Old World New Ideas

Nations, Institutions, and Symbols

2011-03-26T19:11:00.004-04:00

After a short tour through Mondoweiss, it has come apparent to me that anti-Zionists in the West are very persistent in their arguments about the illegitimacy of the national cause of the Jewish people (i.e. Zionism) as compared to the national cause of the Palestinian Arabs. In an attempt to counter their arguments, I will present to you a short overview of the institutions and symbols of the these two national movements.

But first, I want to say the following:

While I view the Palestinian people as a real people with a common heritage and history deserving of at least some part of the historic British Mandate of Palestine, their national consciousness has come after the modern Zionist movement. But this is common to all national movements. The main aim of this post isn't to show that the Palestinian national cause isn't as real as other national movements. My aim is to show that Jewish nationalism isn't anymore artificial than the Palestinian one by virtue of its followers realizing it, building it, and expressing it sooner than the latter. I'm hoping to show anti-Zionists why the creation of the State of Israel was natural result of a real people expressing themselves and fighting towards self-determination.

And now for the overview:

I. Institutions

Political and Infrastructure - I'm admitting ahead of time that my selection of organizations/institutions is debatable (some more than others). My criteria is that the organizations were significant vehicles or advocates within their movements.

Israel

Palestine

World Zionist Congress (1897-present)

Jewish National Fund (1901-present)

Jewish Agency (1929-present)

Assembly of Representatives/Knesset (1920-present)

Palestinian Arab Congress (1919-1928)

Arab Higher Committee (1936-1948)

Palestine Liberation Organization (1964-present)

Palestinian National Authority (1994-present)

Education - I picked the top three based on size, prestige, and date of establishment. Not scientific.

Israel

Palestine

Technion (1914)

Hebrew University (1918)

Tel Aviv University (1956)

Islamic University of Gaza (1978)

Birzeit University (1953*)

Al-Quds University (1984)

*1953 is when the institution began offering first-year university level courses.

II. Symbols and Documents

Israel

Palestine

Declaration of Independence

National Anthem (adopted)

Flag

1948

Hatikva (1897)

First Zionist Congress (1897)

1988

Fida'i (1996)

PLO (1964)

If I missed any important institutions, symbols, or documents, please write below in the comment section.

Peres lets the cat out of the bag

2011-02-23T00:32:00.002-05:00

Since Peres has already revealed the secret, I might as well talk about it. We, the Jewish people, under the leadership of the Elders of Zion, are behind the recent uprisings in the Arab world. That's right, I said it. We did it!

You must be thinking, "who the hell is this schmuck, and what is he smoking?"

Don't worry, this is a drug-free blog, and there is no need to use pejoratives, so let me explain.

Yesterday, President Shimon Peres said that the West should push Google and Facebook in the Arab to help Middle Easter countries reform. It is undoubted that Google and Facebook helped flame the heated protests in the Middle East.

But so what, what does Google and Facebook have to do with Jews? Well who founded Google and Facebook? Instead of waiting for you to check Wikipedia, I'll just tell you. Behind Google, are Sergey Brin and Larry Page; behind Facebook are Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin. What do all four of these accomplished men have in common? They are all Jewish!

613 mitzvot

2011-02-23T00:29:00.003-05:00

365 (the number of days in a year) + 206 (the number of bones in the human body) + 42 (the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything) = 613 (the number of mitzvot)

Awakened from my slumber

2009-11-04T16:20:00.003-05:00

I wrote two new posts about the UNHRC and the Goldstone report at my new address here

By the Numbers: the UNHRC vote on the Goldstone report
Statements by former UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Louise Arbor from 2006

Moving to iKibbitz>>>>

2009-09-21T01:44:00.002-04:00

If any of you are wondering, I'm trying to revive my blogging at iKibbitz.com

Will Norman Finkelstein break the seige?

2009-09-07T18:06:00.003-04:00

A week ago, I read on Mideast Youth that Norman Finkelstein is organizing a coalition to break the siege of Gaza through a mass demonstration on the 1st of January of next year hoping that it will attract significant world media attention. Finkelstein has always intrigued me because of his clash with establishment academia. He's definitely radical which highly contrasts with my shifting view towards the center.

I believe he's mostly known to Arab activists in North America and Europe but not a frequent speaker in the Middle East. Ali Dahmash of Mideast Youth writes:

It is disappointing that he doesn’t get any attention from Arab media or officials. I would love to see him touring our Universities and addressing our youth but I won’t be surprised if he was harassed by Arab governments as well. Let’s wait for January 1st and see what Mubarak will do?

I would have thought that he'll more likely get in trouble with Hamas in Gaza and not with Mubarak because one of the first details one learns about him is that he's the son of Holocaust survivors, and the Holocaust is one thing Hamas believes to be a "Zionist lie".

Unfortunately for Finkelstein, from the statement he recently posted on his website, it seems that the coalition and organization of the march has been hijacked. The statement isn't long so I think it is worth for me to reprint it in its entirety:

Why I resigned from the Gaza Freedom March coalition:

The original consensus of the International Coalition to End the Illegal Siege of Gaza was that we would limit our statement to a pair of uncontroversial, basic and complementary principles that would have the broadest possible appeal: the march to break the siege would be nonviolent and anchored in international law. I agreed with this approach and consequent statement and decided to remove myself from the steering committee in order to invest my full energies in mobilizing for the march. During the week beginning August 30, 2009 and in a matter of days an entirely new sectarian agenda dubbed "the political context" was foisted on those who originally signed on and worked tirelessly for three months. Because it drags in contentious issues that--however precious to different constituencies--are wholly extraneous to the narrow but critical goal of breaking the siege this new agenda is gratuitously divisive and it is almost certain that it will drastically reduce the potential reach of our original appeal. It should perhaps be stressed that the point of dispute was not whether one personally supported a particular Palestinian right or strategy to end the occupation. It was whether inclusion in the coalition's statement of a particular right or strategy was necessary if it was both unrelated to the immediate objective of breaking the siege and dimmed the prospect of a truly mass demonstration. In addition the tactics by which this new agenda was imposed do not bode well for the future of the coalition's work and will likely move the coalition in an increasingly sectarian direction. I joined the coalition because I believed that an unprecedented opportunity now exists to mobilize a broad public whereby we could make a substantive and not just symbolic contribution towards breaking the illegal and immoral siege of Gaza and, accordingly, realize a genuine and not just token gesture of solidarity with the people of Gaza. In its present political configuration I no longer believe the coalition can achieve such a goal. Because I would loathe getting bogged down in a petty and squalid public brawl I will not comment further on this matter unless the sequence of events climaxing in my decision to resign are misrepresented by interested parties. However I would be remiss in my moral obligations were I not humbly to apologize to those who, either coaxed by me or encouraged by my participation, gave selflessly of themselves to make the march a historic event and now feel aggrieved at the abrupt turn of events. It can only be said in extenuation that I along with many others desperately fought to preserve the ecumenical vision that originally inspired the march but the obstacles thrown in our path ultimately proved insurmountable.

I highlighted the important phrases above.

Some sanity from Avigdor Lieberman?

2009-07-06T09:18:00.002-04:00

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that he will avoid negotiating West Bank policy.

"As far as I am concerned, there is a conflict of interest when someone who lives in a settlement, in an isolate town that is not even counted among the settlements, takes part in the issue," he said.

At least he's not as stupid as the Shas MK heading the Housing Ministry.

Adler's Analysis of Mondoweiss

2009-06-29T09:29:00.002-04:00

Yaacov Lozowick linked on his blog to a very lengthy and detailed analysis of the folks of Mondoweiss (Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz) and Max Blumenthal by Jay Adler. Adler clearly shows what their cause really is. I easily discovered their intentions just by reading the comments below Mondoweiss blog posts. I left a comment on Adler's post asking him to write an analysis of Richard Silverstein because Silverstein was once said that he doesn't see any antisemitism in the comments on Mondoweiss.

The International Campaign to Scapegoat Israel

2009-06-22T09:45:00.002-04:00

The title above is a great line from Jeffrey Goldberg describing the efforts of those who try to delegitimize Israel through the lens of double-standards and prejudice.

Richard Silverstein and James von Brunn share at least one belief

2009-06-12T20:56:00.004-04:00

Harry's Place has an excellent blog post by guest Petra Marquardt-Bigman reviewing Richard Silverstein's atrocious piece in the Cif (Guardian) about the horrible attack on the Holocaust Museum by white supremacist James von Brunn.

Silverstein said this:

People like Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, live for tragedies like this. You wait. Tomorrow or the next day he'll be holding a press conference with the security guard's wife telling the world that African-Americans and Jews must make common cause against the vast antisemitic conspiracy. If he’s really feeling his oats that day he might even work in a reference to an evil Iranian president who denies the Holocaust as well. Mark my words, it’s coming.”

As Petra points out, Foxman did not act that way. He acted like any decent human being would, saying this:

“The shooting at the United States Holocaust Museum, in which a security guard was critically wounded, is a very sad and tragic event which reminds us, as the Museum itself does every day, in the starkest way, where the spread of hatred can lead. […]Brunn’s evil attack, at the very place that was created to remember and teach about evil in the world, is an immediate reminder that words of hate matter, that we can never afford to ignore hate because words of hate can easily become acts of hate, no matter the place, no matter the age of the hatemonger. […]”

I would expect this from Silverstein, but where is Cif's journalistic standards.

Richard Silverstein, it is you who live for these moments making snide remarks against people and institutions you don't like.

One of Harry's Place' readers pointed one more thing - Brunn and Silverstein share at least one false and hate-filled idea - that African Americans are the tools of the Jews. That's right, go scroll back up and look at the excerpt. Notice in Silverstein's description of the theoratical press confrence by Abe Foxman and the presense of Officer John's widow and the rallying of African Americans? I wonder what his response will be to this? Perhaps he ment Zionists?

Refugee Camps in Lebanon

2009-06-10T17:15:00.002-04:00

Under Michael Totten's article about the recent election in Lebanon, I noticed this comment about the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon:

What have been called “Refugee Camps” for 3 generations would be termed “Illegal Settlements” if they were populated by Jews.

Who is the most open and democratic country in the ME?

2009-06-09T15:43:00.003-04:00

According to Al Jazeera, Lebanon is the most democratic country in the region. The country where the President has to be a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of the Parliament has to be a Shi'a Muslim, is sooo much more democratic than Israel.

Also according to Al Jazeera, Lebanon is the most open country in the region, even though it trails both Israel and Kuwait in freedom of press according to Freedom House.

Something a little different

2009-05-29T10:16:00.000-04:00

"Burning Bright" by Shinedown

I feel like there is no need for conversation
Some questions are better left without a reason
And I would rather reveal myself than my situation
Now and then I consider, my hesitation
The more the light shines through me
I pretend to close my eyes
The more the dark consumes me
I pretend I'm burning, burning bright

I wonder if the things I did were just to be different
To spare myself of the constant shame of my existence
And I would surely redeem myself in my desperation
Here and now I'll express, my situation

[CHORUS (2)]

There's nothing ever wrong but nothing's ever right
Such a cruel contradiction
I know I cross the lines its not easy to define
I'm born to indecision
There's always something new some path I'm supposed to choose
With no particular rhyme or reason

[CHORUS (2)]

Reading ...

2009-05-18T12:02:00.003-04:00

It's been awhile.

1. Excellent article posted on normblog - Therapists to the Jews: Psychologizing the 'Jewish Question' (by Shalom Lappin).

2. JPost blog post- An Iranian in Tel-Aviv.

3. NYTimes article - On Fiery Birth of Israel, Memories of 2 Sides Speak.

4. Israeli launches on-line tuition-free university.

5. Arabs in the IDF, conflict of identity.

6. The excellent Khaled Abu Toameh on the failure of Oslo and Western intervention on behalf of the Palestinians, and the terrible state of Palestinian politics.

Update: 7. Hinduism, just like Zionism?

In the news

2009-05-17T15:37:00.002-04:00

Fadi Eyadat of Haaretz reports:

Some 40.5 percent of Israeli Arabs believe the Holocaust never occurred, according to the results of a University of Haifa poll released Sunday.
The survey shows that Holocaust denial among Israeli Arabs has become more prevalent in recent years. In 2006, 28 percent of Israeli Arabs polled denied that the Holocaust occurred.
The annual poll of Jewish-Arab relations, which was conducted by Professor Sami Samuha, also found that only 41 percent of Israel's Arab minority recognize the country's right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, as opposed to 65.6 percent in 2003.
Moreover, only 53.7 percent of the Israeli Arab public believe Israel has a right to exist just as an independent country, according to the poll, down from 81.1 percent in 2003.
"This radicalization in the positions of Arabs was caused by a series of factors such as the Second Lebanon War, the stalemate in the negotiations with the Palestinians, the failure to implement the conclusions of the Or committee, closing the case against the Border Police troops who shot dead the Israeli Arab protesters in October 2000, and more," Samuha said.
700 Israeli Arab men and women participated in the survey, which will be published in its entirety on Monday.

Last week I wrote about the evolving Zionist narrative accepting certain parts of the Palestinian narrative.

Stupidity and the dumbing down of the populace is prevalent in politics everywhere. Changing that will bring peace.

Are neoconservatives ahead of their time?

2009-05-17T15:03:00.002-04:00

I'm listening to the NPR program on the Star Trek franchise. The program notes that as much as neoconservatism has gotten a bad rap in the last 8 years, Gene Roddenerry's (the creator of Star Trek) vision of the future is neoconservative where a Federation of Planets, a "coalition of the willing" if you will, is socially liberal and interventionist. In the new movie, Captain Peko calls it a "humanitarian and peace-keeping armada."

Star Trek is liberal and progressive. Nichelle Nicholes was perhaps the first black woman to be featured in a major television series not playing a maid. The franchise series regularly portray women as major shapers in human history, such as having women captains and admirals (Condi?). It also portrays other races, or species in this case, as equals and allies in the progressive development of the world or galaxy. Captain Kirk, played by the Jewish William Shatner, regularly kisses characters of other specie and race.

Star Trek, Israel, and Palestine

2009-05-17T12:51:00.007-04:00

[Spoiler Alert! This post will discuss some of the movie's plot so don't read this till after you watch the movie, unless you don't care or don't plan to watch the movie.]

I watched JJ Abram's new Star Trek movie yesterday. It was pretty good, not excellent. I think it was made with the goal of expanding the appeal of the franchise to a wider audience instead of recreating the old appeal the franchise has to the usual fans such as myself. Yes, I love Star Trek, but in a cheap Jewish way, meaning I don't buy anything. You couldn't tell what movies I like by looking at the walls of my rooms.

Anyway, the reason I want to talk about this movie is because the narrative reminded me of the narrative of Jews and Palestinian Arabs. In the movie, two races lose their homeworlds, sort of. Nero of Ramulus, the villian, loses his homeworld but subsequently goes back in time. He hunts Spock of Vulcan, the hero, was supposed to save Ramulus but failed because of no fault of his own. Nero, seeking retribution, makes Spock watch the destruction of Vulcan instead of working to prevent the destruction of Ramulus in the future.

Like Nero, Zionists partially blame Palestinians for the Holocaust and dispossed the majority of them. Unlike Spoke, the Palestinians in the 30's and 40's fought hard against what could have saved millions of Jews, as evident by the White Paper. Like Nero, the Palestinians fought for the destruction of their enemy's homeland, Israel, instead of trying to build a new one. Like Spoke, after the Holocaust Zionists built a place to perserve the Jews.

New interest in legal/philosophical theories and principles

2009-05-12T00:53:00.003-04:00

Today is the second time in the last couple of weeks I found my self going through dozens wikipedia pages and online articles regarding legal and philosphopical theories and principles. I like to apply thought from these ideas to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since there are so many, I'll try to discuss a limited amount of them and what its analytical application to the conflict might produce and my critic of all this. It will be hard to limit how much I discuss each day because they are all related.

So here is my first attempt at the task I mentioned above.

Many activists critical of Israel cite numerous UN resolutions and "international law." I and many Israelis have come to the conclusion that the UN and the many of the bodies within are not worthy of the conformity of individuals and the governments that represent them. Here is why:

The United Nations is a collection of governments. Such organization has its strengths and its weaknesses. One of these weaknesses is that not every member is truly represenatitive of the people residing under its sovereignty. In simpler terms, they are not democratic.
In order for me to respect the UN as an authority, I must see some proof that this "social contract" will provide social and political order. I have not seen the UN attempt to secure these things sufficiently in all member states.
The UN uses language of rights to cloak political goals giving them positive connotations. For example, the UN Human Rights Council and Anti-Racism confrences where human rights violations and racism were not condemned but were displayed front and center.

I haven't cited any specific theories yet but the last two points above come from my reading of this wikipedia article (regarding point 2) and this wikipedia article(regarding piont 3).

My diagnosis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

2009-05-12T00:02:00.003-04:00

Dissocial personality disorder (as described by WHO) - personality disorder characterized by disregard for social obligations, and callous unconcern for the feelings of others. There is gross disparity between behavior and the prevailing social norms. Behavior is not readily modifiable by adverse experience, including punishment. There is a low tolerance to frustration and a low threshold for discharge of aggression, including violence; there is a tendency to blame others, or to offer plausible rationalizations for the behavior bringing the patient into conflict with society.

Two Nazi soldiers arrested for stealing credit card from a Jew in Warsaw Ghetto

2009-05-11T11:06:00.003-04:00

Anshel Pfeffer of Haaretz reports:

Two Israel Defense Forces soldiers were arrested for allegedly looting the home of a Palestinian in Gaza during the army's offensive against Hamas earlier this year.

The soldiers, who serve in the patrol battalion of the Givati infantry brigade, are suspected of stealing a credit card belonging to a Palestinian whose home they entered during the fighting.

The two soldiers are alleged to have used the card to purchase goods worth thousands of shekels. The army's police investigative unit launched a probe into the allegations last month after receiving a complaint. A Palestinian residing in the northern Gaza Strip claimed his credit card was stolen during Operation Cast Lead. A short time later, his credit card statement revealed that a number of products were purchased in Israel.

As per the orders of a military judge, authorities have yet to release details of the investigation so as not to prejudice the outcome. The two soldiers have been ordered to remain in military jail for fear that they would try to tamper with evidence. A hearing in the matter is scheduled for Wednesday.

"Recently the Military Advocate General has received a small number of complaints from human rights organizations and private attorneys, including claims that private property belonging to Gaza Strip residents was taken during Operation Cast Lead," the IDF spokesperson's office said. "Given the credibility of the complaint military prosecutors ordered the military police to open an investigation during which testimony will be heard for purposes of examining the claims."

If you are still confused by my title, it is a joke on how people compare Israel to Nazi Germany.

The Evolving Zionist Narrative

2009-05-11T09:46:00.003-04:00

"Poll: many Israelis no longer accept key part of the Zionist narrative" - That's the title the blogger of Realistic Dove gave to the post about this study.

A total of 47 percent of Israeli Jews believe that Palestinians were expelled from Israel during the 1948 war, with 39 percent saying that "The refugees left due to fear, calls of leaders and expulsion by the Jews," and another 8 percent saying the refugees left due only to expulsion by the Jews. Another 41 percent said that the refugees left "due to fear and calls of leaders to leave," the traditional "Zionist narrative."

Some 46 percent believe that Israel and the Palestinians are equally responsible for the outbreak and continuation of the conflict, while 4 percent blame only the Jews. Some 43 percent primarily blame the Palestinians.

In a question about who bears responsibility for the outbreak of the 1987 intafada, 23.6 percent of respondents said it was "Mainly natural hatred towards Israel," and another 17.2 percent said it was "somewhat due to hatred." Some 32 percent responded that the 1987 intifada was caused "More or less equally due to hatred and other reasons (such as unwillingness to be controlled and harsh treatment by Israel)."

I don't think that many Israeli Jews no longer believe in a key part of the Zionist narrative. It is just that the Zionist narrative has evolved to better reflect historical research.

Let's not forget that there are many different kinds of Zionism, each providing its own perspective on history. The study is a reflection of that.

When historians go through historical archives, interview people, or gather any kind of evidence, they choose what is relevant and what is not. Journalists do the same and they are at their best when they are objective. But of course, journalists and historians are still human and will never be objective in everything that they do.

The first time I heard about the "conflict of narratives", it was during my high school trip to Israel. The speaker was a smart American-born historian with a best seller book about the 1967 war. I am of course talking about Michael Oren who is now the new ambassador to the US.

I believe that the Zionist narrative's greatest strength, as compared to the Arab Palestinian narrative, is that its a lot more open to discourse and debate. This of course, comes from the environment the observers live in. Anti-Zionists and critics of Israel hold the faith or nationality of their spokespersons front and center when they are Jewish or Israeli. The implication is that since some of the other side believe in their narrative, it must have merit over the other. But as my psychology teacher said, "correlation does not imply causation." I am implying that the society of many anti-Zionists (i.e. the Arab and Muslim world) is totalitarian to an extent as this report about 88% of Palestinians in Palestinian jails being held with out trial indicates. But I might fall to my own biases and correlate without looking at the causation.

I am no authority to say who is a good historian and who is not. I didn't read Oren's book on the 6 Day War but I did read his other book on America in the Middle East, "Power, Faith, and Fantasy...", a book I highly recommend.

Rabbi Reuven Firestone: An Introduction to Islam for Jews

2009-05-10T21:03:00.002-04:00

A friend pointed me to this very interesting video.

Progressive except Palestine

2009-05-04T06:41:00.001-04:00

Progressive Except on Palestine (PEP) is a phrase and acronym coined by blogger Philip Weiss. People of Weiss' crowd use this term or acronym to refer to liberals, especially Jewish American liberals, who hold "progressive" positions on every issue except on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It stands for people who usually raise their voices, something that Jews do best, for causes for freedom and justice, but are unwilling to criticize Israel when it becomes aggressive towards Palestinians and its neighbors. I'm bringing this up because I think this expression is narrow minded.

PEP is what they would call me. I am a liberal Jewish American (though I lived much of my youth in Israel) who doesn't confrom to their "assimilationist" hard left. Over the last two years, I have become aware of certain faults of the Left of which I still identify as. But I still disagree with many of right-wing people on Israel and other issues. I am very much against the settler movement.

Foreign critics of Israel complain about the most insignificant things. I accept criticism of the settlements, but when they start talking about Israeli immigration policy and marriage laws, it starts to become hate. People who use the term PEP become PEP. They don't think Arabs can, or at least don't have to, become progressive.

Double-standard, everybody uses that term in regards to Israel. Israel activists say that critics of Israel hold Israel to a standard that they themselves don't follow and definetly don't hold that standard to Israel's enemies. Palestinian activists say that the West lets Israel regress punishing the Arabs while holding them to a harder standard. But if the UN is any guide, the latter faults.

