Krysos wrote:Why'd Alice leave anyhow?
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by hava007 » Mon Nov 19, 2012 3:43 am
Krysos wrote:Why'd Alice leave anyhow?
by seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 19, 2012 10:42 am
Chris Hedges' Columns
Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All
Posted on Nov 19, 2012
Illustration by Mr. Fish
By Chris Hedges
Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world’s elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff, are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the planet’s largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones, filled with seas of pitifully poor people trapped in squalid slums or mud-walled villages, are increasingly hemmed in by electronic fences, monitored by surveillance cameras and drones and surrounded by border guards or military units that shoot to kill. These nightmarish dystopias extend from sub-Saharan Africa to Pakistan to China. They are places where targeted assassinations are carried out, where brutal military assaults are pressed against peoples left defenseless, without an army, navy or air force. All attempts at resistance, however ineffective, are met with the indiscriminate slaughter that characterizes modern industrial warfare.
In the new global landscape, as in Israel’s occupied territories and the United States’ own imperial projects in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, massacres of thousands of defenseless innocents are labeled wars. Resistance is called a provocation, terrorism or a crime against humanity. The rule of law, as well as respect for the most basic civil liberties and the right of self-determination, is a public relations fiction used to placate the consciences of those who live in the zones of privilege. Prisoners are routinely tortured and “disappeared.” The severance of food and medical supplies is an accepted tactic of control. Lies permeate the airwaves. Religious, racial and ethnic groups are demonized. Missiles rain down on concrete hovels, mechanized units fire on unarmed villagers, gunboats pound refugee camps with heavy shells, and the dead, including children, line the corridors of hospitals that lack electricity and medicine.
The impending collapse of the international economy, the assaults on the climate, the resulting droughts, flooding, precipitous decline in crop yields and rising food prices are creating a universe where power is divided between the narrow elites, who hold in their hands sophisticated instruments of death, and the enraged masses. The crises are fostering a class war that will dwarf anything imagined by Karl Marx. They are establishing a world where most will be hungry and live in fear, while a few will gorge themselves on delicacies in protected compounds. And more and more people will have to be sacrificed to keep this imbalance in place.
Because it has the power to do so, Israel—as does the United States—flouts international law to keep a subject population in misery. The continued presence of Israeli occupation forces defies nearly a hundred U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for them to withdraw. The Israeli blockade of Gaza, established in June 2007, is a brutal form of collective punishment that violates Article 33 of the Fourth 1949 Geneva Convention, which set up rules for the “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.” The blockade has turned Gaza into a sliver of hell, an Israeli-administered ghetto where thousands have died, including the 1,400 civilians killed in the Israeli incursion of 2008. With 95 percent of factories shut down, Palestinian industry has virtually ceased functioning. The remaining 5 percent operate at 25 to 50 percent capacity. Even the fishing industry is moribund. Israel refuses to let fishermen travel more than three miles from the coastline, and within the fishing zone boats frequently come under Israeli fire. The Israeli border patrols have seized 35 percent of the agricultural land in Gaza for a buffer zone. The collapsing infrastructure and Israeli seizure of aquifers mean that in many refugee camps, such as Khan Yunis, there is no running water. UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) estimates that 80 percent of all Gazans now rely on food aid. And the claim of Israeli self-defense belies the fact that it is Israel that maintains an illegal occupation and violates international law by carrying out collective punishment of Palestinians. It is Israel that chose to escalate the violence when during an incursion into Gaza earlier this month its forces fatally shot a 13-year-old boy. As the world breaks down, this becomes the new paradigm—modern warlords awash in terrifying technologies and weapons murdering whole peoples. We do the same in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Market forces and the military mechanisms that protect these forces are the sole ideology that governs industrial states and humans’ relationship to the natural world. It is an ideology that results in millions of dead and millions more displaced from their homes in the developing world. And the awful algebra of this ideology means that these forces will eventually be unleashed on us, too. Those who cannot be of use to market forces are considered expendable. They have no rights and legitimacy. Their existence, whether in Gaza or blighted postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., is considered a drain on efficiency and progress. They are viewed as refuse. And as refuse they not only have no voice and no freedom; they can be and are extinguished or imprisoned at will. This is a world where only corporate power and profit are sacred. It is a world of barbarism.
