Iran

294 Comments

• At 2006.10.23 06:25, mary said:
  

  He is very wisdom man .I think if west politican chenge there selfish behaiver against iran .there would be good space for goowill in honner relations .

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• At 2006.10.23 13:04, Moses Hess said:
  

  David Kessler, sorry i’m not being rude, just i’m a bit busy, unlike who wouls appear to be a fulltime Israeli/Zionist apologist (probably pays reasonably well) i have a real job to do, and some of devious claims and responses require a little research. Please be patient… and all that.

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• At 2006.10.23 14:59, Kate said:
  

  Moses Hess said:
  October 23, 2006 1:04 PM | permalink

  “David Kessler, sorry i’m not being rude, just i’m a bit busy, unlike who wouls appear to be a fulltime Israeli/Zionist apologist (probably pays reasonably well) i have a real job to do, and some of devious claims and responses require a little research. Please be patient… and all that.”

  As far as I can see, David Kessler only wrote in over the weekend, so, to this interested – and highly entertained – observer, it would appear that he also has a regular job during the week. You, on the other hand, have been spouting your drivel for quite a while before that. So, didn’t your “full-time” job bother you then, or does it only crop up conveniently when someone takes the time to answer your parrot talk with serious, well-researched arguments and irrefutable facts? I suppose the truth is, you need time to run off into a corner and lick your wounds. BTW, what is this “research” you talk about? As far as I can see, most of your claims are just copied off some neo-Nazi site on the Internet. Is that your idea of research? That shouldn’t take you too long. But by all means do some proper research for a change. I shouldn’t think it will make much difference.It seems to me that David Kessler has been running rings around you. By the looks of things, he will continue to do so.

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• At 2006.10.23 15:15, Kate said:
  

  Moses Hess also said:
  “Rabbi Meir Kahane, told CBS News that his teaching that Arabs are “dogs” is derived “from the Talmud.” (CBS 60 Minutes, “Kahane”).
  University of Jerusalem Prof. Ehud Sprinzak described Kahane and Goldstein’s philosophy: “They believe it’s God’s will that they commit violence against goyim,” a Hebrew term for non-Jews. (NY Daily News, Feb. 26, 1994, p.5).”

  Meir Kahana’s “Kach” movement was outlawed by the Israeli Government as a terrorist movement, so it’s hardly fair to claim that Kahana’s philosophy is mainstream Jewish/Zionist/Israeli philosophy. And Dr. Baruch Goldstein (I assume he’s the Goldstein you referred to) was almost universally condemned in Israel except by the extreme right – and by that, I mean the VERY extreme right. Even the Likud condemned him. Once again, you are taking marginal personalities and trying to present them as representative of mainstream Zionist/Israeli/Jewish philosophy. As David Kessler has already pointed out, this is dishonest in the extreme.

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• At 2006.10.23 19:32, Simone said:
  

  Toxy said:
  October 21, 2006 1:48 PM | permalink

  I put the following questions to Simone and she has done her best to ignore them and divert attention to other matters.

  (There follows a list of some 11 questions.)

  What whoppers you tell, Toxy!
  At the point you wrote that I had answered none of your questions, I had, in fact already answered three of them, numbers 3, 5 and 7 (one of them, if I’m not mistaken, before you asked the question!). True, I didn’t number my answers the way David Kessler did. Perhaps that’s what made it so easy for you to ignore them and simply pretend I was avoiding answering. As for the others, since I did not have the facts ready to hand and UNLIKE YOU, I like to check my facts rather than simply shoot my mouth off, I intended to reply in a later post. By the time I got back to you, you had introduced a completely new subject, a vicious and unsubstantiated implication that Israel was behind the 9/11 bombings,knowing perfectly well that I wasn’t going to let that go unanswered and then, having diverted my attention, you had the colossal nerve to suggest that I,

  had changed the subject so as not to answer you!
  At any rate, it appears that David Kessler has got in before me and answered you so very thoroughly that there is hardly anything left for me to say! Most of what he says, I agree with.

  The prosecution rests

  Since, at this point, you had presented not one shred of evidence, but only asked me questions (the accused doesn’t testify during the prosecution case, remember) and simply spouted uncorroborated facts, David Kessler might perfectly legitimately have replied: “No case to answer”.
  The fact that he did choose to answer – and that you chose to twist what answers you could to suit your purpose and ignore all the rest, speaks volumes for his intellectual integrity -and your own lack thereof.

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• At 2006.10.23 22:07, David Kessler said:
  

  Moses Hess said:

  >>David Kessler, sorry i’m not being rude, just i’m a bit busy, unlike who wouls appear to be a fulltime Israeli/Zionist apologist (probably pays reasonably well)

  I hope you’re not implying that I’m paid to represent Zionism or Israel. If so that accusation would be false. I can’t call it libelous of course because in order for it to be libel it would have to cause right thinking people to hold the subject of the comments in ridicule and contempt. And obviously no right thinking person would condemn me if I WERE a paid Israeli spokesman. In effect you are not libelling me but paying me a complement that I don’t deserve.

  By the way, it is quite common for Zionist supporters to devote their time unpaid to the cause. Look at all those students and friends of Justus Weiner who helped him in his expose of that dishonest Egyptian academic Edward Said!

  >>i have a real job to do

  So have I. That’s why I do most of my writing at the weekend.

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• At 2006.10.25 12:41, Kathleen Christison said:
  

  s it only observers outside the conventional mainstream who have noticed that by its murderous assault on Lebanon and simultaneously on Gaza, Israel finally exposed, for even the most deluded to see, the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea?

  Can it be that the deluded are still deluded? Can it truly still be that Israel’s bankruptcy is evident only to those who already knew it, those who already recognized Zionism as illegitimate for the racist principle that underlies it?

  Can it be therefore that only the already converted can see coming the ultimate collapse of Zionism and, with it, of Israel itself as the exclusivist state of Jews?

  Racism has always been the lifeblood of Israel. Zionism rests on the fundamental belief that Jews have superior national, human, and natural rights in the land, an inherently racist foundation that excludes any possibility of true democracy or equality of peoples. Israel’s destructive rampage in Lebanon and Gaza is merely the natural next step in the evolution of such a founding ideology. Precisely because that ideology posits the exclusivity and superiority of one people’s rights, it can accept no legal or moral restraints on its behavior and no territorial limits, for it needs an ever-expanding geography to accommodate those unlimited rights.

  Zionism cannot abide encroachment or even the slightest challenge to its total domination over its own space — not merely of the space within Israel’s 1967 borders, but of the surrounding space as well, extending outward to geographical limits that Zionism has not yet seen fit to set for itself. Total domination means no physical threat and no demographic threat: Jews reign, Jews are totally secure, Jews always outnumber, Jews hold all military power, Jews control all natural resources, all neighbors are powerless and totally subservient. This was the message Israel tried to send with its attack on Lebanon: that neither Hizbullah nor anything in Lebanon that nurtures Hizbullah should continue to exist, for the sole reason that Hizbullah challenges Israel’s supreme authority in the region and Israel cannot abide this effrontery. Zionism cannot coexist with any other ideology or ethnicity except in the preeminent position, for everyone and every ideology that is not Zionist is a potential threat.

  In Lebanon, Israel attempted by its wildly reckless violence to destroy the nation, to make of it a killing zone where only Zionism would reign, where non-Jews would die or flee or prostrate themselves, as they had during the nearly quarter-century of Israel’s last occupation, from 1978 to 2000. Observing the war in Beirut after the first week of bombing, describing the murder in an Israeli bombing raid of four Lebanese army logistics techs who had been mending power and water lines “to keep Beirut alive,” British correspondent Robert Fisk wrote that it dawned on him that what Israel intended was that “Beirut is to die . . . . No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive.” Israeli Chief of Staff Dan Halutz (the man who four years ago when he headed the Israeli Air Force said he felt no psychological discomfort after one of his F-16s had dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment building in Gaza in the middle of the night, killing 14 civilians, mostly children) pledged at the start of the Lebanon assault to take Lebanon back 20 years; 20 years ago Lebanon was not alive, its southern third occupied by Israel, the remainder a decade into a hopelessly destructive civil war.

  The cluster bombs are a certain sign of Israel’s intent to remake Lebanon, at least southern Lebanon, into a region cleansed of its Arab population and unable to function except at Israel’s mercy. Cluster bombs, of which Israel’s U.S. provider is the world’s leading manufacturer (and user, in places like Yugoslavia and Iraq), explode in mid-flight and scatter hundreds of small bombs over a several-acre area. Up to one-quarter of the bomblets fail to explode on impact and are left to be found by unsuspecting civilians returning to their homes. UN surveyors estimate that there are as many as 100,000 unexploded cluster bomblets strewn around in 400 bomb-strike sites in southern Lebanon. Scores of Lebanese children and adults have been killed and injured by this unexploded ordnance since the cease-fire last month.

  Laying anti-personnel munitions in heavily populated civilian areas is not the surgical targeting of a military force in pursuit of military objectives; it is ethnic cleansing. Fully 90 percent of Israel’s cluster-bomb strikes were conducted, according to UN humanitarian coordinator Jan Egelund, in the last 72 hours before the cease-fire took effect, when it was apparent that a UN cease-fire resolution was in the works. This can only have been a further effort, no doubt intended to be more or less a coup de grace, to depopulate the area. Added to the preceding month of bombing attacks that destroyed as much as 50 or in some cases 80 percent of the homes in many villages, that did vast damage to the nation’s entire civilian infrastructure, that crippled a coastal power plant that continues to spill tons of oil and benzene-laden toxins along the Lebanese and part of the Syrian coastlines, and that killed over 1,000 civilians in residential apartment blocks, being transported in ambulances, and fleeing in cars flying white flags, Israel’s war can only be interpreted as a massiv act of ethnic cleansing, to keep the region safe for Jewish dominion.

  In fact, approximately 250,000 people, by UN estimate, are unable to return to their homes because either the homes have been leveled or unexploded cluster bomblets and other ordnance have not yet been cleared by demining teams. This was not a war against Hizbullah, except incidentally. It was not a war against terror, as Israel and its U.S. acolytes would have us believe (indeed, Hizbullah was not conducting terrorist acts, but had been engaged in a sporadic series of military exchanges with Israeli forces along the border, usually initiated by Israel). This was a war for Israeli breathing space, for the absolute certainty that Israel would dominate the neighborhood. It was a war against a population that was not totally subservient, that had the audacity to harbor a force like Hizbullah that does not bow to Israel’s will. It was a war on people and their way of thinking, people who are not Jewish and who do not act to promote Zionism and Jewish hegemony.

  Israel has been doing this to its neighbors in one form or another since its creation. Palestinians have obviously been Zionism’s longest suffering victims, and its most persistent opponents. The Zionists thought they had rid themselves of their most immediate problem, the problem at the very core of Zionism, in 1948 when they forced the flight of nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian population that stood in the way of a establishing Israel as an exclusive Jewish-majority state. You can’t have a Jewish state if most of your population is not Jewish. Nineteen years later, when Israel began to expand its borders with the capture of the West Bank and Gaza, those Palestinians who it thought had disappeared turned out to be still around after all, threatening the Zionists’ Jewish hegemony.

  In the nearly 40 years since then, Israeli policy has been largely directed — with periodic time-outs for attacks on Lebanon — toward making the Palestinians disappear for certain. The methods of ethnic cleansing are myriad: land theft, destruction of agricultural land and resources, economic strangulation, crippling restrictions on commerce, home demolition, residency permit revocation, outright deportation, arrest, assassination, family separation, movement restriction, destruction of census and land ownership records, theft of tax monies, starvation. Israel wants all of the land of Palestine, including all of the West Bank and Gaza, but it cannot have a majority Jewish state in all of this land as long as the Palestinians are there. Hence the slow strangulation. In Gaza, where almost a million and a half people are crammed into an area less than one-tenth the size of Rhode Island, Israel is doing on a continuing basis what it did in Lebanon in a month’s time — killing civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, making the place uninhabitable. Palestinians in Gaza are being murdered at the rate of eight a day. Maimings come at a higher rate. Such is the value of non-Jewish life in the Zionist scheme of things.

  Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe calls it a slow genocide (ElectronicIntifada, September 2, 2006). Since 1948, every Palestinian act of resistance to Israeli oppression has been a further excuse for Israel to implement an ethnic cleansing policy, a phenomenon so inevitable and accepted in Israel that Pappe says “the daily business of slaying Palestinians, mainly children, is now reported in the internal pages of the local press, quite often in microscopic fonts.” His prediction is that continued killing at this level either will produce a mass eviction or, if the Palestinians remain steadfast and continue to resist, as is far more likely, will result in an increasing level of killing. Pappe recalls that the world absolved Israel of responsibility and any accountability for its 1948 act of ethnic cleansing, allowing Israel to turn this policy “into a legitimate tool for its national security agenda.” If the world remains silent again in response to the current round of ethnic cleansing, the policy will only escalate, “even more drastically.”

  And here is the crux of the situation today. Will anyone notice this horror? Has Israel, as proposed at the beginning, truly exposed by its wild summer campaign of ethnic cleansing in Lebanon and Gaza the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea, the essential illegitimacy of the Zionist principle of Jewish exclusivity? Can even the most deluded see this, or will they continue to be deluded and the world continue to turn away, excusing atrocity because it is committed by Israel in the name of keeping the neighborhood safe for Jews?

  Since Israel’s crazed run through Lebanon began, numerous clear-eyed observers in the alternative and the European and Arab media have noted the new moral nudity of Israel, and of its U.S. backer, with an unusual degree of bluntness. Also on many tongues is a new awareness of growing Arab and Muslim resistance to the staggering viciousness of Israeli-U.S. actions. Palestinian-British scholar Karma Nabulsi, writing in the Guardian in early August, laments the “indiscriminate wrath of an enemy driven by an existential mania that cannot be assuaged, only stopped.” American scholar Virginia Tilley (Counterpunch, August 5, 2006) observes that any kind of normal, peaceful existence is anathema to Israel, for it “must see and treat its neighbors as an existential threat in order to justify . . . its ethnic/racial character.” Even before the Lebanon war, but after Gaza had begun to be starved, political economist Edward Herman (Z Magazine, March 2006)condemned Israel’s “long-term ethnic cleansing and institutionalized racism” and the hypocritical way in which the West and the western media accept and underwrite these policies “in violation of all purported enlightenment values.”

  Racism underlies the Israeli-U.S. neocon axis that is currently running amok in the Middle East. The inherent racism of Zionism has found a natural ally in the racist imperial philosophy espoused by the neoconservatives of the Bush administration. The ultimate logic of the Israeli-U.S. global war, writes Israeli activist Michel Warschawski of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem (July 30, 2006) is the “full ethnicization” of all conflicts, “in which one is not fighting a policy, a government or specific targets, but a ‘threat’ identified with a community” — or, in Israel’s case, with all non-Jewish communities.

  The basically racist notion of a clash of civilizations, being promoted both by the Bush administration and by Israel, provides the rationale for the assaults on Palestine and Lebanon. As Azmi Bishara, a leading Palestinian member of Israel’s Knesset, has observed (al-Ahram, August 10-16, 2006), if the Israeli-U.S. argument that the world is divided into two distinct and incompatible cultures, us vs. them, is accurate, then the notion that “we” operate by a double standard loses all moral opprobrium, for it becomes the natural order of things. This has always been Israel’s natural order of things: in Israel’s world and that of its U.S. supporters, the idea that Jews and the Jewish culture are superior to and incompatible with surrounding peoples and cultures is the very basis of the state.

  In the wake of Israel’s failure in Lebanon, Arabs and Muslims have a sense, for the first time since Israel’s implantation in the heart of the Arab Middle East almost 60 years ago, that Israel in its arrogance has badly overreached and that its power and its reach can be limited. The “ethnicization” of the global conflict that Michel Warschawski speaks of — the arrogant colonial approach of old, now in a new high-tech guise backed by F-16s and nuclear weapons, that assumes Western and Israeli superiority and posits a kind of apocalyptic clash between the “civilized” West and a backward, enraged East — has been seen for what it is because of Israel’s mad assault on Lebanon. What it is is a crude racist assertion of power by a Zionist regime pursuing absolute, unchallenged regional hegemony and a neoconservative regime in the United States pursuing absolute, unchallenged global hegemony. As Palestinian commentator Rami Khouri observed in an interview with Charlie Rose a week into the Lebanon war, Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, having both grown out of earlier Israeli wars of hegemony, are the political response of populations “that have been degraded and occupied and bombed and killed and humiliated repeatedly by the Israelis, and often with the direct or indirect acquiescence, or, as we see now, the direct support of the United States.”

  Those oppressed populations are now fighting back. No matter how much Arab leaders in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia may bow to the U.S. and Israel, the Arab people now recognize the fundamental weakness of Israel’s race-based culture and polity and have a growing confidence that they can ultimately defeat it. The Palestinians in particular have been at this for 60 years, never disappearing despite Israel’s best designs, never failing to remind Israel and the world of their existence. They will not succumb now, and the rest of the Arab world is taking heart from their endurance and Hizbullah’s.

  Something in the way Israel operates, and in the way the United States supports Israel’s method of operating, must change. More and more commentators, inside the Arab world and outside, have begun to notice this, and a striking number are audacious enough to predict some sort of end to Zionism in the racist, exclusivist form in which it now exists and functions. This does not mean throwing the Jews into the sea. Israel will not be defeated militarily. But it can be defeated psychologically, which means putting limits on its hegemony, stopping its marauding advance through its neighborhood, ending Jewish racial/religious domination over other peoples.

  Rami Khouri contends that the much greater public support throughout the Arab world for Hizbullah and Hamas is “a catastrophe” both for Israel and for the United States because it means resistance to their imperial designs. Khouri does not go further in his predictions, but others do, seeing at least in vague outline the vision of a future in which Israel no longer enjoys ultimate dominion. Gilad Atzmon, an ex-Israeli living in Britain, a jazz musician and thinker, sees Hizbullah’s victory in Lebanon as signaling the defeat of what he calls global Zionism, by which he means the Israeli/U.S. neocon axis. It is the Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghani, and Iranian people, he says, who are “at the vanguard of the war for humanity and humanism,” while Israel and the U.S. spread destruction and death, and more and more Europeans and Americans, recognizing this, are falling off the Zionist/neocon bandwagon. Atzmon talks about Israel as, ultimately, “an historic event” and a “dead entity.”

  Many others see similar visions. Commentators increasingly discuss the possibility of Israel, its myth of invincibility having been deflated, going through a South Africa-like epiphany, in which its leadership somehow recognizes the error of its racist ways and in a surge of humanitarian feeling renounces Zionism’s inequities and agrees that Jews and Palestinians should live in equality in a unitary state. British MP George Galloway (Guardian, August 31, 2006) foresees the possibility of “an FW de Klerk moment” emerging in Israel and among its international backers when, as occurred in South Africa, a “critical mass of opposition” overwhelms the position of the previously invincible minority and the leadership is able to justify transferring power on the basis that doing so later under duress will be far less favorable. Short of such peaceful transition, along with a move to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Galloway ­ along with many others — sees only “war, war and more war, until one day it is Tel Aviv which is on fire and the Israeli leaders’ intransigence brings the whole state down on their heads.”

  This increasingly appears to be the shape of the future: either Israel and its neocon supporters in the United States can dismantle Zionism’s most egregious aspects by agreeing to establish a unitary state in Palestine inhabited by the Palestinians and Jews whose land this is, or the world will face a conflagration of a scale not fully imaginable now.

  Just as Hizbullah is an integral part of Lebanon, not to be destroyed by the bombing of bridges and power plants, the Palestinians before their expulsion in 1948 were Palestine and still are Palestine. By hitting the Palestinians where they lived, in the literal and the colloquial sense, Israel left them with only a goal and a vision. That vision is justice and redress in some form, whether redress means ultimately defeating Zionism and taking back Palestine, or reconciling with Israel on the condition that it act like a decent neighbor and not a conqueror, or finally joining with Israeli Jews to form a single state in which no people has superior rights . In Lebanon, Israel again seemed bent on imposing its will, its dominion, its culture and ethnicity on another Arab country. It never worked in Palestine, it has not worked in Lebanon, and it will not work anywhere in the Arab world.

  We have reached a moral crossroads. In the “new Middle East” defined by Israel, Bush, and the neocons, only Israel and the U.S. may dominate, only they may be strong, only they may be secure. But in the just world that lies on the other side of that crossroads, this is unacceptable. Justice can ultimately prevail.

  Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.

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• At 2006.10.25 15:51, Kate said:
  

  Wow, what a very long post that was, Kathleen Christison!
  I can’t claim to have your credentials as a student of Middle East politics, but I would like to ask just one question.
  What is so inherently “racist” about the idea of the Jewish People having their own home? The Danes have Denmark, the Dutch have Holland, the Italians have Italy. Why shouldn’t the Jews have a homeland of their own? And if you agree that they have as much right to a homeland as any other nation – what more logical place for that homeland than the land which was once theirs? After all – they don’t have any other. If you were to plonk them down in some other spot and say: “Establish your homeland there”, then the natives would have every right to call them colonialists.

