A Little Something to Chew On

[eumelia]

And then spit.

Yeah yeah. I know, I've been away.
No inspiration to write will do that to you.

However, just a couple of days ago I came across an article (h/t lishablog) which I found incredibly disturbing (and funny!), as I feel it encapsulates the mainstream view of Israel much more than any other article I've read recently.
Mainstream in that it takes at face value the entire Israeli Zionist discourse.

Here it is, with a few added comments from your truly, who just couldn't help but think that this article deserved to be sliced, diced and criticised in that my oh so delicate and witty style.

Israel still looks good, warts and all
The alliance between the Western Left and Islamic anger is perplexing, writes Greg Sheridan

[...]
That Israel of the Western mind (and indeed of the Arab mind) is a hateful place: right-wing, militaristic, authoritarian, racist, ultra-religious, neo-colonial, narrow-minded, undemocratic, indifferent to world opinion, indifferent especially to Palestinian suffering.

It's really surprising how accurate these "distortions" are of Israel's image, isn't it?!

Yet the Israel I know is mostly secular, raucously, almost wildly democratic, has a vibrant left wing, having founded in the kibbutz movement one of the only successful experiments in socialism in human history.

Did this man step outside North-Central Tel-Aviv? Ever? In his visits, did he actually do things other than visit the regular tourist places, and maybe perhaps go to the Jaffa (Yaffo/Yaffa) that wasn't the port? Or Jerusalem that wasn't the Wailing Wall or the Souk?!
Also, The Kibbutz movement didn't actually work because it operated in a nominally Capitalist economy. The fact that people lived communally doesn't make it a successful socialist movement.

It is intellectually disputatious; any two Israelis will have three opinions and be happy to argue them to a lamp post. It is multi-ethnic,

The Black Panthers (the "Mizrahi Power" movement who were extremely active from the mid-60's all the way the First Intifada) were according to Golda Meir, "Not very nice" (paraphrased)
Arabs, of course, are another "race" altogether.

there is a great stress on human solidarity, there is due process. And I've never heard an Israeli speak casually about the value of Palestinian life.

I snorted so hard, I scared my cat.
The graffiti "Death to Arabs" in Hebrew can be found in many places.

I've heard Israelis voice a desire to neutralise Hezbollah or remove Hamas from leadership in Gaza,

By any means nessecary.
Including bombing innocent men, women and children.
July-August 2006.
December-January 2008-2009.
Just in case someone's forgotten.

but I've never in any context heard an Israeli express the view that the value of a human life is determined by race.

I don't think this guy understands Judaism, Zionism or Israel that well.
Or, you know, at all.

The Israel I know is a Western democracy, often under siege, often making mistakes, sometimes moral mistakes. But I also see its institutions, its courts, its free press and vigorous academics challenging those mistakes and trying to correct them, sometimes exaggerating them in the process. I see a society striving for the good, sometimes doing the wrong thing, certainly not beyond criticism, but overall behaving as well as any comparably sized Western society would or could in all the circumstances.

There is free press, who doesn't love Amira Haas. However, she has the prerogative as a Jewish woman to say the things she does and eventually her articles are reduced to anecdotes of human suffering and de-politicised in the extreme.
Israel does good by it's Jewish citizens, we're indoctrinated to believe, at the same time, that we are both strong and victims of persecution. That we have a right to the land on which we live, indeed that there was no one here before we immigrated from whatever shtetl it was we came from.
The Fellahin from whom these immigrants bought the tiny amounts of land were never here, of course.

[...]
First, Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.

Not for the three million plus people who live under Israeli control.

Turkey is a democracy but is not technically in the Middle East.

As Eddie Izzard would say "Quoi?!". The Turks would really, really beg to differ here. Historically (and Orientalistically) Turky was the exemplar of the Middle East!

