Why is it that people can never just watch a film about an event that took place without arguing over the politics of it. Sure there every producer and director has their own point of view and perspective, but I think that the important thing to remember and what Spielberg was trying to show us is that there are victims on both sides and that even though there may be a cause for some of it due to people’s personal experiences with people different than them or due to actriocities throughout history that have been inflicted on their people that although people’s feelings toward others of the group they feel have been unjust to them can be understand both emotionally and pscychologically, but can never really be justified rationally. The point being that hatred and slaughter of others can never be justified no matter the excuse or the number of excuses that people give or their personal feelings toward that group pf people. There is no justification for slaughter of innocent people. I’ve heard many people say that that people need to understand the reasons why people do what they do and my answer is that what the reasons are not as important as people’s actions. Sure people have a reason, most people generally do, but that still doesn’t justify their actions. Serial Killers and Rapists all have reasons, they had reasons during the Crusades, during The Black Plague, during The Spanish Inquisition, During Slavery, during The Pogroms in Russia, during The Salem Witch Trials, during the Holocaust, during the Jim Crow Period in America, during the struggle for women’s rights, during the struggle for the freedom of India, during the struggle for the freedom of Africa, during the masscres in Bosnia, the persecution of Jews and Non-Muslims in the Arab World, the Occupation of the Palestinians, Palestinian Suicide Bombers In Israel, and 9.11, but none of their reasons were or could ever be good enough to justify the afct that their hatred led to murder, because once they killed they crossed the line and became murderers. There are both good and bad people and people who are both, which is the majority of us in every religion, country and ethnicity in the world. So why is then that when one member of a group or a few do something wrong that suddenely many of us blame all members of that group. This blaming tends to be higher when the group of people are Non-White, Non-Christian and are not the so-called Norm in the society which we live in. Society these days is too political and that’s a huge problem, everything is always about being for or against rather than just seeing the rational side of things.

Europe, European and American, 26, Female, Biracial, Jewish

Israeli Uri Avnery reviews the movies Munich and Paradise Now: “…Shall We Not Revenge?”

“A few days later, I saw another film that was nominated for Oscars, the much-praised film of Steven Spielberg, “Munich”. As it so happens, I saw it in Germany, not so far from Munich itself.

On leaving the cinema, my German host wanted to know what I thought of it. Spontaneously, without thinking, I said what I had felt throughout: “Disgusting!”

Only later did I have time to sort out the impressions that I had accumulated during this very long film. What had disgusted me so much?

First of all, the Spielberg style, a combination of the highest cinematic technique and the lowest cultural content. It has pretensions to profundity, with new and revealing insights, but basically it is nothing but another American Western, where the good guys slaughter the bad guys and the blood flows like water.

Some Jewish politicians protested against the film for equating the “terrorists” with the “avengers”. And indeed, in several places in the film the “terrorists” were allowed to declaim some sentences in their defense, about the injustice done to them by the Jews and their right to a homeland. But that is only lip-service, a pretense, in order to give an impression of balance. But in the portrayal of the Munich attack - fragments of which are dispersed throughout the film - the Arabs appear as miserable, ugly, unkempt, cowardly creatures, the very opposite of Avner, the Israeli avenger, who is handsome and decent, brave and well turned-out - in short, the younger brother of Ari Ben Canaan, the superman of “Exodus”.

The Arabs have no qualms of conscience, but the Israelis have scruples in every interval between murders. They hesitate every time when they blow up / shoot / cut down one of their “targets”- which they do, of course, only after ensuring the safety of the wife and children of the victim. They are not just killers, they are Jewish killers. As an Israeli satirical slogan goes: “Shoot and weep.”

The presentation of the affair itself is highly manipulative. It withholds from the viewer some very relevant facts. For example:

- That the post-mortems showed that nine of the 11 Israeli athletes were killed by the bullets of the pathetically untrained German policemen. (The post-mortem reports are kept secret until this very day, both in Israel and Germany. But a powerful person like Spielberg should know about them.)

- That it was Golda Meir and her German colleagues - great heroes, every one of them - who sealed the fate of the hostages, when they rejected the kidnappers’ demand to take them to an Arab country, where they would have surely been traded for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.

- That the Palestinians, who were killed in revenge for Munich, had nothing to do with the affair. The Mossad was looking for easy targets and chose PLO diplomats posted to European capitals, who were quite unprotected.

But most of all I was repulsed by the Spielbergian vulgarity that runs through the whole film, including explicit sex scenes that are both gratuitous and particularly unaesthetic.

The film contributes nothing to an understanding of the conflict. It is basically a routine gangster film, which Spielberg centered on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to garner the longed-for Oscars that have eluded him until now.”

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1139098502/

Robert Fisk’s comments on Munich: “My challenge for Steven Spielberg”. Fisk was ‘described by the The New York Times as “probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain”...(and)...is the world’s most-decorated foreign correspondent.’
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11632.htm

Back to the movie for a moment. Here’s a review in a pro-Palestinian site titled “Munich: Spielberg’s Thrilling Crisis Of Conscience” by Maureen Clare Murphy, and is the lead story on the homepage of The Electronic Intifada
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article4393.shtml

Other links relating to Munich, the movie and the event:
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=lifeAndLeisureNews&storyID=2005-12-28T141422Z_01_EIC848718_RTRUKOC_0_US-LEISURE-SPIELBERG-SPOOKS.xml
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/661465.html
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/656341.html
http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/971129/1997112917.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051227/wl_nm/arts_spielberg_palestinian_dc
_________________________________________

The following is an e-mail exchange on Israel/Palestine between Benny Morris (the well-known Israeli historian)and Kathleen and Bill Christison (both former CIA political analysts), initiated when Morris wrote to criticize an article written by the Christisons.
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison10022004.html

Other interesting articles are:

Dignity, Solidarity and the Penal Colony
http://www.counterpunch.org/said09252003.html

Israel’s Justification for Killing Palestinians
http://www.counterpunch.org/kchristison1022.html

No Middle East Peace Without Justice
http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk02122005.html

The Big Lie: Palestine, Palestinians and International Law
http://www.counterpunch.org/boylebiglie.html

Before There Was Terrorism
http://www.counterpunch.org/kchristison0502.html

Optimism vs. Reality: Struggling for Justice in Palestine
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison02192005.html

Dealing with Jewish Self-Absorption
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison02072004.html

US Foreign Policy Dangerously Slanted Toward Israel
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison02162005.html
_________________________________________

This is my final response to comments by Tribalism and Universalism and by James (see above).  I believe I’ve addressed their points.

How this exchange progressed was not unexpected – the pro-Israel supportes thrive in environments where their facts and arguments are not rigorously held up against truth and logic.  Their comments are mostly misleading or false impressions, and have little or questionable substance. Much of it comes from the misleading Israeli version of history and propaganda, which can be debunked. Not unexpectedly, T v U and James choose to “leave”, rather than stand their ground, in a huff and puff of flimsy excuses.  The exchange here is just a tiny example of the intellectual dishonesty, moral hypocrisy, manipulation and cowardice that underlies the one-sided discussion on the Israel-Palestinian issue in the mainstream.
________________________________________

T v U: “The bottom line here is not that if we aggregate all of these historical events we can net a balance of which side is worse (read: less liberal).”

There’s that “liberal” word again. Confusing crime and violence with “less liberal” (or “more conservative”) is a poor excuse to avoid looking closely at what was done by both sides (Israel and Palestinians). Using your logic, would you say that the Nazi Germans were “less liberal” and that their involvement in historical events, including their crimes, against the European Jews cannot be aggregated and accounted?  That’s the kind of argument the Nazis would have used to defend the actions of their “tribe” “doing whatever it takes to win.”  If pro-Israel supporters are not willing to account for the Palestinian holocaust, no wonder the Iranian president and many Arabs seem to question the Nazi Holocaust.

The Israel-Palestinian historical events, the crimes and the responsibilities can be aggregated and accounted, once we cut through the fog of revised history, cover-ups, lies, half-truths and suppressed facts (examples above are Damour, Sabra & Shatila, Deir Yassin, Israeli-Arab wars, etc.). Historical facts are available to show that, in the big picture, the Israelis/Zionists are the aggressors and Palestinians are the victims in the same way a Mafia family (“tribe”) is the aggressor when it schemes and acts to take over a neighborhood, and the innocent victims fight back.  G-d , or even a Martian, could easily see the truth:

(a) the Zionist Jews started this conflict when, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, they implemented their plans and started colonizing Palestine with British help against the wishes of the Palestinians.

(b) the world had inflicted a terrible injustice upon the Palestinian people in 1947-1948, and the Palestinians are entitled to an independent nation state of their own.

(c) the relative scale and frequency of Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians is far worse and greater than Palestinian aggression against the Israelis.  In fact, Palestinian violence against Israelis is small compared to Israeli violence, and is often a response to Israeli violence and colonization.

(d) there will be no peace in the Middle East until this injustice against the Palestinians was somehow rectified.

(e) Israel could have solved the problem any time over the last 58 years, but chose not to.  It can end the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians tommorrow, if it wanted to. The actions of the Israeli government indicate their desire for power and resources, not peace and security.

The Palestinian side of the story, and the truth, is being written out of history by pro-Israel writers. The powerful get to write history.  What if Hitler’s Nazis had been victorious? The Nazi historians would not have described the Holocaust and Jewish suffering, just like Israel does not mention the holocaust (Nakba or catastrophe) it inflicted on Palestinians in 1948. There would be vulgar descriptions of “courageous Nazis purifying Europe of dirty Jews”;  in the video (link below) we see an Israeli soldier, after killing an innocent Palestinian mother in front of her children, talking about “purification” as the reason “a good Hebrew boy” is in the “dirty” Palestinian refugee camp.  The Nazi historians would have portrayed the Warsaw ghetto uprising of imprisoned Polish Jews in terms similar to the way Israel has portrayed the civilian uprising of the Palestinian people.  They would have described the ZOB and ZZW Jewish resistance fighters as “terrorists”, not different from how Israelis describe many Palestinian groups. Didn’t the Nazis build a wall around the Warsaw ghetto?  That Nazi ghetto wall and the Berlin wall are not as high as parts of the wall Israel has built around the West Bankto confine Palestinians into densely-populated reservations.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/tears_death_israeli_terror_video.htm

If you dig deep enough for the truth—and put aside the Israeli propaganda—you can usually determine “which side was worse”, and which side is the aggressor and the victim.  The truth can sometimes be found in Israeli newspapers. For example, let’s partially account for what caused the current violence since September 2000 (al Aqsa Intifada).  Why do you think the Palestinians have resorted to suicide bomb attacks since March 2001?

- For two years before September 2000, there was “Palestinian calm”(i.e., only three Israelis were killed by Palestinians, even though over two dozen Palestinians were killed by Israelis during those two years).

- On September 28, Ariel Sharon provocatively visited Haram al-Sharif, a holy site sacred to Muslims located in Arab East Jerusalem. It is the third holiest site in the Islamic world (holiest site in Palestine), and contains two major Muslim shrines (Al Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock). The site is also known as the Temple Mount, sacred to the Jews. Accompanied by 1,000 Israeli police, Sharon declared his “message of peace”: “The Temple Mount is in our hands and will remain in our hands.”  (Israeli demands for sovereignty over the Haram al Sharif / Temple Mount, which Palestinians say belongs to the Muslim Waqf, was a key reason the Camp David talks broke down)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,374770,00.html
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Area=middleeast&ID=SP15700
http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/aeac80e740c782e4852561150071fdb0!OpenDocument

- The visit of Sharon, long considered a war criminal by the Palestinians, triggered protests and demonstrations by unarmed Palestinians (and also partly motivated al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack a year later).  According to former CIA analyst Kathleen Christison: “On September 29, 2000, seven Palestinian civilians throwing stones – not lethal weapons – to protest Sharon’s visit the previous day to the al-Aqsa Mosque were shot to death by Israeli soldiers and police.” At least 200 were injured. The Palestinian protestors were not terrorists and did not carry or use guns in the arms in the first two days according to independent journalists and observers, including U.S. Senator Mitchell’s report. There were no terrorist attacks yet (and the first suicide bombing only happened six months later).

- And what was the Israeli violence? Major General Amos Malka (former head of Israel’s Military Intelligence) admitted to an Israeli newspaper that Israeli soldiers fired 1.3 MILLION M-16 bullets at Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza during the first few days of the Al-Aqsa Intifada!  Israel’s military unleashed this massive firepower because military leaders wanted to “fan the flames” and intensify the levels of violence during the uprising’s first weeks, thinking that this would lead to war and, ultimately, military victory against the weak Palestinians. In other words, Israel, the world’s fourth most powerful military, would be able to “finally ‘beat’ the Palestinians, to ‘vanquish’ them and lead them to negotiations in a weakened and exhausted state.” Israeli soldiers were given a free hand to shoot without limit, and they were just “shooting and shooting and shooting”. “The intent was to score a winning blow against the Palestinians, and especially against their consciousness. This was not a war on terror, but on the Palestinian people. Maj. Gen. Malka states that the policy of use of military force caused a flare-up of the fire. In other words, the IDF contributed to the escalation.” 
http://www.fmep.org/analysis/articles/more_than_million_bullets.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/kchristison1022.html

- But 1,300,000 bullets were not violent enough. Israel soon used US-made helicopter gunships, tanks and F-16 fighter planes against the protesting Palestinians. Eventually Israeli attacks escalated into incursions and invasions in densely-populated residential areas involving indiscriminate shelling and shooting, aerial bombardment, mass arbitrary detentions, mass house demolitions, use of civilians as human shields, assassinations of Palestinian political and militant leaders. Israeli snipers even shot dead unarmed Palestinian children, according to eye witness reports from Western journalists. Most of Israel’s military plans in the coming months had already been conceived right at the start, in October 2000. This included the destruction of the Palestinian political, security and other infrastructure (“Field of Thorns” plan). After six months fighting a losing battle against Israeli military terrorism (about 400 Palestinians had been killed and thousands wounded), the defenseless Palestinians retaliated with suicide bomb terrorism, from March 2001 onwards.  We repeatedly hear about Palestinian suicide bombings, but did the mainstream press report Israel firing 1.3 million bullets at the Palestinians?

Israel’s violence fits with T v U’s belief that the Israeli “tribe” should do “whatever it takes to win.” However, most rational people – you don’t need to be liberal – would say that something is wrong with what the “Israel tribe” did.  More civilized societies would have used conventional riot police methods. Kathleen Christison noted: “Although Orthodox Jews in the Mea Shearim district of Jerusalem have for years thrown stones at anyone they consider a Sabbath violator, Israeli police and military have never once fired on them.”
_______________________________________

T v U: “Halper denies the historical narrative which I affirm, as such he disagrees with my ontology of victim and aggressor. The mere fact that he disagrees does not negate the argument that defense of tribes often runs contrary to universalist mores, or that it is better to fight for ethno-nationalism than for recondite, hypocrtical universalism…Also, mentioning Halper qua anthropologist and not qua activist is seriously damaging to your credibility as someone who is rigorous about sourcing and data collection (as you say, you like to quote ‘authoritative evidence’ . Halper cites no empirical data in this article. He evidences no statistical method or blinding of a study. Rather, he states his personal beliefs about the Israeli worldview. Granted that he is entitled to his opinion, this article is NOT anthropology. In fact, there is no evidence on your link to suggest that any of what is said reflects the core values of Israelis in any remote way.”

Your comments were in response to what I wrote: “The link below contains an Israeli anthropologist’s assessment of the core values, attitudes and behaviours of Israelis. Read it and then read post #21 again to get perspective and context on #21’s arguments and premises. Don’t get trapped by the simplistic thinking of “Tribalism vs. Universalism.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison03292003.html

Nice try at trying to “damage my credibility” with some dubious but spirited comments.  But I sensed some defensiveness.  If Halper’s expert opinion is right, then an “Israeli tribe” that’s “autistic with power” is an obstacle to peace.

-  Haven’t you heard of expert opinion? Prof. Halper is obviously an authority giving an expert opinion, as opposed to “authoritative evidence”, if you can distinguish between the two. Prof. Halper is uniquely qualifies to make this opinion. He’s an anthropologist, an Israeli, is American and, in addition, he has field experience in what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians. He’s not some ivory-towered academic from an Israeli think tank.

-  It’s not an article; it is an interview. Halper was giving an interview with interviewers who happen to be ex-CIA political analysts. He wasn’t writing in an anthropological journal, where empirical data, statistical method or blinding of a study may be required (you don’t want me to get into the limitations of this approach).

-  I’m surprised you were not happy I did not mention Halper was also an activist. I did not attempt to create any false impression – I directed you to read the linked information. Anyone who can read, and who is not autististic with power, would realize that the words “activist” and “activism” appeared at least six times by the end of the first paragraph!  Although it is obvious Halper is also an activist, my primary interest was in Halper’s expert opinion as an Israeli anthropologist.

-  Given the information I’ve provided in earlier paragraphs on Israeli aggression and violence, the Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper’s assessment of the core values, attitudes and behaviours of Israelis against Palestinians is right on.

What do you mean “Halper denies the historical narrative which (you) affirm”?  Do you mean Halper’s comments about Israel’s “ “so ferocious a reaction to the intifada?” …It cannot be explained by what the Palestinians did, he says, since in the early days after the intifada began, the Palestinians used no arms and no Israelis were killed, while large numbers of Palestinians were shot to death by Israeli soldiers. But, he says, “they had the chutzpah to call into question our right to have the whole country,” and Israel could not let this stand.”  If so, then Halper’s historical narrative is right (for example, see my comments about 1.3 million bullets in an earlier part of this post) and you are affirming misinformation probably created by Israeli propaganda

Halper is also right when he mentions other historical facts such as “Israelis refer to the Palestinians as Arabs, not Palestinians”, “(Israelis) say this is our country, there’s a bunch of Arabs here, they should go live with other Arabs”, “the “roadmap”… actually uses the word “occupation,” which Israel itself refuses to use”, etc. I could substantiate any of these.

I’m not sure what’s your “ontology of victim and aggressor” but it’s pretty clear that the Palestinians are the victims and Israelis are the aggressors, when Israelis fire 1, 300, 000 bullets at initially unarmed Palestinians protesting a provocative visit by a war criminal who massacred thousands of Palestinians since the 1950s. Imagine how Israeli Jews would react if Hitler visited Jerusalem with 1,000 storm troopers and SS officers and declared that Jerusalem would forever be a Nazi outpost.

In this context, Halper makes sense when he said Israelis “ “just don’t give a damn. They make everyone else a non-issue. They see themselves as the victim, and if you’re the victim, you’re not responsible for anything you do.” Anything goes if you are the victim, he explains: you don’t care about the consequences of your actions for other people, you need not take any responsibility for the effect of your policies on others, you don’t care about how others feel. Israelis always think they’re right, he says. They believe everything they do is right because the Jewish nation is “right,” because they are only responding to what others do to them, only retaliating. “If you combine three elements: the idea that we are right, with the notion that we’re the victim, and with our great military power,” he says, you have a lethal combination. “It’s like being autistic with power. You don’t care about other people because you’ve cast the others as the aggressors. You create a situation where Israel is off the hook.” Israel can act with brutality, but the responsibility, the fault, lies elsewhere.”

