Love of the Land: The Biggest Jewish Settlement

The Biggest Jewish Settlement

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
18 September 09

At the center of the recent controversy about the participation of Israeli artists at the Toronto Film Festival was the fact that the event highlighted the city of Tel Aviv’s centennial. To the signatories of a letter of protest, a group that included Danny Glover, Wallace Shawn, and Jane Fonda, it was the notion of celebrating Tel Aviv that was the real problem. It was, they said, founded on violence and the “suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants.”

The anti-Israel protesters have their facts wrong. Tel Aviv was founded not on the site of former homes of Palestinian Arabs who were dispossessed by the Jews but on empty sand dunes outside the city Jaffa. The village that was founded there a century ago grew large as a result of Jews fleeing anti-Jewish riots in Jaffa in 1921. The city has grown to be the nation’s largest city and is as cosmopolitan … and liberal as any in the world today.

So it is no small irony that those seeking to boycott Israel and brand it as illegitimate are willing to claim that Tel Aviv, of all places, is just another illegal Jewish settlement. As pressure grows on Israel to “freeze” building in the Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem, as well as in parts of that city itself, it is interesting to reflect on the fact that to those who wish to destroy the Jewish state, every house in every town in the country is an illegal settlement.

Many in Israel (especially in Tel Aviv), as well as many friends of Israel in the United States, like to think of the West Bank settlements as being bizarre places where crazy, violent people live and that have nothing to do with the “real” Israel inside the 1967 borders. What these anti–Tel Aviv protesters tell us is that for much of the rest of the world, this is a false distinction. And, in a sense, they are right—just as once Tel Aviv was another empty place where intrepid Jews bravely attempted to put down roots and build homes. Today it may be a booming, bustling city, but to Hamas and Fatah—as well as Glover, Shawn, and Fonda—it is just a part of hated Israel and no more legitimate than any hilltop settlement deep in the West Bank.

Those Americans who think there is nothing wrong with the Obama administration’s decision to press for more Israeli concessions and building freezes in Jerusalem and elsewhere should think about the significance of the Tel Aviv bashers. Some may argue that the settlements, even those in and around Jerusalem, must go to save Israel. But to those whom Obama wishes to appease by this pressure policy, there is no difference between them and the biggest Jewish settlement of them all in Tel Aviv.

Related: Fond Jane and Mr.Braun

Love of the Land: The Biggest Jewish Settlement

Love of the Land: Another Tack: Fond Jane and Mr. Braun

Another Tack: Fond Jane and Mr. Braun

Sarah Honig
JPost
17 September 09

We're all familiar with holier-than-thou anti-Semites whose much-touted "best friends" invariably are Jews. Well, the good news is that Jane Fonda is awfully fond of us. She says so in her blog. Given all that fondness, Fonda feels persecuted for no fault of her own. She cannot fathom why she must "wake up in the morning to a barrage of e-mails" about "a petition protesting the Toronto International Film Festival's decision to feature a celebratory 'spotlight' on Tel Aviv... By doing this the festival has become, whether knowingly or not, a participant in a cynical PR campaign to improve Israel's image, make her appear less warlike."

Fonda is so fond of us that she insists our face remain as dirty, demonic and denigrated as she and her avidly mud-slinging chums (like Danny Glover, presumably our friend by association) deem appropriate for us. Truth may be detrimental to their ends, which obviously justify any and all means.

FOR THESE ends Israel needs to remain besmirched and blackened. And that was why fond Fonda, comrade Glover and more than 50 other petition signatories (among them various indispensable useful-fool Israelis) had such a bone to pick with the Toronto festival, itself hardly a Lovers-of-Zion shindig by any measure.

It featured a bunch of films about Tel Aviv, many of which conform to the popular Israeli genre of self-deprecating, pro-Arab flicks scripted for the explicit purpose of winning acceptance and accolades from Fonda and her ideological likes overseas. Sucking up to the Fondas of this world, it's widely believed in our provincial backwoods, is the only way for an ambitious Israeli academic/artiste/author/moviemaker to carve out a career and bask in the ambiance of moneyed Israel-bashing liberal patrons.

How deliciously ironic then that Fonda - albeit indirectly and inadvertently - punishes precisely those Israeli producers who obsequiously fawn to please just her sorts. Their radicalism and/or brownnosing make no difference. This effectively parallels two millennia of Jewish experience with assorted Judeophobes - including those who had cut no slack for urbane "Germans of the Mosaic persuasion."

Toronto's festival, according to the Jane-brand of spurious historiography, omitted to stress that "Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages, and that the city of Jaffa, Palestine's main cultural hub until 1948, was annexed to Tel Aviv after the mass exiling of the Palestinian population. This program ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps."

