We, The Chosen People [Updated]
I’m not a very good Jew I must admit. If and when the war in Gaza is over, and the heart is a bit lighter, I will bore you with the details. But suffice it to say, when I was 12 1/2 the rabbi I went to wound up suggesting I NOT be given a Bar Mitzvah. And I wasn’t.
Talk about Mitzvahs! I owe that dude, long passed away, big time as he solidly put me on the spiritual road to stone cold atheism. Bless you, Rabbi.
That said, I have — shall we say– a certain, lingering Jewish identifcation (felt most strongly when I bump into a something like the Yale sculling team or stumble into a meeting of a midwestern Rotary luncheon).
So, as a sort-of-a-Jew I want to strongly associate myself with the remarks of my old pal Michael Balter who has these choice words on what it means to be part of a Chosen People — one currently in engaged in a massacre war in which the casualty count is running at about 150 to 1.
UPDATE: Thanks to the alert eyes of one my good friends, here’s a contending or at least supplementary view.
January 16th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
A useful piece of advice for President Obama here:
http://www.beautifulhorizons.net/weblog/2009/01/an-israeli-voice.html
January 16th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
If (1) the Israelis didn’t set up and spend various hours in bomb shelters and (2) if the Israelis made attacks that were too weak to deter Hamas militants, simply emboldening them, than perhaps the “ratio” would seem more moral for you.
A.B. Yeshoua’s letter to Gideon Levy in Hamas recently, and Michael Walzer’s article in proportionality in Dissent give real arguments, but who cares about arguments?
You obviously love the lives of children more than me, I’m like…heartless when it comes to children, Gazan, Israeli, you name it, I’m one cold, callous son of a bitch, almost sociopathic compared to the average pacifist or person who will take umbrage at anything but a token military response from Israel.
…actually, I like this blog a lot.
January 16th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
It’s not even about proportionality, Adam. It’s about what makes sense in the long run. This sort of DISproportionately will only, in the long run, make Israelis that much less secure. The color of blood is never forgotten.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:48 am
It’s curious how the solution is always supposed to be that Israel gives up land, with the implication that this will somehow satisfy Arab demands. Of course this is in complete contradiction to what the Arabs actually say and write and practice. The worst cliche is that one that goes “cycle of violence,” because it involves the underlying assumption that the Arabs cannot figure out how to do the simple experiment of foregoing violence against Israelis and watching carefully where that leads. Perhaps if they stopped with the rockets and suicide bombs, then peace would break out. But of course this can’t happen because (we are supposed to assume), Arabs can’t figure out how to do this experiment.
Of course it’s not that it’s more complicated, but that it’s more simple: As the Arabs keep explaining, they don’t want peace if it involves the survival of Israel. Thus this war that is in its 61st year, with the odd year here and there without actual fighting.
It would be interesting to see how the U.S. and the world would respond to an American president who would state openly what we all know anyway — that peace (lasting or temporary) doesn’t happen while one side wants only war, and until the Arab side decides (whether it takes decades or centuries) that it is willing to live alongside Israel, or until Israel is destroyed, all this talk about a just and lasting peace is just window dressing.
I would be the first to agree that the current war is bad PR for Israel, but some of that difficulty stems from residual antisemitism in Europe, and a lot of it stems from the fact that Israel is really in a trap strategically: it either defends its people, which involves ugly and tragic tactics, or it bows to the European mobs and allows the terrorization of its own residents to continue. If you are willing to accept the underlying assumption that not even one rocket attack or suicide bombing is acceptable and the reasonable corollary that the Gaza ruling authority is complicit in the attacks, then it follows that Israel has the right to fight back. The tragic bind is that the people of Gaza as a whole are complicit in the formation of the Gaza government, but getting blown up is too severe a penalty for casting a vote.
Or to put it even more simply: It takes two sides to make peace. The precondition for serious peace talks is that both sides stop the violence. The demand that Israel stop its attacks without the guarantee that the bombing of Israel stop is not realistic. For some reason, the American left seems to believe that Arabs can’t figure this out. It seems to me that the civilization that invented the foundations of mathematics among other things can figure this out, but refuses.
January 17th, 2009 at 6:28 am
Let me ask Bob G just one question: Can Jews and Arabs marry each other in Israel? If not, why not?
January 17th, 2009 at 7:44 am
Your linked “supplementary” view on Sderot makes no mention of certain basic facts that should be part of any discussion of “Sderot.”
In 1948, before the Jewish Supremacist (as Balter’s link illuminates) state was declared, Jewish terrorists forced the Arab population of a town called Najd from their homes at gunpoint. The town of Najd was bulldozed and the illegal colony of Sderot built on the ruins.
