Gaza, Yamit, the future? – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Hello Helena,
At your invitation from Jonathan’s site, I decided to pop back in to see if the tone of articles and conversation had improved at all.
I see that they have not, and that you are still as nasty and arrogant when it comes to your political enemies in general, and Israelis in particular.
The fact that you can call the grief in Gaza “stage managed” shows that far from practicing your “human equality now” principles, you are very selective when it comes to compassion, empathy, and a sense of justice. Regardless of what you feel about the settlers, these are people who are losing their home, who have put work into the land and in many cases -dare one say the truth without being accussed of orientalism- took empty plots of sand and turned it into productive agriculture.
Yet all you can say is “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PALESTINIANS?” Yes Helena, we are well aware, as is the rest of the world. To say that the Palestinians haven’t had their grievances aired over the past five years, or for that matter these past five weeks, is laughable. The settlers are being portrayed sympathetically recently because they cut sympathetic figures. They are losing their homes, their communities, their livelihoods. It is, for better or for worse, “their moment.” Yet all you can talk about is how they “make out like bandits.” You even have the gall to say that you are more sympathetic to the pied noirs, even though the pied noirs were actually colonists, as opposed to the Jews who, even though you’ll never admit it, have deep historic and spiritual ties to the land.
I also took the liberty at going back and reading some of your recent entries. I see you had to trash Steven Vincent -twice no less- even after he was murdered. Real class act, Helena.
So while I appreciate your friendly offer to come on by, I’m afraid that I will have to decline your invitation. I think you owe some people an apology. 8,500 apologies is more like it. But I suppose you are too good for that.

Up until a few days ago, Helena’s blog was full of predictions of how the violent and nasty “Settlers” and “Colonialists” were going to stage a civil war and shoot their way into history. Now that we see them praying and singing (and sobbing), Helena manages to find fault with that too. It’s too too dramatic! Oh, the drama!
It isn’t the violence Helena objects to. It isn’t the psychodrama Helena objects to. It’s probably just that they’re Jewish.
As I wrote in these blogs a few weeks ago, it’s all a tempest in a teapot. I also predicted a low number of deaths, against all the other violence-propaganda being put forth. I was unable to predict the mass murders of 8 Palestinians by lone gunmen over in other parts of Israel, however. But lone nuts are hard to predict.

WarrenW,
I’m not going to say I “predicted” the gunmen, but it was something that I was worried about all along. I figured the “resistance” that we saw would not stop the disengagement, although it would make for some unpleasant images.
But the two terror attacks by these deranged assholes (sorry for not being courteous, Helena) are the one thing that can really, really screw things up.

Helena,
I posed a couple questions to you on Jonathan’s blog, but you never answered. I hope to revisit those issues here at a later date, but as for the present situation..you cite approvingly an article that is based upon a number of questionable assumptions.
What makes you so sure that the settlers would have left quietly?
What makes you think that this spectacle reflects positively on Israel?
I ask the second question because you imply pretty openly that this is a play for sympathy on the part of Israel. I look at it very differently. If anything it’s pretty blatant evidence that Israel has its own extremist problem. I cannot possibly understand how you would think that Israel would “stage” exposure of this.
I look forward to your replies.

If anything it’s pretty blatant evidence that Israel has its own extremist problem. I cannot possibly understand how you would think that Israel would “stage” exposure of this.
Agreed, that there’s been nothing flattering about the coverage at all. And leaving the settlers behind to my mind spells bloodbath.

Let’s do a thought experiment and envision the PA forces doing the same kind of evacuation of fellow citizens without being armed.
I am waiting to see what will happen when the Gaza settlements are all empty and the IDF hands over the strip to PA. Will the PA and all the Palestinian players be able to work on what they need to do without spilling blood? But pardon me for being skeptical.

Sure, if the IDF had simply announced that it was leaving Gaza on a date certain and that thereafter the settlers would receive no protection from them, then the settlers would all, very evidently, have left.
I’m very far from sure. Quite a few of the settlers recognize not merely a nationalist but a religious imperative to live in Gaza. Many would leave with the IDF, but at least a few – possibly a significant number – would stay. At that point, you’d have a few dozens or hundreds of heavily armed settlers in the middle of a million and a half Palestinians, which would pretty much guarantee a bloodbath.
Would Sharon be a responsible leader to leave Israeli citizens in that position? For that matter, would it be responsible of Sharon to make the Palestinians clean up the holdouts, which would probably result in Palestinian deaths? I suspect that, if the IDF did leave and a conflict erupted between the Palestinians and settler holdouts, you would now be criticizing Sharon for not using force to evacuate them.
BTW, there were 58 injured in Kfar Darom today, including police officers who had acid thrown in their faces by settlers. I’m sure the cops and soldiers in the hospital would be very surprised to learn that the confrontation was stage-managed.

