Blog For Palestine

Azmi Bishara speaks, need I say more…

So I just came across a post on the angry arab’s site which said the following:

To the Arab masses: are you breathing? Just making sure. I have some Danish cartoons if you want me to wake you up.

I gotta tell you guys, I read that and I just couldn’t help but feel sick to the stomach. It’s not that I didn’t realize that the Arab street was useless but when you contrast what’s happenning now with what happened during the Danish cartoons debacle you realize that they are not only useless but also retarded. I think I had blocked out the whole Danish cartoon thing because I was so disgusted with it. But now I am disgusted and angry.

I’m sick of religion. I’m sick of these assholes caring more about a book or a magical trinket than about other people. I’m sick of people who don’t think for themselves and who are directed like sheep. How could the whole Arab world be moved by a cartoon that most of them didn’t even see and not be moved by the pictures of children being massacred every day. Why don’t you go out and revolt in the street. Smash up a Starbucks or two, how about a McDonald’s, camp outside the Israeli embassy and don’t budge until the fucking embassador is gone. You people are garbage. Every person that found their way to the street to protest the cartoons but is staying home right now is total garbage.

If I burn your Bible or your Quran is that more important than a whole family being burned to death in their car as they flee southern lebanon. Will you hate me more if I eradicate a whole population of if I draw a picture of Muhammad giving Jesus a big kiss on the lips. The fact is I want you to hate me, because the reality is that I hate you more than you can imagine.

You know what’s really sick, Israel knows that you people are without a shred of humanity. Isreal will never touch a single religious symbol and at the same time they will go on massacring Palestinians and Lebanese. They know the slumbering Arab masses will stay asleep through the daily massacres. The only way Israel would risk some Arab response is if an Israeli flushes a Quran down a toilet. What a sad world we live in.
Fucking Losers.

-Tineen

Paul Larudee, in an article on Counterpunch, posits that Israel today is trying to realize the vision of Ben Gurion who believed that Israel’s natural northern border should be the Litani river. He points to attacks against civilian targets and the repeated massacres as a means of causing mass evacuation, the largest in the region since 1948, and thus clearing the way for Israeli settlements. He also points to cutting of roads and bridges to the south as a means of delineating an area of future Israeli control. All of this mirrors the actions taken by the Zionist forces leading up to the creation of Israel, sans the Palestinians.

I’m not sure if this theory provides a complete explanation behind Israel’s motivation for engaging in this barbaric assault, something that the author acknowledges. But I do concede is that there is a very good likelyhood that there are some in Israel who subscribe to this belief whether consciously or unconsciously. Expansionism is woven into the fabric of Israeli society and implanted into their psyches and it’s unlikely that they will divorce themselves from expansionist dreams since their very existance is based on usurping land from others.

I think a more reasonable explanation for Israel’s actions is to understand that their are several competing and intersecting interests, motivations and obsessions. Expansionism is definitely one of them, along with an out of control military-industrial complex both in Israel and the US, an ideology of racial supremacy and untouchability, as well as the Iran-oil theory proposed by Juan Cole and a few others.

Whatever the reality is, let’s just hope that we don’t have to launch a right of return campaign for the south lebanese refugee in the coming years.

-Tineen

Michael Neumann in his latest article on Counterpunch, brings to our attention a new book called Jewish Opposition to Zionism. The book apparently attacks Zionism and outlines how Zionism betrays the most important of Jewish religious duties and moral values.

Michael Neumann, along with many pro-Palestinian proponents, seems to celebrate such positions. I remember at an ADC convention that I unfortunately attended a few years ago, some members of an orthodox Jewish organization that was opposed to Israel showed up, and they were quite the hit - I’m talking rockstar status. For many the existance of individuals such as these is a strong indictment against Israel. For one they blow away Israel’s religious argument for its existance. Second, they usually, such as this author (Professor Yakov Rabkin), argue against the immorality of Israeli actions against the Palestinians from a religious point of view. Finally they weaken the argument that Israel is a state for all Jews, as they are Jews that are strongly opposed to its very existance.

