Over at Anne's Opinions, she's tearing up Guardian Israel correspondent Harriet Sherwood. Most of the piece is about coverage of the new anti-BDS legislation, but she added something else that caught my Jewish foodie eye. Anne writes:
In a similar, and totally related, development, Harriet Sherwood reports on McDonald’s withdrawing its McFalafel from Israeli restaurants due to its unpopularity.
So far so tasty.
Then she scrambles her omelette by adding in this nasty little aside right at the end:
"Falafel is thought to have originated in Egypt, although Israel now claims it as a national dish."
Oh! Those thieving Israelis! Not only content to steal other people’s land, now they go and steal other people’s foods! They can claim it as their national dish but we liberal-minded people know better.
Once again Sherwood betrays her bias by inserting an unrelated dig at Israel.
May she stew in her own falafel oil.
This sort of tripe is not uncommon with anti-Zionist types. Assuming as they do that Israelis plopped into the Middle East like Martians from outer space, they are constantly on the lookout for examples of appropriated Middle Eastern foods and such, in order to better define Israelis as fundamentally inauthentic and nonindigenous. I thought I should add a note at Anne's blog, reproduced below:
Lemme ‘splain, Harriet. In 1948, Egypt had 75,000 Jews. Currently, it has less than a hundred. Most of those people headed to Israel, after state persecution and confiscation of their property. In 1956, the Minister of Religious affairs announced that ‘all Jews are Zionists and enemies of the state’, and promised to expel them. Almost no one managed to stay after the 1967 war.
In Israel, these fine people continued to make felafel, and along with other Jews from the region popularized it with the multicultural population of the new nation.
Now, of course, not only is their right of return to Egypt not a potent talking point with left-wing pundits, but even their right to make and eat felafel is apparently up for grabs.
Eejit.
Showing posts with label anti-Semitism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-Semitism. Show all posts
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
A Letter To Jewish California
Read this, and respond:
Dear Jewish Community of California,
Bigotry against Jewish students has occurred on University of California campuses over many years and on many campuses. Jewish students have been subjected to: swastikas; acts of physical aggression; speakers, films and exhibits that use anti-Semitic imagery and discourse; speakers that praise and encourage support for terrorist organizations; the organized disruption of events sponsored by Jewish student groups; and most recently the promotion of student senate resolutions for divestment from Israel that seek to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish State.
Last May, more than 700 Jewish UC students signed a petition expressing outrage at anti-Jewish rhetoric and imagery on their campuses. They asserted that these incidents are as offensive and hurtful to Jewish students as a "Compton cookout" or a noose are to African American students. In addition, dozens of Jewish students from three different UC campuses, who responded to an on-line questionnaire, described feeling harassed and intimidated by the promotion of hatred against the Jewish State and of Jews. Almost all of the students felt that the administrators on their campuses did not treat Jewish concerns as sensitively as they did the concerns of other minorities such as African Americans and Latinos.
In June 2010, leaders of 12 Jewish organizations, including the Orthodox Union and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, wrote to UC President Mark Yudof, expressing their concerns about the hostile environment faced by Jewish students on UC campuses, and calling on him to address this serious problem immediately. President Yudof responded by asking Jewish leaders to have patience and faith in the newly-established Advisory Councils on Campus Climate, Culture, and Inclusion. Over the last year, however, these Advisory Councils have failed to address, or even acknowledge, the problem of anti-Semitism on UC campuses. In fact, the aims and actions of the Advisory Councils since their inception, as revealed by documents released under a Freedom of Information request, show that Jewish students are not a focus at all.
In an effort to convey to President Yudof the deep concern that members of the California Jewish community feel for the well-being of Jewish students, and their distress that the harassment and intimidation of Jewish students have not been addressed by UC administrators in a substantive way, we have created the AMCHA Initiative. AMCHA is the Hebrew word meaning "Your People" and also connotes "grassroots," "the masses," and "ordinary people." It is our goal to bring together Jewish people from all over California so that they might speak in one voice, united in their concern for the safety of Jewish students on UC campuses.
Jewish students, like all students, should be guaranteed a campus environment that is safe and conducive to learning.
