The Zionism debate: When colonialism is embedded in liberalism

The link to Abit’s blog is a 404

“Shall we go through history and examine the many cases of nations who were at war, but were allowed back to their homes when it ended?” It would be more interesting to ask why – of the millions of people who were displaced from their homes in the aftermath of WW2 – only the Palestinians continue to demand the RoR.

Larry Derfner wrote: “That’s what Zionism’s about, and that’s not immoral at all – that’s what every effing nation in the world has wanted.”

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The immoral part comes in when Zionists achieve this majority in the land by expelling the people who were already living there. “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another.” Like David sent Uriah the Hittite to his death so he could take his wife, Israel drove off the Palestinians so they could take their land. And that is immoral.

“what will you do if a given country decides today that the land of “Israel” belongs to its nation, and brings its people to occupy and ethnically cleanse those who have lived here”

This is exactly what Arabs did to Jews. Abir Kopty’s family is from Egypt. Arabs brought their “people to occupy and ethnically cleanse those who have lived here”
http://twitter.com/#!/AbirKopty/status/137146521241133056

I love the idea that Palestinians are morally to blame for not accepting what was clearly a horribly unfair plan forced on them by Europeans. How dare they reject having more than half of their land ceded to a (for the most part) group of recently arrived European immigrants that made up a distinct minority of the residents and whose immigration they had never agreed to in the first place? Why, I can’t imagine why any people would have turned down such a peach of a deal!

Larry Derfner claims that because the other party has been immoral, it is somehow not immoral to be immoral in return. What a feeble excuse!

Dear Mr. DERFNER,
You write: “Unlike typical foreign invaders, the early Zionists got their land by purchasing it, not by driving the inhabitants off. The fact is the violence was started by the Palestinians, the expulsions were started by the Palestinians”
Sorry to say, but this is jast basic propaganda.
The land purchased was the 6% of the total land partioned in 1947 by 33 of the 56 states that formed at the time the UN. Also this 6% was taken by the KKL paying absent landlords that benefited by the Land Code introduced in 1858 by the Porte under Western pressures.
VIOLENCE was started the very day (1895) that Herzl wrote the following sentence:
“WE SHALL TRY TO SPIRIT THE PENNILESS [Arab/Palestinian] POPULATION ACROSS THE BORDER By PROCURING EMPLOYMENT FOR IT IN THE TRANSIT COUNTRIES, WHILE DENYING IT ANY EMPLOYMENT IN OUR OWN COUNTRY…BOTH THE PROCESS OF EXPROPRIATION AND THE REMOVAL OF THE POOR MUST BE CARRIED OUT DISCREETLY AND CIRCUMSPECTLY”.
This was the originary violence. All the rest was a consequence.

Larry, every effing nation in the world certainly does not a 2,000-year old “historic claim.” When does a historic claim expire, anyway? No expiry date for Jews, 60 years for Pals?

JED,
The “Land of Israel” was never in the history only the land of the Israelites. There were always many populations on the spot and the fact that you concentrate yourself only on your/my holy book and narrative explain quite well why you fly so down

Dear Monsieur Jed,
“The Arabs didn’t own the entire land. Even the US is not entirely owned. Most of the land was not owned.”
So what? Did I wrote that they owned all the land? If you know the musha’ system and the land tenure system in the ottoman empire you should know that only about the 5% of the land of the todays 40 countries that composed at the time the ottoman empire was mulk (private land). So, all the present indigenous population of these states didn’t have rights on the land just because they didn’t follow a european system of cataloging the land?

Larry, your only mistake, in my view, is accepting the principle of collective guilt and punishment. That Zionism was not immoral because the Jews did to the Arabs what the Arabs had done to the Jews. As if the Palestinians who were expelled in the Nakba were responsible for the actions of the Iraqis who massacred Baghdadi Jews in the 1930s.

It feels of course good to win a debate about what happened years ago and to have seen that liberal zionism is really just zionism. That does however not win hearts and does nothing to solve the problem in the now. One day the racism hand hate has to end and everybody in the area has to live together in peace. I would rather see a debate about constructive solutions for peace than the evils of zionism.

