“Objectively terrorist” pizza

“…to which we still link in our sidebar”

Delink them. Losing thousands of links from CT is the only way these people will learn.

No, wait! It’s not Florida, it’s Sweden! Someone warn ABBA!

Can’t you see what’s in front of your eyes? That cake shows the location of all of the security cameras at Donald Rumsfeld’s house.

…the shape of Palestine now appears to take in all of Israel…

But isn’t Israel indeed a part of Palestine? What is the problem here?

Laugh all you want, but this is a very dangerous precedent.

Before meeting with Chamberlain at Munich, Hitler baked a pretzel in the shape of Germany that included Austria and the Sudetenland. Chamberlain of course said nothing.

In 1990, Saddam shared with the American ambassador a felafel with in the shape of Iraq that included Kuwait. Of course, the ignorant Americans did not understand what this meant.

Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.

Why has no-one grasped the simple truth that the pizza is itself a symbol of Italians’ unending desire for world domination?
And don’t even get me started on the hamburger…

I hate to say this, but the post is not entirely nuts. I actually agree with all of this:

But perhaps it is now time to be more insistent when asking the question “what do you mean by ‘the occupation’?”

But clearly there is a move to now extend the meaning (and assumptions) of “occupation” in the public’s mind – and hope that nobody notices so that the cognitive shift will be organic.

What Palestinians often mean by “the occupation” is quite different from what many of the rest of us mean. This pizza — trivial as it is — points out the difference, at least as some people see it.

Goofy? You bet. But he does have a point.

“How better to promote this narative than via the smiling faces of young girls around their EZ-half-baked oven?” is not a point, it’s a dribble.

What Palestinians often mean by “the occupation” is quite different from what many of the rest of us mean.

Jason, the Arab Leage, PLO and even about a week ago Hamas – they all agree to 22/78 partition of Palestine along 1967 border.

What do you mean by “the occupation”?

Chris,

Perhaps it is now time to be more insistent when asking the question “what do you mean by ‘organic’?”

I think we may well find that there is a difference between what you understand by “organic” – and rightly do not want to purchase at Tescos – and what the Decent Left’s fellow travellers mean.

uncle kvetch, that is just barbaric. The humane, decent, Western-civilization thing to do would be to send them to Gitmo and torture them for the rest of their lives or until the War on Terra is over, whichever comes first.

And this week’s Golden Rimshot goes to…Kieran Healy. Brilliant.

In all fairness, Lock’s post is not terribly “lengthy” and doesn’t have the tone to merit “diatribe”. He mostly dwells on an apparent divergence in defining the scope of “occupation”.

That said, I’ll be on the lookout for suspiciously-shaped quesadillas… ;-)

Jason, the Arab Leage, PLO and even about a week ago Hamas – they all agree to 22/78 partition of Palestine along 1967 border.

This is a bald, flagrant lie. The Arab League and the PLO have long embraced studied ambiguity on the issue, and Hamas has never, ever renounced its firm stance against the existence of Israel. (If you’re referring to the so-called “prisoners’ document”, ask any Hamas spokesman what it says–or just read it yourself. At one point it discusses possibly restricting “resistance” activity to land outside the 1967 borders, under certain conditions. Nowhere does it even imply recognition of those borders.)

As for the pizza story, it was indeed silly of Brett to focus on a pizza in New Jersey. The use of a map of the entirety of British-Mandate Palestine as a symbol for “Palestine”–among Fatah, Hamas, the PA, and their hardcore international supporters–is so routine, and the exclusion of any suggestion that “Palestine” might mean anything else so complete, that the Camden New Journal can hardly be faulted for not noting that a Palestinian propaganda outlet has simply followed convention and endorsed the obliteration of the state of Israel.

“uncle kvetch, that is just barbaric. The humane, decent, Western-civilization thing to do would be to send them to Gitmo and torture them for the rest of their lives or until the War on Terra is over, whichever comes first.”

Posted by Steve LaBonne

And anybody who opposes this is obviously racist, undecent and unchristian!

James,
Prof. Nathan Brown of Georgetown University actually studied Palestinian textbooks. He writes:

In general, they are base their presentation on an implicit distinction between “geographic and historic” Palestine and “political” Palestine. Thus they sometimes discuss (generally briefly) some areas within Israel’s 1967 borders. But each book also contains a foreword describing the West Bank and Gaza as “the two parts of the homeland.” In short, political realities are confusing and difficult for educators to describe to children. It would be unfair to describe such confused treatment as “delegitimization of Israel.”

OTOH, a couple of months ago Israeli PM Olmert came to the US and gave a speech to a joint session of the US Congress. He said:

I, like many others, was raised with a deep conviction that the day would never come when we would have to relinquish parts of the land of our forefathers. I believed, and to this day still believe, in our people’s eternal and historic right to this entire land.

What do you think about that?

Thread’s over, folks. Move along, nothing to see here.

Translation: we enjoy making fun of people we disagree with, but we don’t actually want to, you know, argue with them. That leads to doubt, which makes our heads hurt.

This is a bald, flagrant lie. The Arab League and the PLO have long embraced studied ambiguity on the issue, and Hamas has never, ever renounced its firm stance against the existence of Israel.

Dan, Israeli pronouncements on its borders, neighbours and subjects is a study in ambiguity and abuse of legal formalism. Israel does not even formally acknowledge that it is in occupation of any territory, since to hear them tell it, there are no internationally recognised borders in the territory of the former British mandate, so there can be no occupation. There is merely disputed territory.

I note that Israeli maps are every bit as much nonsense about its borders. Or have they stopped publishing maps of “Judea and Samaria”?

So, I’d say your claim is a bit the pot calling the kettle black. There is more official acknowledgment of Israel among Arab League members that there is official acknowledgment by Israel that Palestinians even exist as something other than Jordanian squatters.

Dan, there’s no ambiguity whatsoever in Saudi proposal adopted by the Arab League. It is very clear and succinct indeed.

Not much ambiguity in the Oslo accord either. Same thing, based on the UN resolutions 242 and 338.

Hamas position is the mirror image of what Olmert said in that speech: still believe in their people’s eternal and historic right to this entire land, but willing to share because of political realities. I read their statements accepting 1967 borders for the current generation, leaving it for the future generations to decide themselves.

Where do you see that bald, flagrant lie?

But nice try, Dan. The correspondence course in mind-reading is clearly paying off.

Dan, Israeli pronouncements on its borders, neighbours and subjects is a study in ambiguity and abuse of legal formalism. Israel does not even formally acknowledge that it is in occupation of any territory, since to hear them tell it, there are no internationally recognised borders in the territory of the former British mandate, so there can be no occupation. There is merely disputed territory.

As an historical matter, this all makes perfect sense. Prior to 1967, the West Bank and Gaza Strip were officially annexed by Jordan and Egypt, respectively, although those annexations were far from universally recognized. As I recall, Jordan didn’t renounce its claim to the West Bank until the 1980’s. Today, there is a widespread assumption that those territories rightly belong to a yet-to-be-established entity called “Palestine”, but such an entity has never existed in any independent form. The Oslo Accords established something called the “Palestinian Authority” that was to govern a to-be-determined portion of the territories in a to-be-determined manner, but the collapse of the Oslo process meant that the final jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority was never in fact actually determined.

What any of this has to do with the consistent refusal of Fatah or Hamas to clearly and explicitly recognize a 58-year-old sovereign country, though, is beyond me.

I note that Israeli maps are every bit as much nonsense about its borders. Or have they stopped publishing maps of “Judea and Samaria”?

I agree that publishing maps that omitted a border that the Israeli government never ceased recognizing (in the sense that it never annexed the territory beyond it, and always acknowledged its legal distinctiveness from Israel proper) is stupid. My point, however, was not that the Israeli government doesn’t occasionally equivocate about its non-claim of sovereignty over the occupied territories. It’s that Hamas and even Fatah very rarely equivocate about their claim of sovereignty over the entirety of Israel.

So, I’d say your claim is a bit the pot calling the kettle black. There is more official acknowledgment of Israel among Arab League members that there is official acknowledgment by Israel that Palestinians even exist as something other than Jordanian squatters.

Depends on the Arab league members, of course–some, like Egypt and Jordan, have actually officially recognized Israel, whereas others cannot even refer in public to anything other than the “Zionist entity”.

