Eretz Yisroel
Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian
identity serves only tactical purposes. The
founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool
in the continuing battle against Israel ...
-- Zuheir Muhsin, late Military Department head
of the PLO and member of its Executive
Council, Dutch daily Trouw, March 1977
The Prophet Muhammad said, "War is deception
-al-Bukhari, al-Jami al Sahih
Although a politically based mythology has grown up around and smothered, the documented past of the land known as "Palestine," there is recognition among preeminent scholars of what one of them has called "the more chauvinist Arab version of the region's history as having begun with the Arabs and Islam."1 The claim that Arab-Muslim "Palestinians" were "emotionally tied" to "their own plot of land in Palestine" -- based upon a "consistent presence" on "Arab" land for "thousands of years"2 -- is an important part of that recent mythology.
It was contrived of late in a thus far successful Orwellian propaganda effort-an appeal to the emotions that would "counter Zionism" and that "serves" tactical purposes as a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel," as the late PLO official Muhsin stated candidly in an interview, quoted at the beginning of this chapter.
In order to understand how that tool, aided by a general near-ignorance of the "unrelenting past," has distorted the perception of the present, a look at the "yesterday" of "Palestine" is necessary.
The inspection will be focused upon completing a circle-tracing the actual conditions and events that have been glossed over or omitted from the dialogue about the Arab-Israeli conflict; they are conditions and events that shaped the real political, economic, and demographic circumstances in the area. Those circumstances in turn critically affected what "justice" really consists of-for the Jewish and Arab refugees, or the "Palestinian Problem"-for the Arab-Israeli conflict. Illuminating that situation reveals and fills in the chasm between the documented facts and the Arab claims, and gives perspective to those contentions and assumptions that have become key in interpreting what is "just" for the population in question today.
"The only Arab domination since the Conquest in 635 A.D. hardly lasted, as such, 22 years...," the Muslim chairman of the Syrian Delegation attested in his remarks to the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919.3
The British Palestine Royal Commission reported in 1937 that "it is time, surely, that Palestinian 'citizenship' . . . should be recognized as what it is, as nothing but a legal formula devoid of moral meaning."4
That the claim of "age-old Arab Palestinian rights to Arab Palestine" is contradicted by history has been pointed out by eminent historians and Arabists.
According to the Reverend James Parkes, "The Land was named Palestina by he Romans to eradicate all trace of its Jewish history..."
It may seem inappropriate to have devoted so much time to "a situation which passed away two thousand years ago." But it is only politically that the defeat by Rome, and the scattering of the Jewish population, made a decisive change in the history of The Land. That which had been created by more than a thousand years of Jewish history [a thousand years before A.D. 135] remained, as did that which was beginning to be created in the thoughts of the young Christian Church.5
Many authorities have addressed the misconceptions surrounding the word Palestine. The name derived from "other migrants from the northwest, the Philistines. Though the latest arrivals, and though they only exercised control over the whole country for a few uncertain decades, they had been the cause of its name of Palestine. These Philistines were an Aegean people, driven out of Greece and Aegean islands around about 1300 B.C.E. They moved southward along the Asiatic coast and in about 1200 attempted to invade Egypt. Turned back, they settled in the maritime plain of southern 'Palestine', where they founded a series of city-states."6
According to Bernard Lewis, an eminent authority, "The word Palestine does not occur in the Old Testament. . . . Palestine does not occur in the New Testament at all."
The official adoption of the name Palestine in Roman usage to designate the territories of the former Jewish principality of Judea seems to date from after the suppression of the great Jewish revolt of Bar-Kokhba in the year 135 C.E.... it would seem that the name Judea was abolished ... and the country renamed Palestine or Syria Palestina, with the ... intention of obliterating its historic Jewish identity. The earlier name did not entirely disappear, and as late as the 4th century C.E. we still find a Christian author, Epiphanius, referring to "Palestine, that is, Judea."
As many, including Professor Lewis, have pointed out, "From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries; it was a group of provincial subdivisions, by no means always the same, within a larger entity.7 [See the map of "Ancient Palestine" in Appendix I"
In other words, it appears that Palestine never was an independent nation and the Arabs never named the land to which they now claim rights. Most Arabs do not admit so candidly that "Palestinian identity" is a maneuver "only for political reasons" as did Zuheir Muhsin. But the Arab world, until recently, itself frequently negated the validity of any claim of an "age-old Palestinian Arab" identity.
The Arabs in Judah-cum-Palestine were regarded either as members of a "pan-Arab nation," as a Muslim community, or, in a tactical ploy, as "Southern Syrians."8 The beginning article of a 1919 Arab Covenant proposed by the Arab Congress in Jerusalem stated that "The Arab lands are a complete and indivisible whole, and the divisions of whatever nature to which they have been subjected are not approved nor recognized by the Arab nation."9 In the same year, the General Syrian Congress had the opposite view; it expressed eagerness to stress an exclusively Syrian identity: "We ask that there should be no separation of the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine . . .'10 The Arab historian George Antonius delineated Palestine in 1939 as part of "the whole of the country of th name [Syria] which is now split up into mandated territories..."11 As late a the 1950s, there was still a schizoid pattern to the Arab views. In 1951, the Constitution of the Arab Ba'ath Party stated:
The Arabs form one nation. This nation has the natural right to live in a single state and to be free to direct its own destiny ... to gather all the Arabs in a single independent Arab state.12
A scant five years later, a Saudi Arabian United Nations delegate in 1956 asserted that "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria."13 In 1974, Syria's President Assad, although a PLO supporter, incorporated both claims in a remarkable definition:
... Palestine is not only a part of our Arab homeland, but a basic part of southern Syria." 14
The one identity never seriously considered until the 1967 Six-Day War -- and then only as a "tool" -- was an "Arab Palestinian" one, and the absence was not merely disregard. Clearly there was no such age-old or even century-old "national identity." According to the British Palestine Royal Commission Report,
In the twelve centuries or more that have passed since the Arab conquest Palestine has virtually dropped out of history.... In economics as in politics Palestine lay outside the main stream of the world's life. In the realm of thought, in science or in letters, it made no contribution to modem civilization. Its last state was worse than its first.15
1 . P.J. Vatikiotis, Nasser and His Generation (London, 1978), p. 254.
2. Thames Television Series, London, "Palestine," aired in the United States January February, 1979.
3. Minutes of the Supreme Council, in D.H. Miller, My Diary at the Conference of Paris, 22 vols. (New York, 1924), vol. 14, p. 405
4. Palestine Royal Commission Report, Command Paper # 5479,1937, p. 120, para. 14.
5. James Parkes, Whose Land? (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 31.
6. Ibid., p. 17.
7.Bernard Lewis, "The Palestinians and the PLO, a Historical Approach," Commentary, January 1975, p. 32-48.
8. Yehoshua Porath, "Social Aspects of the Emergence of the Palestinian National Movement," in Society and Political Structure in the Arab World, M. Milson, ed. (New York, 1973), pp. 101, 107, 119.
9. Marie Syrkin, "Palestinian Nationalism: Its Development and Goal," in Michael Curtis et al., eds., The Palestinians: People, History, Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1975), p. 200. Syrkin found that Haj Amin al-Husseini-the notorious Mufti of Jerusalem himself - "originally opposed the Palestine Mandate because it separated Palestine from Syria." Ibid.
10. Ibid. According to Neville Mandel, Arabs and Zionism Before World War I (Berkeley, 1976), p. 152, n. 49: "After World War 1, when the nature of an independent Arab state and it's component parts were being discussed, the term 'Greater Syria' was advanced to embrace the Fertile Crescent and its desert hinterland. Palestine, as an integral part of that area, was dubbed 'Southern Syria.' But these terms were not in use in 1913 and 1914, when very few nationalists contemplated complete Arab independence."
11. George Antonius, The Arab Awakening. The Story of the Arab National Movement (Philadelphia, New York, Toronto: J.B. Lippincott, 1939), p. 15, n.1; also see Mandel, Arabs and Zionism, pp. 151-153.
12. The Balath Party "describes itself as a 'national, popular revolutionary movement fighting for Arab unity, Freedom and Socialism,"' in 1951. Syrkin, "Nationalism," in Curtis et al., Palestinians; p. 200; also see Menahem Milson, "Medieval and Modem Intellectual Traditions in the Arab World," in Daedalus, Summer 1972, particularly pp. 24-26; Michel Aflaq, prominent Ba'athist and Christian, on Arab Nationalism, cited in Milson, above; also see Aflaq, Fi Sabil al Baath (Arabic) Beirut, 1962 (3rd printing), cited in Milson, p. 26; also see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939 (London: Oxford, 1962), particularly p. 301.
13. Ahmed Shukeiry, as head of the PLO, to Security Council on May 31, 1956, cited by Syrkin in "Nationalism," in Curtis et al., Palestinians, p. 201.
14. President Hafez Assad of Syria, Radio Damascus, March 8, 1974.
15. Palestine Royal Commission Report, Chapter 1, p. 6, para. 11.
This page was produced by Joseph E. Katz
Middle Eastern Political and Religious History Analyst
Brooklyn, New York
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Wednesday, March 02, 2011
Iran: A Game-Changer Escalation of Repression?
RubinReports
Barry Rubin
A story has been developing in Iran that has so far been at the rumor level but seems to be emerging as accurate (though it is not yet fully confirmed): According to friends and neighbors of these two men, the regime has kidnapped the two main opposition leaders. Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi are said to have been taken by pro-regime Islamic Revolutionary guards to prison along with their wives. Iran's government is denying that this has happened. The two leaders have been under house arrest for the last two weeks.
If the story is true, it constitutes an all-out crackdown by the Islamist regime in Tehran. Western governments should verify or debunk this story fast. If it is true, the effort to publicize the repression in Iran and act against the regime there should be greatly escalated.
Barry Rubin
A story has been developing in Iran that has so far been at the rumor level but seems to be emerging as accurate (though it is not yet fully confirmed): According to friends and neighbors of these two men, the regime has kidnapped the two main opposition leaders. Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi are said to have been taken by pro-regime Islamic Revolutionary guards to prison along with their wives. Iran's government is denying that this has happened. The two leaders have been under house arrest for the last two weeks.
If the story is true, it constitutes an all-out crackdown by the Islamist regime in Tehran. Western governments should verify or debunk this story fast. If it is true, the effort to publicize the repression in Iran and act against the regime there should be greatly escalated.
Palestinians Without Israel
George Jochnowitz
The Arab world is fighting against an independent Palestinian state with its own citizens’ lives and the lives of its children. The Arab states rejected the UN vote of 1947, which would have created a Palestinian Arab state in half of the British Mandate of Palestine–bigger than anything they could ever have gotten since then. Between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan and Egypt ruled the Arab parts of Palestine, there was no movement for a Palestinian state. The cease-fire lines that were established in 1948 were recognized by one country in the whole world: Great Britain. Today, on the other hand, the pre-1967 lines are considered holy in most of the world. Why are there settlements? Because in 1967 the Arab states, meeting in Sudan, unanimously voted for the Three No’s of Khartoum. Had they not done so, Israel would have been willing to cede most of the territories it had conquered during the Six-Day War. Since there was no hope of doing so, those who wanted to settle were allowed to go ahead with their plans.
In 2000 and 2001, Clinton negotiated a deal that would have given the Palestinians pretty much everything they could hope for. Arafat rejected the deal.
In 2005, Israel created and independent Palestinian mini-state in Gaza. Settlers were removed kicking and screaming. The Gazans responded by electing Hamas and launching rockets aimed at Israeli civilians.
When I visited Israel in 2009, I saw Arab women with headscarves strolling down Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem along with all the other Israelis and the tourists. I saw members of Hare Krishna singing and dancing along the beach in Tel Aviv. I saw copies of a Hebrew-language edition of the Falun Gong newspaper “Epoch Times.” Most impressive of all, I saw a vigil in Jerusalem–not Tel Aviv–after murders had taken place at a gay counseling center in Tel Aviv. There were people with yarmulkes at the vigil. And of course there were gay-pride flags.
Israel has an annual gay-pride parade not only in Tel Aviv but in Jerusalem. Israel drafts openly gay men and women into its armed forces. Nevertheless, gay-rights organizations all over the world are anti-Israel. Organizers of gay-pride parades in Canada and Spain announced before their parades that Israelis were not welcome to march.
Women are victims of honor murders everywhere in the Arab world. Israel, on the other hand, elected Golda Meir to be its Prime Minister before any other woman in the world who was not the wife (like Sirimavo Bandaranaike) or the daughter (like Indira Gandhi, daughter of Nehru) of a previous head of government had attained such a position. Despite this, feminists everywhere are anti-Israel.
Almost all of the so-called settlers live in East Jerusalem or its suburbs. The fight about settlements is a fight to retain East Jerusalem, including the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital. Israel has made it clear time and time again that it is eager to withdraw from most of the West Bank. “But the 1967 borders are holy,” says the world.
Fighting for the 1967 borders is a way of fighting against the creation of a Palestinian state. After all, such a state would legitimize Israel’s existence. If the Palestinians wanted a state, they could have one tomorrow–the same state they could have had in 2001 at Taba.
The way to support the Palestinians—the only way—is to support Israel. The Arab world has done only one thing to help Palestinians: arm them. The Palestinians have been allowed to remain in refugee camps for an unprecedented 62 years. Israel, on the other hand, not only has Arab members of the Knesset and an Arab in its cabinet, but is the country where it is easiest for an Arab woman to become a doctor. In addition to Arab physicians, Israel has Arab musicians.
We all know what would happen to the Palestinians if there were no Israel. The neighboring states would subjugate them. It is true that at the moment, Jordan and Egypt are not interested in annexing Gaza and the West Bank. In the case of Egypt, it is because the government doesn’t want a violent minority in the country. In the case of Jordan, which already has a Palestinian majority, the government fears it would be overthrown. But if there were no Israel, the Palestinian issue would go away and the land would be fought over by Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. What would happen to al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock? Rival groups of Muslims would blow them up—preferably at a moment when there were lots of worshipers within the buildings, just as they do in Iraq and Pakistan.
