An assessment of Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin by drama critic Michael Handelzalts states: "He dissected Israeli society and described it in detail: the crudeness, the insensitivity, the interpersonal violence, the oppression, the gluttony, the intolerance and the cruelty. He wrote about people who enjoy feeling superior and causing pain, who thrive on this and who love to harass their interlocutors and haggle with them for the sake of the haggling".
It looks like the nation of legend turning desert into paradise is nothing more than a lousy bit of cheap fiction. This may come as a bit of an eye-opener for anyone with a blind spot for Israel. Mainstream commentators always report unfolding events involving Israel at face value, as though that nation is committed to some kind of constructive process involving others besides itself. Whereas for anyone following the behaviour of Israel as reported by uncensored media this asseessment gives some understanding of the nature of this particular bully in the global playground.
In that playgrond the United States and Israel stick close together. One is the major bully roaming about insisting upon being in charge of everything and in control of everyone. The other is the little devil of a lieutenant tripping around him, goading him to do things, telling tales about others and getting permission and protection do do his own bullying. It seems to be his mission to keep trouble and hatred alive. Why?
The answer seems to be that this particular bully enjoys feeling superior and causing pain, and thriving on this for its own sake. There is a truly malevolent intent in his psychology. He likes being a bully; he wants to be a bully; to glory and gloat in being a top dog. Apologist commentators harass and haggle any evidence or justified criticism as though everything is a playgound game.
A bully of course expects others to change. Israel went into Gaza and massacred 1400 people. There were no consequences for the bully. When Netanyahu visits Gordon Brown some months later there is not a word about this and continuing behaviour. Instead they jointly voice what others (Palestinians, Arabs, Persians) must do and what Israel will not do.
Between serious bouts of violence against the weak the bully is continually harassing them. An example: Israel sends low-flying aircraft over Gaza creating sonic booms instead of dropping bombs. This is described as educational and almost humanitarian, gently reminding the residents who is top dog. This is like holding a replica gun to a person's head instead of a real one, the terrorising effect is pretty much the same. And it is a real hoot for the bully.
Another example: Palestinian children near a settlement have to be escorted to school by Israeli soldiers to protect them from settler harassment, including the shooting of firearms, but the soldiers often fail to show up or when they do are themselves guilty of harassment, such as driving along beside the children so fast that the little ones cannot keep up. For the bullying soldiers a great way to start the day.
There is a psychological sickness behind such behaviours, the sickness of the torturer. The fine line - if there is one - between the bully and the torturer does not exist in the case of this little devil of a nation.
The bully's denial of wrongdoing is often reinforced by a technique of suffocating the victim by presuming to speak for him. This is an Israeli habit. On the surface this may appear as no more than an insufferable patronising superiority. An example: a Jew from multi-cultural New Zealand "returns" to apartheid Israel and tells us that Palestinians - some of whom are working on his new house under armed guard - prefer to live apart. The victim is reponsible for the apartheid.
Another example: while Israel is busy killing the 1400 people in Gaza and deliberately destroying more of their infrastructure senior politician Livni appears on screen to inform us that her country is helping the people of Gaza against Hamas ( the party they democratically elected).
There is a further strange quality to this particular bully. Witness Livni in the United States, while busy thrashing Gaza, literally sobbing that "we" have had enough, "we" cannot take any more. Immediately a cartoon came into my mind of a large adult beating a child while expressing such sentiments. We cannot hope that Israel will drive itself mad because it already is mad. Decades ago Golda Meir also felt sorry for herself because the Palestinians were making her do violence toward them. It is a very puzzling psychopathic condition, but there can be no excuse for it.
Unfortunately the mad psychopathic bully in the playground is a ticking time-bomb, a danger to everyone, and not a ready candidate for rehabilitation.
Showing posts with label Terrorism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Terrorism. Show all posts
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
APPROPRIATE MURDER
Nato aircraft again kill more "unpeople" in Afghanistan and the German general responsible states that the action was "appropriate". This is an attitude that any contemporary Israeli general would endorse with those contemptible Arabs and Persians in mind. It is also an attitude that any general of the Third Reich would have endorsed. Did the SS have generals? If so, they would have fully endorsed it too.
Update: At least 100 people were killed and the German Minister of Defence has resigned because of the cover-up. So contemporary German government not yet as bad as the Third Reich and a whole lot better than the Israeli government.
Update: At least 100 people were killed and the German Minister of Defence has resigned because of the cover-up. So contemporary German government not yet as bad as the Third Reich and a whole lot better than the Israeli government.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
ISRAEL IN PALESTINE: A PRIMER
Criticism of Israel often leads to claims of anti-Semitism by apologists which are designed to deflect attention from the issues which merit discussion. They are as hateful in their determined intolerance and dishonesty as anti-Semitism itself.
If what Israel has just committed in Gaza had been done by any other nation without the acceptance of the United States, the whole world would be voicing its criticism.
In his Nobel Prize speech Harold Pinter stated: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them”. The same could be said about Israel. Certainly the New Zealand mainstream media are extremely hesitant in criticising Israel.
I have tried to take an interest in the Israel / Palestine situation for four decades, and I believe that I have reached a number of valid conclusions. None of them are controversial and I apologise for their obvious nature, but they appear bothersome because apparently we are meant to keep quiet.
The first of my conclusions is that Israel is a nation founded by terrorist activity. An increasingly aggressive settlement of Palestine from the 1880s leading to terrorism in the 20th century killed and drove from their homes and lands 750,000 Palestinians. Many of these people and their descendants now exist in Gaza. It is not acceptable for Jewish people, renowned for intellectual and artistic achievement, to use religion and its texts as an excuse for this terrorism. And although it is understandable, it is also both dishonest and unacceptable to use the holocaust as an excuse.
Israel is not a victim. Jewish people in World War Two were victims, but the contemporary state of Israel is a powerful military force, fully supported by the most powerful nation on earth. It is wrong for Israel to continue to convince itself and the world that it is always and essentially the victim.
Israel is a racist society. If you found a nation for one group of people, a Jewish nation, then it follows as a matter of fact that the foundation of your nation is racist. It also follows that another group of people, the Palestinians, previously and still living within this nation are unavoidably a negative problem. So long as Israel = Jewish nation the mindset of any Israeli government to the Palestinians will be inherently racist. This is completely at variance with social developments in Western countries, mistakenly said to share common values with Israel, which make efforts to forge multicultural societies.
Israel practices apartheid. It has chosen apartheid rather than multiculturalism because it must maintain Israel as a Jewish state. A growing, developing, educated and participating Palestinian population would be a threat to this. So Israel cannot allow peaceful coexistence where all individuals possess equal rights. Some elements of an apartheid state found in Israel include: complete control of all elements of the lives of a group of second class citizens; the need for ID cards in order to travel; the subjection to checkpoints for any movement; the requirement to live in defined areas; arbitrary arrest and detention without charge; the ability to kill without excuse or apology. Israel goes a step further than South Africa by building enormous walls and structures to encircle the defined areas. If the subject population threaten to get out of control, for example by electing the wrong party, then intervention occurs. Sometimes it just occurs anyway.
Israel has never negotiated in good faith. It has strung the Palestinians along for six decades. Negotiation is a game and an end in itself. There is always a reason not to do the right thing. There is always another condition to derail an agreement. There is always someone to blame. The blameworthy have included the PLO, then Fatah, and now Hamas – the very people you must talk to in order to find a just solution. If you demonise them then you do not have to be responsible for a solution, for any solution may mean that you have to relinquish power and control. Yet if Israel has an acceptable person with which to negotiate still nothing happens. Abbas, the Palestinian Fatah president, has been available for negotiation for some time now and Israel has given him nothing – except more checkpoints in the West Bank and more Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. When a person in his position feels the need to write in newspapers directly to the Israeli people for their understanding, this underlines the disdain with which the Israeli government is treating him. Israel need not negotiate with Palestinians when they are divided: Israel will not negotiate with Palestinians when they are united.
Israel has created and is creating the most enormous open prison system in the world. These prisons, given the relentless nature of Israeli policy and behaviour, are on their way via ghettoes to concentration camps. These prisons can be and are shut down at will at any time. This can be done in part or in whole whenever an excuse can be claimed, or it can be done quite arbitrarily. The imprisoned population can be subjected to lack of food, warmth, shelter and other basic necessities of life whenever the occupying power decides.
Israel is responsible for the Palestinian resistance. It is inevitable and a human right that when an occupying power mistreats its subjects they will resist. In films of World War Two we applaud the efforts of the Dutch and French resistance when they blow up the armaments and kill the soldiers of the occupying military force. The Palestinian resistance finds this difficult because they are so bottled up and the occupying force is so much more powerful. Because the Israeli military can mistreat the Palestinians from arm’s length the resistance has adopted the questionable tactic of firing rockets into the Israeli civilian population. Israel refuses to learn the right lesson from this, namely that it is unacceptable for any group to lose some of their people to military force. This tactic merely gives Israel the supreme excuse to blame and to kill further. Israel and “the West” refuse to acknowledge that it is the role of any resistance movement not to allow the occupying force to feel comfortable in its abusive power. In the current crisis, Israel speaks of seeking “peace and quiet” for itself, not ever of dialogue and justice.
Israel is completely self-centred. It appears to have a complete inability to empathise with others, to see their point of view, even to be interested in it. Its racism equates the death of one Israeli (even a soldier) to hundreds of Palestinians. If a human being is self-centred in this way we would say that his development is somewhere between a child and an adolescent with sociopathic tendencies. The USA, as parent of this unruly child, has overindulged and spoiled him all his life. As a result he is demanding, self-righteous, overbearing and out of control. If anyone in the neighbourhood dislikes his attitude and behaviour he will respond with some form of bullying aggression, knowing that Dad is always there to back him up. He becomes the neighbour from hell.
My final conclusion is that Israeli spokespersons lie to the media. Time and again they will, with a reasonable face, indicate what reasonable actions are being taken, only for the persistent media watcher to discover that Israel will not be doing those actions at all or are doing the exact opposite. It is the old story: pay no attention to what is said, but attend to what is done. Unfortunately, in “the West” it works the other way round for most people. When Israeli spokespeople speak to the media they do so from out of an attitude and national character which has created a militant, racist, apartheid society and all the trappings which go with this.
Some of these trappings include the stubborn assertion that Israel is always in the right, and also the inability to consider that a mistake or injustice has been committed, let alone a crime. This can lead to quite extraordinary statements: that because Hamas exists and because it lives among the Gazans it is responsible for the death of 400 children, not the Israeli military who fired missiles, shells and bullets at them. I assume that, in an individual, this severe inability to take responsibility for one’s actions would be recognised as some kind of mental or moral incapacity.
Norman Finkelstein, son of holocaust survivors, has said that if Israel does not wish to be likened to Nazis then it must stop behaving like Nazis. This is true not just for the war on Gaza, but for the war on all Palestinians for the last sixty years. Over this time Israeli policy has shown that it does not respect the Palestinians, it does not care about Palestinian civilians, and it does not want Palestinians to get too close. In the words of Peres it wishes the Palestinians would just disappear.
The only proper solution is integration. This happened in the US in the sixties and in South Africa in the nineties. De Klerk had the statesmanship to realise that apartheid could not continue, it was morally bankrupt. We cannot live in ethnically pure states and democracy cannot be based upon tribalism. There has to be a one-state solution. Part of the one-state solution requires compensation for the Palestinians. New Zealand has experience to offer in the manner in which crimes committed by an occupying people might be addressed by an integrated nation.
Imagine if New Zealand, which has the same kind of population numbers as Israel, were able to virtually dictate American foreign policy and thereby that of Europe? How weird. That one small country with such a small population could cause so much trouble in the world! It would surely go to our heads. We would probably come to believe that the United States was also our country.
If what Israel has just committed in Gaza had been done by any other nation without the acceptance of the United States, the whole world would be voicing its criticism.
In his Nobel Prize speech Harold Pinter stated: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them”. The same could be said about Israel. Certainly the New Zealand mainstream media are extremely hesitant in criticising Israel.
I have tried to take an interest in the Israel / Palestine situation for four decades, and I believe that I have reached a number of valid conclusions. None of them are controversial and I apologise for their obvious nature, but they appear bothersome because apparently we are meant to keep quiet.
The first of my conclusions is that Israel is a nation founded by terrorist activity. An increasingly aggressive settlement of Palestine from the 1880s leading to terrorism in the 20th century killed and drove from their homes and lands 750,000 Palestinians. Many of these people and their descendants now exist in Gaza. It is not acceptable for Jewish people, renowned for intellectual and artistic achievement, to use religion and its texts as an excuse for this terrorism. And although it is understandable, it is also both dishonest and unacceptable to use the holocaust as an excuse.
Israel is not a victim. Jewish people in World War Two were victims, but the contemporary state of Israel is a powerful military force, fully supported by the most powerful nation on earth. It is wrong for Israel to continue to convince itself and the world that it is always and essentially the victim.
Israel is a racist society. If you found a nation for one group of people, a Jewish nation, then it follows as a matter of fact that the foundation of your nation is racist. It also follows that another group of people, the Palestinians, previously and still living within this nation are unavoidably a negative problem. So long as Israel = Jewish nation the mindset of any Israeli government to the Palestinians will be inherently racist. This is completely at variance with social developments in Western countries, mistakenly said to share common values with Israel, which make efforts to forge multicultural societies.
Israel practices apartheid. It has chosen apartheid rather than multiculturalism because it must maintain Israel as a Jewish state. A growing, developing, educated and participating Palestinian population would be a threat to this. So Israel cannot allow peaceful coexistence where all individuals possess equal rights. Some elements of an apartheid state found in Israel include: complete control of all elements of the lives of a group of second class citizens; the need for ID cards in order to travel; the subjection to checkpoints for any movement; the requirement to live in defined areas; arbitrary arrest and detention without charge; the ability to kill without excuse or apology. Israel goes a step further than South Africa by building enormous walls and structures to encircle the defined areas. If the subject population threaten to get out of control, for example by electing the wrong party, then intervention occurs. Sometimes it just occurs anyway.
Israel has never negotiated in good faith. It has strung the Palestinians along for six decades. Negotiation is a game and an end in itself. There is always a reason not to do the right thing. There is always another condition to derail an agreement. There is always someone to blame. The blameworthy have included the PLO, then Fatah, and now Hamas – the very people you must talk to in order to find a just solution. If you demonise them then you do not have to be responsible for a solution, for any solution may mean that you have to relinquish power and control. Yet if Israel has an acceptable person with which to negotiate still nothing happens. Abbas, the Palestinian Fatah president, has been available for negotiation for some time now and Israel has given him nothing – except more checkpoints in the West Bank and more Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. When a person in his position feels the need to write in newspapers directly to the Israeli people for their understanding, this underlines the disdain with which the Israeli government is treating him. Israel need not negotiate with Palestinians when they are divided: Israel will not negotiate with Palestinians when they are united.
Israel has created and is creating the most enormous open prison system in the world. These prisons, given the relentless nature of Israeli policy and behaviour, are on their way via ghettoes to concentration camps. These prisons can be and are shut down at will at any time. This can be done in part or in whole whenever an excuse can be claimed, or it can be done quite arbitrarily. The imprisoned population can be subjected to lack of food, warmth, shelter and other basic necessities of life whenever the occupying power decides.
Israel is responsible for the Palestinian resistance. It is inevitable and a human right that when an occupying power mistreats its subjects they will resist. In films of World War Two we applaud the efforts of the Dutch and French resistance when they blow up the armaments and kill the soldiers of the occupying military force. The Palestinian resistance finds this difficult because they are so bottled up and the occupying force is so much more powerful. Because the Israeli military can mistreat the Palestinians from arm’s length the resistance has adopted the questionable tactic of firing rockets into the Israeli civilian population. Israel refuses to learn the right lesson from this, namely that it is unacceptable for any group to lose some of their people to military force. This tactic merely gives Israel the supreme excuse to blame and to kill further. Israel and “the West” refuse to acknowledge that it is the role of any resistance movement not to allow the occupying force to feel comfortable in its abusive power. In the current crisis, Israel speaks of seeking “peace and quiet” for itself, not ever of dialogue and justice.
Israel is completely self-centred. It appears to have a complete inability to empathise with others, to see their point of view, even to be interested in it. Its racism equates the death of one Israeli (even a soldier) to hundreds of Palestinians. If a human being is self-centred in this way we would say that his development is somewhere between a child and an adolescent with sociopathic tendencies. The USA, as parent of this unruly child, has overindulged and spoiled him all his life. As a result he is demanding, self-righteous, overbearing and out of control. If anyone in the neighbourhood dislikes his attitude and behaviour he will respond with some form of bullying aggression, knowing that Dad is always there to back him up. He becomes the neighbour from hell.
My final conclusion is that Israeli spokespersons lie to the media. Time and again they will, with a reasonable face, indicate what reasonable actions are being taken, only for the persistent media watcher to discover that Israel will not be doing those actions at all or are doing the exact opposite. It is the old story: pay no attention to what is said, but attend to what is done. Unfortunately, in “the West” it works the other way round for most people. When Israeli spokespeople speak to the media they do so from out of an attitude and national character which has created a militant, racist, apartheid society and all the trappings which go with this.
Some of these trappings include the stubborn assertion that Israel is always in the right, and also the inability to consider that a mistake or injustice has been committed, let alone a crime. This can lead to quite extraordinary statements: that because Hamas exists and because it lives among the Gazans it is responsible for the death of 400 children, not the Israeli military who fired missiles, shells and bullets at them. I assume that, in an individual, this severe inability to take responsibility for one’s actions would be recognised as some kind of mental or moral incapacity.
Norman Finkelstein, son of holocaust survivors, has said that if Israel does not wish to be likened to Nazis then it must stop behaving like Nazis. This is true not just for the war on Gaza, but for the war on all Palestinians for the last sixty years. Over this time Israeli policy has shown that it does not respect the Palestinians, it does not care about Palestinian civilians, and it does not want Palestinians to get too close. In the words of Peres it wishes the Palestinians would just disappear.
The only proper solution is integration. This happened in the US in the sixties and in South Africa in the nineties. De Klerk had the statesmanship to realise that apartheid could not continue, it was morally bankrupt. We cannot live in ethnically pure states and democracy cannot be based upon tribalism. There has to be a one-state solution. Part of the one-state solution requires compensation for the Palestinians. New Zealand has experience to offer in the manner in which crimes committed by an occupying people might be addressed by an integrated nation.
Imagine if New Zealand, which has the same kind of population numbers as Israel, were able to virtually dictate American foreign policy and thereby that of Europe? How weird. That one small country with such a small population could cause so much trouble in the world! It would surely go to our heads. We would probably come to believe that the United States was also our country.
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