True peace activists do not call for Israel's destruction

Great post.

Peace and love.

Not destruction and hate.

Wanting freedom for palestinians should not mean wanting death for israelis.

I personally blame palestinian "leadership" far more than I blame israel. If I ran a place and the guys next door were led by "leaders" like arafat, I wouldn't give them any friggin land, either.

These standard Zionist rants (with or without a "progressive" mask) have been refuted on this site over and over again. I don't think we need to waste time with them here, especially when they come from anonymous posters -- if it's not just one anonymous poster!

It's one thing to let Zionists try to refute our arguments. I'm for allowing that within reasonable limits. But it's quite another to let them use indybay as if it were their site, by posting gratuitous attacks on Palestinians and their genuine progressive supporters. If I were an editor on indybay, such posts would be deleted immediately.

If you considered commenting on the above remarks a waste of time, why did you even post your comment to begin with?

You talk here as if you were an editor or the person setting editorial policy. What's the basis for your apparent arrogant posturing that you co-own this board with the other anti-Zionists? Who and what gives you the right to decide what reasonable limits are?

I have never heard any activists call for Israel's destruction. Some people call for a vote for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and some call for a seperate Palestinian state, but neither means the end of Israel.

If you meant a call for disputed-territories' Palestinians to be eligible to vote for the Israeli parliament, that would mean -- under current circumstances -- the beginning of Israel's end: sooner or later the "right of return" would be allowed by the Knesset and once -- further down the line -- most Jews exist the state, Israel would probably unite with Jordan.
If most Israeli Jews remain put, the current intifada would seem like a Sunday school picnic in comparison to the war that will break out and might ravage the whole country, to say nothing of the casualties on both sides.

Perhaps, but the current way thuings are going does suggest that even in the case of Gaza it will have a difficult time becoming an independent state and at some point Israel will have to give it up completeley (including letting Palestinians buy large arms like other nations) or state that it is a part of Israel proper. In terms of fears of land redistribution etc.. one hasnt seen that in S Africa despite the change in government there. Israel may be changed if Jews are only a slight majority but depending on the constitution etc.. there wouldnt be a huge risk of any major changes. US immigration is causing demographic changes here too but only racists would call a future where the white population is a minority the "end of the US".

I agree it'd be ludicrous to make Gaza alone a Palestinian state. It probably already is the most densely populated area worldwide. How would some 5 million "refugees" all be crammed in there? The problem would just be exacerbated.
The latest I heard, Sharon intends to evacuate and withdraw from it completely

What keeps eluding you guys is that in total contrast to the Palestinians, the S. African blacks were led by the apartheid's demise by a paragon of enlightened civility. He wasn't seeking revenge nor encouraged his constituents to initiate attacks against the former enemy. Arafat and Paslestinian religious leaders are the very opposite.

Israel's unwritten constitution is still in its formative stages. Besides, the comparison of Israel to the US in this context leaves a lot to be desired.

and, strangely enough, in the peculiar world of Zionism, that makes me antisemitic

in other words, if, instead a state like Israel, that provides privileges for Jews, such as immigration rights, property ownership and public services, while suppressing Palestinians in the occupied territories through a brutal military occupation, you advocate one country called Palestine that provides for political rights and privileges independent of one's religious identity, as I do, you are somehow an antisemite

truly bizarre reasoning, as anyone who would advocate an American style, federal system of governance for Palestine, as I do, has apparently exposed their hatred of Jews

just as, I suppose, anyone who advocated the rights of African Americans in the Deep South during the 1950s and 1960s must have been giving expression to their deep seated hatred of whites

the blood of Palestine is now being shed as a result of the death throes of two failed nationalisms, the colonialism of Zionism and the mid-20th Century state socialism of the PLO, and there is only way forward, given the inability of the two societies to survive independent of one another: one secular state, with equal rights and privileges for all, as the "two state solution' invariably provokes the violent sadomasochism of both sides

the GOOD progressive left stands consistently for GOOD progressive values, such equal rights for all individuals, regardless of race, class and religion, and does not manufacture rationalizations for supporting a colonial power that has expanded its power and influence by driving out Palestinians, creating a police state for those that remain in the occupied territories, and smear those who object to such a perversion of left principles by calling those who object anti-semites

--Richard Estes
Davis, CA

The main post's author seems to claim that people who find little or no problem with Muslim states in the Middle East and beyond existing as racist states that favor Muslims but do find fault with Israel favoring Jews in much less egregious ways are guilty of bigotry of the anti-Semitic stripe. These people repeatedly fail to sound outcries of the same volume over worse human rights violations in Muslim states (and even non-Muslim ones). I tend to agree with the author. They aren't heard espousing secularism within the Arab/Muslim world. One being preoccupied *exclusively with Israel's* faults is what makes one bigoted,-- you need to look at the forest rather than just the trees to grasp where the problematic part lies.

Your concept might have been very worthy of putting into practice had each sides to this conflict, especially the Palestinian, been culturally and religiously tolerant not unlike most Scandinavians. Alas, the actual situation is a very far cry from the Scandinavian brand of peaceful co-existence and there's no sign for any imminent improvement, thanks in large part for the massive indoctrination, propaganda and incitement rampant in Palestinian society.

The practicality of the American model you're advocating doesn't exist. Even if all expressions and attitudes of Jewish racism toward Arabs were eliminated tomorrow, we would still be facing the problem of eliminated anti-Israeli sentiment and anti-Jewish racism which is a far worse and prevalent problem then its Jewish mirror.
Most Israelis object to your concept, to say nothing of the much more fierce Palestinian objection.

Your claim that Israel "has expanded its power and influence by driving out Palestinians" is immensely afflicted by hyperbole at best.

call for the destruction of *all* nation states.

I have never heard anyone on the left argue for the destruction of Israel. What I have heard is criticism of Israel's polices and lunatic Zionists equating that honest criticism with a desire to destroy Israel.

Buh, bye, Zionist.

One of my sentences should read:

Even if all expressions and attitudes of Jewish racism toward Arabs were eliminated tomorrow, we would still be facing the problem of virulent Palestinian anti-Israeli sentiment and anti-Jewish racism which is a far worse and prevalent problem then its Jewish mirror.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

nessie, you're a self declared "justice activist" rather than a peace activist, so you're in no position to lecture folks aiming at real peace activism about what such activism entails. Speak only in the name of your own principles. Don't try to define others'.

nessie: "I'm also a historically literate, astute observer global political economics."

You misspelled "self-important blowhard who can't distinguish between his personal opinions and objective reality and will make up any old shit about the Zi-i-i-ionists if he thinks someone might possibly buy it."

@%<

True peace activists do not call for Israel's destruction.

SURE THEY DO!!

JUST LIKE THEY CALLED FOR THE 'DESTRUCTION'/ABOLITION OF THE IDEOLOGICALLY APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICAN STATE AND REPLACED IT WITH, IDEOLOGICALLY (AND IN LEGAL THEORY AT LEAST), A MORE MULTICULTURALLY DEMOCRATIC STATE OF SOUTH AFRICA.

JUST LIKE THEY CALLED FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF THE "JIM CROW" STATE IN THE U.S. AND REPLACED IT WITH A MORE TRUE DEMOCRACY.

THAT'S **RIGHT**!! TO **ABOLISH** THE POLITICALLY, LEGALLY, AND IDEOLOGICALLY SELF-DEFINED "THE JEWISH[-SUPREMACIST/ZIONIST/APARTHEID] STATE" AND REPLACE IT WITH A **TRUE** MULTICULTURAL/MULTI-ETHNIC/PLURALIST POLITICAL DEMOCRATIC STATE WITH ABSOLUTELY EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL PEOPLE REGARDLESS OF RELIGION, RACE, OR ETHNICITY.


"by GOOD Progressive lefty"

YOU MEAN A **FAKE** 'PROGRESSIVE' ***POSER***!

I AGREE WITH AARON AARONS, IT'S PROBABLY BAD FORM TO KEEP LETTING ZIONISTS -- ESPECIALLY POSING AS **FAKE** PROGRESSIVES/LEFTISTS -- COMMANDEER INDYBAY FOR, IN EFFECT, THEIR NUMEROUS PROPAGANDA 'LEAFLETS' MACHINE.

THIS SEEMS TO BE _A NEW MOVE_ BY THE ZIONISTS -- ALL OVER INDYMEDIA. BUT, THEY ALREADY HAVE **PLENTY** OF THEIR OWN MEDIA!!

IN ADDITION TO THAT, THEY HAVE **PLENTY** OF THEIR INTIMIDATION SQUADS/ORGANIZATIONS (LIKE THE ADL, THE JCRC, ETC.) TO ATTACK TRUE PROGRESSIVES/LEFTISTS/ANTI-ZIONISTS.

ALL THESE (SOMETIMES EXACT SAME WORD-FOR-WORD!) ARGUMENTS BY THE FAKE "LEFTY" (OR UNDER DIFFERENT ALIASES) ABOUT ISAREL "BEING SINGLED OUT", AND "EVERY OTHER ETHNIC GROUP HAS THEIR OWN STATE", HAVE BEEN RECYCLED OVER AND OVER -- AND DEALT WITH NUMEROUS TIMES AND IN OTHER CURRENT INDYBAY THREADS, LIKE:

"80% of "historic Palestine" became (trans)Jordan"
http://www.indybay.org/news/2004/10/1701058_comment.php#1701747

LORD KNOWS I ENJOY DEBATING AND MAKING FOOLS OF THESE SELF-IMPORTED ZIONIST *IDIOTS*, BUT I AGREE WITH AARON: AT LEAST EDITORIAL CONSIDERATION SHOULD BE MADE FOR JUST DELETING/HIDING THESE *OBVIOUS* ZIONIST LEAFLETS (AT LEAST THE REDUNDANT ONES) -- ESPECIALLY THOSE POSING AS FAKE 'PROGRESSIVES/LEFTISTS'.

