Why Is Ireland Such A Bastion of Anti-Israel Hatred?

Now I see why people were surprised when I recommended his 1970s Norn Iron memoir. He really is quite the fuckstick.

“Northern Ireland is, of course, a British colony carved out of the land of the indigenous people living there.”

Well, of course, in the same way that England is a Norman colony carved out of the land of the Celts and Saxons, and Ireland is a Celtic colony carved out of the land of the Picts, and ……

How many generations does it take before the invaders become the indigenous people? Or is it a matter of picking a period which is politically convenient?

No need to answer that.

Another low point:

The suicide bombers of London two years ago hadn’t been born when this chapter opened in 1979: and such has been the utterly cretinous disregard across Europe for the huge cultural differences between the Islamic and the secular/Christian worlds, that the Continent has since then blithely continued to admit hundreds of thousands of Muslims.

However, true pride of place in the European imbecility stakes must surely go to Ireland, which now has some 60,000 Muslims officially living here, though the figure is probably more like 100,000, the vast majority having arrived since 9/11. Now, just how stupid is that?

I’m going to take a wild guess and suggest that neither James Kroeger nor Jim DeMintia are from Northern Ireland. Crazy stab in the dark, I know.

Ben, 4:

How many generations does it take before the invaders become the indigenous people? Or is it a matter of picking a period which is politically convenient?

My reference to “indigenous people” is useful in explaining only the emotions and the feelings of injustice that are current within a population of dispossessed people.

On your point, it may be true now that a majority of Israel’s citizens were born on the land of Israel/Palestine, but that detail is largely irrelevant in light of the fact that the dispossessed population involved (1) is equal to or greater than the population of the conquerors, (2) is fairly-well educated, and (3) well-connected to a billion sympathetic “cousins” who are not without resources.

Myers views on some subjects are repugnant therefore his views on the subject of interest to Goldberg must be wrong. Hmmm….

It should also be recalled that no one has done more than Myers to rescue the memory of those Irishmen who fought against the German empire in WWI and against Nazism in WWII, and very few did more to prick the conscience of the public in Ireland with regard to the nature and practises of the Provos

Damn, I just bought Watching the Door (the Norn Iron memoir referenced by Alex above) because I’d heard it was quite good, but I never read the Independent so didn’t have much context for Myers. Is it worth reading anyway? Also, is there a large dollop of fantasy in it, do we think, as the review in the UK Indie seems to imply?

This does explain, however, why the guy in the secondhand bookshop was mildly sarcastic about my choice of book. I thought it was just my being English.

@Jim Dimintia:

I’ll answer it anyway. My guess is that that happens right around the time that the invaders no longer systematically discriminate against a subject people on the basis of their indigeneity.

Conclusory, circular, and subjective, all at once. Nice!

You can basically pick and choose whichever side you like then.

@James Kroeger

On your point, it may be true now that a majority of Israel’s citizens were born on the land of Israel/Palestine, but that detail is largely irrelevant

It’s nice to know you don’t consider it a morally relevant fact.

At no point should anyone just accept their grandparents lost the war, and go and do something productive with their lives. No, far better to nurse wounds forever. What was the Schleswig-Holstein question again? Surely we can make some mileage out of that.

Somewhere I hear a starling saying “Mortimer”.

Um, their grandparents didn’t lose any war.

The British controlled India for 200 years, and that wasn’t long enough.

@Ben
Bonus points for managing to support a maximum, nationalist, Zionist outcome in the Levant while posing as some sort of world weary figure (What a world! Nothing anyone can do about it! Sucks, but this is how things go!). Usually you only see this stage of argument after the accusations of anti-semitism, an attempt at a dubious history lesson, etc.. I appreciate your brevity.

@bert, 17 isn’t fooled. He can see through the maneuvers and tricks of the Jews and their hirelings, who try to draw attention from their crimes by bleating about “antisemitism”. And not only that, he’s brave enough to speak out. What terrible revenge do the Jews and their lackeys have in store for Bert?

At no point should anyone just accept their grandparents lost the war, and go and do something productive with their lives.

Isn’t this a self-defeating thing for a Zionist to say? (Also: Jan van Riebeeck turned up in the 1650s.)

I don’t know how I missed this Kevin Myers before. Just some headlines which make a ton of sense: Arab Christians don’t see events in Middle East as liberating, Strauss-Kahn is one of those politicians who serve only power and their own craving for it, Wind is a waste of capital — but at least it makes the Greens feel good, and my favorite: Instead of sporting heroes we have witless slobs.

@Henry I stand by my comment and refer you to Bert’s by way of evidence.

I assumed he was being sarcastic.
It’s an assumption I’m happy to stick to.

@14 candle
yes its definitely worth reading. As we seen myers is an idiot most of the time, but he’s pretty good on the north. Did anyone read “banks of green willow”? I thought it was really readable. i mean the fecker can write!

Sorry, Henry, I didn’t know the backstory, but I could have assumed it. I’ve been to the rodeo a time or two before.

Although in fairness to Dudley Edwards, she has not to my knowledge written a column warning of the political dangers of African men’s massive boners.

We could, I suppose, speculate on the rationale behind the respective attitudes of Myers and Dudley Edwards towards massive African boners, but I would hate to drag down the tone of this site…

Why is The Atlantic such a bastion of toxic nonsense?^1^

…and while we’re at it, why is the word ‘bastion’ such a bastion of poorly/inaptly kludged metaphor? I think JG may have meant ‘hotbed’ there, which is also somewhat a kludge but at least a semi-coherent one. My favorite self-hypothesized substitutions are ‘festering wound’ or ‘rotting compost heap.’ Or maybe ‘festering compost heap.’

^1^I went back and forth between the sinceresque ‘toxic nonsense’ and the facetious parallel ‘journalistic integrity’ and can’t decide which is the better well-someone’s-got-to-say-it riposte. For what it’s worth.

Though Eamonn is gone now (ní bheidh a leithéid arís ann, or so at least we may hope), he does have a bit of a point in one of his tangential observations, that Myers spent a lot of ink on Irishmen who volunteered service in a foreign army because they couldn’t fight Hitler in their own nation’s uniform. (But Eamonn a mhic, despite the absence of conscription in Ireland during WWI, the army Irishmen served in was not, at the time, foreign.)

That bit of ob-fairness out of the way, I have not read anything by Myers lo these 15 years at least, and hence didn’t know he’d become such a dick. No; he was always a bit of a dick, so I should rephrase that. I didn’t realise he’d become such a cartoon caricature of a dick.

As for Dudley Edwards, she carried out her own anthropological field-work among a people different in many ways to the improbably-endowed Nubian brutes that so beguile Myers’s dreams. Though she is distinctly better-disposed to her subjects than Myers to his, I’m not certain her appalling condescension is preferable to Myers’s desperate imitation of what he imagines a post-UDI Rhodesian planter must have been like.

The none-too bright Goldberg approvingly quoting the not at all sane Colonel Myers. Spiffing.