Please help protect Jewish students at the University of California by signing the Petition to UC President Mark Yudof protesting the intimidation and harassment of Jewish students on several UC campuses:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LettertoUCPresidentYudof
In order to reach as many Jewish Californians as possible, please circulate this letter widely.
For more information, contact Tammi Rossman-Benjamin: tbenjami@ucsc.edu.
Sincerely,
Leila Beckwith, Professor Emeritus, University of California at Los Angeles
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, Lecturer, University of California at Santa Cruz
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Israeli Books Banned In Scotland
Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.
--Heinrich Heine
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
--Ray Bradbury
Via Virtual Jerusalem: A Scottish municipality has banned from its libraries books by Israeli authors and that were printed or published in Israel.
The West Dunbartonshire Council, consisting of towns and villages west of Glasgow, ordered new books by Israeli authors to be banned from the council's libraries, according to reports.
The ban reportedly was ordered after last year's raid by Israeli commandoes on a ship attempting to break Israel's blockade on Gaza that led to the death of nine Turkish nationals. The ban followed a decision made 2 1/2 years ago following the Gaza war to boycott goods produced in Israel. According to that law, the council and all its public bodies are forbidden to sell goods that originated from Israel.
Read the rest.
Amos Oz, David Grossman, S.Y. Agnon, Batya Gur, Dorit Rabinyan, Sami Michael, Naomi Ragen, Yehuda Amichai, Tom Segev, Orly Castel-Bloom, Dan Pagis, Yoram Kaniuk, Emil Habibi, Michal Govrin...a language, a nation, an entire literature rejected. I'm sure these censors feel themselves quite smugly in the right. I can't begin to express my fury.
We are only just beginning to sound the vile depths to which the delegitimization campaign against Israel is sinking. This sounds fine, now. Books may only be bought from countries with a right to exist...which would be all of them, except for Israel.
I'm making no excuses for the West Dunbartonshire Council. I don't care if they're vicious or well-meaning, ignorant or knowledgeable, they have set out to be part of the mechanism of destroying a nation.
Hat tip to Vicious Babushka, both for being one of the first people to bring this story to my attention, and for the Bradbury quote, which I would have never remembered.
Friday, July 23, 2010
I Am Trying So Hard To Have Patience With Bad History
Alice Walker is trying my last nerve one more time. You may recall that Alice has popped up in this blog in the past, speculating that Israeli sandals are made with prison labor and exchanging racist blessings with little old ladies.
Well, now she's written an introduction to Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation by Saree Makdisi. I will probably never read this book--I imagine that fairly few people will read this book--but the introduction is so very special that I have to share a few passages with you.
Alice begins with what has become a fairly common theme in her writings about Israelis and Palestinians, the analogy that she draws between her childhood in the racist American South, and the situation of the Palestinians. She continues:
After four hundred years of enslavement followed by over a century of brutal harassment and soul thrashing by white supremacists who had all along wanted only our labor or our land (when we, African or Native American people, possessed land) this internalized self-hatred kept people of color in the United States timid and bowed down with feelings of unworthiness and shame. Like the Palestinians of the last Sixty years, since the coming of European Jews to settle in Palestine after Hitler and the Holocaust in the Thirties and Forties, or like the indigenous people of South Africa (or Africa in general) my people (African, Native American and Poor European) could not fathom, for the longest time, what had hit them. After all, who could imagine it?
Please note, once again, that for Alice, Jews living in what is now Israel before the 1930s simply do not exist, despite the fact that in 1914, say, Jews were 7.6% of the population of Palestine, and in 1922, it was over 11%. Once again, also, for Alice, Jews are 'Europeans'. The thought of proud Sephardi families tracing their lineage in Jerusalem back dozens of generations, or of Jews from North Africa and points farther east made refugees from Arab countries simply does not exist in the hypnotic historical fantasy she's engaging in here.
There you are sitting by your own fire, living peacefully with your family and clan, never having harmed anyone (for the most part), praising and worshiping your own peculiar god. In come a trickle, and then a flood of strangers. First, you feed them, offer them a seat by your fire. Let them admire your little ones. Perhaps you generously teach them how to plant whatever grows around your compound. Perhaps you give them a turkey to keep them from starving in what they persist in calling “the wilderness.” Perhaps you lend them a starter set of goats. Living in the lap of generous nature, speaking generally, there is a certain kind of greed and stinginess that is quite beyond your understanding.
