She's Teaching Us Post-Zionism

I used 'teaching' since Ariana Melamed's family name means 'teacher' in Hebrew (and by extension, in Yiddish, pronounced with the emphasis on the 'la').  I used to read her in Maariv but, I guess, when that newspaper changed owners, Yedioth Ahronot picked her up (which says a lot about that daily).

What does she teach that is post-Zionist?

In the past, in a discussion over the behavior of IDF soldiers charged with preventing illegal entry of Eriteans, she called the soldeirs Judeo-Nazis.

In her latest translated op-ed, she writes:

Hamas is not a terror organization, but a state in the makingOp-ed: Whether we like it or not, Hamas is slowly but surely establishing itself with a disciplined army of paid soldiers, an education system saturated with incitement, and state institutions. And it has an unequivocal ideology that refuses to go away, just like the Jewish settlement of 1947.

The post-Zionism is not in her wrong description, or insufficiently intellectuyally honest description.  It's in the "just like" phrase.  That's the hint.

Post-Zionists seek to downdump Zionism, Jewish nationalism, Jewish moral and ethical principles so that they can say and write 'we're no better than the worst out there' and then follow it up with 'and therefore, those out there are just as good as we are'.  That tautology is intended at one at the same time to deny Jewish uniqueness and to award extremely evil forms of human naction a veneer of respect by linking it, wrongly, to we Jews.

In no way is Hamas, in its ideology and practice, "just like the Jewish settlement of 1947" (and the Hebrew term, yishuv, is not "settlement" but rather "community", another trick).  And it is not that she is blind to the reality:-

we failed to understand the deep despair that is the very basis of Islamic fundamentalism, or the ideology that sanctifies a bloody dream over human life, the willingness to suffer lengthy periods of shortage and a hard siege for faith, and the choice of the promised future in paradise over the future you could build with your own two hands in this world.

but she simply wants to see another reality so that Israel should yield and surrender to it enemies:-

Hamas is not a terror organization. It is a well-disciplined army of paid soldiers. It's an education system saturated with incitement. It is hospitals and police, creches and manufacturing, tunnels and parks, prisons and government. It has a military wing and a political wing and they're incredibly coordinated. No targeted assassination so far has been able to put a dent in Hamas' determination or in its ability to hurt us as it sees fit. Whether we like it or not, it is a state coming into being, or at least a part of one, 

What she ignores is what this portends:

it has an unequivocal ideology that refuses to go away

She assumes that it indeed will go away if we give in, and negotiate with Hamas, reconize it and ignore that it wants, desires and acts toward the goal of we Jews going away.

Terror or not, it is an organization that wants to kill Jews.

And Melamed's post-Zionism won't help.  Iindeed, it is not at all helpful and, in truth, will harm us .

^

Can We Tolerate a Tollerton?

In something called The Conversation*, Dr. David Tollerton writes against Eli Weisel.

Tollerton lectures in "Jewish Studies and Contemporary Biblical Cultures and his two main research interests are (i) religious responses to the Holocaust and (ii) uses of the Bible in relation to modern identities, conflicts and concepts of blasphemy".

Here is his lead in to his article:

From debates concerning the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to the 1967 Six Day War’s titular reference to the days of creation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has often been made to resonate with biblical images and language.

"Titular reference"?

The war lasted ... six days, no?  Is that a joke on his part?  Should they have called it the "War of the Three Week Waiting Period"?  

As for "debates concerning the Temple Mount", actually the role of Mount Moriah and Jewish national renaissance can be traced back, in the modern period, to Rabbis Kalischer, Akiba Eiger, the Chatam Sofer in the early 19th century in connection with the revival of sacrificial service and then in the 1920s involving Rabbis Kook and Hirschhorn concerning permitting entrance into the Temple Mount.  Tollerton is not exactly scholarly in this instance.

But to his central point:

to frame the debate in terms of biblical descriptions of child sacrifice is unhelpful. In one passage, Wiesel creates a three-way comparison between Hamas, the child-sacrificing Moloch-worshippers of the Hebrew Bible, and the mass-murder of Jewish children during the Holocaust.

