After my second book, on liberal parties in settler societies, was published in 2002 I thought about what I wanted to research and write about next. I decided to do a comparative study that would cast light on the phenomenon of military politicians--former senior military officers elected to serve in the Knesset--in Israel. I figured this subject was worth writing about for two reasons. First, serving generals or former generals in government had negotiated every agreement reached with the Arabs from the armistice agreements of 1949 to the Oslo accords. Second, since 1967 military politicians had a virtual lock on the defense ministry and also played a dominant role in the Labor Party and the Likud. So I wanted to be able to make an educated guess as to how much longer the phenomenon would last in Israel.
I knew as a student of American history that the United States had such a class and from doing research in South Africa I knew that it also had a class. Not wanting to rely on such a narrow base of examples I read histories of all the former British settler colonies to see if I could find a trace of any additional groups. My minimum standard was at least four military politicians who had served in parliament or the central government with a minimum of two each during two separate periods to constitute a class. Less than this would not allow me to make conclusions about the country. After I failed to turn up any candidates among the former British settler colonies I expanded my search to include all the European colonial powers that were democracies during their colonial period or within 20 years of its end (i.e. Weimar Germany). I also failed to turn up any cases.
After taking my American and South African cases I was able to divide them into three separate periods each for a potential of six cases to examine: 1) the early American republic 1780s-1790s; 2) the antebellum period 1824-1860; 3) the postbellum period 1869-93; 4) the Boer republics period 1859-1900; 5) the Union of South Africa 1910-1948; 6) the apartheid period 1975-1993. For comparison I was looking at a multiparty system with at least three parties that could be readily compared to Israeli parties and a minimum of at least two major military politicians. Only two periods fit this minimum requirements: the antebellum period and the Union of South Africa. The early American republic and the Boer republics had two-party systems and the Boers also lacked standing armies and had less than 20,000 voters in any election. And during the apartheid period South Africa had only a single elected military politician, Defense Minister Magnus Malan.
America's Indian-fighter politicians of the antebellum period ended with Zachary Taylor. Four presidents (George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Harrison, Zachary Taylor) and one vice-president (Richard Johnson) had been Indian fighters. Washington had been an Indian fighter in the French and Indian War (1754-63); Jackson and Harrison in the War of 1812; and Taylor in the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War, and the Second Seminole War. Except for Harrison they were mainly famous for victories over conventional armies, but the Indian fighting had significantly advanced their military careers and made their subsequent victories over the British or Mexicans possible. The same can be said of Arab-fighter politicians in Israel from Israel's first two generations of military politicians such as Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, and Ariel Sharon.
The postbellum Indian wars in the West produced no major politicians because the wars involved a professional army rather than a popular militia system and the few settlers in the West were remote from the population concentrations on the East Coast, in the Great Lakes Region, and in California. Thus the link between the serving soldiers and the politicians/war heroes were broken. But this Indian-fighter politician class was replaced by first heroes of the Mexican War and then of the American Civil War.
In South Africa the African-fighter politicians of the South African (Transvaal) Republic came to an end with the conquest of that republic by the British in 1900. They in turn were replaced by politicians who were senior officers in the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). These politicians were quite numerous during the decade of 1907-1917. But many were forced to retire from politics for having sided with the Afrikaner rebels in 1914 who fought on the side of the Germans/neutrality in order to prevent South Africa from siding with the Allies. Louis Botha died in office as prime minister in 1919. This left just two members of the class: Jan Smuts, Botha's assistant, and James Barry Munick Hertzog. Smuts and Hertzog remained rivals until 1934 when their two parties fused. Hertzog retired from politics in 1942 a broken man and Smuts retired in 1950 after having lost the 1948 election to the National Party. The two world wars failed to produce any military politicians largely because the Union Defense Force was a professional army and it fought in East Africa and France in World War I and in North Africa in World War II.
So based on the experiences of the United States, South Africa, and Israel in the 19th and 20th centuries I concluded that three things are necessary to produce a class of military politicians. First, there must be a conscript or militia system rather than a professional army. Second, there must be settler self-rule within twenty years of the end of serious fighting with the native population. Third, there must be a serious if not existential threat posed by the resistance of the natives to the settlers. The other settler colonies lacked military politicians for three main reasons. First, the imperial army was responsible for the defense of the colony. Second, the settlers lacked self rule during the period of fighting with the natives. Third, the native resistance never posed a serious threat to the settlers during the 19th and 20th centuries. In several colonies two or even all three of these conditions applied.
