Not intended as justification for Israeli actions.
I’m not known here as someone who leaps headfirst into the thick of things when the going gets heated. I lurk but generally do not comment in those long, divisive threads. But maybe that’s all about to change.
Not intended as justification for Israeli actions.
The other day I made this comment in this story:
Not intended as justification for Israeli actions.
Re: The Israeli Mindset (4.00 / 3)
We’ve seen this mindset before, here in our own country where right wing voices continually shout about the Islamofascist Menace in terms that approach apocalyptic rhetoric. It is the mindset of unrelenting tribal fear,
No. It is fear based upon a couple of thousand of years (or more) of being the world’s scapegoat. It did not begin with terrorism directed at Isreal. It did not begin with Hitler’s little enterprise which murdered 6 million Jews. It did not begin with the pogroms in Russia. It did not even begin with Spanish Inquisition. It began long before, perhaps when the conquerors carried off the remnants of the ancient country of Israel and the diaspora began. Nevertheless, unlike the needless fearmongering that goes on here, Jews have actually suffered at the hands of a variety of nations for a period of extended duration. To compare the Neocon crap put forth here to the experience of Isrealis/Jews does a great disservice. Americans, great students of history that they are, can’t even begin to imagine the suffering that gives rise to current Isreali actions. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not endorsing recent actions, but I do understand that what passes for fear here is not the same as what is happening in the minds of Isrealis.
Fear will keep the local systems in line. -Grand Moff Tarkin Survivor Left Blogistan
by boran2 on Mon Jul 31st, 2006 at 01:05:07 PM EST
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Not intended as justification for Israeli actions.
Careful readers will note that I am not attempting to justify recent Israeli actions but was in fact attempting to provide information that at least some might find interesting and some rare individuals might actually find useful. Being Jewish and speaking daily with other Jews, I believed myself able to provide additional insight. But others did not see it that way.
Not intended as justification for Israeli actions.
In response, I received this:this:
Not intended as justification for Israeli actions.
Re: The Israeli Mindset (none / 0)
As wingers are quick to say when they are called out on something, that’s ancient history, get over it already.When it comes to Israel though we are constantly reminded of the tradgedy of the Haulocaust. And the Holocaust was a tradgedy and a crime of horrendous proportions. There’s no doubt about that.
What I think is another tradgedy if not a crime is that Israel keeps clinging to this mindset of being a victim.
To offer this mindset as a legitimate defense of the over-kill Israel is using in it’s “defence” blows the mind.
by high5 (high5104@yahoo.com) on Mon Jul 31st, 2006 at 03:51:25 PM EST
[ Parent | Reply to This | none0-Mega Troll1-Troll2-Warning!3-Good4-Excellent ]
Not intended as justification for Israeli actions.
I’ve seen this get over it and STFU argument before. I can only assume that the writer is/has not been the subject of acts of hatred. Lucky high5. Some of us have been.
Once again, my point was not intended as justification, as was carefully stated in my original comment. My aim was to provide additional information. But for the record and at the risk of being deemed a troll or whatever the popular term of derision du jur is, I’ll spell it out. Jews have been persecuted for a period that measures in the thousands of years. It didn’t begin with the Holocaust, and it didn’t end there. I have been the subject of acts of Jewish hatred within my own lifetime. So when I’m told to STFU, well, I get a little testy. And this is especially true at a place that prides itself upon being just so warm and fuzzy.
Acts of hatred/persecution (for all groups) are a continuum of events. Individual events are only a convenient reference point for purposes of discussion.
Not intended as justification for Israeli actions.
Yeah, the wingers must be right. Just STFU and get over that damned persecution and/or acts of hatred. Ignore them and they’ll just go away. Just like they have for all the other groups subject to such acts.
Not intended as justification for Israeli actions.
Back to lurking.
Not intended as justification for Israeli actions.
Update:
Today I had a discussion with a coworker wingnut. He demanded to know how I felt about the recent events in the middle east. I stated that the killing has to stop, from both sides. He started to say that wasn’t the issue. I interrupted him and stated that this was the issue. Apparently he assumed that I, being Jewish, would be in support of the war. I stated that every day I open my paper only to find more photos of a dead child in someone’s arms. He began talking about security and stated that he would have many more dead if necessary. (This, from a weekly churchgoer that wears a huge cross under his shirt.) I further stated that this was a proxy war. Immediately he went on about how I’ve had too much kool-aid. I quipped that yes, I was from the anti-security wing of the party and wanted to sing Kumbaya with the terrorists while wearing my birkenstocks. He just groaned but one of my coworkers was smiling.
