How Dysfunctional is Israel?
One night in the 1960s, drunken teenagers in Palmer, Massachusetts decided to spook kids at a Jewish, Hebrew-speaking summer camp. They hurled bottles and catcalls, terrifying 12-year olds in their beds. Two Israeli camp counselors raced into the woods like raging bulls, intending to give the townies more than an escort to the local cops. They didn't catch them, but they set up martial patrols, scaring the campers as much as the rowdies, who never returned.
I am not telling this story to be comical or exculpatory at a time when the UN and the Red Cross have reinforced Darryl Li's claim, presented here on Jan. 4, that Israel has turned Gaza from a Bantustan into an internment camp and worse. I am telling it to offer a glimpse into a part of the Israeli psyche, a mindset that antedates the rockets of today and of 2006, the suicide bombings of 2002 and even the war around Israel's founding in 1948.
It's a mindset that often misjudges its circumstances and responds dysfunctionally: In 1995, the Israeli law student Yigal Amir said that he'd assassinated Yitzhak Rabin because Rabin would "give our country to the Arabs" and "we need to be cold-hearted." In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a Jew from Brooklyn, massacred 29 Palestinians at prayer, prompting me to take a stand that was also a confessional. (Called, "Massacre in Israel Forces a Hard Look Inward," it's the fourth and last item on the pdf.)
We all know where this mindset comes from. If we're honest, we also know that there's a dysfunctional mindset among Arabs that antedates Israel's outrages: (It wasn't Israel, for example, that blocked a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza from 1948 to 1967.)
Each side now thinks that it's a Warsaw Ghetto resisting the Nazis - Palestinians against a racist, expansionist horde of real-estate speculators and militarists, Israelis against a raging sea of 100 million Arabs whose demagogues act as if .01 percent of the Middle East can't be home to a people Immanuel Kant tellingly called "these Palestinians who are living among us," thereby tapping swift, dark undercurrents that would soon surface across Europe.
Each side is right enough about the history to be impervious to the other's moralizing and emoting, especially when the moralizers shrug or keep silent about 1948-1967, or about certain massacres, and suicide bombers or aerial bombings. M.J. Rosenberg reminds us of George Orwell's observation that "All nationalists [and their apologists, I would add] have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts.... Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage -- torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, ... assassination, the bombing of civilians -- which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
Even some who acknowledge their own side's excesses consider them justified in the excruciating balance of history and necessity. So say apologists for the desperation behind the suicide bombings and rockets that have hit Israel. And so say apologists for Israel's responses, the walls and policies that have turned Gaza, especially, into an internment camp. But Orwell's comment reminds us that selective moralism can prove as dysfunctional and destructive as the atrocities it ignores or tries to excuse.
Pondering this ancient and awful habit, I can't help thinking of certain high-born WASP and Jewish writers of the 1930s and 1940s, so guilt-ridden or enraged about the American bourgeois duplicity in their own upbringings that they couldn't see through Stalin, even as millions writhed in his prisons and graves. The self-proclaimed enemy of their own despised pasts had become their friend. Orwell had to contend with such myopia in 1944, when his Animal Farm couldn't find a British publisher because the politically correct, parlour left couldn't tolerate even his thinly veiled send-up of the USSR.
Similarly, some new leftists of the 1960s -- bred in at least modest comfort, as the Port Huron Statement famously noted, and somewhat guilt-ridden about it -- considered the dysfunctional Black Panthers and some of the worst Third World demagogues to be noble because they gave good rhetoric and some social services. But it wasn't only the left: Many conservative Britons and Americans cottoned to Hitler and Mussolini before 1939; others later became apologists and enablers of Chile's Pinochet or the Argentine junta, or of Ahmed Chalabi and worse.
Years ago I examined such delusional apologists for oppression on both right and left, while reviewing Paul Hollander's neo-connish but smartly aimed Political Pilgrims. I commend this review to anyone whose fine-spun rage at their American and/or Jewish pasts has driven them to seek deliverance either in Jewish nationalism and hatred of Arabs in the blinding clarity of the Judaean desert, or in the loathsome submission for which Allah's enforcers Hassan Nasrallah, Khaled Mashaal, Ismail Haniyah, and Mahmoud Zahar are preparing both Shiites and Palestinians, all the more so if Israel disappears.
Let me explore, in this and the next few paragraphs, a few reasons why the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas do get a rather generous pass from critics of Israel who have long found the Jews a remarkably attractive dumping ground for their displaced self-loathing. Then I'll get back to Israel's dysfunctions.
From New Zealand and Australia to South Africa and Canada and the U.S, not to mention London, excoriating the Jews seems an almost genetic compulsion in an annoyingly large proportion of English-speaking whites whose forebears seized other people's lands and slaughtered and enslaved the peoples themselves -- not because the Brits were seeking refuge from annihilation at home but because they were as rapacious then as they are hypocritical now.
I once stopped an Australian who was ranting on and on about the Israelis by telling him, "I agree with you completely that all whites should leave Australia" -- something he hadn't said -- "for doing what you say the Israelis have done, except for the fact that some of you came to Australia in chains when the British first began appropriating it for a penal colony." In the recent movie "Australia," that country indulges in a grand, lachrymose reminiscence about its safely dead or subdued Aborigines, much as Americans waxed poetic about Indians a few decades after their final submission. Mightn't what Israel is doing remind them rather too closely for comfort of something they actually did far more brutally and completely and were never condemned or corrected for doing?
