I’ve read both your articles and they are well crafted. However, Pat Buchanan does speak for his people…the white ancestors of the people who founded this nation and created its laws and institutions. He is not a crazed zealot out to drag the U.S. down. He’s got a worldview that is distinctly pro-American from a strictly traditionalist point of view. That point of view clashes with the views of Zionists who believe that supporting Israel is the most important thing there is. Pat and many others disagree and fear that there can only be one foreign policy in this nation. I’m just going to have to straddle the fence here and hope I don’t get my balls hung in the barbed wire.

How is a pro-Israel foreign policy conflict with American interests? Israel or no Israel, the Muslims would’ve still hated us, we’d always be part of the dar al harb, a part of the world that the Allah squad has to conquer. This is what infuriates me the most about Pat Buchanan. He refuses to see that the Muslims hate us not because of our support for Israel and not even so much because of our decadence. A true Muslim believer is supposed to hate all kuffirs (infidels) and wage war with them until they all submit to the ummah. I want to ask Pat and his defenders a question: Did the Muslims who murdered, raped, assaulted, and intimidated Christians in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Sudan, Nigeria, and Lebanon do so because of their support for Israel or their cultural decadence?

Well, we can take this argument back to the seventh century, but I have not the time and I’m getting sleepy. When you work this out, let me know. Good evening till tomorrow, gentlemen.

About a decade ago I purchased Lawrence Auster’s excellent book The Path to National Suicide, a book about immigration. I’m disappointed he can’t see that the neocons are an example of an ethnic group representing the interests of a foreign country - the kind of thing that leads to national suicide when it spreads to every ethnic group.

Just check the neocon blogs like Roger Simon’s and note how unapologetically these ex-liberals put Israel’s interests ahead of those of the US. When there is any kind of dispute between the US and Israel the neocons uniformly take Israel’s side even when they are spying on the US. When the Larry Franklin case broke David Frum and other neocons claimed anti-Semitism, which puts them in the same category as Jesse Jackson and his ilk. For years I tried not to conclude that they are just a fith column but eventually one has to look reality in the face and come to terms with it.

Eugene Girin - all those examples you gave are of Muslim/non-Muslim disputes within the borders of a particular country. In all cases I personally side with the non-Muslims. There is no US border with a Muslim country and no serious Muslim claim to US territory. Obviously people like Bin Laden hate the West no matter what but the intensity of hatred toward the US is clearly connected to US policy in the region.

Bob Griffin wrote:

“Pat Buchanan does speak for his people…the white ancestors of the people who founded this nation and created its laws and institutions.”

Buchanan is Irish Catholic. Without looking up his family tree, I would bet $10 his ancestors came to America about 100 years after some other white people - to whom he is not related, founded this nation.

As signs ‘Irish need not apply’ attest, people who established this nation most definitely did not consider Buchanan’s grandfather a part of their people.

Just as Mr. Griffin doesn’t consider Zionists (code word for Jews) part of American people.

Mr. Buchanan’s ancestors hail from Maryland, a Catholic colony founded in the 17th century. He also has protestant ancestors on his mothers side spread throughout the South. His roots go deep.

Mr. Mik, I’m going to request an apology for that remark you made about my not considering Jews part of the American people. Jews have made outstanding contributions to this nation since the 17th century. If that apology is not forthcoming, either you or I will sever communications with this website.

To Buchanan’s credit, whomever doubts the policies of Israel is automatically dubbed an anti-semite. Buchanan has guts, that’s for sure. I’m not sure whether he is an anti-semite or not. Even Henry Kissinger thought the Israelis were jerks.

I have nothing against Jews myself, but I think they are often let off the hook for their own bigotry. The Israelis sell out America whenever it can. I went to a very Jewish college and experienced unbelievable suspicion and hostility from Jews. And…now, let me see….what was the definition of the word goyim…..

Pat has a historically based view of the world. His knowledge is phenomenal, but his view is too restrictive concerning Israel and the War in Iraq. As another commentator points out, Muslims are going to hate Israel and us and attack both no matter what, if given the opportunity. Does anyone have a scintilla of historical argument against this conclusion? For goodness sake, the Mexicans Pat accurately identifies as enemies oppose our war every chance they get. Why would we ignore an extremely dangerous enemy that possesses a sympathizer that has a huge border with us?

Please reconsider any rash action Mr. Griffin; of course, some time away might indeed be good for your soul. We just can’t cry and take our footballs home; this is pure metaphor and not in anyway intending to be a slur. Stay here and pursue your view. You are not alone here, as you should know by now.

I regard Mik’s invidious attempt to link my postings to some kind of ant-Jewish sentiment in a very serious light. If he is attempting to intimidate me or to cast aspersions on my point of view as being in some degree racist, let him openly state it. If not, I’ll expect to see an apology from him right out in the open here by the morning. In the absence of an apology, I will cease to post here.

Bob Griffin threatens to take his marbles and go home if he will not get an apology. Let’s see if he deserves one.

He wrote:
“(Buchanan) got a worldview that is distinctly pro-American from a strictly traditionalist point of view. That point of view clashes with the views of Zionists who believe that supporting Israel is the most important thing there is. Pat and many others disagree and fear that there can only be one foreign policy in this nation.”

Zionists can be of any nationality and citizenship. But last sentence makes clear that Mr. Griffin refers to Zionists who are US citizens. Now it is perfectly possible to be a Zionist, ie supporter of Israel and still think that support of Israel is not the most important thing there is.

In my experience an overwhelming majority of Israel supporters do not put Israel interests above US interests.

Most US Jews support Israel to some degree, of course most of them are liberals and their support is rather non-energetic. As supporters of Israel they are Zionists. Mr. Griffin thinks they put Israeli interests ahead of American interests, ie he accuses them of being disloyal Americans, a fifth column of sorts.

When confronted with the logical conclusion of his writings Mr. Griffin became upset. Either he should correct his statement that most US Jews are disloyal or my statement stands - Mr. Griffin doesn’t think Jews are loyal part of American people.

Mr. Auster, you have my email address. I simply can’t stay here with a person of Mik’s ilk. Should you decide to cash him in, please let me know. Otherwise, I have enjoyed corresponding with all the other fine minds here at VFR. Good luck.

I’m also offended by Mr. Griffin’s post of 10:15 p.m., and he shouldn’t be surprised by Mik’s response to it. The issue in my articles on Buchanan is not whether Buchanan likes Israel or has to consider Israel equally with the United States. The issue in those articles, especially the “Open Letter,” is Buchanan’s rationalizations of Jew-murdering terrorists and his attack on Israel as an outlaw country for finally defending itself. Mr. Griffin misses all that, and reduces it to: Old stock Americans don’t care and shouldn’t care about Israel; Jewish Americans do. The utterly false construction he puts on this is that Jewish Americans are forcing old stock Americans to care more about Israel than about the U.S.

How in the world is it speaking for old stock Americans to say that Israel is an outlaw country when it defends itself from terrorists?

Frankly, when I see the kind of statements that have been appearing at this site over the last day, not just from Mr. Griffin but from others, I consider suspending the comments feature again. I don’t have the time to police the discussions here when they get very active and when a lot of participants start heading in a direction that I don’t want to host at this site.

Exactly, what was precient about the piece?
Almost everyone writting about the aftermath concluded that there would be terrorist attacks.
Regimes allied to or seen as close to us continue to exist.
There were positive effects, including the disarmament of Libya.

Moreover, we now know that our supposed allies, France and Russia, were on the take.

If Richard Perle is discredited, where is the mea culpa from Pat and other anti-war writers who were wrong?

I’ll get on my high horse. “The Jews.” It would be helpful to refer to Jewish people as people. Let’s take a deep breath at this point, count to ten, and ignore all that has been written above except Mr. Auster’s article. Is Pat bigoted against Jewish people?

I am a fan of Pat. Is he a “Jew hater”? Not a chance. Does he think America’s preference for Israel over Arabs is detrimental to America? Yes. Does he resent the powerful influence of liberal Jewish Americans in America? Yes. Does this resentment cause him to take the side of Palestinian people in preference to the side of Israeli people? Yes. His primary concern is America and not the dislike of Jewish people? Yes.

I don’t know what the above boils down to except we can expect Pat to criticize Israel. I do know he has chosen the wrong side. He needs to realize Christians are to not take action against the Chosen People, not that Christians must support their every action otherwise we would suffer the same fate as Sodom and….

What I am doing is announcing a new rule. In the future, anyone who writes, as Mark wrote,

“To Buchanan’s credit, whomever [sic] doubts the policies of Israel is automatically dubbed an anti-semite.”

is going to be excluded from this site. This kind of statement is palpably false and ignorant. No one who merely “questioned” Israel’s policy has been called an anti-Semite. The issue is not criticism. The issue is people, like Buchanan, who side with terrorists and attack Israel’s very legitimacy, yet who claim to be as mere “critics” of Israel who are being called anti-Semites merely for making criticisms.

I’m not going let this site be used by people who are so ignorant and so in denial of the basic issues. We should’nt have to keep dealing with same nonsense forever. It’s not worth maintaining a discussion forum if it means dealing with the kind of stupidity shown in Mark’s comment.

I’m surprised by Ron’s question: “Exactly, what was precient about the piece?” The answer is obvious. Buchanan described exactly the situation that we have in fact gotten into.

