I’m going to ask for your patience and possibly forgiveness at the outset. I haven’t done any public speaking in a while, a practice that has always been a source of mixed feelings for me. I normally speak off the cuff about the topic at hand, or about a million offhand topics, but for this event I decided to compose my thoughts. I want to be precise to the degree that I’m capable. It seems unkind, anyway, to subject you to a bunch of tangents that may or may not amount to something coherent. I’m more interested in the ensuing discussion and so I’ll try to give us something useful to think about.
When the folks at Making Worlds approached me about doing an event, they proposed something around Indigenous solidarity and it was difficult to pass on that kind of opportunity. It’s a rich, complex topic, with an endless assortment of possibilities, something we all ought to embrace, because possibility is the only tangible resource in the marketplace of ideas these days. Indigenous solidarity is also subject to a lot of misinformation and hostility, so we can approach the topic by demarcating material politics from orthodoxy and myth.
U.S. exceptionalism, that enduring psychosis indivisible from conquest and plunder, is the greatest progenitor of orthodoxy and myth. It is ubiquitous in the American psyche. Even leftist discourses are often tethered to U.S. exceptionalism.
What does it look like for a leftist discourse to be tethered to U.S. exceptionalism?
It looks like a magnetic attraction to elections and good citizenship and civic responsibilities, as if systemic illness can be cured by a more mindful diagnosis. It looks like that inevitable regression of thought-leaders into libertarian fantasies of individual salvation as a kneejerk response to crisis. It looks like invasive anxiety about sedition and disorder. It looks like anything, really, that can only imagine revolution as something unimaginable.
More than anything, the beating heart of U.S. exceptionalism rarely slows down enough to alter deeply ingrained habits of perception. When we discuss colonization or imperialism or racism, where do we end up, no matter where we started? Contemplating the destiny of the party who enjoys greater structural power, right? Think about it for a second. Replay some noteworthy conversations you had recently. Which party acted as the gravitational force of group rhetoric? The Black speaker or the aggrieved white audience? The Palestinian or the ambiguous liberal Zionist? The Native or the settler? You might not have even noticed at the time, but it happened, didn’t it? Doesn’t it always? It’s too easy to fall back into concern for demographics that unquestionably occupy the category of human. But what about the white landowner? But what about the Israeli refusenik? But what about the politician’s career? But what about joe sixpack’s sensibilities? Only after sorting these essential matters do we get to the downtrodden, if our interest hasn’t already been exhausted.
Conversely, if you’re the type who insists on the primacy of the downtrodden, think about how many times you’ve tried to refocus interlocutors who always drift back to what Black liberation will do to American democracy, back to what Palestine means to Jewish Americans, back to what becomes of Sally and Johnny and their suburban utopia in a land back scenario. It rarely works, does it? You keep insisting and they either ignore you or grow defensive. You become a purist, a wrecker, a fantasist, a connoisseur of the circular firing squad.
Why is the first impulse always to worry about reproduction of common sense, to worry about the colonial entity, to worry about the settler? Precisely because it’s not an impulse. It’s a lifetime of coercion pretending to be organic. Treating chauvinism as impulsive is one way that settler common sense so easily sells itself as objective and universal. This is U.S. exceptionalism in action and those who work hard to avoid it are reviled for their irrational attachment to unreality. It’s a ritual ostracism, compulsive and relentless, intended to warn potential dissidents against any attempt to traverse a colonial state of exception.
Take a look at the leftist pundit class, the academic luminaries, the social media influencers. They spent six years glorifying Bernie Sanders. A lot of them boosted Tulsi Gabbard. They’re obsessed with the Squad. They hold forth about Syria, about China, about Iran, about Venezuela, and yet in the end they’re all the same kind of liberal. When it matters, they all cape for whichever Democratic savior is in fashion. Ultimately, the differences around which they stage so much conflict are superficial, or at best cosmetic, and have more to do with capturing market share in a competitive subscriber economy than with any kind of revolutionary sentiment.
Exceptionalism doesn’t prevent people from seeing a world on the edge of being destroyed. It prevents them from imagining a solution beyond the system implicated in the world’s destruction.
I begin with this rant to arrive at an unpleasant but straightforward conclusion: everything we know about virtually anything is evanescent and unstable. And so everything needs to change. It’s going to change, anyway, whether we like it or not. Sally and Johnny won’t be able to enjoy their idyllic suburban life forever, or even very far into the future. We are in the early stages of a cataclysm. The changes are coming—those that aren’t here already. That’s the one thing we have to recognize. There’s no halcyon restoration on the horizon, no magic technological solution, no back to normal. Easy fixes are beyond reach. Our task is to aim for the least amount of suffering and to initiate a new epoch that doesn’t prioritize extraction and profit over the well-being of life on this planet.
*****
During the first week of September, I went on a bike ride with my wife and son and my brother-in-law and his family. I live in Northern Virginia, which is car-heavy, but the area has terrific bike and recreation trails that were underused until the pandemic. We decided to ride along a creek that flows out of a nearby reservoir—which, much to my amusement, they like to call a “lake.” I’d been on the path a number of times. When my son learned to ride a bike, we used to cycle down the trail and stop periodically to wade in the creek. Mid-Atlantic summer gets hot and humid, but the journey was never especially unpleasant.
Well, on the family outing, something immediately felt off when we entered the woods alongside the reservoir. It was unusually muggy, especially for the end of meteorological summer. I was sweating like a busted fire hydrant. It was one of those itchy sweats, too, as if fire ants were slip-sliding down my back. My lungs were wet and heavy. The foliage sagged with dampness and tree trunks showed a deeper shade of brown. It felt like I was in the goddamn Everglades. Mosquitoes were everywhere, biting us through our shirts. I kept expecting to see alligators in the standing pools of water lining both sides of the path.
Those standing pools were also unusual. Sure, they might appear after a round of thunderstorms, but not so extensively and never so consistently. It had been raining a lot, same as the past few years. Monthly rainfall totals for the DC area were up, with several records getting broken. I’m the type who finds rain depressing, so it’s something I noticed. Beyond my aversion to rain, I was concerned at a more galactic level. It didn’t feel right. The world as I understood it, based on its climate patterns and ecological character, was no longer the same. It didn’t feel right. I don’t know what else to say.
Was I just getting old and crochety? Or was something objectively different about the feel of things, about the entire atmosphere? It’s hard to talk about, because most people perceive it as complaining about the weather. I’ve spent plenty of time in my life complaining about the weather and even in this familiar grievance everything feels different. In any case, it’s not complaining about the weather. It’s about perceiving changes in the weather that portend a near-future of very bad things.
Perhaps that near-future is actually the present. Lord knows a lot of very bad things are already in evidence. The usual assumptions about good governance no longer hold up to reality. But reality can be a difficult site of analysis. Capitalism pretends that its solutions to the very problems it created are uniquely humane and ethical. We’re no longer in any position to dicker around with such nonsense. The only thing capitalism will provide is the ability to feel smug and self-satisfied in the moment of our demise. It has neither the intention nor the ability to stop that demise, however.
I share this experience of biking in an abruptly tropical mid-Atlantic because it’s important to acknowledge and claim our feelings of disorientation. Those feelings aren’t an alien concept to students of Indigenous Studies, anyway. Our unquiet earth has been a major theme in Native literature for many decades: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Linda Hogan’s Power, James Welch’s Winter in the Blood, and so forth. Indigenous activists throughout the Americas have been sounding the alarm about an impending ecocide and have been at the forefront of efforts to disrupt normal patterns of extraction and consumption, the hallmarks of imperialism. This activism, dangerous and unpretentious, is intended to benefit all of earth’s living creatures. It is a resistance focused on survival, justice, empathy. The people devoted to national liberation aren’t talking about winning any fucking elections.
That’s where our attention belongs: on the people doing the indispensable work of survival. It requires effort to focus our attention where it belongs, though, because those with enough power to decide what kind of activism matters, from astroturfing NGOs to socdem media, sure as hell aren’t going to put any spotlight on sites of meaningful insurgency. So it’s up to us, as individuals and social beings, to find inspiration among the creatures unloved by power. We can provide and receive the simplest kind of love among one another: the kind that honors our need for safety and freedom. That love exists in the refugee camps of Gaza, in the resource-rich villages of the Amazon jungle, in the water-poisoned households of Flint and Standing Rock. We have to put aside the pursuits that generate rewards in the imperium and make ourselves students of their example. The only hope I’ve felt over the past few years didn’t come from AOC’s ascension to a colonial governing body or from Palestinian representation in Congress and the NYPD, but from Black protestors burning down a police station and the Palestinian resistance in Gaza which fought the Zionist entity to a standstill. The old Fanonian idea that we recover dignity through struggle rings truer than ever, for resistance is the only thing that gives me life these days. All the gabbing I see in the public environs of the North American left is at best depressing. I daresay I’m far from alone.
Ours is an era of illness and ecocide. And ours is a society that confuses rebooted culture wars with intellectual culture. We haven’t begun processing the widespread trauma from COVID, which of course is ongoing: the disease not only transformed social and economic relations; it also altered most of the familiar ideological categories we could at least superficially rely on before. This on top of massive death and anxiety and the dissolution of untold personal relationships. The pandemic has accelerated a longstanding sense of uncertainty. But that uncertainty is ironic and unacknowledged. These days more people seem absolutely certain about the right solution without any real understanding of the problems they aim to solve.
I wish I could offer suggestions that might rise above cliché or truism, but the language we use to inspire activism can be a cipher for the very uncertainty we purport to counteract. Organize! Resist! Make a revolution! All this stuff is well and good, but in what capacity do we organize, and to what end do we revolt? These are terms that sound nice in the rah-rah confines of social media, which reward insipidness and sloganeering, but say nothing to the indigent classes who would gladly let rich neighborhoods burn if the pundits they’ve never heard of were serious. People who profit from the status quo will run interference for power at the moment of truth, no matter how grandiloquent their language. We have to recognize who’s even viable as a revolutionary before we get too optimistic about the revolution.
Professors and podcasters and politicians are limited by their very status. Maybe instead of nebulous pronouncements about decolonization and resistance, we should speak more precisely—you know, be explicit about burning down police stations or launching rockets or sabotaging pipeline equipment. But the great majority of us can’t do that. Talking that kind of noise will get respectable members of society into a lot of trouble. Only those already loathed by respectable society have the luxury of naming their desires and tactics. In the end, we have to keep asking, “Who has incentive to be serious about an uprising?” We might do well to also ask, “Which aspect of this person’s comportment suggests any willingness, at all, to do right by the downtrodden, to do anything other than conform when it actually matters?” We have to make judgments about reliability and trustworthiness. We have to opt out of spaces in thrall to the narcissism of Western common sense. We have to know when we’re boosting the lowkey guardians of our dispossession.
My dim view of the institutional North American left arises from a lifetime of observation. Thousands of times I’ve seen the same messianic compulsion to exhort the lesser peoples of the globe, Indigenous nations in particular, from Palestine to the Salish Coast.
“This is what they need to do.”
“This is what they ought to avoid.”
“That kind of resistance is unhelpful.”
“They’re being unrealistic.”
“They can’t be so inflexible.”
“Their government isn’t up to my standard.”
“They need to do X, Y, and Z to earn my support.”
“They have to meet people where they’re at.”
That last one has always been a special source of annoyance. Exhorting an oppressed group to meet people where they’re at consigns that oppressed group to the category of non-people. The proverbial people of this formulation represent humanity itself and so the oppressed group must aspire to become half-human by conceding to the very logic of their inhumanity. Without such concessions they will remain in an indefinite state of barbarity.
These paladins of commonsense kowtow to one politician after another—Bernie, Tulsi, Ilhan, AOC—all the while demeaning anyone who expresses skepticism, an age-old liberal disciplining tactic, and then take up the mantle of a principled dissenter when the once-impeccable politician is sucked dry of social capital. There’s an ironclad law of social climbing in the United States: you can be the biggest revolutionary in the world between elections, but when it comes time to seat bodies in the imperium you’d better cape for one of the Democratic candidates. Otherwise, you become disposable along with the earth’s wretched denizens for whom you advocate. I don’t view this phenomenon as a habit to be broken. It’s a colonial sensibility to be expunged. We don’t have time to be disgruntled after the inevitable betrayal—not even a betrayal, really, more like an arc barreling toward its typical ending. Nobody will give a damn who was right or wrong during the cataclysm, anyway.
Again, what I describe is a fundamental aspect of U.S. exceptionalism with its fidelity to individual status in the information economy. However we choose to speak of internationalism or solidarity or revolution or decolonization, the terms are worse than useless without a concomitant understanding of the phenomena they purport to describe.
*****
And so I’ve come to understand that North American sensibilities are anathema to internationalism. It’s not that influencers and thought-leaders in this sphere have no interest in internationalism; they just lack the intellectual framework, and often the desire, to abandon the comforts of liberal normativity. They are enamored of marketable rhetoric and end up depleting radical terminology of meaning. Our conversations shouldn’t end with us mourning the decline of a once-promising system in need of redemption. Capitalism is functioning as designed. Colonization was never about improving the world. It is now the decolonial that needs to be redeemed.
What is internationalism, then? We can reference lots of good definitions. At its most fundamental, internationalism is a Marxist concept that posits an affinity among ruling classes; their affinity requires a corresponding solidarity among the oppressed. For instance, workers qua workers share affinities that transcend borders and ethnicity. They ought to unite for both strategic and moral reasons. Capital is voracious and constantly seeks new markets. It needs to encounter resistance at every turn.
