Stanley L. Cohen argues against any proposed two state solution to Palestine's Israeli problem. 



Is the Two-State Solution now the zombie of Western political-thought–an idea long dead, yet still walking the landscape, with bits of it rotting and falling off, while reason and history shoot holes in it, but it keeps staggering on, infecting the political discourse? Who can sincerely believe in it anymore? Least of all, Israel and the Zionists, since the idea’s basic post-Madrid concept has been so thoroughly abused and violated, perforated with holes so big you can plant a settlement in them. The idea has been rendered no longer materially feasible, to put it politely–well and truly screwed to pieces, not so politely– while any lingering confidence by the Palestinians in the good-faith intentions of Israel and the United States has been replaced with mistrust and despair, and the cold realization that US policy does not have any interest in a just or fair outcome for the Palestinians. It never really has had any interest in helping the Palestinians. What killed the Two State Solution, we might ask?

The settlements killed the Two-State Solution–but NOT as an accidental by-product of Israeli “security” issues, as if the settlements were a casual, reversible mistake. But rather they killed the Two-State Solution as part of a calculated agenda from the very start of the Zionist project to capture, de-populate and settle Jews on All the land of Palestine. Zionism’s early generation of founders always envisioned the large-scale removal of the Arab population, and the settlement of their own descendants in land belonging to others–you can read it in their diaries and letters, in their unguarded moments when they are talking among themselves. Herschel, Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, Meir–they all spoke privately of what they understood: that all of Palestine would be theirs, and that it would be a state for the Jews alone.

This has not changed. The Israeli political establishment is today far more racist and authoritarian than the original Zionists ever dreamed of being. We see today how the orthodox right wing has taken over the official agenda entirely, with predictable results: more walls, fences, checkpoints, prisons, military forces, deadly raids by helicopters and fighter planes, and dehumanization for the occupied people. When the Israeli Occupation Forces start getting their first shipment of drones from the US arsenal, it will only get worse. The settlements–whose population has roughly quadrupled since Madrid–were Always part of the plan historically, even though the agenda of settlement has always been directly at odds with international law, and counter to the creation of a Palestinian state, or any “peace process.” This contradiction has stymied forty years of negotiations–and any continued talk with settlement-building part of the equation is simply contrary to common sense.

Speaking as an American, I must note for you here today that it is fundamentally difficult to understand why Americans ever believed in the Two-State Solution at all – I don’t mean the deep political establishment in my country, which is essentially pro-Zionist, strategically and sentimentally, and has used the Two State Solution as a stalling ruse to buy more time for Zionism’s plan. But rather, I mean the thinking, commenting, “chattering class” of intellectuals, television hosts, and so on, tasked with the job of “selling” the idea over the last forty years or so, and those average Americans targeted for this deception. Because for Americans, a fundamental cognitive dissonance has always surrounded the very idea of Israel as an exclusive “state for the Jews”: and that is the fact that American political culture and civil polity are founded on the sacrosanct, bedrock value of the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution, which essentially says that a democracy does not establish Any religion as the religion of the state, and may not favor any faith over another.

We can’t claim credit for this idea – we got it from the French revolution, and from English philosophers before them. It was a radical idea in the 18th century, but today it’s a mainstream, default concept in the West. It’s how we do government in the West. So how did the United States become the proponent and guarantor of the zombie idea of Israel–an exclusive state which bases citizenship on membership in one religion, while reserving a degraded, second-class citizenship for those who are not Jews? Everything about this is antithetical to the American political tradition. It has been one of the great, triumphant acts of cynical political salesmanship in my lifetime: that the exclusive “state for the Jews” has been rendered as acceptable in polite quarters– even just and fair!–to Americans, within the context of our political discourse, even though every ten year old in American Civics class learns in school that we are a nation where all people are equal, and no religion controls, but you are free to worship as you please.

Selling this idea to Americans has taken decades and lots of money and influence, operating sometimes quietly, sometimes openly. US President Harry Truman in 1947 was extremely skeptical of any “state for the Jews,” and generally objected to the Zionist plan on purely fundamental American values–that the establishment of a religious state was counter to what America stands for, and he didn’t want any part of it. He thought he had worked out with his British counterparts a solution for partitioning Palestine that would allow 100,000 Holocaust survivors from Europe to move there, but would create a federal, democratic government with the existing majority Arab population controlling the majority of the land, in a secular state, among which the European Jews would be permitted to live. Truman even went so far as to remind advisors that “religious wars” had ravaged Europe for centuries, and had been the very thing the American Revolution had got us all away from in 1776, and that a “Jewish State” was not an American idea. Eventually, Truman went along with partition, but only if it awarded Palestine mostly to the Palestinians, with a small enclave for the Jews. He expressed his doubts that any creation of a Jewish state could ever be fair to the Arabs.

