Off to Israel with Him!

Strewth, just how long has this bloke been in the party? Talk about loose lips:

"The new head of the NSW union movement will criticise federal Labor for following Malcolm Turnbull's push to make Australia a 'start-up nation,' in a speech to the ALP's state conference on Saturday. 'Start-ups often pay much less than established companies [...] getting a mortgage is harder [and they] don't always offer decent employment rights,' Mark Morey, the new secretary of Unions NSW, will say in a speech to the state Labor conference on Saturday." ('Start-up nation' can mean a raw deal for workers: Unions NSW boss Mark Morey, James Robertson, Sydney Morning Herald, 12/2/16)

But, Mark, Labor's not just blindly following M' Lord Turnbull here.

It's acting out of its own DNA, mate. As a Zionist party, the ALP cannot help but lap up and regurgitate anything that comes out of Israel. It used to be the kibbutz, but that's sooo yesterday. Now that we're all agile, innovative, neo-liberal go-getters, it's Upstart Nation.

As Zionist elder Mark Leibler once put it:

"Bill Shorten embodies the traditional core values of the Labor Party, and his solid support for Israel reflects that." (See my 21/10/13 post Danby to Keep Young Bill on Straight & Narrow.)

Mark, mate, zip it! Don't go there! Workers be buggered! It's Israel, mate! Israel!

Remember what they did to Tanya (Once was Warrior) Plibersek?  Not a pretty picture these days, eh?

Mark, I'm telling you, utter one word against Upstart Nation and they'll have you marked down... for a right rambamming.

The Tunnel Vision of Geraldine Brooks 2

I was sufficiently intrigued by Geraldine Brooks' Zionist myopia to check her out more fully. For what they're worth, here are a few bits and pieces I came across:

1) Geraldine Doogue interviews Brooks on the ABC's Compass program, 27/4/08 (The interpolations are mine.):

GD: Now you converted to Judaism from Catholicism. Why so?

GB: Well, actually from nothing. I had left Catholicism behind and I'd been cruising along as a merry atheist. And I guess I have to go back to my father. One of his great fascinations and passions in life grew out of the fact that during World War II he served in what was then Palestine. And because he was a passionate socialist leftie, he was of course attracted to the idea of the Kibbutz movement. And so this was very formative for him and this was one of the things that really animated him.

[So here was a bloke who mistook the colonising - think Jewish settlements today - Jews-only kibbutz movement for socialism, and ignored what was really going on in Palestine at the time. Zionist myopia seems to run in the family.]

I remember the first time I ever paid attention to a news story in the paper was during the Six Day War because Dad cared so passionately about all these places that he'd been to. And I remember when I was about 14 or 15 I would ostentatiously haul around these dog-eared copies of The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich. I could recite Yevtushenko's Babi Yar and I started wearing a Star of David. So there was this kind of engagement, I think, with the history of the Jews that remained a kind of interest of mine.

[Obviously, Dad didn't have the wherewithal to distinguish between Judaism and political Zionist triumphalism. Hence young Geraldine's rushing around, fantasising about a second holocaust, while Israel's engaged in its second great land grab (West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, Golan Heights, Sinai) of the 20th century. Now here we are, 48 years on, with Israeli settlements mushrooming, and there's no evidence that I can find that she's learnt anything new on the subject. Pathetic.]

And then, when I fell in love with a Jewish man [US writer Tony Horwitz], and we were planning to be married, I just couldn't bring myself to be the end of the line for his heritage.

[OMG, is she for real?]

GD: What do you mean?

GB: Well, Judaism is passed through the maternal line - a fact that I've always found engaging for its pragmatism as well as for its feminist implications - but if I had married him and not converted then our children would not be considered Jewish.

GD: Did he care?

GB: He didn't give two hoots! (They both laugh.) But it was just something that I felt that I wanted to do because I didn't want to be another instrument in the shadow of the Shoah, of destroying a Jewish family that had made it through the sack of Jerusalem by the Romans all the way to the end of the 20th century.

[OMFG, she is for real! The Romans FFS!]

