Thursday, January 12, 2012

ZionTruth Has Some Words

Karam

Editor's Note - Anyone who posts here knows that I often like to front page reader's comments if I think that those comments either need responding to or because I believe that they would make a terrific stand alone post.

I hope ZionTruth doesn't mind, but I very much appreciate his comment below and want to make sure that our readership gets an opportunity to look it over. - Mike L.

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Clueless? If only. Clueless can be fixed with a little knowledge. With the anti-Zionists you don't get mere ignorance, you're confronted with a total unwillingness to listen. Buttressed by utter contempt.

"For a just and viable peace that guarantees the rights of the Palestinians while taking account of the Israelis' security needs." Yes... one side has rights (dreams, lofty ideals, justice aggrieved etc.), the other, mere security needs (measures to ensure they aren't killed—why, thank you).

The past two decades, Israeli Jews have debated the outcome of 1967, including the Jewish population centers set up in the post-1967 territories, sincerely and furiously. There was even a limited readiness to broach the topic of 1948, though the prospect of having the very foundation of the Jewish state condemned has never been welcomed even by Meretz. In contrast to this, any notion that the Jews have a right to their state in Palestine, as opposed to having been done a favor in the face of the Holocaust, is derided as racism, false history, mythology or worse.

The Progressive Left has never respected the Jewish claim. Their view of Zionists is from above, and from the judgment seat. They hold that the very first batch of Jews arriving from Russia in 1882 (always Russia—a similar arrival from Yemen is never mentioned, lest it seriously dent their view of Zionism as "White European Settler-Colonialism") was the beginning of sin, the point before which everything was perfect. From such a standpoint, they view even the Binational "Solution", where the Jewish nation is to be dispossessed of its one and only nation-state, as an act of clemency, graciousness over true justice, which would be Helen Thomas's call for all Jews to be ethnically cleansed from Palestine.

The greater part of the Israeli Jewish public in the years before the Great Disillusionment (which would be August 2005—the evacuation of all the Jews in the Gaza region, followed by rocket barrages on pre-1967 Israeli Jewish towns) would have been content with an equal-claimants view of this conflict. That is, if the world had accepted comparisons to the Hutus and Tutsis, similar peoples with an equal claim to the land that had better be solved by some sort of sharing agreement. But the Progressive Left rejects forthwith any such view; its beloved comparison is of French vs. Algerians in Algeria, and we know how that ended. The greatest contempt the Progressives have is for the Zionist who believes Jews too are in Palestine by right. Such an uppity thought does not go well with the ideal of Israel and Zionism standing trial before the world.

In all my years of reading the stuff on anti-Zionist forums, Karmafish, nothing, and I mean nothing, has outraged me more than the anti-Zionists' sheer contempt they have for the idea of the Jews' connection to this land. The lighthearted ease with which they dismiss that connection as a bunch of fairy-tales and construe Zionism as a colonialist relic is something that should fill any Jew with righteous indignation. If no respect is given to us and our rights—nothing but bones of "security needs" thrown to us, and not very reliable ones either—then how do they have the gall to demand our respect toward our adversaries? It's usually better to be smart than right, but only up to a point; once the imbalance is such that you become a doormat, you're no longer smart either.

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8 comments:

  1. There's an awful lot here that one can address, but I want to take a moment and discuss this notion of Israel on trial before the world.

    "The greatest contempt the Progressives have is for the Zionist who believes Jews too are in Palestine by right. Such an uppity thought does not go well with the ideal of Israel and Zionism standing trial before the world."

    Quite right and I would emphasize that in the west, this trial was put together not by the conservative right-wing, but by the progressive left-wing.
    And needless to say, as I always emphasize, I say this as someone who comes from the left.  I know that there are any number of "progressives" who like to simply dismiss voices such as mine as "conservative" and therefore to be airily dismissed.  Any such efforts, however, are intellectually bogus because the truth of an assertion is not dependent on the political leanings of the individual making the assertion.

    In this case, it is simply objectively true that it tends to be the political left, rather the conservative right, that challenges Israel's right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people and that perpetually clobbers that country in order to soften it up in preparation for its eventual dissolution.