But then something happened–and this is the salesmanship of Zionism–in the circle of liberal, “progressive” Democrats surrounding the Truman White House: famous men like Judge Brandeis, or the former first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. Liberals! They pushed on behalf of the Zionists for a Jewish state, and against the fairness doctrine that Truman wanted. The Liberal movement in the United States helped create Israel, and in doing so, robbed the Palestinians of their homes, their villages, their farms, their cities and towns. Always beware of the smiling, do-gooder liberals, is the lesson there. So much for the American ideal of the Establishment Clause. Next, the US Constitution enshrines the basic idea of “equality” before the law, and due process for all citizens. As a lawyer, I can tell you that “due process” is the mechanical operating feature of the US Constitution which triggers so many of our rights as citizens–that everyone has the same access to, relationship to, and enfranchisement under the law. The United States has fought bitterly over these issues–including its own civil war, and many rounds of social and political rights movements–but this fundamental western Enlightenment idea has held up as the core value of all our laws in the United States.

The foundation of the Zionist state, of course, was a monstrous crime against the notion of “due process.” Who among the 800,000 Palestinians stripped of their land and homes in 1948 ever received “due process” of the law? Who among the millions of refugees today refused the right to return to where their families come from has ever received any “due process” of the law? Speaking as a lawyer, this is the most troubling aspect of any “Two State Solution”–the constant threat by the Zionists that any Palestinian assertion of the Right of Return justifies a cancellation of all other rights Palestinians possess–it is a miserable, deceitful and coercive cruelty played out over decades by the Zionists against those displaced Palestinians and their descendants who have suffered. It is the original crime at the foundation of the Zionist state–and the Zionists continually cry for the Palestinians to renounce their human right before any other rights can be discussed. As if the human right did not precede all other rights.

This is why the Two State Solution is dead–because the Zionists cannot admit that their state is founded on a crime, and the moral contradiction of their position does not permit a way forward. There is only blind advancement of conquest, subjugation and Apartheid. Speaking as a lawyer, I am most troubled by the failure of the Israeli people to understand the Right of Return in purely legalistic terms: it is a property right, and the body of law dealing with property is long and deep, and originates in many cultures and languages, including, famously, the law-giving culture of the Jews. Much of the ancient Jewish Torah and religious teachings, after all, are concerned explicitly with property, righteousness and what is fair. The foundation of their faith is, in essence, the story of a contract between a people and God, and what happens when contracts are not honored.

Even this past year, we have witnessed the vindication of property claims by Jews against banks, insurance companies, and art collections, concerning the plunder of the Nazis–where property is concerned, many Jews have vindicated their rights across many decades of troubling history, recovering bank accounts, businesses, houses and art. Yet where are the Israelis who stand up and say, “the Right of Return is an issue of equity and property–the land belongs to someone else.” Again, the moral failure of the Israeli state, under the corruption of Zionism, blinds all who stand on stolen ground.

Yet, the “due process” concept is even more troubling for the future that is upon us now: the Apartheid state that the Zionists have built over the years since the Madrid talks can never permit even the faintest whisper of “due process” for those who must live under it. Why do Americans support this? Do they even know what they support? The One State of Zionist Apartheid is upon us, and that needs to be spelled out in every way to folks in the United States. Because now, as the Two-State Solution is dead, the choice for even liberal, peace-seeking Israelis (and for the Americans who would support them) is a choice between a single state from the river to the sea, in which every single person has total and equal enfranchisement before the law, with a resulting Arab majority; or it is a single state ruled by an iron fist, with two classes of citizens–the official, enfranchised class, and the subjugated, serving class, with walls and fences and Bantustan villages to keep them in their place. Does this sound familiar?

But still, proponents push the zombie corpse of the Two State Solution forward. I am amazed at how hollowed out this concept has become from all the abuse it has suffered–according to the Occupiers and the United States’ right wing, the future Palestinian “state” will not have control of its own borders, or ports; exclusive highways for Jews only will criss-cross its land, connecting settlements; it will not have any army or national military force; it will not be permitted armor or airplanes; it will have fences and walls, and the Israeli army and navy, surrounding all of it. That doesn’t sound much like a state I’d like to live in! I wouldn’t live in that state if you made me the President.

