NOVANEWS
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‘New York Times’ implies anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic
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Netanyahu gets to play Superman in case of 7-year-old harassed by orthodox Jews
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At midnight mass, UK’s Catholic archbishop describes ‘deep shadow’ over Bethlehem and West Bank
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Two revealing headlines
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Merry Christmas from the little ghetto of Bethlehem
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Introducing Freedom Funnies – ‘My Name is Samia Halaby’
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The gift of the Jews
‘New York Times’ implies anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic
Dec 26, 2011
Paul Woodward
Shlomo Sand, Israeli historian
When Jim Rutenberg and Serge Kovaleski refer to “books like The Invention of the Jewish People andMarch of the Titans: A History of the White Race,” should we assume that these are just ignorant journalists making a grossly inappropriate association, or are they purposefully trying to mislead their readers?
In their New York Times hatchet job on Ron Paul we are told that “white supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists who have rallied behind his candidacy have not exactly been warmly welcomed.”
White supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists? In the minds of these reporters, anyone who promotes the idea that Israel should become a state of all its citizens — Jews, Arabs and others — apparently looks like a political bedfellow of the likes of Stormfront or the Militia of Montana.
The article reports on the appeal that Ron Paul has among some white supremacists and survivalists and yet says nothing on the anti-Zionist element. Rutenberg and Kovaleski were apparently content to merely insinuate that there is a link between criticism of Israel and racism.
The closest they come to providing evidence of such an association is the article’s opening sentence where the two books are linked.
March of the Titans: A History of the White Race is by Arthur Kemp, an advocate of white separatism and foreign affairs spokesman for the ultra-right and racist British National Party. Kemp is a Holocaust denier and was “linked to the murderer of the South African Communist party and ANC leader Chris Hani in 1993,” The Guardian reported in 2009.
The Invention of the Jewish People, first published in Hebrew in Israel with the title, Matai ve’ech humtza ha’am hayehudi?, is by Shlomo Sand, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University. The book was a bestseller in Israel for several months before being translated into French and English.
Tony Judt wrote: “Shlomo Sand has written a remarkable book. In cool, scholarly prose he has, quite simply, normalized Jewish history. In place of the implausible myth of a unique nation with a special destiny – expelled, isolated, wandering and finally restored to its rightful home – he has reconstructed the history of the Jews and convincingly reintegrated that history into the general story of humankind. The self-serving and mostly imaginary Jewish past that has done so much to provoke conflict in the present is revealed, like the past of so many other nations, to be largely an invention. Anyone interested in understanding the contemporary Middle East should read this book.”
Of course Rutenberg and Kovaleski would be unlikely to attach much weight to Judt’s assessment of Sand’s book — Judt was after all one of those dubious anti-Zionists.
The irony about linking anti-Zionists with anti-Semities is that Zionism is a philosophy that has obvious appeal to anti-Semites. Encourage all the Jews to move to Israel — why would the anti-Semites object?
Indeed, the emerging political convergence on the extreme right has been between anti-Semites and Zionists and that’s an unholy alliance that probably finds Ron Paul the least appealing among the GOP presidential hopefuls.
Netanyahu gets to play Superman in case of 7-year-old harassed by orthodox Jews
Dec 26, 2011
Annie Robbins
While westerners were in the throes of holiday celebrations last weekend, Israel was immersed in a flurry of concern over a news broadcast that aired on Channel 2 Friday night about Naama Margolese, a 7 year old girl in the town of Beit Shemesh, who is afraid of walking to school for fear of being harassed by orthodox Jews in her community. The story was complete with dramatic soundtrack and a deeply concerned parental voice narrating. News travels fast:
LA Times:
[T]hese days many see it as a dark place where religious extremists defy authorities, intimidate children and attack the press. Trouble brewed for months before intensifying when a little girl caught everyone’s attention on prime-time television news.
No worries, Netanyahu to the rescue. The Forward
Unsurprisingly, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who clearly sensed where the political winds were blowing, went on a public relations push over the weekend to show he was taking action. Ynet reported that he “asked Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch on Saturday to instruct the police to act firmly against violent attacks targeting women in the public sphere.” In the aftermath of the Channel 2 story and the reaction, the ultra-Orthodox mayor of Beit Shemesh ordered workers to take down street signs that directed women to cross the street and “not linger” in front of a synagogue. As they did so, Haredim threw rocks and called the municipal workers ‘Nazis.’
