First, I'm simply amazed that you've actually just selectively quoted yourself in an effort to prove that your own response did not revolve around the settlements when anyone can simply scroll up this page and see that the next three paragraphs you wrote are all about the settlements. As for acquiring territory by war, I didn't say that it was legal. I said that since Israel hasn't annexed the West Bank the military occupation as such is not strictly speaking an attempt to acquire new territory. The settlements are another story, which is precisely why I was careful to distinguish them (too bad my care is wasted on you). I also didn't said that Israel had a legally recognized claim to the territory. I said that in the wake of a war where Israel found itself in control of a new territory inhabited by an enemy population likely to descend into a power vacuum in the absence of a sovereign power (since Jordan was no longer in the picture) it was not unreasonable for Israel to maintain a military occupation (again, as distinct from the settlements) pending a negotiated resolution for the territories.
It's great how you take my attempt to make careful analytical distinctions and pretend as if doing so is really my sneaky attempt to paper over the settlements, when I've, in fact, made no effort to defend the settlements. The whole point of the distinction I'm drawing is to separate what is indefensible from what, at least in principle, is not.
And yeah, Zionism is not monolithic. Just like any nationalism is not monolithic. Quick, tell me what the "American nationalists" think? Because they all think the same thing. Because that's how people work, they all come together and agree about everything. The very fact that you think that it's possible to say that all Zionists believe one thing is just more evidence that when you talk about Zionism you're talking about your own warped construct, not about reality.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
So explain to me, if the Jewish nature of the state derives from the fact that the state has a Jewish majority population why is that a racist state? There is no principled contradiction between a Jewish majority state that derives its Jewish character from the legitimate democratic will of the majority and the provision of full equal rights to all citizens regardless of whether they are part of that majority. Were the state not majority Jewish I would agree that there would be a real risk to democratic principles, but as things stand such a problem simply doesn't exist. That's not to say that Israel doesn't have laws on the books that are discriminatory, but those are particular instances, they don't undermine the democratic nature of the state as such, nor do they make the state as such, and the national project that created it, fundamentally racist.
Because as far as Israel goes, we're not talking simply about a Jewish majority population. We're talking about a state run by, and for Jews, that does not provide full equal rights to all citizens regardless of whether they are part of that majority, as has been amply documented. As for your 'particular instances', try telling that to those effected, including those living in the occupied territories.
So first, Palestinians living in the occupied territories aren't citizens of Israel. As poorly as they are treated that treatment doesn't speak to the equality of rights within the Israeli polity. And yes, there isn't perfect equality in Israel. But that doesn't mean that Israel isn't a democracy, or that Zionism and liberal democracy are inherently in conflict. It just means that Israel has its (serious) flaws. Just as the lack of full equality for African Americans made the U.S. flawed without making it somehow not also a democracy or placing it fundamentally at odds with liberal values. Again, I'm not saying that Israel is flawless, but your notion that Zionism is inherently racist simply doesn't hold water. Is Greece fundamentally a racist state because it conceives of itself as a nation-state whose national character is defined by the national majority? As long as such a state provides for the equal rights of minorities there is no philosophical reason why it should be considered inherently racist.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
First, I'm simply amazed that you've actually just selectively quoted yourself in an effort to prove that your own response did not revolve around the settlements when anyone can simply scroll up this page and see that the next three paragraphs you wrote are all about the settlements.
So what? Are you now dictating that no mention of the settlements is permitted in this thread? Is that where your arrogance has taken you?
As for acquiring territory by war, I didn't say that it was legal. I said that since Israel hasn't annexed the West Bank the military occupation as such is not strictly speaking an attempt to acquire new territory. The settlements are another story, which is precisely why I was careful to distinguish them (too bad my care is wasted on you).
A military occupation that protects the settlers. Sure. And you want to try and separate the two? the occupation per se is illegitimate. it's illegal. And by it's nature it constitutes a breach of international humanitarian law. But you want to try and pretend that the occupation is benign.
I said that in the wake of a war where Israel found itself in control of a new territory inhabited by an enemy population likely to descend into a power vacuum in the absence of a sovereign power (since Jordan was no longer in the picture) it was not unreasonable for Israel to maintain a military occupation (again, as distinct from the settlements) pending a negotiated resolution for the territories.
Bullshit. The PLO were the rightful owners of that territory. The Israeli's had no right to it then, and they have no right to it now.
It's great how you take my attempt to make careful analytical distinctions and pretend as if doing so is really my sneaky attempt to paper over the settlements, when I've, in fact, made no effort to defend the settlements. The whole point of the distinction I'm drawing is to separate what is indefensible from what, at least in principle, is not.
Sure, the occupation is legitimate in your eyes. And because Jordan controlled the West bank for 20 years, Israel is merely 'looking after it' until a trusted Palestinian leader comes along, and then Israeli's can show how generous and benevolent they are by deciding how much of the territory to slice up and apportion to them. In the meantime, Israeli control of the area solidifies, and the settlements continue being built.
And yeah, Zionism is not monolithic. Just like any nationalism is not monolithic. Quick, tell me what the "American nationalists" think? Because they all think the same thing. Because that's how people work, they all come together and agree about everything. The very fact that you think that it's possible to say that all Zionists believe one thing is just more evidence that when you talk about Zionism you're talking about your own warped construct, not about reality.
For a start, Zionism in it's foundation didn't envision, and had no reason later to accommodate, a Partition of Palestine into two separate states. And the Zionist leadership down to the present day have made it perfectly clear that they don't accept anything other than full control of all the land between the river and the sea. But let's ignore reality - the reality of the ever-expanding settlements, and the reality of statements made by the Israeli leadership - and indulge in self-serving hypotheses instead.
Is Greece fundamentally a racist state because it conceives of itself as a nation-state whose national character is defined by the national majority? As long as such a state provides for the equal rights of minorities there is no philosophical reason why it should be considered inherently racist.
Once again, deliberately ignoring everything I've posted before on this subject and continuing to cling to the same self-serving falsehoods.
The people of Greece refers to the inhabitants of that country, not those who belong to any racial, or semi-racial, category. Israel defines itself as a Jewish state - i.e, a state run by and for Jews. That makes it a racist state.
HEBRON (Ma'an) -- Israeli settlers on Wednesday assaulted Palestinian school children in the southern West Bank, a school official said.
A school principal told Ma'an that a group of extremist Israeli settlers hurled stones at school girls in the village of al-Tuwani, leaving them bruised.
Israeli soldiers stood by and watched without taking action as the settlers threw rocks, the principal said.
...Regardless of Israeli military presence, settler attacks on children en route to and from school remain commonplace, the principal said.
In 2013, there were 399 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Over 90 percent of investigations into settler violence by Israeli police fail to lead to an indictment.
More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law.
Funny, that when the settlers throw rocks at Palestinian school girls the IDF stand by and do nothing. But when Palestinian children throw rocks at the IDF during protests the IDF don't hesitate in shooting them dead.
A child was seriously wounded Monday night when an Israeli settler ran her down. Sanabel Attous, 9, from Jab’a village southwest of Bethlehem was hit by an Israeli car which witnesses say deliberately ran her down.
She was taken to the Bethlehem Arab Society Hospital suffering serious fractures and bruises in the head, face and abdomen.
...One former Israeli Knesset (Parliament) member posted a video Monday called Palestinian children “little terrorists”, and called for “Death to the enemy, evacuation, and wiping off of [their] smile”, according to a translation by the Electronic Intifada.
Israeli settlers from Betar Illit chopped down olive trees and grapevines near the village of Nahalin, west of Bethlehem, on Tuesday. The Israeli military denied Palestinian land owners access their land as settlers chopped down the trees, in addition to providing protection for the settlers.