I once confronted a genteel New England WASP who called Palestinian suicide bombers "incredibly brave martyrs" -- and who owns a colonial home on the banks of Connecticut River, which his forebears swindled from the Pequots before slaughtering them. I assured him that I will give his address and his child's Manhattan address to incredibly brave American Indian suicide bombers, should any arise to redress the outrages he still profits from. He told me that I had been hurtful, but I had thought it hurtful of him to admire the blowing up of parents and children who were no different from him and his kids, except that possibly they were more innocent, partly because, in many cases, they're far less privileged.
I am not claiming that one imperialism justifies another. I am doubting that Israelis are the imperialists it pleases their European and American critics to think they are, when, really, the critics are writhing uncomfortably in their own pasts. The Jews certainly didn't come to Palestine as the British did to colonies all over the world. The latter weren't fleeing mass slaughter or expulsion, as the Jews were. And the British had no historical ties or religious claims to South Africa, Australia, Canada, New England, or the other places they seized and now call home. Shouldn't they leave?
Jews in Palestine are different enough to remind us of one more historical irony their critics assiduously ignore: The Jewish nation-state was modeled somewhat along the lines of the ethno-racial nation-states that had pushed Jews out in the 1920s and '30s while reconstituting themselves from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, and German empires. These new European entities' celebrations of "blood and soil" nationalism made their centuries-old Jewish communities feel the ground shifting under their feet and convinced them they could be free only in a nation-state of their own.
Hello? Is this really so hard for anti-Israel demonstrators in the streets of Berlin, Paris, and London to understand? Apparently, it is. Europeans, having learned the folly of "blood and soil" solidarities during the Gotterdammerung of World War II, and justly proud of the European Union, now instruct Jews whom they displaced beforehand that their nation-state is out of fashion, an anachronism in a trans-national, global-capitalist world. Yet Jews are now surrounded by peoples touting an Arabist "blood and soil" solidarity that again renders them outsiders, even in their own ancestral land.
So the Jews are an anomaly, and, given the history I've just cited, it's tempting to tell their European and American critics, "Get used to it, and if you're wondering why this anomaly exists, look into yourselves, and give the Israelis a little lag time."
But while it's tempting to say this, I can't insist on it. Israel is becoming an anachronism, for reasons that must be faced by those of us who aren't as hypocritical as its moralizing critics. It is an anachronism partly because of the psyche or mindset I first encountered in Palmer, Massachusetts -- that understandable but dysfunctional defensiveness toward a world that has liberalized in some ways but that also excuses or even encourages some Arabs for going in the opposite direction.
Israel has come closer than any state in the Middle East, even Turkey, to being a European-style social democracy -- even, at least partially, for those of its Palestinians who vote and receive social services that are the envy of Arabs elsewhere. But, caught almost alone regionally in the riptides of global capitalism and in its own Spartan defensiveness against the demagogic rage rising around it, Israel may wind up abandoning its "social democracy" for a Singapore-like market economy, and it has already returned hatred for hatred in ways that only deepen hatred and that erode democracy at home.
As long as Israel occupies lands it conquered almost defensively in 1967 but now claims historically and entrepreneurially, it further erodes its democracy, and, for demographic reasons alone, it can remain a Jewish state only by abandoning any pretense of democracy at all.
Can Israel back out of this tightening vise of embattlement, abandonment, and demography? It can't do so alone. But read some of the columns in the daily newspaper Haaretz to see what many Israelis think, and pay heed to the best of the country's public intellectuals and veteran policymakers, from Abraham Burg to Shlomo Ben-Ami to Aharon Barak, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court. (One of Israel's best resources is the credibility of its dissidents, who are anything but parlour leftists, having done their army service and been part of public life in many ways.)
It's impossible to imagine a significant shift in Israel's policies absent something like a civil-war with its own West Bank settlers, especially the budding Yigal Amirs and Baruch Goldsteins. Until this question has been settled, Israel's policies will be incoherent because it will not have decided what kind of country it is going to be. But even the tens of thousands of Israelis who understand what is needed will never carry a traumatized and demagogued public without some shift in the equally dysfunctional mindset that rules Gaza and that has only been reinforced by its Israeli counterpart.
Israel needs a lot of disguised help from the very Arabs toward whom it has behaved too often as those Israeli camp staffers in Massachusetts did toward the community around them. Some help has been offered anyway in the Arab peace plan (which may reflect Arab states' fears of Hamas and Hezbollah more than it does any great hope for lasting peace with Israel). And help might come from Palestinian leaders like Marwan Baghrouti, who no more deserves to be the political prisoner he is now than did King or Mandela, and from Palestianian lawyers like Hassan Jabarin.
Finally, though, and decisively, Israel will need a lot of tough love from the United States, far more than from "the international community," much of which is marinated in hypocrisies like those mentioned above. Only the United States has enough credibility and clout with Israelis to make them face their own fanatical settlers and the darkest parts of their psyche and to test the more promising of Arab initiatives and leaders.
As of January 20, the U.S. will have in Barack Obama the necessary wisdom to push Israel in this direction. But will he, and we, have the will? Or will we let both Israel's neo-con apologists and Hamas' American counterparts make us, too, dysfunctional?
Nicely written.
Quibble: "I am not claiming that one imperialism justifies another."
But you are.
