From Dissent to Degradation

I hope this won't be too deep an observation and I will not make it long (extended references and details are in the embedded links).

Far left forces, mainly but not exclusively American,  consider Israel's military government regime in the territories liberated from Jordanian occupation as immoral, illegal and un-Jewish.  They began and continually attempt to affect a tectonic change in Diaspora Jewry's mutually important relationship with Israel by declaring that military government to be an illegal occupation in the face of major evidence to the contrary 

That "occupation", I think, despite all sorts of outlandish claims, is fair and just in the conditions in comparison to that existed which before 1967, when that administration was applied to regions of the historic Land of Israel as well as today, under the despotic Palestinian Authority rule.  

These forces, in one apparition or another, in one manifestation or another, have always been with us. They fought Herzl. They struggled against the Balfour Declaration. They denied Jewish nationalism. They were either non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. They waged campaigns against President Woodrow Wilson approving the idea of a Mandate that would reconstitute the Jewish National Home. They insisted, despite all past and current evidence, that there should not be a Jewish state, or something quite less than a political entity.

They were called the Bund. The Reform Movment until 1937.  Neturei Karta. The American Council for Judaism. Jewish Fellowship in England. Palestine Communist Party (who actively supported Arab terror in the 1920s and 1930s* and see: Budeiri, Musa. The Palestine Communist Party, 1919-1948: Arab and Jews in the Struggle for Internationalism)

Brit Shalom. Ihud. Breira. Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow. Open Zion. V15's interference in Israel's democratic process. NIF's previous assistance to subversive groups.  Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, Lord Montagu, Peter Beinart. Michael Chyabon & Ayelet Waldman, Tony Judt. The "tragic mockery" of Leon Trotsky. IJAN. Haaretz. Jews supporting Boycott. Breaking the Silence. Mondoweiss. Richard Falk. Ken Roth. George Soros. Noam Chomsky. Norman Finkelstein. Gideon Levy. Amira Hass and Haaretz's owner, Amos Schocken. They, among others, are ideological opponents, and less than pragmatic critics.

And they lost because their thinking was wrong, because their observance of events was incorrect, because their understanding of political, economic, military and cultural elements was in error and worse, they have not learned from their mistakes in the past.

Now, more than ever, the trend of their promotions is leading not to a singular criticism of a specific policy, of an approach, or lack thereof, of a party or a person.  It is directing anger, frustration and self-impotence against Israel as a whole.

Israel, it is claimed, is an "apartheid" state. It has always been a project of settler colonialism is the assertion. It is "racist". And worse. Now, Nazi memes are employed a la Rogel Alpher.

Basically, what has developed, is that the very idea of Israel is to be rejected and it is being pushed forcefully and prominently.  To be generous, it is difficult to think of these op-ed columnists and bloggers and 'intellectuals' and such as truly intelligent, for any claim that that language and contextualization they employ is not what they intend, although many quite openly do, cannot they see what they are creating?

They present an "Israel situation" that is, in the end, a la Judt** and Mick Davis, bad for the Jews.  As Daniel Gordis phrased it, "It’s not about what Israel does. It’s about what, to their minds, Israel is."  Israel is less important than Diaspora Jews and the existence of a Diaspora. Babylon is better than Jerusalem.  That was done in the 1930s by socialists, non-nationalists and ultra-Orthodox and we know that in a few years, they were all proven wrong.  Shalom Asch declared in 1938 that “what Jabotinsky is now doing in Poland [his evacuation plan] goes beyond all limits…Heaven help a people with such leaders.” Asch eventually declared at a press conference in Jerusalem in 1952: “I deeply regret that I fought against Jabotinsky’s evacuation plan”. 

In the past, these ideas led those that held them to betray Judaism, assimilate, join revolutionary movements, assist the detractors of Jews or be eliminated by anti-Semites.

For these new critics of Zion, these new dissenters, the line of their opposition to certain or any specifics has moved to that of generalities and soon, the line to a totality of rejection will be crossed. And they were learn the lessons of those who trod this path before them, while Israel and Zionism continues to triumph.

