If you go to Palestine, you must also visit Tel Aviv if you are interested in peace. No thanks, I'm not interested in Israel.
Given there is a big investment conference in Bethlehem next week, I am waiting for the call for 'equal' investment in Israel. As if the playing field is equal to start with.
And this kind of shite passes as intelligent peace-loving comment.
We recently had a flap in the U.S. when it was discovered that members of the ruling African National Congress are still on our Terrorism List and weren't allowed into the country. I take it that the ANC finally broke down and recoginized South Africa's right to exist, since they're running the place now.
Gabriel - you've reminded me of something someone told me about on Friday night. Last year Linda Grant claimed that she was having her DNA tested in connection with how Jewish she is. Here's the full quote:
Out of an idle interest in why I have should have dark hair and pale freckled skin, rather than the olive skin of the Middle East, I am having my DNA tested. This has led me to consider what we are talking about when we say that Zionism is racism because it privileges Jews as a race.
Israel has permitted the immigration of Ethiopian Jess who were almost certainly converts, though apperently they share some genetic ancestry with Yemenite Jews, and may be the descendants of Yemenite Jews who somehow found themselves in Ethiopia and intermarried. So it is a weird form of racism that priveleges the some of the most oppressed and exploited Africans on earth above, say, professors at Columbia University.
Sephardi Jews, like Arab Muslims or Christians are Arabs, I suppose, in that, like Europeans, they came from Arab lands, spoke Arabic and held Arabic culture, insofar as it was not religious. We can also assume that there must have been a certain degree of intermarriage, and DNA investigations of Jewish ancestry indicate that while Jews worldwide share genetic ancestry, despite obvious intermarriage (or commonly, in Europe, rape) they also share it Palestinians, some of whom have to be descendants of the original Jewish population.
So to consider Israeli's immigration policies as racist seems to me to be a wild misnomer. It certainly discriminates in favour of one group against others, but then so do the member states of European Union.
I suppose it would add insult to injury (well insult to insult really) to enquire if she actually took the test and if so, what the result was!
I suspect the test came back with the note: "congratulation, you're a purebred Aryan."
In today's Melbourne Age, a certain Jason Fink gives public voice to the local lobby's relief that the paper's honest jobber has ended his term of duty in Israel:
'MICHAEL Stevens (Letters, 12/5) laments the exit of Ed O'Loughlin for the loss of clear-sighted and courageous analysis of the terrible situation in Israel/Palestine. I wonder if Mr Stevens and I have been reading the same paper.
Consistently Mr O'Loughlin's articles portrayed Palestinian deaths in the course of fighting Israel. No doubt the death of any innocent civilian is a horrific event and should be condemned. However, he never really managed to give the complete picture of why these events occurred. His work often rode on the strong inference that Israel, as a more powerful adversary in this conflict, was the aggressor and responsible for cruelly punishing Palestinians in Gaza, thus perpetuating the misery of the war. ... '
Exactly. A clear case of attempting to shoot the messager.
Worse, the Sydney Morning Herald today reports that a local municipal library's attempted exhibition about Nakba refugees has been closed down after a raid from a police counter-terrorism unit.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/
natio...0444436843.html
So there we have it. Recounting the truth about Israel is a terrorist act.
Remind me what the War on Terrorism is about again?
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Sat...icle%
2FShowFull
"I am white, like other South Africans of the white minority. We had no claim whatsoever on any inch of the whole African continent, never mind South Africa. Here you have two rights, two people who are right in terms of ancestral claims, and that's what complicates the situation tremendously.
"You've got fundamentalist Israelis, and super-fundamentalist Palestinians, and these people complicate moves toward peace."
"There is a similarity, alas, [to Apartheid] in the way Palestinians are being treated in the occupied territories, the brutal methods."
"The humiliation of people, moving people out of their homes, keeping them on one side of the wall while their sustenance, their crops and grain, are on the other. It is indeed comparable to what happened in South Africa."
Roberts said he and Gordimer “deadlocked” over her insistence he rework passages criticizing her Middle East politics, including her reluctance to equate the Israeli- Palestinian conflict with apartheid South Africa. Those passages draw on his interviews with Edward Said, the Columbia professor and Palestinian advocate who died in 2003 and to whom he dedicated the biography.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/3...gin&
oref=slogin
I admire Gordimer's writing. So I don't criticize just cause I enjoy it, on the contrary. But she not only went to Israel, she spoke in Israel to a Jewish audience, and for all the injunction to talk with Hamas, she essentially flattered the audience by mirroring to them their fantasies about "ancestral claims" and all such bullshit. Her sense of what is real in Israel is the very opposite of what made her stories of Apartheid so powerful. For me, that's a betrayal of everything she stood for, and it is far worse than the mere fact of tactical disagreement with the boycott (which is how she tries to present her decision)
I added an addendum and used it.
“Amos Oz is the voice of sanity coming out of confusion, the lying, hysterical babble of world rhetoric about current conflicts”
is Gordimer’s opinion, who finds that Oz “convinces irrefutably”.
But Oz is a Zionist, with all that implies:
http://ellissharp.blogspot.com/2...-hard-
disk.html
I must admit I’ve not read any of Gordimer’s novels. This review (which has nothing at all to do with her politics) rather put me off:
http://sternezine.blogspot.com/2...e-
gordimer.html
The man is certainly a hardcore so much so that the zionist left loves him.
Skip the DNA testing and just find out who delivered the milk about the time you were conceived.
Gordimer's infatuation with Oz is evidence of the same. She leaves her intelligence behind when she approaches Israel. Unfortunately not an uncommon disease among left leaning Jews.
I haven't read even half of everything she wrote, but Jump and The Soft Voice of the Serpent are pretty impressive collections of short stories.
Cripes, I'm totally screwed! With me it sticks out a mile. Everybody knows as soon as they see me, or hear me talk.
The reality is that whilst investors at the conference are claimed to be interested in investing upwards of $1 million each in Palestinian businesses, it is only really likely to enrich the already profitable businesses and further depress the majority of unprofitable ones. Moreover, from what I've seen, the chances that deals will be struck involving substantial Israeli business input- perhaps including the building of joint business parks in Occupied Land - (which is hardly the fault of the Palestinian businessmen on one hand, given that there is nothing else available) is high.
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