Tag Archives: israel

Reparations Comparisons

Politics, Uncategorized, , , ,

I’m going to be honest. There is something a bit odd about the comparison between #reparations for slavery and reparations for Holocaust victims.

Besides the fact that almost every German reparation to Jewish victims were only to those who had survived the Holocaust, one has to look to the specificities of the Reparations Agreement between West Germany and Israel and how the reparations were calculated in the 1950s.

The primary reparation was not for the slave labor of Jewish Holocaust victims, but for the cost of resettlement of over 500,000 survivors in Israel. The Israeli government, which at the time was in a deep economic crisis following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, calculated that absorption of at least 500,000 survivors had cost 3,000 dollars per person ($28,958 in today dollars), so they were owed 1.5 billion dollars ($14,500,000,000 in today’s dollars) by (then-West) Germany. The question of a potential 6 billion dollars of property stolen from Jewish citizens of Germany and other states was placed on the backburner. The negotiation was carried out between Israel, West Germany and the Claims Conference, a non-profit which has worked for decades to secure property stolen from Jewish victims by Nazis.

Reparations have since been secured by the Claims Conference for actual slave labor victims: the Article 2 Fund, which is an income-limited lifetime pension to survivors of Nazi slave camps or those who fled into hiding from Nazi persecution; and the Program for Former Slave and Forced Laborers, which is a one-time payment whose application deadline has since expired.

But I wonder which reparations method we are talking about when German reparations to Jewish Holocaust victims are invoked for reparations for American slavery.

Because if we’re comparing to the Israel-West Germany Reparations Agreement of 1951, this would be almost equivalent to the United States having deported all African-American formerly-enslaved people to Liberia after 1865, and decades (or over a century?) later agreeing to pay reimbursement to Liberia of $3,000 for every person deported. Reasonably, Liberia, like Israel, would have successfully righted its economy (and maybe did better by Native Liberian citizens rather than treating them as second-class citizens prior to the 1980 coup).

By comparison, our ancestors who survived slavery lost their chance for “40 acres and a mule” as recompense when General Sherman’s order was overruled.

Even Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Case for Reparations” rests more on compensating the survivors of Jim Crow and redlining rather than slavery.

So even after reading NCOBRA.org, I feel that if we’re going to specify the expanse of reparations for slavery, we will have to collect the family-tree receipts of those blood ancestors who were imported to this continent and their children who lived for 249 years under this regime (numbering over 4 million emancipated by 1865), and specify a price tag for their lifelong labor and for their familial losses.

Thanks to DNA and the few extant historical records we can obtain about historic plantation and slave market records, we may be closer to that goal, but as of this moment very few of us, like Aamir “Questlove” Jones’ family from the Clotilde in Alabama, the Quander family of Virginia-Maryland and the South Carolina descendants of Scipio Vaughn, can claim to know the name of an ancestor who was imported to this continent through a port of call like Charleston, Savannah, Baltimore or New Orleans, who may be the first to possess indelible receipts for reparations from this government.

But we definitely have millions of living, named ancestors who were victimized by white mob violence, Jim Crow, redlining and general American segregation in the last century, and reparations must happen for them.

If I’m in error, I’m open to comments.

Kerry Throws Parting Shade at Netanyahu

Politics, Uncategorized, ,

John Kerry went *in* today on Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump’s actions toward Netanyahu’s right-wing after January 20 will be interesting to watch in how they compare and contrast to how Dubya (during his presidency) interacted with then-PM Ariel Sharon, a former Likudnik who formed his own center-right party because he was opposed by most Likudniks for his unilateral disengagement of settlers and IDF from Gaza.

Trump is likely to be very protective to Israel and West Bank settlers at the UNSC. But I speculate that the two egos at stake here – Trump and Netanyahu – will clash nastily at some point.

And I wonder about Netanyahu’s ego in particular. He’s the Prime Minister who owes, listens and connects the least to the Jewish diaspora – he is the first Prime Minister to be born in Israeli territory after independence in 1948.

Trump + Netanyahu should make for an interesting dynamic

Anti-Judaism and racism in Egypt’s chaos

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

 On one side, there are the caricatures of Mubarak with a Star of David on his forehead….and red fangs protruding from his mouth. One such picture was held by a man in a Getty Images photo that was uncontextually-placed in an article by english.aljazeera.net (by mistake, I assume).

On the other side, there are the verbal and physical assaults on foreign and domestic journalists (including Al Jazeera) by pro-Mubarak counter-protesters, many of whom shout "yehudi!" ("Jew!") at them after being told by Egyptian state television rumors about "Israeli spies" infiltrating the foreign media and taking advantage of the chaos.

