Must Jews always see themselves as victims? (leader, party, state)

[dixiegirl7]

Originally Posted by Lancet71

78% voted for Obama because the majority of us were smart enough to vote for him rather then someone with Palin as a vice presidential candidate.As for you,you are a full blown racist and your quota based lending in todays market is a myth! Some people just target others when they feel inferior and then call us victims when we speak up.

78% of who voted for Obama? Obama did not win the election with 78% of the vote. It was more like Obama - 52% to McCain 46%.

[mossomo]

?

Originally Posted by mateo45

... Israeli state's "siege mentality" style of national identity.

Wow. Really. My collegues in history would consider it ignorant to forget the HOLOCAUST. Ummm not to mention the continued mortar, missle and rocket strikes into southern Israel. Not to mention the continued Hisbullah rocket strikes into Northern Israel.

We are talking 5000 strikes against random civilian targets since the Gaza disengagement when Israel politicians called it land for peace. Palistinians got the land but there was no peace.

Serious. You don't get the siege mentality? Remember the bombing of the youth center in Argentina? Wasn't there a service attendent in LAX that was killed because she was taking reservations for an Israeli airline? Remember the Jews killed at the Munich Olympics, Olympians were killed. Remember when Saddam indiscriminately fired interregional missles on the jewish state? A Yemini just recently killed a jew in Yemin because he was a jew.

[Lancet71]

Originally Posted by dixiegirl7

78% of who voted for Obama? Obama did not win the election with 78% of the vote. It was more like Obama - 52% to McCain 46%.

before you jump the gun why don't you re-read a few posts back and you'll understand!

[NewToCA]

Originally Posted by mossomo

How do you deal with Hamas who swears to the elimination of the jewish people. That is the challenge.

Well, Hamas obviously has to change their charter. I've stated that in quite a few threads.

However, the intent of my posting was to say that attitudes towards each other need to change if they want any long term meaningful progress. This gets back to the original intent of Prof Daniel Bar Tal's research, which has a focus of trying to determine how to change attitudes (if possible at all in the region).

[TnHilltopper]

Originally Posted by justNancy

I disagree. Many Jews do not support Israel at all.

By the way, I wonder how many people who have posted on this or other threads about Israel have any idea that more than 20% of Israelis are not Jewish. At least 2 million of the approximate 7.2 million people in Israel are not Jews.

Over 1.3 million Arabs live & work in Israel. Approximately 19% of Israeli citizens are Muslim. I guess saying Israel is a Jewish state is no different than saying the USA is a Christian state.

Regarding discrimination, there are so many myths about the way Arabs live in Israel because of the Palestinian conflict. Arabic, like Hebrew, is one of its official languages and there are hundreds of Arab schools. Arabs have equal voting rights. In fact, it is one of the few countries in the Middle East where women can vote!

I just want to add that, as I said before, I am very saddened by the deplorable conditions in which so many Palestinians live. However, the PLO is equally to blame, since Israel proposed building neighborhoods to house the refugees and the PLO not only forbade it, it threatened to kill any refugee who moved out of the camps.

As an avid reader of Haaretz, I do find it interesting that there is a great deal of discussion on these issues within Israel and also by the worldwide Jewish community who tend to be more Orthodox as opposed to Zionist.

Originally Posted by mossomo

Must Jews always see themselves as victims?

Not only jews who see themselves as victims, but blacks who see themselves as victims, arabs who see themselves as victims, muslims who see themselves as victims.

But victims at the hand of who.



The irony of empowered. You are a mod there TnHilltopper, right? Yes or no, please.

So brah, whats the opposite of diaphanous. Your opinion is less than. The unsaid in my perspective is apparent. A question mark does not change your main idea. It's like you hide behind a quote. Is it true you're belief is...

So yes or no, is it your belief that jews see themselves as victims?

As has been discussed in this thread the idea of "victim status" need not just apply to Jews or any other single group but the article posted in the paper and the material used to make various points used Jews as the topic of their discussion.

As to your eluding to some under handed or nefarious intent of mine and your quote of using places like the Times to speak for us, I think you should consider the context first. I'm not letting the Times or Post speak for me, I merely picked an interesting topic out of a paper and then posted primarily my own thoughts in the debate. While I may use reference material as a means of example, most all of my posts in this and nearly all subjects on this forum are of my own thoughts, which is the point. (as opposed to dropping a link to an article as a response)

So "brah" like totally try again with blunt attempt of associative/connotation via mind reading and crystal balls.

