"In April 2010, he took out advertisements in four major newspapers, criticizing the Obama administration for pressuring the Netanyahu government to halt construction in Jewish neighborhoods located across the Green Line in East Jerusalem."
For me, as an Israeli Jew, I find him too compromised by nationalism to bother with. I'd much rather read Primo Levi or Paul Celan.
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel#Opinions_about_Jer...
So often it feels like proponents of questionable Israeli policies seem to use the Holocaust, Israel's fight for survival through the endless wars from its creation through the 1970s to justify an aggressive and hostile stance.
Why is this?
Because this criticism is too often intertwined with attacks not on israeli policies, but on Israel's right to exist. And yes, saying that jews don't deserve a nation state is definetly anti-semitic.
> So often it feels like proponents of questionable Israeli policies seem to use the Holocaust, Israel's fight for survival through the endless wars from its creation through the 1970s to justify an aggressive and hostile stance.
Because fight for survival and hostile stance are directly related.
Ask yourself: is average citizen of a country neighboring yours sees you as an enemy? Have he or his parents gone to war against you? Will he help you if you get attacked? Or may he'll be glad to see you die?
Being peaceful and trusting is a privilege that Israel can't afford.
Let's say extremes from both sides of any issue in general tend to over-exaggerate...
You seriously think that the worst part is unfair propaganda by Zionists that exists to such an extent that it overwhelms any countervailing anti-Semitic reworking of anti-Semitism into slanting of news against Israel? Given the huge size of Arab and Moslem populations around the world compared to Jewish populations, the survey results that show their complete acceptance of anti-Semitism, and given the long long and recent history of anti-Semitism all across Europe... given that, to what do you attribute this "worst part"? Are you alleging that the Jews control the media?
Also, while we are on the subject, what races are "some of you best friends"?
I'm not attempting to attack you personally or accuse you, just trying to shake your intellectual lapels a bit to reconsider your stance, for what I've noticed is that your question comes up in every single discussion of this issue, to the extent that it sounds like a mantra to me. Propaganda itself.
Peace.
Would you call the US aggressive and hostile? Would you call Russia aggressive and hostile? How about China? UK? France? South Korea? North Korea? Iran? Iraq? Lebanon? Turkey? (The list could go on and on)... Are these countries in the same situation you describe, i.e. fighting for their survival?
What exactly is the criteria to be considered aggressive and hostile? What would be a reasonable response to various security threats and hostile actions of others? If you apply that criteria fairly - that's fine. If you single out Israel, and filter the events to suit some agenda, maybe not so fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Jerusal...
See http://www.preventgenocide.org/genocide/officialtext-printer...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todesfuge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_This_Is_a_Man
I don't know anything better. They will change your life.
R.I.P.
"You who have not experienced their anguish, who do not speak their language and do not mourn their dead, think before you offend them, before you betray them.… Wait until the last survivor, the last witness, has joined the long procession of silent shadows whose judgment one day will resound and shake the earth and its Creator."
Eli's question is a continuation of the theological "Problem of Evil": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil
As a person of faith, Eli's question is still haunting in it's note of despair.
At least admitting that God does give us free will and does provide an afterlife, but doesn't step in when shit gets ugly in this life (and I mean levels of horrors you would have trouble believing actually exist) allows faith to continue with some acceptance of logic.
But the idea that everything bad is of man, and everything good is of God is a pretty untenable position, it seems to me.
But of course, I am not a man of faith, and my life is pretty good. So these aren't surprising positions I'm sure.
Demolition of Palestinian homes? In response to Palestinians murdering Israeli citizens; men, women, and children?
Carpet bombing? Like the targeted missile strikes in Gaza? Where they warn the targets before-hand, only to see those targets force civilians into the strike zone hoping for mass casualties?
Prison city? The one that had a flourishing tourism industry until Israel abandoned it and Hamas took over? The one that they supply water, electricity, and construction supplies to even though they are not paid for?
Discrimination against Palestinian Arabs? Like when they go out of their way to supply them with jobs? Like how there are Palestinian Arab Members of Knesset? Like how they are full citizens of the State?
Your bias is showing.
My rational side finds such a ideas entirely disturbing!
From a Christian viewpoint - God indeed isn't always interested in our (momentary) well being - only that we are saved in everlasting life.
Our more mystical faithfull would remind us that we each experience this world in the palm of God's hand - in that God could create a separate experience for each of us and that (perhaps) the suffering we witness isn't experienced in the way that we see.
I read PP as talking about the Turks present day treatment of the Kurds, not their previously reprehensible treatment of the Armenians. Are you excusing the way Kurds are treated by Turkey? (and Iraq and Iran and Syria)
I remember when the Holocaust was being discussed in school and having to read books like Night in school and I was actually fascinated by this; the depths of good and evil that people can do are simply unfathomable. A British journalist wrote about the aftermath of the Battle of Shanghai when he visited what was once a densely packed suburb, "I saw only 5 Chinese, who were old men, hiding in a French mission compound in tears."[1]
[1]https://books.google.com/books?id=zNN6M97vYMEC&pg=PA70&lpg=P...
But in the US and Canada, as far as I know, native Americans/first nation are welcome to be first party citizens, no longer forced to live on reservations? Not without an ugly history of oppression; but the "nation state" is mostly a fascist fiction anyway.
Few native people of the artic claim that they deserve to build a "nation state" - at the same time they organise for other rights, and today work quite well with the various states that govern the area.
The most sane parallell to the state of Israel is probably South-africa: it has shown that it is possible to move from an apartheid state to a more modern state that acknowledge all resident cultures. But as with South Africa, as long as the international community largely supports oppression, a peaceful coexistence is likely to remain out of reach. But hopefully popular opinion will turn in Israel before the genocide is complete; I've already heard former a Israeli helicopter pilot mentioned how he became a conscientious objector after fly-overs of the Gaza strip brought home the similarities to stories he'd been told about the Warsaw getthoes.
As for your examples; most of those are true for Europe (not being seen as an enemy, perhaps, but the war part). And would also apply to South Africa. And yet peace could be an option.
The occupied West Bank is land that was formerly claimed by--no, not by "Palestine", that wasn't actually a thing--the State of Jordan which also included the territory of Israel in its claimed territory; the state of Jordan gave up its claim to the West Bank when the people living there (according to them, "Jordanians", but people you know as Palestinians) were politically destabilizing to the government of Jordan. To stave off the political threat (look up Black September), the state of Jordan gave up its claim to the West Bank (and to Israel).
Israel only occupied the West Bank when Palestinian lawlessness and terrorist antipathy toward Israel resulted in numerous bloody attacks on the civilian population of Israel. Israel has a much better case for occupation/pacification than Russia does of its occupation and annexation of Ukraine. I (a non Jew) do believe that anti-Semitism is the root cause of so much more anger directed at Israel than is directed at (say) Russia. Think of other disputed territories around the globe. Only in the case of Israel is there so much bitterness by outsiders toward one side, the less violent side, the side that is actually a civilized democracy and obeys rule of law.
And now that I mention it, do you even know what Morocco has been doing for many years in Western Sahara? Look it up, look up Polisario... it's an ethnic conflict. People will read about that and tut-tut and say, wow, that's terrible what the Moroccans have been doing, but quickly return to condemning Israel. And they look at the Hutus and Tutsis and say "well, there is blame to go around on both sides", and now we turn our attention to the tiny state of Israel, largely surrounded by barbarous dictatorships who don't even treat their own citizens well, and low and behold, it's those terrible awful Israelis who are to blame, much moreso than the Russians or Moroccans. Somehow it doesn't seem like there is plenty of blame to go around in this case, eh?
I believe that there are two reasons for bitterness toward Israel.
1) anti Arab racism motivates the belief that "we can't expect Palestinians to behave any better" (hey, maybe we can't, but if you don't want me to accuse you of anti-Semitism, come out and say it)
2) anti Jewish racism motivates the belief that "still, that doesn't justify the way those people are reacting", even though we see plenty of other "peoples" around the world defending themselves.
What are the Israelis defending themselves against? Click around wikipedia for awhile and look at the sheer number of Palestinian attacks directed at Israel month in and month out every year for the past 35 years. Would you put up with that directed at you and yours?
Yes, but families are split along the borders and checkpoints that have been drawn up by Israel. As long as the territories are occupied, Israel, as the occupier, is responsible for basic human rights and needs in the occupied area. Especially when they stop trade going in, like the attack on ships headed for Gaza.
> 1) anti Arab racism motivates the belief that "we can't expect Palestinians to behave any better" (hey, maybe we can't, but if you don't want me to accuse you of anti-Semitism, come out and say it)
Look, the jews were right to use terrorist tactics in the Warsaw ghettoes, and I can understand why Palestinians (also Semites, by the way) resort to such tactics in the current conflict. ANC wasn't peaceful in South-Africa, and it can be argued that non-violence wouldn't have been able to, on its own, create the civil rights reforms we've seen in the US.
> 2) anti Jewish racism motivates the belief that "still, that doesn't justify the way those people are reacting", even though we see plenty of other "peoples" around the world defending themselves.
This is a little bit like saying the Nazis were worse, so why should we criticise how the British behaved in the Boer wars.
Israel is arguably a functioning, rich state with a strong military. It has the power to approach the situation differently than putting minors in indefinite detention for throwing rocks, for example.
Israel is no failed state - the main reason we think of the holocaust as terrible, isn't (in my mind) just the death toll and suffering, but the systematic nature of it. This isn't millions killed in ravaging civil war, but calculated atrocities.
Just because I want a peaceful resolution to the situation concerning Israel, doesn't mean I won't (or haven't) spoken out against Turkey or Iraq on the situation with the Kurds - to give another example. Or that I don't condemn the US for their many dirty wars.
> Only in the case of Israel is there so much bitterness by outsiders toward one side, the less violent side, the side that is actually a civilized democracy and obeys rule of law.
