864 Neighborhood Bully, by Bob Dylan the Zionist

Neighborhood Bully, by Bob Dylan the Zionist

Newsletter published on 19 October 2016

(1) Neighborhood bully, by Bob Dylan the Zionist
(2) Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate - Adeyinka Makinde
(3) Neighborhood bully: Deconstructing the Lyrics of Bob Dylan in the
light of the Gaza Crisis
(4) White tears from Israel

(1) Neighborhood Bully, by Bob Dylan the Zionist

https://cameosfromzion.blogspot.com.au/2016/05/neighborhood-bully-dan-israel-blood-on_26.html

Thursday, May 26, 2016

"Neighborhood bully"

Artist: Bob Dylan Album: Infidels Released: 1983

Well, the neighborhood bully, he's just one man
His enemies say he's on their land
They got him outnumbered about a million to one
He got no place to escape to, no place to run
He's the neighborhood bully.

The neighborhood bully he just lives to survive
He's criticized and condemned for being alive
He's not supposed to fight back, he's supposed to have thick skin
He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in
He's the neighborhood bully.

The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land
He's wandered the earth an exiled man
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn
He's always on trial for just being born
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized
Old women condemned him, said he could apologize
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad
The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, the chances are against it, and the odds are slim
That he'll live by the rules that the world makes for him
'Cause there's a noose at his neck and a gun at his back
And a licence to kill him is given out to every maniac
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, he got no allies to really speak of
What he gets he must pay for, he don't get it out of love
He buys obsolete weapons and he won't be denied
But no one sends flesh and blood to fight by his side
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, he's surrounded by pacifists who all want peace
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease
Now, they wouldn't hurt a fly. To hurt one they would weep
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep
He's the neighborhood bully.

Every empire that's enslaved him is gone
Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon
He's made a garden of paradise in the desert sand
In bed with nobody, under no one's command
He's the neighborhood bully.

Now his holiest books have been trampled upon
No contract that he signed was worth that what it was written on
He took the crumbs of the world and he turned it into wealth
Took sickness and disease and he turned it into health
He's the neighborhood bully.

What's anybody indebted to him for ?
Nothing, they say. He just likes to cause war
Pride and prejudice and superstition indeed
They wait for this bully like a dog waits to feed
He's the neighborhood bully.

What has he done to wear so many scars ?
Does he change the course of rivers ? Does he pollute the moon and stars ?
Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill
Running out the clock, time standing still
Neighborhood bully.

(2) Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate - Adeyinka Makinde

http://www.globalresearch.ca/about-bob-dylan-nobel-laureate-a-lightning-rod-for-contentious-debate-and-polarized-views/5551458
http://adeyinkamakinde.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/about-bob-dylan-nobel-laureate-and.html

About Bob Dylan – Nobel Laureate: "A Lightning Rod for Contentious
Debate and Polarized Views"

By Adeyinka Makinde

Global Research, October 17, 2016 Adeyinka Makinde 16 October 2016

Did Bob Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature? Not to those who
feel that an award for literature cannot be based on writing popular
music songs and publishing a book on prose poetry. While Dylan’s
influence on rock music cannot be denied, he nonetheless serves as a
lightning rod for contentious debate and polarized views.

For many, Bob Dylan, nee Robert Zimmerman, is a living legend and quite
simply a genius. He is an American icon; one in a long line of unique
characters hailing from a culture where the capacity for self-invention
is seemingly limitless.  In this case, Dylan, the descendant of eastern
European Jews raised in a small town in the American Midwest became an
important figure in an age of tumultuous social change during which
there was a marked evolution in the forms of popular musical expression.

One revolutionary aspect of Bob Dylan’s early career was his part in
nullifying ‘Tin Pan Alley’-style lyrics as the only viable vehicle for
expressing popular music. This ‘Shakespeare in the alley’ changed the
way rock musicians could write songs. Think of the imagery he conjures
in songs like "All Along the Watchtower", "Jokerman" and "Blind Willie
McTell". His influence on fellow musicians was profound. Think of the
Byrds and the Beatles for starters.

And don’t forget that sounding like a screeching, electrocuted poor
kitty cat didn’t stop that controversial aspect of his package from
being influential. Fans of Jimi Hendrix should give Dylan a lot of
credit for inspiring him to sing. Hendrix, the story goes, was
self-conscious about his voice and only really took to singing because
he felt that he stood a chance if the whinny-voiced Dylan could become
successful in the business.

But Dylan has always been a polarizing figure right from the time he
plugged his guitar into an electric socket. The folk purists never
forgave him. Also unforgivable to many of the ideological Left was his
support for political Zionism clearly enunciated in the song
‘Neighborhood bully’. Dylan, they claim had praised Meir Kehane and
never retracted this even though the two major bodies that Kehane
founded, the Jewish Defense League and the Israeli Kach Party, were both
extremist organisations which were later proscribed.

