(I am continuing the other posts, since they all get pretty long. Sorry I think while I am writing, and there's lots to think through.)
Benvenisti is very brutal to his otherwise highly sympathetic audiance. It took me some time to figure him out and I thought of the Matrix I, `I hate to deliver bad news to good people.'
Benvenisti refuses to offer solutions, and says he isn't a politican. Here's my argument taken from Benvensiti's six reasons Here are his six reasons:
``The volatile status quo survives due to the combination of several factors:
1. Fragmentation of the Palestinian community and incitement of the remaining fragments against each other.
2. Mobilization of the Jewish community into support for the occupation regime, which is perceived as safeguarding its very existence.
3. Funding of the status quo by the "donor countries".
4. The strategy of the neighboring states which gives priority to bilateral and global interests over Arab ethnic solidarity.
5. Success of the propaganda campaign known as "negotiations with the Palestinians," which convinces many that the status quo is temporary and thus they can continue to amuse themselves with theoretical alternatives to the "final-status arrangement."
6. The silencing of all criticism as an expression of hatred and anti-Semitism; and abhorrence of the conclusion that the status quo is durable and will not be easily changed.''
http://www.americantaskforce.org:80/daily_news_article/2010/01/22/1264136400_13
In his talk Benvensiti made his audience very angry because he refused to give out answers for the way out. He said, change language, change words, change your thinking. It took me awhile to figure this out, because I went in thinking he was going to answer questions, offer solutions, advocate positions. Benvensiti really pissed them off when he said, forget all that, I am not a politician. (I think Beni could start a riot single handed with his extraordinary hard-ass style. But I got to thinking, this guy is really smart and experienced. I said to myself, Figure him out, stupid.)
I think the answers and solutions are listed above. Change those conditions, and that's the answer. So I went down the list to find one I could think about and a way to change it. I have little to offer on most of them, so I picked 6 to work on.
Like the others 6 requires some guts. Break the silence. This can go along with changing language and words. I thought of Finklestein's term, demonstrated deterance---man that was a flash of recognition. This was Cold War language I understand. Truman had a choice, demonstrate the Bomb or use it. He used it, and that became the foundation for fifty years of nuclear deterance and Cold War.
Changing words and breaking silence are pretty hard to do, but they are also already being done. The other part to breaking down the silence beyond talking back, is listening.
I have been trying to figure out who to listen to. So that's part of the importance of Chomsky, Finklestein, Beinart, Sand, and now Benvenisti. That's one of the reasons I asked for Joel Shalit's review. In the past JS had a pretty good sense of who was worth listening to or reading.
Anyway, there is a serious problem in the US, which is how to change non-Jewish ideas and opinions. My non-Jewish friends and acquainances don't want to talk about Israel Palestine. They don't want to read my Strauss stuff either. It's the same or similar fear of being called anti-semitic. So I can only offer my own way out of that trap of fear.
I was flunked out of senior English in high school for writing a term paper on the Arab-Israeli crisis back in 1960. The cited sources were various UN documents. I had to figure out whether I was an anti-semite. I decided no because my Jewish friends would have let me know. So, the solution is to figure that out in advance. Then start talking and if you get called an anti-semite you can see if it's a corrective, which it sometimes is, or just a meaningless slur.
I also knew by father was an anti-semite to a certainty. I knew what anti-semtism looked like, close up. My baby sister had started to play with the Fink family's daughter. My father put a stop to it. He didn't allow my sister to go to their house or have their daughter come to ours. My sister was about seven! Another neighbor hung a nazis flag in the garage so the Flinks could see it. I saw this because I was friends with the Fink's oldest son and we build model cars in his bedroom where I could see this flag. This shit was everywhere at one time. What was the meaning of this stupid cruelty---on little girls or older boys? Dad didn't like my Chinese kid friend when I was about my sister's age, and I grew in the habit of trying to figure out my father. I didn't get to the depth of it, until I finally saw, this was the underbelly of the US in WWII.
