Max

Max

82p

740 comments posted · 2 followers · following 0

12 years ago @ Max Ajl - Norman Finkelstein on ... · 0 replies · +1 points

It was in the Jewish Week too. Very bad.

On the other hand, watching the damned of MW gives me the feeling of watching someone pick their nose when they think no one is watching.

12 years ago @ Max Ajl - Norman Finkelstein on ... · 0 replies · +1 points

No. And?

12 years ago @ Max Ajl - Norman Finkelstein on ... · 0 replies · +1 points

I believe he asked for it to be taken down exactly under the circumstances that described...

12 years ago @ MRZine - mrzine.monthlyreview.o... · 0 replies · +1 points

There are no reliable numbers, the Israeli government has no interest in counting how many of its citizens live outside Israel. The best estimates are that there is rough parity between Arab Palestinians and Jews in Palestine/Israel.

But speaking more directly to my point, if there were one state, even one bi-national state (and I am not a one stater anyway, I think a better political resolution would be regional) a lot of the Ashkenazi would leave. I believe 70 percent have dual citizenship.

12 years ago @ MRZine - mrzine.monthlyreview.o... · 0 replies · +1 points

I did not say the right of return would never be implemented, I said it would require revolutionary change to be implemented. And then I wrote that even if one assumed for the sake of argument (with Finkelstein) that the regional revolution is impossible, his demand that Palestinians drop the demand for RoR makes no sense.

12 years ago @ MRZine - mrzine.monthlyreview.o... · 2 replies · +1 points

Of course we can bring about revolutionary change. But it will only happen with a revolutionary social movement, minimally in the Arab world, and it would help in the US and also Israel.

12 years ago @ MRZine - mrzine.monthlyreview.o... · 3 replies · +1 points

You are not making "Fink" look good here. If one word will more than suffice, then zero should be sufficient. That being the case, we are dealing not with argument but with faith, which sounds about what your position reduces to.

Again, international law is a framework for mobilization. Who is Finkelstein's social movement, and how do you expect it to put in place a solution that complies with minimal Palestinian national demands? Did you read the Palestine Papers? You saw what the PA was willing to concede even when the Israeli counter-offer was not serious. Imagine Israel made a serious counter-offer, and the Palestinians "get" something between the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating positions at Annapolis. Do you think all these committed troops that Finkelstein has mobilized on the basis of the "two-state settlement" will notice that what is on offer is not Finkelstein's solution but something far short of it? Are you aware that the key Palestinian issue in the West Bank and Gaza is not the right of return but the question of whether the future state will be militarized or not? And do you expect Finkelstein's liberals to act to secure that Palestinian demand, or simply brush it under the table when the issue has been "settled" in accord with the charity they mistake as solidarity?

This is why the radicals in the US and Palestine have moved on from two-states to BDS, because when we don't control the airwaves, there is no other way to sidestep the fact that the "consensus" you piously invoke includes a range of positions. Some of them are far short of Palestinian minimal demands. Those positions are held by those who we intend to pressure. Those who understand the consensus as full withdrawal have no power to implement their understanding of the consensus. The consensus is not "overwhelming" because political action is not a numbers game settled by UN GA votes.

Now either the entire Palestine solidarity movement and Palestinian civil society is wrong, ultra-left, wordy, and whatever term of abuse you haul in to obfuscate the issues, or Finkelstein is wrong for the reasons I laid out above. I leave it to MRZine readers to wonder which is the case.

Now, you haven't taken up these arguments, maybe because doing so would take words. And in return for this quite crappy resolution -- much crappier than what Finkelstein envisions -- you want Palestinians in the US and elsewhere to give up that which fuels their commitment to the land and their people and become solidarity activists who devote a year or three to the cause and then drop out. Good luck.

12 years ago @ MRZine - mrzine.monthlyreview.o... · 0 replies · +1 points

Again, how does one turn the ideas represented by the "legal situation" and the "international consensus" into the political solution Finkelstein advocates?

And who is pressuring the US? The EU? The Gulf States? What will they do, stop selling oil? Like the lobby fetishists, you pay much attention to the performance and little attention to the size of the substantive rift that lies beneath the performances. Inside that rift fits a demilitarized un-sovereign Palestinian state with Ariel smack in the middle of it, and no amount of hot air will convince me let alone the Palestinians and Arabs who increasingly represent the core of the American solidarity movement otherwise.

12 years ago @ MRZine - mrzine.monthlyreview.o... · 5 replies · +1 points

Neither you nor your friend below have offered a way to turn "public opinion" into a political outcome, specifically the political outcome Finkelstein has opted for: a two-state settlement with full Palestinian sovereignty and minimal and mutual land swaps. "Public opinion" is meaningless until it is turned into collective action oriented towards a common goal. As I wrote, Finkelstein wants to drop maximal demands not as part of a final settlement but in order to create a movement that can create pressure for a final settlement.

Perhaps I am reading "public opinion" wrong, but it does not strike me that it is attuned to the differences between the Geneva Plan-style state, a demilitarized state, a state with only partial sovereignty, and the plan Finkelstein envisions. Both the former and the latter plans are part of the "consensus" he constantly refers to, which is exactly what makes it so misleading. If you have a plan to turn this object of polling known as "public opinion" into political action in favor of a full withdrawal to the pre-67 borders -- action which will have to overcome the rejectionism which is not only Israeli but also American ruling class policy -- put it on the table.

12 years ago @ MRZine - mrzine.monthlyreview.o... · 0 replies · +1 points

The road to freedom in Palestine lies in a regional social transformation. That doesn't necessarily mean pan-Arabism, although it could take on a modified form of that, but it does mean an international articulation of struggles along class lines. Matzpen and PFLP knew this decades ago, but that language and more importantly the communist horizon towards which it oriented those using that language is at best a subdued current in the movement -- although again I think it's latent in the BDS call. I think we would be strengthened were it to be recovered. This does not make where Palestinians are any less dark. But nor should we ignore what is going on around Palestine, both to its North and South. The degree to which people both surrounding Palestine, within them, and very importantly in my opinion within Israeli Jewish society are able to organize along class based cleavages will be the degree to which a relatively peaceful transformation of the region is possible.