Tom “The Trog” Trancedo’s remarks about “bombing Mecca” in response to any further explosions ostensibly authored by the followers of Muhammed have precipitated howls of disapproval in the press and even in the halls of the U.S Congress where Mr Trancedo currently sits as a (Republican) congressman from Colorado. Of course, everyone know’s he’s just kidding. Civilized people, and especially civilized Republicans, would never bomb a holy site. Or civilians.
If you believe that, then you’re bound to believe that poor Mr Mammohan Singh, probably soon to become the ex-prime minister of India, made a friend for life when he lined up behind George Bush’s bomb-happy War on Terror. True, India did get some too-little-too-late assistance on developing its civilian nuclear program, and in all probability will receive some aid in preserving the habitat of the Bengal tiger, but poor Mr Singh came up empty on the really big-ticket items like a permanent seat on the expanded UN security council.
Of course, Indians don’t have the same thing about saving face that, say, the Chinese do, so he may return to Delhi in one piece and even keep his job for another few months. Mammohn’s not a bad guy, he just doesn’t have a very strong hand to play. And besides, he’s not the real political power in India, anyway. Sonia Gandhi is, and she ain’t talking.
Unlike the North Koreans. They’re talking plenty. Voice of America is reporting that they’re returning to the six-party talks, but I think the sense is that the US is about ready to cave and hold direct talks with Pyongang. I mean, even the New York Times is calling for such a step to allay worries about nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsular (of which the United States by far possesses the greatest number). America may be ready to consider bombing Mecca, but it ain’t about to tangle with North Korea (and China). Especially not now.
Now that things are going badly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Oh, sure, the US will prevail militarily at some point. Its foe is opportunist and medieval. No one in their right mind wants to live under a fundamentalist regime of any stripe, be it Muslim, Christian, Hindu or Jew. My guess is we’ll end up winning by buying off the opposition. After all, they just want to be in charge, or to be better paid for supporting whoever is.
We could have continued to buy off Saddam, too, but the Israelis wouldn’t hear of it. So, now he’s gone and the zionists are contemplating a Palestinian-free Jerusalem, and much else. Now we get to the crux of the “terrorism” issue. This Israeli thing cannot continue indefinitely. Yes, the Palestinian does evil things. The Jew does evil things. The Palestinian cannot afford to be less evil than the Jew, as it is the latter who sits atop the Palestinian’s stolen land. What will happen in the end, I believe, after thousands more on both sides are dead, is one entity, for both. Palestinian and Jew living side by side in peace, security and self-determination. At last.
Of course, this will please neitherTom Tancredo, nor many others. But, it is the one viable solution to a problem made far worse by religious bigotry and the mischievously lethal fetus of fascism which awaits in the womb of every capitalist society.
At least it’s better than bombing Mecca.
Are you suggesting the Jews should give up their homeland? And go where?
No, but they need to share the homeland with those possessing as much right to it as themselves. Theocracies of whatever color are an anachronism, as is increasingly the nation-state. We are one people. We do not need to be bifurcated by artifical political boundaries.
The Zionist project seems to be unworkable over the long run, even in its own terms, the main reason being the demographic issue. For Israel to continue as a viable Jewish state it must be able to maintain a Jewish majority but the problem is that both Israeli Arabs and the Palestinian Arabs in the occupied territories have a much higher fertility rate than do Israeli Jews, and there is simply not enough Jewish immigration to Israel to make up for the difference in fertility rates.
Years ago, the extreme rightist, Rabbi Meir Kahane was one of the first to point to this issue and the threat it posed to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state over the long term. Kahane, among other things that for this reason and others, democracy was incompatible with Zionism, since if Israel were to eventually have an Arab majority then under a democracy, that majority would be free to vote Israel out of existence. Kahane proposed to resolve this problem throught expulsion of the Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. At the time that Kahane was talking about all this, he was dismissed as a fringe figure within Israeli politics, but in the years following his death, especially during the height of the Second Intafida, talk about the removal of the Palestinians became increasingly mainstream within Israel. But in the end such a proposal besides being horrific also seems to be very unrealistic. It seems highly unlikely that the US or the other Western powers could ever consent to it, as sympathetic as they might be to Israel.
