Israel’s struggle for peace is a sincere one. In fact, Israel desires to live at peace not only with its neighbours, but also and especially with its own Palestinian population, and with Palestinians whose lands its military occupies by force. Israel’s desire for peace is not only rhetorical but also substantive and deeply psychological. With few exceptions, prominent Zionist leaders since the inception of colonial Zionism have desired to establish peace with the Palestinians and other Arabs whose lands they slated for colonisation and settlement. The only thing Israel has asked for, and continues to ask for in order to end the state of war with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbours, is that all recognise its right to be a racist state that discriminates by law against Palestinians and other Arabs and grants differential legal rights and privileges to its own Jewish citizens and to all other Jews anywhere. The resistance that the Palestinian people and other Arabs have launched against Israel’s right to be a racist state is what continues to stand between Israel and the peace for which it has struggled and to which it has been committed for decades. Indeed, this resistance is nothing less than the “New anti- Semitism”.
Attacking Iran – UPI analysis of the impact of an attack on Iran on oil prices, and in part 2 on Russian involvement and the difficulty of assessing which facilities to hit.
A More Islamic Islam – Geneive Abdo on why the Western media wastes its time on “Muslim secularists” like Irshad Manji and Wafaa Sultan.
Four years on – Helena Cobban says “I told you so” about the war on Iraq.
Western Sahara between Autonomy and Intifada – a MERIP piece sympathetic to the Polisario sees a new generation of Sahwari activists emerging (encouraged by ongoing police repression) as long as Morocco can count on the support of the UN and major powers for its autonomy plan. It’s interesting to read next to the rather pathetic attempts by Morocco to link the Polisario with Islamist terror groups.
Hizbullah’s social services – an excerpt from Augustus Richard Norton’s new book, Hizbullah.
Mission délicate pour Javier Solana à Damas – Le Figaro says EU foreign policy supremo Javier Solana is trying to negotiate a secret agreement in Damascus to spare the Asad family from the scrutiny of an international tribunal.
re: the Massad piece in Al-Ahram.
He puts all the various Zionist rationales (as he defines them) into one bundle, creates himself a nice straw man, as if every Israeli or Jew believes them all vehemently. I could not care less about God, don’t think Jews are inherently better than anyone else. I do think there’s something valuable in my culture though — no more or less valuable than others — and I think it would be pretty sad if it died out. If you think that’s paranoia, or craziness, or retroactive rationalization of Israel’s allegedly inherently foul character, I would suggest maybe you could dedicate a few minutes to empathy. Just because most partisans don’t give a shit about the other side’s rationale, and structure their arguments along lines of good vs. bad, doesn’t mean you have to as well. Something tells me empathy is not high on Professor Massad’s list of important character traits. It is very easy to dismiss other people’s concerns as illegitimate.
Israel strives to maintain a Jewish character, or whatever you want to call it, not out of hate, or spite, or sense of superiority, or anything one usually associates with racism; it does it because to be a Jewish state means the Jews survive, and to not be means they probably won’t. I really think it’s as simple as that. It’s not hard to understand. Jews in general tried the diaspora thing, the Stateless People thing, for a long time. You can’t say we didn’t give it a good, honest go. It didn’t work out well. It worked out so poorly that eventually Zionism emerged, saying, basically, if we don’t get back our state, we won’t exist anymore. The professor seems to brush that all aside, suggests it’s imaginary or irrelevant or ahistorical. I guess he would say it is not “exceptional”.
To the professor, you see, I’d fit the model of an exceptionalist. Someone who argues, as he says, that “It is not that no other people has been oppressed historically, it is that Jews have been oppressed more. It is not that no other people’s cultural and physical existence has been threatened; it is that the Jews’ cultural and physical existence is threatened more.” That doesn’t really describe me but in his Zionism that’s the only place I might be imagined to fit.
It would be grand if every country could be multicultural and we all looked at one another as individuals, blind to religion, culture, color, etc. But it’s not how it is. His solution of a binational state imagines that Arabs and Jews would suddenly all become bodhisattvas, live in peace together and never threaten each others’ communal existence, even as the demographic balance quickly tilts in favor of Muslim Arabs. I wonder, if such a state came about, how quick he’d be to leave the USA for it? How long would he stay there once his kids start getting picked on for being Christian, I wonder.
To Dan: I can see your viewpoint on the preservation of Jewish Culture; but how can you justify such a goal’s fulfillment by blatant racial discrimination (whether it be by outlawing marriages between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, the wall, etc). People are suffering, starving, dying, and separated from their families in a life of misery in ghettos in Jordan, Lebanon, and what was once Palestine all for the Jewish character to be preserved? There has to be a better method at preserving the rich culture of the Jews without subjugating the majority of a population to suffer for the past sixty years. I am Christian, and its not Muslims vs. Jews or that the Muslims are the only suffering party, Christian Palestinians have been stripped of their right to return to their homes, their churches have been destroyed, and their livlihood, friends, and towns have all but disappeared. As you said, its a partisan arguement, and you have to look at the other side’s viewpoint and how they have tried numerous times to concede yet new conditions keep arising for peace that are impossible to accept, walls jail citizens and isolate them from family and work, and constant raiding of buildings, razings of homes, bombings and humiliation continue at unexpected times from the occupying force. How would you feel?
Amir, I tried three times to post a reply and each time the site’s swallowed up my comment. I don’t know why, I don’t think it contained anything flaggable by spam filters. Sorry. Maybe the comments will pop up later, sometimes that happens… ?
Dan:
I look forward to your response. If anything, you can email me at matara@dany.nyc.gov