The beautiful Luna choker on the left is already sold out but there’s still a change to get a hold of the Black Velvet Luna Choker on the right (*´∀`*). It’s a single piece that’s hand sculptured and painted with a lot of love (*´ ˘ `*) ♡.
If you try to complete the sentence “The Israeli – Arab conflict is important because…”, you’ll discover that you don’t have an answer...
As a tour guide in Israel I talk about history, religion, the desert, and everything else Israel has to offer. But there is always a big elephant in the room – the Israeli-Arab conflict. Sometimes I think this topic is more interesting than any other. Here I’ve tried to summarize the most important insights I’ve gained from hundreds of discussions about this issue.
The Israeli-Arab conflict is smaller than you might think
If you try to complete the sentence “The Israeli – Arab conflict is important because…”, you’ll discover that you don’t have an answer. The conflict is one of the smallest in the world. Israel is a tiny country without any strategic importance. There is no oil in Israel or in any country surrounding Israel. The only reason why you hear about Israel is because enough people decided that it is important, but there’s no objective reason. Every moment you deal with this conflict is a moment you’re not dealing with the real big and important problems, such as China, a dictatorship with over a billion people that also has the largest economy in the world; the bloody and seemingly intractable conflict in Syria; and the genocide occurring in Sudan.
The world media is obsessed with Israel
The medium is the message. Normally the closer the event is and the more dramatic it is, the chances of you hearing about it in the media are higher. This rule doesn’t apply to the Israeli-Arabic conflict. The smallest incident in Israel immediately becomes headline news all other the world. Here’s one important fact to keep in mind: In more than 100 years of conflict, about 25,000 Palestinians have lost their lives. In the Arab world more than 15,000,000 people have lost their lives in just the last 50 years. You hear much less about them, or the millions that are killed in Africa (or the some 80 percent of the world population that lives under totalitarian regimes). One of the reasons for this is that it’s very easy to work in Israel as a foreign correspondent. There is a modern infrastructure, freedom of speech, and journalists feel safe. The Palestinians also feel safe. Notice that the Palestinians never speak anonymously or cover their faces like people do when they fear the authorities. Israel, like all countries, is not perfect, but it is very important to remember that even the right to complain against the government is a privilege that only a few people in our world enjoy.
It is absurd, but the European media cover Israel more than Europe’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here is an interesting example. In 2011, the British newspaper The Guardian mentioned Israel over 1,000 times. In that year 115 Palestinians died, most of them terrorists. Iraq was mentioned 504 times although more than 4,000 Iraqis were killed, many of them in incidents with British soldiers.
This obsession is also prevalent in the academic world. Today there are more courses, seminars, books, and forums about this conflict than any other conflict.
The conditions of Palestinians are good
Many well-known people criticize Israel. José Saramago, the Nobel Prize winner;Roger Waters, the leader of Pink Floyd; and other famous people have compared what the Israelis are doing to what the Nazis did. Here are some facts that prove otherwise. The life expectancy in the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 (the year Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza) was 48 years. Today it is over 75 years – higher than all the Arab countries around Israel. In 1967 the infant mortality rate was higher than 150 out of 1,000 births. Today it is less than 19. The Palestinians are the most educated Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa. In 1967 there were no universities on the West Bank. Today there are 11 universities and 13 colleges. In 1967 only 4 Arab settlements had running water. Today there are more than 640 that do. (In Amman, the capital of Jordan, only tens of kilometers away, there is running water only one day a week). According to the World Bank, the Palestinians have received four times more aid than Europe did from the Marshall Plan after World War II. Every participant of my tours knew that the United States supports Israel. But none of them knew that the Palestinians get more aid from the United States, the European Union, Japan, the Arab countries, and the United Nations than any other people in the world.
The State of Israel wasn’t established as compensation because of the Holocaust
The notion that the world was so shocked by the Holocaust that it gave the Jews a country is naïve. That’s not the way world politics work. At the time of World War II there was already half a million Jews with a national consciousness, and with all the institutions that a county has – education, health, and political systems, and so on. The establishment of Israel, like the establishment of dozens of countries, had more to do with World War II itself. After every world war there is a new world order. After World War I, a number of countries were established – such asYugoslavia (1918), Poland (1918), Czechoslovakia (1918), Finland (1917), and Turkey (1923). After World War II, many countries were established – such as Jordan (1946), Syria (1946), India (1947), Pakistan (1947), Israel (1948), and Korea (1948). Also after the Cold War, which played out around the world, many countries were also established – such as Croatia (1991), Georgia (1991), Estonia(1991), and Moldova (1991).