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• At 2006.10.25 21:33, Michael Tarzai said:
  

  Kate asked: What is so inherently “racist” about the idea of the Jewish People having their own home? The Danes have Denmark, the Dutch have Holland, the Italians have Italy. Why shouldn’t the Jews have a homeland of their own?
  Come on Kate, you know you are being disengenius, because;

  A)- “Jews” are not a race, and never will be unless the Ashkenazi are succsessful in their subterfuge and manage to revise Judaism into Zionism at the expense of original Judaic morality and against the principles of observant Jews.

  B) Jews are not a race.

  C) Jews are not a race.

  D)The Ashkenazi had a homeland in the countries of Eastern Europe, from where they originated and in which they chose to differentiate themselves. This should not make this sorry group of wanderers (agitators, revolutionaries or nationalists)the problem of the Palestinian and greater Arab people or their land. Give it up guys – it’s over! Let’s all sit around and find some peace. You’ve been exposed, a great many people have been murdered in support of your insanity, noe let’s stop before it gets out of hand. When Sharon dies, let Chauvanist Zionism die with him and let’s create a Great Palestine, together. Anti-semitism cannot be sustained forever, just to sustain you.

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• At 2006.10.26 07:05, C. Wessels said:
  

  Durban South Africa, September 2, 2001 (Reuters) – Israel was branded a “racist apartheid” state early on Sunday by thousands of non-governmental organizations meeting in South Africa.

  The NGO Forum accused the Jewish state of “systematic perpetration of racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.” It called Israel “a racist apartheid state in which Israel’s brand of apartheid as a crime against humanity has been characterized by separation and segregation…and inhumane acts.”

  The declaration, adopted by 3,000 NGOs in 44 regional and interest-based caucuses, shocked Jewish groups. Jewish delegates walked out.

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• At 2006.10.26 08:54, Kate said:
  

  Michael Tarzai said:
  October 25, 2006 9:33 PM | permalink

  “Kate asked: What is so inherently “racist” about the idea of the Jewish People having their own home? The Danes have Denmark, the Dutch have Holland, the Italians have Italy. Why shouldn’t the Jews have a homeland of their own?
  Come on Kate, you know you are being disengenius, because;

  A)- “Jews” are not a race, and never will be unless the Ashkenazi are succsessful in their subterfuge and manage to revise Judaism into Zionism at the expense of original Judaic morality and against the principles of observant Jews.

  B) Jews are not a race.

  C) Jews are not a race.”

  Repeating a lie three times does not make it true. Prove that the Jews are not a race
  As has already been stated by someone else in this discussion, DNA evidence proves the contrary.

  “D)The Ashkenazi had a homeland in the countries of Eastern Europe, from where they originated and in which they chose to differentiate themselves”

  And what about the Sephardic Jews?
  What about the Jews from the Maghreb?
  What about the Jews from the Arabian peninsular?
  What about the rest of the non-Ashkenazi Jews (all these are now the majority in Israel)?
  And what kind of a “homeland” was it where pogroms were regularly instigated against them, where they were subject to discriminatory laws, where, in many cases, they were forcibly converted to Christianity’ and where, finally, six million of them were exterminated by the Nazis, in many cases, with the active collaboration of the (non-Jewish) locals?
  Oh, and for your information, the “Ashkenazim” were those Jews who were originally dispersed to Ashkenaz, that is to say, Germany – and only later did the term come to include Jews living in Eastern Europe.
  I think it is you who are being “ingenuous”?

  BTW – Palestinians are most definitely not a race. If there is an Arab “race”, as a opposed to a linguistic group, they are part of the Arab race. The Syrians for years claimed that “Palestine” was actually part of “Greater Syria”.

  BTW – if they aren’t a race, how can they be “racist”?

  But you still are evading the question. Are the English “a race”? After all, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded the land of the Celts, imposing their culture – their very name – on England.
  What is “a race”? Or perhaps the defining word should be “a nation”? What makes a nation? Are the Jews any less “a nation” than the British, the French, the Germans, the Spanish, the Indians, the Serbs, the Armenians, the Zimbabweans, the Moroccans, the Tunisians, the Algerians, the Tanzanians, the Saudis, the Bulgarians, etc.?

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• At 2006.10.26 08:58, Kate said:
  

  Sorry, Michael Tarzai, that should read “I think it is you who are being “disingenuous”.

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• At 2006.10.26 16:45, Gregory Maxwell said:
  

  “As has already been stated by someone else in this discussion, DNA evidence proves the contrary.”

  This is a bald, unupported statement and, as it stands, no more ‘true’ than stating, say, “The Jews are not a race”.

  So someone has taken DNA from every single person purporting to be Jewish (or even a significant proportion) and demonstrated that these people all have the same racial origins using, say, mitochodrial DNA transmitted through the female line?

  Provide some compelling evidence, and I don’t mean two hundred URL entries where they same the same thing or your argument is no better than Michael Tarzai’s.

  I would require evidence from a worthy and respected technical journal or periodical not, for example, the ‘Tel Aviv Times’.

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• At 2006.10.27 07:36, Tick Tock said:
  

  “Many Jewish people maintain a strong sense of community with other Jews around the world since they are tied together by history, faith, and common values. Indeed, many Jewish people adhere to the idea that the Jewish community makes up a “race” of people when race is defined in a broad, scriptural sense. Authors Joseph Gael and Rabbi Alfred Wolf recognize in their collaborative work entitled Our Jewish Heritage that many Jews subscribe to the “Jews as race” paradigm because of their status of “chosen people” according to ancient tradition. Nevertheless, these Jewish writers state emphatically that “there is no such thing as a Jewish race” (Gael and Wolf, pg. 3). They explain that the Jews belong to a group of peoples that spoke a similar set of languages called Semitic. Moreover, even if the term “Semitic” was a reference to a specific racial constellation, the Jews have undergone considerable integration among indigenous peoples. The racial distinction falls apart especially when trying to account for black Ethiopian Jews or Chinese Jews who have come to reflect the Mongoloid traits of the surrounding population. (Gael and Wolf, pg. 3). Therefore, even the use of the term race to describe their own group by the Jews is an anthropological inaccuracy that often goes unaddressed within Jewish linguistic or cultural conventions. Cultural anthropologist Herskovits is quite explicit when he states “neither the word Aryan nor the term Jew has scientific validity as a racial designation.” Again, the term Aryan refers to a linguistic designation while the term “Jew” refers to a group with a common history whose members resemble the overall population of the geographic area they inhabit. The many terms that have been applied to the Jews: “race, people, nation, cultural entity, ethnic group, historic type, and linguistic unit,” all include at once cultural as well as biological traits of people in the group being considered (Herskovits, pp. 84-85). Herskovits concedes that there are physical characteristics that contribute to a stereotype used to justify anthropological classifications. He rejects such typification by pointing out that “the Jews derive historically and biologically” from Mediterranean elements of the Caucasoid race, which underwent three major dispersals during the Babylonian Exile of 586 BC., the extension of Hellenism just before the Christian Era, and the imposition of Roman rule before and after the start of the Christian Era (Herskovits, pg. 85).

  Nicholas Wade. “Geneticists Report Finding Central Asian Link to Levites.” The New York Times (September 27, 2003): A2. Excerpts:

  “A team of geneticists studying the ancestry of Jewish communities has found an unusual genetic signature that occurs in more than half the Levites of Ashkenazi descent. … The genetic signature occurs on the male or Y chromosome and comes from a few men, or perhaps a single ancestor, who lived about 1,000 years ago… The new report, published in the current issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, was prepared by population geneticists in Israel, the United States and England… They say that 52 percent of Levites of Ashkenazi origin have a particular genetic signature that originated in Central Asia, although it is also found less frequently in the Middle East. The ancestor who introduced it into the Ashkenazi Levites could perhaps have been from the Khazars, a Turkic tribe whose king converted to Judaism in the eighth or ninth century, the researchers suggest. Their reasoning is that the signature, a set of DNA variations known as R1a1, is common in the region north of Georgia that was once occupied by the Khazar kingdom.
  The signature did reach the Near East, probably before the founding of the Jewish community, but it is still rare there. … The present descendants of the Khazars have not been identified. … If the patrilineal descent of the two priestly castes had indeed been followed as tradition describes, then… all Levites [should be descended] from Levi, the third son of the patriarch Jacob. … But the picture among the Levites was less clear, suggesting that they had a mixed ancestry. Dr. Hammer and Dr. Skorecki returned to the puzzle for their new report, based on data gathered from nearly 1,000 men of Ashkenazi and Sephardi origin and neighboring non-Jewish populations. … The paternal ancestry of the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Levites is different, unlike the Cohanim from the two branches…”

  Wow. Evidence that Ashkenazi Levites actually may have picked up a lot of genetic material in Central Asia. Fancy that! :p

  Oh, and Ashkenazi Levites have a mixed ancestry. Oh my, the ‘Jewish race’ has been tainted.

  Dean H. Hamer. The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes (Doubleday, 2004). Excerpt from pages 191-192:

  “A recent study by Skorecki and colleagues uncovered a subgroup of Ashkenazic Levites who have a Y-chromosome pattern that is not seen in other priests, or indeed any major Jewish group, but is common in people around the mouth of the Volga River. A little sleuthing revealed the historical connection. … || … Sometime in the eighth century, they [Khazars] decided to convert from paganism to monotheism. Most of the common people became either Christian or Muslim, but the royal family and many members of the nobility opted for Judaism. They continued to rule the region for nearly five hundred years as a Jewish state. The DNA evidence shows that many of the Khazar converts declared themselves to be not only Jews but of the priestly caste. Thus the infusion of new genetic lines.”

  Oooh, burn! Genetic evidence supporting the case that non-Hebrew Russian-Ukrainian + Turkic Khazars declared themselves converts to Judiasm (and even of the priestly caste!), who later spread their seed.

  Neil Bradman, Dror Rosengarten, and Karl L. Skorecki. “The Origins of Ashkenazic Levites: Many Ashkenazic Levites Probably Have a Paternal Descent from East Europeans or West Asians.” Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Ancient DNA and Associated Biomolecules, July 21-25, 2002. Abstract excerpt:

  “…Levite haplotype distributions were compared with distributions in Israelite Jews and candidate source populations (north Germans and two groups of Slavonic language speakers). The Ashkenazic Levites were most similar to the Sorbians, the most westerly Slavonic speaking group… Comparisons of the Ashkenazic Levite dataset with the other groups studied suggest that Y chromosome haplotypes, present at high frequency in Ashkenazic Levites, are most likely to have an east European or west Asian origin and not to have originated in the Middle East.”

  *chuckles* Wow, Ashkenazic Levites are more likely to have east European or west Asian origins. But wait, didn’t all the ‘true Jews’ (Hebrews) first come from the Middle east? So by the above articles reasoning, it is doubtful if many Ashkenazic Levites are true Hebrews. Oops, another hole shot in the Jewish race myth.

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• At 2006.10.27 07:39, Tick Tock said:
  

  Congressmen blast Israel for slow pace of Ethiopian aliya
  By HILARY LEILA KRIEGER

  Two US congressmen have written to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon urging him to increase the rate of absorption of Ethiopians and criticizing the government for bringing only 300 each month.

  Despite Sharon’s assurances in the summer of 2003 that the immigration was being accelerated, the letter said, “We have been distressed, however, to learn that the pace of immigration from Ethiopia has averaged only 300 each month in spite of the dire poverty faced by the Ethiopian Jewish community.”
  [...]
  In their letter, Nadler and Rangel mention their interest in discussing “how we might be of additional help in completing the ingathering of the Ethiopian Jewish community to our great ally, Israel.”

  Though the document doesn’t specify the type of assistance possible, Nadler told The Jerusalem Post,/i>, “If Israel asks for additional funds for the absorption of refugees, we would certainly work to secure those funds, and there’s a good chance Congress would provide them.”

  In fact, in a letter to Sharon and Poraz written in 2003, the two questioned why Israel was requesting less American aid for absorbing refugees – $50 million in 2004, down from $60m. the year before.

  “It has come to our understanding that you are concerned about a lack of funds to handle the cost of implementing the [February 2003] decision. We are therefore puzzled to hear that Israel might be seeking fewer funds from Congress,” they wrote.

  Michael Janklowitz, a Jewish Agency spokesman, confirmed that US funding for resettling refugees fell from $60m. to its current level of $50m., but said that the allocation is the result of formula by the American government set on a per-capita basis. Since fewer people immigrated from the former Soviet Union, the amount of aid correspondingly dropped.

  He added that American Jewish communities have offered to provide funding for additional absorption of Ethiopians, and that the congressmen’s letters are merely the result of lobbying by the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry.

  Janklowitz also noted that at the end of November Jewish Agency chairman Sallai Meridor called on the government for the first time to increase the rate of absorption of Falash Mura.

  At that time, Meridor declared, “The economic arguments for the restrictions are baseless; quickening the pace of immigration would not raise costs… It is not right to hamper the pace of immigration from any country in the world; this is the only case of this happening in the history of the State of Israel. On the personal level, this is causing unnecessary suffering among those whose immigration has been approved.” Meridor spoke ahead of a hearing in an ongoing High Court case seeking to force the government to implement its February 2003 decision.

  You’re Jewish… as long as you’re not black. And then Israel claims that it doesn’t discriminate. How laughable!

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• At 2006.10.27 09:55, David Kessler said:
  

  Tick Tock wrote:

  >>You’re Jewish… as long as you’re not black. And then Israel claims that it doesn’t discriminate. How laughable!

  And what was the “proof”? The fact that Israel is spending less on absorption of Ethiopian Jews than it used to. This policy may be objectionable and worthy of criticism, but to infer from this that Israel is racist is to extrapolate an awful lot from very little.

  If Israel was racist then why did they absorb so many in the first place? I remember the mass airlift of 20,000 Ethiopian Jews and the mood of celebration in Israel when it happened! That doesn’t sound to me like a racist country!

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• At 2006.10.27 10:07, David Kessler said:
  

  Kate asked: What is so inherently “racist” about the idea of the Jewish People having their own home? The Danes have Denmark, the Dutch have Holland, the Italians have Italy. Why shouldn’t the Jews have a homeland of their own?

  Michael Tarzai said: Come on Kate, you know you are being disengenius, because;A)- “Jews” are not a race, and never will be unless the Ashkenazi are succsessful in their subterfuge and manage to revise Judaism into Zionism at the expense of original Judaic morality and against the principles of observant Jews

  With the greatest of respect, Mr Tarzai, the Danes, Dutch and Italians are not races either, but merely members of races. They are however distinct cultures.

  Speaking for myself I am neither a theological Jew (I am an atheist) nor an ethnic Jew (I agree with you that Jews are not a single race). I am however part of the Jewish culture and tradition. In this respect I may choose to live in the country of my birth (Britain) or the revived country of the Jewish culture (Israel). The choice is mine.

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• At 2006.10.27 13:56, Michael Tarzai said:
  

  David Kessler said:
  October 27, 2006 10:07 AM | permalink

  “With the greatest of respect, Mr Tarzai, the Danes, Dutch and Italians are not races either, but merely members of races. They are however distinct cultures.”

  I never said they were, but I am pleased to see you pointing out the obvious to your hysterical co-religionist.

  Perhaps I might invite you to take a look at another point I raised with Kate? I said “The Ashkenazi had a homeland in the countries of Eastern Europe, from where they originated and in which they chose to differentiate themselves (from their fellow inhabitants).”

  I think Kate was denying that the Ashkenazi are descendants, at least to a great degree of the Khazar converts to Judaism. This conversion clearly confirms the myth of the Jewish race and renders ridiculous the prior claim to the land of Palestine over its rightful inhabitants.

  Becoming a Buddhist and adopting their religion and practices as my own, doesn’t make me Tibetan or give me any historical claim and right to live in Tibet. Neither would I expect to take on the national characteristics of a Tibetan or the racial profile of the Sinoids, just by such a conversion. I might well feel great sympathy with my co-religionists and the plight they are suffering and even feel an emotionally charged bond, perhaps amplified by that suffering, but that hasn’t changed the facts.

  If my descendents continue to follow Buddhist practices etc for the next 1000 years, (forsaking the possibility of inter-marriage changing my descendents racial profile) would they, theoretically, at the dawn of the new millennia, have any rights to displace the descendents of the current population of Tibet, who at that time may well be atheists or Hindus or even be a new nation inter-mixed with ethnic Chinese? The answer is obvious. However, Zionist apologists go to great lengths to hide these obvious truths amid a heap pf empty rhetoric and hot air designed to satisfy the mind of the casual observer to perpetuate the bias toward Zionist aggression. Irrespective, it’s still wrong.

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• At 2006.10.27 16:15, Kate said:
  

  Michael Tarzai said:
  October 27, 2006 1:56 PM | permalink

  David Kessler said:
  October 27, 2006 10:07 AM | permalink

  “With the greatest of respect, Mr Tarzai, the Danes, Dutch and Italians are not races either, but merely members of races. They are however distinct cultures.”

  I never said they were, but I am pleased to see you pointing out the obvious to your hysterical co-religionist.

  First of all, I understand Mr Kessler is Jewish. I, on the other hand, am RC (lapsed). It seems to me you are so prejudiced against Jews that if anyone supports them, you immediately assume they themselves are Jewish.

  Secondly, I don’t think anything I said, or the way I said it, could possibly be described as “hysterical.” So I’ll thank you, as my Gran used to say, to keep a civil tongue in your head.

  Thirdly, I notice you totally ignored the rest of my post, in which I pointed out that the Palestinians are also not “a race”. If only “a race” is entitled to a land of its own, why are the Palestinians any more entitled than the Jews.
  You also ignored the other questions I posed to you.
  I repeat:
  And what about the Sephardic Jews?
  What about the Jews from the Maghreb?
  What about the Jews from the Arabian peninsular?
  What about the rest of the non-Ashkenazi Jews (all these are now the majority in Israel)?

  Finally, I notice you have not yet answered actually my question, why should the Jews not have a home of their own, just as the Italians, Danes, Dutch, etc. Even if, for the sake of argument, we say that neither the Jews nor the other peoples I have mentioned constitute “a race”, you have not yet explained why these other “non-races” are entitled to their own country and the Jews are not.

  Mr Kessler pointed out that the Italians, Danes and Dutch are distinct culture groups. This is certainly true of the Jews.

  Furthermore, I myself suggested that the defining word be “nation” rather than race. A nation is defined by a common language, culture and history. Taking that as my starting point, I repeat the question I put to you:
  What makes a nation? Are the Jews any less “a nation” than the British, the French, the Germans, the Spanish, the Indians, the Serbs, the Armenians, the Zimbabweans, the Moroccans, the Tunisians, the Algerians, the Tanzanians, the Saudis, the Bulgarians, etc.?

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• At 2006.10.27 17:57, Simone said:
  

  Kate said:
  October 25, 2006 3:51 PM | permalink

  Wow, what a very long post that was, Kathleen Christison!
  I can’t claim to have your credentials as a student of Middle East politics…

  I wouldn’t be too impressed with her credentials, Kate. I took a moment to check out her book, “The Wound of Dispossession”, advertised on her own website. It included some details about the author. Here’s what she has to say about herself:
  Kathleen Christison graduated from Duquesne University with a B.A. in English literature in 1964. She worked as a political analyst with the CIA for 16 years, dealing with the Middle East for eight years. Since resigning from the CIA in 1979, she has been a freelance writer, dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

  Simple arithmetic leads to the following conclusion. If she worked as a CIA analyst for 16 years, until 1979, that means she began her career as a CIA analyst in 1963 – before graduating from Duquesne University with her BA degree in English Literature.
  Since she herself mentions no other academic qualification, one is forced to the conclusion that the CIA recruited an English Lit. major to its ranks as a political analyst. One might have expected them to recruit a graduate (or at least a student) of Political Science, International Relations, Modern History – but no. If this is how the CIA recruits its analysts, perhaps one should not be surprised that CIA analyses so frequently prove to be wrong!

  Furthermore, the post in question is, in fact, a cut-and-paste copy of an article published on September 12, 2006, on the neo-Nazi website “Counterpunch” and on various other neo-Nazi websites, to which Mrs Christison and her husband William Christison are regular contributors, such as that of the Institute for Historical Review, a notorious Holocaust-denial website.
  That being so, I would be highly inclined to take anything she writes with a large pinch of the proverbial salt.

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.27 21:21, Anne said:
  

  Be slow to promise and quick to perform. Anne.

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• At 2006.10.27 22:29, David Kessler said:
  

  David Kessler: “With the greatest of respect, Mr Tarzai, the Danes, Dutch and Italians are not races either, but merely members of races. They are however distinct cultures.”

  Michael Tarzai said: >>I never said they were, but I am pleased to see you pointing out the obvious to your hysterical co-religionist.

  But you said this in answer to Kate’s question: >>Why shouldn’t the Jews have a homeland of their own?

  The clear implication of your answer is that only races are entitled to a state of their own. If so, then very few states are legitimate. The Palestinians are not a race. The Jordanians are not either. They are either part of a race (the Arabs) or two races (the Bedouin Arabs and the Levantine Arabs).