Uncool as it may be, according to George Orwell "speaking the truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." Fonda should appreciate revolutionary acts. In her younger years, when she bombastically boosted Huey Newton and the Black Panthers, she insisted that "revolution is an act of love. We are the children of revolution, born to be rebels. It runs in our blood."

So let's get on with the revolutionary act of telling the truth. Habitual knee-jerk detractors, who disdain historical references, please note that Fonda and crew were those who launched us on this foray into that past.

RECENTLY I wrote of almost forgotten Tel Aviv founder Yosef-Eliahu Chelouche, a native of Jaffa, scion of a Jewish family from North Africa (kosher presumably for Third World ennoblers) and a notable political dove till Arab bloodlust disillusioned him. In his 1931 memoirs, long before Tel Aviv became the vast Zionist empire's icon, Yosef-Eliahu described those 12 desolate windswept acres of wasteland purchased for a hefty sum in 1909 for Ahuzat Bayit (as the embryonic city was called). They were hardly occupied by Arab villages as Fonda and friends aver.

Yosef-Eliahu recalled them as "a sea of sand, a barren desert with powdery yellow mountains and hills, where jackals howled." Beyond Jaffa's decaying narrow alleyways stretched an undulating shadeless wilderness. It was a horrendous, almost impassable and seemingly interminable tract, without landmarks or signs of habitation.

From its inception Ahuzat Bayit was traversed by a boulevard - not because it was a preplanned aesthetic feature. Tel Aviv would rise on pyramidal mounds with unstable continuously shifting slipfaces. These were pronounced unsuitable for construction. To level off the area, teams of pioneers used wheelbarrows to move tons of sand from the highest points and deposit them in the gullies bellow. The deepest ditch cut across Ahuzat Bayit exactly where Sderot Rothschild now stretches. Filled with so much soft sand, it was judged unsafe to support structures. Instead it was covered with topsoil and lined with trees. If anything, Tel Aviv was reclaimed from an empty strip of desert.

Elementary intellectual integrity should oblige Fonda and her retinue of our "best friends" to recall that Jaffa was also a pivotal early 20th-century Jewish hub. If anyone was forcibly dislodged therefrom, Jaffa's Jews were; 1921's unprovoked five-day Jaffa-generated Arab riots, in which 49 Jews were massacred (among them leading Jewish literati, including left-wing Yosef Haim Brenner) and more than 150 wounded, effectively brought down the curtain on Jaffa's Jewish community and boosted adjacent Tel Aviv as a separate, independent, viable, modern and thriving alternative entity.

The carnage filled 12-year-old Tel Aviv with tents and makeshift sheds to shelter Jewish refugees fleeing the Jaffa bloodbath before even self-proclaimed anti-imperialists of the Fonda-mold could conjure up supposed Jewish provocation for Arab butchery.

As to the 1948 escapades of Jaffans on the eve of Israeli independence, I will summon my own mother's testimony. The minaret of Jaffa's Turkish-constructed Hassan Bek Mosque, for instance, was used by Arab snipers to take frequent potshots at passersby on the adjacent streets of Tel Aviv. For Jane's attention, that was before we could conceivably be accused of becoming conquistador ogres.

My mother often recalled the mortal risk entailed in crossing the street to the corner grocery. She was nearly shot on her way to the dentist. One afternoon, her landlord, Mr. Braun, buttonholed her at the entrance to his apartment house on 7 Rehov Aharonson. Standing in the doorway he lectured her sternly about the foolhardiness of her sorties outdoors. Just then a bullet whistled by. Mr. Braun fell dead at my mother's feet.

Odds are Jane doesn't know about Mr. Braun. But she should educate herself about Hassan Bek's snipers, who didn't care about the identity of their numerous random victims. It helps Jane's predatory propaganda not to mention them, to pretend that Jaffa didn't aggressively and continuously attack Tel Aviv, that peaceable Jaffans were dispossessed arbitrarily in villainous circumstances devoid of context.

In a world of cosmopolitan detachment, Jane's propaganda works. Toronto Festival codirector Cameron Bailey half-apologetically conceded "that Tel Aviv is not a simple choice and the city remains contested ground." But if even Tel Aviv is "contested ground," if even its legitimacy is questionable, what are we to say about Israel as a whole?

So much for all those insincerely avowed two-state syrupy sentiments.

Love of the Land: Another Tack: Fond Jane and Mr. Braun

Israel Matzav: Jane Fonda, Jew hater

Jane Fonda, Jew hater

My friend Jim Hoft takes Jane Fonda and Danny Glover to task for signing onto a boycott of the Toronto International Film Festival over its focus on Tel Aviv.

