it is you who is missing context and clinging to simplistic explanations.
Nice evasions. What about the Zionist programme to expel Palestinians, revisionist Zionism, and Zionist terrorism? *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
But put that aside for a moment, and address the reality of the Holocaust. Just what would you expect the Jews to have done?--the survivors that is. Where were they to go? What were they to do?
the Jews were offered land in Australia and in Canada but refused.
had they taken it, they would have thrived and would have been sure that they wouldn't have this type of problem to begin with.
Theodor Herzl sought support from the great powers for the creation of a Jewish homeland. He turned to Great Britain, and met with Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary and others. The British agreed, in principle, to Jewish settlement in East Africa "on conditions which will enable members to observe their national customs." ... Zangwill became the movement's undisputed leader. After the rejection of the Uganda scheme on the grounds of impracticability by the British, Zangwill turned his attention to settlement in Canada and Australia. But opposition from local residents led him to abandon the scheme. Expeditions were sent to Mesopotamia (Iraq), Cyrenaica (Libya) and Angola but little came of these expeditions. A project that had some concrete success was the Galveston scheme which contemplated the settlement of Jews in the American Southwest, in particular in Texas. The project received the assistance of Jacob Schiff, the American Jewish banker, and some 9,300 Jews arrived in that area between 1907-1914, through the Emigration Bureau of the Territorialist organization.
...
Zangwill became the movement's undisputed leader. After the rejection of the Uganda scheme on the grounds of impracticability by the British, Zangwill turned his attention to settlement in Canada and Australia. But opposition from local residents led him to abandon the scheme. Expeditions were sent to Mesopotamia (Iraq), Cyrenaica (Libya) and Angola but little came of these expeditions.
A project that had some concrete success was the Galveston scheme which contemplated the settlement of Jews in the American Southwest, in particular in Texas. The project received the assistance of Jacob Schiff, the American Jewish banker, and some 9,300 Jews arrived in that area between 1907-1914, through the Emigration Bureau of the Territorialist organization.
Other territorialist attempts, meant as counterweights to Zionism, were undertaken in the Soviet Union between the two world wars. The first was in the southern Ukraine and the northern Crimea, where four noncontiguous "national districts" (raiony) were established in the early 1920s and obliterated when the Nazis invaded. The second was in Birobidjan, where a "Jewish Autonomous Region" was proclaimed in 1934. This venture also failed, leaving a small Jewish minority in the region. In 1935, in response to the Nazi accession to power in Germany, Isaac Nachman Steinberg established the Freeland League in the United States. This organization attempted, unsuccessfully, to pursue Jewish autonomy by obtaining a large piece of territory in sparsely populated areas in Ecuador, Australia, or Surinam.
Zangwill turned his attention to settlement in Canada and Australia. But opposition from local residents led him to abandon the scheme.
Simultaneously, a wave of Jews immigrated to Palestine from Yemen, Morocco, Iraq and Turkey. These Jews were unaware of Theodor Herzl's political Zionism or of European pogroms. They were motivated by the centuries-old dream of the "Return to Zion" and a fear of intolerance. Upon hearing that the gates of Palestine were open, they braved the hardships of travel and went to the "Land of Israel." The Zionist ideal of a return to Israel has profound religious roots. Many Jewish prayers speak of Jerusalem, Zion and the Land of Israel. The injunction not to forget Jerusalem, the site of the Temple, is a major tenet of Judaism. The Hebrew language, the Torah, laws in the Talmud, the Jewish calendar and Jewish holidays and festivals such as Shavuot all originated in Israel and revolve around its seasons and conditions. Jews pray toward Jerusalem and recite the words "next year in Jerusalem" every Passover. Jewish religion, culture and history make clear that it is only in the land of Israel that the Jewish commonwealth can be built.
