So... no threads about Israel and Gaza, eh? (2014)

[Popular]

I'm cutting and pasting from someone's facebook page (I haven't figured out how to post the picture they are referring to):

If you are not from Israel, you probably never saw this guy's picture before.
His name is Matan Gotlib and he is one of the Israeli soldiers who got killed this week.
Matan was on a mission in Gaza, during which he was approached by Palestinian kids who were asking him for help and led him to a U.N. run clinic. It turned out that the place was booby trapped and when Matan entered the building, the whole place exploded killing him and two of his fellow soldiers – Omer Hay and Guy Algranati. Helping these kids turned out to be a the biggest mistake Matan ever did. It is not surprising though that he made that decision. These are the values he grew up on – to reach out to a helpless person in need. He didn't just grow up on these values, he also acted upon them in the most dangerous of times and in the most dangerous of places.
I don't know what ended up happening to those Palestinian kids in this story, whether they ran away or got killed in the explosion as well. But I know one thing for sure - The Hamas doesn't care about them, just like it doesn't care about any of the other Palestinian civilians it forces to act as human shields. It is hard to comprehend how people can have total disregard to their own people's lives, but this is terrorist mentality and this is the Hamas mentality. They started this war to get as many Israeli and as many Palestinians dead as possible. This is their goal and they will stop at nothing to achieve it.

When you think about Israeli mentality and values, remember Matan, Omer and Guy.
May they rest in peace.

[HorseTears]

Popular, I think it's worth noting, again, that it is possible to be critical of IDF methods and tactics while still feeling enormous sympathy for the deaths of young Israeli soldiers. Just as it's possible to feel sympathy for the death and destruction in Gaza without being supportive of Hamas.

I got a little choked up reading about Matan Gotlib and his last letter home to his family (see link below) in the Jerusalem Post. He seemed like such a sweet kid. And he really was just a kid. I certainly wasn't 'grown up' at 21. I think in this country during the height of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was easy for many of us to grow indifferent to the deaths of young American soldiers because so many of seemed to come from tougher socio-economic backgrounds than we do. But in Israel, of course, with conscription, IDF soldiers come from all walks of life.
Matan Gotlib and Omer Hay laid to rest

[henrikegerman]

Henry Siegman's interview on Democracy Now. Meanwhile CNN is getting trashed by Israel for being too balanced.
Siegman Interview

[PalJoey]

This was just posted by Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of the gay and lesbian synagogue in New York, Congregation Beth Simchat Torah:

At services Friday night, at CBST we listed the names and ages of all the Palestinian children killed along with all the Israelis killed.

***

Dear Friends,

First of all let me say, I totally understand the evil that Hamas represents, abhor the anti-Semitism that is flooding our world, and consider myself a (brokenhearted) Zionist. I also welcome all the debate and those who disagree with me. There are many truths we must hold if we are to remain human. On Friday night I wanted to make sure we don't forget the tragic tragic human cost of the war in Gaza, Israelis and Palestinians alike. I am pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian and pro-peace. There are no simple answers -- but I cry for those who suffer. God help us if our hearts become so hardened that we stop. I do believe that if a synagogue doesn't engage in the most pressing moral and political issues of the day, it is not fulfilling one of its essential functions. We will be debating and discussing these issues for a long time -- let's remain in thoughtful and civil discussion. Maybe another way the LGBTQS synagogue could be trendsetting!

[Popular]

Food for thought...
Boycott Israel

[PalJoey]

He's terrific.

[lovepuppy]

Fantastic and an eye-opener for...closed-eye and closed-minded folks. Worth sharing.

It is a bit ironic that he encourages people to "read the news" and yet shows the NYT at the end. As if they haven't been biased against Israel most of the time...

[lovepuppy]

Also, very interesting video just posted today via the IDF page on FB. A reporter from India saw Hamas members set up a rocket from his hotel room, right in the middle of a very populated, residential area in Gaza:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=829264703763068&set=vb.125249070831305&type=2&theater

In case the link doesn't work, it was a reporter from New Delhi, for their network, "NDTV," in case it needs to be searched.