The term has evolved over the years to reference intercultural communalism and tactical alliances. While internationalism retains a universal connotation, it has become more specific: Ferguson and Gaza, for instance, or Standing Rock and Kashmir. If the imperialist states like to bang on about shared values, the thinking goes, then so should the dispossessed. We are stronger in one another’s company, capable of mutual validation, free to share and learn. There’s also an ethical component to these current iterations, simple but powerful: Palestine can’t properly be free while Hawaii is still occupied.
Such pronouncements oblige us to consider liberation as a shared project. It snaps us out of provincialism. Most important, it demands focus on capitalism, the unifying feature of oppression, a task that becomes increasingly critical as the Twitch and Twitter professoriate process radical concepts into neoliberal buzzwords.
One interesting convergence between theoretical work and popular discourse is the notion of “land back,” much debated in online leftist communities. On the one hand, the emergence of land back in today’s activist lexicon is a something of a victory for Indigenous communities, who have long presented the case for national liberation to often uninterested or hostile audiences in the West; on the other hand, it also reveals a continued stubbornness within the North American left to fully, or even rudimentarily, comprehend the primacy of settler colonization in the set of evils they otherwise abhor. We don’t need to separate settler colonization from imperialism or militarism. The three phenomena aren’t identical, but they’re certainly interconnected, and refusal to acknowledge and examine colonization limits depth of engagement with imperialism and militarism. In fact, it puts a hard cap on one’s ability to make sense of capitalism.
It also reveals structural absences in the way many commenters approach questions of internationalism. Where are Indigenous peoples in our rolodex of concerns? Indigenous histories? Indigenous theories? Any notion of solidarity that diverges from Indigeneity is bound to assume a managerial perspective. How many times have socdem pragmatists or self-branded anti-imperialists suggested that Palestinians and Natives and Black people need to defer their aspirations in order to facilitate electoral success for members of the Democratic Party? How many times have we been dogpiled and insulted for suggesting that it’s unethical to dispose of the least powerful among us simply to gratify a feeble political desire?
No. We’re not deferring shit. And we’re not disposing of anyone presented to us as disposable. Certainly not to grease some two-bit pundit’s naked quest for influence.
Misunderstanding of land back derives in part from this attachment to political convention. Even when the concept is understood, it’s sometimes only at a superficial level. Land back isn’t an online phenomenon, some new phrase emerging from an intractable era of wokeness. It is internet shorthand for a broad and rigorous set of Indigenous intellectual traditions. It distills, and at times bastardizes, centuries-long liberation movements with land as their guiding principle. Land back is a simple, straightforward term vague enough for widespread misapprehension. I’m not going to waste time reassuring anyone that it doesn’t mean dragging white people out of their living rooms and putting them on the next ship to Genoa. We covered the problems with that approach already. The important thing to remember is that manifold struggles precede and contextualize the slogan.
Read Robert Warrior. Read Lee Maracle. Read Leanne Howe. Read Audra Simpson. Read Glen Coulthard. Read Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Read Patrick Wolfe. Read the breathtaking work of the Hawaiian liberation movement: Noenoe Silva, Haunani Kay-Trask, Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua. It goes on and on. A huge body of work gives meaning to the term “land back.” (My notion of “work” includes centuries of practice.) None of this stuff is secret. Nor is it esoteric. It is perfectly comprehensible. It tells us exactly what is needed to undo grave injustices. This work isn’t breezily ignored because it lacks value, but because it requires people to rethink so many sacred commonplaces. It demands that we no longer operate in states of exception.
And, finally, what of solidarity? Solidarity is a good word, but, like any word that is overused, it has become loose and evasive. You cannot have solidarity without recognition—that is to say, without an incursion into other people’s concerns and sensibilities. Solidarity isn’t simply about joining hands; it means changing your own attitude to fit with a broader vision of liberation. You try to give of yourself and what you get in return is a more rigorous education. You learn the essential skill of outfitting the universal with the specific.
You can make a good argument that overcoming ignorance is the first step to a meaningful solidarity. From there we can imagine the framework for a livable future. Livability is contingent on a willingness to suffer and persist. Left techno-modernists, anti-Indigenous on their face, will tell you that science can provide easy solutions to climate collapse and scarcity, that some exotic version of socialism will enable us to exist in luxury, but in reality they’re selling a glossy brand of colonization. The future requires less consumption, individually and collectively. It requires serious changes of lifestyle—not just of lifestyle, but of lifeways that require vigorous atonement and introspection. We cannot continue viewing the earth as a source of abundance. It has been made to overprovide for a tiny fraction of our species. The bill for ruling class greed has come due in the world’s ghettoes and refugee camps. Revolution is the only viable way to clear the ledger. We need a future that values generosity and sacrifice. We need a future that prioritizes inheritance of the meek and wretched. If we even want a future, we need a future that is Indigenous.
Palestinians aren’t indigenous.
Jews are.
Gazans never fought the IDF to a standstill.
You’re full of shit
Fuck yourslf, you bigoted Hamasshole
Hey Tony, you should catch the part in the Q and A where I also make reference to Hizbullah kicking the IDF’s ass. It’s very inspiring–Steve
That’s often been said by your sort, but the truth is that Nasrallah has been living in a bunker since 2006, and Hizbullah hasn’t attacked Israel since then, while the IAF flies sorties over Lebanon every day, and destroys those Iranian weapons shipments on a daily basis
Shame you didn’t mention all those Hizbullah funerals in 2006.
The Bible is fiction. Jews from Europe are not Indigenous to the Mediterranean.
They are white as fuck and so is the Zionist colonial enterprise. Their skin burns in the Palestinian sun.
And they do not have a very strong claim; mostly an ideology developed in the 19th c. based on racism, and Bible stories, which are fictions. So is “Judea” and “Samaria.”
Read history, it has always been Palestine.
Tony Riley, here are some starting points for you to educate yourself out of your fucking racism, delusions of superiority, and general idiocy.
I was going to pick apart Salaita’s desire for the world to become “meek and wretched” which he believes to be synonymous with “indigenous,” but it was too boring to contemplate, so I’ll attack “Reply to Tony Riley.”
Reply, fuck is not white. It is interracial. It is a goal to be desired. There is no “Palestinian sun.” That sun exploded and died. Everyone’s skin burns under the Mediterranean sun. Not only do Judea and Samaria exist, BUT the UN ALSO uses the designation to point out the boundaries of the partition recommendation. Read UNGA res 181 and “educate yourself out of your fucking racism, delusions of superiority, and general idiocy.”
Some Palestinian Arabs are the direct decedents of the Jews. Some remained Jews, others
converted to Christianity and Islam. All were subject to the violence and racism that the majority of Zionists practiced with intent to drive them from their land, businesses and employment. “State of Terror” by Thomas Suarez details with British Foreign Office communications and news articles of the day. The Zionist are the descendants of European racist and white supremacy. Zionism’s founders openly admired Hitler’s “new man” and aspirations for colonial expansion, popular among European Powers who had already claimed Africa and the Americas to Germany’s economic detriment, suffocating their Capital’s demand for resources, markets and surplus population. The racist Brits saw value in having a European colony that shared its values toward Arabs inserted as an outpost of “western civilization”. The Zionist were willing to be the on site thugs to advance their intentions of taking it all. More than just a different religious group the Zionist helped convince Hitler that Jews were a race unto them selves worthy of the same treatment that Britian, France, Belgium, Spain and the United States practiced on the indigenous of the territory they took for their own colonial projects: genocide.
Can you please supply the comic book from which you copied the idiocy you promote? I need it for an anthology of idiots in print.
“State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel” , Thomas Suarez
“HOW VIOLENCE AND TERROR WERE USED BY ZIONIST MILITIAS AGAINST ARABS AND THE BRITISH TO TRANSFORM ARAB PALESTINE INTO A JEWISH STATE. ?This book shows how the use of terror by supporters of the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine was systematic, routine, and accepted by Jewish leaders as necessary to achieve their aims. At the height of the British Mandate in Palestine, terrorist acts were carried out at a frequency and with an intensity that has been largely forgotten, even though daily newspaper headlines in the US, Britain, and Palestine spoke of bombings, assassinations, and massacres against Arabs and British civilians, as well as soldiers. Suarez tells this story using the terrorists’ own accounts in secret internal papers boasting of their successes, and quoting from contemporary intelligence briefings and secret diplomatic correspondence.”
I was surprised to learn the of the three groups of people the Jionists gangs targeted for terrorism, the first on the list were recently arrived Jews who did not like what they saw, frequently comparing it to the programs of the Nazis they fled Europe to escape.
Suarez is known to fabricate the information he uses. The Arabs also committed many acts of terrorism but supporters of Salaita’s brand of writing excuse that.
You will be surprised at your low level of knowledge about the conflict if you ever read a few other books not written by those praised by “as a Jew” people.
“According to Suarez’s website, he does not have academic or professional experience with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict outside of the books and articles he has written. According to the site, “Thomas Suarez’s experience as a researcher began in the 1980s with his work on the history of cartography.” His cartography books cover regions such as Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Suarez also is a professional violinist and has played with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the American Symphony Orchestra.”
Dear Steven,
Note the intellectual level of your interlocutor.
It’s easy to ignore them for the joy of your company!–Steve
I know you guys like to come together for your latter-day Nuremberg rallies, but I’m just here to fuck with your comfort zone.
The word “Palestinian” derives from the Hebrew word for “invader”, so they clearly aren’t indigenous.
You see yourself as a Speer-type, rather than as a Goebbels?
Good luck with that
It appears that “Reply to Tony Riley” meets the intellectual level you admire.
Are you upset that the level is higher that Salaita’s?
Absolutely amazing that I was not alerted about this article until now. I cannot imagine what happened as I am a loyal subscriber.
I dislike repeating what others have said, but as I am a few hours late…
The Palestinian Arabs are no more indigenous than the typical citizens of Mexico, Brazil, and Argentine. They are the descendants of Arab invaders and settler-colonials who force their culture, religion, and language as they intermarried/raped those that came before them.
Just as the Arab supremacists of the Palestinian region feared the loss of political power as the Jews became more numerous (anyone thinking of the new kings of Egypt?), white supremacists in the US fear a loss of political power with increased Latin America immigration from the south.
Steve, you are exactly as Pasha Glubb described you; you demand 100% and you get nothing. The Palestinian Arabs did the same, and like you, they decided violence was the only way, so they attempted to commit genocide. And they lost. And their constant daily humiliation of losing to Jews is the true Nakbah, the true catastrophe that permeates the soul of the Palestinian Arab and why there will never be an end to the conflict.
That you recommend your soul destroying approach to Americans can only be because you are among the Schadenfreude.
It is testament to Steve’s endless patience and empathy, both personally and as Palestinian, that he has to suffer the absolutely ghoulish PragerU pieces of shit that comment here like you after everything he posts. I hope he doesn’t take it too much to heart, honestly, but I fear he must because unlike you, Jack, he’s a feeling human being
I am so glad I have the time to re-read the idiotic comments by those who unconditionally support Salaita.
In the meantime, Perhaps most demoralizing of all was the continuing capture and control of the narrative – the “Occupation of the American Mind” — by Israeli hasbara that has mischaracterized the facts on the ground over there for my entire lifetime and resulted in the marginalization and silencing of Palestinian and anti-Zionist voices by the mainstream media, the Israel lobby, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the cacophony of “pro-Israel” supporters who together have made Palestinians out to be terrorists and their Israeli oppressors victims; when in fact, the Israeli state and settler violence arrayed against the Palestinians has always dwarfed that of the resistance. It has been a remarkable feat of propaganda and narrative control to carry out these crimes against humanity and slowly but inexorably Judaicizing the Land” Pretending to be yearning for a two-state solution while deliberately taking steps to kill any prospect of it. The hasbara has seemed as impenetrable as the Apartheid system it supports.”
Robert Herbst
https://mondoweiss.net/2021/05/lets-have-a-frank-talk-about-israeli-oppression-and-antisemitism/
If MondoWeiss is the source of “your truth” (IAW the vice president who rolled over for the ignorant young lady who was weeping for the humiliated Palestinian Arabs), then your mind is still occupied by a cacophony of lies and nonsense. As the Palestinian Arabs started a civil war in 1947 with the intent of genocide (as earlier demonstrated in 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936-39), and continued acting with genocidal intent through today (pay for slay anyone?), few Israelis do not have the constant thought that some Palestinian Arab is going to commit an act of terrorism any day now.
Yes, Palestinian Arab exceptionally violent “resistance” is dwarfed by the array of Israeli defense measures. Yes, we yearn for a “two-state” solution while knowing it will never come to pass as the Palestinian Arab demand is not for two states. It is to flood Israel and destroy the Jewish state.
As Steve is well aware, the Palestinian Arab goal is 100% of their demands, and they will accept nothing less, so they will get nothing. Arafat knew that if he accepted less, he would be dead by morning.
As your fake name means you do not breath, it is obvious your brain is starved of oxygen and you cannot think.
The land is Jewish. No Judaizing required.
Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.
America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.
As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel’s propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.”
Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim.
Israel is a liberal democracy. All citizens of Israel can, and most do, vote in national and local elections. The citizens of Israel are free to be as political as they desire and also free to ignore it all. There is no need to promote Israel’s democratic ideals to its citizens. If Shlaim is whining about the zero promotion of such to the very literate Arab-Israel society, that is a private whine which Israel need not answer.
The Palestinian Arabs are the Author of their own misery. They elected Hamas. They chose genocide as a tactic. They do not aspire to “a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.”
