I. The Fact of Israel
Israel at 60 is an intractable historical fact. It has one of the world’s strongest armies, without peer in the Middle East, and its 200 or so nuclear warheads give it the last word in any military showdown with any of its neighbors. Don’t believe the hype about an Iranian threat – Israel certainly fears Iran attaining strategic nuclear capability, but not because it expects Iran to launch a suicidal nuclear exchange. That’s the sort of scare-story that gets trotted out for public consumption in Israel and the U.S. Behind closed doors, Israeli leaders admit that even a nuclear-armed Iran does not threaten Israel’s existence. (Israel’s security doctrine, however, is based on maintaining an overwhelming strategic advantage over all challengers, so the notion of parity along the lines of Cold War “Mutually Assured Destruction” with Iran is a major challenge, because without a nuclear monopoly, Israel loses a trump card in the regional power battle.)
Palestinian militants may be able to make life in certain parts of Israel exceedingly unpleasant at times, but they are unable to reverse the Nakbah of 1948 through military means. (Hamas knows this as well as Fatah does, which is why it is ready to talk about a long-term hudna and coexistence – although it won’t roll over and accept Israel’s terms as relayed by Washington in the way that the current Fatah leadership might.)
Israel, in other words, is here to stay – and its citizens know this, which may be why they appear to more indifferent to the search for peace with the Palestinians than at any time in the past three decades. So confident are the Israelis in being able to withstand whatever the Palestinians throw at them that they are able to turn away from the hellish life they have created for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Sure, let Olmert – a weak and skittish leader whose domestic political standing is comparable to that of President Bush, except that the Israeli prime minister can’t seem to shake off the whiff of corruption – engage in the charade of negotiating a hypothetical peace (let’s be very clear about this: the current talks between Abbas and Olmert are aimed only at designing a “shelf” agreement, the elaboration of an “horizon” not unlike the Geneva exercise by Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed-Rabbo a couple of years ago – not a series of steps or deadlines that anyone plans to implement — this is its most optimistic outcome; even that seems doomed to fail, though…) with a hypothetical Palestinian leader. (To paraphrase Stalin on the pope, how many divisions does Mahmoud Abbas command?) Who cares? It’s not as if Olmert is going to confront the settlers or even dismantle most of the 600 or so roadblocks that choke life in the West Bank. So let him and Abbas perform their endless duet of the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”…
The fact of Israel’s survival until now, and for the foreseeable future, is a grim reality for its 1 million Palestinian citizens, whose citizenship is at best, second-class – and more so for the 4 million Palestinians over which it maintains sovereign power in the West Bank and Gaza, without granting them citizenship – for whom Israel means living under an apartheid regime. And that, in turn, means that the trappings of globalized modernity enjoyed by Israel’s secular middle class – the American lifestyle, the high-tech economy and the European football – all come at the price of perennial uncertainty under a cloud of potential violence.
Just as there’s little chance of Israel being eliminated in the foreseeable future, so is there little chance of it militarily eliminating Palestinian resistance. There’s no serious peace process in the works, right now, and the geography created by Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since their capture in 1967 has made the prospect of a Palestinian state largely hypothetical, too – it takes an optimistic imagination to conceive of a viable independent state comprising of Gaza and those West Bank cantonments that lie between the major Israeli settlement blocs and the roads that connect them.
So, while Israel has prevailed in the conflict over its creation that has raged since 1948, it has been unable to end that conflict on its own terms. The Palestinians driven out during the Nakbah have not simply disappeared or been absorbed into surrounding Arab populations, as Israel’s founders had hoped. And without justice for the Palestinians, Israel is no closer now than it was 60 years ago to being able to live in a genuine peace with its neighbors.
At this point, however, the Israelis don’t seem to care.
The curious irony of history, though, is that while the Zionist movement managed to successfully create a nation state in the Middle East against considerable odds, that movement is dead — the majority of Jews quite simply don’t want to be part of a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East. And so the very purpose of Israel has come into question. It’s certainly not the “national home of the Jews,” as much as the Zionists huff and puff about this being the case (frankly, anyone who tells me my “national home” as a Jew is somewhere other than where I was born or chose to live, is an anti-Semite in my book, but let’s not go there for now) — the simple fact is that almost two thirds of us have chosen freely to live elsewhere, and have no intention of ever settling in Israel. Jewish immigration to Israel is at an all-time low, and that’s unlikely to change. In a world where persecution of Jews is increasingly marginal, the majority of Jews prefer to live scattered among the peoples, rather than in an ethnic enclave of our own. That’s what we’ve chosen.
Curiously enough, the very “normality” achieved by Israel in an era of globalization has prompted three quarters of a million Israeli Jews to move abroad. “You have wonderful children,” Ehud Olmert told a gathering of French Jewish leaders two years ago. “I wish they would come home.” Not only are the bulk of French Jews not planning to move to Israel, the supreme irony is that Olmert’s own sons have joined the quiet exodus of Israeli-born Jews leaving Israel to live abroad. Today, it has become the norm for any Israeli who can to acquire a foreign passport.
Israel may be an intractable historical fact, but the Zionist ideology that spurred its creation and shaped its identity and sense of national purpose has collapsed – not under pressure from without, but having rotted from within. It is Jews, not Jihadists, that have consigned Zionism to the dustbin of history.
So what, exactly, is Israel, now? Avram Burg, former Knesset Speaker, appeared to sense the writing on the wall in his plaintive op ed in 2003:
We live in a thunderously failed reality. Yes, we have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvellous theatre and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or anti-missile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed.
It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents’ shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.
What Burg seemed to recognize is the absurdity of seeing the modern State of Israel as some kind of prophetic fulfillment of the Jewish story. If we were to imagine that this, indeed, was what God had intended, we’re imagining a deity with a very, very twisted sense of humor. Three years later, Burg concluded that he could no longer think of himself as Zionist, and recognized that Zionism itself had become an obstacle to Israelis finding peace — and to his own pursuit of his Jewish values.
II. Israel is a Monument to Anti-Semitism…
I visited Israel the year I finished high school, which was the 30th anniversary of its founding. My officially-organized itinerary (I was there as part of a Habonim contingent for intensive ideological training) started the same way as those of any visiting head of state today: At the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem.