Israel was established in the wave of countries that were established after World War II. Most of the Middle East countries were established on French and British territories that they lost after the war.
Israel wasn’t established on stolen Palestinian soil
Many think that there was a Palestinian territory and then the Jews came and took their land. This is not so. The name Palestine originates from the word “Pleshet,” which according to the Hebrew Bible, is an ancient people that probably came from the Greek island of Crete and settled in the southern coast of the Land of Israel. The name Pleshet or Philistia wasn’t common until the Roman emperor Hadrian decided to punish the Jews because of Bar Kokhba revolt, changing in 135 the name of Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina and the name of Judaea to Syria Palestina. The name wasn’t used during the Muslim empires that ruled the Middle East. Most of modern Israel was a small, neglected, and unimportant part of Syria. Jerusalem was never a capital city. Cairo and Damascus were the important cities of the region in the Muslim era. Only under British rule, starting in 1917, after theOttoman Empire collapsed in World War I, did the name Palestine began to be used again. If the British hadn’t come, there wouldn’t be a Palestinian people. And the Arabs that lived in the area would have been Egyptian or Syrian.
Jews lived for hundreds of years in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberius. In 1860 the Jews started buying land outside the four cities. Unlike the first white settlers in the United States who robbed the land from the Indians, and unlike the Australians that stole the land from the Aborigines, all the land that Jews settled on was bought and paid for, down to the last cent. Starting in the 1930s, the British and the United Nations made many proposals about how to divide the land of Israel into two countries – a Jewish and an Arab state side by side. The Jews agreed to the proposals but the Arabs didn’t and started a war. The Jews won. Many of the Arabs that Israel conquered kept on living in Israel, and today 20 percent of the Israeli population is Arab.
Jews and Arabs didn’t live peacefully together in Arab countries
It is true that Jews had it much worse under Nazi rule, but that doesn’t mean that Jews lived as equals or enjoyed religious freedom under Arab rule. Yes, there was a golden age of peaceful coexistence, but it was short and 800 years ago. In all the Muslim countries where Jews lived, from Morocco in the east to Iran in the west, from Syria in the north to Yemen in the south, Jews suffered discrimination, pogroms, and racial violence before the advent of Zionism. After the establishment of Israel, most of the Jews who lived in Arab countries, about 800,000 had to flee to Israel.
The Israeli occupation is not the source of the conflict
In 1967, the Arab states surrounding Israel threatened to eliminate Israel and moved their armies to the borders. In a surprise attack the Israeli Army defeated all the Arab armies in six days, and Israel tripled its size. The Gaza strip was controlled by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan. In the 19 years (1948–1967) that the Palestinians suffered under Jordanian and Egyptian rule no one mentioned them. If the Six-Day War hadn’t occurred, the Palestinians would live under Arab oppression and no one would have dealt with the issue. The best example are the Palestinians that live in camps in Lebanon and Syria. Although the conditions there are much worse than in the West Bank, you don’t hear anything about this in the media.
Many think that it would be better if Israel withdrew from the West Bank, while others say that this would jeopardize Israel’s security. There are good arguments on both sides, but thinking that the occupation is responsible for the conflict is false. There are three basic pieces of evidence that prove this: First of all, and most obvious, is that the conflict started long before the Six-Day War, and even before 1948. The Arabs were unwilling to agree to a two-state solution. The second proof is Lebanon; although there are no Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, Hezbollah clearly advocates the elimination of Israel. The same goes for Iran – although there are 1,000 kilometers (or some 620 miles) and two countries in between, although they are Persians and have a totally different culture and language than Middle East Arabs, Iran’s leaders call for the destruction of Israel. The origin of the conflict is that the Muslims don’t want to accept a non-Muslim state in the Middle East.
The Palestinian refugee problem is not the origin of the conflict
There is good deal of exaggeration and distortion surrounding the Israeli-Arab conflict, but there is one big lie and it involves the “Palestinian refugees” and the “right of return.” Who hasn’t got a parent or grandparent who migrated because of a conflict? The wars and other conflicts of the 20th century produced hundreds of millions of refugees. In the new world order after World War II, entire populations migrated. Over 15 million Germans had to leave their homes in what was previously an eastern territory of Germany. Hundreds of thousands people in the Balkans were forced to migrate because of the new countries that were established there. About 65 million people in what was the Soviet Union had to migrate. Who ever heard about 300,000 Muslims who had to leave Bulgaria, or the 250,000 Greeks and Turks who had to leave their houses after the Turks occupiedCyprus in 1974? The refugee problems continue. About two millions Christians have had to evacuate the Middle East because of Muslim attacks. But there is one group that you hear about more than all the others – the Palestinian refugees.