I’m no expert on any of this either. But I agree with Jonathan. I expect many hundreds of die-hard settlers would have decided to stick it out in their compounds armed to the teeth. And the lead up to a unilateral pullout by the Army would probably have sucked a lot of paramilitary crazies into Gaza ready and willing to fight to the death. It would have been irresponsible in the extreme for the State of Israel to walk off an leave a powderkeg ready to explode. I don’t think the French withdrawal from Algeria is quite the correct parallel. I would expect something more like Rhodesia. The white minority didn’t exactly pack up when the British pulled out. They fought a long and bloody civil war.
For my own part, I personally think they should have just walked away and told all the settlers, those who want to remain Israelis better pack up. Those who want to take up their “land claims” with the Palestinian Authority and who want to live under Palestinian rule are free to stay. If a million Arabs can live in Israel under Jewish rule, then a few Jews ought to be able to live in Palestinian state under Palestinian rule.

From the 18 Aug Toronto Star: A legal brief prepared by the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research stated: “The partial redeployment of Israel’s military presence in and around the territory is not the controlling factor in international law to determine the end of occupation. . .The end of occupation rests essentially on the termination of the military control of the Occupying Power over the government affairs of the occupied population that limits the people’s right to self-determination.”
Why this matter is made clear in the disengagement resolution passed by the Israeli government which states “The completion of the (disengagement) plan will serve to dispel claims regarding Israel’s responsibility for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”.

Leaving the settlers there would have been the most irresponsible thing on earth, and any leader who did that would have gone down in infamy.
It’s very clear to me that to the Helena Cobban wing of the political landscape, no matter WHAT Israel does, even a strategic retreat, is evidence of criminal intent.
At Helena’s invitation, I “came on down.” Not sure I ever want to come back.

Leaving the settlers there would have been the most irresponsible thing on earth, and any leader who did that would have gone down in infamy.
It’s very clear to me that to the Helena Cobban wing of the political landscape, no matter WHAT Israel does, even a strategic retreat, is evidence of criminal intent.
Clearing out of Gaza was a painful move for Israelis, but the right thing to do. Helena if you really cared a damn for the Palestinians, you give Israel a qualified thumbs-up instead of sniping and spinning childish, irresponsible fantasies about staged pseudo-civil wars.
And, by the way, I really found your utter nastiness towards the Mozambique Portuguese sickening. “Slunk” back to Portugal? Many of those people were born there (like Teresa Heinz Kerry). It’s not their fault they were born into a situation they didn’t make. Your contempt for them was so free-flowing. It shows up your ostentatious protestations of Quakerism and your quotations from Buddhist thinkers as the phony act it is.

Growing up in England in the era of decolonization of the british Empire I saw settlers from all kinds of former colonial situations slinking back into the home country. They– or their forebears– had been tempted by the governments of earlier eras with “free” land expropriated from the indigenous peoples and with all kinds of subsidies and incentives, to go and live a la-la-land lifestyle with servants, hyper-profits, swimming-pools, and all kinds of things that few people could afford in England at that time, or since. I saw that for some of those returnees, their return meant a drastic downscaling and was hard to take. For others, they had stashed away enough ill-gotten gains to start over nicely, thank you.
Meantime the economies and social-political systems of the overseas places they had depradated for several generations had often been left in tatters.
This story is only a little different. It has a “religious” aspect to it. But so did much of the British Empire, back when “we” could still believe we were the chosen people.
As for religion, for me, God is (importantly, but not wholly) what I see in every other human and that gives me cause to try to deal with all those “Others” on a basis of reciprocity and equality. I know there are many people who have “sacred places”. But most of them– whether Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, or wheatever — manage to express those links through the practice of respectful pilgrimage and through trying to behave especially well when they’re in the sacred places. Most of these people do NOT try to express links to sacred places by trying to move there for good from wherever else they are in the world, and to take them over completely on a monopolistic and exclusivist basis. To do that surely undercuts the Golden Rule that lies at the heart of most religious understandings and that provides, importantly, the best common meeting point today for people of all religions (or none)?
And Diana, yes, I have given Sharon a qualified thumbs-up for the decision to get out of Gaza, even if not for the manner he chose to do it.