[~~tiny3~~]

great LINK, LOVEPUPPY. How come this FACT!! isn't on CNN, BBC, FOX, CBS, NBC, ETC?? Shame, shame, shame..

I'll just say it right out - I'm so goddam disgusted with entire mainstream media's "denouncement/villainization" of Israel, as if it's the evil empire. Just disgraceful. HAMAS IS A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. What's so hard to understand? They have been lobbing THOUSANDS OF MISSILES INTO ISRAEL FOR A DECADE. Where's the daily MSM reportage?

[lovepuppy]

Actually, it's about 10 decades, as an article recaps in the most recent issue of JUF News, if you receive it.

But yes, you are correct. While I try to maintain an even-keel on the "outrage" thing, I try to just present information, present facts, no matter who I'm talking with, on whatever subject, in whatever form. Outrage is called for in this case, for sure. I just find it exhausting, generally speaking. But thought it was a very contemporary "digestible info for the Millenials" way to describe and share this info on the ills of the world and put it in perspective.

[PalJoey]

Here is the link to the actual page of the television network in India. It might be more persuasive to skeptics than a link to the IDF's Facebook page, which would be dismissed by anyone anti-Israel as propaganda.

I have shared this with several of my most virulently anti-Israel friends and one even pronounced it "credible."


NDTV Exclusive: How Hamas Assembles and Fires Rockets

[henrikegerman]

I have a very hard time accepting that the mainstream media is biased against Israel. I am not anti-Israel. I grew up in a conservative Jewish home and congregation and a country which for the most part accepted Israeli policy at all turns. To this day I do not consider myself anti-Israel

But Israel is the only country in the world whose occupation of other people and territory has or would ever be accepted as a given. It is the only country which began in the middle of the 20th century with world approval whose identification as a state with a religion and ethnicity is accepted, as if this fact - as unAmerican in conception as one could possibly imagine - couldn't be more wholesome or natural. Even the media coverage that gets attacked rarely gets criticized for pointing this out, it rarely if ever does point this out. Instead it gets attacked for describing and portraying Israel's overreach, for Israel's killing civilians, for its strikes on schools and UN sites, and at most for its not doing enough to foster a two state solution - as if a two state solution were taken as the default right thing to do. Where else in the world would Americans ever think of supporting a two state divide based on religion and ethnicity?

Yes, Hamas is horrible, but so - as a great many Israelis say every day - is Israel. The unlawful and perpetually increasing occupation, the history of genocide and displacement, the blockade of Gaza by both Israel and Egypt. The rhetoric of certain powerful Israeli politicians which is just as virulently supremacist and intolerant as that of Hamas - and just as terrorist.

Indeed, what would the U.S. do if it were attacked with missiles?

But what would we do if we were blockaded and our children were starving? If we had had our land taken away from us or shifted from one colonial power to another? Or, if when our particular localized occupation ended, we were isolated because our occupier didn't like the people we elected to office?

My point is that when I turn on CNN, I hear the first question asked repeatedly - and it's a question that should be asked. But how often do I hear these other questions? Rarely if ever.

[Phantom of London]

Wow, no one can accuse of being biased, great post.

[PalJoey]

Referring to Israel as "genocidal" is inaccurate and deliberately inflammatory.

However, since the Hamas charter calls for the "obliteration" of Israel and the extermination of Jews everywhere ("our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave"), it can and should be referred to as "the avowedly racist and genocidal Hamas."

The media bias against Israel that cannot be disputed is that only Israel is described in those pejorative terms. The avowedly racist and genocidal Hamas is given a pass by the European and American media, academia, and (to its everlasting shame) the Left.

[tazber]

But what would we do if we were blockaded and our children were starving?

Well for starters we probably wouldn't have voted a terrorist organization to govern us.

We also would probably also find a way to compromise/negotiate that wasn't based on us perpetrating genocide of whatever country was bombing us.

Israel is a unique country with unique challenges that impact the very existence of not just the state, but of an entire culture.