Bret Stephens in the WSJ shows how bad the Left's coverage and perception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become. It's selective moral outrage. Instead of loving Israel for being progressive and for its potential, people hate her for being old fashioned, using Western models such as nationalism and nation-state. Perhaps that is why liberals gravitate to this conflict. In the West, that's what liberals do, change, fix, destory, remold, and reform the state. They view Israel as a Western expression. Unfortunately, the West doesn't have a very good history with those of the Jewish character.

Zionism isn't like the 1960's civil rights movement in the US. That movement encompassed all of America. Zionism on the other hand is exclusive. It is specific for the Jewish people. But in its own rights it has given Israel's Arab citizens rights and freedoms like none other in the Middle East. But by not striving to help Arabs seek their own freedom and security, it has failed to show the Arabs the attributes of the movement. There were other forces at play. Pan-Arab nationalism was headed by dictators, and Islamist movements followed. The political freedom activist just hasn't been able to operate in the region.

Many lefties are now calling for a one-state, to encompass all Jews and Arabs from the river to the sea. But why only there? They say it is the only way to ensure freedom for all. If the Lebanon, Yugoslavia, and India-Pakistan is any guide, it is doomed to fail. I know that they advocate for this because it would mean Israel's destruction. These people hate exceptionalism. If one person loses, everybody loses. That's basic liberal ideology. Welfare, that's one issue I moved more to the center. We have to show everybody the path to succeed, but artificially lifting those that can't at the expense of others is wrong. Like I mentioned earlier, Zionism didn't show Arabs the path to gain their own freedom and security. And a one-state solution won't either. The West would have to be exteremely hostile towards Israel and the Jews to implement this, and with the already hostile environment, it is a receipy for disaster.

Secular Haredism

2009-05-03T22:24:00.002-04:00

Gideon Levy had another one of his anti-occupation anti-war rants. I call it a rant because he uses every spin in the book to make his argument. He is so detached from reality I don't know where to start.

Someone that goes by the name of Mike left this comment on the online version of the rant:

The imagination that one should not respond to lethal attacks in their country against fellow civilians because of morality is distorted thinking.
This is the secular version of Haredism where one seeks purity through separation from reality.
Cheap spirituality at the expense of others

I couldn't say it any better.

The week that was

2009-05-03T21:53:00.002-04:00

I went to a Lutheran Church with my father and grandmother this afternoon for a concert of Bach's Mass in b-minor. There was a lecture in the beginning given by Prof. Wolf who teaches at Harvard and speaks with a German accent. Even though the church wasn't even 60 years old, it still had that church feeling with the color-stained windows depicting biblical scenes and the massive organs. Surprisingly, there wasn't a massive cross with a carved dead Jesus on it. Maybe because it was Lutheran. But it was still one of those places that you don't feel comfortable till you hear two people with Jewish accents talk about Tanakh behind you. Yup, the cantor of a local synagogue and his family were there as well. The only thing that would have topped it was if the choir sang "Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh" instead of "Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus".

The concert was all my father and grandmother hyped it to be. I am familiar with Bach but this "Mass" was very good, with 4 soloists, a full choir, and a small orchestra. Sure, I closed my eyes a few times, and it took them forever to go through just four words, but I was awake when it counted.

On another matter, I volunteered at a local community playground construction. You can read the Jewish Times article about it here. It's amazing what a shovel and some dirt can do to the soul sometimes.

The only Republican ever I'll vote for ...

2009-04-28T22:07:00.006-04:00

.... is a DEMOCRAT! The NYTimes reports:

In an unexpected turnabout in political loyalties, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania announced on Tuesday that he was leaving the Republican Party to become a Democrat

As a Democrat from Maryland who goes to college in Pennsylvania, I always said that Arlen Specter is the only Republican I'll ever vote for.

On more legal news

2009-04-28T18:34:00.003-04:00

Haaretz has an AP report on another legal case in the Holy Land, this time under the jurisdictiona of the Palestinian Authority:

A Palestinian military court has sentenced a man to death by hanging for selling land to an Israeli company.
Land sales are considered treason by the Palestinians because of their long-running dispute with the Israelis, however the sentence is unlikely to be implemented.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas routinely withholds the required approval for executions. Several others are on death row as suspected informants for Israel.
The sentence was handed down Tuesday in a military court in the West Bank city of Hebron after two days of closed-door hearings.
Prosecutor Issa Amer said the defendant sold land that didn't belong to him in the village of Beit Ummar using forged documents.

Ouch!

Free Speech vs Incitement to Lawless Action

2009-04-27T18:42:00.011-04:00

There is an interesting case right now in Israel about the arrest of seven people who operate two websites suspected of encouraging youths to not enlist in the IDF and gave advice on how they can dodge service. The police released the suspects after questioning and confiscated several computers and documents.

According to a statement issued by the Justice Ministry spokesman at that time, the Web sites of New Profile and Target 21 were suspected of preaching evasion of military service, thereby violating Article 109 of the Penal Law. They were also suspected of helping those slated for military service to obtain an exemption by deceit or by knowingly submitting false information, the ministry said.

Members describe New Profile as a feminist organization.

"The organization does not encourage people to evade military service," she told The Jerusalem Post. "It is in favor of refusal to serve and anti-militarism, but it does not encourage conscripts to do so if they do not want to in the first place."
Ben-Natan added that when the organization explained the options open to a conscript who does not want to serve, it did not include illegal options such as forging medical opinions.
But the state thinks otherwise. In its September announcement that it was opening an investigation, the Justice Ministry spokesman said, "The deputy attorney-general believes that the gravity of the incitement on these sites, in its scope, quality and thoroughness - and especially by the fact that it also tries to persuade conscripts to obtain an exemption by deceiving the army, and gives finely detailed instructions on how to execute this deception - obliges the state to deviate from its [usual] highly restrained policy of not investigating a priori suspicions of incitement to evasion of military duty."

I'm bringing this up because this case prompts an intereting debate on the matter of law and freedom.

It would be more appropriate for me to refer to Israeli law, but I am more familiar with US jurisprudence and it has a much longer history. SinceI am going to refer to US Supreme Court cases, I want to make it clear that I am using the Israeli case as just a launching pad for my post discussing law regarding free speech and that Israel isn't obligated by American jurisprudence.

In the US, falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded movie theater is illegal. Wikipedia actually has an article about this which I used as a starting point for my adventrue through American jurisprudence (if by now you don't know what jurisprudence means, google it). This scenerio refers to a passage in the unanimous opinion in Schenk v. United States (1919) which established the "clear and present danger" test which deemed regulations of speech constitutional if the prohibited language poses a clear and present danger.

I highly encourage readers to read further about the cases I discuss and the people involved.

The "clear and present danger" test was later modified in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) which established the "imminent lawless action" doctrine. This doctrine states that speech is NOT constitutional protected if it advocates criminal activity immidiately. This doctrine is the current legal standard in the US.

Now let's apply this to the current case in Israel. Did New Profile publish texts trying to persuade youths to use deceit to evade military service?

The New Profile charter states: "While we were taught to believe that the country is faced by threats beyond its control, we now realize that the words 'national security' have often masked calculated decisions to choose military action for the achievement of political goals. We are no longer willing to take part in such choices. We will not go on enabling them by obediently and uncritically supplying soldiers to the military which implements them.
We will not go on being mobilized, raising children for mobilization, supporting mobilized partners, brothers, fathers, while those in charge of the country go on deploying the army easily, rather than creating other solutions."

I do not interpret this as advocating "immidiate lawless action". But this is not all the organization published. I don't exactly what else they have published but if they did advocate to youths how to evade "military duty", I would say that it does fall under the "immidiate lawless action" doctrine".

I'm interested how this will play out. There is another incident which was investigated I'd also like to apply American jurisprudence too. I'm referring to when soldiers were incited to refuse orders to evict settlers. The article I linked above is from the end of November of last year. I don't know how it played out.

Deputy State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan has instructed police to launch an investigation regarding a ceremony that was held to praise soldiers who refused an order to evict settlers from the Hebron market. During the ceremony these soldiers received payment as reward for their refusal.
The order was given following a police investigation that raised suspicion that soldiers were incited to refuse commands, an act which under Israeli law is a crime in itself.
Nitzan also ordered an investigation into an ad published on the Internet by a group called the Headquarters to Save the People and the Land of Israel, which is suspected to be the organization responsible for orchestrating the ceremony for the soldiers. The ad states that any soldier that resists orders to evict the residents of the Hebron house will receive monetary reward of several thousand NIS.

I think this obviously falls under "immidiate lawless action". If New Profile advocated in the same "scope, quality and thoroughness" as this ultra-right settler organization, than they too would be guilty under the same doctrine of "immidiate lawless action".

Kuwait, Hamas, and freedom

2009-04-22T15:47:00.004-04:00

If there is one country in the Middle East that can teach democracy to the region, which one would it be? Definetly not Kuwait:

Salah Bahman, an independent candidate for the Kuwaiti parliament, has dropped out of the race a day after he called for full normalization of relations between Israel and Kuwait, igniting a storm of controversy in the Persian gulf state.

I was actually going to write about the politician and what a great move forward he is. Unfortunately Kuwait begs to differ.

Palestine?

Hamas has dismissed allegations that it systematically killed and maimed dozens of opponents during and after Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, the news Website ANI reported on Wednesday.
In a report released earlier this week, the Human Rights Watch accused Hamas of directing its gunmen to eliminate political opponents and suspected collaborators under the cover of Israel's military offensive in Gaza.

Lebanon is a pseudo-democracy heavily under the influence of Iran.

Israel? Perhaps that's why they are so afraid of Jewish self-determination. They, the Arab governments, are afraid that the Arabs will ask for their own transperent, democratic, and responsible government.

Al Jazeera, Al Dura, and Youtube

2009-04-21T08:58:00.002-04:00

People who are familiar with the Al Jazeera English Youtube channel know that they allowed people to post comments on their videos. Videos were filled with comments in a matter of minutes. Like all Youtube videos regarding political issues, especially about Israel and Jews, there were many antisemitic comments. It now appears that Al Jazeera has disabled the comment feature of their Youtube videos. I can't really say that it is unfortunate because the discussions there didn't resemble anything close to intelligent.

For those that wonder why I watch Al Jazeera English, it is because I want to see what the Arabs are saying. I also like to watch the debates between Israeli pundits and opposing pundits. Do I think Al Jazeera is a good network? No. Here's why. They are still talking about Al Dura and only give slight mention at the end of the program that "some" question whether Al Dura actually died. Look here and watch this if you still have doubts.

Blog mission restated

2009-04-20T22:48:00.003-04:00

When I started this blog, my main goal was to cover stories about New Ideas such as social cohesion, caring about the environment, technology, democracy, and human rights being brought to the Old World, aka the Middle East. In this regard, I failed. I let the old political debate overcome me. Honestly, I'm bad at changing my bad habits. It is something I have to change as I grow older.

Durban II

2009-04-20T12:17:00.002-04:00

It's finally here. The much anticipated event in the blogosphere and the international diplomacy scene has exploded online and offline. Here are some interesting pieces from blogs and newspapers about the UN-sponsored Anti-Racism conference:

1. Haaretz article about the exit of dozens of delegates during Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speech. Includes a CNN video of when the delegates were leaving.

2. Haaretz has two correspondants writing two opposing views about the "forum", one for the boycott and one against the boycott. The first by Benjamin Hartman calls the conference "a self-righteous Anti-Zionist jamboree". He explains why the UN has lost any credibility with Zionists and Jews:

Then-Israeli Ambassador to the UN Chaim Herzog told the UN General Assembly in 1975, after resolution 3379 ("Zionism is racism") was passed, "For us, the Jewish people, this resolution based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value. For us, the Jewish people, this is no more than a piece of paper and we shall treat it as such."

So before you reference any UN resolution to a Zionist, keep in mind that he/she and many other people view the UN has having no credibility. I also view the UN has having no credibility. Here is why, when billions of people from scores of states have no influence, either by voting or other democratic processes in their own countries, on how they are represented in the UN, how truely is the UN representatives of the people of the world?

3. Haaretz correspondant Ariel Zibler has the opposing view. Instead of giving my own summary of the article, I'll show you two opposite responses commenters left on the article. Someone by that went by the name "Wmr" had this to say:

There`s nothing to be afraid of, and there are very intelligent and capable people in Israel that would leave these clowns from "democratic countries" in the dust.

An opportunity lost.

Someone that went by the name "getting it wrong" said this:

The last paragraph shows the true agenda of this refusal to face reality,the false hope of appeasementand and a touch of self-hate thrown into the mixture.

Israel`s survival as a Jewish State is not some intellectual exercise that should be subject to discussion with those who would destroy it.

I concur with the second commenter.

4. Harry's Place has a guest post by UJS Students in Geneva Liveblogging from the conference. The writer is describing the mass walkout of delegates, attendants, and protesters, including an appearance by Alan Dershowitz. The writer has an important question:

... whether or not the walk-out has been permanent or temporary…more later.

This conference is looking more and more like the antisemitic orgy that its organizers planned and the liberal supporters wished to ignore.

Iran's drones

2009-04-17T18:09:00.002-04:00

Iranian state-run news agency Press TV ran a story on its website this week praising the unveiling of an Iranian-made drone, that according to the Israeli daily Maariv bears a striking resemblance to an earlier photo taken in Israel of an Israeli-made drone.
I'm still not convinced it's the same UAV.

Gideon Levy and Israel

2009-04-17T11:44:00.004-04:00

Gideon Levy has this issue with Israel. He's sobbing over the fact that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis don't agree with him. He claims that the occupation has been "completely missing from the national agenda" because the Knesset is "devoid of Jewish anti-occupation activists".

There are some very fundemental flaws in his argument. First of all, assuming that there are no "anti-occupation" Jewish MK's, does that mean that all the Jewish MK's are in favor of ruling over another people just for the heck of it? Second, does supporting a two-state solution to end the occupation not "anti-occupation" enough? The answer to these two questions is obviously no. In Netanyahu's first speech as PM, he said that Israel does not want to rule over another people. And Kadima, the party which supports a two-state solution, has won the most seats in the recent election.

Levy's columns are usually about how horrible the occupation or the wars are and how Israelis are generally blind to it. The most surprising thing in this is that he blames the "blindness" on the Israeli media. Hello? You are party of the media, Mr. Levy. You are write regularly in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper. Not only that, who does he think mans the checkpoints? Settlers? No, the IDF does, and who serves in the IDF? I really doubt that soldiers are silent about what they do in the West Bank.

Rather than focus on why so many Israelis support the security measures, aka the occupation, Mr. Levy focuses on why everybody else doesn't share his passion showing how bad Israelis are. I'd like to see Levy write saying that he supports unilateral withdrawl of the West Bank and what he thinks will happen afterwards. Isn't that what he supports? His biggest audience is outside of Israel, people who like to get their fix from the source.

Levy is blinded by his ideology. He is neither effective nor constructive. There are too many negative adjectives one can attach to Levy. Take your pick.

So much to write, so little time to actually do it

2009-04-17T09:02:00.004-04:00

For the last several weeks if not two months, I have been so busy. Aren't we all? I shouldn't complain. I have been gathering links to articles I found interesting. I'll show you two of them today but there will be more to come later. To some I'll write long responses and counter arguments, while others I'll just mention briefly to share what I found interesting.

A new issue from the Palestine-Israel Journal has come out dealing with "The Refugee Question" aka the Palestinian "right of return". This journal gives Palestinian and Israeli perspectives on Palestine-Israel issues. I can't say I'm a long time follower but I found this issue interesting. The first article in the issue I read was by Salman Abu Sitta called "The Implementation of the Right of Return". I must admit it was very uncomfortable to read. It is very well presented and deals with a wide range of issues. There are flaws in his argument and his approach is a bit detached from reality no matter how many figures or spins he makes. It was so powerful and yet uncomfortable that I just have to write a response. I don't know when I'll post it but hopefully it will be in the next few days.

I don't know how often David Brooks of the NYTimes writes about Israel but he has a column on her today. It was an admirable characterization of Israeli society which is a nice break from what Roger Cohen has been doing for the last few months. Brook's column makes me miss my days in Israel. I like reading articles generally describing societies. There was an Op-Ed a few months ago about Japanese society that I also found intriguing. I can't say Brook had anything new to say but it might be new to other NYTimes readers.

Sometimes life is just the process of keeping up with it.

I'm back

2009-04-14T09:07:00.002-04:00

Hello readers. I've finally found time to blog again. Anyway, I found this video at Jewschool. It shows a Jewish Jerusalemite, an Arab Jaffan (Yafo/Yaffa, not Jiffa), and a Jewish Tel-Avivan speak about their perception of history, their narrative. In less than 5 minutes it shows you the conflict of two narratives, and the humanity behind it. This video was created by Amy Rubin.

From the Jewschool post:

In her introduction to the video she writes, ” Trying to achieve peace in Israel without addressing the past is akin to trying to find a cure for cancer by treating the symptoms without ever considering why the cancer developed in the first place.”

I can only add that I believe that we (Jews, Arabs and everyone else in this world) have very slim chances of moving ahead if we can’t take a clear, honest look at history.

A commenter that goes by the name 'Firouz' left a long comment so I'm going to put only some of it here:

I must say, in all these years, I have never experienced a Palestinian empathize with the Jewish experience in the levant. The classic case of “acceptable empathy” is often with regards to the Holocaust, where Palestinians feel they can empathize with the Jews without undermining their essentially political agenda. In fact, this Holocaust empathy is often turned around on the Jews - we empathize with you about the Holocaust in Europe, now you should empathize with us about the Holocaust in Gaza.

But to exhibit a real understanding, much less empathy, for the situation in which the Yishuv found itself in the early part of the 20th century and leading to 1948… I have never seen a Palestinian do so. Indeed, thinking about it now, I’ve never experienced a Palestinian question the actions of their community leading up to Israel’s birth, besides bemoaning that Arab disunity meant it could not be aborted.

I am left to understand that such considerations would be anathema for “the other”, and this makes me question what purpose such an exercise in history serves, when the empathy of one, becomes a weapon for another.

I think Rubin's and Firouz's persepctive both have merit. But Firouz is right that these exchanges of narratives don't go far enough. How constructive are these? They soften us and prepares us for the "divorce" but how much impact do they have on Palestinian society? I know of a few programs that brings together Israeli and Palestinian youth but they are always in small numbers.

This video was also posted on Huffington Post and someone left this comment:

Beyond debate:There was about equal exchange of Jews and Arabs between Muslims world and Israel.

Beyond debate: Israel absorbed the entire stream of the Jewish refugees.

Beyond debate: Muslim world keeps Palestinian Arab refugees in deplorable conditions and deny them basic human rights.
Primary Reason: Even great-grandchildren of Palestinian immigrants must be kept indigent and without hope so as not to reward Israel.

It is important to remember that forces that led to this conflict are regional, not just between two people fighting over one piece of land.

What I'm reading this morning

2009-04-06T09:34:00.006-04:00

1. Bahrain embraces its Jews. All 36 of them.

2. The leading reformist candidate, Mirhossein Mousavi, in upcoming Iranian presidential elections on Monday condemned the killing of Jews in the Holocaust. "Our country was harmed because of extremist policies adopted in the last three years.... My foreign policy with all countries will be one of detente."

3. Israeli whiz kid behind Google's advanced search algorithm.

4. How to build a Palestinian state, by Khaled Abu Toameh

In the news

2009-04-02T01:00:00.002-04:00

1. Egypt will boycott new Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman unless he apologizes for insulting statements he has made about the country, an Egyptian official said Wednesday.
2. The Palestinian Authority has issued yet another warning to Palestinians against selling their homes or properties to Jews, saying those who violate the order would be accused of "high treason" - a charge that carries the death penalty.

3. Dozens of Amish residents from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, toured a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn's Crown Heights to learn more about their culture.

4. Gazan workers hurt in Israel not getting due insurance. Someone blames Zionism.

5. Arab couple sues fertility clinic for malpractice. Nobody commented yet but I promise you someone will blame Zionism soon.

Latest Palestinian to be expelled

2009-04-02T00:07:00.005-04:00

A Palestinian woman was expelled from Palestine on Tuesday. The latest victim of "racism" and fascism was told by the authorities that she had to leave because those are the instructions to those holding her identification card.

Fortunately, she was given refuge and citizenship in Israel.

Wait, I thought you just said that she was expelled?

She was, but it was by Fatah authorities under pressure from Hamas.

Well then she must have done something terribly wrong.

She's a music teacher.

Well, she must have used it to indoctrinate the children against the wishes of the cause.

She held concerts for Holocaust survivors, families of captured Israeli soldiers, and to families of Palestinians in jail.

She can't do that. She's identifying with the racist and fascist enemy. The parents must be angry because she did these things without their permission.

Actually, she is famous in the Jenin camp she works at. And she was speaking with the children's parents when she was given the order to leave. And how is Israel fascist when they allow an elected Arab MK to identify with Iran, a country whose government openly advocates for Israel's destruction, saying that she wished that they get a nuclear bomb? While Palestinian authorities won't even allow their fellow Arabs to even play music to, or with, non-government elderly Israelis. Also, the Palestinians gave conductor Daniel Barenboim, an Israeli Jew, honorary Palestinian citizenship for bringing Israeli and Palestinian musicians together. How are they any different?

Zionism is racism. Palestine will be free! From the river to the sea!

NOW Lebanon

2009-04-01T10:35:00.003-04:00

NOW Lebanon has two interesting articles.

1. Comedy and criminals at Doha: For Lebanon in particular, the support voiced for Sudan’s president in Doha is cause for concern.

2. Interview with Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm. Intro:

Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, the Syrian philosopher, made his name after the 1967 Six Day war when he published a book entitled Self-Criticism After the Defeat, which looked hard at what it meant to be Arab. Following this, as he did, with the Critique of Religious Thought in which he dismissed many Arabs as, he says, "a bunch of sectarians," landed him in jail in Lebanon in 1970. A leading light of leftist philosophy in the Middle East, he is now emeritus professor at Damascus University, although his books have been repeatedly banned there. He also teaches at a number of Ivy League universities in the US. NOW Lebanon sat down with him to discuss Islam, Syria and freedom of speech.

Read the rest here.

Sufian Abu Zaida Addresses Netanyahu

2009-04-01T10:21:00.002-04:00

From the Israel Policy Forum blog - In today's Yediot Acharonoth, Fatah leader and former PA Minister Sufian Abu Zaida addresses Netanyahu personally.

Also from that blog, a group of Israeli windsurfers that led the battle against building a marina on the Haifa beach is offering help to Lebanese surfers who are trying to prevent a new plan to build a huge artificial island. (Israel Radio)

What I'm reading

2009-04-01T09:30:00.000-04:00

1. Parody/critic of Caryl Churchill's "Seven Jewish Children" 10-minute play. The parody is called "Seven Themes for Caryl Churchill" and is featured on normblog.

