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Characterizing Israel

I have also seen reports that anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe, but I am not totally convinced. I have heard some monitoring is pretty shallow and it is also not surprising that there is some backlash against people and institutions associated rightly or wrongly with Israel because of its recent actions in Gaza.

If some have erroneously vented their anger against individual Jews rather than the regime in Israel, or have muddled the actions of the regime with those of innocent European Jews I can understand it, it is a mistake I have made myself in the past.

I think it is most problematic if demonstrations in favour of Gaza or against the regime in Israel are attended by visible anti-semites, attentive media will pick up on that, though I am not sure what the mainstream demonstrators can do about it.
 
For a bit of light relief and escapsim i got hold of a copy of the first Hobbit movie last night...however turns out that "Dwarvish was designed by J.R.R. Tolkien to sounds like a Semitic language, and the history of the dwarves themselves resembles that of the ancient Hebrews."
 
ska invita said:
For a bit of light relief and escapsim i got hold of a copy of the first Hobbit movie last night...however turns out that "Dwarvish was designed by J.R.R. Tolkien to sounds like a Semitic language, and the history of the dwarves themselves resembles that of the ancient Hebrews."
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Lord of the Rings was a key text for much of the third-postionist style italian post-war far right. Serious. Don't ask me why though, never read it.
 
butchersapron said:
Lord of the Rings was a key text for much of the third-postionist style italian post-war far right. Serious. Don't ask me why though, never read it.
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ive no idea why but i guess theres a lot of war along "pure racial lines" going on in with lots of value judgements about which race deserves to live and which race deserves to die.

((((orcs)))


sorry for the derail ;)
 
ska invita said:
For a bit of light relief and escapsim i got hold of a copy of the first Hobbit movie last night...however turns out that "Dwarvish was designed by J.R.R. Tolkien to sounds like a Semitic language, and the history of the dwarves themselves resembles that of the ancient Hebrews."
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I've heard there's a wealth of material on what a mad genetic supremacist type Tolkien was but I have no desire to read any of it or those bloody books ever again. My very lazily put together hypothesis would be that for Tolkien:

Elves - Beautiful, Wise, Strong - Aryans
Dwarves - Love gold, greedy craftspeople, short and not so beautiful but basically ok - Jews
Orcs - evil - black people
 
Spanky Longhorn said:
Any links? I would be interested to read about that
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Yep - and the fantasy thing goes far beyond LOR. This is a non-fascist article hosted on a now dead third-postionist shit site years ago, link is to the internet archive version of it:

The Blend of Literary and Historical Fantasy in the Italian New Right- Roger Griffin

On 10 September 1983 there appeared in the cultural supplement of La Stampa among a group of articles marking the publication of Tolkien's biography a piece written by the president of the Tolkien Society in Italy entitled 'Why He Became a Cult for Us'. A hidden dimension of significance to this innocuous title begins to open up when it turns out to have been penned by Gianfranco de Turris, not only one of Italy's major publishers and cognoscenti of literature of the fantastic, but also a prominent propagandist of the neo-fascist Right. Another propagandist of ultra-Right ideas is Marco Tarchi, who in his programmatic Beyond Right and Left (meaning conventional definitions of these two positions) writes 'we had an example of what it means to belong spontaneously to a cohesive group-mind without any leadership in the years in which many of us discovered Tolkien, the fantastic, the saga'.[1] Perhaps the most striking symptoms of the Italian neo-Right's adoption of Tolkien as one of its official sources, however, lies in the fact that the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano chose to call the summer camp organized for its youth section, Il Fronte della Gioventù, in the Abruzzi 'Camp Hobbit'. No less significantly, the volume commemorating the foundation of the Italian New Right in 1977 was called Hobbit/Hobbit and the title of its publishing cooperative is 'The Rock of Erec'.
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weltweit said:
I
If some have erroneously vented their anger against individual Muslims rather than al Queda, or have muddled the actions of the regime in Damascus with those of innocent European Muslims I can understand it, it is a mistake I have made myself in the past.
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There is bad racism\sectarianism\bigotry. The type espoused by people Marxists dont like. Then there is good racism\sectarianism\bigotry. The type espoused by people Marxists do like.
 
