The hatred that cannot (yet) declare its name:

Thank you to author Fiona Snyckers for sharing the article below by Booker prize winner Howard Jacobson....it is an unfortunate description of the largely unconscious reactive processes unfolding in many Western societies, as people find a "respectable" way to wallow in all the short-term payoffs of prejudice, resentment and hate all wrapped in the Orwellian newspeak of concern for human rights.

I think any fair-minded person who has some insight into their own dynamics will realise that a lot of the reactivity swirling around the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (and I use those terms deliberately, to "localise" it, although for obvious reasons the conflict is played out in the minds of Jews and Moslems around the world, as well as in the minds of many others for whom it has assumed symbolic value) is to do with projection, with people not owning their own "stuff" and displacing it onto the other. This would obviously include me as well, to some extent. But I am self reflective and regularly pull myself up by my shoelaces to examine what is happening internally as well as externally. But what is emerging under the broad church of anti-Israelism is an arational emotional dynamic not dissimilar to the affect cultivated by fascist groups across Europe in the 1930s, which lacks any self reflection, any ownership of its own murderous rage...it is all projected outwards onto Israel and, inevitably by association, onto Jews anywhere and everywhere, irrespective of their orientation, affiliation or degree of identification. It is a dynamic which needs to be discussed, because it significantly impacts on all the societies where it is left unattended to to manifest.


http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/howard-jacobson/howard-jacobson-letrsquos-see-the-criticism-of-israel-for-what-it-really-is-1624827.html

The Love that Cannot Declare Its Name

In some blighted places
people are trying to make Israel
into a love that cannot declare its name
but in fifty or sixty years time
I am convinced there will be Israel pride marches
down every street that matters
(assuming Israel doesn't self destruct
in the interim; a mythical regional peace might well
bring fault-lines in Israeli society to the boil)

And to paraphrase Ben Gurion: we choose to fight the delegitimization as if there were no inequities in Israeli society, and fight the growing inequities in Israeli society as if there were no delegitimization
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at the fleamarket:
love, peace and conspiracy theories
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Israel-Apartheid Hate-Fest: Prejudice, projection and group-think

Isn't it strange that Israel is the only country in the Middle East which has, for example, a vibrant and open gay scene, media which vigorously critique the government of the day, where prime ministers and presidents are impeached for corruption by an independent judiciary, where human rights organisations operate relatively unhindered, where women and members of non-Jewish minorities are in the Knesset, in the High Court, and in the Executive. (Go find a Christian or Jew or Bahai or openly gay person or woman in a position of real power in Iran or Saudia or Egypt )

Yet some resentment filled people looking for a cause (and a few misguided fellow travellers)  brand  Israel as an Apartheid state. Of course Israel does have some Apartheid like features, if Apartheid is understood to be a metaphor for state backed inequity and discrimination...there are the two million stateless citizens of the West Bank/Judea and Samaria (which is Jordan's problem as much as Israel's), there is underfunding of Israeli Arab and Druze municipalities, there is a gap betwen wealthy and poor, there is a lack of sufficient separation between synagogue and state, there is the crumbling of the rul of law as fundamentalist understandings of governance gain traction amongst some sectors of Israeli society .

But if Apartheid is understood in this general way, then every country on earth has apartheid like features, and many have far more than Israel.


Indeed many of the members of the laughably named and completely corrupted UN Human Rights Council, such as  China,  Congo, Indonesia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Russian Federation and Saudi Arabia have far worse track records on a number of key parameters such as:

gender equality
press freedom
religious freedom
persecution of minorities
homophobia
supression of the aspirations of ethnic groupings within their territory

Chosing to charicature Israel in this way is a profound act of accentuating a few features and ignoring all the rest - the very process which characterices all prejudice, all racial, religious and ethnic stereotyping.