“In disposing of man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag,” Karl Polanyi wrote in “The Great Transformation.” “Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organization was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill.”
There are 47.1 million Americans who depend on food stamps to eat. The elites are plotting to take these food stamps away, along with other “entitlement” programs that keep the poor from destitution. The slashing of trillions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs, given the political impasse in Washington and the looming “fiscal cliff,” now seems certain. There are 50 million people considered to be living below the poverty line, but because the poverty line is so low—$22,350 for a family of four—this figure means nothing. Add the tens of millions of Americans who live in a category called “near poverty,” including all those families attempting to live on less than $45,000 a year, and you have at least 30 percent of the country living in poverty. Once these people figure out that there is no economic recovery, that their standard of living is going to continue to drop, that they are trapped, that hope in the future is an illusion, they will become as angry as protesters in Greece and Spain or the militants in Gaza or Afghanistan. Banks and other financial corporations, handed trillions in interest-free money from the Federal Reserve, meanwhile hoard $5 trillion, much of it looted from the U.S. Treasury. The longer this worldwide disparity and inequality is perpetuated, the more the masses will revolt and the faster we will internally replicate the Israeli model of domestic control—drones overhead, all dissent criminalized, SWAT teams busting through doors, deadly force as an acceptable form of subjugation, food used as a weapon, and constant surveillance.
In Gaza and other blighted parts of the globe we see this new configuration of power. What is happening in Gaza, like what is happening to people of color in marginal communities in the United States, is the model. The techniques of control, whether carried out by the Israelis or militarized police units in our inner-city drug wars, whether employed by military special forces or mercenaries in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq, are tested first and perfected on the weak and the powerless. Our callous indifference to the plight of the Palestinians, and the hundreds of millions of poor packed into urban slums in Asia or Africa, as well as our own underclass, means that the injustices visited on them will be visited on us. In failing them we fail ourselves.
As the U.S. empire implodes, the harsher forms of violence employed on the outer reaches of empire are steadily migrating back to the homeland. At the same time, the internal systems of democratic governance have calcified. Centralized authority has devolved into the hands of an executive branch that slavishly serves global corporate interests. The press and the government’s judiciary and legislative branches have become toothless and decorative. The specter of terrorism, as in Israel, is used by the state to divert gargantuan expenditures to homeland security, the military and internal surveillance. Privacy is abolished. Dissent is treason. The military with its mantra of blind obedience and force characterizes the dark ethic of the wider culture. Beauty and truth are abolished. Culture is degraded into kitsch. The emotional and intellectual life of the citizenry is ravaged by spectacle, the tawdry and salacious, as well as by handfuls of painkillers and narcotics. Blind ambition, a lust for power and a grotesque personal vanity—exemplified by David Petraeus and his former mistress—are the engines of advancement. The concept of the common good is no longer part of the lexicon of power. This, as the novelist J.M. Coetzee writes, is “the black flower of civilization.” It is Rome under Diocletian. It is us. Empires, in the end, decay into despotic, murderous and corrupt regimes that finally consume themselves. And we, like Israel, are now coughing up blood.
by Col. Quisp » Mon Nov 19, 2012 5:32 pm
Susan Olsen shared Israel ~ One Heart! . Israel ~ B'Lev Echad! . !ישראל ~ בלב אחד's photo.
Forget what your silver haired pony tail, America hating college professors told you. This is the truth:
"Hamas is firing from population centers in order to strike and kill innocent Israelis."
"The IDF is firing exclusively at terrorists who are firing upon Israeli cities."
