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09-04-2014 #11
Re: reporting Israel and the Middle east
Broncofan, you do realize that Jihadists aren't exclusively clustered around the borders of Israel, right? They're all over Europe. Far less so in America - with that ocean thing and billions spent on homeland security. You don't see European Jihadists motivated by Israel actions against Palestinians? You don't see Europeans maybe having some rational fear about the Jihadists amongst them, and rational pique against Israel who seem to motivate them?
And as for Jews being not affiliated with Israel, how does that work? No matter where you live in the world, as a Jew, you're automatically conferred dual citizenship in Israel. I don't think I've ever seen the t-shirt stating "I'm a Jew but I disavow my Israeli citizenship".
My analogy might have been clumsy, but Broncofan I find it interesting that you ignored the first part of the context that I stated, i.e. a people invading the indigenous territory of another people, and never bothering to stop. Does America deserve shame for its actions in enacting manifest destiny in its early history? Absolutely. But that doesn't absolve Israel's actions just because we haven't shined a harsh enough light on America's history.
I know the concept of worse violence occurring outside of Israel's borders is a big deal for you, but I ask why? Violence by Israel against Palestinians is violence against another people. How is any violence excusable?
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09-04-2014 #12
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Re: reporting Israel and the Middle east
No violence is excusable. Where have I justified violence against Palestinians? I said the claim that violence against Jewish people and Palestinians needs to be juxtaposed is often an excuse to downplay anti-semitism. What is being done is that Israel takes an action and those who do not have a say in their democracy are blamed for it. That should be counter to any decent person's concept of fairness. Being eligible for citizenship does not mean a person is a citizen.
I find your last two statements puzzling. I said I disagreed with Israel's actions in Gaza, and that I thought their policies have been severely wrong-headed. I am against any form of collective punishment. I think your attitude is one of accepting a blurring of boundaries of personal responsibility. In two threads, your stance seems to be that I should condemn Israel's policies (which I've done), say nothing when people misguidedly label it genocide (which I don't do), and pretend that harassment and violence against Jewish people in Europe is somehow natural or acceptable (which I also don't do).
What you say about Jihadists in Europe being upset by Israel is perfect victim blaming. People don't claim that a rape victim wearing a short skirt should not be blamed for wearing the short skirt because they don't think a woman wearing a short skirt might be more likely a target of a rapist. They say it because people are responsible for taking wrongful actions regardless of how enticed they feel by their victim...and women have a right to wear short skirts. In the case of Israel, if someone feels that Israel's actions give them an excuse to firebomb a synagogue in Paris, the onus is on them for taking that action. Is the firebombing more likely to take place during a conflict with Israel? Of course. Someone is more likely to be a victim of mugging in the evening. But people take walks in the evening, and Jewish people as individuals have little (frequently zero) control over what Israel does.
I haven't seen that t-shirt because it would again be counter to any decent person's concept of social justice to require someone to disclaim allegiance to another country (or citizenship they are eligible for but have not availed themselves of) because of their ethnic and religious background. It would also be wrongful to make Muslims speak out against ISIS when there should be no assumption they support it.
The reason I ignored your comment about the founding of Israel is because I found it unclear whether you were talking about the founding of Israel pursuant to the partition plan or the occupation.
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09-04-2014 #13
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Re: reporting Israel and the Middle east
The reason I am against juxtaposing violence against two distinct groups is because I am against collective punishment. If an extremist Muslim organization kills five hundred people and some nut in the U.S decides to take the life of an American-Muslim, the response is not that the extremists Muslim organization killed more people. I can't make you see that if you don't.
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09-05-2014 #14
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Re: reporting Israel and the Middle east
Prospero, as a reasonable and intelligent man you have seen for yourself how in your lifetime both the Arabs and the Jews have been targets of vitriolic abuse and violence, just as there have been times when they were the guilty parties, as if each side is condemned to mimic the other, as if there was no other tune to dance to.