Originally Posted by NewToCA

Well, Hamas obviously has to change their charter. I've stated that in quite a few threads.

However, the intent of my posting was to say that attitudes towards each other need to change if they want any long term meaningful progress. This gets back to the original intent of Prof Daniel Bar Tal's research, which has a focus of trying to determine how to change attitudes (if possible at all in the region).

Yes they do and many of the current attitudes are becoming generational so I suspect any changes in sentiments are going to take at least a generation or two to address. I can use America's views towards racism from the turn of the century until now to get an idea of what it takes to remove such long held and felt opinions.

[mateo45]

Re: the defense of Israeli excesses with, "the Jews have been victims", "remember the Holocaust", "they want to wipe Jews off the face of the earth", etc..... please, enough already, I think we got all that by now.

The problem is, no matter how badly they've been or continue to be "persecuted", "threatened", whatever.... even "victims" still have moral obligations and responsibility for their actions.

And you certainly don't go around killing women and children, and dismiss it with "They deserved it", or "They did it too!". That's not just lack of empathy, that's a psychopath's defense.

Just personally, I think Israel will finally be on the road to collective healing, when it can not only empathize with & forgive its enemies, but also bring it's moral weight and Holocaust experience not for "victimhood", but as a global champion & voice re: so many other ethnic "cleansings" that regularly raise their ugly head... Rwanda, Cambodia, South Africa, Darfur, Tibet, Bosnia, etc., etc.

At the end of WWII, the noted Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung said: "No, the demons are not banished; that is a difficult task that still lies ahead. Now that the angel of history has abandoned the Germans, the demons will seek a new victim. And that won't be difficult. Every man who loses his shadow, every nation that falls into self-righteousness, is their prey.... We should not forget that exactly the same fatal tendency to collectivization is present in the victorious nations as in the Germans, that they can just as suddenly become a victim of the demonic powers." -The Postwar Psychic Problems of the Germans (1945)

[Redisca]

Originally Posted by TnHilltopper

Notably, those Jews living in Iran which constitute the second largest population of Jews in the Middle East seem to be content residing where they are and removed from this type of phenomena.

Since the formation of Israel, the Iranian Jewish community has shrunk by 75%. That's hardly evidence of Jews being content to live there. Moreover, there are significant restrictions placed upon Jews in Iran with respect to leaving the country -- never mind to go to Israel, to go anywhere. If Jews were content living in Iran, and if Iran did not have a stake in holding on to its Jewish community for propaganda purposes, I doubt those restrictions would need to be in place. Moreover, I don't think Iranian Jews actually have the freedom to express any opinion critical of their treatment, without the risk of significant repercussions from the authorities. The only exception was the Holocaust denial cartoon contest, and even then, it seemed to me, most Iranian Jews were simply afraid to say anything about it. I remember how in the eighties, a lot of people in the West were saying that Soviet Jews are perfectly happy in the USSR -- while in fact, most of us never felt at home and wanted to leave. No doubt some Iranian Jews can be found who would never leave Iran. But as a Russian-born Jew, I also knew Jews who would never leave Russia despite the rabid (and institutionalized) antisemitism of that society, even if given a chance, and I know how easily their motivations can be misinterpreted, intentionally or not. In fact, my grandfather was one. The majority of these people prefer to stay where they are simply because of fear of change and because they are so jaded, they don't think any place will be better. Some side with the regime and actually justify antisemitic policies, but they are an exception, not the rule.

Originally Posted by TnHilltopper

Also those Jews living in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast of Russia.

You would wonder why a country with such a long and ugly history of antisemitism as Russia would found a "homeland" for Jews in Birabidzhan. Kindness? Sorry, but JAO was an ethnic cleansing project, albeit one that Stalin simply had no chance to complete. Located in the general area of the Russian Far East traditionally reserved for the severest of the GULAGS, JAO would serve as a pretext to deport all Russian Jews from Russia (you know, the major cities and university centers) into Birobidzhan and restrict them to that area -- a detention camp, if you will. Are the slightly more than 2,000 Jews living there today happy to live there? They've got to be, since that's down from more than 17,000 in 1939, and not taking into account all the wartime refugees. Claiming that JAO is a fair "solution" to the problem of Jews lacking a homeland is akin to saying that the Venetian Ghetto was a fair solution, or the Pale of Settlement.