Here are a few of the comments:
Jeff Koenigsberg The whole incident is designed to draw in Arab neighbors to converge and conquer Israel. It will not work because Egypt is dependent on American aide and they cannot do anything other than symbolically stand with the people of gaza. Israel has no choice but to bottle up the borders there because the leadership in gaza won't play nice with Israel. Time out is over.....time for a spanking yet again.
Mindy Golann I thought all the aid from Egypt has been sold to GAZA? The word peace is not in the MUSLIM/Arab Ntion Dictionary.
Susan Olsen This administration has already armed Syria and killed the Ambassador that was in charge of that. Obama has made the Islamic world more powerful and the Muslim Brotherhood is inside this country. So all you peeps that said "let them build their mega mosques" will have yourselves an unpleasant surprise if Israel doesn't nip this shit quickly. But them Israel will be the big bad bully that the propagandists have said all along. Oh well. I stand with Israel.
Susan Olsen The elections are over Gary. At least now the right president will get the blame for what's gone on for the last 4 years. Romney was probably too much of a whimp to stop it all anyway.
by wintler2 » Mon Nov 19, 2012 7:01 pm
Arabs should use oil weapon against Israel: Iraq
CAIRO: An Iraqi official said on Friday Baghdad will recommend that Arab states use oil as a weapon to exert pressure on Israel and countries that back it, particularly the United States, over the Gaza crisis.
"Playing the economic card is our most powerful weapon at the moment in supporting the Palestinian people, for no military power can currently stand up to Israel," Iraq's permanent Arab League representative Qais al-Azzawi said.
He told reporters in the Egyptian capital, where the League has its headquarters, that Baghdad would take this stand at Saturday's emergency meeting of foreign ministers from the pan-Arab body called by Egypt to discuss Gaza.
"What happened in 1973, when the Arabs stopped oil exports to Western states, is proof that this weapon can succeed in the battle between the Arabs and Israel," Azzawi said of a decision taken during the October Yom Kippur war.
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/ ... 64/1/.html
by 8bitagent » Mon Nov 19, 2012 9:49 pm
by Krysos » Mon Nov 19, 2012 9:56 pm
8bitagent wrote:MSNBC:Speculation grows that Israel is attacking Gaza simply to test out its new toys and test the water of Arab leader's reactions as a true precursor warmup to attacking Iran. Some speculate
Israel could also attack Southern Lebanon as another "warmup exercise"
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/49893047
by 8bitagent » Mon Nov 19, 2012 10:04 pm
by 8bitagent » Mon Nov 19, 2012 10:40 pm
Krysos wrote:8bitagent wrote:MSNBC:Speculation grows that Israel is attacking Gaza simply to test out its new toys and test the water of Arab leader's reactions as a true precursor warmup to attacking Iran. Some speculate
Israel could also attack Southern Lebanon as another "warmup exercise"
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/49893047
I saw Chris Matthews push this idea today all while drooling over himself about how brilliant Israel was because they were forcing Gaza to use Iranian weapons, thus meaning that if Israel decides to attack Iran it will mean that they're only responding to Iranian aggression. I think I much prefer the Fox news foaming at the mouth war hysteria to the adult in the room, NPR type madness. At least I can point out to my pro-Obama friends that Fox is a bunch of war mongers. Not quite so easy to do with MSNBC, CNN, and NPR.
by Wombaticus Rex » Tue Nov 20, 2012 9:28 am
As Professor Michel Chossudovsky noted in 2009, gas may be a central reason for the war over Gaza as well:
This is a war of conquest. Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline.
British Gas (BG Group) and its partner, the Athens based Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) owned by Lebanon’s Sabbagh and Koury families, were granted oil and gas exploration rights in a 25 year agreement signed in November 1999 with the Palestinian Authority.
The rights to the offshore gas field are respectively British Gas (60 percent); Consolidated Contractors (CCC) (30 percent); and the Investment Fund of the Palestinian Authority (10 percent). (Haaretz, October 21, 2007).
