Having made a couple of grumpy ‘plague on both your houses’ comments over at LP’s epic — but good — thread on the eleventy-third Israel/Palestine blow up, here’s a funny from DeusExMacintosh on the topic. For those interested in the actual politics (apart from me being grumpy), then there’s also (good and thoughtful) coverage over at the Australian Libertarian Society, Catallaxy and The Better Part of Valour.
28 Comments
Thanks for alerting me to that LP thread, SL, and to the other excellent posts.
Sort of highlights the dilemma, doesn’t it?
There is no high moral ground here for either government engaged in hostilities, but you just have to feel sorry for those on the ground in Gaza.
You highlight the dilemma clarence girl. Which side violated the ceasefire thousands of times before the other side reacted?
The question is not whether there are justifications for Israel’s incursions into Gaza (clearly, there are when your civilians have been under constant fire for 2 years).
The nub of the matter is how you make Hamas stop. So the real question is: will the action undertaken by the Israelis be effective in stopping Hamas? I’m not convinced that it will be – it may just make matters worse. And result in the loss of more innocent lives in the process.
Still, we’ll just have to wait and see. The problem is that Hamas accepts no quarter and no compromise – its only answer is that Israel should be obliterated. If they cared about the loss of civilian lives, they’d stop firing missiles into Sderot so that the Israelis withdrew, but no – they’d rather their own people be butchered so that the Israelis look really bad and lose support. I feel really sorry for the people on the ground too – stuck between a rock and a hard place.
No one comes out of this looking good.
I was talking to a friend about this, while giving a quick precis of reactions around Ozblogistan. Pretty grim stuff, lots of confected outrage, yada yada yada.
It then occurred to me that there are a mass of complicated issues swirling around this issue that have almost nothing to do with Israel. Only took me nearly 20 years to realise, but there you have it.
In Israel itself, I think that John H’s assessment is pretty much spot on. Hamas started this one, and Hamas are the ones who want Israel to stop existing. Easy to see who the sh*theads are. Strike one against the Islamic fundamentalist nutjobs.
But then there’s a whole other debate, which for me is symbolised pretty neatly by Obama in front of the AIPAC banners in DEM’s funny.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the ‘Jewish lobby’ outside Israel — for all its supposed money, power and influence — is actually terrible at its job. Why? For years it relied on attacking Israel’s opponents (and Israel’s perceived opponents) with one weapon, and one weapon only: accusing them of anti-semitism. Talk about how when a man’s got a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.
I’m not making this up, because I’ve experienced it myself. I had all and sundry accusing me of anti-semitism (and general racism, despite my black partner). It went on and on for months. It was impossible to fight, too, without descending into playground insults … in part because the words still meant something in 1995.
That said, I noticed during my travails that those words were rapidly losing their sting. I’d hear snide comments around the place (journos, mainly), along the lines of ‘oh, don’t worry about them, that’s what they always say’. And people started making jokes about it — people of all different political persuasions, too. And then 9/11 and Bali and 7/7 and truckloads more terrorism in Israel happened and the whole world got to see what real anti-semitism looks like — and this great, neat way of pinning the racist tail on people who clearly wanted Israel to stop existing and who absolutely hated Jews — had utterly evaporated.
Now the Jewish lobby just look like a bunch of bullies, especially in the US. The way they browbeat Obama during the election is a case in point. The guy clearly once had different views of the Middle East… but then, he had to win Florida. Case closed.
The problem is, that ‘bully’ tag has been transferred to Israel proper. The Bob Dylan song that Jason put up over at Catallaxy catches this; the reason it works so well is the song manages to delineate the way that Israel is the bloody opposite of a ‘neighborhood bully’. It focusses solely on Israel, on Israel’s situation (ie, being outnumbered to buggery by large numbers of people who hate you and wish you were dead) and helps you to appreciate the country for what it is.
It’s pretty clear to me — resorting once again to a bit of ye olde law and economics — that lots of Israel’s defenders are just rent-seekers, and the problem is, they’re rent-seekers not only in the US, but also in Israel, too — and it’s her good name with that section of world opinion that could be swayed in her favour that’s getting trashed.
I reckon if I dug up a whole bunch of Pew/Rasmussen poll data on American views of Israel (not among congress, but among the general public) and correlated it with annual lobbyist expenditure in real terms, then controlled the lot against how many times the tag ‘anti-semite’ got bandied about, the relationship would be bloody close to mathematically inverse. DPhil anyone? Bit of Freakonomics on a Sunday afternoon?
I agree with LE about the practical problem of making Hamas stop attacking Israeli civilians probably requiring something other than attacking Gaza. But then, I don’t imagine that there are many states that would react in a less extreme fashion in the same circumstances.