They aspire to reverse the humiliating results of 1947-49, with genocidal intent. They have damned themselves and their progeny to a life of never ending misery.
Avi hasn’t lived in Israel for many decades
Smart Jew: like Pappe, he realised that he can make a good living appealing to the bias of Jew-haters
Well said!
Thank you.
Of course, I didn’t mean Sigman and I think he knows that.
You should have meant Sigman. Otherwise you are applauding bigotry and propaganda and the right to be ignorant.
Following the 1967 war, Israel began establishing numerous settlements, or illegal housing developments for Jewish Israelis only on stolen Palestinian land (colonies). There are now thousands of these settlements throughout the West Bank and Gaza, as well as numerous settlements in the Syrian Golan Heights.
Settlements are one of the major blockages to a peaceful and just resolution to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and other Arabs. The “roadmap” to peace calls on Israel to dismantle these settlements and to return the land to the rightful owners. Unfortunately, Israel continues to expand existing settlements and to build new ones.
Israeli settlers, who are known for their Jewish fundamentalism and desire to take the rest of Palestine (and perhaps even parts of other Arab lands) for Israel, usually carry large guns. They travel on specially built “bypass roads,” that now crisscross the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinians are not allowed to use these roads.
Breathenot,
Your ignorance is not amazing, as MondoWeiss is your teacher. State land is not “stolen Palestinian land.” The Palestinian Arabs have no sovereignty so other than privately owned land, they have no land. The Palestinian Arabs commit acts of terror, the Israelis counter by building homes. Who is devoted to peace?
The “roadmap” demands a negotiated peace. The Palestinian Arabs refuse to negotiate. Their overwhelming demand is that Israel commit suicide. Therefore, there will never be peace and it is the sole fault of the Palestinian Arabs.
Israel is in danger of becoming a failed state. Its demographic engine will ensure numerical superiority of Arabs over Palestinians, even in Israel itself, as time goes forward. This will force a theocratic and racist authority to ever more short-term suppressive and brutal measures over Palestinian rights in Israel and Palestinian existence in the OPT. Their actions will lose Israeli authorities the support of intelligent Americans and Europeans, of international Judaism itself, and of Muslims everywhere. For humanitarian but also for strategic reasons it will become obvious that Israel has become a moral and strategic liability, an anachronism in the modern world. This will have negative implications for its attraction as an investment destination. There will be just too many other ways of making money. China and Russia will be perceived as better, and safer partners, than American proxies and the sinking American hegemon. Turkey and Saudi Arabia, even Shia Iran (in alliance with Baathist Syria) will find more subtle ways to pick up the mantel of religious identity and safeguard the regional interests of all Muslims in and around Israel. Under ever more intense economic, political, cultural and environmental pressures, Israeli intellectuals and liberal religious leaders, in association with allies in the USA and pro-peace movements everywhere, will direct their attention more seriously to unitary-state alternative visions for a new and equitable political entity freer of identity politics. US politicians will learn to follow. Oliver Boyd-Barrett
Breathenot,
There are no Palestinian Arab rights in Israel. However, all Arab Israelis have the same rights as non-Arab Israelis.
But it is interesting that you predict that Israel, with an Muslim Arab majority, will become a failed state.
I think Mr. Sigman’s grasp of the Geneva Conventions seems weak at best, but perhaps, he, like the rogue state for which he apologizes, just doen’t recognize those conventions.
Dannie,
You do not think. You are ignorant of the various conventions and your “knowledge level” is what has been force fed you, through either end, by MondoWeiss and other borderline antisemitic sites.
Good luck with that.
“ In the fights over the future of Israel and Palestine, in which enmities are often understood to be both ancient and eternal, Peter Beinart is the rare figure to have come unstuck. Having made his name as a stalwart of liberal Zionism and a prominent center-left supporter of the Iraq War, both as an editor of The New Republic and a familiar face on cable news, Beinart has spent much of the past decade reconsidering those positions. Last summer, he made a clean break. “The painful truth is that the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades—a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews—has failed,” Beinart wrote, in a long essay for Jewish Currents. He called on interested parties to work toward a single state in the Middle East that would protect the rights of Israeli Jews and Palestinians alike. On May 11th, as violence escalated in Israel and Gaza, Beinart published a second essay, arguing that the Jewish right to return home should also apply to Palestinians. “If Palestinians have no right to return to their homeland,” he wrote, “neither do we.” Two days later, Rashida Tlaib, the left-wing Palestinian congresswoman, quoted Beinart when she led several of her progressive colleagues to the floor of the House to denounce Israel’s latest actions. No one involved in these debates missed the implication: the most influential liberal Zionist of his generation no longer believed in an exclusively Jewish state in the Middle East. Peter Beinart had switched sides.
Beinart is now treated as a pariah except by the borderline antisemitic crowd formed by JVP, INN, JVL, JIV, and Gilad Atzmon. He is no longer considered influential, except among Palestinian Arabs and those who consider genocidal of the Jews as a viable option.
I would recommend subscribing to the Peter Beinart Notebook. Like Steve Salaita’s articles, Peter’s commentary on world affairs and the Israel/Palestine conflict is always interesting and considered.
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/why-i-debate-people-with-whom-i-disagree
About Peter Beinart
Contributing opinion writer, New York Times. Editor-at-Large, Jewish Currents. CNN Contributor. Professor of Journalism and Political Science, Newmark School of Journalism, CUNY. Fellow, Foundation for Middle East Peace.
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-a-food-truck-made-peter-beinart-too-zionist-for-the-pro-palestinian-left-1.9928921
A Food Truck Made Peter Beinart Too Zionist for the pro-Palestinian Left. Antisemitism or legitimate protest? U.S. activists against the occupation are divided after Philadelphia food festival Eat Up the Borders uninvited an Israeli food truck
“People who have been silent about Israel’s apartheid for years, who yawn at news of the crimes of the occupation and turn a blind eye to them; who vote for Yesh Atid, the Labor Party and Meretz, say they oppose the occupation, worship the Israel Defense Forces, patronize the Palestinians and think themselves enlightened – yet their conscience is tortured by the impotence and the conceptual void to which they are subjected. Deep inside they know that they are no less proponents of Jewish supremacy than the right that they despise, and from which they struggle to differentiate themselves. They know that Israel’s left-center governments never did what they had to do in order to enable the Palestinians to exercise their rights. They know that at the end of the day, they themselves are the occupation’s greatest supporters and perpetrators, in their silence, their complacency, their disinterest and their inaction.”
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-the-israeli-left-s-hatred-for-netanyahu-has-driven-it-mad-1.10381935?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_content=author-alert&utm_campaign=Gideon%20Levy&utm_term=20211114-01:03
There is no reason to speak about what does not exist. This is just another one of their Arab propaganda ploys wherein they hop on to a legitimate campaign, like ending police brutality in the US South, or ending South African Apartheid, or ending discrimination of indigenous people, changing the name of the victim to “Palestinian,” and hoping ignorant idiots don’t notice.
Educated antisemitic pro-Arab forces know it is a game. Idiots like Breathenothing have no choice but to toe the party line.
The Palestinian Arabs are the authors of their misery and humiliation. When they stop their genocidal campaign, they may get on the road to peace. Until then, idots encouraging them now do them no service.
“For generations, the world has been a largely silent witness to an unbridled Western enterprise erasing millions of Palestinians from their unbroken ancestral homeland in the name of a diabolical resettlement project built of tenants with enduring leaseholds elsewhere dating back for as long as the West has been settled. Yes, the Old Testament (and other historical religious narratives) as so much providential design, speaks of the Jewish people and the Holy Land as if not just inexorably intertwined, but apparently, it is claimed to the exclusion of all others. However, let us not forget like beauty resting in the eye of the proverbial holder, elsewhere in sacred text we learn the universe is just over 6000 years old; Joshua stopped the sun moving across the sky; Lot, the only righteous man in Sodom offered up his virgin daughters to be gang-raped by a mob; a human witnessed a conversation between God and Satan; that two of every animal fit on a boat for forty days while a flood destroyed the world; that humankind was formed of clay; that the Jewish God, YHYH, fought a monster named either Leviathan, or Rahab or Sir Sea; that the serpent in Eden talked to Eve; that David’s harp was played at night by the wind; and that Samson fell 1,000 Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Star of David … land of myth.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/28/star-of-david-land-of-myth/
Counterpunch? That is the rag you rely on for misinformation? No wonder you come off as an ignorant lout.
By the way, it was not 2 of every animal. But then, who expects those like you the read the source material when you can have antisemites explain everything to you.
Jack Frank Sigman says:
November 11, 2021 at 10:33 am
It appears that “Reply to Tony Riley” meets the intellectual level you admire.
Are the comments in this thread by the same Sigman at an intellectual level?
“As your fake name means you do not breath, it is obvious your brain is starved of oxygen and you cannot think.”
“Idiots like Breathenothing have no choice but to toe the party line.”
“Until then, idots encouraging them now do them no service.”
“No wonder you come off as an ignorant lout.”
I rest my case.
I have a problem here. I don’t often know who is quoting or saying what? You seem, however, Mr. Breathnach to have misunderstood my intent at some point; if, indeed, it is your comment to which I am responding.
be well
db
You have a problem. There is no Mr. Breathnach. The name means “does not breathe” It is a pseudonym for a man, woman, or indeterminant sexual idntity. We do know it has antisemitic leanings and is quite ignorant of the history of the conflict, as well as the current situation. He/she/it is nothing more than a purveyor of propaganda.
You are fooling yourself.
Sorry if I confused you Daniel, but I was showing comments made on the thread by Sigman, in which he is calling commentators names while pretending to be an intellectual. The comment was meant for general consumption as I won’t engage with bigots.
Beathenot,
You are just as confused as Dannie. Did your family disown you as they refuse to deal with bigots?
Your case does not hold water.
Always a problem having to deal with antisemites like Sean
As they say: shooting’s too good for them
Not appropriate, even if honest.
Fair point
What can be done with these antisemitic Hamassholes?
I guess you thought that that pun was so brilliant, you might as well repeat it.
I thought he did so to get it through your thick skull.
Daniel, I think Sigman and his sidekick Riley are intellectually restricted, as their use of gutter language shows. Here are some examples:
“ What can be done with these antisemitic Hamassholes?
“ I thought he did so to get it through your thick skull.”
“ As previously suggested: Fuck Yourselves”
“ As they say: shooting’s too good for them.”
“As your fake name means you do not breath, it is obvious your brain is starved of oxygen and you cannot think.”
“Idiots like Breathenothing have no choice but to toe the party line.”
“Until then, idots encouraging them now do them no service.”
“No wonder you come off as an ignorant lout.”
Breathenot, you also thinknot.
But in your new role as a tag-team idiot with Dannie, you have found your niche.
Antisemitism is a byproduct of mental illness
Actually, it is a byproduct of ignorance and a failed life. Steve has an excuse in that he has had a sense of humiliation his entire intellectual life. However, Dannie and Breathenot, our tag-team idiots, are just ignoramuses who rely on antisemitic and hate-filled propaganda.
That’s your name
Own it
Don’t you Jew-hating virtue signallers pretend that you actually care about Palestine.
If you did, you’d be campaigning for women’s & LGBTQ rights there.
For independent trade unions
For free speech & elections
For an end to Hamas
But your sort never do
As previously suggested: Fuck Yourselves
Steven cares. He is a Palestinian Arab. Of course, as Pasha Glubb indicates, Salaita’s concern is that of the fascist nationalist. As an Arab supremacist, he cannot wrap his mind around the fact that his people lost the civil war they started with genocidal intent. How could they lose to Jews? It is a sense of humiliation that will never leave him. It got worse when he was fired by an Arab university.
But never doubt that Steve cares about Palestinians.
I agree with you Mr. Breathnach. All they can manage is ad hominen vulgarities.
db
So you two are now tag-team idiots?
Over 100 celebrities have signed an open letter criticizing the Israeli government for designating six human rights groups as terrorist organizations. “The vital work of these six organizations to protect and empower Palestinians and hold Israel accountable for its gross human rights violations and apartheid regime of institutionalized racial discrimination is precisely the work that Israel is trying to end,” reads the letter.
https://mondoweiss.net/2021/11/richard-gere-tilda-swinton-mark-ruffalo-susan-sarandon-join-over-100-other-celebrities-in-calling-on-israel-to-rescind-terrorist-designation/
Democratic Jewish state.” The Israeli government uses the phrase constantly. But is it an oxymoron? Can a state be democratic—can the whole people rule—while also elevating one group of people, Jews, over another, Palestinians? In a recent essay in the journal Liberties (subscription required), the Israeli-born philosopher Moshe Halbertal answers yes. In his new book, Haifa Republic, the Israeli-born philosopher Omri Boehm says no. I’m honored that these two brilliant men will join us this Friday, November 19, to argue the point.
Just looked at this debate and I have decided that buying, Haifa Republic, would be a very good idea.
A provocative argument for a new way of seeing Israel, Zionism, and the two-state solution.
Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel is an urgent wake-up call. The philosopher Omri Boehm argues that it is long past time to recognize that there will not be a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. After fifty years, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank constitutes annexation in all but name, even as the legitimate claims of the Arab population, soon to be a national majority, remain unaddressed. Meanwhile, daily life goes on under conditions rightly likened to apartheid. For liberals in Israel and America to continue to place their hopes in a two-state solution is a form of willful and culpable blindness, especially now that Israeli leaders across the political spectrum have begun to speak of ethnic cleansing. A catastrophe is in the making.
