bsmall2

Numbering Palestinians by Israeli Military

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 06:43:46 +0200

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

I saw an FB post with the picture of a man with the number "17" on his forehead and the caption "Israel brands Palestinian detainees in West Bank with numbers on their foreheads" and was reminded of Noam Chomsky's Fateful Triangle book:

.> On Holocaust Day, the 27 of Nissan [the date in the Jewish calendar], the people who were arrested were ordered to write numbers on their hands with their own hands, in memory of the Jews in the extermination camps. --- Aharon Bachar , “Do not say: We did not know, we did not hear’,” Yediot Ahronot, Dec. 3, 1982 .

For Context:

.> Aharon Bachar writes of “the things that are being done in my name and in yours”: “we will never be able to escape the responsibility and to say that we did not know and we did not hear.” He describes a meeting between Labor Alignment leaders (including some of the most noted hawks, such as Golda Meir’s adviser Israel Galili) and Menachem Begin, where they presented to Begin “detailed accounts of terrorist acts [against Arabs] in the conquered territories.” They described the “collective punishment in the town of Halhul,” in these words:

.> .> The men were taken from their houses beginning at midnight, in pajamas, in the cold. The notables and other men were concentrated in the square of the mosque and held there until morning. Meanwhile men of the Border Guards [noted for their cruelty] broke into houses; beating people with shouts and curses. During the many hours that hundreds of people were kept in the mosque square, they were ordered to urinate and excrete on one another and also to sing Hatikva [“The Hope,” the national anthem of Israel] and to call out “Long Live the State of Israel.” Several times people were beaten and ordered to crawl on the ground. Some were even ordered to lick the earth. At the same time four trucks were commandeered and at daybreak, the inhabitants were loaded on the trucks, about 100 in each truck, and taken like sheep to the Administration headquarters in Hebron.
.> .> On Holocaust Day, the 27 of Nissan [the date in the Jewish calendar], the people who were arrested were ordered to write numbers on their hands with their own hands, in memory of the Jews in the extermination camps.

.> The report continues, detailing how prisoners are beaten, tortured and humiliated, how settlers are permitted into the prisons to take part in the beating of prisoners, how the settlers brutalize the local inhabitants with impunity, even in the case of a settler who killed an Arab, whose identity is known, but who is not arrested.[^113] All legitimate, presumably, by the standards of the New Republic. All legitimate, presumably, by the standards of the New Republic, as quoted above. The same correspondent reports similar stories a few weeks earlier, presented to top government officials who did not even take the trouble to check the information, provided by an Israeli soldier.[^114]

[^113] Aharon Bachar , “Do not say: We did not know, we did not hear’,” Yediot Ahronot, Dec. 3, 1982.
[^114] Aharon Bachar , Yediot Ahronot, Nov. 5, 1982 .

#NoamChomsky #FatefulTriangleBook #AharonBachar #IsraelPalestine #TheNewRepublic #YediotAhronot

Noam Chomksy Fateful Triangle Book Israel Palestine

Supporters of Isreal, support who?

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 03:38:36 +0200

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

It's hard to grasp that awful "Illegal means" have been wreaking havoc for decades...

.> General (Res.) Mattityahu Peled observed, the “state of near hysteria” and the “blindly chauvinistic and narrow-minded” support for the most reactionary policies within Israel poses “the danger of prodding Israel once more toward a posture of calloused intransigence.”^10 The well-known Israeli journalist and Zionist historian Simha Flapan describes “the prejudice of American Jewry” as now “the major obstacle to an American-Palestinian and Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, without which there is little chance to move forward in the difficult and involved peace process.”^11 In concentrating on the role of American Jewry, these Israeli writers focus much too narrowly, I believe.

.> a staff writer for Ha’aretz (essentially, the Israeli New York Times) who says that “you American Jews, you liberals, you lovers of democracy are supporting its destruction here by not speaking out against the government’s actions,” referring to the wave of repression in the occupied territories under the “civilian administration” of Professor Menachem Milson and General Ariel Sharon introduced in November 1981 (see chapter 5, sections 5-8). He goes on to explain the plans of Begin and Sharon: to drive a large number of Arabs out of the West Bank, specifically, the leaders and those with a potential for leadership, “by every illegal means.” How?

