16 May 2011

Al Awda & der Judenstaat

I made a post regarding the Nakba Day events yesterday. I explained in it why I avoid that topic. Not because I don’t have opinions, but because everyone does and everyone gets apopleptic about it.

I’ve lived in two countries, travelled in more, and everywhere I have been, the one thing that everyone appears to easily get worked up on is the Palestine issue. I’ve seen Americans who would have no problem understanding the right of an American to criticize and denounce the American president and who would never pull up the treason word to describe those who don’t agree firmly with whatever the current policy is begin practically frothing at the mouth when even the slightest criticism of the Israeli government is made. I’ve seen Syrian dissidents who will denounce Assad until the cows come home suddenly stop to be more concerned about what is happening in Gaza than what is happening here and suddenly beam with pride for Assad when he seems to take up the national cause.

I’ve also seen when someone posts anything on the internet on the subject that, no matter how calm and fair they are, things rapidly descend. It happened on this blog. It happens everywhere.

All Arabs are anti-Semites gets blurted, and any criticism of the Israeli government is Nazism, yeah yeah, seig heil and all that … and someone tosses up the idea that everyone in Syria supported Hitler in World War II …

And that is used to prove how Arabs are unfit for democracy (and possibly to share a planet with) without even stopping to consider that … well, the Germans were looking at a war with France and then defeating it. And if a French army was occupying your country and French policemen were molesting your granny and French politicians were trying to keep you forever in dependence, wouldn’t a German army marching down the Champs D’Elysee look pretty cool?
So you know how the French ‘celebrated’ the defeat of Nazi Germany? Here, they spent V-E Day in 1945 running bombing missions over Damascus. My house still has a scar from DeGaulle’s orders (elsewhere, another way spent celebrating was to riddle Algerian Arabs with bullets).

It’s only a statement of how awful Hitler truly was that he wasn’t a national hero here.

On the other side, the gnashing of teeth comes from those who say ‘how can you undermine Assad, how can you not support the ‘resistance’ of the hero Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah? How can you not support your brave leader who stands up against the evil Zionist spiders?’

And so what? Does mentioning these things mean that reality has to be ignored? Do we give a free pass to someone for such trivia?

I’d love it if there was some magic formula that I knew that, if implimented, would mean everyone, Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druzes, would be happy.

And, when I find it, I’ll go ahead and book my ticket to Oslo and prepare my Nobel Prize speech ...

But I don’t know it.

I don’t honestly see any real hope for peace and justice and everyone living together in perfect harmony, buying each other Cokes or whatever it is that you do then.

Like I said, I’ve traveled, I’ve met people, I’ve read, all of those a lot. I’ve been to Auschwitz and the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto. And I’ve been to Yarmouk and Bourj an Barajneh and Tel al Zaatar and Shatilla. I've talked to people who were driven at gunpoint from Ramle and people who staggered out of German camps. And I’m not going to make equivalencies but to say that from all that I have distilled something that makes me pretty sure that there’s no easy way out. Because I came to an understanding of two simple things: the Return and the Jewish State.

There’s one idea that drives the Palestinian struggle. It isn’t about killing Jews or Jihad or being inspired by Hitler or Stalin or Bin Laden or whatever the haters claim on Fox. And it isn’t about the Holy Cause of Islam or the Struggle of the Arab Nation or even the occupation like they say over on al Jazeera. Religion has nothing to do with it; nationalism has almost nothing to do with it. It’s all about the Return, al Awda as we say.

It’s about the refugees going home, not to a state called Palestine but home, to a particular house in a particular village, to gather olives or oranges from particular trees or live on the street in the town where their great great great grandfather was born. It’s about living as you want in your own small space where your ancestors died and breathing the air that they exhaled and knowing that your children’s children’s children will be looking after the same trees when you’re just remembered as jiddu’s jiddu’s abu or umm …

It’s simple but, maybe, you have to be a Levantine Arab to get this. It makes perfect sense to me; it makes perfect sense to my dad. He had a stroke last year in America and, as soon as he got out of the hospital, he started working to come back to Syria, to Damascus, to our neighborhood, to our house, to sleep in our walls … and to die a few meters from where he was born. Nothing more grand than that. And so, he will; I’ve promised him that much. Whether Assad is gone or not, it doesn’t matter; what matters is home. And I stayed on; we both did not to be heroic or resistant but because it is home, because our house has been our home since before the Ottomans, because we have dwelt in our city since the days of the Umayya and even then we are newcomers. Because it is home. When we leave, we dream of the Return. And we can. So when we regard the Palestinians, it makes sense: Al Awda is then a natural idea; an ordinary idea; the Idea that matters.