2. Another parody of Churchill's play called "Five British Children: A Play for Britain (by Shalom Lapping)".

3. No matter how much Israel allows their minority, even elected officials, to say treasonous statements, people still equate it with Nazi Germany and fascism.

4. General of Israeli "Nazi" Forces raps soldiers for tasteless t-shirts.

5. Study by the United Nations Development Program finds that 70% of Palestinian youth believe that violence to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not very helpful.

Only 8 percent believe violence is an important tool, the study, based on interviews with 1,200 Palestinians over the age of 17 in the West Bank and Gaza.

It found that 39 percent were "extremely" depressed and 42 percent were depressed by their conditions. Depression was more marked in the Gaza Strip where 55 per cent said they were "extremely" depressed.

When asked to define their identity, 47 percent identified themselves as Muslims, 28 per cent as Palestinians, 14 percent as humans and 10 per cent as Arabs.

Funeral owner Haniyeh probably isn't happy.

6. Sharp rise in number of reports of soldiers harming Palestinian civilians. Not good.

7. Haaretz poll: 54% of public dissatisfied with new government and it hasn't even done anything. Not surprising though. At least it is better than the 3% approval of Olmert.

8. UNRAW's director of operations, John Ging, threatens employees who don't disassociate themselves from political parties, mainly Hamas and Fatah.

HaMisrad

2009-03-30T22:57:00.002-04:00

The hit TV show 'The Office', which originated from the UK and reproduced for an American version, is coming to Israel!

The cast will include a variety of Israeli types - an Arab warehouse manager, an ultra-Orthodox saleswoman and a bitter Russian accountant. The Israeli answer to David Brent, the obnoxious boss of the U.K. program, will be named Avi Meshulam, though an actor has yet to be pegged for the role.

I'm actually excited for a TV show for once.

In response to the news, Gervais told the U.K. newspaper The Guardian, "I am thrilled and amazed that Israel is making 'The Office' with local writers, directors and actors. I mean, who ever heard of Jewish entertainers?"

I'm already laughing and they haven't even started filming.

Darfur Muslim Refugees demonstrating in Israel to support ICC

2009-03-30T11:24:00.000-04:00

Check this out. Israel, the only country that welcomed the inconceivably persecuted peoples of Darfur, joyfully rallied to celebrate the decision to prosecute the Islamist President of Sudan for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

I'm pro-democracy, not pro-Palestine

2009-03-29T23:39:00.004-04:00

I happened to stumble upon the Palestine "Think" Tank website today. I wanted to learn a little bit the "thinking" and "logic" that goes behind the Palestinian reasoning for disbanding a Jenin youth orchestra after performing in front of Holocaust survivors in Israel. I'll show you a few excerpts from the related article in the PTT and the website's "About" page.

"Shame on us!" That's the title of the article written by Khalid Amayreh, a "journalist" from the West Bank, about the disbandment of the youth orchestra I talked about above. Most sensible would think Amayreh is pointing the shame on the Palestinian authorities for disbanding the orchestra. Unfortunately, sensibility is one quality Amayreh lacks. Amayreh is pointing the shame towards the Palestinian authorities, but not for disbanding the youth orchestra, rather for letting these children perfom in Tel Aviv in the first place. Here it is in full:

Warning: The following material contains excessive amounts of ignorance and hate.

It is really hard to write on this subject without getting angry. We all know the extent to which Israel can be evil and satanic. After all, we Palestinians have been on the receiving end of Israeli savagery for decades.

In fact, being thoroughly tormented and killed by the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the holocaust has always been and continues to be “the” Palestinians’ way of life.

However, for some Palestinians to allow themselves to be duped to sing and play music to their oppressors and child-killers is simply beyond the pale of human dignity.

It is at least as insulting and humiliating as some Jews were forced or duped to play music to SS, Gestapo and Wehrmacht soldiers during the Second World War. In both cases, the act was meant to humiliate the victims and rob them of the last visages of human dignity.

And now, Jews in Israel are doing the same thing to Palestinians, Nazism’s vicarious victims.

Last week, a few innocent kids from the Jenin refugee camp were surreptiously taken to Tel Aviv to “cheer up and take part in peace-promoting activities.”

However, once there the kids were unceremoniously driven to a reception where they were made to play music and sing to “holocaust survivors,” some of them are former members of the Hagana and Irgun terrorist gangs who had taken part in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and expulsion of Palestinians form their homeland.

God knows how much Palestinian blood did these so-called “holocaust survivors” shed in 1948 and subsequent years. Certainly, Deir Yasin, Tantura, Dawaymeh, and the numerous other massacres were not committed by UFOs. They were committed in cold blood by these very people our children are now cheering up.

Shame on us a thousand times!

Some of the kids were instructed to utter words that should never be uttered by the victims of Zionism. One of the participants reportedly dedicated a special song to Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier taken prisoner by Palestinian fighters in Gaza nearly three years ago. No mention, not even an allusion, was made of the estimated 10,000 Palestinian political and resistance prisoners languishing in Israeli dungeons and concentration camps.

But the kids apparently felt they had to say anything they were asked to say in order to show gratitude for the Jewish “peace contractor” who got them out of the ghetto, otherwise known as Jenin refugee camp, even for a six-our outing in Tel Aviv.

I am not against showing genuine sympathy with the victims of the holocaust. However, a sympathy that is manipulated to justify, rationalize or even extenuate the crime against humanity that is Israel is worse than a crime if only because it serves to promote and perpetuate oppression.

As human beings, we Palestinians do sympathize with all victims of Nazism, Stalinism and imperialism, the wept, the over-wept, and especially the unwept who constitute the vast majority of victims.

Having said that, however, I strongly believe that no honest person under the sun has the slightest right to demand that we pay the price for what the Nazis did or may have done to European Jews nearly 70 years ago.

We didn’t send Jews to the ovens. The Germans did. We didn’t starve Jews to death as Jews are doing to us today in the Gaza Strip.

We didn’t incinerate Jews in Gas chambers as Jews have recently incinerated Palestinian children with White Phosphorus.

Hence, of all people in this world, Palestinians must never be made to feel guilty for what the Nazis and other Europeans did to Jews. I say so because a feeling of guilt, even a modicum of guilt, on our part, would be construed or misconstrued as a vindication of Zionism, the Nazism of our time.

There are additional reasons that make the latest insensitive manipulation of Palestinian suffering especially ugly and dishonorable.

First, nearly all the young musicians who were taken to Tel Aviv came from the Jenin Refugee camp. For those who have forgotten, this is the very same refugee camp that Israeli tanks pulverized in 2002. According to eyewitnesses, Israeli tanks and bulldozers destroyed homes right on top of innocent civilians, including the physically handicapped, while dozens of innocent civilians were systematically massacred, very much like Jews were at Ghetto Warsaw. The massacre at the camp was so hideous that Israel refused to allow UN officials to access the camp to inspect what happened.

Well, again the Nazi analogy is inescapable. Just imagine surviving Jewish children from Treblinka or Bergen Belsen made to sing to SS soldiers!!

Second, the disgraceful concert in Tel Aviv comes on the heel of Israel’s genocidal assault in Gaza where Israeli warplanes showered the children, women and men of coastal enclave with White Phosphorus and other missiles and bombs of death while Israeli Jews were gleefully celebrating the “victory on Hamas” and Israeli rabbis preoccupied with classifying gentiles into “children of light” and “children of darkness.”

In Gaza, the Zionist Jews exposed their shame to all the people of the world by acting like primitive barbarians and murderous savages.

Hence, the utter shamefulness of sending Palestinian children to Tel Aviv to help Israel’s hasbara efforts whitewash Israel’s pornographic barbarianism in Gaza.

Finally, it is obvious that the PA bears much of the blame for this disgraceful event. The PA should never allow so called “cultural exchanges” and “cultural normalization” with the murderers of our children, the very state whose leaders and military commanders view us as “scum, vermin and animals” that ought to be exterminated.

Unfortunately, the PA itself encourages some demoralized Palestinians to endear themselves to Israel, even in the cheapest of manners.

The often cordial meetings and exchanging of kisses between Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert, the butcher of Gaza, leave one and only impression, not only on the children of the refugee camp in Jenin, but also on TV viewers around the world.

As you can see from the above, it contains massive amount of ignorance, hate, and fascism - what they accuse Israelis of being. I couldn't believe this is real. It's like we talk two different languages.

The funny thing is, I thought the performance by the Jenin youth orchestra put the Palestinians in better light, showing their good side. Unfortunately, they don't like their good side, or rather what we in the West think is good, is not what they think is good. How am I, a two-state solution advocate, supposed call myself "pro-Palestinian" as well as pro-Israel when other pro-Palestinian advocates are ignorant and hateful? I support the two-state solution because I think that it is unhealthy for Israel to hold on to land where people can't vote. But, as Hillel said, "If I do not advocate for myself, who am I?" As long as we differ on what is obviously good, I can't advocate for Palestinian rights.

Now lets move on to their About page. It should tell us a little bit more about the Palestinian movement. Here are a few excerpts:

It is the belief that Zionism is wrong. Zionism is racism. For Zionism to happen, it means the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of the land of Palestine. We accept nothing about Zionism as being positive, yet we believe there are some people who don't know exactly what Zionism is, and therefore assume it is something different than an ideology, and therefore, is beyond criticism.

This is as expected. It is the result of generations of Arab propaganda. Unfortunately, even the Arab "moderates" teach their children the same.

We believe that the just struggle of the Palestinian people is the greatest liberation struggle of our times, and we aim to render service to their cause through presenting as many aspects of their history, culture and struggle as we can.

"Greatest"? This is why the media, especially the Arab media, is always focused on Israel. It is the cause of the greater Arab nationalism led by various people of the time, most notebly Nasser of Egypt.

[...] since the full realisation of the potential of people in the entire Arab world has been hindered for far too long by the "International Community".

Looks very similar to Article 13 from Hamas' charter:

Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Abusing any part of Palestine is abuse directed against part of religion. Nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its religion. Its members have been fed on that. For the sake of hoisting the banner of Allah over their homeland they fight. "Allah will be prominent, but most people do not know."

Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the (Palestinian) question. Some accept, others reject the idea, for this or other reason, with one stipulation or more for consent to convening the conference and participating in it. Knowing the parties constituting the conference, their past and present attitudes towards Muslim problems, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not consider these conferences capable of realising the demands, restoring the rights or doing justice to the oppressed. These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Muslims as arbitraters. When did the infidels do justice to the believers?

"But the Jews will not be pleased with thee, neither the Christians, until thou follow their religion; say, The direction of Allah is the true direction. And verily if thou follow their desires, after the knowledge which hath been given thee, thou shalt find no patron or protector against Allah." (The Cow - verse 120).

There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.

The PTT has plenty of criticism of Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah's Palestinian Authority. I haven't seen anything yet about Hamas. The rest of the About page sounds like old German and Soviet propaganda during WWII.

New Ideas vs Old World

2009-03-29T10:57:00.004-04:00

Last week, a Palestinian youth orchestra "serenaded", as the NYTimes article called it, a group of Holocaust survivors in Israel. Unfortunately, Palestinian authorities disbanded the youth orchestra from the West Bank after performing calling the Holocaust a "political issue."

"She exploited the children," said Hindi, the head of the camp's popular committee, which takes on municipal duties. "She will be forbidden from doing any activities.... We have to protect our children and our community."

The move highlights the sensitivity of many Palestinians over acknowledging Jewish suffering, fearing it would weaken their own historical grievances against Israel.

I don't know about you, but I saw the performance as a gesture of peace and good will. It's too bad the children are more mature than the politicians. I am waiting for the day an Israeli orchestra can tour through Arab countries. I am waiting for the day I can take a car and drive from Jerusalem to Beirut to Damascus to Baghdad.

If the Arabs are going to turn everything to a political issue, it is time that they "own up" to their treatment of minorities; own up to the estimated 900,000 Jews that fled or were expelled from Arab/Persian countries. Own up to the alliance that Arab leaders had with Nazi Germany in the 1930's and 40's.

My family fled Tunisia in 1961. It is perhaps a similar story to many Palestinian families. But I, and most Jews from Muslim countries, do not hold grudges against their countries of origin. I do not ask for any compensation.

I believe the reason the Palestinian Arabs hold a grudge, while the Mizrachi/Sephardic Jews do not, is because they let themselves be pawns in the greater schims of Arab leaders. Their entire focus is on Israel. Hardly a beep about Arab policy to keep Palestinians in "refugee" camps for generations, or discrimination to keep them poor. Israeli Arabs, and to an extent the Palestinian in the occupied territories, live in much better conditions than the Arabs around Israel. Who has a greater chance to go to medical school, an Israeli Arab or a Jordanian, Egyptian or Saudi?

Before the intifadas and without the various terrorist Palestinian organizations, Palestinians in the territories could have "enjoyed" the benefits of Israel, including medical care. I'm not saying that there should be one-state, it wouldn't solve the reason for why we need a Zionist Israel. If the Palestinians want to vote, than the two-state plan is the only way.

The NYTimes and Khaled Abu Toameh of the JPost have more details on the story.

What I'm reading (or watching)

2009-03-25T15:40:00.003-04:00

1. Review of "The Israel Lobby" by CAMERA showing how fraudulent Walt and Mearshiemer are.

2. Article about a how Palestinians used George Orwell's Animal Farm play to criticize local politics.

3. Article by an Israeli Arab journalist about the hateful agenda of 'pro-Palestinian' activists on American campuses.

4. Interview of the Arab journalist mentioned above. The video is about how Western media anti-Israel bias is hurting Israel and the Palestinians as well.

5. Video lecture from the Jerusalem Center about war crime allegations against Israel and International Law.

Palestine victim of Arab betrayal

2009-03-24T00:23:00.001-04:00

The following article is so powerful, that I want to show all of it.

INTERNATIONAL donors pledged almost $4.5 billion in aid for Gaza earlier this month. During the past few years it has been very painful for me to witness the deteriorating humanitarian situation in that narrow strip where I lived as a child in the 1950s.

The media tends to attribute Gaza's decline solely to Israeli military and economic actions against Hamas. But such a myopic analysis ignores the problem's root cause: 60 years of Arab policy aimed at cementing the Palestinian people's status as stateless refugees to use their suffering as a weapon against Israel.

As a child in Gaza in the '50s, I experienced the early results of this policy. Egypt, which controlled the territory then, conducted guerilla-style operations against Israel from Gaza. My father commanded these operations, carried out by Palestinian fedeyeen (Arabic for self-sacrifice).

Back then, Gaza was already the front line of the Arab jihad against Israel. My father was assassinated by Israeli forces in 1956.

It was in those years that the Arab League started its Palestinian refugee policy. Arab countries implemented special laws designed to make it impossible to integrate the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab war against Israel.

Even descendants of Palestinian refugees who are born in another Arab country and live there their entire lives can never gain that country's passport. Even if they marry a citizen of an Arab country, they cannot become citizens of their spouse's country. They must remain Palestinian even though they may have never set foot in the West Bank or Gaza.

This policy of forcing a Palestinian identity on these people for eternity and condemning them to a miserable life in a refugee camp was designed to perpetuate and exacerbate the Palestinian refugee crisis.

So was the Arab policy of overpopulating Gaza. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, whose main political support comes from Arab countries, encourages high birthrates by rewarding families with many children. Yasser Arafat said the Palestinian woman's womb was his best weapon.

Arab countries always push for classifying as many Palestinians as possible as refugees.

As a result, about one-third of the Palestinians in Gaza still live in refugee camps. For 60 years, Palestinians have been used and abused by Arab regimes and Palestinian terrorists in their fight against Israel.

Now it is Hamas, an Islamist terror organisation supported by Iran, that is using and abusing Palestinians for this purpose. While Hamas leaders hid in the well-stocked bunkers and tunnels they prepared before they provoked Israel into attacking them, Palestinian civilians were exposed and caught in the deadly crossfire between Hamas and Israeli soldiers.

As a result of 60 years of this Arab policy, Gaza has become a prison camp for 1.5 million Palestinians. Both Israel and Egypt are fearful of terrorist infiltration from Gaza - all the more so since Hamas took over - and have always maintained tight controls over their borders with Gaza. The Palestinians continue to endure hardships because Gaza continues to serve as the launching pad for terror attacks against Israeli citizens. Those attacks come in the form of Hamas missiles that indiscriminately target Israeli kindergartens, homes and businesses.

And Hamas continued these attacks more than two years after Israel withdrew from Gaza in the hope that this step would begin the process of building a Palestinian state, eventually leading to a peaceful, two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There was no cycle of violence then, no justification for anything other than peace and prosperity.

But, instead, Hamas chose Islamic jihad. Gazans' and Israelis' hopes have been met with misery for Palestinians and missiles for Israelis.

Hamas, an Iranian proxy, has become a danger not only to Israel but also to Palestinians as well as to neighbouring Arab states, which fear the spread of radical Islam could destabilise their countries.

Arabs claim they love the Palestinian people, but they seem more interested in sacrificing them. If they really loved their Palestinian brethren, they would pressure Hamas to stop firing missiles at Israel. In the longer term, the Arab world must end the Palestinians' refugee status and thereby their desire to harm Israel.

It's time for the 22 Arab countries to open their borders and absorb the Palestinians of Gaza who wish to start a new life.

It is time for the Arab world to truly help the Palestinians, not use them.

Nonie Darwish, who grew up in Gaza City and Cairo, is the author, most recently, of Cruel and Usual Punishment (Thomas Nelson).

Have you used the Palestinians lately?

What I'm reading this morning

2009-03-23T10:32:00.003-04:00

Harry's Place has 3 new great articles/posts up today.

1. The first is a guest post by Tori Egherman. The following are three excerpts which are intriguing:

A nineteenth century French diplomat described Persians as “full of adoration for the country itself, they do not believe in any means of running it.” [...]

It’s fantastic to be an American in Iran. In fact, I doubt there is a more pro-American population outside of Texas. Why? Because we have not compromised with a corrupt and despised regime as we have in other parts of the world. [...]

Most Iranians would like to be facing West and would embrace the opportunity to do so. I say, give them the opportunity. Let’s talk. Let’s open the embassy in Tehran. Let’s travel to Iran. Let’s open our universities. Let’s wrestle. Let’s pretend that the regime is here to stay.

You should read the whole post but these three excerpt are a good briefing.

2. This is another guest post by Kamran Ashtray, the husband of Tori. Kamran is Iranian, and Tori is an American.

3. David T shows the hypocrisy of South Africa in regards to morality and the influence of money. SA banned the Dali Lama from the world peace conference that leads up to the 2010 SOCCER World Cup. Why? China is heavily invested in South Africa. Go to the link to have a laugh.

All the rage

2009-03-20T16:05:00.000-04:00

I noticed something peculiar today. The biggest story in the Western press about Israel in the past two days has been about the publication of testimonies by Israeli soldiers about the killing of civilian Palestinians in Gaza. One of the two Israeli newspapers that published the testimonies was Haaretz. I saw the Haaretz article yesterday but it’s not featured on the front page anymore. That newspaper is most famous for its criticism of the Israeli government.

Why I care and defend

2009-03-20T16:02:00.003-04:00

The following is a post I made on iKibbitz:

For my first real post on iKibbitz, I’d like to talk about why I sometimes advocate for Israel. I just read MJ Rosenberg’s post called “The Real Israel Is Its Own Saving Grace” in the Israel Policy Forum’s blog. It made me think a lot about my relationship with the state I talk a lot about. I defend and argue about Israel in increasingly uncertain times. This is at a time that I, as a young man, am going through changes of opinion and perception. So this is my attempt to step back and question myself why I do what I do, mainly advocate for Israel.

A simple answer would be because Israel is the state where I was born. But in a few months, the day would come that marks the time which I have lived in the US for over half my life, my country, my home. If, for the purpose of gaining security clearance to get a job in my chosen field of study (engineering), I had to eliminate my Israeli citizenship, I would do it with no reservation. Another simple answer I could give you is that the Land of the Israel rightfully belongs to the Jews and was stolen from them two thousand years ago. But that’s not why I care. That land would always be the Jewish homeland, but if Israeli society moved to the middle of Timbuktu, I wouldn’t have hardly cared about what happened on the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

A superficial answer would be because of Zionism, the need for a state for Jews to be governed by Jews to defend Jews. Not an untrue nor a bad answer for why I defend Israel, but not a very deep one. As I have alluded to before, the one basic principle of Zionism that I would give up is that the state be on the land, to save it from no longer being Jewish and democratic.

The main reason why I defend Israel is because I know it, I enjoyed it, and I know that Israelis can make a country which is a good place to live. I know what Jews are capable of, and as long as the Jews have a state, we can continue this golden age. In my first year (5th grade) in the US, the class that I learned how to read and spell English the most was social studies, not my English or ESOL class. That year I learned about how the American patriots fought for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I didn’t see those principles of America as something new, something that I didn’t hold dear as an Israeli, they were just very well articulated in America’s founding documents. I can make a very lengthy post on why some of America’s founding principles can be partially credited to the Jewish tradition, but I’ll save that for a later day. So basically, I love Israel because I love America. Two countries that stood up to tyranny and organized and fought against it.

When the United States was 61 years old, plenty was wrong and ugly with it, mainly slavery. But because the basic principles were sound, it has a good nation. I believe that Israel’s principles are also sound. The only difference is that Israel isn’t protected by two great oceans and lives in a region of the Old World, where the seemingly New Ideas of liberty and equality haven’t been welcomed with that famous Middle Eastern hospitality. If history is any guide, the fight that Israel is fighting, a fight that even America hasn’t experienced, is the most difficult and thus needs all the help that it can get.

This author is the creator of the Old World New Ideas blog and iKibbitz.

I'll try to make my writings on both sites appear more timely. As soon as I make significant progress on the Wordpress theme I'm making, I'll start to write more often.

About iKibbitz

2009-03-20T15:58:00.002-04:00

I made an introductory post to my new website. It pretty much says what the site is all about. Here it is:

This is the very first post on iKibbitz. You may very well be our first reader. So what are we, and who is behind all of this? To help explain the purpose of this website I’ll tell you about kibbitz.

Kibbitz - In Yiddish, it’s spelled kibets, and it’s related to the Hebrew “kibbutz” or “collective.” But it can also mean verbal joking, which after all is a collective activity. It didn’t originally mean giving unwanted advice about someone else’s game - that’s an American innovation.

So how does that translate into a website? Well, this is what bloggers do. They give “unwanted” advice, or rather, commentary on anything. Except we are going to do it collectively! No, we aren’t trying to spread socialism into the blogosphere. We are trying to use the power of the collective to make the bloggers more successful, i.e. get more readers. Contributing bloggers can keep their own websites, but we want their content to be shown on our website as well.

Let me make this clear, we aren’t here to replace the newspapers. We wouldn’t be here with out the hard work of journalists. How else would we get the news? We are here to share our commentary on our favorite commentators and news stories. We are also going to talk about our own experiences, what ever our contributors want to talk about. Well, maybe not everything. No wack-a-doodles (Antisemites etc.) and crazy college stories.

