The Israel Thread

[Azrael]

[Azrael]

[Hans Bulvai]

Still waiting on Monster_Gardner to answer...

[Mr. Perfect]

[Colonel Sun]

[skyhook77sfg]

indeed a tragic personal outcome.

but individual jewish service was far less visible to fellow citiizens

than the jewish communists in the leadership of violent overthrow

of governments in berlin munich budapest moscow etc

and the acceptance of the sadistic Versailles peace agreement

and the subsequent failed weimar government

that created the economic chaos that ultimately created hitler....

and those millions more of tragic outcomes.

[AzariLoveIran]

[skyhook77sfg]

not quite as you present my fine persian friend....
the freedom they were enjoying was not from European society...

it was freedom from the tunnel vision rebbe dictated shtetl existence

that european enlightenment and the revolutions of 1848

penetrated and engendered the jewish haskalah....


see this and more at

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13962.html

At the beginning of the eighteenth century most European Jews lived in restricted settlements and urban ghettos, isolated from the surrounding dominant Christian cultures not only by law but also by language, custom, and dress. By the end of the century urban, upwardly mobile Jews had shaved their beards and abandoned Yiddish in favor of the languages of the countries in which they lived. They began to participate in secular culture and they embraced rationalism and non-Jewish education as supplements to traditional Talmudic studies. The full participation of Jews in modern Europe and America would be unthinkable without the intellectual and social revolution that was the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment.

[Hans Bulvai]

[skyhook77sfg]

not at this time in this country....

result of systematic hijacking of american values

to actualize the american neocon produced plan

for the political success of a foreign political entity

titled "A Clean Break"


at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Br ... _the_Realm:

Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm is a policy document that was prepared in 1996 by a study group led by Richard Perle for Benjamin Netanyahu, the then Prime Minister of Israel.[ The report explained a new approach to solving Israel's security problems in the Middle East with an emphasis on "Western values". It has since been criticized for advocating an aggressive new policy including the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.

"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right ..."
'
"Israel’s new agenda can signal a clean break by abandoning a policy which assumed exhaustion and allowed strategic retreat by reestablishing the principle of preemption"

The Blueprint for the new Bush policy had actually been drawn up five years earlier by three of his top national security advisors, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser who were working for conservative pro-Israel think tanks. James Bamford explains, "the centerpiece of the recommendations was the removal of Saddam Hussein as the first step in remaking the Middle East into a region friendly, instead of hostile, to Israel. Their plan "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," also signaled a radical departure from the peace-oriented policies of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a member of an extreme right-wing Israeli group."

"a kind of US-Israeli neoconservative manifesto"


and at http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/libr ... node=79661

adam shapiro says:

"A Clean Break"is a definitive Middle East Policy strategy authored and implemented by operatives in the highest levels of the US government.

There is just one problem. The plan was a strategy for Israel, not the United States of America.

[Mr. Perfect]

[Hans Bulvai]

[Hans Bulvai]

[skyhook77sfg]

nice to see mr p breaking ranks for once...

could be like in casablanca where bogey says to rains

this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship

(fade in music)

Aux armes, citoyens...

Quoi ! des cohortes étrangères
Feraient la loi dans nos foyers !
Quoi ! Ces phalanges mercenaires
Terrasseraient nos fiers guerriers !
Grand Dieu ! Par des mains enchaînées
Nos fronts sous le joug se ploieraient
De vils despotes deviendraient
Les maîtres de nos destinées !

Aux armes, citoyens...

[monster_gardener]

[skyhook77sfg]

THANKS MONSTER

interesting and informative post

lead me into former terra incognito

from christian apologetics to van tillian presuppositionalists

to Craigs exposition of Islamic Kalam cosmological argument

never been in those aisles and in those stacks before...

doesnt seem to have a lot of traffic

more dust than people

but thanks again.

[skyhook77sfg]

Poll: Most Israeli Jews won’t accept Jesus as Messiah

According to the poll, only 20% of Jews were shocked and angered to find out they were just “pawns” in the Christian fundamentalist’s plan

On the heels of Glenn Beck’s visit to the Knesset last week and ahead of his keynote speech this week at the 2011 Christians United for Israel (CUFI) Washington summit, +972 magazine commissioned a poll on Israeli attitudes towards the Rapture and the role of Jews in the event of Jesus’ return.