Finally, your comment that “defense of tribes often runs contrary to universalist mores” has some validity.  It often does in practice.  But defense of tribes can also be effectively done within a framework of “universalist mores.” Of course, it requires a leader with a broader mindset to see the possibilities.  Unfortunately, most of Israel’s leaders since 1948 have a tribalist mentality and history of aggression and even terrorism that prevents them from seeing other, better, smarter ways of doing things.
_________________________________________

In closing, former CIA political analyst notes: “there is no reason at all for optimism. Despite all the nice talk, there will be no real Palestinian state, and there will be no peace, anytime in the foreseeable future, and the responsibility for this will lie with Israel and the United States. The reason there will be no Palestinian independence, and therefore no peace and no justice, anytime soon is purely and simply because the Israeli government does not want it, and the United States does not want what Israel doesn’t want… many people, out of a false sense of solidarity and sympathy with Israel, have erected a wall around themselves that keeps them from knowing what’s happening in Palestine and that blinds them to the human rights and justice issues there. This issue is not a Jewish issue. It’s a universal issue; it’s a political issue of a state’s behavior toward another people. It’s an issue, most of all, of justice. And justice, we all know, is blind to color and to religion and to ethnicity. Justice shuns the tendency to view this conflict or any other from only one perspective… I think we need to be aware that Israel’s occupation… came before Palestinian terrorism… And in the end, justice demands that we force Israel to stop oppressing another people.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison02192005.html

Further responses to Comment #23 by Tribalism vs. Universalism

T v U: “It’s clear after the rise of the suicide bomber, the wall, children being brainwashed into become Shaheeds via ‘Voice of Palestine’ radio and other major social currents in Palestinian life, and in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, that neither side is taking a liberal stance here. Both will do whatever it takes to win”

A bully stabs an innocent boy, provoking the victim to defend himself or retaliate with a pen-knife. Later the bully declares: “neither side is taking a liberal stance here. Both will do whatever it takes to win”. So the bully has justified his need stabbing the boy until the bully scores a “win for his tribe.”

“(T)he rise of the suicide bomber… children being brainwashed into become Shaheeds” (i.e., “martyrs”)” are tied to Israel’s occupation, land theft and repression. Remove Israeli interference in Palestinian lives and you remove the causal factor. Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, has compiled a database of every suicide terrorist attack (315 in all) in the world between 1980 and 2003. “The data show that there is far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than most people think… What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in seeking aid from abroad, but is rarely the root cause… First, nearly all suicide terrorist attacks - 301 of the 315 in the period I studied - took place as part of organized political or military campaigns… Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective: from Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign - 18 organizations in all - are seeking to establish or maintain political self-determination. Before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, there was no Hezbollah suicide terrorist campaign against Israel; indeed, Hezbollah came into existence only after this event.”
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/38/11187
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9453.htm
http://www.counterpunch.org/niva08272003.html
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=29430
http://www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org/node.php?id=628
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4798.htm
_________________________________________________

T v U: “I am interested in defense of the tribe…. (if Palestinians get to rule) it means that Israel will be the same land, with the same measures taken to defend its political institutions and people, but the particular nationality, culture and religion will be change. That is, the only thing that changes is that Jews lose, Palestinians win… Both will do whatever it takes to win…  It is rather that both sides have in the past been willing to do whatever it takes to have their tribe win out. The Palestinians have become increasingly willing to sacrifice the quality and quantity of their lives to win, while the Israelis have become less so.”

Actually, Israelis and their government have always been willing to sacrifice Israeli security and lives to win, while Palestinians have been less so (given Palestinian dispossession and Israel’s oppression, you’d think there would be far more Palestinian suicide bombers among 3 million occupied Palestinians). The fact is that Israel has voluntarily chosen to continue the conflict and occupation in order to eventually annex more Palestinian land. Since 1948, Israeli society has chosen governments which pursue this policy.  Israelis have, in defiance of international law, deliberately built illegal settlement colonies next to resentful Palestinians on occupied Palestinian land, but cry fould whenever their illegal settlers are attacked. Israelis have no one but themselves to blame.

According to Israeli Ran HaCohen: “ “The Arab states and the Palestinians have in fact acknowledged Israel’s right to exist in peace, if it withdraws from the occupied Palestinian territories taken in 1967; whereas Israel wants to keep these territories, though it doesn’t quite know how.” It is indeed impressive how successful Israeli propaganda and the Western media are in obscuring the simple fact that ongoing conflict is the result of a voluntary Israeli policy, in which Arabs and Palestinians play a subsidiary role.”
http://antiwar.com/hacohen/?articleid=3660

As well, you’re stuck on the win-lose, zero sum mindset (I think an illegal Israeli settler said something similar in John Pilger’s film Palestine Is Still The Issue in link below).  You’re interested in “(defending your) tribe”  and “(doing) whatever it takes to have (your) tribe win out”. Prof. Halpers expert assessment makes sense given this tribalist mindset.
http://independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=871&fcategory_desc=Under Reported
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison03292003.html

You don’t know whether or not your worst case scenario will happen if the roles were changed or reversed so that Palestinians share or dominate power. You are assuming how Palestinians will behave, based on the limitations of your tribal mindset and given what Israelis have done to them (probably because that’s how you think a tribe would react).

-  After the US left Vietnam in the mid 1970s, many doomsday scenarios were predicted about what the Vietnamese communists would do next . Most of those scenarios were never realized, and today Vietnamese and Americans have a better rekationship, despite what the US did during the war (the US war killed 3 to 4 million Vietnamese) and crippling US sanctions after the war.

-  Before Israel was founded, a number of Zionists leaders were leaders or members of terrorist groups that committed acts of terror far worse than anything Hamas or Islamic Jihad has done.  These terrorist groups were only dismantled after Israel’s founding (e.g., Altalena), not before.  This was also the experience of many former colonies of the Western powers. Two Israeli terrorist leaders – Menachem Begin (Irgun) and Yitzak Shamir (Stern Gang or LEHI) – went on to become Israeli prime ministers. Arguably, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was also linked to acts of terrorism.  The Israeli journalist I have quoted, Uri Avnery, was a former member of the Irgun.

What we know for certain?

- The Palestinians (even militants like Hamas) are not Zionist Jews.  Once freed of Israel, they may – or may not – behave better than the Zionists. Even Hamas is willing to sit down and speak with reasonable Jews (see first link below – an American Jew interviews a Hamas leader, who was a pediatrician and was later assassinated by Israel).  An orthodox Jewish rabbi was minister for Jewish affairs in Yasser Arafat’s cabinet.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=4175

- For centuries before the Zionists started arriving in Palestine in the early 20th century, the Muslim rulers of Palestine as well as its Arab inhabitants generally treated the Jews better than the Europeans did.  Before the First World War, the Palestinians treated the Jews far better than the Zionists and Israel have treated the Palestinians since 1948.

- Before the 1980s, many Palestinians were generally interested in a one state democracy – a Palestine for all people, cultures and religions, for both Arabs and Jews.  This was unlike the Zionists, who were always focused on a Jewish state with as few Arabs and non-Jews as possible.
______________________________________

T v U: “It is rather that both sides have in the past been willing to do whatever it takes to have their tribe win out.”

The Zionist Jews have gone to far greater lengths than the Palestinians. If the Palestinians really did what it takes, the three million occupied Palestinians would rise up in a massive resistance against the Israeli occupation instead of being subjugated by it.  There would be chaos on a scale far worse than Iraq. In the big picture, the Palestinians have been relatively submissive, considering they have endured Israel’s actions for 58 years.

But let’s speculate, using your tribal mindset. What if the “Palestinian tribe” did what the “Zionist tribe” did “whatever it takes”. What might the “Palestinian tribe” have done? Imagine if all American Jews lived only in Massachusetts, their ancestral homeland for centuries. (America and Israel each has just over 5 million Jews, and Massachusetts is about the size of Israel.)  The conniving Palestinians make a secret deal with the US government to allow the former to colonize Massachusetts. The Palestinians leave the Middle East, take a cruise ship across the Atlantic and mass migrate into Massachusetts, telling the world that their ancestors once lived on Massachusetts 5,000 years ago until the Native Indians expelled them.  Of course, the Jewish inhabitants resent the new Palestinian immigrants because the poor Jews are being dispossessed off their homeland. Jewish resistance is brutally repressed by the US military but the US government pays lip service to their peaceful protests.  Menwhile, the Palestinians grow in number and armed power. Eventually, millions of well-armed Palestinians take control of Massachusetts, terrorize and ethnically cleanse 80% of the Jewish population off the state. One million Jewish victims are refugees in neighboring states, and their camps are subjected to frequent Palestinian attacks for 55 years. Another three million Jewish victims are crowded into refugee camps and other dwellings on tiny Rhode Island, where they are subjected to a brutal and humiliating occupation by the Palestinians. The Palestinians build hundreds of “Palestinian only” colonies, thousands of checkpoints and miles of “Palestinian only” roads all over Rhode Island, and send in over 400,000 Palestinian settlers in defiance of UN objections. The Palestinians also build high walls cutting through Rhode Island to imprison the Jews and to wall off the 58% of Rhode Island they intend to annex to expand Massachusetts (which they’ve renamed Palestine).  The Palestinians brutally repress any Jewish resistance, often killing Jewish kids for sport.  They force Jewish women to give birth on roadsides. When Palestinian settlers murder Jewish schoolgirls, the Palestinian courts let them off or give them light sentences.  Whenever the Jews or other conscionable people complain about what the Palestinians are doing to the Jews, the Palestinians accuse them of anti-Semitism, since Palestinian Arabs are Semites.

Of course, this will not happen. But what the Zionists and Israel have actually done to Palestinians is, in many ways, worse than this scenario.
_________________________________________________

T v U: “Given time, I don’t doubt that the Palestinians will prevail. But don’t delude yourself into thinking that it is because the Palestinians are more ‘liberal’ than Israelis. It is because the Israelis will disappear in a wash of universalism.”

Now that’s a delusion. The opposite is far more probable. It is highly unlikely that, in your win-lose worldview, either the Palestinians “will prevail” or Israel “will disappear”. Zionist Jews in Israel, America and Europe have too much political power, information power and zealousness to allow this victim’s paranoia to become reality. Israel has been growing and getting stronger, at the expense of a betrayed, victimized and powerless Palestinian people.  Israel has been deliberately destroying the Palestinians as a nation, and Palestine is disappearing (a “Palestinian state”, if it ever “happens”, will likely be a set of fragmented “Indian reservations” under Israel’s practical dominion). Given the context of history, the best chance the Palestinians had to overcome the Zionist-British conspiracy was before the mid-1930s. Today the forces reinforcing Israel’s existence are far too powerful while the forces seeking justice and a fair resolution for the Palestinians are too weak. In any case, Israel is the world’s fourth most powerful conventional and nuclear-armed military, and the leaders of most of Israel’s Arab neighbors are unpublicized allies (especially Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey) of Israel’s government.

Another powerful advantage that Israel has is the one-sided media coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict that biases most people to Israel’s story, and against the Palestinians.  According to Alsion Weir: “The most monumental cover-up in media history may be the one I’m about to describe. In my entire experience with American journalism, I have never found anything as extreme, sustained, and omnipresent… I was hearing a great deal about Israelis and very little about Palestinians…I discovered international reports about Palestinian children being killed daily, often shot in the head, hundreds being injured, eyes being shot out. And yet little of all this was appearing in NPR reports, the New York Times, or the San Francisco Chronicle. There was also little historic background and context in the stories… The more I looked into all this, the more it seemed that I had stumbled onto a cover-up that quite possibly dwarfed anything I had seen before… Nevertheless, the duration and violence of the injustice I was discovering, and the extent of its omission and misrepresentation – even in Project Censored itself, seemed unparalleled.”
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/sides.html
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/index.html
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/net-report.html
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/nyt-report.html
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/bias.html

This post addresses ‘Tribalism vs. Universalism’s’ comments (#23) to me about Damour, Shabra and Shatila, and Deir Yassin.  I can appreciate that T v U feels that I use the word “ ‘truth’ as if certain of the intellectual rigor and integrity” and feels my “tirades are hackneyed and dishonest”.  But this is, after all, a truth dig.  Getting at the truth requires some shoveling by both sides. If T v U or James has valid facts and arguments to debunk the truths in my posts, I would welcome being proved wrong or dishonest. So far, as can be seen below, I do not appear to be the party who is creating false and misleading impressions and/or fuzzing up the facts.

The mainstream reporting and discussion on the Israel-Palestinian conflict is similarly one-sided and dishonest.
______________________________________

T v U: “Regarding your comments on Israel’s association with the Phalangists who massacred Palestinians at Sabra and Shatilla, I wonder if any of your sources mention the wanton murder, by Palestinian forces (directly, rather than through some proxy), of hundreds of Christian civilians at Damour on January 20th, 1976? Does this reflect a chance of better (read: more liberal) rule by the Palestinians?...  You can continue to cite your Sabra and Shatillas, and I’ll have my Damours.”

Truth check: Are you sure the Damour massacre was “wanton” murder?  Israeli reporting on the Damour massacre, MIT Prof Noam Chomsky observes, is done “in the typical Israeli propaganda style, omitting the facts that this massacre was in retaliation for Christian massacres in Karantina and elsewhere” (pg 407, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, Updated Edition). In summary, by January 1976, there was civil strife in Lebanon.  Lebanese Christian militia had attacked and laid siege on Palestinian refugee camps, and massacred Palestinian civilians as well as Lebanese Muslims. For example, on January 18th, 1976, the Lebanese Christian Phalange had massacred an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 Palestinian and other civilians of Karantina (near Beirut). Avenging the Karantina massacre by Christian forces two days before, Palestinian and Lebanese National Movement (leftist Lebanese Muslims) forces attacked the Christian city of Damour, south of Beirut, and massacred about 250 civilians and Phalange militiamen.  Note: According to Chomsky, “The figure of thousands murdered in Damour appears to be an invention of Israeli propaganda…Colonel Yirmiah gives the figure of 250 killed, in his War Diary” (p 372)

For more details, Noam Chomsky:  “In 1970, many Palestinians were driven from Jordan… In Lebanon, they joined hundreds of thousands of refugees from the 1948 war.  The PLO at first attempted to keep clear of Lebanon’s internal strife…  The PLO was, however, drawn into the civil war, initially, by an April 1975 (Christian Maronite) Phalange attack on a bus killing 27 Palestinians and Lebanese who were traveling to Tel al-Zataar from the Sabra and Shatila camps—a grim portent. At first, the PLO role was largely limited to arming some Muslim and leftist groups and helping to defend Muslim districts that were under Christian (largely Maronite Phalange) attack.  The PLO took a more active role in January 1976, when Christian militias blockaded Palestinian camps. “By this time,” Cooley writes, “such events as ‘Black Saturday’ on December 6, 1975, when over 200 Muslim hostages were taken and murdered by the Phalange in reprisals for murders of four Phalangist militiamen…  The Muslim Karantina slum was overrun by Christian forces with large numbers massacred, then “burned and razed… with bulldozers.”  The Christian (Chamounist) town of Damour was then taken by the leftist-Palestinian coalition and…occupied, looted, and destroyed.”  The propaganda of Israel and its American supporters regularly refers to the last of these atrocities as proof that the PLO was conducting a murderous war against the Lebanese; what preceded is regularly omitted.” (pp. 184 to 185)

In any case, what was the original sin? Why were Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in the first place?  Because, since 1948, Israel had ethnically cleansed Palestinians from the latter’s ancestral homeland and refused to allow these refugees to return home.  This was and is a violation of international law and UN resolutions.  If Palestinians did not have to be refugees in Lebanon, none of this would have happened.  The innocent Palestinians, who became victims because of Israeli aggression and crimes, were forced into a situation they should not have been.  (In many ways, this is not dissimilar to the situation the European Jews were put into because of the actions of the Nazi Germans.  In that situation, the fault is entirely on Nazi Germany and their collaborators, not their Jewish victims).
_________________________________________________

T v U: “Regarding your comments on Israel’s association with the Phalangists who massacred Palestinians at Sabra and Shatilla… (through some proxy)”

The official Israeli cover story, after being changed many times, is that the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982 were the fault and direct responsibility of the (Lebanese Christian Maronite) Phalangists.  Supposedly, these militias were merely associated with the Israelis, or at worse proxies, who were merely avenging past Palestinian atrocities against Lebanese Christians. Ariel Sharon argued that Israel cannot “choose our neighbors in the Middle East”, i.e., if the Lebanese Christians are savages, it is not Israel’s fault. Menachem Begin said: “Goyim kill goyim, and they immediately come to hang the Jews”, i.e., if you criticize Israel for the massacres, you are an “anti-Semite”. (Begin, who was the Israeli Prime Minister in 1982 and received a Nobel Prize for Peace, was once commander of the Irgun terrorist group in the 1940s.)

In reality, those Lebanese Christian militiamen who committed the massacre were incited by Israel’s defense minister Ariel Sharon the day before the massacre; were under Israeli orders and were strong Israeli allies; were trained, assisted and supplied by Israel’s military; and were virtually an extension of the Israeli military during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. 

Prof Noam Chomsky debunks Israel’s propaganda in his book Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, Updated Edition (read the chapters Aftermath, as well as Peace in Galilee and Limited War in Lebanon.).  Chomsky also assesses the near-whitewashing provided by Israel’s Kahan Commission inquiry into the massacre (which the UN General Assembly called a genocide). What Chomsky’s book does not include is new information that hundreds of Palestinians who survived the original camp massacre were later interrogated by the Israelis and then handed back to the Phalangist murderers to be slaughtered over the coming weeks (see Robert Fisk’s comments below).

The following excerpts from Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle book and Fisk’s article explain Israel’s responsibility and possible motivation for the massacres.

