86 Comments

1. Julian Real:

   What the State/Government of Israel is doing, and what all who support its policies and actions are doing, is an atrocity against the Palestinian people, and it can’t be called anything less than that.

   16 July 2006, 7:50 pm

2. eoinmonkey:

   “One can not keep by democracy that which was won by force.”
   -Adolph Hitler

   16 July 2006, 7:59 pm

3. Images from Lebanon You Won't See in the NYT:

   The unpublished AP photos linked below were provided by Hanady Salman, an editor at the Beirut daily, As-Safir, with the following message:”

   Dear friends and colleagues ,You will all have to excuse me for sending this. It’s pictures of the bodies of babies killed by the Israelis in South Lebanon. They are all burnt. I need your help. I am almost certain these pictures won’t be published in the West, although they are Associated Press pictures. I need your help exposing them if you can. The problem is these are people who were asked to leave their village, Ter Hafra , this morning , within two hours , or else. .. So those who were able to flee went to the closer UN base where they were asked to leave. I think that after the Qana massacres in 1996 when civilians were bombed after they took shelter in UN headquarters , the UN does not want to be responsible for the lives of civilians.A FEW MINUTES AGO , the Israelis asked the people of Al Bustan village in the south to evacuate their homes. I am afraid massacares will keep happening as long as Israeli actions are uncheked. Please help us if you can”..

   The message and photos are reposted from As’aad Abu khail’s blog Angry Arab News Service

   Images:
   http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2006/07/i-have-just-received-these-pictures.html

   16 July 2006, 8:36 pm

4. George Kenney:

   It sure didn’t take the HuffPo long to make this essay vanish…

   Nice riff, though.

   16 July 2006, 9:39 pm

5. Julian Real:

   Do we have to start quoting Hitler on this thread? Is that really necessary? To me, it’s anti-Semitic. We can address these horrors as such, but it is too common a phenomenon, in my experience as a Jew, that when the Israeli government’s atrocity against Palestinians gets mentioned, someone immediately has to jump in with something like “Those Jews are as bad as the Nazis” which is not historically accurate, or, in my opinion, a useful point to make here.

   I have no desire to “rank” atrocities. There’s little point and it goes nowhere except to demean someone’s or some group’s suffering and pain, among other aspects of enduring (and not surviving) organized horror and terror.

   But please, could we steer clear of all references to the Nazi Holocaust, on this thread. I’ve just seen that happen far too often, by non-Jews. And I still live in an anti-Semitic world, let’s not forget–even while some of my fellow Jews are committing heinous and horrendous acts, in the name of something that can never justify what they are doing to other human beings.

   16 July 2006, 10:05 pm

6. Stan:

   It is NOT antisemitic. And it MUST be mentioned, precisely because:

   (1) Zionists have pimped the horror of Hitler fascism to justify themselves,

   (2) Zionist apologists always find a way to call any critique of Israel antisemitic, and

   (3) Zionism is rooted in the same premises of racial superiority, expansionism, and militarism.

   I am very disappointed, Julian, that you have declared this antisemitic. That is a VERY serious allegation, and one directed at me.

   Read more closely and you will see that the quote:

   “It is impossible for a man to become assimilated with people whose blood is different than [sic] his own. In order to become assimilated, he must change his body, he must become one of them, in blood. There can be no assimilation. We shall never allow such things as mixed marriage because the preservation of national integrity is impossible except by means of racial purity and for that purpose we shall have this territory where our people will constitute the racially pure inhabitants.”

   …is NOT Adolph Hitler, but Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of Zionism.

   Israel is a fascist Apartheid state, an international outlaw, that is actively killing civilians as this is written, stealing land and water, and threatening the world with a regional war. This must be stated clearly and unequivocally if any of us are to retain a shred of moral credibility.

   This would all be just as true even if my oldest daughter (and first spouse) were not Jewish.

   I will steer clear of the Holocaust when the Zionists stop pimping it. I am using it to expose the truth; and they are using it to emulate it in Palestinian blood.

   That does not make me disrespectful of the pain inflicted by the Nazi horror. Quite the contrary.

   16 July 2006, 10:25 pm

7. elaina:

   I didn’t think that Julian was referring to anything you said, Stan, I thought he was lobbing a critique of the actual Hitler quote put out there by eoinmonkey.

   Please, correct me if that’s not the case.

   17 July 2006, 12:54 am

8. Pierre Monplaisir:

   Stan,
   merci pour votre courage ; attaquer la saloperie des nantis, des corrompus et des salauds ordinaires qui les soutiennent (exemple:
   le tourisme occidental est un colonialisme miteux qui termine l’oeuvre de mort des générations précédentes)est ma seule raison de vivre .
   C’est un combat perdu d’avance mais quelle importance ?

   17 July 2006, 3:17 am

9. Diane Mashek:

   My heart is with the Palestinian people. Never again will I fear an accusation of anti-semitism in defending their struggles. A life-time of self-loathing somewhere in my being that the Jewish people could have been subjected to the horror of the holocaust will always remain. Their existence equally supported, but not by these means.

   17 July 2006, 3:19 am

10. Neilcaff:

    Stan: I don’t think Julian was reffering to your quote in his post I think it was the quote of eoinmonkey.
    Julian: I’ll have to disagree though that eoin’s quote seems anti-semetic. Hitler is useful to quote because his brand of totalitrianism emerged in a less PR obsessed time, where the ruling class tended to be more blunt in their public statements. Now the methods might have changed slightly but the general aim, power, domination, ownership remain the same.
    Just as the invasion of Eastern Europe and the subjugation of the Poles, Russians, Sebs, Gypsies etc would have been impossable under a bourgeois democratic state for the same reason Israel cannot occupy the West Bank and allow the any sort of functioning democracy in occupied territories. This is not to say the state of Israel is a nazi state per se. However Nazism is a more extreme form of the same ideology that dominates the Israeli state, that is a racist, exclusivist ideology that springs from the fact the state exists in effect to dominate and eventually expell the indigenous population.

    17 July 2006, 5:12 am

11. Comandante Gringo:

    So — does this thing go to the next level? Do the zionists bomb Damascus?

    17 July 2006, 5:44 am

12. eoinmonkey:

    I think some (all?) of the “anti- Hitlerisation of the debate” ire may have been directed at my own comment.
    However, as Mr Goff points out, he was the first to mention the Holocaust and Nazis, with (i may add) an entirely adaquate amount of historical/factual justification, in the above post as a whole. I agree with the blog author that mention of this subject can not be divorced from the discussion. I would also wish to point out that the person objecting to the quote is reading a whole lot of politics into a very small amount of text, eg.”when the Israeli government’s atrocity against Palestinians gets mentioned, someone immediately has to jump in with something like “Those Jews are as bad as the Nazis” which is not historically accurate, or, in my opinion, a useful point to make here.” I dont recall writing, or even implying, any such thing- nor would I agree with anyone who did. The objector should perhaps be more careful, especially since he does not know anything about my own background or political beliefs.
    So.

    17 July 2006, 7:00 am

13. Stan:

    My bad. Apologies Julian. Anything I write aftet 10 PM must be taken with the grain of salt resulting from four different old-man pills and their interactions. It’s a good thing I quit drinking.

    17 July 2006, 8:58 am

14. passingthru:

    So, if Zionism is racist, where did all those Ethiopan Jews in Israel come from?

    You know, the thousands and thousands airlifted at great cost–Israel literally had to pay a ransom for each person “allowed” to leave Ethiopia?

    The falashamuras are brown-skinned, Stan.

    Your theory has a hole in it.

    17 July 2006, 9:55 am

15. Stan:

    Read the link:

    http://www.counterpunch.org/love1015.html

    Sephardic Jews are still second-class citizens in Israel, and are shamelessly manipulated by the right-wing.

    Anti-Arab racism is at the heart of Zionism… and explicitly so.

    Your comment is a non-sequitur.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_%28logic%29

    17 July 2006, 10:20 am

16. Neilcaff:

    I think these attacks are a sign of the deep legitimacy crisis in Zionism at the present time. As well as the racist ideology that Stan has outlined there was also a semi social democratic social contract that was the other buttress of the Israeli state. Up to the early 90’s the deal the Israeli ruling class had with the workers was ‘you fight our wars, we provide guarentee employment rights through strong unions, full employment, comprehensive welfare system and health care.’ In many ways this was an even more powerful source of legitimacy for the state of Israel (for its own citizens) than Zionism.
    However from 1988 onwards the two pillars came under attack from two different directions.
    In the early 90’s as part of the wave of neo-liberalism that followed the collapse of Stalinism large sections of the economy was privatised and swingeing cuts were put on health and education spending. This was carried out both by the Labour Party and the Likud although the Likud government of Netanyahu was particularly zealous in attacking unions and selling the family silver. This has led to a simmering anger among the Israeli working class and a deep disillusionment in establishment parties. This is the underlying reason for the instability of Israeli domestic politics with its tendensy towards coalition governments. The disillusionment also tends to express itself in an unusual fashion such as the quick growth of Shas, the orthodox religious party, in the late 90’s then their just as rapid shrinkage after coalition with the Likud in the early part of this century. Or for example Shinui’s even more remarkable growth on an anti-clerical ticket then subsequent implosion after coalition with Sharon.
    The support Amir Peretz of Labour was able get in the last election by oppertuisticly appealing to traditional Labour values in the unions and against neo-liberalism show the level of discontent that does exist in Israeli society. The Israeli ruling class now have to play the Zionism card to retain their legitimacy.
    At the very same time the central myth that props uo Zionism, the invincible Israeli army, is slowly crumbling. The first crack appeared in its disasterous occupation of Lebanon where Hizbollah became the first Arab army to defeat Israel. At the very moment Israel seemed to be extricating itself from Lebabnon the first Palestinian Intifada hit in 1988. The Palestinian liberation struggle has followed many twists and turns, tragedies and blind alleys persued by the Palestinian organisations but one fact remains constant. The Palestinians will not be cowed. This defiance destroys the super soldier image of Zionism. And since negotiation is incompatable with a Zionist myth of superiority over the natives and entitlement to their land the Israeli ruling class is left with no option but to escalate. But here’s the rub. The other side can escalate too as Hizbollah have now shown. I don’t know if anybody saw that press conference with Israeli generals after Hizbollah destroyed the Israeli tank and killed 8 soldiers but they looked worried under their bravado. And they should be. Escalation is their only course but the consequences are unpredictable, but if they back down they look weak and another bit of the Zionist Superman myth goes sailing down the river.

    17 July 2006, 10:29 am

17. Yolanda Carrington:

    Julian…I have to agree with most of the posters here as well. Evaluating Hitler’s or other Nazi leaders’ own words in the context of understanding the oppression of the Palestinians can be very useful. I wouldn’t consider the context of eoinmonkey’s Hitler-quote post anti-semetic or racist.

    I’ve quoted the words of prominent racists, misogynists, and homophobes in similar contexts—to show evidence of their mindsets, expose their hypocrises, or to compare/contrast similar episodes of oppression/dominance in society and history against theirs. This is how I as a Black woman and radical feminist take power back from the men who would destroy me.

    In light of the fact that Zionists regularly pimp the trauma of the Holocaust themselves to justify their violent white supremacy, why in the hell would you object to folks here examining or even daring to refer to the Holocaust? The Nazi Holocaust is probably the most well-known episode of systematic oppression and genocide in human history, certainly more than the genocides against my West African and First Nations ancestors. We as people of conscience have a duty to study the Holocaust, especially in light of what is happening in Palestine now.

    And for your information, Julian: The Nazi Holocaust is my history too, and my damn present. That ain’t ranking oppressions either.

    Yolanda

    17 July 2006, 10:30 am

18. emma:

    Stan,
    Sometimes after reading many of the progressive sites
    I feel they are unintentionally doing the job for Bush and his ilke. They sound more like “visionaries of doomsday”, instead of “catalysts of hope”.

    It is as if - ‘well Bush had told us which countries are the axis of evil so therefore these are the countries he will bomb, so we will forecast it in advance.’

    Now the voices of doom are at it again forecasting a 3rd world war. Again I do not agree this will occur.

    People should be aware that the US and Israel might have superior military might, but they are also not always that bright, in the tactical decision department.

    It is puzzling that the majority of left/progressives fail to ask themselves why would the US bomb Iran, when the US has just installed an Iranian led puppet Government in Iraq.

    After all, enemies can quickly become friends for the occasion even Iraqis and Iranians - The US would have a lot to lose,if this occurred. .

    Fve months before the Iran-Iraq war began Iran’s President stated “Aden and Bagdad” belong to us.” (This statement was published by the Embassy of the Republic of Iraq Washington D.C. Jan 1985.)

    From the present situation in Iraq, it appears the Bush/Israel regime which you correctly describe as “white supremacist” have made the Iranian President’s statement come close to fruition.

    Hoping nobody remembers their support of Iran,Israel now cries “terrorist” against Hezbollah and Hamas.while being merely in the process of stealing more land for themselves.

    At the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war,Israel like a whore,not out of need,but mercenary greed and geopolitical self interest,hopped into bed with Khoumenie and cuddled up to him until the war ended.

    One can read about this in “Profits of War”by Ari-Ben-Menashe(Pub: Allen & Unwin 1992.) which tells us of how through the connivance of your then Vice-President George Bush and the CIA and Israel,unknown to the people of America; Menashe was chosen to be the Israeli’s prime bagman and negotiator for moving dirty drug money and slush funds raised in Australia,US etc. into and out of banks in order to buy arms from other countries cheaply, and then sell them to Iran at highly inflated prices. This resulted in Israel making millions of dollars in profits from these sales,whilst using Iran to weaken Iraq. .

    Israel was not accusing Iran of being “terrorists” at this time were they?.

    - page 19l “Profits of War”.Ari-Ben-Menashe

    “Under the noses of the American people, 4,000 TOW missiles were flown out of Marana Base in Arizona to Guatemala and were shipped through Australia, where they were temporarily parked in the western part of that country. But there was a great deal more on the move. Apart from the TOWs, radar and electronic material and Hawk surface-to-air missiles from the US., this is what was sent to Iran - while congress and the rest of the world remained ignorant.”

    Menashe then goes on to list the military equipment and countries who sold weapons to Iran through Israel ie.. From Israel - 128 U.S. tanks etc………….”

    This is the most spellbinding gangster book ever written. Sadly it is not fiction.