The poll, conducted by Dr. Tina Kemach, shows that a majority of Israeli Jews, 74.3%, have no intention whatsoever of accepting Jesus as the Messiah, despite the fact that after the Rapture, those who do not convert to Christianity will be incinerated.

20% of the people asked were too angry/shocked/confused to answer, and the remaining 5.7% said they would consider conversion if they could get Jesus’ autograph.

Out of the 74.3% who opposed conversion, Dr. Kemach asked how they intend on avoiding their certain death in the dungeons of hell. 90% said they would look for the cheapest deal to Anatalya, Turkey, despite strained relations. If indeed the end of times is near, as Pastor John Hagee claims, this could be great news for the Turkish tourism industry. Unfortunately, those Jews heads would be chopped off upon their return to Ben Gurion airport.

Another question that was asked was, “what do you believe is the reason for the Christian’s right bear hug of Israel?”. 90% chose option a) Because they know we’re right and the rest of the world can go … themselves; 9% chose option b) because they think it’ll get them a cheaper deal for their next baptizing tour on the Jordan River; and only 1% chose the correct answer c) because they believe that for the Rapture to occur, Israel must rule the biblical land and Jews must be protected, right until the battle of Armageddon. After that they’re cooked meat.

Israeli politicians had mixed reactions to the poll. Michael Ben Ari, who during the meet at the Knesset offered Glenn Beck his seat in parliament , felt duped and said: “That bastard! He was looking at me and smiling! And all the while he knew I was going to die in Armageddon?!?! Get him back here right now, I’ll show what happens to people who mess with a Kahanist!”

MK Danny Danon, who invited Beck to Israel, attempted at responding but hung up during the interview. Danon was rushed to hospital with heart palpatations.

MK Einat Wilf, who also attended the Knesset meet with Beck, admitted she was one of the 5.7% who would contemplate conversion. “I mean, let’s face it, it wouldn’t be the first time I sold my soul to the devil, right? Right? Mwaaa, Mwaahaaa Mwahhhhaaahaaaaaaa!!!”

MK Nissim Zeev of the ultra orthodox party Shas, said “I knew that Beck guy was gay. I knew it the minute I saw that new goatee. So gay… I’ll bet he has AIDS, too, may he rot in hell.” Zeev apparently did not know that it was he would rot in hell, if all goes according to the evangelical Zionist’s plan.

Michael Oren, who will be speaking at the CUFI summit, seemed to be caught off guard. “What? So, let me get this straight… these guys don’t love Israel, I mean, just because we’re Israel? There’s an ulterior motive?”

Benjamin Netanyahu will be addressing the conference by video, and told +972 that “I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical reason for all of this. I mean, come on, this is John Hagee, for Christ’s sake, we’re buddies! He’s a cool guy! Did you know they’re making a movie out of his new book? I already told Sara we’re sooo going to that one. It’s got Jerusalem in it. I love Jerusalem. It’s called Jerusalem Countdown.

http://972mag.com/poll-majority-of-isra ... s-messiah/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[AzariLoveIran]

[monster_gardener]

[AzariLoveIran]

[Hans Bulvai]

[Hans Bulvai]

[AzariLoveIran]

.

[Hans Bulvai]

[skyhook77sfg]

LARGEST ISRAELI DEMONSTRATIONS EVER ON VERGE OF REVOLUTION

The social justice demonstrations have been accused of ignoring the key issue of the occupation. But their tremendous groundswell of solidarity and cooperation is slowly gnawing at something even more significant than that – the principle of separation, of which the occupation is just one exercise.

One of the most impressive aspects of the J14 movement is how quickly it is snowballing, drawing more and more groups and communities into a torrent of discontent. Pouring out into the streets is everything that Israelis, of all national identities, creeds and most classes complained about for years: The climbing rents, the rising prices on fuel, the parenting costs, the free-fall in the quality of public education, the overworked, unsustainable healthcare system, the complete and utter detachment of most politicians, on most levels, from most of the nation.

