What's In a Name
by Bob Finch
Introduction by Israel Shamir:
Bob Finch, a friend of earth, a man who knows the value of words, once
an ardent follower of Hannah Arendt, deals with a question of a name we
may use for the Jewish State in Palestine.
Well, what's in a name, said the Bard. Won't Julia be as loveable if
called something else? I am not sure Romeo would be equally infatuated
if she were called Mabel or Synecdoche. Much of the West’s present
infatuation with the Jewish state is due to its name, which is being
proclaimed and extolled in churches every day for two thousand years. I
wonder whether we would ever see the Jewish hold over Europe and the US
coming to its present stage of fruition if the Jewish state were to be
called Birobidzhan and be located in the upper reaches of Amur River. In
the witty words of Lady Michele Renouf, Zionists pirated the best
promoted (by Christians and Muslims) brand, Israel&Jerusalem, on the
planet. If a name and logo of Nike or Coca Cola are worth billions, and
are the biggest asset of these companies, I won’t be amazed if the
biggest asset of the Jewish state turned out to be - not the Dimona
bomb, neither tanks and jets, nor the orange plantations, - but the
brand names of Israel and Jerusalem.
Thus the Jewish takeover of Palestine turns out to be a very smart move.
Let us find a suitable comparison. The White House belonged to the
family of George Washington, and this family is still around. They are
mainly black, and some of his descendents lost their houses in the great
disaster of New Orleans. Would not it be just to return the White House
to the George Washington family? It is the same house, but meanwhile the
brand of the White House was promoted by all the American people. So the
Washington family will receive – not just a house in Washington DC, but
also a multibillion brand name. Similar thing happened with Zionism:
they asked, and got back, not just a piece of land, but also the best
promoted brand name. Clever New York Jews are for peace with
Palestinians, (while retaining Jerusalem for themselves) for they
understand the comparative value of the shiny brand names “Israel &
Jerusalem” and of the run-down real-estate like Gaza or Nablus.
We can’t re-conquer the Holy Land by force of arms but we can take the
brand names back. The name of Israel rightfully belongs to the Christian
Church, while from the Christian point of view, the Jews are illegal
claimants for the title of Israel. Whoever uses this name for the Jewish
state, denies Christ and Church, the only True Israel. We may learn from
the Greeks who wisely did not allow their neighbours to use the brand
name “Macedonia” for their country, and forced the EC to call them FYRM
(Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia).
We may call the Jewish state by the name they prefer and use, “Yisrael”,
in a modern Jewish-American way of spelling, as I suggested in The
Pardes. If they like it, let them have this spelling. Yidland, the state
of Yids :-) is a possibility. Yid is not a swear word, but
self-appellation, like Deutsch for German.
Bob Finch proposes to call the state: “The Jews-Only State”, or JOS, a
brother to ZOG. Somehow, it sounds quite reasonable to wipe both of them
off the map. The names matter!
Israel Shamir
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What's In a Name
by Bob Finch < carbonomics@yahoo.co.uk >
This article is a personal account of my reasons for using the phrase
‘Jews-only state in Palestine’ in preference to commonly accepted
phrases such as ‘the Israeli state’ or ‘the Israeli government’.
The catalyst for the change in terminology was a political protest. In
September 2001 Jack Straw, the left-leaning British foreign minister,
went on a tour of Middle Eastern countries in order to ascertain whether
there was any common ground for reviving peace negotiations in
Palestine. He promptly ran straight into a Zionist brick wall. While he
was on tour a letter he’d written prior to the tour was published and
members of Ariel Sharon’s cabinet reacted to it with rage. “Mr Straw,
who started a four day tour of the Middle East yesterday, prompted
controversy by writing a letter in which he twice referred to Palestine.
The Israelis do not recognize the term for that part of the middle east.
