POLITICS AUGUST 17, 2010
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The argument that Israel is a colonialist entity is often marshaled to undermine the Jewish state’s legitimacy. The theme has certainly permeated Western academia, almost uncritically. For decades, it has been employed against Israel in one international forum after another. In 1973, the U.N. General Assembly gave initial momentum to this idea when it condemned the “unholy alliance between Portuguese colonialism, South African racism, Zionism, and Israeli imperialism.”
That association of Israel with colonialist regimes set the stage in 1975 for the most insidious resolution ever adopted in the General Assembly against Israel, which stated that Zionism was a form of racism. It helped cement the Afro-Asian bloc behind both the resolution and the movement to delegitimize Israel. Even when, in 1991, the General Assembly finally overturned the resolution, comparisons between Zionism and colonialism persisted, arguably becoming even more strident.
Speaking in Johannesburg in 2008, Azmi Bishara, a former member of the Knesset, explained another way that accusing Israel of being a colonialist entity has real political utility. Bishara, who today does not miss an opportunity to question Israel’s legitimacy before audiences abroad, explained that two points had to be established to show that Israel was an apartheid state: first, that Israel practiced racial separation; and second, that it was a product of colonialism.
Of course, anyone who visits the emergency rooms in Israeli hospitals, or the classrooms at any Israeli university, or the voting booths on election day, to say nothing of the Knesset itself, would see both Jewish and Arab doctors, patients, professors, students, voters, and parliamentarians mixing together in a way that utterly disproves the charge of apartheid. That leaves Bishara with mainly the claim of colonialism to make his case.
Unlike the charge of racial separation, the tag “colonialist” cannot be refuted simply by looking around modern Israel. It is a historical charge about how Israel came to exist: In effect, it amounts to the claim that Israel was established as an outpost of another distant power imposing itself on the territory and its native inhabitants. But the fact is that while modern Israel succeeded the 1922 British Mandate for Palestine, it was created by neither the British nor any other occupying power.
The Jews were already asserting their right to self-determination well before the British and the French dismantled the Ottoman Empire. For example, the Jewish people had already re-established their majority in Jerusalem by 1863. Decades later, Britain and the rest of the League of Nations considered Jewish rights in Palestine beyond their power to bestow because those rights were already there to be accepted. Thus the League of Nations gave recognition to “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine.” In other words, it recognized a pre-existing right. It called for “reconstituting” the Jewish people’s national home. And the rights recognized by the League of Nations in 1922 were preserved by its successor organization, the United Nations, which in Article 80 of its charter acknowledged all rights of states and peoples that existed before 1945.
The accusation that Israel has colonialist roots because of its connection to the British Mandate is ironic, since most of the Arab states owe their origins to the entry and domination of the European powers. Prior to World War I, the Arab states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan did not exist, but were only districts of the Ottoman Empire, under different names. They became states as a result of European intervention, with the British putting the Hashemite family in power in two of these countries.
Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states, meanwhile, emerged from treaties that their leaders signed with Britain. By means of those treaties, the British recognized the legitimacy of local Arab families to rule what became states like Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar. A similar British treaty with the al-Saud family in 1915 set the stage for the eventual emergence of Saudi Arabia in 1932.
Moreover, during Israel's War of Independence, Arab armies benefited directly from European arms and training—and even manpower. The Arab Legion initially fought in Jerusalem with British officers, while the skies of the Egyptian Sinai were protected from the Israeli Air Force by the Royal Air Force. Indeed, Israeli and British aircraft clashed in 1949.
William Roger Louis, one of the foremost historians of British imperial strategy, uncovered an extremely revealing document from the British foreign office that puts into perspective Israel’s relationship with the European colonial powers at its birth. In his 1984 book, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951, he describes a meeting on July 21, 1949 of senior British officials at the end of Israel’s War of Independence. Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East Office, said, “We were in a position to control the Arab governments but not Israel.” He then expressed fear that “the Israelis might drag the Arab States into a neutral bloc and even attempt to turn us out of Egypt.” The original Foreign Office document also expressed concern that the British would lose their airbases in Iraq. In 1956, Israel briefly made common cause with Britain and France against Nasser’s Egypt, but this could not alter the fact that, for the imperial powers, Israel was an obstacle, not an outpost.
Nevertheless, in recent years, the effort to portray Israel as a colonial entity has expanded. For many Palestinian spokesmen, in particular, it became important to deny the historical ties of the Jewish people to their land and to portray them as recent colonialist arrivals to the region—in contrast to the Palestinians, who were portrayed as the authentic native population.
This effort reached an audacious peak when Yasser Arafat denied that the Temple had ever existed in Jerusalem at the end of the July 2000 Camp David Summit with President Clinton. Many of his deputies—from Saeb Erekat to Mahmoud Abbas—have since picked up the same theme. Speaking on November 12, 2008, at a U.N. General Assembly “Dialogue of Religions and Cultures,” the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, addressed the historical connections of Islam and Christianity to Jerusalem, but noticeably did not say a single word about Judaism's ties to the Holy City.
In a similar vein, Arafat used to tell Western audiences that the Palestinians are descendents of the Jebusites, with ancient roots in the land. But in Palestinian society, one establishes one’s status by claiming to be a relative latecomer, whose ancestors were from the Arabian families that accompanied the Second Caliph Umar bin al-Khatttab when he conquered and colonized Byzantine Palestine in the seventh century. Even at that time, the Jews were still a plurality—and, perhaps along with the Samaritans, a majority—in the land, six hundred years after the Romans destroyed their ancient Temple and the Second Jewish Commonwealth. This emerges from Professor Moshe Gil’s monumental 800-page A History of Palestine: 634-1099.
Ascertaining the truth has never been the objective of those trying to paint Israel with a colonialist brush. They have been determined simply to conclude that the Jews came as an alien force to Palestine, to advance European interests, rather than see them as a people recovering their historical homeland, where they had deep, indigenous roots.
Dore Gold is an Israeli statesman who has served in various diplomatic positions under several Israeli governments. He is the current President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
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122 comments
The fact remains that modern Israel is not the return of ancient Israelites, they are long dead and gone. It is the result of the movement of a large number of Europeans into Palestine who claimed a cultural/genetic link to the ancient Jews of 2000 years ago. Why is that link so compelling as to allow the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians, and any critical thinking leads to the obvious conclusion that realizing the Zionist project was going to displace the Palestinians? Herzl himself stated the obvious in his diary, when he called for the ethnic cleansing of the Arabs. Even in 1948, Jews made up only 30% of Palestine, and a plebiscite would have resulted in a single state, not partition. Who gave the UN the right to partition Palestine? Why did the wishes of the majority of PAlestine, which rejected partition, not count? The native Palestinians are just as if not more genetically connected to the inhabitants of 2000 years ago as the Jews are, DNA testing shows that. Israel is the product of European Jews animated by an ideology, Zionism, that grew out of a European context, it was not the creed or view of the Jews living in Palestine in 1863. In that sense it is a colonial settler state no different than the other European offshoots, except that it justifies its existence through an appeal to religious/cultural attachments that give it greater legitimacy to do what they did. What the UN or various other states "recognized" about the Jews and Palestine is irrelevant, they have no right to decide the matter, it should have been up to the inhabitants of Palestine to decide whether they agreed to the Zionist project or not. Israel was created without the consent of the Palestinians, and that was possible because of the shield of British imperial control. Without that, Israel would never have happened.
- nayyer_ali
August 17, 2010 at 11:52am
In 2004 I published an article in the Journal of Conflict Studies in Canada in which I analysed the six salient features of Israeli politics: 1) Weak, unstable coalition governments resulting from a PR-list franchise system; 2) Powerful religious parties similar to system Islamist parties in Turkey or Indonesia; 3) A class of "military politicians" --former senior military officers; 4) Parties with paramilitary origins; 5) The "native question" as the determinant of Left or Right status for parties; 6) De jure legal discrimination. These last four traits are all traits shared with settler societies such as Northern Ireland, the United States and South Africa. Israel has more of these features (4) than do the U.S. N. Ireland, and S. Africa with three each. Northern Ireland has paramilitary parties but not military politicians and S. Africa and the U.S. had military politicians but not paramilitary parties. Therefore Israeli politics can be classified as settler politics. Israelis should be seen as "returned natives" for the purpose of legitimacy and as settlers for the purpose of comparison and analysis. Objectively they are both as they see themselves and as their enemies see them. Many countries in the world today especially in the Western Hemisphere have settler origins. And so Israel should not be singled out or delegitimized. But comparative analysis with countries such as Northern Ireland and the U.S. in the 19th century can shed light on Israeli politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the peace process.
- tmitch57
August 17, 2010 at 12:00pm
The names borne by Palestinian Arabs often indicate their ancestral homelands. Masri mean someone from Egypt. Jaabaris are Iraqis. Rantisi is an Italian Crusader name. I'm sure that there are many more such names. Some of their leaders came from outside Palestine, ex. Yasir Arafat was born in Egypt and always spoke Arabic with an Egyptian accent and had an Egyptian grandmother. Ahmed Shuqueiri had a Turkish mother. Nationality meant little in the world of Islamic empires from the 7th to 19th centuries, so Muslim people came to Palestine from all over the Islamic world, including Arabs, Turks, Persians, Slavs, Mongols, black Africans. Not to mention the arabicized Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic minorities.
- amidut
August 17, 2010 at 3:20pm
Jewish people (of which I am one) have and had a historical and religious interest in Israel for 3000 years. This is altogether different from that France in Algeria, England in North America or the Spaniards in Peru. Moreover what some call "Palestine" is the "Holy Land" to billions of people. At a minimum they are interested and care what goes on in Jerusalem, more so than what occurs in Lima or Algiers. This interest is almost entirely derived from Israel's place in the Hebrew Bible. Mainly because of the above, Israel is and always will be a special case: to see it through the prism of colonialism, Marxism, self-determination, imperialism, etc. is misleading. I support Zionism and believe the Jewish claim to Israel is valid though I recognize others who believe Jesus and Mohammed were also there may differ. I have no expectation the entire world will endorse Zionism, but I believe (perhaps hope is more accurate) the interests of Arabs, other Moslems, Christians and even atheists can be accommodated to an independent Jewish State.
- JerryL
August 17, 2010 at 5:38pm
I'm curious to learn more about tmitch57's article. I think he's on to something. I love Israel deeply and consider myself an unwavering supporter. I do think, however, that the argument he sketches out above may be basically right and, if so, defenders of Israel ought to be able to -- unashamedly -- distinguish between the sorts of leftist "critiques" that delegitimize (and demoralize) Israel, as Dore Gold points out, and a reasonably "objective" way of understanding the nature of Israeli nationalism. Israel is not necessarily as one-of-a-kind as we often like to think. I think this kind of analysis MAY be helpful in building a more sophisticated and detailed argument IN SUPPORT of Israel?
- crlchp01
August 17, 2010 at 6:44pm
Ali, too funny. For heaven's sake, do you know the Arab population of Israel in the 20's and 30's? Are you aware that during the time of the Ottomans there were few people in the region, and that the Ottomans invited Jews to build up the region, in fact many, many Arabs moved into the region in the 1880's. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians. Every indication is that there was net Arab immigration into Palestine in this period, and that the economic situation of Palestinian Arabs improved tremendously under the British Mandate relative to surrounding countries. By 1948, there were approximately 1.35 million Arabs and 650,000 Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, more Arabs than had ever lived in Palestine before, and more Jews than had lived there since Roman times. Analysis of population by sub-districts shows that Arab population tended to increase the most between 1931 and 1948 in the same areas where there were large proportions of Jews. Therefore, Zionist immigration did not displace Arabs. I mean, c'mon, try to go with some facts next time. Study the census from the Ottoman empire and the British Mandate sometime.
- blackton
August 17, 2010 at 6:46pm
I would put it differently. Palestine was a colonial conquest made by the Arabs in the 7th century, along with all of North Africa and much of the Middle East. In most of that territory, the population was converted to Islam and became a part of the Moslem world. In Israel, although many of the native inhabitants were dispersed due to colonial conquest dating back to the Romans, the Jewish population was not absorbed into Islam or completely displaced. The end of World War I saw a process of decolonization and disassembling of empire that resulted in the creation of many of the current Arab and Moslem states that had never existed before in history, as there had never been any Moslem state of Palestine or a Palestinian people. Palestinian Arabs are but that portion of the larger Arab population living in the land of the Jews, named Palestina by the Romans centuries before Arabs or Moslems appeared there. In most cases, the decolonization relieved Arabs of their colonial masters. In the case of Israel, it relieved the Jews of their colonial masters. Contra nayyer_ali, it is of absolutely no importance whatsoever whether the Arab colonizers of Israel agreed to the partition and the creation of Israel or not. Nor is it any of the business of the Arab colonizers that the Jews chose to welcome their own dispersed people back to their land or whether those people returned from Europe, China, or as was the case for a very large portion, from Arab lands. As for the authority of the UN to make these decisions, it is the same authority that resulted in the decolonization of the rest of the colonial world, including the Arab world. But for that authority, the Arab world would still belong to Britain and France. So, unless nayyer_ali would like to turn the Arab world back over to its former colonizers, now ejected from their colonial possessions, there is not the slightest reason in the world why Israel should be turned over to its former colonizers, the Arabs, now ejected from their colonial possession. Arab self-determination in the places that are the home of the Arab peoples does not require the consent of the English or the French. Jewish self-determination in the one small home of the Jewish people on earth does not require the consent of the Arabs. Whether they now consider themselves Palestinians or the southern Syrians that they were makes no difference. The refugee problem is a different matter, but that debt has been paid. More Jews who were refugees from Arab lands were absorbed into Israel than Arabs who lost their place in Israel as a result of Arab aggression in 1948. More land land belonging to Jews in Arab lands was confiscated than the area of the entire State of Israel. The proper grievance of Palestinian Arabs is with the rest of the Arab world that first made them refugees and then refused to make room for them. There is no legitimate Palestinian Arab claim to the land of Israel. Not 1,400 years ago, not 150 years ago, not 60 years ago, and not now. Israel is no more a Jewish colony than England is a colony of the Angles, Jutes and Saxons, indeed rather less so. Israel is the land of the Jews as far back as human history extends.