AND NO PROGRESSIVE OR LEFTIST CALLS HIM-/HERSELF A "PROGRESSIVE LEFTY"! THAT (*OBVIOUS* IGNORANCE OF THE BASIC TERMS/USAGE) IS A DEAD GIVEAWAY THAT THE POSER ABOVE IS A **FAKE**!!


FAKE Progressive lefty: "Good members of the progressive left understand it's a complex issue."

NO IT ISN'T "COMPLEX": IT'S STRAIGHT UP EUROPEAN *(SETTLER-)COLONIALISM* IN THE NON-EUROPEAN WORLD.

IT'S JUST LIKE IN FORMER APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA, FORMER RHODESIA, ETC., AND ANYWHERE ELSE EUROPEANS WENT AND ESTABLISHED A COLONIAL OR SETTLER-COLONIAL STATE, SUBJUGATING THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE..

"True peace activists call for the destruction of *all* nation states"

Precisely

And, separate from the anarchist concept that the institution of the state will invariably abuse the liberties of its populace, the concept that any state has a right to exist independent of how it treats those under its power is absurd.

"Your claim that Israel "has expanded its power and influence by driving out Palestinians" is immensely afflicted by hyperbole at best."

Then, I must assume that the Zionists themselves were incurably afflicted with this ailment, as no one spoke so candidly about the need to drive out the Palestinians, and their plans for doing so, as they did.

The problem is, it was socially acceptable in the West, starting in the late 19th Century, and running through, say, the late 1970s, to speak very candidly about the substitution of Jews for the indigenous populace in Palestine, and its purported social and cultural desirability, and the Zionists, perhaps overconfident that the West would always accept its pseudo-historical perspective, expressed themselves too often and too bluntly, and even worse, frequently in writing


--Richard Estes
Davis, CA

I'm satisfied to notice you are at least not continuing to treat your apparent hitherto premise that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were uprooted by Israeli forces as an ingrained article of faith.

I am not aware of any public discussions among or within most Zionist currents following the end of the independence war in '49 until the present in which this alleged need to expel the "Palestinians" was brought up, except among Kahane followers and the late Rehav'am Ze'evi's Moledet party. In fact, I can't recall other Zionist currents or leaders calling for a need to uproot the Palestinians. Surely you don't actually believe the pro-transfer Kahanists and (ex)Moledet add up to a majority of the Zionists, do you? They don't even constitute a huge minority.

Both Ben-Gurion and Begin and their successors never advocated the expulsion of the "Palestinians". B.G. was even on record telling a prominent local Arab figure during a conversation, "the Arabs have no reason to resist our dominant position as rulers of the would-be Jewish state, because they will materialistically benefit immensely from our position of supreme power. [I reconstructed the quote to the best of my recollection]" The Arab retorted, "no, we adamantly refuse and wish to achieve such a living standard within our own state, even if it'll take us a hundred more years to accomplish."

I realize you're not the only person to have long been convinced that the "Palestinian" population was wholly indigenous whereas the Jews were entirely alien. I've shown multiple times how the "Palestinians" consisted also of a sizable body of non-indigenous people from Arab countries and elsewhere. One of the earliest known sources documenting this fact early in the last century is, I believe, the 1911 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica (29 years after the Zionist immigration began). Additionally, there were tens of thousands of indigenous Jews in the Holy Land by 1882. So, we can't maintain an oversimplified picture of indigenous "Palestinians" vs. alien Jews and still be in line with the historical givens.

"Both Ben-Gurion and Begin and their successors never advocated the expulsion of the "Palestinians".

I GUESS THAT'S WHY NO LESS THAN ALBERT EINSTEIN, HANNAH ARENDT, AND A LIST OF OTHER JEWS REFERRED TO BEGIN, IN PARTICULAR, AS A FACIST RACIST IN THEIR OPEN PUBLIC LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES -- AND SAID THAT HE SHOULD NOT EVEN BE ALLOWED INTO THE UNITED STATES.

AND I GUESS THAT'S WHY (WAS IT IN RABIN'S BIOGRAPHY?) THERE WAS A RECOUNTING OF THE STATEMENTS AND QUOTES FROM BEN GURION STATING THAT THE PALESTINIANS WILL BE SWEPT AWAY -- AS WELL AS OTHER WELL-KNOWN AND VERIFIABLE ANTI-PALESTINIAN RACIST STATEMENTS BY THE FOUNDERS OF ISRAEL THAT CAN BE EASILY GOOGLE ("RACIST ZIONIST QUOTES" OR SEARCH TERMS TO THAT EFFECT.)


"B.G. was even on record telling a prominent local Arab figure during a conversation, "the Arabs have no reason to resist our dominant position as rulers of the would-be Jewish state, because they will materialistically benefit immensely from our position of supreme power."

"FROM OUR POSITION OF SUPREME POWER": GEE, THAT DOESN'T SOUND NAZIESQUE, NOW DOES IT.

OTHERWISE IT'S THE SAME OLD EUROPEAN "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" TO RAISE UP THE UNCIVILIZED HEATHEN SAVAGES THAT HAS MARKED EUROPEAN COLONIALISM FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS.

IT REMINDS ME OF WHAT GANDHI SAID ABOUT "WESTERN CIVILIZATION": "I THINK THAT WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA!"

"The Arab retorted, "no, we adamantly refuse and wish to achieve such a living standard within our own state, even if it'll take us a hundred more years to accomplish." "

GEE, THOSE UNGRATEFUL AYE-RABS!!: THEY REJECTED SUCH WHITE (*INCIDENTALLY*, **SELF-SERVING**) MAGANAMINITY!!


"I realize you're not the only person to have long been convinced that the "Palestinian" population was wholly indigenous whereas the Jews were entirely alien. BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH..."

READ: I REALIZE THAT YOU HAVE READ AND BOUGHT INTO THE ZIONIST 'MEIN KAMPF" BY THE ULTRA-RIGHT-WING ARCH-ZIONIST JOAN PETERS, THE TOTALLY DISCREDITED "FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL". (WANT A BOOK REVIEW: IT MADE THE *ORIGINAL* NAZIS BLUSH!)


"Additionally, there were tens of thousands of indigenous Jews in the Holy Land by 1882."

GEE, 10's OF 1000's!: AND YET THE MOSTLY INDIGENOUS JEWISH POPUPLATION -- AND HEAVILY DISCRIMINATED AGIANST BY INVADING EUROPEAN JEWS -- OF PALESTINE AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY WAS 3%-6% OF PALESTINE -- AN UNDERWHELMING MINORITY WHO ESSENTIALLY LIVED IN PEACE (AS MUCH AS HUMAN BEINGS MIGHT EVER DO) WITH THE MUSLIMS AND THE CHRISTIANS.

CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW MANY PALESTINIAN *ARABS* (MUSLIM AND CHRISTIAN) THERE WERE!!

AND THE INDIGENOUS PALESTINIAN JEWS **NEVER** CALLED FOR "A ZIONIST JEWISH STATE".

BUT 'CT' HAS ONE THING RIGHT: THE EUROPEAN ZIONIST JEWISH PLAN FOR THE RACIST COLONIZATION OF PALESTINE -- WITH THE SPONSORSHIP AND HELP FROM THE WESTERN EUROPEAN IMPERIALISTS -- BEGAN LONG BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST.

Zionist historian Benny Morris has concluded that Israel did, in fact, seek to expel the Palestianian population in response to the 1948 war, as following excerpts from a 1/13/04 Haaretz interview indicate

in other words, Ben-Gurion was a "transferist"

furthermore, the extent and scope of this deliberate effort, and the violence that resulted from it, remain the source of much controversy, see, for example, Nur Masalha's recent book about the Palestinian refugees, "The Politics of Denial", wherein he reads the historical record even more harshly than Morris, especially in regard to the extent that the expulsion can be laid in any way at the feet of the Palestinians

anyway, here are the excerpts, and it is also interesting reading in regard to the psychological and colonial mindset of Zionism, whereby Arabs resisting the seizure of their land in Palestine, and subordination to Jews immigrating from Europe, are somehow conflated into the equivalent of Nazis

here is the link for the article, and I could not find the original on the Haaretz site:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1057399/posts

apparently, it was posted there by a pro-Likud type there who found the actions and Morris' perspective about them unobjectionable



[Rape, massacre, transfer

Benny Morris, in the month ahead the new version of your book on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be published. Who will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or the Palestinians?

"The revised book is a double-edged sword. It is based on many documents that were not available to me when I wrote the original book, most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives. What the new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape. In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor of the IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.

"At the same time, it turns out that there was a series of orders issued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinian intermediate levels to remove children, women and the elderly from the villages. So that on the one hand, the book reinforces the accusation against the Zionist side, but on the other hand it also proves that many of those who left the villages did so with the encouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself."

According to your new findings, how many cases of Israeli rape were there in 1948?

"About a dozen. In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her and her father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and tried to rape several more. At Hunin, which is in the Galilee, two girls were raped and then murdered. There were one or two cases of rape at Tantura, south of Haifa. There was one case of rape at Qula, in the center of the country. At the village of Abu Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four female prisoners, one of whom was raped a number of times. And there were other cases. Usually more than one soldier was involved. Usually there were one or two Palestinian girls. In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder. Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg."

According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?

"Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.

"The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion.

"That can't be chance. It's a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres."

