Saturday 24 October 2015

When Monsters Fight: Benjamin Netanyahu Blames A Palestinian Cleric For The Holocaust.

A Monster Himself: Such is Benjamin Netanyahu's hatred of the Palestinian people that he is willing to absolve Adolf Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust and shift it, instead, onto the shoulders of a Palestinian cleric, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini (1897-1974). This revisionist lie reveals the true extent of Zionism's moral collapse.
 
WRITING ABOUT ISRAEL is never easy. Always there is the shadow of the Shoah. The attempted genocide of the Jewish people by the Nazis interposes itself between the Israeli people and their critics. The Holocaust is a crime so vast in scope, so horrendous in execution, that the crimes of the Israeli state seem small and petty by comparison. Whatever Israel does risks being absorbed in, and absolved by, the Jewish people’s unique historical tragedy.
 
A cynic might even go so far as to suggest that the Shoah is Israel’s most precious possession. Those grainy black and white images, recorded by the liberators of the death camps at the end of World War II, are seared upon humanity’s collective memory. The mechanisation – no, the industrialisation – of mass murder marked a definitive break in the supposedly upward trajectory of civilisation. In Auschwitz and Treblinka humankind was presented with an abysmal mirror, into which most people did not care to look.
 
That the victims of the Holocaust were Jews contributed an inescapably religious dimension to the horror. God’s chosen people, reviled and persecuted across the centuries, had finally become the playthings of pure evil. Who dared object to the traumatised survivors being allowed to return to their ancient homeland? How could the West, who worshipped a crucified Jew, possibly say “No.” to the State of Israel? Hadn’t the Jews earned it?
 
The answer, of course, is “No. They had bought, borrowed and (in the end) stolen it from the people who had lived in the land the Romans called “Palestine” from the Second Century to the late Nineteenth Century, when Theodor Herzl and his Zionists began buying up Palestinian farms and businesses. The encroachment of these Jewish settlers, and their settlements, gathered pace through the early decades of the Twentieth Century, to the point where the Palestinians and their religious leaders rose in angry revolt. One of those leaders, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was to become an implacable enemy of the Zionist project.
 
Palestinian protests and uprisings against the unceasing encroachments of Israeli settlers and settlements continues to this very day. In its latest manifestation, the resistance takes the form of what amount to suicidal knife attacks on Israelis as they walk the streets of Old Jerusalem. Not surprisingly, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s belligerent Prime Minister, has demanded that these attacks be quelled – by any means necessary!
 
Few would have predicted, however, that in his determination to rouse the passions of his people, Netanyahu would have seized upon the single most important – and certainly the most sacred – talisman of the Israeli state: the Shoah.
 
So intense is the Israeli PM’s hatred of the Palestinians that, in a speech to the World Jewish Congress, he claimed that the responsibility for the mass murder of European Jewry lay not with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi co-conspirators, but with the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.
 
Haj Amin al-Husseini meets with Adolf Hitler in Berlin, 28 November 1941.
 
“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time”, Netanyahu told the Congress, “he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here’. ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said. ‘Burn them’.”
 
Historians from all over the world, and many within Israel, responded to Netanyahu’s words with a mixture of fury and disbelief. The Nazi’s genocidal project was commenced long before al-Husseini met with Hitler on 28 November 1941. The infamous Wannsee Conference, held outside Berlin in January 1942, brought together for final approval plans and specifications demanded several months earlier, as the massive logistical implications of Hitler’s “final solution” to the Jewish Question became clear. The Mufti of Jerusalem was little more than a Nazi catspaw in the complex military and diplomatic equation that was the Middle East. For anyone to suggest that he, and, by some curious Zionist variant of the “blood libel”, the Palestinian people, were responsible for the Holocaust would be outrageous. But for the Prime Minister of Israel to make such a statement, in the midst of serious sectarian strife, is beyond outrageous – it is criminal.
 
It also marks an important, and quite possibly fatal, deterioration in the intellectual and moral condition of Zionism. That a Zionist leader is willing to publicly exonerate Adolf Hitler for the extermination of six million Jews, and place the blame, instead, upon a Palestinian cleric, indicates how abysmal are the depths into which the defenders of Israel have fallen.
 
The Nineteenth Century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
 
Have we not just seen the abyss swallow up the monster called Netanyahu?
 
