Peace prevails when some lies are acknowledged and brought to a standstill. Without apprehension of the Soviet Era, historic Russian anti-Semitism (which the Soviet would go on to heavily promote in the middle east), and the KGB invention of Arafat followed by the spinning up of so many “alternative narratives”, indeed that poison will not subside for a while — but the Soviet has been gone 25 years, Moscow-Tehran aren’t looking very good in Syria, and Hamas and Hezbollah, both endorsed by the same “couple”, may be reaching the end of their argument with only corruption, kleptocracy, and death to show for it. They’re going to be “found out” by those they boasted of protecting, and that will the end of the middle east conflict.
Hamas – Muslim Brotherhood (way out of step with Wasatia Moderation and Reconciliation) – and wealthy: Haniyeh and Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires.
The “camps” of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt: Arab-created and managed.
For partial isolation in geopolitical space, the refugees of 1948 may become an ethnolinguistic cohort — a “People” — by (x) beliefs x calendar x customs x language (!) x rituals — but in clinical overview, the same have been abused by Arab powers and by Moscow.
In the efforts of the Soviet to establish and sustain power in the middle east, endemic Russian anti-Semitism became a message promoted by the same to encourage an Arab bond.
The Soviet Union self-dissolved almost 25 years ago, but the character of its political existence did not leave Russia, and continued disinformation plus promotion or tolerance for terrorism (Moscow has in recent years hosted PFLP and refuses to this day to designate Hezbollah or Hamas as terrorist organizations) have remained a part of Putin’s “neo-imperial” Russia.
The common bond and cause for a still reckless mythology — Jew hate and discomfort in general with “the west” — the generally higher-integrity, democratic, humanist, and open societies.
Fatah and Hamas have their “track records” as governments. Why they serve as the interlocutors of the Palestinians – now isolated and subject to the same post-Soviet and Muslim Brotherhood forces — should be a difficult question to answer in retrospect.
The twin basis for the middle east conflict: the “Zionists” stole their property from “The Palestinians” and Israel “occupies” the land.
The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 “brought about the appropriation by the influential and rich families of Beirut, Damascus, and to a lesser extent Jerusalem and Jaffa and other sub-district capitals, of vast tracts of land in Syria and Palestine and their registration in the name of these families in the land registers”.[8] Many of the fellahin did not understand the importance of the registers and therefore the wealthy families took advantage of this. Jewish buyers who were looking for large tracts of land found it favorable to purchase from the wealthy owners. As well many small farmers became in debt to rich families which led to the transfer of land to the new owners and then eventually to the Jewish buyers.
In 1918, after the British conquest of Palestine, the military administration closed the Land Register and prohibited all sale of land. The Register was reopened in 1920, but to prevent speculation and insure a livelihood for the fellahin, an edict was issued forbidding the sale of more than 300 dunams of land or the sale of land valued at more than 3000 Palestine pounds without the approval of the High Commissioner.[9]
There’s more to the stories of indigenous Jewry in Palestine, the capitalization of agriculture in Palestine, and the purchasing – not stealing – from Arab leaseholders of serious tracts of property in Palestine. To overlook that part of history, one must lie about how capital and labor developed on the land and peacefully and productively changed its demographics, both Jewish and Arab.
As regards “The Occupation”, the comment tells the truth about the KGB, Arafat, and the PLO; about the role played by the famously anti-Semitic Soviet in the “winning” of the Arab world (for a short while); and about Hamas and its most famous billionaires.
When it comes to Arab intransigence over the “middle east conflict” (never mind what’s going on in Syria and Iraq – the term obsessively refers to the conflict forced on Israel), one must suppose some fathers would rather lie to their children — and have their children lie as well — than disappoint them.