And here comes the next part of the fantasy...the simple, tribal, bucolic life assumed to have happened in Palestine before the nasty (not even Poor) European Jews showed up. I think what Alice is presenting here is loosely based on the Thanksgiving story we were taught as children--if she mentioned teaching the Yahud to plant fish in the corn hills, I could be sure--but it does seem to leave out the complex history of the region, in favor of a sort of general sentimentalized fantasy about simple tribal life.
In contrast to that simple, honorable life, of course, is the 'greed and stinginess' of the European Jew, quite beyond the understanding of the innocent and naive Palestinians. Greedy, greedy Jews. Enough said.
And of course, missing from Alice's patronizing portrayal of happy rural Arabs is any understanding that these simple country folk know what Jews are. They have a long history with them. They've banned them from holy sites of their own faith, for example, and occasionally massacred them. Alice refers a few passages back to "being black and living in the United States under American style apartheid. The daily insults to one’s sense of being human. Not just the separate toilets and water fountains with their blatantly unequal lettering and quality of paint, but the apparent determination of the white population, every moment, at every turn, to remind any person of color, no matter how well spoken or well dressed, or how well educated or in what position of authority in the black community, that they were niggers, objects of ridicule, contempt, and possible violent abuse." Yes. That's what it was like to live as a Jew in the Arab world, Alice.
I'm reminded of a seder where I listened as a man told his daughters about growing up Jewish in Baghdad. "We had good friends who weren't Jewish," he said, "but you had to remember all the time that anything could happen." Then he told a story about walking to school while boys threw stones at him and called him a Jew.
But I digress, I digress from Alice's happy ahistorical history of the European Jewish Conquest of the Palestinian Tribal Lands. Let's look at the next paragraph.
Way back in Europe, though, your “guests” have come up with a plan to assuage their hunger for more: more land, more money, more crops, more food, more things to buy and sell, and drawn maps that have your “territory” on it like a large pie, and they are busy dividing up slices of it. You, sitting by your fire, your little ones clamoring for a bedtime story or another mango, date, olive or fig, are not on the map at all.
At this point, please notice, Hitler, who's been so far presumed to be these folks' reason for being here just vanishes, and the Jews morph into full-fledged European imperialist invaders. Please note, also, that I am not actually sure that mangoes were grown in Mandate Palestine. I could be wrong, and Israel does grow mangoes for export now. And this is a dumb thing to focus on. But I'm not sure about the mangoes.
Coming back to your fire, the strangers smile at you, learn your language, as if respecting it, admire your culture. But you notice they’ve brought strange gadgets that they use to measure things. At first you and your neighbors laugh: these crazy people, you say to each other, why, they would measure even the sky! But soon you do not laugh, because they have measured a road that goes right through your living room. They have destroyed all the villages on one side of yours, already. You did not know, because you couldn’t imagine anyone doing such a thing, and besides, you do not understand their language, though they, many of them now, certainly understand yours. Why should you learn the language of your guests, you think.For a long time it doesn’t make sense to make the effort. And when you begin to understand that your guests are your enemies, it seems horrible to you to try to learn to speak their wicked tongue.
I'm deeply intrigued by the way the whole Israeli War of Independence, especially the part where five peaceful, rustic, innocent Arab nations rolled tanks into the fledgling State of Israel, appears to simply not exist in Alice's narrative.
I'm equally impressed at her portrayal of mid-twentieth-century Palestinians as having, apparently, never seen 'measuring gadgets' before.
But mostly I'm appalled. This woman either knows nothing of the history of this conflict she opines so freely on, or she's lying about it to appeal to a certain audience, and either is shocking. Alice Walker's version of the origins of the Israeli/Palestinian struggle is historically false, bigoted against both Jews and Arabs, and based on a twee, prepackaged narrative of the invasion of indigenous lands. Epic fail.
Well, now she's written an introduction to Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation by Saree Makdisi. I will probably never read this book--I imagine that fairly few people will read this book--but the introduction is so very special that I have to share a few passages with you.