Tollerton does not mention the 160 children sacrificed in tunneling the "smuggling tunnels" and I do not have up-to-date figures on the "terror tunnels" but they should be in the dozens (and we won't mention the Gazan Arabs killed by Hamas rockets falling short or exploding on launch as, perhaps, Tollerton would refer to them as "sacrifices").  In writing so, he misrepresents Weisel's advert.  Without this relevant framework, Tollerton is quite unfair to argue with Weisel, especially in an organ whose readers, I am presuming, are primed to be anti-Israel and this only adds fuel.

Tollerton is buzzed by the Bible.  It's his right.  He can deconstruct as much as he wants and others can deconstruct his destruction (no misspelling).  But not to misuse the good book and its imagery as well as its basic moral message for mankind, including Muslims.

Tollerton, in the past, has written about blasphemy using the

interesting interface between [the Monty Python film] Life of Brian and historical scholarship on the period, consideration of such debates in late Second Temple Judaism also highlights in more general terms how unstable concepts of blasphemy can be during times of social upheaval. 

This present script of his does injustice to his academic thesis as well as to the reality of Hamas. Or, perhaps, his academic thesis, as applied to current political events is colored by his ... political outlook?

Even if he dismisses the applicability of a Biblical paraphrasing to describe what is happening in Gaza, Hamas surely is engaged in child sacrifice, the ritual sacrifice of Jewish children.  And I think the Nazis acted similarly.

And for this, shame on Tollerton and, how a university tolerates Tollerton is beyond me.

_____________

*

The Conversation is "an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community and delivered direct to the public.  Our team of professional editors work with university, CSIRO and research institute experts to unlock their knowledge for use by the wider public...Our aim is to allow for better understanding of current affairs and complex issues...We only allow authors to write on a subject on which they have proven expertise...Since our launch in March 2011, we’ve grown to become one of Australia’s largest independent news and commentary sites. Around 35% of our readers are from outside Australia."

P.S.

I received this comment which I decide belongs inside the post:

His central premise in any case goes unargued.  He presents it here:

“Rather than seeing Hamas fighters as human beings driven by varying mixtures of rage, desperation and extremist ideology, they become players in an ongoing battle between good and evil that is epic in scope and primordial in origin.” 
And that’s bad why?  Tollerton doesn’t say.  He merely avers that Wiesel’s approach for drawing analogies and framing moral lessons “provides little insight into messy realities.”  A complete dodge.
How about this: Hamas fighters, as morally responsible human beings, should give up rage, desperation, and extremism and get a job.  Argue against that, Tollerton.

_____________

UPDATE

Not children but it is sacrificial in a sense.  In other socieites, they could have been called "activists promoting peace and coexistence through anti-terror activity".

^

From Post-Zionism To Retro-Anti-Zionism

Here's a headline:-

More than 1,000 Jaffa residents protest
Jewish settlement project being built in the heart of the city

"Settlement"?

So, those things are not restricted to beyond-the-Green-Line-Israel?

On May 1-2, 1921, Arabs killed Jewish immigrants and others staying at a hostel as well as Yosef-Chaim Brenner, the novelist, in a nearby orchard in Jaffa.

The "killing of Zionism" continues.

Remind me, was it the "Arab port" of Jaffa from where Jonah attempted to flee his mission? A "Palestinian port"? Was Jonah a "Palestinian"?

^

That's Telling Them

Bark and Co. vs. the post-Zionist radical, progressive far-out Left

...Einat Wilf, one of the four Labor members of Parliament who joined Mr. Barak in the Independence faction...said in a telephone interview that the new government arrangement would send a signal to the Palestinians that there was little point in waiting for the Netanyahu government to fall apart.

“I don’t belong to the camp that believes Israel is solely responsible for the failure of these negotiations,” Ms. Wilf said. 'The Palestinians bear responsibility for not entering the talks. Some people have sent them a message to wait around for a new government.'

and

Mr. Barak and his four colleagues said in a statement announcing the formation of their new movement...'We also did not accept the self-flagellation of those who see the State of Israel as exclusively responsible for the lack of a diplomatic process.'

Source
^

Beinisch Goes Slumming

Here's Justice Dorit Beinisch (center right), President of Israel’s Supreme Court, meeting with major funders of post-Zionism, anti-Yesha campaign leaders such as Ford Foundation President Susan Berresford (center left). In the back row from left to right are Israel Executive Director of the New Israel Fund, Eliezer Yaari; NIF Board VP in Israel Neta Ziv; Ford Foundation Deputy Vice President, Program Management David Chiel; Ford Israel Fund Director Aaron Back; and NIF CEO Larry Garber.