An Israeli cabinet minister called Mr Straw’s comments an “obscenity”
which, he said, turned Israel from the victim of terrorism into the
accused.” (Mirror 25.9.2001 p. 5). In what would have been an
unprecedented political rebuff, Ariel Sharon refused to meet him. The
meeting went ahead only after the personal intervention of Tony Blair
who agreed that henceforth his foreign secretary would comply with
Sharon’s wishes. “The row began when Mr Straw said anger over the plight
of the Palestinians was helping to breed terror. He also referred to
Palestine, a term Israel does not recognize. Downing street said “no
offence was intended” by Mr Straw’s remarks. The Prime Minister’s
spokesman said the government will go back to referring to the
“Palestinian-controlled authorities” instead of Palestine. Mr Straw
said, “I stand very firmly against the terrorism which the Israeli
people have suffered.” (Mirror 26.9.2001 p.5). Just in case this might
be thought to have been solely a matter between Britain and the
Jews-only state it ought to be pointed out that according to one
commentator, “(Jack Straw) dares to say the “P” word - Palestine - which
Washington fights shy of.” (Paul Routledge, Mirror 26.9.2001 p.5).
Despite my long acquaintanceship with Middle East politics, I was
shocked to learn of a ban on the word ‘Palestine’. How was it going to
be possible to bring peace to Palestine when Jewish racists were able to
force Western governments to stop using the name of the country to which
those governments were trying to bring peace? Thereafter, as a personal
political protest, I stopped using the phrases ‘Israeli state’ or
‘Israeli government’. I tried various replacements such as ‘the Zionist
state in Palestine’ before settling on the admittedly rather ugly, and
convoluted, phrase ‘the Jews-only state in Palestine’ or ‘Jews-only
state’ for short. I thought it objectionable to allow racists to define
which concepts I should use. The use of racist concepts such as ‘the
Israeli state’ makes racism seem normal and thus politically acceptable.
Incidentally, Jack Straw returned to England a politically chastened man
and thereafter never failed to reiterate the Zionist line emanating from
the Jews-only state.
At the time I decided to stop using the word ‘Israel’ I supported the
United Nations’ two state solution to the conflict in Palestine. I then
came across an article by Joseph Massad proposing a single state
solution. Without realizing it, I’d become so conditioned into
supporting the conventional two-state solution it took me a long time to
think through the merits of his arguments and change my mind. The more I
agreed with Massad, the more redundant terms like ‘Israel’ and ‘Israeli
state’ seemed to become. This added to the political necessity for
finding an alternative formulation.
One of the alternative phrases which attracted my attention was “the
Jewish state”. Its implication of a monocultural state seemed to
correctly convey the Jewish racism rampant in Palestine. And yet
gradually I realized the phrase was not merely far from satisfactory but
highly dangerous. It was a phrase used by Jewish racists to indicate
their desire for the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The big
political advantage of their use of the phrase was that to non-racists
it created a favourable impression of the Jews-only state as being as
harmless as the British state or the French state. It implied ‘the
Jewish state’ was as multi-cultural as Britain and France. But ‘the
Jewish state’ is not multi-cultural - members of different cultures do
not have exactly the same rights. On the contrary, it is a racist state.
Jewish racists were thus cleverly using the phrase to parade their
racist goals whilst camouflaging the racist nature of the Jewish state
behind benign connotations of multi-culturalism. Whilst it was
transparent that a Jews-only state was a Jewish state, it was not at all
transparent that a Jewish state was a Jews-only state. There is surely
something wrong with racists and anti-racists sharing a common
terminology.
I began using the phrase ‘Jews-only state in Palestine’ because it
explicitly denotes an apartheid state. The Jews-only state denies
Palestinians in the Jews-only state the same rights as Jews. The use of
the phrase Israeli Palestinians was being used to deceive the world into
believing that the Palestinians inside the Jews-only state had the same
rights as Jews. Even today there are anti-Zionists in the peace movement
who promote the idea that Palestinians and Jews have the same rights
within the Jews-only state. Whether these peace activists are ignorant
of the truth or Zionists just pretending to be Jews in order to promote
Zionist propaganda is difficult to say. But, either way, they shouldn’t
be allowed in the peace movement. Of course, Palestinians in the
occupied territories have no rights, and thus no protection, from the
Jews-only state. For instance, the Jews-only state in Palestine has
recently decreed the newly elected Hamas government to be part of an
axis of evil and has thus embarked on a policy of crippling the
Palestinians’ economy in order to starve them into submission and
perhaps even forcing them to leave their own country.
