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Huckabee in the Holy Land
Former (future?) GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has been on a visit to Israel this week, sponsored by a pro-settler organization. According to the Associated Press, Huckabee said "'there is no room for a Palestinian state' in the middle of the Jewish homeland, and Israel should be able to build settlements wherever it wants." He also said "The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That's what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic."
Given that current demographic trends suggest that Arabs will be a majority in the lands currently controlled by Israel in the not-too-distant future, Huckabee is either endorsing ethnic cleansing or calling for the permanent denial of democratic rights to the Arab residents of the Occupied Territories, which is a form of apartheid. Either way, he is no friend of Israel, and the policies he's endorsing will do great damage to US interests throughout the region.
I thought about writing at length about Huckabee's trip, but Glenn Greenwald, Richard Silverstein, and Spencer Ackerman already did, and I doubt I could improve on their insights. So I suggest you read them instead.
DAVID FURST/AFP/Getty Images
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“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Harvard University.
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Right of Relocation
"...endorsing ethnic cleansing or calling for the permanent denial of democratic rights to the Arab residents of the Occupied Territories, which is a form of apartheid."
Maybe not, Right of Relocation of the most literate Arabs ever on the face of the earth (with a penchant for voting in open and transparent elections) to any of the 22 members of Arab League would be an immense realignment of strategic proportions.
The Arab countries would
The Arab countries would never go for it.
They treat their Palestinians worse than the Israelis do.
Look at the camps they keep them in.
In Lebanon, they live under apartheid.
Look at how moderate Jordan is revoking the rights of Palestinians in their country.
Apartheid all around!
While their treatment is despicable, other Arab countries hardly treat Palestinians "worse" than Israelis by any subjective measure.
Or do you mean OTHER than the military assualts on densly packed civilian populations?
Would Arab League really have a choice?
After all - pitiful despotries who lose every war they fight, fake any elections they have and provide nearly zero services for their own people would have precious little to counter such a deal.
OTOH, Arab League has much to atone for - like the "3 No's of Khartoum" and the nigh constant state of war - hot, cold or asymmetrical they have collectively aided and abetted for 6 decades against Little Satan - a democratic member of UN.
While Little Satan haters seem to lust to see Merkava panzers driving hapless Palestinians into the sea ala ethnic cleansing or creation of an apartheid state - Right of Relocation would solve far more problems than it would create.
Plus it would also have the happy benefit of allowing Arab League to create the solution rather than advocate failed, tired staus quo.
On its own merits
On its own merits - despite the inevitable barrage of the Israel vs. Palestinian comments sure to come - can we talk about how insane Huckabee's pronouncements are?
Did Huckabee detail where he thought the "Jewish Homeland"
is? Is it all of Eretz Yisrael?
Regardless of whether you support a one state or two state solution, if Huckabee is taken seriously as a candidate in 2012 the US will lose whatever is left of its legitimacy as an actor in the Arab world (and beyond). Insane.
Mike Huckabee is an amoral creep.
When Christ was asked to lead a revolt against the roman occupiers of Israel, he explained that his mission had nothing to do with that. From a christian apologetics standpoint, the "promised land" is the salvation that christ offered all people as the result of his sacrifice on the cross, and not a nice piece of seaside real estate exclusively for Jewish people. As a Jew, Christ FULLY understood the gravity of what he was saying.
Unfortunately, if your a politician, this view does not really excite voters, as it is, as Christ went to great pains to describe, an UTTERLY apolitical philosophy that is not containable within any particular party or nation, but completely transcends all politics.
But that has not Hindered Huckabee, who, in this case, has decided to collect and politically exploit that which should be rendered unto Caesar, as opposed to that which should be rendered unto God.
Could it possibly be that Christ is an apartheid advocate?
Not even remotely. If you are a Christian, the most important tenets of Christianity are quite clear. To live your life as a reflection of Christs love and forgiveness, so that others may see Christs example in your life. Love you neighbor as yourself. When you are kind or Cruel to the least of your brothers, you are being kind or Cruel to Christ.
Mike Huckabee is so politically hungry that he would have his christian brethren all but abandon the major tenets of Christs teaching, (as he advocates BRUTALIZING what MUST be considered the least of our brothers economically, and from a human rights standpoint) so that HIS (mike Huchabees, not Christs) followers may focus on an utterly misinterpreted view of the importance of the presence of Jewish people occupying ALL of what is considered to be their historic homeland. Pretty much the same evil reasoning that led to the crusades, although back then, they were perfectly content to slaughter Jews as well.
He does this in an effort to further his political career and to undermine our current president. He does this regardless of the fact that the occupation and the settlements that he supports are an inspiration for terror throughout the middle east, fo terror against Israel, and that they helped contribute to the terrorist funding and recruiting that helped bring about 9/11, and will undoubtedly lead to similar acts in the future if the situation remains as such.
That is how badly that Mike Huckabee wants to be politically powerful. He Would abandon Christ, abandon the welfare of his own nation, abandon the welfare of Israel, and utterly forsake the welfare of some of the worlds most put upon and impoverished people.
I hope he finds that it is worth it. My only advice is:
Keep washing those hands Mike. That's a LOT of blood for so little personal gain.
I agree that Huckabee is a
I agree that Huckabee is a complete idiot, but your continued use of the term "Apartheid" makes you just as much an extremist as he is.
Consider these in reference to the time before the end of Apartheid.
1. Did other African countries invade South Africa three times to kill or expel all the white South Africans? No.
2. Did Mandela order buses and restaurants full of white South Africans to be blown up? No.
3. Did Mandela order white South African Olympians to be gunned down in cold blood? No.
4. Did Mandela order thousands of Rockets to be fired into white South African towns? No.
5. Was Mandela offered peace several times and turned it down because it didn't lead to the expulsion or murder of all white South Africans? No.
6. Was a black South African ever on the Supreme Court of South Africa? No.
The Palestinians are a people AT WAR with Israel not Israeli citizens. The use of the term Apartheid is as much a barrier to peace as Huchabee's idiocy.
Thats not the point
This is a totally disingenuous argument.
While I concede the term apartheid has been used poorly in the discourse surrounding this conflict it has been used most explicitly - and for good reason - to describe the institutional structures of the Israeli Occupation. For instance: the separate roads for Israelis, the separate citizenship and identity cards for Palestinians, the separation wall itself...
When comparing the experiences of Palestinians with those of South Africans - or of one population with another - history will never line up the way you have suggested it should.
Now TheWestBank is being disingenuous
Apartheid is a system of race based laws.
Of course people outside of Israel have separate citizenship and consequently the attending paper work. That is the established rule around world.
Further and more to the point, I don't recall the US, Europeans or Soviets giving Japanese or Germans citizenship en masse in their respective countries, following their wars of Aggression and the subsequent occupation.
As for the separation you allude to it is based primarily on SECURITY not race.
But I am certain TheWestBank already knows all of this.
Actually...
Well...
Israel DOES have separate, race based laws: the Law of Return, for instance. Then there is the “Citizenship and Entry into Israel” Law that has been criticized by foreign governments and NGOs for specifically discriminating against Israeli Arabs.
As for not granting citizenship to Palestinians under Occupation I’m only being disingenuous if I concede that the military occupation is somehow temporary. Israel continues to collect taxes annually from Palestinians in the West Bank yet refuses to govern or officially annex the territory beyond their ever expanding settlements. Post war examples are thus hardly appropriate. The longest military occupation you suggest as an apt comparison is the American occupation of Japan that lasted 7 years (Germany was occupied for 4 years). The Israeli Occupation of the West Bank has lasted 42 years.
And finally, yes, you are right – any discriminatory actions such as the ethnic separation between races are purely for “security” and nothing more. A favorite conceit of you on the right.
more disingenuous arguments
Jews are not a race. It is a nationality and it is on this basis the right of return is applied. Israel the same as every other sovereign nation has the absolute right to qualify it's citizenship and Immigration laws.
If "Right of Return" is your barometer for Apartheid then equally Greece, S. Korea, Japan, Germany as example of countries with right of return laws are Apartheid states.
Everyone in Israel as a matter of the Law is equal in the abstract. Like many countries certainly the US chief among them although they frequently fail to live up to that Ideal it in no way means they are Apartheid states.