It is impossible to complete this vivid encounter with the industrial-age savagery meted out by the Nazis on the Jews of Europe without being profoundly moved and angered. It certainly added a jet of gasoline to the Zionist flame that burned in my teenage heart, and I can only assume that it’s the shaming effect of the exhibits that has the likes of President George W. Bush mumbling about how the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz. Oy, who puts these ideas in your head, Mr. President? (I can guess, actually, but we won’t go there.) Speaking selfishly, perhaps, I’m rather glad the U.S. didn’t kill Primo Levi. And actually, Mr. President, if you want to be atoning for failing the Jews of Europe in the 1940s, a better place to start might be the fact that anti-Semitic U.S. immigration policy prevented two thirds of the survivors of Auschwitz from actually settling here. Not that the Zionist movement of the time was at all upset by this — as Morris Ernst recalls of his efforts to lobby his friend President Roosevelt to admit more Jewish immigrants at the end of the war, they were furiously denounced by Zionist leaders. The fate of the Jews of Europe had never been a foremost concern for Israel’s founders. As Ben Gurion put it in 1938 in his diary, “If I knew it was possible to save all [Jewish] children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to Eretz-Yisrael, I would choose the latter – because we are faced not only with the accounting of these [Jewish] children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish People.”
Still, by the 1960s, the Israeli leadership began to recognize the utility of making the Holocaust the centerpiece of its national story, overcoming its own reluctance to engage with the survivors and their story. By representing itself as the state of the survivors, bringing Eichmann to trial in Jerusalem as a way of educating its next generation in the horrors of the Holocaust in order to offer them a unifying perspective on their common national identity, Israel could establish a narrative frame for rationalizing its behavior in respect of the Palestinians, too. So deep has been the penetration of this particular construct that when Jimmy Carter challenged the apartheid policies Israel has adopted on the West Bank, he was quite seriously accused of giving aid and comfort to Holocaust-deniers! (The demented logic here held that by failing to give adequate attention to the Holocaust when discussing the West Bank, he was effectively denying the former!)
Still, I think Yad Vashem is an appropriate starting point for any visit to Israel, because I believe that the Holocaust really was the key to Israel’s creation. The modern nation-state of Israel did not emerge from the spiritual yearning for a “return to Zion” that had long been an essential part of the Jewish liturgical tradition — that “return” had always been clearly tied to the arrival of the Messiah; that was never understood as a recipe for the creation of a nation state in Palestine before the Zionists arrive on the scene, in concert with the rise of nationalism in Western and Central Europe in the late 19th century. The Zionist movement, which called for the creation of a Jewish nation-state, emerged as a response to the political crisis facing Western European Jews at the turn of the 19th century, as the breakdown of empires stirred nationalist passions that threatened the status of Jews in many European countries. And also the ongoing oppression of the Jews of the Russian empire. Still, even then, it was hardly the dominant response to that crisis: The Zionist movement had been a minority trend in mainstream Jewish politics in Europe before World War II (and it hardly existed at all among Jews of the Islamic world).
But the Holocaust destroyed most of the Jewish leadership of Europe, and it shamed the world into granting Jews a nation-state in Palestine — settling there became a matter of survival for two thirds of the survivors of the Holocaust, who despite the ordeal they had suffered, were mostly denied any alternative.
Israel, then, rather than some kind of Jewish achievement or prophetic triumph, looks to me more like a huge monument to Western anti-Semitism. Zionism had demanded that the Jews have a nation-state of their own, claming that for Jews to live among others was simply unnatural and untenable, and that anti-Semitism was a natural and inevitable consequence of gentiles having Jews in their midst. Apparently vindicated by the Holocaust, they set about building a sovereign nation state that would serve as a “national home” to the Jewish people. Israel was never intended to simply be a state of the Israelis, Arab and Jewish. It was a state for the Jews of the World, and it dedicated itself to “ingathering” them as it “redeemed” the Biblical land of Israel. It’s precisely for that reason that I, who was born in Cape Town South Africa, can automatically assume the rights of citizenship and land ownership in the place where my friend, Jamil, was born, but was driven out of at age 4, and to which he is forbidden from returning simply because he is not Jewish.
It’s also this logic that rationalized the ethnic cleansing of 1948, and the calamitous policy of settling Israelis in the territories occupied in 1967.
III. …But anti-Semitism is on the Wane
The founder of the modern Zionist movement, Theodore Herzl, framed the movement’s attitude to anti-Semitism in his diary comments while covering the notorious Dreyfus trial in France in the late 19th century: “In Paris, then, I gained a freer attitude toward antisemitism which I now began to understand historically and make allowances for,” wrote Herzl. “Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of efforts to “combat antisemitsm”.
The premise of Zionism has been that anti-Semitism is inevitable and immutable when Jews live among gentiles, allowing Jews only a truncated and perennially threatened existence in “exile.” This was the very basis of their case for creating a separate Jewish nation-state, in order to achieve “normality” alongside other nations and nationalisms.
This premise, of course, was never accepted by a majority of Jews, although the Holocaust had made Israel an historic imperative for hundreds of thousands of Jews who found themselves with nowhere else to go.
Still, today the political crisis of European Jewry that produced the Zionist movement has passed. Anti-Semitism has become a marginal threat to Jewish life in much of the world, and the majority of Jews have voted with their feet to live in a wider world, rather than in an ethnic ghetto. Today, the preferrred destination of Jews leaving former Soviet territories is Germany; and tens of thousands of the Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel during the Russian economic collapse of the Yeltsin years have since returned to Russia. The head of the Russian Jewish Congress estimates the number at up to 120,000, while the Israeli embassy in Moscow says that 90,000 Israeli citizens are currently living in Russia. And Russia is hardly the most philo-Semitic option. The Zionist authorities in Israel have long ago accepted that they’re unlikely to see signficant immigration from the Jewish communities of North America and Western Europe, where there is little significant pressure on Jews to vacate.
So, it turns out, we’re able to live quite comfortably among others, which is where the majority of us choose to spend our lives. Israel has emerged as one of the world’s largest Jewish communities, but it seems a little wishful to imagine it the sine qua non of Jewish life on the planet — we managed without it for 2,000 years, after all. And do we really believe that the reason Jews today feel safe and secure living in the United States or Canada, for example, is the existence of a well-armed Israeli Defense Force?
IV. Be Careful of What You Wish For
The greatest impulse driving the early Zionists was the idea that by separating themselves into an independent state of their own, Jews could achieve the “normality” that eluded them in Europe. They could right what the Marxist-Zionist Ber Borochov called the “inverted triangle” of the Jewish class structure, building a society founded on Jewish agrarian and industrial labor. Jewish farmers, Jewish worker, Jewish soldiers, marching together singing the Internationale. For those of more liberal persuasion, Zionism offered the opportunity for nationalist nationhood with all the trappings of romantic illusion, just like the German nationalists, or the Italian nationalists or the Hungarian nationalists.
