Obama And The Need For A 'truthful' History Of Israel

That was an outstanding, and IMO devastating, piece, Mr P - thanks. Esp so re. the point that Hitler had nothing to do with a Zionist movement that was strong and large before anyone ever heard of the holocaust.

Any chance that you can start to apply the same level of care, respect and editing to your Spine posts?

"Not as a reparation, but as a right."

A bit of a tangent, but if you apply the principles of Zionism to the United States, doesn't that give the Native Americans some valid claims to far more of the U.S. than they were alloted by the government.  Like the Jews of Israel, they were here first.  Like the Jews of Israel, they've always been here.  Like the Jews of Israel, they were thrown into diaspora -- by the same government that continues today, by violence, and with legions of broken treaties.  Yes, there are some key differences: the U.S. offers Native Americans today equality (societal racism aside), something the dhimis codes of the Middle East (if even that) didn't offer Jews.  Native Americans were given reservations, but on inferior land and even then their land rights were habitualy abused.  The real answer America has to Native American grievences is that so much time has passed, what's done is done -- a kind of genocidal statute of limitations.  

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying Zionism is wrong or not legitimate -- I think just the opositte.  But we're not as much unlike the Arabs as we may think.

As I indicated in response to Michael Crowley's original poist, I don't think that Obama's explicit acknowledgment that Israel's right to exist is rooted in something more than "tragic history that cannot be denied" means that his argument is either false (which it isn't, unless you choose to read things into his statement that may or may not be there) or undermines Obama's stated goals.  His stated goals are to achieve a peaceful settlement between Israel, the Palestinians and those of Israel's Arab neighbors that do not yet recognize it, and utilize progress in peace negotiations toward the greater goals of defanging Iran's influence in the region and eliminating Arab support for terrorist extremism.  Lecturing his Arab audience about the Jews' biblically-rooted right to a sovereign state in their midst would reinforce Arab paranoia about how the Zionists are taking over their lands with American assistance and would help them shut out whatever else Obama is proposing.  Marty, a keen student of Middle Eastern history like you would know that the Arabs have often made concious decisions to ignore their purported best interests where they did not approve of the messenger or the way that message was delivered.  My hunch is that Obama and his advisors thought long and hard about how to defend Israel's right to exist to their intended audience, evaluated the idea of mentioning the history of Zionism and Jewish prayers for redemption and decided it would do more harm than good, or would do insufficient good.  I guess we will know more sooner or later for certain, but that's what I would surmise.

lymon1: "Native Americans were given reservations, but on inferior land and even then their land rights were habitualy abused.  The real answer America has to Native American grievences is that so much time has passed, what's done is done -- a kind of genocidal statute of limitations. "

I think that's a bit of a stretch but I see what you're getting at and I don't totally disagree. What has happened to the Palestinian people -- both at their own hands and at Israel's hands -- is nothing short of tragic. The question is where do we go from here, though.

If Native Americans started to agitate in a serious way for a separatist state, I, for one, think that would have to be considered seriously as a just claim and made possible if possible.  The problem, I think, rather than being one of "what's done is done" or a statute of limitations is that Native Americans identify pretty closely with the particular regions they come from, and those are spread across the continent.  I just don't see the Shinnecock of Long Island or the Pequot of Rhode Island getting together and moving to, well pretty much anyplace, for the purpose of creating a nation-state together with the Apache or even the relatively close Iroquois.  On the other hand, the 300 million or so people here aren't going anyplace else, as in giving back the entire continent and moving to the moon.  So, I don't think there is any practical way to recognize the Native American claim.

In contrast, the Jews have their origin of what became, well after Israel was first a state, a small corner of a vast, Arab colonial empire.  The intellectual mistake that is constantly made is in viewing Israel as an outpost of European colonialism.  No, despite the long excursion of the Jews there.  Rather, Israel was a small corner of the Arab Moslem conquest that was never assimilated.  If it had been, then the Jews there would have been Moslems.  And the reason it wasn't assimilated is that it was a backwater.  Other than in the modern era when beating the Jews, or trying to, became a symbol of Arab manhood when they couldn't beat anyone else, including the Turks, it was considered by the Arabs to be of no importance.  

There is no reason why the Great Powers at the end of World War I should have recognized the Arab desire to end their colonial status, whether at the hands of the Ottomans or the Europeans, without according the Jews the same right not to become again a colonial possession of the Arabs.  What the Arabs cannot abide is that any piece of their long ago empire, the caliphate, that had ceased to exist hundreds of years ago, should not be returned to their control.  Too bad.  The Great Powers giveth, and thy also giveth to others.  Just as in the Balkans, many nationalities were recognized with a state.  And some weren't.

As for Isreal and the Holocaust, it is rather ahistorical, in the least, to pretend that the Holocaust has nothing to do with the founding of the State of Israel even though modern Zionism and Jewish resettlement in Israel antedate the 20th century  Peretz likes his history as ideological as possible, just like everything else.