    The far fringey right has anti-Zionists, but the progressive-left is mainstreaming theirs in places like the HuffPost and elsewhere, but ideology and group-think (and all that this entail) prevent liberal pro-Israel Jews from facing that hard fact.

    It amazes me the long, long list of things that we are not allowed to notice if we want to claim status as part of the progressive movement.  This is not a problem for me because I gave that up some time ago.  This means that I can acknowledge obvious truths, such as that Arab and Palestinian Koranically-based anti-Jewish racism is the fundamental source of the conflict.

    I can acknowledge that truth only because I am entirely free of progressive-left group think backed up by social pressure and bullying.

    In any case, thank you Ziontruth for some interesting words to chew over.

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  2. Ziontruth nails it. I have commented before about how when some poster here tells the truth about all this stuff a fortuitous news item will appear to confirm the POV. Here EoZ posts about a woman who really takes the cake in Israel/Jew hate in the most astounding way.

    "Latest libel: Israel's doctors are too careful with their patients' lives






    The Dutch newspaper Trouw has an unbelievable article written by Ilse
    Van Heusden, who had pre-natal care done in Israel for her child.



    Her verdict? "The Chosen People have to be perfect."



    Van Heudsen's thesis is that Israelis value Jewish children's lives
    because they think they are better than everyone else. Therefore, they
    recommend all of these unnecessary tests to make sure that they have
    nice, perfect children. Israelis, she says, are obsessed with perfect
    children, and will abort any child who falls short of this standard.



    It is, to her, irresponsible to care that much about a mere baby. Her implication is that it is borderline racist...."

    You cannot make this stuff up.

    http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2012/01/latest-libel-israels-doctors-are-too.html

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  3. I think these folks once did respect the Israeli narrative. The root of change occurred in Europe, after 1967, based on the desire to cooperate with Arab states and protect the lines of oil. As this cooperation among states grew, it naturally spread into the intelligentsia and among the elites, and eventually to many those similarly situated in the USA, the so-called Progressive Left. We have the Europeans to thank for another mess. As I read "Eurabia" I cannot help but think the premise is valid.

    ZionTruth makes a strong case for how the matter has evolved.

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  4. Now if I can just get the guy to write for us on a regular basis.

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  5. That would be great! He is very insightful.

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  6. Here is more on the bigoted mom who had to receive extra care because her pregnancy was not normal, then turned it into an gesture of antisemitism.

    http://honestreporting.com/dutch-daily-the-chosen-people-have-to-be-perfect/ 

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  7. Thanks Oldschool. This stuff just makes me ill.

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  8. No, Karmafish, I don't mind. :)

    oldschooltwentysix,

    "The root of change occurred in Europe, after 1967, based on the desire to cooperate with Arab states and protect the lines of oil."

    I agree, but I also argue for an ideological change that happened during the 1960s: The older, Social-Democrat Left (which was pro-Israel) was waylaid by the Marxist Left (anti-Zionist since 1920). As I have often said, this blog represents remnant Old-Leftists, the heirs of FDR and Truman in contrast to the many Marxified denizens of Daily Kos.

    Doodad,

    I don't know about writing regularly here... first of all, I consider myself a right-wing guest on your turf, and second, I only post occasionally when time permits and inspiration hits—that latter point is true everywhere for me, not just here.

    From time to time there'll be a blog post here, in synchrony with other recent events, that gets my writing juices flowing, but I'm not strong on doing sustained writing. My Hebrew-language website*, for example, had a steady pace of updates for a few months until I no longer felt I had anything new to add.

    Thanks for the kind offer, though.

    Karmafish,

    As I just wrote on CiFWatch, it appears to me that, although Jew-hatred is by no means limited to the Marxist Left, the other groups always turn to the Marxist Left for the justifying rhetoric they need to sugarcoat their hatred and make it palatable to polite society. A Buchananite like Mearsheimer, a black supremacist like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and an Islamic imperialist like Ismail Haniyeh sound normally like the Jew-haters of the 1930s, but when they come to present their case to the world, they tone it down and dress it up with the arguments of anti-Zionism. Where do they all get those arguments? Copy and paste from the works of Marxist anti-Zionists from 1920 to now.

    *The link on my name.

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