Human Beings are Capable of Good and Bad, Israeli Jews Included

Israel is put in a class by itself and has been since its creation. It has never accepted responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees that it created in 1948, refusing a penny (or shekel) to support them. Instead the UN had to come to the rescue and is still, 75 years later, providing health and education services to the over 50 camps still sitting on the sites where they were established using tents so long ago. Incredibly, Israel has asked that even this UN relief operation be stopped.

That Israel is a colony is undeniable. That Israel is not a democracy because it rules over people who have no vote is undeniable. That Israel has openly engaged in ethnic cleansing is undeniable. That the US has protected Israel from any censure by the UN is undeniable. The Palestinians have been referred to as the niggers of the Middle East. It's true for everyone to see - no civil rights, constant abuse, constant questioning over what they are doing and where they are going. Easy conviction and imprisonment can be expected. And something never suffered by African-Americans, a registry of every single Palestinian by the Israelis, a number assigned to each just as numbers were assigned to concentration camp inmates by the Nazis.

While all this might make sense to Israelis, what is going on with America? It can only be the holocaust that makes Israel exempt. The movie Exodus was a blockbuster in the US, telling the story that Israel wanted told of its creation with handsome Paul Newman in the starring role. The intro to the movie that became famous is of crossed human arms holding weapons against a backdrop of flames. The British, portrayed in the movie as antisemitic by Peter Lawford, had in fact gone to great lengths to keep a lid on the region, up to and including a brutal suppression of the quite understandable Arab Revolt of 1936-38 that rejected the Zionist takeover that by then was perfectly obvious to anyone paying attention.

The British conducted a survey of the population of Palestine in 1939 to try to find a way to settle things that would respect both the Jews and the Arabs. In the resulting white paper, which soon-to-be Israeli president David Ben Gurion rejected immediately but secretly, land was reserved for both sides. The Arabs, seeing what had been all theirs at the start of the 20th century rejected it for "offering" them 45% of Palestine though they made up 55% of the population. Ben Gurion vowed to fight WW2 with the Allies and then get serious about Palestine. So it would be.

In the movie and in the actual event, the British were despised because they called a halt to Jewish immigration after 250,000 had recently arrived from Europe, in line with the recommendation of the white paper resulting in the British boarding the ship Exodus, loaded with holocaust survivors, and forcing the refugees back to British controlled Germany. The world, including the US, unwilling to take the refugees as morality would dictate, instead denounced the British.

The fact that is not allowed to be expressed, and is something I have never, ever heard anyone in any American government say, is that Jews are no more or less human than anyone else. That they suffered a horror in Europe in no way justified their going to Palestine and forcing the Palestinians out. But this would not have won Harry Truman the vote of American Jews. Yet the movie Exodus would have us believe that Zionism was perfectly rational and even heroic as we see Paul Newman and Lee J. Cobb and a group of young Jewish kids deal with skulking Arabs hiding in the shadows, conniving with Nazis and murdering a beautiful white Jewish girl. Hollywood could have done no more for Zionism and Americans ate it up to our cost.

The US has thrown aside liberty and justice for all in favor of the Israeli exception. What makes this doubly strange is that American Jews would never ask for or be extended similar exceptionality here in the US where they are equal American citizens along with all the rest of us. There would be outrage if American Jews were excused when called before the justice system, if they were given a unique discount on home purchases, given land exclusively, from which they could pump sewage onto other land, etc., etc down the list of what Israelis do and have been doing to Palestinians openly and without apology for so many years.

Now we are allowing Israelis the ultimate: to kill and destroy without limit, to take more land, to determine what to do with all the money and weapons we give them while we stand by timidly and do not dare to intervene, our foolish Secretary of State running around the world trying to get other countries to join us! And this has been going at a lower level for decades with the US holding off all attempts at entirely peaceful sanctions from an outraged world via the UN, pressuring other countries economically to vote as the US and Israel wish them to vote.

