Lawrence of Cyberia

Quote of the Week: Dan Halutz

"If you nevertheless want to know what I feel when I release a bomb, I will tell you: I feel a light bump to the plane as a result of the bomb's release. A second later it's gone, and that's all. That is what I feel."

-- Dan Halutz, interview with Ha'aretz, 21 Aug 2002.

Photos:

Center - Newly appointed Israeli Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz , center, kisses his grandson Yonathan following the official handover ceremony at the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem, Wednesday, June 1, 2005. Halutz, 57, a former air force chief, outraged Israeli liberals when he endorsed the July 2002 decision to drop a one-ton bomb on the home of a Palestinian militant leader in a densely populated Gaza neighborhood at night, killing the target and 14 sleeping civilians, among them nine children.  (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

Left - A Palestinian child [Mohammed Matar?, aged 4] is removed from the rubble of destroyed homes after a late night Israeli missile strike July 23, 2002 in Gaza City, Gaza. Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh, who was at the top of Israel's most wanted list, and 14 other Palestinians, including children, were killed in the attack. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that the operation was a success and that civilians were not the intended targets. The attack comes during a time when both sides were talking about easing tensions in the West Bank. (Abid Katib/Getty Images)

Right - Rescue workers recover the body of Dina Rami Matar, aged 2 months, one of nine children under the age of eleven who were killed when an Israeli F-16 dropped an American one-ton precision "smart bomb" on an apartment building in the al-Daraj neighbourhood of Gaza City on 23 July, 2002. Dina’s cousins Allaa (11), Dalia (5), Mohammed (4) and Ayman (18 months) were also killed. (Abid Katib?/Getty Images)

Killing By Numbers

The Independent ran an article on Friday about Shaul Mofaz, a contender for the Kadima party leadership and presumably, if it looks like Likud is a better bet for electoral success than Kadima, also a contender for the position of Defense Minister in a Netanyahu government. The article describes a briefing Mofaz gave in May 2001 (when he was Army Chief of Staff) in which he reportedly gave verbal instructions to the IDF's senior commanders in the West Bank that he expected from them seventy dead Palestinians every day.

The significant thing about that article is not what it says about Shaul Mofaz: I don't think he is at all unique among the Israeli leadership in his "kill-em-all-let-god-decide" attitude toward the lives of Palestinian people. The significant thing about this article is not that it happens to be Shaul Mofaz who is speaking, but that it shows very senior Israeli officers considering setting a daily quota of Palestinians to be killed. And that is significant because it confirms the testimony of Israeli servicemen who have come forward to describe how they carried out such a policy on the ground in the Occupied Territories during the al Aqsa intifada.

I've already blogged about Israeli soldiers who talked after the fact about killing unarmed Palestinians simply because on a particular night the IDF chain of command would issue verbal orders that any Palestinian found on the street is "sentenced to death".

And this testimony, from an Israeli (former) officer, specifically describes his experience of killing Palestinians in order to fulfil a quota [emphasis mine]:

Captain T. was the commander of an armed high-speed reconnaissance boat. His naval commanders expected him to have a brilliant military career. But soon after Operation Defensive Shield, T. handed back his equipment and went to India. He came home for a visit, and his mother turned to the Breaking the Silence organization to have an activist talk to him. His story, from the spring of 2002, can explain what can happen to a Palestinian family that goes out for a breath of fresh air on the Gaza shore. His words are quoted with necessary cuts and editing:

"After Defensive Shield two boats went down to the area of Sudaniya in the northern Gaza Strip. We had with us representatives of the navy, of the air force, of helicopter units, and of various participating combat units, as well as people from units on the shore, intelligence, etc. One of the senior officers told us that the Israel Defense Forces was acting in very extensively and said that he wanted 'two dead every night'; 'I want at least two "terrorists" every night,' he said, from the beach front. The feeling was of a revenge mission. We waited, two boats, at a distance of about 2,000 meters from the shore.

"We spotted a patrol on the shore going to the beach outside our target area, on the beach itself. About three to four people sat there at the beach and lit a fire, and we noted some action between the (patrol) group and the fire. We had no other identification of these people, no idea who they were, whether they were armed or not.

"When Naval Task Force 13 signaled that they saw weapons at the site, all of us (on the boat) felt very excited. Night after night boats returned from nightly duty without firing a single shot, and now we had such an opportunity. Our feeling was imbued by the aura of 'Defensive Shield,' the (suicide) attacks preceding it and the tension. No wonder I wanted to shoot. I said 'legitimate target' and had the concurrence of all other ranks up to the one giving the order. And we started firing. We continued shooting, aiming at hitting as many as possible, even those carrying the wounded. The problematic issue was that we didn't really know who was sitting around the fire. It could have been the kid brother of someone there, it could have been ...we don't know. This happened every night.

"Another incident occurred in the southern area of Khan Yunis. Ten people went into a building. Again there was no discrimination between the armed and the unarmed, and you didn't know exactly who was inside. People started coming from the area to help the wounded and into this chaos we fired at figures running in all directions, to take out as many as possible. Like a video game, click, click, click. I wanted to shoot. In my eyes it was legitimate, otherwise I would have refused. I was crazed.