The problem that has emerged is that Hamas is able to feed so effectively on failure: they are the creature of a whole lot of opportunities not taken over decades and decades, and renewed conflict makes them look more attractive to many Palestinians who really can’t imagine things being otherwise. Even Israel’s successes will turn out to be failures in relation to the problem of Hamas.
I think it’s a pity that a lot of moderate and realistic pro-Palestinian positions seem to have become unavailable recently. People who were vilified in the 80s and 90s for their qualified support for Palestinian autonomy are beginning to look quite sensible now by comparison.
Sceptic lawyer
On my site (enpassant.com.au) I argue consistently for a one state solution.
I think this stuff about Hamas starting it is nonsense. There has been an unrelenting campaign by Zionism both before and after 1948 up to today against the Palestinians.
Zionism is an ideology of exclusion (ie racism) and has used terror consistently against the Palestinians since before 1948. The latest ongoing bombings – to teach the Palestinians not to exercise their democratic rights in ways that offend their masters, to cower them and destroy their infrastructure – continue this long history of Israeli state terror.
The solution is not to destroy the Jews or drive them into the sea or whatever else is the nonsense coming from Hamas, nor to collaborate with the occupiers as Fatah is doing, but to open Palestine up to all who want to live there, Jews, Palestinians and anyone else.
Zionism will not allow this, and given Israel is the fourth most powerful military in the world, supported by the US for whom Israel is the attack and watchdog, this will not occur through negotiations.
But the (mainly) US backed dictatorships in the region are unstable. Massive strikes broke out in Egypt earlier last year. Mubarak brutally suppressed them. They will recur and at some stage be successful.
If the Arab masses can overthrow one of their dictatorships and begin running society for themselves then the whole situation in the Middle East changes. Zionism as the backward step it has always been becomes clear to all and the possibility of a one state solution may arise.
It happened in South Africa. It can happen in Palestine. Not overnight, but history will work its way through this at its own pace and eventually it will happen.
Skepticlawyer and I had an argument about the Israel/South Africa comparison just this afternoon – she doesn’t agree with it, but I can see it. Difference choices were made about which was the ethnicly subordinate class (and apparently Jewish refugees were welcomed into South Africa with open arms during WWII) but I do think in Israel your civil rights are still largely determined by your religion – and that is a problem. As well as having the Palestinian territories in a resources and access headlock, even in Israel proper your religion will decide whether you can keep property and until relatively recently, where you could live. There are many places with happily mixed communities of course, but elsewhere middle class arabs have had to go to court before they can move into middle class areas that happen to be Jewish.
My suspicion is that a one-state solution is going to be necessary for purely economic reasons – I’m not sure the country is economically viable without everyone pulling together (and it certainly seems impossible for the Palestinian territories to be self-supporting). That may mean accepting a separation of synagogue and state in favour of a secular national government. It might also mean accepting the return of Palestinian refugees (my standard joke is that if the historic ‘land of Israel’ can wait a thousand years for the Jews to return then it can certainly wait fifty for the Palestinians).
Long live the United States of Israel and Palestine!
Talk about how when a man’s got a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.
Seinfeld’s uncle?
In Melbourne there are a lot of Holocaust survivors and descendants. I’d never encountered political Judaism until I’d moved here. The first time I encountered it I was reading a lot about ancient Sumerian mythology.
This mythology is very similar to Jewish mythology altho’ the moral compass is often reversed. In the Cain and Abel story, for example, Cain is the one that offers the sacrifice of a slaughtered animal which is rejected in favour of Abel’s garden vegetables thus inspiring him to slaughter his brother (makes sense really).
At lunch I was pointing this out to a friend and she got all hot and bothered and declared: “You know I’m Jewish!!!”
As if I’d said something anti-semitic!
She wasn’t particularly religious in fact she’d often challenged the Rabbis on feminist grounds but as a Goy I’m not allowed to discuss archaeological data illustrating the genealogy of mythology.
And then there’s puzzlements that Goys speak differently when Jews aren’t around. Thing is I don’t. I’ve known Jews since the cradle and I’ll damn well say what I want. They can lump it. They have no privileges. Sorry. It’s ridiculous to have to tiptoe ’round something as esoteric as Sumerian mythology for fear of being labeled a bigot.
I went and killed my brother ’cause God liked his bananas better n’ my lamb! Glad to see religion’s always been good for what it’s always been good for.
The one-state solution won’t work (imho).
the idea of Israel was as a Jewish state, a place where Jews wouldn’t be vicitimized because they were the majority. Given the, ahem, rather substandard civility of relations between Palestinians and Jews over the last little while I fully doubt they’d play nice together.
Given the, um, lack of modern governmentality amongst Palestinians I don’t think it’d be advisable. Israel’s unstable enough as it is. Add the three million ideological factions of the Palestinian Arabs and Israel’d make Italy look like Great Britain.
