Tuesday, October 30, 2007
What really happened at Oxford - Finkelstein comments:
Insofar as the lies about what happened at the Oxford Union are getting more and more appalling, I have very reluctantly decided to post the email from the President of the Oxford Union disinviting me.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Rewriting history before the ink has dried
Monday, October 29, 2007
Still more on the Oxford Union [Peter Tatchell]
Monday, October 29, 2007
More on the Oxford Union [Ghada Karmi]
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Israeli soldier writes President of Oxford Union
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Shouldn't there be a mandatory decent interval before history is rewritten?
Finkelstein comments: Many months ago I was invited to the Oxford Union to debate the one-state vs. two-state settlement for the Israel-Palestine conflict. At the very last minute I was dropped allegedly due to pressures from Professor Dershowitz. Appalled by Oxford Union's capitulation, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, and Ghada Karmi withdrew. Here's how the Jerusalem Post construes what happened.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Isn't it time to seek therapy for his obsession? [Alan Dershowitz]
........................................
Intellectual terrorism
Ghada Karmi, The Guardian, October 25, 2007
Appeasing bullies like Dershowitz will not stop them. It will rather encourage them to go further. The question is, do we in this country want a McCarthyite witch hunt?
.........................................
BLOGGERS
Mark Elf:
Monday, October 29, 2007
The real Ghada Karmi?
There are two letters arising out of the Oxford Union Finkelstein saga today.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
To conclude, was it the ex-Orangeman or the Jaffa Orangeman?
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Holocaust survivor versus holocaust industry
Here's an email I got from an angry person I know to be a Jewish holocaust survivor and a supporter of the Palestinian cause. It came after I posted something on the Finkelstein at Oxford (or not) business.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Peace Now? Well not now, wait till I finish my reserve duty
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Believe this!
Friday, October 26, 2007
Stop being so silly, it was the lobby wot dunnit
Thursday, October 25, 2007
More on Finkelstein as Tatchell queers the pitch
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Anyone but Finkelstein at Oxford
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
'Jerry Haber' - with comments from Peace Now UK's Peter Usiskin:
Monday, October 29, 2007
What Finkelstein Would Have Said at the Oxford Union
Finkelstein would have argued for the two-state solution, and at the same would have argued that Israel's policies have thwarted the two-state solution.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Shalom u-le-hitraot to "Harry's Place"
The political Zionists are quite happy that they were allowed to represent the two-state solution at the Oxford Union instead of Norman Finkelstein. Pity that none of them really believe in it.
Indeed, as I have written here before, I know very few Israelis, and almost no diaspora Jews, who favor a true two-state solution in which one state neither dominates, nor is dominated by, the other, a solution in which there is real parity between the states.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
How the Israel Lobby Works -- Finkelstein and the Oxford Union
Clearly, Dershowitz and UK Peace Now's Usiskin thought it was more important to get Finkelstein off the panel -- because they simply are incapable of understanding how an anti-Zionist can favor a two-state solution -- then allow the invitation to get through.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Disinviting Finkelstein to Speak at the Oxford Union
Last week I posted a statement about the academic boycott in which I said that I am not ready to support it. Well, I am still not ready, but I am one step closer after I read about the antics of UK Friends of Peace Now...
*****************
Charlie Pottins:
Sunday, October 28, 2007
An Oxford Whodunnit?
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Fools at Oxford
*****************
Richard Silverstein:
October 28, 2007
Dershowitz, Hidden Hand Behind Oxford Union's Cancellation of Finkelstein Invitation
October 26, 2007
Oxford Union, Under Pressure from Peace Now UK, Disinvites Finkelstein from Israel Debate
==============================
Some history... Norman Finkelstein demolishes Alan Dershowitz on Democracy Now - Wednesday, September 24th, 2003
Showing posts with label ghada karmi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ghada karmi. Show all posts
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
Sunday, 30 September 2007
Joined-up solution
Martin Woollacott is impressed by Ghada Karmi's eloquent argument for a single Israeli-Palestinian state, Married to Another Man.