As such, the illegal squatters in Sderot have no right to be there, and the Palestinians have every right to defend their land by shooting rockets towards it. The illegal squatters living there now should leave immediately for whatever country they or their immediate family came from.
January 17th, 2009 at 7:46 am
PS. to Bob G: you’re a disgusting Nazi racist. Goebbels would be proud of you.
January 17th, 2009 at 7:53 am
I don’t go along with calling Bob G a Nazi racist but matter is right about Najd and Sderot. The Palestine Remembered site is well known and based on documents from the British mandate times and other sources:
http://www.palestineremembered.com/Gaza/Najd/
January 17th, 2009 at 8:17 am
“Bob G: you’re a disgusting Nazi racist.”
If you disagree with matter, you are a horrible human being….no, less than, and the only way his marginal intellect can make this known is to pick a few choice slurs from a list of left-wing approved favorites.
The degree of quality of ones argument, and therefore its threat to matters idealogy, can be measured by the seriousness of the names he has chosen for you.
It is weak, foolish, and juvenile. I’m guessing so is matter, regardless of age.
January 17th, 2009 at 8:25 am
PALESTINIAN DOCTOR HAS CHILDREN KILLED IN GAZA WHILE DOING LIVE SHOW ON ISRAELI TV
(Palestinian’s don’t mourn and cry over their children like “real” people, Spit!!)
“So Channel 10′s Shlomi Eldar is interviewing the good doctor by phone, live on TV, when suddenly there’s a boom and the doctor begins to scream “Oh god, they killed my daughters”.
“Oops! One of our tanks missed its actual target and took out the good Dr’s house, killing two of his daughters and injuring a third (who, because Dali had nothing on reality, was airlifted to the same hospital where her dad works).
This, by the way, happened after the doctor complained earlier in the week that a tank with its barrel pointed directly at the his window was making him nervous. So Ronni Daniel, the (traitor to journalism, embedded IDF spokesman) military reporter for Channel 2, reportedly spoke to the commander in question and got him to point that thing someplace else. Only temporarily, as it turns out.”
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING IN GAZA, THINK OF THIS AGONY IN THE DOCTORS CRY THOUSANDS OF TIMES OVER
http://news.nana10.co.il/Video/?VideoID=66241&TypeID=0
January 17th, 2009 at 8:47 am
“Let me ask Bob G just one question: Can Jews and Arabs marry each other in Israel? If not, why not?”
Can an Arab marry a Jew, Catholic, or Protestant? The difference between inter-religious marriages is, while other religions tolerate them but don’t recognize them, Muslims can and do kill the offending Muslim.
This is the answer to ‘why not’ in Arab Countries.
January 17th, 2009 at 9:31 am
Nice try JimR, totally avoiding the racist state apparatus.
January 17th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Well, if that is Balter’s only question, this isn’t going to be a very fruitful discussion.
In spite of the irritating wording, I think Matter has defined the question better: If you agree that Israel is an illegal squatter nation and the Arabs have the right to try to take it back, then all the rest of the talk is just window dressing. On the other hand, if you accept the existence of Israel as a legitimate sovereign nation, then all of the rest is just window dressing. That was my point above, and the discussion of Sderot exemplifies it. The ruling authorities in Gaza believe that they have the right to continue to rain down terror on Israeli populations until they have achieved justice in their own eyes. The question of the legitimacy of Sderot as Israeli vs Arab is just a subset of the question of Israel as a whole, as 60 years of Arab pronouncements make clear.
I would invite Balter to consider how closely his remark parallels the political arguments made by right wingers over the past eight years every time the latest Republican scandal hits: “The other side does it too. Just look at that crooked congressman from Louisiana.” Perhaps I’m too simple, but how exactly does this justify the continuing chronic murder of the inhabitants of a sovereign country different from one’s own? Or to stretch just a teensy bit, haven’t you just made an argument for the American invasion, occupation, and subjugation of Iraq? They certainly have customs different from our own, and some of them were made to look pretty ghastly in the runup to the war. I suspect that you didn’t really intend to make this argument.
My experience with internet arguments over the middle east is that they go on and on, each side trotting out its list of grievances. Over at dealmac, they actually closed the discussion site for a while because the name calling got so intense. There is even a tongue in cheek “rule” called Godwin’s law: “The first person to call the other a Nazi is the loser.”