As for my being on the right? I can't even begin to guess how far left you are to come to such a conclusion.
The states you have listed do
The states you have listed do not have "return laws" that deny applicability to the indigenous community of the land on which those states now exist. THAT is what makes Israel a special case.
Everyone in Israel is NOT equal in the law - even in the abstract.
Zionism's Nazi Terminology
By examining the specialized vocabulary that American journalists apply to the conflict over Palestine, Saree Makdisi's article entitled The language that absolves Israel ventures into territory already explored by Victor Klemperer's Lingua Tertii Imperii.
Klemperer's perceptive analysis of the language of Third Reich depended on his specialized linguistic skills and carefully controlled anger that helped him avoid slipping into reflexively Nazified though-patterns. In contrast, Makdisi like all Americans constantly bombarded by Zionist propaganda suffers to some extent from mental colonization, for he writes:
Makdisi should have pointed out that the logic of supporting a Zionist territorial claim based on the etymological connection of the word Jew with the word Judea would give Irish Roman Catholics the right to steal and ethnically cleanse Rome because the word Roman is morphologically derived from the word Rome. In other words, Zionism is so extreme that it is psychotic, and the failure of Americans to show any awareness of inherent Zionist extremism strips the term extreme of any meaning in US political discourse.
Makdisi complains that US news reports invariably identify Israeli colonies in the Occupied Territories as settlements or even neighborhoods. In this case, the Hebrew media is more honest. During the British Mandatory period, the Zionist movement dispatched European Jews to establish hityashvuiot (settler-colonies) on land purchased by the Jewish Agency in Palestine. Today Israel as a nominally independent state within the Zionist imperial system seizes or steals land to establish its own hitnaheluyot (squatter-colonies) within Occupied Palestine.
Standard colonialist discourse associates settler-colonies with a colonial motherland, which dispatches colonists to regions under imperial control. In the case of Zionism, the British government was not dispatching its own citizens to colonize Palestine and does not fit the role of a traditional colonial motherland.
Identifying the colonial motherland requires understanding of the politics of historic Poland. The Polish government from the medieval to early modern period treated different ethnic groups functionally in a sort of caste system and gave them full autonomy as long as they fulfilled their designated role. Polish Armenians had a governing council called the Voit while in principle the Council of the Four Lands, to which the most important Jewish communities (kehillot) sent delegates, ruled Polish Jewry from the 16th until the 18th century when the Jewish Council failed to meet its tax obligations.
Thus Eastern European Jews or ethnic Ashkenazim had the habit of a sort of virtual state system. After Commonwealth Poland was divided between Prussian, Russia, and Austria, ethnic Ashkenazim developed transnational politics.
In historic Poland Jews had wealth, power, and status almost comparable to the szlachta (gentry). In divided Poland, Jews were a marginal population in the hinterlands of great empires. Jewish disaffection grew, and a small group within the Russian Jewish intelligentsia began to dream of creating its own empire by mobilizing Western European Jewish wealth for a colonial enterprise that would send lower class Russian Jews to Palestine and that Jewish intellectuals would direct from European capitals.
Even though practically no Western Jews had any interest in immigrating to Palestine and even though working class Russian Jews were much more interested in revolution than in colonialism, Zionist colonialist ideas were far from ridiculous. There were more Yiddish Jews than there were Danes or Croats while Western European Jewish wealth and effective GDP were far larger than those of Denmark, which was running a fairly respectable colonial empire at the time. With or without awareness the Zionist movement was proposing a low budget colonial empire that would be run from a virtual colonial motherland among the Jews of Central and Western Europe.
The Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl and his fellow Congress or Political Zionists found an effective marketing strategy in using the Dreyfus Affair to scaremonger wealthy Western Jews with fears of imminent pogroms at the same time Congress Zionism created a sort of liberal enlightened national Jewish identity that could substitute for the traditional religious faith and sacred law on which the Jewish networks of trust so strongly depended. Such networks of trust gave Jews immense competitive advantage in both business and finance as well as more recently in both the arts and academia.
Because all major European states encompassed multiple ethnic or national groups at the time of Herzl, the Congress Zionist concept of liberal Jewish national identity made sense in the Old World context.
Because citizenship and nationality are congruent in the USA, the famous German American Jewish lawyer Louis Brandeis developed and proselytized a form of Congress Zionism stripped of the idea of a separate Jewish national identity as a way of bringing liberal Enlightenment values to immigrant Yiddish Jews in order to Americanize the newest segment of the US Jewish population.
Thus, Brandeis originated the form of Zionist ideology that is called Refugeeism and that was compatible with the philanthropic politics that German American Jews practiced, that still characterizes the American Jewish community, and that expresses itself at its most hypocritical in the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Save Darfur movement.
More or less simultaneously with Brandeis’ conversion, the Zionist movement brought wealthy members of the British Rothschild family into the fold. There was a strong element of economic self-interest in the Rothschild Zionization because the British Rothschilds desperately wanted to invest in Mesopotamian oil. Members of the family could easily discern a value both to dismembering the Ottoman Empire and also to creating a Jewish colony in Palestine to which a pipeline from Mesopotamia could be directed.
The Zionist members of Rothschild family influenced some of the chief families of the Cousinhood of the wealthiest British Jewish to become Zionists. The combined Jewish wealth fairly quickly brought forth the Balfour Declaration possibly in part as an exchange for information about the Zimmerman Note that so enraged the US Congress and that brought the USA into WW1 on the side of France and Britain against Germany.
In effect by the end of WW1 and in the context of ethnic Ashkenazi transnational and virtual state politics, the Zionist intellegentsia had mobilized some of the most important members of the Cousinhood to help create the Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland or Judonia, which effectively partnered with the British government to create settler colonies (hityashvuiot) in Mandatory Palestine. Eventually, Judonia's center of gravity moved to the USA, where its public face is commonly known as the Israel Lobby.
Because Zionism crystallized in late 19th and early 20th century Central and Eastern Europe, Zionist ideology incorporates both
Zionist Hebrew vocabulary exhibits the full range of völkisch and extremist organic nationalist concepts in am (race), leom (nation), neged-am (anti-race), i-am (non-race), leumanut (nationality), and ukhlasiyah (population).
From the standpoint of Zionist ideology Palestinians stand in more or less the same position as Jews do in German Nazi ideology. Hence it has been common for Zionists to argue that Palestinians only define themselves negatively in opposition to Zionism (i.e., as an anti-race) while other Zionists like Golda Meir would deny that Palestinians constituted a genuine people (i.e., they represented a non-race) but are rather a piece of the Arab nation, to wit, a nationality (narodno??), that should be absorbed into the Arab nation (naród) outside of Israel. The approach is similar to that of some Serb politicians, who wanted Albanian Kosovars to leave Kosovo in order to live in Albania.
In addition, just as there were occasionally liberal Nazis, who did view Jewry as a real Volk, there are now and then liberal Zionists, who accept the concept of a Palestinian people but would use some sort of binational subterfuge in order to avoid granting Palestinians full citizenship rights in the Israeli state. Binyamin Netanyahu does not belong to this Zionist subset. He is probably closest to the German Nazis, who viewed conquered Poles as members of a Bevölkerung (population) with no rights within the German Reich except existence as long as they groveled sufficiently. In Netanyahu's conceptualization the Palestinian "state" serves as a formal structure of control for the Palestinian Bevölkerung.
The above description is only half the picture of the Zionist or American Jewish mentality that characterizes American journalism.
From the standpoint of Zionist propaganda,
Palestinians are surrogate German Nazis against whom any form of terrorism or atrocity may be committed as retribution for the Holocaust, and Zionist authors produce a tremendous amount of literature to prove that Palestinian, Arab and Muslim leaders of the 30s and 40s were Nazis.
Even though this idea is patently ridiculous on many grounds, as Arabs say, "???? ?????? ?? ????? ?? ?? ???? ????" ("Throw mud at a wall. If it does not stick, it leaves a stain.")
Thus, while Makdisi provides a useful service by identifying the presence of Zionist ideological and propaganda terminology in the US media, it is just the barest start of the struggle to tear up the Zionist web of control over America.