The Zionist ideal of a return to Israel has profound religious roots. Many Jewish prayers speak of Jerusalem, Zion and the Land of Israel. The injunction not to forget Jerusalem, the site of the Temple, is a major tenet of Judaism. The Hebrew language, the Torah, laws in the Talmud, the Jewish calendar and Jewish holidays and festivals such as Shavuot all originated in Israel and revolve around its seasons and conditions. Jews pray toward Jerusalem and recite the words "next year in Jerusalem" every Passover. Jewish religion, culture and history make clear that it is only in the land of Israel that the Jewish commonwealth can be built.
My understanding is that Uganda was proposed by Joseph Chamberlain in 1903. At that time Britain had no control over Palestine. His proposal was turned down because the entire basis of Zionism was a return to the historical land of Israel.
Quite so, but Herzl supported the idea. The world's northernmost desert wind.
Now, a Zionist source claims the Canadian and Australian options foundered because of hostility from local populations... I'd like to have independent confirmation. Nothing is 'mere'. — Richard P. Feynman
well, first of all, claiming a place that your ancestors left 2000 years and has occupants who have lived there for those 2000 years, is a really bad start.
Add to those while the Sephardim and Mizrahim are almost certainly descended from person who lived in Israel, the origins of the greatest antagonists for a "Jewish" state, the Ashkenazi, have disputed orgins, and may be descended from the Khazars, a Turkic people who lived in the Ukraine in 9th and 10th centuries.
Regardless, if this 2,000 year old claim is valid, do the descendents of Muslims expelled from Spain have a right to conquer and live in Andalucia (Al-Andalus.) Do Mexicans have the right to retake lands ceded in 1848 in the treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo? Do the descendents of the Canannites have the right to expel Israeli Jews from "their" land? And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
You keep putting it aside all the time, and I have to put it back again and again. Why do you want the Holocaust to explain a string of terror attacks that started before the Holocaust? And by the way, why do you want to make all Holocaust-surviving Jews complicit in Irgun's philosophy? (For your information, not all Holocaust survivors were even Zionists, while revisionists were a minority among them.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Why do you want the Holocaust to explain a string of terror attacks that started before the Holocaust?
and of course not all Holocaust survivors were Zionists,,,,,they were people trying to recover, and find someway to live their lives. What would you have had them do?
There was massive displacement of Poles, Czechs and others during WWII, and their contribution to slave labour and concentration camp statistics is far from negligible.
And yet - none of them used this as an excuse for terrorism after the war. For the most part they integrated successfully into communities in the UK, Canada and the US.
Don't forget too that there have been many examples of tribes or nations reinventing themselves after a move to new territory.
Why is the Middle Eastern types (and it doesn't seem to be exclusively a Jewish problem) who believe that that godforsaken stretch of near desert on the edge of the Mediterranean is the most?
What you don't understand is that there are always choices and options. The creation of Israel was a choice, not a necessity, and certainly not an inevitable outcome of the Holocaust.
Levelling Beirut and using banned phosphorus weapons on civilians is also a choice. Or do you think the Holocaust explains that as well?
Slavs? Ummm... no. Extreme brutality, gratuitous slaughter, mass slavery - but not extermination. He might have gotten around to it eventually but it never actually happened. And Czechs are a really poor example - as Nazi occupations go that one was pretty mild - comparable to France rather than the stuff that occurred in occupied Poland and USSR.
The Roma got the same treatment as the Jews but he wasn't equally into the idea. One was a centerpiece of Nazi ideology the other a throw in. Not that it made any difference to the Roma.
I haven't heard of any terrorism by Jews in US or Canada or the UK either, like the local Slav communities they lobbied and integrated. But at home it was a different story. The Poles and their neighbours indulged in plenty of atrocities against each other while the Germans who had the bad luck to find themselves within what became the Communist Bloc were brutally ethnically cleansed and the Red Army killed, looted and raped everyone in their path, but particularly Germans.
Yup, but an understandable choice under the circumstances.
(A Polish commenter at my blog pointed out that "according to polish Institute of National Memory (IPN) there is no evidence that Solomon Morel - or any close memmber of his family - was in KL Auschwitz. there are strong (i think) suggestions that he was in Stalin's soviet Russia in 1943-45.") The world's northernmost desert wind.
