#lod homeland

[princefleabitten]

Sketches for that one Drizzt book everybody read (Legend of Drizzt: Homeland)

[sethshead]

"6th Century?

"And Mohammed wrote the Qu’uran in the 7th Century…..

"Remind me again - who are the ‘occupiers’?

"Jews were present in Gaza until August 1929, when they were evacuated by the British army due to violent riots against them around the country - to quell tension and appease the Arabs.

"When the Arabs in Gaza tried to harm the Jews in Gaza, and massacre them as had been done to them in Hevron, the Jews gathered in a city hotel. With the help of the a-Shawa family which belonged to the aristocracy of Gaza Arabs, the British managed to protect them from the Arab mob besieging the hotel and get them out in the middle of the night by train to Lod, and from there to Tel Aviv.

"In the 4th century, Gaza was the primary Jewish port of Eretz Yisrael for international trade and commerce.

"There is archaeological evidence of Jewish life in the ‘Hasmonean Period’ 145 CE.

"Up to 30 years ago one of the inscriptions on a pillar of the great mosque’ in Gaza read: 'Hanania bar-Yaacov' in Greek and in Hebrew, and above was engraved a menorah [7-branched candlestick] with a shofar [ram’s horn] on one side and an etrog [citron] on the other. This was evidence that there used to be a Jewish synagogue on the spot which probably served the Jewish community in the days of the Talmud.

"#FreeGaza from #HamasTerrorists#AmYisraelChai"

h/t Helen Oster

The very land has a retort to those trying to erase a historical and ancient Jewish presence in Eretz Yisrael. I am a two-stater and hope only that future Israeli relations with a future Palestinian state will be positive enough to allow for tourism and collaborative archaeology.

Jews did not suddenly "turn up in Palestine after a 2,000 year absence" after the Holocaust. Jewish holy and heritage sites dot the landscape south, east, north, and west. Jews have every right to inhabit and exercise self-determination and sovereignty over some part of our ancestral homeland, no less than do Palestinian Arabs.

[a-cloud-for-dreams]

Hello There❤️

First Thoughts on LOD After An Impulsive Download:

Yeah, the English translation is pretty bad 😭 I've read fanfic with worse translation and I read by skimming so it's not too obvious, but it's there so be wary of that

Love the character customization options at the beginning and how that affects the character's background! I was able to choose a different skin tone and eye color, and between different personality traits and hobbies, which actually affects the story.

For instance, I chose the Tehran sprite and that background was different from the other sprites. Here's a quote from the WiKi:

Her mother, Bahar Davoudi was the daughter of an influential Persian subject who Peter met during his visit to Iran. Peter had to make many efforts to persuade the girl's father to give his only daughter in marriage to a European. They married in Tehran and lived there for several years, but moved to Hungary soon after the birth of their daughter. She was seven years old when her mother traveled to Iran to visit her family and became an accidental victim due to a revolution in her homeland. She speaks fluent Farsi and respects Middle Eastern culture.

I can't speak on how accurate the information is to Middle Eastern (or Hungarian culture for that matter) but I like that was a really cool addition I wasn't expecting!

Keep in mind that this is a newer book I haven't tried any of the other books yet which may have different customization choices

[too-many-blorbos]

I want to focus my efforts this week and finish one of my nearly-done WIPs, but I am bad at decisions and also crave validation from my peers. So:

[spotlightstudios]

Having Kensington Estate thoughts again:

->Emphryean never met a lot of other genasi. He was raised an orphan, and Genasi are really rare to see just wandering in towns. (Most of them are employed by the rich and powerful thanks to their powers. Air genasi are the rarest to see outside their homeland.) So, he has a strange take on the genasi he meets along the way once he meets Kensington.

-> Fire Genasi are most often soldiers, and Commander Orn is the one he knows the best. They're pretty solid friends after Siren introduce them to eachother. (Lod knows they start sone blazes when they hang out.)

->Water Genasi are often ethereal and a high-standard of beauty in the upper class circles. Cipit and Siren's mother is the only one Emphryean has met personally, but that wasn't the best interaction. (They're usually servants or concubines, which explains the high number of half-genasi kids running around at any given time.)

->Siren is half Water-Genasi and half High-Elf, while Cipit is Water-Genasi/Shapeshifter. In order to escape their father's wrath, Siren ran away with Cipit and joined the Theives Guild. Both brothers have very good relationships with Em.

->Earth Genasi are the backbone of some of the most successful kingdoms. They usually work in architecture and crafting, but when given the opportunity they are very good about money and making level-headed decisions. The advisor of the King is actually an Earth Genasi. (She and Em have spoken a few times, but back when he was an adventurer being hired on quests. She was pleasant, but blunt.)

