The Palestinian Re-Write of History

One of the things that I find most appalling about I-P discourse... among the very many things that I do find appalling about I-P discourse... is the rewriting of history. Advocates for the Palestinian position, that the Jews must be robbed of self-determination and self-defense as a matter of social justice, often resort to the re-writing of history in order to better position the Palestinians in their conflict with the Jews.

This is done in a myriad of ways and has been ongoing at least since Arafat told a slack-jawed Bill Clinton that Solomon's temple was never in Jerusalem, but here, there, or elsewhere somewhere within the Arab world, probably Iraq. Since that time we've been told that Jews have no historical connection to ancient Jewish land, this despite the sciences of anthropology and archeology which tend, for some crazy reason, to disagree with Mahmoud Abbas despite his PhD dissertation denying the Holocaust.

One of the biggest lies, of course, is that the Palestinians are an ancient people who have lived on that land since time immemorial. Zach of the Huffington Post Monitor gives us a current example in his discussion of Ru Freeman's latest article.

Freeman writes:

The people of Palestine have undergone centuries of external pressure if not always occupation -- from the Israelite, the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Iraqi, Egyptian, Turkish and British forces to name a few -- and history has proved that, when push came to shove, the Palestinian voice was repeatedly silenced. Nobody asked them for their thoughts when Theodor Hertzl advocated for a Jewish State...

And Zach responds:

Quick question. Who exactly does Ms. Freeman think "the Palestinians" are? Is she not aware that they are the descendants of the Arab armies who invaded in the 700s? Because they are, and will proudly tell you of their brotherhood with their fellow Arabs. So as usual it is ironic that she says the Israelites "occupied Palestine" before it even was Palestine, and therefore occupied the Palestinian Arabs, even though there were no Palestinian Arabs there to occupy. Her writing indicates a level of ignorance or a level of dishonesty that is unusual even by Huffington Post standards.

Unfortunately, this level of ignorance or dishonesty is all too common in I-P discourse as a whole. In fact, one cannot even discuss the history of the Palestinian people with anything like honesty because to do so immediately places one in opposition to Political Correctness and the multicultural ideal which insists that politics must trump historical fact.

Here is an historical fact. The Palestinians did not even become the Palestinians until somewhere between the last third and the last quarter of the last century.

This is one of those little facts that no one is supposed to acknowledge. The truth is that from the end of the nineteenth century through until 1948 the "Palestinians" referred to the Jews of Palestine, not the Arabs. The Arabs in fact rejected that term precisely because it did refer to the Jews. It was not until the 1960s that the Arabs of that area began in large numbers to call themselves "Palestinians."

The Palestinians did not emerge as a coherent group until Yassir Arafat conjured them up in the middle of the 1960s. Before that they were simply the local Arab population. Some of their ancestors came from the area around Israel, but many of their ancestors came from all over the Arab world. We know that there were high rates of Arab immigration into Palestine throughout the early part of the twentieth century because Jewish industriousness provided employment.

From all over the Arab world they came. From Egypt and Syria and Jordan and Iraq. Just as many Jews immigrated into Palestine from both Europe and other parts of the Middle East, so Arabs from throughout the region migrated toward the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. And what that means is that only an unknown percentage of Palestinians are actually descended from people who lived in the region during earlier periods.

This is an historical fact and, yet, it is entirely taboo to discuss.

Understand, of course, that I am not claiming that the Palestinians are not a people. Palestinian nationality, like most nationalities, was born from conflict. It was out of the Arab ambition to reinstate subjugation of the Jews as dhimmis, and through our new-found willingness to defend ourselves, that the Palestinian people were born as "Palestinians."

That they are Palestinian now should not be in doubt.

But let us not lie about the history, here. The Arabs of what was the British mandate have formed themselves a national identity. Sure, it's a brand-spanking-new national identity, but a national identity it is.

But when their leadership tells us that the Palestinians have been living on that land for seven thousand years or nine thousand years or millions upon millions of years making them "the master's of history" we are under no obligation to condescend to such laughable nonsense.

Nor should we.

Open Thread and Relaunch

I've been giving this blog some thought and I have decided that I want to make a few changes. This should not effect the way anyone participates here, really, but I've decided that I want to post less and what I do post to be more contemplative and less reactionary.

The way I did before was simply to post brief, daily pieces based mainly on what I was seeing within Daily Kos I-P, as well as I-P news events, more generally.

My thesis, which I stand by, is that the progressive-left as a movement, as well as the grassroots / netroots of the Democratic party, has betrayed their Jewish friends through welcoming an anti-Zionist and Israel hating contingent within Democratic party ranks.  Therefore Jews should leave both that movement and that political party so as not to be taken for granted.

This is very much still my position, because it strikes me as undeniable... unaddressed, but undeniable. It is undeniable that the Democratic party has an anti-Zionist element as part of its constituency.

The reason that I was constantly linking back to Daily Kos was because I was providing evidence for the cornerstone of my argument. The Democratic party does contain an anti-Zionist Israel hating element and, here, look at what this guy has to say. That was the point. The point was to show the amazing hatred and pure nonsense that gets spouted about the Jewish state on a daily basis within progressive-left circles.

What continues to surprise me, however, is how unwilling anyone is to really refute my very simple and very obvious argument. No one is really telling me that I am wrong on my central claim, they just refuse to accept the obvious conclusion and they generally do not want to discuss it. They are evading the obvious, but one cannot evade the obvious forever.

Reality will not allow.

