Henry Siegman, Leading Voice of US Jewry, on Gaza: "A Slaughter of Innocents"

[Divernan]

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/30/henry_siegman_leading_voice_of_us

Given his background, what American Jewish leader Henry Siegman has to say about Israel’s founding in 1948 through the current assault on Gaza may surprise you. From 1978 to 1994, Siegman served as executive director of the American Jewish Congress, long described as one of the nation’s "big three" Jewish organizations along with the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. Born in Germany three years before the Nazis came to power in 1933, Siegman’s family eventually moved to the United States. His father was a leader of the European Zionist movement that pushed for the creation of a Jewish state. In New York, Siegman studied the religion and was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi by Yeshiva Torah Vodaas, later becoming head of the Synagogue Council of America. After his time at the American Jewish Congress, Siegman became a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He now serves as president of the U.S./Middle East Project. In the first of our two-part interview, Siegman discusses the assault on Gaza, the myths surrounding Israel’s founding in 1948, and his own background as a German-Jewish refugee who fled Nazi occupation to later become a leading American Jewish voice and now vocal critic of Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories.

"When one thinks that this is what is necessary for Israel to survive, that the Zionist dream is based on the repeated slaughter of innocents on a scale that we’re watching these days on television, that is really a profound, profound crisis — and should be a profound crisis in the thinking of all of us who were committed to the establishment of the state and to its success," Siegman says. Responding to Israel’s U.S.-backed claim that its assault on Gaza is necessary because no country would tolerate the rocket fire from militants in Gaza, Siegman says: "What undermines this principle is that no country and no people would live the way that Gazans have been made to live. … The question of the morality of Israel’s action depends, in the first instance, on the question, couldn’t Israel be doing something [to prevent] this disaster that is playing out now, in terms of the destruction of human life? Couldn’t they have done something that did not require that cost? And the answer is, sure, they could have ended the occupation."

[Divernan]

1. Amy Goodman questions him re Israeli historians' accounts:

From the link above, Amy Goodman, interviewing Siegman, asks him about accounts by Israeli historians, Benny Morris and Ari Shavit of Israeli acts of ethnic cleansing and terrorism.

HENRY SIEGMAN: The Israeli historian (Morris), right, then in the book Righteous Victims, in which he said—I recall, when I read it, I was shocked—in which he—particularly in his most recently updated book, which was based on some new information that the Israel’s Defense—the IDF finally had to open up and publish, that Israeli generals received direct instructions from Ben-Gurion during the War of Independence to kill civilians, or line them up against the wall and shoot them, in order to help to encourage the exodus, that in fact resulted, of 700,000 Palestinians, who were driven out of their—left their homes, and their towns and villages were destroyed. This was terror, even within not just the terrorist groups, the pre-state terrorists, but this is within the military, the Israeli military, that fought the War of Independence. And in this recent book, that has received so much public attention by Ari—you know, My Promised Land.

HENRY SIEGMAN: Ari Shavit. He describes several such incidents, too. And incidentally, one of the people who—according to Benny Morris, one of the people who received these orders—and they were oral orders, but he, in his book, describes why he believes that these orders were given, were given to none other than Rabin, who was not a general then, but he—and that he executed these orders.

AMY GOODMAN: What did it mean that he executed these orders, Rabin?

HENRY SIEGMAN: That he executed civilians. And the rationale given for this when Shavit, some years ago, had an interview with Benny Morris and said to him, "My God, you are saying that there was deliberate ethnic cleansing here?" And Morris said, "Yes, there was." And he says, "And you justify it?" And he said, "Yes, because otherwise there would not have been a state." And Shavit did not follow up. And that was one of my turning points myself, when I saw that. He would not follow up and say, "Well, if that is a justification, the struggle for statehood, why can’t Palestinians do that? What’s wrong with Hamas? Why are they demonized if they do what we did?"

[cpwm17]

5. I saw Bill Maher talked about Benny Morris on his show and Maher supports Morris' position

that even though the ethnic cleansing was unprovoked, it was necessary to create that state of Israel. Bill Maher is an extreme racist so it's not at all surprising that he supports ethnic cleansing.

There are no links to most of Bill Maher's shows, but this does cover Benny Morris:

http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/israel-stands-by-the-damned-of-1948-as-it-seeks-to-finish-the-nakba

His argument echoed that of the Israeli revisionist historian Benny Morris, another leading light of the Zionist left, whose early work exposed the mass expulsions of Palestinians in 1948 and before, but who declared in a shocking interview with Shavit during the height of the Second Intifada that Israel had not gone far enough.

The Jewish state would never be at peace, Morris suggested, until it purged the rest of the Arab demographic contaminants living within its realm.

“I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands,” Morris told Shavit. Building on his zero-sum analysis, he continued: “A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it. When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it’s better to destroy.”

[yurbud]

9. that last line is key to the whole victim meme. Israel took Jews real victimhood in the Holocaust

and transferred it to their position in Palestine, where in fact everyone did NOT want to destroy them--they just didn't want to be displaced and overrun without having a say in it.

[malaise]

2. And the answer is, sure, they could have ended the occupation."

Sadly stealing all that land is their raison d'être because 'they' chose themselves as the 'chosen people'.

[sulphurdunn]

3. I don't think any sane person

can any longer consider what is happening in Gaza as anything other than a premeditated massacre.

[Divernan]

7. Some are starting to refer to it as the Palestinian Holocaust.

[JackInGreen]

4. The articles point not withstanding

'Jewry'...really? Come on dude...we can make arguments without resorting to something that could easily be taken as a slur.

[Divernan]

6. "Jewry" is no slur according to the Oxford Dictionary

And I was quoting the exact headline used by Democracy Now in it's very favorable article about a leading American rabbi.
Definition of Jewry in English:
Jewry
Syllabification: Jew·ry
Pronunciation: /ˈjo͞orē

/
noun (plural Jewries)
"Jews collectively."
More example sentences

" Moreover, the nation-states of the Enlightenment were considered more insidiously dangerous to Jewry than the nation-states of reaction."
"His aim was for the nation of Eastern European Jewry to survive and continue."
"Grenada and Cordoba were home to the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry under Muslim rule."
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/Jewry

[JackInGreen]

8. Fair enough

Still sounds offensive to me but that's probably bias, I've never heard it outside of really harsh and nasty tones from people i'd color as anti-semites. (not that it was the only thing used, but other true slurs often featured in the same convo.)