.> You activate terrorists to plant bombs in the cars of their elected mayors, you arm the settlers and a few Arab quislings to run rampages through Arab towns, pogroms against property, not against people. A few Arabs have been killed by settlers. The murderers are known, but the police are virtually helpless. They have their orders. What’s your excuse for not speaking out against these violations of Israeli law and Jewish morality?

.> The settlers, he adds, are “Religious Jews who follow a higher law and do whatever their rabbis tell them. At least one of the Gush Emunim rabbis has written that it is a mitzvah [religious duty] to destroy Amalek [meaning, the non-Jewish inhabitants], including women and children.”

- ^10 General (Res.) Mattityahu Peled, New Outlook (Tel Aviv), May/June 1975, reporting on a visit to the United States.
- ^11 New Outlook editor Simha Flapan, speaking at an October 1979 conference in Washington; cited by Merle Thorpe, Jr., President, Foundation for Middle East Peace, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, 97th Congress, First Session, Dec. 16, 1981 (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1982, p. 143).
- Jessie Lurie, Jewish Post & Opinion, May 28, 1982.

#NoamChomsky #FatefulTriangleBook #MattityahuPeled #SimhaFlapan #JessieLurie

Noam Chomsky Fateful Triangle Book Supporters of Israel

Terrorism Innovations from Israeli Military

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 03:05:47 +0200

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

Before the pager and other digital device explosions as an innovative new form of terrorism warfare, the Isreali miliatry might also be credited with inventing the plane hijacking. And we've been led to think this sort of "retail terrorism" (not the "wholesale terrorism" of carpet bombing and state-sponsored death squads and torture regimes) is mostly driven by "non-state actors." A closer look might show that it's a case of "monkey see monkey do" with the "non-state actors" emulating their bigger already-a-state's violent militaries.

.> In the light of [USA]American beliefs about the history of terrorism, it should perhaps be observed that along with acts of piracy such as these, Israel has also resorted to hijacking of airplanes, and may indeed have initiated this practice. In December 1954, a Syrian civilian airliner was captured by Israeli military aircraft to obtain hostages for exchange with Israeli soldiers who had been captured within Syria. The Prime Minister of Israel, Moshe Sharett, states in his diary that he was informed by the State Department that “our action was without precedent in the history of international practice.” Note that this Israeli action is a direct precedent for much later PLO actions to capture hostages for exchange with captured guerrillas, as in the major terrorist incidents that were widely and properly denounced in the West; at Ma’alot in 1974, for example.

.> See TNCW{Towards a New Cold War], p. 458, citing Livia Rokach’s very important study, *Israel’s Sacred Terrorism (AAUG, Belmont, 1980), based largely on Sharett’s Personal Diary (Yoman Ishi, Hebrew, Ma’ariv, 1979).

#NoamChomsky #FatefulTriangleBook #MasheSharret #IsraeliPrimeMinister #PlaneHijacking #TerrorismHistory

Noam Chomsky Fateful Triangle Book

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 03:30:24 +0200

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

Looks like we can't avoid crediting the USA military for psycho innovations as well.

.> The widespread physical injuries are intended to have a larger psychological effect, according to Jezzini. "I would compare it to an operation made by the Americans in Vietnam where they actually planted faulty ammunition that made the guns explode for the Viet Cong on the NVA and during the Vietnam war,” said Jezzini, referring to an operation called Project Eldest Son.

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-pager-attack

#JeremyScahill #MurtazaHussain #TerrorismWarfare #IsraeliMilitary #USAmilitary

Water Offering Sacrifice

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 05:34:44 +0200

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

Has anyone ever reacted to the Dune books the way China Mieville? After seeing Mieville mentioned by Justin Podur in a blog post I got into Perdido Street Station and worked through other books in that series. On-line articles and interviews told me that his books were a reaction against the fantasy conventions set by J.R.R. Tolkein with the Lord of the Rings books. In response to all-white, rural, and fuedal settings he decide to write diverse, urban, and polyarchic(?) settings.

The idea for a reversed Dune setting came to mind while reading about Samid on Noam Chomsky's Fateful Triangle. What if the inhabited universe had been overtaken by the non-violent, long-suffering, forbearing ones instead of the mass-killing, Messia-following militaries?