And of course, unforgivable to many is the perception of Dylan as a
sell-out to the values to which he had professed as he was propelled to
fame and fortune. They argue that he imitated the folk hero activist
mantle of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger but only used the protest
movement as a pathway to personal enrichment and a means of opening the
door to membership of the social elite. In this way, Dylan, it is
argued, is no better than those purveyors of the 1960s ‘counter culture’
who had by the 1980s reinvented themselves as agents and functionaries
within the capitalist system.

The popular view of Dylan as a rebel has worn thin with the passage of
time. Songs of social protest gave way to ruminations of a personal and
religious form. It is fair to say that Dylan did not have to bear the
turmoil of threats to his life and livelihood as did the musician
purveyors of Tropicalismo who had to flee from the clutches of the
Brazilian military junta of the 1960s and 1970s, or the Nigerian Fela
Kuti who suffered beatings and imprisonment at the hands of successive
military governments or Bob Marley who survived an assassination attempt
by gunmen with a political motive.

If the question were asked as to what tangible change a political
musician such as Jackson Browne achieved from his protests on behalf of
the environment and against the United States backed authoritarian
governments of Latin America, the response might be that Dylan did not
even bother trying.

Dylan’s award of the Nobel Prize is not its first controversial award.
The committee’s award to Barack Obama that of its Peace Prize was
criticised since the incoming president had not presided over any
successful peace initiative. The award of that prize to the former Irgun
terror chief Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, who as a young Egyptian
officer had been willing to cooperate with the advancing Wehrmacht if
they could secure his country’s independence, while based on an
unexpected peace treaty in a troubled region, was in time criticized by
those who believe that only a comprehensive peace settlement and not
separate treaties will bring true and lasting peace to that area of the
world.

There has always been the suspicion of a political basis in regards to
Nobel awards.

Does the committee favour those who work within the English language
above others? Are developing countries given a fair appraisal? There are
suspicions of a rotation system among the continents. For instance, when
Japan was about to receive its first award for literature, it was felt
that Yukio Mishima, the most prominent Japanese writer of his time was
the favourite. But Mishima later ruled himself out of contention when he
discovered that his early mentor Yasunari Kawabata was in the reckoning
and wanted consideration. Kawabata won. Mishima had written a note of
recommendation to the Nobel committee in Kawabata’s favour and died
having correctly prophesized that when Japan’s ‘turn’ came again, it
would be his rival Kenzaburo Oe who would be the more likely to succeed.

The award to Bob Dylan is baffling. While it is true that Dylan has, as
the committee cited, created "new poetic expressions within the great
American song tradition," song lyrics are not poems and many poets may
tend to eschew the use of instruments as part of their range of
expression. He has only written one book of prose poetry and an
autobiography. Meanwhile, those writers who have been genuinely
innovative and experimental in form and content have been ignored.

Perhaps the members of the Nobel Prize giving board are just sentimental
old hippies.

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England

(3) Neighborhood bully: Deconstructing the Lyrics of Bob Dylan in the
light of the Gaza Crisis

http://adeyinkamakinde.blogspot.com.au/2014/07/neighborhood-bully-deconstructing.html

(c) Adeyinka Makinde (2014)

Monday, 28 July 2014

Neighborhood bully: Deconstructing the Lyrics of Bob Dylan in the light
of the Gaza Crisis

The ongoing assault conducted by the armed forces of the state of Israel
on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza has, yet again, brought stark images
to the world of the devastating capabilities of the awesome military
machinery at the disposal of the 66-year old Jewish state.

As occurred in Lebanon back in 1982 and more recently in Gaza during
Operation Cast Lead of 2009, Israel, while insisting that it is acting
in justifiable self-defence and for the preservation of the safety of
its citizens, has mounted a military response which has wrought quite
devastating consequences.

Bombs and missiles unleashed from the ground, the skies and the sea have
reigned in on Gaza destroying swathes of buildings, wiping out whole
families and permanently scarring the overwhelmingly non-combatant victims.

Images of decapitated babies, horrendously deformed children, and the
look of sheer terror in the eyes of a dishevelled and disconsolate
civilian population have pervaded the media.

It is a situation unlike that of the past when Israel fought against the
standing armies of surrounding nation states each of whom it routed in
the wars of 1948, 1967 and in 1973.

The Palestinian population of Gaza, hemmed into a blockaded strip of
land that is subject to the constant scrutiny of the Israeli security
apparatus, are effectively a defenceless people in possession of no
tanks, no jet aircraft or naval vessels.