-  Noam Chomsky: “What is clear is that the atrocities were carried out by militiamen brought in by Israel who, furthermore, had “a well-documented history of atrocities against Palestinians civilians”…the exact constitution of the forces is hardly of crucial significance.  As David Bernstein comments in the Jerusalem Post, “In the final analysis, the question is largely irrelevant as both Haddad and Phalange are Israel’s creatures, having been armed and trained over the past eight years by the IDF.” That they were under IDF control as they were organized to enter the camps, and under its observation as the operation was carried out, is hardly in serious doubt… the efforts of the Israeli government to disassociate itself from the work of its hired guns…” (p 374)

-  Noam Chomsky: “An excellent analysis by Uri Avneri (Haolam Haze, Feb 16, 23 1983)… reviewing the evidence surveyed above, reaches the only plausible conclusions: no one believed the “fable of the ‘2000 terrorists’ “; The Phalangist units were organized and sent into the camps with the expectation that they would commit murderous acts in order to cause a mass flight of Palestinians (recall that the international response was surely unanticipated); the IDF, intelligence , and the political echelons cooperated in the massacre throughout, at the command post and elsewhere.  Repeating Amos Elon’s image, Avneri observes: “When someone places a poisonous snake in the bed of a child, and the child dies after it is bitten – there is no need to prove that whoever put the snake there wanted the child to die.  The burden of proof is on someone who denies this intention.” (Israel’s Kahan) Commission did not accept this burden of proof, but simply adopted unquestioningly the hypothesis that those who put the snake in the child’s bed were “insensitive” and failed to give adequate attention to what they should have known. Those who accept this reasoning, or regard it as “sublime,” reveal a good deal about themselves.” (pp. 408 – 409)

- Robert Fisk: “In the end, Sharon got away with it (Sabra and Shatila massacres), even when it was proved that he had, the night before the Phalangists attacked the civilians of the camp, publicly blamed the Palestinians for the murder of their leader, President-elect Bashir Gemayel. Sharon told these ruthless men that the Palestinians had killed their beloved “chief”. Then he sent them in among the civilian sheep - and claimed later he could never have imagined what they would do in Chatila. Only years later was it proved that hundreds of Palestinians who survived the original massacre were interrogated by the Israelis and then handed back to the murderers to be slaughtered over the coming weeks. There was a story told to me by one of the men investigating Sharon’s responsibility for the Sabra and Chatila massacre, and the story is that the then Israeli defence minister, before he sent his Phalangist allies into the camps, announced that it was Palestinian “terrorists” who had murdered their newly assassinated leader, President-elect Gemayel. Sharon was to say later that he never dreamed the Phalange would massacre the Palestinians….But how could he say that if he claimed earlier that the Palestinians killed the leader of the Phalange? In reality, no Palestinians were involved in Gemayel’s death….An AP report of 15 September 1982. “Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, in a statement, tied the killing [of the Phalangist leader Gemayel] to the PLO, saying: “It symbolises the terrorist murderousness of the PLO terrorist organisations and their supporters.” ”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11479.htm
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story.php?sid=20020912210826592

- Noam Chomsky: “(Israeli journalist) Ze’ev Schiff reports an “authorized investigation” after the massacres showed that they were… “a premeditated attack which was designed to cause a mass flight of Palestinians from Beirut and from the whole of Lebanon” (Tony: like the Deir Yassin massacre, which was also under Menachem Begin’s leadership). David Shipler reports that as early as mid-June, “Israeli officials were speaking privately of a plan, being considered by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, to allow the Phalangists to go into west Beirut and to the camps against the Palestine Liberation Organization.  The calculation was that the Phalangists, with old scores to settle… would be more ruthless than the Israelis and probably more effective.”… “The ABC News investigation reported that three Phalange leaders “bear direct responsibility for the massacre”: Fady Frem, Phalange military commander; (Elie) Hobeika, Phalange chief of security and military intelligence; and Joseph Edde… Frem and Hobeika are reputed to be the leaders of the most strongly pro-Israel section of the Phalange…” (pp. 370 – 371)

If you want more details, here are Chomsky’s review of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, the official Israeli inquiry (Kahan Commission) and of Israel’s initial public relations campaign to deny its involvement.  If not interested, skip to the next section on Deir Yassin:

- Noam Chomsky: “Israeli armor also surrounded the Sabra and Shatila (Palestinian refugee) camps, where the population was now completely defenseless. These two camps, along with the third major Palestinian camp (Bourj el-Brajneh), had been mercilessly bombarded from June 4 (1982)…with many casualties… Sabra and Shatila… were “sealed off” by the IDF (Israeli army) so that “no one could move in or out” and under direct observation from nearby (Israeli) command posts…On Thursday September 16, truckloads of Phalange and Haddad troops entered the camps, coming from behind Israeli lines to a staging area that Israel had established and following carefully prearranged and marked routes.  The Phalangists appear to have been drawn largely from the Damouri Brigade, which had been operating behind Israeli lines since June. These units consisted of “some of the more extreme elements in the Christian militia,” “with a well-documented record of atrocities against Palestinian civilians,”… The Haddad militia is “virtually integrated into the Israeli Army and operates entirely under its command.”… The forces that Israel had mobilized were sent in to the now defenseless camps for “mopping up” and “to clear out terrorist nests” (Sharon).  For anyone with a minimal acquaintance with these circumstances, it was clear that these expectations were being fulfilled, with ample evidence that a massacre was in progress. Throughout Thursday night, Israeli flares lighted the camps while the militias went about their work, methodically slaughtering the inhabitants. The massacre continued until Saturday, under the observation of the Israeli military a few hundred yards away. Bulldozers were used to scoop up bodies and cart them away or bury them under rubble. One “mass grave that has been specially bulldozed” was directly below an Israeli command center, with a view from an Israeli rooftop position “directly onto the grave and the camp beyond.”… On Friday afternoon (Israel’s) Chief of Staff Eitan and Generals Drori and Yaron met with the Phalangist command. Eitan congratulated them on having “carried out good work,” offered them a bulldozer with IDF markings removed, and authorized them to remain in the camps for another 12 hours. The killings continued.  At 5AM Saturday morning the murderers began to leave the camps, and after 36 hours, the slaughter ended. On Saturday morning, “reporters entered the camp long before any Israeli soldiers,” and the full story began to reach the outside world…. It is obvious from the circumstances and the troop deployments that the IDF was well aware of what was happening in the camps to which it had dispatched the gangs of murderers it had organized, just as the Czar’s police and army could not have failed to know what was happening in the Jewish quarter of Kishinev.” (Tony: read about the Kishinev pogrom that killed over 40 Jews) …The senior command of the IDF knew on Thursday night that civilians were being killed…”They did nothing to stop the carnage”… U.S. Special envoy Morris Draper demanded that “You must stop the massacre. They are obscene. I have an officer in the camp counting the bodies… They are killing children.  You are in absolute control of the area and therefore responsible for that area.”… After many falsehoods and evasions which we may omit, the government of Israel finally conceded that it had sent Phalangists into the camps, settling on a figure of 100-150… The final official story was that they were sent in for the purpose of “cleansing” the camps of 2000 heavily-armed terrorists left there by the PLO (Tony: this was a lie as journalists and other witnesses said the camps did not contain “armed terrorists” but women, children and old/infirm people)… And once this claim is dismissed as the nonsense that it is… (because if this nonsense is true, then) The 2000 heavily armed Palestinian terrorists seem to have been singularly inept. The 150 Phalangists sent in (by the Israelis) to overcome them reported (two Phalangists) killed.” (pp 362 – 370). Although the Israel claims only 800 Palestinians were killed, the Lebanese government reported about 2,000 and the Palestinians claim up to 3,500 dead.

- Noam Chomsky: “The picture that emerges from the (Israeli inquiry) Kahan Commission Report is therefore quite clear. The higher political and military echelons, in their entirety, expected that Phalangists would carry out massacres if they were admitted into Palestinian camps.  Furthermore, they knew that these camps were undefended, so they were willing to send in approximately 150 Phalangists known for their unwillingness to engage in any conflict with armed men. Within 1 - 2 hours after the Phalangists had entered on Thursday at 6PM, clear evidence reached the (Israeli) command post 200 meters away from the camps and overlooking them that massacres were taking place, and that there was no serious resistance.  At the command post, the IDF and Phalange commanders and their staffs, including intelligence and liaison, were present and in constant contact.  The IDF then provided illumination, and the next day, after receiving further corroboratory evidence that massacres were in process and that there was no resistance, sent the Phalange back into the camps, with tractors, which the IDF knew were being used to bury the bodies in the mass grave which they could observe (the latter fact is ignored by the Commission). The Phalange were selected for this operation because, as the Chief of Staff stated, “we could give them orders whereas it was impossible to give orders to the Lebanese army.” And in fact, the IDF did give the Phalange orders, from the moment they sent them into the camps to conduct their murderous operations, to the time when they were sent back in on Friday afternoon to complete them, to Saturday morning when they were withdrawn because of American pressure, at which time the IDF began rounding up those (Palestinian refugees) who had escaped and sending them to Israeli concentration camps (again, this fact is not discussed by the Commission). That is the story as it emerges from the Commission Report (with the exceptions noted).  What will a rational person deduce from this record?” (p. 404)

- Noam Chomsky: “When the reports of the massacre reached the outside world, Israel denied any knowledge of what had happened.  This pretense was quickly dropped in favor of outraged denial of any responsibility.  The official reaction of the government was announced on September 19 (1982), and appeared in a full page advertisement in several American newspapers. The heading was “BLOOD LIBEL,” a reference to traditional anti-Semitic incitement.  It is a reflex reaction to accuse critics of Israel of anti-Semitism, a device of proven effectiveness to deflect any rational discussion of the issues.  The official government statement then went on to assert that “there was no position of the Israeli army” in the area where “a Lebanese unit entered a refugee camp in order to apprehend terrorists hiding there.”… These shameful lies were silently abandoned later on.” (p. 375)
_________________________________________________

T v U: “You can cite Deir Yassine, and I’ll cite the literally thousands terror attacks originating from that town before the Irgun attacked it (and the efforts the Irgun made to alert the civilian population and enable them to leave…).”

You’ll cite thousands of terror attacks originating from Deir Yassin? From which sources?  From an Irgun propaganda website?  Or from Emanuel Winston or Abba Eban?

Deir Yassin was a slaughter of innocents in April 1948. I’ll cite the observations of Haganah officers.  The Haganah, precursor to the Israeli army, was the main Jewish paramilitary force at the time and involved in the Deir Yassin attack.

- Yoma Ben-Sasson, Haganah commander in Givat Shaul, stated that “there was not even one incident between Deir Yassin and the Jews”.

- According to Yitzhak Levi, 1948 Jerusalem Haganah intelligence chief, Deir Yassin was different from al-Qastel (Kastel had recently been attacked by the Haganah) in that it did not participate directly in the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. The villagers reportedly wanted to remain neutral in the war and they had repeatedly resisted help and alliances with the Palestinian fighters. Instead they had made a pact with Haganah to not help the Palestinian fighters as long as they were not the target of Jewish military operations. (“Nine Measures”, pp 340-341).

- Haganah intelligence confirmed after the village had been captured that it in fact had stayed “faithful allies of the western [Jerusalem] sector.” Palestinian and Arab fighters had repeatedly urged the villagers to let soldiers enter the village but they were denied or resisted by the villagers. For example, according to IDF Archives, on April 7, 1948 the Haganah intelligence reported that three days earlier the elders of Deir Yassin and Ein Kareem had met Kemal Erikat (Abdel Kader’s deputy) who proposed to bring foreign troops into the villages. The elders of Deir Yassin rejected the proposal.

More information on Deir Yassin:

- Noam Chomsky writes that Irgun’s leader Menachem Begin took pride in the Deir Yassin operation.  100 to 250 defenseless Palestinian people were slaughtered in April 9 to 10, 1948, including a large number of women and children.  (Tony: The terrorists also dynamited houses, looted and raped Palestinians in the attack. British official Richard Catling noted “Many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered. Many infants were also butchered and killed.”)  Chomsky: “Recently discovered personal testimonies of the Zionist terrorist leaders reveal that the majority favored eliminating whoever stood in their way, including women and children, and proceeded to do so, murdering captured and wounded. Begin praised his murderers for their humanity, for “acting in a way no other fighting force had ever done.” The Irgun command sent an internal message of congratulations on the “wonderful operation of conquest,” saying “As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere… Oh Lord, Oh Lord, you have chosen us for conquest.”  The Haganah command condemned the operation, including the looting and plunder that appear to have been the objective according to the recently discovered documents, NOTING THAT THE VILLAGE WAS ONE OF THOSE THAT HAD AVOIDED ANY COOPERATION WITH THE ARAB FORCES” (Deir Yassin village had previously entered into a non-aggression pact with the Jews).  In 1949, according to Haaretz, there was a settlement festival for religious settlers in “the former village of Deir Yassin” (now part of Jerusalem). In 1980, the remaining ruins were bulldozed to make a settlement, and streets were named after units of the Irgun which perpetrated the massacre and of the Palmach (Haganah strike force). (pp 95 – 96, Fateful Triangle)

- Albert Einstein and a number of Jewish-American intellectuals publicly protested against Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States in 1948. In their protest letter (published in the New York Times), they wrote: “A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands which wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (Zionist) TERRORIST BANDS ATTACKED THIS PEACEFUL VILLAGE, killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade them as captives through the streets of Jerusalem… But the terrorists far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.”

- According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe:  “… in the 1948 war, the mere reference to what the Israelis had done to put Palestinians to flight stands in stark contrast to the mainstream Zionist version of the war’s history. The official version, reiterated lately by mainstream historians in Israel in their debate with the new historians, is that the Palestinian leadership called upon its community to leave so that they would not impede the invading Arab armies. No recognition of atrocities beyond Deir Yassin is given in this version, and even this atrocity is attributed to renegade right wing terrorists, not to the Haganah, the main military force of the Jewish community. The new historians, on the other hand, attribute other massacres to the Haganah and some have even discovered a link between the Haganah and the Deir Yassin massacre…This chapter in the new history shattered more then any other the founding myths of the state of Israel. A state founded in a dirty war ending in the expulsion of the local population was a historical version that was only heard before in Palestinian and Arab propaganda. But no less important was the new historians’ erosion of the Israeli self image of their state as being peace-loving and peace-seeking in comparison to an intransigent Arab world.”
http://www.ameu.org/uploads/vol31_issue1_1998.pdf

In addition, are you saying those thoughtful, murdering Irgun made efforts to alert the Deir Yassin villagers to leave before they massacred them?  Just like they did before they bombed King David Hotel? The Irgun terrorists bombed Jerusalem’s King David hotel in 1946, which murdered over 90 people.  Israeli propaganda has also tried to soften that massacre by stating that Irgun made an effort to warn people to leave.  Apparently Irgun did send a warning a few minutes before the bombing.  But if Osama bin Laden warned Americans to leave the World Trade Centre 20 minutes before the first plane hit, does it lessen the crime?

Before I respond to T v U’s comments in #21 and part of #23, I have to make an observation to put things in context.

Be patient and check the facts. I know the truth hurts James and T v U, but it’s easier for them to make excuses and hide rather than refute with facts and sound arguments. In comment #28, I’ve proven that—contrary to T v U and James’ accusations (#26 and #27)—I am not the one who was intellectually dishonest about the Google search.  In additon, what I did not mention, T v U’s link http://icssa.org/toynbee.html does not show up in a Google search of either “fossilized religion” or “fossilised religion”.  Did it come from T v U’s private collection on “scholars to attack using the anti-Semitism label”?  If anyone else can find that link on Google, let me know.

And here is a “spectacular” example of intellectual dishonesty: James: “(Tony N) spends paragraphs trying to prove that Gilbert is the most devious, hateful, and all around nasty brute historian one could possibly imagine – a kind of pro-Israeli Goebbels.”  That’s nonsense.  In comment #22, all I wrote was: “Perhaps James can convince me that Martin Gilbert is an objective authority who can be trusted.  To me, Gilbert is an academic supportive of Zionism who is pro-Zionist/Israel in his chauvinism, interpretation and bias, and exaggerations” and gave valid examples. Even James later wrote “I would acknowledge that Gilbert is pro-Israeli, and does not give full balance to the Arab side of the story.”  In other words, James agres with me even though he proceeds to distort the meaning of what I wrote. Once again, I have proven that I am not the one who is intellectually dishonest.

Even the great Jewish intellectual Noam Chomsky has found that when his pro-Israel detractors lack facts and arguments, they sometimes resort to shooting the messenger to divert from his message.  Take a look at Alan Dershowitz doing it to Chomsky in their Harvard debate: “Israel And Palestine After Disengagement: Where Do We Go From Here?”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11190.htm
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=9458
http://www.counterpunch.org/ryan12072005.html
_________________________________________________

T v U: “Firstly, I am not interested in Israel behaving in an idyllic, liberal fashion.”

It was T v U’s conjecture, not interests, that led me to write “…Sabra and Shatila… let’s understand this example of the righteous, idyllic and universalist suzerainty enacted by Israel” in response to T v U’s misleading comment “Tony N, Hanan Ashrawi, Hussein Ibish et al. would have us believe that the Palestinians would enact a more idyllic, universalist suzerainty if they were to replace the existing Zionist (read: racist) entity.” 

First, T v U’s comment misleads. T v U made stuff up – I did not attempt “have you believe” how Palestinians would behave in the future. Where did I write anything to this effect? I presented reality about what Israel, as current political rulers with military power, actually did in Sabra and Shatila as an example. Second, T v U reflexively ridiculed the possibility that Palestinians could behave better than the “Zionist entity”.  Is T v U’s mindset limited by narrow tribalist beliefs and assumptions or is T v U speculating about an unknown future?  T v U does not take into account that Arabs and Muslims had been tolerant to Jews and Christians for many centuries before the Zionist Jews mass immigrated into Palestine in theearly 20th century, but appears to assume that Palestinians, if they obtain political and military power, will behave in future as the Zionists have been doing.  That’s limiting, at minimum.
_________________________________________________

T v U bandies the word “liberal” and makes unfounded assumptions and specious comments about me such as “Here again we have the story of the reflexive universalist” (reflexive?) or “I am certain that Tony N…derive great strength and satisfaction from the fact that Jews have preponderantly supplanted their Jewish identities with liberal-democrat ones”  (I really don’t care what values Jews or Muslims want to supplant, as long as their actions do not potentially affect me)  or “One ridiculous aspect to note about this Western contrition over its past is that those tribal zealots who are most effective at milking the guilt are those who portray their cause as an essentially liberal one. Hence, Tony N…would have us believe…”  (there’s that liberal word again… I’m not interested in milking guilt, and would be equally incompetent in milking a cow… T v U appears to be a Zealot – that’s with a capital Z as in those Jewish Zealots in the first century AD who fought to the death against the Romans and who killed or persecuted Jews who collaborated with the Romans).