I don’t want to get into that rut with Balter — Marc respects him and his blog demonstrates some level of respectable thought. But the problem I have with the American left on this subject can be summarized by my description of their approach to Israel: “Israel does have a right to exist, but the other side has the right to attack it at some level, and Israel has to accept those attacks at some level because Israel took the land in an illegitimate way. In other words, Israel doesn’t have a right to exist, at least until the Arabs say so. Or maybe sometimes.” Balter’s question about marriage kind of slips into that level of argument — since Israel practices a particular kind of limit on a practice available even to the people of Detroit, why then, its people can be subject to getting blown up. I don’t see how this follows.
I would like to suggest that if you continue to disagree with the U.N. partition decision that allowed for the creation of Israel, then make this clear and put your thoughts on the table. The Arabs have argued this way consistently. On the other hand, if you accept the sovereignty of Israel (or the United States for that matter, considering our history), then apologetics for continued Arab terrorism look pretty illogical.
Marc makes a slightly different point, and I will take him at his word that it is what he really means: Israel, whether justified or not, is being unwise. I think his point is well taken, and could be restated to some extent as the argument that Gazan lives are important and can’t be taken for granted in some geopolitical struggle. I agree fully and find the current conflict abhorrent. But please notice that this is the point I made too, only about Israeli lives. My view is that the American left and the European demonstrators have an obscene double standard about the right of Arabs to kill Israelis vs the right of Israel to shoot back. The quandary for Israel is longstanding, obvious, and well known to everyone: It can give in to some Arab demands in pursuit of the latest armistice, but it won’t give in on the demand that it dismantle itself by allowing for unlimited Arab migration into Israel. This may be a tragedy in the formal sense, but it’s reality.
January 17th, 2009 at 10:08 am
“I have spent most of the Bush administration’s tenure reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia and other conflicts. I have been published by most major publications. I have been interviewed by most major networks and I have even testified before the senate foreign relations committee. The Bush administration began its tenure with Palestinians being massacred and it ends with Israel committing one of its largest massacres yet in a 60-year history of occupying Palestinian land. Bush’s final visit to the country he chose to occupy ended with an educated secular Shiite Iraqi throwing his shoes at him, expressing the feelings of the entire Arab world save its dictators who have imprudently attached themselves to a hated American regime.
Once again, the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned population of Gaza. The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans live on TV and online; the western media largely justify the Israeli action. Even some Arab outlets try to equate the Palestinian resistance with the might of the Israeli military machine. And none of this is a surprise. The Israelis just concluded a round-the-world public relations campaign to gather support for their assault, even gaining the collaboration of Arab states like Egypt.
The international community is directly guilty for this latest massacre. Will it remain immune from the wrath of a desperate people? So far, there have been large demonstrations in Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The people of the Arab world will not forget. The Palestinians will not forget. “All that you have done to our people is registered in our notebooks,” as the poet Mahmoud Darwish said.
I have often been asked by policy analysts, policy-makers and those stuck with implementing those policies for my advice on what I think America should do to promote peace or win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. It too often feels futile, because such a revolution in American policy would be required that only a true revolution in the American government could bring about the needed changes. An American journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified. My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the Jews in Nazi Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.
Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims’ struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.
Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.
Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.
Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people are being eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure on Israel. Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.
Not long ago, 19-year-old Qassem al-Mughrabi, a Palestinian man from Jerusalem drove his car into a group of soldiers at an intersection. “The terrorist”, as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz called him, was shot and killed. In two separate incidents last July, Palestinians from Jerusalem also used vehicles to attack Israelis. The attackers were not part of an organisation. Although those Palestinian men were also killed, senior Israeli officials called for their homes to be demolished. In a separate incident, Haaretz reported that a Palestinian woman blinded an Israeli soldier in one eye when she threw acid n his face. “The terrorist was arrested by security forces,” the paper said. An occupied citizen attacks an occupying soldier, and she is the terrorist?
In September, Bush spoke at the United Nations. No cause could justify the deliberate taking of human life, he said. Yet the US has killed thousands of civilians in airstrikes on populated areas. When you drop bombs on populated areas knowing there will be some “collateral” civilian damage, but accepting it as worth it, then it is deliberate. When you impose sanctions, as the US did on Saddam era Iraq, that kill hundreds of thousands, and then say their deaths were worth it, as secretary of state Albright did, then you are deliberately killing people for a political goal. When you seek to “shock and awe”, as president Bush did, when he bombed Iraq, you are engaging in terrorism.