2) You'll note the reference to feminism. Brooks is big on feminism, but some, to put it mildly, aren't too impressed. Here's an extract from the Australian-Palestinian novelist Randa Abdel-Fatteh's review of Brooks' 1994 book Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women:

"In perhaps the most astonishing display of veil fetishism in the book, Brooks reflects on her visit to Gaza, where it is as if a brutal military occupation does not exist. The reader is instead regaled with more stories about sexuality and veiling. Brooks says, 'The struggle had changed and so had Gaza. Driving from the huge military roadblock that divides the Gaza Strip from Israel, I hadn't seen a single unveiled woman.' It is astounding that Brooks, a feminist and journalist who purports to be concerned about the situation of Muslim women and human rights abuses, can only summon a comment about the veil in her assessment of her trip to Gaza. Brooks displays no interest in the impact of Israel's occupation on the lives of Palestinian women - the violation of their basic human rights, the impediments that the occupation places on their choices, freedom of movement, and their access to education and health services, as examples. What matters to the classic Orientalist is what Muslim women wear, and that any oppression they suffer must be due to Islam." (Griffith Review)

3) By their tweets ye shall know them: here's one of Brooks' from 18/6:

"Congrats. But please stop releasing balloons, which end up in the ocean killing marine life."

Now while this is a sentiment I agree with, I note that Israel's genocidal war on Gaza last year elicited not a peep/tweet from Brooks. Did she, I wonder, think about the women of Gaza she'd met in the 90s? Too busy dreaming of Davo?

Her retweeting of the following Horwitz tweet, however, is telling - of both:

"Iraq was always 3 nations and should become so again. Kurdistan already set, divide rest between Shiite and Sunni before it's full civil war." (14/6/14)

4) Horwitz, himself, is a little more forthcoming on Gaza. Here's his idea of an appropriate comment on the Gaza massacres:

"My Middle East peace plan. Text everyone to leave and pour sand over the entire region." (29/7/14).

And here's another example of his talent for smartarsery:

"Mideast progress: Miss Lebanon refers to photo-bombing contestant as Miss Israel rather than 'Miss Zionist Entity'" (20/1/15)

Needless to say, The Secret Chord was given the thumbs up in a review in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald and should sell like the proverbial hotcakes. Alas, such is the way of the world.

Buy This 'Vicious Anti-Israel Screed' NOW!

To warm you up here's Australia's leading Zionist comedian, Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan:

"[T]he Israel I know is mostly secular, raucously, almost wildly democratic, has a vibrant left wing, having founded in the kibbutz movement one of the only successful experiments in socialism in human history. It is intellectually disputatious; any two Israelis will have three opinions and be happy to argue them to a lamp post. It is multi-ethnic, there is a great stress on human solidarity, there is due process. And I've never heard an Israeli speak casually about the value of Palestinian life." (Israel still looks good, warts & all, The Australian Literary Review, 6/5/09)

Now once you've picked yourself up off the floor, read this extract from Chapter 13 - Cut Off from the Tribe - of Max Blumenthal's new book Goliath: Life & Loathing in Greater Israel. The usual suspects are describing it as a "vicious anti-Israel screed" so you know it's good value:

"Over a plate of surprisingly decent bean curd sauce at the Chinese restaurant - one of only a handful I knew in [Tel Aviv] - [David] Sheen recalled how he arrived in Israel in 1999 from a solidly middle class, ultra-Zionist family from Toronto, Canada. At age 25, he was brimming with excitement about the earthy communal dream that awaited him: 'I saw Israel entirely through the frame of a Zionist education. I grew up in a very heavily Jewish environment, in a Jewish neighborhood, a Jewish school, synagogue - everything. The school was Zionist, and I was heavily immersed in the idea that we need Israel so there won't be another Holocaust, and that Israel needs us because it needs to be built up - it's surrounded with enemies so it needs our help to build itself. So when I first arrived in Israel I was thinking about the collective, and the concept of the Jewish people represented the strongest collective.'

