Apartheid and the occupation of Palestine

[Sofiyya 1,687]

I posted this link before, but it was immediately dismissed by the Muslim peanut gallery as being "Zionist" (as apparently all Wikipedia articles are).

Opps, you fail. "Muslim peanut gallery" wins.

Wikipedia sucks because there is a lot of editing that bears no relationship to the facts. Bullying and threats of banning to support political positions ruled and now, edits are viewed with suspicion. Only the most intellectually lazy and least scholarly consider it to be a reliable source, not just on this subject, but so many others, as well.

However, the Arab-Israeli subjects are particularly contentious to the point where warnings are issued as to the legitimacy of the articles and what is being done to keep them stable. I know because as an editor, I was part of the debate as to how the information was being distorted and what to do about it.

If you're the least bit motivated to find the truth, you can hit the "Discussion" tabs when using Wikipedia and read what is going on behind the scenes. In the case of your link, here's what's behind that tab:

This article is the subject of an arbitration ruling. It is expected that editors abide by the letter and spirit of that ruling. Those editors who violate the ruling, but are unaware of it, will be informed of the details before any sanctions are invoked.

WARNING: ACTIVE ARBITRATION REMEDIES

The article Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries, along with other articles relating to the Arab–Israeli conflict, is currently subject to active arbitration remedies, as laid out during a 2008 Arbitration case, and supplemented by community consensus in November 2010. The current restrictions are:

All articles related to the Arab-Israeli conflict broadly construed are under WP:1RR (one revert per editor per article per 24 hour period). When in doubt, assume it is related.

Clear vandalism, or edits by anonymous IP editors, may be reverted without penalty

Editors who violate this 1RR restriction may be blocked without warning by any uninvolved administrator, even on a first offence.

After being warned, any editor who repeatedly or seriously fails to adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, any expected standards of behavior, or any normal editorial process may be blocked up to one year, topic-banned, further revert-restricted, or otherwise restricted from editing.

Reports of editors violating any of these restrictions should be made to either the Arbitration enforcement or Edit warring noticeboards.

If you are a new editor, or an editor unfamiliar with the situation, please follow the above guidelines. You may also wish to review the arbitration case page. If you are unsure if your edit is appropriate, discuss it here on this talk page first. When in doubt, don't revert!

Next time you want to SETTLE for Wiki as a reliable source rather than do the heavy lifting to find authoritative sources, don't glout.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Another thing that must be noted is the colonial hold that European countries had over much of the region. The Germans and Italians built concentration camps and ovens in North Africa to eliminate Jews in Arab countries. The French Vichy party functioned openly in Morocco and areas under French control. Jewish forces used terrorist tactics to kill and threaten British agencies in the area to apply the British Mandate over them. The bad acts that oppressed and unsettled Jews in MENA before and during WWI were heavily influenced or instituted by Europeans, not by Arabs.

Edited November 9, 2011 by Sofiyya

[Sofiyya 1,687]

More behind the scenes at Wikipedia re fighting over the "facts" re Arab-Israeli issues.

Keep telling yourself that Wikipedia is a reliable, authoritative source of information about Islam, Arabs, Israel, Muslims or Jews. It's not simply because anyone with an opinion has been able to change the information. With arbitration, it simply reflects who's been able to edit in the last 24 hours. I lament the lack of critical thinking, scholarship and just plain curiosity in the general population in the advent of the open internet

Edited November 9, 2011 by Sofiyya

[luckytxn 2,265]

More behind the scenes at Wikipedia re fighting over the "facts" re Arab-Israeli issues.

Keep telling yourself that Wikipedia is a reliable, authoritative source of information about Islam, Arabs, Israel, Muslims or Jews. It's not simply because anyone with an opinion has been able to change the information. With arbitration, it simply reflects who's been able to edit in the last 24 hours. I lament the lack of critical thinking, scholarship and just plain curiosity in the general population in the advent of the open internet

Wikipedia is a decent place to START looking at something. I use it to read and see what I need to burrow deeper. If anyone uses wikipedia as their only source then they will be very misinformed if not uninformed. Want to know how bad if can be? Go to wikipedia and look up any subject that you may have the most informed knowledge about. Now the lack of insight on that subject is the norm for all of wikipedia.

[Boiler 46,125]

I posted this link before, but it was immediately dismissed by the Muslim peanut gallery as being "Zionist" (as apparently all Wikipedia articles are).

I just picked the top one, it is not exactly unknown

[Danno 1,228]

remember this news story?

Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups

Since the earliest days of the worldwide web, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has seen its rhetorical counterpart fought out on the talkboards and chatrooms of the internet.

Now two Israeli groups seeking to gain the upper hand in the online debate have launched a course in "Zionist editing" for Wikipedia, the online reference site.

