Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Tricky Bibi: Transcript

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2010/07/14/bibi-the-bamboozler-to-settlers-america-wont-get-in-our-way-its-easily-moved/comment-page-1/#comment-136257
Israel's Channel 10 secured a video (Hebrew) recorded in 2001 during the 
height of a Palestinian terror campaign against Israel and the settlements. 
It records a condolence call Bibi Netanyahu, recently "retired" from 
politics after losing the prime ministership and leaving the Sharon 
government (where he had been Finance Minister), pays on a group of West 
Bank widows whose husbands had been killed by Palestinian attacks.
For those on the Israeli right who claim that the Oslo Accords broke down 
due to Palestinian terror or any such thing, watch this and you will see 
that Bibi brags that he destroyed Oslo.  Even if you discount this by half 
as the braggadocio of a macho Israeli politician, it's still eye-opening. 
Gideon Levy too has written about this footage in Haaretz.
Note in the first passage how Bibi brags that he has America wrapped around 
his thumb.  The cynicism is breathtaking.  Here is Dena Shunra's 
translation:
Bibi:.The Arabs are currently focusing on a war of terror and they think it 
will break us. The main thing, first of all, is to hit them. Not just one 
blow, but blows that are so painful that the price will be too heavy to be 
borne. The price is not too heavy to be borne, now. A broad attack on the 
Palestinian Authority. To bring them to the point of being afraid that 
everything is collapsing.
Woman: Wait a moment, but then the world will say "how come you're 
conquering again?"
Netanyahu: the world won't say a thing. The world will say we're defending.
Woman: Aren't you afraid of the world, Bibi?
Netanyahu: Especially today, with America. I know what America is. America 
is something that can easily be moved. Moved to the right direction.
Child: They say they're for us, but, it's like.
Netanyahu: They won't get in our way. They won't get in our way.
Child: On the other hand, if we do some something, then they.
Netanyahu: So let's say they say something. So they said it! They said it! 
80% of the Americans support us. It's absurd. We have that kind of support 
and we say "what will we do with the."  Look. That administration [Clinton] 
was extremely pro-Palestinian. I wasn't afraid to maneuver there. I was not 
afraid to clash with Clinton. I was not afraid to clash with the United 
Nations. I was paying the price anyway, I preferred to receive the value. 
Value for the price.
In the following segment, Bibi boasts about how he emptied the Oslo Accords 
of meaning by an interpretation that made a mockery of them:
Woman:  The Oslo Accords are a disaster.
Netanyahu: Yes. You know that and I knew that.The people [nation] has to 
know.
What were the Oslo Accords? The Oslo Accords, which the Knesset signed, I 
was asked, before the elections: "Will you act according to them?" and I 
answered: "yes, subject to mutuality and limiting the retreats." "But how do 
you intend to limit the retreats?" "I'll give such interpretation to the 
Accords that will make it possible for me to stop this galloping to the '67 
[armistice] lines. How did we do it?
Narrator: The Oslo Accords stated at the time that Israel would gradually 
hand over territories to the Palestinians in three different pulses, unless 
the territories in question had settlements or military sites. This is where 
Netanyahu found a loophole.
Netanyahu: No one said what defined military sites. Defined military sites, 
I said, were security zones. As far as I'm concerned, the Jordan Valley is a 
defined military site.
Woman: Right [laughs].The Beit She'an Valley.
Netanyahu: How can you tell. How can you tell? But then the question came up 
of just who would define what Defined Military Sites were. I received a 
letter - to my and to Arafat, at the same time - which said that Israel, and 
only Israel, would be the one to define what those are, the location of 
those military sites and their size. Now, they did not want to give me that 
letter, so I did not give the Hebron Agreement. I stopped the government 
meeting, I said: "I'm not signing." Only when the letter came, in the course 
of the meeting, to my and to Arafat, only then did I sign the Hebron 
Agreement. Or rather, ratify it, it had already been signed. Why does this 
matter? Because at that moment I actually stopped the Oslo Accord.
Woman: And despite that, one of our own people, excuse me, who knew it was a 
swindle, and that we were going to commit suicide with the Oslo Accord, 
gives them - for example - Hebron.
Netanyahu: Indeed, Hebron hurts. It hurts. It's the thing that hurts. One of 
the famous rabbis, whom I very much respect, a rabbi of Eretz Yisrael, he 
said to me: "What would your father say?"  I went to my father. Do you know 
a little about my father's position?
.He's not exactly a lily-white dove, as they say. So my father heard the 
question and said: "Tell the rabbi that your grandfather, Rabbi Natan 
Milikowski, was a smart Jew. Tell him it would be better to give two percent 
than to give a hundred percent. And that's the choice here. You gave two 
percent and in that way you stopped the withdrawal. Instead of a hundred 
percent." The trick is not to be there and be broken. The trick is to be 
there and pay a minimal price.
---------------
Here are a few of Levy's choice characterizations of Bibi's performance in 
this video:
.Israel has had many rightist leaders since Menachem Begin.but there has 
never been one like Netanyahu, who wants to do it by deceit, to mock 
America, trick the Palestinians and lead us all astray. The man in the video 
betrays himself in his own words as a con artist, and now he is again prime 
minister of Israel. Don't try to claim that he has changed since then. Such 
a crooked way of thinking does not change over the years.
Forget the Bar-Ilan University speech.this is the real Netanyahu. No more 
claims that the Palestinians are to blame for the failure of the Oslo 
Accords. Netanyahu exposed the naked truth to his hosts at Ofra: he 
destroyed the Oslo accords with his own hands and deeds, and he's even proud 
of it. After years in which we were told that the Palestinians are to blame, 
the truth has emerged from the horse's mouth.
.The government of Israel is led by a man who.thinks that Washington is in 
his pocket and that he can pull the wool over its eyes.
It should be noted that Bibi isn't the only prime minister who boasted of 
such manipulation of the U.S.  Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon's Mephisto 
bragged of "putting the peace process in formaldehyde" via the Gaza 
withdrawal.  He too claimed he had George Bush wrapped around his little 
finger (though he didn't say which one).
This seems to be a fashion among right-wing Israel prime ministers.  They 
come to believe their own press clippings.  But really who is to blame for 
this but American presidents who allow Israeli leaders to outwit and 
outmaneuver them?  When has an American president, except perhaps George 
Bush pere, ever stood up to Israel and won?  And I'm rapidly coming to the 
conclusion it won't ever happen with the current president. 

 conclusion it won't ever happen with the current president.
vedi? Sono loro, i "sionisti", quelli che controllano la politica
mondiale. Non ti viene voglia di boicottarli?


Per niente; però mi viene voglia di prendere per il culo quel magliaro di 
Netanyahu. Perché citi Levy e non citi le innumere scemenze che "Bibi" è 
andato dicendo? Secondo me, IL e IT dovrebbero gemellarsi, perché due 
cialtroni come i nostri pdc è difficile trovarli, nel resto del mondo.
Namib 

 andato dicendo?
perche' Levy ha degli obbiettivi molto chiari.