The enormous irony of the holocaust is that it has so impressed the minds of Zionists and Americans that another holocaust is now underway perpetrated by those who believe that that victimhood 80 years ago makes them uniquely righteous, allowing any and all behavior on their part in the taking of land and the killing of people with the mighty US holding the world at bay with the immense armed force that is now truly doing the opposite of what that force is intended to do - PROTECT THE UNITED STATES, not a foreign outlaw country. Our Navy right now intimidates all for the sake of epic injustice to proceed without restraint. Need anyone wonder if this is ramping up hatred of the United States? HAMAS committed an act of terror, but in doing so it revealed, even to the most obtuse, the clear status of Israel as a unique oppressor that must not be stopped.

"Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..."

The masses are huddled in Gaza waiting to be killed and have not been free in their lifetimes.

The Statue of Liberty is now nothing but a relic and a joke.

And our blind President is ready to go to the wall to leave unrestrained a foreign country with less than 2% of our population.

There are many American Jews who see exactly what is going on and denounce it. If you support them, as I do and have done for over 25 years, check out the Jewish Voice for Peace website. Let it also be said that there are a dwindling number of Israelis who denounce what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians over decades. Check out the website of B'Tselem (bet SELL um).

Bradley Burston on toxic Zionism

Bradley Burston of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has written a powerful opinion piece that is so impressive I reproduce it here. Zionism was originally an attempt to shelter a helpless people by giving them complete control in a country of their own, but with the unlimited power it now has under the protection of the United States it has become a monster of oppression allowing Zionists, if they so choose, to act like Nazis once did with impunity and for the same reason: power without accountability. Like National Socialism, Zionism will fail because the contempt for others that comes with power is inevitable in the two ideas.

          There's something inside me that I can't seem to get rid of. I push it down, try to pay no attention, but still it rattles around down there, souring the system. Then, over the last miserable couple of weeks, I realized that it's time I brought this up, to the surface, and, at long last, dealt with it.

It's about Zionism. Zionism as a form of toxic masculinity.

Toxic masculinity, as in: I, as a self-decreed Alpha, can do whatever the Capital Eff I please, to whomever I please, for whatever personal benefit I can extract, with absolutely no fear of negative consequence.

As in: I should be able to badger and bludgeon anyone I please, in order to get my way, regardless of the issue, regardless of how many people it hurts, demeans, infuriates, oppresses.  

Why? #BecauseZionism.

It has to do with toxic masculinity in behavior, policy, enforcement, in word and deed. In the West Bank, and in Israel proper.

It has to do with just one week, in which right-wing Israeli soldiers attacked and fought with Israeli Border Police, in an effort to forcibly release settlers the Border Police troops had arrested for throwing stones at Palestinian homes in the West Bank. 

You read that right.  

It has to do with settlers pressuring cabinet ministers to attend a protest AGAINST their own government, for not acting fast enough to respond to terrorist attacks by immediately legalizing – in the vernacular, "Koshering" - thousands of settlement homes which even Israel recognizes were built illegally on Palestinian-owned land. Obedient as dogs under a threatening stick, nine ministers, one short of a cabinet majority, attended the protest, 

You read that right.

All in the service of Zionism as a form of toxic masculinity – all for the sake of the new Greater Israel, where 2,000 wrongs make a right wing.

All for the sake of Zionism, which has testosteronized into a he-man, screw-everyone-but-us government of the settlers, by the settlers, for the settlers. A government deriving its just powers from the consent of the settlers. And no one else. 

It has to do with overstepping – crushing underfoot - all imaginable bounds, just because you can. It has to do with Israel pressuring U.S. state and federal government to enact anti-BDS legislation, and reportedly asking German Chancellor Angela Merkel to act to cut-off German funding to organizations and institutions which Benjamin Netanyahu's office views as critical of its policies – among them, the Israeli news and commentary website +972 Magazine, and, most astonishing, the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

You read that right, too.