Israel's military politicians, like those of the United States and South Africa, belong to several different political parties and have a range of political beliefs. The main difference among the groups is that the Afrikaners and Americans had intertwined political and military careers rather than sequential careers as in Israel. For example, Washington served as a British army officer, then as a politician in Virginia's House of Burgesses, then as the commanding general in the American Revolution and finally as the president. Jackson had an early political career in the 1790s. He then withdrew to concentrate on a career as a planter and as a general in the Tennessee militia. He then became a regular U.S. Army general in 1814 and served for a decade before quitting to run for president in 1824. Louis Botha, Jan Smuts, and Barry Hertzog all were professional politicians before serving with the Afrikaner commandos in the Boer War. Botha became commander of the Boer forces in early 1901. After the war he served as a politician again before once more donning a uniform to fight the Germans in South West Africa in 1915. He then returned to Pretoria to continue as prime minister. Hertzog never wore a uniform in the field again after 1902. Smuts served as a general in both World War I and World War II. In the United States only Taylor and Ulysses S. Grant had conventional Israeli-style consecutive careers. Taylor retired from the Army in 1848 after over forty years and ran for president. Grant retired in 1868 after some 17 years of service over a quarter century period.
So my prediction is that for some fifteen to twenty years after Israel signs a peace treaty with the Palestinians, if such a peace treaty is ever signed, Israel will continue to have military politicians. This is important because among the center-left parties only former generals have the security credentials to be able to sell a peace deal with the Arabs. Dayan, Allon, Rabin, and Sharon all had those credentials. Without Rabin, Peres would not have been able to sell the Oslo agreements to the Israeli public. So this phenomenon of Israeli militarization should be embraced by supporters of peace rather than deplored.
Since June 1967 only two politicians have served as defense ministers in Israel who were not either former generals or professional military industry technocrats (Shimon Peres and Moshe Arens). These three were: Menahem Begin (1980-81), and Amir Peretz (2006-07). Begin deferred to whatever the Israeli general staff wanted. Peretz ended up in charge during the Second Lebanon War with a new inexperienced prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and a chief of staff from the Israeli Air Force rather than the ground forces. The next year he was quietly replaced by Ehud Barak, the most decorated soldier in Israeli history, and his political career seems to have come to an end.
Comparable military dominance of civilian institutions existed in the United States where former Civil War generals had a lock on the Republican nomination for president from 1868 to 1892, with the exception of James Blaine who was nominated in 1884 and lost to Grover Cleveland. Grant served for two terms and Ruthorford B. Hayes, Chester Arthur, and Benjamin Harrison each served for a single term as president. In South Africa former Boer generals had a lock on the premiership from 1910 to 1948. But because the South African case involves fewer politicians who were more skilled, the U.S. example is a better one to compare with Israel.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Are Zionists settlers?
Zionists have traditionally seen Israeli Jews as "returned natives"--a people that has reconstituted itself as a nation and returned to its homeland after two millenia starting in the early 1880s. Arabs and their supporters have simply seen them as settlers, no different morally or even conceptually than the white settlers who have settled around the world from Europe since the early 16th century. In this post I will demonstrate that Israel has the characteristics of a modern settler society and then offer my perspective on the returned native vs. settler controversy.
In the summer of 1998 I went to Belfast to examine what was taking place there after the conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement. I was fresh off a tour in the Army in Kosovo and finally had the savings for research and writing. After spending some time in the Linenhall Library's political collection reading up on the history of The Troubles--the period of Northern Ireland history from late 1968 that was then still continuing--I saw many similarities with both Israel and South Africa. I ended up writing my first book, Native vs. Settler, which examined the three conflicts in a range of categories. My book, published in 2000, joined a growing literature that had compared the three conflicts since 1989. Mine was I believe the first to compare all three conflicts on a settler/native basis.
In 2002 after my second book, Indispensable Traitors, was published, I was thinking about what to write about next. I decided to write about Israel's military politicians and I started looking for cases to compare them with. This is how I began researching antebellum America, about which I will write further in my next post. It was not until 2004 that I wrote an article, published in 2005 in The Journal of Conflict Studies in New Brunswick, Canada that I set out systematically to demonstrate that Israeli politics were settler politics. What follows is the essence of that article.
