[Peace-discuss] Israeli massacre in Gaza [and J Street PAC's call to end the violence and the blockade]

[Stuart Levy]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 12:13:04AM -0600, Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> I'm moved  to comment on this, although I'm sure that Stuart is quite 
> capable of doing defending himself.
>
> 1) Stuart did not say "that the violence may be "out of control" "; he said 
> that it may get out of control. There's a difference, which Carl in his not 
> unusual manner distorts. It is another issue whether it will get our of 
> control. I have to agree with Carl that it could be stopped at any time if 
> there was a will to do so by the U.S. administration---not to speak of the 
> Israelis. But I take the sense of the statement to imply that the situation 
> can even become worse if there is no outside intervention.
>
> 2) What Stuart is saying, if I interpret him right, is that one ought not 
> get hung up, under the present circumstances,  on the issue of who started 
> firing first, as our mass media is prone  to do, since NOW it's more 
> important that the murderous bombing be stopped immediately. (In any case, 
> as Cindy Sheehan remarks, a country being strangled and occupied,  has good 
> reasons to resist.) This is not to imply that the two sides are equally at 
> fault and should be equally condemned. Clearly, there is no just 
> equivalence between the Israeli and Palestinian actions.

The question (of who fired "first", or better,
who uses disproportionate force) is absolutely worth asking.
And Israel loses big if it does get asked, as in Ali Abu Nimah's
article Carl passed along this evening.

J Street deliberately avoids that question now in hopes of
gaining wide support for fast action -- on a call for things
that the US has not (as far as I know) so far pushed for,
like an end to the Gaza siege as well as the bombardment, or to
acknowledge "that justice will only be served when the rights
and grievances of both sides are recognized and a peaceful two-state
solution to this long-running conflict is put in place."

If it succeeded in moving the rhetoric from "all the violence is
Hamas' fault/don't fuck with the Jews" to "let's see the Gaza blockade
broken, resume uneasy truce, and return to negotiations",
Israel would still be tremendously guilty, but we'd all be
a lot better off than we have been.   And the game would have changed.

> Finally, I found J Street's message mealy mouthed, too solicitous of 
> Zionist prejudices. They turned me off.

Oh, well...  Now *that* is a problem.

>
> On Dec 28, 2008, at 10:15 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> Stuart Levy wrote:
>>> ... 
>>> http://action.jstreet.org/t/3251/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=508&tag=gazaemail-txt
>>> Here's their call:
>>>> ... And there is nothing to be gained from debating which injustice is
>>>> greater or came first.   What's needed now is immediate action to stop 
>>>> the
>>>> violence before it spirals out of control...
>>
>> That's surely wrong.  It's obvious to the world "which injustice is 
>> greater or came first."  The attempt to equalize the crimes is 
>> disingenuous at best.
>>
>> So is the suggestion that the violence may be "out of control": it is 
>> entirely within the control of the US and Israel.
>>
>> And so is the suggestion in the next lines that the US is "wait[ing] ... 
>> before intervening ... as they did in the Israel-Lebanon crisis of 2006."  
>> In both cases the US was actively "intervening" and very much in control 
>> of the continuous Israeli crimes.
>>
>> J Street here tips its propaganda hand.  --CGE
>>
>>
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