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 24 October 2015.

39 comments:

TeWhareWhero said...

Well said. I met a young Palestinian taxi driver yesterday who told me I was the first Kiwi he'd met who understood about the role of Zionism in the Palestinian conflict. He also said that people he meets here think it is a 'war between two countries' and a religious war when it is a in fact 'a struggle for human rights' - all he wants is the right to live in the land of his ancestors on an equal footing and in peace.

Netanyahu's descent into publicly using extremist rightwing hate propaganda that has been circulating for years in Israel, has one positive benefit - it clearly demonstrates the moral bankruptcy of his regime.

Anonymous said...

A great piece of research and writing, I hope your article reaches a wider audience. well done.

Anonymous said...

Stephanie said:

You would never have written this when you were of the old Left.

I suppose you have read Dershowitz' 'Case for Israel', and/or Meir-Levi's 'History Upside Down'. The Mufti is, at the least, to blame for many of the deaths from Hitler's ethnic cleansing.

You've come a long way, baby.

Richard McGrath said...

I think any claim that Palestinians want to co-exist peacefully with Israelis will become remotely credible when the ongoing imam-fuelled campaign to stab Jews is denounced by President Abbas.

Guerilla Surgeon said...

The whole idea of Hitler actually listening to the grand mufti of Jerusalem – appointed by the British I might add as a political cats paw – is ridiculous. No doubt the man was anti-Semitic, no doubt he did help to raise part of a division of SS troops to fight for Germany, but at the very least Occam's razor tells us that the Germans didn't need outside suggestions to kill Jews. As it was, far more Muslims volunteered to fight against fascism than ever fought for it. Many of these were in fact Palestinians, something that is conveniently forgotten by many.

greywarbler said...

This is no place for flip comments Stephanie.
Chris you have tackled a grisly, gristly and ghastly situation in your essay. In the Israel-Palestine assymetrical fight, there are deep divisions and I feel it is a sewer that breeds the infection of callous killing seen in the Middle East from ISIS and other groups. They echo what is being done against Muslims, and it is repeated between different sects of Islam, and the moral compass in the ME is lost.

The Israelis play the Palestinians like chess pieces. Every time they want to stir them up so they can act against them in some punitive way, they do something to threaten or encroach on the Palestinian access or right to the Temple Mount. It is machiavellian.

What is so devastating is that the Jewish people have been the leaders of intelligent scholarship in so many disciplines. The Nazis no doubt felt belittled in their own country by the Jewish high-achievers, and found a way to steal their business and wealth, and then eliminate the competition.

Since World War 2 Israelis have had the opportunity to establish themselves, gain security and make peace with the Palestinians but have remained in the thrall of their defence force which wants to keep the stamp of their boots and iron fists in Palestinian faces, and in this way to remain in power over Israel. Committing all Israel to peace and forgiveness for wrongs by Palestinians, as Germany has to Jews,
seems to be beyond this country of what should be principled people. They are losing their souls, and entering the domain of Mordor, in a true epic of human kind.

Guerilla Surgeon said...

I think any claim that Israelis want to leave peacefully with Palestinians will become more credible when they stop the settlements.

Bushbaptist said...

Agreed GS they must stop the settlements. They won't though.

Benny Wiesneski (AKA Netanyahu) is an Polish Ashkenazim and has no genetic relationship to the few tribes of Hebrews who populated the Negrev and Sinai deserts. His ancestors converted to Judaism about 1400 years ago. They are real trouble makers too.

Israel gets away with all their sabre rattling because the US supports them unconditionally. I hope to live long enough to see a US President with the balls to stand up to Israel.

Israel is an artificial state taken by force from it's indigenous natives (A lot like the US was; research the Oklahoma Land Grab to understand how Israel came into being). Ariel Sharon, who was an Ukranian Ashkenazim, father was he man who invented the car bomb and used it with devastating effect against Palestinians and British alike.

Bushbaptist said...

Incidentally the lead photo of Benny is an accurate one. The look of a madman Chris. He's mad alright, dangerously mad!

Unknown said...

What's the old and irrelevant Left remotely git to do with this article?..put your cloth cap away and get on the programme

Unknown said...

Very good article...anti-Zionist feeling is strengthening

Simon Cohen said...