It is obvious that the progressive-left has an anti-Zionist constituency and it is therefore also obvious that this is unhealthy for Jewish people and their children. This is just basic common sense.  It therefore follows that Jews should leave the progressive-left. Or, at the very least, this is one perfectly reasonable conclusion to be drawn.

It is certainly the conclusion that I have drawn, so that we may not be taken for granted, and no one has refuted that conclusion. I wonder why? There are, after all, arguments to be made for reform and I would expect someone who cares about the Democratic party to make that argument and yet no one ever did.

How odd.

In any case, going forward I intend to operate on the principle that sometimes less is more. I will therefore limit my own writings to one or two pieces a week, which I hope to be a tad more contemplative than simply informing you that this person, or that person, is essentially a Nazi in sheep's clothing.

Part of the reason that I have pulled back a little is because once you start screaming from the mountainsides about Nazis then there is no place to go but down... unless, of course, you are Pamela Geller.  Whatever anyone might want to say about Geller, she has certainly built quite a career from mountainside screaming.

Good for her.

Also, my regular readership will notice that I deleted about a gazillion blog posts and readers' comments along with it. I hope that this has not put anyone's nose out of joint, but I very much feel like I want to start fresh. It's actually kind of funny. Yesterday as I began the process of dismantling this joint I got an email from a friend of mine who says, "Hey, Karma, your blog is melting!"

:O)

Yes, it most certainly was.

And with that we launch Israel Thrives Part Deux and I very much hope you guys will drop in and give us your thoughts.

Sincerely,

Karam

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By the way, tomorrow morning, bright and early, Laurie and I are on Lake Chabot, just south of Oakland, on the hunt for catfish.  They say it may rain, which should be good for the fishing.

Although, I must say that there are few things in this world more ridiculous than standing on the shore of a lake during a complete downpour with a fishing rod in your hand... and, yet!

The Jews and Israel Are One: An Open Letter

One of the primary assumptions on the anti-Zionist Left is that Israel and the Jewish people have virtually nothing to do with one another and, therefore, no matter what horrible things you say about the Jewish state, this is not meant to convey anything negative toward the Jewish people.

Of the various "big lies" that inform I-P discourse, this is among the most prominent and least discussed. It represents a general background which is so pervasive it just fades into the wallpaper.

The problem, of course, is that it is a "lie." The notion is entirely false. The fact of the matter is that Israeli Jews and diaspora Jews are brothers and sisters. We stand together, even in disagreement, and we do so under the name of Israel. We, as a people, are Israel. Israel is the Jewish state and it is the Jewish people. We may agree or disagree with the policies of the Jewish state, but almost to a person we support Israel, stand with Israel, and stand with our fellow Jews.

I know, of course, that there are any number of Jewish anti-Zionists or Israel Haters that "progressives" can point to in order to justify their malice, but the vast majority of Jews, both Israeli and diaspora, feel more or less like I do.

We support one another, particularly when we perceive ourselves as under siege and make no mistake, Israel is very clearly under siege. In the modern Middle East Jews have been under siege for one hundred years. The Long War Against the Jews began in the 1920s when the Mufti instigated Arab riots against us and it continues to this day.

For this reason we need very much not to demonize one another based on our varied political positions. I often criticize, and even berate, the Jewish liberal left, but I come out of the Jewish liberal left. In fact, to be more accurate, I would say that I just come out of the Left, because "Jewish" was not so important to me until I realized the extent of the challenge that we continue to face as a people.

Therefore, we need to understand that pro-Israel Jewish conservatives, such as, say, Netanyahu or David Horowitz, or whoever, are not our enemies. They are friends that we may disagree with on policy, but they want essentially what Jewish liberals want. They want peace. The problem, obviously, is that they disagree with Jewish liberals on how to get there. But let that disagreement be a disagreement among friends. Let us encourage the Jewish Right to understand the good intentions of the Jewish Left, but let the Jewish Left also understand the good intentions of the Jewish Right and let us reach out to one another during a period of rising danger.

Finally, we also must understand who our non-Jewish friends are and who they are not. This is a very important point because many, many people on the progressive-left are trying their hardest to sell us on the idea that our friends are our enemies and our enemies are our friends.

Do not buy into this.

Keep it relatively simple. If they speak nicely toward the Jews and the Jewish state then they are friends. If they defame the Jewish state, and by extension the Jewish people, then they are not our friends.

It's not particularly complex, nor should it be. Our friends will criticize, but our enemies will demonize. That's the difference. And if our friends fail to criticize, you can be sure that we will do a fine and dandy job of criticizing ourselves, thank you very much. Jews are probably the most self-critical people on the entire planet. (Too much so, in my opinion.)

One striking example of unrequited friendship toward us, of course, is the Evangelical community. Those people are NOT our enemy. They simply are not. We may disagree with them about a woman's right to choose an abortion or about the right of marriage for Gay people, but this does not change the fact that the Evangelical community is probably the best non-Jewish friends that Israel has anywhere in the world.

I know that most of you think that the Evangelicals only care about Israel out of some malicious and crazed End of Days theological framework, but if you believe this then you simply do not understand the Evangelicals.

Maybe I will write more on them at some later date.

Peace to you, please.

Mike Lumish (Karam)

By the way, here is a link to Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. It's a video of him speaking about his work with Evangelicals with Rabbi Mark Golub, the wise and friendly host of Shalom TV, and runs about 45 minutes.

If you can take the time you should check it out, because his insights are important... despite Rabbi Golub's too lengthy introduction.

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.}