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Title: Fearsome Words? A Suppressed Talk on the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Source:
CounterPunch
URL Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann10142009.html
Published: Oct 14, 2009
Author: MICHAEL NEUMANN
Post Date: 2009-10-15 19:48:16 by Dakmar
Keywords: None
Views: 63
Comments: 1
In April of this year I was invited by the Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Association to speak at one of their meetings. The meeting was to have taken place in the Parliament building in Ottawa, where I have spoken previously without incident. John Ivison, in the National Post newspaper, published a not particularly vicious or unbalanced attack on me, deploring the invitation. After this, without any contact with me and without seeing the content of my talk, the meeting was 'postponed'. It is now clear that the postponement was permanent. This might seem spineless, but it involved more than the National Post article. Ivison reports that Alykhan Velshi, director of communications for Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney, had the following to say: "In a free country like Canada, Mr. Neumann has the right to air his noxious views. The corollary, of course, is that we can and must criticize them. Neumann's farrago of cant, conspiracy theory and hate are completely repugnant to our government, and we make no apology for saying so." Bob Rae (former Ontario premier, former head of the New Democratic Party, now a high-ranking Liberal Party leader) is reported to have been '"surprised and disappointed" that the parliamentary group thought Mr. Neumann had something positive to contribute'. Here is the alleged farago of cant, conspiracy theory and hate - unaltered since before the attacks. Readers may judge for themselves whether the allegations have merit. * * * Nationalism and the Israel-Palestine Conflict For a brief period in the 1970s I worked in the Vancouver used book trade. I got to know a legend among booksellers - Bill Hoffer. Bill was a skilled purveyor of Canadian first editions and a great bluffer. Once I found him in earnest and extended conversation with one of 'his' authors; later I asked Bill whether the guy's stuff was any good. "I don't read it," said Bill, "I just sell it.". Bill told me that the secret of the used book business was 'gaining moral ascendency' over the customers (whom he called 'civilians'). This meant making them feel like you were more knowledgeable about and more committed to whatever they were interested in. Intimidate the customer a bit, and your business flourishes. The Israelis gained moral ascendancy long ago; some reputed people called 'the Arabs' never had it. This involved more than PR skills. It also involved terrible confusions about nationalism. They're the secret weapon of the Zionists and the secret weakness of 'the Arabs'. Zionist ideology has always departed from a question: every people has its state; why not the Jews? A 'no' answer would tie you to that evil of evils, antisemitism. The rights of 'the Jewish people' meant Israel had a morally titanic 'right to exist'. It meant that the relentless expansion of Jewish As for the Palestinians, they described themselves as Arabs. This sounded like they *had* a home; it was the whole Arab world. If their 'Arab brothers' would not take them in, well, that was no fault of the Zionists. So if the Palestinians were squeezed ever further into unlivable enclaves, it was the Arabs who were to blame. The Arabs would rather dispute a tiny strip of their vast possessions than grant the Jews their little homeland. These claims - we're just a people like any other, we just want to go home - are the last bastion of lsrael's crumbling moral stature. It is hard to imagine a more inappropriate public relations ploy. Israel's rhetoric of peoples and homelands constitute a rejection of everything we ought to have learned from the Nazi era. The confusions that sustain them not only raise racial crusading to a moral imperative; in other ways they bring unjust disrepute and demoralization on the entire so-called Arab world. If we cannot see the harm in talk of peoples and homelands, it is because our obsession with antisemitism has blinded us to the true origins of Nazi ideology. Before the Nazis, antisemitism was prevalent all over Western Europe. There were ugly incidents, one or two outrageous miscarriages of justice, but no genocide and nothing remotely resembling the peasant pogroms of Russia and the Ukraine. As for Germany, my Jewish parents, born and raised there, staunchly maintained that it was the least antisemitic country in all of pre-Nazi Europe. Why then is the Nazi genocide attributed to antisemitism, which clearly was necessary but not sufficient to produce it? And what about the aspects of Nazi ethnic cleansing that antisemitism can't possibly explain - the genocide against the gypsies and the planned extermination of thirty million Slavs, many of whom died as 'subhumans' in inhuman prison camps? There was an ideology sufficient to drive all those atrocities. It fairly stares us in the face. It was not devised by Hitler, but by 19th Century Romantics - poets and pseudo-historians from Scandinavia across Central Europe and down into the Italian Peninsula and the Balkans. It was not the Nazis, but Woodrow Wilson who made it a fixture of contemporary politics. This was the ideology of ethnic nationalism. Before proceeding let me forestall a predictable objection. I intend to trace the ravages of ethnic nationalism, not by any means to make Zionists into Nazis. It is entirely unnecessary to take this false step, which would obscure rather than clarify the repellent aspects of Zionism. The offspring of ethnic nationalism are a nasty brood, but of course the Nazis were in a league of their own. Wilson legitimized this atrocious doctrine during the peace negotiations that ended the First World War. Wilson's own secretary of state, Robert Lansing, anticipated its consequences all too accurately: "The more I think about the President's declaration as to the right of 'self-determination,' the more convinced I am of the danger of "What effect will it have on the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptians, be harmonized with Zionism, to which the President is practically committed? "The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until too late to check those who attempt to put the principle in force. What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause!" For his prescience Lansing incurred Wilson's disfavour and was forced to resign. He seemed