Because Zionist subversion is so strong, an effective strategy should probably focus on compelling the US government to enforce its own Israel-Lobby-inspired anti-terrorism laws by declaring the IDF to be a terrorist organization as the recent Gaza Rampage clearly shows it to be. Then the FBI will be obliged to round up racist Jewish Zionist terrorism-supporters so that they can be charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced each to at least 65 years in prison with concomitant seizure of all assets.
In addition, as long as Zionists are flinging epithets like Islamofascism, pointing out the congruence of large components of Zionist and German Nazi ideology is completely appropriate. In fact, even if Zionists refrain from name-calling, identifying Zionism as ethnic Ashkenazi Nazism is still unequivocally appropriate because it is true.
Because of the disproportionate influence of Zionist Jews in American culture, society and economics, Nazi ideas derived from Zionism have become a living force in American politics and made it possible for Neocons acting as a Jewish special interest to manipulate the USA into cutting a swath of destruction from the Sudan through Pakistan. In the process they wrecked the fractional reserve banking system and created the potential for blow-back that will make 9/11 look penny ante. To save the USA Zionism must be purged not only from our newspapers but also from our culture, from our society, from our economy, and from our politics. There is no other way.
You are right, Apartheid does
You are right, Apartheid does not entirely cover it. It is apartheid only for the purpose of ultimate ethnic cleansing,and is, as Carter and Desmond Tutu put it, WORSE than apartheid.
One only need to listen to the settlers to understand what their goals are, that is to say, the complete removal of Palestinian people from the occupied territories and the total Israeli takeover of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Let me ask you, if another country occupied and the started settling the US, how long would it take for us to make peace BEFORE the settlers and occupiers were gone? FOREVER. we would fight with every resource available to us, including terror, until the settlers and occupiers were gone and within their own borders again. Only then could there be peace.
You are simply attempting to white washing an ongoing campaign of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Let's correct the story: 1.
Let's correct the story:
1. Did the other African countries send in troops to stop the Afrikaners from using state terror to expel the indigenous people? No.
2. Did Mandela order ANC militiamen and terrorists to execute in cold blood the inhabitants of Afrikaner villages so that the ANC could seize the land? No.
3. Did Mandela order the bombing of hotels and markets to encourage the Afrikaners to leave? No.
4. Did Mandela order his air force to drop 2-ton bombs on residential apartment buildings? No.
5. Did Mandela start wars of conquest in 1947, 1956, 1967, 1980, and 2006? No.
6. Did Mandela ever offer "peace" proposals he knew the Afrikaners could not accept, that he meant the Afrikaners to reject, that his own foreign minister said were shams, and then blame the Afrikaners for not accepting? No.
7. Did Mandela's Supreme Court ever rule that Afrikaners' home could be seized without compensation, that Afrikaners could be tortured, and that collective punishment of Afrikaners was legal? No.
8. Did Mandela ever say that 9/11 was good for South Africa? No.
9. Did Mandela ever order the South African Air Force to attack US Navy ships, killing 34, wounding 175, while strafing life rafts? No.
The Israels have been at war with the Palestinians since 1947. The Israelis have created a system that categorizes its inhabitants by race, segregates people by race, and grants people differing legal rights solely on the basis of race. THAT is apartheid.
I am not saying there is no
I am not saying there is no reason to criticize Israel. Anyone is free to hate Israel, but it is not and will never be Apartheid.
Extremists call the Palestinians a death cult worshiping suicide, but this also would be utterly false. Extremist propaganda like Walt's only hurts the chances peace by hardening positions against compromise by dehumanizing the other side.
Also, the things you cite do have genuine safety reasons for them.
The separate roads are so the Israelis are not killed by snipers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Shalhevet_Pass
The separation "wall" (95% of it is not wall) has completely eliminated suicide bombing from the west bank. The barrier has been moved by order of the Israeli Supreme court to reduce the burden on Palestinians.
http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2007-09/2007-09-04-voa20.cfm?moddate=2007-09-04
Palestinians are not citizens of Israel so, of course, they have separate ID cards just as Americans and Iraqis have different ID cards.
Arab residents of East Jerusalem can become Israeli citizens, but most have chosen not to.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/24962.html
Over a million Israeli Arabs have full citizenship. There are Arab members of the Israeli legislature and an Arab Supreme Court justice.
The Israelis and Palestinians are two separate peoples who are at war. If Israeli Arabs (who have full legal rights) had no rights then Walt would be correct.
History doesn't have to line up perfectly, but in this case it doesn't line up at all.
I don't hate Israel, in fact I think I care about it more than
you appear to. You would have them continue on a course that allows them to alienate themselves increasingly from the rest of the world, by continuing to engage in internationally condemned behavior that inspires little but hate and terrorism throughout the region and now through out the world.
The settlements are morally indefensible, the pointlessly and needlessly inspire terror against the US and Israel while only serving to degrade the nation of Israel in the eyes of the rest of the world.
Furthermore, without the "final solution" of mass forced removal or mass killings, The Palestinian population will soon outstrip that of the rest of Israel (Without the two state solution) and Israel will indeed become just like South Africa in every respect, and its hope for maintaining a Jewish Identity and gaining acceptance in the world otr even the region will be lost forever. It would just be a matter of time before they are reduced to repressing a majority population that is given a fraction of the rights of other Israelis and who will eventually prevail with the blessing of the rest of the world.
Rather, I would prefer to see the settlers ( who are Israels analog of the US KKK) removed from their settlements and moved back into the state of Israel along with the IDF in accordance with International law established in the Geneva convention. Allow a Palestinian state to emerge with mostly Arab UN peace keepers Keeping Palestinian factions at bay and Israel settlers and IDf out under all circumstances.
That would allow Israel a fighting chance at maintaining a Jewish homeland of some sort.
Again, just so we are clear, Israel is engaging in apartheid and ethnic cleansing, plain and simple, and it is degrading them, hurting their standing in the world and eroding their support in the US. If they DON'T stop this sort of thing before the US achieves energy Independence, (which will be MUCH sooner than anyone thinks) Israel will be left out in the cold completely, and sociopaths such as Huckabee and the rest of the fair weather friends in congress will suddenly turn a blind eye to Israel as they go on their merry way looking for other political/religious flash-points with which to manipulate the uneducated and gullible.
Huckabee's "Jewish homeland". Where is that?
"Huckabee is either endorsing ethnic cleansing or calling for the permanent denial of democratic rights to the Arab residents of the Occupied Territories, which is a form of apartheid. Either way, he is no friend of Israel, and the policies he's endorsing will do great damage to US interests throughout the region".
Forgive me if I have missed the point here but with those comments from Huckabee, how is he not a total friend of Israel. He wants no other solution than an Israeli-oriented solution, more of the same. As for damaging US interests in the region, I would appreciate, like thousands of others, knowing what those current interests are supposed to be. Has anyone in the Obama administration come out and clearly enunciated the US objectives for the Middle East. The visit to Washington by Mubarak will serve little purpose as he has hardly been an independent voice in his part of the world.
But let's go through the motions. This does seem to be the name of the game; consult, but do nothing. Hard to offend anyone with that plan. Ultimately, it will be the AIPAC members who will decide until that becomes identified as an organisation representing a foreign country which it is, quite clearly.
This insidious influence has made the US a laughing stock in the world. The slippery, oversubsidised foreign tail wagging the big US, but toothless dog!
I'm more surprised someone
I'm more surprised someone didn't ask Hucka-bust a follow-up question along the lines of "Where do you want them re-located?", just to see him squirm a bit and try to dodge the fact that he may have called for ethnic cleansing.
In any case, none of this is surprising. Huckabee is a good-standing member of the evangelical Right, who by and large are devout supporters of Israel. I'd be more surprised if he actually had expressed something like a balanced, reasonable position.
Now TheWestBank is being disingenuous
Apartheid is a system of race based laws.
Of course people outside of Israel have separate citizenship and consequently the attending paper work. That is the established rule around world.
Further and more to the point, I don't recall the US, Europeans or Soviets giving Japanese or Germans citizenship en masse in their respective countries, following their wars of Aggression and the subsequent occupation.
