The question in my mind is whether the choices of which abuses to protest are conditioned by (maybe hopelessly) complex combinations of the practical (only so many hours in a day) and the ideological. As a Jew, I tend to take Israel's bad actions more personally, feel more responsible for them. I believe that many Americans also take the actions of "another democracy" more personally (for the sake of not getting completely lost in all the questions begged by the phrase in quotes I will ignore them here); and rather than a double standard, maybe there is the feeling that Israel is more open to influence as a "non-autocracy."
Please note that I don't assert that any of these intuitions are true, but they probably help determine how people end up spending their limited time. I certainly would agree with a suggestion that Arab Americans ought to be protesting Saudi Arabia at least to the same extent that an increasing number of American Jews no longer toe the Israeli line.
Just a final comment: I agree that the focus should be on the establishment of a Palestinian state that is not a bantustan. It is one of those ideas that ought to be universally accepted but somehow remains maddeningly "open to debate." (I'm sure everyone has a list of a dozen or more such issues that persist in our discursive universe willy-nilly because of the gravitational influence that power exerts.)
Arthur
On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 7:37 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I take your point about student victory against administration, but I don't
> think an academic discussion of Zionism is a good idea. Every nation has
> founding mythology and most nations were formed by imposition of central
> authority over others. Debating this is just academic hair splitting.
> A far more useful thing is discussing different plans for solving the
> current situation outside the box of establishing Palestinian bantustan.
> And while the treatment of Palestinians in Israel is deplorable, it pales
> in comparison to how people are treated next door. There are double
> standards here. Israel is judged by higher standard of democratic state and
> condemned while its Arab neighbors are judged by the standard of autocracy
> and left of the hook.
> If we're are concerned about human rights violations let's focus on worst
> abusers not on easiest targets.
>
> Wojtek
> Sent from my Droid
> On Apr 24, 2013 9:21 PM, "Chuck Grimes" <cagrimes42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > You are missing the point. That student government got this to an open
> > vote is a win in a long standing battle between student groups at UCB,
> that
> > reflects the larger battle against the US and Israel.
> >
> > Of course it is meaningless in direct action outcomes. It remains a
> > symbolic gesture. Unfortunately places like Berkeley, Madison, et al are
> > sometimes good at symbolic gestures and not much else.
> >
> > There is another level of contention to the resolution and that is
> whether
> > or not the ASUC senate controls how ASUC funds are spent and in this case
> > invested. At a guess, there is probably a committee with administration
> > oversight that can control that power if it wants to. This level showed
> up
> > now and again in yore and included who could speak on campus and who
> > couldn't. The ASUC is an alternate source of funding for speakers and
> > entertainment gigs.
> >
> > It occurred to me that if progressive student groups wanted to really get
> > a bang for their bucks, they could have scheduled a series or panel of
> > speakers ranging from Norman Finkelstein to Shlomo Sand to deconstruct
> the
> > heroic myths of Israel and Zionism. As I learned from studying Weimar, it
> > is a very old fracture that attempts to weld together an identity that
> > Jewish equals Zionism equals Israel.
> >
> > I'd like to add several academics who would include radical
> > anthropologists and sociologists to illuminate the entire formative
> process
> > of national identities and their universal fabrications. The identity
> > formation process taps into some sort of psyche bound propensity toward
> > tribalism. This prehensility is how we grasp and creat the social and
> > ourselves as social beings.
> >
> > While that view seems far removed from more concrete issues, I would
> argue
> > it is at the core of the problem, which is manifest in the
> historical-legal
> > concept of citizenship. This concept is almost universally constructed on
> > exclusion through a whole state apparatus, just to filter out who
> > eventually ends up in a room with the flag and can take an oath of
> > allegiance. The last thing that a state wants is a open inclusive
> apparatus.
> >
> > CG
> >
> >
> > ______________________________**_____
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> >
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