All this has been obfuscated for decades by the conflict, by a perpetual state of emergency; one of the benefits from leaving the occupation outside the protests, for now, was to neutralise the entire discourse of militarist fear-mongering. Contrary to what Dahlia and Joseph wrote last week, the government so far utterly failed to convince the people military needs must come before social justice; Iran has largely vanished from the news pages, and attempts to scare Israelis with references to a possible escalation with Lebanon or the Palestinian are relegated to third, fourth and fifth places in the headlines, with the texts often written in a sarcastic tone rarely employed in Israeli media on “serious” military matters.

Over the past week, though, the Palestinians themselves have begun gaining presence in the protests; not as an external threat or exclusively as monolithic victims of a monolithic Israel, but as a part and parcel of the protest movement, with their demands to rectify injustices unique to the Palestinians organically integrating with demands made by the protests on behalf of all Israelis.

First, a tent titled “1948″ was pitched on Rothschild boulevard, housing Palestinian and Jewish activists determined to discuss Palestinian collective rights and Palestinian grievances as a legitimate part of the protests. They activists tell me the arguments are exhaustive, wild and sometimes downright strange; but unlike the ultra-right activists who tried pitching a tent calling for a Jewish Tel Aviv and hoisting homophobic signs, the 1948 tenters were not pushed out, and are fast becoming part of the fabric of this “apolitical” protest.

A few days after the 1948 tent was pitched, the council of the protests – democratically elected delegates from 40 protest camps across the country – published their list of demands, including, startlingly, two of the key social justice issues unique to the Palestinians within Israel: Sweeping recognition of unrecognised Bedouin villages in the Negev; and expanding the municipal borders of Palestinian towns and villages to allow for natural development. The demands chimed in perfectly with the initial drive of the protest – lack of affordable housing.

The demands chimed in perfectly with the initial drive of the protest – lack of affordable housing. Neither issue has ever been included in the list of demands of a national, non-sectarian movement capable of bringing 300,000 people out into the streets.

And, finally, on Wednesday, residents of the Jewish poverty-stricken neighbourhood of Hatikva, many of them dyed-in-the-wool Likud activists, signed a covenant of cooperation with the Palestinian and Jewish Jaffa protesters, many of them activists with Jewish-Palestinian Hadash and nationalist-Palestinian Balad. They agreed they had more in common with each other than with the middle class national leadership of the protest, and that while not wishing to break apart from the J14 movement, they thought their unique demands would be better heard if they act together. At the rally, they marched together, arguing bitterly at times but sticking to each other, eventually even chanting mixed Hebrew and Arabic renditions of slogans from Tahrir.

Yesteday’s mega-rally was also where Palestinian partnership in the protests came to a head, when writer Odeh Bisharat spoke to nearly 300,000 people – overwhelmingly, centrist Israelis Jews – of the grievances of Palestinians in Israel and was met with raucous applause. I’ll return to that moment a little further below, but before that, perhaps I should explain why I think the participation of Palestinian citizens of Israel in the protests has more bearing on the conflict than any concentrated attempt to rally the crowds against the occupation.

On the most practical level, if the protesters had begun by blaming all of Israel’s social and political woes on the occupation, none of the breathtaking events of the past three weeks would have happened. They would have been written off as Israel-hating lefties and cast aside, just like every attempt to get mainstream Israelis to care for Palestinians before caring for themselves was cast aside for at least the past decade.

Altruist causes can rarely raise people to a sustained and genuine popular struggle against their own governments, and attempts to rally Israelis to the Palestinian cause for selfish reasons – i.e. for our own soldiers’ sake or because of the demographic time bomb – smacked of hypocrisy and ethnic nationalism; hypocrisy is a poor magnet for popular support, while ethnic nationalism is the natural instrument of the Right, not of the Left, which wields it awkwardly and usually to its own detriment.

It should be admitted, 11 years after the second Intifada, 18 years after the beginning of the peace process, that the Israeli left has utterly and abjectly failed to seriously enthuse Israelis in the project of ending the occupation. There was never a choice between a social struggle focused on the occupation and a social struggle temporarily putting the conflict aside, because the first attempt would have flopped . There was nothing to be gained by trying the same thing again for the Nth time. There have been many important victories in battles, but on the whole, the two-state left (as opposed to the two-state right) has lost the war.

