USA media news - Chomsky Book - Palestine Israel
The Whining About "24" Has Started
Posted by Robin Boyd on January 16, 2007 - 11:33.Last night I predicted that CAIR would be demanding an apology from FOX for the depiction of Muslims in "24" within 24 hours. Well it's not CAIR but ABC has started the ball rolling...
Sut Jhally, co-producer and co-director of the film "Hijacking Catastrophe," says the dramatic action in the show creates a dangerous climate in which the public loses some of its perspective on what's real and what's not. Of course that may be a minority opinion given the show's enormous popularity.
Television shows like '24' also reinforce stereotypes about Arabs, he said, and in this episode connections are drawn between terrorism, Arabs and nuclear war. With the U.S. wrestling with Iran over its nuclear capabilities, these associations are dangerous, he said.
"This television show is very political, and it's no accident that it's on Fox," said Jhally, who directs the Media and Education Foundation and is professor of communications at University of Massachusetts. "Given their propaganda system, it doesn't surprise me."
How many times do we have to tell the MSM that if they want to be taken seriously, they need to reveal the background of their "experts"? Giving the complete title of a movie wound be a great place to start...
A new documentary "Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire" examines how the Bush administration used Sept. 11 to transform American foreign policy and enter a phase of so-called preemptive warfare while rolling back civil liberties and social programs at home.
The film is produced by the Media Education Foundation and features former government officials combined with many of the leading scholars and thinkers of our time including Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, Chalmers Johnson, Daniel Ellsberg, Tariq Ali and more. The film is narrated by Julian Bond.
Nah - no bias here.... Move along now...
http://newsbusters.org/node/10194
Chicago improv legend grows
`Trucker's' Koechner latest to make his mark| |
For decades, veterans of Chicago's improv scene have been migrating to television, but these days, there's an unusually strong bumper crop of Windy City talent on the small screen.
Veterans of the fertile Second City and IO (formerly ImprovOlympic) stages of the '90s are responsible for a good deal of the most intelligent comedy on TV these days (and these are just a few of the more high-profile names):
Steve Carell is the quietly masterful star of "The Office."
Steven Colbert's wickedly sharp "Colbert Report" gets funnier by the week.
Neil Flynn is an ace supporting performer on "Scrubs" (he also did a deft guest turn as a washed-up ballplayer on "My Boys" recently).
Tina Fey's "30 Rock" is must-see TV, in part thanks to a sweetly goofy performance by yet another Second City and IO veteran, Jack McBrayer.
Who knows if it's because of the improv training they received here or the performers' innate talent, but what unites these varied characters is that they are characters -- they're not just vaguely defined stock personas who exist only to deliver or guffaw at predictable one-liners. What's funny about them derives from the fact that they're real human beings, even at their most ridiculous.
Add a sly drifter named Gerald "T-Bones" Tibbins to that list of memorable creations.
Tibbins, one-half of the highly amusing "Naked Trucker & T-Bones Show" (9:30 p.m. Wednesday, Comedy Central), is the creation of David Koechner, a mainstay of Chicago's improv scene from 1985 until 1995. The actor debuted an early version of the audacious character years ago for a Chicago improv show called Jazz Freddy.
"It was loosely based on a drifter that had come through my hometown in high school, this guy Four-Way George," says Koechner, a 44-year-old native of Tipton, Mo.
A few years after moving out to L.A., Koechner was invited to perform in a late-night revue created by Dave "Gruber" Allen, who does a character called the Naked Trucker. When T-Bones took the stage with the Naked Trucker, it was a true meeting of the minds, and their twisted, deceptively deep show became a mainstay of Los Angeles' comedy scene.
On the road
For their TV show, the duo performs songs and chitchats in front of an audience; those bits are interspersed with filmed sketches, which usually revolve around T-Bones' demented schemes or the pair's inspired interactions with hitchhikers.
In the show's premiere, one hitchhiker is played by Will Ferrell, a castmate of Koechner's when the Chicago actor did a single season of "Saturday Night Live." Andy Richter, another IO veteran, makes a guest appearance in a later outing.
One of the things that's so pleasing about the pairing is that the Naked Trucker seems like a perfectly reasonable, intelligent guy. Who just happens to be nude. And just when you're ready to dismiss the brash and cocky T-Bones as a drunken, no-account schemer, he'll toss out a reference to Samuel Beckett, John Negroponte or Noam Chomsky.
One thing's for sure, "The Naked Trucker & T-Bones Show" is like nothing else on TV.
"That's what I love, no one knows how to describe it," says Koechner with a laugh. "To me that is high praise."
Koechner describes the pair's vibe as "Abbott and Costello meets Martin and Lewis meets the Smothers Brothers all on a long road trip with Jack Kerouac, and Creedence Clearwater Revival is playing on an 8-track player, loudly.
All along the road, the hay bales are soaked in moonshine, and they're on fire, while Noam Chomsky discusses the entire enterprise with the undead ghosts of Joseph Campbell and Hunter S. Thompson."
As for T-Bones, he's a product, in part, of Koechner's years of study with IO's Charna Halpern and Chicago improv icon Del Close, whose teachings the actor calls the "greatest part of what informs my work."
"Del said, `Play everything at the top of your intelligence.' And so that's what we've endeavored to do," Koechner says. The idea was, "don't talk down to your own characters and certainly don't talk down to your audience."
Especially at IO, where he cites his fellow students as among his best teachers, "it was completely put in your hands to develop and create your own voice," he adds.
"It was encouraged -- it was insisted upon."
"It kind of reminded me of being a kid and playing and not caring what you looked like or if you sounded foolish," fellow IO and Second City veteran McBrayer said in a recent interview. "It was just fun."
Twenty years after stumbling upon Chicago improv, Koechner still participates in the scene. He does improv with fellow Chicago transplants at the IO's L.A. outpost, and he and Allen continue to perform the live version of "The Naked Trucker & T-Bones Show" at the L.A. club Largo when their schedules allow.
http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/tv/mmx-0701160316jan17,0,6173565.story?coll=mmx-television_heds
Book Review: 100 Ways America is Screwing Up the World by John Tirman
I was initially reluctant to read this book for a reason I cannot quite articulate. I think my feeling was, and still is, something like ‘it’s too simplistic’ or ‘illogically overgeneralized’. I think it is a mark of maturity to take criticism well and learn from it, both as an individual and as a society or nation, but being told that one is just “screwing it up” tends to provoke a bad reaction instead of a mature one, and tends not to help one improve very much (this is my main problem with some of the work of Noam Chomsky, an example of which I am discussing in a 9-part series on this site). Also, in one sense it is not accurate. America is not ’screwing up the world’, but certain prevalent trends in America and certain actions and trends of our leaders are causing a lot of unnecessary harm to a lot of people, and should be opposed. The lack of clarity of the title of the book in this case is unfortunate, as the author of this book is very mature, and much of the book reads like an abstract or concise summary of the major problems of America and the world, many of which we can address, and some of which will not be known to the general reader as they do not or have not recieved much attention in the popular press.
The author is John Tirman, executive director of the Center for International Studies at MIT, a leading scholar in the field of international affairs and contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The Nation. Given this, I wonder if the title and structure of the book (references given online instead of in the book) are part of a marketing scheme with an understandable, if somewhat questionable logic to it. I have seen this kind of logic in science writing. I think it was Stephen Hawking who warned that for every equation you put in a popular book, your sales decrease by half. His long-time collegue, Roger Penrose, obviously disagrees, as his books and especially his latest popular work, The Road to Reality, are filled with equations in fields of mathematical physics that many who don’t follow the sciences much aren’t likely to have ever even heard of. I am not sure which is the better strategy; I suppose it depends upon intent. If one wants to be more widely read but not get all the points across with supporting evidence, then perhaps the way of Tirman and Hawking is the best. However, any serious student of international affairs or mathematical physics may find Hawking and Tirman trivial.
If it was Tirman’s aim to give a summary of the most important problems in American foreign policy today with the option of further research for the general reader, he has done his job well. Most readers will find much to agree with in this book, as Tirman, like any honest and objective scholar, comes off as mainly non-partisan and only vaguely ideological in his analysis. The selection of topics is based on reasonable principles but also reflects to some degree the personal preferences and desires of the author. So we find essential chapters on America’s significant contribution to global warming and the destruction of the natural environment, support for oppressive regimes, defiance of international law and basic moral and political norms, etc., along with some discussion of the likes of Mel Gibson, Paris Hilton, and Michael Jackson. Tirman designates the last ten issues on his list “Ten Annoyances” to indicate that he finds them comparitively trivial, but includes them, I think, because they do in fact say something significant about the American popular mind (it is an interesting question why the celebrity culture even exists, isn’t it?). For good measure, and no doubt to also pre-empt the vacuous charge of “American hating leftist” (or whatever), Tirman includes a section on “Ten Things America Does Right in the World”, including fairness, secularism, creativity, and human rights as appropriate topics.
The picture all of this very general discussion gives is of an often dangerous and destructive but potentially glorious nation run on principles of justice, tolerance, and freedom as liberation of the spirit of the common people. Walt Whitman, who in his life and work would make my list as one of the greatest contributions America has given the world, argued in Democratic Vistas that America finds it’s greatness not in it’s institutions or national leaders or wealth but in the common people, and may find it’s ultimate unforeseeable justification in a better future brought about by those very people. John Tirman’s book, despite it’s possible marketing flaws and lack of detail, fits squarely in the best of the American tradition and looks forward to just such a future.
http://www.bloggernews.net/13843
BOOKS
Game of hegemony
| A scholarly work that traces and analyses the policies of the Unites States in its quest for global dominance. |
NOAM CHOMSKY'S insightful and scholarly Hegemony and Survival created yet another round of worldwide debate after Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, recently held up a hardback copy of the book in the United Nations General Assembly for the world to see, as a corroboration of the United States' aggressive quest for dominance and its violent pursuit of policies across the world as well as the resistance from Latin America. Being ardent critics of neoliberal globalisation and U.S. foreign policy, both Chavez and Chomsky regard the U.S. as the leading terrorist state in the world and challenge its unjust power.
