The New Hot Button — And The Three Ironies.

[a.saccus]

The New Hot Button — And The Three Ironies.
Phil Weiss, in a brief and interesting-in-its-own-right story,
The Christian Divide:Liberal Protestants Criticize Israel, the Religious Right Defends Her,
refers to a current issue of The Boston Globe: Conflict besets Andover High

Conflict besets Andover High

By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff | January 8, 2007

ANDOVER -- The social studies teachers say they merely wanted to provide their students different perspectives about conflict in the Middle East when they invited a group with a history of condemning Israel's treatment of Palestinians to speak at Andover High School.

The teachers never expected that their invitation to the group Wheels of Justice would set off the firestorm that has ensued, pitting student against student, teacher against teacher, and rabbi against minister in this affluent suburb north of Boston.
[…]
The debate highlights the struggle faced by school systems to teach students to think critically about explosive world events without alienating the communities they serve.

The invited group was “Wheels of Justice"; their website with mission and platform, pictures of the neat, funky bus, and students of all ages can be found at: http://www.justicewheels.org/
From their “Mission and Platform" page:

Truth-Telling:

To speak honestly and openly about Palestine/Israel, one must recognize that the Israeli military occupation continues a legacy that began in 1947 with the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to make room for the State of Israel. The violence suffered by Israelis and Palestinians will continue as long the roots of the conflict remain-colonization, occupation, displacement, apartheid and the denial of the right of Palestinian refugees.

To speak honestly and openly about the war against and occupation of Iraq, one must recognize the ongoing legacy of U.S. involvement in Iraq. The current U.S. occupation of Iraq, the lifting of sanctions under U.S. military rule, and the continued local instability deny the Iraqi citizenry the very self-determination championed by the United States. The cultural, political and economic institutions of Iraq belong to the Iraqis, not to Washington; the hijacking of Iraq’s culture and resources by a foreign power exacerbates and prolongs the consequences of the 13-year U.S.-led war, and the ordinary people of Iraq still have no self-governance.

You cannot have peace without justice, you cannot see justice without actively resisting injustice, and you can’t nourish a nonviolent resistance without a supportive community. The consequences of these wars and occupations fall upon the shoulders of the poor and oppressed, the refugees and the marginalized, and those in our own communities whose needs are neglected by government’s costly pursuit of foreign wars; the human cost is paid for by the innocent and most vulnerable, here and abroad. To see an end to the violence and injustice of war and occupation, we must invest in justice and human rights for those living with and living under the occupation and war.

Although I would date the beginning of the Palestinian conflict much earlier than 1947, these people are certainly the kind of people I want talking to my children. I’m getting off track here, I know, but this Boston Globe article yields many tempting insights about the current state of democracy in America, which makes it worth a read. It certainly pushed a lot of my own buttons. So let me get back to The Button:

[…]"This is pure propaganda," a man shouted as Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian American and medical geneticist who helps coordinate the group, addressed the crowd.

"You're a liar," another yelled to Qumsiyeh, after he compared Israel to South Africa's former apartheid state.

Ah, the Israel Apartheid Button! This is The New Hot Button. When pressed, it evokes a truly amazing number of very shrill and irrational denials from neo-cons and Zionists of all ages and all covers, perhaps because it somehow, mysteriously, has the ability to penetrate lethargy and illusion and so enable people to begin to grasp the truth and the horror of what the Palestinians are being subjected to in the occupied territories. Quite possibly, it owes its potency to the magnitude and duration that it has been suppressed. As my imaginary grandfather used to say, you can’t keep a good truth down.

The First Irony
What's ironic is that the Zionists’ complaint that there is no apartheid in Israel is correct — but only because what’s happening there is actually far worse. The labelling of current Israeli actions against the Palestinians as “apartheid" is only temporarily correct; for apartheid is only a stop on the way to the ultimate goal of the hard-line Zionists — which is nothing less than ethnic cleansing.

[…]In 1923 Jabotinsky wrote The Iron Wall, which could be called a benchmark essay for the entire Zionist movement. He set forth bluntly the essential premises of Zionism […]. He wrote as follows:

“There can be no discussion of voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs, not now, and not in the foreseeable future. All well-meaning people, with the exception of those blind from birth, understood long ago the complete impossibility of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority. Each of you has some general understanding of the history of colonization. Try to find even one example when the colonization of a country took place with the agreement of the native population. Such an event has never occurred."

That the current situation is indeed apartheid-on-the-way-to-something-worse is confirmed by someone who has lived through the South African apartheid. Again Weiss provides the informationhere.

[…]Then the door opened and a group of international volunteers came in. I heard European accents, and a tall black man with a tan haversack walked across the room and took the seat right beside me. [Weiss is having this encounter in Hebron, August 2006.]

"Where are you from?" I asked.

"South Africa," he said.

"Do you know about apartheid?"

"I lived through apartheid."

"How does this compare to apartheid?"

"In Johannesburg we had access to all the roads; they do not have that here," he said. "There were times we couldn't use the roads but those were exceptional occasions. We did not have these checkpoints. We carried papers but we were not constantly having to produce our papers as I have seen happens here. Our schools were inferior, but at least we could go to school. Many of these children are harassed on their way to school or are not allowed to get to schools. I have been here only three and a half weeks--but in my opinion, it is worse than apartheid."

"Worse than apartheid:" the words of Gosiame Choabi, an official of the South African Council of Churches.

The Second Irony
What is doubly ironic is that while engaged in one crime (ethnic cleansing), Zionists have been accused — “wrongly" accused, I suppose they would say — of a different crime, (apartheid). But they can hardly plead their innocence, for their only defense is that they are really engaged in the crime against humanity of ethnic cleansing, not some petty crime like apartheid. So Zionists have the lovely alternative of either biting their tongues, or slitting their own throats. No wonder they’re squealing!

But Wheels of Justice has got it right:

[…]Wheels of Justice travels around the country sharing first-hand accounts of what Qumsiyeh called human rights abuse in the Middle East.

But Qumsiyeh has angered Jewish groups around the nation by referring to the establishment of Israel as ethnic cleansing.

A Necessary Distinction
In order to get the full flavor of the Third Irony, and to begin to unravel the tangled Middle-Eastern skein with which the whole world has become ensnared, consider this distinction:

Zionism and Expansionist, All-Jewish Israel are inimical to Judaism.

Chapter 4 The Use of Force
[…]for it is not by strength that man prevails.(Samuel I 2:9)

[…] After the Romans’ destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem, Jewish life underwent a metamorphosis, which included a principled rejection of the use of force. In theological terms, the loss of the Temple spelled the end of an entire decision-making system that had made military action legitimate. Viewed in the context of Judaism, the annihilation of Jerusalem has defined the normative Jewish attitude toward force, resistance, and the Land of Israel ever since.

Yakov M. Rabkin is Professor of History at the University of Montreal.

If you can adequately summarize 2000 years of history in a sentence: from the time of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 135 A.D until just after World War II, the Judaic tradition stressed non-violence, and the only “Israel" was a spiritual “Israel". The current violence against Palestinians is overwhelmingly of Zionist origin (e.g., the Jabotinsky quote above), and is so out of character with normative Judaism that it constitutes an actual negation of Judaism, according to Rabkin and the many Jewish Anti-Zionist sources he cites. After practically two milennia of the same tradition, the magnitude of the change which took place among the Jews within the Russian Pale of Settlement at the end of the 19th century and it’s consequences are still not generally understood and are at the root of the current crisis in the Middle East.

While other Jewish communities the world over remained faithful to the tradition of non-violence and contemplated no armed action against the populations amongst which they lived, that tradition became ever weaker in Russia, as great numbers of Jews discovered the allure of political violence. Many Russian Jews supported the radical political parties through their periods of crisis and decline, due in part to their unshakable idealism and to their use of smuggling networks for oppositionist political ends. Russian civil servants of the day saw Jews as the “most dangerous component of the revolutionary movement" (Eric Haberer, “Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-century Russia", Cambridge, 1995,Ch. 12). Western historians have corroborated the observation: Jews were among the dominant element among illegal opposition groups. In some organizations, Jews accounted for more than fifty percent of the membership. More than three-quarters of the members of a radical group uncovered by the police in 1889 were Jews (Haberer, 254). For example, 83 per cent of political exiles in the Yakutsk region of Siberia were Jews.

For these Russian / Polish / Lithuanian Jews, Emancipation had failed. And these Jews were the primarily Ashkenaz, non-semitic decendents of the Khazars. These Jews lived in the Pale of Settlement:

At its heyday, the Pale, which included the new Polish territories, had a Jewish population of over 5 million, which represented the largest concentration (40 percent) of world Jewry at that time.

Thus over the course of the next half century, 40 per cent of the world’s Jewish population was subjected to a series of pograms, revolutions, and world wars. A large proportion of the Jews from the Pale of Settlement came to America and got rich; another, smaller group of Pale Jews went to Palestine. These two Russian-Ashkenaz-Secular Jewish groups formed the seeds of the current crisis.

The Russian dimension of Zionism cannot be overestimated. One telling indicator is the composition of the Knesset twelve years after the founding of the state [1960]. Despite the almost total prohibition of emigration from the Soviet Union for more than four decades, over 70 per cent of the members of this political elite were Russian-born, while 13 per cent were born in Palestine / Israel of Russian parents. The American Zionist elites, whose support was crucial for Zionism’s success, were also composed primarily of Jews of Russian origin (Martin Gilbert, “The Atlas of Jewish History", New York, William Morrow & Company, p 115). The replacement of the Jewish elites of German origin with those originating in Russia also contributed to the shift, between the two world wars, of Jewish public opinion in the United States in favor of Zionism. […]The essentially Russian character of Zionism stands revealed in its concepts, its methods and the support it drew from the most powerful section of the Diaspora, the United States.

The Third Irony
Failure by American non-Jews to recognize that Zionist Israel has nothing to do with America’s best interests and really nothing to do with the form of Judaism practiced by their next door American neighbor; and failure by American Jews to look deeply enough into their own tradition to recognize that Israeli imperialism and violence is contrary to everything their religion has stood for for 2000 years, will lead to the Third Irony:
Themselves the victims of a holocaust at the hands of the Nazis, some psychopaths disguising themselves as Jews are, in the course of only two generations and in the name of the Jews, perpetrating a holocaust upon the Palestinian people.

It’s only when you hear from a Zionist's mouth the cry “Never again" —referring to the Nazi holocaust — that you feel the full force of the Third Irony.

 

[vinny]

Ah, the Israel Apartheid Button! This is The New Hot Button. When pressed, it evokes a truly amazing number of very shrill and irrational denials from neo-cons and Zionists of all ages and all covers, perhaps because it somehow, mysteriously, has the ability to penetrate lethargy and illusion and so enable people to begin to grasp the truth and the horror of what the Palestinians are being subjected to in the occupied territories. Quite possibly, it owes its potency to the magnitude and duration that it has been suppressed. As my imaginary grandfather used to say, you can’t keep a good truth down.

hmm... I wonder if a useful thing to do now is to PRESS that button, and KEEP jabbing it as hard as possible!
The ridiculous nonsensical mouth-foaming responses will illustrate the point nicely to anyone who is watching, and perhaps will wake up a few more.

"Israel. Worse than apartheid."

Difficult to ignore a quote like that, even for 'Joe public'.

 

[a.saccus]

The New Hot Button — And The Three Ironies.

hmm... I wonder if a useful thing to do now is to PRESS that button, and KEEP jabbing it as hard as possible!

The ridiculous nonsensical mouth-foaming responses will illustrate the point nicely to anyone who is watching, and perhaps will wake up a few more.

Exactly! The ability of the Matrix to generate the sleep of illusion, though strong, is still dependent on there being no one around trying to wake anyone up, which is quite important, as anyone knows who’s tried to sleep-in on a weekend with a houseful of family and guests already up and clunking about.

And because the response is guaranteed, by design, to be, as you say, “ridiculous, nonsensical, and mouth-foaming" — because such emotional responses make rational thinking difficult and divert the discussion away from the central issue and, if virulent enough, away from any examination of the matter at all — it’s especially important for the waker-upers to get their facts straight and to speak the truth.

I have written to my local high school, informing them of the existence of the Wheels of Justice and urging them to invite the Wheels to my community. I’ve also sent them the Boston Globe article, so that they may fully understand that, while they’re opening a can of worms, it’s a can that needs to be opened.

My community has a large, successful and liberal Jewish community, among whom I have many friends. It will be interesting to see how this approach to the high school pans out. Time to see how much genuine democracy is left in the neighborhood.