Some 50 celebrities, artists and filmmakers, including actors Jane Fonda and Danny Glover, musician David Byrne and filmmaker Ken Loach, have accused the Toronto International Film Festival of "complicity with the Israeli propaganda machine" over its spotlight this year on Tel Aviv.

...

The program "ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories" after a "mass exiling of the Palestinian population" in 1948, according to the letter.

"Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city's past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto," AFP reported the letter as saying.

The picture at the top of this post is a picture of an 'Israeli Arab' at the beach in Tel Aviv. You won't find any signs like this one from Durban, South Africa in Tel Aviv:

But of course, Fonda is now denying that she's anti-Israel and claiming that she favors a 'two-state solution' (Hamas and Fatah?):

"I, in no way, support the destruction of Israel. I am for the two-state solution. I have been to Israel many times and love the country and its people."

Rabbi Marvin Hier, who has won two Oscars for documentaries, disagrees.

Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center is blasting the the actors -- and everyone else who signed the letter -- claiming "Whoever would sign on to a campaign like this would support the complete destruction of Israel."

Hier -- who's won two Academy Awards for documentaries -- added, "People who support letters like this are people who do not support a two-state solution. By calling into question the legitimacy of Tel Aviv, they are supporting a one-state solution, which means the destruction of the State of Israel."

"I applaud the organizers of the festival for celebrating on the 100th anniversary of Tel Aviv. If every city in the Middle East would be as culturally diverse, as open to freedom of expression as Tel Aviv is, then peace would long have come to the Middle East."

Tel Aviv was built on sand dunes, and not on 'Palestinian' villages.

In Canada's National Post, George Jonas rips the boycotters' hypocrisy.

Pressure groups operating in democracies must reconcile their urge to bully cultural institutions with their society's residual inhibition against doing so. This requires some mental gymnastics. The Greyson-Klein method is do and deny. Who, us, objecting to Israeli films? Perish the thought. We're only objecting to Israeli propaganda. Okay; what's Israeli propaganda? Well, the Israeli films we're objecting to.

What Israeli film wouldn't be Israeli propaganda for [York University Professor John] Greyson [who withdrew a film in protest CiJ] or [Naomi] Klein? Your guess is as good as mine, but an Israeli film of anti-Israeli propaganda might pass muster -- say, one about kidnapping Palestinians for their body parts.

Greyson should certainly recognize propaganda when he sees it. He's noted on festival and university circuits for his video essays of gay activism. To hear him object to "state-subsidized propaganda" is ironic, to say the least. As an activist-filmmaker, he has been a propagandist for the values of the ultra-liberal state and its shibboleths throughout his career. Pushing a good agenda is still propaganda -- but I guess only old-style communists were honest enough to call their functionaries "agitation and propaganda cadres" or "agit-prop" for short.

Of course, in a free country it's perfectly legitimate to withdraw one's film to protest other people showing their films. Not only that, but it may be an astute way of pushing one's own agenda.

Indeed. Read the whole thing.
Israel Matzav: Jane Fonda, Jew hater

Love of the Land: All of the Jewish state is “contested ground”

All of the Jewish state is “contested ground”

FresnoZionism.org

04 September 09

JTA reports:

In an open letter in response to a protest by dozens of celebrities protesting the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to showcase the city of Tel Aviv, festival co-director Cameron Bailey wrote that spotlighting Tel Aviv was “not a simple choice and that the city remains contested ground. We continue to learn more about the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.”

If the city, which was founded on sand dunes by Jews in 1909, is “contested ground” then everything is. And in truth the existence of every last Jew in Israel is “contested”. This is not a big surprise to anyone who pays attention to what Palestinian Arab leaders of any faction say whenever they are not speaking specifically for Western consumption.

I am sure that Bailey, who does not appear to be particularly political, is “learn[ing] more” about the morally inverted ‘movement’ to isolate Israel. Naomi Klein, one of the leaders of the protest, describes her motivation thus:

Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade.

Klein lives in an alternate universe, where Israel did not (in 2005) dismantle 21 settlements in Gaza and 4 in the West Bank, and evict more than 8,000 Jews (and some Bedouins whom the Palestinian Arabs view as ‘collaborators’). In Klein’s universe, Hezbollah apparently did not invade Israel, killing seven soldiers and firing missiles into Israel, and Hamas did not fire eight thousand Qassam and Katyusha rockets against Sderot and vicinity. This is undoubtedly the version of reality that Bailey is busy ‘learning’.

Read All at :

Love of the Land: All of the Jewish state is “contested ground”

JANE FONDA IN "BARBARELLA"