- roidubouloi
August 17, 2010 at 7:16pm
Instructive post Blackton.
- basman
August 17, 2010 at 7:19pm
...Good posts from Blackie and Roi... From me in the amen corner today: agreed.
- basman
August 17, 2010 at 8:33pm
blackton: Every indication is that there was net Arab immigration into Palestine in this period, and that the economic situation of Palestinian Arabs improved tremendously under the British Mandate relative to surrounding countries. blackton is undoubtedly right that Arab immigration into Palestine was essentially unrestricted throughout the Mandate period. One of the conclusions of the 1930 Hope-Simpson Commission (sent from London to investigate the 1929 Arab riots) was that the Mandatory's practice of ignoring the uncontrolled illegal Arab immigration from Egypt, Transjordan. Syria and North Africa had the effect of displacing the prospective Jewish immigrants. The British Governor of the Sinai from 1922-36 observed: "This illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai, but also from Transjordan and Syria, and it is very difficult to make a case out for the misery of the Arabs if at the same time their compatriots from adjoining states could not be kept from going in to share that misery." By the late 1930s, Palestine was essentially closed to the Jews of Europe but not to thousands of illegal Arab immigrants, who poured into Palestine from other parts of the Middle East, attracted by the superior economic conditions created by the Zionists.
- JPKatz
August 17, 2010 at 11:00pm
@chrichpo1 Post a valid email address and I'll mail a copy of the article on which the outline is based and my resume.
- tmitch57
August 17, 2010 at 11:51pm
The belief that modern Jews have no lineal connection to the ancient Israelites is no less faith-based than the idea that they do. In addition to widespread DNA evidence, anti-Zionists ignore more than 3,000 years of archaeological evidence establishing a contiguous link between the Israelis and the Israelites, including extra-biblical sources. Those who deny the ancestry of the Jewish people are really no different from those who deny the Holocaust. The former dismiss the Jewish people's greatest triumph, the latter their greatest failure; both reject the Jewish people a priori. tmitch57, I would like to read your article as well. You can e-mail it to this handle @yahoo.com. Sophia, what do you think of all this? You have a better gift for words than any of us.
- drheingold
August 18, 2010 at 1:02am
tmitch57. Thanks -- please e-mail me a copy as well. My e-mail is this screen name at gmail.com. (the last two digits are zero-one)
- crlchp01
August 18, 2010 at 7:22am
There is no evidence of meaningful large scale immigration of Muslims or Christians into Palestine in the 1800's or 1900's. In 1917, Jews made up less than 10% of the population of Palestine. The Palestinians were almost entirely illiterate peasant farmers living in villages with a few small towns. There is no evidence that large numbers came from Egypt or Iraq (the rest of the Middle East was far more sparsely inhabited than Palestine). Records show the Palestinian villages to have been continuously inhabited for centuries, they were not thrown up hastily in 1935. Certainly modern Jews have a genetic link with the ancient Israelites, but modern Jews are the result of significant interbreeding with local populations in Europe and the Middle East too. Many Jews in Palestine converted to Islam also over the centuries, many Palestinians have Jewish ancestors in the distant past. The Arab conquests replaced ruling classes, but there were no large scale movements of people from Mecca to Palestine or Egypt or elsewhere, there was no point to that nor enough Meccans to be more than a drop in the ocean. The Anglo-American survey of population done in the early 1930's reported that net immigration of Arabs to Palestine was negligible and did not explain the rising number of Palestinians that were giving the Zionists cause for concern. As to displacement, that is exactly what occurred when Israel was created, without ethnic cleansing, Israel would have been over 50% Palestinian in population. In medicine there is the key concept of informed consent, that no matter how noble or justified your intentions, you cannot do something to another human being without their permission. The Palestinians never gave informed consent for the Zionists to do what they did. Neither the British imperialists nor the Ottomans nor anyone else had the right to decide for the Palestinians that precise issue. What was done to them was an historical injustice and a grave act of violence far exceeding anything they have done. And to blame neighboring countries for not disposing of the refugees is wrong. The problem was created by Israel and Israel bears the responsibility for solving it.
- nayyer_ali
August 18, 2010 at 11:51am
Jews have a 3000-year interest in Israel, as part of our religion and history. Anyone concerned about what others call Palestine ought to be aware of that. This claim is not exclusive and I recognize others will assert their interests. Analogies from medicine are irrelevant to this political, religious and social issue: Israel is called "the Holy Land" by billions of people for reasons inextricably tied up with Jewish history and religion: Mohammed and Jesus did not just happen to show up there. Popular sovereignty will not override these historic facts. What happened to the Arab refugees from Palestine was tragic. Unfortunately, their leaders led them into an avoidable conflict, which they lost. Defeat has consequences. I suggest Palestinian Arabs accept (not like) the verdict of 1948 and come to terms with Israel. I think they will be surprised at the generosity the Jewish state will show its former foes.
- JerryL
August 18, 2010 at 2:42pm
tmitch, I'm very curious as to how you declare Northern Ireland to be a "settler society" willy nilly. In terms of your six criteria as applied to NI, it seems to me that 1, 2, and 3 don't apply; 4 is certainly applicable but that could apply to Nazi Germany, the Falange in Spain etc too, so it would seem to be moot; 5 and 6 are definitely candidates, but 5 becomes very vague if one thinks of how many on the left have problems with nationalism and ethnic particularism; 6 is incontrovertable in terms of discrimination against Catholics, but one can also argue that the (non-settler?) Irish Free State and then the Republic returned the favor with a softer but nonetheless distinctive rejection of pluralism in favor of a Catholic state. It's an interesting approach but the to say that NI is (was?) a "settler" society appears to load the case against Northern Irish Protestants before it's even opened.
- ironyroad
August 18, 2010 at 8:33pm
@nayyer_ali " What was done to them was an historical injustice and a grave act of violence far exceeding anything they have done. And to blame neighboring countries for not disposing of the refugees is wrong. The problem was created by Israel and Israel bears the responsibility for solving it." Yes, it was an injustice, one of many such in the mid-20th Century. And while I don't mean to be callous or minimize anyone's suffering, which in the case of the Palestinians is quite real and heartbreaking, it is minimal compared with other dislocations of the same period. Tens of millions of South Asian Hindus and Muslims were displaced by the division of the Indian Subcontinent into India and Pakistan in the same period that Israel was formed, with at least a million killed. The shifting of borders by the Soviet Union at the end of WWII displaced tens of millions of Poles from lands that the Soviets absorbed and tens of millions of Germans from lands the Poles absorbed. Are any of these people still considered refugees today? No, only the Palestinians still are. And why? Because the Arab states to which they fled refused to absorb them. And yes, I can blame them for that. Lebanon just this week passed a law allowing Palestinians to practice normal professions in that country. Meaning that for the past 62 years, 400,000 Palestinians have been limited to menial labor in Lebanon and are not allowed to purchase or own land. The injustice palestinians have suffered at israel's hands does not justify the greater injustice they've suffered at Arab hands.
- skeebler
August 18, 2010 at 10:21pm
@ironyroad Thank you for your questions. First, I attach no moral significance to the terms native and settler so I don't "cook the books" against the unionists. Incidentally, Ian Adamson has claimed that the Scots-Irish are the descendants of the Picts who were expelled by the Celts from Ireland. If true, this means that the Scots-Irish/Ulster Scots as well as Israeli Jews are returned natives as well as settlers. If you have problems with the term settler look it up in the dictionary. 1) Northern Ireland normally has a five party system: DUP, SDLP, SF, SDLP, APNI. Under the rules of the Good Friday Agreement any legislation must have the support of a majority of both unionists and nationalists. The UUP under Trimble lacked a majority and so relied on the votes of the PUP to pass legislation from 1999-20002. This is a de facto coalition. Normally Ulster politics were two-party politics in each community, but in the 1970s and again in the 1990s unionism fragmented when faced with a peace negotiation and so we have a genuine multiparty system within unionism from 1996-2003. 2)The DUP was based on the Free Presbyterian Church with Ian Paisley as the head of both from 1971 to 2007. Thus #2 applies to N. Ireland. One can also argue that the SDLP is a Catholic Party reflecting the views of the Catholic Church. 3) #3 is the one Israeli characteristic that doesn't apply to NI. It would have had NI become independent but because it is a province of the UK and the UK lacks a tradition of former senior officers in politics (other than the Duke of Wellington before it was a democracy) this is moot. 4) Nazi Germany and Franco's Spain weren't democracies. In the West among democracies only three countries have/had traditions of paramilitary parties: Israel, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland within the UK. Since 50% of the non-Israeli cases are settler colonies, this makes it a trait. 5) I am presently writing a book comparing the Republic of Ireland with Israel with one of my arguments being that the Irish Free State from 1922-32 at least was an ethnic democracy. I also argue that the "settler question" separated the main parties in Ireland both in the post-civil war period and during The Troubles in N. Ireland. Buy my book, "When Peace Fails: Lessons From Belfast for the Middle East" and I think you'll find that it is not at all anti-unionist.
- tmitch57
August 18, 2010 at 11:05pm
Sorry, that should be UUP instead of SDLP the first time in the list of parties in NI.
- tmitch57
August 18, 2010 at 11:10pm
Malahat, I took it as given that S. Africa, the United States, and Northern Ireland not to mention Australia, New Zealand, Canada and numerous countries in Latin America are settler societies. I selected those that were both considered to be democracies (including herrenvolk democracies) and settler societies are compared them to the features of Israel. Germany or Spain are not considered to be settler societies--there has been no mass migration of one people into the countries in modern history. Except for maybe Turks in Germany--and they have yet to take over. When they do I'll consider adding it to the list. crichp01: I tried mailing you the article twice and received delivery failure notifications. Either the email you gave me was bad or you need to clean out your mailbox.
- tmitch57
August 19, 2010 at 2:20am
nayyer_ali: As to displacement, that is exactly what occurred when Israel was created, without ethnic cleansing, Israel would have been over 50% Palestinian in population. Displacement is not the same thing as ethnic cleansing. Following the November 1947 UN Partition Resolution, the Arabs in Palestine launched a war against the Jewish community with the intention of preventing the emergence of a Jewish state and possibly destroying that community. But the Arabs lost the conflict, and one of the consequences was the displacement of 700,000 refugees (though most were displaced from one part of Palestine to another, which is not exactly what one usually means by a refugee). Ethnic cleansing, according the UN definition, is "the planned deliberate removal from a specific territory, persons of a particular ethnic group, by force or intimidation”. There was no Zionist plan or blanket policy of evicting the Arab population, or of ethnic cleansing in 1948. There were indeed places, where Jewish forces expelled the residents of Arab communities for military reasons. There were also places where Arab leaders advised or ordered the evacuation of whole communities (as occurred, e.g., in Haifa in late April 1948). But the vast majority fled simply to avoid the fighting (and in the expectation that they would return following an Arab victory). The only ethnic cleansing that took place in Palestine in 1948 was in the areas occupied by Arab armies. Indeed, it was indeed a stated war aim of the Arab leaders to eliminate the Jewish community in Palestine. Following the conflict, every single Jewish community in the areas occupied by Jordan and Egypt (e.g., Gush-Etzion, the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, and Kfar Darom) was destroyed; the Jewish populations were deported, killed, or executed. There was not one single Jew left in Gaza, the West Bank, or East Jerusalem. Not one.
- JPKatz
August 19, 2010 at 9:10am
"Neither the British imperialists nor the Ottomans nor anyone else had the right to decide for the Palestinians that precise issue. What was done to them was an historical injustice and a grave act of violence far exceeding anything they have done. And to blame neighboring countries for not disposing of the refugees is wrong. The problem was created by Israel and Israel bears the responsibility for solving it." The decision was not that of the Palestinian Arabs to make. Period. The self-determination of the Jewish people in their homeland, and their only homeland on earth, was theirs to make. No more was it the decision of the British or the French to make concerning Arab self-determination. When a people throws off a colonial yoke, as the Jews did their colonial conquest by Moslems, they typically do not get, nor do they need, the consent of their colonial masters. The fact that a large part of Palestine was to be partitioned and given over to the Moslem population was in deference to their residing there, in Israel, for whatever period of time. That they became refugees was not the doing of Israel but of the larger Arab nation of whom the Palestinians are but a part, at least as closely related to Syrians and Jordanians in every sense as New Yorkers are to Texans, likely moreso. The refugee problem was created by the Arab nation. It bears all of the responsibility for solving it quite apart from the fact that Israel has "solved" the refugee problem created when Arab nations drove out Jews who had, in many cases, lived there since long before Mohammed. The problem, nayyer_ali, if I may say so, is that the Arab world never accepts its responsibility for anything. It wishes to be considered a perpetual victim and thus refuses to acknowledge its responsibility for its actions and their consequences. Time to grow up and behave like adults.