Yes rozenson, except that when "what has happened to the Palestinian people" happened, there was and never had been in history a Palestinian people.  The "Palestinians" are merely the Arabs who come from Isreal, never distinct in anything, language, culture, history, religion, other than by their connection to the Jews.  Withal, none of the other Arab states want them or the land west of the Jordan where some of them live, Israel won't have them, so I am all for according them a state.  No time like the present to become a people.  It just isn't going to happen at Israel's expense.

As I said on a related thread, due to the Arab wars against Israel, roughly 700,000 Arabs were displaced within the Arab world, moving roughly the distance from Long Island to New Jersey with an Arab nation that comprises an area comparable in size to the US.  800,000 Jews from Arab countries were driven out and ended up in Israel.  The debt is paid.  In the real world, rather than the fantasy world of the Arabs or their sympathizers, this is no more subject to being revisited than is the existence of Pakistan and the fact that 7 million Moslems and 7 million Hindus moved from one side of the line to the other when Pakistan was separated from India (despite no such state ever having existed before), accompanied by violence that may have cost the lives of 1 million.

The tragedy of the Palestinians is that their Arab brothers have been screwing them for 60 years for their own political advantage.  Nobody regards the 800,000 displaced Jews as a tragedy today because they were taken in and integrated with their own people in their own land.

Native Americans have had the last laugh, even better than a separate state: they've found a way to extract massive, million $-per tribal member economic rents from individual Americans every year, a cash flow that's more secure than anything Philip Morris or ConEdison ever generated. Not exactly full reparation for what their forbears suffered, but not such a bad deal, either.

Roid, the problem with your analysis is that the Jews were a very small proportion of the population in present-day Israel and Palestine when the Moslems conquered the area in the seventh century (most of the population were Hellenized gentiles of various origins, the majority of whom converted to Islam and assumed Arab cultural identities over several centuries).  The Jewish population of that area waxed and waned during the years of Moslem and other ruling empires, but they never achieved a majority status in the entire region until the 20th century (although Jews predominated in some parts of that area at certain times).  On the other hand, much larger Jewish communities existed in modern-day Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria and the Maghreb that were conquered by the Moslems but never assimilated into Islam.  Those communities almost never sought sovereignty in the places where they dwelt, either from their Moslem or non-Moslem rulers, until Arab violence following Israel's independence drove most of them from their homes ... to Israel for the most part.  Which just goes to show how complicated it is to argue about historic rights to a homeland, especially for a people that is scattered about the world.

I concur with wildboy.  As was noted in the comments to Crowley's post, the term "tragic history" in Obama's speech is reasonably understood as going back to the diaspora.  In any event, Obama did not attribute "the birth and development of Israel solely to the Holocaust."  If he said that, it would be false.  But he did not say that.

It is not clear what Pearl and Peretz think Obama SHOULD have said.  That Jewish people have a religious or moral claim to that piece of geography that is superior to that of other people who have been living there for centuries?  I don't think you can expect even non-Jewish supporters of Israel to embrace that proposition, much less the Muslim/Arab world.  Please correct me (as I know you will) if I have misconstrued what you think Obama should have said.

Rozenson, I believe lymon is comparing Jewish people, not the Palestinians, to Native Americans.  As Jewish people believe they have a historical claim to the land now roughly defined by Israel, so Native Americans arguably have a historical claim to much of what is now the United States.  If a particular Native American tribe or nation were to assert its historical right to A particular piece of US geography, what would be the rationale for not recognizing that claim, while recognizing the Jewish people's historical claim to Israel?

Tep: Naw, we're moving in on that too -- look at the explosion of state gaming licenses in the last couple decades.  Near where I live the city of Waukegan (home of Jack Benny!) is coming very close to getting a casino license, which will tear a big chunk of people from Pautawaname in Wisconsin.  We're going to legalize internet gaming soon enough as well.  

lymon - interesting. Now how do I play this as an investment strategy? Pls provide the ticker symbols - thx, t

Roi, I'm not sure at the end of the day whether the Native American analogy is a good one, but let's play this out a little further.  Let's say the Shinnecock of Long Island assert a claim that they should all be repatriated to Long Island and a Shinnecock nation should be established there.  The non Native Americans that have been living there for more than a century could either stay as legal residents (or perhaps could become citizens of the Shiinnecock nation under certain circumstances), or could move elsewhere.  There are all kinds of reasons that this would never happen.  But what if the Shinnecock people asserted that claim.  Would the only basis for rejecting it be its impracticality?

Tep and Lymon, you're not really saying that this casino stuff is just compensation of the nation-destroying this country did in the 18th and 19th centuries are you?

read my post, hurtado. READ the whole post.

roid:  As I've mentioned before I think the India/Pakistan partition is a good (if not perfect) anaolgy.  But it depends on how one invokes Pan-Arabism.  India took in Hindu"Pakistanis" -- if they had not, would, say, Sindh Hindu, be in a position to argue a right of return and a separate homeland?  They've always been in the region (a few remain in the Karachi area today), they were driven out by religiously motivated violence, etc.