    I hope this will contribute to folks being able to
    join up a few more dots on this issue.
    -

    17 July 2006, 10:41 am

19. Neilcaff:

    On the other side though Hamas and Hezbollah have also hit an impass. Both built their support through uncomprimising armed struggle. However like other armed groups before them (like the IRA) they have discoverd that military force alone is a dead end in the absense of a programme that breaks with capitalism. In an attempt to break out of their blind alley they turned towards electoral politics but both have been hamstrung for various reasons.
    Hamas’s difficulties with the Israeli blockade have been well documented. However in a deeper sense their narrow Islamic ideology means they cannot build a movement that can appeal to the discontent felt by Israelis both with its governments neo-liberalism and its failure to make peace despite a majority of Israelis backing some sort of land for peace deal. Instead their history of suicide bombings and rhetoric of destroying Israel (although Hamas were showing signs of moving from that position and may in fact have been the reason Israel increased its bombardment of Gaza in order to forestall this) alienates Israeli workers who feel they have no option but to hold their noses and support their government.
    However Hamas for all their faults are still a resistence movement operating under conditions of occupation and so have limited options available to them even if they did have the best programme in the world.
    Hezbollah is a different kettle of fish. They are in reality the single most powerful political movement in Lebanon. They remain the only millitia to hold on to their arms (mostly thanks to Israels constant menacing of Southern Lebanon, talk about shooting yourself in the Zionist foot) and have ministers in the Lebanese government. They enjoy strong backing from Syria and Iran, have a sophisticated welfare system and their own media. In probably any other country in the world they would be running the show for sure. Again though because they are at base a sectarian organisation they will always be opposed by the other minorities in Syria. The absense of a class analysis that can unite Lebanons people means Christian, Sunni, Druze etc will view any gain for Hezbollah as a loss for themselves thus stoking the fires of future sectarian conflict. This is not ultra-left idealism by the way. In 2004 and early 2005 a wave of class stuggle erupted in Lebanon with numerous strikes breaking out, very few were defeated using sectarianism with Christians, Muslims and Druze organising together to defeat the bosses. Hezbollah played an entirely reactionary role even going so far as to act as strike breakers during a postal dispute and assaulting postal workers.
    With the Hariri events Hezbollah clearly felt power slipping away from them. The sucess of Hezbollahs attacks on Israel speaks of months of planning. Clearly they knew the best thing to try and overcome sectarian obstacles would be an invasion from the outside. Since Israel is trapped in its Zionist mythos as I outlined previously Hezbollah could easily exploit this, which is what they have now done. You’ll notice Hasan Nasrallah has been using nationalist sentiment to unite Lebanese people behind the Hezbollah banner. However this is only a quick fix as it merely papers over the crack of sectarianism instead of getting at its root capitalist imperialism.

    17 July 2006, 1:02 pm

20. Neilcaff:

    Should say other minorites in Lebanon

    17 July 2006, 1:04 pm

21. the burningman:

    Israel does not have a “right” to exist, not as a Jewish state on multi-ethnic land. It is a deliberate attack on the masses of Arab people, as a state, from even before its inception under (colonial) UN mandate.

    It’s been nothing but occupation, murder, ethnic cleansing and subcontracted America’s dirty work since.

    Israel has no right to exist. It’s been terrible for Jewish people and obviously worse for everyone with the misfortune of being within their bombing range.

    To say nothing of Israel’s concern about genocide in, say, Guatemala…

    That state must fall. I believe it will much sooner than others. Its power is superficial, its economy weak-to-nonexistent. Without a foregin sponsor, I don’t think it would last ten years… It’s racist to the core and the demographics are just not favorable.

    To say they aren’t like “Hitler” is ridiculous. Of course they are. What is Gaza but a concentration camp? The destruction, racist dehumanization, and sadistic state power are exactly fascist.

    The final solution didn’t begin until the Nazis were losing.

    Julian, what do you think Israel keeps all those nukes around for? Decoration? What holocaust are the Zionists prepared to unleash to defend their stolen land?

    17 July 2006, 1:36 pm

22. Timothy R. Anderson:

    From the files of ” So I’ve been told. ”
    Uh, one quick thingy about Israel and then my anniversary griping thingy.
    Israel. Uh, I have been told, more than once, that the citizens of Israel engage in debate over all kinds of stuff , within the ” democratic ” context of the nation of Israel. So, I get just a little bit ” upset ” when I hear on American network t.v. that the complete population of Israel supports, totally, the actions of the oligarchy running Israel’s government. The fuck anyone can say it is total. Period.

    Pardon my righteous outburst. July 19, 2006
    is forty months in Iraq. That’s beeeeeen
    weighing heavy on the Timothy brain.

    War is a RACKET. http://www.warisaracket.org

    Timothy R. Anderson

    17 July 2006, 1:59 pm

23. astras:

    i feel for the poor lebanese. it appears hezbollah is fighting a proxy war by dragging the ‘raging bull’ israel into yet another war in poor little libanon.
    of course israel is no peacefull civilized country. a civilized country would not occupy other people’s land, imprison thousands and deny them human rights. it’s sickening to see israel always portrayed as an ‘outpost of democracy’ by the media.
    yet hezbollah knew exactly what the israelis would do (only about one third of the israeli population is opposed to building settlements and going to war).
    hezbollah has obviously not been hit in any significant way by the bombing. they don’t care that the tourist industry is shattered. in fact they staged serveral protests against the tourist industry. they don’t need the libanese government, they are said to receive about 500.000.000 a year from iran alone. now they have simply decided to wage this war on the backs of their fellow lebanese. who are too weak to do anything about it.
    even though israel surely deserves to be condemned for these outrages acts of war against a civillian population, hezbollah is not much better.
    most of all of course the so-called west deserves condemnation for supporting the israeli land-theft for years and years which has lead to this monstrous disaster.

    17 July 2006, 3:19 pm

24. passingthru:

    I’m sorry, but I fail to see how a racist, white-supremacist state would lift a finger to aid thousands of black-skinned Ethiopian Jews.

    I know I’m not the brightest bulb on the tree, but please explain to me how bringing the falashamura in was a racist, white supremacist operation.

    Try not using Counterpunch as a source for a change.

    17 July 2006, 3:33 pm

25. Charles Brown:

    Quoting Hitler doesn’t help an effort to criticize Zionism, for the obvious reason that Hitler _was_ history’s most infamous anti-Semite. So, when eoinmonkey quoted Hitler, it lent to possible confusion and unfounded notions of anti-Semitism with respect to Stan’s critique of Zionism even as Stan tried to distinguish anti-Semitism and criticism of Zionism.

    It is best to leave Hitler’s words and thoughts out of the criticism of Israel’s current actions. It is just becomes a diversion from telling the truth of what is happening now in Palestine.

    17 July 2006, 5:19 pm

26. Julian Real:

    It is a time of great human tragedies–all over the globe, disproportionately affecting women, especially poor women of Color, and their children.

    Thanks for your apology, Stan. I stand with you, and you know that. I may disagree with you about some things, but I also tend to voice those disagreements, which you graciously allow me to do, “in your home”, so to speak, here on your blog. You have been a fine supporter of my work. Thank you for that.

    My original comment was directed only and precisely at eoinmonkey, as Elaina noted. Thanks Elaina, for that clarification. I’m not feeling safe enough to proceed in this debate, which I am woefully inadequately prepared to engage in with strong minds who will and should state their views as they do.

    I’m leaving this particular discussion, on this thread. I have clearly stated my political opposition to what the Israeli government is doing, as an atrocity against humanity, Palestinian humanity especially, as painful and horrible as any atrocity was or is. I do believe the Israeli government IS imperialistic, militaristic, racist, classist, and sexist and misogynistic, among other ways of being oppressive and otherwise destructive to humanity.

    I would request this to all contributors here: Please read “Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation”, by Andrea Dworkin, before you engage WITH ME further on this topic.

    I hope the Palestinian people find peace soon, in this lifetime.

    See: http://hort.net/+13tx

    I am feeling very outnumbered here, AS A JEW.

    I respectfully disengage.

    Julian

    17 July 2006, 5:20 pm

27. Jonas:

    [quote]I know I’m not the brightest bulb on the tree, but please explain to me how bringing the falashamura in was a racist, white supremacist operation.[/quote]

    Because it looked good in the media?

    Look everyone! We’re not a racist white-supremacist state!

    I remember reading articles some years ago that Jews of African descent were all but integrated into Israeli society, they have their own dancing clubs, bars etc..

    17 July 2006, 6:02 pm

28. Bob:

    It sure is easy to blame Israel, huh? So the land belongs to the Palestinians? What start date do you use to say that the land is theirs? 100 years ago? 1000 years ago? The Israelites occupied the land 5000 years ago, built Jerusalem 3000 years ago. It is quite clear that both peoples have legitimate claim to the land. The recognition of this fact is why the UN created the two-state solution in 1948. A solution that the Israelis happily accepted. It is the Palestinian leadership and the Dictators of the surrounding Arab states who refuse to accept Israel. Israel seeks recognition and a peace treaty. That is it. Hizbollah wanted Israel out of Lebanon. Israel vacated Lebanon. Why is Hizbollah still an armed militia that patrols the border and routinely launches rocket attacks into Israel?

    17 July 2006, 6:42 pm

29. Dahlia Wasfi:

    Fantastic piece! Stan, you are the man!

    17 July 2006, 7:44 pm

30. Michael:

    Stan, would it be too much to ask how you found out that the Israeli soldiers that were kidnapped were across the border at the time? This is the first I’ve heard of this and to me puts the entire situation in a new light and context.

    17 July 2006, 8:12 pm

31. DeAnander:

    To bring in the gender perspective again… The works of Daniel Boyarin, distinguished theological historian and Talmudic scholar, focus fairly often on the attempted “remasculinisation” of the Jewish male, and I think the swaggering militarism of the present Israeli state is about gender politics as well as — perhaps as much as — the Boer politics of occupation and colonialism.

    The socialism, collective living arrangements and gender equity envisioned by the early kibbutzim (some of whom also tried, w/in the limits of the expropriation they were committing, to live in peace with Arab neighbours) have largely been jettisoned: the new settlements in the OT are cookie-cutter carburbs modeled on the dysfunctional American suburb: isolated, privatised, w/o mass transit, water-intensive, connected by a sprawl of new highways (some of which, it is reported, Arabs are banned from using)… The attempt to overlay a water and fuel intensive lifestyle onto a desert biome that will not support such a lifestyle, combined with the displacement and destruction of peasant farmers with lifeways well adapted to the biome, are trademarks of Anglo/Euro colonialism (not to mention a bad case of Planners’ Myopia, but what else is new).

    Attacks on the “welfare state” in Israel are, much as they are in the US and other first world nations, attacks on women as a class: the undercutting of child support, creche care, socialised medicine and all the rest is calculated to drive women out of the workforce and into poverty, out of the legit workforce and into the shadow economy, and as an alternative to these fates, into greater dependence on individual wage-earning men (who then regain patriarchal authority over women and children, as breadwinners and de facto heads of household). This takes place at the same time as the militarisation of “Jewish manhood” in Israeli culture, and a rejection of the traditional E European ideal archetype of the gentle, nurturing and scholarly male as the highest ideal of Jewish manhood.

    Anyway, I don’t think one can talk about the imperialist and colonial flavour of contemporary Israeli society, or its apparently increasingly overt anti-Arab racism, w/o talking about the several-decade programme (or drift) of “Making Israel a Man Again” — which parallels, unsurprisingly, the similar backlash against feminism and social infrastructure provision in the US.

    BTW I have recently found an online bibliography on Men and Masculinity — I have not evaluated the content for political leaning, so I have no idea whether it’s a “men’s movement” resource or a pro-feminist resource, but it’s certainly extensive. unfortunately the compiler has not discovered Sex and War yet

    18 July 2006, 12:34 am

32. DeAnander:

    BTW, I am not sure why people find it so shocking that Israeli military forces, secret police etc. replicate many of the tropes of the Nazi era. For a start, all colonial/occupational forces resort to the same series of tactics in the end: heavy-handed repressiveness, impoverishment/hunger, scorched earth, torture/terror, and collective punishment, followed (if the escalation is not stopped by some intervention or a collapse of the effort due to resource dearth) by exterminism. Correct me Stan if I am making a serious blunder in military history here, but in my admittedly limited reading, every invasion force that stays to colonise and control follows the same recipe over time, as the inevitable resistance organises and tests the controllers’ resolve. The Americans have fallen into this recipe as they try to occupy and “pacify” (read: terrorise into submission) Iraq.

    Rather than regarding the Nazis as uniquely, ahistorically monstrous [though there are aspects of their programme that set historical records, other records have been set by other nations, such as the first use of atomic weapons by the US on the militarily nonessential targets of H and N], we could regard them as falling into an historical tradition, a continuous thread, of occupying/conquering armies. The Romans used similar tactics against tribespeople in conquered territories; the Spanish in the Conquista; the Anglos against indigenes in N America; the Boers against the “Kaffirs” in S Africa. The Israelis got tips and training from the Boers, as did the Nazis in a different generation before them. The technologies have evolved over time, offering greater “efficiency” by the usual measure of industrialism — fewer man-hours and more fossil fuel inputs needed to kill X thousand people — but the basic recipe is consistent and “improves” only in details of strategy and application. To compare the Israeli crimes in the OT to Nazi crimes in occupied Europe is merely to say that occupational forces behave like occupational forces… imho. Not much surprise there.

    Nor is there much surprise for me in the fact that the literature of ethnic supremacy, or ethnic nation-statism, has a genre quality which makes a sample from one epoch or context sound not unlike a sample from another epoch or context, modulo linguistic change and a different selection of adjectives and nouns. If we compared Hitlerian texts with, say, Japanese justifications for the annexation of Manchukuo, or Hutu radio speeches advocating the wholesale murder of the Tutsi with Goebbels’ scripts advocatin the wholesale murder of Jews, or compared all the above with American editorials of early C19 advocating the wholesale murder and imprisonment of Native Americans, we would find the same basic script: Our People are Better, Because. Their People are Inferior, Because. We Deserve Their Land/Property/Crops/Water/Oil… They Have No Right to Live and Own Things That Should Be Ours. If They Resist Us They Are Barbarians/Criminals/Terrorist and Deserve to Die. We are Human and They are Less Than Human. It is No Real Crime to Kill Them. The Law Does Not Apply To Them. And so on and so on.

    Like the cookie-cutter excuses of generation after generation of students for late papers and missing homework, the whiny self-justification of wannabe expropriators, mass-murderers and genocidalists, and the grandiose self-flattery and racial supremacist rhetoric that fills the other side of the pamphlet, never really changes. Just the dialect, some nouns and a few adjectives (though we will reliably find pest, parasite, animal, dirty, stupid, primitive, inferior, doomed, insect, sex-crazed, wanton, ugly, child-stealer, poisoner, conspiracy, witchcraft in some form or another in almost every edition of the Exterminators’ Pamphlet). It comes with the territory of ethnic supremacist belief systems, and why we would expect militarised, aggressive Zionism to break the mould and be the only ethnic nationalism in history to depart from the script, I am not sure (unless it’s a reflection of the degree to which the rest of the world agrees that Jews are G-d’s Chosen People and inherently better than all other humans so far produced). Just about every genocidal project starts with the zealous belief in being God’s (or Gods’, or the Inevitable Historical Process’) Chosen People. Such a belief, combined with armed might, tends to lead to invasions, occupations, and exterminations; much as a belief that God personally speaks to you is fairly harmless when held by an ascetic anchorite sworn to the imitation of Christ and living a blameless life in a remote island monastery, but is kind of worrying when held by the guy next door who collects assault rifles.

