JUNE 2007
With all due respect for the 'blue
box'
By Meron Benvenisti
Ha'aretz Tuesday, May 29, 2007http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=864483
In his
article "Mazuz versus Herzl" (Haaretz, May 25),
Israel Harel reminds us that we grew up on the ethos of
the Jewish National Fund's "blue box" for
donations, whereby thanks to our small coins, the JNF's
lands were redeemed. He writes: "The JNF owns 2.5
million dunam (625,000 acres) in Israel. They were bought
- I must tell you today, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz
and the justices of the Supreme Court in its capacity as
the High Court of Justice - 'dunam by dunam, clod by
clod,' so they would become the 'Jewish people's eternal
property,' in accordance with the principle established
by modern Zionism's founder, Theodor Herzl, at the Fifth
Zionist Congress in 1901."
Harel is entitled to object to Mazuz's decision, and even
to warn the Supreme Court justices not to dare to apply
the principle of nondiscrimination between Jews and Arabs
in allocating lands. But there is no doubt that he would
not want his arguments to be based on incorrect facts and
an untruthful rewriting of history, thereby opening a
Pandora's box.
For Israel Harel's information: Of the more than 2.5
million dunams owned by the JNF, two million dunams were
not purchased with the small coins put into the blue
boxes, but were rather lands abandoned by Arabs that
David Ben-Gurion, in a typical maneuver, "sold"
to the JNF in 1949-1950. The first deal was clinched on
January 27, 1949. It included the sale of a million
dunams of abandoned land in various areas in return for
about 18 million Israeli pounds.
This was an improper and also an illegal decision. The
Israeli government sold the JNF lands that it did not
own, but which had rather been captured in the war (and
even the laws that it had enacted by then did not grant
the state ownership of these lands). Ben-Gurion thereby
achieved three aims. First of all, he transferred
responsibility for the abandoned lands, on which new
settlements were planned, from the Mapam party, which
held the agriculture portfolio, to the JNF, which was
under the influence of his own party, Mapai. Secondly, he
could claim to have clean hands with respect to the
continued confiscation of lands. And thirdly, he
established a political fact that barred the way to the
refugees' return.
A week before the decision on the sale of the million
dunams, the United Nations General Assembly had passed
Resolution 194, under which the refugees were to be
permitted to return to their homes, and if they chose not
to return, they would receive compensation. Ben-Gurion
did not want Israel's sovereignty to be sullied by
matters that stank of illegality, deviation from
international norms and immorality.
The heads of the JNF knew very well that the sale was
illegal, but it was important to them to establish that
the JNF would continue serving as the institution that
held the Jewish people's lands and developed them for
purposes of settlement. They insisted that the government
commit itself to "making (in the future) all the
legal arrangements so that the lands will be registered
under the JNF's full ownership under the laws of the
State of Israel."
In October 1950, the government sold another million
dunams to the JNF, and in this fashion, about 40 percent
of the abandoned lands were transferred to its
possession. Thus the JNF's land holdings, which on the
eve of the state's establishment had amounted to about
900,000 dunams (out of about 1.8 million under Jewish
ownership), more than tripled.
The distinction between voluntary purchases from Arab
owners during the period of the Mandate and "the
redemption of lands" from the hands of the Israeli
government was blurred, and the lands of the uprooted
Arabs became the lands of the Jewish people, covered by
the JNF leasing laws, which prohibit leasing them to
non-Jews. In this way, a principle was established that
discriminates between Jewish citizens of Israel and Arab
citizens, from whose uprooted fellow-Arabs the land was
confiscated (or "purchased") and for which the
original owners received no compensation at all.
Eventually, the Israel Lands Administration was
established to manage the state's lands and those
"of the Jewish people." The JNF, an
anachronistic body that was left in place only because
David Ben-Gurion did not want to deal with shady matters,
is represented in this institution. Its considerable
weight in the ILA enables it to dictate decisions
concerning lands to the state, and in this way affords an
excuse for an entire system of discrimination against the
state's non-Jewish citizens. Menachem Mazuz's courageous
decision is meant to atone for this original sin, and
Israel Harel would do well to take care not to exploit
myths that are precious to many of us for his own
ideological purposes.