And on the other side of Jebel Shaikh, another single idea drives everything. And it is not because of some crazy secret teaching of the Talmud or the Learned Elders, not because of racism or wanting to be a master race, or colonialist conspiracies or whatever they are saying.

It is about autonomy and having a Jewish State; der Judenstaat in Herzl’s title, a state where Jews collectively would have control of their own destiny and set their own standards, where they’d have a refuge and a flag and a seat at the table … a state, an independent state, as Jewish as England is English was the phrase I recall.

And that doesn’t mean an autonomous region in a bigger country or a non-sectarian secular
democratic unified state or a self-governing millet.

Golda Meir explained it to Emir Abdallah: “We didn’t come all this way just to sit in your parliement.”

No, they didn’t.
And they didn't come to rob the Palestinians of their patrimony either.
They came for solid, reasonable, intelligent and understandable reasons.

To be free. To escape persecution. To be masters of their own destinies. To flourish just like anyone else.

And even now, while the idea of a two state solution or peace between states is conceivable as being something that could be done, it doesn’t resolve this tension between al Awda and der Judenstaat:

The Palestinians return … and the Jewish State gets a Muslim majority; for there to be a Jewish State, there can be no return and for there to be a Return, there can be no Jewish state.
No matter how smoothly and peacefully everything is handled, one idea cancels the other. And knowing Jewish history, knowing Arab history, the idea of either group letting go the big idea is even less likely than making them both work.

So, I come to the conclusion that there’s no easy solution, no way out.

All that can be achieved is what they call in other fields ‘harm reduction’, to make wars and killings and violence, injustice and oppression less likely, less painful. Treaties can be signed between Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon. The Israelis can evacuate the West Bank and Gaza and there can be a Palestinian state. All of that is possible.

But without squaring der Judenstaat and al Awda, there can be no permanent solution.

(Flame away!)

42 comments:

elanit said...

Beautifully written, as sad and painful as it is.

yanti said...

Once again, just as I was about to despair, you have inspired me with hope..

Soul said...

I think you're missing out the possibility of a secular state that would disregard the "Jewish" or "Muslim" nature of the state, no?

Michael said...

Just to remind all,
All the reasons above are true,
But also the Jews lived in the state of Israel for 4000 years, they are not taking over the land, they are coming back home.

Armelle said...

Strange the way we have the same analysis of this problem. I once had to explain it to a farmer friend who own his grand father farm. I just ask him : if someone want to take your farm saying that 2000 years ago it was his ancestries' farm, what would you do. The answer was simple : take a gun and fire... I would say part of the solution can be in each other understanding (and listening before)the other side.

Armelle said...

Strange again, My comment is an answer to Michael one... and I didn't read it before. Of course Jews lived there for 4000 years, but they were not the only ones. And the "land without people for the people without land" that we all heard when I was young was false.. there were people there all that time, A People I don't know, but people for sure...

syrie reis 2011 said...

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a German/American/Jewish political philosopher and has among others written: ‘Origens of Totaliarism’ and ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’. Daniel Martin-Katkin in ‘A stranger from abroad’ writes in short what Arendt’s attitude to Israel was: ‘From Arendt’s perspective Jews and Arabs were both oppressed people, both badly served by their own leadership’ and ‘She was not hostile to Israel but was firmly in the loyal opposition, wanting Israel to adopt secular, multicultural values in support of a state based on the equality of all citizens; failing that, she would have liked a government with a less belligerent attitude, committed to working for peace by promoting projects of cooperation between Arabs and Jews.’

Veganovich said...