Addendum – Principal or Transactional Regard? – Choose Principal – Regard Will Come of That
Although the awesome conversation on the middle east conflict strives for “balance” Israeli and Palestinian interest, the actions of the old KGB and its approach to the manipulation of information plus, perhaps, the Arab leadership’s own language behavior across time have left the Arab world and the Palestinians arguing through the invention of multiple alternative narratives, all of which devolve to the delegitimizing of the presence of the Hebrews in the Land of the Hebrews. Basically, if one does not recognize the “Palestinian People”, why should the same recognize the “Jewish People”? The question begs for the “I’m okay – you’re okay” hug that it cannot and must not receive, the difference between the effects of “magical thinking” and empiricism and reason being what it is: one leads “the masses” in an abyss; the other keeps individuals en masse from it.
Also from the awesome conversation —
None contest links to the land by Arabs resident on it at the time of Israel’s chartering.
None contest the status of the same as refugees of war caught between armies, as none contest the role of the Arab armies as intending the annihilation of the Jews on the land, and thereby placing Jewish militia in the historic defensive position.
None contest the Jews as having for all functional intents militarily and politically secured _their_ state in 1948.
What happened to the proposed Arab state for the areas that are today “contested” — but not so much: Gaza, I’ve heard, has been “Judenrein” since 2005.
A “People” can be many things these days. After all, who are the “American People”? 🙂
Still, one might ask: how do the Palestinian People differ from the Arab People?
The “PLO” became the “PA” — but I’m going to call it the “PSO” — “Palestinian Slavery Organization” from here on out. The Fatah Party, a secular-nationalist political machine, continues to dominate the PLO / PA. The chain of association between it, the old Soviet, the Baath Parties, and pan-Arab nationalism should be clear.
I don’t know the early history of Hamas, but two characteristics certainly stand out today: we know (we know, I know you know, and everyone knows) it”s a Muslim Brotherhood organization. However, it is also an organization approved and manipulated by Moscow and Tehran, neither of whom — from Tehran, we would expect this but not from Putin’s Moscow — will join the west in designating the same as a terrorist organization. In fact, and despite Putin’s “anti- anti-Semitism” stance, Moscow hasn’t altered its relationship much since Soviet days, and the neo-feudal / neo-imperial revanche has sought to sustain old “friendships”.
Although Hussein and Gaddafi have been shoved off the world’s stage, Putin appears to regard the Russian client Syria as essential to his state’s ambitions and defense — and mafia ways of doing business. It appears to me that Washington and NATO have chosen to contain the Russo-Syrian-Iranian arrangement rather than challenge it while at the same time seeking to accept the fallout in jihadism (ISIS was incubated by Assad’s counterrevolutionary strategy, and I have plenty of evidence for that) and refugees, leaving the blame for Syria on Moscow’s doorstep.
Back to the “Palestinians” — the refugees: they remain representative of Cold War / Soviet politics. As Putin plays extremes against the middle, i.e., supporting Far Right and Far Left organizations and personalities worldwide, the PA and Hamas suit his ends, which includes promoting and sustaining absolute and frequently criminal political power at state level in his world and in others.
Into this comes Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi who for his good nature slipped through the fence, figuratively in his reading, literally with the visit to Auschwitz with his students, and now I think the has a larger problem: what does one say to a whole population that has been duped by political machinations they could not see? How does one approach decades of disinformation, miseducation, and deep political manipulation?
As suggested in the excerpt From the Awesome Conversation, the Obama Administration and NATO have adjusted to perhaps containing the apparent (!) energies of a revanchist Russia while choosing to let that most dispassionate of political scripting that has been “Assad vs The Terrorists” play itself out into the horror that it has become.
From Cold War to Cold Struggle and from the installation of the Middle East Conflict to this day seems not that long a span by the measurements of history — 68 years of statehood for Israel and the same period for the Arab world’s separation of the Refugees of 1948 from the mainstream of Arab history; 71 years since the collapse of Nazi Germany and the near concurrent initiation of competition and hostility (and fear) between Moscow and Washington — and 24 years and six months since the dissolving of the Soviet (December 26, 1991).
Where are we now?
