One of the most harebrained ideas to come down the pike in recent years is the proposed U.S.-Israel defense pact. The Jerusalem Post reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “made progress” on finalizing the pact while meeting in Lisbon recently.
This is an idea that has absolutely nothing to recommend it. At a time when the US government should be ending its “collective defense arrangements” – NATO and the other six – such an arrangement with Israel is an especially bad idea. But it would be just as bad were it the only such arrangement the US government had.
Having failed at one attempt to suppress pro-Palestinian advocacy and activism on American college campuses, the Trump administration will try a new tack: defining Jewishness as a nationality or race.
President Trump plans to sign an executive order on Wednesday targeting what he sees as anti-Semitism on college campuses by threatening to withhold federal money from educational institutions that fail to combat discrimination, three administration officials said on Tuesday.
The order will effectively interpret Judaism as a race or nationality, not just a religion, to prompt a federal law penalizing colleges and universities deemed to be shirking their responsibility to foster an open climate for minority students. [Emphasis added.]
The Times notes that “prominent Democrats have joined Republicans in promoting such a policy change to combat anti-Semitism as well as the boycott-Israel movement.”
This is the 51st anniversary of Israel’s 1967 war against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and the Palestinians. The so-called Six-Day War began the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and Sinai peninsula, which was eventually relinquished by Israel. It also continued the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that began around 1948.
After more than half a century, should we continue to call this an occupation? Israel has annexed the West Bank, Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem for those the state regards as Jews. The Gaza Strip is a prison camp into the which the guards do not go, preferring to gun down protesting prisoners and medics from a safe distance outside the fence while the authorities fully control the ingress and egress of people and goods like building materials, medicines, and other vital things. Every so often the Israeli Air Force bombs Gaza to smithereens.
Razan al-Najjar, 21, a paramedic helping injured protesters in the Gaza Strip, was murdered by what Benjamin Netanyahu insists the Palestinians recognize as the State of the Jewish People.
How, in these conditions, can individuals who are not religious believers but simply humanists, democrats and liberals, and endowed with a minimum of honesty, continue to define themselves as Jews?
~Shlomo Sand, How I Stopped Being a Jew
Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we deplore their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.
~ Israeli Gen. Moshe Dayan
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. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu’a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.
~ Israeli Gen. Moshe Dayan
Today marks the 72nd anniversary of U.S. President Harry Truman’s atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. The atomic bombing of Nagasaki took place three days later in 1945. Some 90,000-166,000 individuals were killed in Hiroshima. The Nagasaki bombing killed 39,000-80,000 human beings. (It has come to my attention that the US military bombed Tokyoon Aug. 14 – after destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after Emperor Hirohito expressed his readiness to surrender.)
There isn’t much to be said about those unspeakable atrocities against civilians that hasn’t been said many times before. The US government never needed atomic bombs to commit mass murder, but it dropped them anyway. (Remember this when judging the official US moralistic stance toward Iran.) Its “conventional” weapons have been potent enough. (See the earlier firebombing of Tokyo.) Nor did it need the bombs to persuade Japan to surrender; the Japanese government had been suing for peace. The US government may not have used atomic weapons since 1945, but it has not yet given up mass murder as a political/military tactic. Presidents and presidential candidates are still expected to say that, with respect to nuclear weapons, “no options are off the table.”
Monday was Nakba Day, the day set aside to remember the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 in connection with the creation of the “Jewish State” of Israel. Over 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and villages, and many massacred, in an ethnic-cleansing operation that should shock the conscience. Hundreds of villages were erased and replaced by Jewish towns. The Arabs who remained in the Israeli state that was imposed on them by Zionist military forces have been second-class citizens, at best, from that time.
Since 1967 the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, many of whom were refugees from the 1948 catastrophe, have lived under the boot of the Israeli government. Their day-to-day lives are under the arbitrary control of the Israeli government. Gaza is an open-air blockaded prison camp subject to periodic military onslaughts (the latest was last year), while the West Bank is relentlessly gobbled up by Jewish-only settlements and violated by a wall that surrounds Palestinian towns and cuts people’s homes off from their farms. For the Israeli ruling elite, the so-called peace process is a sham. Benjamin Netanyahu, who is now embarking on an unprecedented fourth term as prime minister, rejects any realistic plan to let the Palestinians go – that is, have their own country on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. He insists that they must recognize Israel as the Jewish state, that is, as the state of Jews everywhere, even though it sits largely on stolen property (PDF) – which raises an interesting question: Is subjugation of the Palestinians an instantiation of Jewish values or is it not? If it is (as apparently most of its supporters believe), then what does that say for Jewish values? If it is not, then what does that say for Israel’s purported status as the Jewish State?