You write as if the desire to “return” to a place one has never been because one’s ancestor’s lived there sixty years ago is natural. But it is certainly not the norm. History is filled with people who had to relocate as a result of political unrest. But only one people is demanding a “right of return” sixty years after the event. There is only one people considered “refugees” in the place where there parents were born.

Many Germans were forcibly relocated from Eastern Europe after World War II. Not too many of them want to “return” to Eastern Europe. Most people are capable of moving on instead of living in the past. Regardless of how tragic the Nakba was, demanding the “right of return” only perpetuates the tragedy by ensuring that there could be no solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Rania said...

Yo Veganovitch, you are I assume aware that the whole Zionist idea is based on a presume return to a land where their ancestors may or may not have lived 2000 years ago?
That's a lot more than 60 years ago.
Why don't you save your racist trolling for some one of your regular hatefests and stuff it with the hypocrisy?

JC said...

I think we need to separate out these two issues. Of course many thousands, hundreds of thousands of Jews who escaped the camps or the Nazi pogroms came to Palestine because they wanted (and desperately needed) refuge. In seeking refuge they sought to create a homeland in which they would never face such atrocities again. But in doing so they did rob another people of their patrimony and deprived them the right to be masters of their own destiny.

What ended up being a real colonial take-over of another people’s country cannot be morally defended or “balanced out” by the atrocities faced by the victims-turned-perpetrators. I don’t use that phrase lightly – the theft of Palestine, the Nakba and the subsequent violence and wars waged by the “Jewish State” for years, is a tragic outcome of such terrible suffering (of which Palestinians had no part) and one that elides a very different and noble Jewish history as was seen with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

It is not a conspiracy to say that Zionism was a colonial movement long before Hitler’s ascent to power. The problem with balancing the two – Al Awda and der Judenstaat – as you do, is that, o the one hand it equates them morally, and on the other it implies that there is a perpetual dead-end.

It is true that if Israel were to genuinely democratize and extend full equality and rights to all Palestinians (as well as the right of return), all of the hard-liners and ultra right-wing settlers would leave. This happened in South Africa when Apartheid ended, and it is an inevitable (and welcome) consequence of post-colonialism. But the right of return need not mean that Israelis would wholesale lose their homes. The majority of Palestinians just want to live and be free, if that can be achieved by living in a single democratic state with Israelis, most would jump at the chance.

In my view, there is no need to “square” Return with the Jewish State – the only equation is ultimately this: if Israelis want real security, stability and peace, then they will have to recognize (as many are now) that there “exclusively Jewish” State and their way of life cannot be at the continued expense of Palestinian suffering and displacement.

The “one-state solution” is not right around the corner, for sure, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t the obvious and just solution for all involved… if anything, this is the only way to balance things out, where both Palestinians and Israelis can live with freedom, dignity and equality. The only thing that needs squaring is the will of two peoples.

Jinan

Micah said...

Why would anyone expect anything other than what we have after generations of dueling narratives designed not to resolve a conflict but rather to exploit and deepen the conflict.

Let's reduce things to what they really are.

European Jews migrated to the region to escape crushing persecution and resulting poverty- and that was before the Holocaust.

The local governments resented this influx because they could not control them and in short while the new arrivals built a functioning and modern European style state and economy predicated on freer markets, capitalism and not baksheesh.More importantly, these new immigrants had commercial contacts in Europe and overseas..They were going to make a go if it. Whatever they were producing was being sold and new markets for their products were being created. Couple that with a then democratic/socialist style of government and the handwriting was on the wall. The Arab world status quo was challenged. Family and tribal supremacy was under threat.

Again, that was before the war. After the Holocaust, the migrations became a tidal wave of refugees

Now, here is where it gets interesting. Does anyone really believe those Jews, still smoldering and reeling from the destruction heaped upon them were capable of forming a 'healthy state'? This is the critical juncture. Rather than pointing a finger at the Christian west Iand once and for all claiming the moral high ground)- "Look at what you have done!', the Arab regimes (precursors to the despots we have today) in the region did something incredible- they identified and lionized the oppressors.