  >>I think Kate was denying that the Ashkenazi are descendants, at least to a great degree of the Khazar converts to Judaism. This conversion clearly confirms the myth of the Jewish race and renders ridiculous the prior claim to the land of Palestine over its rightful inhabitants.

  My understanding is that the Khazars were reconquered afterwards and converted to Christianity. Of course in any large block of people there are going to be differences and divergences. (I pointed out as much in response to the hysterical rantings of Moses Hess.) But the presence of Russo-Turkic DNA in Ashenazi Jews, merely testifies to the obvious fact that Jews did indeed intermarry – and not only with Khazar – some leaving the religion, others adhering to it.

  Obviously the existence of such variety as Swedish Jews, Eastern European Jews, Sephardi Jews and Ethiopian Jews means that there has been intermarriage (and conversion). One doesn’t need DNA to prove that. A cursory glance will do. (DNA can flesh out the details of course.)

  But the Jews have acquired the characteristics of a culture and even a nation. Certainly there is a Jewish Nation State on the map today. In contrast there has never been a Palestinian State. Even the Palestinian national ASPIRATION is a recent innovation.

  Indeed when the British Mandatory authorities issued passports to the locals bearing the word “Palestinian” the Jews were very proud of them and showed them off to their friends. The Arabs objected on the grounds that they were “Arabs” not “Palestinians.” Indeed they have long been ambivalent about how they view themselves. There was a desire (half-hearted perhaps) for a Pan-Arab state. (Nowadays it would probably be a Pan Islamic state.)

  >>Becoming a Buddhist and adopting their religion and practices as my own, doesn’t make me Tibetan or give me any historical claim and right to live in Tibet…

  >>If my descendents continue to follow Buddhist practices etc for the next 1000 years, (forsaking the possibility of inter-marriage changing my descendents racial profile) would they, theoretically, at the dawn of the new millennia, have any rights to displace the descendents of the current population of Tibet, who at that time may well be atheists or Hindus or even be a new nation inter-mixed with ethnic Chinese? The answer is obvious.

  The analogy is imprecise:

  Firstly the most that has been proven is a Khazar contribution to the Jewish gene pool – not a complete supplanting of it.

  Secondly, it is important to bear in mind that when the Zionists arrived in that sparesely populated corner of the decaying Ottoman empire, they tended to congregate in the more sparsely populated areas. (Tel Aviv, for example, was in 1903 a vacant hill outside the town of Jaffa.) They bought land at grossly inflated prices. Thus it was not a case of expropriation but one of purchasing and contributing to the land.

  Thirdly, Arabs tended to flock to the area where Jews were gathering (and investing) because of the increased work opportunities in those areas.

  Fourth, the movement of populations is natural and a long-established facet of human history. Most of the present local demographies of Europe, Australia and the Americas, as well as parts of Asia are the results of past migrations, including mass migrations. Israel is unexeptional in this regard.

  Fifth, the area in which the Zionists sought to establish a homeland was NOT an established country but an area in a state of flux – i.e. a corner of a decaying empire. Up to and including the first decade of the 20th century, the Jews and the local Arabs both aspired to drive the Turks out and fulfil there respective national ambitions. There was even correspondence between Haim Weizmann and Faissal of Iraq attesting to this commonality of purpose.

  (NB I am aware that David Ben-Gurion served in the Turkish army, but this was an abberation and an exception.)

  Sixth, it was inevitable that the Ottoman empire would collapse and it had to be replaced with something. A Jewish state in some areas – those where the Jews had settled and built communities – was not unreasonable in principle.

  The displacement of Palestinians – although certainly real – was not the inevitable consequence of Zionism. It was the consequence of Arab intransigence in the face of a Jewish minority in the Middle East who were not prepared to accept the status of “protected minority” in a Pan-Arab state.

  Of course one can argue that the Zionists availed themselves of this intransigance to further their own agenda and we can argue about the relative culpability of the parties for the refugee problem. (I am not an unmitigated apologist for Israel.) But the all-or-nothing approach adopted by the Arabs was not unly a contributory factor to the refugee problem but also totally unjustified.

  Seventh, within five years of statehood, Israel began absorbing large number of Sephardi Jews. By the late sixties they were a majority of the Jewish inhabitants. Whatever Israel started as, it soon became the Homeland both Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews. The two may be different ethnically, and even in some of their religious practices, but taken together they are a Nation.

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• At 2006.10.28 08:48, Michael Tarzai said:
  

  Kate said:
  October 27, 2006 4:15 PM | permalink
  Thirdly, I notice you totally ignored the rest of my post, in which I pointed out that the Palestinians are also not “a race”. If only “a race” is entitled to a land of its own, why are the Palestinians any more entitled than the Jews.
  I am not sure that the above makes any sense, but I’ll try and answer what sense I can make of your comment / question. Of course the Jews have a right to a homeland as do all peoples. Let us turn the clock back to 1900. Palestine has around 900 000 to 1 000 000 Palestinians Arabs, some Muslim, some Christian, some Secular and some 60 000 that call themselves Palestinian Jews. Had they all come from one solid stock, with one birth mother or did they share common DNA from male line, I don’t know. Are they all Semites? Yes culturally, linguistically and from general appearance, I think it would be very difficult to tell them apart. (to use your term Kate, they would look like they were of the same race).
  What I do know for certain is that up until this point these people lived pretty much in peace as did the 100 000 Iraqi Jews that lived in and around Baghdad at the same point in time. Do I believe that all these people classed Palestine or Iraq as their homeland? Yes and quite right they were to do so.
  We’ll start with the Ashkenazi Jews in Poland, Russia and Germany. Do I believe that they have a right to a homeland? Absolutely; in Poland, Russia and Germany. Does their ancestors’ adoption of Judaism and rejection of Paganism some 12 hundred years earlier give them a right to move to Palestine, destroy communities that do not share their religion, alienate the minority Jewish believers in other communities, steal, murder and dispossess the indigenous population of their birthright? Only a fool (an immoral political Zionist as maybe a lapsed Catholic) would believe that to be fair, just or right. It is illegal by any test you care to use.
  Mr. Kessler, who appears to be far more sensible than you Kate, at least acknowledges the conversion of the Khazars, although he does seem to want us to believe that a subsequent conquest by marauding Christians (Roman Catholics, as once you were Kate) turned them all into Christians, which is clearly not that case, otherwise we wouldn’t have Ashkenazi Jews at all. But this is the type of nonsense that Apologists for Zionist history like to engage in, to muddy the waters a little.
  Now let’s assume that amongst this Ashkenazi there is in fact some remnants of Semitic blood (DNA), how much more superior does, says a 5% blood-bond to Palestine make their claim over the inhabitants of 1900 with their 100% blood-bond and their descendants to come? What about the other 95% (you can play with the percentage as you wish) of their blood-line, what other rights are they likely to spring in the future? At all time bearing in mind that the so-called Diaspora Jews had left Palestine 2000 years earlier.
  Are the descendants of the founding fathers of the USA British or American? How many generations needed to pass before they became American and not British. Most of them clearly did not class themselves as British by 1784 and I doubt that aside from some romantic attachment by a few and the (alleged) language bond, any of them would bother to call themselves British today. They are two totally separate nations.
  But let’s assume for a moment that the founding fathers had been driven from England against their will but nurtured a hope of one day being able to return (a bit like Kunta Kinte in Roots!) to London and continued that hope in their offspring.
  With the ensuing mixing with Swedes, Germans, Italians, Africans and even the Irish would their descendants really have a better claim than the present inhabitants of Britain to live there on the basis of attachment by a severely diluted blood line and speaking a variant of the English Language (or Yiddish in the case of the Khazars)?
  The answer is obvious and the question childish really. What about Australians, who probably are still linked strongly to the British in terms of “blood” do they class themselves as British and do you think the British class them as such? And this Kate is after just 200 or so years. After 2000 the whole exercise becomes inane. Palestine belongs to the people that lived their in 1900 and no-one else. Today it belongs to its inhabitants, Israelis including a million recent Russian émigrés, who the Jewish Agency was forced to admit the majority of whom of which do not even profess the Jewish faith (aside from the fact they have absolutely no Semitic ancestry whatsoever, not even the 5% or whatever I,s that has been used as the excuse for the sorry colonization in the first place. It also has Arabs both within its borders and in refugee camps in neighbouring countries whose rights need to be recognized.
  It’s now 2006 and Mr. Kessler is British and naturally has the right to live in Britain. He doesn’t state whether he views himself as a Briton or a Jew first. He does thought completely understate his “Britishness” The fact that he has allegiance to another country is strange as normally that is true of 1st generation immigrants and 2nd generation immigrants at a push (which may well be true in his case, perhaps he’s from Israel). Perhaps not. Maybe that’s where anti-semitism begins, with distrust of people of any group who have allegiance to a place or group other than a dedication to the nation as a whole, in the country of their birth.
  Had America been founded on that basis, it would now be a series of colonies of Sweden, Britain, Spain and a multitude of other countries as well, and whilst there are still ethnic divisions the progress of total integration has occurred in large areas of the country in just 200 years and following the civil rights movement of the 60′s integration with a totally different race is progressing (yes Kate Black people are a different race) Imagine the complete integration in 2000.
  I’ll attend to the rest of your post later. I’m busy right now.

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.28 12:17, David Kessler said:
  

  Hi Michael, hope you don’t mind me intervening, but you mentioned me so I assume that gives me standing to comment.

  >>We’ll start with the Ashkenazi Jews in Poland, Russia and Germany. Do I believe that they have a right to a homeland? Absolutely; in Poland, Russia and Germany. Does their ancestors’ adoption of Judaism and rejection of Paganism some 12 hundred years earlier give them a right to move to Palestine, destroy communities that do not share their religion, alienate the minority Jewish believers in other communities, steal, murder and dispossess the indigenous population of their birthright?

  Whoa there! You’ve strung together rather a lot. Why shouldn’t they emigrate to a another country (or in this case a small provence of another empire?)

  “Destroy communities”? In what way did the Zionist emigration destroy communities? They built communities. And Arabs flocked to those communities to find work.

  “Steal”? The early Zionists bought land – and were charged grossly inflated prices for it. The Jews had to pay $1100 per acre for swampland in Palestine when fertile Arable land in Iowa was going for $110 per acre.

  Murder? When the Ottomans were kicked out, the local Arabs (who were later to call themselves “Palestinian”) decided they no longer needed the Jews and then their friendship turned to hostility and the killing began on both sides. We can argue till the cows come home about who started it, but the Arabs gave as good as they got. Look at the murders of Jews in 1921-22, look at the massacre of Jews in Hebron, Safad and Jerusalem in 1929. All this way before the Arab uprising of 1936.

  “dispossess the indigenous population of their birthright”?

  If you mean the dispossession of Arab owned land in Palestine, the Zionists must certainly plead guilty to that (as must the Arabs who confistacted Jewish property when Jews fled from persecution in Arab countries). But your phrase here is too vague and nebulous. Do you mean their “birthright” to a country? After they rejected the partition plan?

  >> Mr. Kessler, who appears to be far more sensible than you Kate, at least acknowledges the conversion of the Khazars, although he does seem to want us to believe that a subsequent conquest by marauding Christians (Roman Catholics, as once you were Kate) turned them all into Christians, which is clearly not that case, otherwise we wouldn’t have Ashkenazi Jews at all.

  Let’s recall that you yourself acknowledged that many Khazars converted to Christianity and Islam. Only some (including the royal family) converted to Judaism. To argue that those who converted to Judaism specifically the Levite class) created the entire Ashkenazi community doesn’t make sense.

  First of all, if it were true, then one would expect all or most Ashkenazim to be Levites – which is clearly not the case.

  Secondly, if the Askenazi branch of Judaism was created to Khazar conversion, after they heard the arguments of the three monotheistic religions, then why would they introduce the specific doctrinal differences that characterize the Ashekenazi-Sephardi differences?

  Thirdly, more significantly, how do you account for the differences in Sephardi and Ashkenazi pronunciation of the language? Such as the Taf and the Saf? You can’t say that this is because the Khazars couldn’t pronounce these things, because the Ashkenazi pronunciations are in ADDITION TO rather than instead of the Sephardi ones. Thus an Ashkenazi will distinguish between a Taf and Saf, whilst a Sephardi will not, pronouncing them all as a Taf.

  If the Ashekenazim were simply a later addition to Judaism they would either pronounce words the same way as the Sephardim or – if they couldn’t pronounce certain phonemes would simply change the pronunciation on ALL occasions and not just some. It would make no sense to change the pronunciation of a letter on some occasions but not others.

  From this it is clear that we are talking about two streams of Judaism that diverged from each other and not one group of converts who embraced the religion of another.

  >>Now let’s assume that amongst this Ashkenazi there is in fact some remnants of Semitic blood (DNA), how much more superior does, says a 5% blood-bond to Palestine make their claim over the inhabitants of 1900 with their 100% blood-bond and their descendants to come?

  You don’t offer any specific justification of your 5% claim. It is a purely arbitrary figure pulled out of a hat. And why is the year 1900 privileged in history? Do you choose it in order to include the Egyptians who came over between 1831 and 1840, when Mohamed Ali carved a chunk out of the Ottoman empire and Egyptians settled in the Gaza region? But to choose 1900 as your yardstick year for territorial claims, you would have to exclude the Arabs who crossed over from Transjordan between the two world wars.

  >>But let’s assume for a moment that the founding fathers had been driven from England against their will but nurtured a hope of one day being able to return (a bit like Kunta Kinte in Roots!) to London and continued that hope in their offspring.
  With the ensuing mixing with Swedes, Germans, Italians, Africans and even the Irish would their descendants really have a better claim than the present inhabitants of Britain to live there on the basis of attachment by a severely diluted blood line and speaking a variant of the English Language

  You seem to be forgetting that if these Anglo-Americans came back to Britain today, they would be coming to an established COUNTRY with a large population. The Zionist Ashekanazi Jews emigrated not to an established country but to a colony of an empire that was in a state of decay. If Palestine had been an established country your analogy would have held, but such was NOT the case.

  Moreover the Turkish colony to which the Jews came was also sparsely populated and had room for many more immigrants. As it was sparsely populated they had the right to emigrate there. As its status was in a state of flux, they had the right to seek to fulfil their national aspirations there.

  Also, it is important to remember that the Arabs living there were also immigrants – they had just happened to have immigrated at an earlier time.

  >>What about Australians, who probably are still linked strongly to the British in terms of “blood” do they class themselves as British and do you think the British class them as such?

  No but the Australians are a national group. The Jews in Europe were not a national group there but a portion of the population. Again, your analogy is inaccurate.

  >> And this Kate is after just 200 or so years.

  So do you concede that if the Israelis hang on for 200 years they will have a right to the State of Israel, not because of any contentious ancestral linkage but simply because they will by then have had a state for 200 years? (With the Arabs as the equivalent of the Aboriginees?)

  Palestine belongs to the people that lived their in 1900 and no-one else.

  You have not offered any justification for treating 1900 as a privileged year in history. Why does immigration to what was then part of the Turkish provence of Syria become illegitimate after that year?

  >>It also has Arabs both within its borders and in refugee camps in neighbouring countries whose rights need to be recognized.

  Indeed so, but a country whose very right to exist is being questioned is not going to be inclined towards moderation.

  >>It’s now 2006 and Mr. Kessler is British and naturally has the right to live in Britain. He doesn’t state whether he views himself as a Briton or a Jew first.< <

  The question is meaningless. British is my nationality. Jewish is the religion of my birth and the culture to which I belong. There is also a British culture, so culturally I am the product of a cross-fertilization of British and Jewish culture.

  > He does thought completely understate his “Britishness”

  I do not know on what basis you say this. I am British. What would you have me do? Jump up and down waving the Union Flag? (I support the UK Independence Party so I’m not exactly soft on my Britishness!)

  >>The fact that he has allegiance to another country is strange

  I don’t recall saying that I did. I said that I have the right to live in Israel (pursuant to its laws). I have also defended Israel’s right to exist, though I have also been critical of some of its policies. I don’t see that this constitutes allegiance to another country. Many people in Britain dream of emigrating to other countries with warmer climates. Is this also classified as “allegiance to another country”?

  >>perhaps he’s from Israel

  I already stated that I was born in this country.

  >>Maybe that’s where anti-semitism begins, with distrust of people of any group who have allegiance to a place or group other than a dedication to the nation as a whole, in the country of their birth.

  When people start trying to “explain” antisemitism, their mask begins to slip. Also Mr Tarzai please don’t forget that modern Zionism only goes back to the late 19th century. Antiseminitsm has been around a lot longer. So to “explain” antisemitism in terms of a response to “allegiance” to Israel is somewhat disengenuous.

  >>Had America been founded on that basis, it would now be a series of colonies of Sweden, Britain, Spain and a multitude of other countries as well, and whilst there are still ethnic divisions the progress of total integration has occurred in large areas of the country in just 200 years and following the civil rights movement of the 60′s integration with a totally different race is progressing (yes Kate Black people are a different race) Imagine the complete integration in 2000.

  Israel too has achieved great strides forward in integration. Israeli Arabs have had the vote since the state was established in 1948 – 17 years before the Voting Rights Act gave teeth to the 15th Amendment and extended the right to millions of disenfranchised American blacks!

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.28 14:13, Simone said:
  

  Michael Tarzai said:
  October 28, 2006 8:48 AM | permalink

  Only a fool (an immoral political Zionist as maybe a lapsed Catholic) would believe that to be fair, just or right.

  Are you now trying to imply that Catholics are immoral? Or only lapsed Catholics?

  Mr. Kessler, who appears to be far more sensible than you Kate, at least acknowledges the conversion of the Khazars, although he does seem to want us to believe that a subsequent conquest by marauding Christians (Roman Catholics, as once you were Kate) turned them all into Christians, which is clearly not that case, otherwise we wouldn’t have Ashkenazi Jews at all.

  I wonder why you keep harping on about Kate’s Catholicism (even though she apparently no longer adheres to that belief). Could it be that having implied that her support for Israel stems from her Jewishness, only to discover that she is not, in fact, Jewish, you now feel the need to cover up your mistake with irrelevancies?
  BTW – I don’t seem to recall that she actually denied the conversion of the Khazars. Neither do I. Where you and I differ is on their ultimate fate.
  To say, as you did, that they were clearly not all turned into Christians by marauding Christians, otherwise we would have no Ashkenazi Jews at all, is fallacious logic. It depends on the truth of the claim that all the Ashkenazi Jews are in fact, descendants of the Khazars and not of Jewish descent at all – and that claim has NOT been proved.
  Oh, and without wishing to appear pedantic, I feel it incumbent upon me to point out that the “marauding Christians” to whom you are apparently referring were not Roman Catholic. Sorry to deprive you of yet another whip with which to beat Kate, (who has admitted, from the very start, that she is not an expert on the subject of the Middle East or on Jewish history), but the Kievan Rus who overcame the Khazars adhered to the Orthodox brand of Christianity.

  It’s now 2006 and Mr. Kessler is British and naturally has the right to live in Britain. He doesn’t state whether he views himself as a Briton or a Jew first. He does thought completely understate his “Britishness” The fact that he has allegiance to another country is strange

  You know, Michael, whenever someone starts bringing up that old accusation, that Jews have “another allegiance” – it becomes clear where the drift of the conversation is leading. It certainly brings your own motivation into question.

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.28 14:20, Michael Tarzai said:
  

  David Kessler said: But you said this in answer to Kate’s question: >>Why shouldn’t the Jews have a homeland of their own?

  MT Says: I have answered this question both in the context of present day Israel and the rights of its current inhabitants today as well as the situation as it stood in Palestine pre-Zionism, and in relation to what constitutes a homeland generally. If you need it spelt out in simplified form then; the inhabitants of a land have a right to call that land a homeland. Adherence to a particular religion can not confer on a group greater right to a foreign land than land’s present inhabitants. Such a concept is iniquitous.

  MT Says: Now your turn, tell me what rights you feel the Palestinians had in 1900, what should be the rights of the displaced Palestinian refugees in their historical land (indeed to houses, settlements, villages and towns that still exist, but which have had Israeli squatters in them since 1948. A previous poster mentioned the illegality of building settlements in occupied territory and whilst you tap dance around the matter of who the West Bank belongs to, it is clear that it does not belong to Israel.

  David Kessler said: The clear implication of your answer is that only races are entitled to a state of their own. If so, then very few states are legitimate. The Palestinians are not a race. The Jordanians are not either. They are either part of a race (the Arabs) or two races (the Bedouin Arabs and the Levantine Arabs).
  MT Says: I have made my position quite clear on race so I do not take kindly to your obfuscation and the temerity with which you make such ridiculous statements.

  David Kessler said: My understanding is that the Khazars were reconquered afterwards and converted to Christianity. Of course in any large block of people there are going to be differences and divergences. (I pointed out as much in response to the hysterical rantings of Moses Hess.) But the presence of Russo-Turkic DNA in Ashenazi Jews, merely testifies to the obvious fact that Jews did indeed intermarry – and not only with Khazar – some leaving the religion, others adhering to it.

  MT Says: I could challenge you on the percentage of Semitic blood, but that would be pandering to the specious nature of the whole premise you propose about land rights conferred through some ancient ancestor (singular ancestor at best in the case of the Khazars it would appear).