They are themselves the refugees and the descendants of refugees who
were forcibly removed or who fled from their homes at the time of the
war which led to the creation of Israel.

The outrage felt by much of the world centres on what many consider to
be the infliction of a disproportionate level of violence on the
Palestinian population under the pretence that the measures are targeted
and that any collateral damage -to use the cruel euphemism- is the fault
of Hamas, which callously uses its own people as human shields.

John Kerry, the secretary of state of the United States and himself of
Jewish origin, was heard to mutter off-camera that Israel was conducting
what he termed "a hell of a pin-point operation".

Nonetheless, the leaders of the United States, Britain and France have
remained largely muted and have insisted that Israel reserves the right
to act in self-defence against Hamas.

In the belief of the Israeli chiefs of state and the majority of its
citizenry, Israel is justified, and is not, to utilise a useful term, a
‘neighbourhood bully’.

Israel as a ‘bully’ is a theme which was once explored through the
musical lens of Bob Dylan. And condensed in its lyrical expressions are
a rationale based on the historical experiences of the Jewish people;
riddled as it is with numerous persecutions, the afflictions of
perpetual insecurity and the enduring dream of Zion.

The Minnesota-born singer-songwriter, an acknowledged genius and a
confirmed legend when barely into his twenties, has been the purveyor of
lyrics which have consistently provoked debate and detailed analysis
among his fans and the music critics.

Deconstructing the labyrinth of words and phrases typically employed by
Dylan has over the years become something of a sport.

Yet few, if any, have succeeded in pinning down a universally accepted
explanation of many of the meanings in regard to which the author has
tended to maintain either a studied silence or to offer a series of
bland and imprecise ruminations during interviews.

Like the decoding of ancient esoteric texts, they remain a mystery to
the masses.

But if interpreting Dylan’s lyrics have been laborious exercises which
have frequently failed to penetrate the enduring enigma, the words to
the song Neighborhood bully presented a statement which is largely
spared the opacity that is the typical fare of Dylan lyrics.

The song forms part of the album named Infidels which was released in
October of 1983 on Columbia Records. The record came after years of
discussion about his apparent conversion to the Christian faith and the
gospel inflected albums which had preceded it including Slow Train
Coming (1979) and Saved (1980).

Infidels was seen as a return to a ‘secular’ album with references to
love and loss, the environment, and the United States economy as a
battlefield between opposing union and corporate interests.

Nonetheless, Dylan’s penchant for the use of religious reference points
persisted. The album’s introductory song, Jokerman, dense with biblical
imagery and pregnant with moral analysis appeared to some to be about
Jesus; the lines "Standing on the water casting your bread" in that song
as well as "news of you has come down the line" and "in your father’s
house there’s many mansions" from Sweetheart Like You giving some
credence to this line of interpretation.

Long before the series of albums which celebrated Christian themes,
Dylan had apparently found in Jesus a figure of inspiration.  The line
from All Along the Watchtower, a stand out song from the seminal album
John Wesley Harding, "There must be some kind of way outta here, said
the joker to the thief" is claimed to allude to Christ on the cross
alongside the two convicted criminals as they bleed to death on Mount
Calvary.

Infidels represented a drift from his excursions into Christian
spirituality. And if not an outright renunciation of Christianity, it
did present him as been back among the fold of the Jewish tribe, as the
inner jacket features him crouched and in contemplation while wearing a
yarmulke on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives.

The song Man of Peace with the line "you know that sometimes Satan comes
as a man of peace" was interpreted as a backslap directed at the
evangelists who had converted him and the words "Took a stranger to
teach me to look into justice’s beautiful face, And to see an eye for an
eye and a tooth for a tooth" from I and I seemingly confirmed the breach.

Dylan the apostate Jew did not sit well with many Jews whose ancestors
for centuries suffered persecutions visited on them by European
Christian communities. Indeed, one Washington-based rabbi felt compelled
to ‘excommunicate’ Dylan from his record collection.

Traditional Christian doctrine of course held the Jews and their
descendants to be responsible for the execution of Christ, and this
antipathy is held out as the rationale for the numerous incidents of
group libels, pogroms and expulsions.

But the ancient antagonism between Judaism and Christianity was not
birthed in medieval Christian Europe. Nor was it one-sided.

Jesus, although tutored and practised in the rites of ancient Judaism,
was considered a heretical preacher and according to Talmudic scripture,
a sorcerer and self-idolator who after death, was conjured to life by
Jewish priests in order to face four different executions and as a
punishment for his heresies is boiling for eternity in a cauldron of
human faeces.

Later, credit would be given to the Chasidic scholar Rabbi Manis
Freidman for steering Dylan back to his Judaic origins.  He was reported
as attending study meetings with the Lubavitch Hasidim in Brooklyn.

