Why this obsession with Israel and the Palestinians?
I'm not alone in my disproportionate interest in Israel – but why do so many of us pick away at this conflict like it's a giant scab?
Benjamin Netanyahu When I see Binyamin Netanyahu and his colleagues putting their side of some event, I do not see honest men. Photograph: Reuters
I think of myself as an average sort of Englishman, a little to the left of centre politically but within the moderate middle ground. I like good beer and country walks. My tastes are boringly average.
So why do I, so far away and so much a product of my own country, take such an interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict? Where does my disproportionate interest come from, considering that other conflicts around the world are equal or worse in their unpleasantness?
I devour articles about Israel-Palestine on Cif; I look at Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post, al-Jazeera and other commentaries. When things heat up, it is close to an addiction. Why am I not so worked up about Zimbabwe? North Korea? Sudan? Tibet? Burma?
I am not alone. Comments posted on the internet by Israel supporters, by Palestinian supporters and by trolls on each side show that there are millions of us around the world, millions upon millions, picking away at this one conflict like it's a giant scab.
What are the implications of such a level of passionate interest? Perhaps I am an antisemite? Seen from Zionist eyes, where Israel does little that is not justified, this has to be the first and most likely explanation for why I follow their affairs so closely. Restricting the word to its definition in the Concise Oxford dictionary, and ignoring all the meanings to which "antisemitism" is being irresponsibly stretched nowadays, it is fair that I ask myself the simple question: does my interest in Israel spring from hostility to Jews?
Does some horrid antipathy towards them rise to the surface from my European bones whenever Israel is mentioned? I am obliged to entertain the thought.
But delving into my deepest heart, I cannot honestly say that I am more hostile to Jews than I am towards Scotsmen and Welshmen. And since normally, far from being hostile, I rather like the Scots, Welsh and Jews that I meet, antisemitism can hardly be the reason for my interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict. That one is out of the window before we start. Sorry.
There is another aspect to my relationship to Jews, however, which does significantly affect the interest I take in Israel. I have many Jewish friends, I went to school with boys from Jewish backgrounds and consequently I do not think of Jews as being foreign. It would be as absurd for me to call my Jewish friends foreign as it would to call my Quaker friends foreign; they are as English as I am. It is a religious category for me and nothing more, and quite rightly so.
The trouble is that Israel promotes itself as the state for all Jews, including – despite themselves – my friends. And because some of my friends are Jews and it is therefore their country, it is in some subliminal sense my country too. This produces a particular attitude towards Israel – it means that I do not think of Israel as truly foreign either. It is foreign, of course, but not emotionally, not like Thailand or Uzbekistan, and I do not respond to it as I do to most other foreign states. It is, emotionally, almost an English county planted on the Mediterranean shores.
Israel's non-foreign status is amplified by the extraordinary support it enjoys in the corridors of power in Britain. As many as 80% of Tory MPs are members of Conservative Friends of Israel. The same cannot be said for Conservative friends of Thailand or Uzbekistan.
So not only is it in effect an English county, but many of my rulers appear to be its devoted citizens, subjectively speaking. All those shrill arguments over water or settlements, all that killing, all that fear and loathing, are not far away from me at all, no further away than Belfast.
So I judge this by domestic standards, not foreign ones. I do not expect Israelis to behave like Burmese generals; I expect them to behave like Englishmen, like my friends.
Supporters of Israel complain frequently and loudly that they are singled out for special attention and criticism. What about your own country's misdeeds, or China's, they say? And they are right. Israel is singled out for special attention. The Tibetans scarcely get a look-in compared to the Palestinians.
The number of news items about Israel-Palestine has created a self-reinforcing cycle – my appetite for yet more items is whetted by each new article or drama. All of which would appear to vindicate the complaints of the pro-Israel lobby – except that they should consider how they themselves contribute to this.
One reason why Israel is singled out for so much attention is because its supporters are so very vociferous, pushing their agenda at every opportunity. As a consumer of news, the speed of their responses and their sheer ubiquity inflames my interest and my antipathy. Why do they persist in trying to defend the indefensible?
Another reason for my disproportionate interest in this conflict is that I feel I have been lied to, and I feel that people are still trying to lie to me and I don't like it. Why try to convince me that those Turkish activists on board the Mavi Marmara were terrorists? Whatever else they were, they patently were not that. If the word "terrorist" is to have any meaning at all it must refer to those who attack innocent civilians. From an Israeli propaganda perspective, silence would be better than lies.
I can remember a time back in the 1960s when I accepted a view of Israel as a plucky little state full of kibutzes busily taming the desert. At that time I had scarcely heard of the Palestinians. Then I discovered the other narrative.