You have been selective by quoting the Charter of Hamas rather than, say, the Charter or Constitution of Likud (consider the meaning of 'The land of Israel' in that document) in your desperate need not to be associated with any real criticism of Israel, perhaps because you have been drawn into the vortex of the existential fallacy that has been an essential part of the Likud's war against freedom since it was first elected in 1977.
Begin, Shamir, Sharon and Netanyahu collapsed the whole of the politics of Israel into this existential dilemma in which everything that happens in Israel is an either/or life or death struggle. Thus, if someone criticises Israel, because Likud insists that Israel is a Jewish state, then they argue that in fact it is not Israel that is being targeted but Jews, and that this then becomes part of the 'old hatred'. But what this does is make a sound critique of politics almost impossible, and also has the effect for the foreign audience for whom this is intended, of diverting attention away from real political issues which matter for many Israelis, such as immigration, the incorporation of Orthodox Jews into the military, or the lack of affordable housing for young couples in the metro area around Tel-Aviv.
The question which a good journalist would ask next is -Why is the Likud so obsessed with external affairs, as if nothing else mattered? Because the whole pivot of Israeli politics since 1967 has been skewed by the occupation, by the catastrophe of occupying a land in which Israel is hated by 99% of the people under its control. To understand the tragic nature of this situation you need to accept that the whole of the debate on modern Israel is now seen through the prism of the 1967 War and its aftermath.
Since that time, the original, Zionist humanitarian elements that were embedded in the foundation of Israel in 1948 (even though Zionism is a problematic mix of ideas), have been sold out for a crude nationalism that was always there, and was the ideology of the most violent and uncomprising 'terrorists'/'guerillas'/'freedom fighters' (eg the Lehi), but was considered by the Labour elite at the time as a marginal factor that would not become mainstream. It has meant that what was at one time argued to be a moral and political right for the Jewish people that they would willingly share with non-Jews (cf the works of Martin Buber and Judah Magnes that I cited in the Palestine thread), has been replaced by an emphasis on the Holocaust as if Israel was now in a comparable situation. It also means you have a bigot like Avigdor Lieberman becoming Foreign Secretary when his stated views about Arabs are so offensive that in Europe or North America he would not even be selected to run for office never mind being elected -where was the outrage over the inclusion of this man in the Israeli government?
Just as serious is that this anti-politics has infected the liberals so that they are now caught up in both their own mixed record and their inability to detach themselves from the dominant rhetoric of nationalism, as if to do so would be un-patriotic, and true to form, those Israeli historians who do criticise past governments are derided as un-patriotic traitors, the most recent being Ahron Bregman because of his book Cursed Victory (see one of the reviews on Amazon to get a flavour of the flak).
There is a clue to this problem in a remark that Friedman makes, in parenthesis, as if it were not a fundamental factor: (I am a believer in the importance of the “mainstream” media, a liberal, and a critic of many of my country’s policies.)
Does this mean he is exempt from responsibility because he is not a political sympathiser of Likud or its coalition partners? Is there some magic wand that he can wave to exempt himself from the latest round of bloodletting, as if his liberal politicians in Israel over the last 60 years had nothing to do with the illegal occupation(s) of the West Bank and Gaza District, no involvement in illegal settlement building, no responsibility for the expulsion of Arabs from their land, no responsibility for demolishing homes as collective punishment if one member of the family was designated a 'terrorist', no responsibility for the detention of Arabs without trial, torture and murder?
Taking sides for or against Israel or the Palestinians is an option that I reject because the values that are important to me are not in display in this Israeli government, or Hamas, or any other government in the region. Freedom is too important to be left to jackasses like Netanyahu or Abbas.
1967 was the key moment that has led to the current crisis. Before 1967 a secular Arab nationalism was dominant in the region, after it a widespread loss of faith in secular politics encouraged the growth of the political Islam which had been dormant since the 19th century -or suppressed in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria. I take the view shared by Olivier Roy that the Islamic movement has lapsed but that there is no coherent alternative, either religious or secular around which the Arabs can unite while the actual experience of the state endowed by Anglo-French imperialism is now in a crisis, though we still don't know if it is terminal.
