The group has brought together Arab journalists, artists, politicians, diplomats, Quranic scholars and others who share a view that isolating and demonizing Israel has cost Arab nations billions in trade. They say it has also undercut Palestinian efforts to build institutions for a future state, and torn at the Arab social fabric, as rival ethnic, religious and national leaders increasingly apply tactics that were first tested against Israel.
The wisdom that comes to mind: “The enemies of Israel defeat themselves.”
In modern thought, however, I believe in humanist ethics and principles that over time defeat family, feudal, and tribal pressure and torque while at the same time degrading the motivations for war itself. We have only one planet; we are all of the Earth herself; and whether we like it or not, we are going to have to arrange and contain ourselves for our sense of efficacy, freedom, and survival.
Too often, those who drive conflict — who incite others to violence — have for themselves aggrandizement and greed in mind foremost. Only to a certain extent may they define “the way of the world”. The way of the world is everyone else, and the truth is “everyone else” gets tired of being victimized by other people’s made-up battles — or psychoses.
All who want more death, more injury, more jealousy, more resentment, more fear, more authority, more force for suffocation of the human spirit . . . keep fighting. Everyone one else — take care of everyone else.
On Facebook, frequent Time of Israel columnist Fred Maroun wrote in light of the above cited article:
“Stop the expansion of settlements on Palestinian land, and ensure full rights for Palestinians”. One may not agree with Ilan Omar on everything, but she’s right on that point. And if Israel won’t give West Bank Palestinians equal rights within the state of Israel, it should let them run their own state in which Palestinians would be citizens. The current state of limbo — no equality and no Palestinian state — is not acceptable and is not worthy of the great democracy that Israel is.
This editor’s riposte has picked up more than a dozen FB “Likes” and “Loves” since it was added to the conversation. Here it is as part of the assault on the “Middle East Conflict” itself, not on the Palestinians who have been made to suffer through 70+ years of Arab Apartheid and Soviet/Post-Soviet disinformation, manipulation, and political repression by their own corrupt and kleptocratic “leaders”.
Palestinians do run their own “territories”, which would be states if their leadership were not in the end murderous!
Omar’s ploy is to eliminate Israel as a Jewish-Majority state. She either conveniently or ignorantly forgets that Israel is 20 percent Arab Muslim enfranchised.
To this point, the Palestinian leaders have appeared to prefer lying to their people — and taking their money for themselves — to buckling down into clearly responsive and responsible governance. If ever there were a place to being building a New Palestinian Society, it would be Shuafat!
Inspiration for the post: the question as to why the Palestinian bloc resists reciprocity in so many open online forums surrounding the middle east conflict.
Of late, the editor has been trotting out two or three significant articles involving shared Israeli-Palestinian experience:
What follows: a few words From The Awesome Conversation —
Much of the Arab World and the Palestinians (who have been separated from the same even while touted as an Arab cause) are in a pickle in relation to the benefits of the modern world that are so ubiquitous within it that we take them for granted.
We all miss the good conversation with the Palestinian side because their political communities demand conformance and otherwise appear inflexible as well as deeply and viciously politically repressed.
While the puppet masters — advisers, financiers, manipulators — are elsewhere in the Arab, Persian, and Soviet / post-Soviet worlds, cognizant Israelis and hapless Palestinians are stuck on the fault line between “east” and “west”, and the hell of it is neither can do much for authentic Palestinian liberation.
One friend, Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi, had the audacity, courage, loving motivation, and spirit to bring a class of Palestinian students to Auschwitz, a breakthrough in peace making if ever was. His reward: a torched automobile courtesy of the nefarious political mafia power n the Palestinian midst. Today, some hold a hard line even though they know what I know as regards the KGB’s meddling in the middle east (see also the last section of this post as regards a true telling of the Palestinian experience). While Daoudi searches for the middle path, he sees no going backward on the “Palestinian narrative”, which has been such an invention in language — and in academe, an intellectual infection — that none (who are of the west and disinclined toward “magical thinking”) can work with it.
That’s my explanation for the question, “Why is it so difficult to expect the same thing” — fair and forward-thinking reciprocity — from the Palestinians. Political and social methods of repression work, and the “leaders” have made a mint while managing what is just one among the world’s “frozen conflicts”.
The focus of the world really should be on the PLO / PA, Hamas, and, one big step up in the world of foreign affairs, the malicious political creativity of Moscow and Tehran. The old Arab side power nodes have not been much better, but with the Shiite v Sunni conflict in play, Washington has been trying to pull the Kingdom forward while addressing the “Islamic Revolution” with punitive measures.