Just as the traditional American cowboy film presented white Americans under siege, with Indians as the aggressors, which was the opposite of reality, so, too, have Palestinians become the aggressors and not the victims. Beginning in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages were destroyed, and their land was settled by colonists, who went on to deny their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the remaining natives and the national liberation movements the Palestinians established around the world. Every day, more of Palestine is stolen, more Palestinians are killed. To call oneself an Israeli Zionist is to engage in the dispossession of entire people. It is not that, qua Palestinians, they have the right to use any means necessary, it is because they are weak. The weak have much less power than the strong, and can do much less damage. The Palestinians would not have ever bombed cafes or used home-made missiles if they had tanks and airplanes. It is only in the current context that their actions are justified, and there are obvious limits.
It is impossible to make a universal ethical claim or establish a Kantian principle justifying any act to resist colonialism or domination by overwhelming power. And there are other questions I have trouble answering. Can an Iraqi be justified in attacking the United States? After all, his country was attacked without provocation, and destroyed, with millions of refugees created, hundreds of thousands of dead. And this, after 12 years of bombings and sanctions, which killed many and destroyed the lives of many others.
I could argue that all Americans are benefiting from their country’s exploits without having to pay the price, and that, in today’s world, the imperial machine is not merely the military but a military-civilian network. And I could also say that Americans elected the Bush administration twice and elected representatives who did nothing to stop the war, and the American people themselves did nothing. From the perspective of an American, or an Israeli, or other powerful aggressors, if you are strong, everything you do is justifiable, and nothing the weak do is legitimate. It’s merely a question of what side you choose: the side of the strong or the side of the weak.
Israel and its allies in the west and in Arab regimes such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have managed to corrupt the PLO leadership, to suborn them with the promise of power at the expense of liberty for their people, creating a first – a liberation movement that collaborated with the occupier. Israeli elections are coming up and, as usual, these elections are accompanied by war to bolster the candidates. You cannot be prime minister of Israel without enough Arab blood on your hands. An Israeli general has threatened to set Gaza back decades, just as they threatened to set Lebanon back decades in 2006. As if strangling Gaza and denying its people fuel, power or food had not set it back decades already.
The democratically elected Hamas government was targeted for destruction from the day it won the elections in 2006. The world told the Palestinians that they cannot have democracy, as if the goal was to radicalise them further and as if that would not have a consequence. Israel claims it is targeting Hamas’s military forces. This is not true. It is targeting Palestinian police forces and killing them, including some such as the chief of police, Tawfiq Jaber, who was actually a former Fatah official who stayed on in his post after Hamas took control of Gaza. What will happen to a society with no security forces? What do the Israelis expect to happen when forces more radical than Hamas gain power?
A Zionist Israel is not a viable long-term project and Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long since made a two state solution impossible. There can be only one state in historic Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be confronted with two options. Will they peacefully transition towards an equal society, where Palestinians are given the same rights, à la post-apartheid South Africa? Or will they continue to view democracy as a threat? If so, one of the peoples will be forced to leave. Colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who flee. Eventually, the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise and seek one state for both people. Does the world want to further radicalise them?
Do not be deceived: the persistence of the Palestine problem is the main motive for every anti-American militant in the Arab world and beyond. But now the Bush administration has added Iraq and Afghanistan as additional grievances. America has lost its influence on the Arab masses, even if it can still apply pressure on Arab regimes. But reformists and elites in the Arab world want nothing to do with America.
A failed American administration departs, the promise of a Palestinian state a lie, as more Palestinians are murdered. A new president comes to power, but the people of the Middle East have too much bitter experience of US administrations to have any hope for change. President-elect Obama, Vice President-elect Biden and incoming secretary of state Hillary Clinton have not demonstrated that their view of the Middle East is at all different from previous administrations. As the world prepares to celebrate a new year, how long before it is once again made to feel the pain of those whose oppression it either ignores or supports?”
Nir Rosen
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/29/gaza-hamas-israel
January 17th, 2009 at 10:19 am
I am afraid that Bob G’s comments amount to abstractions–”Israeli sovereignty,” etc. More than 1100 people, a third of them children, have been killed by the Israelis–Hamas rockets have killed 3 in the past several months. Here is the reality, more children dead:
http://michael-balter.blogspot.com/2009/01/palestinian-doctors-daughters-killed-by.html
January 17th, 2009 at 10:31 am
REPETITION
http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/BATTLE%2BFOR%2BALGIERS/video/x1g5bb_battle-of-algiers-10_politics
January 17th, 2009 at 10:31 am
Now, I’m going to make things as clear as I possibly can. Anyone who comes on a blog like this one to discuss current events in the Middle East and does not express remorse or sadness for the deaths in Gaza but goes straight into justifying Israel’s actions as their primary concern is demonstrating that they do not give a shit about the lives lost. That is the stance of Israeli leaders, that is the stance of the overwhelming majority of Senators and Representatives, that is the stance of George W. Bush, Condi Rice, et al. It’s too bad that it is also the stance of some who blog here.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Bob G reflects the point I’ve often made that, whether Israel’s ardent admirers like it or not, the rightwing radical nationalist Jabotinsky, who counseled ruthlessness with all who stood in the way and for whom “Zionism is the only morality” was the true prophetic voice of the Israeli state, not the idealistic kibbutznik bullshit. “No one could have predicted….” (like so many other things that were quite predictable.)
