Monday, December 13, 2010

Daily Kos Comment of the Day: Stealing Jewish Identity Edition

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Israel (4+ / 0-)

has dispossessed the Palestinian people and forced them into exile. Call it annihilation if you will. Palestinians do not have a homeland, do not have a state, and the majority of them are exiles and refugees. They are the new Jews of the Middle East and the world, thanks to Israel.

That's what I was saying.

by sortalikenathan on Mon Dec 13, 2010 at 06:09:46 PM PST

sortalikenathan is one of my all-time favorite Arab-American Israel-Haters on Daily Kos. Nathan, much like his friend, unspeakable, simply despises Israel and therefore probably despises Jews, as well, according to a recent sociological study by Edward H. Kaplan and Charles A. Small of Yale.

His every word drips contempt, as you can see above.

It's not surprising, really, given the fact that Nathan wants Hezbollah to have nukes.

I advocate Iranian nukes in the hands of Hizballah to neutralize the capacity of Israel to commit its massacres against Arabs.

Good God, what a vicious moron.

Anyway, strictly for the hell of it, let's fisk this thing bit by bit, shall we?

Israel has dispossessed the Palestinian people and forced them into exile.

The first thing to notice, of course, is the total inability of the anti-Israel delegitimizer to give any responsibility for anything to the Palestinians. It's always, and forever, Israel's fault. Whatever it is, Israel done it.

In this case, obviously, he's talking about that little thing that we like to call "the refugee problem." It is true, obviously, that many Arabs of the mandate were displaced and became refugees during the '48 war.  About 700,000, in fact.  What he doesn't tell you is that about an equal number of Jews were likewise displaced from Arab countries and that the Arabs of mandated Palestine launched a genocidal civil war against the Jews directly after UN 181, the partition plan, at the end of November '47, right after the Holocaust.

A war fought, in part, by Jewish women and Holocaust survivors.

I suppose he forgot that part.

Benny Morris, one of the foremost historians of the I-P conflict, cleared this up in his now famous letter to the Irish Times:

ISRAEL-HATERS are fond of citing my work in support of their arguments. Let me offer some corrections. In defiance of the will of the international community, as embodied in the UN General Assembly resolution of November 29, 1947, (Palestinian Arabs) launched hostilities against the Jewish community in Palestine in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community. But they lost; and one of the results was the displacement of 700,000 of them from their homes.

Nathan continues with:

Call it annihilation if you will.

I think that I will call it a hot pastrami sandwich, actually.

:O)

Puh-lease.

Palestinians do not have a homeland, do not have a state...

That's right. They do not have a state, now do they?  I wonder why?

Could it be because wild horses couldn't get the Palestinians to actually accept a state for themselves in peace next to the Jewish one if their lives depended on it?... which is why they do not have a state to begin with?

The truth is that  until they are willing to accept a state in peace next to Israel than they will continue to live in self-inflicted poverty, misery, and squalor... except for the ones who don't.

It's entirely up to them.

and the majority of them are exiles and refugees.

They certainly are, but whose fault is that? They launched a civil war, got beat, and then their Arab brothers locked them into camps in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan and, in many places, are keeping them there forever... while blaming the Jews. It's fucking horrendous, actually.

They are the new Jews of the Middle East and the world, thanks to Israel.

And this is why this entire comment grabbed my attention. What interests me about it is that it represents an example of Palestinian appropriation of Jewish identity. The nonsensical, ahistorical gibbering about victimhood is old hat, but more and more we are seeing the denial of Jewish history or the appropriation of that history by Palestinians.

Arafat, for example, claimed that Jesus was a "Palestinian."

{Ho. Ho. Ho.}

A PA official, just the other day, put out a "study," all of five pages long, claiming that Jews have no connection to the Western Wall.

During the Camp David Accords Arafat shocked Bill Clinton by claiming that the Second Temple was not in Jerusalem, the City of David.

According to Gold and Dennis Ross, at the 2000 Camp David Summit, Yasser Arafat insisted that the Jewish Temple existed in Nablus, not on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

This is what former Israeli ambassador, Dore Gold, calls Temple Denial.

It is this very creepy inclination among some Palestinians to either deny Jewish history, for the purpose of severing any Jewish connection to the land of Israel, or to usurp Jewish history and identity for the purpose of claiming that connection for themselves.

The problem is that when they do this kind of thing it draws attention to their own history and identity.

Jewish history and culture, if I may say so, is rich, deep, and old. Along with the ancient Greeks, the Jewish tradition is one of the great pillars of the western tradition.

The West draws its provenance from Athens and Jerusalem.

But whenever I read about Palestinians trying to deny Jewish history, or to appropriate it for themselves, it simply calls to mind Palestinian history... and its many contributions to humanity.

2 comments:

  1. Great post. Stealing someone's identity is one of the main dehumanization techniques.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, man.

    I think that we need to understand this whole conflict as one long war, starting with the Mufti in the 20s.

    The latest phase, obviously, is the delegitimization phase and part of that tactic is the theft of Jewish history.

    On the one hand, it is pathetic, but I also wonder about its effectiveness?

    My guess is that it will not be very effective, simply due to the fact that there is such a thing as the historical record.

    Peace to you, please, good sir.

    Cheers!

    ReplyDelete