A differenza di Bibi? :) Questi europei nati (sfacciatamente) a Tel Aviv 
sono davvero inaffidabili...
Namib 

 A differenza di Bibi? :)
si'. Puoi trovare contraddizioni tra quel che dice Bibi in momenti
diversi della sua carriera -come ogni politico. Levy invece e' del
tutto coerente e fedele a se' stesso. Responsabili di ogni male sono,
per lui, la generazione dei suoi genitori, che ha avuto la colpa
principe di tutte - sopravvivere come ebrei, e non unirsi
nell'abbraccio con i locali. Roba affascinante nella Mitteleuropa,
semplicemente noiosa sul lungomare di Tel Aviv. Che e', BTW, un posto
notevolmente piu' interessante.

 semplicemente noiosa sul lungomare di Tel Aviv.
Dove è nato lui :)
Namib 

 il cui padre di politica capisce un po' piu' di te.
ricordo che il padre di Bibi era sodale di questo signore qui:
"All'inizio del 1933, Ahimeir dichiara su Hazit Ha'am che vi è del
buono in Hitler, riferendosi alla sua «polpa anti-marxista»" (e
Bibi,che pure è nato molto dopo che il nazifascismo face quello che
fece, ha avuto il coraggio di difenderlo dicendo che il fascismo del
'28 non era quello degli anni '30 e quindi era lecito non capire dove
sarebbero andati a parare....)
E che l'altro eroe di riferimento di Nahum firmava accordi con
massacratori di ebrei come Petliura e il governo polacco anteguerra
(«Non dobbiamo sentire vergogna, camerati borghesi»: Questo era Jabo)
TAnto per spazzare via il mito tutto zanardiano dei revisionisti
sionisti che avevano capito prima di tutti dove si andava a finire col
nazifascismo
E tanto per rimestare tutto il torbido, ricordiamo pure che forse è
vero che non furono i fascisti che ammazzarono Arlosoroff, ma di
sicuro fecero di tutto per creare il clima che portò al suo omicidio.
"La mattina stessa dell'omicidio Hazit Ha'am aveva lanciato un attacco
violentissimo contro di lui «il popolo ebraico ha sempre saputo
giudicare come si deve coloro che vendono il suo onore e la sua fede.
Questa volta ancora, saprà trovare la risposta adeguata a questa
porcheria che si fa pubblicamente»"
Fatte le debite proporzioni, si può ben dire che Ahimeir è colpevole
dell'omicidio Arlosoroff quanto Lama è colpevole della morte di Tachè,
tanto per usare un leit motiv zanardiano.
E anche il viziaccio di Netanyahu di allearsi coi corvi neri non è una
novità:
"Jabotinskij decide nel 1935 che il Partito Revisionista debba
abbandonare l'OSM dominato dai socialisti. Il Partito Revisionista
decide di dar vita a una «Nuova Organizzazione Sionista» (NOS) per
rimpiazzare l'OSM. Ma la NOS attirerà (come il Partito Revisionista)
solo gruppi marginali, in particolare i religiosi sionisti
conservatori del Mizrahi"
E finiamola pure con un altro mito, quello che le bombe nei mercati
arabi guadagnarono ai terroristi sionisti il rispetto inglese. Al
contrario: PRIMA delle bombe la posizione ufficiale inglese era quella
della dichiarazione Balfour, dopo quelle bombe ci fu il Libro bianco,
che non parlava più di stato ebraico, ma di Palestina unitaria (ergo
dominata dagli arabi):
Se Nahum avesse un cervello al posto di una scatola cranica ripiena di
merda, ringrazierebbe ogni giorno il suo d-o che la destra non contò
un emerito cazzo nei primi 70 anni del sionismo, anzichè dire che
avevano ragione anche quando erano infima minoranza.

 principe di tutte - sopravvivere come ebrei
se questa idiozia che puzza di proiezione lontano un miglio fosse
vera, l'odio per i genitori (e quindi per Israele di cui facevano
parte) sarebbe nato in età adolescenziale.  Peccato che lui racconti
(e la sua biografia sta lì a dimostrarlo) che il cambiamento di
prospettiva sia giunto molto più tardi, e facendo qualcosa che con i
deliri psicotici c'entra molto poco, ovvero andando a vedere di
persona com'erano le cose, ovvero l'esatto opposto del mito zanardiano
(ma questo non è solo suo, è l'asse portante di tutta l'hasbara) degli
ebrei buoni e disposti a fare la pace anche subito, peccato che ci
siano quei cattivoni terroristi che non vedono l'ora di buttarci tutti
a mare....E al contrario delle stronzate di Nahum, è proprio come
figlio di sopravvissuti alla Shoah che ha fatto suo il dovere morale
di impedire ai suoi connazionali di dire che non possono sapere (che è
l'autodifesa dei nazi)

 Dove è nato
e allora?
BTW, non immaginavo che il diritto di nascita, e magari il legame tra
sangue e suolo, fossero un argomento popolare a sinistra. L'ebraismo,
BTW, privilegia un punto di vista differente, sara' una della molte
incompatibilita'.

 sangue e suolo, fossero un argomento popolare a sinistra.
infatti è un argomento che ripeti tu. ROTFL

 Dove sei nato tu
per favore, Namib. L'Insubria non è Mitteleuropa,

 incompatibilita'.
quale sarebbe *il* punto di vista privilegiato dall'ebraismo?
<:3)-


wrote:

ovviamente quello del paranoico nahum.

 incompatibilita'.
Mon ami, sei tu che da mane a sera pontifichi sull'indicibilità della zolla 
gerosolimitana, la quale conferirebbe, a chi l'annusa, una particolare 
scienza politica; trovo dunque molto divertente che un recente annusator 
della summenzionata zolla abbia da ridir sul point of view di un antico 
annusatore della stessa. Ma sono balli tipici, quindi non metto lingua :)
Namib 

 sono balli tipici,
si', Gideon Levy si esibisce da anni nello stesso numero  - quello 
dell'ebreo che anela alla scomparsa e si acconteterebbe della debolezza. 
Le scelte elettorali dei miei (e suoi, eh) concittadini, mostrano che si 
tratta di un ballo poco popolare da noi. In Europa, si sa, ha una lunga 
storia di successi. Tra i gentili, voglio dire.