    The next reason why I am surprised by the surprise of those who compare the Israeli behaviour to Nazi memes and tropes, or the outrage of those who protest such comparison, is that it’s common knowledge as well as documented in sociological research, that abused children often become abusers as adults; that people who have been subjected to terror, pain, humiliation, etc., do not necessarily as a result become angels, but may later in life take out their rage and need for vengeance on various targets of opportunity, not all of which may be actually complicit in the original abuse; or they may feel compelled to re-enact the horrifying abuse for reasons which we don’t fully understand (I believe we’ve had some discussion here about the extent to which sexually abused children, or battered children, may later in life become attached to BDSM practise, a way of re-enacting their early experiences). While I don’t suggest that nationality recapitulates psychology, i.e. that nations are individuals who could lie on couches and explain their family history and compulsions to an analyst, the phenomenon of delayed and/or misplaced vengeance, and of obsessive reliving or re-enacting of remembered sufferings and victimisations, seems universally human: the blood feud that persists across generations seems like a typical example.

    Andrea Dworkin (pbuh) wrote back in 1990 about a visit to Israel in which she talked with Israeli feminists and began to survey the state of pornography in Israeli culture. She found that Holocaust themes were popular in Israeli pornography — that Israeli men were getting off to obsessive re-enactments of Nazi sadism:
    

    You have to see it to believe it and even seeing it might not help. I’ve been sent it over the years by feminists in Israel — I had seen it — I didn’t really believe it. Unlike in the United States, pornography is not an industry. You find it in mainstream magazines and advertising. It is mostly about the Holocaust. In it, Jewish women are sexualized as Holocaust victims for Jewish men to masturbate over. Well, would you believe it, even if you saw it?

    Israeli women call it “Holocaust pornography.” The themes are fire, gas, trains, emaciation, death.

    In the fashion layout, three women in swimsuits are posed as if they are looking at and moving away from two men on motorcycles. The motorcycles, black metal, are menacingly in the foreground moving toward the women. The women, fragile and defenseless in their near nudity, are in the background. Then the women, now dressed in scanty underwear, are shown running from the men, with emphasis on thighs, breasts thrust out, hips highlighted. Their faces look frightened and frenzied. The men are physically grabbing them. Then the women, now in new bathing suits, are sprawled on the ground, apparently dead, with parts of their bodies severed from them and scattered around as trains bear down on them. Even as you see a severed arm, a severed leg, the trains coming toward them, the women are posed to accentuate the hips and place of entry into the vaginal area.

    Or a man is pouring gasoline into a woman’s face. Or she’s posed next to a light fixture that looks like a shower head.

    Or two women, ribs showing, in scanty underwear, are posed in front of a stone wall, prisonlike, with a fire extinguisher on one side of them and a blazing open oven on the other. Their body postures replicate the body postures of naked concentration camp inmates in documentary photographs.

    […]

    The same magazine published all the visual violence described above. Monitin is a left-liberal slick monthly for the intelligentsia and upper class. It has high productions and aesthetic values. Israel’s most distinguished writers and intellectuals publish in it. Judith Antonelli in The Jewish Advocate reported that Monitin “contains the most sexually violent images. Photos abound of women sprawled out upside-down as if they have just been attacked.”

    Or, in a magazine for women that is not unlike Ladies’ Home Journal, there is a photograph of a woman tied to a chair with heavy rope. Her shirt is torn off her shoulders and upper chest but her arms are tied up against her so that only the fleshy part of the upper breasts is exposed. She is wearing pants — they are wet. A man, fully dressed, standing next to her, is throwing beer in her face. In the United States, such photographs of women are found in bondage magazines.

    For purists, there is an Israeli pornography magazine. The issue I saw had a front-page headline that read: ORGY AT YAD VASHEM. Yad Vashem is the memorial in Jerusalem to the victims of the Holocaust. Under the headline, there was a photograph of a man sexually entangled with several women.

    What does this mean — other than that if you are a Jewish woman you don’t run to Israel, you run from it?

    I think — mho — one thing it means is that Israeli masculinity has always been in crisis — that Israel itself is a creation of crisis, the reification of a crisis mentality; that grief, rage and horror over the Nazi Holocaust has always been twinned in many Jewish men’s minds with an outrage to their masculinity, or a failure as men (to protect “their” women and children from the oppressor); and that there is a strong, obsessive impulse to “prove their manhood” and repudiate the old fashioned shtetl archetype of the gentle, nonviolent, nurturing Jewish husband/father in favour of a violent, misogynist, tough-guy “New Jewish Man” (Rambo on the West Bank, a never-ending replay of endless vigilante/vengeance flicks) who will be so tough, so mean, so lethal, so scary that no one will ever humiliate or hurt him (or his wife and children) again. Of course this archetype is justified by the need to “protect the women and children” (it always is), even as the political policies that go with this remasculinisation are hurting real, living women and children w/in the State of Israel (not to mention the “kaffir” women and children in the OT, who as the Enemy’s women are merely a lever to be used against him)…

    Anyway, I just don’t see that the parallels between Israel in its current deplorable condition (political, military, economic) and other nation-states in similar structural circumstances, are surprising or shocking. The structural circumstances have a lot to do with the behaviour, just as they did at Abu Ghraib and during the rape and murder of Abir at al-Mahmudiyah (Abir whom the US press persisted in calling am “Iraqi woman” for weeks, despite the fact that her age — 14 — was known from early in the story’s development).

    Assigning a unique Taint to the Nazi era is imho a way of obscuring and obfuscating its place in the history of occupation, ethnic cleansing, exterminism, racial supremacy dogma, militarisation, etc. When the Nazis are so Tainted that nothing must ever be compared to them — a kind of anti-God whose name cannot be taken in vain, nor can any evil ever be compared to theirs — we are hamstrung in an effort to understand the structural similarities and patterns in peaks of patriarchal/militarist/colonialist behaviour over time. Godwin’s Law is required because of the unique Taint attached to the Hitler regime, yet Godwin’s Law and the unique ahistorical Taint that inspires it tend to prevent rational analysis and prediction of the behaviour of state power, specifically masculinised, militarised, armed power under the influence of a racial exceptionalist dogma and engaged in a war of annexation and occupation.

    18 July 2006, 1:23 am

33. RedDan:

    Stan and others,

    Lenni Brenner is an absolute must-read in these times.

    “Zionism in the Age of Dictators” and “The Iron Wall”

    Outline and document in painstaking detail each and every one of the rhetorical, philosophical, and actual atrocities committed in the name of the Zionist “Project” over the last century.

    Let me be very, very clear on this topic:

    I am a Jew, and very, very proud of my heritage. The contribution of Jewish intellectuals, scientists, artists, workers, organizers, and philosophers to world history and development is immense and valuable. This is true on a wide variety of levels and over a wide range of contexts.

    From Maimonaides to Marx to Trotsky to Einstein and Feynman to Zinn and Chomsky, from Freedom Riders to the present and everywhere in between…Jews have been and continue to be an important and potent force for progress.

    Those who seize upon the Zionist nightmare and use Israeli depredations as an excuse to justify their eliminationist anti-semitism are poisonous freaks or deluded fanatics.

    This is true of the likes of Tom Delay or James Dobson, who seized upon the Zionist Project as a means to foster their crazed ideas about Armaggedon and the Rapture (just google the Red Heifer Project and see what kind of insanity is going on over at the Fundamentalist end of the spectrum.

    It is also true of the mouth-breathing idiots over at StormFront and the rest of the Neo-Nazi, Neo-Fascist cesspits.

    It is also true of many of the radical Islamist, eliminationist, hate-spewing Arab and Persian Right Wing groups and alliances, who use Israel and Israeli policies (hateful and stupid as they are) as political and rhetorical cover to both excuse their virulent, racist stupidity and to excuse and justify their own Fundamentalist insanities.

    The fact is, at least in my opinion, that the Zionist Right has been and is being used as Useful Fools (in the same sense that Lenin used the term) by the corporatists, imperialists, and neo-colonialists. Instead of focusing on the depredations of the capitalist west, neo-liberal and neo-conservative rapaciousness and hyper-capitalistic rape of the planet, oh so many (and I include ANSWER and many others on the “maximalist” Left in this)…so many are focusing on the actions and offenses committed by Israel. Israel and, by extension (and unfairly and inaccurately), Jews have become ammo sponges for the Imperialist powers.

    The fact is that most Jews in the world are ambivalent about the nature and aims of the Zionist project. The fact is that there is a large anti-zionist contingent amongs secular and religious Jews. The fact is that the Israeli Right has in the past and continues to sacrifice the well-being of worldwide Jewry at the altar of neo-colonialist and imperialist dreams of conquest.

    It is time, and past time, that the arguments on the topic of Israel, Zionism, the wisdom, morality and righteousness of the Zionist enterprise…arguments that rage in private between members of Jewish families, Jewish political organizations, Jewish social groups, and Jewish religious congregations (and I know that these conflicts rage because I have been party to all to many)…it is well past time that these arguments go public. Because of the painful, real, and all-too-repeatable horrors of the Pogroms and the Holocaust, because of the history of the Jewish People, it is my opinion that Jews, and only Jews (and remember that I count myself an integral and proud member of that community) can solve this problem.

    18 July 2006, 3:22 am

34. Sam:

    Julian, passingthru, jonas and bob..

    All Jews in Israel are not racist any more than all whites in South africa were racist.

    But the fact is the State of israel has policies that are racist towards non-jews..
    1. Israel has jewish only highways (non-jews are not allowed access) what would you call this if not racist?
    2. Israel jails, without due process, palastinians (including women and children) for any infraction by labeling them terrorists.
    3. Israel denies access to land to non-jews. In many cases the land is confiscated based on laws that do not apply to jews.. is this not racist?
    4. Collective punishment which is applied only towards non-jews.. again is this not racist?

    I could go on and on.. and I’m sure some people in this forum will..

    Nobody in this forum is saying anything against the jewish people, they are making their points against the policies of the state of Israel.

    For the life of me I will not understand why anyone would defend any of the above policies of the state of Israel. They are illegel, immoral and inhuman and they give all jews a bad image in the eyes of the world.

    And Bob about the land and who it belongs to.. even if the land did belong to the original isrealites (3000 years ago) as you state. Does that give them the right to punish and crush human beings that just happen to be the wrong DNA? And if Israel is really happy to accept the UN created solution then why is Israel also not happy to accept other UN resolutions that go against it? oh yeah I know, it must be because any solution coming out of the UN that goes against the state of Israel is anti-semetic

    your logic is disgusting..

    Can you defend any of the policies of the state of Israel listed above? without resorting to the anti-semetic rant..

    We are not against the jewish people.. we are against the state of Israel that uses the suffering of the jewish people to justify their brutal and racist policies which are in some ways comparable to the policies that were used by states in the past to crush the jews.. ironic isn’t it?

    18 July 2006, 4:01 am

35. emma:

    Neil, Whether it is Hizbollah or Emmabollah, as far as Israel is concerned - anyone Arab who takes up a rightfulfight against them is a “terrorist”, any non-Arab who opposes them on justifiable grounds is anti-semetic,any Jewish person who opposes them on the same grounds is a ‘Jew-hater’and any Any Arab children who throw stones against them are also ‘terrorists’ and are treated as such.

    Surely, at this time in history, we have not the time for Israel’s nonsense in this department. Hizbollah and Hamas might not live up to our varied political requirments- but we are not there.
    We can criticise from afar, but it is in the hands of the Arab people to sort this out.

    Meanwhile, history shows us that Israel has no credibility whatsoever, when it comes to excuses for its ‘killing fields of the innocent”in occupied Palestine and Lebanon.

    Take for instance, the non-action of our Prime Minister, John Howard and Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, in response to evacuating 25,OOO visiting Australian Lebanese from Lebanon,

    From the obvious lack of action by these two in the past days, one cannot help get the feeling that Israel is doing what has been arranged with the United States’s disgraceful excuse for a President - Bush.

    If our white skinned Aussie, Aussie Aussies oi, oi, oi’s (as they call themselves) were stranded in Lebanon a solution would have been worked out very quickly indeed - and we would have had newsbulletins every 5 minutes on the telly-with piccies of the traumatised.

    Anway, yourself and the other readers might be interested in looking at Damien Lataan’s(Sth.Aust) blog site -
    “Telling the history of the twenty first century as it really is.”

    Israel Planned Provocation Thur. 13/7/2006
    report in “Jerusalem Post” of same day very revealing

    This report claims only one week ago an entire reserve
    division was drafted in order to train for an operation such as the one the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) is planning in response to Wednesday mornings Hizbollah attack on IDF forces along Northern Border……….”

    Also in regard to Israel’s kidnapping of the
    Palestinian parliamentarians the Israeli “Haaretz” editorial 3/6/2006 stated “…….arresting people to use as a bargaining chip is the act of a GANG, not a State…..” (my emphasise on gang). Interesting!

    Imagine if members of our parliament/congress were
    abducted. Our governments would be using more than
    low-tech rockets and there would be little world condemnation.

    Oh! Postscript: I just heard Downer on the news. He has been telling us all day that they are trying to persuade a Charter Shipping Co. that it will be safe for them to pick up Australians from Lebanon. He is also proud that to date we have managed to get 87 of 25,000 people out of Lebanon by bus.

    Prior to this when some Australians first went to the embassy it was closed. The staff had packed up and gone - never to return. It was not until pressure went on Howard and Downer that the embassy had to re-open.

    Now Downer tells us that 4,000 Australians have registered with the Australian Consul - too bad the other 21,000 thousand people are mainly in the south of Lebanon, and are stranded there due to Israel’s bombing of the area.

    Another point worth thinking about is that Israel knows that at this particular time of the year in Lebanon it is the height of the tourist season.

    Finally, I agree 100% with Stan, this issue is about “White Supremacy”. Also,it represents the now seemingly ongoing “war on everyone who does not support white supremacist’s ideology.”

    18 July 2006, 4:19 am

36. Michael:

    Also, is it true that Huffington Post dropped this article? If so, that’s a damn shame.

    18 July 2006, 7:30 am

37. Neilcaff:

    Emma: Can you clarify your first paragraph a bit? I hope I didn’t come across as agreeing with those PNAC types who brand legitimate resistence as terrorist.
    I will do my level best to defend Lebanon’s sovereignty and the right of Palestinians in demo’s vigils, public meetings, conversations, whatever. I’m fully aware that Israel is the main aggressor here and that a solution to the myriad of problems in the ME begins with negating Israeli millitarism.
    At the same time though I think its important to realise some of the limitations of resistence groups. I say this not as some ultra left point scorer trying to defend an ephemeral programme. I’ve seen the sharp end of liberation/sectarian conflict. (Hope I don’t sound like I’m boasting or being patronising, wish I hadn’t) Incorrect tactics that flow from political errors (i.e. suicide bombings of civillian areas because one views Israelis as an undifferentiated ‘millitarised’ mass) have consequences that can rebound on the movement.
    I fully recognise I am not a Palestinian living in Gaza or a Shia in South Lebanon. My intention is not condemn Hamas and Hezbollah because their methods do not conform to my own. I make criticism of them because I believe it is our duty in the West to try to build public opinion against attacks against the people they represent. To do that, to win over people who are not yet fully convinced Israel is the aggressor, we need to not only explain the context of Hamas/Hezbollah actions but be open in our genuine criticism of those organisations methods. Its too easy just to oppertunisticly go along and preach to the converted by being uncritical of them or even worse dismiss people with genuine concerns over ‘terrorist organisations’ as reactionaries or whatever.

