antichrist

Avraham Burg: The end of Zionism | World news | The Guardian

CommentThe end of Zionism

Israel must shed its illusions and choose between racist oppression and democracy


The Guardian, Monday 15 September 2003

Article historyThe Zionist revolution has always rested on two pillars: a just path and an ethical leadership. Neither of these is operative any longer. The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice. As such, the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep. There is a real chance that ours will be the last Zionist generation. There may yet be a Jewish state here, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly.
There is time to change course, but not much. What is needed is a new vision of a just society and the political will to implement it. Diaspora Jews for whom Israel is a central pillar of their identity must pay heed and speak out.

The opposition does not exist, and the coalition, with Ariel Sharon at its head, claims the right to remain silent. In a nation of chatterboxes, everyone has suddenly fallen dumb, because there's nothing left to say. We live in a thunderously failed reality. Yes, we have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvellous theatre and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or anti-missile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed.

It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.

It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. You can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see the occupation. Travelling on the fast highway that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied.

This cannot work. Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger for ever, it won't work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism's superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing.

We have grown accustomed to ignoring the suffering of the women at the roadblocks. No wonder we don't hear the cries of the abused woman living next door or the single mother struggling to support her children in dignity. We don't even bother to count the women murdered by their husbands.

Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centres of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated. We could kill a thousand ringleaders a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below - from the wells of hatred and anger, from the "infrastructures" of injustice and moral corruption.

If all this were inevitable, divinely ordained and immutable, I would be silent. But things could be different, and so crying out is a moral imperative.

Here is what the prime minister should say to the people: the time for illusions is over. The time for decisions has arrived. We love the entire land of our forefathers and in some other time we would have wanted to live here alone. But that will not happen. The Arabs, too, have dreams and needs.

Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean there is no longer a clear Jewish majority. And so, fellow citizens, it is not possible to keep the whole thing without paying a price. We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world's only Jewish state - not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish.

Do you want the greater land of Israel? No problem. Abandon democracy. Let's institute an efficient system of racial separation here, with prison camps and detention villages.

Do you want a Jewish majority? No problem. Either put the Arabs on railway cars, buses, camels and donkeys and expel them en masse - or separate ourselves from them absolutely, without tricks and gimmicks. There is no middle path. We must remove all the settlements - all of them - and draw an internationally recognised border between the Jewish national home and the Palestinian national home. The Jewish law of return will apply only within our national home, and their right of return will apply only within the borders of the Palestinian state.

Do you want democracy? No problem. Either abandon the greater land of Israel, to the last settlement and outpost, or give full citizenship and voting rights to everyone, including Arabs. The result, of course, will be that those who did not want a Palestinian state alongside us will have one in our midst, via the ballot box.

The prime minister should present the choices forthrightly: Jewish racism or democracy. Settlements, or hope for both peoples. False visions of barbed wire and suicide bombers, or a recognised international border between two states and a shared capital in Jerusalem.

Why, then, is the opposition so quiet? Perhaps because some would like to join the government at any price, even the price of participating in the sickness. But while they dither, the forces of good lose hope. Anyone who declines to present a clear-cut position - black or white - is collaborating in the decline. It is not a matter of Labour versus Likud or right versus left, but of right versus wrong, acceptable versus unacceptable. The law-abiding versus the lawbreakers. What's needed is not a political replacement for the Sharon government but a vision of hope, an alternative to the destruction of Zionism and its values by the deaf, dumb and callous.

Israel's friends abroad - Jewish and non-Jewish alike, presidents and prime ministers, rabbis and lay people - should choose as well. They must reach out and help Israel to navigate the road map toward our national destiny as a light unto the nations and a society of peace, justice and equality.

© Avraham Burg

· Avraham Burg was speaker of Israel's Knesset in 1999-2003 and is a former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel. Reprinted with permission of The Forward, which translated and adapted this essay from an article that originally appeared in Yediot Aharonot

comment@guardian.co.uk


AC
The bolded section is against international law that gives Palestinians refugees the right to return to original homeland - that is in Israel proper.

It is Zionist racism that is against such as well that the Palestinians may eventually outbreed the Jews if the right of return was to take place,

But love the article all the same

Axiom

Gilad Atzmon on Zionism and Jewish Identity on Vimeo

savethemales.ca - Henry Kissinger was a "Soviet" Agent

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"Sometimes the obligation of the intelligent is to restate the obvious. None more important than emphatically stating that there is a : ' Naked Emperor Elephant in the Room' " Axiom

antichrist

Quote:
Originally Posted by deanhogg
BTW- what is going on with your waist line ?

Igor
It shows 100% resilience to adverse economic conditions and continues years and years of uninterrupted growth.

AC
Just like Israel over the years despite adverse UN resolutions

Rex

Israel does not enjoy our freedom and safety so you cannot compare it with our standards. Israel is OK, long live Israel.

Axiom

Admin - we have a bot that needs attending to .

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"Sometimes the obligation of the intelligent is to restate the obvious. None more important than emphatically stating that there is a : ' Naked Emperor Elephant in the Room' " Axiom

Rex

This is just bulldust.

antichrist

\\Igor: I don't think that Icon and bunch of his loony friends make up three quarters of the world. Or is it another infamous approximation?

AC
Well the recent vote in the UN against illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine was about 130-1, the veto by USA, that is more than 3/4 to one.

