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Charles Krauthammer on Gaza Flotilla Raid

quantumushroom says...

There was no such thing as a "Palestinian" before 1948. They are ragtag Arabs used as pawns by Middle East tyrants to antagonize Israel. The Arab nations will not allow these "Palstinians" to simply immigrate to their countries.

The most frightening thing to "Palestinians" would be the granting of statehood; they would then have to produce things and coexist with other nations, including Israel. But were that ever to happen, the "Palestinians" would simply use the new land as another launch pad for missiles.

For peace to work, both sides have to want it. When everyone wants Israel "wiped off the map" including the useful idiots in the West, there cannot be peace.

World condemns Gaza flotilla raid - Russia Today

quantumushroom says...

There was no such thing as a "palestinian" before 1948. Who should give a sh*t about a fictional people on permanent welfare other arab nations use as pawns to antagonize Jews?

The "world" aka UN is made up mostly of tinpot dictators, warlords, crony capitalists and socialist poltroons. Thank goodness at least one country will still put a finger in the eye of the one-worlder tyrants.

Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution' (BBC)

westy says...

You moron , I have seen the full series how about you engage your brain gears.

the piont is the nazies didnt get away with it and they fucked it up , they could have exsploited the laber far more efficently ,

all the clever countries now are getting away with it , exploiting the 3rd world is how its ment to be done.
the nazies just didnt have the imaginatoin to do it properly.

the advantage of doing things totaly overseeies with the most deprived natoins is that no other natoins give a shit and the populatoins of the natoin your raping are evan more poweless to do annything , becuse they dont know anny better and allso they are to far islated from the controlers to do annything.

allso its a waist of money and time puting them all in camps and killing them all , why not let them maintain themselfs just make sure you keep it so they can never be in a positoin to actualy earn the true amount of income they deserve.

The reasoin the germans faild is the top brass was so concernd in setting up a new rome/empire. im sure if they had got away with it everyone would hail the germans as sucsesfull conqerors and masters of a new civalisatoin . In the same way allot of people have this bizar respect for the romans and how gr8 they were , despite the fact that there gratness was most likely bult of the backs of slave labor murder and genoside.

a more recent example than romans would be How the british raped and exploited people around most the world and still remain respectable.
the germans were just noobs.


The whole genoside thing repatedly happens and we still dont seem to give a shit it would be nice if people were educated about genoside in general and how easily it happens.


Intresting genosides

Mao Ze-Dong (China, 1958-61 and 1966-69, Tibet 1949-50)

Slobodan Milosevic (Yugoslavia, 1992-99)

Kim Il Sung (North Korea, 1948-94)

Pol Pot (Cambodia, 1975-79)

colinisatoin of amerca ( admitedly allot of it was desize but the british and other people that moved to USA compelaty fucked up a whole load of people)


I dont know if u can class the reacent wars in iraq a genoside , or maby veatnam war. personaly im not so sure how much intentoin matters , in the sence that if u intend to wipe out a natoin of people or if thats just what happens. in the end if a whole load of people end up dying then from the perspective of that group of people its a genoside. the only difference would be if they died because they were activly in combat with the otherside running at them with guns , or if they were cavileans that were killed through a genetic / gealogical asoceatoin .





>> ^demon_ix:

If you had actually watched the video instead of just trolling, you would have seen that's exactly what they did. They set up factories in Poland to take advantage of the Coal resources in the area and used the prisoners as forced labor to build weapons for the German war effort.
>> ^westy:
~Its still fine to murder people or just forget its hapaaning , you just canot do it in camps .
if the nazies were clever they would have just exsploited 3rd world labor and only invaded countries that had pore militaries but strong resources.


Palestine:Timeline (John Rees)

demon_ix says...

Well, since this has been promoted, I'll paste the reply I left on EndAll's profile to his question.
I'll also correct myself: In my third point I falsely claim that Lehi was responsible for the King David hotel bombing, when in fact it was the Irgun that committed that act. Those guys weren't as extreme as Lehi, but not by much.
>> ^demon_ix:

- The video seems to take it for granted that "Zionists" are a tiny fraction of Jews, when in fact, the opposite is true. The anti-Israel Jews are a tiny minority, and their only objection to Israel is that it's too early. They believe that when the messiah comes again, he will take back the land, and so there is no reason to do it before his return. They are the Jewish equivalent of Christian believers in Rapture, fanatical Muslims and so on.
- There's some nice footage at 5:50 of planes dropping bombs and cannons bombarding settlements while Mr. Rees discusses the Jewish defensive organizations, conveying the appearance that the Jews were attacking Palestinians at the time, when the biggest piece of military hardware they had at the time were rifles, often without ammo.
- The bombing of the King David hotel (6:46) was performed by a tiny splinter group known as Lehi, which was the most extreme bunch of lunatics in our history. They even attempted to ally themselves with Nazi Germany at one point. Mr. Rees generously attributes this to "The Zionists".
- In the description of UN resolution 181 (7:20), he skips completely over the actual formation of the Nation of Israel on May 14th 1948, and declares the 1948 war which involved EVERY SINGLE NATION BORDERING ISRAEL, was in fact simply Jews terrorizing Palestinians. The relevant details about the actual progress of the war are here. He mentions the actual war in about 3 words afterwards.
- The 1967 war, or the Six Day War, started with an invasion of Israel by it's bordering nations. Mr. Rees states that Israel expanded it's borders as though it was on an Imperialist quest to grab more land.
- The quickly described war of 1973, or the Yom-Kippur War, was started AGAIN by an invasion from all sides. This time, they picked Yom-Kippur as their day of attack, and managed to catch most of our army by surprise on the one day where the vast majority of Jews rest and eat nothing. This war wasn't spinnable in an anti-Israeli way for Mr. Rees, so he glossed over it quickly and moved on.
- At around 14:00 Mr. Rees describes the American aid to Jordan and Egypt as "payment for not attacking Israel", and ignores the fact that Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 and Jordan followed in 1994. Syria and Lebanon are still technically at war with Israel, and Iraq actively attacked Israel with Scud missiles during the first Gulf War.
---------
I could probably go into further detail, find more links and keep debating this, but it's 2:15am and I'm quite sleepy. I'll be glad to continue tomorrow.
In reply to this comment by EndAll:
Can you point out for me what history was rewritten? What facts they got wrong, or left out?

A bunch of people came to my village. They weren't very nice

qualm says...