January 17th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Michael Balter and Marc Cooper are to be saluted for the consistency of their convictions.
That is, unlike most American Jews, they aren’t hypocrites, supporting on one hand efforts to destroy the social order in majority-gentile socieities by pushing universalist rot like free trade, unlimited immigration, militant secularism, pornography, birth control, cultural Marxism and Boasian anthropology, while on the other hand supporting blood and soil nationalism for their own people.
No, Balter and Cooper want EVERYONE to have to attend workplace diversity training sessions and lock their doors at night, not only in America and nothern Europe, but in Tel Aviv too.
Where there any Jewish members of Congress with similar convictions, or additional evidence that Balter and Cooper’s views aren’t anomalous within the American Jewish communisty, it would serve as a worthy rebuke to the anti-Semitic observations of Kevin MacDonald. (Look him up, he’s interesting, particularly in The Culture of Critique.)
January 17th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Jim R: “Can an Arab marry a Jew, Catholic, or Protestant?”
There are, in fact, *many* Arab Catholics and Protestants, you ignorant fucking peckerwood.
January 17th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Marc,
I don’t believe that peoples HAVE to remember episodes of bloodshed in a particular way. How do Germans feel about the their soldiers killed by Allied soldiers in traditional combat? In general, not so embittered. How do they feel about the bombing of Dresden? In some cases, embittered; in other cases, stoic. How do Vietnamese feel about the United States now? From the POV of the family of an individual soldier, although there are notable exceptions, it is almost impossible not to feel hostility toward the forces who killed your loved one. But looking at the viewpoints that become prevalent in peoples as a whole, it depends a lot on how the society evaluates its own mistakes. And history provides a lot of examples when military defeat is a factor that convinces a nation or a movement that it was mistaken.
———
In answer to the question of whether Jews and non-Jewish Arabs can marry in Israel: Yes, after a conversion. In the case of any Jewish-non-Jewish couple–i.e., with no conversion–Israel will recognize a marriage in another country as a civil union–as Israel does for gays or any heterosexual couple not married by religious authorities.
Jewish marriages aren’t recognized as anything by many Arab countries, with state religions, not even civil unions. As an American, my belief about the word “marriage” is that it is fundamentally a religious institution, and the federal government should only ratify relationships as “civil unions,” which is what they are literally: unions supported by the government. Different religious groups afterward can tell their followers that it constitutes marriage, a metaphysical union. The Catholic Church doesn’t have to recognize my marriage, as it wasn’t done in the name of Christ. I’m fine with it. If I was gay and a believer, I’d probably go to a Church that recognized my civil union as marriage.
January 17th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
News Report from Reuters:
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE50G07920090117
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Authorities on Friday arrested a U.S. man on suspicion of threatening to kill President-elect Barack Obama based on statements he posted on a website about UFOs and aliens, the Justice Department said. Steven Joseph Christopher, in three postings to http://www.alien-earth.org, said he planned to assassinate Obama in Washington “as a sacrificial lamb,” the department said in a statement.
“It’s really nothing personal about the man. He speaks well … . But I know it’s for the country’s own good that I do this,” Christopher reportedly wrote. “It’s not because I’m racist that I will kill Barack, it’s because I can no longer allow the Jewish parasites to bully their way into making the American people submit to their evil ways.”
Uncontrolled hatred can make you sick.
January 17th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
In the spirit of e-democracy.org and other internet discussion sites, I am going to limit my number of posts. So here goes.
I have to laugh when I am accused of making remarks that are just “abstractions.” Meanwhile, somebody named V points out that terrorism is a “normative” term. And the good Dr Balter demands that people have to type their words a certain way if they want to post here. But no, It’s just an internet site and this is just the comments subsection. If somebody forgets to insert the obligatory remarks that warring sides shouldn’t slaughter children, it may simply be that it’s such a self evident point that one doesn’t really have to say it over and over again in polite company. But taking that same approach, why is it any different to start out a comment without ritualistically decrying the rocket attacks against Israel? I don’t really think that Balter or Cooper support these attacks (apparently one or two others do, though), and I think it is a little silly to insist that they make that point at the beginning of each and every post.
