It's a good, short piece showing Gazan children impacted by this war. Guess we gotta kill them, their parents, siblings, et al. to finally get rid of Hamas because they killed Israeli children, parents, siblings on Oct 7th. We will bomb them flat, bomb them as we have for 15 days ... 15 days and they say they havent started yet!
Ive recently returned to CNN for its pretty decent (mainstream) Israel War coverage, esp during wee hrs of the night (Brits mostly host it, report on the ground too). It does seem more sober, more balanced (eg, Ive seen reporters get ripped by a bullying IDF spokeman and an incensed West Bank protester, both accusing them of bias). It seems more journalistic, more "European" in its coverage than it was in its insufferable Trump Era phase - all that useless garbage they were encouraged to toss out to the TDSed viewer - smug, opinionated anti Trump rants, palace intrigue, Trump-Russia obsession, clubby table talk... (like MSNBC)
A dire warning to fellow Israelis from the pen of a deeply-rooted Zionist, now former Zionist & ex Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Avraham Burg. This piece was published 20 years ago. I read it then with awe and great respect, as I do today. His prescient warning was not heeded. His words are even more relevant today because they were not heeded.
Avraham Burg
The End of Zionism
"Israel must shed its illusions and choose between racist oppression and democracy"
"It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.
It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. You can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see the occupation. Traveling on the fast highway that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied."
If you have a paid subscription to Ha'aretz, you can read about Avraham Burg -- former Knesset speaker and former Zionist, former Israel-believer -- wanting to "quit the Jewish people". I cant access it, but I'd like to because I bet it's a compelling read;
"A Scion of Zionist Aristocracy Wants to Quit the Jewish People. Will Israel Let Him?
Why Avraham Burg, who has served as Knesset speaker, interim president and head of the Jewish Agency, is asking Israel to annul his registration as a Jew"
INTERESTING!!! Q & A w Burg at the end of this synagogue talk.
One example:
"Deborah asked why he called his cousins bad guys. Burg said:
Listen, if cousins of mine literally speaking are racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, OK, a few other phobias, and I can give you the whole of it. But racists– they are from my point of view, they are genetic Jews but I don’t have any partnership with them. If somebody, my next door neighbor, might be an Arab, might be the educator of my grandchildren, who is pluralistic, tolerant, humanist, who comes to her position from her Islam not Judaism– she is my partner. [More applause]"
Just ... WOW. Such a rarity - this highly elevated, illuminating, fearless human being. Respect!
Why can’t they just live peacefully beside their Jewish neighbors?
From the mountain of examples that show why they find that hard to do - a segment from the ongoing documentary project,
BREAKING the SILENCE.
You will witness IDF & SETTLER ATROCITIES perpetrated against Palestinians. Not a rarity, but a ‘normal’ everyday occurrence
Don’t take it from me, but from the mouths of former IDF SOLDIERS who were there, who participated in these inhumane acts. Take it from the video clips that show what they describe, what they & the settlers, as oppressors, do to the oppressed.
As you watch, perhaps, like me, the slimy words of Netanyahu & his ilk, including American PRO Israel gaslighters (and also some ignorant true believers) will come to mind: Claims like: Israel is The One in this conflict, these wars, that has morality on its side. Our military is the most moral on earth. We do not ever target innocent civilians. Etc.
How hideous they sound, as they waft across the consciousness, across this film.
If you had asked me on Oct 7th, I would have had sympathetic Israel-centered things to say about the Hamas attack: horrendous, shocking, brutal. Israel must defend itself, of course. Those poor hostages, all those victims of unspeakable cruelty in the kibbutzes and elsewhere...
Anyway, those things still live in me, but Israel has put focus and sympathy for itself on low, on the back burner. I have moved on because Israel has moved us on.
GAZA
Heartbreaking collective punishment, worse than ever before, raining down on Gazans for 2 weeks. I am seeing rage killing. Mass murder. Deprivation of survival basics: food, water, medicine. A child is killed every 15 minutes (heard on CNN) So many children now without a mother or father, sisters, brothers. I see war crimes. It is insane. We are paying for it. And Biden has given Israel a green light to do this, even if with whispered cautions for restraint. Do you see restraint?
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN:
I came upon a link on X (twitter) to a recent podcast (w video), The Katie Halper Show, where she talks this week w Norman Finkelstein about the assault on Gaza. It's 2+ hrs (!!!) but I found it very listenable.
"Norman Finkelstein on Israel's BRUTAL Assault On Gaza"
He said, starting in 2020 he'd turned away from 40 yrs of focusing like a hawk on Israel-Palestine, but that this WAR, what is happening now, brought him RAGING back into the fray. His summarizing of past events and facts, up to now, is helpful, especially since I, too, had stopped paying attention, in my case over the past 6 years or so, not nearly as engaged as I once was... the situation just seemed so redundantly awful with no change on the horizon.
BREAKING the SILENCE
In this podcast, Norman mentioned, and reminded me of, an Israeli activist documentary, BREAKING the SILENCE, made by former IDF soldiers. (The full collection of videos compiled since 2004 is linked below.) They are heartbreaking - comprised of interviews w IDF soldiers, and video clips that show the atrocities they describe: their encounters with Palestinians, their feelings and behaviors, their lack of feeling, their violence, settler violence, the dehumanization. It is raw and brutally honest, which, as with many other revelations out there, puts the lie to Israel's self-serving claims that they, unlike the Palestinians, operate on the moral high ground.
It's a film that keeps growing - there is no “The End" because there is no end in sight for this inhumane occupation and land theft. It is breathtakingly painful, but is important to help understand more fully the reality of occupied Palestine, beyond US-Israeli propaganda. And it is especially important now, as this hideous massacre, this war of deprivation of basics while constantly bombing civilians is waged with our US dollars.
I saw one portion of Breaking the Silence yrs ago. The official full collection is linked below. I can only take so much at a time. I googled it and started in anew on YouTube with one segment that is presented within a very good group presentation. Below is its text intro & link
"Join us for a conversation between Rabbi Sharon Brous and Breaking the Silence leaders. The evening will open with a screening of Mission Hebron, a short documentary by Rona Segal based on the testimony of Israeli soldiers who served in the West Bank.
Note, in the video linked above, the awful behaviors of “deeply religious” settlers. Imagine your land, your home, is suddenly snatched from you - because they can - with no right to reclaim it, no consequences for the thieves. Then imagine, as if this weren’t bad enough, the thieves are protected from you but you are punished by them, that the authorities defer to these insane bullies as they harass & attack you & your loved ones. You have just imagined yourself as a Palestinian in the West Bank. No need to imagine it though - the proof is clearly shown in the videos.
Hamas gave Israel a gift. The attack made Israel a victim. The United States is sending support to Israel. At a minimum, a condition of the support should be that Israel cannot allow even one more settler to build in Gaza. Gaza needs support from the United States as well.
Hamas has to let the humanitarian aid to be distributed freely to the Palestinians. If there is any interference with the aid, MSM will mak it seem that all Palestinians deserve to suffer because they “can’t get their act together”. The suffering of Palestinians will not be the focus of MSM.
Netanyahu built up Hamas and worked to diminish the power of the Palestinian Authority. He should not be able to escape his responsibility with his political career intact.
President Jimmy Carter wrote a book “Peace Not Apartheid” pointing out that Israeli contro of Palestinians was a major part of the problem. Imagine that Palestinians can have electricity and water cut off and then have rely on others to give “permission” to bring aid to Gaza.
The anger can be understood. Hamas let that anger control action. The attack was not going to improve the situation in Gaza. Getting out information about the apartheid ghettos in Gaza under an authoritarian Netanyahu government may have moved the needle. I say this, but I realize that politicians and journalists in the West felt free to call Palestinians “animals” without any real repercussions, so nothing may have changed.
Wow. Surprised if you can show me where they actually are quoted, are taped, saying "animals" about "Palestinians" If you mean Hamas, not surprised. Not at all surprised if done in private about both. But there are many who dont use such brutish language, who still choose to refuse to scratch below the surface of commonplace, more 'civilized' propaganda, designed to keep our eyes averted, our brains truth-fuzzed.
Getting out information... yes, in the mainstream it's so buried, so slow a trickle, over so many years - it hasnt yet broken thru and been able to sustain and grow in strength. My hope here is with the growing movement of anti-Israel (wrongs & crimes) folks, many young people.
I will say Ive found CNN again due to this war... Esp at night, wee hrs, it's much more balanced in terms of the Palestinian life experiences, the horrors of this war as it is impacting them. More a la European way of viewing it. More in depth interviews w Arabs, Palestinians, Jews who dont toe the sanctified line.
I remember hearing the current CNN CEO stated, when he took over, that the network would return to its original journalistic MO, which to me would mean getting off the insufferable 24/7 loop of anti Trump, woke biased, boring, ranting, opinionated, bad reportage. Cant give a big blue ribbon yet, but the late night coverage of Israel's War has progressed beyond even where they used to go on the ME Conflict, prior to their really awful yrs during Trump era. This signals to me that they are listening to, seeing, the growing global pushback against the "righteous" (dont dare challenge it!) US-Israeli narrative.
Israel blocked food, water, and electricity to 2 million people. That is treating the entire population of Gaza as “animals”.
This is from March. These are the words of Israelis
“Most Israelis are avoiding what’s happening in the territories, most Israelis don’t visit there…For most people it’s some kind of unclear reality happening somewhere else that has hardly anything to do with them…
“A lot of Israelis who have strong principles feel very, very badly about what has happened. Others are saying, Serves them right, this is the way to do– eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. And unfortunately what you hear is some — not just the far right politicians– some rightwingers are saying that as well, too.
“There is a sentiment among many Israelis, saying, OK these are the circumstances, they’re animals anyway, let’s behave the same way. And that is very, very frightening. and I think this is some of the results or the implications of a long term occupation. I was born after the Six Day War, this is the reality I know. For many other people they don’t even think about that anymore. This is the part of the reality– Jews are up, Arabs are down, whatever, this is the way things are. But in the long run of course it cannot be maintained forever. In the long run, there will be a deep moral price to pay because of the situation, especially if you put in religion into the equation as well, which is part of the problem in my view.
No, we mostly treat our animals better, and well we should.
But you said, " I realize that politicians and journalists in the West felt free to call Palestinians “animals” without any real repercussions, so nothing may have changed."
That is a specific accusation that your examples don't show in black and white. They just show someone saying some Israelis have that "sentiment." (True! And Im sure some say it too!) There's enough ugliness in the world to point out.... so Im just pointing out your wording, in that one part, makes it seem you've actually seen or heard it from 'the horse's mouth' - pols and journalists. Then you give an example of Israelis in general w a sentiment like that. That's all.
Don't you mean to say about Netanyahu: "He should NOT be able to escape his responsibility with his political career intact."? I think you missed the "not."
Israel has its horror show for survival---brutal, systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to create a Jewish state.
"The One hundred Year’s War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonization and Resistance, 1917-2017.
Mar 6, 2020 WATSON INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.
Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.
Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies in the department of History at Columbia University. He received his B.A. from Yale in 1970, and his D.Phil. from Oxford in 1974. He is co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and was President of the Middle East Studies Association, and an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 until June 1993. He is author of: Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (2013); Sowing Crisis: American Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle East (2009); The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (2006); Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East (2004); Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1996); Under Siege: PLO Decision-Making During the 1982 War (1986); British Policy Towards Syria and Palestine, 1906-1914 (1980); and co-editor of Palestine and the Gulf (1982), The Origins of Arab Nationalism (1991), and The Other Jerusalem: Rethinking the History of the Sacred City (2020).”
The United States officially recognizes Arabs as white as well as most Jews. The situation between the Zionists and Arabs is white-on-white crime, considering the history. The war in Ukraine is a continuation of white-on-white crime. Europeans have slaughtered each other by the multiple millions through endless wars.
I do recall African students studying at universities in both Russia and Ukraine were the last allowed to leave both countries when the war began. If I remember correctly animals were allowed to leave before the Africans. In addition, Poland initially denied entry.
Sometimes there are no good guys. Hamas are assassins, not soldiers. They will kill Jews or Muslims and let. aAllah sort out the afterlife. Netanyahu is trying to escape legal consequences and in doing so failed to protect Israeli citizens.
Palestinians in Gaza have limited control of their lives. Note an outside entity can turn off electricity and water. The unemployment rate for young people is said to be 50%. Some Black Americans can look back in time and remember slave revolts by people like Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey. Thus there is a reason that connections can be made between enslaved Blacks and Palestinians in what could be called a concentration camp.
It is. 2023, how can we view the murderous attack by Hamas? Hamas says tgat its warriors are ready to die for their cause. They also .appear to believe that Jews should not exist. Genocide cannot be condoned. Palestinian suffering cannot be condoned. Hamas appears willing to murder every one who does not support Jewish eradication, thus they cannot be supported. That does not mean that random killings of Palestinians cannot be criticized. Palestinians have been called animals by government officials. Dehumanizing all Palestinians will be a green light to slaughter.