Survival of the Fittest?
An Interview with Benny Morris

By ARI SHAVIT

http://www.counterpunch.org/shavit01162004.html

"But in an astonishing recent Ha'aretz interview, after summarizing his new research, Morris proceeds to argue for the necessity of ethnic cleansing in 1948. He faults David Ben-Gurion for failing to expel all Arab Israelis, and hints that it may be necessary to finish the job in the future. Though he calls himself a left-wing Zionist, he invokes and praises the fascist Vladimir Jabotinsky in calling for an "iron wall" solution to the current crisis. Referring to Sharon's Security Wall, he says, "Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another." He calls the conflict between Israelis and Arabs a struggle between civilization and barbarism, and suggests an analogy frequently drawn by Palestinians, though from the other side of the Winchester: "Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians."

See also:
Diagnosing Benny Morris
The Mind of A European Settler
http://dissidentvoice.org/Jan04/Ash0126.htm

It Takes A Big Army To Bomb Little Girls

qualm says...

Diagnosing Benny Morris
The Mind of a European Settler
by Gabriel Ash


Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral" justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every "ethnically cleansed" village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers.

Israel's apologists tried in vain to attack Morris' professional credibility. From the opposite direction, since he maintained that the expulsion was not "by design," he was also accused of drawing excessively narrow conclusions from the documents and of being too naive a reader of dissimulating statements. Despite these limitations, Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem, 1947-1949 is an authoritative record of the expulsion.

In anticipation of the publication of the revised edition, Morris was interviewed in Ha'aretz. The major new findings in the revised book, based on fresh documents, further darken the picture.

The new archival material, Morris reveals, records routine execution of civilians, twenty-four massacres, including one in Jaffa, and at least twelve cases of rape by military units, which Morris acknowledges are probably "the tip of the iceberg." Morris also says he found documents confirming the broader conclusions favored by his critics: the expulsion was pre-meditated; concrete expulsion orders were given in writing, some traceable directly to Ben Gurion.

Morris also found documentations for Arab High Command calls for evacuating women and children from certain villages, evidence he oddly claims strengthen the Zionist propaganda claim that Palestinians left because they were told to leave by the invading Arab states. Morris had already documented two dozen such cases in the first edition. It is hard to see how attempts by Arab commanders to protect civilians from anticipated rape and murder strengthen the Zionist fairy tale. But that failed attempt at evenhandedness is the least of Morris' problems. As the interview progresses, it emerges with growing clarity that, while Morris the historian is a professional and cautious presenter of facts, Morris the intellectual is a very sick person.

His sickness is of the mental-political kind. He lives in a world populated not by fellow human beings, but by racist abstractions and stereotypes. There is an over-abundance of quasi-poetic images in the interview, as if the mind is haunted by the task of grasping what ails it: "The Palestinian citizens of Israel are a time bomb," not fellow citizens. Islam is "a world in which human lives don't have the same value as in the West." Arabs are "barbarians" at the gate of the Roman Empire. Palestinian society is "a serial killer" that ought to be executed, and "a wild animal" that must be caged.

Morris' disease was diagnosed over forty years ago, by Frantz Fanon. Based on his experience in subjugated Africa, Fanon observed that "the colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say, with the help of the army and the police, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil � The native is declared insensitive to ethics � the enemy of values. � He is a corrosive element, destroying all that comes near it � the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces" (from The Wretched of the Earth). And further down, "the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms" (let's not forget to place Morris' metaphors in the context of so many other Israeli appellations for Palestinians: Begin's "two-legged beasts", Eitan's "drugged cockroaches" and Barak's ultra-delicate "salmon"). Morris is a case history in the psychopathology of colonialism.

Bad Genocide, Good Genocide

When the settler encounters natives who refuse to cast down their eyes, his disease advances to the next stage -- murderous sociopathy.

Morris, who knows the exact scale of the terror unleashed against Palestinians in 1948, considers it justified. First he suggests that the terror was justified because the alternative would have been a genocide of Jews by Palestinians. Raising the idea of genocide in this context is pure, and cheap, hysteria. Indeed, Morris moves immediately to a more plausible explanation: the expulsion was a precondition for creating a Jewish state, i.e. the establishment of a specific political preference, not self-defense.

This political explanation, namely that the expulsion was necessary to create the demographic conditions, a large Jewish majority, favored by the Zionist leadership, is the consensus of historians. But as affirmative defense, it is unsatisfactory. So the idea that Jews were in danger of genocide is repeated later, in a more honest way, as merely another racist, baseless generalization: "if it can, [Islamic society] will commit genocide."

But Morris sees no evil. Accusing Ben Gurion of failing to achieve an Arabian Palestine, he recommends further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including those who are Israeli citizens. Not now, but soon, "within five or ten years," under "apocalyptic conditions" such as a regional war with unconventional weapons, a potentially nuclear war, which "is likely to happen within twenty years." For Morris, and it is difficult to overstate his madness at this point, the likelihood of a nuclear war within the foreseeable future is not the sorry end of a road better not taken, but merely a milestone, whose aftermath is still imaginable, and imaginable within the banal continuity of Zionist centennial policies: he foresees the exchange of unconventional missiles between Israel and unidentified regional states as a legitimate excuse for "finishing the job" of 1948.

Morris speaks explicitly of another expulsion, but, in groping for a moral apology for the past and the future expulsion of Palestinians, he presents a more general argument, one that justifies not only expulsion but also genocide. That statement ought to be repeated, for here is a crossing of a terrible and shameful line.

Morris, a respectable, Jewish, Israeli academic, is out in print in the respectable daily, Haaretz, justifying genocide as a legitimate tool of statecraft. It should be shocking. Yet anybody who interacts with American and Israeli Zionists knows that Morris is merely saying for the record what many think and even say unofficially. Morris, like most of Israel, lives in a temporality apart, an intellectual Galapagos Islands, a political Jurassic Park, where bizarre cousins of ideas elsewhere shamed into extinction still roam the mindscape proudly.

Nor should one think the slippage between expulsion, "transfer," and genocide without practical consequences. It is not difficult to imagine a planned expulsion turn into genocide under the stress of circumstances: The genocides of both European Jews and Armenians began as an expulsion. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was the product of decades of thinking and imagining "transfer." We ought to pay attention: with Morris's statement, Zionist thinking crossed another threshold; what is now discussed has the potential to be actualized, if "apocalyptic conditions" materialize.