Wow.

(Kippa tip: INN)

- - -

Benny Morris' 180-Degree Turnabout

Avi Beker points out how Benny Morris has basically, made a "Return to the fold" in his historiographical presentation of the Israel-Arab conflict.

Highlights:

...the post-Zionist era, has come to an end. The historical debate between Zionists and anti-Zionists hasn't changed, but it is no longer possible to hide behind claims of a Zionist conspiracy to expel Israel's Arabs and ethnic cleansing of the area west of the Jordan River. It seems that a group of historians, who actually did not offer any new insights into Zionist historiography, hid behind a fictitious structure of post-modernist realizations that became a system for distorting proofs and rewriting facts.

...More than anyone else, Morris provided the historical sources for the argument that the State of Israel was born as a result of a conspiracy to carry out the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. His books and articles provided the basis for an indictment of the State of Israel, something that helped the Palestinian and Arab leadership reject all peace efforts right after the Oslo Accords, at Camp David in 2000 and in discussions of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's peace proposal in 2008.

The narrative built by the New Historians changed the parameters of political negotiations: A peace agreement is not meant to correct the 1967 "occupation" and create a framework for territories in exchange for peace, but to atone for the atrocities of the nakba. It became apparent to all that the main obstacle is the problem of the right of return to all parts of the State of Israel.

...suddenly, 20 years later, Morris discovered that the Arabs had declared a jihad against Zionism already back in 1948. He explains his new approach as stemming from the opening of archives, including the Israel Defense Forces' archive, which were closed to researchers until now. He also adds that "in the current book, I placed the refugee problem within the overall context of the War of Independence," and with the help of recent studies, "I tried to present a new and comprehensive description of the war, and primarily of the connections between the military processes and the diplomatic processes."

"A new description"? The exact opposite, in fact...The dismissal of the threats of jihad was intentional and critical for the rewriting in order to turn the nakba into a "holocaust", but the jihad was apparent to all: threats of annihilation were heard from all sides and even from the dais of the UN in 1947 and 1948.

The mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini repeated it over and over again; and religious scholars in Cairo issued an official manifesto calling for jihad two days after the resolution on the partition plan was passed on November 1947...

An Artisitc Expression of Post-Zionism

What happens when ideological fervor melts:




(found in an office building in Jerusalem. Photo credit: Y. Medad)

Herzl Is Not Wanted

It reads:

"We Don't Want; We Don't Need"

Ah, Post-Zionism.



Spotted in Tel Aviv

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

A close collaborator sent me this:

It’s more in the direction of “If you don’t want, you don’t have to.” like ירצו יאכלו, לא ירצו לא יאכלו.

In other words, if you don’t like Herzl, don’t bother.

The Cerebral Exile or, The Forgetfullness of Being

Yishai Fleisher, a founder of Kumah, and a broadcaster at Israel National Radio (aka Arutz 7) has a great op-ed in Ynet:-

A state of exile

A methodical exile is taking place; the exile of location and exile of the mind


Excerpts -

...But what then is a full exile? A full exile is when the connection between the land and the people is forgotten. If there is no memory of prior ownership, no longing to return, no stories told to children, then the exile brought about by an enemy nation which wished to impose a disconnect between the people and its land comes into full effect. If the very fact that the nation has been exiled is forgotten, then that is true exile.

The idea that the loss of collective national memory brings true exile has a surprising corollary: a nation can be in a state of exile even while living on its original soil! Like a person suffering from amnesia while sitting in his own house – a nation may be so utterly without memory that it has no idea that it is at home.

Such is the case in Israel today. The memory that has been carried in our collective conscience for two thousand years has steadily worn away and no longer serves to keep the exile at bay...

...As we have noted, physical exile is one thing, but cerebral exile, the cutting off of memory is the final guillotine of exile. Here, the groundwork for forced forgetting has been in the works for decades. On the one hand, the Jewish people's historical connection to the land has been systematically un-taught. In schools, many Jewish children learn to hate the Bible, learn a revisionist anti-Zionist history, and are simply never taught the stories and the emotional connection to places like Rachel's Tomb. On the other hand, a new milieu and accompanying lingo fill the void left in the young mind: Occupation, Palestine, Peace, and Post-Zionism. Our history and with it, our emotional connection to our land, is being erased.