So who is going to contribute? At first it is going to be just Comrade Tovya and I, Monsieur Ginger. Soon we are going to ask our favorite bloggers to join our enterprise. We don’t know every blogger so if you are interested in joining us, contact us.

As you may have noticed, kibbitz is a Jewish word, so the iKibbitz community will tend to be Jewish. But we don’t want to be limited by it. At first, we want to focus on what Jews like to talk about - politics, culture, Israel, Middle East, etc. But eventually we are hoping to get non-Jewish contributors as well. We welcome all. We don’t know where this enterprise will take us. Tovya and I are here to set the foundations, and the community will push us forward. We’ll be strong when the iKibbitz community is strong. Enough with the slogans.

Like good Jews, Tovya and I disagree on many things, and we respect that. We encourage criticism from our readers and fellow contributors. We are here to engage. We just want everybody to be honest about themselves and their opinions. We expect everybody in the community to be respectful of each other. If you aren’t respectful in this home, we reserve the right to use what ever power is given to us as website administrators.

People blog for many reasons. They blog because of the freedom that comes with it. They blog because it is an opprotunity to share their opinions. What ever your reason for blogging is, we are here to facilitate that. We are not a Left-wing website nor a Right-wing website. We are a community website. So we expect the community to respect that and you to respect the community.

We are still working on the kinks and knots so bear with us. I hope this will be the beginning of a beautiful kibbitz.

I'll add the site to my blog roll here so you find it easily.

New cooperative blog

2009-03-20T15:51:00.002-04:00

Hello readers. You may have noticed that the number of posts have declined this month. The reason is because I'm working on creating a new website. It's called iKibbitz and I'll tell you more about it soon. If you are a blogger who is interested in working on a joint blogging website go to iKibbitz and contact me. I've been learning a lot of html/css/javascript lately so I can make my own WordPress theme. If you are a blogger that knows how to make a wordpress theme and is interested in joining me, or just want to offer your services for free, give me a holler. This project is still in the construction and design stages but I already started to contribute. I'll tell you more about the project in the next post.

Muslims moving forward

2009-03-11T13:38:00.000-04:00

I want to share with you two articles I read in my local paper, the Baltimore Sun.

The first is about Egypt's first female mayor.

Eva Habil Kyrolos wears the distinction lightly as she tends to law and order and social matters in Komboha, the village her great-great-grandfather was granted in the 19th century. [...]

"People from nearby towns used to mock us, 'Oh, you have a woman mayor now,' " said Osama Gamel, a car mechanic, mimicking the needling chirps of those who poke fun. "But you know what? She's better than a man."

The second was a column by Amreena Hussain titled "Engaging American Muslims in policy." Here's some of it:

For Muslim Americans, engagement in domestic policy has been marked by mutual disinterest and dissociation. This is not too surprising in a community with a fairly self-sufficient suburbanized citizenry whose primary policy concerns lie beyond American shores - events such as wars in Muslim totalitarian states and American foreign policy concerning Iran, Palestine and Lebanon. Yet this audience is just as concerned with its image in in the U.S. as it is with growing unrest in the Muslim world.

The moral dilemma of the American Muslim has grown exponentially in the past few years. We grapple with a sense of responsibility for global terrorism in the name of Islam, while we simultaneously struggle to come to terms with an American attitude that vacillated between anti-terrorism and anti-Islamism through the Bush years. The Muslim community has, for the most part, chosen to face this dilemma with silence and inaction.

Decades ago, community organizing among American Muslims promoted efforts to assimilate and engage in the existing social fabric. However, this soon turned into defensive protectionism of the Muslim lifestyle, manifest in civic disengagement and seclusion. But U.S engagement with the Muslim world in recent years has piqued American interest in Muslims - and Muslim interest in America. Speaking at a recent event at the Johns Hopkins University, Haris Tarin, director of community development at the Muslim Public Affairs Council, addressed the mutual "skirting" of issues between the U.S. government and the American Muslim community. He suggested that the way to melt this silent face-off between the state and an alienated Muslim community would be to revive the attempts at civic engagement by the American Muslim community from half a century ago.

I've met Arab high school students in Israel during my school trip there. I've played soccer with Iraqis, Egyptians, Latinos, and West Indies. But I've never had a discussion with my fellow minorities here in the US, that's why I'm interested in exploring a Jewish-Muslim interfaith program.

Another one bites the dust

2009-03-10T21:40:00.002-04:00

Chas Freeman, Obama's appointee to become the head of the National Intelligence Council, withdraw himself from the selection process. The "Israel Lobby" will get the credit, but it doesn't take a genius to determine that a man who worked for and probably paid handsomely by the Saudi and Chinese governments, should not work in American Intelligence. His defenders would say that his relationships and comments toward those governments have nothing to do with the motive of his critics. That's the most immoral defense ever. He's still bad. If that's not moral relativism, I don't know what is.

HT: Z-Word.

Purim

2009-03-09T23:35:00.002-04:00

Chag sameach! I almost forgot, it's Purim.

On 1948, Refugees, and Nationalism

2009-03-09T18:11:00.003-04:00

I have long accepted that Israel is partially responsible for the situation of the Palestinian refugees who were displaced in the Israeli-Arab war of 1948. People were aligned into two sides knowingly and not. The Arabs lost, a state with borders was created, and people who were caught on the wrong side of that border were expelled.

There are two significant differences between the Israeli and Arab treatment of the "other." One, Jews from Arab countries had nothing to do with Zionism and Israel. While the Palestinians were involved in the war and were very aggressive toward all Jews in the decades preceding the war. Second, Israel did not expel all the Arabs in her borders and gave them citizenship in a democratic country. Sure, Israeli Arabs face discrimination in measurable ways, but you can't completely blame the Israeli political system nor the nature of Jewish Israelis toward people of other religions. Israeli Arabs face discrimination because they have in countless ways sympathized with the enemy - the Palestinians regardless of their militancy toward the state which gave them citizenship. 30% percent of the medical students in the top Israeli University, Technion, are Arab.

While I see that Israel has done great things letakken (to fix) this problem of Arab and Jewish refugees, I still believe that more should be done. I used the Hebrew word in the previous sentence because it is part of the Jewish concept of tikkun olam which means fixing the world. When there is a problem, we must work towards a solution. Some solutions may take great time and labor, but as humans, I believe we are obligated to do so out of principle (Kohlberg's 3rd level of morality). I would say we are obligated letakken haolam by God but since I don't believe in God, I say principle developed by inner conscience.

So what's the solution? I'm not sure, and any of the people that I highly respect don't have a solution either.

Since the Palestinians are having it so bad, why do they maintain in pursuing the cause of redominating (did they actually ever have sovereignty over it?) the historic land of Palestine? The Palestinian cause isn't just a national liberation movement, it is a movement of conquest as Hamas and the PLO have told us many times. I still believe that the majority of Palestinians want to dominate Israel proper.

60 years ago, the sovereign state (or rather 'Islamic Republic' if history is any guide) of Palestine failed to come into fruition. Since a Palestinian state has never existed, what makes the Palestinians a nation? And what fuels this passion after failing countless times?

They say the the land "from the river to the sea" is the ancestral homeland of the Palestinians. But what made that specific land so important. Haven't their ancestors ever been anywhere else? Why isn't the region of Mecca and Medina, where the religion of the most militant Palestinians, their ancestral homeland? The reason is because the events that occurred in the last 100 years, their war with the Jews, are the most important events in their historical narrative and culture. Which is kinda sad considering their lack of achievements in culture and civilization building - art, technology, business, civil liberties, and religious enlightenment. If I was Palestinian, I would rather look take home when Islamic high culture was the good in this world rather than the dark Christian Europe of the medieval ages.

A civilization requires statehood and culture. The Palestinian civilization or nation also has a distinct culture. This culture rose dramatically in one year, 1948, and would forever would be characterized by this - Nakba Day. American culture is characterized by it's war for independence for principles of freedom, liberty, and equality (what the British monarchy denied them) as described in its founding documents - Independence Day.

Every country is born out of violence and war. The Palestinian nation was created likewise. The principles behind the failed Palestinian war for independence were centered around the land (which was denied to them by Israel) and pan-Arab nationalism (which is what fueled support among Arabs for the Palestinian cause). Their culture has been for so long centered around perpetuating violence to over come that one great failure - Nakba. It doesn't matter if others are trying to exploit them as long as they are supported to overcome the failure. Nakba, the Catastrophic Failure. That is my humble non-scholarly characterization of Palestinian nationalism and its cause.

Palestinian nationalism's focus on the land has fluctuated in recent years. The movement has evolved somewhat. Self-determination has been the focus of the movement since Oslo. Unfortunately, its main supporter, Fatah, has lost favor with the Palestinians in recent years. Land would never lose great focus in the eyes of Palestinians. What is the peace process all about? It is land for peace, which is a totally corrupt idea. Not self-determination for peace, a more noble goal. That's why Gaza was so explosive. Israel thought that if it would give self-determination to the Palestinians in Gaza, there would be peace. But to the Palestinians, it was land for peace, or rather less war. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a supporter of negotiations and the two state solution. The conditions aren't there yet for progress in the peace process.

Every citizen of a country knows what his basic duty is. In America it is to defend the principles detailed in the its founding documents. In Israel, it is to defend the principles of Zionism, which I would briefly characterize as creating a state for Jews so that we can defend ourselves when nobody else would. Unfortunately Israel does not have a constitution which details the state's democratic and liberal principles therefore has to constantly be checked from within. The basic duty of a Palestinian on the other hand is to accomplish what they think their ancestors failed to do in 1948. Every human being needs a sense of belonging. One gains this sense by fulfilling the duties society has placed on him. If a Palestinian strays away from this path, even if they are for noble goals, he is not Palestinian. He's a collaborator at best, an actual Israeli at worst.

Because Jerusalem is unusually central to the Palestinian cause compared to the principles of Palestinians nationalism I stated above, I would say that Islam is also a central part of the Palestinian nationalism. Current radical interpretation of Islam is another fuel for Palestinian nationalism. Since no Jewish ultra-nationalist party in Israel has ever experienced the support of Israelis like Hamas has experienced the support of the Palestinians, I would say that Zionism hasn't used the Jewish religion as one of its main principles. Israel's founders were very secular. Hamas' founders were extremely religious as you can see in their charter.

I wouldn't say that Zionism and its materialization in the State of Israel hasn't never suffered from extreme interpretation of Judaism. It is suffering from this right now as is evident from the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Israel has suffered because of this in treasure and support because of this. As long as Israel's leaders and majority in society do not commit to this religious influence into policy, it would be safe.

So why am I talking about this? This is just another defense of Zionism and Israel. We want solutions. Well, I have no idea who I am writing to. I'm looking for a solution to the refugee problem. It is hard to feel that it is my responsibility when the Palestinian cause is stuck in perpetual violence because it failed at creating a state. It is still waging its revolutionary war.

When the Palestinians themselves truly paint their cause as a noble one, a cause of freedom, liberty, and equality, I can give a hand. But what is the main word which they use to characterize their cause? It is "Justice." It is perceived like a call for revenge. What made Zionism a noble cause was not inflicting "Justice" upon the oppressors of the Jews. It was so people won't be able to oppress the Jews anymore. Not by making them weaker, but by making us stronger through a nation-state. There was a huge debate in Israel when Germany offered them monetary compensation. They called it "blood money." What is Justice? When human lives are concerned, you can't get things back. You can get property back but the disputed land isn't just property. It is the subject of war where human lives are lost. That is what Palestinians want. They want their lives back, lives where the Jews were some tiny powerless minority. That is the case when the vast majority of Palestinians support attacks targeting civilians - terror.

When the people of Nineveh were transgressing against God, He told Jonah to be his prophet and tell the Ninevites to repent. Jonah didn't want to do this because he wanted them dead, they were the enemies of the Israelites. God on the other hand did not require the Ninevites to sacrifice their lives for the transgressions they have committed. He only required that they repent.

So how are Israelis and Palestinians supposed to repent? Well, eventually Israel is going to have to end occupying the West Bank and stop the war of attrition in Gaza. The Palestinians would have to reform the very essence of their culture which I believe can happen with intense Westernization of the territories. It might seem like I am ignoring my dark characterization of Palestinian culture but it is not really. Opinions can change and if the Palestinians decide that the goal is to make it so that they won't be oppressed anymore is more important than getting the land back, all would be swell.

Steve Cohen

2009-03-09T16:59:00.004-04:00

Who was Steve Cohen? I had no idea till today. I said "was" because he died recently.

Engage reports:

Steve was a socialist and a campaigner against all racism, including antisemitism.
Steve was the author of “That’s Funny You Don’t Look Antisemitic”, published in 1984 and re-published by Engage in 2005. This was a landmark argument against antisemitism on the left.

Steve also wrote this memorable and angry response to a boycott motion passed by the old Higher Education trade union NATFHE in 2006.

I started reading That's Funny. Cohen called himself an anti-Zionist Zionist because he said that Zionism is both racist and anti-racist. To understand that, I suggest you read it because it is a very deep book (which you can read online from the link).

Just some thoughts

2009-03-09T16:23:00.002-04:00

Since I haven't been blogging much recently I decided to reprint a comment I left on this post from Comrade Tovya's Zion Report.

Here it is:

I watched some videos of the protest. The people up front of the protest, those banging and jumping on the police vans spoke entirely in Arabic.

I disagree with Tovya on this. Islam as a religion is not the cause of fascism in the Muslim/Arab world. Islam as a political movement is ONE reason why the Arab world is so fascist. When Imams or Islamic leaders such as Haniyeh, PM of Hamas in Gaza as well as an Imam of a Gaza mosque, become top political leaders of a party, the tend to blur the lines between civil laws and religious laws. Religion by nature is fascist because anyone who disagrees with official dogma or religious authority is by nature heretics. When the center of political power in Europe was with in the Church, Europe tended to be fascist. If the Arab world can look up to secular leaders (who can leave observant lives, just not be religious leaders), it would become more liberal.

Religion needs a form of Talmud which is accepted as religious opinions which sometimes can conflict but are otherwise accepted and not heretical. They are guides, not absolute laws. Different interpretations of Scripture must also be accepted. When certain elements of Islamic authority become fascist as we have seen in recent history (as well as ancient history), violence ensues.

The second reason there is fascism in the Arab world is because of tribalism. I won’t get into it now.

The notion of the separation of Church and State is ingrained in every American school child, at least for those who go to public and secular schools. I don’t know what religious schools teach except the Jewish high school I went to which was very liberal and pluralistic so it taught American ideals.

Israelis are so lucky that Israel’s founders where secular and dominated Israeli politics for so long. The foundations of democracy and liberalism are strong in Israel but like all foundations, repair is sometimes needed overtime. Jewish Israelis are surprisingly united. Who would have known that people who came from so many different countries all around can overcome their differences to create a state together. It partially has to do with the army, and also partially to do with how Torah treats Jews as a nation(Also because we had a common enemy). But how it was infused with secular and liberal ideals is quite an accomplishment. This accomplishment is why Israeli Arabs get the best treatment in terms of services and political opportunity in the Middle East.

Critics of Israel like to call it “ethnocracy” and “apartheid” but we all know that it is bull because Israel is way too liberal and secular for those terms. In the Middle East, an ethnocracy is when one tribe rules all - Syria for example. But Jews are way too diverse and don’t have a tribal hierarchy to rule like that. The best chance for an Arab in the Middle east to rise economically and politically is in Israel - if they are citizens of course.

Critics of Israel like to characterize the Israeli Palestinian conflict as ethnic clashes but the conflict is way too complex to just call it that. Perhaps in the 20’s and 30’s the conflict was actually about ethnic collide which I say is absolutely not the Jews fault. But Jewish Israeli political evolution has moved beyond that and sees an OLD WORLD in the Palestinians where Islamic fascism and tribalism are always lurking - a place where Jews can’t thrive. Where can a Jew thrive? In a place where liberalism and secularism are in the foundations. That’s why Israeli Jews will always resist outside forces from changing the state’s form. Radical changes would give an opening to radical forces such as Islamic fascism and tribalism.

Tovya responds:

My opinion is not that Islam as a religion is fascist, but the way that Islam is interpreted is Fascist by and large.
Like I’ve stated time and time again, not every Muslim follows the dogma of death–but unfortunately those who follow the peaceful route are largely ignored or are to scared to speak up.

So is Islam fascist by itself? No, but once upon a time, Christianity was fascist in its interpretation as well. Had I been writing this blog in the 17th century, I would have written precisely the same thing that I am writing about Islam today.

Christianity grew up and began to interpret their doctrine in a much more peaceful manner as it evolved. Islam, ironically, started off on a very high plateau and slowly descended downwards.

At one time, Islam created the great scientific knowledge of its day, and was much more welcoming to “unbelievers” than Christianity was during the same time period.

Some religion apparently enjoy evolving, and others seem to like dissolving.

I've been very busy lately working on a project with Tovya among other things. I can't tell you what the project is at the moment but I'll unveil it soon.

Criticism of Saudi Arabia is a Neo-Con thing now

2009-03-09T11:53:00.004-04:00

I've been following the debate over the Obama's administration's appointment of Chas Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council. I've read Jeffrey Goldberg's, Jon Chait's, and the Wall Street Journal's take on this. I've also read Stephen "The Israel Lobby" Walt's, James Fallows', and M.J. Rosenberg's defense of Freeman. If you haven't read Chait's "elegant takedown" of Walt yet, I recommend you do so.

Now that there is a new administration in the White House it looks like everything is flipped over our heads. As Matt Welch points out, the "Bush neo-cons" were the ones criticized by Lefties for being connected to the Saudis and for not caring about Human Rights there. Now these same Lefties are defending Freeman who is a Saudi apologist and a payed shill of the clan.

Now let me make this clear, I'm a Lefty, was very much opposed to countless Bush administration policies, including the Iraq war, and a supporter of President Obama. But this reversal of principles by some of the Left reminds me how hypocritical Israeli critics are sometimes and one should not be ashamed to agree on issues with the Right.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still a supporter of Obama, but I must take issue with this. Freeman defenders say that he is not afraid of telling "truth to power" and that a national intelligence analyst doesn't need to be able to make moral distinctions. This is ridiculous.

Welch concludes:

This is a man with warped judgment, and I'd rather not pay his salary, let alone have him screening important national intelligence. If that's the modern hate-fiction definition of "neocon," then perhaps it's time for a new definition.

I concur.

(HT: Jeffrey Goldberg)

Hypocrisy Week

2009-03-06T08:37:00.002-05:00

This week is Israel Apartheid Week. I have already written about why Israel isn't an apartheid state. But here is the reason in the flesh - Ishmael Khaldi, the Israeli deputy counsel general in San Francisco, and as the name suggest he's not Jewish but an Arab Bedouin writing for the Chronicle newspaper:

For those who haven't heard, the first week in March has been designated as Israel Apartheid Week by activists who are either ill intentioned or misinformed. On American campuses, organizing committees are planning happenings to once again castigate Israel as the lone responsible party for all that maligns the Middle East.

Last year, at UC Berkeley, I had the opportunity to "dialogue" with some of the organizers of these events. My perspective is unique, both as the vice consul for Israel in San Francisco, and as a Bedouin and the highest-ranking Muslim representing the Israel in the United States. I was born into a Bedouin tribe in Northern Israel, one of 11 children, and began life as shepherd living in our family tent. I went on to serve in the Israeli border police, and later earned a master's degree in political science from Tel Aviv University before joining the Israel Foreign Ministry.

I am a proud Israeli - along with many other non-Jewish Israelis such as Druze, Bahai, Bedouin, Christians and Muslims, who live in one of the most culturally diversified societies and the only true democracy in the Middle East. Like America, Israeli society is far from perfect, but let us deals honestly. By any yardstick you choose - educational opportunity, economic development, women and gay's rights, freedom of speech and assembly, legislative representation - Israel's minorities fare far better than any other country in the Middle East

So, I would like to share the following with organizers of Israel Apartheid week, for those of them who are open to dialogue and not blinded by a hateful ideology:

You are part of the problem, not part of the solution: If you are really idealistic and committed to a better world, stop with the false rhetoric. We need moderate people to come together in good faith to help find the path to relieve the human suffering on both sides of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Vilification and false labeling is a blind alley that is unjust and takes us nowhere.

You deny Israel the fundamental right of every society to defend itself: You condemn Israel for building a security barrier to protect its citizens from suicide bombers and for striking at buildings from which missiles are launched at its cities - but you never offer an alternative. Aren't you practicing yourself a deep form of racism by denying an entire society the right to defend itself?

Your criticism is willfully hypocritical: Do Israel's Arab citizens suffer from disadvantage? You better believe it. Do African Americans 10 minutes from the Berkeley campus suffer from disadvantage - you better believe it, too. So should we launch a Berkeley Apartheid Week, or should we seek real ways to better our societies and make opportunity more available.

You are betraying the moderate Muslims and Jews who are working to achieve peace: Your radicalism is undermining the forces for peace in Israel and in the Palestinian territories. We are working hard to move toward a peace agreement that recognizes the legitimate rights of both Israel and the Palestinian people, and you are tearing down by falsely vilifying one side.

To the organizers of Israel Apartheid Week I would like to say:

If Israel were an apartheid state, I would not have been appointed here, nor would I have chosen to take upon myself this duty. There are many Arabs, both within Israel and in the Palestinian territories who have taken great courage to walk the path of peace. You should stand with us, rather than against us.

The poster up top is a "spoof [which] shows the same boy being used as a shield by militants launching rockets at Israel, while journalists film the boy.

It was created by Australia-born David Guy, 54, from Rehovot, and his son's best friend, 23-year-old Guy Gurfinkel from Shoham, who will
begin studies at the Bezalel Academy of Arts next year. "

Ni’lin pays tribute to Jewish victims of the Holocaust

2009-03-01T17:00:00.002-05:00

You don't see this everyday:

BETHLEHEM – Every Friday, the West Bank village of Ni'lin is home to some of the most violent clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian, Israeli and international demonstrators.

Each week, activists from the village's Land Defence Committee stage demonstrations at the Separation Barrier which cuts off as much as half the village's farmland and water from its inhabitants.

As a reporter for a Palestinian news agency in Bethlehem, I too travelled to Ni'lin, but last weekend beheld a spectacle perhaps more remarkable than these weekly Barrier protests: Villagers had set up an exhibition to coincide with the United Nations-declared International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January, an exhibition organised by Ni'lin's Popular Committee Against the Wall.

Hassan Moussa, the exhibition's organiser, spoke to me over the phone from Ni'lin. And despite the hot-headed rhetoric coming from both sides that weekend (a number of protesters were tear-gassed just hours before), Moussa explained that the exhibit was organised with the most noble of intentions.