The bottom line in Israel's case is that an amazing thing happened: a combination of world sympathy because of the hHolocaust and "might making right" (or at least military parity).   I think most people would agree that the ancestors of Native Americans probaby have *some* historical claim to more than they've received (I think the least we could do is offer free college tuition and/or vocational training to any Native American born on a reservation and lifetime access to Medicare) but that they won't get it because they have nothing beyond the moral power of their plea.  That said, if the Native Americans today were given an offer like 2000 Arafat, they'd probably have considered it rather than launching a huge wave of terrorism...

dhurtado -- of course not, see my initial post and my suggestion for additional compensation (still not enough...) above.  But I'm a realist -- we're not going to "make amends" to the ancestors as we should (though we should do a lot better on the Indian Trust lawsuit that's been going on for, what, a decade?)  

Actually, I apologize to Lymon, who is saying that we are taking away a substantial portion of the Native Americans' profits from gaming.  Tep, true, you say "Not exactly full reparation for what their forbears suffered, but not such a bad deal, either."  I took that to mean that the gaming profits are at least substantial reparations for what their forebears suffered, which  ithink would be a preposterous proposition.  

Marty, In the article you wrote:

"There was one startling passage in Obama's speech that very few commentators have noticed, perhaps because they also don't know their history. "Islam has always been a part of America's story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second president, John Adams, wrote, 'The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.'" Now, as Michael Oren recounts in his magisterial history of America's enmeshment in the region, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, the fact is that this treaty, which imposed a ransom of money and ships on the Americans, was a fraud. "

It would have been a strange type of irony if Obama were to be educated about the role of Muslims in the history of the US by the Israeli ambassador to Washington.

Tep, over on the thread from McWhorter's post re: "Wise Latina racist," you asked a some questions about affirmative action at the University of California, to which I responded with some questions of you, if you care to respond.

Well, dhurtado, all the Shinnecock pretty much are in Long Island on a reservation in Southampton. Bet you didn't know there was an Indian reservation in the Hamptons, did you?  They number a few thousand at the most, but they have a very valuable piece of real estate on the water and have been angling for a casino.  The Anglos are worried about the traffic that would result and are trying to get them a casino somewhere else, like the Catskills.

But let us suppose that all the Native Americans in the US were Shinnecock, scattered there by successive colonial regimes, the English, the Dutch, the French, the Spanish, and wanted to reclaim Long Island, started moving in, bought up the land, and then wanted to declare their independence from the United States in Suffolk County, the easternmost part, where they form a majority.  I cannot think of a single reason why that desire should not be accommodated by the United States of America.  In any case, the UN declares a partition of Long Island, giving the eastern half, Suffolk County, where the Shinnecock are now the majority, to them and the western part, Nassau, Queens and Brooklyn Counties, to the Anglos, notwithstanding that the Anglos also have the rest of the State of New York and the millions of square miles that constitute the US too.  And yes, the Long Islanders could decide to stay and become a part of the Shinnecock Nation or move to adjacent Nassau County, the Anglo side of the partition, or to Westchester or Connecticut or New Jersey or Alaska or any other part of the vast United States.

Instead, the US refuses to recognize the Shinnecock Nation in a piece, not all, of its historic homeland of Long Island and invades.  Improbably, the US loses the war, Anglo refugees depart, and the Shinnecock, who at one time owned all of Long Island, pick up Nassau County too.  At the end of the war, the US still refuses to recognize Shinnecock in Suffolk and Nassau Counties, less than all of Long Island which also includes Queens and Brooklyn on the west end.  At the close of the war, Queens and Brooklyn are annexed by New York City.  The border of Queens County and Nassau County, the armistice line, becomes the de facto border between New York and Shinnecock.  

20 years later, the US starts yet another war, following a long period in which it had adopted terrorist guerrrilla tactics against the Shinnecock whom it still refuses to recognize as a state.  The US loses this war too and the Shinnecock take Queens, Brooklyn, and the rest of New York City.  In a subsequent peace treaty, they return Manhattan, the Bronx, the Yankees, and Staten Island to the State of New York.  They remain in Queens and Brooklyn and start to settle there, in the remaining part of their homeland of Long Island.  But the Anglo residents of Queens and Brooklyn stay put.  40 years later, there are Shinnecock settlements in Queens and Brooklyn, but the Shinnecock are a small minority there.  However, they annex Belmont Raceway, the location of their ancient seat of government, on the Nassau-Queens line, where there has been continuous Shinnecock residence for millenia.

The US expels as many Shinnecock as fled Nassau.  They take up residence in the Shinnecock nation.  The US keeps the Anglo former residents of Nassau County in refugee camps in such alien places as Manhattan, New Jersey, Connecticut.  There are even some in Boston.

