Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forumOccupation is the real 'Jewish terrorism'
http://972mag.com/occupation-is-the-real-jewish-terrorism/109972/The phrase ‘Jewish terrorism’ has come up frequently over the past week. But aren’t the daily actions of the Israeli army also terrorism? And can radical settlers be considered terrorists if they share the convictions of the state?
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Under “Palestinian terror” were descriptions of Palestinian actions defined as terror, in contrast to the Jewish settlement movement in the time of the British mandate, at the time of the establishment of the State of Israel, and thereafter. “Terror activities were principally invasions into Jewish neighborhoods and settlements, murders of their residents, ambushes of vehicles, and the burning of Jewish-owned orchards and fields.”
Surely there must be a mistake here. This is exactly what settlers have been doing to Palestinians for quite some time, under the supervision of the army, even. For years we have heard and seen and witnessed instances of ransacking and harassment, burglary of land and property, vandalism, hostility, destruction of land, uprooting of trees and abuse of employees, imprisonment of Palestinians and control over their lives, destruction of houses, paving of roads and interruption of the West Bank in every direction. How do we call this form of terror? Ah, yes, “occupation.” Suddenly it made sense: Jewish occupation / Jewish terror.
I know that we’re not going achieve peace through a discussion about who started with terrorism, and who gets to define terrorism, and whether resisting occupation is terrorism or not. Indeed, armed Jewish gangs in 1948 carried out acts against the Palestinian population that included everything mentioned above, and their war was called a “War of Independence,” not a “War of Terrorism.”
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R. Daneel Olivaw
(12,606 posts)The cruelty of the terrorist attack in Duma surprised Israelis a little, but not Palestinians, for whom occupation has become routine. Eliraz Fine, an extremist settler who surely represents only herself and not the peace-loving settler public, said: “I see it as a proper and appropriate action. Deal with that truth and ask yourself: what what is the Jewish interest in acting this way?” According to Fine, “In my view, it’s very appropriate and honorable to damage Arab property.” “The defeatist approach of condemning such actions will only bring more senseless murders. To the Arabs, such actions make clear that the other is capable of unimaginable cruelty. That is exactly the way to stop and deter them.”
oberliner
(58,724 posts)So when people are critical about the Occupation, they are criticizing a "Jewish occupation"?
The Jewishness is centrally relevant to highlight with respect to Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
Israeli policy and Jewishness are linked then?
R. Daneel Olivaw
(12,606 posts)I see no difference between the soldiers who remove Palestinians from a pool in order to allow settlers to swim there comfortably, and the settlers who burn and uproot olive trees during harvest time under the supervision of the army, or the settler woman who spits and yells “whore” because she knows that there will be no price to be paid.
The “crazy ones” who murdered Muhammad Abu Khdeir, like those who torched the churches and the bilingual school, believe in their heart of hearts that this is the way to cleanse the Holy Land of its non-Jewish elements. They are one and the same with those who carried out the crime against Duma, who probably see in their actions some kind of heroism.
“The king of media” in this country probably doesn’t read the responses to the last murder: how the horror is lauded on the Internet, and how it is shown as a legitimate way to prove to the Arabs who are the cruel masters in this land. His eminence still asserts that we’re talking about a number of “wild weeds,” and a group of crazies whom we can label “Jewish terrorists.”
Little Tich
(6,171 posts)There are many ways how what's going on in the West Bank can be described, I often use the word apartheid, but "Jewish terror"? - Never!
There are perhaps instances of "terror" committed by the IDF when they pay surprise visits to peoples homes and accidentally kill a lot of people, or when they use live fire against stone throwers, but that terror is never "Jewish". Nor is everything that the IDF or the settlers do, "terror".
I can't help but feel that the author of the OP is knowingly misinterpreting the etymology of some words in order to make them mean something else.
R. Daneel Olivaw
(12,606 posts)Do you read what you write, or is it like psychic writing?
There are perhaps instances of "terror" committed by the IDF when they pay surprise visits to peoples homes and accidentally kill a lot of people, or when they use live fire against stone throwers, but that terror is never "Jewish". Nor is everything that the IDF or the settlers do, "terror".
Your reply is full of contradictions.
No Jewish Terror. There are perhaps instances of "terror"... Nor is everything that the IDF or the settlers do, "terror".
Do you consider it Greek Terror? Irish Terror?
The settlers and the IDF are what dear?