"This is a way of extending our sympathy for the Jews," and the Palestinians' way of extending that sympathy "to the Israeli people, themselves," he says.

"Nobody thinks war will lead to peace and security. It will lead to more violence and hatred and agony, as well as suffering to this area, which is neither in our interest, nor the Israelis."

Since late January the people of Ni'lin have opted to complement their demonstrations with something "to show the Israelis that we feel sorry for them."

As a Palestinian activist, Moussa says he also wants to convey his suffering: "My suffering will not lead to peace. When I lose my land, it's like losing your heart from your body."

The village's Municipality hosted the Holocaust Remembrance Exhibition at its headquarters in Ni'lin, where organisers say more than 1,000 visitors have paid tribute to the victims of Nazi atrocities committed against Europe’s Jews.

The exhibition of posters and texts, provided by an Israeli Holocaust museum, details "the genocide that was committed against the Jewish people during the 1930s and 1940s in Germany and in other parts of Europe," Moussa explains.

"We admit that there was terrible pain inflicted on the Jewish people as a result of this genocide," he says. "We are feeling sorry for this genocide.”

Moussa added that "the Palestinians have no connection at all with that genocide… It is our fate to live on this land so we have to live in peace—only peace can bring security," he explains.

"We feel sorry for you," Moussa says when pressed for his message to the Israeli people. "Our hand is extended in peace; we are ready to make peace with the Israeli government."

"We want peace for the people of Israel, and the people of Palestine and the people of the world, as well," he says. "This is our way to express this message; it is our message to the whole world."

The exhibit is not only intended for Israelis, though a number have attended. "Frankly speaking, the people who came and visited the exhibition, [for the] first time saw something about this genocide," Moussa says. "They heard some from their history books, but this is the first time they saw the pictures."

The most common Palestinian reaction after seeing the horrifying images, Moussa tells me, is that "they feel sorry; they feel really sorry for the [Jews], once they see the posters."

One in five of the village's 5,000 residents are estimated to have viewed the exhibition, with hundreds more from Israel and elsewhere in the West Bank. It is still open to the public at the village's municipality building.

"We received so many visitors," Moussa says. "Even some Israeli activists came to have a look at the exhibition." Particularly interested were those Israelis whose ancestors survived the Holocaust: "They came and they appreciated the idea."

"And they expressed their sorrow for us," Moussa notes. "Their message, as well as my message, is to create a new type of generation that really believes in peace."

Thanks to Jewschool.

Lieberman makes his case

2009-02-26T16:25:00.004-05:00

While I am not a supporter of Avigdor Lieberman, the chairman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, I think it would be responsible blogging for me to provide multiple views. Here he makes the case for himself, which I think he did very well. While I do support the Left in Israel, I think Lieberman can and is willing to make the sacrifice to push the peace process forward. I hope he can make peace like Begin, not make war like Begin. Here is is an excerpt:

I stand at the head of the most diverse political party in the Knesset. Four out of our first 10 Knesset members are women. Three out of our first 10 have a physical disability. Hamad Amer is a pillar of the Druze community. Anastassia Michaeli is the first convert to enter the Knesset. And David Rotem is a religious Zionist and obviously sees Yisrael Beiteinu as supportive of religious Jews.

[...]

Another label that has been thrust in my direction is “far right” or “ultra-nationalist.” I want the State of Israel to remain a Zionist, Jewish and democratic state. There is nothing “far” or “ultra” about those ideals. I also advocate the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

If I was in charge of making a coalition, I would include him in it. For a terrible problem, one has to strive for a solution, even if it is imperfect. I just hope he has his legal issues resolved and doesn't alienate the moderate and integrated Arabs in Israel.

Holocaust resonance

2009-02-26T09:44:00.005-05:00

I just read a terrific article in Harry's Place about the use of the Holocaust by people who are protesting against Israel. Dave Rich, the author of the article, concludes:

Once the central argument of anti-Israel campaigning in this country is that Israel is Nazi Germany, then this is no longer an anti-Zionist movement: it is an antisemitic one, with an antisemitic politics as its driving force.

I suggest you read this article and if you know or see anyone that equates Israel with Nazi Germany, make the argument this article is making. The argument is long so I won't bother to repeat it here.

Government Reform and One State Solution

2009-02-24T19:31:00.008-05:00

Yesterday, I volunteered at JNF (Jewish National Fund) - stuffing envelopes and stamping them to be sent out to donors. There, I met another volunteer, an elderly fellow named Steve. We talked about Israeli politics, Jewish and family history.

He proposed a drastic government/electoral reform and a one state solution. I am against a one state solution because I think it would just lead to civil war, but I'll paraphrase Steve's proposal anyway because there is some merit in it.

Steve's one state solution - he proposes that if Gaza is returned to Egypt, the demographic numbers of Jews and Arabs in Israel proper and the West Bank eases the concern that Israel won't remain a Jewish and democratic state. Also, many Arabs in the West Bank have family in Jordan so if the eastern part of the West Bank is given to Jordan, it will ease greater demographic fears in Israel. According to the Israeli Census, due to the Westernization of Arab fertility rates in Israel, Arab families are more in size with Jewish families.

There are several issues with this version of the one state solution. First, one has to convince Egypt to take Gaza back and Jordan to take parts of the West Bank back. This is a difficult task because the opposition of Egypt's current regime is the Muslim Brotherhood and their Palestinian branch is Hamas which stronghold is Gaza. And Jordan is controlled by a Hashemite king which might not want politically emboldened Palestinians incorporated into his country. The only way to overcome this first hurdle is to use America's leverage of foreign aid to Egypt and Jordan to make them agree to this plan.

A second issue with this plan is that the Palestinian Authority (PA) would have its position and power reduced greatly in this new one state because its constituency would be broken off to Egypt and Jordan. And I don't think the PA cherishes their people's democratic aspirations. How it would be incorporated into the Israeli political scene? - I don't know. In order for this plan to work, one would have to negotiate with Egypt and Jordan behind the PA's back.

A third issue is what to do with the Palestinians who are in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and other Arab countries. Political positions of people do change but allowing a mass immigration of Palestinians into Israel, the "Right of Return", is one position which I think Israel would never change. So what would the status of Palestinian refugees outside the Palestinian territories be? For them, this solution is not a solution. In order to solve this problem, the US and Europe must get the Palestinian refugees' "host" countries to permanently settle them there.

Even assuming that there is Israeli political backing for this, I think this plan has very little chance because there won't be Arab political backing for this. It would take great efforts on part of the US and Europe to facilitate the negotiations for this. The Israeli Right would say, "We are ready for this, it is they which need to change." The Israeli Left would say, "If we change, they will change."

Now to Steve's government reform proposal. The current electoral system of "ultra-democracy" and coalition building has brought down numerous government downs and disabled the government from making a decision on the one important issue of the last 41 years - what to do with the Palestinian territories. We have seen the same old faces responsible for failed policies run for election and get a large amount of Knesset seats many times.

Steve states that because the voters are voting for a party, party members are only beholden to the party, and not the people or any part of Israel. He proposes that you connect each Knesset seat to a district, like in the US. That way, that Knesset member would be beholden to his district and not to his party chairman (or chairwoman). I think this would eliminate the small and one issue parties from the Knesset.

I support this measure of reform but who knows if the current Knesset would because it is filled with numerous small parties. In the mean time, let's hope that the upcoming government can deal with the upcoming crises.

Religious Self Criticism

2009-02-23T21:36:00.001-05:00

Last month, I referred to a devout Muslim American whose name is Khaled Hamid who blogs at Khaled Hamid Forum. He recently wrote a wonderful post criticizing the state of his own faith for not addressing the important issues Muslims face today such as Sunni-Shiite tensions and behaving righteously (by not beheading your wife).

Here is an excerpt:

Listening to recent Friday sermons debating the authenticity of Christmas as a religious occasion, or of the devilish pagan origins of Halloween seems to me and to many fellow Muslims like disputing whether our neighbor's house has proper foundation or not, while our own house is on fire.

A commenter that goes by the name of bettyzoole leaves this comment:

I once heard a rabbi say that most people worry about the spiritual well-being of other people and the physical well-being of themselves -- but that what God wants from us is to worry about the physical well-being of other people, and the spiritual well-being of ourselves!

Islam, Christianity, and Judaism all agree on this. It is very sad that most of their followers don't, really.

All religions suffer from this. If you notice that your clergy is criticizing your neighbor's house while his is on fire, let him know.

Quote of the Day

2009-02-23T19:17:00.006-05:00

"Religion isn't the opium of the masses. It's the placebo of the masses."

-Dr. House (TV show)

Mahmoud Darwish

2009-02-23T18:46:00.002-05:00

Like most non-Arabs, I have not known the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish who was well known and loved in the Arab world. I only heard some mention of him in the press when he died last year. I have recently encountered his name and a part of a poem of his in the blogsphere. I don't know much about his politics so I won't care to write about it here. But what I do know that he is tremendously skilled as a poet and thinker.

Here is a video I found where he appears in a French movie called Notre Musique:

And here is the transcript (might not be the same as the video but the video has subtitles) I got from here:

[translated] Truth has two faces. We’ve listened to the Greek mythology, and at times we’ve heard the Trojan victim speak through the mouth of the Greek Euripedes. As for me, I’m looking for the poet of Troy, because Troy didn’t tell its story. And I wonder, does a land that has great poets have the right to control a people that has no poets? And is the lack of poetry amongst a people enough reason to justify its defeat? Is poetry a sign, or is it an instrument of power? Can a people be strong without having its own poetry?
I was a child of a people that had not been recognized until then. And I wanted to speak in the name of the absentee, in the name of the Trojan poet. There’s more inspiration and humanity in defeat than there is in victory. If I belonged to the victor’s camp, I’d demonstrate my support for the victims.
Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? Because you are our enemy. The interest in us stems from the interest in the Jewish issue. The interest is in you, not in me. So we have the misfortune of having Israel as an enemy, because it enjoys unlimited support. And we have the good fortune of having Israel as our enemy, because the Jews are the center of attention. You’ve brought us defeat and renown.

If the Palestinians were fighting the Russians, Chinese, or the Sudanese nobody would have cared. I'll let you ponder all that he said - it's all very deep with meaning.

Waltz with Gaza

2009-02-22T01:00:00.005-05:00

I'm borrowing the title from Waltz with Bashir to apply the nuances to Hamas' rule of Gaza. In the movie's imagination of the Wild Wild West, the thuggish cowboy would shoot at a man's feet, making him dance to avoid the bullets. This is what Hamas is doing in Gaza - shooting at the Gazans' feet to make them dance to the tune of Hamas. Since the coup and counter coup between Fatah and Hamas, the democratic political institution of the Palestinians have collapsed with Fatah (partially) controlling the West Bank and Hamas controlling Gaza.

I recently discovered this interesting documentary on how Hamas is governing Gaza. It's called Inside Hamas.

The Phenomenon called the Israeli Arab

2009-02-21T10:15:00.006-05:00

Sayed Kashua writes a satirical piece for Haaretz where he tries to explain to foreign Western reporters what an Israeli Arab means and what their life is like. He tries to tell the reporter about how Israeli Arabs suffer from "ray-cee-zem" and "dees-kreem-ee-nay-shun" while accepting an offer from his Jewish neighbor to go see a movie later. Absolutely halerious.

Elders of Zion, MD

2009-02-20T13:13:00.005-05:00

Last Monday, I went to a little event at the house of one my parent's Israeli American friends. My parent's friend is a very successful artist with a huge house with walls clad with art. The event was organized by Friends of the IDF which provides IDF soldiers, especially those who came to Israel from the Diaspora, with support in helping them live in Israel and serve in the IDF (apartments, spending money, food baskets, people to care for them, etc.). Everybody there was Israeli and spoke almost entirely in Hebrew. There were about 30 people there and many are IDF veterans such as my dad.

An IDF officer was there to talk about the conflicts the IDF faces when in war - such as fighting in heavily populated areas where the enemy hides among civilians. He talked about the recent Lebanon war and had short video about a daring IDF operation in Lebanon '06. He had another short video about how Hamas uses civilians and abuses childrens to do there bidding. Some of the guest asked why aren't they showing these pictures in the media - we are the Elders of Zion, aren't we?

Another guest said that when he was an officer in the IDF, he was frustrated because the upper echelon of the army didn't have their best interest at heart - they weren't letting them finish the job.

The night was exciting for me because I haven't been around so many Israelis in the US ever. My parents knew about half the people there. One of the guests was an old army buddy of my dad.

What Book I'm Reading

2009-02-20T12:49:00.006-05:00

I'm over 200 pages into Constantine's Sword by James Carroll. Carroll, a former Catholic priest, tells about his discovery (through study of history and himself) of how inherent Christian (especially Catholic) Jew hating teachings led to the Holocaust.

It is very clearly written and well researched. But I'm starting to be reluctant to continue reading the book because it is adding to my paranoia of a resurgent antisemitism in Europe. Over the last couple of months, I've been reading many articles in the Israeli press about an increased sense of harassment (and actual attacks) of Jewish communities in Europe and elsewhere.

Everybody is talking about how blatant antisemitism is no longer frowned upon in European societies. But it begs the question - has Europe changed at all? All it takes is an economic crisis for Europe to return to its ol' Jew hating self.

As one of the organizers of a Friends of the IDF event I went to said, "We all know how every 100 years somebody wants to kick our butts." This is true. At least this time, we have a democratic Western world. Technically, the last 60 years has been a Golden Age as far as Jewish history (and world history) is concerned. There is no reason for it to stop, economic crisis or not.

Voices of youth

2009-02-20T12:35:00.002-05:00

My local newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, isn't a particular good newspaper. The quality has declined greatly over the years. Thomas Friedman's column used to appear here but then all of a sudden they stopped. Now we have Garrison Keillor's column where he never actually writes about anything. Just garbage!

I don't know why I read the Sun - definitely not for the Middle East coverage (probably for the sports coverage). Anyway, today they have an interesting collection of questions and responses from teenagers from the Ramallah Friends School and the Hebrew University Secondary School. I admit, some of it is disturbing. Some of the responses from the Palestinian youth are laced with hate. I might seem biased but just look at some of those shocking answers of the Palestinian youths. For example:

Q. So what happens now?

"I think the perfect plan now is to establish two states, one Palestinian, one Israeli, and with the help of time, the Palestinian state is going to be strong and we'll do to the Israelis the same thing they did to us." - Hend Younis

I've never heard of a Jew wishing for the near annihilation of the Germans. This is disgusting.

The prospects for peace aren't great. But I still believe in Amos Oz's vision for peace - where both sides still hate each other but are just worn out from war. IMHO Israeli-Palestinian peace will not occur during Obama's first term. I hope I am wrong. Hopefully in the 2nd term (if there would be one).

At what price?

2009-02-20T01:22:00.005-05:00

If you were Prime Minister of Israel, how many terrorists would you be willing to release in order to get Gilad Shalit back? and you don't even know if he's dead or alive. Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, said to Gilad's father that he's alive but I don't think he actually knows. He probably just told him what he wanted to hear.

Would you release the masterminds and terrorist leaders with the blood of scores of Israelis on their hands? If it was up to me, I would only release them in a real comprehensive peace deal. Of course that won't happen for a long time. I would offer to release those who have committed lesser crimes which could number up to the thousands if I understand correctly.

I understand why Israel released Samir Kuntar. I might have made the same deal. A lot of non-Jews can't understand it because they don't understand how much Israel values the lives of its soldiers and how important it is in the Jewish tradition to bury our dead. As the Gaza war has shown, Israel is not willing to risk another Jenin. The IDF just can't go room to room to search for weapons anymore, especially not in Hamas controlled Gaza.

So why deal with Hezbollah and Hamas? I believe Israel achieved 'deterence' but the price to get Shalit back is too high yet. During the Gaza, Thomas Friedman explains in his column about 'deterence.' He talks about how Meshaal, the leader of Hezbollah, apologized to Lebanon on TV on a channel not of his organization. Untill the Hamas leadership apologizes to the Palestinians on a Fatah controlled channel, I would not release the terrorist masterminds of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations. Israel must achieve uptimum 'deterence' in order to take such a deal.

Empower the Village

2009-02-19T23:15:00.006-05:00

Kudos to Thomas Friedman for highlighting the wonderful Muslim community in India.

There are nine bodies — all of them young men — that have been lying in a Mumbai hospital morgue since Nov. 29. They may be stranded there for a while because no local Muslim charity is willing to bury them in its cemetery. This is good news.
The nine are the Pakistani Muslim terrorists who went on an utterly senseless killing rampage in Mumbai on 26/11 — India’s 9/11 — gunning down more than 170 people, including 33 Muslims, scores of Hindus, as well as Christians and Jews. It was killing for killing’s sake. They didn’t even bother to leave a note.

This community shows by example how a community should deal with extremism.

“People who committed this heinous crime cannot be called Muslim,” Hanif Nalkhande, a spokesman for the trust, told The Times of London. Eventually, one assumes, they will have to be buried, but the Mumbai Muslims remain defiant.
“Indian Muslims are proud of being both Indian and Muslim, and the Mumbai terrorism was a war against both India and Islam,” explained M.J. Akbar, the Indian-Muslim editor of Covert, an Indian investigative journal. “Terrorism has no place in Islamic doctrine. The Koranic term for the killing of innocents is ‘fasad.’ Terrorists are fasadis, not jihadis. In a beautiful verse, the Koran says that the killing of an innocent is akin to slaying the whole community. Since the ... terrorists were neither Indian nor true Muslims, they had no right to an Islamic burial in an Indian Muslim cemetery.”
To be sure, Mumbai’s Muslims are a vulnerable minority in a predominantly Hindu country. Nevertheless, their in-your-face defiance of the Islamist terrorists stands out. It stands out against a dismal landscape of predominantly Sunni Muslim suicide murderers who have attacked civilians in mosques and markets — from Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan — but who have been treated by mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera, or by extremist Islamist spiritual leaders and Web sites, as “martyrs” whose actions deserve praise.

There is a lot the Arab world can learn from the Muslim and Arab communities in India, and America. The American media usually ignores or doesn't not present Muslim American criticism of Islamic terrorism so Friedman's column is a great surprise to me.

I looked at the wiki page of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish terrorist from Israel.

In 1996, members of the Labor Party called for the shrine-like landscaped prayer area near the grave to be removed, and Israeli security officials expressed concern that the grave would encourage extremists.^[22] In 1999, following passage of a law designed to prohibit monuments to terrorists, and an associated Supreme Court ruling, the Israeli Army bulldozed the shrine and prayer area set up near Goldstein's grave.^[23]

Kudos to Israel as well.

Friedman concludes with this:

It is why so few, if any, Indian Muslims are known to have joined Al Qaeda. And it is why, as outrageously expensive and as uncertain the outcome, trying to build decent, pluralistic societies in places like Iraq is not as crazy as it seems. It takes a village, and without Arab-Muslim societies where the villagers feel ownership over their lives and empowered to take on their own extremists — militarily and ideologically — this trend will not go away.

There are many examples across the globe that when you empower the weak in society, that society becomes stronger and problems are solved. For example, in places of over population and high birth rates, studies show that if the women get education, they would have less children. Actually, that's true in all places. I don't know who said it but, "A country is only as strong as its people." So if you give the people an education and a voice, the society would become more moderate and better organized to fight extremism.

To read the rest of Friedman's column, go here.

David Gregory has a Blog

2009-02-19T22:45:00.006-05:00

I just found from Jeffrey Goldberg's blog that David Gregory of Meet the Press has a blog about politics (which is the center of his job) and spirituality. I added it to the Blog Roll on the right. I am surprised to learn that he's Jewish. My dad is a lot better than me in determining if someone is a member of the tribe by name and nose ... er' ... looks, hehe. Just look at that hair! Doesn't look very Semetic.

I'm not a religious person. Sometimes I prefer to call my self a "secular Jew" (like those styled in Israel) rather than a "Reform Jew." But I'm still very intrigued in theology, interpretation of Scripture, and striving for a fulfilling life. I was never excited in my Judaics classes in high school but now that I'm in college, I kinda miss them.

Apparently, Gregory and Goldberg study Tanakh together. I'm actually excited to read Gregory's blog because he's a famous TV personality, tribe member, has a blog, and he's going to talk about Judaism and spirituality. I saw him on the Daily Show once talking a bit about Israel so it looks like he knows his stuff about the Middle East too. Sounds like an appealing combination to me.

Extra: One of the features Gregory has on the blogs is "What I'm Reading Today" and then list 5 recent articles or blog posts (with links) with short descriptions. I like this so I'm going to do the same. I might not do it daily and I might accumulate a few important articles over a few days.

Sudan refugees find love in Tel Aviv

2009-02-18T10:25:00.002-05:00

Haaretz has a collection of photos taken by Ariel Schalit of AP of Sudanese refugees "breaking glass" in Tel Aviv. I was surprised to find one of these photos in the local Baltimore Sun.

Top Knesset Moments

2009-02-14T17:13:00.002-05:00

Haaretz highlights some of the funniest and embarrassing moments in Knesset history.

Import Brains to Stimulate the Economy

2009-02-11T19:45:00.005-05:00

I don't usually talk about the economy but I just have to put this here because ... well ... it's Thomas Friedman. I do like economics but I didn't create this blog because I needed to vent on economic issues.

Before I talk further about Friedman's article, I want to make a few comments on the man. Friedman is perhaps the most influential writer on my foreign policy and economic views. We are both interested about the Middle East, Economics, and Green Technology (or just innovative technology in general). A lot of people think that he is writing about subjects that he has no expertise about. Perhaps, he's not an economist, a foreign policy maker, or a businessman. But he is a journalist and the greatest tool he has which many of us lack is insight. When he writes about something, he goes there. Whether it is about the West Bank or India, he is there to talk with experts in their respective fields. He is not afraid to talk to people. He understands what drives people. If you haven't read From Beirut to Jerusalem yet, do it.

Here are a few excerpts from his latest column with my comments in between -

“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

Indians and Asians in general truly are some of the hardest people. They've seen the slums. Those that make it to America know how lucky they are to be here. They have the drive and ambition to help the American economic wheels working. There are plenty of engineers and PhDs in Asia that would love to come to America and achieve the American Dream. They just don't have the visas to do so.

Perhaps new immigrants would make the melting pot better money managers.

“Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.”

What put America ahead of Europe? In America, the will of your heat and sweat and the merit of your cause. It was a land of opportunities where immigrants could help themselves and help America at the same time. It was and still can be for many generations to come.

In conclusion, if you want a more innovative work force, there are two ways of going about. Either raise it (educating children to become engineers and the like) or import it (educated immigrants).

I just took a couple snippets from the column. To read the rest, go here.

NOW Lebanon borrowing from Talmud

2009-02-11T19:37:00.003-05:00

One of the recent blogs/online publication I've added to the 'Blog Roll' section on the right is NOW Lebanon. I have only looked at this newspaper a couple time and I just noticed that their slogan in the title is "If not now, when?" which is attributed to Talmud or Hillel. Mossad?

