Here are the headlines from Mondoweiss for 11/26/2010:
- Israel conducts 'wave of demolitions,' including mosque, across West Bank
- When hope is lawful
- Is new Washington Post blogger, Jennifer Rubin, a conservative or a neoconservative?
Israel conducts 'wave of demolitions,' including mosque, across West Bank
Nov 25, 2010 03:23 pm | Philip WeissHappy Thanksgiving. How much more information do we need about the current Israeli regime? Where is Obama's outrage? Oh he can't muster any, doesn't have it in him. Remember Nir Rosen calling Israel a "rogue apartheid state"? What kind of people do this kind of thing? Reflect that the Jordan Valley, where many of these demolitions are happening, is the "security zone" Israel claims, unilaterally, endlessly expanding. Note too the military response to the popular committee members-- arrests for protesting landgrabs. Where are the American Jewish organizations rising up and saying, This must stop? From Joseph Dana's blog:
Israeli forces demolished Palestinian homes in the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills today in what seems as a wave of demolitions following yesterday's demolitions all across the West Bank. Non-violent leaders from Beit Ummar have also been arrested in night raids. Grassroots organizers Mousa and Yousef Abu Maria were arrested from their homes as harassment continues in Beit Ummar
After carrying demolitions in the villages of Qarawat Bani Hassan near Salfeet, al-Jiftlik in the Jordan Valley and Hizma near Jerusalem yesterday, Israeli bulldozers returned to the Jordan Valley today. At 6:30 this morning, Israeli Civil Administration bulldozers accompanied by soldiers and armored military jeeps entered the Jordan Valley village of Khirbet Yarza, east of Tubas, and demolished the village's mosque, a houses and four animal shelters. The demolitions rendered eleven people homeless.
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When hope is lawful
Nov 25, 2010 11:00 am | Sara NasrallahThey call us insane because we want the truth. They call us insane because they say we want too much. They say we are crazy because we do not settle for less. They say "take what you can get" as if we will be "getting" something.
If you ever defended the two state solution as a Palestinian, know that you are throwing away land. Know that land in the 48 borders was Palestine, and the only reason it is not today, is because of racism and greed.
For all the non Palestinian "activists" who believe the one state solution will not work, please, do not advise the Palestinians to leave what is lawfully theirs. If you want me to state why I think it is lawful and very legitimate, (other than the fact that it was taken forcefully, other than the fact that there are more than 4 million refugees waiting to go back, other than the fact that the one state solution is already in place along with a system of apartheid) the UN can explain it. The UN declaration of Human Rights article 13 states (I know this by heart)
"Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state, Everyone has the right to leave any country, including their own, and to return to their country." The refugees have a right to return, no debate needed about that.
To Chomsky's followers: I do not see Noam Chomsky as a leader on these issues, but as a Zionist, who supports and accepts Israel as an international Jewish state.
In an Israeli interview, Chomsky explains his stance: "Israel should have--should have--all the rights of a state in the international system, no more and no less."
But just the fact that Israel exists as a Jewish state is an issue. That fact cancels out the Palestinians and their rights in the international system, as Muslims and Christians. Chomsky does not mention where the Palestinians stand. .
When he does talk about the Palestinians, it is not a strong stance. He says the right of return is unfair for the refugees because it is false hope. Well people feed off of hope! The Palestinians live for this, they have hope and always possessed hope. Do you think we could have been able to stay strong for 60 years if hope was not there? So Chomsky's argument is for killing hope (because it is "unrealistic"), and therefore, killing the movement. It is as if he and others are lecturing, imposing ideas in activists' heads to kill off the hope. And I ask, why should Palestinians listen? Are they going to listen to the U.S., or the U.N. or the E.U. or maybe to Israel itself? No. I don't believe that Palestinians should even listen to other Arab countries (we all know Arab nationalism and "brotherhood" died the same day as President Nasser of Egypt ). And why listen to any "activist" or "friend" who will tell you to leave what you have stolen from you?
Here is another quote from Chomsky about the nature of his advocacy:
I will keep here to advocacy in the serious sense: accompanied by some kind of feasible program of action, free from delusions about "acting on principle" without regard to "realism" -- that is, without regard for the fate of suffering people.