The march of civilization and the corpses of the uncivilized

It is instructive to look closer at the manner in which Morris uses racist thinking to justify genocide. Morris' interview, precisely because of its shamelessness, is a particularly good introductory text to Zionist thought.

Morris' racism isn't limited to Arabs. Genocide, according to Morris, is justified as long as it is done for "the final good." But what kind of good is worth the "forced extinction" of a whole people? Certainly, not the good of the latter. (Morris uses the word "Haqkhada," a Hebrew word usually associated with the extinction of animal species. Someone ought to inform Morris about the fact that Native Americans aren't extinct.)

According to Morris, the establishment of a more advanced society justifies genocide: "Yes, even the great American democracy couldn't come to be without the forced extinction of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds." Such hopeful comparisons between the future awaiting Palestinians and the fate of Native Americans are common to Israeli apologists. One delegation of American students was shocked and disgusted when it heard this analogy made by a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Morris's supremacist view of "Western Civilization," that civilization values human life more than Islam, has its basis in the moral acceptance of genocide for the sake of "progress." Morris establishes the superiority of the West on both the universal respect for human life and the readiness to exterminate inferior races. The illogicalness of the cohabitation of a right to commit genocide together with a higher level of respect for human lives escapes him, and baffles us, at least until we grasp that the full weight of the concept of "human" is restricted, in the classic manner of Eurocentric racism, to dwellers of civilized (i.e. Western) nations.

This is the same logic that allowed early Zionists to describe Palestine as an empty land, despite the presence of a million inhabitants. In the end, it comes down to this: killing Arabs -- one dozen Arabs or one million Arabs, the difference is merely technical -- is acceptable if it is necessary in order to defend the political preferences of Jews because Jews belong to the superior West and Arabs are inferior. We must be thankful to Professor Morris for clarifying the core logic of Zionism so well.

The color of Jews

Morris assures us that his values are those of the civilized West, the values of universal morality, progress, etc. But then he also claims to hold the primacy of particular loyalties, a position for which he draws on Albert Camus. But to reconcile Morris' double loyalty to both Western universalism and to Jewish particularism, one must forget that these two identities were not always on the best of terms.

How can one explain Morris' knowledge that the ethnic Darwinism that was used to justify the murder of millions of non-whites, including Black African slaves, Native Americans, Arabs, and others, was also used to justify the attempt to exterminate Jews? How can Morris endorse the "civilizational" justification of genocide, which includes the genocide of Jews, even as he claims the holocaust as another justification for Zionism? Perhaps Morris' disjointed mind doesn't see the connection. Perhaps he thinks that there are "right" assertions of racist supremacy and "wrong" assertions of racist supremacy. Or perhaps Morris displays another facet of the psychopathologies of oppression, the victim's identification with the oppressor.

Perhaps in Morris' mind, one half tribalist and one half universalist, the Jews were murdered to make way for a superior, more purely Aryan, European civilization, and the Jews who are today serving in the Israeli army, both belong and do not belong to the same group. They belong when Morris invokes the totems of the tribe to justify loyalty. But when his attention turns to the universal principle of "superior civilization," these Jews are effaced, like poor relations one is ashamed to be associated with, sent back to the limbo they share with the great non-white mass of the dehumanized. In contrast, the Jews of Israel, self-identified as European, have turned white, dry-cleaned and bleached by Zionism, and with their whiteness they claim the privilege that Whites always had, the privilege to massacre members of "less advanced" races.

False testimony

It would be marvelous if Morris the historian could preserve his objective detachment while Morris the Zionist dances with the demons of Eurocentric racism. But the wall of professionalism -- and it is a very thick and impressive wall in Morris' case -- cannot hold against the torrent of hate.

For example, Morris lies about his understanding of the 2000 Camp David summit. In Ha'aretz, Morris says that, "when the Palestinians rejected Barak's proposal of July 2000 and Clinton's proposal of December 2000, I understood that they were not ready to accept a two state solution. They wanted everything. Lydda, and Akka and Jaffa."

But in his book Righteous Victims, Morris explains the failure of the negotiations thus: "the PLO leadership had gradually accepted, or seemed to�Israel...keeping 78 percent of historical Palestine. But the PLO wanted the remaining 22 percent. � At Camp David, Barak had endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state�[on only] 84-90 percent of that 22 percent. � Israel was also to control the territory between a greatly enlarged Jerusalem and Jericho, effectively cutting the core of the future Palestinian state into two�" Morris' chapter of "Righteous Victims" that deals with the '90s leaves a lot to be desired, but it still strives for some detached analysis. In contrast, in Ha'aretz Morris offers baseless claims he knows to be false.

If Morris lies about recent history, and even grossly misrepresents the danger Jews faced in Palestine in 1948, a period he is an expert on, his treatment of more general historical matters is all but ridiculous, an astounding mix of insinuations and clich�s. For example, Morris reminds us that "the Arab nation won a big chunk of the Earth, not because of its intrinsic virtues and skills, but by conquering and murdering and forcing the conquered to convert." (What is Morris' point? Is the cleansing of Palestine attributable to Jewish virtues and skills, rather than to conquering and murdering?)

This is racist slander, not history. As an example, take Spain, which was conquered in essentially one battle in 711 A.D. by a small band of North African Berbers who had just converted to Islam. Spain was completely Islamized and Arabized within two centuries with very little religious coercion, and certainly no ethnic cleansing. But after the last Islamic rulers were kicked out of Spain by the Christian army of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492, a large section of the very same Spanish population that willingly adopted Islam centuries earlier refused to accept Christianity despite a century of persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. 600,000 Spanish Muslims were eventually expelled in 1608.

Obviously, Islamic civilization had its share of war and violence. But, as the above example hints, compared to the West, compared to the religious killing frenzy of sixteenth century Europe, compared to the serial genocides in Africa and America, and finally to the flesh-churning wars of the twentieth century, Islamic civilization looks positively benign. So why all this hatred? Where is all this fire and brimstone Islamophobia coming from?

Being elsewhere

From Europe, of course, but with a twist. Europe has always looked upon the East with condescension. In periods of tension, that condescension would escalate to fear and hate. But it was also mixed and tempered with a large dose of fascination and curiosity. The settler, however, does not have the luxury to be curious. The settler leaves the metropolis hoping to overcome his own marginal, often oppressed, status in metropolitan society. He goes to the colony motivated by the desire to recreate the metropolis with himself at the top.