To be honest with you, I care very little for these voices. The reasons are varied, not the least of which is the fact that I hate religion. To hear people make an argument on behalf of the Palestinians because their religion says so is repulsive to me. More importantly this is not a religious issue and therefore it doesn’t need Jewish scholars on both sides to hash it out. Zionism, at its most fundamental level is not religious in nature. Zionism is rooted in a very human trait of group identity. Whether this identity manifests itself in nationalism, ethnicity or religion is irrelevant, what is important in our case is how ugly human beings can become when they are taken over by their group identity. The end result can be discrimination, oppression, and ethnic cleansing. This happened in Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa, and in Israel. Outrage against Zionism should be rooted in common human values, not some artificial religious construction of morality.

-Tineen

This has been a belief that I’ve had for a long time. The classic case is of course Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz is a Law Professor at Harvard University, which one would think indicates some level of intelligence. But when it comes to defending Israel there is rarely anything that this guy says that isn’t stupid. I’m guessing that this is the result of trying to defend the undefendable and to excuse the inexcusable. In that position you have no choice but to abandon logic and adopt convoluted and irrational arguments in an attempt to obscure the facts. But I digress, this post has nothing to do with Dershowitz and everything to do with a piece I read in Foreign Policy magazine.

The title of the piece was A World Without Israel, which was an intriguing name for an article, and even though I knew that the conclusion would be in support of Israel I was still hoping for a serious analysis. But what I found was a total joke!! The author, Josef Joffe, has managed to conclude that Israel’s existence in the Middle East prevents more anatagonism than it creates. Wow, thank you Israel for being such a friend. This realization has made me change my whole perspective; instead of mourning May 15 as the day in which almost a million Palestinians were driven out of their own homes and made refugees and the rest were turned into second class citizens in their own land, I shall start celebrating the birth of Israel as a bearer of good fortunes to the troubled Middle East.

By any standard the article is a festival of stupidity. Basically this guy, trying to write in a supposedly serious magazine, was attempting to prove that Israel’s presence in the region is in some way a good thing. So what is the measure he is using to test this hypothesis, well he never really tells us. He never bothers identifying the terms of the equation that he’s using, which is probably because there is no equation that would make Israel’s presence and the policies it has adopted a good thing.

So what does he talk about in 4 pages of absolute gibberish? Well, he talks about Arab states fighting against each other, the struggle between modernizers and traditionalists, the ideological and religious distinctions in the middle east, the wars that the Arabs have fought amongst themselves, and the lack of democracy and freedom. What’s interesting is that in mentioning all these things he only mentions Israel, the topic of the article, in the most peripheral way. He says that Israel helps absorb some tensions in the Middle East by being a common enemy for competing forces. (Wow maybe they should leverage that absorbancy and make “Israel” brand paper towels; can you imagine the ad campaign: “If we can absorb the hatred of Arabs, imagine what we can do with that spill”). Of course the real point of this idiot using almost 90% of his article to outline the flaws of the Arabs is that there is no case to be made for Israel. He needs to hide Israel’s grotesque existence behind the demonization of Arabs. He needs to distract people from asking the basic questions about what Israel has done and what the consequences of its existence and actions have been.

I can talk at length about everything that is wrong with this article: the absolute lack of facts, the absence of evidence behind his claims (he tries to pretend that Israel isn’t a factor behind Arab animosity towards the US), and the disconnect between his many examples and the case that he is trying to make. You can read the article yourself and if you’ve taken high school debate or have the simplest of abilities to formulate an argument you’ll understand how juvenile this article is.