"It is highly probably that on the beach there was a child of 12 who was waiting with the narghile for his big brother to come back from guard duty. A person like that is not a legitimate target. I think that I am a war criminal. Supposing that people come to me now, and I'm on my trip, and they put me on trial at the International Court of Justice, what can I tell them? I know that I obeyed an order that is illegal in my eyes. If a relative were to come to me now, I would tell him: I am guilty. Your child was murdered for no reason because we wanted to bring two corpses every night."

-- Not Just A Security Thing, by Akiva Eldar; Ha'aretz, 20 Jun 2006.

It is the actual killing of Palestinians to meet an arbitrary quota that is the really newsworthy aspect of this story, not whether Mofaz's part in formulating the policy "reinforces [his] image of hawkishness" as he positions himself for a run at the Kadima party leadership.

Everybody's Children Matter

So, Israeli President Shimon Peres thinks that the fact that thousands of Lebanese people would turn out to celebrate the return of prisoners from Israel – including Samir Al-Quntar, convicted of murdering a four-year-old child – is proof that Israel’s moral values are superior to its neighbor’s:

President Shimon Peres denounced the red carpet treatment that welcomed the five prisoners that returned to Lebanon on Wednesday, comparing between the behavior of Israelis, who mourned the return of Regev and Goldwasser, and what he called Lebanese "dancing and drumming."

"I see and hear what is happening on both sides of the barricade. In Lebanon there are victory celebrations…

The heads of states, heads of Hezbollah are dancing and drumming before welcoming Kuntar - the murderer who with his rifle's butt smashed the skull of Einat, of blessed memory, who was four years old, and who shot her father in cold blood. In Israel, the people are crying. Today we are all the Goldwasser and Regev families…

You can see where the pain is, where the happiness is. But if you ask really where is the supreme moral victory, and where is the human defeat - [look] in the reception of a unparalleled, base murderer, and the lighting of memorial candles for the remembrance of our loved ones - the answer is clear…"

Einat Haran was that four-year-old Israeli child, beaten to death in April 1979 by 16 year-old Samir al-Quntar, a member of a four man PLF (Palestine Liberation Front) unit that infiltrated by sea from south Lebanon, and attacked the apartment building where she lived in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya.

At trial, eyewitnesses and an Israeli doctor testified that Samir al-Quntar had killed Einat by beating her about the head with the butt of his gun. For beating to death an Israeli child with the butt of his gun, an Israeli court sentenced al-Quntar to life imprisonment (and to 542 years overall). He was released in a prisoner exchange after serving 29 years in jail, and welcomed home as a hero in Beirut. Millions of Israelis were apoplectic at the release of a child-killer.

Whereas ...

Hilmi Shusha was an 11-year-old Palestinian child, beaten to death in October 1996 by 36-year-old Nahum Korman, an Israeli settler in the West Bank.

At trial, eyewitnesses and the Israeli state pathologist testified that Nahum Korman had killed Hilmi by beating him about the head with the butt of his gun. For beating to death a Palestinian child with the butt of his gun, an Israeli court sentenced Korman to six-months community service (and a fine equivalent to $17,500). He was welcomed home as a hero at Hadar Beitar settlement. Millions of Israelis were utterly apathetic that their law enforcement and judicial system should enable a child-killer to walk free.

Commenting on the plea deal that the Israeli District Court offered Nahum Korman, which allowed him to escape jail time for beating a Palestinian child to death, the Israeli civil rights group, B’Tselem, noted:

The Court's decision to accept the plea bargain is a direct continuation of the policy of all Israeli law enforcement agencies - from the police and the IDF, to the State's Attorney's Office and the Courts, and including the Presidency. Throughout the years, all these institutions have turned a blind eye to cases where Israelis injure innocent Palestinians, and have even supported them. This policy stands in blatant contradiction to the authorities' treatment of cases where Palestinians injure Israelis. In the latter cases, the justice system is suddenly highly efficient and employs all means at its disposal, including measures that violate human rights...

This incident is one of dozens in which Israeli civilians killed Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. B'Tselem conducts a comparative study of all these cases, which paints a disturbing picture: many cases are never even investigated by the Police; others that are investigated, the State's Attorney's Office decides not to file indictments; the few cases that do reach the courts end in acquittal or in light sentences. In those isolated incidents where a serious sentence is imposed, the President commuted the sentence.

-- B'Tselem, Palestinian Life Continues to be Cheap; 22 Jan 2000.

But now the President of Israel thinks he has the standing to lecture Lebanon on how to treat child-killers. Sorry, Mr Peres, but people who think it perfectly normal that the killing of an Israeli child by a Lebanese should be punishable by life imprisonment, while the killing of a Palestinian child by an Israeli should be punishable by six months of community service, have nothing to teach the rest of us about morals or values.

Photos: Einat Haran via Arutz Sheva; Hilmi Shusha via BBC News.

Still Waiting

I remembered today how much I liked Uzi Benziman’s article, Israel awaits its De Gaulle, when I first read it in 2002.

Benziman wrote the article after yet another Israeli government had failed to serve its full term, and had to call early elections.   He noted that once again Israel would tinker with its electoral system in the hope of resolving its political instability, and knew that once again it would be disappointed.  And the reason it would be disappointed was that Israel’s political instability did not arise from problems with its voting system, but from the dogged determination of both Right and Left (such as it is at the moment in Israel) to continue squandering its blood and treasure on trying to colonize the Occupied Territories.

