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The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland has evidently fully recovered from his jarring experience with vicious anti-Zionists at a debate on BDS in London with participants (including Omar Barghouti) who seek the end of the Jewish state.
According to The JC’s report on the debate, Freedland’s attempts to refute accusations that Israel is an “apartheid” state and that, therefore, BDS was a moral imperative were both repeatedly shouted down by pro-Palestinian activists, which led an evidently shaken Freedland to tell the audience:
“Tonight has been hugely revealing. I thought my disagreement with the boycott movement was because I want to see the end of occupation and you want to see the end of occupation and it was an argument about tactics.
“What has come through loud and clear is your motivation is not actually just the end of occupation but it’s with Israel itself – you have a fundamental problem with it.”
Just how revealing was Freedland’s jarring experience with rabid anti-Zionists? Well, not so jarring that he’s in any more predisposed to take on anti-Zionist such as Joseph Dana.
Joseph Dana, an American-Israeli, is a vocal BDS activist and proponent of the one-state solution, that is, the end of the Jewish state – a position which has endeared him to such vicious anti-Zionists as Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss. (In fact, Dana is a judge at something at Mondoweiss called the Mondo Awards – no doubt an award in great anti-Zionist achievements – a panel which includes Omar Barghouti)
Dana once wrote, “Why anyone, Jew or Arab, would want to see this [Israeli] state continue in its present form is really beyond comprehension.”
And, he has even echoed the vile logic of CiF’s Slavoj Zizek that modern Zionists have come to resemble old style fascists, in an essay published at the viciously anti-Israel site, DesertPeace.
Recently, Jonathan Freedland Tweeted the following to his friend Joseph Dana (who Tweets under “ibnezra”)
The article Freedland links to, in Ha’aretz, reports on a group of settlers who vandalized an Israeli Army base as part of a “price tag” for the IDF’s recent demolishing of an outpost in Migron. While the destructive actions of the settlers are of course indefensible, the shallow implication of Freedland’s Tweet encouraged me to respond in kind.
Beyond the Tweet itself (which was, interestingly, re-Tweeted by Seumas Milne), it’s dispiriting to say the least that Freedland has apparently learned nothing from his encounter with the anti-Zionist crowd in London.
In an essay about his experiences at the debate, published at the Zionist Left site, Engage, Freedland wrote the following:
“What [the debate] confirmed out loud was that the hard core of boycott campaigners do not merely object to the post-1967 occupation- even if that dominates their public rhetoric – but to Israel as Israel.”
Speakers from the floor repeatedly returned to the alleged ills of pre-1967 Israel and of Zionism itself. Indeed, Naomi Foyle, the activist who had acted as a “volunteer consultant” to the South Bank in organising the debate, later blogged a concise response to my claim that the boycott campaign was anti-Israel rather than anti-occupation: “Damn right.”
By finding common cause with one-state solution proponents who vilify Israel and her supporters at every opportunity, such as Joseph Dana, it’s clear Freedland – like many who maintain soft support for Zionism yet don’t want to get their hands dirty in the fight – is not willing to sacrifice alienating those in his progressive political circles for the sake of Israel’s survival.
While I’m a big believer in the idea of “Big Tent Zionism”, the key word in that phrase is, of course, “Zionism”.
Related articles
- Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland is mugged by the reality of BDS movement’s malevolence (cifwatch.com)
- An open letter to Jonathan Freedland (cifwatch.com)
Slavoj Žižek is a Guardian commentator, philosopher and unreformed communist who has attributed the attacks of 9/11 to the “antagonisms of global capitalism”, and has argued that Hitler’s greatest sin was that he was “not radical enough” in that he didn’t “dare to disturb the basic structure of the modern capitalist social space”, adding that the Nazi dictator ”was not violent enough…not ‘essential’ enough.”
He has also recently joined a growing list of Guardian and CiF columnists who have opined that the Jewish state should not exist.
Writing for British left-wing political magazine The New Statesman, in an essay titled “Israel’s best hope lies in a single state“, Žižek begins by characterizing the wish of Jews in Israel to marry within the faith as a sinister, intolerant, and irrational hatred towards “the other”, meant to maintain racial purity – a fantastical tale which mocks Israeli “Guardians of Jewish purity” and manages to conjure “vigilante-style patrols work[ing] to stop Arab men from mixing with local Jewish girls.” [emphasis mine]
In Žižek’s imaginary Middle East, Israelis (and certainly not Hamas, PFLP, and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade) are the only real terrorists in the region: sinister political actors who – as anyone schooled in the dark history of Jewish malevolence in the world surely would not be surprised to know – are not above literally “poisoning” [Palestinian] water” wells.