"Though Sheen was heavily immersed in the tribalistic culture of Zionism, he had also cultivated strong leftist views through his participation in anti-globalization protests in Toronto. 'With every other issue besides Israel, I was on the left side of the spectrum,' he said. 'I was a PEP - a Progressive Except for Palestine.' Within a month of arriving in Israel, that began to change. He realized that everything he had known about Israelis and Palestinians was a fantasy cultivated through years of heavy indoctrination. His view of the occupation as a necessary, albeit unpleasant security measure was shattered after he spent long hours chatting with Palestinian workers who woke up at 4am each morning to slip into Israel from Nablus to work construction jobs for meager pay. 'Once I saw how the occupation created a permanent underclass and that it existed to promote exploitation - just by realizing that I broke with the PEP mentality.'

"Sheen's contact with actual Israelis undermined his idealized vision of the Zionist collective. 'Israelis were not exactly trying to pull together in the name of the Jewish people like I thought,' he said. 'It's a dog-eat-dog shark pool where you've got to swim to survive, and nobody has any idea of what civility means. People are manipulative and exploitative without any moral compunction or sense that there's anything wrong with that. They're not embarrassed about taking advantage of other people.'

"Alienated by the aggressive capitalism that was consuming urban life in Israel, Sheen retreated to a kibbutz in the Negev Desert called Kibbutz Samar. At first he thought he had finally found the slow-paced communal lifestyle he had been seeking. But then he peered beneath the kibbutz's socialist veneer: 'What broke me was they got workers from Thailand to work on the kibbutz for next to nothing,' Sheen recounted. 'I realized it wasn't really socialism they were practicing. It was socialism for Jews only. I grew up in multicultural Toronto where diversity was a positive thing. So it went against my values, and I tried to convince the kibbutz not to do this, to let the Thai workers live in normal apartments like everyone else - don't stick 6 of them in a fucking closet. Treat them like normal humans. Very few people even saw it as an issue worth discussing, let alone dealing with. They didn't see them as deserving of basic standards of living. They said, 'They're making more here than they would back in their country.' So that makes it okay? I wanted to get away from capitalism and away from exploitation, but I saw that kibbutz life was just that - it was segregationist Zionism. So I left.'

"In 2006, Israeli forces simultaneously carpet-bombed the Gaza Strip and Southern Lebanon. Israel blanketed the Strip with more than 6,000 artillery shells and missiles, deliberately destroyed Gaza's main power plant, then bombed the access roads to prevent the plant from being repaired. Within the span of about two months, the army had killed at least 202 civilians including 44 children in an operation billed to Israelis as a search for the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. In Southern Lebanon, Israeli bombing turned 800,000 Lebanese citizens - over a quarter of the country's population - into refugees while killing more than 1,100 civilians, including at least 300 children. Summarizing the views of the Israeli military leadership at the time, columnist Yaron London, one of the most prominent television journalists in the country, wrote, 'There is no longer any need for complicated distinctions... In practical terms, the Palestinians in Gaza are all [Hamas leader] Khaled Meshal, the Lebanese are all [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah, and the Iranians are all [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad.'

"Indignant at the disproportionate violence Israel had unleashed against civilians, Sheen joined up with the small but feisty bands of Israeli radical leftists who had dedicated themselves to direct action against their country's militaristic policies. During a gay pride rally in Tel Aviv called 'Queeruption', Sheen and a group of friends held signs reading, 'Stop the bombing.' They were immediately set upon by riot police who beat them with billyclubs before dragging them away.

"'I was shocked,' Sheen remarked. 'Nowadays everyone knows the police are brutal, but at the time I still couldn't believe that Israeli police would attack other Jews - and for simply holding signs.' At another anti-war protest in Tel Aviv, a prim-looking waitress burst through the door of a nearby restaurant and hurled a glass at the protesters. 'I watched that glass hit the ground and shatter. I can still hear the sound. It was when I realized that even in the heart of liberal Tel Aviv there is a seething hatred for anyone with humanistic values,' Sheen said.