Above all, it stemmed from the absence of a leader who could transcend everyday politics, and do for Israel what De Gaulle had once done for a faltering French Fourth Republic, when he answered the chattering jingoism that claimed "France without Algeria is not France", with the simple reality that "Algeria is not France. The Algerian people are not French".

I went back to read Benziman’s article again today, when it looks like Israel may well face early elections again, and it’s as applicable as it was in 2002.  In fact Israel seems more unlikely than ever to produce a de Gaulle who will say plainly to its citizens: “The Occupied Territories are not Israel”.  You can’t help but notice that at one time Israel produced statesmen who – even when you disagreed with them fundamentally – represented the country with gravitas on the world stage.  Today it produces … Shaul Mofaz?

Anyway, the article in question:

Quote of the Week: Emanuel Scherer

"Rights for Jews everywhere without wrongs and injustices to other people anywhere."

-- Dr Emanuel Scherer, Secretary of the Bund World Coordinating Committee, cited here.

I wish I'd seen that quote before I wrote Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism? Because in retrospect I think there's a huge omission in the paragraph I wrote about those Zionists who were and are critical of the "gun Zionism" that created and sustains Israel, and who recognize the need to explore alternative vehicles of Jewish self-determination. My omission was that I failed to refer to the fact that, even with the state of Israel being in existence 60 years, most Jewish people did not and never will emigrate to Israel, and their (in)action is an expression of Jewish self-determination too. It is the Jewish self-determination that affirms that Jewish people are full and equal citizens in the countries of their birth, and is positively affronted by any suggestion that their Jewishness makes them lesser citizens whose loyalty really lies with a foreign country, Israel. This is the kind of Jewish self-determination that was described by Mahatma Gandhi when he rejected Zionism as an answer to anti-semitism. It's also the kind of Jewish self-determination that historically was articulated by the Bundists, whom I really should have mentioned in my original comment. So I thought I might make up for that hole in the original, by adding this thought as a Quote of the Week. 

Cartoon: Arab and Jew greet each other - "Shalom!" "Salaam!" in each other's languages, the sight of which sends the man at the הסוכנות היהודית/Jewish Agency (Zionist organization founded to promote Jewish immigration to Palestine) into a panic.  (h/t The Bundist Voice)

Racist Language Finds A Home At "Liberal" Ha'Aretz.com: Part 2

This is the second part of a post I began here. 

For sheer hypocrisy, you can't beat today's Haaretz.com.

It contains an article (includes embedded video which loads automatically, so if you have a slow connection you might not want to go there) about a Hamas summer camp that allegedly teaches children to hate and kill Israelis and Americans.  Now, reasonable people - regardless of where they stand on the I/P issue - have to recognize that indoctrinating children to hate is always wrong. Denouncing racial incitement is a no-brainer we can all agree on, right?

Well no, not all of us.  For instance, Ha'aretz.com itself seems rather equivocal about what it feels on this subject. Obviously, it doesn't like it when the incitement is against Israelis - otherwise it wouldn't have run the report on the Hamas summer camp - but how outraged do you think Ha'aretz.com would be by racist incitement against certain other groups of people? For example, if there were an organization that incited against say, Arabs, and even went so far as to advocate the elimination of the Arab population of Israel and the Occupied Territories, what might Ha'aretz.com make of that?

Well, you don't have to go far to find out. In fact, you only have to go as far as the main advertisement on the very web page where Haaretz.com reports on the Hamas summer camp.

That advert about "saving Jewish babies" links to a Web page advertising the activities of Efrat, an organization I mentioned in my prior post on this subject, which works to prevent the aborting of specifically Jewish fetuses in order to counter the "demographic threat" posed to the "Jewish state" by the birthrate among the Palestinian population. 

But look closely at the url for that Efrat ad, and you'll see the ad in Haaretz.com doesn't link to Efrat itself, but to a page about Efrat on "Samson Blinded", a web site I also wrote about in my earlier post, which advocates "the total destruction of the Palestinian people, the murder of large numbers of Muslim civilians, the assassination of the family members of Arab rulers, and the use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons against dozens of countries." 

If you can stomach it, explore for a while the Samson Blinded web site that Ha'aretz has been taking advertising revenue from for at least the last nine months.  How do you like this page for example (h/t palestine think tank), on the subject of Palestinians as cockroaches?

On the practical plane, goodness doesn’t matter. Our actions toward Arabs are evil. People pursue self-interest which, in the case of Israel’s right, only incidentally correlates with the divine goodness of Torah. Roaches are not happy when we squash them. They are unthreatening, but merely aesthetically detestable. Arabs, likewise, suffer through no guilt of their own. They are good, but still have to be evicted from Israel for the Jewish good.

Judaism resents hunting because animals have to be killed for food properly, with respect for their lives. Stone Age people enjoyed hunting because it gave them food; modern hunting is recreational. Enjoyment of murder, even of animal, is unethical. There is nothing wrong with Arabs. They lived their lives on the hills which they plowed for generations when Jews came to their country. Naturally, the Arabs fought back – not because of the European Judophobism, but as normal people who resist their country usurped by aliens; it’s a pity that Jews are less normal than Arabs and accept that Arabs breed to become a majority in Israel. Jews have to push the Arabs out and inflict suffering. That’s regrettable, but there’s no choice: as we need food to sustain bodies, we also need sovereignty to sustain our communal body. We “hunt” the Arabs without enjoying it - just because we have to live in a state of our own.