But Haifa Republic also offers grounds for hope. Catastrophe can be averted, Boehm contends, by reconfiguring Israel as a single binational state in which Palestinians and Jews both possess human rights and equal citizenship. The original Zionists—Theodor Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and, early in his career, David Ben-Gurion—all advocated such a federation, and as prime minister, Menachem Begin successfully submitted a kindred plan to the Knesset. A binational federation offers a last chance for the two peoples who call Palestine home to live in peace and mutual respect and to have a truly democratic future in common.
Omri Boehm, as a philosopher, has a point. As a lawyer, as an expert in international relations, as a person with common sense, he has no point.
The Palestinian Arabs are an enemy people under the military control of Israel. They will never be a “national majority” because they are not a part of the nation of Israel.
The catastrophe was the Palestinian Arab hope to settle the issue through genocide.
It is true that the original Zionists—Theodor Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and, early in his career, David Ben-Gurion—all advocated co-existence with the existing Arab population. However, the Arabs revealed their incipient genocidal mentality (as indicated by noted genocide scholar Martin Shaw) in 1920, 21, 29, and 36-39, and that they would never acquiesce to living along side a majority Jewish population in the Middle East.
Steve, you are moderating now?
Steve, continuing the Beinart theme. Gideon Levy wrote an interesting piece in July 2020 on Peter’s conversion.Here is the article with a few comments.
A page-one headline in Friday’s international edition of The New York Times (a day after the piece appeared in the paper’s U.S. print edition): “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State.” No, the significance of this cannot be overstated. Peter Beinart, one of American Jewry’s most prominent liberal intellectuals, an observant Jew who was raised in a Zionist home, who was 28 when he became the editor of The New Republic, and who later became a senior columnist at Haaretz, has said goodbye to the two-state solution and in effect issued a divorce decree to Zionism, at least in its current format.
In an impressive essay that has already made waves in the United States, he writes: “It’s time to imagine a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state.” Beinart is not a lone voice in the United States. American Jews are beginning, if belatedly, to take a clear-eyed look at Israel, its darling. The Democratic Party is also doing so, slowly. Now we can hope that Beinart’s op-ed will motivate more and more intellectuals and others to look honestly and bravely at reality, as he has done, and to say what is still considered heresy, a betrayal of Israel and not politically correct in the United States.
Beinart has seen the light. An end has come to years of a pleasant, intoxicating belief that it was possible to be a liberal Jew and still support Israel, by dint of the illusion of the two-state solution, which Israel and the U.S. never intended to carry out. Now Beinart too realizes that there is an inherent contradiction that cannot be resolved. As long as the occupation continues, no liberal, Jewish or not, can support Israel. Beinart realized that the die has been cast: The two-state solution died because of the irreversible number of settlers, to which the annexation plan was recently added. “The goal of equality is now more realistic than the goal of separation,” Beinart writes, expertly describing reality a moment before being attacked with the claim that the one-state solution isn’t realistic. (Anshel Pfeffer did so in Haaretz on Thursday.)
Yes, the followers of the two-state solution are “realistic” and those who are for the one-state solution are delusional. It’s hard to think of a more delusional mirage. For 53 years there has been a single state here, its apartheid regime is becoming entrenched with sickening speed and to speak of regime changing in this single state is to speak unrealistically. When only two options remain, a single democratic state or an apartheid state, the democratic option doesn’t even come up for discussion in Israel, and barely does in the United States or the rest of the world.
The remnants of the imaginary possibility of a Palestinian state have long since been torn, but we must continue to hope for it, to long for it and to pray for its establishment. A Palestinian state? Where? How? Not here. Not now. Instead of launching the only struggle that offers a just vision – equality; one person, one vote – the liberals continue to sing paeans to a past that will never return, to a train that has left the station and will never return. Instead of taking the necessary conclusions, they continue to shut their eyes and scatter illusions. It’s more comfortable for everyone; for Israelis, for the Palestinian Authority and the world. A Palestinian state will surely come to be, just you wait and see.
The standard weapon of the “realists” for burying the last just solution is the threat of the terrible bloodshed that would occur in the binational state. The 53 years of the apartheid state generated the most terrible bloodshed of all. Things can only get better. Beinart, whose parents emigrated from South Africa, knows from history that when a government of equality is established in a binational state, and all its inhabitants win freedom and can exercise their rights, violence declines and even disappears. It happened in Northern Ireland as well as in South Africa. But the Zionist chorus will continue to paint a terrifying picture of the unknown and cling to the status quo, the steady, institutionalized situation of apartheid, which is the worst of all.
Beinart misses the day when he saw Israel as a source of pride, like many Jews. Myself included. Now Beinart is himself a source of pride: an American Jew who heralds a change that gives hope.
Comments.
Victor01:53 12.07.2020
It is for Israel to decide. But America has been subsidizing Israel’s defense, so we have a say, too. The only position consistent with American values, and with Jewish values, is equal rights for all inhabitants. Israel has made the “Two-State Solution” impossible. To still cling to the two-state myth amounts to accommodating repression. It’s time to expect Israel to become a normal state of all its inhabitants. Israel’s defenders cry, impossible! It is for now, but so, in the long run, is a continuation of the current state of affairs. So is the right-wing option to force the Palestinians out. Let’s stop talking about waiting for the “two sides” to agree to peace. There is only one side, the heavily armed Israeli side that now controls a largely passive non-Jewish population, whose fault is its failure to prostrate itself completely. Only Israel has the power to head in a more positive direction. It may not seem so, but it’s the only chance Israel has to save itself.
LouArpino15:33 12.07.2020
Israel’s secular socialist founders clearly defined their state as One State for all the inhabitants of the land, the borders of which were left intentionally undefined.
The opening words of their Country’s Declaration of Establishment unilaterally proclaim that “ERETZ-ISRAEL-the Land of Israel, Palestine”, not only “will be open for Jewish immigration and for the In-gathering of the Exiles”, but also “will foster the development of the country for the benefit of ALL its inhabitants”. Most significantly they pledged that their new State “will ensure COMPLETE EQUALITY of social and political rights to ALL its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex”.
And, in the bait and switch con game of the Century, Israel’s right wing Nationalist Annexationists have suspended the reality of the sacred promises made in their Country’s most basic legal document.
Sam Spade17:59 13.07.2020
As others have noted, today’s Israel is a Jewish supremacist racist ethnocracy with a severe self-inflicted disaster, the settlement enterprise poisoning its core with apartheid, rampant racism, discrimination and a tattered rule of law. Israeli Jews clearly fear democracy and have embraced an endless conflict with arabs/palestinians which can only result in more bloodshed and extreme violence on the part of Israel. Today Israel has the political and military power to change the equation. Annex all the territory and commit to one person/one vote. Two states is long dead and Israeli Jewish apartheid will not end any better than it did for South Africa.
Breathless, thank you for the antisemitic comments. As the vast majority of Jews consider Beinart in the same breath as MondoWeiss and other progressive nutcases, your posting, preaching to an antisemitic choir, is noted.
Steve, I though you might like to read this comment by an American lady, Jan, to a recent article by Gideon Levy.
“I have cared for many years. I began to care years ago when my American born Israeli relative told our family that he had participated .in the ethnic cleansing of the Arab villages in the north of Israel. I have visited my member of Congress and demonstrated in front of the Israeli consulate. If I could have done more, I would. Today as I head into my 90s the best I can do is contribute to organizations that help Palestinians and raise my voice on Facebook.
I was raised to believe that no one has the right to take the land of others and that no one has the right to deny human rights to other people. In 1948, my father put on a huge fund raiser in Hollywood raising many thousands of dollars for what he thought would be a bi-national state. In the years before he passed away he said that Israel was becoming a fascist state.I hope for an end to the occupation and a time when you and all Palestinians live with peace, freedom and justice.”
Merry Christmas Steve, to you and all men and women of goodwill.
Jan,
I am so sorry that a lack of education has led to your about face regarding the support you should have for Israel. Had the Arabs accepted the resolution recommending partition, had the Arabs not started a civil war with the goal of a second Holocaust, had the Arab armies not invaded the brand-new state with that same goal of genocide, there may have been “peace, freedom and justice” for all.
We all hope for an end to the “occupation.” However, until the Arabs decide that negotiating peace is preferable to genocide, it will never happen.
Stephen, some comments from a recent article by Gideon Levy & Alec Levac in Haaretz.
Israeli Army Bulldozes Palestinian Wheat Fields to Make Way for Tanks.
Liz
For the ignorant: the EU has tried to provide basic infrastructure to the Palestinians in area C because Israel sends in the bulldozers to demolish any structure – ranging from an entire community, schools, even a playground – that has not received planning permission. Of course, Israel has devised the perfect Catch-22 situation. It simply refuses to give that permission and even destroys what the EU supplies (so that the EU was even discussing charging Israel for what it provides and Israel destroys). It’s not rocket science: Israel wants area C ‘cleansed’ of Palestinians but they can only ‘encourage’ them to leave, otherwise even the state might find itself being challenged by the international community. BTW, Mort, only Israel calls it ‘state land’ so we can view that for what it really is, state theft in breach of international laws.
William
Roman statesman Cato said that Carthage Must be Destroyed, replace Carthage with Zionism.
It’s just appalling that a people that suffer the Holocaust could be so Atrocious and Abhorrent .
eros
I sometimes think the Israeli Govt, different than the people, tries too hard to be deliberately seen as a cold and heartless entity that it doesn’t even seem like the place that was built by survivors of a genocide. Just recently Haaretz did a story where they tried to justify Israeli crimes being on par or less than crimes by other nations. I refuse to accept that “cop out” . I expect more from Israel and so does the USA which has $3billion yearly reasons plus to expect more and countless benefits bestowed on Israel which are not on Myanmar, or Iraq or India , Pakistan, Kazakhstan. 3 free squadrons of F35 should be reason enough to expect some semblance of the “american spirit” lives in Israel. Unless Israel is the true face of America? The child is not good at hiding its sins like the father?
The more you post, the more ignorance you reveal. Israel was not built by those who survived the Holocaust devised by your people. Israel was built by those who defied the Arabs’ genocidal attempts in the 1920s and 30s. Israel was built by the Jews who endured the hardships and created a nation. Israel was built by Jews who spit on you and yours and laugh while you cower.
But they did provide a home for 100 thousand Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.
Israelis expect you to shut up until you receive a proper academic education instead of stuffing your empty skull with antisemitic propaganda. Your incipient antisemitic mindset shines through your every post. Are you reliving the sins of your antisemitic forebears?
Israel does not care what you refuse to accept.
Let’s have a frank talk about Israeli oppression and antisemitism.
The dam is breaking.
It has been seven years since Operation Protective Edge — the obscenity in which Israel’s merciless bombardment of Gaza killed more than 2,000 Palestinians, more than 500 of them children.
Frankly, they have been seven lean years in which progress in that struggle seemed demoralizingly difficult: more of the same slow, steady ethnic cleansing, discrimination and oppression of Palestinians wherever they live in the Land between the River and the Sea – more discriminatory laws like the Basic Jewish Nation State law; unequal provision of water, education, health and other public resources; expanding Jewish-only settlements; more Palestinian evictions and home demolitions; more killing and maiming of unarmed Palestinian protesters; ever-increasing right-wing politics and comfort with this matrix of control in Israel; and continued financial, moral, religious and cultural support for the oppression in and by the United States and established elements of the American Jewish and evangelical Christian communities.
Perhaps most demoralizing of all was the continuing capture and control of the narrative – the “Occupation of the American Mind” — by Israeli hasbara that has mischaracterized the facts on the ground over there for my entire lifetime and resulted in the marginalization and silencing of Palestinian and anti-Zionist voices by the mainstream media, the Israel lobby, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the cacophony of “pro-Israel” supporters who together have made Palestinians out to be terrorists and their Israeli oppressors victims; when in fact, the Israeli state and settler violence arrayed against the Palestinians has always dwarfed that of the resistance. It has been a remarkable feat of propaganda and narrative control to carry out these crimes against humanity and slowly but inexorably Judaicizing the Land, pretending to be yearning for a two-state solution while deliberately taking steps to kill any prospect of it. The hasbara has seemed as impenetrable as the Apartheid system it supports.
But starting early this year, the narrative dam started to crack. B’Tselem issued its “Apartheid” report, followed by the Human Rights Watch report to the same effect. By the time of its publication, the New York Times, newly-woke, with a new Jerusalem bureau chief and apparently new editorial policies about Israel-Palestine, put the A-word on page 1. Other mainstream media followed the Times’s lead. Then there was sympathetic coverage of the home evictions in Sheikh Jarrah and the Israeli provocations in and around Al Aqsa. When Netanyahu’s “Wag the Dog” war against Gaza promised a repeat of Protective Edge, this time Israel’s brutal, disproportionate destruction of civilian lives and property was covered and laid bare, forcing the Biden Administration to rouse itself to push for a ceasefire earlier than the Israeli Government wanted. This thankfully limited Palestinian deaths to “only” 65 kids rather than 500. And two days ago, on the front page of the Times, I saw something I have never seen in more than 60 years of reading the paper, and never thought I would see: in addition to the two Israeli children killed by Hamas rockets, 62 faces of the Palestinian children – some as young as six months, two, four and five years — slaughtered by Israeli warplanes and munitions, some of which were made right here in America and purchased by Israel with our Benjamins, knowing part of it will inevitably be used just as it was. And inside was a two-page spread not only describing these children and their dreams and nightmares but also reporting that they were killed “when Israeli warplanes hit homes and residential neighborhoods, [where] the number of children at risk is extraordinary. Sometimes nearly entire households disappear with a single blast.” In other words, the Israelis knew what they were doing when they killed scores of innocent children, like the hundreds they killed seven years ago.
