Zionism

It reads better in the original German

Israel/Palestine, Zionism
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Palestinian but pretending to be Jewish to score with a Hebrew chick? In Israel you’re guilty of rape if she finds out the truth after you had sex:

Segal said: “The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price – the sanctity of their bodies and souls. When the very basis of trust between human beings drops, especially when the matters at hand are so intimate, sensitive and fateful, the court is required to stand firmly at the side of the victims – actual and potential – to protect their wellbeing. Otherwise, they will be used, manipulated and misled, while paying only a tolerable and symbolic price.”

UPDATE: Lenny has more:

The woman who filed the charge can hardly be burdened with most of the responsibility. Who knows what pressures she was under? Perhaps no pressures other than the racist ideology that she will have internalised if she is a normal product of the Israeli education system. But perhaps it was put to her that her honour as an Israeli Jewish woman, and that of her family, had been sullied by her treasonous intercourse with an Arab from East Jerusalem and that, if she wished to expiate her crime, she should say that she had been raped. Whatever the case, without the backing of the forces of racist patriarchy her complaint would not have resulted in a conviction. It’s not as if it’s easy for women to get their complaint heard and a conviction obtained when a rape really has occurred. It’s not as if the criminal justice system throws its weight behind women every time they experience domestic violence, harrassment, or sexual violation. This was a complaint that, with its obvious paucity of evidence of any kind of violation or assault, could easily have been dealt with outside of the courts. Instead, they devoted their considerable resources to keeping this man in lockdown – he was under house arrest for almost two years while the case was brought to trial – and so loading the scales against him that even when no evidence of rape emerged, he still ended up ‘guilty’.

Think of it as an exclusive country club

Zionism
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You wouldn’t want to just let anybody in your Holocaust memorial:

A plan to honor gays and other non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution in Brooklyn’s Holocaust Memorial Park was blasted Sunday by critics as political pandering.

Politicians and community activists gathered at the Sheepshead Bay park Sunday to demand Mayor Bloomberg block a plan they contend undermines the memorial’s core message.

“The Holocaust is a uniquely Jewish event,” said Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn), whose mother is a Holocaust survivor.

The city Parks Department has proposed adding five new markers to the memorial at West End Ave. and Shore Blvd. to honor homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled, Gypsies and political prisoners targeted by Adolf Hitler and his henchmen.

It’s quite shocking to see how many Zionists, both Jewish and otherwise, want to see the Holocaust not as an example of man’s inhumanity” to man but as “man’s inhumanity to Jews”, who would agree with Dov Hikind that it is “a uniquely Jewish experience”. Hikind is a nasty piece of work but his views are shared by many more mainstream Zionists. As Norman Finkelstein (like Hikind a child of Holocaust survivors) argues in his book The Holocaust Industry this obsession with keeping the Holocaust a Jewish tragedy is partially due to its use as the founding myth of Israel. Israel needs to be a explicitely Jewish state because that is the only way to avoid another Holocaust and if the Holocaust happened to other people (homosexuals, Sinti & Roma, disabled Germans, etc) that justification makes a lot less sense. Hence the opposition to putting the Holocaust in context with other examples of genocide like Ruanda or the Armenian genocide, hence the opposition to remembering other nazi victims. Hence also the attempts to teach the Holocaust as the logical culmination of centuries of European anti-semitism.

Public Holocaust memorials need to be universal, need to be true to the historic reality if they are to have any meaning. Jewish people were the largest group of victims of the nazis, but we should never forget that millions of others were killed by them as well: Poles, Russians, German socialists and other political opponents, disabled German children, Roma and Sinti, Jehova’s Witnesses and other religious people opposing the nazis out of their beliefs and yes, homosexuals (the only group nazi laws against which were enforced on after the war). Hate is universal and there isn’t something uniquely Jewish about being the victim of it.

To think otherwise is to beg history to repeat itself. Again.

Zionists crying wolf too often

Israel lobby, Israel/Palestine, Zionism
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Via Aaronovitch Watch (Incorporating “World of Decency”) comes Tony Greenstein’s account of the debate on anti-semitism between Aaronovitch (Zionist / warmonger) and Gilad Atzmon (jazz musician / somebody who if he isn’t anti-semitic, doesn’t do much to deny the charge). Aaronovitch himself was furious that in the choice between two evils, the audience took the side of the jazz musician, but as Greenstein says “the wars and blockades that Aaronovitch has supported in different parts of the world have killed upwards of 2 million people. Atzmon’s anti-Semitism has killed no one because, as far as I’m aware, death by boredom cannot be entered as a cause of death on a death certificate“.

His main point is made slightly later:

When you attack Palestinians and anti-Zionists, not least Jewish anti-Zionists, as being anti-Semitic, then what you do is let the real anti-Semites like Gilad Atzmon off the hook. When you deliberately confuse and conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism it is not the anti-Zionists you hurt but the anti-Semites you help. The only reason Gilad Atzmon can pass himself off as an anti-Zionist, when he is politically at one with Zionism’s founding creed, that diaspora Jewry is a hideous thing and that being Jewish and Zionist is one and the same thing, is because anti-Zionists and anti-Semites are tarred by the Zionists with the same brush of anti-Semitism.