Alice begins with what has become a fairly common theme in her writings about Israelis and Palestinians, the analogy that she draws between her childhood in the racist American South, and the situation of the Palestinians. She continues:
After four hundred years of enslavement followed by over a century of brutal harassment and soul thrashing by white supremacists who had all along wanted only our labor or our land (when we, African or Native American people, possessed land) this internalized self-hatred kept people of color in the United States timid and bowed down with feelings of unworthiness and shame. Like the Palestinians of the last Sixty years, since the coming of European Jews to settle in Palestine after Hitler and the Holocaust in the Thirties and Forties, or like the indigenous people of South Africa (or Africa in general) my people (African, Native American and Poor European) could not fathom, for the longest time, what had hit them. After all, who could imagine it?
Please note, once again, that for Alice, Jews living in what is now Israel before the 1930s simply do not exist, despite the fact that in 1914, say, Jews were 7.6% of the population of Palestine, and in 1922, it was over 11%. Once again, also, for Alice, Jews are 'Europeans'. The thought of proud Sephardi families tracing their lineage in Jerusalem back dozens of generations, or of Jews from North Africa and points farther east made refugees from Arab countries simply does not exist in the hypnotic historical fantasy she's engaging in here.
There you are sitting by your own fire, living peacefully with your family and clan, never having harmed anyone (for the most part), praising and worshiping your own peculiar god. In come a trickle, and then a flood of strangers. First, you feed them, offer them a seat by your fire. Let them admire your little ones. Perhaps you generously teach them how to plant whatever grows around your compound. Perhaps you give them a turkey to keep them from starving in what they persist in calling “the wilderness.” Perhaps you lend them a starter set of goats. Living in the lap of generous nature, speaking generally, there is a certain kind of greed and stinginess that is quite beyond your understanding.
And here comes the next part of the fantasy...the simple, tribal, bucolic life assumed to have happened in Palestine before the nasty (not even Poor) European Jews showed up. I think what Alice is presenting here is loosely based on the Thanksgiving story we were taught as children--if she mentioned teaching the Yahud to plant fish in the corn hills, I could be sure--but it does seem to leave out the complex history of the region, in favor of a sort of general sentimentalized fantasy about simple tribal life.
In contrast to that simple, honorable life, of course, is the 'greed and stinginess' of the European Jew, quite beyond the understanding of the innocent and naive Palestinians. Greedy, greedy Jews. Enough said.
And of course, missing from Alice's patronizing portrayal of happy rural Arabs is any understanding that these simple country folk know what Jews are. They have a long history with them. They've banned them from holy sites of their own faith, for example, and occasionally massacred them. Alice refers a few passages back to "being black and living in the United States under American style apartheid. The daily insults to one’s sense of being human. Not just the separate toilets and water fountains with their blatantly unequal lettering and quality of paint, but the apparent determination of the white population, every moment, at every turn, to remind any person of color, no matter how well spoken or well dressed, or how well educated or in what position of authority in the black community, that they were niggers, objects of ridicule, contempt, and possible violent abuse." Yes. That's what it was like to live as a Jew in the Arab world, Alice.
I'm reminded of a seder where I listened as a man told his daughters about growing up Jewish in Baghdad. "We had good friends who weren't Jewish," he said, "but you had to remember all the time that anything could happen." Then he told a story about walking to school while boys threw stones at him and called him a Jew.
But I digress, I digress from Alice's happy ahistorical history of the European Jewish Conquest of the Palestinian Tribal Lands. Let's look at the next paragraph.
Way back in Europe, though, your “guests” have come up with a plan to assuage their hunger for more: more land, more money, more crops, more food, more things to buy and sell, and drawn maps that have your “territory” on it like a large pie, and they are busy dividing up slices of it. You, sitting by your fire, your little ones clamoring for a bedtime story or another mango, date, olive or fig, are not on the map at all.
At this point, please notice, Hitler, who's been so far presumed to be these folks' reason for being here just vanishes, and the Jews morph into full-fledged European imperialist invaders. Please note, also, that I am not actually sure that mangoes were grown in Mandate Palestine. I could be wrong, and Israel does grow mangoes for export now. And this is a dumb thing to focus on. But I'm not sure about the mangoes.