Related on BackChannels
My argument for the Palestinian People: after 70+ years of comparative isolation associated with Arab Apartheid, the cohort defined by the Arab refugees of 1948 have indeed become a People, but they have been also deeply intellectually poisoned. The big lie as a thought left unaddressed to fester . . . to whip resentment into boiling anger: “The Jews stole your land and God wants to you to seize it back (and annihilate the Jews)”. Never mind the Turkish land registries, the land purchases that began long before WWII, the agricultural industry that drew Arab labor into its economy, or the continuous presence of Jews in Roman-named “Palestine” across millennia.
The myth: Israel was an invasion.
The truth: Israel has been an investment legitimately obtained.
The cruelties to which the Palestinians — in some radicalized part — remain subject: Hitler’s license for the harboring of genocidal ambitions now supported by Hamas, at least; Uncle Joe’s and Father (I guess) Andropov’s reliance on “Information Warfare” and political repression in the ordering of their own delusional worlds.
Peace for Israelis and Palestinians may turn out a thing that swells up into political space rather than something forced by arms, it being more the natural inclination of humanity to establish a natural security through heightened interaction and more normative reciprocal and trustworthy social behavior.
By David Bedein and posted to YouTube February 2, 2017.
Europeans who may wish to see fewer “3rd world country people” in their neighborhoods would do well to address the state leaders who sent them: Putin, Assad, and Khamenie.
How?
By applying “Reflexive Control” in the manipulating of Islamic Terrorism and the shaping of their wars.
Method #1: detect and amplify any present national, racial, or religious suspicion into self-righteous anger and resentment — and crank it up;
Method #2: develop and deploy appropriate agitprop and agent provocateur — and for the Devil’s sake, don’t worry about anything having to do with ethics, ideals, principles, or values: in fact, dispense with the possession of conscience altogether and reduce all complexities — also, all cultural richness and intercultural relations to two essential dimensions: will and survival.
Method #3: Prepare the violence to come: arm convinced militia and move the same toward perceiving slights or promoting provocations, for either will serve the dual purposes necessary for the inhabiting of a renewed medieval world governed by feudal arrangements in support of “absolute power” (to be shared between political criminals and similar life forms).
Method #4: In hybrid, highbrow, and lowest manner, infiltrate target organizations and states for purpose of abetting their destabilization, perpetuating disinformation, and for ultimately exploiting legitimate business and labor for gain leveraged by bribery or extortion / reward for cooperation and threat for independence in either thought or action.
Centrist leaders across Europe hope the fallout from the “Ibiza scandal” will be felt beyond Austria in the European parliament elections this week, in which populist, nationalist and far-right parties have been forecast to make gains.
Strache’s apparent eagerness to embrace corruption is in stark contrast to the “drain the swamp” rhetoric populists routinely deploy in their attempts to portray politics as a battle by decent ordinary people against a venal elite. The FPÖ is a key member of an alliance of European nationalist parties led by Matteo Salvini of Italy’s League.
Add to the title: “We want to be free.” Posted to YouTube on February 10, 2014.
BackChannels has embedded with many posts the key word or phrase, “medieval v modern”, and that has worked for the editor, but what has emerged in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and elsewhere also could be called a “Reactionary Conservatism” that fits with the anti-democratic and piratical renewal of feudal absolute power. Where such has succeeded, so far, the same has devolved into patently criminal cronyism.
Added 5/23/2019 —
BBC on Orban’s Hungary and its “Populism” — Posted to YouTube May 22, 2019.
State of Affairs: Palestinian leaders needs must treat the Palestinian main base as captives to be kept from free and open discourse and research in relation to their own history.
For BackChannels, “The Palestinians” exist, but the idea of the “The People” may exist differently than presumed by the dictatorships and kleptocrats that have chosen to exploit as weapons “the refugees of 1948”, i.e., the many Christians and Muslims abandoned between armies as Arab forces abandoned their mission to annihilate the Jews of Israel.
Genuine peace may have something to do with shared integrity, not my-side-your-side and the wheedled detente that is ever a ceasefire, never a peace.
My argument for the Palestinian People: after 70+ years of comparative isolation associated with Arab Apartheid, the cohort defined by the Arab refugees of 1948 have indeed become a People, but they have been also deeply intellectually poisoned. The big lie as a thought left unaddressed to fester . . . to whip resentment into boiling anger: “The Jews stole your land and God wants to you to seize it back (and annihilate the Jews)”. Never mind the Turkish land registries, the land purchases that began long before WWII, the agricultural industry that drew Arab labor into its economy, or the continuous presence of Jews in Roman-named “Palestine” across millennia.
