User Profile

One point, however, already seems quite clear: equality, justice, cohabitation, and the critique of state violence can only remain Jewish values if they are not exclusively Jewish values. This means that the articulation of such values must negate the primacy and exclusivity of the Jewish framework, must undergo its own dispersion.

— Necessity of Exile by Shaul Magid

There are deep layers of history that will need to be addressed if a genuine attempt is to be made at a resolution. After World War II, Zionism was allowed to become a colonialist project at a time when colonialism was being rejected by the civilized world because the creation of a Jewish state offered Europe, and West Germany in particular, an easy way out of the worst excesses of anti-Semitism ever seen. Israel was the first to declare its recognition of “a new Germany” - in return it received a lot of money, but also, far more importantly, a carte blanche to turn the whole of Palestine into Israel. Zionism offered itself as the solution to anti-Semitism, but became the main reason for its continued presence. The “deal” also failed to uproot the racism and xenophobia that still lies at the heart of Europe, and which produced Nazism on the continent and a brutal colonialism outside of it. That racism and xenophobia is now turned against Muslims and Islam; since it is intimately connected to the Israel– Palestinian question, it could be reduced once a genuine answer to that question is found.

We all deserve a better ending to the story of the Holocaust. This could involve a strong multicultural Germany showing the way to the rest of Europe; an American society dealing bravely with the racial crimes of its past that still resonate today; an Arab world that expunges its barbarism and inhumanity ... Nothing like that could happen if we continue to fall into the trap of treating mythologies as truths. Palestine was not empty and the Jewish people had homelands; Palestine was colonized, not “redeemed”; and its people were dispossessed in 1948, rather than leaving voluntarily. Colonized people, even under the UN Charter, have the right to struggle for their liberation, even with an army, and the successful ending to such a struggle lies in the creation of a democratic state that includes all of its inhabitants. A discussion of the future, liberated from the ten myths about Israel, will hopefully not only help to bring peace to Israel and Palestine, but will also help Europe reach a proper closure on the horrors of World War II and the dark era of colonialism.

— Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe (Page 137)

"... Israel insists that what it does, it does in the name of Judaism, and when its actions are rejected by people around the world, the criticism is not only directed toward Israel but also towards Judaism. The leader of the UK Labour Party,Jeremy Corbyn, attracted of a lot of criticism when he explained, to my mind correctly, that blaming Judaism for Netanyahu’s policies is like blaming Islam for the actions of the Islamic State. This is a valid comparison, even if it rattled some people’s sensitivities."

— Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe (Page 132)

So the Bundists, with their tens of thousands of working-class members devoted to “hereness,” regularly debated the Zionists, mocking them for their “thereness.” The Bund held fast to the belief that Jews would be free when everyone was free, and not by building what amounted to a militarized ghetto on Palestinian land. “Your liberation can only be a by-product of the universal freeing of oppressed people,” wrote the Bundist leader Victor Alter in 1937. Besides, argued Walter Benjamin, “things will go very badly in Europe if the intellectual energies of the Jews abandon it.” Rosa Luxemburg, years earlier, had sparred with the Bund and advocated a universalism unbound by her Jewish identity. “What do you want with this theme of the ‘special suffering of the Jews’?” a friend asked in 1917. She replied, “I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the black people in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch … I have no special place in my heart for the [Jewish] ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” Those lines led her detractors to claim that she minimized Jewish suffering at a time of great hardship. I prefer to see her reaching, however idealistically, for a vision of human solidarity that transcended identity and national borders.

— Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (71%)

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18. 'Anthropological Review,' April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. the break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

— The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. by Charles Darwin (The works of Charles Darwin ;) (26%)

The flip side of the post-World War II cries of "Never again" was in unspoken "Never before." The insistence on lifting the Holocaust out of history, the failure to recognize these patterns, and the refusal to see where the Nazis fit inside the arc of colonial genocides have all come at a great cost.

— Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (Page 260)