- roidubouloi
August 19, 2010 at 2:18pm
tmitch, I would like to note that (a) I am perfectly aware of the existence and use of dictionaries, and (b) was not suggesting a problem with the dictionary definition of "settler" but rather the ideological implications of describing a working-class population whose families have been in a specific small region for 350 years with a term that implies some kind of outsider status and lack of rooted connection with the place. I've read your article, and it has a lot of good ideas and interesting explorations. That said, I find the discussion of Ireland in the broader sense a bit confusing. You discuss the mutation of Sinn Fein/IRA into the broad popular parties that are still around today but completely ignore the non-sectarian Irish Labor Party, whose origins predate both the other main parties in Irish political history. I also wasn't sure to what degree the "settler politics" argument applies to the Irish Free State/Republic, which is presumably to some degree a "non-settler" or "native" society as the Protestant-Unionist population declined so radically after independence. I think we'll have to disagree somewhat on your numbered bullets, as I'm not convinced by your explanation. For 50-odd years NI was ruled by the the Unionist Party with the Nationalist Party in a permanent minority place. I would not call this weak government based on PR-type systems. Quite the opposite -- there was a stable built-in Protestant majority buttressed by a corrupt voting system with gerrymandered constituencies. However, it was also the case that NI was part of the United Kingdom and discrimination against Catholics was clearly illegal (it was carried on by stealth, even though its results were visible.) But we each may be using different frameworks here. By the way -- if you are writing more on Ireland -- it's Eamon De Valera, not Liam De Valera.
- ironyroad
August 19, 2010 at 4:42pm
@ironyroad: 1) The Irish Labour Party dates from 1932. Fine Gael was founded later, but is basically a continuation of an earlier ruling party that dated from 1922 Cumann na nGeadhael (or something like that). Fianna Fail dates from 1926--both Fine Gael and Fianna Fail can trace their roots back to the original Sinn Fein and IRA. Although some will claim that the Labour Party can trace its roots to Larkin's Irish Citizen Army. 2) When I refer to Northern Ireland as a multiparty system I'm refering to the party system that began in 1970 with the formation of Alliance and the SDLP and was followed a year later by the formation of the DUP. So this system has been in existence for 40 years now. 3) The gerrymandering and housing discrimination carried out in N. Ireland wasn't very stealthy, London just didn't care. 4) I used the terms native and settler so that I could make comparisons across several cases. Natives refers to the original group and settlers to the group that came later. Since in all the instances that I mentioned the conflict is traced to the original settlement of the outsider group, I felt it was fair to use this term. Most of the Portuguese settlers in Angola and Mozambique were working class as well, and the pieds noirs in Algeria. Just because my use of the term doesn't fit your preconceived notion of what a settler is is not my fault. 5) Thank you for catching the De Valera screw up--I cannot imagine why I put Liam.
- tmitch57
August 19, 2010 at 11:45pm
You are correct, malahat, the Holocaust was not a failure on the part of the Jewish people. I should have said "greatest loss." nayyer_ali, the Jewish people did not consent to the destruction of their Temple—twice—or their exile. Much of the subsequent "interbreeding with local populations in Europe and the Middle East" was not consensual either. The historical injustice was in barring Jews from returning to their homeland, even as Hitler pledged their obliteration, for which the Palestinian Arabs and the British share responsibility.
- drheingold
August 20, 2010 at 10:11am
Or to be more precise, worst loss.
- drheingold
August 20, 2010 at 10:23am
"Every indication is that there was net Arab immigration into Palestine in this period, and that the economic situation of Palestinian Arabs improved tremendously under the British Mandate relative to surrounding countries." Here is an excerpt from The Peel Commission Report (July 1937): "The Arab population shows a remarkable increase since 1920, and it has had some share in the increased prosperity of Palestine. Many Arab landowners have benefited from the sale of land and the profitable investment of the purchase money. The fellaheen are better off on the whole than they were in 1920. This Arab progress has been partly due to the import of Jewish capital into Palestine and other factors associated with the growth of the National Home. In particular, the Arabs have benefited from social services which could not have been provided on the existing scale without the revenue obtained from the Jews." And from this source: http://www.mideastweb.org/palpop.htm "... Every indication is that there was net Arab immigration into Palestine in this period, and that the economic situation of Palestinian Arabs improved tremendously under the British Mandate relative to surrounding countries. By 1948, there were approximately 1.35 million Arabs and 650,000 Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, more Arabs than had ever lived in Palestine before, and more Jews than had lived there since Roman times. Analysis of population by sub-districts shows that Arab population tended to increase the most between 1931 and 1948 in the same areas where there were large proportions of Jews. Therefore, Zionist immigration did not displace Arabs. For a detailed discussion that focuses on this myth, please refer to Zionism and its Impact."
- noga1
August 20, 2010 at 11:34am
Malahat, Apparently you've never written an academic article before. The introduction was written once the research and arguments were completed. Usually when writing an academic book or article the last parts to be written are the introduction and conclusion. Over the years I've heard all kinds of arguments for why the Zionists weren't settlers, based mainly on the belief that settlers are evil or that to admit that the Zionists were settlers is politically disadvantageous. Like I wrote to ironyroad, there is a simple dictionary definition of settler and a dictionary definition of native and they apply across the cases that I use and allow for easy comparison. Israel seems to be unique in the circumstances of its founding, but the existence of an ongoing native-settler conflict has made it similar to other independent settler colonies. I point this out for the purpose of learning from these other cases. I haven't bothered to research a book on South Africa because I believe that at present it has relatively little light to shed on Israel, although this could change over time. I've concentrated on researching the American and N. Ireland cases as they seem to have the most to offer. And I'm afraid that I've exhausted the usefullness of the antebellum American case. Jews have a continual presence in Israel, but looking back over time what percentage of the population were they? The assertion of one village, Pekin, hardly constitutes a convincing argument. These arguments are more like the non-rational arguments posed by people arguing in favor of a particular religion. My purpose in writing the article was to demonstrate that in its features Israel is not unique and in fact bears quite a few things in common with Northern Ireland. I have since published a book, "When Peace Fails: Lessons From Belfast for the Middle East" (McFarland, 2010) that argues that there are a number of lessons that could be learned from both the Oslo and NI peace processes that would improve the chances of peace next time. If you read the book you'll see that I nowhere absolve the Arabs of blame for the failure of the Oslo process.
- tmitch57
August 20, 2010 at 11:52am
"Displacement is not the same thing as ethnic cleansing. " Absolutely. The Israelis evacuated from Gaza complained about being ethnically cleansed. I always considered it as a kind of displacement from a place where they were a suspected minority to a place where they were part of the majority culture, language, food, music, history, etc. And not all that remote, just a few kms down the road from where they used to be. I'm not unsympathetic to the personal misery of being forced to leave a place you were born in and love deeply but there were compelling reasons to support that move which were based on common sense and a greater good, mainly the prevention of great violence as well as preparing the ground from a possible agreement for co-existence between the two peoples.
- noga1
August 20, 2010 at 11:53am
"Apparently you've never written an academic article before." Ooo... And tmitch57 has written an academic paper. I'm properly impressed. Clearly he or she is a cut above all those who have not written academic papers before... There has been an indigenous Jewish presence in the entire Middle East for thousands of years. The most prosperous were the two Jewish tribes in the Hijaz which Muhammad's armies annihilated. Perhaps tmitch57 can write an academic article about how Jews indigenous to Saudi Arabia were ethnically cleansed in the most thorough way possible so that he sees fit to justify their hold over their tiny possession of 0.1% of the territory throughout which they lived in great numbers over the last 1400 years of Arab domination as illegitimate.
- noga1
August 20, 2010 at 12:05pm
Tangentially relevant, Ireland and Israel, the Irish and the Jewish: http://transmontanus.blogspot.com/2010/08/rebel-girl-from-rebel-cork.html
- noga1
August 20, 2010 at 12:59pm
tmitch, the Irish Labor Party was founded in 1912 as the political arm of the Irish Congress of Trades Unions and its status was validated by the British Labor Party recognizing that founding and resolving not to become active in Ireland. The journey via James Connolly and the ICA is an important strand of Irish leftwing history but not definitive for the Labor Party. Other than that, I once again feel the need to underline that the dictionary definition of "settler" is not at issue but rather your selection and deployment of the term to describe, for example, the Protestant working class population of East Belfast whose identification with their traditional home areas was quite as strong as that of Catholics in West Belfast. I understand -- believe me, please -- that the term is important for your analysis and your theory of Irish and Israeli politics but that doesn't not prevent a challenge on the basis that your terminology tends to pre-dispose a certain analytic bias that you seem oddly incapable of recognizing yourself. Leaving aside our skirmishing over the term itself, I think that one big problem I have with your article is that I am confused as to whether your argument is that (a) "settler" politics defined Ireland as a whole before independence, and afterwards defined Northern Ireland; (b) "settler" politics defined Ireland as a whole before independence, and afterwards defined both NI politics and Irish Free State/Republic of Ireland politics; or (c) "settler" politics defined Northern Ireland only, after Partition, and what went before was something different. It does appear to make a difference which approach you are taking on this issue. The discussion on the Briscoe family and Jews who were on the Nationalist side in the War of Independence reminds me of a kind of vaguely covert joke that used to be told: Did you hear about the Jewish guy in the IRA? No, what about him? He's making a bomb!
- ironyroad
August 20, 2010 at 2:40pm
I don't get the joke.
- noga1
August 20, 2010 at 3:25pm
"making a bomb" = "making a lot of money"
- ironyroad
August 20, 2010 at 3:27pm
I now realize I have a stupid typo in my longer response to tmitch above: the third para should read of course "that does not prevent a challenge . . ."
- ironyroad
August 20, 2010 at 3:29pm
Is this in Irish slang?
- noga1
August 20, 2010 at 3:36pm
Irish/British. It's funny that in the U.S. it went the opposite way, to mean failure ("the play bombed").
- ironyroad
August 20, 2010 at 3:49pm
tmitch57 “In 2004 I published an article in the Journal of Conflict Studies in Canada in which I analysed the six salient features of Israeli politics:” The fact that you published an article in a Journal doesn’t mean that your view is the correct one. Now, let’s how your little list which is meant to delegitimize the Jewish State stands up to close scrutiny: “1) Weak, unstable coalition governments resulting from a PR-list franchise system;” I don’t know what this means exactly, but for a country with a weak unstable government Israel has done very well. “2) Powerful religious parties similar to system Islamist parties in Turkey or Indonesia;” Are the religious parties in Israel any more powerful than, say, the Christian right in the US? They certainly are not as powerful as the Islamist party in Turkey which is in control of the government. “3) A class of "military politicians" --former senior military officers;” Golda Meyr was hardly a “military politician,” and neither were Ben Gurion, Levi Eshkol, or Menachem Begin. Even Shimon Peres was not a military leader. “4) Parties with paramilitary origins;” The religious parties, which you claimed have so much influence, did not have a “paramilitary” origin. Neither did the Labor party which was an amalgamation of different groups in the Labor movement. That the Jewish State had to defend itself since before independence is no secret. The defenders, for the most part members of Kibbutzim who worded the land by day did not constitute a paramilitary organization. Moreover, the Mizrahis who first favored Begins’ party and then formed the Shas party did not originate in any paramilitary organization. The only parties one can claim origin in a “paramilitary organization” was Begins’ Herut party which then became the Likud movement. The paramilitary period was before 1948 and at the time they did not comprise a majority neither of the electorate nor of the fighting forces in the IDF. I could go one, but your claim #4 is way overstated. “5) The "native question" as the determinant of Left or Right status for parties;” Again this is too vague to be taken seriously. There is not “native question” in Israel. The Arabs who stayed in Israel after 1948 were not the sole determiner of “left/right” political divisions in the country. “6) De jure legal discrimination.” Again, this is too general to be meaningful. Discrimination in Israel against Arabs while it exists is not sanctioned by law. So far all we have is a pretty ad hoc and subjective list of features which the writer thinks apply to colonial countries. He goes on to say that: “These last four traits are all traits shared with settler societies such as Northern Ireland, the United States and South Africa. Israel has more of these features (4) than do the U.S. N. Ireland, and S. Africa with three each. Northern Ireland has paramilitary parties but not military politicians and S. Africa and the U.S. had military politicians but not paramilitary parties.” I don’t know if his list applies to say, Northern Ireland (I know they don’t apply to the US---notice that he didn’t bother to mention any South American country or Australia which also had colonial periods.) Then he comes up with the question begin conclusion: “Therefore Israeli politics can be classified as settler politics.” This is faux reasoning, a pretty bad parody of legal argumentation. I can only conclude that “the Journal of Conflict Studies in Canada” which published this travesty must not have a high editorial standard. “Israelis should be seen as "returned natives" for the purpose of legitimacy and as settlers for the purpose of comparison and analysis. Objectively they are both as they see themselves and as their enemies see them. Many countries in the world today especially in the Western Hemisphere have settler origins. And so Israel should not be singled out or delegitimized. But comparative analysis with countries such as Northern Ireland and the U.S. in the 19th century can shed light on Israeli politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the peace process.” This is a pretty weak disclaimer and I am sure no Arab intellectual would accept the mealy mouthed conclusion.
