It seems that Palestinians are very familiar with injustice.
Don't even waste time with a threat. Just cut the mooching murderers off.
Greg Kocher aqt the Herald:
More than 50 people protested Israel's bombing of Gaza during a downtown Lexington demonstration late Friday afternoon, "Two, four, six, eight, stop the killing! Stop the hate!" they chanted.Notice they are not demanding a Palestinian homeland, which they should have been. They are not threatening to drive the Jews into the sea. They are asking for peace, and an end to hate.
"Honk for peace" one sign read, and several motorists did just that.
Ismael Shalash, 32, of Lexington, who is of Palestinian heritage, said, "We feel it is our job as a community to come together here, to unify together."
It looks like this.
I cut no slack for Palestinians. I am as anti-Palestinian as you are going to find among American liberals.
But this is not the Israel I grew up admiring.
This is not the Israel of the '70s Peace Movement.
This is not the Israel of the Camp David Accords.
This is not the Israel of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. Fuck, this is not even the Israel of that old terrorist Menachem Begin.
I do not believe what I am reading. I know it is true, but I don't believe it.
It fucking breaks my heart.
More than Vladimir Putin (and don't think that Israel's ground invasion of Gaza beginning right after Putin's Ukrainian allies shot down a passenger jet is a coincidence), more than Darth Cheney and the U.S. warmongers, more than every terrorist on the planet put together, the greatest threat to peace today is the country that was - for a moment, long ago - a beacon of civilization in a barbarous world:
Israel.
Really hard to figure out this one: is the Tribble-Toupeed One really that grossly ignorant of decades of Israeli occupation of the West Bank or is he so completely owned and occupied by AIPAC that he doesn't care about the damage he's doing?
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul will introduce a bill this week, calling for an end of U.S. aid to Palestine until it recognizes Israel’s right to exist, which could be seen as an attempt to drum up pro-Israel support prior to a possible 2016 bid.
“Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with an entity that does not believe it should exist and that has used terrorist tactics to seek its end,” the Republican senator said in a statement Monday.The biggest - by several orders of magnitude - obstacle to Middle East peace is the categorical refusal of Israel's fanatically right-wing government to stop its slow-motion genocide of Palestinian Arabs.
In the three decades since I visited Israel and Egypt, I have evolved
from an Israel partisan who looked down on Arabs to a Palestine
partisan who despises Israel's anti-Arab policy. And that is entirely the fault of the Israeli government's abusive, murderous and unconscionable apartheid of Palestinians and the successive U.S.
governments that enable it.
And still I am amazed that hope survives the hate.
Digby:
From the "hate us for our freedom" files
In case you missed it:
RAMALLAH, West Bank -- With the Boston Marathon bombings on their mind, hundreds of Palestinian and international runners participated Sunday in what was billed as the first Palestinian marathon.He went on to say that he wanted freedom. Which means, I guess, that he hates America. Or something.
The Right to Movement Palestine Marathon kicked off in front of the Church of the Nativity in the biblical city of Bethlehem in the West Bank.
Before it began, Jibril Rajoub, head of the Palestinian Olympic Committee, asked runners to bow their heads in silence for one minute in remembrance of the Boston Marathon victims.
“As we stand here at the Nativity Square, we should bow in silence for one minute for the victims who died in the terrorist act last week in the Boston Marathon,” he said.
I am of "Exodus" generation: we who read Leon Uris' book as teenagers in the '70s and fell like a ton of bricks for the heroic story of Israel's founding. We loved and defended Uris' Israel unconditionally, which is why the Socialist Utopia's recent sharp right turn to savage and brutal colonialism cuts so deeply.
From the Herald:
Most of the people who gathered in protest at the Robert F. Stephens Courthouse Plaza in downtown Lexington on Tuesday had not even been born 64 years ago, when Israel became an independent state.
Still, they said they long for the return of the land to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were forced to leave or flee in the wake of the declaration.
The rally, attended by more than 50 people, was one of many held throughout the world Tuesday, which has become known as Nakba Day, or "Catastrophe Day," for Palestinian supporters.
Those in the market for conspiracy theories might be pleased by the mainstream media reaction to Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism. Not only has the book been widely attacked but so too have its author’s motives for writing it. Beinart’s book is essentially a call for American Jews to challenge the professional Jewish establishment that has failed to stand up for the liberal values of the community it professes to represent and acts instead as an apologist for Israel’s rightward, anti-democratic drift toward permanent occupation. With an impressive uniformity of opinion, Beinart’s reviewers have by and large ignored the details of his critique. Jewish liberals, centrists, neocons and far-right chauvinists all apparently agree that Beinart has written the wrong book. Instead of focusing his attention on the shortcomings of Israeli and American Jewish institutions, he should be complaining about Palestinian rejectionism and suicide-bombing (as might be expected of former protégés of Marty Peretz), as it is obviously their behavior, rather than any action that Israel may have been forced to take in self-defense, that lies at the root of the conflict.