This nationalist “normality” has longsince been achieved, of course. Despite its ongoing conflict with its neighbors, Israel has Jewish farmers and Jewish soldiers and Jewish cab drivers and gangsters and prostitutes — along with the more familiar crop of doctors, scientists, mathematicians, violinists and chess players. And, in keeping with the “normality” of the age of globalization, its Jewish entrepreneurs create companies in Silicon Valley, its Jewish footballers play in Europe, its Jewish live in lofts in New York, its Jewish club kids wander the pyschotropic beaches of Goa… I could go on, but you get the picture. We’re a wandering people (even before the Romans ostensibly exiled us from the Holy Land, there were thousands of Jews living all over the Mediterranean basin…), and many young Israeli Jews, like young Jews — and young people of whatever background — everywhere, want to be part of a global conversation, a global economy, a global playground. Globalization mocks national sovereignty and its boundaries, and its patterns of integration today may be a greater threat to the Zionist project than any Jihadism.
Even when I was first there in ’78, giddily lapping up the ideology, I was warned that one of the biggest crises Israel faced was that its own young people didn’t give a toss about Zionism. Why would they be any more likely to embrace nationalist kitsch than would kids raised in East Germany or Franco’s Spain?
The very “normality” created by Israel over the past 60 years undermines the nationalist mission of the state’s founders — if the wider world is sufficiently comfortable for Jews to make their homes all across it, then why not Israeli Jews, too? As we noted earlier, 750,000 — 15% of Israel’s Jewish population — already live abroad. The likelihood of the world’s Jews moving to Israel to bolster its Jewish population to keep pace with the Palestinian birthrate is increasingly remote. More likely is a net loss of Jewish population as Israel’s best and brightest see no obstacles, and plenty of allure to going forth into a wider world.
V. Israel Without Zionism
On Yom Kippur in 1979, instead of going to shul — a pointless exercise for an atheist who no longer felt the need to pretend for the sake of communal bonds, now that I was forging my own community — I stayed home and read Uri Avnery’s seminal book, “Israel Without Zionism.” His work was a revelation that had a major part in my “deprogramming” as a Zionist. Here was a soldier of the Haganah speaking bluntly about the crimes committed against the Palestinians in 1948, laying bare the brutal truth beneath the national mythology I’d been spoonfed. Avnery recognized that for Israelis to be able to live in peace in their neighborhood, their starting point had to be relinquishing the ideology that rationalized their conquest and displacement of others, and instead to forge a common commitment to justice.
Zionism rationalizes conquest and colonization as “redemption” of Jewish territory on behalf of the world’s Jews. It treats the Palestinians only as an obstacle and threat to its own purposes, not as people with the same rights as Jews and with legitimate claim to the land on which they were born. And yet, there’s a guilty conscience that sometimes emerges in flashes — a rare moment of Jewish ethical recognition, that is quite at odds with Zionism. My favorite came from Ehud Barak, world class chump though he may be in the annals of statesmanship, when he was on the campaign trail in 1999, and was asked by a TV talkshow host what he’d have done if he’d been born Palestinian. “Join a fighting organization,” he said in a flash of honesty he’d later regretted.
But if the roles had been reversed, and it had been the Israeli Jews who’d been first driven out of their homes in 1948, and then occupied in 1967, you can bet that Barak and Rabin and all before them would have been leaders of the PLO. Ariel Sharon would have been in Islamic Jihad!
The end of the Zionist moment leaves Israeli Jews facing — although in many cases not necessarily facing up to — the reality that the people with whom they’re going to share the Holy Land are not the rest of us Jews, who have no intention of moving there, but the Palestinians, who they found there and displaced and dispossessed, and continue to rule over — supposedly in our name, but without our consent.
Zionism — contemporary Jewish nationalism — is unlikely to bring Israel peace, because of its failure, or inability, to accord full equality to the claims of others.
As Rami Khouri noted in 2006 during the Lebanon war, in one of my all-time favorite columns on Israel and its neighbors,
Deuteronomy, a pivotal book of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), is supremely relevant here because it blends the three issues that I believe Israeli, Arab and international journalists must affirm in order to honour their professional dictates along with their own humanity. These are: good governance anchored in the rule of law; a moral foundation for human relations anchored in the dictate to treat others as you want others to treat you; and the towering divine commands to ‘choose life’ and ‘pursue justice’.
Deuteronomy is an appropriate balm because it emphasises – in both human society and the divine plan – the central value of justice that is anchored in a system of codified laws that are administered fairly by compassionate and competent judges. The most beautiful and powerful part of Deuteronomy is verses 18-20, ending with: ‘Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue.’
…The single biggest reason that Israel has found itself locked in ever more vicious wars with assorted Arab neighbours is its refusal to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians and other Arabs on the basis of the rule of law, and to resolve disputes on the basis of both parties enjoying equal rights.
On the two occasions that it has made resolutions on the basis of law and equal rights – the peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt – Israel has found calm, official acceptance and some normal contacts with citizens in those Arab lands. But in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, where Israel has acted unilaterally and in a predatory and violent way, it has reaped only resistance, ever more fierce and proficient with the years.
The common Israeli view … sees the Arabs and Iran as pits of Islamic terror and anti-Semitic savagery that want only to kill Jews and annihilate Israel. They are free to live in this imaginary world if they wish to, but the consequences are grim, as we see today. Subjugated and savaged Arabs will fight back, generation after generation, just as the Jews did historically, inspired as they were by the moral force of the ‘Deuteronomistic’ way. If the world does not offer you justice, you fight for your rights.
The missing element in Israeli behaviour is to ask if Israel’s own policies have had any impact on reciprocal Arab behaviour. If this is a war between two sides – which I believe it is – then both need to examine their policies, and make concessions to resolve their disputes. Peace-making and conflict resolution must be anchored in law that dispenses justice equally to all protagonists. The law we have to deal with here comprises UN resolutions and bodies of international conventions and legal precedents.
We cannot pick one UN resolution we want implemented – say, 1559 – and forget the others, such as, say, 242 and 338. This is what has happened since 1967 and even before. The rights of Israel have been given priority over the rights of Arabs, and this skewed perception has been backed by US might.
I wish Israeli journalists would apply to their writing and analysis the moral dictates and divine exhortations that their Jewish forefathers passed down from generation to generation: obey the law, treat others equally, pursue justice, choose life. Journalists should identify the legitimate rights, grievances and needs of both sides by providing facts rather than propaganda.