The term "Ashkenazi"; it refers to Jews living or whose "paternal" ancestors immigrated to the following parts of central and eastern Europe: the Rhine Valley, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, former Czechoslovakia, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine.
A study of haplotypes of the Y chromosome, published in 2000, addressed the paternal origins of Ashkenazi Jews. Hammer et al.[30] concluded that the Y chromosome of most Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews contained mutations that are also common among Middle Eastern peoples, but uncommon in the general European population. This suggested that the male ancestors of the Ashkenazi Jews could be traced mostly to the Middle East. The proportion of male genetic admixture in Ashkenazi Jews amounts to less than 0.5% per generation over an estimated 80 generations, with "relatively minor contribution of European Y chromosomes to the Ashkenazim.
Bushbaptist makes the assertion that they are not descended from the Hebrews who inhabited the Middle East.All modern genetic scholarship disputes this.
As an Ashkenazi Jew I find his comments racist and I am surprised that moderation didn't prevent them.
I wonder what would have been said if he said that Maori are troublemakers !!!!

Guerilla Surgeon said...

Actually, the "Maori are troublemakers" has been said numerous times by various people on this site. Accusations of racism are also thrown around by various right-wing commentators in these threads. I think Chris is a firmer believer in freedom of speech than most on the right-wing blogs. And four exclamation marks don't really add much to your argument.

Charles E said...

Bb what do you know about Jewish ancestry? Nothing. I bet you don't know why the right to become an Israeli was given to anyone with just one Jewish grandparent. Once you have looked it up you might also learn that being Jewish, or being an Israeli is not necessarily a racial matter at all.

You might also learn that Jews are indigenous to Israeli/Palestine too, and the current Israel is I believe, the third Jewish nation there. Whereas there has never been a Palestinian nation, although the time has surely come for one now. Many Israelis support that too except the rest say look at Gaza, look at Syria & Iraq and so it is not going to happen until the Islamists lose steam and are defeated.

I think the solution is a federal one: two states, two governments plus a third federal & secular one with a joint defence force including foreign peacekeepers, there for a generation.
Together Israel-Palestine could be a very successful country and a new model for a currently completely stuffed ME. Having said that, the safest place for a Muslim there at the moment is probably Israel, although that isn't saying much.

Bushbaptist said...

Wrong again Simon. The Ashkenazim are those who converted to Judaism in the old Kazarkh Empire. The King converted to Judaism and forced his loyal followers and those no-so loyal to convert too. When he died most converted back to what they were previously but some didn't and they are regarded by the Hebrews as 'Foreigners= Askenazim". The Hebrews do not regard them as real Jews.

What most don't understand is that the Hebrews and the Palestinians are the same people (Aramaic) as are the Jordanians and some Syrians and Lebanese.

When Judea was trashed by the Romans many Hebrew Jews spread throughout the Roman Empire and settled across Europe. Most notably in the area now the border between Austria and Germany. So many in fact, that they developed their own variation of a Germanic Dialect called 'Yiddish' (a variant of Jewish). Now extinct in Europe but is spoken by many in the US.

Hitler's Hatred of the Jews started when he was a young man and a devout Catholic and he believed that the Jews killed Jesus. Later it developed further because many European Jews were members of, or supported the Communists in Europe and they were his arch enemy. He blamed them for Germany's troubles after WW I.

Davo Stevens.

Grant said...

Davo, you sometimes have useful things to say, but on this issue, you do not.
I strongly suggest you go and have a close read of the following links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews#The_Khazar_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_of_Jewish_origins#Y-DNA_of_Ashkenazi_Jews

Unknown said...

when Theodor Herzl and his Zionists began buying up Palestinian farms and businesses. The encroachment of these Jewish settlers, and their settlements, gathered pace through the early decades of the Twentieth Century,
........
It’s called diversity ?

Victor said...

Here we go again!

Imaginary history, courtesy of Bush Baptist!

To start with, the term Ashkenazim was originally used to designate the Jews of North West Europe, although it was later extended to the Jews of Poland, Russia etc.

This was not to denote their lack of Jewishness but their distinctiveness vis a vis the Sephardic Jews of Iberia (‘Sapherad’ in Hebrew)and the Mediterranean in general.

Secondly, it wasn’t the Kazarkh but the Kazhars who converted to Judaism, which, as far as we can make out, remained their religion for around three centuries, i.e. much longer than the lifetime of any individual monarch.