Zionist phobia of a dignified Palestinian neighbor runs deep and broad–just like racism–and would provoke laughter if it were not such a sickness. This phobia is so powerful that the Israelis and the Americans won’t even allow the Palestinians to take their place among the organizations of nations, and have access to international cultural and political resources–as witness the temper-tantrum Israel and the US State Department threw last year when the Palestinian Authority joined various United Nations organizations. It is time for the Zionists to grow up, and stop poisoning the phony discourse–either admit your agenda is conquest, or get out. If it’s conquest, then the apartheid system shall prevail, which–as South Africa demonstrated–will lead to a protracted battle for rights by the majority population, leading to their eventual triumphant – in A One State Framework. This is what Palestinians have to look forward to, I’m afraid!

But I have been visiting South Africa quite a lot in the past few years as a lawyer–and I can tell you, I know of no more other society so determined to find a just and equitable future together, really struggling with the legacy of injustice and working creatively to make a real nation, than I find in South Africa. It holds out the promise that one day Palestine will be the state we are talking about, from the river to the sea. Yet the zombie of the Two State Solution still strides the land, spawning its infected army of zombie believers–most recently the U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, who staggered through the region, ineffective and clueless, then made an observation back home that Israel was flirting with Apartheid.

The result? He has paid politically in Washington, where he had to go down on bended knee and apologize publicly to the Zionist lobby, and it’s unlikely his political career has anywhere left to go now, because he dared to use the “A-word” in referring to Israel. Of course, popular cinema has taught us that to kill a zombie, you must hit it in the head, and destroy its brain. This tells me that we must struggle now to defeat the intellectual justifications for the Two State Solution–defeat the far-flung network of bogus think-tanks and apologists who hold up Israel as a shining beacon of polite, lawful statehood, while keeping the Palestinians disenfranchised. We must win the intellectual battle, at the same time as the fight on the ground continues–the world must learn that the American and Zionist agenda is intended to subjugate the Palestinians further, and will continue to do so until world opinion & the Palestinians themselves change that–just as happened in South Africa.

This article is adapted from an address to the “Nakba 2014” Conference in Zurich, 15 May 2014.

Keep up with Stanley Cohen @ Counterpunch Follow Stanley Cohen on Twitter @StanleyCohenLaw

The Two-State Solution Is Neither

Stanley L. Cohen argues against any proposed two state solution to Palestine's Israeli problem. 



Is the Two-State Solution now the zombie of Western political-thought–an idea long dead, yet still walking the landscape, with bits of it rotting and falling off, while reason and history shoot holes in it, but it keeps staggering on, infecting the political discourse? Who can sincerely believe in it anymore? Least of all, Israel and the Zionists, since the idea’s basic post-Madrid concept has been so thoroughly abused and violated, perforated with holes so big you can plant a settlement in them. The idea has been rendered no longer materially feasible, to put it politely–well and truly screwed to pieces, not so politely– while any lingering confidence by the Palestinians in the good-faith intentions of Israel and the United States has been replaced with mistrust and despair, and the cold realization that US policy does not have any interest in a just or fair outcome for the Palestinians. It never really has had any interest in helping the Palestinians. What killed the Two State Solution, we might ask?

The settlements killed the Two-State Solution–but NOT as an accidental by-product of Israeli “security” issues, as if the settlements were a casual, reversible mistake. But rather they killed the Two-State Solution as part of a calculated agenda from the very start of the Zionist project to capture, de-populate and settle Jews on All the land of Palestine. Zionism’s early generation of founders always envisioned the large-scale removal of the Arab population, and the settlement of their own descendants in land belonging to others–you can read it in their diaries and letters, in their unguarded moments when they are talking among themselves. Herschel, Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, Meir–they all spoke privately of what they understood: that all of Palestine would be theirs, and that it would be a state for the Jews alone.

This has not changed. The Israeli political establishment is today far more racist and authoritarian than the original Zionists ever dreamed of being. We see today how the orthodox right wing has taken over the official agenda entirely, with predictable results: more walls, fences, checkpoints, prisons, military forces, deadly raids by helicopters and fighter planes, and dehumanization for the occupied people. When the Israeli Occupation Forces start getting their first shipment of drones from the US arsenal, it will only get worse. The settlements–whose population has roughly quadrupled since Madrid–were Always part of the plan historically, even though the agenda of settlement has always been directly at odds with international law, and counter to the creation of a Palestinian state, or any “peace process.” This contradiction has stymied forty years of negotiations–and any continued talk with settlement-building part of the equation is simply contrary to common sense.

Speaking as an American, I must note for you here today that it is fundamentally difficult to understand why Americans ever believed in the Two-State Solution at all – I don’t mean the deep political establishment in my country, which is essentially pro-Zionist, strategically and sentimentally, and has used the Two State Solution as a stalling ruse to buy more time for Zionism’s plan. But rather, I mean the thinking, commenting, “chattering class” of intellectuals, television hosts, and so on, tasked with the job of “selling” the idea over the last forty years or so, and those average Americans targeted for this deception. Because for Americans, a fundamental cognitive dissonance has always surrounded the very idea of Israel as an exclusive “state for the Jews”: and that is the fact that American political culture and civil polity are founded on the sacrosanct, bedrock value of the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution, which essentially says that a democracy does not establish Any religion as the religion of the state, and may not favor any faith over another.