The myth: Israel was an invasion.
The truth: Israel has been an investment legitimately obtained.
The cruelties to which the Palestinians, in some radicalized part, remain subject: Hitler’s license for the harboring of genocidal ambitions now supported by Hamas, at least; Uncle Joe’s and Father (I guess) Andropov’s reliance on “Information Warfare” and political repression in the ordering of their own delusional worlds.
Today we know what happens to Palestinian dissidents.
Haven’t The Palestinians an inherent right to question their leadership — it has been a long time since the last casting of ballots for them — or to read and discuss, I don’t know, say, Benny Morris, Efraim Karsh, or to engage with Israels as each may see fit without fear?
The Soviet / post-Soviet seduced Left / Far Left — the Corbynites, the Cult BDSWaters of the world — are not for the Palestinians but for those who have enriched themselves championing their misery in service to the corruption of those who most purport to represent them.
Soviet cartoons distributed in the Middle East to leverage “the masses” into the Soviet camp.
Might Russia’s animus with the Jews go all the way back to the Viking encounter with the Khazar Kingdom that received tribute from east-west trade?
That’s possible. The Khazar, representing a Turkic Khaganate, had converted en masse to a Karaite form of Judaism and would have been regarded as Jews by those whose eastern trade they had taxed. The ever expanding-contracting-expanding range of Nordic / Russian power overtook the Kingdom has it would Kiev as well as half of Britain: the Vikings were to hold sway in what is today thought of as “The West”, or one might say the European tribes north of the Roman Empire.
Has anti-Semitic hate traveled forward from that far in the past?
That too is possible, the calendar of the Hebrews dating back 5,779 years this year.
How primary in the life of polities are fundamental beliefs and accompanying attitudes?
Would Great Britain be “British” without the anti-Semitic depictions of Shakespeare’s Shylock and Dickens’ Fagin, both far predating the encouragement of Russia’s Okhrana and later Bolshevik KGB?
Add the thought to conjecture.
Whatever history may tell the scholars, today’s hatred of the Jews, i.e., contemporary anti-Semitic ideation and obsession, seems a part of the medieval world and its views, not the modern one of integrity, reason, and study.
For The Palestinians, living as subject to the capricious and unquestionable power of Fatah (via the PLO / PA) and Hamas (thanks to its financial supporters), their dignity, freedom, and human rights will remain in the hands of their true captors, and that is the present Palestinian “leaders” who have led them into the most absurd and dark of dead ends.
There’s a great deal of material “related online” — and in the libraries — but this happened to cross my desk while the post was still a week or so new, and I though I would recommend its reading:
Skullduggery at about 27:48 (iTunes), Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman ask Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Dem., Michigan) for her views on the Middle East Conflict, which she then mixes with observations having to do with the Holocaust and her Palestinian ancestry.
There’s a kind of a calming feeling I always tell folks when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust and the fact that it was my ancestors, Palestinians, who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihoods, their human dignity, their existence in many ways had been wiped out and some people’s passport . . . I mean all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post the Holocaust, post the tragedy and horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time, and I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right?, in many ways, but they did it in a way that took their human dignity away, right?, and it was forced on them, and so when I think about one state, I think about the fact that why couldn’t we do it in a better way?
In 1948, an Arab war intent on the annihilation of the Jews of a most recently UN chartered Israel produced what would become the refugees of that year and the related Arab Apartheid camps of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. Moreover, some Arab populations that fell in with the Jews would become themselves the Christian and Arab complement of Israel among Israel’s citizens, comprising about 20 percent of modern Israel’s population.
What was to corrode Palestinian dignity and freedom were the combined effects of Stalin’s pick-up of what Hitler and the Nazis failed to hold in their defeat; the amplification of Arab anti-Semitic ideation, much appreciated by Hitler and subsequently encouraged by Stalin in the aftermath of WWII; and in the more modern decades of the 1960s and 1970s, KGB manipulation of the Palestinians en masse with direct relation to their leadership.
Representative Tlaib’s ancestors did not have to suffer the re-emergence of the Hebrews as a political power in the Land of the Hebrews.
Quite opposite and far predating WWII, Jewish agricultural capitalization and land purchases (based in the Ottoman Land Registries) produced a new regional economy and heightened the Arab populating of the space with both Arab and Jewish labor. The refusal of Arab states to accept a Jewish enclave established the initial Palestinian separation from both Arab state cultures and from amity with the Jews. The period since the Islamic Revolution in Iran (and the related sponsoring of Hezbollah and funding of Hamas) may add its impact as regards the deepening of Palestinian captivity by those who have most professed to represent them.