I went back to my office and opened the paper. There was a photo of a dead child in his dead mother’s arms.
The other day, coming home from a vigil, I was thinking on some recent accusations and some of the taunts received while standing “out there” and this song came on … reminded be a bit of that Ghandi saying… “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Everywhere people stare,
each and every day.
I can see them laugh at me,
and I hear them say:
Hey you’ve got to hide your love away.
Hey you’ve got to hide your love away.
How could I even try,
I can never win.
Hearing them, seeing them,
in the state I’m in.
Hey you’ve got to hide your love away.
Hey you’ve got to hide your love away.
—-
But what do you mean by that Janet? Should I hide away??? No. Of course not. 🙂
To me it means that even though I’m one of those types that wears their emotions and passions right at the forefront. Everything in my life is political or passionate or both. I color outside of the lines and think outside the box… so in a way I’m a target for others.
I can live with my passions and love… but that doesn’t mean I have to always engage everytime. I’m starting to learn that it’s okay to just walk away from a Bush/Cheney woman in the parking lot and leave her to be yelling at the empty space where I was standing. I walk away with my words and my passion.
There’ll be another time and another person who might be in a better situation to hear them. A safer time for me. So sometimes I just walk away and hide it away. I know they laugh at me, I can hear them call me names as I slip into the store… but I know just around the corner I may bump into a Veteran for Peace, or an artist with paints all over their pants…
Someone else to share my love with.
coffee drank…
Okay what I’m trying to get at … my protesting, my politics is now a part of me. It’s my way of giving back love. I can’t use it all up to “engage” with people who just want to hate me.
I dunno… it’s really hard to be told STFU. I’m sorry.
(((Janet))), I really hope to get to meet you one day. You are amazing inspiration to me as well as others. I’m so glad that you don’t hide away your views. (But you’re right, sometimes you do have to walk away.)
this is a difficult topic, because there is a sense in which the collective Jewish memory of relentless persecution colors the decisions that Israel’s leaders make. And, yet, that collective memory can lead them astray. They certainly have a different collective experience than the collective American memory, even as they make up a good part of the American memory.
Americans expect not to be fucked with, while Jews have no such expectation, just that wish.
Attack America and we will overreact thinking that we can scare the bejesus out of everyone and prevent any follow-on attacks.
But Israel sees threats where threats do not exist. Or, more properly, they hear someone in Iran say they want to destroy Israel, and they overreact, taking ill-advised actions that actually harm their national security and strengthen their enemies.
If it even makes sense to talk about a collective character, or a collective memory (and with caveats, I think it does) then Jews, Israelis, and Americans all have distinctive and partly overlapping experiences.
And those experiences involve both lessons learned, and lessons learned that do not apply in today’s world.
For example, the capitulation in Munich has catastrophic because Germany was so strong. Making concessions to a pesky enemy (Syria) is not the same as making them to Nazi Germany.
Oversimplify things and you miscalculate.
Anyway, good diary Boran.
“…the collective Jewish memory of relentless persecution colors the decisions that Israel’s leaders make.”
Great comment — very insightful, articulate, and diplomatic on an extremely volatile subject. The only discrepancy I might want to make is with regard to the process by which leaders (including Israel’s leaders) decide to make war on another country and the way those decisions are “colored” (or perceived) by an individual’s allegiance to his or her ethnic/religious/racial/gender, etc.
IMHO these are two very different subjects since one applies to those who start wars and the other applies to those who have to fight them at the risk of untold death and destruction to themselves, their families, and their communties.
IMHO it is fair to say that wars are fought for the sake of wealth and power, and it is not the wealth and power of those who fight the wars, but the wealth and power of the leaders who make the decision that is at stake here.
So the leaders make their decisions based on financial considerations but the one’s who fight the wars and defend the wars do it based on the fact that they feel their identity is at stake and their most basic, gut-level self-defense mechanisms have been compromised.
That’s how Bush used 9/11, exploiting (best case) that horrific disaster to propagate lies that fanned the flames for Americans who had to protect this attack on their identity and the identity of their nation.
For me (at least) it is no coincidence that Israel has chosen this moment to attack Lebanon and activate an identity crisis for Jewish liberals in America. This is the ultimate slippery slope that will deliver Jewish progresives back into the fold of the Bush Regime. Divide and conquer.
However, this is the first time I have ever tried to explain my thoughts on this subject, since I don’t want to activate hostility because people percieve this as a personal attack when they feel their identity is at stake.