We can’t claim credit for this idea – we got it from the French revolution, and from English philosophers before them. It was a radical idea in the 18th century, but today it’s a mainstream, default concept in the West. It’s how we do government in the West. So how did the United States become the proponent and guarantor of the zombie idea of Israel–an exclusive state which bases citizenship on membership in one religion, while reserving a degraded, second-class citizenship for those who are not Jews? Everything about this is antithetical to the American political tradition. It has been one of the great, triumphant acts of cynical political salesmanship in my lifetime: that the exclusive “state for the Jews” has been rendered as acceptable in polite quarters– even just and fair!–to Americans, within the context of our political discourse, even though every ten year old in American Civics class learns in school that we are a nation where all people are equal, and no religion controls, but you are free to worship as you please.

Selling this idea to Americans has taken decades and lots of money and influence, operating sometimes quietly, sometimes openly. US President Harry Truman in 1947 was extremely skeptical of any “state for the Jews,” and generally objected to the Zionist plan on purely fundamental American values–that the establishment of a religious state was counter to what America stands for, and he didn’t want any part of it. He thought he had worked out with his British counterparts a solution for partitioning Palestine that would allow 100,000 Holocaust survivors from Europe to move there, but would create a federal, democratic government with the existing majority Arab population controlling the majority of the land, in a secular state, among which the European Jews would be permitted to live. Truman even went so far as to remind advisors that “religious wars” had ravaged Europe for centuries, and had been the very thing the American Revolution had got us all away from in 1776, and that a “Jewish State” was not an American idea. Eventually, Truman went along with partition, but only if it awarded Palestine mostly to the Palestinians, with a small enclave for the Jews. He expressed his doubts that any creation of a Jewish state could ever be fair to the Arabs.

But then something happened–and this is the salesmanship of Zionism–in the circle of liberal, “progressive” Democrats surrounding the Truman White House: famous men like Judge Brandeis, or the former first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. Liberals! They pushed on behalf of the Zionists for a Jewish state, and against the fairness doctrine that Truman wanted. The Liberal movement in the United States helped create Israel, and in doing so, robbed the Palestinians of their homes, their villages, their farms, their cities and towns. Always beware of the smiling, do-gooder liberals, is the lesson there. So much for the American ideal of the Establishment Clause. Next, the US Constitution enshrines the basic idea of “equality” before the law, and due process for all citizens. As a lawyer, I can tell you that “due process” is the mechanical operating feature of the US Constitution which triggers so many of our rights as citizens–that everyone has the same access to, relationship to, and enfranchisement under the law. The United States has fought bitterly over these issues–including its own civil war, and many rounds of social and political rights movements–but this fundamental western Enlightenment idea has held up as the core value of all our laws in the United States.

The foundation of the Zionist state, of course, was a monstrous crime against the notion of “due process.” Who among the 800,000 Palestinians stripped of their land and homes in 1948 ever received “due process” of the law? Who among the millions of refugees today refused the right to return to where their families come from has ever received any “due process” of the law? Speaking as a lawyer, this is the most troubling aspect of any “Two State Solution”–the constant threat by the Zionists that any Palestinian assertion of the Right of Return justifies a cancellation of all other rights Palestinians possess–it is a miserable, deceitful and coercive cruelty played out over decades by the Zionists against those displaced Palestinians and their descendants who have suffered. It is the original crime at the foundation of the Zionist state–and the Zionists continually cry for the Palestinians to renounce their human right before any other rights can be discussed. As if the human right did not precede all other rights.

This is why the Two State Solution is dead–because the Zionists cannot admit that their state is founded on a crime, and the moral contradiction of their position does not permit a way forward. There is only blind advancement of conquest, subjugation and Apartheid. Speaking as a lawyer, I am most troubled by the failure of the Israeli people to understand the Right of Return in purely legalistic terms: it is a property right, and the body of law dealing with property is long and deep, and originates in many cultures and languages, including, famously, the law-giving culture of the Jews. Much of the ancient Jewish Torah and religious teachings, after all, are concerned explicitly with property, righteousness and what is fair. The foundation of their faith is, in essence, the story of a contract between a people and God, and what happens when contracts are not honored.