Thirdly, Yiddish was spoken right across the Ashkenazi world and not just in the border area of Austria and Germany (which border area, by the way?). Nor is it extinct in Europe or, for that matter, New Zealand, although, of course, thanks to Hitler, there are far fewer people around to speak it. By the way, it was my parents’ mother tongue and I can speak it after a fashion.

Fourthly, the origins of East European Jewry are far from clear but the preponderance of genetic evidence currently favours a mixture of Middle Eastern ‘Y’ Chromosome with primarily South European Mitochondrial DNA, though there are still some who favour the Kazhar thesis as a partial explanation. Genetics is anyhow a fast moving field of research, with new evidence regularly coming to hand.

But why should you believe me, BB? I’m only another tricky Ashkenazi and Polish to boot. Yet, I must insist, I’m not an Ashkenazim, because that would mean there were at least two of me and I don’t, as far as I can make out, suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder.

Finally, as a non-Zionist Jew, I have no idea how to resolve the appalling impasse in the Middle East. But of one thing I’m certain; those who spew hatred towards or seek to denigrate any of the ethnicities involved are part of the problem and not of the solution!

Victor said...

Correction: It's 'Khazars' not 'Kazhars' and hence even more different to 'Kazarkh'

Andrew Nichols said...

No doubt the man was anti-Semitic

Arabs are semites too....I do wish this term hadn't been hijacked to refer solely to anti jewish actions.

Max Ritchie said...

The Zionist leader did not publicly exonerate Hitler. He added the Mufti to the list of guilty persons. Netanyahu stated, in public, after his Mufti speech, and widely reported, that Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust. This is a complicated debate at the best of times - and these are not! - and attributing statements incorrectly is not helpful.

Bushbaptist said...

Funny that's not what I was shown and learned when I was in Israel Victor. Long discussions with various Rabbi and other learned Scholars, that's where that info came from. Who cares about the spelling anyway that's just being picky, people know who I am talking about.

I suggest you actually go there yourself and do the same. The point I was making was that the Jews who trace their ancestry to the original tribes that wandered the deserts there refer to the Ashkenazim with much disdain because they are not "genuine" Jews. I tend to agree with them.

Nor do I believe that the Jews are a "Chosen People" by god or any other entity or that they have any more right to a piece of real estate than any others. Nor are they the only Semites (descendant from Shem), the Palestinians, Jordanians etc. are all Semites. Neither are the Palestinians "Arabs", they are Aramaic and are closely related to the Hebrews. Hebrew is a dialect of old Aramaic just the same as English is a dialect of old Low Germanic as is modern German. The Arabs come from Arabia.

My ancestry is Viking, so does that make the Vikings 'God's chosen people' I think not. They are or were just another small group of humans amongst the sea of humanity. As are the Jews.

Guerilla Surgeon said...

"I do wish this term hadn't been hijacked to refer solely to anti jewish actions."

Don't tell me – you're also annoyed that you can't use the word "gay" anymore?

Chris Trotter said...

To: Max Ritchie.

Netanyahu only resiled from the content of his speech to the World Jewish Congress when he realised the strength of the international and domestic reaction to his lies.

The man is a monster, Max. If you can't see that, then I'm sorry for you.

Andrew Nichols said...

Don't tell me – you're also annoyed that you can't use the word "gay" anymore?

No. Why?

Victor said...

Bush Baptist

If you care to give me the names of the Israeli rabbanim you consulted, I’m happy to ask a rabbi friend of mine in Israel if she knows of them and their views and if you’ve given an accurate description thereof.

Assuming they exist, I suspect that you might have misunderstood what they were saying. But I could be wrong, as there’s no shortage of cranky clergy in Israel as elsewhere.

In any event, the historical origins of the Jewish people seems to me to be more a subject for historians, philologists, DNA researchers and archaeologists to ponder on rather than rabbanim, though the latter might think otherwise.

You won't get an absolute consensus from secular scholars either. But the latest DNA research does suggest that both Ashkenazim and Sephardim are largely descended from a small group of Middle Eastern males (perhaps slaves or traders)who impregnated primarily south European women.