Israeli politics in 2004-05 exhibited six salient features:
1) Because of the proportional representation--list franchise system, Israeli elections result in multiple parties and all governments are coalition governments, most of them weak and unstable.
2) Israel has powerful religious parties that are more akin to the system Islamist parties found in Turkey and Indonesia than to parties found in Western Europe or North America.
3) Former senior military officers have played a major role in electoral politics since at least 1954.
4) Both the Labor Party and the Likud have paramilitary roots to their parties--both have one component party at the time of their formation (1968, 1973) with paramilitary origins.
5) Since the June 1967 Six Day War the territorial question has been the dividing line between parties of the Left and the Right, rather than economic policy. Before 1967 other aspects of the Arab question were the main dividers between the Revisionists/Herut and Mapai.
6) Israel has a legal differentiation in status between Arabs and Jews.
The first two features are the subject of most texts on Israeli politics (at least in English--I own three of them). Traits three through six are traits typical of self-governing or autonomous settler societies such as the United States, Northern Ireland, and South Africa under white rule. It is not a single one of these traits but their combination that makes it possible to speak of Israeli politics as settler politics. Although all three of the above mentioned societies had traits five and six, they either had traits three or four but not both. Thus, Israeli politics are more settlerlike than most settler societies.
Because Israel's multiparty system is so defining of the Israeli political system, comparisons should best be made with settler societies that have a similar party system. Unfortunately, however, most British settler colonies used the first-past-the-post franchise resulting in two- or three-party systems. Only Northern Ireland is a settler society that has a form of proportional representation. Its party system, however, is normally made up of five parties: two unionist British Protestant (settler), two nationalist Irish Catholic (native), and a small liberal non-sectarian party. So normally when examining settler politics in Northern Ireland one is looking at a two-party system. But when the system is put under pressure by pressure from London to reach a solution to the Irish question, a breakdown in unionist unity results. Unionist politics were multipolar from 1973 to 1978 and from the mid-1990s to 2003. Fortunately the latter period was during the peace process and resulted in a weak two-party coalition that can be usefully compared to Israeli governments.
Northern Ireland has five of the six salient features of Israeli politics. It is only missing a major role for former senior military officers. This is because Northern Ireland is a province of the United Kingdom rather than a sovereign entity. Although throughout the 19th and 20th centuries unionists from Ulster contributed greatly to the senior ranks of the British army, they did not go on to serve as politicians after Northern Ireland became autonomous starting in 1922. This is because there is no tradition of former senior officers having a second career in politics as there was in the United States in the 19th century or in South Africa among Afrikaners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To make comparisons on this very important feature of Israeli politics we will have to turn to these two societies, and that will be the subject of my next post.
Many Jews for ideological reasons, and many Arabs as well, are incapable of seeing Israeli Jews as both returned natives and settlers--they must be one or the other. About 90-95 percent of Israeli Jews are descended from at least one parent whose ancestors arrived in Palestine/Israel after 1880, most after 1917. After 1917 Palestine was administered first by the British army and then by the Colonial Office. Palestine was de facto a British settler colony with some loose supervision by the League of Nations. The Palestine mandate was run for its first two decades until 1939 primarily for the benefit of the Zionists--to encourage immigrant absorption and Jewish economic development, although adjustments were made periodically to assuage Arab resentment and resistance. During the last decade the mandate was run on a more equal basis as Britain backed away from its commitments to Zionism under the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the League of Nations mandate. This is the period that is largely used by the Zionists to create an anti-colonial mythology.
So are Israeli Jews only settlers? DNA testing has established that they have ties to the Holy Land and are related to the Palestinian population. The only other group of settlers that claims to be returned natives are a few of the Ulster-Scots of Northern Ireland who claim that they are the descendants of the ancient Picts who were driven out of Ireland by the Gaels in about 1,000 AD and then returned some six hundred years later. And this is very much a minority position among unionists raised some 350 years after the original Ulster plantation.
Arabs and anti-Zionists take two different, and contrary, positions on Israelis as returned natives. First, some say that their exile from the land resulted in the Jews losing any political rights to the land as a separate people. Among Arabs and Muslims this is made easier by the belief that Jews cannot be both a religion and a people (or nation) and so are only the former. This ignores the traditional Jewish religious position on this question. The second position is to simply deny any connection to the land. In July 2000 at Camp David Yasir Arafat denied that there had ever been a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. He claimed that the temple had been in Nablus. After all, he was an expert on Judaism. Palestinian children are taught in Palestinian schools that the Jews have no historical link with the land.