Also, it seems evident that the Zionist project is doomed to failure over the long term because there are simply not enough Jews who wish to go there to live. The early Zionists from Herzl down on, believed that Jewish emancipation in the western countries was a fraud that was doomed to failure. Like the anti-Semites, they believed it impossible for Jews and Gentiles to live together amicably as equals. Herzl and the other classic Zionists believed that conditions for Jews in the western countries would inevitably deterioate, forcing millions of Jews to come to Israel for their very physical survival. The events of the 1930s and 1940s seem to bear out these predictions but following the defeat of the Third Reich in WW II, conditions for Jews in the western countries, especially in the US greatly improved to levels undreamed of by past generations. Hence, millions of Jews did not seek to flee Europe or American to live in Israel. Now of course it is always possible that at some future time conditions for Jews could deterioate but that’s not likely to come soon enough to bail Israel out of its demographic problems.
Yes, I think the zionist project is in the long run untenable. But, the run can be long, longer than any of Israel’s present leaders need envisage. An caveat is if, as you suggest, the diaspora suffers some cataclysmic reversal, such as wholesale terrorism directed at Jews within a number of societies. I don’t see this happening, though as the islamic world is transformed (and it is being transformed in a fundamental way), reactions against jews and other westerners may become more violent. (I still have trouble explaining why “Al-Quaeda” has never directly attacked Israel, and why it always appears at the most propitious moment for Messrs. Blair and Bush.)
Sadly, Mr. Godena spouts false Marxist anti-Israel rhetoric without verifying or knowing what he speaks about. Israeli Jews are not on “stolen land.” Prior to 1948 there were 27 Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank that were seized by Jordan and Egypt (there never was a “Palestinian” state). The Jews took thier land back in 1967. The majority of Palestinian Arabs emigrated to the area the same as Jews during the Zionist mvoement. Israel is not a theocracy, just a refuge for Jews.
For an accurate history of the region go to http://www.dafka.org and click on MiddleEast history on the left menu. Click on “A True Story” for the real history. Judea and Samaria and Gaza were always parts of the Jewish land of Israel that has always had a Jewish presence. Jews purchased all their land legally.
It looks to me like the David Horowitz article that is cited by Lee Kaplan recapitualtes the claims that Joan Peters made in her book, *From Time Immemorial*, concerning claims that the growth in the Arab population from the late 19th century on was due to their immigration into Palestine. Such claims were refuted by the Israeli historian, Yehoshua Porath, in his classic demolition of the Peters book in the pages of the New York Review of Books, back in 1986.(http://www.nybooks.com/articles/5249).
As Porath expressed it:
“As all the research by historians and geographers of modern Palestine
shows, the Arab population began to grow again in the middle of the nineteenth century. That growth resulted from a new factor: the demographic revolution. Until the 1850s there was no “natural” increase of the
population, but this began to change when modern medical treatment was introduced
and modern hospitals were established, both by the the Ottoman authorities and by the foreign Christian missionaries. The number of births remained steady but infant mortality decreased. This was the main reason for Arab
population growth, not incursions into the country by the wandering tribes who by then had become afraid of the much more efficient Ottoman troops. Toward the end of Ottoman rule the various contemporary sources no
longer lament the outbreak of widespread epidemics. This contrasts with the Arabic chronicles of previous periods in which we find horrible descriptions of recurrent epidemics – typhoid, cholera, bubonic
plague-decimating the population. Under the British Mandate, with still better sanitary conditions, more hospitals, and further improvements in medical treatment, the Arab population continued to grow.