Lebanon is no longer a full democracy, its politics dominated by armed militias and Syrian interference. Israel is the only society in the Middle East with all the institutions of a democracy: a media that reveals all its secrets, a free parliament, independent courts, independent universities and the rest. This earns it a lot of support, especially in the US, but it also means that Israelis generate much of the most damaging criticism of Israel.

Emphasis by me and am proud to be of service.

This is a singular quality of Israel but it is also discloses a singular quality of the Middle East. Is there another region in the world in which there is only one democracy? This fact alone demonstrates how utterly at odds with its own region Israel is, but also how very odd that region is. The Jewish people, as Walter Russell Mead has written, are an old people but the Israelis are a young people. And deeply imprinted on their DNA is the culture of democracy.

This whole paragraph is probably the most racist and antisemitic of them all.
Let's look at it closely for a moment.

Israel is also the only Western nation in the Middle East (with the exception of substantial but minority parts of Lebanon). Israel is the only national expression of Western values, and indeed Western power, in today's Middle East.
Excuse me, your white neo-colonialist, racist and culture oblivious ass is showing.

These terms can be confusing. The West aspires to universal values of democracy and human rights,

Go read, if you please, Rudyard Kipling's The White Man's Burden.
Everything this guy is saying, only much more pretty and still much appreciated for both it's lyrical value and historical moment.

[R]ights that can be as well observed in Japan, South Korea or India, nations with very different cultural traditions from the West. Nonetheless these values, while universal, define Western nations in their polities.

This leads to the third of Israel's distinctive roles. Second only to the US, Israel is the most acute object of the hostility to the West that flourishes in Western intellectual life. Official Iranian propaganda has described the US as the "Big Satan" and Israel as the "Little Satan". In the West, this is a view mostly found on the ideological Left but it has echoes more generally. Much of it is heir to traditional Marxism, which saw the structure of capitalist societies as inherently unjust and built on exploitation. This ideology was expanded to incorporate the international economy: Western nations are rich because they exploit poor nations. This is not the social democratic critique of neo-liberalism recently articulated by Kevin Rudd. It is instead the view that capitalist societies, and the international system, are of their essence irredeemably and intolerably unjust.

If you add to this inheritance the polemic of Noam Chomsky and his disciples against Western militarism, of Edward Said against Western scholarship and understanding of the Middle East and indeed of all formerly colonised peoples, and of the epistemological assault on traditional Western knowledge mounted by French critical theory from the 1960s onwards, you have a paradigm for understanding the West into which Israel fits all too neatly.

Why are those post-colonial types whining!? We Western People brought prosperity and technology and democracy EVERYWHERE!!!!

This paradigm can be reduced to four propositions: Western societies are inherently evil and unjust in their economic order; they are inherently racist both as successors to European colonialism and in their treatment of their own racial minorities; their knowledge is inherently false, they labour under false consciousness; and they maintain global hegemony through military and financial power.

They can be all those things, and indeed to certain populations are.
It's just that, these "certain populations" are usually voiceless and thus don't have as much resonance in the mainstream discourse and seeing as they are already marginalised, everything they say will be labelled as either crazy talk, lies on order to promote an opposing agenda, or just plain ignored.

It is easy to see where Israel fits in this analytical grid, and why it has a starring role. It is capitalist, Western, an ally of the US and uses military force when necessary to maintain its security. It rules, if temporarily, over an occupied Arab population and despite its own racial diversity is a mostly non-Arab population in a predominantly Arab region.

You call 42 years of Occupation "temporary"? You have a very wibley-wobley timey-wimey sense of time.

[...]
But there is another factor, probably as important as these, and this is Israel's role as the homeland of the Jewish people. Israel's founders decided that it would be a Jewish state and a democracy, a home and a refuge for Jewish people, but which also gave full political, civic and human rights to all its citizens regardless of their religion or racial background.

The Palestinians under Occupation beg to differ.
The Palestinians who live in Israel proper beg to differ.
The Bedouin who live the Negev desert beg to differ.
The Druze who live the Galilee and Golan beg to differ.
I could get into the feminist analysis of institutional sexism and racism, but that would make this little deconstruction even longer.

