re: #363 Effy

Thank you Effy, but someone didn’t like what I said. So I’m open to better explanations. As I said, it’s a long a complex story. There is also anti-Semitism on the right, which has different roots. I’m going back to 1966 when the left was actually a good friend of Israel, as Israel was truly trying to experiment with a socialism that wasn’t a closet form of fascism, small scale Kibbutzim. While this was happening, Egypt’s Nassar was trying to create a Pan-Arabism, that is, make all of the national boundaries (drawn artificially by the English Foreign Office), completely meaningless and unite the region under one leader, Nassar. He assembled an army of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and made no secret of his intentions, making speech after speech of his intent to drive the Israelis into the Sea. In other words, wholesale massacre of the population.

He assembled a vast army at the border of Israel—and here’s the kicker— he asked the UN peacekeepers in the region to leave for about 3 weeks. The UN complied. Israel attacked first with quickness and precision, and won the war in 6 days, and Israel acquired territory—which, for the most part, it has returned sovereignty to the previous nation who held it. During this time, those living in the West Bank and Gaza were seen as part of the greater Arab region. The PLO, already formed before this war, wanting to liberate Haifa, Tel Aviv, any city or property owned by Jews, began to focus on this new territory.

The PLO was a terrorist organization, blowing up school buses of children, doing what terrorist organizations do. Arafat, besides his day job in Israel, went around the world training other terrorist organizations, such as the IRA and Bader-Meinhoff. So he never got out of the killing business. And yet, at this time, he was working on changing his image and strategy, separating his organization from the Nassar, Pan Arabist approach, making the Jordanians into the Palestinian People, and turning them into an oppressed minority. In 1974 he received and invitation to the UN, where he addressed the General Assembly while wearing his pistol, and received and wonderful reception. And then the transition was complete, the PLO became a cause of the Left. It has only grown in power since then—

The anti-Semitism on the right, while it still exists, is tempered by two things. One, that the left is so anti—-well, this is another part of the PLO’s image remake, to distinguish anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism. The UN helped this greatly, passing a resolution that Zionism is a form of racism. This little linguistic trick unleashed the torrent of Jew hatred, because now it’s not racism to hate Jews, since one is hating Israel. Anyway, since part of the right mindset is to be anti-left, whatever the left celebrates, the right abhors. The other factor tempering the Antisemitism of the right is the NeoCons, many Jews formerly of the left, who decided that free markets are in fact effective, that the US has been a force for good in the world, and have argued these positions quite eloquently. Nevertheless, as NeoCons have fallen into some disfavor, the old right is making noise, and well, same old leopard.

But the bottom line is that the PLO raced to the top of hill when it came to defining themselves as oppressed victims. Magic words.