Israel has the military might to destroy Gaza. Fighting an urban ground war in Gaza will result in more death. Given the anger on both sides, Imdo not see a nonviolent solution.mGaza will be crushed and then the US will help built it back up.
Edit to add
The best comparison may be how the old ANC approached apartheid with necklacing, etc. to the tactics of Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr to Hamas. Malcolm X suggested self defense, but not overt slaughter. Killing innocents is not going to free Palestinians.
2nd Edit to add:
Telling college students that they should not support Hamas will likely fall on deaf ears. They view the Netanyahu government as corrupt. Netanyahu was attempting to change the Israeli judicial system so that his legal woes would disappear.
Many college students hear of the suffering in Gaza from fellow students who are Palestinian. They trust those source much more than they trust mainstream media or even their own professors. Many students are not surprised by the attack on Israel. The students also know there is no easy exit from Gaza. They Israelis attack them. Jordan and Egypt refuse refuge. If Hamas hides among the Palestinian population, they will simply follow the population if it moves south. Most Palestinians realize that Jim they abandon the north, they will never be able to go back to their homes in the north.
Palestinian comedian Bassem Youssef gave a darkl humorous take on the situation.
For me, the Democratic Party is the default options. Republics are very clear in stating they do not want Blacks to vote. My other rationalization is that the current leadership of of Republicans are clueless and immoral. They choose David Duke without the baggage and a man who passed no legislation in 16 years in Congress as Speaker candidates.
Republicans shout morality to the rooftops but select a convicted sex offender as their party leader. I repeat the charge because we have to remember the morals of so-called moral Republicans. Republicans are so disgusting that you have to vote for Democrats to keep hypocritical and evil Republicans anywhere from any legislative control.
It is hard to suppress laughter when Conservatives get on their moral high horse. When you hear Conservatives whine about the mental infirmatiies of Joe Biden, you look at the legislation passed and then the word salad and slurred and in coherent speech of Donald Trump and feel vindicated. You vote against Republicans because they do not want you to have a vote.
Note that there is no mention of the clear and present danger presented by the Republican Party on this site or on rightwing networks. One looks at the ineptitude of the Republicans in the House and then at the attempts of the GOP to suppress votes and you realize they have no real policies but power. When Republicans focus on the failed culture of the Black community, you look at Matt Gaetz, Lauren Bobert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and you laugh at the hypocrisy.
I'm finished with the Democratic Party. At the same time, I'm not GOP. Jim Crow Joe Biden, related, "If you don't vote for me, you're not black." Kamala Harris related, (paraphrasing), " I'm not just gonna do things for black people."
Look at the Hispanic hordes with unearned benefits coming across the border and being put in hotels rent-free for 6 months, costing billions of dollars. Then they're put in black neighborhoods with very limited resources. Most of the homeless in this country are black. Come on bruh! The black boot licks like "fish fry" James Clyburn who got a quid pro quo position for his daughter in the Biden Administration? And he doesn't support reparations. There are more black politicians today and the cities they run are more messed up. It's time to look at other options.
We have a two-party system the Presidential winner will be a Democrat or a Republican. Again quoting Clarke, there may not be any good guys, but Republicans are clear tgat they want us out of the picture, Look at DeSantis in Florida A wingnut was just elected in Louisiana, he will unleash pure Hell on the Black community. The Republican Governor of Texas sected a person to remove books from Houston schools. The libraries will be replaced by detention centers.
We see Conservatives here discuss their benign plans for the Black community. What we see Conservatives put in practice are attacks on Black education and putting as many Blacks as they can in prison.
Blacks have performed very well under adversity. My grandfather owned a successful 400-acre farm under Jim Crow. He was very self-reliant. Blacks at that time had a better-enforced code of conduct. Whites are not responsible for the current 75% black out-of-wedlock birthrate. Agency is essential. Family is important. Asians? I don't have any children out of wedlock.
The actual number of out of wedlock births by Black women has decreased. We give you a percentage. The actual number of births of Black married women has decreased, so the fraction remains high. This is the same nonsense number they throw out about Blacks in prison. They tell you that there are more Black men in prison than in college. The number in prison counts men of all ages. The number in college would generally be limited to the 18-25 age group. There are more 18-25 year old men in college than in prison. Don’t accept their white supremacist numbers.
The number to be concerned about is the one that tells us rabid white supremacists are the largest terrorist threat in the United States. When you put Christian Nationalists like Marjorie Taylor Greene or white supremacists like Paul Gosar in office, you give a green light to other white supremacists.
Obviously Blacks have thrived, cresting the ire of the white supremacists. Black cities like Rosewood and Greenwood were destroyed. You keep your weapon close by, but you never vote to give legislative power to white supremacists, it is self-defeating.
They are too afraid to analyze the evil and idiocy of current day Conservatives, so they critize Black culture, while their morals are much worse than the average Black person.
We obviously face a problem. Martin Luther King Jr worried that he was integrating his people into a burning house. When you are in that situation. You work to keep the arsonist white supremacists from gaining power. Not voting is not an option. In Arkansas, they elected Sarah Huckabee Sanders over a literal Black rocket scientist as Governor. She rails against AP African American history while being accused of paying $19K for a mythical lectern as cover for a trip to France. The GOP is the bottom of the barrel.
Edit to add:
White supremacists are consistent. In the past they destroyed thriving Black towns. In 2023, they file a lawsuit to prevent successful Black women from granting funds to Black female entrepreneurs who are very unlikely to receive loans from the usual sources.
We can discuss TED talks and Ibrim X Kendi, but there will be no mention of attempts to overturn an election. Voting is the very least we can do to show our displeasure with the actions of white supremacists. I understand the argument that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is a form of mental illness. My counter to that is that Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers and others did stress the vote, and we got voting rights bills. Our problem is that we then went to sleep and voting was ignored. The result, a white supremacist is elected Governor in Louisiana. Only 25% of eligible Black voters cast ballots.
From my perspective, I can only see this conflict, historically, in the context of the international balance of powers. Locally, between Israel and the Palestinians, it is a matter of actual rights and wrongs, of the aspirations of two peoples who come into conflict. But since the start, Palestine has become a symbol of the much broader conflicts of powers in the region and in the world. This is why it is so hard for people to disengage from ideology about it and see the actual people involved.
Israel is a very complex society. The Palestinian society is -- has been, in many respects, much more complex than what it seems as well, even if the state of conflict has flattened it into uniformity at least at surface level.
But nothing of this matters because, in the eyes of the world, the Palestine question has become a symbol that completely overshadows the parties actually involved, their human motivations.
Since the very start... a peculiar strand of antisemitism that never existed in the same cultural terms in Islam was planted among Palestinian Arabs by a kind of antisemitism of European descent -- there was opposition to the immigration of Jews and their buying lands in Mandatory Palestine, there was a nationalist Arab movement born as a consequence of the fall of the Ottoman empire after WWI, when a concept of nation states began to take shape in the Middle East also under the influences of Western culture -- but Nazi ideology played a huge part in fomenting antisemitic hatred in Palestine, as is evidenced by any study of the many declarations of the Grand Mufti al-Husseini, of al-Qassam of the Black Hand, and of al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; all these declarations make reference to global Jewish domination conspiracy theories that draw directly from the Protocols of Zion.
The dream of the early Zionists on the other hand was of an Eretz Yisrael that included the whole of Palestine.
The partition into two states was proposed first a few years before the start of WWII by the Peel Commission and rejected by the Arab leaders, while the Zionist leaders accepted it (though we know, by internal documents, that they did not accept it without reservation of further action).
After WWII, the Soviet Union and the entirety of the Western Left strongly supported the State of Israel in the beginning. But it happened that the Communist parties in Israel did not seize power, but rather a labour coalition, which positioned Israel in alignment with the West -- and the Soviet Union dropped its support for what could not become a satellite state, and looked elsewhere.
Since then, the conflict in Palestine became one of the theatres of confrontation of the Cold War, and the actual issues on the table took backstage relevance. I have a strong perception that the entire problem of Islamism has grown and festered in consequence of bad choices of both main actors in the Cold War. How things could have developed if the allies of the Palestinians and the allies of Israel had pushed towards reason and compromise rather than using the conflict for their own propaganda, we will never know.
But things are as they are. The conflict has wrought havoc on Palestinian society, pushing Palestinian Arabs to support more and more fundamentalist positions. And it has soured and twisted Israeli society to a much lesser but still painful extent.
How it will end it is difficult to say now. I see more hope among the Israeli Left than what is expressed by Mr Hugues. What I see in the country, what I hear from the part of my family that is there and from my son who was visiting when this horror happened and flew back to fight, is a strong determination to destroy the perpetrators of this crime and extirpate them from among the Palestinian people -- which will be far from bloodless (it was far from bloodless to extirpate the Nazis from among the German people, after all) -- after which, to turn around and try to solve this decades old conflict in a reasonable way, because to continue like this is impossible (like Ami Ayalon says, like Ehud Olmert, like say so many of the kibbutznikim who were attacked and survived on the Gaza border and are now fighting in the IDF or civil support).
Yes, there are a number in Israel that do not feel like this. But they are not the majority and war, oddly, has always tended to unite the country towards more hope.
Will this succeed? I do not know. There are too many other players involved, too many other interests at play. But I do hope and so does the part of Israel that has learned from the experience of the Diaspora the values of democracy, tolerance, peace and compromise.
As for the unqualified hostility of a certain Left to Israel, a hostility that bleeds strongly into hostility towards the Jews, most of whom are Zionist in the sense of believing in the desirability of a state of the Jewish people (beyond which Zionism has many bents and denominations) -- there are deep and longstanding reasons for it. It goes far beyond the disturbing dogmas of Critical Social Justice about colonialism, it is rooted in the old, antisemitic identification of the Jews with money, with the rich and powerful, with capitalism, with oppression and privilege, and with a readiness to betray because irredeemably Other. The same kind of tropes come up every times Jews are attacked as dissenters from orthodoxy... be it in Stalinist Soviet Union or in social justice groups.
I suggest to you three gentlemen to read this article of a young writer who has focused his research on totalitarian thought. I, in my old age, have been deeply enlightened by it, because I never saw the connections so clearly.
I am confused about where to comment on what with this. I already posted this comment in response to an earlier link to this conversation or some part of it. But what I wrote there is still what is on my mind now, so I am pasting it in again here:
I appreciate the even-handed discussion of the Israeli situation. I am glad there is no question about the utterly barbaric pogrom Hamas carried out. I do have reservations about the way you all discussed two issues -- the possibility of an "overreaction" by Israel and the place of the settlements in the whole conflict.
Daniel Pipes has for a long time argued that no settling with the Palestinians will be possible until they experience total defeat - a la Germany and Japan after WWII. Maybe he's right or wrong, but in any case, I think Israel has no viable option other than the total defeat and annihilation of Hamas. Hamas is not in the least interested in governing Gaza or for that matter in winning a Palestinian state. It is openly and avowedly purely genocidal. It cares not a whit for the people of Gaza, who will have no hope of a decent life until Hamas is eliminated. Whatever war Israel conducts, therefore, will not be an "overreaction" if it achieves this objective of total victory.
As for settlements, I am not a big fan of them, nor are I believe most Israelis. But I think you all vastly overrate the significance of the conflict over the settlements. For one thing, Gaza has no Jewish settlements, in fact no Jews at all. Israel took all of them out in 2005, even though the Jews there resisted that. It was an extreme right-wing prime minister who did that, by the way. The departing Jews left a viable economy in place, which Hamas proceeded to trash. It then turned what is falsely labeled the "open air prison" of Gaza into what is in truth a "medieval fortress," from which it sallies forth every so often to kill Jews. What the critics of the settlements need to do is explain why Israel should have any doubts about what would happen in the West Bank if it were to do what it already did in Gaza. The example of Gaza tells Israelis why it is futile to think an abandonment of the settlements would make a bit of difference.
The Palestinians are in the grip of an ideology that is in fact a fusion of Nazi and Islamist thinking that was brought to full fruition during World War II especially. It is genocidal, and its ultimate goal has nothing to do with a Palestinian state -- which Israel has offered several times to no avail. Unlike you all, however, I do not think this will go on another 75 years. The rest of the Middle East (except Iran) is already moving toward ever more substantial reproachment with Israel. Once the genocidal dreams of the Palestinians die, they will move that way as well. A total defeat of Hamas could put an end to the massive aid the UN, Europe and America have provided and that keeps the Palestinian leadership in power, and this would force the people of Gaza to embrace pragmatic and economically motivated leaders. TOTAL defeat of Hamas is what I believe to be the only hope for Gaza as well as for Israel.
