Partners for Progressive Israel and its decision to print the PLO emblem with the no-Israel map - by Stephen M. Flatow

It’s more than about a map. Entire generations of Palestinian-Arab children have been raised on an image with a powerful message: All of Palestine belongs to the Arabs. None of it belongs to the Jews.

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
31 August '20..

Partners for Progressive Israel, a left-of-center group that is part of the American Zionist Movement, is in the midst of a 12-session “digital excursion to Israel and Palestine.” Session No. 3, which was held this past week, consisted of virtual meetings with officials of the Palestinian Authority.

The Partners’ official program booklet, describing the contents of the sessions, includes a photo or illustration for each one. For the session with the P.A. meetings, the booklet reprinted the official logo of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which is the parent body of the P.A. The emblem features a map of all of Israel, emblazoned with the words “Palestine From the River to the Sea.”

Why does that matter?

Here’s why. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Israeli left-wing activists started pushing the idea called “the two-state solution.” The premise is that Israel would withdraw to the nine-mile-wide 1949 armistice lines, or “Auschwitz lines” in the memorable words of the diplomat Abba Eban, and a sovereign state of “Palestine” would be established in the vacated areas. The argument is that if the Palestinian Arabs are given their own state in those territories, then they will live in peace with Israel.

The major obstacle to the proposal is that Palestinian-Arab spokesman keeps saying that they will not be satisfied with a state in the territories, but will continue to regard all of Israel as “occupied Palestine” and will fight to “liberate” Palestine.

That’s what makes it so hard to convince a majority of Israelis to support creating a Palestinian state. Most Israelis see the evidence before their eyes, and they don’t believe that the Palestinian Arabs will live in peace. They see the bombings and the shootings—the way Palestinian society glorifies the bombers and the shooters. They hear the speeches calling for jihad and blood. Their blood.

And they see the maps.

By now, the Israeli news media has widely publicized images of the map that appears on the PLO’s letterhead, on the walls in P.A. offices and, most of all, in textbooks in P.A. schools. A map that shows all of Israel as “occupied Palestine.”

(Continue to Full Column)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

Election day in Israel has become a day of mourning for J Street and other Jewish critics of Israel - by Stephen M. Flatow

...Every four years, they delude themselves into thinking that the Israeli left will finally triumph, and every four years they watch in horror as the Israeli left goes down in defeat. It’s like Charlie Brown thinking that this time, Lucy won’t pull the football away. This year’s election outcome was the worst yet.

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
16 April '19..

In the space of 48 hours last week, four Jewish Democrats in Congress denounced Israel’s prime minister, two more Democrats wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post denouncing Israel’s prime minister, and 10 Jewish liberal groups issued a statement denouncing Israel’s prime minister. What a remarkable coincidence!

The allegedly spontaneous three-pronged media assault began with Representatives Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), on the op-ed page of The Washington Post on April 10, absurdly accusing Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu of “sanctioning violence against Palestinians in the occupied territories.” The phrase “sanctioning violence” linked to an article in The New York Times that presumably proved that charge.

One little problem: The Times’ article didn’t contain a single word about Netanyahu sanctioning violence against Palestinians. Whoever provided Van Hollen and Connolly with the “facts” for their article profoundly misled them and sullied their names in the process. Too bad the congressmen didn’t check the facts before signing their names to such an outrageous allegation.

The next day, four other Democrats in Congress—Eliot Engel, Nita Lowey, Ted Deutch and Brad Schneider—issued a statement warning Netanyahu not to take any “unilateral steps” that might interfere with creating a Palestinian state. Which means, of course, a Palestinian state along the 1967 armistice lines—reducing Israel to just nine miles wide.

To sugar-coat their bitter statement just a bit, the four acknowledged that, as they put it: “To paraphrase Abba Eban, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Nevertheless, the congress members demanded that Israel search high and low for an opportunity to create “Palestine” in Judea and Samaria.

(Continue to Full Column)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

.

Destroying Jewish and democratic values in one easy step - by Evelyn Gordon

The left’s subversion of language has thus wreaked long-lasting harm on both Israel and the Jewish people. And all of us will be paying the price for many years to come.

Evelyn Gordon..
JNS.org..
10 April '19..

Distorting the meaning of language is a seductive but dangerous game. It’s seductive because it provides enormous short-term benefits. It’s dangerous because, as two recent examples show, it can ultimately eviscerate fundamental values.

