The “Palestinian Cause” has left refugee residents stranded in Gaza and around Ramallah while failing to produce anything — anything — beyond “martyrs”, not that billionaires Mashaal and Haniyeh would wish to join them.
The failure over the summer of “Gaza Fortress” — credit Robert Satloff at TWI for that term — appears to have pushed Hamas to push itself where it has outside of (Judenrein) Gaza. Still, no matter what Hamas does, the cause is done, the encampments — as inholdings in Israel, as ghettos like Yarmouk in Syria — are maintained entirely not by disaffected Arab hands but by Arab kleptocrats hiding what they really do (how else become a billionaire on the backs of the impoverished?) behind cloaks, screens, and walls of disingenuous words.
Suzerainty might serve for Israel’s area of control to recognized international borders. The camps elsewhere want for a sea change in Arab heart and outlook. The twined ropes of national socialism and a strident Islamism have repeatedly served to aggrandize autocrats while failing, and in fact killing, their constituents.
It was never a real estate problem.
It isn’t one today.
It’s a problem about enmity founded in avarice and religious successionary ambition, old ropes tangled together by perhaps the Soviet encouragement of a thieving while patronizing “pan Arab nationalism” — of the sort pursued by Saddam Hussein (count the palaces built at the expense of the hunger of his constituents) — and a klepto-theocratic Islamism, the kind that sacrifices children to tunnel building and tells the mothers to regard their own innocent young as “martyrs”.
It should be over.
Someone needs to call it “over”.
No interest vested in sustaining the middle east conflict.
None, perhaps, hooked on one- and two-state real estate arguments care much for a responsible and, actually, liberating suzerainty with public courts and a press in which the tolerant among the curious are well defended and the reportage — clear, accurate, and complete — routinely notes not only the arrest but the cause of it as well.
For some 20 years now Israeli governments, left and right, operated within the paradigm of the two-states solution, “land for peace” formula and the belief that only the establishment of a Palestinian country in the very heart of our own will solve all our problems. This, however, was tried and failed numerously. If there’s indeed any science in “political science”, then these “experiments” and “observations” must be taken into the most serious of consideration.
I should publish the above excerpt as a link and leave it be.
Instead, and this a true “back channel” in “People’s Diplomacy” (online), I will suggest only that poetry needs once again to be taken seriously.
🙂
The kind of Gazan leadership that uses children — 160 of them now dead — to build assault tunnels has a problem in the head sustained by language internalized and maintained (or else!) in the head.
That language can be changed.
Gazans may be quiet, considering the kind of ears the walls may have, but they need no longer be kept blind and deaf as well.
Where Hamas has exploited children, Gazans may know it.
Where Hamas has forced, manipulated, or positioned noncombatants and their immediate surrounds as human shields, Gazans well know it.
Where Khaled Mashaal appears to have gone missing through the action while producing a reputation as a now powerful and wealthy man worth more than $2.5 billion, Gazans may know it.
Where Israelis mean well and Arab Israelis, Christian or Muslim, do good by themselves and others, Gazans now know it.
Those are nice homilies for reading by the side of the road, but let’s really get on the on ramp: the language traps formed by Islamist and Soviet post-Soviet anti-Semitic cant and rant and the congruent manipulations in language to produce anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist passion are the kind of traps that hold the mind in tangled webs. They’re woven of evil pairings — simple metonymy — into dismal and self-defeating worldviews. Taken up and strewn around campuses and streets by the “solidarity movements”, they sustain the plundering of Gazans by powerful, deeply exploiting, and sociopathic personalities.
The Revolution on the Inside will not be televised.
The content dates from Spring 2014, and some of it has been well reviewed, but I feel it still worth a listen and a look.
______
A video was uploaded onto YouTube which featured a young Palestinian Christian woman describing what it was like to live under Israel military occupation. If that was all the video was about, it would have simply been added to the thousands of other YouTube videos which describe the same thing. What made Christy Anastas’ video unique was that she bravely revealed how Palestinian Christians have and are being treated by Palestinian Muslims and nationalists.
Christy Anastas: “I believe in people, not concrete.”
Posted to YouTube – 4/25/2014.
On the whereabouts of Christy Anastas —
Christy Anastas, the 24-year-old woman who has fled the West Bank (where a journalist was recently sentenced to a year in prison for mocking Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas on Facebook), will present herself for inspection at a police station in England on the morning of April 29, 2014.
