have established that the statute of limitations does not yet apply to crimes within that time window.

    I would agree with you that were Israel to institutionally agree with those claims against the Germans that would be a contradiction. I don’t know that Israel has had that position. To the best of my knowledge that’s a USA position not an Israeli one. As far as I know Israel’s position s that the West Germany paid Israel a sum of 3 billion marks plus 450 million marks paid to the World Jewish Congress was German’s repartitions for slave labor and Jewish property that was stolen by the Nazis.

    So here we have a simple dispute on fact. I’m not agreeing with you that Israel makes such claims. Certainly individual Jews do and the USA has backed them but I don’t believe Israel has.

    On a related point, if the injustices to the Visigoths by the Franks should be dropped due to time passage, then the injustices to the Jews by the Romans should certainly also be dropped, since it was much farther in the past.

    Absolutely. They go together. One can assert a racial right for Palestinian refugees but that creates one for Jews. One can deny such a racial right for Palestinians and thus also it denies one for Jews. I don’t personally believe in racial rights but they get asserted quite often.

    More generally, the argument that “other people have gotten away with the same crime in the past” is not a legitimate defense in a court of law.

    That’s not quite the analogy. The analogy would be situations where the DA refused to prosecute or courts refused to pass strict sentences. And that a defense. The 8th Amendment is frequently used when a person is held to a standard much higher than others. For example we saw that just recently when William MacDonald was being prosecuted for Oral Sodomy the courts held that the State of Virginia’s unwillingness to regularly prosecute crimes against nature made them unable to prosecute in this specific case.

    Finally, you addressed none of the points in my previous post regarding your claim about the “worthiness” factor.

    I don’t know what claim I didn’t address. Possibly it was the Jewish worthiness has nothing to do with state formation… In which case I’m going cite again history. The world is filled with nations waring about their borders. The return of China to a single country and the end of the three kingdoms is possibly the most violent episode in world history (WWII is the other major candidate). Again it is history no one says we should reverse the wars of the 3 Kingdoms and redivide China because the violence was “unjustified”.

    BDSers are not engaging in an abstract morality discussion in history class. Their policy is that the governments of the world should gang up against the state of Israel so as to annihilate the Jewish nation and replace the Jewish state with a Muslim Arab state. BDS aims for something on par with what America did to Iraq, except some of them believe that a it will all be peaceful.

    I don’t have political arguments about the “justification” for the Iranian Revolution. In 2015 my choices are either to accept the consequences of that Revolution and look to make policy adjustments and thereby legitimize the revolution; or to totally reject it and aim for regime change with possible border adjustments.

    My response is that the entire structure of your argument about regarding worthiness is holding Jews to a unique standard.

    • bryan on May 18, 2015, 4:16 am

      Jeffy B – I am sure you do not really believe the nonsense you are spouting about universalism, morality and the Frankish justification for Zionism, but perhaps we need to spell it out. JWalters offered you two specific flaws in your arguments but there is another far more significant reason why they are absurd: The Frankish conquests from the Visigoths predate Magna Carta, the Enlightenment, the English, French and American Revolutions, the development of liberal democracy, the formulation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the codification of International Law, including the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and the founding of the United Nations – the Israeli conquests of 1948 and 1967 post-date all of these events and occurred at a time when the civilized world was unanimous that the acquisition of territory by conquest was illegitimate.

      The argument that ancient French violent territorial conquest legitimizes modern violent Israeli territorial conquest is on a par with the argument (which no-one now would have the temerity to advance) that the ancient practice of slave-holding, universally accepted by Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and many other peoples (though they sometimes drew the line at the enslavement of their own coreligionists) would justify the modern existence of that phenomenon. Quite simply, violent conquest, enslavement, religious persecution, political oppression, ethnic cleansing and a whole series of crimes against humanity were once upon a time viewed as the natural order of things and ordained by God (as the Old Testament repeatedly tells us). Nowadays they are simply and universally regarded as immoral, illegitimate and utterly abhorrent. It is deeply perplexing that your political ideology drives you into such a deeply immoral stance.

      • JeffB on May 18, 2015, 8:09 am

        @Bryan

        occurred at a time when the civilized world was unanimous that the acquisition of territory by conquest was illegitimate.

        Well first off Israel’s claim to the territory is self determination not rite of force. Up until WWII International law recognizes the right of people living in a territory to govern themselves. The UN in total opposition to the direction of international law that had been evolving for centuries reversed this and instead took strong conflicting position when it embraced the anti-colonial movement with its concept of permanent racial claims.

        You as a BDSer are arguing that Jews should never have had the right to a government of their own choosing that represents their interests. BDS is about eliminating self determination for Jews because the Zionist project was illegitimate and replacing Israel with an Arab Muslim state.

        Now I should mention you history is also wrong. The civilized world has over the centuries almost always held that position including during the time Frankish conquest. Then it was the the vestiges or the Roman traditions, the inheritors from the Roman system who continued to play their role even after Rome was sacked. Then it became the Pope who granted legitimacy to kings. There are cycles as war gets more or less fashionable. Not surprisingly incredibly destructive wars lead to a determination to use peaceful means, while successful wars lead to greater advocacy for war to solve complex problems.