Myers, along with much bigger intellects (Conor Cruise O’Brien being the classic example) has been driven quite mad by the cognitive dissonance involved in trying to integrate opposing anything that an imaginary “Irish Republican fellow traveller” might support (FARC, Castro, feminism, anti-apartheid, socialism, Nazism, decolonization, the deposing of Arab dictators, the support of some other Arab dictators, atheism, Catholicism, and so on) while also having a coherent world view that follows from some essential moral and political principles (rather than being reactionary particularism).

This is not an easy task and the stress of venerating/opposing war has warped him into the cartoon figure of grandiloquent prejudice that he now is. Imagine the unbearable mental stress involved in upbraiding Islamists (or whoever the current “other” is) for their cult of martyrdom and then whining about insufficient attention being paid to the Irish heroes of the Battle of the Somme. Painkillers and drink would not be enough.

Goldberg, by comparison, has it easy. He can apply discretion as to whether something he writes or quotes helps or hinders his particular flavour of right wing tribalism and can recant at will, since he believes in the particular and not the universal. Kevin Myers however has the sad psychological compulsion of the Irish revisionist, he imagines he believes in something while having no cause except opposition and no future but the past.

J, you may want to try to configure your blog to allow commenting without having to log in.

Henri,

I go by Otto. I tried not needing a log in to comment and was inundated with commercial spam left by bots. That is something much, much worse than uncivil comments.

“He has a quite cohesive and tightly-bound together set of claims concerning Africa, Islam, immigration of horrid foreigners who worship strange gods, and the suicidal wishy-washiness of European liberals with respect to all of the above…”

Given how much this sounds like Mark Steyn, is it possible all these people are THE SAME GUY writing under a 100 different pseuds?

I can tell America is angry when I read this man’s columns.

Walt:

I am not dying to make any argument. But, I find it strange that somebody puts up a post on a subject and then shuts down debate on it. Why put up the original post at all? But, its Dr. Farrell’s blog and he can do what he wants.

I think it’s because from long experience I/P discussions here are always tremendously shitty.

Why “here” in particular? If there’s a blog where they aren’t always tremendously shitty, I’m not aware of it.

#53, to slander people and pretend that it’s an ‘academic’ exercise. The same reason why ‘Hatred’ was chosen for the title rather than ‘opinion’. Because anti-Israel hatred is clearly an invocation of antisemitism, while anti-Israel opinion indicates a difference in political opinion. Choosing that term, and indeed writing this entire post, allows them to cast dispersions on people they don’t like without ever actually having to take responsibility for it. Issuing a blanket ‘I’ll delete any post that talks about anything other than what horrible bigots the people I don’t like are!’ is just a way to prevent being called out for this behavior.

All other responses to you appear to be attempt to avoid answering this question, or even thinking about it.

It might be time to rummage through Atlantic blogger approving links to Johann Hari ….

Bert @61 – I 100% agree with your last paragraph. However I’d invite you to read the Phoenix’s commentary on Shatter, especially since the election (unfortunately not available online.) It runs the gamut from claims that the decision to fold the Justice and Defence portfolios into one is an attempt to use Ireland’s (puny, SAR focused) military to establish a military Junta to articles that seem to have no point but to subtly remind the readership that Shatter is Jewish. Over and over again. Playing the man, not the ball as we say seems disturbingly acceptable to a big chunk of the Irish pro-Palestine left (I’m thinking Sinn Fein and the SF-lite section of FF, not Greens/Lab/SWP BTW) in the case of Alan Shatter. And it’s wrong.

Haven’t seen Phoenix, Daragh.
I should admit to my own prejudice. A general aversion to organised religion tends to edge into outright contempt when faced with the more ridiculous aspects of the Catholic church. I think it comes from early exposure to the history of Cardinal Pacelli. It’s something I try to overcome, but it’s superego versus id, as a great Jew would have put it.

Mr. Shatter is also the only Jewish member of Dail Eireann. A number of Irish people on the P side, such as the Phoenix (thing an Irish version of Private Eye just nowhere near as good) and even former TD Chris Andrews have been blowing pretty hard on the dog whistle as a result.

This doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. There have been other Jewish deputies with the recent past (various Briscoes, and a Labour party member?) and no-one is seriously going to claim (I hope) that they were subjected to anti-Semitism. What’s different about Shatter? He is *very* partisan towards Israel, notably in scandalous efforts to foul up or delay Dáil business concerning Palestine. And his appointing Tom Cooney, another Humphreys-like loo-laa from UCD, as his “special advisor” in the Dept. was a clear signal of intent.

By the way, the Phoenix’s point about the desirability in a democracy to keep the military and police function separate is a very good point, and one which in the original articles in no way suggested any particular connection to Shatter or any other particular minister, good bad or indifferent.

Dr. Farrell’s ban seems to me a part of a growing trend in the blogosphere towards less debate and the creation of more echo chamber blogs in the name of promoting civility. In many ways this is a good thing. But, even though the blogosphere was a lot nastier back in 2005-2006 it was also a lot more livelier, dynamic, and interesting. For one thing the new civility seems to have led to a complete death of commenting on my own blog.

Anybody remember the conservative professor in Frederick Crew’s Postmodern Pooh whose blistering denunciation of literary theory culminates with the complaint that no one has remembered his birthday? (“We were not expecting any presents anyway.”) This is funny like that.

And for the record, Crooked Timber has one of the best comments sections around, in large part — I’m sure — because it is firmly moderated.

Did someone mention Johann Hari?

What hasn’t been mentioned in relation to Irish anti-Israeli sentiment is the part played by sound information coming from soldiers and ex-soldiers that have served on peace keeping missions in the Lebanon. The Irish army were there for 23 years. They have seen at first hand the depredations caused by the Israelis there. Yesterday’s Irish Times article on the new force being sent out after a hiatus was by Ray Murphy who served with Unifil. It is critical of Israel. Other media commentators in Ireland have similar military background. The ordinary brutal and licentious don’t like Israel much either, you tend to develop negative feelings towards those that have shelled you.

@EWI:
Myers’ whining in his column for some weeks about this earned him an invite from the Royal British Legion (no doubt in gratitude of his tireless recruiting efforts for HM Forces) , who smuggled him into their line-up for handshakes at Islandbridge. I understand that the Irish public were honoured with a large photo the next day in the Indo of the occasion.

There was a truly epic whinge by the Sindo the Sunday before HM arrived as to why Myers, RDE and Eoghan “Incitatus” Harris weren’t being suitably honoured.

It worked. For any owners of depressed felines, this should do the trick.

And for the record, Crooked Timber has one of the best comments sections around

Mmm. I’d offer a few caveats, which would include

a. that’s not a very high standard in the first place
b. it’s sometimes true, but often not, and on some subjects it’s never true
c. it would more true if you could somehow produce an edited highlights comments box. As it is, there’s still a lot of frogs you have to kiss.

What do Ireland, Iceland, and Greece have in common? Besides relative geo-political tininess, I mean.

Looking at how this thread has progressed since Henry’s ban on I-P comments, I think the ban was a success, since rehashing the history of the conflict is a very unhelpful distraction, and there have been some good on-topic comments (e.g. 67, 68, 74). But at the risk of being tendentious, I feel obliged to point out that such a policy of threatening shutdowns when comments get too nasty gives highly partisan people a great incentive to drop in and make nasty comments, or make nastier comments than they otherwise would, since shutting down discussion harms the different sides very unequally in the larger political/intellectual context.