The Susan above is not me. Guess you can tell us apart by the – USA attached to my name.

Diana,
As one who grew up in “a situation I didn’t make” as a settler’s child, I thank you for the defence, but it is not necessary. To be honest, it is actually misplaced.
Both the willing settlers and their children have to change. Especially they must realise that settlers in general are not victims but perpetrators. Having done so it is possible, but difficult, to make a very fine contribution to liberation, as many South African whites (and some white Mozambicans) have managed to do.
I have to tell you that Helena’s point of view is more understanding of the position of settlers and ex-settlers than yours is. The last thing we need is misplaced sympathy.

Dominic,
I believe that the point the others are trying to make here is that deamonizing the settlers in the interest of glorifying the Palestinians does not serve the cause of settling the conflict.

JES, what planet are you on? What I can see is not demonisation, but wall to wall canonisation of the wailing Gaza settlers. To hell with all that!
What kind of sick mind is it that thinks that asking for people’s rights is “glorification”? Have you any idea of the position of the Gaza residents? Do you read this site at all?
“Settling the conflict” indeed! You’ve got settling on the brain, my friend.

Dominic,
Thank you for a response that is “couteous, fresh, helpful and to the point”.
As a matter of fact, I do read this site. I also happen to live in Israel (proper, within the Green Line), and I dare say I personally know more settlers and Palestinians than either you or Ms. Cobban, so please spare me the holier than thou lecture.
I believe it would do you both well to understand that not all settlers are violent racists and that some Palestinians are bloodthirsty, Jew-hating terrorists.
You may want to take a look at:
http://www.germsspot.blogspot.com/

And you call yourself a Quaker? My god…..your comments, and Loewenstein’s proposed ‘bet’…as in I BET (theirs and other’s lives)that the settlers will leave, send a chill down my spine.

I think it’s entirely plausible that a few heavily armed settlers would have stayed if the Israeli state hadn’t evicted them. That would have created an impossible situation for Sharon politically – he couldn’t leave them to be flushed out or killed by the PA with all the fallout that would result.
So to that extent I think the evictions are necessary. That doesn’t entirely preclude the charge of stage-management though. Obviously the entire Gaza pullout is a calculated act by Sharon designed to get rid of settlements that are not worth defending, make the Israeli state appear “reasonable” and “moderate”, while consolidating control of the West Bank and continuing to expand settlements there.
As to sympathy for the settlers? I understand that they are receiving substantial financial compensation and new homes in much safer areas. I would be inclined to save my sympathy for all the Palestinians who have been evicted rather less gently, often by bulldozers and certainly without compensation or rehousing.

Helena’s comparison to Portugese and French colonialists is just plain stupid. The Portugese and French were not in their colonies because Portugal and France were counter-attacking against attacks by Africa. Israel is in Gaza and the West Bank because of attacks by Arab States and a counter-plan to get “land for peace”. A plan that has worked with Egypt and the Sinai.
Helena knows all this and deliberately chose to lie about it. This is an absolutely disgraceful thing to do. Get some decency, Helena!
And that criticism of “Monopolizing holy places”? Who is that directed at, Israel or Saudi Arabia? Or is the Moslem Authority in charge of the Al Aqsa Mosque? Helena, learn to read a book.
Helena, if you search your heart you’ll find that you are a very, very angry woman. Your political rantings perpetually verge on outright hate speech and ethnic prejudice. I think your repeated references to “Racism” in the settlers is a projection of your own heart. The religious zionists Israelis have no racial theories. They do have a scathing critique of Palestinian culture. But consider that the Lebanase and Jordanians feel the same way about Palestinian culture. Is that racism too?
At least watch carefully the meanings of the words you use. “Racism” has a particular meaning, it is not just an invective to be thrown at everything you dislike.
Your whole world view is a repulsive regurgitation of the failed Third-World Marxism of the disproved immiseration theory. Read a new book.
Now that your blood libel of the settlers resistance has not borne fruit, you manage to criticize their prayer and song. If you hate prayer and song, say so. You have no standing to criticize their religion, and you already know that.