The Jews were amazed. In spite of the Jewish immigration, the natural increase of the Arabs-at least twice the rate of the Jews’ – slowed down the transformation of the Jews into a majority in Palestine. To account for the delay the theory, or myth, of large-scale immigration of Arabs from the neighboring countries was proposed by Zionist writers.
Mrs. Peters accepts that theory completely; she has apparently searched through documents for any statement to the effect that Arabs entered Palestine. But even if we put together all the cases she cites, one cannot escape the conclusion that most of the growth of the Palestinian Arab community resulted from a process of natural increase.”
I was looking for Lee Kaplan’s follow-up response. Apparently, he cut and ran, as I expected he would. I guess that David Horowitz can’t protect him over here.
Actually, Lee sent me something a bit later than this, and I neglected to post it. I will find it and post it here later today or tomorrow. I am on my way to Cambridge to attend a pro-immigration meeting and fundraiser.
Lee Kaplan sent me this on the 29th of July.
Mr.Godena;
Your nihilism knows no bounds as does your ignorance of Israel in its quest for peace. Yes, Israel has a better military than the PLO but the PLO has the entire arab world behind it as a threat. The PLO has plenty of weaponry now smuggled in. If soemone was raping your mother would you fault the policeman who protects her for being better armed than the rapist? The only reason the PA has a state-in-the-making is because Israel gave up half its territory. Israeli funds 70% of he PA budget,my friend, hardly a vicious regime mistreating Arabs. Israel has always provided free medical care to the Arab world. You know nothing oif Arab tribalism or Islamism to even comment as you do intelligently. Joan Peters started out anti-Israel like you but at least did the research to formulate another opinion. You base your opinions obviously on garbage put out by the Palestinian information ministries that are in fact ministries for a totalitarian society.
Your comment that Saddam Hussein did not model his regime after Stalin is both ignorant and disingenuos. It was not created by the CIA as the source was Hussein himself. Hussein also studied the regimes of Hitler as well. Hussein started out as a torturer for the Ba’ath Party. You oibviosuly have never lost family to a dictator, or a terrorist.
Your website glorifies Marxism, an economic theory that has inspired totalitarian societies that have killed millions of people. It is puerile to say the least ands something that thrives only on college campuses where anythiing goes–including misinformation.
I suggest you read Myths and Facts then get back to me. No doubt you will claim it contains untruths because you only embrace the revolutionary despite the harm it does to other people from the safety of Harvard and America.
By the way, I suggest you visit Israel and see how good the Israelis really are to the Arabs in contrast to how Jews are treated in the Middle East and under MArxist societies.
Lou, I think that you had done Mr. Kaplan a favor when you had neglected to post his response, given its muddled and scattershot approach. He makes much of Israel’s financing of the PA, while ignoring the most obvious reason for it doing so, which is that Israel expects the PA to police the Palestinians in much the same manner which the apartheid regime in South Africa established supposedly independent and “sovereign” ‘homelands’ in order to police black South Africans. Hence, the barely uncontained glee that was expressed in much of the Israeli press following the death of Arafat, over the possibility of a Palestinian civil war, in which it was hoped that the PA would crush Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP etc., and the disappointment that was expressed when this civil war failed to materialize.
I was also amused by Mr. Kaplan’s response concerning Joan Peters (apparently, Mr. Kaplan thinks that both you and I are the same person). He writes that, “…Joan Peters started out anti-Israel like you but at least did the research to formulate another opinion.” Unfortunately, in the case of Ms. Peters, for all of her research, she delivered up a load of tripe, as was pointed out by any number of scholarly experts on Israeli and Middle Eastern history, when they reviewed her book. Professor Yoshua Porath was simply one of a number of such reviewers. If his was especially noteworthy, it’s because he is known as a conservative in Israeli politics (he was, the last time I checked into it, a Netanyahu supporter). Anyway, it is even more noteworthy that Mr. Kaplan had nothing concrete to offer in response to Professor Porath’s demolition of Joan Peters.