But although Dylan had claimed in 1985 to still believe in the Book of
Revelations, the following decade, in an interview with Newsweek
magazine, he would claim "I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers,
evangelists, all of that."

Dylan had long supported the cause of Israel and this support may have
played a part in his break with the political Left in the 1960s. He is
said to have reproved the ‘Black Panther’ Revolutionary Huey Newton for
his opposition to Israel, and his famous ‘comeback tour’ of 1974 was
rumoured to have substantially contributed to the coffers of the Israel
Emergency Fund.

Played in a rockabilly mode and sang with heavy irony, Dylan sets out
Israel’s case amid the accusations of its iron-fisted dealings with its
Arab neighbours. It is a song which is said to be particularly popular
with the Likudniks as an after-party conference boogie-down number, and,
according to the Jerusalem Post, "a favourite among Dylan-loving
residents of the (Israeli-occupied) territories".

The year before the release of Infidels, tired of border incursions and
other acts of terror directed at settlements on its northern border,
Israel had invaded Lebanon in an attempt to destroy the Palestinian
militias who were based in that country.

A grand slaughter of thousands ensued as the Israeli Defence Force
advanced through the country and bombs reigned in on the capital city of
Beirut where Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation
eventually became besieged.

The city was itself reduced to heaps of rubble and became for all
intents and purposes a wasteland. After a negotiated agreement which
provided that the P.L.O. be allowed to depart by ship to Tunis,
Palestinian families based at the Shabra and Shatilla camps on the
outskirts of Beirut were massacred by Christian militias with the
connivance of  the Israeli military who were under the direction of the
ruling Likud Party’s defence minister, former General Ariel Sharon.

Under more valorous circumstances, the Israeli Air force had
demonstrated its professional acumen in destroying a high proportion of
its Syrian counterpart in just a few hours fighting over the Bekaa Valley.

But the cost of the Lebanese mission in terms of the destruction of
human life and property inspired widespread revulsion and the opprobrium
of many from around the world.

Israel, the ‘small’ nation which had valiantly defeated combined Arab
armies in the Six Day War of 1967 and whose special forces had contrived
an audacious rescue of hostages at Entebbe Airport in 1976, had fallen
markedly in the esteem of wide sections of world public opinion.

It had in the eyes of many become a ‘neighbourhood bully’.

It was in this context with the reputation and moral authority enjoyed
by Israel being at an all-time nadir since its creation that Dylan wrote
the song.

The song begins by stating two key precepts underscoring the Zionist
world view.

The first that the enemies of Israel "claim he’s on their land" serves
as a rebuke to those who deny the legitimacy of the historic claim to
the land of Israel by the Jewish people insisted on by Zionist ideology.

The second, that he is "outnumbered by a million to one" posits the
frequently alluded to representation of Israel as the underdog; a small
state surrounded by hostile nations whose sheer vastness in numbers
continually present a threat to its existence.

The second phase of the song underlines the ages-long reason for the
creation of a Jewish state:

Being driven out of every land
He’s wandered the earth an exiled man
Seen his family scattered, people hounded and torn
He’s always on trial for just being born

The Jew is portrayed as a perpetual victim in regard to who, according
to Dylan, a "license to kill him given out to every manic".

But there is pride in his survival instinct as "every empire that
enslaved him is gone: Egypt and Rome even the great Babylon".

Given this background, Dylan ruminates with heavy irony that he is "not
supposed to fight back and have thick skin, supposed to lay down and die
when his door is kicked in"; this a reference not only to wars fought
with Arab armies and incursions made by Palestinian guerrillas into
Israeli territory but also the gnawing feeling among Jews of the passive
submission to a bestial fate which is suggestive of the Holocaust
imagery of Jews being herded into gas chambers without fighting back.

Thus, with biting humour, Dylan decries the supposition that "he’s
surrounded by pacifists who all want peace" and recounts how "when he
knocked out a lynch-mob, old women condemned him; said he should apologize".

In the earlier decades of the 20th Century, Ze’ev (nee Vladimir)
Jabotinsky, the man acknowledged as the founding father of the Israeli
Defence Force, had sought to create a new species of man; namely that of
the "fighting Jew".

And for Dylan the survival of Israel is impliedly predicated on such
species of person who can be directed to neutralise all threats to its
existence. The song’s reference to the destroying of a "bomb factory"
alluded to the destruction in 1981 of the Osirak nuclear reactor being
built by the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Criticism of Israel’s right to exist and its ‘counter-measures’ appear
to him to be predicated on anti-Semitism, the basis of which, according
to Dylan’s words, is both inexplicable and irrational: "Does he (meaning
the Jew) change the course of rivers, does he pollute the moving stars?"
he asks.