        There is of course the issue for 2SS people of the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by force. Under that frame, Israel has borders, it is entitled to govern within those borders but that the West Bank and Gaza are outside those borders. One can argue about that case but that has nothing to do with MW or BDS.

      • Shingo on May 18, 2015, 9:40 am

        You as a BDSer are arguing that Jews should never have had the right to a government of their own choosing that represents their interests.

        You racist Zionists hasbarats keep making that claim without ever citing one example fo any of it BDSers ever making such an argument. Jews, as with any tribe, can do what they like so long as they don’t do it at the expense of others.

        BDS is about eliminating self determination for Jews because the Zionist project was illegitimate and replacing Israel with an Arab Muslim state.

        Another blatant and shameless lie. First of all, the Zionist project was illegitimate precisely because it replaced an Arab state with a Jewish state by expulsion and conquest/colonialism. The world decided long ago that these were indeed illegitimate practices.

        Withdrawing to the 1967 borders would not replace Israel with an Arab Muslim state. It would simply put and end to your greater Israel wet dream, which for you closet right wing racist nut jobs is indistinguishable from the existence of Israel as a state.

        Under that frame, Israel has borders, it is entitled to govern within those borders but that the West Bank and Gaza are outside those borders. One can argue about that case but that has nothing to do with MW or BDS.

        How does it not have anything to do with MW and BDS?

      • catalan on May 18, 2015, 8:36 am

        Bryan,
        Political oppression is universally regarded as immoral? You should mention that to Leopoldo Lopez. Him and the other three or four billion people who live in politically oppressive regimes (China, much of Asia and Africa and Latin America).
        Seriously, “in Denmark” is not equal to “universal”. I don’t see why you have to bring up delusions to criticize Israel. The same remark applies to all your other supposedly universally disapproved things like ethnic prosecution, enslavement, etc.

      • JeffB on May 18, 2015, 10:08 am

        @Shingo

        You racist Zionists hasbarats keep making that claim without ever citing one example fo any of it BDSers ever making such an argument

        You are one. Your goal quite clearly stated is the deliberately premeditated mass death of the vast majority of the Jewish population due to an economic collapse caused by a Nato blockade. Which somehow is not collective punishment.

        Bryan on this tread whom I responded to 2 seconds ago advocated for the destruction of the Jewish society in Israel. The whole point of discussing historical Zionism to to rally people towards the deliberate destruction society. If the goal were merely civil rights then the discussion would be about civil rights not how Israel is a racist colonialist… There was someone arguing with Donald just yesterday that Donald wasn’t entitled to promise on behalf of the Palestinians that any Jews should be allowed to remain in Palestine or have any rights if they did. That’s much stronger than just a denial of self determination.

        But I’ll be happy to point out where your compatriots call for something less than a right of self determination as we go. The whole BDS movement is based on a denial that Jews are a people entitled to the same rights as other people.

        Withdrawing to the 1967 borders would not replace Israel with an Arab Muslim state.

        Of course it wouldn’t. But BDS’s demand isn’t merely a 2SS. 2SSers like the European mainstream may be wrong but they aren’t racist advocates for genocide. Or in American terms the 2SS is J-Street’s while BDS ranges from the PLO charter position to the Hamas charter. A simple 2SS position has nothing to do with BDS or BDS advocates. They shouldn’t be conflated. For J-Street Israel is a normal country doing bad stuff and should stop doing the bad stuff. For BDS Israel is an intrinsic evil and needs to be destroyed.

        That’s not to say I don’t have disagreements with J-Street as well, but with J-Street there is a shared framework that Jews are fully human and Israel is having the same kinds of problems other states have. You don’t share that position.

      • Shingo on May 19, 2015, 6:28 am

        You are one. Your goal quite clearly stated is the deliberately premeditated mass death of the vast majority of the Jewish population due to an economic collapse caused by a Nato blockade.

        That’s quite extraordinary Jeff. Where and when have I quite clearly stated anything even remotely close to this JeffB? Is that what you do when losing an argument, say the first thing that comes into your racist supremacist, paranoid mind ?

        When have I ever alluded to the the death of any Jewish person?

        You are a sick and deranged liar.

        But BDS’s demand isn’t merely a 2SS. 2SSers like the European mainstream may be wrong but they aren’t racist advocates for genocide.

        What BDS is advocating for is far less destructive and violent than what Israel is doing in Gaza. Do I take that as an admission from you therefore that Israel is made up of racist advocates for genocide?

        BDS ranges from the PLO charter position to the Hamas charter.

        Oh my, you really have lost your mind. Name one statement from the BDS web site that includes anything from the PLO or Hamas Charters. Not something you claim to have heard or was inferred, not what a friend of a friend of a cousin of an associate of a BDSer once said, but an actual statement.

        For J-Street Israel is a normal country doing bad stuff and should stop doing the bad stuff.

        Who the hell cares what J-Street stands for? J-Street is for maintaining the status quo, maintain Jewish supremacy in Israel, while trying to improve Israel’s image.

        For BDS Israel is an intrinsic evil and needs to be destroyed.

        No, that is your paranoia and tribalism talking not your head. You’re rambling like a paranoid schizophrenic who thinks their parents are spying on them and that anyone who disagrees with them is an enemy.