As for the separation you allude to it is based on SECURITY not race.
But I am certain TheWestBank already knows all of this.
Your right. This behavior is WORSE than apartheid.
It mixes ethnic cleansing WITH apartheid. That is Precisely why the Geneva convention forbids the transfer of civilians onto land occupied during a war. Because that is ethnic cleansing. If you kill the residents all at once, thats REALLY bad. but slowly pushing them out as hundreds of thousands of new settlers are encouraged to enter and multiply, is just about as bad, especially when all settlers have citizenship and full rights but Palestinians in the occupied territories are treated as stateless, righless second class citizens.
You logic is that of an aparthied/ethnic cleansing proponent who is too ashamed to admit that is what you support and desire.
Here is what demonizing
Here is what demonizing Israel with outlandish words like Apartheid leads to: ratcheting up worse and worse lies. Remember it's just anti-Israel not anti-semetic.
Swedish newspaper says Israelis harvesting Palestinian organs.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1108604.html
The link to this article in
The link to this article in FP.com main page states "Huckabee would evict Jesus from the Holy Land". How do comments about Arabs apply to a Jew for the Galilee?
Apartheid
The facts here are actually quite clear, if we can get past the demagoguery posted by apologists for the Israeli occupation.
This is some information taken from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_apartheid
The crime of apartheid is defined by the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as inhumane acts of a character similar to other crimes against humanity "committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime." It lists such crimes as murder, enslavement, deprivation of physical liberty, forced relocation, sexual violence, and collective persecution.[1]
On 30 November 1973, the United Nations General Assembly opened for signature and ratification the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (ICSPCA)[2] It defined the crime of apartheid as "inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them."
I believe that, given this definition, it is more than clear that Israel is engaging in Apartheid, as defined by the international community. If this is true, than the real question is not ‘if’, but ‘so what?’. Israel has consistently used semantic wrangling to get around international laws and norms to further their occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians. But once you get past the semantic gymnastics then it seems to me that the people excusing Israel’s behavior are really saying that these laws apply to everyone but Israel. I personally disagree with that stance. I also agree with Dr Walt that the US aiding and abetting Israel to continue to flout international law is a bad policy for greater US interests and needs to stop for the good of the US.
systematic oppression and
Israelis and Palestinians are nationalities not racial groups hence, by your own definition, it is not and can never be Apartheid.
The Israelis are at war with the Palestinians which is why my post above (quoted below) shows why it is not in any way Apartheid.
SouthAfrican Apartheid advocates tried the same moral tap dance.
You sound pathetic, desperate and without conscience or moral grounding as you try to use semantic gymnastics to cover state sanctioned, ongoing crimes against humanity.
If you don't think that moving Israeli citizens ACROSS their internationally recognized borders onto the land of another people, forcibly removing those people with violent measures and constantly pushing further and further outside of their rightful homes while simultaneously subjecting them to a rightless and stateless condition is not apartheid and ethnic cleansing, then what would you call it, and do you find it an acceptable practice? Where else in the world is such a thing currently occurring in a manner that you would endorse as acceptable, or is this something that only Israel is allowed to do without consequence?
The settlers and their backers are a minority in Israel, and most people there and the VAST majority of US Jewish people find the practice abhorrent.
HUH?
So then if they are not 'racial groups' what are they? Do you really believe the intent of this law as it is defined does not address this issue?
You are the poster child for the semantic gymnastics that I was talking about. Trying to parse words to get them to mean what you want may allow you to (marginally) rationalize your beliefs, but this does not work on people who are not totally aligned to your ideology. People on the other side or even neutral observers just see this as a remarkably weak attempt to make a case that does not stand up to rational thought.
You sound pathetic, desperate
How can I respond to such a well reasoned argument. Such "a ballanced view".
Look, I am in favor of not keeping 90% of the settlements and a two state solution, but until an agreement is reached, Israel has the right to defend its own citizens who were being blown up on busses and restaurants. There were no check points in the West Bank and no barrier until the suicide bombings started.
When peace comes I hope almost all the settlements are removed. Some right along the green line will probably stay and those that are not removed should be exchanged for equal amounts of land.
While I am against the settlements, you don't have the right to ignore facts.
Israel is not moving anyone (transfer is the legal term). People chose to move. The law was put in place because the Germans forcibly moved citizens into the Rhineland in Poland in WWII. The law also only applies to moving people to another country (High Contracting Parties). Palestine has never existed as a country. They don't even have a single entity that they internally agree on is their government. No one owns the empty land in the West Bank. The settlements are not sitting on top of Palestinian destroyed towns. You can argue that the settlements are horrible and a huge barrier to peace if you want (I might agree with you on most of the settlements), but the Geneva Convention does not apply.
There is no recognized border. The land right now is disputed. The Palestinians themselves agreed in Oslo that the border was to be negotiated so saying that Israel ends and any future Palestinian state begins at the green line is simply wrong even according to the Palestinians.
The Palestinians have been offered a state many times in 1937, 1948, 2000, 2008 and have rejected it every time because they could not get everything they wanted. Not to mention that the West bank and Gaza were part of Arab countries from 1948-1967 who could have created a Palestinian state at any time. Palestinians are stateless because they and the Arab countries chose them to be. If the Palestinians had wanted a state more than they wanted to destroy Israel, they could have had a state for the last 60 years.
Your outlandish rhetoric serves no purpose. It would be as if I said, "if the Palestinians do not make peace right now, the prove they are simply a death cult who worship suicide bombers and see becoming martyrs by killing Jews as the greatest thing one can do with their lives. Oh, and by the way, I want peace and a two state solution."
You don't have a balanced view whatsoever. You think Israelis want to be in the West Bank? You think they wanted to spend billions to create a barrier to stop suicide bombing. You think they wanted to enter Gaza before the rockets started landing in Israeli towns?
What happened when the Israelis completely withdrew from Gaza and the Gazans had their own international border with Egypt? They burned down the multimillion dollar greenhouses left for them to grow food, used the border to bring weapons in, and fired them at Israeli citizens.
Israeli restrictions on Palestinians are to stop attacks against it. The only reason for Apartheid was the color of people's skin. If you can’t even acknowledge Israel’s legitimate security interest in stopping its citizens from being murdered, then there is nothing more to say.
"People chose to move..."
i cant imagine why.
"Israeli restrictions on Palestinians are to stop attacks..."
and what right did zionists have to terrorize hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and land in the first place?
Look, I am in favor of not
If it were just the checkpoints, I'd be more supportive. But the secretive settlement-building belies the "security" justification.
After their land is confiscated by the Israeli state and given to settlers, or simply taken over by settlers who then ignore Palestinian land titles.
Are you talking about the ludicrous plans offered in 1937 and 1948 - the ones that would have given the Zionists the majority of the land in spite of the fact that they represented a small minority in terms of both population and landownership, and dumped hundreds of thousands of Arabs into a state with no real say on it? The Palestinians were right to reject both.
The 2000 offer was a waste, but calling it a "state" is generous - the Palestinians would have control over 82% of the land in the West Bank, and eventually over 90% of it (after 5-21 years of Israeli occupation of the Jordan River Valley), with no right to have a military or even control their own borders.
2008 was more of the same.
A large enough fraction do that they managed to get Netanyahu picked as PM, and a number of them are still out there, setting up outposts on Palestinian land.
Well, there was the total chaos the Israelis left because they couldn't be arsed to coordinate the withdrawal with the PA, followed by their blockade in 2006 against the Hamas government when they didn't like the election results. Next question?
You said "do you think
You said "do you think Israelis want to be in the west bank?" and the answer is yes. The settlers say quite explicitly that their intention is to take all of the west bank and east Jerusalem and that Palestinians should simply be deported to Jordan and other countries. IE, Ethnic cleansing, using apartheid in the short run. That is what they actually say. That is what they are doing. They do it violently, and attack and murder Palestinians regularly to achieve it. they Use the army to protect them from the reprisals, and the army often assists.
Why do you attempt to semantically white wash the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people along ethnic lines if you don't even support the practice? You fail to have a moral stance. First you try to obfuscate the practice, suggesting that if you say it just right, that it will somehow not be apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
There is a VERY simple stance to take if your only worried about Israeli security and not whitewashing land grabs. Remove every settler. Remove the IDF. Install a UN mandated Arab peace keeping force along all bordering areas to keep both sides honest.
