Re: good article Archived Message Posted by Ian M on February 27, 2020, 1:42 pm, in reply to "good article" More examples of the disgusting racism in place since the founding of Israel (and helping to justify its atrocities ever since) in this biography of David Ben-Gurion: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n20/adam-shatz/we-are-conquerors Excerpts: 'The first Arabs he met struck him as ‘goodhearted and friendly ... You could say that they are big children.’ [...] Ben-Gurion never imagined that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land, a fable he ridiculed as ‘naive Zionism’. He believed that Jews, as the rightful owners of Palestine, ‘deserved to receive it despite the fact that it was populated by Arabs’. He felt ‘at home’ in Ilaniya, a placid moshavah in the lower Galilee, because he didn’t have to see any Arabs [...] ‘We are not workers,’ he said. ‘We are conquerors. Conquerors of the land.’ [...] The [Peel] commission, he noted, was proposing to move Arabs out of territory that had been assigned to the Jewish state: ‘compulsory transfer’, he underlined approvingly in his diary. Who would carry out the transfer was unclear: ideally the British, he thought; or perhaps the Zionist Organisation could pay Iraq £10 million to absorb the refugees. In his diary he kept a list of Arab villages with the numbers of their inhabitants. ‘Our movement is maximalist,’ he wrote. ‘Even all of Palestine is not our final goal.’ [...] Six weeks after the war ended, he met a group of wealthy Jews in New York to raise money for arms and equipment for the coming war of independence against the British. Rudolf Goldschmidt Sonneborn, his host, reassured the guests that the Arabs would be no obstacle to Zionist ambitions, since ‘the average of that race is inferior even to our average Negro.’ [...] Segev makes it clear that Ben-Gurion set policy over the fate of the Palestinians. He spoke in a quiet voice; sometimes he would drift off into silence or cite a passage from the Bible (especially the verses in Exodus in which God promises to send hornets to drive foreigners out of Israel). He explained to his generals what he wanted – ‘maximum territory, minimum Arabs’, in Segev’s words – and left it to them to realise his intentions. There was often ‘no need to issue an explicit order to expel Arabs – the spirit of the message conveyed by the commander in chief was sufficient.’ The soldiers who carried out the expulsions were the heroes of the war of independence: Yitzhak Rabin, Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan, all tzabarim, native-born Israelis, whom Ben-Gurion loved. [...] During the 1948 war tens of thousands of Palestinians in Lydda and Ramleh were forced out: Ben-Gurion had ‘waved his hand in a manner that Rabin interpreted as a directive to expel them’. According to one of the field commanders of the newly formed Israel Defence Forces – comprising Haganah, Irgun and Lehi troops – ‘a strange stillness pervaded the streets’ of Ramleh, ‘as if after a pogrom’. By December, Ben-Gurion was able to marvel in his diary: ‘It is almost unbelievable: along the way from Tel Aviv to Tiberias, there are almost no Arabs.’ [...] According to Segev, Ben-Gurion thought it unbecoming for an Israeli official to live in a home confiscated from an Arab: it was as if he wanted ‘to draw a line between himself and all that’. [...] [T]he rabbis were given the power to define who was and wasn’t a Jew, and which marriages would be recognised. (His own feeling was that Jewish women shouldn’t be allowed to marry Arab men ‘because as I see it an Arab is still not on the human level that I would want for a man who marries a Jewish woman.’) [...] Ben-Gurion died in 1973. He left behind a dynamic and prosperous state, significantly larger and better defended than at the dawn of independence. The Jews of the Yishuv, thanks in great part to him, had been turned into a Hebrew-speaking nation. But he worried that there were still too many Arabs and that the Jews were becoming more religious, and less ‘Israeli’.' One I came across recently from Moshe Dayan, then chief of staff in the IDF, making a straightforward, unapologetic call for ethnic cleansing of the Bedouins: 'We should transform the Bedouin into an urban proletariat – in industry, services, construction, and agriculture. 88% of the Israeli population are not farmers, let the Bedouin be like them. Indeed, this will be a radical move which means that the Bedouin would not live on his land with his herds, but would become an urban person who comes home in the afternoon and puts his slippers on. His children will get used to a father who wears pants, without a dagger, and who does not pick out their nits in public. They will go to school, their hair combed and parted. This will be a revolution, but it can be achieved in two generations. Without coercion but with governmental direction … this phenomenon of the Bedouins will disappear.' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negev_Bedouin#Land_ownership_issues Seems like it's impossible to advance a land-grabbing colonial project without justifying this with racist dehumanisation of the original inhabitants. It happens all the time: if you spend your life killing, dispossessing, exploiting others you pretty much have to view them as subhuman or get torn apart by the cognitive dissonance. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius I Message Thread: ML ALERT: With Head Lowered And Eyes Averted – Israeli Racism And The ‘Honourable’ Robert Peston. - johnlilburne February 26, 2020, 4:28 pm Re: ML ALERT: With Head Lowered And Eyes Averted – Israeli Racism And The ‘Honourable’ Robert Peston. - keenyg February 26, 2020, 7:06 pm It works fine for me. Here's a screenshot of the article: - sashimi February 26, 2020, 7:31 pm Thanks so much sashimi! - kennyg February 26, 2020, 7:41 pm I stopped bothering after they blocked me on twitter - Keith-264 February 26, 2020, 8:28 pm good article - Ian M February 27, 2020, 12:00 pm Re: good article - Ian M February 27, 2020, 1:42 pm Re: good article - Mary February 27, 2020, 4:02 pm   Searching