In a must-read post on settler violence, Hilzoy uttered the necessary mantra against trolls.
Obligatory disclaimer for Israel/Palestinian threads: No one should draw any conclusions from this post about my general views on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In particular, no one should infer from the fact that I wrote about settlers behaving despicably that I do not believe that any Palestinians have done things that are equally bad. I do. I am not on either the Israeli or the Palestinian side. If I have to choose sides t all, I side with those decent people in both groups who want peace, and against those in both groups who either practice violence or engage in injustice.
When it comes to settler issues there is no need to be cagey like this. People who support the long-term success of Israel as a state should absolutely detest the violent extremists who establish provocative, illegal settlements in Palestinian territory. Conversely those who want Israel isolated, discredited and eventually forced to give full citizenship to a Palestinian majority has every reason to cheer them on.
Violent, counterproductive, self-righteous activists are hardly unique to the Israel-Palestine issue. Blinkered greens inspired by Ed Abbey’s semi-paranoid books wrecked the credibility of environmentalism. When I led an environmental group in the 90’s I had the dubious privilege of watching it happen. People like this focus on purity. They see consensus and incremental progress as a sort of betrayal. Purity of cause, ideological purity and the purifying effect of violence crop up whenever the mindset corrupts one cause or another. It is not an illness of any particular ideology. Self-righteous manicheanism is an inbuilt weakness, a mold that grows on lazy minds, whenever a group finds a cause.
You do not have to hate environmentalism to detest extremists like Earth First! and the ELF. The only crowd who loves them, or should, is Exxon and the other polluting interests. Those guys, certainly not anyone else, benefited when misguided activists sidelined the movement.
In foreign policy we call the disease neoconservatism. Weirdly enough (or not, if you get my point) neoconservatives sound to me exactly like the self-righteous pricks I knew from my activist years. You can hear it when they insist that you do not have to know much as long as you have pure motives. The self-righteous entitlement is there plus the usual twist that criticism equals hating the Cause (the Earth, America, Jews). It is not a coincidence that settlers’ most important ally in America, evangelical zionists, quite literally want Israeli Jews to die in a fire. No doubt America’s fringier Christians have grown sick of waiting for Israel to bulldoze the Dome, reuild the Temple and trigger that nuclear apocalypse already. Gestures towards peace, e.g. the late Yitzhak Rabin, must drive them crazy.
The other day a settler cussed out a reporter on TV. He came back again and again to the same point. Are you an anti-semite?!? Are you an anti-semite!? One would guess that the reporter, a Jew living in Israel, might find the question silly. Of course it also seemed quite ridiculous that Americans skeptical of invading Iraq might secretly want their home country destroyed by terrorists, but somehow that idiocy soaked into the discourse here as well. No doubt settlers have more profound arguments to make, but, like American neocons who pulled the antisemitism card just as hastily, you don’t have to cut very deep with these people to reach the toxic victimology.
To his credit Ariel Sharon recognized that Israel’s neocon wing was long term poison. Unlike others who saw but failed to act, Sharon made tangible steps towards fixing the problem. It would be perfectly fair, given their behavior, to ask settlement supporters angry rhetoricals like Do you hate Israel?! Why do you hate Ariel Sharon!?, but there is already enough stupid in this debate. The rational reasons for any friend of Israel to oppose the worst excesses of that country’s neocons are already more than enough.
Stuck in the Funhouse
Well thought out and worded post. We all should use more the word extremist when it applies to those few who try to capture the agenda away from rationality.
Svensker
Care to give an example? Seemed to me, Sharon was a genius at pushing the neo-con agenda, while talking/acting as tho he was pushing for peace.
Mike
I must be missing something, because I can’t see how anyone would find that weird.
And when he had the stroke, the Christian Right insisted it was retribution from God for doing so.
Garrigus Carraig
@Svensker: Sharon pulled out of Gaza & split up Likud.
Incertus
The article I read yesterday about the removal of the settlers described a scene where settlers were standing on a hill and calling their fellow Israelis, soldiers though they were, Nazis. If there were ever a question about how extremists can lose sight of reality, that’s a great example to point out.