    DeAnander: Wow repect on those last two posts. I’m constantly impressed at how feminists can make me see new sides to a situation I thought I knew. Thanks

    18 July 2006, 9:27 am

38. Stan:

    The border of Southern Lebanon and Israel is a seamless web of intervisible Israeli outposts with night vision devices, tied together with ground surveillance radar, plowed-flat and raked daily to see footprints, and backed by quick reaction forces. Israelis routinely make incursive patrols into Lebanon. It is nearly impossible for an organized group of Hezbolla or anyone else to cross the border south, much less capture prisoners there. The very notion that this was an incursion INTO Israel is propped up solely by the credulity of the general public that knows nothing about military operations. In reality, the idea is as ludicrous as the Easter Bunny.

    18 July 2006, 9:51 am

39. passingthru:

    Still, no one has truly answered my question. A racist, white supremacist state would not deliberately go to Africa, pay hundreds of millions of dollars in ransom, and bring thousands of black-skinned Ethiopian Jews to live–as equals–in the State of Israel.

    How is Israel a white supremacist state in light of these events? White supremacy is absolute: They want nothing to do with any brown-skinned people. (And by the way, have you taken a good, hard look at the Jews in Israel who were born in Arab and Muslim lands? Those skins look pretty dark to me.)

    I could quote that famous Jack Nicholson line right about now: You can’t handle the truth.

    Therefore, you make up lies to make you feel better about your hatred of the only democracy in the Middle East. Homosexuals are not jailed and hanged in Israel. That would be Iran. Women are allowed to drive, work, hold office, and, gee, vote. The Arab minority have rights–they vote, stand in the Knesset, own property, companies–sure, it isn’t perfect, but the vile pictures you paint are fantasies.

    Your hatred of Israel oozes out of every word you write. If Israel didn’t exist, whom would you hate instead?

    18 July 2006, 11:17 am

40. Timothy R. Anderson:

    Once or twice, perhaps even more, times in my life,
    I have worked with folks who really, really, really did NOT want to be working the job.
    So why do it ? Why be in a mistreated,
    underappreciated state-of-permanent misery ?
    Well, same thing as why , FORTY MONTHS ( minus one day ) into the current Iraq War thingy …..
    there are still more than 100,000 servicemen and servicewomen serving in the conventional U.S. military on the ground in Iraq .

    That thing is ” Survival ( roughly translated as ” money ” ) . I cannot begin to mention, here, today, how many times I have heard this ( cop-out ) lump of shit ” Hey, look, I did NOT want to do it , but what choice did I have ? I do not make the world-altering
    decisions . I simply follow orders. ”

    Uh, riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight, that’s what democracy is ?

    Anyhooooooooooo, tomorrow’s the official FORTY
    MONTHS marker of the current Iraq War.
    Please consider adding your name to the petition at http://www.warisaracket.org . As the old song says ” It would sure do me gooood, to do you gooooood, let me help. ”

    The petition be at http://www.warisaracket.org

    Uh, I probably messed some of this up, but
    I am more passion than technique. ( Smile )

    Timothy R. Anderson
    Pacific Standard Time is 9: 30 a.m.

    18 July 2006, 12:29 pm

41. Stan:

    The only thing this is “passingthru” is a horse’s bowels.

    Passingthru: “Still, no one has truly answered my question. A racist, white supremacist state would not deliberately go to Africa, pay hundreds of millions of dollars in ransom, and bring thousands of black-skinned Ethiopian Jews to live–as equals–in the State of Israel.”

    Stan: Ever since Operation Solomon, Ethiopian Jews have been treated as anything but “equals.”

    Passingthru: “How is Israel a white supremacist state in light of these events?”

    Stan: The same way the US is a white supremacist state. And a patriarchal one. And a bouregois one. Rich, white men still control all the levers of power, even if they let a few darker people sit at the table.

    Passingthru: “White supremacy is absolute: They want nothing to do with any brown-skinned people.”

    Stan: That’s the dumbest, most misinformed thing I’ve ever read here, and that is saying something. White supremacy is precisely about whtie people living WITH the dark Other… in a system of domination. Ever heard of slavery? White supremacists LOVE brown skinned folks, the way Tyson loves chickens.

    Passingthru: “(And by the way, have you taken a good, hard look at the Jews in Israel who were born in Arab and Muslim lands? Those skins look pretty dark to me.)”

    Stan: Have you taken a good look at their chief governmental officials and generals?

    Passingthru: “I could quote that famous Jack Nicholson line right about now: You can’t handle the truth.”

    Stan: Good one. You just quoted a character from a film who was a raving, misogynist lunatic.

    Passingthru: “Therefore, you make up lies to make you feel better about your hatred of the only democracy in the Middle East.”

    Stan: List the lies and rebut them with evidence.

    Passingthru: “Homosexuals are not jailed and hanged in Israel. That would be Iran. Women are allowed to drive, work, hold office, and, gee, vote.”

    Stan: I love how right-wingers suddenly become feminists ande gay-rights advocates when they are engaging in Islmophobia. Of course, al you have to do to be denied the right to vote, free movement, jobs, or even the right to a house, in Palestine is be Palestinian. Oh yeah, you CAN vote, then the Israelis will fire rockets at your elected officials and kidnap them.

    For a taste of passingthru’s past commentary elsewhere, I offer this:

    Passingthru: This is what happens when you enlist foreigners into the military. There are people who still espouse making potential immigrants serve in the army as a means of proving their loyalty to the United States. Unbelievable. As soon as they get out of the army, they go to work for drug dealers.

    “Enlisting foreigners into the military creates a foreign military. Foreign soldiers have no problem shooting Americans. DON’T YOU GET IT?!”

    Stan: Yeah, we get it.

    Passingthru: “The Arab minority have rights–they vote, stand in the Knesset, own property, companies–sure, it isn’t perfect, but the vile pictures you paint are fantasies.”

    Stan: Yeah… uh, imperfect. Good one.

    “Israel never sought to assimilate or integrate the Palestinian population, treating them as second-class citizens and excluding them from public life and the public sphere. The state practiced systematic and institutionalized discrimination in all areas, such as land dispossession and allocation, education, language, economics, culture, and political participation.”

    Passingthru: “Your hatred of Israel oozes out of every word you write. If Israel didn’t exist, whom would you hate instead?”

    Stan: Oh, that one really stuck it to him, that bad guy. He is a Hater… someone with this wellspring of hatred that just has to flow someplace. Or should I say, ooze? Would a critique of Paratheid in South Africa have been equally hateful?

    18 July 2006, 12:45 pm

42. Neilcaff:

    Passingthru: It might well do if it knew it could use those same people to prop up its demographic disadvantage against the Arabs.
    Or if it knew it could use them in its millitary for it war against the Arabs.
    I think the nub of the problem is your idea that white supremacy wants nothing to do with brown people. This is wrong. White supremacy is about dominating brown people or black people or even other white people who have been defined for whatever reason as non-white. (this is way simplified btw). Remember Apartheid South Africa was perfectly happy to have Africans come into their homes and do their laundry, mind their kids, hell even be in the army and fight their wars of aggression against their neighbours so long as white people were the ones calling the shots.
    I don’t really see the relevance of women being able to drive in regards to criticing Israel. Number one Israel is attacking Lebanon, where women do in fact drive, vote in elections, are MP’s, hey some of them even committ adultry and none of them get stoned to death by a Shari’a court. Does this mean its now a bad thing to drop bombs in their civilian areas? Also the country that is being attacked is called LEBANON which is a couple of thousand kilometres from Iran, which by the way is populated in the majority by an ethnic/cultural group called Persians as well as a minority of Arabs.
    Your lack of knowledge on these basic issues speaks poorly of you my friend.

    18 July 2006, 12:51 pm

43. Timothy R. Anderson:

    Spooooooooky. The mention of South Africa.
    For if I was to hate, oh how dreadfully human of me,
    any country’s particular government the list would include Saudi Arabia, South Africa , and oh maybe two or seven others.
    My own wellspring of hatred tends towards
    the thieving lying hypocrites that run the show.
    Of course, if the psycho-analysts got a-hold
    of me, they would qualify my “hatred ”
    as a mere manifestation of my completeness.

    For I love, too, I just is in a slump lately.
    Timothy R. Anderson

    18 July 2006, 1:15 pm

44. Timothy R. Anderson:

    Even now, in 2006 , I will not play Sun City / South Africa.
    I don’t , really, see how the government in South Africa has ” evolved ” to an impressive degree in the years since 1989 , say, or 1990 .
    Poor people’s still poor. Lots of people ain’t got much political power, small amount of people gots a lot of political power. Uh, isn’t the
    fact that no “average South African ” is ever
    interviewed by CBS , CNN , Fox News, ABC , NBC
    television ……. isn’t that fact kind of

    suspicious - y ?

    I mean South Africa, today, likely suuuuuuuuuuucks for huge sums of persons. Which was NOT the point of Little Steven’s ( and others’ ) efforts.

    Timothy R. Anderson
    Forty months in Iraq is tomorrow. Yikes.

    18 July 2006, 2:30 pm

45. frank:

    Hey folks- if you haven’t seen the film “Paradise Now”, see it- for what it’s worth.

    18 July 2006, 4:40 pm

46. astras:

    http://wakeupfromyourslumber.blogspot.com/2006/07/israeli-children-sign-their-missiles_18.html

    the above link is well worth looking at.

    18 July 2006, 6:01 pm

47. Stan:

    Going to rent “Paradise Now”… now.

    How do folks feel about doing a film for discussion from time to time? De and I had a long chat on “Man on Fire,” and there was a lot to talk about.

    18 July 2006, 6:21 pm

48. Fred:

    Someone please write a comment to this fool’s blog:

    http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/

    Rumble

    July 17, 2006
    With the suddenly ramped up struggle between Israel and Jihadist Islam, world geopolitical opinion has entered a dark realm of pretend. Pretend that Hezbollah is defending anything. Pretend that Israel has any choice now except to disarm Hezbollah by force, and to compel Lebanon to control what goes on within its sovereign territory. Pretend that this fight can be neatly contained.

    Nobody know where this fight is going, but Israel has set clear limits on the homicidal behavior of her neighbors. The terms are unambiguous: Hezbollah can no longer deploy an arsenal of dangerous toys along Lebanon’s southern border; and Lebanon will either enforce better behavior down there or will be sequentially punished for failing to. If anybody else around the neighborhood wants to jump into the fight, they can expect a hearty response from Israel.

    Except for the US, the rest of the world wants to pretend that Jihad is a legitimate extension of foreign policy, because the oil-producing region of the world is now under the sway of Jihad, and the West especially is under the sway of oil addiction. Germany, Italy, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain — none of these players want to disrupt their supplies of oil coming up through Suez. France goes further in deploring Israel’s self-defense, to get brownie points from its own large and restive Islamic minority. Russia has enough oil and gas for the moment to enjoy playing the West off against Jihadist Islam, which has the beneficial side-effect of taking the focus of Jihad’s wrath off Russia’s southern borders.

    The US wants to pretend that perhaps Israel alone can take this opportunity to deal with an increasingly adventurous and crazy Iran, and Iran may provide just that opportunity if it tries to ride to Hezbollah’s rescue.

    Jihad is not a program that a civilized world can tolerate indefinitely because it is essentially a form of genocidal hubris. My own guess is that it has risen as a consequence of runaway population growth in a part of the world that has grossly exceeded its carrying capacity by artificial means, namely oil wealth. It is a geopolitical psychotic reaction to an ecological crisis. But that is just an explanation, not an excuse.

    The great fear in the background of the current struggle is that it will permanently disable the oil markets that the advanced nations depend on — that we will reach a point in a few days or a few weeks where a lot of things will be smashed up in that part of the world and life will not be so comfortable again. That is a valid fear, but it is not an excuse to let Jihad run roughshod through the Middle East. The truth is, somebody has to kick Jihad’s crazy ass, and that unpleasant task is being left to Israel. What we seem to forget is that it is in the exact nature of heroism to act where others are too frightened and timid.

    18 July 2006, 7:25 pm

49. frank:

    Stan and All-
    The film discussion topic is a good idea- film is such a mainstream communication device these days, and how good it is to see films such as “Paradise” being made available-there is a Syrian filmmaker,(can’t recall his name now) who has been working on his own film about life in Damascus and it’s environs-sounds like another great chance to get another perspective of that world that some of us fortunate Americans haven’t seen, and thus, base our opinions on the mainstream; I’ve heard it said that there are three sides to the truth: your take,my take, and the truth…
    “Paradise Now” left me stunned, to say the least.

    18 July 2006, 7:32 pm

50. John Brown:

    Hey Stan,

    First post, but I read you regularly.

    I’ve been covering Hizbullah for a while on my blog and I wanted to ask you, as a military man, what you think Apartheid Israel’s endgame is here? Do you think they can afford politically (or militarily) to put boots on the ground in Southern Lebanon? It seems to me that Hizbullah has proven themsleves quite capable of defeating any invasion, while the Zionists appear to have no recourse other than collective punishment.

    If so, what effect will that have on their Gaza bloodletting?

    As I see it, unless Apartheid Israel agrees to a prisoner release, it’s hard to imagine a scenario that doesn’t lead to a war with Iran. Militarily - it seems to me - Apartheid Israel has no answer in Lebanon-proper to Hizbullah Resistance. Ma’an reports: “The Lebanese resistance is preparing a retaliation parallel to Israel’s military actions. Hassan Nasrallah will address the people of Tel Aviv and warn them to evacuate the city within one hour. As soon as the delay ends, hundreds of heavy missiles will start landing in the city which has been divided into squares in order to let damage reach every inch of the city. An estimated 500 missiles are expected to land in Tel Aviv in a short period of time.”

    Solidarity,

    18 July 2006, 7:36 pm

51. Stan:

    Endgame is a chess term. It’s a final gambit that settles everything once and for all. Geopolitics is not chess. Iran hasn’t the slightest intention of attacking Israel. imo.

    There will be no endgame for anyone until the hegemon collapses, and that is itself a process. Neither life nor history conform to cinematic conventions. And military success is not determined by tactical outcomes. It is determined by political outcomes.

    To understnad the real end-process, look not to Israel, but to New Orleans.

    18 July 2006, 9:29 pm

52. emma:

    Neil- What I was trying to highlight was the obvious contradiction in the fact that Israel and the US are so blantantly hypocritical in their statements on Iran.

    I thought there woud be some response to this from the readers. We are all capable of logic. Ask yourselves how come Israel and the US are telling us that Iran/Hezbollah are the enemy in Lebanon while at the same time the US has created a Uranian government in Iraq? Isn’t there a huge big contradiction here? Next step is to ask why the contradiction?.

