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Message: 12
Date: Sat, 5 Nov 2005 09:55:05 EST
From: DBachmozart@…
Subject: Hatfields and McCoys, or right and wrong

The Zionist movement never sought to merely colonize Palestine in the way
that for example, England colonized India –to exploit the population as cheap
labor and steal precious resources. Their aim was the REMOVAL of the native
Palestinians and to REPLACE them with a new settler community.

The original sin of Zionism was the slogan, “a land without people for a
people without land”.Political Zionism was born in the 1890s in Europe during
the imperialist seizure and carving up of Africa, China and India. The racism
that justified this (”white man’s burden”) was contagious and infected the
Zionist movement. There WERE people in Palestine, but they were only Arabs!

In 1917, there were 56,000 Jews in Palestine and 644,000 Palestinian Arabs.
In 1922, there were 83,794 Jews and 663,000 Arabs. In 1931, there were
174,616 Jews and 750,000 Arabs. In order to build a Jewish state in a land where
Jews were a small minority, the non Jewish/native Palestinian population would
have to be removed somehow. In the 1930s the so-called “Labor” Zionists had
a “buy Jewish/hire Jewish” campaign to try to starve the Palestinians out by
denying them employment and boycotting their produce. Jews who bought Arab
goods or employed them were shunned, and sometimes physically attacked. By 1947
however, Jews owned only 6% of the land of Palestine and comprised 31% of
the population, 630,000 against 1.3 million Palestinians.

Despite this, the UN, with the strong support of British and US imperialism
as well as Stalin’s USSR took it upon itself (without consulting the
Palestinian people) to partition Arab Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. The
Jewish state (with 1/3 the population!) was to receive 54% of Palestine, which
just happened to include the most fertile land. But before the partition could
take effect, Zionist terrorists — Irgun, Stern gang and the Haganah —
seized 3/4 of the land and expelled 750,000 Palestinians. In 1948, 385
Palestinian villages and towns out of a total of 475 were razed to the ground, reduced
to rubble.

On April 9, 1948 Irgun terrorists (whose leader Menachem Begin was to one
day become Israel’s leader) murdered 254 men, women and children civilians in
the village of Deir Yassin, just outside of Jerusalem. (Years later, Begin
bragged about the importance of this “victory” in his book, The Revolt - Story
of the Irgun). After word of this massacre spread, Arabs would flee at the
sight of invading Zionist forces, screaming “Deir Yassin!”.The Zionist
falsifiers of history have long maintained that the Arab governments went on the
radio and told the Palestinians to leave, so as not to get hurt when the Arab
armies marched in and “wiped out the Jews”. But NO dates or texts of these
messages nor names of the radio stations involved have ever been cited. The BBC
monitored all radio broadcasts throughout the Middle East in 1948, and the only
messages they have on record was of pleas for the Palestinians to STAY PUT!

In 1940, Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization
Department wrote,

“Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples
together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in
this small country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here
to neighboring countries — all of them. Not one village, not one tribe
should be left.” (Joseph Weitz, “A Solution to the Refugee Problem,”
Davar,9/29/67, cited in Documents From Israel 1967-73,page 21.)

Four million Palestinian Arabs make the dream of a Jewish state impossible,
but the last 57 years have been a nightmare for the native people. A
terrible crime was committed and it must be addressed and corrected. This is NOT a
Hatfields vs. McCoys feud with equal blame for both sides. There is a right
and a wrong and the issue of the right of the Palestinians to return to their
homeland will not go away. No one is suggesting sending the Jews of Israel
back to where they originally came from. The struggle is to de-Zionize Israel
and create a democratic, secular society, open to all. Strategies promoted by
the likes of Ted Glick denying the right to return and consigning the
Palestinians to nothing more than isolated “Bantustans” are beneath contempt.

Dennis Kobray

In a message dated 11/5/2005 2:12:30 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
JerryBails@… writes:

In a message dated 11/5/05 12:18:03 AM, DBachmozart@… writes:

< <
In a message dated 11/4/2005 3:18:26 PM Eastern Standard Time,
JerryBails@... writes:

We all inherit the s--- of those who came before us. If we
obsess on correcting the injustices of the past we will just create more
s---.
As much as we love and empathize with those close to us, their pain is not
cleansed by our inflicting new pain on others.

response -

So all we have to say to the Palestinians' expulsion from their land and
their wish to return is, "s--- happens!" Way to go Jerry! >>

I am sorry that my meaning was so unclear that you could draw such
conclusions from what I wrote. I was talking about escalating violence,
teaching
children to fear and hate, and compounding injustice over generations.

I support reparations, and believe that the first principle in all cases of
injustice is to try to restore the harmony, justice and health to the
afflicted
parties. I was speaking out against vengeance and arguing that in cases
like
the Hatfields and the McCoys, the feuding went on so long that the
descendents had no idea who started the feud or how it all began (although
both sides
certainly attempted to put history on their side).

