 |
Hamas as a Political Failure |
|
 by Michael Weiss, December 30, 2008 |
||
Commentators in the American and European press too often succumb to a solipsistic way of thinking of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as if only one side had any autonomy or agency. The debate between supporters and critics of Israel is typically couched in the same grammar: Either the Jewish state is acting defensibly, in its own self-interest, or it is not. Thus Tom Segev writes in Ha'aretz that while the latest assault on Hamas military and political infrastructure is morally justified, it represents a strategic blunder. A major fallacy ensues from this one-sided premise, which is that Israel is the sole stimulus for Hamas response, and therefore it alone bears the responsibility for the undeniable misery in Gaza. Those quick to point out how Olmert's miscalculations have hurt the people he governs will typically suggest that military incursions "radicalize" Arab sentiment, leading to more suicide bombers and more dead Israelis.
Assuming this is true, why is it that the corollary is never
asked: namely, how does Hamas radicalize Israeli sentiment? A much remarked-upon fact of the last 72 hours is that Israel's ultra-left-wing party Meretz
has endorsed Operation Cast Lead, a development that should concern partisans
of both sides. If there is merit to the "root causes" argument, then
surely it applies to the decisions undertaken by a Jewish polity as much
as it does to those undertaken by a Muslim one. Or does a belligerent Israeli
consensus form in a vacuum? Honest sympathizers of the Palestinian cause should
inquire as to what culpability Ismail Haniyeh and Khalid Mashaal bear for the
all-but-certain election of Benjamin Netanyahu, who is sure to continue - to
coin another witless cliché of this ageless debate - the "cycle of
violence." If, as Hannah
Arendt once phrased it, Theodor Herzl and Bernard Lazare were "turned
into Jews by anti-Semitism," why would their empowered disciples be any
less susceptible to external threats?
From India to Northern Ireland, no colonized population has ever been deemed immune from having the pursuit of its own political interests held up to scrutiny. Indeed, complaints in the Western media about the staggering corruption and incompetence of Fatah have given way to an almost total absence of any serious evaluation of Hamas's many blunders and failures of foreign policy. Either this indicates an unpardonable bias, which many supporters of Israel allege, or the implicit acceptance of a disturbing reality -- that Hamas is still too recalcitrant a political entity to effectively barter with. Judging by its long-term objectives and its short-term behavior, the group is committed to withholding the minimum concessions to its enemy at the cost of incurring the maximum suffering of its people. Derived from an all-encompassing Islamist social movement, Hamas bears a striking resemblance in its political organization to 20th-century fascist parties, a point that must also factor in any assessment of Hamas's "pragmatic" capabilities.
Originally the outgrowth of the Mujamma', the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Islamist movement that took hold in the Palestinian university system in the early 1980s, Hamas is ruled today by an educated elite that seeks to agitate a working-class constituency according to reactionary nationalist principles. It uses the conduits of democracy to implement the least democratic measures-in this case, sharia law. It purports to control the entire state apparatus, including the army, the press, local municipalities, and utilities, while remaining actively hostile to the idea of independent labor unions. (About a year ago, Hamas gunmen attacked the home of the Deputy Secretary General of the Palestinian Federation of General Trade Unions.)
There are two constituent groups within Hamas. The "inside" group devotes itself to the maintenance of social institutions-clinics, kindergartens, blood banks and welfare services. Ismail Haniyeh is the most recognizable figure allied to the "inside" group. The "outside" group controls the political and military establishment of Hamas and is responsible for conducting Gaza's foreign policy, which includes floating the idea of hudna, or a short-term truce with Israel, or implementing tahdi'a, a period of "calm" associated with the now-expired ceasefire agreement.
The "outside" group is said to be divided by conflicting or contradictory impulses, though bound by the same unwavering objective, enshrined in its charter, of annihilating Israel and erecting an Islamic Palestinian state that would range from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea. The public face of this wing is Khalid Meshaal, who, acting from safe haven in Damascus where he receives succor from the Assad dictatorship and funding from both Hezbollah and the mullahs of Iran, orders jihadist operations, and consents to the firing of Qassam and Grad rockets into southern Israel (even when proxies do the firing, Hamas is still responsible as regional authority). It was the Meshaal-backed leadership of this group that also vetoed the attempt by its more sensible Gazan counterparts to renew the Egypt-brokered ceasefire with Israel, masterminded suicide bombings in Israel during the al-Aqsa intifada, and ordered the kidnapping of IDF solider Gilad Shalit. And it was this leadership that decided last year to instruct the Hamas Executive Force and the 'Iz a-Din al-Qassam Brigades to overtake the Fatah-controlled security agencies of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, an usurpation that led to a bloody civil war and Hamas's ouster from the West Bank.