Now, tell me, are you crying yet for the displaced of Nassau County who ended up in Manhattan, Westchester, etc.?  New York City declares it no longer wants Brooklyn and Queens.  The Anglos want their own state there.  The Shinnecock say, okay,, you can have it, but you have to make peace and stop committing terrorism.  The Anglos say, and by the way, all the refugees from Nassau have to be allowed back in and we have to recover Belmont race track because, in a dream, George Washington was flown by heavenly beings to Belmont, won the trifecta, and was taken up to heaven to collect his winnings.  The Shinnecock say, no, too late for the Anglos to come back to Nassau and we are not giving up Belmont which we created and has always been the center of our national existence.  Brooklyn and Queens refuse to accept statehood there and continue a terrorist guerrilla war against the Shinnecock.  Oh, and by the way, the residents of Brooklyn and Queens decide that they are a separate nation, the Lawn Guylanders, although all of them are really just New Yorkers who moved to Nassau.

Are you now going to tell me that, given those facts, you are move by the "tragedy of the Lawn Guylanders?"  Because that is pretty much the ridiculous story that we are supposed to accept about the Palestinians, a large number of whom emigrated into the area from surrounding parts of the Arab world in the 19th and 20th centuries when Jewish settlement began to make the area more prosperous than adjacent areas.

The Arabs conquered the Levant and North Africa and assimilated most, but not all, of it.  They conquered Palestine.  They were in turn conquered by the Ottoman Turks.  When they gained their independence from their colonial masters 400 years later, in the 20th century, they were not again given colonial dominion over the Jews, who gathered in their exiles.  We do not hear of the tragedy of the Hindus of Rawalpindi or Karachi or of Bengal.  We do not hear about the 800,000 Jews displaced from Arab countries, many of whose Jewish communities had been there since long before Mohammed.  Why do we still hear about the 700,000 displaced Palestinian Arabs?  Political exploitation.  Period.  

Unlike posters around here, who are too hot-headed to discuss of Obama's speech, its lacunae, its analogies, its ambiguities, in anything even resembling cool headed objectivity, here is  Norm Geras on same:

"Suppose there are four widely-used arguments for a certain proposition. Let's call them A, B, C and D, and the proposition in support of which these arguments are put forward, P. Then, woe betide you if in stating the case for P on a given occasion, you happen to voice C and D but not A. There'll be someone out there for whom A is the essential argument for P, and voicing only C and D will be a misdemeanour. So, if you shouldn't slap the guy across the face because he has a right against assault, and it will hurt him, and he hasn't done anything wrong, and you'll get better results from engaging him in dialogue, then woe betide the person who says, 'Don't slap him; it will hurt him and he hasn't done anything wrong'. That person has failed, miserable wretch, to mention the right against assault.

But maybe she wasn't constructing a philosophical case, building from first principles and all that. Maybe she was just making a speech and reaching for a couple of arguments that might sway people against slapping the guy in the face."

normblog.typepad.com/.../beware-tripwire.html

I have to confess, I find Norm's argument persuasive. Maybe because I want to be persuaded, I don't know. at least for now, or until more data becomes available.

Lymon, I don't think that partition is a process of infinite regress in which progressively smaller bits secede from each other.  If the Hindus had remained in Pakistan, in Sindh, they would be entitled to be citizens of Pakistan with full political and economic rights.  They would not be justified in conducting a guerrilla war against Pakistan.  If living in a majority Hindu state is of critical importance to them, the have vast India to go to.  If the Sindh Hindu now decided they want to return to Pakistan, 60 years after the partition that was essentially contemporaneous with the partition of Palestine, who in the world would pay any attention?  Did the world embrace the Tamil separatist movement?

It is particularly worth noting that the Moslem world has never objected to the creation of Pakistan, and then Bangla Desh, out of India.  When the purpose is to create a Moslem majority state out of a piece of another land, notwithstanding that Islam was a conqueror in India, just as it was in Palestine, the Moslem world is content.  Thus, it is not the principal of religious partition that they object to.  Rather, the Moslem, and particularly Arab, world has the idea that, unlike any other people in the world, Moslems are entitled to be sovereign in any place where a majority can be created for them.  They, unlike the Jews and plenty of other people, cannot be a political minority anywhere even though they are a governing majority in a vast portion of the habitable earth.   Nor do they tolerate other minorities very well, no matter how ancient.  Just ask the Coptic Christians of Egypt of the Bahai.

What about the Kurds, what about the Tibetans, what about.....I can go on and on about dispossessed peoples and their feelings of historical justification. At some point you have to throw aside history and take the world as it is or we will be in a never ending historical pissing match. The only thing that matters now is what percentage of the West Bank will be Palestine and what won't, and what other part of Israel will be ceded to the Palestinians (think parts of the Negev) as compensation for the parts of the West Bank that will remain Israel. I don't care about what the Bible says, or the Koran, or the Crusades or Saladdin, just chuck it all. Nobody anywhere owns the land, we are just occupying it during our life span, so lets take it as it is now. Yeah, I know perspective is just wishful thinking.

