jlaw172364, basically, your arguments are variations on three spurious claims, repeated over and over, and failing to address any arguments that undermine them.
1) The fact that any Palestinian people remain alive is proof that the Israelis are neither engaged in, nor have any intention of, exterminating them as a people, i.e. genocide.
You deliberately ignore all the evidence that they are doing just that (using military means, but also starvation, dehydration, radiation poisoning, home demolitions, terrorism, humiliation, depriving them of education and other means of breaking a people's body and spirit) and that their intentions have been explicitly articulated -- not by "fringe extremists", but by those who have the means to do exactly what they want to a helpless, captive population whom they describe as "vermin" and a "demographic threat" to their zionist "dream".
As c2w so aptly put it, :
..in effect, what you're saying boils down to: "Well, sure, their lives are unlivable. But at least they exist. Get back to me when they're dead, and I'll consider revising my comfort level with that."
2) Nobody has the right to object to Israeli crimes because everybody is evil. Everybody commits atrocities, no nation would exist without atrocities, we're all a bunch of vicious, soulless demons living in a cesspool of greed and violence, scrabbling for what we can snatch from the cold, dead fingers of other tribes and races. International law is bullshit, private property is bullshit, all morality is bullshit.
This, behind all the hasbara and pretty words designed for Western consumption, is the world-view promoted by zionism -- it is mental illness, induced paranoia and festering hatred elevated to the status of a 'national ideology'. Many scholars, including many Jewish scholars such as Israel Shahak, Alfred Lilienthal and Noam Chomsky have worked very hard to raise the alarm about this dangerous dogma that has been drilled into the heads of so many Jews in order to recruit them as shock troops, apologists, financial supporters and espionage agents for the zionists' criminal project.
Fundamentally, it is no more a true reflection of reality than the deranged beliefs promoted by "Christian" zionism, or any other form of racism for that matter, but just as resistant to reason or factual evidence to the contrary. In the end, the way we choose to accept or reject differing interpretations of reality reflects how we perceive our role as individuals within humanity as a whole, and how we choose to define "right" and "wrong".
3) The only way to dismantle the genocidal, racist zionist project is via exterminating all the Jews. Hence, opponents of zionism are just as evil as its proponents.
By framing the conflict as one between evil zionists and evil antisemites, you absolve yourself and others of responsibility for supporting the evil zionists. Again, you ignore the fact that there are many, perhaps most people in the world, who reject your kind of medieval tribalism -- who see themselves as human beings first and members of different races and tribes second, if at all. This is the basis for our current system of international humanitarian law, upon which you and your fellow zionists heap so much contempt.
Regardless of your delusions, the zionist project will indeed fail, not, as you claim, through the extermination of "the Jews", but through a combination of the following:
A) International isolation and pressure to boycott, divest and impose sanctions against it until, like the Apartheid system, it becomes no longer sustainable;
B) Solidarity with the Palestinian people and their heroic struggle to remain on their land, their refusal to be broken or abandon their rights -- this includes countering zionist propaganda with the testimony of courageous eyewitnesses on the ground, the mounting public pressure to prosecute Israeli war criminals, and the mounting international outcry against such barbaric practices as the racist colonies, the segregation Wall, the barbaric siege of Gaza and the denial of civil and human rights to the non-Jewish population of the "Jewish state".
C) Coordination between the Palestinian grassroots resistance and other popular resistance movements in the region and the world, including para-military and political, legal and media activists.
D) Efforts to raise awareness among American taxpayers of how enormous sums of their hard-earned money is diverted from solving urgent problems at home and used to support a regime where citizens enjoy the 16th highest per capita GDP in the world (higher than Saudi Arabia's), which is engaged in apartheid and genocide, in violation of the U.S.' own laws.
E) Its own environmental non-sustainability. The zionists have set up a 'first-world' type of society in an ecological environment that simply cannot withstand the kind of irresponsible damage and patterns of consumption that characterize such societies. Already, Israel is approaching a serious crisis of arable land and useable water, not to mention environmental (including nuclear) pollution that have made certain areas uninhabitable, or highly dangerous.
In order to outrun the crisis, zionists have made several attempts to expand their territory into neighboring lands, stolen massive amounts of water from the Litani river in Lebanon and the Jordan river (both of which are dangerously depleted), come up with various schemes to pipe water from occupied Northern Iraq, and dumped their garbage, toxic and nuclear waste and sewage in the severely overcrowded areas where they trap the Palestinians.
Thanks to the Lebanese resistance and the Iraqi armed resistance, the zionists have so far been pushed back, prevented from new invasions and occupations to take over those countries' natural resources. In Egypt, a massive, widespread movement is growing to stop the sale of Egypt's precious natural gas to Israel at far-below market prices, or at all. Already, this movement has won two court cases, and the regime is facing nearly unbearable public pressure to end this subsidy of the zionist project, including cries of 'treason' and open accusations of being little more than Israeli puppets.