It is the self-righteous declarations of piety and the arrogance of claiming
that only the other side has sinned that bring on the Hundred Year Wars.

There is a marked difference between ‘’obsessing over past injustices'’
(however real) and attending to existing inquities while avoiding continuing

violence.

The Zionist pedagogical use of the pogroms against Jews through European
history and especially the Holocaust as a justification of the establishment
of an
oppressive theocratic state in the Levant is one example of a general
principle that we have seen over and over. The persecuted too easily become
the
persecutors when they come to power, and they justify their actions by
referencing
their past sufferring.

The Africaners of South Africa used that same argument in support of Aparthe
id. There is no question that Dutch settlers in S.A. were very brutally and
inhumanely treated by the British in the Boer War (c1900), but that, I
maintain,
did not justified the Apartheid regime when the Africaners came to power.

One of the greatest accomplishments of the 20th century was the fact that
Nelson Mandela managed to stem the tide of retribution and reciprocal
violence
when he came to power in South Africa.

You see reparations as inflicting pain or punishment on those who have
profited from past injustices. If I had stopped to think that this is what
some
might think, I would have chosen different words. I don’t consider the
opportunity to restore harmony and justice to afflicted people as painful.
Look in the
face of Jimmy Carter when he talks of the wonders his foundation has
achieved
in restoring health to the poor around the world. He is enriched by his
sharing.

When I put together swimming parties back in the 1950s to integrate Swope
Park’s public swimming pool in Kansas City, I wasn’t in any pain. Putting
things
right can give the greatest satisfaction. I don’t view it as painful at all.

I would be delighted — even overjoyed — if America would follow the Quaker
example and help to restore the broken lives of people America has harmed in

Vietnam, Iraq and a dozen other places, including the Wetsrern Hemispere.
It
would cause me less pain than dropping bombs and trying to prove that we are
the biggest bully in the world.

If I had my druthers, I’d replace the so-called Dept. of Defense with the
Department of Reconciliation. I hate being ruled by bullies, who mistake
injury
as a justification for their power trips. The War on Terror is an oxymoron.

War is terror and it breeds more of the same.

Those of us who have the benefits of choices need to help others find a way
out of eternal feuds and xeonphobia.

Working for peace and justice does not require us to teach our youth to hate
and kill.

–Jerry

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/News_Junkie_GP/
GOP mulls ending birthright citizenship

“There is a general agreement about the fact that citizenship in this country should not be bestowed on people who are the children of folks who come into this country illegally,” said Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican, who is participating in the “unity dinners,” the group of Republicans trying to find consensus on immigration.
Birthright citizenship, or what critics call “anchor babies,” means that any child born on U.S. soil is granted citizenship, with exceptions for foreign diplomats. That attracts illegal aliens, who have children in the United States; those children later can sponsor their parents for legal immigration.
Most lawmakers had avoided the issue, fearing that change would require a constitutional amendment — the 14th Amendment reads in part: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
But several Republicans said recent studies suggest otherwise.

Click here for link.

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Message: 9
Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2005 08:38:06 -0500
From: DBachmozart@…
Subject: Ted Glick gets shot down over the Palestinians’ right to return

For over one hundred years, the Zionist movement has been calling upon the millions of Jews in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Warsaw, Moscow, Odessa, Kiev - Jews whose families have been living outside ancient Israel for two millenia! - to “return to Zion”, to “ingather” and “build the Jewish State”, yet the notion of allowing the four million Palestinians who have actually lived there for centuries and were expelled or are the children/grandchildren of those expelled in 1948 and 1967 is called “impractical”. What is particularly noxious is when some on the left buy into this racist exceptionalism.

Dennis Kobray

Ted,

I must admit that I was more than a little disturbed to see that you would
use the opportunity presented by the media circus around Ahmadinejad’s
cruel and dangerous rhetorical outburst against Israel (an sick outburst
which has, nevertheless, received a thousand times more attention than the
far more tangible existential threat presented to Iran by Israeli and
American nuclear sabre rattling and military grand-standing this past year)
to take a swipe against the Right of Return. You’re buying in, wholesale,
to the attempts to conflate Palestinian rights with Iranian political
rhetoric, operating in the long and ignoble tradition of making Palestinian
rights contingent on the good behaviour of foreign regimes.

I understand that the American anti-war movement has experienced very deep
and vicious divisions on this issue, and that this has probably informed
your writing, and for that I’m sorry. But we, Seven Oaks, will not be
publishing this or, now, any other piece that you write and so I’d ask you
respectfully to please remove us from your mailing list.

The fundamental and inalienable rights of Palestinian refugees are theirs
and theirs alone, and their fates will be decided by them. It is not for
North American progressives to set the limits and purviews of their demands.