Nowadays, Arabs from anywhere in the world can choose to be treated in Israeli hospitals. Some of them agree to make the sacrifice of temporarily recognizing Israel in order to get medical treatment. Then they have to live with their moment of weakness for the rest of their lives.
It is easy to jump on the bandwagon. It is easy to condemn Israel for its real, its debatable, and its imagined moral failings. Doing so does not help anybody. It is merely an easy way to feel superior.
Only Israel can allow a Palestinian state to exist. It tried to do so in the past and failed. Its critics want it to keep on failing.
George Jochnowitz is a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.
Poll: Where do PA Arabs See Themselves in the Mideast Turmoil?
Maayana Miskin
A7 News
Palestinian Authority Arabs are pessimistic regarding their situation, and most would support a non-violent way to reunite Fatah and Hamas and form a state. However, when asked if they expect a youth revolution in the West Bank similar to those that occurred in Tunisia and Egypt, only 22.8% said yes,31.3% said no, with the rest undecided, and 27.2% explained that they felt that Palestinian conditions are different from those in the Arab countries.
Researchers questioned 1,360 PA adults, 860 of them from Judea and Samaria and the remaining 500 from Gaza. The poll was conducted on February 24-26.
The majority of respondents were pessimistic regarding the future, with 54.1% expressing concern regarding the state of the PA economy and 61.8% saying they fear for their lives, their family and their property under the PA.
Of those surveyed, 80.1% said they support the protest movement in the Arab world that has seen leaders toppled in Tunisia and Egypt, and regimes threatened in Libya and Bahrain.
Still, despite uncertainty about their future and support for Mideast protests,, they do not embrace the idea of turning their own lives upside down. Close to 75% said they would support a non-violent popular movement among Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza aimed at getting their government to bring an end to the Fatah-Hamas schism, a move that would unite actively anti-Israel and terrorist Hamas with Fatah.
On the other hand, more than 76% said they would support a popular uprising aimed at forcing Israelis to leave Judea and Samaria, but in this case non-violence was not mentioned. The question of non-violence is irrelevant, since attempted violence against Jews is ongoing.
Peace was also a non-issue. Only 19.6% expressed support for peace talks, while 77.6% said the PA should continue to refuse to speak to Israel unless Israel forbids Jews to build homes east of the 1949 armistice line.
Even the 19.6% who remained in favor of talks were not all optimistic: just 18% said they believe an end to the Israel-PA conflict is possible at this time.
Despite the strong support for unifying Hamas and Fatah, 56.5% said they prefer PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the current second in command to Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, running their lives, to Hamas' Gaza head, Ismael Haniyeh. Just 19.2% said Haniyeh would be preferable to Fayyad.
A7 News
Palestinian Authority Arabs are pessimistic regarding their situation, and most would support a non-violent way to reunite Fatah and Hamas and form a state. However, when asked if they expect a youth revolution in the West Bank similar to those that occurred in Tunisia and Egypt, only 22.8% said yes,31.3% said no, with the rest undecided, and 27.2% explained that they felt that Palestinian conditions are different from those in the Arab countries.
Researchers questioned 1,360 PA adults, 860 of them from Judea and Samaria and the remaining 500 from Gaza. The poll was conducted on February 24-26.
The majority of respondents were pessimistic regarding the future, with 54.1% expressing concern regarding the state of the PA economy and 61.8% saying they fear for their lives, their family and their property under the PA.
Of those surveyed, 80.1% said they support the protest movement in the Arab world that has seen leaders toppled in Tunisia and Egypt, and regimes threatened in Libya and Bahrain.
Still, despite uncertainty about their future and support for Mideast protests,, they do not embrace the idea of turning their own lives upside down. Close to 75% said they would support a non-violent popular movement among Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza aimed at getting their government to bring an end to the Fatah-Hamas schism, a move that would unite actively anti-Israel and terrorist Hamas with Fatah.
On the other hand, more than 76% said they would support a popular uprising aimed at forcing Israelis to leave Judea and Samaria, but in this case non-violence was not mentioned. The question of non-violence is irrelevant, since attempted violence against Jews is ongoing.
Peace was also a non-issue. Only 19.6% expressed support for peace talks, while 77.6% said the PA should continue to refuse to speak to Israel unless Israel forbids Jews to build homes east of the 1949 armistice line.
Even the 19.6% who remained in favor of talks were not all optimistic: just 18% said they believe an end to the Israel-PA conflict is possible at this time.
Despite the strong support for unifying Hamas and Fatah, 56.5% said they prefer PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the current second in command to Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, running their lives, to Hamas' Gaza head, Ismael Haniyeh. Just 19.2% said Haniyeh would be preferable to Fayyad.
The Root Of The Arab-Israeli Conflict Is Not Territory
Shari Goodman
It is time for Americans to be told the truth about the nature of the Middle East conflict. Unlike what we have been led to believe throughout the last two decades, the Israeli-Arab conflict is not over territory. If it was, the conflict would have been solved many years ago.
At the origin of the birth of Israel, the United Nations sought to divide the territory that was Transjordan and occupied by the British into two states...one Jewish and the other Palestinian. Although the area designated for a Jewish state was much smaller than the original size included in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Israel accepted the offer. The Arabs rejected it with the erroneous belief that they could drive the newly formed state of Israel into the sea and conquer the whole territory for themselves.
They miscalculated! Not only did they lose the war to Israel, but they were humiliated in defeat. Honor is a virtue that is prevalent in Islamic culture and saving face at any cost is a must, specifically when the battle is against the non-believers. Thus; the quest to destroy Israel continues to this day with a ferocity tolerated by a secular subdued petro dollar conscious Europe and a leaderless anti-Colonialist American administration that views the Third World as victims of American imperialism. Beginning with the Camp David Accords in 1978, Israel agreed to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza. They returned all of the oil fields in the Western Sinai with commercially productive wells in exchange for a cold piece that guaranteed freedom of passage for Israel through the Suez Canal. Yet, a normalization of relations between Egypt and Israel never materialized. Those who favored trading land for peace were greatly in support of the Oslo Accords signed in 1994 between Yasser Arafat and then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Arafat's PLO was to guarantee Israel's security by clamping down on terrorism; however, instead of getting security, Israel was besieged by terrorism and rocket attacks during the Intifada of 2000.
Unfortunately for Israel, the signing of the Oslo Accords was the beginning of the delegitimization of Israel. The Accords bequeathed upon the "Palestinian people" legitimacy and an identity separate from the rest of their Arab brethren. Although Jordan's population is 70% Palestinian, the recognition by the international community of a "Palestinian" people gave them for the first time an entitlement to land and statehood.
For Israel's entire existence it has been surrounded by Arabs bent on its destruction. In a 2006 Egyptian government poll, 92% of Egyptians viewed Israel as the enemy, and now with the toppling of Mubarak, millions of Egyptians marched through the streets chanting "to Jerusalem we are heading, martyrs in the millions". We are presently witnessing a multi-prong war against the Jewish state....militarily, diplomatically, economically and legally. Driven by Arab oil money in alignment with a Leftist agenda that seeks the fall of Capitalism, there are now many organizations within the United States and Europe that are waging warfare against Israel. What the Arabs could not achieve on the battlefield they are bent on winning in the international arena of public opinion.
During the 1930's and 1940's individual European Jews were the hunted pariahs of the world. Today's anti-Semitism is driven by the Muslim world, and instead of targeting individual Jews, the anti-Semitism of today is collective. An entire Jewish state is now the target. However, the attack on 9/11 and the subsequent numerous attempted Islamic attacks on our own soil have brought to the forefront of our consciousness the belief that we have a problem and the problem is Islamic doctrine.
While it is said that most Muslims are not terrorists, it is also without a doubt that the majority (if not all) of today's terrorist attacks are carried out by Muslims. As it is stated by Mohammed (in Bukhari 4,52,142):
"To battle Kafirs in jihad for even one day is greater than the entire earth and everything on it. A spot in Paradise smaller than your riding crop is greater than the entire earth and everything on it. A day or a night's travel in jihad is greater than the entire world and everything on it."
Then there is the final word in the Koran on the People of the Book (9:29)
"Make war on those who have received the Scriptures (Jews and Christians) but do not believe in Allah or in the last Day."
Given Islamic doctrine, is it any wonder that Jews in war-torn Israel have not been allotted any peace? Now we in the West are feeling the impact of Islamic warfare as dictated by the Koran and its legal code, Sharia. Organizations such as Peace Now and more recently J Street have built their entire raison d'ĂȘtre on the erroneous belief that land must be given up by Israel in order for there to be peace in the Middle East. Well the cat is out of the bag now, and they can disband. The root of the Israeli-Arab conflict is NOT territory, but Islamic intolerance of a non-Islamic state within their midst.
Until we in the West begin to reframe the conflict from one of territory to one of Islamic intolerance, we who love liberty will continue to lose this war. Israel is the canary in a sea of Islamism and just as JFK stated in a visit to Berlin in 1962 "ich bin ein Berliner", we who are committed to the security of Israel now declare, "we are all Israelis,” (anachnu kulanu Israelim).
Family Security Matters Contributor Shari Goodman is Chapter Leader at Calabasas-West Valley ACT! For America, Calabasas, Ca. The views expressed here are hers and do not necessarily represent the views of ACT! For America or of Family Security Matters.
You can find this online at: http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.8860/pub_detail.asp
COPYRIGHT 2011 FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS INC.
Obama's Lawless America
Daniel Greenfield
Obama chooses not to defend DOMA in court. His attorney general tries to deflect a congressional investigation into his office's Black Panther cover up by playing the race card. Congress passes laws which it does not read. A Federal judge rules that inaction is also a form of action. What all these have in common is that they are symptoms of a lawless society.
When most people hear "lawless society", they picture anarchy, but that's not actually the case. All societies have laws of some sort, but where a lawful society is governed by its laws, a lawless society is ruled by power. In a lawful society, the law applies to everyone. In a lawless society it does not apply to those who are in power. Obama began his term in office by setting up an infrastructure of czars to implement policies without legislative oversight. It was an ominous move, and a predictable one. And it didn't end there. In an ethical administration, the Attorney General serves as a watchmen. In Obama's Administration of 40 Thieves, he was bound to be the ringleader. The pick of Eric Holder, a key Clinton Administration Pardongate figure, meant that the attorney general would lead the cover up of any administration scandal.
Additionally new offices were created with ill defined duties to reward supporters. These new office holders jockeyed for power with established cabinet members. Corruptocracies are built like the leaning Tower of Pisa, a peak at the top and a shaky structure underneath. It wasn't long before overlapping powers led to a convoluted chain of command, with infighting and scrambled signals. The lack of law in a corrupt system leads to chaos. While the lack of law benefits the corruptocrats, it also impedes their effectiveness. A corrupt system is greedy, but ineffective. It uses law to control others, but it is not ruled by any law.
There is talk of calling another Constitutional Convention, but when the political system does not respect the existing Constitution, then the problem is not a matter of closing the legal loopholes through which entire freight trains have been driven in the night (e.g. the Commerce Clause), but to restore respect for the law. And by the law, I don't mean every single piece of confetti tape spewed out by numerous legislatures and executives at every level-- but the structure itself.
How do you remodel a house, when the management insists that it's not a house, but a tepee, a carnival, an office building, a launch pad or an apple orchard or anything that suits them at a given time. A lawful society depends on an understanding of the relationship between government and the governed. But in a lawless society, the parameters of the relationship are redefined at the whim of those who govern.
The Living Constitution is a relationship constantly being redefined not by law, but by the will of those in charge. The pretext of change has been employed to dismantle a system of laws, and replace it with rule by fiat. And now under the banner of Hope and Change, there are no more laws, only decrees. Liberal judges scrambling to justify the absurdity of the ObamaCare Mandate are forced to search for retroactive justifications for it. When the legal justifications for a bill are such a mess that a judge's defensive ruling becomes a philosophical debate about the nature of action and inaction, then we are only one step away from convening courts to judge animals, as was done in the Middle Ages.
Every defense of the mandate revolves around the unworkability of ObamaCare. For the sake of preserving it, legal novelties have to be trotted out. Liberal judges cover up for bad lawmakers with leaning towers of logic. Because congress did not use its mind, judges must claim that the government can regulate the mental activity of the public. All this in the wake of a financial crisis which went down the same way, with "too big to fail" incompetence getting covered up by people who knew better, but were determined to keep the system going anyway. Liberal pundits claim that the financial disaster is proof that we must regulate Wall Street-- but who will regulate a government that is behaving the same way?
Everyone knows the Emperor is naked. And the media won't stop throwing invisible cloaks over him. Obama has become their "Too Big to Fail", the messiah they invested everything into with nothing to show for it. And ObamaCare has become his centerpiece achievement. And if one of Clinton's judges must rule that by not buying a product you are participating in a commercial transaction, to protect that crystal chandelier of achievement, then that is what she'll do. The law be damned.
In its spare time, the media speculates how many people knew that Madoff's financial program was unworkable, when all of them know about a much bigger and much more unworkable program. And are part of the cover up for it. The reason the debate doesn't happen, is because they can't afford one. The cards are right in front of them and all they can do is keep bluffing their way through a bad hand. But they aren't alone. Both Democrats and Republicans have their own set of bad cards. Both are bluffing each other. And when the game ends, so does the country.
This wouldn't happen in a lawful system for the simple reason that lawful systems are also truthful systems. The law is a test, not just of adversarial prowess, but of functionality. But when there are laws, but no law, then the laws exist to conceal the underlying lawlessness.
Legislation is used to cover up the faults of the legislators. Two sets of books are covered up with a third. And a law forbidding anyone from even mentioning it. A crisis is dealt with by a round of fingerpointing, and the best fingerpointers get into power just in time to blow their turn at the next crisis. Crisis management becomes a test of public relations and an opportunity to loot the treasury in the name of fixing the crisis. Reforms never happen, because that would mean identifying the actual problem. And the problem is the system itself. Their system.
Both parties agree more than they disagree. The chief thing that they agree on is the need to preserve their own power, to pile new laws over old laws rather than strike at the heart of the dilemma. The big questions go unasked because they are too dangerous. Dangerous not to those who are under the law, but those who make the laws. The lawless men who make laws for all. But do not bind themselves by them.