Why, under any circumstances, whether it is the IDF or the UN occupying, should settlers be included in the mix? It is an internationally condemned process. not a single other nation in the world recognizes Israeli settlers right to be where they are nor do they recognize Israels right to take even an inch of occupied territory. The Geneva convention condemns the practice.
The 80 Palestinians homes in
The 80 Palestinians homes in East Jerusalem taht are being razed is a form of forced transfer. Those people must move elsewhere and they are NOT being compensated. They have been moved out of that area, and the same fate may befall them anywhere else they go.
Every time a settler runs into a Palestinian home and claims it, and is them protected by the army until years of court cases wear down the residents is a forced transfer.
Every time farms are burned or farmers murdered or harassed until they leave is a form of forced transfer.
EVERY SINGLE TIME an Israeli citizen crosses the green line to take residence in the occupied territories is an illegal transfer of Civilians onto occupied soil.
Get over it. It is monstrous. it is not condoned by a single other nation on earth. That alone should be some sort of clue about how monstrous it is.
A great blog on this topic....
from Hussein Ibish on his blog
http://www.ibishblog.com/blog/hibish/2009/08/18/symptomatic_madness_mike_huckabee
The symptomatic madness of Mike Huckabee
August 18, 2009 - 11:55am
So, Mike Huckabee has gone to occupied East Jerusalem, hosted by a group of Israeli extremists and religious fanatics, and declared that, as AP puts it, “the international community should consider establishing a Palestinian state some place else.” The former Governor of Arkansas and GOP presidential nomination candidate is quoted as saying, "The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That's what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic."
He has uttered such wicked twaddle many times in the past. In 2007, Huckabee is reported to have “stated that he supports creating a Palestinian state, but believes that it should be formed outside of Israel. He named Egypt and Saudi Arabia as possible alternatives…” This of course suggests the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied territories into other Arab areas, for the convenience of Israel and to fulfill Huckabee’s political and, I have no doubt, religious fantasies.
Just to clarify, then, Huckabee thinks that it is “unrealistic” to establish a Palestinian state in Palestine – the place where most Palestinians live, where the population of the occupied territories is overwhelmingly Palestinian, and where both international law and international, Arab and Palestinian consensus, and the majority of Israelis if one is to believe the polls, believe a Palestinian state should be established – and that it should be “somewhere else” because all of Palestine constitutes simply “the Jewish homeland.” Apparently he also thinks it is “realistic,” for more than 5 million Palestinians to simply pick up and leave their homes, or be forced out, and relocate “somewhere else.”
Unfortunately, we need not wonder where such ridiculous ideas come from, or what motivates them. Huckabee is a fundamentalist Christian preacher, a former staffer of TV huckster James Robison, an adherent of “Bible inerrancy,” an obscurantist creationist opposed to science, and, judging from his attitudes on the Middle East, quite possibly a pre-millennial dispensationalist to boot. His comments opposing Palestinian national rights and supporting not only the occupation but the annexation and ethnic cleansing of the occupied territories are usually couched in terms of Israel’s “security,” but his, shall we say, unrealistic or even surreal attitudes could well betray the weird dogma of what is often wrongly called “Christian Zionism.”
This is generally derived from pre-millennial dispensationalism, a bizarre strand of Christian theology which holds that all of history is divided up into a series of discrete teleological dispensations, and that we are currently living at the last stages of the final dispensation leading up to the Apocalypse and the second coming of Christ. Many adherents of this prodigious delusion believe that the complete control by Jews of all of “the [biblical] land of Israel” (now completely and conveniently conflated with precise territory of mandatory Palestine between the two world wars) is required before Armageddon, Apocalypse and the return of Christ to rule over the kingdom of heaven on earth or some such gobbledygook. No prizes for guessing what then happens to the Jews and all others who do not instantly convert to the cause of Jesus (hence, this is anything but Zionism no matter what these fanatics and those Jewish Israelis and freinds of Israel who foolishly accept their tainted support may care to tell themselves or others).
Huckabee’s madness in this instance is particularly shameless and off the wall, but at its heart, it represents a very widespread symptom and shares several key features with all other efforts to think up some kind of alternative scenario to ending the occupation and having two states living side-by-side in peace. Huckabee’s solution – simply move the Palestinians out – joins the ranks of all of those “solutions” to the conflict that are completely unacceptable to one of the two parties. It’s certainly wackier, more ruthless and indeed evil than most, but insofar as it is completely unworkable, a nonstarter and utterly unimaginable given the complete resistance any such idea would meet, it ultimately belongs in the same category as other all the other unworkable notions that ignore the basic national interests of one of the two parties. The bottom line is this: any scenario that does not address the minimal requirements of both Israelis and Palestinians is not an idea for ending the conflict or a “solution” at all. They are placeholders, substitutes for having an idea, excuses for avoiding the most difficult choices facing Israelis and Palestinians, and their allies around the world.
Anything that falls short of full recognition of Israel in its internationally recognized borders won’t fly – and that includes Hamas’ hudna, the idea of an Islamic state, and the idea of a single democratic state. It’s obvious that Israelis won’t accept any of these, and will fight bitterly, vigorously and virtually unanimously against them. Anything that falls short of ending the occupation and the establishment of a fully sovereign, viable Palestinian state – and that includes any notion a provisional or limited statehood, a modified, pacified occupation, or the return of Gaza to Egypt and parts of the West Bank to Jordan – won’t be accepted by the Palestinians and the other Arabs, and they will fight bitterly, vigorously and virtually unanimously against them too.
Huckabee’s comments are particularly ridiculous, but they’re useful in reminding us of the clear distinction between workable and unworkable ideas. In formal logic, this is described as a “reductio ad absurdum,” a proposition that inevitably leads to a self-contradictory conclusion. It takes Israel’s security arguments to their logical extreme and envisages not only the permanent denial of Palestinian national rights, but the removal and relocation of the Palestinians themselves. There are plenty of other “ideas” for resolving the conflict that take reasonable propositions and spin them out to their logical conclusions, oblivious to fundamental realities. Not all unworkable ideas are equally silly, equally fatuous or equally immoral. However, if they are completely unacceptable to the overwhelming majority of people on one side or the other, they are equally unworkable and equally useless.
Whence Comes this Bizarre Pseudo-Christian Thinking?
The Evil Zionism Has Created
By Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
Here is a brief summary of some research on Neoconservatives and Neoconfederates.
The anti-anti-Semitism of Israel Lobby organizations like the ADL tends to serve as a distraction from the evil that Zionists planned and committed in murdering Arab Palestine and in driving out the native population. Such Zionist behavior is clearly comparable to Nazi goals for Eastern Europe. The evil is less well-known that Zionism created in forcing DPs (Displaced Persons) to settle against their will in the State of Israel after WW2 and in inciting Arab Muslim hostility toward Arab Jewish communities, which were ultimately destroyed as a result of Zionist crimes in Palestine. But the most insidious evil of Zionism from the standpoint of America lies in inspiring the alliance of American Zionists, Neoconservatives and Neoconfederates. These political factions have joined together in a commitment to maintain a racist Jewish colony in Palestine by means of the brutal oppression and suppression of the native population.
American Zionists are mostly inspired by misguided feelings of guilt and a confused need for atonement. But they have chosen an incorrect method of satisfying this need because giving Zionists a license to commit the sorts of crimes against native Palestinians that Nazis committed against European Jews is a completely mistaken form of expiation. American Zionists only succeed in supporting Zionist crimes against humanity in Palestine and in becoming a major driving force for anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice in the USA.
Neoconservatives are intellectual descendants and often the blue-stripe diaper babies of American Revisionists or Jabotinskians. They argue for a muscular American Empire so that Israel can serve as a middleman or colonial surrogate for the USA in the Middle East just as their forbears claimed a Jewish colony in Palestine could serve the British Empire. Neoconservatives thrive on the disorder that the presence of Israel creates, for they want the USA to treat the symptom by interfering with Arab governments, invading Arab countries and by stationing troops in the Middle East. Neoconservatives absolutely reject any idea of doing away with one of the major causes of Middle East turbulence by forcing the State of Israel to renounce Zionist racism and to make full restitution for Zionist crimes against the native population.