When the USA cops another 9/11 they might wake up to themselves

antichrist

EVENTS IN TIME (BIBLE PROPHECY LITERALLY FULFILLED)(BY GOD): 2/7/10 - 2/14/10
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Isolated and battered, Israeli doves hold protest By DIAA HADID, Associated Press Writer – Sat Feb 13, 3:57 am ET

JERUSALEM – Israel's battered pro-peace camp is showing signs of life with a weekly Jerusalem protest by a motley collection of anarchists, intellectuals and radical rabbis, but they face a public increasingly hostile to their point of view.

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In the latest protest Friday, some 250 demonstrators assembled by a road blowing on shrieking whistles and loudly banging on drums. You have no shame! they chanted at Jewish settlers.Several police officers watched warily across the road, backed by riot police wielding batons and assault rifles.The weekly demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah began after Israeli police evicted Palestinian families from the flash point neighborhood and allowed Jewish settlers to move into their homes.Numbers swelled after police began arresting protesters. Activists shared protest videos on YouTube and Facebook. Anarchists mingled with rabbis, veteran activists, former politicians whose left-wing views have edged out of the mainstream and prominent Israelis like Moshe Halbertal, who helped draft the Israeli army's code of ethics.Anger over the evictions and the apparent crackdown on freedom of speech inspired Holocaust survivor and veteran activist Max Moray, 84, to join a recent protest after years of shirking them. It was the first protest for Ariel Gommershtadt, 26. The only other demonstration he'd ever attended was one he helped disperse as an army conscript, he said.

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the story is supposed to be about Naomi Chazan but cant find on smh site. She is a Jewish peace activist who campaigns against what Israel is doing to Palestinians, but she is turned upon by her own people. You can google her.

Just2Good

If you summarize this post into two short sentences I might actually read it.

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"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

~ Isaiah Berlin ~

Iconoclast

If you cannot be bothered to read the article then perhaps you lose the right to have an opinion on its contents.

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The individual is hopeless without the group.
The group is hopeless without its individuals.

antichrist

I cut to be bone just like the Palestinians have been cut

Just2Good

AC summarised it for me. Basically, the article says that the Palestinians have been victimized.

I try not to have an opinion on Isreali-Palestinian affairs. I am indifferent to issues which are far removed from me, and which do not concern me. If you are honest, you are probably as indifferent as I am for the same reasons.

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"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

~ Isaiah Berlin ~

antichrist

like many others (your mate KB) also does not want to hold opinions. Australians should have an opinion because their rep in the UN 60 years ago was quite forward in promoting the Jewish state from stolen territory.

Is recognising stolen property such a difficult committment. Jews who had art works stolen during the Holocaust are still claiming back such now after 65 years. And as well Israel have re-stolen Palestine for the second time, first time 3,000 years ago during genocide when God permitted them to rape virgins.

- V -

'Yo'av Shamir's 2009 documentary on anti-Semitism, "Defamation," demonstrates that Jews are prisoners of Zionism as much as Palestinians and the rest of the world.

I found it painful to watch young Israelis being forced into mental cages. They steel themselves in fury against the world as they watch Holocaust atrocities and are taught that Jews are universally hated for no reason. On a trip to Poland, they actually play act being hunted by the Nazis.'

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"Few have the stomach to pursue truth , yet most know in their gut something is wrong" V

"But everyone knows the media doesn't inform. Duhhhhhh !! "

antichrist

Why not blame a Jewish conspiracy?
BY: IMRE SALUSINSZKY, NSW POLITICAL REPORTER From: The Australian April

OPPOSITION groups in Libya and Middle Eastern countries should abandon their protests and return to their homes and workplaces.

These deluded protesters appear to believe their problems stem from the corrupt despots who run their countries.

This is not correct. Their problems stem from a sliver of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, 470km long and 135km wide at its widest point.

This tiny nation, Israel, is the root cause of all the problems in the region.

How do we know this?

Because we have been taught it for the past 25 years, by Left intellectuals in the West.

This is why it has been so baffling to discover, over recent months, that the populations of those neighbouring countries do not appear to be paying attention.

Why don't they attend to the message of Marrickville Council, in inner western Sydney, which has imposed a boycott on Israel while leaving relations with Cuba, Zimbabwe and other dictatorships intact?


Why would the council do this if Israel was not the cause of all the problems in its region?

So I say to these "protesters": Where are your banners denouncing the Zionist menace? Why are you focused on an entirely different set of grievances? How can you ignore the root cause of all your troubles?

Actually, I think the answer to these questions is not far to seek.

It's Jewish propaganda, plain and simple, that has deceived them. And don't say we weren't warned.

For example, six days after the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, John Pilger wrote an article in The New Statesman identifying the root cause of those attacks - no prizes for guessing who was to blame - and adding that this root cause would never be understood, by virtue of "the collaborative silence of the Jewish establishment".

A year earlier, David Hicks, one of Australia's foremost authorities on the Middle East, wrote to his mum: "The Jews have complete financial and media control many of them are in the Australian government."

How could Hicks - a man who had a prize-winning ballet based on his experiences and who will be a star guest at the Sydney Writers' Festival next month - be wrong?

These deluded protesters in Libya and countries in the Middle East should get back to work.

AC
the major difference between Israel and the other countries is that Israel is a foreign nation inflicting harm on the Palestinians whilst the other conflicts are internal. Also in those other conflicts there are no questions of the inhabitants right to be there (except of natives in Carribean islands in case of Cuba) - whereas there is absolutely no right for the Israeli state to be created nor to be continue to exist.







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Closed V's "holo-hoax" thread.

There is a minimum level of respect required.
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AC
almost everyone agrees including myself. But Israel does exactly the same cover up job in denying Palestinian rights for 60 years - they can not even allowed to remember Catastrophe Day in Israel - the Zionists are also in denial mode, in fact decades before the Holocaust deniers were