The Guardian Saturday September 15, 2007
This is an important book that demonstrates with relentless lucidity how terribly exhausted the diplomatic and political pursuit of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become. The title is taken from an 1897 report to the rabbis of Vienna on the prospects for a Jewish state in Palestine. The report concluded that "the bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man". Palestine's spouse was of course the Palestinian society rooted in its soil. The existence of any significant number of Palestinians within the Jewish state, or under its authority, Ghada Karmi argues, ultimately threatens a Zionist unravelling. Hence the Zionist dilemma: how to keep the territory without the people or to keep it while somehow negating the people.
The author's alternative is a return to the idea of a single state for both Arabs and Jews, bi-national or, preferably, integrated and non-sectarian. It is, she readily admits, an alternative canvassed only on the margins of both Israeli and Palestinian society, one widely dismissed as utopian, impractical, and, of course, subversive of Zionist intentions. Yet, operating on the same principle as Sherlock Holmes, that when you have eliminated every other possibility what remains must be the truth, Karmi steers the reader toward serious consideration of the idea, or at least of the vision it represents.
She does so not by any particularly convincing explanation of how a single state might come about but by showing how bankrupt are the policies that have so far shaped efforts to end the conflict. No other account of Israel's history and its impact on the Palestinians that I know of shreds with such efficiency the hypocrisies, cruelties and inanities of what amounts to a systematic international attempt over the decades to deny the obvious and delay the inevitable. The author's argument is that Israelis, Americans, Europeans and Arabs - including, although haplessly and unwillingly, many Palestinians - are sustaining a dangerous edifice of nonsense. Nonsense, because we can now see more clearly than most did in the more hopeful Oslo years that there is no logical way of reconciling Israel's purposes and its massive sense of entitlement with justice for the Palestinians.
Dangerous, because the edifice will one day crash down, and the chaos and bloodshed that will result could be on a cataclysmic scale. The American commentator Thomas Friedman, a man who generally leans well toward the Israeli side, once expressed the terrible possibilities of the future by envisaging a suicide bomber with a nuclear bomb in his backpack walking into Haifa or some other Israeli city. Would that, he asked his notional Israeli hardliner, be clear enough for you? It would be an answer of sorts, but not the sort of answer that anybody in Israel, Palestine and beyond could possibly want. Yet this is the Armageddon toward which they may be stumbling.
Karmi recalls Saad Hammami, the PLO's first representative in London, rebuking critics who attacked the organisation for its readiness to accept a "statelet" on a fraction of the original territory of Palestine. There would come a day, he said, when they would rend their clothes for failing to fight for it "because even this small thing will be denied to us, you will see". The years have shown his fears to be well grounded. The Palestinians have not even got the little state they were prepared, after agonised deliberations, to accept, because however much they have conceded it has always been less than enough for the Israelis.
On the face of it, Israel should have gratefully embraced a deal that would legitimise their hold over the bulk of historic Palestine, regularise their relations with all the Arab states, and at least limit any future claims on them by Palestinians. But, quoting the columnist Gideon Levy on the Israeli "national disease" of wanting to have their cake and eat it, Karmi shows how they wanted both to have peace and to keep almost everything of what they have in terms of power, territory and dominance. All too often they sabotaged Palestinian efforts at settlement because they positively wanted to say, in the Israeli phrase, that they "had no partner for peace".
There is no answer to the Zionist conundrum, Karmi believes, except expulsion or genocide. An unviable and truncated Palestinian state would satisfy no one, while political arrangements of the kind often canvassed in Israel and now being discussed anew, under which Gaza might be federated in some way to Egypt and a series of West Bank fragments somehow glued on to Jordan, would be short lived and fraught with trouble.
