Sad post

here:

Apparently, I am a Jew Faggot.

When invective like that is directed at people who are mostly Jewish, because they support Israel (which they do largely because they are Jewish and understand Israel as important to securing their own rights in the world), it hardly matters that the term used is "Jew Faggot." Could be "Zionist scum" or whatever - it's antisemitism.

Also, note at the end of the post:

This tells me that Jews cannot rely on the Gentile world for safety and justice - there just aren't very many people who give a damn about the Jews.
But you already knew that, didn't you?

Jew as Bitch, plus Meretz on Gaza

An interesting editorial at Jewcy:

The debate between supporters and critics of Israel is typically couched in the same grammar: Either the Jewish state is acting defensibly, in its own self-interest, or it is not. Thus Tom Segev writes in Ha’aretz that while the latest assault on Hamas military and political infrastructure is morally justified, it represents a strategic blunder. A major fallacy ensues from this one-sided premise, which is that Israel is the sole stimulus for Hamas response, and therefore it alone bears the responsibility for the undeniable misery in Gaza.

I admit to using this grammar, though I will not admit to laying responsibility entirely with Israel. I think I use that grammar because I identify with Israel, and I'm talking about the choices I would make were I more than merely identified with them. (But I hadn't noticed that.)

But even if this is the reason, not because we infantalize the Palestinians to render them incapable of moral action or because we internalize a myth of superordinate Jewish power (both mistakes, however, seem common), are we focusing on Jews in a strange way? Recently, Deborah Lipstadt wrote:

I must admit when people first began to try to recover their property, bank accounts, and artwork I was a bit discomforted. It was wrong of me to feel that way but I admit to it. As all the attention was focused on material goods it seemed that the tragic loss of life was being overshadowed by the loss of property.

[On some level I had internalized antisemitic charges and was responding to that. But more of that on another occasion.]

One day -- I don't remember what brought about the change -- I recognized I was dead wrong.

Heck, this belonged to those families, why shouldn't they get it back? There's nothing wrong and everything right with their saying: this is mine. It was stolen from me and I want it.

The idea of Zionism was to make Jews normal. Normal people make tragic mistakes, driven by circumstances sometimes partially in their control.

But, also, an interesting nugget from the post that was news to me (despite being, apparently, much remarked-upon):

A much remarked-upon fact of the last 72 hours is that Israel’s ultra-left-wing party Meretz has endorsed Operation Cast Lead, a development that should concern partisans of both sides.

Who'd a thunk of it - a bad nazi?

In the mid-'60s, critic Judith Crist quipped, "[A] screenwriter, with a revolutionary glint in his eye was telling me the other day he's going all-the-way original; he's writing a World War II movie with bad Nazis."

Really, there aren't that many Holocaust movies, when you consider how big an event it was in world history and how many people it touched. This year, however, there are a bunch out for the holidays. (Valkyrie came out Christmas day.) But perhaps people are starting to notice how absurd these films tend to be. (Via)

Seth Freedman on Gaza

Freedman moved to Israel to join the Israeli left, so that that his criticism of Israel could be more effective, in the form of a vote. Though I believe he remains a committed Zionist, his criticism has generally been severe and often crossed some lines for me. He writes at Comment is Free:

For all that I regularly sound off about almost every facet of the Israeli occupation and the government's policies towards the Palestinians, I struggle to see what option Israel's leaders had, other than to take the kind of action that they took this weekend.

Of course I also fail to really see what lasting good this option promises -NPR is now reporting Israeli officials saying they've cut Hamas's ability to launch attacks by 50%, but I wonder how long it will take Hamas to rebuild that capacity- but Freedman is right.

Also, evidence has been mounting that the casualties in Gaza have been almost entirely, somewhere around 80%, members of Hamas's military wing. I've heard similar numbers from several sources now. I doubt any army has ever been that good at preventing civilian deaths, and I doubt such a ratio could easily fail a test of proportionality. There will be further stages of the invasion. I hope they will continue to avoid civilian deaths.

Eric Lee guest post at Harry's

Here:

A Hamas spokesman appearing on the BBC on the first day of the offensive explained that the Palestinian people had the right to defend itself, having lived under occupation these past sixty years. Let’s ignore for the moment the fact that Israel withdrew all its settlements and all its soldiers from Gaza in 2005. Though you really have to ignore that to understand how the Gazans have been struggling against “occupation”.
Instead, let’s focus on how long the occupation has been going on. From June 1967 until today, the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, plus residents of the Golan Heights and earlier on, Sinai, lived under Israeli occupation.

But that’s forty-one years. Not sixty years. Sixty years means that the “occupation” refers to the existence of Israel itself. Even under ferocious aerial bombardment, the Hamas regime tottering, its leaders still think that the very existence of Israel is the problem.

But the better bit is this:

Soon they will run out of the well-worn analogies to Hitler, and then what? Will someone compare what Israel is doing to other mass slaughters?