*************************
A settlements mafia
By Dror Etkes,
Ha'aretz
November
22, 2006
http://www.fmep.org/analysis/articles/a_settlements_mafia.html
The figures
published yesterday by Peace Now's Settlement Watch team
on the ownership of land on which the settlements sit
presents a scary picture of the State of Israel's
behavior in the territories. Approximately 40 percent of
the area of settlements is privately-owned Palestinian
land, according to the Civil Administration. Put simply,
for dozens of years, Israel continued to expand and
entrench the settlement enterprise by dispossessing
Palestinian residents of their lands, whose private
ownership even the State of Israel does not dispute. All
of this is in contrast to the frequently voiced argument
of official government spokesmen and settlers that
"the settlements sit on state lands."
What is the method used to bring about this phenomenon?
From 1967 to 1979, the Israeli military administration in
the West Bank made widespread use of the process of
"acquiring land for security purposes" to grab
thousands of dunams of land under private Palestinian
ownership. These lands were in practice used for the
purpose of expanding the settlements.
Although "acquiring land for security purposes"
in an occupied area is permitted according to
international law, it is also limited to a certain time.
The High Court of Justice rejected the petitions the
landowners submitted against the acquisitions, basing
itself on the argument that the settlements do indeed
have an added security value, as they are located in the
heart of an area where a hostile population lives. That
is, permanent settlements were established on lands whose
acquisition was meant to have been temporary to begin
with. To this day, dozens of settlements owe their legal
existence to the absurd ritual in which the OC Central
Command signs an extension of the acquisition orders for
the lands on which they sit, while declaring that he is
convinced the land in question is "necessary for
military purposes."
Ironically, this method of operation eventually ran into
trouble specifically because of the settlers' refusal to
continue cooperating with the open lie at the heart of
all those declarations the IDF provided to the High Court
of Justice. In a response submitted by the settlers in
1979, when the High Court of Justice was discussing land
acquisitions for Elon Moreh, it was actually the settlers
who refused to recognize the temporary nature of the
settlement they were about to set up, arguing that it was
not being set up for the purpose of temporary security
needs, but as a "supreme moral and divine
order." With no alternative available, the High
Court of Justice was compelled to overturn its previous
decisions and to order the state to refrain from
acquiring lands intended for building settlements. Even
though Elon Moreh had to relocate to an alternate site,
all the settlements that had been established in this
manner until that point remained where they were.
As a result of the Elon Moreh case, the construction of
settlements in the territories, which only accelerated
during those years, switched to two parallel tracks: the
first, the pseudo-legal one, in which the government of
Israel, assisted by the legal advice from the industrious
Plia Albeck, declared huge tracts of the West Bank to be
state lands. And in that way, without Israeli governments
ever having to provide any sort of accounting, not for
the questionable way in which these lands were declared
state lands, nor for the very fact that these land were
allocated only for Jews (even though they were and remain
a small minority of the West Bank population), the
settlement enterprise became entrenched.
The second track on which Israel worked represents a more
advanced stage in the government's scorn for the concept
of its subordination to the laws of the state, whose
enforcement, or so it is commonly thought, it is actually
supposed to oversee: the governments of Israel continued
to initiate or "only" to enable the
construction of settlements, neighborhoods and outposts
on private lands without even bothering to issue
acquisition orders, because after all, the High Court of
Justice would probably have disqualified them.
As mentioned, all of this happened with the knowledge of
the Civil Administration, which did not get lazy and took
the trouble to document the phenomenon and its
dimensions, while insolently insisting on its right to
conceal it from the public. And this is what the
Jerusalem District Prosecutor's Office wrote to the court
when explaining its refusal to hand over the data:
"The subject of the petition is an extremely
sensitive issue that involves, among other things, the
State of Israel's security considerations and foreign
relations."