As a result of the War of Independence in 1948, there were about half a million Arab refugees who left their homes. Many left because the Arab leadership told them to leave and promised them that they could come back. And like in all wars, there were some instances of evacuation. But unlike Germany that helped the German migrants, unlike India that helped the Indus and Pakistan that welcomed the Muslims, or Israel that welcomed the Jewish refugees, the Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese didn’t help the Palestinians, although they are the same people (in 1948 there was no difference between an Arab village in northern Israel and a Arab village in southern Lebanon). Jordan is the only Arab country that gave the Palestinians citizenship. The United Nations is part of the problem. Not many know that the UN has two refugee agencies – UNRWA, for Palestinian refugees only, and UNHCR, for all other refugees in the world. The two agencies have different definitions of what constitutes a refugee. The definition used by UNRWA grants refugee status to the children of Palestinian refugees, so every year the “official” number of Palestinian refugees grows.
One of the groups of refugees not getting any attention is the Jewish refugees from the Arab countries. The Jews that left the Muslim countries never harmed the Muslims but when Israel was established, some 800,000 of them had to flee, leaving behind everything they had to start a new life in Israel.
Back to the basics
We live in a post-post-modern world. We seek to understand reality not only from conventional channels, but also through alternate modes of communication. Not what the leaders say, but what the people think; not from the history books, but from farmers at the local market. One person writes an article about daily life, another makes a documentary film about the children that live with war; one will transmit optimism, the other pessimism. All these different angles can help understand the conflict better, but sometimes it’s good to return to the basics, to what each side says about itself. The Israeli Declaration of Independence states:“We extend our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness.” The preamble to the Hamas Covenantdeclares: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.”
There is no contradiction between Israel as a Jewish and democratic state
Most countries are nation states that have a common ethnic and cultural denominator. All Arab countries identify themselves as Muslim. Most European democracies states are also nation states. In the countries like Denmark, Norway, Poland, and Iceland, Christianity has a special status. The Jews also have the right to their own state. Some 29 national flags bear crosses, 13 national flags the Muslim crescent, and only one national flag the Star of David.
Every time there is violence in the Middle East, there are always people who celebrate Israeli and Jewish deaths. We perhaps expect this from radicalized Muslims but it’s not uncommon to see a white, Christian grad student living in America posting tallies of dead IDF soldiers and celebrating each one. These people usually say something to the effect of, “Colonizers have no right to safety” or “There’s no such thing as an Israeli civilian/innocent.” I disagree with these people (to say the least), but at least they are displaying principled thinking in some way. You could choose, in good faith, to agree or disagree with them.
What’s more troubling is the presence of lies, distortions, and conspiracy theory on the “Palestinian side.” We see this in the media narrative surrounding the shooting of Palestinians who commit stabbings and other terror attacks. Many media sources and individuals on the “pro-Palestine” side are only telling half the story, omitting the information that the Palestinians shot by police had just made attempts on Israeli civilians life. Sometimes they directly parrot from Palestinian propaganda–these people were “executed,” they were “innocent,” the stabbings were “alleged.” In at least one case, a video of a terrorist being shot was circulated with the (false) explanation that it was an Israeli police officer shooting a Palestinian teenager for no reason, and that an “Israeli mob” had screamed “Die, you son of a bitch!”
Leaving aside these attempts to whitewash the attacks (and the expectation that Israelis who have just escaped being stabbed to death should be passive and tolerant towards their attacker, instead of reacting with shock, fear, and anger–like all humans do), there is a broader problem of distortion in the movement. False stories are circulated all the time and–most importantly–there is not an attempt to correct them and be allegiant to the truth. Two notable recent examples: earlier this year, there was a a report that Israel had opened a dam to deliberately flood Palestinian homes. This was reported by the mainstream media, including Al Jazeera and VICE. Later, it turned out that there was no dam in the area and the media had essentially repeated Hamas propaganda–the equivalent of the “Jews poison our wells” fibs of medieval Europe. Almost no effort was made by the many left-wing media sources and individuals who shared the story to correct it. It didn’t matter what had happened. What had mattered was that it was the sort of thing that might have happened and, if you thought otherwise, it was proof you were a colonizer, a racist, a supporter of all Netanyahu’s policies, et cetera.