...Today, those who still teach and preach a connection with these places are branded extremists, so their message makes little sense to our people. Say the word "Hebron" to a young disconnected Israeli and he will only conjure up an occupied Arab city with a few cantankerous crazy Jews who cause all the problems. The majesty of Hebron's history from Abraham to King David to the first Hasidic settlement of 18th century, to the murderous Arab riots of 1929, to the valiant return in 1967, is completely lost on him. It is no wonder then that for him it makes sense to "give it back" since nothing seems to tie us to these places in the first place.

Today's post–Zionist leaders have made Israel into a State of Exile, exiling our people from their homes, exiling our land by cutting it off and giving it away, and exiling the minds and hearts of the Jewish people by teaching them to forget. After waiting for two thousand years to return, Jews are being taught that Hebron isn't Jewish, that Bethlehem isn't Jewish, that Nablus isn't Jewish, that the Temple Mount isn't Jewish. A methodical exile is taking place, the exile of place and the exile of mind.

Can't Get a Handle on Handel

As I am on the board of Israel Academic Monitor, I'd like you to see this catch of theirs:-

They found a PhD candidate at the Cohn Institute for History and Philosophy of Sciences and Ideas, Tel Aviv University, one Ariel Handel, whose PhD thesis is about space, time and their relations at the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Wow. Wow-wee. Okay, I know you won't believe it but here's a summary of his gobbledygook:-

Space and Time in the Occupied Territories, Uncertainty as Control Technology

The Paper’s main argument would be that Israel is controlling the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) by systematically dismantling the relation between space and time, or, in other words, by disassembling the correlation between spatial absolute value and usage value.

Absolute value is what can be measured in uniform distance units, which are, basically, indifferent to the occurrences in the measured space: for example, aerial
distance between two points. Usage value, in contrast, deals with spatial actual usage possibilities. If between two points stands impassable wall, no matter what is the absolute distance from one to another, the actual distance, considering the usage value, would be infinite. Spatial usage value always embodies time in it. Paving road between two points does not change the distance in kilometers, but shortens drastically the actual distance between them. In the same manner, blocking road lengthens the actual distance by containing time postponement within it.

I will attempt to analyze few basic modes of spatial control (i.e. clear sites in which space itself takes major part in control shaping), which are used for describing Israel’s control mode in the OPT: prison, ghetto, siege, camp and “movement policing”. The comparison would be done by spatial analysis tools, putting emphasis on relations between inside and outside, opacity and permeability,
characteristics and locations of supervision points and the visibility relations (what is been watched, where from, where to and why). The analysis would show that although having few similarities among each of the mentioned models none of them fully describes the situation in the OPT, which can be understood only by referring to what I would like to call “technologies of spatial uncertainty”.

He goes on but I had to stop.

Great News

Finally, some sense and commitment to public needs:-

The Judicial Appointments Committee (JAC) will conduct first-ever hearings this week for all 12 candidates for the High Court bench, during which candidates will have to state their judicial worldview, and will be asked questions such as their stand on the Law of Return or post-Zionism.

Committee members are divided over the extent of the hearing, and whether candidates should be required to state their views on judicial activism and other issues.

Some panel members plan to ask the candidates questions on the extent of interference the candidate believes is acceptable in security issues other semi-political questions. Other committee members who are judges oppose a "too invasive" hearing of the type accepted in the United States for candidates for the Supreme Court.

Source.

Micha, Rats and All

A certain Micha Leshem of Haifa University's Psychology Department who specializes in...rats in his studies of the role of emotional activation in memory formation. Using a rat model he assesses the interactions between the hippocampus, amygdale, prefrontal and entorhinal cortex, when learning under different levels of emotional activation, recently made this claim:-

Zionism is the only ideology spawned in the heyday of European imperialism 3 centuries back that has remained immutable.