What you are telling me here, as though by the way, is that in Operation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicit expulsion order. Is that right?

"Yes. One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31, 1948, the commander of the Northern Front, Moshe Carmel, issued an order in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arab population. Carmel took this action immediately after a visit by Ben-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth. There is no doubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion. Just as the expulsion order for the city of Lod, which was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited the headquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]."

Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for a deliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion?

"From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, there is no orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere of [population] transfer. The transfer idea is in the air. The entire leadership understands that this is the idea. The officer corps understands what is required of them. Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of transfer is created."

Ben-Gurion was a "transferist"?

"Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist."

I don't hear you condemning him.

"Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here."

Benny Morris, for decades you have been researching the dark side of Zionism. You are an expert on the atrocities of 1948. In the end, do you in effect justify all this? Are you an advocate of the transfer of 1948?

"There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don't think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands."

We are talking about the killing of thousands of people, the destruction of an entire society.

"A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it. When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it's better to destroy."

There is something chilling about the quiet way in which you say that.

"If you expected me to burst into tears, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I will not do that."

So when the commanders of Operation Dani are standing there and observing the long and terrible column of the 50,000 people expelled from Lod walking eastward, you stand there with them? You justify them?

"I definitely understand them. I understand their motives. I don't think they felt any pangs of conscience, and in their place I wouldn't have felt pangs of conscience. Without that act, they would not have won the war and the state would not have come into being."

You do not condemn them morally?

"No."

They perpetrated ethnic cleansing.

"There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing."

And that was the situation in 1948?

"That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."

The term `to cleanse' is terrible.

"I know it doesn't sound nice but that's the term they used at the time. I adopted it from all the 1948 documents in which I am immersed."

What you are saying is hard to listen to and hard to digest. You sound hard-hearted.

"I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. From the moment the Yishuv [pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine] was attacked by the Palestinians and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war.

"Remember another thing: the Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them."

And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed?

"That is correct. Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history."

And in our case it effectively justifies a population transfer.

"That's what emerges."

And you take that in stride? War crimes? Massacres? The burning fields and the devastated villages of the Nakba?

"You have to put things in proportion. These are small war crimes. All told, if we take all the massacres and all the executions of 1948, we come to about 800 who were killed. In comparison to the massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia, that's peanuts. In comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against the Germans at Stalingrad, that's chicken feed. When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost an entire 1 percent of the population, you find that we behaved very well."

The next transfer

You went through an interesting process. You went to research Ben-Gurion and the Zionist establishment critically, but in the end you actually identify with them. You are as tough in your words as they were in their deeds.

"You may be right. Because I investigated the conflict in depth, I was forced to cope with the in-depth questions that those people coped with. I understood the problematic character of the situation they faced and maybe I adopted part of their universe of concepts. But I do not identify with Ben-Gurion. I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948. Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered."

I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that Ben-Gurion erred in expelling too few Arabs?

"If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job. I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types. But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all. If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country - the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. It may yet turn out that this was his fatal mistake. If he had carried out a full expulsion - rather than a partial one - he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations."

I find it hard to believe what I am hearing.

"If the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza and within Israel itself."

In his place, would you have expelled them all? All the Arabs in the country?

"But I am not a statesman. I do not put myself in his place. But as an historian, I assert that a mistake was made here. Yes. The non-completion of the transfer was a mistake."]


--Richard Estes
Davis, CA

I BET'CHA THAT NON-CRITICAL THINKIFIER WILL FIND A WAY TO EXPLAIN ALL THAT AWAY. RACISM (ESPECIALLY GENOCIDAL RACISM) WANTS WHAT RACISM WANTS -- THAT'S ALL THERE IS TO IT.HE WILL COME UP WITH ANY RHETORICAL CONTORTION.

FOR RACISTS, NO INTELLECTUAL, HISTORICAL, OR MORAL ARGUMENTS, OR COMPARISONS, ARE **EVER** PERSUASIVE.

(OR, IF WE'RE LUCKY, HE JUST WON'T SHOW UP AGAIN AT THIS THREAD -- BUT ONLY TO REPEAT HIS PROPAGANDA IN ANOTHER THREAD. PERHAPS ANOTHER PROPAGANDA PIECE LAUNCHED BY ZIONISTS FOR INDYMEDIA.)

IT'S LIKE THE NAZIS AT THE NUREMBURG TRIALS WHO -- NO MATTER WHAT YOU SHOWED THEM -- AND EVEN IF IT CAME FROM DISCOVERED CLASSIFIED NAZI MILITARY RECORDS -- WOULD KEEP TRYING TO EXPLAIN AWAY JEWISH PERSECUTION AND THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST.

AND TOO MANY **JEWS** TODAY ARE LIKE THE NAZI NON-JEWISH GERMANS OF THAT ERA WHO TURNED THEIR HEADS AWAY FROM THE BRUTAL PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS OR OTHERWISE JUST DIDN'T WANT TO KNOW.

BUT THOSE NAZI ERA NON-JEWISH GERMANS WHO LOOKED TOO CLOSELY TO WHAT WAS HAPPENING TO THE GERMAN JEWS, OR TRIED TO DEFEND THEM, COULD BE IMPRISONED OR KILLED THEMSELVES.

TODAYS JEWS DON'T EVEN HAVE THAT EXCUSE TO IGNORE WHAT ISRAEL/ZIONISTS HAVE BEEN DOING TO THE PALESTINIANS.

BENNY MORRIS: "There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history."

AND THESE ZIONSTS ARE THE KINDS OF PEOPLE THAT GO ON AND ON ABOUT ***HITLER***!!???

AND WEEK AFTER WEEK ON SOME AMERICAN TV/CABLE CHANNEL PUT ON ONE HOLOCAUST MOVIE, PLAY, OR DOCUMENTARY AFTER ANOTHER!!?

THAT SOUNDS LIKE A COMMENT THAT ***HITLER*** COULD HAVE MADE!! -- AND PROBABLY DID!

I've read the entire interview with Benny Morris that you clipped. Morris' claims cannot be summarily dismissed and they bear a ring of truth and credibility, as evidenced -- for example -- by his shattering the myth of 254 villagers massacred at Deir Yassin.
On the downside, I've found that Morris doesn't know Arabic and cannot read documents in that language.

I have just sent an email to Dr. Uri Milstein who's in the same league as Morris and is Israel's most authoritative military historian as well as an anthropologist and sociologist, requesting that he remark on Morris' claims. If Dr. Milstein replies, I shall post his comments to this thread.

The israel-hating freaks have successfully changed hte topic.

Whatever "wrong" stuff happened 60 years ago, it's been 60 years, and you can't "undo" the existence of Israel, or Jordan, or Pakistan, or America, or any established nation.

There are two kinds of peace activists:

1) People who genuinely want peace

2) People who want to destroy israel.

JA and piece of shit scumbags like him are in category #2.

[BENNY MORRIS: "There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history."

AND THESE ZIONSTS ARE THE KINDS OF PEOPLE THAT GO ON AND ON ABOUT ***HITLER***!!???

AND WEEK AFTER WEEK ON SOME AMERICAN TV/CABLE CHANNEL PUT ON ONE HOLOCAUST MOVIE, PLAY, OR DOCUMENTARY AFTER ANOTHER!!?

THAT SOUNDS LIKE A COMMENT THAT ***HITLER*** COULD HAVE MADE!! -- AND PROBABLY DID!]

While there is some truth to this, I don't personally consider this line of analysis very productive, because one could say the same of people like Mao, Stalin, Lord Kitchener, Winston Churchill, Bismarck, William Tecumseh Sherman and many others.

Indeed, if I recall correctly, Morris spoke about the need to "break eggs" at another point in the interview, recalling the comments of a young Mao, probably quoting Lenin, Marx or Engels.

Furthermore, comparisons to Nazism, objections to offensiveness aside, don't strike me as useful, because most people see Nazism as a unique phenomenon, and thus any comparison to it has the unintended effect of removing the subject of comparison, in this instance, Zionism, outside of consideration as something rooted in the everyday world.

Right now, I am interested in the present, and the extent to which Morris' perspective, given the fact that he is a self-described leftist in Israel, opens the door to more unspeakable horrors to come. After all, the world's strongest, and most public, proponents of this approach globally right now are Tony Blair, Osama Bin Laden, George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon. So just as Christopher Hitchens crosses over to the neo-conservatives in America, Morris does something similar in Israel. This is socially important.

One could easily see Bush and Cheney making similar remarks to justify their actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their attempt to remove Chavez from power in Venezuela.

--Richard Estes
Davis, CA

Every genocidal or semi-genocidal state (like the United States with the Native People), the Belgian Congo, Apartheid South Africa, Turkey with the Armenians or the Kurds, even Australia with the Aborigines, historically among too many others -- just like the Nazi state -- tried to erase two basic things about the indigenous/native people they were/are attempting to dehumanize and eliminate: (1) their *history* in the land, and (2) their very *personhood* (first culturally and then, ultimately, literally).

This is what "non-Critical Thinkifier, Anti-Black Racist", repeatedly tries to do, too, in every thread related to Israel!! This, taking after the Zionist Jew, Joan Peters' *'shining'* example in her widely Zionist-loved and, thus, often-textually-mimicked book, "From Time Immemorial", the Zionist Jewish 'Mein Kampf' -- a *totally* discredited book from any serious academic setting.

So, the Zionist State of Israel -- and the Zionist ideology -- merely follows -- and is predicated upon -- the very same genocidal paradigm.