I doubt the 25th anniversary of the dissolving of the Soviet will go unremarked in major media, and perhaps it is about now, this summer, and not to mention this American Independence Day, that analysis, lowly bloggers, and major media pundits will be asking the same question: as regards Moscow and Moscow-Tehran and the many “worlds” spun up around central absolute or authoritarian power, indeed, where are we now?
The “single state” solution fails not for enmity but for comprehension of what is represented by the Hebrews living in the land of the Hebrews.
Language as a cultural technology evolves within a people in somewhat isolated social space sufficient to invent their way of getting along among themselves and with the surrounding earth. For each ethnolinguistic cultural cohort on the planet, there is a land, a someplace, from whence it came.
So the Hebrews are back in the Land of the Hebrews: Israel. There are also Baloch, Pashtun (“B’ni Israel”, self-defined), and Kurds who have a relationship with the land that made them, and they too have some political issues involving their autonomy and survival as a people.
The Jordanian Arabs and the migrant workers caught between armies in 1948 have been deeply manipulated by powerful forces within and outside of Arab culture. The Russian KGB’s invention of Arafat, an Egyptian, and the PLO either is or should be history well known to scholars who have devoted themselves to studying and solving the “middle east conflict” (never the others ongoing — and “hot” — at the moment). The contemporary and feudal Russian story, that which has had Mikhail Bogdanov entertaining PFLP in Moscow (Nov. 2014) while the state refuses to acknowledge either Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, should be taken into account.
It’s not the Israelis or Palestinian People (again: somewhat isolated in time and space — long enough to create new language 🙂 ) who sustain the middle east conflict: all along, it has been those who misinform, mis-educate, and maliciously “program” socially captive innocents in service to their own feudal-medieval aggrandizement (and financial enrichment).
This blog now has plenty of data for backing up its opinion about what has created and what sustains the “Middle East Conflict (MEC)”. From the vicious narcissism that would hold refugees in camps (Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt) and separated from general state populations (a genuinely apartheid policy) to the Soviet distribution of anti-Semitic propaganda and, yes, the invention of Arafat, the MEC has come to represent medievalism at its greed-laden best.
Look into UNRWA spending and tunnel smuggling, and then take another look at who got the loot.
The Palestinians have been at the mercy of powerful Palestinian families and politicians for decades, and the same have kept refugee generations captive or enthralled or leveraged by brutality , disinformation, and outrageous promises.
Part of the story starts here — https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/quote-manipulation…/ — with the foreign policy practices of the Soviet Union and its promotion of anti-Semitic message and conflict. While Putin has worked on “anti- anti-Semitism”, his government has nonetheless met with PFLP in recent years (2014) and has refused to designate Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, which is how they’re officially viewed in the United States.
Districts in poverty are vulnerable to many kinds of exploitation, criminal and political — and sometimes both — through recruitment into programs that are not in their interest.
Feudal methods from patronage to brutalization, intimidation, and murder help keep conditions in Yatta exactly as they are. The talk, whether of nationalism or Islam, enrage or mollify the dispossessed to the advantage of those who purport to represent their interests.
I’ve included PADICO, a Gaza-based development corporation, because its board of directors is listed elsewhere on the site, and each name may be researched as regards education and experience. In outline, many are modern — cosmopolitan, well educated — but perhaps no less than Hamas’s tunnel digging children, they too have been hamstrung between the medieval and modern worlds, or that is where they have maintained themselves.
One should refuse contextless gambits like the KDH (King David Hotel) bombing but might suggest that in 1946, the greater armies had barely stopped moving, the mess in destroyed and disrupted lives moving on the landscape must have been immense if not easily seen, and military and paramilitary action on the part of the British, whom I am sure wanted to be done with World War II and its aftermath, were still undertaken in the near shadows of other combat theaters.
The simplifications disservice multiple rich histories.
The June 8 terrorist massacre in Tel Aviv exposed all five of the major myths that cloud discussions of Israel and the Palestinians.