Neoconfederates are white Apocalyptic Evangelical Fundamentalists. They are the most bizarre block of the supporters for Israel and really require a separate study. Intellectually they are the descendants of racist unrepentant and unreconstructed Southern Confederates, who turned to religion with the defeat of the Confederacy. They found spiritual solace in Premillennial Dispensationalism particularly in the form espoused by the Moody Bible Institute and Cyrus Ingerson Scofield. They believe that the creation of Israel in the 1947-8 murder of Arab Palestine is a genuine sign of the beginning of the End of Time. Because they believe they have a realized eschatology, they are completely irrational and think mythographically. They are extremely dangerous. (See Notes below.)
This unholy political union that is centered on the State of Israel brings together ideologies of racism, racist colonialism, prejudice, bigotry, social intolerance, religious intolerance, social Darwinism, biological determinism, imperialism, millennialism, extremist nationalism, contempt for democracy and contempt for human rights. Never has there been anything closer in the USA to a genuine American Nazism. Defeating this sort of politics is absolutely necessary for the salvation of American democracy and will require a long-term effort with careful planning.
Notes
Because I have not had the time or resources fully to research the issues described in the following, the material below should be considered more a hypothesis of connections and relationships, but I have read a lot of the material available here in the Boston area, and I believe there is a good deal of support for the hypothesis, and the hypothesis suggests other areas of investigation (e.g., it helps explain the attitudes of people like Krauthammer toward affirmative action) and has -- I believe -- some predictive value.
I attended the following discussion at the Wellesley Hillel last semester.
"Evangelical Christians, Jews and Israel." Speaker: Stephen Marini, religion. Tuesday, April 8, 2003, 12:30-1:30 pm, Hillel Lounge. Sponsor: Hillel. Info: x4088.
Marini makes the distinction between eschatological fundamentalists and chiliastic fundamentalists. I call them apocalyptics and literalist fundamentalists. Apocalyptics believe that the End is immanent while literalist fundamentalists accept as a matter of intrinsic belief that the Christian millennium will arrive one day and that they must order their life accordingly.
It was quite interesting. He tied in modern American eschatological fundamentalism to the tail end of the 2nd Great Awakening and the Millerites, a connection of which I was unaware, but which makes sense.
A good book on the Millerites is The Disappointed, edited by Butler and Numbers.
The original Millerite fundamentalist eschatology identified 1843 as the year the end would begin. Obviously, it did not happen, and then they tried again for a date in 1844, and it also did not happen at the later date. Faced with the failure of their calculations, they developed the idea that on the 1844 date, Jesus began to construct the temple in heaven -- a claim not subject to verification.
This sort of eschatological fundamentalism continued to play an important role in American religion straight through the 19th century. Dwight Moody's premillennialist dispensationalism is an important example. He created the "Moody Bible Institute, which became one of the most important training grounds for evangelical pastors and trained lay people." The 1909 Scofield Reference Bible incorporated and popularized much of Moody's theology, and "became the standard version for many evangelicals" (viz Epic Encounters by Melani McAlister).
[You might want to check out "Cyrus Ingerson Scofield, Author of the Scofield Reference Bible" (http://www.cc-vw.org/articles/scofield1.html) , which is a chapter in Stephen Sizer's doctoral thesis, Christian Zionism: Its History, Theology and Politics (http://www.cc-vw.org/articles/articles.html#ChristianZionism).]
The Fundamentals, A Testimony to the Truth, by Torrey, A.C. Dixon and Others (1909) is a basic book of American Fundamentalist Evangelicalism.
Premillennial Dispensationalist theology appealed in particular to a subset of unreconstructed and unrepentant racist Confederates and their descendants. They saw the destruction and the humiliation of the South as the premillennial tribulation. Darby's premillennial dispensationalist theology identifies a dispensation of the Jews, which will take place in Palestine, and a dispensation for white American fundamentalist evangelicals. Premillennial dispensationalists interpret evidence of truth of this Jewish dispensation as support for the "Neoconfederate" dispensation by analogy.
"In their fascination with the Holy Land as the once and future site of God's action in history, these early twentieth-century evangelicals were to become the spiritual inspiration for the fundamentalist turn to Israel nearly a century later, in the 1970s and 1980s." (Vide McAlister.) These Neoconfederates take the Zionist conquest and suppression of the native population of Palestine as a sign by analogy that they will be able as part of their dispensation to subordinate American non-white and non-Anglo populations.
Marini explained that during the 20th century fundamentalists peaked in the 20s. I would argue that they were coasting during the time period from Bryan's departure from Wilson's cabinet as a matter of principle until Clarence Darrow humiliated Bryan (a prairie populist not a Neoconfederate) during the Scopes Monkey Trial.
During this time period, Mencken was quite effectively scorning and deriding everything about the fundamentalist evangelical movement.
Fundamentalism came back stronger in cycles during the 50s, 70s and 90s. George W. Bush is their poster boy because he was a 40-year-old substance abuser that had a vision of God and turned his life around (not unlike the apostle Paul). He prays to God before every major decision. I believe I have read that Bush still has the occasional vision or conversation with the divine. (Acid flashbacks?)
Marini did not actually know the tie-in with Jabotinsky's faction of the Zionist movement, which is the predecessor of Herut (Freedom - Begin's), Gahal and then the Likud (Alliance - Sharon and Netanyahu's) Israeli parties. (The unfamiliarity is not surprising, for Marini is a specialist in 18th and 19th century American religious history.)
I discussed it with him outside after the talk.
During the early 1900s Jabotinsky co-opted a lot of the religious Zionists to his faction. Jabotinsky was a highly Russianized Ashkenazi from Odessa. Because one cannot simply become Russian (Russki) but at best can only be Russianized (Rossitski) if one's ancestry is not Rus, he fell into Zionism. Because he was so far from religion, he actually got along very well with many religious Zionists, who did not mind him as much as they did Zionists, who were closer to religious Judaism and more actively rejected it.
In his private opinion, which can be found in Jabotinsky's Russian writings, Jabotinsky considered the religious Zionists to be idiots that had lots of energy and were infinitely manipulatable.
In the 1920s Jabotinsky came to the USA to found American Revisionism, which is to a large extent the origin of the Neoconservative movement. During the late 1920s he and his followers established their fist contacts with American fundamentalists. He considered them just as much idiots and as manipulatable as the Jewish religious Zionists.
As I noted above, the American fundamentalists were in decline at this point, and they were becoming a national joke. Movies from this time period tend to reflect the contempt with which fundamentalist evangelicalism was treated after the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Jabotinsky and his followers, who included Benzion Netanyahu, Binyamin's father, Rabbi Korf -- later Nixon's advisor and confident -- and Bergson, a nephew of Rav Kook, who at the time was the spiritual leader of the Religious Zionist movement, helped to revitalize American fundamentalism by directing them toward Zionism with a reinterpretation of the literalist fundamentalist eschatological or chiliastic message within the framework Zionist primordialism.
The Revisionist Zionists worked the fundamentalist movement straight through the 30s under Jabotinsky's direction and then in the 40s under Netanyahu's direction.
Under the American Revisionist reinterpretation of American Fundamentalism, the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 is the critical event that proves the truth of the eschatology. Thus Christian Zionist eschatological (and many chiliastic) fundamentalists believe they have a fully realized eschatology (something historically unprecedented).
This belief in realized eschatology makes them very fanatic and precludes most rational discussion.
The possession of a realized eschatology -- in their minds -- brought about increased interest and the beginning of a renaissance in American fundamentalism.
From the 50s onward the Israeli Revisionists continued to strengthen their ties with American fundamentalists through frequent invitations to Israel and a very politicized Biblical archeology, which also helped to create ties between the fundamentalists and other parts of the Zionist movement. The studios began to respond with blockbuster religious films, which in turn sparked more interest in fundamentalist religion. Cecile B. de Mille's Samson and Delilah, The Ten Commandments, Quo Vadis and Ben Hur are examples. As increased ties developed between fundamentalists and Zionist parties across the political spectrum, through the 60s & 70s we see a growing Zionization of the American fundamentalists. Hollywood seems to notice because the Biblical Blockbuster is replaced at this time period by the Zionist blockbuster.