When I asked Chomsky recently about his views on U.S. foreign policy in Asia in the wake of the Latin American Left forming an alliance against American unilateralism, he replied: "Washington is no doubt deeply concerned by the developments in South America, which, for the first time since the Spanish conquests, is not only moving towards greater independence but also integrating, at least to some extent. But I do not think this is the prime motive for U.S. efforts to improve its strategic-economic position in Asia, to counterbalance China. That would have proceeded in about the same way, I suspect, even if Latin America remained under control." In the face of a persistent obsession with an enemy that is about to destroy them, the Americans have always laboured under fear and mistrust, a driving force behind their role in international politics. It is a game of hegemony and survival that works in tandem to counter paranoia, which, as Chomsky argues, "when combi ned with immense power and an extremely cynical and violent leadership is a dangerous combination, no doubt". Even if one's motives are the promotion of democracy, the use of bloodshed as intimidation makes it very difficult to predict how one's enemies will react. The counter-insurgency in Iraq exemplifies this.
Whether it is Asia or Latin America, the motives are the same. The operation of ideological hegemony to maintain power over public opinion has been largely responsible for the brainwashing of a majority of Americans as well as millions around the world into believing that Iraq had amassed weapons of mass destruction or that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 massacre.
Hegemony thus operates through mechanisms including the media, education systems and newspeak with the primary function of maintaining public support for the dominant socio-economic system in the U.S. And sometimes, if need be, force is employed to make nations and peoples fall in line. Chomsky succinctly points out: "Attack is therefore defence, another logical illogicality that becomes coherent once the doctrinal apparatus is properly understood."
As Alexander Hamilton (the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury) writes, the "great beast" (he means the people) had to be kept within convenient confines. Power resides in the hands of a few or, as Woodrow Wilson and George Washington both maintain, those who are "good" and behind "polyarchy". The elite decision-making reinforces the hegemonic/repressive rule of the state. However, in open societies, brutal force cannot be tolerated by the masses, and thus subtle means of ideological state apparatus begin to be strategically employed to control opinions and attitudes. Such self-righteousness of the state is visible within the state or outside it when powerful nations, in the name of democracy, intervene or resort to military action for self-promoting agendas. Walter Lippman's notion of the "manufacturing of consent" is thereby vindicated in the state machinery's success in casting a network of false consciousness over the public. American altruism is only a sham. The media-elite nexus concentrates on the common interests of the media and the corporate world. It is a known fact that The New York Times, a deeply right-wing paper, allows adversarial opinion only as eyewash. The truth is that not a statement made by Edward Said or Chomsky in the post-9/11 months found any space in The New York Times. It is obvious that journalists of the mainstream press internalise the myth about a liberal society that pretends to regard all issues objectively. The happy complacency of the reader is a top priority, and care is taken not to allow over-radical views to destroy it. For instance, all intellectuals in the West have supported the war on terrorism, but any questions that involve the terrorism of the state are conveniently kept out.
PRESIDENT HUGO CHAVEZ of Venezuela holds a Spanish-language version of "Hegemony and Survival" while addressing the 61st session of the U.N. General Assembly in 2006.
Hegemony and Survival also takes into account television news that is often taken as natural and obvious, dependent on "certain preferred definitions of reality and these definitions have profound implications for the cultural reproduction of power relations across society". The truth claims of television news are taken to be authoritative, credible and factual, making it thus a potentially hegemonic agency used for the reproduction of oppressive relations of power across society, an everyday experience in relation to social divisions and hierarchies. The media, therefore, are instruments used for the naturalisation of power relations, working in a way so as to bestow ideological validation onto a range of social disparities and thus setting out to create a world of make-believe impartiality. It works to project the most even-handed and wise "truths" in order to replicate the essentials of hegemony. Antonio Gramsci explains this phenomenon of power dynamics in our society as a "... `spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is `historically' caused by the prestige (and conse quently confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production".
The lackadaisical approach of the Bush team towards global warming is again an instance of "profit over people", which ruthlessly ignores "extreme risks for the United States, Europe, and other temperate zones". The Kyoto treaty is meaningless to President George W. Bush. The threat to the survival of the human race is as immediate in the present times as it was when the Bay of Pigs incident almost triggered a nuclear war; the U.N. took pains to ensure that such disasters do not endanger the human race in the future and, therefore, went on to ban the militarisation of space, but the U.S. blocked these efforts. The invasion of Iraq evoked warnings of a human disaster, but it fell on deaf ears. As Chomsky reiterates, specialists warned that U.S. "belligerence, not only with regard to Iraq, was increasing the long-term threat of international terrorism and proliferation of WMD". The response to this foreseeable catastrophe was to declare "the right to resort to force to eliminate any perceived challenge to U.S. global hegemony". Iraq became the first victim of this "grand strategy".
The weeks immediately following the 9/11 tragedy saw the provocation of worldwide public opinion that opposed the rising power of America and its unscrupulous policy of entering a war on the pretext of checking Saddam Hussein's designs of bringing havoc to the Western world. It was the power of a mighty state against international opinion. The world has veered to a position where it is Bush who has metamorphosed into an antagonist more hateful than Saddam. Only a few months ago when I was at Lake Como (near Milan, Italy), I was witness to the damning of the political leadership in the U.S. when American and Canadian academics gathered there distributed badges at the breakfast table inscribed with slogans such as `Impeach Bush' and `Bush must go'.
Chomsky surveys the unfolding events over the last few years that he takes to be a valid reason for the global hatred and fear generated by the arrogant hegemony of a nation that is prepared to stop at nothing. "Dismissal of elementary human rights and needs [is] matched by a display of contempt for democracy for which no parallel comes easily to mind." But it is of no surprise to Chomsky who emphasises that "there is ample historical precedent for the willingness of leaders to threaten or resort to violence in the face of significant risk of catastrophe. But the stakes are far higher today. The choice between hegemony and survival has rarely, if ever, been so starkly posed".
The polemicist in Chomsky underscores the hypocritical strategies followed by the American state in its blatant dismissal of elementary human rights, evident in the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay debacles, and its simultaneous support for democracy and human rights. Chomsky also details the history of the U.S. trajectory, after the Second World War, towards becoming the most powerful state in history by using military and economic policies that were anything but democratic. As argued by him, the actions and guiding doctrines of the U.S. are of prime relevance to those institutions still operating to maintain global peace and order as well as to the general public that can be the only truly counter hegemon to Washington.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/stories/20070126001507700.htm
Wed January, 17 2007
Rewriting Israel's Story
Nation's claim to moral high ground attacked by Israeli authors.
Published: January 15, 2007
TheTyee.ca
In 1947, when Israel came into being, I was a high school student. The year before, we had a number of European Jewish kids arrive after avoiding, somehow, the Holocaust. I saw the horror newscasts about the Holocaust. I saw the tattoos on surviving Jewish arms. I followed the Nuremberg trials and was sickened by what I saw. When the State of Israel was proclaimed, I was excited. This was a nation for a people hitherto without a home, the home being their biblical land. It made sense to me. Moreover, this land was almost empty and didn't Jewish settlers turn deserts into flora a-blooming?
I didn't ask any questions then or later as I went through university and into the work-a-day world. I did have a nagging concern, however, when I saw newsreels of Palestinian refugee camps containing I knew not how many people but obviously a lot. Where had they come from and why? What was to become of them?
The story went something like this. When Palestine was apportioned between Arab and Jew, and after Israel was recognized by the U.S., the U.S.S.R. and the United Nations in 1947, the new nation of Israel was attacked by Arab armies bent on destroying it.
I was led to believe that Palestinians voluntarily gave up their homes and went elsewhere. One popular version was that they were urged by the Arab forces to leave their homes to make way for them. The Israeli case was, for whatever reason, that these people had abandoned their homes, which entitled Israel to do with the land as it saw fit.
The awkward bit was that while Jews from all over the world were entitled to "return" to Israel even though they had never been there, not so for Palestinians, who had, by fleeing, forfeited their right to return to their ancient home.
Inheritors or occupiers?
This issue is important because while clearly Israel was a nation de facto, did that bestow a legal or moral right to expel those who had lived there for 2,000 years and more?
It was specifically not right by UN resolution 194 (11) which "resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or inequity, should be made good by the governments or authorities responsible."
This point is important because Israel calls itself a democracy based upon the rule of law, a case that can only be made if Israel fairly treats non-Jews who remained and those who left, meaning that Israeli Arabs have the same rights as Israeli Jews and that refugees are entitled to return or receive fair compensation.
Two very important books, both written by Israeli Jews, attempt to shatter Israel's claim of "inheriting" land abandoned by Palestinians and the claim that Israeli Arabs have the same rights and privileges of Israeli Jews.
'Other Side of Israel'
Susan Nathan emigrated to Israel when she was in her fifties, automatically becoming an Israeli citizen. She moved to Tamra, a town of about 25,000 and was the only Jew in the place. Her book The Other Side of Israel tells a shocking story of how Israeli Arabs are treated. Their towns and villages receive much less financial assistance than do Israeli ones; ditto their schools and health care. Their land is regularly expropriated by force and without compensation, and they are constantly harassed by Israeli soldiers if they travel, even if it's to go to work.
It's the second book that sent shivers down my spine and had me wondering whether or not I had been duped or was hopelessly naive. As a journalist, have I been grossly unfair to Palestinians? Was I right to assume that Palestinian refugees had indeed abandoned their homes often at the suggestion of invading Arab forces?
Ilan Pappe is an Israeli academic with a BA from Hebrew University and a PhD from Oxford. He's a senior lecturer in Political Science at Haifa University and is the Academic Director of the Research Institute for Peace at Givat Haviva. His latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, is a shocker.
The dust jacket relates, "The 1948 Palestine-Israel War is known to Israelis as 'The War of Independence,' but for Palestinians it will forever be the Nakba, the 'catastrophe.' Before, during and after this war -- as the state of Israel came into being, occurred one of the largest forced migrations in modern history. Around a million Palestinians were expelled from their homes at gunpoint, thousands of civilians were massacred and hundreds of Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed. Though the truth about the mass expulsion has been systematically distorted and suppressed, had it taken place in the 21st century it could only have been called 'ethnic cleansing.'"