When you come from a predominantly Western, immigrant society such as Australia or the US, you know some groups well but you know them only as minorities. When you visit their homelands, it is a strange experience; you see them no longer as minorities but as the setters of social, cultural, even religious norms. I had this experience when I first visited India, Vietnam and Israel. You see the minority as the majority and it's at first slightly disconcerting, then exhilarating.

Your white privilege is showing.
It is in fact glaring.
No wonder this guy is blind.

Israel's role as the Jewish homeland, when Jewish civilisation was nearly wiped out by the Holocaust, gives it a special place in the estimation of those who love and admire Jewish culture.

Yiddish, Ladino and Judeo-Arabic language and culture continued to be eradicated after the Holocaust and the founding of the State. By the Hebrew-Zionist narrative.
The culture of which you speak is Israeli which you can argue as a renewed Jewish culture, but it is certainly not a shared culture by Jews living in, say, New York City, or Manchester or Sydney!

It is an inherent part of Israel's purpose and identity, which is little remarked in mainstream media because there is an understandable focus on covering the occupied Palestinian territories rather than the life inside Israel.

The Holocaust argument is old and boring and really overdone.

But it is the central reality for those motivated by anti-Semitism. And the evidence is strong that anti-Semitism is once more a growing force in the world. Anti-Semitism has a long, shameful and astoundingly resilient history in Western civilisation. You can make a case that Western anti-Semitism predates Christianity because of Jewish resistance to ancient Rome. In a sense, the world owes monotheism to the Jews.

Because monotheism is the bestest invention evar! I dunno of any disaster that came from that bright idea.

[Now he talks about classic Antisemitisn, which is boring, old and has very little to do with Israel discourse of Antisemitism which insists on conflating it with anti-Zionist criticism, us Israeli Jews see blood libels everywhere] (eumealia)

What can be surprising to the modern consciousness is how pervasive anti-Semitism was in Western culture, and not very long ago.

At the risk of contradicting myself I'd like to emphasis that I don't think Antisemitism doesn't exist. It's there, it's alive and well.
I think there needs to be a distinction between real criticism, which is legitimate and anti-Zionist discourse used as fodder for Antisemitism. Even if Israel didn't exist the Antisemite would hate Jews, Israel is a convieneit simulacra for old style Jew hate, this is important to note.
It still doesn't cancel the very real and important crticism of Zionism. Zionism regularly doesn't allow for other or alternative narratives of the history of Israel. It doesn't contain them and finds itself de-stabilised over and over again - that's why Hasbara has a hard time working well.

[...]
There are clear echoes of [Classic Antisemitisn] in modern attitudes to Israel. In 1975 the UN passed an infamous resolution equating Zionism with racism. More than 15 years later this was rescinded. Now, Israel is frequently called an apartheid state. The foundational basis of Israel is argued to be illegitimate.

But this, surely, is remarkable. Nobody declares Saudi Arabia an illegitimate state because it has no democracy or human rights, and its doctrinaire Wahhabi Sunni establishment rules over a marginalised Shia minority. Nobody declares Turkey an illegitimate state because it has a disgruntled Kurdish minority, some of whom certainly aspire to statehood. Even North Korea, the most extreme Stalinist gulag on earth, is constantly reassured that the West accepts not only the legitimacy of its state, but does not even seek regime change. Only the legitimacy of Israel is routinely questioned: a special standard for the Jewish state.

This is probably the most popular style of pro-Israel debate.
I call it the "Look, Look, They're worse than us" deflection.
The legitimacy of Israel is not put into question by this Monolith he calls the West, or the other Monolith he seems to regard the Middle East.
Israel is a contentious country in that regard for a different reason, I think: If you look at all the countries mentioned above, I think it's easy to see why Israel is singles out (apart from the scapegoating issue). Israel is viewed as a country with whom one can communicate. Israel is considered salvageable from where it is, which is ostensibly, to become too much like its neighbours.
Because Israel is viewed by the "West" as a (liminally) Western nation (and a guardian against the Barbarians of the "East") then it is considered an ally with whom a solution can be reached without bombing the shit out of us (see Iraq).

