[Marxism] Gaza: Franly, I don't like this pullout (was: Gaza settlers, Israeli)

[l.willms@xxxxxxxxxxx (Lueko Willms)]

.    On  17.08.05
  wrote  ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Fred Feldman)
     on  /ALIST/MARXMAIL
     in  000201c5a37a$bafd30a0$6401a8c0@fredpc
  about  [Marxism] Gaza settlers, Israeli troops stage psychodrama for US, Brit


FF> Watching the Gazan Fiasco
FF> The Shame of It All
FF> By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN



   The article by Jennifer Lowenstein which was forwarded by Fred
Feldman explains one aspect of it.

   One should still mention that Israeli settler who decided to stay
and took, if my memory serves me right, Palestinian cityzenship in
order not to be bothered by the Israeli withdrawal.

   Lowenstein unfortunately does also not mention that the Israeli
army will completely destroy all buildings left in the settlements,
leaving only ruin fields to the Palestinians, just as they did when
they left the Sinai and destroyed e.g. the city of Quneitra.

   I am not in favor of ethnically pure territories. I have in
principle nothing against Jews living in Gaza or whereever in the
world.

   The state of Israel should not forcibly remove them from where they
chose to live.

   They should simply have done three things:
   1. dismantle the fortifications of the settlements (not the houses)
   2. disarm the settlers
   3. withdraw all armed forces and police from the Gaza strip and
thus hand over the administrative authority over _all_ people and
places in Gaza strip to the Palestinian Authority.


   The same applies to the settlements in Westbank.


   Those who are not prepared to see other human beings as equals
would have left, as Jennifer Loewenstein writes, quietly without all
the hullaballoo which is staged now.


   Sure, I have to moderate my Subject header -- I rejoice with the
Palestinian Arabs that the resistance and Intifada over the years has
made these colonies untenable and that the state of Israel has, with
gnashing teeth, come to the decision to dismantle at least these.

   But I would have liked another way.


.    On  16.08.05
  wrote  lnp3@xxxxxxxxx (Louis Proyect)
     on  /ALIST/MARXMAIL
     in  Pine.NEB.4.63.0508160837100.10558@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  about  [Marxism] Racist underpinnings of Gaza withdrawal


LP> Disengagement and ethnic cleansing
LP>
LP> Israel's pullout from Gaza is openly justified by demography - in
LP> other words, the need to maintain a Jewish majority
LP>
LP> Daphna Baram
LP> Tuesday August 16, 2005
LP> The Guardian

   In this respect, even the most respected Israeli "left" like Gush  
Shalom and Uri Avneri share this same base with Ariel Sharon and the  
heirs of Vladimir Jabotinski.

   A phrase in Avneri's recent weekly column on the Gaza pullout stuck  
in my eyes: "For 37 years, the Israeli army has been the Settlers  
Defense Army." Well, the Israeli Army has been, from its inception as  
the Yishuv's militia, as Haganah or the terrorist groups, to which  
Avneri himself belonged, been the armed instrument of the settlers.  
Israel is a colonial settler state, based on the rejection of Abraham  
Lincoln's formula of a "government of the people, by from the people  
and for the for the people" opting instead for a "government of my  
ethnical group, by my ethnical group, and for my ethnical group".

   Avneri and Sharon differ only in the extent of the conquest which  
they want to keep - Avneri is content with the conquests of 1948, and  
thinks Israel can secure those conquests by conceding all the rest of  
Palestina to the Arabs, while Sharon also wants to keep the conquests  
of 1967, and leaves the door open to more expansion.

   Both stick to the goal formulated by Golda Myerson (who later  
changed her last name to Meir) in response to "the question of an  
American member of the last Anglo-American commmission carrying out  
investigations in Palestine in 1946:

   'If the Jews as a minority had the same privileges as those you  
arer promising the Arabs as a minority, would you be satisfied?'

   'No, sir,' replied Golda Myerson, 'For there must be one place in  
the world where Jews are not a minority'." [Marie Syrkin: Golda Meir.  
French translation, Paris, Gallimard, 1966, p.133, quoted from Maxime  
Rodinson: Israel, a Colonial Settler State. New York, Pathfinder  
Press, 1973, p. 77f]

   Which in a country whose majority is not Jewish, and which rejects  
another foreign rule, another national oppression, or gerrymandering  
of its territory in order to provide the minority a territory where it  
is the majority, could only be achieved by violent relocation of the  
majority of the Apartheid-like racist oppression of the majority.

   By the way, the number of 55% Jewish majority quoted by Daphna  
Baram is not correct; Jews counted only for 49% of the population in  
the Jewish part of the 1947 UN gerrymandering plan; they had not  
counted the Arab bedouins in the Beersheba region.

   From the background of the German experience with racism and racial  
oppression not only during the Nazi rule, I can only give one advice:  
the thought that one can secure one's own ethnical group by oppression  
other ethnical groups is a lethal fallacy. Only the fight against  
_every_ form of discrimination can end national and racial oppression.

   As Marx and Engels repeated often during all their political life:  
"A people which oppresses other peoples is forging its own chains".




Yours,
Lüko Willms                                     http://www.mlwerke.de
/--------- L.WILLMS@xxxxxxxxxxx -- Alle Rechte vorbehalten --

"Der einzige Weg, Armut zu überwinden, ist den Armen die Macht zu geben"
                 - Hugo Chavez, Präsident von Venezuela

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