And just in case you're in any doubt about Samson Blinded's remedy for the presence of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories, they've illustrated it for you:

 

Ha'aretz.com knows very well the ideological position of Samson Blinded. It was pointed out to them in June when ei contacted them about an earlier ad from the same organization that ran on Ha'aretz.com's front page.  And yet here they still are, week after week, month after month, lining their pockets with ad revenue from a sponsor that advocates racial hatred and the elimination of Palestinians from Israel and the Occupied Territories.  They're even running those ads as accompaniment to an article that decries racist incitement on the part of Hamas! Even if no-one at Ha'aretz.com has the decency to be offended by the crude racism behind these ads, you'd think that someone on the payroll would have enough of a sense of irony to see the absurdity of placing them on a page supposedly decrying racist incitement.

Osnat Kohali, the manager of Haaretz.com, answered ei's query by saying that the newspaper and its website have a clear policy of no "incitement against any side", but also offered as a defense the fact that the openly racist, genocidal stuff was only at Samson Blinded's web site, not in the actual ads that Ha'aretz.com runs (though the ads of course link directly back to the web site). Well, pardon my French, but I think the correct legal term for that line of defense is "dissembling bullshit".

I think it is absurd for Ha'aretz.com to suggest that the contents of the web sites it advertises are none of its concern just so long as the ads themselves are not inciting or genocidal. I don't believe for a minute Haaretz.com would use that defense if an organization that incited against Jewish people were to approach them with an ad they wanted to place in the on-line edition.  How about if I were planning to release on DVD the notorious anti-Semitic propaganda film, The Eternal Jew, and I was looking for someone to advertise my web site, which happened to carry stills from the movie:

"In the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, they [the Jewish people] spread from Eastern Europe like an irresistable tide, flooding the towns and nations of Europe - in fact, the entire world."

"Wherever rats appear they bring ruin, by destroying mankind's goods and foodstuffs."

"In this way, they (the rats) spread disease, plague, leprosy, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and so on."

"They are cunning, cowardly, and cruel, and are found mostly in large packs. Among the animals, they represent the rudiment of an insidious and underground destruction -

- just like the Jews among human beings."

Do you think Haaretz.com would accept ads for my website? OK, the web site itself depicts Jewish people as vermin, but I could make the ads themselves less offensive than the web site they link back to, so Ha'aretz would be all right with that, wouldn't they? 

My ass, they would. I don't believe for a minute that Haaretz.com would run ads to a web site portraying Jewish people as "rats" who must be eliminated, just so long as the actual ads themselves didn't openly depict Jewish people as vermin.  Nor do I think they should. But then why is Ha'aretz - "liberal", "progressive", opinion-forming Ha'aretz - collecting ad revenue from a web site that portrays Palestinian people literally as vermin? 

Test

Working off a new computer network.
Is this thing on?
Can everybody hear me at the back?

Israel's Human Shields

For ease of indexing, I am combining into a single post my previous entries on the IDF's use of civilians as human shields for its military operations:

1. Hiding Behind Civilians

2. "Military Juntas" For 500, Alex

3. What Kind Of "Soldiers" Hide Behind Civilians?

4. Meanwhile In A Parallel Universe.

Photo: An Israeli soldier leans his hand on the back of a handcuffed unidentified Palestinian resident as he is made to enter before the soldiers inside a building during a search operation in the Old City of the West Bank town of Nablus, in this Sunday, Aug. 24, 2003 file photo. Israel's Supreme Court on Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005, banned the military's practice of using Palestinian civilians as 'human shields' in arrest raids, saying it violates international law. The court ruled in response to petitions by human rights groups. (AP/Nasser Ishtayeh)

Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism?

I wrote the following as a comment on a post of the same name at My Left Wing. I'm reproducing it here because it is also a suitable response to readers who email from time to time with questions along the lines of "How can criticizing a Jewish state not be anti-semitic?"*:

I think this post misses the point entirely about why people can be anti-Zionist but not anti-semitic. And it misses the point because you start off from a strawman argument. Specifically this misrepresentation of why people might be opposed to Zionism:

What anti-Zionism says is that despite this, despite the millions dead, it was a moral abomination for Jewish people to gather in their traditional home for purposes of self-defense, and self-determination. In other words, after one-third of the entire Jewish population was wiped off the planet for reasons of "race," the Jews are racists for organizing in their own defense.

I'm sure there are anti-semites who are anti-Zionist, but the logic that you've ascribe to anti-Zionism as a whole is fallacious. That's not what anti-Zionism says. It's what YOU say in order to put words into the mouths of anti-Zionists so that you can make your argument. You're not really writing about why anti-Zionism is anti-semitic. You're writing about how, from the perspective of someone who accepts the principles of Zionism, regards Zionism as the normative way of looking at Israeli-Palestinian relations (and I would say this is the dominant paradigm is American discourse on Israel), and has really put no time or energy into considering whether there might be logical, rational, non-hateful reasons for opposing political Zionism as it has played out in the creation and history of the state of Israel, then anti-Zionism can be made to look like anti-semitism.