I agree with you that there are worse sins than mistaken spelling. But, in your case, these mistakes are worth noting as they seem to be symptomatic of a woeful ignorance that is in sharp contrast to your lordly claims to historical omniscience.

How is one meant to take seriously the opinions on the subject of Jewish origins of someone who thinks that Ashkenazim and Yiddish speakers are two totally separate, mutually exclusive categories? It’s like arguing that Maori and speakers of “Te Reo” are mutually exclusive. In other words, it’s just poppycock.

Does it matter if you spew poppycock on the web? Not particularly. But using derogatory and hence racist epithets about a particular ethnicity, is, to my mind, a more serious matter. And I’d be of that opinion even if I wasn’t a "real trouble maker" of a Polish Ashkenazi and, hence, part of the ethnicity being insulted.

Meanwhile, I’m not sure why you’ve suddenly raised the issue of whether or not the Jews are “the Chosen People”? I’m not aware of anyone on this thread making this claim. So is this a “man of straw”, a smokescreen or both?

I’ll be away from my computer for a few days but, upon my return, I’d be happy to acknowledge your apology. I might not be a Christian but I believe in forgiveness.

Charles E said...

'Monster'? Really? Monsters don't usually resile from anything.

You seem to have a special hatred of this entirely typically rotten ME leader. I would not defend him mostly but surely there are much worse candidates out there you don't write so often about. So why do you?
Perhaps it's just the usual case of Israelis being expected always to have higher standards than any of their neighbours and most of the rest of the world. They should be flattered I guess, as the implication from the attention they get, almost always from the left, is that nobody expects good behaviour from their Arab & Persian foes, but Jews, they are expected to be..... ah ... like us! Unconscious racism at best.

Or is it guilt? Israel was very much a left wing project in the thirties & after WW2, and Socialist Zionism was very much part of its building as a nation. When I lived there in 1981 for six months I was on a very large communist kibbutz, and that was not unusual at all. There were a lot of kibbutzim, mostly socialist or communist, and secular. Few were religious. The country had a strong left. It was about that time that Lukud built a solid 20-25% vote that has managed many coalitions since with all sorts. And from the PLO to Hamas to Hezbollah to Isis today, all Israel's enemies have helped and still help to keep Lukud & the likes of Netanyahu in power. The Western left now helps too.

Guerilla Surgeon said...

Charles, if the mainstream media was as evenhanded as you wish for Chris, then there would probably be no need to criticise Netanyahu more than the Palestinian leaders. But it's not. The media, particularly the American media is biased against the Palestinians who you'd never guess were living under a military occupation. Being held to a higher standard is an old and tired complaint, designed pretty much like the anti-Semitism accusation to shut down the debate about Palestinian independence.

Max Ritchie said...

Chris

I'm not defending Netanyahu. How can you jump to that conclusion after a one line blog post? I think he's awful, although he does have the baggage of a dead brother. But he had explained what he thought of Hitler before you wrote your article. You don't need to give only part of his opinions to make your point - that's a real journo trick and you're better than that. Aren't you?

Charles E said...

I see a few laughable letters in The Press along the lines of some posts here that are essentially claiming that most Israelis are not actually Jews now! Must be the latest left/islamist strategy to delegitimise Israel. They need to do more research on Nazi race profiling to improve their propaganda.
As if the supposed race of distant ancestors makes ones current identity.
If they really know their stuff they will have to point out that the Welsh & Irish are not really much more Celtic than the English, which is very little indeed and that the modern Greeks are not particularly related to the ancients, nor are modern Egyptians the same people as the pyramid builders, nor are the Turks .........
When will people learn that actually race is mostly myth, indeed it doesn't really exist at all. The only relevant race is the human race, the only one we do belong to. What people are really referring to is culture, which certainly does exist and differentiate us. Those obsessed with race are often from an insecure or declining culture, or just think they are.

Grant said...

@Max. No no, of course you're not really defending Netanyahu. How could we possibly jump to that conclusion? You're merely suggesting Chris should accept that the Prime Minister of Israel didn't really mean what he said in his keynote speech to the WJC, he just accidentally mis-spoke himself and made a noble and generous amendment to his original comments while dancing on the head of a pin in front of journalists after the event. The later dissimulation over what he actually meant in his original comments, should of course be given equal weight when balanced against his carefully scripted original speech. Because of course he is much given to accidentally giving the appearance of vilifying Palestinians when he doesn't really intend to.

