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What I’ve Been Up To Lately
- mazel tov to @bluenatic and @grandstreet on the birth of their baby girl 2 weeks ago
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JATO Race Traitors?
Daniel Gara writes,
I don’t get why you would have a link to the website of these hateful people on your website.These people are absolutely deluded. Don’t give me any crap about free speech. These are self-loathing Jews who need to be smacked in the head, not to be given free publicity.
To which I respond,
Mr. Gara,Who is being hateful? JATO — an organization which is seeking to end the ethnic cleansing being committed in the name of the Jewish people — or you, who accuses them of being hateful, deluded, self-loathing, and needing to be “smacked in the head”?
To be critical of Israeli policy is far from an act of self-loathing. It is a Jewish tradition as old as the state of Israel itself. Perhaps you could benefit from a reading of “Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Israel and Zionism” or “Wrestling With Zion.” They might help you to see that one can be a proud and active Jew without being complicit in the worst actions of the Israeli government, and the most despicable manifestations of Zionism.
Mobius One
Jerusalem, Israel
Gara replies,
Everything must be considered in context. To discuss the Israeli-Arab conflict purely from the distorted view of one side is not consistent with critical thinking. To be angry about a wall is one thing. But how angry can you be when it stops the next Sbarro?The lack of even-handed debate (or any debate for that matter) leads one to assume that this form of anti-zionism is based on anti-semitism. If you really have an opinion that is even remotely similar to that of JATO, I sincerely hope you get some help.
And I again, in turn:
When you recognize that Palestinian militancy which breeds such incidences is an outgrowth of occupation, repression and disposession, then you will see that no, the wall will not stop the next Sbarro — it will encourage many more. It may seem to be making things better in the short term, but in the long term, it does no more then generate further animosity for subsequent generations.For all of your talk of critical thinking, you yourself are approaching this situation from a one-sided view. From your remarks, it would appear that your concern is merely for the lives of Jews living in Israel, and not for the lives of Palestinian people at all. I care very much about the lives of Jewish people in Israel as well, but I do not think that they are inherently more valuable than the lives of Palestinians, nor do I think their security should come at the expense of the Palestinians’. Does that make me an antisemite or a self-loathing Jew? Likely, in your opinion. But luckily, that’s not an opinion I’m bound to. I prefer the position of the Torah which states that all human beings are of the family of Adam and were created in the image of God. And in that, I have an obligation to defend the rights of all people, be they Palestinians, Jews, or otherwise.
Yesterday I was in Tel Aviv with some schoolmates and we were conducting a survey amongst Israeli Jews. One of the questions we asked (in contrast to the preceeding question “What about Israel makes you most proud?”) was “What about Israel makes you most ashamed?” Hands down, every single time, no matter who we asked, the answer was “The occupation and the way we’re treating Palestinians.” This is from people who have lived here their entire lives; who read the Hebrew press every day; who have served in the Army; who knew Palestinians before the Intifada.
From Australia, reading foreign media, and defining your allegiances along ethnic lines, it’s very easy for you to take the position you have. Try taking a tour of the occupied territories, however, or go olive picking with Rabbis For Human Rights and see the way the soldiers and the settlers behave towards you, let alone the Palestinans. Then maybe you will consider the humanity of the Palestinian people, and what they endure each day. Perhaps you will then understand. But for now, you’re inadvisably speaking from an ill-informed place, attempting to veil your understandable but regretable ethnocentrism behind a mask of rationalle.
If I have learned anything from Judaism, it is that justice is more important than Judaism itself. As Rav Kook wrote, “Religious behavior must not be allowed to compromise our natural moral sensitivities. If indeed it does, then it is clearly misguided. We know that our behavior is derived from pure and spiritual motive when our innate sense of what is right becomes the more exalted as a consequence of its religious inspiration. If the opposite occurs and the moral quality of the individual and public response is diminished by our religious observance, then we are certainly mistaken in our path and our supposed purity is of no value.”
I believe in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and freedom from oppression. But in order to be entitled to such things, we must fight for these rights on behalf of all people who suffer under the hand of another — particularly when that hand is our own. JATO is doing that work, as are various other organizations whose participants define themselves as Jews. As opposed to saying these people are “race traitors”, which is what your remark implies, can you not simply say you respectfully disagree with where they are coming from?
Mobius One
Jerusalem, Israel
Some people. Hmph.
it’s not ethnic cleansing
i disagree. for certain it’s not genocide. but it most definitelty is ethnic cleansing. there is not just a subtle, but an incredibly vast difference between the two.