The 5 Tribes of Israel

2009-02-10T14:55:00.002-05:00

Five? Don't you mean twelve? Hold on with me. One of the blogs I added to my 'Blog Roll' is Bernard Avishai Dot Com. I don't know much about him but his most recent post has been very insightful for people who aren't that knowledgeable about Israeli politics. There are some issues with his description of Israeli politics but overall its pretty good and the second to last paragraph was just funny. So here it goes:

Monday, February 9, 2009

The Center: The Players And The Program
If all one means by center is a vague desire to contain Palestinian terrorism yet distance oneself from settlers’ excesses—to do the former without alienating Washington, and the latter without splitting the Jewish people—then a stable majority has been centrist since 1967. But this is a free-floating desire, not the basis of a political identity. You can see how much good vague desire is when others create facts.

ISRAELIS ANGUISH OVER five issues, actually. First, there is the question of whether to rely primarily on military power when dealing with the troubled Middle East. Second, there is the collateral but more ideologically charged question of whether to withdraw from occupied territory, historic Eretz Yisrael, in order to advance to a “two-state solution” with Palestinians. Third, there is the question we have examined thus far, whether a democracy can accord exclusive privileges to legally defined Jews—a question linked to the first two, but not limited by them. Next there is the question, tucked into the last one, of whether to privilege orthodox religious practice. Finally, there is the question of economic privilege, even class: who wins and who loses in a global market economy?

One cannot easily find a center in the permutations these questions produce, which is why as many as twenty political parties typically compete in Israeli elections. But when pundits speak about a center now, they mean leaders who—though they’ll want to have things both ways on many of these issues—have tipped in certain directions: immediate toughness over eventual diplomacy; “painful concessions” in the territories over “Zionist” devotion; some civil reform yet Jewish privilege over scrupulous attention to Arab rights; the religious Status Quo over secular discomfort; and global markets over working-class discomfort.

Some of these choices are short-sighted, no doubt, but the ambivalence is promising. Centrists will often advance contradictory positions: shows of social compassion for the poor wedded to reassurances to venture capitalists; civil marriage, yet jobs for Rabbis.

To add to the complexity, Israel’s elections bring out five more or less permanent tribes to debate these issues: groups of electors defined by primordial ethnic or religious loyalties. Each comprises about 20 percent of the electorate, or something around a million and a half people. The tribes have had immigrant experiences at very different times, and so tend to think of Israel in different ways. They sometimes melt into each other and more often chafe against one another. For some time now, Israeli coalition politics has been a game of temporarily patching them together.

THE FIRST TRIBE—call it Tribe One—is dominated by veteran Ashkenazim (of European origin), most of them “Sabras.” They were born in the country, are now well-educated and cosmopolitan, secular and (if anything) observant of Judaism in the emancipated sense, live-and-let-live by instinct—and living very well indeed in fashionable neighborhoods like North Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem’s Bak’a or Haifa’s Carmel. These are the Israelis Americans usually run into, members of the educational and professional élite, often drawn by opportunities abroad: a visiting appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, a stint at A.T. Kearney. Their old-timers tell harrowing, personal tales of ideological non-conformism and political prescience, of immigrant courage and pioneering struggle during the Mandate. Successful entrepreneurs will yet justify their businesses in the rhetoric of the old pioneering communitarianism. Tribe One are Israel’s WASPs. Clearly, they are crucial to an understanding what the Israeli center is and can yet be. Think Kadima and Labor.

Tribe Two, in contrast, are the residual core of the rather larger North African immigration of Mizrahi Jews, who came to Israel in the 1950s and 60s en masse. They were as shocked as the Arabs by Tribe One’s ideological and sexual avant garde. Most had been petit-bourgeois, small merchants and tradesmen back in Casablanca, Tunis, Tripoli, etc. Their most educated or affluent leaders often went to Paris or Montreal. Back in the Maghreb, men ruled and plotted family survival. Women were generally illiterate. The collapse of colonialism, and the birth of Israel, left Mizrahi Jews exposed to unexpected retaliations in their countries of origin; businesses and friends were left behind in heartbreaking haste.

Once in Israel, however, the Mizrahim found themselves in an underclass, much less well-educated than the Eastern European Labor Zionists who ran the place. They were pressured to work for, and become like, the socialist bosses who presided over the kibbutzim, union-owned factories, and government agencies. Their old culture heroes were the French bourgeoisie.

On average, Tribe Two still actually earns a third less than Tribe One. Pride in Tribe Two is pride in the family, not in tales of some old commune or movement. But it is a pride that tips easily into social anger, for they see the state as a kind of great family that ought to take care of its own. Many have now made it in retail businesses, or car repair shops, or real estate. Their children have become lawyers, police officers, and contractors. Yet most of Tribe Two remain hungry for status, and tens of thousands still struggle with unemployment in inner-cities and neglected development towns. Think Likud.

Unlike Tribe One, Tribe Two follow Halakha naturally, if not quite piously. They still feel they have a score to settle with “the Arabs,” the Muslims, who drove them out, mainly after the Sinai War. They still cannot believe how they could have been so marginalized by the old Labor aristocracy. Think Shas.

As with the Boston Irish, their social resentment gets passed on from generation to generation and gets channeled into cultural politics: over-zealous devotion at soccer matches, or overt nepotism in the smaller city councils, where Tribe Two politicians tend to dominate.

TRIBE THREE, THE newest tribe, have their origins in about 900,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union, most of whom came in the 1990s. They include people from the Ukraine, the Baltic states, etc., but are generally known as “the Russians.” Hyper-educated, hyper-secular (about 25 percent were never “real” Jews back home in Moscow or Kiev), the Russians were beneficiaries of both a rigorous Soviet education and a vital anti-Soviet “refusenik” underground. Fo them, Jews are victims of perpetual hatred, and their national retaliation defines them. They are repelled by the orthodox and are gluttons for high culture and, horrors, non-kosher food: symphonic music, experimental theater, cosmopolitan styles, mathematical science.

In the 1990s, when Israeli high tech was taking off, about a third of the research programmers, materials scientists, etc., were from Tribe Three. But they are also hyper-nationalist, certain of their purchase on Europe’s grim history, scornful of Muslim fanaticism and backwardness (their Vietnam was Afghanistan, after all), and dismayed by the squishy liberal intellectuals of Tribe One who allegedly pander to the Muslim world. They came to Israel to join the “West” and to save it from itself. They are searching for an Israeli Putin. Think Lieberman and Yisrael Beiteinu.

Haaretz’s Lily Galili, who has followed this community for years, told me that a majority of the Russians are feeling chronically embattled, “a combination of seeing impending catastrophe and a certainty that toughness will bring progress.” They are quick, she says, to see Nazis in Palestinians, and yet they are certain about Israel’s ability “to exercise a kind of omnipotence” on a world stage:

“This is very Russian, the idea that ‘liberalism’ is holy and yet something for Jewish suckers, which is why they have such common language with American neo-conservatives. Natan Sharansky is in many ways their hero—the chess player, the intellectual, the world prophet. He appealed to international liberal conscience while he was in prison, but after coming to Israel, he seems to have found that he could both lecture to the world about democracy and lecture Israelis that the Jewish claim to Jerusalem was a ‘higher value’ than liberalism—that the Arabs had better learn to accept it—that Israel, being a better ‘democracy’ than its neighbors, should be immune from Western criticism.”

These first three tribes intermarry at a high rate, and their edges are getting blurry. Some vote their class interests, some their security fears—none of the three is monolithic. The melding of Ashkenazim and Sephardim is especially great in the twenty-something generation. More educated Mizrahim and more cosmopolitan Russians tend to vote Labor and embrace liberal ideas. Nevertheless, “identity politics” play out among these tribes in unpredictable ways, depending on who leads or what buttons get pushed—say, whether security concerns or economic issues dominate the headlines.

On the whole, economic issues pull people leftward, that is, toward concessions to the Palestinians, while security issues pull rightward. Though a majority in each tribe has tended to hold to certain directions—Tribe One to Labor, Two to Likud, Three to rightist splinter parties, claiming Russian loyalties—it is in Tribes Two and Three where virtually all of Israel’s swing voters live today.

IN THE FRAUGHT election of 2001, which brought Sharon to power, the affluent mainly Ashkenazi suburb of Kfar Shmaryahu voted 78 percent for Labor, while 81 percent of the comparatively poor Mizrahi town of Beit Shemesh voted Likud. In 1999, some 65 percent of the Russians voted for Barak in 2001, about 70 percent voted for Sharon. All of which brings us to Tribes Four and Five, more familiar by now—also more monolithic and predictable.

Four is made up of Israel’s ultra-nationalist, theocratic groups, bronzed West Bank settlers wedded politically, if not temperamentally, to pale Haredi Yeshiva students. Tribe Four are devotees of the Land of Israel. Yet they tend to be economically socialist—“national socialist,” one settler told me with a kind of creepy pride—for many of the orthodox live off the state, either in state schools or embattled settlements. Tribe Four disdains Israeliness as an effort to decouple the national life of the state from the Jewish world of Torah and commandments. It refuses the distinction between the covenantal people and the Israeli nation.

Its bane is Tribe Five, Israeli Arabs, living in towns segregated by both archaic land policies and the discrimination of Zionist institutions. Poor but up-and-coming, willing if not eager to enter Israeli democracy, Israeli Arabs are enraged by the existing version of the Jewish state. Five is counting on, if anything, Israeliness.

ORDINARILY, THEN, TRIBE Three hates Four, condescends to Two, and doubts One; Two hates One, resents Three and (for different reasons) Four; One is afraid of Two, patronizes Three and hates Four; Four hates One, proselytizes Two, and is afraid of Three. All four are afraid of Five.

So imagine how, if at all, any winner of tomorrow's election will be able to form a government, and how long any such government will last. The real question is whether a government will form that will be able to respond to an American initiative, which is the only hope.

(Many of these observations are taken from
The Hebrew Republic.)

Now here are some critics provided in the 'Comment' section.

LB said...

I would add two tribes - tribe four (ultra-nationalist, in your words) has very little in common with haredim, despite what outsiders may think. Religiously, somewhat - beyond that - one group is Zionist, one is not. So I would add Haredi tribe (big enough for their own tribe).

Also, Western Olim (mostly Anglos [US, Canada, UK, Australia, S.Africa], some of the French) - arguably big enough for their own tribe. Usually pretty liberal on domestic issues, yet capitalists. Very idealistic - but also tend to be squarely in the right - really, they're what Bibi portends to be.
Y. Ben-David said...

Dr Avishai says the country is "terribly fragmented". This, along with his division of Israel into various tribes that supposedly are at each other's throats seems to me to be greatly exaggerated. All countries have social, ethnic and religious divisions. But (Jewish) Israel has a vary strong Jewish national identity whose symbols are almost exclusively drawn from Jewish religious tradition (although secularists may view them more in a "folklorish" way than religious.)
I take exception to his claim that "Tribe 4-the ultra-religious-nationalists 'live off the state' more than other groups" (full disclosure-I am a member of this 'tribe'). I work in a company with many engineers and we have not a few engineers from this group, and the other Jewish groups as well. Everybody gets along just fine.
I also think it is bizarre when Avishai says "Group X 'hates' Group Y". Social differences may make people feel disdain for others, but when we see, for example, in Iraq Sunnis and Shi'ites slaughtering each other we are seeing real HATRED. When Muslim preachers on official FATAH-controlled Palestinian state television praising suicide bombers who go into crowded pizzerias, we are seeing rale HATE. Saying different groups hate each other makes it sound like Israel is on the verge of civil war which is nonsense.

Again, after living in the "pluralist, multicultural" United States before making aliyah 22 years ago, I feel a much stronger national identity in Israel than I ever did in the US. I am afraid that when we combine the "fragmented society" that Dr Avishai views to the very common view presented by "progressives" like those here at TMP by MJ Rosenberg, Sam Bahour and others, that Israel is an "abberational" artificial state that is merely an outpost of American/Western Colonialism under American's thumb, and if only the Americans would "pull the plug" Israel would submit to a far-reaching diktat, or even worse , go under (see Sam Bahour's recent post below for a version of this). Dr Avishai himself seems to also believe a modified version of this himself.
This distorted view leads many people (like some posting here at TPM) to think Israel is on the verge of falling apart, civil war, mass emigration, etc. None of this is true. The country is growing stronger and immigration continues, although it has its ups and downs like everything else. Immigration is now on a slow but steady rise even from prosperous countries in Western Europe and North America. I can only say for myself that my quality of life in Israel is much higher than it was in the United States, when taking into account things like having a proper atmosphere to raise children and give them a quality Jewish education.
If you think Israel is a "fragmented society" then what of that of the Palestinians? They can't form any sort of national state infrastructure, in spite of being prodded for the last 15 years by the US and the West to do so. This is true of most Arab states that have to ruled by the iron hand of an autocrat (see what happened to Iraq when that iron hand was removed?-We'll see what happens there as the Americans withdraw). Arab states are riven by clan rivalries that greatly exacerbate national divisions. Israel is a very united country compared to them.

This is not to say, of course, that Israel doesn't have problems. The political system is archaic and is having difficulty adjusting to having a better educated population that resents the paternalistic tendencies of the veteran political parties.
But in the bottom line I can only repeat what I believe it was President Sarkozy said: Israel is the great success story of the 20th-21 centuries.
If the Arabs would finally get rid of their archaic view that the existence of a Jewish state is a terrible humiliation for them, and decide to cooperate, they would be the major beneficiaries. But who says people always behave in a logical manner?

Overall, an excellent article.

Political Decision Taken on the Back of Patients

2009-02-10T14:42:00.002-05:00

I just read an article by Ethan Bronner of the NYTimes and it is a very sad story. Here it is in its entirety:

February 10, 2009

Palestinians Stop Paying Israeli Hospitals for Gaza and West Bank Patients

By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — Scores of Palestinian patients being treated in Israeli hospitals, a rare bright spot of coexistence here, are being sent home because the Palestinian Authority has stopped paying for their treatment, partly in anger over the war in Gaza.

Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem says that for the past week, no payments have come in and Palestinians whose children it is treating have been instructed by Palestinian health officials to place them in facilities in the West Bank, Jordan or Egypt.

“Suddenly we have had 57 patients dropped from our rolls,” said Dr. Michael Weintraub, director of pediatric hematology, oncology and bone marrow transplantation at Hadassah. “We have been bombarded by frantic parents. This is a political decision taken on the backs of patients.”

The Palestinian health minister, Fathi Abu Moghli, said he was examining the entire referral procedure because he was tired of adding to what he called Israel’s “oil well,” meaning the payments for Palestinian patient care. In particular, he said, he had no desire to see the wounded from the Gaza war receive Israeli care.

“We already pay $7 million a month to Israeli hospitals,” he said in a telephone interview. “Since the first day of the Gaza aggression, I said that I will not send to my occupier my injured people in order for him to make propaganda at my expense, and then pay him for it.”

An Israeli clinic set up with great fanfare on the Israeli-Gaza border the day the war ended, Jan. 18, has already closed, since both Hamas, which governs Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority essentially boycotted it. The Palestinian Authority pays for much of its citizens’ care in Israel from its budget.

Israel has long pointed to its medical care of Palestinians as an example of its advanced skills and humanitarianism. Palestinians generally are eager to gain the benefit, but are also resentful. As relations have chilled, each side has accused the other of political manipulation.

Dr. Abu Moghli said that with 24 hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank, there was no reason for so many Palestinian patients to go automatically to Israeli facilities, which he said were much more expensive and contributed to a culture of dependency.

“We can’t pay our government salaries this month, but at the same time I have to pay Israeli hospitals so much,” he said. “The Israelis have refused to reduce their costs.”

Israeli doctors and nonprofit groups support having the Palestinians provide more care for their own people, but say that the gap with Israel in quality remains huge, and that the Palestinian Authority is making a mistake that could cost lives.

“Cutting it in one day makes no sense,” said Ron Pundak, director general of the Peres Center for Peace, which sponsors care for 1,000 Palestinian children a year in Israeli hospitals and training for 40 Palestinian doctors. “Such a move needs to be coordinated, but dialogue with the Palestinian Authority has been much harder since the war.”

Anan Dahmi, a salesman from the West Bank city of Tulkarm, said he had been told by the Palestinian Health Ministry last week that his 4-year-old son, Aous, had to stop going to Hadassah Hospital for follow-up treatments after a bone marrow transplant there a year ago, and should be taken instead to a Palestinian or Jordanian hospital.

Mr. Dahmi said that his 6-year-old daughter had died from the same disorder because he had not gotten her to Hadassah quickly enough, and that now he was deeply worried about his son.

“I don’t know how I am going to manage,” he said by telephone. “I don’t want to lose my son the way I lost my daughter.”

Hadassah officials say that removing Aous from their care could endanger his life, because his medical requirements are strict and specific and there is not yet a pediatric oncology facility in the Palestinian areas (one in East Jerusalem is due to start functioning, with Israeli help, in the coming year).

They add that while the cost of care is much higher in Israel than in the West Bank, Palestinians are not charged the higher rates for foreigners but those for Israelis — which are much lower than rates in the United States or Western Europe. In addition, they say, there are subsidies from foreign governments, charities and the hospital itself.

“The cure rate for childhood cancer is about 80 percent, but only in the first world,” Dr. Weintraub, of Hadassah, said. “It costs between $50,000 and $100,000 here. It costs four times that in the U.S.”

He added that the relationship between an Israeli hospital in Jerusalem and patients in the West Bank was like that between a hospital in El Paso and patients on the Mexican side of the border.

“People in the third world want first-world care just like we do,” he said. “If they live in Malawi, they have no hope for it. But if they live 10 minutes from Hadassah, they will do everything they can to get admitted. And we are happy to take them. There are no politics in our wards. Twenty percent of our patients are Palestinians, and we have one common enemy: cancer. The rest is immaterial. The question now is how to get those patients back into our care.”

Hamas Returns Supplies to U.N.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) — The United Nations said Monday that Hamas had returned all of the aid supplies that it seized from the agency in the Gaza Strip last week.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency said the return of the supplies cleared the way for it to resume all of its operations in Gaza. The agency had suspended imports of goods on Friday after accusing Hamas of twice seizing aid supplies, which included food and blankets.

Poor patients and their families. Kudos for Israel for giving Palestinians Israeli rates.

A Prophet

2009-02-10T14:21:00.005-05:00

I started reading Abraham J. Heschel's "The Prophets". I only read the introduction written by Heschel in 1962. The introduction was astonishing. Here are the last two paragraphs:

The prophet was an individual who said No to his society, condemning its habits and assumptions, its complacency, waywardness, and syncretism. He was often compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his heart expected. his fundamental objective was to reconcile man and God. Why do the two need reconciliation? Perhaps it is due to man's false sense of sovereignty, to his abuse of freedom, to his aggressive, sprawling pride, resenting God's involvement in history.

Prophecy ceased; the prophets endure and can only be ignored at the risk of our own despair. It is for us to decide whether freedom is self-assertion or response to a demand; whether the ultimate situation is conflict or concern.

Abraham J. Heschel
Jewish Theological Seminary
New York City
August, 1962

I thought this was great. Here is the Wiki page on him. He's a rabbi but I don't know why it doesn't say so on the book cover in his name. Caption to the picture above provided by Wiki:

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, second from right, participating in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, on March 21, 1965.

From far left: John Lewis, an unidentified nun; Ralph Abernathy; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Ralph Bunche; Abraham Joshua Heschel; Fred Shuttlesworth.

I hope this inspires you in the right direction. Sometimes I regret not having God as a tool when arguing.

Palestinians Finally Learn

2009-02-09T16:22:00.002-05:00

JPost reports that according to a recent poll "conducted by the Beit Sahour-based Palestinian Center for Public Opinion" that Hamas popularity has dropped dramatically.

Today, Hamas is supported by only 27.8% of the population in the Gaza Strip, compared to 51.5% in November, said Dr. Nabil Kukali, founder and general director of the PCPO.

This poll has many other interesting statistics. One thing is for certain. Israeli deterrence has been restored. It is a cold reality. Hopefully Israel and the Palestinians can move forward.

I hope this poll would gain support for Ehud Barak's Labor party for he was the Defense Minister instead of Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party.

A Lebanese Political Satirist With Hezbollah Among His Targets

2009-02-08T12:07:00.002-05:00

In my previous post, I mentioned a Lebanese political satirist and his comment on Lebanese media freedom. The NYTimes has an interesting profile on him. Here is an excerpt from the very end of the article:

Mr. Khalil, who cites Woody Allen and Mel Brooks as two of his chief influences, concedes that satire is not a very powerful weapon in a country where politics is still largely a matter of feudal allegiance. But he seems willing to settle for making people laugh.

“When we first started, all this was new, and people resisted it,” he said. “But I discovered that people here are not so different from Europe and the United States. They accept political satire.”

I thought it was interesting that two of his big influences are American Jews.

The Dayton Mission

2009-02-08T00:48:00.005-05:00

In Thomas Friedman's latest column, he tells the efforts of Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton to establish a security institution in the West Bank.

I accompanied him and his little team to Jenin — once the most violent city in the West Bank — to see their work. It was quite a scene: I watched a company of newly trained, proud and professional-looking Palestinian Authority troops, standing at attention, AK-47 assault rifles at their side, listening with obvious respect to the American general telling them: “What you’ve done has done more to advance the Palestinian national project than anything else ... You took care of your people at a difficult time. That is how the security forces of a country behave.”

One of the things I like about Friedman is that if he wants to write about the West Bank, he'll write from the West Bank.

General Dayton was addressing the Second Special Battalion of the Palestinian National Security Force, or N.S.F. It was trained by the Jordanian police in a program overseen by the U.S. Security Coordinator — a k a Dayton. He was originally assigned to help reform Palestinian security by the Bush team in 2005, but only got the funds to do so after Hamas took over Gaza in 2007. Some 1,600 Palestinian N.S.F. troops have since graduated, and 500 are now in training. Schooled in everything from riot control to human rights, the N.S.F. is the only truly professional force controlled by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.
The Israeli Army, originally dubious about the Dayton mission, has come to respect it and is now allowing it to expand to Hebron. What really got Israel’s attention was that during the three-week Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, the West Bank never blew up, largely because N.S.F. troops allowed widespread protests but kept Palestinian demonstrators from clashing with Israeli soldiers.
“General Dayton is our friend,” said Col. Radi Abu Asida of the N.S.F. “Now we have excellent training. Now we have professionalism in our security work. We told the people during the Gaza demonstrations, ‘You can protest, but you must do it in a modern way.’ ”

There are many in Israel who would never trust an Arab with a gun or with a ballot. They cite the 2006 Palestinian elections. They fear a Palestinian state which won't be able to stop Hezbollah or Hamas to establish launching pads around Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv. This is a reasonable fear. Just look at Lebanon - a country of elections. But the Lebanese Army can't stand up to the Iran backed Hezbollah, and political parties have militias. And the media outlets are each controlled by a different faction.

