Thursday, April 22, 2010

Perennial Terrorism

There's no such thing as the good old days if you're an Israeli settler. It was terrorism then, it's terrorism now, and... you guessed it, it'll be terrorism tomorrow. If you think about it, it's a wonder there's a settler left standing:

"Mr Netanyahu used his Memorial Day address to warn that terrorism presented the new threat to Israel. 'Terrorism is not a new phenomenon. It has been accompanying us since the first days of Zionism, since the Jewish settlement in the land of Israel was resumed in the late 19th century. Today, terrorism is supported by radical Islamist regimes, led by Iran, which have turned the call to destroy Israel into their daily bread'." (Netanyahu insists building to go on, John Lyons, The Australian, 21/4/10)

And Bibi's right, of course, the Palestinians have been doing 'terrorism' from Day 1:

"The 1901-2 attempt of the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) to 'remove the peasants who cultivated the land so far' from a tract of about seventy-thousand dunums in the Tiberias district (the largest single piece of land thus far purchased for Jewish settlement in Lower Galilee) met with stiff resistance from the Arab inhabitants of the villages of al-Shajara, Misha and Melhamiyya, who were to be dispossed by this purchase. Of this land, over sixty-thousand dunums had been purchased from the big Beirut merchant family of the Sursuqs, and their business partners, the Tuenis and Mudawwars. Some seven hundred had been bought from local landlords, and three thousand from some of the fellahin [peasants] themselves. According to the account of the incident by H M Kalvariski, an official of the JCA, the peasants not only refused to be removed from their lands; the JCA agent who had engineered the land deal, a Mr Ossovetsky, 'was shot at; troops were brought and many tenants were arrested and taken to prison'. Through the forceable intervention of the [Ottoman Turkish] authorities, lands cultivated by the inhabitants of the three villages were seized and they were prevented from tilling them. Over the next three years, the Jewish agricultural settlements of Sejara, Kafr Tavor, Yavniel, Menehamia and Bet Gan were set up on these lands." (Peasant Resistance to Zionism, Rashid Khalidi, in Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship & the Palestinian Question, 1988, Edited by Edward Said & Christopher Hitchens, 1988, p 217)

Must be in the blood.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"It has been accompanying us since the first days of Zionism, since the Jewish settlement in the land of Israel was resumed in the late 19th century"

Love how he alludes to a fictional 'eternal' Zionism - note the word "resumed", rather than "invented from scratch".

I am surprised Bibi was so restrained in claiming that terrorism has only plagued Jews since the 19thC. Doesn't he have the chutzpah to claim that Jews have been under attack from terrorism since the dawn of time? They are, after all, the Eternal (and Best) Victims.