For Those Who Died in Gaza

You're a pernicious idiot, Alcove-One. You preach for Jews to be monolithic in support of Israeli actions and then you blame Arabs for viewing us as that same monolith. 

Alcove-One, you seem to have difficulty with the concept of 'point of view'. The point of view in this piece is that of Wa'el and others I spoke to in East Jerusalem that day. It expresses how things look from their point of view - not from yours, or from mine.

I wouldn't single out Leila. There is no such thing as an impartial journalist. I accept it. The only ones that I have no repsect for are the ones who claim that they are impartial or try to conceal their agendas.

Simple question yes or no:

Would Iran be easier to marginalize if Israel had better relations with her other neighbors? Allowing that the neighbors are the chief obstacle to peace treaties (which, like it or not, is subject to legitimate debate), yes or no?

Or is Israel's security more dependent on hurling invective at young women and then threatening to tattle when it's thrown at you?

The evidence of anti-semitism in Britain is abundant enough, so I doubt anyone here would benefit from my posting the reams of links available on the phenomenon. It's intrigued me for quite some time and something I don't quite fully understand. As the last empire to bear the torch of Western civilization, why has Britain retained such blatant and deep-seated anti-Jewish sentiment? As someone who grew up in the country that inherited Britain's claim to the former, I never understood it. Why are we so fortunate to have been founded by people who drew inspiration from the biblical Israel, yet we can't manage to shake off our obsession with business (like the "nation of shopkeepers" who colonized our country), our British stuffiness, or our God-awful taste that we share with Albion when it comes to food and art? And when it comes to sex, we even manage to go a step further than our cultural forebears and take after the witch burning and mind-numbingly bizarre Puritans who were never more than a minor sect across the pond.

But I digress. The only thing I can think to add to the obvious is this link to a Guardian article that actually chronicles the rise in anti-semitism in Britain (by 2008, no less! What a way to stay on top of things!), but of course with the obligatory parallelism of "Islamophobia" thrown in for good measure. But it shows that even The Guardian couldn't keep a lid on things. And then, there's Orwell. Ahhh... Orwell! At least we had him on our side.

Beta male's not bad, actually.

But let me see if I understand this correctly- Israel's enemies are strengthened by self-hating Israelis and Jews who, in love with their own kishke-less moral vanity, create public fissures of opinion, which make Israel look weak.  And these same enemies who see these fissures as ripe for exploitation are doubly jerks because they dismiss these fissures to refer to the law-abiding IDF as "the Jews."  HOWEVER, these inherently anti-semitic Arabs on the street are disorganized rabble whereas Iran's nuclear ambition represents a very serious existential threat to Israel. But the Arabs, who view "the Jews" as both too brutal to accept and too weak to respect, have developed an abiding and unshakeable fondness for the unremitting bellicosity of Tehran. Thousands of years of enmity subsides in the face of the common enemy of "the Jews" and suddenly Saladin is Persian.  And so under these dire circumstances, complaints about civilian deaths in the inconclusive military campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza are serving the enemy.  Which ones, it doesn't matter.  Situations like this are no time for moral recrimination.

Alright. When is?

Alcove-One,

I am concerned that your posts might suggest to other readers that Leila Segal has unknown "benefactors" that influence her writing. The fact is that Leila Segal has supplied her blogposts to Zeek for free. We asked for them because they offer observations about the Gaza conflict that we don't often see in the U.S. press.

Segal is giving us a snapshot of the thoughts of a few people at a particular time and place. The people with whom Segal talked certainly had their own perspective and agenda, just as you certainly have yours. I suggest to  you that you will convince more people of your perspective if you moderate your language.

From an ethnolinguistic standpoint, the Kurds are an Indo-European people and have more in common with the Persians than with the Arabs or other Semitic peoples. And then of course, there's a whole recent history of American intervention in Iraq - which Joe Biden wanted to divide into three sectors - which should help illustrate the point.