The only just and final solution, according to Žižek, to this wretched nightmare named Israel is not a two-state solution but rather, to ”abolish the apartheid [state] that exists” and replace it with one majority Arab state.
Žižek’s advocacy for the political destruction of the first sovereign Jewish polity in 2000 years should not be judged too harshly as, not unlike Mya Guarnieri, he’s clearly only trying to save Jews from themselves, to save – as Guarnieri so subtly put it – “Judaism’s very soul“, and indeed closes by sagely moralizing to Zionists, these “Israeli defenders of Jewish purity”, that “they want to protect [Israel] so much that they are ready to forsake the very core of Jewish identity.”
Adam Kirsch, reviewing Žižek’s book, In Defense of Lost Causes, for The New Republic, observed that to Žižek:
“Jews are a mere abstraction, objects of fantasy and speculation, that can be forced to play any number of roles in his psychic economy.”
Thus, it’s indeed very likely that his philosophical musings on the moral failings of Jews, and the moral necessity of the Jewish state’s demise, will continue to be welcomed at the Guardian.
Ahmed Moor
As anyone who has spent time in or seriously studied the Middle East and the Arab world knows, the default option for many a political leader or struggling dictator in that region when the going gets tough is to kick the Zionist cat.
Rising opposition from within? The Zionists must be behind it. Economy going off the rails? The Israelis are of course to blame. Indeed more or less anything can be attributed to the Jews, often in a manner which would not seem out-of-place in a Monty Python sketch, because the conspiracy theories about them have been cultivated for so long that they have become part of the region’s folklore and mindset.
So when self-declared anti-Zionist, one-stater, promoter of apartheid analogies and would-be dismantler of the Palestinian Authority Ahmed Moor appears on the pages of CiF America promoting Jewish/Zionist conspiracy theories, we can be sure that here is one American who has well and truly imbibed the culture surrounding him in his chosen new home in Beirut.
According to Moor, both the Israeli government and pro-Israel American Jewish organisations are leaning heavily on the US administration to confront Iran, if not directly then by way of its proxy in Lebanon, Hizbollah.
“Josh Block – a former spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) – recently argued that President Obama ought to confront Hezbollah in Lebanon in order to confront Iran.”
“Only last week, Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu flew across the Atlantic to ask Vice President Joseph Biden to launch a war against Iran on Israel’s behalf.”
“The pro-Israel lobby is aware that America is too over-committed to attack Iran. But America is evidently capable of taking on Hezbollah, an Iranian ally”
In actual fact Josh Block seemed to be arguing in favor of strengthening and supporting the Lebanese people who do not want their country taken over by proxies of a theocratic dictatorship – the link in Moor’s article is broken – see here. The Lebanese are of course not the only ones in the region concerned about Iran’s growing influence on the area and the possibility of its gaining an upper hand in the Middle East power struggle; there are several Arab countries who have no less interest than either Lebanon or Israel in containing the neighborhood bully before it is too late to prevent yet more violence. Moor completely ignores the bigger regional picture, however, in favor of a trite kick to the local cat; Israel.
Harriet Sherwood summed up the British Foreign Secretary’s two day visit to Israel last week in an article which raises quite a few questions with regard to the British government’s policies and attitudes towards Israel, in addition to those already prompted by David Cameron’s “prison camp” remarks made in Ankara.
First, however, let’s take a look at some of the comments prompted by this article. A significant proportion of them seemed to accept unquestioningly Hague’s dubious axiom whereby the so-called ‘window of opportunity’ for a two-state solution to the conflict is closing, and duly leapt in with their own suggestion – the somewhat hackneyed ‘one-state solution’.
Obviously ‘NoNukesPlease’ has never heard of this institution in Jerusalem.
That seems to sound like a threat of violence.
Well,well; it’s amazing what one finds out by reading the Guardian. Had I not read the October 28th editorial “In praise (I think that’s British understatement) of George Soros” for instance, I would never have discovered that I’m apparently of a curmudgeonly persuasion.