So, if the historical connection is irrelevant, why go to great lengths to deny it? This is the question that anti-Zionists must answer. The League of Nations and the British certainly thought that it was relevant. Americans as a whole continue to believe that it is relevant.
The other question is: Are all settler societies automatically illegitimate? Zionists certainly seem to believe that this is the case, which is one of the prime motives for denouncing any talk of Zionists as settlers. Yet we find settler societies throughout the world: Australia and New Zealand in the Pacific; Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile in South America; Costa Rica in Central America; the United States and Canada in North America. In many other countries in Latin America the descendants of settlers constitute a large minority of the population as in Brazil, Paraguay, Venezuela, and Cuba. All of these countries are considered legitimate.
I believe that by engaging solely in a hasbara campaign on this issue, the Jewish Right is foregoing much valuable analysis that can be used in the struggle for peace. Maybe this is because the Right does not believe in the possibility of peace.
In the summer of 1998 I went to Belfast to examine what was taking place there after the conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement. I was fresh off a tour in the Army in Kosovo and finally had the savings for research and writing. After spending some time in the Linenhall Library's political collection reading up on the history of The Troubles--the period of Northern Ireland history from late 1968 that was then still continuing--I saw many similarities with both Israel and South Africa. I ended up writing my first book, Native vs. Settler, which examined the three conflicts in a range of categories. My book, published in 2000, joined a growing literature that had compared the three conflicts since 1989. Mine was I believe the first to compare all three conflicts on a settler/native basis.
In 2002 after my second book, Indispensable Traitors, was published, I was thinking about what to write about next. I decided to write about Israel's military politicians and I started looking for cases to compare them with. This is how I began researching antebellum America, about which I will write further in my next post. It was not until 2004 that I wrote an article, published in 2005 in The Journal of Conflict Studies in New Brunswick, Canada that I set out systematically to demonstrate that Israeli politics were settler politics. What follows is the essence of that article.
Israeli politics in 2004-05 exhibited six salient features:
1) Because of the proportional representation--list franchise system, Israeli elections result in multiple parties and all governments are coalition governments, most of them weak and unstable.
2) Israel has powerful religious parties that are more akin to the system Islamist parties found in Turkey and Indonesia than to parties found in Western Europe or North America.
3) Former senior military officers have played a major role in electoral politics since at least 1954.
4) Both the Labor Party and the Likud have paramilitary roots to their parties--both have one component party at the time of their formation (1968, 1973) with paramilitary origins.
5) Since the June 1967 Six Day War the territorial question has been the dividing line between parties of the Left and the Right, rather than economic policy. Before 1967 other aspects of the Arab question were the main dividers between the Revisionists/Herut and Mapai.
6) Israel has a legal differentiation in status between Arabs and Jews.
The first two features are the subject of most texts on Israeli politics (at least in English--I own three of them). Traits three through six are traits typical of self-governing or autonomous settler societies such as the United States, Northern Ireland, and South Africa under white rule. It is not a single one of these traits but their combination that makes it possible to speak of Israeli politics as settler politics. Although all three of the above mentioned societies had traits five and six, they either had traits three or four but not both. Thus, Israeli politics are more settlerlike than most settler societies.
Because Israel's multiparty system is so defining of the Israeli political system, comparisons should best be made with settler societies that have a similar party system. Unfortunately, however, most British settler colonies used the first-past-the-post franchise resulting in two- or three-party systems. Only Northern Ireland is a settler society that has a form of proportional representation. Its party system, however, is normally made up of five parties: two unionist British Protestant (settler), two nationalist Irish Catholic (native), and a small liberal non-sectarian party. So normally when examining settler politics in Northern Ireland one is looking at a two-party system. But when the system is put under pressure by pressure from London to reach a solution to the Irish question, a breakdown in unionist unity results. Unionist politics were multipolar from 1973 to 1978 and from the mid-1990s to 2003. Fortunately the latter period was during the peace process and resulted in a weak two-party coalition that can be usefully compared to Israeli governments.
Northern Ireland has five of the six salient features of Israeli politics. It is only missing a major role for former senior military officers. This is because Northern Ireland is a province of the United Kingdom rather than a sovereign entity. Although throughout the 19th and 20th centuries unionists from Ulster contributed greatly to the senior ranks of the British army, they did not go on to serve as politicians after Northern Ireland became autonomous starting in 1922. This is because there is no tradition of former senior officers having a second career in politics as there was in the United States in the 19th century or in South Africa among Afrikaners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To make comparisons on this very important feature of Israeli politics we will have to turn to these two societies, and that will be the subject of my next post.
