@FT offered one small news report on the Gaza Massacre and then this editorial :
Headline: Israel’s disproportionate response to the Gaza protests
Sub-headline: Trump encourages Netanyahu to embrace maximalist positions
This observation near the beginning of this ‘editorial’ almost demonstrates that The Financial Times editors are just partial invertebrates, with a talent for articulating the patently obvious :
Celebrating the opening of the embassy during the 48 hours when Israelis and Palestinians are most divided each year in commemorating their very different versions of history was little short of diplomatic arson.
And then this restrained, almost sympathetic treatment of the Nakba appears, as a recognition of a Palestinian reality of Gaza, although as a non-state under siege, from a State that is financed and armed by that ‘honest broker’, remains just offstage!
The contrast between events in Jerusalem and those in Gaza during the past two days is revealing. In Jerusalem on Monday, the 70th anniversary of the birth of the modern state of Israel, Mr Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, mingled with assembled Israeli and US VIPs as they cut the ribbon on the new embassy. In Gaza on Tuesday, the day the Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, or disaster — when 700,000 were driven from their land and homes — thousands gathered to bury their dead.
There is noting new here, except that The Financial Times quotes from reliable American Foreign Policy marionette Richard Haass:
As Richard Haass, president of the US Council on Foreign Relations, noted, the “US played a big card for nothing, weakened its claim to be an honest broker [and] helped to fuel violence”.
https://www.ft.com/content/c01bc910-583f-11e8-bdb7-f6677d2e1ce8
That ‘honest broker’ Party Line is repeated by Senator Dianne Feinstein in her press release with the title:
Feinstein: Israel Must Exercise Greater Restraint Responding to Gaza Protests;
…
Refusing to act will only reinforce the perception that this administration has chosen a side in this decades-long conflict and can no longer be an honest broker to bring peace to the region.”
‘Greater restraint’ is the least offensive critique, that an American politician, in the thrall of AIPAC’s swift destruction of any nonconformism of America’s political class.
The @Economist offers this :
Headline: Israel must answer for the deaths in Gaza
Sub-headline: But it is time for Palestinians to take up genuine non-violence
Even with the equivocation in its Sub-headline, ‘genuine non-violence’ . The Nakba has no political legitimacy and ‘thriving democracy’ for citizens of ‘The Jewish State’ . This opening paragraph is unsurprising in its exercise of Oxbridger withering contempt allied to a corrosive dishonesty. This contempt for the lower orders of humanity, in what ever historical/political context, is the natural inheritance from Oakeshott. Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration were the British Imperial documents that ushered in the State of Israel, aided by the guilt of ‘The West’ over their inaction over the Shoah.
GAZA is a human rubbish-heap that everyone would rather ignore. Neither Israel, nor Egypt, nor even the Palestinian Authority (PA) wants to take responsibility for it. Sometimes the poison gets out—when, say, rockets or other attacks provoke a fully fledged war. And then the world is forced to take note.
Note that the ‘rockets’ are enhanced fireworks, and that the Israeli army strictly controls everything that enters Gaza, a non-state under siege. Gaza is a burden to all respectable bourgeois editorial writes, who tire of the burdens of setting the world on the right path, of the Free Market, and its issue the necessary ascent of the indispensable rule of technocrats and their propagandists. The Human Rubbish- Heap is a product of the misbegotten notion, that the Holocaust required that the Jewish state should be about the dispossession of the indigenous peoples of Palestine. The British Zionist who wrote the above paragraph continues her/his screed but modifies the tone, but not by much.
But Palestinian parties, though weak, are also to blame. Seven decades after the creation of Israel as a thriving democracy, there is a better way than endless conflict and bloodshed.
This is pure agitprop, as the Palestinian demonstrators were armed with tires and Molotov cocktail, the Israeli’s used live ammunition and sharp-shooters to murder unarmed civilians: weapons provided by America!