Coming back to your fire, the strangers smile at you, learn your language, as if respecting it, admire your culture. But you notice they’ve brought strange gadgets that they use to measure things. At first you and your neighbors laugh: these crazy people, you say to each other, why, they would measure even the sky! But soon you do not laugh, because they have measured a road that goes right through your living room. They have destroyed all the villages on one side of yours, already. You did not know, because you couldn’t imagine anyone doing such a thing, and besides, you do not understand their language, though they, many of them now, certainly understand yours. Why should you learn the language of your guests, you think.For a long time it doesn’t make sense to make the effort. And when you begin to understand that your guests are your enemies, it seems horrible to you to try to learn to speak their wicked tongue.
I'm deeply intrigued by the way the whole Israeli War of Independence, especially the part where five peaceful, rustic, innocent Arab nations rolled tanks into the fledgling State of Israel, appears to simply not exist in Alice's narrative.
I'm equally impressed at her portrayal of mid-twentieth-century Palestinians as having, apparently, never seen 'measuring gadgets' before.
But mostly I'm appalled. This woman either knows nothing of the history of this conflict she opines so freely on, or she's lying about it to appeal to a certain audience, and either is shocking. Alice Walker's version of the origins of the Israeli/Palestinian struggle is historically false, bigoted against both Jews and Arabs, and based on a twee, prepackaged narrative of the invasion of indigenous lands. Epic fail.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
QUIT Turns Out To Protest Gay Israeli Films
Several people came up to me as I stood in front of the Roxie Theater on 16th Street with my Israeli flag and asked for clarification--who were we? And why were we there? And who were the other people?
You have to love San Francisco. Here is what was going on...
The Roxie was showing Eyes Wide Open,a film about an Orthodox man in Jerusalem, struggling with his sexuality. This was part of Out In Israel, a month-long celebration of things LGBT, Jewish and Israeli, organized by the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco.
Now, if this had happened a month earlier, the Westboro Baptists might still have been in town, and they could have come and protested the gayness, but instead they had moved on, and the film was being protested by QUIT. That's Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism. No, I did not make that up.
QUIT was there because they hate the State of Israel. They were there with pink banners, complaints about 'pinkwashing', and very creepy signs. My friends and I were there because they were there. We were showing support for films about closeted gay men in Jerusalem by holding Israeli flags, rainbow flags, and signs that were much more delightful and amusing than those held by QUIT.
I was struck, as always, by the passion and intensity of the people I find myself across the lines from at these events. The jumbled tangle of anti-Semitism and vague left-political platitudes, turned into something so irrational, heartless and strange that I can barely make out what these folks think they're doing.
The question I wanted to ask, and didn't get a chance to, was this: "Is there another country on earth, no matter what its human rights record, that you would protest gay films from?"
The answer, of course, is 'no', as one of my fellow flag-wavers said briskly. But it does highlight the unique place Israel holds in the minds of her haters--the only nation on earth with no right to even make films about its LGBT citizens, reviled by these 'activists' far more than nations that, say, just KILL their LGBT citizens.
Strange world. Queer, even, one might say.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Fun and Games With Hamasniks
On Sunday, having thoroughly rested up, I headed to Union Square, to be a counterprotester against the pro-Hamas demo happening there.
Specifically, it was supposed to be candelight memorial service, to mourn those killed during Operation Cast Lead, and you sort of feel bad counterprotesting a memorial service. Until you show up, and notice the vile anti-Semitic signage, and the chants of "From the river to the sea", and QUIT standing happily out with their banner, and the paper-mache puppets, and you realize that this isn't a memorial service, this is another dang Hamas rally.
The opposition had the steps leading into Union Square, corner closest to the Powell Street BART, so we lined up on the opposite side of the street, streaming past Max Azria, Victoria's Secret, and the Westin St. Francis, which happened that day to be flying the flag of Saudi Arabia, just to make everything completely deranged.
A fairly low-key evening, really. Cold. Me clutching a sign with a message about gay Palestinians in one hand, and one with the faces of children killed in Sderot in the other, singing "Oseh Shalom" and stamping my feet. Assorted Japanese tourists took pictures--I suspect that we have ended up in many a photo album, as an example of real American protestors. We wound up around six o'clock.
One thing I have not entirely worked out is how to deal with the people who drive by in the stalled traffic in SUVs, waving Palestinian flags and screaming at you, when they roll down the back windows and encourage their small ones to do likewise. I am torn, between stony-faced "Am Yisrael Chai!" yelling, and smiling and waving at the children. Hard to do both, especially when both hands are full.