Also on Tuesday the Israeli army razed land in Hassaka, a small Palestinian village to the north of Hebron. The land had been partially covered with greenhouses and was planted with vegetables. The Israeli forces further handed a demolition notice to a resident of the village.
Soldiers also handed a notice to a Palestinian for demolition of his egg farm in Khalet Ash-Sharbati in southern Hebron, giving him 72 hours to evacuate it.
Israeli forces handed 10 Palestinian residents of Jenin notices to evict their shops in the industrial zone of Barta'a, to the south of the city, pending demolition.
And the Israeli's act shocked and surprised when revenge attacks occur. Three Israeli settlers were killed whilst walking in occupied Palestinian territory, and the World is outraged. Yet, verbal abuse, spitting, beating, stabbings, murder, and destruction of property is a daily occurrence for the Palestinians under occupation.
The bodies of three Israeli settlers who went missing on June 12th were found in a hastily dug shallow grave in Halhul, north of Hebron.
Since the teens went missing from Gush Etzion, a Jewish-only colony in the West Bank, Israel has besieged the 4 million Palestinians who already live under its thumb, storming through towns, ransacking homes and civil institutions, conducting night raids on families, stealing property, kidnapping, injuring, and killing. Warplanes were dispatched to bomb Gaza, again and repeatedly, destroying more homes and institutions and carrying out extrajudicial executions.
Thus far, over 570 Palestinians have been kidnapped and imprisoned, most notably a Samer Issawi, the Palestinian who went on a 266-day hunger strike in protest of a previous arbitrary detention. At least 10 Palestinians have been killed, including at least three children, a pregnant woman, and a mentally ill man. Hundreds have been injured, thousands terrorized. Universities and social welfare organizations were ransacked, shut down, their computers and equipment destroyed or stolen, and both private and public documents confiscated from civil institutions.
This wonton thuggery is official state policy conducted by its military and does not include the violence to persons and properties perpetuated by paramilitary Israeli settlers, whose persistent attacks against Palestinian civilians have also escalated in the past weeks. And now that the settlers are confirmed dead, Israel has vowed to exact revenge. Naftali Bennet, Economy Minister said, “There is no mercy for the murderers of children. This is the time for action, not words.”
Israeli settlers torturing a young Palestinian
Although no Palestinian faction has claimed responsibility for the abduction, and most, including Hamas, deny any involvement, Benjamin Netanyahu is adamant that Hamas is responsible. The United Nations requested that Israel provide evidence to support their contention, but no evidence has been forthcoming, casting doubt on Israel’s claims, particularly in light of its public ire over the recent unification of Palestinian factions and President Obama’s acceptance of the new Palestinian unity.
In the West, headlines over pictures of the three Israeli settler teens referred to Israel’s reign of terror over Palestine as a “manhunt” and “military sweep.” Portraits of innocent young Israeli lives emerged from news outlets and the voices of their parents are featured in the fullness of their anguish. The US, EU, UK, UN, Canada and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) condemned the kidnapping and called for their immediate and unconditional release. Upon discovery of the bodies, there has been an outpouring of condemnation and condolences.
President Obama said,
“As a father, I cannot imagine the indescribable pain that the parents of these teenage boys are experiencing. The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms this senseless act of terror against innocent youth.”
Although hundreds of Palestinian children are kidnapped, brutalized or killed by Israel, including several in the past two weeks, there is rarely, if ever, such a reaction from the world.
Just prior to the disappearance of the Israeli settler teens, the murder of two Palestinian teens was caught on a local surveillance camera. Ample evidence, including the recovered bullets and a CNN camera filming an Israeli sharpshooter pulling the trigger at the precise moment one of the boys was shot indicated that they were killed in cold blood by Israeli soldiers.
There were no condemnations or calls for justice for these teens by world leaders or international institutions, no solidarity with their grieving parents, nor mention of the more than 250 Palestinian children, kidnapped from their beds or on their way to school, who continue to languish in Israeli jails without charge or trial, physically and psychologically tortured. This is to say nothing of the barbaric siege of Gaza, or the decades of ongoing theft, evictions, assaults on education, confiscation of land, demolition of homes, color coded permit system, arbitrary imprisonment, restriction of movement, checkpoints, extrajudicial executions, torture, and denials at every turn squeezing Palestinians into isolated ghettos.
...This exceptionalism and supremacy of Jewish life is a fundamental underpinning of the state of Israel. It pervades their every law and protocol, and is matched only by their apparent contempt and disregard for Palestinian life. Whether through laws that favor Jews for employment and educational opportunities, or laws that allow the exclusion of non-Jews from buying or renting among Jews, or endless military orders that limit the movement, water consumption, food access, education, marriage possibilities, and economic independence, or these periodic upending of Palestinian civil society, life for non-Jews ultimately conforms to the religious edict issued by Dov Lior, Chief Rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba, saying “a thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.”
...What should we do, then? Palestine is quite literally being wiped off the map by a state that openly upholds Jewish supremacy and Jewish privilege. Our people continue to be robbed of home and heritage, pushed to the margins of humanity, blamed for our own miserable fate. We are a traumatized, principally unarmed, native society being destroyed and erased by one of the most powerful militaries in the world.
...But none of that matters either. Does it? It matters that three Israeli Jews were killed. It doesn’t matter who did it or what the circumstances were, the entire Palestinian population will be made to suffer, more than they already are.
Is Greece fundamentally a racist state because it conceives of itself as a nation-state whose national character is defined by the national majority? As long as such a state provides for the equal rights of minorities there is no philosophical reason why it should be considered inherently racist.
Once again, deliberately ignoring everything I've posted before on this subject and continuing to cling to the same self-serving falsehoods.
The people of Greece refers to the inhabitants of that country, not those who belong to any racial, or semi-racial, category. Israel defines itself as a Jewish state - i.e, a state run by and for Jews. That makes it a racist state.
I don't think you know very much about Greek national self-definition. But whatever, let me put it another way. What you're saying is that unlike every other national group in the world, when Jews exercise their right to self-determination they are acting in a racist manner. Why is Jewish self-determination racist while the self-determination of every other people on earth isn't?
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
I don't think you know very much about Greek national self-definition. But whatever, let me put it another way. What you're saying is that unlike every other national group in the world, when Jews exercise their right to self-determination they are acting in a racist manner. Why is Jewish self-determination racist while the self-determination of every other people on earth isn't?
Jews had a right of self-determination in Palestine, just as they had a right of self-determination in the U.S and elsewhere. Did they have a right to usurp the Palestinians, commit ethnic cleansing, and impose racial sovereignty over them? No, they didn't. And until Israel ceases defining itself as a Jewish state - i.e, a state run by, and for, Jews, then it will continue to be a racist state.
"Nation-states are, for the most part, not ethnic states. They are not states designed to perpetuate the power of a single ethnic group over everyone else within the territory over which that group holds sovereignty. All such states are illegitimate. No one ought to support that supposed right, and I certainly do not do so." - Michael Neumann - Canada - January 16, 2006
Michael Neumann: 'The Zionists and their camp followers did not come simply to "find a homeland," certainly not in the sense that Flanders is the homeland of the Flemish, or Lappland of the Lapps. They did not come simply to "make a life in Palestine." They did not come to "redeem a people". All this could have been done elsewhere, as was pointed out at the time, and much of it was being done elsewhere by individual Jewish immigrants to America and other countries. The Zionists, and therefore all who settled under their auspices, came to found a soveriegn Jewish state.'