Having read the book, I can assure you that this dust jacket accurately sums up Dr. Pappe's case. Whether it's a fair or accurate case I cannot say and, as I'll relate later, there are plenty who don't agree with him.
'Ethnic cleansings' alleged
Dr. Pappe's fundamental position is that the emptying of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages was anything but voluntary; that prior to, during and after the 1948 war, Israelis systematically drove residents from their homes and that thousands, including children, were massacred. One of the more famous of these "ethnic cleansings," as Dr. Pappe describes them, was at Dawaymeh on Oct. 28, 1948, where Israeli troops (Battalion 89 of Brigade 8) killed some 400 villagers, including women and children, while expelling about 6,000 others.
In answer to the Israeli position of a voluntary exodus, Dr. Pappe writes, "It should be clear by now that the Israeli foundational myth about a voluntary Palestinian flight the war started -- in response to a call by Arab leaders to make way for invading armies -- holds no water. It is a sheer fabrication that there were Jewish attempts, as Israeli textbooks still insist today, to persuade Palestinians to stay. As we have seen, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had already been expelled by force before the war began, and tens of thousands more would be expelled in the first week of the war..."
The book goes on to tell of rape and death as Israelis "cleansed" 531 villages as it expelled more than half the Arab population.
I mentioned earlier that Ilan Pappen has his detractors. I would suggest that readers Google Ilan Pappe and read what the opposition has to say. My conclusion is that he's of the "academic left," much in the image of Noam Chomsky.
'Most hated Israeli in Israel'
Probably Pappe's sharpest critics -- at least that I could find -- are Janet Levy and Dr. Roberta Seid, who write: "'The most hated Israeli in Israel' -- an ignoble moniker to be sure -- has not eroded Ilan Pappe's star power on U.S. college campuses, where he is more often than not warmly greeted. The usual contingent of [Edward] Said acolytes, Chomsky groupies and a panoply of pro-Palestinian student organizations are invariably well-represented in his audiences. The prominence of resolutely anti-Israel partisans is unsurprising, given Pappe's role as one of Israel's most prominent die-hard Marxists. Pappe was invited to UCLA by history professor and fellow Edward Said disciple, Gabriel Piterberg. A call to the university revealed that history department professors may invite speakers at their own discretion using departmental funding to cover expenses for colloquia without any oversight. This practice enables faculty to freely promulgate their political agendas and control the degree to which students are presented with alternative views and critiques. Piterberg has been labelled 'an avant-garde radical who harangues campus demonstrations, endorses petitions and teaches a course in post- and anti-Zionism.'"
But the point is not what we think of Dr. Pappe or Ms. Nathan but whether or not their evidence is sufficiently accurate to cast serious doubt upon the "official" history put out by the State of Israel. The reason this is in issue is not just to satisfy people like you and me, but because if Pappe and Nathan's arguments have substance, there'll be no peace in the Middle East until the wrongs claimed are settled. Absent a settlement, Israel, a nuclear power, will be missile to missile with Iran, which will soon be in the nuclear club.
Staving off Armageddon
For the most part, we in the West, starting with President Bush, don't understand the underlying religious convictions that drive Islam in some of its manifestations. The United States thinks that it has a mission and the right to democratize the world and can't understand why other countries --especially Iran -- have similar passions about their ways of life, and believe that Allah has reposed in them a duty to rid the Middle East of Jews. That we, very much including me, emphatically disagree doesn't alter the fact that the United States isn't the only government that thinks it has a mandate from God.
For Israel the time is short. Palestinians who demand the right to return are increasing rapidly. Palestinian Arabs, now 25 per cent of Israel's population, will continue to increase and will one day have enough members in the Knesset to negate the Jews' ability to govern.
I support Israel's right to exist and to do so in peace, but until the Palestinian question is resolved, it will remain on a path to destruction that could well bring about a nuclear holocaust.
Dr. Pappe's and Ms. Nathan's books cannot be trashed by ad hominem attacks. If the issues they raise are not satisfactorily dealt with, the believers in the Armageddon of the Book of Revelation may be right after all.
Related Tyee stories:
Jimmy Carter Palestine:
Jimmy Carter
Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.
excellent book by a nobel peace prize repicient.
at some point the truth must prevail.
tks,
rjm
oops
no intention to slag the authors mentioned in the article.
tks,
rjm
Don't Get Me Wrong, Indeed
Oh my, MyBrainIsOnFire. I'm not sure how to take your comments this morning. First, the idea that Israel was created as part of a political strategy based on a religious text. Do you mean that it was a nation made up of people with one predominant religion? That's not the same thing. I agree that religious beliefs should not be made the basis of law- morality is way too subjective for that- but I thought that Israel came into being as a result of the Holocaust and as a way for the world to atone for the atrocities of WWII by creating a safe homeland for the Jewish people. Misguided, perhaps, but not mean-spirited or an attempt to "ghetto-ize" the Jews (again) in a land far away from Europe. How the process was undertaken was obviously very flawed and it makes one wonder what the nations involved were doing while the violence and frank injustice to the Palestinians was occuring. Did they turn a blind eye? Were they unaware? Was the PR from the pro-Zionist end able to paint a rosy picture of cooperative Arabs leaving their homes- as Rafe seems to imply from the story? No idea. Maybe the west didn't look too closely at the violence, thinking that after the Holocaust, it was only natural that the Jews get a little of their own back. It makes no sense, but maybe that's how it went.
I gotta say that I am most concerned about your assessment of our multicultural policy in Canada. Just how are we creating the conditions of the middle east here? Are we forcing foreigners to live in terrible conditions? Practicing a tacit policy of "ethnic cleansing"? I have seen no bulldozers taking down houses in immigrant neighbourhoods here. Well, except in Surrey, but those were crack houses, and most of the residents were white Canadians: ) I think you may be overstating that particular case, MBIOF.
Now, don't get me wrong. I agree that the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people has been atrocious and I can't understand how a people who have been so discriminated against themselves can turn around and do the same to others. I have been reading a book called Palestine by Joe Sacco- loaned to me by my friend who recently converted to Judaism. It's a graphic novel - Sacco is a cartoonist who spent a lot of time in Palestine, including Gaza, interviewing Palstinians and sharing their experiences. It's a heavy book, for a comic, and depicts the bleak existence af humiliation and deprivation that most Palestinians must endure very well. Add it to the two that Rafe names in his article, if you want to explore this issue more deeply.
Cartoon Palestine
Hey, I just noticed the link to the Cartoon Palestine at the bottom of Rafe's story. I should have known the Tyee was on the case. Check out the details for yourself.
who is more secure know?
If one accepts that Israel was created as a place in which Jews could feel secure and at home after the Holocaust, then the question arises: who is secure now? The Jews in Israel who have been in bloody conflict with their neighbours for 60 years and depend on support from the US for their survival, or those who either stayed in Europe or emigrated to other contries where they have established successful, secure lives and careers integrated within the larger communities?
Quote:"...the reason this is
"...the reason this is in issue is not just to satisfy people like you and me, but because if Pappe and Nathan's arguments have substance, there'll be no peace in the Middle East until the wrongs claimed are settled."
Well Rafe, the first thing I want to do is acknowledge the moral and intellectual courage it must have taken you to write this article. And from a quite different perspective. (Though it needs to be said that there are not small numbers of Jews and even Israelis who understand what drives the Palestinian and greater Arab cause-, to yours and their credit.)
But what is most important and astute on your part here is your following expressed realization:
For Israel the time is short. Palestinians who demand the right to return are increasing rapidly. Palestinian Arabs, now 25 per cent of Israel's population, will continue to increase and will one day have enough members in the Knesset to negate the Jews' ability to govern.
And this is, outside of the, I would say, Hitleresque proportion injustice being perpetrated by the Israeli Jewish State against the Palestinians, the central threat to any kind of eventual peaceful accommodation between Jews and Palestinians. (And contrary to what many pro-Israelis here may think about my positions in defence of Palestinians, it is my hope that a way can be found for a settlement between them, giving Palestinians the right of return to their lands, and yet making room for the Jewish newcomers.)
For there is a very real threat emerging here, given the extent of Israels dependence upon US military and economic aid and largesse, without which they could likely not long survive on their own resources and against the combined Arab mass beyond their borders, that they may soon be precisely up against this rock and hardplace. (And it is what is really driving Iran, alongside the US Empire threat in Iraq, in their, I think one should probably presume, though there is no concrete evidence, rush for nuclear weapons technology; preparations for the need in any future stand up against the Israeli State. For the Arabs
have
And this "new and dire situation" for Israel arrives on the very day that the US Empire is driven out of the Middle East, is broken militarily and exhausted of huge sums of its treasury. (And there is already, a not insignificant hostility emerging in the US to their so-called Jewish Lobby and support for Israel.) It's appetite thereafter, to continue to prop up its collapsed Empire facade, the main support beam of which is its reliance and use for Israel, is likely to very quickly dissipate in its own sea of post Middle East war red ink. The bond of Israel's and the US Empire's shared interest in the Middle East will then have been shredded by a new reality, and Israel suddenly alone; an miniscule ant being carried along on a leaf by a giant fast moving river, clutching its erect phallus in its hand as it approaches a bridge across the river, shouting "Raise the drawbridge, raise the drawbridge!"
On that day that the US Empire goes down again in its second Vietnam, only this time likely costing it, its complete imperial dominant position in the world, Israel is this ant, alone in a surround Arab/Palestinian sea, and for which event "the sea" has long been preparing itself, building up hatred with every humiliation, to drown it.
Better for Israel and its Jews they not wait this parting of the sea.
(Though we also, like Ed Deake might say, need to be more focused ourselves on such opportunity for recovery of our own country, upon that day the US goes down for the last time in the Middle East. That is frankly, my real interest in all this. Better that we too start to move away from them now.)
The mess we created
Isreal was created artificially and as such, will be in turmoil until the refugees are eliminated. Of course this will not happen any time soon and the reult is death and destruction through out the middle east.
But they still can't vote for a non-zionist party...
