An Insight into Whether Arabs are Indigenous to 'Palestine'

From "The Nusseibeh Family: Khazraj Roots That Grew and Blossomed in Jerusalem", July 10, 2024:

"The origins of Jerusalem’s Nusseibeh family trace back to the large Banu Khazraj tribe, one of the tribes of Mazin ibn al-Azd, originally from southern Arabia. Along with their cousins from the Banu Aws tribe, the Banu Khazraj supported the Prophet Muhammad and welcomed him and his Muslim followers in Medina after they fled Mecca during the hijra in 622 CE....

The Nusseibehs were named after Nusseibeh bint Ka‘b of Medina, also known as Umm ‘Ammara, one of the earliest women to convert to Islam. During the Battle of Uhud near Medina in 625 CE between the early Muslims and the tribe of Quraysh, Umm ‘Ammara is said to have treated and cared for the wounded at night and fought alongside the Prophet during the day, sustaining wounds herself...

The detailed origins of the family are recorded by Hafiz Abdul Rahim Nusseibeh al-Khazraji in his book The Khazraj Nusseibeh Family: Custodians of History and the Present. Extensively researched and drawing on more than 830 Ottoman documents related to the family, the book traces 600 years of the family’s lineage since the advent of Islam. The sources used to tell these elaborate details also depict the family’s high social and religious status in Jerusalem, owing in large part to its members participating in the Islamic conquest of the city under the leadership of Caliph Umar in 638 CE.

Arrival in Jerusalem

Regarding the family’s arrival in Jerusalem, Hafiz Nusseibeh explains that, among the warriors in Caliph Umar’s army was Abdullah ibn Nusseibeh, the son of Umm ‘Ammara. The Umari conquest of Jerusalem, which included a four-month siege of the city, led to the capitulation of the Byzantines under Patriarch Sophronius. But upon conquering the city, Caliph Umar instructed his Muslim army to protect the churches and other non-Muslim shrines, assigning Abdullah ibn Nusseibeh the responsibility and honor of protecting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre from any attacks by Muslims or others. This was part of a treaty, known as the Pact of Umar, reached in 637 CE between the invading Muslim army and the non-Muslims of the Levant. As part of the pact, non-Muslims were granted security, protection, and rights under Muslim rule in exchange for loyalty..."

"...Jerusalem Story sat down with one of the eldest members of the Nusseibeh family, 70-year-old Wajih Nusseibeh, who has been responsible for opening and closing the door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for more than 40 years. We met in his home in the Wadi al-Joz neighborhood of Jerusalem, in the presence of a younger family member, Munir Nusseibeh, to recount the family’s enduring presence in Jerusalem for nearly 14 centuries.

Wajih was born in 1949 in the Nusseibeh family home in the Musrara neighborhood of Jerusalem near the Damascus Gate...Wajih described his Khazraj origins, explaining that the Nusseibeh family’s roots go back to Medina, and that their ancestor, Umm ‘Ammara, was a devoted fighter who stood by the Prophet Muhammad. 

“We came to Jerusalem as conquerors during the time of Umar ibn al-Khattab..."

Arabs in 'Palestine' - since the 7th century, as conquerors.

^

On Jabotinsky's Views on Arabs

From here, Shlomo Avineri:

"In connection with the central position of national existence in Jabotinsky’s theoretical concept, his approach to the position of Zionism in the Arab question is especially interesting. And we repeat, we are not interested in tactical positions, but in the question of principle, and here Jabotinsky inevitably faces a very difficult problem.

On the one hand, one might believe that a person like Jabotinsky, who saw in nationalism, in national characteristics, in the national desire to separate from others and in national pride, the focus of state and historical development, would be attentive to the aspirations of Arab-Palestinian nationalism. One who did not shy away from Ukrainian nationalism with its anti-Semitic manifestations, as we saw above, who was intellectually interested in Serbs, Croats and Albanians with their national rights, who believed that Estonian choirs testify to the strength of the national feeling seething in the Estonian people , - from such a person one could expect that, having come to analyze the Middle Eastern reality, he would try to find a place for Arab nationalism - in Palestine and in neighboring countries - in the overall picture of his worldview.

But that did not happen. Anyone who wants to find in Jabotinsky an attempt to resolve this issue will be disappointed. The fundamental decision here was not easy for any of the Zionist thinkers, but perhaps it could have been expected from such a thinker as Jabotinsky, in whose philosophy nationalism, as a universal phenomenon, occupied such a central place. However, Arab nationalism is discussed infrequently and in passing in his writings, and anyone who detects a considerable amount of disdain for the Arabs in this limited material would be right.