Can we reform government is not the question. We can reform it in the same way that we can take a vandalized house, slap a little paint on it, oil the hinges, tinker with the plumbing, and then lean back and accept congratulations for a job well done. Even if it means that the house will just fall down a little later. That is the kind of reform that our politicians are very good at. But we don't need to reform government, what we must do is restore lawful government. You can only slap so many fresh coats of paint on termite ridden walls before the whole structure with its new white walls come crashing down.
The Obama Administration has set a new standard for lawlessness. Not in disobeying or disregarding, but in displaying outright unawareness of it. To the liberal legislator, the Constitution has become no more relevant than the Magna Carta. Placing limits on authority is irrational to him, as it defeats his chief notion of what the purpose of government is, to provide services and keep the people from harming themselves through their own ignorance and vulnerability. In the legal sense, they do not see themselves as public servants, but as caretakers of the public. They see themselves as no more bound by the laws they make, than parents are bound to follow the curfew they set for their children.
This is where the constant redefining of the relationship between government and the governed has brought us. To rule through a two tier system by a breed that sees itself as legislative Eloi scrambling to rein in the gun-loving and bible-keeping Morlocks. Elitist petty tyrants who assert their authority in our name, but without regard to our wishes. Their elitism justifies tyranny. Law becomes a means of reigning us in, while giving them free reign. And as in any system, where the ruled are not considered to be on par with the rulers, either morally or mentally, the laws which apply to the ruled, do not apply to the rulers.
Elitism means entitled privilege. Beneath the veneer of self-sacrifice beats the lawlessly progressive heart, always on the lookout for new layers of authority and new means of control. And the luxuries of office are justified by their self-sacrifice. To fancy yourself morally superior is to possess the right to treat others as moral inferiors. To take what is theirs in the name of your grand cause. And thus lawlessness becomes law. The relationship between government and the governed becomes that of predator and prey.
Welcome to Obama's Lawless America.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s Hate on the American Campus
Jamie Glazov
FP: Shari Goodman, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
I would like to talk to you today about a petition you created that seeks to take some action against the Muslim Student Association and its teachings of hate at UCLA. Tell us about it.
Goodman: Recently the Muslim Student Association sponsored an Islamic Conference attended by about 700 students. Two of the invited guests were radical Imams. One was Imam Amir Abdel Malik, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, who urged the attendees to die for the establishment of Islam. The following Muslim Brotherhood pledge was recited at the end of the two day event:
“I Pledge: Allah is my lord, Quran is my guide, Jihad is my spirit, righteousness is my character, and paradise is my goal. For I command what is right and forbid what is wrong. I will fight against oppression and will die to establish Islam.”
In response to that event, our chapter decided it was time to take a stand; thus, our petition was created. We seek to ban any group that advocates the overriding of our laws and our government. We are hoping to gather at least 1000 signatures before we mail it to the Chancellor at UCLA. One can sign the petition by going online to:
www.petitiononline.com/ACTCAL1/petition.html FP: How many Muslim Student Association chapters are there?
Goodman: There are over 1000 university and high school MSA chapters across the country.
FP: Aside from signing the petition what can the public do to remove seditious groups from our university campuses?
Goodman: Ultimately pressure must be put forth on University Chancellors who have allowed their campuses to be used as a propaganda tool to further an Islamic agenda under the guise of free speech. The effort to supplant our Constitutional Republic with Islam and Sharia is an exercise in sedition. Years ago, we actually charged people with seditious behavior, but since the Vietnam War our government has looked the other way. President Franklin Roosevelt actually enacted the Smith ACT of 1940 which made it illegal to advocate for the overthrow of our government.
FP: Tell us about ACT’s mission.
Goodman: We are a local chapter of ACT! For America, a non-profit citizen grass roots organization dedicated to promoting public policies that protect our national security as well as defend traditional American values against an assault of radical Islam.
FP: Are you receiving any help from the Jewish community?
Goodman: No, we are not. The Los Angeles Jewish Journal did not even want to cover a story about the petition. One free lance reporter tried to pitch the story to them, but he reported back that the content was not Jewish enough for them.
FP: Has the ADL or the Simon Wiesenthal Center gotten involved?
Goodman: I have not heard from the Simon Wiesenthal Center and it appears the ADL is still busy searching for white supremicists in white hoods rather than admit that the main threat to Jews stems from rabid anti-semitism rampant throughout the Muslim world.
FP: Are you succeeding in awakening the American public?
Goodman: I believe that Americans are slowly waking up to the stealth Jihad that is being waged upon us. We began our chapter nearly two years ago with seven people and we now have a membership close to 500. Our national organization has grown to nearly 450 chapters with 150,000 members. As we continue to grow, the larger our impact on Capitol Hill.
FP: How can people get in touch with you and your organization?
Goodman: Our national website is actforamerica.org and you can reach our local chapter at calabasasact@gmail.com
FP: What other projects has ACT undertaken?
Goodman: Our national organization has a STOP SHARIA FINANCING campaign on our national website. Islamists have infiltrated many of our institutions with demands for Sharia compliance and many have complied; thus, money is being funneled to Islamic charities which then end up in the hands of Hamas and Hezbollah.
FP: What challenges does your organization face?
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The Muslim Brotherhood’s Hate on the American Campus
Jamie Glazov Posted by Jamie Glazov on Mar 2nd, 2011 and filed under Daily Mailer, FrontPage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling, United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror. His new book is Showdown With Evil. He can be reached at jamieglazov11@gmail.com.
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Goodman: I have not heard from the Simon Wiesenthal Center and it appears the ADL is still busy searching for white supremicists in white hoods rather than admit that the main threat to Jews stems from rabid anti-semitism rampant throughout the Muslim world.
FP: Are you succeeding in awakening the American public?
Goodman: I believe that Americans are slowly waking up to the stealth Jihad that is being waged upon us. We began our chapter nearly two years ago with seven people and we now have a membership close to 500. Our national organization has grown to nearly 450 chapters with 150,000 members. As we continue to grow, the larger our impact on Capitol Hill.
FP: How can people get in touch with you and your organization?
Goodman: Our national website is actforamerica.org and you can reach our local chapter at calabasasact@gmail.com
FP: What other projects has ACT undertaken?
Goodman: Our national organization has a STOP SHARIA FINANCING campaign on our national website. Islamists have infiltrated many of our institutions with demands for Sharia compliance and many have complied; thus, money is being funneled to Islamic charities which then end up in the hands of Hamas and Hezbollah.
FP: What challenges does your organization face?
Goodman: I would say the biggest challenge is that we have to rely on word of mouth and the internet to get our message across. In the politically correct mainstream media we are either a liability (Islamic lawfare) or they fear being a target of Islamic terrorism.
Just look at cartoonist Molly Norris who had to go into hiding after she advocated a “Draw Mohammad Day”. Unfortunately, the threat of physical harm to those of us who speak out is paving our march toward Dhimmitude as we refrain from criticizing Islam. For those who are not familiar with the term, Dhimmitude is an Islamic word for secondary class citizenship for non-believers.
FP: What do you view as the most significant obstacle we must overcome?
Goodman: We need to rid ourselves of the belief that all cultures are equal. It is a foolish indoctrination that has stripped us of our national identity and without a national identity we are adrift and quite susceptible to a stealth Jihad that seeks to replace our values and way of life with Islamic doctrine.
FP: Shari Goodman thank you for joining us. For all of our readers who are interested in Ms. Goodman’s petition against the MSA at UCLA, click here to find out more about it.
Meanwhile, we welcome all of our readers to support another campaign that is fighting jihad on our American campuses: the Freedom Center’s spring Islamo-Fascism Awareness Campaign that is doing its best to expose and block Islamic extremists’ genocidal intentions and their campaign of lies during the genocidal Anti-Israel Apartheid Week. As the centerpiece of the Freedom Center’s counter-protest, student groups will confront the “apartheid walls” with our center’s “Wall of Lies,” which is composed of the anti-Israel lies Palestinians promulgate with the intention of destroying the Jewish State.
Israel’s Radical Left
To the Editors:
The dilemma of the radical leftist described in Assaf Sagiv’s essay (“The Sad State of Israeli Radicalism,” Azure 40, Spring 2010) can be summarized as the conflict between the rejection of what one’s society stands for on the one hand, and the attempt to retain some degree of effective participation in its life on the other. It is also the awareness that one’s actions will invariably be dismissed by the majority of that society’s members. As one fated to express radical views, I have felt this predicament keenly for forty years and over many campaigns. For instance, I have seen my book, Overcoming Zionism (2007), banned, and I have been forced from my academic position. It has indeed been rough at times. But I would not say—as does Sagiv—that I have despaired. For me, at least, being a radical connects with something much greater and more enduring than the mere obloquy of the world. There is comfort in feeling connected to those who have gone before me in the struggle for radical change, for example the anti-slavery campaigns in the United States or the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa. There is comfort, too, in knowing that all four Gospels remind us of Jesus’ saying that a prophet—the word for “radical” in those days—is not without honor, save in his own country and household. There are many examples of this principle in the Hebrew Bible, whose prophet-radicals so often camped outside the walls of the city. Indeed, I feel privileged to have been able to call for the basic transformation of something so destructive to humanity—Jews included—as the Zionist state.
Although my knowledge of the Israeli anti-Zionist radicals about whom Sagiv writes is minimal (in part due to my limited Hebrew), I wish that he would do more than infer their misery. Sagiv should provide evidence as to how these radicals actually feel about standing against the majority of Israeli opinion. I wonder about the degree to which they are sustained by beliefs such as those which I described above, and whether it is they who despair, or instead members of the Zionist left. It is the latter, after all, who are faced with the thankless task of trying to resolve the absolute contradiction of Zionism: Namely, that a Jewish state, born in violence and maintained by usurpation, can also be genuinely democratic and worthy of the ethical grandeur woven into Judaism.
In fact, I believe the Zionist leftist has the much harder time of it, being a walking oxymoron; her tribalist, Zionist identity crashes continuously against her solidarity with the victims of injustice and those who struggle against it. She must also grapple with her fidelity to the Enlightenment tradition of critical reason, or what Marx called “the ruthless critique of everything existing.” But an oxymoron is only a logical category, and thus it can be overcome, at least to a degree. The Zionist left (and I am led to include Sagiv in this category) can do something about these contradictions, namely by striving to expand the universal elements within its discourse while simultaneously narrowing the corrupting influence of chauvinism. Concretely, the left should work hard not to present the Palestinians as bloodthirsty congenital terrorists, and the anti-Zionist radicals as peevish cranks.
Unfortunately, Sagiv’s method gets in the way of this, precisely because, as he says, it “avoids the usual quarrels over historical narratives… [in order to] uncover the internal logic of anti-Zionist thought and point to its theoretical implications and practical conclusions.” The problem is that, however we shape our narratives, there are objective and discernible dynamics to history. To set these aside can make a seemingly sophisticated analysis arbitrary, thus creating a vacuum to be filled by Zionist chauvinism. Case in point: Sagiv frames his argument by invoking the “weight of Palestinian violence,” under which the hopes of the Zionist left “may indeed have crumbled.” He is also agitated by the “stubborn refusal of the Palestinians” to recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state or to renounce the “right of return” that dashed the near-“messianic” hopes of Oslo. The image is of congenital Palestinian intransigence and, along with it, the perverse insistence of the radicals that the answer lies in the events of 1948. Well, maybe it does—or maybe the history goes back to 1937, 1929, 1917, 1897, or 70 C.E. But what about the history of the Oslo period itself, which we are meant to regard as an abstract, “good-faith” gesture made by the liberal Israeli state under Ehud Barak?
I am amazed that Sagiv omits consideration of that most glaring of the “facts on the ground” during this period: the expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Was this, we must ask, a mere real-estate operation, or was it in truth a slow-motion ethnic cleansing that continues to this day? What conclusion can a rational person draw except that settlement building expresses the Zionist impulse to eliminate everything non-Jewish from Palestine? It is a lot harder, when seen in this light, to fault the Palestinians for stepping up their resistance. By ignoring such a pertinent aspect of the situation, Sagiv makes the radical anti-Zionists seem like quixotic romantics instead of like people who soberly assess the reality on the ground.
Sagiv’s essay also touches upon the vexing question of the Palestinian right of return, and here another problem surfaces. The relevant passage is as follows:
One… problem lies in the marking of 1948 as the turning point in Jewish-Palestinian relations.... It stems, in large part, from a desire to turn back the hand of time and “heal” the original trauma. At the same time, however, it precludes any possibility of ever reaching a feasible agreement with the Palestinians. After all, a return to 1948 as a way of making amends, if only in part, for the injustices of the Nakba would also imply an acceptance in some form of the Palestinian “right of return.” Needless to say, this proposal is met with fierce opposition from the vast majority of Israel’s Jewish citizens, who perceive it, not unreasonably, as a recipe for national suicide. Given the present reality, the radical left’s position is more intent on reopening old wounds than it is on achieving a real breakthrough toward reconciliation. [Emphasis mine.]
Instead of “Needless to say” and “not unreasonably,” Sagiv would have been wiser to say, “unreasonably,” since he obscures the fact that there are two distinct meanings condensed into the term “national suicide.” First is the actual, self-inflicted death of the Israeli nation, reminiscent of Masada, and second (and more likely) is allowing for a repeat of the Holocaust. Of course, the Holocaust has not the slightest chance of recurrence in today’s world; nonetheless, it looms like an ominous rain cloud over the Israeli collective consciousness. It is used to prevent any chance of coming to grips with the second, and real, meaning of the right of return, which is the potential downfall of the Jewish state, whose pseudo-democracy depends on a permanent majority of Jews, and could dissolve were Palestinians allowed to return to the land from which they had been expelled.
By not differentiating between the two meanings, Sagiv uses the Holocaust to haunt the notion of human rights and trump the very idea of justice. He allows radical unreason to override the claims of reason and justice, all the while calling it “not unreasonable.” This manipulation of the great sufferings of the Jewish people in the name of perpetuating Zionist rule is, unfortunately, symptomatic of larger segments of Israeli society. It largely explains the rise of the religious right and the collapse of the Israeli left. As a result, it is hardly surprising that Israel is becoming more and more isolated—and more and more desperate—with the passage of time.