But the reader is unprepared in this exercise in coruscating polemic at the appearances of something that resembles something like historical candor but rhetorically framed, as always, by the perpetual bad actor Hamas:
Just as important is the broader political question. The fence between Gaza and Israel is no ordinary border. Gaza is a prison, not a state. Measuring 365 square kilometres and home to 2m people, it is one of the most crowded and miserable places on Earth. It is short of medicine, power and other essentials. The tap water is undrinkable; untreated sewage is pumped into the sea. Gaza already has one of the world’s highest jobless rates, at 44%. The scene of three wars between Hamas and Israel since 2007, it is always on the point of eruption.
Might this list of Palestinian grievances be enough to trigger a ‘revolt’ ? A question that eludes this potted history in the guise of a propaganda melodrama that has as its lead villain Hamas.
Then there is this about the Israeli economy:
It is hard to convince Israelis to change. As Israel marks its 70th birthday, the economy is booming.
With American aid in the amount of $4 billion dollars a year, provides an economic cushion, or call it by its actual name subsidy, that few other countries in the world can match in any way.
But the final two paragraphs of this polemic are astounding in denial of the reality of the Palestinian revolt against their captivity, oppression. And even the attempt of Israel to engage in the active project of genocide against Palestinians, by poisoning their water, and keeping them in a continuing state of starvation ; and their state of being the actual prisoners of a Zionism, that enacts the same oppression that Jews experienced in a European context. Call this an obscene historical recrudescence of the Warsaw Ghetto. And where are the ‘guns’ and ‘explosives‘ spoken of in these two final two paragraphs ?
For all their talk of non-violence, Hamas’s leaders have not abandoned the idea of “armed struggle” to destroy Israel. They refuse to give up their guns, or fully embrace a two-state solution; they speak vaguely of a long-term “truce”. With this week’s protests, Hamas’s leaders boasted of freeing a “wild tiger”. They found that Israel can be even more ferocious.
If Hamas gave up its weapons, it would open the way for a rapprochement with Fatah. If it accepted Israel’s right to exist, it would expose Israel’s current unwillingness to allow a Palestinian state. If Palestinians marched peacefully, without guns and explosives, they would take the moral high ground. In short, if Palestinians want Israel to stop throttling them, they must first convince Israelis it is safe to let go.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/05/17/israel-must-answer-for-the-deaths-in-gaza
The Party Line , as it emerged from these two publication, on the atrocity commented by Israel in the Gaza Massacre, was that it was Hamas that was/is the guilty party! Though it was the Israeli forces that fired the live ammunition at the unarmed ‘infiltrators’. Call this the ‘Looking Glass Reasoning’ of the Israeli Apologists, an utter banality to act as cover for mass murder.
Political Observer
@john4lawin
Thank you for your comment. My reply is that Post-Holocaust, there can never be any legitimate critique of Judaism, Zionism or Israel. Read Norman G. Finkelstein’s book ‘The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering’ for the necessary background for my assertion. Perhaps not? Even in the face of this bloodbath, in which only Palestinians died,while Israel simply used their American supplied weapons, to slaughter a caged people. Who have had enough of their servitude, to the last gasp of European Imperialism: Sykes-Picot, The Balfour Declaration and Western Guilt are the fateful destructive triad that led to the Nakba. The 70th anniversary of the Nakba is a reckoning long in coming.
Bret Stephens and Thomas Friedman were the New York Times political vanguard, that pronounced on the culpability of Hamas as the Party Line of this atrocity: in its various iterations, it will be endlessly repeated as a kind of ersatz political fact, in the respectable bourgeois press. Yet the slow erosion of Israeli legitimacy and its status as moral arbiter is a fact. The success of BDS is a telling symptom of that erosion.
See this quote from Hannah Arendt on the fate of Israel from this Mondoweiss essay:
And even if the Jews were to win the war, its end would find the unique possibilities and the unique achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed. The land that would come into being would be something quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist. The ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded into ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and acitvities. The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people; social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries; political thought would center around military strategy…. And all this would be the fate of a nation that — no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries (the whole of Palestine and Transjordan is the insane Revisionist demand)–would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors.