Many Jews for ideological reasons, and many Arabs as well, are incapable of seeing Israeli Jews as both returned natives and settlers--they must be one or the other. About 90-95 percent of Israeli Jews are descended from at least one parent whose ancestors arrived in Palestine/Israel after 1880, most after 1917. After 1917 Palestine was administered first by the British army and then by the Colonial Office. Palestine was de facto a British settler colony with some loose supervision by the League of Nations. The Palestine mandate was run for its first two decades until 1939 primarily for the benefit of the Zionists--to encourage immigrant absorption and Jewish economic development, although adjustments were made periodically to assuage Arab resentment and resistance. During the last decade the mandate was run on a more equal basis as Britain backed away from its commitments to Zionism under the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the League of Nations mandate. This is the period that is largely used by the Zionists to create an anti-colonial mythology.
So are Israeli Jews only settlers? DNA testing has established that they have ties to the Holy Land and are related to the Palestinian population. The only other group of settlers that claims to be returned natives are a few of the Ulster-Scots of Northern Ireland who claim that they are the descendants of the ancient Picts who were driven out of Ireland by the Gaels in about 1,000 AD and then returned some six hundred years later. And this is very much a minority position among unionists raised some 350 years after the original Ulster plantation.
Arabs and anti-Zionists take two different, and contrary, positions on Israelis as returned natives. First, some say that their exile from the land resulted in the Jews losing any political rights to the land as a separate people. Among Arabs and Muslims this is made easier by the belief that Jews cannot be both a religion and a people (or nation) and so are only the former. This ignores the traditional Jewish religious position on this question. The second position is to simply deny any connection to the land. In July 2000 at Camp David Yasir Arafat denied that there had ever been a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. He claimed that the temple had been in Nablus. After all, he was an expert on Judaism. Palestinian children are taught in Palestinian schools that the Jews have no historical link with the land.
So, if the historical connection is irrelevant, why go to great lengths to deny it? This is the question that anti-Zionists must answer. The League of Nations and the British certainly thought that it was relevant. Americans as a whole continue to believe that it is relevant.
The other question is: Are all settler societies automatically illegitimate? Zionists certainly seem to believe that this is the case, which is one of the prime motives for denouncing any talk of Zionists as settlers. Yet we find settler societies throughout the world: Australia and New Zealand in the Pacific; Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile in South America; Costa Rica in Central America; the United States and Canada in North America. In many other countries in Latin America the descendants of settlers constitute a large minority of the population as in Brazil, Paraguay, Venezuela, and Cuba. All of these countries are considered legitimate.
I believe that by engaging solely in a hasbara campaign on this issue, the Jewish Right is foregoing much valuable analysis that can be used in the struggle for peace. Maybe this is because the Right does not believe in the possibility of peace.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Blog Introduction: Who am I and what this blog is about
This is a blog devoted to discussing foreign affairs and in particular foreign affairs and politics dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Middle East.
The immediate impetus for this blog is that it is a requirement for a journalism degree that I'm pursuing. But I've been considering it for some time as for the last five years I've been a regular contributor to a number of blogs on this subject (APN's The Conversation by Leonard Fein; Dan Fleshler's Realistic Dove; the MeretzUSA blogspot; Michael Lame's Rethink the Middle East; and the Promised Land). I've written several guest blogs at both the Realistic Dove and MeretzUSA. Although I'm quite aware that one doesn't need qualifications in the blogosphere, I think that I should lay out mine for my readers so that they can judge them for themselves. I have a doctorate and masters degree in International Relations from the University of Southern California and a bachelor's degree in the same subject from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I have had five books published: three dealing with comparative politics comparing and contrasting Israel, Northern Ireland and South Africa; and two with antebellum American politics. Over the last dozen years I've focused on researching conflicts and societies that I believe can cast light on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and on Israeli politics. I've focused on looking at settler societies--and I'll explain my rationale for doing so in detail in my next post--not in order to delegitimize or stigmatize Israel but rather in order to learn from other conflicts that have already reached a stage that Israel or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have not, and thus learn from them. As a student of history, I believe that it is possible to learn from the past, but that few people rarely do because most people see history as an exercise in self-validation and legitimation rather than as a means of learning. This is because this is the way it is normally taught in school and in popular works. It is also because much of what we learn from the past is not really very flattering.