But to do that you've had to gloss over the the key point - the same key point that Zionism has always glossed over: the fact that Palestine had a pre-existing population, 95% of whom (at the time of the first aliyah) happened to be not Jewish, but Muslim and Christian. You imply that the terrible things that Israel has done to the Palestinians are due to bad decisions by various Israeli governments, but that's not true. Palestinians have to be expelled, excluded or at least disenfranchised if you are to create a Jewish state in Palestine, because they happen to form the natural majority there. Expelling hundreds of thousands of them in 1948, and denying equality today to those who remain and whose high birth-rate once again is making them the majority even without the return of the refugees, is simply what you have to do if you are to create a "Jewish and democratic state" in a land where most people happen not to be Jewish.

You ignore this point, and suggest that what people are objecting to is the Jewishness of the people who created Israel, when really there is another logical explanation. Perhaps what people are objecting to is the creation of a self-identified sectarian state that is designed to be a home for one group of people, in a land where another - majority - people already lives, and where that new state can be created only through the dispossession and displacement of the preexisting population. Can you really not imagine that people might object to Zionism because they do not believe that the right of one group to create a Jewish state in Palestine overrides the right of another group not to be expelled or disenfranchised? Or that this opposition is not based on the Jewishness of one of the parties involved, but on the underlying morality of expelling one group from their homes to create a new home for another group? From this perspective, the Jewishness of one of the parties is incidental: it would not be more acceptable if the people involved were creating a Hindu, Buddhist or Martian state in Palestine. The opposition is not about Jewishness, it is essentially about whether a Palestinian is an equal human being to anyone else. It is an affirmation that despite what that early champion of Zionism, Lord Balfour, claimed, Palestinians are not "700,000 negroes whose views we do not intend to consult on this matter"**, but are fully equal human beings whose right not to be forcibly dispossessed is in no way inferior to the right of Zionism to create a "Jewish and democratic state" that by its very definition cannot give full equality to Palestine's non-Jewish majority without ceasing to exist.

(And to use the argument that this displacement of the Palestinians can be justified by the Holocaust is, from a Palestinian, Arab, Muslim or other non-Zionist perspective, not a mitigating factor. It is actually an aggravating factor. Because not only are Palestinians "negroes" whose rights can be ignored whenever they conflict with Zionism, but they can now be ignored because of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, for which the Palestinians were not themselves responsible. This is a double whammy of inequality).

If it helps diffuse some of the rancor that dogs discussion of the I/P conflict, think of it this way. Most people in the world were opposed to white rule in South Africa. They weren't opposed because they were "anti-White". When the international community had to decide whether Afrikaners had a right to national self-determination in South Africa, where Afrikaner dominance could be established only by the dispossession, displacement and oppression of the existing indigenous majority and maintained only through the apartheid system of government, it decided overwhelmingly that South Africa had no right to exist as a "white and democratic" state. Outside of the immediate coterie of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, it was self-evident that the right of one ethnic group to exclusive self-determination did not outweigh the right of everybody else to equality. The Afrikaners' self-determination had to be achieved within the context of their South African nationality, which they share with fellow South Africans of all races and religions. It would have been absurd to suggest that anti-apartheid campaigners acted as they did because they were prejudiced against Afrikaners and therefore opposed to the principle of self-determination for Afrikaners. Collectively, they were motivated not by animosity toward Afrikaners, but by the belief that - in a land where other people live too - exclusive self-determination for one group impinges unacceptably on the rights of all the others. The absence of any suggestion that this might be a similar motivation for people who oppose Zionism, rather than the Jewishness of the people who benefit from it - is a huge omission.

As for your point that there have historically been prominent Zionists (you mention Martin Buber) who favored a cooperative relationship with the Palestinians - well that's certainly true. But Martin Buber was not a dominant founding father of the Jewish state. So what does it matter in practice that some individual Zionists were genuinely tolerant of Palestinians, respectful of their rights and troubled (as Buber was) about the morality of creating a Palestinian population in exile in order to solve the plight of a Jewish population in exile, if theirs was not the outlook that predominated on the ground? The dominant founding fathers of the Jewish state were people like Herzl and Ben Gurion, whose dominant brand of Zionism was based on the premise that the Palestinian population could be "spirited away across the border", that the Arab majority had to be reduced to no more than 15% of the population and saw nothing wrong with the "transfer" out of Palestine of the existing population. I'm not sure how relevant it is to cite examples of less exclusivist Zionists when the Zionism of the real world is one that created (and maintains) a Jewish majority in Israel by the forced exclusion of a large part of the non-Jewish population.