The reasons why people wish to  cast Israel in this light are many; in Europe it sometimes stems from a desire to shed Holocaust guilt; "see, they're not so different from us, they're not so virtuous, they  also do bad things  (maybe they even deserved it a bit....)" It also stems from the disowned parts of self, such as avarice, greed and agression which have been historically projected onto 'the Jews'. Most fundamentally, in post-Christian Europe it stems from replacement theology; the 'anxiety of influence' of a culture (Christianity) birthed from a religion (Judaism)  that must be devalued to reduce the internal tension of simultaneously rejecting the parent while being unable to be completely free of it.This is why European culture  goes to geat lengths to differentiate betwen contmporary Jewry and the "ancient Israelites" - its langaging is designed to attack the notion that there might be a continuous identity.

In the Islamic world state sponsored anti-Semitism is the norm not the exception, and a useful mechanism for collective self avoidance, and sometimes the glue which keeps these societies from imploding (just as the enmity of much of the Islamic world is sometimes the glue which keeps Israel from tearing itself apart)

In countries which have recently experienced transitions to democracy from minority or foreign rule their is an knee jerk identification with the Palestinians as an opressed grouping, irrespective of thekind of fundamentalist and anti-democratic rule the Palestinians have chosen for themselves, and the human rights abuses perpetrated by Palestinian Authorities which are daily practice in both Gaza and the West Bank and Israel. (Where Palestinians have, for the last 80 years, randomly targeted Israeli citizens in acts of terror, beginning with the 1929 Arab pogroms in Hebron and elsewhere, which temporarily ended the at least 2000 year old Jewish presence in that West Bank town ).

"Dam braces and bless relaxes...." (Blake, I believe, talking of Milton). The more one-sided, unhinged, hate filled and vitriolic, the more the basic impulse to make wrong irrespective reveals itself from under the newspeak of human rights, the more it creates an equal and opposite force, as those like myself, complacent, preoccupied with other things, and frequently critical of developments and uglinesses in Israeli society, are pushed back towards identification by the injustice of the attacks...such as this man telling it like it is:
http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/surrounded-by-anti-israel-haters-ben-shapiro-did-what-we-all-wish-we-could-do

Muddy(ing the) Waters

Why doesn't Mr Roger Waters take on a more difficult and intractable assignments like Darfur, like the Congo, like Chechnya, like Tibet where Han Chinese have displaced and replaced Tibetans, or Xinjiang province where the same thing is happening with Uighurs, or perhaps become a spokesperson for the Kurds struggle for autonomy, ...all of these protracted issues have quantitatively involved far greater loss of life and liberty than in the disputed territories...is it because Israel is a soft and easy target, and you're guaranteed an instant crowd, or is it because Waters was raised and lives and breaths in a cultural milieu where Jews are always guilty of something, and if no crime of suitable proportions can readily be found then one must be manufactured?

I think Israelis and Palestinians have a better chance of reaching an enduring compromise without Mr Rogers muddying the waters...and that a brave new world can not be built on the mother of all prejudices

It's not every day that a supermodel takes on a rock legend. But today, Bar Refaeli told Roger Waters if he's going to boycott Israel, he'd better take her picture out of his concert art. http://htz.li/19JkaWL

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Erdogan's Song:

"How can I stop them looking at me
how can I get away from accountability
how can I distract from my own country's inequity
I need someone to blame
I need someone to shame
quick: call out a name...
Israel:

26 Palestinian Freedom Fighters released

The 26 include Abu-Musa Salam Ali Atia of Fatah, who murdered Holocaust survivor Isaac Rotenberg in a Petah Tikvah construction site in 1994. Rotenberg’s family perished in the Sobibor extermination camp during World War II. Rotenberg escaped and joined the partisans fighting the Nazis in the forests of Eastern Europe. He arrived in Israel in 1947, joined the IDF and fought in Israel’s Independence War on the Lebanese front.

A plasterer by trade, Rotenberg was attacked by Abu Musa and an accomplice at a construction site where all three men worked in March 1994. He sustained repeated blows to the neck with axes. His wounds induced a coma, and he died two days after the attack. He was survived by his brother and sister, who were also survivors of Sobibor, and by a wife and two children. Rotenberg was 67 when he died.

Rotenberg wasn’t the oldest victim of the prisoners who made it onto the list Sunday. Fatah member Ra’ai Ibrahim Salam Ali was jailed in 1994 for the murder of 79-year-old Moris Eisenstatt. Eisenstatt was killed with ax blows to the head while he sat on a public Kfar Saba bench reading a book.

Israelis hold up pictures of their children killed by Palestinians released between 13-15 August 2013. A letter issued by the Palestinian foreign ministry urged Palestinian ambassadors to stress among international diplomats that the long-serving prisoners were not terrorists, but “freedom fighters.”

Another prisoner, Salah Ibrahim Ahmad Mugdad, also of Fatah, was imprisoned in 1993 for killing 72-year-old Sirens Hotel security guard Israel Tenenbaum by beating him in the head with a steel rod.

According to Almagor, the Poland-born Tenenbaum had immigrated to Israel in 1957, at age 36, and settled in Moshav Ein Vered. He was an agricultural worker on the moshav, but was working as a night watchman at the hotel in 1993. Tenenbaum was 72 at the time of his death. He was survived by a wife, two children and four grandchildren.

Two of the prisoners, Abu Satta Ahmad Sa’id Aladdin and Abu Sita Talab Mahmad Ayman, were imprisoned in 1994 for the murder of David Dadi and Haim Weizman. After killing Dadi and Weizman as they slept in Weizman’s apartment, the attackers cut off their ears as proof of the killing.

Abdel Aal Sa’id Ouda Yusef was imprisoned in 1994 to a 22-year sentence for several grenade attacks, and for his part as an accomplice in the murder of Ian Sean Feinberg and the murder of Sami Ramadan.

Feinberg, a 30-year-old father of three, was a proponent of Palestinian economic development. He was killed by gunmen who stormed a business meeting in Gaza City which he attended in April 1993.

Also on the list was Kour Matwah Hamad Faiz of Fatah, imprisoned in 1985 after he was convicted of killing Menahem Dadon and Salomon Abukasis in 1983 and planning to murder then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Another two prisoners to be released, Fatah members Sualha Fazah Ahmed Husseini and Sualha Bad Almajed Mahmed Mahmed, were imprisoned for a stabbing attack on a crowded Ramat Gan bus, on the 66 line, in 1990. The two, together with a third accomplice, stabbed wildly at passengers, killing 24-year-old Baruch Heizler and wounding three young women. Heizler was named after his grandfather, who was killed during the Jordanian bombardment of the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem during the 1948 Independence War.

Sha’at Azat Shaban Ata was imprisoned in 1993 for helping to orchestrate the murder of 51-year-old Simcha Levi, a woman who made her living transporting Palestinian day laborers to work in Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. In March 1993, three of the women laborers were disguised male attackers, who beat and stabbed her to death.

Maslah Abdullah Salama Salma, a Hamas member likely to be sent to the Gaza Strip after his release, was imprisoned in 1993 for the brutal murder of Petah Tikvah convenience store owner Reuven David. Abdallah, together with an accomplice, entered David’s convenience store on May 20, 1991, bound David’s arms and legs and beat him to death, before locking the store and fleeing the scene. Born in Iraq in 1932, David was 59 at the time of his death, and was survived by a wife, three children and multiple grandchildren.

Causation and Consequence in the Palestinian- Israeli conflict

Last night on ABC's Lateline uncritical anchor Emma Alberici “interviewed’ an embedded Palestinian journalist in Gaza whose dubious interpretations included some inaccurate and exaggerated statistics  re both the number of Palestinian casualties, and the number of  supposed civilians amongst these. These made up figures were supplied for  both Operation Cast Lead and the current attempts to halt Palestinian missiles. This was followed by a long “interview” with an Arab academic at the American University, Rami Khourie, who was not challenged even once, but simply given a platform to spout fiction after fiction without being called out on any of these. For example that the Arab world has essentially accepted Israel’s right to exist, and has ceased to attack, demonize, delegitimize, and discriminate against Israel at every opportunity and in every international forum.