To give a sense of the toll of this coup took on the people of Gaza, I quote at length from B'Tselem, the Israel Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, which by no means flatters Tel Aviv or ignores its violations of international humanitarian law:
From the beginning of the year to mid-November, at least 344 Palestinians were killed and thousands injured in the fighting between the factions. B'Tselem's figures indicate that at least 73 of the dead, 22 of them children, were not taking part in the hostilities and were killed during street fighting or from gunfire during demonstrations. Some three hundred of the dead were killed in the first six months of the year, the vast majority of them in the Gaza Strip. 160 persons were killed in June alone. The casualties occurred during violent clashes between members of the Palestinian Authority's security apparatus, most of whom belong to Fatah and are loyal to Palestinian Authority president Mahmud Abbas, and Hamas militias, headed by the Hamas Executive Force and the 'Iz a-Din al-Qassam Brigades.
Media reports and investigations by Palestinian and international human rights organizations indicate that in the weeks leading up to the Hamas takeover of the security apparatus in the Gaza Strip, the organization's militias abducted several senior members of the Palestinian Authority's security forces and executed them in cold blood without trial. Other PA security officials who were abducted were tortured. In some instances, they were shot in the legs as "punishment" before being released.
After the Hamas takeover, the street battles came to an almost complete halt. The ruling Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, headed by deposed PA prime minister Isma'il Haniyeh, has imposed an oppressive regime against its critics, especially those identified with Fatah. The Executive Force carries out arrests daily. The prisoners are held for a number of days and no charges are filed against them. Amnesty International has taken many testimonies from Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who have been arrested in this manner, and the victims report being ill-treated and tortured.
The Executive Force has frequently broken into the homes of Palestinians in search for weapons in the hands of opposition members. The militias have used excessive force in dispersing demonstrations in the Strip over the past few months. The gravest use of excessive force occurred on 12 November in response to a Fatah demonstration in Gaza City commemorating the death of Yasser Arafat: seven Palestinians were killed, including a twelve-year-old boy.
Something very much like this scenario was anticipated by Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela in their book The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence, which made the provocative case for viewing Hamas in paradoxical terms of what the authors called "flexible rigidity" or "pliant conformity." That is to say, the Islamists could brook compromise and short-term negotiation despite outward posturing as relentless warriors of theocratic nationalism. Yet in presenting their thesis, Mishal and Sela also conceded that the landslide legislative victory in 2006 caught Hamas off-guard, and the party was not ready to assume full political responsibility. The seeds of administrative failure were planted in its electoral success, and the internal tensions of the organization may have only been heightened to the point where "controlled violence" gave way to a third intifada, which now looks to be very much in the offing.
How that intifada is to be waged should be clear to anyone paying attention to the way Hamas has acted in the past and has chosen to "defend" its people. As Jeff Robbins, a former US delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, points out:
In direct contravention of international law, Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, utilizing homes, schools and community centers as launching pads, content in the knowledge that if innocent Palestinian civilians are caught in the cross-fire, it will be Israel that is criticized. This amounts to a sort of Daily Double of human rights violations: the use of innocent Palestinians as human shields for the infliction of violence upon innocent Israelis.
No proponent of Palestinian rights can in good conscience look admiringly on such barbarism. Whatever its behind-the-scenes complexities, Hamas has clearly committed itself to an unsustainable status quo of militant authoritarianism, more concerned with saving face than altering the material conditions of its constituents. The economic sanctions imposed on the strip by Israel, justified or not, would be eliminated with the basic concession of Israel's right to exist and the repudiation of terrorism as a legitimate means of resistance, two things Hamas stubbornly continues to refuse as Gazans continue to starve. It may well by the case that the group is capable of "flexible rigidity," but so far, only the most rigid and lethal exponents of permanent jihad and messianism have had their way. A hardheaded editorial in Der Spiegel stated the matter bluntly:
[A]s bloody as the Israeli offensive has been, it comes largely as the result of a deeply cynical calculation on the part of Hamas. The Islamist group must have known that Israel would not tolerate the incessant cross-border rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip indefinitely. Since the six-month cease-fire between Hamas and Israel ended on Dec. 19, dozens of rockets once again began landing well inside Israel, killing one civilian last week and another, an Arab-Israeli, on Monday.
