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Jews as a people are no more or less artificial than the Brits, French, Germans, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, Portuguese, Indonesians speaking the invented Bahasa Indonesia language, Italians (remember Cavour, "we've made Italy, now we have to make the Italians").
And Jews as a people are certainly less artificial than the Spaniards (in the eyes of Catalans and Basques), Russians (in the eyes of Tatars, Bashkiris, Kalmyks, Komys, Karelians, Yakuts, occupied Ukrainians, Tuvans+100+ more of Russia's subjugated peoples), Belgians (in the eyes of the Flemish and Walloons to each other).
The definition of anti-semitism is holding Jews to a higher standard--of unity, continuity and uniformity in this case--or not applying the same standards of behavior, unity, historical continuity to other peoples as are applied to Jews. By this definition the author qualifies as anti-semitic by applying a standard to Jews he'd never apply to some of the peoples listed above who clearly surpass Jews in the cosplaying disunity and discontinuity departments.
Let's do a title search on the real estate with an old parable:
“Sharon sits down with Arafat at the beginning of negotiations regarding the resolution of the conflict. Sharon requests that he be allowed to begin with a story. Arafat replies, “Of course.”
Sharon begins his story: “Years before the Israelites came to the Promised Land and settled here, Moses led them for 40 years through the desert. The Israelites began complaining that they were thirsty and, lo and behold, a miracle occurred and a stream appeared before them. They drank their fill and then decided to take advantage of the stream to do some bathing — including Moses. When Moses came out of the water, he found that all his clothing was missing.
“Who took my clothes?” Moses asked those around him.
“It was the Palestinians,” replied the Israelites — “
“Wait a minute,” objected Arafat immediately, “there were no Palestinians during the time of Moses!”
“All right,” replies Sharon, “Now that we’ve got that settled, let’s begin our negotiations.”
This is how to do a proper title search in real estate.
The inhabitants of Kibbutz Urim near Gaza, which miraculously escaped attack, and where my brother lived in 1979, didn’t steal anyone’s land. It was bought from absentee landlords in Constantinople and Cairo at up to 5x the market price.
BTW, from 1948-67 Gaza and the West Bank were ruled by Egypt and Jordan. Neither gave the inhabitants a state because they were Arabs who were no different from the rest of Egypt and Jordan. Nationality in the Arab world is a recent and artificial western import. What counts in the Arab world is clan, tribe and religion. The idea of "Palestinians" as separate from other Arabs was a tactical invention, as one of Arafat's right hand men, Zuher Mohsen, said in 1977:
Mohsen essentially followed the line of as-Sa'iqa's Syrian Ba'athist ideology, which interpreted the Palestinian question through a perspective of pan-Arab nationalism. In some respects this contravened the PLO charter, which affirmed the existence of a future Palestinian State.
Mohsen himself stated that there were "no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese", though Palestinian identity would be emphasised for political reasons. In a March 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw he stated that "between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese there are no differences. We are all part of one people, the Arab nation [...] Just for political reasons we carefully underwrite our Palestinian identity. Because it is of national interest for the Arabs to advocate the existence of Palestinians to balance Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons", representing the Ba'athist perceptive regarding the question of Palestine.[5]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuheir_Mohsen
Hamas agrees with Mohsen, as is clear in its charter: https://medium.com/illumination-curated/palestine-israel-slogan-demolition-and-1712e39e9c1d
Some other facts:
1. The Israeli government apologized for Deir Yassin, carried out by the renegade ultra-nationalist Irgun, that undoubtedly triggered refugee exodus.
"The massacre was condemned by the leadership of the Haganah - the Jewish community's main paramilitary force - by the area's two chief rabbis and famous Jews abroad like Albert Einstein, Jessurun Cardozo, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and others.The Jewish Agency for Israel sent Jordan's King Abdullah a letter of apology." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre)
But here's the difference: no Arab leader has ever apologized for or even mentioned the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Hebron, East Jerusalem and the expulsions and expropriations of 800000 Jews in Arab countries.
2. Arabs regularly turn synagogues and Jews into targetable Israeli embassies, attacking Jewish institutions in North and South America and Europe. The reverse has never happened. No mosque in Europe or America has ever been attacked by Jews.
3. The Palestinian negotiation memo at Camp David in 2000-01 specifically denied that the Western Wall was the Temple Mount and that Jews had inhabited Israel before the Arabs. That memo is the same kind of fake history as this writer pushes; just as fake as Mahmoud Abbas' and Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial.
4. Following the rebellions the Romans deported or massacred most of Judea's population, emptied Jerusalem of its Jews, which explains why 10% of the Roman empire's population in the 2nd century was Jewish. Paul had a lot of Jews all over the empire to write letters about Jesus to.
5. Judaism prohibits proselytizing. It's the easiest club to be born into and the hardest one to join. That's how we gave you Groucho Marx, and that other Marx too.
6. 1948 expulsions: The Haganah sent sound trucks through Haifa's Arab neighborhoods asking Arabs to stay. Their leaders told them to leave, telling them they'd soon return after the armies of five Arab states drove the Jews into the sea.
Who urged the Arabs to flee Israel in 1948? Arab leaders who expected a quick victory and extermination of Palestine's Jews. From the NY Times, April 23, 1948, for example:
"the Arabs' surprise decision to order a full evacuation despite the truce offer ensuring the residents' protection prompted a tearful plea by the town's Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levy, for the leaders to reconsider. The Haganah's chief representative in Haifa also assured the Arabs that if they stayed, "they would enjoy equality and peace, and that we, the Jews, were interested in their staying on and the maintenance of harmonious relations." The British commander in Haifa, Hugh Stockwell, emphatically insisted that the Arabs were making a mistake, and also urged them to change their decision, which reportedly came from the Arab Higher Committee in Beirut. Even as Haifa's Arabs were streaming out of the city on British boats and trucks, the Jewish establishment continued to urge an end to the exodus and to insist that those who had departed should return. "Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives," reported the British Superintendent of Police. A member of the Arab National Committee, Farid Saad, admitted that Jewish leaders "have organized a large propaganda campaign to persuade [the] Arabs to return." (https://www.camera.org/article/contradicting-its-own-archives-new-york-times-expulsion-escape-of-haifas-arabs/)
7. % of British mandatory Palestine given to Jews: 22%.
8. Partitions Jews said yes to that Arabs said no to: Peel Commission in 1937, UN Partition in 1947, Clinton Parameters in December 2000.
After two millenia of Christian persecution, pogroms, ghettoization and genocide and 14 centuries Muslim Jim Crow dhimmitude culminating in the Arab alliance with the Nazis, Jewish sovereignty is not negotiable.
Jews are a religion and a people--a nation.
Zionism is the national liberation movement of that people. To be anti-Zionist is to be anti-semitic because it denies the nationhood part of Jewish identity.
It's the Arabs on the West Bank and in Gaza who dream of "from the river to the sea". Until Hamas and Hizbullah launched wars in 2006 and 2008 most Israelis believed in a two state solution, especially the left wing kibbutzniks living near Gaza and the tech entrepreneurs like Eyal Waldman, who employed hundreds of Palestinian developers, brought an Apple design center to Rawabi in the West Bank and just saw his daughter murdered by Hamas.
I'm a prosciutto-loving atheist NY Jew who will no more accept any gentile telling me what Jewish identity is than a Ukrainian will accept a Russian telling him that a Ukrainian nation doesn't exist. But, like many anti-semites, this writer thinks things he doesn't even know he thinks, just with a more academic veneer than most.
