Location, Location, Location!

Ziontruth

We mustn’t be so hard on the anti-Zionists; a lot of them don’t really think the Jews deserve to be stateless forever, in fact they’re generous souls who think there’s no problem with the Jews having a state of their own, just not in Palestine. From the soft-spoken ones who argue the point in academic treatises to the trolls who dump on pro-Israel forums with stuff like “Next Year in Brooklyn!” (because everybody knows Solomon’s Temple was built in Brooklyn /sarc; but just make the slightest suggestion that the non-Jewish “Palestinian nation” is a recent invention and those same people flare in righteous anger), the anti-Zionists say the only problem with the Jewish state is the chosen location.

This brings me to a series of little thought-experiments, but before I begin, I wish to clear the difference between the anti-Zionist stance and the different “Bad Neighborhood” position voiced by various people such as the late Yoram Kaniuk and isolationists. As one American paleoconservative and a true isolationist (a lot of them only pretend to be isolationists, right before spewing the same anti-American and anti-Zionist points you’d get from the Far Left) put it to me on some forum, “I don’t care about the Middle East conflict either way, but you’ve got to realize you’ve built your state in a bad neighborhood.” That’s a position I can respect. My only disagreement is, as with the quote on the back cover of Kaniuk’s book, is that it’s out of date: True, Israel is in a bad neighborhood, but our neighbors are no longer confined to the Middle East, as the recent news about Boston, London and Stockholm make clear.

But let me get back to the anti-Zionists, the ones who do care about the Middle East conflict of all the many conflicts in the world for some reason, the ones who say the Jews had the right to set up a state of their own (how kind of them) but they should have set it in a place not already inhabited by “a people who had been on the place for generations.” That’s already one big assumption—to name just a few examples going against that narrative, the family of Arab Knesset member Azmi Bisharah settled in Palestine in the 19th century, and Arafat and Edward Said both came from Egypt—but you know what, I’ll go with it now. Let us embark on a counterfactual journey where we survey the relations of a Jewish state set up elsewhere in the world.

Where do we begin? The most famous proposal for a Jewish national polity outside of Palestine was, of course, Uganda. Actually, Herzl did not suggest setting up the permanent Jewish state there; he suggested it only as a temporary place of shelter while his quest for a charter from the Ottoman Sultan for Jewish inhabitation of Palestine was in the process, not knowing that the Ottoman Empire was not long for the world. But what if, by unforeseen circumstances, Uganda had become the Jewish state?

The answer is so easy: Consider that the present conflict over Palestine is between Jews in Israel who come in all colors (black Ethiopians, brown Sephardim, white Ashkenazim) and Arabs who come in all colors (black Bedouin descendants of slaves from Zanzibar, brown Arabs in many parts and white Arabs in the Galilee), yet the Far Left anti-Zionists have managed to shoehorn this conflict into their race-based view of “white European colonists” versus “brown indigenous Palestinians,” together with a spurious comparison to South Africa to boot. Can you imagine what they’d make of a conflict between the Jews and the black Ugandans? They’d absolutely have a field day with their racial theories then.

The runner-up after Uganda, though much less known, is Argentina, where Baron Hirsch made serious efforts to build self-sufficient Jewish communities in the late 19th century to prepare for statehood. Argentina’s not a bad place, but I mustn’t let my love for Argentine cuisine blind me to the fact that a Jewish state set up there would be confronted with the “Jewish colonists vs. indigenous peoples” once again, the indigenous peoples this time being the local Indians, descendants of the pre-Columbian inhabitants. The Far Left still castigates the United States of America for having been founded on American Indian land, holding back on the vitriol somewhat only because the U.S. is too big a foe to be overcome in the ways they seek to do for Israel; with a Jewish state in Argentina, they would not hold back any more than with the Jewish state on the Land of Israel.

Since I’m touching on American territory, it would be appropriate to refer to the suggestions often made by anti-Zionists that the Jewish state should have been set up in a piece of the vast expanses of North America. Again, a “Jewish reservation” on North American soil would be charged with some made-up pretext of “oppressing the indigenous,” and the charges would be made by the same type of people who would not apply the standard of “evacuating stolen lands” to themselves, because that would entail leaving the comfort of their armchairs.