Based purely on these and other environmental factors, the zionist project is doomed unless it can implement its plans to wrench more and more territories and resources from surrounding countries, something which is starting to look more and more unrealistic.
In addition to the above, there are three distinct trends which contradict your emphasis on brute military force as the determinant of the future of the zionist project:
First, since Israel is a colonial settler state, the
continuously shrinking number of Jews emigrating to Israel, and the rapidly increasing number of
Israeli Jews who are leaving or wishing to leave indicate that time is not on its side.
Second, since the overwhelming majority of Jews outside Israel live in the United States, it is American Jews, especially the younger generations, who represent the greatest pool of potential colonists and recruits to the zionist project. Fortunately, it is precisely this demographic that is increasingly disassociating with zionist objectives, among American Jews:
Relying on the findings of several focus-group-based studies, Luntz (2005) describes a growing impatience with Israel and a growing emotional connection with the Palestinian cause, especially among Jewish graduate students. In an earlier (2003) study of people ages 18 to 29, Luntz found qualified support for Israel, accompanied by expressed comfort in questioning the Israeli position. He states that young Jews’ “association with Israel is frighteningly weak and ill-defined, despite its near daily appearance in the news headlines.” ...
Luntz (2003) is particularly interested in assessing college students’ reactions to pro and anti-Israel advertisements and has concluded that “most traditional communications and marketing strategies are not reaching the vast majority of young Jews.”
Two ethnographers (Aviv and Shneer, 2005) use a variety of ethnographic case studies to convey their conclusion that Israel does not occupy a central emotional place in the lives of young Jews. They argue that Israel no longer represents the “promised land” for Diaspora Jews, and therefore should not be considered the sole geographic focus of Jewish life. They propose that the celebration of Jewish pluralism extend to an appreciation of multiple centers of Jewish life, including vital communities that exist in places such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Moscow.
http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/%7B42D75369-D ... 102006.pdf
As the traditional sources of human cannon fodder and colonists dry up, zionists are turning to desperate, even wacky,
efforts to identify or invent "lost" or "hidden" Jews.
Third, there is no statute of limitations on the inalienable legal right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, a right that has been reaffirmed every single year since it was formulated back in 1949 as UN Resolution 194, and was agreed to by Israel as a pre-condition for acceptance into the United Nations.
With every generation, the Palestinians become
more, not less, determined to achieve their full legal and human rights, above all their legal right of return.
Yet, even if we totally ignore the legitimate rights of more than four million stateless Palestinian refugees, even so, Jews TODAY constitute a minority within the borders of the Palestinian territory claimed as the "Jewish" state.
Fact: Jews are a minority in Israel/Palestine
Thus, already it is a misnomer to call Israel a "Jewish state"; it is far more accurate to describe it as a Judeo-supremacist, apartheid state.
Zionist strategists are fully conscious of the looming existential crisis that faces their judeo-supremacist colonial project, in a context where everything from demographics to world opinion and international law are against it. So far, there are still Palestinians who cling to the false hope of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. But this false hope is fading very fast. As former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert put it, “It's only a matter of time before the Palestinians demand 'one man, one vote' - and then, what will we do?".
This is a question to which the criminal zionist movement has only criminal zionist "solutions". From Arnon Soffer's "kill and kill and kill," to Olmert's arid, inhumane and already severely overcrowded bantustans, to Avigdor Lieberman's and Binyamin Netanyahu's plan to "expel" the Palestinians.
Expel them where? None of the countries bordering Palestine, whether Egypt, Lebanon, Syria or Jordan have anything close to the resources that would allow them to absorb millions of destitute refugees, even if the political will existed, which it does not. No, Israel will not be allowed to strip the Palestinians of everything and then force others to deal with the resulting human catastrophe.
In zionist terms, that leaves "kill and kill and kill", or Israelis resigning themselves to the role they currently play, as concentration camp guards over a captive, desperate and determinedly rebellious population.
Like Israel's pattern of irresponsible consumption and environmental depletion, such a plan is neither realistic, nor sustainable in the long or even medium term.
It's left to the "peace" camp to come up with solutions that are at least sane:
1) The two-state solution, under which the zionists withdraw to the pre-1967 borders and dismantle all their colonies in the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, and the Golan;
2) A democratic, secular state in full compliance with international law, which grants its Jewish, Muslim, Christian and other inhabitants the same rights and freedoms that Jews expect and receive elsewhere in the world.
It is my belief, and the belief of a growing number of scholars, that, due to the zionists' deliberate creation of irrevocable changes, the former is no longer realistic or even desirable.
That leaves the latter solution, one democratic, secular state, where all who are willing to live in peace, mutual respect and equality with their fellow citizens are welcome. And I believe that's what will happen, sooner or later, "sooner" being much, much less painful for everyone involved, than "later".
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
by orz » Fri May 15, 2009 9:04 pm 