Indeed, all that holds the Jewish state together today is the infusion of massive doses of impunity by its imperial patron. But as this impunity only leads to more reckless transgression by the Zionist state, Israel has become caught up in a vicious circle with no resolution, save eventual collapse. As a matter of fact, the Jewish state’s collapse is being hastened by the inevitable withdrawal of American support, despite the enormous degree of influence wielded by Zionists in American society. There are too many straws in the wind to ignore the storm’s approach. Consider what Israel’s Ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, said several months ago: Relations between the two countries are not in a “crisis,” because a crisis is something that passes; rather, relations are in a state of tectonic shift, in which continents are drifting apart.
In light of this reality, anti-Zionist radicals are becoming more prophetic, and less despairing, by the minute.
Joel Kovel
New York, N.Y.
To the Editors:
Assaf Sagiv provides a view of the Israeli radical left as seen from a conservative vantage point. Although his analysis aims to be fair, and does avoid the ill-informed and hateful rhetoric so common in the media, he nevertheless makes several crucial missteps. As a result, he paints a distorted picture.
First, Sagiv’s account of Israeli responses to the failure of Oslo ignores that process’ most important aspect: the ongoing settlement construction, the land confiscation, and the intensification of the Occupation (through closures, roadblocks, targeted assassinations, etc.). The effect of these Israeli policies was twofold: The Palestinians, out of frustration with the process, turned to Hamas; and Israeli radicals rejected the two-state solution. The consistent reluctance of both the Israeli government and the public to abandon their practices of expansion and subjugation, and to regard the Palestinians as equal partners, could not but raise questions about the historical roots of that approach and its implications for a possible solution.
Second, in citing Ehud Barak’s explanation for the failure of Camp David in 2000, Sagiv ignores a significant body of research that disputes Barak’s account and asserts that Israel effectively offered Palestinians a series of non-contiguous territories with limited powers—thus falling far short of real independence. This truth was exposed, for example, in a series of articles by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha in the New York Review of Books, among others. But again, for Sagiv, radical responses have nothing to do with Israeli policies and actions.
Third, Sagiv’s statement that the radical left wishes to return to 1948 is misleading. Rather, the radical left seeks to address the legacy of the situation created in 1948, while acknowledging that many subsequent changes are irreversible (demography, for example). Most authors discussed in the essay (Kimmerling, Yiftachel, Shenhav, and others) accept the State of Israel as an inevitable product of history, but seek to change its nature so as to render it a more liberal state, one that treats all of its citizens equally. To be sure, expanding the boundaries of citizenship by severing its restrictive relationship to ethno-religious identity may not be acceptable to the majority of the Israeli-Jewish public. But is this not a classic liberal goal?
Fourth, contrary to Sagiv’s claim, the majority of people mentioned in his essay recognize that pre-1967 Israel is not the same as the Israel of the post-1967 Occupation, and that Palestinian citizens enjoy more substantial civil liberties than their occupied relatives. But they also argue that the Jewish nature of Israel places serious limits on the degree of democracy for Arabs (as the phrase goes, “Israel as a Jewish-democratic state is Jewish for Arabs, and democratic for Jews”). They also argue that the relative democratic nature of pre-1967 Israel could be made possible only after the ethnic cleansing of the majority of the pre-1948 Arab residents. There is a strong inverse relationship between the proportion of Palestinians in the country’s population and their political assertiveness on the one hand, and the degree to which Israeli Jews are willing to live with them in a fully democratic system on the other. Seeking to make democracy more inclusive is a well-established liberal goal, and would not be considered radical at all in most societies.
Fifth, in contrast to Sagiv’s assertion, no member of the radical left supports or sanctions the acts of tyrants or terrorists (on the Arab or Muslim side). Rather, they frequently express solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people for political rights and equality with Israeli Jews. Such solidarity cannot be equated with support for their leaderships.
All these points clearly demonstrate that, contrary to Sagiv’s analysis, the so-called Israeli radical left wants Israel to become a more liberal, more democratic, more inclusive state. In most societies in which Jews live as a minority, this is a desirable goal, one they often support fully. Why, then, should it be seen as a radical existential threat in the case of a society in which they are a majority?
Ran Greenstein
Johannesburg
To the Editors:
As a certified “radical Israeli leftist,” and an anthropologist who, rather than teaching, directs the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, I read Assaf Sagiv’s essay with the detached and bemused interest of a subject who has been rendered an object, or at least a category.
I have little problem with the terms Sagiv uses to describe “us.” In fact, his radical-versus-Zionist-left distinction captures the great ideological chasm that has divided radicals from liberals in all times and places. As Sagiv recognizes—yet doesn’t seem to accept—radicals, unlike most liberals, define themselves not by their citizenship in a particular state, but rather by their commitment to universal social justice, along with a heavy dose of suspicion toward the intentions of states and those who too closely identify with them. Sagiv’s enigmatic phrase, “They deride the accusations of treason,” sums it up nicely.
The same applies to a nationalist ideology like Zionism. Israeli radicals do identify themselves as Israelis (hence the name of the organization I head), but would argue that any nationalist conception must conform to the cause of a just peace and inclusive social justice. Radicals envision Israel being transformed into a state of all its citizens, either binational or unitary. Unfortunately, this criterion does alienate radicals from the general public, as Sagiv notes deridingly. From their perspective, this alienation derives not from the justness or workability of their conception of the state and the universal values it embodies, but rather from the lack of critical political thought demonstrated by the public—a public, that is, socialized by state-run educational institutions, a flawed political system, subservient media, and nationalistic militarism into a narrow nationalism and a fear of the Other.
It is difficult to provide a radical critique of Sagiv’s paper, because the issues it raises—the inability of radicals to influence government policy or public opinion; their unavoidable “anti-Zionism,” based on the “sins” of 1948; their mistrust of states in general; their political agenda, which rejects mere reform and insists instead on restructuring society according to principles of egalitarian inclusiveness, cultural pluralism, and universal human rights; and the transnational nature of their activism, which holds one’s own country can be held accountable for its policies and actions—rest on an infrastructure of assumptions shared by Sagiv and his Azure readership that tend to be left unsubstantiated and merely asserted. In many such instances, as when Sagiv quotes Sartre’s famous introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, he believes it is enough simply to ask: “Is there any radical leftist in Israel who would not wholeheartedly endorse these words?” The outrageousness of this assumption does not require any additional comment.
The problem for a critic, then, is not to counter Sagiv’s analysis; in fact, he puts his finger on the main issues defining the radical-left position and provides excellent documentation. It is, rather, to ask: So what? Sagiv does not actually address the substance of the various positions he reviews, but simply assumes that by exposing them, their unacceptability will be evident to a “normal person.” Yet the positions outlined are “repulsive” only if the reader accepts the unstated “Zionist,” and generally conservative, weltanschauung underlying Sagiv’s own position. So we must start by deconstructing the self-serving ideological foundations of Sagiv’s piece.
First, Sagiv assumes that Zionism is morally defensible in an age of human rights and is somehow normative; “anti-Zionism” is, therefore, to be deplored as an unacceptable deviation. He evaluates all the arguments of the critical Israeli left in light of a reified, unproblematic, disembodied “Zionism,” as if the actions of the Israeli government over the past six-plus decades do not count. For Sagiv, there is no autonomous Israeli agency. Only the Arabs act, only they are to blame for the “colossal failure” of the Oslo process. Missing is an Occupation that pursues policies based on an exclusive Zionist claim to the entire Land of Israel, rather than on genuine security concerns. Regarding the particular issue with which I am engaged, for instance, some 24,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished since 1967, almost none with a security motive.
Sagiv’s omission of Israeli responsibility—and power—might reflect the views of most Israeli Jews, but it creates an intellectual discourse in which discussion of radical-versus-liberal politics is divorced from reality. The figures mentioned above are not mere details; they mean something. But Sagiv’s decision to approach the positions of the radical Israeli left on a purely ideational level allows him to avoid such messy externalities. For this reason, he discusses mainly those views of radical academics (with the exception of Hannah Safran, Sami Shalom Chetrit, and a brief quote from Gideon Levy). While academics indeed constitute a key part of the radical left, missing are those engaged intellectuals positioned largely outside of academia, whose actions and analyses are grounded in the daily oppression that is the Occupation: the late Simha Flappan, Uri Avnery, Shulamit Aloni, Michel Warschawsky, Akiva Orr, Ruhama Marton, Reuven Kaminer, Uri Davis, Dafna Baram, Meron Benveniste, Michael Sfard, Peretz Kidron, Haim Baram, Shir Hever, Sergio Yahni, Meir Margalit, Kobi Snitz, and others, myself included (not to mention the many voices of Palestinian citizens of Israel). Perhaps that is why Sagiv concludes, in the face of intense activity in the Territories, within Israeli society, and internationally, that “Unfortunately, radicals are all too reluctant to get down in the trenches. They would rather criticize from the safety of their perch above.”
Much of Sagiv’s criticism of the radical left rests on his indignation that in bypassing channels of internal change—that is, in invoking such extra-state authority as human rights, international law, and UN resolutions—it is not playing by the rules. He accuses the radical left of harboring a “profound suspicion of the modern state as such,” and argues lamely that because “said state’s dominance is showing no signs of decline” (a very contentious proposition), radicals are deluding themselves if they think they can effect social change, hence entering into—and disseminating—despair. There is “something almost pathetic about the politics of ‘resistance’ advocated by the radicals,” he writes.
Now I do not know what world Sagiv lives in, but if he does not harbor a profound suspicion of the modern state (by which he means one of the powerful loci of the capitalist world system), with its bristling militaries pursuing deadly resource wars and its neoliberal economics impoverishing the vast majority of humanity, all the while invoking “security” as a pretext for limiting civil rights; if he believes, moreover, that “the encroaching colonization of life by the law” is not the biggest danger threatening us—then we really do have little to talk about.
But is the radical left really so powerless in mobilizing forces for a just peace? Maybe we’re talking about a difference of strategy rather than of effectiveness. Sagiv would naturally wish to shift the Israeli Jewish public this way or that by internal political processes, since he is (emphatically) part of that mainstream. But radical leftists have set for themselves a different agenda—namely, bringing Israel, with its structured discrimination of its own Arab citizens and a 43-year-old Occupation, into conformity with the norms of the international community—even as they fight to make countries everywhere accountable to those same norms. Given that states like Israel have the power to neutralize the critical abilities of their own citizenry through their monopoly over the media, the education system, the political agenda, and the decision-making process, it is no wonder that the radical left goes abroad to try and effect changes in Israeli policy. Sagiv is simply wrong when he says that “The vanguard of radical resistance to the Jewish state is not interested in taking part in the Israeli milieu, even as an opposition. It has given up on it, and is looking for a way out.” (Emphasis mine.) We are not looking for a way out. But in a situation where 90 percent of the Israeli Jewish public cannot recognize the illegality, immorality, and just plain stupidity of unleashing one of the world’s most sophisticated armies on a defenseless population of a million and a half people in Gaza, we are simply looking for more effective means of change. But sadly, Sagiv, like the Israeli government itself, misses—or dismisses—the most potent force for that change: international civil society. Rather than leading to “despair,” the radical agenda leads to just the opposite: hope, struggle, resistance, and change. I have just returned from the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, where the issue of Palestine was central to the 13,000 young people gathered there. Loyalties today seem to be shifting away from states, and toward the universal principles of social justice and human rights that states have either actively opposed or failed to respect.
There is also the issue of what “Zionism” still means (Sagiv, after all, aims his essay at “those waging a moral crusade against Zionism”) and to what degree an ideology can really define, or even influence in the long run, a state. This is especially so in the case of Israel, a country whose very character is being contested by many of its own citizens. What constitutes “anti-Zionism” is also an open question. If, to take Zionism at face value, it means supporting the idea of Israel as a Jewish state, then one can hardly imagine anything more anti-Zionist than the systematic policy of settlement activity inaugurated by Begin and Sharon, which, despite various attempts to sell a Palestinian Bantustan as part of a “two-state solution,” has had the effect of permanently incorporating into an Israeli polity millions of people to whom it does not want to extend citizenship.
Ideology certainly plays a role in the evolution of a country, but it by no means determines it. All kinds of things happen that fundamentally influence the direction a country takes, many of which have nothing to do with ideology, and in the end may even defeat it. Consider just a few developments that have taken place since 1948: the end of colonialism and the oppressed masses finding their own “voice,” for example, or the rise, since World War II, of human rights and international law as integral parts of international relations. There have also been dramatic demographic developments: The vast majority of the world’s Jews chose not to emigrate, including 99 percent of American Jews; meanwhile, perhaps 800,000 or more Israelis have left the country. Some 25 percent (Amnon Sofer puts it at 30 percent) of Israelis are not Jewish. Moreover, because of its settlements and exaggerated security demands, Israel has created a binational reality and controls, probably permanently, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza—meaning that half the population of de facto Israel is Palestinian, which in turn raises the specter of apartheid. There have also been fundamental economic realignments (Ber Borochov would have been appalled by the national obsession with the Tel Aviv Stock Market, an IMF official being appointed governor of the Bank of Israel, and the government’s policies of privatization).
In the end, Sagiv offers us a rather unusual essay. His commentary aside—for it does not add up to a counterargument—it is a rather good review of radical-left positions, with rich and evocative quotes. But rather than “confronting” radical views “with honesty and courage,” as he took it upon himself to do, he constructs a “radical left” straw man, and then proceeds to demolish its well-reasoned positions with one or two lines of dismissive assertions. One is left with the question: Why is the state of the radical left “sad”?
Is it because it is not popular among the Israeli public? “The radical left, particularly among Israeli Jews, is an extreme minority,” observes Sagiv. “Its considerable influence in academic and cultural circles does not translate into any sizable political power, and its spokesmen and activists usually relegate themselves to parties representing the Arab vote.” Since when, however, has being in a minority ever had a bearing on the cogency of one’s political views? Skipping over the obvious reference to Germany in the 1930s, consider South Africa, where more than 90 percent of whites supported the apartheid regime until its sudden collapse, and Jews worldwide took pride in the lone voice of Helen Zussman.