Yesha Council, representing the Jewish settler movement, and the rightwing Israel Sheli (My I srael) movement, ran their first workshop this week in Jerusalem, teaching participants how to rewrite and revise some of the most hotly disputed pages of the online reference site.

"We don't want to change Wikipedia or turn it into a propaganda arm," says Naftali Bennett, director of the Yesha Council. "We just want to show the other side. People think that Israelis are mean, evil people who only want to hurt Arabs all day."

Wikipedia is one of the world's most popular websites, and its 16m entries are open for anyone to edit, rewrite or even erase. The problem, according to Ayelet Shaked of Israel Sheli, is that online, pro-Israeli activists are vastly outnumbered by pro-Palestinian voices. "We don't want to give this arena to the other side," she said. "But we are so few and they are so many. People in the US and Europe never hear about Israel's side, with all the correct arguments and explanations."

Like others involved with this project, Shaked thinks that her government is "not doing a very good job" of explaining Israel to the world.

And on Wikipedia, they believe that there is much work to do.

Take the page on Israel, for a start: "The map of Israel is portrayed without the Golan heights or Judea and Samaria," said Bennett, referring to the annexed Syrian territory and the West Bank area occupied by Israel in 1967.

Another point of contention is the reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – a status that is constantly altered on Wikipedia.

Other pages subject to constant re-editing include one titled Goods allowed/banned for import into Gaza – which is now being considered for deletion – and a page on the Palestinian territories.

Then there is the problem of what to call certain neighbourhoods. "Is Ariel a city or a settlement?" asks Shaked of the area currently described by Wikipedia as "an Israeli settlement and a city in the central West Bank." That question is the subject of several thousand words of heated debate on a Wikipedia discussion thread.

The idea, says Shaked and her colleauges, is not to storm in, cause havoc and get booted out – the Wikipedia editing community is sensitive, consensus-based and it takes time to build trust.

"We learned what not to do: don't jump into deep waters immediately, don't be argumentative, realise that there is a semi-democratic community out there, realise how not to get yourself banned," says Yisrael Medad, one of the course participants, from Shiloh.

Is that Shiloh in the occupied West Bank? "No," he sighs, patiently. "That's Shiloh in the Binyamin region across the Green Line, or in territories described as disputed."

One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, who doesn't want to be named, said that publicising the initiative might not be such a good idea. "Going public in the past has had a bad effect," she says. "There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground."

In 2008, members of the hawkish pro-Israel watchdog Camera who secretly planned to edit Wikipedia were banned from the site by administrators.

Meanwhile, Yesha is building an information taskforce to engage with new media, by posting to sites such as Facebook and YouTube, and claims to have 12,000 active members, with up to 100 more signing up each month. "It turns out there is quite a thirst for this activity," says Bennett. "The Israeli public is frustrated with the way it is portrayed abroad."

The organisiers of the Wikipedia courses, are already planning a competition to find the "Best Zionist editor", with a prize of a hot-air balloon trip over Israel.

Wikipedia wars

There are frequent flare-ups between competing volunteer editors and obsessives who run Wikipedia. As well as conflicts over editing bias and "astroturfing" PR attempts, articles are occasionally edited to catch out journalists; the Independent recently erroneously published that the Big Chill had started life as the Wanky Balls festival. In 2005 the founding editorial director of USA Today, John Seigenthaler, discovered his Wikipedia entry included the claim that he was involved in the assassination of JFK.

Editors can remain anonymous when changing content, but conflicts are passed to Wikipedia's arbitration committee. Scientology was a regular source of conflict until the committee blocked editing by the movement.

Critics cite the editing problems as proof of a flawed site that can be edited by almost anybody, but its defenders claim the issues are tiny compared with its scale. Wikipedia now has versions in 271 languages and 379 million users a month.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-editing-zionist-groups

------------------------------------

Wikipedia is good for non controversial topics but, when you get into anything controversial, not so much.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

True, because people from all over the world edit there, it's a great source for links to articles, documents and books you may not have known about before, and I use it for that.

Wikipedia is a decent place to START looking at something. I use it to read and see what I need to burrow deeper. If anyone uses wikipedia as their only source then they will be very misinformed if not uninformed. Want to know how bad if can be? Go to wikipedia and look up any subject that you may have the most informed knowledge about. Now the lack of insight on that subject is the norm for all of wikipedia.

Good catch, Danno And, some thought the "Muslim peanut gallery" was talking out of its a$$ If you want to know, the info is out there.

remember this news story?

Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups

Since the earliest days of the worldwide web, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has seen its rhetorical counterpart fought out on the talkboards and chatrooms of the internet.

Now two Israeli groups seeking to gain the upper hand in the online debate have launched a course in "Zionist editing" for Wikipedia, the online reference site.

Yesha Council, representing the Jewish settler movement, and the rightwing Israel Sheli (My I srael) movement, ran their first workshop this week in Jerusalem, teaching participants how to rewrite and revise some of the most hotly disputed pages of the online reference site.

