The energies and numbers of Israelis and Palestinians engaged in cross-cultural activities (like this one with Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi), in trade, even in commiseration, have been stable and strong for years.
Do the extremists the west calls “terrorists” authentically represent Islam?
Do yesterday’s rockets from Gaza represent today’s Palestinians?
The PLO/PA and Hamas have ways of making the news look bad.
Other Palestinians, however, have ways of getting things done despite the efforts of the Phantoms of the Soviet to repeat their declarations — year after year for 72 years — while handily lifting some money from Palestinian pockets and skimming more from UNCHR revenues intended for Palestinian development. While the war that exists in the minds of Palestinian “Leaders” — and ticks off the IDF most of all — goes on and on and on and on, Palestinians have long been working.
Here are a few references that BackChannels regards as positive indicators for the region. The URL titles provide the story headers:
Inspiration for the author of this blog: a nice patch of short observations related to the Middle East Conflict, i.e., “Israel v Palestinian ‘Leaders'”.
Regarding the Framing of the Conflict: Notes on the Treatment of Time in Arguments About Control and Ownership of Contested Space
Time has been the New Space for a while, DM, and I have found two kinds of people plainly dangerous: 1) those who cannot keep themselves from dwelling in the past 🙂 ; 2) those who want to get to the end of their civilizational story as fast as possible!
😀
One is too far behind and the other way too far into the future — and both may be too attached to ancient and medieval dogma.
For the purposes of Administration and Adjudication, issues (real estate disputes) that can be worked in the courts have been submitted as such, and those that cannot be worked out in a civil fashion may be better set aside for what good may be achieved for everyone.
There are leaders, other personalities, and organizations invested in sustained conflict, and as long as the “middle east conflict” is around (forget about the others in the ME), they’re good to go.
Add the thieves who have factored in their own corruption in their estimation of personal revenues given conditions that don’t change.
I see no reason for either Israelis or Palestinians to remain subject to animosities that supposedly drive one or the other to violence while actually benefiting those who would manipulate them most for their own aggrandizement and enrichment.
Everyone should see how Time is used to frame issues and OBSTRUCT their resolution in exchange for political gain, and neither for the betterment nor welfare of Israelis and Palestinians but primarily for themselves and often in service to their own image.
For what is not already in the courts, there are no legal remedies — only political ones!
Feudalism and Tribalism figure highly in sustaining the conflict, but neither today offer healthy benefits to anyone but those institutionally invested in sustained conflict.
I believe Israelis would be happy with the cessation of Palestinian or related violence (within as well as without) and modern Palestinians might finally appreciate moving on with decency in employment, freedom, and prosperity. I also feel certain that both “options” or channels into the future are real.
By dwelling Back There in Time, Arab Palestinians and Jewish Israelis delay their own potential experience of reconciliation, resolution, and peace and security — and those who benefit are those who perpetually care about themselves at the expense of caring about others.
While my own sweet words belie difficult questions — e.g., what to do with civilizational ambition, greed, and pride? — there’s truth to them in relation to broader regional development plus improvements to be realized in Qualities of Living for Israelis and Palestinians.
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!
The above juxtaposition may be found the BackChannels reading page — the page on which the editor shares part of his daily news feed — at https://www.facebook.com/BackChannels/ .
BackChannels believes history unified: when all has been truthfully reported, the parts may be found to fit all the way through. The greater public will with time dismiss lies and liars alike, and clarity and peace may emerge and prevail.
Well, for the sake of realpolitik, perhaps it is better to have walked on to the bridge than to have continued throwing mud balls from opposite banks.
More than likely, and in light of basic necessary Israeli-Palestinian cooperation (as with COGAT), interaction (growing, voluntary, social), and trade, peace will well up from beneath the headlines to essentially drown the conflict in modern Palestinian doubt, fair-mindedness, humanity, and indecision — and appreciation and love. New ideas and information may do that. The once-Soviet Era poison as installed will slowly evaporate as light works its way into and through the community.
The response to that statement by this blog’s editor follows:
That has been the power of Soviet / post-Soviet propaganda and one of the more basic features of misguidance on the Left. “Colonialism” — horrific and true enough in the age of the Grand Game — lost its legitimacy as the empires got the native boot and, with time, local political forces reestablished their claims and writs to the point, which one might suggest is about now, where the finger cannot be pointed at other than themselves. British power and European kingdoms have not gone missing, but they are not what they once were.
The Soviet engaged in two egregious behaviors throughout its tenure: it whipped resentments into small conflicts that it could then manage to its own advantage; and through the this-and-that “liberation” movements, it produced piratical dictatorships that would become centers for the promotion of ideology and the worst kinds of mischief.
For how Cuba and Venezuela turned out, I would recommend looking up both at the InSight Crime website.
The creation of Arafat and the PLO (along with the courting of Arab power) follows the Soviet / KGB template, and the fact that the movement persists with the Soviet long gone only to be replaced by an autocratic mafia-type (and mafia-associated) regime tells of a modern take on the thuggish history of mankind — but it also leaves the Palestinians trapped between a defunct political era and a more cooperative, idealistic, and higher-integrity modernity.
Why should the Palestinians now be kept from authentic critical historical scholarship?
The Soviet duped everyone.
The KGB would use the term “framing” to describe how it positioned events and persons psychologically. Indeed, the propaganda became the perception but because of its baseless qualities — and in the way of Potemkin — the Palestinians may stand up and look brave (which they do) but there’s nothing really beneath them and there won’t be until they acquire the power to pursue independent inquiry with integrity in their own right.
Related Online
Regarding post-Soviet Cuba and Venezuela
With regard to Soviet / post-Soviet influence, BackChannels had the following in mind in relation to its suggestion to have a look at Cuba and Venezuela via the information window provided by InSight Crime.
BackChannels has long featured a get-you-started (got the editor started) library page titled, “Russian Section“. It’s a worth a look (but ageing right along with the editor who may wish to start over with that focus).
One among many Soviet cartoons distributed in the Middle East (this one from the 1970s) to leverage “the masses” into the Soviet camp.
What if one awakes from a dream or nightmare one morning with the knowledge that much of what one has been taught to believe has turned out simply . . . not true?
The Earth has been proven round, not flat.
Does one go on as before without change in aspirations, beliefs, routines?
One may.
Or one may have a fresh look around at a world wildly different from that which one had for so long imagined on the basis of falsehoods and deliberate misguidance fashioned by the powerful and powerfully corrupt.
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.
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.
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