And it is not just the reporting. The opinion pages have opened to Palestinians and their advocates. Just this week Times readers read a rip-roaring column by Palestinian human rights lawyer Diane Buttu, while Peter Beinart, of all people — a critic of Zionism — is now an occasional columnist for the Times, most recently writing in favor of the right of return for Palestinians! While Nicholas Kristof, who for decades has taken on the cause of human rights victims the world over but maintained a both-sides-have-their-complaints posture toward Palestinians, wrote two columns earlier this month suggesting that there might be better uses for the $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel every year, and that the “unshakable” alliance between Israel and U.S. might properly be shaking since Israel “systematically discriminates against Palestinians in the occupied territories and seems to think it can indefinitely control them and grab their land and water without giving them voting rights.”
This break in the dam at the Times – and at NBC, CNN, HBO, Comedy Central and elsewhere – has potentially huge implications for the struggle if the river waters released continue to run free, and I believe they will, thanks to forces as disparate as former President Trump and the Black Lives Matter movement. Trump demonstrated how important it is to the very maintenance of democratic government for the news media to report the true facts, rather than what two sides say about it. Our collective ability to distinguish truth from hasbara has atrophied, and that has not only disadvantaged Palestinians, but also the weak and marginalized in our own society. BLM and the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, against police racism, violence and impunity, have highlighted parallels between the racism and caste in Israel Palestine and here at home. Influencers like Trevor Noah and John Oliver now have more freedom to report or comment candidly on the brutality of Israeli Apartheid and the suffering humanity of Palestinians, and more will follow, here and around the globe. More Palestinian voices will be heard in the mainstream media. More American and other Christians will overcome their reluctance to criticize the Apartheid conditions that have caused the Christian population of the Holy Land to decline from 11% to less than 1% — a reluctance born of centuries of antisemitism and a disinclination to offend their Jewish brothers and sisters. As the trauma of the Holocaust and the conflation of Judaism with Israel diminishes, more Jews will overcome their tribal instincts and instead honor their democratic principles and Jewish religious and moral precepts that make a shonda of the edifice of Jewish supremacy upon which the Jewish State is built.
This is how the struggle against South African Apartheid was won. The realization by enough people here and around the world that the Israeli oppression of Palestinians is not right and can no longer be tolerated will ultimately be reflected in the policies of their governments, and the BDS which Palestinians have yearned for, and for which their supporters like Jewish Voice for Peace, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, American Muslims for Palestine, and Students for Justice in Palestine have advocated, will gain more adherents. Israel and AIPAC fear that prospect far more than Hamas rockets,
Just this week we saw the first evidence that the next seven years may be fat ones that bear fruit. The Dail, the Irish Parliament, voted unanimously to condemn Israel’s ongoing settlement expansion as “de facto annexation” of Palestinian territory. That is 160 elected representatives, all voting to make Ireland the first European nation to officially condemn Israel. The Irish foreign minister stated that we are at “a point where we need to be honest about what is actually happening on the ground.”
That has always been the battle: to break through the disinformation, the falsehoods, and to get the world, America, and the Jewish people to focus honestly on the true facts of Palestinian life on the ground under Jewish rule. How threatening this initial breakthrough is to those opposed to such discussion is obvious from their responses, like Abe Foxman’s calling the Times’s placement on the front page of photos of dead Palestinian as well as Israeli children an antisemitic “blood libel” and announcing he is cancelling his subscription which, like mine, goes back 65 years.
A prime obstacle to the honest discussion of the Palestinian plight we seek has been the misuse of antisemitism as a weapon against Palestinians and their advocates, Jewish and Gentile. It is therefore critical, as we go forward, to have an honest discussion about antisemitism, what it is, what it is not, and what needs to be done to minimize it.
Real antisemitism is hideous. It is hostility or prejudice against Jews because they are Jews. When a Jewish man is confronted, challenged or physically attacked on the street because he wears a yarmulke, or payos, he is being confronted, challenged or attacked by an antisemite. The attacker does not know whether the Jew is a supporter or critic of Israeli policy, whether he is a Zionist, a non-Zionist or an anti-Zionist, or whether he has supported or spoken out against Israeli policies or the oppression of Palestinians. Real antisemitism, or Jewphobia, is as vicious as Islamophobia, homophobia, or any of the other discrimination or hatreds of members of a group because they are members of that group. This is to be abhorred and opposed wherever we find it. All physical assaults, whether against persons or property, are crimes and should be prosecuted.
But we Jews have a responsibility to talk honestly about antisemitism, and the roots and causes of the seeming rise in it today. First, we must acknowledge that members of our tribe have used it as a weapon to tamp down and silence critics of Israel and its policies on Palestinians. Those of us who publicly criticize Israeli policies as unjust and intolerable are not antisemites, but the fear of being labelled as such has silenced many of all faiths who have been troubled by the Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Like the boy who cried wolf, those who affix the antisemitism label to these critics for tactical purposes may find that the benefits diminish as the cry “antisemite” loses its sting as well as society’s response to it. This may already be starting to happen, and the practice of defending Israeli policies and attacking Israeli critics with the antisemite label should cease forthwith. Let’s confine our fire to real antisemites, many of whom are Israel’s strongest supporters.
There is another aspect of the antisemitism discussion that needs more honest reflection. When we discuss what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, or as some prefer, the “conflict,” we always characterize it as a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. We say “Israeli policy toward the Palestinians,” or “Israeli oppression of or discrimination against the Palestinians.” I have done it myself in this column repeatedly to illustrate the practice, as you can see from the paragraphs above.
But if we are going to speak the truth, frankly, without fear or favor, we have to acknowledge that 20% of Israelis within the Green Line are Palestinian. They are not in conflict with Palestinians. They are not discriminating against Palestinians. They are not oppressing Palestinians. It is, I am sorry to say, Israeli Jews who are the perpetrators of the oppression. The Israeli government is, by preference and design, a Jewish government. Its actions have the overwhelming support of the Jews who have constructed and maintained their “democracy” for themselves. It is a government and nation of, by and for Jews. If there was any doubt about it, the adoption of the Basic Jewish Nation State Law recently made that crystal clear. It made Jewish supremacy the Basic Law – the Supreme Law – of the Land, deliberately, unapologetically, for all the world to see. As Netanyahu said at its passage,
This is our state — the Jewish state. In recent years, there have been some who have attempted to put this in doubt, to undercut the core of our being. Today, we made it law: This is our nation, language, and flag.
The Palestinian oppression is therefore a Jewish shonda. And were it not for the fear that speaking the truth might stoke hostility toward Jews among the oppressed or those who feel allied with the oppressed, that oppression would more properly be described not as an Israeli oppression of Palestinians, but as a Jewish oppression of Palestinians, especially since for so long it has had the overwhelming financial, political, cultural moral and religious support of world Jewry.
I say this as one of the growing number of fervent Jewish objectors to it. With my advocacy of Palestinian liberation, I do what I can to separate myself from this shonda and to reject the claim of Israeli politicians to speak and act in the name of the Jewish people everywhere. But it is and has always been foreseeable, as we lawyers say, that Palestinians and their allies would naturally perceive their oppressors to be Jews, writ large, there and round the world.
When you are killing and maiming Palestinians, ethnically cleansing and depriving them of their rights and dignity, annihilating them culturally if not physically, it is quite rich to demand that they maintain the presence of mind, moral decency and nuance to confine their anger to those Jews actively oppressing them, and those Jews who actively facilitate, finance and support the oppression. Yet most Palestinians I have met, in the West Bank as well as the United States, have retained that decency and nuance. That is to their grace and our benefit. It is, however, a lot to ask, and it is a grace that may not last while the Israeli knee remains on the Palestinian neck.
Accordingly, the best way to minimize antisemitic attacks going forward is to acknowledge the Apartheid crimes against humanity imposed on the Palestinians, to end those crimes as soon as possible, and to provide adequate reparations and reconstruction to the victims.
Robert Herbst
Herbst? MondoWeiss? JVP?
Sean Nobreath,
Surely you could come up with comments from other than accidental Jews using their supposed identity to shield themselves from the accurate charge of spreading antisemitism?
Or are you just too stupid and uneducated?
Mr. Sigman take a breather. You come across increasingly as unhinged. Your negative
accusations, slurs and misinformation mirror the colonial project you defend in a manor
that underscores the morality of the BDS movement. I thought you were performing your assignment well in being mildly annoying, slurs and misdirection, in what appears to me a continuation of a Zionist vendetta to drive Professor Salaita into public oblivion. I’m reminded by your technique of a speaker from CAMERA who organizers thought was there to give a critique of a propaganda model developed by Sut Jhally and tested in a new documentary film being presented at a media conference, in the context of U.S. Corporate reporting on Israel. Once at the podium he launched into an slanderous attack on Palestinians. Period. It caused outrage in the audience, prevented any Q&A and effectively shut down the conference. The builders of the settler colony you defend included “The Freedom Party” which in 1948 was compared “….in organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Menachen Begin then and now his ideological decedents use lies and intimidation to spread “the doctrine of the Fascist state.” I saw it at work in Illinois when Zionists robbed students at the U of I Champaign of academic access to one of the clearest analyst of language and its use in the perpetuation of oppression that I have encountered. Terrorism was used to build the “State of Israel”, as documented by the British Foreign Office in cables that are the basis of “State of Terror – How Terrorism Created Modern Israel”. It continues to be used. These are stressful times Mr. Sigman. Please seek professional help.
If Sigman is allowed to continue to pollute this list with crude and ignorant ad hominen comments, I think I’ll be outa here soon (but I suppose that’s what the Zionazi wants).
Dannie,
Leave. The “antisemites who support Salaita” fan club ran out of money having given it to Nobreath to post propaganda. There is no money left to pay you to make antisemitic statements. But thank you for proving me right.
“ But we Jews have a responsibility to talk honestly about antisemitism, and the roots and causes of the seeming rise in it today. First, we must acknowledge that members of our tribe have used it as a weapon to tamp down and silence critics of Israel and its policies on Palestinians. Those of us who publicly criticize Israeli policies as unjust and intolerable are not antisemites, but the fear of being labelled as such has silenced many of all faiths who have been troubled by the Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Like the boy who cried wolf, those who affix the antisemitism label to these critics for tactical purposes may find that the benefits diminish as the cry “antisemite” loses its sting as well as society’s response to it. This may already be starting to happen, and the practice of defending Israeli policies and attacking Israeli critics with the antisemite label should cease forthwith. Let’s confine our fire to real antisemites, many of whom are Israel’s strongest supporters.”
Yes Daniel, Sigman has lost his sting.
Nobreath,
It stings you so hard you keep posting propaganda to help heal your wounds. But it doesn’t help you and you know it.
“I notice Mr. Herbst used to be a chapter coordinator for Jewish Voice for Peace. Obviously he is no longer a voice for peace in these United States, but a voice for conflict here in this country. At one time JVP wanted a seat at the table. No longer. They are now throwing stones through the windows. Kind of reinforces the refusal to give them a seat at the table in the first place.”
This was posted on MondoWeiss.
I think it would be wise to let Steven’s readers make up their own mind on who is writing Hasbara and who is not. Apologies Stephen, if I have taken the comments to the limit of your patience. Over and out.
Of course, you think it wise for ignorant antisemites, such as yourself, to make up their own uneducated minds on pseudonyms like you on who is posting propaganda.
Stephen, although we are diametrically opposed in our positions, and while I am still writing my doctoral dissertation, and whether or not you have read my book disproving Martin Shaw’s suggestion of Israel committing genocide, I thank you for your infinite patience with those who disagree with you and congratulate you for putting up with anonymous chuckleheads like Sean and Dannie who seek to keep antisemitism alive and well on your website.
Stephen, this is a powerful article on the Amnesty report on apartheid in Israel by Gideon Levy. I’m sure some of your readers would appreciate a read.
Opinion | Tell Me What’s Untrue in Amnesty’s Report on Israel
Gideon Levy. Feb 3, 2022 in Haaretz newspaper.
As the curses and screeches subside – Amnesty are antisemites, the report is full of lies, the methodology is absurd – one must ask: What, precisely, is incorrect in the apartheid report?
Was Israel not founded on an explicit policy of maintaining Jewish demographic hegemony, while reducing the number of Palestinians within its boundaries? Yes or no? True or false? Does this policy not exist to this day? Yes or no? True or false? Does Israel not maintain a regime of oppression and control of Palestinians in Israel and in the occupied territories for the benefit of Israeli Jews? Yes or no? True or false? Do the rules of engagement with Palestinians not reflect a policy of shoot to kill, or at least maim? Yes or no? True or false? Are the evictions of Palestinians from their homes and the denial of construction permits not part of Israeli policy? Yes or no? True or false?
Is Sheikh Jarrah not apartheid? Is the nation-state law not apartheid? And the denial of family reunification? And the unrecognized villages? And the “Judaization”? Is there a single sphere, in Israel or the territories, in which there is true, absolute equality, except in name?
To read the report is to despair. It’s everything we knew, but condensed. Yet no despair or remorse was felt in Israel. Most of the media marginalized and blurred it, and the hasbara choir batted it away. The propaganda minister, Yair Lapid, recited his lines and went on the attack even before the report was published. Diaspora Affairs Minister Nachman Shai was quick to follow. The international report has yet to be born that Israel won’t denounce while neglecting to respond to a single point it makes. One organization after another, some of them important and honest, call it apartheid, and Israel says: antisemitism.