'Zionism was from the start an ill-considered and menacing experiment in ethnic nationalism. Neither history nor religion could justify it. The Jews had no claim to Palestine and no right to build a state there. Their growing need for refuge may have provided some limited, inadequate, short-term moral sustenance for the Zionist project, but it could not render that project legitimate. The mere fact of later suffering cannot retroactively convert a wrong into a right: my attempt to usurp your land does not become legitimate simply because I am wrongly beaten by someone else, far away, when my project is near completion. Nor did the well founded desperation of the Jews during the Nazi era provide any justification for Zionism; at most it provided an excuse. If someone is murdering my family in Germany, that does not entitle me to your house in Boston, or my "people" to your country. All Jews fleeing Hitler were indeed entitled to some refuge. One might even suppose that it was the obligation of the whole world, including the Palestinians, to do what they could to provide such refuge. But this is not the whole story. For one thing, those with ample means to provide refuge, and those who are responsible for the need, have by far the greater share of responsibility. The Palestinians fell into neither category. Even more important, there is an enormous difference between providing refuge and providing a sovereign state. No amount of danger or suffering requires this, and indeed it may conflict with the demand for refuge. Simply to control one's own affairs isn't always the safest alternative. Arguably, for instance, the Jews were safer in the United States, where they are not sovereign, than they ever were in Israel. This is not only a fact but was always a reasonable expectation, so the need for refuge is also no basis for Zionism...
If there are any great lessons to be learned from the Nazi era , they are to watch out for fascism, racism, and ethnic nationalism. Supporting Israel hardly embodies these lessons.'
"I am an enthusiastic advocate of the Jewish State, even if it involves partitioning Palestine now, because I work on the assumption that a partial Jewish State will not be the end, but the beginning. When we acquire 1,000 or 10,000 dunams of land, we are happy. Because this acquisition of land is important not only for its own sake, but because through it we are increasing our strength, and every increase in our strength helps us to acquire the whole country. The formation of a State, even if it is only a partial State, will be the greatest increase of strength we could have today, and it will constitute a powerful lever in our historic effort to redeem the country in its entirety."(David Ben-Gurion, Letters to Paula, Aubrey Hodes, tr., Pittsburgh (University of Pittsburgh Press) 1971 [1968], 154f.)
"I tell you explicitly that the Torah forbids us to surrender even one inch of our liberated land. There are no conquests here and we are not occupying foreign lands; we are returning to our home, to the inheritance of our ancestors. There is no Arab land here, only the inheritance of our God - and the more the world gets used to this thought the better it will be for them and for all of us..." - Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook
http://isgap.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ISGAP-Working-Papers-David-Hirsh.pdf There is not, and there never has been, a genocide of Palestinians; there are no Israeli gas-chambers, concentration camps or Einsatzgruppen; the numbers of deaths on both sides throughout the conflict are analogous to the number of murders that the Nazi regime routinely committed every few minutes.
What Is Antisemitism? by Michael Neumann June 04, 2002
'...Well before the Hitler era, Zionists came thousands of miles to dispossess people who had never done them the slightest harm, and whose very existence they contrived to ignore. Zionist atrocities were not part of the initial plan. They emerged as the racist obliviousness of a persecuted people blossomed into the racial supremacist ideology of a persecuting one. That is why the commanders who directed the rapes, mulilations and child-killings of Deir Yassin went on to become prime ministers of Israel.(*) But these murders were not enough. Today, when Israel could have peace for the taking, it conducts another round of dispossession, slowly, deliberately making Palestine unliveable for Palestinians, and liveable for Jews. Its purpose is not defense or public order, but the extinction of a people. True, Israel has enough PR-savvy to eliminate them with an American rather than a Hitlerian level of violence. This is a kinder, gentler genocide that portrays its perpetrators as victims.
Israel is building a racial state, not a religious one. Like my parents, I have always been an atheist. I am entitled by the biology of my birth to Israeli citizenship; you, perhaps, are the most fervent believer in Judaism, but are not. Palestinians are being squeezed and killed for me, not for you. They are to be forced into Jordan, to perish in a civil war. So no, shooting Palestinian civilians is not like shooting Vietnamese or Chechen civilians. The Palestinians aren’t ‘collateral damage’ in a war against well-armed communist or separatist forces. They are being shot because Israel thinks all Palestinians should vanish or die, so people with one Jewish grandparent can build subdivisions on the rubble of their homes. This is not the bloody mistake of a blundering superpower but an emerging evil, the deliberate strategy of a state conceived in and dedicated to an increasingly vicious ethnic nationalism. It has relatively few corpses to its credit so far, but its nuclear weapons can kill perhaps 25 million people in a few hours.'
What are your thoughts on it? If criticism of Israeli policies can be swept up in the dragnet of all things anti-Semitic, and if condemnation of Israeli policies can be felt as a moral obligation, then does that not make anti-Semitism a moral obligation?
'Suppose, for example, an Israeli rightist says that the settlements represent the pursuit of aspirations fundamental to the Jewish people, and to oppose the settlements is antisemitism. We might have to accept this claim; certainly it is difficult to refute. But we also cannot abandon the well-founded belief that the settlements strangle the Palestinian people and extinguish any hope of peace. So definitional acrobatics are all for nothing: we can only say, screw the fundamental aspirations of the Jewish people; the settlements are wrong. We must add that, since we are obliged to oppose the settlements, we are obliged to be antisemitic. Through definitional inflation, some form of ‘antisemitism’ has become morally obligatory.
It gets worse if anti-Zionism is labeled antisemitic, because the settlements, even if they do not represent fundamental aspirations of the Jewish people, are an entirely plausible extension of Zionism. To oppose them is indeed to be anti-Zionist, and therefore, by the stretched definition, antisemitic. The more antisemitism expands to include opposition to Israeli policies, the better it looks. Given the crimes to be laid at the feet of Zionism, there is another simple syllogism: anti-Zionism is a moral obligation, so, if anti-Zionism is antisemitism, antisemitism is a moral obligation.'
The bodies of three Israeli settlers who went missing on June 12th were found in a hastily dug shallow grave in Halhul, north of Hebron.
Since the teens went missing from Gush Etzion, a Jewish-only colony in the West Bank, Israel has besieged the 4 million Palestinians who already live under its thumb, storming through towns, ransacking homes and civil institutions, conducting night raids on families, stealing property, kidnapping, injuring, and killing. Warplanes were dispatched to bomb Gaza, again and repeatedly, destroying more homes and institutions and carrying out extrajudicial executions.
Thus far, over 570 Palestinians have been kidnapped and imprisoned, most notably a Samer Issawi, the Palestinian who went on a 266-day hunger strike in protest of a previous arbitrary detention. At least 10 Palestinians have been killed, including at least three children, a pregnant woman, and a mentally ill man. Hundreds have been injured, thousands terrorized. Universities and social welfare organizations were ransacked, shut down, their computers and equipment destroyed or stolen, and both private and public documents confiscated from civil institutions.
This wonton thuggery is official state policy conducted by its military and does not include the violence to persons and properties perpetuated by paramilitary Israeli settlers, whose persistent attacks against Palestinian civilians have also escalated in the past weeks. And now that the settlers are confirmed dead, Israel has vowed to exact revenge. Naftali Bennet, Economy Minister said, “There is no mercy for the murderers of children. This is the time for action, not words.”
Israeli settlers torturing a young Palestinian
Although no Palestinian faction has claimed responsibility for the abduction, and most, including Hamas, deny any involvement, Benjamin Netanyahu is adamant that Hamas is responsible. The United Nations requested that Israel provide evidence to support their contention, but no evidence has been forthcoming, casting doubt on Israel’s claims, particularly in light of its public ire over the recent unification of Palestinian factions and President Obama’s acceptance of the new Palestinian unity.
In the West, headlines over pictures of the three Israeli settler teens referred to Israel’s reign of terror over Palestine as a “manhunt” and “military sweep.” Portraits of innocent young Israeli lives emerged from news outlets and the voices of their parents are featured in the fullness of their anguish. The US, EU, UK, UN, Canada and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) condemned the kidnapping and called for their immediate and unconditional release. Upon discovery of the bodies, there has been an outpouring of condemnation and condolences.