These silly straw man comparisons are nothing more than false equivalencies designed to condemn the only democracy in the Middle East in the name of "morally justified anti-antisemitism"

It's bull****. Hamas wants every Jew in the world dead. Hamas want's its own citizens to "martyr" themselves for the sake of P.R. Hamas wants to create a ISIS style state.

They are not good. They are not defensible.

[henrikegerman]

I respectfully disagree with you.

The Bush administration was a state terrorist organization and we revoted it into office. And that is far from the only time our country has committed war crimes and terrorist acts.

The founders of Israel included terrorists. The Irgun was a terrorist organization. Israel voted into office executives who were former members.

Israelis officially terrorized and killed Palestinian civilians and appropriated their properties thus compelling the population - 700,000 of them - to become refugees in the 1940s. Israelis involved in this have admitted such, conceding that they were involved in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. a campaign just as hateful as those that produced mass Jewish diasporas from the same land across the centuries. That, my friends, is genocidal.

The fact is that the situation is complex and there have been atrocities on both sides. But to argue that the American media is biased against Israel is to me completely unpersuasive.

The fact is that until people realize that both sides are complicit in a perpetual **** show the conflict is never going to have even a small chance of improving for anyone.

[PalJoey]

The only truth in the your post is that "until people realize that both sides are complicit in a perpetual **** show the conflict is never going to have even a small chance of improving for anyone."

[Phantom of London]

Another great post from henrick.

How can the American media be anti Israel especially New York? People joke that New York is Israel's second capital city. Isn't the New York Times owned by Jews?

[tazber]

henrik,

Perhaps the media that you're following isn't biased. But some of the media I'm following is most definitely biased against Israel.

It seems all media has a bias these days. Objective reporting is a thing of the past.

The NYT, as one example, is undoubtedly biased against Israel. There's not much worth in debating that point, you can just read it for yourself.




Israelis involved in this have admitted such, conceding that they were involved in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. a campaign just as hateful as those that produced mass Jewish diasporas from the same land across the centuries. That, my friends, is genocidal.

That is just simply not true. False. Bogus. Made up.

The Jews have never systematically participated in ethnic cleansing.


I'm going to assume you got that from one of your media sources that isn't biased against Israel.

[henrikegerman]

Joey, you don't consider the massacres at Deir Yessin (194 and at Sabra and Shatila in cooperation with the Phalangists (1982) terrorist acts?
You don't consider Deir Yessin a genocidal act justified by.... wait for it..... a blockade?
You don't consider an Israeli professor calling for the rape of Palestinian women and children to be genocidal?
You don't consider, for example, the hundreds of thousands of people the U.S. has killed in Indonesia and Central America, the act of a terrorist regime?
You don't consider a high-up in Israel's Home Party calling for the death of Palestinian mothers a call to genocide?
You don't consider what the U.S. has done in Iraq criminal?
You don't consider torture a war crime?

You don't believe any of this from Israeli historian Benny Morris - a controversial figure from both the Israeli and Palestinian perspectives when he said:

"A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."





from haaretz (2004)

[PalJoey]

You're looking to rehash ancient arguments, and I'm not going to give you the satisfaction.

I will simply quote yourself back to you: "until people realize that both sides are complicit in a perpetual **** show the conflict is never going to have even a small chance of improving for anyone."

Despite that statement, your one-sided view of the complexity of this situation is creepy to me. It reeks of a pseudointellectual Judeophobia that I see more and more among people I once considered smarter than that. I will be more guarded around you in the future, on this as well as other topics.

[henrikegerman]

I don't mean to creep you out. How exactly is my view which recognizes that both sides have committed horrible acts, and is simply asking how the media has been, by any objective view, biased toward Israel, "one sided," let alone creepy?

As for ancient arguments, isn't the Zionist goal of restoring a Jewish homeland in Israel blatantly based on ancient history? Hard to accept that speaking about things that happened in the last 100 years - as well as the many current facts I've referenced - can be considered disproportionately dependent on ancient history relative to Zionism itself.

Moreover, what is wrong with ancient arguments, provided they are part of an effort to understand the present context.