The single-state argument is not the essence of the problem. The essence is a change in the nature of Zionism. It was this change that the more hopeful proponents of a two-state solution thought would come with time as the two states cooperated, and their populations mingled on more equal terms. In other words, two states were not the end of the peace process but a stage in it, and even though Rabin's hafradah, or separation, was the Israeli starting point, it would not be their end point. One of the most appealing aspects of this book is the way it combines a hard eye on Israeli motives with empathy for their fears and for the contradictions in which the Zionist dream has entangled them. But it eloquently makes the point that those contradictions have got to be worked out, or they will bring disaster on Jews and gentiles alike.
The Guardian Saturday September 15, 2007
This is an important book that demonstrates with relentless lucidity how terribly exhausted the diplomatic and political pursuit of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become. The title is taken from an 1897 report to the rabbis of Vienna on the prospects for a Jewish state in Palestine. The report concluded that "the bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man". Palestine's spouse was of course the Palestinian society rooted in its soil. The existence of any significant number of Palestinians within the Jewish state, or under its authority, Ghada Karmi argues, ultimately threatens a Zionist unravelling. Hence the Zionist dilemma: how to keep the territory without the people or to keep it while somehow negating the people.
The author's alternative is a return to the idea of a single state for both Arabs and Jews, bi-national or, preferably, integrated and non-sectarian. It is, she readily admits, an alternative canvassed only on the margins of both Israeli and Palestinian society, one widely dismissed as utopian, impractical, and, of course, subversive of Zionist intentions. Yet, operating on the same principle as Sherlock Holmes, that when you have eliminated every other possibility what remains must be the truth, Karmi steers the reader toward serious consideration of the idea, or at least of the vision it represents.
She does so not by any particularly convincing explanation of how a single state might come about but by showing how bankrupt are the policies that have so far shaped efforts to end the conflict. No other account of Israel's history and its impact on the Palestinians that I know of shreds with such efficiency the hypocrisies, cruelties and inanities of what amounts to a systematic international attempt over the decades to deny the obvious and delay the inevitable. The author's argument is that Israelis, Americans, Europeans and Arabs - including, although haplessly and unwillingly, many Palestinians - are sustaining a dangerous edifice of nonsense. Nonsense, because we can now see more clearly than most did in the more hopeful Oslo years that there is no logical way of reconciling Israel's purposes and its massive sense of entitlement with justice for the Palestinians.
Dangerous, because the edifice will one day crash down, and the chaos and bloodshed that will result could be on a cataclysmic scale. The American commentator Thomas Friedman, a man who generally leans well toward the Israeli side, once expressed the terrible possibilities of the future by envisaging a suicide bomber with a nuclear bomb in his backpack walking into Haifa or some other Israeli city. Would that, he asked his notional Israeli hardliner, be clear enough for you? It would be an answer of sorts, but not the sort of answer that anybody in Israel, Palestine and beyond could possibly want. Yet this is the Armageddon toward which they may be stumbling.
Karmi recalls Saad Hammami, the PLO's first representative in London, rebuking critics who attacked the organisation for its readiness to accept a "statelet" on a fraction of the original territory of Palestine. There would come a day, he said, when they would rend their clothes for failing to fight for it "because even this small thing will be denied to us, you will see". The years have shown his fears to be well grounded. The Palestinians have not even got the little state they were prepared, after agonised deliberations, to accept, because however much they have conceded it has always been less than enough for the Israelis.
On the face of it, Israel should have gratefully embraced a deal that would legitimise their hold over the bulk of historic Palestine, regularise their relations with all the Arab states, and at least limit any future claims on them by Palestinians. But, quoting the columnist Gideon Levy on the Israeli "national disease" of wanting to have their cake and eat it, Karmi shows how they wanted both to have peace and to keep almost everything of what they have in terms of power, territory and dominance. All too often they sabotaged Palestinian efforts at settlement because they positively wanted to say, in the Israeli phrase, that they "had no partner for peace".
There is no answer to the Zionist conundrum, Karmi believes, except expulsion or genocide. An unviable and truncated Palestinian state would satisfy no one, while political arrangements of the kind often canvassed in Israel and now being discussed anew, under which Gaza might be federated in some way to Egypt and a series of West Bank fragments somehow glued on to Jordan, would be short lived and fraught with trouble.