One example comes from this week’s Israeli election, in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party actually gained seats despite multiple corruption cases against him. A survey published in February by a Haifa University political scientist explains why: Most voters for Likud and allied parties don’t believe the allegations because they don’t trust the legal system. Fully 65 percent of Likud voters and 75 percent of haredi voters think law-enforcement agencies are simply trying to oust Netanyahu.

On one level, this is shocking. But on another, it’s not shocking at all because the Israeli left has spent decades successfully subverting the concept of “the rule of law” for its own political benefit.

For instance, Israel’s Supreme Court repeatedly overturns government policies not because they violate any law, but because the justices deem them “unreasonable.” Whether or not a policy is reasonable is a question other democracies leave to the voters. But the left has successfully branded all efforts to curb such judicial policy interventions as “contrary to the rule of law,” and thereby managed to stymie proposed reforms: Most legislators don’t want to “sabotage the rule of law.”

Moreover, in almost every Western democracy, the executive and legislative branches choose Supreme Court justices; only in Israel do sitting justices have veto power over the choice of their successors. Yet the left has branded every attempt to align Israel’s judicial appointments system with this Western norm as “contrary to the rule of law,” and thereby successfully staved off change.

(Continue to Full Column)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

.

Beinart and The Forward : Leftist anti-Zionism whose roots are still in the same anti-Semitic Marxist sewer - by Daniel Greenfield

Karl Marx was right about one thing. There is a struggle between Judaism and the left. For the left to win, Judaism must be destroyed. And Beinart and The Forward are still waging his war on Judaism. And the Jews of Israel are winning through the traditional Jewish strategy of surviving. Every Jewish child born in Israel, every Jewish home that rises on a hill, is a defeat for Beinart, The Forward, and the left.

...Beinart, an anti-Jewish activist of
Jewish descent, is the perfect fit for an
anti-Jewish tabloid of Jewish descent.

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
29 August '18..

Anti-Israel activist Peter Beinart had spent years arguing that Hamas was a potentially moderate organization. Then when he was questioned at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, he played victim.

But as Caroline Glick notes, there was every reason for Israeli authorities to question Beinart’s visit, because the anti-Israel BDS activist had participated in anti-Israel protests in Israel. Beinart was not, despite his claims, detained. He was asked about his participation in that protest by the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. The Center, despite its name, is used by Jewish Voice for Peace members, a BDS hate group, which also, despite its name, advocates for and supports terrorists who attack Israel.

JVP members are on the banned list. Beinart had participated in a protest organized by a group that it used as a vehicle. So it’s completely normal that he was asked about it just as visitors to this country are asked about their membership in prohibited organizations such as the Nazi, Communist and other totalitarian parties. The BDS blacklist that bigots like Beinart rave about is no different than the United States blacklist on anyone who “has used a position of prominence to endorse terrorism.”

That’s the BDS movement.

JVP declared that it was proud to host Rasmea Odeh. Odeh had been convicted of a supermarket bombing in Israel that killed Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner: two Hebrew University students. It called the terrorist an “inspiration” and used the hashtag, #HonorRasmea. That’s using “a position of prominence to endorse terrorism” which gets you banned from both the United States and Israel.

Beinart writes for The Forward, a paper notorious for attacks on Israel and Jews that veer into the anti-Semitic. Typically anti-Semitic Forward headlines include, "3 Jewish Moguls Among Eight Who Own as Much as Half the Human Race” and "Why We Should Applaud The Politician Who Said Jews Control The Weather."

Beinart, an anti-Jewish activist of Jewish descent, is the perfect fit for an anti-Jewish tabloid of Jewish descent. The Forward's rebranding dropped the "Jewish" part of its name in 2015. That was also the year that Beinart accused Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel of a “tendency, to whitewash Jewish behavior.”

"He is largely blind to the harm Jews cause," Beinart railed against Wiesel in terms ominously similar to those used by anti-Semites. Israel, he claimed, "leads gentiles of goodwill to fear that if they criticize Israel they’ll be called anti-Semites." Peter Beinart or Richard Spencer: who wore the bigotry best?

But the gauzy line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is if anything even thinner among obsessive Israel bashers of Jewish origin like Beinart or The Forward’s Jane Eisner, its radical editor who stripped the lefty tabloid of its Jewishness, but not of its poisonous hatred of Jews. On the cocktail party circuit, Beinart is misleadingly billed as a ‘liberal Zionist.’ Like the Holy Roman Empire, he’s neither a liberal nor a Zionist. Neither liberals nor Zionists excuse Hamas or blame the victims of terror for their own deaths.