Frankly, I have no idea what the present context portends. If I were king, I would think that there should be a secular nation with freedom and justice for all and without any religious symbolism on its flag or charter. On the other hand, I can't imagine either side agreeing to such a thing. Or rather I can only imagine it in my dreamy head. And I am also perfectly cognizant of how experiments in foisting a vision of nationhood on others, especially when the foisting is done by Americans, results in situations which are often worse than the situations seen to require remedy.

I'm not looking for satisfaction. I thought we were all having a debate about very important and difficult issues. And I believe I've been nothing but civil. I don't accuse you of being other than civil, but I'm beginning to detect possible signs of hostility; unfortunate that it's come to this.

[Someone in a Tree2]

"It reeks of a pseudo intellectual Judeophobia..."

If we as Jews can't look critically (as Henrik has) at the atrocities committed by our own beloved Israel with a clear and unjaundiced eye when we think it's justified, then we are no better than the Christian extremist evangelicals in our own country, or the Muslim extremists throughout the world who defend their own murderous agendas and call all nay-sayers blasphemers.

Judeophobia, like self-hating homophobia, seems like an accusatory brush to paint anyone within a given tribe who doesn't tow the party line. Sorry to say, PJ, but that doesn't seem worthy of you.

[dented146]

Henrike, you can list facts galore and, indeed, many are correct but the final reality is this: The radical Islamic groups, including Hamas want the total destruction of Israel and Jews everywhere. Israel is not trying for the total destruction and elimination of Islam. They are not trying to wipe Egypt or Syria off the map. They just want to exist.

In the process Israel has had to act in a cruel manner, kill innocent people, and alienate most all Palestinians just to survive. Hamas is 100% responsible for all the death in Gaza. During its entire existence Israel has one terror group or another seeking its destruction. There has never been one political entity in Palestine ready to negotiate with Israel who could control the terrorists among them.

Israel is willing to live with others. The others refuse. It's really very simple.

[PalJoey]

Judeophobia, like self-hating homophobia, seems like an accusatory brush

J'accuse, then. J'accuse.

This is how it happens, the ancient game called "Blame the Jews." We are told we are supporting "genocide" by supporting a fight against avowed and determined genocide; we are told we are "not thinking critically" when we look critically at one-sided blame; we are told we are "enforcing orthodoxy" when we object to the bone-chilling blame-the-Jews orthodoxy we see in those around us.

As Howard Jacobson said, much better than I, in the UK Independent during the last time of fighting in Gaza, "And so it happens. Without one’s being aware of it, it happens. A gradual habituation to the language of loathing. Passed from the culpable to the unwary and back again. And soon, before you know it..."

I have no more words.


THE INDEPENDENT, February 2009: Howard Jacobson: Let's see the 'criticism' of Israel for what it really is

[henrikegerman]

Joey, I'm truly sorry you feel about me that way. That I'm a Jewish anti-Semite one-sidedly criticizing Israel in order to revel in blaming the Jews.

I will try to take comfort from the fact that you then most likely feel the same way about Tony Kushner, Ed Asner, Wally Shawn, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Rabbi Henry Siegman, Rabbi Laurie zimmerman, Rabbi Buzz Bogage, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, Eve Ensler, Naomi Klein, the late Howard Zinn, Baruch Kimmerling and Adrienne Rich, Gloria Steinem.... the whole bunch of us who think critically about Israel.

But allow me one moment of ethnic pride:

At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, I happen to believe that if only more people throughout the world and all its demographics thought as critically as so many "self-loathing" Jews do about their own respective establishments, if only more people freely questioned group authority as much as some of us "internalized Judeophobes," then this world just might be a much better place.

Tazber, you wrote:


" Israelis involved in this have admitted such, conceding that they were involved in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. a campaign just as hateful as those that produced mass Jewish diasporas from the same land across the centuries. That, my friends, is genocidal.

That is just simply not true. False. Bogus. Made up.

The Jews have never systematically participated in ethnic cleansing.


I'm going to assume you got that from one of your media sources that isn't biased against Israel."

your assumption is incorrect