For the settler, going to the colony is not a rejection of the metropolis, but a way to claim his due as a member. Therefore, the settler is always trying to be more metropolitan than the metropolis. When the people of the metropolis baulk at the bloodbath the settler wants to usher in the name of their values, the settler accuses them of "growing soft," and declares himself "the true metropolis." That is also why there is one crime of which the settler can never forgive the land he colonized -- its alien climate and geography, its recalcitrant otherness, the oddness of its inhabitants, in sum, the harsh truth of its being elsewhere. In the consciousness of the settler, condescension thus turns into loathing.

Israeli settler society, especially its European, Ashkenazi part, especially that Israel which calls itself "the peace camp," "the Zionist Left," etc., is predicated on the loathing of all things Eastern and Arab. (Now, of course, we have in addition the religious, post-1967 settlers who relate to the Zionist Left the way the Zionist Left stands in relation to Europe, i.e. as settlers.) "Arab" is a term of abuse, one that can be applied to everything and everyone, including Jews. This loathing is a unifying theme. It connects Morris' latest interview in Ha'aretz with Ben Gurion's first impression of Jaffa in 1905; he found it filthy and depressing.

In another article, published in Tikkun Magazine, Morris blames the "ultra-nationalism, provincialism, fundamentalism and obscurantism" of Arab Jews in Israel for the sorry state of the country (although Begin, Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, and most of Israel's generals, leaders, and opinion makers of the last two decades are European Jews). For Morris, everything Eastern is corrupt and every corruption has an Eastern origin.

One shouldn't, therefore, doubt Morris when he proclaims himself a traditional Left Zionist. There is hardly anything he says that hasn't been said already by David Ben Gurion or Moshe Dayan. Loathing of the East and the decision to subdue it by unlimited force is the essence of Zionism.

Understanding the psycho-political sources of this loathing leads to some interesting observations about truisms that recur in Morris' (and much of Israel's) discourse. Morris blames Arafat for thinking that Israel is a "crusader state," a foreign element that will eventually be sent back to its port of departure. This is a common refrain of Israeli propaganda. It is also probably true. But it isn't Arafat's fault that Morris is a foreigner in the Middle East. Why shouldn't Arafat believe Israel is a crusader state when Morris himself says so? "We are the vulnerable extension of Europe in this place, exactly as the crusaders."

It is Morris -- like the greater part of Israel's elite -- who insists on being a foreigner, on loathing the Middle East and dreaming about mist-covered Europe, purified and deified by distance. If Israel is a crusader state, and therefore a state with shallow roots, likely to pack up and disappear, it is not the fault of those who make that observation. It is the fault of those Israelis, like Morris, who want to have nothing to do with the Middle East.

Morris is deeply pessimistic about Israel's future; this feeling is very attractive in Israel. The end of Israel is always felt to be one step away, hiding beneath every development, from the birthrate of Bedouins to the establishment of the International Court of Justice.

Naturally, every Palestinian demand is such a doomsday threat. This sense of existential precariousness can be traced back to 1948; it was encouraged by Israel's successive governments because it justified the continuous violence of the state and the hegemony of the military complex. It may eventually become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But this existential fear goes deeper. It is rooted in the repressed understanding (which Morris both articulates and tries to displace) of the inherent illegitimacy of the Israeli political system and identity. "Israel" is brute force. In Morris' words: "The bottom line is that force is the only thing that will make them accept us." But brute force is precarious. Time gnaws at it. Fatigue corrodes it. And the more it is used, the more it destroys the very acceptance and legitimacy it seeks.

For Israel, the fundamental question of the future is, therefore, whether Israelis can transcend colonialism. The prognosis is far from positive. In a related article in The Guardian, Morris explains that accepting the right of return of the Palestinian refugees would mean forcing Israeli Jews into exile. But why would Jews have to leave Israel if Israel becomes a bi-national, democratic state? One cannot understand this without attention to the colonial loathing of the Middle East which Morris so eloquently expresses.

But taking that into account, I'm afraid Morris is right. Many Israeli Jews, especially European Jews who tend to possess alternative passports, would rather emigrate than live on equal terms with Palestine's natives in a bi-national state. It is to Frantz Fanon again that we turn for observing this first. "The settler, from the moment the colonial context disappears, has no longer an interest in remaining or in co-existing."

Related Articles:

* The Education of Benny the Barbarian by Ahmed Amr
* Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion by Adi Ophir

Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel. He is a regular contributor to Yellow Times.org, where this article first appeared (www.yellowtimes.org). Gabriel encourages your comments: gash@YellowTimes.org

EndAll (Member Profile)

demon_ix says...

- The video seems to take it for granted that "Zionists" are a tiny fraction of Jews, when in fact, the opposite is true. The anti-Israel Jews are a tiny minority, and their only objection to Israel is that it's too early. They believe that when the messiah comes again, he will take back the land, and so there is no reason to do it before his return. They are the Jewish equivalent of Christian believers in Rapture, fanatical Muslims and so on.

- There's some nice footage at 5:50 of planes dropping bombs and cannons bombarding settlements while Mr. Rees discusses the Jewish defensive organizations, conveying the appearance that the Jews were attacking Palestinians at the time, when the biggest piece of military hardware they had at the time were rifles, often without ammo.

- The bombing of the King David hotel (6:46) was performed by a tiny splinter group known as Lehi, which was the most extreme bunch of lunatics in our history. They even attempted to ally themselves with Nazi Germany at one point. Mr. Rees generously attributes this to "The Zionists".

- In the description of UN resolution 181 (7:20), he skips completely over the actual formation of the Nation of Israel on May 14th 1948, and declares the 1948 war which involved EVERY SINGLE NATION BORDERING ISRAEL, was in fact simply Jews terrorizing Palestinians. The relevant details about the actual progress of the war are here. He mentions the actual war in about 3 words afterwards.

- The 1967 war, or the Six Day War, started with an invasion of Israel by it's bordering nations. Mr. Rees states that Israel expanded it's borders as though it was on an Imperialist quest to grab more land.

- The quickly described war of 1973, or the Yom-Kippur War, was started AGAIN by an invasion from all sides. This time, they picked Yom-Kippur as their day of attack, and managed to catch most of our army by surprise on the one day where the vast majority of Jews rest and eat nothing. This war wasn't spinnable in an anti-Israeli way for Mr. Rees, so he glossed over it quickly and moved on.