Wait, did anyone mention that the Housing Ministry is building more and more exclusive communities for the religious segment of Israel’s society? If Netanyahu is so concerned about civil liberties, what’s he doing about the draconian racist legislation passed by the Knesset this year that includes neighborhood purity committees designed to preserve segregated neighborhoods? Isn’t this his governing coalition? According to this excellent article in Haaretz today by Nurit Elstein, “there is widespread support for restricting civil rights“.
Such developments in the history of political thought provided inspiration for the totalitarian state………Politicians do not operate in a vacuum. They are well aware of the public’s mood. Any public-opinion survey will find that there is widespread support for restricting civil rights. Public discourse is fraught with extremist statements denouncing Arabs, leftists and others. Knesset legislation converts cultural trends into legal norms.
…A government that views a minority’s opinion as a nuisance that must be silenced, and criticism of the state as something akin to treason, is headed toward totalitarianism.
When Israel’s cultural Petri dish yields such bills, some of which will become law, it can only mean that there is a real potential for fascism in this country, enacted by its majority. Recognition of this possibility must guide the behavior of the minority.
Of course, none of this is new to us. Not the rise of extremism in Israel’s society. Not the growth of the Ultra Orthodox community, or of the racist settler community, nor the National Religious Party, and all with influence in the government. Lest we forget, Noam Sheizaf at 972, The myth of “Good Israel” vs. “Bad Israel”:
The Israeli middle class, the good ole’ boys, are the ones supporting the racist bills in the Knesset and the anti-democratic initiatives. In other words, we always had Rabbis like Shmuel Eliyahu and members of Knesset like Kahane’s student Michael Ben-Ari. The difference is that now, we have Kadima and Likud backing them.
Just like the settlements couldn’t have been built without the active support and participation of the Israeli center-left (including Labor party, which started the whole thing back in the 70′s), the current torrent of racist bills couldn’t have come without the help of Kadima, Labor and Likud members. And with all the ridiculous, xenophobic and undemocratic ideas they came up with, their public can’t get enough. When it comes to questions of human rights and democracy, there is no coalition and opposition in the Knesset: Almost everyone is on the same side.
So why now you might ask? Why the widespread MSM coverage today over previously documented social issues plaguing Israel’s society for a long time? The Forward claimed “the government took action only after the media paid attention to Beit Shemesh” but that’s not entirely true. The media covered another incident outside this same school in September, and so did we.
I think the Powers that be are concerned that the image of Israel’s ‘democracy’ is alarming western supporters, and this is their way of combating that image. So, we are being treated to a media blitz of the PM coming to the rescue of little Naama. As Noam would say, the ‘good vs the bad’ in Israel’s society. It’s another ‘look over there’ moment, when anti democratic legislation is supported by the majority of Israel’s society! You don’t believe me? Listen to Jessica Montell, Executive Director of B’Tselem: ‘The political climate in Israel is more hostile than ever’. While funding for NGOs championing human right’s in Israel and Palestine are threatened with being silenced.
I think Israeli society is concerned too, and I do not intend to diminish that concern, but where are the resources invested to combat these problems? The end of the video mentions the website of the person who translated the dialogue into English.
The comment section is revealing:
Tzirel says:
December 25, 2011 at 9:36 PMNot only are politics involved, but the police themselves are greatly intimidated and fear to go too far into the areas that where the kitzonim live. These are the same people that rampage and set dumpsters on fire. I have a former neighbor whose arm was broken by members of this group when he tried to come to the aid of a policeman who was being brutally beaten by this group. The policeman ended up in the hospital with head injuries…
We really, really need Mashiach. Not that I want any enemies, but it’s so much easier when your enemies are not your brothers…
For when your “enemies are not your brothers” they are allowed to run wild tormenting Palestinians.
And while our MSM offers up a good Bibi today (defender of human rights), they continue to pile the table with the usual feast of scare tactics and propaganda:
One official was quoted as saying Abbas was paving the way for Hamas and Islamic Jihad to take control not only over the PLO, but the entire West Bank as well.