One of the things I personally like about Judaism is the room for dissent. The Talmud essentially consists of arguments between rabbis as to the proper interpretation of Biblical verse. It all seems very familiar to me as a common lawyer – and indeed, I have used Talmudic arguments to illustrate common law doctrines. Technically, perhaps I shouldn’t be making Talmudic arguments as I am a female shiksa, but I really don’t care about that, and have told people so. I say what I want, and I have found that my Jewish friends respect me because I try to make sure that I know what I’m talking about before I open my mouth.
But perhaps the Holocaust has weakened the capacity for dissent in some quarters. The problem is that when you treat a particular group of people abominably, a certain proportion will decide that the correct response is to follow suit and show no mercy. Some Israelis dismissively call those Jews who were slaughtered in the Holocaust “sabon” or soap – sheep who went willingly to the slaughter. They are determined never to let that happen again, and to fight tooth and nail against anyone who threatens them. Woe betide anyone who challenges this. One can understand this – if my family had been wiped out, perhaps I’d feel the same. But I think it’s really important to question the morality of one’s actions nonetheless.
Adrien, I would not call your comment about Sumerian mythology anti-Semitic. It is challenging to someone who believes in the Jewish faith. Any Jew who believes the accounts of the Old Testament verbatim is going to get upset with you because the inference is that their account is just another Middle Eastern myth. But that’s more an argument of comparative religion and ethnology than anti-Semitism.
To my mind, anti-Semitism is when people are anti-”Jews” as a monolithic entity, and have prejudice towards individuals of that ethnic group before they get to know them. It can consist of believing false conspiracy theories that Jews want to rule the world and must be stopped. It can consist of wanting to insult, hurt or kill a person just because he or she is Jewish.
I am someone with a lot of Jewish friends, from almost entirely secular Jews to ultra-orthodox Jews (Adass, Lubavitch etc). You can’t draw generalisations about the beliefs of my friends – they are as variable as the views of non-Jews. Some are Zionists, some are not, and the level of Zionism does not necessarily correspond to the level of religious observance. Indeed, some Hassidic and Lubavitch groups are actually anti-Zionist.
An important distinction is between anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic. Is someone who disapproves of the actions of the present or past Israeli government anti-Semitic? I do not believe so, and it devalues the notion of anti-Semitism to say so. However, some anti-Israeli feeling can verge on anti-Semitism when it turns into gross generalisations used to justify hurting or discriminating against Jewish people, either en masse or specifically.
My point of view is always that you must take people as they come – not merely as a “Jew” or a “Palestinian”, but as a human being with complex beliefs and emotions which can vary. You’re always going to meet some Jews or Palestinians who are bigots or nasty or violent. That doesn’t mean that everyone of that particular group has the same characteristics. The answer is for people to see the other side as human beings, not as a faceless monolithic mass who need to be wiped out.
Why even discuss a one state solution when it is bleedingly obvious that a two state has not succeeded?
This whole process is one of dragging the arabs into the modern world.
LE,
judaism encourages discussion and debate from an early age, they just never stop!
It must make for some good minds
“(and it certainly seems impossible for the Palestinian territories to be self-supporting)”
This is a real potential problem. Palestinians could get their state and find that they are dependent on foreign aid to survive, only to a lesser extent than they are now.
There are lots of complicating factors, like water access, the dependence on jobs in Israel, the legacies of decades of economic siege…
And perhaps the most intractable problem of a one-state solution – what to call it. I don’t think USIP will pass muster
My South African friends (and there are many, of all different backgrounds in Oxford) reject the apartheid comparison, for the same reason that I found being called racist very irritating. The comparison doesn’t hold. Apartheid involved — and I didn’t realise this until put right by a Saffie only yesterday — the deliberate resegregation of communities that had once been mixed.
Where do you think the ‘Cape Coloureds’ came from? Black people and white people had obviously been happily bonking away before Hendrick Verwoerd came along in 1948. Quite apart from that, there were all the things one associates with Southern Jim Crow laws — segregated pools, beaches, cinemas, schools, water fountains, public transport and parks — complete with signage and ‘pass laws’.
Apartheid is just too extreme to relevantly compare (you can make a case that apartheid was worse than Jim Crow, in part because blacks had no property rights vis-a-vis each other, let alone whites). In the US, there was always the possibility that an educated black person could at least become prominent among his own ethnic group as a businessman or soldier (think of the Tuskegee Airmen). Not so in South Africa.
Well Gaza is pretty segregated… so segregated its almost impossible to get out of if you’re Palestinian – it’s just that they’ve gone for absolute physical segregation using walls in Israel.
And I still think Israel should sack its overseas lobbyists (if it’s at all possible, or at least tell them to STFU). At the moment they’re doing more harm than good.