- At around 14:00 Mr. Rees describes the American aid to Jordan and Egypt as "payment for not attacking Israel", and ignores the fact that Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 and Jordan followed in 1994. Syria and Lebanon are still technically at war with Israel, and Iraq actively attacked Israel with Scud missiles during the first Gulf War.

---------
I could probably go into further detail, find more links and keep debating this, but it's 2:15am and I'm quite sleepy. I'll be glad to continue tomorrow.

In reply to this comment by EndAll:
Can you point out for me what history was rewritten? What facts they got wrong, or left out?

Netanyahu calls for a demilitarized Palestinian state

enoch says...

great post GEO!
so basically netanyaho is saying:
"we shall have all the weapons and control and you all can have a flag and an anthem and THEN we shall call you a palestinian state"
and the collosal prick award goes to........
i think we can also give a douche award to britain for amending the balfor declaration giving converted khazars 55% of palestinian lands in 1922.
and lets not forget america in 1948 for rushing like a horny teenage boy to vote its new girlfriend ISREAL into nationhood.

the isreali/palestinian conflict is probably the largest propagator of muslim extremism towards the western world,and is not easily going to be rectified.
who profits?that is my question...
because as usual,it is the common man,the poor that pays the price for the arrogance of the political,influential and the elite.
and by what right do the converted khazars claim isreal?
aaaah..thats right.a book.
lovingly called the bible.or torah..no matter.
this travesty of humanity makes me crazy with rage.the millions that have suffered in the name of god,that still suffer today.
self-righteous murdering fucktwits,
in the name of god?
my ass.

Highlights from Obama's Cairo address, June 4th 2009

quantumushroom says...

That was the best speech Neville Chamberlain has given yet!

Muslim radicals are working for a better world, a world with no Jews, Israel or United States.

If so given, "Palestinians", a people that didn't exist before 1948, will turn their new State into a missile launch pad aimed at Israel.

George Galloway banned from Canada

bcglorf says...


bcglorf: "Let's not pretend that for all the atrocities committed by the Jews and Zionists in 1940's Palestine there weren't just as many atrocities perpetrated against them by Arab Palestinians. It was a mess both then and now."

Qualm:Even hard-core Israeli apologists like Benny Morris don't believe that. It is no mild understatement to say this is not historically accurate.
...
bcglorf: "Your insistence that it was just a series of murderous rampages initiated by Zionists against friendly Arab Palestinians is what's been exposed here."

Qualm:I never make that claim.


Okay, I don't see a whole lot of room in between the above statements for ambiguity. I've openly stated, more than once, that Zionists and Israelis have committed numerous atrocities, through the 1940's(and before and since for that matter). Yet when I point out that similarly atrocities where committed against them by Arab Palestinians, you suddenly balk at the notion. Do you or do you not recognize that the violence and atrocities committed in Palestine from 1900-1948(and again onwards for that matter), included a very large proportion of tit for tat and revenge/self defense motivations from BOTH sides.

That's my reading of history, and it seems pretty consistent(and unbiased) with all of human history. The Jews and Zionists were more aggressive/violent/defensive given their treatment in Europe and status as a minority in Palestine. Similarly the Arab Palestinians had been under the yoke of either the Ottomans or the British and were also more aggressive/violent/defensive as a result. Neither of those are any excuse for the atrocities committed, it's just a much stronger motivation for their societies than a simple Zionist campaign to expunge the Arabs and Arabs defending themselves. It's much simpler than the Zionist position of Arabs bent on annihilating all Jews. The truth is in the middle of those, do you reject the whole of this?


Rougy:Your obdurate unwillingness to admit that Israel is at fault for anything is what is really being exposed here.


Really? I repeatedly condemn the atrocities they've committed. Up thread I've repeatedly referenced atrocities committed by them from before 1948 through to the present day as a given. I referenced the most recent invasion up thread saying There's a lot of undeniable evidence the IDF need to be prosecuted for crimes committed in the recent offensive.


You are pro Israel, right or wrong, and that is clear as day.


No, I'm anti-Hamas, there's a very big difference. If you'd like me to condemn all of Israel just out of 'fairness' I won't. That'd be the equivalent of condemning all Palestinians, which is the workings of a racist. I condemn Hamas specifically as a horrific organization that manages to kill more of it's own people than anyone else. An equivalent condemnation would be of Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu party as racists and a horrific evil, I'll happily condemn them as strongly as Hamas as they chant 'Death to Arabs' with as much vigor as Hamas chants 'Death to Israel'.

George Galloway banned from Canada

qualm says...

bcglorf: "Really? Alleged incidents? So you deny mistreatment of the Jewish people by the Arab majority in Palestine from well before 1948?"

I can't deny anything I haven't seen. What are you refering to? Was there even a single massacre perpetrated against Jewish settlers by the Palestinian majority? Because if you've read Morris you already know he meticulously documents a shockingly high number of massacres perpetrated against Palestinians.

bcglorf: "Let's not pretend that for all the atrocities committed by the Jews and Zionists in 1940's Palestine there weren't just as many atrocities perpetrated against them by Arab Palestinians. It was a mess both then and now."

Even hard-core Israeli apologists like Benny Morris don't believe that. It is no mild understatement to say this is not historically accurate. But this is just the sort of genocidal logic I have exposed.

George Galloway banned from Canada

bcglorf says...


you press forward with claims of Jewish mistreatment within Palestine pre-1948, as if those alleged incidents


Really? Alleged incidents? So you deny mistreatment of the Jewish people by the Arab majority in Palestine from well before 1948?


as if those alleged incidents supplied the necessary historical context to then go ahead and justify, to your mind, actually ignoring the serious and supported claims about actual atrocities.


I suggest we ignore them? Are you really gonna try to misread what I said that deliberately? I'll repeat myself again Let's not pretend that for all the atrocities committed by the Jews and Zionists in 1940's Palestine there weren't just as many atrocities perpetrated against them by Arab Palestinians. It was a mess both then and now.

Or how about my last paragraph:

Look at the whole history and there are no easy answers like some might like to think. How do you blame the Jewish people for fleeing Europe and defending themselves aggressively in Palestine after? How do you blame the Arab Palestinians for feeling threatened, especially after the British had been ruling over them as a colony until then? It's a mess, and blaming one side or the other is ignorance or personal bias.


Is that really anything like a defense of genocide? Really?

George Galloway banned from Canada

qualm says...