And where are the Palestinians in all of this? Do the millions of refugees, the millions living under occupation and oppression, the scores that were massacred when Israel gained its “independence”, the tens of thousands that died because of Israel’s territorial ambitions, and those that continue to die, do any of them count? Are they a factor in any equation in assessing Israel? Not in Josef Joffe’s opinion, who only gives mention to the Palestinians in claiming that if Israel didn’t exist the Palestinians might be killing Egyptians or Jordanians.  Again there are no facts here, just a disgusting, bigoted statement thrown out there by a moron for consumption by an ignorant public.

The greatest success that the pro-Zionist elements in Western society have accomplished is dictating the language of the discourse for the world. Even worse many of us supporting Palestinian rights fall into the trap of using the blatantly false language imposed by the other side. By doing so we immediately put ourselves on the defensive and weaken our position. The word ‘terrorism’ and the phrase ‘peace process’ need to be completely eliminated from our vocabulary. When we sit there and try to squabble over whether Israeli terrorism is greater that Palestinian terrorism we’re already at a disadvantage because terrorism has been imprinted in the minds of people as a crime of the Palestinians. Saree Makdisi’s analysis of Language and Politics talks about how the corruption of the language surrounding the conflict has resulted in the absurd scenario of the victims of occupation and aggression being labeled as the aggressors. This piece is a must read.

It is absurd that we, the supporters of justice, the ones on the right side of the argument should ever have to be on the defensive. The other guys, the ones supporting oppression, occupation, racism, and murder, those are the ones that should be afraid to engage us in discussion. The language that has been fabricated and imposed on everybody has robbed them the ability to think for themselves. We need to speak a new language, one that describes the facts, not the fantasies woven by the ministers of Zionist propaganda.

We should all learn how to do a better job of framing the discussion. A couple of articles that I recently came across do a great job of doing that by insisting to provide the context of occupation and violence that Israel imposes on the discussion. The first is one by Ali Abunimah called ‘Two Failed States’, the other is by Saree Makdisi called ‘What’s Missing from the Discussion’, both articles manage to highlight the ruthelessness of the occupation and how that is the true catalyst for the violence. Read these articles, learn from skills of these linguistic and reasoning ninjas and try to become one yourself.

Not too long ago a paper came out published by a couple of hotshot University professors talking about how powerful the Israeli Lobby is. Everybody reacted as expected: many on the pro-Israeli side denounced it as anti-Semitic (suprise suprise) and many on the pro-Palestinian side have hailed it as validation of what they have been saying all along. This is all well and good. The part that is confusing me is why this story won’t go away even after all this time.

Molly Ivins, the professional Bush Basher, decided to chime in with an article whose only purpose, as our friend The Angry Arab pointed out, is to declare how pro-Israeli she is. Robert Fisk, in an article entitled The United States of Israel, is more interesting because he talks about the reactions to the paper by the pro-Israel side. But again there is nothing new here. Even the Israelis are paying attention to this, in an opinion piece in Haaretz, the author suggests that Olmert should ‘Walk on eggshells’ when engaging the Americans because there might be some additional scrutiny to Israeli relations with the US as a result of the paper.

The reason that I think this whole issue is lame is because simply talking about it doesn’t do anything for us. ‘Exposing’ the lobby will not diminish its power. As long as the politicians’ pockets are being lined with cash and political destinies are decided by voting the right way in congress, we will continue to have business as usual. The solution isn’t to expose the lobby, it is to oppose it.

Let me provide an analogy here. Let’s say I’m the greatest tennis player there is. I win all my matches and there is nothing that can stop me. It just happens that all my opponents are drunk seven year old children without rackets. Simply making the world aware of the fact that my opponents are at such a disadvantage will not stop me from being the best, it might be a little embarassing, but I’ll still be world champion. If you’re not getting the analogy, let me clarify, the pro-Palestinian lobby is the drunk seven year old without a racket. So instead of dancing around happy because somebody recognized that the other side is kicking our ass let’s recruit some adults, stop the drinking, hit the gym, get ourselves a nice racket and go out there and even up the odds.