Is movie "Munich" propoganda?

[Chris Alger]

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[joedirte]

All things media are essentially propaganda. The Bible is propaganda, and I don't see too many conservatives boycotting that.

[Cyrus]

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While Israel still has her domestic political problems, the religious have far less influence of security policy than you would have the 2+2 population believe.

[/ QUOTE ] Save it.

Maybe some other time I might go through the whole rigmarole of arguing about the Jewish fundamentalists and their influence on Israeli policies. For the moment, let's allow the audience to get to know the story of a certain Baruch Goldstein. (For more on how the Jewish fundamentalists treated that mass murderer, check out Chapter 6 of this book).


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One more thing:
Some guy's opinion of Shahak and others

[/ QUOTE ] Brilliant. You introduce as valid a dismissive opinion on that great, great Jew, the late Israel Shahak, by some nut who claims that Noam Chomsky is allied with the ..neo-Nazis. Totally brilliant.

Israel Shahak obit in The Nation

[andyfox]

"Israel is directly a response to centuries of European and Arab social and violent discrimination against Jews that culminated in the Holocaust."

Zionism had absolutely nothing to do with Arab treatment of Jews. Herzl's The Jewish State makes no mention of the Arabs. Jews fared far better under Islam than they did under Christianity.

As for the cleansing, Moshe Dayan said: "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." [address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.]

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Zionism had absolutely nothing to do with Arab treatment of Jews. Herzl's The Jewish State makes no mention of the Arabs. Jews fared far better under Islam than they did under Christianity.


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Andy, you keep statiing this, but the fact is that the Jews fared like CRAP under the Arabs. That the Jews fared even worse under the Europeans is not a mitigating factor in the least. Whether or not Zionism was a response to European AND Arab oppression--which both certainly existed--is not the only point here. Even if you are right that Zionism was a response only to European oppression of the Jews, it DESERVED to be a response to Arab oppression of the Jews as well. Moreover Arab oppression of the Jews (and of the Christians) goes on to this day, and many Arab states have many laws against religious freedom, and against non-Muslims having equal rights in court.

Regarding Zionism, I personally think Arab oppression of the Jews was at least a small contributing factor, although surely lesser, than European oppression of the Jews. At least, it was a peripheral factor in the psychological sense. But even if it was a total non-factor, as you seem to be asserting, it SHOULD have been a factor. And so it should be to this day and on into the future, until the Arab states reform their BIGOTED and BACKWARDS horribly oppressive laws and attitudes.

[Zeno]

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Jews fared far better under Islam than they did under Christianity.


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This is a fact of History that is indisputable. They are a few things within this framework that are troubling however. To mention the most obvious, in the practical sense one prefers only 3 lashes on the back as opposed to 10 or 15. But the plain and ugly fact that the lashes are delivered in the first place emphasizes the root of this perennial and sticky problem and does not dissolve away the guilt and morally repugnant behavior displayed by any one group.


For an interesting article that discusses some of these very same themes in a historical light with relevance down to today, I highly recommend an article recently published in the American Scholar (Winter 2006 Issue). The article is titled “Anti-Semitism’s New Rationale” written by Bernard Lewis. He explores Islam and Christian antecedents of Anti-Semitism and flushes out the historical contexts, rationals, and results. I will not go into any details. I thought it well written and a worthwhile read [this does not mean I endorse his every conclusion or analysis etc. etc. (it shows the wayward decline of this forum that it is necessary to add this pedantic caveat)]. Unfortunately the text is not available via the web, so a journey to a University Library is probably required unless you are a subscriber.

-Zeno

[andyfox]

1) Jews did not fare like crap under the Arabs. This is just not true. Every scholar who has studied this, including those, like Bernard Lewis, who cannot in any way be considered pro-Arab and rejects the idea of a "Golden Age" in Jewish-Islamic relations, has come to the same conclusion.

2) Why was it that Herzl did not even mention the Arabs in his manifesto on Zionism? Because A) Arab anti-semitism and mistreatment of the Jews paled in comparison to that of Europe and Russia, and was a non-issue for him; and B) because he knew that the Jews that lived in Palestine before the advent of Zionism lived there largely without the kinds of problems they suffered under Christianity.

3) To say that Zionism deserved to be a response to Arab oppression of Jews doesn't make sense. The vast majority of Jews lived under Christianity and they were persecuted to a far greater extent under Christianity than under Islam. This is not to say that they were not mistreated in Arab lands. But had they been treated as well in Europe and Russia as they were in Islamic lands, there would have been no Zionism. Two excellent works on the subject are Bernard Lewis's The Jews of Islam and Mark Cohen's Under Crescent and Cross.

