The I-P Status Quo Will Continue

There's really no way around it.

The status quo will continue because the Arabs have yet to end their war against the Jews. And, indeed, why should they give up on it when they've done such a good job over the decades encouraging the Palestinians to be their surrogate fighters?

The war goes on because the Palestinians refuse to make peace and the Arabs, for the most part, refuse to settle them on Arab land. The reason that Palestinians refuse to make peace is because they are convinced that Haifa and Tel Aviv and Beersheba belong to them. They do not accept Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land and, indeed, refuse to accept Jewish land as anything but their own.

So, yes, the status quo will continue.

Nonetheless, we constantly hear that the status quo is untenable.

Is it?

One of the things that I very much enjoy about having freed myself from political partisanship is that I am able to question political dogma that takes on the character of religious certitude. In other words, if everybody knows something to be true, such as that "the status quo is untenable," there's an excellent chance that the notion is false.

It seems to me that the status quo is very tenable. The status quo in terms of I-P is that the western bank of the Jordan River remains disputed territory. That is the status quo. This is a situation in which Jews and Arabs share that land, but the Jews remain citizens of Israel and the Arabs are, for the most part, under the sovereignty of Fatah, although subject to, in certain places, Israeli checkpoints as required for Israeli security.

Is the continuation of this untenable? Not at all. We've had varying degrees of something quite like this since 1967. It's been 44 years, so why is it suddenly no longer tenable? Of course, it is tenable. This can go on for decade upon decade upon decade. It can go on and on and on well into the future. The Israelis will thrive and build a great country, and continue to rack-up all those Nobel prizes, while the Palestinians of the western bank of the Jordan River, and those who live in Gaza, continue to incite hatred and shoot rockets and blow up their kids in an effort to murder Jewish kids.

This can go on and on and on.

It can, because it has.

Do I prefer it? No.

What I would prefer to see are the Palestinians at last agreeing to the two-state solution and then settling in to build a decent life for themselves and their kids. Unfortunately, this is not what they want. It is what most Israeli Jews want, that much is certain, however there is little to indicate that this is what the Palestinians want.

What they clearly want is victory over the Jews.

For fourteen hundred years the Arabs ruled over us in the Middle East.  We were second class citizens and third class citizens, depending upon just where and when.  We had to pay a special tax, had no say in government, and had no means of self defense.

And that is precisely what they will not get, yet again, any time soon.

And the thing of it is, so many people, so many liberals, Jews and non-Jews, think that Israel can solve this problem by doing this, that, or the other. If only the Jews would comply with Arab racism and have a civil war with itself by trying to shove 500,000 of our brothers and sisters off that land, then there would be peace.

What horrific nonsense.

The Jewish Left continues to delude itself that Israel is the reason why there is no peace in this conflict. The reason for that is Jewish Stockholm Syndrome and the reason behind Jewish Stockholm Syndrome is that it gives one a sense of some control over circumstances. That's the basis of it. If we can only convince our fellow Jews to stand on their heads while playing the kazoo, then it means that we have the power to fix the situation.

But, we don't.

That's the truth.

We cannot have peace if they will not ever be peaceful. We cannot have peace if they always and forever refuse to accept peace through a negotiated settlement. So long as they continue to be willing to sacrifice their own children on the altar of Jew Hatred, then there can be no peace.

The rest of the Arab world doesn't care if Palestinians kill themselves in their efforts to kill Jews, for if they did, they would have offered those Palestinians citizenship in Lebanon and Syria and Egypt, but they refuse to do that. The obvious reason that the Arab states refuse to relieve the Palestinians of refugee status is because they want the Palestinians to be right where they are, on the front line in their holy war, their Jihad, against the Jews.

I do not like it any more than do you, but we have no choice.

Israel, under Netanyahu, yet again called for negotiations without preconditions and the Palestinians, with some encouragement from Barack Obama, refused.

This means that the status quo continues.

Most progressive Jews will never acknowledge the obvious.  I feel bad for them because they earnestly want a resolution and therefore are constantly trying to negotiate with the other side.

And, yet, as we see throughout the Left political blogosphere, the other side, that is non-Jewish progressives who despise Israel, spit on Jewish liberals and constantly drag our characters through the muck.

What a shame.

It's one of the reasons that I have said my goodbyes to the Left.

Jews Leaving the Democratic Party and the Progressive Left

I come out of the Democratic Party and the progressive-left, but I am done with it.

The simple truth is that Jews should abandon the Democratic Party and the progressive movement for the obvious reason that these people are not our friends and do not represent our interests.  Quite the contrary.

Daily Kos's MiddleClassTraitors wrote a piece, today, asking how it is that conservative Jews are willing to vote against their own economic class interests in favor of Republicans who, he suggests, pay lip-service to support for Israel.

The truth is that conservatives and Republicans support Jewish well-being while "progressives" simply do not.

Whether or not Republicans are better, materially, for the American middle class than are Democrats is a question that I will leave aside, but what I argue is that because the progressive-left and, hence, the Democratic Party have become the political home for anti-Semitic anti-Zionists some Jews are leaving that party and that movement, including me.

Whether it is Daily Kos, or the Huffington Post, or the UK Guardian, the western progressive-left is where anti-Zionism mainly lives. These are progressives providing venues for the spread of hatred toward the Jewish state. They will tell you, of course, that they criticize Israel out of a concern for human rights.

This is false.

The BDS campaign, which uses these venues, is not about "criticism" but about delegitimization. Most anti-Zionists virtually never criticize Israel. They defame it. Furthermore, the very last thing in this world the progressive-left cares about is "human rights." If they cared about human rights or social justice they would concentrate on places in the world that are human rights disasters, such as the Congo or Darfur, but they do not.