Similarly, a malign Zionist or Jewish influence in the media is frequently asserted, even though the Western media is full of criticism of Israel.

Odd how the pro-Israel types manage to find nothing but criticism for Israel, while the pro-Palestianin type find nothing but support.
A medium is probably what is found more often than not.

[Now he's stereotyping the Left Wing movement and such, which is basically reiterating all the things we here daily, as Leftists that we support terror, fundamental Islamism and the annihilation of Israel and the Jews in general - I'm so happy I'm self-hating!] (eumelia)

However, even as classical anti-Semitism has had to make its reappearance in the West in mostly disguised form, it is raging without any disguise at all across the Arab world. The examples are limitless but let me offer just a few. The government-aligned Al-Gomhuria newspaper in Egypt published a cartoon of a serpent strangling Uncle Sam. The caption read: "The Jews taking over the world".

An Egyptian cleric, Ahmad Abd al-Salam, on Al-Nas TV, said: "I want you to imagine the Jews sitting around a table, conspiring how to corrupt the Muslims ... The Jews conspire how to infect the food of Muslims with cancer."

Also on Al-Nas TV, another Egyptian cleric, Safwat Higazi, revealed the wholly fictitious scoop that the female figure in the Starbucks logo was really Queen Esther of the Jews.

Throughout the Arab world, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious tzarist forgery, figure in popular culture. The Iranian Government, famously, sponsors conferences in which the sole purpose is to deny that the Holocaust took place.
The Antisemitism found the the Muslim and Arab world is very different in context and must be viewed as such I think. There's no point in comparing the two types of Antisemitic sentiment as their histories don't correspond and are problematic on different levels and for different reasons.

Throughout Gaza and the West Bank an extravagant anti-Semitism is a central part of the Palestinian discourse. Anyone who doubts this should Google the Hamas charter, where they will learn that even Rotary and Lions clubs are part of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

In Israel we don't need to be overt in our anti-Arab racism. It's institutional. We've got the power. It's subtle and far more deadly that the Antisemitism found in the West Bank and Gaza.

[...]
Nonetheless it would be wrong to underestimate the benefits that anti-Semitism can provide Arab regimes. Israel is the licensed grievance for these societies. By theologising the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and presenting it as a case of Western and specifically Jewish persecution of an Arab minority, Arab regimes, even those allied with the US, can offer an outlet to anger on the street and attempt to channel both Islamist and pan-Arab sentiments in a direction that does not challenge their rule.

This exploitation of anti-Semitism fits a broader political narrative of the Arab world. A few years ago a committee of Arab intellectuals working under the auspices of the UN produced a devastating indictment of the Arab encounter with modernisation. Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis recounts and updates some of their most shocking findings in the March-April 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs. Here are a few of the depressing highlights. In the previous quarter century, real per capita gross domestic product has fallen in the Arab world. Combined Arab GDP in 2000 was less than that of Spain. One-fifth the number of books are translated every year into Arabic as are translated into Greek in Greece. Between 1980 and 2000, Egypt registered 77 patents in the US, South Korea 16,328. And so on.

As a matter of mere logic, the presence of 5.5million Jews in Israel cannot be responsible for the economic and political development of hundreds of millions of Arabs. But the Arab mind is presented with a disagreeable conundrum. The Arab world possesses, in its view, the one true religion, the greatest culture and much of the world's oil, yet its societies are impoverished and dysfunctional. How can this be explained? In societies that do not allow searching criticism of ruling regimes, the answer has to come in the form of anti-Arab conspiracies, centred on the West generally, but more specifically on the US, Israel and the Jews.