    Did not the US government tell the world that they were
    going to bring freedom to the Iraqi people - instead the US are using Negroponte to oversee the death squads in Iraq as he did in South America, While this is happening we are told it is simply Sunni fighting Shia.

    First of all people need to understand, that all Shia or all Sunni or Kurdish do not share the same political
    views. Do all people of different races and religions have the same political views in western societies. Why assume Middle Eastern people do? Because the media tel you this?.

    In Hussein’s government 70% were Shia. Many Iraqis who are Arab do not share the views of the Iranians (persian) fanatical version of their religion.

    Those opposed to the US’s invasion of Iraq protest loudly that they were lied to about “weapons of mass destruction” , but when are you all going to protest loudly about the Christian fundamentalist US government telling you the biggest lie of all. They told the world community that the Islamic Fundamentalist were their enemy but instead the US government has made them their allies, and have set them up as the new puppet government of Iraq. This is a weapon and a half to use against Bush but there is silence from the peacegroups and from most of the progressives - who are more caught up in the fervor of the US going to bomb Iran. Which they will not do.

    I strongly oppose the US/ Iranian death squads in Iraq and I strongly oppose the mass murder by Israel in Palestine & Lebanon. As to Hezbollar, what I am saying is that they are not the reason for Israel’s
    present terrorism we see being carried out in the Gaza and Lebanon.

    In the washup, it is all about Israel trying to expand its illegal territory. I re-iterate Israel armed and supported Iran against Iraq. They supported the US invasion of Iraq and the Iranian Puppet Government of Iraq. How can they support Iran in one part of the world and not the other?.

    Obviously things have not panned out in Iraq as they were banking on. And yes, they have been using Iran for their own purposes. Now they have decided on a different strategy - so Iran is now the enemy. and the
    demonisation and lies start flowing.

    We should all bear in mind that if Israel agreed to swap the civilian Palestinian men, women and children prisoners in Israeli jails whose names are not Hezbollah - for the 3 Israeli soldiers then there would be a cease fire. Fair enough swap surely. As one Israeli soldier’s life is worth a few hundred Palestinian peoples lives according to Israel This is what Hezbollah has put to Israel. What is wrong with this?
    There is a time for discussing the in and outs of someone elses ideology - but what we see Israel doing in the Gaza and Lebanon at this present time needs no anaylsis - there is no one else to blame - Israel holy and boly is responsible for the destruction of a country and the mass murder of its people. And at this present time this is what we should respond to by political action.

    “The mass media has become a latter-day Leni-Riefenstahl editing reality into a presentable
    montage that makes the actions of mass murder not only acceptable, but presentable to the general public.”

    William Bowles - Uruknet 19/7/2006

    Our new headlines tonight “Hundres of Australians stranded.

    Seems as if a Turkish ship our government said they had hired,has been double booked - therefore no ship out today. This is after 6 days.

    Kerry O’Brian interviewer ABC Channel 2. Asked our foreign minister, Alexander Downer, seeing that Australia had good relationships with Israel couldn’t our government get some co-operation from them?

    Downer’s response was that this conflict was a matter of life and death for the Israelis. And he advised that to keep safe all Australian-Lebanese should keep away from Hezbollah.

    He then went on to tell us that the United States of
    America is giving Israel one more week to pursue Hezbollah. What he means of course is one more week for Israel to continue their murder and destruction.

    And few days ago our government announced that we have a war ship in the Gulf, but would not be using it for evacuation. No, it is more important to be keeping the Arabs in hell in Iraq - and the Australian Arabs in hell in Lebanon. Can kill two birds with the one stone this way.
    The aforementioned is but a small example of how White Supremacists function.

    Postscript: the date of Haartz article should have read 30th June not 3rd. apologies.

    Certainly appreciate your site at the moment Stan it helps ease the frustration and heartache felt for our brothers and sisters in Lebanon and the Gaza.

    Hope I have made things clearer for you Neil.

    19 July 2006, 7:10 am

53. Stan:

    from an email forward:::::

    Steve sent this blurb and link to a MERIP article, and MERIP is usually a source of thoughtful and grounded analysis; and also a note from some contact’s left friends in Beirut.

    Juliet
    ************

    For many in Israel, and apparently also in the Bush administration, the
    escalating wars in Lebanon and Gaza are conjoined in a single war against a
    unified “axis of terror” linking Hizballah and Hamas to Damascus and distant
    Tehran. By lumping together the different struggles of Hizballah and Hamas,
    Israel casts resolvable political crises as unfathomable, irrational hatred,
    in an attempt to justify its massive bombing campaigns.

    As Robert Blecher argues, the dual conflicts are indeed linked by more than
    captive Israeli soldiers — not by radical Islam, but by Israel’s plan to
    “disengage” unilaterally from much of the West Bank to manage its conflict
    with the Palestinians. With its two-front war, the Israeli government has
    set out to prove to the Israeli public that disengagement is not a mistake.
    Blecher’s article, “Converging Upon War,” is now posted at Middle East
    Report Online:
    http://www.merip.org/mero071806.htm

    .
    Middle East Report Online is a free service of the Middle East Research
    and Information Project (MERIP).
    *****************************************************************************.

    With the Arab comprador regimes exposed for what they are-now more than ever, I wonder what the long term implications of this war are. A state against non state actors in a war of attrition directed toward civilian populations,and critical infrastructure. If the US was hated before, rage must be the popular sentiment today.

    I expect Hizbollah to be defeated along with Hamas, but I hope the Israelis feel the pain as well. Nobody will intercede, no state actors care, the US will get its way or so it seems.

    Who knows?

    Steve

    Hi, all,

    Some quick comments and analyses from Leftist friends in Beirut:

    Hassan Nasrallah is said to be very angry and disappointed with key Arab states, particularly Syria, for not backing the Hizbullah’s self-declared “adventure.”

    So, Hizb is feeling this is either their moment of victory or their swan song, either way, they are going to pull out all the stops.

    If there is no political pay off for this for the Palestinians and the Lebanese, then it’s likely that Hizbullah will be smashed and discredited on the Lebanese scene.

    The other scenario is that anger on the Arab street will make this a defining moment in the overall paradigm of the conflicts(s).

    Laurie

    19 July 2006, 9:53 am

54. Stan:

    As Dan so nicely summarized it in his comment on the other post, and extrapolating a bit further within the atmospheric inter-evolution of science and politics, there is an Energy War afoot. The ruling class here was presented by both the intransigent and tendential laws of nature with an option to change or attack. They have elected to follow the course that all ruling classes have followed in the past when confronted with the limits of their systems… violent readjustment.

    The science that tells us there is an energetic limit to growth is only malthusian if we fail to consider at the same time the “social relations” of energy, as they are embedded in a capitalist world system (which was built atop a patriarchal social foundation), and write the whole thing off as “human nature,” some kind of genetic defect. We needen’t speculate about what those social relations look like. We are looking directly at them… in Beirut, in Damascus, in Tehran, in Tel Aviv, in Baghjdad, in New Orleans, and in La Paz… etc.

    We see these social relations when we watch people scowl at the gas station as their fuel bills rise, and we see these social relations in the systematic and cynical abandonment of whole continents (like Africa) to suffer a prolonged and agonizing mass dieoff. We are in the age of exterminism, where there is a “shortage” of “resources” created by the simultaneous imperatives of capitalism to “grow” economically (create vast and expanding energy sinks) and expand population (Marx called this the capitalist law of population, and he gave it special emphasis).

    The form taken by science was masculine, and it was predicated upon not merely Decartes subject-object dichotomy, but on that dichotomy specifically characterized as conquest and colonization. The conquest and colonization of nature, the conquest and colonization of subordinate peoples, and the conquest and colonization of women… the common denominator being the Subject, who was a privileged (read: superior) male.

    But the nugget of universalizable and liberatory value that lay within the frightening efficacy of ths method was self-understanding — a standpoint that reintegrates the alienated subject back into nature, and replaces control with cooperation. If there is one aspect of science, seen this way, that we might identify as potentially OUR science (and Marx went part way there, but it took national liberation, feminism and ecology to get us further down the path), it is the baseline understanding that everything we observe — like this computer monitor’s screen — is an external, superficial, and often highly symbolic representation of realities that are far more complex than they first appear.

    Events do not appear before us with signboards around their necks explaining the forces of which they are the result.

    Science can then be seen as the process of dicovering these complexities… the reason Marx and Engels called their method “scientific socialism,” which they counterposed to “utopian socialism.” They insisted that bourgeois economics and bourgeois science were designed to CONCEAL as much as they discovered… but in the process, they didn’t live long enough to develop this train of thought into the deeper critique of dualism as a central aspect of male power and epistemology… which connects class, gender, and ecolgy at a deeper level, a deeper historical materialism, so to speak.

    What this means for us… now… is that the signposts are there in our everyday lives and in the news. But we need the interpretive instruments (epistemology) to make sense of them. Given the historical and cultural inter-layering of patriarchy, geography, capitalism, thermodynamics, et alia, neither deduction nor induction are adequate to the task, nor even a “combination” of both. Revolution doesn’t require primarily social engineers; it requires physicians and artists and soldiers. Why? What does this mean?

    These vocations require dynamic reflection of dynamic circumstances. Their “reasonong process” is abductive. “Abduction allows us to reason from the experience at hand, to so as to understand that experience not as a unique phenomenon, but as a meaningful case of some hypothetical rule or principle.” (Pierce) One reason for this blog (whether it works or not remains to be seen, but there are instances of it here) is to create a dynamic reflective space for this kind of interpretation in the service of a revolutionary project — a place where facts are conjoined with analysis, but also with “serendipity and creativity”, and where we might generate an autopoietic process that draws on “intellectuals” both formal and feral, as well as aspirants to either, who can harvest the intentional breakdown of an intellectual division of labor. Lydia, who works inside the academy and has a blistering critique of it, has said more than once that this medium (whatever it is), at this point in time, is already contributing to the irrelevance of the most pernicious territories staked out by the academy on behalf of the ruling class/gender; and we should take that very seriously.

    How many laws of probabilty have been broken by us here? Dan and I met when he was a grad student and I was still on active duty in the Army. I could list out the unlikelihoods from there for all of you.

    The question becomes then, at least from this cubicle right now, what can this autopoiesis do to move us through (and it can only be expressed linearly in this textual form) observation, orientation, decision, and action. The purpose of ruling class intellectuals within the division of labor is to produce knowledge. Listed as they are, there appears to be a kind of parity in the OODA components, but orientation is the place where that abductive logic has to make the most signficant contribution… the development of efficacious intuition… that tells us how to intervene in the production of knowledge, as these knowledges come into crisis, and supplant them with a different episteme.

    How do we explain Palestine? How many layers of obfuscation are in place: factual, interpretive, affective, symbolic? What is necessary to break through those layers? A logical argument? And what can we do to invite and welcome more intellectuals, formal and feral, into this space (not here specifically) to engage in this praxis?

    Lots of coffee. (-:

    19 July 2006, 10:33 am

55. Neilcaff:

    “Last week, the Knesset passed a law - believed to be aimed at Arab parliamentarians - allowing the expulsion of any “disloyal” member who “supports terror organisations”.
    And on Wednesday, the Israeli interior minister, Roni Bar-on, described Jamal Zahalkha, an Arab-Israeli parliamentarian, as “a snake born to a snake” after he criticised the government’s actions in Lebanon.

    “I’d be happy if you would join some of your friends in Lebanon to enjoy what they are enjoying now,” he said in comments reported by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.”

    http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/B121A6B2-3EFF-40F9-B587-F5F39C4DF4B6.htm

    20 July 2006, 4:29 am

56. Kim Alphandary:

    well … i made a visit to your site in the hopes that i might find some nifty analysis of the situation in the middle east. instead, i see that you’ve been occupied with the task of explaining zionism and judaism…

    to me, the whole mess is TERRIFYING!!!

    according to stratfor.com lebanon will be invaded this weekend; US troops are already on lebanese soil for “rescue operations”; isreal.jpost.com says that Lebanese Minister of Defense warned Israel Thursday that if IDF ground forces are sent into southern Lebanon, Lebanese troops will fight along with the Hizbullah against Israel; fox and cnn are proclaiming the beginning of WWIII …

    HELP ???

    thanx, kim

    20 July 2006, 6:33 pm

57. Stan:

    Hi Kim,

    There are quite a few pieces archived here, in the category Imperialism (just keep hitting the little red > button at the bottom).

    Other pieces on the region can be found throughout the internet, by looking up Dahr Jamail, Pepe Escobar, Rania Masri, and others. F. William Engdahl is often interesting. Tarik Ali, too.

    This is not Armageddon, but it is a very serious situation, especially for Lebanon… which is giving many a sinking sense of deja vu (like me) who lived through the 80s. A close friend of mine was killed when the US Embassy was bombed; in response to the bombing of the Marine barracks, we invaded Grenada (true story); and I sat untold hours at Larnica in an RAF hangar waiting for one mad adventure-plan after another related to the alphabet soup of militas that were fighting there. Rats used to eat the human corpses left laying on the Green Line, because it was too dangerous to pick them up.

    20 July 2006, 7:44 pm

58. Tom Murphy:

    Lebanon Israel Facts the Media Isn’t Telling You

    See the facts about Lebanon, Israel, Gaza Hezbollah and the Palestinians

    ebanon Israel Facts the Media Isn’t Telling You

    Spread the word about this video:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKq38COoTG8 about Lebanon, Israel, Gaza Hezbollah and the Palestinians

    Noam Chomsky reveals facts like the abduction of the two Gaza civilians June 24, BEFORE the Israeli soldiers were captured. Learn the background that the mainstream media doesn’t report.

    Chomsky talks about the EVENTS that incited a reaction: “In my view, the inciting event in the present case, events, are those that I mentioned — the constant intense repression; plenty of abductions; plenty of atrocities in Gaza; the steady takeover of the West Bank, which, in effect, if it continues, is just the murder of a nation, the end of Palestine; the abduction on June 24 of the two Gaza civilians; and then the reaction to the abduction of Corporal Shalit.”

    About the civilian brothers, Chomsky wrote, “My sources were Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz, July 2, 2005; Jonathan Cook, July 30, who reviewed British press notices of the kidnapping, marginal and understated, in the media critique journal Medialens. David Peterson has since done a media search. He found brief mention in the Baltimore Sun and LA Times, dismissing it as quite normal (Hamas militant, suspected Hamas militant, therefore OK — soldier in an army attacking Gaza, definitely not OK, in fact a major crime). He also found serious coverage, even identifying the victims (not worth naming in the US and UK), in the Turkish Daily News, June 25, an immediate report.”