Mr. Auster, you assume that I recall all the details in your article. I don’t. My remarks were meant to express what I thought Mr. Buchanan’s point of view is in regard to his antithesis to Zionism. Being anti-Zionist is not a crime, though it appears to be one here…which is an interesting revelation to me (and I am not pro or anti-Zionist). Thus there is little more I can say. Mr. Auster, I’m sorry your rather emotional attachments to Israel are clouding your judgement in my case. But I understand that attachment. And I apologize to you or anyone who happens to have misread my piece. I happen not to be emotionally attached to Israel or any foreign power including that of my ancestors, England, and am thus able to comment on all foreign policy debates without the need to inject vitriol into them. There are many people in the world who regard Israel with indifference: Malays, Chinese, Polynesians. Is everyone on the planet supposed to view Israel with heart-stopping theatrics? Mr. Buchanan is a nativist and I understand his sentiments because of my own roots, even if I don’t approve of Buchanan’s thinking all the time. Mr. Auster, you seem otherwise very sensible from what I have read in your other columns, but I think your sensitivity is misplaced in my case. Since no aplogy seems forthcoming, I leave you to your cogitations with best wishes.

Good evening to you all.

Mr. Griffin writes: “Is everyone on the planet supposed to view Israel with heart-stopping theatrics?”

Mr. Griffin is still clueless—apparently, impenetrably clueless—about the substance of this discussion, despite the fact that it has been stated over and over again and was spelled out with logical clarity in my article on Buchanan that Mr. Griffin just said he read. Buchanan did not merely say: “I’m not interested in Israel, I’m just interested in America.” If Buchanan had simply said that, no one would have called him a friend of Israel or the Jews, but also no one would have called him an anti-Israel bigot. But Buchanan did NOT merely say that he wasn’t interested in Israel. Buchanan ATTACKED ISRAEL FOR DEFENDING ITSELF FROM TERRORISTS. By doing so, he was saying Israel does not have the right to defend itself, that it does not have the right to exist, and that Israelis don’t have the right to live.

I say again, if there are people reading this who still do not get this basic point that I’ve just made, don’t waste our time by posting here with the ignorant statement that Buchanan is being called an anti-Semite merely for caring about the U.S. more than he cares about Israel.

Horrors. Please Mr. Auster, do whatever you think it takes to eliminate anti-Semitic comments here if the alternative is that you stop posting and allowing discussion of your concerns. Others and I (feebly) try to oppose the anti-Semitism, so if you deem it inadequate, then by all means please make it a nonisssue. Just delete the thread as though it had never occurred, but don’t stop posting. Otherwise the morons will have silenced you. You are part of the alternative media (the bloggers hated by the Democrats) that is making a difference.

I can’t lead an excellent site such as this, or I would. You can. Consider a break. Maybe you could cashier a committee of us to serve as a substitute in your abscence.

Hey the rest of you, don’t just sit back and rely on Mr. Auster to do your work for you and reply to anti-Auster or anti-Semitic comments. Contribution does not mean merely giving money but engaging the confused and the nasty people that appear. It is hard work to match wits with scores of people with clever ideas, and Mr. Auster also might need to earn a living.

It seems to me that part of the reason for the polarization here is the lack of moderates among the critics of Israel (at least on the right); that is, there are very few who have merely criticized Israel; almost all of them have suggested that the Israelis bear most of the blame for anything that has gone wrong.
It’s not so much that criticizing Israel “automatically” gets someone labeled, rather 95% of the people criticizing Israel tend to phrase their criticisms in the format of: “Israelis kill innocent children - again.”
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/comments.php?id=P1464_0_1_0

Because of this, it sometimes seems as if all criticism of Israel is taboo, but that’s mainly because of the nature of most of the criticism that currently exists.
Moderate criticism of Israel probably won’t get labelled as antisemitism, and we will test this hypothesis once one of the critics actually decides to engage in moderate criticism.

Thanks much to Mr. Henri.

And also, I want to say that I respect the way Mr. Henri dealt with the Buchanan issue. He doesn’t exactly agree with me, he maintains a sympathy and liking for Buchanan (which I don’t), but he still makes it clear that what Buchanan has been saying is wrong. That kind of balance is admirable.

And thanks also to Mr. Jose for his true and much needed point.

I am extremely honored: praise from Mr. Auster. I am encouraged to work harder.

I think that for a long time, Buchanan was seen as the leader of the fight against hte neoconservatives; therefore, a lot of paleoconservatives automatically jumped to his defense because he was “one of us.”

The Israel issue is rather hard for me, because most of the antiwar conservatives or libertarians tend to be unkindly disposed toward Israel, and I am not.
Therefore, I have to endure a lot of “Israel is bad” propaganda whenever I want to read conservative antiwar stuff.

Not that I entirely disagree that some of the pro-war people put Israel’s interests first (I think that Richard Perle falls into this category, and maybe Michael Ledeen may as well (see http://www.isteve.com/sep04.htm and use control-F (apple-F for a mac) and type in “Michael Ledeen,” with a comma at the end (without the comma you’ll hit other articles first))). But to the extent that there were ulterior motives on the pro-war side, there were at least three others (projecting American power (Jamws Woolsey, Jed Babbin), messianic democratism (Paul Wolfowitz, Andrew Sullivan, Clifford May), and guilt about the US abandoning the Shiites and Kurds in 1991(Paul Wolfowitz)).
Of course there were those who truly believed in the war because they believed in the WMDs or the ties to Al Qaeda, as well.

In any case, while there is room for criticism of Israel, the relentless focus on Israel does get tiring.

Maybe that is why I like Ilana Mercer.

Moreover, I will not even address Pat here; just the facts madame, as our beloved DI said in the Naked City. If I defend Pat in any way, it will be elsewhere. I am so scrupulous/principled, I forget human feelings. Don’t snob me anyone, I don’t think I have a superior ability to endure scruples and principles.

I simply cannot fathom the apparent bigotry of Pat Buchanan against Israel. My impression is that Mr. Buchanan is just so completely furious at what he views as treasonous corruption on the part of the Israel lobby (which wouldn’t have anywhere near the power it does were it not for millions of Evangelical Christians) and at the American Jewish population who is overwhelmingly leftist. If there’s corruption, why doesn’t he hold the feet of the gentile politician sellouts to the fire at least as much as he does Jewish neocons?

As Mr. Jose pointed out, there are a number of reasons neocons were so gung-ho about going to war in Iraq, and some of them are objects of legitimate attack. Instead of making a vaulable contribution to the national debate, PJB focuses - and obsesses on Israel and its supporters. The tragic irony is that Israelis themselves would benefit from many of the fine insights and ideas he is certainly capable of. Israelis aren’t our enemies, Mr. Buchanan. Liberals (who can be Gentiles, Jews, or of any ethnicity - including Irish) and jihadist Muslims are the enemies. What a waste!

Two things I should mention:
First, for what it is worth, I believe that Pat is half Irish. His other half is German.
Second, I think that a lot of things need to be understood in the context of the Cold War and the end of the Cold War.
Pat always hoped for the US to be able to get rid of Communism and then to go into isolation. He sees Israel as dragging us into foreign entanglements, and therefore resents it (as I recall, the charges of antisemitism, and many paleocons’ animus toward Israel started about the time of the First Gulf War, which was at the end of the Cold War).
[The end of Soviet support for Arafat also had a lot to do with the softening of his image, and with his attempts to appear more moderate; and finally it was part of the reason why the Israelis thought that the Palestinians could finally be brought to the peace table].

Whew! Here goes.

I sympthize with Israel’s wall-building and its attempt to root out the terrorists in the territories. I think that its actions have been relatively restrained.

But…the fact remains that Israel was created by Romantic nationalists who rationalized or ignored the effects that mass immigration of Jews would inevitably have on the native population.

I don’t think that justifies terrorism. But I think that Muslims tend to perceive Israel as a creation of the West, which it largely was, and a threat to Islam, a sort of bridgehead or stalking horse of a West intent on destroying Islam.

This latter is of course NOT true. But the illusion is an understandable one, given people’s natural chauvinism with respect to their religions and cultures. It doesn’t EXCUSE Arab terrorism, but it does mean that it’s not necessarily just innate savagery of Arabs that inspired this kind of behavior.

To say that the terrorism is inspired by features of Islam itself is reasonable, but I doubt that it is the whole explanation. It seems at least reasonable to suggest—no one can PROVE something like this of course—that had there been no Zionism, there might not now be a global jihad against the West.

The fact is, many Jews often act as though pointing out that Israel is a VERY RECENT settler nation created on the land of dispossessed people that makes deep and abiding hatred and resentment by Palestinians inevitable; many act as though pointing this out is itself anti-Semitic. But there is justice in it, though it is not the whole story. I can see asking a Palestinian to acknowledge the deep connection of the Jews to his land. I can see asking a Palestinian to recognize that whatever the justice of the origins of Israel it is now a fact and it must be accepted. I CANNOT see asking a Palestinian to rejoice that Israel was established or to consider Zionism a fair and just disposition of himself and his neighbors.

And it is worth noting that, in my experience, most of our fellow Christians in the Middle East, for all their suffering at the hands of the Muslims, generally share the Muslim resentment of Israel.