        You are beyond pathetic, but sadly, you are a perfect stereotype of a so called “liberal Zionist”.

      • bryan on May 18, 2015, 1:12 pm

        JeffyB -“Bryan on this tread (perhaps you meant thread) whom I responded to 2 seconds ago advocated for the destruction of the Jewish society in Israel.” No I certainly did not – I would only be too happy if Israel survived (despite the overwhelming international doubts about its legitimacy) but granted equivalent rights to the Palestinians – do you have an equivalent position to put forward, or are you simply an Apartheid supporter?

      • bryan on May 18, 2015, 1:37 pm

        Catalan – if you can dismiss the enlightenment, the development of international law and human rights theory, (much of which was a response to the centuries old persecution that Jews (and many other peoples experienced)) as simply “delusions”, then you are simply an ill-educated and backward ex-Bulgar. Be quiet, unless you can enter the European mainstream.

      • eljay on May 19, 2015, 8:27 am

        || Shingo: You are beyond pathetic, but sadly, you are a perfect stereotype of a so called “liberal Zionist”. ||

        Funny, I don’t see anything remotely “liberal Zionist” about JeffB. He’s as unapologetically hard-core a Zio-supremacist as the worst of them.

        (JeffB is one of the guys who does all the dirty work while his meeker co-collectivists like R.W., jon s, y.f. and the Potato-man “hold their noses”.)

    • JWalters on May 18, 2015, 4:19 am

      “We don’t consider the descendant’s of the Frank’s hold on France to be a ‘crime’ we consider it to be history. In the case of Jews we consider it to be a crime.”

      Again, the BIG difference between your two cases is that the Franks attacked the Visigoths 1500 years ago, while the Zionists attacked the residents of Palestine within living memory. There are Palestinians living today with keys and deeds to homes and lands from which they were expelled. There are no living Visigoths with deeds to land taken by the Franks. Ignoring these facts and equating these two cases as you do in the above quote is just plain silly. Your conclusion that Jews are being singled out unfairly, based on your silly equivalence, is correspondingly silly.

      You try to slide around the fact that Jews have sought justice for their losses to the Nazis on the grounds that Israel itself may not support the efforts to return stolen art. But you acknowledge that Israel recognizes reparations for Nazi acts as appropriate. Such recognition by Israel also establishes a time window for restitution, and the Palestinians’ losses occurred within that time window. Whether the time window for restitution from the Nazi acts is established by individual Jews’ efforts to recover lost property, or by U.S. policy, or by Israeli policy makes no difference. Even by the one you acknowledge, Palestinians should have an equal right to sue for restitution. You want to deny them that, while giving Jews a pass because their theft of Palestinian land was “in the past”, using a sloppy definition of “in the past” that ignores the obvious relevant facts above.

      You bring up “racial rights”. I assert no “racial rights”. I am talking there about a reasonable time frame for accepting past history as done. I don’t know why you are bringing up “racial rights”.

      You bring up the situation of DA refusing to prosecute a case. Neither you or I were talking about such a case. But applying your new point to the present discussion, it would mean that Jews should be allowed to steal Palestinians’ land because the DA refused to prosecute the Franks for stealing the Visigoths’ land.

      Despite all my facts and logic being clearly aimed at applying the same standards of justice to Jews and non-Jews, you seem determined to claim I am applying a different standard to Jews. In reality you are ignoring facts by the ton in order to give Jews preferential treatment. You seem reasonably intelligent and articulate, but your reasoning powers are completely malfunctioning on this topic. You reveal a strong emotional attachment to the “Jewish state”, and strong emotions are known to derail rationality. It’s the syndrome of the mother who simply can’t stand to even imagine her child committing a crime. Every available stratagem of denial, hair-splitting, and distraction comes into play.

      • JeffB on May 18, 2015, 7:23 am

        @JWalters

        Again, the BIG difference between your two cases is that the Franks attacked the Visigoths 1500 years ago, while the Zionists attacked the residents of Palestine within living memory

        I’ve agreed that one could potentially make a claim that these rights exist for a time period and then expire. The question is when do they expire. How long till they expire in your thinking? 20 years, 50 years, 100 years? For example if we say 100 years then the Palestinians are still fully liable and owe reparations for the ethnic cleansing of Hebron. The cost of developing Tel Aviv after the Jaffa riots would be on their account. If we say 50 years than the Nabka is out.

        So what exactly is the statute of limitations.

        As for the Nazis your claim was “Today there are Jews trying to recover art taken by the Nazis. Thus, Jews have claimed that possessions taken within this time window should be legally recoverable” And I’ve pretty clearly shown that is not the case. The Jewish collective body, the World Zionist Congress and the Israeli Knesset both reject your claim about how reparations should work and that all claims are paid.

        The USA government, which is not under the control of Jews, is the one pushing this issue. It is Baptists not Jews who are making the claim. Now of course individual Jews when given the opportunity to get stuff sometimes take it. But I see no reason to claim that Jews are asserting

        There are Palestinians living today with keys and deeds to homes and lands from which they were expelled.