    On 7/2/06 Gideon Levy of Haaretz reported, “It’s no accident that nobody mentions the day before the attack on the Kerem Shalom fort, when the IDF kidnapped TWO CIVILIANS, a doctor and his brother, from their home in Gaza.” http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=7…33427
    http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/070306X.shtml

    Jonathan Cook writes, “Few readers of a British newspaper would have noticed the story. In the Observer of 25 June, it merited a mere paragraph hidden in the “World in brief” section, revealing that the previous day a team of Israeli commandos had entered the Gaza Strip to “detain” two Palestinians Israel claims are members of Hamas. The significance of the mission was alluded to in a final phrase describing this as “the first arrest raid in the territory since Israel pulled out of the area a year ago”. More precisely, it was the first time the Israeli army had re-entered the Gaza Strip, directly violating Palestinian control of the territory, since it supposedly left in August last year.”
    http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060630_kidnapped_by_…l.php

    The media’s non-reporting is all the more amazing since, as mentioned, this incursion was the first into Rafah since the implementation of the Israeli Disengagement Plan in September 2005! http://pchrgaza.org/files/W_report/English/2006/29-06-2…6.htm
    http://tinyurl.com/s6c7g

    20 July 2006, 10:05 pm

59. Die for the Elite:

    Godwin’s Law Repealed

    Yes, we’ve all heard of Godwin’s Law, but considering the extreme *relevance* of the descriptor “Nazi” these days in relation to historical events, Godwin’s (first) Law is clearly defunct. Thus, Godwin’s Second Law was born:

    “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of being wrongfully smeared as an anti-semite approaches one.”

    Tradition has it that once such a smear is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the anti-semitism has automatically “lost” whatever debate was in progress. Godwin’s Second Law does not dispute whether, in a particular instance, the anti-semite smear might be apt.

    20 July 2006, 10:24 pm

60. Social Democracy Now:

    I think the problem is about a hell of a lot more than Zionism - it’s about Jewish power. The Zionist movement and the Zionist agenda for Israel are only a part of the problem, the veritable tip of the iceberg. Even non-Zionist Jews are complicit in the process by which democracy, the rule of the law and free speech have been subverted in the interests of creating a double standard - a standard in which Jews are extremely privileged and insulated from all criticism. Even if Israel vanished tomorrow, we would still live in a world in which it was forbidden to criticize Jewish control of our economy, our media and our politicians. Those who think the problem stops with Zionism are shockingly naive.

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: And this will shockingly be your last post here. Go to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion site. The rules are clear. There will be none of this. -Stan Goff

    20 July 2006, 10:29 pm

61. Rachel's friend:

    Stan, an outstanding post. please post the meds you’re on. Herr Hitler is said to have engaged in systemtic extermination. Such programs have been carried out in many places as we all know. Making reference to the Nazis is completely justified as the Israelis of all people should not engage in such behavior.

    It is well past time for US citizens in particular to inform themselves and get more involved. I can’t overstate the importance of the following links:

    Jewish investigator David Cole’s interview at Auschwitz
    http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradfordSmith_Cole.html

    USS Liberty http://www.ussliberty.org. Watch the BBC documentary on the 1967 attack on the Liberty by Israel.

    Former Zionist Benjamin Freedman’s speech
    http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradfordSmith_Freedman.html

    I’ve never seen a President – I don’t care who he is – stand up to them [the Israelis]. It just boggles the mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn’t writing anything down. If the American people understood what a grip those people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens don’t have any idea what goes on - Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

    “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they
    defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come
    here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.”
    – David Ben Gurion, quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan’s “Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.

    20 July 2006, 10:57 pm

62. Stan:

    It is one of the most troubling complexities on the issue of Palestine that Zionism DOES attract the wrath of anti-semites as well as anti-imperialists… and that anti-semitism is inflamed by the actions of the State of Israel. This contradiction always seems to accrue to the interest of Israel and its apologists. Meanwhile, Israel’s aggression continues in Gaza and Lebanon, and any attempt to fight back on the part of Palestinians or their allies is branded “terror.”

    The two-state solution is a dangerous and persistent delusion that only prolongs these agonies.

    20 July 2006, 11:15 pm

63. Die for the Elite:

    I take it “Social Democracy Now” doesn’t know many Jewish people. Many Jewish people are not blind apologists for Israel. It’s not just the people of Israel who will lose: I fear for my Jewish friends and family, and all the Jews outside of Israel, who vociferously oppose Israel’s unaccountability, yet will likely suffer the blame as those who cannot distinguish between Judaism and blind support for Israel suffer the blowback. They are the victims of 60 years of zionist propaganda equating Israel with Judaism.

    Thank you, Stan, for sharing your writings and sensibility.

    20 July 2006, 11:40 pm

64. gamal:

    Hi all,

    I think its quite important to avoid formulations such as “shi’ism is a iranian (persian) fanatical version of islam, with most arabs are out of sympathy”. firstly because to assert that what distinguishes sects in islam is their relative “fanatacism”, seems to me to have no explanatory value, instead it appears to reify the situation in iran, and other muslim countries, as an expression of some underlying quality of iranian shia or which ever sect, namely their fanaticism.

    but if we subject the history of iran to cogent materialist analysis, the emrgence of vilayat-eh -faqih etc, can be seen not as emerging from an dedication to islam but rather it emerged from the desire of iranians, in common with the rest of humanity, to live secure prosperous lives.

    There is a piece by piere tristram from the daytone or something on common dreams that perfectly exemplifies this strange decontextualised essentiliast notion of the peoples of the mid east, sorry my wife is insisting i take her out, will try to log in later and make a sensible comment.

    yours
    gamal

    21 July 2006, 6:21 am

65. Henry Cartington III:

    Israel’s aggressive war is a sideshow. As Israel bombs her neighbors, the US erodes our rights at home by stealing private lands, caging peaceful demonstrators, banning books like “America Deceived” by E.A. Blayre III from Amazon and Wikipedia. Soon, the US will attack Iran sending the Middle East into total chaos. Add in another false-flag attack on the US (like 9/11) and the public will beg for the ’safety’ of One World Gov’t.
    Last link (before Google Books caves to gov’t pressure and drops the title):
    http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?&isbn=0-595-38523-0

    21 July 2006, 9:04 am

66. Stan:

    Henry, I cut a lot of slack here, but I’m telling you now that your One World Government comment is sending up a flag. I leave people alone who believe the world system is a vast conspiracy, even though I consider that point of view wrong.

    But there are strong associations between the OWG and its half-sibling, ZOG. Cross the line, and you will post elsewhere. Black helicopters and Jewish Bankers will earn the exit.

    21 July 2006, 11:22 am

67. reprehensor:

    Cross-blogged you over here, bro;
    http://www.gnn.tv/B16878

    And added some anti-Zionist background material as well, Lilienthal, Finkelstein, Avnery and Nafeez Ahmed. (Though calling Ahmed “anti-Zionist” isn’t exactly true, he is very acute and critical.)

    Onward.

    21 July 2006, 4:16 pm

68. James M:

    Well, I didn’t want to go here, because I hate to see these discussions devolve into self-defense against baseless charges of anti-Semitism, as well as defense against actual anti-Semitic infiltrators with whom we don’t want to be associated … a la “Social Democracy Now.”

    But we’ve already gone there, Stan, so I thought while we’re on the topic, I’d tip you off to something:

    http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=236

    You link to this person’s blog, and awhile back I came upon the post, which rang huge alarm bells when I saw the words “Auschwitz and its discredited gas chambers.”

    I’m assuming, since you don’t buy the idea of ZOG or black helicopters, you’re not a fan of holocaust revisionism either.

    I don’t expect you to police every site you link to … I just thought you might like to know what this person’s saying, so you can choose whether you want your blog associated with it.

    21 July 2006, 8:16 pm

69. Dan:

    Aren’t there two separate issues here? One, the motivation of the Israeli state (which may be partially insane, in view of their history, as suggested above). But two, the motivation of the US/UK alliance, which can not claim to be the same. It’s one thing for US politicians to make an emotional appeal in the media. But that doesn’t direct foreign policy. IMHO, Israel serves to deflect the attention of the Arab world away from the US. This allows the US/UK allies to pursue their Middle East Strategy without it being constantly in the spotlight. It’s an energy war hiding behind a religious war smokescreen. From the perspective of the energy war strategists, I don’t see how Israel’s survival matters.

    21 July 2006, 9:16 pm

70. peggy:

    I wrote this several days ago and then could not post it because my internet card had run out (I’m away from home). After I came back the next day with a new internet card, the number of posts on this topic had doubled in length, and it seemed my thoughts of a few days back were not relevant. But now I think maybe they still are relevant, even if they are not The Right Answer. So anyway, here’s what I wrote:

    To be honest, I am not convinced that white supremacism is (consciously) on the top of any national leader’s agenda right now. I see the current world war (no point in numbering these diffuse conflicts any more) as most of all a contest between the big powers with the big bombs and the big airplanes to drop them, and the ground guerrillas, who know their own territory, are generally better tacticians and strategists than their opponents with the big bombs, and are manifestly not afraid to die. Such contests are happening in many places throughout the world. The contests around Israel and Palestine are just among the most visible, and provoke the most emotion among ordinary Americans because of the historical connections of the Israel-Palestine conflict with WWII (America’s “Good War”)

    In general, I am rooting for the ground guerrillas. Many of them are labeled by the big bombers as terrorists, and maybe this is what “the war against terrorism” is really all about. It gets most scary to the big bombers when the ground guerrillas get their hands on airplanes and use them to strong effect, as we have seen, even if they do it only once, and kill only about three thousand random Americans. (The war against Iraq has already killed two thousand Americans, to say nothing of many thousands of Iraqis, but, as Stan and others have pointed out, the outcry against this murder of our own and other people by our own leaders is muted, to say the least). I think the fear is that, with airplanes, the ground guerrillas will become like “us” (i.e, those who live happily with capitalism, and profit from it, or even those who think they do) and then we will really be in for it.

    The other thing about the ground guerillas that scares the daylights out of the big bombers is “suicide bombers”. Why? This particular inordinate fear is irrational, and interesting for that reason. The usual justification for the fear is that suicide bombers (often but not always) kill random civilians. It’s not like our airplane bombers don’t do the same thing, only much worse. Buy I think what really worries the big bombers about suicide bombers is that it demonstrates the commitment to what they say they are fighting for. This commitment is what makes them really different from “us”. “We” say we are fighting for freedom and democracy, but we are manifestly not committed to those goals. They say they are fighting for their homes and their people. And they mean it.

    Despite Neilcaff’s quite reasonable opinion on the ineffectiveness of (armed) resistance movements, I think some of them are pretty effective. If I had any money, I would put it on the ground guerrillas. This is largely because wherever they are, I want them to win. They are the revolution that leftists have been calling for, even if they are not leftists themselves. They are breaking the rules of the current world order, making it so those rules do not work. That has to be done, does it not? It can’t be done gently and peacefully. I wish it could be, but I don’t see how. Much that is good will be destroyed. There will be big chaos, and nobody can know what kind of order will eventually arise from that chaos.

    The other point I wish to bring up is that I think the “shocking” thing about Stan’s original post up top here is the revelation that some Zionist leaders supported the Nazi effort to exterminate European Jewry. This revelation would have been shocking, indeed unthinkable, to our Julian, because to many Jews, the memory of the Holocaust is sacred, in no trivial way. If the Holocaust involved Jews betraying Jews, the sacrality of that memory becomes profoundly defiled.

    Also, the Holocaust is part of the memory of WWII, which is sacred to most Americans (because, see above). Most Americans still believe, because they were taught, that their fathers and grandfathers who fought in WWII were fighting to save the world, and in particular the helpless Jews, from a terrible monster: the Ultimate Evil (Mr Hitler). That is what our leaders have all told us. And Americans think that their leaders are by and large good and they think that Hitler was the ultimate evil, which is why his name is evoked all the time. Americans have a hard time believing that Hitler was not really the ultimate evil. He was horrible, but definitely not the Ultimate. Many people benefited under his rule – provided they had the right religion, the right color, and the right ancestry. Likewise, Americans have a hard time believing that even one of their leaders has seriously and deliberately betrayed them.

    The thing is, political and religious leaders betray their own people ALL THE TIME. It’s like, as rape is intrinsic to war, so betrayal is intrinsic to political and religious leadership. Americans are too insulated to know this. But Julian is intelligent and well-educated, and I think he probably does know.

    The Zionists in question apparently had their one fixed goal, which was the establishment of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people. If millions of innocent Jews had to die so that this goal could be attained, so be it, must have been what they were thinking. Perhaps they justified their thoughts and actions to themselves by the belief that they were struggling to establish a greater good. In truth, their betrayal was evil and monstrous, just like rape. But, like rape, such betrayal is totally commonplace. Little leaders of little village tribes do it, American presidents do it, leaders of my favorite insurgents do it, and apparently Zionist leaders did it, too. Surprise.

    What I say here may be seen as an anti-Semitic statement, but I think that the revelation about Zionist leaders only reveals that Jews are just like everyone else. I think many Jews know this fact and try to promote it in the world, among Jews and non-Jews alike. It is a sad, but good thing to know. Nothing is sacred.

    22 July 2006, 2:56 am

71. Robin Hering:

    Dan: “From the perspective of the energy war strategists, I don’t see how Israel’s survival matters.”

    What a shame the citizens of Israel don’t realize how expendable they are, as a subsidiary of UK/USA, Inc. Their fate could easily be that of all other client states, sacrificed eventually. The Strausscon mode seems to be a combination of disaster capitalism, where money is no option, just synthetic lettuce sprinkled on the earthworm bins to keep the worms tilling for their ends, leveraging some fearful fundamentalist groups for constabulary purposes simply by funding them (i.e., you don’t have to direct them, just let human nature take its course), and chaos, stirring up the pot here and there so various communities will do their dirty work for them, killing and exterminating each other.

    I guess I repeat you - with Iraq established, they won’t necessarily need Israel any more. Israeli soldiers are pawns just like ours.

    Peggy: “who know their own territory, are generally better tacticians and strategists than their opponents with the big bombs, and are manifestly not afraid to die.”

    Agreed in the cases of some groups and individuals. But in some isolated cases, I think it’s GHW Bush, et. al., black ops. Like SAS in Basra. Some years back I had the chilling thought that some suicide bombers might be youth drugged in the prisons. That is so horrible and perverse I scared myself thinking it, but the way things are, I see, it’s possible.

    22 July 2006, 11:57 am

72. Dee:

    So, if the whole world now lined up against Israel, finally succeeds in exterminating Zionism, will there be any Jews remaing?

    What is amazing to me is the size, in area, people, money, military equipment from Russia, China, support from all of the Islamic countries, Russia, and China, and the world still has Israel, the Jews, the Zionists, beatin off everything the Godless people can throw at them. Sounds like the story of Guideon, and David and Golitha.
    It sure makes me think that the God of Israel is to be taken into consideration. I am not stupid enough to think that the Moon God of the Muslims, nor the no God of Evolutionists should even count. Something is wrong with this entire picture.
    Something tells me the rest of you idiots had better take a closer look at events and the outcome.

    MODERATOR’S NOTE: Enough said. Bye.