If anything, the above incidents within the last few days are exemplary of the casual, provincial anti-Jewish bigotry being exhibited by many of the everyday Egyptians who protest both for and against the current, long-ruling government. It runs deep, and has been punctuated by decades, if not centuries, of both official and non-official solicitations to the scapegoating of the specter of evil, baby-killing, bloodthirsty Zionist monsters.

Furthermore, such public manifestations of bigotry lend credibility to those outside of Egypt who fear the influence of the proscribed Muslim Brotherhood party in the anti-Mubarak movement, but also hold the Mubarak government in a muted ill-regard for decades of authoritarian misrule. 

The last two weeks in Egypt, if not the last month in much of North Africa and Western Asia, have offered remote viewers outside of the regions a game-changing view into the desires and lives of the residents who have lived under similar regimes. However, in the midst of the chants for greater democracy, better governance and brighter economic prospects, it would be a grave mistake to ignore the existing religious and ethnic bigotries which run deep and hard in Egyptian society, bigotries which may or may not manifest in a post-Mubarak Egypt, or a post-kleptocratic North Africa and Western Asia.

Comments such as those offered by one anti-Mubarak protester to Agence France Presse – "The Israeli people are like the Egyptian people, we want peace and freedom" – or another who shouted into a camera in Tahrir Square for YouTube – "We will not be silenced! whether you are a Muslim, whether you’re a Christian, whether you’re an atheist, you will demand your goddamn rights!" – might yet offer the hope of cooler heads prevailing in the aftermath of these protests in regards to Egyptian-Israeli relations and the future of interfaith and intermoral relations in Egypt proper.
 
But these statements, these sentiments, can only go so far in showing the Egyptian people’s long-term collective capability in restraining or suppressing the casual bigotries which have been used in multiple generations in order to repress and suppress the quality of life and mind of themselves and their neighbors.

Nationalist negation of the diaspora and theodicy: where they intersect

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , ,

When the audio transcript of John Hagee’s theodical justification of the Holocaust (and, by extension, Christian anti-Semitism) as a means of accomplishing Christian eschatological ends through mass Jewish aliyah surfaced online in 2008, various political sectors observing the then-ongoing presidential election leveled intense scrutiny against Hagee and the Republican presidential aspirant who had courted Hagee’s support in the election; not least among those reacting sectors were the demographically-dwindling Jewish members of the Holocaust survivor community, who took particular exception to Hagee’s open and explicit co-opting of both an ideologically-driven tragedy that wreaked so much havoc upon them and the repatriative ideology of Israeli Jewish nationalism – both of which emphatically exclaim that the adherents to the Jewish religion, including the dead victims and living survivors of the Holocaust, do not belong anywhere else in the world but Israel – as a positive step toward the eventual end and destruction of the world (according to the Christian worldview).

Within Judaism, theodical explanations for the Holocaust have been offered – and just as fiercely rejected and demeaned among Jewish survivors of the Holocaust – by Haredi (Orthodox) rabbis and rabbinical authorities, including former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel Ovadia Yosef (repeatedly) and the late Rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch sect, Menachem Schneerson. 

But an interesting aspect of John Hagee’s intersection of Jewish aliyah with the Holocaust (as a forceful push), Israel (as a destination to be pushed toward), anti-Semitism (as an ideological justification), Negation of the diaspora (as a process) and Christian eschatological timing (as the end and answer to all of the above) is that he only added a further layer to the belief that the Jews are only a collective object to be pushed around at the whim of their neighbors, most of whom want to push them entirely away from themselves and reject the view that these people are citizens of their own countries (or, in the case of Iran and the USSR, keep them within their own states in order to eventually drive the Jewish religion or sense of ancestral/cultural homeland out of their adherent citizens and turn them into compliant, assimilated citizens). Another, more crazed dimension to this meme is the long list of ethnic enclaves to which various powers sought to pull or push the Jews as a people, the majority of which placed the Jews in the most-isolated (or least-populable) outposts of various continents.

This meme of constricting an entire people into one place in the world was also visited at one point by both U.S. philanthropists and (repeatedly) Afro-American ethnonationalists upon the Afro-American minority of the U.S. in the view that Afro-Americans cannot ever belong in this society, and that the colorism, racism, ethnic segregation and slavery foisted upon them was the end result of existing in a majority-European-populated country, and that the only country in which they could feel safe and defend themselves and their interests would be in a country that was ruled and majority-populated by their "kind", reasonably removed from the land of their should-be-former oppressors, and build alliances with foreign powers which work to their own best interests. Of course, Liberia didn’t attract the majority of the African-American population, and neither did Sierra Leone attract the majority of former British Empire slaves and maroons, but both countries became templates for the sometimes-mutual ideological movement for repatriation, which presented the two agents – the repatriater and the receiver – view the same people within endemic views which complimented each other: the repatriating country saw the ethnicity as trash, and the receiving country saw the ethnicity as treasure. 