I don’t think dead Israelis are abstractions any more than I think that dead Gazans are abstractions. They are broken, bloody, torn human beings. If you’ve seen what that looks like up close, it’s a lot harder to make idiotic remarks to the effect that terrorism is a normative term (ie: it doesn’t count if the Gazans do it).
And by the way, I’m willing to consider whether the Israeli response is excessive, or even completely wrongheaded. What I don’t see coming from my esteemed colleagues here is any sense that maybe, just maybe, Arabs are equally intelligent as the rest of us (certainly as much as us Americans on average) and have made choices that include support of a government and of actions that involve chronic violent attacks on Israelis. Somehow there is this blindness to the concept that the Gazans decided to escalate violence against the Israeli population knowing full well that it would result in a counterattack. Where Balter et al are right is that it has had a devastating effect on children and other living things, and the Israelis will have to live with that even as the Gazans are dying from it. The question comes down to this: Going on the assumption that Israel has a right to exist and to protect its own citizens, what options were there? I suspect that there are two standard counters to this question, the first being to deny the premise and the second being to suggest forebearance, and end to the blockade on Gaza, etc.
Let’s also admit that a lot of people got killed who aren’t directly involved in armed conflict with Israel. The critics refer to this as applying collective punishment to the innocent children (and some adults) of Gaza. The Israeli military uses a different terminology, implying that the intent is not to punish civilians but to disable the Hamas military capacity, but the result is the same. What is ugly about the “collective punishment” wording is that it is a sneaky way to try and wrap the actions of Nazi Germany around the Israeli neck. It seems to me that this is to invert history, in the sense that Czechoslovakia, Poland and Norway weren’t arguing that Germany should be dismantled and forced to cease to exist, but hoping to continue to exist themselves. Remind you of anyone?
January 17th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
You mistake my comments Bob G., it is not a terminology issue, that would be a self-flattering exaggeration of your position. It is an issue that you do not know what you are talking about.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
“What is ugly about the “collective punishment” wording is that it is a sneaky way to try and wrap the actions of Nazi Germany around the Israeli neck.”
The Nazis killed Jews deliberately; over its history, Israel has killed many Palestinians deliberately and caused the deaths of many others because it did not care whether they lived or died (as in the most recent war in Gaza.) Yes, definitely reminds me of someone.
January 18th, 2009 at 1:49 am
Jim R: “Uncontrolled hatred can make you sick.”
I’m sure the irony of this statement is lost on you.
I’m so glad that I’m gonna be alive to see the year 2042.
January 18th, 2009 at 7:39 am
You did all you could with your previous logic Bob. You’re dealing with pure emotions here. You could have had the driveway shoveled by now.
Serenity is helping the emotional with reason, accepting it when you cannot, and the wisdom to know when it’s time to shovel.
January 18th, 2009 at 11:30 am
By all means, let’s remain calm and serene in the face of so many deaths. Zen, let’s meditate, let’s accept it as God’s will–the God of the Israelites, of course, a stern but just God whose spirit guided the Israeli bombs to their targets.
January 18th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Mr. Balter are you driven absolutely beyond serenity–and demanding the same of everyone– by Zimbabwe, Tibet, world hunger, homelessness, innocent people convicted of crimes, prison rape, rape in general….etc. etc. etc., or does it have to be something where you get to slam the God of the Israelities?
January 18th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
At the time of the UN partition plan, Jews owned 6-7% of Mandate Palestine. That is why the Palestinians rejected the partition plan. Why should anyone simply agree to hand over half of their country to recently arrived carpetbaggers? Particularly since these carpetbaggers were prone to violent terrorism.
Crimes were committed. Zionist terrorist gangs rampaged through the land, forcing some 700,000 Palestinians to leave and stealing their land and property. Anyone talking about Israel’s “right to exist” is justifying these crimes. They are saying, “there is a right to conquest, massacres, ethnic cleansing, theft.” This is the point that supporters of Israel, and of course Israelis, refuse to deal with (most of them). But that’s what’s required for Israel to “grow up” and become a normal nation.
Israel must come to terms with these existential crimes, and seek forgiveness. Then everyone should be allowed to vote on how one nation, a nation of all its citizens, should proceed. (Supporters of Israel characterize one-person, one-vote democracy as “the destruction of Israel.” Pretty wacky, eh?)