Jeff Kantor

About half the population of Israel consists of Jews or the descendants of Jews who, until the twentieth century, had lived for millennia in Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and other Arab countries until they were driven out under the threat of genocide. Where should these Jews have gone? And what kind of morality elevates the plight of a handful of psychopathic Muslims over that of a free and democratic state notable for science, literature, and civilization? Nobody who expresses concern for the situation of whites in Zimbabwe, for example, who are generally the descendants of voluntary migrants, could fairly withhold that concern from the refugee population of Israel.

“It seems at least reasonable to suggest—no one can PROVE something like this of course—that had there been no Zionism, there might not now be a global jihad against the West.” Perhaps there would not be a global jihad, but it has been pointed out time and again that Muslims are in conflict everywhere in the world that they come into contact with non-Muslims. Nigeria, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Sudan, India, etc. None of the locations listed have anything to do with Israel or the Palestinians. So, perhaps instead of “global jihad”, there would be “trouble everywhere that Muslims live”. Is that a big difference that we should care about?

Mr. Kantor seems to think it is a bad thing that Israel is a settler nation.
What does he think the USA is?
His assertion is not even exactly true, since, as Agricola says, half the Israeli population is derived from people chased out of Muslim countries. Whatever the situation when Israel was created, a population exchange later took place, which the Arabs will not accept.

I myself would long since have concluded that Pat Buchanan was anti-Semitic if I did not know Jewish people who had worked for him and energetically defend him against this charge. My estimate is that his incongruous attitude toward Israel — it is incongruous given his general outlook — is prompted by 1) resentment against liberal American Jews and 2)— here Michael Jose is dead on target — nostalgic isolationism. Buchanan was ready enough to fight the Commies, but could never get worked up against the Nazis, and once the Cold War was over, thought America could pick up its doilies and go home.

Buchanan couldn’t get worked up against the Nazis because the Nazis were a minimal threat to the United States. Nazism itself was also a minimal threat worldwide, because it had such limited appeal. No group of people outside Germany could ever conceivably embrace Nazism. Communism, on the other hand, had global appeal. It found adherents all over the place. G. Patton was right: the US really did fight against the wrong army.

Nazism was a minimal threat worldwide? Um, well, if you weren’t Czech, Polish, Russian, or British, at a minimum…..

Now I’m adding a third item to the index of prohibited opinions: Anybody who seeks to minimize the evil and threat of Nazism, such as saying that “Nazism was a minimal threat worldwide,” will be excluded from this site.

“Mr. Kantor seems to think it is a bad thing that Israel is a settler nation.
“What does he think the USA is?”

Indeed. And if the United States had not succeeded in pushing the aboriginal inhabitants of this land into the bantustans we call Indian reservations, and reducing their relative population vis-a-vis that of the settlers, we’d be facing the same problem as the whites in South Africa and the Jews in Palestine. The Boers tried the same solution as the Jews in Palestine—partition—when they instituted the “homelands,” but that measure came much too late, after decades of trying to keep the Bantu in the same society with them, but as a subject class. Perhaps if the Boers had taken their inspiration from the Peel Commission and opted for partition in the 1930s, they’d have pulled it off.

Ulster was settled by the Protestants about the same time as South Africa by the Boers or the American colonies by the English. Partition seems to have worked out there, not perfectly, but a lot better than it did for the Boers in South Africa. But if partition were being proposed today rather than in 1920-22, I doubt it would be accepted. (As it was, it was barely accepted by the Irish Nationalists even then.) The alternatives to partition for the Protestants in Ireland were loss of political power in a 32-county Ireland, or a probably futile attempt to maintain the Ascendancy in the face of an increasingly violent tide of Irish nationalism. (For a while there, it looked as if the Ulster Protestants were going to face the same problem as the Jews in Israel: the fact that the subordinate minority was reproducing so fast that in time they would naturally become the majority. More recently, though, I think the Catholics in Ulster have slowed down to Protestant reproduction rates, so the Protestants may have dodged that demographic bullet. Of course, the way things are going in the UK, the Moslems are likely to move in and outbreed both.)

The Jews came to Palestine much later than the Boers to South Africa, the English to North America, or the Protestants to Ulster. So it’s not surprising that the proposal for partition should be accepted with much more difficulty in Palestine than in Ireland, and with almost as much difficulty as in South Africa. It didn’t help that Zionist immigration got going in a big way just as the principle of self-determination was coming to be accepted generally in the West. (Which is why the King-Crane commission, sent by President Wilson to the Levant after World War I, ended up advising the U.S. government that the Zionist program of unrestricted Jewish immigration required “serious modification” (see http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/crane.html).) But regardless of the merits of Zionism at the beginning of the Palestine Mandate, now that the State of Israel has been in existence for 60 years, it should enjoy a certain right by virtue of adverse possession. That doesn’t mean the displaced Palestinians should be happy about it, any more than the Sioux are obligated to be happy about the loss of the Black Hills (let alone the Great Plains). They just have to live with it.

That link should have been: [Note from LA: it is necessary to place at least 100 characters in a comment preceding a hyperlink to prevent the right-hand column from dropping to the bottom of the page.]
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/crane.html

I think what John Ring misunderstands is that the threat of Nazism manifested differently than the threat of Communism. The Communists tried a lot more to rely on indigenous revolutionaries, while the Nazis simply invaded and took what they wanted.
He is correct that Nazism did not have the same kind of world-wide appeal as Communism.
On the other hand, the Nazis really didn’t need world wide appeal, because if they wanted to turn a country Nazi, they eschewed appealing to the masses and simply invaded and conquered it.
As for Nazism being a world threat, I think that it is safe to say that it was indeed a world threat. Granted, I disagee with the statements of some that Hitler would have invaded and tried to conquer the US, and I think it likely that he would have left Britain alone had it stayed out of the war. However, it seems likely that he would have expanded eastward until he got to the Pacific. Germany controlling all of Eastern Europe and quite likely Siberia as well would have greatly upset the balance of power in the world.
I don’t think that the Nazis wanted to or were going to conquer the world, but it is quite likely that they would have achieved a level of power and influence over the world that would be equal to or greater than that of the US.
Put another way, imagine that the position in the world that America occupies today (the hegemon) was instead occupied by a Nazi empire.

Mr. Jose’s response to Mr. Ring demonstrates why I am simply excluding opinions such as Mr. Ring’s in the future. Mr. Jose argues oh-so-reasonably that, yes, Nazism did represent a world threat. But, Mr. Jose, do you realize how ridiculous it is to have to make such an argument? People who say the sort of things Mr. Ring did are just pulling your chain. They love to have the opportunity to make their statements about Nazism not really being so bad, so that well meaning people like you get pulled into never-ending discussions with them.

It should not be necessary for normally intelligent people such as Michael Jose to prove that Nazism represented a threat to the world. And that’s why people such as Mr. Ring who assert that it didn’t will not be allowed to post here.

Mr. Jose is right about Pat’s origins. His father was a descendant of Ulster Protestants (Scotch-Irish) and his mother was a German Catholic. Buchanan never considered himself an Irishman, in his autobiography he called himself a Scot.

Mr. Kantor is being inaccurate when he states that Middle Eastern Christians resent Israel as much as the Muslims. This is true about those Arab Christians who embrace Pan-Arab nationalism or communism (Michel Aflaq, Hanan Ashrawi, George Habash, Nayef Hawatmeh, Tariq Aziz) or simply act like dhimmis and try to gain favor with the Muslims. However, Mr. Kantor failed to mention the thousands of Lebanese Christians both Maronite (Bashir Gemayel, Etienne Sakr [Abu Arz], Danny Chamoun) and Melkite (Saad Hadad) who welcomed Israelis to their country and fought side by side with the Jews. Even the Palestinian Christian leader Elias Freij who was the mayor of Bethlehem in the early 1990s begged Rabin to annex his city into Israel and not to hand it over to Arafat. Thousands of Christian Palestinians have fled the PA because of assaults, intimidation, arson, and torture that were perpetrated against them by Muslim thugs.

“G. Patton was right: the US really did fight against the wrong army.” Can this supposed quote by Patton be verified anywhere?

Razib over at http://www.gnxp.com knew some Lebanese Christians whom he said were antisemitic.

On the other hand, one of the strongest Zionists is a Christian Lebanese-American (Joseph Farah).

Palestinian Christians are caught between a rock and a hard place. Niether Muslims nor Jews have much use for them, beyond the tourist dollars their sites may bring. The Muslims encroach and intimidate, and in E. Jerusalem there’s a serious problem with Orthodox Jews assaulting Christians. There was a dust-up a couple weeks back with an Armenian Patriarch and a rabbinical student. Apparently, the students tend to spit on Christian clergy. A lot of Christian land around Beit Jala was also siezed for settlements.

The best relations are between the more secular Jews and Christians, perhaps because both tend to be more focused on “the spirit” instead of the letter. But it’s hardly the stuff of allies.

The Maronites used and were used by the Israelis, but it did little good for either side. The Maronites were tossed out of power and branded collaborators by their neighbors, and the Israelis lost to Hizbollah. At any rate, there really wasn’t anything approaching genuine affection.

