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Yet more football, Zionism, Occupation
Posted on: Friday, June 25, 2004
Heye shalom! And what a fine day it is what with England having been routed in Portugal last night! It really was gut-wrenching experience; uncertainty until the very last minute. As I had said: I'm not a follower of football by any definition but last night was really a wonderful game--all 120 minutes of it, really good soccer. Well, the Englishers are out; good riddance. Naturally, they can't go quietly but have to bitch about the supposed iniquity of the disallowed goal and cry yet again "boo-hoo, we was robbed". Pathetic. Why was the goal disallowed? Because John Terry, England's number five, very deliberately held down goalkeeper Ricardo's arm as the latter extended it to deflect the oncoming football. And he did this in the five-meter goal area in which every contact with the goalkeeper is prohibited, even normally allowed tackle methods. So, Terry's action stopped the game and, naturally, any immediate scores were rescinded. Hey, rules are rules. Therefore, no England, you "was" not "robbed"; you merely got beaten by a better team. Suck it up.
Well, I'm back posting to Usenet. It used to be a pastime of mine a couple of years ago and I'd spend hours posting and replying, mostly on alt.politics.british. It was fun; we were all like a family almost. Of course, most of us despised each other--after all, how could Reich-wingers, left-wingers, libertarians and secular humanists possibly get along well--but it was good to see people whose silly "arguments" you could deconstruct piece-by-piece there daily, offering yet more fodder. It's changed now. Most of the regulars left in the meantime. There don't seem to be as many articles on the Middle East (touch wood) and just as well, for it's very easy to get sucked in and take the bait of any dope who thinks they're the foremost expert on the matter and whose "expertise" is encapsulated in their sigs: "zionism=$=racism". LOL!!
I promised I'd offer my dubious wisdom about Zionism. What IS Zionism? Zionism is the belief that the Jewish nation, after millennia of pogroms and persecution which culminated in haShoah, deserves the protection offered to a nation by its having its own state. It's as simple as that. Zionism says NOTHING about the superiority or inferiority of Jews or anyone else, the "purity" of such a state, its size, its territorial occupation, even its location. Indeed, early Zionists at the end of the nineteenth century actually toyed with the notion of establishing a Jewish state in Uganda, Australia or South America. Nevertheless, Jews and the international community actors at the time resolved to establish Medinat Yisra'el in the Palestinian Mandate. THAT is what Zionism is.
Now, has Zionism been responsible for the suffering of the Palestinian people, their refugees, the occupation of Yesha, etc? Well, one by one. The State of Israel was established in 1948. Was there at that time even a semblance of a national consciousness of a Palestinian people and/or a movement toward their own nation state? No. If anything, they did not even call themselves Palestinians and their leaders had only a few years earlier advocated joining a greater Syria. Of course, things have changed since but we're talking about then. Did the Jewish immigrants displace the "indigenous"* population? Well, most Jewish immigrated to the Mandate BEFORE the war in 1948 which, co-incidentally, was started by external Arab states. And before 1948 there were NO refugees and there was comparatively little strife. So, how did Palestinians become refugees? In the war of 1948 which was started by other Arabs.
*Were the non-Jews in the Palestinian Mandate in 1947/48 really "indigenous people who have lived on the land for generations", as Israel's detractors like to parrot? Many were; a lot were not. When Britain took over the Mandate at the end of the Great War, its administration, together with Zionist immigrants who introduced European standards of professional expertise, healthcare, etc, effected a radical change in what had until then been mainly barren land. The infrastructure was built up, infant mortality rate slashed, jobs created and so on. This attracted inward migration from neighboring Egypt and Syria. How many Arabs thus immigrated is difficult to say. But in 1918 there were 570,000 Arabs in the Mandate (very important point: Mandate includes both today's Israel proper AND YESHA!), while in 1947/48 they numbered almost 1.2 million, which is a roughly 100 per-cent. increase and is considerably more than comparable rates of adjacent countries, especially when one considers the fact that industrialization tends to DEPLETE the natality rate, not the other way round.
But the main point is that despite an influx of Jewish refugees into Israel, no Palestinian was displaced resultantly. And, as I pointed, the first ever Palestinian was made a refugee in consequence of the 1948 war. Now, is the cause of this ongoing conflict Israel's presence in Yesha? Logic says no: the conflict started in 1948 whereas Israel first entered Yesha in 1967. So, there had been war and animosity between Israel and the Arab world almost twenty full years before the beginning of the "occupation". I do NOT think Israel should stay in Yesha; I actually think we should withdraw as soon as possible (not because of the threat of terror but because I see that as the decent and lawful thing to do). But I wanted to make it clear that the "occupation" is not the root-cause of this enmity and, consequentially, terminating the "occupation" will not end the conflict either.