The Jew after all, he sings, has contributed so much to civilization and
special mention is made of the scientific advances which have been made
by people of Jewish origin via the lines: "took sickness and disease and
turned them into health".

And of the achievement of Israel, "he’s made a garden and a paradise in
the desert sand".

The following lines are an instructive indication of the Jewish-Zionist
mindset:

He got no allies to really speak of
What he gets he must pay for
He don’t get it out of love

What Dylan appears to be saying is that what the Jewish state acquires
is as a result of hard-bargaining. Israel is ultimately alone and must
be self-reliant.

The advances made towards the establishment and later the sustenance of
the Jewish state have materialised through hard-nosed negotiations as
well as the formation of some bizarre and unusual alliances, a number of
which have been temporary.

The Balfour Declaration issued by the British in 1917, a 67-word text in
which the war-time foreign minister, James Arthur Balfour viewed with
favour the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people, was
as Winston Churchill later observed not a "mere act of crusading
enthusiasm or quixotic philanthropy".

It was issued he continued "with the object of promoting the general
victory of the Allies, for which we expected and received valued and
important assistance".

Such help and assistance included mobilizing influential Jewish-American
figures in media, industry and politics to bring the United States into
the war on the side of the allies who were facing defeat by Germany in
the latter part of 1917.

For Balfour, a self-acknowledged anti-Semite who recoiled from the idea
that Britain should accept more Jewish immigrants, a Jewish homeland
meant perfect sense. Affecting his view was also the fact that he was
what came to be termed a Christian Zionist.

The modern alliance between Jewish-Israeli interests and Christian
Zionism has played a major part in fortifying support within the United
States for the state of Israel.

A fundamental plank of Christian Zionist-Dispensationalist thinking is
that following the creation of the modern state of Israel, the
rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem must form a necessary precursor to
the end days during which Christ’s chosen will be secretly raptured.

American evangelical support for Israel is unconditional, and over the
years their members have given millions of dollars to groups in Israel
which are opposed to any form of concessions to the Palestinians.

But the support granted by John Hagee, chairman of Christians United for
Israel, and the likes of Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, is
not predicated on a "love" for the Jews.

Their eschatological doctrine is premised on the belief that the Jews,
who rejected Jesus, will be given a final opportunity to accept Christ
and will be put to the sword if they refuse.

Yet this bizarre, evidently mutually beneficial, alliance persists with
the willing cooperation of both Diaspora Jews and Israelis. The
Christian Zionists according to a quote attributed to the Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu function in the final analysis as "useful
idiots".

The "he don’t get it out of love" sentiment has a basis when reference
is made to the later discovery that prominent non-Jewish supporters of
Israel and Jewish interests have harboured deep resentments about Jews.

President Harry Truman, during whose tenure the state of Israel received
United States recognition, noted in a 1947 diary entry discovered in
2003 that he found Jews to be "very, very selfish".

"When they have power", he continued, "Physical, financial or political,
neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or
mistreatment to the underdog."

Similarly, the discovery of tape recordings between Richard Nixon and
Billy Graham; the former whose presidency staunchly favoured Israel and
the latter, the world famous evangelist whose ministry was pro-Israeli,
in which both criticized the policies of Israel and expressed negative
views about the influence of Jews on American culture documented a
scenario in which a gentile supporter of Israel had an unflattering
privately held view.

The line that "He got no allies to really speak of" may ostensibly be
pooh-poohed by simply recounting the special relationship between Israel
and the United States. It is a relationship which is underscored by the
power and leverage exercised by Israel-Jewish lobby groups in particular
that of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Although America is seen as the great ally and benefactor of the Israeli
state; demonstrated through its vetoing of resolutions against it in the
United Nations and giving it military aid to the tune of billions of
dollars every year, such an alliance is not necessarily presumed to be
an everlasting one.

There is much truth to the thesis that America has coldly considered
Israel to be a useful asset in the Middle East during the Cold War-era
and beyond; as Vice President Joe Biden said in a speech before AIPAC,
"If there weren’t an Israel, we’d have to invent one."

The nagging suspicion is that as has occurred over the ages with the
alliances forged between Jewish communities and powerful figures and
nations, the Israel-America relationship will one day expire.

The assertion by Moshe Dayan that Israel "must be like a ‘mad dog’, too
dangerous to bother’ was based not only on the presumptive ‘Samson
Option’ which means Israel would utilise its nuclear arsenal to take
down the region and beyond if it was in danger of being defeated, but
also spoke to a scenario in which it would no longer be able to count on
the United States.

A key point of note is that by not specifically once mentioning the
terms ‘Jew’ and ‘Israeli’ or ‘Judaism’ and ‘Zionism’, Dylan inextricably
binds all together. His proposition is that Jewishness cannot be
separated from Zionist sentiment and aspiration.