Divert, divert, divert.
For those of you who didn’t make it all the way thru the video, if you fast forward to to 8:20 you can hear a woman lament, ‘A little Iran is developing here’.
(Hat tip Joseph Dana)
At midnight mass, UK’s Catholic archbishop describes ‘deep shadow’ over Bethlehem and West Bank
Dec 26, 2011
Philip Weiss
Archbishop Vincent Nichols
Europeans continue to lead the international discussion of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, as one of the preeminent human rights issues of our time. At Huffpo UK, yesterday:
The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales offered prayers today for people in Bethlehem at risk of losing their homes.
During his Midnight Mass sermon, Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols spoke of 50 families in the West Bank who he said could lose their land to Israel.
Addressing the congregation at Westminster Cathedral, Archbishop Nichols urged people to “see more clearly all those things which disfigure our world”, adding: “We too live ‘in a land of deep shadow’.”
He went on: “That shadow falls particularly heavily on the town of Bethlehem tonight.
“At this moment the people of the parish of Beit Jala prepare for their legal battle to protect their land and homes from further expropriation by Israel.
“Over 50 families face losing their land and their homes as action is taken to complete the separation/security wall across the territory of the district of Bethlehem.
“We pray for them tonight.”
Two revealing headlines
Dec 26, 2011
Philip Weiss
Yuli Edelstein
1. Yossi Gurvitz at +972: “Israel’s Propaganda Minister: ‘Arabs are a deplorable nation'”
Israel’s Propaganda and Diaspora Minister, Yuli Edelstein, said the Arabs are a “deplorable nation.” His spokesman: He meant every one of them Israel’s Propaganda and Diaspora Minister, Yuli Edelstein, told a crowd in a public diplomacy event in Or Yehuda that “as long as the Arab nation continues to be a deplorable nation, which continues investing in infrastructure for terrorism, education to hate, and welfare for the families of shaheeds (martyrs), there will be no peace.”
It can be seen in his Facebook page, here (Hebrew). The Hebrew epithet used by Edelstein to describe Arabs – נפסד – is rather difficult to translate: I put it as “deplorable” but it can also mean “morally bankrupt.”
I phoned the minister’s office for comment, and asked his spokesman: “Are you aware of the fact there are some 80 million Arabs in the world, from Sudan to Syria?” He replied: “Yes, there are – and the minister meant them all.”
2. Ari Shavit from 10 days ago, in Haaretz: “Israel has never been so ugly”
We have never been so ugly. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu seeks to silence the call to prayer over the loudspeakers of the country’s mosques, and to shut down Channel 10 television. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman expresses support for the Russian “democtator” who has just rigged elections. Defense Minister Ehud Barak stands by while Jewish settlers victimize Palestinians and ultra-Orthodox religious nationalists victimize female soldiers.
Merry Christmas from the little ghetto of Bethlehem
Dec 26, 2011
Roqayah
Youth in Santa Claus suits light candles on a Christmas tree fashioned from barbed wire and decorated with cards bearing major milestones in the Israeli occupation of Palestine in an effort to educate Christmastime tourists visiting Bethlehem’s Manger Square.
“It is unconscionable that Bethlehem should be allowed to die slowly from strangulation”
– Archbishop Desmond Tutu
From The Institute for Middle East Understanding:
As Christmas approaches, Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, are busy decorating the city and preparing the holiday festivities. Like Christians the world over, the city of Bethlehem, which suffers under Israeli military occupation, is in the hearts and minds of Palestinians everywhere at Christmas time.Bethlehem and its holy sites are part of a larger heritage shared by all Palestinians, Muslims, Christians, and non-believers alike. In January, 2011 Palestinians submitted an application to have the Church of the Nativity (built 1,700 years ago on what is considered to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ) designated a World Heritage site. With Palestine’s recent admission as a member to UNESCO, such a move has a higher chance of success, helping to preserve this historic church for Palestinians and Christians around the world, indeed for all of humanity.
Economically, Bethlehem relies upon religious tourism for much of its income. However, Israel has largely monopolized the industry by arranging tours of religious sites and controlling the movement of tourists in and out of Bethlehem, denying many struggling Palestinian businesses much-needed access to foreign consumers.