My purpose here is not to go into the rights or wrongs, but to point out that if Israel had been described to me from the start as the product of remorseless expropriation of some else's land (not the full story, I know), I might well have lost interest by now.
But having been told how heroic and wonderful it was and then to find out that, at the very least, there is a different and more troubling story running in parallel, that affects me emotionally.
When I see Binyamin Netanyahu and his colleagues putting their side of some event, I do not see honest men and my emotions are the same as those I experience when I see burglars and con-men – distaste and disapproval. And yet they won't shut up.
I am not sure where all this leads, all these millions of us from both sides picking away at this particular scab. The sheer number taking so much passionate interest is in itself dangerous. Dogs must bark before they can bite. This relatively small conflict has the potential to destroy on a colossal scale. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
But delving into my deepest heart, I cannot honestly say that I am more hostile to Jews than I am towards Scotsmen and Welshmen. And since normally, far from being hostile, I rather like the Scots, Welsh and Jews that I meet, antisemitism can hardly be the reason for my interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict. That one is out of the window before we start. Sorry.
There is another aspect to my relationship to Jews, however, which does significantly affect the interest I take in Israel. I have many Jewish friends, I went to school with boys from Jewish backgrounds and consequently I do not think of Jews as being foreign. It would be as absurd for me to call my Jewish friends foreign as it would to call my Quaker friends foreign; they are as English as I am. It is a religious category for me and nothing more, and quite rightly so.
The trouble is that Israel promotes itself as the state for all Jews, including – despite themselves – my friends. And because some of my friends are Jews and it is therefore their country, it is in some subliminal sense my country too. This produces a particular attitude towards Israel – it means that I do not think of Israel as truly foreign either. It is foreign, of course, but not emotionally, not like Thailand or Uzbekistan, and I do not respond to it as I do to most other foreign states. It is, emotionally, almost an English county planted on the Mediterranean shores.
Israel's non-foreign status is amplified by the extraordinary support it enjoys in the corridors of power in Britain. As many as 80% of Tory MPs are members of Conservative Friends of Israel. The same cannot be said for Conservative friends of Thailand or Uzbekistan.
So not only is it in effect an English county, but many of my rulers appear to be its devoted citizens, subjectively speaking. All those shrill arguments over water or settlements, all that killing, all that fear and loathing, are not far away from me at all, no further away than Belfast.
So I judge this by domestic standards, not foreign ones. I do not expect Israelis to behave like Burmese generals; I expect them to behave like Englishmen, like my friends.
Îòëè÷íî ñêàçàíî. Ñõâà÷åíà ñóòü äåëà: ïî÷åìó Èçðàèëü òàê ïðèòÿãèâàåò ê ñåáå âíèìàíèå. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
Supporters of Israel complain frequently and loudly that they are singled out for special attention and criticism. What about your own country's misdeeds, or China's, they say? And they are right. Israel is singled out for special attention. The Tibetans scarcely get a look-in compared to the Palestinians.
The number of news items about Israel-Palestine has created a self-reinforcing cycle – my appetite for yet more items is whetted by each new article or drama. All of which would appear to vindicate the complaints of the pro-Israel lobby – except that they should consider how they themselves contribute to this.
One reason why Israel is singled out for so much attention is because its supporters are so very vociferous, pushing their agenda at every opportunity. As a consumer of news, the speed of their responses and their sheer ubiquity inflames my interest and my antipathy. Why do they persist in trying to defend the indefensible?
Another reason for my disproportionate interest in this conflict is that I feel I have been lied to, and I feel that people are still trying to lie to me and I don't like it. Why try to convince me that those Turkish activists on board the Mavi Marmara were terrorists? Whatever else they were, they patently were not that. If the word "terrorist" is to have any meaning at all it must refer to those who attack innocent civilians. From an Israeli propaganda perspective, silence would be better than lies.
I can remember a time back in the 1960s when I accepted a view of Israel as a plucky little state full of kibutzes busily taming the desert. At that time I had scarcely heard of the Palestinians. Then I discovered the other narrative.
My purpose here is not to go into the rights or wrongs, but to point out that if Israel had been described to me from the start as the product of remorseless expropriation of some else's land (not the full story, I know), I might well have lost interest by now.
But having been told how heroic and wonderful it was and then to find out that, at the very least, there is a different and more troubling story running in parallel, that affects me emotionally.
When I see Binyamin Netanyahu and his colleagues putting their side of some event, I do not see honest men and my emotions are the same as those I experience when I see burglars and con-men – distaste and disapproval. And yet they won't shut up.
Ïîëíîñòüþ ñîãëàñåí. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
So I judge this by domestic standards, not foreign ones. I do not expect Israelis to behave like Burmese generals; I expect them to behave like Englishmen, like my friends.