->Air Genasi isolated themselves after the last war between kingdoms. Any traces of them in modern-day are hybrids from a fourth or fifth generation. They once took the role of their Water-based relatives, performing and being so beautiful that they rivaled the elves. Every house wanted one employed, if only to have around. (Emphryean has found that all the other Genasi he's met have always regarded him with a nearly hostile guard up, belittling him from the moment they realize what he is. Once he was told by a water genasi that his eyes were bland and lifeless. They're fiercely protective of their new rank as the most desired variation of Genasi.)

I love writing lore for how races treat eachother in a dnd world setting.

[thesynaxarium]

Today we celebrate the Holy and Great Martyr George the Triumphant. If April 23 falls on or before Great and Holy Pascha, the Feast of Saint George is translated to Bright Monday. Saint George, this truly great and glorious Martyr of Christ, was born of a father from Cappadocia and a mother from Palestine. Being a military tribune, or chiliarch (that is, a commander of a thousand troops), he was illustrious in battle and highly honoured for his courage. When he learned that the Emperor Diocletian was preparing a persecution of the Christians, Saint George presented himself publicly before the Emperor and denounced him. When threats and promises could not move him from his steadfast confession, he was put to unheard-of tortures, which he endured with great bravery, overcoming them by his faith and love towards Christ. By the wondrous signs that took place in his contest, he guided many to the knowledge of the truth, including Queen Alexandra, wife of Diocletian, and was finally beheaded in 296 in Nicomedia. His sacred remains were taken by his servant from Nicomedia to Palestine, to a town called Lydda, the homeland of his mother, and then were finally transferred to the church which was raised up in his name. May he intercede for us always + Source: https://www.goarch.org/chapel/saints?contentid=29 (at Lod, Israel) https://www.instagram.com/p/CcwRVSIPcQF/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[eretzyisrael]

Identity and Reality

This morning I picked up a book from my philosophy student days, “Identity and Reality,” by Emile Meyerson. It’s a book about the metaphysical foundations of science, but the title inspired me.

Everyone has an identity in the sense of their answer to the question “what are you?” Almost everyone has a need to find, adopt, or construct an answer. Often it’s a list of things: a mother, a Jew, a football fan, a plumber, and so on. Recently “gender identity” has been added.

There is no national identity with a longer pedigree than that of the Jewish people. For millennia Jews have had a unique language and religion, and a tradition that connects them to the Land of Israel, which (according to that tradition) was given to them by Hashem. Religious Jews explicitly remind themselves of this three times a day.

This makes “Jewish” a very desirable identity. As Jimmy Durante said (about something else), “everybody wants to get into the act,” despite the anti-Jewish attitudes that Jews have to deal with. Jewish identity is so sought-after, that one of the popular themes of antisemites is to claim that they are the “real Jews” and we are Khazars or just fakers. If a Jew chooses to live in the Land of Israel, they have additional prejudices against them. Recently a European “anti-fascist” said that as an Israeli Jew, I was “stealing the very air I breathe.”

But still, the Jewish identity is attractive because – here is the connection to the book I picked up – it is solidly grounded in reality. Lots of people hate Jews and even want to kill them, but no identity is better documented. Indeed, one of the most important parts of the cognitive warfare that is being waged against the Jewish people by its enemies is the effort to break down that identity; in particular, to disconnect us from the Land of Israel. So, for example, Palestinian Arabs go out of their way to destroy archaeological evidence of ancient Jewish provenance in the land, as they have done at the Temple Mount and numerous other sites.

Mahmoud Abbas has always insisted that “Jewish” refers only to a religion, not to a people, because a people can have ties to a particular land, and if there were a Jewish people, this would be their land. This is why he objected so strongly to the condition that he recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people, although he claims to recognize Israel’s existence. This is why the PLO has never agreed to the formulation “two states for two peoples,” although it claims to support a “two state solution.”

Tribal identities are important to Arabs, but attempts to forge a pan-Arab identity among Arabic speakers haven’t been particularly successful, because, for example, North Africans, Egyptians, and Syrians have little in common. A great deal of energy is put into the attempt to establish that there is a historical “Palestinian” identity, but the people who identify as “Palestinians” today have diverse origins, with many of them relatively recent (after 1830) migrants to the area. There is very little that is specifically Palestinian in their culture (as opposed to tribal, Arab, or Muslim), other than elements that developed in opposition to Israel. They didn’t even self-identify as “Palestinian” until the 1960s. That is not to say that there cannot be a “Palestinian people” – give them another 3000 years, and if they still remember the Nakba, they may become as well-established as the Jewish people.

The Palestinian argument is that we, the Jews, appeared from Europe in the 20th century and “colonized” a long-established indigenous “Palestinian people,” ultimately taking their land by force, driving most of them out of their homes and not allowing them to return. The Jews, according to this story, are not even a people, just a bunch of Europeans whose made-up religious myth connects them to what is actually the Palestinians’ homeland (I am not sure how they account for the more than 50% of Israelis who previously lived in various Arab countries).