"We don't want to change Wikipedia or turn it into a propaganda arm," says Naftali Bennett, director of the Yesha Council. "We just want to show the other side. People think that Israelis are mean, evil people who only want to hurt Arabs all day."

Wikipedia is one of the world's most popular websites, and its 16m entries are open for anyone to edit, rewrite or even erase. The problem, according to Ayelet Shaked of Israel Sheli, is that online, pro-Israeli activists are vastly outnumbered by pro-Palestinian voices. "We don't want to give this arena to the other side," she said. "But we are so few and they are so many. People in the US and Europe never hear about Israel's side, with all the correct arguments and explanations."

Like others involved with this project, Shaked thinks that her government is "not doing a very good job" of explaining Israel to the world.

And on Wikipedia, they believe that there is much work to do.

Take the page on Israel, for a start: "The map of Israel is portrayed without the Golan heights or Judea and Samaria," said Bennett, referring to the annexed Syrian territory and the West Bank area occupied by Israel in 1967.

Another point of contention is the reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – a status that is constantly altered on Wikipedia.

Other pages subject to constant re-editing include one titled Goods allowed/banned for import into Gaza – which is now being considered for deletion – and a page on the Palestinian territories.

Then there is the problem of what to call certain neighbourhoods. "Is Ariel a city or a settlement?" asks Shaked of the area currently described by Wikipedia as "an Israeli settlement and a city in the central West Bank." That question is the subject of several thousand words of heated debate on a Wikipedia discussion thread.

The idea, says Shaked and her colleauges, is not to storm in, cause havoc and get booted out – the Wikipedia editing community is sensitive, consensus-based and it takes time to build trust.

"We learned what not to do: don't jump into deep waters immediately, don't be argumentative, realise that there is a semi-democratic community out there, realise how not to get yourself banned," says Yisrael Medad, one of the course participants, from Shiloh.

Is that Shiloh in the occupied West Bank? "No," he sighs, patiently. "That's Shiloh in the Binyamin region across the Green Line, or in territories described as disputed."

One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, who doesn't want to be named, said that publicising the initiative might not be such a good idea. "Going public in the past has had a bad effect," she says. "There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground."

In 2008, members of the hawkish pro-Israel watchdog Camera who secretly planned to edit Wikipedia were banned from the site by administrators.

Meanwhile, Yesha is building an information taskforce to engage with new media, by posting to sites such as Facebook and YouTube, and claims to have 12,000 active members, with up to 100 more signing up each month. "It turns out there is quite a thirst for this activity," says Bennett. "The Israeli public is frustrated with the way it is portrayed abroad."

The organisiers of the Wikipedia courses, are already planning a competition to find the "Best Zionist editor", with a prize of a hot-air balloon trip over Israel.

Wikipedia wars

There are frequent flare-ups between competing volunteer editors and obsessives who run Wikipedia. As well as conflicts over editing bias and "astroturfing" PR attempts, articles are occasionally edited to catch out journalists; the Independent recently erroneously published that the Big Chill had started life as the Wanky Balls festival. In 2005 the founding editorial director of USA Today, John Seigenthaler, discovered his Wikipedia entry included the claim that he was involved in the assassination of JFK.

Editors can remain anonymous when changing content, but conflicts are passed to Wikipedia's arbitration committee. Scientology was a regular source of conflict until the committee blocked editing by the movement.

Critics cite the editing problems as proof of a flawed site that can be edited by almost anybody, but its defenders claim the issues are tiny compared with its scale. Wikipedia now has versions in 271 languages and 379 million users a month.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-editing-zionist-groups

------------------------------------

Wikipedia is good for non controversial topics but, when you get into anything controversial, not so much.

[scandal 951]

I would like to a reliable source for these numbers. Have heard this often but never verified. Easy to say stuff but source link would be nice.

The following is testimony given at UNHRC hearing, not typically known as a setting sympathetic to claims of oppression of Jews.

The resultant UNHRC Communique, based in part on this testimony, is here.

UN Watch Oral Statement

Agenda Item 9: Interactive Dialogue with

Special Rapporteur on Racism Doudou Diène

UN Human Rights Council, 7th Session, March 19, 2008

Delivered by Regina Bublil Waldman

Thank you, Mr. President.

We thank the Special Rapporteur for his work against racism, and address two areas of his report.

Dr. Diene, in Addendum 1 you mention Libya’s treatment of ethnic minorities. In Addenda 3 and 4, you envision a multicultural society based on two principles: respect for historical truth and non-discrimination against minorities.

As a victim of Libyan discrimination, I agree: only with historical truth can we build a better future.

Today I wear my traditional ethnic dress to celebrate my heritage, but also to mourn its destruction.

One million Jews lived in the Middle East at the turn of the century. Today, less than five thousand remain.

Their plight has been ignored by the international community.

Their story is my story.