You may be right, although I hope that in some respects you are not. Hamas needs to be quashed. But the Hezbollah are waiting, and both Hamas and Hezbollah are an Iranian cultivar. There is only so much that military force can accomplish without such a toll of civilian lives that not just the civilised world, but the Israeli people will not stomach it (international law did not forbid indiscriminate bombing of civilian population prior to WW2; now it does). A solution can be reached if, along with military force, comes pressure. The states that care for stability in the region, the friends of the Palestinian people need to clearly subordinate their help, especially material help, to the abandonment of genocidal aspiration towards Israel and the abandonment of terrorist targeting of civilians. On the other hand those in Israel who want a solution must obtain a majority in the Knesset and set out clear and fair offers for peace.
I do not know whether this can be accomplished, but unless it is, the conflict will continue and threaten to spread.
Sharon was, by the way, far from extreme right-wing, although the Left in the West depicted him as such. He was a man of the right, yes. But he was a man of the Old Guard, a man of solid principles, like Begin, like Shamir. Likud was destroyed by the rise of new right, unprincipled populists. If you want to see what extreme far right looks like, look at the parties that have held Netanyahu hostage in the last 10 years.
But you are right in that unless Hamas suffers a defeat from which it cannot rise again, there is little hope for the Palestinian people, and for Israel as well. Because living amidst constant hatred and violence destroys the civil society, even if the state itself may survive.
I don't see evidence that Israel is engaged in "indiscriminate bombing" even though that is what the press here tries to make look like. Telling civilians to move and giving them time to is also labeled a war crime by these same sources. Go figure. As for international law since WWII, I believe the Vietnam War happened post WWII. I recall a bit of what sure looked like indiscriminate bombing there. No?
Anyway, what you say is a bit confusing. You start out saying you hope I am right except in some respects (it's not clear what those are) and then you say "but you are right." In any case, I stick with Daniel Pipes and say victory is the way to get to an end to the death cult that the Palestinians have embraced or had forced on them. What happens after that? I certainly do not know. Crass materialism would be a much higher ideal for the Palestinian people than what they lust for now. I've said before, and only half jokingly, set up a Gaza Strip Authority, create a vacation wonderland out of Gaza, get the wealthy Jews in Israel to help them finance it, get rich and "forget the dead, they will not follow you."
I am sorry to have been confusing. I have a son there doing his duty to wipe out Hamas, too many friends and children of friends, know too many people who have died, and that may bring too many thoughts into my head at the same time. And the question is far from simple or easily solved.
I said that you may be right about the need for a complete military annihilation of Hamas (although it is quite easier said than done... Nazi Germany and her allied Japan were states, not a terrorist group. Nazi Germany was quashed, but Nazism has remained with us on the fringes; and Fascism has remained with us much wider than on the fringes)
and I said that yet I hope that in some respects you are not: those respects are the human cost of attempting to completely wipe out Hamas in Gaza. Which may be huge, and not worthwhile beyond a certain extent.
For the problem is that this is not a regular war between states, in which victory can be normatively achieved. Hamas is not Egypt or Syria or Jordan in '56, '67 or '73, where you wage war, you win or lose, you make peace. This is more like Lebanon in '82 and 2008, where there is the risk of an entanglement without any true result and a huge risk of massacring the civilian population wantonly.
(Let us avoid bringing up the Vietnam war, it was filled with violations of international war laws; and moreover, the US lost it, without ever having even declared it)
There are some of the opinions of Pipes that I read, which I share. Many others are abominable stupidity, and his positions on Israel are unpalatable to me. I completely endorse Hitchens's opinion on the fellow.
Things are far for simple or clear cut. And the settlements in the West Bank have a huge impact in the mental approach to the entirety of the conflict, like the way that Israel treats/has been forced to treat its Arab population. It matters inside Israel. It matters in the view of Israel's neighbours. And it matters in the world's opinion.
When I read people like Pipes talk of victory, I am reminded what little love I have for all those who so easily prattle of war from their armchairs. Go and take a gun with my son, my nephews and their younger friends, come defend the country, and then speak. Otherwise, pontificate less.
Victory as Pipes imagines it may well come only from the extermination of the Palestinian people. Then what? You over there sit back at your wargames on computer while Israel finds itself, bloodied by genocide, still in the heart of Middle East and in the middle of countries that would, for a change, have a righteous reason to hate it and strive for its destruction?
That would be the death of Israel even should it survive.
I hope we manage to uproot Hamas enough that a peace agreement can be reached, if the friends of the Palestinians actually bring them to reason and to the acceptance of a two state solution. I hope that we can do it without too much damage to the civil population (although I am aware that it will be bloody and every drop of blood will be used in propaganda). There is only hope, and perseverance, and an attempt at keeping a cool head and acting humanely in the middle of so much horror.
Sounds like the more pragmatic Arab countries will eventually accept Israel and the terrorists will be squeezed out. Which leaves Iranian theocracy which citizens would be happy to vote out eventually. The Israel haters have no reason, most appear to have suffered negligence at the hands of parents most likely cognitively, emotionally challenged themselves, decided to feed paranoia and lies to their children who may be destined to be ignorant, pathetic , conspiracy believing Jew haters.
Sweet Finkelstein made his name decrying the "Holocaust industry" that blackmails the West on guilt to line the pockets of rich Jewish organisations, as he put and puts it. Finkelstein believes that the state of Israel has no right to exist and the "historical evidence" in his theories (note, he has no training in History, he is a Political Scientist and activist) is one of the sources of the thesis that Israeli Jews are coloniser settlers that displaced the 'natives' and must be expelled. Finkelstein approves of the politics and actions of Hezbollah and finds the organisation quite nice (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAGVQF-Kys8). Finkelstein's mother was a communist (mine was too) who supported Stalin's USSR to the last breath and toed the line of the Comintern on Israel (my mum revolted against Stalin and maybe that is why I grew up with an ability to disengage from dogmatic ideology, who knows, sons love their mums). Finkelstein is a friend and disciple of Chomsky and of the same stripe -- they look where the US turns and support the opposite, anytime, anyhow, anywhere, no matter what.
Brilliant people both, very good at finding arguments, terrible examples of reasonable thinking, because they are overcome by their biases to the point of blindness.
There are Jews that want the end of the State of Israel in Israel too. There is even Naturei Karta, and Jewish Holocaust deniers. Finkelstein's positions are not more reliable because he is a Jew... that's pretty racist as a concept, as if Jews could not think beyond their Jewishness. You know, there are Jews all across the political spectrum.
It is sadly ironic to hear Jews say that Israel is the one place on earth where they, as Jews, are safe, when it appears that everywhere else on earth where Jews live, they are safer.
In my opinion, Israel, on balance, was not a good idea. But it happened. its existence must be accepted. It's a done deal. But the way it has behaved, the expansion with settlements, the subjugation and oppression of the Palestinians, the brutality and BS, is unacceptable.
Here's a dire warning from a former speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, a Zionist, to his fellow Zionists. As relevant today as back when he wrote it, 20 yrs ago. Actually, more so.
The End of Zionism
by Avraham Burg
Israel must shed its illusions and choose between racist oppression and democracy
"It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.
It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. You can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see the occupation. Travelling on the fast highway that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied."
Burg, like Benvenisti, like Grossman -- like Pappé and Chomsky and Finkelstein, suffer from a serious virus in regards to Israel: far-left ideology. Like I said (and I come from half a Communist family) Israel became, since shortly after its creation, a symbol and polarity in the Cold War. These people do not anymore understand or try to understand the situation in Israel, the state of things that has developed over the years through the interactions of all the players in that area and the international players as well. These people want a stand of righteousness from which to fulminate and feel good, very much like the far-Right in Israel, very much like a huge part of the woke left today.
Avrum talked about a two state solution 20 years ago... then he did not get to become the Secretary of Labour, and it went down from there. He stopped being a Zionist a long time ago. Now he is a "Post-Zionist" who tells Jews to get over the Shoah and that they have no right to a state of their own. This is where the road led people like Burg. They are utterly blind to anything else but Jewish guilt, they are the Robin DiAngelo of Hebraism. After two times in which the two states solution was rejected by the Palestinian representatives (twice in 2000 by Arafat, once in 2008 by Abbas), the conclusion of these people is to call for the dismantling of the State of Israel. Which is the political verbiage to the militant actions of Hamas and of all the Palestinian terrorists before Hamas.
Israel is a state far from perfect and in many respects become worse and worse because of the circumstances surrounding its survival. It remains a democratic state, unless pushed towards undemocratic solutions by being attacked, physically, materially, every day that dawns. For decades. The suicide bombers, the missiles. Sure, Israel has built a good missile defence, which has allowed its population to live and function relatively well; still the missiles come, and pieces sometimes hit (especially in outlying areas). In the awareness of every Israeli remains constant the very clear fact that only the Iron Dome separates them from death raining down from the sky.
Now I would like all the finger-waggers in the Western Left to truly try to think about that: what it is to live under constant threat, and what it may do to people. Some, like the folks on the Right, become more and more fiercely nationalist and hateful (and guess what, most of the supporters of the far-Right, aside from the ultra-Orthodox, are among Mizrahi Jews -- people who were expelled or forced to flee from the Arab countries first at the time when so much Nazi propaganda poisoned the Middle East, then after 1956, after 1967, after 1982; people who remember fear and discrimination in the same way as European Jews remember the Holocaust; people for whom the feeling of being surrounded by hatred often engenders hatred.
Sure, dear friend, Israel might have been a bad idea. It was a dream of homecoming (many things are the Jews of Israel, but colonisers they are not -- despite what people like Burg say, who maintain that Jews are naturally stateless and should be content with it, they are one of the Indigenous Peoples of Palestine, which was 2000 years ago called Judaea), it was the dream of planting a garden that would give, with statehood, a right also to self defence. It was planted in the ancestral land that had become, after the invasion of the Arabs, for 1400 years a place of hostility. Yes, that perhaps was a mistake, the hope that civilisation would prevail in the end.
The dire warning of Burg was ridiculous then, and it is even more ridiculous now. It is not on Israel alone that all this blood falls, unless one wants to look at history with only one eye and a preconceived ideology. The Palestinian people may want peace, but the leaders it follows and elect do not. Sharon withdrew, unilaterally, from Gaza, removing forcibly thousands of Jews; they left in Gaza structures and means of production, giant glasshouses as well, which Hamas destroyed. The Palestinians have received immense funds over the years and have only employed them towards weapons. From wherever the Palestinians have reached, since the glorious times of al-Husseni and his Nazi propaganda, hatred and violence have come towards Israel.
There is a decades long hostility that only has generated more hostility. The Palestinian people have increasingly embraced Islamism over the last decades (they embraced or excused terrorism before, but not to the same extent); the Jewish Israelis have increasingly embraced illiberal nationalism and religious identity, which produce discrimination and oppression beyond what security demands.
But half of Israelis are against the acts and policies of the government assembled by Netanyahu in the last 20 years; half of the Zionists in Israel want a state for the Palestinians, separate from Israel, because the two systems and cultures are in this age incompatible. The Palestinians seem to want the whole of Palestine and, according to polls, support Hamas by a majority of 70%. When the government changed and Olmert offered them the two state solution (2008 -- 96% per cent of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip), Abbas said no. So we got Netanyahu back, and more missiles, and more attacks.
If people do not stop laying blame only with one side of this conflict, and if they don't begin demanding from the side that they favour actual steps towards peace, mutual recognition and then an actual agreement on a plan for a two state solution, this bloodshed will never end.
Or perhaps it will end as Hamas explicitly wants, a Caliphate from the desert to the sea. I am tired of explaining things to the righteous in the West that at the bottom of their heart hate the plutocrats that support Israel (fine old Left conspiracy theory) and hate Israel because it looks so strong and successful, so Western, so little Third World. Israel has existed under threat for over 80 years now, and the only reason why it is strong and successful is that it has never given up under that threat. The pressure has darkened Israel's soul as well -- and none of Israel's enemies are innocent of this.
I appreciate your well articulated comment, your civil words and tone. There is obvious affection and devotion to Israel in your comment. I glossed over a few other posts of yours here and believe you said you have a son in the IDF, now in this fight, as well as knowing many who have been harmed by this too-long conflict.
Without taking all your examples point by point, refuting or agreeing or just begging ignorance, Ill just say, overall, I cannot excuse the wrongs committed by the Palestinians. I cannot excuse the human failings they've exhibited, the cruelty and callousness on their side, the mistakes theyve made.
That said, none of that causes me to change what I said, to which you responded.
I will note you seem to give much relevance to the communist linkage to some of the Jewish advocates for the human condition of the Palestinians, who you named, as if that negates their findings, their critiques, and conclusions. I dont understand what, in their critical presentations, must be tainted with any shortcomings we may find in communism - and again, the communists or zionists or any other group of any kind are comprised of individuals. I dont think examples of wrongs and inhumanity are invalidated because they come from someone who was or is a communist.