The wall (deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice) that Israel has built runs extremely close to the city center, obstructing the movement of people, trade, and commerce. As a result, the city center has actually shrunken in size. Bethlehem’s sister city, Jerusalem, which lies just a few miles away, is now inaccessible except for the few who can obtain travel permits from Israel.
Israel’s nearly 45-year-old military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, makes a normal life virtually impossible for Palestinians living there, including those in Bethlehem. Nevertheless, it’s not all bad news. About 1 million Christian pilgrims still come to Bethlehem every year, making it one of the most visited religious sites in the region.
Decorating Bethlehem
More beautiful photographs from Occupied Palestine during Christmas.
This post first appeared on Roqayah’s blog.
Introducing Freedom Funnies – ‘My Name is Samia Halaby’
Dec 26, 2011
Ethan Heitner
This is the first in a monthly series of comics Ethan Heitner will be producing for Mondoweiss. Heitner is freelance illustrator and cartoonist who also volunteers with Adalah-NY: The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel. More of his work can be seen on his website, www.freedomfunnies.com and in the magazine World War 3 Illustrated. He can be contacted at freedomfunnies@gmail.com and he’s available for hire!
(Click on the first image below to view it larger, and then click in the upper right hand corner to scroll to the next page.)
The gift of the Jews
Dec 26, 2011
Philip Weiss
The young Lessing
For the last few months I’ve been reading a classic of philosemitism: the “Martha Quest” novels of Doris Lessing. Set in Southern Rhodesia in 1936-1949 and published in England in the 1960s, the first four of these books trace the youth of a fiercely independent child of British colonials born, as Lessing was, in 1919.
Lessing is famous as a “kaffir-lover,” to use the racist slang hurled against her; her hatred of the color bar resulted in her leaving Rhodesia for England in 1949 and culminated in her winning the Nobel Prize four years ago. But there are no major black characters in these novels, and really Martha Quest is a Jew lover. Determined to overcome her parents’ anti-Semitism, she gravitates to the Jews in the provincial capital of Salisbury (now Harare, Zimbabwe).
A fatherly Jewish lawyer gives Martha a job so that she can leave her parents’ farm and move to the city. There Martha loses her virginity to one Jew (Eastern European “scum,” he says), marries another (German Communist refugee), and has an intense affair with a third (Zionist Communist). A Jewish doctor prescribes contraception and tells her she’s too far along for an abortion. Martha’s Jewish friend Stella sets the bar on fashion and decoration, while Jasmine Cohen sets the bar on politics. Jasmine’s cousin Abraham dies fighting in Spain– and Jews are all over the small Communist party group Martha joins. (In her actual autobiography, Lessing has said that the Jewish mentors in these books were based on real people.)
But my business here is not to count the many Jews in these books. It is to express pride in my inheritance as it was perceived by a non-Jew. The sense pours through these books that were it not for the Jews of that generation and their “ancient culture,” Doris Lessing could never have become Doris Lessing. As brilliant a writer as she is, Lessing needed to break out of the thick racist porridge of the land-based cultures that surrounded her—the British colonials with their “Sports Club” snobbery and the Dutch Afrikaaner men with thighs like “pillars”—and to do so she threw herself on intellectually-sophisticated Jews.
At the beginning of the Martha Quest story, there are the Cohen boys, Joss and Solly, the “brilliant” sons of a shopowner in the small town of Banket, who recognize adolescent Martha’s intelligence and send packages of books to her every week or two. From the books of Communism and psychology, “Martha had gained a clear picture of herself, from the outside.” This becomes her greatest “weapon” in life, literary consciousness:
“She was not only miserable, she would focus a dispassionate eye on that misery. This detached observer, felt perhaps as a clear-lit space situated just behind the forehead, was the gift of the Cohen boys at the station….”
The Cohen boys in their Kosher household–Solly a Trotskyite Zionist, Joss a Marxist–are exact cousins of the Jewish intellectuals at City College in the 1930s.