The NYTimes has a wonderful profile on Lebanese satirist Charbel Khalil.

Mr. Khalil shrugs it off. “We are completely free here [regarding the media] compared with other Arab countries,” he said, sitting at a desk in his cozy, wood-paneled studio office just north of Beirut. “Nothing is forbidden for satire except the president of the republic.”
Then he adds, with faint embarrassment, “and the army. And the judges, and religious leaders. And the presidents and kings of ‘sister and neighborly countries.’ ” All these are specifically protected from public ridicule under Lebanon’s media law, he says.

The reason the 2006 elections were a disaster for the Palestinians is that they didn't have the institutions in place to actually create a democratic state. There is more to democracy than elections. There needs to be a balance of power. Institutions that strengthens democracy such as a free media, labor unions, an independent security force, government transparency and accountability. None of these are just going to pop up or be easy to establish.

Defeating the enemy through sheer force is not the only way to establish security. One can also establish an environment which the enemy can't garner support and operate. Such an environment is one which has strong societal institutions such as those I talked about above.

Angry Peacemaker

2009-02-07T22:34:00.004-05:00

I don't know why I am calling myself peacemaker here because my actions aren't directed into actually making peace but that's the best word I could think of. I seek to understand. Knowledge is my gold. But through understanding, perhaps I would see the path to peace, and then act.

I was recently having a debate with Esra'a of Bahrain here on the MidEastYouth website. I can't say that this debate specifically triggered my anger but that along with the various other blogs I added to my 'Blog Roll', many of which I oppose the message, are making me angry. Now you must understand, I am not an emotional person. I rarely feel negative emotions towards others. I can become very happy, but never terribly upset or sad, as long as I can pursue my gold.

I see that many "peace activists", Jew and gentile, are fueled by their emotions, especially anger, to act. To me anger clouds judgment. As Simeon ben Lakish once said, "Anger deprives sage of his wisdom, a prophet of his vision." If you are wondering where I found this quote, it is from an old "Jewish Wisdom" quote book that I recently found in the house. Anger leads to mistrust. Anger and mistrust are exactly what the ultra-rightists feel or think about Arabs. Don't do the same.

In the words of the great American philosopher, Eric Cartman:

One person challenges another, "Do you know how to defeat hate?"

"How?"

"With more hate!"

I'm not defending indifference. That's not what I advocate. It just seems that more emotional anti-Israel styled peace "activists" get, the more demonization and hate arises. I do not hate the Nazis or Hamas. I just see them as characterizing one aspect of humanity - stupidity. I guess I only recently realized how stupid and savage we humans are. It doesn't matter from what culture you come from (except maybe Buddhists but I don't know much about them), we humans are capable of doing the most destructive things.

So what now? How can I relieve my anger? Reading hasbara doesn't help. Reading anti-Israel crap only angers me. I don't like the way Israel is moving forward as recent polls suggest. Perhaps the Israeli elections will surprise me. The Palestinians and Israeli Arabs are only going backwards. Can I still call myself an optimist? Perhaps it's the weather or the tons of furniture I have been moving recently which is keeping me down.

God Himself says, "May my mercy overcome my anger."
Abba Aricha

Maybe I need to repent. Since I am not a believer I don't think that will mean anything to me. I need some constructive criticism. Any takers?

To vote, or not to vote?

2009-02-07T22:03:00.002-05:00

I have talked a lot recently about the Arab Israeli community. Al Jazeera recently reported on the debate among Israeli Arabs on whether to vote or boycott the election. I already talked about the same topic here. To me, it seems silly. It seems like they are digging themselves a bigger hole, a hole which the ultra-nationalist parties (such as Israel Beiteinu) are happy they are digging. Never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity (Abba Eban). In the end of the Al Jazeera video, the reporter said this:

Back in the 1950's, 90% of Palestinian Israelis voted in elections. By 2003, this figure dropped to 63%. By 2006, it dropped even further to 52%.

He also said that this year it is projected that less than 50% of Israeli Arabs will vote.

Those advocating for Arab boycott of the elections reason that voting in this election is a recognition of the "Zionist entity." The vast majority of them already voted in this "entity" right after its creation so that can't be it. What could it be? It seems that the less they vote, the worse their situation gets. Just like the more anti-Jew the Palestinians get in their history, from the early 20th century till today, the worse their situation gets.

Perhaps this is a similar strategy to how Arab leaders utilized Palestinian misfortunes to do their bidding - fight against Israel. I think it is.

Israeli Arabs

2009-02-06T21:30:00.002-05:00

As you may have noticed, I recently added many links to the "Blog Roll" section to the right. Most of them lead to blogs but a few lead to journals or online newspapers. Many I have discovered only recently. I like to hear many different voices because I think that is the first step to understanding people, and since the Israeli Arab conflict is a people's conflict, hearing many Jewish and Arab voices is a natural step to bridge gaps, build relationships, and move forward in a constructive way.

Today I discovered that the Baltimore Jewish Times has a blog section. One of their contributors is Allison Mondell who writes from Jerusalem. I just read her latest post and I just thought that it was wonderful and articulate. So here it is in its entirety:

10:03 am every morning I race out of my apartment to catch the number 30 bus from Mt. Scopus to Talpiot. I try to pinpoint the places you can feel the change in atmosphere as I travel from East Jerusalem, the Arab part of the city, through the center of town to end in the wealthy American hub where my office is located. Yesterday, about three stops after I got on, one of the Arab custodians from my building got on. He’s probably about the same age as me and always smiles as he empties my trash can and vacuums the floor around me. After he got on the bus and gave his usual smile, he bypassed the empty seat next to me to sit on the back of the bus.

Israeli Jew. You never hear it used because it seems like a given. If you call someone Israeli, the assumption is that person is a Jew. Israeli Arab. You hear that all the time, but if being Israeli inherently means being Jewish, then isn’t Israeli Arab a contradiction? If it isn’t a contradiction, does it shown possessiveness? This Arab belongs to the Israelis…

The tension felt between the term Israeli and the term Arab is one that Palestinians living in Israel struggle with daily. Being born Arab in Israel means poorer quality education, high poverty and unemployment rates, and life as a second class citizen. Being born Arab in Israel also means equality for women, a voice (though it may be small) in the government and access to public education and services.

This duality, the pros and cons of each identity, makes the life of the Palestinian in Israel confusing. The reality is that they have very different goals then the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. Yes they want a two state solution, but many of them wouldn’t move. According to a lecture by Mohammad Darawshe, the Co-Director of The Abraham Fund Initiatives and leading expert on Jewish-Arab relations, (and my cab driver from last night; cab drivers here are really talkative) most of them would choose to not to leave Israel.

Mr. Darawshe used the actions and inactions of the Palestinians living in Israel as proof of this statement. He pointed to several Hamas leaders that called on them to begin the third intifada, and those calls were ignored. Demonstrations have been peaceful and contained and Muslim leaders in Israel are thinking about the day after. They realize they will still be living in Israel the day after.

The Disintegration of Arabs in Israeli Democracy

2009-02-05T01:15:00.015-05:00

When I read the news I try to connect events by common themes in order to see trends occurring in society. The current trend I am observing is the decay of Arab involvement in Israeli politics. There has always been a rift between the Arab minority and the Jewish majority in Israel, but what I don't understand is why are they not embracing the right to vote and the right to run for office, and the power that comes with it, to correct whatever injustices they may feel. They are helping the Evil of Powerlessness. They are doing what the ultra-right parties want them to do. The only way to beat them, is to do it in their own game - politics. Resistance, Intifada, demonstrations and riots, what ever you want to call it, has only weakened the Arabs and brought resentment to everyone, Jew and Arab, in Israel. Suicide bombers went to clubs and pizzerias, places where secular left leaning Israelis go, not where the Datiim go. This is the time to build relationships, not break them.

Anyway, the following will be my presentation of recent news articles from various sources on the current state of Arab Israelis in the Israeli political sphere:

During the Gaza war, I wrote about the disqualification of Balad and United Arab List from the upcoming election. Fortunately for the sake of democracy, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the Election Commitee's ruling.

I found this from the KACH and Kahane Chai wiki page for why Kach was first officially disqualified in the Israeli 1988 elections:

A candidates list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset if its objects or actions, expressly or by implication, include one of the following:
(1) negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people;
(2) negation of the democratic character of the State
(3) incitement to racism

Those who presented the case against the Arab parties gave additional reasons for disqualification but I thought that it would be interesting to look at the law that first disqualified the far right/fascist/racist KACH party.

The next news story is by Shani Litman of Haaretz about the Arab leader of Da'am. Her name is Asma Agbarieh-Zahalka, "apart from Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, she is the only woman heading an Israeli political party."

Even the ad by Yisrael Beiteinu, which strongly questioned the loyalty of Israeli Arabs, did not annoy them. The couple watched it as though it were a science fiction film. The only thing that concerned Agbarieh-Zahalka was the Balad ad, which did not even bother offering a Hebrew translation of its all-Arabic content. Her own ad was unusual not only because of its modest cost, or because it clearly showed her in the advanced stages of pregnancy, but also because of the party's utopian self-definition, exceptional in the Israeli political landscape of 2009: "We are Da'am, a workers' party."

You hear that? Not an Arab or Zionist party, but a workers' party.

Asma Agbarieh-Zahalka was born in Jaffa 35 years ago. Her maternal grandfather stayed there in 1948, when all his siblings fled to the Gaza Strip.

"We had good relations with our relatives in Gaza until the closures began," she said. "Since then, the connection has been cut off. I don't even know whether any of them were killed in the recent war."

Her father, a renovations contractor, came from a large family in Umm al-Fahm. He died when she was 18. She has three sisters and two brothers, all of whom lead traditional though not extremely pious Muslim lives.

It was in this context that her first rebellion took place. As a teenager, she became more and more devout, to the extent of joining the Islamic Movement. "I wanted to be close to God," she said, "and I thought this was the way. I didn't understand that the movement has political implications. I thought that religion contained elements of justice and meaning with respect to questions like 'why are we here and where should we be going.' As a girl who never left Jaffa until she went to university, I didn't have many options apart from the religious one."

But when she started studying in the humanities faculty at Tel Aviv University, another change took place. "This turned my world around in a very difficult and painful way. Suddenly I realized that there are different truths and different cultures. This confused me and brought the questions back much more forcefully, but this time there was no answer. Descartes dismantled everything for me, but he didn't manage to put it all back together again."

It was around that time, in 1995, that Da'am (which means "support" in Arabic) was founded by Jewish and Arab activists who had left the Derekh Hanitsotz organization. The party's first branch opened in Jaffa and got involved in trying to solve the housing problems of the city's Arabs residents. An activist who knew Agbarieh-Zahalka offered her a job as a copy editor at the party's newspaper.

"I came to the opening of the branch and they talked about politics, and I didn't understand a thing," she recalled. "There I met Michal Schwartz, who spoke to me in Arabic. It amazed me to meet an Ashkenazi Jewish woman who knew Arabic. That was the first time I had been able to feel that the two of us were the same."

I always wished I had learned Arabic. Being born in an enclave of Hebrew in the middle of the Arab world, and having a mother born in Tunisia, an Arab country, you would think learning Arabic would be important but because Israel hardly has any trade with Arab countries, Arab isn't necessary to learn; which is kind of odd because all the highway signs are in Arabic as well as Hebrew and English (though I think they removed the English since I left), and at least 20% of Israelis are Arab.

Working at the newspaper, she said, opened her eyes. "I began to understand what was happening around me and to believe that it is possible to change the situation - in contrast to my previous outlook that life is just a corridor through which one must pass as quickly as possible, because the important thing is life after death. After a few months, I joined the party. This wasn't easy. I entered an opposition politics that aims to change the way the world works, and this is something that frightens the population I come from, which is a minority guided by fear and survival instinct. From their perspective, the evil that is known is better than the evil that is unknown. It was hard for my family to accept this. I also had to fight for my right as a woman to follow this path. Only in the 2006 elections were they finally persuaded, and for the first time, my mother and brothers voted for me."

Great description of Semites: "a minority guided by fear and survival instinct" and "from their perspective, the evil that is known is better than the evil that is unknown."

A few days before she gave birth to her first child, Adam - during the height of the war in Gaza - Agbarieh-Zahalka was still answering intentionally provocative questions from potential voters at a parlor meeting in Tel Aviv. One of them wanted to know whether she condemned Hamas and Hezbollah terror in the same way when she spoke in Arab locales. "How do you say that in Arabic?" he asked again and again.

Agbarieh-Zahalka did not lose her composure. She is familiar with the suspicion of Arabs that even many leftists feel ...

This is true, even leftist Israelis are suspicious of Arabs. This isn't just because of tribalism. It is because many Arab Israelis affiliated with the Palestinians - they are Palestinian as far as they are concerned. I went to dinner with a bunch of Israelis recently. The host is acquainted with two Jewish medical students at Technion (the MIT/John Hopkins of Israel). These medical students have Arab friends but there is always a rift between them when an Israeli or Palestinian is killed because of the conflict. When a Palestinian civilian is killed, Jewish Israelis are saddened and Arab Israelis are angered. But when an Israeli is killed, Jewish Israelis are griefed (they don't shoot bullets into the air) and their Arab peers seem indifferent. This causes a lot of Israelis to question the loyalty of the Arab minority which doesn't even have to serve in the IDF (except the Druze).

Note: according to the host and her acquintences at Technion, 30% of the medical students there are Arabs. The host didn't like this but the rest of the table seemed it was fine.

and she is also familiar with suspicions about her party. Da'am sees itself as a party whose members are united by their class affiliation, not their national identity. For now, however, there seems to be little class affiliation between Da'am's Arab agricultural and construction workers and its Jewish university lecturers. Jewish employees of manpower agencies from Yeruham and Dimona have not yet joined this workers' society, or the labor unions it is trying to establish.

"Most of our activity began in the Arab sector," said Agbarieh-Zahalka, "because this is the weakest population, and is therefore prepared to accept our party's ideas - peace and equality. Arabs have no problem accepting this. The side that has been deprived of equality is the one that wants equality back, whereas the side that thinks it is rightly enjoying its privileges - the Jews - clearly won't want to relinquish them. But the state of the Jews is no longer the state of the Jews - it is the state of the wealthy. And therefore, in reality, even Jews no longer have privileges. Arabs and Jews are suffering from the same situation, from the privatization of their right to live with dignity.

"I would like to think it will not be very long before Jewish workers, unemployed people and laborers understand that they have nothing more to lose, that it is worth their while to join forces with the Arabs. We have branches in Tel Aviv and we are helping people who need our help. At the moment, those who are contacting us are those who are naturally more open to accepting aid from a nonprofit organization in which Jews and Arabs work together."

What bothers me more than Arab Israelis affiliating with the Palestinians is Jewish Israelis of the religious and ultra-right persuation (fascist) being hostile of the Arab minority. This goes against every fiber of my American democracy loving self.

But the Arab masses are not voting for Da'am either.

"Our greatest enemy in Arab society is despair. More than 50 percent of the Arab public will not vote at all. They have lost all faith in the parties and in politics, and this is a faith that is hard to restore. And in any case, in recent years, Arab society has not been voting ideologically but rather by clans, and therefore, it is impossible to learn anything from the vote in the Arab street about political trends in this population. To my great regret, the establishment reinforces the clan structure of Arab society by not strengthening the economy of Arab society. When the extended family becomes the economic bulwark, anyone dependent on the family has to pay the price politically, and his vote is determined by the head of the clan. Therefore, the same people can vote for the Islamists in one election and for the communists in the next.

I think this characteristic of tribalism, which the Western Jews have already gotten rid of, not only makes Arabs vote by clan but also makes them affiliate with the Palestinians.

"The clans to which I belong - Agbarieh from Umm al-Fahm and Zahalka from Kfar Qara on my husband's side - put the Triangle [region] at my disposal and could bring in tens of thousands of votes. But I want to create a different electoral culture, one in which you vote for the party that represents your ideas."

Couldn't have said it better. The Arabs need "to create a different electoral culture, one in which you vote for the party that represents your ideas."

For Da'am members, the Knesset race is only the tip of the iceberg of the party's activities. Mainly, these are carried out through the Ma'an nonprofit organization and other nonprofits affiliated with the party, which are supported by donations from workers' organizations abroad and dues paid by party members. Agbarieh-Zahalka - like the second person on the slate, Nir Nader, and other employees of Ma'an - is paid minimum wage for her work. The fact that the party has not yet won enough votes to enter the Knesset, and is apparently far from doing so this time as well, does not discourage them, nor has it caused them to seek shelter under the wing of another party with a similar ideology, such as Hadash (the Communist Party which has a list of Jews and Arabs).

"We draw hope from our day-to-day work, from the palpable change that occurs when you succeed in arranging a permanent job or a pension for someone," Agbarieh-Zahalka said. "My aim isn't to take shortcuts to the Knesset. If there were a party that was at all close to my opinions, I would vote for it. But since workers don't have any representation in the Knesset, from my perspective, the need is great. We are creating a change in consciousness and in the political culture and waiting for the moment when conditions are ripe. When that will happen doesn't concern me. "The progress of the workers' movement will also depend on the situation of workers' movements in the rest of the world. Even in Egypt, a dictatorship, we have seen a workers' movement that is beginning to build a different left. I want to believe that this can happen here, too. Today I know that this is my purpose in life, that I have found the answer I sought when I was young. Now, this has also become a personal issue, because I am doing this so that my son will grow up in a healthier society. We named him Adam [which means human being] because this is a universal name, and I hope the love of mankind will be a supreme value for him."

In a democracy people from totally different backgrounds but with similar goals can join forces to achieve their goals. Unfortunately, Arab Israelis haven't yet embraced this political arena because many have not yet embraced Israel, and Israel hasn't done enough to embrace the Arabs.

As Science, Culture and Sport Minister Ghaleb Majadle said, "Anyone who wants loyalty from Israeli-Arabs must first ensure that the State is loyal to them, by closing the gaps."

The minister was speaking in response to the Israel Beiteinu election campaign which says only those loyal to Israel should be granted citizenship.

Majadle added, "I hope we will return to being a moderate society, and that the demagogues don't succeed in bringing us to state of despair." He said that the "vast majority" of Israelis were "sane and pragmatic."

The minister also referred to Israelis' scientific achievements in recent years, saying "We're one of four leading countries in space technology, and among the world's leaders in security research." He added, however, that Israel was not fulfilling its potential in societal terms.
He warned that the county would be in danger if "gaps in Israeli society" were not bridged.

Majadle is 15th on the Labor party's Knesset list.

I was reading the comments on readers left on the online article in JPost and it brings up the issue of whether Israel should be a Jewish state where everything is Jewish i.e. the people and the laws are Halacha, or a state of Jews and other people (but that doesn't mean that all of a sudden million of Palestinian refugees are going immigrate to Israel - I am very much against that). One commenter said:

Arabs living in the State of Israel are the citizens of the Jewish State and their security protected by the Jewish State equally as for all the citizens, I call it "the Jewish State's most precious loyalty to the Arab citizens". The Jewish state provides all the social benefits to the Arab citizens equally to all the citizens is another precious Jewish State loyalty. Unfortunately, Arabs (except Bedouins) would not be loyal to Israel. Proven by:1) Commemorate naqbah, 2) Committed to help terrorists to harm Israeli citizens. 3) Refuse to serve in the Israeli Army. 4) Israeli (cont. from 1of 2) Arabs deny to call Israel "home" (I never heard Israeli Arab abroad, to say he is from Israel) 5) Refuse to study the history of Israel.... Free and democratic Israel doesn't have punitive laws against present Israeli Arab attitude. Until the state laws to be changed or Arab world forges peace with the State of Israel, Israeli Arabs will side with their Palestinian brothers and stay the enemies of the Jewish State. If the above points are facts, Israeli Arabs who abuse democracy serve in the Knesset could cause more harm to the Jewish State and its nation.

So does State rejection of its Arab minority in "spirit" cause Arab citizens to be hostile to the State, or is it Arab rejection of the State to which they are citizens of cause the State to be hostile in "spirit" ot the Arab minority? I think it is the ladder. So what if the Israeli symbols are Jewish? All is required of the Arabs is to follow the law which they have the opprotunity control via the Knesset. One thing is for sure, both the Arab and ultra-right parties have to get over their sentimental issues. I don't see an Israeli "Brotherhood" poping up nor do I seek it. I just think that both the Israeli and Arab communities should have a stake in the other.

The next article is by Thomas Friedman in the NYTimes writing from Jenin, West Bank.

In recent days, some have questioned whether Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was making a big mistake in appointing so many “special envoys,” such as George Mitchell, to handle key trouble spots, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I think they are right to question Mrs. Clinton about this plethora of envoys. But I don’t think the problem is that she has too many; it’s that she doesn’t have enough. In the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she may need at least a half-dozen envoys. Actually, this conflict is now broken into so many different pieces it may take a whole State Department of its own to resolve it.
In addition to Mitchell, Hillary may want to enlist Bill and Chelsea to take a crack at solving this one, definitely Jim Baker and Jimmy Carter, too. Why, heck, she might want to even ask some perfect strangers she meets in the halls at Foggy Bottom: “Hey, would you like a free trip to the Middle East?” Sure, it helps to know some history, but a grasp of biology now is even more useful — like how an amoeba reproduces by constantly splitting itself in half.

Nissim Dahan, a friend of my parents, said that he would like to go as an envoy to the Middle East or perhaps tag on Mitchell "with no pay and no position." He makes me excited because he has even more hope, more optimism, and more drive than I for Middle East peace - more specifically Israeli Palestinian peace.

Here is another excerpt from the Friedman article:

How did this conflict get so fragmented? For starters, it’s gone on way too long. The West Bank is so chopped up and divided now by roads, checkpoints and fences to separate Israel’s crazy settlements from Palestinian villages that a Palestinian could fly from Jerusalem to Paris quicker than he or she could drive from Jenin, here in the northern West Bank, to Hebron in the south.
Another reason is that every idea has been tried and has failed. For the Palestinians, Pan-Arabism, Communism, Islamism have all come and gone, with none having delivered statehood or prosperity. As a result, more and more Palestinians have fallen back on family, clan, town and tribal loyalties. In Israel, Peace Now’s two-state solution was blown up with the crash of the Oslo peace accords, the rising Palestinian birthrate made any plans to annex the West Bank a mortal threat to Israel’s Jewish character, and the rockets that followed Israel’s withdrawals from both Lebanon and Gaza made a mockery of those who said unilateral pullouts were the solution.
All of this has led to a resurgence of religiosity. According to Haaretz, the following questions were posed by a well-known rabbi in one of the pamphlets distributed by the Israeli Army’s Office of Chief Rabbi before the latest Gaza fighting: “Is it possible to compare today’s Palestinians to the Philistines of the past? And if so, is it possible to apply lessons today from the military tactics of Samson and David? A comparison is possible because the Philistines of the past were not natives and had invaded from a foreign land.”

