[Peace-discuss] Peretz Article

Thu Feb 14 19:54:26 CST 2008

David,

Thank you for the information about the Christian Zionist movement; I did
not know anything about their existence.  Obviously from my response, I did
not take Peretz's (or is it Putz's) comments very seriously and find it
difficult to regard him seriously.  That is not to say that I do not regard
him and his comments as dangerous.

But even with tongue in cheek and foot up one's a**, I still am left to
wonder why he would refer to a Christian Zionist movement as petitioners for
a Jewish State as opposed to petitioning for a Christian State in the name
of Jesus - sort of a Protestant Vatican - and why he would say: "That's from
before there were any Jews in the U.S. There were maybe a dozen Jews in
every city."  This is factually incorrect; he even admits and contradicts
his first statement by noting that there were maybe a dozen in every city at
the time he is referring to.  In fact there were probably even more Jews
than that, although they may not have been Zionists since Jewish Zionists,
according to you, came later.  Thus, his deliberate loose use of language
obscures the fact that he is not referring to Jews per se but to Jewish
Zionists in his statement (and not only Jewish Zionists as individuals but
as an established formally organized movement.

However, I guess that this is neither here nor there in terms of his
argument.  But I would question his argument that > People like Walt and
Mearsheimer are "facing a stone wall, which is the fact that the American
people like Israel and identify with it" < ; this has not always been the
case.  It is a contemporary love affair of convenience.  Christian America
before and after WWII were as anti-Semitic as they were racist for the most
part and really did not give a damn about Israel or a Jewish homeland until
post 1948.  Ironically, it was the USSR that first recognized Israel as an
independent sovereign country - partially for ideological reasons and
partially for Cold War reasons - although they did not recognize it as a
Jewish homeland per se.  This embarrassed the US government and forced it to
recognize Israel; once it did, the US set forth to buy its loyalty and turn
Israel against the USSR.  This support was given begrudgingly by the US
government and even more so by its Christian citizens.  Citizen support
would only come much later after much manipulation by the Israeli lobby and
US govt. officials.  The fundamentalist Christians in the US who until
recently hated Jews and were as prejudiced against them as they were toward
blacks (just Jews were not as easy to identify as blacks) only recently
found it expedient to love and support them, to attempt to convert rather
than kill them, and to treat them as allies now that many of the Jews
started t o identify with conservative values and goals versus the older
liberal orientation.  I suspect that the pendulum will swing in the other
direction in the future and these Christian supporters will again become
anti-Semitic and non-sup[porters of Israel. 

From: peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net
[mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of David Green
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 11:36 AM
To: Peace Discuss
Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] Peretz Article

Not to take this too seriously, but Peretz is referring to a Christian
Zionist movement from earlier in the 19th century that predated both the
Jewish Zionist movement (1895) and the mass immigration of Jews from Eastern
Europe.

LAURIE SOLOMON <LAURIE at ADVANCENET.NET> wrote: 

How is this possible?  How can you get petitions from Americans before there
were any Jews in the U.S. unless we are talking about petitions from
non-Jewish Americans, in which case why would they want a JEWISH homeland?
Since there have been Jews in the U.S. since the beginning of the U.S., they
must be talking about the early settlers before the U.S. Revolution and even
before the establishment of the early colonies.  Given that this makes
little sense, I can only conclude that they are referring to the American
aboriginals as having petitioned for the establishment of a Jewish homeland
in Palestine

I further have a hard time understanding why the American aboriginals would
want a Jewish homeland in Palestine and why they would be petitioning the
white man in the U.S. (or Europe for that matter) for it; or how the white
men of that period would know how to read a written petition from an
American aboriginal.  By the way, do we know which aboriginal group it was.

From: peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net
[mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of David Green
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 8:34 AM
To: Peace Discuss
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Peretz Article

So if this is true, why did they want a Jewish homeland in Palestine? Was it
because they loved Jews so much, or just wanted them to go somewhere else?
Or was it because they dealt with their discomfort with Jews by projecting a
biblical fantasy on to them? In any event, the vast majority of Jews either
in Europe or America did not want a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Does that
make any difference to Peretz? And why do Americans identify with Israel (if
they do)? Only because propaganda since 1967 has exploited the Holocaust vis
a vis Arabs and Muslims, and Israel has been identified with militarism.

DG

"C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote

People like Walt and Mearsheimer are "facing a stone wall, which is the 
fact that the American people like Israel and identify with it," he 
says. That support has little to do with the Israel lobby. "We have 
petitions upon petitions from centuries ago by Americans who wanted a 
Jewish homeland in Palestine," he says. "That's from before there were 
any Jews in the U.S. There were maybe a dozen Jews in every city."

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