Like all “Europeans,” the story continues, the Jews are white racists who exploit black and brown indigenous peoples like the Palestinians. Justice therefore requires that the Jews should give up control of the land to its “rightful owners,” the millions of descendants of the Arab refugees of 1948.

The Palestinian story is wildly wrong on several points. First, there were several ancient Jewish commonwealths in the Land of Israel, and some Jews always were present during the millennia in which the land was under the control of various outside powers. Doubtless some of today’s Palestinians are also descended from ancient residents of the land, but the great bulk of Palestinian families arrived much later. So the claim that Arabs are “more indigenous” than Jews is false. Arab families with names like “al Musri” (Egyptian) or “al Haurani” (Syrian) and numerous others testify to their origins.

Second, when the Zionists arrived and began developing what would become the Jewish state, it was not in the possession of the Palestinian Arabs – there was never a sovereign Palestinian entity in the land – but was a colony of the Ottoman Empire. Most private land belonged to absentee owners. Shortly thereafter the British Mandate was established, and the Arabs, led by Amin al-Husseini, who later cast his lot with Hitler, violently tried to prevent the advent of Jewish sovereignty. When the British were forced out, the Jews defeated the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab nations that invaded (who were interested in grabbing territory and kicking the Jews out, not in setting up a Palestinian state). The Jews did not “colonize” Palestine – they decolonized it, by ejecting the British.

Third, by the time the British left and the Arab nations invaded, the Palestinian Arabs had been fighting with the Jews for several months (with the connivance of the British, who preferred that the land come under Arab control). Much of the Arab elite fled early in order to avoid the conflict (some went to summer homes in Lebanon). The poorer Arabs fled for various reasons, including fear induced by propaganda about Jewish atrocities – which was not difficult for them to believe, since their own leaders planned to do the same to the Jews if they got the upper hand. Some Arabs were expelled (Lod or Lydda) because their towns or villages fought on the side of the Arab armies. Some 500-700 thousand Arabs left for various reasons, but there was no overall plan to expel them. In some cases (Haifa) Jewish authorities asked non-belligerent Arabs to stay.

After the war, only a few were allowed to return. The new state simply could not take the risk of allowing hostile Arabs to return and reignite the war. This was a classic ethnic conflict over land, and the usual result of these is either that the weaker side becomes refugees, or the winner massacres the losers. The leaders of the Arab nations did not hide their intention to massacre the Jews if they won. The 800,000 Jews kicked out of Arab countries at about the same time suffered a similar fate to the Palestinian Arabs.

Fourth, and finally, the whole “racism” theme is nonsense. Only a minority of Israelis ever lived in Europe. They range in color from black Ethiopians to white Europeans with red hair and freckles. Most are various shades of brown, as are Palestinians, who also include the descendants of black slaves and – if you remember her – Ahed Tamimi, who earned the nickname “Shirley Temper” for kicking and hitting Israeli soldiers, with her pale skin and blonde hair. The conflict is best described as national and religious, not racial.

But unlike other similar conflicts, the losers managed to persuade the world of the justice of their cause, with the help of the Soviet KGB, the Arab oil weapon, the liberal application of terrorism, and the exploitation of the always-present antisemitism of the west. Which is why my European anti-fascist acquaintance thinks I’m an oxygen bandit.

Abu Yehuda

[jacobsvoice]

Israel is to Blame

Jerold Auerbach

Torah scrolls, Jewish holy scriptures, are removed from a synagogue which was torched during violent confrontations in the city of Lod, Israel, between Israeli Arab demonstrators and police,

Laceration of Israel is nothing new for The New York Times. Decades before Jewish statehood, criticism of Zionism was embedded in the newspaper purchased by Adolph Ochs in 1896, and embraced by his Sulzberger successors since the 1930s. In its most appalling dereliction of journalistic responsibility the Times virtually ignored the Nazi murder of six million Jews lest it be identified as a Jewish newspaper. 

Its enduring discomfort with the idea, no less the reality, of a Jewish state in the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people is by now too deeply embedded to expect change. Given its bias, criticism of Israel is hardly surprising. The Times is so dependent upon clichés of Israeli malfeasance as to justify reframing its motto to “Only News, Columns and Editorials critical of Israel are Fit to Print.” 

The recent Times barrage began with Michelle Goldberg’s column entitled “Kushner’s Absurd Peace Plan Has Failed” (May 17). Generously conceding that “one can condemn Hamas and its rockets,” she quickly segued to the absurdity that “this conflagration began with Israeli overreach born of a sense of impunity.” 