Israel and the US have ploughed ahead for decades with a predatory Israeli policy that savages Arab rights, land and dignity. In return, public opinion in the Arab world has become violently anti-Israeli, and resistance movements have emerged in Palestine and Lebanon. If current policies continue, similar movements will emerge elsewhere, just as Hamas and Hizbollah were born in the early 1980s in response to the Israeli occupation of their lands.
Moses had it right, perhaps because he accumulated much wisdom during his 120 years of life. Meet the legitimate demands of both parties to a dispute, he said, and a fair, lasting resolution will emerge. Ignore the centrality of justice and equal rights for both parties, and you will be smitten by divine fire – or fated to fight your adversaries forever, as Israel seems to have opted to do.
The largest Jewish community in the world is in Israel.There they exercise the inalienable right of Jewish self-determination(left wingers please note this also applies to Jews!) True, many Jews live in other countries. There are probably more Irish in the USA today than in Ireland. So what does that prove? That Ireland has no right to exist?
As an Israeli I am at home in Jerusalem. When I visit the USA I stay in a hotel. I pay for the stay but I do not own the place. Some countries like the USA are decent towards their Jewish minorities. Others are less so. History has shown that things can change and not always for the better.
I wonder what will be the effect of a serious US economic recession on the antisemitism graph in that country?
You did not mention that Israel is still financially supported by the US government, and the Jewish diaspora. Israel was born on life support and cannot survive without it. The greatest danger facing Israel is a disruption in the ability of the US government to tax US citizens and transfer the funds to Israel. Israelis need to pay more attention to the current financial crisis in America.
You also did not mention that Lebanon 2 did not go very well. I would not say Israel lost, but Israel could not dislodge a bunch of Shite peasants with primative weapons.
Interesting how when you steal someone else’s land, you have to be loaded with nukes and military hardware from Big Brother Uncle Sam. Otherwise, the dispossessed are plotting non stop to reclaim their native soil. Our high tech weapons in the hands of Zionists versus rocks and pipe bombs. Shit, sounds like a fair fight to me.
A poem that I wrote two years ago.
JACOB THE PIT BULL
America’s pet
A specimen of pride and joy
They called him by his first name, Jacob
Paraded him at all the mid-east shows
To educate the locals how to live
And rigged the judging panels for the ribbons
He evoked the greatest sympathy
That brought donations from around the world
To be transformed into his personal wealth
He dared to sleep in neighbor’ yards
Not only in the cool of night
But in the heat of day
The master had a leash
He thought appropriate for a pit bull
But showered him with laser-guided toys
Then something snapped
Jacob went berserk and terrorized the neighbors
Causing carnage of a magnitude unreal
The master espoused Jacob’s right to self defense
Disproportionate was the call by other nations
And there was never any pulling on his leash
The Iraqi blood-stained hands of Congress persons
Were raised too quickly in support of Jacob
While hundreds of innocents were being killed
But something snapped
It wasn’t Jacob’s fault he was a pit bull
His genes determined his image and demeanor
His American masters had been numbed, born of rebellion
Bred in revolution and steeped in war
Their red glare of rockets and bombs bursting in air were idolized
But something snapped
And Jacob continued his destruction of the remaining five percent
Of all the major bridges in the neighbor’s yard
Then it dawned on many
That this scenario had been dreamed up long ago
To be implemented at the slightest provocation
The neo-cons and kooky Christians cheered
As Jacob wreaked this devastation
On his different thinking neighbors
Then something snapped
And Jacob turned around to bite
The hand on his leash that had so generously fed him
Now animal doctors think that some intervention
Like counseling, selective neurosurgery or genetic engineering
Might correct the part that snaps in pit bull brains
But the master is ultimately responsible
For the carnage that a pet imposes upon a neighbor
And with regret, they often have them put to sleep
I have never been able to understand why Jews feel they have a right to steal land and property from other people, then live on that property in peace and security. Jews do not have as much right to the land of Palestine as do the native Palestians who were living in that area long before Jews ever heard of the place.
I have never been able to understand the total ignorance and celebration of nihilism by people like “minemule” who don’t know the first thing about history.
“There are probably more Irish in the USA today than in Ireland. So what does that prove? That Ireland has no right to exist?”
A profoundly stupid argument. If that’s the best anyone here can do, hasbara is in a worse state than even I imagined!
Just three points:
1) Ireland was not built on stolen land, and its establishment did not require the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of native people.
2)The vast majority of people in Ireland have roots going back in that country since time immemorial. The same is not true for the vast majority of Israeli Jews, most of whom have been there less than 100 years.
3) Of course, people of all faiths and races can apply for – and often obtain – citizenship in Ireland, but the same is not true regarding Israel. Also, simply being of Irish descent does not automatically give one the right to live in, much less be a citizen of, Ireland. Jews, however, are automatically granted citizenship of Israel, even though most have no ties whatsoever to the land.
OK, I am writing papers now, so maybe I didn’t read things too closely, but one thing jumped out at me. The whole idea that because Nasrallah can bomb border towns the IDF isn’t doing its job. Come on! That’s like saying America will not exist in 50 years because some terrorists managed to hijack some planes. Simply does not follow. Terrorists can also hit Spain pretty much at will, does that mean Spaniards should give Ard al-Andalus back?
Regarding eventual Arab military superiority, of course that’s possible. That’s why Israel’s idea that we’ll perpetually oppress the Arabs and it will work out is less than brilliant.
I’ll read/write more later.
“The whole idea that because Nasrallah can bomb border towns the IDF isn’t doing its job. Come on! ”
You’re right – you haven’t read the posts closely enough. What people are saying is that the IDF’s much touted – deterrence power’ just isn’t working, even now, and even with less than formidable enemies. When – it’s not really an if – one or more of Israel’s enemies develops a more sophisticated military, Israel is in big trouble.
“That’s why Israel’s idea that we’ll perpetually oppress the Arabs and it will work out is less than brilliant.”
I agree – but the Israelis have failed to come up with an alternative policy. I suspect they’ve never much tried, both because of the contempt for Arabs inherent in Zionism, and because the policy of ‘hitting them hard’ has worked tolerably well from the Israeli perspective. Until now.
Murphy,
Jews have been living more or less continuously for 4000 years. True, there has been a major immigration of Jew to the country during the last 100 years BUT THAT IS TRUE OF THE SO-CALLED “PALESTINIANS” TOO! For example, one of the big clans in Hebron is called “Al-Masri” which means “The Egyptian”. There has been constant in-migration and out-migration of non-Jews from the country since the beginning of time, and they had different cultures and religions. The Arabic speaking and Islamic religion are relative newcomers.