Terms such as liberal can be meaningless when used in the political sense because they are too often misused to discredit the messenger. So if you don’t like someone’s valid views and have no facts or arguments, just call him a liberal. The values underlying my message are quite conservative (as in opposing change and opposing lack of adherence to international laws, civilized norms and G-d’s laws [the Ten Commandments] such as You Shall Not Murder, You Shall Not Steal, You Shall Not Covet Your Neighbor’s House And Field, and You Shall Not Bear False Witness Against Your Neighbor).  The Israel-Palestine conflict, which impacts us all, was caused by the Zionists policy and actions which dispossessed the Palestinians off their ancestral homeland and were crimes against the Palestinian people that violated international laws and conventions as well as G-d’s laws. I’m for law and order, and the history and facts do show which party was the original wrongdoer in this conflict. The Palestinians were originally innocents until the Zionists started doing what they did in the early 20th century.  On the other hand, Zionists may be tribalists, but they actually act liberally – they do not follow established laws and traditions, including Judaic, when it gets in the way of whatever they want to do. See Uri Avnery’s comments in the next section.
_________________________________________________

T v U: “Jews who see Israel as a stain on Jewish history, who want Jews there to give up house and home, who want to to give up the only independent power that stands up for Jewish values (even if they are only the nationalistic aspects of those values) are essentially those who want Judaism to die via tribal heart-block.”… least likely to be knowledgable about Jewish values as distinct from post-enlightment values. There are, of course, some exceptions, like the Niturei Karta group. Yet,these exceptions are often only waiting for the Messiah. Once that happens (or once they believe it happens), they may advocate the biblical approach to ruling Israel: kill every last man, woman and child in groups who oppose your reign. Are Jews better off righteous, even if it means they’re dead? And righteous only according to values that are not their own? ”

T v U’s “Zealot” (I’m making this assumption about T v U) mindset about Jewish values, identity, history and religion – whether or not it is correct Jewishness – needs to be seen in context of its evolution (bearing in mind there are many Jewish denominations and ethnic groupings). Perhaps then T v U’s tribalist paradigm will be be better understood. According to former Israeli Knesset member Uri Avnery: “Until the advent of modern Zionism, Jews never once tried to return en masse to Palestine—indeed, this was explicitly forbidden by their religion… During the last few centuries, European-American Judaism became more and more a religion imbued with a universal moral message. Jewish thinkers believed that it was the “mission” of the Jews to bring universal ethics to the nations of the world, seeing that as the real substance of Judaism…Zionism came into being as a part of the nationalist revolution in Europe and as a reaction to its generally anti-Semitic character. It originated the theory that the Jews are a nation like other European nations, and that this nation must set up its own state in the country now called Palestine. Not by accident did the teachings of Herzl arouse the violent and vocal opposition of almost all the great rabbis of his time, whether Hassidim or their opponents the Mitnagdim, whether orthodox or reformist…BUT WHEN THE ZIONIST COMMUNITY IN PALESTINE ESTABLISHED A STATE, SOMETHING HAPPENED TO JUDAISM THERE. THE CONNECTION WITH THE TERRITORY, THE SOIL, CHANGED THE FACE OF THE RELIGION, AS IT DID TO ALL OTHER PARTS OF NATIONAL LIFE. IT IS NO EXAGGERATION TO CLAIM THAT THE JEWISH RELIGION IN ISRAEL UNDERWENT A MUTATION, WHICH HAS BECOME MORE AND MORE EXTREME IN RECENT YEARS…A RELIGION WITH A UNIVERSAL MESSAGE BECAME A TRIBAL CULT. A religion of ethics became a religion of holy places. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a Jew of the old kind, defined the religion of the settlers as a pagan, idolatory cult…The new cult of the temple is the climax of this process. The practical preparations for the destruction of the mosques and the restoration of the temple, together with animal sacrifices and other temple cults, constitute a break with the last two thousand years of Jewish religion. It is a religious revolution of historic dimensions…If this tendency becomes dominant in the State of Israel, it will not, I believe, lead to the building of the Third Temple but to the destruction of the “Third House”. The Second Temple, together with the Jewish people in this country, came to a violent end because a small minority of fanatical Zealots, who were very similar to today’s extremist settlers, came to power in the Jewish community and dragged it into a mad, hopeless war. That can happen again.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery09202004.html

For views of some of the Jews who T v U is lamenting about read the following sites. The fourth link makes interesting reading: “The Orthodox Jewish response to the criticism of the Iranian President”.  According to the Neturei Karta orthodox Jews, “Neturei Karta oppose the so-called “State of Israel” not because it operates secularly, but because the entire concept of a sovereign Jewish state is contrary to Jewish Law… Jews are not allowed to dominate, kill, harm or demean another people and are not allowed to have anything to do with the Zionist enterprise, their political meddling and their wars…. The true Jews are against dispossessing the Arabs of their land and homes. According to the Torah, the land should be returned to them.”
http://www.nkusa.org/
http://www.nkusa.org/AboutUs/index.cfm
http://www.nkusa.org/AboutUs/Zionism/judaism_isnot_zionism.cfm
http://www.nkusa.org/activities/Statements/2005Oct28Iran.cfm
http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/jews_against_zionism.html
http://www.jewsnotzionists.org/
http://web.media.mit.edu/~nitin/mideast/chomsky_lecture.html
http://www.cam.org/~rsilver/jewspeakout.htm

Although the great Jew Albert Einstein was a universalist (I guess T v U would say he subscribes to “recondite, hypocrtical universalism”), the Zionists exploited his fame. According to Alfred Lilienthal, “Einstein, despite the Time’s incessant recitals to the contrary, clearly opposed the creation of the State of Israel… In his testimony in January 1946 before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, and in answer to the specific question whether refugee settlement in Palestine demanded a Jewish state, Einstein stated: “The State idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected with narrow-mindedness and economic obstacles. I believe that it is bad. I have always been against it.” He went further to deride the concept of a Jewish commonwealth as an “imitation of Europe, the end of which was brought about by nationalism.” Then, in 1952, in a message to a “Children to Palestine” dinner, Einstein spoke of the necessity of curbing “a kind of nationalism which has arisen in Israel if only to permit a friendly and fruitful co-existence with the Arabs… Einstein referred me to his book Out of My Later Years, published in 1950, in which he had expanded on his philosophy: “I should much rather see a reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together than the creation of a Jewish state. Apart from practical considerations, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain.”
http://www.globalwebpost.com/farooqm/writings/other/einstein.htm
http://www.alfredlilienthal.com/sanctions.htm
_________________________________________

Finally, I haven’t yet even responded to T v U’s comments about my use of the Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper to explain the Israeli tribe’s values, beliefs and culture; T v U’s obsession with “defense of the tribe” and win-lose paradigm; Damour and moral equivalence, scale and balance of Israeli v. Palestinian actions; my credibility, etc.  I’ll do this in my next post. In the meantime, as I wrote before: “the link below contains an Israeli anthropologist’s assessment of the core values, attitudes and behaviours of Israelis.”  It gives perspective on the tribalist mentality in Tribalism vs. Universalism’s posts. 
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison03292003.html

I ended my last post on the impact of Jerusalem:  “Israel’s illegal occupation of this holy Muslim site continues to fuel resentment against Israel in the Muslim world and is a key barrier to peace in the Middle East.”

Osama Bin Laden has cared deeply about Palestine since his youth, according to Middle East history professor Juan Cole and terrorism experts. The Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, Palestinian treatment by the Israelis and U.S. support for Israel were central to Bin Laden’s hatred for America. Bin Laden has repeatedly mentioned Jerusalem and the occupation of Islam’s holiest cities by infidels. Al-Qaeda considers Jerusalem, which is Islam’s third holiest city, to be under foreign “infidel” occupation by Israelis. Osama Bin Laden has repeatedly said that one of the reasons he attacked the US on 9/11 was because of Israeli attacks on the Palestinians. The 9/11 report and/or its staff reports note that Bin Laden twice wanted to move the attack up from September 2001 to punish the US for supporting Israel (See page 18 of 9-11 commission link). Was this fact even reported in the newsmedia?  The World Trade Center was almost certainly chosen largely because al-Qaeda believed it represented a symbol of Jewish capital. Israel’s iron fist policies against Palestinians, settlement colony expansion and continuing annexation of Jerusalem and the West Bank have provided al-Qaeda with Muslim recruits they would not otherwise have. Al-Qaeda cannot be defeated until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is justly resolved. A viable Palestinian state with its capital in and Palestinian flag flying in Old Jerusalem (i.e., Arab East Jerusalem) with authority over the Al Aqsa Mosque “would pull the rug out from under al-Qaeda recruiters on the Jerusalem issue.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1650426,00.html?gusrc=rss
http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_statements/staff_statement_16.pdf

What Israel does to Palestinians affects us all.  However, pro-Israel supporters do not want us to make the connection and the mainstream media rarely mentions it. James’ attempts at diversion at the end of post #17 could have been made 65 years ago by Nazi Germans who want a “cessation of anti-Nazi propaganda” because of the “specious” arguments and “half-truths” supporting claims that the Nazis were exterminating Jews in the early 1940s. Those Nazis would have been upset that people “whip themselves up into a frenzy” trying to prove what “bad guys” they are and prefer the world focus on Africa or on British treatment of its colonies. The Nazis may not want to accuse those people of being “anti-Teutonic” “(for that is a dark and deep hole to peer into)” but instead would advise them to start looking at the “gray areas between good and evil” and examine the source of their fury.  If James was a Polish Jew 65 years ago, wouldn’t he want the world to discuss what was happening?  Sadly, Israel has violated many international laws and Geneva Conventions that were established to prevent Nazi behaviours from being repeated again.
_____________________________________________

James: “Despite claims to the contrary, an 1844 census by the Ottomans found that Jews were the single largest ethnic/religious group in Jerusalem, ahead of Muslims and Christians. (I never claimed Jews were a majority in Palestine in the Ottoman period.) “

The Ottoman census actually indicates that Palestinian Arabs (up to 9,150) were the most likely the majority ethnic group in Jerusalem in 1844, rather than the Jews (7,120). Why? Because Palestinian Arabs can be either Muslim or Christian.  I assume James used a pro-Israel source that carried the following 1844 Ottoman census figures for Jerusalem:  7,120 Jews + 5,760 Muslims + 3,390 Christians = 16,270 total Jerusalem population.  Other pro-Israel sources incorrectly reduced the Muslim population to 5,000 instead of 5,760 (as if 760 Muslim human beings made a big difference).  Note: A tiny number of the Christians were not Arab but Armenian, Greek, etc. so not all Christians were Arabs. Also, the Ottoman census did not include non-Ottoman and non-Palestinians, i.e., citizens of other countries who happened to be in Palestine at the time.  Some pro-Israel writers tried to inflate the Jewish numbers with these foreigners. Justine McCarthy has written a book “The Population of Palestine.”
http://www.mideastweb.org/palpop.htm
http://www.jerusalemiloveyou.net/article.php3?id_article=17

The pro-Israel sites misleadingly trumpeted that Jerusalem had a “Jewish majority” to ignorant readers.  These sites also did not state another obvious fact: that for almost 1400 years before 1917, many Muslim rulers allowed Jews to return to Jerusalem and practice their religion.  Compare this Muslim tolerance to contemporary Israeli leaders who are ethnically cleansing Jerusalem of Palestinian Arab Muslims and Christians, rather than allowing them to return to Jerusalem.

Some info on Jerusalem and its significance to Christians, Muslims, Jews and over a dozen other groups who once invaded and settled in the city:

-  Jerusalem’s Old City, measuring 0.4 sq miles, contains the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (sacred to Christians), Dome of the Rock and al Aqsa mosque (sacred to Muslims), and the Western Wall (sacred to Jews).

-  By the late 18th to early 19th century, the Old City of Jerusalem, had fewer than 10,000 residents, a quarter of them Jewish. Once new buildings had been constructed outside the walled Old City, after 1855, Jerusalem’s population increased, and the percentage of Jewish residents increased especially in the early 20th century.
http://www.jerusalemites.org/jerusalem/ottoman/24.htm
http://www.jerusalemites.org/jerusalem/ottoman/7.htm

-  Jerusalem was captured by various invaders over the last 4,000 years.  Archeological evidence proves that, already in 1900 BCE, Jerusalem was a big and fortified Canaanite city with a sophisticated water system, long before the Hebrews arrived.

-  The Jews were only one of over 20 invaders, and Jewish kingdoms were only one of many periods in ancient Palestine.  Contrary to the Bible, there is no archaeological or historical evidence to confirm that David and Solomon’s believed empire ever existed. The Jewish leader David supposedly captured Jerusalem around 1000 BCE, and it became the capital of a united kingdom of Israel for about 73 years.  David and his son Solomon’s kingdom supposedly lasted only until about 930 BCE when Solomon died.

-  Israel supposedly then divided into two weaker kingdoms, and Jerusalem was the capital of the southern Jewish kingdom of Judah.  (The northern kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians around 721 BCE.)  The Babylonians sacked Jerusalem around 586 BCE, ending Jewish rule over any part of Palestine. The Babylonians expelled most of Jerusalem’s population and destroyed the supposed Jewish temple.  The Jewish religion as we know it came into being only in the Babylonian exile, and since then two thirds of the Jews lived outside of Palestine.  Over the next few centuries, other invaders allowed the Jews to return and the status and influence of the Jews depended on who was the invading ruler.  Roman emperor Hadrian seized and destroyed Jerusalem in 132 AD, and reconstructed it as a Roman colony. Jews were banned.  Jerusalem later became a holy Roman city. 

-  Jerusalem came under Muslim rule from 637 AD to 1917, except for a few interruptions.  Most Muslim rulers allowed Jews to return and Christians were given freedom of worship. The Ottoman empire recognized and protected the rights of Jews and Christians (many Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal were granted refuge in Ottoman lands). Many Jews returned to the Arab world.  However only a few went to Palestine despite Napoleon’s call to the Jews to set up a Jewish State in Palestine. Until the development modern Zionism, a political ideology, Jews never once tried to return in large numbers to Palestine—indeed, this was clearly forbidden by their religion. Still Jerusalem and Palestinian had a small population of Jews for centuries.  In 1917, Jerusalem was captured by British forces (the British had promised Arab independence after WW1 but reneged soon after.). 
http://www.jerusalemites.org/jerusalem/ottoman/index.htm
http://www.jerusalemites.org/jerusalem/ottoman/2.htm

-  The 1947 UN partition plan (which Israel used to declare its independence in 1948 and which was a condition of its joining the UN in 1949) specified Jerusalem to be independent and under UN administration. After the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, the city was divided into two parts: the west and south of the new city was known as West Jerusalem, while the north of the new city and all of the Old City was known as East Jerusalem.

-  In 1967 Israel seized East Jerusalem and tried to make it part of Israel.  UN Security Council resolution 476 (1980) reaffirmed earlier UN SC resolutions on the Holy City of Jerusalem – 252 (1968), 267 (1969), 271 (1969), 298 (1971) and 465 (1980) – and reconfirmed that all measures taken by the expansionist Israel that altered the character and status of the Holy City were legally invalid and violated the Geneva Conventions.
_______________________________________________

James: “This is why Israel needs to be strong, because there is very little room for error in a country with such a tiny landmass.”

Actually Israel, which sits on almost 21,000 sq km and occupies over 6,000 sq km of Palestinian territory, has more than adequate land, if only its policies and actions with Arabs were less belligerent. Two more economically successful nations than Israel on much smaller lands with even less natural resources are Singapore (4.4 million people on 680 sq km) and Hong Kong (7 million on 1,000 sq km). New York City has a population of 8 million on 800 sq km.  Singapore is surrounded by 240 million Muslims, more than Israel has to deal with. The difference between Singapore and Israel is that Singapore did not provoke its Muslim neighbors and steal their land through conquest. Yet Singapore is 40% richer in per capita income than Israel, is the most economically free state in the world and most globalized nation.  It has no natural resources, but Singapore does not get the $5 billion in aid and loan guarantees from the US government that Israel gets every year. In addition, Israel is the world’s fourth most powerful military and the fourth most powerful nuclear power with 200 to 400 undeclared nuclear warheads.

Israel’s 5 million Jews can live securely, comfortably and thrive as a pure Jewish state with a high wall around its borders. All Israel has to do is immediately return a huge chunk of Palestine back to the Palestinians. It would be a magnanimous gesture and all problems would be solved. Note that for decades the Palestinians and the Arab states have acknowledged Israel’s right to exist in peace, if only it withdraws from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (as well as occupied Syrian and Lebanese territories) taken in its 1967 invasion.

Comment #26 “Tribalism vs. Universalism”:  Is this your intellectual rigor and integrity in action, or are you trying to too hard to discredit me by making a mountain out of a molehill?  You need to evaluate whether you yourself made a “hackneyed and dishonest tirade” before you accuse me of the same.  Unless this a lame excuse to evade discussion of your comments, your simplistic tribalist mindset (that even a Nazi mass murderer could have used to rationalize his actions against the Jews), and valid points about the Israel-Palestine problem that affects everyone?  Stand up for your beliefs, facts and arguments!

In any case, the facts are clear and simple to understand, even if you are trying to exploit and twist it.

First, are you sure the “237 hits” and “136 additional hits” you claim to have found are really useful?  As a matter of intellectual rigor, you should go through each and every hit to find out how many have the name ‘Toynbee’ in them. Remember that in comment #20, James accused Toynbee of “spectacular anti-Semitism.”  If Toynbee is not in them, it’s a waste of my time.  Too many religions are fossilized.

Second, James could have responded to my comments by simply pointing me to his information sources, as you did.  It’s really very simple and nothing to get uptight about.

Third, in comment #20, James stated: “Anyone who knows anything about TOYNBEE is aware of his rather SPECTACULAR ANTI-SEMITISM, referring to Judaism as a FOSSILIZED RELIGION…”

- James did not write fossiliSed religion, as you did. Because James wrote “fossiliZed” I Googled [Toynbee “fossilized religion”] and got only one result.  Since Truthdig published my comment, there are now two Google results.  When I Googled “fossilized religion” alone I got mostly useless 259 hits with no Toynbee in them.  Googling [Toynbee “fossilized religion”] gave me these two hits:
http://www.icjs.org/scholars/bachcml.htm
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/12302005_munich_avni/ 

- If James had given me accurate information by writing the British “fossilised” instead of the American “fossilized”, and the spell checker didn’t change the s to z, then perhaps I would have done it your way.

- However, when I did it your way and Googled “fossilised religion” I got 14 useless hits, most with no Toynbee in them or the website you found.  When I Googled [Toynbee “fossilised religion”] I got these two hits:
http://www.gurmatps.org/index.html?other_books/mansukhani/1-general
http://pub35.bravenet.com/faq/show.php?usernum=2954473454&catid=3831

Fourth, T v U, your comments have helped to vindicate my comments to James.  James accused Toynbee of “rather SPECTACULAR ANTI-SEMITISM”, yet you yourself write “irrespective of whether Toynbee was anti-Jew, he most certainly was anti-Israel”.  Too many pro-Israel propagandists are abusing the term “anti-Semitism” to silence criticism of Israel and its policies.  Such abuse is diluting the important value and meaning of the term anti-Semitism: hostility toward, discrimination against or prejudice against Jews or Judaism.  There is a distinction between criticizing a state and its unacceptable policies and making unacceptable comments about any group of people. In fact, in the second link below, Uri Avnery explains how Israel is manufacturing anti-Semites. The first link is the book by Norman Finkelstein (both his parents are Holocaust survivors)  “Beyond Chutzpah : On The Misuse Of Anti-Semitism And The Abuse Of History”.
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/content.php?pg=11
http://gush-shalom.org/archives/article213.html
http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/h092903.html
http://www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org/node.php?id=116
http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann12302003.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,10986 25,00.html
http://www.zmag.org/meastwatch/fiskjourn.htm
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery1002.html

I, too, was about to sign off from this discussion when I saw Tribalism vs. Universalism’s well justified resignation. Tony N really has soured things with such blatant intellectual dishonesty. His capacity for research – and his stamina – are impressive, but to what end? He is like a man who thinks he has found the truth, and that truth is as clear cut a thing as can be imagined, unambiguous as Dick Tracy, with its heroes and villains. His dishonesty, however, ruins that poisonious little dream. He ignores points he does not like, gathers information – mixing history with propaganda – making no effort at all to be balanced, or to see complexity, or to understand that the Jews of Israel are people too.