Please, prove Amnesty wrong. That there aren’t two systems of justice in the territories, two sets of rights and two formulas for the distribution of resources. That the legitimization of Evyatar is not apartheid. That Jews being able to reclaim their pre-1948 property while Palestinians are denied the same right is not apartheid. That a verdant settlement right next to a shepherd’s community with no power or running water is not apartheid. That Israel’s Arab citizens aren’t discriminated against systematically, institutionally. That the Green Line has not been erased. What’s not true?
Even Mordechai Kremnitzer was frightened by the report and attacked it. His arguments: The report does not distinguish the occupied territories from Israel, and it treats the past as if it were the present. That’s how it goes when even leftist academia enlists in defense of Zionist propaganda. Accusing Israel of the sins of 1948 and calling it apartheid is like accusing the United States of apartheid because of the Jim Crow past, he wrote in Wednesday’s Haaretz.
The difference is that institutionalized racism in the United States has gradually disappeared, whereas in Israel it’s alive and kicking as strong as ever. The Green Line has been obliterated too. It’s been one state for a while now. Why should Amnesty make the distinction? 1948 goes on. The Nakba goes on. A straight line connects Tantura and Jiljilya. In Tantura they massacred, in Jiljilya they caused an 80-year-old man to die, and in both cases Palestinian lives aren’t worth a thing.
There is, of course, no propaganda without accolades for the justice system. “The important contribution of the government’s legal counsel and the courts, which, against a large political majority, prevented the banning of Arab candidates and lists for Knesset … An Arab party joining the coalition immediately puts the accusation of apartheid to ridicule,” wrote Kremnitzer.
It’s so good to wave the High Court of Justice, which has not prevented a single occupation iniquity, and Mansour Abbas to prove there’s no apartheid. Seventy-four years of statehood without a new Arab city, without an Arab university or a train station in an Arab city are all dwarfed by the great whitewasher of the occupation, the High Court of Justice, and a minor Arab coalition partner, and even that one considered illegitimate.
The world will continue to hurl the invective, Israel will continue to ignore it. The world will say apartheid, Israel will say antisemitism. But the evidence will keep piling up. What is written in the report does not stem from antisemitism, but will help strengthen it. Israel is the greatest motivator of antisemitic urges in the world today.
Nobreath, thank you for posting more bigoterd nonsense from Levy, hosted by Israel’s gift to antisemites around the world, Ha’aretz.
Amnesty has been proven wrong so many times we have lost count.
Is there a problem? Yes. Is there Apartheid. No.
But you are preaching to the antisemites in Salaita’s choir.
It is a fact that antisemites cannot handle facts:
Amnesty International was once a respected advocate of human rights. Sadly, that changed years ago and, along with other NGOs such as ‘Human Rights Watch’ which have abandoned their original mission, it has taken up the cause of delegitimising Israel’s very existence.
The swift appearance of that article strongly suggests that, as is often the case, the BBC was among the media organisations to receive an advance copy of the AI report which was embargoed until 11 a.m. Israel time on February 1st.
Leaked copies of that embargoed report had emerged three days earlier, meaning that the BBC had plenty of time to prepare material that would have enabled it to comply with its own editorial guidelines concerning “contributors’ affiliations” by informing audiences of AI’s own record on racism, its long history of anti-Israel activity and the “particular viewpoints” of some of the NGO’s staff apparently involved in the creation and publication of this latest screed (see p26 and p85 here).
The fact that no such information was provided to readers of this BBC report will not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the corporation’s record of promotion of AI’s various campaigns or the fact that it failed to report on AI’s rejection of a motion to tackle rising antisemitism in 2015.
The BBC’s 823-word promotion (version 2) of this latest AI report does however include 160 words – including an insert – explaining the term ‘apartheid’. Selected Amnesty International talking points are completely uncritically promoted in 339 words while the sole dissenting reaction to the report – from Israel’s foreign ministry – is presented in 149 words including a link to a statement. As with other British media outlets, no effort is made to explain to readers why the MFA’s statement refers to antisemitism.
Readers are told nothing of additional critical reactions to the AI report from civil society organisations outside Israel, members of the US congress, foreign leaders, an Israeli Arab MK or from media outlets including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.
Some four and a half hours after its initial publication, the article was however amended to include a reaction form the Palestinian Authority.
“The Palestinian foreign ministry welcomed the report, saying it was a “detailed affirmation of the cruel reality of entrenched racism, exclusion, oppression, colonialism, apartheid, and attempted erasure that the Palestinian people have endured”.”
BBC audiences are not informed that the AI report was also welcomed by the terrorist organisations Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the PFLP, which clearly regard it as advancing their agenda.
he remaining 173 words of the BBC’s article are given over to ‘background’ of a genre that audiences have seen time and time again. [emphasis added]
“Just over 20% of Israel’s population of 9.45 million are Arabs, many of whom self-identify as Palestinians, while 2.9 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war. Another 1.9 million Palestinians live in the Gaza Strip, which Israel pulled out of in 2005 but the UN still considers to also be occupied. The vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank are governed by the Palestinian Authority and all of those in Gaza by the Palestinian militant Hamas movement.
More than 600,000 Jews live in about 140 settlements built in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Most of the international community considers the settlements illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.”
As usual, BBC audiences are not told that the majority of Arab Israelis do not identify as Palestinians. Neither are they told that “the West Bank and East Jerusalem” were included in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and were illegally occupied by Jordan between 1948 and 1967. The reason why the UN still describes the Gaza Strip as “occupied” despite Israel’s withdrawal from the territory in 2005 is not clarified to readers but the BBC’s inevitable partisan mantra concerning “international law” is of course promoted.
Readers are also told that:
“Palestinians displaced by the war which surrounded Israel’s creation in 1948-49, as well as their descendants – a number which the UN puts at 5.3m in total – claim the right to return to their former homes. Israel says to do so would demographically overwhelm it and threaten its existence.”
No mention is made of the relevant fact that no other refugees in the world are given automatic hereditary refugee status or that a significant proportion of those 5.3 million people hold citizenship in a third country (e.g. in Jordan) and/or live under Palestinian control.
A link to a previous BBC article from April 2021 promoting a similar report by ‘Human Rights Watch’ is provided both in the body of this article and at its end. However the BBC makes no effort to explain the dynamics and aims behind the ongoing campaign to delegitimise Israel by political NGOs including ‘B’tselem’, ‘Human Rights Watch’ (both of which are mentioned in AI’s report, along with a plethora of additional anti-Israel NGOs framed as ‘human rights organisations’) and now ‘Amnesty International’.
A link to the uncredited AI report was added to the BBC’s article some four and a half hours after its initial publication. Most readers will of course not bother to plough through that amended version of the over 200 page report and few of those that do will have the knowledge to assess its claims critically, not least because the BBC has failed to provide such information both in this article and in the past.
Amnesty International was once a respected advocate of human rights. Sadly, that changed years ago and, along with other NGOs such as ‘Human Rights Watch’ which have abandoned their original mission, it has taken up the cause of delegitimising Israel’s very existence.
The BBC has shown little interest in holding the organisations it blandly presents to its audiences as ‘human rights groups’ to account. Instead it continues to provide uncritical amplification for their political agendas in articles such as this, thereby mainstreaming the ‘apartheid’ smear intended to delegitimise the existence of the sole Jewish state.
Stephen,
This is a powerful article proving Levy wrong and proving Amnesty International to be a fraud. I’m sure few of your readers would appreciate a read, but there may be a couple who are not obsessed with attempting to destroy Israel and have an open mind.
https://agpiworld.com/tell-amnesty-never-again?blm_aid=0
Stephen, Levy asks many questions in his first three paragraphs. No one here has answered a single one of them in a way that provides the slightest refutation of Levy’s thesis. It isn’t unusual for defenders of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians to smear the messenger, but fail to address the message.
Several organizations have answered Levy’s false charges. How many times must Breathless be proven to be an unreliable antisemite?
Even the Democrats in Congress have condemned AI. As for Breathless, several organizations have answered levy’s absurd questions. Only antisemites continue to rant about it.
Additionally, a group of House Democrats––including Representatives Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) and Brad Sherman (D-CA)––issued a joint statement condemning the report, noting that this was Amnesty’s 208th report on Israel, yet they have only written 40 reports about North Korea and 61 on Venezuela. “The ‘apartheid’ accusations against Israel misrepresent and diminish the actual tyranny, segregation and dehumanization perpetrated in apartheid South Africa,” they said. “South Africa’s institutionalized racial segregation of the past bears no equivalence to Israel’s vibrant democracy where all citizens, regardless of religion or race have rights and are represented at the highest levels of government, education, healthcare, business and the courts. In fact, Israel currently has perhaps the most diverse governing coalition in the word, made up of parties across the political spectrum, including the United Arab List. The government ministers include Jews and Muslims, religious and secular, Arabs, Ethiopians, and LGBTQ people. Israel is the only country is the Middle East where Jews and Arabs govern together.”
The group of House Democrats added that “Amnesty’s many baseless allegations are rooted in historic prejudices and false narratives. This report will only further fuel antisemitism and intolerance by those seeking to undermine the only Jewish nation in the world, and those working to undermine future prospects for peace between Palestinians and Israelis.”
https://jewishjournal.com/news/worldwide/344724/us-germany-condemn-amnesty-uk-report-accusing-israel-of-apartheid/
The Democrats in Congress have as little legitimacy as Israel in denouncing Amnesty Internationals findings in this matter. Most are terrified of Zionist cash running an opponent against them in a primary, others have been compromised in Israeli run blackmail operations; Jeffry Epstein and Ms Maxwell come to mind but they evidently already had something on Lyndon Johnson who, unlike his predecessor had no intentions of requiring the Zionist lobby to register as agents of a foreign government, who helped them cover up the Israeli attempt to sink the U.S.S. Liberty with napalm, rockets and torpedoes (34 dead – 171 wounded – 30ft diameter hole in the ship) during the 1967 war Israel started. Jack offers Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) in support of his position; a lying, dishonest and disgraced Zionist, she is a good example of the caliber of the people attacking Amnesty International; what a joke.
Concerned American Jews warned in 1948, “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”
Not only Israel but the U.S. has been poisoned by their success in taking over power of the State.
Further edification for your readers who have open minds:
Steven, “our video friend, Yoseph Haddad’s background is Christian. He is from Nazareth. A small part of the Christian community there has reneged on its Palestinian heritage and thrown its lot in with the Zionist state. He calls himself an “Israeli Arab” and has served in the Israeli army. This young chap went through the Zionist education system. He served in the army and was injured in Lebanon against Hezbollah. He claims that he wants to bridge the gap between Arab and Jew. That is fair enough, but he crosses the line when he allows himself to be used as a pawn by the State of Israel, for instance decrying the AI report on Israeli apartheid.” Thanks to Ben Alofs for this information.
Yes, for so many antisemites, Arabs “cross the line” when they tell the truth.
Stephen, a letter in Saturday’s Irish Times on Amnesty report.
Amnesty report on Israel
Sir, – The recent letter from Dr Derek O’Flynn of the Israeli embassy (Letters, February 3rd) misrepresents not just Amnesty International’s recent report on Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians but also, unsurprisingly, the experiences of Palestinians under this system. Some of the accusations against Amnesty are clearly absurd attempts to deflect attention away from what the report actually reveals.
Let us be frank in response. Through four years of rigorous and extensive research on laws, policies and practices, we have documented in detail how Israeli authorities continue to treat Palestinians as an inferior racial group and systematically deprive them of their rights.
The reality is that this cruel system of domination and oppression is apartheid. We conclude that it is enforced against all Palestinians living under the effective control of Israel – whether in Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, or in other countries as refugees.
Any amount of attempts to deflect attention will not change the overwhelming amount of evidence the research provides. And it will not change the lived realities of the Palestinian people.
Far from singling out Israel, a brief glance at our website shows that Amnesty reports on human rights violations wherever they occur and whomever is responsible. Indeed, our research has previously found that the Myanmar government subjects the Rohingya people to a system of apartheid. It is extremely easy to find our work on Syria, Iran, and yes, our work on violations by Palestinian groups as well. Again, absurd attempts to deflect which will not work.
It is true that the findings of our report may shock and disturb. Indeed, they should. There is no place and no excuse for apartheid in our world. It is a crime against humanity, and it has to end.
Rather than trying to evade scrutiny by diverting attention away from our findings, we would ask the Israeli authorities to confront the substance of our assessment. – Yours, etc,
COLM O’GORMAN,
Executive Director,
Amnesty International
Ireland, Dublin 2.
How funny! Did you think AI was not going to defend their absurd charge? But this is the funniest – “our research has previously found that the Myanmar government subjects the Rohingya people to a system of apartheid.”
Recent? The Rohingya had their citizenship revoked in 1982. Since 2017, there is evidence of the Myanmar government committing genocide against the Rohingya, bu AI just found out about it now. And they are bragging about it!
If AI, like Breathless, were not obsessed over the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, they may discover the crimes against humanity being committed all over in Asia, the Islamist states, the Balkans, and elsewhere.
As for the last, “we would ask the Israeli authorities to confront the substance of our assessment.” Israel did. Israel would like to know how much AI paid the ignorant incompetents to write the report as there is no substance.