[Every genocidal or semi-genocidal state (like the United States with the Native People), the Belgian Congo, Apartheid South Africa, Turkey with the Armenians or the Kurds, even Australia with the Aborigines, historically among too many others -- just like the Nazi state -- tried to erase two basic things about the indigenous/native people they were/are attempting to dehumanize and eliminate: (1) their *history* in the land, and (2) their very *personhood* (first culturally and then, ultimately, literally).

This is what "non-Critical Thinkifier, Anti-Black Racist", repeatedly tries to do, too, in every thread related to Israel!! This, taking after the Zionist Jew, Joan Peters' *'shining'* example in her widely Zionist-loved and, thus, often-textually-mimicked book, "From Time Immemorial", the Zionist Jewish 'Mein Kampf' -- a *totally* discredited book from any serious academic setting.

So, the Zionist State of Israel -- and the Zionist ideology -- merely follows -- and is predicated upon -- the very same genocidal paradigm.]

I don't fully agree with this, and hope that you don't mind hacking through the thicket of my verbose prose, because I think that the distinctions I discuss really do matter, as they influence one's view of the past, present and future. Your remarks provide me with a good opportunity to give a more global presentation my views.

I'm no academic, and, as someone initially versed more in the cultural and left politics of Europe, Central and South America and East Asia, I came late to this issue. And I struggle to avoid becoming an intellectual obssessive about this conflict, because I'd really rather watch silent films at the PFA, or "Hero" at the multiplex, but it's difficult.

Turkey with the Armenians, Nazi Germany with the Jews, and to a lesser extent, the Slavs, the US withNative Americans and the Belgians in the Congo, wanted to exterminate or ethnically cleanse the populace that they believed to be impossible to incorporate into the new society.

But the Nazis wanted to kill all the Jews, but they didn't want to kill all the Slavs. Why? Because they explicitly wanted to use Slavs as a subservient, enslaved labor force for the Reich. Similarly, the US wanted to kill Native Americans, until they had almost completed the genocidal process, but did not want to eradicate African Americans, although there were a number of "return to Africa" resettlement schemes. Again, why?

Well, Southerners brought African Americans to the South to perform back breaking agricultural labor, so the idea that African Americans had a role to play in the US as a subservient labor force was well established. Bringing people to the US, and then killing them made no sense, except to the extent that violence was necessary to keep them under control. Of course, there was a great tension, as a lot of whites hated African Americans with such an intensity that they killed them and burnt down their towns, but, ultimately, the economic incentive of the elite prevailed over the bigotry of the masses.

Likewise, the apartheid regime in South Africa expropriated the lands of the Africans already living there, but never wanted to exterminate them. They wanted Africans to work in the mines for nickels and dimes while they pocketed the profits.

Additionally, I do consider the Nazi experience to be separable from the others, because Nazi leadership were driven by a medieval influence, a hostility to modernism (and especially urbanism), which is absent in your other examples. Liberal imperialism was a bigoted, exploitative variant of modernism, to be sure, but it was modernist none the less, lacking the hostility to contemporary cultural expression that so clearly marked Nazism.

My superficial impression is that Zionism never resolved the question of what to do about the Palestinians. Some Zionists maintained that they should be expelled, and killed if they resisted. Others believed that they would accept a subordinate role in the new society as non-Jews. Meanwhile, there were non-Zionist Jews that opposed the idea of colonizing the region to the detriment of the people already living there.

In other words, they were all over the map, except that none of them, or very few of them, ever saw Arabs as the equal of European Jews, as Zionism has its roots in the liberal imperialism of the late 19th Century. Indeed, a number of refuseniks, who were interviewed from the recently published book, "Breaking Ranks", speak candidly about the continued persistence of this attitude today, including the potentially explosive consequences of a social caste system among Jews themselves, both on an ethnic and class basis.

Morris' interview, and the political odyssey revealed there, can be read as movement away from the view that Israel could negotiate an arrangement with the Palestinians in which they would be the low income labor engine of the region (one of the objectives of liberal imperialism) to one in which he came to the conclusion that they were just too intractable, and too prone to violently resisting their subordinate role that they should have been ethnically cleansed, and killed if necessary (a tragic result of frustrated liberal imperialism in the Congo and, to some extent, Indonesia).

And, thus he says that Ben-Gurion made a mistake by not completing the explusion of the Palestinians in 1948. I'm guessing that Ben-Gurion decided not to complete the "transfer"or many reasons, including a lack of confidence that Jewish immigration would fulfill all the economic needs of Israel. So, it was a half measure. And, the history of Israel since 1948 is a succession of half measures, many of them brutal, but half measures, none the less.

The invasion of Lebanon in 1982, advertised by Sharon as the eradication of the Palestinian problem through the military defeat of the PLO and the creation of a docile population in the occupied territories, stands out as the exception that proves the rule, and its disasterous failure over the next 20 years may have subconsciously made Isrealis adverse to such aggressive action in the future.

Note, for example, that, to this day, Israel will unleash disproportionate force within the occupied territories, including the grostesque invasion of the West Bank in April 2002, but is still very circumspect about any military action in Lebanon, Syria or Iran (as opposed to threats), or any other action that would impact these countries, as well as Jordan, through mass killings of Palestinians or the explusion of Palestinians there.

Finally, there is an acute psychological issue which I cannot discuss very well, except to say that Israelis seem to also define themselves paradoxically in contrast to the Palestinians, while exotically expropriating their culture, creating a sort of pan Middle Eastern culture that is neither European or Arabic, but both. What is the emotional consequence if the Palestinians are killed or driven away to be "resettled" elsewhere? Southern whites face a similar difficulty, and may explain why they accepted desegregation, as limited as it is, to a perpetual campaign of violence against African Americans.

One cannot imagine Southern whites existing in the absence of African Americans, and, likewise, one cannot imagine either Israelis or Palestinians in the absence of one another. Which is why I believe, as incomprehensible as it is to many, that one day there will be a secular state encompassing all of the territory of Israel and the occupied territories.

Of course there are all the usual objections from both the Jewish and Palestinian nationalists, but the present approach is clearly unworkable, as the "two state solution" has been hijacked by conservatives in both Israel and the US, and generates competition between the two competing nationalist visions. And the present situation trafficks in a false sense of normality that becomes increasingly violent with the passage of time, while the one, secular state solution continues to be condemned as naively utopian.

Now, Israel has an enormous population of Palestianians which it cannot economically exploit, as they live in locked down conditions in the occupied territories, and yet, it cannot develop the political will to ethnically cleanse them, or kill them in large numbers, as it remains fearful that it will socially and economically marginalize itself if it does so. Clearly, something has to give, the time for half measures has almost come to an end.

Accordingly, we live in an especially dangerous time, but the fact that Sharon has pragmatically accepted the reality that Israel can never directly control Gaza is ground for very cautious long term optimism, especially since Sharon himself, during the early 1970s, worked to create the prospect of Gaza being incorporated into Israel. Perhaps, a grasping at straws, but one likes to have some hope. Hopefully, my remarks will not be misunderstood as an endorsement of the Gaza disengagement plan itself, as I fully recognize the Machiavellian motivations behind it.


--Richard Estes
Davis, CA

-- BECAUSE YOU DELETED MY SECOND TO LAST POST MERELY POINTING OUT TO RICHARD THAT YOU DELETED MY POST.

THERE'S NO POINT IN MY RESPONDING TO YOU IF "ONE OF THE EDITORS" AT INDYBAY IS JUST GOING TO DELETE MY POST.

CAN YOU IMAGINE WHY THEY WOULD DO THAT?

JUST LIKE NESSIE AT SF.INDYMEDIA!

APPARENTLY, SOMEONE AT INDYBAY OR NESSIE (I DIDN'T KNOW HE WAS WORKING AT INDYBAY NOW) KEEPS DELETING MY POST (A RESPONSE TO RICARD ESTES, INCLUDING MY POST NOTIFYING RICHARD THAT MY RESPONSE TO HIS POST WAS DELETED) IN THE THREAD:

"True peace activists do not call for Israel's destruction"
http://www.indybay.org/news/2004/10/1701656.php

MAYBE, SINCE YOU ARE JEWISH AND ADAMANTLY ANTI-ZIONIST, I'LL EMAIL IT TO YOU AND YOU CAN REVIEW AND POST IT (IF YOU APPROVE) AND SEE WHAT "ONE OF THE EDITORS" (AS NESSIE CALLS HIMSELF) DOES.

Mr. Estes' view of Israel's military activity within the disputed territories in general and the '02 Operation Defensive Shield in particular is, I speculate, a product of the skewed coverage by the media he relied on.

Otherwise, his latest post is a remarkably incisive and lucid analysis of some aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli problem.

JUST LIKE THE **ORIGINAL** NAZIS AT THE NUREMBURG TRIALS!!:

'VEE TRIED TO HALT ZHE JJEWWZ FROM RUNNING INTO ZHE DEALTH CAMPS UNDT JUMPING INTO ZHE OVENS BUT ZHERE VAS NOTHING VEE COULD *DO*!!'

YOU CAN BET THE RENT MONEY ON HOW THOSE *ZIO*-NAZIS THINK AND BEHAVE:

'OY VEY...!! THE STORY, IT'S BUBKIS!! I SHOULD *LIVE* SO LONG TO TELL YOU JUST HOW *MESHUGENEH* ALL THOSE PALESTINIAN SCHLEMAZELS WERE!! THE WHOLE NUDNIK MAGILA OF THEM JUST KEPT JUMPING IN FRONT OF OUR BULLETS WHILE WE WERE DUCK HUNTING IN JUDEA AND SAMARIA!! THEY KEPT PROVOKING OUR MOTHERS' JEWISH GUILT!! AND NOW ALL THEY DO IS KVETCH, KVETCH, KVETCH...!!'


non-Critical Thinkifier, ANTI-BLACK RACIST!: "I have just sent an email to Dr. Uri Milstein who's in the same league as Morris and is Israel's most authoritative military historian as well as an anthropologist and sociologist"

NOW NON-'CT' IS GOING 'ZIONIST SHOPPING'!! NOT CONTENT THAT ONE ZIONIST SAID, IN EFFECT, '*SURE*! WE HAD MASSACRES! LET'S BE HONEST! BUT WE DIDN'T GO FAR *ENOUGH*!!'