"At the time, Sheen was living on a moshav (a collective farm) near the Gaza border. From his home, he listened to the thundering sound of bombs falling on Gaza all day and all night. 'The ground was literally shaking underneath my feet,' he recalled. Sheen ventured into town filled with revulsion at the shelling of Gaza. 'When I told people at the supermarket what I thought of the bombing, they would all say, 'What do you care? It's not going to hit you, it's hitting them.' I said back, 'It's hitting actual people. Doesn't that matter to you?' And they would get enraged and say, 'What are you, a fucking leftist? You don't care about the Jews.' That's when I realized that in Israel, you're either in favor of any level of violence unleashed on those people, no matter who they were, or if you're against it, you're with the terrorists. I was shocked that that attitude was so mainstream.'

"Sheen went on: 'To come out against these wars on civilians - you were cut off. You were not part of the tribe. You were not part of the Jewish people. You were alone. Once you have a personal experience like that, it etches those beliefs into your soul'." (pp 66-68)

Now do yourself a favour and go out and buy it!

Living in a Zionist Bubble

"We lived in a bubble. We didn't know what exists outside the kibbutz."

So commented one of the group of Melbourne Jews, recalling their kibbutz 'experience' back in the 70s, on  the ABC's Compass program, Whatever Happened to... The Kibbutzim (28/7). It set the tone for the entire program.

Not one of our former kibbutzniks - all long since returned to their comfortable Australian middle class existence - at any stage ventured any kind of comment or reflection that went beyond Zionism's ideological bubble. On the contrary, they were having the time of their lives, convinced they were 'creating a new society' and 'making the desert bloom' - until, that is, the Egyptian and Syrian armies rudely intervened in October 1973, "shattering our dreams."

At one point, we heard the testimony of a South African Jew who said he'd become involved in anti-apartheid protests there but left for Israel because he couldn't bear to be part of a racist South Africa. Presumably, Israel's expulsion of the bulk of the Arab Palestinians in 1948 and the Zionist groupthink of the kibbutz combined to ensure that he was not disturbed by a sense of deja vu.

Nor did Compass presenter, Geraldine Doogue's simple-minded narration help, with the kibbutz characterised simply as "a radical social experiment" with no mention of its discriminatory, Jews-only nature, or its central role in the Zionist colonisation and takeover of Palestine. There was, need I say, no mention whatever of dispossessed Palestinians. At one point Doogue referred to "disputed land," but said nothing of the parties to this so-called 'dispute'. Absent any political context, she could have been talking about hippie communes in Nimbin.

In short, viewing Whatever Happened to... The Kibbutzim merely confirmed my original suspicion that it was going to be yet another example of the ABC uncritically dishing out Zionist propaganda. See my 28/7/13 post Zionist Propaganda Alert. 

By way of a corrective, here is some useful data on the genealogy of the kibbutz from Gabriel Piterberg's fine study, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics & Scholarship in Israel (2008). (Given the length of Piterberg's account, I've had to leave out much that is of considerable interest, so please consider the following excerpts merely an appetizer and an incentive to purchase this invaluable, eye-opening book):

"Common knowledge has it that the kibbutz originated from an astonishing socialist experimentation with an ideology the settlers (pioneers, or chalutzim) had acquired in Europe. Even someone as astutely prophetic as and sober as Arendt thought that the kibbutzim were marvellous. That this rendering accords the settlers not only a central role but also hyper-agency is hardly surprising, for these settlers were members of the Second and Third Aliyas, that is, the ruling political elite of the Yishuv (from the 1920s onward), the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) and Jewish Agency (from the 1930s on) and the state of Israel (1948-1977). However, there is solid scholarship that seriously questions this story and offers a threefold correction: it tempers the settlers' hyper-agency by underscoring the pivotal role played by German Jewish settlement experts; it shows that the decisive factors were the conditions and desire of colonization; and that, even in terms of ideational flow from Europe to Palestine, what we have is ideas of colonization and race rather than socialism.

"In the mid 1980s two geographers of the Hebrew University, Shalom Reichman and Shlomo Hasson, published a revealing article on the formative influence of the pre-First World War colonization project of the German Reich in the Posen (Poznan in Polish) province of the east Prussian marches, upon the early phase of the Zionist colonization effort in Palestine. A sizeable chunk of the east Prussian marches, the Ostmark, had been appropriated when Poland was partitioned in the late eighteenth century. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, three of the Ostmark provinces - Eastern and Western Prussia, and Silesia - had a German majority; only the fourth, Posen, had a Polish majority of roughly 60%. Posen was identified by the Germans as a centre of Polish nationalism. The purpose of the state project - the wider background of which was the crisis of German agriculture and the attendant Landflucht (land flight) - was to effect a demographic transformation in Posen first and foremost, and in the Ostmark more generally, by dispossessing the Polish majority of its hold on the land and settling Germans in their stead...