It turns out too that I’m deemed to remain “an ill-tempered person full of resentment and stubborn notions” (according to the dictionary) for the Guardian informs me that “[o]nly the most curmudgeonly of his critics could fail to admire what the billionaire is doing with his money”.
As a socialist, I do resent the fact that the Soros fortune was mostly made by carelessly playing around with the lives of the little people affected by currency speculation. Short sellers and operators of hedge funds for the super-rich are not the traditional type of praiseworthy hero for a Left of centre newspaper, but the Guardian’s apparent ‘conversion’ indicates just how far it is prepared to go in sanctifying the methods in order to realise the aim.
I’m afraid that I must also plead guilty to holding on to the stubborn notion that the legalisation of drugs – one of Soros’ pet campaigns – is not a positive step for society to take, particularly in light of the well-known link between drugs and the financing of terror, but also due to my experience as a health-care professional who has often had to deal with the devastating effects of drug use not only upon the lives of addicts themselves, but also upon their families and even innocent bystanders.
But the aspect of Soros’ ‘chequebook advocacy’ which makes me most ill-tempered is his support for organisations which aim to eliminate the Jewish nature of Israel and undermine the elected government of a democratic nation by means of delegitimisation. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to live in a society in which we count votes, not cash; in which every voice carries equal weight, regardless of wealth or connections. The sad thing is that once upon a time, the Guardian believed in that too.
Soros’ ‘Open Society Institute’ funds a whole host of operations in Israel such as Adalah, Peace Now, Breaking the Silence, Gisha and Yesh Din. Adalah works towards a one-state ‘solution’ in which the Jewish nature of Israel would be replaced by a “democratic, bilingual and multicultural” framework. Jewish immigration would only be permitted for “humanitarian reasons.” In other words, millions of Palestinian refugees would be brought to Israel, but Jews would be severely limited in their right to immigrate as the Law of Return would have been abolished. Adalah promotes the erroneous and delegitimising concept of ‘Israeli apartheid’ and contributed significantly to the infamous Goldstone Report. Soros’ Open Society Institute has provided legal assistance to Adalah in its attempts to overturn the Israeli law which states that spouses from enemy states are not automatically granted Israeli citizenship for reasons of security. That’s not only foreign intervention in the internal legal affairs of a sovereign state, but also reckless gambling with the lives of Israeli citizens.
Soros recently donated $100,000,000 in matched funding over a period of 10 years to Human Rights Watch. Readers will no doubt remember that just over a year ago Human Rights Watch’s founder, Robert Bernstein, accused the organization of “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state”. The generous Soros pledge does not bode well for any kind of improvement in the organizational culture at HRW ; in fact one might even say that this is a case of ‘birds of a feather’ joining forces – supposed political agenda-free ‘human rights’ activists using the language of civil rights and democracy in order to promote extremist ideology. And if that sounds a little far-fetched, consider the following.
A guest post by AKUS
The Guardian has become notorious for the dissemination of anti-Israeli articles. Many contain factual errors, some outright lies, but we never see significant attempts by the Guardian to correct its errors. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are about the year that has passed, and the year ahead. We examine our souls and our conduct towards others, and ask forgiveness for our sins and faults. It is time for the Guardian to conduct a “cheshbon nefesh” – an accounting of one’s conscience – for the New Year. I will be even more specific – it is time for the Guardian’s Jewish writers to issue apologies for the attacks against Israel that they have largely led on the Guardian’s website.
This year, once again, we have had several egregious and inflammatory articles run by the Guardian. Perhaps the worst was a story about rape in Israel that that was picked up by the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood on July 21st and repeated on July 25th in more detail as Saber Kushour: ‘My conviction for “rape by deception” has ruined my life’ . The articles built on extraordinary claims made largely by Israel’s home-grown hater, Gideon Levy, of Israeli racism when an Arab was apparently found to have committed “rape by deception”.
