• Shlomo Sand On Israel And The Myth Of Diaspora
• Audio: Shlomo Sand And The Invention Of The Jewish People

Originally written in Hebrew it now appears that it has been translated into English. For those interested the book even has it’s own website which can be accessed at The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand. The site has more information on the book and details about Professor Sand’s upcoming events and interviews.

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A new book by an Israeli Rabbi has raised eyebrows. Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro is a resident of the Yitzhar settlement located in the Samarian hills. The settlement is around 130 families strong and Rabbi Shapiro is the head of the Dorshei Yichudcha Yeshiva .

In a book entitled “The King’s Torah” the Rabbi explains that even babies and children can be killed if they pose a threat to the nation of Israel. Surprising as it may sound other rabbis such as Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh and Yaakov Yosef have recommended the book to their students:

“Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro, who heads the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the Yitzhar settlement, wrote in his book “The King’s Torah” that even babies and children can be killed if they pose a threat to the nation.

Shapiro based the majority of his teachings on passages quoted from the Bible, to which he adds his opinions and beliefs.

“It is permissible to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation,” he wrote, adding: “If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments – because we care about the commandments – there is nothing wrong with the murder.” {Source: Haaretz}

Imagine what the reaction to the book  would have been like if Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro was a Muslim, writing about the permissibility of murdering Israeli babies and children ?

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Israeli Exceptionalism

We finish our series of posts looking at  Zionism and nationalism.

{Part one can be accessed at Zionism: An “Abnormal” Nationalism [1]

Part two can be accessed at Zionism: An “Abnormal” Nationalism [2]}

Israel was the product of a partnership that seems unlikely at first blush, between Western Jews and the Christian West. It is the powerful alchemy of the Zionist idea that produced and sustained this partnership. The Zionist project to create a Jewish state in Palestine possessed the power to convert two historical antagonists, Jews and Gentiles, into allies united in a common imperialist enterprise against the Islamicate. At different times, the Zionists have harnessed all the negative energies of the West – its imperialism, anti-Semitism, Crusading zeal, anti-Islamic bigotry, and racism – and focused them on a new project, the creation of a surrogate Western state in the Islamicate heartland. At the same time, the West could derive considerable satisfaction from the success of the Zionist project. Western societies could take ownership of, and revel in, the triumphs of this colonial state as their own; they could congratulate themselves for helping ‘save’ the Jewish people; they could feel they had made adequate amends for their history of anti-Semitism; they could feel they had finally paid back the Arabs and Turks for their conquests of Christian lands. Israel possessed a marvellous capacity to feed several of the West’s egotistical needs.

As a vehicle for facilitating Jewish entry into the stage of world history, the Zionist project was a stroke of brilliance. Since the Jews were influential, but without a state of their own, the Zionists were going to leverage Western power in their cause. As the Zionist plan would unfold, inflicting pain on the Islamicate, evoking Islamicate anger against the West and Jews, the complementarities between the two ancient adversaries would deepen, and, over time, new commonalities would be discovered or created between these two antagonist strains of Western history. In the United States, the Zionist movement would encourage Evangelical Christians – who looked upon the birth of Israel as the fulfillment of end-time prophecies – to become fanatic partisans of Israel. The West had hitherto traced its central ideas and institutions to Rome and Athens; in the wake of Zionist successes, it would be repackaged as a Judeo-Christian civilization, drawing its core principles, its inspiration from the Old Testament. This reframing would not only underscore the Jewish roots of the Western world: it would also make a point of emphasizing that Islam is the outsider, the eternal adversary opposed to both.
Zionism owes its success solely to this unlikely partnership. The Zionists could not have created a Jewish state in Palestine by bribing the Ottomans into granting them a charter to colonize Palestine. Despite his offers of loans, investments, technology, and diplomatic expertise, Theodore Herzl was repeatedly rebuffed by the Ottoman Sultan. It is even less likely that the Zionists, at any time, could have mobilized a Jewish army to invade and occupy Palestine, against Ottoman and Arab opposition.i The Zionist partnership with the West was indispensable for the creation of a Jewish state.