Myth #1: “The problem is the settlements”
This was not a massacre of “settlers.” The attack did not take place in some disputed territory. Nobody can claim that the victims “provoked” the violence by living in some predominantly Arab area. These were people drinking coffee in the heart of Tel Aviv . . . .
This curriculum is informed and inspired by many sources, including the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Standing on the Side of Love campaigns, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, Churches for Middle East Peace, World Council of Churches, the American Friends Service Committee, the Israel-Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Just Vision, Jewish Voice for Peace, Open Hillel, Nakba Education Project, Zochrot, many Palestinian organizations working for peace with justice, the UUJME Newsletter, Kairos Palestine, Steadfast Hope, Zionism Unsettled, Middle East Research and Information Project Primer, and Phyllis Bennis’s Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer. Links to information about these and other resources are in the lessons and/or the Resource page at the end of the guide and the UUJME website. We are inspired also by those who choose to implement this part of the UUJME Reflection & Learning Project, and wish you the best in this endeavor to stand on the side of love with the people of Israel-Palestine.
However, and with all that love accepted, let’s have a look at some of the other contributors to the curriculum promoted by the Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East (UUJME).
To advance their “justice and peace” initiatives, they collude with Islamic and Palestinian friends in a covert scheme to sabotage Israel. Their web of anti-Zionism extends throughout Europe, the Americas and Africa. While this may seem a bold assertion, it is nonetheless worth examining some undeniable evidence.
WCC is among the many coalitions of Christians that embrace the extreme left and the jihad agenda as appeasers and collaborators.
In 2008, the AFSC, along with other similarly minded religious groups, hosted a gala dinner with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the guest of honor, despite Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, and genocidal threats against the Jewish state. Ahmadinejad, however, is only the most extreme example of the AFSC making dubious friends. The participants in its BDS summer camp were mostly Palestinians or Palestinian-Americans associated with the group Students for Justice in Palestine—an organization notorious not only for its vicious rhetoric against Israel, but for going so far as shouting down pro-Israel speakers on campus and harassing Jewish students.
Washington Presbyterians who engage in dialogue with Jewish groups are scrambling to undo what they say is the damage caused by a congregational study guide assailing Zionism distributed by a group affiliated with their denomination.
Related: NGO Monitor. “The Role of Antisemitism in the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Decision to Support Divestment.” June 25, 2014, updated March 31, 2016; Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reporting on tension within the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the offshoot Israel-Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church: “Polling data consistently show that “mainline” Protestants overwhelmingly support a safe and secure Israel, even while also being concerned about the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The efforts at the PC(USA) and other churches to pass divestment resolutions reflect the views of a minority of activists within those churches who take advantage of the structures of those churches to press their agenda.”
JVP, like other prominent Jewish anti-Zionist individuals and groups, uses its Jewish identity to deflect allegations of anti-Semitism leveled against the anti-Israel movement in order to provide it with a greater degree of legitimacy and credibility. In this guise JVP views itself as the “Jewish wing of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement (PSM)” and is an integral part of this anti-Israel coalition, serving as its “Jewish shield”, espousing the belief that if there are Jews demonizing Israel, it can’t possibly be anti-Semitic.
Also like other aggressively anti-Israel organizations, JVP members regularly attempt to shut down dissent by disrupting pro-Israel events such as a 2010 talk by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the events at a 2011 Taglit Birthright reunion in New York and the 2012 AIPAC conference. Brandeis University Prof. Ilan Troen, who calls JVP “self-appointed saints with no mass following”, explains that “If you’ve ever dealt with the JVP, they themselves are a semi-terrorist group, promoting the disruption of free speech and the inability of others to conduct public discourse.”
The JVP advisory board includes leaders in anti-Semitic and anti-Israel hate, such as Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, and Sarah Schulman. All three of these anti-Israel advocates deny the Jewish right to self determination, legitimize the internationally recognized terrorist group Hamas, and support the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.