Concerning Mr. Kaplan, I was impressed with his apparent ignorance of Iraqi history and of the United States’ role in backing Saddam Hussein over the years. In fact, the US relationship with Hussein apparently extends over many years, as has its support for the Iraqi Ba’ath Party. The US supported the Ba’athists as early as 1963 when they helped to overthrow the left-nationalist government of General Abdul Karim Qassim , who had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in 1958. By the early 1960s, the US State Department had become increasingly distressed over the independent policies of Quassim’s government, so it was willing to back the Ba’athists against it. The US also supported the 1968 coup of the Ba’athists, which resulted in General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr becoming the president of Iraq. As it so happens, the general was a relative of Saddam Hussein, and that family connection was crucial to Saddam’s rise to power. In the 1970s, Saddam was made a vice president of Iraq, and vice chairman of the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council. As President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr’s health began to decline, Saddam began to take on increasing powers and responsibilities, so by the late 1970s, he was the de facto leader of Iraq. In 1979, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr resigned from the presidency and Saddam succeeded him in office. Shortly thereafter, Saddam convened an
assembly of Ba’ath party leaders. During the assembly, which he ordered videotaped, Saddam announced his
“discovery” of spies and conspirators within the Ba’ath Party and read out the names of members who he thought could oppose him. These members were labeled “disloyal” and were removed from the room one by one to face a firing squad. After the list was read, Saddam congratulated those still seated in the room for their past and future loyalty.
Concerning Kaplan’s best buddy, David Horowitz, he’s quite a character, isn’t he? I have on my
bookshelf in front of me two of his books that he wrote back in his commie left-wing days: *Marx and Modern Economics* and his *The Fate of Midas and Other Essays*.
The first book is a collection of essays from assorted economists, both Marxist and bourgeois, which explored the relationships between Marxian political economy and what was then contemporary mainstream economics.
That book had essays from people like Lange, Joan Robinson, and Paul Sweezy amongst others. And the book itself was published by Monthly Review Press, which I believe
still keeps it on its backlist.
The second book is a collection of essays by Horowitz, himself, many of them on that same theme. One of the theses of that book was the convergence between Marxian economics and Keyenesian economics(that I already in regards to the first book), a thesis that had been advanced earlier by people like Paul Sweezy and Joan Robinson. Other essays explore ideas derived from the great Marxist historian, Isaac Deutscher, who had been one of Horowitz’s mentors in the early 1960s when he was in London. Another essay was on Bertrand Russell, with whom Horowitz had worked with when he served a stint as director of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. (I imagine that Ralph Schoenman had something to do with that).
Horowitz, during his leftwing commie days, wrote other books too such as *The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War* which was back in the 1970s an influential popularization of the “revisionist” understanding of the origins of the cold war.
It is said that back when he was a commie leftist, Horowitz didn’t have a penny to his name, and spent years earning a poverty-level income at most. Then when he became a right-winger, all sorts of money began to flow in and he has now become quite wealthy. On the other hand, the one thing that he has failed to acquire is any real respect. After all, in his pilgrimage from the far left to the far right, he has been preceded by many better men like Max Eastman, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers etc. I get the impression that Horowitz thought he would be able to become sort of an intellectual leader of the right, the way he had been of the left. While, he has managed to acquire a certain notoriety, especially with his website, FrontPage, I don’t think that he has gotten all that much respect. After all when he was on the left, he was very much a big fish in a small pond, whereas on the right he is just one voice within a crowded field. And how much self-respect can a man retain after he has sold out
the way the Horowitz did?