Sometimes the majority is fickle. For example, the vast majority opposed giving up the settlement of Yamit and the Sinai region on the eve of Sadat’s visit, yet the vast majority supported Begin’s decision to do so immediately afterward. I’m not sure the Israeli Jewish majority today does, in fact, support the government’s settlement policies or its political program. Overall, as the capitalist system collapses and natural disasters overtake us, most governments, supported by the majority of their populace, nevertheless pursue unsustainable policies. In terms of anticipating global developments that will affect Israel in major ways, I would argue that the radical left may be a small minority, but it is much more in touch with reality than is Sagiv’s Israeli Jewish mainstream, locked as it is into the tunnel vision of local politics.
“Sad,” “ineffectual,” “frustrated,” “in despair”? According to Sagiv, radical Israeli leftists exhibit a “fascinating yet frightening weltanschauung that cultivates pessimism instead of hope, and alienation instead of involvement.” On the contrary, I would argue that we are “winning.” Our actions, together with those of thousands of our compatriots in Palestine and abroad, and supported by global politics and processes, have rendered the Occupation unsustainable (a term used by Joe Biden on his recent visit to Israel). Just how and when the Occupation will end, and what will replace it, is still unknown, but it is impossible to gauge this impending, momentous change simply by observing Israeli politics, or by assuming any connection between what Israeli Zionists want and what will actually transpire. The thrust of Sagiv’s argument leads to a disconnect between internal politics and global processes, which is extremely dangerous for Israelis who would like to salvage something from the end of the Occupation, even if it is the increasingly unlikely prospect of a two-state solution.
There are many other specific issues Sagiv brings up that cannot be addressed here. For the most part, however, after presenting the radical left in a fair, thorough, and insightful way, he fails to engage with it, and prefers instead to reduce sophisticated arguments to simplistic caricatures. Thus his essay is littered with phrases like “reopening old wounds,” promoting a “culture of complaint,” being “blind to the many shades of gray,” “the problem can be solved by simply handing over their backyard to their neighbors,” and mere “fantasies of severing the Gordian knot of the Occupation.” He also belittles and ridicules significant issues, often in an insulting way, as when he writes: “Of course, no list of the victims of Zionism would be complete without mention of the female sex.” And he sums up complicated positions with flippant non sequiturs, such as the following description of radical-left thought: “The Occupation, the Zionist government, Israeli society—all are bound up in a stinking mass that must be wiped off the face of the earth, one way or another.” Such a dismissive and shallow discourse does not do justice to Sagiv’s own justification for his essay (phrased, as usual, in a qualified and patronizing manner), namely that the voices of the radical left “contain nuggets of truth and profound insights that merit careful attention.” That “careful” consideration is yet to come.
Jeff Halper
Director, Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
Jerusalem
Assaf Sagiv responds:
Many of the criticisms leveled against my arguments from the radical fringe of the political spectrum are directed toward several points that I deliberately refrained from addressing in my essay. Jeff Halper, Ran Greenstein, and Joel Kovel seek, for instance, to discuss the circumstances in which the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians foundered, assigning responsibility for the resounding failure of the Oslo accords to the Jewish state alone. It would be tempting to argue this issue with them, and to remind them of certain facts that seem to have slipped their memory, but I will leave this work to others. Although I have a definite opinion on the matter (which is not devoid of self-criticism), I did not intend to make it the focus of my piece; in any case, it is only marginally relevant to the general context of the thesis I presented. My main goal, as I clarified, was to trace the course of radical thought, wherever it might lead us.
And it definitely takes us to some strange places. Joel Kovel, for example, defines the Jewish state as “destructive to humanity,” and seems to be under the impression that it is the contemporary incarnation of the Third Reich. Someone who ascribes to Zionism the impulse “to eliminate everything non-Jewish from Palestine”—no less!—probably has no idea what actually goes on in the State of Israel and the territories under its control. This is the rhetoric of a hysteric, one that employs images and expressions borrowed from the darkest chapters of history. He seeks to imbue his audience with the sense that it is faced with an absolute evil, one that must be eradicated at all costs. Indeed, it is ironic that Kovel accuses me of making perverse use of the Holocaust, when he himself does not hesitate to attribute genocidal intentions to the Zionists, and to accuse Israel of a “slow-motion ethnic cleansing.” Obviously such a crude demonization of the Jewish state—is there any point in arguing with it on the factual level? In bringing it face to face with reality?—provides full justification for terrorism. In Kovel’s words, “It is a lot harder in this light to fault the Palestinians for stepping up their resistance.” This sanitized expression refers, we should remember, to the blowing up of buses full of women and children, and the showering of rockets on civilian communities.
Kovel openly yearns for the collapse of the Jewish state, and those who support its continued existence are therefore entitled to reject his call for the fulfillment of the Palestinian right of return. Ran Greenstein presents a somewhat gentler vision. The goal to which he and his friends aspire, he contends, is simply to render Israeli democracy more “inclusive.” He envisions a liberal state “of all of its citizens” in which Israelis and Palestinians enjoy equal rights, and does not understand why I insist on labeling this aspiration “radical.”
Greenstein’s arguments can only be described as disingenuous (his insistence that no radical has lent his support to terrorists or tyrants is quite astonishing; the way Noam Chomsky consorted with the leaders of Hezbollah during his most recent visit to Lebanon, in May of this year, is only the latest example in a very long list of shameful associations). He asserts his absolute commitment to liberal democracy, yet there is something undemocratic, if not anti-democratic, in the way in which he and some of his colleagues have advocated a boycott of Israel. One need only read the letter by Jeff Halper, co-founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, to be persuaded of this.
Halper’s lengthy and carefully argued response deserves to be closely parsed. If I could have, I would have quoted it in the essay itself, as it openly manifests some of the most disturbing aspects of the radical campaign against Israel. Halper justifies the radical left’s resort to foreign tribunals on the grounds that 90 percent of the Israeli public has been thoroughly brainwashed by the government, and is therefore incapable of making decisions or acting in a morally acceptable manner. Simply put, they are zombies, creatures devoid of reason. Accordingly, Halper explains, there is no point in radical activism within the framework of Israeli politics. Whoever aspires to genuine, substantive change in the status quo must turn to a different, external force: “international civil society.”
This is a disturbing claim, as it indicates that Halper despairs not only of Israeli society and the modern state, but also of democracy in general. Contrary to the government of Israel, or that of any other democratic state, what Halper refers to as “international civil society” neither represents nor purports to represent the will of the voting public. What this pretentious label really denotes is a multitude of organizations and institutions that have taken up the cause of “human rights.” This is in itself a noble cause, yet its proponents all too often engage in sanctimonious attacks on the West, aligning themselves, both intentionally and not, with some of the worst forms of religious and ideological fanaticism. Some of these groups—like the thousands of young people who participated in the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, whom Halper proudly mentions—are motivated by a naĂŻve idealism, a sincere desire to mend the world that is not informed by a genuine understanding of the political, economic, and moral realities. Others are not so innocent: Organizations like the IHH, which initiated the Turkish flotilla’s expedition to Gaza and waves the banner of “humanitarian aid” while aiding and abetting Islamic terrorism in places like Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia, dramatically illustrate the dangers inherent in the lax admission requirements of the so-called international civil society.
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Yisrael Medad
Shiloh
Mobile Post Efraim 44830
Israel
www.myrightword.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/content/green-lined
(previous: http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/greenlined/)
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/5
The dilemma of the radical leftist described in Assaf Sagiv’s essay (“The Sad State of Israeli Radicalism,” Azure 40, Spring 2010) can be summarized as the conflict between the rejection of what one’s society stands for on the one hand, and the attempt to retain some degree of effective participation in its life on the other. It is also the awareness that one’s actions will invariably be dismissed by the majority of that society’s members. As one fated to express radical views, I have felt this predicament keenly for forty years and over many campaigns. For instance, I have seen my book, Overcoming Zionism (2007), banned, and I have been forced from my academic position. It has indeed been rough at times. But I would not say—as does Sagiv—that I have despaired. For me, at least, being a radical connects with something much greater and more enduring than the mere obloquy of the world. There is comfort in feeling connected to those who have gone before me in the struggle for radical change, for example the anti-slavery campaigns in the United States or the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa. There is comfort, too, in knowing that all four Gospels remind us of Jesus’ saying that a prophet—the word for “radical” in those days—is not without honor, save in his own country and household. There are many examples of this principle in the Hebrew Bible, whose prophet-radicals so often camped outside the walls of the city. Indeed, I feel privileged to have been able to call for the basic transformation of something so destructive to humanity—Jews included—as the Zionist state.
Although my knowledge of the Israeli anti-Zionist radicals about whom Sagiv writes is minimal (in part due to my limited Hebrew), I wish that he would do more than infer their misery. Sagiv should provide evidence as to how these radicals actually feel about standing against the majority of Israeli opinion. I wonder about the degree to which they are sustained by beliefs such as those which I described above, and whether it is they who despair, or instead members of the Zionist left. It is the latter, after all, who are faced with the thankless task of trying to resolve the absolute contradiction of Zionism: Namely, that a Jewish state, born in violence and maintained by usurpation, can also be genuinely democratic and worthy of the ethical grandeur woven into Judaism.
In fact, I believe the Zionist leftist has the much harder time of it, being a walking oxymoron; her tribalist, Zionist identity crashes continuously against her solidarity with the victims of injustice and those who struggle against it. She must also grapple with her fidelity to the Enlightenment tradition of critical reason, or what Marx called “the ruthless critique of everything existing.” But an oxymoron is only a logical category, and thus it can be overcome, at least to a degree. The Zionist left (and I am led to include Sagiv in this category) can do something about these contradictions, namely by striving to expand the universal elements within its discourse while simultaneously narrowing the corrupting influence of chauvinism. Concretely, the left should work hard not to present the Palestinians as bloodthirsty congenital terrorists, and the anti-Zionist radicals as peevish cranks.
Unfortunately, Sagiv’s method gets in the way of this, precisely because, as he says, it “avoids the usual quarrels over historical narratives… [in order to] uncover the internal logic of anti-Zionist thought and point to its theoretical implications and practical conclusions.” The problem is that, however we shape our narratives, there are objective and discernible dynamics to history. To set these aside can make a seemingly sophisticated analysis arbitrary, thus creating a vacuum to be filled by Zionist chauvinism. Case in point: Sagiv frames his argument by invoking the “weight of Palestinian violence,” under which the hopes of the Zionist left “may indeed have crumbled.” He is also agitated by the “stubborn refusal of the Palestinians” to recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state or to renounce the “right of return” that dashed the near-“messianic” hopes of Oslo. The image is of congenital Palestinian intransigence and, along with it, the perverse insistence of the radicals that the answer lies in the events of 1948. Well, maybe it does—or maybe the history goes back to 1937, 1929, 1917, 1897, or 70 C.E. But what about the history of the Oslo period itself, which we are meant to regard as an abstract, “good-faith” gesture made by the liberal Israeli state under Ehud Barak?
I am amazed that Sagiv omits consideration of that most glaring of the “facts on the ground” during this period: the expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Was this, we must ask, a mere real-estate operation, or was it in truth a slow-motion ethnic cleansing that continues to this day? What conclusion can a rational person draw except that settlement building expresses the Zionist impulse to eliminate everything non-Jewish from Palestine? It is a lot harder, when seen in this light, to fault the Palestinians for stepping up their resistance. By ignoring such a pertinent aspect of the situation, Sagiv makes the radical anti-Zionists seem like quixotic romantics instead of like people who soberly assess the reality on the ground.
Sagiv’s essay also touches upon the vexing question of the Palestinian right of return, and here another problem surfaces. The relevant passage is as follows:
One… problem lies in the marking of 1948 as the turning point in Jewish-Palestinian relations.... It stems, in large part, from a desire to turn back the hand of time and “heal” the original trauma. At the same time, however, it precludes any possibility of ever reaching a feasible agreement with the Palestinians. After all, a return to 1948 as a way of making amends, if only in part, for the injustices of the Nakba would also imply an acceptance in some form of the Palestinian “right of return.” Needless to say, this proposal is met with fierce opposition from the vast majority of Israel’s Jewish citizens, who perceive it, not unreasonably, as a recipe for national suicide. Given the present reality, the radical left’s position is more intent on reopening old wounds than it is on achieving a real breakthrough toward reconciliation. [Emphasis mine.]
Instead of “Needless to say” and “not unreasonably,” Sagiv would have been wiser to say, “unreasonably,” since he obscures the fact that there are two distinct meanings condensed into the term “national suicide.” First is the actual, self-inflicted death of the Israeli nation, reminiscent of Masada, and second (and more likely) is allowing for a repeat of the Holocaust. Of course, the Holocaust has not the slightest chance of recurrence in today’s world; nonetheless, it looms like an ominous rain cloud over the Israeli collective consciousness. It is used to prevent any chance of coming to grips with the second, and real, meaning of the right of return, which is the potential downfall of the Jewish state, whose pseudo-democracy depends on a permanent majority of Jews, and could dissolve were Palestinians allowed to return to the land from which they had been expelled.
By not differentiating between the two meanings, Sagiv uses the Holocaust to haunt the notion of human rights and trump the very idea of justice. He allows radical unreason to override the claims of reason and justice, all the while calling it “not unreasonable.” This manipulation of the great sufferings of the Jewish people in the name of perpetuating Zionist rule is, unfortunately, symptomatic of larger segments of Israeli society. It largely explains the rise of the religious right and the collapse of the Israeli left. As a result, it is hardly surprising that Israel is becoming more and more isolated—and more and more desperate—with the passage of time.
Indeed, all that holds the Jewish state together today is the infusion of massive doses of impunity by its imperial patron. But as this impunity only leads to more reckless transgression by the Zionist state, Israel has become caught up in a vicious circle with no resolution, save eventual collapse. As a matter of fact, the Jewish state’s collapse is being hastened by the inevitable withdrawal of American support, despite the enormous degree of influence wielded by Zionists in American society. There are too many straws in the wind to ignore the storm’s approach. Consider what Israel’s Ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, said several months ago: Relations between the two countries are not in a “crisis,” because a crisis is something that passes; rather, relations are in a state of tectonic shift, in which continents are drifting apart.