Even this past year, we have witnessed the vindication of property claims by Jews against banks, insurance companies, and art collections, concerning the plunder of the Nazis–where property is concerned, many Jews have vindicated their rights across many decades of troubling history, recovering bank accounts, businesses, houses and art. Yet where are the Israelis who stand up and say, “the Right of Return is an issue of equity and property–the land belongs to someone else.” Again, the moral failure of the Israeli state, under the corruption of Zionism, blinds all who stand on stolen ground.

Yet, the “due process” concept is even more troubling for the future that is upon us now: the Apartheid state that the Zionists have built over the years since the Madrid talks can never permit even the faintest whisper of “due process” for those who must live under it. Why do Americans support this? Do they even know what they support? The One State of Zionist Apartheid is upon us, and that needs to be spelled out in every way to folks in the United States. Because now, as the Two-State Solution is dead, the choice for even liberal, peace-seeking Israelis (and for the Americans who would support them) is a choice between a single state from the river to the sea, in which every single person has total and equal enfranchisement before the law, with a resulting Arab majority; or it is a single state ruled by an iron fist, with two classes of citizens–the official, enfranchised class, and the subjugated, serving class, with walls and fences and Bantustan villages to keep them in their place. Does this sound familiar?

But still, proponents push the zombie corpse of the Two State Solution forward. I am amazed at how hollowed out this concept has become from all the abuse it has suffered–according to the Occupiers and the United States’ right wing, the future Palestinian “state” will not have control of its own borders, or ports; exclusive highways for Jews only will criss-cross its land, connecting settlements; it will not have any army or national military force; it will not be permitted armor or airplanes; it will have fences and walls, and the Israeli army and navy, surrounding all of it. That doesn’t sound much like a state I’d like to live in! I wouldn’t live in that state if you made me the President.

Zionist phobia of a dignified Palestinian neighbor runs deep and broad–just like racism–and would provoke laughter if it were not such a sickness. This phobia is so powerful that the Israelis and the Americans won’t even allow the Palestinians to take their place among the organizations of nations, and have access to international cultural and political resources–as witness the temper-tantrum Israel and the US State Department threw last year when the Palestinian Authority joined various United Nations organizations. It is time for the Zionists to grow up, and stop poisoning the phony discourse–either admit your agenda is conquest, or get out. If it’s conquest, then the apartheid system shall prevail, which–as South Africa demonstrated–will lead to a protracted battle for rights by the majority population, leading to their eventual triumphant – in A One State Framework. This is what Palestinians have to look forward to, I’m afraid!

But I have been visiting South Africa quite a lot in the past few years as a lawyer–and I can tell you, I know of no more other society so determined to find a just and equitable future together, really struggling with the legacy of injustice and working creatively to make a real nation, than I find in South Africa. It holds out the promise that one day Palestine will be the state we are talking about, from the river to the sea. Yet the zombie of the Two State Solution still strides the land, spawning its infected army of zombie believers–most recently the U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, who staggered through the region, ineffective and clueless, then made an observation back home that Israel was flirting with Apartheid.

The result? He has paid politically in Washington, where he had to go down on bended knee and apologize publicly to the Zionist lobby, and it’s unlikely his political career has anywhere left to go now, because he dared to use the “A-word” in referring to Israel. Of course, popular cinema has taught us that to kill a zombie, you must hit it in the head, and destroy its brain. This tells me that we must struggle now to defeat the intellectual justifications for the Two State Solution–defeat the far-flung network of bogus think-tanks and apologists who hold up Israel as a shining beacon of polite, lawful statehood, while keeping the Palestinians disenfranchised. We must win the intellectual battle, at the same time as the fight on the ground continues–the world must learn that the American and Zionist agenda is intended to subjugate the Palestinians further, and will continue to do so until world opinion & the Palestinians themselves change that–just as happened in South Africa.

This article is adapted from an address to the “Nakba 2014” Conference in Zurich, 15 May 2014.

Keep up with Stanley Cohen @ Counterpunch Follow Stanley Cohen on Twitter @StanleyCohenLaw

17 comments:

  1. The author should provide credible historical evidence that the State of Israel was founded on the "original sin" that the State of Israel was founced on the intention of Zionist Jews to occupy ALL of historic Palestine and therein to expel all Arab inhabitants. It is this pathological hatred of the existence of a Jewish nation in historic Palestine that fuels contemporary left (and far right to some extent) antisemitism that has poiosoned the culture of the British Labour Partry with the results that John Ware (he who exposed the Omagh and Pat Finucane killers) described on that excellent Panorama documentary last night on the BBC.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Barry - the guy himself is Jewish and I think his pathological hatred is of the Israelis behaving like Nazis.
      I missed Ware last night - didn't even know he was on. He would do a thorough job.