The only difference was that Poles around - say - Oswiecim were considered useful as labour while Jews were fast-tracked for extermination.
From a humanitarian viewpoint, the distinction is subtle - being a slave was not a healthy long-lived occupation - and 400,000 slave labourers passed through Oswiecim alone. The total number in Nazi territories was well into millions.
Once the war was over the plan was always to ethnically cleanse Poland and settle it with Germans. This would have required the extermination of the original inhabitants.
Certainly if Poland had been looking for a justification for violence, it could easily have found one.
I haven't heard of any terrorism by Jews in US or Canada or the UK either, like the local Slav communities they lobbied and integrated.
How is this relevant? The point is the Poles could easily have created a terrorist organisation after Yalta to try to liberate Eastern Europe. It's true the Soviets were tough bastards, but so were the Nazis, and the Polish resistance wasn't shy about taking them on.
One reason this didn't happen is because after Yalta the US and UK saw it as strategically inappropriate.
Aside from all the nonsense about homelands, this is as much about geopolitical strategy as anything else.
No more understandable than some of the alternatives, surely?
The point is you can't - at all - use the Holocaust to justify the creation of Israel. As a talking point it carries no weight when alternatives were available that would have guaranteed peace and very possibly prosperity elsewhere.
Just from a common sense point of view, the idea that a tribe has a claim on land that it came from two millennia ago is irrational at best and unique in history. I can't think of any other culture that uses events from Roman and pre-Roman times to justify political strategy today. It makes as much sense as the UK demanding reparations from Scandinavia for the Viking landings, or from Italy for the Roman conquest.
To be fair the UK has to take some of the blame here, because its diplomatic ineptness before and after WWII helped create today's Middle East.
But the Israeli narrative of a brave homeland surrounded by enemies is straight out the Old Testament, and should really have been put out to grass by now. Using it to justify atrocities isn't going to convince anyone who isn't convinced already.
Militarily it's naive. And diplomatically, the best way to deal with enemies is to avoid creating more of them in the first place.
Throw in the religion stuff, and the claim is comparable to Greece claiming the Turkish Mediterranean coast on the basis of The Illiad. The world's northernmost desert wind.
There were three resistance organizations operating in Poland during WWII - the Communist AL, the fascist NSZ, and the AK which covered the spectrum from semi-fascist right wingers to very left wing socialists, constituted the vast majority of the resistance, and was the official resistance legitimized by the government in exile. For obvious reasons the AL was not into fighting the new order. The AK decided armed struggle had absolutely no chance of success with the West having accepted Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and that therefore it would be wrong to add more death to all that had happened. The NSZ decided to fight on with a mix of guerilla and terrorist tactics. They were joined by some AK veterans, particularly after it became clear that the Communists were imprisoning and killing AK leaders anyways. However, even though most Poles hated their new rulers, they agreed with the AK leadership's decision.
Just from a common sense point of view, the idea that a tribe has a claim on land that it came from two millennia ago is irrational at best and unique in history.
You clearly aren't too familiar with modern Polish history, unless you think that referring to the 1400's rather than the 100's makes all the difference.
Like what? Neither Britain nor the US nor the USSR had been particularly interested in the fate of the Jews before and during WWII. The non-Jewish populations of German occupied Europe had been mostly indifferent to what was going on. The alternatives weren't particularly good from the perspective of the immediate post WWII period - create a state where you can rely on yourself for self-defense but be surrounded by enemies, or rely on people who hadn't defended you but were promising that next time they would. The Holocaust may not justify the creation of Israel, but the rise of antisemitism and what that ideology culminated in certainly explains a lot.
Who said anything about justifying atrocities?
So what are you defending? Have you completely forgotten what ignited your initial comment?
find someway to live their lives. What would you have had them do?
So you think the way to live their lives is to go to another country and join a group there who killed the locals since before the Holocaust?