The PA-BG-CCC agreement includes field development and the construction of a gas pipeline.(Middle East Economic Digest, Jan 5, 2001).
The BG licence covers the entire Gazan offshore marine area, which is contiguous to several Israeli offshore gas facilities. (See Map below). It should be noted that 60 percent of the gas reserves along the Gaza-Israel coastline belong to Palestine.
The BG Group drilled two wells in 2000: Gaza Marine-1 and Gaza Marine-2. Reserves are estimated by British Gas to be of the order of 1.4 trillion cubic feet, valued at approximately 4 billion dollars. These are the figures made public by British Gas. The size of Palestine’s gas reserves could be much larger.
Who Owns the Gas Fields
The issue of sovereignty over Gaza’s gas fields is crucial. From a legal standpoint, the gas reserves belong to Palestine.
The death of Yasser Arafat, the election of the Hamas government and the ruin of the Palestinian Authority have enabled Israel to establish de facto control over Gaza’s offshore gas reserves.
British Gas (BG Group) has been dealing with the Tel Aviv government. In turn, the Hamas government has been bypassed in regards to exploration and development rights over the gas fields.
The election of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 was a major turning point. Palestine’s sovereignty over the offshore gas fields was challenged in the Israeli Supreme Court. Sharon stated unequivocally that “Israel would never buy gas from Palestine” intimating that Gaza’s offshore gas reserves belong to Israel.
In 2003, Ariel Sharon, vetoed an initial deal, which would allow British Gas to supply Israel with natural gas from Gaza’s offshore wells. (The Independent, August 19, 2003)
The election victory of Hamas in 2006 was conducive to the demise of the Palestinian Authority, which became confined to the West Bank, under the proxy regime of Mahmoud Abbas.
In 2006, British Gas “was close to signing a deal to pump the gas to Egypt.” (Times, May, 23, 2007). According to reports, British Prime Minister Tony Blair intervened on behalf of Israel with a view to shunting the agreement with Egypt.
The following year, in May 2007, the Israeli Cabinet approved a proposal by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “to buy gas from the Palestinian Authority.” The proposed contract was for $4 billion, with profits of the order of $2 billion of which one billion was to go the Palestinians.
Tel Aviv, however, had no intention on sharing the revenues with Palestine. An Israeli team of negotiators was set up by the Israeli Cabinet to thrash out a deal with the BG Group, bypassing both the Hamas government and the Palestinian Authority:
“Israeli defence authorities want the Palestinians to be paid in goods and services and insist that no money go to the Hamas-controlled Government.” (Ibid, emphasis added)
The objective was essentially to nullify the contract signed in 1999 between the BG Group and the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat.
Under the proposed 2007 agreement with BG, Palestinian gas from Gaza’s offshore wells was to be channeled by an undersea pipeline to the Israeli seaport of Ashkelon, thereby transferring control over the sale of the natural gas to Israel.
The deal fell through. The negotiations were suspended:
”Mossad Chief Meir Dagan opposed the transaction on security grounds, that the proceeds would fund terror”. (Member of Knesset Gilad Erdan, Address to the Knesset on “The Intention of Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to Purchase Gas from the Palestinians When Payment Will Serve Hamas,” March 1, 2006, quoted in Lt. Gen. (ret.) Moshe Yaalon, Does the Prospective Purchase of British Gas from Gaza’s Coastal Waters Threaten Israel’s National Security? Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, October 2007)
Israel’s intent was to foreclose the possibility that royalties be paid to the Palestinians. In December 2007, The BG Group withdrew from the negotiations with Israel and in January 2008 they closed their office in Israel.(BG website).