 debolezza
Il tutto riportando le cazzate realmente dette da Bibi "Coso Buffo" 
Netanyahu. Che non ti azzardi a commentare. Et pour cause. Magari il piano 
che attribuisci a Levy sta tutto nella zucca di Benjamin, vassapé :)
Namib 

 italica? Forse sono europeo...
gia' Buona lettura:
July 14, 2010
Israel Through European Eyes
Every few months, Israel is publicly pilloried in the international
media and on university campuses around the world for some alleged
violation of human rights, real or imagined. Last month it was over
an
Israeli raid on a Turkish ship trying to run the blockade on Gaza,
which left nine dead after the ship resisted seizure. A few months
from now it will be over something else: Perhaps it will be over
Israeli action against the Islamic terror state in Gaza, or against
the Hizballah army in South Lebanon and its ever-growing mountain of
missiles. Perhaps it will be over an Israeli strike on the Iranian or
Syrian nuclear programs. Perhaps it will be over the destruction of
an
Iranian weapons ship at sea. Perhaps it will be over the revelation
of
an Israeli covert operation in an Arab country or in Europe or
elsewhere. Perhaps it will be over an incident in an Israeli jail or
at a roadblock in the West Bank. Perhaps it will be over the visit of
an Israeli public figure to the Temple Mount, or the purchase and
occupancy by Jews of a building in East Jerusalem. Perhaps it will be
over something else.
But whatever the ostensible subject, and regardless of whether
Israel’s political leaders and soldiers and spokesmen do their work
as
they should, we know for certain that the consequence of this future
incident, a few months from now, will be another campaign of
vilification in the media and on the campuses and in the corridors of
power—a smear campaign of a kind that no other nation on earth is
subjected to on a regular basis. We know we will again see our nation
treated not as a democracy doing its duty to defend its people and
its
freedom, but as some kind of a scourge. We’ll again see everything
that’s precious to us, and everything we consider just, trampled
before our eyes. We’ll again have to experience the shame of having
former friends turn their backs on us, and of seeing Jewish students
running to dissociate themselves from Israel, even from Judaism, in a
vain effort to retain the favor of digusted peers. And we’ll again
feel the bite of the rising anti-Semitic tide, returned after its
post-
World War II hiatus.
All this has happened repeatedly, and we know it will happen again.
Indeed, these outbursts have grown more vicious and effective with
each passing year for a generation now. And there’s every reason to
think this humiliating trend will continue, with next year worse than
this one.
As to the reactions of Jews and other friends of Israel to these
smear
campaigns—as far as I can tell, the reactions haven’t really changed
in the last generation either: My friends on the political left
always
seem to think that a change of Israeli policy could prevent these
campaigns of vilification, or at least lessen their reach. My friends
on the political right always seem to say that what we need is
“better
PR”.
No doubt, Israel could always stand to have better policies and
better
public relations. But my own view is that neither of these otherwise
sensible reactions can help improve things, because neither really
gets to the heart of what’s been happening to Israel’s legitimacy.
Israel’s policies have fluctuated radically over the past 30 or 40
years, being sometimes better, sometimes worse. And the adroitness
with which Israel presents its case in the media and through
diplomatic channels has, likewise, been sometimes better, sometimes
worse. Yet the international efforts to smear Israel, to corner
Israel, to delegitimize Israel and drive it from the family of
nations, have proceeded and advanced and grown ever more potent
despite the many upturns and downturns in Israeli policy and Israeli
PR.
Nothing could make this more evident than the Jewish withdrawal from
Gaza and the subsequent establishment there of an independent and
belligerent Islamic republic 40 miles from downtown Tel Aviv.
Israelis
and friends of Israel can reasonably be divided on the question of
whether this withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, or the parallel withdrawal
from the security zone in South Lebanon in 2000, was really in
Israel’s interests, and whether the Jewish state is today better off
because of them. But one thing about which we can all agree, I think,
is that these withdrawals did nothing to stem the tide of hatred and
vilification being poured on Israel’s head internationally. Whatever
it is that is driving the trend toward the progressive
delegitimization of Israel, it is a trend operating more or less
without reference to any particular Israeli policy on any given
issue.
To put this in slightly different terms, it’s not the maintenance of
a
security zone in South Lebanon, or Israeli control of the Gaza Strip,
or a raid on a Turkish blockade runner’s boat that is reponsible for
what is happening to Israel’s position on the world stage. These
specific instances of Israeli policy are, for our opponents, nothing
but symbols of something deeper and more hateful that they see
revealed time and again when they look upon the state of Israel and
its deeds. And until we understand what this deeper issue with Israel
is, I believe we’ll remain powerless to understand the progressive
growth of the hatred toward us—and powerless to fight it.
The rest of this letter will be devoted to trying to get at what that
underlying objection to Israel is. This won’t be your usual op-ed
piece on the subject because I don’t think the answers we want are
accessible by looking at surface phenomena. I think we have to go
much
deeper. After I try to do that, I’ll say a few words about what I see
as the only possible course of action if we are interested in
ultimately reversing this trend.
II.
In 1962, a Berkeley professor named Thomas Kuhn published a book
called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which went on to
become the most influential academic book of the last half century,
selling over a million copies in a dozen languages. Kuhn’s book
dropped a depth charge under the foundations of academic thinking
about the way we search for truth, and about the way we come to
believe the things we believe. And although the subject of the book
is
the way the search for truth works in the physical sciences, it has
implications well beyond the sciences.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn argues that the
traditional picture of science—in which scientists conduct
universally
replicable experiments to accumulate verified facts, which together
make up the body of scientific truths—is without basis in the actual
history of science. Instead, scientists are trained to see the world
in terms of a certain framework of interrelated concepts, which Kuhn
calls a paradigm. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the paradigm
not only determines the interpretation that a scientist gives the
facts, but even what facts there are to be interpreted: The “facts”
that scientists consider admissible for discussion are those that
easily conform to the dominant paradigm, or that can be made to
conform to it by extending the paradigm or introducing minor repairs
into it. Those facts that can’t be made to conform to the reigning
paradigm are overlooked entirely or dismissed as unimportant.
Kuhn was famous, of course, for pointing out that things don’t go on
like this forever. The history of science is punctuated by shifts in
the dominant paradigm, as when Aristotelian physics gave way to
Newtonian physics, or when Newton’s science was displaced by
Einstein’s. Kuhn calls these shifts in paradigm scientific
revolutions, and in the book he discusses tens of such shifts from
the
history of the physical sciences. Kuhn concludes that while most
scientists are reasonable people, what we would usually consider
reasonable discussion and argument only takes place among scientists
who subscribe to the same paradigm. Nothing like a normal process of
persuasion is involved in battles between competing paradigms.
Indeed,
when scientists representing competing paradigms argue, there is
often
no way at all that either one will be able to prove his case to the
other:
The proponents of competing paradigms are always at least slightly at
cross-purposes. Neither side will grant all the non-empirical
assumptions that the other needs in order to make its case…. [Thus
while] each may hope to convert the other to his way of seeing…,
neither may hope to prove his case. The competition between paradigms
is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.[1]
As Kuhn points out, even a mountain of facts will not change the mind
of a scientist who has been trained in a different paradigm, because
the fundamental framework from which he views the world is different:
The facts themselves mean something completely different to him. In
fact, very few scientific paradigms, including the most famous and
most successful, are able to provide the kind of decisive
experimental
evidence that can force scientists to give up the old paradigm.
How, then, do scientists come to change their minds? Kuhn says that
in
many cases, they never change their minds—and that an entire
generation has to pass before the scientific community enters a new
paradigm:
How, then, are scientists brought to make this transposition? Part of
the answer is that they  are very often not. Copernicanism made very
few converts for almost a century after Copernicus’ death. Newton’s
work was not generally accepted, particularly on the Continent, for
more than half a century after the Principia appeared. Priestley
never
accepted the oxygen theory, nor Lord Kelvin the electromagnetic
theory, and so on…. And Max Planck, surveying his own career in his
Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth
does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the
light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new
generation grows up that is familiar with it.” [2]
Kuhn doesn’t go quite as far as endorsing Planck’s claim that
paradigms change only when the supporters of the old paradigm die off
and a younger generation takes their place. But he comes close,
approvingly quoting a passage from The Origin of Species in which
Darwin suggests that even the most brilliant scientists will likely
be
unable to adjust to his theory of natural selection. The prejudices
run too deep, Darwin writes, and it will take new generation of
scientists to be able to consider the new theory fairly. As he
writes:
Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this
volume…, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists
whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during
a
long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite mine….
[B]ut I look with confidence to the future—to young and rising
naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with
impartiality.[3]
III.
Kuhn’s ideas have had an immense impact on the way the scientific
enterprise is understood in the universities. And since most academic
disciplines see themselves as “sciences,” few have escaped revision
in
light of Kuhn’s way of thinking about science. This has been true,
for
example, in the field of international relations, in which studies
applying Kuhn’s ideas have concluded that nations are likewise
perceived from within a fixed conceptual framework or paradigm, and
that their actions, regardless of how carefully crafted, usually do
little more than reinforce pre-existing expectations.[4] The
implications of this kind of rethinking for academic research and
teaching are vast, and are still unfolding even now.
But as far as I can tell, the revolution in the way scholars think
about facts, arguments, and truth has not yet had the slightest
impact
on the manner in which Jews and friends of Israel think about the
progressive delegitimization of the Jewish state in the international
arena. Indeed, most of the concerned individuals I speak with are
still convinced that if only certain facts were better known–or
better
presented–Israel’s circumstances could be improved dramatically.
Unfortunately, I don’t think this is right. Media battles such as the
one over the Turkish ship off Gaza are necessary for Israel’s short-
term defense, and we had better do our best to win them by presenting
the facts as best we are able. But I think that Kuhn’s argument makes
it clear that the outcomes of these contests won’t have any real
impact on the overall trajectory of Israel’s standing among educated
people in the West. This standing has been deteriorating for the past
generation, not because of this or that set of facts, but because the
paradigm through which educated Westerners are looking at Israel has
shifted. We’ve been watching the transition from one paradigm to
another on everything having to do with Israel’s legitimacy as a
sovereign nation. So long as we don’t understand this well, we won’t
really understand what’s going on, and we won’t be able to do
anything
to really improve things.
What’s the old paradigm? And what’s the new one to which the
international arena is shifting?
Let’s begin with the old paradigm, which is the one that granted
Israel its legitimacy in the first place. The modern state of Israel
was founded, both constitutionally and in terms of the understanding
of the international community, as a nation-state, the state of the
Jewish people. This is to say that it is the offspring of an early
modern movement that understood the freedom of peoples as depending
on
a right to self-protection against the predations of international
empires speaking in the name of a presumed higher authority.[5] And
while there have always been nation-states—the Jewish kingdom of the
Bible was the most important classical example[6]—the modern history
of the national state focuses on the rise of nation-states such as
England and the Netherlands, and subsequently Richelieu’s France,
whose self-understanding as sovereign nations was sharpened and
consolidated during the long struggle to liberate their peoples from
the pretensions to universal empire of the Austro-Spanish Habsburgs
(that is, the “Holy Roman Empire”) beginning in the mid-1500s. What
made the defeat of the Spanish “Armada” by Elizabeth in 1588 a
turning
point in mankind’s history was precisely the fact that in turning
away
Phillip II’s bid to rule England, she also made solid the freedom (or
“self-determination”) of peoples from the Austro-Spanish claim to a
right to rule mankind as sole protector of the universal Catholic
faith.
The defeat of the universalist ideal in the Thirty Years’ War in 1648
led to the establishment of a new paradigm for European politics—one
in which a revitalized concept of the national state held the key to
the freedom of peoples throughout Europe. By the late-1800s, this
idea
of national liberty had been extended to the point that it was
conceived not only as a governing principle for Europe, but for the
entire world. Progressives such as John Stuart Mill and Woodrow
Wilson
championed the sovereign nation-state, which would have the right to
defend its form of government, laws, religion and language against
the
tyranny of imperial actors, as the cornerstone of what was ultimately
to be a new political order for humanity. Herzl’s Zionist
Organization, which proposed a sovereign state for the Jewish people,
fit right into this political understanding—and indeed, it was under
British sponsorship that the idea of the Jewish state grew to
fruition. In 1947, the United Nations voted by a 2/3 majority for the
establishment of a “Jewish State” in Palestine. And the birth of
Israel was followed by the establishment of dozens of additional
independent states throughout the Third World.
But the idea of the nation-state has not flourished in the period
since the establishment of Israel. On the contrary, it has pretty
much
collapsed. With the drive toward European Union, the nations of
Europe
have established a new paradigm in which the sovereign nation-state
is
no longer seen as holding the key to the well-being of humanity. On
the contrary, the independent nation-state is now seen by many
intellectuals and political figures in Europe as a source of
incalculable evil, while the multinational empire—the form of
government which John Stuart Mill had singled out as the very epitome
of despotism—is now being mentioned time and again with fondness as a
model for a post-national humanity.[7] Moreover, this new paradigm is
aggressively advancing into mainstream political discourse in other
nations as well—even in countries such as the United States and
Israel.
Why is this happening? How is it that so many French, Germans,
English, Dutch and others are now willing to lend a hand in
dismantling the states in which they live, and to exchanging them for
the rule of an international regime?
To answer these questions, we have to take a brief look at the source
of the modern post-national paradigm in European thought. This
alternative way of viewing European politics was launched in a 1795
manifesto by Immanuel Kant called Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical
Sketch. In it, Kant issued a famous and explicit attack on the ideal
of the nation-state, comparing national self-determination to the
lawless freedom of savages, which, he said, is rightly detested as
“barbarism,” and a “brutish debasement of humanity.”  As he wrote:
We look with profound contempt upon the way in which savages cling to
their lawless freedom. They would rather engage in incessant strife
than to submit to legal constraint…. We regard this as barbarism,
coarseness, and brutish debasement of humanity. We might thus expect
civilized peoples, each united within itself as a [nation] state,
would hasten to abandon so degrading a condition as soon as possible.
But instead of doing so, each state sees its own majesty… precisely
in
not having to submit to any external constraint, and the glory of its
ruler consists in his power to order thousands of people to immolate
themselves….
For Kant, then, the hallmark of reason in politics is the willingness
to give up any kind of right to act on the basis of one’s own
political independence. This is true of the individual, when he
submits to the lawful order of the political state. And it is true of
nations as well, which must in the same way give up any right to
independent action and enter into an “international state” that will
assume all rights respecting the use of force and the establishment
of
justice:
There is only one rational way in which states co-existing with other
states can emerge from the lawless condition of pure warfare…. They
must renounce their savage and lawless freedom, adapt themselves to
public coercive laws, and thus form an international state, which
would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the people
of
the earth.[8]
In Perpetual Peace, then, Kant argues that the establishment of a
universal state, which will “grow until it embraced all the people of
the earth,” is the only possible dictate of reason. Human beings who
do not agree to the subordination of their national interests to the
decisions of such a universal state are seen as opposing the
historical march of humanity toward reason. The supporters of the
nation-state are seen as supporting a violent egoism on an
international scale, which is as much an abdication of morals as the
insistence of violent egoism in our personal lives.
For many years, the Kantian paradigm, which imputed an intrinsic
immorality to the institution of the national state, found few takers
in Europe. In the 19th century, it was embraced by a minuscule number
of Communists and utopians, and a handful of Catholic reactionaries.
But the 20th century was a different story. The Soviets and Marxists
blamed the carnage of the two world wars on the order of nation-
states. This was an argument that had little traction in the European
mainstream between the wars. But after World War II, when Nazism was
added to the list of crimes attributed to the nation-state, the
result
was very different. Nazism was seen as the rotten fruit of the German
nation-state, and Kant looked to have been right all along: For the
nations to arm themselves, and to determine for themselves when to
use
these arms, was now seen as barbarism and a brutish debasement of
humanity.
For the record, my own view is that this line of argument is
preposterous. The heart of the idea of the nation-state is the
political self-determination of peoples. The nation-state is a form
of
government that limits its political aspirations to the rule of one
nation, and to establishing national freedom for this nation. The
Nazi
state, on the other hand, was precisely the opposite of this: Hitler
opposed the idea of the nation-state as an expression of Western