Meanwhile, Code Pink is still stalled in Cairo, although apparently a group of them are to be let through.
Specifically, it was supposed to be candelight memorial service, to mourn those killed during Operation Cast Lead, and you sort of feel bad counterprotesting a memorial service. Until you show up, and notice the vile anti-Semitic signage, and the chants of "From the river to the sea", and QUIT standing happily out with their banner, and the paper-mache puppets, and you realize that this isn't a memorial service, this is another dang Hamas rally.
The opposition had the steps leading into Union Square, corner closest to the Powell Street BART, so we lined up on the opposite side of the street, streaming past Max Azria, Victoria's Secret, and the Westin St. Francis, which happened that day to be flying the flag of Saudi Arabia, just to make everything completely deranged.
A fairly low-key evening, really. Cold. Me clutching a sign with a message about gay Palestinians in one hand, and one with the faces of children killed in Sderot in the other, singing "Oseh Shalom" and stamping my feet. Assorted Japanese tourists took pictures--I suspect that we have ended up in many a photo album, as an example of real American protestors. We wound up around six o'clock.
One thing I have not entirely worked out is how to deal with the people who drive by in the stalled traffic in SUVs, waving Palestinian flags and screaming at you, when they roll down the back windows and encourage their small ones to do likewise. I am torn, between stony-faced "Am Yisrael Chai!" yelling, and smiling and waving at the children. Hard to do both, especially when both hands are full.
Meanwhile, Code Pink is still stalled in Cairo, although apparently a group of them are to be let through.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Overcoming Speechlessness
I notice that Alice Walker has reposted to her blog an essay entitled "Overcoming Speechlessness: a Poet Encounters "the horror" in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel". I had thought to write something about this essay when I first read it, but I put it aside. Other matters were pressing, and, well, I didn't know where to begin. But now it's back, and rather than grinding my teeth, I'm overcoming my own speechlessness and saying something, hardly everything there is to say, about it.
Beginning:
It's hard to know how to begin to tackle this enormous, sprawling, hateful and clueless essay. Maybe at the top, where there is a picture of Walker posing with "Hamas Sister, Huda Naim, Member of Parliament, and Mother of five children". Maybe just a piece at a time, picking out a piece or two that got my Irish up.
Walker begins the essay with an account of meetings and travels in Africa. She begins with the stories of women in Rwanda and Congo who have survived things that make you want to scream to think of them. And then, she brings us to her understanding of Israel:
Does the willful ignorance take away your breath yet? The "holocaust" in quotes, which doesn't reflect past treatment of Jews but 'future' disasters, the European Jews who passively "were settled" there? The ignorance of the history of Zionism, of the thriving communities of Jews already living in the land, working and living on land they owned? The communities of Jews living in what is now Israel, since Ottoman times or before? The people who came during the ninteenth century, and the first half of the twentieth, to build a country? The non-European Jews who came after the war--oh, Alice, tell me why you think they came from countries they had lived in since the Babylonian Empire was a going political power, lands like Iraq and Egypt? That's not to even bring up the Jewish people's connection to and presence on this land going back to the Bronze Age, which I'm sure Alice doesn't take into account at all.
So this woman knows nothing, nothing at all, about Israeli history, and yet she is going to write an essay about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From the heart, one supposes.
So many Jews.
Alice wants you to know about all the Jews, seeking justice, who went to Gaza with her. This includes:
A Jewish man who was born in Palestine? How could that be, Alice? I thought they were resettled after the war by the Brits. Oh, never mind. I am supposed to believe that Israeli customs officials have never seen a passport issued to someone born in British Palestine before, and treat him like an enemy, because he is 'Palestinian'? Alice, sorry, but this is BS. Your ignorance of the country you see as the stronghold of racism and discrimination is leading you to swallow bubbemeisehs.
Let me tell you another story, and ask why you think this man's wife was not on the bus with you. The grandfather of a woman I know used to go every year, by train, to British Palestine, to pray at the Tomb of the Patriarch. It's a long train ride from Baghdad to Hebron, but he went every year, and then he prayed, not at the Tomb itself, because Jews were not allowed inside, but from the outside, as close as he was permitted to the shrine itself. His children and grandchildren now live in Israel and the United States, because within a decade of the founding of the State of Israel, Iraq was no longer a safe place to live as a Jew. Alice, did your guides introduce you to anyone who could tell you a story like this? Why do you think this man's wife, or his daughter, were not on your bus to tell their stories?