Mr. Kantor,

I am not even going to go into the historically inaccurate drivel you spew*. Nevertheless, for the sake of your argument (and Mr. Buchanan’s, too) let us assume you are correct. What, therefore, do you propose that us Israelis do? Should we willingly – in the name of rectifying some (imaginary, in my opinion) colonial wrong - submit ourselves to genocide (again)? Come now Mr. Kantor, do not pretend you do not know what the return of the “dispossessed” would mean for Israelis. “Do not be here, do not be there” means “do not be”.
A visiting Israeli

* If there was one thing the Ottoman province of Palestine was known for until the end of the 19th century, it was its desolateness and lack of population. Read Mark Twain’s account of the place before you start reciting Arab lies. Most of those who nowadays call themselves “Palestinians” descend from immigrants coming from Syria, Lebanon and other neighbouring Arab countries, said immigration, how bizarre, only beginning after those colonialist Jewish settlers started developing the land.

I think the poster misunderstands Mr. Kantor. As I understood him, Mr. Kantor was not saying that Israel doesn’t have the legitimate right to exist. He was saying that we can’t expect the Arabs to feel happy about Israel’s existence. But he also made it clear that the Arabs must be made to accept it.

Mr. Auster,

While I made light of the obvious problems we face with native insurgents and foreign terrorists, I stand by my statement.

“A burst of gunfire could convert Jordan, Afghanistan or nuclear-armed Pakistan into an enemy overnight. “
Pat was wrong about what would happen in other Muslim countries.
Pakistani Islamists tried to kill Musharaf before 9/11 and have done so since then. Our actions are not the cause of this.

“Once in Baghdad, how do we get out? If the Kurds rebel to create a nation, will U.S. troops help Turks crush them? If the House of Saud falls, will it be succeeded by social democrats, or Bin Laden’s fanatics?”

The Iraq Kurds have accepted an Iraqi federal state, not an independent Kurdisan.
The Saudis have not fallen.

We may well be in Iraq for decades, but not necessarily as occupiers. An independent Iraq would be a useful base of operations, now that we have left Arabia.
We still have troops in Germany and Japan, 49 years after the war.
Am I being overly optimistic? Perhaps, but Pat is being rather pessimistic.

”. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavor at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror and guerrilla war. They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon.”

Israel still exists.
The USSR pulled out of Afghanistan, but communists still control many Islamic former Soviet Republics. Large parts of Russia are largely Muslim and have been for 500 years.
China and India have large Muslim areas.
The US put down two Muslim uprisings in the Phillipenes.

There is nothing inevitable about Muslim guerilla victories.

“Twelve years ago, this writer predicted that George Bush’s Gulf War would be “the first Arab-American War.” The coming war will not be the last. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.”

Last time I check, the first war between Arabs and Americans was the Barbary war, 2000 years ago.
As long as we need oil and face an Islamist threat, we will be in the Middle East.

Pat has not described our situation.

“The Iraq Kurds have accepted an Iraqi federal state, not an independent Kurdistan.”

They are going along with it for the time being. As time goes on, I think we will find the Kurds increasingly driving all Arabs out of northern Iraq and the neventually declaring indpendence.

” An independent Iraq would be a useful base of operations, now that we have left Arabia. “

I seriously doubt that a truly independent Iraq will want us there.

“Israel still exists.
The USSR pulled out of Afghanistan, but communists still control many Islamic former Soviet Republics. Large parts of Russia are largely Muslim and have been for 500 years.
China and India have large Muslim areas.
The US put down two Muslim uprisings in the Phillipenes.”

Except for the last example , in all of thsoe cases the non-Muslims had one thing going for them. They wanted the land. If Israel were a Jewish colony rather than THE Jewish state, I think that they would have left long ago. The fact that the Israelis actually live there gives them an advantage that we don’t have. I will have to check out about the Philippines.

I should also point out that since the end of major combat operations in May 2003, the general trend has been for the rate at which coalition troops are killed to increase.
http://lunaville.com/oif/Timelines.aspx
With the exception of November 2003, every month since April 2004 has had more hostile fatalities than every month from May 2003 to March 2004.

Ron leaves out of his passage-by-passage critique the specific passages of Buchanan’s that were prescient.

Israel was established by UN Resolution 181, which also established a Palestinian State, around 1948. Thus the legal foundation of Israel is secure.

Soon after, Israel signed the Geneva Convention which forbids settling a signatories citizens in land conquered in war.

Hence Israel’s settlements in the land conquered in 1967 are illegal under the Geneva Convention.

Israel has the right to occupy the conquered land for her security, but does not have the right to settle there.

The illegal settlements have long been known to be an obstacle to peace, and have, until recently, been so characterized by US foreign policy. They are at the root of the reduction in influence of Muslim moderates since 1967. The decline in influence of Muslim moderates is at the root of the rise in influence of radical Muslims.

A minority of Jews in the US, led by the Federation of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (I may have this slightly wrong.) has supported Israel in its settlement policy.
While a minority of Jews, they are well organized and dominate campaign contributions, AIPAC, etc.

Hence, I believe that the settlements are at the root of international Muslim terrorism, of 9/11, etc.

Until recently, I thought that solving the settlements issue could eventually lead to a solution of the entire Muslim terrorism problem.

However now, with the war in Iraq, I fear that the settlement problem has metastasized into a problem that cannot be cured by solving the settlement problem. I think that this has been the goal of a number of Israeli politicians; they hoped to put us permanently against their enemies, and their policies have been influential in putting us there. The future looks bleak.

I disagree with Mr. Copold’s assessment of the relationship between Maronites and Israelis. The leadership used each other, but the Maronite and Israeli soldiers were like brothers. A Maronite militiaman was telling a story a few years ago, that when the Hizbullah blew up the Israeli HQ in Tyre, Maronites were lined up for several blocks to donate blood to the Israeli wounded. And the fact that thousands of members of the South Lebanese Army (both Maronites and Shiites) now reside in Israel and hold Israeli citizenship are a further proof the genuine sense of brotherhood between the Israelis and the Maronites.

Mr. Copold, when you stated that Israel seized “Christian” land around Beit Jala, you conveniently left out the fact that in 2000-2002, Beit Jala was taken over by Muslim thugs who used it to shoot at the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo. Another country would’ve leveled Beit Jala, but the Israelis didn’t want to hurt the Christians and risked their soldiers to do house to house searches. The Palestinian Christians are themselves at fault for their current situation. Throughout their history, they turned their back on the Jews and sided with their oppressors. Now it’s just too late. They’re paying the price for engaging in voluntary dhimmitude.

al-qaeda-type global jihad ideology is far too grandiose and expansive in its scope to be entirely dependent in its existence on one single localized conflict blown entirely out of proportion ( ie, the israeli-palestinian conflict ).
osama and the rest of the global jihadists know that if history had been a little different, the state of israel might never have existed. from the point of view of a universalist/’historically inevitable’ type of ideological movement, they can’t afford to have an accidental ‘historical circumstance’ ( ie, the state of israel, the settlements ) as the only reason for their existence.
therefore, i’m not surprised that obl rarely mentions israel in his tapes, giving equal if not greater focus to other conflicts ( kashmir, chechnya, etc ).

Mr. Hume adopts the “settlements-are-the-cause-of-terrorism” argument that is deployed by Israel-haters on the Left (NYT, Tom “Jewish Dhimmi” Friedman, International Solidarity Movement, etc.) and on the Right (Paddy Buchanan, Taki). Mr. Hume, what should be more important to the Jews? The Torah and centuries of their history or an article of a treaty? Like my rabbi said during the last Simchat Torah celebration: “Let’s remember that G-d and not the UN rules the world”.

Also, all the people that so vehemently denounce the settlements don’t say a word about the annexation of Eastern Prussia and the Kurile Islands by the Russians and the millions of Germans who were thrown out of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Eastern Prussia. The Jews are just a much more appealing target than the Russians.

For a variety of reasons, I am not enthusiastic about Israeli settlements in the lands taken in 1967. BUT: 1) The Arabs refused to make peace before this problem ever came up 2) Egypt and Jordan made peace with Israel despite the settlements 3) there is little sign that most Palestinians would accept even a settlement based on complete return to the 1967 boundaries. 4) The settelements are not”illegal” under the Geneva Convention because the Arab states had never agreed to recognize Israel’s boundaries before the 1967 war. The Convention was not operable.
Any reading of the words of Bin Laden or any of the other Islamist leaders shows they care about many other issues than the Arab-Israeli conflict.
By the way, the US became involved in the Middle East during WWII to keep supplies flowing to the Soviets. Our involvement became permanent when we had to force the Soviets out of Iran in 1946 and keep them out. The Arab-Israeli dispute was a latecomer in American relations with the area. Further, the Arab states were drawn into the Cold War, mostly on the Soviet side, not by the Arab-Israeli conflict but because of the conflict between the leftist nationalists like Nasser and relatively conservative elements — mainly the Nuri Said regime in Iraq, which were willing to permit Western bases.

“Also, all the people that so vehemently denounce the settlements don’t say a word about the annexation of Eastern Prussia and the Kurile Islands by the Russians and the millions of Germans who were thrown out of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Eastern Prussia.”