Of course, equal rights and fair voting are a utopian fantasy, and a complete non-starter with Israelis and their American fifth column. Their real goal, of course, is complete ethnic cleansing; and until this final solution is achieved, they kill and kill and kill the Palestinians, putting them in “formaldehyde” as one Israeli put it; “putting them on a diet” as another said, or “unleashing a bigger Holocaust on them” as yet a third Israeli put it, most bluntly, honestly and priescently.
Israel doesn’t want to share the land. They want all of it, and they’re actively working on their plan, attack by attack, wall by wall, siege by siege, and now, an orgy of violence in that experimental laboratory known as the Gaza Concentration Camp.
During the Nazi Holocaust, many Jews had property, money and real estate seized in Germany and other countries. Since the war, and continuing to the present day, numerous lawsuits have been brought against German companies, Swiss banks, and other entities, to recover these items.
Let me be perfectly clear: I support these types of lawsuits completely and wish every possible recovery to the victims of these crimes.
Now, let’s apply the same standard to Palestine. Palestinians have legal titles to the many pieces of property in Palestine. (Despite Israel’s many attempts to destroy such records, and fabricate fraudulent documents in their favor.) Paying fair compensation for all of them, the loss of use, oh yes, and compensation for the massacres (although really, no amount of money can bring back the lives lost) would certainly bankrupt Israel.
So if Israel truly wishes to be “a light unto nations” as they claim, they need to grow up. Accept responsibility for their actions. Seek forgiveness. Find a way towards equal rights for all, and end all of the racist apartheid laws. (Including the recently-enacted racist marriage law.) It can end like South Africa; that might be the best case scenario. Or it can end like the French in Algeria, with all the colonists leaving. A full implementation of Israel’s plan for “transfer,” (as it’s referred to in Israeli Newspeak) would cause the comparison to sink completely to the level of Nazi Germany. Israel isn’t there yet, but many in Israel want to go there. They openly advocate ethnic cleansing, as Tzipi Livni did recently, or worse.
Now, the counter-argument, in brief. No doubt some chirpy Zionist will respond that Jewish Arabs in Israel (euphemistically referred to as “Sephardim”) should be compensated for property lost in leaving Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Morocco, and other Arab countries. Of course, this argument is null and void, as the Israeli government instigated these population transfers, for example, in Baghdad, with a series of terrorist bombings.
Then the matter of equal rights. Polls in Israel of course show this as an impossibility. But just as the US went through a Civil War and then the Civil Rights era, so must Israel grapple with these issue. Those that aren’t willing can vote with their feet, as many Israelis already have.
January 18th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Listen, Michael B., I apologize to a large degree, because I’ve belatedly looked at your blog, and I see that you’re honestly deeply agitated by many grim things in the world. I just think that you should not be censorious of other perspectives than yours on the Israeli/Palestinian tangle, including the current Gaza crisis, being expressed, and possibly shedding some light on the situation. All this wild anti-Israel emotion, what does it lead to?–sometimes to weird formulations like “matter”‘s next to last paragraph above, where he rejects out of hand any sympathy or compensation for Jews forced to leave Iraq, Syria, Yemen, etc., because the “Israeli government inistigated these populations transfers”. Sure, let Arab governments say they kicked out all their Jewish citizens because of actions by Israel, and that’s totally acceptable, and requires no reparation. ???
January 18th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Dear Baraban, or should I say “Stephen the chirpy Zionist,” as that’s what you reveal yourself to be.
The fact that you can only pick up on one minor point, which I mentioned was going to be brief, instead of the crux of the situation, (1948) shows that you are precisely one of those dogmatic individuals who refuses to address the root cause of the problem. Instead, you’d rather equate Israel’s active efforts to gain more Jews with Israel’s active efforts to ethnically cleanse Palestine. One action does not cancel the other; they are part of the same strategic plan.
January 18th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Stephen Barbaran,
In spite of all the terrible things that Israelis and Palestinians have done to each other–a conflict which I believe past history and present events prove beyond a doubt that Israel and Zionism are primarily responsible for–they will have to make peace and forgive each other one day if either group is to survive, just as the Blacks and whites of South Africa had to do (another situation in which there was no question who was right and who was wrong.) So there might be some common ground of agreement between us on that one point despite our differences on other things.