(his full opinion I've addended at the bottom)

I am sure this has nothing to do with Haifa University that it seems to attract this mutant type of opinion but I don't think he is correct. [Here's his signature against a supposed 2003 IDF 'invasion' of the PNC territory] [and here's his opinion of Tali Fahima: Prof. Micah Leshem, University of Haifa - I endorse the appeal to treat Tali like any other untried detainee and with full cognizance of her rights under the law. Vindictiveness by state authority is a travesty and unacceptable, and those individuals in the prison service who are harassing Tali will have to answer for it.]

Leshem (ironically, one of the precious stones of the breastplate worn over the High Priest's ephod, the Urim v'Tumim, a comparison I am sure would shock him), ignores the activities of people like himself and many other of those in academia who are attempting quite vigorously, with a bit of success, to alter Zionism.

From a pioneering movement, it's become all powered-out.
From a messianic movement, it's become all messy.
From a restorative movement, it's now all about restoring land to Arabs, land they conquered and tried to keep from us.
From a redmptive movement, they've made it irredeeming.
From a movement providing security for Jews, their kowtowing moralism is endangering Jewish lives.
From a movement to establish the Jewish National Homeland, they want to establish a second Arab polity in the area allotted for the Jewish state and want to leave all the Arabs in the Jewish state while removing all the Jews from the area of the Arab states.

Oh, it has changed and altered and mutated alright.

Micha and friends and associates are post-post Zionists.


----------------------------------------------

Subject:Israel's right to be racist
Sent: 22 March 2007 19:08:14

Well I take issue with the erstwhile correspondents. Zionism is the only ideology spawned in the heyday of European imperialism 3 centuries back that has remained immutable. And this despite the momentous changes that have occurred in Western thinking in the past 120 years, and in the face of the momentous events that have impacted us Jews - the early C19 pogroms and mass Westward emigration, the HOLOCAUST, the establishment of the Jewish State with a war every decade of its existence, excepting the one decade wherein we engaged in genuine peace efforts. Such is the mother of all Dogmas. And as such, it interprets every event as reinforcing its worldview.

Anyone attempting to rethink Zionism is castigated and pilloried by its adherents, which are most of Israel's Jewish sector, and our instruments of governance and media. Nevertheless, minimum serious consideration reveals it a folklore ideology fit for the kindergarten where we are first fed its tenets, and the grave, to which most of us carry it unchanged, unchallenged, incontrovertible.

The actual concept of a state with a single monolithic ideology to which all its citizens are required to be loyal is extraordinary. Very few such states remain, Israel, Iran and North Korea. The Democratic credentials of all three are looked at askance by the vast majority of people outside those countries, but sincerely, enthusiastically, and with profound conviction believed in by the majority citizenry inside them, professorships notwithstanding.

As to the essence of the debate, I would be grateful if any of you dogmatic Zionists can please explain how a State can constitutionally discriminate in favour of one ethnic group, whilst not discriminating against another, which is what Masad argues using impolite terms.

You are like the parents of Petah Tikva all strongly supported the ingathering of the Jews to our country, and in the same interview explained they did not want Ethiopian Jews in their children's schools, or in their neighborhoods. Oh - also, they insisted they were not racist. That is true-blooded street-level Zionism, robust in both rationale and denial. In our National Narrative it excuses our eviction of the natives, our army's rampage in the occupied territories, and it is epitomized by the Settlers and their war-cries "We are the true Zionists!" and "We are all settlers!". Indeed, amen, there is no denying that, despite the occasional feeble protestations that perhaps that is taking it a bit too far.

That is the legacy, the inherent contradiction, and the logical outcome of Zionism preaching a Jewish state. It was probably a wrenching requirement in the darkest period of our history, buttressed by the mores and rulers of the time, but why, today, we cannot be a Democratic State where the (majority) Jews can have whatever ethnic-religious-community services we require without incessantly oppressing and dispossessing other humans is beyond me. Do we really need Jewish-only soldiers. Jewish-only policemen, Jewish only politicians, Jewish-only electricity workers, Jewish-only lecturers, Jewish-only students, Jewish-preferring laws, Jewish only land
rights, and in addition, command unwavering allegiance to the one, state sanctioned, all-pervading ideology in order for us to live in a country where our children can be decently educated, which is clean and green, where health and social services are equitable and effective, where our future is considered, planned, and invested, where our culture can once more be respected, and which can join the community of nations on an equal footing?

The evidence speaks quite emphatically to the contrary.