May I ask (and I apologize if it’s too controversial): this sudden (if it is sudden) burst of activity by Myers and Goldberg, is it some sort of a preemptive attack in anticipation of the imminent Zionist action of self-defense against the new Gaza flotilla? In that case, it’s probably simply a part of a campaign initiated by the Ministry of Love there.

Very grateful for the link to Mr Myers’s work. I shall make a point of following him in future: I see him as the great Dada-ist of the age.
This is what the internet is for:

How does one address The Daily Llama?

“Christ, weren’t you here yesterday? And the day before if I’m not mistaken.”

May I humbly suggest that the next time someone on Crooked Timber levels charges of anti-semitism at a random passer where the only justification seems to be long distance interrogation by psychic powers by (a la Eamonn@22) that, Spartacus style, every subsequent poster inserts an

crypto-zionist@xx

No, I am antisemite!

at the end of their posting? It might have a salutary effect on blog content around I/P and it has the broken syntax that Internet memes are made of.

No, there is nothing ironic whatsoever in me saying this dsquared. Nothing. Whatsoever.

That God Watson Ladd showed up to illustrate the wisdom of Henry’s policy.

On the question of I/P discussion, I would like to point out this thread, which did indeed start to veer off into the weeds of vitriol, but was pulled back, and a long and, I think, reasonable discussion ensued. We can do it, and we have to be able to discuss these issues. If we can’t have a reasonable discussion of I/P on a site like this, where can we have it? What I think it took was for other commenters, and not just the hosts, to insist on civility.

On the meta questions, any possibility of getting the site search capability to index comments as well as posts? It’s hard to track down old threads using Google, as the old threads show up with “Recent Comments” boxes reflecting newer, sometimes much newer, threads. I guess that when an old page is retrieved, the new “Recent Comments” box is stuffed in, and this is, at least sometimes, cached by Gooogle.

MB, re: Google – I’ve only found that to be a problem when looking for comments by a particular person (e.g. oneself) – they keep cropping up in pages they didn’t contribute to because of the ‘recent comments’ phenomenon you mention, which is presumably due to Google revisiting and reindexing pages periodically. The comments themselves are, however, searchable via Google.

You can exclude the too-recent comments by using the last term (mut. mut.) in this sample search predicate:

site:crookedtimber.org "antisemitism" "Martin Bento" -"Martin Bento on"

This is not perfect: it will exclude all pages in which “Martin Bento on” occurs – even if that is in the comment text itself, and probably more problematically, if the person appears in the recent comments in Google’s current version of the page you are actually looking for. I suppose trying both with and without that term would increase your chances of finding the page you’re after without having to trawl through too many unwanted results.

Generally I find Google’s search facilities very poor – both in documentation and in the features available. Considering this is Google’s main function, one would wish (though I would not even hope, let alone expect) it would have honed its capabilities to provide much richer search functionality. (I suppose the market types would claim that people don’t want it – in fact they would have to claim that making it available to those who do want it, like me, is not worth the social cost of doing the minor development entailed. Which I’m pretty sure is balls.)

Maybe that would interfere with its sponsored links, possibly silently selling privileged search status etc., dunno. Maybe just the general trend shared in particular by MS of infantilising users by using opaque fuzzy algorithms that ‘predict’ what they are looking for. Maybe that is even a conscious strategy – keep em docile and needy, try to avoid being pinned down to meeting any fixed standard. There’sd also the more legit. point that allowing open-ended search terms with ands and ors could lead to some rather costly queries. But that could easily be avoided, and is mostly irrelevant to the kind of things I’d like to see, such as, e.g., searching the target address of links.

BTW and a bit more on topic: as predicted, Malhotra and Margalit have still shown no sign of presenting their findings from that Boston Review piece in an academic paper.

@ Mrs Tilton

As for Dudley Edwards, she carried out her own anthropological field-work among a people different in many ways to the improbably-endowed Nubian brutes that so beguile Myers’s dreams.

You forget her infinite regret at having to push the line as self-proclaimed Pearse’s “biographer” that he was a unknowing gay paederast.

And incidentally, I am intrigued by your suggestion that “people who call for a 1967 boundary with land swaps” might at least conceivably provide an example of “Left anti-Semetism”.

I’m reminded of the story of a friend of mine who went to Israel and wound up in a bar having a conversation with a couple of Israelis who spoke fluent Irish. Although they wouldn’t say how they came to speak Irish, they dropped enough hints that he gathered they worked for Israeli intelligence. Apparently the Irish peacekeeping forces in Lebanon used to talk as Gaeilge over the radio, assuming that no one would be able to understand them.

Myers must be delighted to be sanctified by Goldberg and the Atlantic. You can be sure he squeed with delight at that, particularly given the difficult job he had avoiding facts or aknowledging anything other than his own prejudices. Goldberg! He helps make the arguments for bombing places! Yes there is more attention given to the Middle East’s largest open sore in Ireland than many other regional, or international intractable situations. Sri Lanka say. And of course there’s an interesting debate to be had about that sure Myers isn’t the one to do that. Given that Irish interest in matters Near Eastern, Myers’ logic dictates identifying something that seperates it from other similar situations, finds Judaism and he presto, it means those concerning themselves with the issue are anti-semites. By a similar logic the Dunnes Stores workers who campaigned against the apartheid regime in South Africa would be anti-white (and/or sympathetic to militant crazies in league with cannibals, and probably in thrall to previously mentioned tumescent priapic black African manhood). Yes the his style of writing is to choose descriptions that delegitimise anything at all his cultural enemies might try to say. And yes in Myer’s world they are all cultural enemies, because he has chosen his moral hinterland in the past and finds it beset on all sides by, you know, some conspiracy of fey sickly European liberalism that will see the gains of a (surely!) superior culture thwarted by dark, threatening Other.

And so we get language like “hysterical” used to describe anyone critical of the current Israeli government’s stance on the occupied territories and the ex-peace process, and efforts depict them as mad and absolutely beyond engaging with rationally. Olivia O’Leary even gets the brush off in the article for ‘sniffing’ about illegal settler construction. Why don’t you just stick a knife in a rabbi Olivia.

And yet no where in his article is there any mention of an aid convoy being sent to Libya from Ireland, or any mention of his putting his hands in his pocket to support it, or of the Elsaftys who were in the first land convoy to Gaza having organised demonstrations and campaigns in support of Tahrir Sq and Libya here. Or the recent pressure being put on the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland over it’s relations with Bahrain or the work that Frontline have been doing all over the Middle East. But there’s no point bringing anything like that up because unless you landed in IDF ribs at Latakia and trekked to Damascus and killed Assad with your own bare hands, you’re a duplicitous anti-semite if you mention Gaza.