Will it make you feel better to call it Israeli terror?
Little Tich
(6,171 posts)Something is something, and often there's a definition of that something. But changing that definition doesn't change the properties of that something. Describing something as "Jewish terror" doesn't make it into Jewish nor terror if it isn't.
By more or less inventing the definition of "Jewish terror" and let it mean all kinds of things, but still keep the sinister connotation, a sort of false definition becomes the result. This false definition is only good for propaganda, as it's no more than a loaded description.
I think it's wrong to describe the actors of terror with a generic ethnic description. It's likely that a Greek would object to the idea of "Greek terror", as it would imply all Greeks.
I'm not too happy with the OP because it demonizes, and frankly, the object of this demonization isn't really spelled out.
This doesn't mean that I'm not opposed to the activities described in the OP, I just completely disagree with all of the insights of the author of the OP.
R. Daneel Olivaw
(12,606 posts)the activity, and it takes some soul searching to come to that realization.
Now you understand how Muslims feel when they hear the term "Islamic Terrorism."
Israeli
(4,156 posts).....with the help of Akiva Eldar and Yuval Diskin ......
Former Shin Bet head: Jewish terror slow-growing 'cancer' in Israel
Summary : Former Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin has posted a scathing criticism of Jewish terrorism, blaming weak Israeli leadership for failing to counter "anarchist ideologies."
Author Akiva Eldar Posted August 11, 2015
Instead of trying to catch the deadly mosquitos with administrative detention nets and hollow war cries, Netanyahu should learn the lesson of the 1994 massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Instead of continuing to wallow in the swamp where the mosquitos fester, he must dry it up. One can start with the evacuation of a half-dozen illegal West Bank outposts. Diskin signed off his prophecy of rage, “One must wait until things get worse, in order for things to maybe get better. … Only then will we start to understand that we must save this incredible Zionist enterprise called the State of Israel, which is growing farther and farther away from the vision of the founding fathers.”
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/08/israel-hamas-jewish-terror-settlers-kingdom-judea.html#ixzz3iZfUFPrG
Little Tich
(6,171 posts)The OP is about putting the communal responsibility and blame for terrorism on Jews and Israel, it's not restricted to trying to define the cause. Communal blame is a dangerous thing that could lead to vilification of a whole group of people.
Maybe I'm overreacting to the OP, but I have an instinctive aversion to articles that misuse the etymology of words.
Your article is OK, I agree with it, and it's in line with what I already know on the subject. I'll have peek at the other one now.
Israeli
(4,156 posts)Why ? .........its all based on religion .
Uri Avnery : The Hebrew State Is Disappearing, the Jewish State Is Taking Over
We are witnessing a mutation of Judaism, a new Judaism – fanatic, violent and now murderous as well. It is liable to bury the state, just as it buried the Second Temple ...
HAARETZ.COM
After World War II, I participated in many demonstrations against the British, who were ruling this area at the time. All those demonstrations used the slogan, “Free immigration! A Hebrew state!” I can’t remember a single demonstration at which people shouted, “Free immigration! A Jewish state!”
Back then, “Jewish state” sounded like a paradox to us. Everything pertaining to the Jewish community in the Land of Israel was “Hebrew.” Everything pertaining to Jewish communities in the Diaspora was “Jewish.” There was Hebrew agriculture, a Hebrew underground, the first Hebrew city. There was Jewish religion, a Jewish Diaspora, Jewish immigration.
One can leaf through any newspaper published here before the state’s establishment: The term “Jewish” as applied to things created in this land was virtually nonexistent. The spoken language had adopted this distinction long before the small group of writers and artists who took it to extremes had arisen. This group, which Avraham Shlonsky derogatorily termed “the Canaanites,” claimed we had no connection with the Jews at all; rather, we were an old-new “Hebrew” nation that had leapfrogged over 2,000 years in the history of the Jewish Diaspora.
If so, how did it happen that the declaration of the state’s establishment in 1948 spoke of a “Jewish state”? To understand this, it’s necessary to go back to the reality of those days. In the eyes of the British, there were two peoples in this land: Arab and Jewish. Thus the UN resolution on partition decreed the establishment of an Arab state and a Jewish state. The Declaration of Independence was based on this resolution, and therefore declared the establishment of “a Jewish state ... the State of Israel.”