The name of my blog comes from a combination of the two reflexive "insults" that the Israeli and Jewish nationalist right use to shutdown any discussion that is outside of their box. The terms are: self-hating Jew and anti-semite. Thus one can either agree with them or be dismissed as either an anti-semite or someone who hates one's own cultural background or ethnicity. Over the years I've been labeled both based on whether the name-callers thought that I was a Jew or a Gentile. Some thirty years ago I was labeled a self-hating Jew by Midge Decter after I wrote a letter in to Commentary magazine disagreeing with an article that attacked Shalom Akshav/Peace Now. More recently I've been called a Jew hater for asserting that Israeli Jews can be most objectively seen as BOTH returned natives and settlers. I'm a Hebrew-speaking gentile who admires Jews for their cultural achievements and learning over the centuries. Also in Italian gentile means nice and kind, and I like to think that that meaning also fits me.
Most of my comparative work has involved comparing Israel to four different societies: South Africa, Northern Ireland, antebellum America and the French Fourth Republic. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on internal settlements in Southern Africa (Namibia, Rhodesia, South Africa) and I conducted doctoral and post-doctoral research in Natal, South Africa in 1988 and 1990. I also served as a volunteer in the Rhodesian Guard Force and Rhodesian Ministry of Internal Affairs leading African troops in the bush war in 1978-79 because I believed then that no good could come from a self-proclaimed Maoist ruling the country. I believe that Robert Mugabe's performance over the last thirty years has more than proven my instincts correct. I conducted research in Belfast, Northern Ireland on The Troubles and on the Northern Ireland peace process during the summer of 1998 and the summer of 1991. I availed myself of the opportunity to collect a small library of books on the sectarian conflict there. When the Northern Ireland peace process collapsed between 2002 and 2006 I took advantage of the opportunity to research Indian-fighter politicians in American history and then anti-slavery parties in antebellum America. Incidentally, the term antebellum America refers to the North as well as the South, and it was mainly the former that I compared Israel to. I have also read about the party system during the French Fourth Republic, but have not published anything on the subject. During 2010 I researched the process by which Dublin renounced its constitutional claim to Northern Ireland, but I have yet to publish on the subject.
The immediate impetus for this blog is that it is a requirement for a journalism degree that I'm pursuing. But I've been considering it for some time as for the last five years I've been a regular contributor to a number of blogs on this subject (APN's The Conversation by Leonard Fein; Dan Fleshler's Realistic Dove; the MeretzUSA blogspot; Michael Lame's Rethink the Middle East; and the Promised Land). I've written several guest blogs at both the Realistic Dove and MeretzUSA. Although I'm quite aware that one doesn't need qualifications in the blogosphere, I think that I should lay out mine for my readers so that they can judge them for themselves. I have a doctorate and masters degree in International Relations from the University of Southern California and a bachelor's degree in the same subject from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I have had five books published: three dealing with comparative politics comparing and contrasting Israel, Northern Ireland and South Africa; and two with antebellum American politics. Over the last dozen years I've focused on researching conflicts and societies that I believe can cast light on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and on Israeli politics. I've focused on looking at settler societies--and I'll explain my rationale for doing so in detail in my next post--not in order to delegitimize or stigmatize Israel but rather in order to learn from other conflicts that have already reached a stage that Israel or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have not, and thus learn from them. As a student of history, I believe that it is possible to learn from the past, but that few people rarely do because most people see history as an exercise in self-validation and legitimation rather than as a means of learning. This is because this is the way it is normally taught in school and in popular works. It is also because much of what we learn from the past is not really very flattering.
The name of my blog comes from a combination of the two reflexive "insults" that the Israeli and Jewish nationalist right use to shutdown any discussion that is outside of their box. The terms are: self-hating Jew and anti-semite. Thus one can either agree with them or be dismissed as either an anti-semite or someone who hates one's own cultural background or ethnicity. Over the years I've been labeled both based on whether the name-callers thought that I was a Jew or a Gentile. Some thirty years ago I was labeled a self-hating Jew by Midge Decter after I wrote a letter in to Commentary magazine disagreeing with an article that attacked Shalom Akshav/Peace Now. More recently I've been called a Jew hater for asserting that Israeli Jews can be most objectively seen as BOTH returned natives and settlers. I'm a Hebrew-speaking gentile who admires Jews for their cultural achievements and learning over the centuries. Also in Italian gentile means nice and kind, and I like to think that that meaning also fits me.