A representative moment in his infinite rebutals may be seen in response to a comment I made in which I suggested he examine Martin Gilbert’s history of Israel for more information on early Palestinian attacks on Jews. He started with a pedantic correction of the title of Gilbert’s history (quite unneccesary, since I was describing the book, not giving its title) and then spends paragraphs trying to prove that Gilbert is the most devious, hateful, and all around nasty brute historian one could possibly imagine – a kind of pro-Israeli Goebbels. I would acknowledge that Gilbert is pro-Israeli, and does not give full balance to the Arab side of the story, but this does not make him quite the villain that Tony N tries to portray. I merely suggested he look at Gilbert’s description of the early attacks, which are to some extent referenced.

This single instance, the Martin Gilbert episode, is one of many that would have to be addressed in order to straighten out the tangled knot of half-truths (yes, Tony, half-truths) and non-truths that he reels off ad nauseum, all the while handing down to us poor fools admonitions about how the truth can be hard to face, and other such pronouncements from the barren heights of his certainty. (His “fossilized religion” rebuttal, utterly incorrect, as Tribalism vs. Universalism pointed out, is still another example of the arrogance with which he pases out his misinformation.)

I don’t have the time or inclination to get bogged down in this quagmire. Finally, I contend, as I mentioned in an earlier note, that there is something extremely odd about Tony’s obsession that it is reminiscent of the transference of personal rage to political causes by which many escape the complexities of life. That, I think, is somewhere near the botton line: the intolerability of complexity. Whether that be the complexity of Arab and Jewish relations, where there are no clear good guys and bad guys; the complexity of making arguments, where one acknowledges the weaknesses of one’s own case; and the complexity of living, which isn’t pretty. Good luck and shalom.

“Regardless, I did Google for Toynbee and “fossilized religion”.  In the entire Google universe, there was one – and only one – result.  It did not explain what he meant and was not even a direct quote from Toynbee.  If, as James claims, Toynbee spouts “rather spectacular anti-Semitism”, you’d think Google would be flooded with results to enlighten the world about this instance of spectacular anti-Semitism.” - Tony N

I actually followed up on this and found 237 hits. If you google ‘fossilised religion’, you’ll find an 136 additional hits. A good number among these discuss Toynbee’s prejudices at length. One useful snippet is at http://icssa.org/toynbee.html . This particular piece shows nicely that Toynbee denied Israel’s right to exist by employing universalist first principles (propter quid demonstration). Irrespective of whether Toynbee was anti-Jew, he most certainly was anti-Israel. As such, his historical account reflects this predilection.

More to the crux of matters, Tony N throws out the word ‘truth’ as if certain of the intellectual rigor and integrity in his data collection. I will have it no more. I am leaving this forum partially because his tirades are hackneyed and dishonest, but mostly because Avni has not deigned to respond.

Avni! Stand up for your work, or, like Popper, admit a petitio principii!

James: “The notion that Israeli initiated the Arab-Israeli wars is laughable.”

True facts are nothing to laugh about, even though you’ve tried to dismiss the facts as “anti-Israel propaganda”, “speciousness and half-truths”.

The truth cuts trough the heavy fog of Israeli propaganda and revisionism— Israel has been the aggressor against the Arab nations for the most part.  While the Arabs usually admit when they’ve commit acts of aggression, Israel typically denies it did anything, denies it did anything wrong or tries to incriminate Arabs for Israeli crimes (e.g., Lavon Affair).  In 1973, two Arab states did attack Israel (see below). However, the Israeli military and/or Zionists militias initiated attacks against Arabs and/or Arab nations in 1948, 1954, 1956, 1967, 1982, 1985 and on other occasions. Here are examples:

- In 1947-48 Zionist militia attacks on and massacres of Palestinian Arabs partly prompted the first Israeli-Arab war in 1948. (see below)

- In 1954, Israel committed acts of terrorism in Egypt against US and British targets (called the Lavon Affair or Operation Suzannah). Egyptian Jewish and Israeli terrorists, ordered by the Israeli government, fire bombed several US and British buildings in Egypt, including a US diplomatic facility.  These Israeli terrorists left evidence behind in an attempt to implicate Arabs as the culprits. Israel planned the terror attacks to upset budding US-Egyptian relations. In March 2005, Israel’s president honored nine of the Egyptian Jew terrorists. “We decided now to express our respect for these heroes,” President Moshe Katzav said after presenting the three surviving members of the bomber ring with certificates of appreciation at a Jerusalem ceremony. Incredible – Israel honors Israeli terrorists who attacked America as heroes and gave them certificates. Do you know of any Arab terrorists getting certificates of appreciation?

- In 1956, Israel illegally invaded Egypt (see below).

- In 1967, Israel invaded and occupied territories of Egypt, Syria and Jordan (see below)

-  In 1978, Israel invaded South Lebanon after Lebanon-based Palestinians killed 35 Israelis.  Israel’s invasion destroyed 82 Lebanon villages and killed 2,000 people, mostly civilians.

- In 1982, Israel illegally invaded Lebanon (see my previous post) on a false pretext, killing over 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, mostly women and children.  Israel violated UN Security Council resolution 509 and US brokered ceasefires. The brutal invasion and occupation, which included massacres in Sabra and Shatila, led to the creation of Lebanese militia groups such as Hezbollah to drive Israel out of their country.  Till today, Israel has not fully withdrawn from a part of Lebanon.

- In 1985, Israel illegally attacked Tunis, Tunisia with “smart bombs” killing about 75 people, mostly civilians, and tearing many to bits.  The UN Security Council unanimously passed a resolution condemning Israel for an act of armed aggression (even the US abstained; the US usually vetoes or stops UN resolutions against Israel)

- In 1985, Israel’s Iron Fist Operation in Southern Lebanon with massacres, atrocities and kidnappings.

This is not a complete list of Israel’s attacks on Arabs.
_____________

Okay, let’s review the 1973, 1948, 1956 and 1966 wars.  I’ll start with the 1973 war since it was clearly started by those “unremitting murderous” Arabs…

1973 ARAB-ISRAELI WAR (Yom Kippur War). Arabs were the aggressors.  However, James’ description in his previous post is a nice fable of Israeli propaganda.

-  This was the ONLY time that Arab nations initiated a war against Israel, but even this was the result of some Israeli provocation and rejectionism.

- Why did the Arabs attack?  Israel, for six years, rejected Egypt and Syria’s peaceful diplomatic attempts to recover Arab territories illegally seized by Israel in its 1967 invasion.  Even the UN mediator felt the Arab peace proposals met UN Security Council resolution 242, in which all parties were to agree to a comprehensive peace in exchange for Israel returning Egyptian, Syrian and other Arab territory seized in 1967. Israel’s answer to Egypt’s 1971 peace proposal was provocative:  Israel accelerated building illegal settlement colonies on occupied Egyptian Sinai (under international law the occupying country cannot build settlements on occupied land). According to Uri Avnery: “after the 1967 Israeli invasion Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan “led a nation intoxicated by victory. They did not dream of giving up any of the conquered territories. For this purpose, they spread contempt for the Arabs, the feeling that Arabs were vastly inferior, that one could safely ignore them. “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people,” Golda pronounced, and Dayan made jokes about the Arab armies.”  Imagine Kuwait peacefully asking Iraq to return its territory for 6 years, but a laughing Saddam rejects peace and starts building Iraqi colonies and pumping Kuwaiti oil and humiliating Kuwaitis. 

- So in 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a limited invasion against Israeli forces only in the occupied Arab territories.  Their goal was to regain their Arab territories back from Israel, and then get the UN to end the war.  The Arabs were not interested in invading, occupying and destroying the state of Israel itself. Yes, the Arabs had brilliant initial victories and almost won their territories back had the Americans not saved Israel with arms airlifts/shipments totaling 35,000 tons and other support (almost starting a confrontation with the Soviets in the process), and Israel almost used its nuclear weapons instead of losing a battle fair and square. An Arab oil embargo was imposed on the military backers and supporters of Israel.  In violation of UN resolution 338, Israel broke the ceasefire to attack the Golan and Suez front.  According to Uri Avnery: after the war “Anwar Sadat was able to lead Egypt towards peace only because he was admired as the commander who had defeated Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Only after the Egyptian people had won back their national pride were they able to consider peace with the enemy (with Israel).”
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery08182003.html
http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/article66.html

- Israeli historian Ilan Pappe explained the “pragmatic nature of the Arab military plan. After all this was a priori a limited war aimed at breaking a deadlock in the diplomatic efforts to solve the conflict. Thwarted after two years of futile attempts to convince Israel to accept the principle of land for peace, President Sadat of Egypt decided, in alliance with Syria, to try and take by force the areas occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. The war was conducted in such a way as to facilitate the swift intervention of the United Nations and the two superpowers. There was no room (for Israel) to hide an aggressive Israeli policy behind claims that the state faced neighbors bent on destroying it in all-out war. Most Israelis were shaken in their previous confidence that its military could impose its will upon demand. Given the Arabs’ relative success in the 1973 confrontation, new questions were raised about the previous wars. The reasons behind Israel’s victory in the 1948 war were probed afresh. As a result, the official version of Israel’s victory as miraculous was displaced by a more normal, commonsensical view.” See the section “The 1973 Arab-Israeli War” for this Israeli historian’s summary of the facts in the link.
http://www.ameu.org/uploads/vol31_issue1_1998.pdf
http://www.counterpunch.org/faruqui10152003.html
_____________

1948 ISRAELI-ARAB WAR:  Israel was the aggressor. 
- The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe set the record straight when he answered the question: “What Really Happened 50 years Ago (in 1948)”.
http://www.ameu.org/uploads/vol31_issue1_1998.pdf

- In late 1947 and early 1948, pre-Israel Zionist militias started attacking and occupying mixed Arab-Jewish and Palestinian villages and transport routes, not just within the proposed area for a Jewish state(54% of Palestine) in the UN partition plan but also within the proposed area for a Palestinian state (45% of Palestine).  The Zionists terrorized (massacred, raped, looted, etc.) and expelled Palestinians, and confiscated their property.  In other words, the Zionists were ethnically cleansing the vulnerable Palestinians off their homelands (by the end of 1948, over 750,000 Palestinians had become refugees).  Read the sections “Zionist policies of territorial expansion” and “The first Palestinian exodus” in the linked UN document below: “From writings of Zionist leaders, it is evident that Zionist policy was to occupy, during the period of (British) withdrawal, as much territory as possible (including the “West Bank”) beyond the boundaries assigned to the Jewish State by the partition resolution….(Future Israeli PM Menachem) Begin writes: “In the months preceding the Arab invasion… we continued to make sallies into the Arab area… Our hope lay in gaining control of territory.”… (Then Israeli PM David) Ben-Gurion writes: “nothing a tottering Administration (meaning the British Mandatory) could unkindly do stopped us from reaching our goal on May 14, 1948 in a State made larger and Jewish by the Haganah ...”…This territorial expansion by the use of force resulted in a large-scale exodus of refugees from the areas of hostilities.”
http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/d442111e70e417e3802564740045a309!OpenDocument

- On May 14, 1948, as the British Mandate was about to end, Israel unilaterally proclaimed independence against Palestinian wishes.  The Palestinians were still negotiating with the UN to change the plan (one side or the other did not accept other partition plans since the late 1930s). By this time, the Zionist militias had occupied more Palestinian land than allowed by the UN partition plan.  A number of weak armies from Arab nations intervened to protect Palestinian Arab lives and property from Israeli attack in those zones allocated to the Palestinian state (the British military administration had ceased on May 15) as well as to end the Zionist Jewish state that had been established in Palestine (since the proposed UN General Assembly partition plan Israel used to declare independence was nonbinding and opposed by Palestine’s Arab majority). The Arabs battled the Israelis mostly on the Palestinian side of the partition, not the Israeli side.  The Israelis, who violated a number of UN ceasefires over several months, fought to conquer as much land as possible and establish a homogenous national state that would be as large as possible. The Israelis were a better prepared and led military, and outnumbered the Arab forces by at least two to one.

-  By the end of 1948, Israel occupied an additional 23% of Palestine, which it annexed in 1949. Along the way a Zionist militia (led by future Israeli prime minister Yitzak Shamir) murdered UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte (who had been a big savior of the Jews during the Nazi Holocaust).  Thus the Jews, who formed almost a third of Palestine’s population on the eve of the war, seized almost 78% of Palestine instead of the 54% allocated to them in a non-binding UN GA resolution.
_____________________

1956 ISRAELI-ARAB WAR:  Israel was the aggressor. 

- In 1956, Israel illegally invaded Egypt. Although James claims it is “complex”, it is not. Israel’s invasion happened two years after the Lavon Affair, when Israeli agents committed acts of terror in Egypt.  In 1956, Israeli PM David Ben-Gurion colluded with France and Britain to invade and conquer the Sinai peninsula from Egypt.  Israel’s invasion of Sinai started two day’s before England and France started attacking Egypt. Israel also expelled thousands of Arabs—citizens of Israel—from Israel’s Galilee region during the 1956 attack on Egypt (this fact was revealed by former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who at the time was commander of Israel’s northern region. He said that 3,000 to 5,000 Arabs—Israeli citizens—were expelled by the Israeli Army to Syria at that time).

- Ben-Gurion declared the Third Israeli Kingdom. He believed that the Americans were preoccupied with their election and would not interfere. He was wrong.  US President Dwight Eisenhower, who was standing for re-election, expected a landslide majority and did not need the Jewish vote. So Eisenhower presented Ben-Gurion with an ultimatum: evacuate the Sinai or else. Four days after setting up his kingdom, Ben-Gurion announced its ending.  Israel was forced to withdraw. (Eisenhower also forced Britain to withdraw… if only present-day US governments would force Israel to make peace with the Palestinians and give up land it illegally conquered since 1948). After the war, the occupying Israeli Army slaughtered hundreds of Palestinians and robbed homes in the Gaza Strip.
___________________

1966 ISRAELI-ARAB WAR:  Israel was the aggressor in the Six-Day War.

Again, James’ description of the 1967 Six-Day war is a nice one-sided Israeli fable, consistent with Israeli propaganda about the war, but he leaves key facts out and ignores the real context – it was Israel that originally provoked and launched the war, not the Arabs (who were reacting to Israel) and Israel’s aggression in the past worried the Arabs.

-  Israel had provoked Syria and Egypt before the war. For example, Syria took seriously Israel’s threats to overthrow its new government.  So Syria signed a defense treaty with Egypt. In April 1967, Israel attempted to cultivate a disputed Arab land in the Syrian-Israeli demilitarized zone, thus triggering a confrontation. A month later, Syria informed Egypt of Israel’s troop concentrations along its border. Given Israel’s aggression against Egypt in the 1950s, Nasser promised to aid Syria in May 1967, and sent Egyptian troops to Eastern Sinai. Egypt asked the UN forces to leave the 1956 truce lines, blockaded the Tran Straits and Jordan signed a defense pact with Egypt.

-  On June 5, 1967, Israel launched an aggressive war against the militaries of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq.  Israel won within six days, after first rejecting the UN Security Council’s call for an immediate ceasefire on June 6… then later accepting a UN ceasefire which it later violated to capture the Golan Heights and Egyptian territory. The Israelis occupied East Jerusalem, containing the third holiest shrine of Islam (Al Aqsa mosque which Sharon provocatively visited in 2000, starting the current intifada) as well as the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai. Former Israeli PM: Menahem Begin: ‘In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.’” Former Israeli PM: Yitzhak Rabin:  “I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to The Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it.”.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/origin.html#1967

- In November 1967, the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 242, which laid out two primary conditions for the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. First, it called for the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” Second, it called for the “termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”

-  However, Israel refused to withdraw from the occupied Arab territories. The 1967 Six Day War led to the 1973 Yom Kippur War in 1973.  Because Israel nearly lost the 1973 war, Israel realized it had to make peace with Egypt and returned the Sinai. It also made peace with Jordan in the 1990s, but did not return East Jerusalem. To this day, Israel’s illegal occupation of this holy Muslim site continues to fuel resentment against Israel in the Muslim world and is a key barrier to peace in the Middle East.  It was one of the reasons Osama bin Laden has cited for attacking the United States on 9/11. An entire generation of Palestinians has grown up in the West Bank and Gaza under brutal Israeli occupation since 1967, and they see no hope for their future given Israeli rejection of a just peace.

I’ll address comment #23 later.  In the meantime, here a follow-up to comment #20 (James).

John Pilger Video: Palestine is Still the Issue
Pilger: “Twenty-five years ago, I made a film called Palestine Is Still The Issue. It was about a nation of people - the Palestinians - forced off their land and later subjected to a military occupation by Israel. An occupation condemned by the United Nations and almost every country in the world, including Britain. But Israel is backed by a very powerful friend, the United States. So in 25 years, if we’re to speak of the great injustice here, nothing has changed.”
http://independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=871&fcategory_desc=Under Reported
_____________________________________________

James denies the truth about how Israel was founded, when he accuses Prof. Toynbee of “spectacular anti-Semitism”.  Since James did not like “the long quotes from the “eminent” historian Arnold Toynbee” I’ll quote David Ben-Gurion, a founder of Israel and its first prime minister:

-  “‘in our political argument abroad, we minimize Arab opposition to us…When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves—that is only half the truth…” Ben-Gurion urged, ‘let us not ignore the truth among ourselves…” The truth was that “politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside’... ” (1938)

-  “No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of the Land Of Israel. (A) Jewish state in part (of Palestine) is not an end, but a beginning ...  Our possession is important not only for itself ...  through this we increase our power, and every increase in power facilitates getting hold of the country in its entirety. Establishing a (small) state .... will serve as a very potent lever in our historical effort to redeem the whole country.” (1937)

-  “We must expel Arabs and take their places…  and, if we have to use force – not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places – then we have force at our disposal.” (1937)

-  “If I knew it was possible to save all (Jewish) children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to Eretz-Yisrael, I would choose the latter – because we are faced not only with the accounting of these (Jewish) children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish People.” (1938)
__________________________________________

James: “Anyone who knows anything about Toynbee is aware of his rather spectacular anti-Semitism, referring to Judaism as a fossilized religion, and wondering aloud about the irrationality of the continued existence of the Jews.”

Actually, anyone who knows anything about Toynbee is aware of his approach to history— as the rise and fall of culture-based civilizations and religions based on their successful response (rise), or lack of response (fall), to challenges confronting each civilization. In this context, Toynbee has made hard observations about many civilizations, not just the Jews, that have offended people.  Sometimes the truth hurts.

Regardless, I did Google for Toynbee and “fossilized religion”.  In the entire Google universe, there was one – and only one – result.  It did not explain what he meant and was not even a direct quote from Toynbee.  If, as James claims, Toynbee spouts “rather spectacular anti-Semitism”, you’d think Google would be flooded with results to enlighten the world about this instance of spectacular anti-Semitism. 

Pro-Israel propagandists want to discredit Toynbee because his historical facts are the basis for our understanding of history of that era. Thus I have to consider the possibility that – since he had no facts and arguments to not attack the messenger’s message – James tried to attack the messenger as “anti-Semitic”.

