Yaacov is Angry – Me Too!
Yaacov Ben Moshe is doubtlessly one of my favorite bloggers and has been since his first post. Today, he is royally pissed off (and yes, I’M allowed the occasional cuss word but you aren’t after all, this is my blog) about the term “settlers” contained in an AP story in the Washington Times:
JERUSALEM | Jewish settlers forced their way into a disputed house in East Jerusalem on Tuesday, using hired guards to evict an elderly Palestinian woman and tossing the other residents’ belongings into the rain-swept yard.
The settlers displayed what they said was a court order granting them ownership of the simple one-story building. Human rights groups said the takeover was a push by Jewish settlers to expand their presence in East Jerusalem.
What a load of crap. The building(s) in question belonged to jews for literally hundreds of years until they were forcefully evicted on pain of death by the Arabs in the 1948 land grab by Jordan during the first Arab-Israeli war. Notice it was the Arab-Israeli war, not the “Palestinian” – Israeli war. The Jews went to court to claim their property (can you imagine the Arabs going to court to evict Jews? Yeah, sure you can!
Yaacov’s comment to the Washington Post:
This is so obviously badly slanted as to be almost unbelievable. Even so, there is enough information in the article to get to the truth. Key Phrase: “Mr. Grenimann said 29 members of the al-Kurd family lived in the house evicted on Tuesday. Some of them had settled there after they were evicted from another house in the same neighborhood, following the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the settlers’ claim to the ownership of that building.” Translation: They are illegal squatters that the Israeli government is unable to screw up the nerve to deal with directly, nearly forcing the legal owners to do stupid stuff like this. The pathetic case went all they way to the SUPREME COURT OF THE LAND and the so called journalist who wrote the article still calls it a “claim.” The truth is that the Israeli courts bend over backwards to uphold “Palestinian rights”. Would a squatter case ever get argued in front of the US Supreme Court? When the Jordanians overran West Jerusalem in the 1948 war for independence, they massacred a Jewish population that had inhabited the Jewish quarter continuously for more than three thousand years and blew up ancient Synagogues and community buildings in order to expunge all trace of Jewish life there. Now Jewish people are referred to as “settlers” and Arab squatters are portrayed as “Palestinians”. They are not “Palestinians”, they are Arabs. They are of the same Arab tribes that compose a majority of Jordan. There was never such a thing as a “Palestinian” until 1968 – the name is the single biggest triumphant lie foisted by Arafat on the conscience of the world. When Israel left Gaza, all Jewish “settlers” had to leave because to stay would have been a death sentence. If East Jerusalem ever does become the capital of a previously fictitious state, all Jews will be forced out by violence and/or death. The Arabs living in Israel are the most secure, wealthiest and healthiest in the world and all the Washington Times can do is run obviously scurrilous trash like this. The great injustice here is not that the Jewish people who did this are not being “nice people”, it is that the very fact that they stand up for their property rights makes them villains.
Yaacov is exactly right, stand up for your rights in a PC world and get shafted. Well, the Israeli’s are doing whats right and the world can kiss my ass if they don’t like it. Read the whole post: Jews Are Always Settlers.
Update: I originally stated that the story was in the Washington Post. It was in the Washington Times – since corrected.
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Comments
What a racist illeterate scrreed that you’ve just written. It’s very easy to discover whether what you’re saying is at all valid, both politically and historically. Population surveys were conducted routinely under the British mandate period in Palestine and what you’ll find is fairly nonmcontraversial and even accepted as mainstream knowledge within Israel. And that is in the years precending 1948, and now Im talking about generations the land that we refer to as Israel as well as the occupied territories was predominantly Arab Palestinian, with a population of about 20 per cent Christian. This is also true if you look at property ownership at the time. It was only through the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 and the eaction of laws like the Arab absentee land law that this started to change. its true that Palestinians and the A rab regimes rejected partition in 1948, but they viewed what was happening, not totally incorrectly, as a mass european migration and settlement on their land, with expulsion motivations, and were upset that the great powers had devised a plan whereby at that time the minority recentlky settled jewish population was getting the bulk of the land.
As for Yaacov Ben Moshe’s point he seems then to have a problem with international law, and UN resolutions which still regard East Jerusalem as occupied land of which in the past few decades Palestinians have been routinely driven off of. GM Roper i ask you a question sincerely. Do you think that its right that by virtue of religion a jew from new york has more rights to resources and water to land in east jeruselam or the west bank than a Palestinian who not onl;y presently lives there but can trace their lineage for generations? And if this is your view than what rights (if any) do you imagine that millions of Palestinians have to the small percentage of whats left of their land, where they live. Do you fovour ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to neighbouring countries, if so your opinion is not only against international law, the genva conventions but also decades of US offical policy.