The author is perhaps more optimistic than warranted about the prospects for democracy within Israel. Israeli courts have defined "Jewishness" as a "constitutional principle" and have opined that it would therefore be unconstitutional to repeal the "Law of Return". Conversely, political parties in Israel must receive state registration, which has frequently been denied Arab parties. Specifically, attempts to launch a political party advocating complete equality between Jews and non-Jews have been denied registration as contrary to the constitutional principles of the State. So, you can't vote your way out of this one.
Small Correction...
Though there does need to be one small correction in Rafe's claim that Palestinian Arabs make up 25% of Israel's population. That does not include that far greater number of Palestinians driven by Jewish terror into camps in Gaza, Jordon, Syria and other parts of the Middle East. Were they included and given the "right of return" to their homeland, Israel's great fear of course, their numbers would far overwhelm the numbers of Jews. So-called "democracy" then in Israel would have a Palestinian majority. Which is the source, of course, of "official" Israeli hostility and rejection of this "right of return".
(I don't have any estimates of the ratio in numbers between Jews and the diaspora Palestinian population as a whole handy to hand here, though I have seem them, and they are accessible enough with a simple Google on the internet.)
Names and Numbers
Actually, Coyote, there is some confusion in the author's use of the term "Palestinian", which doesn't distinguish between Arab citizens of the state of Israel, and inhabitants of the occupied territories. Arabs citizens constitue approximately 20% of the population of the state of Israel (I think the author's numbers are too high). In addition Arabs constitute approximately 50% of the population of "Greater Israel", including the occupied territories.
this topic and more
It seems whenever the predominating world powers flex muscle around our globe it is often ill thought and has long never ending results. Much of the middle east is a direct result of this. In addition isreal has done a great PR job of branding its critics as anti semites. Well done Rafe this article is well written well researched and shows a sensitive aporach to a very difficult topic. One can indeed take a critical look at the Israel State and not in any form be an anti Semite. I do not know the answers as to Palestinians and Isrealies can co exist but co exist they must. But at some point we in the western world must question the Role of the Isrealie government and how it affects the world. And yes my friend. not to do so could result in a Nuclear war that we all fear.
Never paid too much attention
It's only recently that I started examining the Israel/Palestine issue and only because our noses were rubbed in it last summer.
Whatever good will there was for Israel, I think has been blown by the atrocity of their attack on Lebanon.
I've been holding my breath on whether the US will attack Iran. That the push behind it comes directly from Israel is no longer in doubt given Netanyahu's statements of the last few weeks and his links to the Neocons. www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/washington/politic
As usual, the agressor blames the victim.
Changed perception
1967 Isreal and I were the same age. I had just read "Exodus" or seen the movie. It seemed to make sense (as the beleaguered tiny Jewish state stomped the stuffing out of their much larger neighbours ) to go and join a Kibutz.
Procrastination allowed me to continue a safe but (I thought then) boring life in western Canada.
Still susceptible to current propaganda I now agree with Rafe.
One pastime my wife and I engage in while traveling is the game: Which tourist group is the most offensive?
1) The Ugly American
2) The Arrogant German
3) The Huge Dutch
4) The Bumbling Canadian
5) The Israeli
You guessed it.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the "Angkor What?" Bar in Siem Reap:
We would be talking to another traveler and find them quite pleasant, informed, tolerant and be shocked to find out they were Jews from Isreal. These individuals turned out to have one thing in common: They were of Arabic decent as opposed to European decent.
There are words to describe those who were resident in the area and those who came from away - I can't come up with the words just now but I see a difference.
Like Rafe, growing up I had
Like Rafe, growing up I had the idea of Israel's right to exist and didn't even know what a Palestinian was. I don't recall ever being exposed to what really happened when Israel was created. I do remember horrific films of the Holocaust being shown in school and on T V. Also seeing the films "Exodus" and Judgement at Nuremberg". But there was never a discussion anywhere of Palestinian rights or that perhaps Israel should not have been created as it was.
Slowly over the years, I've become aware that there was reality other than what was so conveniently "sold" to us here in North America. That reality was the plight of the Palestinians.
Now there is this book "The Ethnic Cleasing Of Palestine", along with the other book "The Other Side of Israel"
seem to present even more evidence of the wrongs commited with the formation of Israel and ongoing injustices.
With Bush and the neo-cons in America, there is unquestioning support for Israel and it's rather strange definition of democracy. The American Christian Right vocally and financially supports this policy as some have the belief that Israel must exist or they will not go to heaven!
Now, there is a threat of a even bigger war with Iran and this could involve nuclear weapons. All over not only Israels right to exist but it's "right" to go on behaving as it has.
Obviously there needs to be there needs to be a peace between the Israeli's and the Palestinians. A peace that works towards resolving the Palestinian question and allows for an ongoing dispute resolution process without either side resorting to violence and discrimination.
Are we going to blow up because back 1947 a mistake was made and the rights of the Palestinians were not considered? The history of what really happended with the formation of Israel has been coming out for years and years now, surely a way can be found to find peace without a total catastrophe.
A neigbour of mine ,now near
A neigbour of mine ,now near retirement age, was originally from Northern Ireland, and grew up in the midst of all that sectarian hornet's nest.
He made a point that it takes about 3 Generations for all the in -grained and in-bred "Hate" to be effectively extinguished.
We saw this in -bred hate within Yugoslavia when communism loosened its grip....centuries old grudges and old scores between Serbs and Croats were re-ignited.
Unless the "first generation" can get the process started, nothing will change.
In my view, these are centuries old issues, and all indications are that it will get worse. I am not even sure PEACE is an objective by many vested interests.
Quote:Actually, Coyote,
Actually, Coyote, there is some confusion in the author's use of the term "Palestinian",
You are correct of course, Percy. Nor does Rafe tell us, no great oversight if you already know, more or less, as I do, even outside of "Greater Israel", how many more Palestinians there are in the camps throughout many parts of the Arab world surrounding Israel, who were driven entirely out by what they call, and was accurately, the period of "Zionist terror" that preceded the official creation of the Israeli State out of Palestine. When, of course, in the post Holocaust, it should have more justly been the Germans, Poles and Austrians etc who surrendered land for the creation of a "Jewish homeland." (I have seen UN estimates of the number of Palestinian diaspora that survived the Nakba, but only by fleeing to surrounding Arab states, but that was a fair while ago now.)
Later today, when I've finished baking my bread, I will attempt to secure an accurate estimate of the total Palestinian diaspora.
Similarly
As the Boers "Voortrekker"ed across South Africa they also found a land open for settling.
They pioneered some techniques the Israelis and others have perfected: Apartheid. It means, as far as I know: "Out of sight, out of mind"
Since both of these countries were threatened and surrounded they cooperated with each other in a number of ways: Economics and weapons development especially. But propaganda and "peace keeping" within their borders run parallel.
I had some exposure to the aftermath of the failure of the South African Apartheid. Yes there were and still are some problems but there is a sense of mending and progress in to the future there.
Israel MUST take that first step.
Both feet
Ireland
There is a parallel between Israel and Ireland, but not the one Maestro points to. Rather it is the support each got from sympathetic US citizens. The Boston Irish were supporting the IRA with money and arms.
There is no doubt that it takes generations to get past shock and horror, and as doggone kind of pointed to, it is the Europeans, not the Palestinian Jews who made trouble with Christian and Moslem Palestinians.
Unless the funds and military aid from the US are cut off, there is nothing to hold Israel in check and I'm afraid of the literal fallout.
I'm also annoyed by the Harpercrits unquestioning support for Israel's territorial expansionism.
HOMELAND
Rafe's entire article, well thought out, makes me wonder if he has read the book 'Homeland'?
The chilling ending from that book and Rafe's own ominous final notes
If the issues they raise are not satisfactorily dealt with, the believers in the Armageddon of the Book of Revelation may be right after all.
harmonize just too well...
Hebron
Israeli "settlers" constant harrasment make life a living hell for the indigenous population.
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3350480,00
www.antiwar.com/hacohen/h021903.html
In the most recent figures
In the most recent figures on the Palestinian diaspora that I could find, the Palestinian National Authority claims a total Palestinian diaspora population in all lands of 9,305,222. The latest "Jewish" populations figures for the State of Israel I could find claims some 5,764, 000 actual "Jews" in the so-called country.
UN figures don't quite agree with this figure, being as they count only "registered" regugees. (Kinda like our own "official" unemployment stats.) The UN breaks their diaspora distribution down thusly.
One of the things which needs to be kept in mind of course, is that apparently the Palestinian population, being a very young population, like our own Natives, has a much higher birthrate than Israel as well-, which again like us, is much dependent on "immigration inflows" to maintain population.
PALESTINE
West Bank 1,869,818
Gaza Strip 1,020,813
WBGS residents living abroad 325,258
Areas Occupied since 1948 953,497
Total Inside Palestine 4,169,386
DIASPORA
Jordan 2,328,308
Lebanon 430,183
Syria 465,662
Egypt 48,784
Saudi Arabia 274,762
Kuwait and Gulf area 143,274
Libya and Iraq 74,284
Other Arab Countries 5,544
The Americas 203,588
Other Countries 259,248
Total Outside Palestine 4,233,637
Total Palestinian Population Worldwide 8,403,023
Hmmmmm. It just occurs to me, reading these above distribution figures, that the do not include those Palestinians, some one million plus, who yet remain in the so-called State of Israel. Which would make them jibe with that figure from the Palestinian National Authority.
You want the raw data re the source of Middle East tensions and the escalating conflict, there they are. They are the bare bones stuff upon which the flesh of the Palestinian, what they call "misery camps" hang. Cold figures to the bitter hard realities of the Middle East conflict, and under pinning it-, in addition to the US Empire resource thefts going on across the region as well.
Israel and the US
Israel and their neo-con/zionist supporters in the US are trying to re-make the Middle East. Iraq, however, is a diversion. As the army attacks Iraq, the US gov't erodes rights at home by suspending habeas corpus, opening mail, stealing private lands, banning books like "America Deceived" from Amazon, rigging elections, conducting warrantless wiretaps and starting 2 illegal wars based on lies. Soon, another US false-flag operation will occur (sinking of an Aircraft Carrier by Mossad) and the US will invade Iran, (on behalf of Israel).