Another benefit of the phrase Jews-only state was its historical
accuracy. The Jews-only state is becoming increasingly a state only for
Jews. Ever since the establishment of the Jews-only state Palestine has
been acquiring an increasingly Jewish identity whilst correspondingly
losing its Palestinian identity. For example, Palestinian villages have
been demolished and all traces of Palestinians’ connection to the land
deliberately eradicated. Even to this day Palestinian property homes
continue to be expropriated and demolished. The Jews then build new
homes to give the land a Jewish identity. Jennifer Loewenstein indicates
the variety of ways in which the Jews-only state is removing all traces
of Palestinian existence from Palestine. “With every new brick laid for
the settlements, every new road paved to Ariel, Maale Adumim, Gush
Etzion and beyond, with every permit denied for work, education, medical
care and travel, every truck left waiting with rotting produce at Sufa
and Karni, every tax and customs dollar stolen from a people interned on
their own land, Israel parades its contempt for human decency and gets
standing ovations in the US Congress and elsewhere.” (Jennifer
Loewenstein ‘Watching the Dissolution of Palestine’
http://www.counterpunch.org/loewenstein02242006.html February 24, 2006).
Palestinians, whether inside or outside the Jews-only state, now own far
less land in Palestine than they did in the past. Even if Palestinians
still own land within occupied areas, the squatter state has placed so
many restrictions on their freedom of movement that Palestinians’
attachment to their property is being increasingly severed.
Historically, the Jews-only state is also increasing the political
rights of Jews whilst decreasing the political rights of Palestinians.
Eventually the Palestinians trapped inside the Jews-only state will be
made as stateless as the Palestinians outside the Jews-only state, “Here
we are really talking about almost genocide, in the future. Although I
don’t think this will really happen and I hope that the world will not
stand aside. But for the Palestinians in Israel, where this danger is
not that imminent, the future means even less rights, social rights,
civil rights, human rights, than they have now. They still have limited
of these, but it will become worst. The Jewish state will become more
ethnic, more racist, more exclusive, and anyone who is not a Jew, or is
not regarded as Jew, will suffer from it more in the future than he or
she suffers today.” (Prof. Ilan Pappe quoted in Steve Zeltzer ‘Ilan
Pappe on the Israel-Palestine conflict’ Labor Video Project cable TV
program http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=16276 October 29,
2005).
The phrase “Jews-only state” is also more politically accurate than its
alternatives in the sense that it implies there are many Jewish racists
in Palestine, and around the world, who want to deport, or exterminate,
the Palestinians still left in Palestine. Genevieve Cora Fraser is but
the latest commentator to conclude that the Jews are intent on genocide
against the Palestinians. “If Israel gets its way, how long will it be
before Palestine is in a similar situation – especially if, once again,
Israel unleashes a reign of terror through unrelenting military assault?
For nearly six decades Palestinians have been systematically ethnically
cleaned - driven off their land, and Israel has all too often prevented
food deliveries as well as access to medicines and water (as documented
by hundreds of UN Resolutions against Israel). However, the complete
economic deprivation that Israel insists on, in this writer’s opinion,
is far beyond a slap in the face at democracy by refusing to acknowledge
a Hamas-led government, but an attempt to commit genocide against the
Palestinian people.” (Genevieve Cora Fraser ‘Israeli Defense Minister
Declares Palestine “Axis of Evil”
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Feb06/Fraser23.htm February 23rd 2006).
Yes indeed, for some Jews the best way to eradicate the stigma of living
in an apartheid state would be to remove all traces of Palestinians from
Palestine!
