Your opinion of the State of Israel- Have your religious views affected it?

by nvrgnbk 24 Replies latest members adult

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  nvrgnbk

  In light of some discussion taking place on JWD regarding the situation with Iran, I thought this would be of interest.

  Here is another perspective on the state of Israel.

  Is it anti-semitic?

  Is it reasonable?

  Your thoughts, please.

  Famous Author Excoriates Israel

  bySirocco
  Sat Aug 5th, 2006 at 12:23:35 PM EST

  Crossposted from my blog.

  Jostein Gaarder, the author of the global literary phenomenon Sophie's World (printed in 26m copies in 53 languages), launches a scorching attack on Israel in Aftenposten, Norway's paper of record. Gaarder, a historian of ideas, describes himself as a friend of the Jewish people but doubts whether Israel truly is the same. Suffice it to say that this will not appear in the New York Times anytime soon.

  The form of Gaarder's condemnation is inspired by Amos, the first Judaic prophet whose message is preserved in scroll (ca. 750 B.C.). Quoting Wikipedia: "The central idea of the book of Amos according to most scholars is that Yahweh puts his people on the same level as the nations that surround it -- Yahweh expects the same morality of them all."

  God's chosen people

  Jostein Gaarder, Aftenposten 05.08.06

  From the Norwegian by Sirocco

  There is no turning back. It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel. We could not recognize the South African apartheid regime, nor did we recognize the Afghan Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein's Iraq or the Serbs' ethnic cleansing. We must now get used to the idea: The state of Israel in its current form is history.

  We do not believe in the notion of God's chosen people. We laugh at this people's fancies and weep over its misdeeds. To act as God's chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.

  Limits to tolerance

  There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance. We do not believe in divine promises as justification for occupation and apartheid. We have left the Middle Ages behind. We laugh uneasily at those who still believe that the God of flora, fauna, and galaxies has selected one people in particular as his favorite and given it funny stone tablets, burning bushes, and a license to kill.

  We call child murderers 'child murderers' and will never accept that such have a divine or historic mandate excusing their outrages. We say but this: Shame on all apartheid, shame on ethnic cleansing, shame on every terrorist strike against civilians, be it carried out by Hamas, Hizballah, or the state of Israel!

  Unscrupulous art of war

  We acknowledge and pay heed to Europe's deep responsibility for the plight of the Jews, for the disgraceful harassment, the pogroms, and the Holocaust. It was historically and morally necessary for Jews to get their own home. However, the state of Israel, with its unscrupulous art of war and its disgusting weapons, has massacred its own legitimacy. It has systematically flouted International Law, international conventions, and countless UN resolutions, and it can no longer expect protection from same. It has carpet bombed the recognition of the world. But fear not! The time of trouble shall soon be over. The state of Israel has seen its Soweto.

  We are now at the watershed. There is no turning back. The state of Israel has raped the recognition of the world and shall have no peace until it lays down its arms.

  Without defense, without skin

  May spirit and word sweep away the apartheid walls of Israel. The state of Israel does not exist. It is now without defense, without skin. May the world therefore have mercy on the civilian population. For it is not civilian individuals at whom our doomsaying is directed.

  We wish the people of Israel well, nothing but well, but we reserve the right not to eat Jaffa oranges as long as they taste foul and are poisonous. It was endurable to live some years without the blue grapes of apartheid.

  They celebrate their triumphs

  We do not believe that Israel mourns forty killed Lebanese children more than it for over three thousand years has lamented forty years in the desert. We note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs like they once cheered the scourges of the Lord as "fitting punishment" for the people of Egypt. (In that tale, the Lord, God of Israel, appears as an insatiable sadist.) We query whether most Israelis think that one Israeli life is worth more than forty Palestinian or Lebanese lives.

  For we have seen pictures of little Israeli girls writing hateful greetings on the bombs to be dropped on the civilian population of Lebanon and Palestine. Little Israeli girls are not cute when they strut with glee at death and torment across the fronts.