Final link (before Google Books bends to gov't demands and censors the title):
America Deceived (book)
Quote:As the army attacks
As the army attacks Iraq, the US gov't erodes rights at home by suspending habeas corpus, opening mail, stealing private lands, banning books like "America Deceived" from Amazon, rigging elections, conducting warrantless wiretaps and starting 2 illegal wars based on lies.
Which is the whole other level working within this thing, of course, this period of history. The drift toward fascism occurring within the so-called "Western Democracies", as part of their flagrant "imperialist" and "imperialist enabling" behaviours (think Canada). It is all part of this neocon/fascist driven period, with its particular manifestation within the major capitalist countries themselves, at the helm of which is the US Empire, and the way it manifests itself abroad, in the recently broken away from old British Empire "colonial" world, in which a "new" colonial power is attempting to establish itself.
It is all, one and the same creature.
Good point, Reader11722. (You really must come up with a better moniker, bro/sis.)
More snow -- Great!
I'm not a skier so I'll likely be on this site for a day or so - please bear with me - its simply not economic to charge wages while I slip and slide about on someone's roof.
I don't know from "False Flag" but I smell a Rat (or two). When it comes to survival most animals (myself, Israeli, Neocon) will fight to the death. At this point I must not feel quite as threatened as the others because I'm still not ready to kill someone who is not actively attacking me or mine. Apparently they are, having their access to brilliant think tanks and an over abundance of "information".
Seems to be "OK" if you screw it up now and then as long as you maintain the "Die Nasty".
Now if I was responsible for what is happening just now in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan I hope I would have the courage to do the Honourable thing:
Ethnically Cleanse Myself
The other side of Israel
I have to agree with your point of view, Rafe. I remember the 1967 Six-day war, and thought the Israelis were heroes. Moshe Dayan was a household name in England. The heroic founding of the state of Israel was a epic story. David be Gurion and Golda Meir were icons.
As time passed and Israel invaded Lebanon, attacking Palestinian refugee camps, as they invaded the West Bank with over 200 illegal settlements, built a wall on Palestinian territory and bulldozed Palestinians homes, they fell from grace.
It has been a long time since Israelis could play the Holocaust Survivor Card to justify their displacement and harrassment of the Palestinians. What they are doing in Palestine and Lebanon exactly parallels what the Nazis did to their neighbours in 1939 - expanding their territory to provide lebensraum or living space for the Chosen People.
The Israelis have endured murderous attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers and Iraqi Scud missiles, but when they react to provocation, it is always with excess.
They killed over 1,000 Lebanese because someone kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. They invaded the West Bank in retribution for rockets launched against them paying back the insult with interest.
The opinions of one Canadian are insignificant in the scheme of things, but this Canadian has no sympathy for the Israelis and he is getting less tolerant of Jews and other religious zealots in general. I am sick of listening to people of all stripes speaking as if they are a cut above the rest.
A pacifist at heart, I am not going to shed tears if another bomb explodes in a Tel Aviv restaurant, killing a few dozen Israelis. They had their homeland given to them by U.N. resolution and they will keep it, but let them pay for it with their own blood like everyone else in history.
We know they have at least 200 nuclear weapons. They are an excellent deterrent and they may win a short war, but they will never win peace.
The other side of Israel
I have to agree with your point of view, Rafe. I remember the 1967 Six-day war, and thought the Israelis were heroes. Moshe Dayan was a household name in England. The heroic founding of the state of Israel was a epic story. David be Gurion and Golda Meir were icons.
As time passed and Israel invaded Lebanon, attacking Palestinian refugee camps, as they invaded the West Bank with over 200 illegal settlements, built a wall on Palestinian territory and bulldozed Palestinians homes, they fell from grace.
It has been a long time since Israelis could play the Holocaust Survivor Card to justify their displacement and harrassment of the Palestinians. What they are doing in Palestine and Lebanon exactly parallels what the Nazis did to their neighbours in 1939 - expanding their territory to provide lebensraum or living space for the Chosen People.
The Israelis have endured murderous attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers and Iraqi Scud missiles, but when they react to provocation, it is always with excess.
They killed over 1,000 Lebanese because someone kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. They invaded the West Bank in retribution for rockets launched against them paying back the insult with interest.
The opinions of one Canadian are insignificant in the scheme of things, but this Canadian has no sympathy for the Israelis and he is getting less tolerant of Jews and other religious zealots in general. I am sick of listening to people of all stripes speaking as if they are a cut above the rest.
A pacifist at heart, I am not going to shed tears if another bomb explodes in a Tel Aviv restaurant, killing a few dozen Israelis. They had their homeland given to them by U.N. resolution and they will keep it, but let them pay for it with their own blood like everyone else in history.
We know they have at least 200 nuclear weapons. They are an excellent deterrent and they may win a short war, but they will never win peace.
The other side of Israel
I have to agree with your point of view, Rafe. I remember the 1967 Six-day war, and thought the Israelis were heroes. Moshe Dayan was a household name in England. The heroic founding of the state of Israel was a epic story. David ben Gurion and Golda Meir were icons.
As time passed and Israel invaded Lebanon, attacking Palestinian refugee camps, as they invaded the West Bank with over 200 illegal settlements, built a wall on Palestinian territory and bulldozed Palestinians homes, they fell from grace.
It has been a long time since Israelis could play the Holocaust Survivor Card to justify their displacement and harrassment of the Palestinians. What they are doing in Palestine and Lebanon exactly parallels what the Nazis did to their neighbours in 1939 - expanding their territory to provide lebensraum or living space for the Chosen People.
The Israelis have endured murderous attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers and Iraqi Scud missiles, but when they react to provocation, it is always with excess.
They killed over 1,000 Lebanese because someone kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. They invaded the West Bank in retribution for rockets launched against them paying back the insult with interest.
The opinions of one Canadian are insignificant in the scheme of things, but this Canadian has no sympathy for the Israelis and he is getting less tolerant of Jews and other religious zealots in general. I am sick of listening to people of all stripes speaking as if they are a cut above the rest.
A pacifist at heart, I am not going to shed tears if another bomb explodes in a Tel Aviv restaurant, killing a few dozen Israelis. They had their homeland given to them by U.N. resolution and they will keep it, but let them pay for it with their own blood like everyone else in history.
We know they have at least 200 nuclear weapons. They are an excellent deterrent and they may win a short war, but they will never win peace.
Correction on Lebanon
Those Israeli soldiers were not kidnapped. They were captured inside Lebanon. At the time at least 13 newspapers reported the correct information, but the propaganda machine wiped the real story out of peoples minds.
So what Israel did in Lebanon was like what Hitler did in Danzig.
Rewriting Israel's History
Hi mopled
You are incorrect. The Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah last July were inside Israel. The first few media reports were in error because they assumed the soldiers where inside Lebanon as that is where the tank manned by their fellow soldiers was destroyed while pursuing the Hezbollah guerrilas. If you pursue the issue you will find that neither Nasrallah nor any member of the Lebanese resistance has said the soldiers were inside Lebanon.
The fact that they were within Israel when captured does not, however, in any way justify Israel's barbaric Blitzkrieg invasion/attack by land, sea and air against Lebanon's civilian population and infrastructure which resulted in about 1300 dead, including around 300 children, $billions in wanton destruction, the displacement of nearly 500,000 and the utterly inhumane dispersal of hundreds of thousands of cluster bomblets that are still killing innocent Lebanese, including scores of children.
Israel's utterly disproportionate response is consistent with its history since 1948. And of course, we now know that Olmert and his fellow thugs were waiting for a pretext to re-invade Lebanon with the intention (as also requested by the Bushites) to destroy Hezbollah. Needless to say, Israel was defeated and one of the many consequences is that Washington's perceived "pitbull" in the region failed to deliver. This defeat was a major blow to Israel's relations with Washington. Among other factors now on the table, it is of prime concern to Israel's rulers. As more and more Americans with credibility and of influence are openly declaring, Israel (which receives about $17 million each and everyday from US taxpayers) is America's number one geopolitical liability. It serves no positive purpose whatsoever and only creates enemies of the US. The day of reckoning is rapidly approaching.
fish counter
You may have lots of time to produce these posts but I have a limited time to read them.
When I notice that anyone's particular post is more than a couple of paragraphs I simply scroll down. I am confident that I miss some suscinct writing but the topic and the comments fade away quickly.
Now I feel better and will go back and read exactly what you wrote
fish counter
Not bad.
But I will still never read anything that is carried over with the same commentor unless there is a long lag between the posts
good for you, Rafe, for telling the truth.
I think though, for those who didn't figure out what went on until they were well into college, the words, "Palestinian refugee camps," should have set off a few alarms. I gotta assume Rafe, that you're at least as smart as I--and several times as knowledgeable on this issue, so do you mind if I don't buy your sudden revelation.
Although, I respect you for coming out on this.
The Palestinians, have a lot of suffering left to do, but in the long run, as every Israeli politician already understands, unless it's constant war with the Arabs, and bullying of the Israeli, Gazan and West Bank Palestinians, Israel will be an Arab state in fifty years.
So do the Israelis really want to make peace and allow equity for the Palestinians? I don't think so. It would mean the end.
Which, of course, is what happens when you have a state founded as a homeland for a certain relgious tribe.
Sooner or later, you become the minority, especially if you frown upon intermarriage.
Sorta like the Mexicans getting Arizona, Texas and California back by repopulating America in the dark. Or the Europeans herding the first people around here on to reservations.
(Lest anyone think that only Jewish people steal the land of others, then lie about it.)
Similar propaganda supported the Jewish takeover of Palestine as now defines the Yankee takeover of once-Mexican states. Most Americans don't even realize that these states were once part of Mexico, thinking, I guess, that the Mexicans all just walked home out of boredom, like the Palestinians abandoned Jaffa.
See 'ethnic cleansing in Jaffa.'
War
How come there is no money for health care and education, but hundreds of billions of dollars for weapons?
Kudos to Rafe
I just realized that in my previous post I forgot to write what is most important.
Rafe Mair is to be congratulated and highly commended for writing this piece. It takes great courage, conviction and tons of moral integrity for a North American journalist to criticize Israel. Rafe, this is perhaps your finest and most important commentary.