President Obama said,
“As a father, I cannot imagine the indescribable pain that the parents of these teenage boys are experiencing. The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms this senseless act of terror against innocent youth.”
Although hundreds of Palestinian children are kidnapped, brutalized or killed by Israel, including several in the past two weeks, there is rarely, if ever, such a reaction from the world.
Just prior to the disappearance of the Israeli settler teens, the murder of two Palestinian teens was caught on a local surveillance camera. Ample evidence, including the recovered bullets and a CNN camera filming an Israeli sharpshooter pulling the trigger at the precise moment one of the boys was shot indicated that they were killed in cold blood by Israeli soldiers.
There were no condemnations or calls for justice for these teens by world leaders or international institutions, no solidarity with their grieving parents, nor mention of the more than 250 Palestinian children, kidnapped from their beds or on their way to school, who continue to languish in Israeli jails without charge or trial, physically and psychologically tortured. This is to say nothing of the barbaric siege of Gaza, or the decades of ongoing theft, evictions, assaults on education, confiscation of land, demolition of homes, color coded permit system, arbitrary imprisonment, restriction of movement, checkpoints, extrajudicial executions, torture, and denials at every turn squeezing Palestinians into isolated ghettos.
...This exceptionalism and supremacy of Jewish life is a fundamental underpinning of the state of Israel. It pervades their every law and protocol, and is matched only by their apparent contempt and disregard for Palestinian life. Whether through laws that favor Jews for employment and educational opportunities, or laws that allow the exclusion of non-Jews from buying or renting among Jews, or endless military orders that limit the movement, water consumption, food access, education, marriage possibilities, and economic independence, or these periodic upending of Palestinian civil society, life for non-Jews ultimately conforms to the religious edict issued by Dov Lior, Chief Rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba, saying “a thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.”
...What should we do, then? Palestine is quite literally being wiped off the map by a state that openly upholds Jewish supremacy and Jewish privilege. Our people continue to be robbed of home and heritage, pushed to the margins of humanity, blamed for our own miserable fate. We are a traumatized, principally unarmed, native society being destroyed and erased by one of the most powerful militaries in the world.
...But none of that matters either. Does it? It matters that three Israeli Jews were killed. It doesn’t matter who did it or what the circumstances were, the entire Palestinian population will be made to suffer, more than they already are.
The silence is defining in here. Where u at Matt? Where's your condemnation of these acts attributed to Israel? Ohhhhhh, that's right, it's happening TO the Palestinians then it's OK! I forgot in your eyes, Israel is right in EVERYTHING they do. As those Palestinians lives ain't worth SHIT.
And if that picture byrnzie posted of the Israelis torturing that Palestinian had been reversed and it was a Palestinian torturing an Israeli, we all know damn well that shit picture would be on the cover of EVERY paper in the WEST and world.
The bodies of three Israeli settlers who went missing on June 12th were found in a hastily dug shallow grave in Halhul, north of Hebron.
Since the teens went missing from Gush Etzion, a Jewish-only colony in the West Bank, Israel has besieged the 4 million Palestinians who already live under its thumb, storming through towns, ransacking homes and civil institutions, conducting night raids on families, stealing property, kidnapping, injuring, and killing. Warplanes were dispatched to bomb Gaza, again and repeatedly, destroying more homes and institutions and carrying out extrajudicial executions.
Thus far, over 570 Palestinians have been kidnapped and imprisoned, most notably a Samer Issawi, the Palestinian who went on a 266-day hunger strike in protest of a previous arbitrary detention. At least 10 Palestinians have been killed, including at least three children, a pregnant woman, and a mentally ill man. Hundreds have been injured, thousands terrorized. Universities and social welfare organizations were ransacked, shut down, their computers and equipment destroyed or stolen, and both private and public documents confiscated from civil institutions.
This wonton thuggery is official state policy conducted by its military and does not include the violence to persons and properties perpetuated by paramilitary Israeli settlers, whose persistent attacks against Palestinian civilians have also escalated in the past weeks. And now that the settlers are confirmed dead, Israel has vowed to exact revenge. Naftali Bennet, Economy Minister said, “There is no mercy for the murderers of children. This is the time for action, not words.”
Israeli settlers torturing a young Palestinian
Although no Palestinian faction has claimed responsibility for the abduction, and most, including Hamas, deny any involvement, Benjamin Netanyahu is adamant that Hamas is responsible. The United Nations requested that Israel provide evidence to support their contention, but no evidence has been forthcoming, casting doubt on Israel’s claims, particularly in light of its public ire over the recent unification of Palestinian factions and President Obama’s acceptance of the new Palestinian unity.
In the West, headlines over pictures of the three Israeli settler teens referred to Israel’s reign of terror over Palestine as a “manhunt” and “military sweep.” Portraits of innocent young Israeli lives emerged from news outlets and the voices of their parents are featured in the fullness of their anguish. The US, EU, UK, UN, Canada and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) condemned the kidnapping and called for their immediate and unconditional release. Upon discovery of the bodies, there has been an outpouring of condemnation and condolences.
President Obama said,
“As a father, I cannot imagine the indescribable pain that the parents of these teenage boys are experiencing. The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms this senseless act of terror against innocent youth.”
Although hundreds of Palestinian children are kidnapped, brutalized or killed by Israel, including several in the past two weeks, there is rarely, if ever, such a reaction from the world.
Just prior to the disappearance of the Israeli settler teens, the murder of two Palestinian teens was caught on a local surveillance camera. Ample evidence, including the recovered bullets and a CNN camera filming an Israeli sharpshooter pulling the trigger at the precise moment one of the boys was shot indicated that they were killed in cold blood by Israeli soldiers.
There were no condemnations or calls for justice for these teens by world leaders or international institutions, no solidarity with their grieving parents, nor mention of the more than 250 Palestinian children, kidnapped from their beds or on their way to school, who continue to languish in Israeli jails without charge or trial, physically and psychologically tortured. This is to say nothing of the barbaric siege of Gaza, or the decades of ongoing theft, evictions, assaults on education, confiscation of land, demolition of homes, color coded permit system, arbitrary imprisonment, restriction of movement, checkpoints, extrajudicial executions, torture, and denials at every turn squeezing Palestinians into isolated ghettos.
...This exceptionalism and supremacy of Jewish life is a fundamental underpinning of the state of Israel. It pervades their every law and protocol, and is matched only by their apparent contempt and disregard for Palestinian life. Whether through laws that favor Jews for employment and educational opportunities, or laws that allow the exclusion of non-Jews from buying or renting among Jews, or endless military orders that limit the movement, water consumption, food access, education, marriage possibilities, and economic independence, or these periodic upending of Palestinian civil society, life for non-Jews ultimately conforms to the religious edict issued by Dov Lior, Chief Rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba, saying “a thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.”
...What should we do, then? Palestine is quite literally being wiped off the map by a state that openly upholds Jewish supremacy and Jewish privilege. Our people continue to be robbed of home and heritage, pushed to the margins of humanity, blamed for our own miserable fate. We are a traumatized, principally unarmed, native society being destroyed and erased by one of the most powerful militaries in the world.
...But none of that matters either. Does it? It matters that three Israeli Jews were killed. It doesn’t matter who did it or what the circumstances were, the entire Palestinian population will be made to suffer, more than they already are.
Wicked. And cruel. No other way to put it.
The dragnet that has seen 570 people kidnapped and imprisoned as a response to the kidnapping and murder of the three teenagers is simply another excuse for wanton violence and heightened aggression.
Say nothing of the other contributions that illustrate a cold and callous population.