  The retribution of blood vengeance

  We do not recognize the rhetoric of the state of Israel. We do not recognize the spiral of retribution of the blood vengeance with "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." We do not recognize the principle of one or a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye. We do not recognize collective punishment or population-wide diets as political weapons. Two thousand years have passed since a Jewish rabbi criticized the ancient doctrine of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

  He said: "Do to others as you would have them do to you." We do not recognize a state founded on antihumanistic principles and on the ruins of an archaic national and war religion. Or as Albert Schweitzer expressed it: "Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose."

  Compassion and forgiveness

  We do not recognize the old Kingdom of David as a model for the 21st century map of the Middle East. The Jewish rabbi claimed two thousand years ago that the Kingdom of God is not a martial restoration of the Kingdom of David, but that the Kingdom of God is within us and among us. The Kingdom of God is compassion and forgiveness.

  Two thousand years have passed since the Jewish rabbi disarmed and humanized the old rhetoric of war. Even in his time, the first Zionist terrorists were operating.

  Israel does not listen

  For two thousand years, we have rehearsed the syllabus of humanism, but Israel does not listen. It was not the Pharisee that helped the man who lay by the wayside, having fallen prey to robbers. It was a Samaritan; today we would say, a Palestinian. For we are human first of all -- then Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. Or as the Jewish rabbi said: "And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others?" We do not accept the abduction of soldiers. But nor do we accept the deportation of whole populations or the abduction of legally elected parliamentarians and government ministers.

  We recognize the state of Israel of 1948, but not the one of 1967. It is the state of Israel that fails to recognize, respect, or defer to the internationally lawful Israeli state of 1948. Israel wants more; more water and more villages. To obtain this, there are those who want, with God's assistance, a final solution to the Palestinian problem. The Palestinians have so many other countries, certain Israeli politicians have argued; we have only one.

  The USA or the world?

  Or as the highest protector of the state of Israel puts it: "May God continue to bless America." A little child took note of that. She turned to her mother, saying: "Why does the President always end his speeches with 'God bless America'? Why not, 'God bless the world'?"

  Then there was a Norwegian poet who let out this childlike sigh of the heart: "Why doth Humanity so slowly progress?" It was he that wrote so beautifully of the Jew and the Jewess. But he rejected the notion of God's chosen people. He personally liked to call himself a Muhammedan.

  Calm and mercy

  We do not recognize the state of Israel. Not today, not as of this writing, not in the hour of grief and wrath. If the entire Israeli nation should fall to its own devices and parts of the population have to flee the occupied areas into another diaspora, then we say: May the surroundings stay calm and show them mercy. It is forever a crime without mitigation to lay hand on refugees and stateless people.

  Peace and free passage for the evacuating civilian population no longer protected by a state. Fire not at the fugitives! Take not aim at them! They are vulnerable now like snails without shells, vulnerable like slow caravans of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees, defenseless like women and children and the old in Qana, Gaza, Sabra, and Chatilla. Give the Israeli refugees shelter, give them milk and honey!

  Let not one Israeli child be deprived of life. Far too many children and civilians have already been murdered.
• 

  Terry

  The premise, if you will, of Israel's existence is beyond existential; it is rooted in megalomania wrought over 6,000 years of ritual self-hypnosis!

  They are no less deserving of existence.

  Hardly a nation around today doesn't have a self-myth and a massive sense of entitlement.

  The symbiosis of Israel/America is problematic for the Arabs, however.

  The firepower of Israel will cause them to scramble into mad rejoindeer as a matter of policy.

  The tail chases the dog, as always.

  Rational government plagues Israel, in one sense. They are constrained not to act theocratically!

  Irrational government on the part of their surrounding neighbors has only fear of annhilation at the hands of the West as their constraint.

  All hardly a basis for diplomacy, treaty or ideology!