"The German project... had a formative impact upon the Zionist project in four related ways: the impact of the German project resulted in the decisive rejection of the French model that had been introduced by the Rothschild experts; it accorded primacy to national colonization over economic profitability; it accorded primacy to (an equivalent of) the state and its bureaucracy over the market and private capitalists; and it implanted in the WZO what [Gershon] Shafir perceptively calls the pure settlement frame of mind. The agents of this formative impact were two German Jewish settlement experts, Franz Oppenheimer (1864-1943) and perhaps the single most important individual for the Zionist settlement in Palestine, Arthur Ruppin (1876-1943)...

"Ruppin's role in the colonization of Palestine was so pivotal that he is known in Zionist Israeli lore as 'the father of Jewish settlement in the land of Israel'. In addition to settlement... he was also responsible for the historical alliance within Zionism between the nationalist bourgeoisie and the labour movement, and for the agreement with the Nazis on the transfer of German Jews and their capital to Mandate Palestine... [His] Weltanschauung was social Darwinism and its formation occurred in the 1890s and 1900s, within a budding interdisciplinary paradigm that became known as Eugenics or Racial Hygiene (Rassen-hygiene). One of Ruppin's mentors was a central promulgator of the new paradigm in Germany, the blond, blue-eyed biologist Ernst Haeckel, whom Ruppin described in his diary as 'the marvellous German type'. Haeckel's mission was to disseminate 'Darwinism as a Weltanschauung'. From Ruppin's early work in the early 1900s, it is clear that he adhered to a rigid biological determinism of race, whereby 'we are connected to our predecessors not through the spiritual tradition but through the continuity of the primordial substance that exists in our body.' His reflections on the superhuman (Ubermensch) resulted in his conclusion that such a man should develop only among his physical type, from which view the shift to the idea of racial purity needed just a nudge. What made Ruppin concern himself for the rest of his life with the correction and betterment of 'the Jewish race' was the anti-Semitic rejection by his beloved German nation and homeland...

"Evidence for the extent to which the German colonization project in Posen and East Prussia in general informed Ruppin consists both of explicit statements by him that this was the case, and structural similarities between the Prussian and Zionist colonization projects. On several occasions Ruppin stated his indebtedness to the German venture... Two principles evinced the pure settlement vision that underpinned Ruppin's colonizing approach; these in turn were congruous with the spatial concept of the German Colonization Commission. 'One', Reichman and Hasson elaborate, 'was to avoid penetration into areas densely inhabited by another national group, and the other was to form contiguous blocks of settlements'...

"Shafir confirms the argument that the kibbutz was first and foremost a colonizing tool for the formation of a settler project, and that it was based to a considerable degree on social and ethnic exclusion. He observes: '[T]he national character of the kibbutz was its foundation and raison d'etre and determined its composition, and in part its structure. The kibbutz became the most homogenous body of Israeli society: it included almost exclusively East European Jews, since it was unwilling to embrace Middle Eastern and North African Jews, and was constructed on the exclusion of Palestinian Arabs'." (pp 78-87)

Zionist Propaganda Alert

ABC television's religious affairs program Compass is currently screening a series of documentaries under the heading Whatever Happened to...?

As the Compass website explains: "In this series Compass revisits radical religious and social movements in Australia's recent past, exploring their impact and legacy."

To date, they've covered the Hare Krishnas and the Charismatics. Tonight's episode, screened at 6:30 pm, is Whatever Happened to... The Kibbutzim. Here's the blurb:

"Episode 3 - The first Kibbutz was founded in Israel just over 100 years ago. A radical socialist experiment, it combined communal living and Zionist philosophy with the aim of 'making the desert bloom'. Soon there were dozens, and training farms were set up in countries like Australia to prepare young people for the physical hardship of kibbutz life where - in exchange for manual labour - volunteers were provided with food, shelter, education and medical care. In the late 60s and 70s many young Australians, Jewish and non-Jewish, went to Israel to join a kibbutz. Why did they go? How has the experience shaped their lives? And do kibbutzim still operate? Compass finds out."

