Friedemann Contra Spritzler Contra Avnery

Re: Uri Avnery's Despicable Devil's Hoof

by Karin Friedemann

with some minor edits from Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

John Spritzler's friendly Jewish Marxist advice (below) to the Palestinians is every bit as pretentious, arrogant and vacuous as Uri Avnery's.

 

It recalls the movie Zohan. There is also no logic to it. Since 99.9% of Jews are unlikely to support equal rights with Palestinians even in hope of peace, what's the program for making them buy into siding with Palestinians in a war against Jewish elites? The Jewish Marxists actually cannot have their little cute working class revolution as long as Palestinians get their land back. Because then they wouldn't be poor.

 

The class war theory is just leftist camouflage for the standard Jewish superiority complex vis-a-vis those ignorant peasants -- whether Arab, Polish, or Ukrainian -- who must learn from Jewish Marxists how to hate people of another social class. It really makes no sense because Palestinians are originally landowning gentry or peasantry. Their main industry has traditionally been agriculture and tourism. Palestinians neither identify themselves as proletariat or lumpenproletariat, nor do they seek answers in Marxist theory, which requires the farmland to be turned into a factory economy.

 

Islam specifically rejects the concept of Class War because it holds that God gives wealth as a test, and commands the wealthy to help the poor, including the possibility of waging war with their own money to liberate the oppressed. Christianity holds similar beliefs. So what Spritzler is suggesting basically is that Palestinians should give up their culture and their belief system and adopt the secular Jewish Marxist belief system. Nice friendly advice?

 

Not only do the majority of Palestinians traditionally refrain from hating people for how much wealth they own or do not own, but it's also simply not part of their culture to be so materialistic and shallow.

 

Application of doctrinaire "class warfare" theory in the past has mainly resulted in burning down the homes of the rich, destroying infrastructure and causing flight of industries out of the region.

 

Detroit's class war of 1969 resulted in worse poverty for Blacks -- no improvement whatsoever. If you drive around the burned down mansions, you will find them inhabited by homeless crack addicts, who wander around with glazed eyes like zombies and rob any pedestrian. As bad off as the Palestinians are, they have not yet become so absolutely and utterly degraded as those Detroiters that once believed in class war. Increasingly, these Detroiters are turning to Islam to regain a sense of dignity and adopt a realistic, sensible program for improving themselves and society both mentally and financially.

 

I do agree with the seizing of assets idea, but the idea that this can be accomplished with class warfare is comical. You need either a government or the bankers on your side to seize someone's assets. Most billionaires do not keep their billions stashed under their mattress so that some Robin Hood can liberate this wealth for distribution to the poor.

 

A far more reasonable approach would be to allow Black Americans to sue Jewish and non-Jewish investment banks that like Lehman Brothers or Brown Brothers Harriman that profited off slavery in American history* -- just as the Jews always like to sue any company that used Jewish underpaid labor during WWII. America already has a strong contingent of people who support Reparations for Blacks. The main thing holding it back is that most white people were not slave-owners so there is some resistance from poor whites to have to pay poor blacks for past misdeeds from which they did not personally profit. It would take a court ruling to do it, but it is far from impossible that Black Americans could liquidate the assets of New York Jews, whose wealth is founded in the slave economy of the pre-Civil War period.

 

It baffles me that Spritzler is super-offended by the idea that the US should use the *threat* of violence to force the Jews to accept equal rights for Palestinians, but violence in the form of class war is OK? I thought you were against all violence John. So sure of your moral superiority that you could not even look me in the eye or return my greeting. Talk about arrogance. Is this how you will treat any and all Palestinians who don't go along with your class war theory too? It sounds like just another excuse for Jews to feel smug and superior.

 

Note from Joachim Martillo

 

* The history of Jews, African Americans and Civil Rights is far more complex than commonly depicted in American history textbooks. When the NAACP was first founded with considerable Jewish financial assistance, wealthy American Jews might have hoped that mainstreaming African Americans could provide a sort of elevator effect to move the Jewish elite upward in American society as a whole.

 

I have questions about the behavior of the NAACP during the early period of Jewish "guidance." The recent release of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon opens up the question of the NAACP's behavior during this time period. The effective reenslavement of African Americans after reconstruction was not really secret. There was even a popular saying to the effect that Lincoln freed the slaves and his son Robert Todd Lincoln as General Counsel and then as President of the Pullman Palace Car Company put them back in bondage. Many important Jewish philanthropists involved with fighting racism against Africans had interests in companies profiting from African American forced labor in the South.

 

In other words profiting from coerced, stolen or otherwise non-reimbursed African American labor did not cease with the end of slavery, and among the profiteers seems to have been a number of wealthy mostly New York German American Jews, who vociferously espoused the cause of Negro Advancement within the USA.