Example 2: Last summer, a French Palestine solidarity turned violent. Some (though by no means all) protestors attacked Jewish shops and smashed windows. It culminated with a mob surrounding a synagogue, rattling the doors and trying to get in. The mob were fended off by the Jewish Defense League, a right-wing organization that formed in response to French antisemitism. Later, it was claimed by many left-wing journalists (including Richard Seymour writing for Jacobin) that the “mob story” had been a fabrication and that the JDL had “incited” the attack by screaming racial slurs. However, this claim was definitively debunked by the Guardian: there had been a mob and the JDL had not incited them. As far as I know, neither Seymour nor anyone else made any attempt to correct their misreporting. I still hear it cited as an example that Zionists “made up” the reports of antisemitism in the wake of last summer’s war.
Conspiratorial thinking is also prevalent. Documented facts and credible historical accounts are disputed on the base that they are “Zionist revisionism” and “propaganda.” It’s not uncommon to see someone promote an article from the New York Times that criticizes Israel, only to call it a “Zionist rag” several hours later when it criticizes Hamas. People pick and choose and deliberately tune out voices that contradict what they already believe. Of course, this is a problem on both “sides,” but only one “side” claims to be socialist and anti-racist.
I’m not pointing this out to say that people who engage in this behavior are terrible people (although some of them certainly are), or even necessarily anti-semitic (although some are). Rather, I see this as a problem that is caused by the growing irrationality of the left wing. Instead of treating Palestine as a solidarity cause like any other, it is treated as the ultimate test of good and evil. When you move so far away from actual material conditions and events, you wind up sabotaging yourself and hurting innocent people, Israelis and Palestinians alike. Much of the pro-Palestinian movement is tragically no longer rooted in coherent leftist principles. It doesn’t advocate for the rights of both peoples; it advocates for the destruction of Israel. It doesn’t point out that claims of autonomy and indigenousness are complicated, it claims that Jews have no right to autonomy and are indigenous to nowhere. It doesn’t subject Israeli nationalism to a standard critique, it sneers that Hebrew is an “invented language” and that Jews eating hummus is “cultural appropriation.” It doesn’t point out that Israelis are protected by a state military while Palestinians have none, it claims that no Israeli has a right to be safe. It refuses to consider the conflict through the lens of the Arab world’s hostility towards Israel or the fate of ethno-religious minorites in the Middle East. It doesn’t advocate a principled boycott of West Bank goods; it tries to boycott all Israeli academics and stop Palestinians and Israelis from artistic collaborations or even appearing onstage together. These damage the credibility of the movement. They are a sign of something fundamentally wrong with today’s left.
None of this is the Palestinian’s “fault” and of course pro-Israeli media is capable of lies and distortion. But we don’t need MORE bullshit. What we need is people to emerge and be rational and say, “Anyone who murders other people out of religious mania is not on my side.”
[Picture of students gathered behind a table. Attached to the table are several (illegible in this photo) signs, and one bearing a large, red swastika]
I walked onto my campus to see this today.
I came down a set of stairs, to see this before me. My heart stopped in my chest, I stopped talking mid sentence. I was paralyzed with fear. I could only see the bold red swastika, I couldn’t read the signs.
How could they just display a notorious hate symbol - the Nazi swastika - out in the open like that?
I was very abruptly reminded I am Jewish and this is not a safe place for me.
In before “it’s a Buddhist symbol” - it’s red and not facing the right way.
That’s a Nazi Swastika.
I want it to be known that the University of South Carolina did not stop this. Multiple students, myself included, came forward, expressing feeling unsafe, or distaste and disgust and asked for its removal. The university defended their ability to fly a hate symbol that strikes fear and memories of horror into minority students – because they weren’t really Nazis, they were protestors arguing for “free speech” and “anti-censorship”.
Nevermind that I panicked as I was led away by a friend. Nevermind that I was reminded I could very easily be at risk. Nevermind that I felt scared and unsafe and worried for other Jewish students. Nevermind that I confronted them and explained how uncomfortable and scared it made me - how I told them I’d met Neo-Nazis face to face - how my own extended family had been murdered in the Holocaust - that they would never understand that fear.
What the University of South Carolina doesn’t realize is, they have set a very scary precedent.
It’s okay if you fly a hate flag, or have a hate symbol as your icon. So long as you don’t actually *say* ‘wow I hate Jews’ you’re fine, it’s your “freedom”;
What this means is, any antisemite, any Neo-Nazi or Nazi-sympathizer, can now proudly display a swastika… so long as they don’t actually SAY they’re a Nazi.
What this means is, this campus just became a whole lot less safe for Jews.
Now we have to work twice as hard to stay safe.
Share this. Let it be known that USC officials let them fly this for the duration of their time on Greene Street, the main street of our campus.
