Combating Disfigurations, Part Two

And now for phase Two, the Jewish alternative.

"The Arabs, including and especially the Palestinian Arabs, have been the aggressors throughout the nearly 100 years of the Arab-Israel conflict."

This quote from Rachel Neuwirth's article confirms what I had already suspected about her. She represents a faction of Zionist thought that does not want peace, does not want a resolution, but wants vengance. It is a thought that does not serve Jews or Israelis nor humanity as a whole.

I say this after reading about Jewish approaches to religious peacebuilding and how Jews and Arab Muslims do not have to live in a cycle of violence. There does not have to be a question of a victor or a loser.

Marc Gopin is way cooler than Rachel Neuwirth, and people who want to read about the Jewish side of the conflict should check him out. My favorite piece of his comes from a sort of anthology of religious peacebuilding works entitled Faith Based Diplomacy edited by Douglas Johnston.

He talks about how the intensity of the human despair caused by the violent conflicts trumps the things that caused it. We can point to so many reasons and events that led to the violence, but because the casualties have been so devastating, deconstructing all of that won't really help. Each side's needs are equal to the other in importance.

One of the more creative ideas he has, the land that is fought over so bitterly can be used as a tool in building a relationship between the two sides. One of these ways draws on the shared tradition of memorializing the dead for Jews and Muslims. This should be done via a bilateral process and could be as simple as picking a place where violence has occurred and making it a communal mourning place. But it is something that needs happen organically and over an extended period of time. The absence of judgement is key. The focus needs to be on the loss of life no matter what the reason was.

He also highlights a plan for resolving the conflict. These points include involving religious leaders in the peace process, resotring the sanctity of Holy places, engaging in joint mourning, supporting injured adversaries, develop trust-building initiatives, developing a process for restoring justices, combatting poverty, restoring dignity, and engage religious traditions in transforming relationships.

For a more detailed plan within Jewish theology to fix it all, google him and read whatever you find about him.

Now, I can imagine Mr. Snarfquack reading one or two sentences of all this and ignoring it and quite possibly responding with his pre-scripted diatribe of how I'm no better than a terrorist or Nazi, and that's fine. The world is full of Snarfquacks who are too far into their own perceptions that they can't reason with anything else, and so are consistently irrational in their responses and annoying to everyone else. I wouldn't bother to write so much about all this just because a Snarfquack sent it to my inbox. No, I'm writing all this because I want people to read something level headed and peace oriented on this subject. If all this makes me a Nazi terrorist who drinks the blood of Jewish babies, then the discussion ends and I continue to not care what you think of me.



Because your name is Snarfquack. Fo' realz.

Combatting Disfigurations, Part One

Part One

Back in Miami, when I was but a young Odalisque (18 years old, really), I used to visit this book discussion group at the swanky Books and Books in Coral Gables. It was frequented by some very amazing businessmen and professionals who really wanted to talk about a lot if important global issues.

I'm still on their e-mail list and today one of the members (who seems to be a little too okay with the fact that we don't know his name and so we call him by his e-mail, which is Snarfquack. That's Snarf-quack ladies and gentlemen. And as far as I can tell, a grown man) sent out this article. It's a right wing look at the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I don't think there are many people who would read it and agree with it, but there are many people who don't know what the actual history is and this article doesn't really help.

The article starts off in a very scary way, acknowledging the presence of an unnamed yet powerful and "vast" enemy of the Jews and Israel.

"The confluence of international forces that has gathered against the Jewish people and faith, including the spiritual and intellectual fifth column amongst us, is indeed a formidable adversary. Nevertheless, there are things we can do if we are willing to work together to protect our rights and stand up to the massive defamation campaign waged against us."

That's never a good sign. Whoever is out to get the Jews and Israel is a very small population and certainly not all that powerful. When it comes to organizing a community, it is a very human reaction to do so by saying that someone is "out to get" your community. But that doesn't make it right or true.

"One very important thing that all of us can do is to counter the endless lies and distortions of Israel's history and character that appear in the press, mass media, on the Internet, and even in scholarly journals. These distortions and outright falsehoods are a major reason why Israel is in such deep trouble, and in danger of "going under." Because the entire world has been led to believe an inaccurate, grossly distorted "narrative" of the conflict, the government of Israel feels it has no choice but to make concessions to the demands of its enemies, in order to appease world opinion. But these concessions imperil Israel's existence."

Israel has its own problems outside of Palestine. Israel's existence is ambiguous by its own definition, which is still being decided today. What kind of Jewish state will Israel be? If it is a democratic and liberal society, does it make sense to be so exclusive? If Israel is to be a refuge for Jews across the world, how will it relate to the rest of the world?

"The Israelis are not colonialists or alien "settlers" in the Land of Israel with no past connection or relationship to the country... there have been at least some Jews living there almost continuously for 3,200 years."

The Jews native to the area are not settlers. The Jews who came from Europe to live in Israel are settlers in a secular/legal sense.

"There has never been a distinctive "Palestinian" Arab people or an Arab "Palestine" state or nation. While it is true that some Arabs have lived in the Land of Israel for many centuries, they have never been ethnically or culturally distinct or different from the Arabs who live in other lands, including the original Arab homeland, the Arabian Peninsula. The Jews, however, are a people who originated in the Land of Israel and never had any other national homeland."