IS has stepped into a vacuum, but its behaviour merely promises more of the same dictatorship that has cursed the Arabs since kings and dictators were installed by the British and the French in 1920-21. Thus:
-Dictators ruled without consent, IS rules without consent.
-Dictators controlled the media, IS controls the media.
-Dictatorships privileged the military and embedded it in the economy, IS privileges the military and seeks to embed it in local economies.
-Dictatorships were notorious for their savage violence, IS is notorious for its savage violence.
-Dictatorships vilified their enemy while trading with them, IS vilifies its enemies while trading with them.
-Arab dictators have claimed descent from Muhammad (the Hashemites, the Kings of Morocco, Saddam Hussein), thus 'Caliph Ibrahim' now wants to be called Ibrahim al-Baghdadi al-Qurayshi because he too is a descendant of the Prophet, which makes you wonder why they are at war with the Partisans of Ali (Shi'at Ali) who think the Caliph should be a relative of the Prophet....
The extremes have taken over the centre ground, in Israel and the Arab states, and we are living with the consequences, and will be for some time to come.
(Note -I am in the middle of a major project at the moment and cannot post on a regular basis).
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09-05-2014 #15
Re: reporting Israel and the Middle east
Good arguments Stavros (though I think the deep seated anti-semitism of the Hamas document is unmatched in official terms in Israel). Certainly Lieberman represents an abhorrent racism.The rise of the Sephardic domination of Israeli politics is also a key element.
As regards the tendency to absolutism that surely predates modern times and the crude imperialistic division of the region under Sykes-Picot - and is deeply embedded in some dominant strands of islam (in particular the Wahhabist/Salafist tradition which is intolerant of all but the very purest interpretation of the Qur'an and underpins the ideology of all the major islamist movements around the globe)
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09-05-2014 #16
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Re: reporting Israel and the Middle east
We are wrestling with an apparently intractable problem: has dictatorship in the Middle East been a reflection of age-old enmities, or does it create them? You could ask of Scotland, is the desire for independence a reflection of their feelings for 'the auld enemy' or is this latest wave of separatist feeling something that has been created in more recent times, and is related to the collapse of the vote for the Conservative Party in Scotland, a disenchantment with Westminster, a belief that the financial crisis of 2008 showed that Scotland cannot rely on London for its security, and so on?
What is striking about modern Israel is that the developmental years from 1948 to 1977 enabled Israelis to create a civil society in which they had space to move and create independent of government, and must be one reason why Israel has achieved so much in science and engineering, in the arts and entertainment, and may also explain why so many Israelis are actually disenchanted with their own politicians, in the sense that the criticism Odelay has made of politicians in the US also applies to Israel -but note too that this experience was different from the Mandate when the British dominated politics and were reluctant to open politics for all out of a fear of sectarian conflict, which happened anyway, and possibly because the more the British tried to suppress political expression, the more aggressive was the response, though the vexing problem of immigration was undoubtedly a toxic factor.
But if you then look at the Arab states, the British stifled political expression in TransJordan, while struggling to contain it in Iraq; the French faced numerous rebellions in Syria throughout their rule, and even after the independence of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, the 'west' continued to intervene in a way that they never did in Israel so that whereas Israel had that space in which to breathe and live free from intervention, no such luxury was afforded the Arabs who also, like it or not, resented the degree to which the imperial powers had lumbered them with states that served a minority interest, and fought against it.
In the case of oil, what could be more stark than the failure of Iranian nationalisation in 1951? Far from being an intervention to prevent extremists taking power, Musadeq was Prime Minister in a democratically elected Majlis, and while he blundered over the nationalisation because he did not anticipate the success of the world-wide boycott and thus could not sell anyone Iranian oil, the British view was that the oil belonged to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company just as it would later insist that the Suez Canal belonged to the shareholders of the Suez Canal company and not the Egyptians. Iranian oil was a crucial source of foreign exchange for the UK in the straitened circumstances of the post-war, so this really was an 'oil war' except that what happened was the coup you know about rather than an actual war.
