I’ll give ya twenty quid if you post it on Daily Kos.

Posted by: D. Mathews | Dec 21 2008 2:39 utc | 3

What matters is not comparing Israel’s 56-year run with the Third Reich’s 12-year run.
What matters is where Israel is pointed — toward harsher racism and genocide against a burgeoning population of Others. Palestinians, Arabs, Persians, who are all brothers of the same Jordanian religions but blood enemies of the sands everyone considers sacred to themselves alone.
Israel is pointed toward banishing and eliminating whomsoever lives in Greater Israel. If in 56 more years we review Israel again, and find that the 112-year old nation now spans what used to be Syria, Lebanon, plus huge tracts of Jordan and Egypt, and yet still needs to build a bomb-proof wall around its holdings, will anyone be surprised?
Israel cannot survive as a nation on what it has, and it cannot quit and go elsewhere. It either melds and merges with the larger Arab population it cannot keep up with birth-wise, or it does whatever it takes to eliminate and drive off those populations.
Peace was never possible, and never will be.

Posted by: Antifa | Dec 21 2008 5:49 utc | 5

Israeli blockade ‘forces Palestinians to search rubbish dumps for food’

The figures collected by the UN agency show that 51.8% – an “unprecedentedly high” number of Gaza’s 1.5 million population – are now living below the poverty line. The agency announced last week that it had been forced to stop distributing food rations to the 750,000 people in need and had also suspended cash distributions to 94,000 of the most disadvantaged who were unable to afford the high prices being asked for smuggled food.
“Things have been getting worse and worse,” said Chris Gunness of the agency yesterday. “It is the first time we have been seeing people picking through the rubbish like this looking for things to eat. Things are particularly bad in Gaza City where the population is most dense.

Posted by: b | Dec 21 2008 7:19 utc | 7

Like many others here I now have to force myself to consider the plight of the people of Gaza. The siege has been going on so long, the USukEU pressure mounting relentlessly. Yet there is less indication now of a break in the solidarity of the citizens of Gaza that there was 3 years ago when the insane decision was made to try and overturn the result of a fair and open election.
An election free of the duress of some ME countries and also free of the rank corruption of Israeli elections.
The reasons I have to force myself to consider Gaza and the West Bank are not just that too much contemplation of the depth of suffering makes one akin to a war porn junkie, it is also because if one wants to really consider all facets of this horror one must also wade through pages of condescendingly irrelevant and over intellectualised garbage such as that posted on the TPM links someone hooked to above.
These idjits who know nothing of Palestine and it’s people but who keep making pronouncements about what is the best way forward in the ME (in the pre 2001 sense when amerikans meant Israel Palestine when they spoke of the ME) because they are ‘jewish’ whatever the fuck that means in the secular societies most inhabit. Of course the blatherings of those who are ‘jewish’ because they follow the whole judeaist theology are even less informed and less rational than the secular bullshit artists.
Who cares what those fuckers decide. The dire situation the amerikan empire is currently in reinforces the simple reality – what happens in the Jordon valley, whether the ill fated, racist and evil israel experiment finally ceases this decade or the next, won’t in any way be dependent on what fat assed, pasty faced zionists pontificate on, no matter whether they are dribbling out of Tel Aviv or Brooklyn.
The power rests with the Palestinians now as it always has. They will end this horror when they finally decide enough is enough. Every house bulldozed down, every child murdered by the israeli gestapo, serves only to hasten that day.
Yes it has been 52 years, not the shortest time infidels have tried to occupy jerusalem but definitely not the longest either, nevertheless this occupation will end in exactly the same manner as all the other attempted colonisations – in a sea of blood and misery for the invaders.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Dec 21 2008 8:30 utc | 9

London Review of Books: If Gaza falls . . .