 

 

In a message dated 8/24/2008 8:05:53 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, spritzler@comcast.net writes:

http://spritzlerj.blogspot.com/

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Uri Avnery's Despicable "Devil's Hoof"

by John Spritzler

In his "The Devil's Hoof" Uri Avnery writes as if he were giving friendly advice to Palestinians. But his real message is a despicable threat: If you frame your struggle not as one for a separate Palestinian state but rather for full equality with Jews in a single state for all of Palestine, then we--the Jews of Israel--will ethnically cleanse you from all of Palestine. Using his "friendly advice" writing style, Avnery warns:

"There is no chance at all that the Jewish public will agree, in this generation or the next, to live as a minority in a state dominated by an Arab majority. 99.99% of the Jewish population will fight against this tooth and nail. The demography will not stop haunting them, but on the contrary, it will push them to do things which are unthinkable today. Ethnic cleansing will become a practical agenda. Even moderate Israelis will be driven into the arms of the fascist right-wing. All means of oppression will become acceptable when the Jewish majority adopts the aim of causing the Arabs to leave the country before they have a chance of becoming the majority."

This is no different from a Mafia thug giving "friendly advice" to a shop owner, warning what the consequences will be for failure to pay the Mafia's "protection" fee. Here we see Avnery the Zionist dropping his facade of "kindly friend of the Palestinians" and making it perfectly clear where he stands: challenge the Zionist project of an exclusively Jewish sovereignty in most of Palestine, and we will all unite as a "fascist right wing" to drive you out of Palestine.

Let's look closely at what Avnery and a Mafia thug have in common. The Mafia thug does not want the recipient of his "advice" to know how the Mafia can be defeated, and he does not support the efforts of people to do so. Likewise, Avnery does not want Palestinians to know how Zionism can be defeated, and he does not support the efforts of people to do so.

Avnery's Devil's Hoof Hides the Achilles Heel of Zionism

Avnery uses bogus talk about a Devil's Hoof to hide the Achilles Heel of Zionism. He does not want Palestinians to know that Zionism can be defeated by waging class war against it. Zionism is the ideology and practice of a Jewish upper class whose chief goal is to rule over and exploit a mainly Jewish working class, and whose chief strategy for controlling that Jewish working class is to wage war against non-Jews in the name of Jews in order to make non-Jews hate Jews and thereby make ordinary Jews so afraid of non-Jews that they will cling to their Jewish rulers for "protection." This fact is the Achilles heel of Zionism.

A class war against Zionism can defeat it. A class war against Zionism, for example, would, as I have discussed in detail elsewhere, call for wealth in the possession of the eighteen wealthiest families in Israel to be used to return to Palestinians the property that Zionism stole from them. The wealth of these eighteen families alone could make it possible for every Israeli family living on stolen land or in a stolen house to have one million U.S. dollars to either buy the property from the original and rightful Palestinian owner or return the property to them and use the million dollars to build a new house for themselves, thereby causing an economic housing boom that would benefit practically everybody, Jew or non-Jew, in all of Palestine. Ordinary Jews, far from fearing it, would welcome the return of Palestinians inside the Green Line if it were framed this way.

The Zionist ruling class of Israel (and Uri Avnery) does not want such a political agenda to see the light of day. It is horrified by any framework that puts ordinary Jews and non-Jews in Palestine on the same side of the issue. It loves the opposite, and it loves for its "enemies"--from Avnery to the PLO to Hamas-- to play along with the game of making it seem that ordinary Jews and non-Jews are necessarily enemies. As long as this game is played, the Israeli Zionist ruling class can continue to drive down ordinary Jews the same way the American ruling class is driving down ordinary Americans while controlling them with a "war on terror."

Another thing that Avnery does not want the recipients of his "advice" to know, is that a class framework makes it possible to turn the American public against Zionism, and to make a revolution in the United States, thereby depriving the Israeli ruling class of the American backing that it needs to stay in power.

Another thing that Avnery does not want his "friends" to know is that Jewish support for Zionism is no more carved in stone than white support for apartheid in South Africa was carved in stone. When the rulers are persuaded that an overtly racist strategy of social control is no longer viable because it is condemned by too many people around the world, then, like South Africa's President DeKlerk, they give "their own" people a green light for rejecting what had previously been beyond criticism, and suddenly what was thought impossible becomes quite possible. For example, in 1992 the BBC reported that "White South Africans have backed an overwhelming mandate for political reforms to end apartheid and create a power-sharing multi-racial government…In a landslide victory for change, the government swept the polls in all four provinces, and all but one of 15 referendum regions…It won 68.6% of the vote in a record turn-out, which, in some districts exceeded 96%." Avnery doesn't want Palestinians to appreciate the lesson of this historical event.

While Avnery is no better than a Mafia thug, the problem is not just Avnery. Good people who have been advocating for a One State Solution have been remiss in failing to identify the struggle as part of the class war--a war of ordinary people around the world to overthrow their elite rulers and shape society by the working class values of equality and democracy and solidarity. The consequence of this failure is that Avnery's "advice" persuades many people that our struggle is hopeless. Another consequence is that advocates of One State, fearing the permanence of the Israeli public's hostility to the just demands of Palestinians for a return of their property, try to avoid talking about or even thinking about how those just demands should be met; this makes the One State idea appear to many Palestinians as a goal that does not really address their concerns. We need to get on the right track--class war--if we are to prevail against Zionism and its "devil's hoofs" like Uri Avnery.

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