When questioned as to why Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan had labelled Israel’s actions “terrorism” Khourie insightfully explained it was because “Erdogan is not afraid of upsetting Israel.” The interview compliantly nodded and then allowed Khourie to continue. Perhaps a more informed or critical interviewer might have examined Turkey’s bid for leadership in the Islamic world, and the way any Islamic leader can and does use anti-Israel rhetoric to garner popular support; the more extreme the rhetoric, the greater the knee-jerk support. A more critical interviewer might have examined how governments throughout the region have used – and continue to use – popular anger and identification with the Palestinian cause to distract from the more immediate challenges they face.

Khourie’s basic thesis: the instability, corruption, low productivity, lack off freedoms, factionalism, economic mismanagement, authoritarianism, and general decay in much of the Sunni Arab world is no one’s fault but Israel’s, and the growth of various forms of Islamic supremacism – from Salafists to Al Kayda to the Moslem Brotherhood – is all Israel’s fault. It is this very abdication of responsibility and culture of blaming the other which continues to perpetuate systemic dysfunction in many of the societies Khourie claims are now democracies. During the interview it seemed to me the meta text unwittingly slipped out. The profound sense of inferiority felt by many (men?) in the Arab world re the West, the resentment this engenders, and the psychological need to eradicate “reminders” of this perceived inferiority, such as Israel.

His thesis (his threat?) that Israeli intransigence has created radical fundamentalism and that Israel had better deal with its current opponents before worse ones come along can easily be reversed. It is the implacable belligerence and hostility of the surrounding countries and populations which has created, and continues to create, an increasingly radicalized and right leaning Israel. It is not easy to persuade Israelis that further territorial concessions and a Palestinian State will provide stability when ceded territory becomes one giant launching pad for missiles and mortars.

I hope that at the least, Lateline will allow equal and opposite views to be aired – for example an interview with celebrated Israeli historian Benny Morris, or with journalist David Landau (formerly Haaretz editor),  and give them as much freedom and latitude to provide alternative views of causality and consequence in this long running conflict.
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Israeli victims of Palestinian torture ...

The Art of War Al Pi Ashton

Catherine Ashton, Vice-president and high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy, made the following statement on Friday 16th November. "The rocket attacks by Hamas and other factions in Gaza, which began this current crisis, are totally unacceptable for any government and must stop,” Ashton said.“Israel has the right to protect its population from these kind of attacks. I urge Israel to ensure that its response is proportionate,” she said.

This comment can be explained in two ways. It may mean: "When you are attacked, do not try to overwhelm your opponent, rather leave them in a condition where they can attack you again the next day" 

or it might be advising the Israeli's to treat the Palestinians in Gaza in a way similar to the way Palestinians have treated Israelis, perhaps even copy the Palestinians exactly, to make sure everything is fair and in proportion. If the latter, she seems to be suggesting that Israel should indiscriminatel shoot 12 000 rockets into civilian centres of Gaza (which is basically the whole of Gaza), and pack these rockets with nails and bolts so they can maim and kill as much as possible. In addition Israel should send suicide bombers into Gaza to blow up buses packed with Palestinians, places where Palestinians are celebrating religious holidays, pizza parlours (or the Gazan equivalent) and coffee houses, bus stops, and so forth.

Which do you think she meant? 

Alice Walker and Torquemada Tutu

Alice Walker bravely declares her solidarity with the one party, mysogynistic, homophobic, civilian-targeting, supremacist monocultural regime in Gaza, but her penetrating and morally pure gaze somehow misses the bloodbath in Syria just a few hundred kilometres further north, the Kurd's 40 year struggle for autonomy and the Turks ruthless repression thereof, the ethnic displacement of Tibetans by Han Chinese and Chinese domination of the Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang "autonomous" region, the plight of the Saharawis in Morroccan claimed Western Sahara  the Russian dismemberment of Chechnya and a dozen other disputes around the world.