@jewish-privilege @littlegoythings @tikkunolamorgtfo and other jumblr blogs: please help me get this noticed. My university did not listen to me.
You should submit this to the Everyday Antisemitism tumblr. How freaking awful. A major problem in our society is people’s refusal to see bigotry unless it’s explicitly stated with the word “hate” or uses a slur. That’s how the media gets away with dog whistle racism. Plus, according to popular opinion, antisemitism no longer exists, and there’s no convincing people otherwise. Even when there’s a damn swastika staring them in the face. I’m so sorry this happened. Good on you for speaking up, and I hear you.
Salon.com is the epitome of the fair weather Leftist ally in the fight against anti-semitism. I saw someone on tumblr passing around yet another entry in their so-called fight against anti-semitism and, as, expected, it was bashing Donald Trump.
Salon’s fight against anti-semitism is phony and disingenuous in the extreme. They will oppose it vehemently when Donald Trump or Ann Coulter is responsible, because it’s one more point against people they already hate, and they worry about how anti-semitism might hurt Bernie Sanders’s campaign because they favor his agenda, but they’ll regularly publish screeds by goyim blaming Israel for anti-semitism in the diaspora and publish articles implying that Magneto shouldn’t be a Holocaust survivor because his age stretches the logic of comic books where other mutants have lived for millennia, with the not so subtle implication that we should just stop talking about the Holocaust already. They’ll happily tokenize’s Jon Stewart when he attacks Netanyahu with Jewish humor, but will completely erase his Judaism in two separate articles celebrating his work (bonus points for one of the pieces for listing several other influential Jewish comedians like Lenny Bruce and Tom Lehrer who laid down road for Stewart while not mentioning that connection).
A quick search of the site reveals that they spend far more time refuting claims of anti-semitism than actually fighting it. They’re against anti-semitism in theory, but they only care about us as Jews when they can use us to bash other Jews. When I complain about the Left being disingenuous about its opposition to anti-semitism, Salon is one of the biggest cases in point.
No, before you get the wrong idea. I am not afraid of my husband. I am afraid of you.
You, who threaten all cops because of a few bad cops.
You, who threaten all cops families so “those useless pigs can know your pain.”
When my husband leaves in the morning I know there is a chance he won’t come home because he would give his life to protect the innocent. But now I have to worry he won’t come home because you let your hatred blind your judgement.To bring justice to Michael Brown. Eric Garner, and all of the other victims of police brutality, you are threatening innocent men and women who took an oath to protect your life with their own.
I know you are hurting, and I know there has been great injustice for the two men and their families. I know there are corrupt cops, but the reality is, most police officers are not the problem. It is a select few who are ruining the image of all.
Please, I am one woman asking you to stop threatening my family and my husband because of the actions of others. I want my son to grow up without the fear I have. I want him to be able to tell his friends his father is a police officer without having to be afraid of backlash.
i married a black man and i’m afraid.. now don’t get me wrong, i’m not afraid of my husband. i’m afraid of cops because my husband is black.
cops, who because of institutionalized racism perpetuating the narrative of the inherent criminality of black skin
cops, who without knowing my husband judge him because he is a large, black man, who is perceived as a threat because he was born to look he way he does.
when my husband goes to work the swing shift, i know there is a chance that on his way home around 11 pm, he won’t come home because he could be shot during a “routine stop” or even if he calls the cops to his place of employment, because of the perception of black men in america.
his blackness is not a crime. his blackness, our blackness is beautiful. but you don’t see that.
you’re damn right we are hurting. we are hurting because Michael Brown was an unarmed black boy killed for being perceived as a threat. Eric Garner was choked to death ON camera. neither of their killers will face criminal prosecution. that there is a “blue wall of silence” that keeps so-called “good cops” from doing the right thing and confronting corruption and institutionalized racism.
i get to live with the painful knowledge that any sons AND daughters we are blessed with, will walk through life with that hanging over them. that those are painful lessons we will have to teach them, so we don’t have to go identify the bodies of our beautiful wanted loved children.
i am one woman, standing in representation of my fellow sisters, my mother, my aunts, my cousins, my friends and in solidarity women i do not even know, but share this fear or have seen this fear realized to say
disabuse yourself of these notions that WE are a threat to you
understand that your husband chose to be a cop. we did not choose to be black. we love our blackness, but we hate how it is perceived. it is literally proving fatal for us.
i married a black man, and i don’t want to see him dead.
i will bear black sons and daughters, and i don’t want to see them dead.
Your fear of your husband dying in a job that is dangerous by default, doesn’t outweigh the collective fear of an entire race of people at risk for being killed just for who we are.
titsay
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