- jdyer
August 21, 2010 at 12:44pm
I wonder, jackson, if this is the first time David Mitchel has had to deal with very real and knowledgeable criticism of the half-baked and juvenile theories he advances. "The Journal of Conflict studies" is issued at New Brunswick University, Fredericton, NB. Fredericton is a semi-comatose city where the local paper, The Daily Gleaner, provides only half to one page in each issue to international affairs and the only op-eds are always written by Gwynn Dyer. The university itself is known for its mediocrity and frankly, intellectual lethargy. When my son was 13, I signed him up for a week's summer camp at the university. On the first day of camp the organizer of the camp called me up expressing her view that my son was a potential violent threat to others and politely asked me to take him out of the program. I was flabbergasted. My son who was the number one nerd in his class, who only three weeks before that got an excellent student award, him, a potential violent threat? Her proof? She told me that she struck up a conversation with him as they were waiting for a bus and he told her that he would do military service in Israel. That's how she concluded that he was one of those boys, you know, inclined towards violence. That's just an anecdotal way of explaining what NB university is about and the level of intellectual and academic rigor that can be expected of its graduates. I have browsed over the offerings of this academic journal and I didn't see anything to impress me as deviating from the general mediocrity that characterizes the university. There was one article in which the author tries to make case that the success of Jewish terrorism between 1940 and 1948 has left a legacy of terrorism in the Middle-East. You see, the thriving and proliferation of terrorist organizations in the Arab and Muslim world are to be blamed on Etzel and Lehi! What do you know.
- noga1
August 21, 2010 at 1:36pm
Thanks for the info about the journal, Noga. I had a hunch that what you wrote is the case. Thanks for verifying it. btw and this is off topic, living in Montreal I wonder if you are familiar with A. M. Klein an authir and poet. "Retrieving A.M. Klein" By Allan Nadler http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2010/8/17/main-feature/1/retrieving-am-klein
- jdyer
August 21, 2010 at 1:46pm
I've also been struck by a couple of vehemently asserted errors. The one I corrected above, regarding the origin of the Irish Labor Party, is odd. It's clear that tmitch didn't just make a typo when he cited 1932 as the date of founding. But everyone who knows anything at all about modern Irish history would have an intuitive sense of something wrong. Indeed, all you have to do is go to the Irish Labor Party's website and click on "Who We Are" and you can read a brief history of the party. The insertion of Liam instead of Eamon for De Valera's name was a genuine mistake in the article that he admitted, but it's still a weird error, as if you were writing on Israel and at some point referred to Menachem Ben-Gurion (and nobody noticed it in the proofs -- I mean, embarrassing things can happen, but still). I'm assuming that the Journal uses some kind of peer-review process (outside NBU) before it publishes articles, but "conflict studies" is one of these new and cool interdisciplinary areas of research in which a great deal of fuzzy quasi-scholarship can take up space alongside serious work. If tmitch is reading this, I'd simply like to point out that he himself directed our attention to his article -- we didn't go looking for it with malice aforethought. If you put something out in the world, you take a risk; you can't determine in advance that it will always be treated as gospel.
- ironyroad
August 21, 2010 at 2:04pm
There was a conference about A.M. Klein organized by Concordia U's Sherry Simon and Norman Ravin. I read a paper she wrote about him, her interest mainly in the fact that he was a translator, but I can't say I was ever moved to a greater interest in him. I know he is feted in Montreal as a great poet and a James Joyce scholar. Here is the book Simon wrote in which Klein is featured extensively: http://mqup.typepad.com/mcgill_queens_university_/sherry_simon_translating_montreal/
- noga1
August 21, 2010 at 2:14pm
ironyroad "I've also been struck by a couple of vehemently asserted errors. The one I corrected above, regarding the origin of the Irish Labor Party, is odd. It's clear that tmitch didn't just make a typo when he cited 1932 as the date of founding. But everyone who knows anything at all about modern Irish history would have an intuitive sense of something wrong. Indeed, all you have to do is go to the Irish Labor Party's website and click on "Who We Are" and you can read a brief history of the party." I caught some of the mistakes he made with regard to Irish history, but I thought I'd leave them to you to correct them. His posts are riddled with errors and omissions but I don't have the time to mention all of them.
- jdyer
August 21, 2010 at 3:04pm
Until recently AM Klein was just a translator's name to me. I was glad to learn more about him. I did like the short excerpts of his poems in the article.
- jdyer
August 21, 2010 at 3:06pm
so called "nayyer_ali" is muckenzie under an assumed ID.
- jdyer
August 21, 2010 at 5:34pm
Speaking of the Irish-Israeli connection, here is something to chew on: http://transmontanus.blogspot.com/2010/08/rebel-girl-from-rebel-cork.html
- noga1
August 21, 2010 at 5:59pm
About the brave Cliona Campbell: August 21, 2010 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-s-cohen/anti-zionists-plumb-new-d_b_688196.html?view=print
- jdyer
August 21, 2010 at 7:53pm
Irony, The 1932 date is taken from Kieran Allen's book, "Fianna Fail and Irish Labour: 1926 to the Present." You can argue with him about whether or not it is correct. As I mentioned previously, it can be argued that the Irish Labour Party does have a connection with the Irish Citizen Army. But the modern party dates its history from 1932. Jdyer: You apparently are a mind reader as you can perceive my motives without ever having met me or knowing anything about me. If you would bother to read the article it is explained in the article what point #1 means. Every Israeli government for the past 20 years has failed to complete its term in office--this is generally taken as a sign of weak, unstable governments although they are much better than the record of French or Italian governments. You can name a number of Israeli premiers who weren't former generals. That doesn't prove anything. Now try naming democracies beside the United States and South Africa that have close to as many former generals as prime ministers as Israel has had? Israel has mostly parties without paramilitary origins, but along with Ireland and Northern Ireland it is the only Western country to have any political parties with paramilitary origins. Israel had three parties with paramilitary origins the same no. as in NI, but fewer than the Republic of Ireland. In Israel it is the Arab question, or the question of the territories that determines whether or not a party is considered to be left or right. This has been the case since June 1967. Thus, people who are fervent capitalists but support returning all the territories in return for peace are considered to be leftists. Those who support an extensive welfare state but want to retain the territories are considered rightists--or who want to expel the Arabs, or make them sign a loyalty oath, etc. I didn't compare Israel with Australia because in Australia the Aboriginees were considered more of a nuisance than a serious existential threat. The Latin American countries, although many are settler colonies, were not democracies until recently and the influence of Spanish and Portuguese culture makes them much harder to compare with Israel than other countries that had a British connection such as the U.S., South Africa, and N. Ireland. Noga, Why not criticize New Brunswick on the quality of its football team?
- tmitch57
August 23, 2010 at 12:30am
"You can name a number of Israeli premiers who weren't former generals." Of the twelve known Israeli prime ministers to date, only four were former generals: Alon, Rabin, Sharon and Barak. All of whom produced visions for peace which necessitated serious compromises. BTW, one can detect a distinct tone of acerbity in Mitchel's responses here. As if he finds it hard to believe readers will dispute his findings as dubious. It is a mark of lack of confidence in his own theories that he switches so easily from : "A class of "military politicians" --former senior military officers;” to "Now try naming democracies beside the United States and South Africa that have close to as many former generals as prime ministers as Israel has had?" Faced with facts, his argument has changed but not the bellicose tone or the conclusion or understanding that should follow from it. “Any opinion that cannot be amended by the introduction of new facts is not an opinion but a prejudice.” (Benjamin Franklin)
- noga1
August 23, 2010 at 8:40am
Noga, I stand by what I said, "a class of military politicians." I never claimed that all prime ministers or even a majority of prime ministers were military politicians. The military politicians have really dominated the defense ministry, not the premiership. Since June 1967, with two minor exceptions (Begin, Amir Peretz) all defense ministers have either been former generals or defense technocrats (Peres, Arens). For a comparable level of dominance we would have to look at the post-Civil War presidency in the United States from 1869-1893 in which all the Republican presidents were former Union generals, or the 1910-1948 period in the Union of South Africa in which all the prime ministers were former Boer generals from the Second Anglo-Boer War. Incidentally Yigal Allon was never prime minister, but rather deputy premier under both Eshkol and Meir. Nor did I claim anything about the quality of the rule of the Israeli generals who were former prime ministers. I investigated the phenomenon because I recognized that since the Yom Kippur War all peace agreements with the Arabs had been negotiated by former generals (Allon, Rabin, Dayan, Barak) with the exception of the 1993 Declaration of Principles. So I wanted to see how long this class was likely to remain intact in Israel. For that I looked at the demise of the similar phenomena in the U.S. and South Africa and saw that none of the circumstances applied to contemporary Israel. As long as the conflict with the Palestinians continues so will the phenomenon of Israeli military politicians and probably for some 20 years after peace is concluded. You and your cohorts start by making assumptions about my motives and then make inferences from what you think I've implied. Irony, I looked up the history of the party on Wikipedia and it lists 1912 as the date of founding. But there was a major split in 1924. The 1932 date I got from too quick a read of Allen's book, just glancing for a response as he discusses cooperation between Labour and Fianna Fail. In any case, at the time I wrote the article in question I claimed no expertise in the politics or history of the Republic of Ireland. As Ireland and Northern Ireland are two separate countries, my discussion is of Northern Ireland since The Troubles. When I mentioned the Republic of Ireland it was to list all of the parties that at one point had split from Sinn Fein/the IRA. These include Cumann na nGaedhael/Fine Gael (and I don't claim to know Irish so the spelling of the first might be off), Fianna Fail, Cumann naPoblachta, SF-the Workers' Party and the contemporary Sinn Fein. I have since read much more on modern Irish politics but my familiarity with the Irish Labour Party is with the period from 1982 when Dick Spring took over.
- tmitch57
August 23, 2010 at 11:23am
"Since June 1967, with two minor exceptions (Begin, Amir Peretz) all defense ministers have either been former generals or defense technocrats (Peres, Arens" Please note again the sleight of hand in the morphing of arguments. Compelled to justify his choice of description of "a class of military politicians." with the facts that don't quite support it, he then expands the definition of "former generals" and "military politicians" to include: "either... former generals or defense technocrats". And then continues on his way as if nothing has been changed. He stands by his assertions. Of course in a way he is correct that all or most politicians are ex-military (with the possible exceptions of ultra religious leaders). Since all citizens over 18 in the state of Israel are obligated by law to serve in the army, the only way a political establishment can avoid electing former military people would be if the candidates came from parties whose constituencies for the most part did not do military duty, like, again, the ultra orthodox or Arab parties. In other words, parties which either advocate the dissolution of the state of Israel or a reinforcement of the theocratic element in the state of Israel. I repeat that Mitchell's refusal to take into account the simple and verifiable facts presented here suggest he is not interested in any genuine academic investigation but proving a preconceived theory whose beauty he cannot resist. A reliable academic would not resort to the type of generalization and blurring, such as the one I pointed out between "former generals" and "defense technocrats" (whatever that means). A true academic mind is really interested in understanding things not imposing on them a pre-meditated mold. A true academic would not arrange only those dots selected to fit his theories. There has been an accumulation of arguments here that by now should have alerted Mitchell to the flaws in his theories. But instead of taking a second look at his academic paper, as any responsible student on the undergraduate level would do having been alerted, he goes on the attack : "You and your cohorts start by making assumptions about my motives" Who are my "cohorts"? Mitchell ought to answer the question if he is even remotely an academic with some academic integrity.
- noga1
August 23, 2010 at 11:55am
tmitch: "But the modern party dates its history from 1932." Oh come on! This isn't some obscure event open to multiple interpretations. From the web site of the Irish Labor Party (www.labour.ie): "The Labour Party was founded in 1912 in Clonmel, County Tipperary, by James Connolly, James Larkin and William O'Brien as the political wing of the Irish Trade Union Congress. It is the oldest political party in Ireland and the only one which pre-dates independence. The founders of the Labour Party believed that for ordinary working people to shape society they needed a political party that was committed to serving their needs; they knew that there is only so much that trade unions and community organisations can do, an effective political party is needed to create a fair society. Similar political movements were being forged throughout the world at this time, and the internationalism and progressive politics of this era has profoundly shaped Labour's philosophy since." You will notice if you read the longer text entitled "A Brief History of the Labour Party" that the year 1932 does not get even a single mention.
- ironyroad
August 23, 2010 at 12:52pm
tmitch: "The 1932 date I got from too quick a read of Allen's book" I can imagine. In any case, I'm glad that I apparently now don't have to argue with Kieran Allen. That still leaves us, however, with the three-part question on a central issue that I find very confusingly treated in your article, to wit: (a) Do "settler" politics define Ireland as a whole before independence, and afterwards define Northern Ireland? (b) Do "settler" politics define Ireland as a whole before independence, and afterwards define both NI politics and Irish Free State/Republic of Ireland politics? Or (c) Do "settler" politics define Northern Ireland only, after Partition, and what went on in Ireland before 1922 was something different?
- ironyroad
August 23, 2010 at 1:06pm
"too quick a read of " Figures.