  The Middle East is impervious to logic!
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  nvrgnbk

  The Middle East is impervious to logic!

  Amen!
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  Merry Magdalene

  Eggs Fail To Recognize Omelette's Right To Exist

  One of the Quartet's conditions for dealing with a Hamas-led government of the Palestinian Authority is that it must "recognize Israel". Quite often, this demand that Hamas recognize Israel morphs into the requirement that Palestinians must "recognize Israel's right to exist". This sounds similar superficially, but really is a quite different demand altogether. And it's one that even the most amenable, "moderate" Palestinian is unlikely to comply with, let alone Hamas.

  "Israel's right to exist" is code for a very specific demand. It isn't asking the Palestinians to recognize that the state of Israel exists and has the right to security within mutually agreed borders (which is essentially what the PLO has accepted). And it doesn't mean that the Palestinians must recognize an Israeli state where Jewish and non-Jewish citizens alike enjoy full rights of citizenship (as proposed in the partition resolution of 1947, in which "Jewish Palestine" was essentially a binational state). When Israel and its supporters demand that Palestinians must "recognize Israel's right to exist" they specifically mean that Palestinians must acknowledge Israel's "right" to exist as a Jewish state on the lands of former Mandate Palestine.

  Why would that be a problem for Palestinians? Well, bear in mind that when Zionists established their first settlement in Palestine in 1882, the population of the land that they proposed to turn into a Jewish state was not in fact Jewish, but 95% Muslim and Christian Arab. Bear in mind too that throughout the twentieth century, Palestinians maintained one of the highest birthrates on earth. So even though the proponents of a Jewish state managed in mid-century to create a Jewish majority by expelling large numbers of Arabs, within a couple of generations they are – even without allowing the expelled population to return - once again facing the prospect of a Palestinian majority. So creating a Jewish state in Palestine comes down to an endless battle to gerrymander a Jewish majority where one does not naturally exist.

  There are various ways you can do this. You can do it by killing off or expelling the majority population, till it is reduced to a manageable size, as in 1948. (And then you can even afford to give the vote to the remnant left behind, and proclaim yourself a democracy, because you have made sure that the natives are so reduced in number they can never democratically bring about any change in their status). Or you can do it by simply disenfranchising large numbers of the "undesirable" population in the land you claim for your Jewish state, as is the current situation for millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. These ugly means are not an unfortunate by-product of an Arab propensity for "terrorism" or "anti-semitism", forced upon unfortunate Zionists who would otherwise have preferred to peacefully coexist; they are absolutely intrinsic to creating a Jewish-majority state in Palestine. They are simply what you have to do in order to create a regime that favours one kind of people over another, in a land where the "other" people are the majority. Presumably, for Zionism, the end goal of creating a Jewish state in Palestine is of such import that its benefits outweigh the "collateral damage" that this inevitably involves for the Palestinian population.

  When you demand that Palestinians acknowledge the "right" of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, you are asking them to say that they too think Zionism is worth all this "collateral damage". You are asking them to acknowledge that it was and is morally right to do all the things that were and are necessary for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, even though these necessary things include their own displacement, dispossession and disenfranchisement. You are asking them to internalize the fact that they have less right to live freely on their own ancestral lands where they have lived in unbroken continuity for millenia, than an immigrant to the Middle East who, by an accident of birth, happens to have been born into a "preferred" religion.

  While every nation's tragedies are unique, the fact is that the Palestinians are not the only people who have had their modern national consciousness shaped by catastrophe. African-Americans have been shaped by slavery, Jewish Israelis by the Holocaust, and present-day South Africans by apartheid. But Palestinians are the only people that are told they must recognize the "rightness" of the catastrophe that befell them. And we demand this because, in the U.S., Zionism is the prism through which we look at the Arab-Israeli conflict. For us, Zionism is worthy and normative, and it is very difficult for us to acknowledge that for the people who have been – and inevitably had to be – on the receiving end of it, Zionism is cruel, and violent, and racist. But try to imagine what you would think if you heard someone demand that – in the interests of reconciliation with their former oppressors – African-Americans must acknowledge not only that the slave trade existed, but that it had a "right" to exist. Or that black south Africans must recognize the "right" of apartheid to exist. Or Jews, the Holocaust. Just by describing the scenario, we can see that we would be demanding something grotesque. But we take it for granted that the Palestinians must do it; and condemn them for anti-semitism when they refuse.

