You haven’t contributed much today. Just the usual loose use of the English language. Israel has bigger guns, yep, they have more support of world leaders, yep.
Given the situation, the only fair solution would be a freeze of colonisation, the giving back of the most possible lands to Palestinian, and a secularist state. I would add indemnisation of expelled Palestinians by this state, with an international help.
What’s the purpose of nazi talk ? You want to shift the burden of European crimes to the arabs who are under occupation?
One people are under occupation and cannot get justice. Saying leadership has failed or they don’t want peace or they are equally responsibility for it completely dismisses this context and the history of international law violations and crimes Israel has committed to maintain it.
Did anyone see Tony Greenstein’s letter to the editors of the Guardian the other day??
Tony Greenstein’s Blog
Socialist, anti-Zionist, anti-racist
28 December 2021
Open Letter to the Guardian’s Editor Kath Viner & its Zionist Gatekeeper, Jonathan Freedland
Do You Not Have a Shred of Decency? Why did the Guardian remove from its coverage of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s death any reference to the Palestinians?
Dear Kath and Jonathan,
Yesterday’s Guardian has 4 pages dedicated to the life of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. 60% of the front page was also devoted to his death. As someone whose first political activity, as a 16 year old schoolboy, was demonstrating against the 1970 Springbok Rugby tour, I am the last person to quarrel with the extent of your coverage.
What I find amazing though is that there wasn’t even a passing mention of Tutu’s support for the Palestinians or his description of Israel as worse than its South African counterpart:
"your struggle will be harder than ours, as Israel’s apartheid is even worse than South Africa’s. We never had F-16s bomb our bantustans killing hundreds of our children. Remember that.”
Tutu never lost an opportunity to criticise what he termed an apartheid state. This was well before B’Tselem’s Report describing Israel as ‘A regime of Jewish supremacy’ and Human Rights Watch’s Report ‘A Threshold Crossed - Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution’.
Perhaps I can make a more general observation? When people pay a tribute to someone and deliberately, for unspoken political reasons, excise a part of their life, they end up saying more about themselves than their subject. Your coverage of Desmond Tutu’s death says more about the Guardian than it does about him.
To do all these things and distort someone’s life, because it’s politically inconvenient to tell the truth, and is at variance with the Guardian’s editorial line, is not merely dishonest but politically odious. It suggests that the tribute you paid to Archbishop Tutu’s struggle against Apartheid is just hot air. Pious and empty words aimed at convincing your readers that you retain some integrity.
We all know the reasons for the Guardian’s dilemmas. You spent five years demonising Jeremy Corbyn and the Left as ‘anti-Semites’. You lost no opportunity to portray people who were opposed to apartheid as racists. Even worse you did it in the company of genuine racists and anti-Semites.
People like Boris Johnson, who in his 2004 novel ‘72 Virgins’ depicted Jews as controlling the media and being able to “fiddle” elections. Not forgetting Jacob Rees-Mogg who, apart from tweeting in support of the neo-Nazi AfD in Germany, described fellow Jewish MPs John Bercow and Oliver Letwin as “Illuminati who are taking the powers to themselves.” A comment described as ‘expressly anti-Semitic’ by Professor Michael Berkowitz of UCL.
Let me remind you both of one of Desmond Tutu’s most famous speeches when he said:
“I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces. Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government.”
What is there in this that you or your fellow scribes at the Guardian don’t understand? Either your opposition to what happened in South Africa, the subjugation of people according to the doctrines of racial supremacy, is a principle or it is a narrow political calculus dependent on the circumstances of the time.
The omission of any mention of Desmond Tutu’s longstanding support for the Palestinians was not accidental, an unfortunate oversight but a deliberate editorial decision. We know this because a critical comment from Professor David Mond, who pointed this out, was deleted by the Guardian. It did not accord with your ‘community standards.’ Likewise two comments from Mark Seddon, the former Editor of Tribune, were also deleted.
Desmond Tutu was a strong supporter of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, just as he supported sanctions against South Africa. That was the real reason for your selective editing.
Of course you did not want to mention Tutu’s position on Palestine. Tutu’s opposition to Israeli apartheid routinely attracted cries of ‘anti-Semitism’ from those who refuse to understand that opposing the Israeli state for what it does is not the same as hostility to Jew.
I fully understand your dilemma. The Guardian has spent so much of its time making false accusations of anti-Semitism that you don’t know how to handle the legacy of someone who, according to your definition, was anti-Semitic. Desmond Tutu was an opponent of apartheid in all its forms, including its Jewish equivalent, Zionism.
Just one final thing. The Guardian seems to have gone quiet on Labour ‘anti-Semitism’. I presume that you are satisfied with the fact that in order to eradicate ‘anti-Semitism’, Starmer is expelling dozens of Jewish members? If you are Jewish in the Labour Party today you are 5 times more likely to be expelled as non-Jews. It seems a strange way to oppose anti-Semitism which is presumably why the Guardian says nothing?
Is it too much for you now to come clean and admit that the campaign against Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ was never about Jews and always about Israel and its apartheid practices?
Yours truly,
Tony Greenstein
Halas, i feel that the reference is interesting and that one cannot call that a Goodwin point. I explain:
The victors of WWII authorized the creation of Israel as compensation for the genocide which had just taken place and for which they bore an aprft of responsibility, however secondary. In addition, Stalin had fully seen the consequences and therefore the opening of a chance in an Anglo-American preserve.
The creation of Israel was a huge injustice to the Palestinians.
- Some compare Israel’s attitude towards the Palestinians to that of the Nazis towards the Jews.
As much as the notion of Apartheid seems to me to be justified, this comparison seems to me to be obviously exaggerated. Israel does not use gas chambers.
And to be clear, i don’t ask the destruction of Israel.
It’s called part of the sorry pathetic history, dismissing that issue as an irrelevance, sure doesn’t do much for establishing your moral high ground, . . . nor towards a pragmatic understanding or solution.
Reread my posts… no good guys, no nice guys, no solutions at this point. I’m sorry I sound hopeless about the tragic mess, but pretty speeches aren’t enough, never were.
Neither is beating a dead horse. I’ve nothing to add.
Just try to stay on topic triplex69. You use words loosely, never answering my questions about definitions, then you make assumptions about someone else’s use of a word and try to inflame the conversation. morgankane01 made a good point, read it again.
Yeah well, that didn’t happen.
I was reviewing your way of interacting generally.
How in the world did we go from Bishop Tutu’s death to Gaza?
Or, as one might say, “Good grief, where is that in this thread?”
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Happy to help
And that is bad, how? I oppose Capitalism, Apartheid, and Imperialism.
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Payback? Tango? That implies some sort of parity, equivalence, balance of injury, tit for tat. ‘I say Sir, are you aware that you insouciantly, unapologetically trod on my foot? Like that?’.
Your country has been stolen. You have been evicted from it. Not even allowed to stay as a Saxon serf to Norman lords. How do you ‘payback’ that? How do you tango in that?
Whatever you are reduced to in your degraded, deprived, degenerate desperation it won’t be pretty. It will be ugly. It will be the scrabblings of the weak against the strong. What always amazes me is how little there is. As in South Africa. How acquiescent, how non-violent the oppressed majority were there and are in Palestine.
Palestine had a domesticated dog that had been there for at least five thousand years. The Arab. Part of a scrappy local pack. With the older Canaanite. After a thousand years and more the Canaanite had an aloof pup. Possibly by a Chaldean. Who possibly had become a late tributary of the Arab line too. Within a couple of thousand years the strange pup was driven out by an Italian mastiff. A couple of thousand years later it came back, terribly abused, traumatized, barely alive and with a rabid vengeance wreaked not on the long gone mastiff, but on the five thousand year native Arab that had always been there and supplanted it, drove it out.
Rinse and repeat.
No it isn’t.
It’s guerrilla and revolutionary warfare (which means provoking the enemy to oppress your people to insurrect - which never really gets going against Israel), terrorism, suicide bombing of enemy civilian buses and markets, murdering every prisoner you ever take, putting your own children in harm’s way, randomly firing missiles. Being reduced to that deranged, desperate, merciless, understandable level of weak, marginal, animalistic barbarism.
Self defense is self defense.
There can never be peace as long as there is injustice. Israel is a US-Russian dominated 75 year UN wrong that cannot be righted without Israel ceasing to exist.
Global warming is going to be the ultimate factor.
There is no Palestinian - or Israeli - Tutu and never will be.
There wasn’t an F’n thing light-hearted about the sentiments I was foolish enough to share Martin.
You surprise me, and all this time I thought you were grooming your place as our resident cynic.
I would have thought your daddy taught you, it’s a dog eat dog world.
It’s tragic, but very typical that the citizenry winds up paying for the despotism, arrogant stupidity and self-serving mistakes of their leaders, but ain’t that how it is.
Seems to me, now you are trying to claim who the biggest victims are, when I see the victims on both sides, and also see that which ever side winds up on top, turns into the monsters they so nobly fought to defeat.
One more time, my feeling is simple: both sides have totally lost their moral high ground - and Middle East is synonymous with hopelessness.
Rather than trying to proclaim one side or other the victim - I think we’d get much further in resolving our non-stop petty infighting, by appreciating we are guilty on all sides. Of course, the powerless aren’t the guilty ones, its the leaders they obey who are the villains.
Same as it ever was.
It occurs to me, an unfair assumption is being made. nothing I’ve wrote has anything with endorsing Israel, in my they are even more contemptible for how far they’ve fallen, and what they done to create the horror of today’s Middle East. So guess perhaps I was exaggerating when I said one was as bad as the other - Israeli is worse, yet both are guilty of making sure it’s a hopeless nightmare.
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cc4, it ain’t fair. So there is no parity in outrage. Palestinian outrage has to be amateur, jagged, desperate. Israeli has to be disproportionate on top of intrinsic. They just haven’t been doing it long enough, as we have here in Merrye Olde Englande, where the source of injustice is invisible in plain sight at the Palace of Westminster and in one of the most iconic buildings here in Leicester, the land registry.
Injustice starts with stealing land. Israel is just continuing that interrupted four thousand year natural unenlightened intentional impulse that was interrupted half that time ago. Paradoxically she instituted the most enlightened land reform of ancient times in her conquered, ethnically cleansed lands. Something not yet achieved in South Africa. Or even Zimbabwe. Human nature eh? We are genetically averse to the genetic impulse of justice.
I agree, whatever the wrongs of the Palestinians, at the beginning, theirs lands were stolen.
One of the conditions of peace is that be recognized.
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No justice no peace as the saying goes
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