How so? Because “Jewish settlers” (the repetitive target of Times criticism) led a “campaign” to “evict Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.” The only problem is that the property, owned by Yemenite Jews since the 19th century, was seized by Arabs during their war to annihilate the fledgling Jewish state in 1948. It was returned to Israel two decades later during the Six Day War but Arab occupants refuse to vacate property that they do not own.

Then Goldberg segued to the crime of “an Israeli police raid” on the Al Aqsa Mosque atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City, once the site of the First and Second Temples. Why the “raid”? To “cut off its loudspeakers lest prayers muffle a speech by Israeli’s president” on the plaza below. Not so. Jewish worship at the Western Wall below had been silenced by stones stored in the Mosque and thrown from the Mount.

The other villain for Goldberg was the American government “enabling Israel’s occupation and settlement project for decades.” She ignores the reality that Jewish “settlement,” in translation, marks the return of Jews to their Biblical homeland in Judea and Samaria, seized by Jordan during Israel’s Independence War. “Jewish ethnonationalism,” she preposterously concludes, is to blame. Moslem violence is ignored.

One week later (May 24), a front-page article by Times Jerusalem reporter Isabel Kershner was headlined “Movement in Israel Aims to Bolster Jewish Presence in Mixed Cities.” For decades, she wrote, “Israeli nationalists have sought to shift the demographics of the occupied West Bank by building Jewish settlements, undermining the prospect of a two-state solution.” She adds the repetitive Times refrain: “Most of the world considers Jewish settlements in the occupied territories a violation of international law.”

Settlements and occupied territories aside, Kershner’s primary focus is on recent violence in the mixed (Muslim and Jewish) Israeli city of Lod (Lydda), a few miles east of Tel Aviv – and hardly a “settlement.” It was a center of Jewish scholarship and commerce from the fifth century BCE until the Roman conquest in 70 CE. (Arabs, no less “Palestinians,” did not yet exist.) As she acknowledges, “hundreds of the city’s Arab citizens took to the streets, throwing stones, burning cars and setting fire to properties.” 

Why? They were merely “venting their rage” against young Orthodox families who had arrived in recent years to make the city “more Jewish.” Palestinian violence against wicked Israelis is always justifiable and unworthy of condemnation — certainly not in the Sulzberger newspaper where Israelis are routinely depicted as violent trouble-makers undeserving of a peaceful homeland. Such is The New York Times.

Algemeiner May 25, 2021

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of twelve books, including Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel 1896-2016, selected for Mosaic by Ruth Wisse and Martin Kramer as a Best Book for 2019

[muslimsurviverofdomesticviolence]

*SIGNIFICANCE OF MASJID AL-AQSA AND BAYT Al MAQDIS (JERUSALEM) IN ISLAM*:🚩🚩 📍The Messenger (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) was taken to Bayt al-Maqdis on his Night Journey (al-Israa’) from al-Masjid al-Haraam to al-Masjid al-Aqsaa. Allaah says (interpretation of the meaning): “Glorified (and Exalted) be He (Allaah) Who took His slave (Muhammad) for a journey by night from Al-Masjid Al-Haraam (at Makkah) to Al-Masjid Al-Aqsaa (in Jerusalem)…” [al-Israa’ 17:1]. 📍One prayer in al-Masjid al-Nabawi is equivalent to one thousand prayers elsewhere, so one prayer in al-Masjid al-Aqsaa is equivalent to two hundred and fifty prayers elsewhere. (Ref: Al Haakim 4/509, Silsilah al-Saheehah, hadeeth no. 290). 📍The one-eyed Dajjaal (“Antichrist”) will not enter it. 🌸“He will prevail over all the earth, apart from al-Haram [in Makkah] and Bayt al-Maqdis.” ( Ahmad, 19665. Classed as saheeh by Ibn Khuzaymah, 2/327, and Ibn Hibbaan, 7/102). 📍The Dajjaal will be killed close to al-Quds. He will be killed by the Messiah ‘Eesa ibn Maryam (peace be upon him), as was stated in the hadeeth: “The son of Maryam will kill the Dajjaal at the gates of Ludd.” (Narrated by Muslim, 2937). Ludd (Lod) is a place near Bayt al-Maqdis. 📍It (al-Quds) was the first qiblah of the Muslims, as was reported by al-Baraa’ (may Allaah be pleased with him): the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) prayed in the direction of Bayt al-Maqdis for sixteen or seventeen months. (Bukhaari, 41 – Muslim, 525) 📍It is the place where Wahy (Revelation) came down, and it is the homeland of the Prophets. This is well known. 📍It is one of the mosques to which people may travel. It is not permissible to travel to any spot on earth for the purpose of worshipping there, except these three mosques. 🌸The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “No journey should be made for worship except to three mosques, al-Masjid al-Haraam, Masjid al-Rasool (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) and Masjid al-Aqsaa.” (Narrated by al-Bukhaari, 1132). https://www.instagram.com/p/CO40cVlDMEh/?igshid=12w51myuo8wzu