I tested this out on a long time friend who is Jewish and her thoughtful responses validated my theory.
Military agression against another country that has not attacked you is wrong. What is going on with Israel and Lebanon has echoes of the same kind of “pre-emptive” agression that Bush used in Iraq.
No matter what the threats, when you look at the cost of war, you are never justified in a pre-emptive strike. Never. Making war is not the way to end war. Just isn’t.
I read that comment of your’s and took it exactly the way you wrote-giving a history and context to the very real fact of jewish persecution that has gone on since the beginning of time-I certainly didn’t take it as any kind of ‘excuse’ for Israel either.
I always look for your comments by the way as I always find them to be either insightful or funny and don’t ever STFU!
As wingers are quick to say when they are called out on something, that’s ancient history, get over it already.
You did provide insight, thank you. As for the response, the right winger’s complete lack of empathy for others is perhaps not the best thing to be emulating. In fact, it’s the one thing above all else about them that scares the hell out of me. People who clearly don’t give a shit about others should not be leaders.
.
Even before finishing the military operation, Israel needs to hammer home “the Iranian-Hizbullah-Syrian axis of terror” message. By doing so, he said Israel would create legitimacy for future action against Hizbullah, or even against Iran.
“Iranian’s President Ahmadinejad doesn’t only want to erase Israel off the map, he wants to erase the map and build Islamic components. Lebanon is the clearest example, and we need to show that.”
Jerusalem Post
Ra’anan Gissin, prime minister Ariel Sharon’s recently sidelined, gravel-voiced spokesman, may be watching the current crisis from his living room, but he had advice for how Israel should be waging the public relations campaign: “Emphasize Iran, Iran and Iran.”
Efraim Sneh (former Labor MK and deputy defense minister under Ehud Barak), who had served in intelligence-related jobs in the Israeli army declared:
“[I]t is still possible to prevent Iran from developing its nuclear bomb. This can be done, since Iran threatens the interests of all rational states in the Middle East. We should therefore do all we can to prevent Iran from ever reaching nuclear capability. Israel cannot possibly put up with the nuclear bomb in Iranian hands. If the Western states don’t do what is their duty, Israel will find itself forced to act alone and will accomplish its task by any means considered suitable for the purpose.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
I wonder what Israel was saying about Iraq one to two years prior to us invading them…
The Russians had a fear of all the countries around them attacking them, so they attacked them first and crushed them into the megolopoly that the USSR became. Yes the Jews were herded into Ghettos (and they have herded the Palestinians into Ghettos) and they were exterminated in huge numbers (REAL GENOCIDE!) They haven’t done that as yet, but they have incarcerated and tortured folks, just as they were incarcerated and tortured. They haven’t really allowed the Arab citizenry full citizen status either.
We, here in the good ole US of A are supposed scared of terrists! And yet we have done some dang good terrorizing ourselves! We have tortured where we claimed to have interrupted Saddam’s torturing, we have wiped out people and villages in the name of “rooting out terrorists” (Fallujah comes to mind.) We have used weapons of mass distruction with the phosperous weapons we used against civilians.
When we first came into this land, we said we wanted freedom for our religion and then we killed Indians and took their children and raised them in “white” homes with “white” religions.
… if this was intended as justification for Israeli actions? (Sorry, couldn’t resist!)
and I still think it was a great comment. Sorry about the response. I had wandered off and didn’t see it till now.
I’m struck by how similar this seems to the matter in which I regularly find myself engaged with many white people here in the south: “Slavery ended 100 years ago, those people should just GET OVER IT.” and “Racism was outlawed in the 1960’s, they should just GET OVER IT.”
Sounds easy, doesn’t it?
But everything has a context, and history has long arms. We are all mostly who we used to be. Change takes time, sometimes. Some wounds heal slowly and serious injuries may incapacitate or disable us for a long time, individually or collectively.
It’s not really so simple after all.
Many of us are not willing to accept the burdens of past wrongdoing laid on us by our foremothers and forefathers. We abrogate collective responsibility too easily and instead point fingers, in vain attempts to whitewash our own souls. And everyone loses, and problems go on and on and on.
Thanks for all your contributions here Boran2.
Thanks for this Boran2. I missed the whole episode.
Given your fondness for “lurking” this might not be something you are willing to do, but I would love to hear your analysis of how this “long arm” of history might be playing out it Israel now. Or what effect you think it has. I feel very comfortable being completely against the actions of the Israeli government, but still trying to understand how history has led them to where they are.