The idea of an anti-Dune, or Dune-reversal, series came to mind again while reading Madison Smartt Bell's account of a Haitian Vodou ceremony:

The vessel was a curious affair, a pot of white enameled tin fitted into a similar tin plate, like a cup and saucer for a giant. The pot held a large amount of clear, clean, potable-looking water, as much as half a gallon. Clean water, water of any kind, is in scarce supply in Haiti, and this lack is at the bottom of many problems: communicable diseases, environmental deterioration, starvation. For such reasons, the ceremony of jété dlo was a genuine, terrible sacrifice—the unconditional offering of the most valuable thing you possessed. I took the pot and poured water three times on the ground before each portal, and when I had completed the circuit, I poured what was left on the spot of earth where I had previously been sitting. This too was an offering to Legba, and I poured in a counterclockwise circle, drawing the vévé for my journey in water on the ground.

- https://creativenonfiction.org/writing/soul-in-a-bottle/

Shehadeh distinguishes three ways of responding to occupation. The first is that of “blind hate,” the second, “mute submission.” To the captive population, the first way is that of the freedom fighter, the second, that of the quisling. To the conqueror, the first way is that of the terrorist, the second, that of the moderate. The paymasters keep to the rhetoric of the conqueror, naturally. What then is “the third way”? That is the way of the Samid, “the steadfast one,” who watches his home turned into a prison. “You, Samid, choose to stay in that prison, because it is your home, and because you fear that if you leave, your jailer will not allow you to return. Living like this, you must constantly resist the twin temptations of either acquiescing in the jailer’s plan in numb despair, or becoming crazed by consuming hatred for your jailer and yourself, the prisoner.” To be Samid...

- Fateful Triangle Noam Chomsky

#ChinaMieville #DuneBooks #AntiDune #DuneReversal #LordOfTheRings #LordOfTheRIngsReversal #FantasyBooks #HatianVodou #Vodou #MadisonSmarttBell #NoamChomsky #RajaShehadeh #Samid

Soul in a Bottle - Creative Nonfiction

It was normal and usual for a foreigner, a blan, to go through a period of anxiety and fear while planning a trip to Haiti. Perhaps it was even sensible. For Haitians of the diaspora, the risk of visiting their country was much greater, but I had taken to observing certain Haitian practices before I […]

Madison Smartt Bell ChinaMieville J.R.R. Tolkein Dune Books Fateful Triangle Book Noam Chomsky Raja Shehadeh Samid The Third Way

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 01:39:45 +0200

bs2

bsmall2@mstdn.jp

@bsmall2@tiksi.net
> #WilliamSmarth, a priest expelled by Papa Doc in 1969, was forced out... when his windshield was smashed. He found a machete poised above his head. "But brother," he said, "we are just four priests."..another threw a large rock..wounding him in the groin. The other passengers pulled Smarth back in as the car's driver accelerated through a hole that had opened in the barricade.. They disappeared into the night, rain pouring in through the shattered windshield. #Freycineau #PaulFarmer

Overuse of UN Vetos: Diaper Influence?

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 12:46:54 +0200

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

This paragraph and endnote from Fateful Triangle by Noam Chomsky reminded me that I want to see data on UN Vetos. It would be interesting to see a data visualization of Security Council Vetos... and General Assembly vetos too. Time for another search!! (I've searched before I think, but didn't find anything.. maybe this time)

Israel’s policies in the West Bank, Benvenisti concludes, are “an outgrowth of an imperial concept—‘I want this’—combined with the ability to go about taking it.” It must be stressed again that this “ability” is conferred by lavish U.S. funding, ideological support of the kind described, and diplomatic support; for example, the U.S. veto of an April 2, 1982 Security Council resolution calling on Israel to reinstate the ousted elected mayors Bassam Shak’a of Nablus, Karim Khalef of Ramallah, and Ibrahim Tawil of El Bireh, recent targets of terrorist attack (see pp. 56f.).* The U.S., which stood alone in voting against the resolution (Zaire abstained), regarded it as “one-sided.”