Why?
Because a self-styled “peace and justice” activist has called the police in England, informing the authorities that she may be a “missing person.” Consequently, Christy will present herself at a police station somewhere in England this morning to assure them that she is not being held against her will.
So, given that even Hamas never claimed that 96 percent of those killed were civilians, where did Erekat get this number? Again, we must admit that he simply made it up.
This is not exactly the first time: Erekat was one of the inventors of the “Jenin Massacre” in 2002. In fighting in the West Bank city, 52 Palestinians were killed, as were 23 Israeli soldiers. Yasser Arafat claimed at the time that the “Jenin Massacre” could only be compared to the siege of Stalingrad in World War II. Erekat himself said “the numbers of killed could reach 500 since the Israeli offensive began. Thousands of wounded. The Jenin refugee camp is no longer in existence, and now we’ve heard of executions there.”
There was considerable destruction in parts of the camp, but at no time did it cease to be in existence. He made that up. Does any of this matter? It does.
Integrity counts and truth matters and the two integrate with honest scholarship. “Simply put, the Jews fleeing Europe and the atrocities of Nazism, found a home in the mid-1940s in the newly-created State of Israel, while the Palestinians lost theirs.” It’s not true. It’s stated as true because it’s believed, easily comprehended, and perhaps troublesome to actually independently research. Even intending to “get into the books” may be complicated by questions like “how far back does one go?” Or “what should be taken into account and what dismissed?”
Zionism responds to centuries of European persecution, and in fact discrimination that targeted Muslims along with Jews. The leveraging of religious passion and supersessionary argument account for that (the Church has had its institutional subscription building and subscription-taxing interests too) as does ethnic minority status outside of one’s homeland.
Modern Zionism is also a 19th Century pursuit and the subsequent Jewish immigration and agricultural capitalization of what is today Israel far precedes the rise Nazi Germany.
The best scholars serve God because the attachment of mind to cultural and personal loyalties produces ephemeral research and dishonest and disingenuous findings. We should not see what we want to see but see what is to be seen, and doing that with clarity, we may then repair some things.
Source of the little bit of grit in this clam’s shell:
Proposed new approach: adopt empirical methods; adhere to good principles in ethics, morality, and scholarship; and let’s move on to get people settled without rancor in their various spaces and otherwise integrated, independent, and living as the free agents of their own destinies, not as the subjugated pawns of the destinies of piratical dictators or their mafias.
What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.
______
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,
In this year, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Israel has chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.
Moreover, they may be proven untrue, the Jews being the absolute worst genocidiers on the planet: before they kill you, they afford you basic services, emergency and sophisticated specialized health services (in which all patients are treated absent of politics), Internet access, freedom of speech sufficient to sustain adverse public relations and research organizations (like B’Tsalem).
What may be true is the greater the hate encountered in anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist cant (there is no difference between those two), the greater the opportunities for Israel’s expansion.
The Abbas speech may be investigated and laid out purple phrase by phrase (“Amidst a torrent of massacres and storms of massive destruction” — not one mention of the more than 10,000 rockets launched from Gaza since 2005 and every two to few years to launched at a tempo sufficient to call the same an assault against Israel’s children).
Sins of omission are not the only sins evident in Abbas’s speech before the UN.
Note the demonizing of Israel, the “reflections in a mirror” — a very dark and most primitive mirror in language — in such well-known canards as “However, and as usual, the Israeli government did not miss the opportunity to undermine the chance for peace” — never mind those tunnels illegally and surreptitiously built (with child labor, 160 accidentally killed or deliberately murdered in the process) to assault Israeli communities.
Add to that demonizing simple Arab refusal of just responsibility for the Arab refugees of 1948:
Israel refuses to end its occupation of the State of Palestine since 1967, but rather seeks its continuation and entrenchment, and rejects the Palestinian state and refuses to find a just solution to the plight of the Palestine refugees.
BackChannels no longer casually employs the term “Palestinian”.
As neither Egypt nor Jordan will absorb nor take responsibility for the constituents of (Judenfrei since 2005) Gaza, I refer to the same as “Gazans”).
Given the lying going on around Gazans — allegedly on their behalf but never beyond sacrificing them (individuals, family, finances, and property) as the pawns of Hamas’s supersessionary war against Judaism, one might expect them to become independent in their own right and to insist on the development for themselves of an independent, modern, responsible, responsive, and transparent democratic government.
Judea may be more complicated with its historic flow-down from the Soviet’s brand of poison (not only the Palestinian Liberation Organization, in spirit, remains present but a simple right-click of the mouse is all one needs to reach the airliner-hijacking Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the effects of the anti-Semitic New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left lingering long on the landscape, still leveraging the language of the refugees, which comes in the Abbas speech as, ” . . . against Israel’s policies of occupation, apartheid and colonial settlement . . . .’
The lie that is self-aggrandizing speech is there in that portion: one wonders just how large the combined International and Palestinian Solidarity Movements really are.
Investigating consultant and journalist Lee Kaplan has told me about the seeding of these groups on America’s college campuses and their access to student activity funds, which is fair under the precepts of freedom of speech in a truly open democracy, but we didn’t get to how really small these movements may be despite their broad distribution and the money pumped into them for priming.
The phrase comes from the 1940’s film Gaslight, in which an abusive husband deliberately dims the gaslights in the house, but when his wife comments on it he tells her she’s imagining it, that the lights never dimmed at all.
Gaslighting is one of the most insiduous, viscious, nasty and effective forms of emotional and psychological abuse.
Transporting psychology — the study of individual mind and mentality — into politics may have inherent issues in both psychology and politics: for example, are we now going to filter or judge politicians in relation to our concept of “malignant narcissism”, which in turn would seem to inform the psychology of dictatorship? At the same time, what choice has the world suffering war between brutal and sometimes immense despotic personalities?
(Of Bashar al-Assad and opponent (in general terms) al-Nusra, I have often remarked: “Different talk — same walk”.
The two together, Assad and al-Nusra — and the advent of BadDaddy and the Islamic Hate represent where the path of the malignantly narcissistic winds up — have burned out and left scorched the middle humanity of the historic Syrian state — factually speaking, about 9 million Syrians have been displaced in the fighting between the tyrant and the zealots [about 200,000 souls have been separated from life altogether]).
What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.
Some people lie.
That’s a sad fact of life, and criminals and politicians both often draw the pointing fingers on the basis of their affiliations, ambitions, and reputations. Less acknowledged and less stated: observations about culture-wide denial, dissimulation, false assertion, and hapless vulnerability to the beguiling and patronizing sweetness of an evil tongue.
Often, in many quarters of the world, if not most, a loyal lie may be preferred to an uncomfortable truth, for shows of loyalty may draw immediate rewards, from praise to patronage, while relaying a critical or damaging truth may be met with punishment, including that of a swift death.
Pakistan is a Muslim-majority state that may need to protect its minority populations and accept the same — Christians and Jews (I know of one) — as citizens with equal rights, not dhimmi status.
Israel is a Jewish-majority state that has enfranchised its Arab Christian and Muslim citizens fully.
Surrounding Arab rejection of Israel / a Jewish-majority state / of Jews, in general, has kept trapped the remaining refugees of 1948. Egypt will not absorb Gaza. Refugees in now built camps in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan indeed remain barred from citizenship in those states.
In the stateless preoccupied territories intended in part for independent statehood, the two key power brokers, Fatah and Hamas, have not been able to negotiate peace between themselves. As their anti-Semitic beliefs and postures remain genocidal, Israel have had to work with both in a perfunctory manner as regards the delivery of basic services, including their security against crime (Washington writes the paychecks for Abbas’s security force, which is trained in Jordan by Israel instructors).
Here’s where I sympathize, however, in departure from more conservative elements: I think it’s time to get Fatah and Hamas thugs out of the way and enable the residents of Gaza and the West Bank to take control of their own lives. On that, however, the realpolitik continues to work opposite, and Hamas, which has made everyone in Gaza unhappy, has been gaining popularity in the West Bank, which is a headache for Abbas.