        Now they don’t, at least not in any meaningful numbers. A 30 year old in 1949 would be 96 today. People who live in squalid refugee camps don’t make it to 96 with very few exceptions. What you have are people who have stories passed down to them generation after generation after generation of homes that no longer exist in villages that no longer exist. Among the most elderly you have children that have some real but mostly constructed memories of their village from a child’s perspective.

        I have such deeds too. I have claims to property in Tzarist Russia and Ukraine. Want to see if any of those would be honored. In the USA I have inherited deeds to men’s clothing stores that no longer exist on properties that were burned out in the 1960s too. Those deeds are worthless.

        The people who were expelled are dead. The people who expelled them are dead. This is a discussion between the great grandchildren of refugees and the great grandchildren of their expellers. What you really have in the refugee community though is legend about an imaginary Palestine that never existed.

        If we were talking about a real country and real facts for things like the citrus boom we would be looking at GDP numbers or exports. But you see the constant hyper emotional nonsense that anyone who denies the Palestinian narrative is a racist, colonialist, liar…

        Despite all my facts and logic being clearly aimed at applying the same standards of justice to Jews and non-Jews

        Your facts fell apart on initial examination. You are simply making stuff about holocaust reparations and saying Israel should be held to the same standard as what happens in your imaginary world. If we were to put a value of say 250k per person, for intentional murder the debt of Germany would have been $1.5t just for the murders. Another trillion or so in property destruction interest adjusted. Nothing like that ever happened. There was a settlement with Israel which the Jews accepted and then the USA pushed for some other stuff on specific properties lost by the ancestors of USA Jews.

        You want to talk about facts. Talk about facts. That means stuff that actually happened not stuff you wished happened or think happened that didn’t. You aren’t applying facts you are ignoring them.

        Let’s take some examples:
        Bulgarian expulsion of their Turks in the 1980s
        Mauritania expelling the Fula, Toucouleur, Wolof, Soninke and Bambara
        Bhutan ethnic cleansing of the Lhotshampa
        etc… we don’t see hundreds of UN resolutions. Rather the world simply accommodates the new situation, resettles the refugees and moves on. That’s how it is handled. Today. By events at least 1 1/2 generations newer than the I/P.

        It is because you are ignoring facts that you now have to speculate about how my attachment to the Jewish state derails rationality. If I were being irrational and you rational, you would be showing me dates, tables, lists….

      • bryan on May 18, 2015, 1:30 pm

        Jeffy B – there is a sickness (not your much vaunted universalism) entering this dialogue: “People who live in squalid refugee camps don’t make it to 96 with very few exceptions”, And are there no Holocaust survivors still alive? Perhaps the fact that they will have survived for several years longer than Palestinian survivors in their camps, suggests that the German death camps were better places? You are one amoral individual to even put that argument forward. But hang it any defense of Israel is morally scrupulous – but can you understand why your unprincipled opportunism might wind people up? And do you ever think for a few seconds before you regurgitate your nonsense and hit the keyboard?

    • andrew r on May 18, 2015, 4:37 am

      We don’t consider the descendant’s of the Frank’s hold on France to be a “crime” we consider it to be history. In the case of Jews we consider it to be a crime. That is precisely the problem.

      That’s because Israel is a standing threat to the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens in the Green Line as well as those under occupation in the West Bank, Gaza and E. Jerusalem. No citizen of France who might be of Spanish descent is in danger of being expelled, nor apparently does any living person have an outstanding grievance with France on the basis of an ancient Frank-Visigoth conflict. Is anything about that rocket science?

      • JeffB on May 18, 2015, 7:55 am

        @andrew r

        That’s yet another standard. The its OK as long as it isn’t a current threat. The “its not rocket science” I think is contradicted that every single time we look at this example your side comes up with an entirely different standard distinguishing the cases. We’ve had the “it was long enough ago”, “it is irreversible”, the human rights based one (i.e. any society is fine), and now the living person grievance.

        I guarantee you if Visigoth descendants had a plausible shot of getting rich from claims against the Frank’s descendants and there was a global movement to make sure the grievances were cultivated with mass marches, a friendly media… then they would have grievances. Historical grievances are created by societies. So you aren’t really answering the question saying that people choose to have a historical grievance. A good example was the Slavs grievances against the Kosovaars. Those were real historical grievances among living people and we didn’t honor those.

        Now I’ll address your other claim or a contemporary threat. If the threat were just that Israel agree to civil rights for Palestinians under the control, in particular no more ethnic cleansing we would have a much less complex I/P debate. That’s a reasonable position that Israel is a contemporary threat to Palestinians and if it going to govern territory with Palestinians in it it needs to treat them as Israelis.

        But that is not the BDS position. BDS’s position is not that Israel needs better civil rights law but that the Israeli nation should be destroyed and replaced with an Arab Muslim nation. The 1st demand of BDS is ethnic cleansing, “Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall“. You can take a human rights position or you can be part of a group that fully endorses racism as long as it is directed against groups it doesn’t like. You can’t without contradiction do both.

        Moreover arguing the BDS position is based on a fear of ethnic cleansing is ridiculous. There is probably nothing more likely to result in increased chance of ethnic cleansing or genocide than increasing external pressure on Israeli Jews. They are most likely to lash out at a minority population aggressively when they feel vulnerable and want to diminish the number of enemy fronts. The thing that would most diminish the chances of ethnic cleansing would be economic integration. A movement designed to try and decrease the chances of ethnic cleansing would be a pro-normalization movement focusing on creating economic integration between Israelis and Palestinians. Soda Stream and Ahava would be the heroes of such a movement.