In 1948, there were thirty-six thousand Jews living in Libya. Today, there are none.

During the 1967 war between Israel and her Arab neighbors, mobs took to the streets and shouted, “Edbah el Yehud!” — “Slaughter the Jews!”

They burned my father’s warehouse and came to burn our home.

An honorable Muslim neighbor stopped them, and saved our lives.

The government ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Libya, where my family had lived for hundreds of years. They confiscated our homes and all our assets.

We were given this one-way travel document — never allowed to return.

My family was put on a bus to the airport. The bus driver got out, and tried to burn the bus with us in it. We were rescued from death by two Christian friends.

I come here today bearing no hatred -- only these historical truths:

Jews have been an indigenous people of the Middle East for over 2,500 years.

On the basis of race and religion, Arab regimes subjected Jews to arbitrary arrest, confiscation of property and expulsions. This is fully documented in this report by Justice for Jews from Arab Countries.

The UNHCR has ruled that Jews fleeing from Arab countries were ‘bona fide’ refugees, victims of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Dr. Diene, your report envisions a future of tolerance and equality. Applying the principles you set forth, we trust you will examine the actions of Libya and other Middle Eastern countries that forced out their Jewish minorities.

Like in South Africa, only the acknowledgment of truth and history will lead to reconciliation.

Thank you, Mr. President.

[luckytxn 2,265]

The following is testimony given at UNHRC hearing, not typically known as a setting sympathetic to claims of oppression of Jews.

The resultant UNHRC Communique, based in part on this testimony, is here.

Thanks for the read. I want to look more into this but at home and get little done as the wife for some reason expects my attention to be more focused on her. I promise to research more on Jewish expulsion soon. Still the figure quoted here is less and not way more than the Palestinians.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

The topic of this thread is Israeli apartheid and the occupation of Palestine. Whether or not some Middle Eastern Jews were expelled from or fled some Arab countries, Israelis have been in control of large Arab populations in occupied territories for decades, and do little to garner empathy with their treatment of those people or their willingness to ignore international law.

-----------------

UNITED

NATIONS

General Assembly

Distr.

GENERAL

10 January 2011

Original: English

A/HRC/16/72

10 January 2011

Human Rights Council

Sixteenth session

Agenda item 7

Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories

Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Richard Falk

Summary

The report addresses Israel’s compliance with its obligations under international law, in relation to the situation in the Palestinian territories that it has occupied since 1967. Israel’s persistent lack of cooperation with the fulfilment of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur, as well as other United Nations human rights mechanisms, is highlighted. The Special Rapporteur focuses attention on concerns regarding the expansion of Israeli settlements, in particular in East Jerusalem, the consequences of the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip and the treatment of Palestinian children detained by Israeli authorities.

I. Introduction

1. Unfortunately, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 needs to again call to the attention of the membership of the Human Rights Council the continuing refusal of the Government of Israel to allow the Rapporteur to visit the occupied Palestinian territories. Repeated attempts have been made to engage the Government of Israel in discussion with the hope of reversing the policies that led to the detention and expulsion of the Special Rapporteur from Ben-Gurion Airport on 14 December 2008, but so far without any response. Efforts will be made to seek the necessary cooperation of the Government of Israel in relation to the obligation of the Special Rapporteur to discharge official undertakings of the United Nations. Such cooperation should be understood as a fundamental legal obligation incident to membership in the Organization.

2. As repeated efforts to call this situation to the attention of the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly have to date produced no positive results, the Special Rapporteur appeals on the occasion of this report for a more robust attempt to secure the cooperation of the Government of Israel. It should be recalled that Article 104 of the Charter of the United Nations declares that the Organization “shall enjoy in the territory of each of its Members such legal capacity as may be necessary for the exercise of its functions and the fulfilment of its purposes”. Article 105, paragraph 2, specifies that those who represent the United Nations shall enjoy in the territory of State Members: “such privileges and immunities as are necessary for the independent exercise of their function in connexion with the Organization”. These provisions were elaborated in the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, adopted by the General Assembly on 13 February 1946, and then implemented via the Agreement between the Swiss Federal Council and the Secretary General of the United Nations, dated 19 April 1946. Article VI, Section 22, thereof, entitled “Experts on Missions for the United Nations”, is particularly relevant, setting forth the rather extensive duties of Members to cooperate with such representatives as special rapporteurs and to avoid interfering with their independence.

3. It should be pointed out that the Government of Israel has also not cooperated with other recent important initiatives of the Human Rights Council relating to the occupied Palestinian territories, including the report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (A/HRC/12/48) and the report of the independent international fact-finding mission to investigate violations of international law, including international humanitarian and human rights law, resulting from the Israeli attacks on the flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian assistance (A/HRC/15/21). This pattern of non-cooperation with official undertakings of the Human Rights Council should produce a concerted attempt by this organ and the Office of the Secretary-General to do what can be done to obtain the future cooperation of the Government of Israel.