Roi, you are correct that I don't know the history of the Shinnecock (nor had I heard of them until now), nor do I know the complete history of the Israeli/Arab history as you do.  That said, your analogy is brilliant.  However, it also is attacking a straw man, at least as far as it applies to me.  I have not said anything about the "tragedy of the Palestinians."  My point is to explore the nature of the Jewish historical claim to the land that is now largely defined by Israel.  You address that point as follows:

"[L]et us suppose that all the Native Americans in the US were Shinnecock, scattered there by successive colonial regimes, the English, the Dutch, the French, the Spanish, and wanted to reclaim Long Island, started moving in, bought up the land, and then wanted to declare their independence from the United States in Suffolk County, the easternmost part, where they form a majority.  I cannot think of a single reason why that desire should not be accommodated by the United States of America."

But as you well know, the United States would not accommodate that desire.  The US would not recognize any legitimate claim to the land by the Shinnecock, and would not permit the Shinnecock to establish an independent state there.  What rationale would support the US's refusal?  Its having the raw power to prevent it?  Perhaps, but I  am sure a principled rationale would be invoked along the lines of time and adverse-possession having extinguished any claim the Shinnecock might have had to the land, and recognition of the reliance-interests of existing non-Shinnecock residents of the land and of the US itself on the Shinnecock land having been part of the US for the past 150 years.  

So, would the Shinnecock in fact have a valid moral, if not legal, claim to the land?  I think that is a very difficult question, but clearly our nation would answer in the negative.

And let's throw in a claim by the Shinnecock that they have a right to the land because it was given to them by their god or gods may centuries ago.  Could anyone other than the Shinnecock themselves be expected to recognize that claim?

dhurtado,

I wasn't charging you with pushing the "tragedy of the Palestinians."  I was just making the point that people accept, and encourage, claims by the Arabs that would be considered preposterous in any other corner of the club, certainly by Moslems.

I am sure we will never know, but I would be willing to bet that Americans would be willing to grant Native Americans an independent state if they could more or less agree where to put it.

Blackton,

If it were up to me, I would get China out of Tibet and create an independent Kurdistan.  Both populations are significant, have no other independent homeland, and are culturally threatened and discriminated against in the polities that claim them.  But I would not for an instant grant that they have the right to achieve independence by violent methods.  That is for self-defense.  If they were under physical threat or attack, they have the right of all human beings to fight for their lives.   Political boundaries should be determined politically.  It is the particular misfortune of the Arabs that they started all the wars they lost.

If one wants to chuck history, it suffices that the State of Israel was effectively created by the United Nations, as was Pakistan.  That gives it legitimacy that few states can claim.  From that point on, they had the right of self-defense.  End of story.

Roi says:

"I would be willing to bet that Americans would be willing to grant Native Americans an independent state if they could more or less agree where to put it."

But Roi, we sort of already have that with the "reservations."  What I am hypothesizing is that a certain Native American people, the Seminole, perhaps, asserts a claim to their ancestral land (Florida or southern Florida, whatever that ancestral land would be).  It is not a matter of agreeing on where to put an independent state, but a matter of a claim of right to particular piece of land.  The Seminole would in effect be saying "you must return to us the land that you stole from us, not only because we possessed it first, but because god gave it to us."

As a matter of historical and political reality, that is not going to happen, just as the egg could not be un-scrambled in the Middle East.  The State of Israel is there and is not going anywhere.  But in defending the existence of the State of Israel, I do not think Obama could rightly have been expected to invoke the Jewish people's historical or devine "right" to possess the land.

Oh yes, let's let the Bible determine our foreign policy.  Pat Robertson couldn't have said it any better, Mr. Peretz.

This notion of "Who was there first" is ridiculous anyway.  The forefathers of today's Christians were Jews way back then, just like the forefathers of todays Jews.  

That's absolute form over substance, meant to exacerbate the fighting, not bringing solutions.  There was no reason that the Jewish state had to be there; if we had put it in North America, we wouldn't have these problems.

My own colleague is a cat. So, sure, I take with a grain of salt some of the things she says.

Still she was rather adamant about the self-serving hypocrisy our species employs over and again to jury rig history to suit our own narrow interests.

She reminded me, for example, that the Middle East is veritably awash day in and day out with the creme de la creme of history's cherry pickers. Beyond an art, beyond a science, it approaches the metaphysical with an aplomb that is simply breathtaking.

Not to mention fatally flawed.