*All* of the people? I for one, have been known to be quite critical of that notorious piece of ethnic cleansing, which is estimated to have cost the lives of up to a million noncombatant Germans. It was especially appalling that the Russians were then permitted to sit as judges on the Nuremburg Tribunal, which defined the forced deportation of civilian population as a war crime and a crime against humanity: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/imtconst.htm#art6

Dear Mr. Auster,
May I – belatedly – respond to your post, November 20, 2004 02:43 AM? My problem with Mr. Kantor (and others who hold similar opinions) is expressed by the following sentences, taken from his post:
“But…the fact remains that Israel was created by Romantic nationalists who rationalized or ignored the effects that mass immigration of Jews would inevitably have on the native population.”
And:
“Israel is a VERY RECENT settler nation created on the land of dispossessed people that makes deep and abiding hatred and resentment by Palestinians inevitable”
I am not sure what is meant by “Romantic nationalists”, unless Mr. Kantor wishes to imply that what is perfectly acceptable for any other people is strictly verboten for Jews. If it is right that white Americans (and those who submit to their beliefs and culture) should have their place in the sun – quite possibly, to the detriment of the Indians’ (and, nowadays, the Mexicans’) feelings – then why is it wrong for Israelis, who directly descend from the ancient Israelites (in other words: quite unlike Boers or early Anglo Americans)? Beats me. “Mass immigration”? Were that so! Most Jews either stayed in Europe, the Magreb or took the first boat to America. As for “native population”, to re-iterate: the Ottoman province of Palestine was truly an empty place. The only significant population centres were Jerusalem and Jaffa. In between you had sparsely populated Arab villages and nomadic Bedouin tribes, who never confined themselves to just one area. A well known slogan used by the early Zionists was “a land without people to a people without land”. I submit this was how things were at the time. I also submit that problems really started towards the end of the 19th century when ARAB immigrants (Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian) who – not unlike Mexicans in the US today – started coming to Palestine to look for work at a place where the economy was suddenly on the up (those dastardly Jewish settlers). Mass immigration again: in the thirties, when some of the European Juden-Eloy began to wake up, the British did not allow any significant immigration of Jews into the land; Arabs, however, were not so restricted. 1+1=2.
“Dispossessed people”. Hmmm. Who be they? Does he refer to those Arabs, who in 1948, after their brethren declared their intent to finish Hitler’s job (think about it: three (!) years after THAT war), left because they were convinced the whole thing would be finished in 3 days and did not wish to be bothered by the inconveniencies of war and who, ever since, have been whinging about their miscalculation? Well, war is tough. When you attack someone, you take your chances. In so far as THIS Israeli is concerned, we have been too SOFT on the Arabs (anybody wishes to provide an example of the overly liberal streak afflicting the Jews, there’s your best example).
Methinks I digress too much. The problem I have with Mr. Kantor and his ilk is that they base their argument on a falsification of history. The implication then is that “yes, of course they have a right to defend themselves, BUT…” etc, etc ad infinitum. Please understand: After more than a hundred years (not really “VERY RECENT” anymore) during which Israelis and (later) the State of Israel have been trying to compromise with the Arabs to no avail, one gets to the stage in which we DO NOT GIVE A HOOT about their (at best, self-inflicted, at worst, imaginary) grievances. We do no longer wish to understand; we simply treat them like the weather, sometimes good, sometimes bad. We cannot change it, so we deal with it (uncle Sam permitting: there is a flip side to Rev. Buchanan’s “Amen corner”. For every Nixon, there’s a Carter; for every GWB, a Clinton) the best we can. It is of course not helped by demands we accommodate the Palestinians even further, IMPLIED by Mr. Kantor (if one reads between the lines).
Sorry about the length.

Oh: sincerest apologies to our friends the Eloi for misspelling their name.

Mr. Kantor’s and Mr. Hume’s arguments are either the result of simple ignorance or the willing acceptance of Arab lies and falsifications.

I beg to differ, Mr Auster.
I disporved most of the assumptions upon which Pat’s assertions were made. Morover, I contested all but one of them.

The only good point by Pat was his pertinent question: “Once in Baghdad, how do we get out?”

The lack of a coherent exit strategy was a real problem. Frankly, I don’t think that the Buish administration had a coherent strategy on dealing with post-war Iraq.

Mr. Jose wrote:

“They are going along with it for the time being. As time goes on, I think we will find the Kurds increasingly driving all Arabs out of northern Iraq and the neventually declaring indpendence.”

There was some ethnic cleansing at first. It was mostly limited to those areas where Kurds had been removed by the Ba’athists and replaced by Arabs and Turkmen. Turkey threatened to intervene over this in Kirkuk and the US and provisional government put an end to the expulsions.

The recent violence in Mosul by Sunni militants (mostly Arabs) is an attempt to to restart ethic violence in the north.

The failure to disarm and control the Iraqi army and to use them to either rebuild Iraq or hunt down criminals is haunting us.
This was not inevitable.

As for the comments of Mr. Hume,
I would suggest that he revisit the Geneva convention.
One can only occupy territory that was held by a sovereign regime. The West Bank and Gaza were siezed by Egypt and Jordan in 1948. No one contested this because these were not sovereignly held properties. However, their annexation was not accepted as legal. Thus these territories were not part of Jordan or Egypt.
As such, Israel’s capture of them and buidling of communities on them is not illegal as the land is disputed, not occupied.
That is international law.

As to your larger assumption that the results of the 1967 war led to terrorism, it is both true and false. Feyadeen had been operating since the 1930’s. The PLO was founded in 1964.
AS long as dhimmi control Islamic land, the Muslims will repond through war.

Territory once controled by Muslims includes not only Israel, but the Iberian and Balkan penninsulas, Malta, Sicily, Naples, and most of Russia. In the long run the Islamists wish to conquer the world.

At what point will you stop appeasing them? Where is your Poland?

“Once in Baghdad, how do we get out?” is a very big question. The idea that our occupation forces would come under terrorist attack is a very big question. These questions are not to be dismissed by Ron. While they were very briefly touched on prior to the war, there was never a sustained discussion of them. I myself had thought, “We could end up with our own West Bank” but didn’t develop that thought further. The debate on the justification for the war and on the supposedly sinister motives of Bush and the neocons was so intense that I was distracted from thinking more deeply about the problems of the post-war situation. That is why I like to give credit to those who did warn in print about it, even if, as in the case of Buchanan, they are people with whom I otherwise disagree.

Over two years ago, I warned on this Forum that an invasion of Iraq would result in large numbers of Iraqis coming to this country. Another reason I opposed an invasion was that it would take away from the very small attempt at controlling the border that now takes place. I expected plenty of trouble in any occupation of Iraq as well.

Last Spring, there was a news item in Nashville, TN that the police had been called to a domestic dispute. There was a problem. The couple were Iraqis and couldn’t communicate with the police officers. So now we have an Iraqi presence in Middle Tennessee. Police departments all over Tennessee already have to have Spanish speakers.

A few months ago, an Iraqi was arrested for planning to attack a Synagogue in West Nashville. The reaction to this was, “We have to increase tolerance.”

I’m afraid we have a permanent West Bank situation. Our leaders think it’s something they can “manage.” Mr. Bush imagines that “All people want freedom.” What they want is to be what they are.

David wrote:

“Mr. Bush imagines that ‘All people want freedom.’ What they want is to be what they are.”

I was going to comment further on this, but no comment is needed. It says it all.

So the issue is that the democracy-in-Iraq crowd needs vindication; they need some way to declare victory. They need a way to take the results of a carefully vetted and controlled election commanded and controlled from on high by the U.S. and claim that it represents legitimacy in virtue of the fact that it is “democratic”. Legitimacy implies democracy; democracy implies legitimacy; even though all of the preconditions on these “democratic” elections are - as with all democratic elections - imposed a-priori.

So I am puzzled how spread-democracy triumphalists are going to make a principled distinction between “free democratic elections” and “a power struggle among murderous thugs in expensive suits”:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=13676_Palestinian_Election_Charade

If it were me, the cognitive dissonance would probably be incapacitating. But fortunately I think I’ll manage to avoid the padded cell for the time being since I don’t see any substantive connection between democracy and moral legitimacy.

Matt remarked: “But fortunately I think I’ll manage to avoid the padded cell for the time being since I don’t see any substantive connection between democracy and moral legitimacy.”

There isn’t, of course. Three wolves and a sheep voting on the evening’s dinner menu is a democracy, after all. That’s why Adams made that famous remark back in the days of the USA’s founding. He understood that moral legitimacy is something quite separate from process. I expect a majority of the founders understood this principle as well. In late 18th century America, the idea was largely part of common sense or unwritten wisdom - natural law.

Despite all the Evangelical jargon that comes from his mouth, this concept is utterly alien to Bush and his neocon sycophants. Liberals can’t grasp the idea. They manage to keep going, incoherent as they are, through the UE. Che-che-che.

“Does he refer to those Arabs, who in 1948, after their brethren declared their intent to finish Hitler’s job (think about it: three (!) years after THAT war), left because they were convinced the whole thing would be finished in 3 days and did not wish to be bothered by the inconveniencies of war and who, ever since, have been whinging about their miscalculation? Well, war is tough. When you attack someone, you take your chances.”

Well, in a lot of cases, those who left were not people who “attack[ed] someone,” but noncombatants who left for the same reason that most noncombatants left Fallujah—because their homes were IN THE MIDDLE OF A FREAKING WAR ZONE.