That's all I have for now. (life calls ... appointments, etc). I'll end with my desire - that no one harms anyone, peace to all. Easy to say? Simplistic? Honest.
You are right about me. Yes, my son and my ex wife live in Israel, and I have a strong affective connection to that country and its trials (to be completely clear, although I do not believe it matters, I am not a Jew -- nor could I ever become one, as the ethnic identity is inextricably linked to faith, unless it comes from blood, and I am not a believer in any religion; but my son is a Jew, because his mother is, and that is how ethnic belonging is transmitted among Jews). We have always remained connected, and I consider my ex wife's family part of my family, as she does with mine. I spent long periods in Israel, and I developed a closeness that often brings me to think as "we", although I do not know that I have the right, as I am not a citizen of Israel. However, 38 years of connection have brought me, a a historian, to also study the history of Israel and of the conflict in Palestine.
And I strive, believe me, even in a moment like this, to keep an even-minded judgement.
The shortcomings of the Jewish intellectuals I mentioned are not that they advocate for the human condition of the Palestinians (whose faults and wrongs, just like the faults and wrongs of Israel, have not been committed by a people on the whole, but by the leaders of that people -- and are loaded with historical and psychological reasons). It is the manner in which these intellectuals advocate their opinions -- turning the entire discourse into a black and white theatre of good against evil, and vilifying any opposing or doubting opinion, in particular other intellectuals, as lackeys of American Imperialism or self-serving members of the plutocratic elite. They are passionate -- in a dangerously ferocious way; the same way of inquisitors; the same way of believers in a Revelation; the same way of dogmatic Communists.
Communism unites a few of them, and a certain strain of left ideology encompasses all.
I notice this because I am myself a man of the Left -- in the broad sense: I still hold my membership in the Labour Party (UK) despite living now in Canada; over half a century of it. As such, I notice the flaws in leftist thought better than in the thought of the Right: I see the flaws of the Right from outside, while those of the Left I see from within.
I mentioned that my mother was a Communist -- a rather unorthodox Italian Communist who married a Brit alongside whom she had fought in the war, an ardent admirer of Golda Meir (clearly, a link with Israel was written in my stars), and one who suffered almost physically at every new revelation of how far the USSR had strayed from her ideal. From my mother, more than anyone else, I learned to admire ideals while being wary of dogmatic ideology -- something into which the Left has a tendency to fall -- and so does the Right, but again, I can see the deleterious effects of dogmatic rightwing ideologies, but of the leftist ones I better understand the workings.
I do not use the Communist scare to detract from the reasoning of intellectuals like Burg and Pappé, I do not invalidate their thinking because they are Communists. But I notice what their position is, from their words and arguments: Their findings are not negated, their conclusions become invalidated by being blinded by ideology, which selectively chooses to point out only certain facts and not others.
And for somebody familiar with far-left propaganda, it is inevitable for me to correlate their stance with their involvement in fringe, Marxist-Leninist groups that all talk the same old talk since the 1930s. I cannot go here into too much detail about MAKEI, the Israeli Communist Party, and its conflicted history. Stalinist USSR at the very first supported Israel and its right to exist, but short after, when free elections in Israel did not result in a Communist state but in a majority Socialist government that allied itself with the values of Social Democracy, Stalin turned into Israel's most fierce enemy -- the Soviets sided with the Arab states that refused the right to existence of Israel -- with the very same arguments still used today -- and they persecuted Jews at home and forced Jewish members of the Soviet establishment, under threats and torture, to confirm the most outrageous Jewish Conspiracy theories. The Hadash today talks still in the manner of Stalinist Soviet propaganda; and so do these intellectuals in all of their arguments that mostly are passionate rants.
And that is my problem. They point out painful, horrible truths -- the same that half the country that has not voted for Netanyahu's coalition also points out -- but they draw the conclusion that Israel is rotten at the core and does not deserve, never deserved to exist, while the Palestinians are saints that only want to live in peace (I know a large number of Palestinians who totally want to live in peace and have no desire to destroy Israel, only for a state of their own, and who are driven occasionally to violence by the oppressor; I do not know enough to say how many just live under the thumb of Hamas and other smaller terrorist organisations). People like Burg and Pappé do not see reality, but a version of reality distorted by their ideology, where everything is the fault of American Imperialism and where Israel is the poster child of American Imperialism -- and nothing, nothing ever, can Israel or the US do that is good -- even should it seem so, it has hidden nefarious purposes. The situation is framed, if one reads the old Soviet propaganda, in exactly the same terms.
This is the exact mirror image of the Right's obsession with the various Communist Conspiracy theories, last the one about Cultural Marxism.
Forgive my always excessive logorrhoea. It mattered to me to explain my point.
We do desire, and hope, for the same thing. And I do hope that it will not be too late. I do hope, like many of my family and friends in Israel do, that after the inevitable bloodshed there will be a chance for peace, for working towards a two state solution. Somewhat like it happened with the Partition of India, although on a smaller scale, if it comes to pass it will not be easy, and it will take reasonability on all sides. Since some of the players involved beyond Israelis and Palestinians seem highly unreasonable, this may be exceedingly hard.
But we must hope. For if we lose hope, what is left?
Hi. I have such a long list of must-do To Do's (that I just updated afresh), that I cannot give your post, which I just saw, the attention I'd like to in order to respond thoughtfully. It has a lot to take in, and I had to stop after the 3rd paragraph. However, I did want to acknowledge it, which is the purpose of this brief reply. Hopefully I can give it more attention and a decent response in the near future.
I will say, I see unhelpful, objectionable, and sometimes revolting behaviors in the protest movement (where there is actual anti semitism or callous disregard for Jewish lives, in Israel or anywhere), in the protests against Israel's relentless bombardment of Gazans, but that does not sway me from my revulsion and opposition to Israel's brutal, heartbreaking collective punishment against these people, ongoing to this moment for 3 & 1/2 weeks. Nor does it detach me from my opposition to the indulgence of brutality, theft, hardship perpetrated, well documented, against Palestinians in the West Bank, by both by Settlers and IDF.
I was able to write the above now only bc it's an opinion that has already been formed, informed thru research, thought - it has been tested and has stood as true, even with updated efforts to seek the facts, so I need not spend much time on it. As I said, I'll have to come back to digest -- or try to, lol -- your thoughts when I have the bandwidth, the time. Till then - understanding and non violence is my continuing hope. Peace to you and all.
Arguing, on decent terms, is what always will make the world better. May I be spared the dreary fate of only hearing from those who agree with all my views.
Bibi was no different in trying to buy off Hamas than the UN, Europe, the US, Iran, Qatar, and many others who also have supported Hamas AND the P.A. under Abbas with lots of money. Which is how Hamas can control Gaza without doing anything that could remotely be called governing it. As for the fantasy of the two-state solution, the P.A. and the PLO under Arafat and Abbas have no more interest in it whatsoever than Hamas does. It is a dream to tempt Iraelis, and the rest of the West falls for it. When Abbas addresses his people in their own language (as did Arafat) he spews the same vicious fantasy as motivates Hamas and the deluded radicals of the Western nations -- that is, "from the river to the sea," which is a nice sounding phrase meaning genocide. None of this will change, as Daniel Pipes has said, until Hamas is utterly defeated, and the Palestinians know it and accept it.
Glad to see that you support Bibi, the incarnation of corruption. The reasons why he supported Hamas was not the same as the reasons why the West may have tried to appease Hamas. Bibi made awful miscalculations and deliberate choices, to keep himself in power and to keep the support of his far right allies that are the only reason why he could remain in power. This government and its unspeakably incompetent defence minister moved entire IDF divisions from the Gaza border to the West Bank to protect the celebrations of the settlers staged to rouse Palestinian wrath. When we say that Bibi has this blood on his hands, we do not jest.
Israel is politically divided today similarly to the US although in a different way.
But there is a difference. Israel unites in a crisis like this. Now Israel fights -- and yes, it may be that annihilation is on the bill, especially if Iran gets involved as it is threatening, but Israel has fought a much stronger enemy quite a few times before, and won.
And once the fight is over, comes the reckoning with Bibi -- much better politicians than he, Meir, Begin, Sharon, were brought down by these kind of disasters. And after that, hopefully, we talk of peace.
Did I say I supported Bibi? I am glad to know Israelis personalize and demonize their political squabbles as insanely as Americans do. But I doubt the security failures have as much to do with what you refer to as you claim. In any case, what saves Israel is that they cannot lose a war even once. So, yes, they will unit and do their duty. Same will happen here, I imagine, when we face an existential threat and put aside the idiocy of BLM, gender gnostic fantasies, climate paranoia, and all the other fads that keep the left rev'd up daily, and we unite again around our basic constitutionally defined rights and protections.
All I know about Israel's internal political bickering is the battle over the very powerful supreme court. Since I tend to favor legislative supremacy, I am sympathetic to critics of the Israeli court's apparently very great powers. But it's really none of my business. Nor is it Biden's. And since he's absurdly weighed in on it, I surely won't any more than what I say here. All I say here is win this F'g war.
I suspect a lot of Gazans would love to have an alternative that would actually "govern" as the Council on Foreign Relations puts it. I would not say Hamas governs, I would say it rules.
Sounds like BS to me, given that 1) the IDF forces securing the boundary are uniformly reported as undermanned and under-equipped, and 2) the responsible higher ups in the IDF look to be in line for serious penalties for the poor precautions for protection of the Jewish population.
Before we dive into Gaze, there are many people who worry about what we did to both German and Japanese civilians during World War II. "Slaughterhouse 5" anyone? And that is just one, popular example.
There is a lot of ignorance in this short discussion. Israel pulled out of Gaza. Israel sent in their army and forcefully removed Israelis but left all the infrastructure they'd built intact. Hamas razed anything the Israelis left behind.
Then came the terror campaign known as the First Intifada. Hamas revealed their innovation, the suicide bomber, which is what led Israel to built their fence.
Even with the fence Israel has tried to send food and medicine into Gaza for years. Hamas has deliberately limited what is allowed in to keep their boot on the neck of the people of Gaza.
As there were limited opportunities for employment Israel opened their border and allowed Palestinians to cross and work. This allowed Palestinians to gather information about where and when to strike.
Look at a map. Gaza has miles of beaches on the Mediterranean. Any other country in the world - Egypt, Israel, France, Italy, Greece, etc. would build resorts and become a fantastic tourist destination. But Hamas spent all their time and energy and hundreds of millions of dollars on wiping out all the Jews in Israel.
And then there is Egypt... but I'm tired of writing.
It's disappointing how little you seem to have prepared for this discussion.
I'll make myself scarce again... (I havent commented here in ages...)
Peace. Out.
What Is at Stake in Israel?
Also, What Is at Stake in Gaza?
Watch this from CNN
It's a good, short piece showing Gazan children impacted by this war. Guess we gotta kill them, their parents, siblings, et al. to finally get rid of Hamas because they killed Israeli children, parents, siblings on Oct 7th. We will bomb them flat, bomb them as we have for 15 days ... 15 days and they say they havent started yet!
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/10/12/exp-gaza-children-pkg-fst-101203pseg2-cnni-world.cnn
CNN
Ive recently returned to CNN for its pretty decent (mainstream) Israel War coverage, esp during wee hrs of the night (Brits mostly host it, report on the ground too). It does seem more sober, more balanced (eg, Ive seen reporters get ripped by a bullying IDF spokeman and an incensed West Bank protester, both accusing them of bias). It seems more journalistic, more "European" in its coverage than it was in its insufferable Trump Era phase - all that useless garbage they were encouraged to toss out to the TDSed viewer - smug, opinionated anti Trump rants, palace intrigue, Trump-Russia obsession, clubby table talk... (like MSNBC)
May it only get better...
A dire warning to fellow Israelis from the pen of a deeply-rooted Zionist, now former Zionist & ex Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Avraham Burg. This piece was published 20 years ago. I read it then with awe and great respect, as I do today. His prescient warning was not heeded. His words are even more relevant today because they were not heeded.
Avraham Burg
The End of Zionism
"Israel must shed its illusions and choose between racist oppression and democracy"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/sep/15/comment
An excerpt:
"It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.
It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. You can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see the occupation. Traveling on the fast highway that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied."
UPDATE on Avraham Burg .
If you have a paid subscription to Ha'aretz, you can read about Avraham Burg -- former Knesset speaker and former Zionist, former Israel-believer -- wanting to "quit the Jewish people". I cant access it, but I'd like to because I bet it's a compelling read;
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2021-01-02/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/a-scion-of-zionist-aristocracy-wants-to-quit-the-jewish-people-will-israel-let-him/0000017f-f277-d223-a97f-ffff549b0000
"A Scion of Zionist Aristocracy Wants to Quit the Jewish People. Will Israel Let Him?