January 18th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Despite what I said above, any moral equivalence between Israelis and Palestinians in this conflict is contemptible. I have put the following quote on my blog’s Quote of the Day section:
“A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning and violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
–Leon Trotsky, “Their Morals and Ours,” 1938
January 19th, 2009 at 7:46 am
One possible positive consequence of the grisly Gaza mess — Netanyahu may lose the upcoming election. With Livni/Barak as heads of a coalition (no matter what many here may think of them) diplomacy will still be possible. The slim remaining chance for a resolution to this cycle of bloodshed will not be extinguished, as it would be with Netanyau as PM. Any solution would require outside intervention that carries a lot of political risk (i.e. alienating AIPAC) and would also demand that the parties involved back away from the demagoguery, grievance-mongering and appeals to blood and soil tribalism which can be so grimly satisfying and politically beneficial. A tough sell, but what other choice is there.
January 19th, 2009 at 8:04 am
matter -
Why is the term ‘Sepharadim’ a euphemism? Some, though not all Jews in Arab lands did originate in ”Sepharad’ — Spain. They made their way to North Africaa, Turkey etc. after the inquisition. Some, though not all Eastern European Jews originated in Germany (“Ashkenaz”) and yet all are called “Ashkenazim”. Neither term is a euphemism. Neither hides any sort of insidious conspiratorial menace. They’re just loose and imprecise designations, which do describe with rough accuracy separate populations with certain separate customs. In Israel, there’s often a distinction made between Sepharadim, genuine descendants of the Spanish diaspora (usually from North Africa, Turkey and the Balkans) and those Jews from North Africa and the Mideast who had no connection to Spanish Jewry. I hope you don’t find that too diabolical. To complicate matters, many Eastern-Eurpoean Hasidic Jews adopted a number of elements of the Sephardic liturgy and as a result, their prayer services and prayerbooks are designated ‘Sephardic”. Again, this is not a conspiracy. Please don’t be alarmed.
January 19th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
What evets said. My boss is a Jew, born in Morocco, whose family moved to France when he was 16.
There are significant differences between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, not the least of which is the absence of Yiddish in Sephardic culture and the existence of Ladino (although it is fading fast.)
January 19th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
People like Balter and Matter correctly, I think, equate the Israeli colonial enterprise with the South African and Rhodesian ones, then urge the Jews to ben over and “seek forgiveness.” I assume both writers are eager advocates of a post-Zionist “one state solution.”
It just won’t happen. Israeli Jews don’t wish to live in a third-world country, and don’t wish to voluntarily create a new political order that would institute widespread discrimination (or worse) against them. That is to say, they’re normal: they want to survive and thrive as a distinct people and they believe they have a right to do so. They’re aren’t going to commit collective national suicide.
And thanks to their support within the American ruling class, unlike the white South Africans, they won’t have to.
As Arab demographics west of the Jordan continue to surpass the Jewish demographics with each passing year, the voices of liberals and leftists (particuarly in Europe) calling for Israels to add a crescent to the Jewish flag and become “binational” will grow louder and louder.
At that point, the Israelis willingness to live side-by-side with a viable Palestinian state will increase, and their offers for a two-state solution will become better and better from a Palestinian perspective: Arab Jerusalsm and other Israeli Arab settlement blocs will suddenly be offered up to Fatah or its successors in the “moderate” camp, as well access between Gaza and West Bank. At some point, this will be enough for a majority of Palestinians to accept and they’ll have their state.
That’s how this will work out in the end, I think.
Or maybe I’m wrong and Israel will turn into the same sort of hell hole that South Africa has turned into.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8Aqzs-KoAA
January 19th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Evets & Randy Paul:
While I can appreciate the sincerity of the hair-splitting distinctions you made, my point about the use of the term Sephardim has to do more with the broader tendency within Israel to use the term “Arab” the way a KKK member (for example) uses the “N” word.
“Arab” is routinely used as a racist insult in Israel, so calling oneself an “Arab Jew” while simultaneously talking about the “Arab Enemy” (as so many Israelis do) would invite severe cognitive dissonance.
I refer you to this article for further reading: I am an Arab Jew
January 19th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Addendum to Randy Paul: I’m well aware of the distinction between Ashkenazi and Sephardim. And to expand upon my last comment, think about how the constant use of the term “European Jew” (instead of Ashkenazi) would sharpen the point of the debate about who belongs in Palestine…and who doesn’t.
January 19th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Funny, I’ve never used the term Arab Jew or European Jew, just Sephardic and Ashkenazi.
January 19th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Precisely my point. Euphemisms are used, to avoid discussing the reality that the master race in Israel is European Jews; and that they don’t belong there; at least, not in their current supremacist position.
January 19th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
I meant to add I honestly have never heard the terms used.