On the same day, the U.S. vetoed a resolution which “named no names and made no charges.” but “simply repeated United Nations Charter principles opposing intervention in the affairs of other countries and the use of force.” It was implicitly directed against U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, which at that time was still being denied. The U.S. objected to the resolution on the grounds that it “breeds cynicism” and “harms the United Nations” because “it undermines the Inter-American system” and “mocks the search for peace.” The basis for this charge was that the resolution called upon the Secretary General of the UN to keep the Security Council informed about the crisis in Central America and the Caribbean. Observers could recall no previous occasion when one country cast two vetoes on two different subjects at the same session. Those whose sense of humor inclines them in this direction might be intrigued to look back at the learned discussions by distinguished Western anthropologists on Russian vetoes in the early days of the UN, when the U.S. dominated the organization; the explanation offered was
that Russian negativism resulted from the practice of swaddling infants, “diaperology,” as the theory was called by the occasional skeptics.

#SwaddlingInfants #Diaperology of #RussianNegativism #UNVetos

Noam Chomsky Fateful Triangle Book UN Vetos West Bank

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 12:58:04 +0200

bs2

bsmall2@mstdn.jp

A barchart copied from the statista site in the first link of the post. Title: Who Vetoed the Most in the UN? > Number of UN Security Council resolutions vetoed by permanent member 1946-2017 USSR/Russian Federations 107 USA 79 UK 29 France 16 China 11

@bsmall2@tiksi.net

Found some Security Council Veto data. Are there General Assembly vetos too?

https://www.statista.com/chart/10758/un-security-council-resolutions-vetoed/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vetoed_United_Nations_Security_Council_resolutions

#UNVetos #SecurityCouncilVetos

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 13:07:51 +0200

bs2

bsmall2@mstdn.jp

A screenshot from the Japanese page linked in the post, a visualization of UN votes: Yes, No, Abstention(?欠損値？) Russia: Yes 3,876 No 814 USA: Yes 1,569 No 2,812 I'm not sure what the rest of the data labels mean yet.

@bsmall2@tiksi.net

I have to find more data on UN votes: Yes, No, Abstention..

The record for the Convention for the Rights of the Child is pretty damning, I remember hearing..

https://ja.exploratory.io/data/kei/United-Nations-Voting-Data-for-US-Canada-and-Russia-0781669549964935

#UNVotes #GeneralAssemblyVotes

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 13:22:54 +0200

bs2

bsmall2@mstdn.jp

A screenshot of the bottom part of a United Nations General Assembly Voting dataset from the page at the first link of the post. The annotations mention that "Mexico has voted "yes" the most number of times, followed by the Philippines and <br />Venezuela." and that "The US has voted "no" the most number of times, followed by Israel and the UK"

Another screenshot from the page at the first link of the post. This part of the United Nations General Assembly voting data visualization is annotated: "France has voted to "abstain" the most number of times, followed by the UK and <br />Belgium." and "European states, along with the US, Canada and Israel tend to vote "no" or "abstain" on more resoutlions."

@bsmall2@tiksi.net

There is an interactive visualization of UNGA voting. I took screenshots but it's not making much sense to me yet: the annotations are interesting though.

https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2019/how-has-my-country-voted-at-unga/index.html

Maybe the "Harvard dataset" is easy to work with?

https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/LEJUQZ

#UNGA #UNGAVoting #UNGAVotingDataSet #UNVotesDataset

Nahum

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 07:59:12 +0200

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

.> As for Nahum Goldmann, he became President of the World Zionist Organization from 1956 to 1968 but remained critical of Israel’s diplomacy, including its entry into the Cold War system on the side of the U.S. and its post-1967 rejectionism. He was also critical of the tactic of converting the Holocaust into a device to justify atrocities and murder. At the beginning of the Jewish New Year, in October 1981, he wrote:
.> .> We will have to understand that Jewish suffering during the Holocaust no longer will serve as a protection, and we certainly must refrain from using the argument of the Holocaust to justify whatever we may do. To use the Holocaust as an excuse for the bombing of Lebanon, for instance, as Menachem Begin does, is a kind of “Hillul Hashem” [sacrilege], a banalization of the sacred tragedy of the Shoah [Holocaust], which must not be misused to justify politically doubtful and morally indefensible policies.24 [ Shalom Network Newsletter (Berkeley), Oct./Nov. 1981, reprinted from the London Jewish Chronicle. See p. 446*.]