And if the underlying hope was that an extraordinary retaliation would take place, how can anyone pledge confidence or faith in a party that begs for the punishment of its people? A Hamas defeat at the polls would certainly be a welcome occurrence, if still an insufficient resolution to a systemic problem. Palestinians lack a viable political program that places statehood, peaceful coexistence, and socioeconomic wellbeing at the fore, where these interests don't require academic specialists to decipher them. Call it Fatah without the kleptocracy, or social democracy with teeth. In searching for such a program, or at least the philosophical underpinnings that precede it, Palestinians might take a lesson from an unlikely tutor: 19th-century Zionists. Was there ever any problem Diaspora Jews faced that they thought could not be solved by the temporary salves of charity and favorable international publicity? What the early Zionists came to realize was that without first addressing the integral political crisis of the Jewish nation, the cultural and humanitarian concerns would never be adequately resolved. For today's Gazans, an ambulance driver who swears upon the Protocols of the Elders of Zion may serve a proximate physical need, but can he really serve a long-term national interest?
Lazare put it astutely when he described the main affliction of the Jewish establishment in the Diaspora as "the demoralization of a people made up of the poor and downtrodden, who live on the alms of their wealthy brethren, a people revolted only by persecution from without but not by oppression from within, revolutionaries in the society of others but not in their own."
It would be too depressing if Palestinians failed to absorb the dialectical wisdom of this judgment.
If you think the Easter story is scary, brace yourself for the...
Forty weeks and 5 days of hell was just the start
How Rick Ross became a cult buster extraordinaire
What if the Caped Crusader worked in the American Jewish commu...
An Orthodox Guy Goes Undercover at an Egalitarian Minyan
| Advertise | Privacy Policy & Terms of Use | FAQ | |  | | Comment Policy | About Us | Contact | Submissions |
| Hosting provided by Tilted Planet | ||
lbjack
. . . witless cliché of this ageless debate - the "cycle of violence."
Thank you!
It would be too depressing if Palestinians failed to absorb the dialectical wisdom of this judgment.
Depressing but, alas, inevitable. I mean, how can one expect a scintilla of introspection by a people who have, for a hundred years, defined themselves by their hatred of Israel?
Though by no means of symmetrical quality (Israelis hate Palestinians because they murder Israelis, Palestinians hate Israelis because they exist), Israeli-Palestinian hatred has become almost symbiotic, hasn't it?
כהנא צדק
Ismail
"...a people who have, for a hundred years, defined themselves by their hatred of Israel?"
Silly me. I've been hating Israel for only 60 years. Guess I have some catching up to do.
Fishman
Yeah, prior to the creation of Israel, Ismail couldn't focus his anger quite as well as he can now. I mean there were so many things to choose from: The Elders of Zion, The World Zionist Shadow Government, heck, the entire Jewish people! That had potential but quickly fell out of vogue in the "progressive" circles after 1945.
It takes a big man to hate an entire country of 6 million people 1 million of whom are his own blood.
lbjack
Palestinian hatred of Israel has been manifest not just since Israel's founding but since the inception of Zionism, over a hundred years ago. Even the idea of Israel made them go ballistic.
Hatred gives people with bleak, desolate lives something to do. Arabs, being desert dwellers, have a bleak desolate world view, articulated by a bleak, desolate religion. Hatred of Israel gives the Arabs something to do.
כהנא צדק
Ismail
"Arabs, being desert dwellers..."
More infantile sociology from an idiot. First, not all Arab countries are deserts. Second, your conviction that the topography of one's country dictates a particular ethos in the global manner you suggest is harebrained beyond words.
And what shall we make of "Palestinian hatred of Israel has been manifest not just since Israel's founding..." ? That Palestinians hated Israel before...there was such an entity? Hmmmm.... I'm sure this makes sense to you, given the preposterous epistemological howlers you embrace in your other posts, but I assure you that, to those of us sadly saddled with the demands of logic and with a solid competency in the English language, it's straight out of Wonderland.