        So while this is a nice argument it is precisely the opposite of what the reality of the strategy indicates. Fear of ethnic cleansing and opposition to ethnic cleansing is not what BDS comes from.

      • Mooser on May 18, 2015, 11:57 am

        JeffyB thinks that the Zionists are entitled to the benefit of any atrocity which has happened anywhere, throughout history.’ If they did it, Zionists can do it’ seems to be “JeffyB” slogan.
        Of course, it never occurs to “JeffyB” that Zionists should pay the same price as others do, and that Zionism does not have the resources to pay those prices.

      • bryan on May 18, 2015, 2:00 pm

        I can assure you JeffyB that “the human rights based” argument is most definitely not that “any society is fine” – have you got the feintest idea what you are spouting on about – you unprincipled ideologue. Perhaps you should complete your education by reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, particularly the sections that refer to “equal dignity and rights”, irrespective of “race, colour, language, religion”, “right to life, liberty and security”, prohibition of ” torture or … cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” … ” arbitrary arrest, detention or exile” etc., etc. and study just how far the Occupation is evil – see http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/)

    • bryan on May 18, 2015, 1:03 pm

      I think JeffyB, you may have intended to refer to “right of force” not ” rite of force” which is an utterly different matter, thankfully, because there are too many rites spouted by religious nutters which no sane, decent secularist has any duty to acknowledge. but I am happy that your riposte is to invoke the dominance of the one per cent (“might = right”) though 99% might disagree with you on that matter. Perhaps though you could actually cite examples from recent history where the dominant group actually and permanently overcame sheer force of numbers, apart from Vietnam, Algeria, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, none of which are particularly good advertisements for your racist / colonialist project.

      • JeffB on May 18, 2015, 2:21 pm

        @bryan

        On rite vs. right you are correct.

        . Perhaps though you could actually cite examples from recent history where the dominant group actually and permanently overcame sheer force of numbers

        The process takes centuries. Either it happened mostly long ago and is wrapping up in the last century or so (though by recent you might even mean less time) or there is no way to know who permanently overcame whom. Israel is a bit faster.

        The obvious example on a micro scale are the cities of America. You can see wave after wave of population displacing one another things like Welsh to English to German to Irish to Jewish to Black to Puerto Rican are common.

        Another example around 1948-9 but even larger was the expulsion of 14m ethnic Germans carried out by the allies. That’s still in effect.

        Another obvious comparative examples would be the 19th century war of Turkey agains the Christian Armenians. The Armenians used to hold a tremendous amount of territory that slowly contacted from Ottoman and Russian pressure. Turkey in the 1880s and then again in the 1910s wanted to change the demography of their eastern border scattering Armenians all over the planet and thus forcing the Russia / Soviet Armenians into a most restricted territory. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/ArmenianDiaspora.png

        Another example is the forcible repatriation of Soviet people’s after World War II. The allied armies drove millions of peoples that had settled outside of Soviet territory that were of Soviet ethnicities back into the Soviet Union.

        As for your examples those are classic colonialism. That’s a ruling elite not a remapping of the nation.

        Though if you go back Vietnam is another example in the opposite direction. Between 4000 BCE and 2500 BCE there was a mass migration south of the Kinh who became the dominant ethnic group and mostly replaced the territory of the still existing earlier indigenous ones. Vietnam in an earlier era is exactly what’s happening today, a mass migration followed by a new nation taking over. So that if you were going to apply this no colonialism standard to everyone that’s yet another country where the bulk of the population needs to be forcibly migrated north back to parts of what’s China today and then other ethnic groups need to have their property restored and…

        South African is all colonialism. Most of the black tribes are only slight less recent immigrants than the whites.

        What is Rhodesia an example of? The Whites were never the dominant society there at all.

        As for Algeria I think that demonstrates you aren’t really grasping the difference. . The Pied-Nors aren’t really dominant. An 500k Pied-nors army takes 90k casualties from the 300k FLNers. The FLNers have a far better ability to replace losses (8::1 population ratio) and lose 150k. The kill ratio is under 1::2 with just 13% of the population even with almost twice as many forces. I think the problem was that the Pied-Nors wanted a colonial existence in Algeria they didn’t want to become Algeria. Or they just sucked at war.

        If the kill ratio had been something more reasonable for a European army against a colonist army like 1:100-1::300 I suspect the result is quite different. And the high end is what you would see Israel vs. Palestine if such a thing were ever going to happen which it won’t because Israel is not Rhodesia and Jews are not 3% of the population. But about Algeria it is a good lesson about surrender. Jews know there is no France to retreat to at the end of the war. Jewish children learn well the alternative to Zionism is Auschwitz. .So they should understand what happens if they lose.

      • Bornajoo on May 19, 2015, 2:25 am

        “Jewish children learn well the alternative to Zionism is Auschwitz. .So they should understand what happens if they lose.” (JeffB)

        Zionists like you brainwash your children to grow up fearful, paranoid and to hate the Palestinians and Arabs in general.