With the ascent of fundamentalists in American politics, Zionists can count on a 25-50 million-voter block in the USA. This voter block has tremendous linkage to Neconservatism via the movement's original incarnation as American Revisionism.
Where is H. L. Mencken when you need him? Unfortunately, he is dead and buried in Baltimore. But this recrudescence of religious nuttiness might even be too much for Mencken, for in comparison to the 20s the fundamentalists are probably too strong to shame back under their rocks.
I asked Marini if he thought the argument that I make to distinguish among ancient Israelites, Greco-Roman Judeans and modern Ashkenazim would be effective in dissociating American fundamentalists from Right-wing Zionism. He rejects the idea because American fundamentalists think mythographically from their eschatology, and they believe the End has already begun. Note that they do not merely live in a world of myth; they write (and rewrite) the myths by which they understand the world to correspond to their understanding of the End, which began in 1948 with the creation of the State of Israel. They make very strange and bizarre connections between events.
They fit contemporary politics into their vision of the coming rapture and apocalypse and then backwards rewrite the past to conform to their vision of the future.
Thus, the facts are completely irrelevant, and they simply do not care about any injustices done or being done to Palestinians because there is a state named Israel in the ME, whose "Jewish" population can be connected to the prophesies of Daniel, Ezekiel and the Revelation of St. John.
References that you might wish to check out are:
Militant Zionism in America: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926-1948 (Judaic Studies Series) by Rafael Medoff and
Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky by Michael Stanislawski.
You must read both cum grano salis. Rafael Medoff does not read Russian and does not realize that Jabotinsky is lying when he pretends devotion to democracy in English. Michael Stanislawski does read Russian and does not make that particular error, but his world view is somewhat distorted by Zionist indoctrination, and his analysis sometimes reflects this Zionist bias and a certain ideological exceptionalism that characterizes Jewish studies. Nevertheless, it is probably the best English language intellectual historical analysis of the beginnings of Zionism.
If it were just the
What secret settlement building? Please elaborate.
Any proof of this? There was a report a few months ago by B'tselem that 9 houses in the 3000 person settlement of Ofra were built on land owned by Palestinians, the Israeli courts have ordered them dismantled.
In the part of the Palestine Mandate that became Israel, they were about 50% of the population (remember 90% of the mandate was turned into Transjordan) which doubled within a few years with Jewish refugees driven from Arab countries.
You are thinking of the understandably rejected Camp David proposal
http://www.imemc.org/attachments/jan2008/campdavid.jpg
instead of the later Taba offer which was 95% percent of the West Bank with 3% more land from Israel, and full control of borders. There wasn't even a counter offer to this proposal. Arafat just unleashed the second intifada.
http://www.mideastweb.org/Rossmap_Dec20000.gif
The Palestinian state would be demilitarized, but that is what happens when you lose wars. (ex: Germany and Japan).
The only reason they didn't coordinate with the PA is that the PA refused to coordinate with them unless it was part of a final status agreement--which no one thought was happening any time soon. And there wasn't total chaos any more than before the Israelis left. They could have taken the opportunity to better the lives of the people of Gaza, but they chose war.
Bottom line is that Israel has legitimate security interests in what it does. Can you argue they go too far? Sure. But it is not remotely close to a system of laws that discriminates for the sole reason of the color of skin.
Dave, Is a violently
Dave,
Is a violently enforced colonial settler movement EVER morally justified? If not, then condemn the practice.
So far, all you are saying is that this is apartheid and ethnic cleansing, but you honestly believe that it is JUSTIFIED apartheid and ethnic cleansing. So did South African Afrikaners. So did Milosevic. So did Stalin. So did the Germans.
What secret settlement
Come on, Dave. Do I really need to say it? How about the way they keep authorizing new housing developments in the West Bank, under the guise of "natural growth"? Or the way they looked the other way on the outposts until Obama starting riding them on it?
You might want to follow-up and see if they actually were dismantled.
And owned, what, 4% of the land, primarily concentrated in three urban areas? You have to actually look at the ratio of land owned by Arabs versus land owned by the Jews Israel was ostensibly created for to really get an idea of how ludicrous the division was. The Zionists received vast tracts of lands, particularly the Negev, in which they possessed only a small fraction of the land in question. To make it worse, hundreds of thousands of Arabs were dumped into Israel's territory with no say on their part due to the 1947 Partition.
I said 82% because, if I recall correctly, Barak wanted a security presence in the Jordan River Valley from anywhere from 5 to 21 years after the proposal went through. The area would eventually become part of Palestine, or at least that was the idea.
As for Arafat, well, the man cared about his political survival first and foremost - he saw what happened to Anwar Sadat. He did some good things for the Palestinians, but was generally a coward when it came down to it.
Post-war Germany and Japan were occupied. If you're going to claim that the new Palestine would be operating under occupation rules, then don't pretend it's really an independent state.
They aren't de-militarized now (and there was limited militarization allowed afterwards), and in any case, both made up for it with being allowed to join a defensive alliance against a greater threat (the Soviets). The latest proposal would have specifically barred the Palestinians from doing so, which, along with the de-militarization, would have left them at the mercy of the Israelis. How stable do you think such an arrangement is, in that neighborhood of all places (where armed militias are ubiquitous and states support them as a tool of statecraft)?
Was that before or after they slammed down the blockade and rejected the elected government run by a party they had let go forward?
If you actually believe that
If you actually believe that was what I was saying, you haven't listened to or understood a word I have written so I have nothing more to say on the issue.
Somehow, I doubt that. I'll
Somehow, I doubt that. I'll see you the next time Walt brings up Israel (which shouldn't take too long).*
*Speaking of which, I think our foreign policy experts are too oriented towards the Middle East.
Brett: 'The Palestinians were right to reject a state'
I think history shows otherwise. Even assuming they get everything they were offered in 1947, the intervening 60 years of statelessness and misery would have been avoided. And of course, they will get a worse deal than the one they rejected in 1947.
Huckabee thinks that the Palestinians of the middle east deserve to have the 24th Muslim Arab state in the middle east, just that it shouldn't be in between Jordan and Israel. He is excoriated for this.
On the other side of the coin, does anyone here believe the Jews of the middle east deserved their own state? Brett? Anyone? Or were the Jews of the middle east expected to continue living under truly apartheid systems, literally at the whim of their Muslim Arab governments, which at times had been benign and at other times deeply hostile and hurtful towards their Jewish populations?
And if you think the Jews did deserve to have their own state, where should it have been set up?
Do Jews derserve their own state?
...crickets chirping...
I think history shows
You're looking at this with hindsight, David. In hindsight, it probably would have been wiser had the Palestinians accepted the Partition in 1947, since they would have had one state that they would have dominated, and another state (Israel) where they would be a significant minority - and could have subverted the situation from there.
But look at it from where they were standing in 1947. They were the dominant group in Mandatory Palestine - they had the majority population, and owned the overwhelming majority of the land there. They were surrounded by Arab states supportive of their claims and extremely skeptical and hostile to the Zionists, who had sworn to invade if the Zionist state declared independence. They had every reason to believe that if push came to shove, they could overwhelm any Zionist state that emerged, so why should they have taken the unfair land partition that emerged?
As I mentioned, they under-estimated the Israeli strength, and over-estimated both the strength of their Arab allies, as well as their motivations (Egypt and Jordan used the occasion to make land grabs rather than go completely for Israel's throat). It's easy to see that they fucked up in hindsight, but understandable when you look at the circumstances that existed at the time.
As well he should be, since millions of Palestinians live and call that area home, and since there's probably zero chance that Israel is simply going to incorporate the area and all its people as citizens, it's more or less an implicit call for ethnic cleansing.
You're assuming I support the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank out of some belief that the Palestinians have a fundamental "right" to exist there. I don't - I'm tentatively supporting it because it's the least worst option that doesn't involve ethnic cleansing. The best solution would be a series of secular states based on civic nationalism, not religion, race, or ethnicity.