Don't you think that, say, getting land from Germany would have been more just pay for the Holocaust? *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Surely you must recognize the impact of the Holocaust on Israel.
We are discussing the establishment of the state of Israel after the Holocaust. I'm arguing that the tenor of this article, "Israel: a walk on the dark side", needs to be put in a much broader context of the real dark side of that period--a people fleeing from the Holocaust and trying to re-establish their lives. To me, it's very understandable how and why the state of Israel was established. And it seems impossible to discuss it outside of that broader context.
I don't know where you're coming from with this statement--
since when, and for how long, is being a victim of genocide a moral blank check?
No. You keep narrowing it down to that. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
In 1923, well before the Holocaust was more than a nasty, obsessive fantasy in the minds of rightwing euroneandercons of their day, the regrettable Jabotinsky wrote
Any native people view their country as their national home, of which they will be complete masters. They will never voluntarily allow a new master. So it is for the Arabs. Compromisers among us try to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked with hidden formulations of our basic goals. I flatly refuse to accept this view of the Palestinian Arabs. They have the precise psychology that we have. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux upon his prairie. Each people will struggle against colonizers until the last spark of hope that they can avoid the dangers of conquest and colonization is extinguished. The Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is hardly a spark of hope. It matters not what kind of words we use to explain our colonization. Colonization has its own integral and inescapable meaning understood by every Jew and by every Arab. Colonization has only one goal. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible. It has been necessary to carry on colonization against the will of the Palestinian Arabs and the same condition exists now. Even an agreement with non-Palestinians represents the same kind of fantasy. In order for Arab nationalists of Baghdad and Mecca and Damascus to agree to pay so serious a price they would have to refuse to maintain the Arab character of Palestine. We cannot give any compensation for Palestine, neither to the Palestinians nor to other Arabs. Therefore, a voluntary agreement is inconceivable. All colonization, even the most restricted, must continue in defiance of the will of the native population. Therefore, it can continue and develop only under the shield of force which comprises an Iron Wall through which the local population can never break through. This is our Arab policy. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy.
They have the precise psychology that we have. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux upon his prairie. Each people will struggle against colonizers until the last spark of hope that they can avoid the dangers of conquest and colonization is extinguished. The Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is hardly a spark of hope.
It matters not what kind of words we use to explain our colonization. Colonization has its own integral and inescapable meaning understood by every Jew and by every Arab. Colonization has only one goal. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible. It has been necessary to carry on colonization against the will of the Palestinian Arabs and the same condition exists now.
Even an agreement with non-Palestinians represents the same kind of fantasy. In order for Arab nationalists of Baghdad and Mecca and Damascus to agree to pay so serious a price they would have to refuse to maintain the Arab character of Palestine.
We cannot give any compensation for Palestine, neither to the Palestinians nor to other Arabs. Therefore, a voluntary agreement is inconceivable. All colonization, even the most restricted, must continue in defiance of the will of the native population. Therefore, it can continue and develop only under the shield of force which comprises an Iron Wall through which the local population can never break through. This is our Arab policy. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy.
It doesn't seem like much of a coincidence that Chaim Weizman (a prominent architect of the Balfour Declaration) was a friend of Gen. Smuts (architect of the S African Apartheid system), or that Israel maintained a strategic alliance with S Africa for many decades. As Weizman said, "with regard to the Arab question - the British told us that there are several hundred thousand Negroes there but this is a matter of no consequence." That sounds like the British of that era -- and that sounds like Weizman too.
Pop quiz: who said
It is impossible for a man to become assimilated with people whose blood is different from his own. In order to become assimilated, he must change his body, he must become one of them, in blood. There can be no assimilation. We shall never allow such things as mixed marriage because the preservation of national integrity is impossible except by means of racial purity and for that purpose we shall have this territory where our people will constitute the racially pure inhabitants.
Yup, it was Jabotinsky again -- prechannelling Dr Strangelove. (AFAIK Israel still prohibits mixed marriage or 'miscegenation'; the supreme court of the State of California recognised such laws as unconstitutional in 1948, but as late as 1967 there were still US states with antimiscegenation statutes). He was also an admirer of Mussolini (go figure).