    22 July 2006, 5:24 pm

73. tochigi:

    A worthwhile roundup from the Sunday Times (conservative end of the UK spectrum) Hell in the Holy Lands
    BTW, Condi’s “birth pangs” comment has only been reported in the UK press in this article so far…

    23 July 2006, 12:33 am

74. dave brown:

    Stan a good post. Sorry to be late arriving here.
    Not only are the Zionists hypocrites to claim they alone were the victims of the holocaust, when they collaborated with it, I would argue that the creation of Israel constituted a fascist state.

    If we define fascism as the mobilisation by a national capitalist class of the petty bourgeoisie and layers of the working class, facing a extreme political/economic crisis, on the basis of a racist/nationalist ideology to eliminate the threat of working class revolution, then the physical expulsion and confinement of the Palestinians to labour camps and ghettos where they need papers to pass from one to the other is near enough to fascism for me.

    23 July 2006, 8:50 am

75. neilcaff:

    emma: thanks for your comments, haven’t had a chance to respond but I think we’re in general agreement over whats happening in Lebanon anyway.

    peggy: I’m not opposed to armed struggle per se. Sometimes a people have no choice but to fight against imperialism. Stan has outlined at length the limited options that are available to a weaker gureilla force and the necessity of doing things that to outsiders seem brutal and immoral. I accept all that. I think though that for a group that is fighting an imperialist army they must ask the questions, ‘who is fighting in the imperialist army?, why are they doing it?, and most importantly, can my actions divide my enemy?”
    I’ll repeat this again and again, the Zionists are in deep trouble in Israel. The standing of the generals has never been lower. All the establishment politicians are mired in corruption scandels. The working class is groaning under the weight of a decade long policies of disasterous neo-liberalism. This was the political situation in Israel prior to the bombings and may well have influenced the Israeli ruling class to go to war.
    From speaking to my comrades in israel I can tell you that there was deep unease among Israelis about the bombing. This did not manifest itself in much open opposition, true. However when those eight people were killed in Haifa public support immediately swung behind Israeli millitarism. We on the left take it as read that Israeli bombings only serve to strengthen Hezbollah (which of course they have) but the converse of this is that Hezbollah rocket attacks on civilians serve to strengthen Israeli (and ultimately US) imperialism.
    If, as now seems likely, a ground invasion does occur then high Israeli casualties look certain. In these circumstances an explosion of discontent in Israel cannot be ruled out.
    Notwithstanding Stan and De’s legitimate criticism of Israeli society, don’t rule out the Israeli workers just yet. Under conditions of war the political situation can and will change rapidly.
    Finally if I was speaking to a hypothetical Hezbollah member I would say, I support your right to defend yourself and your people. Because I want you to win I have to ask you, is it the most effective use of your millitary resources tactics that make your enemy stronger?

    24 July 2006, 6:38 am

76. neilcaff:

    Dave: I think you missed out the most important element in that equation. Those forces are mobilised in order to physicaly destroy workers organistations. This has not happened in Israel proper, where unions, political parties peace groups etc do continue to operate relatively freely.
    Whats happening in the occupied territories is similar to most racist occupations conducted by Britain, France and America down through the years, who were still able to maintain bourgeois democracy domesticly.
    Certainly Israel has fascist elements in its state apperatus and ideology, but to call it an out an out fascist state is misleading and only tends to alienate people who are unconvinced about the nature of the Israeli state.

    24 July 2006, 7:13 am

77. Charles Brown:

    Thousands protest Israeli attacks on Lebanon, Palestine

    “One person’s terrorist is another one’s freedom fighter,”

    23.JUL.06

    By Diane Bukowski
    The Michigan Citizen

    DETROIT — As Israeli ground forces invaded Lebanon and the Gaza strip, up to 10,000 Arab-Americans marched through Dearborn, center of the largest Arab community in the western hemisphere, on July 18, to protest the previous days’ bombings of Lebanon and Palestine.

    Many carried signs with photos of mutilated and scarred Lebanese children, asking the question “Are these terrorists?” They chanted “Hezbollah” and “Stop the Killings, Stop the War.” At least 230 Lebanese, most of them civilians, and 25 Israelis have died so far.

    “One person’s terrorist is another one’s freedom fighter,” said Melanie Czekaj. “Hezbollah is our freedom fighter.” She waited in vain for the march to arrive at Dearborn’s city hall, but Dearborn police had blocked the march route and diverted it to Hemlock Park.

    “They do this all the time,” she said. “They isolate us in our neighborhood and don’t want our voices to be heard where there are more Americans.”

    She said family members who live in the south of Lebanon have told her that Israeli forces are using chemical warfare against the population there. Although these claims have not been substantiated, international human rights groups suspect that the Israeli army has used chemical weapons recently in the Gaza Strip.

    Many marchers blasted U.S. President George Bush, saying Israel could not carry out its attacks without U.S. support and calling on Bush to support a cease-fire.

    “It wouldn’t cost Bush anything to do a cease-fire, to spare human life, whether it’s Muslim, Christian or Jew,” said Nadia, who didn’t give a surname. “Israel has a green light from him. At least feel sorry for the children. We want nothing but our land and peace.”

    “America is supplying the weapons to kill our people,” said teen-ager Hassan Hukr.

    His young friend Mohammad Bittar, added, “Lebanon and Palestine are supposed to be free countries. That should be made clear to the members of the G-8.”

    One marcher carried a sign declaring, “Bush, Stop this Sh-t,” a reference to Bush’s sidebar conversation with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the recent G-8 summit in Russia. Not knowing a microphone was still on, he told Blair that Syria should get Hezbollah to “stop this sh-t.”

    Imad Hamad, regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said, “Words cannot describe the pain, grief and anger we are trying to express today. The Israeli invasion is aimed at the destruction of the infrastructure of Lebanon. It’s a new genocide. They claim self-defense, but that does not condone the killing of innocent children and collective punishment. The victims of the Holocaust are committing a new holocaust.”

    Many marchers said their support of Hezbollah is based on its role in ending the Israeli occupation of Lebanon six years ago. Hezbollah helped rebuild the country’s infrastructure and has continued to provide services to the Lebanese people as the country’s government revives.

    Several of the marchers said that Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, which Israel used as an excuse to launch the war, was an effort to obtain the freedom of some of the 9,000 Arab prisoners held in Israeli jails. Many feel that the prisoners are being tortured.

    Israeli government officials have threatened to attack Syria and Iran as well, claiming they support Hezbollah and Hamas, the party recently elected to power in Palestine. Bush has issued his own threats against Syria and Iran as well.

    http://michigancitizen.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=1&twindow=&mad=&sdetail=3312&wpage=1&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1070&hn=michigancitizen&he=.com

    24 July 2006, 2:22 pm

78. emma:

    Whilst the US are sending more bunker-busting bombs in post haste to Israel.- to be used while Ms. Rice does her political ‘peace’ prancing for a week giving Israel more time to increase the numbers in their mass murdering campaign against the Lebanese community.And after which Israel will agree to a prisoner swap whilst having expanded more illegal territory for itself..

    Readers might be interested to know “US Bombers to practise in NT” this week.The Age.com.au Monday 24th July,2006 informs the Australian public that the United States bombers will pound a test range in the Northern Territory this week, practising the pinpoint strikes they would use on targets such as nuclear weapons sites, missiles or terrorist bases.

    The US bombers will fly non-stop from their base on Guam and back, and be refuelled in the air by American planes operting out of the RAAF base in Darwin.

    Taking part in the demonstration of long-range air power will be B-l and B-2 stealth bomers and B52’s.

    The aforementioned shows that unlike Iraq, the US does not have to bomb Australia into submission to steal our natural resources, and take over our way of life - both socially and economically and militarily.

    Our neo-conservative leader while kissing Bush’s bottom and like the pimp he is; has already offered our country to Bush to rape as much as Bush likes

    In addition, on the Uruknet site - there are calls from doctors in Lebanon asking does anybody know what sort of bombs Israel is using because they have not seen injuries of this sort before. I thought Stan this might be in your field.

    Also I do not know if Americans are aware that your government has just pulled off a successful coup in East Timor.

    They did not like Prime Minister Dr. Alkatari refusing
    to go along with the world bank or wanting secular schools or free hot lunches for the children.

    Now we have Washington’s man installed - Mr. Jose Horta
    who wrote a huge article in our media as to why the
    US should invade Iraq.

    The breakaway rebel army leader who started off the coup just happens to have a wife that works in the US embassy in East Timor.

    The US government, as we would say in Australia, are certainly little terrors aren’t they?

    24 July 2006, 11:57 pm

79. Lenny Lyons:

    Prior to the attack on the WTC it was fairly easy to leave the imperialist causes of “Islamic” terrorism unexamined and to marginalize those informed commentators who said we had it coming. But with the US sending a rush order of additional bombs to support Israel’s illegal invasion of Lebanon and the resulting ongoing war crimes, the Bush government has made us a legitimate military target. If Iran is a target for their support of Hezbollah, as Israel and the Bush government are so eager to claim, how is our support of Israel any different? Next time we’ll be forced to confront the fact that “we asked for it.”

    25 July 2006, 3:47 am

80. peggy:

    Here is a thing from Counterpunch that I think may be relevant, just because it supports my suggestion that the ground guerrillas are better at tactics and strategy than the big bombers.

    Why Israel is Losing

    By ASHRAF ISMA’IL

    The world is witnessing what could be a critical turning point in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel is now engaged in a war that could permanently undermine the efficacy of its much-vaunted military apparatus.

    Ironically, there are several reasons for believing that Israel’s destruction of southern Lebanon and southern Beirut will weaken its bargaining position relative to its adversaries, and will strengthen its adversaries’ hands.

    First, Israel has no clearly defined tactical or strategic objective, and so the Israeli offensive fails the first test of military logic: there is no way that Israel’s actions can improve its position relative to Hamas or Hizballah, much less Syria or Iran.

    The logic of power politics also implies that a no-win situation for Israel is a definite loss, because Israel is the stronger party and thus has the most to lose. In an asymmetric war, the stronger party always has the most to lose, in terms of reputation and in terms of its ability to project its will through the instruments of force.

    The lack of any clearly defined objective is a major miscalculation by Israel and its American patron.

    Second, Israel cannot eliminate Hizballah, since Hizballah is a grassroots organization that represents a plurality of Lebanese society. Neither can Hamas be eliminated for the same reason. By targeting Hizballah however, Israel is strengthening Hizballah’s hand against its domestic rivals, such as the Maronite Christians, because any open Christian opposition makes them look like traitors and Israeli collaborators.

    Consequently, while Hizballah will obviously pay a short-term tactical cost that is very high, in the long run, this conflict demonstrates that it is Hizballah, and not the Lebanese government, that has the most power in Lebanon.

    The Shia represent an estimated 35-40 per cent of Lebanese society, while Lebanese Christians are thought to constitute no more than 25-30per cent of the entire population. Furthermore, the Shia community’s fertility rate is thought to be far higher than that of the other religious components within Lebanon.

    Thus, the current confessional division of power in Lebanon, which grants Christians a political position that goes far beyond their minority status, is ultimately unsustainable, which means that the Maronite Christians will lose even more power, and the Shia and Hizballah will inevitably gain more power.

    Third, Israel’s failure to achieve anything at all greatly enhances Syria’s influence over Lebanon and its bargaining position relative to the U.S. and Israel itself. No solution in Lebanon can exclude Syria, and so now the U.S. and Israelis need Syria’s approval, which certainly weakens both the U.S. and Israel.

    And even Israel’s accusations against Iran, although largely baseless, greatly enhance Iran’s prestige in the region, and may bring about exactly what the Israelis are trying to prevent. While the Arab states look like traitors, Iran looks like a champion of the most celebrated of all Muslim causes.

    Fourth, Bush’s impotence is a clear demonstration that America has lost a great deal of global power over the last three years. If Bush cannot control Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hizballah, or Israel, then what real power does the world’s “hyper-power” possess? America’s inability to influence any of the actors that are relevant to the current crisis is yet more evidence that America’s foreign policy is a form of global suicide.

    Fifth, the age of great power warfare has been replaced by a world in which great powers must live and compete with non-state actors who possess considerable military capabilities. William Lind calls this transformation “4th generation warfare.”

    Consequently, the age of Bismarckian warfare, or what William Lind refers to as “3rd generation warfare,” is effectively over. “Bismarckian warfare” is a term that describes large-scale wars fought by large-scale armies, which require national systems of military conscription, a significant population base, and enormous military budgets.

    Bismarckian warfare seems to have become ineffective in the Arab-Israeli context, because Israel no longer poses the threat that it once did to the Arab regimes, and the Arab regimes much prefer Israel to the rising non-state actors growing within their own borders.

    William Lind has also argued that non-state actors such as Hamas and Hizballah can checkmate the Israelis as long as these Muslim parties never formally assume power. If Muslim parties were to assume the power of states, then they would immediately become targets for traditional Bismarckian warfare. However, as long as Muslim movements retain theirnon-state identity, they are strategically unconquerable.

    Sixth, we must more carefully study the reasons why Bismarckian warfare is no longer effective.

    The global diffusion of the news outlets is obviously important for understanding why Bismarckian warfare has become so ineffective. For instance, Hizballah has its own media network, and can draw upon the global satellite network to get its message out, and can also use the global media to take advantage of Israel’s targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure.

    Further, the competition between Arab and Muslim satellite channels is also important, because each station wants to demonstrate its sincerity by spreading news that is not only critical of Israel and the U.S., but ultimately undermines people’s trust in the Arab regimes and thereby lends legitimacy to non-state actors.

    And although the American media largely supports Israel, the information about the Americans stranded in Lebanon limits Israel’s freedom of action, and makes Israel look like it cares nothing for the lives of American citizens.

    At an even deeper level, the rate and density of global information transfer, and lack of any centralized control over the global distribution of information, is causing the fabric of space and time to contract, and so Israel’s crimes can much more quickly create a global backlash.

    Time and space, as we experience them, are contracting because the global diffusion of technical and scientific knowledge is permitting events in one part of the world to increasingly influence events in other parts of the world, and events that once took years or even decades to unfold can now occur within mere months or weeks.

    As a consequence, the disenfranchised peoples of the world are developing the ability to affect the lives of the more privileged members of humanity, which means that anything that Israel does to the Palestinians or Lebanese will have effects upon Israel that are more direct and more negative than ever before, and that further, these effects will occur in an accelerated time scale.

    Thus, as it becomes self evident that Israeli military power is no longer as effective as it once was, this will surely accelerate the flow of Jewish settlers out of Israel. Information regarding emigration of Jews out of Israel is a closely guarded secret, but using Israeli government statistics, we can infer that immigration to Israel has rapidly declined over the last several years, and that Israel may even be experiencing a net outflow of Jewish migrants. According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, the number of Jewish immigrants to Israel declined to 21,000 in 2004, which is a 15-year low. In 2005, the number of immigrants rose slightly to 23,000, which is still dramatically lower than the 60,000 that immigrated in 2000. Furthermore, Israel became a net exporter of its citizens in 2003, when9,000 more Israelis left the country than entered, and in the first two months of 2004, this figure rose to 13,000.