      Delete
  2. John Ware did the job asked of him by the State gatekeepers. If he was a true journalist he'd have delved more deeply into the Omagh bomb.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh dear John Ware didn't do such as a good job for the State gatekdeepers when he exposed the extent of collusion between loyalist terror groups and the security services in his excellent 2012 documentary which one Jeremy Corbyn praised in an Early Day Motion in the Commmons.

      But nice try Wolfe Tone.

      Delete
  3. https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2019-07-03/plot-corbyn-out-power/

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anthony

    Being Jewish offers no immunisation from antisemitism whether it is of the right-wing variety which Netananayu indulges when he buys into the George Soros conspiracies pushed by his chums Orban in Hungary and the Donald or the far left conspiracy theorising about Zionist and Israeli power and influence which the pro-Corbynite Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL)peddle.

    If you watch the Ware documentary you may begin to understand why Isaeli-Nazi comparisons are not just factually wrong but are offensive to the majority of Jews and are quite rightly classified as a form of antisemitism under the International Holocausat Remembrance Association definition. As I keep saying there is nothing antisemitic about condemning the building of settlements on the West Bank; the repressive controls exercised on the West Bank population; the conduct of Israeli military operations in Gaza or indeed any aspect of Israeli governance and policy just so long as the same criticisms are made of other states (I note that Mr Cohen has said elsewhere that he would defend President Assad). It is the opposition to the existence of the State of Israel that I find antisemitic and I am not going to resile from that view,

    Anthony, if you do watch the documentary I would like to know your views on a party leadership that as its title suggests supposed to defend workers' rights imposing Non Disclosure Agreements on whistle blowing staff. I would be interested to know your opinions of the Labour hierarchy going after a disinguished investigative journalist for carrying out his ethical and professional duties in probing the rottenness in the higher echelons of a party that is seeking the highest public office.

    By seeking the services of Peter-Carter Fuck solicitors in the pursuit of a libel challenge, Corbyn's Labour is no different from the powerful corporate and state bodies that it purports to oppose.

    Btw, the Tories have exactly the same issues with hatred of Muslins and beholdennbess to member-led extremism as Corbyn's excuse of a Labour Party. British politics is truly a crock of shit at this moment.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Barry - by the same token being accused of anti-Semitism does not mean a person is. I very much guess Stanley would reject the charge. The IHRA definition means absolutely nothing to me when it seeks to protect the Israeli stage from allegations of carrying out Nazi like atrocities on Palestinians. Why would I be swayed by a body that refuses to call something by its name. Nor do I care in the slightest that the majority of Jews might be offended by the comparison of Israeli activities to Nazi ones. There is not right not to be offended. I no more care for what they think than I do for what Catholics think when their Church is compared to a global rape institution. Israeli-Nazi comparison are factually right - war crimes/crimes against humanity - we should never shirk from calling them by their name - Nazi like atrocities. It can never be anti-Semitism to speak out against Nazi like war crimes.
    I am going to try and watch the documentary - I know Ware's work, know him, know his ability to get to many things that astound and in some cases have still to make their way into the public domain. There are things that he and I would have a radically different opinion on. I told him back in 94 exactly where the Provos were going and he thought I had lost the plot!
    Barry - you can probably guess my opinion on the questions you asked. The bottom line is the Left will always screw you over. There is nothing more certain in this life than death, taxes and the Left learning to stand on its hind legs.
    The thing about the Ware documentary is that after the initial hostile reaction from the upper echelons of the BLP there is now a more sober approach, a recognition that the issue of anti-Semitism is there and needs addressed. That does not make Corbyn an anti-Semite but as was pointed out last night Macpherson saying the Met was institutionally racist didn't mean the Commissioner was racist. More importantly, as was also pointed out by the Guardian journalist on Newsnight, the anti-Semitism problem was there under Blair, even before his crowd came to office.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Barry - and Wolfe Tone might just have a point when he queries the programme. this is from Twitter.

    Clayton Swisher

    Verified account

    @claytonswisher
    10h
    10 hours ago


    More
    Clayton Swisher Retweeted Asa Winstanley
    It is stunning @BBCPanorama failed to mention context to Ella Rose's role in our undercover series in 2017 on Britain's pro-Israel lobby. They even tried to use her story but not identify her by name or her past work for the Israeli government!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anthony

    I guess we will have to permandently agree to disagree on this intactable issue but the IHRA explicitly excludes criticism of Israeli policiers viz-a-viz the occupation, Palestinian, Gaza etc from definition of antisemitism. It merely says opposition to the existence of and the demonisation of the State of Israel and Zionism as uniquely evil is a form of antisemitism.