The single-state argument is not the essence of the problem. The essence is a change in the nature of Zionism. It was this change that the more hopeful proponents of a two-state solution thought would come with time as the two states cooperated, and their populations mingled on more equal terms. In other words, two states were not the end of the peace process but a stage in it, and even though Rabin's hafradah, or separation, was the Israeli starting point, it would not be their end point. One of the most appealing aspects of this book is the way it combines a hard eye on Israeli motives with empathy for their fears and for the contradictions in which the Zionist dream has entangled them. But it eloquently makes the point that those contradictions have got to be worked out, or they will bring disaster on Jews and gentiles alike.
Monday, 10 September 2007
Sabra and Shatila Remembered
The Sabra and Shatila Massacres (16-18 September 1982)
Ellen Siegel, Middle East Policy Council, Volume VIII, December 2001, Number 4
Our captors led us down the road in front of the hospital and on to Rue Sabra, the camp's main street. As we were marched along, I heard gunshots being fired on the right, then the left, then the right. After each one, I instinctively ducked. Someone told me, "Keep walking." The militiamen themselves did not react at all; they completely ignored the sound. It was as if they had not heard it.
Some of the camp residents, including some of the cooks and cleaners who worked at Gaza, followed us. The militia stopped them. Along the way, a Palestinian had joined us; fearful, he begged for one of us to give him a lab coat. Someone did. He looked Arab, though, and was quickly confronted by a militiaman asking for his ID card. The Phalangist slapped his face with the card and made him take off the lab coat. I turned around and saw him on his knees begging. As before, someone told me, "Keep walking." The next thing I heard was a shot. I did not look back.
As we continued marching down Rue Sabra, we saw dead bodies lying along the sides of the street; some were old men, shot point-blank in the temple. As we moved on, we approached a large group of camp residents, mainly women and children, huddled together, with men in uniform guarding them. They were very scared. We were worried about them, and they were frightened for us, seeing us led past them at rifle point. A few of them gave us the "V" sign. It seemed that with their eyes and their lips they wanted to reassure us and thank us for coming to help them. One young woman, fearing she would not survive, stepped out of the crowd and handed her infant to one of the female doctors. Dr. Swee Ang was able to walk a few feet with the baby before a Phalangist stopped her. He took the baby away from her and handed it back to the mother. For a few seconds, I thought about the Holocaust, about mothers being sent off to concentration camps. I had read much about Jewish women in Germany and Poland handing over their babies to others in order to save them from extermination.
By now we were halfway down Rue Sabra into Shatila; the camps sit beside one another, with no visible line dividing them. The number of militiamen increased greatly; they were everywhere. These looked different from the ones who had escorted us out of the hospital. They were sloppy and unkempt; their uniforms were dirty and rumpled, without any identifying insignia. They seemed exhausted, edgy and ill-tempered. Throughout this ordeal, most of the uniformed men were in constant communication with someone. There were many walkie-talkies in use.
Our group began to tighten up. It was dawning on us that we might not make it out of these camps alive. A few of us were crying softly. As we reached the end of the camps, our captors began harassing us. They yelled, "You are dirty people, you are not Christians -- Christians don't treat terrorists who kill Christians." The ranting continued, "You are communists, socialists, Baader-Meinhof." They were closing in and encircling us. They collected our passports, ordered us to keep walking. The crackling sound of their walkie-talkies became a familiar noise.
As we reached the end of the camp, the landscape had changed dramatically. Where homes had stood were piles of rubble. A yellow bulldozer was moving earth back and forth in an area that had been dug up and greatly enlarged. The bulldozer was scooping up dirt, moving it, then dumping it back out. Back and forth. This spot was very busy, with lots of men in uniform. We had to stop many times in order to let the bulldozer go past and do its job. I noticed it had a large Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, stenciled on its side.