  David Kessler said: Obviously the existence of such variety as Swedish Jews, Eastern European Jews, Sephardi Jews and Ethiopian Jews means that there has been intermarriage (and conversion). One doesn’t need DNA to prove that. A cursory glance will do. (DNA can flesh out the details of course.).

  MT Says: Very brave of you to go this route as it really weakens your whole argument. Notwithstanding, I read something interesting the other day regarding Ethiopian Jews and I quote,

  “Some 60 percent are considered to be living in poverty compared to 20 percent of the general population, according to figures from Meyers-JDC-Brookdale, a prominent Israeli social research institute. “We are making an effort to stop this through new programs,” said David Yasu of Israel’s Immigration Ministry, adding that Ethiopians get more state aid than other immigrants to Israel. Encouraging immigration is a cornerstone of policy in a country where officials worry about the faster birth rates of Israeli Arabs and Palestinians than Jews and falling immigration from other parts of the world.”

  MT Says: I assume that the last comment about faster birth rates of Israeli Arabs (Palestinians) and falling immigration being a concern, doesn’t do a lot to counter the progressively compelling argument I have seen on this board in support of the claim that Israel is a racist state or an Apartheid(like) state. If, as you have stated David, one doesn’t need to be a religious Jew to have an affinity with Israel, indeed as with the case of the Ethiopians, one needn’t be the same race as the majority Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jews and we’ve established that there is little from a tribal perspective that links the 2 groups of European Jews, then what exactly is Zionism now? As the Jewish Agency have confirmed the majority of recent Russian émigré Jews are not Jews, then it appears that anyone can come as long as they are not Arabs! I quote …” The interior minister and leader of the Shas party, Eli Yishai, says such figures (non Jewish Russian immigration) threaten the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. “By the end of the year 2010 the state of Israel will lose its Jewish identity,” he said. “A secular state will bring … hundreds of thousands of goyim [gentiles] who will build hundreds of churches and will open more stores that sell pork. In every city we will see Christmas trees.”

  MT Says: Mr. Yishai is an obvious voice of dissent, but please tell me how an Ethiopian tribesman (let’s use the eyeball test and not go the DNA route) a white Russian, a Khazari descendent (with possibly a little semitic ancestry) or a Sephardim (with a lot more semitic blood) can all have a better claim to live in Palestine than a Palestinian born there, who is probably 100% semitic?

  David Kessler said: But the Jews have acquired the characteristics of a culture and even a nation. Certainly there is a Jewish Nation State on the map today. In contrast there has never been a Palestinian State. Even the Palestinian national ASPIRATION is a recent innovation.

  MT Says: Now you’re being disingenuous again. You are using the argument that the Palestinians didn’t have a government at the time of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to suggest that there was no Palestine, or are you doing a “Golda Meir” and saying there is no such thing as the Palestinian people; that was rich coming from a US citizen born in Russia, when writing off the inhabitants of a land not her own as being non-existent.

  MT Says: The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination was first recognized by the League of Nations in 1919. Palestine had been part of the Ottoman empire until its collapse at the end of the World War I, and was among a number of non-self-governing Arab territories in the Middle East that were placed under temporary ‘tutelage’ or administration of foreign powers under the League of Nations Mandate System until such a time as the peoples of these territories were deemed ‘ready’ for independence. In 1922, the League of Nations entrusted the Mandate for Palestine (CONSIDERED TO BE “CLASS A” OR CLOSEST TO INDEPENDENCE) to Britain.

  MT Says: If the Palestinian nation wish to call themselves Arabs, Palestinians or whatever isn’t relevant; what is relevant is that they were already on the land. I would stick to Zionist sources in support of this..-

  “”We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state; instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of those villages, and I do not blame you because these villages no longer exist. There is not a single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab Village.” –Moshe Dyan, March 19, 1969, speech at the Technion in Haifa, “Israel” quoted in Haaretz, April 4, 1969. (385 villages have been destroyed within pre-1967 Israel…)”

  David Kessler said: Indeed when the British Mandatory authorities issued passports to the locals bearing the word “Palestinian” the Jews were very proud of them and showed them off to their friends. The Arabs objected on the grounds that they were “Arabs” not “Palestinians.” Indeed they have long been ambivalent about how they view themselves. There was a desire (half-hearted perhaps) for a Pan-Arab state. (Nowadays it would probably be a Pan Islamic state.)

  MT Says: I’m not sure what point you think you’ve scored with this, but I fail to see what it matters if the Palestinians called themselves Arabs. What a great pity it is that Zionists didn’t take such great delight in “showing off” Palestinian passports to their friends, as the Palestinian Jews did, they off course adopted a different and far more murderous and destructive course.

  David Kessler said: MT said:>>Becoming a Buddhist and adopting their religion and practices as my own, doesn’t make me Tibetan or give me any historical claim and right to live in Tibet…If my descendents continue to follow Buddhist practices etc for the next 1000 years, (forsaking the possibility of inter-marriage changing my descendents racial profile) would they, theoretically, at the dawn of the new millennia, have any rights to displace the descendents of the current population of Tibet, who at that time may well be atheists or Hindus or even be a new nation inter-mixed with ethnic Chinese? The answer is obvious.

  David Kessler said: The analogy is imprecise:

  MT Says: David Kessler then goes on to make SEVEN points that propose to show the analogy is not precise, without EVER showing their relevance to the analogy, but I’ll deal with them all the same.

  David Kessler said: Firstly the most that has been proven is a Khazar contribution to the Jewish gene pool – not a complete supplanting of it.

  MT Says “my analogy CLEARLY says “(forsaking the possibility of inter-marriage changing my descendents racial profile). This was to dissuade you from introducing this fallacious argument. Sadly it failed.

  David Kessler said: Secondly, it is important to bear in mind that when the Zionists arrived in that sparesely populated corner of the decaying Ottoman empire, they tended to congregate in the more sparsely populated areas. (Tel Aviv, for example, was in 1903 a vacant hill outside the town of Jaffa.) They bought land at grossly inflated prices. Thus it was not a case of expropriation but one of purchasing and contributing to the land.

  MT Says: Can I refer you back to the above quote from Moshe Dayan, who although I have absolutely no respect for, I will at least concede that on this point he is being honest. Or better still, try this one,

  “”I don’t understand your optimism. Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country.”–David Ben Gurion, 1956, quoted by Nahum Goldmann in The Jewish Paradox, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978, p.99.

  David Kessler said: Thirdly, Arabs tended to flock to the area where Jews were gathering (and investing) because of the increased work opportunities in those areas.

  MT Says: I find this piece of deception beneath contempt and not worthy of a response, however this will leave an opening for more deception so I quote

  “With the Arabs we shall not achieve our aim of being an independent people in this country. The only solution is Eretz-Israel, at least the west part of Eretz-Israel, without Arabs… And there is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries. Transfer all of them, not one village or tribe should remain…” –Joseph Weitz, entry in his diary for 1940 (Quoted in his article: “A solution to the Refugee Problem: An Israeli State with a small Arab Minority”, published in Davar, 29 September, 1967.

  MT Says: Yes, I can see why the Arabs simply flocked to the Zionist settlements!!

  David Kessler said: Fourth, the movement of populations is natural and a long-established facet of human history. Most of the present local demographies of Europe, Australia and the Americas, as well as parts of Asia are the results of past migrations, including mass migrations. Israel is unexeptional in this regard.

  MT Says: You are right; there is such a thing as natural movement of populations. Zionism however is not an example of it. What happened in Palestine was colonization and then conquest. What makes it extreme and gives rise to the ongoing trouble is that no accommodation was envisaged for the conquered and colonized people, as is seen from the quote above.

  David Kessler said: Fifth, the area in which the Zionists sought to establish a homeland was NOT an established country but an area in a state of flux – i.e. a corner of a decaying empire. Up to and including the first decade of the 20th century, the Jews and the local Arabs both aspired to drive the Turks out and fulfil there respective national ambitions. There was even correspondence between Haim Weizmann and Faissal of Iraq attesting to this commonality of purpose.

  MT Says: The first part of David’s Fifth Point seems reasonable until one considers that there were about 1 000 000 Palestinian Arabs and about 50 000 Palestinian Jews, who he claims wished to fulfill their “respective” (my emphasis) national ambitions”. How misleading, there is no record of a Nationalist Jewish Palestinian movement at all. David himself mentioned how proud the Jews of Palestine were to show off their Palestinian passports.

  MT Says: regarding the balance of the Fifth Point: In 1919, King Faisal, then the only recognized Arab leader in the world, executed a treaty with Chaim Weizmann adopting the understanding of the Balfour Declaration. It outlined relations between Palestine and the Arab state, recognizing the former as a National Home for the Jews, in which they should quickly settle. He wrote, “We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our delegation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday to the Zionist organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper.” -

  MT Says: The key elements here are “A National Home for the Jews” quite different to an exclusively Jewish State from which Arabs would be expelled. The other key point is the term “moderate and proper”, clearly the proposals submitted as mentioned, bore no resemblance to the acts carried out in the name of Revisionist Zionism of the kind Jabotinsky was about to unleash and to which I am sure Weizmann concurred.

  David Kessler said: (NB I am aware that David Ben-Gurion served in the Turkish army, but this was an abberation and an exception.)

  MT Says: I see when looking through your posts that there are a number of these Zionist aberrations and exceptions coming to the surface.

  David Kessler said: Sixth, it was inevitable that the Ottoman empire would collapse and it had to be replaced with something. A Jewish state in some areas – those where the Jews had settled and built communities – was not unreasonable in principle.

  MT Says: I’m sure many Arabs would have agreed, and had it not been for Revisionist Zionist exclusionist greed, we probably wouldn’t have the mess we have right now.
  David Kessler said: The displacement of Palestinians – although certainly real – was not the inevitable consequence of Zionism. It was the consequence of Arab intransigence in the face of a Jewish minority in the Middle East who were not prepared to accept the status of “protected minority” in a Pan-Arab state.

  MT Says : Really? I don’t agree, I quote

  “”Do we sin only against the refugees? Do we not treat the Arabs who remain as second-class citizens? — Did a single Jewish farmer raise his hand in the Parliament in opposition to a law that deprived Arab peasants of their land?…How lonely, in the city of Jerusalem, sits the Jewish conscience.”
  –Moshe Smilansky, 1958, in an essay entitled “Zion and the Jewish National Idea” in the Menorah Journal, Volume XVI, 1958, reprinted in Zionism Reconsidered, Macmillan, N.Y., 1970.

  MT Says: How about Vladimir Jabotinsky the Revisionist Zionist let’s see if he agrees with David Kessler and the benign effects of Zionism – “Zionist colonisation must be either terminated or carried out against the wishes of the native population. This colonisation can, therefore, be continued and make progress only under the protection of a power independent of the native population – an iron wall, which will be in a position to resist the pressure to the native population. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs.

  MT Says: Mr. Jabotinsky then drops all pretenses of being accomodating -

  “A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the near future. He announced he would speak frankly, so that Revisionism would be made clear … “Revisionism”, he began, “is naive, brutal and primitive. It is savage. You go out into the street and pick any man – a Chinaman – and ask him what he wants and he will say one hundred per cent of everything. That’s us. We want a Jewish Empire. Just like there is the Italian or French on the Mediterranean, we want a Jewish Empire.”

  David Kessler said: Of course one can argue that the Zionists availed themselves of this intransigance to further their own agenda and we can argue about the relative culpability of the parties for the refugee problem.

  MT Says : • (1)”I gathered all of the Jewish mukhtars, who have contact with Arabs in different villages and asked them to whisper in the ears of some Arabs that a great Jewish reinforcement has arrived in Galilée and that it is going to burn all of the villages of the Huleh. They should suggest to these Arabs, as their friends, to escape while there is still time… The tactic reached its goal completely. The building of the police station at Halsa fell into our hands without a shot. The wide areas were cleaned.(cleaned? Is this ethnically cleansed? MT ed)..” –Yigal Allon, Ha Sepher Ha Palmach, Vol. 2, p. 268, 1948

  (2)• “Nearby, a loudspeaker burst out in Arabic. Haganah broadcasting to civilian Arabs, urging them to leave the district before 5:15 a.m.: “Take pity on your wives and children and get out of this blood bath,” it said. “Surrender to us your arms. No harm will come to you. Or get out by the Jericho road, that is still open to you. If you stay, you invite disaster.” –H. Levin, Jerusalem Embattled, p. 160, 1948.

  (3)• “…as uncontrolled panic spread through all Arab quarters, the Israelis brought up jeeps with loudspeakers which broadcast recorded ‘horror sounds’. These included shrieks, wails and anguished moans of Arab women, the wail of sirens and the clang of fire-alarm bells, interrupted by a sepulchral voice calling out in Arabic: “Save your souls, all ye faithful: The Jews are using poison gas and atomic weapons. Run for your lives in the name of Allah’.” –Leo Heiman, Israeli Army Reserve Officer who fought in 1948. Marine Corps Gazette, June 1964.

  David Kessler said: (I am not an unmitigated apologist for Israel.) But the all-or-nothing approach adopted by the Arabs was not only a contributory factor to the refugee problem but also totally unjustified.

  MT Says: I can’t comment on whether you view yourself as an apologist for Israel? I can comment on the mendacious and wicked manner in which you present the plight of the Palestinian refugees. Do you have any human compassion outside of other people that call themselves Jews?

  David Kessler said: Seventh, within five years of statehood, Israel began absorbing large number of Sephardi Jews. By the late sixties they were a majority of the Jewish inhabitants. Whatever Israel started as, it soon became the Homeland both Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews. The two may be different ethnically, and even in some of their religious practices, but taken together they are a Nation.

  MT Says: Yes they are, they are now Israelis, but what of the Palestinians and their nation, who have had their birthright taken from them, communities smashed, populations chased from their homes, towns and villages, who today are suffering the iniquities of the 1940′s again in the West Bank, as once again Zionism seeks to relieve them (of the remainder) of their land, towns and possessions? Do you think it’s fair David?

  “If it is proper to ‘reconstitute’ a Jewish State which has not existed for two thousand years, why not go back another thousand years and reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there.” –H.G. Wells, quoted by Frank C. Sakran in Palestine Dilemma, p. 204.

  MT Says: When dealing with Zionist/Israeli racist propaganda it is well to bear in mind the following quote as nothing has changed

  “In later years it became a Zionist habit to speak not only in two but in several voices, to run several lines of persuasion at the same time. A result was to debauch to movement with propaganda to an extraordinary extent so that Zionists, preoccupied with higher truth at the expense of the yet more essential lower truth, got a not undeserved reputation in the world for chronic mendacity.” –Christopher Sykes, Cross Roads to Israel, pp. 24 and 26.

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.28 14:45, Michael Tarzai said:
  

  Simone said:Quoting MT “Only a fool (an immoral political Zionist as maybe a lapsed Catholic) would believe that to be fair, just or right.”

  Simone said:Are you now trying to imply that Catholics are immoral? Or only lapsed Catholics?

  MT Says: This is typical of the obfuscation that Zionist apologists indulge in. The point I made was “We’ll start with the Ashkenazi Jews in Poland, Russia and Germany. Do I believe that they have a right to a homeland? Absolutely; in Poland, Russia and Germany. Does their ancestors’ adoption of Judaism and rejection of Paganism some 12 hundred years earlier give them a right to move to Palestine, destroy communities that do not share their religion, alienate the minority Jewish believers in other communities, steal, murder and dispossess the indigenous population of their birthright? Only a fool (an immoral political Zionist as maybe a lapsed Catholic) would believe that to be fair, just or right.

  Did Simone counter the argument. Not a chance. I assume you have no opinion then Simone?

  To answer your question: – I consider all immoral Catholics to be immoral, be they lapsed or not, there is no degree of lapsation in my book, so no matter how little or how far the lapsee, or not, as may be the case, has lapsed, or not, does not in my view, excuse immoral behaviour from either. I hope this clears the matter up for you.

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.28 14:49, Michael Tarzai said:
  

  David Kessler said: And why is the year 1900 privileged in history?

  Apologies, I thought that was obvious, i was choosing a point in time that just pre-dated the beginning of Zionist colonization of Palestine, or there abouts. Sorry i thought it was obvious my mistake.

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.28 14:58, Michael Tarzai said:
  

  Simone said: Oh, and without wishing to appear pedantic, I feel it incumbent upon me to point out that the “marauding Christians” to whom you are apparently referring were not Roman Catholic. Sorry to deprive you of yet another whip with which to beat Kate, (who has admitted, from the very start, that she is not an expert on the subject of the Middle East or on Jewish history), but the Kievan Rus who overcame the Khazars adhered to the Orthodox brand of Christianity.

  Please provide me with an approximate date for this event! – Michael

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.28 15:56, David Kessler said:
  

  MT Says: Now your turn, tell me what rights you feel the Palestinians had in 1900, what should be the rights of the displaced Palestinian refugees in their historical land (indeed to houses, settlements, villages and towns that still exist, but which have had Israeli squatters in them since 1948. A previous poster mentioned the illegality of building settlements in occupied territory and whilst you tap dance around the matter of who the West Bank belongs to, it is clear that it does not belong to Israel.

  Personally I agree. I never supported settlement in the West Bank, which started in earnest in 1974 when the Jordanians accepted the Rabat Summit Conference decision that the PLO are the “sole legitimate representatives of the Palestinian People.”

  OTOH I believe that the Jews have a right to the whole of Jerusalem, as they have been an absolute majority there since 1872.

  David Kessler said: Obviously the existence of such variety as Swedish Jews, Eastern European Jews, Sephardi Jews and Ethiopian Jews means that there has been intermarriage (and conversion). One doesn’t need DNA to prove that. A cursory glance will do. (DNA can flesh out the details of course.).

  MT Says: Very brave of you to go this route as it really weakens your whole argument

  As my argument is not based on an ethnic claim to Israel, it doesn’t weaken my argument in the least.

  MT Says: Notwithstanding, I read something interesting the other day regarding Ethiopian Jews and I quote,

  “Some 60 percent are considered to be living in poverty compared to 20 percent of the general population, according to figures from Meyers-JDC-Brookdale, a prominent Israeli social research institute. “We are making an effort to stop this through new programs,” said David Yasu of Israel’s Immigration Ministry, adding that Ethiopians get more state aid than other immigrants to Israel. Encouraging immigration is a cornerstone of policy in a country where officials worry about the faster birth rates of Israeli Arabs and Palestinians than Jews and falling immigration from other parts of the world.”

  I read through this passage several times and am still stuggling to see the relevance.

  MT Says: I assume that the last comment about faster birth rates of Israeli Arabs (Palestinians) and falling immigration being a concern, doesn’t do a lot to counter the progressively compelling argument I have seen on this board in support of the claim that Israel is a racist state or an Apartheid(like) state.

  First of all Israeli Arabs are not to be confused with Palestinians. You don’t have to take my word for it, just ask them! Secondly, concern about the changing

  MT Said: >>If, as you have stated David, one doesn’t need to be a religious Jew to have an affinity with Israel, indeed as with the case of the Ethiopians, one needn’t be the same race as the majority Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jews and we’ve established that there is little from a tribal perspective that links the 2 groups of European Jews, then what exactly is Zionism now?

  Zionism holds that there should be a national homeland for those who identify themselves as Jews whether religiously or culturally. The legal test for qualifying under the law of return is having one Jewish grandparent or being a convert to Judaism. (There is some internal dispute as to what constitutes conversion. I believe that they currently recognize Orthodox and Conservative Synagogue conversions but not reform. I may be wrong on this point. I haven’t kept up to date with it.)

  But now that Israel is an established state, it is entitled like any other sovereign state to set its own immigration policy, just as Britain sets its immigration policy (subject to the busybody intereference of the EU).

  MT Writes:>>As the Jewish Agency have confirmed the majority of recent Russian émigré Jews are not Jews,

  Ethnically? Religiously? Culturally?

  >> then it appears that anyone can come as long as they are not Arabs!

  A bit of an exaggeration. Did these immigrants present themselves as non-Jews when they applied to immigrate to Israel? At any rate, Israel is a sovereign state and may allow in who it pleases. It is not for you or I to tell them who they may and may not allow in to their own country.

  MT Says: >>please tell me how an Ethiopian tribesman (let’s use the eyeball test and not go the DNA route) a white Russian, a Khazari descendent (with possibly a little semitic ancestry) or a Sephardim (with a lot more semitic blood) can all have a better claim to live in Palestine than a Palestinian born there, who is probably 100% semitic?

  You seem to have conveniently forgotten that most of those who now call themselves Palestinian were NOT born there. They were born in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan!

  MT Says: Now you’re being disingenuous again. You are using the argument that the Palestinians didn’t have a government at the time of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to suggest that there was no Palestine,

  To suggest that there was no COUNTRY of Palestine. Palestine was part of the Turkish provence of Syria it was then governed by Britain under a League of Nations Mandate. At no stage was it a country. That may be an unpalatable fact to you, but it IS a fact.

  MT writes:>> or are you doing a “Golda Meir” and saying there is no such thing as the Palestinian people; that was rich coming from a US citizen born in Russia, when writing off the inhabitants of a land not her own as being non-existent.

  Drawing analogues between me and Golda Meir and then atacking her, is an excusion into irrelevancy.

  MT Says: If the Palestinian nation wish to call themselves Arabs, Palestinians or whatever isn’t relevant; what is relevant is that they were already on the land.

  And before they were, others were. And now others are. You can’t turn back the clock 60 years any more than you can turn it back 2000. More has changed in the world in the preceding 60 years than in the previous 2000. As Alvin Toffler has pointed out, even the rate of change is increasing. Israel is a sovereign state now. Palestine isn’t and never was. It wasn’t even an aspiration until AFTER Israel was established.

  MT says:>>I would stick to Zionist sources in support of this..-

  “”We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state; instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of those villages, and I do not blame you because these villages no longer exist. There is not a single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab Village.” –Moshe Dyan, March 19, 1969, speech at the Technion in Haifa, “Israel” quoted in Haaretz, April 4, 1969. (385 villages have been destroyed within pre-1967 Israel…)”

  Tel Aviv? Haifa? Eilat? Jerusalem?

  MT Says: I’m not sure what point you think you’ve scored with this, but I fail to see what it matters if the Palestinians called themselves Arabs. What a great pity it is that Zionists didn’t take such great delight in “showing off” Palestinian passports to their friends, as the Palestinian Jews did,

  The Palestinian Jews WERE Zionists.

  MT Says: David Kessler then goes on to make SEVEN points that propose to show the analogy is not precise, without EVER showing their relevance to the analogy, but I’ll deal with them all the same.

  The relevance is that the Jews did not return to a country, they came to a piece of land whose political status was in a state of flux and where there was room for many more people.

  >>David Kessler said: Firstly the most that has been proven is a Khazar contribution to the Jewish gene pool – not a complete supplanting of it.

  >>MT Says “my analogy CLEARLY says “(forsaking the possibility of inter-marriage changing my descendents racial profile). This was to dissuade you from introducing this fallacious argument. Sadly it failed.

  Your argument failed because it was false. There has been a great deal of intermarriage in the history of the Jews and the presence of Khazar or any other genes in their gene pool doesn’t mean that the Jews and the Khazars are one and the same. Nothing you have said has proven that the Ashkenazi Jews are the Khazars. Bearing in mind that those Khazars who converted to Judaism did so upon being persuaded to do so, it is quite likely that they WOULD have intermarried with those Jews who persuaded them!

  David Kessler said: Secondly, it is important to bear in mind that when the Zionists arrived in that sparesely populated corner of the decaying Ottoman empire, they tended to congregate in the more sparsely populated areas. (Tel Aviv, for example, was in 1903 a vacant hill outside the town of Jaffa.) They bought land at grossly inflated prices. Thus it was not a case of expropriation but one of purchasing and contributing to the land.

  MT Says: Can I refer you back to the above quote from Moshe Dayan, who although I have absolutely no respect for, I will at least concede that on this point he is being honest.

  The fact that Jews bought land is a matter of record. The Turks introduced a land reguistry law in 1858 and these purchases were recorded. Your selective quote of Moshe Dayan hardly refutes the records of the land registry!

  David Kessler said: Thirdly, Arabs tended to flock to the area where Jews were gathering (and investing) because of the increased work opportunities in those areas.

  MT Says: I find this piece of deception beneath contempt and not worthy of a response, however this will leave an opening for more deception so I quote

  “With the Arabs we shall not achieve our aim of being an independent people in this country. The only solution is Eretz-Israel, at least the west part of Eretz-Israel, without Arabs… And there is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries. Transfer all of them, not one village or tribe should remain…” –Joseph Weitz, entry in his diary for 1940 (Quoted in his article: “A solution to the Refugee Problem: An Israeli State with a small Arab Minority”, published in Davar, 29 September, 1967.

  So? One man expresses an obnoxious opinion (in 1940 long after the Arabs have flocked to those areas) and on the strength of this you pretend that Arabs did not flock to Jewish areas in search of work? That’s quite a leap of imagination on your part.

  MT Says: You are right; there is such a thing as natural movement of populations. Zionism however is not an example of it. What happened in Palestine was colonization and then conquest.

  Arriving, buying land, draining swamps, building universities, building cities – all this is colonization and conquest?

  May I remind you that colonization means ruling one land from a power base located in another. For example, India was a British colony run from a colonial country called Britain, located in Europe. Algeria was a French colony ruled from a colonial country called France, located in Europe. Now according to you Palestine was or became a Zionist colony, so presumably it was run by a colonial country called… called… called (please fill in the blank Mr Tarzai) and that colonial country was located in… (please fill in the blank Mr Tarzai). If you cannot fill in the blanks then please drop this spurious allegation of Zionist colonialism!

  What makes it extreme and gives rise to the ongoing trouble is that no accommodation was envisaged for the conquered and colonized people, as is seen from the quote above.

  MT Says: The first part of David’s Fifth Point seems reasonable until one considers that there were about 1 000 000 Palestinian Arabs and about 50 000 Palestinian Jews, who he claims wished to fulfill their “respective” (my emphasis) national ambitions”.

  But the number of Jews soon grew through a perfectly legitimate process known as immigration.

  >> How misleading, there is no record of a Nationalist Jewish Palestinian movement at all. David himself mentioned how proud the Jews of Palestine were to show off their Palestinian passports.< <

  Because in those days the word Palestinian did not mean Palestinian Arab or even native born to Palestine. Jewish immigrants to mandatory Palestine were also classed as Palestinians.

  MT Says: regarding the balance of the Fifth Point: In 1919, King Faisal, then the only recognized Arab leader in the world, executed a treaty with Chaim Weizmann adopting the understanding of the Balfour Declaration. It outlined relations between Palestine and the Arab state, recognizing the former as a National Home for the Jews, in which they should quickly settle. He wrote, "We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our delegation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday to the Zionist organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper." -

  MT Says: The key elements here are "A National Home for the Jews" quite different to an exclusively Jewish State from which Arabs would be expelled.

  If the Arabs had accepted the UN partition plan and not invaded the newly born state of Israel (before the British had even withdrawn) then they could have had an Arab state alongside a predominantly Jewish state.

  >> The other key point is the term “moderate and proper”, clearly the proposals submitted as mentioned, bore no resemblance to the acts carried out in the name of Revisionist Zionism of the kind Jabotinsky was about to unleash and to which I am sure Weizmann concurred.<<

  Jabotinsky’s movement was in a minority, as well you know. In subsequent Israel elections, the Jabotinsky influenced parties and coalitions (Herut, Gahal and Likud) were in a minority until 1977. In fact only by merging with other parties that were not Jabotinsky influenced, did Beigin eventually come to power. But this was long after the events that we are talking about.

  David Kessler said: (NB I am aware that David Ben-Gurion served in the Turkish army, but this was an abberation and an exception.)

  MT Says: I see when looking through your posts that there are a number of these Zionist aberrations and exceptions coming to the surface.

  IT is only because we are talking about Israel and not the behaviour of the Arabs that you are spared the need to confront their wrongs and evils. As long as Israel is the accused and the haters of Israel, the accuser that you have this advantage. The reality is that there is right and wrong on both sides. But by focussing on Israel and ignoring the wrongs on the Arab side, you project the false impression that Israel is the villain. Let’s talk about the actions of the Arabs (something you have clevery glossed over) and a different picture emerges.

  We see the persecution of the 130,000 Jews of Iraq and a similar number in the Yemen. We see the pesecution of 150,000 Algerian Jews, 48,000 Syrian Jews. All of these fled from aoppression and found refuge in Israel. Let us talk about the oppression that drove them to flight. And let’s not pretend that its the fault of Zionism. Oppression is oppression.

  MT Says: I’m sure many Arabs would have agreed, and had it not been for Revisionist Zionist exclusionist greed, we probably wouldn’t have the mess we have right now.

  Then all the more reason why the Arabs should have accepted the UN Partition Plan.

  David Kessler said: The displacement of Palestinians – although certainly real – was not the inevitable consequence of Zionism. It was the consequence of Arab intransigence in the face of a Jewish minority in the Middle East who were not prepared to accept the status of “protected minority” in a Pan-Arab state.

  MT Says : Really? I don’t agree, I quote

  “”Do we sin only against the refugees? Do we not treat the Arabs who remain as second-class citizens? — Did a single Jewish farmer raise his hand in the Parliament in opposition to a law that deprived Arab peasants of their land?…How lonely, in the city of Jerusalem, sits the Jewish conscience.”
  –Moshe Smilansky, 1958, in an essay entitled “Zion and the Jewish National Idea” in the Menorah Journal, Volume XVI, 1958, reprinted in Zionism Reconsidered, Macmillan, N.Y., 1970.

  Again, you’re quoting one man’s opinion about events that happened after the attempted Arab invasion of Israel.

  Your quotes of Jabotinsky are meaningless, because his view was the minority view. That’s why the political parties based on his views were always minority parties and in opposition until 1977 (even then they had to form a coalition to hold power).

  David Kessler said: Seventh, within five years of statehood, Israel began absorbing large number of Sephardi Jews. By the late sixties they were a majority of the Jewish inhabitants. Whatever Israel started as, it soon became the Homeland both Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews. The two may be different ethnically, and even in some of their religious practices, but taken together they are a Nation.

  MT Says: Yes they are, they are now Israelis, but what of the Palestinians and their nation, who have had their birthright taken from them, communities smashed, populations chased from their homes, towns and villages, who today are suffering the iniquities of the 1940′s again in the West Bank, as once again Zionism seeks to relieve them (of the remainder) of their land, towns and possessions? Do you think it’s fair David?

  I think much of it is unfair, but I think it is a consequence of three things: the misconduct of some Israeli governments, the misconduct of Palestinian leaders and the misconduct of Arab leaders. I do not share your lopsided view of history in which you ignore the wrongs of the Arabs and focus only only on the wrongs of the Jews.

  “If it is proper to ‘reconstitute’ a Jewish State which has not existed for two thousand years, why not go back another thousand years and reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there.” –H.G. Wells, quoted by Frank C. Sakran in Palestine Dilemma, p. 204.

  The reality is we can’t go back at all. We have to go forward. And destroying an established state is not an option.

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.28 16:13, Simone said:
  

  Michael Tarzai said:

  “Only a fool (an immoral political Zionist as maybe a lapsed Catholic) would believe that to be fair, just or right.”

  I replied:Are you now trying to imply that Catholics are immoral? Or only lapsed Catholics?

  Michale replies: This is typical of the obfuscation that Zionist apologists indulge in.

  He further says:
  To answer your question: -I consider all immoral Catholics to be immoral, be they lapsed or not, there is no degree of lapsation in my book, so no matter how little or how far the lapsee, or not, as may be the case, has lapsed, or not, does not in my view, excuse immoral behaviour from either. I hope this clears the matter up for you.

  And Michael accuses me of obfuscation?!
  The point I was making was that Michael, having struck out in his implication that Kate’s support of the Jews stems from her actually being Jewish herself, (since she is not), now has to cover up his mistake by attacking her for being Catholic.

  Michael also said:
  The point I made was “We’ll start with the Ashkenazi Jews in Poland, Russia and Germany. Do I believe that they have a right to a homeland? Absolutely; in Poland, Russia and Germany. Does their ancestors’ adoption of Judaism and rejection of Paganism some 12 hundred years earlier give them a right to move to Palestine, destroy communities that do not share their religion, alienate the minority Jewish believers in other communities, steal, murder and dispossess the indigenous population of their birthright?
  Did Simone counter the argument. Not a chance. I assume you have no opinion then Simone?

  This is the same kind of question as “when did you stop beating your wife?”
  Michael claims that the Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of the Khazars, who adopted Judaism some 1200 years earlier and then invites me to state my opinion as to whether this gives them the right “to move to Palestine, destroy communities that do not share their religion, alienate the minority Jewish believers in other communities, steal, murder and dispossess the indigenous population of their birthright.”
  Since I do not accept the claim that the Ashkenazi Jews are really the descendants of Khazars, (nor, incidentally, do I accept that they destroyed communities etc. etc.), the whole question becomes pointless.
  I do believe that as descendants of the ancient Hebrews, the Ashkenazi Jews had and have every right to return to the Land of Israel.

  In his next post, Michael said, (in reply to David Kessler’s question as to the significance of the year 1900):

  Apologies, I thought that was obvious, i was choosing a point in time that just pre-dated the beginning of Zionist colonization of Palestine, or there abouts. Sorry i thought it was obvious my mistake.

  I presume you are talking about modern Zionist colonization, or rather, “The Return to Zion.”
  Well, Moroccan Jews starting resettling in Jaffa as early as 1838, although a census carried out by Montefiore in 1939 showed that there were also Jews there from Turkey, Egypt, Smyrna, Bulgaria, and the Yemen.
  But of course, you mean the Ashkenazim, don’t you? Well, by 1843, there were 50 Ashkenazi families in Tiberias, so we could say that what you would no doubt term “the colonization” was well underway quite a while before the year 1900.
  Incidentally, a leading figure in the renewal of Jewish life in the Land of Israel was Joel Moses Salomon, born in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1838.

  In yet another post, Michael quoted me :
  Simone said: Oh, and without wishing to appear pedantic, I feel it incumbent upon me to point out that the “marauding Christians” to whom you are apparently referring were not Roman Catholic. Sorry to deprive you of yet another whip with which to beat Kate, (who has admitted, from the very start, that she is not an expert on the subject of the Middle East or on Jewish history), but the Kievan Rus who overcame the Khazars adhered to the Orthodox brand of Christianity.

  and replied:

  Please provide me with an approximate date for this event!

  Towards the end of the 10th century CE, Michael, from 962 CE onwards.
  As I think I have mentioned in an earlier post, this was a gradual process, but you did ask for an approximate date only.

  Now, I could continue debating this with you ad nauseam, but as I am going on holiday, I must pack.
  Goodbye – or should I say au revoir?

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.28 18:14, David Kessler said:
  

  David Kessler said: And why is the year 1900 privileged in history?

  MT replied:>>Apologies, I thought that was obvious, i was choosing a point in time that just pre-dated the beginning of Zionist colonization of Palestine, or there abouts. Sorry i thought it was obvious my mistake.

  Of course it was obvious: In order to make out your case against Zionism, you were saying that before the mass immigration of the Jews there were very few Jews living there. This would me like me saying that before the Arabs conquered the Land there were no Arabs living there.

  What does this prove? That people arrived at a certain time? But why is that time privileged?

  Who are the majority now?

  By selecting a particular arbitrary point in time you make out a bogus case. Obviously before a certain group of people arrived there they weren’t there. That is an obvious truism. But why should the clock be turned back to when the Zionists hadn’t yet arrived? To help you arrive at the conclusion you want to reach?

  What right did the Arabs have to conquer the land? Who asked the Muslims to spread by conquest?

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.29 00:43, David Kessler said:
  

  Simone said:>>I presume you are talking about modern Zionist colonization, or rather, “The Return to Zion.”
  Well, Moroccan Jews starting resettling in Jaffa as early as 1838, although a census carried out by Montefiore in 1939 showed that there were also Jews there from Turkey, Egypt, Smyrna, Bulgaria, and the Yemen.

  A point well made Simone, but I think you’re giving Michael Tarzai more credit than he deserves. By his own admission he admits that he picked the year 1900 in order to reach the conclusion that he wants to reach. In effect he’s saying that only those who were living there before the mass migrations of Jews have the right to live there.

  The irony is that he also said “As the Jewish Agency have confirmed the majority of recent Russian émigré Jews are not Jews, then it appears that anyone can come as long as they are not Arabs!”

  But it turns out that his own position is: Anyone except the Jews.

  I notice that like Hess and Toxy, Michael Tarzai likes to sidestep any questions about Arab/Moslem behaviour, their invasion of Eretz Yisrael, their acts of desecration (building the Dome of the Rock and Aksa Mosque on a Jewish Holy site), their massacre of the Jews of Yathrib (which then became Medina), the Damascas Blood Libel of 1840, their violence against the Jews in Palestine in 1920-21, in 1929 and then in 1936, the fact that they didn’t allow a single Jew to remain alive in the areas that they conquered in the 1948-49 war when the armies of the neighbouring Arab states invaded to destroy Israel at birth.

  This last fact is most telling because they claim that Jews would be left alone as a minority in an Arab country and yet they were not even ready to tolerate a tiny Jewish minority in the territories that Jordan and Egypt conquered when they invaded Israel and Palestine in 1948.

  Their savage kinship towards their own brethren is malso something that these haters of the Jewish State prefer to gloss over. The treatment of women? The they don’t even want to talk about it! The treatment of the Blacks of Sudan? They prefer to remain Shtum!

  And the Palestinians themselves? Murdering any Palestinian who sold land to a Jew? They pass over this in silence. Instead they accuse the Jews of stealing land. Tarzai even had the audacity to deny that Jews had bought land!

  They like to attack, but they are not so good at defending because they haven’t got a leg to stand on.

  If one wants to know what Palestine would be like without the Jews, one has only to look at Syria – a backward primitive military dictatorship. That is the legacy that Michael Tarzai wishes on the Palestinians for whom he professes to feel sympathy!

  What a humanitarian he is!

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.29 16:45, Steven_L said:
  

  ‘their acts of desecration (building the Dome of the Rock and Aksa Mosque on a Jewish Holy site), their massacre of the Jews of Yathrib (which then became Medina)’(David Kessler)

  I thought this thread come would come down to this sooner or later, the old ‘Mohammed started it’ argument.

  Well I guess the Jews had control of Israel/Palestine before the Muslims came along, then the Muslims had it, now the Jews have it again. The Muslims don’t look like they’re going to stop fighting over it and the Jews don’t look like they’re going to give it up without a fight either.

  That, I think, pretty much sums it up.

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.29 18:10, David Kessler said:
  

  I wrote:>>’their acts of desecration (building the Dome of the Rock and Aksa Mosque on a Jewish Holy site), their massacre of the Jews of Yathrib (which then became Medina)’(David Kessler)

  Steven_L wrote>>”I thought this thread come would come down to this sooner or later, the old ‘Mohammed started it’ argument.”"

  I wasn’t using the ‘Mohamed started it argument.’ I was simply concerned that the form of the entire debate was Israel’s opponents attacking Israel and Israel’s supporters defending Israel, but with no direct discussion of the wrongs on the other side.

  Given that there are rights and wrongs on both sides, I felt that the discussion was taking a one-sided turn – something which the enemies of the Jewish State (and Jewish state) were quite happy with.

  My comment was designed to ensure that we look at both sides of the coin – and that includes the wrongs committed by the Moslems (both ancient and modern) on others in the Middle East.

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.29 18:23, Roberta Cohen said:
  

  Once U.S. troops invaded Haiti in the name of human right violations, the death toll increased within a month from 1,500 to 4,000. We can simply usurp the sovereignty of another nation and expect for the citizens within the country to in face increasing turmoil. This can be demonstrated through Kosovo, Bosnia, Serbia and the Balkans for only a few examples.

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.30 13:58, Michael Tarzai said:
  

  David Kessler said: OTOH I believe that the Jews have a right to the whole of Jerusalem, as they have been an absolute majority there since 1872.

  MT Says: Liar! Census 1844 results below (close but no cigar.

  Jews 7 120
  goyim 9 150……so the Goys have it by a whisker!

  MT Says: I believe the term “hoist by your own (Jewish, racially dismissive) petard” is in order.

  MT Says: But David, isn’t your claiming Jerusalem for Jews on the basis of “an ethnic minority” being a majority in a smaller environment of the larger condition, the same logic that Hitler used for annexing the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia?

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.30 20:07, David Kessler said:
  

  David Kessler said: OTOH I believe that the Jews have a right to the whole of Jerusalem, as they have been an absolute majority there since 1872.

  MT Says: Liar! Census 1844 results below (close but no cigar.

  Jews 7 120
  goyim 9 150……so the Goys have it by a whisker!

  I wrote “1872″ you replied with the figures of 1844 and YOU call ME a liar? Evidently you are incapable of telling the difference between 1844 and 1872? I suggest you check out the 11th edition of Encyclopoedia Brittanica.

  But then again this is ane example of the level of honesty of your arguments throughout our entire exchange! So much for your credibility!

  MT Says: I believe the term “hoist by your own (Jewish, racially dismissive) petard” is in order.

  In view of your confusion over numbers (such as your inability to distinguish between 1844 and 1872) methinks the boot is on the other foot.

  And once again you resort to making snide remarks about Jews – which shows your motives!

  MT Says: But David, isn’t your claiming Jerusalem for Jews on the basis of “an ethnic minority” being a majority in a smaller environment of the larger condition, the same logic that Hitler used for annexing the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia?

  I never advocated ethnic cleansing. I simply pointed out that because of the long-standing Jewish majority in Jerusalem, the case for Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem is similarly strong. Of course the non-Jewish minority are welcome to stay there. Once again you are dishonestly putting words into my mouth.

  It was the Muslim Arabs who practiced ethnic cleansing when they expelled all the Jews from eastern Jerusalem in 1948/1949.

  Bearing in mind your remarks about Jews above, I don’t see that you’re in any position to compare ME to the Nazis. Again, the boot is on the other foot!

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.30 21:22, David Kessler said:
  

  MT Says: Liar! Census 1844 results below (close but no cigar.

  You antisemites are very quick to use the word liar about people who present truths that you wish to deny.

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.30 21:32, David Kessler said:
  

  MT Says: Liar!

  I have had enough of this rudeness. Only an antisemitic scumbag of the type who would have collaborated with the Nazis would accuse me being a liar.

  Rate This: 0  0

  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.31 08:34, Michael Tarzai said:
  

  David Kessler said: MT Says: Now your turn, tell me what rights you feel the Palestinians had in 1900, what should be the rights of the dislaced Palestinian refugees in their historical land (indeed to houses, settlements, villages and towns that still exist, but which have had Israeli squatters in them since 1948. A previous poster mentioned the illegality of building settlements in occupied territory and whilst you tap dance around the matter of who the West Bank belongs to, it is clear that it does not belong to Israel.

  David Kessler said: Personally I agree. I never supported settlement in the West Bank, which started in earnest in 1974 when the Jordanians accepted the Rabat Summit Conference decision that the PLO are the “sole legitimate representatives of the Palestinian People.”

  MT Says: You forgot to address my question relating to Palestinian rights at the dawn of the Zionist programme and to their property that has been stolen and for which they have received no compensation. And I am not referring to any property purchased legally. I acknowledge your stance on the illegal settlements in the West Bank, and would ask if you are prepared to add your voice to the growing number of people calling for sanctions on the State of Israel, unless a positive programme of complete withdrawal has been undertaken in the West Bank?

  David Kessler said: OTOH I believe that the Jews have a right to the whole of Jerusalem, as they have been an absolute majority there since 1872.

  MT Says: Isn’t this the same logic that Hitler used with annexing the Sudetenland, in Czechoslovakia, I believe the logic was something along the lines of an ethnic minority of German speakers were the majority in certain parts of the country.

  Next point deleted as neither party appears to be getting anywhere.

  David Kessler said: MT Says: I assume that the last comment about faster birth rates of Israeli Arabs (Palestinians) and falling immigration being a concern, doesn’t do a lot to counter the progressively compelling argument I have seen on this board in support of the claim that Israel is a racist state or an Apartheid(like) state.

  David Kessler said: First of all Israeli Arabs are not to be confused with Palestinians. You don’t have to take my word for it, just ask them! Secondly, concern about the changing (argument incomplete I presume)

  MT Said: >>If, as you have stated David, one doesn’t need to be a religious Jew to have an affinity with Israel, indeed as with the case of the Ethiopians, one needn’t be the same race as the majority Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jews and we’ve established that there is little from a tribal perspective that links the 2 groups of European Jews, then what exactly is Zionism now?

  David Kessler said: Zionism holds that there should be a national homeland for those who identify themselves as Jews whether religiously or culturally. The legal test for qualifying under the law of return is having one Jewish grandparent or being a convert to Judaism. (There is some internal dispute as to what constitutes conversion. I believe that they currently recognize Orthodox and Conservative Synagogue conversions but not reform. I may be wrong on this point. I haven’t kept up to date with it.)
  But now that Israel is an established state, it is entitled like any other sovereign state to set its own immigration policy, just as Britain sets its immigration policy (subject to the busybody intereference of the EU).

  MT Says: What is clear from the ever-changing way in one qualifies as a Jew, first it’s only through your mother, now it’s your Grandad, and more recently if you just manage to say shalom, if you happen to be a Russian thug whose talents for violence will be invaluable in propping up the occupation of the Palestinian Territories. – I am paraphrasing Richard Ben Cramer in his book “How Israel Lost”. Incidentally you forgot to mention that Zionist also sets out to be an exclusively Jewish State, whose problem is the Arabs who didn’t run away and what to do about the millions of Arabs in the West Bank that they so desperately want to annex. They should go ahead and do it, it should be fun seeing the Jews in Etertz Yisrael being the minority. What will they do then, drop the façade and become a fully-fledged Apartheid State?

  David Kessler said: MT Writes:>>As the Jewish Agency have confirmed the majority of recent Russian émigré Jews are not Jews,

  David Kessler said: Ethnically? Religiously? Culturally?

  MT Says: All of the above it would appear David. So how do you account for this and do you believe they should be deported or forced to convert? I could direct you to a website recently set up that looks at the growing scourge of anti-semitism in Israel. One of these Russian boys serving in the army got lifted by the Police who discovered a Swastika on his arm. Apparently him and his buddies (all of whom got the Kosher stamp) had started a Hilter Youth movement of their own, in Israel.

  David Kessler said: >> then it appears that anyone can come as long as they are not Arabs!
  A bit of an exaggeration. Did these immigrants present themselves as non-Jews when they applied to immigrate to Israel? At any rate, Israel is a sovereign state and may allow in who it pleases. It is not for you or I to tell them who they may and may not allow in to their own country.

  MT Says: It would appear non-Jews and even Russian-Nazis are ok, just not the Arabs that were chased off their own land. May I ask why it is you think the government of the State of Israel is so bent on denying the Palestinians anything, they’ll even go so far as to prostitute the very Jewishness of the State as long as they don’t have to give anything viable to the Palestinians.

  MT Says: I concede that the Jewishness of the State has been a subterfuge all along, because as you and I both know, Zionism and Judasim are really mutually exclusive, the Torah refutes the right of Israel to exist as a man-made political entity, so “Jew” was a badge of convenience for those Ashkenazi revolutionaries. I acknowledge attitudes amongst Jewry softened towards Zionism after the holocaust. But now, when the whole world is in need of peace in the Middle East, why don’t you stop the deception?

  Mt Says: I do not accept your spurious argument about Arabs being blood-thirsty savages which you bring up repeatedly later in this post. Let me remind you that you raised the matter of the communication between Zionists and King Faisal in which the King said, “We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our delegation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday to the Zionist organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper.”

  MT Says: I concede that you “Jews” (let’s call them what they are and drop the Jewish pretence right now, they’re Israelis) need to do a lot of apologising now, but your assessment of Arabs and Arabs countries is unfair.

  MT Says: Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire the Arab peoples and their lands have been carved up by Colonialists and neo-colonialists; maps and territories decided by others rather than Arabs, communities have been thrown together or split against their logical ethnic, social or religious lines, i.e. Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon. These colonialists have looked upon the Arabs as backward and treated them with contempt. US, British and Zionist interests (amongst others) have overthrown governments, crushed popular movements, assassinated those they didn’t feel were sufficiently “sympathetic to their respective causes”, propped up oppressive and brutal dictatorships as their needs dictated. And now these colonizers have created the monster of militant and fanatical Islam. I’m afraid David that labelling Arab morality in this environment is like judging Irish morality in the context of “The Troubles”.

  David Kessler said: MT Says: >>please tell me how an Ethiopian tribesman (let’s use the eyeball test and not go the DNA route) a white Russian, a Khazari descendent (with possibly a little semitic ancestry) or a Sephardim (with a lot more semitic blood) can all have a better claim to live in Palestine than a Palestinian born there, who is probably 100% semitic?

  David Kessler said: You seem to have conveniently forgotten that most of those who now call themselves Palestinian were NOT born there. They were born in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan!

  MT Says: Really? What about those born in Gaza and the West Bank? Is that the plan then Dave, when the last Palestinian chased off their land dies, then that will be Zionism perfected, their children don’t count? Anyway aren’t there UN resolutions regarding the rights of the refugees and their offspring? – David, I’m afraid you’ve been reduced to mere Zionist apologist rubbish, at least in the beginning some of it required a bit of thought to see through, not any more.

  David Kessler said: MT Says: Now you’re being disingenuous again. You are using the argument that the Palestinians didn’t have a government at the time of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to suggest that there was no Palestine,

  David Kessler said: To suggest that there was no COUNTRY of Palestine. Palestine was part of the Turkish provence of Syria it was then governed by Britain under a League of Nations Mandate. At no stage was it a country. That may be an unpalatable fact to you, but it IS a fact.

  MT Says: Poland has been wiped off the map, conquered, forgotten and absorbed, by Russia, Germany, Austria and Genghis Khan more times than the average Polish high school child cares to remember for history tests. That does not change the fact that there always was a Polish “nation” and those that identified with their Polishness. Same with Palestine, the temporary oddity of the Zionist experiment has undoubtedly changed that face and population of the future Palestine, but it will still come to exist. In your deluded Zionist mind the Palestinian people should under no circumstances be granted the right of self-government then, because they’ve never had it, is that what you’re saying? I you question my humanitarian credentials. You are arrogant and transparent in the extreme. Do you believe that the Kurds deserve autonomy David, or just the Jewish ones?

  David Kessler said: MT writes:>> or are you doing a “Golda Meir” and saying there is no such thing as the Palestinian people; that was rich coming from a US citizen born in Russia, when writing off the inhabitants of a land not her own as being non-existent.

  David Kessler said: Drawing analogues between me and Golda Meir and then atacking her, is an excusion into irrelevancy.

  MT Says: Why Dave, we haven’t got to the bottom of your attitude toward the Palestinian nation yet and what you feel should be done with, or to them. What is you final solution? Golda alluded to hers quite clearly, you just hint at yours. Do you admire her for such a ridiculous claim David?

  David Kessler said: MT Says: If the Palestinian nation wish to call themselves Arabs, Palestinians or whatever isn’t relevant; what is relevant is that they were already on the land.

  David Kessler said: And before they were, others were. And now others are. You can’t turn back the clock 60 years any more than you can turn it back 2000. More has changed in the world in the preceding 60 years than in the previous 2000. As Alvin Toffler has pointed out, even the rate of change is increasing. Israel is a sovereign state now. Palestine isn’t and never was. It wasn’t even an aspiration until AFTER Israel was established.

  MT Says: So it was ok to try and turn the clock back 200-years only 60-years ago, but it’s not ok to turn back the clock 60-years today? More Zionist rubbish. In 1922, the League of Nations entrusted the Mandate for Palestine (CONSIDERED TO BE “CLASS A” OR CLOSEST TO INDEPENDENCE) to Britain. See, you’re being mendacious again. Zionism was a racist misconception. We today, live in the post-Zionist era now David, so apologising and making amends is ok. The problem is we are daily confronted by people like you; people who appear on the surface to make sense, but after careful scrutiny are found to be incapable of lying straight in bed.

  David Kessler said: MT says:>>I would stick to Zionist sources in support of this..-
  “We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state; instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of those villages, and I do not blame you because these villages no longer exist. There is not a single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab Village.” –Moshe Dyan, March 19, 1969, speech at the Technion in Haifa, “Israel” quoted in Haaretz, April 4, 1969. (385 villages have been destroyed within pre-1967 Israel…)”

  David Kessler said: Tel Aviv? Haifa? Eilat? Jerusalem?

  MT Says: Oh I see, so now Moshe Dayan is one of your Zionist aberrations as well, the list gets longer. I’m not going to waste time on a Sunday looking into the history of the four you mention (but I’m sure that as with everything else you say there will at best only be the allusion of truth), but does their introduction reduce the enormity of the admission Dayan was making?

  David Kessler said: MT Says: I’m not sure what point you think you’ve scored with this, but I fail to see what it matters if the Palestinians called themselves Arabs. What a great pity it is that Zionists didn’t take such great delight in “showing off” Palestinian passports to their friends, as the Palestinian Jews did,

  David Kessler said: The Palestinian Jews WERE Zionists.

  MT Says: Prove it Dave, because the historical record says otherwise!

  David Kessler said: MT Says: David Kessler then goes on to make SEVEN points that propose to show the analogy is not precise, without EVER showing their relevance to the analogy, but I’ll deal with them all the same.

  David Kessler said: The relevance is that the Jews did not return to a country, they came to a piece of land whose political status was in a state of flux and where there was room for many more people.

  MT Says: The pretext was RETURNING. If you are correct, which you obviously are not, surely the State of Israel wouldn’t have on its statute books “A LAW OF RETURN” it would have a “Law permitting anyone we think is on our side to immigrate to a country founded in a state of flux” Maybe they called of the “Law of Return” because it was easier to remember! The interesting point is that the likes of Arik Sharon’s mum was astounded to find the land of Israel was inhabited when these early Zionists arrived in Palestine.

  >>David Kessler said: Firstly the most that has been proven is a Khazar contribution to the Jewish gene pool – not a complete supplanting of it.

  David Kessler said: >>MT Says “my analogy CLEARLY says “(forsaking the possibility of inter-marriage changing my descendents racial profile). This was to dissuade you from introducing this fallacious argument. Sadly it failed.

  David Kessler said: Your argument failed because it was false. There has been a great deal of intermarriage in the history of the Jews and the presence of Khazar or any other genes in their gene pool doesn’t mean that the Jews and the Khazars are one and the same. Nothing you have said has proven that the Ashkenazi Jews are the Khazars. Bearing in mind that those Khazars who converted to Judaism did so upon being persuaded to do so, it is quite likely that they WOULD have intermarried with those Jews who persuaded them!

  MT Says: If there is inter-marriage and an introduction of a large number of male and female converts, where does the “right to the land, by birth” come into it, or have you totally dropped the pretense that being Jewish gave Zionism its moral imperative?

  David Kessler said: Secondly, it is important to bear in mind that when the Zionists arrived in that sparesely populated corner of the decaying Ottoman empire, they tended to congregate in the more sparsely populated areas. (Tel Aviv, for example, was in 1903 a vacant hill outside the town of Jaffa.) They bought land at grossly inflated prices. Thus it was not a case of expropriation but one of purchasing and contributing to the land.

  David Kessler said: MT Says: Can I refer you back to the above quote from Moshe Dayan, who although I have absolutely no respect for, I will at least concede that on this point he is being honest.

  David Kessler said: The fact that Jews bought land is a matter of record. The Turks introduced a land reguistry law in 1858 and these purchases were recorded. Your selective quote of Moshe Dayan hardly refutes the records of the land registry!

  MT Says: How much land, David, please be precise as I really would like to expose you for the mendacious fool you are?

  David Kessler said: Thirdly, Arabs tended to flock to the area where Jews were gathering (and investing) because of the increased work opportunities in those areas.

  David Kessler said: MT Says: I find this piece of deception beneath contempt and not worthy of a response, however this will leave an opening for more deception so I quote “With the Arabs we shall not achieve our aim of being an independent people in this country. The only solution is Eretz-Israel, at least the west part of Eretz-Israel, without Arabs… And there is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries. Transfer all of them, not one village or tribe should remain…” –Joseph Weitz, entry in his diary for 1940 (Quoted in his article: “A solution to the Refugee Problem: An Israeli State with a small Arab Minority”, published in Davar, 29 September, 1967.

  David Kessler said: So? One man expresses an obnoxious opinion (in 1940 long after the Arabs have flocked to those areas) and on the strength of this you pretend that Arabs did not flock to Jewish areas in search of work? That’s quite a leap of imagination on your part.

  MT Says: Oh dear, not another Zionist aberration. Will the list never end? Give me a clue David, how many Jewish sources must I introduce to refute every point you make, until you realise that maybe it is you, Mr Kessler who is the aberration, a man so bent on Zionist apology that you have forsaken all decency.

  David Kessler said: MT Says: You are right; there is such a thing as natural movement of populations. Zionism however is not an example of it. What happened in Palestine was colonization and then conquest.

  David Kessler said: Arriving, buying land, draining swamps, building universities, building cities – all this is colonization and conquest?

  MT Says: Personally I think there were a lot of well intentioned parts of early Zionism. But Jabotinsky, Begin and Stern, Ben Gurion quickly altered all of the to be followed by Dayan, Sharon and Netanyahu.

  David Kessler said: May I remind you that colonization means ruling one land from a power base located in another. For example, India was a British colony run from a colonial country called Britain, located in Europe. Algeria was a French colony ruled from a colonial country called France, located in Europe. Now according to you Palestine was or became a Zionist colony, so presumably it was run by a colonial country called… called… called (please fill in the blank Mr Tarzai) and that colonial country was located in… (please fill in the blank Mr Tarzai). If you cannot fill in the blanks then please drop this spurious allegation of Zionist colonialism!

  MT Says: Oh that’s right Dave, it was just a natural result of movement of people. Jonathan Friedland from the Guardian was being interviewed on the BBC a few months ago and said that the colonization of Israel should be seen in the same context as the colonization of Australia or Argentina. Perhaps you can add him to your list of Zionist aberrations. As mentioned above when you give me the number of Jewish sources needed to expose the mendacity of each of your points I will happily oblige.

  David Kessler said: MT Says: The first part of David’s Fifth Point seems reasonable until one considers that there were about 1 000 000 Palestinian Arabs and about 50 000 Palestinian Jews, who he claims wished to fulfill their “respective” (my emphasis) national ambitions”.
  David Kessler said: But the number of Jews soon grew through a perfectly legitimate process known as immigration.

  MT Says: Normally, when immigration happens in a country that is being established people are invited by the government, as in the case of the USA. What we have here as disgruntled Europeans who see an opportunity to flee the lands of their birth and move to another country, but not with the intention of mingling with the local population, but with the specific intention of dispossessing that people of their land using some absurd religious pretext. Jabotininsky’s book “Iron Wall” puts it clearly in perspective, brutal colonization. You can call it what you want Dave!

  David Kessler said: >> How misleading, there is no record of a Nationalist Jewish Palestinian movement at all. David himself mentioned how proud the Jews of Palestine were to show off their Palestinian passports.

  David Kessler said: Because in those days the word Palestinian did not mean Palestinian Arab or even native born to Palestine. Jewish immigrants to mandatory Palestine were also classed as Palestinians.

  MT Says: Really, a native born in Palestine wasn’t a Palestinian? What was he then?

  David Kessler said: MT Says: regarding the balance of the Fifth Point: In 1919, King Faisal, then the only recognized Arab leader in the world, executed a treaty with Chaim Weizmann adopting the understanding of the Balfour Declaration. It outlined relations between Palestine and the Arab state, recognizing the former as a National Home for the Jews, in which they should quickly settle. He wrote, “We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our delegation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday to the Zionist organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper.” -
  MT Says: The key elements here are “A National Home for the Jews” quite different to an exclusively Jewish State from which Arabs would be expelled.

  David Kessler said: If the Arabs had accepted the UN partition plan and not invaded the newly born state of Israel (before the British had even withdrawn) then they could have had an Arab state alongside a predominantly Jewish state.

  MT Says: The UN Security Council didn’t even accept it, why should the Palestinians? Do we need to expose the unfair nature of the partition plan? Let’s assume the Arabs had accepted it, what would have become of the Arabs within Israel, (assuming the terrorist attacks hadn’t caused 750 000 to leave), you know those happy group of serfs that swarmed around the benign settlements and the ones that stayed in their hundreds of towns and villages in the borders of Israel? Would they have been “transferred” (Zionist code for ethnic cleansing) anyway, forced to convert, or killed? Clearly for a Jewish State to remain Jewish in nature you couldn’t allow such a large percentage of the population to be non-Jews that would defeat the point. Much the same conundrum as in the West Bank eh, David?

  David Kessler said: >> The other key point is the term “moderate and proper”, clearly the proposals submitted as mentioned, bore no resemblance to the acts carried out in the name of Revisionist Zionism of the kind Jabotinsky was about to unleash and to which I am sure Weizmann concurred.

  David Kessler said: Jabotinsky’s movement was in a minority, as well you know. In subsequent Israel elections, the Jabotinsky influenced parties and coalitions (Herut, Gahal and Likud) were in a minority until 1977. In fact only by merging with other parties that were not Jabotinsky influenced, did Beigin eventually come to power. But this was long after the events that we are talking about.

  MT Says: Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism is Zionism today which in turn is Israeli State policy. Give the Arabs nothing, and kill them when necessary if they don’t leave voluntarily. You trying to tell me that Zionist thinking toady and right the way through your short history from Moshe Sharrett to Olmert hasn’t been shaped by “Iron Wall” mentality? Please, you’ve even got a concrete one as well now. That ghetto mentality is so hard to shift isn’t it?

  David Kessler said: (NB I am aware that David Ben-Gurion served in the Turkish army, but this was an abberation and an exception.)

  MT Says: I see when looking through your posts that there are a number of these Zionist aberrations and exceptions coming to the surface.

  David Kessler said: IT is only because we are talking about Israel and not the behaviour of the Arabs that you are spared the need to confront their wrongs and evils. As long as Israel is the accused and the haters of Israel, the accuser that you have this advantage. The reality is that there is right and wrong on both sides. But by focussing on Israel and ignoring the wrongs on the Arab side, you project the false impression that Israel is the villain. Let’s talk about the actions of the Arabs (something you have clevery glossed over) and a different picture emerges.
  David Kessler said: We see the persecution of the 130,000 Jews of Iraq and a similar number in the Yemen. We see the pesecution of 150,000 Algerian Jews, 48,000 Syrian Jews. All of these fled from aoppression and found refuge in Israel. Let us talk about the oppression that drove them to flight. And let’s not pretend that its the fault of Zionism. Oppression is oppression.

  MT Says: The plight of the Iraqi Jews certainly was the fault of Zionism. I’ll check up on the rest.

  David Kessler said: MT Says: I’m sure many Arabs would have agreed, and had it not been for Revisionist Zionist exclusionist greed, we probably wouldn’t have the mess we have right now.

  David Kessler said: Then all the more reason why the Arabs should have accepted the UN Partition Plan.

  MT Says: UN Security Council states Partition Plan is unenforceable aside from it being immoral. God you’re arrogant, why can’t you just envisage living peacefully amongst the other inhabitants of the land. We’ve already established that the early Zionist Ashkenazi’s aren’t really Jews anyway, so dropping the pretence of the religion would have been logical. You mention that Zionist settlement was just natural immigration, where else did a situation arise where an immigrant population usurped the land, resources and infrastructure of the indigenous people? Think carefully about your answer, because otherwise you could be staring at colonialism in the face.

  David Kessler said: The displacement of Palestinians – although certainly real – was not the inevitable consequence of Zionism. It was the consequence of Arab intransigence in the face of a Jewish minority in the Middle East who were not prepared to accept the status of “protected minority” in a Pan-Arab state.

  David Kessler said: MT Says : Really? I don’t agree, I quote
  “”Do we sin only against the refugees? Do we not treat the Arabs who remain as second-class citizens? — Did a single Jewish farmer raise his hand in the Parliament in opposition to a law that deprived Arab peasants of their land?…How lonely, in the city of Jerusalem, sits the Jewish conscience.”
  –Moshe Smilansky, 1958, in an essay entitled “Zion and the Jewish National Idea” in the Menorah Journal, Volume XVI, 1958, reprinted in Zionism Reconsidered, Macmillan, N.Y., 1970.
  Again, you’re quoting one man’s opinion about events that happened after the attempted Arab invasion of Israel.

  David Kessler said: Your quotes of Jabotinsky are meaningless, because his view was the minority view. That’s why the political parties based on his views were always minority parties and in opposition until 1977 (even then they had to form a coalition to hold power).

  MT Says: Yes Dave I know, “the lone nut theory”. Interestingly, your friend Simone calls Vlad Jabotinsky “a man of vision”. You apologists should get your story straight. What a shame for the Arabs that his “vision” was so menacing.

  David Kessler said: Seventh, within five years of statehood, Israel began absorbing large number of Sephardi Jews. By the late sixties they were a majority of the Jewish inhabitants. Whatever Israel started as, it soon became the Homeland both Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews. The two may be different ethnically, and even in some of their religious practices, but taken together they are a Nation.

  David Kessler said: MT Says: Yes they are, they are now Israelis, but what of the Palestinians and their nation, who have had their birthright taken from them, communities smashed, populations chased from their homes, towns and villages, who today are suffering the iniquities of the 1940′s again in the West Bank, as once again Zionism seeks to relieve them (of the remainder) of their land, towns and possessions? Do you think it’s fair David?

  David Kessler said: I think much of it is unfair, but I think it is a consequence of three things: the misconduct of some Israeli governments, the misconduct of Palestinian leaders and the misconduct of Arab leaders. I do not share your lopsided view of history in which you ignore the wrongs of the Arabs and focus only only on the wrongs of the Jews.
  “If it is proper to ‘reconstitute’ a Jewish State which has not existed for two thousand years, why not go back another thousand years and reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there.” –H.G. Wells, quoted by Frank C. Sakran in Palestine Dilemma, p. 204.

  David Kessler said: The reality is we can’t go back at all. We have to go forward. And destroying an established state is not an option.

  MT Says: I agree, so stop killing Arabs, stealing more land, water and resources and settle with the Palestinians. Don’t forget the refugees!

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• At 2006.10.31 08:48, Michael Tarzai said:
  

  David Kessler: I never advocated ethnic cleansing. I simply pointed out that because of the long-standing Jewish majority in Jerusalem, the case for Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem is similarly strong. Of course the non-Jewish minority are welcome to stay there. Once again you are dishonestly putting words into my mouth.

  MT Says: Your indignation is laughable.You state “long-standing Jewish majority in Jerusalem” – Long standing indeed! The census proves otherwise, but what you meant was that non-Jews could be split into smaller groupings thereby making Jews the largest group.

  Bye Bye Dave!

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.31 09:10, Gregory Maxwell said:
  

  I’ve read this debate with interest and, from what I can gather, anyone who disagrees with Israeli government policy is either:

  If Jewish, ‘a self hating Jew’ or an isolated aberration;
  If not Jewish, an anti-Semite.

  Thank gentlemen for your generous insight into the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. I shall be reading about these matters with interest in the future.

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.10.31 17:11, Michael Tarzai said:
  

  Simone said:
  October 28, 2006 4:13 PM | permalink
  Michael Tarzai said:
  “Only a fool (an immoral political Zionist as maybe a lapsed Catholic) would believe that to be fair, just or right.”

  I replied:Are you now trying to imply that Catholics are immoral? Or only lapsed Catholics?

  Michale replies: This is typical of the obfuscation that Zionist apologists indulge in.

  He further says:

  To answer your question: -I consider all immoral Catholics to be immoral, be they lapsed or not, there is no degree of lapsation in my book, so no matter how little or how far the lapsee, or not, as may be the case, has lapsed, or not, does not in my view, excuse immoral behaviour from either. I hope this clears the matter up for you.

  Michael Tarzai Says: You don’t do irony very well do you Simone? I see you claim to be a barrister; I am relieved that my liberty will never be determined by your expertise, skill and sharp-mindedness.

  Simone said: In his next post, Michael said, (in reply to David Kessler’s question as to the significance of the year 1900):

  MT Said: Apologies, I thought that was obvious, i was choosing a point in time that just pre-dated the beginning of Zionist colonization of Palestine, or there abouts. Sorry i thought it was obvious my mistake.

  Sime-baby said: I presume you are talking about modern Zionist colonization, or rather, “The Return to Zion.” Well, Moroccan Jews starting resettling in Jaffa as early as 1838, although a census carried out by Montefiore in 1939 showed that there were also Jews there from Turkey, Egypt, Smyrna, Bulgaria, and the Yemen. But of course, you mean the Ashkenazim, don’t you? Well, by 1843, there were 50 Ashkenazi families in Tiberias, so we could say that what you would no doubt term “the colonization” was well underway quite a while before the year 1900. Incidentally, a leading figure in the renewal of Jewish life in the Land of Israel was Joel Moses Salomon, born in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1838.

  Michael Tarzai says: I acknowledge fully that throughout the last few hundred years, prior to the Zionist colonization and destruction of the Palestine people’s birthright, religious Jews had been coming to the land of Palestine, which they saw as a spiritual home, and I acknowledge that they came in peace.

  Michael Tarzai says: However, this is a far cry from the virulent, racist policy of Zionism that had absolutely nothing to do with spiritual Judaism whatsoever but merely sought to colonize Palestine whilst hiding behind the moral cloak of Judaism, with disenfranchised Eastern European agitators and revolutionaries who have failed to usurp power in their own homelands and now found themselves targets for recrimination in those homelands. It is acknowledged that Zionism was the brainchild of Theodor Hertzl and whatever Zionism was supposed to be, it took no account of the indigenous population and their rights. The hideous form of Zionism we have seen visited on the Land of Palestine needs to be brought to a swift end.

  Michael Tarzai Says: Why do you people try to make it appear that Zionism is some glorious enterprise that could bring a new dawn of civilization if it wasn’t for the intransigence of Arabs. Zionism is an exclusive, evil and mean-spirited doctrine that brings shame on Israel and all Jews that blindly support it “right or wrong”. Fortunately not all Jews are Zionists. Real Jews reject it out of hand.

  Simone Said: Towards the end of the 10th century CE, Michael, from 962 CE onwards.

  As I think I have mentioned in an earlier post, this was a gradual process, but you did ask for an approximate date only.

  Michael Tarzai Says: I’m getting a different picture – “”One of the Jews undertook the conversion of the Khazars, who are composed of many peoples, and they were converted by him and joined his religion. This happened recently in the days of the Abbasids…. For this was a man who came single-handedly to a king of great rank and to a very spirited people, and they were converted by him without any recourse to violence and the sword. And they took upon themselves the difficult obligations enjoined by the law of the Torah, such as circumcision, the ritual ablutions, washing after a discharge of the semen, the prohibition of work on the Sabbath and during the feasts, the prohibition of eating the flesh of forbidden animals according to this religion, and so on.” – Abd al-Jabbar ibn Muhammad al-Hamdani, in his early 11th century work The Establishment of Proofs for the Prophethood of Our Master Muhammad”

  “The king and his vizier travelled to the deserted mountains on the seashore, and arrived one night at the cave in which some Jews used to celebrate the Sabbath. They disclosed their identity to them, embraced their religion, were circumcized in the cave, and then returned to their country, eager to learn the Jewish law. They kept their conversion secret, however, until they found an opportunity of disclosing the fact gradually to a few of their special friends. When the number had increased, they made the affair public, and induced the rest of the Khazars to embrace the Jewish faith. They sent to various countries for scholars and books, and studied the Torah. Their chronicles also tell of their prosperity, how they beat their foes, conquered their lands, secured great treasures, how their army swelled to hundreds of thousands, how they loved their faith, and fostered such love for the Holy House that they erected a tabernacle in the shape of that built by Moses. They also honored and cherished the Israelites who lived among them.” – The Kuzari: The Book of Proof and Argument in Defense of the Despised Faith, a philosophical work composed in the 12th century by the Sephardic writer Yehuda HaLevi

  Sime-baby said: Now, I could continue debating this with you ad nauseam, but as I am going on holiday, I must pack.
  Goodbye – or should I say au revoir?

  Michael Tarzai Says: Shalom sweetheart

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• At 2006.11.01 06:59, Beware the Zionists said:
  

  Ehud Olmert’s political party, Kadima, currently leading the murderous charge in Lebanon, was forged out of Likud, and Likud out of Herut, the political party of Zeev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism, a movement at odds with socialist Zionism and taking its cues from Benito Mussolini and fascism.

  In 1940, Avraham Stern, inspired by Jabotinsky, formed Irgun Zvai Leumi be-Yisrael, or simply Lehi, a terrorist group dedicated to killing not only officials and soldiers of British colonialism in Palestine, but anybody, regardless of race or religion (including Jews), who stood in the way of realizing a “homeland in the Land of Israel within the borders delineated in the Bible,” as Stern declared in his 18 Principles of Rebirth (see David Ohana’s Zarathustra in Jerusalem: Nietzsche and the “New Hebrews”). Stern and Lehi, also called the Stern Gang, attempted to team up with the Nazis during the Second World War, declaring a “common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO (Lehi).”

  …..continued at //vancouverdotindymediaDOTorg/?q=node/2029)

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.11.01 09:24, David Kessler said:
  

  MT Says: You forgot to address my question relating to Palestinian rights at the dawn of the Zionist programme and to their property that has been stolen and for which they have received no compensation. And I am not referring to any property purchased legally.
  You have systematically ignored my questions regarding wrongs committed by the Arabs (including those now calling themselves Palestinian). The Arabs who fled in 1948 were offered compensation provided the applied for it. What of the Jews who were expelled from the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem in 1948? Do you acknowledge that they are entitled to compensation? What about the Jews who were driven out of Hebron in 1929? Were they entitled to compensation?
  MT Says: I acknowledge your stance on the illegal settlements in the West Bank, and would ask if you are prepared to add your voice to the growing number of people calling for sanctions on the State of Israel, unless a positive programme of complete withdrawal has been undertaken in the West Bank?
  I doubt if sanctions would work. They would be more likely to increase the siege mentality of the Israeli Right. Aside from that are sanctions reserved for occupation of land – or do they apply to human rights violations in general? If the latter then I can think of a whole load of countries who should be boycotted before we get to Israel. If you link sanctions to land occupation rather than human rights violations, then you effectively saying that you are more concerned with property rights than human rights.
  Sorry about the incomplete sentence. I think I typed it and then inadvertently deleted it.
  MT Says: What is clear from the ever-changing way in one qualifies as a Jew, first it’s only through your mother, now it’s your Grandad, and more recently if you just manage to say shalom, if you happen to be a Russian thug whose talents for violence will be invaluable in propping up the occupation of the Palestinian Territories.
  I don’t know what you mean by this “Russian thug” reference.
  MT Says: Incidentally you forgot to mention that Zionist also sets out to be an exclusively Jewish State,
  It didn’t. Zionism never ruled out the possibility of non-Jewish citizens.
  MT Says: whose problem is the Arabs who didn’t run away and what to do about the millions of Arabs in the West Bank that they so desperately want to annex.
  They don’t. Ben Gurion could have captured the West Bank in 1948 but chose not to do so – preferring instead to secure the Negev against the Arab aggression. In the first few years after the Israeli acquisition of the West Bank (in self defence against the Jordanian aggression of 1967), the Israelis tried desperately to persuade King Hussein to negotiate for its return. They were ready to return it to him in return for a peace agreement.
  MT Says: I could direct you to a website recently set up that looks at the growing scourge of anti-semitism in Israel. One of these Russian boys serving in the army got lifted by the Police who discovered a Swastika on his arm. Apparently him and his buddies (all of whom got the Kosher stamp) had started a Hilter Youth movement of their own, in Israel.
  Please do. I would like to check out this website and see whether your claim about “most of” these Russian immigrants is true.
  MT Says: I concede that the Jewishness of the State has been a subterfuge all along, because as you and I both know, Zionism and Judasim are really mutually exclusive, the Torah refutes the right of Israel to exist as a man-made political entity, so “Jew” was a badge of convenience for those Ashkenazi revolutionaries.
  That is a matter of divided opinion within Judaism. The Torah (which stops when Moses handed on the baton) certainly does not forbid Jews to live in a Jewish State. There are some who say that after the dispersion, any return to Zion must be divinely ordained. There are others who say that “God helps those who help themselves.” (Precedent: Ezra and Nehemia didn’t have a divine commandment to build the second temple.)
  Mt Says: I do not accept your spurious argument about Arabs being blood-thirsty savages which you bring up repeatedly later in this post.
  I pointed out that they too have committed wrongs, which you have chosen to gloss over because you prefer to keep Israel alone in the dock. I gave specific examples. You may be uncomfortable with these examples, but you can’t sweep them under the carpet.
  MT Says: Let me remind you that you raised the matter of the communication between Zionists and King Faisal in which the King said, “We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our delegation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday to the Zionist organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper.”
  And let me remind you that ten years later a representative of King Faisal (of Iraq) sent a letter saying (I am quoting from memory) “His majesty has no recollection of sending such a letter.”
  MT Says: I concede that you “Jews” (let’s call them what they are and drop the Jewish pretence right now, they’re Israelis) need to do a lot of apologising now, but your assessment of Arabs and Arabs countries is unfair.
  How do you respond to the specific examples I gave? Are you denying the crimes of the Arabs against their own brethren (and others)? Or do you blame it all on the Zionists?
  MT Says: Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire the Arab peoples and their lands have been carved up by Colonialists and neo-colonialists; maps and territories decided by others rather than Arabs, communities have been thrown together or split against their logical ethnic, social or religious lines, i.e. Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon. These colonialists have looked upon the Arabs as backward and treated them with contempt. US, British and Zionist interests (amongst others) have overthrown governments, crushed popular movements, assassinated those they didn’t feel were sufficiently “sympathetic to their respective causes”, propped up oppressive and brutal dictatorships as their needs dictated. And now these colonizers have created the monster of militant and fanatical Islam. I’m afraid David that labelling Arab morality in this environment is like judging Irish morality in the context of “The Troubles”.
  A pathetic excuse! It’s the old “blame it all on the colonialists,” cop-out. Arabs are as much responsible for their actions as Jews (Zionist or otherwise), Americans, French, Italians and Fijians are for theirs. As far as assassinations go, the Arabs are perfectly capable of doing that for themselves. And the extent that Israel has had to contend with that problem (Rabin) they have shown that a solid democracy can withstand such vicious acts by the wicked and the misguided.
  Furthermore, Arab and Muslim injustices against others (and their own) are not limited to the areas that were once part of the Ottoman empire. The treatment of Christian blacks in Sudan, women in Afghanistan and moderate Muslims in the Philippines has nothing to do with the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire.
  Also the Arabs were not excluded from participation in the decision-making processes. Faisal of Iraq and his brother Abdullah (sons of Hussein ibn Ali, Sharif of Mecca) were respected Arab leaders whose voices were listened to and who became leaders of Iraq and Transjordan respectively.
  David Kessler said: You seem to have conveniently forgotten that most of those who now call themselves Palestinian were NOT born there. They were born in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan!
  MT Says: Really? What about those born in Gaza and the West Bank?
  I said “most”.
  MT Says: Is that the plan then Dave, when the last Palestinian chased off their land dies, then that will be Zionism perfected, their children don’t count? Anyway aren’t there UN resolutions regarding the rights of the refugees and their offspring? – David, I’m afraid you’ve been reduced to mere Zionist apologist rubbish, at least in the beginning some of it required a bit of thought to see through, not any more.
  Once you get into the rights of children – or in this case grandchildren and great-grandchildren – we come down to the question of how far down the line rights can be carried. If you rule out the right of return even of those whose Jewishness you don’t appear to dispute (the Sephardim) then your premise is presumably that there is a cut off point for the right of return. So what is your ancestral cut-off point for the right of return?

  David Kessler said: MT Says: Now you’re being disingenuous again. You are using the argument that the Palestinians didn’t have a government at the time of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to suggest that there was no Palestine,
  David Kessler said: To suggest that there was no COUNTRY of Palestine. Palestine was part of the Turkish provence of Syria it was then governed by Britain under a League of Nations Mandate. At no stage was it a country. That may be an unpalatable fact to you, but it IS a fact.
  MT Says: Poland has been wiped off the map, conquered, forgotten and absorbed, by Russia, Germany, Austria and Genghis Khan more times than the average Polish high school child cares to remember for history tests. That does not change the fact that there always was a Polish “nation” and those that identified with their Polishness. Same with Palestine,
  The difference is that notwithstanding occupations and colonizations, Poland DID exist. Palestine did NOT. And the Palestinian national identity is such a recent innovation that even in the period of the British mandate it was vying for the hearts and minds of the Arabs in mandatory Palestine with the alternative (however unrealistic) or Pan-Arab nationalism.
  Moreover if the test of a Nationality is psychological identification, then Zionism too can derive its legitimacy from the state of mind of the Zionists, regardless of their ethnicity or religious practice. Personally I believe that this is indeed the case and that both Palestinian Nationalism and Jewish Nationalism (Zionism) are legitimate for this reason. That is why I favour a two-state solution (the Jordanian option may have looked tempting between 1949 and 1973, but after that it ceased to be credible).
  MT says: the temporary oddity of the Zionist experiment has undoubtedly changed that face and population of the future Palestine, but it will still come to exist. In your deluded Zionist mind the Palestinian people should under no circumstances be granted the right of self-government then, because they’ve never had it, is that what you’re saying? I you question my humanitarian credentials.
  Although there is no historical basis for a State of Palestine, given that the people are there and cry out for some kind of a just solution, I concede that there should be a State of Palestine as well as – not instead of – the State of Israel.
  MT Says: You are arrogant and transparent in the extreme.
  Not really, although when pushed I do push back. But I am not indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinian Arabs.
  MT Says: Do you believe that the Kurds deserve autonomy David, or just the Jewish ones?
  I don’t honestly know how to solve the Kurdish problem. There are large Kurdish populations in five countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Armenia. Should they have autonomy or independence? Autonomy in all those countries? Or only in some. I honestly don’t know. It’s a case of “damned if I do and damned if I don’t.” The Kurdish problem is potentially more explosive than Israel-Palestine. I certainly feel that in the context of Iraq, an autonomous Kurdish region is the best way to get the balance between their legitimate desire for self-determination and concerns that others have about the break-up of the country. But I don’t pretend to have all the answers: it is a complex problem.
  David Kessler said: MT writes:>> or are you doing a “Golda Meir” and saying there is no such thing as the Palestinian people; that was rich coming from a US citizen born in Russia, when writing off the inhabitants of a land not her own as being non-existent.
  David Kessler said: Drawing analogues between me and Golda Meir and then atacking her, is an excusion into irrelevancy.
  MT Says: Why Dave, we haven’t got to the bottom of your attitude toward the Palestinian nation yet and what you feel should be done with, or to them. What is you final solution? Golda alluded to hers quite clearly, you just hint at yours. Do you admire her for such a ridiculous claim David?
  My words were different from hers. I spoke of the fact that there had never been a Palestinian country. Palestinian nationalism is legitimate in the same way that other MODERN national movements are legitimate. But it IS a modern nationalist movement and you cannot trump Zionism by claiming that Palestinianism is an ancient venerable movement. That is why my position is that Zionism and Palestinianism have to find a way to co-exist.
  MT Says: So it was ok to try and turn the clock back 200-years only 60-years ago, but it’s not ok to turn back the clock 60-years today?
  I assume you mean 2000 years. But MY position is that if Zionism depended on the 2000 year argument then it wouldn’t be a strong enough case. I have already explained my position on this point about normal human migrations to an area whose sovereignty was in a state of flux. I will not repeat the argument.
  David Kessler said: MT says:>>I would stick to Zionist sources in support of this..-
  “We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state; instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of those villages, and I do not blame you because these villages no longer exist. There is not a single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab Village.” –Moshe Dyan, March 19, 1969, speech at the Technion in Haifa, “Israel” quoted in Haaretz, April 4, 1969. (385 villages have been destroyed within pre-1967 Israel…)”
  David Kessler said: Tel Aviv? Haifa? Eilat? Jerusalem?
  MT Says: Oh I see, so now Moshe Dayan is one of your Zionist aberrations as well, the list gets longer.
  I didn’t say it was an aberration on this occasion. But you seem to assuming that any declaration contra to interest made by a Zionist is automatically true and proof of your point. That is an absurd assumption. Where is your PROOF that all Jewish settlements were built on Arab land? Where is your research and scholarship on the subject? Quoting an over-the-top statement by Moshe Dayan is cunning but it isn’t proof? I would like to see some scholarship on your part on the subject, not picking out quotes.
  David Kessler said: MT Says: I’m not sure what point you think you’ve scored with this, but I fail to see what it matters if the Palestinians called themselves Arabs. What a great pity it is that Zionists didn’t take such great delight in “showing off” Palestinian passports to their friends, as the Palestinian Jews did,
  David Kessler said: The Palestinian Jews WERE Zionists.
  MT Says: Prove it Dave, because the historical record says otherwise!
  The ones who showed their Palestinian passports proudly were not only natives but also immigrants who arrived in the Mandate. Your very distinction between Palestinian Jews and Zionists is arbitrary.
  MT Says: The pretext was RETURNING. If you are correct, which you obviously are not, surely the State of Israel wouldn’t have on its statute books “A LAW OF RETURN” it would have a “Law permitting anyone we think is on our side to immigrate to a country founded in a state of flux”
  The Law has a clear definition of who may return, it is based on Jewish ancestry and the non-practice of other religions. It is a complex solution to a complex issue. A Jew could be persecuted even if he wasn’t a practicing Jew. It would have been wrong to exclude such Jews from the protection that the Law of Return offered. As for the presence of non-Jewish Russians, I do not know if they masqueraded as Jews or took advantage of bureaucratic chaos to get into a prosperous country, but such a recent event hardly invalidates the legitimacy of the approach that the Zionists took to a complex issue.
  MT Says: If there is inter-marriage and an introduction of a large number of male and female converts, where does the “right to the land, by birth” come into it, or have you totally dropped the pretense that being Jewish gave Zionism its moral imperative?
  Judaism does allow conversion. And if intermarriage vitiates a claim, then does that mean that Palestinians who marry non-Palestinians weaken their claim – or that of their children or grandchildren?
  MT Says: How much land, David, please be precise as I really would like to expose you for the mendacious fool you are?
  I will check it out. But how about YOU tell us how much Arab-OWNED land the Zionists “stole”! When I say owned, I mean land that was registered with the Land registry office, not government land that they were using without permission. And please be precise!
  David Kessler said: Thirdly, Arabs tended to flock to the area where Jews were gathering (and investing) because of the increased work opportunities in those areas.
  David Kessler said: MT Says: I find this piece of deception beneath contempt and not worthy of a response, however this will leave an opening for more deception so I quote “With the Arabs we shall not achieve our aim of being an independent people in this country. The only solution is Eretz-Israel, at least the west part of Eretz-Israel, without Arabs… And there is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries. Transfer all of them, not one village or tribe should remain…” –Joseph Weitz, entry in his diary for 1940 (Quoted in his article: “A solution to the Refugee Problem: An Israeli State with a small Arab Minority”, published in Davar, 29 September, 1967.
  David Kessler said: So? One man expresses an obnoxious opinion (in 1940 long after the Arabs have flocked to those areas) and on the strength of this you pretend that Arabs did not flock to Jewish areas in search of work? That’s quite a leap of imagination on your part.
  MT Says: Oh dear, not another Zionist aberration. Will the list never end? Give me a clue David, how many Jewish sources must I introduce to refute every point you make, until you realise that maybe it is you, Mr Kessler who is the aberration, a man so bent on Zionist apology that you have forsaken all decency.
  You seem to be under the misapprehension that you have refuted the point. In fact, your response is a complete non sequitur to my point. Please tell me how Weitz’s opinion refutes the fact that Arabs took up residence in Jewish areas and sought (and obtained) employment there. There is nothing in the Weitz quote (from 1940) that in any way contradicts my point. All the quote shows is that that particular man didn’t like the situation. Moreover, the Arabs had been flocking to Jewish areas long before 1940 when the Weitz quote appeared in his diary. By all means quote Jewish sources – but try to make the quotes relevant to the point that you are trying to refute.

  David Kessler said: MT Says: You are right; there is such a thing as natural movement of populations. Zionism however is not an example of it. What happened in Palestine was colonization and then conquest.
  David Kessler said: Arriving, buying land, draining swamps, building universities, building cities – all this is colonization and conquest?
  MT Says: Personally I think there were a lot of well intentioned parts of early Zionism. But Jabotinsky, Begin and Stern, Ben Gurion quickly altered all of the to be followed by Dayan, Sharon and Netanyahu.
  Throwing in Ben Gurion with Jabotinsky, Begin and Stern is like throwing in Bill Clinton with George Bush (snr) George W Bush and Ronald Reagan. Even comparing Dayan with Sharon and Netanyahu is misleading.
  David Kessler said: May I remind you that colonization means ruling one land from a power base located in another. For example, India was a British colony run from a colonial country called Britain, located in Europe. Algeria was a French colony ruled from a colonial country called France, located in Europe. Now according to you Palestine was or became a Zionist colony, so presumably it was run by a colonial country called… called… called (please fill in the blank Mr Tarzai) and that colonial country was located in… (please fill in the blank Mr Tarzai). If you cannot fill in the blanks then please drop this spurious allegation of Zionist colonialism!
  MT Says: Oh that’s right Dave, it was just a natural result of movement of people. Jonathan Friedland from the Guardian was being interviewed on the BBC a few months ago and said that the colonization of Israel should be seen in the same context as the colonization of Australia or Argentina. Perhaps you can add him to your list of Zionist aberrations. As mentioned above when you give me the number of Jewish sources needed to expose the mendacity of each of your points I will happily oblige.
  Again I don’t see that quoting a Jew to bolster your opinion automatically makes you right. You seem to assume that all you have to do to “prove” your point is quote a Jew when he says something you happen to agree with and then crow that you have “refuted” my point when in fact you have done no such thing. But in this case, there is no argument from me. I agree with you and Friedland: I think it is a fair and reasonable analogy. If you use the word colonial not in the British/India or French/Algeria sense but rather to mean people cutting their ties with the country of their birth and creating a new country somewhere else, then I accept the analogy. So tell me Michael, do you now wish to abolish Australia?
  MT Says: Normally, when immigration happens in a country that is being established people are invited by the government, as in the case of the USA. What we have here as disgruntled Europeans who see an opportunity to flee the lands of their birth and move to another country, but not with the intention of mingling with the local population, but with the specific intention of dispossessing that people of their land using some absurd religious pretext. Jabotininsky’s book “Iron Wall” puts it clearly in perspective, brutal colonization. You can call it what you want Dave
  The “disgruntled Europeans” didn’t flee to a “country”, they fled to a Turkish colony. If the Palestinians had a government then your analogy might have applied. But they didn’t. When Zionism started it was a Turkish colony. Then it was under British administration. When a government WAS formed it was the Israeli government (with the other areas being conquered by Jordan and Egypt).
  Also in the American example, who invited the people to FORM the government? The original immigrants weren’t invited!
  Jabotinsky may have had brutal aspirations – he wanted the West Bank and Transjordan – but the mainstream Zionist movement had much more modest aims. The Jewish Agency agreed to the UN partition plan of the part of Mandatory Palestine that remained after the cession of Transjordan.
  MT Says: Really, a native born in Palestine wasn’t a Palestinian? What was he then?
  A Palestinian was a person permanently resident in Palestine, native or otherwise. Like being British doesn’t necessarily mean native.
  David Kessler said: If the Arabs had accepted the UN partition plan and not invaded the newly born state of Israel (before the British had even withdrawn) then they could have had an Arab state alongside a predominantly Jewish state.
  MT Says: The UN Security Council didn’t even accept it, why should the Palestinians?
  Why should the Security Council have a veto over the decision of the full membership in the General Assembly? That’s like saying that the cabinet should have a veto over parliament?
  MT Says:Do we need to expose the unfair nature of the partition plan? Let’s assume the Arabs had accepted it, what would have become of the Arabs within Israel, (assuming the terrorist attacks hadn’t caused 750 000 to leave),
  The Arab refugees (those who fled both from the designated areas of Israel and the areas that Israel captured by way of defensive response to the Arab aggression) were some 550,000 in number. Had it not been for the Arab aggression, the Palestinian Arabs might have become a gradual majority in Israel or they might have been outnumbered by Sephardi Jewish immigrants from Arab countries.
  But what about the tiny Jewish minority in the areas that were designated to be part of the Arab state, and especially those in the areas that fell to Jordan and Egypt. Not one of these was permitted to remain alive in those areas. If the Arabs were not ready to tolerate even a tiny minority that was no threat to them, then how would they have behaved towards a Jewish minority? I notice your reluctance to confront questions such as this and I can well understand why.
  In contrast some 200,000 Arabs remained in Israel where they were given voting rights (including the women!) and citizenship. They were able to form political parties and sit in the Israeli parliament. Did they have similar rights in the Arab world? Oh yes, I know, they were denied these rights for decades by their own brethren because of the legacy of colonialism!
  MT Says: Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism is Zionism today which in turn is Israeli State policy.
  Since 1977 yes, but that was because Arab intransigence and aggression let the genie out of the bottle. To use your interesting phrase it is the Arabs who have “created the monster” and now they are complaining about the consequences.
  MT says: You trying to tell me that Zionist thinking toady and right the way through your short history from Moshe Sharrett to Olmert hasn’t been shaped by “Iron Wall” mentality? Please, you’ve even got a concrete one as well now. That ghetto mentality is so hard to shift isn’t it?
  The concrete wall is to keep out terrorists. I make no apology for it. I know the terrorists don’t like it, but making them happy was never its purpose, or mine.
  David Kessler said: We see the persecution of the 130,000 Jews of Iraq and a similar number in the Yemen. We see the pesecution of 150,000 Algerian Jews, 48,000 Syrian Jews. All of these fled from aoppression and found refuge in Israel. Let us talk about the oppression that drove them to flight. And let’s not pretend that its the fault of Zionism. Oppression is oppression.
  MT Says: The plight of the Iraqi Jews certainly was the fault of Zionism. I’ll check up on the rest.
  Once again you use the old excuse. The oppression of the Jews of Iraq was the fault of the people who oppressed them. You hold Israel responsible for its actions, please be consistent. Otherwise I might get the impression that you hold one set of standards for Jews and another for their oppressors.
  MT Says: UN Security Council states Partition Plan is unenforceable aside from it being immoral.
  The UN General thought otherwise. And when did the Security Council say it was unenforceable and immoral? Did the USA and USSR agree? They both recognized Israel as soon as the state was established.
  MT Says: God you’re arrogant, why can’t you just envisage living peacefully amongst the other inhabitants of the land.
  Like the Jews of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, Libya? Like the Black Christians of Sudan? Like the Kurds of Iraq and Iran?
  MT Says: We’ve already established that the early Zionist Ashkenazi’s aren’t really Jews anyway,
  I think we’ve agreed to differ on this point.
  MT says: so dropping the pretence of the religion would have been logical.
  Does that mean that religious Ashkenazim should practice the religion?
  MT Says: You mention that Zionist settlement was just natural immigration, where else did a situation arise where an immigrant population usurped the land, resources and infrastructure of the indigenous people? Think carefully about your answer, because otherwise you could be staring at colonialism in the face.
  As I’ve conceded, if you use “colonialism” in the Australian sense, then I accept it as an approximate analogy. Of course, it is not exact because initially Australia was a British colony. But it is a reasonably close analogy and we may use it as a convenient shorthand for defining one of the few areas where our views seem to be converging. But the Zionists came as builders. They built much of the infrastructure that you claim they usurped. Only when it came to a struggle for survival against Arab invaders, did the Zionists go on the offensive – to meet an enemy that was coming towards them with murderous intentions.
  David Kessler said: Your quotes of Jabotinsky are meaningless, because his view was the minority view. That’s why the political parties based on his views were always minority parties and in opposition until 1977 (even then they had to form a coalition to hold power).
  MT Says: Yes Dave I know, “the lone nut theory”. Interestingly, your friend Simone calls Vlad Jabotinsky “a man of vision”. You apologists should get your story straight. What a shame for the Arabs that his “vision” was so menacing.
  The fact is you are trying to elevate Jabotinsky to something he wasn’t. He was the voice of the opposition not the establishment. His view was not that of Haim Weizman or Ben Gurion. The political parties that were influenced by his legacy remained in opposition until 1977. You can quote him till the cows come home. It would be like me quoting Haj Amin al Husseini to prove that all Palestinians were Nazis.
  David Kessler said: The reality is we can’t go back at all. We have to go forward. And destroying an established state is not an option.
  MT Says: I agree, so stop killing Arabs, stealing more land, water and resources and settle with the Palestinians. Don’t forget the refugees!
  Fair enough, I’m in favour of giving back all the 67 acquisitions (except Jerusalem) and even some of the pre-67 territory. Barak actually offered to give Arafat a couple of Arab villages in the pre-67 boundaries but the Arabs themselves objected (quite rightly!) because they preferred to be part of the horrible oppressive Zionist state than the nice compassionate Palestinian one. In other words they preferred living under the Zionists to living under the tender mercies of their own brethren. But then again perhaps I’m not allowed to mention that because it might imply that politically the Arabs are savages.

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.11.01 09:31, David Kessler said:
  

  MT Says: Your indignation is laughable.You state “long-standing Jewish majority in Jerusalem” – Long standing indeed! The census proves otherwise, but what you meant was that non-Jews could be split into smaller groupings thereby making Jews the largest group.

  Once again you’re confusing the census of 1844 with the figures for 1872, the year that I stated.

  The 1844 showed that Jews were already a simple majority and very close to an absolute majority. The figures for 1872 (THE YEAR THAT I STATED) were:

  10,600 Jews
  5,300 Christians
  5,000 Muslims

  That’s 10,600 Jews to 10,300 non-Jews – in other words an ABSOLUTE MAJORITY!

  And that was in 1872 – that’s 132 YEARS AGO. That’s what I call that “long-standing” buddy!

  Adios Amigo!

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.11.01 12:42, DPAK said:
  

  Beware the Zionists said:>>In 1940, Avraham Stern, inspired by Jabotinsky, formed Irgun Zvai Leumi be-Yisrael, or simply Lehi, a terrorist group dedicated to killing not only officials and soldiers of British colonialism in Palestine, but anybody, regardless of race or religion (including Jews), who stood in the way of realizing a “homeland in the Land of Israel within the borders delineated in the Bible,” as Stern declared in his 18 Principles of Rebirth (see David Ohana’s Zarathustra in Jerusalem: Nietzsche and the “New Hebrews”).

  You’re confusing Lehi (Lohamei Herut Yisrael – Fighters for the Freedom of Israel) with Etzel (Irgun Zvai Le’umi or National Military Organization).

  Stern started out as a member of Etzel. But when Etzel suspended hostilities with the British in order to unite in the fight against the Nazis (in 1939), Stern disagreed. So he broke away from Etzel and formed Lehi.

  Stern and Lehi, also called the Stern Gang, attempted to team up with the Nazis during the Second World War, declaring a “common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO (Lehi).”

  This is true. And Stern had the audacity to claim that he was the true leader of Etzel. But the fact is Etzel rejected his position and supported the position of David Raziel and Menahem Begin, that Etzel should work with the British against the Nazis. When it became clear that he was in a tiny minority, Stern gave his rump organization a new name.

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.11.01 14:38, Michael Tarzai said:
  

  MT Says: Bye Dave,[Ed: unacceptable remarks deleted]

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  [Reply]
• At 2006.11.01 21:25, David Kessler said:
  

  >>Bye Dave, I didn’t think you’d have any response to refutation of all of the points you have made in the lengthy post above.

  You misinterpreted the “Adios”. I think you also missed the long response I wrote. I’m sorry that I forgot to leave spaces and bunched it all together.

  You haven’t actually refuted anything UI’ve said except in your own mind. For example in response to my statement of fact about the Arabs flocking to Jewish areas, your purported “refutation” was a quotation from a Zionist (in 1940) that he didn’t like having Arabs in the midst of Jews. You didn’t even have the wit to realize that if this individual said this then it means that Arabs were indeed living in the midst of Jews. And the reason Arabs were living in the midst of Jews was because they did indeed flock to the Jewish areas in the from the decline and end of the Ottoman empire through the British Mandate.

  Thus to the extent that your quotation was relevant, it SUPPORTED my claim. But in your demented mind the quotation was a refutation. The lie wasn’t in the quotation but in the pereverse construction you placed upon it.

  This was typical of your warped logic throughout the exchange.

  You have also evaded all those points that you are uncomfortable with: like Arab treachery in their dealings with the Zionists, like Arab violence towards the Jews as far back as 1921, like the human rights record of Arab (and Muslim) States and its implications for your alternative to Zionism.

  You also fail to acknowledge the great Zionist contribution to the economy of the land, to healthcare, education, science and technology and the excellent example the Zionists set in the treatment of women (which culminated in Jordanian women being given the vote.)

  >>The purpose of my debate with you and the witless Simone has not been to change your opinion as you are both lost causes. Rather it has been to effect a change in perception of Israel in those that view these posts, and to encourage them to take a closer look past the Zionist propaganda and see the cruelty that it masks.< <

  Your purpose was to stir up hatred of the Jewish State and draw people's attentions away from the appaling human rights record of Israel's neighbours.

  >>It has been important to further highlight that Judaism is not Zionism and that in fact the two are mutually exclusive; < <

  Another lie - you offered no evidence to support this claim and I systematically refuted it. Needless to say you ignored my refutation of your spurious claim because you had no evidence.

  >>that Ashkenazis are not really Jews in any proper sense

  You never proved this. You simply cited the fact that some of Khazars (by your own admission it was only some) converted to Judaism and claimed falsely that this proved that the Ashekenazim and Khazars are synonymous. You evaded my arguments about the different streams of Judaism and spelling and pronunciation etc, because you lack the scholarship to argue these points.

  >>Any doubts at to the level to which this particular political elite will not stoop will be quickly dispelled by searching on sites set up by Torah Jews

  Explain.

  >>and looking into to the historical record of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis in the extermination of expendable Jews.< <

  Apart from the single incident involving Avraham Stern (mentioned in DPAK's post above) there was no such collaboration.

  >>Zionism today is singularly responsible for the supposed rise in anti-semitism around the world, as people wrongly equate the rancid and unjustifiable behaviour of the government of Israel with Jews in general, on account of the fact that there appears to be an almost universal support of Israel by those that call themselves Jews.

  Antisemites are responsible for antisemitism. And don’t kid yourself that it’s rising, because it isn’t – notwithstanding the attempt of people to stir it up under the guise of “anti-Zionism”. Those who seek to shift the blame for antisemitism from the purpetrators to the victims are morally corrupt and depraved. It’s like shifting the blame from the rapist to the girl wearing a short skirt.

  >>Zionism needs anti-semitism and will stoke it up where it can.

  The evidence shows the opposite.

  >>more and more morally aware Jews, and some Ashkenazi, are seeing that Zionism has failed,

  Funny, earlier – when you were defending antisemitism – you claimed that Zionism had “universal support of Israel by those that call themselves Jews.” Make up your mind Tarzai!

  Aside from that, Zionism has built a country with six universities, a science institute, a music academy, advanced hospitals with large research departments, many advanced technology corporations, many agronomical research projects that have greatly benefited Africa and other parts of the third world. That’s some failure!

  >> that the terrorism daily visited on the Palestinians is wrong

  The terrorism commited BY the Palestnians is wrong.

  >> and has been wrong since Zionism became a policy of ethnic cleansing and murder.

  And of course, on the issue of the ethnic cleansing by Arabs against Jews you remain silent or blame Zionism without a shred of evidence or logic.

  >>Israel as it is constituted today can not survive another 10-years.

  I heard man say that at Speaker’s Corner in 1980.

  >>Boycotting Israel will hurry up the process

  There’s an awful lot to boycott: pharmaceuticals, medical implants, electronics, agricultural technnology…

  But boycotting Israel will only encourage Arab aggression and ultimately harm the Arabs themselves as it will prolong their delusion that they can destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamic state. Their efforts to destroy Israel have brought harm upon them. The one state that made peace with Israel has advanced since doing so. Egypt had 80% illiteracy in the days of Nasser.

  If the Arabs want to advance, let them follow Sadat’s example, renounce their efforts to destroy Israel and make peace. Let them also democratize (including the right to campaign freely) and then they will live long and prosper.

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