    My objection to Nazi-Israeli comparisons are less to do with offence caused but with the trivialisatrion and relativisation of not just the Shoah/Holocaust but the T4 extermination of the disabled programme, the genocide of the Roma and Sinti, ditto gays, the mass incarceration and often murder of the "socially useless" and political opponents.

    War crimes and crimes against humanity (Syria, Yemen, Congo etc, etc, etc) take place in all conflict zones but the perpetrators never seem to awarded Nazi comparisons. You yourself in your excellent book of essays that I have recently read dismiss Nazi comparisons with Northern Irish Unionism. So call out ALL war crimes etc as Nazi like or not at all except when they involve genocidal intent and outcome as in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur and Myanmar.

    Was that Guardian journalist Dawn Foeter by any chance?

    Pro-Israel lobby? Well there are pro-China lobbies, pro-Saudi lobbies, pro-Russia lobbies etc. etc, etc. It is how embassies work as intereswt maximisers. There is nothing special about the pro-Israel lobby in the UK no matter what Hamas sympathiser Asa Winstanley wishes to imagine it.

    ReplyDelete
  8. John Ware, like others before him, has yet to point the finger at the elephant in the room regarding the 'extent' of Brit govt collusion. In fact it has been the tenacity of families' of lost loved ones that has/is forcing the hand of the State. But nice try at your virtue signalling.
    Those blinded by their beliefs fail to even notice that the touted next prime minister has behaved far worse than Corbyn and indeed Trump. For eg if Trump had jokingly dismissed the dead bodies in Libya as a minor inconvenience at making money he'd be rightly condemned for it. And yet the 'free' press and its gatekeepers are ignoring lots of scandalous words and acts by Bojo in their coverage of the Tory poll? On the contrary they are almost making it a feel good factor concerning Johnstons imminent premiership. Just imagine if Corbyn had said the things toff Johnson had said and honestly tell me if you think the media wouldn't go to town on him? Maybe John Ware will pick up the mantle or perhaps he ain't allowed to disrupt the State plan? Just saying.

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  9. Barry - what the IHRA deems anti-Semitism has no more purchase on me than what the Vatican deems murder. The IHRA gives cover to Israeli Nazi-like activity by trying to limit the language through which critics wish to descriptively argue what Israel is guilty of.

    The Israeli state is evil, not uniquely so, but no less evil for that. The murder of children is evil, it is Nazi like. Or do you think child killing was something the Nazis did not do?

    There is no trivialisation involved. No one is claiming that the Shoah is on a par with Israeli policy. But many other aspects of Nazi behaviour are. And in those circumstances the comparison is fair and accurate.

    All crimes against humanity are Nazi-like without exception. It would be inconsistent and hypocritical to exempt the Israelis from the term and apply it to everybody else. Northern Ireland unionism was not Nazi but let us not pretend that Bloody Sunday was not Nazi like or Kingsmill. They were.

    I'm not sure Barry who the Guardian journalist was? She was critical of Labour's history of anti-Semitism.

    All lobbies for war crime regimes should be disdained, don't you think?

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  10. Anthony

    If "war crime regimes" or non-governmental entities have been indicted by the ICC and where reputable human rights bodies like AI and HRW document the evidence then yes. But much as I deplore the current and many previous Israeli admins, I do not concur with the use of tbhe word "evil" to describe as I am reluctant to use the word "evil" even with bodies I vehehemtly disagree with: Putin, Hamas, Hezbollah, Provos, Loyalists - you name them.

    The accusation that Israel systemically and preemptively targets children for killing in the manner of is not supported by hard, verifiable evidence and the notion that it does echoes the ancient trope that Jews are child killers. I have no dount that many children have been killed in Gaza in response to Hamas rocket attacks but Hamas has to accept some responsibility for them where they have launched missiles in built up civilian areas (as has been commented on by UN Reports on war crimes by both Hamas and Israel.

    I am glad we are on the same page on equivalence between the Shoah and Israeli policies as that is what the IHRA deems as antisemitic because many (but by no means all) of the complaints of Labour antisemitism concern this deliderate conflation wiith the "Zio-Nazi" epithet. I repeat, the IHRA does not preclude accusations of Israeli war crimes just the specific comparisons with the Shoah and the allegations that Israel was at its inception a racist and settler-colonial project.

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  11. Barry - As recently as March the United Nations Human Rights Council released a report which concluded that children were targeted for murder by the Israelis.

    Amnesty International on the Israelis terrorism against peaceful protestors including children:

    It is now time the international community shows ‘zero tolerance’ towards Israel’s flagrant contempt for Palestinian lives and disregard for its obligations under international law.”

    Human Rights Watch on Israeli Terrorism against children:

    Offenses committed by Israeli security forces as part of the occupation, such as deliberate attacks on civilians, would be subject to prosecution under international humanitarian law as war crimes.