(NOTHING LIKE AN *HONEST* ZIONAZI!! IT CUTS OUR WORK BY THREE-QUARTERS.)

JUST KEEP IN MIND THIS IS THE SAME MILSTEIN WHO SAID THAT MANY OF THE IDF OFFICERS AND ISRAELI GENERAL WHO WENT ON TO BECOME POLITICAL HEADS WERE NOTHING BUT A BUNCH OF INCOMPETENT *COWARDS*!

(DID YOU SEE THAT IN THE OTHER THREAD WHEN NON-'CT' BROUGHT HIM UP TO ME BEFORE AND I GOOGLED THE NAME AT SOME JEWISH WEBSITE?)


ANOTHER ZIOFREAK: "Whatever "wrong" stuff happened 60 years ago, it's been 60 years, and you can't "undo" the existence of Israel, or Jordan, or Pakistan, or America, or any established nation."

NOW...!! KEEP IN MIND...THAT THIS IS THE BUNCH OF MESHUGENEHS (CRAZY ASS LOOONATICS!) THAT WANT TO GO BACK **2,000** YEARS!! FOR A PROMISE THEY SAID WAS MADE BY "*GOD*" ***5,000*** YEARS AGO!!

WHITE JEWISH RACISM KNOWS NO CHUTZPAH!!


ANOTHER ZIOFREAK: "And fuck the anti-israel scumbags who ignore the fact that israel has been hit with literally hundreds of terrorist attacks over the last few years by people who don't want "freedom" but want to wipe israel out."

BOO-HOO...!! IT TAKES A **LOT** TO MAKE ME CRY!!

(I'VE ALREADY STATED MY POSITION ABOVE. I'M FOR THE ABOLITION OF THE ZIONIST STATE. JUST LIKE I WAS FOR THE ABOLITION OF THE *OTHER* APARTHEID STATE. JUST LIKE I WOULD HAVE BEEN FOR THE ABOLITION OF THE "JIM CROW" AND, EALIER, ANTEBELLUM STATE. JUST LIKE I WOULD HAVE BEEN FOR THE ABOLITION OF THE **ORIGINAL** NAZI STATE.)


ANOTHER ZIOFREAK: "JA and piece of shit scumbags like him BLAH, BLAH, BLAH... Rot in hell, you evil piece of shit BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...

AND THE FACT THAT UPSETS YOU SO BRINGS ME ***ENDLESS JOY***!!!


REGARDING MAO, Richard: I am not an apologist for Mao. He certainly was not perfect -- anymore than most heads of state (especially of imperialist states). But, you seem far too intelligent to put Mao -- who was an *anti-colonial* 'freedom fighter' for the independence of the Chinese people from the European West (and their brutal Chinese 'puppet'/client) -- who, incidentally, Truman hated as *totally* immoral and corrupt.

Anyway, I think it's one thing to make such statements in the course of a defensive war against your aggressors or a war of liberation from oppression (in one's *own* country -- not some far away "glorious" ancient Biblical land who's origin is apocryphal and even mythological), BUT IT'S ANOTHER THING TO MAKE SUCH A STATEMENT IN THE COURSE OF *GENOCIDE*.

Didn't Mao say that, "A revolution is not a tea party"? To me, that means that if you want freedom, you must be prepared to take *action* and make sacrifices.

For example, consider the Iraqi resistance (of course the Western news media calls them "insurgents", which is at least a better acknowledgment than before when the Western media called them "terrorists"). Does anyone think that the Iraqi resistance can successfully ask the U.S.: "Now that you couldn't find what you said you came for, WMD's, and now that you *did* find what else you wanted, Saddam, may be please have our country back?"


"Furthermore, comparisons to Nazism, objections to offensiveness aside, don't strike me as useful,..."

Of course, it is useful -- and it's long overdue -- and it's been made by, in particular, plenty of anti-Zionist (including former Zionist) Jews. People like Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt made it. The comparison is intellectually and morally obvious -- except that before, the Zionist movement had successfully made it taboo to openly say so. No moral, thinking person can deny the comparison, as you yourself don't even try to: you just claim that it doesn't strike you as "useful".

I remember a good line in a movie by a male who was defending the right of women to speak out against sexism and patriarchy. He said, "If offense be taken, then perhaps it is *time* for offense."

Many of us have tried to speak more gently to Zionist Jews about the oppression of the Palestinians. It has not, to borrow from MLK, "pricked their conscience". So, it is time for more blunt comparisons. It is time for *us* to break a few eggshells that we have ben walking on. Innocent people's *lives* are being lost by the thousands and thousands of others lives are in the balance.


"...because most people see Nazism as a unique phenomenon..."

Unfortunately, it is not! Don't forget that Hitler was afraid that he would fall behind emergent world powers (and empires) like the U.S. with its largely successful genocide against the Native Peoples and with its subsequent "Jim Crow" laws (the national institutionalization of "The Black Codes" -- the U.S. 'Nuremburg laws/institutionalizations' against Blacks.

In fact, Hitler looked at how the U.S. had solved 'The Indian Question' and how it was 'solving' 'The Black Question'. Hitler thought the U.S.'s solution was kinda *savage*: letting its troops run around shooting up entire Indian families and villages, letting vigilantes run around grotesquely scalping Indians (and even paying them to do so) or, later, letting vigilantes run around mutilating to death and/or burning Blacks up alive (in their homes or on bonfires) and/or brutally lynching them at *picnics* with white families (and their *children*) after Sunday *church*!!

It might have eluded your comparison that the last of the great "Native American" chiefs and the continuing crimes against humanity against Blacks were occuring as the HItler was politically ascending to public awareness in Germany!

We won't even talk about what had been going on in the "Poor Little Belgium" Congo!

Hitler advocated a more *"civilized"* system for its "racial hygiene", for its "ethnic cleansing"; in short, for getting rid of its unwanted racial groups: 'Vee simply tell zhem to queue up in an or-der-ly manner, quietly transport zhem to zhe camps, have zhem quietly queue up again, tell zhem it is zhe showers for zheir health, undt quietly eliminate zhem. Vee don't need zhe savage undt bloody behavoir used by zhe Americans!"

Lastly, the point, you will recall -- and the *GREATEST* moral lesson of the Nuremburg Trials -- was just how much, as Hannah Arendt put it, "banal" the Nazi genocidal mentality and *state* terrorism could be; that most any of us could become a participant in such a grotesque system through its satisfying appeals to ethnic/cultural superiority (like, "We are God's Chosen People and the Palestinians must leave!", the very claim of the Jewish settlers), through it own meticulous parsing of moral responsibliity so that *no one* is responsible (you know how that goes, from 'I merely made the arrest', sequentially down the line to 'I merely carried out the sentence'), and through its own invidious momentum.

The greatest moral lesson of the Nuremburg trials against the Nazis was that it could happen to and by the people of *any* nation: the scapegoating of a vulnerable and made-despised minority, the propganda control over and employment of the media and the educational system, the increasing closedness and militarization of the state and society, the demogogic appeals to racial/ethnic chauvinism and patriotism. To say that this could happen to anyone else, except to Jews (and to even say that "Jews cannot be racist", as Zionists have typically claimed, is itself *racist*.

Remember when Isabelle Allende said that the people of Chile would *never* have thought that their country could turn into a brutal, genocidal, military dictatorship!? -- that they would have thought their society was *far* to civilized.

Look what's starting to happen in our own country: the Israelification of our own govt/society -- and the Nazi mentality of the neocons in the Bush Administration: with "the Patriot Act" undt Father-, errr, "Homelandt Security".

In fact, the second greatest lesson -- PERHAPS THE EVEN GREATER LESSON!! -- of the the Nuremburg trials -- and A LESSON FOR *ALL* HUMANITY!! -- is that it can even happen to a brutally oppressed people if they too do not maintain their moral consciousness. "Never again!", should have meant "NEVER AGAIN" FOR *ALL* HUMANITY -- at least without loudly speaking up -- not just "Never Again" for Zionist Jews.

No!: Hannah Arendt said that Nazism was *NOT* "unique".

Otherwise -- but we would agree that no "leftist" would support a racist ideology, or ethic cleansing, or genocide, wouldn't we? -- your comments as I have come to know them, are very intelligently expressed.

[Btw, I don't know where, offhand, on my crowded bookshelves, that I have stuffed it, but Hitchens, maybe about fours years ago, once wrote a generally *excellent* multipage Vanity Fair article (maybe you can look it up in the meantime for the date) criticizing Zionism. I guess he realized that he was never going to get rich, or on coporporate tv, expressing ideas like that or, in general, being a leftist.]

Finally, I tip my hat to you for having the patience to be more formal with these ZIONIST *FOOLS*!!

But, you won't be any more successful than I. That's why its more *FUNNN* to just MAKE *FUNNN* O' THEM Zionist!! -- and *didactically* ridicule them. The sharpest pen is morally comparative satire and parody.

But, I'm sure that you serve an alternative (let us say 'complimentary') educational means for others to whom my style may not *initially* be as accessable.

Take care.