Invasion Plan on The Drawing Board
The invasion plan of the Gaza Strip under “Operation Cast Lead” was set in motion in June 2008, according to Israeli military sources:
“Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago [June or before June] , even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.”(Barak Ravid, Operation “Cast Lead”: Israeli Air Force strike followed months of planning, Haaretz, December 27, 2008)
That very same month, the Israeli authorities contacted British Gas, with a view to resuming crucial negotiations pertaining to the purchase of Gaza’s natural gas:
“Both Ministry of Finance director general Yarom Ariav and Ministry of National Infrastructures director general Hezi Kugler agreed to inform BG of Israel’s wish to renew the talks.
The sources added that BG has not yet officially responded to Israel’s request, but that company executives would probably come to Israel in a few weeks to hold talks with government officials.” (Globes online- Israel’s Business Arena, June 23, 2008)
The decision to speed up negotiations with British Gas (BG Group) coincided, chronologically, with the planning of the invasion of Gaza initiated in June. It would appear that Israel was anxious to reach an agreement with the BG Group prior to the invasion, which was already in an advanced planning stage.
Moreover, these negotiations with British Gas were conducted by the Ehud Olmert government with the knowledge that a military invasion was on the drawing board. In all likelihood, a new “post war” political-territorial arrangement for the Gaza strip was also being contemplated by the Israeli government.
In fact, negotiations between British Gas and Israeli officials were ongoing in October 2008, 2-3 months prior to the commencement of the bombings on December 27th.
In November 2008, the Israeli Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of National Infrastructures instructed Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) to enter into negotiations with British Gas, on the purchase of natural gas from the BG’s offshore concession in Gaza. (Globes, November 13, 2008)
“Ministry of Finance director general Yarom Ariav and Ministry of National Infrastructures director general Hezi Kugler wrote to IEC CEO Amos Lasker recently, informing him of the government’s decision to allow negotiations to go forward, in line with the framework proposal it approved earlier this year.
The IEC board, headed by chairman Moti Friedman, approved the principles of the framework proposal a few weeks ago. The talks with BG Group will begin once the board approves the exemption from a tender.” (Globes Nov. 13, 2008)
by beeblebrox » Tue Nov 20, 2012 1:45 pm
The Israeli Nightmare
Peace in Israel is the establishment's worst nightmare.
By Tony Cartalucci
Israel is an excuse, a mandate, a perpetual casus belli, and both an ideological as well as literal beachhead in the Middle East. Created and propped up by the West, in particular the US and United Kingdom, it has served as the medium through which Western foreign policy flows in and out of the Arab, and to a greater extent, the Muslim World.
It is through a carefully cultivated strategy of tension that this perpetual casus belli is maintained. Without the constant perceived fear of Israel’s demise and the “moral imperative” to prevent it, real or imagined, it would be difficult to justify Western involvement in nations that otherwise pose no perceivable threat to America or Europe. A “clash of civilizations” is likewise being created within the West itself to augment this paradigm, but it has yet to “come of age,” and still depends heavily on Israeli-Arab tensions to sustain itself.
It is clearly in the best interests of Western corporate-financiers seeking to remain involved in the Middle East and reassert hegemony over the region, to keep this strategy of tension viable and as heated as possible. The policies of Israel are so ham-handedly provocative, it is surprising that more people do not see the truth behind them – that Israel’s heavy-handed belligerence is a calculated decision to keep the tension ratcheted up as high as possible. For what other reason could a nation-state want to deliberately, slowly, and systematically bulldoze the homes of impoverished men, women, and children? Self-preservation by eliminating it enemies? Or the perpetual creation of new enemies?
It is not just a theory that the West and Israel purposefully cultivate and exploit the hatred incurred by their calculated, blatantly provocative policies.
Like a dam straddling a river, the force of tension against the dam produces energy from which those who constructed it, benefit. The hatred, fear, and violence perpetuated between the Jewish people and their perceived enemies has been a prominent driving force behind Wall Street and London’s century-long campaign of invasion, occupation, subversion, and exploitation across the Muslim World.