You are also wrong that non-Jews can not come to Israel. Anyone can convert to Judaism, if they are willing to carry its burden and they are then eligible to immigrate.
“You are also wrong that non-Jews can not come to Israel. Anyone can convert to Judaism, if they are willing to carry its burden and they are then eligible to immigrate.”
Now I know that Zionists are getting desperate and that the old arguments (which are all they have) just aren’t working anymore – witness David’s first paragraph.
But this one takes the you know what. So it’s not true that non-Jews can’t come to Israel? Sure they can – provided thy become Jews first!
LOL LOL LOL!!!
I could write an essay. Suffice, however, to declare the following:
Israel will inevitably suffer the same fate as all settler colonialist states dependent on the support and largesse of another country thousands of miles away. As an American, I can assure you that the winds of change are blowing here. More and more of us, and our emerging leaders, are at last, comprehending the fact that Israel is our number one geopolitical liability, a liability that must be dealt with. America’s “passionate attachment” to or “special relationship” with Israel will end. There is no alternative.
Within 15-20 years there will be nearly 2.5 billion Muslims, about 750 million Arabs, including around 12-15 million Palestinians between the River Jordan and the Med. alone. These are the real “facts on the ground” that will determine America’s interests. The outcome is obvious.
i think we all are tired of numbers, stats, and historical speaches, my reply is mainly for “Arie Brand” i read part of his post, about the peacfull loving jews moving in to live next to arab towns, then arabs started the killing and fighting, stop there and go back to ur own post in 1917 you all were promised by Belfor a nation in palestine, so stop and don’t say we wanted to live there side by side, about 30 years before the creation of ur state, plans already started for that, so the claims to moving in palestine just to live there next to arabs, without any further plans to take over the place is just naive .
finally, this land is holly, for muslims, christians before them, and jews before all, and they all lived on this land before 1948 and 1917,
if arabs are jew haters for no reason , you would find no jews surviving in morocco, tunisia, come toward egypt, and most of the other arab and muslim nations,
let me finish with this
injustice may last but not for ever,
Something I wrote in 2000:
They were there
October 21, 2000
To even the blind and deaf it should be summarily obvious that either Arafat has no control over his citizens or he sponsors their frenetic violence in the streets. That Arafat has little control should be no surprise since no Palestinian has ever acknowledged him as their supreme leader. He was chosen to be the up front mouth by factions within the Palestinian movement only because he prevailed as such early on. But just the up front mouth, and nothing more. No Palestinian will acknowldedge him as their incontestable leader for real.
They have no leader. And they have no point. Or do they?
The History of Palestine
The concept of a Palestinian state did not recur until the Six Day War of 1967 which was clearly an Israeli victory. Most “Palestinians” were then citizens of Jordan, some three quarters of a million of them having been run out of Palestine by the Jews years earlier. Palestinians, whoever they were or are, living in Jordan, as they were, were saying, “Screw this. Israel got their own country and we want one too. Screw Jordan and Israel!”
So who the hell are these “Palestinians”? For that matter, who the hell are “the Israelis”?
Both the Jews and the Palestinians shared some land a long time ago. There were no “nations” then on this land though the Palestinians of the Islamic persuasion consisted of 95% of the population. The religion of the few Jews who were there was generously tolerated.
The deal is, the Jews gained the sympathy of the entire world as a result of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the lot of them. This sympathy, empathy perhaps, translated eventually into: “OK, take this spot of land and call it yours. It’s never been anything but untitled land before now and now the whole world wants it to be your land.”
Cool. The Jews settled in, what was left of them, named this real estate “Israel”, and the rest of the folks who used to live there a couple thousand years earlier, dispossessed as they were, got jealous as they slowly realized what had happened. Big time jealous.
This jealousy is festering now, yet again, and it is bloody. One thing the “Palestinians” should acknowledge is that no one has ever attempted to exterminate the lot of them. In this sense they are at the disadvantage of the Jews who maintain historical empathy. With this empathy the Jews successfully cut out and now maintain a lock on the geographical boundaries the victors of World War II penciled in for them.
What has really happened is that of the two peoples who once occupied this land only one has been given status. Only one has been gifted a country. The others have no status and nothing was penciled in for them. Because there was no Nazi attempt to obliterate the Arabs who also occupied this land but who also failed to leave it and permeate Europe as did the Jews there is no sympathy, no empathy, and no country.
Of course, that is the problem.
It is very unfortunate. And, needless to say, it is unfair.
A couple of generations after the war that carved that land some now say, “Wait a minute. No one ever asked me or my father or my grandfather. You carve out a nation for Jews and, what the hell, we are now excluded from the land that was once all ours? I don’t think so. We are slow, but we will not be dispossessed.”
“We will not be dispossessed!” These words, not necessarily spoken so clearly by the protagonists of the time, now compose the fuel behind the emotional “Palestinian” impatience with the birth, or rebirth, of their own country. They are pissed and they want a country now. They also do not want to be excluded in any way from the city things, the religious things, that they helped create but were slow in reclaiming.
Before this land was arbitrarily carved into geographical specifics by those who won the War, they were there. The Palestinians were there and they had been there for a few thousand years.
Sure, Jews were there too. They were all there, and they were all Palestinians.
Think about it.
Israel here to stay ? As usual ,Zionist arrogance…..The JEWS have sucked the US ,their “benefactors” dry and once the Kitty is dry,who are you going to drain? Russia,European Union,China ? I think not !!Frankly,the world cannot stomach Israel and subsequently the world hates the US because of “support” of the little parasitic state….neve forget that !!
I find it amusing that there are more Israelis living in NYC every day.
Israel here to stay ? In a world of inpermanence you helped create?…How blind you are !!!
Your article is just full of ideology, with blameless, victimized Arabs and evil-doing jews. You are not objective. People choose their battles all the time but it is sad that you would go against your own people….it is not like we have lived the easy life these past 2000 years…and by being jewish and blaming jews, you animate the jew haters and discourage fellow jews.
I am unlikely ever to visit Israel, and below I explore why (it is a little long, I am sorry), although I have close links with the country through my partner who has 100 Israeli cousins, one of whom I know personally. I enjoyed your article, including its contradictions! Listening to Rashid Khalidi tonight on Palestine I realised how little I know. I continue to see Israel as occupied Palestine, but I do not see an end to the occupation. Perhaps it will gradually ebb away as the Israeli economic elite start to migrate elsewhere, as they are already doing in small numbers.