This partnership was also fateful. It produced a powerful new dialectic, which has encouraged Israel – as the political center of the Jewish diaspora and the chief outpost of the West in the heart of the Islamic world – to become ever more aggressive in its designs against the Islamicate. In turn, a fragmented, weak and humiliated Islamicate, more resentful and determined after every defeat at the hands of Israel, has been driven to embrace increasingly radical ideas and methods to recover its dignity, wholeness, and power, and to seek to attain this recovery on the strength of Islamic ideas. This destabilizing dialectic has now brought the West itself into a direct confrontation against the Islamicate. This is the tragedy of Israel. It is a tragedy whose ominous consequences, including those that have yet to unfold, were contained in the very idea of an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine.

M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. This is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (Palgrave Macmillan, November 2009). He may be reached at alqalam02760@yahoo.com

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Whenever the word Shariah is mentioned in polite western society  notions of barbarity, misogyny and backwardness wash over the western mind. However this characterisation might not be wholly correct. As the comments to the following news report from the Daily Mail illustrate.

According to Saudi authorities,  in the northern city of Hail, a 22 year old man has been found guilty of raping five children and leaving one three year old to die in the desert. A lower court passed a guilty verdict and ordered the guilty man to be beheaded and crucified. Now a higher court has upheld the punishment and western commentators to the Daily Mail website are “singing” the praises of Shariah law:

• Maybe we should all follow this particular example. – Keith, Switzerland
• Probably th best decision I have ever heard of. Well done the Saudi’s what a fantastic message to the perverts. pl stroud – pete llewellyn, gloucester
• British courts could learn a thing or two from this. – Matt, Guildford, Surrey
• Dont agree with much in Saudi or the Islamic way of doing things, but this one I certainly do although I do think beheading is too good for him. – Mark, Sheffield
• Saudi Arabia I salute you what a good way to treat these scumbags. – Tony, Bromley
• For once I agree with the Saudis. Punishment and Deterrence is the way to go – not letting them out after a year or two in a luxury prison. This sort of person has long abandoned any claim to Human Rights. – Dean, UK
• We could learn a lesson from the Saudis here, excellent sentence and real motivation not to break the law, especially where children are concerned. WELL DONE SAUDI ARABIA! – S.G., UK ARMED FORCES
• cant fault the saudi courts on their sentence, we should try that here, would cut crime at a stroke (no pun intended). – GREG, COALVILLE , LEICESTERSHIRE,
• I never thought I’d say this but……..I think the Saudis got it right this time. – Charlotte, Leeds {Source: Daily Mail}

It seems that this is not the first time that Daily Mail readers have voiced support for Shariah punishments. Back in August 2007 the Daily Mail carried another news report detailing Shariah punishments. On that occasion also  Mail readers supported Shariah punishments. Click Westerners “Supporting” Sharia Law to see that post.

image by Saudi

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Israeli Exceptionalism

We continue with guest writer M. Shahid Alam of Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts,  who delves into the topic of  Zionism and nationalism.

{Part one can be accessed at  Zionism: An “Abnormal” Nationalism [1]}

Part three can be accessed at Zionism: An “Abnormal” Nationalism [3]}

Zionism was a grave assault on the history of the global resistance to imperialism that unfolded even as Jewish colons in Palestine laid the foundations of their colonial -settler state. The Zionists sought to abolish the ground realities in the Middle East established by Islam over the previous thirteen hundred years. They sought to overturn the demography of Palestine, to insert a European presence in the heart of the Islamicate world, and to serve as the forward base for Western powers intent on dominating the Middle East. The Zionists could succeed only by combining the forces of the Christian and Jewish West in an assault that would almost certainly be seen as a new, latter-day Crusade to marginalize the Islamicate peoples in the Middle East.

It was delusional to assume that the Zionist challenge to the Islamicate would go unanswered. The Zionists had succeeded in imposing their Jewish state on the Islamicate because of the luck of timing – in addition to all the other factors that had favored them. The Islamicate was at its weakest in the decades following the destruction of the Ottoman Empire; even a greatly weakened Ottoman Empire had resisted for more than two decades Zionist pressures to grant them a charter to create a Jewish state in Palestine. The first wave of Arab resistance against Israel – led by secular nationalists from the nascent bourgeoisie classes- lacked the structures to wage a people’s war. Taking advantage of this Arab weakness, Israel quickly dismantled the Arab nationalist movement, whose ruling classes began making compromises with Israel and its Western allies. This setback to the resistance was temporary.