If there is anyone who can articulate to readers a trend in a Middle Eastern society, it is Thomas Friedman. If you haven't read "From Beirut to Jerusalem" yet, after you have finished reading this sentence, go to the nearest library or book store and get that book, read it, and educate yourself.

The last issue I want to talk about is about a potential Arab boycott of the elections.

The debate in the Israeli Arab community on the question of boycotting the elections is growing in intensity. As of this week, all public debates between the two Arab and one Arab-Jewish party now include another participant arguing for a boycott. The parties are choosing to address the question as the possibility of boycott looms increasingly large, especially in the wake of the Gaza war. Some forecast that a high enough number of boycotters may result in one of the three parties not passing the 2 percent election threshold and losing its Knesset seats altogether.

One such debate took place in Sakhnin Wednesday. The secretaries of Hadash, Balad and the United Arab List-Ta'al were joined on stage by Muhammad Kana'aneh, secretary of the Abna el-Balad ("Sons of the Land") movement that supports a boycott. Kana'aneh told the audience that voting in the elections constitutes a complete recognition of the Zionist entity built on the ruins of Palestine. He went on to say that the Israeli establishment is utilizing the presence of Arab MKs to propagate its democracy, while in effect they have little influence. "The Arab representation in parliament does not influence decision-making, but it allows the Zionists to boast Arab MKs, including a deputy-chairman of the Knesset and members of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee," Kana'aneh said.

Is Arab lack of influence in government decision-making due to the Israeli establishment or because of Arab rejection of the State? It is obviously the latter. As another Haaretz article reports:

According to the government's statistical yearbook for 2008, Israel has about 120,000 Druze citizens, constituting 1.6 percent of the population. Five Druze lawmakers would be 4 percent of the Knesset's 120 members, 2.5 times more than the proportion of the community within the national population.
One surprise candidate is Hamad Amar of Shfaram, a long-time activist in Yisrael Beiteinu, and 12th on the party's list. Amar, who declined to answer questions Sunday about his candidacy, would only say that for the Druze community, Yisrael Beiteinu's campaign slogan "no citizenship without loyalty" is a natural one.

So why are Arabs under represented and Druze over represented in the Knesset? The reason is that Druze are more active in the Israeli establishment. They serve in the IDF and the police, and embrace Israel.

Deputy Foreign Minister Majali Wahabi (Kadima), a Druze, said yesterday that his community cannot be expected to vote en bloc: "The large parties have to understand the importance of our community. I personally plan to represent my people faithfully, but also anyone who voted for my party, no matter what sector they come from. I believe in our involvement in Israeli society, not in separate parties."

So this leads me conclude that the Arab disintegration from Israeli politics is self inflicted. One commenter on the Haaretz article about the boycott said:

Is it true that Israeli Arabs never lose an opportunity to lose an opportunity?

Another commenter said:

In Britain this sort of thing is called `cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Their leaders such as those in Balad and United Arab List (UAL) would never be able to help their people till one of them goes through the channel of mainstream politics and build relationships such as Barack Obama did in America, or what the leader of Da'am is trying to do.

Franz Kafka and Judaism

2009-01-31T14:39:00.005-05:00

I have recently started to correspond with a devout Muslim American. I'll give him a proper introduction soon but he made me think about religion so that is why I am writing this post today. Since I am writing about religion one would expect me to quote Scripture, but I will not today. For my birthday a few years ago, my grandma gave me "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations" and I enjoy reading wise, clever, and insightful quotations. Some of the most memorable quotations which I have read thus far are by Franz Kafka (1883-1924) who is the author of "Metamorphosis" (which I have read) and other fiction books. Two of the quotations by Kafka in "Bartlett's" describe certain Judaic principles or ideas. I don't know if they are unique to Judaism but I know that they greatly differ with Christian interpretation of messiach and Judgment. So here are the two quotations:

"The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last."

Parables. The Coming of the Messiah

"Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session."

The Great Wall of China. Reflections

I have always been uncomfortable with the idea of messiah. Even the Jewish interpretation of Messianic Age bothered me. But Kafka's interpretation describes something that I more or less believe in - an Age on Earth where all conflicts are resolved, when man no longer oppresses man, where world civilization finally learns from history. Do I think this will ever happen? Irrelevant. A world with no problems would make for very boring TV. How can you be creative in an Age where everybody is perfect? This is a dream which we can not understand.

You may have noticed that I haven't talked about God yet? It's a clue.

Managing the Situation

2009-01-28T19:14:00.004-05:00

Aluf Benn of Haaretz reports that Prof. Efraim Inbar, director of the right-wing think tank Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, "the most effective way to deal with the conflict is through a "controlled management" of the problem that includes the evacuation of isolated West Bank settlements."

His latest study, "The Rise and Fall of the 'Two States for Two Peoples' Paradigm," whose publication coincides with the new eras in Washington and Jerusalem, Inbar writes that the best solution would be to repartition the country, with Egypt resuming control of the Gaza Strip and Jordan controlling the West Bank. But since such an arrangement would take time to implement, for now focus should be placed on managing the conflict in its current state. Inbar also proposes "stopping terror, reducing the amount of suffering caused to Israeli and to Palestinian society and preventing escalation."

These views provoke interest because BESA, which was founded about 15 years ago, is traditionally known as a mainly right-wing institution that generally reflects pro-military views.

According to Inbar, Israel will have to evacuate additional isolated settlements to reduce the friction between Jews and Palestinians as well as showing restraint in the use of force. He said that beyond making changes to its education system and its media in order to create a more positive atmosphere, little can be expected from the Palestinian Authority. Inbar says that correct management of the conflict, which must be carefully coordinated with Washington, will help to isolate Hamas.

Inbar says that the two-state solution to which the international community is currently committed is "nonsense" in the light of Hamas' takeover in Gaza and the impotence of the PA in the West Bank. He believes that the expectation that the Palestinians will create a modern state, after the PA's failure, are unreasonable. At the same time, Inbar is aware of the difficulty involved in letting go of the two-state idea among both governments and people throughout the world.

Inbar is perhaps my favorite Israeli pundit on Al Jazeera English. I love it when they have Israelis on to argue but Inbar does it the best.

As difficult as it is to imagine a two-state solution any time soon, I still think it is the only solution. That status quo would and should not remain. I think maintaining the peace process through "gestures" would build up confidence among Israelis and Palestinians with the process. Dismanteling of settlements, even small settlements and "outposts", is a start and I believe would build confidence and relieve tensions. Perhaps if Israel show more cooperation with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinians would see that life under the Palestinian Authority (PA) and peaceful negotiations is the path to their dreams. Perhaps another peaceful Palestinian player would rise?

Emmanuel Navon of JPost also talks about managing the situation.

If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be solved in the short term, it has to be managed. But how? The rationale of the disengagement strategy was that, since the conflict seems unsolvable and since the status quo is untenable, Israel might as well get the Palestinians off its back. If only. We left Gaza, but Gaza did not leave us.

He later says:

While we should continue to strive for a political solution, we have to understand that the more the Palestinians feel that we cannot do without such a solution, the less likely they will be to compromise. Managing the conflict, at this point, means making the status quo both bearable and changeable.

The day to day life of the Palestinians must be improved. While withdrawal from the West Bank, even those areas away from settlements or the border, is supported by all who supports the two state solution, it is "nonsense", as Inbar puts it, in the current situation. Palestinian media and political institutions must be developed. Perhaps a charity network independent of Palestinian armed groups would lead be a stepping stone for institutional developement. One thing is for sure, the current Palestinian political situation is a mess. There are plenty of lessons to be learned from the Gaza withdrawal, the 2006 Palestinian elections, the Hamas-Fatah infighting, and operation 'Cast Lead'.

Cash for Peace

2009-01-28T17:42:00.003-05:00

Cash for Peace, I can't explain it better than they can so here it goes:

Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture The Simha Bahiri Annual Youth Essay Prize The Palestine-Israel Journal (PIJ), Middle East Publications, declares the launching of the Simha Bahiri Annual Youth Essay Prize. The prize competition is open to all Israeli and Palestinian youths between the ages of 18 and 26. The topic of the 2009 essay is “The Day after the Gaza War: What Can Young People Do to Strengthen the Prospects for Peace?” The essay should be between l, 000 and l, 500 words and submitted typed and double-spaced in one of the three languages: English, Arabic or Hebrew. The deadline for submission is March l0, 2009. There will be one Israeli and one Palestinian winner who will receive a prize of $l,000 each. An award ceremony will be held on March 28th, 2009, the anniversary of the launching of the Arab Peace Initiative. Middle East Publications retains the exclusive copyright for reproducing the winning essays in a future issue of the Palestine-Israel Journal, the PIJ website, or any other medium as chosen by the PIJ Editorial Board. Essays not selected will not be returned to their authors. The PIJ was able to offer this prize thanks to the generous donation of the PIJ’s Editorial Board member, Dr. Simha Bahiri and his family. Questions can be directed to heidi.pij[at]gmail.com

I was thinking of writing an essay, using my Assuming the Worse About the Other idea, but I no longer live in Israel and it's much easier to write about peace behind the safety of the US.

Anyway, God bless Dr. Simha Bahiri and his family. I'm going to check out this Palestine-Israel Journal.

Assuming the Worse About the Other

2009-01-27T00:37:00.009-05:00

When I read articles and op-eds, I recognize phrases or sentences that tell a lot more about a subject or topic than a few words usually do. These phrases usually have global, psychological and philosophical implications which can be expanded a hundred different ways. They are good starting points for a sermon. But this isn't a sermon. I always think sermons have to mention a passage in the Bible and I'm not going to do that. Torah/Bible/Koran studies are sort of like group sermons where all the participants add to the overall message of the sermon and contributes to the collective Biblical/moral insight of the group.

So back on topic: assuming the worse about the other. In this JPost article about the new American Middle-East envoy Senator Mitchell and the idea of internationalizing the peace process, the author quotes the conclusion of Mitchell's May, 2001 report on how to re-ignite the peace process in the wake of the second intifada. The last sentence in the quote is "Amid rising anger, fear, and mistrust, each side assumed the worst about the other and acted accordingly." I think this sentence tells a lot about human conflicts in general, but let's focus on the only conflict we in the West and Arab world care about - the Israel- Palestinian one.

What do the respective parties assume about the other? I can't really tell you what the Palestinian/Arab really assumes about Israelis except what their political and religious leaders say to the press and in public. In this op-ed by Jeffrey Goldberg, published in the NYTimes, Goldberg explains why Israel can't make peace with Hamas. He provides many quotes from an interview he had with Nizar Rayyan who was an influential leader in the Hamas organization who was killed in the recent war in Gaza. I suggest my readers (if I have any) read Goldberg's piece. Any Westerner who isn't sympathetic to Hamas would understand what Israelis assume about the Arabs - that they are, at least indifferent, to antisemitism. Also, Israelis assume that as soon as the Palestinians get their state according to '67 borders, they will ask for more - as stated in the Hamas Charter. The Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and other "host" countries don't care that much to be resettled in the West Bank or Gaza. They want to go back to where their grandparents once lived. Some of the more right-wing Israelis and Evangelical Christian Americans are either just racist and would never trust the Arabs no matter what.

In I wrote about a Christian woman I met on election day. Her world view of Biblical prophecy chiseled in stone would need many discussions with Israelis and Arabs to melt away.

On a recent program on Al Jazeera English, an Israeli and a Palestinian talk about the recent war in Gaza and international law. The Palestinian and the Arab mediator assume the worse about Israel - that Israel kills civilians in order to terrorize the population and to pressure on Hamas into submission. That's why the Arabs and the European lefties said from the get-go that the operation wouldn't work. They assumed that the goal of the operation was to terrorize and they tried to prove to the Israelis that they weren't scared. Hence the operation was doomed to failure.

Nine minutes into this other Al Jazeera program an Arab business man says exactly what I just said. He assumes that "anti-peace" Israelis want to terrorize the Palestinians in Gaza and it will fail because they are not afraid. At least he acknowledges that there is more than one view in Israel.

So where does that leave us; those that care about Israel, Palestine, and humanity? Try to recognize that you, too, have assumptions and prejudices. Confront and challenge those in your communities. And seek the 'other' to get understanding of his life and a feel for his shoes. At the end of the day, we all breath the same air and harbor the same germs.

BSG-Palestinian parallel

2009-01-24T04:28:00.006-05:00

I am a fan of the sci-fi TV series "Battlestar Galactica" (BSG). I'm not sure why I like this show. I discovered the show only at the beginning of season three. It's a drama ... in space. It is a Peabody Award winner and has excellent writing. Here is a synopsis from wiki to give you a little background:

Battlestar Galactica continues from the 2003 mini-series to chronicle the journey of the last surviving humans from the Twelve Colonies of Kobol after their nuclear annihilation by the Cylons. The survivors are led by President Laura Roslin and Commander William Adama in a ragtag fleet of ships with the Battlestar Galactica, an old but powerful warship, as its command ship. Pursued by Cylons intent on wiping out the remnants of the human race, the survivors travel across the galaxy looking for the fabled and long-lost thirteenth colony: Earth.

At the end of season 2 the fleet decides to settle on an in habitable planet called New Caprica. The Cylons eventually find them and take over the planet occupying the humans already living there. The humans' standard of living wasn't that great before the occupation but it got even worse during the military and brutal occupation by the Cylons. The humans' had a corrupt and ineffective leadership before and during the occupation. During the begining of season 3, those who were in the human military start leading a resistance. One time, they sent a suicide bomber to the human police graduation ceremony in order to kill the puppet governor for colaborating with the Cylons. Many humans (collaborators) died but the corrupt governor didn't. This led to a tighter crack down on the human population. The Cylons were contemplating whether to kill all the humans, try to come to a peaceful understanding, or just leave. After a succesful and daring rescue by the rest of the human fleet, the humans flee the occupation and the planet looking for a new future. The Cylons decided to stop pursuing them. During and after the escape some that led the resistance killed some humans believed to have collaborated with the Cylons. They held secret informal (illegal) tribunals to persecute and kill those who they believe to have collaborated. The new leader and President of the fleet Roslin decides to pardon all people except the puppet governor of the Cylons (though he is later acquitted of all charges).

One of the character's on the show is a former terrorist and prisoner who was released and then became Vice President (but as a political rival to the main characters) of the fleet's make-shift government. In the latest show (412 Disquiet Follows My Soul) he has this monologue about the latest crisis in the story arc which I think gives an insight on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

In prison, you start to confuse your hopes and dreams with reality. You start to believe that because you want something to happen ... for all the peel and red ... you start to believe that it will happen. You start to live on wishes ... the way things should be rather than the way they are ... all because you can't face reality. The leaders of this fleet are succumbing to wishful thinking because they can't face reality and the reality is that the Roslin/Adama Administration has led us nowhere. Earth was a mirage ... a fantasy they tangled in front of us for four long years in order to maintain power ... a fantasy the dreamed up as a way hold on and control the government over the democratic wishes of the population. So now ... what is the effectless and dispirited leadership is doing to solidify their position after failing us so miserably? ... Turning to the Cylons ... the Cylons, for help. Aren't the Cylons the reason we are out here in the first place? Aren't they the enemy? Or are they suddenly our friends if that keeps Roslin/Adama in power?

Later in the episode he says:

Every citizen has the right to protect themselves from oppression. Take whatever measure you think is necessary.

The parallel between the BSG and Palestinian story is remarkable. I don't know if the producers and writers of the show did this on purpose but I think they have great insight on human behavior like all great literature.

Eyal Press

2009-01-19T23:51:00.004-05:00

I have previously spoken about the blog Ta-Nehisi Coates recently but now I want to introduce it as a recurring feature on this blog. On January 5th, 2009 the main writer of the blog (which I am aware of - just found this blog) introduces a new writer named Eyal Press to write about the war in Gaza.

Here's Eyal in his own words:

Growing up, I visited Israel every summer, often traveling through the country with my cousin and his friends in Hashomer Hatzair, a progressive Zionist youth group. My attachment to the country runs deep. But I'm also among the many progressive Jews who went to the college when the first Palestinian Intifada erupted and who have come to view the occupation as a calamity. I'm not a pacifist but I've seen enough wars go awry (Lebanon in '82 and 2006, Iraq...) to be deeply skeptical.

My grandfather was a socialist-Zionist who fled Bialystok for Palestine in the 1920s. Had he not done so, he almost certainly would have shared the fate of relatives who stayed behind and didn't survive World War II, which is one reason I don't run with the crowd on the left that views Zionism simply and solely as a colonialist movement, forgetting the part about Jews being murdered and persecuted relentlessly for centuries on end. (It had a colonial element, to be sure, but it was also a liberation struggle.)

Anyway, I find this guy interesting and I'll be talking/analyzing what he and other commentators on that blog have to say. They seem to have a healthy discussion over there, unlike Mondoweiss.com, RichardSilverstein.com and even Digg.

Israel = Apartheid?

2009-01-19T23:20:00.002-05:00

Many critics and protesters of Israel have been comparing Israel to South Africa's apartheid system in the 80's. I admit I don't know much but South Africa during the 80's but I got the gist of it. The only thing similar between Israel now and S. Africa then is that people are trying to lead a campaign to delegitimize and boycott Israel. This analogy does not hold. Israeli Arabs which make up about 20% of Israel's population can vote, form parties, and run for office just like all citizens of Israel.

Some say that Israel has created an apartheid system in the West Bank. As the 18th century English theologian Joseph Butler once said, "Every thing is what it is, and not another thing." It is occupation, not something else. Focus on the issue. By distorting the discussion, you are more interested in hurting Israel than helping the Palestinians.

Israeli political correctness

2009-01-19T23:06:00.004-05:00

I found another interesting opinion online from the same page as my last post from Ta-Nehisi Coates which is a blog from The Atlantic.

Hey again. No, I definitely do not underestimate the discrimination against Arab-Israelis. Israelis are surprisingly forthright about their prejudices - they have virtually no culture of political correctness. Israelis have hastily assured me that it was an Arab who robbed my friend, and warned not to go out with a particular guy explicitly because he was Arab. The prejudice is definitely there.

But it's not Jim Crow. Nor is Arab prejudice against Jews (Arab states evicted most of their Jews in 48) really analogous to Jim Crow, which is specific to American history. Not in substance and certainly not in context. Whatever their entrenched ethnic prejudices, these populations have actually been physically fighting each other for 100 years. Huge proportions of the populations have personally seen combat. If you've ever heard Hungarians and Romanians talk about each other, you're getting close to the warm-and-fuzzy of Israeli-Palestinian feelings.

I never thought of it before - Israeli political correctness. I wasn't a political animal when I lived in Israel because I was too young so I didn't think of it back then. But now that I am aware of that concept in American politics, it adds a whole new dimension of comparison between Israeli democracy and American (and European) democracy. Israel is only 60 years old. It's new and old at the same time because of its Jewish character. It's in the middle of the Middle East, a regional minority, and faced or waged many wars. Many racist things have been said in the Knesset by the far right. Many offensive things have been said by the Arab MKs as well. Perhaps it is just a product of the Israeli political system with its many parties. Or perhaps it hasn't matured enough to the measure of American and European democracies. After all, it did take more than 60 years for the United States to end slavery.

Let Hamas fail

2009-01-19T22:34:00.007-05:00

I've heard this idea circulating recently: in order to defeat, or at least delegitimize Hamas to the Palestinian people, Israel must negotiate with it. If that process fails, Hamas would lose power just like Fatah did in the years following the failure of the Camp David peace talks.

It is fair to say that most Palestinians and Arabs (at least those that live in the West) don't agree with Hamas' ideology. But because of the lack of political maturation and self-criticism of the Palestinians, they don't have many options between the radical Islamic (and antisemitic) Hamas and the corrupt Fatah. That is one reason why Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006. Many people, Jews, Israelis, or otherwise, some of whom I call "friends" on Digg and the real world, believe that the Palestinians have so demonized the Israelis (and Jews) to their children that the Palestinians can't be trusted now and probably for generations to come. This is something we have to accept, though it is easy for me to say that here from the safety of the United States. I'm sure that many, if not most, Arabs have negative perceptions of Jews and Israelis. We, in general, also have negative perceptions about Arabs.

I think Jews, especially in Israel, need to have more dialogue with the Arabs. Emotions need to be expressed and felt by both sides. We all cry, smile, and laugh the same way. Hopefully, through enough dialogue, we would be smiling together for it is contagious - or so I'm told. There is so much to be said by commoners like us that don't participate in negotiations or government decisions.

So why do I still hold reservations on whether Israel should talk to Hamas after expressing a need for dialogue between Israelis/Jews and Palestinians/Arabs? One reason is that Hamas is blatantly antisemitic. There are some lines you don't cross. This might be one of them. A second reason is that if Israel talks or even acknowledges Hamas as the representative of the Palestinians, it would create a dangerous precedent. As I said before, Hamas is an antisemitic organization. But also, the nature of Palestinian politics and the way their elections were held in 2006 gives Israel and the West a bad taste about 'democracy.' Political factions MUST disarm in order to run for elections. This won't resolve the first reason of why Israel can't talk to Hamas but at least it would mature Palestinian politics. Political factions in Iraq had to disarm and hopefully the nature of Iraqi politics would mature further but there hasn't been any alarming issue other than troop withdrawal and inability for them to spend money which is understandable.

Searching for opinions (on the internet)

2009-01-19T22:16:00.002-05:00

I recently stumbled upon this post on a blog from The Atlantic. Nothing particular interesting about this particular post but I found one of the comments interesting.

One hard-earned lesson from the Northern Ireland conflict was that competitive screaming about who suffered more at the hands of the other side (it came to be called 'whataboutery') achieves nothing except a zero-sum game.
A second useful lesson is that the biggest historical injustices are the hardest ones to remedy. At some point, the victim simply has to accept amelioration of the symptoms, not a cure. God is on the side of the big battalions, unfair as it is. (What this says about God is a matter for a different discussion...) Time, however, has a way of changing the size of the battalions.
A third lesson is that subversives (or terrorists, or guerillas, call them what you want) win simply by not being defeated. The surprising corollary is that demilitarising a situation can take away their reason for being.
Let's not be naive: Hamas follows a loathsome doctrine of hatred, but they gained sway in Gaza by addressing crisis condition that Israel, as an occupying power, permitted to develop and even worsened. Israel will continue to be perceived - rightly or wrongly - as the wrongdoer unless and until the Palestinians have their own viable state and government to blame. And to get to that point, Israel will have to swallow hard and talk to the people who say they want to wipe it off the map.

These are some good insights. I'm starting to rethink my opinion on whether Israel should talk or even, chas vechalila, negotiate with Hamas.