Thus it is almost as though Marty is channeliing God Himself [one of them] in establishing a Whole Truth that both underlies Zionism's narrative, while simultaneously undermining the Palestinian's. And from this assumption we can surely embrace how this Whole Truth is a sincere reflection of an honest appraisal of the unfolding historical conflicts there. That, in other words, it has little or nothing to go with Israel's military might.....a  jauggernaut hooked into the U.S. Defense Department...to the flea market where the Palistinians procure their own "arsenal".

Alas, on both sides of the divide, reification revolves far more around racism and religion than an honest exchange about the profoudly prolematic historical trajectory there. For the True Believers, of course, everything eventually gets reduced down to The Word. Well, The Word and the armaments that back it up.

I shall read Marty's piece on "Narrative Dissonance". If for no other reason than the curiousity I have regarding the manner in which he defines the relationship between a narrative, human history and moral and political value judgments.

I don't expect to be surprised, of course.

george walton

OK, so I understand, Israel and zionism is not about the Holocaust, not about antistemitism as a result of living on other people's lands and not having a land of their own.  Its about Jewish longing for a return from exile, Jewish longing for what is belongs to them, for what they deserve.  That's fine.  I think every tribe has their own dream of the promised land.  My question: why should non-Jews somehow be expected to invest themselves in this dream?  Or tolerate it if, as with the Palesinians, it requires them to...move.  

“A bit of a tangent, but if you apply the principles of Zionism to the United States, doesn't that give the Native Americans some valid claims to far more of the U.S. than they were alloted by the government.”  Lymon

Many American Indians that I have met in the service and in my travels did tell me would like to have had their own nation. In the late 19c there was even a Lakota ritual “ghost dance” which expressed those very wishes.

But here is the rub: to want to something and to work towards acquiring it are two different things. Jews since antiquity wanted to go back to Eretz Israel but only since the mid 19c did they take steps to make it a reality.

Zionism wasn’t just a dream it was a call to work the land, it was a call to take concrete steps to build a civil society through which Jews could build their own nation and achieve independence.

This is what is lacking in all this talk here. Peoples may have valid claims but unless they work towards making these claims tangible they will be merely idle claims made by dreamers.

No one will give anyone a nation; no one gave the Jews a nation. When the League of Nations and later the UN voted to recognize the Jewish nation they merely affirming that was already there.

It matters less on what basis national sovereignty is claimed (religious, linguistic, historic, etc. or all of the above) than that the people putting forth the claim of nationhood stand by it.

“Native Americans were given reservations, but on inferior land and even then their land rights were habitualy abused.”

The land the Jews reclaimed from the 1980’s to the 1940’s was swampland, it was desert it was rocky and it was painstaking and back breaking work. The real difference between say Lakotas and Jew was that the former had no interest in farming. They were a hunting gathering people. The early Zionists on the other hand used the worthless land to transform themselves from Ghetto Jews into farmers.

It’s no all about what is given you, it’s about how you deal with what is given you.

“The real answer America has to Native American grievences is that so much time has passed, what's done is done -- a kind of genocidal statute of limitations.”

Who has given Native Americans such an answer, Lymon?

goerge walton von brunn  is baaaaaaaaaaack!

.Overbrook said:

"Oh yes, let's let the Bible determine our foreign policy. "

Where did Marty say that, Overreader?

"If it were up to me, I would get China out of Tibet and create an independent Kurdistan."

The seizure of Tibet is one of the great crimes of the 20th century. What makes me angriest about it is the way the Maoisit left, but not only them, made excuses for the genocide commited against the Tibetan people in the name of "progress."

One hears less of that today, but the fact that Tiber is ignored by the left shows that a similar mindset is still present.

The Kurds will I am convinced achieve independence some day if and when they unify and work towards it peacefully.

gurdjieff66 said:  "OK, so I understand, Israel and zionism is not about the Holocaust, not about antistemitism as a result of living on other people's lands and not having a land of their own.  Its about Jewish longing for a return from exile, Jewish longing for what is belongs to them, for what they deserve."

Why the cynicism. Zionism is and always was about the Jewish longing for their homeland.

" That's fine."

No one cares if you approve or not.

" I think every tribe has their own dream of the promised land."

This is rubbish. Israel was the promised land when the Jews left Egypt. This is the Biblical account, part legend, part myth, part history, great story though.

Zionists dreamt of returning to their historic homeland. The place from which they were ethnically cleansed by the Romans.

"My question: why should non-Jews somehow be expected to invest themselves in this dream?"

No one asked you to intrude into this reclamation project. So why have you? Why do you hang around a pro Zionist magazine. Shouldn't you be posting on Von Brunn's web site.

Why are antisemites so invested in Jewish affairs?

 "Or tolerate it if, as with the Palesinians, it requires them to...move. "

Who the fuck has asked you to move anywhere?  Gurdj is just mad because his dream of a greater Serbia didn't work out.