If you take that statement apart it suggests that the "suffering people" need to stay and suffer where they are and not have any hope, so experience their misery, without hope. The problem with this is that he does not even talk about a feasible solution for the refugee issue. The refugees need to establish themselves where they are at now.
That might be possible-- except that many do not have equal rights because of their refugee status. They do not have proper paperwork, or they are stateless, or they get kicked out of where they are, or they are below the poverty line, and all these issues are not easily fixed. I know the refugees, and the issue is complicated, but the bottom line is that Chomsky's suggestion is not a feasible answer.
And therefore, hope is key, and this hope is not some crazy fantasy like growing wings or even winning the lottery kind of hope. No it is lawful hope, like the hope for the sun to rise every morning, rational, legitimate and righteous.
The fact is there is one state already implemented, so the Palestinians are only asking for equal rights in the land. Chomsky says that the right way to get to the "one state" is to sign the "two state" first. How is this a feasible way? In doing so the Palestinians will need to sign the "two state" and throw away all the land within the 48 borders, then find a way to regain it all? How? Are we going to flip the script and have Palestinians occupy what will be a fully legitimate Israel that the Palestinians and the international consensus agreed on?
The Palestinian movement is still in a fragile stage. There is no room for uncertainty, there is no room to question if the right of return is a good idea or not, or if the BDS movement is creating a cult (as Chomsky has also suggested). His belief on this issue is far from where the movement should be. We cannot settle for what is "realistic" because that means settling for what is most convenient to the U.S. and Israel. This issue is clear, and you are with us or against us.
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Is new Washington Post blogger, Jennifer Rubin, a conservative or a neoconservative?
Nov 25, 2010 09:20 am | Philip WeissHere's a report on the Washington Post's hiring of "conservative" blogger Jennifer Rubin. The report includes the announcement memo from WP Op-Ed editor Fred Hiatt. Some points of confusion:
--Rubin is regularly referred to as a conservative columnist. Is she against abortion and stem-cell research and does she dig Scalia? I don't know; I don't read her regularly. But I sense that's not what people mean....
--Isn't conservative a misnomer for neoconservative, and blind support for Israel? As Daniel Luban points out, this is Rubin's core position. She lives in the U.S. and writes for Commentary and thinks that all of Palestine belongs to the Jews, or some other hokum that rationalizes the killing of Palestinian noncombatants at a rate of one every other day in the Jim Crow Jewish hinterland. Israel is the core of her engagement; but of course the announcement and news story don't mention that angle. Here M.J. Rosenberg says that Rubin's politics boil down to contempt for Muslims.
--Rubin is being hired as a balance to Greg Sargent and Ezra Klein. Klein has taken some good stances on the issue. But I don't think it's front and center for him, and I think of him as being in the liberal Zionist camp. So does the Post have any bandwidth on the central intellectual question of the unending Israeli occupation and its effect on American foreign policy and the American image? Does it have anyone who is as concerned about the occupation and Zionism as Rubin is, but from the other side? Or as Andrew Sullivan said some months ago, Are there any anti-Zionists working in the Mainstream Media? And if not, why not? It's a completely legitimate position in an age of multicultural democracy. The former Saudi ambassador says our support for Israel is the root cause of Muslim antagonism, and Petraeus and Biden have offered tamer statements of the same idea in the last year; could a Post blogger/columnist be a dissenter on this question? I'm waiting.
By the way, Luban, whose headline is, "Will Pam Geller be next?" says that Rubin unlike Sargent and Klein is not a reporter, and the hire shows that the Post is self-destructing, making itself into a stables for a lot of wornout ideological nags, including Bill Kristol, Krauthammer, and Michael Gerson (though Luban blasts Rubin as anti-semitic for the piece I liked, her Commentary analysis of why Jews hate Palin, because we don't do manual work. I think the sociology of Jewish achievement/employment is central to understanding our political attitudes-- oy).
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The US will do nothing to stop this genocide. In fact the US will continue to support endless Wars for Israel, it all started nearly a decade ago under a false flag attack.
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