Obama is saying that Jews need to live apart in Israel or they can’t be truly free. Think about the implications. Something about Jews makes it impossible for them to be really at home anywhere—including in what the right-wing (and presumably Obama) tout as the freest nation in the history of the world. So Jews need an ethno-religiously exclusivist state. That view amounts to a wholesale rejection of the western liberal tradition, which was inclusive and universalist and in which all people have the same rights without being seen as members of a tribe. Isn’t it the official line that this is what made America great? So why is Obama rejecting it? And why is the right-wing conspicuously silent?
Counterpunch: Shameful Double Standards on Israel .
When Obama achieved presidency, the world became astonished but somehow contagied by hope when he was given a Nobel Peace Prize in a preventive manner, just because of the expectations of change and justice, and the chances to bring a fair end to the israeli-palestinian issue.
As we say in Spain, “Hope is the last thing to loose” BUT
… one can not expect a fair treatment and a true diplomatic effort when after decades, US rejected the first Palestinian serious attempt to achieve the right to be considered a state by the UN.
One can’t expect US to hold a fair position when all reactions to Israel’s policy on occupation, settlements, etc… are merely rethoric, and they always rejected to apply International Law and UN resolutions dating back from 1967 (not to mention the shameful use of vetto) ,… and now this… c’mon… zionism can’t be considered a model for democracy. It’s just another nationalism, born at the end of 19th century as an extreme fruit of french revolution and Napoleonic Wars. That was the same time when germans, italians, turks, serbians, croatians, japanese, australians, indians, basques, hungarians, moldavians, poles, finnish, russians, developed a real identity as MODERN NATIONS. Even previously inexistent territorial units, such as Italy or Germany, were created from zero. And same idea crossed the mind of jews. Simply they had the trouble of noticing that the land they were attached culturally to, was not theirs anymore since almost 2000 years before… and someone else was living there, already.
I agree that exceptional situations require exceptional solutions, and WWII and the nazi attempt to exterminate jews was the most terrible extreme of a millenary record of discrimination, prosecution and social rejection wherever jews settled. Culturally jews also promoted this situations because (same as muslims notice nowadays here in Europe), we don’t like people who create their own social ghettoes, staying away from the people they live with (that is,….us), unable to mix, marry, eat same things, and specially when we are told that we are not as “pure” as they are… add to it the atavic historical conception of jews as “killers of Jesus” and u got a perennial excuse to take profit of a weak social position.
No one would side with them. Same as happens nowadays with muslims. They are not socially considered “one of us” in the Old Continent, even if they were born here. Because they culturally eat different, dress different, drink different, speak different, pray different, and all they bring to our culture comes from outside europe. We never see in them a part from us. Maybe if Europe was Canada, it would be easier, but we are the ones who created the modern concept of nation and people. We are not multiculturals by definition. And since long ago. It’s not nice, but it’s what we are, let’s face it honestly, liking it or not.
So in base to that concept, and the exceptional circumstances of the holocaust, I always accepted the creation of the state of israel according to the partition plan approved by UN in 1948.
I won’t say this was a fair solution for Palestine arabs. Absolutely not. But they were barely gestating a national project by 1948. A project that was more defended and promoted by their neighbours than by palestinian arabs themselves.
Of course they felt like Palestinians. Of course they knew they belonged there and wanted to get rid of colonialism and brits, same as of ottomans before… but even if they knew who they were : muslim, christian and even jewish! arabs, usually called falasteen, linked to that ground since generations ago, from semite, beduine, mamaluk, syrian, lebanese, turkish or whatever the origin.. even when they knew they belonged to that land with same or more right than anyone else,… they could not stand up as a nation.
Because there was any serious and firm national project for an arab Palestine after the turks and the brits. Any constitution or declaration, political parties or recognised institutions to deal for that people in 1948’s real world. Anything.
Just maybe the expression of a social will of independence. And the support of other arab nations, who, quite obviously, also hold hidden agendas about territorial claims over those territories.
The same lack of strength for a Palestine Nation could have been used by Faruk of Egypt or the Hashemis of Amman to take that land. In fact I am convinced that most of that initial support was closely guided by the eventual ambition of establishing a “protectorate” or a nominal dominion over that sacred land… if they had succeeded in kicking out the new born israelis, of course.
But that didn’t happen. And these same jews took advantage of the situation and started a policy of ethnic cleansing that lasts until nowadays. During decades they were the attacked ones…. the democratic state surrounded by kings and despotic personalist regimes… (as if Lebanon had ever been one of those) and they took profit of it. And kept advancing in the creation “ex-novo” of a whole national identity. Not anymore that of jews in the diaspora. They started to create an Israeli jewish identity. And that is the point where everything started to crash.
The world can’t accept now Israelis as victims. They are the strong dudes now. No country around them is nowadays a direct menace. Not Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, KSA….. or even chaotic Syria. We all can see it. Now it’s just them and Palestinians.
And these palestinians are not the same guys than 30 years ago… they tacitely accept a 2 state solution. A partition. They accept a land for their own and one for Israelis. Not explicitely at first… but we see how they move towards that. Even Hamas is swifting silently towards that.
But now it’s Israelis who want the whole cake. They even talk openly of annexing the West Bank (Galilee…), leaving without effect a single chance of creating an arab state of Palestine, but just a Jewish National State of Israel. And they need violence to stay, in order to secure all the achievements they reached till now, fairly or not.
This was called Lebensraum in the past… and Anchluss.
And to be talking about democracy when you apply a social discrimination based in religion and racial or ethnic origin is simply like mixing oil and water. It will never stand.
And we see it.
Israelis now want it all for them. And just for the full glory of the jewish european part of them. Other jewish communities (yemenis, sefardis, moroccan, palestinian, ethiopian,…) are second class nowadays among the jewish nation.
Any plan of full equal national rights for those who stayed in that territory since 1948 till now, and are not jews, (this is, arab israelis, who have been living there for centuries) is a uthopia.
Woody Allen or Steven Spielberg have it easier to enjoy full israeli citizenship than an israeli arab from East Jerusalem whose family lived there for centuries.
And we see all this.
Not to mention the colonies and the military actions, and the walls, and the cultural, territorial, ethnical, etc… process of expoliation. I am just talking of what Israel is becoming as far as we see it.
Because we see it. Even those like me that are not against the existance of Israel.
I repeat once again:
I WANT ISRAEL TO EXIST… (back on 1967 borders, of course) BUT NOT THIS ISRAEL WE ALL SEE.
BECAUSE THAT, MR. OBAMA,… IS EVERYTHING EXCEPT AN EXAMPLE OF DEMOCRACY.
IT WAS CALLED APARTHEID IN SOUTH AFRICA.
IT WAS CALLED SEGREGATIONISM IN THE US.
IT HAD MANY OTHER NAMES THAT YOU MAY SURELY KNOW.
All based in the same feeling, that is “that this is OUR land… the land of OURS. It was our RIGHTEOUS posession. Our own homeland for OUR NATION”. Same as said by the boers, for example… or many others you may know.
So what’s next…will our sons have to wait for a new Mandela to see things fixed?
No, Mr. President. I can’t accept that you agree with that idea. You can’t agree with a national supremacist project that says that someone has to change his religion to become a full citizen, and gives more rights to foreigners than to locals, depending on their faith or a family name.
That is not democracy.
Period.
Al-Must'arib (the vocational Mossarab) 