Yes! I emailed a White European arch-Zionist Jew who might reply back to me with his White European Jewish arch-Zionist comments and just might have been disagreeing with Morris to some extent. I'm so glad that a NOINazi (see that? I've just coined something which will surely prompt you to bitch that I'm being even more anti-Black...) like JA just might have to read his comments and then he'd try making fun of him or label him a Zionazi.
Hmmm, does JA at least accept Morris' account of the Deir Yassin incident?

Though a substantial number of Jewish residents in the disputed territories do brandish the slogan "we are God's Chosen People and the Palestinians must leave" -- notably the Kahanists and other extreme groups -- it is by no means the motto subscribed to and acted upon by the entire "settler" population. JA seems to think he can dispense with the nuances any time he utters something about those uppity "White arch-Zionist European Jews".

The interview is in two parts:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=380986 and
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=380984

If you're a masochist and want to see the non-print versions, they're at:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=380986 and
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=380984

"Though a substantial number of Jewish residents in the disputed territories do brandish the slogan "we are God's Chosen People and the Palestinians must leave" -- notably the Kahanists and other extreme groups -- it is by no means the motto subscribed to and acted upon by the entire "settler" population."

So, is Benny Morris a Kahanist? Ariel Sharon? All the other prime ministers, military generals, and apartheid bureaucrats of Israel? They all wanted the Palestinians to leave. For those Israelis who are religious, do they believe they are "God's Chosen People"? Since major ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was a necessary goal and documented practice of Zionist colonialism, who _weren't_, blatantly or implicitly, the Kahanists?

Richard, I wonder if you're an academic, because, while you're obviously intelligent, you here seem to focus on narrower semi-tangential issues and sociological aspects and analysis, rather than the broader moral picture.

Case in point:

"While there is some truth to this, I don't personally consider this line of analysis very productive, because one could say the same of people like Mao, Stalin, Lord Kitchener, Winston Churchill, Bismarck, William Tecumseh Sherman and many others. ...Indeed, if I recall correctly, Morris spoke about the need to "break eggs" at another point in the interview, recalling the comments of a young Mao, probably quoting Lenin, Marx or Engels."

So, just to recap, more succinctly, my response this point of yours, you're missing the broader moral point that there *IS* a *MORAL* distinction between, say a Che Guevara [I'm more at ease using him than Mao], vs. a Hitler/Sharon/Morris making a similar comment about "breaking eggs".

And the fact that Morris quotes someone who most Israelis I suspect would consider evil, shows that, as MLK once said, that if we are not morally conscious, "We can become the thing we hate." Thus, the Israeli refusenik quoting his commander saying, "Let's be Judeo-Nazis!"

(A term, *Judeo*-Nazis that would have had the Zionists in Indymedia jumping up and down with ranting red-faced apoplexia, screaming "*ANTI-SEMITISM*!!!," if a gentile ever dared to say this.)

But, interestingly, I'm reminded that you say that you are no academic. So, I must surmise some other reason for your narrower focus. You more than seem to be intellectually inclined, and sometimes intellectuals or politicos (read: your involvment in the left politics on at least three different continents) like to focus in on narrower issues and debate them to the exclusion of the more general context. In this sense -- you do, indeed, seem to be somewhat an "intellectual obssessive" in your narrow analysis of brutally oppressive, ideologically racist states.

When I discuss Israel/Zionism, I purposely don't let the Zionists (those who know anything about the more detailed history) get me mired down in the details/purposes/motivations of, say, the Peel Commission. All that, like Zionist debates about Clinton's 'Camp David', is just Zionist dust to obscure the racist nature, itself, of "the (Zionist) Jewish state".


"because I think that the distinctions I discuss really do matter, as they influence one's view of the past, present and future."

I'm don't know what you mean by this. Maybe you can specify or elaborate, your time permitting.


"Turkey with the Armenians, Nazi Germany with the Jews, and to a lesser extent, the Slavs, the US withNative Americans [and the slaves] and the Belgians in the Congo, wanted to [depending, either] exterminate or ethnically cleanse the populace that they believed to be impossible to incorporate into the new society. [Etc.]"


First, in making the distinctions between regimes that engage in pure genocide/expulsion versus those who seek to create an exploited class of laborers, you’re focusing on a *polemically* _narrower_ issue, and missing the *morally* _broader_ point: BOTH types of regimes are engaged in wholesale racial/ethnic oppression. Therefore, it’s legitimate to talk about them as being THE SAME in that _broader_ *moral* sense.

Second, the distinctions aren’t as clear as you suggest. In the United States, Germany, and Israel, in fact, one finds BOTH types of approaches used:

(1) In Germany, Jews were generally expelled and killed, whereas non-Jewish Slavs were designated as the subordinate laboring caste.

(2) In the United States, the same division applied to Native Americans versus African slaves.

Israel is following the same pattern: Palestinians, like Native Americans, have become too “uncooperative” anymore, as a practical matter, to Israel's oppression of them for Israel, foreseeably, to really tolerate them as a laboring caste/class. And Israel doesn't want to integrate them into "the Jewish state", because Zionist Jewish religio-ethnic supremacist ideology views Palestinians as racially unacceptable (most notably, demographically so).

As a result, the goal is ultimately to expel the Palestinians completely (I believe that some Israeli polls have shown that the majority of Israelis even want to expel Palestinian citizens in Israel itself) and have poor, subordinate, economically exploitable/abusable, temporary (but recyclable), 3rd World foreign workers brought in (e.g., from the Philippines, as Israel has been doing). Hitler had a slave labor force: I guess that Israeli Jews feel they can sort of have a quasi one too.


Now, using CAPS for emphasis and, here, demarcation: THAT IS MY ESSENTIAL REPLY TO YOUR ANALYSIS.


===========================================================
===========================================================

But to make another point of mine and, I submit, to indulge your other points:

Actually, in Nazi Germany the distinction was not completely dichotomous: Hitler also used legions of Jews as slave laborers too (although his slave labor camp bureaucrats did calculate, in general, Jewish laborers' productivity lifespans -- and thus literally their very lives -- according to the very marginal food and shelter allocations that he wanted to budget for them, given their labor specialties and replaceability). But, undoubtedly, had Hitler won the war, he would have eventually replaced all Jewish slave laborers with non-Jewish Slavs.


"a lot of whites hated African Americans with such an intensity that they killed them and burnt down their towns, but, ultimately, the economic incentive of the elite prevailed over the bigotry of the masses."

Of course, even after slavery, Blacks did jobs -- especially stigmatized domestic, agricultural, and other menial work (as with Mexican laborers today) -- that whites would not want to do. So, the Blacks who were killed (and the towns that were destroyed) were those Blacks (or of those Blacks) -- as a public example -- who were considered trangressive or too uppity, according to degree. The usual goal of the destruction of Black towns was not to wipe out a required menial labor force (at least in the South).

In fact, there was the saying that whites in the South didn't care how *close* Blacks got (especially in domestic service), as long as they didn't get too 'big' [attitudinally or economically]; and whites in the North didn't care how *'big'* Blacks got [the relative few that did], as long as they didn't get too close.

(But, of course, while there were comparatively more employment alternatives for Blacks in the North, whites in the North employed plenty of Black menial laborers too, including in domestic service, which eventually became too stimatized do to the sexual exploitation/abuse of Black women domestics -- especially younger women -- by white men.)


"Additionally, I do consider the Nazi experience to be separable from the others, because Nazi leadership were driven by a medieval influence,..."

I don't know what you mean by "medieval", but Zionists are engaged in what I sarcastically call "a literally *worse* than medieval argument"!! Going back *2,000* years to the presence of their *religious* ancestors!!? -- based upon a mythological story of an "Exodus" -- and ultimately to some mythological *5,000* year-old promise by "God"!!!?

Actually, as I have pointed out numerous times on Indymedia in the past, BOTH Nazism and Zionism attempted to reclaim some *"glorious"* ancient past! A glorious Teutonic past for the Nazis; a glorious 'Biblical' past for the Zionists; and note, tangentially, a glorious Roman past for the Fascists.


"...a hostility to modernism (and especially urbanism),..."

What does this mean? (Not too much detail please, for sake of both our times.) The Nazis practiced cutting-edge physics, engineering, and, in particular, aeronautical science (if sometimes pseudo-science). They weren't like Pol Pot who wanted to destroy urban society and return to an agrarian society.

(So, since you are a film buff, you must be narrowly focused on some cinematic/artistic concept of "urbanism/modernism", which I don't think is particularly relevant to the broader moral issue at hand.)

"...which is absent in your other examples."

Yes...? Why would my "examples" require this? (And here it's too late at night for me to go back and try to figure out, "from my examples", what you mean.)


"Liberal imperialism was a bigoted, exploitative variant of modernism, to be sure, but it was modernist none the less, lacking the hostility to contemporary cultural expression that so clearly marked Nazism."

Again, this is a narrow and tangential focus -- at best -- to the broader, and main, moral issue at hand.

What are you saying: that the Nazis were anti-"modernism" because they didn't like abstract art or something? Like most oppressive regimes, they don't like *any* art that might question/challenge the state or its espoused "traditions" -- and that's usually any art that is not clearly understood as not being a threat to the state. I'm sure the Israels react the same way to Palestinian art that's not clearly benign.

But, in your sense, the Bush Administration is artisitically opposed to anything non-traditional or anything that questions/challenges the values of the state under their conception. (Remember, the Taliban blew up a couple of giant scultures in the desert and Ashcroft covered the nude breats of Lady Liberty (or whoever the hell she was) at the Justice Dept and the painting of Guernica was covered up at Nato headquarters or someplace that Collin Powell was. So, what's new!?