Continued at the link.

Edited November 10, 2011 by Sofiyya

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Post-Zionism and the Sephardi Question

by Meyrav Wurmser

Middle East Quarterly

Spring 2005, pp. 21-30

A growing group of Jewish Israeli professors is challenging the legitimacy of the Israeli state from within. Many are Mizrahim, as the Sephardi Jews from the Middle East and North Africa are increasingly called, and do so from a distinctly Mizrahi outlook. In July 2004, for example, a poem appeared online entitled, "I Am an Arab Refugee":

When I hear Fayruz[1] singing,

"I shall never forget thee, Palestine,"

I swear to you with my right hand

that at once I am a Palestinian.

All of a sudden I know:

I am an Arab refugee

and, if not,

let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.[2]

The author is not a Palestinian refugee but rather an Israeli Jew. His name is Sami Shalom Chetrit, a Mizrahi professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem who, along with Mizrahi academics like Ella Shohat, Eli Avraham, Oren Yiftachel, Yehouda Shenhav, Pnina Motzafi-Haller and others has developed a radical critique of ethnic relations in Israel. True to post-Zionism, an intellectual movement that believes that Zionism lacks moral validity, post-Zionist Mizrahi writers believe that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state. According to Mizrahi post-Zionism, the Mizrahim, about half of Israel's Jewish population, are "Arab-Jews," who like the Palestinians are victims of Zionism. While this new school of intellectual radicalism remains so far contained within the halls of academia and without broad support among the broader Mizrahi population, it, nevertheless, represents a new and worrisome twist on the post-Zionist phenomenon that continues to dominate Israel's academia and media.

The Mizrahi Rejection of Zionism

At the center of the radical, post-Zionist Mizrahi critique is a deep feeling of victimization. The post-Zionist Mizrahi writers continue to live their parents' insults and humiliations at the hands of the European Ashkenazi Jewish establishment that absorbed them in Israel after immigration. Discriminatory policies created a continuing social and economic gap between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim. These academics promote the view held by many young Mizrahim that discrimination did not end with their parents' generation. The children—who, in large part, were born in Israel—continue to face discrimination and cope with social and economic handicaps.

The radical Mizrahim who turned to post-Zionism tap into anger beyond the well-known complaints of past ill-treatment, including the maabarot, the squalid tent cities into which Mizrahim were placed upon arrival in Israel; the humiliation of Moroccan and other Mizrahi Jews when Israeli immigration authorities shaved their heads and sprayed their bodies with the pesticide DDT[3]; the socialist elite's enforced secularization; the destruction of traditional family structure, and the reduced status of the patriarch by years of poverty and sporadic unemployment. These Mizrahi intellectuals' fury extends beyond even the state-sponsored kidnapping of Yemeni infants for adoption by Ashkenazi families who lost their children in the Holocaust.[4] The real anger Sephardim feel nowadays, and upon which these Mizrahi post-Zionists seize, comes from the extent to which, in their view, the Zionist narrative denied, erased, and excluded their historical identity.

Some of the adherents of this new Israeli school of thought now equate Mizrahi grievances with those of Palestinians. In an article, "Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims," a takeoff on Edward Said's famous "Zionism from the Standpoint of its [Palestinian] Victims,"[5] Ella Habiba-Shohat, an Iraqi-Israeli woman and one of the principal Mizrahi post-Zionist leaders, claims that, alongside the Palestinians, Mizrahi Jews are Zionism's "other" victims.[6] According to Shohat, Zionism is a white, Ashkenazi phenomenon, based on the denial of the Orient and the rights of both Mizrahi Jews and the Palestinians. Indeed, she argues, the conflict of East versus West, Arab versus Jew, and Palestinian versus Israeli exists not only between Israelis and Arabs but also within Israel between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews.

This view contradicts the mainstream Zionist narrative, which maintains that Zionism saved Mizrahi Jews.[7] According to this view, the Mizrahi Jews were devout Zionists who deeply wished to leave the Diaspora and return to Zion.[8] Zionism saved these Mizrahim when persecution in their Arab and Iranian homelands intensified after Israel's independence. It also rescued them from the backwardness of Arab society and introduced them to the technology and culture of the civilized world. Zionism helped them to overcome the disadvantages of the illiterate, despotic societies from which they came.

In contrast, post-Zionist Mizrahi writers believe that this official Zionist account is false and needs to be de-constructed. They maintain that the Mizrahim did not come from backward or primitive societies. Cities like Alexandria, Baghdad, and Istanbul were great metropolises of wealth and culture. Most Mizrahim had been exposed to Western culture and ideas since they came from countries once subject to British or French rule. The Mizrahim were also largely literate, if not highly educated. Most men and even some women could read the Torah.