(Continue to Full Article)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

.

Jewish ethics does not include a pact for suicide-by-good-intentions - by Sheri Oz

...This ingrained humanitarianism is what motivates Jewish leftists to yearn to commit ever greater acts of appeasement and self-denigration, accepting the misnomers of occupiers and suppressors of freedom anti-Semites apply to the Jewish state. Using our own good qualities as a weapon against us has become a modus operandi among leftists, here and elsewhere, Jewish and otherwise.

Sheri Oz..
Israel Diaries..
26 October '16..






Jewish ethics impels us to help the needy and stand up for the oppressed. It is not supposed to set us up for disaster.

* * * * *

Jewish ethics and morality is something we can be proud of. We are instructed to pay attention to the needs of others. For example, it is a mitzvah (commandment) to leave the unreaped corners of one’s fields for the poor (Lev. 19:9), to love one’s neighbor as oneself (Lev. 19:18), to love the stranger/non-Jew (Deut. 10:19), and more. In fact, while only a minority of the 613 commandments concern how to treat others, in common parlance, the word ‘mitzvah’ is used to mean ‘doing a good deed’.

Our sages dealt at length with issues concerning our interactions with those around us. We are entreated to conduct ourselves with loving-kindness (Pirkei Avot 1:2), and instructed in the importance of truth and peace (Pirkey Avot 1:18).

Evidence of Jewish loving-kindness abounds. Whenever there is a natural or man made disaster and lives are at stake, property in ruins — there you will find Israeli humanitarian organizations, sometimes the first ones with boots on the ground. so to speak. There are non-Israeli Jewish organizations that send teams to these sites and many more provide the financial resources that make such missions possible. Sure, there are also humanitarian organizations from other parts of the world, some UN, some governmental, some Christian and perhaps some with other associations. But it seems almost like a Jewish ethical imperative that where help is needed, Jews are there.

We were there in the American Civil Rights demonstrations. We were there fighting apartheid in South Africa.

And here is where I think the Leftists started to lose their way. We have been used to joining up with the oppressed. We were oppressed ourselves and there was a sense of being in the same boat with other oppressed peoples. After all, remember that in the 50’s in the United States, admission to beaches and other places was forbidden to blacks, Jews and dogs. We were not part of the elite, part of the empowered, regardless of how many of us were educated, successful or wealthy. We were kikes or dirty Jews.

And, while it was a frightening position to be in, it was familiar — almost a genetic inheritance passed down from generation to generation.

And then a miracle happened. We pulled ourselves out of the ashes of Europe and out of the Middle Eastern and North African countries that no longer wanted us there and we regrouped in our ancient indigenous homeland. Here we rose up like a phoenix in the deserts and swamps of our sacred land and grew strong. We were no longer pitied. We were admired.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

.

How a white Jewish guy lost his guilt and found redemption - by Vic Rosenthal

...So in the name of Jewish “fighters and dreamers and martyrs and prophets,” he will struggle for “a free Palestine,” or in other words, the end of Jewish self-determination. Well, no one said he had to be consistent.

"...I congratulate you, Yotam, on the
success of your dialectical process.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
05 September '16..

The recent release of the platform of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), which accused Israel of genocide and apartheid against the Palestinians (it has since been toned down slightly), gave rise to a spate of mostly predictable reactions: fury from Zionists, cheers from Palestinians, and a particularly emetic genre of “of course you are right that Israel is an oppressor, and I would never criticize a black person, but maybe you went too far, just saying” literature from guilt-ridden left-wing Jews.

Yotam Marom, 30, is a Jewish “political organizer, educator and writer” who was active in Occupy Wall Street and numerous other causes. He has lived in Israel and has a grandmother who survived the Holocaust. He was arrested in 2014 at the offices of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations where he was protesting Israel’s operation in Gaza. The M4BL platform, which he called “brilliant and powerful” nevertheless made him think about the place of Jews in a Left that some say is more and more anti-Jewish.

Marom, who has totally devoted himself to The Movement, and who spends his days demonstrating for “Palestinians in Gaza, or the Black folks being shot down in the streets,” wrote a long confessional article about how he finally came to the realization that the Left that he is so much a part of, hates Jews:

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

.