The Arab nationalist resistance would slowly be replaced by another that would draw upon Islamic roots; this return to indigenous ideas and structures would lay the foundations of a resistance that would be broader, deeper, many-layered, and more resilient than the one it would replace. The overarching ambitions of Israel—to establish its hegemony over the central lands of the Islamic ate – would guarantee the emergence of this new response. The quick collapse of the Arab nationalist resistance in the face of Israeli victories ensured that the deeper Islamicate response would emerge sooner rather than later. As a result, Israel today confronts – now in alliance with Arab rulers – the entire Islamicate, a great mass of humanity, which is determined to overthrow this alliance. If one recalls that the Islamicate is now a global community, enjoying demographic dominance in a region that stretches from Mauritania to Mindanao – and now counts more than a billion and a half people, whose growth rate exceeds that of any other collectivity – one can easily begin to comprehend the eventual scale of this Islamicate resistance against the Zionist imposition.

In the era preceding the rise of the Nazis, the Zionist idea – even from a Jewish standpoint – was an affront to more than two millennia of their own history. Jews had started migrating to the farthest points in the Mediterranean long before the second destruction of the Temple, where they settled down and converted many local peoples to the Jewish faith. Over time, conversions to Judaism established Jewish communities farther afield – beyond the Mediterranean world. In the 1890s, however, a small but determined cabal of European Jews proposed a plan to abrogate the history of global Jewish communities extending over millennia. They were determined to accomplish what the worst anti-Semites had failed to do: to empty Europe and the Middle East of their Jewish population and transport them to Palestine, a land to which they had a spiritual connection – just as Muslims in Bangladesh, Bosnia, and Burkina Faso are connected to Mecca and Medina – but to which their racial or historical connections were nonexistent or tenuous at best. Was the persecution of Jews in Europe before the 1890s sufficient cause to justify such a radical reordering of the human geography of the world’s Jewish populations?

A more ominous implication flowed from another peculiarity of Zionism. Unlike other white settlers, the Jewish colons lacked a natural mother country, a Jewish state that could support their colonization of Palestine. In the face of this deficiency, the career of any settler colonialism would have ended prematurely. Instead, because of the manner in which this deficit was overcome, the Zionists acquired the financial, political, and military support of much of the Western world. This was not the result of a conspiracy, but flowed from the peculiar position that Jews – at the end of the nineteenth century – had come to occupy in the imagination, geography, economy, and the polities of the Western world.

The Zionists drew their primary support from the Western Jews, many of whom by the middle of the nineteenth century were members of the most influential segments of Western societies. Over time, as Western Jews gravitated to Zionism, their awesome financial and intellectual assets would become available to the Jewish colons in Palestine. The Jewish colons drew their leadership—in the areas of politics, the economy, industry, civilian and military technology, organization, propaganda, and science – from the pool of Europe’s best. It can scarcely be doubted that the Jewish colons brought overwhelming advantages to their contest against the Palestinians and the neighboring Arabs. No other colonists, contemporaneous with the Zionists or in the nineteenth century, brought the same advantages to their enterprise vis-à-vis the natives.

Pro-Zionist Western Jews would make a more critical contribution to the long-term success of Zionism. They would mobilize their resources – as well-placed members of the financial, intellectual, and cultural elites of Western societies—to make the case for Zionism, to silence criticism of Israel, and generate domestic political pressures to secure the support of Western powers for Israel. In other words, the Zionist ability to recruit Western allies depended critically upon the peculiar position that Jews held in the imagination, prejudices, history, geography, economy, and politics of Western societies.

The Jews have always had a ‘special’ relationship with the Christian West; they were special even as objects of Christian hatred. Judaism has always occupied the unenviable position of being a parent religion that was overtaken by a heresy. For many centuries, the Christians regarded the Jews, hitherto God’s ‘chosen people,’ with disdain for rejecting Jesus. Nevertheless, they incorporated the Jewish scriptures into their own religious canon. This tension lies at the heart of Western ambivalence toward Jews; it is also one of the chief sources of the enduring hatred that Christians have directed toward the Jews.

In addition, starting in the fifteenth century, the Protestants entered into a new relationship with Judaism and Jews. In many ways, the Protestants drew inspiration from the Hebrew bible, began to read its words literally, and paid greater attention to its prophesies about end times. The theology of the English Puritans, in particular, assigned a special role to the Jews in their eschatology. The Jews would have to gather in Jerusalem before the Second Coming of Jesus; later, this theology was taken up by the English Evangelicals who carried it to the United States. Over time, with the growing successes of (Jewish) Zionism, the Evangelicals slowly became its most ardent supporters in the United States. The obverse of the Evangelical’s Zionism is a virulent hatred of Islam and Muslims.