Second Quibble: "Israel needs a lot of disguised help from the very Arabs toward whom it has behaved too often as those Israeli camp staffers in Palmer did toward the community around them."
Can you really compare your camp story to this:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_O5OuU90ru-Y/SWPuWE6wbpI/AAAAAAAAC28/8qUW8l0a5-Y/s1600-h/268714-2.jpg
January 9, 2009 6:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh dear, I guess we're a couple of quibblers, because I had the same reaction. This is the statement I found quibble-worthy:
It wasn't Israel that blocked a Palestinian state? Really? During all the cited period Israel continued to neglect it's responsibilities under U.N. resolution 194 (passed in 1948), which certainly impeded the creation of a Palestinian state. And the selection of the year 1948 as the start point for the example is somewhat questionable anyway, since certainly the creation of the state of Israel itself put quite the damper on Palestinian national aspirations.
And in describing the social services that Israeli Arabs receive as the "envy of Arabs elsewhere," you fail to note that the delivery of services to Arab citizens of Israel is abysmal compared to that received by Jewish citizens.
But despite the several Israel-centric assumtions in the article, the rest is very well done, and the conclusions are very welcome. Tough love is indeed what's needed at this point, as the parties have shown themselves incapable of extricating themselves from this mess on their own. Friends don't let friends drive drunk.
January 10, 2009 3:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Seems to me plenty of Israelis and a number of American Jews (Lieberman comes to mind) suffer from collective PTSD. This may be incurable.
No American President past or present or future has a license to practice clinical psych. Israel is not our problem. It is dysfunctional to believe it is.
January 9, 2009 6:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Israel is not our problem.
You keep saying this. I wish it were true but as long as we continue to fight Israel's wars and continue to arm and subsidize their military that is used against her neighbors, then Israel is our problem.
To make it not our problem we must disengage and cut off the subsidy. But that is not politically possible today. Surely you saw the unanimous Senate vote supporting Israeli actions in Gaza. That further consolidates our alliance with Israel. That included two senators that I voted for. So all we can hope for is that the US will somehow force Israel to make peace with the Palestinians.
January 9, 2009 7:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
That is exactly why I keep saying that Israel is not our problem. For some reason, Americans got fixated on it being our problem. It's not. But it's supporters have successfully brainwashed Americans into this reflexive conflating of Israel's trials and tribulations with our own. Those who get all sentimental about the Palestinians just fall into the same trap. This is NOT our problem. We owe Israel nothing. We owe the Palestinians nothing. We have grave problems at home that we are not addressing. Israel is an enormous distraction from our real problems and our unquestioning support of Israel distorts our foreign policy and makes it almost impossible to focus on other international problems.
We can't solve the problem. If we could have, we would have. The sooner we and the people in the region figure that out the sooner they face reality.
January 9, 2009 7:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Amen.
January 9, 2009 8:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
You are, of course, correct, but I have no hope that anything will change with Obama as president. Whatever ties us to Israel is made of extremely strong stuff.
January 9, 2009 11:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
bluebell,
I think the reason Israel IS our problem is because we have so many Jewish people in this country in powerful places like Government, media, and the general public who have a strong connection to Israel and this is manifested in their actions.
I suspect they sometimes go overboard in this support so as to do some harm to America. Joe Lieberman comes to mind quickly, as do the neocons
that got us into Iraq, and those that support Bill Kristol's "robust foreign policy"
Fortunately, we also have a lot of Jewish people in the US who are the opposites of the Richard Perles, the Wolfowitzs, the Kristols, the Douglas Feiths, etc. and they help offset the damage done by the Israel first people and the neo-cons.
I shall now build a bunker to take cover for all the charges of anti semitism I suspect will be coming in shortly.
January 10, 2009 9:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Interestingly enough, during the time of the Gaza incursion, a more brutal attempt to suppress a minority group was occuring in Sri Lanka, where the Sinhala majority government was waging a terrible war against the Tamil Tigers, the group that has committed the largest number of suicide bombings in the world, far more than any of the Islamist groups. The Sri Lankan government hjas banned all foreign reporters from the area, a dissident Sinhala journalist was recently killed, and the civilian Tamil casualties, while unreported, are estimated to be 10 times that of Gaza. Nevertheless, nobody seems to give a damn about this. A similar indifference would be nice regarding Israel and Palestine, but is only possible if the US cuts off all funds to Israel now.
January 21, 2009 2:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, cut the subsidy! I know it's politically unfeasible, but if we are taking moral stands, this is the best one.
January 21, 2009 2:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
An interesting point of view, from the horse's mouth, as it were:
from http://www.3quarksdaily.com/
January 9, 2009 7:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Really really really dysfunctional.
January 9, 2009 7:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim, your article makes me think of Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Vinece". Except, what's happening is certainly no comedy.
January 9, 2009 8:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's Venice not Vinece....
January 9, 2009 8:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Zeno,
let me go out on a limb here;
If you didn't bring our attention to the typo, I'd say 98% of those who read your post are like me, they missed seeing the typo. :-)
January 10, 2009 9:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
January 9, 2009 8:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
SholomA,
you seem to spend most of your time reading right wing magazines thee scurrying over here with your cut and paste tool with the latest from Commentary, PajamaMedia, etc.
Do you have any opinions of your own?