In fact I think that referring to the existence of Zionists who had problems with a Zionism that relied on transfer to create a more ethnically-homogeneous state, actually undermines the argument that people who oppose Zionism as it exists on the ground do so because they don't like Jewish people. It relies on a faulty logic that says the only possible vehicle of Jewish nationalism and self-determination is the Ben Gurion kind of Zionism that created the current state of Israel, and that as this is the only possible expression of Jewish self-determination then people who criticize it must do so out of anti-semitism. But the Zionism of Martin Buber for example, or cultural Zionists like Ahad Ha'am and then Judah Magnes, or modern post-Zionists like Avrum Burg, shows that Zionism at the point of a gun is not the only possible expression of Jewish nationalism; and that even among some Jewish Zionists there was always an understanding that realizing Jewish self-determination by creating a "Jewish state" in Palestine raised legitimate moral (and practical) concerns, which led them to try to think of ways that Jewish self-determination and nationalism might be realized without requiring the expulsion or destruction of the existing people and culture in Palestine.

Overall, I would say the problem is that the old one-liner, "Earthquake in Peru: is it good for the Jews?", is meant to be a joke, but you treat it as if it is the baseline for how everybody is allowed to think of Zionism. You have no right to assume that if people oppose anything that involves Jewish people it must be because their anti-semitism is showing through. Yet in the way you have (mis)represented the motivations of anti-Zionists, you did just that. You don't consider that there can be perfectly legitimate opposition to Zionism from both Jews and non-Jews that arises not from anti-semitism - not from anything to do with Jewishness at all - but from the belief that it is problematic to create a state for one group of people in a land that already has a people and a culture, which will have to be destroyed to create a Jewish state there. This destruction is not, as you suggest, the result of some bad decisions by successive Israeli governments, its is simply the only way to create a Jewish state in Palestine. I disagree fundamentally with Benny Morris, but when he identified the central issue of the conflict as the need to break (Palestinian) eggs so that you can make the (Israeli) omelet he was at least being honest enough to say out loud the unpalatable reality that most people who speak about I/P issues from a Zionist POV simply ignore: the Palestinians refused and still refuse to give their consent to a project that requires they take the part of the eggs in someone else's omelet.

You are talking about Zionism in the partial, one-sided way we are used to hearing it discussed in U.S. discourse. It is only about Jewishness and anti-Semitism, in which Palestinians have a walk-on "humanitarian" part (when you make your obligatory nod to their suffering, which you attribute to bad government decisions). What is completely missing from your discussion of Zionism is any sense that the Palestinian people are equal players in this scenario, whose individual human rights and collective national rights are as deserving of respect as anybody else's, and who might just have a right to self-determination that does not involve having created in their midst and against their will an ethnic/religious-based state that by its very nature requires their own majority status to be diminished or denied. By glossing over what political Zionism did and does - and absolutely had to do - in order to create and maintain a "Jewish and democratic state" in a land where the natural majority was (and is) not Jewish, you are simply finding a more wordy way of treating Palestine as "a land without a people for a people without a land".

* Yes, I know my email response time is awful and the backlog in my inbox is atrocious. Tell me about it.

** Hence the title of the earlier post in which I identified Palestinian equal rights as the key issue in the I/P conflict: Palestinians Are Nobody's Negroes.

Quote of the Week: Primo Levi

"Everybody is somebody's Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis."

-- Primo Levi, cited in A Hard Case: The Life and Death of Primo Levi; The New Yorker, 17 Jun 2002.

Photo: An Israeli settler boy prevents a Palestinian woman from passing in the street as Israeli troops stand and watch. By Nayef Hashlamoun in Hebron, 1 Apr 2004.

Palestinians Murder, Israelis Have Accidents

So, the JTA thinks it is a stupid suggestion (from James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal) that the "accidental killing" of American activist Rachel Corrie by an Israeli bulldozer in March 2003 may have given the Palestinian who perpetrated Wednesday’s attack in Jerusalem the idea for turning his vehicle into a deadly weapon.

The JTA has a point. It is impossible to know what goes through the mind of a murderer as he embarks upon his murders, so it is sheer speculation to suggest Wednesday's killer might have been influenced by the Corrie "accident".

Besides, if he was influenced by a specific prior incident, why would it have to be the Corrie case that affected him? With all that the Palestinians go through under Israeli occupation, how self-centred do we have to be to think it was specifically the case of an American victim that influenced him? If he really was motivated to murder by the example of Israel's own use of bulldozers to murder its opponents, wouldn't it be more likely for him to be influenced by cases involving fellow Palestinians, like Jamal Fayed:

Jamal Fayed, 38 and severely disabled, was killed on 11 April [2002] when the bulldozing of his home caused a wall to collapse on him. The family had shown the soldiers preparing to demolish the house Jamal Fayed's ID to prove that he was paralysed and could not get out of the home without their help. The soldiers refused to help and soon after a bulldozer approached the house. The family yelled at the driver to stop. He did not, and Jamal Fayed, still trapped inside the house, was killed. (Amnesty International)

Or by the case of the al-Shabi family, ages ranging from 4 to 85 years, who were crushed to death when an Israeli soldier demolished their house on top of them:

During Operation Defensive Shield extensive house destruction took place, especially in Nablus and Jenin. In both Nablus and Jenin the IDF reportedly bulldozed some houses while residents were still inside; at the same time they blocked medical and humanitarian aid coming to help those injured or buried under the rubble of houses.