Why Avraham Burg, who has served as Knesset speaker, interim president and head of the Jewish Agency, is asking Israel to annul his registration as a Jew"
------------------------------------------------------------------
However, I WAS able to access this about Burg from 2018, Mondoweiss
"In calling for end of Jewish state, Avraham Burg is painted as ‘troublemaker’ at liberal NY synagogue"
https://mondoweiss.net/2018/02/calling-troublemaker-synagogue/
INTERESTING!!! Q & A w Burg at the end of this synagogue talk.
One example:
"Deborah asked why he called his cousins bad guys. Burg said:
Listen, if cousins of mine literally speaking are racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, OK, a few other phobias, and I can give you the whole of it. But racists– they are from my point of view, they are genetic Jews but I don’t have any partnership with them. If somebody, my next door neighbor, might be an Arab, might be the educator of my grandchildren, who is pluralistic, tolerant, humanist, who comes to her position from her Islam not Judaism– she is my partner. [More applause]"
Just ... WOW. Such a rarity - this highly elevated, illuminating, fearless human being. Respect!
Break the Silence. Can you?
What’s wrong with those Palestinians!!!
Why can’t they just live peacefully beside their Jewish neighbors?
From the mountain of examples that show why they find that hard to do - a segment from the ongoing documentary project,
BREAKING the SILENCE.
You will witness IDF & SETTLER ATROCITIES perpetrated against Palestinians. Not a rarity, but a ‘normal’ everyday occurrence
Don’t take it from me, but from the mouths of former IDF SOLDIERS who were there, who participated in these inhumane acts. Take it from the video clips that show what they describe, what they & the settlers, as oppressors, do to the oppressed.
As you watch, perhaps, like me, the slimy words of Netanyahu & his ilk, including American PRO Israel gaslighters (and also some ignorant true believers) will come to mind: Claims like: Israel is The One in this conflict, these wars, that has morality on its side. Our military is the most moral on earth. We do not ever target innocent civilians. Etc.
How hideous they sound, as they waft across the consciousness, across this film.
WATCH IT
https://youtu.be/0Mj4OpHEmzk?si=A-fizollaEtjbzv8
If you had asked me on Oct 7th, I would have had sympathetic Israel-centered things to say about the Hamas attack: horrendous, shocking, brutal. Israel must defend itself, of course. Those poor hostages, all those victims of unspeakable cruelty in the kibbutzes and elsewhere...
Anyway, those things still live in me, but Israel has put focus and sympathy for itself on low, on the back burner. I have moved on because Israel has moved us on.
GAZA
Heartbreaking collective punishment, worse than ever before, raining down on Gazans for 2 weeks. I am seeing rage killing. Mass murder. Deprivation of survival basics: food, water, medicine. A child is killed every 15 minutes (heard on CNN) So many children now without a mother or father, sisters, brothers. I see war crimes. It is insane. We are paying for it. And Biden has given Israel a green light to do this, even if with whispered cautions for restraint. Do you see restraint?
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN:
I came upon a link on X (twitter) to a recent podcast (w video), The Katie Halper Show, where she talks this week w Norman Finkelstein about the assault on Gaza. It's 2+ hrs (!!!) but I found it very listenable.
"Norman Finkelstein on Israel's BRUTAL Assault On Gaza"
https://www.youtube.com/live/m36CUGA1Ucw?si=-iZBIKKkwP8JneKG
He said, starting in 2020 he'd turned away from 40 yrs of focusing like a hawk on Israel-Palestine, but that this WAR, what is happening now, brought him RAGING back into the fray. His summarizing of past events and facts, up to now, is helpful, especially since I, too, had stopped paying attention, in my case over the past 6 years or so, not nearly as engaged as I once was... the situation just seemed so redundantly awful with no change on the horizon.
BREAKING the SILENCE
In this podcast, Norman mentioned, and reminded me of, an Israeli activist documentary, BREAKING the SILENCE, made by former IDF soldiers. (The full collection of videos compiled since 2004 is linked below.) They are heartbreaking - comprised of interviews w IDF soldiers, and video clips that show the atrocities they describe: their encounters with Palestinians, their feelings and behaviors, their lack of feeling, their violence, settler violence, the dehumanization. It is raw and brutally honest, which, as with many other revelations out there, puts the lie to Israel's self-serving claims that they, unlike the Palestinians, operate on the moral high ground.
It's a film that keeps growing - there is no “The End" because there is no end in sight for this inhumane occupation and land theft. It is breathtakingly painful, but is important to help understand more fully the reality of occupied Palestine, beyond US-Israeli propaganda. And it is especially important now, as this hideous massacre, this war of deprivation of basics while constantly bombing civilians is waged with our US dollars.
I saw one portion of Breaking the Silence yrs ago. The official full collection is linked below. I can only take so much at a time. I googled it and started in anew on YouTube with one segment that is presented within a very good group presentation. Below is its text intro & link
"Join us for a conversation between Rabbi Sharon Brous and Breaking the Silence leaders. The evening will open with a screening of Mission Hebron, a short documentary by Rona Segal based on the testimony of Israeli soldiers who served in the West Bank.
https://youtu.be/0Mj4OpHEmzk?si=OmjREv6IJ5ofVXRi
SETTLERS & OTHER ATROCITIES
Note, in the video linked above, the awful behaviors of “deeply religious” settlers. Imagine your land, your home, is suddenly snatched from you - because they can - with no right to reclaim it, no consequences for the thieves. Then imagine, as if this weren’t bad enough, the thieves are protected from you but you are punished by them, that the authorities defer to these insane bullies as they harass & attack you & your loved ones. You have just imagined yourself as a Palestinian in the West Bank. No need to imagine it though - the proof is clearly shown in the videos.
More links:
Article abt Breaking the Silence https://theintercept.com/2019/03/03/breaking-the-silence-israel-idf/
Breaking the Silence video archive: https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/videos
Hamas gave Israel a gift. The attack made Israel a victim. The United States is sending support to Israel. At a minimum, a condition of the support should be that Israel cannot allow even one more settler to build in Gaza. Gaza needs support from the United States as well.
Hamas has to let the humanitarian aid to be distributed freely to the Palestinians. If there is any interference with the aid, MSM will mak it seem that all Palestinians deserve to suffer because they “can’t get their act together”. The suffering of Palestinians will not be the focus of MSM.
Netanyahu built up Hamas and worked to diminish the power of the Palestinian Authority. He should not be able to escape his responsibility with his political career intact.
Thanks
Corrected
President Jimmy Carter wrote a book “Peace Not Apartheid” pointing out that Israeli contro of Palestinians was a major part of the problem. Imagine that Palestinians can have electricity and water cut off and then have rely on others to give “permission” to bring aid to Gaza.
The anger can be understood. Hamas let that anger control action. The attack was not going to improve the situation in Gaza. Getting out information about the apartheid ghettos in Gaza under an authoritarian Netanyahu government may have moved the needle. I say this, but I realize that politicians and journalists in the West felt free to call Palestinians “animals” without any real repercussions, so nothing may have changed.
Wow. Surprised if you can show me where they actually are quoted, are taped, saying "animals" about "Palestinians" If you mean Hamas, not surprised. Not at all surprised if done in private about both. But there are many who dont use such brutish language, who still choose to refuse to scratch below the surface of commonplace, more 'civilized' propaganda, designed to keep our eyes averted, our brains truth-fuzzed.
Getting out information... yes, in the mainstream it's so buried, so slow a trickle, over so many years - it hasnt yet broken thru and been able to sustain and grow in strength. My hope here is with the growing movement of anti-Israel (wrongs & crimes) folks, many young people.
I will say Ive found CNN again due to this war... Esp at night, wee hrs, it's much more balanced in terms of the Palestinian life experiences, the horrors of this war as it is impacting them. More a la European way of viewing it. More in depth interviews w Arabs, Palestinians, Jews who dont toe the sanctified line.
I remember hearing the current CNN CEO stated, when he took over, that the network would return to its original journalistic MO, which to me would mean getting off the insufferable 24/7 loop of anti Trump, woke biased, boring, ranting, opinionated, bad reportage. Cant give a big blue ribbon yet, but the late night coverage of Israel's War has progressed beyond even where they used to go on the ME Conflict, prior to their really awful yrs during Trump era. This signals to me that they are listening to, seeing, the growing global pushback against the "righteous" (dont dare challenge it!) US-Israeli narrative.
Israel blocked food, water, and electricity to 2 million people. That is treating the entire population of Gaza as “animals”.
This is from March. These are the words of Israelis
“Most Israelis are avoiding what’s happening in the territories, most Israelis don’t visit there…For most people it’s some kind of unclear reality happening somewhere else that has hardly anything to do with them…
“A lot of Israelis who have strong principles feel very, very badly about what has happened. Others are saying, Serves them right, this is the way to do– eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. And unfortunately what you hear is some — not just the far right politicians– some rightwingers are saying that as well, too.
“There is a sentiment among many Israelis, saying, OK these are the circumstances, they’re animals anyway, let’s behave the same way. And that is very, very frightening. and I think this is some of the results or the implications of a long term occupation. I was born after the Six Day War, this is the reality I know. For many other people they don’t even think about that anymore. This is the part of the reality– Jews are up, Arabs are down, whatever, this is the way things are. But in the long run of course it cannot be maintained forever. In the long run, there will be a deep moral price to pay because of the situation, especially if you put in religion into the equation as well, which is part of the problem in my view.
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/03/palestinians-are-animals-why-many-jewish-israelis-approve-settler-pogrom/
No, we mostly treat our animals better, and well we should.
But you said, " I realize that politicians and journalists in the West felt free to call Palestinians “animals” without any real repercussions, so nothing may have changed."
That is a specific accusation that your examples don't show in black and white. They just show someone saying some Israelis have that "sentiment." (True! And Im sure some say it too!) There's enough ugliness in the world to point out.... so Im just pointing out your wording, in that one part, makes it seem you've actually seen or heard it from 'the horse's mouth' - pols and journalists. Then you give an example of Israelis in general w a sentiment like that. That's all.
Peace Out :)
Don't you mean to say about Netanyahu: "He should NOT be able to escape his responsibility with his political career intact."? I think you missed the "not."
There was an interesting interchange between a Saudi news anchor and a Hamas official.
The Saudi news anchor asked the Hamas official
1. Why would he not expect the Israeli government to overreact in punishing Gaza
2. Why he didn’t give Arab nations in the area a head’s up so they could be ready for the blowback
3. How he thought this would benefit the Palestinians in Gaza
4 Why he gave Israel the upper hand in the public opinion battle. Israel would be the victim, rather than the Palestinians
https://x.com/hxhassan/status/1715404424326074443?s=57&t=l8XxLtAy7PR0pMVSwGllUQ
It should be kept in mind that the Saudi government was trying to work on a peace treaty with Israel.
Hamas did not want to see the peace become a reality.
Israel has its horror show for survival---brutal, systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to create a Jewish state.
"The One hundred Year’s War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonization and Resistance, 1917-2017.
Mar 6, 2020 WATSON INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.
Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.
Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies in the department of History at Columbia University. He received his B.A. from Yale in 1970, and his D.Phil. from Oxford in 1974. He is co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and was President of the Middle East Studies Association, and an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 until June 1993. He is author of: Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (2013); Sowing Crisis: American Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle East (2009); The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (2006); Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East (2004); Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1996); Under Siege: PLO Decision-Making During the 1982 War (1986); British Policy Towards Syria and Palestine, 1906-1914 (1980); and co-editor of Palestine and the Gulf (1982), The Origins of Arab Nationalism (1991), and The Other Jerusalem: Rethinking the History of the Sacred City (2020).”
https://youtu.be/wH8Ip1cvlRY?si=kxHi6nDl0aNJQANm
It is hilarious that Conservatives decrying violence are openly supportive of pardons for those who attacked the Capital on January 6th.
The amazing fact is that flotillas carry Jews from Europe to Haifa faced bombs planted on ships by MI6. Often, there are no good guys.
Edit to add
Link to British blocking Jews
https://www.thedailybeast.com/mi6-attacked-jewish-refugee-ships-after-wwii
The United States officially recognizes Arabs as white as well as most Jews. The situation between the Zionists and Arabs is white-on-white crime, considering the history. The war in Ukraine is a continuation of white-on-white crime. Europeans have slaughtered each other by the multiple millions through endless wars.
Lol
I do recall African students studying at universities in both Russia and Ukraine were the last allowed to leave both countries when the war began. If I remember correctly animals were allowed to leave before the Africans. In addition, Poland initially denied entry.
Edit to add:
Link
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-shows-racism-has-no-boundaries/
https://x.com/justinamash/status/1715470077196194068?s=20
There was a brief proposal that the Jewish refugees be offered land in Kenya
https://jewishaction.com/jewish-world/history/whats_the_truth_about_the_uganda_plan/
Sometimes there are no good guys. Hamas are assassins, not soldiers. They will kill Jews or Muslims and let. aAllah sort out the afterlife. Netanyahu is trying to escape legal consequences and in doing so failed to protect Israeli citizens.