First you diminish and misread Gabriel Ash's deconstruction and contextualization of Benny Morris's Israel, (within a framework of traditional European colonial racism), and Morris's appalling rationalization in favour of genocide, and then you press forward with claims of Jewish mistreatment within Palestine pre-1948, as if those alleged incidents supplied the necessary historical context to go ahead and justify, to your mind, actually ignoring the serious and supported claims about actual atrocities.

In other words, you are rationalizing crimes against humanity. In light of this, your copy/pasted paragraph which is meant to establish your bona fides rings pretty hollow.

And what was it again that you see as positive for Israel in this deconstruction of Benny Morris and the logic of genocide?

George Galloway banned from Canada

bcglorf says...

^If you read Gabriel Ash article there closely you should notice something. He takes EVERYTHING negative Morris' historical account says about Israel and declares it fact beyond contention. He then also declares EVERYTHING positive Morris' historical account says about Israel and declares it the working of a depraved and racist/colonial mind. That doesn't give you any pause?

Here's the bigger picture of 1948, since the context is important and cliff's notes versions are generally the tool of propagandists from either side. Palestine, under British rule, had both Jewish and Arab Palestinian's living there in 1900 already. By the 1940's, the Jewish population was growing, but still a minority that was being mistreated. By the mid 1940's the Nazi genocide was in full swing, and more European Jews came to Palestine as refugees. Many of them entering the country illegally, but under the circumstances I find that difficult to condemn. Among the European Jews, Zionist's had risen up as a result of European oppression and their ranks were filled by those who believed only a Jewish state would ever recognize the rights of Jews.

Low and behold as the majority of them settle in Palestine, the majority Arab Palestinians are mistreating them terribly. Is it really much of a wonder that this boiled into a civil war between Jewish and Arab Palestinians? Is it really a nefarious act of conquest by the Jews, or is just a tragic series of events with hate begetting more hate, over and over again? Let's not pretend that for all the atrocities committed by the Jews and Zionists in 1940's Palestine there weren't just as many atrocities perpetrated against them by Arab Palestinians. It was a mess both then and now. I find it hard though to go back to that time and place all the blame on Jewish Zionist aggression. It's even harder when in '48 those Jewish Zionists declared their acceptance of a UN proposed 2 state solution, only to have all the neighboring Arab countries declare a united war to eliminate them. Given just how many of those Jewish people had just come from a Nazi dominated Europe and there might be some legitimate concerns for their own survival playing a role from that point forward, no? Was that really merely Zionist fear mongering?

Look at the whole history and there are no easy answers like some might like to think. How do you blame the Jewish people for fleeing Europe and defending themselves aggressively in Palestine after? How do you blame the Arab Palestinians for feeling threatened, especially after the British had been ruling over them as a colony until then? It's a mess, and blaming one side or the other is ignorance or personal bias.

George Galloway banned from Canada

qualm says...

"Is Israel not simply a response to outright hostile actions purported by the States of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran and Lebanon?"

The short answer is, no. Israel is a classic settler nation with all the existential attributes and brutality of a colonial ruler.

Sometimes an article deserves reprinting in full.

(copyfree)

Date : 2004-01-29
''Diagnosing Benny Morris: the mind of a European settler''

By Gabriel Ash - YellowTimes.org Columnist (United States)

Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral" justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every "ethnically cleansed" village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers.

Israel's apologists tried in vain to attack Morris' professional credibility. From the opposite direction, since he maintained that the expulsion was not "by design," he was also accused of drawing excessively narrow conclusions from the documents and of being too naive a reader of dissimulating statements. Despite these limitations, Morris' "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem, 1947-1949" is an authoritative record of the expulsion.

In anticipation of the publication of the revised edition, Morris was interviewed in Haaretz - ( http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/380986.html,
Hebrew original at
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/objects/pages/PrintArticle.jhtml?itemNo=380119). The major new findings in the revised book, based on fresh documents, further darken the picture.

The new archival material, Morris reveals, records routine execution of civilians, twenty-four massacres, including one in Jaffa, and at least twelve cases of rape by military units, which Morris acknowledges are probably "the tip of the iceberg." Morris also says he found documents confirming the broader conclusions favored by his critics: the expulsion was pre-meditated; concrete expulsion orders were given in writing, some traceable directly to Ben Gurion.

Morris also found documentations for Arab High Command calls for evacuating women and children from certain villages, evidence he oddly claims strengthen the Zionist propaganda claim that Palestinians left because they were told to leave by the invading Arab states. Morris had already documented two dozen such cases in the first edition. It is hard to see how attempts by Arab commanders to protect civilians from anticipated rape and murder strengthen the Zionist fairy tale. But that failed attempt at evenhandedness is the least of Morris' problems. As the interview progresses, it emerges with growing clarity that, while Morris the historian is a professional and cautious presenter of facts, Morris the intellectual is a very sick person.

His sickness is of the mental-political kind. He lives in a world populated not by fellow human beings, but by racist abstractions and stereotypes. There is an over-abundance of quasi-poetic images in the interview, as if the mind is haunted by the task of grasping what ails it: "The Palestinian citizens of Israel are a time bomb," not fellow citizens. Islam is "a world in which human lives don't have the same value as in the West." Arabs are "barbarians" at the gate of the Roman Empire. Palestinian society is "a serial killer" that ought to be executed, and "a wild animal" that must be caged.

Morris' disease was diagnosed over forty years ago, by Frantz Fanon. Based on his experience in subjugated Africa, Fanon observed that "the colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say, with the help of the army and the police, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil … The native is declared insensitive to ethics … the enemy of values. … He is a corrosive element, destroying all that comes near it … the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces" (from "The Wretched of the Earth"). And further down, "the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms" (let's not forget to place Morris' metaphors in the context of so many other Israeli appellations for Palestinians: Begin's "two-legged beasts", Eitan's "drugged cockroaches" and Barak's ultra-delicate "salmon"). Morris is a case history in the psychopathology of colonialism.

Bad Genocide, Good Genocide

When the settler encounters natives who refuse to cast down their eyes, his disease advances to the next stage -- murderous sociopathy.

Morris, who knows the exact scale of the terror unleashed against Palestinians in 1948, considers it justified. First he suggests that the terror was justified because the alternative would have been a genocide of Jews by Palestinians. Raising the idea of genocide in this context is pure, and cheap, hysteria. Indeed, Morris moves immediately to a more plausible explanation: the expulsion was a precondition for creating a Jewish state, i.e. the establishment of a specific political preference, not self-defense.