Now let’s go to a different proposal, the one attributed to an Arabian king, the founder of the House of Saud. As the anti-Zionists will tell you, he suggested the Jewish state be carved out of Germany after its defeat in WWII, as an act of compensation for the Holocaust. It sounds like a most pragmatic suggestion at first: If the Germans ever raise objections to it later, remind them that it is because of the Holocaust. (Amazingly, the same people who favor this proposal are the loudest voices accusing Israel of using the Holocaust for political gain.)

Putting aside my wonder at the optimism of some people—then again, those are the same ones who think a binational state in Palestine could work—I have to point out the flaw in this plan even if the Germans acquiesced to it. Look at Western Europe today, the target of mass colonization by Muslims from the Third World. Do you think they would let a Jewish state in Germany continue to exist? The depredations suffered by Jews under their hands, as in Toulouse for example, say otherwise. They would not be moved by the memory of the Holocaust, either. For one thing, those of them who don’t deny the Holocaust think it’s a totally European affair (it isn’t; beside the Mufti of Jerusalem joining the Nazi cause, it was the Arab pressure on Britain that made the latter close the doors to Jewish refugees of the one land that actually belonged to them). For another, the Islamic world has yet to apologize for its genocides of the Hindus and the Armenians, so don’t expect any remorse even if they were to acknowledge their part in the Holocaust (the aforementioned pressuring of Britain that doomed millions of Jews).

There is no escaping it: Other places for a Jewish state would run into the same problems as today, the problem of charges of oppressing the indigenous peoples of the area, or the problem of Islamic imperialists wishing to bring the Jews under dhimmitude, or both. The only remaining places that might be exempt would be desolate ones like Birobidzhan, which, at his convenience, Stalin dissolved as quickly as he made it a Jewish autonomous region, or Antarctica, as suggested to me by one neo-Nazi troll posting on Frontpage Mag. However, as in Jurassic Park, so with Jew-hatred, nature always find a way; a Jewish state in Antarctica would probably be targeted for environmentalist reasons, such as liberating the Penguistinian population from oppression by its Ziontarctic masters. I wish I could be only joking about this, but in our insane world it would be perfectly possible.

In summary, despite the contention of the anti-Zionists that a different location would have prevented all conflict, it takes only a little common-sense reasoning to realize that things would be much the same. Whether it is the indigenous peoples of another place or the fact that our “bad neighborhood” has come to settle and colonize most of the First World, the Jews would not know peace and safety in a state outside the Land of Israel any more than on it. And worse, those would really be places that a Jew could never consider home, just as a Greek in the 1820s could not seriously accept building a new Parthenon outside Hellas.

The best outcome, then, is the very outcome that has actually ensued: That the Jews have set up their state in their ancestral homeland of the Land of Israel a.k.a. Palestine, the only place in the world they can fight for with self-confidence, for they are its one and only indigenous people. Thus the Zionist is in the best position to turn the tables on the anti-Zionists, by making it clear to them that his is a movement for the self-determination of an indigenous people while theirs is about supporting imperialist aggression and colonialist theft of land perpetrated at the indigenous Palestinian nation—the Jewish nation.

Charting The "Palestinian People."

Doodad

Israel Matzav posted an interesting little chart which flows from Google Books Ngram Viewer.

The things we can learn!

Editor's note - the captions in yellow read as follows:

There is virtually no talk of a Palestinian people or a Palestinian state for almost 500 years prior to Israel taking the West Bank in self defense.

Talk of a "Palestinian state" and a "Palestinian people" suddenly emerged after Israel took the West bank in 1967 in self-defense. Why? -  ML

BDSers To Spew Old Crap in New York

JayinPhiladelphia

The bigoted, terrorist-loving, pro-war BDS 'movement' (which is frankly no different than the countless other Jew-boycotting movements which preceded this current one), will be getting together for a little rendezvous, shamefully under the auspices of a Quaker group, in New York next month.

Though this is surely nothing new for the Quakers.

This 'Friendly' (tm) hate-filled hoedown will follow the usual pattern - it will feature all the rather unfriendly, historically deadly antisemitic tropes BDS is so fond of; nobody outside of a few folks like us will notice it, and it will then slouch off toward its well-deserved insignificance until the next time those failures show up somewhere to proudly preach their hate speech.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center report said the BDS program meets Natan Sharansky’s “3D Test" for anti-Semitism: It follows “double-standards” by criticizing Israel while overlooking human rights abuses across the Arab world; “demonizes” Israel by comparing its actions to those of Apartheid regimes; and attempts to “delegitimize” the Jewish state by targeting its existence.