Palestinians in Gaza have limited control of their lives. Note an outside entity can turn off electricity and water. The unemployment rate for young people is said to be 50%. Some Black Americans can look back in time and remember slave revolts by people like Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey. Thus there is a reason that connections can be made between enslaved Blacks and Palestinians in what could be called a concentration camp.
It is. 2023, how can we view the murderous attack by Hamas? Hamas says tgat its warriors are ready to die for their cause. They also .appear to believe that Jews should not exist. Genocide cannot be condoned. Palestinian suffering cannot be condoned. Hamas appears willing to murder every one who does not support Jewish eradication, thus they cannot be supported. That does not mean that random killings of Palestinians cannot be criticized. Palestinians have been called animals by government officials. Dehumanizing all Palestinians will be a green light to slaughter.
Israel has the military might to destroy Gaza. Fighting an urban ground war in Gaza will result in more death. Given the anger on both sides, Imdo not see a nonviolent solution.mGaza will be crushed and then the US will help built it back up.
Edit to add
The best comparison may be how the old ANC approached apartheid with necklacing, etc. to the tactics of Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr to Hamas. Malcolm X suggested self defense, but not overt slaughter. Killing innocents is not going to free Palestinians.
2nd Edit to add:
Telling college students that they should not support Hamas will likely fall on deaf ears. They view the Netanyahu government as corrupt. Netanyahu was attempting to change the Israeli judicial system so that his legal woes would disappear.
Many college students hear of the suffering in Gaza from fellow students who are Palestinian. They trust those source much more than they trust mainstream media or even their own professors. Many students are not surprised by the attack on Israel. The students also know there is no easy exit from Gaza. They Israelis attack them. Jordan and Egypt refuse refuge. If Hamas hides among the Palestinian population, they will simply follow the population if it moves south. Most Palestinians realize that Jim they abandon the north, they will never be able to go back to their homes in the north.
Palestinian comedian Bassem Youssef gave a darkl humorous take on the situation.
https://youtu.be/4idQbwsvtUo?feature=shared
MLK, Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu? Democratic Party too? Lol!!!!
For me, the Democratic Party is the default options. Republics are very clear in stating they do not want Blacks to vote. My other rationalization is that the current leadership of of Republicans are clueless and immoral. They choose David Duke without the baggage and a man who passed no legislation in 16 years in Congress as Speaker candidates.
Republicans shout morality to the rooftops but select a convicted sex offender as their party leader. I repeat the charge because we have to remember the morals of so-called moral Republicans. Republicans are so disgusting that you have to vote for Democrats to keep hypocritical and evil Republicans anywhere from any legislative control.
It is hard to suppress laughter when Conservatives get on their moral high horse. When you hear Conservatives whine about the mental infirmatiies of Joe Biden, you look at the legislation passed and then the word salad and slurred and in coherent speech of Donald Trump and feel vindicated. You vote against Republicans because they do not want you to have a vote.
Note that there is no mention of the clear and present danger presented by the Republican Party on this site or on rightwing networks. One looks at the ineptitude of the Republicans in the House and then at the attempts of the GOP to suppress votes and you realize they have no real policies but power. When Republicans focus on the failed culture of the Black community, you look at Matt Gaetz, Lauren Bobert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and you laugh at the hypocrisy.
I'm finished with the Democratic Party. At the same time, I'm not GOP. Jim Crow Joe Biden, related, "If you don't vote for me, you're not black." Kamala Harris related, (paraphrasing), " I'm not just gonna do things for black people."
Look at the Hispanic hordes with unearned benefits coming across the border and being put in hotels rent-free for 6 months, costing billions of dollars. Then they're put in black neighborhoods with very limited resources. Most of the homeless in this country are black. Come on bruh! The black boot licks like "fish fry" James Clyburn who got a quid pro quo position for his daughter in the Biden Administration? And he doesn't support reparations. There are more black politicians today and the cities they run are more messed up. It's time to look at other options.
https://youtu.be/ilj1vBGeA8U?si=0Aj2zUhVc30icQo8
We have a two-party system the Presidential winner will be a Democrat or a Republican. Again quoting Clarke, there may not be any good guys, but Republicans are clear tgat they want us out of the picture, Look at DeSantis in Florida A wingnut was just elected in Louisiana, he will unleash pure Hell on the Black community. The Republican Governor of Texas sected a person to remove books from Houston schools. The libraries will be replaced by detention centers.
We see Conservatives here discuss their benign plans for the Black community. What we see Conservatives put in practice are attacks on Black education and putting as many Blacks as they can in prison.
Blacks have performed very well under adversity. My grandfather owned a successful 400-acre farm under Jim Crow. He was very self-reliant. Blacks at that time had a better-enforced code of conduct. Whites are not responsible for the current 75% black out-of-wedlock birthrate. Agency is essential. Family is important. Asians? I don't have any children out of wedlock.
The actual number of out of wedlock births by Black women has decreased. We give you a percentage. The actual number of births of Black married women has decreased, so the fraction remains high. This is the same nonsense number they throw out about Blacks in prison. They tell you that there are more Black men in prison than in college. The number in prison counts men of all ages. The number in college would generally be limited to the 18-25 age group. There are more 18-25 year old men in college than in prison. Don’t accept their white supremacist numbers.
The number to be concerned about is the one that tells us rabid white supremacists are the largest terrorist threat in the United States. When you put Christian Nationalists like Marjorie Taylor Greene or white supremacists like Paul Gosar in office, you give a green light to other white supremacists.
Obviously Blacks have thrived, cresting the ire of the white supremacists. Black cities like Rosewood and Greenwood were destroyed. You keep your weapon close by, but you never vote to give legislative power to white supremacists, it is self-defeating.
They are too afraid to analyze the evil and idiocy of current day Conservatives, so they critize Black culture, while their morals are much worse than the average Black person.
We obviously face a problem. Martin Luther King Jr worried that he was integrating his people into a burning house. When you are in that situation. You work to keep the arsonist white supremacists from gaining power. Not voting is not an option. In Arkansas, they elected Sarah Huckabee Sanders over a literal Black rocket scientist as Governor. She rails against AP African American history while being accused of paying $19K for a mythical lectern as cover for a trip to France. The GOP is the bottom of the barrel.
Edit to add:
White supremacists are consistent. In the past they destroyed thriving Black towns. In 2023, they file a lawsuit to prevent successful Black women from granting funds to Black female entrepreneurs who are very unlikely to receive loans from the usual sources.
We can discuss TED talks and Ibrim X Kendi, but there will be no mention of attempts to overturn an election. Voting is the very least we can do to show our displeasure with the actions of white supremacists. I understand the argument that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is a form of mental illness. My counter to that is that Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers and others did stress the vote, and we got voting rights bills. Our problem is that we then went to sleep and voting was ignored. The result, a white supremacist is elected Governor in Louisiana. Only 25% of eligible Black voters cast ballots.
None of that is relevant to the linked text. Did you read it?
From my perspective, I can only see this conflict, historically, in the context of the international balance of powers. Locally, between Israel and the Palestinians, it is a matter of actual rights and wrongs, of the aspirations of two peoples who come into conflict. But since the start, Palestine has become a symbol of the much broader conflicts of powers in the region and in the world. This is why it is so hard for people to disengage from ideology about it and see the actual people involved.
Israel is a very complex society. The Palestinian society is -- has been, in many respects, much more complex than what it seems as well, even if the state of conflict has flattened it into uniformity at least at surface level.
But nothing of this matters because, in the eyes of the world, the Palestine question has become a symbol that completely overshadows the parties actually involved, their human motivations.
Since the very start... a peculiar strand of antisemitism that never existed in the same cultural terms in Islam was planted among Palestinian Arabs by a kind of antisemitism of European descent -- there was opposition to the immigration of Jews and their buying lands in Mandatory Palestine, there was a nationalist Arab movement born as a consequence of the fall of the Ottoman empire after WWI, when a concept of nation states began to take shape in the Middle East also under the influences of Western culture -- but Nazi ideology played a huge part in fomenting antisemitic hatred in Palestine, as is evidenced by any study of the many declarations of the Grand Mufti al-Husseini, of al-Qassam of the Black Hand, and of al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; all these declarations make reference to global Jewish domination conspiracy theories that draw directly from the Protocols of Zion.
The dream of the early Zionists on the other hand was of an Eretz Yisrael that included the whole of Palestine.
The partition into two states was proposed first a few years before the start of WWII by the Peel Commission and rejected by the Arab leaders, while the Zionist leaders accepted it (though we know, by internal documents, that they did not accept it without reservation of further action).
After WWII, the Soviet Union and the entirety of the Western Left strongly supported the State of Israel in the beginning. But it happened that the Communist parties in Israel did not seize power, but rather a labour coalition, which positioned Israel in alignment with the West -- and the Soviet Union dropped its support for what could not become a satellite state, and looked elsewhere.
Since then, the conflict in Palestine became one of the theatres of confrontation of the Cold War, and the actual issues on the table took backstage relevance. I have a strong perception that the entire problem of Islamism has grown and festered in consequence of bad choices of both main actors in the Cold War. How things could have developed if the allies of the Palestinians and the allies of Israel had pushed towards reason and compromise rather than using the conflict for their own propaganda, we will never know.
But things are as they are. The conflict has wrought havoc on Palestinian society, pushing Palestinian Arabs to support more and more fundamentalist positions. And it has soured and twisted Israeli society to a much lesser but still painful extent.
How it will end it is difficult to say now. I see more hope among the Israeli Left than what is expressed by Mr Hugues. What I see in the country, what I hear from the part of my family that is there and from my son who was visiting when this horror happened and flew back to fight, is a strong determination to destroy the perpetrators of this crime and extirpate them from among the Palestinian people -- which will be far from bloodless (it was far from bloodless to extirpate the Nazis from among the German people, after all) -- after which, to turn around and try to solve this decades old conflict in a reasonable way, because to continue like this is impossible (like Ami Ayalon says, like Ehud Olmert, like say so many of the kibbutznikim who were attacked and survived on the Gaza border and are now fighting in the IDF or civil support).
Yes, there are a number in Israel that do not feel like this. But they are not the majority and war, oddly, has always tended to unite the country towards more hope.
Will this succeed? I do not know. There are too many other players involved, too many other interests at play. But I do hope and so does the part of Israel that has learned from the experience of the Diaspora the values of democracy, tolerance, peace and compromise.
As for the unqualified hostility of a certain Left to Israel, a hostility that bleeds strongly into hostility towards the Jews, most of whom are Zionist in the sense of believing in the desirability of a state of the Jewish people (beyond which Zionism has many bents and denominations) -- there are deep and longstanding reasons for it. It goes far beyond the disturbing dogmas of Critical Social Justice about colonialism, it is rooted in the old, antisemitic identification of the Jews with money, with the rich and powerful, with capitalism, with oppression and privilege, and with a readiness to betray because irredeemably Other. The same kind of tropes come up every times Jews are attacked as dissenters from orthodoxy... be it in Stalinist Soviet Union or in social justice groups.
I suggest to you three gentlemen to read this article of a young writer who has focused his research on totalitarian thought. I, in my old age, have been deeply enlightened by it, because I never saw the connections so clearly.
https://forward.com/opinion/393107/how-anti-semitisms-true-origin-makes-it-invisible-to-the-left/
I am confused about where to comment on what with this. I already posted this comment in response to an earlier link to this conversation or some part of it. But what I wrote there is still what is on my mind now, so I am pasting it in again here:
I appreciate the even-handed discussion of the Israeli situation. I am glad there is no question about the utterly barbaric pogrom Hamas carried out. I do have reservations about the way you all discussed two issues -- the possibility of an "overreaction" by Israel and the place of the settlements in the whole conflict.
Daniel Pipes has for a long time argued that no settling with the Palestinians will be possible until they experience total defeat - a la Germany and Japan after WWII. Maybe he's right or wrong, but in any case, I think Israel has no viable option other than the total defeat and annihilation of Hamas. Hamas is not in the least interested in governing Gaza or for that matter in winning a Palestinian state. It is openly and avowedly purely genocidal. It cares not a whit for the people of Gaza, who will have no hope of a decent life until Hamas is eliminated. Whatever war Israel conducts, therefore, will not be an "overreaction" if it achieves this objective of total victory.
As for settlements, I am not a big fan of them, nor are I believe most Israelis. But I think you all vastly overrate the significance of the conflict over the settlements. For one thing, Gaza has no Jewish settlements, in fact no Jews at all. Israel took all of them out in 2005, even though the Jews there resisted that. It was an extreme right-wing prime minister who did that, by the way. The departing Jews left a viable economy in place, which Hamas proceeded to trash. It then turned what is falsely labeled the "open air prison" of Gaza into what is in truth a "medieval fortress," from which it sallies forth every so often to kill Jews. What the critics of the settlements need to do is explain why Israel should have any doubts about what would happen in the West Bank if it were to do what it already did in Gaza. The example of Gaza tells Israelis why it is futile to think an abandonment of the settlements would make a bit of difference.