Your narrow and tangential focus, I surmise, is probably based on your being a cinematic buff and analyzer.


"In other words, they [Zionists] were all over the map, except that none of them, or very few of them, ever saw Arabs as the equal of European Jews, ..."

Actually, it seems quite clear from the statements of the early Zionists themselves -- and Israel's founders -- that they always wished to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. I'm sure they would have gladly employed some of them as, afterwards and ironically, relative to the state of Israel, an 'immigrant' menial labor force.

(And actually, according to Naomi Wolf, in her book "Promiscuities", apparently, in a history I know nothing about, Irish laborers were brought to Israel to, at least, work in the Jewish fruit orchards, if not elsewhere. It seems that most Zionist Israeli Jews always wanted "to make the desert bloom" on the backs of a *non*-Jewish, or non-white Jewish, menial labor force. As she relates it in her book, Wolf used to have affairs with the Irish orchard laborers, because, she said, they made better lovers than Israeli Jews!!)

Failing an historical military ethnic cleansing, Israel tried one (employing Palestinians as primarily menial labor) and then the other (expulsion and semi-genocidal practices) Only, even Israelis' political self-understanding has been made clear vis-a-vis Israeli desires: a state cannot get away with total racial expulsion or genocide, anymore, and get away with it -- 'DAMNIT!!!' -- without being an outright pariah state and isolated from virtually all modern world interaction. Israel would, foremost, be cut off from the financial nipple of American money due to, finally, clear world public outrage.


"...a number of refuseniks, who were interviewed from the recently published book, "Breaking Ranks", speak candidly about the continued persistence of this attitude today, including the potentially explosive consequences of a social caste system among Jews themselves..."

--What I always pointed out, but what the Ziofreak propagandists posting at Indymedia have always denied.


"Finally, there is an acute psychological issue which I cannot discuss very well, except to say that Israelis seem to also define themselves paradoxically in contrast to the Palestinians, while exotically expropriating their culture..."

GEE!! WHAT ELSE IS NEW!!? WHITE-AMERICANS HAVE BEEN DOING THIS TO BLACKS EVER SINCE BLACKS WERE BROUGHT IN CHAINS TO THIS COUNTRY: APPROPRIATING OUR CULTURE!! -- AND OFTEN CLAIMING IT AS THEIR *OWN* (WHITES)!!

AS I MORBIDLY JOKE, NOW THERE ARE MORE "JEEP CHEROKEES" THAN *REAL* CHEROKEES!!

ONE PALESTINIAN TOLD ME, WHEN SOME WHITE-AMERICAN ZIONIST JEWS STARTED PLAYING MUSIC IN SOME "JEWISH" CULTURAL PROGRAM (WITH FOOD) AT THE UNIVERSITY INT'L HOUSE ONE EVENING: "IT'S BAD ENOUGH THEY'VE STOLEN OUR LAND; NOW THEY'VE EVEN STOLEN OUR CULTURE!"

I WARN THAT IF THE ISRAELI ZIONISTS GET THEIR WAY, THEN, ONE DAY, THERE WOULD BE MORE "JEEP PALESTINIANS" IN PALESTINE THAN *REAL* PALESTINIANS LEFT IN PALESTINE!

AND, THEN, INSTEAD OF AMERICAN-BOUGHT "TOMAHAWK MISSILES" 'HONORING' THE NATIVE AMERICANS, MAYBE THERE WOULD BE ISRAELI-MADE "INTIFADA MISSILES" 'HONORING' THE PALESTINIANS, AFTER THEY'RE ALL GONE!!


"One cannot imagine Southern whites existing in the absence of African Americans, and, likewise, one cannot imagine either Israelis or Palestinians in the absence of one another."

Many Southern (or Northern, for that matter) whites *easily* could -- and many could today!! Many Israelis *obviously* can -- and also including the self-imported Zionists here at Indybay!! Don't doubt Racism's imagination!!


"one day there will be a secular state encompassing all of the territory of Israel and the occupied territories"

Well, long ago I realized that the Israelis would have painted themselves into the corner of a unified state, because, just as MLK said about Blacks, 'we have become too entangled with each other to separate, in spite of racism. There's no foreign option for either of us. And thus our destinies have become in "extricably intertwined".'

HAHAHA!!: Israel has politically painted itself into its own shrinking corner with the major settlements -- put there, as a fait accompli, in order to make it impossible to politically remove them (certainly in the West Bank). Knowing the white racist mentality, I *knew* that Israel could never remove the major, especially, West Bank settlements. The wildly circuitous nature of Israel's apartheid wall confirms that.

Was it Frederick Douglass (?) who said that one cannot create and chain a slave unless one, in reality, ties the other end of that chain of destiny around one's own neck. (Something like that.)

AND NOW, ANYONE WITH MEANS AND BRAINS IN ISRAEL, AND NOT ECONOMICALLY TRAPPED THERE, IS AT LEAST QUIETLY CALCULATING A FUTURE WAY OUT -- FOR AT LEAST THEIR KIDS: GETTIN' THOSE PASSPORTS TOGETHER FOR THEIR CHILDREN FOR WHEN THINGS GET EVEN WORSE. (AND AS I SAID BEFORE, SOME JEWS EVEN PREFER GERMANY!)

SO MUCH FOR "THE JEWISH STATE" ZIONIST UTOPIA!

THE ZIONIST DREAM OF A "PROMISED LAND", AS I WROTE YEARS AGO IN A UC BERKELEY NEWSPAPER COMMENTARY, WAS A FLAWED DREAM FROM THE START -- BECAUSE IT ATTEMPTED TO CLAIM THE HOMELAND OF ANOTHER.

-- OR AS ONE EARLY ZIONIST TRAVELER TO PALESTINE, "THE LAND WITHOUT A PEOPLE", UPON DISCOVERING THAT THIS WAS NOT TRUE, RETURNED TO EUROPE AND TRIED TO TELL OTHER JEWS, "I HAVE SEEN THE BRIDE, SHE IS BEAUTIFUL! BUT, ALAS, SHE BELONGS TO ANOTHER MAN!"

I SAID IN MY COMMENTARY THAT MARTIN LUTHER KING CONCEIVED OF "THE PROMISED LAND" AS BEGINNING IN ONE'S HEART -- THAT "THE PROMISED LAND", IN KING'S VISION AND AFRICAN AMERICAN LONGING, WAS *NOT* A PARTICULAR PIECE OF REAL ESTATE: "THE PROMISED LAND" WAS _A JUST SOCIETY_.


"Clearly, something has to give, the time for half measures has almost come to an end."

AND HERE, ANY INTELLIGENT PERSON HAS TO ABSOLUTELY AGREE WITH YOU, RICHARD.

THOUGH PREDICTED TO LAST FOR A THOUSAND YEARS, HITLER'S "GLORIOUS" MYTHOLOGICAL ANCIENT REVIVAL KINGDOM DIDN'T LAST LONG, AND NEITHER IN HISTORY'S SWEEP OF TIME, WILL THE ZIONISTS', THOUGH BOTH WILL HAVE COST PROFLIGATE DEATH AND INEFFABLE MISERY.


Take care, Richard.

>>>"I don't know what you mean by "medieval", but Zionists are engaged in what I sarcastically call "a literally *worse* than medieval argument"!! Going back *2,000* years to the presence of their *religious* ancestors!!? -- based upon a mythological story of an "Exodus" -- and ultimately to some mythological *5,000* year-old promise by "God"!!!?"<<<

Indeed, Zionism has derived much inspiration from the triumphal Israelite and Jewish historical events along with some myths narrated in the Hebrew Bible. That doesn't mean any religious Zionist stream, let alone secular ones, want to re-establish both the fundamentalist Jewish Hasmonean state and the Jewish lifestyle of that era.

>>>' BOTH Nazism and Zionism attempted to reclaim some *"glorious"* ancient past! A glorious Teutonic past for the Nazis; a glorious 'Biblical' past for the Zionists."<<<

A few among Israel's founding generation and their successors conceived and introduced some customs, notably holiday customs, that are reminiscent of certain biblical themes, like the Torah precept enjoining the farmers to bring their first harvest to the Temple in Jerusalem on the Festival of the Weeks (Shavu'ot) as a token of thanksgiving. This hardly registers as an attempt to reclaim a religious state following Jewish law, whether contemporary or strictly biblical.

JA and his likes are perpetually locked in their breathtakingly (though not necessarily surprising) superficial misconception and seem entirely unable, or unwilling, to recognize the profoundly more complex reality.

I don't get why JA isn't banned from here. He's obviously a friggin maniac...

(1) BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT INDYMEDIA.

(2) BECAUSE, UNLIKE *ZZZIONISTS*, WE PROGRESSIVES/LEFTISTS BELIEVE IN FREE SPEECH. (THAT'S WHY WE *EEEVEN* LET *YOU* POST.)

(3) WE KNOW THAT YOU ZIONISTS JUST *HATE* TO SEE COGENT ARGUMENTS OPPOSED TO ZIONISM AS A *RACIST* JEWISH-WHITE-SUPREMACIST IDEOLOGY. ( --ESPECIALLY, BECAUSE YOU CAN CENSOR THEM AND BAN ANTI-ZIONIST ANTI-RACISTS FROM THE CORPORATE MEDIA.)


AND YOU HATE *ME* TOO!! -- WHICH BRINGS ME ***ENNNDLESS JOY***!!! I'M ETERNALLY *ECSTATIC* THAT MY POSTS REALLY JUST GET TO YOU SO MUCH!!!

(DON'T YOU WISH THIS WERE PALESTINE, WHERE YOU COULD JUST HAVE ME ASSASSINATED!!?)