effeteness. On his view, the political fate of all nations should be
determined by the new German empire that was to arise: Indeed, Hitler
saw his Third Reich as an improved incarnation of what he referred to
as the First Reich—which was none other than the Holy Roman Empire of
the Hapsburgs! The Nazis’ aim was thus diametrically opposed to that
of the Western nation-states. Hitler’s dream was precisely to build
his empire on their ruin.
Obvious as this seems to me, many Europeans declined to see things
this way, accepting the view that Nazism was, more or less, the
nation-
state taken to its ugly conclusion. In this way, the Soviets’
condemnation of the Western nation-state was joined by a new Western
anti-nationalism, which eagerly sought an end to the old order in the
name of Kant’s march of reason. As the philosopher Jurgen Habermas,
perhaps the leading theoretician of a post-national Europe, pointed
out, this transition was particularly easy for Germans—given
Germany’s
role in World War II and the fact that post-war Germany was in any
case under occupation and was no longer a sovereign state.[9] He
might
have added that unlike the British, French and Dutch, the German-
speaking peoples of Europe had historically never lived under a
single
sovereignty, so that the dream of the nation-state was perhaps in any
case somewhat less important to them.
Be this as it may, this post-national vision found takers all over
Europe. A mere generation later, in 1992, European leaders signed the
Treaty of Maastricht establishing the European Union as an
international government, and stripping member states of  many of the
powers associated historically with national independence. Of course,
there are many in Europe who have not yet accepted this course. And
it’s still unclear what the future holds—whether the nation states of
Europe will succeed in retaining aspects of their sovereignty, or
whether these states, as independent nations, will soon be a mere
memory.
But either way, the impact of the new paradigm, which is the engine
driving the movement toward European Union, has already been
overwhelming. Both in Europe and in North America, we are watching
the
growth of a generation of young people that, for the first time in
350
years, does not recognize the nation-state as the foundation of our
freedoms. Indeed, there is a powerful new paradigm abroad, which sees
us doing without such states. And it has unleashed a tidal wave of
consequences, for those who embrace it and for those who do not.
IV.
I have to admit I’m deeply troubled by the prospect that a nation
such
as Britain, which has so often been a light to others in politics,
philosophy, and science, should some day soon step down from the
stage
of world history forever. And the same may be said of Holland,
France,
and others. But my focus in this letter is the Jews and our own
state,
and I’d like now to try and understand what Israel looks like when
seen through European eyes—or rather, through the eyes of the new
paradigm that provides the framework for understanding Israel to so
many in Europe, and now also to increasing numbers of educated people
in America and elsewhere.
Consider the Auschwitz concentration camp. For most Jews, Auschwitz
has a very particular meaning: It was not Herzl’s Zionist
Organization
that succeeded in persuading nearly all Jews the world over that
there
could be no other way but to establish a sovereign Jewish state. It
was Auschwitz and the destruction of the six million at the hands of
the Germans and their sympathizers that did this. From the horror and
humiliation of Auschwitz, this inescapable lesson emerged: That it
was
Jewish dependence on the military protection of others that had
brought this about. This message was already articulated with perfect
clarity by David Ben-Gurion in the National Assembly of the Jews of
Palestine in November 1942:
We do not know exactly what goes on in the Nazi valley of death, or
how many Jews have already been slaughtered… We do not know whether
the victory of democracy and freedom and justice will not find Europe
a vast Jewish cemetery in which the bones of our people are
scattered…. We are the only people in the world whose blood, as a
nation, is allowed to be shed.… Only our children, our women… and our
aged are set apart for special treatment, to be buried alive in
graves
dug by them, to be cremated in crematoriums, to be strangled and to
be
murdered by machine guns… for but one sin:… Because the Jews have no
political standing, no Jewish army, no Jewish independence, and no
homeland…. Give us the right to fight and die as Jews.… We demand the
right… to a homeland and independence. What has happened to us in
Poland, what God forbid, will happen to us in the future, all our
innocent victims, all the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands,
and perhaps millions... are the sacrifices of a people without a
homeland…. We demand… a homeland and independence….[10]
In these words, the tie between the Holocaust and what Ben-Gurion
calls the “sin” of Jewish powerlessness is powerfully in evidence.
The
meaning of Auschwitz is that the Jews failed in their efforts find a
way to defend their children. They depended on others, decent men in
power in America or Britain, who, when the time came, did virtually
nothing to save European Jewry. Today, most Jews continue to believe
that the only thing that has really changed since those millions of
our people perished—the only thing that stands as a bulwark against
the repetition of this chapter in the world’s history—is Israel.[11]
It is a little-discussed fact that the Jews are not the only ones for
whom Auschwitz has become an important political symbol. Many
Europeans, too, see Auschwitz as being at the heart of the lesson of
World War II. But the conclusions they draw are precisely the
opposite
of those drawn by Jews. Following Kant, they see Auschwitz as the
ultimate expression of that barbarism, that brutal debasement of
humanity, which is national particularism. On this view, the death
camps provide the ultimate proof of the evil that results from
permitting nations to decide for themselves how to dispose of the
military power in their possession. The obvious conclusion is that it
was wrong to give the German nation this power of life and death. If
such evil is to be prevented from happening again and again, the
answer must be in the dismantling of Germany and the other national
states of Europe, and the yoking together of all the European peoples
under a single international government. Eliminate the national state
once and for all—Ecrasez l’infame!—and you have sealed off that dark
road to Auschwitz.
Notice that according to this view, it is not Israel that is the
answer to Auschwitz, but the European Union: A united Europe will
make
it impossible for Germany, or any other European nation, to rise up
and persecute others once again. In this sense, it is European Union
that stands as the guarantor of the future peace of the Jews, and
indeed, of all humanity.
So here you have two competing paradigms concerning the meaning of
Auschwitz. In a sense, they’re each looking at the same facts: Both
paradigms take it as a given that millions were murdered in Auschwitz
by the Germans and their collaborators, that the deeds done there
were
utterly evil, and that Jews and others who died there were the
helpless victims of this evil. But at this point, agreement ends.
From
here, precisely as Kuhn suggests, individuals looking at the same
facts through different paradigms see utterly different things:
Paradigm A: Auschwitz represents the unspeakable horror of Jewish
women and men standing empty-handed and naked, watching their
children
die for want of a rifle with which to protect them.
Paradigm B: Auschwitz represents the unspeakable horror of German
soldiers using force against others, backed by nothing but their own
government’s views as to their national rights and interests.
It’s important to see that these two views, which at first don’t even
seem to be talking about the same thing, are actually describing
points of view that are almost perfectly irreconcilable. In the one,
it’s the agency of the murderers that is seen as the source of the
evil; in the other, the powerlessness of the victims—a seemingly
subtle difference in perspective that opens up into a chasm when we
turn these competing paradigms in another direction and look at
Israel
through their eyes.
Here are the same two paradigms, now with their attention turned to
Israel and what it represents:
Paradigm A: Israel represents Jewish women and men standing rifle in
hand, watching over their own children and all other Jewish children
and protecting them. Israel is the opposite of Auschwitz.
Paradigm B: Israel represents the unspeakable horror of Jewish
soldiers using force against others, backed by nothing but their own
government’s views as to their national rights and interests. Israel
is Auschwitz.
In both paradigms, the fact of Israel takes on an extraordinary
significance because of the identity of the Jews as the victims of
the
Shoah. For Israel’s founders, the fact that the survivors of the
death
camps and their children could be given weapons and permitted to
train
as soldiers under a Jewish flag seemed a decisive movement of the
world toward what was just and right. It could in no sense make up
for
what had happened. But it was just nonetheless, granting the
survivors
precisely that empowerment that, had it come a few years earlier,
would have saved their loved ones from death and worse. In this
sense,
Israel is the opposite of Auschwitz.
But Israel takes on extraordinary significance in the new European
paradigm as well. For in Israel, the survivors and their children
took
up arms and set themselves on a course of determining their own fate.
That is, this people, so close to the Kantian ideal of perfect self-
renunciation only a few decades ago, have instead chosen what is now
seen as the path of Hitler—the path of national self-determination.
It
is this which lies beneath the nearly boundless disgust so many feel
towards Israel, and especially toward anything having to do with
Israel’s attempts to defend itself, regardless of whether these
operations are successful or unsuccessful, irreproachable or morally
flawed. For in taking up arms in the name of their own national state
and their own self determination, the Jews, as many Europeans and
others now see it, have simply taken up the same evil that led
Germany
to build the camps. The details may differ, but the principle, in