_____________________________________________________________

*

For example, as described here:  "A squad led by Daniel Abramovich scattered nails on the roads for a few nights, to harass Jewish transportation, and also cut down electricity poles. Two bombs were thrown in Haifa, one of them at the building of the Labor Council. There was also a plan to attack the new dock that was then under construction in Tel Aviv, but it was too well guarded, so the activists set fire instead to a pavilion of the Orient Fair.  Dothan maintains that [Simcha] Tzabari, who was then the only Jew on the Central Committee (Meir Slonim was in prison), bore responsibility for the terrorist policy...Dothan quotes a leaflet written by Tzabari in July 1936 [but not distributed], which explained that by “destroying the economy of the Zionist occupiers through acts of sabotage and partisan attacks, the Arab liberation movement seeks to make the continuation of Zionist colonization impossible.” 

**

"Diaspora Jews cannot influence Israeli policies, but they are implicitly identified with them, not least by Israel’s own insistent claims upon their allegiance. The behavior of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews. The increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel. The depressing truth is that Israel’s current behavior is not just bad for America, though it surely is. It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews."

^

To All My Kibbutz Friends, You 'Settlers', You

Do you know to what this term is referring?

"a communitarian settler"

Well, here's the context, from a review of Tony Judt's book, "The Memory Chalet":-

...“Before even turning 20 I had become, been and ceased to be a Zionist, a Marxist and a communitarian settler: no mean achievement for a South London [Jewish] teenager.”

So, you, too, are "settlers", at least in the mind of the radical, progressive, humanitarian camp.

^

Have a Jolly Laugh on Judt

Here is one of Tony Judt's more outrageously dislocations from truth and reality:-

You say the Israel Lobby is too influential, albeit in a way analogous to other lobbies; and you say that criticism of same shouldn’t be censored, or self-censored. Beyond creating a space for dissent, what do you propose be done to lessen the Israel Lobby’s influence?

Create a counter-lobby. Sure there is J Street, but it is almost always on the defensive, responding to absurd exaggerations from the other side. And anyway, it has no money. The only way to proceed, it seems to me, is to build a counter-opinion, a counter-consensus that the Israel Lobby is bad for America. Actually, it is even worse for Israel, but no one here cares about that. So it is all about creating a public space in which to discuss these things. Hence my essays.

No money?

Try this. And let's see how many employees there are:

J Street’s staff

Jeremy Ben-Ami, President. Hadar Susskind, Vice President of Policy and Strategy. Daniel Kohl, Vice President of Political Affairs. Rachel A. Lerner, Vice President of J Street Education Fund. Isaac Luria, Vice President of Communications and New Media. Carinne Luck, Vice President of Grassroots and Field Programs. Nan MacNamara, Vice President of Finance and Administration.

Communications and New Media
Amy Spitalnick, Press and New Media Associate. Zachary Teicher, Communications and Web Associate. Jeff Kulp, Web Assistant.

Government Affairs
Dylan J. Williams, Deputy Director of Government Affairs. Rebecca Wasserman, Assistant Director of Government Affairs.
Kevin Rachlin, Government Affairs Associate.
Rachel Streitfeld, Government Affairs Associate.

J Street Education Fund
Aliza Becker, Director of Special Projects.
Sarah Beller, Director of Education and Programs.
Andrew Meyerson, Development & Communications Associate.
Julia Terlinchamp, Programming Associate
Elizabet Wendt, West Coast Organizer, J Street U.

J Street Local
Gordon Gladstone, Northern California/Northwest Regional Director. Anne Gregory, South/Southeast Regional Director. Kate Press, New York City Regional Director. Gillian Rosenberg, Midwest Regional Director.

Political
Shira Barchilon Frank, Deputy Director of Development and Leadership Outreach. Daniel Kalik, PAC Manager. Daniel Rosove, Research and Program Assistant. Jesse Greenberg, Midwest Regional Political Director. Janette Hillis-Jaffe, New England Regional Political Director. Barbara Lahav, Pacific Northwest Regional Political Director. Adee Telem, New York Regional Political Director.