Well, I promised Lee Kaplan to obtain and read a copy of Myths and Facts, but if it is anything like the Peters book, then it will be a fairly tendentious exercise. I hope its author’s prose style is a bit more fluid, as well. I think there is a consciousness in Israeli society — and this exists to a greater or lesser degree among Jews of *all* political stripes — that there is something fundamentally “immoral” about the occupation, and, perhaps, even about the existence of Israel itself. This arises from the moral and intellectual aspects of the diaspora and is in fact endemic to Jewish life itself. Jews consider themselves a very “moral” people. I cannot, for example, imgaine the Turks or the Japanese sweating in public about the brutality of *their* occupations, or the rightness of subjugating a whole people for national self-aggrandizement. This may be the bone that chokes the whole zionist enterprise. Yes, I do have a couple of David’s books from his marxist period. One is a good anthology (which he edited) on the estimable marxist historian Isaac Deutscher. The other, a collection of pieces on American working class culture. It’s too bad about David. If he had been a bit more circumspect about his political evolution (and had not surrounded himself with such dreadful trogdalytes like Ann Coulter and that guy Savage) he could be enjoying a comfortable sinecure at one of the better addresses in academia. I suspect quite a few at our more “liberal” institutions practice what David Horowitz preaches — and are well paid for it.
Uh, WE stole THEIR land? Actually THEY do not really exist as a people, they are a figment of the Arab’s imagination. The “Palestinian” people were given a name to further the murdering of Jews.
Everyone knows this, it’s simply that Jew-haters such as yourself hide behind the mask of anti-Zionism because it’s the stylish thing to do.
If you really were half as enlightened as see yourself to be, you would open up a history book and tell me about the long-history the so-called “Palestinians”. And your not-so-enlightened brain would figure out that there is no such thing as a Palestinian, and that the word was an invention of the Romans and was later adopted by the British.
Oh I forgot though, this is the true history of “Palestine” and that doesn’t seem quite as romantic to you people. But reading your non-sense is good for a laugh none-the-less. I catergorize this blog under my favorite’s folder called “B.S. Fiction”.
Tovya; Regardless of what you call them, “Palestine” was inhabited by people who had been there for many, many generations. Neither the Jew nor the Palestinian has ever been the sole proprietor of the land that is now alternatively called “Israel” or “Palestine”. You know as well as I that the only tenable solution is one state with equal rights for both, including most importantly the right of return of those who were displaced in 1948. No, there is nothing remotely “romantic” about either people, or about any people for that matter. Your insistance that “Israel” remain a theocracy for the Jews is not workable, just as the Arab theocracies are not tenable, either.
There is a difference madame. We are more than happy to have them in our country (as equal citizens, as we have proven), but they will NEVER accept a Jew living side-by-side with them.
That does not mean that every Arab feels this way, it simply means the great majority would rather kill us than make peace with us.
It’s a fact of middle eastern politics. They want us dead, and just want them to leave us alone.
A “one-state solution” will never happen because they can’t accept Jews as their equal. We would either have to run, or live beneath them as a sub-serviant population.
Obviously neither of the above solutions would work, so we will continue to fight them until one of us wins. Nothing will change that, and there will never be peace. That’s reality.
please excuse me for refering to you as if you were a woman, I didn’t realize that you are a man. my deepest apologies.
Re-reading your comment, I found a few additional errors (aside from what I already wrote):
A) I never said anything about a theocracy government (by either party) as you asserted.
B) Those who were displaced in 1948 left by their own free will. The Arab hordes told them to run, and that they could come back when they wiped us out. As history shows, quite the opposite happened. They should have bet on the right horse and they would still be there.
C) Yes, WE Jews have been the sole-proprietors before, so you are incorrect in your assertion that Israel has never been solely run by either party. Surely you know your history better than that? Or are you one of those revisionists who re-write history that they disaprove of?
Well, Israel has become a “de facto” theocracy, as it identifies itself as a homeland for the Jews, with concomitant rights and privileges that are “de facto” denied others, and especially Palestinians. As a matter of ascertainable fact, there is apartheid in the treatment of the two peoples in education, housing, employment, ownership of land, etc. If there is no alternative to war to the finish between Jew and Palestinian, that does not bode well for either side, does it? Could Israel exist as a viable entity after exterminating an indigenous population like itself? You know the answer. The Jew cannot exists as an entity outside of a moral order. “Doing the right thing” is central to Jewish thinking. Others (like the revanchist Arab regimes) could gleefully kill whole populations while appealing to ecclesiastic authority for absolution. This the Jew cannot do; he must in the end do the right thing; it is too much a part of what Jewish culture is. It is at once a great disadvantage, *and* a powerful asset.