This trash-treasure view is embraced in some countries in Europe by far-right nationalists, who often participated in discussions which demonized the Jews as "parasitic" "trash" which could only gain respect if they were as far away from their own white, European Christian selves as possible (hence the oft-used expression by far-rightists in Europe "go back to Israel", which is probably less used than "to the ovens" or "Hitler should’ve finished the job"). The BNP in the UK (and, perhaps, the NASOFI group in Germany) is one of the more notable "converts" to this ideology, particularly as it pragmatically-partners with the pro-Israel right (seeing that Israel plays a useful role in decimating the presence of Jews in Europe and earns its macho stripes in "kicking barbarian ass") against Muslim fundamentalists in an about face from their previous stance against the presence of Jews in the UK. 

To the theodical and eschatological views typical of Hagee, however, perhaps the Jews are seen less within the "trash-to-treasure" spectrum and more along a "wandering, rebellious ram to docile, sacrificial lamb" spectrum. For Hagee, it matters less that the Jews get out of his country and stop being "parasitic" "pests" and more that they stop being so gosh-darn rebellious and proceed to fully populate Israel and the West Bank in order to set the stage for Christian eschatology already (even if it means that there are few rebellious Jews left in North America in his view, or the less, the merrier!).

What do Israelis get out of repatriation (whether it is justified by anti-Semitic or "philo-"Semitic reasons)? They regain their homeland in full, get back the Temple Mount, smooth out the wrinkles caused by the initial Roman kickout of their ancestors nearly 2000 years prior (or get those other tribes’s lost descendants back as genetic citizens, if possible), let the Arab-Israeli dispute settle down somewhat, hope that the European Union can nip the pervasive anti-Judaism meme that caused incidents like the Holocaust in the root, hope that both Christianity and Islam both deservedly grind themselves and each other into dusty minority stubs over their very structures of propagation and expansion, and so on. (Sorry, no Holocaust Part 2: Christian Apocalypse – ed.).

But perhaps there will be an end to the usage of the Jewish people as an object to be carried around. Maybe the Jewish nationalism in Israel will be less propelled (or resisted) in its persistence and will morph into something else (like most nationalisms do after the threat of eminent danger has passed), even as the religion continues among its practitioners and leaders without as much molestation, or becomes subject to another cataclysmic schism within the group. 

EDIT 1/1/2011: Let me also emphasize that one component of this belief – that the Jews are a monolithic people who are destined to be placed in some part of the world at the end of time – also intersects with the study of any nation-state’s own intersection with its own diaspora. Diasporas can be used as couriers and beneficiaries of the homeland state’s own relationship with another state, or they can be rejected by their homeland state’s government due to an antagonistic foreign policy against political exiles. 

 
Thus, if diasporas are seen as "useable" or "disposable" by the home country’s ruling government when they are not resident inside the home country, then such a perception should be judged by observers of human rights as a barometer in terms of that home country’s civil and human rights record, holing just as much validity in terms of observation as the treatment of that same country’s current residents and citizens, immigrants, expatriates, etc. 

Haredi autonomy/federation in Israel

Uncategorized

 I think that Haredi autonomy or self-governance in Israel is a likely event, be it in a one-state or two-state solution. To that end, I propose a "Haredi Autonomous Area" or "Haredi Province" that will govern South and Jerusalem Districts under a stricter interpretation of Halakhah. In this way,

  • the Haredi sector of the Israeli population will tend to their own affairs with their own regional Knesset (and Sanhedrin, if they prefer), letting the secular, atheist and liberal population remain in the Gush Dan under their own laws.
  • the Haredim will become the face (and, if necessary, force) of the Israeli Hebrew side of the dispute over Jerusalem and Judea (southern bulge of the West Bank), letting secular nationalists (Hilonim Leumim) in Israel concentrate more upon their own affairs and less upon defending face for erstwhile theocrats (ranging from Hasidics to Kahanists) who could care less for "liberals" and the "left fifth column".

This idea is not intended to bring stability to the state, but rather to concentrate the fight between Hebrew-speaking Jews and Arabic-speaking Muslims in the southern portion of the country, while letting the dispute over Samaria/Shomron (northern West Bank) be settled between Gush Dan migrants and Arab residents without as much of the religiously-motivated bitterness.