It should be noted that the same United Nations whose resolution calling for the partition of Palestine forms the legal basis for the establishment of the State of Israel also resolved in 1948, even before the final Arab-Israeli armistices were concluded, that “[r]efugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” At this point, it’s probably never going to be “practicable” to permit the return of the Arab refugees to their former homes (any more than it will be practicable for the Germans to return to Koenigsburg, the Serbs to Krajina, or the Jews to Baghdad), but the fact remains that the return of refugees after the cessation of hostilities is the norm under international law, and it’s a bit thick to blame Palestinian Arabs of “miscalculation” because they thought that norm would be observed in their case.

Also, I’d be very surprised if Visiting Israeli could quote any statements by the governments of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan or Iraq at the time of the 1948-49 war that actually “declared their intent to finish Hitler’s job.”

Seamus writes:

“I’d be very surprised if Visiting Israeli could quote any statements by the governments of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan or Iraq at the time of the 1948-49 war that actually “declared their intent to finish Hitler’s job.”

Does Seamus doubt that was indeed the intent of at least some of the Arab parties in the conflict?

No, I don’t have references handy. But in case if Mr. Seamus doubts the existance of holocaust I do have a few references handy.

Mr. Seamus continues:

“United Nations … resolved in 1948, even before the final Arab-Israeli armistices were concluded, that “[r]efugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”

Unfortunately majority of refugee Arabs were never willing to live at peace with their Jewish neighbors. A few that were, some of them did return.

To demand that a new, very poor, very small state, immediatly after war for survival, accepts hundreds of thousands of people who clearly have wished the state dead just a few days ago - well that is a rather fantastical view of the world, to be very charitable.

“Does Seamus doubt that was indeed the intent of at least some of the Arab parties in the conflict?”

Well, according to the Arab League at the time, the intention of the Arab states in “interven[ing] in Palestine” was “solely in order to help its inhabitants restore peace and security and the rule of justice and law to their country, and in order to prevent bloodshed.” (Source: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/arab_invasion.html ) Maybe Mik thinks those are code words for “finish[ing] Hitler’s job,” but they hardly constitute a “declared … intent” to do so, which was Visiting Israeli’s point.

But, no, I don’t believe the Arab states intended genocide. (I’m not so sure about the likes of Grand Mufti Haj Amim al-Husseini, but neither am I sure he qualifies as an “Arab part[y] in the conflict.”) I believe what they wanted was a unitary state embracing all of Palestine, in which the Arabs would be able to outvote the Jews by a two-to-one margin (roughly the same advantage that the Moslems had over the Copts in Egypt at that time).

“I believe what they wanted was a unitary state embracing all of Palestine, in which the Arabs would be able to outvote the Jews by a two-to-one margin (roughly the same advantage that the Moslems had over the Copts in Egypt at that time).”

Are you kidding? The Arabs openly stated that it was to be a war of annihilation! The reason so many Palestinian Arabs fled is because their leaders told them to send away the women and children to make it easier for Arab armies to “throw the Jews into the sea” and because many Palestinian Arabs were afraid of Jewish vengeance if the “war of annihilation” failed.

“To demand that a new, very poor, very small state, immediatly after war for survival, accepts hundreds of thousands of people who clearly have wished the state dead just a few days ago - well that is a rather fantastical view of the world, to be very charitable.”

I admitted that the return of the Palestinian refugees was probably impracticable at this point (now that two or three generations have passed), and I’ll state further that it probably would have been impracticable at any time except as part of a comprehensive peace settlement. Again, that doesn’t mean the Arabs whose parents or grandparents fled Haifa and Joppa (or where caught abroad when hostilities broke out) should be required to be happy about it, any more than the Jews who fled or were expelled from Baghdad should feel happy about *that*.

“Are you kidding? The Arabs openly stated that it was to be a war of annihilation!”

Which Arabs? Certainly not the Arab governments. This sounds like one of those things that “everybody knows” that just ain’t so.

(BTW, making blanket claims about “the Arabs” is about as unhelpful as Pat Buchanan talking about “the Jews.”)

Even though I dislike and disrespect Buchanan (in an earlier post I characterized him as “a shameful crank”), it must be stated that he never made blanket claims about Jews and never accused the Jewish people as a whole of anything.

I believe my claim about the Arabs of that time period is accurate since the invasion of Israel and the massacres of Jews that preceded it were overwhelmingly supported by a vast majority of the Arab people. I challenge you to give me one significant example that contradicts this claim.

Unfortunately, I’m not fluent in Arabic and have no access to Arab governmental archives of that time period. However, Arab leaders like Haj Amin Al-Husseini and Fawzi Al-Kaukji (who had much more influence than Arab heads of state) openly bragged about massacring the Jews.

Mr Seamus attempts to prove the point that Arabs didn’t intend to drive Jews into the sea:

“according to the Arab League at the time, the intention of the Arab states in “interven[ing] in Palestine” was “solely in order to help its inhabitants restore peace and security and the rule of justice and law to their country, and in order to prevent bloodshed.”

Based on this statement, doesn’t Mr. Seamus think that Arab League should have been awarded Nobel Peace Prize?

I would offer Mr. Seamus an almost new bridge for a very reasonable price, but I think it is worse than that. I don’t think discussions that take at face value an Arab League document (or Stalin speech or Gering memo) have any value. Sorry Mr. Seamus, you have to look for someone else to provoke .

It’s very sad and very shameful that so many conservatives can be blinded by Arab propaganda. The Arabs sure know how to make up myths and fables, from 1001 Nights to the current pro-Palestinian propaganda.

Well, I guess I’ve made some progress. My interlocutors are no longer insisting that the massacre of the Jews was the “declared intention” of the Arab states in 1948-49, but simply that they were lying when they said they wanted to establish a unitary state in Palestine.

I have no doubt that Mik and Mr. Girin sincerely believe that the Arabs would have massacred the Jews if they’d gotten the chance. I also have no doubt that many Jews in Palestine in 1948 were equally suspicious of the Arabs; even if they credited the good faith of the governments of the Arab states, they may have doubted the peaceful intentions of their Arab neighbors. After all, a few months earlier, when the British had withdrawn from India as they were about to from Palestine, the best professions of peaceful intentions by the new governments of India and Pakistan hadn’t stopped Hindus and Moslems from cheerfully murdering their neighbors.

But Arabs as well as Jews could look to what happened in India and conclude that, at least until things cooled off, it would be imprudent for them to remain in enclaves surrounded by the “other” community. (For that matter, when civil war broke out in Yugoslavia, many Croats and Serbs reasonably decided not to bet their lives on the good intentions of their neighbors, even supposedly civilized Christian neighbors with whom they had lived peacefully for decades, but fled to where they would be among their own group.) So the decision of Arabs to flee from Israeli-held areas was not necessarily an irrational one, much less one that obviously merited expropriation and exile.

As I recall the secretariat of the Arab League did blather, in public, about massacring the Jews in 1948. What the precise war aims of the Arab governments —Syria, Egypt and Jordan, or more exactly Transjordan — were seems to be unknown. One would have to see their secret archives. I suspect if they had won they would have been too busy fighting each other over the spoils to carry out a full-blown genocide, and I believe the Emir of Transjordan would have rejected that out of hand anyway. About the others, who knows? I am mystified by Seamus’ dismissal of the Mufti as a party to the war. He could have better argued that the Mufti or even the “Palestinians” as a group, and their wishes, were not that important since there is no reason to believe that any of the Arab states wanted an independent Arab Palestine!

Good point Mr. Levine. Until the 1960s, the “Palestinians” were not recognized as a distinct nation by other Arabs. A commmon slogan for Palestinian Arabs up until the Six Day War was “Syria is Palestine!”.

“Good point Mr. Levine. Until the 1960s, the
‘Palestinians’ were not recognized as a distinct nation by other Arabs.”

This is plainly false. The Arab League document, to which I linked earlier (from the Jewish Virtual Library, so I think we can accept its authenticity) explicitly claimed that “The Pact of the League of Arab States declared that Palestine has been an independent country since its separation from the Ottoman Empire.” The date of this document was May 15, 1948, which a bit before the 1960s, and the Pact of the Arab League which it refers to (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/arableag.htm ) dates from 1945, which is even earlier. The Pact of the League directly contradicts Mr. Levine’s claim. I admit that the Jordanians may not have been eager to recognize the Palestinians as a distinct nation, but that’s because they had designs on Palestinian territory, as witness their annexation of the West Bank, which I believe was recognized by only two other nations (UK and Pakistan, if I remember correctly—neither of which was an Arab state).

Seamus,
Sorry about the delay, I have been occupied with straightening my landlord’s bent Jaguar. You want proof of my wild submitions?
Here: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf14.html and here: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf4.html and here: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf18.html is your proof. Please do not try to apply the North Ireland (or South African) scenario to Israel; they are not the same.
Visiting Israeli

Well, I looked over the three pages to which visiting Israeli linked, vainly searching for the “proof” that the invading Arab states had “declared their intent to finish Hitler’s job.” The closest I can find to anything like that is a statement by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said, saying that “We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in,” which will bear a genocidal interpretation if that’s what you’re aiming at, but on its face simply declared an intention to administer a crushing military defeat.

Seamus wrote:

“searching for the “proof” that the invading Arab states had “declared their intent to finish Hitler’s job.” The closest I can find to anything like that is a statement by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said, saying that “We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in,” which will bear a genocidal interpretation if that’s what you’re aiming at, but on its face simply declared an intention to administer a crushing military defeat.”