Front people responsible for articulating Israel's actions and mindset simply cannot defend these types of actions. Yoshi, I have really enjoyed the dialogue between you and Byrnzie. I feel you have done as credible a job as one might be able to do defending Israeli actions in this affair; however, it might be time to reassess your position. As well spoken as you are, and as patient as you have been with Byrnzie, your script has become hollow.
I feel no need to reassess, principally because I make no effort to defend the abuses of the occupation. They're abhorrent. I know that and have never tried to deny it. My problem with Byrnzie is not when he criticizes these actions, it's when he goes beyond criticizing specific policies or individuals and argues that the aspirations of my entire people to national self-definition, a right recognized by international law, is inherently racist. In so doing he implicitly argues that the legitimate rights of the Palestinians should trump the legitimate rights of Jews. Rather than supporting solutions to the conflict that would realize the rights of both parties he treats the conflict as a zero-sum game and argues that the legitimate and internationally recognized rights of the Jewish people should simply be extinguished. If Byrnzie could contain himself to criticism of specific actions and policies I would have no problem with him. Since he insists on arguing that Jews, as a people, are not entitled to the same rights as every other national group, we've got a problem.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Byrnzie, nice to see that you're back to posting articles from Counterpunch.
Counterpunch
Gene, February 27th 2005, 9:33 pm
A Canadian court has cleared the way for Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel to be deported to Germany to stand trial.
Zundel, a leading proponent of white supremacy who claims the Holocaust never happened, is also the author of “The Hitler We Loved and Why.”
He has been held in a Toronto jail for two years while authorities determined whether he posed a security risk to Canadian society.
Federal Court Justice Pierre Blais said Friday that Zundel’s activities were not only a threat to national security, “but also a threat to the international community of nations.”
In his 63-page decision released in Ottawa on Thursday, Blais called Zundel a racist hypocrite and said his Toronto home was a “revolving door” for some of the world’s most notorious white supremacists who have promoted violence and hatred against Jews and minorities.
Last March a much more sympathetic account of Zundel was published. It described him as a “64 year-old painter and pacifist” and “the most widely recognized figure in the growing number of historians, both amateur and academic, questioning the veracity of orthodox accounts of the events which took place in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II, specifically with reference to the number of Jewish dead and the means by which they came to their demise.”
There are of course grounds to challenge Zundel’s treatment by Canadian authorities as a denial of free expression, as did Alan Borovoy, general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
“Zundel, I have no difficulty saying, is a nasty, nasty character and everything I’m saying is without the slightest sympathy for him,” Borovoy said. “But the process in itself is unfair.”
But nowhere does the article’s author, Alan Cabal, suggest the true nature of Zundel’s repulsive ideas, or express uneasiness with those ideas. Instead he calls Zundel “the world’s premier thought-criminal.” He concedes that Zundel’s views may be “provocative,” but he seems more disturbed by the “Holocaust industry” for persecuting people like Zundel and for behaving “in every way like a fanatical cult.”
What makes Cabal’s sympathetic article especially interesting is that it did not appear in some publication of the extreme Right but rather in a publication of the hard Left: Counterpunch, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
Cabal’s piece is not currently posted on Counterpunch’s popular website, but it is posted (approvingly) on a pro-Zundel website. (The Counterpunch website continues to include references to the article.)
And this is hardly the first or only time Counterpunch has been a congenial host to writers minimizing antisemitism and dropping dark hints about “Jewish power” and Jewish loyalty.
Canadian professor Michael Neumann wrote in January 2003:
Talk of a Jewish power structure is increasing at two levels. In the nether regions of the internet, there’s more about Jewish control of the US’ Israel policy, or perhaps of the US itself. Higher up, one hears about a Jewish lobby, or a Jewish-Israel lobby, or, more often, about mean-spirited, unpleasant people who control the government, and who, it is said or coyly suggested, are Jews.
There is inconclusive but considerable evidence to support these claims. Jews loom large among the high ranks of government policy advisers, and in influential non-governmental policy organizations. Most media push a Zionist line; many are owned by Jews. And there are well-documented cases of senators and congressmen who have learned to regret, come election time, wavering in their support for Israel. Some suggest that Jewish pressure groups had a role in the downfall of Bush the First.
It is clear that American Jews are deeply involved in the formation of US policy towards what they call the Jewish homeland, the self-styled Jewish state of Israel. It is also clear that the interests of Israel are not identical with those of the United States. This naturally raises questions about the ultimate loyalties of these policy-makers, so the collection and distribution of such evidence is quite justified.
A few months earlier, he offered this lighthearted suggestion: I think we should almost never take antisemitism seriously, and maybe we should have some fun with it.
The Canadian Jewish Congress reported in 2003 on an email exchange between Neumann and the proprieters on the antisemitic website Jewish Tribal Review.
The Web site quotes Neumann as writing, “I should perhaps have said I am very interested in truth, justice and understanding, but right now I have far more interest in helping the Palestinians. I would use anything, including lies, injustice and obfuscation, to do so. If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don’t come to light, I don’t care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism or reasonable hostility to Jews, I don’t care. If it means encouraging vicious racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the State of Israel, I still don’t care.”
Neumann still writes for Counterpunch.
And would anyone care to argue that Alexander Cockburn himself– who still contributes a column to The Nation– has not tumbled into an abyss of antisemitic paranoia when he writes stuff like this:
It’s supposedly the third rail in journalism even to have a discussion of how much the Jews do control the media. Since three of the prime founders of Hollywood, were Polish Jews who grew up within fifty miles of each other in Galicia, it’s reckoned as not so utterly beyond the bounds of propriety to talk about Jewish power in Hollywood, though people still stir uneasily. The economic and political commentator Jude Wanniski remarked last week in his web newsletter that even if the Jews don’t control the media overall, it is certainly true to say that they control discussion of Israel in the media here.
Certainly, there are a number of stories sloshing around the news now that have raised discussion of Israel and of the posture of American Jews to an acrid level. The purveyor of anthrax may have been a former government scientist, Jewish, with a record of baiting a colleague of Arab origins, and with the intent to blame the anthrax on Muslim terrorists. Rocketing around the web and spilling into the press are many stories about Israeli spies in America at the time of 9/11. On various accounts, they were trailing Atta and his associates, knew what was going to happen but did nothing about it, or were simply spying on US facilities. Some, posing as art students have been expelled, according to AP. Finally, there’s Sharon’s bloody repression of the Palestinians, and Israel’s apparently powerful role in Bush’s foreign policy, urging him into action against at least two of the axes of evil, Iraq and Iran.
Well, we just can’t keep those darn stories from sloshing and rocketing around, can we, Alex?
The Jude Wanniski to whom he refers is one of the Reaganite fathers of supply-side economics who seems to share Cockburn’s paranoia about the Jews, and apparently admires the racist and antisemitic Lewis Farrakhan. He too has found a home at Counterpunch.
And yet… Counterpunch remains a prized source for hard-left anti-imperialist bloggers who frequently blogroll and link to it. Unsurprisingly it is a favorite among the conspiracy-minded denizens of Medialens.
Do Counterpunch’s devoted leftist readers ever notice these things? If so, does it matter to them? Or do they sometimes believe, in their heart of hearts, that maybe people like Cabal, Neumann and Cockburn are on to something about those Jews?
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
he implicitly argues that the legitimate rights of the Palestinians should trump the legitimate rights of Jews...that the legitimate and internationally recognized rights of the Jewish people should simply be extinguished...Since he insists on arguing that Jews, as a people, are not entitled to the same rights as every other national group, we've got a problem.
Ethnic Nationalism isn't legitimate, it's a monstrosity. As for my claiming that the 'internationally recognized rights of the Jewish people should be extinguished', I did nothing of the sort.
Point me to where international law condones ethnic nationalism.