Under such circumstances… the Palestinian Jews would degenerate into one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta. Their relations with world Jewry would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large number of Jews lived. Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people. Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland…
Sir, your reply is unsurprising, in its recitation of historical instances of Anti-Semitic thought, the ‘Blood Libel‘ and ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. You should have spent a bit more time organizing, and thinking through your reply, as the in order too of coherence : as opposed to a reply that is more about the scattershot of anger, than about rational argument.
Regards,
StephenKMackSD
https://www.economist.com/comment/3576984#comment-3576984
Chas Arthurin, thank you for your comment. ‘Right to exist’ is part of the ex post facto apologetics for the state of Israel. Does any ‘state’ have the right to exist? The states of the Americas are founded on genocide and economic exploitation: do these states have a right to exist? Yes, because they exercise that right to exist based in the genocide of indigenous peoples.
The Zionist Project was about the guilt of ‘The West’ Post-Holocaust, the Balfour Declaration and Sykes-Picot that created the ‘States of the Middle-East’ like Jordan. I think your comment should be directed to the authors of Sykes-Picot or its contemporary rationalizes like the Zionist, who continue to repeat this propaganda of ‘right to exist’ while they operate their own Warsaw Ghetto! The demographics are such that the Palestinian Captives have a higher birth rate that the Zionists. Even though they live where 97% of the water is undrinkable.
The Nazi’s called Jews ‘rats’. What sobriquet do the Zionists use to describe Palestinians? The Palestinians are ‘The Wrenched of the Earth’, to use Frantz Fanon telling description.
Regards,
StephenKMackSD
https://www.economist.com/comment/3577033#comment-3577033
Chas,
‘Your perspective strikes me as sad, essentially one of self flagellation.’ A reckoning with the facts of history is about the liberating possibility of the exercise of candor. You echo the Conservative Party Line, that somehow facing those facts is nihilistic: genocide and slavery built the New World and made ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’ a fact. As uncomfortable as that my be to Conservatives, it is a fact. As a part of that reckoning the question then becomes , what is to be done?
The British Empire’s documents Sykes-Picot and The Balfour Declaration were the Colonial origins of the state of Israel. The dispossession of the indigenous population of Palestine, was the sacrifice that Europe and America were willing to make, to rescue their political self-esteem, and the myth of Western hegemony, and its deep seated belief in its moral superiority. Although that moral superiority is still yet to manifest itself. But the bloodbath perpetrated by Israel, has now demonstrated that it and its allies are willing to do anything to maintain the murderous status quo. BDS will only grow more powerful, even in the face of sanctions against it in some America states, which only demonstrates the power of the Israel Lobby and its propaganda arm of AIPAC.
Tony Judt published this essay in the New York Review of Books in the October 23, 2003 titled Israel: The Alternative
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2003/10/23/israel-the-alternative/
The status quo is untenable: what is to be done?
Regards,
StephenKMackSD
https://www.economist.com/comment/3577036#comment-3577036
Chuck,
Thank you for your comment. Injustice begats injustice, to use a cliche, that is more than applicable in the case of founding of the state of Israel, and the subsequent turmoil that has been its watershed. Here is a link to a report from April 10,2018 by the Congressional Research Service documenting American aid to Israel since its founding and or before:
I and many other Americans want this military and economic aid to end. No more economic aid as de facto moral support for this state. Also no more economic/military support for the Arab states in the region and its leader Saudi Arabia.
The American Empire needs to end and its beneficiaries need to fen for themselves. The American Empire and its ‘Clash of Civilizations’ called the ‘War on Terror’ has destroyed what was left of The Republic.
China is just off stage waiting for its historical moment of dominance, and The West, under the Leadership of America, can’t get its house in order, so scattered are its ‘interests’ and its Free Market Dogmas have proven catastrophic. Given that utterly bleak description of the political present, America as the World’s Policeman and Moral Arbiter, not to speak of ‘Honest Broker’ in terms of Israel/Palestine peace looks like what it is hegemonic delusion!
Regards,
StephenKMackSD
https://www.economist.com/comment/3577093#comment-3577093
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