One problem with misusing the anti-Semitism label is that 300 million Arabs are Semites, just like Jews (even if some claim that Ashknazi Jews are not Semites).  When it comes to spectacular anti-Semitism, Israelis are proficient.  For example, let’s consider what Robert Fisk wrote: “Rafael Eytan, the former Israeli chief of staff, had referred to Palestinians as “cockroaches in a glass jar”. Menachem Begin called them “two-legged beasts”. The Shas party leader who suggested that God should send the Palestinian “ants” to hell, also called them “serpents”. In August 2000, Barak called them crocodiles. Israeli chief of staff Moshe Yalon described the Palestinians as a “cancerous manifestation” and equated the military action in the occupied territories with “chemotherapy”. In March 2001, the Israeli tourism minister, Rehavem Zeevi, called Arafat a “scorpion”. Sharon repeatedly called Arafat a “murderer” and compared him to bin Laden.”  What was it that Toynbee said?

Tony N:

Firstly, I am not interested in Israel behaving in an idyllic, liberal fashion. I am interested in defense of the tribe. Halper denies the historical narrative which I affirm, as such he disagrees with my ontology of victim and aggressor. The mere fact that he disagrees does not negate the argument that defense of tribes often runs contrary to universalist mores, or that it is better to fight for ethno-nationalism than for recondite, hypocrtical universalism.

Regarding your comments on Israel’s association with the Phalangists who massacred Palestinians at Sabra and Shatilla, I wonder if any of your sources mention the wanton murder, by Palestinian forces (directly, rather than through some proxy), of hundreds of Christian civilians at Damour on January 20th, 1976? Does this reflect a chance of better (read: more liberal) rule by the Palestinians?

On the contrary, it means that Israel will be the same land, with the same measures taken to defend its political institutions and people, but the particular nationality, culture and religion will be change. That is, the only thing that changes is that Jews lose, Palestinians win. It’s clear after the rise of the suicide bomber, the wall, children being brainwashed into become Shaheeds via ‘Voice of Palestine’ radio and other major social currents in Palestinian life, and in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, that neither side is taking a liberal stance here. Both will do whatever it takes to win. You can continue to cite your Sabra and Shatillas, and I’ll have my Damours. You can cite Deir Yassine, and I’ll cite the literally thousands terror attacks originating from that town before the Irgun attacked it (and the efforts the Irgun made to alert the civilian population and enable them to leave…). You can cite your Plan Dalet of the Hagana, and I’ll cite the ALA attack on soil bought by the JNF (15% of modern Israel).

The bottom line here is not that if we aggregate all of these historical events we can net a balance of which side is worse (read: less liberal). It is rather that both sides have in the past been willing to do whatever it takes to have their tribe win out. The Palestinians have become increasingly willing to sacrifice the quality and quantity of their lives to win, while the Israelis have become less so. Given time, I don’t doubt that the Palestinians will prevail. But don’t delude yourself into thinking that it is because the Palestinians are more ‘liberal’ than Israelis. It is because the Israelis will disappear in a wash of universalism.

Also, mentioning Halper qua anthropologist and not qua activist is seriously damaging to your credibility as someone who is rigorous about sourcing and data collection (as you say, you like to quote ‘authoritative evidence’). Halper cites no empirical data in this article. He evidences no statistical method or blinding of a study. Rather, he states his personal beliefs about the Israeli worldview. Granted that he is entitled to his opinion, this article is NOT anthropology. In fact, there is no evidence on your link to suggest that any of what is said reflects the core values of Israelis in any remote way.

Even so, I fail to see how this negates the fact that increasing numbers of Jews worldwide are because distanced from Israel and their ethno-nationalism.

#21 Tribalism vs. Universalism:  Well, since Sherna Berger Gluck brought up Sabra and Shatila in post #6 , let’s understand this example of the righteous, idyllic and universalist suzerainty enacted by Israel. The first link is an independent eye witness account by orthopaedic surgeon Dr. Ang Swee Chai:  “The slaughter of unarmed children, women, the aged and the infirm was shocking. For me, I was doubly outraged that I had to discover the truth about a brave and generous people only through their deaths. Until then, I never knew Palestinian refugees existed. As a fundamentalist Christian, I had been a supporter of Israel, hated Arabs and saw the Palestinian Liberation Organisation as terrorists to be loathed and feared.”  Dr. Ang’s account is corroborated.  Read Peace for Galilee and Limited War In Lebanon in Noam Chomsky’s book “Fateful Triangle:  The United States, Israel and The Palestinians” for an excellent summary of Israel’s illegal invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which killed over 20,000 people.  The second link contains Robert Fisk’s review of the Sabra abd Shatila massacre (as well as his thoughts on Sharon as a bonus).
http://www.inminds.co.uk/from-beirut-to-jerusalem.html
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11479.htm

The link below contains an Israeli anthropologist’s assessment of the core values, attitudes and behaviours of Israelis. Read it and then read post #21 again to get perspective and context on #21’s arguments and premises. Don’t get trapped by the simplistic thinking of “Tribalism vs. Universalism.” 
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison03292003.html
_________________________________________________

#20 James’s rebuttal is characterized by his emphatic claim that “Tony N’s seemingly endless capacity to research and describe instances of Jewish crimes against Arabs is only matched by HIS TOTAL NEGLECT OF THE REVERSE… Still, Tony N seems to enjoy nothing better than listing Jewish crimes while IGNORING THE OBVIOUS FACT OF ARAB CRIMES (emphasis mine).”

That’s not correct.  I did not “neglect” the “reverse”, much less “total neglect”.  In my last post, I clearly wrote about Palestinian “violence”, “anti-Jewish riots”, “revolt” and “attacks”.  In fact, unlike James, I even quoted authoritative evidence to confirm that Palestinian violence had happened.

Despite James’ concern for balance, he made this questionable comment in his first post:  “the above list of Israeli/Jewish violence should be seen in the context of the UNREMITTINGLY MURDEROUS ACTIVITIES PROPAGATED BY ARABS/PALESTINIANS AGAINST JEWS FOR MORE THAN A HUNDRED YEARS (emphasis mine)”.  The response in my last post should be seen in this context.

James wrote “his CLAIM that British records show no evidence of these attacks is a bit much (emphasis mine)”.  This is not a claim, but a true fact.  British records do state that for 80 years before 1920 (i.e., at least 1840 to 1920) there was no recorded instance of Arab attacks on Jews in Palestine.  Even the representatives of the Zionist Jews did not dispute this fact during the Shaw Commission inquiry in 1929-30.  Don’t you think that the Zionists living in the 1920s would have known what happened to Jews in Palestine before 1920, and would have been motivated to provide evidence to the British – their friends – who ran the inquiry?  (Martin Gilbert, the British Zionist Jewish historian was born in 1936, and would have best had an indirect understanding of what happened.) Furthermore, evidence given by the representatives of all parties, including the Jews, told the Shaw Commission that before the First World War “the Jews and Arabs lived side by side if not in amity, at least with tolerance”.  The Shaw Commission (led by a former British colonial chief justice and which included the pro-Zionist commission member Harry Snell) took evidence from the representatives of the key parties – Zionist Jews, non-Zionist indigenous Jews, Palestinian Arabs, British officials and others.  James should read the Shaw Commission report “Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August 1929”.
http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/aeac80e740c782e4852561150071fdb0!OpenDocument

James statement “referencing British records from Palestine of attacks on Jews is a little like asking wolves to count the hens” is biting the hand of friends who once helped the Zionist Jews and gave their lives for them.  Without significant British help, there would be no Israel today. The British and the Zionists were the “wolves” in a conspiracy against the Palestinians, who were the victimized “hens” being slowly eaten for dinner ever since. The British were heavily pro-Zionist in the 1920s (search for “Balfour Declaration”, “Palestine Mandated” and “Churchill Memorandum” in link below… Martin Gilbert should have noted that Winston Churchill supported Zionist Jews’ goals in Palestine).  After WW1, the British facilitated the mass migration of foreign Zionist Jews from Europe into Palestine and militarily shield the Jewish immigrants.  The British did not have to open Palestine’s doors to Jewish immigration, and this was done against Palestinian wishes. But even the British were constrained by the consequences of this Zionist colonization and injustice against the majority Palestinians. There was only so much the British could do without the British Mandate becoming a total farce.  The Zionists wanted the British to do far more than they already did, but even doting parents have to place limits on insatiable children before it gets out of hand.
http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/aeac80e740c782e4852561150071fdb0!OpenDocument

Despite their pro-Zionist bias, the British came to the conclusion that there was no record of Palestinian violence before 1920. I chose the British/UN records (not Palestinian or Zionist sources) for simple reasons – the British were the mandated rulers of Palestine between 1920 to 1948, and the British government was pro-Zionist and had been facilitating the accomplishment of Zionist goals against Palestinian wishes.

These true facts are part of the real history, even if, decades later, revisionist Zionist historians tried to minimize and revise the history with a narrative that fits their Zionist version. Unfortunately the sea of Zionist revisionist history has drowned out the truth.

For example, James wants me to take “Martin Gilbert’s history of Israel” (actually it’s Israel: A History) as a “starting place should he be inclined to study” the “numerous and well documented” “occasions of Arab violence against early Zionist settlers.”  A quick check of amazon.com indicates that while the pro-Israel reviewers loved it, other reviewers found the book to be misleading and heavily pro-Israel in bias, and contains numerous omissions, selective quoting, inconsistencies and poor referencing of sources. As one reviewer said: “If you are an Israeli or a Jews who’s interested in feeling good about Israel, then that’s your book. It gets you so high to the point that you need no Hash. On the other hand, if you’re a historian who seeks the truth, this book is extremely misleading, the quotes are selective, and the presented facts are often contradictory.”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0688123627/qid=1137053319/sr=8-6/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i6_xgl14/002-9385249-9543202?n=507846&s=books&v=glance

Perhaps James can convince me that Martin Gilbert is an objective authority who can be trusted.  To me, Gilbert is an academic supportive of Zionism who is pro-Zionist/Israel in his chauvinism, interpretation and bias, and exaggerations. 

-  In Israel: A History, Gilbert wrote: “Israel … following a victorious war in 1967, has had to share part of its own land with another people.”’  This is misleading. According to Gilbert the West Bank and Gaza were part of the state of Israel’s ‘own land’ even before 1967 (but these are Palestinian territories as the UN and International Court have designated) and/or that Israel’s conquest makes these Palestinian territories part of Israel (but this would be a violation of international laws and UN resolutions… otherwise Iraq could have held on to Kuwait)

-  In addition, Gilbert maintained that Israel’s leaders from the beginning perceived the conquered territories as an undesired ‘burden that was to weigh heavily on Israel’.  According to Norman Finkelstein, “careful review of the historical record, however, suggests that they were just waiting to happen. In light of the Zionist movement’s long-standing territorial imperatives, (Zeev) Sternhell concludes: ‘The role of occupier, which Israel began to play only a few months after the lightning victory of June 1967 was not the result of some miscalculation on the part of the rulers of that period or the outcome of a combination of circumstances, but another step in the realization of Zionism’s major ambitions.’ ”  Other facts also prove that Finkelstein is right, that Israel had prepared for years before the 1967 war.

-  According to Finkestein: “Martin Gilbert argues that “there was a strong desire among the Labor Zionists to live together with the Arabs, and not, as many of the extremists hoped, to make them subordinate to Jewish nationalist needs, or even to drive them out of Palestine altogether.” Scholarship does not sustain this claim. Labor Zionism was committed to the “building of a Jewish society by Jews alone, from foundation stone to rafter” in “all of Palestine” (Anita Shapira). Accordingly, as Zeev Sternhell shows in an important study, “nobody fought against the Arab worker more vigorously than [Labor Zionists]; nobody preached national, economic and social segregation with more determination than the Labor movement.” “

- Gilbert’s “Never Again: A History of the Holocaust” contains an example of his pro-Jewish chauvinism: “I think that European Jews were the most knowledgeable people on earth because they wanted to know about the world around them.”  Can Gilbert’s conclusions be trusted if he jumps to conclusions without providing reasonable evidence to back his claims?

- As a historian, Gilbert’s makes questionable dramatic claims. For example, in ‘Auschwitz and the Allies’ (p.26) Gilbert states:  “The deliberate attempt to destroy systematically all of Europe’s Jews was unsuspected in the spring and early summer of 1942: the very period during which it was at its most intense, and during which hundreds of thousands of Jews were being gassed every day at Belzec, Chelmo, Sobibor and Treblinka.” If “hundreds of thousands every day” implies a minimum of 200,000 Jews murdered per day, this would amount to 6 million each month or 72 million in one year.  This does not even include figures for Auschwitz.

I’ll reply to the rest of James’s comments later.

Here again we have the story of the reflexive universalist providing ideological ammunition for decidedly illiberal tribalist. I am certain that Tony N and the whole lot of Palestinian irredentists derive great strength and satisfaction from the fact that Jews have preponderantly supplanted their Jewish identities with liberal-democrat ones. Indeed, Jewishness is becomingly increasingly synonymous with voting Democrat unless you are among the benighted ‘fundamentalist’ groups (whose epistemology, by the way, is no more or less valid than the secular, ‘enlightened’ lot).

Israeli and diaspora Jews are increasingly doubting their cause. As so many of my friends say, “Why are so many people dying over a piece of land? They should share it!” An important logical corollary of this universalism is that Western culture was wrong for asserting its dominance. I find it hard to believe that this line of thinking is unrelated to the civilization-wide suicide playing out in the western world right now.

One ridiculous aspect to note about this Western contrition over its past is that those tribal zealots who are most effective at milking the guilt are those who portray their cause as an essentially liberal one. Hence, Tony N, Hanan Ashrawi, Hussein Ibish et al. would have us believe that the Palestinians would enact a more idyllic, universalist suzerainty if they were to replace the existing Zionist (read: racist) entity. However, liberalism and assertion of ‘rights’ is not a concept that permeates all cultures, and it is a very easy thing to project these values onto murders and scallywags of all stripes (...Dr. Che). Thus, the success of this strategy seems to reflect only more ethnocentrism and unwavering belief in the moral superiority of liberalism (another Western value…) on the part of liberal-democrats.

As such, I have no sympathy for people who want to see Western culture put its own head on the chopping block. Jews who see Israel as a stain on Jewish history, who want Jews there to give up house and home, who want to to give up the only independent power that stands up for Jewish values (even if they are only the nationalistic aspects of those values) are essentially those who want Judaism to die via tribal heart-block.

I say this because these tend to be the same Jews who inter-marry at the highest rates, who have the fewest children, who are least likely to give their kids a Jewish education, and who are least likely to be knowledgable about Jewish values as distinct from post-enlightment values. There are, of course, some exceptions, like the Niturei Karta group. Yet,these exceptions are often only waiting for the Messiah. Once that happens (or once they believe it happens), they may advocate the biblical approach to ruling Israel: kill every last man, woman and child in groups who oppose your reign.

Are Jews better off righteous, even if it means they’re dead? And righteous only according to values that are not their own? This is the crux of the matter, and I wonder how Avni would actually answer this question.

Tony N’s seemingly endless capacity to research and describe instances of Jewish crimes against Arabs is only matched by his total neglect of the reverse. Is he really implying that Arabs did not attack Jews starting from the initiation of the Zionist enterprise? He is quite correct in citing instances of Arab generosity to Jews, but again he neglects to mention the aid that Jews have provided to Arabs from the 19th century to the present. Does that, however, describe the entirety of their relationship. Obviously not. The problem here, and the point I have been endeavoring make, is that neither people – Jews nor Arabs – are endowed with some intrinsic evil or virtue. Still, Tony N seems to enjoy nothing better than listing Jewish crimes while ignoring the obvious fact of Arab crimes. He claims that the Arabs were welcoming and kind to Jews from Europe when they first arrived in Palestine, and that there were no attacks on Jews. This claim is beyond ignorance, it is a matter of putting on the blinders, of digging for facts only where they support one’s ideology. The occasions of Arab violence against early Zionist settlers are numerous and well documented. A quick perusal of Martin Gilbert’s history of Israel will give Mr. N a starting place should he be inclined to study that particularly sordid area of history. His claim that British records show no evidence of these attacks is a bit much. Referencing British records from Palestine of attacks on Jews is a little like asking wolves to count the hens.

A few quick refutations:
- Despite claims to the contrary, an 1844 census by the Ottomans found that Jews were the single largest ethnic/religious group in Jerusalem, ahead of Muslims and Christians. (I never claimed Jews were a majority in Palestine in the Ottoman period.)
- The United States did not militarily support Israel until the Yom Kippur War in 1973 when the USSR was supplying arms to the Arab countries as fast as they could. Europe was not much better. France sold Mirages to Israel for a time, then stopped. Czechoslovakia also sold arms for a while to Israel, then stopped. So, my earlier contention that Israel was weak in its first two decades of existence is not a myth. The British, who had sold arms briefly to the Israelis refused to sell replacement parts to them during the Six-Day War, claiming to not want to take sides. At the same time, the British were training Egyptian fighter pilots. When an Israeli diplomat pointed out the discrepancy, a British minister suggested that Israeli should be happy that these pilots were still in training and not able to join the fight.
- The long quotes from the “eminent” historian Arnold Toynbee is quite something. Anyone who knows anything about Toynbee is aware of his rather spectacular anti-Semitism, referring to Judaism as a fossilized religion, and wondering aloud about the irrationality of the continued existence of the Jews
- The notion that Israeli initiated the Arab-Israeli wars is laughable. It is true that Israel struck first in the Six-Day war, but again Tony N ignores the context. Israel’s Arab neighbors had mobilized their armies and lined them up on the border. Gamal Nasser of Egypt was at the same time public proclaiming on the radio the intention of the Arab armies, which he said would shortly be attacking Israel, to wipe the Jewish state off the map. The Israelis waited as long as they dared before attacking first. This was not so different from most of the other campaigns except for two: the Suez campaign and the Yom Kippur War. The former is complex, but admittedly quite different from the other wars. The Yom Kippur War resembled the Six-Day War very closely, with the Arab countries lining up of their armies on the Israeli border and calling for Israel’s destruction. The difference was that Israel waited this time for the Arabs to attack first, fearing that they would otherwise be branded by world opinion as aggressors. And as a result of their hesitancy, they nearly lost the war. They suffered huge losses (relative to their size) and certainly proved the wisdom of their attacking first in the Six-Day War. A week or so later, the Israelis were on the outskirts of Damascus and had meanwhile surrounded the Egyptian Third Army. I mention this not as proof of Israeli prowess, but to conjure up what might have happened had the initial success of the Arab armies been just a little greater. The equivalent of being on the outskirts of Damascus would, for the Israelis, meant they had already lost the war, for they did not have endless miles of land to fall back on. One really big mistake and that would have been the end of Israel. This is why Israel needs to be strong, because there is very little room for error in a country with such a tiny landmass.