Go to sleep.
Fishman
Since you are such a proponent of logic, Ismail, then lets use a bit of logic, shall we?
First, HAMAS does not recognize Israel's right to exist, thereby reducing it to a non-entity in their ideology. It is all "Occupied Palestine" which must be liberated. In other words, "threw the Jews down the well". Immidiately HAMAS extinguishes any logical basis for dialogue. HAMAS openly shows itself as the enemy of Israel.
Now lets look at how the sides compare to eachother. HAMAS is a badly-trained, beadly-armed, druggedup band of degenerates. Their only advantage is the fanaticism and abject poverty of the Gazans. Israel is a modern military state with nuclear arms, tanks, trained soldiers.
Logic and the heritage of the region dictate carpet-bombing of Gaza into oblivion. Is that not how enemies are treated in the Arab world?
omarali50
I wrote this comment on another story, but I think its valid here too..
Gandhi in Palestine?
new
The whole point of a gandhian movement is moral force...to ask for your
rights while ACCEPTING that your opponent may have their rights and
appealing to their good sense (thus accepting and even insisting that
they HAVE good sense) and then being almost infinitely patient and
willing to suffer. All this is hard and even utopian in the setting of
the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Still, its better to try this and
fail than to stick with what is going on now.
Certainly, the Israelis are not like the British. They are fighting
for land, they have all the self-righteousness of victimhood and the
power to actually make THEIR victims suffer...the British did not see
themselves as victims. All the ugliness that comes with being
underlings was not there. They were at the peak of their confidence,
saw themselves are very moral and as STRONG ENOUGH to afford to be
moral. But then, the Palestinians are not like the Indians either.
Their is no deep and vast tradition of non-violence and moral force in
that culture. Arab culture is suffused with bombastic notions of
machismo and honor and warrior greatness that leads to all this "burn
the ground under the oppressors" and "mother of all battles" bullshit.
There was probably no chance this would turn out well.
Still, in the long run, it is Israel that has to rethink its position.
This kind of cult of force and beating the shit out of people till they
accept whatever crumbs are being thrown towards them, its not going to
bring peace. Wherever the border is drawn, there will be a fight at
that border. The dream that America will somehow go and destroy
("remake"?) the whole middle east on behalf of Israel is dying already.
The wise man will make corrections before he is FORCED to make
corrections. .. the second choice is always worse.
I do agree with the poster who said there is no Palestinian Gandhi
because there hasnt been a palestinian gandhi. Gandhis are not born
every day. That was an unusual achievement and an unusual man..a very
unusual man.
lbjack
Omarali, I'm with you until . . .
This kind of cult of force and beating the shit out of people
till they accept whatever crumbs are being thrown towards
them, its not going to bring peace.
There's no "cult of force" in Israel. There are those who believe force is the only solution remaining, but there's nothing cultish about them. In fact, the peacemakers like Rabin, Barak and, yes, Sharon, who withdrew the occupation, have been military men.
To characterize Israeli concessions as "crumbs" is outrageous. Israel has offered everthing but her existence for the sake of peace -- withdrawals, land for peace, endless talks, endless mediation, endless kow-towing to Western sob sisters, endless "going the extra mile" and turning the other cheek, endless restraint and forebearance, in the face of a continuous campaign of murder and intimidation.
You tell Israel to "try something else"? Israel has tried EVERTHING else! You say, force sin't going to bring peace? NOTHING brings peace, short of Israel's annihilation. The Palestinians have said it, Hamas, Iran and other jihadis live for it, they put their words into action every day. There is no treating with them. They are incorrigible. They are like the serial killers whose defence attorneys use the "abused as a child" defence. Sad story, and it does move brainless sentimentalists, who think history begins whenever Israel mounts a defence.
As to a Palestinian Gandhi, you're right, there is none, and if there were, he'd be murdered like Gandhi. (At least Gandhi was able to do his work.) And I disagree that Gandhis are not born every day. I think they are born every day, only not amongst the Arabs. You know what happened to Sadat and Hariri. Statesmen, much less Gandhis, don't last long in Arabia.
כהנא צדק
omarali50
Look, I can also get up and start a tirade about the crumbs being "everything", but it wont change the facts. What independent state are you offering the Palestinians. Lets have some details. Where will the borders be, what happens to illegal settlements and will that state have the right to control its own borders and so on?