To Seamus “obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in” is not a proof of genocidal intentions. Nothing is. Apparently in Seamus opinion Jews occupy a different reality where intention to oblitirate them doesn’t mean what it says.

Some people are just too brainwashed by the Arabs to accept reality.

How about this one:
The Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade…. He pointed out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw [the] Jews into the Mediterranean…. Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes, and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down.
- Habib Issa, Secretary General of the Arab League (Azzam Pasha’s successor), in the newspaper Al Hoda, June 8, 1951

Mik believes that Prime Minister Said’s words ae unambiguous calls for genocide. I wonder how he would regard the exhortation of Ilya Ehrenburg to advancing Soviet soldiers in World War II: “Now we understand the Germans are not human. Now the word ‘German’ has become the most terrible curse. Let us not speak. Let us not be indignant. Let us kill. If you do not kill a German, a German will kill you. He will carry away your family, and torture them in his damned Germany. If you have killed one German, kill another.” This certainly sounds bad, and some have characterized Ehrenburg’s words as an incitement to genocide against Germans generally, including civilians. In the context in which the words were spoken, however, I think they could be characterized instead as a call to battle fiercely in combat against German *combatants*. I wonder whether Mik would condemn Ehrenburg for incitement to genocide here, or whether he would require more unambiguous evidence of Ehrenburg’s intent before making such an accusation.

“all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw [the] Jews into the Mediterranean”

Again, the specific accusation was a plan to “finish Hitler’s job.” What I read here is talk about explusion, not genocide. I’m not claiming it would be a good thing. It would be every bit as bad as the expulsion of the pied-noirs after the French gave up in 1962, or the expulsions of the Serbs from Kosovo after 1999. But nobody (except maybe the former Grand Mufti, if he was repeating the kind of stuff he used to broadcast from Berlin a few years earlier) was calling for anything like a Final Solution.

Seamus’ comparison is inappropriate. Just to remind him, Ilya Ehrenburg was a Soviet Jew who lost relatives in the Holocaust and was justifiably angry at the Germans. Seamus is so anxious to defend his Arab friends that he is willing to make insulting comparisons.

Seamus also has a habit of ignoring other readers’ posts that disprove his theories. I urge him to read Paul’s posting of 5:13 pm.

“all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw [the] Jews into the Mediterranean”

“Again, the specific accusation was a plan to “finish Hitler’s job.” What I read here is talk about explusion, not genocide.”

Seamus evidently believes that Jews are amphibians. Expulsion into a large body of seawater counts as genocide in my book.

Paul wrote: “Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes, and property and to stay in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down.”

It’s not obvious to me what this changes. If a civilian acts on a warning like this, that by itself doesn’t prove genocidal intent on the part of the civilian. It doesn’t prove anything but the normal instinct for self-preservation. Civilians have always tried to get out of the way of invading armies and they always will. Equally, there’s nothing sinister about Arab civilians taking refuge behind Arab lines rather than Israeli. Civilians run in the direction they think is more safe, not less safe. And, as Seamus says, that by itself doesn’t take away their right to come back to their homes when the war is over.

Israel didn’t have to ratify 4th Geneva (The Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War). But they did ratify it and they did take on its obligations. And one of those is to allow civilians to return to their homes after the war.

Also note that some 75,000 Palestinian civilians, either by accident or by design, did take refuge behind Israeli lines. They got classified as “Present Absentees” under the Absentee Property Law so their homes and land could also be expropriated.

“Seamus evidently believes that Jews are amphibians.”
That is the funniest thing I’ve read on VFR. Now I understand why Mark Spitz and Lenny Krayzelburg are such good swimmers. :-)

I’m surprised that Seamus hasn’t used the Muhammad Mehdi excuse, which is that when Moslems threaten to kill you, they don’t really mean it. This is explained in the below passage by me:

——————

This Islamic mind-set that denies the undeniable was on full display in a special segment of the “Charlie Rose” program following the original PBS airing of “Jihad in America” in 1994. We have already described the film, with its footage of Muslims in communities around America calling for Holy War and the “killing and finishing off” of Jews, Christians, and “idol worshippers.” Instead of denouncing these barbaric calls to violence by American Muslims, the respectable “moderates” on the Charlie Rose panel—Clinton ally Alamoudi among them—all denounced the documentary for provoking anti-Muslim feeling. Alamoudi, for example, insisted that Hamas was not a terrorist group. Most amazingly, he and his fellow “moderates” said that Americans should not feel threatened by extremist leaders addressing large Muslim audiences in this country calling for “Jihad of the sword” and chanting “Kill the Jews, kill the Christians.”

Attempting to explain away that murderous rhetoric, another well-known “moderate” on the panel, the late Mohammed Mehdi of the American Muslim Committee (a frequent guest on William Buckley’s “Firing Line” over the years), said that Muslims habitually use hyperbole, such as “I’ll kill your grandfather,” but that it doesn’t mean anything and people shouldn’t take it seriously. [end of quote]

—————

Evidently, “we will drive the people of Israel into the ocean belongs to the same category of harmless hyperbole. However, as my manuscript continues:

—————

But the problem remains: If the members of a particular religious/ethnic group routinely engage in or approve of such bloodthirsty threatening language, how can they realistically be expected to be participants in a Western democratic society based on shared allegiance to reason and the rule of law? And how can any Western society survive the inclusion of large numbers of such people in it? [end of quote]

——————-

While my context is immigration in the U.S., the same point applies to Israel. How were the Israelis supposed to respond to people who not only threatened to kill them all, but also launched a war against them? Were the Israelis supposed to think, “Well the Arabs are threatening to kill us all, and they’re actually engaged in a war against us which if it succeeds will destroy our infant state and place all of us at their mercy, but hey, we should understand that the Arabs don’t literally want to kill all of us, they just want to kill a very large number of us.”

“Ilya Ehrenburg was a Soviet Jew who lost relatives in the Holocaust and was justifiably angry at the Germans.”

Please clarify. Are you saying that Ehrenburg was indeed calling for genocide, but that it’s OK because he was reasonably provoked? If so, we really have no common ground on which to continue a conversation. Or are you saying that he wasn’t in fact calling for genocide but was just using hyperbolic language to vent his personal grief and outrage? If so, I would point out that he wasn’t just speaking for himself, but was an official propagandist for the Soviet government. So citing his personal circumstances really does nothing to invalidate the comparison. If the Soviet government was speaking hyperbolically but not literally calling for genocide, then I don’t see why the same benefit of the doubt can’t be given to the government of Iraq.

I don’t see how Mr. Girin can accuse me of “ignoring other readers’ posts that disprove his theories,” and then citing “Paul’s posting of 5:13 pm” as an example, even though I specifically addressed that post at 5:42. Maybe Mr. Girin doesn’t think I adequately answered it, but that’s not the same thing as ignoring it. (Actually, I just noticed that Mr. Girin’s post was at 5:46, and that he probably didn’t see my 5:42 post. In that case, all I can say is: Gimme a bloody break. I don’t reply to Paul within a half hour, and somehow that means I’m “ignoring” him?)

If paul thinks the only possible reading of Azzam’s words was that he intended literally to force individual Jews to rush like lemmings into the Mediterranean, or to make them walk the plank off piers in Acre, Joppa, and Haifa, then he is clearly ready to give the worst possible interpretation to any Arab statement, without conceding the any allowance for the hyperbole of warfare or the use of figurative language, as long as the result is to make Arabs look bad. And to repeat, Azzam’s words are a lot easier to reconcile with a non-genocidal interpretation than are Ehrenburg’s.

Finally, let me report that I’ve done a little research on the web about Azzam Pasha (about whom I knew nothing until yesterday), and I’m a little surprised that my interlocutors haven’t quoted the words that I find are widely attributed to him, in which he is alleged to have called on May 15, 1948 (or maybe 1947—the sources aren’t consistent) for a “war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” If this quotation is genuine, and if it hasn’t been misleadingly quoted out of context (the way some anti-Semites quote passages from the Talmud out of context), then I’ll happily confess error. But I have to say I’m sceptical. Not only do some sources say 1948, while others say 1947, but some even say that the words were spoken by Gamel Abdul Nasser in 1967. Moreover, the words just don’t ring true with other things attributed to Azzam. For example, this account shows Azzam as committed to the resort to arms, but not as genocidal: http://hippercritical.typepad.com/hipp/2003/11/negotiations.html

If I had time, I’d like to go to a library and try to find some print source that might cast light on this quote, rather than having to rely on internet sources that quote the words out of context and for all I know are all quoting each another rather than a genuine primary source.

The Israeli tragedy was that in defending the new state against the Arab invasions of it the Israelis were unable to secure all of the land west of the Jordan. Had they succeeded in doing that, which was a very tall order for a new and very small state, I think Israel might have succeeded in securing international approval of that border, which makes sense given the terrain. At the time it might have worked; remember that at the beginning the Soviet Union supported Israeli independence. This was before Israel and her Arab neighbors became de facto proxies for the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively, and Israel enjoyed stronger European support (which meant more then) than she does today.