The Palestinians are in the grip of an ideology that is in fact a fusion of Nazi and Islamist thinking that was brought to full fruition during World War II especially. It is genocidal, and its ultimate goal has nothing to do with a Palestinian state -- which Israel has offered several times to no avail. Unlike you all, however, I do not think this will go on another 75 years. The rest of the Middle East (except Iran) is already moving toward ever more substantial reproachment with Israel. Once the genocidal dreams of the Palestinians die, they will move that way as well. A total defeat of Hamas could put an end to the massive aid the UN, Europe and America have provided and that keeps the Palestinian leadership in power, and this would force the people of Gaza to embrace pragmatic and economically motivated leaders. TOTAL defeat of Hamas is what I believe to be the only hope for Gaza as well as for Israel.
You may be right, although I hope that in some respects you are not. Hamas needs to be quashed. But the Hezbollah are waiting, and both Hamas and Hezbollah are an Iranian cultivar. There is only so much that military force can accomplish without such a toll of civilian lives that not just the civilised world, but the Israeli people will not stomach it (international law did not forbid indiscriminate bombing of civilian population prior to WW2; now it does). A solution can be reached if, along with military force, comes pressure. The states that care for stability in the region, the friends of the Palestinian people need to clearly subordinate their help, especially material help, to the abandonment of genocidal aspiration towards Israel and the abandonment of terrorist targeting of civilians. On the other hand those in Israel who want a solution must obtain a majority in the Knesset and set out clear and fair offers for peace.
I do not know whether this can be accomplished, but unless it is, the conflict will continue and threaten to spread.
Sharon was, by the way, far from extreme right-wing, although the Left in the West depicted him as such. He was a man of the right, yes. But he was a man of the Old Guard, a man of solid principles, like Begin, like Shamir. Likud was destroyed by the rise of new right, unprincipled populists. If you want to see what extreme far right looks like, look at the parties that have held Netanyahu hostage in the last 10 years.
But you are right in that unless Hamas suffers a defeat from which it cannot rise again, there is little hope for the Palestinian people, and for Israel as well. Because living amidst constant hatred and violence destroys the civil society, even if the state itself may survive.
I don't see evidence that Israel is engaged in "indiscriminate bombing" even though that is what the press here tries to make look like. Telling civilians to move and giving them time to is also labeled a war crime by these same sources. Go figure. As for international law since WWII, I believe the Vietnam War happened post WWII. I recall a bit of what sure looked like indiscriminate bombing there. No?
Anyway, what you say is a bit confusing. You start out saying you hope I am right except in some respects (it's not clear what those are) and then you say "but you are right." In any case, I stick with Daniel Pipes and say victory is the way to get to an end to the death cult that the Palestinians have embraced or had forced on them. What happens after that? I certainly do not know. Crass materialism would be a much higher ideal for the Palestinian people than what they lust for now. I've said before, and only half jokingly, set up a Gaza Strip Authority, create a vacation wonderland out of Gaza, get the wealthy Jews in Israel to help them finance it, get rich and "forget the dead, they will not follow you."
I am sorry to have been confusing. I have a son there doing his duty to wipe out Hamas, too many friends and children of friends, know too many people who have died, and that may bring too many thoughts into my head at the same time. And the question is far from simple or easily solved.
I said that you may be right about the need for a complete military annihilation of Hamas (although it is quite easier said than done... Nazi Germany and her allied Japan were states, not a terrorist group. Nazi Germany was quashed, but Nazism has remained with us on the fringes; and Fascism has remained with us much wider than on the fringes)
and I said that yet I hope that in some respects you are not: those respects are the human cost of attempting to completely wipe out Hamas in Gaza. Which may be huge, and not worthwhile beyond a certain extent.
For the problem is that this is not a regular war between states, in which victory can be normatively achieved. Hamas is not Egypt or Syria or Jordan in '56, '67 or '73, where you wage war, you win or lose, you make peace. This is more like Lebanon in '82 and 2008, where there is the risk of an entanglement without any true result and a huge risk of massacring the civilian population wantonly.
(Let us avoid bringing up the Vietnam war, it was filled with violations of international war laws; and moreover, the US lost it, without ever having even declared it)
There are some of the opinions of Pipes that I read, which I share. Many others are abominable stupidity, and his positions on Israel are unpalatable to me. I completely endorse Hitchens's opinion on the fellow.
Things are far for simple or clear cut. And the settlements in the West Bank have a huge impact in the mental approach to the entirety of the conflict, like the way that Israel treats/has been forced to treat its Arab population. It matters inside Israel. It matters in the view of Israel's neighbours. And it matters in the world's opinion.
When I read people like Pipes talk of victory, I am reminded what little love I have for all those who so easily prattle of war from their armchairs. Go and take a gun with my son, my nephews and their younger friends, come defend the country, and then speak. Otherwise, pontificate less.
Victory as Pipes imagines it may well come only from the extermination of the Palestinian people. Then what? You over there sit back at your wargames on computer while Israel finds itself, bloodied by genocide, still in the heart of Middle East and in the middle of countries that would, for a change, have a righteous reason to hate it and strive for its destruction?
That would be the death of Israel even should it survive.
I hope we manage to uproot Hamas enough that a peace agreement can be reached, if the friends of the Palestinians actually bring them to reason and to the acceptance of a two state solution. I hope that we can do it without too much damage to the civil population (although I am aware that it will be bloody and every drop of blood will be used in propaganda). There is only hope, and perseverance, and an attempt at keeping a cool head and acting humanely in the middle of so much horror.
Sounds like the more pragmatic Arab countries will eventually accept Israel and the terrorists will be squeezed out. Which leaves Iranian theocracy which citizens would be happy to vote out eventually. The Israel haters have no reason, most appear to have suffered negligence at the hands of parents most likely cognitively, emotionally challenged themselves, decided to feed paranoia and lies to their children who may be destined to be ignorant, pathetic , conspiracy believing Jew haters.
From an American Jew who has lived in Gaza:
https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/the-slave-revolt-in-gaza-and-bernie
Sweet Finkelstein made his name decrying the "Holocaust industry" that blackmails the West on guilt to line the pockets of rich Jewish organisations, as he put and puts it. Finkelstein believes that the state of Israel has no right to exist and the "historical evidence" in his theories (note, he has no training in History, he is a Political Scientist and activist) is one of the sources of the thesis that Israeli Jews are coloniser settlers that displaced the 'natives' and must be expelled. Finkelstein approves of the politics and actions of Hezbollah and finds the organisation quite nice (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAGVQF-Kys8). Finkelstein's mother was a communist (mine was too) who supported Stalin's USSR to the last breath and toed the line of the Comintern on Israel (my mum revolted against Stalin and maybe that is why I grew up with an ability to disengage from dogmatic ideology, who knows, sons love their mums). Finkelstein is a friend and disciple of Chomsky and of the same stripe -- they look where the US turns and support the opposite, anytime, anyhow, anywhere, no matter what.
Brilliant people both, very good at finding arguments, terrible examples of reasonable thinking, because they are overcome by their biases to the point of blindness.
There are Jews that want the end of the State of Israel in Israel too. There is even Naturei Karta, and Jewish Holocaust deniers. Finkelstein's positions are not more reliable because he is a Jew... that's pretty racist as a concept, as if Jews could not think beyond their Jewishness. You know, there are Jews all across the political spectrum.
It is sadly ironic to hear Jews say that Israel is the one place on earth where they, as Jews, are safe, when it appears that everywhere else on earth where Jews live, they are safer.
In my opinion, Israel, on balance, was not a good idea. But it happened. its existence must be accepted. It's a done deal. But the way it has behaved, the expansion with settlements, the subjugation and oppression of the Palestinians, the brutality and BS, is unacceptable.
Here's a dire warning from a former speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, a Zionist, to his fellow Zionists. As relevant today as back when he wrote it, 20 yrs ago. Actually, more so.
The End of Zionism
by Avraham Burg
Israel must shed its illusions and choose between racist oppression and democracy
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/sep/15/comment
One passage from Burg's piece:
"It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.
It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. You can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see the occupation. Travelling on the fast highway that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied."
Burg, like Benvenisti, like Grossman -- like Pappé and Chomsky and Finkelstein, suffer from a serious virus in regards to Israel: far-left ideology. Like I said (and I come from half a Communist family) Israel became, since shortly after its creation, a symbol and polarity in the Cold War. These people do not anymore understand or try to understand the situation in Israel, the state of things that has developed over the years through the interactions of all the players in that area and the international players as well. These people want a stand of righteousness from which to fulminate and feel good, very much like the far-Right in Israel, very much like a huge part of the woke left today.
Avrum talked about a two state solution 20 years ago... then he did not get to become the Secretary of Labour, and it went down from there. He stopped being a Zionist a long time ago. Now he is a "Post-Zionist" who tells Jews to get over the Shoah and that they have no right to a state of their own. This is where the road led people like Burg. They are utterly blind to anything else but Jewish guilt, they are the Robin DiAngelo of Hebraism. After two times in which the two states solution was rejected by the Palestinian representatives (twice in 2000 by Arafat, once in 2008 by Abbas), the conclusion of these people is to call for the dismantling of the State of Israel. Which is the political verbiage to the militant actions of Hamas and of all the Palestinian terrorists before Hamas.
Israel is a state far from perfect and in many respects become worse and worse because of the circumstances surrounding its survival. It remains a democratic state, unless pushed towards undemocratic solutions by being attacked, physically, materially, every day that dawns. For decades. The suicide bombers, the missiles. Sure, Israel has built a good missile defence, which has allowed its population to live and function relatively well; still the missiles come, and pieces sometimes hit (especially in outlying areas). In the awareness of every Israeli remains constant the very clear fact that only the Iron Dome separates them from death raining down from the sky.
Now I would like all the finger-waggers in the Western Left to truly try to think about that: what it is to live under constant threat, and what it may do to people. Some, like the folks on the Right, become more and more fiercely nationalist and hateful (and guess what, most of the supporters of the far-Right, aside from the ultra-Orthodox, are among Mizrahi Jews -- people who were expelled or forced to flee from the Arab countries first at the time when so much Nazi propaganda poisoned the Middle East, then after 1956, after 1967, after 1982; people who remember fear and discrimination in the same way as European Jews remember the Holocaust; people for whom the feeling of being surrounded by hatred often engenders hatred.
Sure, dear friend, Israel might have been a bad idea. It was a dream of homecoming (many things are the Jews of Israel, but colonisers they are not -- despite what people like Burg say, who maintain that Jews are naturally stateless and should be content with it, they are one of the Indigenous Peoples of Palestine, which was 2000 years ago called Judaea), it was the dream of planting a garden that would give, with statehood, a right also to self defence. It was planted in the ancestral land that had become, after the invasion of the Arabs, for 1400 years a place of hostility. Yes, that perhaps was a mistake, the hope that civilisation would prevail in the end.
The dire warning of Burg was ridiculous then, and it is even more ridiculous now. It is not on Israel alone that all this blood falls, unless one wants to look at history with only one eye and a preconceived ideology. The Palestinian people may want peace, but the leaders it follows and elect do not. Sharon withdrew, unilaterally, from Gaza, removing forcibly thousands of Jews; they left in Gaza structures and means of production, giant glasshouses as well, which Hamas destroyed. The Palestinians have received immense funds over the years and have only employed them towards weapons. From wherever the Palestinians have reached, since the glorious times of al-Husseni and his Nazi propaganda, hatred and violence have come towards Israel.
There is a decades long hostility that only has generated more hostility. The Palestinian people have increasingly embraced Islamism over the last decades (they embraced or excused terrorism before, but not to the same extent); the Jewish Israelis have increasingly embraced illiberal nationalism and religious identity, which produce discrimination and oppression beyond what security demands.
But half of Israelis are against the acts and policies of the government assembled by Netanyahu in the last 20 years; half of the Zionists in Israel want a state for the Palestinians, separate from Israel, because the two systems and cultures are in this age incompatible. The Palestinians seem to want the whole of Palestine and, according to polls, support Hamas by a majority of 70%. When the government changed and Olmert offered them the two state solution (2008 -- 96% per cent of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip), Abbas said no. So we got Netanyahu back, and more missiles, and more attacks.
If people do not stop laying blame only with one side of this conflict, and if they don't begin demanding from the side that they favour actual steps towards peace, mutual recognition and then an actual agreement on a plan for a two state solution, this bloodshed will never end.