How Zionism left them behind - by Vic Rosenthal

...You say that you’ve left Zionism behind, and that’s fine – as long as you don’t adopt anti-Zionism in its place, and don’t assist those who want to wipe us out. Much as it irritates the hell out of you, Israel will be here if you need her.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
04 August '16..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2016/08/how-zionism-left-them-behind/



Hasia Diner and Marjorie N. Feld, two academics, intellectuals and Jews, recently published a manifesto of sorts, entitled “We’re American Jewish historians. This is why we’ve left Zionism behind.”

The existence of yet another two Jewish intellectuals who despise the Jewish state is not news. Their justifications for it and for the “repulsion” (Diner’s word) they feel for Israel are thoroughly eviscerated here by Richard Landes, who points out that instead of actual arguments, all they have are “Palestinian myths – which they have allowed to colonize their minds, and which they regurgitate without any critical thinking at all.” And see Elder of Ziyon’s comments here.

But what makes good scholars, which I am assured that Diner and Feld are, incapable of critical thinking in their own discipline?

For Feld and others like her (but not Diner), the answer is simple: their cowardice in the face of pressure from their friends and colleagues has paralyzed them, causing them to put aside their analytical abilities in favor of joining the herd. When faced with the need for a fight-or-flight response, they choose to fly.

Feld’s own words explicitly describe her terror at being perceived as a political outlier:

From non-Jews I met in liberal and left organizations in college, I first heard strong critiques of Zionism as Western colonialism, as a militarist project, as racism. Very smart friends of mine were articulating these critiques, and they made me terrifically uncomfortable.

A feminist scholar I met at a conference asked me directly if I considered myself a Zionist, and I gave an indirect answer. Her anger became palpable. She nearly shouted: “You’ve read Chomsky, haven’t you?” I had not yet read Noam Chomsky’s writings on Israel, I confessed. As I recall she turned away and didn’t speak to me again that evening. That might be hyperbole, or more likely my own sense of shame. [my emphasis]

She responded by volunteering for re-education, like a good Stalinist:

I reeducated myself, stopping to look at all of the facts that I had bumped up against for years. The 1947 radio broadcast of the votes at the UN that declared the Jewish people had a home and would never face genocide again: I had listened to this recording and this interpretation dozens of times in the sites of my Jewish education. Now I interpreted it anew. The founding of Israel was the Nakba, the great catastrophe, for Palestinians, with ethnic cleansing, destruction, and no right of return.

The utter irrationality of her conversion is shown by the way this historian ignores the fact that the 1947 partition resolution called for a Jewish and an Arab state, which the Arabs rejected, and that the nakba followed the invasion of Palestine by Arab armies.

Diner’s motivations are something else entirely. Her remarks in this short manifesto tell us only that she had “read too much about colonialism and racism to maintain what I now see as a naïve view…” Her romantic vision from summer camp in 1958 of Israel as a socialist paradise was dispelled not only by the acquisition of territory in 1967, but by her belief that Israel has been a colonialist and racist enterprise from its founding. There is no doubt that Diner read Chomsky, early and often. Unlike Feld, she has not been terrorized: she is more likely to be the one who terrorizes.

(Part 1) Leftist Jews: Jewish Uncle Toms?

...Leftist Jews sincerely believe that they are acting in Israel’s best interests. They are, in their opinion, trying to raise the ethical and moral standards demonstrated by leaders of the country so that Israel corresponds to their image of a just and tolerant society. In some cases, leftist Jews may believe that they are successors of those who fought for civil rights in the USA and against apartheid in South Africa. They draw some kind of equivalency between the Palestinian Arabs in Judea & Samaria and the Blacks of the States/South Africa.....However, they are aligning themselves with those who seek Israel’s destruction and not simply redress for crimes they accuse Israel of committing against Palestinian Arabs.

Sheri Oz..
Israel Diaries..
26 July '16..

Credit for inspiration for this two-part piece goes to both Diane Weber Bederman and to Sarah Tuttle-Singer. Diane wrote that J Street Jews (and I suppose others like them) can most accurately be understood as Jewish Uncle Toms. Sarah wrote about privilege. In Part I, I will expand upon Weber Bederman’s application of the term Uncle Tom to leftist Jews; in Part II, I will discuss how Uncle Tomism interacts with a (false) sense of privilege leading to Jewish leftism.

By Jewish leftism I am referring only to the issue concerning attitudes to the Israeli-“Palestinian” conflict, or political leftism. I am not a political leftist. Political leftism stands in contrast to economic leftism with which I do concur to a large extent.

Jewish leftists engage in behaviours that non-leftists see as directly or indirectly harming Israel, whether in the short term or the long term. Harming the Jewish state (either intentionally or unintentionally) can be seen as a form of self-harm. Some critics of the Jewish left call the leftists antisemitic Jews or self-hating Jews.

Defining Self-Hating Jews

Many of us struggle trying to understand the apparent willingness of certain Jews to operate against the Jewish state all the while proclaiming that they are concerned with the well-being of the Jewish state. Many of those, like me, do not feel that calling leftists self-hating Jews is either accurate or really captures the phenomenon.

Surely there are those who hate the fact that they were born into The Tribe. But that is likely not the majority. I am certain that those who act in ways that I see as being against the better interests of Israel, in fact believe that they are trying to save Israel’s soul.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

.

Probably not what Israel’s founders had in mind in 1948 - Stephen Flatow

...which brings us to the final and most misleading part of the ad—the part that concerns Israeli independence. The Abraham Center demands the creation of “a demilitarized Palestinian state.” That’s an oxymoron if there ever was one. No Palestinian Authority (PA) official has ever accepted the notion ofa demilitarized Palestinian state. The very concept was dreamed up by Peace Now activists and State Department officials as a way to get the Israeli public to swallow the Palestinian statehood idea. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the PA did sign an agreement promising that their state would be “demilitarized.” Who, exactly, could Israel rely upon to enforce it?

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
12 May '16..

Marking Independence Day by making Israel more dependent

Just when you think they’ve run out of ideas, the American Jewish left has found a novel way to commemorate Israel’s Independence Day—by trying to make Israel more dependent.

In a full-page ad in the New York Times on Thursday, the S. Daniel Abraham Center demanded that Israel withdraw to the pre-1967 boundaries and accept creation of a Palestinian state.

The Abraham Center’s solution is a recipe for total Israeli dependence—on the goodwill of the Palestinians and the assurances of the international community. Which is probably not what Israel’s founders had in mind in 1948 when they established what was intended to be a free, proud, and genuinely sovereign state.

The New York Times ad began with the usual misleading claims. For example, it alleged that “the Jewish democratic character of Israel is at risk” because “Arabs are today 50% of the population between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Jews are 49% of that population.”

Well, if that’s the case—if the Arabs are already a majority—then how is it that Israel still exists as a Jewish state?

(Read Full Post)

Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in a Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

.

Their Hatred is Not Your Fault - Even Those of You Who Choose to Live in Judea or Samaria.

...What we can do now, however, is simply stand up for ourselves. We can stand up for the Jewish people in the Middle East because they should be stood up for. We have both morality and history on our side and we should not be ashamed to say so. We should not be ashamed to stand up for Israel because Israel is a beacon within the darkness. That may sound a little hokey, but it also happens to be the truth. Whatever that country’s problems and flaws, they amount to virtually nothing compared to the raw barbarism that characterizes much of the rest of the world.

Michael Lumish..
Times of Israel..
06 May '13..

Every once in awhile I wonder why I bother maintaining this blog. I have no doubt that all blog owners, particularly political blog owners, come fact-to-face with this question all the time. I certainly have no doubt that Maryscott O’Connor, the proprietor of My Left Wing - a blog that I was associated with for years under a pseudonym - faced this question continually and probably still does.

Those of us who continue to march forward do so because we have enough of an ego to honestly believe that we have a point of view that needs to be articulated. This blog – my little bit of home turf – is a niche of a niche. It is always going to be a rather small place with a rather small readership. My Left Wing was at one time a rather active progressive-left blog, but it was a political blog with a broad focus.

Israel Thrives does not have a broad political focus.

Our specific focus is the Arab-Israel conflict. That, in itself, immediately chops off almost all of our potential readership. Most people, in truth, do not care about the Arab-Israel conflict and for the life of me I do not know why they should? I do not go around fretting over the fate of the Czech Republic, so how can we expect non-Jews to care about Israel?

Nonetheless, the Jews of the Middle East are a people under siege and that is something that I do care about. It is six million Jews with their backs to the Mediterranean on a tiny slice of land that has been the home for the Jewish people for around four thousand years. Those six million Jews are surrounded by around four hundred million Arabs who, for the most part, do not want them there.