Eretz Israel is the promised homeland for a rootless nation of people
–any and all who have a right to live there- and the overwhelming
majority of Jewry supports it.

But Zionism was not always the natural counterpart of Judaism; indeed
the strict teachings of Judaism disavow the man-made recreation of
Israel, considering such an enterprise to be an abomination. Israel, the
scriptures provide, can only be created by the act of God. It had few
adherents at the beginning of the 20th century.

Henry Morgenthau Sr, a former US ambassador to Turkey portrayed it as
"the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history". He felt it to be
"fanatical in its politics" and "sterile in its spiritual ideas".

The Jewish English politician, Edwin Samuel Montagu who served in the
coalition government during the First World War was as scathing,
describing it as a "mischievous political creed" which he opposed
because he foresaw the trouble what be believed to be a chauvinist
ideology would cause in Palestine with the indigenous population and
also that accusations of dual loyalty would be made against Jews who
lived in other states.

It was, he believed, a project which would unleash the beast of
anti-Semitism.

Once upon a time a distinction could be made between ‘Spiritual’ Zionism
as espoused by Ahad Ha’am on the one hand and Theodore Herzl’s
‘Political’ Zionism on the other.

Herzl’s creed would eventually carry the day; and although it once, to
paraphrase Churchill, contended with Bolshevism for the soul of the
Jewish people, ‘Political’ Zionism became the universal doctrine for
world Jewry after the Shoah.

For the likes of Morgenthau and Montagu, Zionism served as a rejection
of the Haskala, the 18th Century Jewish Enlightenment movement which
posited the solution to anti-Semitism as being the assimilation of Jewry
into Western secular culture.

The contention by Jews who opposed it was on the premise that Zionism
represented a weary, doom-laden, pessimistic philosophy that Jews can
never be assimilated into ‘foreign’ societies and need to live apart in
a nation of their own.

It accepts the inevitability of anti-Semitism among all non-Jews.
Ideally, all the world’s Jews should live in the state of Israel,
although the reality is that most of them do not. In fact, there are
more Jews in America than there are in Israel.

The line "He’s got no place to escape to" is not correct since there
have been periods when more Jews have left Israel than have settled in it.

But it does represent the belief among many Jews that Israel is a home
which would serve as a last refuge from the persecutions which have
dogged its people throughout history.

It would be remiss to fail to mention the influence of the Revisionist
Zionism as espoused by Jabotinsky on the formation of Israel as well as
on the doctrines and policies of contemporary Israel which gives insight
into the manner in which it deals with the occupied territory of the
West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

In his book The Iron Wall, Jabotinsky called on Zionists to drop all
pretence about reaching an accommodation with the Arab population of
Palestine, insisting that in attaining the goal of transforming
Palestine "from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority" a
militaristic policy of colonisation must be pursued.

In his words:

Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or it falls by
the question of armed force

He was aware that there would have to be opposition from Palestinian Arabs:

Each people will struggle against colonizers until the last spark of
hope that they can avoid the dangers of colonization and conquest is
extinguished. The Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is
hardly a spark of hope

This reality has underlain Israeli policy whatever the spin given to the
purportedly defensive wars fought in 1948 and 1967. The heirs to
Jabotinsky are the founders of the ruling Likud Party through which its
hardliner leader, Menachem Begin –a mentee of Jabotinsky- first came to
power in the 1970s.

Begin often referred to the occupied West Bank as historically Jewish,
namely the regions of Judea and Samaria. The father of the current
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, served for a time as
Jabotinsky’s secretary.

Likud and other parties simply will not accept any form of Palestinian
statehood which would have the semblance of an independent country.

While the Israeli government continues to permit the building of
settlements on the West Bank in contravention of international law, Gaza
is effectively blockaded by land and sea and cannot conduct business
relations with the outside world in a conventional manner.

The importation of items ranging from certain forms of concrete to
crayon are banned and whatever is allowed through by Israel is subject
to a tax payable to the Israeli state. It is deprived of clean water
while at the same time in the West Bank access to natural water springs
is the preserve of illegal settlers.

The line "Does he change the course of rivers" has some resonance
although not in the way Dylan intended.

One often understated reason for the war of 1967 relates to the
acquisition of water resources. And under the auspices of the conquered
territory, Israel utilises over 70% of the aquifers. The Palestinian
population use less than 20% while the Israeli settlers, always growing,
but proportionally far less than the Palestinians use more than 10%.

To much of the world, the Palestinians hold out; valiantly refusing to
succumb to what they perceive to be the crumbs offered by Zionism while
the Israelis insist that a failure on the part of Palestinian leadership
has been the impediment to achieving a two-state solution.