:-)

OTHERWISE KNOWN AS 'WAFFLING, SPIN, OR TWO-STEPPIN':

Non-Critical Thinkifier, ANTI-BLACK RACIST: "***INDEED***, Zionism has derived ***MUCH*** inspiration from the triumphal Israelite and Jewish historical events along with some ***MYTHS*** narrated in the Hebrew ***BIBLE***."


Non-Critical Thinkifier, ANTI-BLACK RACIST: "Israel's founding generation *AND* their successors conceived and introduced some customs, notably holiday customs, that are reminiscent of certain ***BIBLICAL*** themes".


SO, NOW -- BECAUSE THEY ARE AS *RIDICULOUS* AS THEY SOUND -- 'CT' IS PRETENDING THAT ZIONISTS DON'T CLAIM PALESTINE BASED ON SOME ANCIENT RELIGIOUS PRESENCE.


WE WON'T EVEN GO INTO HOW MUCH OF ISRAELI CIVIL LIFE IS CONTROLLED BY THE (RATHER PATRIARCHAL AT THAT) RABBINIAL *RELIGIOUS* COURTS AND LAW IN ISRAEL.

JA: "And the fact that Morris quotes someone who most Israelis I suspect would consider evil, shows that, as MLK once said, that if we are not morally conscious, "We can become the thing we hate." Thus, the Israeli refusenik quoting his commander saying, "Let's be Judeo-Nazis!"

(A term, *Judeo*-Nazis that would have had >>>__the Zionists in Indymedia__<<< jumping up and down with ranting red-faced apoplexia, screaming "*ANTI-SEMITISM*!!!," if a gentile ever dared to say this.)"

OF COURSE, I MEANT >>>__"THE ZIONISTS [**POSTING**] IN INDYMEDIA"__<<<.

NOTWITHSTANDING ANY ZIONIST INFILTRATORS, I *HOPE* THAT THERE ARE NO ZIONIST RACISTS IN INDYMEDIA!

Anti-Zionism IS anti-Semitism pure and simple


The anti-Semitic world has developed a euphemism for the destruction of Jews in the modern era of tolerance.


By Lee Kaplan, DAFKA National Director



The term “politically correct” has emerged in the Western world where religious and racial tolerance as an idea has become common, mostly as an outcropping of the Holocaust, South Africa and the US Civil Rights Movement. But old ways die hard, and the remnants of the political movements of the totalitarian world still cling to Jew-hatred. The only dilemma for those movements is how to sell a “politically correct” version of that hatred. Hence, “anti-Semitism” is separated from “anti-Zionsim,” even though they are both one and the same. This “politically correct” form of anti-Semitism always revolves around the existence of Israel.



How so, you say, when there are even Jews who classify themselves as “anti-Zionist” or even “post-Zionist” who call for the destruction of Israel?







“Zionism” is the concept that the Zionist movement created to found the state of Israel and bring the Jews back to the Holy Land to enable Jews to not live under persecution in their own land. With the creation of Israel, "Zionism" was fulfilled. The Zionists piror to 1948 purchased all their land legally and emigration was legally done. Other Jews resided in the area for thousands of years. Today, “Post-Zionists” is as term used to connote Jews living in Israel and how they regard their future circumstances. Israel is a fact now, a fact that the “anti-Zionists” wish to negate. As such, “anti-Zionism” has become a euphemism for Jews whenever the professional propagandists of the old Soviet Union or the Arab Muslim world needed it (and still is) to mask their persecution of Jews.



Arab college professors, not only the ones in Arab universities who teach that Jews never lived in the Holy Land, nor the agents provacateurs sent to US universities by the Saudis and the PLO, began the intellectualization of anti-Semitism as a “politically correct” propaganda tool by denying their hatred of Jews simply by saying they only hate "Zionists." Martin Luther King understood the game plan when he told a student at one college lecture that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism pure and simple.



So how do we affirm for certain that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism? We look at who says uses the term “anti-Zionist” and this salient analogy: Imagine if during the Second World War Adolf Hitler had developed a euphemism for the Jews-Juden in German- and called them “EuroJews.” He would then proceed to deny he was an anti-Semite. After all, he wasn't doing anything to the Jews in the USA. He was only righting the injustices done by Jews during the First World War whom he blamed Germany's loss on. Seminars would be held in American universities in their German Studies departments, organized by the German-American Bund to discuss the EuroJew world problem: the abuses of human rights abuses by the EuroJews for stealing German property and land. The superior attitude of Jews as the “Chosen People” could be discussed and how this impacted on the starving Germans after 1918 who the Jews left hungry. Of course, these people, the Jews, should be dispossessed in the name of “social justice.” And German soldiers killing them, well, that was naturally self-defense and "legitimate resistance" to occupation by these interlopers who really never came from Germany and should go back wherever they came from. They should be deported and attacked if they remain behind. German contributions to American universities would increase with this program in order to further “greater understanding” between the US and Nazi Germany.



The above is the current scenario when discussing anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionists who would claim they are not anti-Semitic simply because they do not advocate the murder, or dispossession of Jews in the Diaspora, but who support an Arab fascist movement that says the Jews now living in Israel must either flee their homes, be murdered, or submit to Arab Muslim domination and eventually live under Sharia Law, or at minimum strict Arab majority rule, mask their intentions from a world that remembers what the Germans actually did. This is done by using the euphemism "Zionists" instead of Jews. And like Goebbel's Big Lie, the incessant repetition of this theme, especially in our educational system in the classroom, libraries and at conferences over and over has made it seem acceptable.



But what about those Jews who call themselves “anti-Zionists”? Is it possible that Jews can be anti-Semites also? The answer is a resounding “yes.” The Germans had plenty of Jews who betrayed their own people for assorted reasons. At the start of the Holocaust, some German Jews also complained about the “less sophisticated” Bohemian Jews who the Germans first started their pogroms on. Some of secular Jewish ancestry even served early on in the German army. Germany later employed “Jew catchers,” Jews who would wander around in former Jewish neighborhoods, in the park, or the library, to root out Jews who were hiding their identities and not yet caught. The Warsaw Ghetto had the Jewish police—it was easier to control the Jews with their own kind—who carried out the deportation of the Jews until their usefulness ended and they too were murdered. And the death camps had kapos, Jews who supervised the other Jews for the Nazis in exchange for better treatment. Jews like these did these things usually for more food or better treatment than their peers. But many also considered themselves “different” or “better” than the other Jews and even claimed to understand why what was happening to Jews was their own fault, due to innate characteristics of Jews and their ideas, or their being too pushy, or their sense of intellectual superiority. Most perished with the rest.



Today’s “anti-Zionist” Jews are largely found on college campuses where the intellectualization of anti-Semitism fits in with the “anything goes” concept of allowing for new ideas and discourse in the academic paradigm. Like the Jews above, they usually claim intellectual superiority to their peers. Some like Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein draw attention to themselves and make a fortune writing books or on the lecture circuit when they would never be as recognized for their mainstream work and ideas. A Jew who will condemn other Jews for living in Israel is news and will always be embraced by the Arab money machine that works in “solidarity” with any organization or person who will support the goal of dismantling Israel. Some claim they are citizens of the world, and thus owe no allegiance to the Jewish people any more, and if the world wants the Jews of Israel dispossessed or killed, so be it. Some are ignorant of the concept that “the Chosen People” does not mean that Jews are superior to other people—they are not any better or worse—but that Jews have a covenant with God to set an example by behaving better than other people. And some Jews (and when I say “Jews,” I mean people of Jewish ancestry only, not people who recognize their being Jewish anymore) through the social obligations they were brought up with as young Jews to support the community of mankind, embrace radical socialist movements such as communism or anarchism that traditionally see Jews as the “capitalists” and “money grubbers” of the global world. They willingly unite with Muslims who are really just anti-Semites to help them in opposing the current world order by tearing down the world as they see it to create their perverted idea of a better one.



Yes, Jews can be anti-Semites too by mitigating their position as Jews in the world and being politically correct “anti-Zionists.”



The goal of “anti-Zionists” is to deconstruct via politically correct terms the real nature of anti-Semitism for their own perverted
ends. Hence, Palestine Solidarity activists who support “legitimate armed resistance as proscribed by international law” are not advocating the murder of Jews in Israel, but rather upholding “international law.” That they would cheer when a resolution put forth at a previous conference at Duke University to condemn suicide bombings was announced as being defeated becomes ignored under the cloud of their “politically correct” rhetoric as they call themselves “peace activists.” “Peace” will come when Israel is dismantled and “Palestine” is in its place to these people. What happens to the Jews living there now, and the end of the only real democracy for Jews and Arabs in the Middle East afterward, is irrelevant. “Peace workers” who would enable a suicide bomber to pass a checkpoint to kill Jews then can become the humanitarians, and the terrorists become “freedom fighters” when they are really just thugs who prey not only on Jews but on their own people.




Anti-Zionists cannot excuse their anti-Semitism by their support of the subjugation, expulsion or murder of only one part of the world Jewish community—the one in Israel. The constant dissembling and parsing of words by professional Arab propagandists and the radical Left must be perceived for what it is—deception. This deception has been steadily creeping into our university system in America and threatens the very social tolerance that system claims to support. That is the basis behind the Palestine conference to be held at Georgetown University in February where anti-Semites from across the US will gather to strategize and train in how to weaken and destroy the state of Israel.



So the next time you hear someone say they are an “anti-Zionist” and not an “anti-Semite,” rest assured they are referring to the Jews.




They just haven’t gotten around to all of them yet.


http://www.dafka.org/NewsGen.asp?S=4&PageID=1091