The Occupation is just part of a bigger problem

But these were the tactical considerations valid only for the beginning of the protests. Social injustice does not exist in a vacuum, most certainly not in a conflict zone – and the problem in Israel-Palestine is much wider and deeper than the occupation. The occupation may be the most acute and violent injustice going on, and, like Aziz and I wrote in our New York Times op-ed last week, it’s certainly the greatest single obstacle to social justice on either side of the Green Line. But it’s still only one expression of an organising principle that has governed all of Israel-Palestine for at least the past sixty years: Separation.

Israel-Palestine today is, for all intents and purposes, a single political entity, with a single de-facto sovereign – the government in Jerusalem, but the populations this government controls, are divided into several levels of privilege. The broad outlines of the hierarchy are well-known – at the bottom are Palestinians of ‘67, who can’t even vote for the regime that governs most areas of their lives and are subject to military and bureaucratic violence on a day to day basis; Palestinians of ‘48, who can vote but are strongly and consistently discriminated and lack collective rights (which is a Jewish privilege); and finally the Israeli Jews.

But separation runs deeper than that: It employs and amplifies cultural and economic privilege to fracture each broad group into sub-groups, separating Druze from Bedouins from Palestinians, Ramallah residents from residents of Hebron, city residents from villagers, established residents from refugees; and within Jewish society, Mizrachis from Ashkenazis, settlers from green-line residents of Israel, ultra-Orthodox from secular, Russians from native-born Israelis, Ethiopians from everyone else, and so on.

The separation system is so chaotic even its privileges are far from self evident: ultra-Orthodox and settlers are seen as the communities most benefiting from the status quo, but it is important to remember the actual socio-economic standing of both is rather weak, and many in both are not only beneficiaries, but also hostages – the ultra-Orthodox to sectorial parties, the settlers to the occupation. And the occupation itself is just an instrument of separation: Its long term purpose is to acquire maximum land with a minimum of Palestinian on it, but for the past 40 years it mainly ensured half the population under the control of a certain government would have no recourse or representation with that government on any level.

And while the issue of the occupation remains to be engaged with directly in the #j14 movement, the very dynamic of the protests is already gnawing at the foundation on which the occupation rests – the separation axiom. Haggai Matar is a veteran anti-occupation activist, with a prison term for conscientious objection to serve in the IDF and countless West Bank protests under his belt. There are few people in Israel more committed to ending the occupation than him. And yet this is how he writes of yesterday’s rally:

Odeh Bisharat, the first Arab to address the mass rallies, greeted the enormous audience before him and reminded them that the struggle for social justice has always been the struggle of the Arab community, which has suffered from inequality, discrimination, state-level racism and house demolitions in Ramle, Lod, Jaffa and Al-Araqib. Not only was this met with ovation from a huge crowd of well over a hundred thousand people, but the masses actually chanted: “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.” And later, in a short clip of interviews from protest camps across the country, Jews and Arabs spoke, and a number of them, including even one religious Jew, repeatedly said that “it’s time for this state to be a state for all its citizens.” A state for all its citizens. As a broad, popular demand. Who would have believed it.

It would be seriously far-fetched to assume the protesters are deliberately trying to pull down the entire meshwork of rifts and boundaries. But one of the many unexpected consequences of this movement – indeed, the movement itself is an avalanche of completely unexpected consequences – is that these boundaries are beginning to blur and to seem less relevant than what brings people together. We have failed to end the occupation by confronting it head on, but the boundary-breaking, de-segregating movement could, conceivably, undermine it.

Like Noam wrote earlier today, it’s still too soon to tell where the movement will eventually go, and “it can even bring Israel further to the right; it certainly won’t be the first time in history in which social unrest led to the rise of rightwing demagogue – but right now, it is creating a space for a new conversation. Limited as this space may be, it’s so much more than we had just a month ago.” The slow erosion of separation lines means there are also possibilities opening up for new conversation about the Jewish-Palestinian divide – including the occupation.

PERHAPS THEY WILL DISCOVER THEY HAVE MORE IN COMMON WITH EACH OTHER THEN THEY HAVE WITH THEIR OWN EXTREMISTS