In other words, Begin recognized at Vilna that the situation “back home” was not as dire as he had initially thought.
Perhaps we should all try to assess the original conditions, contexts and causes of this whole situation, and de-hyperbolize them in order to break the cycle of pathology BEFORE we all end up in a prison of our own making.
Iran is far more stable than Israel.
Stephen Kinzer has observed that Iran has had a functioning system of citizen-input to their government’s decision-making for nearly a century, with awareness of constitutional governance that goes back even farther.
And if Israel is such a boon to the US, why is it the US is discussing calling upon Iran rather than Israel to aid in countering ISIS in Iraq?
— Oh, I know: because Israel stands to gain from Kurdish separation from the Iraq orb. As in the Ukraine, Israel is working counter to US preferences, and working for Israel’s advantage, in Ukraine and wrt to Kurdistan.
aka Moron replies to Shingo:
As J J Goldberg noted in his discussion of the Kishinev pogrom,
“The event, and the worldwide wave of Jewish outrage that it evoked, laid the foundations of modern Israel, gave birth to contemporary American-Jewish activism and helped bring about the downfall of the czarist regime.
from the Haaretz article:
“Is our downtrodden past at the root of the prevalent violence? And, if so, how does one break this pathological cycle?”
No, the “downtrodden past” of the Jewish people is NOT “at the root.”
What IS at the root of “this pathological cycle” is the mythology that Jews have a uniquely “downtrodden past.”
In late August 2012 Jane Eisner spoke at a J Street event. Among other things she said,
“The Jewish community today is at a historic turning point. We face . . .opportunities that we might not have imagined a generation or two ago . . .challenges brought about by our prosperity, by our transition from a victimized minority to a group with extraordinary wealth, social status, and political power.
Mark the date well: August 2012, and hold it in mind while considering Edwin Black’s explanation for the anticipated efficacy of the Jewish-led boycott of Germany, March 1933 – 1941:
“Among the Hoffjuden who considered themselves the custodians of Jewish defense, Jacob Schiff stood out as a central figure. A major factor in international finance, Schiff’s greatest weapon was money: giving it, denying it. After the notorious Kishinev pogrom of Passover 1903, Schiff decided to personally lead a crusade to force Czar Nicholas to abandon his antisemitic campaign.
“Schiff used his influence with friends and family in Europe to commit major Jewish and even non-Jewish financial houses to a banking boycott of Russia. And before long, Russia’s loan requests were systematically denied in most French, English, and U.S. money markets. In 1904, after war broke out between Russia and Japan, Schiff lobbied tirelessly among commercial adversaries and cohorts alike to grant high-risk war loans to the Japanese. About $100 million, suddenly infused, quickly armed the under-equipped Japanese, allowing them to score a series of humiliating victories. Schiff’s loans were officially recognized as the pivotal factor in Japan’s victory, and the Jewish leader was commemorated in Japanese newspapers and history books as a new national hero.
“The banking boycott and the financing of Japan’s victory were only the first rounds. In 1906, Schiff and other influential Hoffjuden formed the American Jewish Committee. Their first major objective was abrogation of the Russo-American commercial treaty, the legal basis of all friendly relations with Russia. The Committee asserted that the czar’s denial of Russian visas to Jewish American citizens was an affront not just to America’s Jewish citizens but to the United States itself.”
Presidential candidate William H. Taft made a campaign promise to abrogate the treaty but refused to honor the pledge once elected. Thereupon, Schiff and the American Jewish Committee lobbied Congress to force the resolution.
“Within weeks, after the House voted 300 to 1 to abrogate, Taft capitulated . . . and terminate[d] the treaty.”
[Still the czar would not yield.] “Massacres continued, and the Jewish death toll rose. So the banking boycott was tightened. Its effects became most destructive, however, during World War I, when the czar needed multimillion-dollar military loans. Committee members were criticized for the stubborn continuation of their boycott even as it threatened the Allied war effort. But the boycott remained in effect until the monarchy was toppled in 1917.”
–(The Transfer Agreement, by Edwin Black, pp. 30-32)
Leonard Stein, assistant and companion to Chaim Weizmann for over 20 years, devotes almost 700 pages to chronicling Weizmann’s efforts throughout the course of World War I to insert himself among Britain’s decision-makers and influence their actions in order to obtain the The Balfour Declaration.
In Chapter 5 of her book, Against Our Better Judgment, Alison Weir’s narrative (buttressed by Edwin Black’s narrative in Transfer Agreement) claims that
“After the [first world] war, the victors met in a peace conference and agreed to a set of peace accords that addressed . . . the fate of the Ottoman Empire’s Middle East territories. . . .
Zionists, including Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, World Zionist Organization officials, and an American delegation, went to the peace conference to lobby for a Jewish “home” in Palestine and to push for Balfour wording to be incorporated in the peace accords. The official U. S. delegation to the peace conference also contained a number of highly placed Zionists. . . .
Ultimately, the mandate over Palestine given to Britain supported the Zionist project and included the Balfour language. . . .”
While delegates negotiated in Paris, the King-Crane Commission interviewed hundreds of leaders and members of the indigenous populations of the lands being discussed. The Commission advised that national governments
“should derive their authority from the initiative and free choice of the native populations,” and that it seemed clear that Zionists intended “a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.”