But given that Israel is, you know, a 58-year-old sovereign country, whereas Palestinians haven’t had an independent state since, well, ever, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that Israeli sovereignty is accorded more official recognition than Palestinian sovereignty. Again, what needs explanation is not Israel’s complex attitude towards potential future Palestinian sovereignty, but rather the major Palestinian organizations’ amazingly un-complex refusal to acknowledge fifty-eight years of legitimate, democratic Israeli sovereignty.

Wrong Camden.

Whoops–sorry about that. I saw “pizza”, and drew a foolishly reflexive conclusion….

Dan, there’s no ambiguity whatsoever in Saudi proposal adopted by the Arab League. It is very clear and succinct indeed.

Sure–apart from that bit about refugees, which can certainly be interpreted in ways that obliterate Israel’s sovereignty. In other words, its studied ambiguity is unquestionably more carefully hidden than that of most of the Arab League’s previous public positions.

Not much ambiguity in the Oslo accord either. Same thing, based on the UN resolutions 242 and 338.

However, Fatah’s position on the Oslo accords themselves, and the extent to which they bind Fatah or the (Fatah-dominated) PLO, has long been…an exercise in studied ambiguity.

Hamas position is the mirror image of what Olmert said in that speech: still believe in their people’s eternal and historic right to this entire land, but willing to share because of political realities. I read their statements accepting 1967 borders for the current generation, leaving it for the future generations to decide themselves.

Some or another Hamas spokesperson may at some point have said something that might have been interpretable this way, following the “prisoners’ document” episode–but Hamas’ higher-ups subsequently immediately smacked down the very idea, and recapitulated Hamas’ official position against ever recognizing the state of Israel.

So, to reiterate: your statement,

Jason, the Arab Leage, PLO and even about a week ago Hamas – they all agree to 22/78 partition of Palestine along 1967 border.

was a bald, flagrant lie.

Taking it back to the original CT post, I’m a little bit surprised that no one has pointed out the implicitly racist tone of the Henry’s Place post. Jewish Israeli children can go anywhere in the West and expect to be feted as proud upholders of their tradition. But let a few Palestinian twelve year-olds bake a pizza and the “decent” “left” sees potential suicide bombers under every hijab.

There will never be a “two-state solution” in the middle part of the Levant, because states themselves will never provide a solution. The boundaries of all the Middle Eastern states are the result of thousands of years of war, colonialism and the machinations of capital. I see no reason why working people of any faith or ethnicity should feel morally bound to respect them. Borders are a convenience for the rich and a prison for the poor. And which ever states win the Israel-Palestine conflict, that’s not going to change.

The fact that Fatah not only graciously accepted 22/78 partition, but also ran and won election on that platform in 1996 is absolutely astonishing – condidering that the PM of that country, whose military age Ukrainian parents fled to Palestine via China at the beginning of the WWII, has the unbelievable audacity to claim “eternal and historic right to this entire land”.

Repeating lies doesn’t make them any less false. Fatah maintained its studied ambiguity regarding its willingness to accept the existence of the state of Israel throughout the 1996 elections–which, were, by the way, hardly a model of openness and fairness, what with the violence and threats against non-Fatah candidates. And we saw quite clearly later on, at Camp David in 2000, just how much Fatah “graciously accepted” partition.

As for the Israeli PM, you are quoting him out of context–in the very same speech, he explicitly endorsed the idea of a Palestinian state. And his party–unlike Fatah–not only won an election on an uneqivocal platform of unilaterally ending Israeli occupation of territory earmarked for such a state, but actually took concrete steps towards that goal, by physically withdrawing all Israelis, military and civilian, from the Gaza Strip.

But we all know that your first and foremost concern, Abb1, has always been the sacred rights associated with ethnic heritage. So it’s hardly surprising that what matters to you most about Ehud Olmert is not what policies he endorses and enacts, but rather where his parents were born. ‘Nuff said.

So Dan, in that case it’s fine for Israel to keep on seizing land in the occupied territories and settling its people there, eh?

You must not be reading the news–the burning question these days is not whether Israel will “keep on seizing land in the occupied territories and settling its people there.” Lately, the “seizure” has all been going in the other direction. Rather, the question of the day is just what fraction of the occupied territories the Israeli government will agree to voluntarily and unilaterally ethnically cleanse of Jews, in the absurdly naive hope that such abject capitulation to Palestinian racist irredentism might someday charm a popularly elected Hamas party, sworn to obliterate the Jewish state, into moderating its stance enough to permit some kind of de facto tolerance of Israel’s existence.