Yes I understand these conflicts - despite the fact that they have taken more lives and arguably caused more suffering than the Israeli Palestinian conflict - aren't as sexy in the West, and a fading intellectual has to ensure he/she remains relevant,  Or perhaps it is not a blatant populism that motivates the acclaimed novelist, but rather that she went to the same seminary as Bishop Tutu,  her grandstand stance underwritten by the assumptions that Tutu suckled on from the missionary breast that fed him - that Jews must and always are intrinsically guilty of some extraordinary misdeed. But perhaps, Ms Walker, the myopic focus on the Palestinian issue is what has allowed the other opressions to continue largely unchecked in the background - dictators and demagogues have long used the "blame the Jews" strategy as a way of distracting from their own machinations and destructive agendas. 

Since its creation in June 2006 the so called UN Human Rights Council"  has criticized Israel on 27 separate occasion. Obsessed with condemning Israel, the Council in its first year failed to condemn human rights violations occurring in any of the world’s 191 other countries. In its second year, the Council finally criticized one other country when it “deplored” the situation in Burma, but only after it censored out initial language containing the word “condemn.” It even praised Sudan for its "cooperation." 

The Council’s preoccupation with Israel is not limited to resolutions. Israel is the only country listed on the Council’s permanent agenda, and Israel is the only country subjected to an investigatory mandate that examines the actions of only one side, presumes those actions to be violations, and which is not subject to regular review." For detailed information on the pathological obsession with Israel see UN Watch 

Yes Israel is a stumbling democracy where the rule of law is being savaged on a day to day basis, and where increasingly fear and resentment of the other has come to dominate national discourse and strongly impact on policy. Yes Israel hangs in the balance as a democracy. Yes there is no proper separation off synagogue and state in Israel. Yes Israel has a poor track record of service provision to its Moslem citizens, and of discrimination against Conservative and Reform Judaism. Yes Jewish supremacists murdered an Israeli prime minister because he sought a historic compromise with the Palestinians. And yes Israel has the freest press in the middle east, the most minority group and female representatives in the Knesset and High Courts, the largest and freeest gay community in the middle east, and many other wins that some western democracies still have not achieved.

And yes, Israel's enemies are not democracies, do not extend the hand of peace to Israel, do not acknowledge the validity of Israel's narrative, and do not talk the talk or walk the walk of co-existence. And yes Israel's neighbours - including the Palestinians both in Gaza and in the West Bank (the biblical Yehuda and Shomron) supress difference and dissent amongst their own poulation with a savagery and furiosity Israel has never adopted.

Examine your own unconscious predjudices Ms Walker! And on your grand imperial tour of Gaza, please skip across the border to Sderot and Nachal Oz and Kfar Aza and Mefalsim and Gevim and Ashkelon and the other tens of towns and villages where children spend their days cowering in bomb shelters to try and stay safe from the Hamas missiles and mortars aimed indiscriminately at schools and hospitals.

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BDS and Political Correctness

Is the BDS (Boycott Dirty Semites) campaign just another vehicle for people to express their resentments without having to own that that is what they are doing? Does it offer people a way to express and nurture and feed their resentment of Jews while supposedly doing it for the sake of Palestinians? Does it allow its groupies to express profoundly visceral and irrational and ugly predjudices in a cloak of pseudo rectitude as if they were serving some noble cause? Possible payoffs are:the togetherness of communities built around shared resentment, the avoidance of one's own real issues, the false self esteem that comes with sanctimoniousness, the chanelling of agression and violence towards a relatively safe target (if a few suicide bombers attacked protesters outside a Max Brener shop you'd see a marked fall in attendance by the recreational protestors who are the mainstay of these events) but as it is at the moment there is no overt personal cost for anti-Israeli protestors. (Other than that blindness of lemmings who sacrifice clarity and personal power for the safety and abdication of reponsibility offered by the mob.)