Rachel Shabi had no trouble using this issue on July 23rd as the “hook” for an article with the attention-grabbing headline Israel turns on its own. Shabi’s article played to all the tropes so beloved by the Guardian’s Israel haters (Israel as a racist, violent, European, Mizrachi- and Arab hating implant in the Islamic world). But it was her brief reference to the rape case (“and now a Palestinian man from Jerusalem has just been convicted of rape after pretending to be Jewish and having consensual sex. This verdict, in effect turning the obfuscation of race into a criminal offence, also reveals the extent to which Israelis consider Palestinians to be abhorrent”) that resulted in the extraordinarily large number of 591 comments below the line:
Arch Israel-hater JRuskin (formerly Moeran) was quick to pick up on the allusion to the rape case:
Karmi speaking at a ‘Stop the War Coalition’ (StWC) rally. StWC is a group organized in part by Islamist organisations such as the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB)
I would like to be able to write that Ghada Karmi’s political polemic of September 1st was exceptional. Unfortunately, advocates of the destructive one-state ‘solution’ to the Israel/Palestine conflict have become disturbingly common above the line at CiF, which obliges one to ask if this is also the official editorial line of the Guardian and if so, how many other sovereign states which are members of the UN does the Guardian advocate destroying?
Ghada Karmi is an extremist of the worst kind; one who stokes the fires of conflict in comfort from afar. She is, however, far from unique. The anti-Israel lobby, in its politically correct costume of ‘pro-Palestinian’ activism, is choc a bloc full of people who incite the Palestinians actually living in the Middle East against making the compromises necessary to put an end to a conflict with a toll of blood not paid by Karmi and others of her ilk.
Karmi is of course a known ‘one-stater’ and takes part in incitements such as ‘Israel Apartheid Week’ and Al Awda conventions. She is a board member and former vice-chair of CAABU and a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign – that same organization which intimidates shop keepers in the most thuggish of manners. She co-operates with the ISM – the same movement which harbored suicide bombers in Israel and teaches ‘conflict resolution’ (no, I’m not joking) at Exeter – a university which sees nothing wrong with taking money from the extremist Islamist organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood.
In this latest polemic, Karmi transparently attempted to twist the reality of the long history of Israeli/Palestinian peace negotiations completely on its head in order to create a new narrative.
“There is a real danger that the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks due to starton (sic) September 2 in Washington could yield a botched deal that falls far short of the needs of international law or elemental justice, and sets back the cause of Palestine for decades, if not for ever.”
The solution to a conflict in which both sides have valid, if often juxtaposed, claims will not be found through raising the banner of ‘elemental justice’. Both parties will have to put some of their wish for justice aside in order to make compromises which will be painful, but which will enable a peaceful solution to be reached. Of course Karmi is only concerned about ‘justice’ for one party in this conflict; as an advocator of the one-state ‘solution’ she refuses to recognize the just rights of the Jewish people to self-determination. And if sharing the land available through a two-state solution is such an abhorrent prospect for Karmi, this would indicate that in her view the ‘cause of Palestine’ has nothing to do with peaceful co-existence.
“Time and again, when Israel was thrown a lifeline by Arab neighbours that could have ensured its legitimacy and security, its folly and greed lost it those opportunities.”
Ben White was back on CiF on August 17th with yet another anti-Israel diatribe, this time on the subject of the ‘colonisation’ of the Jordan Valley.
Taking a leaf from Neve Gordon’s book, he claims that Israel is ‘ethnically cleansing’ Bedouins from the area, without addressing the real issues of illegal building without permits and land grabs – in the case of Al Farsiya, in a military zone. Not content with that, he criticizes the existence of security check points within the region using a report by the UN Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) as the basis for his argument. Yes; that is the same OCHA which permitted an announcement to be made on its official website lauding the anti-Semite Yasser Kashlak.
Ben White is obviously well aware that the type of audience which reads his CiF columns does not usually demand that his material come from objective sources, or that he present both points of view of an event or situation. Such pedantry would obviously dilute the concentration of the anti-Israel fix he strives to provide. Neither do most CiF readers demand that events be viewed in the context of documented history, which is probably something of a relief for a polemicist like White, as he would otherwise have been obliged to explain the whole issue of the Oslo accords and Area C (which includes the Jordan Valley), retained by Israel according to those agreements, which were signed in person by Mahmoud Abbas. He would have had to elaborate on the subject of the five year transitional period before permanent status negotiations as specified in those accords and how the Palestinian decision to opt for terror prevented those permanent status negotiations from ever taking place. Who knows; he may even have had to come to the conclusion that had the Palestinian Authority not chosen to renege on the agreements they had signed, or had accepted Clinton’s ‘Bridging Proposals’ in 2000, the Jordan Valley would by now have been under their permanent control.