a fussy old spoilsport, unwilling to grant peoples their rights - peoples, or, as he puts it in the language of his era, races. Could he not see the progressive implications of Wilson's doctrine? Did he not understand that the self-determination of peoples - races, ethnic groups - was a sacred human right? Well, one person did, the person who wrote: "If the race is in danger of being oppressed or even exterminated the question of legality is only of secondary importance. The established power may in such a case employ only those means which are recognized as 'legal'. yet the instinct of self-preservation on the part of the oppressed will always justify, to the highest degree, the employment of all possible resources. "Only on the recognition of this principle was it possible for those "Human rights are above the rights of the State." Ah, human rights, which belong not only to individuals but to 'peoples'. This champion of human rights was Adolf Hitler, writing in Mein Kampf. (Murphy translation, line 4084, Volume I, chapter iii) Hitler 'understood' that peoples had a right to their homeland. The 'national' part of National Socialism was not civic nationalism, the nationalism that calls on French, German, American, Italian or Spanish *citizens* to cherish and defend their countries. It was ethnic nationalism, the nationalism of 'peoples', races, who did not have a homeland, or who had suffered a diaspora or historic wrongs. Hitler held that the German people had suffered both and was threatened with extinction. The Germans wanted their homeland back, all of it. Every other people had its homeland; why not the Germans? Of course this was nonsense. The 'German people' was a bit of a fiction, and the borders of their 'homeland' were founded largely on historical myths irrelevant to contemporary rights and wrongs. But despite the most awful and obvious fulfilment of Lansing's worst nightmare, we have never abandoned Wilson's and Hitler's endorsement of ethnic nationalism. It infects even our condemnations of 'the Germans' for the Nazi era. To condemn 'the Germans' means this: even if you'd spent the war in an orphanage because your parents had died in street battles with the Nazi black shirts, you would share in the Germany's collective guilt. You share in it not because of anything you have done, but because you were, by birth, a German. We might call this 'collective responsibility', but that's just a respectable name for racial guilt, the guilt of a 'people'. From the rubble of the Nazi empire, the rubbish of ethnic nationalism rises up and takes an honoured place among our orthodoxies. From this rubbish comes the right of a fictitiously collective 'Jewish people' to a 'homeland'. That link is explicit. The Nazi conception of a Jewish people lies at the heart of Israel's famous right of return. Don't take my word for it. Listen instead to the AMERICAN-ISRAELI COOPERATIVE ENTERPRISE (AICE), which describes itself as "a nonpartisan organization to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship by emphasizing the fundamentals of the alliance - the values our nations share". To explain in what sense 'Jews' have a right to return to their homeland, the AICE states that "At present, the definition is based on Hitler's Nuremberg Laws: the right of Return is granted to any individual with one Jewish grandparent, or who is married to someone with one Jewish grandparent. As a result, thousands of people with no meaningful connection to the Jewish people theoretically have the right to immigrate." AICE neglects to mention that such persons also have the actual right to immigrate, and to obtain citizenship. On the other hand, a stateless Palestinian refugee, perhaps living a precarious existence in France, has no such right of return, even if his ancestors inhabited Palestine itself for a thousand years. Palestine, it seems, is not is the 'homeland' of Palestinians, but only of the Jews. 'Jew', in other words, does not refer to those who espouse Judaism or embrace Jewish culture. 'Jew' means 'of Jewish ancestry'. In virtually every Canadian jurisdiction, ancestry is explicitly cited as a prohibited ground of discrimination. Ancestry is just a contemporary stand-in for the older notion of race and is generally used in references to racial discrimination.(**) Like skin colour, it's something you cannot change, and therefore a particularly repugnant basis for determining civic status. Poster Comment: (continues... :)
settlement was, far from a mortal threat to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the area, the mere completion of the long Jewish Odyssey. It was just part of the long journey home.
putting such ideas into the minds of certain races. It is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the Peace Congress and create trouble in many lands.
and the nationalists among the Boers? Will it not breed discontent,
disorder, and rebellion? Will not the Mohammedans of Syria and
Palestine and possibly of Morocco and Tripoli rely on it? How can it
struggles to be carried through, of which history furnishes magnificent examples in abundance, against foreign bondage or oppression at home.
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#1. To: Dakmar (#0)
Ah, human rights, which belong not only to individuals but to 'peoples'. This champion of human rights was Adolf Hitler, writing in Mein Kampf. (Murphy translation, line 4084, Volume I, chapter iii) Hitler 'understood' that peoples had a right to their homeland. The 'national' part of National Socialism was not civic nationalism, the nationalism that calls on French, German, American, Italian or Spanish *citizens* to cherish and defend their countries. It was ethnic nationalism, the nationalism of 'peoples', races, who did not have a homeland, or who had suffered a diaspora or historic wrongs. Hitler held that the German people had suffered both and was threatened with extinction. The Germans wanted their homeland back, all of it. Every other people had its homeland; why not the Germans? Of course this was nonsense. The 'German people' was a bit of a fiction, and the borders of their 'homeland' were founded largely on historical myths irrelevant to contemporary rights and wrongs. But despite the most awful and obvious fulfilment of Lansing's worst nightmare, we have never abandoned Wilson's and Hitler's endorsement of ethnic nationalism. Raw naked evil tribalism! A good read. Bump
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Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest"Human rights are above the rights of the State."
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