True, Jabotinsky, with his moral conviction, stood for the fact that in the future Jewish state, where the Arabs would be a minority, they would receive full civil rights as individuals. But a continuous thread runs through all of Jabotinsky’s literary and political activities: he does not seem to notice the Arabs as a serious political, social or cultural factor.

Once again, this seems to be driven not by tactical considerations or an attempt to evade a question that may be difficult to answer, but by something deeper: at the heart of this position is Jabotinsky's concept of the superiority of European culture; therefore, he views Zionism as an expression of this cultural power of Europe. In his writings, he resolutely rejects the idealization of the East or the Arab world, and in the article “Fashion for Arabesques” (1927) he argues with those participants in the Zionist movement who strive to see in the return to Zion also a return of the Jewish people to their origins - to the East. The Jewish people, Jabotinsky argues, are a European people, their culture took root in Europe, European culture itself is based on elements to which the people of Israel contributed from the best of their heritage, and there, in the West, and not in the East, the place of Israel as a people . According to Jabotinsky, this also applies to the Sephardi community: “Our origins from Asia, of course, are not proof. All of Central Europe is filled with races that also came from Asia - and much later than us.

All Ashkenazi Jews and perhaps half of the Sephardic Jews have lived in Europe for almost two thousand years. Enough time to take root spiritually.

Even more important is the other side of the issue: we not only lived in Europe for many centuries, we not only learned from Europe: we, the Jews, are one of those peoples who created European culture, and one of the most important among them...

The spiritual atmosphere in Europe is ours, we have the same right to it as the Germans, English, Italians and French: the “copyright” right. And in Eretz Israel this creativity of ours will continue... Nordau said it well: we are going to Palestine to push the moral limits of Europe to the Euphrates River" [5] .

In the same year (1927), Jabotinsky wrote a long article entitled “Merchants of the Spirit,” in which he tries to prove that the Arab medieval culture was, in essence, not Arab, and not even Muslim, and that most of the famous names in the field of thought in the Arab world of the Middle Ages belongs to the Syrians, Jews, Persians, etc. - and not to the Arabs themselves. It is clear that the main question here is not the historical correctness of such a definition, which itself is historical and conditioned by time; It is interesting that the same thinker who, when discussing Ukrainian nationalism, carefully emphasizes the element of difference between Ukrainians and Great Russians, does the opposite when discussing Arab culture [6] .

The same question finds artistic expression in the story “Zhidenok”, which appeared in a collection in Russian published by Zhabotinsky in 1930.

Jabotinsky himself is aware that the story can be called “obviously chauvinistic.” The main story is a detailed story about a Jewish teenager in one of the settlements of Eretz Israel, proving how much better he knows Arab culture and the geography of the Middle East than all the students of the village Arab school, which is known as “an amazing school: six classes, geographical maps and teacher from students of Cairo Al-Azgar University.” The story may be trivial, but the lesson that Jabotinsky wants to draw from it is clear, especially since the Jewish teenager in the story sums up the goals of this education in a very simple form: “The students must learn two branches of knowledge: to speak Hebrew and to beat face."

Jabotinsky gives this assessment not only to the Arabs, but also to Islam in general. In the article “Islam” (1924), Jabotinsky points out a number of cases in which a handful of European soldiers managed to defeat vastly superior Arab or Muslim forces. The Italian victory over the Senu Sith in 1911 in Tripoli, the victory of the French expeditionary force over Faisal in Damascus in 1920 - all this serves as decisive proof for Jabotinsky of the significant superiority of the West.

“I am not writing this to humiliate or ridicule the Arabs; I have no doubt about their military valor... In our time, war is a scientific and financial matter; backward peoples cannot do it.”

This backwardness is not only a matter of time, according to Jabotinsky, as far as the Muslim world is concerned. “Its real power in the future will be even less than before,” he says, objecting in particular to those who believed that Britain was forced to reckon with the Arab and Muslim factor in its Middle East policy. The Muslim world does not represent—and will not represent—a political force, as Jabotinsky says in the same article: “220 million people or even more profess Islam; but “Islam” as an integral factor in international relations does not exist... in the same way it is possible now, as it was possible a hundred years ago, to bring a conflict with any Muslim people to any end, without risking any complications of a pan-Islamic nature... As a political fist … Islam does not exist.”

