Israel and Gaza

[N.E. Brigand]

N.E. you just asked me to define something that is indefinable...

But...

"indigenous" is like string length; how long?

However, I will use a utilitarian definition; indigenous describes those who have no recollection of living elsewhere, and whose forbears are not alien to the general locality.

I do not think Golda Meir was indigenous to Palestine.

Thanks, but I still can't answer your question without knowing which of the two films you were referring to.

[Beorhtnoth]

My question? Two films?

I feel like I have been inserted into a Kafka short story...

Any chance you could recapitulate and so bring me up to speed? Because I've lost track regarding just how much Palestinians are subject to genocide...

[N.E. Brigand]

My question? Two films?

I feel like I have been inserted into a Kafka short story...

Any chance you could recapitulate and so bring me up to speed? Because I've lost track regarding just how much Palestinians are subject to genocide...

Your question was:

"Does it present the contrarian indigenous perspective, of those who were made 'unhuman' to justify the sudden creation of a nation whose being required the Nakba?"

(my emphasis added)

You posed that question in response to my posting a Youtube video of a 2012 short animated film titled This Land Is Mine. My post included a note that the music in that cartoon, the song "This Land Is Mine" as recorded in 1962 by the late Andy Williams, takes its melody from the main theme from the 1960 Otto Preminger film Exodus.

To help me answer your question, I asked for clarification on what you meant by "indigenous," and what you meant by "it."

[Beorhtnoth]

OK. I think my definition of "it" could be Bill Clintonian vague, but what's the point? It just embodies the reducto ad absurdum nature of the whole media regurgitation of the Palestine issue.

Because I'm tired, I'll state what I think in excess of normal qualifications.

Israel is an illegitimate state, imposed against the wishes of the resident population.

If it wasn't for its claims as the "Jewish State", Israel would have no champions; it is only misplaced guilt that commands support.

Nobody rationally accepts the displacement of non-Jews to make room for Jews except racists who believe Jews are superior to non-Jews. That is what has been, and is still, occurring in Palestine. If you don't like that fact, do something about it rather than attack the fact. Ethnic cleansing is fundamental to the state of Israel. Just ask Israelis how long they have lived in Ashdod...

But to drag back.

Indigenous means residing in an area for as long as recorded memory. You know, the opposite of Netanyahu and his ilk who deny Palestinian identity...

[N.E. Brigand]

A curious twist of fate reported by the Tel Aviv-based newspaper Haaretz:

Arab Woman Receives Kidney Donated by Jewish Man Killed by a Mob in Lod. "The 58-year-old Israeli Arab woman has been on the waiting list for a kidney transplant for seven years."

[N.E. Brigand]

My question? Two films?

I feel like I have been inserted into a Kafka short story...

Any chance you could recapitulate and so bring me up to speed? Because I've lost track regarding just how much Palestinians are subject to genocide...

Your question was:

"Does it present the contrarian indigenous perspective, of those who were made 'unhuman' to justify the sudden creation of a nation whose being required the Nakba?"

(my emphasis added)

You posed that question in response to my posting a Youtube video of a 2012 short animated film titled This Land Is Mine. My post included a note that the music in that cartoon, the song "This Land Is Mine" as recorded in 1962 by the late Andy Williams, takes its melody from the main theme from the 1960 Otto Preminger film Exodus.

To help me answer your question, I asked for clarification on what you meant by "indigenous," and what you meant by "it."

I guess this is a moot point, but for anyone curious about why I was asking:

Not having seen Exodus, I can't say for sure if it presents the Palestinian Arabs fairly. Wikipedia says that it's better in this regard than the novel it's based on. Just to give a taste of how complicated and fraught all this history is, here, again citing Wikipedia, is the real life incident that inspired part of the action of the novel and film:

Exodus 1947 was a ship that carried 4,500 Jewish immigrants from France to British Mandatory Palestine on July 11, 1947. Most were Holocaust survivors who had no legal immigration certificates for Palestine. The ship was boarded by the British in international waters, with the Exodus being taken to Haifa where ships were waiting to return the Jews to refugee camps in Europe.

Now as to that 2012 animated short film I posted here, This Land Is Mine, I figured anyone who could post multiple times in a conversation about it might just take four minutes to actually watch it and decide for himself whether or not it presents the "indigenous" point of view -- or take even less time to scan the character list to which I linked in the same post. But for everyone else: the film presents a series of figures who kill each other for possession of the Levant, each of them singing the title song (which as I mentioned is the theme from Exodus with lyrics written --by Pat Boone-- after the film's release), in what is of course only a rough approximation of the history of the region. In her guide, the animator identifies those figures as representing, in this order:

Early Man
Canaanite
Egyptian
Assyrian
Israelite
Babylonian
Macedonian
Greek
Ptolemaic
Seleucid
Maccabee
Roman
Byzantnie
Caliph
Crusader
Mamluk
Ottoman
Arab
British
Palestinian
Zionist
PLO
Israel

I'm not really sure who on that list gets to claim to be indigenous (obviously a few of them can't make any such claim), but the film's point is that it doesn't matter, since at the end, as the bodies have heaped and the bombs drop, the Angel of Death sings the final line.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Seen on Facebook and then I tracked down the source.

[River]

That's a pretty solid sign.

[Inanna]

Agreed.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It pretty much expresses my views. My grandfather wasn't in Auschwitz, but I do have family that both perished there as well as some who survived and fled to Palestine/Israel.

[Impenitent]

I haven't posted in this thread because my position is as complex and conflicted as it can get.

Without any known Jewish antecedents, I grew up in the bosom of the Melbourne Jewish community purely by accident: after my father died in an accident, his employer of only 3 months offered compassionate assistance - money, legal help, practical advice, even finding my unskilled, non-English speaking mother employment.

Our neighbours were Jews; a goodly portion of my friends at school were Jews, reflecting the population of the area. When I finished high school, I travelled to Israel for a year with a socialist Zionist youth movement and lived on kibbutz and in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

I chose Judaism in my 20s. Though I am not an observant Jew, I am educated on the issues - the religious, the cultural, the historical, the political, the intimately domestic.

I am a Zionist - in so far as Zionism asserts that Jews deserve a home in their traditional homeland. But that aspiration does NOT include a theistic or monocultural state, nor the ethnic cleansing of others who have justifiable claims within that homeland, or the mistreatment of non-Jews by discriminatory policies.

My son, who DOES have Jewish antecedents - his paternal grandfather's entire family bar two brothers were killed in the Holocaust - attends Naqba protests in Melbourne in solidarity with the peace movement that deplores the violence on both sides. He assures me that the organisers and the speakers are pro-peace and not antisemitic. Until this year, he was a leader and edcucation head of the same socialist Zionist youth movement I was part of. When he visited Israel he visited Masada, the old city of Jerusalem, Haifa and Akko and Tel Aviv - and he helped clear the rubble of demolished Arab homes to assist the rebuilding of villages. He, too, is torn.

As to Gaza and the West Bank - a morass that Israel cannot fix.

I have no solutions. My solace is the knowledge that people such as my son, and groups such as the one he worked with outside Jaffa, remain committed to the pursuit of a just peace. And there are many of them! Jews and Arabs working together throughout Israel seeking a way to live together - truly together. They get no media air but they exist.

I listen to The Promised podcast weekly, as it is produced by my kind of people, who keep my hopes from sinking. This episode was recorded in the thick of the current disaster and is illuminating:
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cH ... MmE2?ep=14



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[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm glad you chose to post, Impy. I don't have the solution either. But I know that the only path to a solution is through peace, not violence.