Again, my objection to Tony N and his sympathizers is not an argument in favor of the moral superiority of Jews to Arabs (though his argument does appear to be the opposite) but simply a request for a cessation of anti-Israeli propaganda. What is bewildering is this obsession with proving how evil Israel is. Apart from the speciousness and half-truths supporting such arguments, I would ask simply this: why? Why have such people devoted so much time and emotional energy into proving what bad guys the Israelis/Jews are? If there were just a handful of such people, and were evenly balanced by other groups of obsessives who spend their time declaring the evils of the Sudanese government, or the Russian treatment of Chechens, I would not be so perturbed. It is the inordinate number of such people who have made propagandizing against Israel a personal passion, who vent such copious amounts of bile, while ignoring the crimes of those angelic Palestinians against the bad-guy Israelis, that is so bewildering. I do not know Tony N, and will refrain from guessing at his motivations. But I can say that I have seen so many others who whip themselves up into a frenzy about what a nasty country Israel is. Indeed, colleges in this country and in Western Europe are filled with such people. To some extent it would appear to be a form of radical chic, but I think it is deeper, at least in some cases. Accusations of anti-Semitism aside (for that is a dark and deep hole to peer into), the simplification of the complexities of life, of the gray areas between good and evil, seems to me a good place to start looking. Just as fundamentalists of all stripes seek a reprieve from the uncertainty and scariness of the world, there is a fervent group that identifies their morality and their sense of justice with a political cause. Anyone even slightly familiar with political activism will recognize the type: oddly committed to a cause outside of themselves and thus a bit too busy to examine the source of their fury. It would be a more peaceable world, I think, if people addressed the origins of their own anger instead of heaping abuse on a nation they deem deserving of their hostility. Politico, heal thyself.

Although James claims that “this forum has descended into a predicatable series of Israel-bashing screeds”, digging for the truth can bring up facts and history that are uncomfortable if one is blinded by myths, revised history and narrow tribalism.  Although the history of this conflict is sometimes a “subjective endeavor” which “yields a game of he said-she said/ he did-she did of infinite regress”, this does not need to be the case.  Excellent records do exist, even if they are drowned out by the Israeli public relations machine. True facts are true facts, true history is true history, no matter what is done to distort or revise it. Justice for both the Israeli and Palestinian people will not be served by “collective amnesia” but only when both sides agree to a truthful narrative of what really happened.  In any case, those who don’t try to learn the true history and facts are doomed to manipulation by propaganda and emotional appeals.
_________________________________________________

As for other comments by James: 

For many centuries before the First World War, the indigenous Jews were a tiny minority (3 to 5%) of the Palestine population.  For centuries these groups had lived in relative harmony in Palestine: 80 percent Muslim, 15 percent Christian, 3 to 5% Jewish. The 1878 Ottoman Turkish census listed 462,465 Turkish subjects in Palestine: 403,795 Arab Muslims (including Druze), 43,659 Arab Christians and 15,011 Jews. Not counted as Ottoman subjects:  at least 10,000 Jews with foreign citizenship (recent immigrants to the country) and several thousand Muslim Arab nomads (Bedouin). As for Jerusalem, Ottoman records indicate that the majority of its population was Arab.
http://www.cactus48.com/earlyhistory.html
http://www.jerusalemites.org/jerusalem/ottoman/24.htm
http://www.jerusalemites.org/jerusalem/ottoman/index.htm

A well-promoted Zionist myth is that Palestinians had been murderously and senselessly attacking the Jews “at least starting in the 19th century when Zionist migration to Palestine began”. That’s not true. Before WW1, Palestinian Arabs got along relatively well with the minority indigenous Palestinian Jews (they were mostly not interested in Zionism) and even aided some of these foreign European Jews immigrating into the majority Arab-populated land.  In fact the minority Jews had better lives in the Arab Middle East than they did in many parts of Europe.
http://www.juancole.com/2004/12/have-arabs-or-muslims-always-hated.html

In fact, nice Palestinians peasants helped the foreign Jewish immigrants (initially for purely religious reasons) arriving in Palestine in the late 19th century, contrary to James’ claims. For example, Israel’s Petah-Tikva city was founded in 1878 (today its the second largest industrialized city in Israel with a population of 175,000).  According to Ari Shavit in Hareetz: “I am now reading a book by Eliezer Be’eri about the beginning of the conflict and the start of the Zionist enterprise… on November 3, 1878, as Yehuda Raab tilled the first furrow in the soil of Petah Tikva, he felt that “he is the first person to hold a Jewish plow on the soil of the prophets after the long years of exile.” But look what it says here: “Arabs also joined Yehuda Raab on the big day when plowing began. He himself, with his plow harnessed to animals, could not have tilled an area of hundreds of dunams. He was joined in the plowing by 12 Arab fellahin.” What does that mean, Ari? You tell me what it means. What it means is that when Yehuda Raab came to till the first furrow after 2,000 years of exile he didn’t have the strength to do it alone. He needed fellahin, and 12 of them came to help him. Reading that, I tell myself that I know all about Raab and who his descendants were and I know how his project developed. But I know absolutely nothing about the 12 fellahin. They appear in history as unknowns and disappear from history the same way, with hardly a trace. They were removed from history by Zionism. Who were they? Where did they go? Where are they today? So the aging revolutionary you see before you has taken a vow to find those 12 vanished individuals, those 12 abductees of history. My life mission is to set them free from their historical captivity and give them names and faces and rights. Because their whole sin in relation to Raab was that they lived in this country untold generations before him. Why should they be punished for that? Why insist on their oblivion?”  This would be a beautiful movie for Spielberg to make.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=4100

British records contradict James’ claims about Palestinian attacks starting at least in the 19th century: “(Palestinian) revolt of 1929…A special Commission, headed by Sir Walter Shaw, a retired (British) Chief Justice of the Straits Settlements.. observed in 1929: ‘FOR 80 YEARS BEFORE THE FIRST OF THESE ATTACKS (in 1920) THERE IS NO RECORDED INSTANCE OF ANY SIMILAR INCIDENTS. It is obvious then that the relations between the two races during the past decade must have differed in some material respect from those which previously obtained. Of this we found ample evidence. The reports of the Military Court and of the local Commission which, in 1920 and in 1921 respectively, enquired into the disturbances of those years, drew attention to the change in the attitude of the Arab population towards the Jews in Palestine. This was borne out by the evidence tendered during our inquiry when REPRESENTATIVES OF ALL PARTIES (JEWS AND ARABS) TOLD US THAT BEFORE THE WAR THE JEWS AND ARABS LIVED SIDE BY SIDE IF NOT IN AMITY, AT LEAST WITH TOLERANCE, a quality which to-day is almost unknown in Palestine’. ”
http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/aeac80e740c782e4852561150071fdb0!OpenDocument

The problems between Zionists (i.e., Jews subscribing to the political ideology of Zionism) and Palestinians started after WW1.  That’s when these foreign Zionist Jews started mass migrating from Europe, with the help of the double dealing British and its military forces, against the wishes of the indigenous majority Palestinians.
-  During WW1, the British made an agreement with the Arab leader Sherif Husain (or Sherif Hussein), in which “Great Britain is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits demanded by the Sherif of Mecca” in return for Arab support against the Ottoman Turks during the war.  Eminent British historian Prof. Arnold J. Toynbee noted: “The Palestinian Arabs could therefore reasonably assume that Britain was pledged to prepare Palestine for becoming an independent Arab state.”
-  By 1919, however, the Palestinians realized what the foreign Zionist Jews were up to – colonization – and realized they were being dispossessed of their ancestral homeland. The Palestinians distrusted and protested against the Zionists and the Western powers (first the British, then the US and Europe) that supported Zionist goals. When the British and Zionists disregarded the peaceful opposition and protests of the Palestinians, they became frustrated and later resorted to violence to try to stop these mass migrations.
-  The first recorded instance of Palestinian violence was in 1920: “As early as April 1920, while Palestine was still under (British) military government, anti-Jewish riots broke out just as the San Remo Conference was finalizing the allocation of the Palestine Mandate to Great Britain. The underlying causes of the riots were cited as: “The Arabs’ disappointment at the non-fulfilment of the promises of independence which they believed to have been given them in the War” and “The Arabs’ belief that the Balfour Declaration implied a denial of the right of self-determination and their fear that the establishment of a national home would mean a great increase of Jewish immigration and would lead to their economic and political subjection to the Jews.” ”
http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/aeac80e740c782e4852561150071fdb0!OpenDocument

Prof. Toynbee wrote in 1968: “All through those 30 years, Britain (admitted) into Palestine, year by year, a quota of Jewish immigrants that varied according to the strength of the respective pressures of the Arabs and Jews at the time. These immigrants could not have come in if they had not been shielded by a British chevaux-de-frise. If Palestine had remained under Ottoman Turkish rule, or if it had become an independent Arab state in 1918, Jewish immigrants would never have been admitted into Palestine in large enough numbers to enable them to overwhelm the Palestinian Arabs in this Arab people’s own country. The reason why the State of Israel exists today and why today 1,500,000 Palestinian Arabs are refugees is that, for 30 years, Jewish immigration was imposed on the Palestinian Arabs by British military power until the immigrants were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-armed to be able to fend for themselves with tanks and planes of their own. The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one; it is a tragedy for the world, because it is an injustice that is a menace to the world’s peace.”
http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/aeac80e740c782e4852561150071fdb0!OpenDocument

Even Mahatma Gandhi once wrote:  “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French…What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct…If they [the Jews] must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs… As it is, they are co-sharers with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them. I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regard as an unacceptable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.”
http://www.cactus48.com/mandate.html
_______________________________

There are a number of other myths about Israel.
- Israel has cultivated the image of a plucky little state of poor, defenseless and threatened people fighting off extermination.  Contrary to James’ claims, Israel was not “quite weak” during “the first 20 or so years of existence.”  It may have been outmatched in terms of population, but it was well equipped, well trained and militarily stronger than its Arab neighbors even in 1948.  Israel also had the support of the world’s powers—United States and key European powers. According to an Israeli document Truth Against Truth (#36): “The myth of “the few against the many” was created on the Jewish side to describe the stand of the Jewish community of 650,000 against the entire Arab world of over a hundred million. The Jewish community lost 1% of its people in the war. The Arab side saw an entirely different picture: A fragmented Arab population with no national leadership to speak of, with no unified command over its meager forces, poorly equipped with mostly obsolete weapons, facing an extremely well organized Jewish community that was highly trained in the use of the weapons that were flowing to it (especially from the Soviet bloc.) The neighboring Arab countries betrayed the Palestinians and, when they finally did send their armies into Palestine, they mainly operated in competition with each other, with no coordination and no common plan. From the social and military points of view, the fighting capabilities of the Israeli side were far superior to those of the Arab states, which had hardly emerged from the colonial era.”
http://www.ameu.org/uploads/vol31_issue1_1998.pdf
http://www.gush-shalom.org/Docs/Truth_Eng.pdf
.
-  The other cultivated myth is that Israel was relentlessly “attacked by its (Arab) neighbors.”  The opposite is true. The fact is that the Israel military and the Zionists militias initiated major attacks against Arabs and/or Arab nations in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1982, 1986and on other occasions.  The only time the Arabs initiated an attack against Israel was the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which Egypt and Syria launched to try to take back their territory occupied during Israel’s invasion in 1967.  Eqypt and Syria attacked because the Israelis ignored their peace attempts (which were based on UN resolution 242 – peace for land).

-  Israel’s attacks have aimed to overawe and terrorize the Palestinian population into submission. For example, Sharon indicated in his diary that he had orders to inflict heavy damage on the inhabitants of Qibya. He wrote candidly: “The orders were utterly clear: Qibya was to be an example to everyone.”
_______________________________

As for James’ claim that the “attribution of the King David Hotel bombing to Ben-Gurion is simply disinformation. He had rescinded an order for the attack, which Begin carried out anyway.”
-  Begin’s Irgun terrorist group had conceived a plan for the King David attack early in 1946, but the green light was given only on July first. According to Dr. Moshe Sneh, the chief of the Haganah General Headquarters, the operation was personally approved by David Ben-Gurion.  Sneh sent a letter to Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun, with clear instructions (original letter (in the Jabotinsky Institute Archives k-4 1/11/5): “At the earliest possible opportunity, you are to carry out the operation at the “chick” (code for the King David Hotel) and at the house of “your servant and messiah” (code for the David Brothers building). Inform me of the date. Preferably at the same time. Do not reveal the identity of the implementing body - either by announcing it explicitly or by hinting. We too are preparing something - will inform you of details in good time.”  Repeated delays of the operation were requested by the Haganah in response to the changing political situation. The debate is whether the Irgun went ahead with the Jewish Agency/Haganah’s approval or on its own without approval. The attack used approximatly 350kg of explosives spread across six charges. Imagine if Saddam Hussein initially ordered the 9/11 attacks then later claimed he had “rescinded the order” but Osama carried them out anyway…
-  With respect to Zionist terrorism against the British and Palestinians, according to British records: “there appears to be some evidence of involvement of the Jewish Agency, as indicated in an official report: “The information which was in the possession of His Majesty’s Government when they undertook their recent action in Palestine led them to draw the following conclusions: (1) That the Haganah and its associated force the Palmach (working under the political control of prominent members of the Jewish Agency) have been engaging in carefully planned movements of sabotage and violence under the guise of ‘the Jewish Resistance Movement’; (2) That the Irgun Tzeva’i Leumi and the Stern Group have worked since last autumn in co-operation with the Haganah High Command on certain of these operations;...(3) That the broadcasting station ‘Kol Israel’ which claims to be “the Voice of the Resistance Movement” and which has been working under the general direction of the Jewish Agency has been supporting these organizations.”
http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/aeac80e740c782e4852561150071fdb0!OpenDocument

You can learn the basic history and British records on Palestine from this UN link “The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: Part I 1917-1947” (as well as other resources below):
http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/aeac80e740c782e4852561150071fdb0!OpenDocument
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/
http://www.cactus48.com/truth.html
http://www.gush-shalom.org/Docs/Truth_Eng.pdf
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story.php?sid=20030228221059935
http://www.palestine-un.org/info/frindex.html
http://www.ameu.org/uploads/vol31_issue1_1998.pdf
http://www.un.org/Depts/dpa/ngo/history.html
http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/historicaldocuments/26.shtml
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story.php?sid=20020702071406432

I agree wholeheartedly; but you will find, that atheists do not go door to door threatening you with hell and trying to convince anyone to “disbelieve.”
Atheists fare better when they keep quiet about it - because religious fanatics do not tolerate atheists, and we have fanatics in all religions. “Peace” has become a two bit word - what religious fanatics teach is hell fire and damnation - death and Godly Vengeance. Exodus chapter 15 verse 3 says; God is a man of War, the Lord is his name.

We can defend ourselves from evil things done in the name of Bad, but we have little or no defense against evil things done in the name of Good.
That is why the word “Peace” is used so frequently by “so many governments and people.”
John M Sandoval

Essentially, this article and proponents thereof expound a universalist weltanshauung. Wake up! You can’t fight tribalism with universalism. Consider that, as Americans (or for that matter citizens of any developed country), you exploit a global economic reality in which slave/child or other inhumane labor is done to provide you with a quality of life that is the envy of the preponderance of the world. No amount of reflexive pseudointellectual moralizing, or debates about foreign policy quagmires will free you - as a willful exploiter - from the wrath of third-world peoples. You blame religion but, fail to see the tribalism can exist without a godhead. You are seen as the tribe that exploits - and you need no god to do it. With inconsistent and maladaptive cultural values such as yours, it looks like you’re just ‘circling the drain’.

By comissioning Operation Wrath of God, Golda Meir displayed a will to fight for Jewish survival. This is of course repugnant to you; after all, why not fight for peace? for the benefit of all? In short, because human life is sometimes a zero-sum game, as Malthus might remind you. As long as you persist in believing that mutually exclusive ideologies can simply be replaced by your tyrannical ideology of universalism, you and your ideas will not survive.

You are beginning to see that, inter alia, with the Republican domination of almost all tiers of US goverment, and with the rising influence of the Christian right; with Queen Margarethe II of Denmark calling for a fight to defend her tribe; with Jean Marie Le Pen’s National Front gaining support in France; and with the recent riots on the beaches of Australia.

Your ‘enlightened’ hope for peace is nothing more than a hope that your tribe will successfully brainwash the whole world with a message of peace. As much as I do genuinely want peace, your methods is won’t bring it, not leastways because you exploit a good portion of the world. If you want peace, either learn how to defend your country, or start abasing yourself post-haste as a terror-apologist. I mean, at least get peace through utter defeat…

Truthdig - is not a place to promote racial hate and religious wars. It is certainly not a place for Jewish or Arabic bashing either. Factual Historical Facts, enlighten the mind and soothe the soul. Not bad at all, that responsible parties for the world’s conflicts are therein revealed and exposed.
Amnesia could possibly bring more peace, only because death (is a way out) in place of life.
Complacency or disinterest in the middleEast crisis can be compared to Amnesia. How much better to observe and understand the differences, that cause discord between fanatical “Christians in general” - Jewish “non Christians” - Arabic Kurds, Sheites, and Sunnis.
I believe; the scourges of humanity are caused by mankind’s inveterate desire to believe in a supreme being. Religious doctrines and a passion for good fortune - are the main causes of our World’s conflicts. Thank God for Truthdig.
John M Sandoval

We can look through the annuals of history as much as we want to find some original crime, but we all know that it’s a subjective endeavor which, in the case of this conflict, yields a game of he said-she said/ he did-she did of infinite regress.  It may be unsatisfying, but ironically the conflict is all about history, and yet that history is crippling, and produces more death than peace.  Collective amnesia has more chance of generating peace than “historical accuracy.”

How sad that this forum has descended into a predicatable series of Israel-bashing screeds. It is this kind of pathological rooting for the underdog - regardless of the circumstances that has made them such - that has rendered the Left so unpalatable to people like myself who are otherwise in general sympathy with the Left.

Once, for the first 20 or so years of existence, Israel was quite weak, clearly outmatched in population and resources (including military resources, thanks to the USSR) - yes, they were the underdog. Its relative weakness, and the residual guilt in the West about the Holocaust, combined to make Israel, briefly, a cause for sympathy in much of the world. Its mistake, for the Left, was to be successful. To be strong, to be tough in a tough neighborhood, and not to be another gathering of poor benighted Jews. The Olympic athletes were a symbol of this change. And yet one sees so many people like Tony N, above, who become obsessed with the narrow righteousness of the Palestinian cause. Not narrow for the Palestinians, but narrow, blinded, and perhaps cathartic, for those so sure they have chosen the virtuous side, that this is the “good fight”. Good guys and bad guys. (And what about the Syrians, the Saudis, the Egyptians? What of their attrocities? For that matter, what about the plight of the Somalis and the Sudanese? Are they not worthy of such sympathy?) Meanwhile, what would happen if Israel suddenly became weak, and was attacked by its virtuous neighbors as it once was. Given a short - Orwellian - moment for adjustment, Israel might once again be on the right side of the “good fight”.