With a Zionist sales pitch like that - making the desert bloom indeed! - I'm afraid it doesn't bode well. Needless to say, I'll be returning with a corrective after the screening if necessary.

But just in case you find yourself asking whether the kibbutz phenomenon isn't perhaps a tad too marginal to be part of a series on Australian religious and social movements, let me remind you that there is still at least one old bugger around who once came under the influence and has never fully recovered from the experience:

"Two weeks pass [following a hip replacement]. And I've been demoted from the Zimmer to crutches to walking stick. And while I become very attached to my tormentors (a variation on the Stockholm Syndrome), it's time to leave [Mater Hospital]. For Wolper, a Jewish hospital nearer home. If you think the Catholics are tough, you haven't been in Wolper. It's like a kibbutz during the Six-Day War. With a hint of Mississippi slave era (Tote that barge, lift that bale.) And I'm going in for 3 days a week for months." (I'm in the hip crowd, Phillip Adams, The Weekend Australian Magazine, 20/7/13)

Sheridan in Love 1

"What becomes clear, when one looks closely at [Sheridan's] ouvre is that [he] is an ideologue, a crusader and an apologist for one of the most barbaric regimes on the planet and for the acolytes who, without question, back the war crimes and despotic violence that this regime visits on those who disagree with its religious fundamentalism and lust for world domination. In Sheridan's worldview it is also legitimate to vilify, denigrate and misrepresent your intellectual and political opponents, while maintaining your position in the face of competing facts and analysis." (Getting the story straight: Greg Sheridan in the shifting moral sands of Iraq, Martin Hirst & Robert Schutze, espace.library.uq.edu.au, 1/1/04)

The Australian's foreign editor and self-styled "most influential foreign affairs analyst in Australian journalism"* Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan has just published the ultimate paean to Israel, for which his earlier effort, Deep inside the plucky country (19/1/08), was just a warm-up. It seems that the more Israel's stock plunges, the more obvious that something is indeed rotten in the State of Israel, like some demented diehard Stalinist, the more ardent he becomes. Being feted and stroked by the right people, or being on Murdoch's payroll, has nothing to do with it. It's quite simple: Sheridan's in love.

[*From Sheridan's bio on The Australian's website.]

Israel still looks good, warts & all (The Australian Literary Review, 6/5/09) is a ringing defence of the beloved against all who would look sideways at her (most of the planet by now). But I'm reluctant to touch it. After 36 posts hosing down Sheridan's ardours, I'd love nothing better than to let another such steamy display go by. However, considering his alleged influence (do Kevin and Stephen and Joel and crew really hang on his every word?), not to mention the sweep and breadth of this one (do I see a book coming on?), I feel have little choice but to unwind the hose once again. Still (I hate homework like the best of them), it'll be bit by bit, in a series of not necessarily consecutive posts:-

"I have my very own Israel problem and it is this: the Israel I know... bears no relation to the Israel I see in most of the Western media." IOW, the Israel Sheridan "knows" is the real Israel, the rest a mere figment of the Western/Arab imagination. But what kind of Israel can a cosseted, ideologically-blinkered News Ltd 'journalist' get to know?

"That Israel of the Western mind (and indeed of the Arab mind) is a hateful place: right-wing, militaristic, authoritarian, racist, ultra-religious, neo-colonial, narrow-minded, undemocratic, indifferent to world opinion, indifferent especially to Palestinian suffering. Yet the Israel I know is mostly secular, raucously, almost wildly democratic, has a vibrant left-wing, having founded in the kibbutz movement one of the only successful experiments in socialism in human history. It is intellectually disputatious... it is multi-ethnic, there is a great stress on human solidarity, there is due process. And I've never heard an Israeli speak casually about the value of Palestinian life."