The first time Emily Amrousi, a former spokesperson for the Yesha settler council, heard an Israeli ponder the possibility of the state ceasing to exist was last weekend, at a meal in Paris, she says. Their mouths full of stuffed duck, a journalist from the newspaper Israel Hayom and some Israeli leftists announced that the Zionist adventure is coming to an end. Amrousi, of course, has contempt for such defeatism.
This anecdote is nothing new. A stock item in the arsenal of right-wing spokespeople, it is used to depict leftists as indulgent egoists who enjoy life in their Tel Aviv bubble but, notwithstanding their comfortable way of life, lack faith and courage, and disparage their homeland when they are overseas. The policy of betrayal that led from Peace Now and the Oslo peace process to the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is the direct outgrowth of cowardice and a desire to be popular around the world, goes the refrain; and this leftist outlook is what has brought to Israel all of its woes.
According to this simplistic dichotomy, Israel's Jewish citizens are divided into proudly erect patriots and self-hating, craven defeatists. Were this foolish Manichean division to remain with the sphere of settler demagoguery, it could be ignored; however, it has managed to permeate Israeli public consciousness, and has come to be seen as almost factual. Worse, the dichotomy monopolizes the way Israel relates to the world, and also the new race legislation it is adopting at home.
In the area of foreign relations, Avigdor Lieberman is playing the role of Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak's crazed watchdog. Under the cover of his seemingly fanatic statements, they can continue to pretend that they are interested in peace negotiations. In fact, both are convinced that only on the foundation of eternal conflict can Israel continue to survive, or at least that their own survival in positions of power depends on the continuation of the conflict (actually, they would be wise to be cautious, because given the current pace of events, Lieberman is liable to claim the fruits of their labors and snatch the premiership ).
What holds for foreign relations holds for domestic affairs too. Since the world, led by the United States, is pressuring Israel to conduct peace talks - and since the world, led by the European Union, believes that it is the Israelis, not the Palestinians, who are obstacles to peace - Netanyahu and Barak have no choice other than to create turbulence in the domestic arena and then blame it for the failure of the negotiations.
It's no accident that are insisting on blowing up the "problem of Arab citizens of Israel" to monstrous proportions and depicting it as a critical matter in the talks. The ploy seems complex, but is actually quite simple: Israeli Arabs are described as a subversive group and turned into an obstacle impeding a peace agreement with the Palestinians, provoking ultra-nationalist panic. In this way, the government wins public support for toughening its demands and escalating the country's stance of isolationist self-involvement. The public has been persuaded that it lives under the threat of the Iranian bomb and Hezbollah attacks, along with Palestinian-Muslim encroachment and domination and the proliferation of foreign laborers. In light of the panic, the government has an easy time passing its series of so-called nationalist bills. And we are supposed to think that any citizen who loves his or her country but opposes the government's policy is nothing but a coward and a traitor.
And so now is the time to praise the cowards, support the worriers, and glorify all those who fear that the revival and independence of the Jewish people in Israel is endangered. There should be no confusion; whereas Zionism aspired to normalcy, to the establishment of a state like all other stable states, Netanyahu, Barak and Lieberman are nurturing an isolationist ethnocracy. Singing hymns to Zionism, they are turning the Jewish citizens of Israel into the residents of a frightening, aggressive ghetto in the Middle East. And they are promising a future that can only be bad.
Happy is the man who is always afraid, but he who hardens his heart will fall into evil, the Book of Proverbs tells us. Right-wing spokespeople, now dizzy with success as a result of the way their regurgitated slogans have taken off, can continue to stigmatize others and take pleasure in their own perceived heroism. But the true patriots are the cowards, the doubters and the troubled, Israel's heart-stricken lovers who see before their opened eyes the worrisome signs of the beginning of the fall. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
...A stock item in the arsenal of right-wing spokespeople, it is used to depict leftists as indulgent egoists who enjoy life in their Tel Aviv bubble but, notwithstanding their comfortable way of life, lack faith and courage, and disparage their homeland when they are overseas. The policy of betrayal that led from Peace Now and the Oslo peace process to the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is the direct outgrowth of cowardice and a desire to be popular around the world, goes the refrain; and this leftist outlook is what has brought to Israel all of its woes.
According to this simplistic dichotomy, Israel's Jewish citizens are divided into proudly erect patriots and self-hating, craven defeatists...
Õîðîøî ñêàçàíî! Ñîãëàñåí. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
The facts must be acknowledged: The heads of the rightist parties have a strategic outlook and the ability to take the long view, and they also know how to choose the right tools to carry out their mission.