If this concept defines Jabotinsky's position in assessing Arab nationalism, then it is clear that his conclusions regarding the demands of the “Palestinian” Arabs are unambiguous. Testifying before the British Royal Commission on Palestine (Peel Commission) in 1937, Jabotinsky demands the establishment of a Jewish state throughout the land of Israel in accordance with the basic principles of the revisionist movement and continues: “We unanimously affirm that the economic situation of the Arabs in the country is in the period of Jewish settlement, and thanks to Jewish settlement, is the envy of neighboring Arab countries to such an extent that Arabs from these countries show a clear tendency to migrate to Palestine. And I have already shown you that, in our opinion, there is no need to oust the Arabs. On the contrary, we mean that Palestine on both sides of the Jordan will accommodate both the Arabs and their descendants and many millions of Jews. I do not deny that in the course of this process the Arabs will inevitably become a minority in Palestine. However, I deny that this will cause them suffering. This is not a misery for any race or nation if it already has so many nation-states and many more nation-states will be added to them in the future. One part, one branch of this race, and by no means the most significant, will join the state belonging to others in order to live in it... This is a completely normal thing, and there is no “suffering” in it.”

Note that Jabotinsky does not argue that, compared with the Jewish claims to Eretz Israel, the Arab claims are less valid or that, compared with the possibility of the Jews remaining in the minority, the situation in which part of the Arab nation will be a minority in the Jewish state will be a lesser disaster and will entail less hardship.

For him, turning the Arabs in Palestine into a minority will not cause them any trouble at all. Personal rights, of course, will be granted to them - but on a national level they have no claims. Here the right is not opposed to the right and 13* 387 claims - claims, as Weizmann and his like-minded people saw it. From Jabotinsky’s point of view, everything that was once said about Jews in the Diaspora can also be said about Arabs in Palestine: the Arabs of this country as individuals have everything, but as a collective nothing."

^

Shumsky's Fooling Us on Jabotinsky

In a review of Dmitry Shumsky's Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion, Brian Horowitz writes:

The chapter on Jabotinsky permits a different reading from the usual interpretation. In 1906, at the Helsingfors Zionist Conference (which took place right after the failed Russian Revolution of 1905), Jabotinsky formulated a conception of minority rights based on the writings of Rudolph Springer (Karl Renner). In this conception, minorities would have full national autonomy to develop their character through separate cultural, educational, and legal institutions. Although these ideas were designed to reconfigure the Russian Empire along national lines, Jabotinsky saw them as applicable to any multicultural politic. Thus, he conceived of Jewish-Arab coexistence in the Ottoman Empire during the period of the Young Turk Revolution, and then in Mandate Palestine. Jabotinsky placed his stress on the development of the nation in concrete territory rather than the construction of a nation-state. In this interpretation, Jabotinsky showed himself as a believer in something like a binational Palestine in which the country would contain Arabs who would have equal civil and national rights, albeit as a national minority.

That is misleading.

Jabotinsky forcefully oppose binationalism (I have just translated two of his articles on the subject).

I also have posted on his famous 1940 article, "The Arab Angle - Undramatized". Here is a copy and the article begins on page 211.

His willingness to afford national minorities rights extended to the non-political for those who refused to see themselves as part of the political entity they resided in.

The Arabs, and others, were not nationalities but ethno-communitites.  And these are the areas of activity:

The following matters shall be delegated by the State to each ethno-community with regard to its members: 
(a) religion and personal status; 
(b) education in all its branches and grades, especially in the compulsory elementary stages; 
(c) public relief, including all forms of social assistance; 
(d) settlement of ordinary law cases arising out of the above-mentioned matters. 
3. Each ethno-community shall elect its National Diet with the right to issue ordinances and levy taxes within the limits of its autonomy, and to appoint a national executive responsible before the Diet. 
4. A permanent Minister of Cabinet rank, independent of all parties, shall represent each ethno-community in the country's government. 

And he added this:

Whether the Arabs would find all this a sufficient inducement to remain in a Jewish country is another question. Even if they did not, the author would refuse to see a tragedy or a disaster in their willingness to emigrate. The Palestine Royal Commission did not shrink from the suggestion. Courage is infectious. Since we have this great moral authority for calmly envisaging the exodus of 350,000 Arabs from one corner of Palestine, we need not regard the possible departure of 900,000 with dismay. The writer, as he has already said, cannot see any necessity for this exodus: it would even be undesirable from many points of view; but if it should appear that the Arabs would prefer to migrate, the prospect can be discussed without any pretence of concern.

Sorry, but he is reinterpreting Jabotinsky according to his own world-view.

^ 

Sari Nusseibeh: Arab Jerusalemites "Not Really Rational"; 'Unreasonable'

as part of a broader “anti-normalization” campaign, the Palestinian leadership has for decades warned residents against casting ballots. So a vast majority do not vote, despite the possibility that their large numbers could win a solid blocking minority on the 31-member City Council, if not a winning coalition with sympathetic Israelis.

“The whole thing is not really rational,” said Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al Quds University, whose family has 1,300-year roots in Jerusalem. “It’s not by reason that people are guided; it’s by sentiments and feelings and fears and histories.”