ViolentPanda said:
If you're talking about the desires of some to kick the Protestants into the Irish Sea and drown them, then yes, if you're talking about peaceful co-existence, then no.
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no wish to derail but despite some localised sectarian tensions in the north there is absolutely no political or religious group anywhere in Ireland who have this aim or have ever expressed it as an aim . Not even in the 16th century. Even the drowning in the Bann stuff back then is regarded as a myth by todays historians.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Fuck, it's hard. When even left-wing idealists at kibbutzim cannot properly face up to the fact that their brave social experiments are growing out of the ruins of the Palestinian villages they have replaced, the problem feels intractable.

I don't think comparisons with fascism are quite there. I see very strong parallels with apartheid South Africa in the current positions of Palestinians and Arab Israelis, and also with North America and Australia in the 'original sin' of the founding of the nation that nobody, left or right, can quite face up to. The first of these could possibly be resolved were it not for the second.

One thing I think is for sure is that there can never be an equitable, or even workable, two-state solution. In effect, this, what we have now, is what a two-state solution looks like, and always will. A one-state solution can only come about with (among other things) an end to zionism. Hard to see how this can end, but then things can change very quickly, as they did at the end of apartheid in SA.
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I think Zionist mainstream society has now become politically and ethically radicalised to the point it has surpassed apartheid south Africa and is on the verge of assuming a more openly nazi, volkicsh character. While the white south african regime were bigots they werent into genocide, they never talked about wiping out the black population as a means to preserve apartheid . In Israel today when articles like this one, when Genocide is permissable, can be found in the mainstream media written by mainstream commentators one must consider things there have passed beyond the apartheid mentality stage and gone somewhere much much darker.

http://www.ibtimes.com/when-genocid...s-israel-yochanan-gordons-post-sparks-1646490

Personally I see the zionist phenomenon as first and foremost a white European colonial one regardless of the fact some of the colonists came from Arab and even some African societies. The jewish angle to it for me is much more an ethnic thing than a religious one. The bulk of these colonisers come from either Europe or the United States and often their links to or observance of Judaism can be tenuous in the extreme, while others can definitely be zealots . Whether some want to seize land and expel or otherwise destroy populations because they believe God told them to, or just use that as an excuse for expansionism, or couldnt care less and just want to expand anyway is largely irrelevant to me. Why they want to do it will always first and foremost be for their own self enrichment and empowerment at the expense of others. Their statekd justifications for it will simply be an excuse to legitimise racial crime .

Personally I believe the Nazi regime targetted jews first and foremost because they were a crew of gangsters who saw the jews as easy people to rob and exploit . I believe many of them didnt really give a real hoot about racial theories , although they were ignorant bigots at heart , and were first and foremost interested in loot. Same with the slavs, a bunch of nazi gangsters first and foremost wanted land, resources and slaves and all the racial theory did was gave them the green light to take it legally and morally .

Zionist expansionism largely does the same . Religious theory is simply used to give a veneer of morality and legality to nazi style gangsterism. Whether some of its proponents proclaim that as an article of religious faith or not matters little when the expansionist and racist aims of secular zionist and religious zealot are essentially the same. The destruction of the Palestinian people in persuit of Lebensraum for the master race. Without doubt zionists , even the liberal ones, see themselves as a master race with a perfectly legitimate right to seize their neighbours lands and wipe them from the face of it. The difference between secular zionist and religious zionist is the difference between a Strasserite and a Hitlerite. Not that much when alls said and done.
 
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Here's an interesting article in Haaretz today - it's an interview with Zeev Sternhell . He's one of the most respected writers on the birth of fascism - his thesis is that it was a synthesis of right and left wanting to take the fruits of modernisation but hold back the social upheaval it brings with it - it's not a position that i agree with, but it's an influential one and he's someone that should be taken seriously - . The interesting/relevant part in this is the suggestion that Modern day Israel most closely resembles vichy france - a regime that came to power to remove democracy with majority support under pressure of war conditions - the comparison is obvious here when you look at the direction of left-travel in Israel over the last 50 years:

When will we cross the line in which democracy implodes?

“Democracy rarely falls in a revolution. Not in Italy, not in Germany and not in France with the Vichy regime – which is a crucial thing, because France was a democratic country that fell into the hands of the right wing with the support of the vast majority of the population. It was not the fall of France that generated this ideology. It was the result of a gradual process in which an extreme nationalist ideology took shape, a radical approach that perceives the nation as an organic body. Like a tree on which human individuals are the leaves and the branches – in other words, people exist only thanks to the tree. The nation is a living body.
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Signs of fascism in Israel reached new peak during Gaza op, says renowned scholar

edit: oh bugger, full article now gone - let me try and find another version of it.
 
Casually Red said:
I think Zionist mainstream society has now become politically and ethically radicalised to the point it has surpassed apartheid south Africa and is on the verge of assuming a more openly nazi, volkicsh character. While the white south african regime were bigots they werent into genocide, they never talked about wiping out the black population as a means to preserve apartheid . In Israel today when articles like this one, when Genocide is permissable, can be found in the mainstream media written by mainstream commentators one must consider things there have passed beyond the apartheid mentality stage and gone somewhere much much darker.
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I'm not sure you can claim a "volkisch" character to Zionism per se, even though many nationalist Zionists presume to borrow from Jewish history at will, they can't really assemble a "national myth" or set of myths more than a century old.
 
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, Noam, you say that the analogy between Israel’s occupation of the terrories and apartheid South Africa is a dubious one. Why?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Many reasons. Take, say, the term "apartheid." In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by "apartheid" you mean South African-style apartheid. What’s happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse. There’s a crucial difference. The South African Nationalists needed the black population. That was their workforce. It was 85 percent of the workforce of the population, and that was basically their workforce. They needed them. They had to sustain them. The bantustans were horrifying, but South Africa did try to sustain them. They didn’t put them on a diet. They tried to keep them strong enough to do the work that they needed for the country. They tried to get international support for the bantustans.

The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just don’t want them. They want them out, or at least in prison. And they’re acting that way. That’s a very striking difference, which means that the apartheid analogy, South African apartheid, to the Occupied Territories is just a gift to Israeli violence. It’s much worse than that. If you look inside Israel, there’s plenty of repression and discrimination. I’ve written about it extensively for decades. But it’s not apartheid. It’s bad, but it’s not apartheid. So the term, I just don’t think is applicable.
 
ViolentPanda said:
I'm not sure you can claim a "volkisch" character to Zionism per se, even though many nationalist Zionists presume to borrow from Jewish history at will, they can't really assemble a "national myth" or set of myths more than a century old.
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I think story telling is a big part of zionism and Jewish culture in general, with lots of history to retell from the modern era, but especially the biblical persecution of the Israelites is a big influence to those raised within the religion and definitely an important component of the Israeli national myth - don't you think? Maybe it isnt drawn on by the state as explicitly as the nazis did, but thats only because it is a given understanding - it doesn't need to be embellished and promoted by the state to the same degree as its already there, and the continuation of the myth making is carried out by the rabbis.
 
ska invita said:
I think story telling is a big part of zionism and Jewish culture in general, with lots of history to retell from the modern era, but especially the biblical persecution of the Israelites is a big influence to those raised within the religion and definitely an important component of the Israeli national myth - don't you think? Maybe it isnt drawn on by the state as explicitly as the nazis did, but thats only because it is a given understanding - it doesn't need to be embellished and promoted by the state to the same degree as its already there, and the continuation of the myth making is carried out by the rabbis.
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Well, you're stepping into a very loaded area, with regard to Zionist story-telling, given how massively they've sliced and diced Jewish culture to arrive at their particular mythos. We're talking about people who pretty much scorned most Yiddish-language folk myth because it didn't fit in with their plans to "capture" Jewishness by endorsing Hebrew; people who ignored masses of European Jewish history because it was socialist and/or anarchist and internationalist rather than nationalist. Jewishness is so much broader than what Zionism proffers as "Jewish".
 
ViolentPanda said:
Well, you're stepping into a very loaded area, with regard to Zionist story-telling, given how massively they've sliced and diced Jewish culture to arrive at their particular mythos. We're talking about people who pretty much scorned most Yiddish-language folk myth because it didn't fit in with their plans to "capture" Jewishness by endorsing Hebrew; people who ignored masses of European Jewish history because it was socialist and/or anarchist and internationalist rather than nationalist. Jewishness is so much broader than what Zionism proffers as "Jewish".
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sounds fascinating.....but do you not think, loaded and partisan though it may be, it is a characteristic of the state?
 
ska invita said:
sounds fascinating.....but do you not think, loaded and partisan though it may be, it is a characteristic of the state?
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Sure, it's a characteristic of most states in fact, but I'm not convinced that in Zionism's caseit's constructed along Volkisch lines. To do that would require at least making an attempt at inclusivity with regard to your "national" group, rather than eliding those bits of history and myth that you find embarrassing, as Zionism has done.
People tend to forget that the Nazis didn't cut and paste their folk myth, they merely bent what already existed to their own ends, whereas the nationalist Zionists have, in effect, attempted to re-write history.
 
This is from a paper (pdf) by Roger Griffin looking at developments in the far-right in the 'post-fascist era'. He doesn't use it in relation to Israel but the parallels are clear:

It would be academically irresponsible, however, to give this brief account what is, in a liberal perspective, a happy ending. As many reading this will have been already waiting impatiently for me to point out, another type of radical right has crept up on European society, one which is potentially of considerable virulence, not in its ability to destroy liberalism from without, but to contaminate it from within. Sometimes called ‘radical right populism’, or simply ‘the radical right’, its paradoxical qualities perhaps emerge more clearly in the term ‘ethnocratic liberalism’.

It is a type of party politics which is not technically a form of fascism, or even a disguised form, for it lacks the core palingenetic vision of a ‘new order’ totally replacing the liberal system. Rather it enthusiastically embraces the liberal system, but considers only one ethnic group full members of civil society. As the case of apartheid South Africa illustrates only too clearly, a state based on ethnocratic liberalism is forced by its own logic to create institutions, including a terror apparatus, to impose a a deeply illiberal regime on all those who do not qualify on racial grounds for being treated as human beings. This contaminated, restrictive form of liberalism poses considerable taxonomic problems because, while it aims to retain liberal institutions and procedures and remain economically and diplomatically part of the international liberal democratic community, its axiomatic denial of the universality of human rights predisposes it to behave against ethnic outgroups as violently as a fascist regime.

This is who Griffin is applying it to btw:

The Front National, the FPÖ, the Lega Nord, the Vlaamsblok, the Republikaner, the Centrumpartei, the Scandinavian Progress parties, and scores of openly xenophobic parties which have emerged in the countries of the former Soviet Empire vary considerably in their programmes and aspirations, and can sincerely claim to have nothing to do with historic fascism in the conventional sense of the word. Yet in a world inoculated against openly revolutionary varieties of palingenetic ultranationalism, their axiomatic rejection of multi-culturalism, their longing for ‘purity’, their nostalgia for a mythical world of racial homogeneity and clearly demarcated boundaries of cultural differentiation, their celebration of the ties of blood and history over reason and a common humanity, their rejection of ius soli for ius sanguinis, their solvent-like abuse of history represent a reformist version of the same basic myth, one which poses a more serious threat to liberal democracy than fascism because it is able to disguise itself, rather like a stick insect posing as a twig to catch its prey.

 
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