It has to do with doing all that, and then saying nothing, looking the other way, when a Texas school district allegedly fires a children’s speech pathologist because she refused to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel, prompting a lawsuit over First Amendment rights.

All for the sake of a Zionism which now takes the worst, most obnoxious elements of what may be called the Israeli personality, and glorifies them, to the exclusion of what was once actually positive here. 

Meet the New Zionist Man: Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Bezalel Smotrich, of the radical settler-dominated Tkuma faction of the hardline Bayit Hayehudi party. 

Famed for: Having called an LGBTQ Pride march a "parade of beasts"; having urged segregation of Arabs and Jews in hospital maternity wards ("It is natural that my wife would not want to lay down next to someone who just gave birth to a baby who might want to murder her baby in another 20 years."); having said that children throwing stones at soldiers should be shot to death, and having declared, regarding Israelis, that God commanded Jews not to sell homes to Arabs.

Current claim to fame: Author of profoundly surreal legislation initially approved Sunday by the Netanyahu cabinet, which would, if passed by the Knesset, magically legalize no fewer than 65 illegal West Bank outposts, supply them with infrastructure, government services, connection to the Israel Electric Corporation power grid, and a Treasury guarantee of a mortgage for any settlers who want to build a new home where they are – as well as effective immunity from official enforcement actions like eviction and demolition. 

Or Meet the New Zionist Man: Yair Netanyahu, prospective Knesset Likud candidate, and the potty-mouthed, racist, girlfriend-humiliating, hormone-driven, uber-privileged, colossally arrogant sock-puppet son of the prime minister. 

Watch him progress in stature and influence as he publicly advocates ethnic cleansing against millions of Muslims, promotes anti-Semitism against left-leaning Jews, swears on the witness stand like a leave-drunk sailor, and, for dessert, makes obscene gestures in a courtroom, 

Watch his proud parents kvell. 

Why? 'Cause he's a real man. Cause he's a real rightist. Cause he's Israeli and Jewish and Likud.

Because Zionism now equals settlements. And democracy-strangling legislation. Because in order to win the favor of the crucial swing vote of racist ultra-masculine (in their own minds) neo-Kahane neo-fascists and, yes, to win the favor of the settlement movement, Israel's leaders now call for war when the military is against it. 

Groveling at the feet of the far-right, beating their chests like male great apes in display, Israel's leaders now want to uproot and expel family members of terrorists - even when the Shin Bet and senior army and police officials have explicitly and repeatedly told the cabinet ministers that the expulsions are counter-productive in combating terror, and are directly in conflict with to Israel's short- and long-term interests at home and abroad.

You read that right. 

It's gotten so bad that the discourse of toxic masculinity now also extends to those who oppose Zionism, and who have adopted its aversion to sympathy and compassion for any of those who stand on the other side of the conflict.

So where does that leave me? 

It leaves me, and an enormous number of other Jews, orphaned of a homeland, supplanted by well-meaning evangelicals and foreign anti-Semites and other Greater Israel-friendly supporters of settlements and permanent occupation and permanent Netanyahu and permanent warfare and permanent collective punishment and denial of basic rights for millions of Palestinians. 

I can tell you this: If this is Zionism, I am so off the bus. 

If you'll excuse me, I have some uprooting and expulsion of my own to do. Inside me.

There may be no cure for toxic masculinity, but that's no reason to leave it to fester where it is.

Zionism is anti-Semitism? A must read

Five years ago Joseph Massad wrote an essay for Al Jazeera's website, The Last of the Semites, subtitled, "It is Israel's claims that it represents and speaks for all Jews that are the most anti-Semitic claims of all."

How can this possibly be? Can you think of a any title more likely to make people scoff?