- noga1
August 23, 2010 at 1:31pm
tmitch57 “You apparently are a mind reader as you can perceive my motives without ever having met me or knowing anything about me.” Not a mind reader at all, just commenting on what you wrote and its implications. “If you would bother to read the article it is explained in the article what point #1 means. Every Israeli government for the past 20 years has failed to complete its term in office--this is generally taken as a sign of weak, unstable governments although they are much better than the record of French or Italian governments.” This is in the nature of parliamentary systems. A reigning coalition may decide not to call for elections early in order to gain an advantage. Still I don’t know what this point proves. “You can name a number of Israeli premiers who weren't former generals. That doesn't prove anything. Now try naming democracies beside the United States and South Africa that have close to as many former generals as prime ministers as Israel has had?” I haven’t studied the roster of leaders in most countries. However, when you limit yourself to democracies you are stocking the deck aren’t you? Still, you are also limiting yourself to the last 20 years. OK, in that period, since say 1990 Rabin wan an exemplary General at one time though he didn’t take office as a General. The same is true for Barak. Still neither Shimon Peres nor Olmert were Generals. Ariel Sharon of course was a famous general, but he too didn’t rule as a general. As for Netanyahu, he wasn’t a general either. So in the last twenty years we have six prime ministers three were generals and three were not. So what is your point? Israel is a society at war and it’s natural for people to wish to elect people with military experience to high office. This has very little to do with the country being a “settler or colonial” society which it isn’t. “Israel has mostly parties without paramilitary origins, but along with Ireland and Northern Ireland it is the only Western country to have any political parties with paramilitary origins. Israel had three parties with paramilitary origins the same no. as in NI, but fewer than the Republic of Ireland.” This is trivial, what is your point? This is like saying that the Republican Party in the US founded on an antislavery ticket makes it a “progressive party” today. It doesn’t. In spite of TS Eliot origin isn’t destiny. You have also btw changed your tune about the paramilitary origin of political parties in Israel. “In Israel it is the Arab question, or the question of the territories that determines whether or not a party is considered to be left or right.” The whole game of left or right is beside the point. Ariel Sharon was on the right, yet he withdrew from Gaza. Moreover, the “Arab question” is not the same as the “Territorial question.” Finally, Mitch, your view about colonial societies is confused. Colonial societies have mother countries that sponsored them; hence Australia, the US, Canada, South Africa, (at one time) was sponsored by England. The same is true of the Chinese in Tibet. All of South America and the Caribbean were sponsored by Spain and Portugal, the Dutch, France, etc. Israel was never sponsored by any one country. Great Britain which administered Mandate Palestine under the League of Nations wasn’t a sponsor in the same sense. This is why you need to resort to a doubtful structural analysis in order to claim that the Jews are colonists in some imaginary Palestinian country. Jews have been accused of being colonists wherever they lived, from Spain in the late middle ages till they were expelled to the Russian pale pogroms going back centuries which were justified on the same grounds, to Germany in the 20’s and 30’s where they were viewed as interlopers who didn’t belong. That the left has decided to see Jews in their historic homeland as “colonizers” makes their ideology no different from that of the ideology of the above mentioned regimes.
- jdyer
August 23, 2010 at 2:17pm
jdyer, malahat, irony, et al.: If you will provide me with your email addresses I will gladly send you copies of my original article. Than you can write your own articles attempting to refute the actual points made in the article and have them published in The Journal of Conflict Studies or another academic journal dealing with the subject matter. You will find that this task may be more difficult than engaging in ad hominem attacks or claims about how I'm twisting my argument, etc. A class in sociological or legal terms is composed of a number of people who have a relevant feature in common. In Israel the class of military politicians are those who were former senior officers(Brigadier General to Lieutenant General). You have chosen to infer what you think I implied from my statements and then refute that other than what I actually said. I actually investigated all other former British settler colonies and European colonial powers who were democracies at the time of their colonial period or immediately afterwars (i.e. Weimar Germany) looking for classes of military politicians. I didn't really find any except for three former generals in Frances between 1934 and 1958. My definition of a class was a minimum of two separate national politicians at the same time in at least two separate eras such as in the U.S. after the American Revolution and after the War of 1812, or in South Africa during the Boer republics and during the Union of South Africa. Neither France, Germany or Ireland made the grade. What I put in the first post (#2) was an abstract of the article. Now Irony is all upset because I'm not an expert on the history of the Irish Labour Party--which is nowhere mentioned in the article. Irony, Settler politics can be perceived in Ireland as a whole from the mid-1880s when the first Home Rule proposals were made and Randolph Churchill decided to plan the orange card. But as Ireland was ruled as part of the UK, the main effect of the settler politics was to give the settlers a veto over Home Rule until just before World War I when the provisions for passing legislation were changed to remove the veto of the House of Lords. The unionists wanted to prevent Home Rule completely and they failed at this. Instead it was limited to the 26 Counties while the Six Counties of Northern Ireland emerged as a settler colony run independently by the settlers, with British financial subsidies, until March 1972 when the Stormont parliament was prorogued and direct rule was instituted. Thereafter there was settler politics without settler rule. Northern Ireland, as I make clear in my book, Native vs. Settler (Greenwood, 2000), is a special case because it is ultimately a dependent settler colony run by a metropole, but it has its own political party system and it enjoyed a 50-year period of autonomy. Michael MacDonald in his "Children of Wrath" (Polity Press, 1986) makes a similar argument. Donald Akenson makes a long comparison between Israel, Northern Ireland, and South Africa in his book "God's Peoples" (Cornell University Press, 1992) but doesn't refer to them as settler colonies as his argument is religio-cultural. But I must say, that looking at it after a decade, I think my first Israeli characteristic, weak coalition governments, is far more important than any of the four settler features. So I'm now looking at etnic democracies, as defined my Israeli sociologist Sami Smooha, that have PR franchise systems. The Republic of Ireland's party system is what Israel's could look like if it implemented serious electoral reform. If all of you will actually read the article without being so defensive, you'll see that it is actually an argument to look at applying approaches from Northern Ireland in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than the South African approach i.e. sanctions. I also argued that if, when I wrote it back in 2004, stable peace had not been established in Northern Ireland after more than a decade, one had to be realistic about the conflict and its durability and what efforts would be needed to achieve peace.
- tmitch57
August 23, 2010 at 4:31pm
Irony, In the first para of my post to you change independently to autonomously. The legal metropole for the Palestine Mandate was the League of Nations, but the de facto mandatory power was Britian specifically the British COLONIAL OFFICE. When a colonial power's, i.e. the British Empire, colonial office runs a territory for the benefit of immigrants that is a pretty good definition of a settler colony. (Algeria also had large numbers of settlers who weren't French but came from Italy and Spain.) After 1939 this became problematic and the settlers revolted as settlers did in the United States and in Rhodesia and attempted to do in Algeria. Britain turned the problem over to the UN because it couldn't see any way to reconcile the Jews and Arabs. Noga, I don't count former or reserve enlisted personnel or junior officers as military politicians. In an article in the Journal of Military and Political Sociology (or Political and Military Sociology) "Native-Fighter Politician" I define a native-fighter politician as one who achieved significant military or political advancement because of his reputation fighting the native population of his country i.e. Indian fighters in the U.S., African fighters in South Africa, and Arab fighters in Israel. Generals Washington and Jackson both achieved high military rank in the regular army because of their earlier service against Indians. These are the type of people I compare with the Israeli military politicians not the vets like Presidents Kennedy through Ford who served in World War II as junior or mid-rank officers. Refute the actual points I make not your imagination as to what I say.
- tmitch57
August 23, 2010 at 4:56pm
"Native-Fighter Politician" I define a native-fighter politician as one who achieved significant military or political advancement because of his reputation fighting the native population of his country" It's a silly trick, Mitchel, quoting yourself and your definitions. Ithzak Rabin did not fight "native people of his countrty'. That would mean he fought Jews within Israel. I realize you need to make these definitions so that your theories will stick together. But even if we apply your own definition, it fails the test of verifiable reality, since Rabin fought enemy armies from neigbouring Arab countries. As did Sharon. As did Barak. BTW, you did not answer my question: Who are my cohorts? What's the matter, out of new definitional ideas?
- noga1
August 23, 2010 at 5:33pm
Apropo, Ireland and Israel, this is pertinent, from Eamon McDonagh: "88 years after Collins was killed and 87 years after the end of the Civil War we Irish are still dealing with its consequences and attempting to heal the breach it opened between us. Meanwhile, some Irish people would like the Jews to just get over what happened to their parents and grandparents in Europe between 1939 and 1945, accuse them of being the contemporary incarnation of their own worst oppressors and are prepared to boycott their state until it behaves as they would wish." http://blog.z-word.com/2010/08/michael-collins-88-years-and-burying-the-past/ I realize that the H-word is a taboo issue in Mitchell's theories about settler politics and colonialist enterprises. All the more reason to remind him that his understanding of pre-Israel history is highly flawed, to say the least, if not downright perverted.
- noga1
August 23, 2010 at 5:42pm
Continued: http://blog.z-word.com/2010/08/michael-collins-88-years-and-burying-the-past/ I realize that the H-word is a taboo issue in Mitchell's theories. It might interfere with the smoothness of his theories about settler politics and colonialist enterprises. All the more reason to insert it into the discussion by way of reminding him that the pre-Israel realities were a lot more complicated than his juvenile theories would allow him to acknowledge.
- noga1
August 23, 2010 at 5:47pm
Noga: "It's a silly trick, Mitchel, quoting yourself and your definitions. Ithzak Rabin did not fight "native people of his countrty'. That would mean he fought Jews within Israel. I realize you need to make these definitions so that your theories will stick together. But even if we apply your own definition, it fails the test of verifiable reality, since Rabin fought enemy armies from neigbouring Arab countries. As did Sharon. As did Barak." I agree.
- jdyer
August 23, 2010 at 5:58pm
tmitch: "The Republic of Ireland's party system is what Israel's could look like if it implemented serious electoral reform." There's a great movie comedy in there somewhere. An Irish dude comes to Israel to reform their electoral system and falls in love with Tzipi Livni.
- ironyroad
August 23, 2010 at 8:16pm
Well, I can agree at least that Israel needs a serious electoral reform.
- noga1
August 23, 2010 at 9:08pm
Gabriel Byrne?
- noga1
August 23, 2010 at 10:33pm
jdyer, You're wrong. Rabin fought Palestinians during the first phase of the War of Independence from January to May 1948.Raphael Eitan was involved in the attempted assassination of a leading Palestinian figure from the Arab Revolt, who was the father of one of the Black September leaders. Dayan also fought Palestinians with Wingate during the Arab Revolt, as did Allon, and Sharon fought them in the reprisal raids of the 1950s and in the Gaza Strip in the early 1970s as well as in Lebanon. Most of the first two generations of military politicians fought the Palestinians at same point as well as those who came after 1982.
- tmitch57
August 23, 2010 at 10:46pm
Noga, Is the H-Word holocaust or hasbara? Because if its the latter that's all you seem to be doing rather than analysis.
- tmitch57
August 23, 2010 at 10:48pm
"Is the H-Word holocaust or hasbara? Because if its the latter that's all you seem to be doing rather than analysis." What a very inelegant and defensive way of ducking a question. Who are my cohorts, Mitchell?
- noga1
August 23, 2010 at 11:34pm
Colin Meany: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000538/ And don't anyone dare say he's too old!
- ironyroad
August 24, 2010 at 12:41am
tmitch, malahat linked to your complete article on 8/19 at 12:28 (see p1 of this thread). We have been critiquing your complete text ever since then, in case you hadn't noticed. One objection I had was based on your odd statement: "Only two other Western democracies have had paramilitary parties: the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom – the latter only within Northern Ireland.22 In Ireland the two factions of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) that fought the Irish civil war in 1922-23, eventually formed separate parties that eventually became the two main parties in Ireland, Fianna Fail (warriors of destiny) and Fine Gael (band of Gaels). Later, smaller groups would emerge from the IRA to form smaller parties. Until the emergence of the Workers’ Party in both Ireland and Northern Ireland in the early 1980s, all of these parties followed the Israeli pattern of being extensions of a former paramilitary group rather than being the political arm of that group. Although the IRA continued to exist, Liam [sic] de Valera split from it when he formed Fianna Fail in 1927." This is confused at best and deliberately misleading at worst, and the penultimate sentence about the Workers' Party is sheer drivel. You leave out the entire history of the Irish Labor Party, the oldest continually existing political party in Ireland and one that had a distinctive relationship with both the labor and nationalist movements. You say you're not an expert on the Republic (I'll concede that) but you're the one who lays out the historical party map and gets it wrong. I think it's begging a number of questions (if not a deliberate misnomer) to speak of "paramilitary parties" when both the Republican movement (essentially including both Sinn Fein and the IRA) parties that became the leading political forces in the Irish Free State/Republic of Ireland put all police and military forces under legal and constitutional supervision and control and did not seek to establish private armies or underground military forces after 1923 (Cumann na nGael) or 1932 (Fianna Fail). Nor, most importantly, did either party ever seek to overturn an election result by force or intimidation. I would dispute the validity of the term "paramilitary parties" for the Irish Free State/Republic of Ireland in the sense I think you're using it. In any case, I appreciate the response you gave to my question. I would have some problems with it, although not entirely, but you still refuse to see that "settler" is not a neutral term but a descriptor that ideologically inflects your whole analysis (and, incidentally, your article would be stronger if you conceded that upfront but defended why you still want to deploy the term). Finally, I am made uneasy by your easy bellicosity and tendency to say stuff without forethought. You haven't been present around these parts too long, so you may not know much about who or what you'll meet, but you managed within a few posts to: 1. respond to my fairly polite original question by telling me I needed a dictionary; 2. respond to makover by telling him he had obviously never published an academic article; 3. respond to me by telling me that I needed to argue my point with a particular author whose book you had quoted, rather than with you; and then 4. rush into print to confirm that you had indeed failed to read this author correctly. To that extent, you are the one who reached first for the ad hominem stuff. I see a prickly defensiveness at work, a tendency to cut corners, and an unwillingness to concede possible flaws in your scholarly product. It doesn't make me want to have a long exchange, to be quite honest.
