THE FURTHER CORRESPONDENCES OF MARC SUSSELMAN PART 9

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1 November 2023

MS said:

My house is in order, wallerstein.

The mantra of the good-hearted, liberal Jew – I am always fair; always ready to turn the other cheek, no matter who slaps me; I expect more from my fellow Jews than the world expects from everyone else; please love me, I am such a good person; go ahead, kick me again, please.

No, you are a Jew in name only. None of the above is endorsed in the Torah or the Talmud. You know nothing of the Jewish religion, Jewish history, or the history of the founding of Israel and its opposition, from the beginning, by the Arabs and Muslims.

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Michael said:

SW is a Jew genetically, even if he is not one religiously. But in reading his posted words, I believe he is also a Jew in his heart. Of course, I'm goyim so what do I know about being Jewish?

Marc, in the Talmud (Zeraim) it says that Jews can give Halla by burning up a piece of dough. What difference does it make if one offers a Meal Offering (Ch.2 Leviticus) on a campfire anywhere or a Sin Offering (Ch. 5 Leviticus) in the form of fine flour if one can do an offering of Halla anywhere? A Jewish man studying the Mishneh-Torah once told me that goyim like me can offer a meal offering anywhere in the wilderness but Jews are only allowed to offer a Meal Offering at the Temple Mount. And yet I know reports of some Jewish men paying farmers to offer sheep (or goats) in the direction of Jerusalem on nearby Jerusalem farmland.

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2 November 2023

MS said:

s. wallerstein,

You once more display your ignorance. Phillip Roth a self-hating Jew? Then how do you explain his being awarded an honorary degree in 2013 by the Jewish Theological Seminary, with Hatikavah being sung in the background?

You are as duplicitous as you are ignorant. I did not state that you are not a Jew; I stated that you are a Jew in name only. They are not the same. And you know very well that I am not universally abusive. Even you praised me for my defense of an African-American who was wrongly incarcerated for a crime he did not commit.

It is true that I am from time to time abusive, however, especially to sophomoric scum like you.

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5 November 2023

MS said:

Query:

When the Arab Muslims invaded Palestine and all of North Africa and asserted sovereignty over these territories in the 7th-8th centuries, were there no other people living there?

When Jews emigrated to the Ottoman controlled Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, did they “steal” the land from the Arabs living there?

When the Jews who emigrated to Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, drained the swamps, planted orange groves on land which the Arabas had left untilled, and built schools and hospitals, did the Jews violate the rights of the Arabs?

When the Arabs under the leadership of Al-Kassam in 1931-1932 killed dozens of Jewish civilians who had not threatened them, were they morally or politically justified in doing so?

And s. wallerstein, for your information, Pharoah did not enslave the Hebrews in Israel - it was a country known as Egypt. And the Maccabees revolted against the Syrian Greeks. No wonder you feel no kinship to Jews – you know absolutely nothing of Jewish history, or Jewish religious precepts. Your years in Hebrew school were wasted.

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MS said:

"It is not my impression that Israelis do not want to exploit the labor of the Palestinians. They simply want them to go away."

From the eminent Israeli historian Robert Paul Wolff.

Is that why they agreed to the UN partition of Palestine, creating separate Jewish and Palestinian states? A partition which the Arabs rejected, vowing to drive the Jews into the sea. Who wanted to get rid of whom?

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MS said:

The following is an excerpt from the Israeli Declaration of Independence:

WE APPEAL - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

WE EXTEND our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

Yes, Israelis just want the Palestinians to “go away,” by extending an olive branch to them, which they have repeatedly rejected.

And by recognizing the citizenship of 1,900,000 “Palestinians” living in Israel West of the Green line, five of whom sit on the Israeli Knesset.

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MS said:

LFC’s ignorant comment:

“Anyway the phrase ‘land without people for a people without a lan’" has probably to be given a non-literal interpretation: i.e. the early Zionist 'pioneers' realized the land was inhabited but they didn't view the inhabitants as ‘a people’ with rights. That was doubtless true of some of the 'pioneers' but not true of all of them. I haven't read the 'pioneer' memoirs, of which there are doubtless quite a few, so this comment is necessarily somewhat speculative.”

Yes, they realized there were Arabs living on the land. And, No, they did not discount that they had rights – the rights which the Ottoman Turks grudgingly gave them.

The land without a people was the swamp-ridden, arid land which the Zionist immigrants drained and then cultivated – something which the indigenous Arabs failed to do. On an Earth where there is a finite amount of land to feed its inhabitants, do not the Zionists deserve credit for having cultivated land which the Arabs were willing to leave fallow for centuries?

The ignorance of the people commenting about Israel on Wolff’s blog – including Wolff himself – is staggering.