And the reason that they do not want them there, or cannot abide Jewish autonomy on Jewish land, is because of the deep anti-Jewish racism that pervades Arab-Muslim cultures as derived from the Koran and the hadiths. That’s the main reason. That’s the real reason. If this conflict had something to do with Arab rights then the Arab countries would have integrated their brothers and sisters from Jewish land into their own societies, but they did not. If the Arab governments and peoples honestly wanted to create a Palestinian-Arab state they could have done so between 1948 and 1967, yet somehow nobody even raised the question. The great majority of Arab residents in Israel at the time did not even consider themselves “Palestinian” and thus there was no effort to create a Palestinian-Arab state.

We're Talking About The Big “O” in Occupation

Mike Lumish..
Israel Thrives..
31 January '13.

It is one of my ongoing contentions that the extent to which progressive-left Jewry incorporates the “Palestinian narrative” of perpetual and perfect victim-hood into their understanding of the Arab-Israel conflict is the extent to which their views on the matter are counterproductive to the well-being of world Jewry.

This is not to say that there are no elements of truth in the “Palestinian narrative” but merely to suggest that when this narrative is held up to historical scrutiny it is found largely to be a lie. The essence of the lie is that the Jews of the Middle East are the oppressors of an innocent local Arab population with a distinct and separate ethnicity from other Arabs in the region. The “Palestinian narrative” holds that during the latter part of the nineteenth-century, and throughout the first half of the twentieth-century, imperialistic European Jewish colonists stole land from the indigenous Arab population, whom they ethnically-cleansed from the region, under the false belief that G-d is a sort-of cosmic real estate broker. These vicious Jews then went forward to oppress the innocent Palestinians who, to this day, live under a brutal apartheid system leaving them no choice but to resist the Jewish settler-state in any manner possible, including suicide bombings.

Painting with a rather broad brush, this represents the “Palestinian narrative” as it is presented today to gullible and well-meaning westerners, including of course gullible and well-meaning progressive-left western Jews. The degree to which we accept this narrative is the degree to which the Jews are guilty before the conversation even begins. The degree to which we accept this narrative is the degree to which the argument can never be won because the conclusion of Jewish guilt is embedded directly within the fundamental premises of the narrative itself.

(Continue)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook.

.

Honig - Contextualizing ‘Ned’ "anti-Israel activist"

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
25 May '12..

Not all left-wing foreign troublemakers were barred from this country during the recent “flytilla.” Many agents provocateurs recurrently trickle in, among them rabidly anti-Israel activists in the International Solidarity Movement (with the Palestinians). Yet others enter boldly via the wide-open gates of the Law of Return because they are Jews. My cousin, whom I’ll here call Ned, is one of them. His story is of broad interest because he’s not alone.

Ned recently arrived from the US under immigrant status, though he himself probably has no clue how long he’ll stay. He isn’t employed anywhere and has no visible means of support. Someone is footing his bills. But someone always has because, to the best of my knowledge, Ned has never held any job long-term and never forged any career. There must be an organizational benefactor but I can’t say for sure.

Ned and his brother are both products of American Hashomer Hatza’ir inculcation and both remain radically tied to that pro-forma Zionist-Marxist youth movement (even though both are now thirty-something). They seem unable to outgrow the evidently addictive juvenile connection.

Both brothers lived in American communes and both thrive on political activism. There’s almost no radical cause which they hadn’t passionately espoused, even that of the Mavi Marmara. For years they paid sporadic visits to Arab communities in and outside our Green Line and they waxed positively ecstatic over last year’s camp-in at Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard.

It wasn’t long afterwards that the Occupy Movement began springing up, initially on Wall Street, from whence it spread to other urban centers. The brothers were there, very confrontationally there.

Sultan Knish - Power and Weakness in Zion

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
14 February '12..

The liberal deconstruction of Zionism begins with the Jews as the victims and ends with the Jews as oppressors. To understand their mindset it is enough to see a protest banner of the Star of David transformed into a Swastika paralleling the journey from concentration camp victim to concentration camp guard.

There is a certain amount of historical revisionism in play here, and not just the obvious kind. The left had been calling Zionists, Fascists and later Nazis, before there was a modern State of Israel and before the left was hard at work pretending that it cared about Muslim militias and clans who would later be rebranded as the Palestinian people. A meaningless name up there with the South American people.