    The global micro-diffusion of military technology is also critical, and so military innovation and its global diffusion will only strengthen grassroots rebellions and allow them to more effectively resist the instruments of Bismarckian control, as well as the depredations of the military hippopotami that are the ultimate guarantors of statism and statist regimes.

    For all of these reasons, Israeli attempts to impose terms on Lebanon, or to redraw the political map of Lebanon, or even to impose a NATO force upon Southern Lebanon, are not militarily feasible nor politically achievable, and if attempted, will prove ultimately unsustainable.

    As will soon be demonstrated by events on the ground, Israel will not be able to destroy or even disarm Hizballah. Neither will Hamas, Hizballah, Lebanon, or Syria permit Israel or America to dictate terms to them. Consequently, if Israel lingers too long in Southern Lebanon, its presence will be paid for at such a high cost, that it will be forced to withdraw in ignominy, as it has so many times in the past.

    In the end however, Israel’s loss of power will make it even more dangerous, because the more threatened the Israelis feel, the more likely they will launch destructive wars against the Palestinians and Israel’s other adversaries.

    Finally, the same can be said of the U.S., with respect to its loss of global power. Instead of becoming more careful with its use of force, the erosion of America’s global dominance will likely make the U.S. government more aggressive, as it attempts to re-assert its former position relative to its adversaries and competitors.

    And it is precisely because America and Israel are losing influence over global events, that an American attack upon Iran in 2007 becomes more likely.

    God help us all.

    Ashraf Isma’il is an academic whose interests range from international relations, international economics and international finance, to global history and mathematical models of geo-strategy.

    25 July 2006, 7:06 am

81. Charles Brown:

    Fourth, Bush’s impotence is a clear demonstration that America has lost a great deal of global power over the last three years. If Bush cannot control Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hizballah, or Israel,

    ^^^
    CB: or Iraq, or Afghanistan

    ^^^

    then what real power does the world’s “hyper-power” possess? America’s inability to influence any of the actors that are relevant to the current crisis is yet more evidence that America’s foreign policy is a form of global suicide.

    25 July 2006, 3:49 pm

82. Dan:

    “According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, the number of Jewish immigrants to Israel declined to 21,000 in 2004, which is a 15-year low. In 2005, the number of immigrants rose slightly to 23,000, which is still dramatically lower than the 60,000 that immigrated in 2000. Furthermore, Israel became a net exporter of its citizens in 2003, when9,000 more Israelis left the country than entered, and in the first two months of 2004, this figure rose to 13,000.”

    Interesting. Has anyone connected this to disagreement with Israeli policy? Have any of these people commented on why they are leaving? Are Israelis of conscience voting with their feet? And if so, what does that leave behind?

    30 July 2006, 11:37 am

83. DeAnander:

    worth a read: Jews At Home In The World, a review of Larry Tye’s book.

    there’s an increasing (as far as I, from my goyishe perspective, can see) disconnect between the Diasporic Jewish culture and the militarised/paranoid/patriarchal State of Israel. Israeli culture and geopolitics contradict many of the cherished norms and values of Diasporic Jewry. there’s some kind of meme-war going on over whose values are more authentically “Jewish”, muddied and muddled of course by gender and race…

    Tony Judt’s essays, particularly his recent Ha’aretz thinkpiece “The Country That Wouldn’t Grow Up” underscore this dissonance in global Jewish consciousness. Marc Ellis argues that “Constantinian Judaism” (Judaism as the State religion of a militarist nation-state) threatens the very essence of Jewish spiritual life and community.

    Sharon’s repeated attempts to exaggerate the scale and importance of any antiSemitic incident in Europe — particularly France, which both the Likudniks and the US wingnuts join in demonising — are typical of the old-school wingnut Zionist programme of recruitment-through-fear (which led to its own absurdity/obscenity during the runup to the Holocaust, as mentioned on previous thread ‘The P Word’). But contrary to the Likud (and Millennialist) agenda, Jewish community life is undergoing a minor Renaissance in Berlin, and many Israelis feel that their future or their childrens’ future is more secure in Europe (or America) than in Israel.

    In a desperate attempt to maintain immigration numbers, the wingnut faction in Israel has been doing transnational evangelism (something previously associated with the xtian church, not with Judaism) to recruit new settlers
    

    The miracle of the creation of this community of new Jews has to be chalked up wholly and exclusively to the credit — or debit — of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. Two months ago, at the order of the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Israel Meir Lau, a delegation of rabbis traveled to Peru. During their two weeks in the country, they converted 90 people to Judaism, most of them of Indian origin.

    “We found a small river between Trujillo and Cajamarca and everyone immersed in it. We took the people from Lima to be immersed in the ocean and then we also had to remarry them all in a Jewish ceremony according to the halakha [Jewish religious law],” says Rabbi Eliyahu Birnbaum, a judge in the conversion court and a member of the delegation.

    The rabbis converted only those who said they were willing to immigrate to Israel immediately.
    […]
    Theoretically, the new Jews had the option of joining the Jewish community in Peru, but that was ruled out.

    “How can I put it without hurting anyone?” Birnbaum says. “The community in Lima consists of a certain socioeconomic class and did not want them because they are from a lower level. There was a kind of agreement that if they were converted, they would not join the Lima community, so there was no choice but to lay down the condition that they immigrate to Israel.”

    In the grand tradition of “rice Christians” the rabbinate has now created “land Jews” — landless peasants and indios who converted to Judaism, basically, for the promise of a bit of land of their own. Dispossessed and deracinated by the Conquista, these victims of colonialism now (in one of history’s plentiful ironies) become agents of Israel’s colonial programme in Palestine. Note that the Jewish community in Lima did not want these “lower” people (read: non-Whites, poor, paisanos), but they were welcome as settlers to Israel.

    The immediate cross reference in my mind is that of the export of “the criminal classes” of the British Empire to the frontier, where they served the imperial agenda by dispossessing indigenes and Enclosing land; and of the highly imperial contemporary American strategy of recruiting Hispanic immigrants for the armed forces with a promise of citizenship (even if posthumous). The use of the Gurkhas by the British in India also comes to mind; the imperial occupier often promised the loyal native grunts a land grant at the end of their service, but they would never have been welcome “back home” among Whites.

    If Israelis of conscience are voting with their feet then this does indeed leave the hardcore behind; on the other hand, it also weakens the net of international support for Israel, the steady flow of donation and subsidy which enables Israel to defy public opinion, UN resolutions, and diplomatic wisdom in its dealings with surrounding states.

    One of the curious things about the diaspora vs Israel divide is that in most cases where there is a community “in exile”, the exile community is more rightwing, revanchist, extremist, or delusional than those still in country; Miami Cubans are nutcases compared to even the most outspoken dissidents in Havana, for example, and the White Russian exile community in the teens and 20’s of the last century were notoriously batty and grandiose in their fantasies of returning to power. It is true to an extent that American Likudism is more repressive (debate is more stifled) than the homegrown variety, but in general the politics of diasporic Jewish communities tend to be more liberal than Israeli politics. It is a fragile generalisation because of the many contradictory elements: some of the most conservative and illiberal Orthodoxim in the US are actually anti-Zionist, believing that the foundation of a physical, territorial Eretz Yisroel is blasphemous.

    Given the two trends (emigration from Israel by Jewish citizens uncomfortable with Israeli politics, and a higher birth rate for Arab citizens), Israeli Apartheid does indeed face a crisis. I will be interested to see, over time, how the “new Diaspora” (ex-Israelis living worldwide, in exile from their birth nation) shapes up as a political and artistic force.

    30 July 2006, 3:18 pm

84. Josiah:

    An African perspective on the Arab-Israeli conflict (while we’re linking):
    http://zeleza.com/blog/index.php?p=40

    This is one of the best commentaries I’ve read on issue recently, by the Malawian novelist and scholar Paul Tiyambe Zeleza. He brings to the issue an intimate knowledge of the violent and tumultuous aftermath of settler colonialism in Africa (Malawi used to be Nyasaland, federated with Rhodesia), and places Israel/Palestine/Lebanon in what I view as the properly broad geographical and historical context. He also makes interesting suggestions for possible long-term solutions to the conflict by analogy with post-apartheid South Africa. S.A. is, of course, a shaky touchstone for emulation, as South African whites still own 87% of South Africa’s land, and the equivalent would be Israeli settlers maintaining an absentee monopoly over the best water and land in the O.T. into perpetuity. But still, worth a read.

    30 July 2006, 8:48 pm

85. Tammy:

    Sam, you commented:”And Bob about the land and who it belongs to.. even if the land did belong to the original isrealites (3000 years ago) as you state. Does that give them the right to punish and crush human beings that just happen to be the wrong DNA?”

    Concerning DNA, I encourage you (and anyone who might claim to be a jew, i.e. descendant of Israel) to take a look at these links. Eye-opening to say the least.

    http://www.arabisraelites.com/f0900.htm
    http://www.arabisraelites.com/Nefertiti01.htm

    20 August 2006, 5:18 pm

86. Anna:

    1. Did you know that non-Jewish Israelis cannot buy or lease land in Israel? A Jew from any country in the world is guaranteed citizenship in Israel, while the Palestinians who have been there for centuries are oppressed and persecuted.

    2. Did you know that instead of sewing an insignia on clothing to distinguish race (like the Germans did to the Jews before WW2), Palestinian license plates in Israel are color coded to distinguish Jews from non-Jews?

    3. Did you know that East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights are all considered by the entire world community, including the United States and the United Nations, to be occupied territory and NOT part of the State of Israel?

    4. Did you know that Israel allots 85% of the water resources for Jews, and the remaining 15% is divided among all Palestinians in the territories? For example in Hebron, 85% of the water is set aside for about 400 Jewish settlers, while the remaining 15% is distributed among Hebron’s 120, 000 Palestinians?

    5. Did you know that the United States awards Israel $5 billion in aid each year from American tax dollars?

    6. Did you know that US aid to Israel ($1.8 billion annually in military aid alone) exceeds the aid the US grants to the entire African continent? This aid is used both to buy American weaponry and to buy arms made in Israel.

    7. Did you know that Israel is awaiting an additional $4 billion worth of American military hardware, including new F-16s and Apache and Blackhawk helicopters. As Israel’s main ally and supporter internationally, the United States is committed to maintaining the Jewish state’s “qualitative edge” in weapons over its neighbours.

    8. Did you know that the U.S. administration has notified Congress on numerous occasions that Israel has violated the rules on how US-supplied weapons are used? (In 1978, 1979 and 1982 during fighting in Lebanon, and once after Israel’s bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.)

    9. Did you know that Israel is the only country in the Middle East that refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and bars international inspections from its sites?

    10. Did you know that high-ranking military officers in the Israeli Defence Forces have admitted publicly that unarmed prisoners of war have been summarily executed by the Israeli forces?

    11. Did you know that Israel blew up an American diplomatic facility in Egypt and attacked a US warship in international waters (the USS Liberty), killing 33 and wounding 177 American sailors and the US did nothing about it? (Imagine if an Islamic country like Iraq did this!)

    12. Did you know that Israel stands in defiance of 69 United Nations Security Council Resolutions?

    13. Did you know that Israel is explicitly dedicated to the policy of maintaining a distinct Jewish character?

    14. Did you know that Israel’s current Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, was found by an Israeli court to be “personally and directly responsible” for the Sabra and Shatilla massacre in Lebanon where more than a thousand innocent Palestinian men, women, and children were axed to death or lined up and shot in cold blood?

    15. Did you know that on May 20, 1990, a group of unarmed Palestinian labourers were lined up and murdered by an Israeli solider as they sat waiting for transportation back to Gaza? The terrified labourers who gathered in an area of southern Israel known as Rishon Lezion (known to Palestinians by its Arabic name Oyon Qara) handed their ID cards to the Israeli soldier. The soldiers ordered the distressed labourers to kneel down and face the ground and unexpectedly showered them with a barrage of bullets, killing seven and wounding many others. Needless to say, the soldier was not charged with any crime.

    16. Did you know that until as recently as 1988, Israelis were permitted to run “Jews Only” job ads?

    17. Did you know that the Israeli Foreign Ministry pays six US public relations firms to promote a “positive image” of Israel to the American public?

    18. Did you know that Sharon’s coalition government includes a party–Molodet–which advocates ethnic cleansing by openly calling for the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from the occupied territories?

    19. Did you know that recently-declassified documents indicate that David Ben-Gurion approved of the forced expulsion of Arabs from all Palestinian territory in 1948?

    20. Did you know that the former chief rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, who is also a founder and spiritual leader of the religious Shas party (Israel’s third largest political party) openly advocates a ‘Final Solution’ to annihilate the Palestinians? Speaking at the widely broadcast sermon marking the last Passover, he declared of the Palestinians: “The Lord shall return their deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world. It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.”

    21. Did you know that Palestinian refugees make up the largest portion of the refugee population in the world?

    22. Did you know that Palestinian Christians are considered the “living stones” of Christianity because they are the direct descendants of the disciples of Jesus Christ? And the Palestinian Christians stand united with their Muslim brethren in the struggle against the Israeli occupation.

    23. Did you know that despite a ban on torture by Israel’s High Court of Justice, torture has continued unabated by Shin Bet interrogators on Palestinian prisoners?

    24. Did you know that despite every Israeli attempt to disrupt Palestinian education, Palestinians have the highest ratio of PhDs per capita in the world?

    25. Did you know that the right of self-determination is guaranteed to every human being under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [December, 1948], yet Palestinians were/are expected to negotiate for this right under the Oslo Accords?

    26. Did you know that despite what is widely perpetuated and written in the history books that the Arabs attacked Israel in the 1967 war, it was Israel who attacked the Arab countries first, capturing Jerusalem and the West Bank, and called the attack a pre-emptive strike?

    27. Did you know that, as an occupying power, Israel has a particular responsibility under the Geneva Conventions to protect Palestinian civilians?

    28. Did you know that, despite Ariel Sharon’s public call for a unilateral ceasefire, Israeli soldiers have not stopped shooting, killing or bulldozing Palestinian homes? The most recent example of this is the murder of three innocent women who were shot by an Israeli tank as they sat in their tent!

    29. Did you know that the Zionists have been trying to destroy Masjid al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock for the last 50 years by digging underground tunnels beneath the sites to weaken its foundation causing it to collapse?

    30. Nelson Mandela called the Israeli government an apartheid regime, just like South Africa used to be.

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

    “Israel is an illegal creation of the United Kingdom!”

    Britain illegally created the state of Israel.

    Palestine was once a British colony, but the British promised to pass the Arab country to the Jews for their help in involving the U.S. join WWI and side with the British.

    So the UK, who didn’t own the land, had given it to the Jews, who do not belong there.

    Fostering Jewish immigration in the hope that it might ultimately lead to the creation of a Jewish majority and the establishment of a Jewish state with the consent or the acquiescence of the Arabs was one thing. It was quite another to contemplate, however remotely, the forcible conversion of Palestine into a Jewish State against the will of the Arabs.

    27 October 2009, 5:05 pm

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