Instead, on a daily basis, they pick on, defame, demean, and dehumanize the one, sole, lone Jewish state, even as they justify Jihadi violence against innocent civilians.

It is, in fact, one of the most profound and perverse historical developments that contemporary anti-Semitism actually marches under the banner of human rights. In every generation they have reason to tell one another that the Jews are bad and it always leads to, at least, some level of violence against us. Sometimes it's not so bad and sometimes it is horrific. We do not know where we are heading, just yet.

What we do know is that the rough beast has made a home for itself in the Democratic Party.

{Progressives should be very proud.}

This is MiddleClassTraitor's eminently reasonable response under the name jgorran:

I happen to be the author of the post you referred to. Your background seems very, very familiar. I agree that Israeli bashing has been a favorite past time of the far-left extreme progressives and some of the not so far left. I simply don't buy that republicans who seem to pander to Jewish voters by trying to "out Jew a Jew" by simply mouthing the most extreme statements of support that cost them nothing, should get one's vote. I don't buy that the democratic political establishment is out to destroy Israel. When I see people like Rep. Allen West, Rep. 19th FL advocate for a biblical "greater Israel", I can only assume that he cares more for getting Jewish voters than he does for what happens to Israel.

June 1, 2011 3:13 PM

I certainly agree that the Democratic political establishment is not out to destroy Israel. MiddleClassTraitors and I agree on this. My issue is not so much with the Democratic political establishment as it is with the base of the Democratic Party and the progressive-movement because they provide venues for anti-Zionism and the shrouded anti-Semitism within anti-Zionism.

This is the answer that I have given to MiddleClassTraitor's question. I cannot really speak for conservative Jews or Republican Jews because I am neither. No conservative would consider me a conservative on the issues.

But one thing that I know for sure, as the anti-Zionism and Israel Hate moves from the fringes to the center in Democratic Party circles you will see, more and more, Jewish liberals running for the hills.

We are NOT going to support people who are either actively working to undermine our collective well-being or who are indifferent to the presence, in the Democratic Party or the progressive-left, of those who are.

That is my position and it is a more than reasonable position for anyone who cares about Israel to take.

Liberals can whistle pass the graveyard all they like, but there is a big, big problem with the Democratic Party and the progressive-movement and that problem has a name: anti-Zionism.

(Ask citizen53, he'll tell ya.)

I do not make this stuff up.

I just report the news.

Why I am Not a Zionist

In the discussion around the ongoing Arab-Israel conflict there are, depending on one's perspective, good people and bad people. If one is an anti-Semitic anti-Zionist the bad people are called "Zionists." These Zionists are thought to be an unusually horrid breed of people who hold nefarious intent toward Arabs and bolster a particularly extreme, if not fascistic, form of ethnic nationalism.

The funny thing is, and what no one ever says, is that Zionism, as a political movement, is over with. It's done. What Zionism really was, of course, was the movement for Jewish national liberation and it fulfilled itself in May of 1948 when Israel was recognized by the UN as a state. It should be noted, by the way, that the UN did not create Israel. People often say this, but it is not true. Israel was not created by well-meaning pencil pushers in the UN, but by Jewish people (and some non-Jewish people) on the ground.

Between the end of the 19th century and 1948, hundreds of thousands of Jews built that country from nothing. It was swampland and desert, but they worked that land. They grew the crops and developed the farms and created the infrastructure, political and material, necessary for a state. All that the UN did was recognize a condition that already existed, the condition of Jewish statehood.

Those people were Zionists. That is, those people, those Jewish farmers and Jewish laborers and Jewish politicians, those people were Zionists. They dreamed of creating a national homeland for the Jewish people on historically Jewish land and went about doing precisely that.

I am not a Zionist because I was born too late to have anything to do with the Zionist project of building a state. By the time that I came around the state was already built. The truth of the matter is that most Jews who care about Israel do not necessarily think of themselves as Zionists. When I was growing up, in an American middle class home wherein we supported the Jewish state, we almost never even used that word.

I do not recall my folks, or their friends, ever referring to themselves as Zionists. We were just American Jews who supported Israel. We did not require a separate name for ourselves any more than American Italians who happen to like Italy get some specific name or Chinese Americans who care about China have some separate and specific name for themselves.

More and more the word "Zionism" is nothing but an epithet spit at Jews who happen to be supportive of Israel. That's what Zionism really is today. It is the word that our enemies use to isolate us and separate us out from other people. It is an identifying mark at this point. It is the yellow star, and in the mouths of hate-filled anti-Zionist progressives, a stigma.

Zionists are the category of people whom it is OK to hate. Where it was, once upon a time, socially acceptable to hate Jews that is no longer the case among people who consider themselves contemporary-left anti-racists.

Progressives do not hate Jews because that would be racist.

Instead the socially acceptable category of people to hate is not Jews, but Zionists. You cannot openly hate on Jews in polite society. (Is that still the case?) But you can hate on Zionists. And just because the vast majority of Jews happen to be Zionists represents no reason not to despise Zionists because these insidious people are promoting... or so they never tire of telling us... a truly virulent form of racist imperialism and colonialism resulting in the ethnic cleansing and oppression of those icons of pure victim-hood, the "Palestinian" people.

That is what Zionism means in the mouths of the anti-Zionist progressive-left.

The oppressor.

The Jew as oppressor.

That is what they mean when they call us Zionists.

Nobody ever talks about it, but anyone who follows the never-ending conflict cannot possibly miss this. It is a fundamental and central part of the discussion. They have conjured up an entire class of evil people, Zionists, and anyone who defends Israel from their never-ending defamation becomes one of these insidious beings.

And this is why anti-Zionism represents the new anti-Semitism.

And what a shame that this time around it is coming at us from the Left.

Shame. Shame. Shame.

{Sad, really.}