And then answer this question: Do the Palestinians have a right to self-determination in a state of their own? (According to the U.N declaration that was the basis for the foundation of Israel they do. The foundation of Israel was legitimized by a resolution that decreed that all of the territory external to that allocated to the Israeli's was to be granted to the Palestinians, on which they too could establish their own state. The Israeli's love to talk about 'delegitimization'. By trampling on the very legal framework that Israel's foundation is based on, aren't the Israeli's guilty of 'deligitimizing' themselves?)
And again, Counterpunch has repeatedly run articles by prolific anti-Semite, Gilad Atzmon. Briefly, Atzmon has questioned whether the Holocaust occurred, while simultaneously arguing that, if Hitler’s genocide did occur, it can partly be explained by Jews’ villainous behavior. Atzmon also explicitly charged that Jews are indeed trying to take over the world, and has endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, arguing about the document that “it is impossible to ignore its prophetic qualities and its capacity to describe” later Jewish behavior. You can see for yourself as follows: http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/08/28/the-most-common-mistakes-of-israelis/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/02/dreyfus-the-protocols-and-goldstone/
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Comments
It's great how you take my attempt to make careful analytical distinctions and pretend as if doing so is really my sneaky attempt to paper over the settlements, when I've, in fact, made no effort to defend the settlements. The whole point of the distinction I'm drawing is to separate what is indefensible from what, at least in principle, is not.
And yeah, Zionism is not monolithic. Just like any nationalism is not monolithic. Quick, tell me what the "American nationalists" think? Because they all think the same thing. Because that's how people work, they all come together and agree about everything. The very fact that you think that it's possible to say that all Zionists believe one thing is just more evidence that when you talk about Zionism you're talking about your own warped construct, not about reality.
But you want to try and pretend that the occupation is benign. Bullshit. The PLO were the rightful owners of that territory. The Israeli's had no right to it then, and they have no right to it now. Sure, the occupation is legitimate in your eyes. And because Jordan controlled the West bank for 20 years, Israel is merely 'looking after it' until a trusted Palestinian leader comes along, and then Israeli's can show how generous and benevolent they are by deciding how much of the territory to slice up and apportion to them. In the meantime, Israeli control of the area solidifies, and the settlements continue being built. For a start, Zionism in it's foundation didn't envision, and had no reason later to accommodate, a Partition of Palestine into two separate states. And the Zionist leadership down to the present day have made it perfectly clear that they don't accept anything other than full control of all the land between the river and the sea.
But let's ignore reality - the reality of the ever-expanding settlements, and the reality of statements made by the Israeli leadership - and indulge in self-serving hypotheses instead.
The people of Greece refers to the inhabitants of that country, not those who belong to any racial, or semi-racial, category.
Israel defines itself as a Jewish state - i.e, a state run by and for Jews. That makes it a racist state.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=688684
Soldiers stand by as Israeli settlers attack Palestinian school girls
09/04/2014
HEBRON (Ma'an) -- Israeli settlers on Wednesday assaulted Palestinian school children in the southern West Bank, a school official said.
A school principal told Ma'an that a group of extremist Israeli settlers hurled stones at school girls in the village of al-Tuwani, leaving them bruised.
Israeli soldiers stood by and watched without taking action as the settlers threw rocks, the principal said.
...Regardless of Israeli military presence, settler attacks on children en route to and from school remain commonplace, the principal said.
In 2013, there were 399 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Over 90 percent of investigations into settler violence by Israeli police fail to lead to an indictment.
More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law.
http://www.imemc.org/article/68291?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+imeu+(IMEU+:+Institute+for+Middle+East+Understanding)
On Monday night...Israeli extremists attacked two Palestinians in Jerusalem. A taxi driver was sprayed with pepper spray, and a second man was beaten by Israeli settlers in West Jerusalem.
A child was seriously wounded Monday night when an Israeli settler ran her down. Sanabel Attous, 9, from Jab’a village southwest of Bethlehem was hit by an Israeli car which witnesses say deliberately ran her down.
She was taken to the Bethlehem Arab Society Hospital suffering serious fractures and bruises in the head, face and abdomen.
...One former Israeli Knesset (Parliament) member posted a video Monday called Palestinian children “little terrorists”, and called for “Death to the enemy, evacuation, and wiping off of [their] smile”, according to a translation by the Electronic Intifada.
http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/features/human-rights/8221-israeli-civil-military-coordination-of-settler-violence
Israeli civil-military coordination of settler violence
26 June 2014
Israel's current offensive against Palestinians in the West Bank features strong coordination between the army and settlers in attacks against Palestinian-owned property. This coordination practically formalizes the settler attacks known as "price tag" into a joint civil-Israeli operation.
Israeli settlers from Betar Illit chopped down olive trees and grapevines near the village of Nahalin, west of Bethlehem, on Tuesday. The Israeli military denied Palestinian land owners access their land as settlers chopped down the trees, in addition to providing protection for the settlers.
Also on Tuesday the Israeli army razed land in Hassaka, a small Palestinian village to the north of Hebron. The land had been partially covered with greenhouses and was planted with vegetables. The Israeli forces further handed a demolition notice to a resident of the village.
Soldiers also handed a notice to a Palestinian for demolition of his egg farm in Khalet Ash-Sharbati in southern Hebron, giving him 72 hours to evacuate it.
Israeli forces handed 10 Palestinian residents of Jenin notices to evict their shops in the industrial zone of Barta'a, to the south of the city, pending demolition.
So where are their newspaper headlines?
July 1, 2014
By SUSAN ABULHAWA
The bodies of three Israeli settlers who went missing on June 12th were found in a hastily dug shallow grave in Halhul, north of Hebron.
Since the teens went missing from Gush Etzion, a Jewish-only colony in the West Bank, Israel has besieged the 4 million Palestinians who already live under its thumb, storming through towns, ransacking homes and civil institutions, conducting night raids on families, stealing property, kidnapping, injuring, and killing. Warplanes were dispatched to bomb Gaza, again and repeatedly, destroying more homes and institutions and carrying out extrajudicial executions.
Thus far, over 570 Palestinians have been kidnapped and imprisoned, most notably a Samer Issawi, the Palestinian who went on a 266-day hunger strike in protest of a previous arbitrary detention. At least 10 Palestinians have been killed, including at least three children, a pregnant woman, and a mentally ill man. Hundreds have been injured, thousands terrorized. Universities and social welfare organizations were ransacked, shut down, their computers and equipment destroyed or stolen, and both private and public documents confiscated from civil institutions.
This wonton thuggery is official state policy conducted by its military and does not include the violence to persons and properties perpetuated by paramilitary Israeli settlers, whose persistent attacks against Palestinian civilians have also escalated in the past weeks. And now that the settlers are confirmed dead, Israel has vowed to exact revenge. Naftali Bennet, Economy Minister said, “There is no mercy for the murderers of children. This is the time for action, not words.”
Israeli settlers torturing a young Palestinian
Although no Palestinian faction has claimed responsibility for the abduction, and most, including Hamas, deny any involvement, Benjamin Netanyahu is adamant that Hamas is responsible. The United Nations requested that Israel provide evidence to support their contention, but no evidence has been forthcoming, casting doubt on Israel’s claims, particularly in light of its public ire over the recent unification of Palestinian factions and President Obama’s acceptance of the new Palestinian unity.
In the West, headlines over pictures of the three Israeli settler teens referred to Israel’s reign of terror over Palestine as a “manhunt” and “military sweep.” Portraits of innocent young Israeli lives emerged from news outlets and the voices of their parents are featured in the fullness of their anguish. The US, EU, UK, UN, Canada and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) condemned the kidnapping and called for their immediate and unconditional release. Upon discovery of the bodies, there has been an outpouring of condemnation and condolences.
President Obama said,
“As a father, I cannot imagine the indescribable pain that the parents of these teenage boys are experiencing. The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms this senseless act of terror against innocent youth.”
