The State of "Palestine" Quiz

yosi wrote:

When Israel talks about its right to exist it is not demanding anything different than what every other sovereign nation on earth enjoys. No other nation talks about its right to exist because no other nation's right to exist is questioned the way that Israel's is. Israel isn't asking that they be treated in some exceptional manner. They're asking that they be treated the same way that every other nation is treated, that their right to exist be simply accepted the same as the U.S. or Egypt or France or Vietnam. Basically, they just want people to stop talking about how to get rid of Israel.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/10/14/fearsome-words/
'...These claims – we’re just a people like any other, we just want to go home – are the last bastion of lsrael’s crumbling moral stature. It is hard to imagine a more inappropriate public relations ploy. Israel’s rhetoric of peoples and homelands constitute a rejection of everything we ought to have learned from the Nazi era.

...If we cannot see the harm in talk of peoples and homelands, it is because our obsession with antisemitism has blinded us to the true origins of Nazi ideology. Before the Nazis, antisemitism was prevalent all over Western Europe. There were ugly incidents, one or two outrageous miscarriages of justice, but no genocide and nothing remotely resembling the peasant pogroms of Russia and the Ukraine. As for Germany, my Jewish parents, born and raised there, staunchly maintained that it was the least antisemitic country in all of pre-Nazi Europe. Why then is the Nazi genocide attributed to antisemitism, which clearly was necessary but not sufficient to produce it? And what about the aspects of Nazi ethnic cleansing that antisemitism can’t possibly explain – the genocide against the gypsies and the planned extermination of thirty million Slavs, many of whom died as ‘subhumans’ in inhuman prison camps?

There was an ideology sufficient to drive all those atrocities. It fairly stares us in the face. It was not devised by Hitler, but by 19th Century Romantics – poets and pseudo-historians from Scandinavia across Central Europe and down into the Italian Peninsula and the Balkans. It was not the Nazis, but Woodrow Wilson who made it a fixture of contemporary politics. This was the ideology of ethnic nationalism.

...Hitler ‘understood’ that peoples had a right to their homeland. The ‘national’ part of National Socialism was not civic nationalism, the nationalism that calls on French, German, American, Italian or Spanish *citizens* to cherish and defend their countries. It was ethnic nationalism, the nationalism of ‘peoples’, races, who did not have a homeland, or who had suffered a diaspora or historic wrongs. Hitler held that the German people had suffered both and was threatened with extinction. The Germans wanted their homeland back, all of it. Every other people had its homeland; why not the Germans?

Of course this was nonsense. The ‘German people’ was a bit of a fiction, and the borders of their ‘homeland’ were founded largely on historical myths irrelevant to contemporary rights and wrongs. But despite the most awful and obvious fulfilment of Lansing’s worst nightmare, we have never abandoned Wilson’s and Hitler’s endorsement of ethnic nationalism. It infects even our condemnations of ‘the Germans’ for the Nazi era.

...The Nazi conception of a Jewish people lies at the heart of Israel’s famous right of return. Don’t take my word for it. Listen instead to the AMERICAN-ISRAELI COOPERATIVE ENTERPRISE (AICE), which describes itself as "a nonpartisan organization to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship by emphasizing the fundamentals of the alliance – the values our nations share". To explain in what sense ‘Jews’ have a right to return to their homeland, the AICE states that "At present, the definition is based on Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws: the right of Return is granted to any individual with one Jewish grandparent, or who is married to someone with one Jewish grandparent. As a result, thousands of people with no meaningful connection to the Jewish people theoretically have the right to immigrate." AICE neglects to mention that such persons also have the actual right to immigrate, and to obtain citizenship. On the other hand, a stateless Palestinian refugee, perhaps living a precarious existence in France, has no such right of return, even if his ancestors inhabited Palestine itself for a thousand years. Palestine, it seems, is not the ‘homeland’ of Palestinians, but only of the Jews.

‘Jew’, in other words, does not refer to those who espouse Judaism or embrace Jewish culture. ‘Jew’ means ‘of Jewish ancestry’. In virtually every Canadian jurisdiction, ancestry is explicitly cited as a prohibited ground of discrimination. Ancestry is just a contemporary stand-in for the older notion of race and is generally used in references to racial discrimination.(**) Like skin colour, it’s something you cannot change, and therefore a particularly repugnant basis for determining civic status.

For the homeland to *belong* to the Jews is for them to have *sovereignty* there. Thus Article 7(a) of Israel’s Basic Law stipulates that "A candidates’ list shall not participate in the elections to the Knesset if its objects or actions, expressly or by implication, include… negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people." The Jewish people, in other words, are sovereign, and hold the power of life and death over all non-Jewish inhabitants under state control. Lest this seem overdramatic, note how the Israeli ministry of justice commented on a court case in March 2009: "The State of Israel is at war with the Palestinian people, people against people, collective against collective."(***)

So a miracle appears among us. The very ideology of homelands and peoples under whose auspices the Jews were all but exterminated has become the sustaining ideology of Israel, a state devoted to Jewish ethnic sovereignty. This is why we always hear that Israel – not Israelis – has a right to exist. What matters are not the citizens of a state, but the state itself, the totemic icon of ‘the Jewish people’. The fatal confusion that legitimized ethnic nationalism at the Paris Peace Conference now legitimizes Israel itself. When Zionists suggest that the French and Germans have a right to their states, they conveniently forget that this means the *inhabitants* of France and Germany, not those of some French or German *ancestry*, not a ‘people’ in the sense of an ethnic group. (The world was outraged when it suspected that Britain’s ‘patrial’ immigration laws were designed to favor those of ethnically British ancestry.) But ‘the Jewish people’ have a right to their state, and this is supposed to be some lofty ideal. Why? Because ethnic nationalism has taken on the cloak of civic nationalism, and we are too stupid to notice. Had ethnic nationalism not shed a single drop of blood, we should still be ashamed for crediting its mystique of peoples, historical wrongs, collective vices and virtues, ineluctable destinies. Abstractions and myths that could not even gain entrance to a university’s ivory towers flow daily from the lips of supposedly practical people.

...We are so bemused by the lovely vision of peoples determining themselves, we cannot see that ethnic self-determination is, in the real world, a quest for racial sovereignty, not a bid to enter some international folk dancing festival. We take the Zionist adoration of Israel, its commitment to racially Jewish rule of Palestine, as a paean to freedom and human rights. We look up to Israel for precisely what should make us abhor it. The ‘self-determination of peoples’ is a poison set in the very heart of our humanitarian ideologies. Neutralize it and Israel will lose its moral ascendency.'

catefrances wrote:

bennett13 wrote:

Byrnzie wrote:

No, irrational Islamic Jew hatred is just a convenient fantasy that you've concocted to justify and excuse Israel's continuing construction of racist, illegal, Jewish-only settlements on land stolen from the Palestinians.

Just like the Holocaust, right? :roll:

you know as a rule i dont like to speak for other people but i feel confident in stating that byrnzie does not think the holocaust is 'just a convenient fantasy' as your quote of his post is suggesting. i would shudder tot hink anyone who contributes here on a regular, or even semi regular basis thinks that hitlers final solution wasnt a very real event. and i dont think those same people would think it was anything but an extremely heinous and deliberate act. it pisses me off no end that people who would scream bloody murder if they were forced from their land, separated from their livelihood, community and family and denied the rights that we all take for granted seem to be of the opinion that somehow the israeli govt has the right to enact these same injustices upon the palestinian people. and that they think the palestinians should just roll over like dogs.

Don't feed the trolls.