As with Saladin, the Arabs, despite their emnity for Persia, will have no problem respecting Iran for warring and agitating against Israel. And that's a big part of the reason for Iran's stance. It strongly undercuts the Arab governments' nationalist (read: "anti-Zionist") credentials. Do you seriously not see this, Brian? 

The lack of acceptance among Arabs of Israel is due to nationalism and ethnocentrism. It has nothing to do with Israel being too allegedly brutal. Of course, it can be plausibly argued that if Israel were perceived as being less brutal then that might change or modify this situation. But that is different from assuming that the dynamic of hatred is rooted in anything other than a perceived threat to Arab nationalism and the powerful imperial legacy which forged and shaped it. 

You should know better, Brian. Your challenges to Alcove-One cannot be taken as seriously as you wish without first acknowledging and accounting for these facts. 

What I don't understand is how the Shiites make no bones about wanting to dominate the region with its pestilence of Jews and Sunni (and Saladin was a hardcore Sunni. Hardcore.), and they don't waste their time with these senseless displays of equivocation like Israel does, and yet the Sunni Arab nations have no problem with cheering on Iran's march towards dominance in exchange for a couple million bucks and some military training.

So, "am I to acknowledge... these facts" that the math of these insane and bizarro nationalistic Arab leaders concludes that there is greater benefit in Iranian patronage than there is in open trade with a developed nation like Israel?  And that the only thing that Israel has, can, should or should have done that can change this deadly dynamic is to quit messing around and really flatten somebody?

Not that I care about any of this stuff nearly as much as being taken seriously by semi-anonymous commenters...

I had to look twice to see if you really wrote that these areobservations not seen in the US press. I have seen exactly these observations in the NYT, Washington Post, LA Post, CNN, 60 minutes and the Boston Globe.

Do you want an honest suggestion about covering an under-reported perspective? Do a series about Jewish refugees from Arab countries. The overwhelming perspective in this (and many other) Jewish websites is from the Ashkenazi   point of view.

It would behove commentors on this site to follow the Jewcy comments policy: "No personal attacks or name-calling.  All comments must be topic-specific, directly related to the content of the post and should not aim to insult the author or other  commenters within the Jewcy community."

For the record, I work (unpaid) for an Israeli charity in Jaffa, with teenagers - Jewish and Arab - on a community writing and photography project. The writing here is a reproduction of my personal blog, which I keep as a record of my experiences working in Israel. I was approached by Zeek who wished to reproduce it. I am not paid for this writing, nor is it commissioned by any external source.

The Guardian piece on our project showcases some of the teenagers' photography - Arab and Jewish kids from one of Israel's poorest communities, who speak and photograph about the peace they long for - and deserve. Far from seeking to take advantage of ignorance and prejudice, this work seeks to humanise, showing the faces of the innocents who must endure this conflict day after day.

Writes Ms. Segal:

The point of view in this piece is that of Wa'el and others I spoke to
in East Jerusalem that day. It expresses how things look from their
point of view - not from yours, or from mine.

Actually, in using a word like "sneer" to describe the expressions of the Israeli soliders, Ms. Segal does impose her own personal point of view on the story.

She might've written, instead, "faces curled into a sort of frown," or "faces curled into a strange half-smile" or "faces curled into an enigmatic expression -- not exactly a frown and not quite a smile." Any of those would've avoided giving the impression that Segal is a clairvoyant or extra-terrestrial able to assess telepathically what the soldiers were thinking and feeling. But a "sneer," in contrast, is defined not by its physical contours but by the emotions behind it -- a "sneer" is not just any curl of the lip, but a curl of the lip motivated by contempt and scorn, and is not a sneer in the absence of such scorn. (Just as a smirk is not really a smirk unless there is smugness behind it, and a leer is not a leer without some sort of prurient interest.)

So I guess my question to Ms. Segal would be: "Are you in fact a telepath visting us from planet Betazed, or just an underskilled propagandist with the feather-deft touch of a North Korean parade banner?"

הגיון

Thanks for this lovely piece of short prose, Leila. I'm sorry that the comments have thus far devolved into the usual slinging of rhetoric, instead of focusing on the literary merit of this short piece, which I find quite powerful.

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