Even though it is hard to understand what "security
considerations" could have been involved in this
matter, it is easy to guess how Israel's foreign
relations would indeed have been affected by the
information contained here. The unfortunate conclusion is
that when it comes to land management policy, the State
of Israel acts like a mafia state inside the area of the
West Bank.
The author is the director of Peace Now's Settlement
Watch project.
[newprofile
message1167] Israel's Land Grabbing of Palestinian
property
********************************
The
Dialectic of Negation,
by Gilad
Atzmon
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Ideological and political
thinkers often start out with the task of defining their
subjects. It should be assumed that they have come to
their conclusions through intellectual processes of
deduction and categorical research. Here are some
(devastating) quotes that expose what early Zionist
ideologists had to say about their brothers, those for
whom they were developing a nationalist project based on
a philosophy of racial ethnic identity:
“The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human
being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual
in society he revolts and throws off the harness of
social obligations, knows no order nor discipline.”
(Our Shomer “Weltanschauung”, Hashomer
Hatzair December 1936, p.26. As cited by Lenni Brenner 1)
“The fact is undeniable that the Jews collectively
are unhealthy and neurotic. Those professional Jews who,
wounded to the quick, indignantly deny this truth are the
greatest enemies of their race, for they thereby lead
them to search for false solutions, or at most
palliatives.” (Ben Frommer, The Significance of
a Jewish State, Jewish Call, Shanghai, May 1935,
p.10. As cited by Lenni Brenner 2)
“The enterprising spirit of the Jew is
irrepressible. He refuses to remain a proletarian. He
will grab at the first opportunity to advance to a higher
rung in the social ladder.” (The Economic
Development of the Jewish People, Ber
Borochov, 1916 3)
“The emancipated Jew is insecure in his relations
with his fellow-beings, timid with strangers, suspicious
even toward the secret feeling of his friends. His best
powers are exhausted in the suppression, or at least in
the difficult concealment of his own real character. For
he fears that this character might be recognized as
Jewish, and he has never the satisfaction of showing
himself as he is in all his thoughts and sentiments. He
becomes an inner cripple, and externally unreal, and
thereby always ridiculous and hateful to all higher
feeling men, as is everything that is unreal. All the
better Jews in Western Europe groan under this, or seek
for alleviation. They no longer possess the belief which
gives the patience necessary to bear sufferings, because
it sees in them the will of a punishing but not loving
God. Max Nordau (Address at the First Zionist
Congress, Max Nordau, 1897 4)
Early Zionist ideologists were pretty outspoken when it
came to their Diaspora Jewish brothers. Ber Borochov
eloquently diagnosed the inherent Jewish non-proletarian
tendencies. Max Nordau didn’t spare words when
confronting the intrinsic post-emancipated Jewish social
incompetence he saw. In the eyes of Hashomer Hatzair, the
Diaspora Jew is nothing but a caricature and for Ben
Frommer, it is nothing less than neurosis, which we are
dealing with. Seemingly, early Zionists were rather
fearless when elaborating on the social conditions of
their brothers. Yet, they were optimistic, they somehow
believed that a ‘new beginning’ would cure the
emancipated Jew of what seemed to some as an inevitable
‘disgraceful’ fate. They believed in a global
Jewish ‘homecoming’, they were convinced that
such an endeavour would heal the Jews of their symptoms.
In an article published just after the first Zionist
Congress (1897) Ahad Ha'Am, probably the prominent
polemist at the time, wrote “…the Congress
meant this: that in order to escape from all these
troubles (the Jewish anti-social symptoms as described by
Nordau) it is necessary to establish a Jewish
State.”5
Being inspired by 19th century ideologies
such as Nationalism, Marxism, Early Romanticism,
Darwinism and Life Philosophy (Leben Philosophie),
early Zionists preached for the emerging of the bond
between the Jew and his soil. Naively, they believed that
the love of farming, agriculture and nature would turn
the Emancipated Jew into an ordinary human being. Early
Zionists predicted that Zionism would create a new
authentic form of Jewishness in which Jews would be
entitled to love themselves for who they are rather than
who they claim to be. While the socialists amongst them
were talking about a new commitment to working class
ideology (Berl Kazanelson, Borochov, A.D. Gordon), those
on the right wing (Jabotinsky, Frommer) dreamed of a
master race that would emerge and rule the land.