Platitudes, form a queue! One at a time, please:

Mostly secular? How can a 'Jewish' state, a state where religion and nationality are one, be mostly secular?

Wildly democratic? Yes, democratic in a fashion. There are parties and elections, but how can a state which uses religious criteria to decide citizenship be wildly democratic? And how can a state that has ethnically cleansed most of its non-Jewish indigenous inhabitants (1948) and subjected the rest (since 1967) to decades of brutal occupation be wildly democratic? Wildly ethnocratic, perhaps, but certainly not wildly democratic. Nor did 66% of Israelis think Israel was wildly democratic when they registered their disatisfaction with Israeli democracy in an Israel Democracy Institute poll in 2007 (66% of public dissatisfied with Israeli democracy, ynetnews.com, 6/10/07) And nor is Israel wildly democratic enough for Israel's minority non-Jewish population: "Amidst the increasingly precarious situation of Palestinian citizens of Israel, prominent and broadly representative members of that community published in 2007 a series of documents setting out visions for Israel as a state of all its citizens with equality for all. The response of the Israeli body politic was overwhelmingly to view these initiatives as an unwelcome threat to the 'Jewish character' of the state. Israel's Shin-Bet secret police, responsible among other things for many 'targeted killings' in the Occupied territories, went so far as to warn that it would 'disrupt the activities of any groups that seek to change the Jewish or democratic character of Israel, even if they use democratic means'." (Anti-Arab racism & incitement in Israel, Ali Abunimeh, thejerusalemfund.org, 25/3/08)

The kibbutz movement - vibrant and socialist? Sorry, Greg, this is 2009 and the kibbutz movement is neither vibrant nor socialist. And anyway, weren't these pre-67 settlements Jews- only?

Intellectually disputatious? Really? Here's Israeli historian Ilan Pappe: "I was boycotted in my university and there had been attempts to expel me from my job. I am getting threatening phone calls from people every day." (Ilan Pappe leaves Israel for England, cites harrassment, muzzlewatch.com, 6/4/07) Ditto for the late Tanya Reinhart who had to leave for the US. (Not, of course, that Sheridan would even bother to read either scholar.) One thing's for sure though: Israel won't tolerate intellectual disputation among its neighbours. This year it bombed the Islamic University of Gaza, and in 2006 it bombed over 20 publishing houses and research centres in the southern suburbs of Beirut (Israel's war on intellectual life among untold stories of summer conflict, dailystar.com, 20/7/07)

Multi-ethnic? Maybe. But harmoniously so? How about the Border Guards of Ethiopian descent who cop such racist abuse from Israeli settlers as "Niggers don't expel Jews! This isn't what we brought you here for!" (Settlers to Ethiopian troops: Niggers don't expel Jews, ynetnews.com, 4/12/08) Which I suppose is preferable to the ubiquitous cry of 'Death to the Arabs'.

A great stress on human solidarity? Er, shouldn't that be 'tribal solidarity'?

Due process? *Sigh* I'm getting lazy. See my 21/7/08 post The 'Motiveless Malignancy' of Samir Quntar.

Nary a bad word about the Palestinians? In its 2007 Israeli Democracy Index, the Israel Democracy Institute found that 87% of all Israeli citizens rated Jewish-Arab relations in the country as being 'poor' and 'very poor'; 78% of Israeli Jews opposed having Arab parties or ministers join Israel's government; Just 56% of Israeli Jews supported full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel; 75% of Israeli Jews agreed with the statement that 'Arabs are inclined to violent behaviour'; 43% of Israeli Jews agreed that 'Arabs are not intelligent'; 55% agreed that 'the government should encourage Arab emigration from the country'. And Greg must've somehow have missed those wonderful t-shirts worn by Israeli soldiers with slogans such as Better use Durex (next to a dead Palestinian baby and his weeping mother) or 1 shot, 2 kills (next to a bull's eye superimposed on a pregnant Palestinian woman), or the comment by the Israeli soldier returned from the Gaza massacre: 'The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers'. (See my 22/3/09 post Ubermenschen)

Hey, but what's a love letter without platitudes? Stay tuned for Sheridan in Love 2.