Why I think we should take notice, and what we should try to counteract, is the apparent mainstreaming of modern day bund camps like this.  Their ideological predecessors were shut down by our government the last time around, because we just so happened to enter a major war against their patrons not long after.

Such a thing is unlikely this time around, though, and to be honest I wouldn't even support a government crackdown in that same manner myself, but what does need to be done is exposure of who these people are and exactly what they stand for.  And making sure their atrocious ideas remain far out of the mainstream, and stay there forever.

(h/t Shirl in Oz)

The Ease of Making Demands

Ziontruth

With all the discussions of various peace plans for the Middle East, one important issue, one not having to do with the size that Israel should be, is usually overlooked: The ease with which demands, of any size, of any nature, are made of the Jewish state.

In complaining about those demands that give the impression as if Israel were a sprawling empire to rival the old Mongol one in breadth, while the Arabs act as if merely agreeing to sit opposite the Jews at the negotiations table were a concession beyond price for them, the reply given by the anti-Zionists is usually on these lines: “What do you expect? You’re the powerful, oppressing party, while the Palestinians [Arab colonists in Palestine. –ziontruth] are the weak and oppressed. It is only just that the powerful oppressor must make concessions to the weak and oppressed.”

I could point out counterexamples. For all the decades when Lebanon, riven by sectarian strife, was brought down to the status of a Syrian fief in all but name, our justice-seeking supporters of the weak and oppressed had nary a peep against the powerful, oppressing Syrian state, not even a “Free Lebanon” sticker campaign; and that is just one among so many examples. However, my purpose here is not to regale the reader with more stories of the world’s hypocrisy, which, as far as I am concerned, is a given. My concern is with the way Israel attracts such easily made demands, and especially why Israel and Zionist Jews do not stand up to that ease of making demands as strongly as they should. I opine that the state of affairs is a consequence of the Western mode of thinking.

The Hypercritical West

Some may think that a criticism of the West will now follow. It will not. Democracy, science and technology born of the Western tradition are among the good things Israel has taken aboard from its inception, and not for a moment do I think the Jewish state should turn away from them. However, it must be acknowledged that good things taken with a system usually come with the bad things also, and this explains why Israel is beset with much of the same national-political irrationality that is found in the politics of other Western states.

The late and unlamented Arab writer Edward Said asserted throughout his entire book Orientalism—an intellectual holding cell carefully crafted to make any defense of the West synonymous with justification of colonialism—that the West never reflected on itself and never took care to study other cultures and value systems unless there were imperial gains to be had from it. This strikes me as a projection on Said’s part, since such a thesis fits the Arab/Islamic world far better, while the critics of Orientalism have pointed out a Western objective and self-critical tradition going all the way back to Herodotus. The European slave trade in Africans was as bad as the Arab, but the Western world also produced the Abolitionist movement and even fought a civil war in America to free the slaves, while the Arab world has yet to acknowledge their role in the slave trade, and outlawed slavery only recently (Saudi Arabia did so in 1961) under Western influence, with clandestine slavery still in existence to this day.

The Western self-critical tradition is an old one, and this is something the chief anti-Western alliance, that of the Far Left and Islamic imperialism, knows only too well, which is the reason they have put it to their best advantage by advancing an overblown version of it. So steeped (contra Said) is the West in contemplating the Other that looking at itself as part of the world has become either impossible or forbidden. Westerners are taught about their legacy of colonialism and oppression of indigenous peoples, and they are taught to view all non-Western cultures as precious treasures of lore that need to be preserved at all costs from the onslaught of “McWorld neo-colonialism”; but the idea that Westerners might be indigenous peoples themselves, and that their own culture might be under global-imperialist encroachment and worth preserving from that, either fails to cross their minds or, if it does, is ruthlessly put down as thoughtcrime under the rules of political correctness.

In the hypocritical discourse on Western politics we can clearly see a pattern of mental capitulation that makes possible the physical subjugation of old, established indigenous peoples without the need for military invasions and horrible battles. A truly anti-racist idea would be that, as we are all human beings, there is no reason at all for a particular group of human beings to be perpetual colonists and oppressors by nature, to be excluded from the possibility of being indigenous peoples under the threat of colonization. But like uncovering the fraud of the non-Jewish “Palestinian nation” to reveal the truth of Arab imperialist aggression against the Jewish state, the idea of Islamic colonists oppressing the indigenous of the West is far too inconvenient to be allowed. The vested interests of the Far Left and the Islamic imperialists demand that the West, including Israel, be cast as “Oppressors now, oppressors tomorrow, oppressors forever!” And, consequentially, that those “oppressors” acquiesce to any attacks waged against them and their culture on their own soil, accepting them as atonement for a past and present of natural oppressorhood.