And some evidence: Pew data here, with the glorious little factoid that 73% of Europeans supported Israel in 1973, while 67% of Europeans now support the Palestinians.
Spain currently tops the hate heap, led from the front by a moonbat President who, among other things, has commented that ‘it’s understandable that someone might justify the holocaust’ (click through for an article, then on the link supplied if you speak Spanish or Italian — he gets nicely wound up).
It’s called losing the PR war, fellas.
L’eagle – Any Jew who believes the accounts of the Old Testament verbatim is going to get upset with you because the inference is that their account is just another Middle Eastern myth.
.
That’s it. She didn’t. It’s just that the hairs on the back of her neck rise whenever a Goy talks Jewish stuff. It’s just the way it is. She knows, she used to say: I’m Jewish I have a persecution complex.
.
As a Holocaust survivor I knew once used to say: What can you do?
.
JJ (FF) – Palestinians could get their state and find that they are dependent on foreign aid to survive, only to a lesser extent than they are now.
.
I’ve linked to it before and I’ll link to it again. If you read Joe Sacco’s Palestine you’ll see there a lot of people there who endeavour to educate their children and strive toward economic betterment. That is they’re not all theocratically batshit.
The Israel policy of intentionally stifling the Palestinian economy is understandable but it’s preventing Palestinians from developing economically and perpetuating their dependence on Jihadist groups and states like Iran.
Trouble is it’s a war and you can’t tell people to help the economy of the people they’re at war with. It doesn’t compute.
Pleasantries first: Happy New Year to y’all. Now, down to business.
1. It is time people stopped referring to the Hamastanians as “Palestinians”. Has anyone noticed that since Hamas assumed the Gaza caliphate, public displays of the Palestinian flag have basically vanished? All you see in Gaza now is a sea of Green – flags, towels on heads, etc. It is a different story in the West Bank where the Palestinian national flag still flutters.
2. I have always snorted at this specious “Palestinian” national identity as a ruse cooked up by the KGB following their bitchslapping in 1967. The Hamastanians in Gaza are not fighting for a small enclave to call their nation state. They are simply a link in a semi-regionally-articulated imperialist Islamist campaign.
3. The root cause of this is simple. It is called “The Koran”.
4. And why do people keep talking about this “truce”? Who signed it? It does not appear on the Net. And since when has Gaza been a nation state, a member of the UN, with the legitimacy to enter into agreements with legitimate nation states like Israel?
5. Meanwhile in Oz, the Luvvies are stepping their “Human Rights Act” jihad. Why? To provide complete access to Australia for Muslims across the globe. This is not an “Australian” Bill of Rights!
6. The Israelis have every right to keep up the offensive until the Hamastanians say “Uncle” and agree to every single condition Israel demands.
7. Israel has made it clear it intends to “change the rules of the game”.
May they triumph.
Adrien
Your steely resolve in the company of Yids is admirable. But tell me, are you similarly resolute in the company of Muhammadans?
Actually, that’s a good point.
Mr Greenfield,
I believe this trend goes hand in hand with the disappearance of moderate pro-Palestinian positions. It’s getting uglier on both sides, on the ground in Gaza and elsewhere in the world.
While I don’t disagree with Israel having the right to defend its citizens, somebody has got to figure out how to weaken Hamas effectively: killing people in Gaza is only the answer if they intend on annihilating everybody in Hamas, which strikes me as near to impossible, and will be a blow to their legitimacy in working with a post-Hamas Gaza. Anything less means Hamas gains martyrs, and more support from beleaguered Palestinians who can’t see a way out. Israel needs to find a carrot to go with their stick. They may have a right to continue (and they may not), but should they?
As for @20: I can pretty much guarantee that Adrien is as much of a pain in the ass to Muslims as he is to Jews.
But tell me, are you similarly resolute in the company of Muhammadans?
Yeah.
Skeptic’s right that is a good point viz the Hamas flags. Evidence of ideological totalitarianism perhaps?
If they’d kept the UN very simple and practical the Chinese would’ve come in by now and made everyone play nice.
The way this is going there’s going to be a Big Fat War!
I can pretty much guarantee that Adrien is as much of a pain in the ass to Muslims as he is to Jews.
Indeed.
But that’s nothing to the Hell I give the Catholics.
ha ha ha ha ha!
SL says:
“The comparison doesn’t hold. Apartheid involved — and I didn’t realise this until put right by a Saffie only yesterday — the deliberate resegregation of communities that had once been mixed”
You conveniently ignore the fact that 80% of Gazans were originally in Israel proper, or are the children of such persons. At that time they were not segregated from their Jewish neighbours. Obviously a Palestinian trapped in Gaza is entitled to reflect on how his predicament is not altogether different from that of a black South African trapped in a Bantustan.
The middle east always reminds me of the tragedy of Romeo & Juliet…West Bank Story even!
West Bank Story