In light of this reality, anti-Zionist radicals are becoming more prophetic, and less despairing, by the minute.
Joel Kovel
New York, N.Y.
To the Editors:
Assaf Sagiv provides a view of the Israeli radical left as seen from a conservative vantage point. Although his analysis aims to be fair, and does avoid the ill-informed and hateful rhetoric so common in the media, he nevertheless makes several crucial missteps. As a result, he paints a distorted picture.
First, Sagiv’s account of Israeli responses to the failure of Oslo ignores that process’ most important aspect: the ongoing settlement construction, the land confiscation, and the intensification of the Occupation (through closures, roadblocks, targeted assassinations, etc.). The effect of these Israeli policies was twofold: The Palestinians, out of frustration with the process, turned to Hamas; and Israeli radicals rejected the two-state solution. The consistent reluctance of both the Israeli government and the public to abandon their practices of expansion and subjugation, and to regard the Palestinians as equal partners, could not but raise questions about the historical roots of that approach and its implications for a possible solution.
Second, in citing Ehud Barak’s explanation for the failure of Camp David in 2000, Sagiv ignores a significant body of research that disputes Barak’s account and asserts that Israel effectively offered Palestinians a series of non-contiguous territories with limited powers—thus falling far short of real independence. This truth was exposed, for example, in a series of articles by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha in the New York Review of Books, among others. But again, for Sagiv, radical responses have nothing to do with Israeli policies and actions.
Third, Sagiv’s statement that the radical left wishes to return to 1948 is misleading. Rather, the radical left seeks to address the legacy of the situation created in 1948, while acknowledging that many subsequent changes are irreversible (demography, for example). Most authors discussed in the essay (Kimmerling, Yiftachel, Shenhav, and others) accept the State of Israel as an inevitable product of history, but seek to change its nature so as to render it a more liberal state, one that treats all of its citizens equally. To be sure, expanding the boundaries of citizenship by severing its restrictive relationship to ethno-religious identity may not be acceptable to the majority of the Israeli-Jewish public. But is this not a classic liberal goal?
Fourth, contrary to Sagiv’s claim, the majority of people mentioned in his essay recognize that pre-1967 Israel is not the same as the Israel of the post-1967 Occupation, and that Palestinian citizens enjoy more substantial civil liberties than their occupied relatives. But they also argue that the Jewish nature of Israel places serious limits on the degree of democracy for Arabs (as the phrase goes, “Israel as a Jewish-democratic state is Jewish for Arabs, and democratic for Jews”). They also argue that the relative democratic nature of pre-1967 Israel could be made possible only after the ethnic cleansing of the majority of the pre-1948 Arab residents. There is a strong inverse relationship between the proportion of Palestinians in the country’s population and their political assertiveness on the one hand, and the degree to which Israeli Jews are willing to live with them in a fully democratic system on the other. Seeking to make democracy more inclusive is a well-established liberal goal, and would not be considered radical at all in most societies.
Fifth, in contrast to Sagiv’s assertion, no member of the radical left supports or sanctions the acts of tyrants or terrorists (on the Arab or Muslim side). Rather, they frequently express solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people for political rights and equality with Israeli Jews. Such solidarity cannot be equated with support for their leaderships.
All these points clearly demonstrate that, contrary to Sagiv’s analysis, the so-called Israeli radical left wants Israel to become a more liberal, more democratic, more inclusive state. In most societies in which Jews live as a minority, this is a desirable goal, one they often support fully. Why, then, should it be seen as a radical existential threat in the case of a society in which they are a majority?
Ran Greenstein
Johannesburg
To the Editors:
As a certified “radical Israeli leftist,” and an anthropologist who, rather than teaching, directs the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, I read Assaf Sagiv’s essay with the detached and bemused interest of a subject who has been rendered an object, or at least a category.
I have little problem with the terms Sagiv uses to describe “us.” In fact, his radical-versus-Zionist-left distinction captures the great ideological chasm that has divided radicals from liberals in all times and places. As Sagiv recognizes—yet doesn’t seem to accept—radicals, unlike most liberals, define themselves not by their citizenship in a particular state, but rather by their commitment to universal social justice, along with a heavy dose of suspicion toward the intentions of states and those who too closely identify with them. Sagiv’s enigmatic phrase, “They deride the accusations of treason,” sums it up nicely.
The same applies to a nationalist ideology like Zionism. Israeli radicals do identify themselves as Israelis (hence the name of the organization I head), but would argue that any nationalist conception must conform to the cause of a just peace and inclusive social justice. Radicals envision Israel being transformed into a state of all its citizens, either binational or unitary. Unfortunately, this criterion does alienate radicals from the general public, as Sagiv notes deridingly. From their perspective, this alienation derives not from the justness or workability of their conception of the state and the universal values it embodies, but rather from the lack of critical political thought demonstrated by the public—a public, that is, socialized by state-run educational institutions, a flawed political system, subservient media, and nationalistic militarism into a narrow nationalism and a fear of the Other.
It is difficult to provide a radical critique of Sagiv’s paper, because the issues it raises—the inability of radicals to influence government policy or public opinion; their unavoidable “anti-Zionism,” based on the “sins” of 1948; their mistrust of states in general; their political agenda, which rejects mere reform and insists instead on restructuring society according to principles of egalitarian inclusiveness, cultural pluralism, and universal human rights; and the transnational nature of their activism, which holds one’s own country can be held accountable for its policies and actions—rest on an infrastructure of assumptions shared by Sagiv and his Azure readership that tend to be left unsubstantiated and merely asserted. In many such instances, as when Sagiv quotes Sartre’s famous introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, he believes it is enough simply to ask: “Is there any radical leftist in Israel who would not wholeheartedly endorse these words?” The outrageousness of this assumption does not require any additional comment.
The problem for a critic, then, is not to counter Sagiv’s analysis; in fact, he puts his finger on the main issues defining the radical-left position and provides excellent documentation. It is, rather, to ask: So what? Sagiv does not actually address the substance of the various positions he reviews, but simply assumes that by exposing them, their unacceptability will be evident to a “normal person.” Yet the positions outlined are “repulsive” only if the reader accepts the unstated “Zionist,” and generally conservative, weltanschauung underlying Sagiv’s own position. So we must start by deconstructing the self-serving ideological foundations of Sagiv’s piece.
First, Sagiv assumes that Zionism is morally defensible in an age of human rights and is somehow normative; “anti-Zionism” is, therefore, to be deplored as an unacceptable deviation. He evaluates all the arguments of the critical Israeli left in light of a reified, unproblematic, disembodied “Zionism,” as if the actions of the Israeli government over the past six-plus decades do not count. For Sagiv, there is no autonomous Israeli agency. Only the Arabs act, only they are to blame for the “colossal failure” of the Oslo process. Missing is an Occupation that pursues policies based on an exclusive Zionist claim to the entire Land of Israel, rather than on genuine security concerns. Regarding the particular issue with which I am engaged, for instance, some 24,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished since 1967, almost none with a security motive.
Sagiv’s omission of Israeli responsibility—and power—might reflect the views of most Israeli Jews, but it creates an intellectual discourse in which discussion of radical-versus-liberal politics is divorced from reality. The figures mentioned above are not mere details; they mean something. But Sagiv’s decision to approach the positions of the radical Israeli left on a purely ideational level allows him to avoid such messy externalities. For this reason, he discusses mainly those views of radical academics (with the exception of Hannah Safran, Sami Shalom Chetrit, and a brief quote from Gideon Levy). While academics indeed constitute a key part of the radical left, missing are those engaged intellectuals positioned largely outside of academia, whose actions and analyses are grounded in the daily oppression that is the Occupation: the late Simha Flappan, Uri Avnery, Shulamit Aloni, Michel Warschawsky, Akiva Orr, Ruhama Marton, Reuven Kaminer, Uri Davis, Dafna Baram, Meron Benveniste, Michael Sfard, Peretz Kidron, Haim Baram, Shir Hever, Sergio Yahni, Meir Margalit, Kobi Snitz, and others, myself included (not to mention the many voices of Palestinian citizens of Israel). Perhaps that is why Sagiv concludes, in the face of intense activity in the Territories, within Israeli society, and internationally, that “Unfortunately, radicals are all too reluctant to get down in the trenches. They would rather criticize from the safety of their perch above.”
Much of Sagiv’s criticism of the radical left rests on his indignation that in bypassing channels of internal change—that is, in invoking such extra-state authority as human rights, international law, and UN resolutions—it is not playing by the rules. He accuses the radical left of harboring a “profound suspicion of the modern state as such,” and argues lamely that because “said state’s dominance is showing no signs of decline” (a very contentious proposition), radicals are deluding themselves if they think they can effect social change, hence entering into—and disseminating—despair. There is “something almost pathetic about the politics of ‘resistance’ advocated by the radicals,” he writes.
Now I do not know what world Sagiv lives in, but if he does not harbor a profound suspicion of the modern state (by which he means one of the powerful loci of the capitalist world system), with its bristling militaries pursuing deadly resource wars and its neoliberal economics impoverishing the vast majority of humanity, all the while invoking “security” as a pretext for limiting civil rights; if he believes, moreover, that “the encroaching colonization of life by the law” is not the biggest danger threatening us—then we really do have little to talk about.
But is the radical left really so powerless in mobilizing forces for a just peace? Maybe we’re talking about a difference of strategy rather than of effectiveness. Sagiv would naturally wish to shift the Israeli Jewish public this way or that by internal political processes, since he is (emphatically) part of that mainstream. But radical leftists have set for themselves a different agenda—namely, bringing Israel, with its structured discrimination of its own Arab citizens and a 43-year-old Occupation, into conformity with the norms of the international community—even as they fight to make countries everywhere accountable to those same norms. Given that states like Israel have the power to neutralize the critical abilities of their own citizenry through their monopoly over the media, the education system, the political agenda, and the decision-making process, it is no wonder that the radical left goes abroad to try and effect changes in Israeli policy. Sagiv is simply wrong when he says that “The vanguard of radical resistance to the Jewish state is not interested in taking part in the Israeli milieu, even as an opposition. It has given up on it, and is looking for a way out.” (Emphasis mine.) We are not looking for a way out. But in a situation where 90 percent of the Israeli Jewish public cannot recognize the illegality, immorality, and just plain stupidity of unleashing one of the world’s most sophisticated armies on a defenseless population of a million and a half people in Gaza, we are simply looking for more effective means of change. But sadly, Sagiv, like the Israeli government itself, misses—or dismisses—the most potent force for that change: international civil society. Rather than leading to “despair,” the radical agenda leads to just the opposite: hope, struggle, resistance, and change. I have just returned from the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, where the issue of Palestine was central to the 13,000 young people gathered there. Loyalties today seem to be shifting away from states, and toward the universal principles of social justice and human rights that states have either actively opposed or failed to respect.
There is also the issue of what “Zionism” still means (Sagiv, after all, aims his essay at “those waging a moral crusade against Zionism”) and to what degree an ideology can really define, or even influence in the long run, a state. This is especially so in the case of Israel, a country whose very character is being contested by many of its own citizens. What constitutes “anti-Zionism” is also an open question. If, to take Zionism at face value, it means supporting the idea of Israel as a Jewish state, then one can hardly imagine anything more anti-Zionist than the systematic policy of settlement activity inaugurated by Begin and Sharon, which, despite various attempts to sell a Palestinian Bantustan as part of a “two-state solution,” has had the effect of permanently incorporating into an Israeli polity millions of people to whom it does not want to extend citizenship.
Ideology certainly plays a role in the evolution of a country, but it by no means determines it. All kinds of things happen that fundamentally influence the direction a country takes, many of which have nothing to do with ideology, and in the end may even defeat it. Consider just a few developments that have taken place since 1948: the end of colonialism and the oppressed masses finding their own “voice,” for example, or the rise, since World War II, of human rights and international law as integral parts of international relations. There have also been dramatic demographic developments: The vast majority of the world’s Jews chose not to emigrate, including 99 percent of American Jews; meanwhile, perhaps 800,000 or more Israelis have left the country. Some 25 percent (Amnon Sofer puts it at 30 percent) of Israelis are not Jewish. Moreover, because of its settlements and exaggerated security demands, Israel has created a binational reality and controls, probably permanently, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza—meaning that half the population of de facto Israel is Palestinian, which in turn raises the specter of apartheid. There have also been fundamental economic realignments (Ber Borochov would have been appalled by the national obsession with the Tel Aviv Stock Market, an IMF official being appointed governor of the Bank of Israel, and the government’s policies of privatization).
In the end, Sagiv offers us a rather unusual essay. His commentary aside—for it does not add up to a counterargument—it is a rather good review of radical-left positions, with rich and evocative quotes. But rather than “confronting” radical views “with honesty and courage,” as he took it upon himself to do, he constructs a “radical left” straw man, and then proceeds to demolish its well-reasoned positions with one or two lines of dismissive assertions. One is left with the question: Why is the state of the radical left “sad”?
Is it because it is not popular among the Israeli public? “The radical left, particularly among Israeli Jews, is an extreme minority,” observes Sagiv. “Its considerable influence in academic and cultural circles does not translate into any sizable political power, and its spokesmen and activists usually relegate themselves to parties representing the Arab vote.” Since when, however, has being in a minority ever had a bearing on the cogency of one’s political views? Skipping over the obvious reference to Germany in the 1930s, consider South Africa, where more than 90 percent of whites supported the apartheid regime until its sudden collapse, and Jews worldwide took pride in the lone voice of Helen Zussman.