        The vast, vast majority of Palestinians just want to live a normal life with dignity and their human rights. But in your dark, sick paranoid world you only believe they will slaughter you the first chance they get.

        And that’s what you teach your children, that’s what they taught my cousins’ children and that’s what they taught my niece and nephews. All now completely brainwashed and damaged for life

      • Kris on May 19, 2015, 10:28 am

        @JeffB: “Jewish children learn well the alternative to Zionism is Auschwitz. .So they should understand what happens if they lose.”

        Actually, Jewish children should be studying the Nazis and the Nuremberg Trials.

      • eljay on May 19, 2015, 10:48 am

        || JeffB: … Jewish children learn well the alternative to Zionism is Auschwitz. … ||

        Except that it isn’t. Which means that the students are not learning well, and the teachers are doing them a great disservice by poisoning their minds.

  17. MHughes976 on May 18, 2015, 8:24 am

    Acts in the distant past are not necessarily excluded from the category of crimes. I grew up with the idea, right or wrong, that the ‘barbarian’ invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries were criminal and the ‘Viking’ invasions of later days even more so. King Alfred, who led the resistance to the Vikings, is still our only monarch customarily called ‘Great’ – my English ancestors probably thought this title deserved, though I suspect that my Welsh ancestors by contrast considered the Vikings to be liberators. The English-Welsh conflict took near a thousand years to settle.
    I believe that it is quite important to think through some of the moral problems which arose in the distant past: the past is most definitely not another country where moral categories do not apply.
    The true contrast is not between the conflicts of old time and the conflicts of recent days but between conflicts that have been settled over time, in the sense that there are now no armies in the field and no one is now a refugee or a disfranchised person or one excluded from claimed property because of them, and by contrast conflicts where people are still in these horrible conditions.
    Our ancestors were not so different from us as not to know that marauding, invasion and slaughter were hideous crimes though like us they thought that there were exceptions based on self-defence and ideology, usually special divine decree.

    • Donald on May 18, 2015, 9:38 am

      That’s fine MHughes and I agree, but you do realize that someone bringing up the Franks and Visigoths in this context is a kook, don’t you? I really do agree with you, but your post is an example of an Internet phenomenon–there is no troll that ever goes hungry, because some well-meaning person will come along and think about how awful it was that the Vikings raped and pillaged villages a thousand years ago and how some conflicts and abuses really do drag on for centuries, at least in some cases. I thought of American slavery myself, but didn’t bring it up because we could go off on 50 different tangents, and also because some of us realize there is a direct continuation of the original crime going on now. I did bring up the ur-example of all such cases–the apparent genocide of the Neandertals, though apparently not complete since there are some bits of the Neandertal genome in some of us.

      JeffB is not trying to have a serious discussion of all possible historical cases of oppression and when one should be concerned about them and when not. He is engaged in an idiotic attempt at distraction involving, among other things, the freaking Visigoths. As it happens his idiocy has inspired some interesting responses from tree and others, but no, we don’t have to call into question the basic moral foundations of the pro-Palestinian movement because JeffB can pick some random atrocity from 1500 years ago and call us hypocrites.

      But hey, let’s extend it even further. Why limit this to humans? Some say the megafauna extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene were caused by Homo sapiens. How can we possibly criticize the Nakba when we say nothing about the poor mastodons, the saber toothed cats, and the short faced bears? And it is important–people really do get upset over the question of whether Native Americans actually caused a mass extinction. But I don’ think it is necessary to respond to a troll trying to excuse Israel’s crimes with a thousand page discussion of every ethical issue that has ever come up. But if we are going to do this let’s have some fun with it. Is it possible to parody JeffB or are his examples already as ridiculous as it is possible to get?

      • Donald on May 18, 2015, 9:57 am

        In keeping with my own challenge, I have already responded to the plight of the Visigoths with the sad examples of the Neandertals, mastodons, and short-faced bears. But now I’m thinking even the latter is too anthropocentric. It’s the typical lefty response–blame humanity first. But what about what the placental mammals did to the marsupials in SouthAmerica when the Central American land bridge went up? And what happened to the anaerobes when photosynthesis was invented? Heh? What about that? Any of you so called social justice warrior types have anything to say?

      • catalan on May 18, 2015, 11:03 am

        “sad examples of the Neandertals, mastodons, and short-faced bears. – ” Donald
        These are not things to be sarcastic about, they are real tragedies. The fact is that Homo sapiens has presented quite possibly the greatest threat to diversity of life since 400 million years. The annihilation of virtually all large land and marine mammals, the other hominids (e.g Neanderthals), the great apes, forests, and essentially every form of life except domesticated animals and grains is a tragedy of truly galactic proportions.
        The short-sightedness and greed of humanity is truly staggering. Here is a species that actually is quite willing to destroy all life on earth over greed. Israel is not free of guilt but the final extinction will most likely come through a conflict among Russia, China, and the U.S.

      • just on May 18, 2015, 12:36 pm

        @ catalan’s “These are not things to be sarcastic about, they are real tragedies.”

        You’ve got feelings for extinct forms of life, but none for the living and breathing tragedy of the Palestinians that Israel is ethnically cleansing, kidnapping, incarcerating, maiming, terrorizing, Occupying, and besieging.

