[quote=""columbus""]
cnorman18;248706 wrote: I suggest we return to discussing the book, as opposed to whatever this is.
Are you willing to discuss Chapter 2, or are we going to continue with assumptions, facts not in evidence, and slanted characterizations of the matters we're supposed to be discussing? Where I come from, that's called "begging the question" -- assuming that Israel Is Wrong is one of the given parameters of the discussion. Don't remarks like "stoking the fires of war" and "obviously wrong" rather prove my point about that?
Chapter 2?
Well, I think we are leaving an awful lot of unresolved issues. I'll come back to them later, when I have more time.
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I would agree with that, but thats sort of my point -- these issues SHOULD remain unresolved until we CAN deal with them later,
one at a time and not all at once.
Chapter 2, like 1 and 3, has as an accusation a totally unnuanced statement. The only why to give an unnuanced response, such as "true or false", is to take the strictest possible interpretation. So strict as to become irrelevant to the situation in 2011 CE. This is why I thought them unimportant chapters.
Uh, not so fast. The accusation in EVERY chapter is given in one sentence; thats the structure of the book. But -- to judge it
fairly -- the nuances, etc., are given in the lengthier following section, called The Accusers, from which you have quoted twice now. THOSE are the statements which are rebutted by Dershowitzs arguments.
In the present case, as long as critics of Israel -- yourself, for example -- are going to keep bringing up the initial foundation of Israel in discussions like this one, those events are not irrelevant to the situation in 2011 CE.
While the accusation in 1 was clearly false, the accusations in 2 and 3 are clearly true.
Ah, so now I have my answer; you regard those chapters as not worth discussing because Dershowitz is obviously wrong. In that case, it should be easy for you to analyze, dissect and counter his arguments. Lets see how you do:
The accusation is "The European Jews who came to Palestine displaced Palestinians who had lived there for centuries." If even a few European Jews now live on land that used to be occupied by indigenous people, who did not leave happily, then the accusation is true. It is obvious that this did happen. The question is how much did this happen and how relevant is it? Like almost everything else about this situation it's largely a matter of interpreting the words and opinions.
Note my italics again. Note, too, the part of the accusation which reads,
who had lived there for centuries. Well get back to that presently.
Lets back up and take a look at the statements you do NOT quote in The Accusers, and see if they are talking about even a few European Jews:
First quote:
The Jews stole our land. What else do you want us to do, just go away?
Hmm. No
nuance there -- no qualifications of any kind, no recognition that ANY Jews obtained ANY land in Palestine in any way other than stole it. Unqualified statements -- "The Jews" -- can be read in no other way. There's nothing about "a few Jews" or even "some Jews" here.
Second quote:
The Jews hate the Arabs. They hate the Palestinians because the Jews stole the land of the Arabs and Palestine. A thief hates the owner of the right.
Not much nuance there either; again, ALL Jews are alleged to have stolen ALL the land that they occupy.
Third quote:
Zionists
conceived their plan for a colonial-settler state in Palestine, as they went about executing this plan on the backs of imperialist powers -- with wars, massacres, and ethnic cleansing -- and, later, as they have persisted in their plans to dispossess the Palestinians of the last fragments of of their rights and legacy whose Canaanite roots were more ancient than Isaiah, Ezekiel, David and Moses.
And more of the same. In NONE of these are land purchases even alluded to or acknowledged to exist. No sign of in a few cases or even in some cases. These are blanket accusations, and are intended to be.
The fourth quote is about the thousands and thousands of years that the Palestinians inhabited this land (an aspect of the accusation that you did not address, and to which we shall return in a moment) and makes no direct reference to the Jews stealing it. And the fifth quote you have already posted, below.
I ask you;
is it either fair or accurate to take quotes and accusations which very clearly indicate that
all or nearly all of the land which Jews occupy today was
stolen -- and you know and I know that that is
exactly the way that that accusation is normally phrased, and
exactly the meaning that it is usually intended to convey,
as it indisputably was in these quoted accusations -- and say that it is TRUE if
even a few Jews now live on land that was once occupied by Palestinians?
Blacks are criminals. Is that true if
even a few are? That would be equally fair, would it not?
Its one thing to claim that an accusation is extreme and given without nuance, even though nuances are clearly indicated a few lines later -- and I object to that; but its another, and much more problematic, thing to go on to claim that
that very extreme and unnuanced argument is totally valid -- in your words, "clearly true" --
if it is valid in only very small part, and I object to that very much more.
Now, before we go on, I must remark upon somehing that is becoming a pattern: in both Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, you have quoted from The Accusers, but have said nothing -- nothing at all -- about Dershowitzs arguments to counter those charges; you have not quoted them, nor even alluded to them, never mind rebutted them or explained why you reject them. It appears as if the only things you have read were the accusations, with which you agreed, and read no farther. From reading your posts, I can see no evidence that you have done anything else.