I gave him a chance and he makes a solid case, pointing out that Zionism shared with European anti-Semitism the idea than Jews in Europe were not Europeans, but a people apart who could never belong and needed to be moved from Europe to a place of their own. This is in contrast to the view of the great majority of European Jews who did not have any desire to go to Palestine and felt themselves to be part of the countries in which they lived. Massad's article is a must read.

Zionism was having a very hard time attracting Jews to Palestine until after World War 2. Then, with the aid of anti-Semitism in the US and Britain that denied Jews in the displaced persons camps of Europe entry, Zionists were assured of an influx of Jews to Palestine, who had nowhere else to go. In fact Zionists did what they could to keep the US and Britain from admitting Holocaust survivors. For detailed information on this period, read In the Shadow of the Holocaust by Yosef Grodzinsky.

Today, Benjamin Netanyahu continues to tell European Jews that they should move to Israel and insists that he in his role as Israeli Prime Minister speaks for Jews worldwide, outright denying by this that such people, equal to the number of Israelis, are simply American, German or English. In other words they are to be discriminated as Jews, called out to leave their homes against their own preference to be known as citizens of their native lands.

In short, Hitler had and Netanyahu has the view that half the world's Jews should not stay where they are for the fact that they are Jews. Hitler had no objection to German Jews going to Palestine and neither does Netanyahu. In fact Zionists worked out a deal with Hitler in 1933 to expedite such a move. You may recall an eager Netanyahu rushing to Paris after the Charlie Hebdo killings. The man is concerned with convincing non-Israeli Jews that they should leave their own countries for a place he designates for them, while at the same time proclaiming he speaks for them.

Anti-Semitism is the idea that Jews are not like other people, but must be set apart. Zionism endorses this with the added ideas that there is only one place where Jews do belong and it must be exclusively theirs with the expulsion of non-Jews who are native to the place selected. In the long run, this cannot last, but the horror of the Holocaust gave it a boost that has kept the idea going as Israel moves further to the right. This is to be expected of a society based on discrimination that blatantly oppresses under the protection of a country that has the gall to claim it stands for liberty and justice for all. It says volumes that Donald Trump is very popular in Israel.

Allan Brownfeld: battles over Zionism inside Jewish organizations

Here is another outstanding 15 minute video from the National Summit to Re-assess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship held in Washington D.C. early this year. Allan Brownfeld consistently writes outstanding articles for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

After describing how Zionism was a minority view in Judaism until after WW2, Brownfeld goes on to describe the hypocrisy of America supporting a state for a single religious group. He also tells of the prohibition by the Hillel (campus Jewish group) of any speakers who are anti-Zionist. He finishes be describing his optimism about the future in this way:

"Among young people there is a great belief in freedom of speech, in freedom of debate, and a desire that moral values treating each individual with human dignity be applied everywhere, in Palestine, in Israel as well as in our own country. So I think Zionism within the Jewish community is in retreat."

the sweet sound of reason

Here is the first part of a wonderfully clear explanation of the origin of the problem in Palestine. A tutorial for Americans

Herzl's vision vs Israel's reality

Theodore Herzl is considered the founder of Zionism as laid out in his book Der Judenstaat (1895).

Today, President Obama on a visit to Israel has laid a wreath at the grave of Herzl, paying him honor in doing so. But the State of Israel is quite different from what Herzl had in mind. A comment on the site, Mondoweiss by Palestinian Ramzi Jaber, puts this in a listing as follows...

Obama must keep the following 12 facts in mind: 

1- Palestinians are the gererous party who are willing to share our land with Israel

2- Herzl dreamed up Zionism to solve a non-Palestinian problem: Jews not being welcome in Europe

3- Zionism imposed a state over land that did not belong to Jews

4- Contrary to what Herzl dreamed up, the region is not better off because of Israel

5- Contrary to what Herzl dreamed up, Israel is not a secular democracy

6- Contrary to what Herzl dreamed up, Israel is not the only democracy in the Middle East.