Although hundreds of Palestinian children are kidnapped, brutalized or killed by Israel, including several in the past two weeks, there is rarely, if ever, such a reaction from the world.
Just prior to the disappearance of the Israeli settler teens, the murder of two Palestinian teens was caught on a local surveillance camera. Ample evidence, including the recovered bullets and a CNN camera filming an Israeli sharpshooter pulling the trigger at the precise moment one of the boys was shot indicated that they were killed in cold blood by Israeli soldiers.
There were no condemnations or calls for justice for these teens by world leaders or international institutions, no solidarity with their grieving parents, nor mention of the more than 250 Palestinian children, kidnapped from their beds or on their way to school, who continue to languish in Israeli jails without charge or trial, physically and psychologically tortured. This is to say nothing of the barbaric siege of Gaza, or the decades of ongoing theft, evictions, assaults on education, confiscation of land, demolition of homes, color coded permit system, arbitrary imprisonment, restriction of movement, checkpoints, extrajudicial executions, torture, and denials at every turn squeezing Palestinians into isolated ghettos.
...This exceptionalism and supremacy of Jewish life is a fundamental underpinning of the state of Israel. It pervades their every law and protocol, and is matched only by their apparent contempt and disregard for Palestinian life. Whether through laws that favor Jews for employment and educational opportunities, or laws that allow the exclusion of non-Jews from buying or renting among Jews, or endless military orders that limit the movement, water consumption, food access, education, marriage possibilities, and economic independence, or these periodic upending of Palestinian civil society, life for non-Jews ultimately conforms to the religious edict issued by Dov Lior, Chief Rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba, saying “a thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.”
...What should we do, then? Palestine is quite literally being wiped off the map by a state that openly upholds Jewish supremacy and Jewish privilege. Our people continue to be robbed of home and heritage, pushed to the margins of humanity, blamed for our own miserable fate. We are a traumatized, principally unarmed, native society being destroyed and erased by one of the most powerful militaries in the world.
...But none of that matters either. Does it? It matters that three Israeli Jews were killed. It doesn’t matter who did it or what the circumstances were, the entire Palestinian population will be made to suffer, more than they already are.
Interesting.
Did they have a right to usurp the Palestinians, commit ethnic cleansing, and impose racial sovereignty over them? No, they didn't. And until Israel ceases defining itself as a Jewish state - i.e, a state run by, and for, Jews, then it will continue to be a racist state.
"Nation-states are, for the most part, not ethnic states. They are not states designed to perpetuate the power of a single ethnic group over everyone else within the territory over which that group holds sovereignty. All such states are illegitimate. No one ought to support that supposed right, and I certainly do not do so." - Michael Neumann - Canada - January 16, 2006
'The Zionists and their camp followers did not come simply to "find a homeland," certainly not in the sense that Flanders is the homeland of the Flemish, or Lappland of the Lapps. They did not come simply to "make a life in Palestine." They did not come to "redeem a people". All this could have been done elsewhere, as was pointed out at the time, and much of it was being done elsewhere by individual Jewish immigrants to America and other countries. The Zionists, and therefore all who settled under their auspices, came to found a soveriegn Jewish state.'
'Zionism was from the start an ill-considered and menacing experiment in ethnic nationalism. Neither history nor religion could justify it. The Jews had no claim to Palestine and no right to build a state there. Their growing need for refuge may have provided some limited, inadequate, short-term moral sustenance for the Zionist project, but it could not render that project legitimate. The mere fact of later suffering cannot retroactively convert a wrong into a right: my attempt to usurp your land does not become legitimate simply because I am wrongly beaten by someone else, far away, when my project is near completion. Nor did the well founded desperation of the Jews during the Nazi era provide any justification for Zionism; at most it provided an excuse. If someone is murdering my family in Germany, that does not entitle me to your house in Boston, or my "people" to your country. All Jews fleeing Hitler were indeed entitled to some refuge. One might even suppose that it was the obligation of the whole world, including the Palestinians, to do what they could to provide such refuge. But this is not the whole story.
For one thing, those with ample means to provide refuge, and those who are responsible for the need, have by far the greater share of responsibility. The Palestinians fell into neither category. Even more important, there is an enormous difference between providing refuge and providing a sovereign state. No amount of danger or suffering requires this, and indeed it may conflict with the demand for refuge. Simply to control one's own affairs isn't always the safest alternative. Arguably, for instance, the Jews were safer in the United States, where they are not sovereign, than they ever were in Israel. This is not only a fact but was always a reasonable expectation, so the need for refuge is also no basis for Zionism...
If there are any great lessons to be learned from the Nazi era , they are to watch out for fascism, racism, and ethnic nationalism. Supporting Israel hardly embodies these lessons.'
"I tell you explicitly that the Torah forbids us to surrender even one inch of our liberated land. There are no conquests here and we are not occupying foreign lands; we are returning to our home, to the inheritance of our ancestors. There is no Arab land here, only the inheritance of our God - and the more the world gets used to this thought the better it will be for them and for all of us..." - Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook
What Is Antisemitism?
by Michael Neumann
June 04, 2002
'...Well before the Hitler era, Zionists came thousands of miles to dispossess people who had never done them the slightest harm, and whose very existence they contrived to ignore. Zionist atrocities were not part of the initial plan. They emerged as the racist obliviousness of a persecuted people blossomed into the racial supremacist ideology of a persecuting one. That is why the commanders who directed the rapes, mulilations and child-killings of Deir Yassin went on to become prime ministers of Israel.(*) But these murders were not enough. Today, when Israel could have peace for the taking, it conducts another round of dispossession, slowly, deliberately making Palestine unliveable for Palestinians, and liveable for Jews. Its purpose is not defense or public order, but the extinction of a people. True, Israel has enough PR-savvy to eliminate them with an American rather than a Hitlerian level of violence. This is a kinder, gentler genocide that portrays its perpetrators as victims.
Israel is building a racial state, not a religious one. Like my parents, I have always been an atheist. I am entitled by the biology of my birth to Israeli citizenship; you, perhaps, are the most fervent believer in Judaism, but are not. Palestinians are being squeezed and killed for me, not for you. They are to be forced into Jordan, to perish in a civil war. So no, shooting Palestinian civilians is not like shooting Vietnamese or Chechen civilians. The Palestinians aren’t ‘collateral damage’ in a war against well-armed communist or separatist forces. They are being shot because Israel thinks all Palestinians should vanish or die, so people with one Jewish grandparent can build subdivisions on the rubble of their homes. This is not the bloody mistake of a blundering superpower but an emerging evil, the deliberate strategy of a state conceived in and dedicated to an increasingly vicious ethnic nationalism. It has relatively few corpses to its credit so far, but its nuclear weapons can kill perhaps 25 million people in a few hours.'
What are your thoughts on it? If criticism of Israeli policies can be swept up in the dragnet of all things anti-Semitic, and if condemnation of Israeli policies can be felt as a moral obligation, then does that not make anti-Semitism a moral obligation?
'Suppose, for example, an Israeli rightist says that the settlements represent the pursuit of aspirations fundamental to the Jewish people, and to oppose the settlements is antisemitism. We might have to accept this claim; certainly it is difficult to refute. But we also cannot abandon the well-founded belief that the settlements strangle the Palestinian people and extinguish any hope of peace. So definitional acrobatics are all for nothing: we can only say, screw the fundamental aspirations of the Jewish people; the settlements are wrong. We must add that, since we are obliged to oppose the settlements, we are obliged to be antisemitic. Through definitional inflation, some form of ‘antisemitism’ has become morally obligatory.