If you cry ‘wolf’ for long enough, don’t be surprised if people no longer believe or listen to you when the wolf makes an appearance. And that is the real contribution of David Aaronovitch and Zionism to the fight against racism and anti-Semitism.

I’m not sure how real this danger is; there have been various studies showing anti-semitism is on the rise in Europe (examples left as exercise for your googling skills) but many of those suffer from the same problem as Greenstein mentions, that they confuse criticism of Israel, anti-zionism and anti-semitism. Anecdotally there have been incidents here in the Netherlands where hotheaded demonstrators against Israel’s War on Gaza have shouted anti-semitic slogans, which have then been used to discredit legitamite attacks on Israel. It does make sense to assume that in a climate where anti-semitism as a charge has been devalued to the point that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitic by default, people will wory less about it as they see how ridiculous most charges are. It even makes sense that this will lead to more real anti-semitism.

From the point of view of the Israel boosters this may not even be so bad, as 1) it delegitamises genuine criticism and 2) it adds credibility to the idea that Israel is the sole defence Jews have against persecution and that therefore they should support it unconditionally. Which doesn’t mean this was a conscious goal of those that have made those accusations the most of course, just that it’s a not entirely unwanted side effect.

Better not talk about racism at an UN conference on racism

Israel/Palestine, Zionism
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Diplomats walk out as president of Iran calls Israel a racist state:

Diplomats have walked out of a speech by the Iranian president at a UN anti-racism conference after he described Israel as a “racist government”.

Two protesters, wearing coloured wigs, disrupted the beginning of the speech by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – followed by the Western walkout.

Others enthusiastically clapped as Mr Ahmadinejad continued his address.

France said it was a “hate speech”. A number of other Western countries have boycotted the conference altogether.

The walkout is a public relations disaster for the United Nations, which had hoped the conference would be a shining example of what the UN is supposed to do best – uniting to combat injustice in the world, says the BBC’s Imogen Foulkes in Geneva.

[…]

Mr Ahmadinejad, the only major leader to attend the conference, said Jewish migrants from Europe and the United States had been sent to the Middle East after World War II “in order to establish a racist government in the occupied Palestine”.

He continued, through an interpreter: “And in fact, in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racist regime in Palestine.”

This walkout by western diplomats is embarassing at best, political correctness trumping truth as what’s being sold as a principled action is the equivalent of a child sticking their fingers in their ears and going “la la la can’t hear you”. What’s more, this is the second conference on racism in which the US and EU are throwing their weight around to defend Israel, the first being the conference in Durban back in 2001, where too much attention was paid to Israel as well. Several western countries, including my own, actually stayed away entirely this time because it “echoed the spirit of Durban” too much. It’s all incredibly cringeworthy, as it shows up how far our governments are willing to go to deny the truth about Israel.

Israel/Palestine: when did the NYT get a clue?

Israel/Palestine, Zionism
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Because this article by Jeffrey Goldberg is surprisingly insightful:

“We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us,” he said. If this happens, and worldwide sanctions are imposed as they were against the white-minority government, “the state of Israel is finished,” Mr. Olmert said in an earlier interview. This is why he, and his mentor, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, turned so fiercely against the Jewish settlement movement, which has entangled Israel unnecessarily in the lives of West Bank Palestinians. Once, men like Mr. Sharon and Mr. Olmert saw the settlers as the vanguards of Zionism; today, the settlements are seen, properly, as the forerunner of a binational state. In other words, as the end of Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy.

Other Israeli leaders have spoken with similar directness. The former prime minister, and current defense minister, Ehud Barak, told The Jerusalem Post in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state that might then become another Belfast or Bosnia.”

[…]

And the best way to bring about the birth of a Palestinian state is to reverse — not merely halt, but reverse — the West Bank settlement project. The dismantling of settlements is the one step that would buttress the dwindling band of Palestinian moderates in their struggle against the fundamentalists of Hamas.

No, these ideas aren’t particularly shocking, radical or even progressive, but the fact that they can now be expressed in the New York Times, perhaps the cheerleader for zionism must be a good thing. For too long American zionism in particular has held to the idea that Israel could have its caek and eat it: have a greater Israel incorporating the Occupied Territories without having to deal with the Palestinians, the idea that the Palestinians could be bought off by a sham state. If it is no longer beyond the pale to demand a Palestinian state controlling the whole of the Occupied Territories, progress has been made. That said, I still believe even this maximalist two-state solution is least acceptable valid solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. My preference is still a new state, neither Jewish nor Palestinian but open to both.

I also think that the idea that in Israel there’s a greater range of debate possible on this subject, while true, should not be taken too optimistically. there are still incredibly strong political pressures against any Israeli politician being too accomedating to the Palestinians, or being too realistic in which Palestinian organisations are credible discussion partners. Some of these pressures are from imported superzionists from America or Europe, but there are plenty of domestic wingnuts as well. the main difference between Israel and the US is that the day to day reality of Zionist Israel is harder to ignore.