This political explanation, namely that the expulsion was necessary to create the demographic conditions, a large Jewish majority, favored by the Zionist leadership, is the consensus of historians. But as affirmative defense, it is unsatisfactory. So the idea that Jews were in danger of genocide is repeated later, in a more honest way, as merely another racist, baseless generalization: "if it can, [Islamic society] will commit genocide."

But Morris sees no evil. Accusing Ben Gurion of failing to achieve an "Arabenrein Palestine," he recommends further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including those who are Israeli citizens. Not now, but soon, "within five or ten years," under "apocalyptic conditions" such as a regional war with unconventional weapons, a potentially nuclear war, which "is likely to happen within twenty years." For Morris, and it is difficult to overstate his madness at this point, the likelihood of a nuclear war within the foreseeable future is not the sorry end of a road better not taken, but merely a milestone, whose aftermath is still imaginable, and imaginable within the banal continuity of Zionist centennial policies: he foresees the exchange of unconventional missiles between Israel and unidentified regional states as a legitimate excuse for "finishing the job" of 1948.

Morris speaks explicitly of another expulsion, but, in groping for a moral apology for the past and the future expulsion of Palestinians, he presents a more general argument, one that justifies not only expulsion but also genocide. That statement ought to be repeated, for here is a crossing of a terrible and shameful line.

Morris, a respectable, Jewish, Israeli academic, is out in print in the respectable daily, Haaretz, justifying genocide as a legitimate tool of statecraft. It should be shocking. Yet anybody who interacts with American and Israeli Zionists knows that Morris is merely saying for the record what many think and even say unofficially. Morris, like most of Israel, lives in a temporality apart, an intellectual Galapagos Islands, a political Jurassic Park, where bizarre cousins of ideas elsewhere shamed into extinction still roam the mindscape proudly.

Nor should one think the slippage between expulsion, "transfer," and genocide without practical consequences. It is not difficult to imagine a planned expulsion turn into genocide under the stress of circumstances: The genocides of both European Jews and Armenians began as an expulsion. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was the product of decades of thinking and imagining "transfer." We ought to pay attention: with Morris's statement, Zionist thinking crossed another threshold; what is now discussed has the potential to be actualized, if "apocalyptic conditions" materialize.

The march of civilization and the corpses of the uncivilized

It is instructive to look closer at the manner in which Morris uses racist thinking to justify genocide. Morris' interview, precisely because of its shamelessness, is a particularly good introductory text to Zionist thought.

Morris' racism isn't limited to Arabs. Genocide, according to Morris, is justified as long as it is done for "the final good." But what kind of good is worth the "forced extinction" of a whole people? Certainly, not the good of the latter. (Morris uses the word "Haqkhada," a Hebrew word usually associated with the extinction of animal species. Someone ought to inform Morris about the fact that Native Americans aren't extinct.)

According to Morris, the establishment of a more advanced society justifies genocide: "Yes, even the great American democracy couldn't come to be without the forced extinction of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds." Such hopeful comparisons between the future awaiting Palestinians and the fate of Native Americans are common to Israeli apologists. One delegation of American students was shocked and disgusted when it heard this analogy made by a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Morris's supremacist view of "Western Civilization," that civilization values human life more than Islam, has its basis in the moral acceptance of genocide for the sake of "progress." Morris establishes the superiority of the West on both the universal respect for human life and the readiness to exterminate inferior races. The illogicalness of the cohabitation of a right to commit genocide together with a higher level of respect for human lives escapes him, and baffles us, at least until we grasp that the full weight of the concept of "human" is restricted, in the classic manner of Eurocentric racism, to dwellers of civilized (i.e. Western) nations.

This is the same logic that allowed early Zionists to describe Palestine as an empty land, despite the presence of a million inhabitants. In the end, it comes down to this: killing Arabs -- one dozen Arabs or one million Arabs, the difference is merely technical -- is acceptable if it is necessary in order to defend the political preferences of Jews because Jews belong to the superior West and Arabs are inferior. We must be thankful to Professor Morris for clarifying the core logic of Zionism so well.

The color of Jews

Morris assures us that his values are those of the civilized West, the values of universal morality, progress, etc. But then he also claims to hold the primacy of particular loyalties, a position for which he draws on Albert Camus. But to reconcile Morris' double loyalty to both Western universalism and to Jewish particularism, one must forget that these two identities were not always on the best of terms.

How can one explain Morris' knowledge that the ethnic Darwinism that was used to justify the murder of millions of non-whites, including Black African slaves, Native Americans, Arabs, and others, was also used to justify the attempt to exterminate Jews? How can Morris endorse the "civilizational" justification of genocide, which includes the genocide of Jews, even as he claims the holocaust as another justification for Zionism? Perhaps Morris' disjointed mind doesn't see the connection. Perhaps he thinks that there are "right" assertions of racist supremacy and "wrong" assertions of racist supremacy. Or perhaps Morris displays another facet of the psychopathologies of oppression, the victim's identification with the oppressor.

Perhaps in Morris' mind, one half tribalist and one half universalist, the Jews were murdered to make way for a superior, more purely Aryan, European civilization, and the Jews who are today serving in the Israeli army, both belong and do not belong to the same group. They belong when Morris invokes the totems of the tribe to justify loyalty. But when his attention turns to the universal principle of "superior civilization," these Jews are effaced, like poor relations one is ashamed to be associated with, sent back to the limbo they share with the great non-white mass of the dehumanized. In contrast, the Jews of Israel, self-identified as European, have turned white, dry-cleaned and bleached by Zionism, and with their whiteness they claim the privilege that Whites always had, the privilege to massacre members of "less advanced" races.

False testimony

It would be marvelous if Morris the historian could preserve his objective detachment while Morris the Zionist dances with the demons of Eurocentric racism. But the wall of professionalism -- and it is a very thick and impressive wall in Morris' case -- cannot hold against the torrent of hate.

For example, Morris lies about his understanding of the 2000 Camp David summit. In Haaretz, Morris says that, "when the Palestinians rejected Barak's proposal of July 2000 and Clinton's proposal of December 2000, I understood that they were not ready to accept a two state solution. They wanted everything. Lydda, and Akka and Jaffa."

