Category Archives: Essays

At the suggestion of ReWrite, here is a video from The Chappelle Show that serves as a good accompaniment to yesterday’s post on the Republicans’ cynical worldview of due process for corporations only.

There are always two sides to every story, at least that is what we are supposed to believe. Personally, in this story I have no stake. I am not a Christian or Muslim Arab and I am not a descendant of European or American Jews. As an American – and one who grew up amongst a large Jewish minority outside of Washington, DC, I do have a certain natural affinity for Jewish culture. As a matter of fact, I have probably been to a synagogue (for bar mitzvahs and weddings) more times than I have been in a Christian church of any denomination.

Furthermore, I – with my well-trained American olfactory sense for sniffing political incorrectness and racism – now live in Europe and can attest to the fact that Europe is not an option for Jews. Even more than a half century after the Holocaust, I cannot think of a single European country that is comfortable with sharing its society with a non-indigenous, non-Christian minority. Europeans define themselves as European, not on shared values or citizenship (in a strictly political sense), but on ethnicity alone. Full stop. It shouldn’t be surprising then that while most Europeans would not consider themselves anti-Semitic, the vast majority side with the Palestinians over the Israelis. Ironically, though, Europeans are more openly hostile to Muslims than they are to Jews.

So there you have it: regardless of what Helen Thomas may think, Jews of European descent really don’t have the option of going back to Europe. On the other hand, though, you have all of the Palestinians – both Christians and Muslims – who have spent the last half century asking themselves why they should have to pay the price for the Europeans’ brutality towards the Jews. They’re wondering why an American from New York or a Russian has more rights in and to the land they grew up in than they do. And just as I have grown up with the children of those who were forced to flee for their lives from Europe to the U.S., I also know Palestinians who have lost their family homes, quite literally, to Americans and Europeans resettling in Israel.

So without taking any sides – once again as I have absolutely no stake in the dispute – I read Rabbi David F. Nesenoff’s critique of Helen Thomas in today’s Washington Post. Rabbi Nesenoff happens to be the person to whom Ms. Thomas uttered those very unfortunate words about how the Jews should leave Palestine and return to Europe and America, inevitably causing Thomas to resign her position as a White House journalist.

Interestingly enough, what Rabbi Nesenoff finds most troublesome is that Ms. Thomas justified her comments by declaring that she was “from Arab descent”. (Ms. Thomas’ father was an Arab Christian immigrant to the U.S.)

For the next few paragraphs Rabbi Nesenoff discredits Thomas’ conclusion with a few different predictable arguments about the inherent anti-Semitism in her statement and how it denies a two-state solution to the crisis, and even how the Bible grants this land to the Jews. But in the end, he too denies the other’s right to co-exist, offering little more than the exact mirror of Thomas’ “because I am from Arab desecent”:

My grandmother used to kibitz, “Friends you choose; family you’re stuck with.” The Jew is stuck with Israel. There is no ungluing the connection. It is beyond the ambiguous term “chosen people”; they are “the people who have no choice.” It is more than a religious belief; it is a value and a moral barometer of the Earth. History, truth, integrity and the foundation of our world are not negotiable.

In other words, this land is mine because I am Jewish. And you are not.

At least both of them are comfortable in the U.S., as long as they don’t move to Arizona.

Over the last few days’ media coverage of Israel’s botched interception of the aid flotilla in international waters off the coast of Gaza, I kept hearing cries in the U.S. press – mainly by politicians and right wing pundits — justifying Israel’s actions on the basis that Hamas doesn’t believe Israel has the right to exist. Without any intention of passing judgment whatsoever on Israel, I kept wondering why Hamas’ opinion mattered. First of all, why would anyone even bother to lend credibility to such nonsense unless they purposefully wanted to empower Hamas? Does a farm league baseball team get air-time to question the Yankee’s existence? But more importantly, Israel does exist. It is the region’s only true military super power, backed by the unconditional support of the most expensive, powerful and technologically advanced military the world has ever known. Furthermore, Israel is fully autonomous and frankly couldn’t care less what anyone else thinks (not even the U.S.) about its actions and proceeds accordingly.