The USA, the British and the French were involved in interventions in Iraq in 1958, in Lebanon in 1958, in the Yemen and Oman in the 1960s and so on -but no such interventions ever took place against Israel even when it was in illegal occupation of the Sinai peninsula, bombing targets in Egypt, Syria and Jordan, not to mention the mysterious case of the USS Liberty during the 1967 War. The Arabs are aware of all these incursions, but again, one wonders if the culture of dictatorship and violence in the Middle East is a reflection of its failed politics or contributes to it. I suspect it is a mixture of both.
As for IS, the link to an interview with Roy from a year or so ago offers a different perspective from what is being debated in most of our media.
https://cup.columbia.edu/static/Inte...ier-globalized
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09-13-2014 #17
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Re: reporting Israel and the Middle east
Joe Klein has reviewed Lawrence Wright's study of the Camp David peace talks, looks like a book worth reading: review is here:
Elusive Peace
‘Thirteen Days in September,’ by Lawrence Wright
On March 11, 1978, 11 Palestinian militants came ashore in Zodiac boats north of Tel Aviv and set about murdering as many Israelis as they could with guns and grenades. They hijacked a taxi and two buses; 38 were killed, including 13 children. The massacre was intended as a provocation; a disproportionate Israeli response was assumed. And three days later, Israel invaded southern Lebanon, which was then controlled by the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasir Arafat. “Those who killed Jews in our times cannot enjoy impunity,” the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin said. More than a thousand Palestinian civilians were killed; more than 100,000 were left homeless. The world, including President Jimmy Carter, was horrified. Following another invasion in 1982, Israel would occupy parts of southern Lebanon until May 2000. The similarity to recent events in Gaza is striking, of course. The Middle East never changes.
Except, very occasionally, when it does. A mere six months after the Lebanon incursion, Begin and the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, would negotiate peace between their countries, having been hounded into a very tentative comity by Carter during 13 days spent in isolation at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain Park. It was not a happy two weeks for the participants; Begin and Sadat could barely look at each other; no one sang “Kumbaya.” A great deal of what Carter and Sadat wanted to accomplish — a comprehensive plan to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands — had to be set aside. But a framework for peace between Egypt and Israel, the region’s principal adversaries, was beaten into shape during marathon sessions of what can only be called bare-knuckle diplomacy. The final peace treaty was signed at the White House on March 26, 1979, after even more haggling. Thirty-five years later, the peace between Israel and Egypt stands, sometimes unsteadily, as the most profound diplomatic achievement to emerge from the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Lawrence Wright’s “Thirteen Days in September” is a magnificent book with an unusual provenance. It began as a play called “Camp David,” which Wright wrote at the behest of Gerald Rafshoon, Carter’s old media meister. The negotiations were a natural piece of theater, filled with strange and colorful characters, constant plot twists and deathbed-dark humor; the play was mounted successfully at Washington’s Arena Stage in the spring of 2014. But Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and one of our finest nonfiction writers, wasn’t satisfied. The Camp David process was more than just stirring drama; it was a hinge in the history of the region, and a tutorial in negotiating strategy. Yet, aside from the memoirs of the participants, it has received relatively skimpy consideration by historians.
Perhaps the greatest service rendered by “Thirteen Days in September” is the gift of context. In his minute-by-minute account of the talks Wright intersperses a concise history of Egyptian-Israeli relations dating from the story of Exodus. Even more important is Wright’s understanding that Sadat, Begin and Carter were not just political leaders, but exemplars of the Holy Land’s three internecine religious traditions. Carter, the born-again Christian, “had come to believe that God wanted him to bring peace.” Sadat, a devout Muslim, brought along his deputy prime minister and astrologer, Hassan al-Tohamy, a Sufi mystic, because “he has something godly in him and he can see the unknown.” Tohamy reported “prophetic dreams or conversations he had just had with angels.” The rest of the Egyptian delegation thought he was mad.