MAX HATS
The settlers really are at the forefront, already making a choice Israel at large keeps postponing: become an Apartheid state, integrate the Palestinians (hahahahahaahah), or make a real effort at creating a viable Palestinian state.
The settlers choose Apartheid. Here’s hoping the rest of Israel has a truer moral compass.
Will Hunting
Wilfred will be stopping by in 3, 2, 1…
MarkusB
Tim, between this and John’s recent post, this is one fine day’s worth of Juice. That is to say, I could hardly agree with either of you more.
Jim
The Sharon taking tangible steps argument stems from Sharon’s expressed insight that the goals of the "neo-con agenda" would result in the end of Israel as a Jewish state, i.e. the integration of most of the West Bank into Israel and the subjection of the Palestinians as second class citizens would result in apartheid-like political structure that would be unsustainable or integrate the geography and grant Palestinians political rights effectively stripping Israel of its Jewishness.
That being said, there is likely a large gap between what compromises Sharon was willing to make and what would constitute a mutually satisfactory solution.
srv
That Sharon, a complete enabler of everything you lamented about, realized it wouldn’t work at the very end does not a hero make. He sowed the foundation.
Anti-semitism is a meaningless, laughable epithet now. A horrible thing, but that is because of the Lihkud and their neocon fanboys.
That Hilzoy even has that obligatory crap, I’d be embarrassed to link to her. Perhaps she should preface all her torture posts about how she hasn’t taken any sides vis-a-vis George Bush.
Dennis - SGMM
Israel is what America would have looked like had we exercised our Manifest Destiny in an age of automatic weapons and plastique.
anonymous
Huh? All settlements in the occupied territories are illegal, per the Geneva Convention prohibition of transporting population into occupied territories.
The notion that it’s just the big, bad Israeli right doing this stuff is just downright silly. They’re just trying to do it more quickly and provocatively.
anonymous
@srv:
Yeah, I get sick of that kind of crap, too.
On the one hand, you have the virulently anti-Arab racists. On the other hand, you have the fairminded "liberal" guys who are keeping their hands clean like this, or killing comment threads when things on this issue get too heated.
[delurk]...[/delurk]
Isn’t anyone but me annoyed by the term "antisemitism" altogether? If you mean "anti-Jewish", say "anti-Jewish".
If you let the term "antisemitism" go by, sooner or later you know you’re going to hear somebody accusing the Arabs of being "antisemitic", and the Universe can’t support that level of ignorance: it will implode into a Black Hole of stupid!
Delia
@[delurk]…[/delurk]:
Oh, do we have to do this one again? Historically, the term, "anti-semitism" was invented in nineteenth century Germany to refer specifically to anti-Jewish sentiment, simply dressing it up in more intellectual sounding terms to disguise its baseness. It’s quite legitimate to use it in the sense it’s being used.
J. Michael Neal
This is true, but doesn’t actually apply to Israel. In a legal sense, the state of Israel has no borders. The UN proposed some, but they were rejected by the Arabs. The Green Line is nothing more than where the forces were when a cease-fire was declared. It doesn’t have any force of law behind it, though it is clearly going to be the starting point for any eventual settlement.
I have no brief for the settlers. Israel needs to crack down on them, and enforcing their own laws would be a good place to start. Hell, you can make a perfectly plausible argument that there shouldn’t be a state of Israel at all, and that all of the land was confiscated. I don’t think that it’s a useful argument; in fact, it’s quite dangerous. You can also make a plausible, and equally dangerous, argument that Israel has a right to hold on to a lot of the Occupied territories.
Pretending that there is anything simple about the Arab-Israeli conflict, on any level, is a delusion.
[delurk]...[/delurk]
@ Delia:
How are the Arabs any less Semitic than the Jews? At least they still speak their Semitic language; it didn’t have to be "revived".
[disclaimer] I am not anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli. Just a linguistics purist. [/disclaimer]
Silver
If wishing that Israeli settlers die a violent death makes me an anti-semite, I guess that’s what I am.
I know, all they are doing is trying to carve out some living space in the teeth of a crazy religion. So are the Palestinians, of course…
J. Michael Neal
Languages aren’t static. Get used to it.
[delurk]...[/delurk]
@J. Michael Neal:
Languages aren’t static, but some are members of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family, like Arabic and Hebrew. Others aren’t.
srv
Instead of bombing terrorist camps in Wazirastan, maybe we should try bombing a few terrorist "settlements" elsewhere.
Scott de B.
This is true, but doesn’t actually apply to Israel. In a legal sense, the state of Israel has no borders.
I’m pretty sure that, whatever the legal status of Israel’s borders, according to international law they don’t include any of the West Bank.
Phoebe
The "amount of stupid" is exactly why I let other people talk about this stuff and stay the hell out. This is the only subject matter that I see people – otherwise smart, totally rational people – just go completely rabid about, all the way to 11, at the drop of a hat.
LanceThruster
Since the mid-1970s, there’s been an international consensus for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict. […] It’s called a two-state settlement, and a two-state settlement is pretty straightforward, uncomplicated. Israel has to fully withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza and Jerusalem, in accordance with the fundamental principle of international law, […] that it’s inadmissible to acquire territory by war. The West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, having been acquired by war, it’s inadmissible for Israel to keep them. They have to be returned. On the Palestinian side and also the side of the neighboring Arab states, they have to recognize Israel’s right to live in peace and security with its neighbors. That was the quid pro quo: recognition of Israel, Palestinian right to self-determination in the West Bank and Gaza with its capital in Jerusalem. That’s the international consensus. It’s not complicated. It’s also not controversial. ~ Dr. Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein & Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami Debate
Duke of Earl
It’s really unfortunate for Israel, the Jewish people, the Palestinian people and the world in general that the radical Zionists were so hell bent on their idee fixe that they ignored the utterly predictable strategic implications of many of their more provocative tactics.
Israel came to be via force of arms (including terrorism) in a time when the spread of information was accelerating at a geometric rate and in a place where people have extremely long memories and take grudges about as seriously as anywhere on our poor planet. The current situation, while not predictable in detail, was really a foregone conclusion in 1947 given the highly sectarian nature of the societies in that particular part of the world.
Svensker
Son of concentration camp survivors, recently denied tenure and unemployed in the US because of his views on Palestine, denied entry into Israel recently because he actually spoke to Palestinians.
Now that’s freedom!
John
Delurk/Lurk – anti-semitic is a word which was coined to mean "anti-Jewish." It has never had any connection to the Semitic languages, except in that the 19th century racists who coined the term knew that Hebrew was a semitic language, and thus chose that term for their views.
Arabs are Semites. The term "anti-semitic", however, means "anti-Jewish". Anyone who actually knows anything about the history of the English language should know this.
For example, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language gives us two definitions of Anti-Semitism:
1. Hostility toward or prejudice against Jews or Judaism.
2. Discrimination against Jews.
That’s what the term means. No mention of Semites or Semitic languages – which of course would be silly. The Jews who the term was invented to talk about hatred of did not themselves even speak a Semitic language – they spoke Yiddish, a Germanic language
El Cid
And as for Labor, a good rant by Gideon Levy in the most recent Haaretz:
larry birnbaum
These religious zealots in Hebron are whackos and the Israeli government did the right thing in removing them — and failed to do the right thing in restraining their violent anti-Palestinian rampage afterwards. However we need to be clear that these people and their ilk aren’t the major practical impediment to moving forward towards a political solution at this time. The major impediment is the complete political disintegration of the Palestinians with the result that there isn’t at this time anyone with the moral or political authority to negotiate on their behalf and make the results stick.
Now I’m not saying that this is entirely their responsibility — Israel, the US, and other parties should have done more to help build viable Palestinian political structures. On the other hand, it would be infantilizing the Palestinians to say that they have no responsibility for their own political predicament.
Finally, once internal Palestinian political reconciliation is achieved, the resulting authority — including, presumably, some representation from Hamas — would have to re-affirm the previously negotiated commitments — specifically, acknowledgment that the final outcome includes recognition of Israel. Israel isn’t going to offer any further inducements to return to these previously negotiated Palestinian commitments because that would establish perverse incentives contrary to the stability of any future negotiated commitments.
Jrod
[delurk], anti-semitism has been used to mean anti-Jewish for over two-hundred years. No, the word does not literally have such a narrow definition, but in English not every word or phrase’s meaning is completely literal. Why a linguistic big-shot like you can’t understand that, I don’t know.
Next up, [delurk] whines that the word homophobe means "one who is afraid of the same," therefore he must annoy any blog he discovers using the term impurely. Godspeed, language warrior!
mm
"People who support the long-term success of Israel as a state should absolutely detest the violent extremists who establish provocative, illegal settlements in Palestinian territory. Conversely those who want Israel isolated, discredited and eventually forced to give full citizenship to a Palestinian majority has every reason to cheer them on."
oh please. i’m an antizionist jew and i think that the behavior of the settlers is despicable. i’ve been to the west bank and participated in palestinian protests. acting like "radical activists" are all invested in purity of purpose and are filled with schadenfreude is ridiculous. it’s also the kind of thinking that is continuously associated with palestinians by peddlers of Conventional Wisdom: "palestinians are happy with martyrs, they actually bring violence on themselves to get more pity from the international community." i find that kind of nonsense sickening and dehumanizing.
also thanks to the folks invoking finkelstein. the things that have happened to him are a real shame – especially considering what a huge figure he is in middle eastern scholarship.
AhabTRuler
But we can’t revisit the meaning of a two-hundred year old phrase for a more accurate, nuanced, and fuller idea of the principle involved?
Jay C
@larry birnbaum:
Actually, I believe Israel military and police DID make serious efforts to control the settlers’ anti-Palestinian rioting: which is what pissed them (the settlers) off so much, and engendered a sort of national freakout in Israel – by and large, they’ve preferred to try and keep the nuttier element of the settler movement off the PR radar: when stuff like the Hebron riots gets into the international (especially the American) press, it’s viewed as a national embarrassment.
And I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the settler bloc, or their sympathizers, as a factor in crafting an Israeli-Palestinian "solution". Violent, racist, theocratic nutbars as they might be, their level of support (for their general goals, if not specific tactics or actions) among the Israeli public at large is of decidedly non-trivial dimensions. Despite what impressions the US’ domestic "Israel Lobby" tries to publicize.
[delurk]...[/delurk]
@John:
@AhabTRuler:
The term "Semitic" was invented to divide the known languages of the world into groups named after the sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japhet. (The Japhetic languages would include Indo-European, among others.) The "Hamitic" languages are not a coherent group, that’s why they changed the name of the Hamito-Semitic family "Afro-Asiatic."
It was stolen as a racial term in the 19th century, but it makes no sense. There’s no such thing as a Semitic "race." In fact the characteristic physiognomy that we in the West see as "Jewish" is, in the old-fashioned racist typology, called "Armenoid." The only criterion to call a people Semitic is language.
I know I’m fighting a losing battle: just as people using the term "gender" (original meaning: just "kind") as a euphemism for "sex" for so many years, leads to them looking at you like you’re crazy when you tell them Swahili has 20 genders. You have to use awkward terms like "agreement class" instead. (Why is 20 genders any more unbelievable than 3?)
And no, as long as people use "homo" as a short version of "homosexual" and everybody knows what it means, then there’s nothing wrong with "homophobic", even though it might confuse some time traveler from the past.
LanceThruster
One thing that occured to me regarding the Nazi origins of what Semitic means and how that usage has carried through to today; should people who have had interacial relations be described as having practiced "bestiality" because the Klan does not see "mud people" as fully human?
Language does indeed evolve and the "anti-Semitism" I see these days involves irrational hatred/distrust of Arabs. I think we need to take back the language, as using anti-Semitism to mean negative attitudes towards Jews exclusively makes an entire entire segment of Semitic people virtually invisible.