their eyes, is the same: Israel is Auschwitz.
Try to see this through European eyes: Try imagining being a proud
Dutchman, whose nation was the first to light the torch of liberty in
that hopeless uprising against Catholic Spain in a war of
independence
that lasted eighty years. “Yet I am willing to give this up,” he says
to himself, “to sacrifice this heritage with its dreams of past
glory,
and to say goodbye to the country of my forefathers, for the sake of
something higher: I will make this painful sacrifice for the sake of
an international political union that will ultimately embrace all
humanity. Yes, I will do it for humanity.” Yet who is it who stands
against him? Who, among the civilized peoples, would dare turn their
backs on this effort, blessed by morality and reason, to attain at
last the salvation of mankind? Imagine his shock: “The Jews! Those
Jews, who should have been the first to welcome the coming of the new
order, the first to welcome the coming of mankind’s salvation,
instead
establish themselves as its opponents, building up their own selfish
little state, at war with the world. How dare they? Must they not
make
the same sacrifices as I in the name of reason and good? Are they so
debased they cannot remember their own parents in Auschwitz? No, they
cannot remember—for they’ve been seduced and perverted by the same
evil that had previously seized our neighbors in Germany. They have
gone over to the side of Auschwitz.”
Thus it is not just by some fluke that we constantly hear Israel and
its soldiers (by which we mean the sons and daughters of most of the
Jewish families in Israel) constantly being compared to the Nazis. We
aren’t talking about just any old smear, chosen arbitrarily or for
its
rhetorical value alone. In Europe and wherever else the new paradigm
has spread, the comparison with Nazism, sickening and absurd though
it
may be, is as natural and inevitable as mud after rain.
And this, I think, gives us the answer to the question with which we
started. We want to know how it can be that at some very fundamental
level, the facts don’t seem to matter any more: How it can be that
even where Israel is undoubtedly in the right—not to mention the
inevitable cases in which Israeli leaders or soldiers have performed
poorly—the country can be pilloried in campaigns of vilification that
bite deeper and hit harder with every passing year. How it can be
that
after the destruction of the Israeli security zone in South Lebanon,
and after Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the hatred of
Israel
only grows more full-throated? The answer is that while hatred for
Israel may, at a given moment, be focused quite sincerely on certain
facts about the security zone or the Gaza Strip or the Turkish
blockade runners, the trajectory of international disgust or hatred
for Israel is just not driven by any of these facts. It is driven by
the rapid advance of a new paradigm that understands Israel, and
especially the independent Israeli use of force to defend itself, as
illegitimate down to its foundations. If you believe that Israel is,
in some important sense, a variant on Nazism, then you just aren’t
going to be very impressed by “improvements” in Israeli policies or
PR. An improved Auschwitz is still Auschwitz.
Perhaps you are asking yourself the following: If this is right, and
the comparison between Israel and the most odious political movement
in European history is hard-wired into the new paradigm of
international politics that is quickly advancing upon us, then isn’t
it the case that people who subscribe to this paradigm are going to
be
coming to the conclusion that Israel has no right to exist and should
be dismantled?
To which I say: Of course this comparison leads to the conclusion
that
Israel has no right to exist and should be dismantled. And why not?
If
Germany and France have no right to exist as independent states, why
should Israel? And if everyone is prepared to remain dry-eyed on the
day the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are finally gone, why
should anyone feel differently about Israel? On the contrary, while
Jews and their friends continue to speak in dread of “Israel’s
destruction,” this phrase is no longer feared among new-paradigmers
of
various stripes—some of whom are already permitting themselves to
fantasize in public about political arrangements that will permit the
Jewish state to cease to exist.[12]
V.
Israel continues to be threatened militarily, first and foremost by
Iran. But if Israel falls, it will not be by way of Iranian missiles.
It will be by way of words, as the Soviet Union fell. Jews and non-
Jews will simply cease to understand why such a state should exist—
and
then one day, with awesome speed, the independent Jewish state will
be
no more.
Those who are concerned to defend Israel on the battlefield are well
aware that this involves a never-ending reassessment of the sources
of
danger and the means needed to meet new threats as they arise. On the
battlefield of ideas, the state of Israel is today in danger as never
before. But the danger isn’t coming from Israel’s traditional enemies
and it can’t be fought using the traditional means. You can’t fight a
paradigm with facts—because pretty much any facts you’ve got are
either dismissed as irrelevant or absorbed into the new paradigm and
reinterpreted in a way that only reinforces it. You can only fight a
paradigm with a competing paradigm. And the paradigm that gave birth
to Israel and which held it firm, both domestically and
internationally, is today in tatters.
What can be done? A good start would be to read Kuhn’s The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions—or to read it again if you read it in
college. If you’re used to academic books, it’s an easy read. And if
not, it’s a bit of an effort, but worth it. No book will give you a
clearer insight into what’s happening to Israel today in the
international arena, on the campuses, and even, to some extent, in
Israel’s universities.
After that, we have to begin talking about what it takes to establish
a new paradigm, or to rebuild an old one that has collapsed. There’s
much to be said about this, and it’s not for now. But I’ll leave you
with just this thought as a start on it: Paradigm shifts aren’t like
an election campaign or a struggle over some aspect of policy, much
less a short-term media battle like the one over the Turkish
flotilla,
which can be resolved one way or another in matter of weeks or
months,
if not days. Paradigm shifts are unusual in the lives of individuals.
And when they happen, they often take years to work themselves out.
For this reason, clashes between political paradigms tend to play
themselves out over a generation or more. By the same token, the
relevant media in which these clashes are played out aren’t the
newspapers or television or the internet. By the time we’re reading
the newspapers or watching CNN, we’ve already got our paradigm in
place
—just like the reporters we’re watching, who just keep reporting from
within their own set paradigm, over and over again. When it comes to
shifts of political paradigm, these take place principally through
books, which expose people to an idea at length and in depth; and in
schools, where such books are studied and discussed, especially
universities. If we are interested in the reconstruction of the
paradigm that has served as the foundation for Israel’s existence,
that’s where the work is going to have to be done.
Please send your responses to 
yoram.haz...@shalem.org.il
. I’ll be
posting selected responses on my website, about which more soon.
Notes
[1] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1962]), p. 148.
[2] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp.
150-151.
The quote is from Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other
Papers, F. Gaynor, trans. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1968
[1949]), pp. 33-34.
[3] Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (New York, 1889), vol.
II, pp. 295-296. Quoted in Kuhn, p. 151.
[4] An early study that successfully applied Kuhn’s ideas to the
international arena is Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in
International Politics (Princeton: Princeton, 1976).
[5] For a more extensive discussion of the nation-state as a means of
freeing mankind from empire, see my essay, “Empire and Anarchy,”
which
is the first of my trilogy of essays on the nation-state. Yoram
Hazony, “On the National State, Part 1: Empire and Anarchy,” Azure 12
(Winter 2002), pp. 27-70.
[6] On the Jewish state of antiquity as a national states, see Adrian
Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and
Nationalism (New York: Cambridge, 1997); Steven Grosby, Biblical
Ideas
of Nationality: Ancient and Modern (Winona Lake, Indiana:
Eisenbrauns,
2002); Yoram Hazony, “On the National State, Part 1: Empire and
Anarchy,” Azure 12 (Winter 2002), pp. 34-35, 39; Daniel Gordis, “The
Tower of Babel and the Birth of Nationhood,” Azure 40 (Spring 2010).
[7] See, for example, Jurgen Habermas, “The European Nation-State: On
the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship,” Ciarin Cronin
and
Pablo De Greiff, eds., The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in
Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT, 1998), pp. 117-119, 160-161; Yael
Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton, 1993), pp. 151f,
170
n. 7. One scholar who recognized that these beliefs are leading to
the
reemergence of the Hapsburg empire as the institutional structure of
Europe is Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, pp.
121-122, 200.
[8] Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Hans
Reiss, ed., H. B. Nisbet, trans., Kant’s Political Writings
(Cambridge: Cambridge, 1970), pp. 102-105.
[9] Jurgen Habermas, “The European Nation-State,” p. 118.
[10] Speech by Ben-Gurion before a special session of the National
Assembly, November 30, 1942. Central Zionist Archives, J/1366.
[11] For discussion of Israel’s role as the guardian of the Jewish
people, see Yoram Hazony, “On the National State, Part 2: The
Guardian
of the Jews,” Azure 13 (Summer 2003), pp. 133-165.
[12] See, for example, Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative,” The New
York Review of Books, October 23, 2003. An impressive Zionist
response
is Leon Wieseltier “Israel, Palestine, and the Return of the Bi-
National Fantasy: What is Not to be Done,” The New Republic, October
27, 2003.