Helena,
I’ve been a bit shocked by the ad hominem attacks in the blog comments for this post. At the same time, I know I may have done the same thing when I’ve felt too personally close to a topic.
Because the issues are life and death, when people do feel personally affected it is natural to lash out in fear.
Also, sometimes people comment out of purely intellectual engagement, not realizing that their virtual interlocutors may have visceral personal stories that interweave with the discussion at hand. Armchair pundits often don’t realize the limits of their proclamations; I’ve certainly been guilty of that.
A thought experiment came to me: what would it take to make peace on your blog? How might a process in such a microcosm inform broader attempts at peace and reconciliation? What roles would need to be created? How might your posts change? How might a process evolve for responding to or refereeing the comments?
I only ask this because of your Quaker background…perhaps you won’t think it’s just silly and idealistic. Perhaps it is. But I think there’s a kernel of truth in the notion that the reason peace doesn’t exist in the world is that peace doesn’t exist on the more granular levels of society, either.

Actually, Warr-W, in global discourse, “racism” doesn’t have anything like a single, particular meaning. For example, British people connote something by it that’s completely different from what Americans connote by it.
I was using it in its broad, British meaning rather than its more specific, skin-color-related US meaning. Sorry if that was inappropriate or misunderstood.
The facts remain that (1) all the settlers have been the benficiaries of a longterm system of preferment that has given them benefits based only on their “Jewishness”– a characteristic that is often thought of inside Israel as constituting a “nationality”. For example, Israeli citizens of Palestinian ethnicity cannot move to or “buy” property in the settlements, far less receive the huge government subsidies that are offered to all who do so… And of course, far less can the actual Palestinian residents of the lands of the occupied territories get access to those benefits!
(2) Nearly all the people who made a conscious decision to move to a settlement did so in the full understanding that they would thereby be becoming the beneficiaries of a deeply discriminatory system; and they did so anyway. I agree with those who say the situation of children or other dependents whose presence in the settlements was not their choice is more complex. This is a good reason to hasten the final resolution of the national-sovereignty issues in these areas. (It also helps underline the wisdom of the 4th geneva Convention which outlawed any implantation civilian settlers into land held under military occupation.)
Also (3), I think you will agree it’s a fact that many of the extremists among the settlers do indeed espouse and often act upon a virulently anti-Arab ideology. (If not, check out many of the well-documented reports of settler-perpetrated, anti-Arab violence found on Btselem’s website.) This was probably particularly true of the “hilltop youth” types from the West Bank settlements who infiltrated Gaza in recent weeks in order to stage their rituals of “dispossession” there.
There have been some small numbers of settlers– in Gaza, in Golan, in the West Bank– who have come to realize the deeply discriminatory (my British self would say “racist”) nature of the whole settlement project and who have struggled to deal with that. My sincere respects to those people, some of whom I know. Such people were not, however, noticeably represented among the settlers photographed these past few days in Gaza?
Vivion– I do what I can. But why don’t you email me some more thoughts.

Hi Helena,
Has anyone noticed that the Israeli soldiers have treated the illegal settlers much differently from how they have treated the Palestinians? When Palestinian children throw stones, the soldiers retaliate by firing, and many times, killing youngsters. However, when the settlers threw acid in the faces of the soldiers, the soldiers responded by pouring water on the crowd to disperse them.

Helena,
Just a couple of points here.
First of all, you state that “settlers have been the benficiaries of a longterm system of preferment that has given them benefits based only on their “Jewishness”– a characteristic that is often thought of inside Israel as constituting a “nationality”.
The first bit may be correct, but at any rate is being dealt with under law (within Israel proper). However, please indicate why you feel free to imply that “Jewishness” is any less a “nationality” than is, say, “Palestinian”? (My wife’s passport from the USSR, for example, clearly says under nationality: “Jewish” (Ivrika).
My second question to you is have you read the IVth Geneva Convention lately? If not, I suggest you do. All of Article 49 clearly speaks about FORCED transfers of populations, including the final clause, to which you refer. Whithout speculating as to the “wisdom” of the drafters, I suggest that you look closely at the historical context in which the convention, and that clause specifically, were drafted. When the convention speaks of the occupier transferring its own civlian populations to the occupied territories, I believe that what the authors had in mind was, for example, Germans transferring portions of their civilian population to places in Western Poland such as Auschwitz-Treblinka.
There may be a lot of reasons for being against Israeli settlement in Gaza and the West Bank, but that particular clause is not, I believe, one of them!

I recommend Ran HaCohen’s August 19th “Letter from Israel”, headed “Stop your sobbing”, at http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/?articleid=7007

“Prime Minister Sharon wants the eviction to be portrayed as a huge national trauma

Helena,
Let me think about this some more, and I will get back to you.