Rubble.
And she describes Gaza, and she asks: If children are not safe playing in their schoolyards, where are they safe?
And I think of pictures of children dead in Sderot, and I wonder at this woman's inability to see more than one snapshot of a conflict.
May God Protect You From The Jews
Alice encounters an old woman in Gaza:
What a moment of solidarity, between the Palestinian woman and the leftist American novelist. A racial slur. Beautiful. But of course, Alice has a reason:
I wonder, Alice, if that might be because you've never bothered to learn the true history and the more complicated stories, and when you hear that from him, you turn off your ears and close your heart. But, no, clearly the ethnic slurs are justified.
I'm being mocking here because I don't know how else to respond. The sheer, stupid, self-justifying ugliness in this passage stopped my heart for a moment.
It's the pretension of awareness that gets to me. The self-anointing as struggler in a cause seen out of context, seen with no historical understanding, or knowledge of the broader world. The photographs with the Hamas 'Sister', with no understanding of what Hamas is, what they have done, who they are. The justifications for everything. The unwavering willingness to be the latest poor dumb American to come along and not look for any hidden truth or moral ambiguities.
May I never have to overcome speechlessness when it comes to lies and ignorance like this.
Beginning:
It's hard to know how to begin to tackle this enormous, sprawling, hateful and clueless essay. Maybe at the top, where there is a picture of Walker posing with "Hamas Sister, Huda Naim, Member of Parliament, and Mother of five children". Maybe just a piece at a time, picking out a piece or two that got my Irish up.
Walker begins the essay with an account of meetings and travels in Africa. She begins with the stories of women in Rwanda and Congo who have survived things that make you want to scream to think of them. And then, she brings us to her understanding of Israel:
Like most people on the planet, I have been aware of the Palestinian-Israel conflict almost my whole life. I was four years old in 1948 when, after being
subjected to unspeakable cruelty by the Germans, after a "holocaust" so many future disasters would resemble, thousands of European Jews were resettled in Palestine. They settled in a land that belonged to people already living there, which did not seem to bother the British who, as in India, had occupied Palestine and then, on leaving it, helped put in place a partitioning of the land they thought would work fine for the people, strangers, Palestinians and European Jews, now forced to live together.
Does the willful ignorance take away your breath yet? The "holocaust" in quotes, which doesn't reflect past treatment of Jews but 'future' disasters, the European Jews who passively "were settled" there? The ignorance of the history of Zionism, of the thriving communities of Jews already living in the land, working and living on land they owned? The communities of Jews living in what is now Israel, since Ottoman times or before? The people who came during the ninteenth century, and the first half of the twentieth, to build a country? The non-European Jews who came after the war--oh, Alice, tell me why you think they came from countries they had lived in since the Babylonian Empire was a going political power, lands like Iraq and Egypt? That's not to even bring up the Jewish people's connection to and presence on this land going back to the Bronze Age, which I'm sure Alice doesn't take into account at all.
So this woman knows nothing, nothing at all, about Israeli history, and yet she is going to write an essay about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From the heart, one supposes.
So many Jews.
Alice wants you to know about all the Jews, seeking justice, who went to Gaza with her. This includes:
A woman in her late fifties or early sixties stood at the front of the bus, as we passed donkey carts and Mercedes Benzes, and spoke of traveling to Palestine without her husband, a Jewish man who was born in Palestine. Several times they had come back to Palestine, renamed Israel, to see family. To attend graduations, weddings, and funerals. Each time they were held for hours at the airport as her husband was stripped, searched, interrogated, and threatened when he spoke up for himself. In short, because his passport was stamped with the place of his birth, Palestine, he was treated like a Palestinian. This Jewish husband sent his best wishes, but he could no longer endure travel in so painful a part of the world.