Is this connected wth the flotilla? I happen to get forwarded emails with press clippings from the Israeli Embassy in Dublin and yes, alongside items on how the IHH/Mavi Marmara crew were Islamists associated with Hamas bent on the destruction of Israel and were armed on the boat, with attached photos of the IDF soldiers being assaulted with iron bars (they brought scaffolding on the boat! It must be premediatated attempt to murder IDF soldiers.) the Embassy has being delighted to forward Myers rantings. He is also happy to act as a cog in their machine, taking their assertions about the flotilla at face value. Meanwhile the Irish vessel MV Saoirse appears to have been sabotaged.

For Myers this sort of article is really the simplest thing in the world: decry your enemies irrationality; leaven with some woe-is-me amidst such intellectual lilliputians keening; throw in a few moral pronuncements on the charcter of what you’re defending as a proxy for yourself thus egotistically making it a vehicle for your own ineffable moral superiority; stalk off with would-be Cassadra like pronouncements of the impending collapse of moral order that your opponents are engineering. It’s nearly like a thought experiment for a certain elite of commentators on either side of the I/P issue, some people find it a happy hook to hang old moth eaten rags, some people find it a broad stage with large audience to tread to and for and give a performance their biggest, bestest diva-esque warbling, even if they cannot hit a note.

bq.get your military codetalkers to use it
Empathy with the Navajo explains the widespread and worrying prevalence of anti-americanism among the Irish.

Whether the Irish troops believed themselves to be codetalking or not, you would still have had to learn Gaelic in order to eavesdrop on them.

The US military used to, and surely still does, run a school that provides intensive year-long courses in the language of every country that has an army and/or navy worth mentioning, specifically to train people to eavesdrop on military communications. It’s in Monterey. I once spent an evening in a bar with two guys who were learning Bulgarian there, and could look forward to two years of sitting all day every day in a room somewhere (in Turkey, I would think), listening to bored Bulgarian sergeants talk about their girlfriends. A tedious existence, but way better than getting your butt shot off in Vietnam.

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that that is where the IDF guys referred to @100 learned Irish. Outsourcing the training would surely be much cheaper than setting up your own school.

Even better when the link does not come through properly. Let’s try again: Yu Ming is ainm dom
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA0a62wmd1A

The return of Israeli land to Palestine (all of it) is tantamount to expelling the Jews.

It’s interesting to compare statements like the to similar language used about the US South in the 19th century. Here’s Tocqueville:

As soon as it is admitted that the whites and the emancipated blacks are placed upon the same territory in the situation of two foreign communities, it will readily be understood that there are but two chances for the future: the Negroes and the whites must either wholly part or wholly mingle. I have already expressed my conviction as to the latter event. I do not believe that the white and black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere. …

If, on the one hand, it be admitted ( and the fact is unquestionable) that the colored population perpetually accumulate in the extreme South and increase more rapidly than the whites; and if, on the other hand, it be allowed that it is impossible to foresee a time at which the whites and the blacks will be so intermingled as to derive the same benefits from society, must it not be inferred that the blacks and the whites will, sooner or later, come to open strife in the Southern states? …

If the white citizens of North America remain united, it is difficult to believe that the Negroes will escape the destruction which menaces them; they must be subdued by want or by the sword. But the black population accumulated along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico have a chance of success if the American Union should be dissolved when the struggle between the two races begins…. the whites of the South, even if they are abandoned to their own resources, will enter the lists with an immense superiority of knowledge and the means of warfare; but the blacks will have numerical strength and the energy of despair upon their side, and these are powerful resources to men who have taken up arms. The fate of the white population of the Southern states will perhaps be similar to that of the Moors in Spain. After having occupied the land for centuries, it will perhaps retire by degrees to the country whence its ancestors came and abandon to the Negroes the possession

For Tocqueville, abolishing slavery and allowing blacks to become full citizens of the US, was very possibly tantamount to expelling whites from the South. Are the equivalent fears about “a state of its citizens” in Israel-Palestine any better grounded?

@110 Watson Ladd: So, your example of “Left Anti-Semitism” is the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network?

Also, you left some context out of that quote: “We organize to expose and dismantle Zionist institutions such as the Jewish National Fund (JNF) – an organization founded in 1901 to acquire land in Palestine for Jewish-only settlement and use. We are part of an international campaign to discredit and abolish the JNF and for the return of land and property to its rightful owners – the Palestinians.” (emphasis added)

Looking at this in the full context, it seems that IJAN’s main intent is to reverse expulsion of Palestinians from their land by/for Jews, not to expel all Jews from Israel+Palestine. At most you could accuse them of not clearly thinking through the full implications of their stated position, and of course there are such thing as Palestinian Jews, so even the most uncharitable reading doesn’t have them calling for removal of all Jews from Palestine.

Is a joke, or did you just expect many readers would not follow the link and just assume you had evidence backing your claim? Or do you have evidence that most people in IJAN aren’t actually Jewish? Or do you believe in “self-hating Jews”? What’s the deal here?

puss wallgreen @97:

Does Helen Thomas meet your requirements? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Thomas

This video of the O’Carolan tune Lord Inchiquin (highly recommended) by some Israeli musicians (Gali Glickman and Shay Tochner) indicates that the idea of Israeli soldiers speaking Irish mightn’t be as far fetched as it might seem.

The titular Lord Inchiquin throws a bit of a spanner into the Myers/Dudley Edwards world view as well, as well as that of the IRA. The 1st Baron Inchiquin was Murrough O’Brien, a local Gaelic monarch of Thomond in Clare/Limerick which had succeeded in maintaining independence between 1172 and Tudor times. He accepted a British peerage and converted to what is today called Anglicanism, as did numerous other Irish rulers in a brief window of opportunity to go the Scottish route of preserving cultural distinction at the expense of political independence.

The 6th Baron earned a bit of a bad rep fighting first for Cromwell and then Charles II during the general depravity of the English Civil war’s Irish arm, though he and the Earl of Ormonde nonetheless needed no protection when left virtual refugees in the (Catholic) Confederation of Kilkenny after defeat at the Parliamentarians. He was nonetheless proud of his Gaelic heritage and the O’Carolan air dedicated to a later Baron shows the respect was mutual.

The current Baron, a former British army officer, has returned to Clare although there’s no sign as of yet that the heir of Brian Boruma might be restored to the High Kingship.

@Lemuel Pitkin: No, I don’t think that’s what Torquiville is saying. He’s saying that unless society treats whites and blacks equally there will be open conflict between them. Either they part ways or they mingle. Israel exists because cohabitation in the Palestinian mandate was increasingly impossible. As for the JNF, the land the JNF purchased in the 1910’s and 1900’s was bought fee simple. Then it underwent a shift in national sovereignty without a change in ownership. Calling for the return of this land to its rightful owners is demanding its return to the JNF. I don’t agree with the JNF’s racist policy in rental, but what’s being asked for is not the equality of Israeli Arabs, but the return of Palestinian sovereignty.

puss wallgreen @117

It is up to you whether you view an influential US newspaper reporter qualifies.
Helen Tomas most defiantly called for the expulsion of Israel. She was fired for this.