This Arab anti-Semitism, popular and official, is incidentally a huge obstacle to peace. If Israel is not just a nation like any other but the most visible and offensive manifestation of a giant Western and Jewish conspiracy against Islam and the Arabs, then making peace with it is not honourable but despicable.

That whole thing.
"Look, Look, They're worse than us!".
Those figures do not change the fact that Israel is an militant and occupying force. What other nations do that are bad, doesn't mean that Israel has a carte blanch to disregard it's own Human Rights violations.
Which it does.
Daily.

What is perplexing is the emerging strategic alliance between the Western Left and Islamist anger. This is evident especially in Western demonstrations where left-wing protesters carry banners saying things such as "We are Hamas".

Hamas is the resistance group in Gaza. While I disagree with their methods, policy and all around views on Palestinian Liberation, at times that's all people know and who they can support seeing as there are many who view the Fatah today as collaborators with the Israeli government.

But it is also to be observed in the general silence of the Western Left on human rights abuses throughout the Arab world and in Iran. One of the most arresting sights in Israel is the magnificent Bahai headquarters in Haifa. The Bahais have an equally beautiful temple in New Delhi. The Bahais fled to Israel and India, two states where minority religions are not subject to official persecution, because of the murderous repression they suffer in Iran. Yet the Western Left is infinitely more active about Israeli human rights abuses, real or alleged, than Iranian human rights abuses. Similarly, the more left-wing the Western feminist, the less will be said about the routine abuse of women's rights in much of the Arab world.

Such utter, utter nonsense.
The thing is, things are complicated.
Complicated things make bad sound bites.
If it's not on mainstream media it is sadly non existent.
Thank you blogosphere.

[...][T]he assumption that Israel does not seek peace and a just solution for the Palestinians is flawed.

Not only is the ball in Israel's court, the court belongs to Israel. Israel is the one with power here and with it comes the responsibility of doing right by it.

[And from this point it just the same all discourse of the fact that Israel does nothing but compromise, that it's the Palestinians who do not want peace, that they should be grateful to take what was offered to them at the time and that everyone does nothing but demand things from Israel] (eumelia)

Both the intense hatred and in other circles the affection that Israel inspires have little to do with the actions any Israeli government could reasonably take. It is rather Israel's multiple identities, going to the heart of Western history and contemporary Arab politics, the hostility among intellectuals to Western society, the inheritance of anti-Semitism and the search for scapegoats for the Arab world's troubled encounter with modernity, that ensure that the Israel of the mind will remain at the forefront of international concerns.

And the rest as they say, is Bullshit.

I hope you enjoyed that little ride.
It was certainly a fun article of FAIL to make fun of.
And help y'all to read.

Comments

[tinyrevolution.livejournal.com]

I <3 your commentary.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

I'm glad it is of interest to someone other than me!

:)

[tinyrevolution.livejournal.com]

Very!

And I'm sure others think so too whether or not they say so. :)

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

Overall, your commentary was good. I think you should consider polishing it up and sending it to be published as a response.

I found it interesting that you could contest some of the underlying facts he presented in the beginning of the article (not always correctly, AFAIK the Turks would NOT consider themselves as exemplars of the Middle East, especially while they're trying to join the European Union.)

Using the 30+ year old example of Golda Meir is not a particularly efficient way of contesting current Israeli multi- or mono- ethnicity.

What I found fascinating was that you had no answer to his claims beyond saying things like "Such utter, utter nonsense. The thing is, things are complicated." and "And the rest as they say, is Bullshit."

You did not answer his claim that the Israeli-Palestinian problem is part of a larger Israeli-Arab problem, besides mocking him.

You commentary started off well, but I feel that you didn't follow through enough...

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Personally, I don't think it was particularly good commentary. I found his article to be very overtly racist and didn't feel comfortable with a pro-Israel article of that kind.
So I commented on it.