I think we have a history in this country, of expecting people to “get over it.” We don’t understand much of how centuries, not just decades of history, can influence outlook and thought.
I bear an Irish name, for example, and feel about as Irish as my cat T.B. It pains me greatly to be asked by an Irishman, as I have been, whether I am Catholic or Protestant. He insists the answer is of primary importance, though I find it totally irrelevant, to what our relationship with each other can be. I find his insistent emphasis on religion silly and even dangerous, and I’m dismissive. And I wonder at seeing young children paint their houses with “Remember 1690” (Battle of the Boyne). How could they possibly know what that is about, or care?? My problem, he says, is that I’m not Irish, I’m just wearing the name as a costume.
He’s about right. Like many Americans, I’m a squeezed-into-a-melting-pot type, of a people who do not value history much. My Irish name comes from a forebear of some 200+ years ago. So why should I care? We have politicians haranguing about the danger of immigrants when their own grandparents came from other countries seeking refuge, economic prosperity, etc. We lose our history here, and quickly.
Now, as to Muslims, and Jews, as individual sets of peoples: their history far exceeds that of our country, and our public culture. Some of my favorite students right now, are mourning the attacks and deaths in Bint Jbail, the place that’s “home” for their families, and many SE Michigan citizens who came from Lebanon. Also, the family of one of my dearest friends grew up in what is now northern Israel, where they had lived since about 1890. She and her family are Jewish. She does not sit rejoicing at what is going on, by no means. Each set of families has had terrible losses. When I think of their circumstances, it is hard not to dissolve in tears, but that isn’t much help, either.
I don’t think we can tell anyone to get over it, I’m not sure that we can understand what it is, very well.
I don’t mean to offend anyone by this. I believe my own forebears are tainted both by hatred and horrific deeds, even towards some of those that they later learned to befriend, love, and even cherish. I’m pretty bad about expecting some of those folks to forget the past, too. However, I doubt that we can come up
Thank you for reminding me, Boran. I needed reminding.
Not intended as a justification for Israeli actions.
No. It was a call for empathy. Without empathy no steps toward peace and reconcilation can be accomplished.
I also believe that it is very difficult to forgive if the person/entity that has hurt us does not sincerely and truly recognize and accept responsibility for the harm they have caused.
People continue to feel victimized if the “other” ignores or gives lip service to exent of the injury suffered. Fear, anger, hurt continue to fester. Negative emotions lead to bad decisions which lead to retaliation. The beat goes on and on and on.
I had a white South African friend who fled the country because she feared a bloodbath when the blacks took over government. I am fairly ignorant about South Africa, but it seems that the reconcilation process there, which included both accepting responisbility and forgiveness, worked pretty well.
I wish our society could develop the emotional maturity to realize we can have empathy for someone even if we believe that what they are doing is wrong.
Thank you for writing this, boran2. You made the point well.
Here is, IMHO, why there ARE some parallels btwn Israel’s actions and ours:
The exploitation of memory for political aims and personal gain. Jews in Israel, and in communities around the world, are subjected to a relentless shakedown that has empowered and enriched the Israeli right for DECADES now. The massive landgrabs of Palestinian land, the lucrative defense industry … NONE of which have made Israelis any safer.
Our right and the Israeli right work very closely together. The use similar methods. They exploit each other’s populations fears, bigotries and selective historical memories.
The Holocaust is one of MANY holocausts. Yes, the Jews have been targeted relentlessly in many places, but that is true of MANY tribal people who maintain distinct identities separate of the places they live. Instead of remembering the pain of that persecution, instead of learning the lesson of compassion, the Israeli right has twisted those memories into the fuel feeding montrous crimes against another people. It’s important to remember that there is a historical basis for this fear, but it is equally important to point out the exploitation of it for nefarious reasons.
Yes, I think I will do that from now on.
Although, I have to say this first:
Considering the context in which you brought up your essay on ‘The Israeli mindset’ i.e. outright war by Israel on Lebanon at least I couldn’t but interprete that as if not a defence of the Israeli actions then an appeal for us to understand them.
I’m sorry but however much you feel wronged by my words I still can’t understand Israel in this fight. Rather, as I also said in my post but you failed to highlight, I see it as a tradgedy, if not a crime, keeps clinging to it’s victim mentality. Why is it a tradgedy (if not a crime)? Because it allows for easy manipulation of peoples minds.
that Israel keeps clinging
Rather than seeing it as a “victim mentality” you should see it as a “suviver mentality”. There is a world of difference between both.