Menachem Begin was the most secular of the three. His Judaism was litigious, drawn from the Talmudic tradition of worrying the law to distraction, fighting over every codicil. But even Begin had his mystical moments. When Carter proposed that Israel allow a Jordanian flag to fly over the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Begin responded, “Never. . . . What will happen when the Messiah comes?” He agreed to participate in the negotiations because “President Carter knows the Bible by heart, so he knows to whom this land by right belongs.”
In most thumbnail accounts of Camp David, Sadat emerges the hero, with good reason. He’s the visionary who started the reconciliation process by going to Jerusalem in 1977; he pays for the treaty with his life when he is assassinated in 1981. He is a more sympathetic character than Begin, a sourpuss extremist. But Sadat also has a clear, tough-minded sense of what was about to happen: He would offer a comprehensive peace plan for the region, Begin would reject it, Carter would pressure the Israelis to accept it. If Begin didn’t cave, he would be held responsible for the failure of the summit. Begin didn’t cave on anything except giving up the Sinai Peninsula, but Sadat did the unthinkable — he recognized Israel — and emerged from the haggling an almost saintly presence (in the West, at least), and Egypt gained crucial economic and military aid from the United States.
It is a measure of Wright’s fairness and subtlety that Begin comes across as an almost-sympathetic character. He isn’t dashing; he isn’t eloquent; he doesn’t smile. But there is integrity and brilliance to his stubbornness. He is a former terrorist who believes that not just Gaza and the West Bank, but also the Sinai Peninsula, are integral to Israel. He knows he’s going to have to give up Sinai, but he refuses to relinquish the Jewish settlements there. This is a central issue in the talks, resolved in a bolt of cleverness by Israel’s Moshe Dayan, who suggests that Begin pass the decision along to his parliament, the Knesset. Carter allows the gambit, with a private vow from Begin that he won’t campaign against the proposition.
In the end, Camp David is Jimmy Carter’s triumph, although it is not a transcendent one. Somehow, Carter, the unlovable Sunday school teacher, always eludes the credit he deserves. He conducts the discussions thoughtfully, at one point asking Begin and Sadat to talk about their days as political prisoners, which they do. But this doesn’t create a bond. He asks them to dress casually for the talks — Begin refuses — as if informality can induce intimacy. He brings no eloquence to the table, and little charm. He is a brilliant, dogged negotiator, but a self-righteous and curiously joyless one. He has staked his presidency on the talks and somehow manages to hold them together for 13 days, despite regular attempts by Begin and Sadat to walk away. He gets into shouting matches with both men, and at critical moments threatens them — effectively — with the loss of American aid and friendship.
But he is also able to rise above the clutter of the moment and change tactics. He arrives at Camp David expecting to be a facilitator, but by Day 5 he realizes that he has to take the lead. He proposes a detailed American peace plan, which becomes the template for the final agreement. (Barack Obama has been far more cautious — unwilling to present a detailed American plan, unwilling to call the Israeli and Palestinian leaders to the mountaintop.)
Wright reminds us that Carter’s Camp David was an act of surpassing political courage. At a time of double-digit inflation, sluggish economic growth, soaring gas prices and a real-time revolution in Iran, he dropped everything for two weeks and took a long shot at creating peace. He won his treaty, but lost his presidency because most Americans blamed him for not doing more to address the things they really cared about. There is a stubborn myopia to Carter’s quest, but also integrity and real honor — and now, a 35-year track record of a grudging but effective peace. Lawrence Wright makes a masterly case that it is time we gave Jimmy Carter full credit for all the lives his inspired diplomacy saved.
THIRTEEN DAYS IN SEPTEMBER
Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David
By Lawrence Wright
Illustrated. 345 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/bo...ttom-well&_r=0
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