Ethnic Cleansing the removal or extermination of a racial or cultural group (through forced migration or genocide).
i prefer the far less simplistic definition offered by wikipedia:
“The term ethnic cleansing refers to various policies of forcibly removing people of another ethnic group. At one end of the spectrum, it is virtually indistinguishable from forced emigration and population transfer, while at the other it merges with deportation and genocide.
At the most general level, however, ethnic cleansing can be understood as the expulsion of an “undesirable” population from a given territory due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these.
Some political commentators avoid use of the term, which they see as a political euphemism which attempts to apply a word with positive connotations (cleansing) to a morally objectionable act (forced population movement usually achieved through violence).”
if you consider the policies in effect within the occupied territories, it is clear the goal of the israeli government is to make life as unliveable for the palestinians as possible so that they evacuate the territories. in the last four years, the entire civil infrasctructure has been eradicated with the israeli government bombing everything from schools to records offices, and house demolitions continue in areas that pose no threat to israeli security.
consider the matrix of control. in looking at this map, does it seem that a contiguous palestinian state is a viable option? and is a binational state an option in which the palestinian population would overrun the jewish one? of course not. by the administration’s own admission it would seem that israel doesn’t intend to let the palestinians have a state — at least, not one which is dominated by militant factions. unfortunately, israel has succeeded in nothing more than further imbuing the power of these militant groups — and i believe it is doing so intentionally in order to make the situation intractable. the government needs the violence to persist, so that it can achieve its aims of maintaining control over the west bank. it will do this by instigating enough violence to justify further military incursions that will make life ultimately unliveable for the palestinian population and thus, in effect, serve as an indirect form of explusion for which they can not be considered necessarily culpable.
lest we forget, likud are the intellectual heirs of jabotinsky’s revisionists who openly advocated transfer. in an age of political correctness, likud’s policy may very well continue to be transfer, but it is masked behind political manuevering which makes it difficult to “call it like it is” by making it easier to justify their actions as a rational response to irrational violence, as the conflict is often framed.
there is also a dual benefit to the proliferation of palestinian violence, one which i have been hearing a lot about from many israelis. they feel the conflict is used by the government to distract the israeli populace from their own social concerns. by making the issue entirely one of israeli security, the government deflects attention from issues such as poverty and corruption, and economic policies which are not in the people’s interest, such as privitization and corporate welfare.
the people generally vote for likud because likud is “strong” in the face of terror, and people respect their power. but likud is fucking the poverty-strickin, which is the vast majority of its voting block. if there were an end to the conflict, vis a vis an end to the occupation, likud would lose the leverage they need to retain control, because the people, no longer distracted by palestinian violence, would suddenly realize the hand that’s been in their back pockets. and so it is believed that the conflict is perpetuated in order to keep the public’s eye on the carrot and off the issues.
at least, this is what five months of living here has shown me.
Hmm… Well I suppose I prefer the still less simplistic version here: http://tinyurl.com/65ahx
Happy reading.
Stay Strong Mobius One. The Jewish people need more voices like yours…..
ya dan, ehtnic cleansing’s not a happy term, pretty harsh, but it’s the reality of what’s happening here and if we don’t call it out and fight it then we’re being complicit.
It’s problematic when you get into discussions on genocide and “ethnic cleaning” when your parameters are based upon numbers.
For example, during the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, reports would filter out that a village of 150 people was wiped out. The word genocide was never invoked, because, by definition, as cited above, genocide refers to the “systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group” when a mere 100 or 200 people hardly constitues an “entire” group. But, as history shows, wipe out 100 groups or villages, and soon, the numbers rise. And, within years you’ve come close to 3 million dead.
Also, there is issue, historically with “systematic and planned”, simply because, it does not actually have to be so completely discussed and established to become genocidal in nature.
The genocide of the Native peoples in the newly formed United States from the mid 1700’s to early 1900’s was not a systematic plan. It was actually defined at the time as defense of settlers and business intersts. The US military’s attitude and offical policy, as well as the US governments, was one of establishing safety for the economic movement of settlers.
High mortality rates amongst native populations were considered allowable for years, since the numbers weren’t actually dealt with as a whole.
So, over the course of three centuries, somewhere around 5 million Natives parished from direct policies forced upon them. Another several million likely died from indirected sources- disease, forced poverty, loss of social structure, loss of familial structure, and many others reasons.