No one talks about the Arabs in North Africa who sheltered and saved Jews during the war- and there were many. No one today talks about the Imams of the Grand Mosque in Paris who rescued and saved hundreds if not thousands of Jews. Why? Because in todays highly charged political environment, Jews don't want to be reminded of that reality and Muslims today don't want to draw attention to the fact they saved Jews. This is one of the great tragedies of modern times on many, many levels.

In any event, the lines and distinctions were drawn.

In a very short period of time, these wretched remnants of a European community built a modern European state in what was a backwater.

This was an insult to the local populations. They had been promised a mythical dominion over far away mythical peoples. Up close and personal, that clearly was not going to be the case.

Cont'd

Micah said...

Cont'd

To this day, tyrants have reduced a once forward thinking and proud ummah to near irrelevance. A nation of legendary Arab traders and innovators have been reduced to mere consumers and told the lie that consumption alone makes them equal to nations which produce. The UN Report on Human Development cites the Arab world as having just about the lowest level of education in the world today. Despite obscene wealth, Arab rulers fear an educated society because an educated society is their minds a dangerous society that might upend their stranglehold. The Arab culture that gave the world so much in terms of art, literature and science has long since vanished. Mosques that were once a place of breathtaking beauty have been re branded into places that are cold, dark and forbidding. When the state controls religious expressions the outcome is inevitable.

The Arabs paid the price- and that price has been steep, indeed. Notwithstanding the billions of dollars poured into Palestine by the west- and Israel for schools, housing, security and ultrastructure, the west remains hated. Palestinians and much of the Arab world revere the likes of Saddam for the few thousand dollar reward he gave to the families of suicide bombers.

All that is changing, albeit slowly. The Arab Spring is evidence of that. When a culture is kept isolated, there can be no meaningful change When cultures and societies become familiar with the 'outside', change becomes inevitable. That applies both to the Israelis and Palestinians. The mirrored meme of either side- 'They have to go' becomes more and more hollow every day. Notwithstanding the furious noisemakers, that truth is undeniable.

Anonymus Valesianus said...

Micah,
You miss one extremely crucial detail.

Zionist settlers did NOT move in to an Arab ruled land, but to one that was under British military occupation

and a colonial government that was set up with the express purpose of creating a 'Jewish National Home'.

British troops fought to repress the independence of the Arabs as did the French.

Blaming the 'stupid backwards natives' for failing to catch up with the settlers while ignoring the very real issues of the time evades responsibility and allows your anti-Arabism to remain in a 'moderate' form while absolving Britain (as well as France, the USA, and the former USSR) of any responsibility.

AV

Micah said...

Yes, AV, you are correct.

That said, for better or wore the British Mandate by design allowed for much local control (or lack thereof)> That resulted in Tribal and familial groups extracting taxes and honorariums at will. There was no structure for real tax collection (which would have benefited the Arab population), a necessary service that would have 'equalized' the relationship.

Now, I am not blaming the 'natives'. As I have repeatedly stated, they have been the biggest victims of successive Arab tyrannies. At the end of the day, the Israelis went to bed at night in a democratic state. The Arabs had no such great fortune.

As to calls for a 'One State Solution', that will remain a pipe dream for many, many decades.

As long as HAMAS! HAMAS! JEWS TO THE GAS! and similar slogans remain kindergarten ditty's, it is not hard to understand why the Israelis might object to a one state solution.

Veganovich said...

--- Why don't you save your racist trolling for some one of your regular hatefests and stuff it with the hypocrisy? ---

Did it ever occur to you that you would be more persuasive if you actually sounded like you considered what other people wrote before you responded? Do you really think that a response like this will make people more inclined to find merit in your opinion?

Micah said...

Veganovich-

To whom are your remarks addressed?e

Veganovich said...

--- To whom are your remarks addressed? ---

Rania, whose statement I was responding to. The text in dashes was her writing, which I was just quoting.

Benjamin Rosenbaum said...

Amina, thanks for writing this. This is exactly the right way to look at it, and something I've been struggling to find a way to communicate for a while.

enusayr said...

I thought I might share this here:

Genetic studies bring new hope for peace between Jews and Palestinians

www.readersupportednews.org

Genetic studies show common origin of Jewish and Palestinian peoples

Steven said...