(a) Israel is actually trying to erase its Jewish image, which will be revealed as a huge histake.
(b) Palestinians are not citizens of Israel, and as with any other nation on Earth, non-citizens do not get to vote. Israeli ARABS do get to vote though, and they have Arab MKs representing them.
(c) There is no “fact” that Israel is an apartheid state. We do not have seperate Arab and Jewish water fountains, nor or are the Arabs lacking representation as the blacks in South Africa did. I could list the differences forever, but I would rather hear what you say the “facts” are. (and no, quoting Al-Jazeera or the Protocols does not count as proof text).
(d) Israel has never tried nor have we ever mentioned at exterminating anyone. If we wanted to do that, we would have done that in 1948 and then later in 1967, and no one would have raised an eye to it back then. But we did not do it, because we are not infected with the sickness of extermination like the Europeans. That’s their disease, not ours.
(e) But I will agree on your last point, the Jewish idea is one of compassion. This of course underlines my previous points. We have never been an apartheid state (that was a christian invention BTW, and if you know us t all, you’d know we don’t copycat christian ideas), and we have never exterminated anyone, we have only been the victims of extermination attempts for the last 2000 years.
Be well.
Tovya; It all comes down to the Right of Return which, of course, means the end of Israel as we know it; perhaps the end, or at least the eclipse of the Jewish ideal of a secular, open, democratic society. What is the alternative? The inexorable breakdown of the very idea of the Jew; the destruction of a people as a moral force, which is the great achievement of the Jew. One cannot have people coming from Kiev, from Miami, from Montreal, from virtually every locale on earth, expropriating land from which thousands have been driven into penury and landlessness. Yes, the criminal Arab autocracies deserve much, perhaps most, of the blame, but is it the way of the Jew to blame others when he is far from a passive player on the stage of history? He has the power to make it right, and this he will do; zionism as a recipe for the exclusive ownership of a disputed land is a dead-end, regardless of the justifications of history. The deliberate killing of six or eight million Jews cannot be forgotten, but its memory must not — even inadvertently — be used to faclitate new wrongs which in the end will fester into the destruction of both peoples.
Reading Tovya’s remarks here, I started asking myself whether or not he is a Kahanist. I said to myself, if this guy is not a Kahanist, then he is sure doing a great imitation of one. Then I went and checked his blog and what do you know? Tovya really is a Kahanist.
Now it so happens while I regard the late Rabbi Meir Kahane to have been a vile racist and worse, I do give him credit for possessing a basic intellectual honesty, or at least a greater intellectual honesty than most Zionists. In particular, I give him credit for facing up to the demographic problem that confronts Israel and for his asking the question as to whether Zionism is compatible with democracy. His answer was no, in large part because he advocated a theocracy but also because he argued that as long as Israel remains a democracy, its future existence remains in doubt. That’s because given the greater feritility rates of Palestinian Arabs over Israeli Jews, there will be a time, in perhaps just a few decades when Israel will be ruling over an Arab majority. If all these Arabs were to become citizens, then by exercizing their democratic rights they would be able to vote Israel, as a specifically Jewish state, out of existence.
