the one after 193

Not something from the back of a cereal box. A real country. Or some neutered and coiffed Bantustan experiment with nifty uniforms and fan-far parades. Real borders and a real economy. Or a box within a box and the welfare cheque is in the mail-box. A low cost property on the global monopoly board. Well you have to start somewhere though were a generation or two from ’67 and this is really in the late innings. It smells kind of stage managed and socially engineered. Abbas is something out of a Herman Melville’s confidence man, a bluffy, second-tier huckster reporting to higher-ups with a branch-plant mentality. Man, great to be able to grab a refreshing coke out here and support the local bottler! All this within an arm’s length of desire. Still, the effort is worth supporting:…

---The Old Testamenst clearly teaches us that the land of Canaan is not owned by the Jewish people. Leviticus 25:23 informs us that…”“The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is Mine and you are but aliens and My tenants”. 3,000 years of Jewish tradition and 2,000 years of Christian tradition affirm that the occupation of the land of Canaan by the Jewish people has been conditional upon their adherence to the religious and ethical traditions of the Torah. These ethical traditions demand that the Jewish people treat non-Jews in a manner reflecting the very heart of God towards all humanity. No sense of arrogant entitlement to the land of Canaan is condoned by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Rabbi Moshe Sober sums up the tradional idea of the relationship of Jews to the land of Israel: “The notion that we can do whatever we please, to any kind of temptation, or engage in any form of foolish self-aggrandizement without fear of penalty because we have an inside track to the Almighty is the plain opposite of religious faith. It is in fact an affront to the Divine, whose authority to determine the course of history we are usurping---Read More:http://craignielsen.wordpress.com/tag/jacob/

in 1947 the u.n. voted for the partition of palestine leading to the establishment of a jewish state without a prior negotiated accord with its neighbors. but israel took it anyway. in september 2011, the u.n. is poised to vote for a palestinian state without a prior negotiated accord with its principal neighbor, israel. i think both palestine and israel should take it, and use this as an opportunity to negotiate peace as equal recognized members of the international community.( Hune at Martin Buber Institute )

----Gentileschi. ---Rabkin:There are several reasons for this. Efron amply shows how Zionist theories are based on anti-Semitic stereotypes. He quotes several founding fathers of Zionism in support : Herzl had already noted in 1894 that Jews had ‘taken on a number of anti-social characteristics’ <…> and that Jewish character was ‘damaged’. David Frischman wrote that traditional ‘Jewish life is a dog’s life that evokes disgust’. Chaim Brenner likened Jews to ‘filthy dogs, inhuman, wounded dogs’. A.D. Gordon wrote that European Jews were parasites. M.J. Berdyczewski called traditional Jews ‘spiritual slaves, men whose natural forces had dried up and whose relation to the world was no longer normal,’ and elsewhere, ‘a non-people, a non-nation – non-men indeed.’ Israeli society, which incarnates these theories, naturally inherited this basic anti-Semitism with respect to traditional Jews, which the author illustrates with chilling cartoons drawn from mainstream Israeli press: “it is an ugly picture, and it recalls centuries of anti-Semitic iconography, from sixteenth-century woodblocks of Jews draining the blood of Christian innocents to Nazi portrayals of Jews as vermin” . Efron recalls that the main objective of Zionism was “regeneration” of the traditional Jew and his transformation into a virtually Aryan model of a Muskuljude, a strong, blond farmer tilling the land and valiantly defending his land and his people. This negates any value to the traditional Jew: intellectual, urban and meek, in line with Europe’s varieties of transformative nationalism of the 1930s. Read More:http://www.yakovrabkin.ca/english/articles/judaism-zionism-and-israel/antisemitism-in-zionism-and-in-israel/