The post-Zionist writers also attack the claim that the Mizrahi Jews longed to immigrate to Israel. In reality, they argue, as loyal residents of the Arab world, Zionism played a relatively minor role in the Mizrahi world-view. Despite the role that the longing for Zion played in their religious lives, they did not share the European-Zionist desire to leave the Diaspora. Even after the Holocaust, post-Zionist writers maintain, Mizrahi Jews remained largely opposed to Zionism and lived peacefully with their Arab neighbors. Yehouda Shenhav, professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, writes in his study of the Jews of Iraq that the Mizrahim were never really Zionists. Instead, he argues that the Ashkenazi establishment encouraged their immigration less to protect the Mizrahim and more to address its own need for cheap labor.[9] Instead of saving the Mizrahi Jews, Zionism only ruthlessly displaced an entire community, Shenhav maintains, and removed its members' right to determine their own future. Pursuing this logic to its end, he argues that Zionism cannot be considered a liberation movement for all Jews. It liberated European Jews but enslaved the Mizrahim who, like the Palestinians, are an abused Third World people suffering under the yoke of first world Ashkenazi oppressors.

One of the main complaints of this radical intellectual school is the belief that Zionism destroyed the Mizrahi sense of community and culture by forcing the adoption of new "Zionist" and "Israeli" identities so as to eradicate any threat of a Mizrahi-Arab alliance. This action not only destroyed the natural Arab-Jewish identity of the Mizrahim, these post-Zionists argue, but also sparked the Arab-Israeli conflict. Shiko Behar, a Mizrahi post-Zionist writer, asserts that identity in the Middle East today is shaped around post-colonial nationalism, not the religious division between Muslim and non-Muslim Arabs.[10]

Before the rise of modern Jewish and Arab nationalism, Mizrahim and Arabs could coexist without conflict because they all shared an Arab identity and only differed in their religious beliefs.[11] In Zionist Israel, continues Behar, the Mizrahim could not be considered Arab-Jews even if their historical identity was more closely aligned with the Arab rather than Israeli identity. The Arab-Israeli conflict meant that the Mizrahim were forced to choose: either they were Jews, or they were Arabs. Mizrahim suffered communal schizophrenia because, for the first time since perhaps the time of the Caliph Harun ar-Rashid (763-809) when the Islamic caliph forced Jews to wear yellow patches, Arabism and Judaism were in conflict. Yet for this very reason, argues Behar, the Mizrahim—victimized by both Ashkenazi Zionism and the rise of Arab nationalism—are the key factor in solving the Arab-Israeli conflict. They alone can serve as the bridgehead into the Arab world since they, like the Palestinians, are refugees whose identity was destroyed.[12]

Zionism and the Mizrahim: What Went Wrong?

The Mizrahi academic embrace of post-Zionism is an attempt to address a broader, genuine problem. Post-Zionist Mizrahi writers present a compelling account of the systematic economic and ethnic discrimination that they personally, their families, and Mizrahi Jews in general have faced since the establishment of Israel to the present day. They provide evidence of discrimination and racist attitudes beginning with the early years of statehood. For example, in 1949, Ashkenazi journalist Aryeh Gelblum wrote the following about the arriving Mizrahi immigrants:

This is the immigration of a race we have not yet known in the country. We are dealing with people whose primitivism is at a peak, whose level of knowledge is one of virtually absolute ignorance and, worse, who have little talent for understanding anything intellectual. Generally, they are only slightly better than the general level of the Arabs, Negroes, and Berbers in the same regions. In any case, they are at an even lower level than what we know with regard to the former Arabs of Israel. These Jews also lack roots in Judaism, as they are totally subordinated to savage and primitive instincts. As with Africans you will find among them gambling, drunkenness, and prostitution ... chronic laziness and hatred for work; there is nothing safe about this asocial element. [Even] the kibbutzim will not hear of their absorption.[13]

Gelblum was not alone. Post-Zionist Mizrahim quote one of Israel's leading intellectuals in the 1950s, Karl Frankenstein, a celebrated professor at Hebrew University and the man considered the father of the Israeli education system. Frankenstein expressed outright racist attitudes towards Mizrahim, writing, "We have to recognize the primitive mentality of many of the immigrants from backward countries."[14] He further suggested that Mizrahi Jews have the mentality of primitive people who are somewhat mentally disturbed.[15] Israeli sociologist Yosef Gross argued in the early 1950s that Mizrahi immigrants suffered from "mental regression."[16] One of the worst examples of the anti-Mizrahi discrimination involves The Ashkenazi Revolution published in 1964 by writer Kalman Katzenelson in which the author argues that the Mizrahim suffer from irreversible genetic inferiority that endangers the superiority of the Ashkenazi-Zionist state. He called for the establishment of an apartheid regime that, among other limitations, would abolish their political rights. He also objected to mixed marriages and demanded the prohibition of the Hebrew language because it resembled Arabic too greatly. Instead he demanded that Yiddish become the national language because of its supreme Germanic origins. His book was a bestseller until Ben-Gurion banned it.[17]