One of BackChannel’s conservative Israeli friends online had this to say this morning in relation to Rep. Tlaib’s comments:
Tlaib also said that Netanyahu would not be able to look her grandmother in the eye. Her grandmother lives in an Arab village called “Beit Ur al Fa’uqah,” one of two adjacent “Beit Ur” villages on adjacent hilltiops.
The irony is that the two villages are actually the Jewish town of Beit Choron. Though we have a modern Beit Choron nearby the two Arab villages are where Jews lived for roughly 3-millenia until the 17th Century CE. At that point Tlaib’s ancestors rode filthy camels across our homeland and stole the town along with the rest of HaEretz in a process that began in 634 CE. This “woman” is real big on talking about “ancestors.” Not all Jews in Israel are Ashkenazi Holocaust Survivors. Some are Baladi, Jews like myself whose families for the most part have always lived on the land. When the very first Arab INVADED in 634 CE the last pre-modern Jewish State had only fallen 20-months before.
How far forward may any go by going so far back?
Whatever the answer, there may be a greater point to be made on behalf of historic truth looked on in Arab and Jewish partnership, so that the past has its place more in history than in the future adjustment of separable but perhaps ultimately complementary separable ethnic and political cultures.
At this point in time, any modern person in possession of a computer, moderate English language skills, and Internet access — and who is not politically repressed as regards reading and speaking online — may search up historians Benny Morris and Efraim Karsh, for a start, on Palestinian real history.
It’s sad to note of political reality that more constituents in the world’s states may prefer partisan fairy tales and convenient sloganeering to the adventure that is about learning new things, but when the pain is great enough — or old enough — as it has been for Israelis and Palestinians (for more than 70 years), one may wish for scholars to rise with integrity against the lies and inventions of politically ill-informed (at best) or venal (at worst) personalities that perpetuate conflict through the many forms of fascist-totalitarian methods focused on the continuing political servitude of those defenseless, ignorant, and powerless against them.
The topic is perennial: “The Poles did nothing to stop Hitler”; “The Poles murdered the Jews”; “The Poles were the worst of anti-Semites”; etc. So here is one fast response to all of that.
The Holocaust may be unique in this overlooked way: it was an event so damning of the character of our species that it has been and may remain visited universally over time. The experience of it has given over to the memory of it. Each soul that visits The Holocaust, and there are many ways now, will experience and respond to it differently.
Compiled by the Polish American Librarians Association, a new list of recommended reading emphasizes books that effectively examine inflammatory questions that may never be fully answered or understood but continue to be asked: Did Poles collaborate with the Germans? Why did Poland have the largest Jewish population of any country in Europe? Why did the West disbelieve information about the death camps that was gathered by the Resistance? Why didn’t more Jews resist? Why was Poland the only country in which the death penalty was imposed for Christians harboring Jews? Why was the response of the Catholic Church so meek? Why, by far, are there more Polish names on the roll at Yad Vashem of Righteous Gentiles who saved Jews than any other nationality?
Three million Poles were also taken by the Holocaust.
And there’s no denying the theft and inhabiting of Jewish property by the Poles.
Nonetheless, lose the black-and-white thinking.
For the energetic, two lesser known proper nouns might be worth a look-up in relation to The Holocaust: “Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter”; “Michael Kellogg” (The Russian Roots of Nazism).
I had left the nouns — Kellogg and Scheubner-Richter — without URLs to encourage readers of the thread to make a little bit of effort to know the true kernel of The Holocaust.
Inspiration: Corbyn’s intellectual connection with the Soviet Era as mentioned by Ben Cohen in a notice and review (The Tower, October 2016) of David Rich’s The Left’s Jewish Problem. My conversational partner had asked about the origins of British anti-Semitism, and while I had a sense of where the answer might be, I hadn’t much validation for it. Now that little patch of curiosity and intuition may be on the cusp of becoming known.
From the Awesome Conversation on Facebook
Of course. I’ve been right about the “Phantoms of the Soviet”. I just purchased the earlier Kindle edition of David Rich’s The Left’s Jewish Problem and hope that will fill in some gaps.
The west has made broad strides in mopping up after the Cold War; however it has succumbed to the new “syndicate”, a melange of authoritarian governments bent on the renewal of feudalism above a darker background of global crime and corruption driven by trade in narcotics and abetted by money laundering.
For Russian power, today’s “anti- anti-Semitism” and anti-Semitism are just political tools for the defense of the terminal or singular representation of the power of the state in one person. What it long ago promoted beyond its borders has been pure intellectual poison.