While Israel continues to argue that it acts in self-preservation in
actions vastly disproportionate to the damage caused by mainly home-made
Palestinian rockets, much of the world community sees it as aggression
posed as self-defence, and that the historical accounts of victimhood
are cynically utilized in order to camouflage the contemporary reality
of the Jewish state as an oppressor.

The actions of Hamas in firing a largely non-descript collection of
projectiles which are referred to as ‘missiles’ most of which by the
Israeli army estimates penetrated the so-called Iron Dome are the
actions of desperate people.

The projectiles are largely ineffectual and only give Israel the excuse
it needs to mete out a collective form of punishment with its large
array of sophisticated and highly deadly arsenal.

If it need be reminded, all peoples are entitled under international law
to resist occupation, and the designations of ‘terrorist’ and
‘terrorism’ are used by Israel without a trace of irony given the nature
of its creation by the terror actions of the Irgun and Stern gang as
well as the legacy of ethnic cleansing notably by the massacre
perpetrated at the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin – the site of
which stands ironically approximately 2000 feet from the Yad Vashem
Holocaust Museum.

When Begin formed the Herut Party, the precursor of Likud, in 1948
Jewish luminaries including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt wrote an
open letter to the New York Times describing it as an ominous portent;
that Israel would head down a path which legitimized "ultra-nationalism,
religious mysticism and racial superiority".

In the Israel of today, a mainstream politician can advocate the killing
of Palestinian women on the basis that they give birth to "little
snakes" while a university professor seriously suggests the use of rape
as a weapon of war against Palestinian sisters and mothers; positing the
culture of the Middle East as the justification.

Under state policy Ethiopian Jewish women have been surreptitiously
sterilised, and Sudanese and Eritrean refugees are referred to as
‘infiltrators’ and are casually vilified. Edicts are issued banning the
sale or renting of apartments and homes to non-Jews.

Israel is a racially exclusive state where immigration is subject to DNA
testing and where a non-Jew cannot legally marry a Jew.

The linkage of Judaism with Zionism is one which creates uneasiness in
an increasing number of Jews and non-Jews. The bombs which kill and maim
scores of innocents, the policies which constrict the everyday lives of
millions and which condone the theft of Palestinian land are done in the
name of the Jewish state.

David Goldberg, a London-based rabbi once wrote that the time may have
come for "Judaism and Zionism to go their separate ways". But this would
be a difficult task to achieve given the aforementioned philosophical
shift which took place among world Jewry over the course of the 20th
century.

Further, rabbis in Israel have given religious sanction to the idea of
inflicting terror on the Palestinians. The recently deceased Rabbi
Ovadia Yosef, once the chief rabbi for Israel’s Sephardic community and
when the spiritual leader of the ultra-orthodox  Shas party which over
the years has formed coalition alliances with Netanyahu’s Likud, called
for the annihilation of Arabs during a Passover sermon delivered in 2001.

It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them
and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable...waste their seed and
exterminate them and vanish them from this world.

And during the present crisis, the Jerusalem Post reported a rabbi’s
claim that Jewish law permits the destruction of Gaza in order to bring
safety to Israel.

It echoes an uncompromisingly brutal counsel from Rabbi Friedman, the
charismatic Chabad figure who redirected Dylan towards Judaism, in
response to a question posed in Moment magazine’s "Ask the Rabbis" feature.

The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy
sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle).

Yet, Israel seems largely impervious to criticism; wrapped up in what it
views as a justified self-righteous mentality.

It is a mindset which some have compared to those of Afrikaner settlers
in Apartheid South Africa and the European settlers in Algeria: The
outside world simply does not understand. The methods employed may seem
harsh and bullying but they are done in the name of self-preservation.

What the Zionist mindset cannot demonstrate as being moral it has
nonetheless imposed through force and given the history of suffering by
the Jewish people it has been a case of Zionism ‘right or wrong’ so far
as its lobbying agents are concerned.

As things stand, the two-state solution has for years been an all but
dead proposition, and a one state solution would negate Zionist
aspirations and equate to national suicide.

The resilience of the Israelis, their tenacity and ferocious resolution
to hold on to the state which they have carved out is evident in Dylan’s
final verse.

Neighborhood bully
Standing on the hill
Running out the clock
Time standing still

It is an explicit statement that Zionist Israel is determined to outlast
its enemies and its critics and intends to persevere literally until the
end of time.

(4) White tears from Israel

    Eric Walberg<walberg2002@yahoo.com>

17 October 2016 at 23:02

http://ericwalberg.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=642:white-tears-from-israel&catid=39:europe-canada-and-us-&Itemid=92

White tears from Israel

Monday, 17 October 2016 07:30

Eric Walberg

The McGill Daily reported a serious problem. "White tears" have
increased sharply on campus "by 40% just in September this year". It's
not tears from tear gas or shootings, as happens every day in the
occupied territories, the result of routine Israeli acts of terrorism.
No, heaven forbid. It is the tears of anti-BDS students who complaint
about BDS activists, who see red when they see kippah wearing students
with pro-Israel, anti-BDS buttons and posters.