Thus it has become acceptable for the Western world to say that a blonde female reporter like Lara Logan should never have trod the streets of Cairo, for it is the culture there to sexually assault a woman uncovered and unaccompanied by a male protector; while the reciprocal idea, that the Muslim immigrants in Western Europe must leave that “culture” behind and adapt to the laws and customs of the new lands, is decried as “racism” and “cultural imperialism.” In the introduction to the movie Empire of the Sun, the narrator remarks how the British possessions in pre-WWII China were made to look just like the homeland with British architecture and churches all around, and no one disputes that that was colonialism—yet even speaking of the North African no-go zones in France is grounds for being hauled on charges of hate speech. Anti-colonialism, then, looks very much like a one-way, anti-Western street.

The Zionists’ Cultural Deference

When the anti-Zionists advance the Big Lie of Zionism as a Euro-settler colonial movement, they base it like all Big Lies on a grain of truth: That the thinking in 19th-century Europe was the catalyst for the renewal of Zionism, a renewal that had actually begun to be seriously mulled by Jews in both Eastern Europe and Yemen following the catastrophes of the 17th century (the Cossack Rebellion in Poland and the Mawza Decrees in Yemen, decimating both communities). Zionists who were also assimilated Jews (i.e. no longer informed by an Orthodox Jewish upbringing), such as Herzl, approached the question of the Arabs with a typical Western ambivalence: In his Altneuland, Herzl reasoned that the Arabs in Palestine would be grateful for the technological advances a renewed Jewish presence would bring, and at the same time he exhibited a cultural deference to the Arabs as being “as the Jews once were,” in Biblical times.

That was a common attitude at the time. T. E. Lawrence was so enamored with Arab culture as to dress up in Bedouin attire, and the Polish Jew Leopold Weiss went even more extreme by turning his back on the Jewish people, converting to Islam and changing his name to Muhammad Assad, all on the grounds that he perceived the Islamic way of life, culture and clothing to be as the Jews used to be long, long ago. But even the staunch Zionists among the Jews deferred to Arab culture, at the same time as they regarded the Arabs as sworn enemies. The members of the Guard (HaShomer), the Jewish self-defense force operating prior to WWI, had the job of keeping Jewish life and property safe from Arab thieves and robbers, but many of them were photographed in Arab garb and took pride in their knowledge of Bedouin lore. The need to defer to Arab culture as a “remnant of the original Israelite way of life“ was felt by many Jewish returners from Europe, even while they set up a state on Western lines.

It is only today that this cultural deference is set to end, mainly because the majority of Israeli Jews are now of Arab-world extraction, no longer harboring the ambivalence that white people have toward Arab culture. Yet its after-effects are still being felt, and may take a while to wear off. The self-confidence of a majority Sephardi Israel has yet to assert itself; as of this writing, Israeli Jewish thinking is still largely tied to the Western hypercritical view that does not welcome the thought that we may be the indigenous and the other side the colonists. Because of this, the outside world is primed to make demands so easily of the Jewish state.

Holding Our Own

I opened with calling it an important issue. If so far it seems there is nothing but academic rambling and intellectual one-upmanship to it, now is the time to make the practical ramifications clear.

When, about a month before 9/11, a Sbarro pizza parlor in Jerusalem was hit by an Arab suicide-murderer, with a toll of 19 dead and 140 wounded, the anti-Zionist Progressive Left in its usual show of sympathy said the Israelis had better stop whining about not being able to eat pizza safely while the [faux-]Palestinians had to worry about surviving to the next day because of the occupation. Here is the view of the conflict as it is rigged against Israel: The view that the Jews have, at best, security needs to be considered, while the Arabs in Palestine have legitimate grievances to be addressed and dreams of freedom to be fulfilled. It is the view that any concessions the Israeli Jews make are cut-downs on their conveniences and luxuries, while the Arabs can concede nothing, because it is their necessities of life they would be conceding.