Let’s see – an effective one might be to compare it to that much larger massacre of Muslims, the one that took place back in 1982. Ten thousand dead, maybe double that number.

I’m referring to Hafez al-Assad’s slaughter of his Muslim Brotherhood opponents in Hama. You will be forgiven if you thought I was referring to something Israel did in Lebanon.

No, the Left will probably not use Hama in its slogans. It would cause confusion to carry banners reading “No More Hamas!” That might be misunderstood.

Just war and criticizing Hamas

Gershom Gorenberg writes about tragedy. Along with some necessary criticism of Israel, I appreciate the inclusion of this paragraph:

Outside of the hammer, actually, Hamas did have some delicate tools in its tool chest. It could, for instance, have proposed indirect negotiations aimed at a two-state solution.That would have caught Israel’s leaders totally off guard, and undermined the political rationale for the siege. I guess that no one in the Gaza leadership considered this for 10 seconds.

Also,

Israel claimed that Hamas wasn’t keeping the agreement. That was true.

It's nice to see somebody who isn't a right-wing Zionist acknowledging that. Hamas didn't stop mortar fire. They didn't (as would be the responsibility of any government claiming legitimacy) stop others from sending rockets. Yet he still frames this within a larger narrative of rising burn injuries during the siege, which I find touching.

Terry Glavin raises questions about proportionality:

In the UK, the editorialists at the Independent wonder whether "counterproductive" rather than "disproportionate" is the better term to deploy in considering, say, a possible ground assault on Gaza: "There are, in any case, problems with the notion of proportionality in situations such as these. No state can be expected to tolerate rockets being launched at its civilians."

Something about proportionality, is that, while it's absolutely central to just war theory, it's ridiculously vague. Ten billion to one is a proportion. So is one tablespoon [butter] to one tablespoon [flour].

Pacifism might be a reasonable alternative. Personally, while I believe in peacefulness and even a radical peacefulness, I'm not a pacifist. But, also, when I look around at the people talking about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I see far too few serious pacifists. So I'll only deal with just war theory here.

What is really meant by proportionality is "in reasonable proportion" What is meant by reasonable is often put off for later discussion. Surely, the word proportional has always implied something different from symmetrical or equal. Though those would qualify as types of proportionality, there's a reason people don't use those terms. There is no rule in just war theory that all violence must intend to result in a draw. So what defines reasonableness? Reasonable to accomplish a desirable end, I would argue. Reasonable to prevent future attacks. In the short term, medium term, or long term? What if efficacy is measured differently on different timescales? The question always leads to more unanswerable questions.

Eamonn McDonagh quotes Fabián Glagovsky:

There is a lot of confusion being put about by those who hate Israel with regard to the question of proportionality. These people make reference to just war theory, of which they have not the slightest understanding. According to some formulations of this theory, military action does indeed have to be proportionate, proportionate to military or political objectives.

Taking sides

There are times when even the most moderate of voices has to take sides. This is not one of those times. It's amazing just how many bloggers I respect have pissed me off today. And some people I don't know have pissed me off more than that.

Someone I don't know, somewhere I won't say, writes:

The family memories of the Holocaust (and the pogroms before that) pain me greatly.

Bull-fucking-shit. These things fucking don't pain you in the least except that it's incovenient for your Jews-are-evil stories. Otherwise, you wouldn't be retelling the same fucked up propaganda about scheming Jews who manipulated history. "Infiltration operations"? WTF?!

The world, since organizing itself into nation states, still fucking can't find a way to make space for Jews. If assimilation or multiculturalism ever had a chance, that ended when political power was tied to nation-states. So take your "one-state solution" back to Hitler-just-went-too-far-land.

Somewhere else, someone I usually agree with writes:

[Israel] should also strive to kill as many political and military leaders as it can.

I doubt -I hope- in a different state of mind he'd include that word "political." Frankly, I'm not in favor of any call for killing "as many" anything. But more than that, though politicians are tied into military decisions, if people aren't military targets they just aren't military targets.

And someone else, I can't repeat what was said too closely because that person will probably read this. But it's right up there with "Those Shylock Jews are all racists." How can you claim to be for inclusive politics when the title of your post is (paraphrased) "They're just not like me." How can you repeat that Christian slur of vengeful Jews, when you know that's a Christian interpretation of Judaism.

This is not a time for taking sides. This is a time for profound humility, for admitting that we can't solve this ourselves. There's no way in hell I can support the Israeli attack on Gaza. What can it possibly accomplish? But I can't bring myself to condemn Israel more strongly than that. There are a million asymmetries here. One is that Israel is more powerful and bears a greater burden of restraint.

But another is that Israel does a far better job of living up to that burden. It doesn't work here to say you're against the rockets coming from Gaza only when someone accuses you of being one-sided. Sorry, that's not remotely a pro-peace position.

And if you think this is a simple story of oppressors and oppressed, you haven't been paying attention.