James
“It is up to you whether you view an influential US newspaper reporter qualifies”
I have no idea how influential Ms Thomas is, but she is not, in any meaningful sense I am aware of, a leftwinger, nor does she represent anybody (I realise you may be using the term “left wing” in its Zionist sense as referring to anybody who supports Palestinian human rights)
“Helen Tomas most defiantly called for the expulsion of Israel”
No, she said that Israeli Jews of European origins should return to Europe. She didn’t say they should be forced to do so.
Watson Ladd
“As for the JNF, the land the JNF purchased in the 1910’s and 1900’s was bought fee simple. Then it underwent a shift in national sovereignty without a change in ownership. ”
But the vast majority of the land the JNF controls was not purchased in the 1910s and 1900s, it was simply stolen after the “shift in national sovereignty” from its rightful Palestinian owners who had been forcibly expelled from their homes. Demanding justice for those people is neither anti-semitic nor “tantamount” to calling for the expulsion of Jews. And can you please provide some actual examples of the latter?

George Galloway endorsing the shelling of Israeli civilians. http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=9334

@118: I’m not sure what “Palestinian sovereignty” would mean. To my knowledge, the only sovereignty there has only been over this territory – counting backwards over the last millennium – was exercised by Israel, (possibly Jordan and Egypt, over the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, between 1948 and 1967), Britain, the Ottomans, Mamluks and Crusaders. Though it could be argued that the Palestinian Authority currently exercises (some) sovereignty over Areas A and B of the West Bank, pursuant to the Oslo Agreements.

@117: I would prefer a secular one-state solution for Israel/Palestine but one would have to be a deaf-and-blind visitor from Mars not to understand that such a solution is a) utterly impossible in current Middle-Eastern circumstances (especially in light of the sectarian, religious and intranational carnage now occurring across the region), and b) would surely entail either the expulsion of the Jews (most of whom were previously expelled from other Arab/Muslim countries in the Middle East) or a repeat of the 1948 war. As for Helen Thomas, I believe she’s of Lebanese descent, so would be very unlikely to meet your “no true Scotsman” test.

A question and a reference:

How representative of leftist opinion are George Galloway’s opinions? If significantly, then we on the left have a problem. If not, then Watson should perhaps look for a better example.

A very good book that argues strongly against Watson’s capsule history @118 is Michael Neumann, The Case Against Israel (Counterpunch).

Gene, I don’t mean that Stanford necessarily endorses whatever it Professors say, of course. What I mean is, if two unknown people with no University associations had made sensationalistic claims based on data they had not and would not share, would the Boston Review have published them? I don’t think so. I don’t mean could they have been published by someone. BR is a pretty reputable publication. If they had associations with Jerry Falwell’s outfit, an accredited University, would BR have published them? I don’t think so. I imagine the fact that they are associated with a highly prestigious University had something to do with the acceptance of this article. I suppose the way to determine whether this is true would be to open a dialog with the BR asking why they did publish this, which might be a worthwhile thing to do, though I don’t know that I would get much of a response, and a private correspondence would be of limited value anyway, as satisfying my personal curiosity is not of much consequence. What might be of consequence is whether Stanford feels its reputation is being well-served by professors that who invoke open review by the Internet to avoid peer review, invoke peer review to avoid open review by the Internet, and publish highly sensational deliberately provocative non-peer reviewed material without revealing this.

What is problematic in that Galloway’s piece, geo? It seems rather unremarkable and uncontroversial, except for the last para that’s a bit silly.

There’s not a huge population of Irish Jews, 1000 + I think but more than enough to supply the needs of Israeli intelligence for Irish speakers. Obviously no conflict of loyalties when viewed as a UN/Israeli thing.

This post is missing the context that in America, the Prime Minister of Israel can give a speech before Congress criticizing the President of the United States, to standing ovations on both sides of the aisle. Nobody sees anything unusual about any of this. Jeffrey Goldberg, for pointing out that Obama hasn’t actually changed America’s position at all, is labeled a far-left Israel hater.

In that environment, Tel Aviv looks like a bastion of anti-Israel hatred, never mind Ireland.

But it does have a statement that they do not have a legitimate claim to statehood.

Hang on, Watson, let’s stop there for a minute and evaluate. It’s hard to take you seriously when your response to “you spoke falsely and misleadingly about the contents of this webpage” is “but that webpage contains something else!” You claimed that, in a linked webpage, there is a direct assault on the right of Jews to live in Israel. That was not a true statement, as Tim was kind enough to point out mildly and respectfully. At this point I’m feeling inclined to consider it an intentional lie (or if you prefer, an instance of Frankfurtian bullshit) — you’ve had several people call to your attention the falsehood of your false claims, and you show no evidence of acknowledging and accommodating them.

If you are attempting to fix your false statement(s), let me suggest some improvements to your strategy — you should be careful to include two things: (1) an acknowledgement that you spoke falsely, and (2) an apology for doing so (perhaps with a caveat that you hadn’t intended to mislead, if you can say so sincerely). On the other hand, if you don’t mean to fix your statement and you intend to contest its truth/falsehood, then you should explicitly stand by it instead of deflecting to some other claim. Repeatedly doing neither (and continuing to make new provocative statements that are, shall we say, seem unsupported by your references to quite a lot of us) just puts more and more evidence in the “Henry’s completely in the right to quash this stuff” bin.

#135, I’m afraid the clock’s struck 14 a few too many times for me to bother looking for a statement by the Socialist Worker that actually expresses the view Watson Ladd attributes to them. The fact that some people think Israel should never have been created does not amount to a “strain of thought” that Jews are uniquely not entitled to a nation state.

Henri @134: I hadn’t read Galloway’s piece at that point; I was assuming, for the sake of argument, that Galloway’s opinions were as obnoxious as Watson (and Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, et al) have claimed, and then asking what that would prove. My sense is that, whatever one thinks of Galloway’s opinions, they’re not representative of more than a tiny sliver of the left.

Having now read the piece, I agree with you that it’s mostly unobjectionable, apart from the absurd ending. For what it’s worth, I think rocket attacks on Israeli civilians are morally repellent and strategically obtuse. But the best discussion of terrorism I’ve seen is in the book I recommended earlier: The Case Against Israel by Michael Neumann. It leaves the conventional wisdom about Zionism and terrorism in tatters.

142 /”he had taken me to be meaning an attack on the right of the Jews to reside in the area they now occupy”
Yes, because, guess what, when you say “I am not talking about people who call for a 1967 boundary with land swaps, but rather those who want nothing less then the expulsion of the Jews from Israel” most people would take that as referring to an attack on the right of Jews to reside in the area they now occupy. It seems that in fact that your reference is to those who call for a solution which would involve state recognition of full legal equality between Jews and non-Jews, and the possibility of such a state having a non-Jewish majority. This, you believe, is tantamount to calling for the expulsion of the Jews. So perhaps we should discuss that equation, rather than the somewhat irrelevant question of whether Hezbollah practices terrorism.
“Now, could a one state supporter not be anti-semitic? Only if they don’t endorse the principle of self-determination in other cases, or place restrictions upon it that would not cause it to apply in the case of Israel that are not special pleading.”
I must say if I wanted to discuss this question I would like to do it with somebody who was capable of writing more coherently than your good self, but for your information there are literally hundreds of claims for self-determination and statehood made around the world that I wouldn’t support, and I am sure that is true of all of us. You presumably know how this works, since the Israeli state you support has persistently denied the right to self-determination and a state to the Palestinian people. Are you implying that the Israeli state is racist? As to “restrictions that would not cause it to apply in the case of Israel that are not special pleading”, whatever that means, you would have to point to other states that were founded on the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of people, the theft of their property and the refusal of their right to return, combined with the legal embodiment of systematic privileges intended to favour one ethnic grouping over others, and see whether the “left” treated them differently. But all of this is rather tedious, and if your point is simply that Trotskyists are not very keen on Zionism, let me tell you this has always been the case, so it would not be indicative of any degeneration on “the left” since 1967.