The sentiments expressed by these intellectuals, the Mizrahi post-Zionists argue, were not uncommon. There were racist attitudes toward the Mizrahi Jews even among the highest political levels. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion described the Mizrahi immigrants as lacking even "the most elementary knowledge" or "a trace of Jewish or human education."[18] Furthermore, he said, "We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are bound by duty to fight against the spirit of the Levant that corrupts individuals and society."[19] Likewise, Abba Eban, one of Israel's most eloquent diplomats, noted that "one of the great apprehensions which afflict us is the danger of the predominance of immigrants of Oriental origin forcing Israel to equalize its cultural level with that of the neighboring world."[20] In 1949, Shoshana Frasitz, a member of the Knesset, said of the Mizrahim, "You know that we have no common language with them. Our cultural level does not fit with their level; their lifestyle is the lifestyle of the middle ages."[21] Nachum Goldman, chairman of the Jewish Agency and president of the World Zionist Organization in the late 1940s and 1950s, said, "A Jew from Eastern Europe is worth twice as much as a Jew from Kurdistan," and continued, "We should return a hundred thousand of the Jews of the East to their countries of origin."[22] Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once asked, "Shall we be able to elevate these immigrants to a suitable level of civilization?"[23]

The current clique of radical post-Zionist Mizrahim argues that such attitudes have not disappeared from Israel. Even as late as 1983, for example, the left-wing liberal and Palestinian-rights advocate, Shulamit Aloni, who headed the Citizens' Rights party and served as a member of the Knesset, denounced the Mizrahim as "barbarous tribal forces" who were "driven like a flock to the sound of tom-toms … chanting like a savage tribe."[24] In the same year, the celebrated Ashkenazi columnist Amnon Dankner raised the possibility of an Ashkenazi-Mizrahi cultural war in Ha'aretz:

This will not be a war among brothers … [because] these are not my brothers … The sticky blanket of "Jewish love and brotherhood" is thrown on my head and I am asked to be considerate of the [Mizrahi] cultural deficit and the authentic feelings of discrimination. My blood boils when I hear those hypocritical calls. They put me in a cage with a baboon running amok and then they tell me: "Okay, now you are together and begin a dialogue.…" Now I want to tell you that I am tired of empathizing and understanding. I have heard all the stories about discrimination, the social-economic gap, the feelings of frustration, the DDT and the maabarot. [i am told that] we [the Ashkenazim] have Heine, Freud, Einstein, and the wonderful synthesis between Judaism and Western culture, but the [Mizrahim] also have some wonderful things: hospitality, respect for mother and father, and a wonderful patriarchal tradition. … For me, however, they are not among the traits that I wish to see in the society that my spiritual fathers and I dreamed about establishing here: an exemplary and modern society laced with the most beautiful visions of humanistic liberalism. [still] the advocates of Jewish love and brotherhood say, "Do not call them [the Mizrahim] Khomeini-like or primitive. It makes them even angrier.'[25]

These anti-Mizrahi attitudes, argue the post-Zionist Mizrahim, exist in the depiction of Mizrahim in movies, literary works, and especially, the media. They quote the findings of researcher Eli Avraham who investigated the media portrayal of the Mizrahim in the 1980s and 1990s. He found a number of recurring themes were associated with the Mizrahim. Those included violence, crime, and social unrest; unseemliness and neglect; limited future prospects; a herd mentality, and ethnically-determined political identity; an inability to be "like us [Ashkenazim]; and a syndrome of 'primitivism.'"[26]

While anti-Mizrahi attitudes are a legitimate concern, for radical post-Zionist writers, the problem does not end with the racism of some of Israel's founding fathers, politicians, and intellectuals. For them, the core issue is economic and social discrimination. In the 1970s, the Mizrahi Black Panther movement emerged to address economic and social discrimination through violent protests. Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered a brutal crackdown on the movement, which took its revolutionary outlook from the African American struggle in the United States and Marxist movements in Latin America. Radical post-Zionists believe that socioeconomic discrimination continues to exist, and they see it as the key factor that has led the Mizrahim to vote in droves since 1988 for the religious Mizrahi party Shas.

Continued at the link.

[sandinista! 1,816]

Agreed, it's a diversionary tactic, and a lame one at that.

*cue the lineup of posters who will now demand you condemn this grievous event because it's your responsibility as the resident Arab Muslim Palestinian to do this no less than 75x a week on this forum, and because of your demographics we have to assume that your default position on this issue would be different than that of the decent, moral human beings here.

The topic of this thread is Israeli apartheid and the occupation of Palestine. Whether or not some Middle Eastern Jews were expelled from or fled some Arab countries, Israelis have been in control of large Arab populations in occupied territories for decades, and do little to garner empathy with their treatment of those people or their willingness to ignore international law.