What adds to the legitimacy of the phrase ‘Jews-only state in Palestine’
is a tendency amongst Jews in the west to set up ‘Jews-only’
organizations. In Britain, there is ‘Jews for Justice for Palestinians’;
‘Jews Against Zionism’; ‘Jews for a Just Peace’; ‘the Jewish Socialists
Group’. In Scotland, ‘Scottish Jews for a Just Peace’. In America,
‘Jewish Voice for Peace’. A new organization has just been formed called
‘Jews against anti-Christian Defamation’. It’s objective is to do for
Christians what the Anti-Defamation League has done for Jews! Is it
possible we’re now going to get Jews spying, and compiling files, on
Americans for the sake of protecting Christianity? These are just groups
I’ve come across by accident so it has to be wondered how many more
could be found with a bit of research. Personally, I’d never come across
so many examples of political separatism outside of feminists’
women-only groups.
The above mentioned groups are not blatantly Jewish supremacist
organizations like the World Zionist Organization or AIPAC dedicated to
furthering the political dominion of Jews around the world. On the
contrary, some are supposedly pro-Palestinian; others avowedly
anti-Zionist. But there is a self-evident common denominator between the
Jews-only state and Jews-only organizations. Beyond the common elements
of separatism and exclusivism, however, it has to be wondered how much
the specialness or even supremacism of the former is dripping into the
assumptions of the Jews in the latter organizations.
Paul Oestreicher seems to have personal knowledge of some of those
involved in a Jews-only organization which dispels any misgivings he
might have had towards such organizations, “In Britain, Jews for Justice
for Palestinians organises to give Jewishness a human face. Tell them
they are anti-semites and they will laugh bitterly, for the charge hurts
deeply and is a lie.” (Paul Oestreicher ‘Israel's policies are feeding
the cancer of anti-Semitism’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329416218-103552,00.html February 20,
2006)**. Despite Oestreicher’s moral authority, his personal
ratification of Jews-only organizations is not going to make the doubts
disappear. Jews-only organizations raise a host of questions about their
real agenda. Why do Jews feel a need to organize by themselves? What are
they hiding? What are they frightened about? Are they trying to promote
a sense of Jewish victimhood? Why can’t they organize an anti-apartheid
movement in which everyone could help to fight Jewish racism? Are they
secretly trying to nullify Jewish opposition to the Jews-only state? Are
they radical gatekeepers for criticisms of the Jews-only state? What are
the benefits of excluding non-Jews? The questions go on and on. At the
very least, non-Jews are going to waste time pondering on what these
organizations are really up to. There is also the problem that such
organizations will distract attention from the causes for which they are
allegedly fighting. At worst, they are going to breed suspicion and
mistrust. It is virtually impossible for such Jews-only exclusivism not
to raise doubts about latent supremacism especially given the
supremacism of Jewish racists in the Jews-only state. It is absurd for
Jews-only organizations to copy the practices of the Jews-only state and
then expect non-Jews to believe they are opposed to the Jews-only state.
Israel Shamir’s quip about such organizations exposes their preposterous
political stance, “The concept of Jews for Justice, Jews for Peace and
other separatist all-Jewish groups in pursuit of common goals appears to
me about as justifiable as that of Whites against Apartheid. Equality in
South Africa was achieved by overcoming such dubious groupings, by the
colour-blind force of the ANC. It appears that the cause of justice in
Palestine should not be different. Why, then, such groups exist?”
(Israel Shamir ‘The New Bund at Old Tricks’
http://www.israelshamir.net/Left/Left1.htm July 11th 2005).
Jeff Blankfort also questions such organizations but from a different
perspective, “In this country it has been used to silence so many
people. And this is one of the reasons I am against specifically Jewish
organizations wanting to lead the fight for Palestine. What happens is
that there are many anti-Zionist Jews, or who claim to be anti-Zionist,
who say "we, as anti-Zionists Jews, should provide the leadership so
that other people will see that not all the Jews are for Israel”. And I
am totally against that because all Americans pay their taxes and thus
support Israel. And this is an American issue. And by putting it out
that Jews are the leaders, that Jews, anti Zionists Jews are doing this,
what it says to non-Jews is: they can do this because they are Jewish.