Anyway, I dont think I will convince you. Go ahead and do whatever brilliant things you are doing and in 50 years our descendants can compare notes and see where things led...
Isaac
"Where will the borders be,"
Since Israel withdrew from Gaza to its absolute margins, that border is currently right along the 1948 ceasefire lines. One doesn't imagine that a more "complete" withdrawal beyond those lines is within the capacity of the even most ardent Palestinian partisan to demand.
"what happens to illegal settlements"
They were taken down. Structures that could have been used thereafter by Palestinian industry were also taken down, but that was done in a fit of riotous rage by the Palestinians themselves.
"and will that state have the right to control its own borders and so on?"
Listen, this is the only part where you even start to have a point. Blockades are not very productive to the Palestinians, but neither are munitions being fired at Israeli children. I understand that Palestinian pride demands no less than the ability to target their enemy civilians at will, but the reality is that this is an endeavor with questionable dividends. Plus, no country has a God-given right to be able to trade with any other country. These things usually happen when they 1) assume a less belligerent posture toward them (including acceptance of their trading partner's right to exist - I know, what a trifle), and 2) start taking into account their own people's needs.
You'll notice that I treated Gaza as an entity distinct from the West Bank in this comment. Although the "Peace Process" proceded under the assumption that the West Bank and Gaza would be treated as a single territorial unit politically, Hamas' willingness to stage a successful if utterly lawless coup against the Palestinian government effectively obviates that condition. And while the never-ending bleats about what Israel "owes" a Palestinian state before it even declares itself must be a comfortable crutch to the partisans of the only cause in the world that envisions the entire concept of autonomous political responsibilities to be completely obsolete, it's a downright cowardly retort. If the will for a Palestinian state was significant enough, their leadership would declare it into existence, as countless others have (including, funnily enough, the state declared by the American Revolution) - their overseers be damned. But that is clearly not their goal so much as continuing to allow the nation that they're determined to define their own fate and the course of their own lives through, and through whom they've mirrored their own insanely jealous and pathetic sense of copy-cat nationalism, is. Apparently taking up arms against the Zionist enemy in the course of fighting your own war for independence requires a sort of political and moral bravery that indiscriminately targetting and offing its civilians with no coherent goal in mind doesn't.
Congratulations on the Sullivan link, BTW. That should create a nice uptick in traffic and get Ismail and lbjack some prime exposure.
Isaac
WTF is up with the damn margins? This is incredibly annoying. Can you please get webmaster Craig to work on that problem, for crying out loud?
Tommy Barrios
The main stream media has done everything it can to paint the
current situation in Gaza as a war on Arabs/Palestinians/Muslims. This
IS WHY the world media cannot be trusted to tell the truth when it comes
to reporting on their designated victims of choice.
This is a war on terrorism, terrorists, and their enablers. It IS
NOT a war the Palestinian people as the howling jackanapes in the
international media would have everyone believe. It is a military
action aimed squarely at the murdering terrorist criminals who
slaughtered their opposition in the streets of Gaza and are continuing
to do so even as this action proceeds. It is aimed at the cowards who
hide behind innocents and hostages. A rabid pack of canine spawn
calling themselves HAMAS, period.
JewcyCraig
Sorry. Should be fixed. Dunno what that was about. It only seemed to affect IE.. If that matters.
Tommy Barrios
Anyone who uses the Microsucks platform or any of Microsucks products deserve whatever hassles they get from same! I have no sympathy!
Isaac
Who needs your sympathy Tony Iommi Barrios when I've got Microsoft-certified technical wizard Jewcy Craig to keep the website in tip-top shape!
I'm no fan of Microsoft but to push the blame for their failures onto the lowest level of end-use consumers within a market that doesn't give them much choice or forces them to make trade-offs between usability and robustness is particularly asinine. I like Safari, but the pop-up windows for linking things here are flawed on it. I had Firefox on my last desktop and used it exclusively but IE appropriated all their features since and designed a better look and feel. Google Chrome? Kind of new. And other than the silly glitch that kept appearing only on Jewcy it didn't really give me any problems.
But I think this is all moot because as cloud computing and the market for open-source continue to expand, we will be left paying less and less of a price for the government's fecklessness in holding Microsoft responsible for their predatory actions in maintaining such an artificially inflated sense of dominance.