In Nablus the IDF surrounded the Qasbah area (the old city) on 1 April [2002] and imposed a strict curfew, shooting at anyone who left their homes. During the curfew Amnesty International spoke to residents of the Qasbah who spoke of a dead body rotting in the street as the IDF shot at anyone who left any house. Some houses were destroyed; one was a house in the old city which was bulldozed down on top of its occupants on 5 April. Mahmud Umar al-Shabi discovered the demolished house of his family only a week later, on 12 April, when the curfew was at last lifted for two hours. He began to dig in the rubble with the help of friends and neighbours; he was fired on several times for breaking the curfew and it began to rain. Late at night the rescuers found a small opening to the ground floor of the house and discovered, alive, Mahmud al-Shabis uncle, Abdallah al-Shabi, 68, and Shamsa al-Shabi, 67, his wife (crippled from before the intifada). At 1.30am they found the eight other members of the family, all dead, huddled in a circle in a small room: Mahmud al-Shabis father, Umar, 85; his sister Fatima, 57; his cousin Abir, 38; his cousin Samir, 48; Samirs 7-months pregnant wife, Nabila, 40; and their three children, Abdullah, 9; Azzam, 7; and Anas, 4. (Amnesty International)

Since the outbreak of the second Intifada posters of Palestinian martyrs are common on the walls of Palestinian towns. In Nablus, there is one poster, showing the names and faces of eight members of the Shubi family, that people stop to look at. (Photo: Arjan El Fassed, for ei)

Or by the case of 16-year-old Mahmud Kayed, whose head was crushed (photo, very graphic) by an Israeli bulldozer that was tearing up Palestinian farmland in the Gaza Strip.

Or by the death of 75-year-old Ibrahim Mahmoud Khalafallah, who was crushed to death when an army bulldozer demolished his Khan Yunis house on top of him, even though his wife, Eida, had warned the soldiers that her husband was wheelchair-bound and would not be able to get out of the house by himself? [Footnote]

So the JTA is correct that is probably foolish (and, I would add, extremely Amero-centric) to suggest that Rachel Corrie's death was influential on Wednesday's horrible murders. There are hundreds of other cases of bulldozer-related death, injury and ethnically-motivated home demolition over the last eight years, any or all of which might have mattered more to this particular murderer than the Rachel Corrie case. (Including those cases I cited above, which resulted in the murder of Palestinian civilians, whose deaths deserved - but naturally, never got - every bit as much outrage and sympathy as is rightly afforded Wednesday's Israeli victims, and whose Israeli murderers deserved - but naturally, never got - every bit as much opprobrium and condemnation as is rightly heaped upon the head of Wednesday's Palestinian murderer).

Perhaps that's what the JTA is trying to suggest. Otherwise, the JTA's casual dismissal of the suggestion that the manner of Wednesday's killings might in any way be a reflection of the almost iconic role that Israeli bulldozers have played in the Occupation of the Palestinian Territories over the past eight years, seems a little bit glib. It makes it sound as if the JTA actually believes that when a Palestinian kills Israelis with a bulldozer, it is a context-free random act of murder; that when an Israeli kills an American with a bulldozer, it is "accidental"; and that when Israelis repeatedly kill Palestinian civilians with bulldozers ... well, that simply doesn't happen.

Footnote: Journalist Gideon Levy wrote about the killing of Ibrahim Khalafallah by the IDF, an event that was barely reported in Israel, and asked his Israeli readership to imagine how different the coverage would have been if the perpetrators were Palestinian, and the victim Israeli:

What would happen if a Palestinian terrorist were to detonate a bomb at the entrance to an apartment building in Israel and cause the death of an elderly man in a wheelchair, who would later be found buried under the rubble of the building? The country would be profoundly shocked. Everyone would talk about the sickening cruelty of the act and its perpetrators. The shock would be even greater if it then turned out that the dead man’s wife had tried to dissuade the terrorist from blowing up the house, telling him that there were people inside, but to no avail. The tabloids would come out with the usual screaming headline: “Buried alive in his wheelchair.” The terrorists would be branded “animals.”

Last Monday, Israel Defense Forces bulldozers in Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip, demolished the home of Ibrahim Halfalla, a 75-year-old disabled man and father of seven, and buried him alive. Umm-Basel, his wife, says she tried to stop the driver of the heavy machine by shouting, but he paid her no heed. The IDF termed the act “a mistake that shouldn’t have happened,” and the incident was noted in passing in Israel. The country’s largest-circulation paper, Yedioth Ahronoth, didn’t bother to run the story at all. The blood libel in France – a woman’s tale of being subjected to an anti-Semitic attack, which later turned out to be fiction – proved a great deal more upsetting to people. There we thought the assault was aimed against our people. But when the IDF bulldozes a disabled Palestinian to death? Not a story. Just like the killing, under the rubble of her home, of Noha Maqadama, a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy, before the eyes of her husband and children, in El Boureij refugee camp a few months earlier...

If it were the reverse; Ha'aretz, 18 July 2004.

When You Don't Like The Message, Shoot The Messenger

Or call him a "Holocaust denier".

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said of the Holocaust: "If you (Europeans) committed this big crime, then why should the oppressed Palestinian nation pay the price?", most of us in the U.S. didn't hear anything beyond the initial "if". We heard that "if", and immediately launched into a cacophony of "If? What does he mean 'If'? Is he saying it never happened? He's a Holocaust denier!".