Israel’s siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then. Israel’s siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt.
…
The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. The European Union announced recently that it wanted to strengthen its relationship with Israel while the Israeli leadership openly calls for a large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip and continues its economic stranglehold over the territory with, it appears, the not-so-tacit support of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah – which has been co-operating with Israel on a number of measures. On 19 December Hamas officially ended its truce with Israel, which Israel said it wanted to renew, because of Israel’s failure to ease the blockade.
How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza’s children – more than 50 per cent of the population – benefit anyone? International law as well as human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be next.

Posted by: b | Dec 21 2008 14:10 utc | 11

Was it Rip On Jew Day, yesterday?
Israel is a fact which will not go away. Nor should it. And it is inappropriate for a German from Hamburg to link to any article suggesting a functional equivalency between nazism and Israel. It’s ok for other jews, like Chomsky, to do so, but not a German. Not ever.

Posted by: slothrop | Dec 21 2008 17:05 utc | 13

If you can discuss the book by Avraham Burg, can you discuss the book by Jeff Gates “Guilt by Association”? Or was it discussed here already?

Posted by: mimi | Dec 21 2008 17:56 utc | 15

israel is left in very much the same position as apartheid south africa – to slaughter the palestinian people, or liquidate the palestinian people through the jordan option or it must make an equitable arrangement between peoples. unfortunately, the darker & i mean darker apocalyptically are the voices which are reigning in israel
there is very little reason for optimism
whatever history is common to the jewish people, israel dishonours

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 21 2008 18:12 utc | 17

Jaffa mosque daubed with ‘Mohammed is a pig,’ ‘Death to Arabs’

Extremists spray-painted “Mohammed is a pig” and “Death to Arabs” early Sunday on the walls and doors of the Sea Mosque in Jaffa, sparking the fury of the Islamic Movement in the mixed Arab-Jewish city.
…
While Israel strongly protests desecration of Jewish cemeteries in Europe, there is incitement within Israel against everything Muslim, Sheikh Abu Ajweh said.

Posted by: b | Dec 21 2008 18:23 utc | 19

It’s a shame that the westward expansion is a taboo topic in Israeli universities.

Posted by: Lloyd G. | Dec 21 2008 20:46 utc | 21

what’s wrong with the goy criticizing Israel when there are rather obvious problems there?
Because I know after five years here where these discussions go: “Israel is the shit on the world’s asshole,” etc. I don’t think anyone here really believes america is irremediably evil. But, not so Israel. And this “not so” boils down to one obscene aversion: that the most oppressed people in human history gallingly defend themselves with statehood.
And then the next step as debs reminds us: they should stop being so secular, you know.
We already know about the contradictions of the project to create a sanctuary for these people.
So, I wonder sometimes the motivation for this bit of perennial israel-cum-jew-bashing.

Posted by: slothrop | Dec 21 2008 22:05 utc | 23

slothrop
let me be brief. i do believe that u s imperialism is irrevocably evil & it’s evil will dissapear when its empire is on its knees – which appears closer today than anytime in my life
israel, on the other hand is a historical aberration which came about from a confluence of a crazed zealot minority within the jewish community, a balfour agreement & in the end the political demand of j v stalin who was the political backbone to the state of israel’s existence. it was his will more than any other which created this historical aberration
what ought to have happened is that austria & a significant if not all of bavaria should have become the state of israel. that would have been the logical geographical answer. the work of consolidating that would have elimenated any possibility of messianic politics

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 21 2008 23:02 utc | 25

@13
And it is inappropriate for a German from Hamburg to link to any article suggesting a functional equivalency between nazism and Israel. It’s ok for other jews, like Chomsky, to do so, but not a German. Not ever.
I’m sorry but I do’nt see what being from Hamburg has to do with anything. And actually, it looks like intimidation.
The situation in Palestine/Israel is very very serious. While reasonable people may disagree on the extent of whats going on & where its headed, I personally would not preclude that a massive crime against humanity may lie ahead. Yes Israel has become an apartheid state thats dehumanizing the Palestinians. And while I do not expect to ever see Palestinians sent into gas chambers, everyday people in Gaza are dying already, from everything from aggression, disease & hunger.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Dec 21 2008 23:43 utc | 27