As I have said elsewhere on VFR, Israeli willingness, especially after the Six Day War, to consider borders that exclude any of Judea, Samaria and Gaza is a terrible mistake. It both shows weakness and at least appears to undermine the moral foundation of a Jewish claim to the land. Given, too, that the attitude of Arabs (of all Moslems?) toward Israel for the foreseeable future is that Israel is an impermissible invasion of the Dar-al-Islam, negotiating over borders is somewhat pointless as no line-drawing exercise will bring peace. Israel should insist on borders that enclose the ancient land of Israel (as I’ve said, I would draw the line at the Jordan, although some Zionists claim lands east of the river as well) and are defensible, and make sure the IDF is strong enough to defend them and understands the need to do so.

Arguing over whether the Arabs of 1948 wanted all the Jews in Israel dead or merely gone is rather pointless. The practical result of Arab success then would have been much the same either way. HRS

Ehrenburg was not calling for genocide but was as you said “just using hyperbolic language to vent his personal grief and outrage”, the Soviet government used this as propaganda. I did not see your response to Paul when I posted at 5:46 but I did see his post of 5:26 and erroneously concluded that he ignored Paul’s point for which I apologize.

“Azzam’s words are a lot easier to reconcile with a non-genocidal interpretation than are Ehrenburg’s.” How can you put an Arab thug and a Jewish writer on the same level? Even if Ehrenburg’s words seem more belligerent than Azzam’s does not mean you can compare the too. Seamus, I would suggest that when we talk about the Middle East, you would stick to the Middle East and not dig up irrelevant quotes.

I agree with Mr. Sutherland. Israel was unable to take control over Judea and Samaria during the War of Independence. However, it had control of Gaza and then relinquished it under international pressure (it would do it again in 1956). After the Six Day War, when Israel inflicted a stunning defeat on the Arabs, it should’ve disregarded public opinion and annexed the liberated areas simultaneously transfering all the Arabs to surrounding countries.

The repeated Israeli failure to be sufficiently aggressive was built into Zionism from the start. Zionism is a strange hybrid of humanitarian leftism and nationalism. As nationalists, the Zionists knew they would have to fight the Arabs to secure a place for themselves, but as humanitarian leftists they kept thinking that, as soon as they beat the Arabs, the Arabs would accept them, and then Jew and Arab would walk arm in arm onto the broad sunlit uplands of international brotherhood.

That is why Jabotinsky became so disgusted with mainstream Zionism and founded the Revisionist Movement. Religious Zionism (Tekuma Party, Rabbi Meir Kahane, National Religious Party) doesn’t have such a problem.

Mr. Auster,

Could the Jews have it ingrained in their soul that their Arab cousins still exist as pre-Islamic influenced Arabs? That is, not imbibed with the spirit of jihad and spreading the message of Islam throught the world?

“How can you put an Arab thug and a Jewish writer on the same level?”

What evidence is there, other than his words, that Azzam was “an Arab thug”? I tried to give a counter-example, to show that words that appear bloodthirsty may well have another meaning.

“‘the late Mohammed Mehdi of the American Muslim Committee (a frequent guest on William Buckley’s
‘Firing Line’ over the years), said that Muslims habitually use hyperbole, such as ‘I’ll kill your grandfather,’ but that it doesn’t mean anything and people shouldn’t take it seriously. [end of quote]”

It isn’t just the Arabs. Curtis LeMay talked about bombing North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age.” Back in 1979-80, a lot of folks talked about turning Tehran “into a parking lot” and “nuking ‘em till they glow.” More recently, Jimmy Swaggart said about homosexuals that “if one looks at me that way, I’ll kill him and tell God he died.” And Ronald Reagan famously did a sound check before one of his TV addresses to the American people in which he said, “My fellow Americans, I have just signed legislation to abolish Russia forever. We launch missiles in ten minutes.” These statements may be intemperate or irresponsible, but none of them should be taken literally.

“The Israeli tragedy was that in defending the new state against the Arab invasions of it the Israelis were unable to secure all of the land west of the Jordan. Had they succeeded in doing that, which was a very tall order for a new and very small state, I think Israel might have succeeded in securing international approval of that border, which makes sense given the terrain.”

Maybe, but only if the Israelis treated all the Arabs they ruled the way they did those who found themselves within the 1949 armistice lines: that is, given citizenship and voting rights. Capturing and governing all the land west of the Jordan would have amounted to renunciation of partition and adoption of the one-state solution for which the Arabs went to war. I wonder whether Israel would have been willing to do this, or whether it would have felt compelled to turn to “ethnic cleansing” (as Robert Locke has proposed), or to institute what would have amounted to a regime of explicit ethnic discrimination, comparable to that in South Africa. When Israel captured the West Bank in 1967, I don’t believe it ever seriously considered annexing that territory (other than East Jerusalem), because it realized that doing so might be tantamount to swallowing a demographic time bomb. But it could only keep the West Bank in the limbo of “occupied territories” because the 1949 armistice lines had come to be regarded as de facto international borders.

First of all, what Reagan said about bombing Russia was a joke. Secondly, I consider the comparison between Curtis LeMay, an American military leader and Azzam to be inappropriate. One thing is bombing a communist country that is fighting our allies and is a threat to our interests in that region and another is threatening to massacre an entire nation.

I believe that “the ethnic cleansing”, I prefer to call it “Transfer”, that my friend Robert Locke talked about in one of his articles, is the only way for Israel to survive.

Mr. Girin, I think I’ve figured you out. Please correct me if I’m wrong, though. Your ethics are 100% tribal. My own are 0% tribal which is why it took this long for it to click. In your writings, a course of action is good if it’s good for the Jewish People and bad if it’s bad for the Jewish People. There are no other considerations. Now, *you* may place the good of your own tribe as the supreme good — liberal moral relativism requires me to say that — and any argument based on that premise will be internally consistent and thus impossible to answer.

On the other hand, you cannot realistically expect anyone born into a different tribe to buy into your premise. In particular, if the only justification for a particular course of action is “it was for the good of the Jewish People”, that alone is going to carry no more weight outside the tribe that “for the good of the Palestinian People” or “for the good of the Pushtun People” would with you.

Taking this to the extreme, why *shouldn’t* someone with the misfortune to be born into the opposing tribe show exactly the same loyalty to his people that you do to yours? Why *shouldn’t* he want to see his national homeland built on the ashes of yours instead of yours on the ashes of his — if those are the only two choices. Why shouldn’t he subordinate the same extraneous ethical considerations to his tribal goals that you have to yours?

Granted, this would make him “evil” by the standards of your tribe — but only by those standards. If a Palestinian turned your statement inside out and said, “I believe that sending the Jews back to Europe, as a friend of mine described in an article in Free Arab Voice, is the only way for Palestine to survive,” you’d be outraged and rightly so. But if tribal ethics is all there is, it’s not clear why an outsider is required to be outraged by his statement and not yours.

I’m surprised so many VFRers have fallen into the trap Seamus has laid with his “Ilya Ehrenburg” argument. Essentially, Seamus wants you to feel sorry for Ilya because he lost relatives to the Holocaust, and therefore excuse his statements, and then he can accuse you of hypocrisy for condemning Pasha Azzam.

The easiest way out is to condemn Ilya Ehrenburg, who, if I understand correctly,deserves condemnation. This will make Seamus’s entire argument fall apart.

Not that the condemnation is merely a device for winning the argument: if Mr. Ehrenburg was a Soviet propagandist (I am completely ignorant about the man, not having heard of him before tonight), then he was evil and however understandable his rage at the Nazis (although he himself worked for an equally mass-murdering government), he should not have called for genocide against Germany and if he did so as part of his official capacity or in an actual act of incitement, he is guilty of a crime against humanity.

Okay, so now I have condemned Mr. Ehrenburg. Will Mr. Seamus now condemn Pasha Azzam? Or was this exercise all for show?

Another point: Seamus’ analogy is Pasha Azzam:Arabs::Ilya Ehrenburg:Soviets. Because the Soviets did not take Ehrenburg’s advice, he is stating that we should interpret Pasha Azzam’s statement as hyperbole in the same vein.

So given that to go on, I guess we should conclude that when the Arabs talked about annihilating the Jews, their real intent was to gang rape all of their women and then to force them to live under Sharia as slaves to a Muslim totalitarian state.

Gosh, I guess we’ve really misjudged Azzam, haven’t we?

Mr. Hechtman,

I think I have also figured you out. Like most Jewish liberals, you are uncomfortable with Jewish nationalism and sympathize with the enemies of your people because you feel sorry for the “poor landless Palestinians” and refuse to see the simple and brutal truths of the Middle East. I’m not saying this to insult you, I’m just stating my perception of your views.

As a conservative I believe in Absolute Good and Absolute Evil and what is bad for my people (Whites, Americans, Jews) is bad for me.

What you call “tribal ethics” are what real Zionism or any kind of nationalism for that matter is. And indeed I don’t expect the Arabs to accept my arguments, I understand that an Arab will put his people’s interests first (something that cannot be said of a lot of Jews). That is why I advocate the Transfer. No matter how much the Israelis accomodate the Arabs, they will still not become loyal citizens because they believe that our land is their land and that we’re just a bunch of infidels who are intruding on the Dar al Islam.

Finally, I’m not outraged at some Arab’s proposal to send the Israelis back to Europe. Like I said above, I realize that they (falsely of course) consider our land theirs and only by force will they accept the truth.