I don’t dispute that there were two antagonists in the 47/48 conflict, and I’m not a Zionist.

However, I don’t think the violence of a native people is quite the same as the violence of a settling people. Neither is justified, to be clear. But when Palestinian Arabs initiated hostility against arriving Jews in the decades before independence, they probably had in mind that the Jews were trying to take their land. Which they were, and the Nakba proves that. It had always been the intention of Jews arriving in Palestine to ethnically cleanse it, whether through peaceful overtures, intimidation, outright force, or the fog of war. If you had been a Palestinian, would you not have resisted this movement from the beginning? Not out of pure, eternal ant-Semitic hatred, as the Zionist argument goes, but out of a desire for self-determination?

One other thing: while I’m not a Zionist, I acknowledge that back in the 40s there was sufficient reason to believe that Jews would not be safe without their own state. I can therefore forgive Zionism for whatever it did to secure its homeland pre-1967. I can also accept the “liberal Zionist” term insofar as it describes a person who believes fundamentally in the need for a Jewish state and who otherwise tries to be as liberal as possible. Its contradictory, but that doesn’t mean its wrong. Be a liberal Zionist. fine with me.

Directrob
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I agree with you for once or maybe the second time about the need to argue constructively about the future rather than the past. I think that too many people are in blame mode even though there is enough blame to go around against BOTH sides. Till that stops, we won’t see a peaceful solution.
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Talking about solutions, whatever it will be, there will be a need for BOTH sides (again) to be pragmatic. Otherwise we still won’t get a solution.

Rico …
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You too make the mistake of talking about “native population” as against
Jewish invaders. For your information, those “Jewish invaders” were descendants of natives who populated the land of Israel and Judea way before the Arab invaders arrived in the 7th century. Nevertheless, by 1947, the majority of Jews and their leadership accepted the idea of the two state solution. Guess who didn’t? But as I said above, I don’t want to go into blame mode because attitudes like yours which imply that only Arabs have and had the right to live in Palestine, are the root cause of this problem. Please just accept it, the Jews are not going to go away. They won’t give up their ancestral home land. They are willing to share it with the Arab people who have also lived there for a long time now. Share it in the form of the two state solution. One Jewish state one Arab state. Anything else will just not cut it.

Bosko, It does not matter that the people who came to the land in the early half of the 20th century were the descendants of the people who were expelled from it two millenia ago. They are also the descendants of Europeans through conversion and intermarriage. As a matter of fact, many Palestinians who we now call Arab are ALSO the descendants of Judeans. They are also the descendants of Christian Caananites and pagan Caananites who had lived in the land way before the Arabs came from Arabia and conquered and Arabized its inhabitants. It is totally pointless to make this a debate about who your descendents were.

Jed, “Nakba” is also the Palestinian term for the displacement of Arabs from what was to become the state of Israel.

In 1930-1948, chiefly-newly-arrived Jews living in Palestine decided to create an orphanage, a philanthropic splendor, for Jewish orphans, but had to rob a bank to obtain funds to open this orphanage. To the orphans (Jewish immigrants to Israel), this project was wonderful, but to the owners of the bank and the depositors, who lost all (Palestinians), this was a crime.

If this crime and benefice must go forward through time, shackled together inseparably, as it appears, it were best if the bank-robbery were as small as possible. This is possible. Israel should retract 9in the matter of land) to an area roughly the size of New York City (or twice or thrice that), and the remainder of Israel and the present OPTs should become Palestine. Refugees, whether from Gaza or Lebanon, etc., should be free to return to their original homeland — even if that were the new and small Israel — but they would be small numerically, and most would return into the new (and also smaller) Palestine.

Any Israel which demands, as today’s does, to take over the entire bank and all the accounts — when far less would do for purely philanthropic purposes — is not (whatever else it may be) “liberal” or, indeed, anything other than a perfectly standard might-makes-right operation of power-uber-alles and, to that extent and so considered, indistinguishable from the operations which Hitler began so enthusiastically.