  Usually when you hear the Israeli government say, "Of course we want to talk, but first….", you are simply hearing excuses from a government that has no intention of ever entering meaningful talks with the Palestinians, and can always come up with one more precondition to ensure that they don't have to. But the demand, "first they must recognize Israel's right to exist", is a precondition of a different kind altogether. It goes much deeper than a desire to avoid negotiating, and arises instead from a need to avoid recognizing the original sin at the heart of Zionism, which is that it could be realised only by destroying the people already in Palestine.

  I wrote in an earlier post – Islamofascists – about the tendency of Zionists to present Zionism as merely a project to establish a national homeland for the Jewish people, while leaving out the rather important point that it is actually a project to create a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, which already had an indigenous, non-Jewish population. For a long time, Israelis simply denied that there was a problem – maintaining a contradictory narrative that said that the Palestinians didn't exist, but also that (despite not existing) the Palestinians "left" in 1948 because they wanted to, not because they were expelled. But Israel's own New Historians put an end to those fictions, leaving Israelis with two choices. Either acknowledge the catastrophe that creating a Jewish state inflicted on the Palestinians, express regret for the suffering it caused, and discuss with them in good faith where both peoples can go from here. (And really, if you read the moderate kind of wording that the two sides were working on in Taba in relation to the refugee issue, you can see that nobody was asking Israel to rend its clothes or don sackcloth and ashes over this). Or deal with it by pretending you have nothing to regret, and beating the Palestinians as hard as you can in the hope that they will eventually tell you, "it's OK, it doesn't really matter"; which is what the "right to exist" precondition boils down to.

  But the second option is not going to happen. No matter how much you hurt them, the Palestinians are never going to internalize the claim that their individual human rights and their collective national rights are inherently inferior to someone else's, merely because of their failure to have a Jewish mom. They are never going to tell you that it was all right to dispossess them, just because this will make you feel better about the nagging doubt over your own legitimacy that is eating away at you. Palestinians are willing to reach a negotiated settlement in which the two parties will agree on what terms they will coexist, then legally recognize the existence of each other and the right of each to live in security within the framework they have mutually agreed. That is the only kind of recognition that can realistically be demanded of the Palestinians. They are not going to become Zionists in order to save Israelis from having to confront the skeletons in their cupboard.

  If Israelis feel such a crisis of national legitimacy that they need someone to hug them and tell them that what Zionism has done to the Palestinians doesn't really matter, they'd better find a therapist to do it, because the Palestinians won't. No Palestinian is ever going to tell them, "You're right, I am a lesser breed of human being, of course your rights are superior to mine" which, from a Palestinian perspective, is essentially what recognizing the "right" of Israel to exist as a Jewish state in Palestine entails.

  http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2007/03/eggs_fail_to_re.html

  ~Merry
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  stillajwexelder

  or you have two states - one palestinian and one israeli
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  nvrgnbk

  or you have two states - one palestinian and one israeli
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  IP_SEC

  or have no States... oh well, we arent ready for that yet are we.

  Please come aquarius.
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  nvrgnbk

  oh well, we arent ready for that yet are we.

  Ummmm.

  That would be a "NO".
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  bluesapphire

  Two states on one piece of land? That's like saying we will have two countries: One the USA and the other the Indigenous peoples but both on the same land.

  Israel is guilty of nothing less than "manifest destiny" all over again.
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  IP_SEC

  That would be a "NO".

  F#ck you nvr!! You just wait 'til 2012... then you'll see.