But with so much focus on the well-resolved question of Israel’s existence, it surprises me that no one ever asks whether the existence of the Palestinians is at stake. For example, when 89 year-old Helen Thomas is rightfully criticized for her clearly anti-Semitic (and politically ridiculous) comments, shouldn’t logic dictate that comparable anti-Arab statements be followed by similar condemnation?  Why is it that Ms. Thomas resigns while prominent right wing journalists (and politicians) who make anti-Arab statements never meet the same fate? As Glenn Greenwald writes,

As for the Helen Thomas condemnation fest and subsequent resignation today, the central issue — as both my Salon colleague Gabriel Winant and The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer adeptly document — is not the perception that she’s guilty of bigotry, but the wrong kind of bigotry.  Anyone who doubts that should compare the cheap, easy and self-righteous outrage orgy against the powerless, 89-year-old columnist to the total non-reaction in the face of the incessant and ongoing anti-Arab bigotry of The New Republic’s Marty Peretz, or to the demands of then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey that the Palestinians leave the West Bank and go back to where they came from, and similar statements from Mike Huckabee (still gainfully employed at Fox News).

That’s because, as I wrote the last time Peretz had one of his vicious anti-Arab rants, severe punishment is meted out to those who engage in the wrong kind of prejudice while those who spout the right kind do so with total impunity.  That, and the fact that there are consequences for the actions only of the powerless in Washington, but never the powerful.

Not that it should make any real difference, but the standard-issue “they’re Muslims and we are the enlightened West” chauvinistic rationalism doesn’t quite apply. When referring to Arabs, we should understand that the term also includes Christians. As a matter of fact, the Catholic Church just produced a study that found that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a key factor in the diminishing presence of Christians in the Middle East. A large chunk of Palestinian Christians have left and those who have remained suffer the same fate as their Muslim compatriots. (Arab Christians are also important minorities in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and in Iraq until the fall of the Sadam Hussein – ironically, a collateral effect of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was to topple one of the only secular governments in the Middle East with an important Christian political class in government.) The study also made reference to the fundamentalist (and principally American Protestant) Christian belief in the Rapture — that frighteningly quirky belief that Israel must be first cleansed of all non Jews in order to prepare for Jesus’ second coming.

So recognizing the obvious – that Israel’s existence is a given while that of the Palestinians is precarious — and taking into account the ongoing, unrepentant settlements and that Gaza is a virtual prison of 1.5 million people comparable in modern times perhaps only to Soweto, there is one question the righteous should be asking: do the Palestinians have a right to exist?

I think that answering that question in the affirmative and with conviction would resolve much of the problem, including defusing the raison d’être, demagoguery, and feigned outrage of many of the Region’s biggest instigators.

If Israel is infallible, can’t do no wrong – no questions asked — and has universal public health care, shouldn’t we, the American tax payers who so graciously shell out billions a year in our hard earned money to subsidize Israel, also get a public option?

On another note, if it is unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment for public money to flow to domestic religious groups, how does sending billions a year in tax payer money to self-defined religious states pass constitutional muster?

From Washington Post’s Tom Toles. Of course, the notion that they cannot is a fabrication of politicians.

“The distinguished Middle East correspondent of The Independent [Robert Fisk] recalls the culinary highs and lows of an extraordinary career – from feasting with kings in Jordan to eating under fire in Afghanistan.”

Robert Fisk: Tea with Bin Laden…and other stories:

When the Iranian Revolutionary Guards closed the roads to journalists after Ayatollah Khomeini’s return from exile in 1979, I decided to travel the country by rail. Secret policemen and soldiers always forget trains. They like road-blocks; and the journalist who wishes to elude them must remember Michael Collins’ old maxim, that no one ever sees a man on a bicycle. No one ever sees a journalist on a train. So Iranian state railways – and their single-carriage restaurant cars – became my home for weeks. Continue reading →