Sometimes the majority is fickle. For example, the vast majority opposed giving up the settlement of Yamit and the Sinai region on the eve of Sadat’s visit, yet the vast majority supported Begin’s decision to do so immediately afterward. I’m not sure the Israeli Jewish majority today does, in fact, support the government’s settlement policies or its political program. Overall, as the capitalist system collapses and natural disasters overtake us, most governments, supported by the majority of their populace, nevertheless pursue unsustainable policies. In terms of anticipating global developments that will affect Israel in major ways, I would argue that the radical left may be a small minority, but it is much more in touch with reality than is Sagiv’s Israeli Jewish mainstream, locked as it is into the tunnel vision of local politics.
“Sad,” “ineffectual,” “frustrated,” “in despair”? According to Sagiv, radical Israeli leftists exhibit a “fascinating yet frightening weltanschauung that cultivates pessimism instead of hope, and alienation instead of involvement.” On the contrary, I would argue that we are “winning.” Our actions, together with those of thousands of our compatriots in Palestine and abroad, and supported by global politics and processes, have rendered the Occupation unsustainable (a term used by Joe Biden on his recent visit to Israel). Just how and when the Occupation will end, and what will replace it, is still unknown, but it is impossible to gauge this impending, momentous change simply by observing Israeli politics, or by assuming any connection between what Israeli Zionists want and what will actually transpire. The thrust of Sagiv’s argument leads to a disconnect between internal politics and global processes, which is extremely dangerous for Israelis who would like to salvage something from the end of the Occupation, even if it is the increasingly unlikely prospect of a two-state solution.
There are many other specific issues Sagiv brings up that cannot be addressed here. For the most part, however, after presenting the radical left in a fair, thorough, and insightful way, he fails to engage with it, and prefers instead to reduce sophisticated arguments to simplistic caricatures. Thus his essay is littered with phrases like “reopening old wounds,” promoting a “culture of complaint,” being “blind to the many shades of gray,” “the problem can be solved by simply handing over their backyard to their neighbors,” and mere “fantasies of severing the Gordian knot of the Occupation.” He also belittles and ridicules significant issues, often in an insulting way, as when he writes: “Of course, no list of the victims of Zionism would be complete without mention of the female sex.” And he sums up complicated positions with flippant non sequiturs, such as the following description of radical-left thought: “The Occupation, the Zionist government, Israeli society—all are bound up in a stinking mass that must be wiped off the face of the earth, one way or another.” Such a dismissive and shallow discourse does not do justice to Sagiv’s own justification for his essay (phrased, as usual, in a qualified and patronizing manner), namely that the voices of the radical left “contain nuggets of truth and profound insights that merit careful attention.” That “careful” consideration is yet to come.
Jeff Halper
Director, Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
Jerusalem
Assaf Sagiv responds:
Many of the criticisms leveled against my arguments from the radical fringe of the political spectrum are directed toward several points that I deliberately refrained from addressing in my essay. Jeff Halper, Ran Greenstein, and Joel Kovel seek, for instance, to discuss the circumstances in which the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians foundered, assigning responsibility for the resounding failure of the Oslo accords to the Jewish state alone. It would be tempting to argue this issue with them, and to remind them of certain facts that seem to have slipped their memory, but I will leave this work to others. Although I have a definite opinion on the matter (which is not devoid of self-criticism), I did not intend to make it the focus of my piece; in any case, it is only marginally relevant to the general context of the thesis I presented. My main goal, as I clarified, was to trace the course of radical thought, wherever it might lead us.
And it definitely takes us to some strange places. Joel Kovel, for example, defines the Jewish state as “destructive to humanity,” and seems to be under the impression that it is the contemporary incarnation of the Third Reich. Someone who ascribes to Zionism the impulse “to eliminate everything non-Jewish from Palestine”—no less!—probably has no idea what actually goes on in the State of Israel and the territories under its control. This is the rhetoric of a hysteric, one that employs images and expressions borrowed from the darkest chapters of history. He seeks to imbue his audience with the sense that it is faced with an absolute evil, one that must be eradicated at all costs. Indeed, it is ironic that Kovel accuses me of making perverse use of the Holocaust, when he himself does not hesitate to attribute genocidal intentions to the Zionists, and to accuse Israel of a “slow-motion ethnic cleansing.” Obviously such a crude demonization of the Jewish state—is there any point in arguing with it on the factual level? In bringing it face to face with reality?—provides full justification for terrorism. In Kovel’s words, “It is a lot harder in this light to fault the Palestinians for stepping up their resistance.” This sanitized expression refers, we should remember, to the blowing up of buses full of women and children, and the showering of rockets on civilian communities.
Kovel openly yearns for the collapse of the Jewish state, and those who support its continued existence are therefore entitled to reject his call for the fulfillment of the Palestinian right of return. Ran Greenstein presents a somewhat gentler vision. The goal to which he and his friends aspire, he contends, is simply to render Israeli democracy more “inclusive.” He envisions a liberal state “of all of its citizens” in which Israelis and Palestinians enjoy equal rights, and does not understand why I insist on labeling this aspiration “radical.”
Greenstein’s arguments can only be described as disingenuous (his insistence that no radical has lent his support to terrorists or tyrants is quite astonishing; the way Noam Chomsky consorted with the leaders of Hezbollah during his most recent visit to Lebanon, in May of this year, is only the latest example in a very long list of shameful associations). He asserts his absolute commitment to liberal democracy, yet there is something undemocratic, if not anti-democratic, in the way in which he and some of his colleagues have advocated a boycott of Israel. One need only read the letter by Jeff Halper, co-founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, to be persuaded of this.
Halper’s lengthy and carefully argued response deserves to be closely parsed. If I could have, I would have quoted it in the essay itself, as it openly manifests some of the most disturbing aspects of the radical campaign against Israel. Halper justifies the radical left’s resort to foreign tribunals on the grounds that 90 percent of the Israeli public has been thoroughly brainwashed by the government, and is therefore incapable of making decisions or acting in a morally acceptable manner. Simply put, they are zombies, creatures devoid of reason. Accordingly, Halper explains, there is no point in radical activism within the framework of Israeli politics. Whoever aspires to genuine, substantive change in the status quo must turn to a different, external force: “international civil society.”
This is a disturbing claim, as it indicates that Halper despairs not only of Israeli society and the modern state, but also of democracy in general. Contrary to the government of Israel, or that of any other democratic state, what Halper refers to as “international civil society” neither represents nor purports to represent the will of the voting public. What this pretentious label really denotes is a multitude of organizations and institutions that have taken up the cause of “human rights.” This is in itself a noble cause, yet its proponents all too often engage in sanctimonious attacks on the West, aligning themselves, both intentionally and not, with some of the worst forms of religious and ideological fanaticism. Some of these groups—like the thousands of young people who participated in the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, whom Halper proudly mentions—are motivated by a naĂŻve idealism, a sincere desire to mend the world that is not informed by a genuine understanding of the political, economic, and moral realities. Others are not so innocent: Organizations like the IHH, which initiated the Turkish flotilla’s expedition to Gaza and waves the banner of “humanitarian aid” while aiding and abetting Islamic terrorism in places like Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia, dramatically illustrate the dangers inherent in the lax admission requirements of the so-called international civil society.
--
Yisrael Medad
Shiloh
Mobile Post Efraim 44830
Israel
www.myrightword.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/content/green-lined
(previous: http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/greenlined/)
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/5
Human Rights Watch should have been keeping tabs on Libya'
BENJAMIN WEINTHAL, JPOST CORRESPONDENT
03/02/2011
NGO Monitor calls on HRW Mideast/Africa head Sarah Leah Whitson to resign for ignoring Libyan abuses, failing to offer aid.
BERLIN – Fast-moving events in Libya have catapulted the scandal-plagued Middle East and North African Division (MENA) of Human Rights Watch into a new controversy for its failure over the years to diligently investigate human rights violations in Libya.
According to Anne Herzberg, a legal advisor for Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor, “Human Rights Watch, and specifically MENA director Sarah Leah Whitson, has soft-peddled [Libyan leader Muammar] Gaddafi’s oppressive acts and offered no help to the Libyan people. Whitson was well aware of the atrocities committed by the Gaddafi regime, but she chose to present the facade that Gaddafi’s son [Saif al- Islam] was prepared to implement ‘reforms.’” Calling on the HRW official to resign, Herzberg said on Sunday that the ongoing events in Libya “reveal Whitson’s gross incompetence. She has failed to retract her previously misleading statements. She cannot continue to head the MENA division.” Whitson has long been a controversial figure within human rights circles. She recently conducted fund-raising activity in Saudi Arabia to garner donations to be used to finance reports slamming Israel, and has praised anti- Israel activist Norman Finkelstein, who equates Israel with Nazi Germany.
“I continue to have tremendous respect and admiration for [Finkelstein] because making Israel the focus of one’s life work is a thankless but courageous task,” she said last year in a New Republic investigative report on HRW.
NGO Monitor received backup from Nick Cohen, an author and columnist for the Observer and New Statesman, who, in a Sunday opinion piece in the Guardian titled “Our absurd obsession with Israel is laid bare,” wrote that “Human Rights Watch, once a reliable opponent of tyranny, went further and described a foundation Saif ran in Libya as a force for freedom, willing to take on the interior ministry in the fight for civil liberties.”
NGO Monitor claims Whitson “covered up” widespread human rights violations in Libya and waxed lyrical about the Gaddafi regime and Saif al- Islam, citing a 2009 Foreign Policy article in which she called the younger Gaddafi “the real impetus for transformation” because of a charitable foundation and two quasi-private newspapers he had established.
Just last year, during a visit to Libya, she called him one of the “forces of reform” and compared his foundation to HRW.
Last week, al-Islam took to state television and warned pro-democracy activists and those opposed to the regime that “we will eradicate them all.” While he has told Western reporters that the political situation in Libya was calm and under control, Al Jazeera provided video footage on Monday showing him stirring up regime supporters to massacre pro-democracy activists and asking the crowd whether they “need guns.”
Whitson has backtracked in the media over the past two weeks regarding her longstanding praise of al-Islam.
“What Sarah Leah Whitson admits she knew about the Gaddafi family’s fraudulent reform agenda completely contradicts statements during her Tripoli trip,” Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor, said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Reform was never on the horizon and Saif Islam was simply seeking to validate the eventual transfer of power to his hands, using allies like Whitson,” Steinberg said. “Her attempts to give a facelift to MENA’s treatment of Libya is indicative of the division’s approach to many of the repressive regimes in the region, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, Hamas, and others.”
Whitson was returning from the Libyan-Tunisian border on Monday and was unavailable for comment, although HRW special adviser Fred Abrahams communicated with The Jerusalem Post by e-mail.
“Human Rights Watch has a long record of exposing abuses by repressive governments throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and Libya is no exception.... I very much doubt that any other organization has produced more detailed coverage of human rights abuses in Libya over the past 6 years,” Abrahams wrote.
In both e-mails and telephone calls with the Post on Monday, HRW officials declined to comment on whether Whitson should resign.
“It is patently untrue to say that Human Rights Watch has ever been ‘praising the regime in Libya,’ as your question suggests,” Abrahams wrote after being asked about Whitson’s and HRW’s praise for al-Islam and the Gaddafi regime. “On the contrary, we have consistently and unreservedly condemned serious human rights violations by the Libyan government, and put into the public domain previously unknown information about serious abuses.”
Click for full Jpost coverage of turmoil in the Middle East
He added that HRW “also seeks change and impact by advocating with repressive governments” in an effort to end abuses.
“In some cases we do such advocacy through governmentaffiliated organizations, such as the Gaddafi Foundation, which in some ways acted as the Libyan government’s Ministry of Human Rights,” Abrahams wrote. “We believe our advocacy with the Gaddafi Foundation was appropriate because it produced results: The Foundation secured the release of 202 arbitrarily detained prisoners in 2010 and another 132 prisoners in 2006.”
He also noted that HRW is often asked why it produces more material on Israel than on repressive governments like Libya, Syria and other closed, repressive regimes.
“The amount of attention we devote depends in part on the number of developments to address,” he wrote. “In recent weeks, we have been devoting far more attention to Libya, for example, than to Israel. Our reporting on Israel similarly peaked when there were significant developments during the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.”
Nevertheless, NGO Monitor claims that HRW has a structural bias against the Jewish state, saying that according to the group’s website, “since 1991 it has issued six substantive reports on Libya (versus more than 40 on Israel, for example). HRW’s website lists 42 pages of documents and reports on Israel and only 12 pages for Libya. In fact, many of HRW’s ‘major’ reports on Libya are actually directed towards the EU, US and Italy.”
Herzberg, NGO Monitor’s legal advisor, told the Post that “Whitson’s division consistently issues more publications on Israel than Libya. Perhaps if Whitson had devoted more resources to Gaddafi’s brutal regime, there would not be murders occurring in the streets of Libya right now.”
She added that al-Islam frequently invoked anti-Semitic rhetoric in speeches.
“Whitson never once publicly admonished the foundation or Saif Islam for this hateful speech,” she said.
According to NGO Monitor, in a 2008 speech al-Islam said, “Palestine is an issue that was invented by the Zionist movement, led by Jewish elites such as Rothschild and Herzl. These elites used the issue of religious persecution in Europe to call for immigration to the promised land until they were able to persuade and to influence millions of Jews in the world, and then create the tragedy of Palestine and the Arab-Jewish conflict, and now Arabs and Jews are paying for it.”
In 2009, HRW’s handling of the Gaddafi regime’s incarceration and repression of antiregime activist Fathi Eljahmi prompted Eljahmi’s brother, Muhammad, to write in an online commentary for Forbes that the activist’s death “should give prominent human rights organizations pause. For nearly a year, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch hesitated to advocate publicly for Fathi’s case, because they feared their case workers might lose access to Libyan visas.”
NGO Monitor said HRW did not “sound the alarm over blatant abuses” in connection with Eljahmi.
A legacy of violence
EFRAIM KARSH
Gap between delusions of grandeur, localism, bridged time and again by force of arms became key element of Islamic political culture.
Turbulent times often breed nostalgia for a supposedly idyllic past. Viewing the upheavals sweeping the Middle East as a mass expression of outrage against oppression, eminent historian Bernard Lewis fondly recalled past regional order.