January 10, 2009 9:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
" moralizers shrug or keep silent about 1948-1967"
I suppose you are saying that Jordan and Egypt should have created a Palestinian state in the scraps of land that are Gaza and the West Bank. But Palestinians wouldn't have been interested, for the entirely justifiable reason that they had just been expelled from their real homes. This is a common flaw with liberal Zionists--they think Palestinians had nothing to complain about with respect to Israel before 1967.
And no, I'm not suggesting an unlimited right of return now, for various reasons.
On the criticism of the US and the Brits and the Australians--you're right. And you are making exactly the same comparison that Chomsky, Finkelstein, Said, and others were making decades ago. Israel is a settler colonial state. It might have been useful if American Zionists had all along admitted this, again, not necessarily to advocate a one-state solution, but to eliminate the utter nonsense that Israel was making a "generous offer" whenever it talked of giving back a small fraction of what it stole. The big difference between the US and Israel is not morality, btw--it was pandemics. Disease brought over to the New World caused catastrophic population drops in the Native American population, which meant that once the whites had conquered the land, a few generations later nobody was blathering about a demographic threat no matter how racist they might have been. There aren't 300 million Lakota and Creeks and Crows and Iroquois trapped on reservations, not allowed out. Israel falls neatly in-between the US experience where the invaders soon far outnumbered the natives, and Algeria, where the French colonists were never more than 10 percent of the total. In the case of Algeria, the French had to leave, but they also had someplace to go. In the case of America, nobody thinks Native Americans have to be confined to reservations. Israel's in-between case is what makes the situation so tough.
January 9, 2009 8:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
I forgot to add that you have a point about those who romanticize Hamas or Hezbollah or for that matter Fatah (the corrupt party which is now the darling of the West). If Palestinians ever get Israel off their neck the next step will be finding leaders worth voting for. But that will be their problem.
January 9, 2009 8:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Donald, you're missing something important in your historical review. Immediately after 1948 about 800,000 Arabs have fled Israel, and about the same number of Jews have fled Arab countries (E.g. about a third of Baghdad population after WWII has been Jewish) The Jewish refugees from Arab countries haven't linger in refugee camps for generations - they have been quickly absorbed into Israeli society, just as hundreds of thousands refugees from Ethiopia, Poland, Iran, USSR, etc. over the following decades. There were no permanent refugee camps for millions of Germans thrown out of what is now Poland, Czech Republic and Russia after WWII - they have been sheltered and absorbed into German society.
The refugee problem has been carefully and deliberately maintained by Arabs for decades as a weapon against the problem with which they haven't made peace to this day - a Jewish-majority state in the Middle East. That's why the bravest attempts at peace, like Taba, fail not because of settlements (major problem that they are) - Israel offered to evacuate 98% of those, and to exchange land for the rest - but because of the right of return, i.e. because of Arab's insistence on destruction of a Jewish-majority state.
So yes, there is a moral difference between Israel and US or Australia.
January 9, 2009 9:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Anatol, what happened between the various Arab states and the Sephardic Jews is yet another Middle Eastern problem that needs to be resolved--I've read a little about this, much of it conflicting, so I can't comment with any assurance. But assuming the worst, two wrongs don't make a right.
Also, I don't think the Arab states carefully maintain the refugee problem--rather, they use it as propaganda, of course, and they mistreat Palestinians, but it's the Palestinians themselves who want their homeland back or failing that (though they'd undoubtedly prefer the whole thing), they want a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza--the whole 22 percent.
In theory I agree it'd be nice if the Palestinians would just be absorbed into other countries and I've often facetiously said that American Zionists should be uprooted and their homes given to Palestinians. More seriously, maybe we could absorb some of them if they want to come here. One could also say that America should have absorbed all the Jewish refugees both before, during, and after WWII.
January 9, 2009 9:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don,
We don't know. You can't say that the preference for the Palestinian population is to stay where they are or integrate into the wealthier parts of the Arab civilization. They have absolutely no freedom of movement to emigrate to these regions and if they do manage to sneak out, they are not allowed to own property or apply for citizenship. So its an unknown unknown.
However we can use some proxies to guess and if you look at the numbers that wish to emigrate out ... well then maybe the Arab states play a larger role in the 'dysfunction' than we care to admit
January 10, 2009 12:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
Israel didn't steal anything. Go read a book, jerk, about how the U.N. voted a prtition plan which Ben Gurion and Weizman accepted, and then the Arabs started a war on the day Israel proclaimed its independence and its willingness to live by that partityion plan.
Harry Truman would have smashed your teeth in. Where is he when we need him?
January 9, 2009 10:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
I've read books, sageematchel. Responses like yours don't mean anything except that your blood pressure is rising. You shouldn't let that happen. Of course Israel stole land--they stole land from hundreds of thousands of individual Palestinians, whose property rights would be totally unaffected no matter where the borders were drawn.
January 9, 2009 10:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don,
It's a wee bit more complicated than that since the bulk of the Palestinians who left were tenants, not property owners and the Israeli state went out of its way to purchase the land after the fact.
Hell, that's more than my ancestors got when they were cleared out of the Highlands.
January 10, 2009 12:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think Israel (or rather, Zionist groups) purchased land during the Mandate period and before, but in 1948 it was straightforward confiscation of refugee land and while some had fled, some were forced out and in either case there was no intention of allowing them back. Meron Benvenisti writes about the fig leaf of legality the newborn Israeli government gave to the confiscation process in his book "Sacred Landscapes", but I'd have to dig it up to find the details.