I think you've analyzed the Israeli-Palestinian problem well.
I've always felt that, for there to be true peace, both sides will have to make really painful concessions. Israel will have to stop being a "Jewish state" and start being a secular republic. It will have to fully incorporate the West Bank and Gaza, give citizenship to their residents and let at least some Palestinian refugees back in-a series of steps which will, almost certainly, produce and Arab majority. For their part, Israel is a very small country, and I just don't see how it has the resources and economic capacity to absorb every Palestinian refugee. A good many, I think, will have to accept citizenship, and a life, somewhere else. I don't think either side will come to these conclusions anytime soon, but I do hope that, eventually, they both find it in themselves to put the lives and well-being of their children above national identity.

StrumSoundly said...

I wasn't able to find the article that enusayr referred to but it was a point I was going to make. Archeological evidence points to the idea that Palestinians and Jews were all Canaanites at one point in time. Different societies rose to power and then waned over time, then new societies rose to replace them, but they were all the same people. Eventually those that would come to be the Jews managed to forge a national identity for themselves, and then got beaten up by every larger adjacent empire.

Anyway my point is, Canaanites. (Though really we're all African if you go back far enough, but try telling that to your average bear...) But these cultural identities that have been forged over centuries are not going away any time soon. Getting people to give up their fear of each other, and getting leaders to stop exploiting that fear for their own gain, is a huge challenge.

Micah said...

For more on DNA results of Jews, Arabs and Kurds, See these. The results of the studies are fascinating.

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/03/the-dna-of-abraham-s-children.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Kurdish_people#Similarity_to_Jewish_people

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/study-finds-close-genetic-connection-between-jews-kurds-1.75273

yanti said...

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/it-was-always-my-dream-to-reach-jaffa-syrian-infiltrator-says-1.362166

Omar Hamwi said...

I can only smile. Touche'
A question: Going home - good. Trying to relive the past- ?

S.M. Stirling said...

At a conference on refugees recently, a German whose family had been "cleansed" from the Sudetenland remarked:

"I can visit in peace the village my ancestors lived in for over a thousand years -because- I accept that I have no right of return."

His point being that it would be ludicrous to expect the Czechs to live in peace with Germany if Germany hadn't accepted the results of the war as final and definitive -- including the expulsion of around 11,000,000 (fairly) innocent civilians in 1945-50. And, incidentally, there were another 2,000,000 or so who were just butchered out of hand.

A substantial proportion of the German population are descended from these refugees; just as about a third of all Turks are descended from those driven out of the Balkans and the Caucasus with fire and slaughter during the Christian -reconquista- there, and just as many Greeks are from the 1,500,000 ethnic Greeks driven out of Anatolia in the years after WW One. The Anatolian Armenians... well, they're just not there any more.

All these countries have accepted that enough is enough, and drawn a line under it and accepted it.

The Palestinians can, of course, refuse to accept defeat. But that is a declaration of war, and it deprives them of any right to complain when the other side makes war on -them-. Their suffering is self-inflicted; to end it, and get peace, and a (small, totally demilitarized, non-irredentist) Palestinian State, all they have to do is admit they're beaten.

And please, no nonsense about "justice". "War" and "justice" don't belong in the same sentence; the very thought is laughable. Every side in every war has believed its cause was just; that's simply another way of saying that it's -their- cause. That's an opinion.

War is about power, which is a fact.

If you decide to put an issue to the wager of battle, you lose any right to squeal about the results; you should have calculated the odds before you fought.

In 1947 the Yishuv accepted the Partition Resolution, though probably in the confident expectation that the Arabs would be dumb enough to fight instead.

The Arabs did just that, proclaiming all the while how they'd destroy the Yishuv if they won. But they didn't. Loser pays.

To the victor, the spoils and profit; to the vanquished, the cost and pain.

(One of the central insights of Zionism is that this is what matters; that it is 'better to beat than be beaten' and that singing sad songs about the injustice of it all doesn't matter bupkis.)