Such intricacies are, however, far too complicated for a one trick pony such as Ben White. He much prefers the tried and tested method of base sloganeering, as demonstrated in this article, employing phrases such as “land seizure and ethnic cleansing”, “colonies”, and “a stark example of Israeli apartheid”. No surprises there; we are all too familiar with White’s bigoted, if not downright anti-Semitic, descriptions of Israel – a nation he deems guilty of ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘death marches’, ‘massacres’, ‘colonisation’, ‘racism’, and last but not least ‘apartheid’. He has characterized Zionism as an ideology of extermination, has promoted sanctions and boycotts against Israel, advocated a one-state ‘solution’ and downplayed (or downright excused) Palestinian violence against Israelis many times before. We have even seen him express his belief that anti-Semitism is an “understandable” reaction to Israeli behavior, and sourcing material from a Holocaust denier for his book.
As Eric Lee so accurately puts it:
“But when you grieve over the suffering — the genuine suffering, I might add — of the Palestinians, but feel nothing in your heart for the suffering of the Jews; when every mention of the Israelis is entirely negative, portraying them as monsters — you are not longer a critic and instead have become a bigot.”
We had to wait until the last paragraph of Khaled Diab’s essay in CiF, Peace Summit or the height of folly?, to learn that he rejects the very moral legitimacy of the state of Israel. He coolly notes that, “I am in favour of [one] bi-national, secular state eventually emerging.” His commentary, like so many others at the Guardian, suggests that Israel, alone among the 192 nations in the world, is not morally legitimate in it current form, as the world’s only majority-Jewish state, and thus must be radically reconstituted into the 51st majority-Muslim nation.
The ostensible focus of his essay was eight Jewish and Arab Israelis who scaled Europe’s highest mountain after months of rigorous training as part of an initiative called Breaking the Ice, which seeks to thaw relations between the two groups – sponsored by a Swiss NGO called coexistences.
Of course, Diab’s bias gleams through right away with the awkward syntax used to describe the participants, referring to them as “a group of young Israelis and Palestinians” - prompting me to initially think he was referring to a group consisting of Israelis and non-Israelis (likely, Palestinians from the West Bank). However, he then adds parenthesis to add a further descriptive “(all of whom are citizens of Israel)” – reluctantly conveying that the group consists of Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel – that is, Israelis. Of course referring to them as Palestinians who just happen to have Israeli citizenship, as opposed to Arab Israelis, is a way of dismissing the fact that, whatever the divides, and inequities, in Israeli society between Jew and Arab, Arabs’ rights as citizens of Israel are simply undeniable.
Israeli Arabs have full voting rights – one of the few places in the Middle East where Arab women may vote – and have also held various government posts, including one who served as Israel’s ambassador to Finland. Oscar Abu Razaq was appointed Director General of the Ministry of Interior, the first Arab citizen to become chief executive of a key government ministry. Ariel Sharon’s original cabinet included the first Arab minister, Salah Tarif, a Druze who served as a minister without portfolio. An Arab is also a Supreme Court justice.
Diab even does his best to convey optimism over the project, quoting Arab and Jewish participants which claim that the program did indeed, to some degree, break down barriers, before shifting gears.
This is a cross-post from Huffington Post Monitor
The odious Ahmed “One State” Moor is back again on the Huffington Post. This time his calls to destroy the Jewish state (and the Jewish state alone) are longer and louder than ever before. In his latest article, “Israel Cannot Be Both Jewish And Democratic,” he not only clearly demonstrates his profound hatred for “Zionism” and Israel but also demonstrates his ignorance on both of those topics. Not that I am entirely surprised, given that he is based in Lebanon and apparently has devoted his life to defaming Israel in any way he can.
Because this article is so revealing about the thought processes I’m going to cover the whole thing but in the interests of time I’ll start with this paragraph and write about the rest tomorrow morning:
“Zionism — the idea that Jewish people ought to have a Jewish state in mandate Palestine — is anachronistic in the 21st century. The idea that non-Jews who have lived on the land for generations before the creation of the state of Israel should be relegated to second-class citizenship because they’re not Jewish is illiberal. It’s also racist.”
So many responses…
The EUMC working definition of antisemitism is very explicit in its formulation that, taking into account the overall context, denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination is antisemitic. The so-called “one-state solution“, which posits a bi-national secular democracy in Israel and the disputed territories, is one manifestation of this and was being touted in an article yesterday by Mehdi Hasan.