From his mouth to our ears.


And some other things I found peculiar:

a)  "There are about 360,000 Palestinian residents in this officially united but deeply divided city of 800,000..."

Is the city truly "deeply divided" or is that the catch-phrase that everyone in the media and on the Left employs - to further divided the city and keep it apart?

b)  Alaa Obeid, 23, a student who briefly flirted with running for City Council this year...said.  “In our society, it’s very important what the public thinks...If all these years, people have boycotted the elections, I might be in a place where there’s a risk to my future. I’ll be an outcast.”

That is "thinking"?  Or is that fear of being killed by the PLO or Hamas?  That's public opinion"?  So, it's easier and braver to shoot a Jew, stab him or throw a rock at her than to buck Arab public opinion?

c)  and on the contrary to the above, consider this: "Mr. Barkat’s opponent in Tuesday’s balloting...has accused the incumbent of threatening Israel’s sovereignty in the capital by giving “the extreme left”

So, what is going on in Jerusalem?  Are Jews also irrational?

________________

I received this from a smart friend:

There is another key line in the piece: “defending his support of Jewish settlement in Arab areas seized by Israel in 1967.”

1.       Arab areas? Is the Jewish quarter of the Old City an Arab area? French Hill? Ramat Eshkol? Ramat Shlomo? What makes them “Arab”? An 18-year Jordanian occupation? (especially if they were empty land since before the Muslim conquest, or Jewish residential quarters for the centuries preceding the Jordanian occupation)?

2.       Seized? Is that what happened in the Six Day War? Israel grabbed?

3.       Settlement is a loaded term, as she well knows.

How about a neutral phrase:

“defending his support of Jewish residence in parts of Jerusalem occupied by Jordan from 1949-1967.”

^

Not What Has Been Done But Is Believed To Have Been Done

I found some interesting material which relates to that problem Mitt Romney managed to stir up although since then, the issue of "culture" has developed a bit differently than the pro-Arab forces had wished.

Here are two excerpts from a book entitled "When We:Lived in Jerusalem" authored by Estelle Blyth, published in 1927 in London by John Murray.  Blyth (1881-1983) She was the daughter of the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem G. F. P. Blyth and she recounts memories of living in the city near the end of the Ottoman period.

First, an observation that is quite relevant to the recent "Muhammed riots":

And an example, an episode of "cultural dissonance":-

By the way,

All in all the Arabs come out as being (more or less) fine people, as do the Armenians. Pure-blooded Turks are magnificent, she says, but the Ottoman Empire is rightly denounced for never really improving Palestine. Her experiences with Jews lead her to unfavorable statements which some might judge as anti-Semitic.

^

Arabs and Christians - The Beginning

I caught a book and reading its description, a thought came to me.

It's called Arabic Christianity in the Monasteries of Ninth-Century Palestine, published by Ashgate Variorum in 1992. The author is Sidney H. Griffith of the Catholic University of America, USA.

This is the description:

The history of Christian literature took a new turn in the 8th century when monks in the monasteries of Palestine began to write theology and saints’ lives in Arabic; they also instituted a veritable programme for translating the Bible and other Christian texts from Greek (and Syriac) into the language of the Qur’an, the lingua franca of the Islamic caliphate. This is the subject of the present volume. Two key factors leading to this change, as Professor Griffith indicates, were that the confrontation with the developing theology of Islam created a direct need for apologetics to face this new religious challenge in its own language; and, second, simply that as the memory of Byzantine power waned, so too did the knowledge of Greek. Issues of particular interest in this apologetic literature are those of the freedom of the will, a key topic in the controversies between Melkites and Muslims, and of the legitimacy of icon veneration, a subject of great contemporary concern at the time of Iconoclasm in the Byzantine Empire.

Admittedly, I am not a scholar of that period but, in a logical approach, one could ask this question:

if Arabs were "always resident in Palestine", as the propaganda claim is made, why did a need for all this appear only in the 8th century, some 150 years after the appearance of Islam?  Was Arabic a 'foreign language' in that geographical area even if Islam was relatively new?

True, the Byzantine empire disappeared and with it the main lingua franca but that was already as early as 614. Moreover, Christianity had been around for centuries and if Arabs lived in the country in any number, they would have known all the theology by now. They were pagans until Muhammed and so were even a better 'target' for Christianity.  Even the rise of Islam in the early 7th century would have provided enough previous time and a need for such translations.

Could it be that in the Land of Israel the presence of Arabs was minimal? And that there was no need for the local monks to engage them theologically?