JES, hi–
I know that in Israel, the USSR, and elsewhere, Jewishness is officially categorized as a nationality. I’m not quibbling with that, at all. In the US and some other countries, however, jewishness is generally thought of (and officially categorized, as much as that happens) as a religion, instead.
All these categories are, of course, social constructions. “Nationality”, for example, is sometimes thought of in Europe and elsewhere as stemming from what most US citizens now call “ethnicity”, instead. But in the US, there’s a very operation view of nationality as being simply the citizenship that one carries…
Regarding the Fourth Geneva Convention, the last para of Art. 49 states very simply “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
Yes, the context of the drafting was the immediate post-Nazi, post-Japanese militarism experience. To “deport” parts of its own civilian population certainly entails a degree of coerciveness, as when German citizens who were Jewish, Roma/Sinti, gay, etc were deported to the death camps in eastern Europe. To “transfer” does not imply coercion (or indeed the lack thereof). It is neutral on the question of whether coercion is involved. That is why every single government in the world, except Israel’s, in the aftermath of 1967, said that israel’s implantation of members of its civilian population in occupied territories was illegal. (The US under Reagan eased back a bit. Not that reagan said it was now “illegaL”; but while avoiding ruling on the legality issue he and subsequent prezzes have defines the settlements as “obstacles to peace.”)
That provision was a response to the Nazi’s non-coercive (but highly state-subsidized) implantation of hundreds of thousands of civilian (Aryan) Germans into the occupied countries of eastern Europe, where they took landed and other properties from the indigenes– and Japan’s exactly parallel policies in its “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity (!) Sphere.”
Also, Art. 147 says that within an occupied territory, “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” constitutes a grave breach of the convention, i.e. a war crime. Over the past 38 years Israel has certainly carried out sSuch destruction of the landed and other forms of property of the indigenes in both the OPTs and occupied Golan– most particularly in its pursuit of the settlement projects.
All in all, though, prolonged military occupation is an unsettling state of affairs whose prolongation encourages such infractions. That’s why I believe it is very important to focus on the conclusion of a fair and sustainable final-status agreement as soon as humanly possible.

Helena,
Sorry for the semi-double comment. I thought that my first version didn’t go thru, so I modified it, submitted the modification, and then discovered that the first version had been accepted.
I’m especially sorry because it gave you the opportunity to sidestep my main question, which is: “what proof do you have that Israel staged the disengagement?”
Cui bono?
Rather than comment further I’ll just wait for your answer.

“Israel has certainly carried out sSuch destruction of the landed and other forms of property of the indigenes in both the OPTs and occupied Golan.”
It is really a shame that Israel’s occupation and accompanying illegal activities and crimes in the Golan get virtually no attention. In fact, when Israel occupied the Golan Heights it ethnically cleansed the area of some 95% of its indigenous population, and completely destroyed 96% of the villages there, making the Golan Israel’s most successful ethnic cleansing so far. That the ethnic cleansing was calculated and intentional is attested to in part by the fact that they selectively expelled Arabs while allowing Druze to remain. There are documented instances of the Israelis taking over a mixed Arab/Druze town or village, ording Arabs on one side and Druze on the other, and expelling only the Arabs. Also among the 5% of the population they allowed to remain, they have shown great favouritism toward Druze over Arabs. They did something similar inside Israel proper by showing favouritism toward Christians and Druze over Muslims.
Their theft of and profit from the land and resources (principally water) of the Golan Heights are almost completely ignored by the world. Their human rights violations there, which are admittedly not as severe as those in the OPT, are completely ignored as well, It’s too bad really.

