White pain

M J Rosenberg, Director of Israel Policy Forum and J-Street promoter, displays his utter ignorance about Israel and zionism on TPM Cafe, mixed with the white man's natural arrogance.

Writing about the Israeli elections, he bemoans the racism of the "Israeli Right", but has no clue where it comes from. He writes:

There is nothing intrinsically racist about Zionism. Had things gone differently, an arrangement could have been worked out with the Palestinians, a state could have been created (see the Peel Commission report) and neither side would have suffered so grievously.

Indeed, however unfair that might have been, an "arrangement" could have been perhaps worked out with Palestinians. That was true one hundred years ago. It is still true today. The question is, could an arrangement ever be worked out with Zionists?

On that I am skeptical. Here is Yoseph Eliahu Shlush, a Palestinian Jew, born in Yaffa, who was taken by the idea of Zionism and welcomed the European settlers like family, summerizing his bitterness late in life:

those who know the history of our settlement know that the issue of building closeness with our neighbors and living in peace with them was our first duty as natives of the place and we fulfilled this duty as we understood it. And if we had any success it was due to the fact that we appreciated our neighbors in whose proximity we had to build our life and we showed them consideration. But, and let us say the bitter truth, our managers, and many of the settlers who came from the diaspora to manage us, had no respect for the important value of neighborly relations, that basic and elementary principle. Maybe they didn't understand it or didn't want to understand it, and their failure on this point is a lot to blame for the way this issue got so complicated and became so painful in our settlement. And many wrote and spoke on this already, that from the day Herzl showed up with the idea of political Zionism, Zionist propaganda all over the wrold and in all languages described the land in which we were going to build our national home as an uninhabited desert wasteland, and after such a description of the land orally and in writing, all the Zionist methods for building the land were based on this certainty, that this was virgin land, and had everything to them, except that one thing, attention to the people who already lived on this land. (cited in Sharon Rotbard, White City Black City)

Seventy years ago, the word "racism" was not used in this sense. But I don't think it takes a lot of imagination to attach this label to the attitude that Shlush regrets among his new relatives from Europe.

After bemoaning the rise of what he called racist right wing Zionism, Rosenberg suffers an attack of empathy:

The Palestinians are, no doubt, taking this in stride. They are used to nothing but bad news. But what about the good, secular liberals of Greater Tel Aviv and Haifa and the kibbuizim? (Israel's "Blue States"). What a nightmare. But they are outnumbered by the crazies. (TPM)

See, Palestinians are used to it. So we shouldn't feel too bad about them. It's not a nightmare for them. it's just normal. The real victims are the secular liberals!!!

Here is what I wrote in the comments:

You mean the good white European people who set up this beautiful pure blooded European society on the shore of the Mediterranean, with an Opera House and a Philharmonic Orchestra and good table manners and evenings about Goethe, and kicked out the original inhabitants and then invited those unwashed Oriental Jewish hordes to come and be their servants and laborers and learn from them obediently how to be civilized and discuss Goethe, only to see these uwashed hordes take over the country and run it down with horrible, horrible racism that God knows from whom they could have learned it?

Yes, that could be really funny if the joke wasn't so lethal.