Both right and left truly believed that due to their
homecoming, Jews would be able to replace their
traditional traits centred on chosenness with aspirations
towards sameness. They genuinely believed that Zionism
would turn Jews into ‘people like all people’.
As much as early Zionists had never tried to disguise the
extent of their prophetic dream, they didn’t make
any efforts to conceal their contempt towards their
brothers either. In their emerging fantasy of national
awakening, Jews were to divorce from their greed and
money seeking as well as their cosmopolitan tendencies.
In their vision, Zion was there to transform the Jew into
an ordinary organic human being. The move to Zion was
there to fill the chasm created by emancipation. The
settlement in Zion was there to give birth to a new man.
A Jew who looks at himself with pride, a Jew who fills
Jewishness with meaning. A Jew that is defined by
positive qualities rather than by mere negation.
The Dialectic of Negation
As much as things can be defined by what they are, things
are just as well defined by what they aren’t. As
much as something is defined by positive qualities for
being X, Y and Z, it can also be defined by not being V,
R and N. As much as my ‘cousin’ can be
understood as the child of my uncle or aunt, it can as
well be defined by an endless list of things this person
fails to be. For instance he or she isn’t my sister,
my brother, my grandmother, a potato, an airplane etc.
Similarly, as much as a German subject may be defined by
being a German national, who may speak the German
language and eats Wurst for lunch, the same German
subject can be easily defined by the endless list of
qualities and characteristics he lacks or fails to be. He
isn’t French or English, he doesn’t speak
Spanish or Farsi, he doesn’t eat humus for lunch, he
is not a potato and he is far from being a red brick
house.
When it comes to Jews, things are getting complicated.
While observant Jews can easily list more than a few
positive qualities they identify with, they for instance
follow Judaism, they practice Jewish laws, they follow
the Talmud, they follow Kosher dietary restrictions,
etc., emancipated secular Jews have very little to offer
in terms of positive characteristics to identify with.
Once you ask a secular Jew what makes him into a Jew you
may hear the following: “I am not a Christian nor am
I a Muslim.” OK then, but what is it that makes you
into a Jew in particular? You see, he may say, “I am
not exactly an American, French or British. I am somehow
different.” In fact, emancipated Jews would find it
hard to list any positive quality that may identify them
as Jews. As it seems, emancipated Jews are identified by
negation. They are made of the very many things they are
not.
This is exactly where Zionism interfered. It was there to
set the Jews in a project that aimed towards an authentic
identification. Zionism was there to let the Jew reflect
upon himself in terms of positive qualities. Within the
Zionist phantasmic reality, the generations of
home-comers were there to declare: ‘We are the new
Jews, we are Israelis, we are human beings like all other
human beings, we live on our land, the land of our
fathers. We speak Hebrew, the language of our
forefathers, we eat the fruit and vegetables that we,
ourselves farmed on our soil.”
Evidently, Zionism has failed completely due to various
reasons. Though the Israelis speak Hebrew and dwell on a
land they associate with their collective past, the
‘new Jew’ failed in transforming himself into
an authentic humanist. Israel is an urban capitalistic
society that maintains its existence at the expense of
others. The bond to soil and nature didn’t last
long. If this is not enough, Israelis didn’t really
manage to divorce the dialectic of negation. Israel has
never become a state of its citizens. It is still a
racist state that employs racially orientated immigration
laws.
In fact, Zionism could never have prevailed. It has been
entangled with colonial sins from day one. Yet, as much
as Zionism has quickly established itself as a criminal
practice, some of its criticism of the emancipated
Diaspora Jewish identity is worth looking into. At the
end of the day, the so-called emancipated Diaspora Jew is
still defined by negation and this fact alone has very
many grave implications.