A lot of salaries to pay. Add to that the other running expenses.

Judt is so smart. Not.


And no public space to discuss antizionism, perversion of history?

Ha, ha, ha. Look at all the space out there, especially The Nation, The New York Review of Books, etc., etc., etc.

Judt is sick and dying (*) but he still doesn't get my sympathy.


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(*)

In 2008, Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. As of October 2009, he was paralyzed from the neck down.

And even Israel can't help him, at the moment:

Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. said Monday its potential Lou Gehrig's disease treatment failed to meet a key goal in a midstage study. The company said Talampanel failed to meet its key goal of effectiveness in the study, which included 559 patients. The drug candidate did meet safety goals.

Lou Gehrig's disease is a fatal neurological disorder that steals the body's ability to move, speak and ultimately to breathe. Also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, it currently has no cure or treatment that halts or reverses the condition.

More opinions.

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Tony Judt: New Status

Tony Judt reveals:

I suffer from a motor neuron disorder, in my case a variant of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS): Lou Gehrig's disease. Motor neuron disorders are far from rare: Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, and a variety of lesser diseases all come under that heading. What is distinctive about ALS—the least common of this family of neuro-muscular illnesses—is firstly that there is no loss of sensation (a mixed blessing) and secondly that there is no pain. In contrast to almost every other serious or deadly disease, one is thus left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one's own deterioration.

In effect, ALS constitutes progressive imprisonment without parole. First you lose the use of a digit or two; then a limb; then and almost inevitably, all four. The muscles of the torso decline into near torpor, a practical problem from the digestive point of view but also life-threatening, in that breathing becomes at first difficult and eventually impossible without external assistance in the form of a tube-and-pump apparatus. In the more extreme variants of the disease, associated with dysfunction of the upper motor neurons (the rest of the body is driven by the so-called lower motor neurons), swallowing, speaking, and even controlling the jaw and head become impossible. I do not (yet) suffer from this aspect of the disease, or else I could not dictate this text.

By my present stage of decline, I am thus effectively quadriplegic.

And to think how he tried to handicap Israel and Zionism.

Jabbing Judt

Tony Judt has generated some letters in response to his op-ed:

A Heated Argument About Israel

To the Editor:

“Fictions on the Ground,” by Tony Judt (Op-Ed, June 22), is the real work of fiction, past, present and future.

Israelis settled in the West Bank because it was deemed part of the historic home of the Jewish people and because the Arabs and the Palestinians rejected opportunities for peace with Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967. The territory in legal terms was undecided because the Palestinians from 1947 rejected the United Nations resolution dividing the land into Arab and Jewish states.

Saying — as Mr. Judt does — that Israel will never give up the settlements ignores the fact that former Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to dismantle 80 percent of the settlements at Camp David; that his successor, Ariel Sharon, dismantled all of the settlements in Gaza; and that Israeli leaders have repeatedly indicated that most of the settlements will go if there is peace, and those held will be part of a swap for Israeli territory.

Settlements are not an obstacle to peace if there is serious peacemaking, peace-teaching and compromise from the other side. As for fictions — as Mr. Judt has made clear in his writings, his problem is not with Israeli settlements, but with Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state.

Abraham H. Foxman
National Director
Anti-Defamation League
New York, June 22, 2009
•


To the Editor:

Tony Judt casts the road map for peace in the Middle East exclusively in terms of his lament for the disappearance of the idealistic kibbutzim of his youth and his fury with the policies of the right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet oddly, in the article, the outside world, including the Palestinians, doesn’t seem to exist.

In these difficult times the United States will have enough difficulty brokering a peace between Israel and the Palestinians — it can’t referee internal Israeli politics. That there are both idealistic and corrupt Israelis and Palestinians is a given. The real issue is how do we pragmatically get to a two-state solution.

Barbara Probst Solomon
New York, June 22, 2009

•

To the Editor:

Tony Judt misleads in many ways, among them by implying that the West Bank was captured by Israel in 1967 from some Palestinian country and not Jordan (which does not seek its return), and contending that Yigal Amir was inspired to assassinate Yitzhak Rabin by “rabbinical” influence at Bar-Ilan University (Mr. Amir has stated clearly otherwise).