It has been tried, so far it has been a failure.” (Jeffrey Blankfort
quoted in Réseau Voltaire ‘The Chomsky/Blankfort Polemic’
http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/editorials/signs_TheChomskyBlankfortPolemic.php
February 20, 2006).
The phrase ‘Jews-only state’ also acquires legitimacy because it
encompasses the phenomenon of the holocaust industry’s myopic
transformation of totalitarian slaughters during the 1930s and 1940s
into a Jews-only slaughter. As someone who still regards the works of
Hannah Arendt as being of profound political and historical
significance, the massacre of Jews has to be understood within the
broader context of the rise and fall of totalitarianism. During the
lifetime of totalitarianism tens of millions of people were killed.
However, today ask any British person (and probably any westerner) what
they understand by ‘the Holocaust’ and they will almost invariably
regurgitate “the slaughter of six million Jews”. Although the Nazis sent
Jews, Communists, POWs, the aged, the sick, homosexuals, Seven Day
Adventists, Slavs, Serbs, Czechs, Italians, Poles, Ukrainians, Gypsies,
etc. into the concentration and extermination camps, the holocaust
industry has transformed this avalanche of death into a Jews-only
slaughter. Uri Avnery has described the way that many Jews have come to
believe that Jews were the only people killed by the Nazis or, even
worse, that amongst those slaughtered the only people that mattered were
Jews. “The centrality of the Holocaust in Jewish consciousness caused
the Jews to insist on its absolute exclusiveness. We are shocked and
furious when somebody tries to remind us that the Nazis exterminated
other communities too, such as the Roma, the homosexuals and the
mentally ill. We get very angry when somebody comes and compares 'our'
Holocaust with other genocides: Armenians, Cambodians, Tutsis in Ruanda
and others. Really! How can one compare?” (Uri Avnery ‘Memory of the
Holocaust - from Jewish property into human possession’
http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives.html#articles March 19th 2005). The
highly profitable Shoah business has transformed totalitarianism into a
racist Jews-only holocaust.
A huge number of British people were killed during the second world war.
It was one of the biggest losses the country has ever suffered. Since
that disaster the British media has continually produced documentaries
about, or dramas set against the backdrop of, the second world war. The
British try to remember their losses, they honour their war dead each
year, and celebrate their military victories which brought peace to
Europe. And yet despite these losses, and there are still many people
alive today who lost relatives or friends because of the war, despite
the continual remembrance of those dark days, if you ask British people
what is meant by ‘The Holocaust’ they will overlook their own history,
their own suffering, and their own losses, and say, “The slaughter of
six million Jews.” Perhaps this concern for other people rather than
themselves is just a product of the compassion of the British people.
But it has to be suspected that this is not true. The British show next
to no interest in the horrendous losses suffered by the Russians during
the rise and fall of totalitarianism. It has been estimated that around
twenty million Russians died during this time. In other words, three
times more Russians were killed than Jews and yet nobody in Britain, or
the west, ever mentions a Russian holocaust, or thinks about 20 million
dead Russians, and there is no Russian Holocaust Day in Britain. This
situation is even more anomalous since it could be argued that if the
Russians had not sacrificed their lives in such vast numbers to defend
themselves against, and help to defeat, the Nazis then it is quite
possible Britain would have lost the war. The British people therefore
owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Russian people. And yet amazingly
even though the Russians did far, far more than the Jews to help Britain
in the war British people are not even aware of the need to feel any
gratitude to the Russians but instead devote their sympathies to the
Jews caught up in the so-called Holocaust.