Related in the news: Shahmoon, Shani. “Jewish Woman Forced to Hide From Anti-Israel Activists at UC-Irvine.” Observer News & Politics, May 20, 2016: “Earlier this month, Jewish and pro-Israel students found themselves caught in what they describe as a “fire of hate” and feelings of mourning as they observed Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Muslim Student Union, Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine and the American Indian Student Association just happened to organize a week of anti-Israel activity marketed under the title, “Anti-Zionism: The Roots of Oppression,” during the same week.”
. . . while Open Hillel phrases their intentions in the context of a free and unfettered debate (hence “open”), their events, speakers and partners actually seem to be far more interested in institutionalizing a set of radical opinions—and browbeating the mainstream into accepting it: That far from being a lonely liberal democracy facing daunting challenges from without and within, Israel is actually an illegitimate, oppressive, colonial state that might be better off not existing; and that Jewish students cannot truly understand it without teaming up with extreme pro-Palestinian groups.
While “Nakba” points to disaster it also brings up the uncomfortable matter of whipping legions to genocidal war and losing the same. In the immediate aftermath of “1948”, the Arab world took revenge on the Jewish residents of Arab states, and that history may be read about on this blog: Point of No Return.
. . . the group’s founder has written the following about his vision of the future:
When the refugees return, Jews will become a minority in the country. Israel as a Jewish state will change radically, and it will no longer be defined as such. Jews will no longer be able to determine their future…by themselves…. There may be Jews, most of them of European origin, who won’t be able to adjust to a non-Zionist reality, and prefer to use their other passport to move elsewhere…”
What’s a nice Jewish girl like Phyllis Bennis doing at the head of the class of anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, (anti-Semitic) leaders, the kind who stand shoulder to shoulder with those inclined to label the Jewish-majority state “Israhell”?
Here’s a partial transcript leading to Bennis’s becoming swept up in the radical politics of the Vietnam Era — her further transformation into parroting the catechisms of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left comes in the back half of the video:
The short answer is the Vietnam War. I grew up right through highschool with this focus on Zionism. That was my social environment. Those were my friends. That’s who I hung out with. And then I went away to college. And I started college in 1968, the big year, if you will, and in that context, I spent my first year being very much a serious student . . . you do grow up as a Jewish kid with . . . it’s all about education, all about getting good grades . . . so here I am, a seventeen year old kid, showing off, linking up with a group of graduate students and taking their courses, their postdoctoral seminars, thinking of myself as quite the intellectual, but by the end of my freshman year I’m suddenly immersed in the student movement, anti-war stuff . . . the Black Student Union had taken over the computer center the year before in the struggle to get an ethnic studies department on campus — I’m at the University of California in Santa Barbara — and suddenly I’m joining SDS [Students for Democratic Society], I’m part of the new student government . . . we have an alliance with the Latino movement and the Black Student Union, and we take over student government, and suddenly I’m the chair of the lectures committee . . . you know what the hell is that? I didn’t really know, but I had a budget of ten thousand dollars, which at that time was really a lot of money, to bring people to campus. So I brought Angela Davis, I brought half the defendants of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, and the lawyers from the trial, and suddenly I was involved with meeting all these people I had only heard about, and school suddenly was not really about going to classes . . . none of us went to class very much. We were publishing an underground newspaper, and we were doing radio — we took over the campus radio station . . . .
In the region of historic anti-Semitism associated with Christianity and Islam resides the concept of “religious succession”, i.e.,the idea that one true church — one true connection with God — will and must displace less authentic, less true competitors, and that includes the Judaism from which Jesus emerged.
BackChannels believes Constantine and Muhammad have made their points and that a medieval portion of their following in legacy continues to take unholy license in the doing of their bidding.
What is to give the new fascists (whether out of the Christian Far Right, the Islamist camps, or the Far Left) pause for reconsideration?