Most egregious, though, is Mr. Judt’s amazing objection to demilitarizing any Palestinian state established in the West Bank, because it would “have no means of defending itself against aggression.” Considering how the Palestinians in a militarized Gaza responded to Israel’s withdrawal from that territory, raining thousands of rockets onto Israeli cities, for Israel to help establish a weaponized Arab country in its very heart, within range of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, would be to commit national suicide.

(Rabbi) Avi Shafran
Director of Public Affairs
Agudath Israel of America
New York, June 22, 2009

•

To the Editor:

Tony Judt didn’t answer my most basic question: Why does a future Palestinian state have to be free of Jews? If Arabs can live in Israel, why can’t Jews live in Palestine?

By refusing to answer this question, he and all the proponents of a settlement freeze turn the settlement argument into a facade. Because if the settlements don’t have to be removed, then why waste time arguing about what is a settlement, where are the boundaries, what is natural growth?

Making Jews, and only Jews, leave their homes is ethnic cleansing. Isn’t this exactly what Israel’s critics accuse it of?

Jonathan D. Reich
Lakeland, Fla., June 23, 2009

•

To the Editor:

Among the many fictions in Tony Judt’s article was his portrayal of Bar-Ilan University. In his remark about the university, Mr. Judt ignored the tremendous diversity of political opinion and religious observance at Bar-Ilan, Israel’s fastest-growing and largest university, with an academic community of 33,000 students.

Bar-Ilan is a leading force in unifying Israel’s religious and secular communities. More than 60 percent of its students identify as primarily secular. They are attracted by the university’s commitment to a first-class education in the sciences, humanities, law, engineering, business and the arts — all within a learning environment that fosters Jewish values and promotes dialogue among Israelis from different backgrounds.

Bar-Ilan University stresses the Jewish people’s ties to Israel for more than 3,000 years — a point that was emphasized in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech. He wanted to speak at a university that is grounded in the Zionist enterprise.

It is the respect that Israelis have for Bar-Ilan University and its efforts to unify Israeli society that led to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to give his recent address at the university’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

Mark D. Medin
New York, June 22, 2009

The writer is executive vice president and chief executive, American Friends of Bar-Ilan University.

Just Judt The Jew

Anti-Zionist radical liberal progressive Tony Judt (there may be more but I'll stop here but read this and his 2003 conclusion of: "The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews") relates to the subject of "settlements", recalling his days at a kibbutz:

I am old enough to remember when Israeli kibbutzim looked like settlements (“a small village or collection of houses” or “the act of peopling or colonizing a new country,” Oxford English Dictionary)

He's upset. In his opinion, as expressed in the welcoming host pages of the New York Times (ever read a piece by a "settler" there?):

Israel needs “settlements.” They are intrinsic to the image it has long sought to convey to overseas admirers and fund-raisers: a struggling little country securing its rightful place in a hostile environment by the hard moral work of land clearance, irrigation, agrarian self-sufficiency, industrious productivity, legitimate self-defense and the building of Jewish communities. But this neo-collectivist frontier narrative rings false in modern, high-tech Israel. And so the settler myth has been transposed somewhere else — to the Palestinian lands seized in war in 1967 and occupied illegally ever since.

Silly Tony. Bringing Jews home to the Land, a major ideological, nay, psychological, tenet of Labour-Socialist Zionism (see here), not to mention the religious interpretation of the Kookian approach (see here and also here), is what drives Jews to reside on the Land and make it flourish.

But there is something else disturbing Judt. Even stereotyping our enterprise with a pejorative term, linked to "colonising", indicating something temporary and foreign, is not enough for Judt. As he explains warpedly:

It is thus not by chance that the international press is encouraged to speak and write of Jewish “settlers” and “settlements” in the West Bank. But this image is profoundly misleading. The largest of these controversial communities in geographic terms is Maale Adumim. It has a population in excess of 35,000, demographically comparable to Montclair, N.J., or Winchester, England. What is most striking, however, about Maale Adumim is its territorial extent. This “settlement” comprises more than 30 square miles — making it one and a half times the size of Manhattan and nearly half as big as the borough and city of Manchester, England. Some “settlement.”