Steven, there have been four substantial reports by reputable organisations, accusing Israel of the crimes of apartheid. Can they all be wrong?
Four reports, one conclusion: Israel practices Apartheid.
1. ESCWA
ESCWA Launches Report on Israeli Practices Towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid. 2017
http://www.unescwa.org/news/escwa-launches-report-israeli-practices-towards-palestinian-people-and-question-apartheid
2. B’Tselem
A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid by B’Tselem. January 12, 2021
http://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid
3. Human Rights Watch.
Threshold Crossed:
Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. April 27, 2021
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
4. Amnesty International.
Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity from Amnesty. February 1, 2022
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/
“This libelous document resorts to baseless ‘apartheid’ accusations against Israel, among other distortions. In so doing, the report commits a double injustice: It fuels those antisemites around the world who seek to undermine the only Jewish country on earth, while simultaneously cheapening and downplaying the horrific suffering that was a result of apartheid in South Africa. The apartheid system practiced by South Africa was characterized by tyranny, segregation and dehumanization established both in law and practice; this has no equivalence to a vibrant democracy where all citizens have rights and representation in the national legislature.
“The report makes no secret of its true intention – which is to cast aspersions on the State of Israel, which it portrays as illegitimate, starting ‘at its creation in May 1948’ (page 20). It disregards the fact that Israel’s robust democracy grants its Arab citizens full rights and equality, includes an Arab Muslim nationalist party in Israel’s governing coalition, as well as a history of senior Israeli Arab governmental officials, including Supreme Court justices, government ministers, high-level diplomats, military officers, and members of Knesset.”
https://www.ajc.org/news/jewish-organizations-condemn-inflammatory-amnesty-international-uk-report-on-israel?ms=EL_EML_20220201_Advocacy-StandwithIsrael&utm_campaign=Advocacy&utm_source=LuminateEmail&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=Advocacy-StandwithIsrael-Statement&p2asource=Advocacy-StandwithIsrael
There have been four substantial reports by reputable organisations, accusing Israel of the crimes of apartheid. Can they all be wrong?
Four reports, one conclusion: Israel practices Apartheid.
1. ESCWA.
ESCWA Launches Report on Israeli Practices Towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid. 2017
http://www.unescwa.org/news/escwa-launches-report-israeli-practices-towards-palestinian-people-and-question-apartheid
Breathless, trying to prove to Steve’s readers that no one is better than Breathless to provide antisemitic material, posted a link to an oft condemned report written by the proven antisemitic Falk who was condemned by the UN General Secy:
U.N. chief Antonió Guterres rejected a report published by ECSWA, a Beirut-based agency of the world body— ECSWA—comprised entirely of 18 Arab states, which accuses Israel of “apartheid.”
The report’s chief author is Richard Falk, a former U.N. official who was condemned repeatedly by the UK and other governments for antisemitism.
In 2011, Falk was also denounced by his own boss, former U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon, for espousing 9/11 conspiracy theories which accused the U.S. government, instead of Al Qaeda, of perpetrating the 9/11 terror attacks.
https://unwatch.org/un-chief-rejects-richard-falks-escwa-report-accusing-israel-apartheid/
2. B’Tselem.
A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid by B’Tselem. January 12, 2021
http://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid
3. Human Rights Watch.
Threshold Crossed:
Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. April 27, 2021
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
4. Amnesty International.
Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity from Amnesty. February 1, 2022
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/
There have been 4 unsubstantiated and false accounts written by obsessed so-called “human rights” organizations regarding the inaccurate charge that Israel has something to do with Apartheid.
The report has been condemned by leading liberal democracies but has been lauded by antisemitic and anti-Israel organizations.
What is particularly upsetting is that these organizations should have been dealing with the authoritarian Chinese government committing genocide against the Muslim Uighurs, the Authoritarian Myanmar government committing genocide against the Muslim Rohingya, and the Authoritarian Russian government planning to invade Ukraine. Instead, they waste the world’s time with Israel, the only liberal democratic state in the Middle East.
An unsatisfactory answer
“The Prime Minister of Israel
Takes pride
In the fact that
His government
Will not negotiate
With the Palestinians
Under any circumstances,
And certainly not
Make an agreement
With them.
The Foreign Minister
Made it crystal clear
That when he
Becomes Prime Minister,
That policy will
Remain unchanged
Any Palestinian,
Anywhere and at any time,
Can fall victim to
Arbitrary, sometimes fatal,
Abuse by Israeli soldiers.
Even an 80 year-old grandfather
Is not safe.
The settlers are not satisfied
With the army’s violence
And add a full measure
Of their own violence.
As far as the government
Is concerned,
This state of affairs
Can and should
Continue indefinitely.
When accused of
Imposing a policy
Of apartheid,
The Prime Minister
And the Foreign Minister
Shriek: “Antisemitism! Antisemitism!”
But, truth to tell,
That response
Just rings hollow.”
An unsatisfactory answer
The President of the Palestinian Authority
Takes pride
In the fact that
he will not let an Israeli be alive
on Palestinian imaginary territory
Hamas has made it clear
Their goal
is the genocide of the Jews
Islamic Jihad
Made it crystal clear
That when they
take over
Hamas will be considered moderate.
Many Palestinian,
Anywhere and at any time,
Can attempt to kill Jews
And get paid while in prison
Even though they killed 80 year-old grandmothers
Many Palestinians are not satisfied
With Hamas and Islamic Jihad violence
So they commit “lone Wolf” violence.
As far as the PA government
Is concerned,
This state of affairs
Can and should
Continue indefinitely.
When accused of
committing genocidal antisemitic violence
Ilhan Omar and Rashid Tlaib
Shriek: “Islamophobia! Islamophobia!”
Breathless says the Jews deserve it.
But, truth to tell,
That response
Just rings hollow.
The art of deception: How Israel uses ‘hasbara’ to whitewash its crimes.
The Israelis have long relied on a public diplomacy strategy to dominate the arena of narrative control and information manipulation.
As Israel conducts its latest round of aggression against the Palestinians, the prevailing narrative often peddled in mainstream western media outlets continues to be implicitly framed to favour the Israeli narrative.
Under the guise of neutrality, media discourse has been to describe the conflict flaring up in occupied East Jerusalem as “clashes” between “both sides”. Israel’s ruthless bombardment of Gaza leading to the deaths of hundreds of civilians is rationalised as an act of “self defence” in response to Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket attacks and their use of “human shields”.
The Israeli state is deeply aware that perception shapes reality. While it commits alleged war crimes with impunity, it can only do so if there is a powerful enough propaganda machine it can deploy to counter inevitable public condemnation and international solidarity with Palestinians.
Enter ‘hasbara’ – Israel’s primary messaging tool.
https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/the-art-of-deception-how-israel-uses-hasbara-to-whitewash-its-crimes-46775
The professional antisemites use every trick in the book to try to reverse the fact that Israel is a liberal democracy that respects the rights of all of its citizens.
One trick is to say that “Hasbara,” rather than a policy to ram the truth down the throats of antisemites and their anti-Israel cousins. You can almost hear Breathless gagging. Even Breathless has to admit they are not war crimes. Note “commits alleged war crimes.” That means that they are not actual war crimes but are perceived at such by the insistence of antisemites like Breathless.
If Hamas did not use ordinary Gazans as human shields, willing or not, to try to keep Israel from bombing Hamas military targets, those Gazans would not have died.
Sigman thinks that repeating lies often enough makes them truth. This has become a forum for him primarily and it sickens me.
The Palestinian Authority practices Apartheid, not Israel.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/theres-apartheid-in-the-holy-land-but-not-in-israel-amnesty-international-palestine-racial-discrimination-disfavored-group-11644338888
The report by Amnesty International accusing Israel of apartheid—a likely preview of similar moves at the United Nations and the International Criminal Court—has been widely debunked, including in these pages. Yet what is remarkable about its 200 pages of distortions is the evidence of real apartheid-like policies that Amnesty leaves out. There are reasons to be concerned about the emergence of apartheid in the Holy Land—but not the ones Amnesty cites.
The defining characteristic of apartheid—what distinguishes it from generic racial discrimination—is the rigid separation of groups in public spaces and positions of power. This is the apart in apartheid.
Thus, a sign of apartheid could be a government policy that bans real-estate sales or transactions to the disfavored group. Apartheid is suggested by policies that carve out massive zones where the disfavored group cannot live or work, create ethnically homogenous zones, and restrict the disfavored group to ghettos. One might consider it apartheid if a government enforced a policy of extrajudicial execution of members of a disfavored group.
All these policies are practiced in the West Bank and Gaza—by the Palestinian Authority government against Jews. What makes the “Israel apartheid” meme particularly despicable is that is not just a lie, it is an inversion of the truth. In all areas controlled by Israel, Jews and Arabs mix openly. Yet the Palestinian Authority has for decades ruled over Gaza and about half the West Bank—and all the areas under its jurisdiction are Jew-free.
Calling Israel an apartheid state is not criticism. It’s a blunt lie. Amnesty International is not the first to label Israel an apartheid state, and probably not the last one.
It has become fashionable to hate the Jewish state under the category of “mere criticism” while siding with the real oppressors of the Palestinians – their very own leaders.
Calling Israel an apartheid state gained official status when Israel Apartheid Week was launched in 2005 after the anti-Israel activists saw that they could use the South African apartheid and the suffering of Black people for their political purposes.
To them, it’s a game. They care more about hating Israel than the well-being of the Palestinians. Because if they cared for the Palestinian people, they would act against the corrupt Palestinian leadership that does nothing to help them, steals public money and incites hatred and violence against Israel. Whether it’s the Palestinian Authority or Hamas in Gaza, they are gaining from the conflict with Israel. Just imagine what the Palestinian leaders could have done with the billions sent to them in aid from the EU, Canada, United States, and of course the Arab countries, had they not used it to sponsor terrorism with the ‘pay to slay’ program or other corrupt reasons.
If one wants to support the Palestinian cause, one should support Israel – the one country that actually helps the Palestinian people more than their leaders. Israel provides the Palestinians with water, electricity, jobs and even health care.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-695895
Stephen, Siegman’s Hasbara never stops.
“Because if they cared for the Palestinian people, they would act against the corrupt Palestinian leadership that does nothing to help them, steals public money and incites hatred and violence against Israel. Whether it’s the Palestinian Authority or Hamas in Gaza, they are gaining from the conflict with Israel.”
All done with Israel’s approval. The Palestinian Authority is Israel’s enforcer against their own people.
“ The hands of the Israeli with whom Abbas had discussions are covered with infinitely more blood than the hands of this elderly politico from Ramallah. No talking with terrorists and murderers? In that case, no talking with Gantz. Any Palestinian leader meeting Gantz or those like him is putting aside his pride much more than his Israeli interlocutor is. Gantz is much more of a “terrorist” than Abbas is.”
“ Israel provides the Palestinians with water, electricity, jobs and even health care.”
“ The legacy of Israel’s 54-year occupation of the Palestinian territories has been systematic human rights violations on a mass scale. One of its most devastating consequences is the impact of Israel’s discriminatory policies on Palestinians’ access to adequate supplies of clean and safe water.
Soon after Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, in June 1967, the Israeli military authorities consolidated complete power over all water resources and water-related infrastructure in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). 50 years on, Israel continues to control and restrict Palestinian access to water in the OPT to a level which neither meets their needs nor constitutes a fair distribution of shared water resources.
In November 1967 the Israeli authorities issued Military Order 158, which stated that Palestinians could not construct any new water installation without first obtaining a permit from the Israeli army. Since then, the extraction of water from any new source or the development of any new water infrastructure would require permits from Israel, which are near impossible to obtain. Palestinians living under Israel’s military occupation continue to suffer the devastating consequences of this order until today. They are unable to drill new water wells, install pumps or deepen existing wells, in addition to being denied access to the Jordan River and fresh water springs. Israel even controls the collection of rain water throughout most of the West Bank, and rainwater harvesting cisterns owned by Palestinian communities are often destroyed by the Israeli army. As a result, some 180 Palestinian communities in rural areas in the occupied West Bank have no access to running water, according to OCHA. Even in towns and villages which are connected to the water network, the taps often run dry.”
“We have not enough water and no control of it. The Israeli authorities’ tactic is to slowly decrease the water so we have to leave the land.”
Mustafa Al-Farawi, Al-Jiftlik
Let us thank Breathless for more propaganda from the noted antisemitic organization, AI.
“A localized water shortage has developed for Israelis and Palestinians alike in northern Samaria and it stems from the especially high consumption because of the region’s intense heat,” Schor wrote. He added that the shortage developed because the Palestinian Water Authority is refusing to approve additional water infrastructure in the West Bank through the joint water committee, “which has led to the old and limited pipes being unable to transfer all the water needed in the region.”
You can almost hear Breathless choke as the truth is jammed down his throat. But with most antisemites, truth is meaningless.
“ Perhaps most demoralizing of all was the continuing capture and control of the narrative – the “Occupation of the American Mind” — by Israeli hasbara that has mischaracterized the facts on the ground over there for my entire lifetime and resulted in the marginalization and silencing of Palestinian and anti-Zionist voices by the mainstream media, the Israel lobby, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the cacophony of “pro-Israel” supporters who together have made Palestinians out to be terrorists and their Israeli oppressors victims; when in fact, the Israeli state and settler violence arrayed against the Palestinians has always dwarfed that of the resistance. It has been a remarkable feat of propaganda and narrative control to carry out these crimes against humanity and slowly but inexorably Judaicizing the Land, pretending to be yearning for a two-state solution while deliberately taking steps to kill any prospect of it. The hasbara has seemed as impenetrable as the Apartheid system it supports.” Especially Sigman’s hasbara.