Something I don’t understand is _why_ are I/P discussions so terrible? Why are they so much worse than any other argument? Watson Ladd’s performance on this is typical of the sheer level of bullshit that you get. (Ethnic self-determination? Really? Has anyone after about 1922 supported this position?) And I’ve seen equally large amounts of bullshit from the other side of the argument, though mercifully not on this thread. I would understand if someone in the argument was Israeli or Palestinian, but usually these arguments involve people who are pretty far removed from the issue. (Or maybe it’s _because_ we’re so far removed from the issue?)

Another view would be that Manhunter was flashy and nasty and thus typical of Mann’s output.

While we’re taking a breather, Chris you were right about Barcelona. As contrition, I’ll be cheering Nadal this afternoon.

151 comments in, and still no polling data about Irish attitudes towards Israel. I couldn’t find any in a quick search either.

Based on anecdotal evidence, then, there does seem to be a significant proportion of the Irish who are vigorously anti-Israeli (as there are in many other countries). Myers’s execrable musings about Africa notwithstanding, the question he raises is a fair one: why, among that proportion, is so much energy being devoted to Israel, and so little to Syria or Iran?

And beyond the empirical question, is this focus of energy on Israel justified morally if there are a great many other more grievous injustices in the world which are in need of attention?

Let’s cut the crap, Andrew F. Israel is a modern democracy established by Westerners, while Syria and Iran are a fucked-up kleptocracy and a fucked-up Islamic theocracy. People expect better out of Israel for the same reason they hold Winston Churchill to a higher standard than they do Genghis Khan.

Syria and Iran are a fucked-up kleptocracy and a fucked-up Islamic theocracy

Which we Westerners had a significant hand in fucking up. Seems we do a lot of that.

Amfref@151

Based on anecdotal evidence, then, there does seem to be a significant proportion of the Irish who are vigorously anti-Israeli (as there are in many other countries).

Some would say that the Irish opposition to Israel boils down to an ingrained and atavistic prejudice against colonialism, despite all the benefits it has brought to the world.

Amazingly it was the same with apartheid South Africa, despite the existence of so many worse dictatorships in Africa at the time Irish people just kept on whining about the lack of rights accorded to the relatively not too badly off black south Africans, even if the black population did have to suffer some discomfort due to security considerations (The RSA was surrounded by enemies, many of them hostile to the western way of life).

And of course the similarities go further, why should the Boers in Africa be uniquely denied a country of their own? What kind of leftist bigotry is that? Where did this hatred for Dutch speaking people come from?

We can all only hope that Israel does not end destroyed and riven by civil war as South Africa has been post unification and that the Irish people come to their senses and get behind the fight against communism/Islamism/antisemitism as appropriate.

Weird. My posting at 159 was adressed to “Andrew F@153”

Adrian has given us an interesting essay there. Thanks.

I’m no expert but it seems to my laypersons eye that there are two major observations missing here.

The first is that Israel is not going anywhere, and cannot be made to sign up to anything they don’t want to. No amount of international pressure can either destroy them or make them do anything they are sufficiently determined not to do. This will be so as long as they possess the hammer of the gods. I believe this is obvious.

The second is that the actions of Hamas firing rockets and sending adultresses and other condemned people as human bombs, cannot be seen as a genuine attempt to destroy Israel. The war against Israel legitimises the repression at home, since desperate times call for desperate measures. The repression at home supports the power of Hamas. It is difficult to avoid the impression that the purpose of the war is to maintain that power, and that Hamas could only suffer by making peace.

I am certain there is a large constituency within Israel which does not see any reason to make peace. I believe there is a larger one which simply does not see any opportunity to do so.

From 50,000 feet, Israel’s strategy looks like they are willing to make peace tomorrow, should there be an opportunity, but while they are waiting, they are going to take the west bank one hectare at a time. That might be thought unscrupulous, but it isn’t daft.

Notice I haven’t said anything about the legal, theoretical, political or theological legitimacy of Israel. They aren’t going anywhere. So what does it matter?

For a discussion of the elusive fatal flaw that puts George Galloway outside the pale, try here. For one reason to be well-disposed toward him, try this.

Again, textile screws up.
Back to markup.

@Ben

[…] Israel is not going anywhere, and cannot be made to sign up to anything they don’t want to. No amount of international pressure can either destroy them or make them do anything they are sufficiently determined not to do. This will be so as long as they possess the hammer of the gods. I believe this is obvious.

This is most probably correct but omits one possibility: that of severe internal turmoil. This is what brought down the USSR after all, and that was a similarly unassailable empire.

In the media and on the blogs it’s all Israel this and Palestine that but these are not monoliths. Certain factions in Israel encourage people to believe all sorts of crazy things while their adversaries are no less trenchant.

The second is that the actions of Hamas firing rockets and sending adultresses and other condemned people as human bombs, cannot be seen as a genuine attempt to destroy Israel.

This observation is surprisingly rare but certainly correct. Nonetheless, just as Israeli politics isn’t some anomaly where the laws of history are somehow changed, so too Palestine. Hamas wasn’t always in the ascendant. Israel, as the dominant political and military force, should consider why things have taken the turn they have.

I am certain there is a large constituency within Israel which does not see any reason to make peace. I believe there is a larger one which simply does not see any opportunity to do so.

The same point about Israel’s role made above applies here as well. More below.

From 50,000 feet, Israel’s strategy looks like they are willing to make peace tomorrow, should there be an opportunity, but while they are waiting, they are going to take the west bank one hectare at a time. That might be thought unscrupulous, but it isn’t daft.

Hmmm… That depends on what you mean by daft. There was one observation I forgot in my little essay: that peace has to be enforced. There’s a classic post-colonial pattern of civil war following immediately after independence. The outcome has varied from case to case, ranging from decisive victory for the peacemaking faction (e.g. Ireland) to indecisive or bloody outcomes (India — 2m dead in 6 weeks in spite of Gandhi’s pleas for calm; conflict still ongoing between the now nuclear armed adversaries in Kashmir).

The prostrate condition of the Palestinian factions begs the question: who’s going to enforce peace?

Note that further advances into the West Bank make any future Palestinian peacemaker’s task more rather than less difficult. Things are at the point where no conceivable peace partner may prove able to enforce a settlement.

Ehud Barak’s foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami characterised the PA as a quisling government — as a Bantustan. According to him, the sole motivation for Arafat’s return to the West Bank was fear that he was losing control of the resistance movement, and that the original (unarmed, 1987-ca.1991) intifada had nothing to do with Fatah can hardly be disputed.