Now I know that is
not what you have done; so I have to ask -- I mean, I HAVE to ask -- why do you have nothing to say about Dershowitzs responses to these accusations, when the very point of this thread, I thought, was to give a fair hearing to the Israeli side of these issues?
(Parenthetically, I would add that you have not yet commented or responded in any way to my repeated objection to the "one-state solution," to wit, that it would leave the Jews a minority in a state numerically dominated by a hostile and largely antisemitic population -- much the same situation that the original Jewish refugees from Europe were fleeing. If some of these issues are being left unresolved, I'm not the only one leaving them that way. I just didn't want you to think I hadn't noticed.)
Lets continue with another quote from The Accusers, the one chosen by you:
D quoted Noam Chomsky: "So there are two national groups which claim national self-determination. One group is the indigenous population, or what's left of it--a lot of it's been expelled or driven out or fled. The other group is the Jewish settlers who came in, originally from Europe, later from other places. So there are two groups, the indigenous population and the immigrants and their descendants".
Aside from calling the indigenes a "national group", which is problematic since there has never been a nation of Palestine, Chomsky is dead on.
Yes, he is, at least in part. He says that both sides
claim national self-determination, and that, at least, is perfectly true.
To what extent the Palestinians can be said to be any more the indigenous population than the Jews -- and, another issue thats rarely even acknowledged in this sort of discussion, to what extent it can be correct to say that there were
only two groups -- is rather another matter.
Of course, the Jews weren't either, prior to colonial intervention. The fundamental problem I see with all of this is that neither the Jews nor the Palestinians have been a nation in living memory, and their only important differences(prior to a few decades of war) were religious and cultural. They were both peoples that did their own thing outside of arbitrary boundaries. It is unfortunate that their cultures and religions clashed so much.
Well, they didnt always, and they dont have to now; but thats another matter. Lets get back to the accusations at the head of Chapter 2, and Dershowitzs arguments against them.
Briefly -- I dont really see why I should have to retype pages and pages of material -- his arguments are these, and he supplies references and footnotes aplenty to prove them:
The Palestine to which the European Jews of the First Aliyah immigrated was vastly under populated, and the land onto which the Jews moved was, in fact, bought primarily from absentee landlords and real estate speculators. The land was not empty, but the areas where the Jews bought (not stole) land largely was, and
very few Arabs indeed, if any, were displaced. David Ben-Gurion, former Prime Minister of Israel (and former terrorist, if you like) instructed the Jewish refugees never to buy land belonging to local fellahs or worked by them.
In many places, Arabs and Jews worked the land side by side; in fact, one reason that the Arab population of what is now Israel expanded AFTER the Jews began to move in was that the Jews, in developing the land and building towns and infrastructure, provided jobs and a higher standard of living for the Arabs of the region; there was more water, better medical care, and better sanitation, all of which was introduced by the Jews from Europe. In other words, most of the Arabs in what is now Israel were immigrants too, who moved there at about the same time!
Moreover, the inhabitants of the land who WERE there when the Jews came were not only Arabs; the local population, sparse as it was, was also made up of Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Kurds, Germans, Persians, Sudanese, Samaritans, Tatars, Georgians, many people of mixed ethnicity --
and Jews. As is mentioned in later chapters, there were ancient Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron, and many other places in Palestine -- villages where Jews had lived since Roman times.
The idea that the Palestinians had lived there for thousands of years, and that the Jews displaced people who had lived there for centuries, are simply -- shall we say -- hugely exaggerated, and to a very large extent simply false. This isnt Zionist fantasy; its historical fact, established by demographic studies and writings of the time.
There is much, much more in this chapter; I dont have the time or the inclination to type it all. Again, I have to wonder why you only quoted Chomsky, agreed with him, and had nothing to say in the way of rebuttal, reply, response, or indeed any comment at all, on the rest of this chapter.
Once again; this material is not irrelevant. The usual narrative that is assumed to be true when criticism of Israel appears -- that Palestine, empty of Jews and filled with happy, peaceful Palestinians, was suddenly and violently invaded in 1948 by European Jews who massacred them, stole their land, and established a nation based on apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and military aggression -- is not even a caricature; it is an antisemitic cartoon with no relation to the truth at all. Jews had ALWAYS lived in Palestine; Jews were BUYING land, legally and from legal Arab landowners, from 1882 and earlier; and whereas SOME Palestinians WERE driven off their land by force,
virtually all of that happened during the War of Independence, which took place AFTER partition. We shall get to that later; but for the moment, the beginnings of Israel had nothing whatever to do with stolen land or foreign invaders. It had to do with peaceful immigrants, purchasing land legally and working it with their own hands.
The accusations at the head of this chapter are false, in general and in detail.
PS~ did you happen to see the top BBC story right now? Palestinian refugees are fleeing Syrian government bombardment in Latakia as Assad moves to crush his enemies. ~
Yes, I did, but I dont see how its relevant to this discussion. Assad is
almost properly named; the last two letters of his name should be replaced with -hole.