Second Great Zionist Fraud
I noticed a particularly egregious error by Professor Stephen Walt (The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy) in a blog entry entitled On Goldberg and Douthat when he writes:
In point of fact, simultaneously with accepting the November 1947 UN GA Partition Proposal, the Zionist leadership green-lighted the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population and put out a false story through Jewish gatekeepers and facilitators in the US and British newspapers.
From the names of the Zionist military operations, (e.g., biur hametz, burning of the [ritually impure] leaven), I believe mass murder of the native Palestinian population was intended.
While Palestinians remembering the Special Night Squads of the 30s organized defensively, Palestinian leaders, who were in exile or jail, were in no position to accept or reject the proposal, and the Palestinian population adopted a wait and see attitude because the Palestinian leadership had already accepted a 55% Palestinian 45% Jewish population ratio as Rafael Medoff, who is admirer of Jabtinsky as well as a modern Jabotinskian Zionist, points out on pp. 93-94 of his book entitled Baksheesh Diplomacy.
If all 300,000 Jewish DPs had joined the 600,000 Jews already resident, the Palestinian-Jewish division would have been a 57:43 ratio, with which Palestinians had no problem in a single democratic state.
Palestinians simply could not accept a partition of the country
The Palestinian position was hardly unreasonable. The commonly believed narrative of the Palestinian rejection of the UN Partition Proposal constitutes the Second Great Zionist Fraud. I describe the Primary Zionist Fraud in Every Israel Advocate a Madoff.
You're looking at this with
Yes, that is what I was addressing. You didn't qualify it either way (current from 1947 or from today's perspective) when you said it.
The larger point which Dave123 was trying to make was that ultimately, regardless of how understandable the rejection was, it was a decision made by the Palestinians for which they are responsible. It was also a lesson they have not internalized yet.
No, I'm not. You have been pretty clear that you don't ascribe to that view.
Notably, you are the only person who addressed the question...and you didn't answer it.
If the world were a perfect place, I grant that your wishful thinking solution would be best. But it is nothing more than well-intentioned fantasy. I am more interested in hearing about solutions that take into account the world as it really is.
Brett. Sorry for the
Brett. Sorry for the confusion. My last post was not directed to you, but to "aballancedview" because of his inability to see any moral distinction between policies based on the color of one's skin and policies based on protecting your citizens from being murdered.
So, I would be glad to continue our discussion.
I don't think that any of these are a "secret." No new settlements, but allowable natural growth has always been Israeli policy and was based on an agreement with the US. Since Obama unilaterally changed this agreement, Israel has now agreed to stop contruction for three months to see if there will be any reciprocation. However, it is literally impossible to permanently stop construction in towns with tens of thousands of people in them. Any human civilization just doesn't work that way. You are completely correct, however, that the outposts should be destroyed as no new settlements are allowed by the Israeli government.
Before the end of WWI almost all of the land in what is now Israel was owned by absentee Ottoman or Egyptian landowners called Effendi. When the Ottoman Empire lost in WWI and ceased to exist all Ottoman land in what became Israel went to the British Mandate for Palestine. 70% of the land that became Israel was owned by the Mandate, 9% was owned by Palestinian Jews, 3% was owned by Palestinian Arabs living in the area and 18% was still owned by absentee Egyptian landowners. Add to that all the land stolen from the 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries and the division looks more than equitable.
As I said before, an easy mistake to make between the Camp David and Taba proposals. The Taba proposal was for a few small emergency monitoring stations (which the Palestinians accepted), but no troops at all.
This kind of brings us to the crux of the whole matter. The Palestinians do not have leaders capable of making peace even if they wanted to because they do not even have close to a unified government. In fact, there is a civil war going on between Fatah and Hamas.
Now, a counterargument by Palestinian supporters might be, Netanyahu is too beholden to Israel's right wing to make peace either. But Israel is a real democracy and if there is a real compromise peace deal on the table he will get voted out office if he doesn't accept it.
At Taba, the PA negotiators agreed that Palestine would be a state with limited arms per Bill Clinton's proposal.
Hamas' war with Israel started far before the elections. Just because the Palestinians elected Hamas, doesn't mean Israel had to be nice to them. The Palestinians had their chance to vote for a government who wants peace, but they voted for a government devoted to war. They are responsible for the consequences of their choices.
If Osama bin Laden was elected president of Mexico and vowed again to destroy the US, would the US simply say "oh well, he was elected. Guess we will send our congratulations on his election and have him over to the White House for an official state visit."
Insufficient to Call Israel Nazi!
Israel is only a piece of the problem.
The Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland (or Judonia) orchestrated the colonization of Palestine, the 1947-8 ethnic cleansing/genocide and benefited from both (especially the theft of practically all movable and immovable Palestinian property and assets within Stolen Palestine (pre-1967 Israel):
Nowadays, the Israel Lobby is the public face of the Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland, which runs a vast imperial system, in which the State of Israel is the keystone or linchpin and the United States of America is an intimidated and dependent client state: [Stephen Walt] Obama meets the Lobby.
So far the USA has spent $5-6 trillion in maintaining the Zionist state in Stolen and Occupied Palestine and subsidizes the State of Israel to the tune of $60-100 billion per year.
As a client state within the Zionist imperial system, obviously the USA is subordinate to the will of Zionist plutocracy and intelligentsia (the Cacocracy) and cannot possibly be restored to political and economic health until the Zionist political-economic vampire is staked through the heart by means of:
According to AJC statistics 80% of American Jews are either Zionists or support Zionism and are therefore either Nazis or Nazi-supporters. America is dying because Jewish Nazis permeate the political, legal, economic, financial, cultural and academic elite. The USA can only be saved by purging Jewish Zionist subversives as supporters of Zionist terrorism.
Ease Up Joachim
Pretty weak shot there comping Little Satan fans to NSDAP. Most Americans support Little Satan because she is the only cat in that particular hood that is well - the most like us.
A tolerant, egalitarian society with a penchant for open, transparent periodic elections, a nat'l treasury under public scrutiny, a military under civie command, an idependent judiciary under elected gov oversight and a free press.
Baby Jesus, M'hammed or Moses aside.
Also Palestinian Sympathy Fatigue is still in full swing in Great Satan -- mainly because of the Strip's reaction to 911 -- passing out laffy taffy and having a great time celebrating the incineration of innocents 1,000's of miles away
Zionism, Fascism, Nazism for Dummies
Often I state definitions of Nazism and fascism in order to relate these ideologies to Zionism, but I have not done such a good job of explaining the ideological details clearly and simply. Except for confusing fascism with Nazism, Shingo recently described the ideological congruence of (Jabotinskian) Zionism with German Nazism almost to perfection in a recent comment on Mondoweiss:
If German Nazism is substituted for Zionism, if German Aryan is substitued for Jew, if the German State is substituted for Israel, if Jew is substituted for Arab, and if ancient Teutons is substituted for Biblical Israelites, the above analysis applies almost exactly to German Nazism. [Note that Hitler was not nearly as autocratic as Western historiography tends to depict him especially because the obvious contemporary comparison would be the far more autocratic Joseph Stalin.]
In contrast, fascism, which is a revision of Marxism, attempts to demonstrate that class conflict can be transcended via national revival. In fascist thinking, the nation need not be defined according to racist or voelkisch principles, but when it is (especially in the German context), the precise terminology is Volkssocialism, and Chaim Arlosoroff expounded the fascist principles of Labor Zionism in book entitled Der juedische Volkssozialismus. The Strasser faction of German Nazism could also be described as Volkssocialist. The Zionist political scientist Zeev Sternhell dishonestly identifies Labor Zionism as national socialism, which he distinguishes from Nationalist Socialism or Nazism, in order to obscure its true voelkisch racist fascist of Volkssocialist nature.
The definitions of fascism and Nazism can be applied to the basic Zionist political categories as follows:
Today mainstream American Zionism, which developed from Refugeeist Zionism, is a full-fledged form of Nazism with an important currents of voelkisch occult mystical Nazism while J-Street and American Friends of Peace Now as remnants of Labor Zionist fascism represent a minor insignificant internal opposition to Jabotinskian Zionist Nazism.