[princefleabitten]

Is it ok to ship Malice and Zaknafein or is this a no–go?🤨

[palestine]

Ghassan Kanafani: Voice of Palestine (1936-1972)

Ghassan Kanafani: Voice of Palestine (1936-1972)

Sep 4 2017 / 10:00 pm

Ghassan Kanafani. (Photo: File)

By Louis Brehony

2017 marks 45 years since the murder of Palestinian writer, activist and political leader Ghassan Kanafani by the Israeli Mossad agency. On July 8, 1972, while living in Beirut, a car bomb explosion killed him along with his 17-year-old niece Lamees. Kanafani was one of the most important figures in 20th century literature. He was also a refugee, a revolutionary Marxist and an internationalist. The Israelis claimed the assassination was a response to the Lod Airport attack two months earlier, although Kanafani had played no direct role in this. He was, according to the obituary in the Lebanese Daily Star, ‘a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages.’ Kanafani was at the time of his death the official spokesman of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the editor of its paper Al Hadaf. The organisation saluted ‘the leader, the writer, the strategist, and the visionary.’

Ghassan Kanafani spent the early years of his life in the port city of Acre, where he was born in 1936. At the time of his birth, Kanafani’s father and other family members were participants in the national revolt against the British occupation of Palestine and its facilitation of Zionist colonisation. Acre was the site of a British occupation jail and of the executions of leading Palestinian activists. The epic song ‘From Acre Prison’ (Min Sijjn Akka) protests against their killing and remains an anthem of the Palestinian struggle. Prior to 1948, Acre had around 15,000 Palestinian inhabitants and no Zionist settlements. The Zionist attacks in the Nakba led to the expulsion of all but 3,000 Palestinians. 12-year-old Ghassan and his family became refugees in the town of Zabadiya, central west Syria, joining the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians exiled from their homelands.

After studying at university in Damascus, Kanafani became a teacher and journalist, working in Syria, then in Kuwait before ending up in Beirut. It was while working in refugee camps that Kanafani began writing his novels; his later interest in Marxist philosophy and politics came while living in Beirut. He was clear that:

‘My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.’

Short Stories, Novels and Poems

The themes of Kanafani’s writing were inseparably connected to the struggle of the Palestinian people over the course of his life. The Nakba is depicted vividly in works like The Land of the Sad Oranges (1963):

‘At Al-Nakura, our truck parked, along with numerous other ones. The men began to hand in their weapons to their officers, stationed there for that specific purpose. When our turn came, I could see the rifles and guns lying on the table and the long queue of lorries, leaving the land of oranges far behind and spreading out over the winding roads of Lebanon.’

‘After that day, life passed slowly…We were deceived by announcements…we were stunned by the bitter truth…Grimness started to invade the faces, your father found it difficult to talk about Palestine or the happy days in his orange groves…’

The refugees are central to his narrative. In the harrowing tale Men in the Sun (1962), a group of Palestinians are smuggled in the burning heat across Iraq and into Kuwait. They make it across the border but suffocate to death in the back of an oil tanker. The story is symbolic of the state of paralysis experienced by the refugees, where access to documentation could determine basic survival.

But Kanafani’s works were not tales of despair and hopelessness. Looked at collectively they speak of the problems and solutions of those expelled from their homes. In Return to Haifa (1970), he emphasises that ‘The greatest crime anybody can commit is to think that the weakness and the mistakes of others give him the right to exist at their expense.’ In other works he draws on the rising armed struggle for Palestinian liberation. The central figure of the short novel Umm Saad encourages her son to fight along with the guerrillas. According to Anni Kanafani, Ghassan’s wife, ‘Umm Saad was a symbol of the Palestinian women in the camp and of the worker class… it is the illiterate woman who speaks and the intellectual who listens and puts the questions.’

Activist-Intellectual

In the years during which these literary classics were written, Ghassan had become an active member of the Arab Nationalist Movement, inspired by Gamal Abdul Nasser’s ideas of national independence and defiance of imperialism. But by 1961, the attempt at unification between Egypt and Syria (under a unified United Arab Republic) had failed, and the still firmly capitalist economy faltered. In the 1967 war, Israel dealt a heavy defeat on Egypian-led resistance. The decline of Nasserism took place alongside the rise of explicitly communist leadership in the anti-imperialist struggles then taking place throughout the world – Cuba, Mozambique and, with growing international significance, Vietnam. During these years Kanafani, along with his comrade George Habash, began to make a more serious study of Marxism, arriving at the conclusion that the political crisis in the Arab world and the ascendancy of imperialism and Zionism could only be solved by turning the anti-imperialist struggle into a social revolution.