It's a satire. An effective one. Good on you, Phlar Daboub. It hit home.

The anti-BDS activists are in a tizzy. Political science student Jordan
Devon, the former president of Israel on Campus, said the satire mocks
students who opposed BDS."Our concerns about anti-Semitism are real," he
said. "This says that Jewish concerns are a joke. Yet Jews are the No. 1
victims of hate crimes in North America."

Boo, hoo. Someone calling you names? Wake up, Jordan. Jews have never
had it so good. Canada embraces Jews, they are at the top of the pecking
order. They/you get spurious legislation supporting Israel passed in the
twinkling of an eye. Grow up. This is not high school. Learn how to
behave in public and you will not be called names.

Jordan quotes a 2015 Brandeis survey
(https://www.brandeis.edu/cmjs/noteworthy/antisemitism.html) that shows
'alarmingly' that:

*One-quarter of undergraduate respondents describe hostility toward
Israel on campus by their peers as a "fairly" or "very" big problem and
nearly 15% perceive this same level of hostility toward Jews.

*Nearly one-quarter of respondents report having been blamed during the
past year for the actions of Israel because they were Jewish.

*About one-third of college undergraduate respondents report having been
verbally harassed during the past year because they were Jewish.

*Despite a significant number perceiving their campus environment to be
hostile to Israel and Jews, students report high levels of connection to
Israel. These levels of connection are higher than those found among
similar individuals in 2014, before the Israel-Hamas conflict.

The study reaches the no-brainer conclusion: Connection to Israel is the
strongest predictor of perceiving a hostile environment toward Israel
and Jews on campus and, to a lesser extent, of personal experiences of
antisemitic verbal harassment. It is likely that those who are highly
connected to Israel become a target of antisemitic or anti-Israel
sentiment because they make their support for Israel known.

Wow. Imagine that. You've never felt an anti-Jewish sentiment all your
cosseted life, then you join the 'Love Israel' club at McGill, and
suddenly you see hostile faces. Your article extolling the Jewish state
is rejected by the student paper. The editor Ben Ger says he prefers the
writings of the anti-Zionist Jewish group Teyf (non-kosher).

Our Jordans want the university to muzzle their foes, to force them to
print pro-Israeli hasbarah (propaganda), lies defending a pariah state,
which murders its captives willfully, denies normal freedoms to its Arab
citizens that we Canadians take for granted.

The BDS activists are fed up with university rejection of their rightful
demands to boycott Israel in McGill's investment decisions. To them
'freedom of speech' is sacred. It means speaking truth to power,
especially when the truth is unpopular. That means, in Jewish-friendly
Canada, protesting Israeli atrocities, which our government and McGill
are too cowardly to do. They are angry that our government passes
spurious laws to support Israeli hasbarah (propaganda) and denounce
Canadians speaking out for justice.

If Jordan wants to know about real racism, he should speak with Muslim
or black or Indian (our First Nation or east Indian) students, as Phlar
suggests in his satire. If you wants to avoid hearing slurs connecting
you via your kippah with a racist state, join the BDS movement. You will
be welcomed warmly, people will be happy to wear kippahs in solidarity.
You will never hear a bad word about Jews.

You'll hear a lot of bad words about Israel, because, as the Brandeis
survey tells us, it's Israel that is the cause of anti-Jewish prejudice.
It's because you identify with a pariah state that people don't like
you. As Woody Allen told his Zionist brother-in-law: I may be
self-hating, but it's not because I'm a Jew.

Jordan' friend Jeff Bicher, executive director of Hillel Montreal, also
whined: the BDS situation has made Jewish students feel "it’s us versus
them." "It makes a specific group uncomfortable and has poisoned the
atmosphere on campus," said Eden Moalem, an exercise science student at
Concordia.

"It’s a situation that’s exploding on campuses everywhere, but seems
particularly pronounced in Canada." Yes, Eden. Life is no paradise for
Palestinians, though it is for Jews in Canada, if they are good Canadian
citizens. Not flitting off to Israel, planting trees on flattened
Palestinian villages, joining the IDF, and shooting people.

And be proud that Canadian students are so empathetic to the world's
underdog, oppressed by people who have kidnapped the name 'Jew' for
nefarious ends.

Jeff is right. It's us versus them. Which side are you on? And be
prepared to stand up when you are pilloried. Or, if you must support
Israel, just hold your breath til you graduate. The mainstream media
welcomes hasbarah, and you will fit right in.