Garter
Who's the real coward u bloddy idiot ! open your eyes TOMMY.. Israel always get backing and protect by America, we all knew it. even so palestine keep facing these war till end.
Isaac
Despite Tommy's slight and eminently correctible imperfections, he's right to let you infer that Hamas is a bunch of physical and moral cowards. If they weren't physical cowards, they wouldn't make a point of blending into civilian areas. And if they weren't moral cowards, they wouldn't target civilian Israelis in the first place.
But apparently that's not the point when they can whip up a merry band of dyslexic illiterates to descend upon cyberspace and scream until they're blue in the face (4 sentences might require a lot of physically exhausting mental exertion for some), spewing slogans that imply a hell-bent tendency for implementing a 7th-century civil society in place of the U.N.-accepted 21st century country that exists there currently.
Keep your idiotic "wars till end" on your own side of the fence, or wherever else you go to harbor your boring vision of the end of days.
lbjack
Omarali...ah, Omar Ali. Of course! Why didn't I see that? My mistake. Shoulda known better.
כהנא צדק
John Sullivan
Wow I won't say much as the comments reflect people's opinions I just want to say as neither a Jew Or A Muslim both sides are wrong and so is America.I'd Love to see the day a Jew sticks up for an Arab or vice versa. Instead of using those brains to argue your point why don't you look for ways to settle the situation. also Israel shouldn't brag about a military that the United States bought.
all this will be the death of us all in the end mark my words
http://potpolitics.com
PS Great post Micheal I also like the way the blog is laid out and excellent content.
Thanks
Peace
Stumbled
amusedkitty
Liberalism and tolerance is a luxury of peacetime, war time is for hawks. This is why the Israelis chose David ben Gurion as their first President, the man who said "We should expel the Arabs and take their places" and “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”
This is similar to the rhetoric of Churchill in WWII and the reason why he won the election in war time but lost it in peacetime. For comparison, look at the West Bank, with all their peaceful compliance, they are still invded and killed by Israelis.
I suspect that Hamas would win the elections in the West Bank today and I think Israel should be prepared that even if Hamas is defeated, the next group could be Islamic Jihad and the one after that, al Qaeda.
http://www.prospectsforpeace.com/2007/05/losing_palestine_to_alqaeda.htm...
So Israelis have to ask themselves. What do they want? The Palestinians have lived through the Hebrew invasion, the Roman empire, the Crusades and the Ottomans. They are not going anywhere.
The trouble with cats is that they've got no tact. - P. G. Wodehouse
Isaac
Or brains.
Nice piece of scat you left behind with the "Hebrew invasion", etc. remark. Apparently your owner never showed you how to use the litter box.
David N. Friedman
Good comments, Michael Weiss. I hope you will stay with Israel as the international community continues to voice opposition to Israel.
amusedkitty
I base it on the genetic closeness of Jews and Kurds. Kurds, I know, are not "Arabs", but Jews are. So I assume Jews are descended from an earlier population of Hebrews [probably related to the Habirus of Assyria or even, if the Torah is right about Abraham, Ur in present day Iraq] and Levantine Canaanites. My assumption is based on some genetic studies which also show a common origin at some point for Palestinians and Jews, which means the Hebrews would have to have intermarried with Canaanites to give us a branch which led to present day Jews.
I only say Hebrew to avoid the confusion between Jews who are genetically related to Palestinians and Hebrews, who I assume were not [since Palestinian "Arabs" and Bedouins show genetic markers which place them with the Lebanese in the Levant].
The trouble with cats is that they've got no tact. - P. G. Wodehouse
Isaac
But listening to it is enough to make anyone literate in basic biology or history cough on a hairball.
The common "origin" between Palestinians and Jews is based on their shared lineage as a Semitic people. It may be closer between them than it is to other Semites, such as Yemenites, Saudi Arabians, or Moroccans. But in all likelihood that's due to the conversion of remaining Jewish communities in the 7th century and afterward to Islam. Instituting second-class citizenship, a poll tax, and the like on brutally conquered communities tends to do that.
Can you kindly go away now? Most people who post comments here bother to make an effort to learn what they're talking about before compulsively posting a response to every damn essay and clogging up the discussion boards, regardless of their point of view.
amusedkitty
You do know that Semitic is based on...linguistics and not genes?