So far, needless to say, it doesn’t seem to be working.

Scott Martens wrote, “I note that Israeli maps are every bit as much nonsense about its borders…So, I’d say your claim is a bit the pot calling the kettle black.”

A crucial difference is that the while the current Israeli government accepts a two-state solution to the conflict, the current Palestinian goverment refuses to recognize Israel and is indeed committed to its destruction:

`We will never recognize the legitimacy of the Zionist state that was established on our land,` Meshaal, the Damascus-based head of the political and military wings of the militant Islamic group, wrote in a column titled `To whom it may concern,` published in Al-Hayat al-Jadida newspaper.

Hamas leaders have said they might heed a truce with Israel as an interim measure that could include the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank, but would not abandon a long-term goal to destroy Israel.

(note that the link given is to a copy of the original article, because the webpage of the daily star is down)

A pizza as a symbol of intransigent Palestinian nationalism? Sounds a bit of a half-baked idea to me.

Perhaps this pizza is just the first step of ‘our dream’ of a borderless world? And a motto? “Eating one border at a time.”

That was a breathtaking post, Dan. However, it was factually wrong. Israeli settlements in the occupied territories continue to grow, and Israel continues to restrict more Palestinian land from Palestinian access.

Really? How far back before the evacuation of Gaza do you have to go, to get a net growth in number of Israelis living in the occupied territories since then?

You seem to be living in the past. Recent events have overtaken you.

That main point is whether Israel has a right to seize Palestinian land and plant its own settlers on it.

Why on earth is that, of all things, the main point? Because you’re still obsessed with it, despite its relative unimportance and hopeless anachronism?

Wake up and pay attention, for pity’s sake. The current Israeli government has already purged Gaza of Jews, and has officially announced its intention of doing the same to large parts of the West Bank. These days, not even the duly elected ruling party in the occupied territories thinks that the “main point” is that Israelis are living there–they’ve long since moved on to their longstanding main mission: killing as many Jews as possible in Israel proper. Sheesh….

…they’ve long since moved on to their longstanding main mission: killing as many Jews as possible in Israel proper.

So, Dan, out of curiosity: if what you’re saying is true, why do you think they hate the Jews so much that all they want is to kill as many of them as possible? Instead of welcoming their new Jewish neighbors/liberators with flowers and so on? Is this some kind of mass-insanity there or what?

Correction – my comment 62 doesn’t take East Jerusalem into account. So Gaza’s share of the settler population total would have been more like 2%.

Dan: Aah, the age-old question…surely, if so many people have hated the Jews so much, for so long, then they must deserve it—no?

Aah, the not-so-age-old sophistry… if there’s a component of anti-Semitism in the reactions of people who have been evicted, persecuted, shot at, bombed, tortured, imprisoned etc by the Israeli state, all their reactions must be mere and irrational anti-Semitism. (By which entertaining logic, since some of Louis Farrakhan’s critics are plainly Negrophobic racists, Farrakhan himself and his Nation of Islam must be quite blameless and totally non-crazy.)

And I love the way you slide in a nice insinuation about abb1’s supposed anti-Semitism for good measure. Vintage IKDF, Dan. Nice work.

Scott,

I don’t know what you mean by “official pronouncements” (statements by Israeli PM’s are not official? weird) so I’ll pass on that one. I’ll note though that the two-state solution was offered to the Palestinians at Camp David 2000 and afterwards at Taba.

Alex: I’ll note though that the two-state solution was offered to the Palestinians at Camp David 2000 and afterwards at Taba.

The Palestinians were offered a set of disconnected bantustans at Camp David and a non-militarized, IDF-occupied state afterwards at Taba. The degree to which either proposal constituted a genuine version of the two-state solution is questionable at best.

No, Alex, the Prime Minister’s statements are no more official or binding on Israel than the head of the PLO’s are on the PLO. Elections happen. The PLO officially recognizes Israel’s right to exist, and yet for most Israelis the election of Hamas seems to negate that.

The Oslo accords contain an explicit recognition of Israel’s right to exist. I want to know when Israel has made any statement comparably official to Palestinians recognizing their right to a state as sovereign as Israel on territory currently controlled by Israel. No such statement exists. Israel does not officially recognize any national rights to exist for Palestinians.