    You are free not to describe such practices as evil much as you are free not to describe Babi Yar as evil. It is just a matter of choice. What it does do however is debunk any argument that it is anti-Semitic to describe Israel state terror as evil.

    The fact that Israel murders children in no way lends itself to the trope that Jews murder children. Israel murders Palestinian children is a straightforward fact. The crime at play here is not anti-Semitism but Israeli murder denial. The howls of anti-Semitism are merely Israeli murder PR.

    Hamas has committed war crimes of which there is no doubt. But the big thieves hang the little ones and in that spirit the war crimes of Hamas pale in comparison to the war crimes of Israel. The murder of children is not a justifiable response to Hamas attacks no more than the killing of Israeli children by Hamas is justified. But we are left to ponder that in terms of war crimes against children Israel is by far the biggest offender.

    The apologists in IHRA should be denied the opportunity to shut down debate about the origins of the Israeli state. You will find enough in Ben Gurion to show there are grounds for arguing that at its inception Israel was a racist and settler-colonial project. I believe that it was and will not be dissuaded from expressing that belief by purveyors of Israeli propaganda.

    The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand or Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe, also provide grounds for not subscribing to the IHRA myths. Sand starts out:

    A nation is a group of people united by a common mistake regarding its origin and a collective hostility towards its neighbours.

    We don't have to subscribe to Shlomo - in fact there is a brilliant review by Michael Berkowitz which seriously challenges the work - but we should acknowledge that it is wrong to label him or anyone else who dissent from the myths of Israel as anti-Semitic. It is a perfectly legitimate position to hold and the IHRA can stick its thoroughly censorious stance right up its jacksie, much as the Vatican can do with its own. Imagine being told by the Vatican that it is deeply anti-Catholic not to believe that Christ was god. And here we have apologists for Israel demanding something on the same par. They are a shameless lot.

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    1. Just read Berkovitz's review. Brilliant piece of work but I confess that I have not read Shlomo's book. Thanks for pointing me in the direction of it, Anthony.

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  12. Anthony

    Actually our views are closer than you imagine. We both believe that comparisons between the Shoah/Holocaust and Israeli actions are inaccurate and inappropriate; is is the use on imagery on social media such as the inversion of the swastika and Star of David done by people who know exactly which buttons to push in relation to Jews (just as the Glasgow Rangers supporters who sing "The Famine Song" know exactly what buttns to press in relation to that particular transformative and traumatic historical moment) that forms part of the antisemitic discourse that is poisoning the Labour Party (other parts have noting to do with Israel/Palestine such as power of the Rothschilds and cabals of secret Jewish conspirators.

    I agree 100% with the HRW and AI reports you cite. I do know about them. Human rights violators should always be held to account without fear or favour or limitation of time. The trouble is (and this definitely does not apply to you, Anthony) that many of the anti-Israel lobby who dominate Corbyn's inner circle and following are silent about Assaad's crimes in Syria and Putin's crimes in Ukraine, Maduro's crimes in Venezuela etc, etc because, adherents are they are to groups like Stop the War Coalition and to gurus like Noam Chomsky, they only recognise evil when perpetrated by Western and Western allides because as Chomsky explicitly says they believe that Western camapigners should only be concerned with Western crimes - hence his indulgence of tnose who denied Serb Chetnik atrocites in Bosnia and his earlier denial of or rationalisation of Khmer Rouge genocidal atrocities.

    Of course no area of history including the circumstances of Israel's foundation should be immune or protected from scholastic investigation. I personally go with Benny Morris's work. What should not happen is distortions of the historical record such as Ken Livingstone's Hitler supported Zionism theories and the thesis advanced by others of that ilk that Jews are white.

    What also cannot be ignored in the context of Israel's formation is the transformational effect of the Shoah/Holocaust on the Jewish people just as the Naqba was to be a transformational event for Palestinian Arabs. Nor can the rejection by the Palestinian leadership of the 1937 and 1947 Partition Plan be discounted.

    Funnily enough the plight of Palestinians did not attract any attention from anti-imperialist Left supporters of Israel (including Irish Republicans) at the time.

    The IHRA definition is non-binding. It was formulated by European antiracist lobbies to help police forces deal with hate crime. Acacademic activites dealing with the Israel-Paldestine conflict.

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  13. I guess the Zionist gatekeepers will be hysterical at this book review............https://off-guardian.org/2019/07/14/review-israel-a-beachhead/

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  14. A somewhat irreverent take on the Labpour antisemitism scandal:

    http://hurryupharry.org/2019/07/16/leaked-labour-shadow-cabinet-meeting-on-antisemitism/

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