 violation of human rights, real or imagined.
no, grazie, buon uomo. DI fuffa sul complotto demoplutomassonico
contro di noi (ed è indifferente che "noi" sia Israele o i fasci) ne
abbiamo abbastanza

 Israel Through European Eyes
Bah, temo che qui non si parli delle mie (assenti) fisime per il luogo in 
cui sono nato. Che è un posto come un altro, per gli umani razionali (e 
biecamente illuministi, immagino).
Namib 

 cui sono nato. 
Oh, invece se ne parla. P. es.
For many years, the Kantian paradigm, which imputed an intrinsic
immorality to the institution of the national state, found few takers in
Europe. In the 19th century, it was embraced by a minuscule number of
Communists and utopians, and a handful of Catholic reactionaries.
But the 20th century was a different story. The Soviets and Marxists
blamed the carnage of the two world wars on the order of nation-
states. This was an argument that had little traction in the European
mainstream between the wars. But after World War II, when Nazism was
added to the list of crimes attributed to the nation-state, the
result was very different. Nazism was seen as the rotten fruit of the
German nation-state, and Kant looked to have been right all along: For
the nations to arm themselves, and to determine for themselves when to
use these arms, was now seen as barbarism and a brutish debasement of
  humanity.
E buona lettura


  humanity.
Certo, che questo tizio non ha capito una benemerita mazza, della storia 
europea, che infatti NON riesce a confluire in uno Stato federale, ed anzi 
finora non ha fatto che moltiplicare Stati e micropatrie. Evidentemente, per 
l'autore, la realtà è un fastidioso dettaglio. Ora ho un ricevimento di 
matrimonio, ma stasera voglio proprio leggermi la fine di quel romanzetto di 
fantastoria.
Namib 

 europea, che infatti NON riesce a confluire in uno Stato federale, 
ma sarebbe bello se lo facesse, vero? Superando questa fastidiosa cosa
delle identita' nazionali (che in Medio oriente, da quando gli ebrei si
sono inventati di averne una, fa tanti di quei danni...)