The Politics of Negation
‘Dialectic of negation’ is there to throw light
over the murderous reality that has been set by the
Wolfowitzes, the Perles and other emancipated warmongers
such as the AJC (American Jewish Committee) that is
currently lobbying for a war against Iran. It is not
really surprising that both in America and in Britain it
was mainly Zionists lobbies that were lobbying
enthusiastically for a war in Iraq. In the name of
‘Democracy’, Coca-Cola and ‘Human
Rights’ Israeli lobbies were and still are promoting
the whipping of country after country.
As far as the newly emerging Neocon ideology is
concerned, we are apparently moving from a discourse of
‘promised land’ into politics of ‘promised
planet’.
But is it only the Neocons that are here to take the
blame? At the end of the day, the Neocons are not that
far off from their Bundist parents.
I suggest that we slow down and to ask ourselves what
Jewish Diaspora identity means in the 21st century. We
better try to find out whether the notion of emancipated
Jewish identity has changed at all since the early
Zionists exposed its problematic character more than a
century ago. We better ask how for instance does a
‘Jewish Marxist’ refer to his Jewishness after
all? During my years in Europe I have come across groups
of people who call themselves ‘Jews for Peace’,
‘Jews for Justice in Palestine’, ‘Jews for
this’ and ‘Jews for that’. I have recently
heard about ‘Jews for Boycott of Israeli
Goods’. Occasionally I end up asking myself what
stands at the core of this racially orientated separatist
peace-loving endeavour. I may as well admit that though I
have come across many German peace activists, I have
never come across an Aryan Palestinian Solidarity group
or even Caucasian Anti-War campaigners. It is somehow
Jews and only Jews who engage in racially orientated
peace campaigning.
As frightening as it may sound, Borochov and Nordau had
provided us with the answer. In the seeking of a
‘political identity’, the emancipated Jew ends
up succumbing himself to the dialectic of negation. His
political identity is defined by what he isn’t
rather than by who he is. United as a group, they
aren’t Germans, they aren’t British, they
aren’t Aryans, they aren’t Muslims, they
aren’t just ordinary proletariats, they aren’t
just common working class people. They are Jews because
they aren’t anything else. At a first glance it
seems as if nothing is wrong in being defined by
negation. Yet, a deeper critical glance into the notion
of negation may reveal some of the devastating aspects of
this form of emancipated dialectic.
Ethical thinking may be the first victim of the dialectic
of negation. In order to think ethically, genuine,
authentic, organic thinking is of the essence. According
to Kant’s categorical imperative, an ethical being
acts ‘only according to that maxim by which he can
at the same time will that it would become a universal
law’. In other words, Kant identifies ethical
thinking with a positive, authentic, genuine orientation
that sets one at a self-search for universal insight.
Clearly, such a process involves thorough
self-reflection. Negation, on the other hand, requires
the opposite, it involves scouting and searching into
others’ praxis. Again, rather than understanding who
you are, you are engaging in differentiating yourself
from the other. Rather than looking into oneself, the
negating subject sets his relationships with his
surrounding environment based on pragmatic and practical
decision-making. At most, he may present a pretence of
ethical thinking but not more than that.
Early Zionists were critical enough to expose the
non-ethical characteristics amongst their fellow
brothers. Zionism was there to erect a new ethical Jew, a
genuine moral being. Yet, the premise was flawed from the
very beginning. Zionists wanted to make Jews ‘people
like other people’. To a certain extent they wanted
Jews to convey the pretence of being people like other
people. The failure of the Zionist dream made it clear
that even the new Jew, the Zionist, cannot engage in
authentic ethical thinking. At most, they look ethical
instead of becoming ethically orientated.