The 2nd Intifada can be characterised in a similar vein: an attempt by Arafat to bolster his position once more by surfing the tides of opinion on that famous ‘Arab Street’, that’s to say to prevent his own overthrow by forces hostile to his collaboration.

If Arafat didn’t feel able to restrain ongoing violence, how can it be expected that any future PA leader will be able to enforce a peace that’s certain to disappoint the extremists?

Viewed from this point of view, things are drifting away from Israel’s control. A deal that would have been readily deliverable on both sides in the 70s or 80s is no longer possible. Either vast numbers of settlers would need to be uprooted or the PA would need to win, without a decisive technical or numerical advantage, an intense turf war against internal enemies.

Here’s something interesting related to the question of the left and attitudes towards Israel.

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1764/algerias-impact-on-french-philosophy_between-posts

The thing that stands out to me is how many on the left, and not just the middling left, really saw Israel through rose-colored glasses, really wanted to believe in it.

@Chris: If you don’t believe in the nation state as a norm, then yes you can argue for a one-state solution without being antisemitic. The problem is when the Israelis do not have a right to self-determination but other groups do. Yes, self-determination is out of style, but it is still believed in by the Left in general. (the hard left, if the capital L didn’t make it obvious). Is the Belgian state really that oppressive to its German-speaking minority? Or the Dutch state to its Frisian minority? Every national state in Europe has regional minorities, most of which have been integrated. (Yes, I know about ETA).

As for the South Africa comparison that others have made, if the Boers were attempting to make a state out of Cape Town and the Transvaal in majority white areas with their own separate history, then it would be a much better comparison. But that was not the plan: the whites wanted dominance over all of South Africa, and ultimately, thanks to Nelson Mandala giving up on calls for revenge as well as the more moderate whites being able to argue the crazy ones into acceptance, a one state solution was possible. The ANC was not all-black: A lot of its early leadership and membership was Jewish. Again, there are no influential cross-boundary political organizations in I/P. Israel does not exert national sovereignty over all of the Territories, unlike South Africa. South Africans were part of a racist state structure, while Israel does not consider the Territories part of its state.

The Cubans, Tanzanians, Angolans, and others could not have brought about this solution through military force. In I/P a two-state solution was the driving goal, as the territories were never thought of as belonging to Israel. The PLO wanted an independent Palestinian state, and ultimately succeeded in splitting Israeli/Palestinian issues from Israeli-Arab issues. Politics matters: a one state solution which doesn’t turn into an excuse for revenge isn’t politically achievable because there aren’t the forces capable of making an acceptable political settlement. Saying Israel should never have been founded doesn’t solve the problem: we can’t roll back the clock without exiling lots of people.

The PLO bases its argument on ethnic self-determination, Hamas on religious self-determination. Self-determination is accepted by everyone in the room, which makes the failure to reach a peace agreement much more likely to be caused by political factors as Adrian and Ben have ably pointed out. Why these political factors? Because there do not exist movements to change these factors to make peace possible.

I understand this post is drifting into territory that we are barred from, but let’s look at the way in which the comparisons to Northern Ireland and South Africa function. Neither of these is a very good model: Northern Ireland still has peace walls up around Catholic villages, and South Africa has a distinct political history as I’ve pointed out. These comparisons become ways to argue I/P in terms of rights, which presupposes that those on both sides of the line are members of what is in some sense the same community. This just isn’t the perception that either the Palestinians or the Israelis have.

Comment removed as per guidelines set out above

@Lemuel Pitkin

Well I don’t know what goes on inside people’s heads, but I do remember reports of discussions between leftist Palestinians and Israelis around 2001-2, with each group being understandably dispirited at the time, stating that they were resignedly taking the view that current circumstances would make the 1-state solution inevitable in the end.

The sort of plan you mention could suffer a surprising disaster: Hamas and the PA could lay down their arms and throw themselves at Israel’s mercy. Then the numbers of the Chomskys and Finklesteins and Henochowiczs would multiply rapidly, not something the right would anticipate with relish.

Israel is not a state including the Territories! The Territories are Occupied Territories, not part of the Israeli state. A one-state solution is not equal rights in Palestine, but rather the abandonment of Palestinian Nationalism as well as Zionism.

I’ve no problem with Israel as an exception to principles about self determination and ethnicity. Antisemitism is (almost) uniquely virulent and broad as a form of prejudice and the most extreme expressions of violent racism were directed at Jews within living memory. There are a few comparable types of racism, but each falls short in extremity in one way or another, and most in a quite a few.

Only Chinese (IMO — although it’s seldom remembered today) were subject to anything directly comparable and that did not in actuality lead to brutality as extensive or to racist ideology as deeply rooted as antisemitism.

I wouldn’t excuse the de-jure discrimination within the state of Israel, but this (meaning specifically the de-jure discrimination) is in any case mild AFAIK. On the other hand, I wouldn’t regard the one state solution as ideal. Time to make peace because otherwise things risk taking on a momentum of their own. The major issue today is in any case water rather than land or rights of return.

geo at 181 – Without taking a position one way or the other, does the territory argument hold for all cases? After all, Native American groups haven’t been geographically located on the land they claim in a couple hundred years, etc.

Interesting question, Steven. Are the Native Americans you mention seeking the return of formerly occupied lands or political sovereignty over the (reservation) lands they now occupy?

geo – depends on the group, but both have been known to occur.

Well, you could be fairer again and compare the Jewish state’s approach to ethnicity and religion with that in European countries like England and Germany. It should have been obvious that it couldn’t work (it was inferior to the US approach to religious freedom for one thing), and was as unfair to non-Jews as the European system had been to Jews, even if it had been carried out as fairly as possible, which it wasn’t (though most people in the US didn’t know it). Everybody got their own chief whatever, got to marry and be buried and be taught according to their personal religion. It matches one (misguided) ideal of a multicultural state pretty well.

I long for the Pat Kenny has Lou Gehrigs disease Late Late show special where Bibi Netanhyahu and Watson Ladd debate Twink and a plastic bag over the role that anti semitism played in Alan Shatters failure to get 17 amendments to the Sexual Predators Act passed

If so, does that justify, morally, the expenditure of such energy on Israel when there are nations that do much worse, and sometimes with inadequate public attention from the populations of the West?

Well, if you’re American you might wonder why you’re sending it around three billion a year to continue invading territory while people are trying to abolish your social security.

The last post looked fine in preview. Lets try it again.

Andrew@193

Leaving aside whether the analogy you draw later in your comment to South Africa is really appropriate,

< Chokes on mint tea >
Leaving aside my main point about the close similarities between the colonial ideology and policies that underlay both Apartheid South Africa and the Zionist project, a linkage that the two countries accepted to the extent that there was extensive military and foreign policy cooperation between them, including nuclear proliferation? Why exactly would I leave aside my main point?

The portion of the Irish for whom colonialism still represents an evil are naturally opposed to Israel , as they were to Apartheid South Africa. That is the answer to Henry’s initial question/joke.

and assuming that the attention Israel draws from a certain proportion of the Irish is due to the colonial history of the Irish, do you think this attention to be morally justified if it diminishes the attention given to other problems?