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6 November 2023

MS said:

Zimmerman, you’re up to your usual sophistry again.

Nothing in the article undermines the fact that at the time the Zionist pioneers drained the swamps, they dramatically improved the agricultural production. In fact, the article notes that the very development of agriculture, known as the Neolithic Revolution, 10,000 years ago has been the subject of controversy and has been blamed for “anthropogentically induced perdition.” This was the theme of the book "Ishmael," which was popular several years ago.

So now Zionists are being singled out for not having the foresight that hundreds of other societies also lacked, resulting in the adverse effects on wildlife. This does nothing to refute the fact that they made the desert bloom. The oranges which the Zionists cultivated in their orange groves became world famous.

A more objective analysis can be found in “Agriculture in Israel and Palestine (1882-2000)” at:

"https://www.historiaagraria.com/FILE/articulos/48leah.pdf"

The authors state:“The settlers were led by a pioneering spirit and a back to the earth ethos, which aimed to wed the people to the land. This agrarian vision had two branches – conquering the land through its transformation and redemption, and simultaneously the creation of a new Jewish man. In exile … the Jewish people have been separated from nature forbidden to work the soil and forced to be urban. The Jewish people will go back to the land, and they will be rebuilt by the land.

. . .

“The second wave of immigrants was made up primarily of Eastern European workers, many inspired by Bolshevik ideas. The new immigrant workers soon realized that Palestine, still semi-feudal at the time, ha no labour opportunities for them and they could not compete against skilled and cheap Arab labour. Jewish farmers, up until then, had preferred the more affordable Arab labour. For example, 200 families in Zichron Yakov employed 1,200 Arabs (Aharoni, 1991: 58) The new labour activists came to realize that they had to convince Jewish employers to hire fellow Jews and that they could only succeed in doing this if the planters perceived Arab labour as threatening their personal and collective experience (Shafir, 1996:10) The labourers, and the Labour movement they gave birth to, needed the Zionist movement as their new patrons, while the Zionist movement needed the workers to engage in the most difficult and least rewarding tasks in the settlement process and to provide the image of the pioneering settler for the world community. The Kibbutz is the idealized representation of this alliance, and the first one, Degania, was established in 1909. The kibbutz emerged as the organizational manifestation of an ideological position that the Jew be ‘neither the exploited nor the exploiter’ (Shafir, 1996)”

It is a fact that the Zionist Jews who settled the kibbutzim proceeded to drain the swamps and replaced them with orange groves, yielding oranges which became famous around the world. Yet you select an article about repercussions which materialized some 90 years later, repercussions which apply not only to the Zionist Jews, but to virtually every industrialized nation on Earth. You selectively single out the Jewish Zionists as being myopic in this regard. One definition of prejudice is criticizing a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group for a particular characteristic or mode of conduct, while simultaneously ignoring the same characteristic or mode of conduct in other ethnic, racial or religious groups. It is called “the shoe on the other foot test,” and your petty effort to delegitimize what the Zionist Jews achieved by finding a single article about repercussions which were appreciated 50 years later, repercussions which are not unique to the Jewish Zionists, fits the bill. It is, to be blunt, a form of anti-Semitism, and you and s. wallerstein resent the implication that you are self-hating Jews, but what other word would you use for it? Wolff’s blog is full of comments by so called intellectuals who know little to nothing about Jewish history or the sources of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but are all too happy to jump on the band wagon and blame Jews and Israel for the mess which is occurring in the war against Hamas – a war which Israel did not start or cause, and which the Palestinians’ repeated refusal to accept reasonable peace settlement offers by Rabin, Barak, and Olmert have caused.

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MS said:

s. wallerstein and Eric have been singing the praises of Israeli historian Ian Pepe. But another prominent Israeli historian, Benny Morris, has severely criticized Pepe's scholarship as full of flaws and mischaracterizations:

manipulations: "The ethnic cleansing of Palestine" is not a serious study

Historian Ilan Pepe seeks to prove that the expulsion of the Palestinians during the War of Independence was part of a Zionist master plan, designed to purify the land and establish a state for Jews only. But his book, which has now been translated into Hebrew, has many failures and inaccuracies.

In 2011, the historian Benny Morris in the "New Republic" reviewed three books by Ilan Pepe , among them "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine", which caused a stir when it was published in English in 2006. "At best," Morris wrote, "Pepa is one of the most careless historians in the world; at worst, one of the least honest. In truth, he's probably somewhere in the middle." Pepe has been playing an ideological role in the boycott of Israel movement for years and is one of the most well-known Israeli historians in the world, with many books dedicated to the history of the region in general and the Israeli-Palestinian.

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The End.