January 10, 2009 4:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
That was incredibly rude and uncalled for. In fact, as I was reading through this thread, I was becoming increasingly impressed with the dialogue, much of it facilitated by the carefully crafted and respectful observations of Donald J. There are other places at the Cafe where jumpoing up and down and acting like a fool and calling people names is the norm and perhaps even encouraged. This is not one of those places.
I am up at 4:45 a.m. because I can't get this horrible situation in Gaza out of my friggin' head. The last thing I want to read is some rude anonymous name-caller who purports to speak on behalf of all of us, perhaps the few of us, who remain sympathetic and supportive of the State of Israel.
Donald J, I admire your cafeful and well-written posts, and for some reason I feel an obligation to apologize that you were treated so rudely.
January 10, 2009 4:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
This was addressed to sageemetchai.
January 10, 2009 5:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
bslev,
wait till you get to be may age, getting up at 4:45 am means sleeping late.
I second your comment about DonaldJ, as I enjoyed reading his comments along with NorthernObserver and a few others, that includes you.
I find a lot of value in reading posts by thinking people who seem to have no militaristic agenda but simply choose to discuss the problem politely and rationally.
January 10, 2009 9:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks, bslev. It wasn't necessary coming from you, but I appreciate the thought.
January 10, 2009 4:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good post. I'm very hopeful about Obama.
As far as world opinion goes, it's evanescent. There was tremendous outrage over Lebanon in the 1980s and in 2006, or the crushing of the second intifada, but the non-Arab world got over it pretty quickly. The anti-Israel rhetoric costs the Europeans and Arab regimes very little. Now, a U.S. oil embargo, or EU economic sanctions against Israel would make a bolder statement, but that ain't gonna happen anytime soon. The tragedy of the Palestinians is that the world encourages them in their deluded belief that they can reclaim the lands lost in 1948. If they had just accepted their defeat, or even Israeli occupation in 1967, they'd all be a lot happier now.
January 9, 2009 8:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
"f they had just accepted their defeat, or even Israeli occupation in 1967, they'd all be a lot happier now."
Um, they were defeated and they are occupied, whether they accept it or not. So if they just choose to accept their situation in an apartheid-like situation, that's the solution? I think you forgot to finish your point.
January 9, 2009 8:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
"And the United States Senate just voted overwhelmingly to support the continuation of this?"
It's often been said to follow the money. One of the simplest ways of doing that is to see whose ass congress is kissing.
January 9, 2009 8:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
You are a disgusting bigot. Please keep spewing your hate. It makes persuading public opinion that Israel is right so much easier for my friends and me.
January 9, 2009 10:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's a cop-out, to blame Jewish money, with an historical predicate that makes the argument more than tiresome, even if that's not your intention. Percolating in my head is a post that needs to be written about the absolute failure of those who oppose American Middle East policy to present a coherent alternative to the AIPAC's of the world and to address the many reasons, beyond Jewish money, for those failures. I'm too tired now. Stay tuned.
January 10, 2009 4:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
I re-read Shelley's immortal poem, "Ozymandias," the other day. I think of it every time I hear an unapologetic aphartheid zionist (like the serial-mistress-marrying Newt Gingrich) babble something about "Jerusalem" as "the eternal capital of Israel." Sixty years. Some "eternity."
Anyway, after meditating upon the beseiged outdoor-toilet refugee camp "Gaza"; the sound of Shelley's Greek word for ancient Egypt; and the fact that my own native America hasn't even lasted as long as some of those transient European crusader kingdoms that disappeared from the Levant eight hundred years ago, I conceived:
Cozy, Scandalous ...
I met a refugee from Gaza Strip,
Who spoke to me with empty, staring eyes
Dumb words whose depth of pain I could not grip
With all the helping hands the world denies
While lapping up the lurid lies that slip
And roll so greasy off the practiced tongue
Of Zionists whose caged and wounded prey
Are told to flee and leave their dying young
To weep beside the corpses of their old
In darkened shattered former homes where they
Cannot refute the garbage we’ve been told
By glib Israeli liars trained to spread
A veil of darkness over crimes they’ve sold
As “Peaceful Co-Existence” -- with the dead.
Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2009
And the United States Senate just voted overwhelmingly to support the continuation of this?
January 9, 2009 8:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your (and my) "native America" was stolen from the Indians. The reservations we put them on are generally pretty bad places.
January 10, 2009 1:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
dedelste said:
Yes, the U.S. did engage in horrific behavior toward our native population in the 19th century and before, and stole land. But that doesn't mean that it's OK to behave according to 19th century standards now. After WWII, the world decided it no longer would approve of 19th century methods of nation building and encodified that in the Geneva Conventions and by the creation of the U.N.
This is just another one of the propagandistic "pro"-Israel appeals that when examined more critically just doesn't stand up to the scrutiny. Israel shouldn't be given a pass based on what is really an atavistic and therefore illogical justification of it's behavior.
(OT: And, btw, I'm all for granting some form of compensation to the Native Americans here - although many are finally doing pretty well on their own, with all those Indian casinos draining away the non-Native's money.)
January 10, 2009 3:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
If it were possible to make the U.S. go the way of the crusader kingdoms, and let the the land revert to those from which it was stolen, would you be in favor?
January 10, 2009 6:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
What a ridiculous question. You simply ignored what I said in my previous post.