It gets worse if anti-Zionism is labeled antisemitic, because the settlements, even if they do not represent fundamental aspirations of the Jewish people, are an entirely plausible extension of Zionism. To oppose them is indeed to be anti-Zionist, and therefore, by the stretched definition, antisemitic. The more antisemitism expands to include opposition to Israeli policies, the better it looks. Given the crimes to be laid at the feet of Zionism, there is another simple syllogism: anti-Zionism is a moral obligation, so, if anti-Zionism is antisemitism, antisemitism is a moral obligation.'
The dragnet that has seen 570 people kidnapped and imprisoned as a response to the kidnapping and murder of the three teenagers is simply another excuse for wanton violence and heightened aggression.
Say nothing of the other contributions that illustrate a cold and callous population.
Front people responsible for articulating Israel's actions and mindset simply cannot defend these types of actions. Yoshi, I have really enjoyed the dialogue between you and Byrnzie. I feel you have done as credible a job as one might be able to do defending Israeli actions in this affair; however, it might be time to reassess your position. As well spoken as you are, and as patient as you have been with Byrnzie, your script has become hollow.
Counterpunch
Gene, February 27th 2005, 9:33 pm
A Canadian court has cleared the way for Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel to be deported to Germany to stand trial.
Zundel, a leading proponent of white supremacy who claims the Holocaust never happened, is also the author of “The Hitler We Loved and Why.”
He has been held in a Toronto jail for two years while authorities determined whether he posed a security risk to Canadian society.
Federal Court Justice Pierre Blais said Friday that Zundel’s activities were not only a threat to national security, “but also a threat to the international community of nations.”
In his 63-page decision released in Ottawa on Thursday, Blais called Zundel a racist hypocrite and said his Toronto home was a “revolving door” for some of the world’s most notorious white supremacists who have promoted violence and hatred against Jews and minorities.
Last March a much more sympathetic account of Zundel was published. It described him as a “64 year-old painter and pacifist” and “the most widely recognized figure in the growing number of historians, both amateur and academic, questioning the veracity of orthodox accounts of the events which took place in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II, specifically with reference to the number of Jewish dead and the means by which they came to their demise.”
There are of course grounds to challenge Zundel’s treatment by Canadian authorities as a denial of free expression, as did Alan Borovoy, general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
“Zundel, I have no difficulty saying, is a nasty, nasty character and everything I’m saying is without the slightest sympathy for him,” Borovoy said. “But the process in itself is unfair.”
But nowhere does the article’s author, Alan Cabal, suggest the true nature of Zundel’s repulsive ideas, or express uneasiness with those ideas. Instead he calls Zundel “the world’s premier thought-criminal.” He concedes that Zundel’s views may be “provocative,” but he seems more disturbed by the “Holocaust industry” for persecuting people like Zundel and for behaving “in every way like a fanatical cult.”
What makes Cabal’s sympathetic article especially interesting is that it did not appear in some publication of the extreme Right but rather in a publication of the hard Left: Counterpunch, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
Cabal’s piece is not currently posted on Counterpunch’s popular website, but it is posted (approvingly) on a pro-Zundel website. (The Counterpunch website continues to include references to the article.)
And this is hardly the first or only time Counterpunch has been a congenial host to writers minimizing antisemitism and dropping dark hints about “Jewish power” and Jewish loyalty.
Canadian professor Michael Neumann wrote in January 2003:
Talk of a Jewish power structure is increasing at two levels. In the nether regions of the internet, there’s more about Jewish control of the US’ Israel policy, or perhaps of the US itself. Higher up, one hears about a Jewish lobby, or a Jewish-Israel lobby, or, more often, about mean-spirited, unpleasant people who control the government, and who, it is said or coyly suggested, are Jews.
There is inconclusive but considerable evidence to support these claims. Jews loom large among the high ranks of government policy advisers, and in influential non-governmental policy organizations. Most media push a Zionist line; many are owned by Jews. And there are well-documented cases of senators and congressmen who have learned to regret, come election time, wavering in their support for Israel. Some suggest that Jewish pressure groups had a role in the downfall of Bush the First.
It is clear that American Jews are deeply involved in the formation of US policy towards what they call the Jewish homeland, the self-styled Jewish state of Israel. It is also clear that the interests of Israel are not identical with those of the United States. This naturally raises questions about the ultimate loyalties of these policy-makers, so the collection and distribution of such evidence is quite justified.
A few months earlier, he offered this lighthearted suggestion:
I think we should almost never take antisemitism seriously, and maybe we should have some fun with it.
The Canadian Jewish Congress reported in 2003 on an email exchange between Neumann and the proprieters on the antisemitic website Jewish Tribal Review.
The Web site quotes Neumann as writing, “I should perhaps have said I am very interested in truth, justice and understanding, but right now I have far more interest in helping the Palestinians. I would use anything, including lies, injustice and obfuscation, to do so. If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don’t come to light, I don’t care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism or reasonable hostility to Jews, I don’t care. If it means encouraging vicious racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the State of Israel, I still don’t care.”
Neumann still writes for Counterpunch.
And would anyone care to argue that Alexander Cockburn himself– who still contributes a column to The Nation– has not tumbled into an abyss of antisemitic paranoia when he writes stuff like this:
It’s supposedly the third rail in journalism even to have a discussion of how much the Jews do control the media. Since three of the prime founders of Hollywood, were Polish Jews who grew up within fifty miles of each other in Galicia, it’s reckoned as not so utterly beyond the bounds of propriety to talk about Jewish power in Hollywood, though people still stir uneasily. The economic and political commentator Jude Wanniski remarked last week in his web newsletter that even if the Jews don’t control the media overall, it is certainly true to say that they control discussion of Israel in the media here.
Certainly, there are a number of stories sloshing around the news now that have raised discussion of Israel and of the posture of American Jews to an acrid level. The purveyor of anthrax may have been a former government scientist, Jewish, with a record of baiting a colleague of Arab origins, and with the intent to blame the anthrax on Muslim terrorists. Rocketing around the web and spilling into the press are many stories about Israeli spies in America at the time of 9/11. On various accounts, they were trailing Atta and his associates, knew what was going to happen but did nothing about it, or were simply spying on US facilities. Some, posing as art students have been expelled, according to AP. Finally, there’s Sharon’s bloody repression of the Palestinians, and Israel’s apparently powerful role in Bush’s foreign policy, urging him into action against at least two of the axes of evil, Iraq and Iran.
Well, we just can’t keep those darn stories from sloshing and rocketing around, can we, Alex?
The Jude Wanniski to whom he refers is one of the Reaganite fathers of supply-side economics who seems to share Cockburn’s paranoia about the Jews, and apparently admires the racist and antisemitic Lewis Farrakhan. He too has found a home at Counterpunch.
And yet… Counterpunch remains a prized source for hard-left anti-imperialist bloggers who frequently blogroll and link to it. Unsurprisingly it is a favorite among the conspiracy-minded denizens of Medialens.
Do Counterpunch’s devoted leftist readers ever notice these things? If so, does it matter to them? Or do they sometimes believe, in their heart of hearts, that maybe people like Cabal, Neumann and Cockburn are on to something about those Jews?
Point me to where international law condones ethnic nationalism.
And then answer this question: Do the Palestinians have a right to self-determination in a state of their own? (According to the U.N declaration that was the basis for the foundation of Israel they do. The foundation of Israel was legitimized by a resolution that decreed that all of the territory external to that allocated to the Israeli's was to be granted to the Palestinians, on which they too could establish their own state. The Israeli's love to talk about 'delegitimization'. By trampling on the very legal framework that Israel's foundation is based on, aren't the Israeli's guilty of 'deligitimizing' themselves?)
And once again you provide no link. Why is that?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/08/28/the-most-common-mistakes-of-israelis/
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/02/dreyfus-the-protocols-and-goldstone/
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/22/what-really-happened-in-the-yom-kippur-war/