        Nice to know that you’ve got your priorities straight!

      • Donald on May 18, 2015, 12:53 pm

        Catalan, get a grip. The sarcasm is not to say that human- caused mass extinctions are a trivial issue, but that JeffB will use any argument at all to distract attention from Israel. I read Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction recently–quite depressing.

        I lose track of the positions of some of the posters here. Are you a JeffB ally playing along with his distraction attempt?

      • catalan on May 18, 2015, 12:58 pm

        “You’ve got feelings for extinct forms of life, but none for the living and breathing tragedy of the Palestinians -” just
        We will all be extinct within not too long. I am convinced that human greed and obsession with ideas (nationalism, capitalism, socialism) will eventually lead to an all-extinguishing conflict.
        When some aliens eons in the future find us, they will be confused to find a civilization that produced Socrates, Buddha, Newton, and Bach, yet blew itself up over some obscure conflict. More likely than not Nagorno Karabakh, Cyprus, Abkhazia, or something similar will ignite the next world war, just like Bosnia ignited the first one, and Danzig the second.
        You are not seeking compassion and moderation but another nationalist state in Palestine. Humanity has, in my opinion, passed its golden hour. It had the opportunity for happiness and immortality but chose greed and tribalism.
        Mozart lost. Putin won.

      • just on May 18, 2015, 1:26 pm

        “Are you a JeffB ally playing along with his distraction attempt?”

        Donald, that could very well be the case! after all, catalan has not commented on his misspellings at all.

      • catalan on May 18, 2015, 2:01 pm

        “Donald, that could very well be the case! after all, catalan has not commented on his misspellings at all. – ” just
        We are colleagues at the Israeli information ministry. You should have seen the faces of the other agents when I proposed as a front the personality of a Bulgarian Jewish accountant living in New Mexico, working for a municipality, and interested in ancient history.
        They doubted that I could pull it off. But with the kind of money they pay, I learned a little bit and here I am.
        Yes, Giles, we actually do have a secret network!

      • Mooser on May 18, 2015, 2:17 pm

        “Mozart lost.”

        Good. I got the rockin’ pneumonia, and
        I need a shot of rhythm and blues. Now, roll over Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news.

      • JeffB on May 18, 2015, 2:24 pm

        @catalan

        Hope we can get the kids together at the next Israeli information ministry family day. My daughter enjoyed the Jenga and the row boating. :)

      • catalan on May 21, 2015, 11:54 am

        “Hope we can get the kids together at the next Israeli information ministry family day” JeffB
        That’s my favorite part! When we meet up, have a drink, and exchange stories. It’s what makes this job worth it. It’s always fun to exchange ideas about new avatars. Perhaps next time I can be a Viking from Lappland, who spent time in India. I need to hone my “diversion” skills, lest we forget, it’s a war! We are public servants, and with the great pay comes great responsibility.

    • MHughes976 on May 21, 2015, 11:37 am

      I’m sure you’re right, Donald, that distraction and change of subject is a standard part of rhetoric in unjust causes. I haven’t got the fortitude to bandy words with some of the bad rhetoricians here but I do sometimes want to say something to back up those like yourself or Andrew R whose fortitude exceeds mine.

  18. bintbiba on May 18, 2015, 9:58 am

    ooh Donald,

    What a wonderful comment ….in all seriousness you had me choking on my coffee !
    “But if we are going to do this let’s have some fun with it ”

    The magic power of Logic.

    Well deserved, JeffB !

    • JeffB on May 18, 2015, 10:13 am

      @bintbiba

      I’ve myself used examples much further back than his. My favorite is the plants displacing the anaerobic bacteria. I respond to Palestinian claims with “get rid of the oxygen atmosphere the anaerobic bacteria want their planet back from the colonists” regularly. As I’ve said before every person living does so because of 10,000 rounds of murder and displacement. Donald is just repeating my point, and claiming that his repetition refutes it.

      Societies live and die. We can morn for dead societies but we can’t resurrect them. The person who died yesterday can no more be resurrected than the one who died 1000 years ago. The BDS Palestine is a particularly bad candidate for resurrection because that society never existed at all, it is like trying to resurrect Albus Dumbledore.

      • Mooser on May 18, 2015, 12:01 pm

        “We can morn for dead societies but we can’t resurrect them.”

        Sure, “JeffyB”, after all everything happens for the best, in this best of all possible worlds!!! Whoopee. Well, except when it happens to Jews, in which case it “justifies” what happens for the best!

      • Donald on May 18, 2015, 1:10 pm

        Plants didn’t invent photosynthesis, JeffB. Some form of bacteria did. But I didn’t realize you’d actually used this example and you think it’s a nice valid social Darwinian way to justify Israel’s behavior. I really can’t parody you. Maybe I should have gone with the photon ionization of neutral atoms ethical dilemma I imagined typing about, but it seemed too over the top, too strained, too ridiculous and cutesy. Maybe I was wrong.

    • Donald on May 18, 2015, 1:01 pm

      Thanks bintbiba. I love the phrase “short faced bear” and have decided to use it in all applicable conversations. Fortunately with JeffB and his morality posts, literally anything and everything is applicable. I thought of including comments on the ionization energy of hydrogen, the Turing test, plate tectonics, and Tolkien’s linguistics in LOTR, but life is short,as are the faces of short faced bears, so I went with them.