When we turned the corner of Rue Sabra, our captors steered us out of the camps towards the Kuwaiti embassy. They asked those wearing white lab coats to remove them. They lined us up in a row in front of a bullet-ridden wall. Facing us were about 40 men in uniform: a firing squad. Their rifles were ready and aimed in our direction. Behind them was a pick-up truck carrying more militiamen and what looked like a piece of anti-aircraft equipment. After a short time, the men in the firing squad lowered their rifles and marched back into the camps.
Ellen Siegel, Middle East Policy Council, Volume VIII, December 2001, Number 4
Our captors led us down the road in front of the hospital and on to Rue Sabra, the camp's main street. As we were marched along, I heard gunshots being fired on the right, then the left, then the right. After each one, I instinctively ducked. Someone told me, "Keep walking." The militiamen themselves did not react at all; they completely ignored the sound. It was as if they had not heard it.
Some of the camp residents, including some of the cooks and cleaners who worked at Gaza, followed us. The militia stopped them. Along the way, a Palestinian had joined us; fearful, he begged for one of us to give him a lab coat. Someone did. He looked Arab, though, and was quickly confronted by a militiaman asking for his ID card. The Phalangist slapped his face with the card and made him take off the lab coat. I turned around and saw him on his knees begging. As before, someone told me, "Keep walking." The next thing I heard was a shot. I did not look back.
As we continued marching down Rue Sabra, we saw dead bodies lying along the sides of the street; some were old men, shot point-blank in the temple. As we moved on, we approached a large group of camp residents, mainly women and children, huddled together, with men in uniform guarding them. They were very scared. We were worried about them, and they were frightened for us, seeing us led past them at rifle point. A few of them gave us the "V" sign. It seemed that with their eyes and their lips they wanted to reassure us and thank us for coming to help them. One young woman, fearing she would not survive, stepped out of the crowd and handed her infant to one of the female doctors. Dr. Swee Ang was able to walk a few feet with the baby before a Phalangist stopped her. He took the baby away from her and handed it back to the mother. For a few seconds, I thought about the Holocaust, about mothers being sent off to concentration camps. I had read much about Jewish women in Germany and Poland handing over their babies to others in order to save them from extermination.
By now we were halfway down Rue Sabra into Shatila; the camps sit beside one another, with no visible line dividing them. The number of militiamen increased greatly; they were everywhere. These looked different from the ones who had escorted us out of the hospital. They were sloppy and unkempt; their uniforms were dirty and rumpled, without any identifying insignia. They seemed exhausted, edgy and ill-tempered. Throughout this ordeal, most of the uniformed men were in constant communication with someone. There were many walkie-talkies in use.
Our group began to tighten up. It was dawning on us that we might not make it out of these camps alive. A few of us were crying softly. As we reached the end of the camps, our captors began harassing us. They yelled, "You are dirty people, you are not Christians -- Christians don't treat terrorists who kill Christians." The ranting continued, "You are communists, socialists, Baader-Meinhof." They were closing in and encircling us. They collected our passports, ordered us to keep walking. The crackling sound of their walkie-talkies became a familiar noise.
As we reached the end of the camp, the landscape had changed dramatically. Where homes had stood were piles of rubble. A yellow bulldozer was moving earth back and forth in an area that had been dug up and greatly enlarged. The bulldozer was scooping up dirt, moving it, then dumping it back out. Back and forth. This spot was very busy, with lots of men in uniform. We had to stop many times in order to let the bulldozer go past and do its job. I noticed it had a large Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, stenciled on its side.
When we turned the corner of Rue Sabra, our captors steered us out of the camps towards the Kuwaiti embassy. They asked those wearing white lab coats to remove them. They lined us up in a row in front of a bullet-ridden wall. Facing us were about 40 men in uniform: a firing squad. Their rifles were ready and aimed in our direction. Behind them was a pick-up truck carrying more militiamen and what looked like a piece of anti-aircraft equipment. After a short time, the men in the firing squad lowered their rifles and marched back into the camps.
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