January 10, 2009 7:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Look, this isn't really my point. My real point is that many Israeli Jews were born there, through no choice of their own. They aren't cardboard villains, they're human beings just like us and the Palestinians who have to make difficult choices in an environment largely not of their own making (as individuals). Any fair solution has to consider their human rights as well. I'm sorry for reacting emotionally and unproductively to your remarks. There are Israeli war criminals, but also lots of ordinary folks -- same for Palestinians and Americans and any national group. We can't let our anger at injustice turn off our empathy.
January 10, 2009 8:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, while I thank you for the apology, dedelste, your words, quite honestly are a little confusing. Generally, the reference to our own native Americans in the context of an I-P discussion is employed to justify the displacement of the indigenous Arab population of Palestine (and to silence U.S. criticism of the same). If you were justifying it then it doesn't sound like your empathy for the Palestinians runs very deep. I percieved your native American comment as an attempt to divert attention away from what's going on in Gaza. Forgive me if there's something about your comments that I've misunderstood. I hope you'll explain.
I should perhaps mention that although I'm critical of Israel, I strongly support a two state solution. For what it's worth, I don't see all Israeli citizens as villians, and I do have empathy for them. That empathy does not extend, however, to the settlers (anyone who chose to ignore international law and move to the Palestinian side of the Green Line), nor to those who themselves feel no empathy toward the Palestinians, which encourages the kind of violence we've seen just lately. According to recent Israeli polls supporting the Gaza action, that's a pretty significant number of Israelis (that's why so much of the world is so angry at the Israelis right now). But I also realize that some of that support may be the result of fear, not unlike the tremendous support in our own country for the Iraq War, which was also motivated by fear and just as misguided. So just to clarify, my own anger is directed at the Israeli government and all those Israelis who support those actions of the Israeli government that are destructive to Palestinians.
January 12, 2009 3:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Define "romanticize" in regards to Hamas and Hezbollah.
Oh sorry, I keep forgetting that the murderous Israeli brutality and serial occupations of Lebanon that birthed and nurtured Hezbollah doesn't count in the eyes of selectively blind Zionists. Just more effin' dysfunctional Arabs, I suppose. How dare they drive out the invaders? How dare they win? How dare they?
How dysfunctional is Israel? At the moment, it's in terrible shape.
[blockquotes]
[Tensions within Channel 2 News Co. over War Coverage
Reported: 09:30 AM - Jan/09/09
(IsraelNN.com) Coverage of the war in Gaza has led to mounting tension between employees of Channel 2's News Company. According to Ma'ariv-NRG, criticism voiced by some employees against lead news anchor, Yonit Levy, ended in tears after Tuesday's evening newscast.
The reason for the emotional incident is disputed: a senior source in the News Company said Levy's feelings were hurt after members of the News Company criticized her for allowing her political views to influence her interviewing. Another source in the News Company said Levy was under emotional stress after having to report the deaths of five IDF soldiers.
An Internet petition to remove Levy from her post because of her “anti-Zionist” views has received almost 20,000 signatures. Levy's critics claim that she tends to interview Arabs from Gaza in a sympathetic way yet is critical of Jewish interviewees who express nationalist opinions, thus creating a defeatist effect.]
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/158987
....and lo and behold, demonstrations in Israel by those who are "writhing in their own".....present
[(IsraelNN.com) The mayor of Nazareth Illit is hoping to avoid a major confrontation between thousands of pro- and anti-war demonstrators on Saturday.
Mayor Shimon Gafaso called on Public Security Minister Avi Dichter Thursday to block a rally scheduled for Saturday by the pro-communist Hadash party.
Gafaso, mayor of a city of more than 43,000 souls, said he has received "dozens of phone calls" from angry residents demanding that he cancel the rally, which is being held to protest the "massacre in Gaza."
Hadash organizers say they expect thousands of demonstrators to fill the convention hall in the predominantly Jewish city, where they will demand an "end to the [IDF] assault and the lifting of the blockade on Gaza."
The Yisrael Beiteinu party has planned a counter-demonstration, said Gafaso. "I know activists… are planning to hold a demonstration opposite the Hadash rally and in all of the city's intersections," he said, a fact confirmed by the head of the local chapter of Yisrael Beiteinu, Alex Gadalkin.]
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/129326
By all means, do read the Israeli media to see what Israelis think. Don't stop with the selected columnists in Haaretz, however. Arutz Sheva and Ynet and the Jerusalem Post have their own writers who provide a broader perspective. Oh, a caution; avoid the "talkbacks" if you are of a sensitive nature. They are hotbeds of hate that include plenty of Americans, including goyim of the white "Christian Zionist" persuasion.
In reading this polemic, I am grateful for the thousandth time that I've learned about Israel from Israelis. Those fighting hard for her honor, regional security and future are not helped by some of their American friendlies.
January 9, 2009 10:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim, I really appreciate your theme and the way you develop it. You hit on seemingly universal themes and natural prejudices in a way that should cause pause for thinking people to question their bias, and that's good. Nevertheless, I would politely submit that your essay fails when you combine sophomoric generalities and writing together when you hit 'Allah's gangsters.'
Mostly, I take exception to your conflating Hizbullah and Hamas and Nasrallah with the Hamas leaders. I know much more about Hizbullah from personal experience, than Hamas, and I would suggest that you are, perhaps unconsciously, taking the common imperial/western/Israeli view by conflating these parties. You seem not to be aware of the many differences, in favor of trying to conflate them to fit your thesis.