I might add that making existential threats against someone with 400 nuclear weapons and another 10-15 every year puts one in the "too stupid to live" category; it's an invitation to being sent into the stratosphere in a gout of radioactive flame.

As the Babylonian Talmud (tractate Sanhedrin) puts it, "If a man come up against thee, to slay thee, slay him first."

Or as an Israeli of my acquaintance said when the subject came up:

"This time if we go, everybody goes."

Omar Hamwi said...

@ S.M. Stirling - allow me to offer a different perspective on Arabs, one much different that what you categorize above. Prior to the Israeli occupation we survived the much longer crusades. The declarations made then were even more brazen. The crusaders left. Before them many other occupations took place, they too left. Time is on the side of the Arabs.

S.M. Stirling said...

Hamwi: Time is on the side of the Arabs

I'm sure they thought something like that in Cordoba and Granada, too. Didn't work out so well. Santiago Matamoros turned out to be the go-to guy.

Optimistic self-delusion and believing one's own propaganda are common human failings, but Arabs raise them to the level of a pancultural compulsion.

yanti said...

'Optimistic self-delusion and believing one's own propaganda are common human failings, but Arabs raise them to the level of a pancultural compulsion'

Stirling,
I think Israelis come a close second in believing their own propaganda.

yanti said...

On the other hand they do have the best newspaper in the middle east by a long chalk

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/israel-should-listen-to-the-message-being-sent-from-syria-1.362213

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/not-all-palestinian-demands-are-a-threat-to-israel-1.362218

Tibal said...

S.M. Stirling : "This time if we go, everybody goes."

I know of the "Samson doctrine" of the isrealian state mutual destruction instead of defeat which proves that contrary to what you wrote above the israelian state does not accept defeat either.

You also wrote Palestinians should accept their defeat as others have, I hope you realised how false this argument is. Then surely the spanish should not have fought back to reconquer Spain, German should dominate Europe, Spain should still be in control of South American states, US and Australia still be English colonies ...

Interestingly enough I have been served the same argumentation on a blog in France...

JC said...

If every time a people are mass-murdered, and the survivors seek refuge on the ruins of another people's homes and over the bodies of their dead children, the world would be a truly hellish place. This cannot be the final moral equation.

yanti said...

Jinan,
The only thing better than a 'one state solution' perhaps, is a 'no state solution'
But such solutions demand more personal responsibility than we are willing to assume.

Micah said...

JC-

'We'll finish what Hitler started' and other such delightful thoughts do not convey any moral authority whatsoever. Nor do such sentiments encourage a one state solution.

Ultimately, the problem is not one of borders or refugees as Hamas has made clear. In fact, they could care less about those things.

They believe A) Israel has no right to exist whatsoever, so borders are meaningless and B) they also believe 'Palestine' ought to be 'Judenrein', free of Jews. As many of their leaders have repeated, 'We must fight and kill the Jews wheresoever they are, etc'.

Do most Palestinians believe that? Probably not. Nevertheless, they voted for Hamas.

As they say, 'If you wanna play, you have to pay'.

Someday, saner heads will prevail. Painful accommodations will be reached by both sides, predicated on practical as opposed to religious ideologies. Until then, we will watch the tsunami of stupidity continue on.

A friend recently sent me this quote By Abba Eban. He lives in Beirut and was wryly commenting on the state of politics of his nation, but the quote is most apropos:

"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives."

Amir said...

I like what you wrote about the Awda. One doesn't need to be an Arab to understand it.

I hate moving from apartment to apartment even when politics or war are not involved and i love my home. I totally identify with people like that; i'd love to have them as my neighbors, especially if they understand that i love my home, too.

And the "Jewish State" is not that important, really, although i thank you for appreciating the validity of the original idea. It's more important that a state would be democratic than that it would be Jewish. One state, two states, three states, or whatever - the number and the borders are not important as long as democracy is everywhere.

I don't mind be a loyal citizen of the Palestinian State, as long as i am allowed to teach my children Hebrew, live in Jerusalem, fly a blue-and-white flag on my home and vote (in that order). That's democracy.

So really, you don't need to square der Judenstaat and al Awda. You just need democracy.