As a student I was an enthusiastic supporter of Hannah Arendt’s works
‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ and ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’. I believe
these works are still valid and I have not yet come across an author who
has a better interpretation of the events leading to the rise and fall
of totalitarianism or a better political analysis of this novel form of
government. I remain confident about the facts she presented and on her
political theory of totalitarianism. In the past I looked upon
revisionists with contempt. However, after reading Norman Finkelstein’s
book on the holocaust industry I became much more suspicious about the
conventional view of the past and when I re-read Arendt’s great works
I’ll keep in mind some revisionist questions to check the validity of
her facts and analysis. I remain confident about the historical veracity
of her works. I am not what I would call an empirical revisionist or an
empirical holocaust denier. In other words, I do not challenge the facts
about the rise and fall of totalitarianism. However, I have become a
conceptual revisionist or a conceptual holocaust denier. What I deny, or
more accurately condemn, is ‘the Holocaust’ as a Jews-only slaughter.
Such a concept is inherently racist. I would indeed wear a badge
"Conceptual Holocaust Denier" with pride.
Totalitarianism is fading into the past but it has undergone a vital
distillation so that politically it serves as a fundamental lesson of
history, a warning of political dangers that ought to be avoided.
However the slaughter of the Jews is not fading into the past. On the
contrary, it has been hyped up out of all proportion, like a Hollywood
blockbuster, into ‘The Holocaust’. Political emotions over the issue are
constantly being fanned until it has become a fanatical secular crusade
sucking everyone in the western world into a vortex of hysteria or
guilt. Throughout his life Ariel Sharon denounced everyone who disagreed
with him as a new Hitler – he even denounced George WMD Bush as a
Chamberlain. Every single anti-Jewish comment no matter how mild or
innocent is instantly reported to Jewish authorities and converted into
cast iron evidence that the concentration camps are on their way back.
These days whenever someone mentions ‘The Holocaust’ as the slaughter of
six million Jews I usually retort ‘And what about the Jewish
dehumanization, demonisation, of six million Palestinians?’ It is the
height of human folly to allow Holocaust propaganda to reach such levels
of pathological irrationality that it can be used to bring about the
genocide of six million Palestinians who played absolutely no part in
the slaughter of Jews during the rise and fall of totalitarianism.
Sympathy for the suffering of the Jews in the long distant past cannot
under any circumstances be allowed to condone what the Jews-only state
is currently doing to Palestinians. There is a clear difference between
keeping the past alive as a guide to a civilized future and using it as
a cudgel to re-enact the past. Jewish racists in the Jews only state are
inflicting on the Palestinians what the Nazis inflicted on European
Jews. They are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from Nazis. They
cannot be allowed to play out their Nazi nightmares on an innocent
people such as the Palestinians.
The phrase ‘Jews-only state’ is also superior to its alternatives in
that it possesses obvious overtones from other apartheid systems where
public signs such as ‘Blacks-only’ or ‘Whites-only’ were commonly in
evidence. Considering the degree to which many Jews around the world
have tried to pretend that the Jews-only state in Palestine is nothing
like the former apartheid state in South Africa, the phrase ‘Jews-only
state’ makes such a comparison unavoidable. It might also draw attention
to the fact that a great deal of support for the racist Jews-only state
currently emanates from former apartheid states in America’s deep south.
Of course, Jews are free to define their state in whatever way they
think fit. But I have no desire to use their concepts and provide them
with any terminological justification for their illegal, murderous,
racist, and genocidal, state. The Jews-only state, and its Jewish allies
in the west, proclaims itself to be a modern, secular, liberal,
democratic, western state but it is easy to dismiss such claims. It is
time to get more fundamental and challenge the name that racist Jews
give to their state. I believe the phrase ‘the Jews-only state’ is much
more historically, politically, and morally, precise than the
alternatives.
For a more in depth look at the Jews-only phenomenon please see
‘The Jews-Only State in Palestine: The Utter Filth of Jews-only Racism’
http://www.geocities.com/carbonomics/MCtfirm/10tf26/10tf26mg.html
The same work also appears on my blog site at
http://mundiclub.blogspot.com/2005/03/jews-only-state-in-palestine-part-one.html
Bob Finch
carbonomics@yahoo.co.uk
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Commentators Highlighting Jews-Only Phenomena:
Edward S. Herman.