I don’t expect this to happen any time soon because to be "anti-Zionist" is defined by some as anti-Jewish on its face. I welcome any and all discussions on Israel because the dialog is definately being squelched. The only reason I was banned from Huffington Post was for challenging the "official narrative" on Israel. Yet they’re seen as a beacon of progressive discourse.
The "Mighty Wurlitzer" is alive and well.
Xenos
@[delurk]…[/delurk]:
At the time the term "anti-semitic" was coined, the conflation of linguistic heritage and race was common, although often with incredibly incorrect results… this is part of the same phenomenon that defined the "Aryans" as a race that excluded all the known Aryans (a/k/a ‘Iranians’).
At a point in the late 1800s Jews in Germany had excelled in the professions and the arts, thriving what was until then the most tolerant part of Europe. The reaction from bitter Germans in the upper and upper-middle classes had to be dressed up a bit, as old-fashioned Jew-hating was considered lower-class. The term "anti-semitism" gave a scientific gloss to vulgar racism, while implicitly asserting that Jews were aliens, just like Arabs, who all sectors of society could reasonably and openly agree were sub-human.
darms
Don’t agree w/these guys, per se, but I don’t hate ’em, either, I know where they’re coming from and in even their most violent moments they have not killed a single human. FWIW, the only people the Weather Underground killed was three of their own, in a bomb-making accident.
How much press did William Krar get? Popped in 2003 w/ a shed full of illegal weapons including two sodium cyanide bombs, a wmd if I ever heard of one. He got 11 years, how’s that compare to the sentences GW’s gitmo guys have received, especially considering many have served 6+ years already, w/neither charges nor convictions?
west coast
You can hear it when they insist that you do not have to know much as long as you have pure motives.
Back in the day there was an adage about what paved "the road to hell," but now we’re in a new age of information, so unless it’s updated and google-able we can ignore that lesson.
I know I’m fighting a losing battle: just as people using the term "gender" (original meaning: just "kind") as a euphemism for "sex" for so many years…
In every human society illiteracy is the rule, not the exception. Combatting illiteracy among university graduates makes Sisyphus’ task seem easy.
Chuck Butcher
As a candidate I once took my lefty self into an environmentalist meeting and told them that as a former hot shot firefighter I had some credibility as someone who had made efforts towards saving forest and that as a hunter and general conservationist that I had a great deal respect for their goals. I also pointed out to them that the fist to fist approach to resource extraction interests was resulting in static management of a sick forest and that to actually do something everybody would get to lose something and not get everything they wanted.
Well, that was sacrilege and I lost that vote bloc and also lost the election to someone with no chance of winning the general or advancing their cause in the least (particularly as a loser). I needed both resource interests and evinvomentalist interests to win in the general, I got neither and the situation remains as was – stalemated and the forest getting sicker by the year.
Neither group would qualify as whackos.
Sarcastro
I am an inveterate anti-semite. Carthago delendum est!
"Anti-semite" does just mean anti-jewish. That still doesn’t make it any less stupid to apply the phrase to other semites.
Abe Bird
You are right Sarcastro, Anti-Semitism applies only to hatred of Jews. I wish you’ll have more reasons to hate Jews in years to come, because that will guarantee that they are prosperous and succeeding in their struggle against the "Great Satan" and the "Axis of Evil". It’s time for the Jews, especially in Israel, to put thing strait and to hit all their combatant enemies as fit to their interests.
As for the Falsetinian Arabs, they have already their national state in Jordan (Transjordan of Palestine). The only thing that we all have to wish is that the AbdAllah Saudi Beduin Occupying Kingdome will vanish and will free the Falsetinian Arabs to create their regime over their Falstinian Jordanian land.
The Jewish people have their right for their national land from the Jordan River to the sea. Arabs might live in dignity In Israel as residents and be citizens of Falsetinian Jordan. They will vote for their Parliament in Amman. I don’t know why two peoples should have three national states (Jews in Israel and Arabs in Jordan and WB+Gaza). It’s make no sense and a lot of violence.
Salam Aleikum WaBarakat