Again, this view plays out in the West outside of Israel. The European is not indulged when he says those women in black covered up to look like Darth Vader are an offensive sight to him, for his demand is that Muslim women give up their “inalienable rights” for the sake of his “convenience.” (The fact is the burka has been under attack even in the Muslim world, for the same reason as in the West: Because its cover facilitates criminal activity.) The ease of making demands, then, plainly rests upon this unequal view that one side merely wants to preserve its conveniences while the other is standing up for its non-negotiable necessities.

And it all goes back to one’s self-view. So long as self-negation and cultural deference is the norm, there will be no impetus for resisting attacks, attacks that cannot even be properly named for fear of the R-word. In Israel’s case, the romantic image of the local Arabs as people who have lived unchanged on this land for generations, preserving the Biblical way of life, is the vehicle of self-negation and cultural deference preventing Israeli Jews from holding their own with confidence. The case for the rightfulness of Zionism can be made from many angles, but as long as Zionists are hesitant in confronting the attack on Zionism as a “relic of Western colonialism,” as a “foreign European implant on this land,” that mode of attack will continue, and it will win more and more hearts and minds for the delegitimization of the Jewish state.

This is not a call for abandoning all the other arguments for Zionism. Most of them can be used together, as they do not contradict. However, regardless of which argument one prefers, I call upon Zionist Jews to build their self-confidence by recognizing themselves as the indigenous people of Palestine who therefore have no more reason to defer to the Arabs than a Quechua Indian has to defer to Spanish culture. I can tell you, from my experience, that the transformation in thinking once this has been done is tremendous: No longer does the defender of Israel squirm or apologize for anything Israel has done, but now speaks from the same position of unapologetic confidence from which he was previously attacked.

The Jewish nationalist who argues from the standpoint of the Jews being the indigenous Palestinians is a new creature even when he brings up one of the many other arguments for Zionism. He gives the message that concessions on Israel’s part are not something that can be taken for granted, and that the demands of the Israeli Jews reflect necessities and not mere conveniences. Above all, he does not approach the discussion with an air of owing the other party anything; once the usual hue and cry of “Zionist racism” is exhausted, what is left is an unprecedented amount of respect, even by our enemies, and that is definitely a better position than what has been beforehand.

Calling for the Slaughter of the Jews

Mike L.

A Tip 'O the Kippa to the Elder of Ziyon.



As I have mentioned on a number of occassions my father's side of the family was killed by the Nazis during Operation Barbarossa in the Ukraine during World War II.  In the little village of Medzhybizh they were, along with the non-Jewish residents, forced into road building for the Nazi advance and when the road was done they were made to dig large and long ditches.  When the ditches were done the Jews were lined up in those ditches and shot dead.

About 3,000 Jews were killed in Medzhybizh by the Einsatzgruppen (Nazi Death Squads) in 1942.

But what I really find amazing - what I find shocking to the core - is the fact that if I point out that the Imam or Ayatollah above is screaming for the slaughter of the Jews, it makes me the racist in the opinion of the progressive-left, including many progressive-left Jews.

Here is the transcript:

The Islamic nation, which is the guardian of Truth, must be aware of the conspiracies of Falsehood, and of the snares of those who lie in wait. Allah has taught [Muslims] that their worst enemies are those about whom He said: "You shall find the Jews and the polytheists to be the most hostile towards the believers" [Koran 5:82]. Thus, Allah made Jihad for His sake and endurance of pain and hardship effective means to fight the people of Falsehood....The confrontation [with the Jews] is inevitable. Our Prophet does not lie. He told us that there would be a confrontation between the Muslims and the Jews before the Day of Judgment, and that the Muslims would vanquish them to the point that the Jews would hide behind the stones and the trees, but the stones and the trees would say: "Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." Prepare for that day, for it will surely arrive, because the divine revelation harbors no lies.

The great Arab nation is about 400 million people.  The vast Muslim population is around 1.5 billion people.  The Jews represent a tiny minority of about 6 million people in the Middle East surrounded by huge numbers opposed to Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land and, yet, they get the blame for the murderous hostility toward them.  The Jews in Germany in the 1930s, by the way, you should know, represented about 1 percent of the population.

The entire situation is profoundly unjust and all that we can do, or so it seems to me, is stand up and say "NO."

We will not allow non-Jews, like Barack Obama and Mahmoud Abbas, to tell us where Jews may, or may not, be allowed to live.

We will not allow non-Jews, or anyone, to screech for the murder of Jews without standing up against such genocidal mania.

If Islam contains an element of fascist, genocidal Jew Hatred then it needs to be pointed out.