As a PFLP leader, Kanafani turned his pen to overtly political questions, reflecting the urgency of developing the Palestinian national liberation struggle by the end of the 1960s. He increasingly dedicated his time to publishing work on the historic struggles of the Palestinian people, resigning from a well-paid job at the Nasserist magazine al Anwar to edit the PFLP newspaper Al Hadaf (The Target). The 1969 document Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine was co-authored by Kanafani and applied a Marxist analysis of class to the forces involved in the revolutionary movement, discussing its prospects and political strategy. The Resistance and its Problems, a pamphlet written by Kanafani and published by the PFLP in 1970, is a critical discussion on leadership, Marxist theory and practice, in the national liberation struggle.

In the pages of Al Hadaf, Kanafani called for ‘all facts to the masses.’ Perhaps his most important overtly political work was his detailed analysis of the 1936-39 Palestinian revolt. Kanafani wrote of the 1935 martyrdom of Sheikh Iz Al Din Al Qassam in an influential article first published in an early PLO magazine Palestinian Affairs (Shu’un Falastiniyeh) and later distributed as a pamphlet on armed struggle by the PFLP. In The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, finished in the year of his death, Kanafani details the structure of Palestinian society, the rise of Zionism, the failures of the left and, perhaps most crucially in the run-up to 1948, the weakening of the revolutionary movement by the ruthless British imperialist regime. Its violence was ‘unprecedented’, and ‘it was during the years of the revolt – 1936-1939 – that British colonialism threw all its weight into performing the task of supporting the Zionist presence and setting it on its feet.’ In this work he spares none of the reactionary Arab regimes from his ruthless criticism.

Anti-imperialism

Kanafani played a major role in raising consciousness of this period in anti-imperialist struggle and was an uncompromising internationalist:

‘Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the world revolution.’

Kanafani’s descriptions of imperialism are characteristically graphic. He pointed to the international significance of the Palestinian struggle.

‘The Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary… as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era’.

In the memoir which Anni Kanafani published after her husband’s death, she wrote:

‘His inspiration for writing and working unceasingly was the Palestinian-Arab struggle…He was one of those who fought sincerely for the development of the resistance movement from being a nationalist Palestinian liberation movement into being a pan-Arab revolutionary socialist movement of which the liberation of Palestine would be a vital component. He always stressed that the Palestine problem could not be solved in isolation from the Arab World’s whole social and political situation.’

We should not forget, of course, that 17-year-old Lamees was murdered alongside him in the car bombing. Ghassan’s sister Fayzeh reflected:

‘Just the previous day Lamees had asked her uncle to reduce his revolutionary activities and to concentrate more upon writing his stories. She had said to him, “Your stories are beautiful,” and he had answered, “Go back to writing stories? I write well because I believe in a cause, in principles. The day I leave these principles, my stories will become empty. If I were to leave behind my principles, you yourself would not respect me.” He was able to convince the girl that the struggle and the defense of principles is what finally leads to success in everything.’

Kanafani’s class analysis was ahead of its time in the Palestinian movement and pointed to the dangers ahead if the bourgeois trend in the PLO leadership went unchecked. Negotiations with the Israeli leadership, he said, would be ‘a conversation between the sword and the neck… I have never seen talks between a colonialist case and a national liberation movement.’

Ghassan Kanafani was murdered for his commitment to Palestinian resistance. Like Basil Al Araj, gunned down in February this year, he was seen by the Israeli occupiers as a threat to the racist occupation regime. His legacy lives on in every Palestinian and internationalist willing to fight for the anti-imperialist cause. Speaking to students he once said,

‘The goal of education is to correct the march of history. For this reason we need to study history and to apprehend its dialectics in order to build a new historical era, in which the oppressed will live, after their liberation by revolutionary violence, from the contradiction that captivated them’.

– Louis Brehony contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

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Via Palestine Chronicle http://bit.ly/2wEMR5y

[thesynaxarium]

Today we celebrate the Holy and Great Martyr George the Triumphant. If April 23 falls on or before Great and Holy Pascha, the Feast of Saint George is translated to Bright Monday. Saint George, this truly great and glorious Martyr of Christ, was born of a father from Cappadocia and a mother from Palestine. Being a military tribune, or chiliarch (that is, a commander of a thousand troops), he was illustrious in battle and highly honoured for his courage. When he learned that the Emperor Diocletian was preparing a persecution of the Christians, Saint George presented himself publicly before the Emperor and denounced him. When threats and promises could not move him from his steadfast confession, he was put to unheard-of tortures, which he endured with great bravery, overcoming them by his faith and love towards Christ. By the wondrous signs that took place in his contest, he guided many to the knowledge of the truth, including Queen Alexandra, wife of Diocletian, and was finally beheaded in 296 in Nicomedia. His sacred remains were taken by his servant from Nicomedia to Palestine, to a town called Lydda, the homeland of his mother, and then were finally transferred to the church which was raised up in his name. May he intercede for us always + Source: https://www.goarch.org/chapel/saints?contentid=29 (at Lod, Israel) https://www.instagram.com/p/COYeDE3Jp-L/?igshid=1vcgab21xqhia

[eretzyisrael]

What is the State of Israel for?