The reason why the left damned the Zionists as fascists had nothing to do with oppression and everything to do with the left's rejection of a unique national identity for the Jewish people. Even the left leaning Zionist movements still linked nationalism and ethnic identity in a way that the left found reactionary, at least as applied to the Jews. Had there been no Arabs in Israel, the left would still have denounced Zionism for daring to assert a national right for the Jewish people.

Peter Beinart's splashy new book, The Crisis of Zionism, follows this same tired old path, attacking Jews for acting like concentration camp victims when they really ought to own up to being concentration camp guards. Beinart and his defenders pretend that they are cutting edge provocateurs, when they are really advancing tiresome arguments that depend entirely on the postmodern left's construct of victims and oppressors.

Tobin - The Left’s Palestinian Halloween Trick

Jonathan S. Tobin
Commentary/Contentions
30 October '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/10/28/jewish-left-valley-forward-halloween-palestinians/#more-772570

Who destroyed Israel? That’s the question a cartoon by Eli Valley, the Forward’s artist-in-residence, asks in a Halloween-themed fantasy in which he poses in a graphic cartoon which begins with the Olympic Games taking place in Tel Aviv, Palestine in 2052. Going backward, he tells us the demise of the Jewish state was the fault of settlers, Israeli right-wingers and their American friends who refused to accede to a two-state solution, leading inevitably to the United States abandoning an “apartheid” Jewish state. The graphic, titled “Never Miss an Opportunity,” attempts to turn Abba Eban’s famous line about the Palestinians “never missing an opportunity” to make peace on the Jews. But his false narrative is an absurd distortion of both recent history and the current situation.

The problem here is not just that it is the Palestinians who refused an Israeli offer of a Palestinian state in 2000, 2001 and 2008 and have refused to negotiate with Prime Minister Netanyahu even during a settlement building freeze. Rather, it is that the Palestinians don’t really exist in the imagination of the Jewish left. Their actions, the reality of Hamas rule in Gaza, incitement, terrorism and inability to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state within any borders not only isn’t mentioned, it doesn’t even enter the debate. For Valley and other American Jewish leftists, peace is solely in the hands of the Jews; therefore the lack of an agreement is the fault of Israel and its enablers. In Valley’s vision, the true role of American Jewry should be in opposing Israeli policies and sending “reparations” to the Palestinians.

Medad: Very left out

Yisrael Medad
Green-Lined/JPost
03 May '11

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/very-left-out


It has been recently a very difficult time for the Jewish self-styled ‘peace camp’ (as if no one else is for peace) both in Israel and abroad. It would seem that the only thing preventing them from collapsing in spasmic writhing of self-abasement and disgrace is ingrained ideological cognitive dissonance.

Despite an ambience of "peace", local Arabs in the former territory of the Mandate of Palestine, have been engaged in murderous violence. A partial list of the Arab violence would include: five members of a Jewish family who were slaughtered in their beds in Itamar by Arab teenagers from a neighboring village, four Jews traveling in a car killed in a drive-by incident near Hebron, an Israeli-Arab-Christian-Jewish activist working in Jenin who was assassinated by Arabs, a Christian woman who was stabbed to death by Arabs while on a nature hike, a Jewish prayer supplicant who was killed by a member of the Palestinian Authority security force, shot from the rear, while leaving the religious site of Joseph’s Tomb and all the while, incitement continues ( I ; II ;) not to mention that all across the Middle East Arabs kill Arabs.

Those who wish us to surrender the Golan (an area devoid of any "demographic" difficulty) do so knowing now that the person to whom those heights would be awarded, Syria's Assad, has so far in the last month or so killed hundreds of his own Syrian countrymen. How will he act towards those he considers still as the “Zionist enemy"?

In essence, there is no peace horizon but that does not stop the stampede of our peaceniks. For example, here’s my friend JJ Goldberg in his The Forward column proclaiming that:

Abu Mazen, a.k.a. Mahmoud Abbas, has said repeatedly in the last few days that he, not Hamas, is in charge of foreign policy, that he still wants to negotiate and make peace with Israel, he still sees Bibi as his partner. He’s even said that the pact calls for elections in a year; if Fatah wins, it should end Hamas control of Gaza.

But what does Hamas say? Here's a spokesman: