If Israel Wants Peace...
By Adil E. Shamoo
Foreign Policy in Focus
The current right-wing government of Israel wants to negotiate with the Palestinians for their independent state as much as China wants to negotiate with Taiwan for its independent state. I have very little faith that this Israeli government will negotiate in earnest with the Palestinians. Netanyahu wants to negotiate for the sake of negotiation.
Writing in a New York Times op-ed, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren bemoans how the Palestinians have not recognized Israel as a Jewish state for 62 years. For 62 years, I did not know or hear that the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state was an issue for the Palestinian to address. More importantly, everyone in the world, including the Palestinians, knows full well that Israel is a Jewish state. So the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is, in reality, a done deal. However, no one in the world, including the United States - Israel’s strongest ally – has recognized Israel as a Jewish state either. There is as much a chance of Israel becoming a non-Jewish state as Saudi Arabia becoming a non-Muslim state. Adding the Jewish-state recognition will add nothing to the security of Israel and the region, but Ambassador Oren knows that already.
Israel’s right-wing governments and their neo-conservative supporters have used other excuses to postpone negotiations with the Palestinians. We remember the line that “peace in Jerusalem goes through Baghdad.” More recently, it’s “peace goes through Tehran” because Iran has nuclear weapons – never mind Israel has nuclear weapons and not Iran.
Yes, the Palestinian leadership outright rejected the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. The Palestinian Authority countered the Netanyahu proposal with its own clever proposal. The Palestinians would recognize Israel as a Jewish state if Israel agreed to go back to 1967 borders, freeze all settlement building, and give them East Jerusalem as their capital. This proves that both sides are intractable.
The crux of Israel’s security problem is that for 62 years, Israelis enjoyed higher standards of living than Palestinians within and outside of the 1967 borders. Israel has treated the 1.5 million Israeli-Arabs as second-class citizens. Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza have lived in poverty, with a high unemployment rate, and under threat of expulsion (or have been actually expelled). Israel has beaten the Palestinians to a pulp with a 100-to-one kill ratio. The Palestinians have never given up. One would think Israel’s government would have learned its lessons and looked for more peaceful alternatives.
If Israel really wants peace, why have they not negotiated a two-state solution with the most ardent peacemaker, pro-American and anti-Hamas leader – Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the president of the Palestinian Authority? If Israel really wants peace, they should deal with a man who is willing to do it. For all of his life, and especially in the last six years, President Abbas has demonstrated his willingness to be a peacemaker. He will accept any semblance of a state for Palestinians. When Abbas came to power in 2004, he immediately declared that war with Israel was over and denounced terrorism. He not only made pronouncements but followed up with actions. He fired anyone who disagreed with him. He accepted training of his security forces by the United States. During Israel’s conflicts with Hamas, he used his security forces to clamp down on any pro-Hamas demonstration by West Bank residents.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Showing posts with label Jewish. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jewish. Show all posts
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Monday, October 18, 2010
Transformative Radio: Martha Ackelsberg
Transformative Radio
Martha Ackelsberg: In 2008 a small collective of anarchists in Hartford, Connecticut organized a series of lectures and events called "Spotlight on Anarchism". This lecture, by Martha Ackelsberg, was the opening talk for the series. In it, she discusses the tensions managing multiple identities–in her case as an anarchist, a lesbian, a Jew, and a feminist.
To Listen to the Lecture
Martha Ackelsberg: In 2008 a small collective of anarchists in Hartford, Connecticut organized a series of lectures and events called "Spotlight on Anarchism". This lecture, by Martha Ackelsberg, was the opening talk for the series. In it, she discusses the tensions managing multiple identities–in her case as an anarchist, a lesbian, a Jew, and a feminist.
To Listen to the Lecture
Thursday, June 03, 2010
Anne Nelson: The Obligations of History: Accuracy versus irony in depictions of the Holocaust
The Obligations of History: Accuracy versus irony in depictions of the Holocaust
by Anne Nelson
Moving Image Source
Somewhere in time, between 1994 and 2010, it became permissible in Hollywood to treat the subjects of the Nazi era and the Holocaust with irony and bombast, instead of the reverence that was formerly expected. Not everyone is comfortable with the shift; Inglourious Basterds, which fictionalizes the end of World War II, failed to harvest its predicted array of Oscars, and a number of critics and historians have regarded it with distaste. But it has pulled in vast audiences and profits around the globe—unlike the more serious films that continue to explore the Holocaust's actual historical legacy.
For decades a debate has quietly raged as to whether the Holocaust should be depicted artistically at all. Even films as reverent as Schindler's List have been criticized for any departure from the historical record. At the same time, there are fears that the Holocaust could be forgotten by future generations, or subsumed into the long list of 20th-century atrocities. Holocaust education is explicitly mandated in 24 states in the U.S. and implicitly required in many others; educators are increasingly using film in the classroom to engage their students.
But today's students encounter radically divergent treatments of Holocaust themes in popular culture. On one side is a wave of dramas and documentaries that explore the historical record more thoroughly than ever before. At the other extreme is a new generation of feature films that take unprecedented liberties with history, treating the period as a vehicle for entertainment—the most obvious example being Inglourious Basterds.
As various critics have noted, Quentin Tarantino's riff on the Nazi era is more homage to film history than to world history. The Basterds score showcases Ennio Morricone's spaghetti-western themes, and the script is a pastiche of action-film genres. In Tarantino's manic vision, Hitler and the Nazi leadership are—very ahistorically—gathered into a Parisian movie theater for a Jewish revenge fantasy. Tarantino's plot device of linking a Holocaust crime to a Jewish revenge fantasy echoes the 2006 film Black Book, by Dutch director Paul Verhoeven. Verhoeven's film also features a (fictitious) beautiful Jewish heroine whose family is murdered by the Nazis. She joins a resistance group, only to be catapulted into Grand Guignol
fantasies of brutality and revenge.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Anne Nelson
Moving Image Source
Somewhere in time, between 1994 and 2010, it became permissible in Hollywood to treat the subjects of the Nazi era and the Holocaust with irony and bombast, instead of the reverence that was formerly expected. Not everyone is comfortable with the shift; Inglourious Basterds, which fictionalizes the end of World War II, failed to harvest its predicted array of Oscars, and a number of critics and historians have regarded it with distaste. But it has pulled in vast audiences and profits around the globe—unlike the more serious films that continue to explore the Holocaust's actual historical legacy.
For decades a debate has quietly raged as to whether the Holocaust should be depicted artistically at all. Even films as reverent as Schindler's List have been criticized for any departure from the historical record. At the same time, there are fears that the Holocaust could be forgotten by future generations, or subsumed into the long list of 20th-century atrocities. Holocaust education is explicitly mandated in 24 states in the U.S. and implicitly required in many others; educators are increasingly using film in the classroom to engage their students.
But today's students encounter radically divergent treatments of Holocaust themes in popular culture. On one side is a wave of dramas and documentaries that explore the historical record more thoroughly than ever before. At the other extreme is a new generation of feature films that take unprecedented liberties with history, treating the period as a vehicle for entertainment—the most obvious example being Inglourious Basterds.
As various critics have noted, Quentin Tarantino's riff on the Nazi era is more homage to film history than to world history. The Basterds score showcases Ennio Morricone's spaghetti-western themes, and the script is a pastiche of action-film genres. In Tarantino's manic vision, Hitler and the Nazi leadership are—very ahistorically—gathered into a Parisian movie theater for a Jewish revenge fantasy. Tarantino's plot device of linking a Holocaust crime to a Jewish revenge fantasy echoes the 2006 film Black Book, by Dutch director Paul Verhoeven. Verhoeven's film also features a (fictitious) beautiful Jewish heroine whose family is murdered by the Nazis. She joins a resistance group, only to be catapulted into Grand Guignol
fantasies of brutality and revenge.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Friday, February 19, 2010
Speaking of Faith: Curiosity Over Assumptions -- Interreligiosity Meets a New Generation
Curiosity Over Assumptions: Interreligiosity Meets a New Generation
Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett
We shine a light on two young leaders of a new generation of grassroots Muslim-Jewish encounter in Los Angeles. They're innovating templates of practical relationship that work with reality, acknowledge questions and conflict, yet resolve not to be enemies — whatever the political future of the Middle East may hold.
To Listen to the Episode and Access More Resources
Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett
We shine a light on two young leaders of a new generation of grassroots Muslim-Jewish encounter in Los Angeles. They're innovating templates of practical relationship that work with reality, acknowledge questions and conflict, yet resolve not to be enemies — whatever the political future of the Middle East may hold.
To Listen to the Episode and Access More Resources
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