Rabbi Kahane discussed his views on these matters with great frankness in a series of interviews with a couple of French journalists, Israel’s Ayatollahs: Meir Kahane and the Far Right in Israel. In one of the interviews he was asked the following question:Q: Professor Neeman has written that the demographic ratio between Jews and Arabs has not changed since 1967.Rabbi Kahane responded with the following remarks:
Another fraud. A statistical fraud. It’s a lie by the Tehiya [nationalist party], because this party has a very serious problem: it wants to annex the Occupied Territories and keep the Arabs living there. The real question is the following: do we need another million and a half Arabs? In fact, the latest statistics show that Arabs from the West Bank territories go to work in Kuwait because there’s work there and there’s no work here. Besides, Neeman is talking about the Arabs living in the Territories, but I’m talking about the Arabs who have Israeli citizenship. And this Arab population is growing twice as fast as the Jewish population. Israel’s Arabs are high-quality Arabs; they all go to school, they are intelligent; they have tremendous qualities. Northern Israel will be completely Arab in the near future. Galilee already has an Arab majority. Umm el-Fahm [a village in Galilee] already has an overwhelming Arab majority.
We’re sitting here doing nothing, watching what is happening without lifting a finger. Once the Arabs have a majority in this country, they’re going to do what any self-respecting nationalist would do. They are not going to accept living in a country called a Jewish state, in a country with a Law of Return that applies solely to the Jews. Once the Arabs have gained a majority, they’ll change the laws and the nature of this state, and they’ll be right. Completely right. And this is why I want to move them all out now. I say now, because we need a minimum of force to do it.
If I were the minister of defense, if I were talking to you now as minister of defense, the mere fact of hearing me say what I just said would sow panic among the Arabs. The Arabs are afraid of me, because they know that I understand them.
It is interesting to note how, fourteen years after Kahane’s violent death, his ideas if not the methods he proposed to facilitate them have become mainstream. This is as true of Labour as it is of the ruling Likudist coalition. This has naturally influenced American policy as well and has found a ready audience among the Christian Republican Right. A Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem is now openly discussed not only at Heritage and Hudson, but at “moderate” think tanks like CSIS. Arrange or re-arrange some of the particulars and the plan for Palestine could conceivably have enjoyed the endorsement of Kahane himself.
A notable example of Kahanist ideas going mainstream was the rather famous or infamous interview with Israeli historian, Benny Morris, that appeared in The Guardian a couple of years ago. Morris has for some years been considered to be one of Israel’s leading “revisionist” historians, in that much of his research, past and present, as been aimed at puncturing some of the founding myths of Israel. Back in the 1990s, when the Oslo peace process was in full motion, Morris was considered to be one of the leading “post-Zionists” in Israel. However, more recently, his politics have taken on a rather different cast. As a historian, he continues to do research that debunks many of the myths concerning Israel’s founding, arguing that Zionist leaders deliberately sought to drive out the Palestinian Arabs from Israel. However, he now argues that this expulsion was necessary and justified, and he takes the then Prime Minister David Ben Gurion to task for not having done the job more thoroughly, thus leaving Israel with the demographic problem that hangs over it like the sword of Damocles. Since Benny Morris comes out of a Labor Party background and was a long time supporter of Meretz, his shift on the Palestinian issue was of some significance and shows how ideas that in the past were associated with Kahane, and thus were marginalized, have now become a part of mainstream political discourse both within and outside of Israel.
I was more than a little amused that Tovya on his blog under the item “Even the Communists Love Comrade Tovya,” got Louis Godena confused with myself. One point Tovya, I am not Louis Godena, he is not me. We are two, quite separate individuals. In fact over the years Louis and I have had our share of political differences, although there is no reason for Tovya to know or care about that. I was the one that called Tovya, a Kahanist, not Godena. I see no reason why Tovya should take offense at that since he clearly is an admirer of Rav Kahane. And even I, who condemns Kahanism will grudgingly admit to a certain respect for Rav Kahane’s candor in his expression of his views and for his having a basic intellectual honesty which seems to me to have been greater than that of most Zionist apologists.
If Tovya had bothered to read through the remarks above, then he would have seen the discussion between Louis and myself over how Kahane’s views have gradually entered into mainstream political discourse both within Israel and without, even to the point where someone like Benny Morris could come to express views concerning the Palestinians that are not so far apart from Kahane’s. If I were Tovya, I would be pleased as punch.