B'shalom...
Posted on: Friday, June 25, 2004
ב''ה
Heye shalom! And what a fine day it is what with England having been routed in Portugal last night! It really was gut-wrenching experience; uncertainty until the very last minute. As I had said: I'm not a follower of football by any definition but last night was really a wonderful game--all 120 minutes of it, really good soccer. Well, the Englishers are out; good riddance. Naturally, they can't go quietly but have to bitch about the supposed iniquity of the disallowed goal and cry yet again "boo-hoo, we was robbed". Pathetic. Why was the goal disallowed? Because John Terry, England's number five, very deliberately held down goalkeeper Ricardo's arm as the latter extended it to deflect the oncoming football. And he did this in the five-meter goal area in which every contact with the goalkeeper is prohibited, even normally allowed tackle methods. So, Terry's action stopped the game and, naturally, any immediate scores were rescinded. Hey, rules are rules. Therefore, no England, you "was" not "robbed"; you merely got beaten by a better team. Suck it up.
Well, I'm back posting to Usenet. It used to be a pastime of mine a couple of years ago and I'd spend hours posting and replying, mostly on alt.politics.british. It was fun; we were all like a family almost. Of course, most of us despised each other--after all, how could Reich-wingers, left-wingers, libertarians and secular humanists possibly get along well--but it was good to see people whose silly "arguments" you could deconstruct piece-by-piece there daily, offering yet more fodder.
I promised I'd offer my dubious wisdom about Zionism. What IS Zionism? Zionism is the belief that the Jewish nation, after millennia of pogroms and persecution which culminated in haShoah, deserves the protection offered to a nation by its having its own state. It's as simple as that. Zionism says NOTHING about the superiority or inferiority of Jews or anyone else, the "purity" of such a state, its size, its territorial occupation, even its location. Indeed, early Zionists at the end of the nineteenth century actually toyed with the notion of establishing a Jewish state in Uganda, Australia or South America. Nevertheless, Jews and the international community actors at the time resolved to establish Medinat Yisra'el in the Palestinian Mandate. THAT is what Zionism is.
Now, has Zionism been responsible for the suffering of the Palestinian people, their refugees, the occupation of Yesha, etc? Well, one by one. The State of Israel was established in 1948. Was there at that time even a semblance of a national consciousness of a Palestinian people and/or a movement toward their own nation state? No. If anything, they did not even call themselves Palestinians and their leaders had only a few years earlier advocated joining a greater Syria. Of course, things have changed since but we're talking about then. Did the Jewish immigrants displace the "indigenous"* population? Well, most Jewish immigrated to the Mandate BEFORE the war in 1948 which, co-incidentally, was started by external Arab states. And before 1948 there were NO refugees and there was comparatively little strife. So, how did Palestinians become refugees? In the war of 1948 which was started by other Arabs.
*Were the non-Jews in the Palestinian Mandate in 1947/48 really "indigenous people who have lived on the land for generations", as Israel's detractors like to parrot? Many were; a lot were not. When Britain took over the Mandate at the end of the Great War, its administration, together with Zionist immigrants who introduced European standards of professional expertise, healthcare, etc, effected a radical change in what had until then been mainly barren land. The infrastructure was built up, infant mortality rate slashed, jobs created and so on. This attracted inward migration from neighboring Egypt and Syria. How many Arabs thus immigrated is difficult to say. But in 1918 there were 570,000 Arabs in the Mandate (very important point: Mandate includes both today's Israel proper AND YESHA!), while in 1947/48 they numbered almost 1.2 million, which is a roughly 100 per-cent. increase and is considerably more than comparable rates of adjacent countries, especially when one considers the fact that industrialization tends to DEPLETE the natality rate, not the other way round.
But the main point is that despite an influx of Jewish refugees into Israel, no Palestinian was displaced resultantly. And, as I pointed, the first ever Palestinian was made a refugee in consequence of the 1948 war. Now, is the cause of this ongoing conflict Israel's presence in Yesha? Logic says no: the conflict started in 1948 whereas Israel first entered Yesha in 1967. So, there had been war and animosity between Israel and the Arab world almost twenty full years before the beginning of the "occupation". I do NOT think Israel should stay in Yesha; I actually think we should withdraw as soon as possible (not because of the threat of terror but because I see that as the decent and lawful thing to do). But I wanted to make it clear that the "occupation" is not the root-cause of this enmity and, consequentially, terminating the "occupation" will not end the conflict either.
B'shalom...
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