Ironically or not, Hizbullah provides the Shia of Lebanon with many of the benefits of 'European-style social democracy,' and they are, in fact, a well-established part of Lebanese society and government, and have little in common with Hamas, other than the fact that they share the same baby-daddy: Israel.
I have sympathy for the Palestinians, and reserved ones for the leaders of Hamas, but, in my opinion, Nasrallah deserves credit and respect for what he has done with Hizbullah and for Lebanon, and is one of the few real leaders in the region--look at the ultimately peaceful takeover of Beirut by Hizb last year. It could not have been done without popular support, discipline, and an absence of corruption. All things in short supply in regimes elsewhere in the ME.
Of course, Lebanon has always been 'convenient,' so both Israel and the US have had plenty of opportunities to display their dysfunctionality there.
January 9, 2009 11:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hezbollah has killed a lot of people to dominate Lebanon. Please don't romanticize them, it's offensive. They are a bit of a tyranny much like Iran. The shia have paid a heavy price for their 'victory'
When were you last in Lebanon?
January 10, 2009 12:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
I was last in Lebanon in March 2008, and have spent several months there over the past few years. What is your personal experience with Lebanon?
I disagree with your one-line assertions, starting with the fact that Hizb doesn't 'dominate' Lebanon right now, and your blanket assertion about how many people Hizb has killed in the past is an odd smear, given that Lebanon had a Civil War.
Hizbullah is not a totalitarian party, and I have heard Nasrallah personally recognize the multireligous, multicultural nature of Lebanon. I won't say they have universal love in Lebanon, but there is respect, and that is enough, for how Hizbullah has stood up to Israel time and again.
Perhaps it is time for you and others to stop demonizing Hizbullah, based on ignorance and propaganda.
January 10, 2009 12:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim, the proof that your article is extremely well written is that the comments here are almost civilized, and that is a huge step upwards from the comments on most articles here about Gaza.
Thank you for some fine writing, and a very thought provoking set of ideas.
January 9, 2009 11:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Seconded.
January 10, 2009 5:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Is there such a crime as "verbicide"?
Maybe the idea is that while Jewish hawks shoot and bomb the Palestinians to death, the job of Jewish liberals is to talk them to death.
One can only bear up so long under the torture implements of Western liberal blather. Eventually, the Gazans may all decide to walk into the sea and drown themselves, rather than endure another exquisitely ambivalent discourse on the tragic historical cycles of victimization, defensive conquest and hypocritical self-loathing.
January 9, 2009 11:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
I consider the article disingenuous in the same manner as most discussion in the United States. If you are going to look at Western colonial powers for the model, then clearly you should compare Israel with the one that stands out as the most comparative, South Africa. The apartheid comparison is blatantly obvious to those who do not have suspect motivations for refusing to see it.
More importantly, for Americans, the issue is not how to settle the war between the Israel and their oppressed half-citizens. It is, why is the United States involved at all? We have no business supporting the oppressor. We have no dog in this fight, so what are we doing there? Americans may not have a clean history, but that gives them no reason to dirty it even more.
January 10, 2009 9:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
There are some interesting points in this article, but it is not without flaws. it is not the case, for example, the America and Australia were "never condemned or corrected" for taking land away from indigenous inhabitants. For another example, there are certainly plenty of instances of "critics of Israel who have long found the Jews a remarkably attractive dumping ground for their displaced self-loathing." This does not mean, however, that that it is therefore any kind of fundamental responsibility of the US government to defend Israel against such critics, or to give it "tough love" (as advocated here) or stupifyingly blind love (as with 90+% of the US Congress for the past 8 years at least). The interest of the US is in a peaceful two-state arrangement in Israel and Palestine. It surely serves NO genuine American interest to act as a superpowered apologist for the utterly counterproductive (to peace and security in the region) mass slaughter of civilians by EITHER Arabs or Israelis, AS the Cheney-Bush Administration has in fact done almost without exception on behalf of WHATEVER the current Israeli policy might be.
January 10, 2009 11:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
The best way to end the bloody occupation is to target Israel with the kind of movement that ended apartheid in South Africa
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/10/naomi-klein-boycott-israel
January 10, 2009 12:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
If those who takes sides are in the grip of ideological blindness, and cannot see obvious similarities between sets of facts. The implication is that those at the dead center are free of ideology and we recognize them by their willingness to be equally condemnatory vis a vis both sides. But the opposite is more true. Those in the middle see way too many similarities between sets of facts, due to their own blinders.
If you see no difference between a suicide bomber a smart bomb, you are free of ideology, and free of selective moralism, which is the fault of nationalists and communists but not liberals I suppose. The latter judge actions on their merit rather by on who did it. This is self-contradictory. Judging things on their merit is judging things in context. Who did it and why is part of the context of the action. Is there a place from which the Partisan who shot a Nazi officer in the back is morally equivalent to the Nazi officer who shot a Partisan in the back? Yes. There is such a place, but I wonder if you would want to inhabit it, or if you would like to describe this place as free of ideological blinders.