Hopefully, it will inspire at least a few of your fellow journalists to step forward and write the truth.
homeland = religious favoritism
If one accepts that Israel was created as a place in which Jews could feel secure and at home after the Holocaust, then the question arises: who is secure now? The Jews in Israel who have been in bloody conflict with their neighbours for 60 years and depend on support from the US for their survival, or those who either stayed in Europe or emigrated to other contries where they have established successful, secure lives and careers integrated within the larger communities?
There is something wrong when Jews feel that they need to live in a specific country!
Any other religion has its followers spread around the world, and they see themselves as citizens of those countries.
Nations need to be first and foremost nations, and preferably have no religious affiliation whatsoever!
Yes, we all felt sorry for the Jews back then, but ny now they have used up any sympathy they once had.
They act like bullies but expect to be accepted as civilized people.
They get a lot of publicity, while the refugees are (deliberately) forgotten
Visit sunny Armageddon
Rafe seems to be telling us he is late to learn the real story of modern Israel. I'd say it's never too late but, of course, sometimes it is too late to avert a horror, as the world may learn in coming years (not decades). I hope not, although the American meltdown in Iraq, intimately connected to Israel's very existence, works against hope.
Rafe refers to "staving off Armageddon" and in so doing either slyly or unwittingly alludes to the fact that Armageddon is not just allegory -- it is a real place and it is in modern Israel, near the port city of Haifa.
A plain (some call it a valley) now called Megiddo, near the modern city also called Megiddo, apparently has been inhabited since the seventh millennium B.C. as a strategic link on the route that connected Egypt with Mesopotamia. It is an oft-bloodied battleground, from Thutmose III (c.1468 B.C.) to Gen. Edmund Allenby (later Viscount Allenby of Megiddo) in World War I.
You can look at the pivotal location of ancient Armageddon in peacetime (as a trade route) and war (as a military route) linking Europe to Mesopotamia, then take a step back and realize that all of modern Israel occupies the same strategic location and function, as the West's beachhead to subdue the Middle East.
The Palestinians have given up so much by accepting co-existence with Israel, and in doing so have established a template for peace. But Israel, founded on the post-Nazi holocaust rallying cry of "never again," now seems driven by the die-hard -- not to say suicidal -- creed of "never enough."
Alive , a bit of background might help
Zionism was led by athiests. Most religious Jews took the position that they were not to go back to the "Promised Land " until the messiah came.
www.jewsagainstzionism.com/rabbi_quotes/teite
www.nkusa.org/
Here is a pretty amazing video of a Zionist
abusing Orthodox demonstrators.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dSHl3C9kgY&feature=P
Sliming dissent
Rafe claims: "But the point is not what we think of Dr. Pappe or Ms. Nathan but whether or not their evidence is sufficiently accurate to cast serious doubt upon the 'official' history put out by the State of Israel."
But, of course, that is the point because that is precisely where the quoted defenders of Israel -- Janet Levy and Dr. Roberta Seid -- turn the argument, away from substance and into the realm of red-baiting character assassination and innuendo. This is the Bush/Rove playbook. The plays have cute names such as "swift-boating" and "sliming."
Who gets to decide who is "the most hated Israeli in Israel"? Hated by whom? And what is wrong with being warmly greeted on U.S. college campuses? Would Levy and Seid want to be booed? If Benjamin Netanyahu were so warmly greeted would this be a sign of his infamy?
There is more to sliming than merely refusing to answer a compelling argument, more to it even than trying to discredit a political opponent. The point of sliming is to transform a debate into a jihad, to turn a constituency into a lynch mob, to be in control of that mob.
Reasoned debate
I'm very impressed with the tone of the article and the debate so far.
However, there are couple of persistent myths that rear their heads in several posters' comments that need addressing.
One is that the founding of the state of Israel is an atonement for the Holocaust. It is nothing of the kind, although the Holocaust was used to disguise the legitimacy of the claim made by the Jewish National Fund, the Jewish settlers in Palestine and the World Zionist Congress among others in 1947.
The first World Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel laid the foundations for claim of a new state of Israel carved out of the slowly-dissipating power of the Ottoman state that controlled Palestine through its Sanjaks of Berytus (Beirut) and Jerusalem. Herzl and Weisman continued to press wealthy individuals and nations on this point, finally finding a soft spot (sucker?) in Britain, which took over administration of Palestine south of Jaffa in 1916. From this time on, colonization and land purchases by Jews in Eretz Yisroel became more numerous and more pressing until strife broke out in 1921 that carries on to this day.
Other myths promulgated above include:
- that Arab nations at the behest of Islamic belief seek to kill all Jews or drive them into the sea;
- that no Palestinians welcomed initial Jewish land purchase or investment;
- that there has been no Palestinian democracy
All these are patently false and a little reading of reasoned histories by competent scholars such as Benny Morris, Mark Tessler, Bernard Avishai and Donna Robinson Divine will give readers a much better picture of not only how tangled the history of this part of the world is, but also how obvious the solution. As Rafe says, Pappe isn't bad either.
Rafe, good job. I just wish you hadn't tried to throw 'the lobby' off your trail with your dissembling in the last couple of paragraphs. It contradicts what you just said in the rest of the article. It may be that a just solution may include no state of Israel. But that is not for us to decide, but the Israelis and Palestinians themselves. May it be accomplished in our lifetimes.
A really valuable
A really valuable contribution to this discussion above me here, Zalm. I had quite deliberately, for fear of over complicating the issue of Palestine/Israel, avoided getting too far into the actual lengthier history of Zionism, which is of course the "official" Jewish ideology of "coveting" a return to ancient "Israel", even Zionisms attempt to co-operate/strike an agreement with the Nazis etc. (It is interesting to note here that the Semites, or Arabs, of which the Jews are one tribe amongst twelve original Semite tribes, though now the Jews I would argue or more a religion and more "European" and less a distinct "ethnicity", were the first people to urbanize the land of Palestine-, building the ancient city of Jericho, for example, long before there was a troubled, fractious and many times invaded ancient Israel and the Roman dispersal of the Jews. The archaeological record of the Neanderthals is also extensive in the land of Palestine. Hopefully, they won't also return to lay claim to Palestine. :-)
Reading your piece though, I see that getting at even that more complex history of Zionism is a useful part of the discussion. The Zionist coveting of Palestine and its ambition to "return" and create a specifically "Jewish" state was certainly "enabled" and given "impetus" by the events of the Second World War and the post-war collapse of British Colonialism in Palestine, of course, but the history of the Zionist "ambition" is far older than even that, for sure.
Indeed, a valuable contribution from yourself, I think.
Further to Zalm's excellent posting
Hello all
I am sure you will find the following quotation of interest. It is from an article I discovered entitled "Palestinian Refugees' Right of Return and Related Matters." Along with other relevant commentaries, it can be found at www.canpalnet-ottawa.org/Gary_Keenan.html
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"For the record: On the day [29 November 1947] the Partition Plan was passed [recommendatory only and in violation of the British Class A Mandate] the total population of Palestine was approximately 2,115,000 of which about 31 per cent were Jews who owned just 5.67 per cent of the total land area of Palestine, including just over 15 per cent of its cultivable area. (Sami Hadawi, Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine , Olive Branch Press, 1991, pp. 49-50)
"As of 1946 (the year for which the last records are available), 90 per cent of the Jewish population consisted of foreigners (primarily from Poland, Russia and Central Europe) and their offspring born in Palestine. Only one-third of the Jewish immigrants had acquired Palestinian citizenship and tens of thousands were illegal immigrants. The remaining ten per cent of the Jewish population was made up of native Palestinian/Arab Jews who were adamantly anti-Zionist. (Clifford A. Wright, Facts and Fables: The Arab-Israeli Conflict , Kegan Paul International, London and New York, 1989, p. 114, various sources cited) Hence, native Christian, Druze and Muslim Palestinians made up 69 per cent of the population and owned 94.33 per cent of the land.
"Given the Partition Plan's grossly unjust recommendations regarding Palestine's natives and the resulting violence (mostly, according to then British High Commissioner to Palestine, Sir Alan Cunningham, on the part of Jewish forces), it is no wonder that as requested by the Truman administration in Washington, the United Nations General Assembly initiated a debate based on the premise that the Partition Plan was unworkable and should be shelved [to be replaced by a UN Trusteeship.] In the midst of the debate, however, David Ben-Gurion and other Jewish leaders in Palestine, citing the Partition Plan as justification, declared the "Jewish State" of Israel on 15 May 1948, the day the British Mandate ended.
"Apart from being illegal under international law and the UN Charter, the declaration of Israel's statehood also violated the Partition Plan which stipulated that its recommended establishment of Jewish and Arab states in Palestine should not occur until two months after the end of the British Mandate.
"It is important to note that during the previous five months prior to the declaration of the state of Israel, i.e., beginning immediately after passage of the Partition Plan, Jewish forces had seized large portions of the proposed Arab state and expelled about 350,000 Palestinians from both the proposed Jewish state and the proposed Arab state. This was in accordance with Plan Dalet, a carefully planned campaign of territorial expansion and ethnic-cleansing [through force of arms and scores of massacres] formulated by the Jewish Agency in Palestine headed by David Ben-Gurion.
"Without informing either the State Department or the U.S. delegation to the UN, President Harry Truman rejected advice from among other key advisors, Secretary of State George Marshall, and immediately granted Israel de facto recognition within its Partition Plan borders. The U.S.S.R. promptly recognized Israel de jure . Thus, with the support of the world's two new super-powers, a Jewish state in Palestine became a fait accompli and any meaningful debate or legal challenge regarding its legitimacy was effectively stifled."
Truman
there is good reason to think that Truman's support for the establishement of Israel, in spite of advice to the contrary, was the same thing that motivates gentile politicians today---money in the form of campaign contributions.
Dewey Stone, a Zionist businessman, had financed Truman's vice-presidential campaign in 1944, and businessman Abraham Feinberg, with jewelry magnate Edmund Kauffman, led fundraising for the otherwise penniless 1948 presidential campaign. "If not for my friend Abe, I couldn't have made the [whistle-stop train] trip and I wouldn't have been elected," Truman stated. "Feinberg's activities began a process that made the Jews into 'the most conspicuous fundraisers and contributors to the Democratic Party.'"
www.counterpunch.org/clark06032006.html
Good Stuff...