Even were one to grant the substance of the anti-Beinart attacks, one would still be left with Lenin’s age-old question: What is to be done? Where are the alternatives to an all-out effort — risks and all — to end the occupation? While some of the reviewers profess distaste for the policies of the Israeli government, none propose a solution that involves anything much more than Palestinian surrender. And since that is not going to happen — indeed the political weakness of Palestinian “moderates” is often cited as yet another roadblock to a sustainable peace agreement—then what we are left with is the passive acceptance of Israel’s slow-motion destruction of its democracy coupled with an apparently endless (and brutal) military occupation.
As is always the case when Israel is criticized, discussion in that country has been far more open and self-confident in its press than in our own. Writing in the invaluable +972 webzine, Mairav Zonszein observes, “Beinart’s writing does not shed new light on the situation, but the fact that he is making such waves reflects just how hard it is for American Jews to figure out their identity vis-à-vis Israel—and how, after 64 years trying to figure it out, it continues to be the mainstay of American Jewish discourse.” Her colleague Noam Sheizaf writes, “The panic with which the ‘Crisis of Zionism’ was met had nothing to do with the book’s not-so-new political message…but rather from the thought that Beinart does represent something real, that the Jewish establishment is indeed failing, not in terms of political effectiveness, but on a much deeper level that has to do with the moral values and the self-perception of the people it claims to represent.”
SNIP
American Jews could play a useful role in aiding our Israeli cousins to see that they are destroying what was noble and admirable in the creation of a democratic and egalitarian Jewish homeland over fears that are in some significant respects (albeit not entirely) driven by psychological rather than real-world factors. But as the ferocious reaction to Beinart’s book, coupled with the nonreaction to the PRIME project, demonstrates, the opposite is unfortunately going to be the case. As Sheizaf observes, the project of “Jewish establishment and members of the Jewish media—the manufacturers of ideology” is to do whatever is necessary “to relieve the pain of their community by blurring the existence of a problem. It is an ungrateful task, which will last as long as the occupation does.”
So again, the alternative? Kiddushin 39b in the Babylonian Talmud tells us, “And wherever the potential for harm is ever present we do not rely on miracles.” Yet that is exactly what the American Jewish establishment and its media apologists do when it comes to the preservation of a Jewish and democratic Israel. And therein lies the true “crisis” of Zionism.
I visited Israel decades ago, and remember as if was yesterday how moved I was by the flourishing democracy a massacred people had built.
Today, I look at Israel and see a once-successful friend crashing to the ground on the crack of overpowering violence, blind to the suicidal path it is on.
Stephen Robert at The Nation:
I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts where my parents headed our local synagogue, Hadassah and the United Jewish Appeal. My first trip abroad after university, in 1962, included a week-long visit to Israel, where I was awed by its accomplishments, as well as by its vulnerability. After the Six-Day War in 1967, I basked in the courage and military prowess of my fellow Jews. The eloquence of foreign minister Abba Eban, defending his beleaguered country at the United Nations, still fills me with pride. In the years since, I’ve been a contributor and fundraiser for the UJA-Federation of New York, a governor of the American Jewish Committee, which is dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, and a founding director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. I’ve made five additional visits to Israel since 1962, the last this summer as part of a humanitarian aid trip to East Jerusalem and the West Bank. As a Jew who has been an ardent supporter of Israel since its independence, it pains me to record what I saw there. But it is my love for Israel and for the Jewish people that drives me to speak out at this treacherous time.
What I witnessed in the West Bank—home to about 2.5 million Palestinians and 400,000 Israeli settlers—exceeded my worst expectations. While the world’s statesmen have dithered, Israel has created a system of apartheid on steroids, a horrifying prison with concrete walls as high as twenty-six feet, topped with body-ravaging coils of razor wire. Spaced along these walls are imposing guard towers that harbor bunkers from which trespassers can be shot by Israeli soldiers. From this physical segregation—one land for Israelis; another, unequal land for Palestinians—flows a torrent of misery, violence and human rights abuses. The West Bank suffers from acute shortages of water, housing, jobs and healthcare. Palestinian children are separated from their parents, denied access to hospitals and stoned and beaten by Jewish settlers. Human rights sanctioned by international law, including the right to health, the prohibition on transferring populations into occupied territories and equal treatment before the law are routinely violated.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, once said that Israel will be judged by how it treats the Arabs. This is a moral test Israel now resoundingly fails—a failure that threatens to undermine all of its accomplishments and, as is increasingly clear, its future.
SNIP
How can Jews, who have been persecuted for centuries, tolerate this inhumanity? Where is their moral compass? How can this situation be acceptable to Judaism’s spiritual and political leaders? I don’t have that answer; except to say that Israel’s biggest enemy has become itself.
* * *
The Arab Spring should make it abundantly clear that the Jewish state is on the wrong side of history. When, exactly, the tipping point will come is not predictable. But when that point arrives, it will bring tremendous risks for Israel, and for almost half the Jews in the world who reside there. That Israel has the upper hand now portends nothing about the future. A small state of 7 million holding 4 million neighbors in prison, without opportunity, sufficient medical care, food, water and equal justice is not a sustainable situation. When, eventually, stasis gives way to unimaginable change, it will be too late to alter course. Israel, “right or wrong,” a position taken by many, will lead to a catastrophe. It represents a suspension of critical thought; characteristic of many radical ideologies. Friends of Israel would serve it better to know the true facts and then drive Israel toward a moral and practical solution.
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