As Alan Dershowitz in the past has stated:
The one-state solution proposal now being made by Palestinian lawyers and some anti-Israel academics is nothing more than a ploy. It is designed to destroy the Jewish state of Israel and to substitute another Islamic Arab state. Those who advocate the single state solution would never do so with regard to India, the former Yugoslavia, or other previously united states which have now been divided on ethnic or religious grounds.
There’s something rather ironically predictable about the Guardian choosing to end this particular year, in which Israel and Jews everywhere have been under unprecedented attack, with a rather pompous piece by Mehdi Hasan. This rising young star of the British media world has been in the spotlight rather often in recent months for reasons which can best be described as ‘interesting’ in the same manner that my children used to describe my mother’s culinary attempts.
For non-British readers, here’s a quick guide to Mehdi Hasan’s world. He was an editor at Channel 4 and commissioned various ‘Dispatches’ documentaries, including ‘It Shouldn’t Happen To A Muslim’ by Peter Oborne – best known to some of us for his recent programme exposing the non-existent ‘Jewish Lobby’. Then Hasan moved to The New Statesman, where he currently works as senior political editor and also blogs. Since taking up his new position he’s managed to ruffle quite a few feathers by suggesting that it’s acceptable to work for the Iranian regime mouthpiece Press TV, that it’s good to talk to the Taliban, and that Israel is to blame for rising antisemitism in Britain. Understandably, he has been taken to task for these and other claims. There was also a rather prolonged spat with Harry’s Place, which culminated in the publication of a video of Hasan speaking at an Islamic centre.
The Guardian’s assault on Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state continues unabated, this time from the one-state solution advocate, Khaled Diab, in an article entitled Middle East: A Belgian Solution?
Drawing upon the similarities between Belgium and Israel, the West Bank and Gaza (which Diab deceptively lumps together as “Israel-Palestine”), Diab states:
But Belgium has been gripped by a nonviolent conflict which has its roots, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the late 19th century. And the similarities don’t end there: both Belgium and Israel-Palestine are about the same size geographically, have a similar population density, and are made up of two main communities.
Diab goes on to argue that with a dose of so-called “Belgium compromise” the two sides could resolve their differences despite their “historical baggage”.
However, Diab falls short of taking the next logical step of explaining what the implications of the “Belgium compromise” are. Nevertheless, it doesn’t take much to realize that this is just another disengenuous push for the one-state solution given that the Walloons and the Flemings live in one-state and that Diab has in the past written
Personally, I am in favour of a federalised bi-national state eventually emerging, since a single state already exists, it only needs to be made fairer – but I don’t hold out much hope of it coming about any time soon.
Of course the Belgium analogy collapses as in the case of the Northern Ireland analogy when one examines the substantive differences rather than a handful of superficial similarities. Geary drives the point home with the following:
Geary
11 Oct 09, 4:41pm
Weird analogy this.
I think the Walloons at least recognise the Flemings exist.
I don’t remember the last time the Flemings were invaded by umpteen French speaking armies.
Do the Flemings have bunkers under their homes as refuge against “home-made” Walloon rockets?
And the Palestinians don’t make chocolate.
Underlying all of this is the rather revealing insight into Diab’s moral relativist world as he gives an example of one of the lessons to be learned from Northern Ireland.
These include the need to involve all the parties in a conflict, even if they are viewed as “terrorists” by the other side,…
In other words, not only is Diab repeating the Guardian World View’s call for negotiations with Hamas but in true Guardianista fashion subscribes to the morally blind school of thinking that “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist”.
And it gets worse. In an attempt to compare Brussels to Jerusalem, Diab makes the following astoundingly ignorant claim.
Brussels has undergone gradual Frenchification and Jerusalem rapid Hebrewisation.
Diab clearly means “Judaification” craftily employing the term “Hebrewisation” in a failed attempt at distortion. Is Diab not aware that the Jewish connection to Jerusalem dates back over 3,000 years – approximately 1,500 years before the birth of Islam? Is Diab not aware that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel under King David? Is he not aware of the central role that Jerusalem plays in Jewish existence and that Jerusalem is the holiest city in Judaism? Or perhaps he is which is why he chose the term “Hebrewisation”.
Should it then come as any surprise that Diab would advocate the one-state solution? As Sol Stern and Fred Siegel wrote:
The “one state” solution is a euphemism for the destruction of the Jewish state – a trope of the most extreme rejectionist elements within the Palestinian movement and their allies in Syria and Iran. Terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah want to create an Islamic Republic in place of Israel.