Good stuff, you guys 'n gals. Some folks have indeed been doing their homework.
There is a considerable better tone and depth of understanding in evidence here, since the last time this issue had a good go 'round.
On the other hand it helps to make clear all those who have not done their homework as well. :-) Guess? :-)
Thinking the musically all knowing one. :-)
Zalm Actually a Arab leader
Zalm
Actually a Arab leader declared at the UN that they would drive the Jews into the sea (or very similar)
Destruction of Israel was in the PLO charter and still in Hamas. The emblem of the PLO shows no room for the state of Israel.
To get a sense of the place prior to 1948, one should compare the Ottoman empire census of 1902 with the UN/American one of 1946. It will be pretty clear the area saw a large immigration of both Jews and Arabs form the neighboring areas. This was mainly because of the British were more adept at running a functioning state than the failing Ottomans and because of the work being offered (Haifa was being rebuilt)
The Arabs have tried to wipe out the state of Israel on numerous occasion so try not pretend that destruction of a people and country have not been their intent, it is not a noble aim. The Israelis are not angels, but do a far better job than if the positions were reversed, how many Arab countries would hear a court challenge to their polices to the Jews? If a synagogue was onto top of the centre of Islam holiest site, how long do you think they would allow it to stand?
Either way you have a small piece of land claimed by both sides, there is going to be a winner and a loser, it’s not nice or pretty, but that’s what you have. The Palestinians have pissed away their future and most of the world’s goodwill on these disastrous Infitidas. If they want to grab there future, they need to call off the attacks, restructure their education system and adopt a model like Singapore. After 20 years the Israelis will bend over backwards to deal with them.
Colin Pure bunkum. Please
Colin
Pure bunkum. Please provide the original authoriative source for your allegation that "an Arab leader declared at the UN that they would drive the Jews into the sea (or very similar.)" If you are able to do so there are 5000 English pounds waiting for you put up by British MP Christopher Mayhew. Many have tried to collect the sum, but after their alleged quotes were judged by a British court, they were found to be fabrications or mistranslations. In fact, it was the Haganah and Irgun, in April and May 1948, who actually drove tens of thousands of Palestinians into the sea from Haifa and Jaffa. Many, unable to acquire seaworthy crafts, drowned. This was all documented by the British Mandatory authorites.
Please provide us with one example of the wars that have been fought between Israel and the Arabs that was not either precipitated or directly started by Israel.
Your other comments about how Palestinians have "pissed away" their future is pure Zionist drivel that could be easily refuted by any first year student of Middle East studies at a reputable university.
Only fools, the grossly un/misinformed or Zionist zealots fail to realize the fundamental facts: Israel is the ethnic cleanser, Palestinians are the dispossessed; Israel is the occupier; Palestinians are the occupied; Israel is the oppressor, Palestinians are the oppressed; Israel is the thief, Palestinians are the victims; Israel is in constant violation of hard won international humanitarian law (much of which came about as a consequence of the slaughter of 6 million Jews and tens of millions of others during WWII), including UN Security Council resolutions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter, the Fourth Geneva Convention etc.
Some words of advice: Do some basic research as Rafe did and learn about the subject. As the Canadian Jewish Congress learned, much to its horror, as a result of a survey it conducted in 2005, the more Canadians learn about the Israel/Palestinian conflict, the more pro-Palestinian they become.
Where the reality is Colin,
Where the reality is Colin, European Jewry has in fact all but succeeded, is certainly attempting to wipe out Palestine and the Palestinians. With the aid of the European parties to the Holocaust, who have with the creation of Israel, found their "final solution" to the Jewish Problem, despite their defeat in WW2-, and assisted by rising US imperialism which has more Jews within its borders than does the So-called State of Israel. (Google Jewish population distribution stats.) All conveniently overlooked by yourself.
The emblem of the PLO shows no room for the state of Israel.
Even if this is true, which is always amenable to change as part of a final settlement anyway, for Jews anyway, if not a "State" of Israel, why should the Palestinians surrender their territory for the creation of a State of Convenience for the Western/European Powers, to let them off the hook for the Holocaust they brought down on the Jews? The Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust, and in fact lived quite peacefully with the Semetic Jews-, who themselves opposed the creation of the Israeli State.
There is no reason, of course, that they should feel beholden or obliged to submit to the Western Powers creation of a European Jewish State upon their soil, in atonement for European crimes.. The gall of you and the US Empire/Israel apologists.
You arseholes won't even recognize the legitimacy of the Native claims for atonement of the crimes committed on this continent against them, and their isolation into our "misery camps" creations-, with recognition of self-governing Native Nations as part of Canada-, and their claim is considerably more recent than the 2000 year old "ancient" claims of European Jewry to Palestine.
Give your head a shake.
Nicely put Straightshooter
Colin, I'm so sad about those who feel it necessary to support Israel in spite of all the evidence of its agression and continual human rights violations. It is so like the the mother of a mass murderer saying to the cops, "He's a good boy."
I understand the love and blindness.
What will it take for you to really examine the evidence. You do both Israel and the world a grave disservice by blindly supporting what they are doing....and what they are doing, through the 25 or so Neocons behind the throne in Washington is leading us to a global nuclear disaster.
Are we "anti-semetic" or what?
I do not think I am but I would not be surprised if there are differing opinions out there. Some of my best friends - etc
What I see here is that the problem in Israel is not the placement of a Jewish state there.
The problem is: Deadly weapons in the hands of ignorant people.
If all we had were hoes and scythes and sticks and stones the mayhem would still go on but it would not be quite so one sided and it would very likely be settled in a truly "democratic" way: more boots on the ground would control more territory.
The first thing I would outlaw is the AWACS. Second is the C130 Gunship and Third is the BlackHawk.
No Pilot is qualified to take responsibility for what he rains down. (and I ain't talking about "friendly fire)
In my opinion these items make travesties like Lebanon and Iraq possible. Once there are no jocks up there we can start to work on the finer points: Tanks firing depleted uranium shells and automatic weapons
Quote:What will it take for
What will it take for you to really examine the evidence. You do both Israel and the world a grave disservice by blindly supporting what they are doing....and what they are doing, through the 25 or so Neocons behind the throne in Washington is leading us to a global nuclear disaster.
Well said, mopled.
And to doggone. Nope, I sin't ag'in a "Jewish State" per se, though I am ag'in a "religious dominated state", muslim, christian or otherwise, as who wants and should more morally give it to them "in atonement" for the sins. (Thinking the Germans first, of course, maybe old East Germany, or even part(s) of Austria etc. ; the old Fascist Axis world that done the dirty deed.) I'd just prefer it was secular of course. That being just my preference of course-, which could be said to amount to about a row of beans.
'twould seem more appropriate to me. Nicht Wahr?
I understand where you're coming from too
"But they (e.g. Hamas,
"But they (e.g. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria,etc.) refuse to recognize Israel's right to even exist" --so say the apologists for Israel's actions, ad nauseum.
But Israel's intolerant actions speak much louder than Arabs' and others' intolerant words.
As Rafe's article describes, it is Israel's apartheid-like policies and ethnic cleansing that demonstrates one group's refusal to acknowledge another group's right to exist,in a much more serious fashion, than do angry pronouncements by Israel's victims and their supporters.
And instead of threatening and pressuring Iran and other of Israel's neighbors on the nuclear arms issue, the US, UN and others should be threatening and pressuring Israel over it's illegally obtained nuclear arsenal. Demands for Iran to halt any nukes
programs should be tied directly to requirements that Israel de-nuke its own military.
If you were a country that had a very hostile neighbor like Israel (witness the overkill in Lebanon last summer) as the only nuclear military power in your region, would you be content to let yourself be so vulnerable and threatened and left on such an uneven playing field?
You might be tempted to develop nukes of your own, for deterent purposes, against
the beligerant over-armed nuts next door.
If Iran IS developing nukes, I can fully understand why they would want to.
I'd like to see disarmament all around, instead of proliferation. The way things stand, Israel is provoking proliferation in the region.
I view US and Israeli policies, not Islamic jihad, as representing the greatest threat to world peace this century.
Anyway, the US helped build and support Islamic jihad in Afghanistan as Mujahadeen opposition to Russian occupation (and aiding Osama).Then the US provoked al Qaida by US support for Israeli brutality, it's support for brutal non-Islamist dictatorships in the region, and for having US military bases in Saudi Arabia ("the holy land"). Now the US is provoking even more jihad against the west by its occupation of Iraq, leaving no end in sight.
Colin
Yeah, that was Nasser that vowed to drive the Jews into the sea, when Israel was seen as proxy colonialists for the Americans and the British before and during the Suez Crisis. There’s no excuse for idiocy among diplomats, but everybody’s said something stupid before, and will do again. Where are the quotes from the various Kings and dictators like Ibn Saud, Abdullah and Hussein of Jordan, and Assad of Syria saying “they would drive the Jews into the sea”? Let me know if you find one.
That’s because Nasser and all the other Arab leaders primarily had a problem with the state of Israel and the way it was founded, not the Jewish people. In 1912, almost a third of the Palestinian Arab population of 450,000 agreed with Jewish immigration because they thought that financial investment, jobs and even Western culture would come in with them. Another third disagreed because they were fellahin, poor serfs who were being kicked off the land they had farmed for years as their Arab landowners sold out to Jewish immigrants.
But nobody foresaw that the immigrant Jews would demand and get the right to carve out their own exclusive nation within the Ottoman sanjaks. Indeed, even after the violence started in 1921, it was not about Jewish statehood, but about the displacement and compensation of Arab serfs and their families; and it wasn’t until 1929 that serious racist and nationalist clashes at the Wailing Wall, Safed and Hebron finally defined the upset as a war between the aims of two peoples.
Rather like all the Americans who have bought up 25% of Whistler properties seeking to have the area made the 51st state. Not a polite thing to do.
In contrast with your belief that the 1946 US survey saw a large influx of immigration, Donna R Divine, using Ottoman, British and French surveys shows how Arab populations moved around the regions from Beirut to Jerusalem for 200 years following opportunity as it arose because there were no borders. When the Mandatory borders were erected by the British, the population of 600,000 then only grew by birthrate which was more than 6% at the time, rather than by immigration, which was prohibited for both Jews and Arabs.