A recent example of this was using regional hatred toward Israel to implement the opening phases of the US-engineered “Arab Spring.” Because any regime Israel feigned support for would be instantly poisoned by a political “touch of death,” Israel openly and oafishly feigned support for Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, claiming it had sent weapons and riot control gear to assist his government in suppressing “anti-American/anti-Israeli” protesters. In reality, the protests in Egypt’s streets were planned years in advance, beginning as early as 2008 in New York City by confabs organized by the US State Department.
In essence, the West and Israel played people’s emotional persuasions like a fiddle, and executed one of the most profound geopolitical re-orderings in recent history.
The same ploy would be used against Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi. Qaddafi was accused of being “Jewish,” hiring Israeli mercenaries, using Israeli weapons, and of any other conceivable link imaginable to likewise inflict him with the “touch of death” incurred by this strategy of tension. And perhaps the most absurd example of all, were early attempts to use the same tactic against Syria, exemplified best in Hareetz of Israel’s op-ed titled “Israel’s Favorite Arab Dictator of All is Assad.”
None of these ploys would have worked, had Israel and its Western-sponsors not maintained seething hatred against themselves throughout the world.
What if?
Now let’s imagine an Israel led by a government genuinely concerned about not only the self-preservation of Israel, but its stability, peace, and prosperity. Would such a nation bulldoze houses leaving destitute families sitting in the rubble before the cameras of the international press? Would such a nation indoctrinate its population to hold an irrational hatred that fuels a destructive conflict that exploits and expends the summation of the Israeli people’s talent, economic activity, time, energy, and attention?
The answer is definitively no. A nuclear-armed Israel which faces no serious existential external threats, that turned away from this current Israeli-Arab strategy of tension would lead to region much like Southeast Asia, where profound cultural differences between neighbors have been largely set aside because each nation is too busy developing itself. Israel would benefit, its neighbors would benefit. Extremists on both sides would find themselves with dwindling supporters.
The only losers would be the policy makers from think-tanks like the Brookings Institution, and the corporate-financier interests which fund them. They admit nations like Iran and Syria pose no threat to either Israel’s or America’s national security, and in fact state that provocations must be made to bait such nations into war. Without the Israeli-Arab strategy of tension, without Arabs and Israelis dying every month, year after year, such provocations and the wars they seek to start would become exponentially more difficult to justify or sell to the public – if not entirely impossible.
A future where Israel lives in peace with its neighbors is possible. The answer is not waging war against its neighbors who neither desire nor will benefit from conflict with a nuclear-armed, Western-backed militant state, but by recognizing the current Israeli government itself as the single most pressing existential threat Israel and its people face. By removing and replacing them with people genuinely invested in “Israel the nation-state,” instead of “Israel the beachhead,” a true path to peace and prosperity can be found and embarked upon.
by Col. Quisp » Tue Nov 20, 2012 2:34 pm
by Luther Blissett » Tue Nov 20, 2012 2:36 pm
8bitagent wrote:MSNBC:Speculation grows that Israel is attacking Gaza simply to test out its new toys and test the water of Arab leader's reactions as a true precursor warmup to attacking Iran. Some speculate
Israel could also attack Southern Lebanon as another "warmup exercise"
Oh, and no shocker Chris Matthews said all this, including the bombardment of Gaza, is a good thing. Yeah. I think I'll take Pat Buchanan's views on the situation.
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/49893047
by lupercal » Tue Nov 20, 2012 3:36 pm
Wombaticus Rex wrote:Via: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/11/ ... l-gas.html
As Professor Michel Chossudovsky noted in 2009, gas may be a central reason for the war over Gaza as well:
This is a war of conquest. Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline.
British Gas (BG Group) and its partner, the Athens based Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) owned by Lebanon’s Sabbagh and Koury families, were granted oil and gas exploration rights in a 25 year agreement signed in November 1999 with the Palestinian Authority.
by Krysos » Tue Nov 20, 2012 11:01 pm
Israel’s Gilad Sharon spills the beans
EDITOR
Understanding Jewish culture is key to grasping the collective Israeli psychosis
By Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Sharon, son of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, wrote in the Jerusalem Post that Israel should “Flatten all of Gaza”.