Or perhaps it will end as Hamas explicitly wants, a Caliphate from the desert to the sea. I am tired of explaining things to the righteous in the West that at the bottom of their heart hate the plutocrats that support Israel (fine old Left conspiracy theory) and hate Israel because it looks so strong and successful, so Western, so little Third World. Israel has existed under threat for over 80 years now, and the only reason why it is strong and successful is that it has never given up under that threat. The pressure has darkened Israel's soul as well -- and none of Israel's enemies are innocent of this.
I appreciate your well articulated comment, your civil words and tone. There is obvious affection and devotion to Israel in your comment. I glossed over a few other posts of yours here and believe you said you have a son in the IDF, now in this fight, as well as knowing many who have been harmed by this too-long conflict.
Without taking all your examples point by point, refuting or agreeing or just begging ignorance, Ill just say, overall, I cannot excuse the wrongs committed by the Palestinians. I cannot excuse the human failings they've exhibited, the cruelty and callousness on their side, the mistakes theyve made.
That said, none of that causes me to change what I said, to which you responded.
I will note you seem to give much relevance to the communist linkage to some of the Jewish advocates for the human condition of the Palestinians, who you named, as if that negates their findings, their critiques, and conclusions. I dont understand what, in their critical presentations, must be tainted with any shortcomings we may find in communism - and again, the communists or zionists or any other group of any kind are comprised of individuals. I dont think examples of wrongs and inhumanity are invalidated because they come from someone who was or is a communist.
That's all I have for now. (life calls ... appointments, etc). I'll end with my desire - that no one harms anyone, peace to all. Easy to say? Simplistic? Honest.
You are right about me. Yes, my son and my ex wife live in Israel, and I have a strong affective connection to that country and its trials (to be completely clear, although I do not believe it matters, I am not a Jew -- nor could I ever become one, as the ethnic identity is inextricably linked to faith, unless it comes from blood, and I am not a believer in any religion; but my son is a Jew, because his mother is, and that is how ethnic belonging is transmitted among Jews). We have always remained connected, and I consider my ex wife's family part of my family, as she does with mine. I spent long periods in Israel, and I developed a closeness that often brings me to think as "we", although I do not know that I have the right, as I am not a citizen of Israel. However, 38 years of connection have brought me, a a historian, to also study the history of Israel and of the conflict in Palestine.
And I strive, believe me, even in a moment like this, to keep an even-minded judgement.
The shortcomings of the Jewish intellectuals I mentioned are not that they advocate for the human condition of the Palestinians (whose faults and wrongs, just like the faults and wrongs of Israel, have not been committed by a people on the whole, but by the leaders of that people -- and are loaded with historical and psychological reasons). It is the manner in which these intellectuals advocate their opinions -- turning the entire discourse into a black and white theatre of good against evil, and vilifying any opposing or doubting opinion, in particular other intellectuals, as lackeys of American Imperialism or self-serving members of the plutocratic elite. They are passionate -- in a dangerously ferocious way; the same way of inquisitors; the same way of believers in a Revelation; the same way of dogmatic Communists.
Communism unites a few of them, and a certain strain of left ideology encompasses all.
I notice this because I am myself a man of the Left -- in the broad sense: I still hold my membership in the Labour Party (UK) despite living now in Canada; over half a century of it. As such, I notice the flaws in leftist thought better than in the thought of the Right: I see the flaws of the Right from outside, while those of the Left I see from within.
I mentioned that my mother was a Communist -- a rather unorthodox Italian Communist who married a Brit alongside whom she had fought in the war, an ardent admirer of Golda Meir (clearly, a link with Israel was written in my stars), and one who suffered almost physically at every new revelation of how far the USSR had strayed from her ideal. From my mother, more than anyone else, I learned to admire ideals while being wary of dogmatic ideology -- something into which the Left has a tendency to fall -- and so does the Right, but again, I can see the deleterious effects of dogmatic rightwing ideologies, but of the leftist ones I better understand the workings.
I do not use the Communist scare to detract from the reasoning of intellectuals like Burg and Pappé, I do not invalidate their thinking because they are Communists. But I notice what their position is, from their words and arguments: Their findings are not negated, their conclusions become invalidated by being blinded by ideology, which selectively chooses to point out only certain facts and not others.
And for somebody familiar with far-left propaganda, it is inevitable for me to correlate their stance with their involvement in fringe, Marxist-Leninist groups that all talk the same old talk since the 1930s. I cannot go here into too much detail about MAKEI, the Israeli Communist Party, and its conflicted history. Stalinist USSR at the very first supported Israel and its right to exist, but short after, when free elections in Israel did not result in a Communist state but in a majority Socialist government that allied itself with the values of Social Democracy, Stalin turned into Israel's most fierce enemy -- the Soviets sided with the Arab states that refused the right to existence of Israel -- with the very same arguments still used today -- and they persecuted Jews at home and forced Jewish members of the Soviet establishment, under threats and torture, to confirm the most outrageous Jewish Conspiracy theories. The Hadash today talks still in the manner of Stalinist Soviet propaganda; and so do these intellectuals in all of their arguments that mostly are passionate rants.
And that is my problem. They point out painful, horrible truths -- the same that half the country that has not voted for Netanyahu's coalition also points out -- but they draw the conclusion that Israel is rotten at the core and does not deserve, never deserved to exist, while the Palestinians are saints that only want to live in peace (I know a large number of Palestinians who totally want to live in peace and have no desire to destroy Israel, only for a state of their own, and who are driven occasionally to violence by the oppressor; I do not know enough to say how many just live under the thumb of Hamas and other smaller terrorist organisations). People like Burg and Pappé do not see reality, but a version of reality distorted by their ideology, where everything is the fault of American Imperialism and where Israel is the poster child of American Imperialism -- and nothing, nothing ever, can Israel or the US do that is good -- even should it seem so, it has hidden nefarious purposes. The situation is framed, if one reads the old Soviet propaganda, in exactly the same terms.
This is the exact mirror image of the Right's obsession with the various Communist Conspiracy theories, last the one about Cultural Marxism.
Forgive my always excessive logorrhoea. It mattered to me to explain my point.
We do desire, and hope, for the same thing. And I do hope that it will not be too late. I do hope, like many of my family and friends in Israel do, that after the inevitable bloodshed there will be a chance for peace, for working towards a two state solution. Somewhat like it happened with the Partition of India, although on a smaller scale, if it comes to pass it will not be easy, and it will take reasonability on all sides. Since some of the players involved beyond Israelis and Palestinians seem highly unreasonable, this may be exceedingly hard.
But we must hope. For if we lose hope, what is left?
Hi. I have such a long list of must-do To Do's (that I just updated afresh), that I cannot give your post, which I just saw, the attention I'd like to in order to respond thoughtfully. It has a lot to take in, and I had to stop after the 3rd paragraph. However, I did want to acknowledge it, which is the purpose of this brief reply. Hopefully I can give it more attention and a decent response in the near future.
I will say, I see unhelpful, objectionable, and sometimes revolting behaviors in the protest movement (where there is actual anti semitism or callous disregard for Jewish lives, in Israel or anywhere), in the protests against Israel's relentless bombardment of Gazans, but that does not sway me from my revulsion and opposition to Israel's brutal, heartbreaking collective punishment against these people, ongoing to this moment for 3 & 1/2 weeks. Nor does it detach me from my opposition to the indulgence of brutality, theft, hardship perpetrated, well documented, against Palestinians in the West Bank, by both by Settlers and IDF.
I was able to write the above now only bc it's an opinion that has already been formed, informed thru research, thought - it has been tested and has stood as true, even with updated efforts to seek the facts, so I need not spend much time on it. As I said, I'll have to come back to digest -- or try to, lol -- your thoughts when I have the bandwidth, the time. Till then - understanding and non violence is my continuing hope. Peace to you and all.
Since I argue a bit with you elsewhere, I feel I need to agree with you here totally.
Arguing, on decent terms, is what always will make the world better. May I be spared the dreary fate of only hearing from those who agree with all my views.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
Bibi has long supported Hamas because both Bibi and Hamas agree on one thing: no peace, no two state solution.
This is blowback text book. Way to go everyone!
Bibi was no different in trying to buy off Hamas than the UN, Europe, the US, Iran, Qatar, and many others who also have supported Hamas AND the P.A. under Abbas with lots of money. Which is how Hamas can control Gaza without doing anything that could remotely be called governing it. As for the fantasy of the two-state solution, the P.A. and the PLO under Arafat and Abbas have no more interest in it whatsoever than Hamas does. It is a dream to tempt Iraelis, and the rest of the West falls for it. When Abbas addresses his people in their own language (as did Arafat) he spews the same vicious fantasy as motivates Hamas and the deluded radicals of the Western nations -- that is, "from the river to the sea," which is a nice sounding phrase meaning genocide. None of this will change, as Daniel Pipes has said, until Hamas is utterly defeated, and the Palestinians know it and accept it.
Glad to see that you support Bibi, the incarnation of corruption. The reasons why he supported Hamas was not the same as the reasons why the West may have tried to appease Hamas. Bibi made awful miscalculations and deliberate choices, to keep himself in power and to keep the support of his far right allies that are the only reason why he could remain in power. This government and its unspeakably incompetent defence minister moved entire IDF divisions from the Gaza border to the West Bank to protect the celebrations of the settlers staged to rouse Palestinian wrath. When we say that Bibi has this blood on his hands, we do not jest.
Israel is politically divided today similarly to the US although in a different way.
But there is a difference. Israel unites in a crisis like this. Now Israel fights -- and yes, it may be that annihilation is on the bill, especially if Iran gets involved as it is threatening, but Israel has fought a much stronger enemy quite a few times before, and won.
And once the fight is over, comes the reckoning with Bibi -- much better politicians than he, Meir, Begin, Sharon, were brought down by these kind of disasters. And after that, hopefully, we talk of peace.
Did I say I supported Bibi? I am glad to know Israelis personalize and demonize their political squabbles as insanely as Americans do. But I doubt the security failures have as much to do with what you refer to as you claim. In any case, what saves Israel is that they cannot lose a war even once. So, yes, they will unit and do their duty. Same will happen here, I imagine, when we face an existential threat and put aside the idiocy of BLM, gender gnostic fantasies, climate paranoia, and all the other fads that keep the left rev'd up daily, and we unite again around our basic constitutionally defined rights and protections.
All I know about Israel's internal political bickering is the battle over the very powerful supreme court. Since I tend to favor legislative supremacy, I am sympathetic to critics of the Israeli court's apparently very great powers. But it's really none of my business. Nor is it Biden's. And since he's absurdly weighed in on it, I surely won't any more than what I say here. All I say here is win this F'g war.
The website of the Council on Foreign Relations says that Hamas "governs more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip".
The last time there was an election (mre than 15 years ago), Hamas won.
Hamas receives money from foreigners on behlf of the Gazans, and Hamas taxes the people of Gaza.
So I don't know if you can insulate the Gazan peope from the hatefull malice of Hamas?
Have you ever spoken with onesuch?
I suspect a lot of Gazans would love to have an alternative that would actually "govern" as the Council on Foreign Relations puts it. I would not say Hamas governs, I would say it rules.
We should be checking up to date sources -still available- "Breakthrough News- plus other sources -but removed from Israel media-
i.e israel survivor/hostage who witnessed the slaughter of hostages - in crossfire-mainly by the massive weaponary of the Israel
She states the Hamas did not mistreat them -then the army came -guns blazing. Blasting everything and everyone in sight
Sounds like BS to me, given that 1) the IDF forces securing the boundary are uniformly reported as undermanned and under-equipped, and 2) the responsible higher ups in the IDF look to be in line for serious penalties for the poor precautions for protection of the Jewish population.
Are you kidding?
Before we dive into Gaze, there are many people who worry about what we did to both German and Japanese civilians during World War II. "Slaughterhouse 5" anyone? And that is just one, popular example.
There is a lot of ignorance in this short discussion. Israel pulled out of Gaza. Israel sent in their army and forcefully removed Israelis but left all the infrastructure they'd built intact. Hamas razed anything the Israelis left behind.
Then came the terror campaign known as the First Intifada. Hamas revealed their innovation, the suicide bomber, which is what led Israel to built their fence.
Even with the fence Israel has tried to send food and medicine into Gaza for years. Hamas has deliberately limited what is allowed in to keep their boot on the neck of the people of Gaza.
As there were limited opportunities for employment Israel opened their border and allowed Palestinians to cross and work. This allowed Palestinians to gather information about where and when to strike.
Look at a map. Gaza has miles of beaches on the Mediterranean. Any other country in the world - Egypt, Israel, France, Italy, Greece, etc. would build resorts and become a fantastic tourist destination. But Hamas spent all their time and energy and hundreds of millions of dollars on wiping out all the Jews in Israel.
And then there is Egypt... but I'm tired of writing.
It's disappointing how little you seem to have prepared for this discussion.