Most of my comparative work has involved comparing Israel to four different societies: South Africa, Northern Ireland, antebellum America and the French Fourth Republic. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on internal settlements in Southern Africa (Namibia, Rhodesia, South Africa) and I conducted doctoral and post-doctoral research in Natal, South Africa in 1988 and 1990. I also served as a volunteer in the Rhodesian Guard Force and Rhodesian Ministry of Internal Affairs leading African troops in the bush war in 1978-79 because I believed then that no good could come from a self-proclaimed Maoist ruling the country. I believe that Robert Mugabe's performance over the last thirty years has more than proven my instincts correct. I conducted research in Belfast, Northern Ireland on The Troubles and on the Northern Ireland peace process during the summer of 1998 and the summer of 1991. I availed myself of the opportunity to collect a small library of books on the sectarian conflict there. When the Northern Ireland peace process collapsed between 2002 and 2006 I took advantage of the opportunity to research Indian-fighter politicians in American history and then anti-slavery parties in antebellum America. Incidentally, the term antebellum America refers to the North as well as the South, and it was mainly the former that I compared Israel to. I have also read about the party system during the French Fourth Republic, but have not published anything on the subject. During 2010 I researched the process by which Dublin renounced its constitutional claim to Northern Ireland, but I have yet to publish on the subject.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Consider other alternatives to treating depression than psychotropic drugs
"In 1989, Joseph Wesbecker shot and killed eight people and injured 12 others before killing himself at his place of work in Kentucky. Wesbecker had been taking the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant fluoxetine for four weeks before these homicides, and this led to a legal action against the makers of fluoxetine, Eli Lilly.[66] The case was tried and settled in 1994, and as part of the settlement a number of pharmaceutical company documents about drug-induced activation were released into the public domain. Subsequent legal cases have further raised the possibility of a link between antidepressant use and violence.[67]
The Prozac Survivors Support Group created a report on 288 individuals who had suffered adverse effects from Fluoxetine during 1991 and 1992. It showed that most of the cases led to violence against self or other individuals. There were 164 cases in the suicide and suicide ideation category, including 34 complete suicides. There were also 133 cases of crime and violence, which featured 14 murders, nine attempted murders, 39 violent actions, 54 violent preoccupations and 17 crimes. The report also showed that 13 individuals had become addicted to Fluoxetine and 14 cases of alcoholism forming or worsening. quoted from Wikipedia re: Fluoxetine.
There is also Columbine, VA Tech, Andrea Yates, Mark David Chapman, etc. The types of psychosis and mass murders/suicides we are experiencing didn't happen 40 years ago. Too many people are on (antidepressants) SSRIs, SSNRIs, SRIs, DRIs, NDRIs, SNRIs and SNDRIs. Even if you had a successful experience with these class of drugs what about the countless people who have had a severe, aggressive, hostile reaction? You or one of your loved ones may be a victim of someone's psychotic rage. WE ARE ALL AT RISK! Toni S.
Chris Benoit murdered his wife and child and then hung himself. He was taking Xanax. Here's a portion of the warning on drugs.com.
Suicide As with other psychotropic medications, the usual precautions with respect to administration of the drug and size of the prescription are indicated for severely depressed patients or those in whom there is reason to expect concealed suicidal ideation or plans. Panic disorder has been associated with primary and secondary major depressive disorders and increased reports of suicide among untreated patients.
Mania Episodes of hypomania and mania have been reported in association with the use of Xanax in patients with depression.
Actor, Jonathan Brandis, 27 hung himself.
His friend said,
"There have been rumors that he was on the medication "Accutane"-- a drug that prevents acne. I looked it up and found that it has been linked to 31 suicides among young adults and has been speculated to cause extreme depression as a side-effect". Actor, Jonathan Brandis, 27 hung himself.
His friend said,
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Depression kills
I recently renewed a friendship with a college friend, thanks to Facebook. We hadn't been in contact in over twenty years. Yesterday, I understand, he died by his own hand, a victim of lifelong depression.
He was not my closest friend, but that was more my fault than his. I got on nerves in college, and set teeth on edge. I was depressed, you see, and that made for an unpleasant personality. My friend Nick, though, didn't allow it to put him off entirely.