One now may easily and rapidly compile data on piratical leaders and their organizations, but the three pieces noted above might suffice to underscore what has happened to the hapless refugees of 1948 and their generations: Arabs have contained them in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt; Israel, despite the claims of The Preoccupation (with the Jews), have provided and promoted a palette of basic services while leaving the Arab politics to the meddling “gentle character of Arab leaders and Arab-wannabee Muslim potentates with their own versions of brown shirts and jack boots on the ground. In the way of Arab suffering at Arab hands, the results loom clear in Hamas, which has spirited now billions of dollars out of the Gaza trough (while sacrificing the lives of somebody’s children as tunnel diggers and sundry others — to about 2,000 recently — by pushing the same in harms’ way as human shields), and in Fatah, which hasn’t yet produced a convincing self-governance replete with human rights, freedom of speech, and general political freedom.
Anyone in for another sixty-six years of the same rigmarole?
One would hope the old Jew-hating and Jew-killing enthusiasm just a little bit aged, brittle, reduced by the criminality of those most responsible for those who have driven it a too long time.
I haven’t been funded for focus, and that has led to a broad reading experience in this area but not mastery of any part. What I have been able to do is distill some themes and and reintroduce some basics and that has led to some terse formulations that others may use to springboard into new journeys and (a phrase I’ve been using lately) _come forward_ of familiar but perhaps stuck historical positions.
An example: Hillel the Elder (35BCE-10CE) | Jesus-Paul-Constantine | Muhammad.
Arab vs Persian Islamism | Fascist Theocratic Kleptocracy
Now you can take a puzzle piece like Bashar al-Assad and see how and where it fits, and the same may be done with Hamas. The language-conveyed expectations and myths expressed by either either may also be codified, bounded, known, and dismissed, evolved, or otherwise put into perspective.
The “Middle East Conflict” has nothing to do with human rights or real estate. It has to do with civilizational self-concept, human behavior, the embrace of ethics and ideals, and allowance or permit or what Assad represents — or Hamas or the iIDF — and then simply choices about a bored child’s question: “What do you want to do now? How do you want to live now”?
I would like to see a global evolving peaceful cultural polyphony smooth along a little bit with planning and tuned toward greater human potential and its realization.
That is a form of believer’s humanism.
Don’t say you didn’t ask.
😀
Someone asked for my opinion on a thread.
Another drop of e-paragraph elixir.
Hamas made a lot of promises on its way into power — everything was going to be okay by their claim — but they are malignantly narcissistic, a familiar profile for dictators, and while glorifying themselves, they have also cheated, intimidated, manipulated, and plundered much of Gaza (and the world, considering the plethora of funding streams involved) and now demand that Israel cease to exist (truly, that was Mashaal’s within the last day or so) to fulfill their own grandiose delusions about themselves. Like a bad daddy (trust me), it’s hard seeing them accurately when they’re close and a little unbelievable seeing them from a distance either in space or time.
. . . how do you feel about the information imparted by Electronicintifada, the International Solidarity Movement, the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, Code Pink 🙂 , Ma’an News Agency (I actually kind of like them as they seem to report about as much as they can without drawing party thugs into their offices, i.e., they leave information out of their stories, e.g., they’ll report arrests but not causes for the same)?
http://www.meforum.org/522/the-smoking-gun-arab-immigration-into-palestine There are a lot of partisan “hate-peace peace groups” for the middle east conflict on Facebook. Some are barbaric. Some are collegial. A few are open. The true divide if interpreted through the filter of political psychology:
Adhesion to Loyalty vs Promotion of Integrity.
I don’t lie to you or anyone (or deceive people who are somehow different from myself) or spin this material, and if at times I’m . . . then I’m wrong. I apologize about it, make amends or corrections, and move on.
In a mafia state — doesn’t have to be religious — a loyal lie may better than survival than the telling of an uncomfortable truth. It just takes more courage to tell the truth, and it helps to tell the truth in an atmosphere more encouraging of it. Where partisan intimidation is present — and lies are invented, told, and sustained to either pander to listeners or to develop power over the same — things don’t work so well, partially because everything becomes based on lies.
The absurdity of Israel’s Gaza campaigns requires an entirely new terminology for the conduct of wars. “Enemy combatants,” “theater of war,” “innocent civilians,” “casualties of war” all have ambiguous meaning in Gaza. There is nothing casual about why so many Gazans die; these deaths are tragically predictable and predetermined. Hamas builds tunnels for terrorists and their rockets; bomb shelters for the people of Gaza never entered the Hamas leaders’ minds.
BackChannels 