In themselves, all actions are different, not only from all other actions but also from themselves. Not only was there only one Warsaw Ghetto uprising, but, paraphrasing Heraclitus, there wasn't even one Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The "Warsaw Ghetto Uprising" is an interpretation we give to thousands of discreet decisions, each with its own context and its own moral dimension. Judging requires facts, knowledge of particulars. What exactly happened, who did what, etc. It also requires principles for the moral interpretation of these facts. Only through the application of these principles to the facts can we decide which aspects of a set of action can be discarded and which are fundamental and thus allow us to group two sets of actions as "similar" to each other. If you judge Hamas and Israel equally at fault, it is not on the basis of the identity between the smart bomb and the suicide bomb. On the contrary, in order to make the case of that identity you need to discard in advance the various elements that make decisions to use these bombs different from each other. You need to discard all the facts about who made the decision, in what context, why, etc. And that is already the application of a principle of ethics that I doubt you will be ready to defend at the level of principle.
I've never heard the comparison of Israel as a whole to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising before. I wonder if you just made it up so you can prove your objectivity. But anyway. Just because it is possible to build an analogy doesn't mean it makes any sense to do it. By withholding judgment between two competing moral judgments based on two analogies, you don't prove your moral superiority except in the sense that you flatter the self image of those who already agree with your choice to remain aloof. That is, you engage in exactly the kind of moralism that you decry when nationalists and communists do it.
The alternative is to delve into the matter, study the particulars and reach a judgment based on your principles, independently and honestly, which means also independently of the urge to flatter those who want to be always in the middle, above the fray, including, if that applies, your own self. But to do so, you will inevitably fall to one side, or to one side more than to the other.
When all is said end done, you either act or you don't, and not acting is not the same as withholding moral judgment. Not acting is also a decision with an impact on others, and therefore you have to decide not to act and that decision has to be the result of a moral judgment to be counted as moral. So when Israel is doing what you see it doing, and Hamas is doing what you see it is doing (and I am not implying any similarity between them.) Split hair as much as you want, but don't pretend that by not taking sides you have the moral high ground. To be moral is to do the right thing, not to have the better eyesight. Unless you're God, doing the right thing requires alliances or at least coordination with others. During world war II (we return to WW-II like a dog returning to its vomit) the communist Herbert Marcuse worked for the imperialist U.S. government whom he despised, while Karl Popper wrote a book denouncing Hegel and Plato and became famous and the darling of all fence sitters. Many leftists today see Hizbullah and Hamas as organizations with a positive impact, not out of guilt but as a result of a reasoned historical judgment, a judgment not too dissimilar to the judgment Marcuse made in 1942.
Your comments about "Allah's enforcers" are what I can only describe as xenophobia, the dislike of the unlike. Let me offer a prediction, by the time Obama steps down, the number of innocent people the secular U.S. will have killed or will have helped others kill during his two terms administration will be many times over all the victims of Hamas and Hizbullah together. I'll pay to be wrong.
January 10, 2009 12:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
People, no doubt, have a poor grasp of history, particularly the dark spots in their own nation's histories. No doubt, schools could do a better job of educating Americans, for an example, of the parallels between what happened with Native Americans and what is happening in the Palestinian territories. Or parallels between the much-deplored Apartheid system of South Africa and the way a lot of people in this country lived under slavery and Jim Crow.
But if we accept your analogy - that historic acts of colonialism or the conquest of indigenous peoples is fairly compared to the Israel-Palestine conflict - your "gotcha" has its limits. First, there's a huge difference between doing something a few generations ago (a historic wrong) and doing the same thing in the modern world. Second, which of those nations hasn't either ended its colonial efforts, granted citizenship and full rights to the descendents of the slaves and conquered poeples within their borders, or both?
That's a fair retort if he was arguing that all Jews should leave Israel, and I'll assume that he was. But your retort falls short if he was arguing simply that Israel should end its occupation of the Palestinian territories or should annex the land and grant rights and citizenship to the Palestinian occupants of that land. You can't undo past wrongs, and even "giving the land back" (that's really a reductio ad absurdem of reparations arguments, and assumes you could even figure out to whom to "give it back", or could expel 300 million Americans back to Europe and Africa) three, four, ten, fifteen generations later wouldn't fix anything that came before. What we try to do in the privileged nations of this modern world, or at least what we claim we try to do, is avoid repeating or perpetuating those past mistakes.
I've lived in England, Canada and the United States, and each nation has elements in their histories that should turn a contemporary person's stomach. But if I criticize Israel's government for ignoring that history or repeating those mistakes, it's not because I'm unaware of them. One of the reasons I am appalled at the Bush Administration is that it was so quick to turn its back on our national heritage, and the lessons we should have learned from the actions (and mistakes) of our founding fathers and those leaders who followed. A lesson not to forget is how easy it was for the Bush Administration to get a majority of the nation to follow with its mantra-like recitation of "national security".
There's no hypocrisy in arguing that Israel should annex the rest of Eretz Israel and grant full rights to its occupants. There's no hypocrisy in arguing that Israel should call a formal end to its territorial ambitions, and declare that it will withdraw to the Green line (with mutually negotiated, equal exchanges of land for practical and security reasons) and grant Palestinian autonomy over historic East Jerusalem, the moment it achieves peace and recognition with the Palestinian people. You can disagree with those proposals, if you wish. It's easy, for example, to come up with compelling arguments against the so-called "one state solution'. But if you don't like those proposed "solutions", rather than bringing up sordid stories from the history of the speaker's nation so you can claim hypocrisy, it's best to suggest viable alternatives.
January 11, 2009 7:13 PM | Reply | Permalink