- ironyroad
August 24, 2010 at 1:30am
Irony, If you read the original article, which you claim to have done, you'll see that the Irish Labour Party wasn't even mentioned. I didn't claim that all Irish parties had paramilitary origins. And you would also see that I state that there are two types of paramilitary parties: those that are a political continuation of the paramilitary group and those that are the political wing of the group like Sinn Fein and the two loyalist parties (PUP, UDP) in Northern Ireland. I argue that Israel's are similar to the paramilitary parties found in the Republic of Ireland and before that the Free State. I've just finished reading several books on Fianna Fail, all the authors stress its paramilitary origins as do Israeli and foreign writers writing about Herut. Incidentally to Noga--Labor has paramilitary origins as well through Ahdut Ha'Avoda, which contained two of the four theater commanders (Allon, Carmel) on the Israeli side as well as Deputy Defense Minister Israel Galili. Irony, you have been the most polite of my interrogators but even then you engaged in your snide congradulatory asides with the others. I was serious about the comment about writing an article or book==the introduction and conclusion are usually written after the research and the body of the article has been written. Somehow the fact that I did this was "proof" that I was jumping to conclusions. Only now have you disputed the fact that the parties I mentioned in the article were paramilitary parties and you do that by ignoring the definition that I give. I don't think that my response regarding a dictionary was impolite, obviously you seem to have disregarded the clear meaning of the word because to admit this was somehow offensive. I guess you define ad hominem differently than I do. And I'm out of here.
- tmitch57
August 24, 2010 at 2:57am
"I guess you define ad hominem differently than I do. And I'm out of here." To me it seems that Mitchell has a proclivity to use language not unlike Humpty-Dumpty. Or as Anne Carson said in one of her glorious poems: "What really connects words and things? Not much, decided my husband and proceeded to use language in the way that Homer says the gods do. All human words are known to the gods but have for them entirely other meanings alongside our meanings. They flip the switch at will. " ____________ BTW, I suspect Mitchell conceals a not too admirable agenda in insisting about this "paramilitary parties" thingy. He is aiming for what Martin Amis called "the fetishisation of balance". Which political party is the best known today for being a paramilitary party?
- noga1
August 24, 2010 at 7:39am
What's wrong with Gabriel? Why can't he be in your movie, ironyroad?
- noga1
August 24, 2010 at 7:41am
Ok already Noga! Ok. Gabriel Byrne can have the part. [IR picks up phone, punches numbers. "Colin? Irony here. Bad news, Noga wants Byrne. I had to give in -- she's like a dog with a bone on this one. Nope, she won't listen. What? I dunno, she probably thinks he's 'nice-looking' or something. I know he's older, but people don't notice that. Yeah, well he doesn't have much else going for him, that's true har har. What? You think? Oh, I'd go back to "Usual Suspects" for his last good one. Fifteen effing years ago, boy! Anyway, nothing to be done now. Talk to you soon, likewise, 'bye!"]
- ironyroad
August 24, 2010 at 10:36am
"If you read the original article, which you claim to have done, you'll see that the Irish Labour Party wasn't even mentioned." That was indeed my very point, tmitch. If you ignore them, you are writing a whole important segment of Irish political history (and, curiously for your own declared purposes, one with an obvious paramilitary strand via the Irish Citizen Army) out of the story. Why? Because they muddy the waters of your theory in some way? Let's stipulate the relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA during the War of Independence and say that it was a paramilitary nationalist complex. Nobody denies the "paramilitary" origins of the major parties in the Republic from that complex, but the point is whether such parties, if they embrace constitutionality and the rule of law (yes, it's fuzzy with Fianna Fail in the 1927-32 period), can in any real sense be defined by their origins, which is what I think you are doing in your piece. Secondly, the issue was that you are using "settler" in a way that determines the answer to a key question before the question can be posed. Thus it's not a politically neutral term and your deployment of it undermines your theory of NI history. And I still don't understand how you explain the stability of the 1922-1972 political structure in NI in terms of your theory of party/parliamentary volatility and settler politics (after all, that's over half the history of NI, longer than the time between 1972 and now). It seems to me you just skip it. Finally, having gone back to read your article for the third time, I still find it confused, and I believe that a significant part of the problem is your tendency, at times implicit and at times explicit, to regard NI as an independent country. This is nonsense. At best it was a kind of corrupt statelet, created entirely by Partition in 1921 and the unwilling benefiary of exactly the kind of "Austro-Hungary" structure under the British crown that the original Sinn Fein in the 1908-1914 period had advocated, but had abandoned in favor of complete sovereignty. Its public administration and finance were British, it had elected representation in the House of Commons, but its political culture was formed by the religious and social dimensions of the broader struggle for Irish independence from the mid-19th century onward. In reality it was and is part of the UK. Incidentally, I wouldn't regard the IRA as having "maximalist territorial ambitions" in the sense that the PLO has or had: I think the ideal conception of Irish Republicanism is one in which religion genuinely doesn't matter (the old 'Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter' slogan) and Protestants of various types have been active and even leading Irish nationalists. A true IRA equivalent would be a militant Palestinian organization that wanted Muslims, Jews, and Christians to work together for a non-confessional state free of foreign influence within the European Enlightenment tradition -- and actually had some Jews and Christians! Although it would be stupid to deny the inter-communal tensions and hatreds in NI and the decline in the Protestant population in the Republic, there was and is no "Protestants into the sea!" strain in Irish nationalist thinking. NOTE: Unsolicited advice: there are ways and ways of dealing with criticism. If you immediately get defensive and tell someone to go find a dictionary when it's not the dictionary meaning but the ideological implications of a key term that's at issue, don't be surprised if they respond with some asperity!
- ironyroad
August 24, 2010 at 11:42am
Colin or Colm? Are they pronounced the same in Irish? If you must have a Colin, I'll settle, albeit with some reluctance, on Colin Firth. I believe he once played a snooty Irish man so he'd qualify.
- noga1
August 24, 2010 at 1:13pm
No they are different. But Meany is that kind of guy. I keep getting his name wrong and he never says anything! No! You're getting Byrne. You've caused enough drama already.
- ironyroad
August 24, 2010 at 1:30pm
tmitch57 “jdyer, You're wrong. Rabin fought Palestinians during the first phase of the War of Independence from January to May 1948.Raphael Eitan was involved in the attempted assassination of a leading Palestinian figure from the Arab Revolt, who was the father of one of the Black September leaders. Dayan also fought Palestinians with Wingate during the Arab Revolt, as did Allon, and Sharon fought them in the reprisal raids of the 1950s and in the Gaza Strip in the early 1970s as well as in Lebanon. Most of the first two generations of military politicians fought the Palestinians at same point as well as those who came after 1982.” Here we have again another confused post by TMitch. Mitch, you are playing semantic games, again. There were no Palestinians in 1948, or rather if there were they were the Jews who were referred to as Palestinians. The Arab leaders with few exceptions didn’t see themselves as Palestinians but as Arabs or south Syrians. The Arab refuges adopted the name Palestinians in the early 60’s with the founding of the PLO. Hence the people that made war on the Jews in 47 and 48 were Arabs who rejected the UN partition plan. The partitions plan didn’t call for an Arab State and a colonial Jewish State. It called for two States one Arab one Jewish. Rabin, et al didn’t make war on the “natives” they too were natives they defended themselves against attacks by Arabs who didn’t want to the Jews to live in any part of Mandate Palestine as a sovereign people. From what you have written, and you can cover it up with as much academic jargon you wish, it seems that you are on the side of the rejectionists. For you it's 1948 all over again and the Jews have no right to a soverign State of their own. Why not say it up front and stop all this beating around the bush?
- jdyer
August 24, 2010 at 2:08pm
Gee you make it sound like a punishment. I wonder if he will condescend to give me some advice about a problem I have (being a drama bee I'm not sure if I am being swatted in the right direction, or to my doom).
- noga1
August 24, 2010 at 2:18pm
The thing is, jackson, that Mitch here is probably teaching students his own perverted version of history and how are they to know they are being duped by an ideologue academic with an agenda??
- noga1
August 24, 2010 at 2:30pm
I know Noga, and it is sad, isn't it.
- jdyer
August 24, 2010 at 8:58pm
"That there was a UN partition plan calling for the establishment of a Jewish state seems to be an inconvenient truth not mentioned at all in tmitch's article." One of many, malahat.
- jdyer
August 24, 2010 at 8:59pm
Another inconvenient truth is the fact that no other "colonial State" was founded by a people the Christian and Muslim world wanted to erase from the world. It is Mitch who is practicing a false form of Hasbara. Hasbara in Hebrew means explanation; this is not the same as propaganda.
- jdyer
August 24, 2010 at 9:03pm
Are you familiar with the name Joachim Martillo, Jackson? He always refers to Hasbara in the same way Mich has in this thread. One wonders what kind of sources inform Mitch's theories and where does he go to read them.
- noga1
August 24, 2010 at 9:53pm
Irony, As you are the most coherent of your group I will respond to your enquiries--if your colleagues have a serious question or challenge to raise they can communicate it to you and you can pose it to me. I am my training an analyst of international politics, a type of political scientist rather than a politician, a diplomat, or a masbir (hasbaran?). As I'm being charged with the attempted deligitization of Israel, a variety of libel charge I feel that I have the right to use truth as a defense as truth of any accusation has always been a recognized right in libel cases. So by saying that I can't use the dictionary definition as defense you are saying that truth cannot be an acceptable defense--when you worry about "ideological implications" you are engaging in a show trial. In the article I compared at length three cases with Israel: antebellum America, Northern Ireland and South Africa. Ireland was mentioned only in regard to the issue of paramilitary parties, in order to show that in Western democracies paramilitary parties weren't exclusively found in settler societies. With five different parties having been formed out of the IRA at various stages (Cumann na nGaedhael, Fianna Fail, Cumann naPoblachta, SF-The Workers' Party, and Provisional Sinn Fein) I felt that it was not necessary to further demonstrate the point by discussing parties that may or may not have come from the Irish Citizens Army or that had no paramilitary origins. Thus all discussion of the Irish Labour Party is irrelevant. And this is not because I have anything against it--if I were an Irish citizen voting in Irish elections I would very seriously consider voting for it. You don't accept my equivalence between the IRA and the PLO, fine. But bear in mind that the IRA is both in means and ends much closer to the PLO than the ANC was. Although as I stated in the article, the ANC, like the PLO, was/is an "official liberation movement" with widespread regional and international legitimacy. The IRA lacked similar legitimacy in Europe. For unionists the desire of the IRA/Sinn Fein and the INLA to destroy Northern Ireland as a political entity was the same as the PLO desire to destroy Israel and create a "democratic secular state." And there have been Christian and even Jews within the PLO. I agree that Northern Ireland is problematic--legally it is part of the UK, but culturally and even in legal status it is quite distinct from the British mainland portions of the UK. In the early 1970s anti-terrorism legislation was passed that subjected those from NI within Britain to certain restrictions that other UK citizens/residents were not. The Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy entitled her book on Northern Ireland "A Place Apart." This meant that it was neither really British nor Irish but a unique combination of the two. Neither England, nor Scotland, nor Wales has had paramilitary parties or engages in annual controversies over marching rights, not to mention the 3500 dead and the many times more wounded in a 25-year terrorist campaign. Culturally NI and the British mainland have grown distinctly apart since 1922. And I believe the ultimate proof of this distinction is that in 1998-2000 Tony Blair wasn't willing to keep IRA prisoners in prison until the IRA began decommissioning its weapons. He didn't want to risk the lives of his citizens for those that on the British mainland are popularly regarded as foreigners. Since 1989 there has been a growing body of ACADEMIC literature (including within Israel) linking the three cases of Israel, Northern Ireland and South Africa. My contribution had three aims. First, to show that the real linkage was the settler features of the politics of the three cases. Second, to demonstrate that NI rather than South Africa was the closest case to Israel--in fact was much closer. By implication this meant drawing lessons from the fate of the Northern Ireland peace process rather than from the South African transition. Third, to introduce antebellum America as a case for analysing the phenomenon of military politicians in Israel. This was, again, because I feel it is a much better case to compare with Israel than is the South African case. I explained at length in the article how I came to pick the particular cases that I did. I also stated at the beginning of the article that Israel had very different origins from settler colonies and that there were legitimate reasons for regarding Israeli Jews as returned natives. Since writing the article I have come to appreciate how characteristic #1--the party system--outweights the other characteristics; so in addition to looking in detail at Northern Ireland I have also looked at the French Fourth Republic, which had a similar party system and insurgencies in Indochina and Algeria to fight, and the Irish Republic, which had irridentist claims on Northern Ireland and a modified form of the PR franchise--the PR-STV, the same as in Northern Ireland for local and Assembly elections. I realize that in Israel this is a touchy subject as well, but they seem to be able to handle it much better than many American Jews and conservatives who support a particular party in Israel are handling it. The same charges of attempting to delegitimize Israel were also leveled against the school of New Historians.