As frightening as it may sound, looking at Israeli
Hasbara as well as at Ziocon politics around the world
and especially in America and the UK, it reveals the
bitter truth of the matter. Ziocons and Hasbara always
presents an ‘ethical like’ argument. They would
employ what seems as a moral excuse in order to introduce
destruction and carnage. As we know the ‘only
democracy in the Middle East’ is also the one that
has been starving millions of Palestinians in
concentration camps for decades. Similarly, the
Wolfowitzes and Perles dragged America and Britain into a
futile criminal war in Iraq in the name of
‘democracy’, ‘human rights’ and
‘liberalism’. Clearly the Palestinians and the
Iraqis are victims of the politics of negation. But they
are not alone. The Western subject who is stained with
the crime of genocide is as well a victim of the Western
shift towards politics of negation. Rather than defining
ourselves by who we are, we get accustomed to our
politicians defining us for how we hate (or whom is it we
suppose to hate: red, ‘axis of evil’,
Islamofascists, etc.).
More frightening is the fact that people who succumb to
the dialectic of negation cannot engage in peace-making
and reconciliation. The reason is simple; the notion of
peace may entail a collapse of the mechanism of negation.
From the point of view of negation, reconciliation means
elimination. Loving your neighbour may lead towards an
identity loss. As early Zionists observed, the condition
of emancipation set the Western Jew into a complicated
identity crisis. Making peace with humanity would mean
the loss of the Jewish identity. Needless to say that in
the last centuries millions of European and American Jews
have chosen peace and assimilation. They have divorced
their Jewish identity and disappeared into the crowed.
Yet, those who maintain negation as a means of
identifying are those who inherently and categorically
oppose the notion of peace. Painfully enough, more than
often they do just that in the name of peace.
Most interestingly is the fact that emancipated Jewish
identity is defined by negation may help us to realise
why is it that emancipated Jews are so often settling
comfortably in political campaigns and revolutionary
movements: They are always against something. It will be
the bourgeoisie, capital, colonialism, Islam, human
rights abuse, historic revisionism, Zionism and so forth.
Seemingly, the journey between ‘dialectic of
negation’ and ‘politics of hate’ is rather
short.
Negation and the Palestinian
Solidarity Discourse
To be an emancipated Jew is to be defined by negation.
And it is this fact alone that may explain why it is that
the Palestinian solidarity intellectual discourse is
saturated with emancipated Jewish contributors. More than
a few Jews indeed oppose the Zionist crime. Yet, due to
their emancipated secularist enthusiasm, sometimes it
looks as if the Palestinian discourse has been
transformed into a Jewish internal debate.
The reason is simple, negation of Zionism is a good
enough reason to set a powerful Jewish political
identity. Though this may explain why Jews are so
involved in Palestinian solidarity, it may additionally
explain why the Palestinian solidarity movement has never
made it into a global mass movement. Apparently, not many
people around are that keen to join a liberal synagogue.
As it seems, though the battle against Zionism suits some
righteous Jews for their personal and political needs,
the Palestinian people were the last to benefit from the
Jewish moral awakening.
However, I am the last person to argue that Jews should
have no say in the Palestinian solidarity movement. As
things stand, righteous Jews around the world are highly
motivated to help Palestine. Considering the scale of the
crimes committed by the Jewish state this may as well
make some sense. Yet, emancipated Jews should be aware of
their role in the movement. Emancipated Jews should learn
to differentiate between their own self-centred political
interests and the Palestinian cause that is becoming a
very dynamic notion saturated with complexity. I truly
believe that Jews would contribute much just by letting
the solidarity movement take off and leave the Ghetto.
Saying just that, an old Jewish joke comes to mind:
Q: What is the difference between a dog and a Jewish
mother?
A: A dog lets go of the bone sooner or later...
It is time for emancipated peace-loving Jews to follow
the dog rather than their mothers, they should just let
go. I would suggest that for a Jew to fight Zionism is to
turn his back on Jewishness and to make peace with
humanity. To fight Zionism is to prove that Nordau,
Frommer and Borochov were totally wrong. The Jew is not
timid, he is brave enough to face the evil within.
For a Jew to fight Zionism is to move from Jerusalem to
Athens, to join humanity and to leave the politics of
negation behind.
1 http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/ch02.htm#n10
2 http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/ch02.htm#n10
3 http://www.angelfire.com/il2/borochov/eco.html
4 http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/6640/zion/nordau.html
5 http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/6640/zion/jewishproblem.html