Are Kurds Semites? Persians? Turks? Assyrians? Can you guess which group(s) is/are homologous with Jews? Did you know Saudis are also Semites?
The trouble with cats is that they've got no tact. - P. G. Wodehouse
Isaac
This has nothing to do with what I wrote.
Isn't there a ball of yarn you can get someone to dangle in front of you?
amusedkitty
But in case you're interested, Jews cluster with Kurds, Turks and Armenians. Linguistically, Indo-Aryans, all. And Hebrew is a Semitic language. So there's been some transplantation back in history somewhere.
The trouble with cats is that they've got no tact. - P. G. Wodehouse
Zeevico
Ahem.
"We will expel the Arabs and take their places" is, according to Efraim Karsh, a misquotation or distortion of Ben Gurion's words. He stated: "We do not wish, we do not need to expel Arabs and take their place...All our aspiration is built on the assumption...that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs." See wikiquote: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_Ben-Gurio and also Fabricating Israeli History: The 'New Historians (2000) by Efraim Karsh, available here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=nvgat25ddU4C&pg=PR17&ots=5I6MnIhxg2&dq=...
Also: The quote "We must use
terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting
of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population" quote is not just fabrication; it is a fabrication commonly attributed to another person, not Ben Gurion. Please see this site (http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=22&x_article=775) for more. The page is long--simply search the word Galilee and you will find the relevant information there.
amusedkitty
Isn't that the site that was recruiting cyber soldiers to ensure a pro-Israel position on wiki?
Strange how what happened under him, supports the quote then
Just out of curiosity, what makes Karsh a more reliable source than Morris? Morris defends the genocide as necessary, so its not like he's anti-Zionist.
Zeevico
I am sure that this disagreement can end quite simply if you refer to the sources you cite for each quotation.
amusedkitty
From what I have been reading over the past few weeks in the Jewish diaspora, there is an excessive tribalistic identification with "our" kind. And to quote George Orwell: "All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts."
There is a serious cognitive dissonance in people who chant the right to defend themselves while ignoring the same right in the other, by completely ignoring an occupation.
Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them,
and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages,
forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery,
assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its
moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side ...
The trouble with cats is that they've got no tact. - P. G. Wodehouse
Brian
Wait a minute, I have been taught that David Ben Gurion was a kindly old man and that Israel is righteous and humane in their fight against Arab jackals who abandoned their lands voluntarily and only recently developed any sort of nationalistic fervor.
I love believing this! And, frankly, I love believing that Hamas's atrocities necessitate Israel's behavior. Screw anybody who messes with my emotions by claiming that Israel is oppressive. Facts, shmacts- it's not fair!
Anyway, why should Israel have to pay full price for being the Jewish homeland? Do we really have to believe that those folks with their dusty streets and hystrionic funerals are of equal human value as all of us delightful overachievers? Because that would really be a bummer.
Garter
You wasting my time with stupid arguments. I think u got a lot of theoretical error. What I say didn’t have a
relationship with your explanation to me. you have to learn more about the sarcasm.
"People who talk too much, usually the one who doesn’t know
anything". just like you!
Empress Trudy
Congrats "Jewcy" you're officially a sewer of racist antisemtic nonsense. Your active readership reflects this. What next? A Jewcy expose on how it's simply bad taste to point out that Jews secretly rule the world? C'mon - try to at least pretend to act like adults.
tolo87
From India to Northern Ireland, no colonized population has
ever been deemed immune from having the pursuit of its own political interests
held up to scrutiny. Indeed, complaints in the Western media about the
staggering corruption and incompetence of Fatah have given way to an almost
total absence of any serious evaluation of Hamas's many blunders and failures
of foreign policy. Either this indicates an unpardonable bias, which many
supporters of Israel allege, or the implicit acceptance of a disturbing reality
-- that Hamas is still too recalcitrant a political entity to effectively
barter with. Judging by its long-term objectives and its short-term behavior,
the group is committed to withholding the minimum concessions to its enemy at
the cost of incurring the maximum suffering of its people. Derived from an
all-encompassing Islamist social movement, Hamas bears a striking resemblance
in its political organization to 20th-century fascist parties, a point that must
also factor in any assessment of Hamas's "pragmatic" capabilities.Well I dont see Hamas as political failure. Mike from pit bike guide site.