The problem is not someone like Pamela Geller.  The problem is political Islam and thus the very people that Pamela Geller points toward.

If As-A-Jew -  as a "progressive-left Zionist" - you think that I am the enemy, then you are a fool.

Confronted with an Uncharitable World

Ziontruth

This is a tribute to recently departed Israeli Jewish writer Yoram Kaniuk (1930–2013).

Kaniuk was of the old Israeli Left, the people who led the renewing Jewish presence in the Land of Israel from the 1930s until their electoral defeat by Menachem Begin in 1977. He served in Israel’s War of Independence (1947–9) and was wounded in the course of it; in 2010, three years before his death, he wrote the book Tashakh, which may be translated as 1948, about his experiences. In his later years he gained notoriety for two things: Lashing against the Jewish inhabitation of the post-1967 territories, and his militant anti-religious stance. This article is about the former aspect.

From the point of view of many onlookers, whether Israeli Jewish right-wingers or Arab imperialist anti-Zionists, the prevalence of people like Kaniuk criticizing the Jewish population centers in the post-1967 territories seems puzzling: This was the generation that witnessed Arab hostility to Zionism during the British Mandate and fought a war that ended with those very pioneers building their homes on evacuated Arab villages and towns. How, the disparate onlookers ask, can people like Kaniuk so tenaciously hold to the belief in a marked difference between pre-1967 and post-1967?

Writers like Kaniuk and Amos Oz, whose fire and brimstone they throw at the post-1967 population centers contrasts so sharply with the glowing terms and absolute confidence in the justice of what Zionism had done before 1967, are easy targets for condemnations of hypocrisy, but there is more to it than appears. A frustrated Israeli Jewish right-winger could ask them, “How can you believe that abandoning the post-1967 territories could end the Arabs’ hostility toward us? You, who have seen with your own eyes how the Jewish towns near Gaza were as much terrorized by the Fedayun in the 1950s as they are now by the Kassam rockets of Hamas!” The reply, which seems to be a total non sequitur, is always on these lines: “Back before 1967 the whole world was agreed on our right to defend what was ours; today, we are weighted down by occupying ill-gotten gains.” The instinctive reaction of the right-winger would be to wring his hands in disbelief, but it pays to reflect on the line of thinking, the narrative, behind those words.

For someone like Kaniuk, the narrative regarding Zionism’s rightfulness and where it went astray goes as follows:

1. In the earlier years, from 1882 until about the end of World War One, the land was largely empty, so the early Zionist returners stole it from no one (terra nullius).
2. During all the time from 1882 to 1947, wherever the Zionists wanted a piece of land belonging to Arabs, they bought it at full price, therefore no theft of land was involved.
3. In 1947–9 the Arabs started a war of their own accord, in contravention of the U.N. Partition Plan as well as earlier international agreements such as the San Remo Convention, so the land gained by the Jewish state in 1949 was the result of their having lost a war of aggression. Therefore, again not stolen.
4. But the injection of a Jewish population into the land gained in the war of 1967 is different—this is contrary to international law (what makes the war of 1967 different from that of 1947–9 is rarely stated, but whatever) and constitutes a stealing of land from the “Palestinians” (a new nation that has popped up all of a sudden where Arabs were beforehand).

The narrative of Zionist Leftist pioneers like Kaniuk, S. Yizhar and Amos Oz holds that the factor to be taken into consideration is not Arab hostility—which they admit was there before 1967—but world opinion regarding what rightfully belongs to Israel and what, in contrast, is land theft. Their view, unchanged from the 1970s, is that Israel would be free to do anything it wanted as long as it were in its pre-1967 size; that, except for the Arabs and some inconsequential political fringes (Communists, Far Right, Neturei Karta), everyone agrees that Israel has gained its pre-1967 territories through the years fair and square.

This is the narrative, and it seems unshakable. However, I have reason to believe Kaniuk faltered in holding it during the last years of his life. What I will now offer is based on my interpretation, which I fully admit may be wrong; even so, in the spirit of thinking well of a man who has recently died, and someone whose divergences with my opinions were not out of malice, I will push through with this interpretation.