A Jewish man who was born in Palestine? How could that be, Alice? I thought they were resettled after the war by the Brits. Oh, never mind. I am supposed to believe that Israeli customs officials have never seen a passport issued to someone born in British Palestine before, and treat him like an enemy, because he is 'Palestinian'? Alice, sorry, but this is BS. Your ignorance of the country you see as the stronghold of racism and discrimination is leading you to swallow bubbemeisehs.
Let me tell you another story, and ask why you think this man's wife was not on the bus with you. The grandfather of a woman I know used to go every year, by train, to British Palestine, to pray at the Tomb of the Patriarch. It's a long train ride from Baghdad to Hebron, but he went every year, and then he prayed, not at the Tomb itself, because Jews were not allowed inside, but from the outside, as close as he was permitted to the shrine itself. His children and grandchildren now live in Israel and the United States, because within a decade of the founding of the State of Israel, Iraq was no longer a safe place to live as a Jew. Alice, did your guides introduce you to anyone who could tell you a story like this? Why do you think this man's wife, or his daughter, were not on your bus to tell their stories?
Rubble.
And she describes Gaza, and she asks: If children are not safe playing in their schoolyards, where are they safe?
And I think of pictures of children dead in Sderot, and I wonder at this woman's inability to see more than one snapshot of a conflict.
May God Protect You From The Jews
Alice encounters an old woman in Gaza:
I gave her a gift I had brought, and she thanked me. Looking into my eyes she said: May God protect you from the Jews. When the young Palestinian interpreter told me what she’d said, I responded: It’s too late, I already married one.
What a moment of solidarity, between the Palestinian woman and the leftist American novelist. A racial slur. Beautiful. But of course, Alice has a reason:
I said this partly because, like so many Jews in America, my former husband could not tolerate criticism of Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians. Our very different positions on what is happening now in Palestine/Israel and what has been happening for over fifty years, has been perhaps our most severe disagreement. It is a subject we have never been able to rationally discuss. He does not see the racist treatment of Palestinians as the same racist treatment of blacks and some Jews that he fought against so nobly in Mississippi.
I wonder, Alice, if that might be because you've never bothered to learn the true history and the more complicated stories, and when you hear that from him, you turn off your ears and close your heart. But, no, clearly the ethnic slurs are justified.
I'm being mocking here because I don't know how else to respond. The sheer, stupid, self-justifying ugliness in this passage stopped my heart for a moment.
It's the pretension of awareness that gets to me. The self-anointing as struggler in a cause seen out of context, seen with no historical understanding, or knowledge of the broader world. The photographs with the Hamas 'Sister', with no understanding of what Hamas is, what they have done, who they are. The justifications for everything. The unwavering willingness to be the latest poor dumb American to come along and not look for any hidden truth or moral ambiguities.
May I never have to overcome speechlessness when it comes to lies and ignorance like this.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
The War Against The War On Christmas Reaches New Depths of Barely-Contained Anti-Semitism
In a cryptic rant on Salon, apparently mostly about how Unitarian Universalists shouldn't mess with "Silent Night", Garrison Keillor writes:
And so the gloves come off. Mr. Keillor, I'm really, really sorry that you're feeling so victimized at this time of year, but since your private religious holiday takes over Western Civilization for approximately six to eight weeks on an annual basis, please forgive me and Irving Berlin and Mel Torme for failing to give you enough cultural distance to feel that your holiday remains free of Jewish trash and dreck.
Mysteriously, after years of War-On-Christmas nuts moaning about the trauma of having to hear "Happy Holidays" in the stores, the second comment on this screed reads:
Merry Christmas, Mr. Keillor. And I really mean that...in the same way Ann Coulter does.
This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for
it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up
the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did
one of our guys write "Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we'll
blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah"? No, we didn't.
And so the gloves come off. Mr. Keillor, I'm really, really sorry that you're feeling so victimized at this time of year, but since your private religious holiday takes over Western Civilization for approximately six to eight weeks on an annual basis, please forgive me and Irving Berlin and Mel Torme for failing to give you enough cultural distance to feel that your holiday remains free of Jewish trash and dreck.
Mysteriously, after years of War-On-Christmas nuts moaning about the trauma of having to hear "Happy Holidays" in the stores, the second comment on this screed reads:
Give 'em hell, Garrison! And don't forget: Don't say Merry Christmas...unless you really mean it.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Keillor. And I really mean that...in the same way Ann Coulter does.
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