“Second, the Israeli state has been allowed to ignore numerous Security
Council resolutions and the Fourth Geneva Convention regarding its
occupation of the West Bank, as well as the International Court of
Justice ruling on its apartheid wall, and simply dispossess the
Palestinians of a large fraction of their land and water, demolish
thousands of their homes, cut down many thousands of their olive trees,
destroy their infrastructure, and create a modern network of roads
through the occupied West Bank for Jews only while imposing serious
obstacles to Palestinian movement within the West Bank.” (Edward S.
Herman ‘Western Approval for Long-Term Israeli Ethnic Cleansing’ Z
Magazine March 2006).
Jennifer Loewenstein.
“Judea and Samaria which are, or were, the northern and southern West
Bank, have been subdivided and parcelled out over decades to hundreds of
thousands of Jewish settlers for their houses and orchards and gardens.
They have been crisscrossed and circled with Jewish-only roads that bind
the land, the houses and orchards and gardens, to Israel. They have been
manned with guards and gunmen and tanks and blue and white Israeli flags
that defend, protect and assure the settlers, their houses and orchards
and gardens, that they are in fact Israelis belonging to a single Jewish
state.” (Jennifer Loewenstein ‘Watching the Dissolution of Palestine’
http://www.counterpunch.org/loewenstein02242006.html February 24, 2006).
Ilan Pappe.
“Israel controls the life of two groups of Palestinians: there are the
Palestinians citizens inside Israel and there are the Palestinians under
Occupation. These are very two different groups. I think the group under
Occupation is under grave threat, there is still a very serious
possibility that this people will be ethnically cleansed, once again,
and that mass killing will be performed against it.” (Prof. Ilan Pappe
quoted in Steve Zeltzer ‘Ilan Pappe on the Israel-Palestine conflict’
Labor Video Project cable TV program
http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=16276 October 29, 2005).
John Spritzler.
“This is why Israel makes Palestinians prisoners inside of refugee camps
and inside areas surrounded by military checkpoints, why it subjects
them to harsh curfews, excludes them from Jews-only roads ….” (John
Spritzler ‘Should People Opposed to Bigotry and Anti-Semitism Support
Israel?’ http://newdemocracyworld.org/War/Should-People.htm February 6,
2005).
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** I wrote a letter to the Guardian editor regarding this article of
Oestreicher:
Sir,
I do understand the words of Paul Oestreicher (20th February, 2006) for
I live in the Holy Land, and while being born of Jewish parents, I
accepted Christ as he did. I understand him, but disagree profoundly. He
writes "Hatred of Judaism - now commonly called anti-semitism - is a
virus that has infected Christendom for two millennia". Every word is
wrong in this diatribe. Not "Hatred of Judaism", but its profound
rejection, is not a "virus", but the very essence of Christendom. Every
trouble of the Holy Land - and Paul Oestreicher lists them (the wall,
creation of bantustans, discrimination etc) - is a derivative of
Judaism, or if you wish, of the Jewish character of the state. I equally
reject the Anglican priest's claim that the events of 1930-1940s are
somehow connected to the Christian faith. Other way around, Adolf Hitler
was an enemy of the Church and explicitly wished "to trample it as a
frog", in his own words. I am shocked by his claim that "as a Christian
priest [he]shares the historic guilt of all the churches." Jesus Christ
removed our guilt by His own blood. In my view, Paul Oestreicher failed
as a priest, for a man who feels guilt of this sort can't and should not
offer the sacrament of communion to his flock. He failed when he calls
the Jewish state by the sacred name of Israel - while every Christian
priest knows that Israel is the Church, not the sacrilegiously-named
Jewish state. He failed when he declares "[Jewish] people are my
people", for the people of an Anglican priest should be the Christian
people of England. The transformation of a Jew into a Christian is a
clear break with his past, and one can't sit on these two chairs, as he
tries. Ironically, this is a tradition the Church shares with Judaism: a
jewish proselyte (according to the Jewish law) does not even inherit his
Gentile biological parents.