Jackson, the question on the table is whether Obama, in defending Israel's right to exist, should have invoked the Jewish people's "historical right" to the land based on their having been there first and/or based on the land having been promised/given to them by God.  (As I said above, if that is not the basic theory of Zionism, then you should feel free to correct me and the others on this thread that have that understanding of it.)  That is the import of the comparison with Native Americans.  Should they not have a "right" to repossess the lands from which they were dispersed based on the fact that they possessed it first.?

If Zionism refers only to the Jewish people's 2000 year struggle to return to their homeland, that is a different matter.  Indeed, Obama's words fairly encompassed that historical struggle.  

Your veiled indictment of Native Americans for not having worked to repossess the lands from which they were dispossessed is not fair.  The Jews were "ethnically cleansed" from their homeland, and repossessed it 2000 years later, but not without the help of other nations.  Native Americans were ethnically cleansed from their lands, and no nation ever came to their aid.

On a rather petty point, Jackson, if you don't care what other posters here think, then why do you bother to respond to them?

jackson:  Given your previous post on what "never again" means to you (i.e., it doesn't apply beyond the Holocaust to other genocides), I'm not surprised you concocted such a post as the above.  Ironically, by its logic the Arabs should just wait out the military superiority of Israel until a time they can "work towards making their claims a reality" and then the United States can just "affirm" the new reality rather than stage a Kosovo-like intervention.  The fact is that there are situations where people have what you admit may be "valid claims" and are powerless to act on them.  Zionism was unique historically because the land the Jews were expelled from was sparsely populated and occupied by a power that permitted it.  I can't think of another expelled people who were in any sort of position to do something similiar (and heaven help them all the more if they're pacifists) -- Liberia maybe, though I think the U.S. was more proactive there too.  ANd the U.N. does not merely "recognize reality" -- for better (the sustained isolation of South Africa) and worse (it's relentless hostility to Israel).

I think Israel owes its existence both to the proactivism of Zionism and to the historical circumstances leading to its international recognition -- not the justification for its existence but the reality of it.  Arguing that but-for the rise of Nazi Germany there would have been sufficient emigration to and cultivation/improvement of land in Palestine that a Jewish state was inevitable is one of those unkowable "what if?" questions.  

dhurtado,

I have no problem with Obama's speech.  I do not think the purpose was history and I find the concern that he omitted this reference or that reference just silly.

lymon1 said:

"jackson:  Given your previous post on what "never again" means to you (i.e., it doesn't apply beyond the Holocaust to other genocides), I'm not surprised you concocted such a post as the above."

What the fuck are you talking about? Where did I talk about the meaning of “never again,” and what does it have to do with what we are discussing?

When you can't deal directly with a topic you start to talk of implications and the "logic of the remark," you go off on irrelevant tangents.

The most idiotic thing you said above (and given the silly nature of your reply this is saying something) was that

"Arguing that but-for the rise of Nazi Germany there would have been sufficient emigration to and cultivation/improvement of land in Palestine that a Jewish state was inevitable is one of those unkowable "what if?" questions."

I never argued such a point, Lymon. I  didn't argue it because had there been no Holocaust the whole world would have been different. Take one key event out of history and you change the history of the whole world.

No WW1, no ww2, no League of Nations, etc.  

Similarly, without a Holocaust there may never have been a UN, nor a decolonization process, nor a civil rights movement, nor and of a dozen socio political events that the Holocaust inspired.

You are trying to be too clever by half, Lymon and it’s often impossible to know what you are talking about.

Finally, your comment that:

“Ironically, by its logic the Arabs should just wait out the military superiority of Israel until a time they can "work towards making their claims a reality"….”

There is no such implication in my comments above. You didn’t seem to understand what “working to make something a reality” is all about.

Had the Palestinian Arabs worked to create a civil society, instead of spending their time attacking and trying to nehgate what the Jews has accomplished, they would have had their own State by now alongside that of Israel.

"If Zionism refers only to the Jewish people's 2000 year struggle to return to their homeland, that is a different matter.  Indeed, Obama's words fairly encompassed that historical struggle"

Yes, this is what Zionism means, dhurtado.

Very few ealry Zionists were religious. Many if not most were secular socialists with a strong sense of history. Their appeal was historical and it was socio-cultural and not religious. (Religious zionism came later after they saw what had already been accomplished.

"Native Americans have had the last laugh"

I was shocked to read this tep, and yes, I did read you WHOLE post. Your resentment toward others seems botttomless.

Jackson, the left does not ignore Tibet.

Thanks Jackson.  Perhaps you could clarify further.  Which form of Zionism do you think Pearl and Peretz are aguiing that Obama should have invoked?  And does historical /cultural Zionism (as opposed to religioius Zionism) nevertheless hold that the Jewish people have a "right" to the land that is exclusive of or superior to that of other claimants to the land?

Jimmy Carter:

""I have been in love with the Palestinian people for many years," he said Saturday, adding that this is a feeling shared by members of his family.