But of course Ahmadinejad didn't just say, "If it happened...". He said "If......, then why.....?". If Europeans did it, why are Palestinians paying? If Europeans were responsible for the Holocaust of the Jews, and the Holocaust is justification for a Jewish state, then why isn't that state in Europe? And that's a different issue altogether than simply denying the Holocaust took place.

I came across an essay (via here, then here and here [PDF] by the late British historian, Arnold J Toynbee, which I think articulates the point Ahmadinejad is trying to make:

I can understand the Jews demanding, after their experience at Nazi hands, that they should be given some piece of territory somewhere in the world, where they would be masters in their own house and where there would be an asylum for any Jews who, in future might be threatened with a repetition of what the Nazis did.

But, if the Jews had a claim to be given a piece of territory, this should have been done at the expense of the Western nation that had done its worst to exterminate the Jews..

If the creation of a new state of Israel was judged to be a legitimate form of compensation to the surviving Jews, the territory for this state should have been taken from the Europeans, not from the Arabs.

The new Israel should not have been carved out of Arab Palestine; it should have been carved out of Central Europe.

This point seems to me to be simple and obvious. But, once, when I made it in a lecture in a Western country, (not Germany, not Britain), it was received with shouts of laughter.

The people who laughed were not Jews; they were non-Jewish Westerners, and the country was one that has been traditionally opposed to colonialism.

Yet, they laughed because it seemed to them preposterous that a Western nation should be made to pay for its own crimes with its own territory, when the West's moral debt to the Jews could, so it seemed to these Westerners, be settled by giving the Jews the territory of a non-Western people that committed no crime at all against the Jews.

This laughter shocked me because it revealed to me what seems to me a shocking persistence of the colonialist attitude of mind. A guilty Western people's territory was to be sacrosanct, because, though guilty, they were Westerners.

An innocent non-Western people's territory could, it was held, legitimately be given away to the Jews by the victorious Western powers.This amounts to the declaration of the inequality of the Western and the non-Western sections of the human race.

It is a claim that Westerners are privileged, however guilty they may be. It is a denial of those universal human rights that, in truth, are possessed by every man, woman, and child in the world, irrespective of differences in civilization; religion, nationality and race.

-- Arnold Toynbee, Two Aspects of the Palestine Question, in Arnold Toynbee, Importance of the Arab World (1962).

That, I think, is what the Iranian President is saying, and what we cannot hear - perhaps are not meant to hear - because of the hysterical chorus that breaks out every time he opens his mouth, from people who may or may not really believe he is the new Hitler, but who are undoubtedly itching for an excuse to attack his country and liberate its oil.

Cartoon: "The Palestinian's Burden". By Malcolm Evans, for the New Zealand Herald

There Goes Another "Period Of Calm"

Do you remember how U.S. newspapers used to refer to any protracted spell between Palestinian suicide bombings as "periods of calm"?  No matter how many dozens of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories were killed by Israeli soldiers in the period between suicide bombings, our newspapers regarded the situation as "calm" so long as no Israeli civilians were getting killed.

Apparently, they still do.

According to the United Nations, the IDF violated the current truce in Gaza six times - by firing upon Palestinian civilians in the Strip - between 20 and 24 June. Palestinian Islamic Jihad broke the truce for the first time by firing Qassams at Sderot on 24 June. And this is how the NY Times reports this state of affairs:

Rockets Hit Israel, Breaking Hamas Truce. (emphasis mine)

Remember these rules of American journalism: as long as Palestinian civilians are killed, but Israelis are not, it's still a period of calm. And as long as Israelis are shooting at Palestinian civilians, but Palestinians are not shooting back, it's still a truce.

Quote of the Week: G. K. Chesterton

"It may be said with rough accuracy that there are three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small power, and fights small powers. Then it is a great power, and fights great powers. Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity. After that, the next step is to become a small power itself."

-- G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, chapter 18 ("The Fallacy of the Young Nation"), 1906.

Photos: Soviets in Afghanistan via englishrussia.com; Americans in Iraq, by Jerome Delay for AP.

Ha'aretz Thinks Israel's Arab Citizens Are Settlers

Well, this is an unfortunate choice of words by Yoav Stern for today's Ha'aretz.com:

Israeli Arabs will distribute 20,000 booklets on the Nakba - the "catastrophe," what happened to the Palestinians after 1948 - outside of schools in Arab settlements throughout the country. A camera crew from the Qatar-based Al Jazeera television network will cover the handing out of the booklets tomorrow at 11 A.M... 

So, Israel's Arab citizens live in "settlements", like Israelis live in settlements in the Occupied Territories?

Interesting equivalence there between non-Jewish Israeli citizens, who have lived on their own land from time immemorial but happen to find themselves currently living under a sectarian system of government based on Jewish privilege, and Israel's settlers in the Occupied Territories, who have immigrated onto land expropriated from its legal owners in defiance of the Geneva Conventions and whose legitimacy is unrecognized by any other nation on earth.

Presumably, the next logical step in this bizarre equivalence would be for Israel to remove these Arab obstacles to peace by transferring the Arab settlement blocs to the PA, or by hanging on to the settlements but expelling their inhabitants to somewhere considered suitable for people of their ethnic-religious ilk.  How very Avigdor Lieberman.

I heard Ha'aretz had a new editor, I didn't realize it was him.