For those who say that the central organising principle of the BDS phenomenon ( I wouldn't dignify it with the name "movement" - is pornography and the millions of people engaged by it a movement??) is a concern for human and Palestinain rights, and not simply a conscious or unconscious visceral resentment of Jews, then why are these same fervent 'campaigners' not organising similar boycotts against Turkey for its ruthless supression of the Kurds and its denial of an autonomous Kurdish homeland, Russia and its brutal suppression of Chechnya, China and its repopulation of Tibet and supression of The Uyghurs (a mainly Sunni Muslim group found throughout Xinjiang Province), Morocco for its occupation of Western Sahara etc.

And how would robbing Israeli Jews of their statehood serve Palestinian interests? Obviously it would only create an enduring passion for Israelis, robbed of their autonomy and rights, to subvert any Palestinian state errected on the ruins of the Jewish one. Are there calls for the dissolution of Turkey so that the Kurds may be free? Or of Russia so that Chechnya can gain its indepenence? Clearly the triumphalist paradigm of BDS does not emerge from real compassion for anyone, but from the desire of people to handle their own psychic garbage via projection, disassociation and splitting.

The Bullies of the BSD "Campaign"

From my point of view the BSD campaign is divisive, polarizing, profoundly unconscious (its based on projection rather than ownership), and profoundly reactive. Its blanket condemnation of Israelis, without distinguishing between those who priorities places - mostly burial places (kever Avot, the 3rd century synagogue in Jehricho) above people, and those who prioritise an abstract "am yisrael" above the need for peace and stability that most Israelis express - this blanket condemnation of all Israelis and Zionists makes "settlers" of us all.

As such the BSD com-(pound)-pain is less likely to reduce human suffering than to increase the energy blockage that swirls around the Israeli-Palestinian wrestle-embrace. Making the other wrong is never fertile ground for change. But perhaps the people who align themselves with it aren't interested in reducing suffering, but in making themselves "right"?

Rather than being coerced and intimidated many people (such as myself) will go out of their way to

a) Buy Israeli products and support Israeli owned businesses

b) Support political parties that promote an even handed approach to the conflict, rather than a punitive and predjudiced one

I also suggest that people look to make contact with Hindu communities in your towns and cities, and establish Jewish Hindu cultural exchange programmes, as there is a natural affinity between the two cultures (despite the ultra-orthodox's misguided labelling of some forms of Hinduism as 'avodah zara" - "idol worship" - but how would they know, they've never stepped outside their mental ghetto to find out, and anyway the ultra-orthodox are no more representative of the Jewish people than the Assad regime is representative of ordinary Syrians.

Palestine will be free / equality of misery

Palestine will be free
from the river to the sea
as free as Gaza, the one party state
where to speak against Hamas is to seal your fate
as free as a woman of the Taliban
who can only breathe if her owner says she can
as free as a Bishop in Teheran
who can choose between a bullet or conversion to Islam
as free as Hariri was to crticize Hizballah
til they blew him and 21 others up to Allah
as free as Turkey to bomb the PPK
and any non-combatants who might get in the way
as free as a donkey, explosives strapped to its back
sent by Hamas in a donky-ish attack
as free as Gilad six years alone
denied Red Cross visits and a word from home
as free as a cronies of Arafat or Abbas
to pocket billions of donor cash
Yes Palestine will be free
from the river to the sea

Today we are all Hamas

Today we are all Hamas
today we all wear kefiyot and feel we are part of something
today we all chant slogans and persecute the Bahai and Maronite and Coptic Christians
today we all blame Israel
an invisible halo of rectitude by association hovers smugly over us
like a dense and poisonous smog
today we all celebrate rockets and mortars falling on frightened
people in Sderot and the surrounding villages
today we say enough!
why must Hamas make do with makeshift missiles and bombs
remove the blockade so that they can blow up Israeli children going to school
with big missiles stamped “made in Iran”
today we are all Hamas
today we throw our political opponents of roofs
and strap explosives to donkeys
today we kidnap soldiers
and don’t allow the red cross to see them
for four or five years
today we promise to ethnically cleanse Palestine
of anyone who doesn’t think
like us
for today we are all Hamas