While, as a Jew, I cannot condone nor accept any kind of anti-semitism (and you may remember me going somewhat ballistic a few years ago when eLROY made what I considered to be vicious anti-semitic remarks), Jewish treatment of the Palestinian natives was a contributing factor to 20th century Palestinian anti-semitism. Zionist and Israeli leaders and scholars of all political stripes, over many years from Ahad Haam to Ze'ev Jabotinsky to Martin Buber to Moshe Dayan to Bennie Morris, who have all considered the Zionism movement to be a morally right and necessary movement for the Jewish nation, have agreed with this conclusion. Condemning only Arab antisemitism and antimodernism without seeing the other side of the coin leads only to oblivion.

[andyfox]

Thanks, Z.

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1) Jews did not fare like crap under the Arabs. This is just not true. Every scholar who has studied this, including those, like Bernard Lewis, who cannot in any way be considered pro-Arab and rejects the idea of a "Golden Age" in Jewish-Islamic relations, has come to the same conclusion.

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Jews EVEN TODAY fare like crap in many Arab countries--at least in those countries where they are even allowed to live in the first place! Pre-Israel, Arab riots against the Jews tormented the Jews in the Middle East, and the Jews had to endure unequal laws. Even back in the so-called "Golden Age", Jews had to live as inferior beings in Arab society, with far lesser legal status, lesser rights and lesser privileges.

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2) Why was it that Herzl did not even mention the Arabs in his manifesto on Zionism? Because A) Arab anti-semitism and mistreatment of the Jews paled in comparison to that of Europe and Russia, and was a non-issue for him; and B) because he knew that the Jews that lived in Palestine before the advent of Zionism lived there largely without the kinds of problems they suffered under Christianity.

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So what? Arab laws today are horribly prejudicial against the Jews--AND WERE SO BACK THEN, too. As of course are the attitudes and customs as well.

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3) To say that Zionism deserved to be a response to Arab oppression of Jews doesn't make sense. The vast majority of Jews lived under Christianity and they were persecuted to a far greater extent under Christianity than under Islam. This is not to say that they were not mistreated in Arab lands. But had they been treated as well in Europe and Russia as they were in Islamic lands, there would have been no Zionism. Two excellent works on the subject are Bernard Lewis's The Jews of Islam and Mark Cohen's Under Crescent and Cross.

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So what, again? A dog that is beaten only twice a month instead of being beaten every day is still being severely mistreated. The Arabs--and the Arab supremacist attitude, along with the Islamic supremacist attitude--and their corresponding unequal laws and vile treatment of the Jews--is ample reason for the Jews to demand a tiny homeland in their original home, where many of them lived anyway at the time, to be free from such oppression.

Your way of mentioning this kind of stuff is sort of like saying: Jim Crow laws weren't all that bad bad, compared to outright slavery. Well pardon me for saying it, but "whoop-de-doo."

As I've stated before, if the USA had not enacted equal civil rights for blacks, the blacks would have had a moral and practical justification, in my opinion, to demand and receive a fair portion of the United States as their own homeland, to therein be free of such opppression. Likewise, the Jews had a moral right to such a homeland in their ancestral home to be free of European and Arab oppression. So what if, using the metaphor, the Europeans "enslaved" the Jews whereas the Arabs only enforced Jim Crow laws against the Jews? (and actually, laws in many Arab states did and still do infringe more upon Jewish civil rights than did the Jim Crow laws infringe upon black civil rights).

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While, as a Jew, I cannot condone nor accept any kind of anti-semitism (and you may remember me going somewhat ballistic a few years ago when eLROY made what I considered to be vicious anti-semitic remarks), Jewish treatment of the Palestinian natives was a contributing factor to 20th century Palestinian anti-semitism. Zionist and Israeli leaders and scholars of all political stripes, over many years from Ahad Haam to Ze'ev Jabotinsky to Martin Buber to Moshe Dayan to Bennie Morris, who have all considered the Zionism movement to be a morally right and necessary movement for the Jewish nation, have agreed with this conclusion. Condemning only Arab antisemitism and antimodernism without seeing the other side of the coin leads only to oblivion.

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Yes Jewish actions exacerbated the problem somewhat. But the root--and fault--of the problem was nearly all of the oppressors: foremost Europeans, yet also, Arabs. And today the Arabs are considerably worse than the Europeans about it.

[andyfox]

No doubt Jews fare better in the west today than they do in Arab countries. We were talking about the advent of Zionism, however, and there is also no doubt that historically they have fared better under Islam than under Christianity. I've quoted extensively, in the past, from Lewis's and others works, so I won't bore everyone by doing it again. While I believe that the so-called "Golden Age" was a myth, and we can find numerous examples of poor treatment of Jews in Islamic countries in history, there is no doubt and no question that they historically fared far better under Islam than under Christianity. They were not "severely mistreated" as they were in the West and in Russia.