^

One Eye-Patch and a...Traditional Palestinian Wedding Dance

[With appreciation to BT]


Of course you knew that when I read this, I immediately thought: "why doesn't he go with a Moshe Dayan costume?", right? And then I had another thought. Read on.

Kate Spear-Brodsky and Louai Abu-Osba

Kate Spear-Brodsky, a daughter of Duston Spear of Bedford, N.Y., and Eugene V. Brodsky of New York, was married Saturday to Louai Yousef Abu-Osba, a son of Nadia Salem Saqer of New York and Dr. Yousef Khalil Abu-Osba of Amman, Jordan. The Rev. Donna Schaper, a minister of the United Church of Christ, officiated at the home of the bride’s mother and stepfather, Jon-Marc Seimon, in Bedford.

...Ms. Spear-Brodsky and Mr. Abu-Osba met in October 2002 when she visited a fellow student’s apartment to watch movies. Mr. Abu-Osba often came to the apartment to play video games with a friend who also lived there, and to cook spicy meals...As Halloween neared, she asked him what costume he was going to wear at the campus party. He revealed plans to go as a software pirate and hand out pirated software. But Ms. Spear-Brodsky said she mistook his answer to mean he “was going to be like Jack Sparrow” and asked if he was going to wear an eye patch.

He was initially taken aback by the question, but then quickly readjusted his costume design — especially after she told him “eye patches are sexy.” Put in that context, he recalled, “I made sure I was wearing an eye patch.”

...The couple chose an olive branch as their theme for the Jewish-Muslim union, and the ceremony under a wedding canopy combined readings in Arabic and English, and a traditional Palestinian wedding dance.

Traditional? No shooting?

Shooting?

Sure:-

Carmiel suffering from Arab neighbors' celebratory gunfire

Custom of shooting guns into the air celebrations in Arab villages has been around for years, but the residents of Carmiel are finally fed up. City resident says, 'Police say not to leave the house if I'm scared. Is that a solution?' Mayor petitions minister of internal security on issue

The celebratory gunfire shot off in Arab towns in the Galilee is not making for particularly happy neighbors. The shooting has reportedly increased during recent nights because of the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of Ramadan.

This has provoked Carmiel Mayor Adi Eldar to petition Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch on the issue, demanding that he "exercise all the force of the police to stop the unending gunfire in the neighboring villages."

Nearly every night throughout the summer gun shots can be heard during one of the weddings in the Arab villages nearby Carmiel. The phenomenon increases during the Eid al-Fitr holiday and during major sporting events. In many cases, the explosions heard are from fireworks, but often comes from hunting rifles, revolvers, and even automatic weapons.

Our house faces the villages. The situation here is just getting worse," said Margalit Wolovitch, a resident of the western section of Carmiel. "The gunfire is unbearable, both in terms of the safety risk and in terms of the fact that large weapons caches exist in these villages, and no one is doing a thing."

According to Wolovitch, "There are entire nights that you can't even shut your eyes here. When there is a wedding, they shoot; when there is a holiday, they shoot; when there are elections, they shoot. Multiple shots in the air at once. On election day last month, they shot throughout the day.

Even Ahmed, the Producer/Host of the Arab American TV Show Belahdan at Minnetonka, MN knows:

...I KEPT ON DRIVING ON A DUSTY ROAD UNTIL I FOUND WHAT SEEMED TO BE A COUNTY FAIR, WITH LOTS OF CHEVY AND FORD CARS AND PICK-UPS SURROUNDING A BIG TENT NEXT TO AN OLD FARM HOUSE. IT WAS OBVIOUS MOST OF THE TOWN'S POPULATION WAS HERE. HUNDREDS OF FOLKS WERE DRINKING, EATING AND DANCING INSIDE THE BIG TENT HAVING A GREAT TIME. I HAD NEVER SEEN SO MANY NON-MUSLIMS AT A MUSLIM WEDDING BEFORE.
THIS WAS THE BIG FAT AMERICAN WEDDING IN REVERSE. I WAS OUTNUMBERED, AND OUT OF MY HOME SECURITY COMFORT ZONE...THE WEDDING CEREMONY WAS SHORT AND SWEET, DEVOID OF ANY EXCESSIVE RELIGIOUS OVER TONE. WE ALL SAT INSIDE THE TENT CELEBRATING THE HAPPY OCCASION; NEXT TO A TABLE WHERE A FEW ARAB GUESTS WERE SEATED, AN OLD COUPLE SEEMED TO BE UNCONCERNED THAT AN ARAB GUEST MAY STAND AND START SHOOTING IN THE AIR, AS ARABS CUSTOMARY DO IN THEIR WEDDINGS.