[Fred314X]

Originally Posted by Redisca

You would wonder why a country with such a long and ugly history of antisemitism as Russia would found a "homeland" for Jews in Birabidzhan. Kindness? Sorry, but JAO was an ethnic cleansing project, albeit one that Stalin simply had no chance to complete. Located in the general area of the Russian Far East traditionally reserved for the severest of the GULAGS, JAO would serve as a pretext to deport all Russian Jews from Russia (you know, the major cities and university centers) into Birobidzhan and restrict them to that area -- a detention camp, if you will. Are the slightly more than 2,000 Jews living there today happy to live there? They've got to be, since that's down from more than 17,000 in 1939, and not taking into account all the wartime refugees. Claiming that JAO is a fair "solution" to the problem of Jews lacking a homeland is akin to saying that the Venetian Ghetto was a fair solution, or the Pale of Settlement.

I was wondering when, or if, anyone would bring this up. If the government of, let's say, the United States proposed to set up a "homeland" for black Americans in northern Alaska, that would be an approximation of relocating Russian Jews to Birobidzhan. And immediately after, you'd see threads here on C-D asking whether black Americans saw themselves as victims. (Or, if it will help people to identify, feel free to substitute "Hispanic," "Asian," or the ethnic group you belong to, for "black.")

[TnHilltopper]

Originally Posted by Fred314X

I was wondering when, or if, anyone would bring this up. If the government of, let's say, the United States proposed to set up a "homeland" for black Americans in northern Alaska, that would be an approximation of relocating Russian Jews to Birobidzhan. And immediately after, you'd see threads here on C-D asking whether black Americans saw themselves as victims. (Or, if it will help people to identify, feel free to substitute "Hispanic," "Asian," or the ethnic group you belong to, for "black.")

While the author of the article posted in the OP spefically referred to Jews, as has been mentioned several times in this thread is how this also might be applied to other groups as well. I used the example of the victimization of blacks in America via racism that later gave birth to a black solidarity movement which was a positive influence to civil liberties and rights in general.

As to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast of Russia, I profess a great deal of ignorance on this subject as I wasn't even aware of its existence until recently. However from the wiki entry (yes I know wiki isn't carved in stone)

Stalin's theory on the National Question held that a group could only be a nation if they had a territory, and since there was no Jewish territory, per se, the Jews were not a nation and did not have national rights. Jewish Communists argued that the way to solve this ideological dilemma was by creating a Jewish territory, hence the ideological motivation for the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Politically, it was also considered desirable to create a Soviet Jewish homeland as an ideological alternative to Zionism and the theory put forward by Socialist Zionists such as Ber Borochov that the Jewish Question could be resolved by creating a Jewish territory in Palestine. Thus Birobidzhan was important for propaganda purposes as an argument against Zionism which was a rival ideology to Marxism among left-wing Jews.

As Redisca pointed out it being Siberian, where Stalin sent what he saw as undesirable to essentially die, I noticed the climate of the specific area is hardly Siberian but I understand the sentiments of exile to the outer realms and away from centers of learning. Of course prior to Israel becoming its own nation, It is difficult to think that it was a great center of learning as say, St. Petersburg or Moscow.

I would be curious as to why Jewish population has declined so severely as regardless of its intent, today it seems far less contentious than living in the Middle East. I think I will have to do more research on this as judging by world sentiment towards Israel, is this more of an ideological thing than a religious issue, because apparently those Jews who still live in Birabidzhan appear to be excluded from such sentiments as expressed by Bar Tal and the author, Antony Lerman.

If nothing else, another interesting bit of history brought to my attention.

[Lancet71]

While tracing my history quite some time ago I traced roots to eastern poland,russia,austria,and mostly in modern day Ukraine(Lviv oblast).During WW2 alot of these areas were rounding up jewish people and some camps were set up in some of these other countries as well.If you check from this time to now you'll see a MAJOR drop in the jewish population because of the extreme anti-semitism.In the world as a whole even in countries like Australia it is very common to see anti-semitism.Unfortunately when talks about the holocaust come out people see it as going to the well, like when black people discuss slavery. The fact is that it HAPPENED and even though there still is bigotry in the world most groups see it as a never ending cycle if it pertains directly to their ethnic group or race.For people who have never felt persecution,you should be very happy. Why should I get a dirty look because I wear a star of david instead of a cross? You will always get people that cling to the victim status like when affirmative action was put into place;but then you have the individuals who want to be judged on their own merit and take offense to being hired for this reason. So why does the world view a race or religion as victims when the majority of the people DO NOT cling to it. Maybe it's just the person who points it out is looking for a reason to single someone out. So maybe it's not the jewish person playing the victim,but the person watching who is merely looking for a reason to ostracize that person.