Your history makes it sound like they’ve been at each others’ throats since always. They haven’t. Palestinian Arabs until the 1940s were the primary workers in Jewish greenhouses and on farms, at least until the advent of “muscular Judaism” and its attendant discrimination against Arabs. The large influx of Holocaust survivors provided most of the socialistic labour force for those farms and greenhouses, and the Arabs were relegated to unemployment and homelessness. That’s when desperation on one side, and settlements on the other, began to grow.
I think you’ve been getting your “facts” from that discredited book by Joan Peters From Time Immemorial, because you say the same things she does. Your last two paragraphs are your own opinion and completely unsupported by facts. Read modern Israeli authors like Pappe, Segev, Morris and Avishai to get a better sense of what went on in the early days.
What now? Justice or Armageddon?
It is refreshing to see that the smokes and screens are being lifted one at a time, and that the tribal knee jerk accusation of antisemistism, self-hating, etc... have found no place here, as they have in the case of Jimmy Carter. The US is not the only North American state that has been involved in the conflict.
In fact, Canada has played a major role in the dispossesion of Palestinians: Justice Ivan C. Rand, an Evangelical Christian Zionist, authored the UN Partition resolution, and then Under Secretary of State for External Affairs Lester Pearson used “diplomatic” persuasion to ensure that the resolution passed (http://christianactionforisrael.org/un/unscop).
Rafe Mair has correctly identified the core issue of the Israel-Palestine conflict, core issue that must be addressed if peace is ever to grace the region: the right of return for those who lived in Palestine before its partition. [UN Resolution 181 as "remembered" in the Canadian Parliament: www.cjc.ca/docs/PARL/322_Nov%2029%20%20sen.do]
Israel’s Basic Laws, which include “Religion” and “Nationality,” allow the state to practice discrimination “legally” on the basis of religion. Thus any and all Jews alone enjoy one special privilege by virtue of the “Law of the Return.” These are individuals who have never lived or owned a piece of land in Mandated Palestine but can not only "return" to a place they've never been, but are made Israeli citizens with all the bells and whistles on demand. Meanwhile, Muslim, Christian and Druze families are denied the right to return to the homes they’ve owned for generations and lived in until their 1948 involuntary exodus.
The on-going active "recruitment" of new citizens for Israel through special programs - a mix of bribery and emotional blackmail – belies the claim that Israel is too small to accommodate those whose return is covered by 181. Where there is a will there is a way.
The drive to entice citizens of Western democracies to "renew their connection with their homeland" and make "Aliyah" promotes the conflation of Judaism, a religion, and Israel, a state. In spite of recurring persecution, Judaism has existed and Jews have thrived for 5000 years without a physical Israel. "Next year in Jerusalem" does certainly not refer a state without borders, built on the blood, tears and misery of so many. Interestingly, Israelis themselves are still divided on whether theirs is a theocratic or a democratic state.
Allowing charities to raise funds and promote the emigration of Canadians is a scandal – and certainly not in Canada's best interest. It is also unconscionable. Not only are we allowing our youth to be lured away from Canada, but their immigration into the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and their enrolment into the Israeli forces help perpetuate the injustice and therefore prolong the conflict. We must stop being part of the problem and become part of the solution.
The Doomsday-lovers will have it their way unless we put justice before peace.
Tone....
I just can't get over the difference in tone and level of understanding between this thread on this issue, and the last time we dealt with it... oh it must be a year ago now. Astounding. And most refreshing.
How much it is a measure of broader Canadian understanding on this issue I do not know, but hopefully so. For it is one of those seeming far off issues of little relevance to ourselves, that is in fact reshaping our world, the place of the US and its collapsing Empire in it, degree by degree. In fact, dependent upon how it is resolved in the end, holds out the possibility of ourselves here in Canada, perhaps, if we awake, organize and move quickly enough, recovering our own entire national independence, including our social and economic development agenda from its current state of control by, and submission to the US Empire interests.
It's but our own timidity, our ruling class and its politician bootlickers and the Neocon braunshirts that serve them, who stand in the way here.
Goodo, for you folks, I say. We all have come a long way, baby. :-)
The issue of ourselves is intricately tied in this issue of the Middle East, and what is happening to the Palestinians.
Correcting Zalm
Hi Zalm
You know the subject well and it pains me to point out an error on your part. In reply to Colin's accusation that an Arab representative at the UN threatened to "drive the jews into the sea" you state: "Yeah, that was Nasser that vowed to drive the Jews into the sea...."
Not so. Nasser never threatened to drive the Jews into the sea and in fact was doing everything possible to avoid war with Israel given Israel's repeated and escalating attacks against Syria with whom Egypt shared a mutual defence pact. ( I am of course, referring to events prior to Israel launching the 1967 war.)
The myth that Nasser threatened to "drive the Jews into the sea" originated with a speech he delivered on May 26/67 to the General Council of the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions that was broadcast throughout the region and monitored by the U.S.
Here is what Nasser actually said regarding a possible war with Israel: "If Israel embarks on an aggression against Syria or Egypt, the battle against Israel will be a general one and not confined to one spot on the Syrian or Egyptian border. The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel." (Translated by the Foreign Broadcasting Information Service, a U.S. agency in Washington.) You will note that Nasser did not threaten to attack Israel, only to respond to an attack.
Not surprisingly, the only portion of Nasser's speech that was quoted by American television commentators Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite as well as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune was the last eight words: "The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel."
This gross misrepresentation of what Nasser actually said could only cause the American public to see him and all Arabs as thirsting for war with Israel which was most certainly not the case. They knew full well they were no match for Israel in terms of modern offensive weaponry.
Indeed, after President Johnson got a commitment from Israel not to launch a war until at least June 11th, Nasser agreed to Johnson's request to send Egypt's foreign minister to Washington to defuse the crisis brought on by Israel's escalting violations of the 1949 armistice agreements. Unfortunately, when Israel (which desperately wanted war in order to seize the remaining 22% of Palestine and the Sinai - the decision to conquer Syria's Golan Heights was made during the war) realized that there was a good chance Johnson's meeting with Egypt's foreign minister may be successful, it broke the promise to Johnson and launched the war on June 5. The rest is history.
Incidentally, I agree that Colin's lack of knowledge of the subject is probably due in large measure to him being seduced by Joan Peters' long since debunked mountain of mendacity, From Time Immemorial. For the record, here is what a couple of Jewish scholars had to say about her fraud:
Dr. Porath, Israel's leading demographic historian, called Peter's book a "forgery... [that] was almost universally dismissed [in Israel] as sheer rubbish except maybe as a propaganda weapon."(New York Times, Nov.28, 1985)
Rabbi Arthur Herzberg, vice-president of the WJC, agreed: "I think that she's cooked the statistics.... The scholarship is phony and tendentious. I do not believe that she has read the Arabic sources that she quotes."(ibid)
Of course, the definitive exposure of Peters' hoax was accomplished by the brilliant American Middle East scholar, Professor Norman Finkelstein, in his monumental book Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Verso, London and New York, 1995.
Read 'em and learn
My thanks to other commentors here. I have not read the books but read these posting avidly: this issue may trump climate change in immediate importance, depending on the short term actions of certain parties including the current Canadian government.
straightshooter
Thanks straightshooter for the heads-up on the Nasser quote. I got it from Gerald Regan's Israel and the Arabs but the quote is unattributed to a source so it may be bogus and have made its way into the common literature of that time. It wasn't just from Regan that I'd heard it.
However, William Martin quotes Benny Morris attributing the quote to ben-Gurion himself in a 1961 speech to the Knesset. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy...
Link at
www.counterpunch.org/martin03112005.html
Thanks also for the excellent quotes on Peters' book. I always forget that not everyody yet knows what a bogus piece of trash it is, and it always bears repeating.
And thanks to BeeSting for the link to Ivan Rand. Interesting to read how the false dogmatism of premillennial Christian tribulation infected much of society at that time. Thank God we're past that now...
...aren't we?
Rudolf Kastner - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Critics of Kastner allege that he agreed with Eichmann not to warn Hungarian Jews in order not to jeopardize negotiations to save the Jews who escaped on ..Balfour Declaration of 1917 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was made in a letter dated November 2, 1917, from the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild (Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild), a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation, a private Zionist organization, on the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the World War I. The letter stated the position, agreed at a British Cabinet meeting on October 31, 1917, that the British government supported Zionist plans for a Jewish "national home" in Palestine, with the condition that nothing should be done which might prejudice the rights of existing communities there. The document is kept at the British Library.By the standards of international diplomacy, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 is an amazing document, succinctly summarized by Arthur Koestler who wrote that the declaration amounted to "one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third."
Jewish Autonomous Oblast - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jewish Autonomous Oblast (Russian: Евре́йская автоно́мная о́бласть, Yevreyskaya avtonomnaya oblast; Yiddish: ייִדישער אױטאָנאָמע געגנט, Yidisher Oytonome Gegnt) is a federal subject of Russia and an autonomous oblast situated in the Far Eastern federal district, bordering China. It has an area of 36,000 km² (about the size of Belgium) and a population of 190,915 (2002), of which only about 1.2% is Jewish: the remainder is primarily Russian (almost 90%) and Ukrainian (see Demographics section below). It is actually a larger area than the modern State of Israel. The administrative center is Birobidzhan.The idea was to create a new "Soviet Zion", where a proletarian Jewish culture could be developed. Yiddish, rather than Hebrew, would be the national language, and a new socialist literature and arts would replace religion as the primary expression of culture.
Earth's magnetic field:
indeed. the idea of basing
indeed. the idea of basing any politcal strategy based on religious texts would appear to be insane - which is how Israel came into being - don't get me wrong, my bio-dad was a lithuanian jew who lost his family in the holocaust.
Israel should never have existed and the allies should have given them a chunk of Europe or North-South America.....it makes one wonder how much christian dislike of jews made them endorse a homeland thousands of miles away from europe...
but it exists now so we have to deal with it and get this issue resolved.
oh and just so you know....canada's multiculturalism policy is recreating the conditions of the mid-east right here in canada - woo hoo!