It’s not a silly question. There are serious disagreements about the answer. But there is only one answer that justifies the sacrifices that have been made to re-establish the Jewish state in its historical homeland, and those that will be required in the future to keep it.

That answer is given by Zionism, which holds that a sovereign state in the Land of Israel is a necessity to protect and preserve the Jewish people – and that their preservation is an objective worth attaining.

The Zionist view implies certain things about the nature of the state, things that logically follow from its function as a refuge for persecuted Jews, a source of strength for the Jewish people, and a place where it is possible to live a fully Jewish life, according to whatever combination of religious and cultural elements are important to the individual.

It is a place where the Hebrew language is dominant, the majority religion is Judaism, the holidays are the traditional Jewish ones (religious and national), and most of the population are Jews. It is (or should be) a place where antisemitism is not tolerated, indeed, where it is unthinkable. Because there are forces that work against these principles, it can’t be expected that they will appear by themselves. They must be woven into the legal fabric of the state and they must be affirmed by its leaders. The Law of Return and the Nation State Law are not accidental; they are essential.

The Zionist state can share some characteristics of a liberal, secular, democratic state such as the USA aspires to be (although recently this conception has come under attack from the anti-rational Left in America), but it cannot be such a state. It will unavoidably need to distinguish between Jews, for whom the state exists, and non-Jewish citizens, in very specific ways that relate to the character of the state – e.g., the language and symbols of the state, the official holidays, etc. – and to the maintenance of its Jewish majority.

Israel is special. It is the only Jewish state, the only one with that specific purpose. It is not a smaller version of the USA. Its socialist founders, despite their emphasis on democratic principles and guaranteeing rights to all citizens, nevertheless were Zionists and proclaimed that they were declaring a Jewishstate. Those weren’t just words.

The state may try to provide every possible civil right and protection against discrimination to its minorities, but when there are conflicts between liberal-democratic ideals and Zionist principles, Zionism must prevail. Otherwise the state will ultimately lose its function as a Jewish state. It will lose its ability to protect and preserve the Jewish people as a people, against persecution and assimilation.

Zionism is unpopular throughout the world. The majority of those who have thought about it do not approve of Zionism for one reason or another. Either they don’t see the importance of there being a Jewish people, they actively dislike them, or they think that the cost to others of the existence of the Jewish state is not justified (I suspect that most of those in this group also fit in the second).

Ever since the founding of the state, there have been Jews who are uncomfortable with Zionism. They correctly note that Zionism can conflict with liberal democratic principles, and for this reason they bitterly oppose it and want to “dezionize” Israel. Sometimes they have even made common cause with enemies of the state.

This issue has come up now in the dispute over the “family unification law”which since 2002 has made it difficult for residents of the Palestinian Authority who marry Israeli citizens to move to Israel in order to live with their spouses. I won’t get into the interesting politics of it now, with Bennet’s coalition trying to extend the existing law despite opposition from some of its Arab members, while Bibi’s opposition tries to embarrass them by proposing an even stronger Basic Law on the subject of immigration in general (something that I favor, although not as a tactic to overthrow the coalition). I mention it to note how the opponents of the law, like the publisher of Ha’aretz Amos Schocken and his antisemitic writer Gideon Levy, scream “racism, apartheid, Jewish supremacism!”

This law has nothing to do with “race,” which is essentially meaningless where Arabs and Jews are concerned. It is not “apartheid” which means enforced separation of racial groups, which would not apply to Israel even if Arabs and Jews were different racially. And it certainly doesn’t imply that Jews are superior to Arabs or believe that they ought to dominate them. Although the original purpose of the law was to reduce terrorism (a disproportionate number of terrorists were the product of “unified” families), it is not embarrassing to admit that it helps maintain Israel’s Jewish majority. It is a Zionist law that is unfair to non-Jews. So be it.

Post-Zionists Schocken and Levy also oppose the Law of Return (or would like to see it apply equally to Palestinian Arabs) as well as the Nation-State Law. They also oppose efforts to repatriate the tens of thousands of African migrants that entered the country via the Egyptian border, before an effective fence was built. These things are “undemocratic.” Perhaps, but they are necessary.