Israel Adam Shamir
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This business of names is indeed important. I will use Yisrael or USrael
from now on. Your 'jews-only-state' (jos) monicker is also fine.
“Jack Straw returned to England a politically chastened man and
thereafter never failed to reiterate the Zionist line emanating from the
Jews-only state.”
As if to complete his conversion, he has just hired a rabid zionist and
Yisraeli adviser Daniel Bethlehem as head of the Foreign Office legal
department. http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1725156,00.html
Re Arendt, I just read something very interesting (Tariq Ali 'Revolution
from above' 1988):
Kremlinologists described the SU as a totalitarian state. Max Eastman,
an ex-Trotskyite said in 1955 just months before Khrushchev's speech
denouncing Stalin that Stalin's police state is more ruthless in its
economic policies, more explicitly committed to world conquest and more
dangerous to democracy and civilized morals than Hitler's.
Arendt in the 1946 draft of 'The origins of totalitarianism' argued that
the essence of Nazism was anti-semitism. But in the 1949 edition added
the SU as totalitarian state arguing that US should attack the USSR to
get rid of Stalin's concentration camps (ie, H=S) a la Russell.
So your disillusionment with Arendt is well founded for several reasons
which apply both to the western critique of the SU and of Islam as the
latest western 'totalitarian' bête noire. Your statement that
"totalitarianism is fading into the past" is unfortunately not at all
the case, as 'Islamologists' are brushing it off and applying it to
Muslims as part of their war in pursuit of the New World Order.
Power in any society is embedded in its socio-economic structure. For
the SU that meant the legitimacy of communist political power was based
on the provision of basic economic and social benefits to workers (I'll
leave the parallel arguments concerning Islam to you). For instance,
Soviet politicians couldn't increase economic efficiency by creating
mass unemployment, raising prices etc, because this would have led to
riots and caused the system to collapse. Revisionist US economists in
the 1970s even invented a term 'bureaucratic pluralism' to describe the
political process (JHough 1977).
Western theorists like Hayek used a sleight-of-hand to disguise this
truth about democracy and power, argument that economic management was
outside the political sphere, but it is the West that is effectively
totalitarian, with the economy and culture controlled by (inhuman)
capital, now increasingly in the hands of zionists (come to think of it
'Zion' is another term illegitimately appropriated by secular Jewish
chauvinists).
This became clear to me from my travels there/here from the 1970s on.
There was always much criticism and freedom of thought - more than in
West, at least in post-Stalin times.
It's now clear that to institute radical capitalist transition in the
SU, it was necessary to create shortages, undermine faith in system, and
eventually ban the CP, which for all its problems was focused on
ensuring that workers got their minimum socio-economic desserts.
Gorbachev's soft Trotskyite policies of opening to the West and
pretending there was a convergence of systems, plus of course the
putsch, look in retrospect like they were programmed to introduce
western totalitarianism.
Arendt was a willing handmaiden in this, despite her occasional
criticisms of Yisrael/ USreal/ jos. Totalitarianism joins Israel as
terms which have been reinvented to meet the propaganda needs of our
real enemies.
Eric Walberg
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Gentle Aboud
Gentle Aboud
Just out from Ramallah
Where Jesus himself
Once preached at each door
Now the settlers build walls
Steal your water and poison
the Sabbath itself
As decency fails
Do they think there’s no God?
That their State is redeemed
By the ovens of yore?
That their crimes are expunged
By colonial fiction?
That the truth will lie silent
As the children they’ve killed?
Now history’s own crime
Is erased by their own
and the souls of their parents
in permanent shame
groan at the forfeit
all that was human
destroyed in the conquest
of goodness and name
Now an army in prayer shawls
Rampaging in orchards
Has broken our dreams
Bulldozed and discarded
Like the olives and streams.
The remnant called “chosen”
Now frozen, rejected,
Will be scorned for all time
In betraying their God
They’ve wasted his favorites
The innocent farmers
Whose love is as food
The innocent garden
Of Gentle Aboud
R.L.Green 02/18/06
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