I shall visit Israel
I shall visit Israel when the olive trees are in bloom
I shall visit Israel when an Arab can marry a Jew
I shall visit Israel when Torah Jews are no longer beaten up in the streets of Jerusalem for reminding their countrymen of the commandments of Moses
I shall visit Israel when Jewish children have to learn Arabic and Arab children have to learn Hebrew
I shall visit Israel when Arab and Jewish children mingle freely in one system of state education
I shall visit Israel when the 7 million refugees from the land of Palestine can choose between a country they can call their own, or compensation for what they lost
I shall visit Israel when the invaders make peace with the invaded (not the other way about)
I shall visit Israel when there is a public apology for the war crimes of 1948 and compensation for the families of the victims
I shall visit Israel when West Bank settlers on stolen land no longer attack and kill the natives and get off lightly or scot free
I shall visit Israel when her soldiers no longer shoot down unarmed children in cold blood
I shall visit Israel when the Wall has gone and all people between the Jordan and the sea can move freely
I shall visit Israel when the house demolitions and expulsions of Palestinians have stopped
I shall visit Israel when 600 West Bank checkpoints are taken down and the bullying, humiliation, beating and rape of Palestinian citizens has ceased
I shall visit Israel when to be born Palestinian is not a reason to be hunted and spied upon
I shall visit Israel when Jews have stopped arriving from far away and calling it their land
I shall visit Israel when Gaza is no longer the cruel laboratory experiment in slow genocide that it is today
I shall visit Israel when her planes have stopped bombing and strafing towns in Gaza and terrifying the people at night with sonic booms
I shall visit Israel when the Lebanon and Gaza are no longer grisly testing grounds for new weapons
I shall visit Israel when Israel has ceased to invade her neighbours on the slightest of pretexts and cause devastation
I shall visit Israel when over 11,000 Palestinian prisoners
and 51 MPs have been released from jail and pardoned for acts or words of resistance
against a state that for 6o years has been taking their land by force of arms and terror
I shall visit Israel when the routine practice of torture in Israeli prisons stops
I shall visit Israel when the “illegal villages” – that existed long before Israel – have been made legal
I shall visit Israel when the Bedouin of the Negev are no longer persecuted
I shall visit Israel when Arab towns and villages have the same status and funding as Jewish ones
I shall visit Israel when the land is shared by all Semites – Arabs and Jews
I shall visit Israel when the Jewish state is an unhappy memory
I shall visit Israel when the Nazi genocide of the Jews is no longer invoked to justify every
imaginable cruelty in a land where they came as uninvited guests and remain as conquerors…
I shall visit Israel when the name of Israel is no longer another excuse to hate the Jews
Paul Grenville 1st July 2008
Note 1. Torah Jews and Israel
The essential Orthodox Jewish position is summarized as follows:
The people of Israel has existed for thousands of years, is characterized by adherence
to the Torah, and whoever denies the Torah and the Faith is no longer part of the
people of Israel.
In contrast, Zionism is a recent one century old secular phenomenon and substitutes a
state with territory and an army for what Jews have called the “kingdom of the mind.”
The Jewish theological objection is that the only time that the people of Israel were
permitted to have a state was two thousand years ago when the Glory of the Creator
was upon them – when in the future the Glory of the Creator is again revealed (the
Messiah), and the whole world will serve Him, then He Himself (without any human
intervention) will grant Israel a kingdom founded on Divine Service.
Accordingly, in this view, the Zionists are violating the Torah and are blasphemers.
Indeed their conduct endangers the very people they claim to be saving.
Note 2 Israel and Education
From Human Rights Watch http://www.hrw.org
Nearly one in four of Israel’s 1.6 million schoolchildren are educated in a public school system wholly separate from the majority. The children in this parallel school system are Israeli citizens of Palestinian Arab origin. Their schools are a world apart in quality from the public schools serving Israel’s majority Jewish population. Often overcrowded and understaffed, poorly built, badly maintained, or simply unavailable, schools for Palestinian Arab children offer fewer facilities and educational opportunities than are offered other Israeli children. This report is about Israel’s discrimination against its Palestinian Arab children in guaranteeing the right to education.
From their first day in kindergarten until they reach university, Palestinian Arab and Jewish children almost always attend separate schools. Palestinian Arab children are taught in Arabic, Jewish children in Hebrew. The two systems’ curricula are similar but not identical. For example, Hebrew is taught as a second language in Arab schools, while Jewish students are not required to study Arabic.
Note 3 Extreme?
Statements made in the piece can be verified by referring to the Israeli Human Rights organization B’tselem at http://www.btselem.org, Amnesty International’s Report Forty Years of Occupation and the work of Israeli historians Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé. Ilan Pappé first used the term genocide to apply to the ongoing Israeli blockade of Gaza in an article published on September 2nd, 2006.
So far in 2008, 466 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military operations, including 75 children and 23 women. A further 1,740 Palestinians have been wounded. Dozens are permanently disabled. Israel is at peace – yet the war never stops.
(Source: National and International Relations Department of the PLO, Ramallah)
Note 4 Genocide
The Nazi genocides involved gay people, Roma (gypsys), opponents of Nazism, the mentally subnormal and 5.1 million Jews (best estimate of Jewish casualties by Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg).
Article 2 of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
It can be argued that while there is no evidence that the intent of the Israeli administration towards Gaza is genocidal, the human results of the Israeli blockade of Gaza fit the internationally agreed definition of genocide. Curiously, just as the Nazi genocides went partly unremarked and raised little international condemnation in time of war, so the slow, but the relentless Gaza genocide in peacetime continues unchecked and raises no outcry at government level either from the United States or the EU countries. The most vocal protests have been from Israelis and Palestinians themselves. It was an Israeli historian who first used the term genocide to apply to the Gaza strip, often described as the largest outdoor prison in the world, containing 1.5 million souls, many of them refugees from former Palestine, in an area 7 to 12km wide and 40km long. The population density for the Gaza strip is 4,118 persons per sq km, compared with a population density for the borough of Barnet of 3694 people per sq km.