- tmitch57
August 24, 2010 at 10:53pm
I know. WTF? I don't know yet whether I'm going to reply to the latest tmitchgram. In any case, I have to read some Henry James for class tomorrow and then become a settler in the Land of Nod.
- ironyroad
August 25, 2010 at 12:47am
“As I'm being charged with the attempted deligitization of Israel, a variety of libel charge I feel that I have the right to use truth as a defense as truth of any accusation has always been a recognized right in libel cases. So by saying that I can't use the dictionary definition as defense you are saying that truth cannot be an acceptable defense--when you worry about "ideological implications" you are engaging in a show trial.” The most generous thing I can say about Mitch’s latest temper tantrum is that it’s incoherent. On the one hand he claims that he is being libeled because I said that he is engaged in an attempt, using academic jargon to delegitimize the Jewish State, while on the other hand, he compares to three States that had lost all legitimacy as sovereign States: “In the article I compared at length three cases with Israel: antebellum America, Northern Ireland and South Africa.” The man would be either blind or a fool if he weren’t an antisemite. He also claims: ““I am my training an analyst of international politics, a type of political scientist rather than a politician, a diplomat, or a masbir (hasbaran?).” As if analysts of international politics couldn’t also be politicians, or propagandists. Finally, Mitch’ analysis is willful, his claims are arbitrary and his conclusions incoherent. nuf said
- jdyer
August 25, 2010 at 1:18am
Irony, which Henry James text are you working on?
- jdyer
August 25, 2010 at 1:19am
tmitch57 “Irony, As you are the most coherent of your group I will respond to your enquiries--if your colleagues have a serious question or challenge to raise they can communicate it to you and you can pose it to me.” So, Mitch, the Jew hater doesn’t like responding to Jews. Jews are non persons in his eyes who can only address him through a non Jewish interlocutor. Doesn’t surprise me; this is classic Jew hatred.
- jdyer
August 25, 2010 at 7:20am
I read the opening paragraphs he talks about: "Israelis and Zionists consider themselves to be returned natives, descendants of the ancient Israelites that have returned to their native land after millennia of wandering in foreign lands. The Arabs and their supporters consider the Zionist Jews who settled in Palestine to be settlers and Zionism to be a form of settler colonialism comparable to apartheid in South Africa or the racism that prevailed in settler colonies throughout South Africa. This author considers both sides to have many valid points: Zionism has many features in common with settler colonialist movements and it developed in unique circumstances that were different from the settlement of the Americas, Africa, and Indonesia by Europeans in the seventeenth to twentieth centuries.1 But by comparing the main practical features of Israeli politics with those of many independent settler colonies, i.e., settler colonies controlled by the local settlers rather than by a colonial metropole, it can be demonstrated that Israeli politics are settler politics. This article examines what the author considers to be the six main distinguishing features of the Israeli political system and argues that four of them are features of colonial settler regimes. It then uses these four features plus one of the two non-settler features to determine which settler colonies are/were closest to Israel in terms of politics." And I cannot find in them support for his assertion that he puts forth an a-priori premise that Israel "had very different origins from settler colonies and that there were legitimate reasons for regarding Israeli Jews as returned natives." What he actually puts forth is something like this: Though Israelis like to pretend they are returned natives, Arabs consider them colonialists and this author, while noting furtively and with some reluctance that Israel "developed in unique circumstances that were different from the settlement of the Americas, Africa, and Indonesia" (the fig leaf fallacy, or, as Nick Cohen would say, the obligatory throat clearing before launching into an anti-Israeli tirade) goes with the Arab narrative. To prove the truth of the author's Arab narrative, the author has managed to come up with six features of defining settler politics/states. The Israeli model fits only 4 of these features but what the heck, one of the other remaining features can also be somehow made to prove the point that Israel is an illegitimate entity. That makes 5 out of six, not a bad achievement for a theory that will get me published in an academic journal so I can boast about it later...
- noga1
August 25, 2010 at 8:49am
"I realize that in Israel this is a touchy subject as well, but they seem to be able to handle it much better than many American Jews and conservatives who support a particular party in Israel are handling it. The same charges of attempting to delegitimize Israel were also leveled against the school of New Historians." There are two most notable new historians. One is Ilan Pappe, a political scientist who now presides over a professorship in a British university dedicated to an accelerated scholarship in the service of the Palestinian narrative. "Pappé is one of Israel's "New Historians" who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel's creation in 1948, and the corresponding expulsion or flight of 700,000 Palestinians in the same year. He has written that the expulsions were not decided on an ad hoc basis, as other historians have argued, but constituted the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, in accordance with Plan Dalet, drawn up in 1947 by Israel's future leaders.[5] He blames the creation of Israel for the lack of peace in the Middle East, arguing that Zionism is more dangerous than Islamic militancy, and has called for an international boycott of Israeli academics.[6][7] He is a prominent supporter of the One State Solution envisaging one state for Palestinians and Israelis.[8]" In Pappe’s own words: "There is no historian in the world who is objective. I am not as interested in what happened as in how people see what's happened. I admit that my ideology influences my historical writings... Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers The debate between us is on one level between historians who believe they are purely objective reconstructers of the past, like [Benny] Morris, and those who claim that they are subjective human beings striving to tell their own version of the past, like myself. [Historical] Narratives... when written by historians involved deeply in the subject matter they write about, such as in the case of Israeli historians who write about the Palestine conflict, is motivated also... by a deep involvement and a wish to make a point. This point is called ideology or politics Yes, I use Palestinian sources for the Intifada: they seem to me to be more reliable, I admit. " And Benny Morris, a reconstructed new historian : "In the end, he says, the Jews, in their restored existence as a national state, are the greater victims, past and potential: "...that's so for the Jewish people, not the Palestinians. A people that suffered for 2,000 years, that went through the Holocaust, arrives at its patrimony but is thrust into a renewed round of bloodshed, that is perhaps the road to annihilation. In terms of cosmic justice, that's terrible. It's far more shocking than what happened in 1948 to a small part of the Arab nation that was then in Palestine." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Morris#Political_views _____________ So which New Historians does Mitch refer to, do you think?
- noga1
August 25, 2010 at 9:02am
JD: The American.
- ironyroad
August 25, 2010 at 10:53am
Early or revised version?
- jdyer
August 25, 2010 at 11:07am
Why have I never been able to warm up to Henry James?
- noga1
August 25, 2010 at 11:28am
He is a quintessential American writer. He doesn’t translate well literally as well as figuratively.
- jdyer
August 25, 2010 at 12:57pm
Hmm. That doesn't quite answer my question. Jane Austen is a quintessential English writer. Amos Oz is a quintessential Israeli author. Yet I am devoted to her and feel about Oz as I feel about James. It doesn't make sense that an author's nationality or culture should create a barrier between his/her novel and its readers. ________ BTW Ironyroad, how come you so willingly respond to jackson's request to know what you are teaching but ignored a similar query from me? Hath not a Noga mind? Heart? Knowledge?
- noga1
August 25, 2010 at 1:18pm
JD: 1876 (the Penguin Classics ed.). Noga: I did!? Noga hath no doubt all the standard equipment (mind, heart etc). Noneth'less ironyroad searcheth / In the dark cellar of memory but findeth / Not such a query. Was this recent? I can remember when we discussed books for a potential course on friendship, but since then . . . ? Please post query again, if it's still relevant.
- ironyroad
August 25, 2010 at 1:41pm
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/77036/obama-stands-principle-defends-muslim-rights
- noga1
August 25, 2010 at 2:11pm
Oh! How odd -- I don't know now if I saw that and forgot, or missed it completely. No, no secret: American Realism and Naturalism, my regular undergrad class, and a graduate class/seminar on Whitman's long career (with a helping of Yeats and Hardy, as we'll be looking at national identity and nationalism in relation to poetry).
- ironyroad
August 25, 2010 at 2:22pm
noga1 “Hmm. That doesn't quite answer my question. Jane Austen is a quintessential English writer. Amos Oz is a quintessential Israeli author. Yet I am devoted to her and feel about Oz as I feel about James. It doesn't make sense that an author's nationality or culture should create a barrier between his/her novel and its readers.” You did ask me to explain why you don’t care for Henry James. That was my answer, though I suspect you already know why you don’t like his books. In any case, there are many great national writers who don’t translate well. The Polish Nobel prize winner, Sienkiewicz. Has anyone read or even heard of The Polaniecki Family? I suspect that the Colombian Jorge Ricardo Isaacs’s Maria is another one. I suppose that there are many more writers who are admired locally than internationally. Henry James short stories, though, do translate pretty well I think judging by the way the critic Tzvetan Todorov responded to them in his “Poetics of Prose.”
- jdyer
August 25, 2010 at 2:27pm
"the Colombian Jorge Ricardo Isaacs’s Maria is another one. " Ah. At least I heard about that novel. As well I should. I ought to take the trouble to read it, though. "...though I suspect you already know why you don’t like his books." No, I really don't know. I can step over his antisemitism, if that's what you mean by "suspect". It's the atmosphere in the novels I did read. The aimlessness of Americans in Europe or something to do with it. And is he considered a "national" author?
- noga1
August 25, 2010 at 2:44pm
noga1 ""...though I suspect you already know why you don’t like his books." No, I really don't know. I can step over his antisemitism, if that's what you mean by "suspect"." Didn't even cross my mine. "It's the atmosphere in the novels I did read." Which novels did you read? "The aimlessness of Americans in Europe or something to do with it. And is he considered a "national" author?" He is not exactly a "national author," his style is too difficult for him to ever have become a national author as Mark Twain became.
- jdyer
August 25, 2010 at 3:35pm
malahat, I admire "The Mayor of Casterbridge" too -- the way the plot reverses on itself is very powerful, I think, as the protagonist circles back to being the outsider he was 25 years earlier. I haven't read all his novels but "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and "Far from the Madding Crowd" are impressive, as is "Jude the Obscure" but it's almost too grim to work (I think it tips over into absurdity at times). It's Hardy's poetry I'll be teaching later on, his second career in many ways. Hardy wrote some very good poems, e.g. "Drummer Hodge," "Channel Firing," "As I Set Out for Lyonesse," "Snow in the Suburbs," "In a London Flat," and many more. They are modest and unshowy, mostly.
- ironyroad
August 25, 2010 at 4:23pm
Oh, I nearly forgot. Jackson, you asked irony about "The American"" "Early or revised version?" I assume there is an important difference and curious to know how the two versions differ and why it matters to the way the novel is taught.
- noga1
August 25, 2010 at 6:16pm
malahat, you're welcome -- your query also reminded me that Return of the Native has been on my to-read list for . . . well, too long (er, 25 years?). I've also been reading the Complete Poems, a few a day, over the summer, and that begins to give one a new appreciation of Hardy.
- ironyroad
August 25, 2010 at 7:42pm
tmitch, thanks for your extended response on the previous page. I have read through it and I am increasingly convinced that this whole "settler" trope leads to confusion and forcing parallels where none exist, or at least where one should proceed very cautiously. Given your point -- which I agree with -- that NI has grown further from the UK since 1922, I would say that it has grown apart from the rest of Ireland also, with the assertive nationalism of the Catholic population in NI finding less and less of an echo in the place where the nationalist project was actually enacted. Certain dimensions of the conflict itself come from the IRA's and Sinn Fein's complete inabilty or unwillingness (which I've seen up close) to grasp that the Protestant working class does not see itself as "settlers" and thus fall in cheerfully with the Irish nationalist narrative. [Parenthetically, Scotland may not have paramilitary parties but sections of it (e.g. Glasgow) have the same religious divisions as NI among the working class population in particular.] In general, I think one of the main problems is that you seem to drill past the obvious in order to make a point that could have been made more easily (somewhat cognate to your failure to state upfront -- if you're wedded to the term -- that you are using a loaded term "settler" but you have reasons for it). For example, the reason why there were/are parties with paramilitary origins in the Irish Free State/Republic of Ireland is that there was an armed uprising in 1916 and a guerilla war against the British Crown from 1919-1921. Fairly obviously, the success of this war was going to permit those who had been involved in it to shape and participate in the politics of the newly independent country. Is this so strange? I ask because it occurred to me that there are very good historical reasons for regarding the Gaullist movement and party in post-war France as a paramilitary party. Certainly the Free French (London) branch of the Resistance in which Gaullism originated had a significant influence, after liberation, on the political culture of the late '40s to the mid-60s, and De Gaulle himself embodies the soldier-politician figure unambiguously. That would tend to broaden the category of "democracies with paramilitary-originating parties" and thus the Irish case would seem less distinctive. One might look at EOKA in Cyprus and indeed the aftermath of both the Greek civil war and the Franco dicatorship in Spain, particularly in respect of the Basque nationalist movements, both violent and law-abiding. I remain, however, convinced that a significant problem with the article lies in your inability to see that "settler" is an ideologically loaded term that provokes difficulties for which a grab for the dictionary definition is not a valid solution.
- ironyroad
August 25, 2010 at 10:23pm
noga1 “Oh, I nearly forgot. Jackson, you asked irony about "The American"" "Early or revised version?" I assume there is an important difference and curious to know how the two versions differ and why it matters to the way the novel is taught.” Henry James decided in the first decade of the 20th c to publish in New York a uniform edition of his work. He wrote many wonderful new introductions to his novels and revised many of them, some extensively. He made extensive revision to the “The American” around 1907. Scholars are still arguing about the meaning of these revisions.