At that time, the Jewish religion in this land was at a nadir. As a boy, I lived for some time on the moshav of Nahalal. Its founders lived for many years in miserable wooden huts. When they were able to build stone buildings, they built cowsheds, and only afterward did they build modest houses for themselves. Then they built a milk processing plant, and then a community center, Beit Ha’am. There was also a synagogue – a small, out-of-the way hut where the old people prayed.
The general feeling was that the Jewish religion in this land was dying, and would die for good when the old men and women who still clung to it passed away. Zionism, we believed, had come in place of religion.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, thought the same. Otherwise, it would never have entered his head to exempt yeshiva students from army service, which he viewed as sacred. The exemption of a few hundred students was, for him, a good way to solve his coalition problems.
For the same reason, he allowed the establishment of the state religious school system. “The old man” liquidated the school system affiliated with the left-wing workers’ movement because he saw it as a danger to the state’s sovereignty. But he permitted the state religious system because he was convinced religion was dying and didn’t constitute a threat.
The religious kibbutz movement was also a withered limb, the stepchild of the secular agricultural settlement movements. And the ultra-Orthodox, somewhere out on the fringes, merited at most a tolerant smile; they aroused nothing but pity.
Toward the end of the 1950s, the wheel began to turn. This was due to several developments that had no relation to each other but had a cumulative impact.
First, as the horrific details of the Holocaust were gradually revealed, the Israeli community began experiencing remorse. After all, we were living here in (relative) happiness and plenty while Jews were being slaughtered over there en masse. Later, the Eichmann trial caused a revolution in Israelis’ consciousness.
Another development was the mass immigration from Islamic countries. The new arrivals were moderate religious traditionalists, just as the Muslims in those countries were back then. The Bulgarian rabbi in Jaffa would ride his bike on Shabbat to watch the Bulgarian team’s soccer games. But the Mizrahi rabbis, who hailed from the Middle East and North Africa, fell captive to the fanatic Ashkenazi rabbis of the non-Hasidic “Lithuanian” sect. They adopted the Lithuanians’ clothing and became more extreme in their turn.
High fertility rates in the religious and ultra-Orthodox communities gradually changed the demographic picture. And instead of shrinking, as Ben-Gurion had hoped, the religious and ultra-Orthodox school systems grew by leaps and bounds.
The dramatic turning point, however, was the Six-Day War of 1967. The stunning victory by the secular Israel Defense Forces turned into a religious celebration; “The Western Wall is in our hands” became the battle cry of the religious fanatics.
The religious Jewish public, which until then had been humble and demeaned, suddenly became aggressive and demanding. The National Religious Party, which until then had been the most moderate party in the government, changed its spots and switched to the side of radical nationalism. Its youth, products of the state religious school system and the Bnei Akiva youth movement, gave birth to the extremist settlements.
Recently, we have witnessed a new phenomenon. In the past, a yawning chasm of hatred divided the national religious youth from their ultra-Orthodox counterparts. Now they have begun hooking up. The national religious are becoming more religiously ultra-Orthodox, while the ultra-Orthodox are becoming more nationalistically fanatic.
The recent atrocities perpetrated by national religious “hilltop youth” and ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students are the writing on the wall (literally). The settlement youth, together with disturbed people who have returned to religion, are imbued with incomparably greater zeal than the youth of the “Tel Aviv bubble” and the rest of the secular public.
History has many examples of countries in which hardy people from the periphery took over a center that had gone soft. The frontier folk are used to war, while the centrists create culture.
Prussia, a remote peripheral region that perpetrated an ongoing genocide, took over Germany. The remote Piedmont region united modern Italy. Two millennia ago, Jews from the Galilee took over Jerusalem and brought about its destruction. The Manchus took over China, while the Japanese took over East Asia during World War II.
This danger is now hovering over Israel. The settlers are neither “wild weeds” nor youth from the margins. They constitute an extreme and immediate threat to everything that has been built in this country in recent generations. The Hebrew state is disappearing, and in its place, the Jewish state is taking over.
And this isn’t the Judaism that arose during 2,000 years in exile – the Judaism of Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai, the Judaism of a dispersed community that loathed violence. We are now witnessing a mutation of Judaism, a new Judaism – fanatic, violent and now murderous as well. It is liable to bury the state, just as it buried the Second Temple.
The state can still be saved. But to do so, the real Israel – the secular, national Israel – must wake up. We need the courage to change before disaster strikes.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.670543?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook
