FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

QUIT banner, San Francisco (courtesy ZombieTime)

Some of the strangest phenomena in the admittedly strange landscape of the Left are “Queers for Palestine” (or QUIT — Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism), “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid” (QuAIA), etc.

Many commentators have pointed out the irony in the fact that gays and lesbians cannot live openly in either the Hamas or Fatah dominated areas of ‘Palestine’, where homosexuality is — officially or unofficially — punishable by torture, prison or death, and that many gay Palestinian Arabs have fled to Israel.

These groups respond that they identify with the Palestinians because gays and Palestinians are both persecuted. And, absurdly, that Israeli security measures are bad for gay Arabs because they make it hard for them to escape Palestinian homophobia!

Just take for example the fact that there is no place on earth, not one square foot where a queer Palestinian citizen of Israel, a queer from Gaza, the West Bank, and a queer Palestinian refugee could meet. Gazans are under siege and cannot leave, people in the West Bank need permits to travel, Palestinian citizens of Israel cannot go to Gaza or the West Bank and many refugees cannot go anywhere. So before we criticize Palestinian homophobia, we need to look at the challenges facing activists there, and remember that there are activists there. We need to ask how can we best support queer Palestinian social movements? The answer to us is clearly that we fight Israeli apartheid.  — QuAIA FAQ

Not only that, but Palestinian mistreatment of gays is Israel’s fault in the first place:

There can’t be freedom of gender and sexuality without freedom from daily violence and the right to love who you choose, live where you choose, and attend groups, meetings and political activities without persecution.  Road blocks, military checkpoints, house demolitions, curfews and the apartheid wall are all part of the daily reality for all Palestinians, regardless of their orientation.

And it can’t be fixed until Israel is out of the picture:

Queer struggles against homophobia in Palestine will never flourish as long as Palestinians live under the intolerable conditions of occupation, violence, and Israeli state terror that disrupt and regulate their daily existence.

These groups marshal all of the usual (specious) reasons to hate Israel, but they never explain why it’s important to express their opinion as gays and lesbians. A gay person can be as pro-Palestinian as anyone, but why specifically in terms of sexual identity — especially in the face of overwhelming evidence that the object of support would as soon murder them as talk to them?

I’ll take a stab at an explanation.

The simplest one is that the members of these groups are honestly convinced that Palestinian Arabs are victims of racism and oppression, etc. Social acceptance of homosexuals in the US and Canada is a relatively new and somewhat spotty thing (the murder of Matthew Shepard took place in 1998). Most have personal stories, some horrifying. So they could be expected to identify with a supposedly persecuted minority.

But this doesn’t explain why there isn’t, for example, a “Queers for Darfur,” or any number of oppressed peoples. I think there’s another psychological reason: I think that the sheer brutality of the treatment of gays in Arab society is too much for some people to deal with. By supporting the Palestinian cause they don’t have to think about how some Arabs suffer because they are gay — just like they are. Rather, they think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is comfortably far away.

This is similar to the Stockholm syndrome, in which a victimized person gains comfort by identifying with the victimizer. In this case, Palestinians are victimizing people with whom the subject feels kinship. Indeed, but for the accident of geography, it could very well be the subject who is beaten to death for the crime of being gay. We can call it “Stockholm Syndrome by proxy.”

Indeed, I think a lot of Jewish anti-Zionism could be explained the same way.

Technorati Tags: Palestinians, homosexuality

PM Netanyahu met Obama this week with smiles, photos, expressions of love between Michelle and Sara, and so forth. And as always, the content of the discussion was “what concessions will Israel make in order to ‘move the peace process forward’?”

In an interview with the irritating George Stephanopolus on ABC this morning, the conversation went this way:

Stephanopolous: So you’re open to extending the [settlement] freeze?

Netanyahu: I’m open to beginning peace negotiations now, and that’s what I want to do. And by the way, I’ve been open for the last year and a quarter. I think we’ve wasted a lot of time with these kinds of excuses, preconditions, all sorts of things that are packed in the way of a simple action.

You know, you’ve seen these pictures of peace conferences. Let’s put it in the Middle East as a peace tent. We’re sitting in the tent, we’re waiting for Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, to sit on the other side, across the table, in the tent. And the Palestinians say, we won’t even enter the tent before the tent or the one before that tent as well.

I say, just fold the tents, get into the main arena, engage in negotiations. Let’s not waste our energies on ancillary things, on minor things. Let’s try to resolve the issues of security, territory, refugees, water. These are huge issues. I think, I’m confident that if I’m convinced that our security needs are met, I think I can bring the peace that the majority of the people of Israel will support. And what we’d really like to see is that the Palestinians understand that we expect them to end the conflict. That the state that they will receive will not be a platform for additional conflicts against Israel, but an end to the conflict with solid security.

The last sentence is almost the whole story. And it is part of the reason that the whole process is a stupid, worthless charade.

The official Palestinian Authority (PA) position, as expressed by the Palestinian Arab media and educational system — for details ad nauseum, see Palestinian Media Watch — is that all of ‘Palestine’ from the river to the sea belongs to them:

So-called 'moderate' PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad with map showing 'Palestine'

President Abbas with another map. Note that although the names of neighboring countries appear in English, there is no mention of Israel.

Palestinian Arab heroes are men and women who have murdered Jewish men, women and children in the name of ‘Palestine’:

Israeli athletes murdered at Munich Olympics, 1972. Palestinian officials, including Abbas, recently eulogized perpetrator Abu Daoud.

Abbas has never said that a peace treaty would end the conflict, and he has never agreed to recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people. He has only said that under certain conditions he would agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the territories.

These are not technical issues like water rights and delineation of borders. They represent a non-acceptance of the idea of peace, and point to the likelihood of continued violence and terrorism — from a far more dangerous strategic position.

Today’s ‘peace process’ is the direct descendant of the Oslo accord, which I believe to be one of the greatest policy errors Israel has made since 1948 (another was the decision to place control of the Temple Mount in the hands of the Muslim waqf in 1967). Israel agreed to accept the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian Arabs, and resurrected Yasser Arafat, giving him weapons, power and money. Arafat — the political heir of the Nazi Mufti al-Husseini, simply lied ahout his intentions, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians. And Abbas is the heir of Arafat.

But as I said, this is only part of the reason that the process is stupid and worthless.

The other part is Hamas. Hamas, unlike the PLO, doesn’t even pretend to want to end the conflict and is quite outspoken about its antisemitic ideology. Hamas is far more popular among Palestinians than Fatah, the party of Arafat and Abbas, and much more powerful militarily. The US is trying to train Abbas’ forces to the point that they will be able to resist Hamas, but — like similar attempts in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan — you can’t buy the kind of zeal that animates the Hamas fighters. So even if the Palestinian Authority soldiers don’t end up fighting Israel, it’s highly unlikely that they will risk their lives to prevent a Hamas takeover once the IDF is out of the territories.

Netanyahu knows all this, but he is being forced to go through the motions by Obama.

The original motivation of the Israeli Oslo planners and President Clinton was to bring about peace. They were unfortunately naive about their partner, who not only did not intend to end the conflict, but did his best to educate the Palestinian Arabs, especially the youth, to hate Jews and Israelis and prepare to fight them (and this effort continues under Abbas).

But the motivation today of the outside players — the US, the Europeans, etc. has changed.

It is no longer to bring about peace. The primary objective now is to create a Palestinian state. This is justified by post-colonialist ideology, the misuse of the idea of human rights, and other left-wing political theory. It is also probably motivated by a desire to appease one of the perennial sources of anti-Jewish hatred, Saudi Arabia (yes, I said anti-Jewish, not just anti-Zionist).

Israel has chosen to to pretend that everyone involved wants peace. But this is ineffective as public relations, because then Israeli objections to the concessions demanded make it look as though it is Israel that’s obstructing progress. Perhaps a better strategy would be to expose the motivations of all of the parties.

This article claims that there is an agreement between Obama and the Saudi king. Is it true? I don’t know, but certainly Israel’s Foreign Ministry can find out.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Netanyahu, Obama

Here is an example of why I despair of most of our news media. I’m using an example from NPR, whom I beat up on regularly, but it could be the AP, the cable networks, etc.

NPR’s Daniel Schorr explained why (a shocker) the ‘peace process’ is going noplace:

Most recently, while special envoy George Mitchell was striving to resume modest contact through so-called proximity talks, the tension was increased, first by the provocative announcement of new Jewish settlement activity at the moment Vice President Joseph Biden was in Jerusalem. Then the Israeli commando raid on a Turkish-led flotilla of relief ships for blockaded Gaza…

The basic deadlock remains firm. Netanyahu will not accept a Palestinian state with its own defense capability. The Palestinians will not accept a Jewish state that nibbles away with settlements in occupied territory. But never mind, we are a long way from tackling these ancient deadlocks.

This is like vuvuzelas at a soccer game. The drone is always there and after awhile you stop paying attention to it. But it still makes you tired.

Let’s just look at some of what’s packed into this boring little report.

First, the ‘provocative announcement’: a lower-level functionary announced, during Biden’s visit in March, that at some time in the future Israel intended to build 1,600 apartments in an existing Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem, a couple of blocks from the green line, a neighborhood that already has 20,000 residents and which would certainly become part of Israel if Jerusalem were to be divided. This should have been a non-event — Biden didn’t even know he was supposed to be insulted until they told him, but the administration decided to make it a test case of the proposition that Israel is not sovereign in Jerusalem.

A huge flap ensued, and Israel was forced — pay attention, you’ll see this again — to agree to an unstated, but real, freeze on construction in East Jerusalem.  The Obama administration sprung a trap on Israel. And from then on the media referred to the “Israeli provocation” as if Israel had done something, er, provocative.

Next, the ‘Israeli raid’: Israeli commandos boarded several ships which ware attempting to break the legal blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza. On one ship they were surprised by a specially trained and organized squad of Islamist terrorists, who tried to beat and stab them to death and/or take hostages. When the Israelis finally defended themselves, several of the terrorists were killed, giving rise to a worldwide fury of condemnation — as if Israel was responsible for the deaths.

The US, as in the previous instance, exacted a price: Israel was forced to lift restrictions on almost all material flowing into Gaza, and forfeit its right to apply economic pressure to the Hamas regime. In essence, the US and the world legitimized Hamas. Just as before, the media — as illustrated by Schorr — has decided that the event will be treated forever after as an Israeli provocation. It would be more correct to refer to it as ‘the IHH [the Turkish Islamist group responsible] ambush’ instead of ‘the Israeli raid’, but you will never hear that.

Finally, the ‘deadlock’: if you repeat something often enough, no matter how nonsensical, ultimately people stop looking for reasons and just assume that it’s true. So NPR, the Times, etc. keep saying that Israeli settlement construction is an obstacle to peace. Nobody seems to notice that Israel hasn’t built a new settlement in years, and that the government is enforcing, sometimes quite forcefully, the settlement freeze it agreed to.  But it is important to the US administration and the media that Israel be seen as the roadblock, and hence the constant emphasis on this.

Let me just add another thing about settlements. Exactly why are they an obstacle? Israeli security measures like the fence and bypass roads, etc., are often used as evidence that Israel is practicing a form of apartheid. But that could not be true, because Israel — within the Green Line — is dotted with Arab settlements, many of which are currently expanding (often by means of illegal construction).

So if Arabs can live in Israel, why can’t Jews live in ‘Palestine’? The answer is that the conception of ‘Palestine’ is precisely of a racist state where Jews are not permitted. If you think this is anything other than racism, ask yourself this: suppose an Arab citizen of Israel wanted to move to ‘Palestine’. Would the Arabs object?

The more complete answer, of course, is that the Arabs see all of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean as belonging to them. They want the Jews out of all of it. What good is a  two-state partition if it doesn’t get them closer to their objective?

There’s a precedent: in 1948, all the Jews living in Jordanian-occupied territory in Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem were forcibly deported — ethnically cleansed — from those places.

All three of these issues are spun in the way they are for a reason: to divert attention from the fact that the responsibility for the continuation of the conflict is on the Arab side. Israel is presented as the problem, and the implication is that the solution requires Israel to move, not the Arabs.

It is profoundly distressing to me that this is the line taken by the US administration and promulgated in its friendly media. Because — what does the administration want to happen?

Technorati Tags: Israeli-Arab conflict

Avraham Burg speaks at PCUSA General Assembly

The Middle East Study Committee of the Presbyterian Church of the US  (PCUSA) recently issued a report that was so one-sided that even J Street protested.

The 179 pages of the report positively reek with self-righteous pomposity, and include quotations from the Tanach and even the Talmud! It’s impossible to deal with this bizarre document systematically, but here are some random notes.

The authors’ historical vision comes entirely through the eyes of Arab and extreme left-wing commentators, like Ilan Pappé and Avraham Burg, as well as anti-Israel NGOs. For example, they portray the creation of the Arab refugees as entirely Israel’s fault:

One of these psycho-traumas is the Holocaust in which 6 million European Jews were annihilated at the hands of the Nazi party, its state apparatus and allies. The other trauma is the forced displacement of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 from their ancestral homeland by the Israel Haganah [the pre-state militant force that was the precursor of the Israel Defense Forces]. [p 30]

The report ignores the actions of the Palestinian and Arab leadership before, during and after the 1948 war, the repeated attempts at reconciliation by Israel, etc. The Nakba story is repeated over and over, and compared with the Holocaust several times.

There’s a creative take on the 1967 war, too:

In June 1967, Israel attacked Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. At the end of six days, Israel had taken the Gaza strip and the Sinai from Egypt, East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan from Syria. The United Nations Security Council passed resolution 242 that requested the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the 1967 war and emphasized the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area could live in security. [p 64]

Interesting. “Israel attacked,” and Nasser’s closing the Strait of Tiran, massing troops on the border and threatening genocide had nothing to do with it! The interpretation of resolution 242 is funny, too, leaving out the “secure and recognized borders.”

They don’t do much better with more recent events. They actually wrote this sentence to describe the bloody 2007 coup in which Hamas overthrew the Palestinian Authority in Gaza:

Violence erupted, thought by many to be aided and abetted by the United States and Israel, within the Palestinian territories with the end result that in 2007 Hamas controlled the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian Authority and Fatah the West Bank. [pp 97-98]

Violence erupted! Shooting Fatah operatives in the knees and throwing them off tall buildings erupted! Setting people on fire erupted! And the US and Israel were responsible! I couldn’t make this stuff up.

And here’s their analysis of the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons:

While this growing fear [of the Iranian bomb] is a deep concern, an equal concern is the number of nuclear warheads that Israel currently stockpiles and thus the growing sense of Iranian vulnerability and insecurity. While Israel will not confirm its possession of nuclear weapons or the number held, it is generally agreed that Israel has stockpiled close to 100 nuclear weapons.

The only just and peaceful solution to this growing concern is to work for a nuclear-free Middle East in both Iran and Israel. [p 36]

Really? It’s “an equal concern?” The Israeli nuclear capability is the reason that it hasn’t already been attacked with chemical weapons, and may well be one of the main reasons that there still is a Jewish state. Israel has never, ever brandished its weapons offensively. Iran would have nothing to feel ‘insecure’ about if it were not developing nuclear weapons and threatening to destroy Israel every other day.

Should the Palestinians be criticized for resorting to terrorism?   The Presbyterians see it as a response to violence by Israel’s army and settlers, and  it’s presented as entirely understandable even if ultimately not “acceptable”:

Inexcusable acts of violence have been committed by both the powerful occupying forces of the Israeli military and the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, as well as, the Palestinians, of whom a relatively small minority has resorted to violence as a means of resisting the occupation. Violence is not an acceptable means to peace, regardless of its rationale. [p 37]

There’s no distinction between terrorism and self-defense, either:

Distressingly, all too often violence is used as a means of reacting to injustice or as a means of inflicting a country’s will on another people. Violence, whether by tanks, attack helicopters, F-16 fighter jets, rubber bullets, tear gas canisters, antipersonnel bombs, white phosphorous, rockets, bombs of any kind including suicide bombs, is reprehensible and is a crime against humanity. [p 70]

The writers choose their facts selectively:

Consider the case of Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian journalist, novelist, and short story writer, who was assassinated along with his young niece, Lamis, on July 12, 1972, by Israeli agents in a car bomb explosion in Beirut. By the time of his early death at the age of 36, he had published eighteen books and written numerous articles on the culture, politics, and the Palestinian people’s struggle. His works have been translated into seventeen languages. A collection of short stories about Palestine’s children was published in English in 1984 and was titled Palestine’s Children. Kanafani’s untimely death deprived the Palestinians of an eloquent voice. [p 71]

Oh, the humanity! But CAMERA points out that Kanafani was the right-hand man of George Habash, head of the ultra-violent PFLP, a group responsible for numerous murders and hijackings. Kanafani met with the Japanese Red Army who perpetrated a vicious attack at Lod airport, killing 26 and injuring 80. Who says that intellectuals can’t also be men of action?

So why is Israel so evil? According to the report, Israelis have been morally damaged by the trauma of the Holocaust:

This sense of historical victimization creates for some Israelis a compensatory reflex to choose power and armament; to reject the claims and critique of others; and the adoption of a philosophy that the “end justifies the means,” even if that means the loss of human rights, life, and the dignity of others.  [p 31]

Of course Israel’s choice to arm itself could not have anything to do with the fact that the country has been under continuous attack from both regular armies and terrorists since its inception, right? Nope, they just don’t care about anyone else.

In addition, despite dozens of references to Israeli policy as ‘immoral’, there doesn’t appear to be a single mention of the policy of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to educate their populations, especially children, to hate Israel and Jews in the crudest antisemitic terms.

Indeed, the report describes Hamas — an organization whose charter preaches the violent destruction of Israel and exhorts Muslims to murder Jews — as follows:

The United States, European Union, and Israel governments consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Israel, while most Gazans see Hamas as an organization formed to resist the occupation by Israel and to recover their lost lands in Palestine. Hamas is an Arabic acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama alIslamiyya, or Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas is a militant organization; however over 90 percent of Hamas’ resources are spent on social services to the Palestinian refugees.

The implication seems to be that resisting the occupation and recovering lost lands applies to the occupation of 1967. But of course, for Hamas, the occupation started in 1948. So “most Gazans” and the Western governments don’t disagree about Hamas’ intentions! The statement about Hamas’ resources is ridiculous and is unsourced.

Overall, the report could not possibly be more one-sided. It is a sustained indictment of Israel. When it mentions Palestinian terrorism and violence (which it does only rarely), it’s always explained as springing from the trauma of the Nakba or the horrors of occupation.

This historically and morally upside-down, hateful document will be considered by the PCUSA’s General Assembly this week.

Update [6 Jul 2010 1341 PDT]: I changed the caption on the photo, which previously read “anti-Israel extremist Avraham Burg…” Burg is not exactly that. He annoys the hell out of me because, in essence, he blames Israel and the Jews for Arab antisemitism. But he doesn’t advocate a ‘secular democratic state of its citizens’, nor does he call for boycotts, divestments, etc.

Technorati Tags: Presbyterian church, Israel, Palestinians