brzydzę się

[Gość: marcin]

takimi ludźmi(?) jak Tony Judt
chciałbym żeby jemu podobni zostali zabici przez antysemitów








Oct. 31, 2003
Eye on the Media: The controversy of Israel
By BRET STEPHENS






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Since when are the Shaba farms "disputed"?

According to the United Nations, this uninhabited strip of land – 14
kilometers long and two kilometers deep – falls squarely on the Israeli side
of Blue Line dividing Israel from Lebanon. But because the farms are also on
the Golan Heights, the UN insists they properly belong to Syria.

In the language of news agencies such as Reuters and the Associated Press,
that would mean the farms are in "Israeli-occupied" territory. But there's a
catch. Syria – which otherwise is so jealous of its territory that it
refused Ehud Barak's 1999 offer to return the Golan Heights minus a strip of
shoreline – does not claim the farms as its own.

Instead, in 2000 Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shara informed the UN that
the farms are Lebanese. Syria claims it made a gift of them to Lebanon in
1951 as part of what one Lebanese official described as a "kind of oral
agreement," but neither government has been able to produce any
documentation proving it.

The Lebanese government has also produced some handwritten deeds for the
farms dating from the 1940s. But even if these are not forgeries, the fact
that they predate the 1951 land transfer renders them inoperative – if
indeed there was a land transfer. According to Lebanese military maps from
the early 1960s, the farms fell squarely in Syrian territory.

So why did Reuters and the Associated Press describe the farms as "disputed"
following this week's Hizbullah rocket attacks? Because, one inside source
helpfully explains, the Golan Heights are "disputed" by Israel and Syria.
But in that case, why do the news agencies otherwise describe the Heights
as "occupied"? And if they are now so sensitive to Israeli claims, why not
also describe the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as "disputed"?

The fact is, Syria and Lebanon jointly pretend the Shaba farms are Lebanese
in order to furnish Hizbullah with a pretext for continued attacks on
Israeli targets. By calling the farms "disputed," Reuters and AP only lend
credibility to what should be described as a fraud.

I EXPATIATE on this topic to make a simple point: Just because someone
disputes something – whether it's land, law, history, received opinion or
whatever – does not mean it's disputed. A controversy is not created by the
act of controverting alone.

Take a homely example: I may swan into your living room, refuse to budge and
claim your house as my own. That does not make it mine. Nor does it make
it "disputed territory," except semantically.

Still, if some camera crew were to arrive on the scene to report not on my
invasion of your property but on this "dispute" of ours, it would go a long
way toward shoring up my case. Let it go on for a month or two, and you
might even be tempted to compromise. The basement apartment, perhaps?

What goes for your house and the Shaba farms goes also for the Jewish state.
Israel's existential legitimacy has been widely assailed for years – but
that came, or comes, mainly from Arab, Islamic and Soviet corners. By
contrast, Israel's critics in the West usually confined themselves to
arguing about Israel's borders. As for the rightness of the Zionist dream
itself, that was ideological territory upon which they dared not trespass.

Now that's changed. A line has been crossed. With the media's help, Israel
has become "controversial." As usual, Israelis and Jews have blazed this
particular trail.

In August, Haaretz ran a long profile by Ari Shavit of "neo-Canaanites" Haim
Hanegbi and Meron Benvenisti, two Israelis who have come to the conclusion
that "Israel as a Jewish state can no longer exist here."

In September, former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg penned an article for
Yediot Aharonot in which he argued that "after two thousand years of
struggle for survival, the reality of Israel is a colonial state, run by a
corrupt clique which scorns and mocks law and civic morality." The article
was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, The Guardian,
the Suddeutsche Zeitung and (of course!), The Forward.

All this was bound to spill over on American shores, and earlier this month
it did. In the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt, a British Jew who is a
professor of history at New York University and director of the Remarque
Institute, has announced "the depressing truth that Israel today is bad for
the Jews." Judt's article is titled "Israel: The Alternative" – the
alternative (actually, the "desirable outcome") being the binational state
propounded by Benvenisti and Hanegbi. His argument is that Zionism "arrived
too late": By the time the Jewish state was born in 1948, the world had
moved beyond nationalism to globalism, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism.

Israel, however, remains a state defined by ethno-religious criteria, even
as a growing percentage of the population within its borders is not Jewish.
So it faces a dilemma: It can either retreat to borders within which it may
remain both Jewish and democratic; it can expel its non-Jewish population,
meaning primarily the Palestinians; or it can become a binational state.

Judt implies that he prefers the first alternative. Only he doesn't think
it's going to happen: "There are too many settlements, too many Jewish
settlers, and too many Palestinians" for the two-state solution to work.
American pressure could help, but none is forthcoming because Bush "has been
reduced to a ventriloquist's dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet
line."

As for that cabinet, it is composed of extremists to whom the the fascist
label "fits better than ever." The government, Judt claims, is moving Israel
in the direction of "full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project."

Thus we arrive, with Hegelian inevitability, at history's juncture. Either
the Zionist fascists of the present government will get their way, leading
to the permanent estrangement of decent Diaspora Jewry from their fanatical
cousins in the Holy Land. Or the decent people will prevail, leading to a
binational state of which Jews everywhere, and the whole world, can be
proud.

This second outcome, Judt writes, "would not be easy, though not quite as
impossible as it sounds." All that's required is "brave and relentlessly
engaged American leadership"; "international force" to guarantee "the
security of Jews and Arabs alike"; and "the emergence, among Jews and Arabs
alike, of a new political class."

ABOUT JUDT'S scheme, many things can be said, the least of which is its mind-
boggling impracticality.

A binational state? Surely Judt is aware of where that path led to in
Lebanon, where the animosities and differences between Christians and
Muslims were nowhere near as deep as they are between Muslims and Jews.

A new political class? Had Palestinian Arabs had such a class in the 1930s,
a binational state may have come into being with the end of the British
mandate, for there was no shortage of Jews advocating as much at the time.

"International forces" to guarantee the mutual security of Jews and Arabs?
We know too well what such forces recently accomplished in Srebrenica and
Kigali.

Then there's Judt's sense of history.
He says that Israel threatens to become the first modern democracy to engage
in ethnic cleansing. Well, no: The United States and Australia, both modern
democracies, did far worse with their aboriginal peoples.

He says that Jewish nationalism came to fruition too late. Wrong again:
India and Pakistan and Indonesia were born alongside Israel; the Ind