Leave it to breathless to post propaganda as she decries “propaganda.
Here is an example of her BS: “the Israeli state and settler violence arrayed against the Palestinians has always dwarfed that of the resistance.” It is not resistance. Launching 4000 unguided missiles into Israeli population centers with the hopes of killing Jews (any Muslims killed are just martyrs) is terrorism with the goal of genocide. Of course the Israeli response dwarfs Palestinian Arab terrorism. The terrorist does not get to control the victims’ response. As for violence coming from the Israeli who reside in the disputed territories under the legal control of the Israeli military, it is minuscule compared to Palestinian Arab terrorism.
As you can see, antisemites specialize in lying about Israel.
Steven, your readers might like to read a letter to the editor of the Irish Times from yesterday.
A chara, – No matter how loudly Jackie Goodall bangs that battered drum (Letters, February 9th), she will never silence those who speak against Israel’s apartheid system. Amnesty’s recent report is correct and it most certainly should not be dismissed outright, as she suggests.
Any state that treats one group differently from everybody else in every aspect of life – housing, education, health, employment, family life, residence, and freedom of movement – is an apartheid state.
Any state whose laws and policies institutionalise racial discrimination and domination against one group is an apartheid state.
Any state that demolishes homes and forcibly transfers the owners to make way for illegal settlements is an apartheid state.
Any state that prevents people in exile from returning to their homes and lands is an apartheid state.
Any state that supports a systematic and severe deprivation of fundamental human rights of one group of people, based on their identity, is an apartheid state.
Any state that denies one group of people a right to freedom of movement and residence is an apartheid state.
And any state that ensures one group suffers murder, torture, unlawful imprisonment and other severe deprivation of physical liberty is an apartheid state.
Israel should now be the focus of constant protests and boycotts in a similar manner to South Africa during its apartheid years. Unfortunately, just as throughout those years, there will always be those who prefer to look the other way. – Is mise,
ENDA FANNING,
Apparently Breathless is afraid to post the original letter from the Irish Times. Perhaps she is tired of having the truth rammed down her throat and would prefer something else.
For those unafraid of the truth, here is that letter:
Sir, – Despite the protests of its defenders (Colm O’Gorman, Letters, February 5th and Bill Shipsey, “Amnesty report alleging Israeli apartheid deserves a hearing”, Opinion & Analysis, February 5th), Amnesty International’s report accusing Israel of “apartheid” is fatally flawed. Israel is not perfect, and suffers from the same societal issues and inequalities as any other democracy, but it has been accused, tried and convicted by Amnesty on false grounds.
Not only does the Amnesty report misrepresent facts, laws and definitions, including misleading statements on land ownership, the right of return, and Arab participation in politics and armed service in Israel, it whitewashes Palestinian terror and dismisses Israel’s duty to protect its citizens – Jews, Arabs and other minorities – from rocket attacks, stabbings, shootings and car-rammings.
The report also chooses to ignore the fact that the security barrier, far from being an example of apartheid, was erected as a direct response to waves of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada. In 2002 alone, the year prior to its construction, 457 Israelis were slaughtered.
The report deliberately fails to acknowledge that Israel’s defensive actions of 1948 and 1967 were a direct response to wars initiated by Israel’s neighbours, and erases from history, Israel’s repeated attempts to achieve a negotiated peace amid successive Palestinian rejections. It ignores the fact that Israel cannot solve the Israel-Palestine situation unilaterally, and that it lacks a genuine Palestinian partner with whom to negotiate.
Despite all this, Israel remains a robust democracy that grants its Arab and other minority citizens full and equal rights under the law. This includes an Arab Muslim nationalist party as part of its governing coalition, as well as a history of senior Arab Israeli government ministers, a Supreme Court justice, judges, diplomats, defence force officers and Knesset members. Arabs also work at the highest levels within other areas of government, healthcare, education and business.
The governments of the US, UK, Czech Republic, Australia, Germany and others have rejected the Amnesty report and condemned the “apartheid” designation, while an Amnesty Israel director, Tal Gur-Arye, has argued that the framework, methodology and conclusions are flawed and that the apartheid designation is not supported by international law.
It is indeed tragic that at a time when many Arab countries are developing closer ties with Israel and relations between Arabs and Jews are flourishing in many parts of the Middle East, Amnesty should produce a report that sows division, forges distrust, and inflames existing tensions.
The Amnesty report should be dismissed outright by those who wish to pursue genuine justice, and by those who are working towards a true and lasting peace for all people groups throughout the Middle East and elsewhere. – Yours, etc,
JACKIE GOODALL
While antisemites might enjoy reading letters from Ireland, one of the most biased western European states, hopefully the rest will enjoy prose pointing out the bigotry of AI that is deliberately spreading antisemitism:
“The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.”
Between legitimate concerns and demonizing accusations, however, lies many a dishonest exaggeration, many a perverse misrepresentation, and specious definition. At the core of Amnesty International’s latest report, stands a bold, formal accusation of racist Apartheid, a key element in the even more grave accusation against Israel for “crimes against humanity.” The report closes with an extensive call to mobilize human rights activists against Israel in international forums – especially the UN and the ICC.
But whereas south African racists, with a formal racist ideology, imposed their appalling apartheid laws on the races they had conquered as a permanent measure, Israelis have imposed a set of restrictions on a politico-cultural group that has shown relentless desire to exterminate her, a desire that dates back not to the imposition of the restraints, but to a triumphalist, imperial ethos that viewed any Jewish independence as an affront to its dominion.
All of this is systematically obscured in the report whose most glaring absence is the world of jihadi terror with which Israel must grapple on a permanent and daily basis. No mention of the genocidal teachings of Palestinian ideologues, secular and religious, the delirious hatred that holds so honored – certainly uncontested – a place in the public sphere of Arabs between the river and the sea under the rule of Palestinians (Gaza, Area A). And yet this political-cultural issue, far better than “race” identifies where and when Israel “denies human rights” to Arabs.
In areas where Israeli sovereignty is in full force, the results are anti-apartheid: Arabs have achieved remarkable integration including the highest ranks of the professions – academia, health care and law. Stating the obvious, Mansour Abbas, Arab Muslim member of the Israeli Knesset and part of the current Israeli government, rejected the apartheid charge. No black or even colored got near the South African legislature nor their supreme court. Recent polls indicate that, the vast majority of Israeli Arabs consider themselves either Israeli or Israeli Arabs. Only 7% consider themselves Palestinian; and yet the Amnesty Report exclusively refers to them as Palestinians. Thus do post-colonial privileged whites deny the subalterns their own voice.
Where a politico-cultural regime of leaders like the PLO and Hamas dominates the public sphere, on the other hand, Israel finds herself forced to curtail activity as a policy. Not for racial, or even religious reasons, but because those so constrained are self-declared, mortal enemies. Indeed, in the first years of the new century, before the building of the “Apartheid Wall,” these Palestinians waged a merciless war of suicide-terror on Israel that killed over a thousand mostly civilians (US equivalent, of 50,000 dead).
But rather than acknowledge this “background,” Amnesty’s report prefers to interpret every Israeli restriction and intervention as an intentional pattern of domination that Israel strives to impose on an innocent people deprived of their rights. It does not matter that Arabs in this region have, historically, never had these demanded rights, and that their predatory leaders have no intention of granting them once they succeed in depriving the Jews of theirs… that if the slogan “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be free” were ever realized, no one would be free except ruling elites. Nor does it matter that, when it comes to the treatment of religious and other minorities (and women), Muslim majority countries, including the “moderate” Palestinian Authority come much closer than anyone to real Apartheid, including legal apartheid, a fate they openly aspire to inflict on their neighbors, the Jews.
Whataboutism, claims AI. Hardly: this is the world in which Israel must navigate its survival.
This Amnesty Report, like the HRW report, like the B’Tselem report before it, illustrates the kind of disorientation that befalls those who ignore Moynihan’s Law:
The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.
https://spme.org/resources/antisemitism-and-amnesty-international/27141/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spme-responds-to-amnesty-international-s-recent-report-israel-s-apartheid-against-palestinians-cruel-system-of-domination-and-crime-against-humanity_2318
Stephen, Sigman writes, “ Apparently Breathless is afraid to post the original letter from the Irish Times.”
It’s very obvious that Goodall and Sigman are singing from the same hymn sheet, supplied by the Hasbara high command.
Why should I post anything which is just trying to distort the truth? Enda Fanning in his reply to Goodall destroys her assertions.
At the end of the day it is worth repeating paragraphs from Gideon Levy’s article in Haaretz, ‘Tell Me What’s Untrue in Amnesty’s Report on Israel’
“ Was Israel not founded on an explicit policy of maintaining Jewish demographic hegemony, while reducing the number of Palestinians within its boundaries? Yes or no? True or false? Does this policy not exist to this day? Yes or no? True or false? Does Israel not maintain a regime of oppression and control of Palestinians in Israel and in the occupied territories for the benefit of Israeli Jews? Yes or no? True or false? Do the rules of engagement with Palestinians not reflect a policy of shoot to kill, or at least maim? Yes or no? True or false? Are the evictions of Palestinians from their homes and the denial of construction permits not part of Israeli policy? Yes or no? True or false?
Is Sheikh Jarrah not apartheid? Is the nation-state law not apartheid? And the denial of family reunification? And the unrecognized villages? And the “Judaization”? Is there a single sphere, in Israel or the territories, in which there is true, absolute equality, except in name?”
Let Sigman reply to Levy’s ‘True or False’ points, one by one, which he hasn’t done so far, instead of smearing and calling people antisemites.
To all of Breathless’ accusation, the answer is no, and the assertions are false. Breathless knows that all the assertions are false, but as a die-hard antisemite who wishes for the destruction of Israel, she needs to state that all of those lies are actually true, as the truth condemns her to a life of misery and humiliation that is the Nakba.
More on AI’s lies:
Firstly – the elephant in the room. We have TWO accusations, not ONE. There is the Apartheid smear (also false) about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and then there is the bigger one – that even if Israel were to withdraw from all the 1967 lands – Israel would still be an Apartheid state. It is important to understand this because it highlights just how bad the report is. What Amnesty International is saying is that if the Palestinians had a state of their own – if Israel withdrew from every inch of Gaza and the WB – Amnesty International would still consider Israel a pariah state. Leftists – take note.
Let me dismiss the lesser of the smears quickly – because leaving it in the air will just get in the way. You simply cannot believe in an ‘occupation’ and believe in ‘Israeli Apartheid’. If there is an ‘occupation’ – then at the root there must be an ‘occupied’ and an ‘occupier’. These labels are applied going by where one would have been standing on the morning of the 4th June 1967. They have absolutely nothing to do with race, Jews, Muslims, or any other criteria other than a historical geographical position. Within this paradigm an Israeli Arab could be an ‘occupier’ and his cousin could be part of the ‘occupied’. Calling this Apartheid is nonsensical. It is an ongoing conflict, and it is complex enough already. What makes the smear even worse is that the only reason Palestinians do not yet have a state of their own – is because they have rejected offer after offer.
We can argue over international law and whether the territories are ‘occupied or ‘disputed’, we can all struggle to find a workable solution that isn’t scuppered by Palestinian intransigence and Islamist extremists – but there is certainly no room around the table for empty smear campaigns that rely on offensive and wildly inaccurate terminology.
Read the rest at https://david-collier.com/amnesty-jews/?fbclid=IwAR3bHvUBvuf017O-TJRWcdUuKOUtQqhNIz9urz6ipaIufBDe9W2mnBo4Z2A
I wonder why Dr. Salaita has not mentioned the real Apartheid in the Land of Israel (not the one “Amnesty” has fabricated). It is his duty as an academic to exam the totality and not just what he favors. https://www.wsj.com/articles/theres-apartheid-in-the-holy-land-but-not-in-israel-amnesty-international-palestine-racial-discrimination-disfavored-group-11644338888
“what is remarkable about its (AI) 200 pages of distortions is the evidence of real apartheid-like policies that Amnesty leaves out. There are reasons to be concerned about the emergence of apartheid in the Holy Land—but not the ones Amnesty cites.
The defining characteristic of apartheid—what distinguishes it from generic racial discrimination—is the rigid separation of groups in public spaces and positions of power. This is the apart in apartheid.
Thus, a sign of apartheid could be a government policy that bans real-estate sales or transactions to the disfavored group. Apartheid is suggested by policies that carve out massive zones where the disfavored group cannot live or work, create ethnically homogenous zones, and restrict the disfavored group to ghettos. One might consider it apartheid if a government enforced a policy of extrajudicial execution of members of a disfavored group.
All these policies are practiced in the West Bank and Gaza—by the Palestinian Authority government against Jews. What makes the “Israel apartheid” meme particularly despicable is that is not just a lie, it is an inversion of the truth. In all areas controlled by Israel, Jews and Arabs mix openly. Yet the Palestinian Authority has for decades ruled over Gaza and about half the West Bank—and all the areas under its jurisdiction are Jew-free.”
Steven, our resident troll for Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity, is suffering from a severe form of loneliness. He is a lone soul, (Has he a soul?) researching previous articles of yours, looking for anything to attack you and pro Palestinian commentators.
If you don’t help him soon, by writing an article, he may become redundant or may even jump off a bridge and then we will never get to see his dissertation.
It appears our resident antisemite and Salaita acolyte has gone off the deep end. Is this a good thing for humanity?