In other words, in a backward technique, the media is serving our interests in labeling our communities "settlements". But, of course, this serves his larger purpose: Israel must go, disappear, beam up, devolve into binationalism. So, "settlements" serves him as a weapon to chop away at Israel pre-1967.

According to him,

If Israel is drunk on settlements

Well, I attended the Plenum Session of the Yesha Council last night at Karnei Shomron and most of the communities informed us that they needed more housing to accommodate the returning children and others wishing to exert their natural growth rights.







It is nice to read Judt claiming:

Despite all the diplomatic talk of disbanding the settlements as a condition for peace, no one seriously believes that these communities — with their half a million residents, their urban installations, their privileged access to fertile land and water — will ever be removed. The Israeli authorities, whether left, right or center, have no intention of removing them, and neither Palestinians nor informed Americans harbor illusions on this score.

But notice how one is left with the doubt, well, I am, - when he writes "settlements", does he mean only post-67 communities or...?

the president could break with two decades of American compliance, acknowledge publicly that the emperor is indeed naked, dismiss Mr. Netanyahu for the cynic he is and remind Israelis that all their settlements are hostage to American goodwill. He could also remind Israelis that the illegal communities have nothing to do with Israel’s defense, much less its founding ideals of agrarian self-sufficiency and Jewish autonomy. They are nothing but a colonial takeover that the United States has no business subsidizing.

One never knows with Judt just what area he considers not to be an Israeli "colonial takeover".

And as for the defense element, quite simply, the prevention of the establishment of an independent Arab Palestine would be the major existential security contribution we could make for all of Israel and its future generations. The raison d'etre of such a state is not the betterment of so-called Arab Palestinians, an improvement in the status of their human rights and civil liberties, their economic development, etc. No. They are a mobilized populace to be wielded, from age 6, as a potential human Qassam to destroy and obliterate the Jewish state of Israel. They possess no independent existence of Zionism. "Palestinianism" as I have written previously at this blog, is solely the negativism of Zionism.

And Judt can't avoid a little slide into antisemitism: America is Israel's

paymaster

Did he write to Obama to use the Cairo speech to condemn the state of democracy in Egypt? Did he suggest the President cut off funding to Mubarak the Dictator whose son will take over soon, establishing a new dynasty in the Arab Middle East? No, that he wouldn't do. He's just Judt the Jew, descendent of Lithuanian Rabbis,



doing his best to fulfill his fantasy of dissolving the Jewish state of Israel.

An Exchange of Opinions

...[For Tony Judt] to equate any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism is silly and perhaps dangerous. But it is equally dangerous to overlook, which is what Judt seems to be doing, the enormous destructive role that anti-Semitic theories play in anti-Israeli sentiments in most of the Middle East, be it in populist or intellectual guises. Jews may be doing well in Holland, the US, and Germany, but the attempts to downplay the potency of anti-Semitism will not aid in addressing the "problem of evil" anywhere.

That was Marat Grinberg, Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and Humanities at Reed College, Portland, Oregon.

And Judt replies:

...anti-Semitism among Palestinians and other Arabs is stupid and deplorable. But far from fueling anti-Israeli sentiment, it has frequently been spawned by it. [?]

Anger and frustration at Israel's actions disposes people to hate all Jews and believe ill of them - as we have seen in Europe's own Muslim communities in recent years. I don't downplay this development. On the contrary, I see it as a new and dangerous twist in the long history of anti-Jewish prejudice. One hundred years ago, anti-Semitism was "the socialism of fools" (Bebel); today it is the consolation of losers. Those who complacently attribute the Middle Eastern tragedy to resurgent anti-Semitism among dispossessed, displaced, and humiliated Arabs should know better. They are blaming the victim.

Source

No, Tony Judt, the Arab is not the victim except, perhaps, the victim of his own stupidity, stubborness and desire to make the Jew the victim, again.