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

Regardless of how the modern Turks feel, the OP's point that, "historically (and Orientalistically) Turkey was the exemplar of the Middle East" still holds.

His claim that the Israeli-Palestinian problem is part of a larger Israeli-Arab problem was based on inaccurate stereotypes about both sides. If someone makes a similar claim with some sort of valid basis, it can be answered (whether that answer is agreement or criticism). When the claim is based on flawed arguments, though, there's nothing significant there *to* answer.

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

I suppose that depends on which histories you're reading/writing. I'm not sure that the Englishmen who coined the phrase were thinking of Turkey at all...

I disagree that the OP successfully contested the validity of the claims made in the origional article.

Since the OP doesn't think her commentary was worth defending, I'll won't continue analyzing it.

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

"Middle East" is a relatively new term that became popular at the turn of the 20th century. For the half millennium or so preceding that, during which Orientalism was developed, most Europeans depictions of "the East", including histories, focused on the Ottomans if for no other reason than that, particularly after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, they were close enough to be seen as a threat.

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

I don't understand.

The article said "Middle East". The OP said "Middle East". I said "Middle East".

What does "The East" have to do with it?

Turkey may exemplify the East, but by no means does that mean that it exemplifies the Middle East or even the Far East. :)

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

The term "Middle East" is new enough, and so inextricably rooted in Orientalism, that talking about it historically IMHO requires going back to its predecessor "the East".

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

Be that as it may, I don't think you can change the fact that OP was (probably) incorrect in stating that "The Turks would really, really beg to differ here. Historically (and Orientalistically) Turky was the exemplar of the Middle East!"

1. I doubt they would beg to differ
2. Turkey was not the exemplar of the Middle East. If anything, Iraq/Mesopotamia or Lebanon/Syria/the Levant were and still are the exemplar countries.

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

At this point I think that each of us is just repeating what was said before, but, while I'm sure it's getting repetitive for you, let me try to clarify my argument:

Many of the Westerb (mis)conceptions about the Middle East today are rooted in the ideas that Europeans developed about "the Orient" during the Renaissance and early modern periods. During those periods, Christendom encountered "the East" through the Ottomans. As a result, the very idea of the Middle East is based on Europeans' understanding of the Turks. The Turks, because of this history, became the exemplar of the Middle East.

The article's author drew upon Orientalist stereotypes about the Middle East while conveniently ignoring the fact that the basis of those stereotypes (which of course were never particularly justified) has, in fact, developed into a counterexample of them.

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that you are confusing "The East" and "The Middle East".

Both the article and the OP spoke of "The Middle East". To my understanding, the expression arose in order to define the area between "The East" (Turkey, as you said) and the "Far East" (India, China, Japan).

In any case, from your last line, it seems that you are agreeing with the article, and with me, in saying that Turkey is not an example of the Middle East and disagreeing with the OP?

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

My point is that the way that the "Middle East" is stereotyped is based in very large part on traditional (mis)conceptions about Turkey, and therefore you cannot separate Turkey from those stereotypes. The article, however, uses them even though Turkey provides a clear counter-example. I very much disagree with the article's usage.

[hemlock-sholes.livejournal.com]

The article said "Turkey is a democracy but is not technically in the Middle East." The OP disagreed and added that Turkey is the exemplar of the Middle East.

You have just stated that "Turkey provides a clear counter-example [of Middle Eastern stereotypes?]"

You sound much more in line with the article's writer than with the OP.

what (mis)conceptions about Turkey are part of the (mis)conceptions of the Middle East and what does that have to do with what we're talking about - which is about a specific detail of the OP's criticism? Criticism which the OP herself feels is below-par.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

If you two don't quit it I'm freezing comments.

You're both running around in circles debating the least interesting (though none the less racist) point of the article.

This is a zero-sum discussion seeing as none of you is going to convince the other of the opposite argument.
Stop digging your heels and move on.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

See comment below.