About a year ago I was looking for a certain book on computer science in a college bookstore. On the way to the CS section of the store, passing through the popular interest section, I stumbled upon Kaniuk’s 1948. I was not going to buy the book, but I was intrigued as to what it might be about. An Israeli Leftist writer touching the subject of 1948? Was he going to plow New Historian territory and rehash Ilan Pappé’s tripe, or was he, instead, going to defend the story of Israel’s birth from the likes of the latter? Morbid curiosity prompted me to read the quotes on the back cover, the most important of which I bring here in translation:

“Though we were the boys with the wind in their hair [This is an unsatisfactory translation of an expression referring to the generation of 1948 in exalted tones. —ziontruth], wise we were not. Wise people do not go to die of their free will when they are seventeen or eighteen or even twenty years of age. Wise people prefer existing states to fighting states. Wise men do not attempt to set up new states in the desert winds, in a land full of Arabs and surrounded by Arab states that see them as foreigners and people of evil intent.”

At the time, right after reading it, I was downhearted. “Has Kaniuk finally gone off the rails and decided to attack pre-1967 Israel as well as post-1967?”, I thought. With the passage of time, however, I have come to interpret the quote differently. Although I still cannot say for sure which is the correct one, I think that, in view of Kaniuk’s somber and withdrawn demeanor of his last years, there is good reason to believe this quote reflects cracks, if not something bigger, in the Zionist Leftist pioneer’s view.

If Kaniuk was a smart person—and most people believed he was, regardless of their disagreements with him—then it is not difficult to imagine that he perceived the changes in the political world since the 1970s. He may have continued to believe in the sharp distinction between pre-1967 and post-1967 to his last day, but his belief that world opinion shared that view was beginning to come under doubt. In disputing the wisdom of setting up the Jewish state in Palestine, my alternative interpretation is that he no longer considered being right in our own eyes to be enough—he came to realize the truth, that the negation of pre-1967 Israel’s right to exist had grown beyond the Arab world and a few insignificant fringe groups. In other words, the unthinkable truth of the mainstreaming of total anti-Zionism may well have crossed his mind.

Naturally, the reader might now ask why such a thought has to be gleaned through an uncertain interpretation of a book quote. Why did he not make those thoughts explicit? Another question might be: Why did he not follow that realization to its logical conclusion and leave Israel as Avrum Burg did?

Again, I can only guess, but I believe my guesses are plausible. Kaniuk wrote 1948 at the age of 80; to ask someone so old, and therefore so set in his ways, to announce his disbelief in a long-held narrative is to demand very much of any person his age. For him to leave Israel would be even more far-fetched; the much younger Avrum Burg could do it, but Kaniuk, having lived so much of his life in Israel and even put it on the line for the country, could by no means leave at 80 years old even if he believed the ship was sinking.

And had he believed the ship was sinking and still been young enough for a new life abroad, there would be reasons for him to stay nevertheless. Kaniuk never doubted the rightness of pre-1967 Israel, so moving to France like Burg or to Britain like Pappé would not have been consistent with his views. Also, if Kaniuk was perceptive enough to note the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, then chances are he was not oblivious to the dangers abroad either. In the 1970s one could still talk of Israel as a state under singular, exceptional threat, but today the threat is over many nations, making the news every day. Burg and Pappé will not find Muslim-colonized Europe safer than Israel in due course; and it is the same story in India, Thailand, Nigeria and many other parts of the world. Even the United States of America is not the safe haven it used to be. If Kaniuk was cognizant of that reality, he probably reasoned that it was best to die fighting for the one and only state in the world that he could actually call his.

Beyond my musings on Kaniuk’s thoughts in his later years, we have here the story of the Israeli Jews’ rightward shift on geopolitics. Throughout the years, the left-wing stance on geopolitics, involving land concessions, had credence among the populace by virtue of seeming reality-based. It was probably the peace treaty with Egypt that did most to cement this view, thus preparing the way for the Oslo Accords, and maintaining that course even in the difficult years (such as 1994 with its frequent bus bombings). But from the year 2000 onward the world changed so much while the left-wing geopolitical thinkers stuck to the views of the 1970s. It was then that many Israeli Jews shifted to the right on geopolitics, thinking that the right-wing stance reflected reality far better than the anachronisms of the Left.

The regular cadence of calls (by the United States, the European Union etc.) for negotiations and land concessions, as well as the insistence on “compliance with international law,” seem in our day like scenes in kabuki theater, while the undercurrents, soon to be lifted onto the mainstream in plain sight, no longer play this game. We can see this in the way the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 is brushed off, and consequently the flagrant Arab violation of it, while the U.N. General Assembly recommendation regarding the Arab refugees of that war is elevated to the status of holy scripture. We can also see it in the post-colonial discourse equating the Jewish state with the French presence in Algeria—wrong no matter how empty the land had ever been, no matter that the newcomers had bought the lands at full price, and no matter that the Arabs had lost a war they had started. Terra nullius is dismissed out of hand as a forbidden justification; the buying of the land is believed to have been dishonestly carried out, as in America with the Indians; and the Arabic-speaking “indigenous Palestinians” had every right to start a war of “resistance” to repulse those “Euro-Zionist invaders.”