Oh, and even he was thinking like me:

AS THE NEWLYWED COUPLE WAS CUTTING THE CAKE, I WONDERED FOR A BRIEF MOMENT; WHY WOULD A YOUNG AMERICAN WOMAN RISK MARRYING AN ARAB AMERICAN NOWADAYS? HASN'T SHE BEEN ALARMED ENOUGH?

An Observation To Ponder

An Observation of Noah Pollak:

...what I see on the West Bank and Gaza are societies that have made themselves so dysfunctional and self-hating that the UN collects their garbage for them. Somehow, the weaker and more divided the Palestinians get, the more powerful they become. And the more economically and militarily mighty Israel gets, the weaker it becomes.

Found here.

What Did You Expect?

These are the fun and games when you have too much money and too much time on your hads, I guess.

Chabadi 'Baddie'

YARMULKE YAHOOS BEST NOT MESS WITH THIS RABBI

An assistant rabbi whose yarmulke was swiped by Arab men turned the tables on his tormentors, chasing one into a Brooklyn street where the thief was struck by a car and arrested, police said yesterday.

Uria Ohana, 25, a member of the Chabad Lubavitch movement, told The Post he entered a subway station alone at Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street in Park Slope at 6:20 p.m. Tuesday. Ohana said he went through a turnstile and spotted a group of young Arabic men sitting on a bench.

Ohana said he felt a hand grab his brown yarmulke off his head. He then spun around and came face to face with one of the men, Ali Hussein, 18, police said.

"...I decided to chase him to get my yarmulke back," Ohana said.

They ran outside and Hussein darted into the street, where he was hit by a blue Volvo and toppled to the ground, cops said. "He couldn't move. He broke his leg. He was crying," said Ohana.

Police arrested Hussein for alleged aggravated harassment as a hate crime.

(Kippah tip: R)

Takes All Kinds

On March 22, 2006, Oded Haklai presented a paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association in San Diego, California. It was entitled: "Why Diaspora Jewish NGOs Donate to Palestinian Social Movements in Israel".

The Abstract:

In recent years, Diaspora Jewish organizations have been increasingly providing financial support to Palestinian social movements and NGOs in Israel. This phenomenon is particularly puzzling because it occurs during a period of heightened Palestinian-Israeli tensions and it involves large organizations from the mainstream of the Diaspora Jewish establishment, such as the New Israel Fund (NIF), the American Jewish Welfare Society (JDC), the Lurie Foundation, and the Abraham Fund initiatives.

Furthermore, several of the recipients are strong critics of the Jewish character of the state and its Zionist ideology. Both studies of the international dimension of ethnic conflict and Diaspora studies typically focus on the ways in which Diaspora communities assist their co-nationals. Conventional theories are silent on the reasons why a Diaspora would assist the "other".

The study explores a number of possible explanations. The first explanation is normative. The argument here is that the donors believe the Jewish state should adopt or enhance a more liberal character, rather than an ethnonational one. Another possible explanation is rational, interest-based. The argument here is that by providing financial support to Palestinian NGOs, the Jewish donors create a relationship of patronage whereby the recipients become dependent on the donors and, subsequently, their criticism of the Jewish-Zionist character of the state is softened.

A third explanation pertains to the image the donor community has of itself and questions regarding its own political identity. Traditionally, the Diaspora Jewish community, particularly in the United States, has had liberal leanings. Its financial support of Palestinian NGOs, according to the third explanation, is in response to growing criticism levelled at the Jewish establishment from the left-of-centre for its perceived blanket support of Israel. The Jewish community is thus caught between what are perceived as tension-laden tendencies: its concomitant commitment to both liberal and ethnonational ideologies.

Relying on dozens of interviews conducted with members of various donor organizations and Palestinian NGOs activists in Israel, the paper evaluates each of these explanations.

Their Effrontery

Many times, in attempting to succinctly explain one of the main problems Israelis have in portraying the difference between Jews and Arabs in the conflict between us, I have used the phrase:

it started when he hit me back

as when two men are brought before a judge - world opinion in our case - and one is asked to elucidate just how the fight between them began.

I have now found another pithy description in a book describing the period immediately after America's Civil War when the South, within 11 years, reversed the military victory of the North and subjected Negroes to their previous position lacking in basic rights and civil liberties. The book is "The Bloody Shirt" by Stephen Budiansky and the phrase is here

To white conservative Southerners, the outrage was never the acts they committed,

only the effrontery of having those acts held against them.

Somehow, the Arabs never see what they are doing and ignore the immoral actions they initiate and then present themselves as victims to gain sympathy.