It is morally vital, unless you believe we (The West[tm]) are engaged in some global clash for civilizational supremacy in which we have to accept that Israel can subvert, displace, murder and extend with impunity because they are somehow on our side against the “real” bad guys. You could also believe that the history of European anti-semitism means we need to keep our mouths shut, two wrongs make a right and all that but that seems even more weak minded,

On a related not it is sad to see that the Greek government did Israel’s dirty work for them by interdicting the Gaza flotilla. I wonder what Mossad had on George Papandreou.

@Substance 194

Cost of the GM, Chrysler bailout $14 billion
Cost of air conditioning for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, $20 billion PER YEAR.

Guess which one the Republican party thinks was an unconscionable waste of public money?

The answer to why the West should make pressuring Israel to obey the requirements of modern civilized society is quite simple: While there are regimes that are more oppressive than Israel, none of those regimes are susceptible to Western pressure. Saudi Arabia has unlimited cash, North Korea is propped up by the Chinese to provide a buffer zone and attempts to bring down Iran and Cuba have been uniformly counterproductive.

Israel is clearly concerned when people in the West state that they consider the foundation of their state to be less than perfect. They are concerned for their security. But they also want to be seen as a legitimate state.

As Jews disown Israel in increasing numbers, the foundation of Israel as a Jewish state crumbles.

But that is one of the facts that Henry does not want us to be talking about here. Can’t let facts that might change people’s minds enter the conversation. They are rather too dangerous.

What is rarely noted is that the 3 billion to Israel is in aid to buy American arms and technology, thus little more than a government subsidy to these US industries and their workers (aka voters).

“Little more” is understating the effect, I think, given that they actually receive the military aid, which amounts to something. The Israeli budget is about 60 billion a year. But yes, it’s a pretty cynical sort of foreign aid.

Well, I suspect it probably attracts attention because several million people have been living under military occupation for 45 years, their only crime being their ethnicity.

Something I don’t understand is why are I/P discussions so terrible? Why are they so much worse than any other argument?

Longevity, I should think. There aren’t many unresolved territorial disputes that have been going on both that long and that bloodily. There are longer-running ones, sure, but it’s not as though (frex) the Argentinians are shelling Port Stanley every other week, or the Germans are blowing up policemen in Kaliningrad over the loss of their ancestral homeland of East Prussia. Most other territorial disputes have been resolved through force or argument or through one side simply giving up.
And it also helps, from the point of view of getting attention, that Israel’s easy to reach and not actually that dangerous, compared to, say, the Great Congo War.

Substance @205,

Perhaps someone else could clarify this, but my sense was that the arms aid was not a formal part of any treaty but simply an indefinite “understanding” (or some similar term). There were periodic murmurs about abrogating these subsidies, a few this year after Mubarak’s overthrow, but, given the arms manufacturers’ (and their Congress members’) clout, I doubt that would happen.

Substance @205,

And further to my previous reply… If the aid was halted, either to Egypt or Israel, or both, for politico-diplomatic reasons, I’m sure the arms manufacturers would find other ways to have their exports subsidized. That industry exists on government largesse.

Substance, my impression (and I don’t know where I formed it) is that 2 billion of the 3 billion is part of the Egypt-Israel peace agreement, so the other 1 billion is more discretionary.

Attempted a link to a PDF, now in moderation. The aid, it appears to me, is not some standing obligation but general yearly practice; Dee’s supposition that military aid would go on anyway without the obligation I believed existed seems to be, in fact, the case.

The fervour of those who see the foundation of Israel as a sign of the end times may begin to dim as the time since that event grows ever larger.

After all most religious prophecies have failed leaving the sect’s adherents disillusioned and determined to abandon their messianic hopes and focus relentlessly on the practical world.

So, with this in mind, what’s the most rational (understandable) position of the “man in the street”: that ethnic discrimination, ethnic violence, and ethnic cleansing are wrong – or the opposite?

Shit happens? We have to look after ourselves because nobody else will? Blood is thicker than water? Put your trust in what is, not what you wish for?

Surely in a world where unjust violence is rife, the first priority is to make sure it doesn’t happen to you and yours. Only once you have done that will you worry about others. I do not think there is anything immoral about that.

@Henri Vieuxtemps

The appeal was for understanding, not political endorsement. The left and the peace movement there were much stronger a decade ago, then the country suffered more than a thousand dead in the 2nd intifada and they suffered political reverses. That several senior labour leaders treated the party as a vehicle for personal ambition didn’t help either. Nonetheless the significance of the fact that its support was much higher in the recent past can hardly be dismissed.

Let’s be honest and say that a lot of countries historically have reacted much more severely when in Israel’s position. In the cold war, the scope for actually getting away with it was much higher. Compare Arab losses in the 6-day war-War of Attrition-Yom Kippur War period with those suffered by North Vietnam (vs USA) or Afghanistan (vs USSR) or the rebel regions of Ethiopia.

The F-4, a cold war stalwart, could carry 8 tonnes of bombs — as much as a WWII heavy bomber. Israel could have sustained 100 sorties a day with these aircraft indefinitely and if the last 60 years of world history is any guide, the list of ‘military’ targets is endless.

Extreme antisemitism quite out of character with the regions history has been the legacy of colonial rule. Just as it favoured Muslims in India, and always favoured minorities as their very minority position made them vulnerable, the British favoured Jews in the middle east.

Sadat and Nasser were both imprisoned in WWII as the Germans approached Alexandria; thus it was a very particular sort of revolutionary leader that was granted credibility. Colonial rule in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria was especially and purposefully divisive.

The legacy has been one of extreme attitudes, attitudes that Israel’s actions since 1982 — a period when it has enjoyed relative security — have sadly only aggravated. The integrity of organisations like MEMRI has been called into question but enough of their output has been independently authenticated to alarm anyone. This is not the case with Liechtenstein.

I never characterised the reactions of the Israeli public as rational, however it’s not difficult to exaggerate the role of rationality in human affairs anywhere.

Israel has neither been as unrestrained nor as restrained as it might have been. It’s policy over the last decade seems to be to generate the maximum of ill will for the of political advantage, and this (as I’ve tried to demonstrate) has been very much a function of the specific political structures in the country.

I’ve made an effort to interpret Israel as a political entity and now invite you to do the same. If you give examples of countries that have exercised more or less restraint, or have made peace or war over recent decades, and provide your interpretations of their actions then we can begin to examine whether Israel’s actions are similar or whether some special rules apply in Israel’s case. My claim is that cultural interpretations, other than generic interpretations of particular circumstances, or special pleading are not productive and that Israel’s history isn’t especially awkward to interpret compared with anywhere else.

You might want to reflect on the fact that the stuff I’ve written would in other places receive a much more emphatic reaction than yours from pro-Israel commentators. My statements were primarily aimed at that country, a reasonable course I think given that nothing can change without Israeli consent.

Jimmy Carter, for example, interprets is as an equivalent of apartheid-era South Africa

Certainly a commonplace of left demonstrations against South Africa and racism within recent memory (e.g. “Apartheid=Jim Crow=Homelessness”) and not especially surprising.