Hi, Diana. Good question. Well, of course at one level it’s straightforwardly true to say that the government “staged”, in terms of “undertook”, the disengagement. But I know that’s not a satisfactory answer. It’s more like, what leads me to think that the government “stage-managed” the terms of the disengagement to the extent that it might be fair to say that aspects of it looked like a “great charade”?
A number of aspects of it. The main ones in my mind are
(1) the allowing of so many non-Gaza activist types to get into the settlements and stay there in some cases for a long time beforehand with no attempt to detain them and remove them before the evacuation of the “bona fide” Gaza settlers took place. Given the history of 1982 Yamit, would it not have been plain to any responsible Israeli planner that the “outsiders” might be expected to be much more emotional and militant than the “bona fide” Gaza settlers?
Why were so many outsiders “allowed” to infiltrate in? Reportedly there were several thousand. If several thousand, say, international activists for peace proved able to infiltrate into a closed military zone, do you imagine the Israeli authorities would have left them there to wander around and pursue their projects without detaining, removing, and most likely also bringing criminal charges against them? But in the weeks preceding the current evacuations, I haven’t seen any reports at all of the authorities taking such actions against the infiltrating settler extremists.
It thus seems clear that for some people in the chain of command– maybe at the cabinet level, maybe considerably lower– there were people who thought the presence in Gaza of those extremists (and their children brought in and shamelessly exploited as “human shields”) was, on balance, useful.
And of course, the presence of a number of thousand outside agitators (and their kids) inside the settlements made the final evacuation much, much harder– more expensive and more emotionally wrenching– to effect than would have been the case if simple police actions before the final evacuation had cleared all unauthorized persons out of the settlements, then allowing the real Gaza settlers to make up their own minds. (I gather that a large proportion of them had left peacefully, before the deadline.)
(2) giving such generous and gracious facilities to the local and international media to go in with the security forces, to be able to relay in exquisite detail images almost of every crying child, davening man, or shrieking-in-outrage woman to the outside world. Contrast this with the media “regime” any completely serious forced-evacuation measure has to be taken…
I know that this was a very serious and very heart-wrenching for Jewish-Israeli society to take. I respect and understand that. I respect and understand that numerous members of the security forces sustained actual injuries in the course of these confrontations– and I certainly wish them the speediest possible recovery. But need the whole operation actually have been so massive and so confrontational? Not if the number of outside agitators inside the Strip had been kept down to a bare minimum beforehand.
The government and security forces had many months to prepare this whole operation. Many aspects of their preparations– including, crucially, the prior collection of all weapons from the Gaza settlers– were very thoughtfully planned and implemented. The authorities had every opportunbity to put in place a much more serious regime to block infiltration of outsiders, and to sweep up in timely fashion any outsiders who might still have gotten through, than what they did. They failed to do so.
Cui bono? — you ask.
Well, after the “painful evacuation” from Yamit Sharon won his beloved settlement project a further 23 years before he felt it had come under sufficient pressure that a further retrenchment/reconsolidation of it would be necessary. In that time, how many hundreds of thousands of settlers have he and his friends been able to implant in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank??
And this time around, how long does he hope it will it be after the “painful evacuation” of the Gaza settlements before another retrenchment of the project seems necessary?

Well Helena,
I’m surprised you don’t demand that Shirin document the facts in his/her arguments. I find the argument concerning the Golan quite telling.
Exactly which Arab populations were expelled from the Golan? I know that the population of Quneitra fled in 1967. I also know how they got there in the first place. Perhaps Shirin would like to share that with us (bearing in mind, for Helena’s sake, the IVth Geneva Convention, and particularly Article 49 of that convention).
Further, I find Shirin’s argument that “among the 5% of the population they [Israel] allowed to remain, they have shown great favouritism toward Druze over Arabs.”
Excuse me, but I believe that Druse are Arabs. So what is it that Shirin actually means here? And exactly what “favouratism” has Israel shown Israeli Christians and Druse over Muslim Arabs? (I suggest that Shirin speak with Christian citizens of Nazareth about what they constantly say concerning the Muslim takeover of the town.)

Incidentally. I walked in late to the party, but this is an interesting and revealing part of the comments. Helena writes: I know that in Israel, the USSR, and elsewhere, Jewishness is officially categorized as a nationality. I’m not quibbling with that, at all. In the US and some other countries, however, jewishness is generally thought of (and officially categorized, as much as that happens) as a religion, instead.
Well, this is sort of important, because it goes to the core of the rejectionist ideology.
The Israeli state was, as I understand it, founded under a relatively important tenet of international law — the right of peoples to self-determination. The people in question, of course, being the Jewish one. The manner in which that self-determination was exercised, etc. is, of course, a whole other discussion. That’s not the point here.
Those who reject any such right do so on the premise that, well, Jews don’t constitute a people, “just” a religion. And, of course, if Jews are no nation, then how could they possible enjoy basic national rights under international law?
Now, like many Jews I hold that to be an antisemitic and fundamentally racist position. But that’s not the point here, either. The point is only to point out that that’s sort of the root of the problem. Yes, it’s patently obvious that nations (peoples) are “social constructions”, albeit ones that are reproduced and cemented by a rather staggering range of material and affective resources. The thing, though, is that these social constructions are the basis of the Westphalian system of international law.
If there is no such thing as a Jewish people — just a bunch of white Europeans, fantastically exotic Yemenites, Khazar-descended fakers, and other stereotypes, all bound by some religious thingy — then, agreed, Israel has no right to exist. The thing is, well, that just isn’t the case.

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