“There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire,” he wrote. “We need to flatten entire neighbourhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.”
Many Israelis and even some Zionists are “outraged” but the truth must be told: Sharon’s views are fully consistent with Zionism, Israeli thinking and aspect of Jewish culture.
Old Testament roots
For example, Sharon’s call is fully consistent with some devastating passages in the Old Testament:
”You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight; your enemies shall fall by the sword before you.” (Leviticus, 26:7–8)
“When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations … you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.” (Deuteronomy 7:1–2)
“Do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them … as the Lord your God has commanded you …” (Deuteronomy 20:16)
…as with his real father and his spiritual forefathers the young Sharon wants to destroy the Gazans, he wants to reduce them and their civilization into dust – thoughts unfortunately embedded in the Old Testament.
So, as with his real father and his spiritual forefathers the young Sharon wants to destroy the Gazans, he wants to reduce them and their civilization into dust – thoughts unfortunately embedded in the Old Testament. Though religious Jews following the Talmud rather than the Torah and may be critical of literal interpretations of the holy book, Gilad Sharon is a secular Israeli and yet he follows here the most banal and literal interpretation of the biblical text.
Sharon’s views are also in line with ultra-Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky’s “iron wall” philosophy. Jabotinsky believed that in the erection of an “iron wall” which “the native (Arab) population cannot break through”. Some would argue that by 1948 Jabotinsky’s iron wall became the backbone of Israeli political pragmatism and, though largely performed by his political enemies, the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe” – the dispossession and ethic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948) could be seen as the materialization of Jabotinsky’s ideology.
Sharon’s views are similar to those expressed this week by Israel’s deputy prime minister, Eli Yishai, who contended: “We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages, destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water.”
It is now time to admit that we cannot understand the Israeli collective psychosis and fascination with violence and death without a deep understanding of Jewish culture, Jewish supremacy and Jewish tribalism.
The young Sharon is clearly a truth teller. He offers us a genuine glimpse into the murderous Israeli psychosis, and the message to be drawn is obvious. It is now time to admit that we cannot understand the collective Israeli psychosis and fascination with violence and death without a deep understanding of Jewish culture, Jewish supremacy and Jewish tribalism.
The truth is out
For obvious reasons some Jews and even a few Palestinians do not want us to take this route and insist that we avoid any criticism of the Jewishness of the “Jewish state”. This bankrupted philosophy would be almost funny if it weren’t so tragic: elaborating on the root cause of Zionist barbarism is now an elementary humanist obligation.
I guess that we have reached the point of no return. We must now critically examine Jewish politics, Jewish lobbying and Israeli crimes in the context of Jewish culture. Such an approach may save the world and, hopefully, also save many Jews from the shackles of their own heritage.
Finally, here is an anecdote. I was amused to learn that the notorious Zionist, Jeffrey Goldberg, himself an ex-Israeli army concentration camp guard, was among the first to denounce Gilad Sharon.
Writing in his Twitter account (@JeffreyGoldberg), he said, in reference to Sharon’s article: “Gilad Sharon has called on Israel to bomb Gaza to oblivion. I’m semi-surprised the Jerusalem Post published such dreck.”
It is not at all clear whether or not Goldberg opposes Sharon’s views. However, it is obvious that Goldberg is tormented by the idea that Sharon’s view have leaked out.
Goldberg believes that the murderous aspects so intrinsic to tribal supremacy are better kept within the ghetto walls. He doesn’t want the gentiles to know about them.
So, predictably, Goldberg was among the first to attack my book The Wandering Who? and pursued my endorsers for the exact same reasons. He was very concerned about what people read about Israel, Zionism, Jewish identity politics, and the ideology that motivates him to serve in our midst as a Zionist agent.
by Luther Blissett » Wed Nov 21, 2012 10:44 am
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