- jdyer
August 26, 2010 at 10:13am
"I remain, however, convinced that a significant problem with the article lies in your inability to see that "settler" is an ideologically loaded term that provokes difficulties for which a grab for the dictionary definition is not a valid solution." Irony I agree, though I see many more problems with Mitch's article, not least of his problem is his inability to deal with pro Israel critics of his work. He seems to be practicing a kind of critical apartheid unable and unwilling to engage with Jewish respondents whom he seems to consider untermenschen.
- jdyer
August 26, 2010 at 10:18am
"He seems to be practicing a kind of critical apartheid unable and unwilling to engage with Jewish respondents whom he seems to consider untermenschen." I agree in principle but I wouldn't quite articulate his problem in terms of "untermenschen." He seems to consider any pro-Israel position as beyond the pale and tribal and therefore irrelevant to the discussion. That's why he agrees to converse with ironyroad whom he considers a safe interlocutor unlike me and my "cohorts" whom he cannot address except in the most contemptuous manner. Maybe he is so defensive about what he intuitively feels is a hostile revision of Jewish history that he cannot afford to talk to those who would threaten his intellectual baby with their strident insistence on their own relevance to the narrative he proposes. A juvenile academic "inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself." :)
- noga1
August 26, 2010 at 10:50am
Reminds me of that journalist, British he was I think, who openly admitted that he never reads readers' response emails from people whose names seemed Jewish.
- noga1
August 26, 2010 at 11:04am
A footnote to JD's succinct note above: generally, the New York Edition versions of the novels and novellas are not favored by the folks (e.g Penguin, Oxford World's Classics etc) who publish the standard paperback volumes today. Mostly, they go for the orginal versions as they appeared either in serialization or as a bound volume. Two examples immediately to hand right now are the Penguin Classics edition of The American and the Oxford WC edition of The Aspern Papers. Some novels never made it into the NY Edition as it wasn't selling well and the publisher backed off -- the project more or less died 3/4 of the way through. I can't remember all of them, but one was definitely The Bostonians -- a pity as it would be fascinating to see what he might have done with that book.
- ironyroad
August 26, 2010 at 11:52am
“The Bostonians -- a pity as it would be fascinating to see what he might have done with that book.” I am glad he didn’t revise that great novel. I am not crazy about his revisions of The American. It has a melodramatic plot and to try and turn it into a “realist” work was a mistake. I do like thought the revisions of the Portrait of a Lady since it deepened the ambiguity inherent in that work. On another note: Cynthia Ozick just published an interesting novel “Foreign Bodies” (2010) which is based on James’ “The Ambassadors.” Earlier she had written a story about James writing habits: “Dictation” (2008) published in a book of short tales by that name.
- jdyer
August 26, 2010 at 12:57pm
I'll have to check out that Ozick novel -- The Ambassadors is a particular interest of mine. Thanks for the tip JD.
- ironyroad
August 26, 2010 at 2:35pm
I asked: "I assume there is an important difference and curious to know how the two versions differ and why it matters to the way the novel is taught." I got some technical answers but no real explanation. Once these literary David and Jonathan love fests start, you can forget about learning anything valuable. All right, guys, I swear here and now that I will never bother you with my questions again.
- noga1
August 26, 2010 at 6:20pm
irony, Thank you for your response. I know that Israelis and their supporters have a problem with the term settler, both because it contradicts their national narrative of being returned natives and because it is used to delegitimize them. I thought that indicating that I accepted the status/reality of Israeli Jews as returned natives for purposes of legitimacy would solve this problem. Apparently some people are so fixated on finding enemies that they have lost the ability to distinguish between real enemies and those who are not. Hence, the widespread use of terms of anti-semite and Jew hater to describe someone who attended a university in Israel and learned the language out of a desire to better understand the country. Seeing as how the term settler was so widespread, I wanted to use it positively to see what analytical value could be obtained by making comparisons with similar situations. I've just about exhausted the analytical utility of it, as I'm finished with the American case and when I publish the latest book I've written on Dublin's input into the NI peace process, this will finish what is relevant for Israel. And most of my findings from that research were negative. This leaves South Africa. The main valid comparisons that I see are comparing Pretoria's regional defense policy from late 1975-1990 with Jerusalem's policy in the mid 1950s and again in the 1972-2000 period in Lebanon. The only political lesson that I see from the South African experience was that there was no military solution to the problem of apartheid. It should be similarly evident after the First Lebanon War that there is no military solution to the Palestinian problem. And I think most Israelis realize this. The problem is that many Palestinians still think that there is a military solution to their Israel problem. The other valid comparison is with Pretoria's migrant labor system and Israel's Palestinin day-laborers from the territories. But as a result of Islamist terrorism during the Oslo process and the al-Aksa Intifada this is largely a historical situation as the Palestinians have largely been replaced with other foreign workers. I also looked at paramilitary parties during the late 3rd republic in France. There were many fascist and royalist paramilitary movements in the early 1930s that were finally outlawed after the 1934 riots that resulted in several killed. I suppose one could see De Gaulle's party as a paramilitary party. But it was really the only one during the 4th Republic, unless the Communist Party is also considered one. But the Communist Party long preexisted the Maquis. Neither the Basque ETA nor the EOKA were really democratic parties--they were undergrounds. I suppose that the ETA might have been considered an underground party during the period that its armed wing was on ceasefire. And I don't regard the existence of paramilitary parties in Ireland as strange. In this regard Ireland is more like Third World countries in Africa and Asia where the liberation movement was transformed into the ruling party. But I regard the existence of a class of military politicians as much more indicative, as do I regard the use of the "native question" to determine left and right. Donald Akenson said that it was the native question that determined the difference between the DUP and UUP, the United Party and the National Party in South Africa, and Labor and the Likud. Before June 1967 Israel had a "normal" economic definition of political left and right. After the war this changed. Do you have a suggestion for an alternative term for settler that would be acceptable?
- tmitch57
August 26, 2010 at 6:47pm
Well, Irony, Mitch is all yours. I don’t talk to people who treat Jews as non persons, though that will not stop me from commenting on his mediocre and bigoted thesis.
- jdyer
August 26, 2010 at 7:32pm
I pointed out above the logical fallacies as well as the historical inaccuracies of Mitch's theses. Nothing he has said since changes anything.
- jdyer
August 26, 2010 at 7:34pm
I am reposting what I said above about Mitch’ post: 08/21/2010 - 12:44pm EDT | jdyer tmitch57 “In 2004 I published an article in the Journal of Conflict Studies in Canada in which I analysed the six salient features of Israeli politics:” The fact that you published an article in a Journal doesn’t mean that your view is the correct one. Now, let’s how your little list which is meant to delegitimize the Jewish State stands up to close scrutiny: “1) Weak, unstable coalition governments resulting from a PR-list franchise system;” I don’t know what this means exactly, but for a country with a weak unstable government Israel has done very well. “2) Powerful religious parties similar to system Islamist parties in Turkey or Indonesia;” Are the religious parties in Isr ... view full comment tmitch57 “In 2004 I published an article in the Journal of Conflict Studies in Canada in which I analysed the six salient features of Israeli politics:” The fact that you published an article in a Journal doesn’t mean that your view is the correct one. Now, let’s how your little list which is meant to delegitimize the Jewish State stands up to close scrutiny: “1) Weak, unstable coalition governments resulting from a PR-list franchise system;” I don’t know what this means exactly, but for a country with a weak unstable government Israel has done very well. “2) Powerful religious parties similar to system Islamist parties in Turkey or Indonesia;” Are the religious parties in Israel any more powerful than, say, the Christian right in the US? They certainly are not as powerful as the Islamist party in Turkey which is in control of the government. “3) A class of "military politicians" --former senior military officers;” Golda Meyr was hardly a “military politician,” and neither were Ben Gurion, Levi Eshkol, or Menachem Begin. Even Shimon Peres was not a military leader. “4) Parties with paramilitary origins;” The religious parties, which you claimed have so much influence, did not have a “paramilitary” origin. Neither did the Labor party which was an amalgamation of different groups in the Labor movement. That the Jewish State had to defend itself since before independence is no secret. The defenders, for the most part members of Kibbutzim who worded the land by day did not constitute a paramilitary organization. Moreover, the Mizrahis who first favored Begins’ party and then formed the Shas party did not originate in any paramilitary organization. The only parties one can claim origin in a “paramilitary organization” was Begins’ Herut party which then became the Likud movement. The paramilitary period was before 1948 and at the time they did not comprise a majority neither of the electorate nor of the fighting forces in the IDF. I could go one, but your claim #4 is way overstated. “5) The "native question" as the determinant of Left or Right status for parties;” Again this is too vague to be taken seriously. There is not “native question” in Israel. The Arabs who stayed in Israel after 1948 were not the sole determiner of “left/right” political divisions in the country. “6) De jure legal discrimination.” Again, this is too general to be meaningful. Discrimination in Israel against Arabs while it exists is not sanctioned by law. So far all we have is a pretty ad hoc and subjective list of features which the writer thinks apply to colonial countries. He goes on to say that: “These last four traits are all traits shared with settler societies such as Northern Ireland, the United States and South Africa. Israel has more of these features (4) than do the U.S. N. Ireland, and S. Africa with three each. Northern Ireland has paramilitary parties but not military politicians and S. Africa and the U.S. had military politicians but not paramilitary parties.” I don’t know if his list applies to say, Northern Ireland (I know they don’t apply to the US---notice that he didn’t bother to mention any South American country or Australia which also had colonial periods.) Then he comes up with the question begin conclusion: “Therefore Israeli politics can be classified as settler politics.” This is faux reasoning, a pretty bad parody of legal argumentation. I can only conclude that “the Journal of Conflict Studies in Canada” which published this travesty must not have a high editorial standard. “Israelis should be seen as "returned natives" for the purpose of legitimacy and as settlers for the purpose of comparison and analysis. Objectively they are both as they see themselves and as their enemies see them. Many countries in the world today especially in the Western Hemisphere have settler origins. And so Israel should not be singled out or delegitimized. But comparative analysis with countries such as Northern Ireland and the U.S. in the 19th century can shed light on Israeli politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the peace process.” This is a pretty weak disclaimer and I am sure no Arab intellectual would accept the mealy mouthed conclusion.
- jdyer
August 26, 2010 at 7:38pm
"I know that Israelis and their supporters have a problem with the term settler, both because it contradicts their national narrative of being returned natives and because it is used to delegitimize them. " Maybe we have a problem with it because it does not reflect the historical record. It would be a correct term if Palestine and the Middle East were totally empty of Jews the way Africa and America were empty of white Europeans who had come without any prior historical links to the land they were settling. Edward Said used to complain that the first Zionists had referred to Palestine as a land without people. Mitchell is trying very hard to persuade us that Palestine, prior to 1880, was empty of Jews. There being Jews in the Middle East and in Palestine is an inconvenient fact. Arabs migrating to Palestine were just natives moving from one place to another in what was naturally their God given land. Jews migrating to Palestine were foreign settlers colonizing a land.
- noga1
August 26, 2010 at 7:41pm
"All right, guys, I swear here and now that I will never bother you with my questions again." Noga, sometimes you do really over-react. I think the other discussion was taking up more of our attention -- it wasn't anyone's evil plan to ignore you. It's a long time since I read the revised edition of The American, so I can't say too much about the differences (JD seems to have them down). From what I do recall, James felt that the romance elements (coincidence, dramatic emotional confrontation, gothic atmosphere etc) in the earlier version of the novel were a kind of shady concession to the serialized fiction market at the time (1875-6) he had the novel accepted by the Atlantic Monthly. Now, a respected and reasonably economically secure author in his sixties, James tried to rectify that inadequacy, as he perceived it in 1906, by increasing the realistic elements of the novel. In general, James also resolved and corrected some small contradictions and errors that he noticed in the earlier version of all these texts. He also wrote new prefaces for the New York edition volumes (there were about 24, I think) in which he meditated on the novels and stories in particular, their origins and meanings, and on the art of fiction. He also, now and again, mentioned the possibility of alternative endings, including for The American. I think the teaching aspect is affected by what I mentioned earlier -- the standard paperbacks today, with academic introductions, tend to go for the earlier versions of the novels as the more "authentic" James texts. It's illogical, in a way, but the New York Edition is treated these days with some skepticism. Other than that, if I chose a particular edition that used the later revised text, I guess I'd have to find some quality in the revision that made it important to go for that version. For me, as I have a kind of chronological setup, I generally go for the version that came out first -- in particular The American as an adventurous attempt by a youngish writer (he was 33) wanting to make his name with something new. That's how I present it to the students.
- ironyroad
August 27, 2010 at 1:00am
"Noga, sometimes you do really over-react." I wasn't really angry, just joking. It's not as if any of you are obliged to answer my questions! And much thanks for the thoughtful answer. I certainly learned something new. Whenever make and re-make can be compared, there is a lot we can learn from the revisions. Unlike you, then, I would actually be more interested in how the two versions differ and why.
- noga1
August 27, 2010 at 7:40am
Noga, the reasons I didn't post a detailed explanation of the differences between early and revised editions of the American are two fold: First you said that Henry James didn’t appeal to you, and second is time. It would take too long to go into detail. There was no slight intended.
- jdyer
August 27, 2010 at 10:11am
Why the Ireland/ Israel comparison is misconceived, by two Irishers, one Canadian the other Argentinian: http://transmontanus.blogspot.com/2010/08/extract-from-protocols-of-learned.html
- noga1
August 30, 2010 at 8:24pm