Just Rolling Along with the Money

Notice the Middle East angle on this story:-

Super-rich make marque on Rolls Royce

The Rolls-Royce may have been the epitome of luxurious motoring for more than 100 years, but for a new breed of super-rich oligarchs and Middle-Eastern royalty, it seems a standard version of the world's most famous car is no longer enough

Demanding extra-high roofs to accommodate tall hats and elongated floors to make room for prostrate servants, those with more money than taste have beaten a path to the door of Mutec near Stuttgart in Germany, the only company formally licensed by the British manufacturer to tinker with its classic designs.

"Our clients are mostly royal households, governments, successful businessmen and, frankly, people who have acquired a lot of money very quickly," said Ian Grayson, the sales manager of Mutec.

Clients are willing to pay up to €1 million - about £735,000 - for such modifications as an extra 3½ft of plush-carpeted floorspace and rear-facing seats in a Phantom model, to make space for their staff. "A royal customer from the Middle East came to us as their tradition did not allow for their servants to sit at the same height as them, so they have to lie on the floor while tending to their masters," said Mr Grayson.

"They were concerned about the comfort of the servants, so wanted us to create extra floorspace in the back."

...Commissions have included fitting a footbath so that an owner could prepare for prayer in the mosque, while a Russian billionaire wanted a longer footwell to accommodate his girlfriend's 44in legs.

The company is also licensed to fit armour plating, bulletproof glass and oxygen supplies in case of poison gas attacks.

Another Foreskin Story (*)

I have posted here at my blog many pictures and also a good few posters, from all sorts of organizations and groups from across the political and ideological spectrum. Several have been funny, weird, outrageous and introspective.

The one below, however, seems to be unique:-



This may be a better reproduction:-



And do you notice the additional note to the side?



It shows three young Jewish men and tells the story of their arrest and sentencing.

It seems that they discovered that young Arabs working in religious neighborhoods would return after work, dressed in jeans, clean shirt and slicked-down hair and present themselves as Jewish. The Arabs had Jewish names and were trying to hook up with "weak" girls.

These three decided to become vigilantes and went hunting and found one called "Rafi". Rafi was beat up so badly that, the poster claims, he will not be able to produce children. It is unclear from the language and terminology of the poster whether he had his member removed or just smashed up. The reference is to "the foreskin of the Philistine".

Now they want help.

Should have done what bloggers do - stalk, take pictures, publish them on a blog and get the police to do their job.

Shall we call this Foreskin Done In?

============

(*) With apologies to JudeanEve

What A Pain

Alexandre Robert, a French 15-year-old, was having a fine summer in this tourist paradise on the Persian Gulf. It was Bastille Day and he and a classmate had escaped the July heat at the beach for an air-conditioned arcade.

Just after sunset, Alex says he was rushing to meet his father for dinner when he bumped into an acquaintance, a 17-year-old native-born student at the American school, who said he and his cousin could drop Alex off at home.

There were, in fact, three Emirati men in the car, including a pair of former convicts ages 35 and 18, according to Alex. He says they drove him past his house and into a dark patch of desert, between a row of new villas and a power plant, took away his cellphone, threatened him with a knife and a club, and told him they would kill his family if he ever reported them.

Then they stripped off his pants and one by one sodomized him in the back seat of the car. They dumped Alex across from one of Dubai’s luxury hotel towers.

...The authorities not only discouraged Alex from pressing charges, he, his family and French diplomats say; they raised the possibility of charging him with criminal homosexual activity, and neglected for weeks to inform him or his parents that one of his attackers had tested H.I.V. positive while in prison four years earlier.

Source

He's Got a Point

Uri Ohrbach has a good point:-

Knesset Member Ahmed Tibi can relax. In the final-status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel will not be transferring its control over the Arab-Israeli towns of Umm al-Fahm and Taibe to the Palestinian state in exchange for settlements in Judea and Samaria.

Even if a final-status agreement is signed (and it will not be signed,) the moment a decision will be made to annex Umm al-Fahm and Taibe to the Palestinian state, tens of thousands of Arab-Israelis will move into the new borders of Israel – because it's better to continue being a discriminated against Arab citizen in the Jewish state than to have equal rights in the Palestinian state.

So, at the end of the day we will end up with more Arabs in Israel and less territory.

and this one:-

It is certainly nice to hear Arab Knesset members enraged every time the idea of territorial tradeoff is raised again. They tremble with rage. After all, this is the only way to see how strongly they cling to the democratic State of Israel.

They may be nationalistic Arabs, but the vision of a Palestinian state interests them only on condition they are not part of it. They are reminiscent, notwithstanding all the differences of course, of the Zionistic Jews residing in wealthy countries in the Diaspora: They support Israel, love it, and want to see it prospering, but they do not really bother to move here.