-----------------

UNITED

NATIONS

General Assembly

Distr.

GENERAL

10 January 2011

Original: English

A/HRC/16/72

10 January 2011

Human Rights Council

Sixteenth session

Agenda item 7

Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories

Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Richard Falk

I. Introduction

1. Unfortunately, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 needs to again call to the attention of the membership of the Human Rights Council the continuing refusal of the Government of Israel to allow the Rapporteur to visit the occupied Palestinian territories. Repeated attempts have been made to engage the Government of Israel in discussion with the hope of reversing the policies that led to the detention and expulsion of the Special Rapporteur from Ben-Gurion Airport on 14 December 2008, but so far without any response. Efforts will be made to seek the necessary cooperation of the Government of Israel in relation to the obligation of the Special Rapporteur to discharge official undertakings of the United Nations. Such cooperation should be understood as a fundamental legal obligation incident to membership in the Organization.

2. As repeated efforts to call this situation to the attention of the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly have to date produced no positive results, the Special Rapporteur appeals on the occasion of this report for a more robust attempt to secure the cooperation of the Government of Israel. It should be recalled that Article 104 of the Charter of the United Nations declares that the Organization “shall enjoy in the territory of each of its Members such legal capacity as may be necessary for the exercise of its functions and the fulfilment of its purposes”. Article 105, paragraph 2, specifies that those who represent the United Nations shall enjoy in the territory of State Members: “such privileges and immunities as are necessary for the independent exercise of their function in connexion with the Organization”. These provisions were elaborated in the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, adopted by the General Assembly on 13 February 1946, and then implemented via the Agreement between the Swiss Federal Council and the Secretary General of the United Nations, dated 19 April 1946. Article VI, Section 22, thereof, entitled “Experts on Missions for the United Nations”, is particularly relevant, setting forth the rather extensive duties of Members to cooperate with such representatives as special rapporteurs and to avoid interfering with their independence.

3. It should be pointed out that the Government of Israel has also not cooperated with other recent important initiatives of the Human Rights Council relating to the occupied Palestinian territories, including the report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (A/HRC/12/48) and the report of the independent international fact-finding mission to investigate violations of international law, including international humanitarian and human rights law, resulting from the Israeli attacks on the flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian assistance (A/HRC/15/21). This pattern of non-cooperation with official undertakings of the Human Rights Council should produce a concerted attempt by this organ and the Office of the Secretary-General to do what can be done to obtain the future cooperation of the Government of Israel.

Continued at the link.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Agreed, it's a diversionary tactic, and a lame one at that.

*cue the lineup of posters who will now demand you condemn this grievous event because it's your responsibility as the resident Arab Muslim Palestinian to do this no less than 75x a week on this forum, and because of your demographics we have to assume that your default position on this issue would be different than that of the decent, moral human beings here.

Ya, I suck, and I don't have a sycophantic cadre to +1 my every post, but somehow, I manage. Here is more of what makes some say I'm insane, but if someone doesn't make it known, they will keep pretending that Israeli society is an oasis of democracy and peace-loving victims in the desert diaspora:

Israeli Racism in Theory and Practice

Middle East Monitor | A Report | October 2009

INTRODUCTION

“Anti-Semitism is no longer the hatred of and discrimination against Jews as a religious or ethnic group; in the age of Zionism, we are told, antiSemitism has metamorphosed into something that is more insidious. Today, Israel and its Western

defenders insist genocidal anti-Semitism consists mainly of any attempt to take away and to refuse to uphold the absolute right of Israel to be a Jewish racist state.”¹

At the United Nations World Conference against Racism held in Durban in 2001, there was significant focus on Israel’s discriminatory practices and treatment of Palestinians coupled with renewed debate analogous to UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 which in 1975 equated Zionism with racism. Such focus no doubt reflects the growing world-wide consensus and repulsion at these practices.

Humanitarians and human rights defenders the world over, from Archbishop Desmond Tutu to Jimmy Carter and Noam Chomsky, in accordance with international law and numerous UN resolutions, condemn Israel as a military occupation implementing racist policies against the nonJewish populations both inside its territory and those it occupies. Yet, meaningful public debate of this pressing issue remains taboo and its very existence is generally ignored - the US stormed out of the Durban conference decrying it as ‘anti-Israel’ and ‘anti-Semitic’ while the EU refused to pass judgment. During deliberation of the 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution in the UN, Israel itself conceded that it discriminated against Arabs, but argued for the need and overriding probity of establishing a Jewish state for displaced Jews.

Continued at the link.

Edited November 10, 2011 by Sofiyya

[Boiler 46,125]

It is a very long time since I did RE, but Mathew 7 comes to mind

http://www.usccb.org/bible/matthew/7/

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Matthew came to my mind, too.

In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets. [Matthew 7:12]

Edited November 10, 2011 by Sofiyya