And insanely enough -- much as the Sharon government used to seize on every antisemitic incident in the international press to urge more Jews to seek refuge in Israel, but even more mindbendingly ironically -- hardline Zionists at the time even saw the Holocaust as a recruitment opportunity for Israel. Ben Gurion notoriously said in 1938, "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative." ("We think the price is worth it," in other words?)
As late as 1943, while the Jews of Europe were being exterminated in the millions, the U.S. Congress proposed to set up a commission to "study" the problem -- with some notion that a rescue operation might result. Rabbi Stephen Wise -- at that time the principal American spokesperson for Zionism -- came to Washington to testify against the rescue bill because it would divert attention from the colonization of Palestine. (cf Sheonman, Ralph, "The Hidden History of Zionism").
Nothing new here -- in every political movement there are Schadenfreudians who pray for conditions to get worse and worse so that, in the last ditch, their pet strategy or theory will finally be seen as the proper and only solution. Sheonman documents that -- insanely as it seems from our post facto POV -- not only did the Zionist Federation of Germany send a resolution of support to the Nazi Party in 1933, "the World Zionist Organization Congress in 1933 defeated a resolution calling for action against Hitler by a vote of 240 to 43."
iirc at least one of the German Left parties did something equally foolish, refusing to make common political cause with anti-Hitler liberals -- perhaps hoping that the fascist crackdown would awaken the masses and spur on the Revolution? (it certainly did awaken the masses, but not in the way they might have hoped). so forget any notion that this kind of face-spiting political strategy has anything to do with Jewishness. a lot more to do with human nature and vanguardism.
But the sordid backroom deals and devil's bargains made by early Zionists, and their explicitly racist dream of a Boer state, predate as well as overlapping with the Holocaust. The notion of a racially exclusive Jewish state established by force, and the displacement or conquest of the Palestinians, was already complete in the minds of the Zionist hardliners, being planned and realised, before the Nazi extermination programme began; and some of them were opportunist and cynical (or zealous and fanatical) enough to see that programme as a PR opportunity rather than a desperate emergency.
The Holocaust had a tremendous impact on Israel; but if it had not been for the fanaticism of some influential Zionists, it might have had a lesser impact on European Jewry. Maybe not much could have been achieved by the American "rescue program" impulse -- maybe only a few thousands or tens of thousands could have been rescued. Probably the Nazi party would have stormed to power anyway, even without the (surely minor) support of the ZFG. But the story of Israel and the Holocaust is not as simple as Cause (Holocaust), Effect (Israel), End of Story.
Tom Hayden looks back on his journey from being a reliable supporter of Israel to a critic...
The argument that all nation states were founded in blood and theft, that most of the western powers have a sordid and sadistic colonial episode in their past, etc. -- and therefore no criticism should or can be levelled at Israeli policy in the OT -- are not, imho, valid arguments against intervening in a re-run of the same old movie. If we were to accept this argument we would have to say that there is no point, nor any obligation, to intervene in any crime being committed at any time, because so many successful crimes have been committed in the past. Why should I intervene to help this person being mugged on the street, when so many other muggings have taken place on so many other streets? Answer: because for this one, on this street, I am present as a witness. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
Who in addition to his ugly domestic polices was a leading supporter of strong international institutions and international law to prevent conflict; a key figure in the movement for a non-punitive peace after WWI and for international understanding. Life isn't always black and white (no pun intended)
(AFAIK Israel still prohibits mixed marriage or 'miscegenation'; the supreme court of the State of California recognised such laws as unconstitutional in 1948, but as late as 1967 there were still US states with antimiscegenation statutes).
There is no civil marriage in Israel, that means no religiously mixed marriages since neither the Jewish nor the Muslim religious authorities will permit them. If you're a mixed couple either one partner has to convert or both have to hop on a plane to get a civil marriage abroad. Foreign civil marriage certificates are is recognized in Israel.
In 1923, well before the Holocaust was more than a nasty, obsessive fantasy in the minds of rightwing euroneandercons of their day
And you think that it just came out of nowhere? I've read mainstream right wing political writing from that period in Germany and Poland. I've read about those views in other European countries. No, they weren't talking about extermination. They were talking about Jews as a grave threat and either a major source of everything that was bad (the moderates) or the major source (the hardliners) and the need to do something about it.
You include a lot of quotes from Jabotinsky, but I wonder how much you've read of his writings. He was strikingly honest for a European of his time about what colonialism meant, and not particularly racist. Instead he felt that the only hope of survival for Jews was a state of their own - for him the Jews were in the same position in Europe as the targets of European colonialism were abroad. He also was contemptuous of liberal democracy and sympathetic to fascism. Not particularly nice.
irc at least one of the German Left parties did something equally foolish, refusing to make common political cause with anti-Hitler liberals -- perhaps hoping that the fascist crackdown would awaken the masses and spur on the Revolution?
Yes, rather poor analysis on the part of the Comintern. Then again the Comintern weren't much better than the fascists - nicer dreams but in practice just as intent on mass murder, which they were carrying out on a grand scale at that moment.
The argument that all nation states were founded in blood and theft, that most of the western powers have a sordid and sadistic colonial episode in their past, etc. -- and therefore no criticism should or can be levelled at Israeli policy in the OT -- are not, imho, valid arguments against intervening in a re-run of the same old movie.
No they're not valid arguments. The problem is that some people seem to think that not only does it not excuse current crimes, but that it somehow puts Israel's right to exist as a state in question. A lot like the American right seems to think about Muslim states, think of it as the left wing mirror image of neo-conservatism. The fact that Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, or the Iranian theocrats are rather unpleasant doesn't mean that the Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians have no right to exist in their own state. Same goes in reverse for Israel.
that's the problem I have with Israel - you don't just take land that belongs to someone else and say that it belongs to you. If the Israelis really wanted peace and their own state, they would have built their country elsewhere.
.
...and the people at that elsewhere would object to it violently as well.
What people like Manon don't understand is that "Palestine" is one of the two poles that the Jewish religon revolves around (the other, of course, being God)
The Mishnah, which is the core of both Talmuds, is mostly about how temple practices should go once the "Palestine" has been regained. That was written back in the Second century CE.
Yeah, the Kenya idea was put to a vote, but it failed almost unanimously. So what? The Soviet Union didn't want a Jewish state anywhere in Northern Eurasia. Poland was activly expelling what remained of it's post-holocaust Jewish population [a book on the subject called "fear" just came out, check the NY Times book review from a week ago]
Where would you have had the Jews go? The US had quotas, the Aussies had quotas, The Soviet bloc didn't want them...where?
But Israel was established where it was. We aren't in 1918 or even 1947. At this point your argument is no different from the Israeli hard right one that if the Palestinians want a state they can just leave the West Bank and go establish one elsewhere.
Is anything I said inaccurate? Messy thinks that by yelling "anti-semite" she/he can get you to stop criticizing Israel. I haven't called anyone names or treated them as racists. I just referenced a few current events
...that summer I made the mistake of my political career. The Israel Defense Forces invaded Lebanon, and Benny Navon wanted Jane and me to be supportive. It happened that I had visited the contested border in the past, witnessed the shelling of civilian Israeli homes, and interviewed Israeli and Lebanese zealots--crazies, I thought, who were preaching preventive war. I opposed cross-border rocket attacks and naively favored a demilitarized zone. Ever curious, and aware of my district's politics, I decided we should go to the Middle East--but only as long as the Israeli "incursion," as it was delicately called, was limited to the 10-kilometer space near the Lebanese border, as a cushion against rocket fire. Benny Navon assured me that the "incursion" was limited, and would be followed by negotiations and a solution. I also made clear our opposition to the use of any fragmentation bombs in the area, and my ultimate political identification with what Israeli Peace Now would say. There followed a descent into moral ambiguity and realpolitick that still haunts me today. When we arrived at the Israeli-Lebanon border, the game plan promised by Benny Navon had changed utterly. Instead of a localized border conflict, Israel was invading and occupying all of Lebanon--with us in tow. Its purpose was to destroy militarily the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) haven in Lebanon. This had been Gen. Ariel Sharon's secret plan all along, and I never will know with certainty whether Benny Navon had been deceived along with everyone else. ...One might argue, and many Americans today might agree, that Hezbollah and Hamas started this round of war with their provocative kidnappings of Israeli soldiers. Lost in the headlines, however, is the fact that the Israelis have 9,000 Palestinian prisoners, and have negotiated prisoner swaps before. Others will blame the Islamists for incessant rocket attacks on Israel. But the roots of this virulent spiral of vengeance lie in the permanent occupation of Palestinian territories by the overconfident Israelis. As it did in 1982, Israel now admits that the war is not about prisoner exchanges or cease-fires; it is about eradicating Hezbollah and Hamas altogether, if necessary by an escalation against Syria or even Iran. It should be clear by now that the present Israeli government will never accept an independent Palestinian state, but rather harbors a colonial ambition to decide which Palestinian leaders are acceptable. In 1982, Israel said the same thing about eliminating PLO sanctuaries in Lebanon. It was after that 1982 Israeli invasion that Hezbollah was born. I remember Israeli national security experts even taking credit for fostering Hamas and Islamic fundamentalism as safe, reclusive alternatives to Palestinian secular nationalism. I remember watching Israeli soldiers blow up Palestinian houses and carry out collective punishment because, they told me matter-of-factly, punishment is the only language that Arabs understand. Israelis are inflicting collective punishment on Lebanese civilians for the same reason today.
Ever curious, and aware of my district's politics, I decided we should go to the Middle East--but only as long as the Israeli "incursion," as it was delicately called, was limited to the 10-kilometer space near the Lebanese border, as a cushion against rocket fire. Benny Navon assured me that the "incursion" was limited, and would be followed by negotiations and a solution. I also made clear our opposition to the use of any fragmentation bombs in the area, and my ultimate political identification with what Israeli Peace Now would say.
There followed a descent into moral ambiguity and realpolitick that still haunts me today. When we arrived at the Israeli-Lebanon border, the game plan promised by Benny Navon had changed utterly. Instead of a localized border conflict, Israel was invading and occupying all of Lebanon--with us in tow. Its purpose was to destroy militarily the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) haven in Lebanon. This had been Gen. Ariel Sharon's secret plan all along, and I never will know with certainty whether Benny Navon had been deceived along with everyone else.
...One might argue, and many Americans today might agree, that Hezbollah and Hamas started this round of war with their provocative kidnappings of Israeli soldiers. Lost in the headlines, however, is the fact that the Israelis have 9,000 Palestinian prisoners, and have negotiated prisoner swaps before. Others will blame the Islamists for incessant rocket attacks on Israel. But the roots of this virulent spiral of vengeance lie in the permanent occupation of Palestinian territories by the overconfident Israelis. As it did in 1982, Israel now admits that the war is not about prisoner exchanges or cease-fires; it is about eradicating Hezbollah and Hamas altogether, if necessary by an escalation against Syria or even Iran. It should be clear by now that the present Israeli government will never accept an independent Palestinian state, but rather harbors a colonial ambition to decide which Palestinian leaders are acceptable.
In 1982, Israel said the same thing about eliminating PLO sanctuaries in Lebanon. It was after that 1982 Israeli invasion that Hezbollah was born. I remember Israeli national security experts even taking credit for fostering Hamas and Islamic fundamentalism as safe, reclusive alternatives to Palestinian secular nationalism. I remember watching Israeli soldiers blow up Palestinian houses and carry out collective punishment because, they told me matter-of-factly, punishment is the only language that Arabs understand. Israelis are inflicting collective punishment on Lebanese civilians for the same reason today.
