[Peace-discuss] Protests for and against Gaza massacre in San Francisco

["E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森"]

It's sort of interesting to read TELawrence's take on the area and it's 
people based on observations made almost 100 years ago,
and see how very little the attitude of the players has changed.  
Lawrence doesnt speak very well of either the Palestinians or the Jews
but he does make some interesting observations about them.

    On the banks of the Jordan valley lived bitterly-suspicious colonies
    of Algerian refugees, facing villages of Jews. The Jews were of
    varied sorts. Some, Hebrew scholars of the traditionalist pattern,
    had developed a standard and style of living befitting the country:
    while the later comers, many of whom were German-inspired, had
    introduced strange manners, and strange crops, and European houses
    (erected out of charitable funds) into this land of Palestine, which
    seemed too small and too poor to repay in kind their efforts: but
    the land tolerated them. Galilee did not show the deep-seated
    antipathy to its Jewish colonists which was an unlovely feature of
    the neighbouring Judea.

    A...section in the latitude of Jerusalem would have begun with
    Germans and with German Jews, speaking German or German-Yiddish,
    more intractable even than the Jews of the Roman era, unable to
    endure contact with others not of their race, some of them farmers,
    most of them shopkeepers, the most foreign, uncharitable part of the
    whole population of Syria. Around them glowered their enemies, the
    sullen Palestine peasants, more stupid than the yeomen of North
    Syria, material as the Egyptians, and bankrupt.

    - TE Lawrence, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom", chapter LVIII, 1926.

On 11/19/12 21:12, David Johnson wrote:
>
>
>   Facts For Working People <http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/>
>
> If you have opinions about the subject matter of posts on this blog 
> please share them. Do you have a story about how the system affects 
> you at work school or home, or just in general? This is a place to 
> share it.
>
> Sunday, November 18, 2012
>
>
>       Tel Aviv protests against and for Gaza massacre
>
> As I listened to the racists and Zionists on the other side of this 
> demo I couldn't help thinking how it's like the many scenes I've seen 
> growing in England of anti-semitic mobs in and before the war. The 
> Zionists/religious fanatics sound just like Nazis. And they're Jews.
>
> I was at the demonstration against the latest genocidal attack on the 
> Palestinians of Gaza in San Francisco on Friday and we were two 
> groups, the Zionists on one side of the street outside the embassy and 
> us on the other. I said to an older retired trade Unionist next to me, 
> a Jewish man, that a number of the Zionists didn't really look Jewish, 
> sort of half joking. /"They're probably Christian Zionists"/ he 
> replied. I forgot about them for a moment. I happened to mentioned as 
> I saw a youth with a mask covering his face that I tend to not talk to 
> people that cover their faces. /"I'm proud to be on this side"/ he said.
>
> I also chatted with an older woman and asked where her accent was 
> from; /"I'm German"/ she replied. She was also Jewish and was born in 
> Danzig but her family fled right before the war. She said that as a 
> child she was a Zionist. /"After Hitler, I really felt that we needed 
> our own country or we wouldn't survive", /she told me, "/But I cannot 
> support what Israel does which is why as a Jew I am here to protest./" 
> These demos to be honest can only go so far. I've been to many of them 
> and Israel still does what it does and US capitalism still arms and 
> endorses this apartheid state. These protests won't stop it.
>
> It's a disgrace in a way that the leaders of organized Labor don't 
> organize a blacklisting and refusal to handle any Israeli goods coming 
> in or US goods going out to the country. But they can't even mobilize 
> their own members to go on the offensive and in fact support US 
> foreign policy. Still, with all its limitations, it was still good to 
> be on the right side of history and to meet others that were there too.
>
>
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