I have noticed with discontent for the past 55 years that Israel has committed grave sins against the Arab/palestinians. And that was way before I became a writer and acquired an educated opinion about this conflict. I have poured over bible passages to decipher, only that Jews have always taken unfair advantage of Arabs. However; even in the formulation of Islam, Mohammed borrowed untold amounts of religion from the Jewish religious concepts and adopted them to Islam. He added horrenduous concepts to Islam (72 virgins thing etc.) but no more fictitious or horrenduous than the other (impossible to believe) things entered into the Holy Bible.
I know; that “The Treasures of Zion” were organized for the sole purpose of accumulation of Wealth, Property, and Political Power. The NWO.
I also know; that the world knows; of the mean, cruel, political methods employed by Israel, and it’s constant religious persecution of the Arabic palestinian community.
John M Sandoval

If the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab-etc conflict can’t get an Aeschylus to tell its tale, what it needs more than a Speilberg or an Auden is a Jonathan Swift.  The calculas of cycles of revenge is hardly abstract: peace in the middle east will happen only when the death-rate exceeds the birth rate.

Reply to # 7 (anonymous):
You can call Spielberg lots of names , but at least he signs his works, Mr/Ms Anonymous. Calling him a Bush-thug is ironic, especially on the part of someone who seems to use the Bush-thugs’s favorite technique—denounce and back stab anyone you disagree with , without any evidence or justification, and preferably anonymously.
Josue Harari

As a movie, Spielberg’s Munich should be rated by impartial critics as C or B- at best.  I give it a B- as a pure fictional movie (disregarding that the subject matter was “inspired by real events”).  I know some people who felt that Munich was boring; one said she slept halfway through it. As for those critics who praised it, how many were influenced by the subject matter and/or Spielberg as choice of director?
 
Everyone – Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, other Arabs, etc – has a right to question the reality, bias and impact of the political history, messages, context and understanding provided in Munich, including its nuances, omissions and highlights.  Let’s not pretend that this movie has to be appreciated exclusively as a mere work of art or as a pretty good thriller. Spielberg set the public’s expectations by opening his movie with the claim that it was inspired by real events – in this case a key political event – and by explaining in interviews that he intended his movie “to open a dialogue, to make us think, to provoke a reaction” and to be “the prayer for peace”.

Whether intentionally or not, Sheerly Avni did hit on a truth: “…the few Arabs who have commented in the Arab press…”  The general public is ignorant of the Palestinian side of the story because people rarely get to hear the undiluted comments of Palestinians, other Arabs and great thinkers such as Noam Chomsky in Western mainstream media. 

The late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said eloquently explained a few years ago that Israel has been mounting an effective international public relations campaign to promote the Israeli image as righteously fighting off terrorist violence and gain support and sympathy for Israel’s policies: “What has enabled Israel to do what it has been doing to the Palestinians for the past 54 years is the result of a carefully and scientifically planned campaign to validate Israeli actions and, simultaneously, devalue and efface Palestinian actions. This is not just a matter of maintaining a powerful military but of organising opinion, especially in the United States and Western Europe, and is a power derived from slow, methodical work where Israel’s position is seen as one to be easily identified with, whereas the Palestinians are thought of as Israel’s enemies, hence repugnant, dangerous, against “us.” ”  This hasbara, or information for the outside world, has essentially become a one-sided PR war over images and ideas in newspapers, TV, advertisements, movies, etc.  As a result, few Americans know anything at all about the Palestinian story, other than what the concerted Israeli information campaign has cultivated into mainstream consciousness.  Thus the term Palestinian tends to evoke negative connotations today.  And the Munich murders have been transformed into the “Munich massacre”, even though it hardly qualifies to be a massacre if a massacre is defined as killing a large number of humans indiscriminately and cruelly.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2001/527/op2.htm
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2001/549/op9.htm
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/580/op2.htm

The Zionist Jewish community should not be “calling for blood” because Munich is a good movie for Israel.  The neutral movie watcher will leave likely inclined to sympathize with Israel’s story, policies and morality. Spielberg’s presentation was biased and misrepresentative in Israel’s favor, subtly and blatantly.  As Spielberg admitted to Roger Ebert: “I am as truly pro-Israeli as you can possibly imagine.” Avni observed that “this love of Israel shines through every frame of the movie.”

According to Israel’s Haaretz newsmedia: “… Dennis Ross, formerly assistant to the secretary of state in the Clinton administration and Middle East envoy…boasted that he succeeded in toning down the film, so that Israel and its war on terrorism are presented in a positive light. He also related that he was able to persuade Spielberg to add a scene that was not originally planned: a monologue by the mother of Avner, the tormented protagonist of the film and the head of the Mossad espionage agency’s hit squad… In it she tries to dissuade her son from leaving Israel and preaches to him about the Holocaust, the Jewish people, historical retribution, etc.”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/661465.html

Unfortunately, too much discussion about the movie has been about placating the pro-Israel Jewish community and addressing their concerns and criticisms about whether the movie is harming Israel’s image.  There is less focus on whether Munich is historically accurate and fair to both sides, as well as on the movie’s artistic qualities (although Avni attempted to discuss these issues more than others).
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1227-24.htm

Finally, Spielberg hired the services of Eyal Arad, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s strategic adviser and PR man. According to Arad: “Kushner and Spielberg…are explicitly trying to create the impression that the film is the historical truth.“The film does not address the question of whether Jonas’ book (Vengeance was the basis for the screenplay) is accurate or whether Yuval Aviv (alleged Mossad agent said to be the model for Eric Bana’s character Avner Kauffman) is a fraud and a liar…I tend to accept the defense establishment position that he is.”  From the mouth of Spielberg’s PR man.

Movies may be works of art, but they can influence the audience’s perceptions of reality and history. As I wrote elsewhere, when watching Spielberg movies such as Munich and Schindler’s List, one should not confuse entertaining movie making with historical accuracy and impartial presentation. Take the Spielberg movie Schindler’s List.  Evidence suggests that the real Oskar Schindler may have been less heroic than the character Spielberg created. In fact, Schindler had almost nothing to do with the List because he was in jail during that time.  And Schindler helped the Nazis plan the invasion of Poland, which led to millions of Polish Jews and other Poles being murdered by the Nazis.  In the end, Schindler’s List was simply another Holocaust-related movie, except it may have immortalized the wrong character.  Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate if Spielberg had crafted a movie that immortalized a genuine hero to the Jews such as Count Folke Bernadotte, who helped as many as 20,000 Jews during the Nazi Holocaust? Unfortunately, because Bernadotte was assassinated by Zionists in 1948, any movie about this hero would be met with criticism by the Zionist Jewish community.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/biography/story/0,,1359301,00.html

It seems almost too obvious to note, but in the light of comments #6 and #8, it is worth pointing out that one could compile a list of shocking and murderous episodes of Palestinian violence against Jews starting… well, at least starting in the 19th century when Zionist migration to Palestine began. (For those not well apprised of the local history, there were many Jews already living in Ottoman, then British-ruled, Palestine at that time. Jerusalem had been majority Jewish, and Jews had been living in Jerusalem more or less without interruption since the Romans sacked the city.)

This endless litany of attacks, I think, is Sheerly Avni’s point about Munich not having happened in a vaccuum. Violence has been ongoing in the area for a very long time. I just think that the above list of Israeli/Jewish violence should be seen in the context of the unremittingly murderous activities propagated by Arabs/Palestinians against Jews for more than a hundred years. The attacks of the PLO, Black September, and more recently Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have their routes in attacks upon new villages and kibbutzim settled in undeveloped and usually unpopulated lands before and after the turn of the 20th century; attacks in which men, women, and children were murdered in cold blood. Should I begin a list to compare to those above, I should run out of room and my fingers would become raw from typing. One last point, comment #6’s attribution of the King David Hotel bombing to Ben-Gurion is simply disinformation. He had rescinded an order for the attack, which Begin carried out anyway.

Sherna Berger Gluck’s comment #6 is hilarious.  But, sadly, it’s not a laughing matter.  The Palestinian and other side of the story does not receive a fair shake and much airtime.

Take item #3 in Gluck’s post, for example, regarding the Israeli attack on the US Navy ship USS Liberty.  Few people know it happened because the mainstream media does not provide the information.  According to the late Admiral Thomas Moorer: “…I am compelled to speak out about one of U.S. history’s most shocking cover-ups.  On June 8, 1967, Israel attacked our proud naval ship — the USS Liberty — killing 34 American servicemen and wounding 172. Those men were then betrayed and left to die by our own government… They were attacked for two hours, causing 70 percent American casualties and the eventual loss of our best intelligence ship…The American people deserve to know the truth about this attack.” Admiral Moorer has held positions of Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1970 to 1974 (a position later held by Colin Powell and Richard Myers), Chief of Naval Operations, and Commander-in-Chief of both the Pacific Fleet and Atlantic Fleet.  The F-14 Tomcat was partly nicknamed after Thomas Moorer, who was also the longest serving 4 star admiral in US navy history.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/ul-moorer.html
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/ussliberty.html

Or item #4 in Gluck’s post about the 1982 slaughter of 800 to 3,500 Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon, overseen and aided by the Israeli military.  The United Nations General Assembly condemned the massacre and declared it to be an act of genocide.  Israel’s Kahan Commission later found then Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon personally but “indirectly responsible” for the Sabra and Shatila massacres.  It recommended that Sharon be fired if he didn’t resign and further recommended that Sharon never hold public office in Israel again. But no legal action has been against Sharon, who continued to serve in subsequent governments.  Since February 2001 Israeli society has twice elected Sharon to represent them.
http://www.indictsharon.net/

What happening in and after Munich 1972 pales in comparison to what Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians for decades. For example, in the early 1950s, Ariel Sharon was commander of the Israeli special forces unit 101, which attacked Palestinian villages, killing women and children. For example, in 1953, Sharon led his Israeli troops on a massacre in the undefended Arab village of Qibya (then in Jordan, now in the West Bank). Sharon was given clear orders by his superiors: “destruction and maximum killing.” 69 Palestinian/Arab civilians were murdered during a 6-hour terror spree that virtually destroyed the tiny village. The attackers blew up about 40 houses, a school, a water pump station, a police station and a telephone office. Among the first 42 bodies found were 38 women and children. A UN observer stated that “bullet-riddled bodies near the doorways and multiple bullet hits on the doors of the demolished houses indicated that the inhabitants had been forced to remain inside until their homes were blown up over them.” Time Magazine reported that “The cries of the dying could be heard amid the explosions.” The UN Security Council passed Resolution 101 which condemned the attack on Qibya and the US State Department urged that the persons responsible “should be brought to account.”  What Sharon did by exterminating Palestinians in Qibya in 1953 was similar to what the Nazis did to Lidice in 1942. The world has known for 52 years that Ariel Sharon was responsible for the terrorism and grave war crimes in Qibya, yet he has never been prosecuted for his actions and is rarely criticized in the mainstream media.
http://electronicintifada.net/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/7/2065

We’ll be reminded of what Palestinians did to Israelis in 1972, but few will know what Israelis did to Palestinians in 1948, 1953, 1982 or on numerous other occasions.

spittle.  speilbergian spittle.  worse:  speilbergian trots - vapors:

give us a break.  speilberg is a snakeoil salesman of high order.  a liar and a bush-thug.

because it is a good comment and not likely to be seen by Truthdig readers, I am reposting this from Arab Calendar. It might be called, “But Is It Good for Palestinians?”

Sent: Friday, December 30, 2005 7:20 PM
Subject: [eFreePalestine] The Ten Movies Steven Spielberg Has Yet To Make

Imagine for a second it is Opposite Day. Imagine we’re in some kind of Twilight Zone parallel universe in which Hollywood gives Arabs and Muslims a fair shake. What kind of movies about the Middle East would we then be chomping Goobers, Junior Mints, and popcorn to at the local twenty screen multiplex?
The Ten Movies Steven Spielberg Has Yet To Make

Israeli soldiers in dialogue with a local Palestinian

Mas’ood Cajee - altmuslim.com December 8, 2005

Hollywood mogul Steven Spielberg’s latest film “Munich” focuses on Israel’s efforts to avenge the tragic killings of its athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Although the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ripe with great ideas for potential blockbuster films, Hollywood flicks about the conflict have tended to remain formulaic and dehumanizing.

Spielberg hopes “Munich” will be different, and claims he didn’t want to make “a Charles Bronson movie - good guys vs. bad guys and Jews killing Arabs without any context.” Critics say Spielberg is too pro-Israel to make a fair film about the conflict.

Imagine for a second it is Opposite Day. Imagine we’re in some kind of Twilight Zone parallel universe in which Hollywood gives Arabs and Muslims a fair shake. What kind of movies about the Middle East would we then be chomping Goobers, Junior Mints, and popcorn to at the local twenty screen multiplex?

Maybe these movies might actually be made by some of the 125 Palestinian kids Spielberg is giving video cameras to document their lives. Perhaps a talented few will go on to become big-time Hollywood directors. Here are ten potential films - all inspired by actual events - that are just waiting for the magic of Spielberg & his wannabes:

1. King David Hotel: The bombing of the King David Hotel, which served as headquarters of the British administration in Palestine, killed 91 Arabs, Jews, and Brits in 1946. Two future Prime Ministers of Israel, David Ben Gurion and Menachem Begin, masterminded the attack. Disguised as Arabs, members of Begin’s Irgun placed 350kg of explosives inside the building. In this action-packed thriller, David (Pierce Brosnan) - a British officer ordered to hunt down the killers - falls for Margaret (Uma Thurman), an American journalist working for Life Magazine. But is Margaret really in love or is she a secret Zionist assassin out to stop David in his tracks?

2. Nakba: A story of innocent love in a time of war and tragedy. Layla (Penelope Cruz) & Salam (Orlando Bloom) are a Romeo & Juliet against the backdrop of the 1948 Nakba, the Palestinian national catastrophe. During the Nakba, over 700,000 Palestinians fled - voluntarily & involuntarily - their homes. Can their love survive conflict?

3. USS Liberty: When Israeli boats and fighter jets attack the US Navy intelligence ship USS Liberty in the middle of the 1967 Six Day War, 34 US servicemen are killed and 173 are wounded. The official word from Washington and Tel Aviv is that the attack was a mistake. But Brad Pitt & Tom Cruise, who play surviving officers from the Liberty, swear vengeance after discovering that the attack was actually part of a plot to start World War III.

4. Sabra & Shatila: It’s 1982 and the war in Lebanon rages on. British war correspondent Robert Fisk (Star Wars star Ewan MacGregor) hides in the camps of Sabra & Shatilla, while a Lebanese militia aided and abetted by Israel slaughters thousands of Palestinian refugees. Sahar (Sandra Bullock) is a Palestinian mother determined to protect her family at any cost.

5. Vanunu: A political thriller set in Israel, Australia, Thailand, England, and Italy. “Syriana” star George Clooney plays Mordechai Vanunu, the nuclear technician who exposes Israel’s nuclear weapons program and pays the ultimate price. Nicole Kidman plays Cheryl Bentov, the American Mossad agent who seduces and kidnaps him.

6. Hebron: A story of tragedy and torn loyalties. In 1994, Brooklyn Jewish doctor Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslim worshippers in Hebron, killing 29. Palestinian American Mazen Khalili (Tom Hanks), a State Department official assigned to investigate the massacre, struggles with his job responsibilities and his roots. Leah Rabinowitz (Meg Ryan) is a Jewish American journalist who discovers a dark family secret that will change her life forever.

7. Qana: On April 18, 1996, Israeli shelling of a UN Compound that shelters Lebanese refugees kills more than 100 & injures over 300 men, women, and children. Jessica (Angelina Jolie) is a UN worker determined to let the world know what happened after witnessing the atrocity. Yossi (Robert De Niro) is a Mossad agent assigned to kill Jolie.

8. Gaza: Chris Hedges (Harrison Ford), a New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem, files stories from his hotel room. Hedges reaches a turning point when he witnesses Israeli soldiers killing young Palestinian boys for sport, then defies his editors by writing stories that humanize Palestinians. David Schwimmer & Sarah Jessica Parker make cameo appearances as the parents of Muhammad al-Durra, the 12 year old Palestinian boy killed by Israeli troops in 2000.

9. Rachel: Rachel Corrie (Gwyneth Paltrow) is the idealistic young American activist crushed to death by the Israeli army with a Caterpillar bulldozer. Sally Field, well-known for her role in “Not Without My Daughter”, plays Rachel’s mother.

10. Refuseniks: When a fellow soldier commits suicide after killing an unarmed pregnant Palestinian woman (played by Natalie Portman) in cold blood, two young Israeli soldiers (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) decide that the occupation and the killing of Palestinians is immoral and unjust.

Mas’ood Cajee lives in San Joaquin County, California.

http://www.altmuslim.com/perm.php?id=1607

If only our President and group of neo-cons could read the conclusion of Avni’s review—perhaps they would learn that nothing is black and white (even in war) as their over simplification and limited understanding of cultural differences lead them to believe. Using Spielberg’s movie as a vehicle for a balanced and provocative view of the conflicts Israel and America are involved in, Avni provides one of the most thoughtful review of a movie that if perhaps not great, nevertheless has the merit to raise real questions. And in this case, raising questions, is a first step in weighing potential answers—a first step our leadership in the US seems incapable of achieving.

Munich - reminds me of this poem.
       
        Yitzhak

Yitzhak, you fled the scene,
your spirit strong the heaven’s sky to soar.
You will pain no more from ugly scenes of death & hate and War.

Yitzhak, now I believe your cry for peace,
I stretch my mind, to understand, The Maaese,
The golden bull - The golden fleece.

Because of you, a prince of peace, the world, may end all wars.
If Christ returns, you might appear with him -
philosophies of gold and love & hate and war - once more, to bare.

Yitzhak Rabin; Our day is done.
We will never see the War, of “El Harmagidon.”
              Shalom

By John M Sandoval
re print permission granted

This is the most sensitive, nuanced movie review I have read in years.Avni, as an expat Israeli, obviously struggles to define his own life parameters, and does a fine job using Spielberg’s film as a vehicle for this.

In my fantasy film a group of wise Jews and wise Palestiians create through ” mutuality” in 1948 a culturally bifurcated but economically integrated Confederation that generates wealth for both and from which flows a mutual appreciation and creativity that produces structures of Education, Research,Tourism,Manufacture,Art and Health Services.

That model derived by intellect spreads and transforms the Middle East in stark contrast to what we now have.
What is then juxtaposed are the fruits of love VS the futile ashes of hatred.

Spielberg’s movie is long, boring and filled with the same kind of cheap thrills/gratuitous violence that characterized “Schindler’s List “and “Saving Private Ryan.”

The movie also betrays its director’s juvenile adulation of soldiers. His blatant romanticization of killing for a “good” cause vitiates any self-declared peace message he may have. The only real question he asks of his macho heroes is “Are we sure what we believe in is worth murdering for?”

Granted, his protagonists are not bird-brained Rambos, but neither is his portrayal of assasins as deep thinkers emotionally attuned to the suffering of others at all convincing.

Only according to the code to Hollywood epic-sized delusions of grandeur could this movie influence the peace process in the Middle East, much less contribute to a more peaceful, thoughtful or empathetic global citizenry.

Also, the Palestinians got it right: Munich is a Jewish movie about Jews that may portray the enemy as human (thanks a lot!), but engages in utter Israelocentrism.