Charles Demers
Co-Editor SevenOaksMag.com

***

Future Hope column, October 30, 2005
Wiping Israel Off the Map
By Ted Glick

I believe that it is important for progressive organizers to have a
long-term vision of what kind of society, what kind of world, they are
working towards. Having such a vision doesn’t mean you will see it fully
realized during your lifetime; it is possible that it may seem further away
when one’s death comes. But without a vision, to paraphrase the popular
saying, one might as well be dead.

Jesus of Nazareth had a vision, that people should love their neighbor as
they love themselves, that we should be as concerned for the well-being of
others as we are about our own life.

Karl Marx also had a vision of a society that he called communism, where
the guiding principle is “from each according to their ability, to each
according to their need,” a society freed from the strait jacket of
economic scarcity because of the development of industry and technology and
culturally advanced so as to administer itself justly, thus giving everyone
the opportunity to develop themselves in ways not possible under
capitalism, feudalism, slavery and their predecessors.

Some who live in the land of historic Palestine have violently competing
visions. Some Israelis have a vision of a “greater Israel” which would
effectively destroy the Palestinian vision of a just and secure future in a
land of their own. In reaction, some Palestinians, and some
non-Palestinians who support them, have a vision of effectively destroying
the majority-Jewish state of Israel, replacing it with a predominantly
Palestinian, secular state that would, in theory, treat its minority of
Jewish citizens fairly. This is the practical position of those who believe
that the top priority when it comes to the Israel/Palestine issue is that
of the right to return. The full implementation of the right to return
would mean the physical return to Israel of up to four million Palestinians
displaced by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 or the descendents
of those displaced.

And the newly-elected, fundamentalist president of Iran, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, has a vision of, in his words, “wip(ing) Israel off the map,”
as he said at a rally in Tehran three days ago. Given his Islamic
fundamentalist politics, however, his vision is certainly not that of a
secular state to replace it.

For over three-quarters of a century, there has been a struggle, often
violent, between Palestinian Arabs and Jews. This struggle began in the
1920’s and accelerated during the 1930’s and 1940’s as the rise of Nazism
and the work of the World Zionist Organization nearly quadrupled the number
of Jews in Palestine between 1931 and 1946 to approximately 600,000, about
1/3 of the total population at the time.

There is no question but that a great injustice was done when the United
States, Western Europe, the Soviet Union and other countries, operating
through the United Nations, partitioned Palestine into what was to have
been a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. ¾ of a million or more
Palestinians were forced to leave land their descendants had lived in for
many centuries.

Yet there is also no question but that the great sufferings of the Jewish
people under Nazism leading to the Holocaust, combined with the overall
refusal of the Christian West to receive large numbers of desperate Jewish
refugees, created a determination to create a Jewish homeland. And it is
clear that, almost 60 years later, Israel is as much a reality as the
United States of America, a country similarly founded upon racism and
violence toward non-European, non-white peoples.

Given this situation, I can conceive of no way that up to four million
Palestinians will ever return to the land they or their parents or
grandparents used to live in, with one exception. That would be if Islamic
fundamentalism swept the Middle East, overturning governments in the region
and leading to a cataclysmic war to implement Ahmedinejad’s vision of
wiping Israel off the map through the use of weapons of mass destruction.
The use of such weapons, of course, would also probably kill millions of
Palestinians and Arabs and could plunge the world into a world war, but at
the end of that war, whenever that might be, whatever Palestinians are left
could do their best to make a living from the likely radioactive soil of
their former land.

Am I missing something? How else could this demand be practically
implemented in full?

On the other hand, I can see a campaign for a right to return which
involved a more limited resettlement and substantial reparations, in the
context of an overall negotiated agreement. Such an agreement would force
Israel to stop building and to dismantle-or turn over to a Palestinian
government– Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and/or
give up land of commensurate value to a newly-created Palestinian state.

But this is not my personal vision of the best-case solution for
Palestinians and Israelis, just as the end of the U.S. occupation of Iraq,
the cutting of the U.S. military budget, a clean energy revolution,
practical steps toward racial and gender equality, etc. are not the
ultimate vision of what I am working for in the U.S. Those are some of the
major issues of the day, but I am doing all I can to build a movement that
is about a very different society than the one we live in today.

Some people call that vision socialism, or communism. Others might call it
a fully democratic society. Religious people could say that they are
working for heaven on earth. Whatever it is called, it is the complete
opposite of today’s competitive, aggressive, selfish culture of domination
and control.

I can see a time in the future, as our pro-justice movements grow stronger
all around the world, as progressive Palestinians and progressive Israelis
build their connections and cooperation, as we in the United States do our
essential work here in the belly of the beast, when conditions are much
more favorable for moving to a higher form of government in the land of
Palestine. It is a tremendous vision. But it won’t come about militarily.
It will come about only through a struggle for justice for all people,
through human connections and the transcending of today’s widespread
bitterness and hatred.

Those of us in the U.S. must continue to demand and work for an end to U.S.
support of Israel’s occupation, the root of the problem, understanding that
without justice, there can be no peace, no possibility of implementing a
higher vision.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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