Chomsky:The Palestinians could be in very serious economic trouble, financial trouble, if the U.S. and Israel, acting jointly, react to any kind of statehood bid by simply cutting off the funding on which they rely. Israel, for decades, has prevented any independent development, serious economic development, in the territories. There is—you know, the numbers show economic growth. It’s highly reliant on outside aid. It’s very artificial. And that could be a very serious blow to the Palestinians. The role that Egypt plays will also be significant, especially with regard to Gaza. My guess is that some kind of compromise position will be worked out, which will provide enhanced observer status to the Palestinians at the United Nations, maybe short of what would trigger U.S. and Israel from simply pulling out the rug from under their survival. It could be worse than that, in fact. Read More:http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/13/noam_chomsky_us_to_veto_palestiniana

Chomsky:And Obama took pride, in his webpage, in having co-sponsored a Senate resolution, right in the middle of the invasion, insisting that nothing be done to impede Israel’s attack in Lebanon and that the U.S. should censure and maybe sanction anyone who tried to interfere with it—Iran and Syria. So, let them—they must be able to go on to achieve their objectives, of killing a thousand Lebanese, again, destroying a strong a large part of the country, and so on. That’s Obama. When he—during the—after he was elected, Israel attacked Gaza, major attack on Gaza, late December 2008 right through January 2009. Obama was—I’m sure your listeners are familiar with that horrible, atrocious attack. The United States blocked efforts at the Security Council to establish a ceasefire to end the atrocities. Obama was repeatedly asked would he say something about it. His answer was, "There’s only one president. I can’t say anything about it." Read More:http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/13/noam_chomsky_us_to_veto_palestinian image:http://www.wga.hu/tours/flemish/eyck/1open3/l3adora4.html


But, it should be remembered that the treatment of Arabs in Israel is not that much worse than their treatment in France, Germany or America and the Occident in general. Again, Bantustan style ghettos on the periphery where dealing in dope, petty theft and weapons is one of the few avenues of advancement. So, they vegetate in ghettos, quite literally, with no real work or job prospects. Psychologically, the tony sections of Tel-Aviv are more remote for them than the the moon. Remember, Golda Meir once said, ” there is no such thing as the Palestinian people.” which as usual, implied Arab blood was cheap, and Israel, really a proficient killing machine, has taken a nation hostage and put at risk the lives of millions.

Paul Klee. Denis Goldberg:On the other hand, I do not accept that the bombing of the Twin Towers, spectacular as it was, was a legitimate tactic. The people who died were not the ones who were oppressing the people of Palestine. What one needs to think about is how in the feudal countries of the Middle East the Palestinian people cannot be free because they will challenge the feudal system. The feudal rulers have supported the demand for a secular Palestinian state, but not when the Palestinians get really dangerous, as we saw with Jordan when they were thrown out of Jordan. Read More:http://www.liberationafrica.se/intervstories/interviews/goldberg/

ADDENDUM:

And what should be the appropriate attitude of Christianity…

Sallie Mcfague:Christianity should wage a major critique of the subject-obj


model that underlies the arrogant gaze of Western culture. It should do so because at the heart of its own spirituality lies a very different model, the subject-subjects one. The simplest definition of Christian spirituality is contained in the great commandment: we should love God with our whole heart and mind and our neighbour as ourselves….

---Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of a state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows the physical elimination not only of political adversaries, but of entire categories of citizens not integrated into the political system. Thus, though it is tempting to link the state of exception to totalitarian regimes, such as the Nazi Reich, Agamben insists that the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic states , and, I would argue, is a significant trait of the state of Israel. The state of exception involves, on the one hand, the extension of the military authority’s wartime powers into the civil sphere, and on the other, the suspension of constitutional norms that protect individual liberties, as argued by Raef Zreik (2008) in relation to Israeli constitutionalism. According to Agamben, the state of exception means not only the sovereign declaring a state of emergency in which the sovereign both enacts the law and stays outside it, but also the idea that it is the nation (volk rather than citizenry or residency) which needs defending from its others. Crucially, the state of exception is a security state, using the paradigm of security as ‘the normal techniques of government’Ronit Lentin.---Read More:http://www.ronitlentin.net/2010/12/01/re-thinking-israel-palestine-racial-state-state-of-exception/

…In other words, we should love God and neighbour as subjects, as worthy of our love just because of who they are and not as means to our ends. But most contemporary Western Christians place two restrictions on the subject-subjects model of their tradition. The first is forgetfulness of Jesus’ radicalizing of the subject-subjects model: it pertains especially to the poor, the outcast, the oppressed. The poor woman, whether living in the first or third world, epitomizes the recipient of Christian spirituality as it refers to humanity. As the representative human being of the 21st century, she is the neighbour who most deserves our attention and love….

Nicolas Poussin. Ruth and Boaz. ---Zionist greed for Palestine knows no sense or reason. The 1947 partition plan was a “great deal” for them at the time. They were given 55% of the land when they consisted of only 30% of the population and over 80% of them had arrived in the last 25 years. But this was not enough for them. David Ben Gurion stated in his diaries: “The Jewish State now being offered to us is not the Zionist objective. Within this area it is not possible to solve the Jewish question. But it can serve as a decisive stage along the path to greater Zionist implementation. It will consolidate in Palestine, within the shortest possible time, the real Jewish force which will lead us to our historic goal.”---Read More:http://craignielsen.wordpress.com/tag/jacob/

…The second restriction that most Christians (and not just Western ones) place on their spirituality is the exclusion of the natural world. Most Christians draw the line at nature: while God and other people are subjects, nature is not. Most of us either do not know how to relate to nature or we relate to it as Western culture does, as an object for our use. My suggestion is that we should relate to nature in the same basic way we are supposed to relate to God and other people — as ends, not means, as subjects valuable in themselves, for themselves. Read More:http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2065/is_n2_v49/ai_19496271/

Renoir. Mosque in Algiers. ---President Peres seems to reply to Libya’s leader Muammar Qadaffi who had argued that the West Bank settlements left no room for a Palestinian state to be created next to Israel. It had been deemed sufficiently important to be found “fit to print” in the wake of President Obama’s inauguration. A few days later, Thomas Friedman was lashing at the nearly half a million West Bank settlers who were precluding any two-state solution. The following Sunday a candid CBS documentary let some of these settlers voice their determined rejection of any Palestinian independence, and showed the appalling conditions that most Palestinians must endure just because they are Palestinians. They suffer solely because of their ethnicity. The alternative, i.e. the one-state option of a common democratic state for all those living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is not new. The majority of the country’s inhabitants – Christians, Jews, Muslims – wanted to live in such a state when the United Nations voted to partition Palestine in November 1947. In the following months the Zionists, then a minority, albeit a militant and well-connected one, expelled a majority of the indigenous Palestinians, whose descendants still languish in refugee camps. Israeli historians, including the unapologetic advocate of ethnic cleansing Benny Morris, have documented this premeditated military campaign against civilian population (Plan Dalet). Some Palestinians were killed, some ran away, others were marched away. Ethnic cleansing has not lost popularity in Israel, as President Peres knew the election would show. The insistence on keeping the country “Jewish” (or non-Arab) has caused incessant violence, destabilized the entire region, and made Israel appear as a major threat to peace in the world public opinion. ( Jacob rabkin ) Read More:http://www.yakovrabkin.ca/english/articles/judaism-zionism-and-israel/is-a-liberal-democracy-a-frightening-prospect-for-israel/

Denis Goldberg: Yes, but the point is it’s been going on and on and on. They mouth off against Israel as the oppressor, but they don’t actually want a secular Palestinian State, a modern State that will challenge the feudal aristocracy, and that for me is a very serious problem. Now I’m not blaming the oppressed for their oppression, I’m simply saying that Arafat’s creation of Palestinian nationalism out of pan-Arabism is very significant but it held within it a serious contradiction, because it was challenging the pillars of pan-Arabism, namely a religious feudal system, and Palestinians are the workers and the intellectuals throughout the Middle East and a threat, in the end, to the feudal overlords. To support the Palestinian people against all that is not terrorism. Read More:http://www.liberationafrica.se/intervstories/interviews/goldberg/

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