Nevertheless,
“Zionists through Brandeis dominated the situation . . . and the report was suppressed until after the Peace Accords were enacted. . . . [A] pro-Israel historian noted, “with the burial of the King-Crane report, a major obstacle in the Zionist path disappeared.” The U. S. delegation was forced to follow Zionist directives.”
In Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, Eric Weitz narrates the influence of Jewish persons in Germany on the establishment and conduct of the Weimar Republic, from the German revolution 1918 until Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, January 1933.
Black’s Transfer Agreement provides some insight into the otherwise shrouded period between January 1933 and 1938 when Zionist anti-German activism and financial and settlement activity in Palestine reached a fever pitch. Of that same period, 1933 – 1938, Breitman and Lichtman wrote:
[B]efore the war Nazi oppression of German Jews followed a jagged trajectory. Some Nazi activists physically assaulted Jews in the early exuberant days of Hitler’s semilegal revolution. Once secure in their authority, Nazi officials curbed personal violence, but enacted a series of discriminatory laws and decrees . . . against Jews. Only in late 1938 did central authorities instigate [sic] the violence known as Kristallnacht . . . For the first time, the Gestapo’s agents imprisoned tens of thousands of German Jews in concentration camps. . .” [emphases added]
Lynne Olson’s record of “America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941” includes discussion of numerous highly placed Zionist and Jewish activists in the interventionist camp.
In Roosevelt’s Second Act: The Election of 1940 and the Politics of War (Pivotal Moments in American History), author Richard Moe records that Felix Frankfurter was the only with whom FDR discussed his decision to run for an unprecedented third term, in a private conversation in the White House within days of FDR making public that intention.
John Judis has traced the baleful influence of Zionists on Truman’s decision to recognize Israel in 1948.
Over the past century and more, from Jacob Schiff in 1903 to Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and Rabbi Stephen Wise, to Martin Indyk today, Jewish persons have used wealth and influence upon leaders at the highest rungs of major governments and institutions to shape events and decisions that affected the lives of millions of people.
So precisely what “transition from a victimized minority to a group with extraordinary wealth, social status, and political power” is Eisner referring to? Exactly when in the past 110 years have Jews NOT had wealth and political power disproportionate to their “minority status”?
Perhaps the way to “break this pathological cycle” is for Jewish people to confront their own reality, and shed the falsified narrative of perpetual victimhood.
Meanwhile back at the ranch —
How are things between the Presbyterians (PCUSA) and Rabbis for Human Rights?
The problem with your irenic proposal is that it rewards Israel for sixty years of criminal behavior that has destroyed the lives and futures of millions of innocent people.
And why would the USA or Florida want a colony of such brainwashed ideologues in its environs? Your argument is, “Israelis act this way because they are in the Holy Land. Take them out of the Holy Land, put them in some of the most desirable geography in USA, problem solved.”
Zionism is a real estate-specific ideology. Where would Jerusalem be?
Are you sure the situation would be a win-win? How would Jewish leaders and even Jewish young people who have been raised on years of believing they are in charge, and they are superior, respond to living in a federation and a state where they have no military of their own; where they are required to comply with rules that they do not have complete control over, etc?
Would Hebrew be their national language? Ooops, national — what does that mean? Would Jews still be a people? Would their identity be somehow different from their surrounding Floridians?
“The problem is not in our stars but in ourselves” — or, in centuries-long ideological indoctrination. THAT is what has to change.
As much as I abhor the Nazi comparison, recall a comment Norman Finkelstein made in a videod conversation with a Lebanese journalist after 2006. He compared Israel to Germany, noted that both had powerful militaries; that Germany suffered defeat and was now “the most morally conscientious of all states.” He continued, “Israel must suffer a defeat, to bring them to their senses.”
I would add, Then, Israel must be de-zionized and must live under occupation for a hundred years, just as Germany was forced to do.
One way to maintain the balance that Daniel Rich advises is by spotlighting the “good guys”. I make lists of those American thought leaders whose voices I wish were heard more often than those who appear to control American foreign policy.
Andrew Bacevich, http://www.c-span.org/video/?320246-6/washington-journal-end-american-exceptionalism Chas Freeman, http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/29130/pid/897 and Flynt and Hillary Leverett http://mediasite.dsl.psu.edu/Mediasite/Play/4fa17d9b059e47b3bbb751cbda5480cb1d are on that list.
“Nazism wanted and Zionism wants to eliminate the ‘other’ altogether. It’s not a coincidence that there are rallies with crowds chanting “death to arabs”. The nazis tried to get rid of the jews with the Transfer Agreement but got more aggressive later, zionists tried with 66 years of Nakba, most dramatically in 1947/8/9 and 1967.”
Wait a minute —
1. Rabbi Stephen Wise recorded in his autobiography that “within a fortnight of der Fuhrer’s appointment, Louis Brandeis said to Wise: “All Jews must leave Germany. … I urge that no Jew shall remain in Germany.” (See Challenging Years, p. 242)
2. Wasn’t it zionists who negotiated the Transfer Agreement?
To sustain the parallel you insist upon, one would have to have Palestinians insisting on their removal from West Bank and Gaza, Jaffa and the Jezreal, etc., and that before the Balfour agreement in 1917.