The post-Zionist vision is remarkably empty. The right-wing Jabotinsky and the left-wing Ben Gurion had very different ideas of what the Jewish state should be like. Schocken and Levy do not think there should be a Jewish state. In their monumental stupidity and arrogance, they wish for a soulless techno-state built on “equality” and “democracy” for peoples that would have nothing in common except geographic proximity, and a great deal of resentment for each other.

Imagine an Israel without its Zionist purpose (and very quickly, without its Jewish majority). How long would it survive? Why would anyone want to fight for it? Would Jews and Arabs make common cause in support of a liberal, democratic state? It’s hard to imagine. We saw last month what happened in mixed cities like Lod and Acco, where there are about half as many Arabs as Jews.

Most likely, Jews with money and foreign passports would flee. After the initial bloodbath, the ones who were left would face a descent into the tenuous, contingent existence that characterized the Middle Eastern diaspora for more than a millennium. Of course, it’s doubtful that the “lucky” ones in Europe, America, Australia, and other places would fare much better.

Just as a Jewish state is essential to the survival of the Jewish people, Zionism is essential to the survival of the Jewish state.

Abu Yehuda

[jacobsvoice]

Fantasies of Israel’s Disappearance

Just when it seems that The New York Times might finally set aside, at least for the moment, its unrelenting obsession with Israeli “occupation” of “Palestinian” land, it falls into the same anti-Israel rut that has long framed its discomfort with the Jewish state. Sometimes in bits and pieces, other times in columns by its own journalists or outside contributors, the consensus invariably is to blame Israel first.

So it was in its May 21 edition. In his front-page article, Jerusalem Bureau Chief Patrick Kingsley revealed his obsession with Israeli “occupation” of the “West Bank” (its Biblical homeland of Judea and Samaria). Seemingly unknown to him, that label referred to Jordan’s occupation of territory west of the Jordan River between 1948 and 1967. So it remained until Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War restored the land Biblically identified as Judea and Samaria to the Jewish state. Kingsley seems either oblivious to that history or determined to disregard it.

In a companion article Lara Jakes, diplomatic correspondent for the Times Washington bureau, ignores a different reality. She refers to “more than 5.7 million Palestinian refugees” who receive financial aid from the United Nations Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA). The agency is a scam; there are only an estimated 30,000 actual Palestinian refugees still alive. But their descendants, unto eternity it seems, will continue to be labeled “refugees” so that UNRWA employees will continue to have jobs and Israel can perpetually be blamed (in the Times) for the Palestinian “refugee” problem. Recognizing the scam, the Trump administration halted lavish UNRWA funding but, predictably, President Joe Biden has restored it.

The centerpiece of the Times trifecta of criticism of Israel was a column by Yousef Munayyer, identified as “a writer and scholar at the Arab Center in Washington, DC” Munayyer — born in the city of Lod, a site of intense fighting during Israel’s War of Independence — grew up in New Jersey and (like the renowned Palestinian advocate Edward Said) became a staunch advocate from the land of the United States for presumed Palestinian rights in the Land of Israel.

As Munayyer sees it, the Hamas-initiated Gaza war represents the Palestinian goal of “breaking free from the shackles of Israel’s system of oppression.” These “shackles” include “the impending expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.” The only problem (ignored by Munayyer) is that these homes are not theirs; in 2008 the Israel Supreme Court affirmed that the property is owned by the Sephardi Jewish community, which purchased it more than a century ago.

Grounded in this false claim, Munayyer writes: “Palestinians across the land who identified with the experience of being dispossessed by Israel rose up, together.” In translation, Palestinians were justified in pursuing their false claim of property ownership with waves of violence in Jerusalem and a cascade of rockets from Gaza. Palestinian defiance, especially in Gaza where Arabs are “caged and besieged,” exposed the “ugliness” of Israeli rule. The only problem is that Israel does not rule Gaza; Hamas does, and bears full responsibility for launching waves of rockets — against Israel.

Munayyer seems to favor the (preposterous) goal of “equal rights in a single state if the two-state solution fails.” But the two-state solution has failed because Palestinians have repeatedly rejected it, preferring the disappearance of Israel, by war if necessary. The alternative, for Munayyer, is another fantasy: “equal rights in a single state.” That would only require Israel to relinquish its identity as the Jewish state that it is, and always will be — a state, he fails to notice, where twenty per cent of its population are Arab citizens.

But even a two-state “paradigm,” Munayyer suggests, is “dead.” Why? Because, predictably, “Israel buried it under settlements long ago.” In the end Munayyer is the perfect New York Times advocate for the disappearance of the world’s only Jewish state. Not coincidentally, it located in the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people.

Algemeiner (May 22, 2021)

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of twelve books, including Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel 1896-2016, selected for Mosaic by Ruth Wisse and Martin Kramer as a Best Book for 2019