By the way, that’s a really weird use of the term PC. Again, if politically correct is simply meant to mean the expression of ideas that go against the prevaling orthordoxy then it seems to me, that in the US at least, advoacy on behalf of Palestinians, articulating their narrative which has involved lost and dispossession, even needing to affirm their existance, not too mention suggesting that there is a powerful Israe lobby wich distorts the debate and silences its opponants, is all very politically incorrect and taboo.
The way that you use the term seems to make no real sense except as a manipulative strategy to dismiss arguments which go against your rather limited worldvew. I’d also recommend that you take a broad non partisan look (hint, no advoacy “web sites”) at the historical record regarding the pre 1948 population stuff as well as whats happened since. Let me suggest that if you remove the ideological blinders and get in touch with the fairly non contreversial record, you may have an experience which feels like an epiphany
Racist? Since both Israelis and Arabs are Semites your comment proves itself illiterate. More later when I’m not so sleepy and I have little else to do other than to reply to knuckleheads.
Oh, and Ahmed “manipulative strategy to dismiss arguments which go against your rather limited worldvew” this from someone who always attacks with codewords. I’m laughing my ass off at both your ignorance and your chutzpa.
“illeterate scrreed”? Ahmed, before calling someone illiterate, try using a spell check at least.
Actually since race is itself a social construction very much outside of any ‘real” biological reality, you could use your argument in the abstract to say that nothing could be considered racist. But that just clouds the issue. That semites, for what its worth, is usually a term applied yes to jews and arabs but here whats usually meant is Sephardic jews, not Ashkenazi. And while Ashkenazi jews are the minoroty om Israel they nonetheless have a greater monopoly on the cultural and political landscape of Israel. Racial and ethnic superiority flows from any such law for example which would grant a jewish citizen of the US greater rights to land, resources, not to mention an occupying army to defend them, than the indegnous Palestinian population, who have lived on that land for generations. I thought I was pretty clear about what I meant here.
OK, so listen, Ahmed has a tough time getting out of his own way logically as he cobbles together non sequiturs, canards and oxymorons to make up his specious arguments. Clearly he has not figured out how to use a spell check. I try not to hold this kind of thing against people’s arguments because nobody’s writing is perfect, least of all mine. But, really, this much disorder and self contradiction in a few lines- does it not betoken either a disordered mind or a subconscious acknowledgement that the arguments being advanced are so transparent that the only choice is to try to throw up an opaque screen of incompetent rhetoric to fend off attack.If it is not derangement or disingenuousness it must be a lack of respect for his reader and a monumental disregard for the very subject he is expending so much energy and passion on.
This is the classic dilemma of a salesman who is hawking defective wares- He may well be twice as smart as he looks to us but he is certainly only half as smart as he thinks he is.
The whole thing, of course is specious. He has the nerve to talk about ethnic cleansing in Israel and to imply that there was a mass expulsion of Arabs from Israel in 1948 while the historical record is clear that had there not been a massive, coordinated invasion by the Armies of seven Arab countries in an attempt to annihilate the newly born Jewish state and its inhabitants, the only mass expulsions in the middle east would have been those of the more than 800,000 Jews that were vengefully driven from the Arab countries in which they lived.
BTW, I have just posted an essay by Rabbi Jonina Pritzker on Breath of the Beast anyone not convinced of the importance and historical authenticity of the Jewish claim to the land and the disingenuous nature of Ahmed’s arguments should read it:
http://breathofthebeast.blogspot.com/2009/11/history-is-not-religious-fanaticism.html
What’s interesting here is that I look towards a future where we can discuss the Palestinian trauma and loss in a way that creates bonds and a sense of a shared narrative with that of the Jewish people, who themselves experienced genocide, exile and dispossession. I think that ultimately the crux of the issue is the Israeli state’s policies posits that its claims to the land need to be exercised over and above that of the Palestinians, and this reality then entails the use of occupation, forced land removals, checkpoints, walls, racist laws and brutality. Which is not to say that the Palestinians haven’t committed crime either. But the disparity of what’s been done to the Palestinians versus what they’ve done to other is staggering and needs to be discussed openly and honestly. Given what he has written about the “right” Israel has to evict Palestinians from East Jerusalem, a quick question that for your commentator. Do Palestinians have any right to live in the West Bank or Gaza. And if not do you expect in this day and age for the world community to watch silently while another ethnic cleansing occurs?