7- Contrary to what Herzl dreamed up, Israel is NOT the vanguard of a westernized Middle East (but a throwback to 19th century Europe - CB)

8- Contrary to what Herzl dreamed up, Israel is not the solution to the Jewish problem

9- Contrary to what Herzl dreamed up, Israel has created Palestinian homelessness

10- Contrary to what Herzl dreamed up, emerging popular Middle Eastern governments are not Israel’s allies

11- Contrary to what Herzl dreamed up, Israel is no longer the oppressed but rather the only superpower (plus nukes) in the ME

12- Contrary to what Herzl dreamed up, Israel never moved beyond 1800s mentality

We came to inherit the land

Amnon Neumann, a former soldier in the Palmach, the army that expelled the Arabs from areas that the future state of Israel would hold as its own, recounts some of his experiences (but not all, some being unmentionable).

Concerning the erasing of what is called by the Palestinians the catastrophe (Nakba), he says on reflection, "my whole world view of what happened in the war changed completely. I saw that this was a deliberate deception of the Zionist movement. And they did it successfully, a major success"



This video was produced by Zochrot, which means remembering in Hebrew. From the website:

Zochrot seeks to raise public awareness of the Palestinian Nakba, especially among Jews in Israel, who bear a special responsibility to remember and amend the legacy of 1948. The principal victims of the Nakba were the Palestinians, especially the refugees, who lost their entire world. But Jews in Israel also pay a price for their conquest of the land in 1948, living in constant fear and without hope.

The Nakba destroyed the fabric of relations that existed between Jews and Palestinians before 1948. In recognizing and materializing the right of return lies the possibility for Jews and Palestinians to live in this country together.

has Zionism run aground?

The number one priority for the Israeli government is to make Jews worldwide feel that Israel is their project, their priority and vital to their lives. This is why Israel denies that there is no such a thing as an Israeli, distinct from being Jewish.

The zealotry of the Zionists is legendary. They were determined, no matter what, to make the Jewish state in Palestine a reality, even if it meant working behind the scenes to close off other options than Palestine for Jews evicted from their European homes. The use of terror to make a physical place for Israel was embraced.

The Arabs living in what was to become Israel, didn't have a chance. There is an interesting account of Harry Truman's involvement in recognizing the new Jewish state in 1948 and his rejection of the position of the pro-Arab U.S. State Department, officials of which predicted exactly what has come to pass should America back Zionism.

I don't believe that the actions of the settlers in the occupied territories can be easily separated from the original Zionist impulse, since the settlers are only continuing to take the land that was claimed even before Israel came into being. Settlement is a second wind of Zionism.

This leaves Jews in a quandary. Is Israel necessary to the survival of worldwide Jewry as was claimed by Zionists from the start of the movement? Are Jews without a voice if it does not originate from Israel? Is a Jew who opposes Zionism some kind of a traitor? Is Israel more of a liability than an asset to those Jews living outside of Israel?

Israel's government would deny emphatically that Zionism has become an anachronism but I believe it has. The counter-arguments that trumped the Arab opposition in past decades - that the Holocaust survivors deserved a place in Palestine, that Israel was an unsinkable battleship for the West in the Cold War, that Israel was a developing democracy - all of these no longer apply.

I would draw an analogy between Israel in Palestine and someone thrusting a hand into a beehive. The angry bees would sting the hand viciously. Would the owner of the hand be right in claiming to be a victim and calling the bees aggressors? Would the owner of the hand be justified in destroying the beehive because he was stung? Would he be right to say the behavior of the bees was unjustified and unforeseen?

I think the establishment of Israel was a mistake with predictable consequences that we have seen come to pass. If anything, Israel should be at pains to address the loses and suffering of the Palestinians that began right from the start, yet this is as far from Israel's policy as can be.

I don't call for the elimination of Israel. We can't roll back history. But I do call for a withdrawal of any and all support for the settlements. Zionism must come to a stop. Enough damage has been done. I am not Jewish. I don't want to underestimate the difficulty that non-Israeli Jews might have in opposing what Israel does. But that is a necessary action for them to take in the name of justice.