But in his book "Righteous Victims," Morris explains the failure of the negotiations thus: "the PLO leadership had gradually accepted, or seemed to…Israel...keeping 78 percent of historical Palestine. But the PLO wanted the remaining 22 percent. … At Camp David, Barak had endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state…[on only] 84-90 percent of that 22 percent. … Israel was also to control the territory between a greatly enlarged Jerusalem and Jericho, effectively cutting the core of the future Palestinian state into two…" Morris' chapter of "Righteous Victims" that deals with the '90s leaves a lot to be desired, but it still strives for some detached analysis. In contrast, in Haaretz Morris offers baseless claims he knows to be false.

If Morris lies about recent history, and even grossly misrepresents the danger Jews faced in Palestine in 1948, a period he is an expert on, his treatment of more general historical matters is all but ridiculous, an astounding mix of insinuations and cliches. For example, Morris reminds us that "the Arab nation won a big chunk of the Earth, not because of its intrinsic virtues and skills, but by conquering and murdering and forcing the conquered to convert." (What is Morris' point? Is the cleansing of Palestine attributable to Jewish virtues and skills, rather than to conquering and murdering?)

This is racist slander, not history. As an example, take Spain, which was conquered in essentially one battle in 711 A.D. by a band of North African Berbers who had just converted to Islam. Spain was completely Islamized and Arabized within two centuries with very little religious coercion, and certainly no ethnic cleansing. But after the last Islamic rulers were kicked out of Spain by the Christian army of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492, a large section of the very same Spanish population that willingly adopted Islam centuries earlier refused to accept Christianity despite a century of persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. 600,000 Spanish Muslims were eventually expelled in 1608.

Obviously, Islamic civilization had its share of war and violence. But, as the above example hints, compared to the West, compared to the religious killing frenzy of sixteenth century Europe, compared to the serial genocides in Africa and America, and finally to the flesh-churning wars of the twentieth century, Islamic civilization looks positively benign. So why all this hatred? Where is all this fire and brimstone Islamophobia coming from?

Being elsewhere

From Europe, of course, but with a twist. Europe has always looked upon the East with condescension. In periods of tension, that condescension would escalate to fear and hate. But it was also mixed and tempered with a large dose of fascination and curiosity. The settler, however, does not have the luxury to be curious. The settler leaves the metropolis hoping to overcome his own marginal, often oppressed, status in metropolitan society. He goes to the colony motivated by the desire to recreate the metropolis with himself at the top.

For the settler, going to the colony is not a rejection of the metropolis, but a way to claim his due as a member. Therefore, the settler is always trying to be more metropolitan than the metropolis. When the people of the metropolis baulk at the bloodbath the settler wants to usher in the name of their values, the settler accuses them of "growing soft," and declares himself "the true metropolis." That is also why there is one crime of which the settler can never forgive the land he colonized -- its alien climate and geography, its recalcitrant otherness, the oddness of its inhabitants, in sum, the harsh truth of its being elsewhere. In the consciousness of the settler, condescension thus turns into loathing.

Israeli settler society, especially its European, Ashkenazi part, especially that Israel which calls itself "the peace camp," "the Zionist Left," etc., is predicated on the loathing of all things Eastern and Arab. (Now, of course, there is the religious, post-1967 settlers who relate to the Zionist Left the way the Zionist Left stands in relation to Europe, i.e. as settlers.) "Arab" is a term of abuse, one that can be applied to everything and everyone, including Jews. This loathing is a unifying theme. It connects Morris' latest interview in Haaretz with Ben Gurion's first impression of Jaffa in 1905; he found it filthy and depressing.

In another article, published in Tikkun Magazine, Morris blames the "ultra-nationalism, provincialism, fundamentalism and obscurantism" of Arab Jews in Israel for the sorry state of the country (although Begin, Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, and most of Israel's generals, leaders, and opinion makers of the last two decades are European Jews). For Morris, everything Eastern is corrupt and every corruption has an Eastern origin.

One shouldn't, therefore, doubt Morris when he proclaims himself a traditional Left Zionist. Most of what he says hasn't been said already by David Ben Gurion or Moshe Dayan. Loathing of the East and the decision to subdue it by unlimited force is the essence of Zionism.

Understanding the psycho-political sources of this loathing leads to some interesting observations about truisms that recur in Morris' (and much of Israel's) discourse. Morris blames Arafat for thinking that Israel is a "crusader state," a foreign element that will eventually be sent back to its port of departure. This is a common refrain of Israeli propaganda. It is also probably true. But it isn't Arafat's fault that Morris is a foreigner in the Middle East. Why shouldn't Arafat believe Israel is a crusader state when Morris himself says so? "We are the vulnerable extension of Europe in this place, exactly as the crusaders."

It is Morris -- like the greater part of Israel's elite -- who insists on being a foreigner, on loathing the Middle East and dreaming about mist-covered Europe, purified and deified by distance. If Israel is a crusader state, and therefore a state with shallow roots, likely to pack up and disappear, it is not the fault of those who make that observation. It is the fault of those Israelis, like Morris, who want to rule the Middle East from behind tall walls and barbed wire.

Morris is deeply pessimistic about Israel's future; this feeling is very attractive in Israel. The end of Israel is always felt to be one step away, hiding beneath every development, from the birthrate of Bedouins to the establishment of the International Court of Justice.

Naturally, every Palestinian demand is such a doomsday threat. This sense of existential precariousness can be traced back to 1948; it was encouraged by Israel's successive governments because it justified the continuous violence of the state and the hegemony of the military complex. It may eventually become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But this existential fear goes deeper. It is rooted in the repressed understanding (which Morris both articulates and tries to displace) of the inherent illegitimacy of the Israeli political system and identity. "Israel" is brute force. In Morris' words: "The bottom line is that force is the only thing that will make them accept us." But brute force is precarious. Time gnaws at it. Fatigue corrodes it. And the more it is used, the more it destroys the very acceptance and legitimacy it seeks.

For Israel, the fundamental question of the future is, therefore, whether Israelis can transcend colonialism. The prognosis is far from positive. In a related article in The Guardian, Morris explains that accepting the right of return of the Palestinian refugees would mean forcing Israeli Jews into exile. But why would Jews have to leave Israel if Israel becomes a bi-national, democratic state? One cannot understand this without attention to the colonial loathing of the Middle East which Morris so eloquently expresses.

But taking that into account, I'm afraid Morris is right. Many Israeli Jews, especially European Jews who tend to possess alternative passports, would rather emigrate than live on equal terms with Palestine's natives in a bi-national state. It is to Frantz Fanon again that we turn for observing this first. "The settler, from the moment the colonial context disappears, has no longer an interest in remaining or in co-existing."

Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel.



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