"Peace isn't Arab Goal"
Dear Jeff Jacoby,
Your column in today's Boston Globe defending Israel and titled, "Peace isn't Arab goal" is a perfect demonstration of the unselfconscious racism of those who defend Israel.
You argue that "Arabs" have rejected historic opportunities for a two-state solution because what they really want is not peace but "Israel's liquidation."
The racist premise of your whole column is that there is something wrong and shameful about wanting "Israel's liquidation." You use the word "liquidation" because it has a negative connotation. You could have used the word "abolition," which means the same thing but has a positive connotation. American Abolitionists fought to abolish (or liquidate) the slave-based Confederacy. Many Americans fought to abolish (or liquidate) the Nazi's Master Race-based Third Reich. Even you, Jeff Jacoby, may have participated in the world-wide effort to abolish (or liquidate) the apartheid South African state.
Mr. Jacoby, here is why the state of Israel should indeed be abolished. If anybody declared 78% of Massachusetts to be a White state, that state would be a racist state that should be abolished. Ditto if it were a Black state or a Muslim state or a Christian state or a Native American state or a Blue-eyed peoples state or a Brown-haired peoples state. Do you not agree Mr. Jacoby? Do you not agree that a state should never be for just one kind of people, but for all of its citizens regardless of their race or religion or ethnicity? Well then, Mr. Jacoby, what's wrong with "Arabs" thinking that it is wrong to declare 78% of Palestine to be a Jewish state? Nothing! That's what's wrong with it.
But you are so racist when it comes to this issue, so incapable of seeing that there is nothing less racist about a Jewish state than a White state, that you actually have no clue why your readers won't agree with you in thinking there is something shameful about wanting to abolish--excuse me, liquidate--a Jewish state.
Mr. Jacoby, Palestinians are the victims of ethnic cleansing carried out in the name of making Israel a Jewish state. Seventy-five or more percent of the non-Jews living in what is now Israel were driven out of their homes and villages in 1947-9 by Zionist military forces whose leader, David Ben Gurion, declared that they had to make the population of the new Jewish state be at least 80% Jewish. These Palestinians want the right to return to their country, a basic human right (article #13 in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.) Yes, if they returned, the population of Israel would not remain a majority Jewish and it would no longer be a Jewish state. So what! Ordinary Jews can live perfectly well as the equals of non-Jews in a state of all its citizens. If you disagree, I suggest you get help for your racism.
John Spritzler
posted by John Spritzler @ 12:44 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Great article, John.
I truly believe that we have reached the point where technology has become one with our society, and I can say with 99% certainty that we have passed the point of no return in our relationship with technology.
I don't mean this in a bad way, of course! Societal concerns aside... I just hope that as technology further develops, the possibility of transferring our brains onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It's a fantasy that I daydream about almost every day.
(Posted using Nintendo DS running [url=http://cryst4lxbands.livejournal.com/398.html]R4i[/url] Post4i)
Ordinary Jews can live perfectly well as the equals of non-Jews in a state of all its citizens. If you disagree, I suggest you get help for your racism.
If that would be so there wouldn't be pogrom in Hebron and other anti Jewish violence before the state of Israel was created.
It's not smart to reduce every conflict to so called "class strugle" ignoring it's religious and historical causes.
Besides that you accept it as a given that Arabs in Gaza etc. are willing to abide by UN defenition of human rights when absolute majority of them elected Hamas a hardcore Islamist movement (google Hamas charter).
The concept of violation of human rights is an integral part of Islamism which enshrines dhimitude
- religious discrimination of non islamic minorities.
In reply to anonymous (above):
1. Yes, there was substantial violence against Jews by ordinary Palestinians before the state of Israel was founded, but not before the Zionist movement was established in Palestine, with its openly declared goal of creating a Jewish state in Palestine in which only "the Jewish people" were to be the sovereign authority and in which ethnic cleansing would be required to ensure that Jews would be the large majority (80% according to David Ben-Gurion) of the population.
2. Yes, the charter of Hamas calls for making only Islam the sovereign authority in Palestine (it does not call for denying Jews the right to live in Palestine, however), but
a) this is merely the mirror image of Zionism's aim to make only the Jewish people the sovereign authority in a purely "Jewish state" in Palestine and
b) every informed observer says that most Palestinians who voted for Hamas did so not because they support the idea of making Palestine an Islamic state but because they viewed Hamas as sincere fighters against Zionism, in contrast to the PLO (which they previously supported overwhelmingly, and which called for a secular Palestine), which is now seen as hopelessly corrupt and in bed with Israeli leaders.
3. Class conflict is the reality, whether one wishes to believe it or not: see http://newdemocracyworld.org/class_conflict_in_israel.htm for some evidence of this.
4. If the Israeli government stopped its ethnic cleansing and allowed Palestinians to return to their homes inside of what is now called "Israel" and live as the equals of Jews there, and compensated them for stolen property (as Germany did for Jews who fled Nazi Germany) then the conflict would end: those few remaining Palestinians who still advocated violence against ordinary Jews would lack support from the Palestinian public and would, in fact, be considered by them to be criminals. Until the ethnic cleansing stops, there will be anger against Jews for the simple reason that the ethnic cleansing is carried out by Zionist leaders who claim (quite falsely) to be acting in the interests of ordinary Jews, and because there are not a lot of ordinary Jews (yet) opposing the ethnic cleansing.
--John Spritzler
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