The proposed new amendment to the Citizenship Law, which is aimed at fomenting a state of constant hostility between Jews and everyone else, is just one aspect of the greater plan of which Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is the official spokesman. The other aspect is the foreign minister's promise to the nations of the world that our war with the Palestinians is an eternal war. Israel needs both an external and an internal enemy, a constant sense of emergency - because peace, whether with the Palestinians in the territories or the Palestinians in Israel, is liable to weaken it to the point of existential danger.
And indeed, the right, which includes most of the leaders of Likud, is permeated with the awareness that Israeli society lives under a cloud of danger of breakdown from within. The democratic and egalitarian virus is eating away at the body politic from within. This virus rests on the universal principle of human rights and nurtures a common denominator among all human beings because they are human beings. And what do human beings have more in common than their right to be masters of their own fate and equal to one another?
In the right's view, that is precisely where the problem lies: Negotiations on partitioning the land are an existential danger because they recognize the Palestinians' equal rights, and thereby undermine the Jews' unique status in Eretz Israel. Therefore, in order to prepare hearts and minds for exclusive Jewish control of the population of the entire land, it is necessary to cling to the principle that what really matters in the lives of human beings is not what unites them, but rather what separates them. And what separates people more than history and religion?
Beyond that, there is a clear hierarchy of values. We are first of all Jews, and only if we are assured that there will be no clash between our tribal-religious identity and the needs of Jewish rule, on one hand, and the values of democracy on the other can Israel also be democratic. But in any case, its Jewishness will always be given clear preference. This fact ensures an endless fight, because the Arabs will refuse to accept the sentence of inferiority that the state of Lieberman and Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman intends for them.
That is why these two cabinet ministers, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's tacit support, rejected the proposal that the loyalty oath be "in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence." As they see it, the Declaration of Independence, which promises equality for all regardless of religion and national origin, is a destructive document whose real aim at the time was to placate the gentiles and win their help in the War of Independence. Today, in an Israel that is armed to the teeth, only enemies of the people would want to give legal status to a declaration that in any case few have ever taken seriously.
This is where the religious dimension naturally enters the picture. Just as it did among the revolutionary conservatives of the early 20th century and the neoconservative nationalists of our own day, religion plays a decisive role in crystallizing national solidarity and preserving society's strength.
Religion is perceived, of course, as a system of social control without metaphysical content. Therefore, people who hate religion and its moral content can dwell contentedly alongside people like Neeman, who hopes one day to impose rabbinic law on Israel. From their perspective, the role of religion is to impose Jewish uniqueness and push universal principles beyond the pale of national existence.
In this way, discrimination and ethnic and religious inequality have become the norm here, and the process of Israel's delegitimization has ratcheted up a level. And all of this is the work of Jewish hands. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
Âäîáàâîê, èçðàèëüñêèå äèïëîìàòû íàìåðåíû àêòèâíî âêëþ÷èòüñÿ â áîðüáó çà ñîáëþäåíèå ïðàâ ìåíüøèíñòâ â Òóðöèè.
Âñå ýòè ìåðû ïðèçâàíû çàñòàâèòü ïðàâèòåëüñòâî Ýðäîãàíà îñîçíàòü ïðîìàõ, äîïóùåííûé â îòíîøåíèè Èçðàèëÿ, è ñìÿã÷èòü àíòèèçðàèëüñêóþ ïîëèòèêó. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoglu on Sunday condemned the plan proposed by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, in which Israel should punish Turkey by supporting the terrorist organization PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party).
"No one will be able to blackmail us," said Davutoglu during a press conference in Ankara. "We hope that Israel's denial [of supporting the PKK] will also be accompanied by actions."
Davutoglu said that the PKK has turned into a tool for anyone who wants to harm Turkey. "Every time someone wants to bother Turkey he uses the PKK," he said. "It is important that our Kurdish brothers pay attention to this."
According to a report in Yedioth Ahronoth, Lieberman assembled a team to discuss a possible retaliation against Turkey. According to the report, the team recommended to Lieberman that Israel should cooperate with the PKK and even consider arming it with weapons. Another suggestion was to offer assistance to the Armenians and file UN reports against Turkey for a violation of the rights of minorities in the country.
However, sources in the Foreign Ministry who were involved in the discussion told Haaretz that the recommendations made were the opposite of what was published in the media Friday. "There were various ideas," a senior foreign ministry official said, "but the foreign ministry's main recommendation to Lieberman following that discussion was to take steps to prevent a further escalation with Turkey. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
FAQ
×òî àíãëèéñêèå äðóçüÿ âûòâîðÿëè íà Áëèæíåâ Âîñòîêå è âî âðåìÿ áåãñòâà åâðååâ èç Åâðîïû âî âðåìÿ Âòîðîé ìèðîâîé âîéíû, îòëè÷íî èçâåñòíî.