“The sort of authoritarian, even dictatorial regimes that rule most of the countries in the modern Islamic Middle East are a modern creation. They are a result of modernization,” he told The Jerusalem Post. “The pre-modern regimes were much more open, much more tolerant. You can see this from a number of contemporary descriptions. And the memory of that is still living.” I doubt past generations of Muslims would share this view. In the long history of the Islamic empire, the wide gap between delusions of grandeur and the forces of localism would be bridged time and again by force of arms, making violence a key element of Islamic political culture. No sooner had the prophet Muhammad died than his successor, Abu Bakr, had to suppress a widespread revolt among the Arabian tribes. Twenty-three years later, the head of the umma, Caliph Uthman ibn Affan, was murdered by disgruntled rebels; his successor, Ali ibn Abi Talib, was confronted for most of his reign with armed insurrections, most notably by the governor of Syria, Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufian, who went on to establish the Umayyad dynasty after Ali’s assassination.
Mu’awiya’s successors managed to hang onto power mainly by relying on physical force to prevent or quell revolts in the diverse corners of their empire. The same was true for the Abbasids during the long centuries of their sovereignty.
WESTERN SCHOLARS often hold up the Ottoman Empire as an exception to this earlier pattern. In fact, the caliphate did deal relatively gently with its vast non- Muslim subject populations – provided they acknowledged their legal and institutional inferiority in the Islamic order of things. When these groups dared to question their subordinate status – let alone attempt to break the Ottoman yoke – they were viciously put down.
In the century or so between Napoleon’s conquests in the Middle East and World War I, the Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in response to the nationalist aspirations of their European subjects.
The Greek war of independence of the 1820s, the Danubian uprisings of 1848, the Balkan explosion of the 1870s – all were painful reminders of the cost of resisting Islamic rule. The 1990s wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo are but natural extensions of this “much more open, much more tolerant” legacy.
Nor was such violence confined to Ottoman Europe. Turkey’s Afro-Asiatic provinces were also scenes of mayhem.
The Ottoman army or its surrogates brought force to bear against Wahhabi uprisings in Mesopotamia and the Levant in the early 19th century, against civil strife in Lebanon in the 1840s and against a string of Kurdish rebellions. In response to the national awakening of the Armenians in the 1890s, Istanbul killed tens of thousands – a taste of the horrors that awaited the Armenians during World War I.
Violence and oppression, then, have not been imported to the Middle East as a byproduct of European imperialism; they were a part of the political culture long before. If anything, it is the Middle East’s tortuous relationship with modernity that has left physical force as the main instrument of political discourse.
Unlike Christianity, Islam was inextricably linked with empire. It did not distinguish between temporal and religious powers (which were combined in the person of Muhammad, who derived his authority directly from Allah). This allowed the prophet and his erstwhile successors to cloak their political ambitions with a religious aura.
Neither did the subject populations of the Ottoman Empire undergo the secularization and modernization that preceded the development of nationalism in Western Europe in the late 1700s.
So when the old European empires collapsed 150 years later, individual nationstates were able to step into the breach. By contrast, when the Ottoman Empire fell, its components still thought only in the old terms – on the one hand, the intricate web of loyalties to clan, tribe, village, town, religious sect or local ethnic minority, and on the other, submission to the distant Ottoman sultan/caliph as the temporal and religious head of the world Muslim community – a post that now stood vacant.
INTO THIS vacuum stepped ambitious political leaders speaking the rhetoric of “Arab nationalism.”
The problem with this state of affairs was that the diversity and fragmentation of the Arabic-speaking world had made its disparate societies better disposed to local patriotism than to a unified secular order.
But then, rather than allow this disposition to develop into modern-day nationalism, Arab rulers systematically convinced their peoples to think that the independent existence of their respective states was a temporary aberration.
The result was a legacy of oppressive violence that has haunted the Middle East into the 21st century, as rulers sought to bridge the reality of state nationalism and the mirage of a unified “Arab nation,” and to shore up their regimes against grassroots Islamist movements (notably the Muslim Brotherhood) articulating the far more appealing message of a return to religious law (Shari’a) as a stepping stone to the establishment of a worldwide community of believers (umma).
One need only mention, among many instances, Syria’s massacre of 20,000 Muslim activists in the early 1980s, or the brutal treatment of Iraq’s Shi’ite and Kurdish communities until the 2003 war, or the genocidal campaign in Darfur by the government of Sudan.
This violence has by no means been the sole property of the likes of Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Hafez Assad, and Ayatollah Khomeini. The affable and thoroughly Westernized King Hussein of Jordan didn’t shrink from slaughtering thousands of Palestinians during September 1970 (known as Black September) when his throne came under threat from Palestinian guerrillas.
Now that the barrier of fear has been breached, it remains to be seen which regimes will be swept from power. But it is doubtful whether Middle East societies will be able, or willing, to transcend their imperial legacy and embrace the Western-type liberal democracy that has taken European nations centuries to achieve.
The writer is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King’s College London, editor of the Middle East Quarterly and author of Islamic Imperialism: A History.
Gap between delusions of grandeur, localism, bridged time and again by force of arms became key element of Islamic political culture.
Turbulent times often breed nostalgia for a supposedly idyllic past. Viewing the upheavals sweeping the Middle East as a mass expression of outrage against oppression, eminent historian Bernard Lewis fondly recalled past regional order.
“The sort of authoritarian, even dictatorial regimes that rule most of the countries in the modern Islamic Middle East are a modern creation. They are a result of modernization,” he told The Jerusalem Post. “The pre-modern regimes were much more open, much more tolerant. You can see this from a number of contemporary descriptions. And the memory of that is still living.” I doubt past generations of Muslims would share this view. In the long history of the Islamic empire, the wide gap between delusions of grandeur and the forces of localism would be bridged time and again by force of arms, making violence a key element of Islamic political culture. No sooner had the prophet Muhammad died than his successor, Abu Bakr, had to suppress a widespread revolt among the Arabian tribes. Twenty-three years later, the head of the umma, Caliph Uthman ibn Affan, was murdered by disgruntled rebels; his successor, Ali ibn Abi Talib, was confronted for most of his reign with armed insurrections, most notably by the governor of Syria, Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufian, who went on to establish the Umayyad dynasty after Ali’s assassination.
Mu’awiya’s successors managed to hang onto power mainly by relying on physical force to prevent or quell revolts in the diverse corners of their empire. The same was true for the Abbasids during the long centuries of their sovereignty.
WESTERN SCHOLARS often hold up the Ottoman Empire as an exception to this earlier pattern. In fact, the caliphate did deal relatively gently with its vast non- Muslim subject populations – provided they acknowledged their legal and institutional inferiority in the Islamic order of things. When these groups dared to question their subordinate status – let alone attempt to break the Ottoman yoke – they were viciously put down.
In the century or so between Napoleon’s conquests in the Middle East and World War I, the Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in response to the nationalist aspirations of their European subjects.
The Greek war of independence of the 1820s, the Danubian uprisings of 1848, the Balkan explosion of the 1870s – all were painful reminders of the cost of resisting Islamic rule. The 1990s wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo are but natural extensions of this “much more open, much more tolerant” legacy.
Nor was such violence confined to Ottoman Europe. Turkey’s Afro-Asiatic provinces were also scenes of mayhem.
The Ottoman army or its surrogates brought force to bear against Wahhabi uprisings in Mesopotamia and the Levant in the early 19th century, against civil strife in Lebanon in the 1840s and against a string of Kurdish rebellions. In response to the national awakening of the Armenians in the 1890s, Istanbul killed tens of thousands – a taste of the horrors that awaited the Armenians during World War I.
Violence and oppression, then, have not been imported to the Middle East as a byproduct of European imperialism; they were a part of the political culture long before. If anything, it is the Middle East’s tortuous relationship with modernity that has left physical force as the main instrument of political discourse.
Unlike Christianity, Islam was inextricably linked with empire. It did not distinguish between temporal and religious powers (which were combined in the person of Muhammad, who derived his authority directly from Allah). This allowed the prophet and his erstwhile successors to cloak their political ambitions with a religious aura.
Neither did the subject populations of the Ottoman Empire undergo the secularization and modernization that preceded the development of nationalism in Western Europe in the late 1700s.
So when the old European empires collapsed 150 years later, individual nationstates were able to step into the breach. By contrast, when the Ottoman Empire fell, its components still thought only in the old terms – on the one hand, the intricate web of loyalties to clan, tribe, village, town, religious sect or local ethnic minority, and on the other, submission to the distant Ottoman sultan/caliph as the temporal and religious head of the world Muslim community – a post that now stood vacant.
INTO THIS vacuum stepped ambitious political leaders speaking the rhetoric of “Arab nationalism.”
The problem with this state of affairs was that the diversity and fragmentation of the Arabic-speaking world had made its disparate societies better disposed to local patriotism than to a unified secular order.
But then, rather than allow this disposition to develop into modern-day nationalism, Arab rulers systematically convinced their peoples to think that the independent existence of their respective states was a temporary aberration.
The result was a legacy of oppressive violence that has haunted the Middle East into the 21st century, as rulers sought to bridge the reality of state nationalism and the mirage of a unified “Arab nation,” and to shore up their regimes against grassroots Islamist movements (notably the Muslim Brotherhood) articulating the far more appealing message of a return to religious law (Shari’a) as a stepping stone to the establishment of a worldwide community of believers (umma).
One need only mention, among many instances, Syria’s massacre of 20,000 Muslim activists in the early 1980s, or the brutal treatment of Iraq’s Shi’ite and Kurdish communities until the 2003 war, or the genocidal campaign in Darfur by the government of Sudan.
This violence has by no means been the sole property of the likes of Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Hafez Assad, and Ayatollah Khomeini. The affable and thoroughly Westernized King Hussein of Jordan didn’t shrink from slaughtering thousands of Palestinians during September 1970 (known as Black September) when his throne came under threat from Palestinian guerrillas.
Now that the barrier of fear has been breached, it remains to be seen which regimes will be swept from power. But it is doubtful whether Middle East societies will be able, or willing, to transcend their imperial legacy and embrace the Western-type liberal democracy that has taken European nations centuries to achieve.
The writer is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King’s College London, editor of the Middle East Quarterly and author of Islamic Imperialism: A History.
Open Letter to the Israel Government
In his recent interview with Charles Moore: "British worry me" (below), (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/charlesmoore/8349311/British-worry-me-says-Israeli-PM-Netanyahu.html) Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that "The Palestinians provide no education for peace. Their school's textbooks preach hatred and the public squares under the Palestinians Authority are named after the murderers of Israelis." This is not new and well documented, only that for decades, Israel pushed this issue away. Though it was among the most important issues of demand of the PalArabs-aka "Palestinians" in the Oslo Accords: "END the incitement against Israel", the PalArabs did not comply and Israel and the international community let it slide by the way side. What the PLO-Palestinian Authority (PA)/ Fatah/Mahmoud Abbas say to their own people, in Arabic Vs. what they tell the West – to which PM Netanyahu was pointing - must be exposed and repeated over and over again, almost to ad nauseam, in Jerusalem, in every Israeli Embassy and consulate around the world, on any occasion and opportunity in which the "conflict" subject is brought up.
It is time to admit the truth and leave all the political correctness behind. Time to put the blame where the blame belongs. The reason there is NO peace must be pointed DIRECTLY at the PalArabs-aka "PALESTINIANS". Enough with blaming Israel; shift the blame onto the culprits.
The Israeli government must expose the PalArabs for what they really are - in their own words.
I thank PM Netanyahu for his honesty. I hereby ask that this will be the new line along which Israel's Hasbarah be conducted. Expose and put the blame on the perpetrators.
Just the same goes for "we are not colonialists; for 3000 years, this land has been our land, the land of the Jewish People/nations and no one else's.
Get off the Merry-Go-Round!
Israel needs not to apologize nor be on the defense all the time. For example, if HE Ron Prosor, Israel's Ambassador to Britain, instead of complaining and "kvetching" all the time about anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, he showed everyone what the PalArabs are really all about Israel will appear in much more positive light in Britain.
In his long overdue interview with The Telegraph PM Netanyahu made a crack in the ice. Now everyone can follow his new Hasbarah line.
Everyone are: Michael Oren, HE Israel Ambassador to the USA, Mr. Yaakov Dayan, Israel Consul General, West Coast USA, Israel Ambassador to Germany – this will get Frau Merkel off PM Netanyahu's back – and all other Israel's ambassadors and consuls wherever they are.
Time for the PalArabs-aka "Palestinians" to begin making their long overdue "concessions," starting with ending the incitement in their curriculum and ending the political and media rhetoric of incitement to hate and violence against Israel and Jews.
Enough is Enough!
Nurit Greenger
Los Angeles California, USA
It is time to admit the truth and leave all the political correctness behind. Time to put the blame where the blame belongs. The reason there is NO peace must be pointed DIRECTLY at the PalArabs-aka "PALESTINIANS". Enough with blaming Israel; shift the blame onto the culprits.
The Israeli government must expose the PalArabs for what they really are - in their own words.
I thank PM Netanyahu for his honesty. I hereby ask that this will be the new line along which Israel's Hasbarah be conducted. Expose and put the blame on the perpetrators.
Just the same goes for "we are not colonialists; for 3000 years, this land has been our land, the land of the Jewish People/nations and no one else's.
Get off the Merry-Go-Round!
Israel needs not to apologize nor be on the defense all the time. For example, if HE Ron Prosor, Israel's Ambassador to Britain, instead of complaining and "kvetching" all the time about anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, he showed everyone what the PalArabs are really all about Israel will appear in much more positive light in Britain.
In his long overdue interview with The Telegraph PM Netanyahu made a crack in the ice. Now everyone can follow his new Hasbarah line.
Everyone are: Michael Oren, HE Israel Ambassador to the USA, Mr. Yaakov Dayan, Israel Consul General, West Coast USA, Israel Ambassador to Germany – this will get Frau Merkel off PM Netanyahu's back – and all other Israel's ambassadors and consuls wherever they are.
Time for the PalArabs-aka "Palestinians" to begin making their long overdue "concessions," starting with ending the incitement in their curriculum and ending the political and media rhetoric of incitement to hate and violence against Israel and Jews.
Enough is Enough!
Nurit Greenger
Los Angeles California, USA
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