The terrible truth that many Israeli Jews have come to understand in the past decade and some, and that Kaniuk too may have realized in the last years of his life, is that we are in the process of mainstreaming the denial of Zionism’s rightfulness in toto—that the world is coming to accept the idea that the Jews are to be denied the right to be anything but tourists in the Land of Israel, just for being Jews, and not because of anything they have ever done, not in 1948, not in 1967, not in any other date. The first ship carrying Jews from Russia to Ottoman-ruled Palestine in 1882 (the Yemenite arrivals of the same year are studiously ignored—why ruin a racial narrative?) was the Original Sin, and the wrong committed by those Jews was that they had landed on the shores with the intent of renewing Jewish political sovereignty in Palestine in the first place.

Confronted with a new, uncharitable world that does not cut Zionism the least slack, the old Zionist Leftist pioneers with their 1970s views are clearly outdated. The shift of the Israeli Jewish populace to the right on geopolitics reflects the belief that the tenets of the Right, formerly dismissed by the majority as “messianic craziness leading Israel to ditch,” are the up-to-date, reality-based ones that Israel needs in order to counter this changed reality. It is recognized that the world gives international law and the distinction between pre- and post-1967 territories lip service but in truth is warming up to the idea of the dissolution of the entire Jewish state as an act of decolonization; against this, the old arguments of the Israeli Left seem powerless, while it is the right-wingers that bring hope. By rejecting the faux-Palestinian narrative wholesale and upholding Zionism’s rightfulness from the get-go in 1882, the right-wing stalwarts are truly able to address the monstrous assault on Zionism today, and that explains why the majority of Israeli Jews have been attracted to their geopolitical stance. Assuming Kaniuk realized this, it is all the more understandable why he could not declare that realization explicitly.

In closing, I thank Mr. Kaniuk for his lifetime of service, and despite all the differences he had with the post-1967 Jewish inhabitants, I console myself in the idea that he was too set in his ways to change course, even in a changed world that he may have acknowledged. I take off where he left, upholding the legitimacy of the Zionist renewal from 1882 onward, the return of the one and only indigenous people of this land to what has always been theirs by virtue of an unbroken cultural connection to the land that no other nation can show.

UN's Ban calls Israeli settlement plans 'illegal'

Mike L.

The snippet below was written by Michael Wilner of the Jerusalem Post.

WASHINGTON -- United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon remains "deeply concerned" over plans to construct hundreds of new housing units in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, his spokesperson said in a statement on Friday.

"These are unhelpful decisions that undermine progress towards the two-state solution," the statement reads. "They constitute a deeply worrisome trend at a moment of ongoing efforts to re-launch peace negotiations."

Could this not be any more transparent?

It goes like this:

1) The Obama administration calls for negotiations between the parties.

2) Israel agrees to negotiations between the parties.

3) Abbas refuses to negotiate until Israel does this, that, or the other.

4) EU countries, and the western left, including the Obama administration, blame Arab intransigence and refusal to negotiate on Israel and threaten dire consequences.

This is playing out just as I predicted that it would.

Yes, what a surprise that Ban Ki-moon is "deeply concerned."

What we are looking at is a set-up more or less engineered by the American administration.  They actually have the audacity to suggest that a few hundred "housing units" are sufficient to reasonably prevent the long-suffering "Palestinians" from accepting freedom and autonomy.

What a joke.

We are honestly to believe that the regional Arabs cannot take the Jewish heartland as a state for themselves because Jewish people continue to live there and thus build housing for themselves?  This is flat-out racism and the more that progressive-left Jews agree that other Jews should not live in Judea and Samaria, the more they justify the kind of Arab anti-Jewish racism that fuels this ongoing war.

We have got to stand up for the Jews in Judea and Samaria, because if we fail to do so we give credence to Arab racism against the tiny Jewish minority.  And it is precisely that racism that drives the never-ending oppression of the Jewish people in the Middle East.

If we will not stand up for ourselves, then just who the hell will?