"The less violent side"?
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/15/world/middleea...
30 (mostly civilan) deaths to each Israeli? Yes, this is what you expect when you attack a mostly civilian population with trained soldiers armed with modern weapons.
I can accept that some people will argue that this is a "necessary" or "justified" response. But "less violent"? That is harder to accept. If this is "less violent" what would a "stronger" response look like?
> Because this criticism is too often intertwined with attacks not on israeli policies, but on Israel's right to exist. And yes, saying that jews don't deserve a nation state is definetly anti-semitic.
Can you explain this to me please? My roommate (who happened to be Jewish) and I in college always used to talk about this and generally disagreed with the common view. He never struck me as anti-Semitic.
It isn't necessarily a matter of "deserving" a nation state, but of displacing native peoples from their homeland to do so. If it was barren desert I'm not sure it would be such an issue.
In theory, criticizing a country and country's right to exist are different things.
In practice, usually people who are most vocal critics of Israel don't think it should exist in the first place.
> displacing native peoples from their homeland to do so
Which is an ugly half-truth. To put things in this way would require either ignorance of the region's history or some ugly dose of bias.
While I agree with you that believing that #1 shouldn't exist is anti-Semitic, I don't see how #2 is necessarily anti-Semitic, especially if the person expressing that view is Palestinian. I believe the Kurds also deserve their own state, but I don't see how that means that, say, the United States is obligated to give them Texas to start one in order to not be anti-Kurdish.
In any case, I, personally, don't believe in any country's "right" to exist. I'm not against any particular country's existence, I just don't think the term "right" applies to it. So am I anti-Semitic for extending that general belief to Israel, too?
You actually did not address how being against Israel's right to exist is equivalent to anti-Semitism, which was the intent of my question.
> Which is an ugly half-truth. To put things in this way would require either ignorance of the region's history or some ugly dose of bias.
Or simply disagreement. 'Bias' implies that your perspective is not itself similarly influenced by bias.
As I said, click around wikipedia for number of rocket attacks, number of terror attacks, etc. initiated by the Palestinians, mostly against civilians. Regardless of how many more Palestinians are getting killed as a result, it's Arabs and Palestinians who rejected every previous set of borders (including "pre-67"), and Arabs and Palestinians (OK, it's not just Arabs and Palestinians, many other Muslim nation states join in with anti-Semitic diatribes) who continue to say right out loud that their intent is to push Israel into the sea, and who continue an armed struggle against Israel's citizens and Israel's right to exist.
Israel today is an advanced, modern, technological country, so yes, they "win" the conflicts with the Palestinians (and Lebanese Shiites) if you measure "winning" in terms of bodycount (which you brought up). But if you measure unprovoked attacks, it is the Arabs by a landslide, and in case where Jewish extremists attack Arabs, Israel follows a policy of prosecuting their own citizens. BTW, Lebanese Christians are Arabs, so are the Druze, and so are the Bedouins, and they largely prefer the Israelis to the vicious treatment they receive from their Muslim neighbors, cooperating in many ways with the Israeli armed forces.
Is Israel perfect? Not by a long shot, but neither is any other people or nation.
I will respectfully indicate that it seems a little disingenuous to claim that attacks on Israel are "unprovoked". They follow a similar pattern to Israeli terror attacks on the British occupation government, and I would hope that there'd be room to find common ground among two prosecuted people, rather than simply replace one oppressor with another in the region.
What I mean by "unprovoked" is, if the Palestinians would stop attempting violence, the Israelis would stop attempting violence.
If the Israelis were to stop their violence... the Palestinians would just keep going; that's actually what's been happening.
Lack of dialogue is one of the cornerstones on which we build hatred, racism and violence. It is much harder to justify demolishing someone's family home in order to have a good killing field from your border wall, if you are friends with that family.
[ed eg: http://m.btselem.org/
I'm by no means saying Palestinians have a carte blanche - I'm just saying that calling the attacks "unprovoked" is a bit of a stretch?
Typically I don't like to engage in political discussion about the middle east because most people have no clue about the history of the region and interpret what's going on over there through some lens with a very shallow depth of field. That tends to apply to Israelis as well. That said I think antisemitism is still a concern that we have to speak out about and definitely some modern incarnations of antisemitism are directed towards Israel. That doesn't mean that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic but it's just something that makes things more complicated.
Just quickly, I am thinking that the fact there are Palestinians alive today who have been displaced renders the question much more urgent and potent than the problematic elimination of Native Americans >100 years ago, for example.
I must've misunderstood it then. Well, isn't it obvious? If you don't deny other ethnicities their nationhood and state, but somehow think that jews don't deserve the same treatment, how can it be not anti-semitic?
Otherwise, you need to argue that there is a higher moral value to giving the horribly oppressed Jewish people a state than the immorality of taking away the land of indigenous peoples. But that is a matter of judgement (esp. given anti-Semitism in the UK/US, esp. the UK, at the time leading to us not accepting them all as political refugees), not bigotry.
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007094 https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/jun/08/immigration.immig...