      Impressive animals, btw. I wish they were still around. I doubt humans armed with pointy sticks took them on directly.

      • Mooser on May 18, 2015, 2:57 pm

        There are still, cough, cough a few examples of the minor megafauna around today, beleaguered as we are.

  19. bintbiba on May 18, 2015, 10:59 am

    The death of my beloved parents and all parents, did not mark the end of our society.
    I do not wish to get into a polemic with you…except to affirm that I, and my people are Palestinian, living, breathing Palestinians… From the land of Palestine, Of the Land of Palestine,
    In an out of the land of Palestine…. and in 2000-3000 years there will still be people of Palestine with a rich Culture, Language , Memory and Yearning , as happens ….. and who knows how the sad, sordid ,story will end.

    • JeffB on May 18, 2015, 12:12 pm

      @bintbiba

      Didn’t know you were Palestinian. Thought you were just a self righteous American liberal looking to prove their radical-chic bonafides by insulting the imperialist Jewish empire. Sorry I was too flippant with you. You got a legitimate complaint, they don’t.

      I can walk you through what I meant or if this is too sensitive I can pass and let you get in the last word. Your call.

      • andrew r on May 18, 2015, 5:26 pm

        You got a legitimate complaint, they don’t.

        Got a newsflash for you JeffB: There’s a Jewish state in Palestine today because some people who didn’t live in the region couldn’t mind their own beeswax. You don’t get a hair up your ass about the British issuing the Balfour Decl. Ha ha different standard.

        It had the opportunity for happiness and immortality but chose greed and tribalism.

        And in supporting the Zionist movement that’s exactly the choice you made. As with opposing the Palestinian refugees’ right of return.

      • bintbiba on May 18, 2015, 6:25 pm

        Mighty gracious of you, JeffB. Apology accepted.

        I think I ‘ll pass being walked through what you meant , thank you very much.

        I can read .

        Peace .

      • JeffB on May 18, 2015, 6:35 pm

        @Andrew r

        Got a newsflash for you JeffB: There’s a Jewish state in Palestine today because some people who didn’t live in the region couldn’t mind their own beeswax. You don’t get a hair up your ass about the British issuing the Balfour Decl. Ha ha different standard.

        First off the British were the government of Palestine. Of course they don’t mind their beeswax, it was, at least in part, their country. As for it existing because of the British you are delusional. The British turned against Jewish immigration pretty quickly and became moderately hostile to it. The people responsible for Israel are the Jews. And while they didn’t live in the region then they do by a majority now.

      • just on May 18, 2015, 7:02 pm

        A thoroughly distasteful comment, JeffB.

        “Thought you were just a self righteous American liberal looking to prove their radical-chic bonafides by insulting the imperialist Jewish empire.”

        Your wild assumptions about others, and your denigration of people who disagree with your rabid Zionist, revisionist, and false history and present is nasty.

        (iirc, you live in the US)

      • eljay on May 18, 2015, 7:21 pm

        || bintbiba @ May 18, 2015, 6:25 pm ||

        My respect to you, bintbiba. :-)

      • andrew r on May 19, 2015, 12:39 am

        Uh, Jeff, the British were in the process of invading Palestine when the Balfour Declaration was issued. It was only a month afterward they took Jerusalem and still almost another year before they had the Galilee. And frankly, if Palestine hadn’t been occupied by a friendly power after WWI, whatever the Zionists accomplished up until then would most likely have been rolled back. Certainly any further progress would have been dead in the water.

        Also, please read some scholarly material on the League of Nations Mandate system, because while the British did govern Palestine, they did not consider it part of their domain like India.

        http://aiscibhistory.wikispaces.com/file/view/meaningmandates.pdf

        Mandatory rule was different from earlier, discredited types of imperial rule, the British liberals and humanitarians who helped to frame it argued, being purely benevolent in its intent and intended to last only for a limited time. It was a transitional form, a
        halfway house between dependence and independence, perhaps even a tool for making those earlier and more exploitative forms of imperial rule obsolete. 5 The first serious scholarly investigations undertaken (often by Americans) in the 1920s tended to endorse that liberal view.
        The mandates system, the American legal scholar Quincy Wright concluded in his massive study published in 1930, was not only a practical and more humanitarian means of administering
        “backward areas,” but was having a spill-over effect as well, as the principles of trusteeship and tutelage on which it was based came to be accepted throughout the colonies.6

    • just on May 18, 2015, 1:31 pm

      Well said, bintbiba. That’s Sumud. That’s you and yours.

      • Bornajoo on May 18, 2015, 1:37 pm

        “Well said, bintbiba. That’s Sumud. That’s you and yours”

        Ditto Just!!

        +1 Bintbiba!

      • bintbiba on May 18, 2015, 6:31 pm

        Just, Bornajoo…

        Many thanks to you both.

      • bintbiba on May 19, 2015, 3:05 am

        @ eljay

        Many thanks !
        My Respect to you, too !

    • Marnie on May 19, 2015, 2:26 pm

      You are much more gracious than I could ever hope to be.

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