I guess I understand now that he understood me better than I did myself. He recognized in my the struggles he also faced.
The struggles that, at 43, finally did him in.
It scares the crap out of me to think that a man that so many loved, that so many relied on, that so many thought of as happy and kind, should succumb to this disease. What about the rest of us? If Nick fell, what can the rest of us hope for?
This is not my best day, so forgive me.
He was not my closest friend, but that was more my fault than his. I got on nerves in college, and set teeth on edge. I was depressed, you see, and that made for an unpleasant personality. My friend Nick, though, didn't allow it to put him off entirely.
I guess I understand now that he understood me better than I did myself. He recognized in my the struggles he also faced.
The struggles that, at 43, finally did him in.
It scares the crap out of me to think that a man that so many loved, that so many relied on, that so many thought of as happy and kind, should succumb to this disease. What about the rest of us? If Nick fell, what can the rest of us hope for?
This is not my best day, so forgive me.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Some days, I have no patience
Waking up on the wrong side of the bed is annoying as hell, and not just to the waker-upper. When you have no patience with people and you have to interact with others, the peevish, pissy, and pedantic behaviors come out in full force.
- Everyone is a lot stupider all of a sudden
- Nobody knows how to do things the right way
- Friends are too cloying, close, and getting in your business
- Friends are too distant, ignoring you when you need them
- Let's not even talk about politicians
Shouldn't come as any surprise that loss of patience can be a symptom of depression. Like most symptoms, however, this one doesn't seem abnormal when you're suffering from it. That guy really did complain about his cappuccino being "too light" when he obviously should have ordered a latte if he wanted a lot of steamed milk. The woman laughing at every joke your best friend tells is obviously flirting with him and he is being a complete idiot by paying attention to her. Obama just doesn't get it about [fill in the blank]. It's all quite reasonable as it's happening.
Patience is a virtue, and a hard-earned one at that. On days like these, no one seems to deserve it, but look out for warning signs that it's more about you than them:
- Rolling your eyes at a remark (even if you only think about rolling them)
- Interrupting someone because you already know what they're going to say and they shouldn't waste their breath
- Yelling at another driver in traffic
- Yelling at another driver when you're the passenger
- Noticing how rude or stupid that person was and really wanting to say something
If you've done anything like that or similar three times in the past hour, consider taking some time away from people. You're getting rubbed the wrong way and you're probably doing the same to them, and it's not fair to any of you. Smoke a cigarette if you're still addicted, meditate, go for a walk . . . just get away, break the pattern, and don't get sucked into choking the living crap out of that bastard who so desperately needs it.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Motivational problems in kids: clue about depression to come?
Motivational problems in kids are probably an indicator of what may happen in the future. I don't have access to any of the studies on motivation and depression in kids that are out there, but I can share an anecdote.
The fact that "depression" means both "sad" and "serious condition affecting the brain" only adds to the confusion, making it more of a challenge for parents and teachers to tell the difference.
In the fifth grade, I was ready to resume my place as one of the smart kids. I'd spent a year with a teacher who hated children so deeply that I have carried a dislike of tenure ever since, but this year I had a teacher whom I respected, and who liked me.
We were given a science assignment, the specifics I can't recall but my excitement over it I remember clearly. I actually took my teacher aside and asked him if there was a maximum word count, because I was afraid I would write too much.
Something happened, though, and it didn't turn out quite like I expected. I lost interest in the project, and I did the fifth-grade equivalent of "phoning it in." It was so poor, in fact, that my teacher took me out in the hall to talk to me about it. "You asked me for a maximum word count," he said, his disappointment showing in his every word, "but this is a minimum of a minimum! How can I accept this from you?"
I didn't have an answer for him. Sure, I had problems with a bully and a few kids who made fun of me from time to time, but that was nothing new. Family life wasn't perfect but the parents weren't beating us or preparing for a divorce. I had been hit, and hit hard, with a lack of motivation, and I had no clue why.I can't fault my teacher or parents for not recognizing it in the 1970s, but I was showing early depressive symptoms. Not every child is lazy if they don't do the work, and not every child is suffering from vision problems (which I first got corrected in fifth grade, as a matter of fact) or reading disabilities. Some of them are having troubles which are completely beyond their comprehension.
The fact that "depression" means both "sad" and "serious condition affecting the brain" only adds to the confusion, making it more of a challenge for parents and teachers to tell the difference.
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