True that there has never been a distinctive Palestinian state or nation until the early 20th century. Nationalism in the Middle East is a modern idea, and by this same reasoning there has never been a concept of a Jewish state or nation in the Palestinian region until the late 19th and early 20th century. Jewish identity is based on ethnicity and religion which would become an ethno-nationalism. Palestinian nationalism is not an ethno-nationalism and a Palestinian may be Muslim, Christian or Jew. Palestinian identity existed as a regional identity in the pre-nationalism era, and in the modern era is a reactionary nationalism formed by the mandate system.

Here's a quote from James L. Gelvin's book The Modern Middle East that will shed a little more light on just how these Arab states came about:

"Over the course of the mandate period, both the Arab nationalist and the Syrian nationalist options became less and less viable. The mandates system not only divided the Arab world into a variety of states, but severed Palestine from Syria. Because the Palestinian Arab community could not reasonably expect to unite with Syrians, the lure of Syrian nationalism eventually lost its hold on it. Over time, the history and institutional development of Palestine and Syria also diverged. Syrian elites, for example, would further their education by studying in France and felt at ease in French culture. Since Britain held the mandate for Palestine, educated elites in Palestine would often learn English, complete their studies in Britain, and come to regard British institutions and traditions, not French, as a model to be emulated.

But there was a second reason why a separate Palestinian identity began to emerge during the mandate period. The inhabitants of Palestine faced a problem that no other inhabitants of the region faced: Zionist settlement. Zionist settlement was very different from the imperialism practiced in Syria or Iraq under the mandates system. The British and French ruled their mandated territories indirectly, through local collaborators. They did not appropriate land, establish a rival and competing economy, or establish rival and competing political structures. Because they faced a different type of adversary, the response of Palestinians was different from the response of their neighbors.

The fact that Palestinian nationalism developed later than Zionism and, in fact, developed in response to Zionist immigration does not mean that Palestinian nationalism is any less legitimate than Zionism. All nationalisms arise in oppositions to some internal or external nemesis. All are defined by what they oppose. Zionism itself originally arose in reaction to anti-Semitic and nationalist movements in Europe. It would be perverse to judge Zionism as somehow less valid than European anti-Semitism or those nationalisms. Furthermore, Zionism itself was also defined by its opposition to the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants of the region. Both the 'conquest of land' and the 'conquest of labor' slogans that became central to Zionist thinking originated as a result of the confrontation of Zionism with its Palestinian 'other'."

By the way, the idea of a Jewish home state in the Palestinian region was not a concrete or universal idea until the early 20th century, starting possibly as early 1920. There was even discussion about going to Argentina, as you may see in Theodore Herzl's article "Argentine or Palestine".

"The Arab population of Israel/Palestine only began to grow in the late 19th and 20th centuries, at the same time that Jews began to resettle the land. Jewish immigrants brought with them modernized agriculture, including the growing of oranges, which had been previously unknown; a market for Arab agricultural goods; employment at Jewish farms and factories; modern hospitals and medicine that saved thousands of Arab lives; the draining of swamps that had caused thousands of deaths from malaria and other insect-born diseases; and vastly expanded Arab education funded by Jewish taxes."

Yeah, those brown people. They were asking for the European Jews to come in and settle in their land. Those savages had nothing until those guys came, they didn't even have oranges.

The second part of this reaction is going to focus on Neuwirth’s take on the beginning and continuation of hostilities.

I will leave you with something I found very amusing. Ibn Saud is reported to have said he supported a Jewish home state…in Germany, because those are the guys that did most of the killing and they should have to pay the price for it, not the Arabs.

Zionism Can Be Mean

It is the week before Spring Break over here at AU, which means it was the week when a bunch of assignments were due. It has also sort of been Jew week in the land of Christa's class readings and discussions.

In my Islamic Societies and The Modern World and Religion and Peacebuilding classes, we've taken a look at the Israel-Palestine conflict. So before I get into all that, let's just start putting all the anti-Semitic comments out there, just so there's no ambiguity. Jews run the world, Jews have all the money, and they have bi-weekly global meetings on how best to destroy Islam. I think that covers it.

Now is where I say "ha ha" and "jk" in case you couldn't tell I wasn't being serious. Saying that any minority group has a set agenda and is able to control the world is just ridiculous. Unless we're talking about Disney, yeah, those guys are coming for us all.

Misinformation is greatest threat to Jews, secular and religious alike. When I criticize the state of Israel or any pro-Israel lobby here in the US, I rarely, if ever, consider those critical masses to be Jews. I think of them as Zionists, which has no Jewish pre-requisite, it just means people who support the state of Israel as a Jewish home state, and frequently support it at the expense of others. In the US, if we were to do a survey, I think we'd find the majority of Zionists are actually evangelical Christians.

I don't care if you ascribe to the Jewish religion, the Christian religion, or the psychotic bastard religion that imposes a different historical narrative on indigenous populations, a nation state with an exclusivist identity that has constructed itself on top of the local traditions and customs of another society is wrong. But its too late to go back and change what happened at the dawn of the 20th century. We have to figure out how we can make it right after so much time has passed and so much blood has been shed.

Somehow, I think we need to find a way to make a non-exclusivist Israel acceptable to everyone, even if a two state solution is realized. There are many Arabs and Muslims in Israel who will not be happy to be shipped over to Palestine just because they are Arab or Muslim. They consider Israel their home too. I don't know how we can create such a definition of Israel, but it still needs to be done and needs to be done soon.

And that concludes my thoughts from Jew week.