JED,
“The land of Israel is to Jews as the land of Arabia is to Arabs, or north Africa is to Africans (not Arabs who occupy it).”:
This is ideologic ignorance.
For your knowledge Palestine was just arabized. Is not that since the 7th century Palestine has a population without roots in this land. Get out from your “ideologic bubble” because your theories sounds childish.
Maxime Rodinson:
“A foreign people had come and imposed itself on a native population. The Arab population of Palestine were native in all the usual senses of that word. Ignorance, sometimes backed up by hypocritical propaganda, has spread a number of misconceptions on this subject, unfortunately very widely held. It has been said that since the Arabs took the country by military conquest in the seventh century, they are occupiers like any other, like the Romans, the Crusaders and the Turks. Why therefore should they be regarded as any more native than the others, and in particular than the Jews, who were native to that country in ancient times, or at least occupiers of longer standing? To the historian the answer is obvious. A small contingent of Arabs from Arabia did indeed conquer the country in the seventh century. But as a result of factors which were briefly outlined in the first chapter of this book, the Palestinian population soon became Arabized under Arab domination, just as earlier it had been Hebraicized, Aramaicized, to some degree even Hellenized. It became Arab in a way that it was never to become Latinized or Ottomanized. The invaded melted with the invaders. It is ridiculous to call the English of today invaders and occupiers, on the grounds that England was conquered from Celtic peoples by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in the fifth and sixth centuries. The population was “Anglicized” and nobody suggests that the peoples which have more or less preserved the Celtic tongues – the Irish, the Welsh or the Bretons – should be regarded as the true natives of Kent or Suffolk, with greater titles to these territories than the English who live in those counties.”

Look Berl, the long and the short of it is that there was and still is room for two states in “Palestine”, one Arab one Jewish. Both people’s can justify their own state on valid historical basis. The Arabs though did not accept that. They wanted EVERYTHING. Many of them still do. That is the root cause of all the problems. Everything else happened because of that, no matter how you want to spin it and blame everything on the Jews. Jews have rights too. If the Arabs don’t want to recognize Jewish rights in Palestine, it just means that they will continue to shoot THEMSELVES in the foot. Talk to them and make them understand that Berl.

ROSE,
Abir Kopty admits her family came from Egypt 100 years go.
http://twitter.com/#!/AbirKopty/status/137146521241133056

Palestinian Arabs came from Arab countries.
To lie about this, when Arabs themselves admit it, is beyond childish.

Important to clarify the following point:
The Arab Palestinians in 1948 were NOT the “sovereign power” over the country. In 1918, when British rule commenced, they took sovereignity over from the Ottoman Empire. There was no ‘sovereign Arab people’ in the country at the time. There was Ottoman sovereignity which ruled over a MIXED population consiting of, among others, Arabs and Jews. There was no such thing as a “Palestinian” identity. The Arab population largely supported their Ottoman rulers in World War I against the British. The British conquered the country, along with other territories in the region. Thus, if Syria or Jordan or Iraq became sovereign states under Arab rule, it was because British soldiers died to give them the ability to set up these states. In “Palestine”-which included Transjordan, the newly ruling British decided to give the Jews the right to build a “National Home” which would naturally evolve into a Jewish state. In 1922, the British decided to divide the territory and give Transjordan to the Arabs and the Cisjordan (Western Eretz Israel) to be open to the Jews according to the Balfour Declaration. In 1937, the British decided to divide Cisjordan into 2 states, Arab and Jewish. All of this was in accordance with the Mandatory powers given to them. Later the UN, upon the British deciding to abrogate the Palestine Mandate decided on a final partition in 1947 between Jews and Arabs.
THERE NEVER WAS A LEGITIMATE CLAIM BY THE ARABS OF “PALESTINE” TO SOVEREIGNITY OVER THE WHOLE COUNTRY! The fact that they were the majority in 1918 was not relevant because they had no sovereign rights in the country…in fact they objected to receiving sovereign rights since they supported their Ottoman rulers in their war against the British. They received their ability to set up a state in 1922, 1937 and 1947 as a gift, essentially.

My understanding is that the term “Nakba” was used around 1920 in the Arab press when Palestine was separated from Syria, because everyone wanted to be Syrians. Why was that?