Slothrop,
I bring up your earlier defense of cosmopolitanism for a reason. Cosmopolitianism abhors tribalism. It requires that people give up their tribal identities and assimilate into some “cosmopolitan” mode of behavior that overrides their tribal norms, reducing their tribal characteristics to something inconsequential. Tribalism, on the other hand, sees the tribal characteristics of a group as sacred and something worth defending, to the death if necessary. Israel’s current problems are the direct cosnequence of its tribal characters.
Of course, this is hardly new: Serbs and Croats did fine under Tito, if they were good “Yugoslavs,” “cosmopolitans” within that country’s borders, but the state fell hard on those who insisted on being “Serbs” and “Croats”–but they couldn’t erase them and set the stage for the trouble of past two decades. Tibetans under Chinese rule do fine if they are good “‘cosmopolitian’ Chinese,” but those who insist on being “Tibetans” suffer harshly, and so on. Playing along with your neighbors and giving up on your tribalness pays in peace and stability. Insisting on being tribal invites trouble. It is tempting for us to apply the same logic to Israel and say, if they insist a bit less on being “Jewish,” a lot of problems will go away. (One thing that I’d like to applaud Bernhard for is that he holds consistent views on both Israel and Tibet–which many people do not.)
But, I do find one trouble with this line of argument–and this is also the fundamental flaw in Avraham Burg’s argument. For many European Jews, assimilation failed and failed miserably. I’d read (can’t remember where…darn!) that many German Jews refused to leave Germany even after Kristalnacht not just because other countries wouldn’t take them but because they felt they were so German that they couldn’t even think of leaving “their” country. Of course, the Nazis didn’t see it that way and the Holocaust effectively wiped out the assimilated Jews of Europe–leaving only the rejectionists, i.e. the Zionists, as “the” Jewish force in the postwar world. In that sense, the Holocaust was unique: it refused to accept voluntary assimilation and integration by a supposedly alien tribe and forced them into the category of the “other,” without any recourse for those excluded to show that they are indeed not “other.” One does have to accept that, as the victims of this tragedy, there is some rationale for Israel as the “Jewish” state, at least for its defenders. In that sense, blanket condemnation of Israel is flawed: it is the product of a unique historical tragedy and one can’t pretend it doesn’t matter.
But, in that token, one does have to ask: can this go on indefinitely? Not without a lot of bloodshed over a very long time. Burg’s question, I think, is whether that’s worth it. He is asking, just because the assimilationist experiment failed once, it should be given up forever? That I’m not sure anyone can answer–and one should definitely tremble before even trying to answer it. The assimilationist experiment that failed didn’t just “fail,” it failed catastrophically. How can anyone ask somebody to try it again, knowing how tragic its cosnequences were.
No, I’m not going to pretend I know the answer.

Posted by: kao-hsien-chih | Dec 22 2008 10:28 utc | 29

Peace was never possible, and never will be.
Even today, the US could enforce it in a flash.
Of course that will never happen, the US now pointedly has only that little toe hold in the ME and it will support Isr. to the death. It has tied its destiny to domination in the ME and to put is very short, killing ‘Arabs’ and maintaining its hold on oil and other resources, mostly thru hoped for control without much thoughts about production, territorial arrangement, labor, finance, development, or anything else. The coming melt down will destroy them both. In about 15 years?
Gaza Gas, just of google, see dates, all this has a long complicated history:
link
link
Not saying it is the only motivation, part of the picture.

Posted by: Tangerine | Dec 22 2008 19:42 utc | 31

[snark]
Tangerine et Kao et Estouxim: SlothTroll is the resident Throp in the bar…
R’giap always tries some form of dialog, but… usually it leads nowhere…
[eom]

Posted by: rudolf | Dec 22 2008 23:05 utc | 33

a massive crime against humanity may lie ahead
um, sorry, but where have you been the past 60+ years? Israel has been committing massive crimes against humanity for decades. Today is just the latest chapter. Try reading this.

Posted by: bea | Dec 27 2008 16:31 utc | 35