Here is an interesting article about Miriam Margolyes, an anti-Zionist Jew and the actress who played Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films, encountering a displaced Palestinian.

clearing the forest with glasses on

Follow me on a flight of fancy and see if you don't think it has a connection to reality.

You and I have eyes that work the same way. But do we see things the same?

I like to think of the way a mind views the world as equivalent to what happens when putting on a pair of glasses.

I'm sure you've heard the phrase "looking through rose-colored glasses" as a way to indicate the way someone looks at things differently. That's right on the mark! The way glasses affect what is seen comes from their design. Each of us, as we grow up, unconsciously puts on a pair of figurative glasses, most often with a prescription, a design, that provides a view that's quite similar to that of our parents.

Everybody wears such glasses and past generations did too.

The colonies that would become the United States were founded by folks wearing European Christian glasses. Wearing them, they were certain that the words of the Bible were a basis for moral behavior. Didn't the Bible say that the earth was given to Man to do with as he wished?

So they acted accordingly, chopping down forests, damming streams, plowing fields. In doing so, they also cleared the land of wildlife and those who had been living there, the Indians. With their glasses firmly on, they saw the wildlife as no problem - trees were just things in the way and animals were mere brutes. The Indians (Native-Americans) were a bit more tricky to deal with but, being viewed as savages, they were with some difficulty put out of the way. Soon after, glasses with an updated lens prescription started to be worn. They gave a crystal clear view of Manifest Destiny for lands to the west.

Now step forward almost to 1900 and consider people that wore Jewish glasses. These glasses had a very long-standing prescription for their lenses that give a vision of a promised land, Zion, of Jerusalem that, just as the earth was promised to those wearing European Christian glasses, was promised specifically to those wearing Jewish glasses. A new, Zionist lens prescription came out that gave a view of making Biblical promises into fact. People could decide to stick with the old Jewish lenses or put on the new Zionist lenses.

Another pilgrimage to a different land began and, as in the American case, land was cleared, streams were dammed, land was planted and plowed. With Zionist glasses, it was all very good. Again, as with the Indians, the Arabs were a bit tricky to handle but, at the end of 1948, were put out of the way.

In the 20th century, quite a few of those wearing the Jewish or Zionist glasses were in the United States. They passed these glasses around, allowing many Americans who didn't have a pair of their own to get a good look through them anyway. Even President Harry Truman was given a pair and he liked what he saw through them.

But few in America had a pair of Arab glasses to lend to others. That view remained invisible in the United States, and largely remains so. In fact, Americans who dare to try on Arab glasses can be called names.

But you and I are alone here. So now, I'm going to offer you, a fellow American, a pair of Palestinian glasses (a special kind of Arab glasses) to put on.

Before you do, I want you to think of Yassir Arafat. What springs to mind? Ugh! He was a terrible man, devious, a liar, a terrorist, someone who should have been targeted for death, right?

WAIT! Calm down for a second. Have you recently worn Zionist glasses? It's amazing how many copies have been made in America. Somebody lent you a pair? No problem. OK, here is the Palestinian pair.

Hey, you don't look half bad wearing them. Now you are ready to watch a video I have for you. In this video, Yassir Arafat will appear differently than in how you've thought of him before. Not only that, you will hear some Palestinian popular music sung by a man who is very popular in Gaza and the West Bank. It's quite emotional, interesting to hear and I'll bet, like me, like 99% of Americans, you've never heard the like of it.

Now watch this video created by some young Palestinian women, a single chapter of about 25 minutes from a series called Sleepless in Gaza and Jerusalem. Get ready to see things differently. If you have a pair of headphones, use them as the audio may be a bit challenging if you use your PC speakers.

Oh, and I won't be back after the video. You can keep the glasses.

view the video