There was no “official” policy to get rid of native peoples. It was a “relocation” policy. But, it wrought genocidal like death nonetheless.
So, planning is a deceptive term in regard to these issues. It’s often invoked because our paradigm for genocide is the Nazi one. But, it’s not always that way at all…
W/R/T the issue of self-hatred . . . there has been exactly one time in my life in which a positive response to the question “Are you a Jew?” has been answered with a “Fuck you.” When was it? Was it walking home from the playground in New York as a child? No. Was it in the airport in Germany wearing a shirt with Hebrew on it? No. It was at the Qalandiyah checkpoint, when the soldier checking my ID on the way back from Ramallah decided I had no business in the West Bank whatsoever. Simply by coming to Jerusalem from the West Bank direction, and being a Jew at the same time, I incurred his kindly “Go fuck yourself.”
Who’s hating who?
i regret to say that no matter how impressive, one man’s scholarly work can not dispell the reality of the palestinian people today. i would not consider it genocide — less than .08% of the palestinian people have been killed in the current intifada. but almost all of the palestinian people have been thrust into unliveable conditions, and the more i experience here, the harder it is for me to believe that it is simply a consequence of israeli defensive measures, as so much as the agenda, in and of itself.
it should go without saying that i am not saying such things to be sensationalistic or because i hate israel. i love israel, and i believe in the zionist ideal. despite my anarchism, i want israel to be a success. but i believe that the current policies will only hurt israel in the end, and jeopardize that state’s existence. and that something i do not wish to see.
Well put. Ultimately, “self hate” on a cultural and social level is about identity politics. “Who are we? What do we stand for? How far are we willing to go to survive? How far are we willing to go to defend our culture?” And, it goes deeper as well.
As human beings, “self hate” issues pervade our society and our behavior. We love to hate each other. Irish hating Irish. Jews hating Jews. Irish hating Jews, Jews hating Irish, Palestinian’s hating Jews, etc etc etc… It’s a complicated scenario. And, it exsists because as human beings, we love to hate, and we love to kill.
It’s big business.
interesting and engaging ex-change.(long last) i’m completely convinced that the only hope for change lies in the inner revolution of our thought and perception mechanisms, it’s the only way. I’m also utterly convinced that it’s not a question of change, because how can a mechanical brain, or train of thought, bring around change? The only start to a true way of change is AWARENESS. Awareness is what makes us non-mechanical. Awareness, second after second, all the rest is nothing but belief, and belief is what has been screwing us up since yonkers.
No it isn’t ethnic cleansing.
The occupied territories are not being emptied of their Arab Palestinian population.
Nor is there any such policy or “agenda” for Israel, if there were such a policy, there wouldn’t be many Palestinians left in the territories.
While some of Israel’s mesaures against Palestinian armed groups are effective (as terror acts have in fact decreased) much of it is trial and error, and much is motivated by the government will to show its citizenry that “it does something”; if there’s anything an Israeli government would like to avoid, is to be widely sees as havng a polciy of “Havlagah” (getting hit without retaliating).
While occupation is terrible wrong, it’s part to the conflict, and there’s a way to end it: to make peace with Israel, that is: to come to terms with its existence and that existence’s legitimacy.
As of now the Palestinian Authority refused it and preferred to revert to “armed struggle”, with the consequences we know.
When it comes to the conflict, the Sharon government is to the “left” of Rabin’s of ten years ago.
When it comes to domestic affairs it is just as beholden to the country’s economcial elites. for the simple reason that there is no rational social-democratic constituency here, nor there is any politcal formation ready to promote such idea, the mainstream left (from Beigah to Beilin) is diluted Thatcherist and some fringe left prefers to halluncinate about some inane post-rational revolutionary utopia.
Israel’s and Zionism’s greatest success were achieved when it had a social and political vision which was both daring as it was realist and full of compromises.
About JATO:
It uses terms such as “apartheid wall” typical of Palestinian nationalism.
I suppose they’d feel like bigots if they espoused a likeminded Jewish nationalism (the kind that uses terms like “Judenrein”, “appeasers”, “Yesha”, “traitors”).
To say they “self-hate” is itself inaccurate and slanderous, destined to serve an ideology which demands to shut any disagreement.
They simply seek to avoid nationalism and bigotry, and believe the antidote against those ills is to espouse whatever nationalism, and possibly bigotry and racism, of a group different and/or antagonist to the one with which they identify (and JATO do identify themselves using the J word).
The short of it: they are not traitors, just idiots.
Mr. Mobius;
You make me proud of the Jewish Nation. With you and Rabbi Moshe Hirsch, we can show the world what is really going on. The Jews put us in a terrible place. We can’t blow them up anymore. So we need ambassadors like yourself, those who are pro-peace and against apartheid, who will force Israel to take down their apartheid wall so that we can get into the Israeli country once again.
Sbarro has moved after the bombing – now there is a new place that shahids must make their mark, and you are of great help in effecting this.
Thanks from the depths of my heart,
General Arafat.
blech. there’s a perfect example of how underhanded and apalling people force discourse on this subject to be. “race traitor!” grow up.
…
yosef: They simply seek to avoid nationalism and bigotry, and believe the antidote against those ills is to espouse whatever nationalism, and possibly bigotry and racism, of a group different and/or antagonist to the one with which they identify (and JATO do identify themselves using the J word).
The short of it: they are not traitors, just idiots.
i am inclined to agree with you on that much. i have been reluctant to associate myself or engage in activities with groups like jato because i believe they are, to an extent, hypocritical, fairly reactionary, and a bit misguided. but that does not, for me, in any way negate the call for justice that stirs them, nor the need for action, which compells them. their goal to fight the occupation and defends the rights and lives of palestinian people is noble, i think. as is their goal to help the palestinians achieve statehood. their mischaracterization of the conflict, however, as well as their acidic feelings towards israel, their defense of palestinian nationalism, and their occasional defense of palestinian militancy, on the other hand, are all things that can be done without. i don’t give a shit about the political or religious ideologies involved, whose land is whose, who did what to who, and so on. i’m interested in seeing an end to the bloodshed and seeing palestinians and israelis both living under economically stable and sustainable conditions.
i regret my invocation of the term “ethnic cleansing” frankly … but i don’t know what else to call what’s going on there, and i don’t feel comfortable writing it off as defensive security measures when hard-to-rationalize and hard-to-forgive policies towards the arabs are constantly being enacted. seeing the cruel and thoughtless actions of this government towards its own citizens — if just the jewish ones, let alone the foreign worker population — it’s difficult to imagine their treatment of the arab population is anything less than morally bankrupt and indefensible. it could be much worse, yes — as you said, “if there were such a policy, there wouldn’t be many Palestinians left in the territories.” but as i wrote above, such an agenda must be “masked behind political manuevering which makes it difficult to ‘call it like it is’.” consider world response to israel’s actions as things stand now. imagine if there were an overt agenda in place. there would be international trade embargos, perhaps even military action, and not even the u.s. would be able to escape international pressure to confront israel. it can never been an official policy. there can never be memos. there can be no evidence whatsoever. but even if — even if there is by no means an agenda in place that’s merely spoken behind office doors by ideologues who use their government seats to enact their own personal policies (and i’m willing to lend myself to that belief) — what is transpiring still amounts to very much the same circumstances. and so regardless of intent, the need to stand up against the occupation and to heal rifts between the jewish and arab communities (instead of broadening them) is still very much a matter of import and immediate attention. and that is something that jato is doing, be it tactlessly, or not.
Mobius
You wrote: ” such an agenda must be masked behind political manuevering which makes it difficult to ‘call it like it is’”, if it were such, it would be widely known, particualrly in a small country like Israel, and would either be matter of consensus or intense debate, it isn’t.
The living conditions in the occupied territories have been falling sonce the late eighties, and took a dive after the PA decided it would go back to “armed struggle” in late 2000. While we are responsible for our actions, notably the unuustifiable and indefensible ones (and there are lots of those) there are two antagonsits here, and being the stronger one is not wrong in itself.
Most Israelis come to realise that ending the occupation is also in their interest, and there always was a public debate about the actions of our institutions and individuals (as happens today about the accusation against sargeant “Reish”); but the hatred and the violences by Israelis toward Palestininans (and vice-versa) are caused by the conflict, and while the abuses and crimes have to be countered (although NOT in way delegitmising either side, and the equating Israel with apartheid was devised back in the seventies by the Soviet bloc and Arab countries in order ot demonise Israel), the conflict have to be resolved.
My opinion is that having a nation-state was a good thing for the Jews (so call me a “statist”, we’ve experimented with statelessness long enough to know it’s not for us), having their own state could be a good thing for Palestinians too, but not without making peace with us.