At the other end of the Rhodesian books is Martha’s tormented lover Thomas Stern, a paranoid refugee from Poland who has lost his sisters in the Holocaust and veers self-destructively from Communism to business, from Jewish terrorism in Palestine to human rights work on behalf of blacks. By scoffing at Martha’s urging that he renounce violence, Stern gives the Martha Quest books their title: The Children of Violence series. But Stern is not only called to violence, he’s called to retail:
“So you see how hard it is to escape one’s fate, Martha? In Poland, middle-men, money-makers—the Stern Brothers. And here? My brother’s a rich man already, and we left Poland with what we had on our backs, eight years ago.”
A lot of my writing on this site is critical of the Jewish political presence in modern America. But I have a chauvinist streak of my own, and Lessing’s non-Jewish eye confirms it in me. The Jewish gift helped to form Doris Lessing as a young writer: the cerebral, text-bound life of persecuted Jews gave her awareness of the world and encouraged her to deliver the savage-sympathetic portrait of white colonial society that would make her name in England in the 1950s. That life is the Jewish culture that I was born into– outsiders, people of the book, harsh critics of the social structure.
[Joss Cohen] fired the following questions at her, in the offhand indifferent manner of the initiate to a breed utterly without the law:
‘You repudiate the colour bar?’
‘But of course.’
‘Of course,’ he said sardonically. And then: ‘You dislike racial prejudice in all its form, including anti-Semitism?’
‘Naturally’—this with a touch of impatience.
‘You are an atheist?’
‘You know quite well that I am.’
‘You believe in socialism?’
‘That goes without saying,’ she concluded fervently; and suddenly began to laugh, from that sense of the absurd which it seemed must be her downfall as a serious person. For Joss was frowning at the laugh, and apparently could see nothing ridiculous in a nineteen-year-old Jewish boy, sprung from an orthodox Jewish family, and an adolescent British girl, if possible even more conventionally bred, agreeing to these simple axioms in the back room of a veld store in a village filled with people to whom every word of this conversation would have the force of a dangerous heresy.
Doris Lessing was an early adopter. Her philosemitism parallels the philosemitism of non-Jewish intellectuals in the States in the 40s and 50s, Edmund Wilson for instance, and anticipates by a generation or two full-blown American philosemitism of the meritocracy– when the White House was loaded with Jewish advisers, when Clinton put two Jews on the Supreme Court, when Jews became university presidents and started google and facebook and craigslist, and neocons guided our foreign policy.
American philosemitism reflects the Jewish contribution to this society. Recently I was told that the world still envies the U.S. because of four industries we have that no one else has (universities/research, film/media, software, and finance), and all these industries are as full of Jews as Doris Lessing’s early novels were. As Scott McConnell, who had something of Doris Lessing’s own Jewish-engendered intellectual awakening when he joined the Commentary neoconservative crowd in the 1980s, has told me, America is thankful to Jews because they are driving the economy. I think this recognition pervades Establishment culture. When I fault Chris Matthews for never talking about the Israel lobby, I must be aware that the network that gives him his salary was built and is now owned by Jewish entrepreneurs in the new global economy. When we try and explain the dismissal of Ron Paul, it is because he above all candidates is representative of an Establishment structure that has no truck with Jews– as opposed to Romney with his neoconservative advisers, Gingrich with his Sheldon Adelson money and Barack Obama with his Axelrods and AIPACs and Crowns. When I marvel that Robert Kagan works for Romney and his wife works for Obama without anyone raising an eyebrow, or that Stuart Levey the former Under Secretary of Treasury worked for Bush and Obama without a hitch—again, this is a measure of the large Jewish presence in the Establishment. Jewish gifts have propelled the new economy, such as it is. And when people accuse Occupy Wall Street of anti-semitism, it is in part because Occupy are critics of the new economy, and much of that economy was built by Jews.
Back when we were outsiders, Hannah Arendt warned Jews about reverence for wealth: liberal Zionists, she wrote, “failed to… attack the role of Jewish finance in the political structure of Jewish life.”
That same warning is sounded in the Martha Quest books, from the restless Communist Zionist Thomas Stern:
“Unlike you, when I work, I think in terms of money. I’m learning that it’s terrifyingly easy to make money.”
She laughed…
“I don’t want you to laugh about money. I’ve got to outwit it. I’ve got to find a way of not becoming Thomas Stern, rich merchant of this city.”