"I have two great-grandsons that are rapidly learning about the people here and the anguish and suffering and deprivation of human rights that you have experienced ever since 1948," he said. "

as if we hadn't known it all along.

www.jpost.com/.../Satellite

"Jackson, the left does not ignore Tibet." mmathog

Which leftists are those?

dhurtado said:

"Thanks Jackson.  Perhaps you could clarify further.  Which form of Zionism do you think Pearl and Peretz are aguiing that Obama should have invoked? "

Lots of loaded questions.

Obama needn't have invoked any form of zionism. He should have said that historically the Jewish people had been dispossesed from their land by the Romans, kept out by both its Christian and then Muslims rulers.

"And does historical /cultural Zionism (as opposed to religioius Zionism) nevertheless hold that the Jewish people have a "right" to the land that is exclusive of or superior to that of other claimants to the land?"

The Israeli government accepted the UN partion plan of 1948, the Arab didn't. The resit is bullshit.

Jackson says:

"Obama needn't have invoked any form of zionism. He should have said that historically the Jewish people had been dispossesed from their land by the Romans, kept out by both its Christian and then Muslims rulers."

OK, but Peretz apparently wanted something more:  "The history of Israel cannot be fathomed without understanding that it emerges from the Zionist idea (both ancient and modern), from the Zionist struggle (both ideological and with arms) and the Jewish response to Zionism which was a successful in gathering of the exiles. After all, half of the world's Jews now live in Israel and speak their revived-by-Zionism Hebrew language. The point is that if the president truly wanted to give an honest rendering of the conflict he wouldn't have omitted this essential ingredient of the narrative."

So I think it is fair to ask what is meant by the "Zionist idea" and whether it includes the idea that Jewish people have a historical or religious "right" to the land.  If you choose not to answer, so be it.

"...the "Zionist idea" and whether it includes the idea that Jewish people have a historical or religious "right" to the land.  If you choose not to answer, so be it."

" If you choose not to answer, so be it."

This reminds me of  what is known in American TV court  dramas as the fifth amendment: a witness may refuse to answer a question because the response could provide self-incriminating evidence of an illegal conduct.

I wonder what thought crime jackson is suspected, that he is allowed not to incriminate himself by not answering.

"the idea that Jewish people have a historical or religious "right" to the land."

There is a difference between religious and historical right. Indecent Lefties are hard at work trying to foist upon Israel a purely-religious  justification, so that they can then claim that  "the Bible is not a deed" and the God is not a real estate agent.

Yet Israel's Declaration of Independence provides the following justification:

"the Land of Israel, Palestine] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books. "

The right of Jews to their land is historical. It's the same right that Germans or the French, or the British, have to be sovereign in their lands.  What constitutes their attachment to their land, that is not equally true of Jews in Israel?

I know I am late but lets not forget one very crucial and critical detail. Israel is a Democracy that's legitimacy is bestowed upon it by the will of the people. It is also a country that possess Liberty. It was a country founded on these principles and from its beginning accepted all ethnic and religious groups as full citizens (in fact, Arab Israelis have expanded rights in that they do not have to perform military service). If Israel were like most of the rest of the Arab world, corrupt oligarchies, I would truly give a rats ass about it. The Serbians had historical claims to Kosovo, tough shit, you lost it when you tried ethnic cleansing and mass murder. The same with the Arabs when they tried to cleanse the area of the Jews, tough shit, you lost. I was not clear with my above post when I said chuck history, it is not the history of Israel but its Liberty that accords it a special place.

Noga,

I am without power to allow or disallow Jackson to decline to answer a question.  He implied that my question was irrelevant.  I disagree, but I cannot compel him to answer it.

The Jews in Israel do have a right to be sovereign in their land.  At minimum, that right derives from the fact that Israel is now an internationally recognized sovereign state.  Does it also derive from the fact that the Jewish people possessed the land two millenia ago, followed by nearly two millenia of dispossession?  That is a different proposition than that a people have the right to possess a land because they possess it now and have possessed it continuously for an extended period of time.  It is a challenging question, IMHO.  That is why commenters on this thread have raised the example of Native Americans, and whether they might have a right to repossess land from which they were dispossessed a century or two ago.

I do not suggest an answer one way or the other.  But I do think it might be unrealistic to have expected Obama to make that case in a speech addressed to the Muslim world.  

A-propo Blackton's comment about the status of Arab-Israelis, here is an account  of a meeting with Mohammad Darawshe:

"Like the others I have heard, this is no feel-good presentation. There is a great deal that remains to be done to bring the circumstances of Israel’s Arabs citizens level with those of its Jewish citizens. However, the direction of progress is unmistakeable. Read on."

engageonline.wordpress.com/.../post-gaza-and-israeli-elections-can-there-be-co-existence-in-israel

"OK, but Peretz apparently wanted something more:"

Hurtado, Peretz told you plainly what that "something more" if you are not satisfied, so be it.