The Truth

After Mazuz's decision and judging from precedents in his rulings, it will not be hard to guess what the High Court will decide. This judicial establishment is intent on forcing Israel to gradually part with its definition as a Jewish state and become a state of all its citizens. The instruction to allocate the Jewish people's lands to the very nation competing with it for this country's ownership and sovereignty is part of the general moral degeneration to which we have succumbed in recent years.

Agree?

Read it all. Israel Harel's op-ed.

Yes, But How Many Candidates Are There?

Dramatic rise in number of Arab volunteers for national service

Data published Thursday by a national service placement organization indicates a dramatic rise in the number of Arabs who volunteer for national service. According to the data, the number of volunteers in the first months of 2007 exceeded by far the total number of volunteers in 2006.

Shlomit, the non-profit organization that arranges placements for secular national service volunteers, registered 213 young Arab volunteers between December and March, compared with 130 volunteers who began their national service last year.

If this trend continues, the total number of volunteers for 2007 is expected to double the registered number for 2006.

Just over 500 out of...?

Who is Underming Who?

Civil rights groups have demanded that the attorney general lay down rules to restrict the activities of the Shin Bet security services against the Arab community and its political groups.

The Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) filed a petition to Attorney General Menachem Mazuz last Thursday to order the Shin Bet to stop trying to block what the group called legitimate political activity.

Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights, is demanding a criminal probe into the Shin Bet's activity, accusing the security service of exceeding its authority and causing incitement against the Arab public.

ACRI's petition follows a letter the Shin Bet sent the previous week to the predominantly Arab Balad party's journal, Fasal al-Makal, warning that it would foil the activity of anyone seeking to harm Israel's Jewish or democratic character, even if that activity was carried out by legal means.

The issue was raised following the recent drafting of four documents in the Arab community calling for a revision of Israel's character. The documents are: the Musawa organization's Ten Points, the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee's Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, the Adalah organization's Democratic Constitution and the yet-unpublished Haifa Treaty.

ACRI's letter said that the Shin Bet's assumption that it was authorized to curtail activity not explicitly prohibited by law "undermines the foundations of democracy and reflects a basic lack of understanding of the concept of democracy."

"The attempt by the Shin Bet to redefine the rules of the democratic game is a serious violation of the rule of law," it said.

The letter also stated that the concept of freedom is a preeminent value of democracy, and from it derives the principle that all that is not explicitly prohibited must as such be permitted.

More of Morris

Another Benny Morris interview.

He gets better with age.

With the 1987 publication of "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949," Morris found himself on a path that led to academic acclaim, an Israeli jail cell for refusing army call-up orders to perform reserve duty and, in recent years, despair over the violence and futile peace efforts. Along the way, his critical perspective seems to have reversed course, the same slow spin that has hardened many Israelis against the Palestinians and now complicates the Bush administration's current bid to revive a peace process between them.

As he embarks on a new book project to explore whether two states for two peoples is still a viable option for resolving the long conflict, Morris has come to believe peace with the Palestinians and the larger Arab world may not be possible, especially as radical Islamic movements that deny Israel's right to exist gain ground in the region.

He holds out hope that a stable Palestinian state might one day emerge and ease hostilities. But he says he can just as easily imagine a day when Israel will have to drive more Arabs from the occupied territories or face expulsion itself.

"We are an outpost of the West, as they see it and as we also see ourselves, in a largely Islamic, backward and in some ways even barbaric area," Morris says in his trademark strafing-fire delivery. "The Muslims are busy killing people, and killing people for reasons that in the West are regarded as idiotic. There is a problem here with Islam."

- - -

The second Palestinian uprising broke out a year after that book's publication in 1999.

"It sent people politically, like a centrifuge, spinning in all directions," Morris says. "It polarized the Israeli left, driving those inclined to the far left farther that way and those of us in the Zionist left in the other direction."

In Morris's view, shared by many Israelis, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was responsible for the collapse of U.S.-brokered peace talks at the time and the violence that followed.

...Morris's research had long suggested to him that the Arabs would never accept a Jewish state in Palestine. The second uprising, spearheaded by the radical Islamic movement Hamas, confirmed his view that "Arab rejectionism has always been very deep and very religious."

He began speaking out in interviews. Among his more surprising contentions was that Ben-Gurion should have expelled more Palestinians during the 1948 war to leave a stronger Jewish majority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

"If the man was already driving out people, maybe he should have gone the whole hog," Morris says now. "Perhaps in the end population exchanges and transfers, although they may have caused great suffering at the time, may in the long run have been better for everyone concerned."

..."The problem that existed here in 1947 remains today -- the Arabs don't accept Israel's presence," Morris says. "A major switch in mind-set must occur for peace to come. That is the sine qua non of any peace agreement. All the rest -- the road map, the peace process -- is just footwork.