The means of genocide in Gaza are threefold: 1) Destruction of the Gazan economy, for example forbidding fishing off the Gazan coast, destruction of trade links with outside world, 2) The witholding of medical supplies, and in particular anaesthetics, power and fuel by Israel leading to high levels of mortality (untreated giardia, cholera and dysentery are now rife in the Gaza strip) 3) Direct and continuous military intervention by the Israeli Defence Forces causing an atmosphere of fear, continuous stress and despair and high levels of civilian casualties including children. A British businessman and amateur photographer, Stuart Littlewood, has reported on recent evidence from a report the Gaza Ministry of Health that Israel has been testing thermobaric, or fuel-air weapons there. While thermobaric weapons obliterate everything living close to the explosion, bodies further away suffer chiefly from the concussion of the blast wave:
“Common features of all the victim’s bodies were lack of main wounds… All victims had serious internal oedema and haemorrhage with loss of blood from all body orifices. All the bodies were covered with dark powder so to look black, but were not burnt. Clothes and hair were not damaged or burnt.” (Gaza Ministry of Health)
UN relief official Jan Egeland and Jan Eliasson, then foreign minister of Sweden, writing in Le Figaro described a people “living in a cage”, cut off by land, sea and air, with no reliable power and little water, and tortured by hunger and disease and incessant attacks by Israeli troops and planes.
John Pilger: “When I was last in Gaza, Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist, showed me the results of a remarkable survey. “The statistic I personally find unbearable,” he said, “is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma you see why: 99.2 per cent of their homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed.” Dahlan invited me to sit in on one of his clinics. There were 30 children, all of them traumatised. He gave each a pencil and paper and asked them to draw. They drew pictures of grotesque acts of terror and of women streaming tears.”
Gideon Levy and Amira Hass are reporters on the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In November 2007, Levy described how the people of Gaza were beginning to starve to death: “There are thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people, unable to receive any treatment . . . The shadows of human beings roam the ruins . . . They only know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions.” Hass, who has lived in Gaza, describes it as a prison that shames her people. She recalls how her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle-train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen on a summer’s day in 1944. “[She] saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking,” she wrote. “This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable ‘looking from the side’.”
“Looking from the side” is what those of us do who are cowed into silence by the threat
of being called anti-Semitic. Looking from the side is what too many western Jews do, while those Jews who honour the humane traditions of Judaism and say, “Not in our name!” are abused as “self-despising”. Looking from the side is what almost the entire US Congress does, in thrall to or intimidated by a vicious Zionist “lobby”. Looking from the side is what “even-handed” journalists do as they excuse the lawlessness that is the source of Israeli atrocities and suppress the historic shifts in the Palestinian resistance, such as the implicit recognition of Israel by Hamas. The people of Gaza cry out for better.”
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I guess the real question is-
The Palestinians were not responsible for the Holocaust why should they be punished for it? This is madness. The Palestinians will soon outpopulate the Israelis ( I think its 4 to 1 right now) they ill then have no choice but to force peace among themselves.
I’m for Netanyahu. Livni proved totally irresponsible in shedding so much blood only so as to counter the rabbis’ declaration that a girl can’t be Prime Minister of a Jewish State. Netanyahu, however, is of that old school that can make pragmatic pirouettes on a dime, turning from stick to carrot, because he knows where he wants to go: an Israel that is a REAL state, integrated in the area, with universally recognized borders and productive ties to the Palestinians (“Greater Israel” is merely a campaign slogan, as was the Ingrun idea of a Jewish state between the two rivers– the star between the stripes on the flag– Nile and Euphrates. He was the only one to see the danger in the Israeli policy of treating Gaza like the Warsaw Ghetto, starving the Palestinians out and then shooting them like fish in a barrel. He therefore could be the only one of the PM candidates that Arabs can respect. The other candidates have proven to be crazy, or fools. Netanyahu has been around long enough to realize that under all that rage the Palestinians admire Israel and would love to have an Israel-like Palestine for their children. Also, Netanyahu is not a coward, like most Israeli politicians; he has both the chutzpah to be a crook and the guts to be a hero. He alone is not afraid of HAMAS and so can compete with it for the hearts and minds of the Palestinians. And, unlike many other Israeli politicians, he has more than cheap pride, he has inherited a sense of real dignity. Having dignity, he can appreciate Arab dignity. As for Sharon, for him, a hard line is not an end, but a means to a cohabitation end. He sees, as did Sharon, a limited purpose to the bloodletting: to get the Palestinians to better appreciate the carrot over the stick. Don’t get me wrong, he shared Israel’s Zionazi lebensraum thesis, achieved through ethnic cleansing. But he also realizes that Israel is no longer a country of willing executioners. He also realizes that young Israelis have no stomach for that and that the world will not permit it.Young Sabras stay as “reservists” in the IDF long enough to finish school and then dream of a job in LA. So good is their education in Israel that finding jobs abroad is a sinch…hence the aliyah in reverse. So Obama would do well to hope for Netanyahu to win and then be ready to stand firm and say: my way or you’re on your own. Netanyhu will diplomatically appreciate that as the right of the payer over the payee. Few Israelis are as realist as Netanyahu, with no illusions about what the Diaspora can be made to do for Israel. He has enough dignity to understand that he who feeds you tells you what to do, hence his determination to make Israel totally self-sufficient; he also realizes that the more he integrates Israel into the Middle East, the less his nation must bow to America. And, the less Israel seems to the Arabs like a barking dog on an American leash, the more likely they are to accept Israel in their midst. Since BenGurion to Begin– LaRonde midgets obsessed with compensating for their size by being shysters– Israel had been ruled Lilliputian complexes relying on a foreign giant, America. Only the likes of real mensch like Dayan and Rabin could face the Palestinians man-to-man. Sharon knew that he would have to deceive Israelis by talking tough. PM Netanyahu did the same. But both came to be respected by the Arabs. Consequently, Obama can count on Netanyahu to realize, before any negotiating begins, that the better the economic integration with the Palestinians, the better the deal Israel can get from the Arab World. The tough talk is only to squeeze campaign dollars from Diaspora Jews and votes from Israelis. Once in power, like Sharon, his goal is peace and, like Sharon, he realizes that use of the stick only results from failure at providing the right carrot. The American similarity is Richard Nixon. He had a reputation as a “mad man” when it comes to the Soviets and Chicoms. Because of that, only he could make peace with China and work out an ABM Treaty. Even if you are not convinced, you will agree that nothing could be worse than the chick trying to prove that she is Dracula and the crazy MIT physicist general who thinks entropy by means of WMDs is the best solution.