But here's the problem. Most non-Jews do not want to get into their own past, beliefs, prejudices, presumptions, problems. Most people want to forget all that---personal, political homework. The consequence is to remain silent. You can see this in officials of both parties (US) and their submission to the current Israeli party line. (I am speaking about the few liberals who really should know better, and not the ones that agree with the line.)
The other part to breaking the silence is getting the Palestinian voices out (good, bad, and whatever). I have to really dig around for those. Language is a big problem and so is the repression and poverty---less tech gizmos means fewer channels to the outside. I've taken to following Aljazeera to try to dig those out. Seems to me Juan Cole and Tariq Ali are also pretty good sources. We could really use more here.
There is a lot more to this talk than finding politically correct solutions. Somebody in the names mentioned, said the conflict is ruining Israel and Palestine. From my view, it is ruining the US. Look at the continued silence on the wars and chaos the US has perpetrated across the Middle East all the way into South Asia. These wars and chaos have their blowback, and I don't mean terrorism. I mean the destruction of the possibility of a representative democratic republic in the US. This means fundamentally a process, not an answer. An operational system, not a fixed concept. The name for the process is one that comes from Hannah Arendt, the Activa Vita, the active life, the political life---that's what is dying---potentiallly dying, the engagement itself. I think that is what Benvenisiti is also saying in his own blunt, crude, brutal way.
This Benvensiti talk in its brutality reminded me I was once friends-aquantances with two Israelis, FOB long ago. Talking, arguing was like getting out the machette for trail blazing, just brutal stuff. US liberals are not cut out for this work. Here's a funny story to end.
Let's call him Mosie. Mosie was from the IDF equivalent to the US Special Forces. He was expert in marshal arts. One time in the shop, we were arguing over the usual (in the late 70s). He grabbed me and pinned my shoulder against the wall for fun, and said, trust me, relax, I want to show you something. Okay. He bent my arm and elbow back passed the center line of my spine and out toward the other side. It was a kind of mystical demonstration of pain and power. Holy God Almighty, I thought. But it worked. He showed me something he probably didn't realize. Israel is one profoundly sick society. I could see it in the dialectic of body and power and that pain my work buddy Mosie inflicted on me. But here's the weird part. Since I did listen and did concentrate on the yoga mind thing, my shoulder tendons didn't get injured. I survived the test. Weirdness. Pure macho weird.
Sorry. I lost it. I don't know how to put words to this thought. Mosie didn't actually hurt me, as long as I was totally submissive. This is a cop lesson, taught in ghettos everywhere. It's a strange mental construct of oppression. Finklesteing talks about demonstrated deterence.
That's the whole point to what the US and Israel do with state terror, they are getting sicker and sicker with every passing day.
There are darknesses I should probably leave to my journal. Mosie was profoundly fucked up, in deep ways that only pretty good friends would understand. His parents were in the Kibbutz system and turned him over to the mercy of that institution when he was about seven or eight, so he was trained as a little boy to be a soldier, something on the Sparta model----heavy into sado-masochistic homosexuality with warrior dreams of dominance. He wasn't the usual military service model. The psychological depth of this was just devastating to understand. It really did have Nazis written all over it. Mosie will struggle his whole life in this terrible exile of violence and love. He tried to deal with it by opening a marshal arts studio and I lost track of him after he left the shop. I should mention he was brillant, an almost genius engineer. We shared a lot of better things that got lost like mathematics and art, but he would not get off his trip with the Arabs. Among other ironies, his parents where Iranian Jews who immigrated under one of the Shaw pogroms in the 50s. He looked Iranian, except with blue-green eyes. curly hair, and light skin. This kind of look comes out of history like an electric shock. It's the look of Alexander. Is that even possible?
The sociological and psychological problems are something to contemplate. Mosie did not know how to form friendships without violence. He didn't know how to love so he had no long term relationship with women. He only knew how to dominate people. This was the long term consequence of his boyhood in a militarized Kibbutz. I decided this was the singular worse affect of institutional child rearing. You can see a similar process in the US child welfare systems and group homes. This is sociopathic stuff. So when Finklestein says Israel is an insane state power, he is not just talking out his ass. The military society is a sociopathic society.