Look to 21st Century sophistication in ethnology, linguistics, and psychology to help us appreciate and comprehend how our species develops and sustains its cultures. That dawning self-awareness and knowledge may well improve general resistance to medieval manipulation and unintentional support of the ambitions, martial powers, and sadism of feudal tyrants — the most malign of narcissists — in their contemporary forms.
This post started with but a single paragraph from the introduction to a full multi-part curriculum developed to lead Unitarian Universalist congregants in the discussion of the middle east conflict, but a glance back at the contributors to that program may tell what its politics are really about. As had a large portion of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 2014, those most responsible in the Universalist Unitarian Association may wish to investigate who — and what — may be served by the subgroup curriculum disseminated through their organization.
Waitstill Sharp was a minister in the Unitarian church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. His wife, Martha, was a noted social worker. During World War II, Martha and Waitstill Sharp helped hundreds of people escape from Nazi persecution.
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel, honored the Sharps as Righteous Among the Nations in 2006.
The Soviet was not only a power structure. It had a mentality — and the same has been transitioned by Putin into the nationalist format — that served the intellectual and political engines of the Far Left. The Tired Old Politics of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left grind on absent of the Soviet, and Haaretz.com, among others, may be dropping those politics while flailing around for a distinct new social liberalism.
Inspiration for the writing: “Ironic that Haaretz is reporting this story, considering that most of the BDS animus is fueled and justified by Haaretz writers.”
Those “Tired Old Politics of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left” keep duped and misdirected possibly millions of well-intentioned Americans (as well as anti-Semites) sitting politely in dozens to hundreds of organizations hooked up to representatives of the the BDS Movement, the International and Palestinian Solidarity organizations, and every other post-Soviet comrade tank.
While BackChannels continues to note that this year will mark the 25th year out from the dissolving of the Soviet Union, the notion that inherently anti-Semitic pro-BDS furor represents the ghosts of another era, one may find online (with relation to “Cold War — Cold Struggle“) a most cynical partisan-to-Moscow approach the modern world’s wrestling with the medieval mind:
‘Independent’ does not mean non-partisan. You can find a statement of our broad views in the antiwar declaration approved at a conference in Yalta, Crimea approved on 7 July 2014 at a meeting of activists from Ukraine, Europe, Russia and North America. We believe great injustices are being committed by the government installed in Kiev in February against the whole Ukrainian people.
On the web, it’s too easy to surf off the BDS issue (in America and globally) and over to Moscow’s maneuvering in Syria and Ukraine, and yet these very different themes — BDS, Cold War, Syria, Ukraine, and Politics on the Left — would seem very much connected by a massive update on old agitation and propaganda methods. (As always, the sense of how the Soviet state worked may be obtained through any number of volumes relayed in the “Russian Section” of this blog).
The poison — anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist; pro-mob, pro-power without warrant — spreads down to American villages in countless “activist” newsletters. Here’s a glimpse from the calendar page of the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter:
Friday, June 3, KINGSTON: There will be a 7 p.m. screening of the documentary The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War in the United States at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Catskills, 320 Sawkill Rd. This film offers a sophisticated analysis of the Zionist strategy to keep Washington policymakers and the U.S. public on Israel’s side despite its subjugation of the Palestinian people.
Hamas governs Gaza — from examination of its constitution to human rights to billionaire status for both Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal, there’s no lack of information online or in books for its goals, its history, its methods, its human rights record, and so on.
Similarly, the Palestinian Authority is the political authority in the West Bank. While Israel and its Defense Forces have defensive control over who and what moves in the disputed territory, the working police serve Abbas. In fact, the timbre of life — how things work within — are defined by the behavior of the Palestinian Authority in concert with others with whom it does business.
Reduction: Hamas occupies Gaza; the PLO / PA occupies the West Bank.
And those “poor Palestinians” may be read about on websites like these: Palestine Real Estate Investment Company, Padico Holding — find the boards of directors online and follow each mogul to related career terminals within the region.
For the Hate-America-Firsters”, perhaps some Americans should take another look at America.
BackChannels 