ATTENTION FRUMMIES AND SABRAS: I AM CONTEMPLATING TAKING A VACATION IN ISRAEL THIS SUMMER AND I WOULD APPRECIATE ADVICE ON HOW TO COMPORT MYSELF WHILE TRAVELING AROUND JERUSALEM. I HAVE BEEN RAISED TO RESPECT THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN. I WOULD BE INCLINED TO OFFER PROTECTION TO A DEFENSELESS WOMAN IF I OBSERVED THAT SHE WAS IN SOME KIND OF DISTRESS. HOWEVER, I DO NOT WANT TO GO TO ANOTHER SOCIETY AND GET INVOLVED IN GRATUITOUS MAYHEM. PLEASE GIVE ME YOUR OPINION AS TO WHAT WOULD BE THE BEST REACTION IN THE FOLLOWING SCENARIO:
I am taking a nice scenic bus ride in Jerusalem. A woman gets on the bus with her bag of groceries, pays her fare and sits on the only remaining available seat. A bunch of bearded men dressed in black start yelling at her and gesticulating wildly. The woman persists in remaining in her seat and the men start to pummel her and drag her from her seat. Her bag of groceries gets torn apart and the various items fall on the floor and are purposefully trampled upon by the men who proceed to slap and punch her. SHOULD I:
A. Sit in my seat, mind my own business and make believe that nothing is going on?
B. Join in and help the men punish the offending woman?
C. Yell out to the men that they are making too much noise and should go about their business more quietly?
D. Take photographs to show to the people back home.
E. Pick out the most offensive of the black clad bearded men, punch him in his bearded mouth and drag him by his beard to the door and throw him off of the bus. After throwing the bearded bastard off of the bus, the next step would be helping the woman gather her groceries and escorting her back to her seat, stopping along the way to kick any other persisting bearded assailants in their baytsim .
MY NATURAL PREDILECTION WOULD BE TO GO WITH ANSWER “E” BUT I WOULD APPRECIATE THE INPUT OF SEASONED ISRAELI FRUMMIES AND SABRAS SO I CAN MENTALLY PREPARE MYSELF FOR THE POSSIBILITY THAT I MIGHT HAVE TO GO AGAINST MY NATURAL INCLINATIONS. WHAT WOULD AN ISRAELI FRUMMY OR SABRA DO UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES?
In appreciation for your kind advice:
Samuel Nosherman
SamuelNosherman@yahoo.com
In 1948 there was almost one million jews living in the arab speaking world including the Maghreb, today perhaps 6 to 7,000 at the most are left, with the majority in morocco and the remainder in Tunisia, with a sprinkling of a few hundred in Syria, & Yemen & a handful in Bahrain. These forgotten Jewish refugees of the arab world, outnumbered the Arab refugees of the Post mandate of palestine by almost two to one, the real estate that they owned including my own family, was almost five times the size of Israel today. The Jewish population of israel today is comprised of around 75% of those jewish refugees of the arab speaking world that make up over 60% of the jewish population of israel, the other 25% live in the USA, Canada, Australia, South America, and europe.
What about our rights, the right’s of the forgotten jewish refugees of the arab world. The arab world has to recognize what they did to us, making us stateless, homeless refugees overnight. We lost just as much as the arab refugees of the former palestine lost, infact we lost much much more. We were not as many people want to think coerced into leaving our arab homeland, we were threatened, persecuted, murdered by those arab cowards who couldn’t get at the Israelis, so they used us defenceless jewish men women, children and babies as scapegoats to take their revenge on, my family was very fortunate to get out in one piece.
LONG LIVE ISRAEL!
LONG LIVE ISRAEL!
LONG LIVE ISRAEL!
LONG LIVE ISRAEL!
LONG LIVE ISRAEL!
Such tough talk, Tony. Coming from a white South African who ran away to the States as soon as the blacks took over, I’m not surprised. You’re not going to have to live with the misery your shrill bullshit will sow. No, just publish the most damaging shit you can dredge up about your fellow Jews, stockpile the anti-semitic scumbags that have commented above with more and more ammuntion, then stand back laughing for the next holocaust. You’ll be warm and dry in some safe haven, that’s for sure. A marxist who lives in New York and works for Time — what a fucking whore you are. If you had a dateline from Havana or North Korea maybe you’d have an ounce of credibility but all you do is arrogantly preach to others from the cushiest little pocket you can find to worm your ass into. If you had any decency, the least you could do is shut your poison mouth when it comes to the fate of the people that gave you life and a secure childhood, not to mention the brains and education you now so traitorously have turned against them, you foul villain. Curse you.
shit israel!!!
save palestin!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I like your articles on your page, but it appears as though your RSS feed is getting a 404 error? Maybe it has something to do with your host. I just thought from webmaster to webmaster I would warn you of this problem so you don’t miss out on potential subscribers! If it still works for you have a friend try it, could be blocking external connections.
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shit israel!
save palestin!
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I knew Roosevelt was unreasonal re refugee immigration. During & after war. But to deny immigration to 2/3rd’s survivors?
Why there is no word of rockets fall in Israel on daily basis? Why nothing is said that most of the land was bought by the Jews from Arabs. Where historical statement of the truth that it is Israel that set up Palestinian Autonomy and feeds these underdeveloped, middle age cultured people; that it was Israel to step out of Gaza to give Palestinians a chance to become people among people and instead received Hamas and rockets.
Look, what is going on in Syria. Arabs kill Arabs and not only insurgents but mostly civilians: kids, women and teenagers. Israel plays tolerance and investigates each accident carefully.
Take the truth majority of Arabs came when the Jews started coming and building Israel giving the Arabs jobs and teaching them industry and science. Some of the Arabs who lived in mountains and cities as well as Christians appeared to be ethnic descendants of the Jews who stayed in the area after Romans expelled the Jews. It supports genetic analysis and many folklore among the Bedouins. Their ancestors were first Christians just separated from Judaism and settled in caves, so Romans could not get them. Then in 7th century they took Islam and became Arabs though they still don’t have any genetic trace of mixing with Arabia Arabs.
This site is terrible propaganda and uses to gather money, probably, for Hamas or Hesbolla. Idiots love it.
A piece of land in the lands of later called Palestine thousand of years ago has had been sold hundreds of times , once to Jew & then the Joe sold it to roman & the Roman sold it to Greek & the Greek sold it to Persian & and the Persian sold it to Mongol & the Mongol then sold it to Arab & then the Arab sold it to French man(Crusaders) & then sold it to Ottoman & the Ottoman sold it again to Arab .
The question is that after one thousand year a Jew came from far away to Palestine & to the Arab who was the last that bought the land and killed him & occupied his land ?
The comments of this story will be left to the reader.
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