We have a horrible legacy of anti-Semitism in this country. But I would still say that Jews fared much better in this country than they did in Europe. There's a big difference between being beaten twice a month than being beaten every day. Twenty-eight or twenty-nine nice days. I'm not sure if it's an apt comparison, but yes, Jim Crow is better than slavery. Every day of the month.

Many Jews did not live in Palestine at the time of the development of the Zionist program. Benny Morris, citing the most careful study of the demography, Justin Mccarthy's The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate, indicates 457,000 total population in 1881: about 400,000 Muslim, 42,000 Christians, and 13,000-20,000 Jews.

The impasse that Jews and Palestinians face today is, with all due respect, your attitude. A complete unwillingness to see any degree of responsibility on one's side for the problem. Jewish actions did more than "exacerbate the problems somewhat." Much of what I write below is from Benny Morris's Righteous Victims. Morris is an Israeli Jew who has made headlines in recent years for his increasingly right-wing beliefs about the current situation in Israel.

From the beginning, the Zionist spoke of cooperation and friendship. But they were hiding their true intentions, which were revealed by their actions. In 1899. Herzl wrote to the Arab notable Husuf Zia al-Khalidi of Jerusalem that Zionism did not pose a threat of displacement for the Arab inhabitants of Palestine; rather, the arrival of an industrious, talented, well-funded people would materially benefit them. But in private he was thinking only of displacement and transfer. In his diary he wrote, "We must expropriate gently . . . We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by . . . denying it any employment in our country. . . . Both t process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

Many Jews who came to Palestine in the Second Aliyah were veteran of the self-defense groups that had formed inside Russia. Self-defense was to be the major pillar of their ideology in Palestine. Many of them instantly translated their Russian experiences into Palestinian: Arab = gentile, Arab marauding = pogrom, local antagonism and territorial feuding = anti-Semitism.

It was natural, at this time, for Europeans to look down on the natives as Europeans had always done. The settlers "looked down" upon "these barbarians" [Chaim Hissin]. "There is no more cowardly, hypocritical and false race than this race" [Avshalom Feinberg]. "We are dealing here with a semi-savage people, which has extremely primitive concepts . . . These Semites--they are anti-Semites" [Moshe Smilansky]

The settlers quickly began to behave like lord and masters. Some Jewish observers saw this as the "new Jews" compensating for centuries of being at the receiving end of gentile violence. [All of them cited Christian violence, none Arab mistreatment.] Ahad Ha'Am, as early as 1891 saw the Jews exhibiting "a tendency to despotism as happens always when a slave turns into a master." He noted that "the attitude of the colonists to their tenants and their families is exactly the same as toward their animals."

Ha'am noted that these attitudes turned into deeds, that the Zionists "behave toward the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass without justification, beat them shamefully without sufficient cause and then boast about it."

The Zionists sought to radically change the status quo, but as much land as possible, settle on it, and eventually turn an Arab-populated country into a Jewish homeland. For decades they tried to camouflage their real aspiration. They were, however, certain of their aims and of the means needed to achieve them:

"The ultimate goal is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand year. The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand, declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland" [Vladimir (Ze'ev) Dubnow].

"The thing we must do now is to become as strong as we can, to conquer the country, covertly, bit by bit. We can only do this covertly, quietly. We will not set up committees so that the Arabs will know what we are after, we shall act like silent spies" [Eliezer Ben-Yehuda].

"We have made it a rule not to say too much, except to those we trust. The goal is to revive our nation on its land if only we succeed in increasing our numbers here until we are the majority. There are now only five hundred thousand Arabs, who are not very strong, and from whom we shall easily take away the country if only we do it through stratagems" [Ben-Yehuda and Yehiel Michaal Pines].

The Palestinians saw, from the Jews' actions, what their true intentions were. "We are a nation going to its death before the Zionist stream in this land of Palestine."

What I see when I see you and Chris Alger argue is that both sides refuse to even acknowledge the other side's point of view. The fact is that the Zionists were uninterested in the Palestinian Arabs' nexus with the soil or in Jerusalem's sanctity to Islam. Nor were they able or willing to recognize the Palestinians as a people. In many respects they still are not because they have always regarded all of Palestine as its patrimony. The fact that it regarded partition as merely a stepping-stone to the whole land might well be behind their later accusation that Yasser Arafat secretly harbored the same thoughts and plans.

Time to get the history right and then move beyong to make a new history.