.> Goldmann was also one of those who felt that American “supporters of Israel” were causing it considerable harm. At the January 1981 meeting of the World Jewish Congress in Israel, he spoke of the need “to effect a change in our policy towards the Arabs.” “What Israel is doing in this regard is very bad,” he added, “and equally bad is the effect of the screams uttered by American Jewry.”25 [ Reprinted in Israel & Palestine (Paris), Oct./Nov. 1981. ] > He was also a sharp critic of the Lebanon invasion. Goldmann died in August 1982, after a lifetime of service to the Zionist cause. Prime Minister Begin did not attend his funeral and “no official statement of grief was issued by the government,” the American Jewish press observed, noting that this indicated the “shabby way” in which the Israeli government treats “its opponents.” A headline in the Jerusalem Post read: “Goldmann’s Death is Ignored.” PLO chairman Yasser Arafat sent condolences, stating:

.> .> The Palestinians mourn the death of Nahum Goldmann. He was a Jewish statesman of a unique personality. He fought for justice and legitimate rights for all peoples.26 [World Jewish Congress News & Views,Sept. 1982; Jewish Post & Opinion, Sept. 17, 1982; SOUTH, November 1982.]

#NoamChomsky #FatefulTriangleBook #NahumGoldmann #HolocaustPolitics

Noam Chomsky Fateful Triangle Book

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 08:01:57 +0200

bs2

bsmall2@mstdn.jp

🧵 from 1984(?) above to 2024 here:

> This old-new myth led to the sinister comparison between the soldiers and citizens killed on October 7, 2023, and the six million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis.
> Such a comparison is a total abuse of the Holocaust memory and, more importantly, an attempt to demonize the Palestinian anti-colonialist resistance, which began back in the 1920s – and will continue until Palestine is liberated.

https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-genocide-in-palestine-how-to-prevent-the-next-stage-from-happening-ilan-pappe/

#ilanpappe
@bsmall2@tiksi.net

Chosmky on Reprisal, Terrorism

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 12:20:28 +0200

bsmall2

bsmall2@tiksi.net

bs2 была создана публикация Sun, 08 Sep 2024 09:30:30 +0200

> ... the terms “terrorism” and “reprisal,” as noted earlier, are to a considerable extent terms of propaganda, not description.

> ... the categories of “terrorism” and “reprisal” are more ideological than descriptive.

#NoamChomsky #FatefulTriangleBook #ReprisalTerrorism #TerrorismReprisal

Israeli Military Operations in Lebanon in the 1970s

Israel’s attacks in Lebanon over the years were generally described in the U.S. as retaliation against PLO terrorism. As usual, the categories of “terrorism” and “reprisal” are more ideological than descriptive. One might, for example, raise the question of what the Palestinians were doing in Lebanon in the first place; they did not move there because they liked the scenery. The comparable question would not be regarded as irrelevant in the case of some official enemy conducting “retaliatory” or “preemptive” strikes against “terrorism,” say, attacks by the Russian-sponsored Afghan army against Afghan refugees in Pakistan (see note 4). Other questions also arise. For example, two days before the PLO terrorist attack in Ma’alot in May 1974, where 20 teen-age Israeli hostages from a paramilitary youth group (Gadna) were killed during an attempt to rescue the hostages after Israel had rejected negotiation efforts (the terrorist unit, from Hawatmeh’s Democratic Front, had previously killed five other Israelis, including 2 Arabs), an Israeli air attack on the village of El-Kfeir in Lebanon killed four civilians. The PLO raid is (properly) described here as terrorism, but not the Israeli air attack—which, in fact, is known (though barely known) here only because it happened to be the native village of the parents of U.S. Senator James Abourezk. According to Edward Said, the Ma’alot attack was “preceded by weeks of sustained Israeli napalm bombing of Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon” with over 200 killed. The aggressors concocted an elaborate and largely successful propaganda campaign in an effort to show that it was Nasser who was planning an attack, not they, comparing him to Hitler while they effectively mimicked Goebbels.

Noam Chomsky Fateful Triangle Book Terrorism