And Ahed Tamimi, who has publicly called for stabbings and suicide bombings, is decidedly no Rosa Parks - by Vic Rosenthal

In case anyone needs a refresher, the Jews didn’t kill Jesus, we didn’t poison wells, we didn’t start all the wars of the 19th century, we didn’t stab Germany in the back, we didn’t cause the Bolshevik Revolution, we didn’t poison Arafat, we didn’t knock down the Twin Towers, we didn’t make Bush invade Iraq, we didn’t create ISIS, the PLO is not the NAACP, we aren’t responsible for the actions of American police – and certainly not for the choices made by Donald Trump. And Ahed Tamimi, who has publicly called for stabbings and suicide bombings, is decidedly no Rosa Parks.

Victor Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
07 December '18..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2018/12/blame-the-jews/

“Ahed Tamimi is the Palestinian Rosa Parks” – Aljazeera headline for an article by David A. Love

One of the most illogical – indeed, embarrassingly stupid – ways to criticize Israel is to make an analogy between the “plight of the Palestinians” and the condition of blacks in America, to equate the “Palestinian struggle” to the US movement for civil rights.

And yet it has been highly effective among minorities and on college campuses. It has been used by intelligent and (sometimes) well-informed individuals like Condoleezza Rice, by dog-whistlers like Barack Obama, and by rabble-rousers like Jeremiah Wright. In the age of intersectionality, it is taken as a given that racism against blacks in the US and “oppression” of Palestinians by Israel are similar phenomena, and that opposition to one kind of oppression demands opposition to all.

Progressive ideology insists that racial strife in the US and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have similar root causes, like capitalism (somehow), colonialism, and racism (defined as racial animosity plus power). Progressives like to put the conflict under a microscope with a very narrow field of view, but by doing that they exclude the broader context in which the narrower struggle takes place. The Palestinian struggle is just a subset of the much larger Arab and Muslim struggle to rid the region of Jews and extinguish Jewish sovereignty. Israel has a degree of military power that has so far enabled her to defend herself, but the balance of power – in terms of numbers, financial clout, and even international support – clearly rests with the anti-Israel side.

There is certainly racial/ethnic animosity on both sides, but the hatred that drives Arabs to stab or run down random Jews is only rarely seen among Jews. Colonialism? Who is indigenous, the Jew whose ancestral culture, language, and religion developed thousands of years ago here in the Land of Israel, or the Palestinian whose ancestors most likely came to the land in the late 19th or early 20th century (even as late as 1946), who speaks Arabic like an Egyptian or Syrian, whose religion is the Islam brought to the region by Muslim colonialists from Arabia, and who didn’t even call themselves “Palestinians” until the late 1960s? If there is a “root cause” of the conflict, it is Arab rejectionism, deeply embedded in ideology and religion, and amplified by every input they receive from their media and educational system.

So now consider the black Americans, who were brought to the country as slaves in the most horrible fashion imaginable, and then when slavery was finally abolished, faced systematic oppression ranging from legal apartheid in the segregated South to multifaceted informal discrimination elsewhere. Unlike Palestinians, they are not part of a coordinated effort to ethnically cleanse white Americans from their homeland. Most of their families have been in America longer than many (most?) other Americans. Their struggle against discrimination has been mostly nonviolent.

Original sin and a J-Street U officer's support for Black Lives Matter platform on Israel

...The important takeaway is what George Orwell taught decades ago, "He who controls the past controls the future." If we ignore insinuations that Israel was created through the dispossession of the Palestinians, then we are ceding control of the past to the post-Zionists and the Palestinianists, and therefore we cede to them the future, that is the litany of "Occupation" perpetuating the dispossession from a century ago.

Sar Shalom..
Israel Thrives..
21 August '16..
Link: http://israel-thrives.blogspot.co.il/2016/08/surprise-surprise-jstreet-u-officer.html

Tablet Magazine ran a few great takedowns of Black Lives Matter's platform as it concerns Israel. Unfortunately, they were followed by an article by Daniel May, a past Director of JStreet U, essentially saying that Israel's occupation policy is responsible for BLM's platform. While nearly every paragraph of May's deserves criticism, in particular his parroting of Haaretz's lies, I'd like to focus on his original sin. In the final paragraph, May writes:

Palestine will never advance so long as Jews deny the cost of Zionism. The Jewish nation’s independence was won only through the dispossession of another nation.

Everything in the case against "the Occupation" stems from the accusation the Jewish sovereignty was won by dispossessing another nation. From the dispossession narrative comes the "right to resist" which justifies Palestinian terror and, with such actions being justified, delegitimizes Israel's countermeasures. Hence we see the one-sided description from JStreet and their ilk.

To understand dispossession as it pertains to the "Palestinians," consider a counterfactual from American history. Suppose that when the Pilgrims came to Massachusetts (for simplicity, I will be using present-day names for places), the population of Indian tribes native to Massachusetts was small. However, just before then, a handful of tribes from Quebec had started migrating to Massachusetts and accelerated during the Pilgrims' lifetimes. Subsequently, the Pilgrims' descendants stopped the inflow from Quebec and imposed population controls on the Indian population in Massachusetts, affecting the Quebec tribes because they were the larger presence. Would such an action constitute dispossession for the Quebec tribes? Such is the case with the Palestinians.

While it is true that Arabs were the majority of the population of the southwest Levant before the advent of Zionism, it does not follow that all non-Jewish population change was the result of natural growth. In the decades before the first Aliya, the Ottomans started moving population from other parts of its empire to the southwest Levant. A larger impetus for immigration was the economic development created by the Zionists. The result is that as the Jewish population rose due to Zionist immigration, so did the Arab population due to Arab immigration. Neither the Ottomans nor the British attempted to document how many Arabs thus entered Palestine. Thus, we have no reliable numbers for how many entered or what percentage of those claiming to be Palestinian have actual ties to the southwest Levant from before the first Aliya. Thus, the dispossession narrative claims that denying sovereignty to immigrants from Arabia and Egypt is dispossessing those immigrants.