Amir, Jerusalem

(P.S. I just realized that by itself "Amir, Jerusalem" doesn't tell whether one is an Arab or a Jew...)

Ranoush said...

The problem with Israelis is that they hate themselves but don't want to admit it. They know they have stolen other people's land, killed other people's children, are living in other people's houses and yet they act as if they are still the victims. It is a sort of pathology and it cannot last. They know that too. Their idea of a religious state only for Jews is both racist and anachronistic. No one else in the world is allowed to have an exclusive nation state anymore, let alone a religious state (only Arians/only anglosaxons, only Celts etc) but they still want to do that in the 21st Century. Don Quixote must be cheering them on and clapping and laughing. They are still on a par with countries like Saudi Arabia in their tribalism and insularity.

Amir said...

Ranoush, you are rightly unhappy about the things that Israel does to Arabs, but cold and hard facts say that on a world scale Israel is not bad at all.

You are quite wrong in comparing Israel with Saudi Arabia. Just look at any report by any human rights organization. In a list of countries sorted by their human rights record, you'll usually find Israel in the top half, in the vicinity of countries like Italy, while Saudi Arabia would be near the bottom. Syria and the Palestinian Authority are near the bottom, too, and that is the real reason why we can't agree on anything – we just don't see democracy and human rights in the same way.

Mind you, i'm talking about reports from international human rights NGOs such as Freedom House, HRW and Amnesty and not about the government of the USA.

And Israelis very much do care about the character of their country – most of us don't want it to be exclusively Jewish or, God forbid, religious.

Ranoush said...

Amir when I said Israel is like Saudi Arabia I meant only in terms of their anachronistic tribalism and insularity, not their human rights record or their technological and social advancement etc. Israel is an advanced country in many ways but it is also an emotionally unhealthy country that lives in a severe state of denial.

Anonymous said...

Ranoush have you been to Israel? Can you possibly comment on Israelis in terms of 'anachronistic tribalism and insularity'? I would hardly think so. Israel is a more emotionally aware country than any other I have been to. It is a tolerant, vibrant state - and, yes, the only Jewish state out of 57 other Muslim states in the area. My family were made refugees from Poland. The rest were exterminated. Their farmhouse is still standing. Shall I go back and demand it? Shall I take the key? Is that acceptable? Is it acceptable that I dream of my 'right of return?' Or shall I simply get on with my life and get over it? Isn't it about time that the Arabs who were displaced from Israel get absorbed into the countries into which they were refugeed and make lives for themselves? Oh, I forgot. These countries will NOT absorb them. You know where. Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait... etc.

Ranoush said...

I must say you sound very emotionally aware but in a very selfish self serving sort of way. Emotionally aware with big blinkers on...Anyway good luck to you. Sadly nothing will make you see what you have done because you don't want to see it. And also at the time (1940s) you were desperate and had no choice, but it did cause you to commit atrocities. You should never forget that.

Bassam said...

Why Palestine? WHy there?
Jews say that because their claimed ancestors lived there 2000 years before and that they only ever had one dream, to return.
But Palestinians are wicked and vile subhumans for wanting where they can actually prove they lived 63 years ago ...
"I don't want my house in Poland" this creep claims above. Yes, because you have been indoctrinated to hate Poland and Poles and not to see that as your home.
ZIonism teaches Jews to hate and to fear all non-Jews ... and then to claim that it is because they are so poor and pathetic that the wicked Arab monsters 'hate'
They are the genocidalists and their guilty conscience denies humanity, denies empathy to the victims of their hate

Ranoush said...

No one is stopping you or anyone from going back anywhere (Palestine/Poland/whatever) if you just want to go back buy a house and get a job, that wouldnt be a problem. But if you said: "Oh I would like to go back to Poland 'en masse' replace the people who live there (oh they can go and live in Russia can't they? They're all Salvs after all, they all have high cheekbones) and then I want to RENAME the country and rule it and exclude anyone from it who isnt Jewish...I mean that is what is unacceptable DARLING.

yanti said...

Why do you all get so personal and viscious? - In contrast to Amina's balanced and thoughtful posts.

Post a Comment