On history what we’re getting here is selective. Yes, neighboring Arab states attacked but any fool with even a cursory reading of early Zionism, pre British Mandate, knows that the dominant goal of the settler movement was to create a jewish state, with a jewish population majority, even though Palestinians formed a much larger group. The Irgun in their rhetoric and acts as well as Ben Gurion were honest about the need to evict Palestinians from their land even before partition. Quotes are available widely about this and this understanding is broadly accepted and the historical concensus. What Im saying isn’t even really disputed in mainstream Israeli society. There was some dissent, within the Zionist tradition. from people like Hannah Arendt and Buber who believed that a militant chauvinistic nationalism bent on establishjing a state that denied Palestinian claims would find itself constantly at war. Prophetic, now, The fact that 700 000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed is by now such a mainstream view that unreconstructed defenders of Israel like Dershowitz accept it. That Palestinians have a connection to the their land, and that their rights are embodied in universal morality and international law is what people like me stress over and over again. Your blogger though seems to want a perpetual system of domination over Palestinians, which means never ending war and seals off the very possibility, ever, of coming to a just form of reconciliation. Thankfully the rhetoric we hear from Yaacov comes across as hallow and out of date in a world which thankfully is changing fast
“What a load of crap. The building(s) in question belonged to jews for literally hundreds of years until they were forcefully evicted on pain of death by the Arabs in the 1948 land grab by Jordan during the first Arab-Israeli war.”
Forgetting the fact that the history if Jerusalem which is plainly recorded in books and archeology indicates that its population was never monolithic and was and is the shared home of many peoples and cultures, including Palestinian, I have a sincere question for Roper. If he thinks that Jewish Israelis have the right to evict Palestnians from their homes in East Jerusalem, a policy against international law and longstanding US policy, then what rights does he imagine Palestinians have in say the West Bank. Should over 4 million people also be evicted from their homes? would he advocate or support such an initiative? Curious
No replies from Rope or his hot under the collar commentator. No surprise, really
Ahmed, I don’t call you by any nicknames and I’d appreciate it if you would be kind enough to call me by my name, either GM or Roper, but Rope won’t hack it.
As to your reply, surely you jest. Your comment doesn’t deserve a reply because you have posted nonsense. Here, let me show you… this post is about a group of Jews who went to court and asked that their property that had been confiscated by Arabs in 1948 in East Jerusalem and the court agreed. NOTHING was said about Jews going to court and getting the right to repossess land in East Jerusalem that didn’t belong to them. Yet, you have the temerity to say:
It was the ARABS that evicted in ’48, and the Jews that are … here you go… repossessing their property if they can prove it was theirs to begin with.
As for the rest of the Palestinian claims in the West Bank… that could have been a Palestinian state any time between 1948 and 1967 when it was under Jordanian rule. Jordan lost it because initially they were smart and started to sit out the 1967 war then Egypt called the king and said “Hey, we knocked the crap out of the Israeli Air Force and we have their troops on the run.” So, Jordan thinking it could kick a dog when it was down jumped in and got their assess handed to them. So, now Israel is governing much of the West Bank. Tough, go whine to the Arabs who kept their people in camps for so long so that they could use them as fodder and as bait.
And international law and US policy doesn’t apply in this case… get over it. Just because you claim “foul” from the sidelines doesn’t mean there is a foul.
Well said GM- I’ll go around the circle with tools like this once or twice but when they refuse to do anything but start around again a third or fourth time I lose interest.
Here is my take on Ahmed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjEcj8KpuJw
Yes, Ahmed that’s you shouting after us, “OOOh, I see. Runnin’ away, eh? You yellow bastards! Come on back here and take what’s comin’ to ya! I’ll bite yer legs off!”
What you’re saying, essentially, besides being historically illiterate, is the defense of every tyranical regime in Earth. That their laws and courts, and in this case the court system which sustains a brutal system of occupation and land theft, overrides international law and even your own countries land standing policy. That’s simply staggering, man
What you are saying in essence then Ahmed, is that well worn propaganda from the apologists for the Palestinians trumps logic and reason. Your argument is nothing more than what you have been saying all along and which flies in the face of reality.
On the other hand here’s Yaacov’s peeps, open advocates for racism and ethnic cleansing
[ed] If you want to use propaganda Ahmed, get your own blog and have at it.
Dude, it was hardly propaganda. Simply interviews which basically allowed the settler movement, which you seem to support, a chance to frame themselves in their own terms. Maybe you didnt like what you saw? Maybe you dont like being challenged? Isn’t that the reason you fled Coopers, tail between leg and all. Just saying
Alsi i was jsut reading some very helpful backround information on this topic over at Jeff Halper’s organisations website, Israelis against House Demolitions. The situation, well, throughout the occupied territories, but especially East Jerusalem, where the Israeli government and courts routinely deny Palestinians permits to build on their land, and this tactic has long been part and parcel of the attempts to shift “demographics” (ie push Palestinians off the land) in order to hold onto the city as the undivided capital of Israel, again in violation of international law and US policy. I know that a lot of US conservatives and right wingers just reflectively support Israel without doing much thinking about it, but I’d really advise you to broaden your use of resources
http://www.icahd.org/eng/news.asp?menu=5&submenu=1&item=748