Guerilla Surgeon said...

Of course race exists, even if only as a rough way of distinguishing human beings from each other. The genetic material might be very similar, but the broad physical differences are what people see, and use to make judgements. Although admittedly culture is also very important. But if you believe race doesn't exist, you should ask that black guy that was shot eight times in the back by a policeman while running away in the US. Oh you can't, he's dead.

Anonymous said...

Who cares what spelling constitutes Jewishness or who what Bibi 'Barney Rubble' Netanyahu said. In 2004 the International Court of Justice was asked for its advisory opinion by the General Assembly and it stated clearly that isreal is illegally occupying the designated Palestinian territories of Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem and must withdraw to its June 1967 border. Nothing complicated. No disputed territory. Simple and plain. That advisory decision stands to this day.

Charles E said...

So what race was the dead man GS?
Not black, that is not a race.
Not African either, no such race.
African American? No, that is a culture.

I would accept that in some remote parts of the world you could say there lives a certain race of people, but what does that really mean? Only that they have a high proportion of common ancestors for several generations. Still not very significant compared to culture, which truly is who they are.

My point is that only the uneducated (eg Bb)today think that there is anything important or relevant about what they suppose someone's or their own race to be. Mostly these people think their imagined race makes them special in some regard and/or that others' race makes them the way they are, usually a negative. It does not, it's all culture, not race.

Victor said...

I should add to my previous posts that I don't believe the descent or otherwise of contemporary Jews from the tribes of Israel has any real bearing on the rights and wrongs of the Middle East conflict.

Nor would I necessarily insist that the Middle Eastern origins of the predominant European Jewish Y Chromosome are derived from those same tribes as opposed to some other group of Middle Easterners (although it's hardly an unreasonable assumption). Nor would I deny that the Palestinians might also be in large measure descended from the tribes of Israel.

And nor, most certainly, am I suggesting that these academic issues are of any great significance compared with the urgent practical need to find a peaceful solution to the problems of Israel/Palestine.

However, Dom_Knots, this does not mean that I believe blatant racism should be allowed to go unanswered or that the claims to superior erudition on which they're based should not be held up to examination and, if need be, ridicule.


Chris

I agree with you. Netanyahu is a monster.

So was the Mufti. Just ask the Serbs and the Roma.

But they're both minor league compared to Hitler, Himmler et al.

Victor said...

I strongly recommend the following article:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/26/frightful-glimpse-binyamin-netanyahu-mind

Guerilla Surgeon said...

I'm not saying I disagree with you Charles, but I think we're talking past each other. Of course races a social construct, used to legitimise certain behaviours. It's all very imprecise, and based on broad physical differences. Whatever you like to say about the man who was shot, he was shot because of these broad physical differences and the policeman's views on race. All the technical hoo ha doesn't alter that fact. The problem is, that your attitude that there is no such thing also legitimises certain aspects of racism/bigotry. Similar to the other right-wing idea that classes have disappeared, or are irrelevant these days.

Victor said...

Dom_Knots

For further clarification, may I add that it's not your post I'm accusing of racism, albeit that, in isolation, my own previous post might be read in that way.

I was merely objecting to your dismissal of my earlier comments on "what spelling constitutes Jewishness". These comments were made in rebuttal of an expresion of blatant racism on the part of another poster that, incidentally, I found personally insulting. I continue to consider my response valid in that specific context.

BTW I'm not sure that the ICJ decided that Israel's occupation of the territories seized in 1967 was illegal, merely that these territories were still to be considered as "occupied" and not "disputed".

By my understanding, International Law recognises that territories can be occupied by a hostile force in the course of a war but imposes a strict code of behaviour on the occupying power.

Israel has breached this code by, inter alia, its settlement policies and the "separation barrier". It has therefore failed in its responsibilities as the occupying power but this, in itself, does not, as I understand it, make the occupation illegal.

Legal or not, the occupation's continuance is both cruel and absurd. The sooner it's ended the better, although I don't see a clear path forward to achieving this. Nor do I think that ending the occupation will, on its own, usher in a new era of peace and reconciliation in this troubled region.

Max Ritchie said...

I suggest everyone read the transcript of the speech to get the context. Especially you, Grant. It's about Jerusalem, not the Holocaust.