And more to the point, should it be any surprise that the Guardian is yet again giving a platform to such deceptively poisonous views?
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
CiF’s Khaled Diab decries Palestinian fixation on ‘right of return’, but still seeks one state solution
May 15, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Comment is Free, Deir Yassin, Delegitimization, Guardian, Khaled Diab, Nakba Day, One State Solution | by Guest/Cross Post | 2 comments
A guest post by Anne, an Anglo-Israeli writer who blogs at Anne’s Opinions
It’s Naqba Day, and the Guardian is certainly not one to miss an opportunity to undermine Israel’s legitimacy. Yesterday’s contribution to this commemoration was an article by Khaled Diab. (Diab is a regular contributor to ‘Comment is Free’, and is a staunch supporter of the one-state solution.)
The general premise of Diab’s ’Comment is Free’ essay sounds fair enough, titled “Palestinians must prioritise people over lost land”, with the sub-title “Nakba day reminds Palestinians that dreaming of the right of return stands in the way of securing more vital rights”.
However, as we read through the essay the position suggested by the title (and some of the opening text) is undermined quite egregiously. He begins with an appeal to the emotions of the reader with an evocative story of a Palestinian grandmother who experienced the events of 1948:
Deir Yassin is one of those “clashes of narratives” that are at the root of Palestinian hostility towards Israel, and which will never be agreed upon by both sides. The article points the reader to the Wikipedia entry for Deir Yassin but one can gain a much more balanced understanding of the event from the Jewish Virtual Library.
Regardless of the facts and numbers of casualties at Deir Yassin, the JVL explains that the Arab propaganda about the alleged Jewish violence against Deir Yassin’s residence backfired, thus confirming Diab’s neighbour’s story:
Returning to Khaled Diab’s article, we read:
This above paragraph really encapsulates the whole Palestinian “right of return” issue. The family fled due to their own leaders’ propaganda, but managed to return to “just a few miles from their former home”. In this case, why are they still considered refugees?
In this vein, Diab continues:
However, Resolution 194 does not say what Diab thinks it says. Paragraph 11 states:
It does not mention descendants inheriting the refugee status ad infinitum. And as proof of Israel’s compliance with this article, Diab’s grandmotherly neighbour herself, back in East Jerusalem, is but one confirmation of this fact.
Diab further relates how the Palestinian demand for “right of return” has taken over their political process but comes to the correct conclusion that this is a loser’s game.
Diab’s recitation of Israel’s “crimes” is repeating the failed propaganda exercise of the Palestinians’ early leaders in 1948. There is no “aggressive expansion of Israeli settlements” since no new settlements have been set up since the mid-1990s. Any new settlement building is done within settlements’ boundaries, and therefore does not encroach on any further land.
Further, Diab’s reference to what he characterizes as Israeli “Nakba denial” necessarily evokes “Holocaust denial”, a hyperbolic and completely unserious historical comparison.
As for Israel’s “insistence” on the Law of Return, that is a direct outcome of (and reaction to) 2,000 years of persecution throughout the world, both in the Western Christian world and the Eastern Moslem world, culminating in the Holocaust. If Israel were to be overrun tomorrow, 6 million Jews would be easy prey with nowhere to go, and politically persecuted Jews in the diaspora would, once again, have no place to take refuge.
Diab is now building up to the main thrust of his article, their treatment at the hands of their fellow Arabs, although he cannot resist a malicious dig at Israel once again:
I would say that it’s about time an Arab commentator stated this clearly.
Diab continues:
This co-opting of Jewish methods for mourning, commemorating the Destruction and Diaspora, and the 2,000 year-old Jewish wish to make “Aliyah” suggests a determined effort to construct a historical understanding necessary to one day supplant the Jewish nation itself.
Furthermore, with the innocuous little phrase “a land with two peoples”, Diab has managed to slyly insert a “one-state solution” proposal by the back door. This does not bode well for a future of peace and co-existence.
Diab is correct that the Palestinians must let go of their insistence on “right of return” because it is recognized as a non-starter. He is also very right in drawing attention to the miserable treatment the Palestinians receive at the hands of their brethren. However, aiming for a one-state solution will not bring the Palestinians any closer to a state of their own.
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