Most importantly, however, it was the entry of Jews into mainstream European society – mostly during the nineteenth century – that paved the way for Zionist influence over the politics of several key Western states. The Zionists very deftly used the Jewish presence in the ranks of European elites to set up a competition among the great Western powers – especially Britain, Germany, and France—to gain Jewish support in their wars with each other, and to undermine the radical movements in Europe that were also dominated by Jews. Starting with World War II, the pro-Zionist Jews would slowly build a network of organizations, develop their rhetoric, and take leadership positions in important sectors of American civil society until they had gained the ability to define the parameters within which the United States could operate in the Middle East.

Serendipitously, it appears, pro-Zionist Jews also found, ready at hand, a rich assortment of negative energies in the West that they could harness to their own project. The convergence of their interests with that of the anti-Semites was perhaps the most propitious. The anti-Semites wanted the Jews out of Europe, and so did the Zionists. Anti-Semitism would also become the chief facilitator of the Jewish nationalism that the Zionists sought to create. In addition, the Zionists could muster support for their project by appealing to Western religious bigotry against Muslims as well as their racist bias against the Arabs as ‘inferior’ non-whites.

The Zionists would also argue that their project was closely aligned with the strategic interests of Western powers in the Middle East. This claim had lost its validity by the end of the nineteenth century, when Britain was firmly established in Egypt and it was the dominant power in the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the insertion of an exclusionary Jewish colonial settler state into the Islamicate geographical matrix was certain to provoke waves of resistance from the Muslim peoples. Western interests in the Islamicate were not positively aligned with the Zionist project. Yet, once Israel had been created, it would provoke anti-Western feelings in the Middle East, which, conveniently, the Zionists would deepen and offer as the rationale for supporting and arming Israel to protect Western interests against Arab and, later, Islamicate threats.

To Be Continued……

M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. This is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (Palgrave Macmillan, November 2009). He may be reached at alqalam02760@yahoo.com

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Now a senior member of the Israeli secret service Shin Bet claims there are other terrorists out there prepared to kill for their ideology:

“A senior Shin Bet official said Jewish terrorists that have not been caught are still at large and may be planning future attacks, Israel Radio reported on Monday…..

…Teitel is not mentally unstable, said the Shin Bet official, who described him as an extremist who firmly believes in his ideology and who acted carefully, decisively and with sophistication.” {Source: Haaretz}

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“Britain supports creation of Jewish homeland on this day in 1917. British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour submits a declaration of intent to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The British government hoped that the formal declaration would help garner Jewish support for the Allied effort in World War I. The Balfour Declaration was included in the British mandate over Palestine, which was approved by the League of Nations in 1922.” {Source: Focus Fen}

Below is a copy of the deceleration:

image by Kopitarian

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A male camel showing off his pink throat sac.

Image by fPat

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Yaakov Teitel a resident of the Shvut Rachel outpost in the West Bank and is implicated in the murder of two Arabs, the bombing of a Messianic Jewish child and the attempted murder of a left-wing professor.

Teitel emigrated to Israel from the United States in 2000 and under police questioning has admitted to most of the charges against him. He even claims that  he emigrated to Israel in order to carry out attacks against Palestinians:

“A resident of the West Bank outpost Shvut Rachel was arrested last month for suspected murder and for his alleged role in a string of attempted murder plots, a gag order lifted on Sunday revealed.

Yaakov Teitel, 37, was is suspected of killing two Palestinians, for rigging the package bomb which left the child of a Messianic Jew seriously wounded, for attempting to kill left-wing professor Ze’ev Sternhell, and for his alleged role in a series of warning attacks against Israel Police at the time of the Gay Pride Parades…..

…Teitel was arrested after a prolonged police follow-up; he was in possession of a loaded gun at the time of the arrest….

…Teitel has confessed to murdering a Palestinian shepherd near Mount Hebron in 1997. He is also suspected of killing a taxi driver in East Jerusalem some two months after that incident. He said that he came to Israel precisely to carry out attacks against Palestinians as revenge for suicide bombings.” {Source: Haaretz}

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