curioso - io sono israeliano, ma tu continui a definirmi europeo. 
Perchè, quando ti conviene, continui a definirti italiano. L'italia
notoriamente è in europa e tu sei un mediocre pagliaccio senza
dignità.
Perchè non rinunci alla cittadinanza italia, pagliaccio?

 pregiudizio verso Israele
quindi se in un articolo di calcio si dicesse incidentalmente che la
shoah non c'è mai stata tu non avresti nulla da eccepire. E' un
articolo di calcio, mica un articolo sulla shoah...

 sono inventati di averne una, fa tanti di quei danni...)
A me? Non mi risulta. Anzi, se proprio ci tieni (?), sono disposto a 
benedire (qualunque cosa significhi) i vostri balli tipici (qualunque ritmo 
abbiano); non capisco a che cazzo vi serva (??) la mia benedizione, ma dar 
retta alle superstizioni etniche è gratuito, ergo... Mi consentirai di non 
ballare, però :)
Namib 

 Obama?
quelli che hanno capito come vanno trattate le religioni, secondo
l'autorevole parere di un pirla

 Le identità sono cazzate. Tutte.
lo sosteneva Kant?

 lo sosteneva Kant?
Lo sostengo, moooolto più modestamente, io. Ma sono anche convinto che 
qualunque branco di montoni o di umani abbia l'inalienabile diritto di 
scegliersi una bandierina, un totem, uno stemmuccio, una collina, una 
genealogia, uno scudetto, un boschetto, una sciarpa, o una culinaria per 
annunciare al mondo la propria inimitabile natura di inimitabile branco. 
Poi, chi non ne sente la necessità avrà anche il diritto di sghignazzarne 
pacificamente, no?
Namib 

 pacificamente, no?
ma tu su Israele non sghignazzi affatto. Ti incazzi ferocemente ogni
volta che si ricorda che si sta difendendo da degli aggressori
determinati a cabcellarlo. E non sei il solo, in questa spropositata
incazzatura.
Israel takes on extraordinary significance in the new European
paradigm as well. For in Israel, the survivors and their children
took up arms and set themselves on a course of determining their own fate.
That is, this people, so close to the Kantian ideal of perfect self-
renunciation only a few decades ago, have instead chosen what is now
seen as the path of Hitler—the path of national self-determination.
It is this which lies beneath the nearly boundless disgust so many feel
towards Israel, and especially toward anything having to do with
Israel’s attempts to defend itself, regardless of whether these
operations are successful or unsuccessful, irreproachable or morally
flawed. For in taking up arms in the name of their own national state
and their own self determination, the Jews, as many Europeans and
others now see it, have simply taken up the same evil that led
Germany to build the camps. The details may differ, but the principle,
in their eyes, is the same: Israel is Auschwitz.
[...]


 paradigm as well.
Ecco, questo è invece un tuo pregiudizio. Il banale pregiudizio di chi 
presume che le proprie fantasie costituiscano il centro del mondo intero. 
Quello che il tuo amico Perrault chiama "nuovo paradigma europeo" è 
semplicemente ciò che volgarmente si definisce "globalizzazione", e che è 
incontestabilmente una realtà. Tu preferisci il secolo scorso, Bové e Bossi, 
i dazi e l'etnicità dello Stato; io il XXII secolo, Stieglitz e Vendola, 
l'internazionalismo e il meticciato culturale. Sono scelte; entrambe 
legittime, spero.
Namib 

 popolare in Europa, ne sanno magari piu' di lui.
Israele è in pace? Evidentemente no. Ergo caro il mio berlusconiano,
non è la maggioranza ad avere ragione...

 determinati a cabcellarlo.
e ogni volta che si "difende" vengono cancellati 1500 aggressori. Chi
è che vuole la distruzione di chi?

 Sono scelte;
spesso sono sono parole - di uno convinto che la stagionatura conferisca
qualche autorevolezza. Che idea al passo con la globalizzazione, davvero.

 qualche autorevolezza.
no, pirla, di uno che si abbassa al livello di chi dice che solo
annusare zolle di terra gerosolimitana dia la ragione. Se il criterio
è quello, chi la annusa da più tempo ha più ragione di chi lo fa da
pochi mesi, e quindi devi stare muto di fronte al quasi coinquilino di
Bibi. Se il criterio non è quello, la cittadinanza è indifferente, e
tu sei un pirla come tanti altri.

 protezione ONU, giusta l'esempio di Srebrenica.
OK. E allora tenetevi i TO, ma: a) non fatela tanto lunga sul "processso di 
pace". Per me va bene: sono fatti vostri. Ma Neranyahu allora finge di 
accettare la two-state solution. O temi si voglia far promotore di pogrom 
"con protezione ONU"?; b) non fatela tanto lunga manco con la "sedicente" 
(cit.) democrazia israeliana: un posto in cui alcuni votano e altri no si 
può chiamare in molto modi. Ma non "democrazia". E' ok per me, cmq. Del 
resto, manco in Cina si vota veramente, no? Ed è un posto civile.
Namib 

 tuo Stato. 
deve essere perche', di questo minuscolo Stato, si fa un gran parlare
per sototlinearne dei crimini ed affermare che l'esistenza stessa e'
illegittima. Chissa' come mai.

 illegittima. Chissa' come mai.
E' legittimissima. Con tuo sommo duolo, non intendo sterminare la tua 
famiglia, ma solo deridere una visione del mondo (la fissazione 
sullcentralità dello Stato nazionale) vecchia come il cucco, e superata 
dalla realtà.
Namib 

 Li commettono anche gli Stati irrilevanti, eh.
curioso, ci sono molti Stati irrilevanti su questo pianeta, ma tu vuoi 
parlarne di uno solo.

 parlarne di uno solo.
None. E' che c'è un solo fissato su questo ng, e ancora non ha capito
che va lasciato delirare da solo...

 andato dicendo?
ecco, Namib, magari tieni il punto anzichè permettere all'anguilla di
svicolare. Perchè alla fine continua sempre a parlare di Levy e di
zolle, invece di ammettere che lui, esattamente come Bibi, non vuole
nessuna pace, ma solo apartheid per i palestinesi

 pericolosa dell'occidente. Certo, non mettono (ancora) bombe,
Solo che per ora a dire che occorre salvare Israele avviata ad una
pericolosa autodistruzione
(magari tramite il ritiro anche dalla WB o la divisione di
Gerusalemme), sono certi ameni
personaggi della destra. Che hanno (già) messo qualche bomba, tipo a
casa di Sternhell
F.