Give Me the HASBARAH Gelt: The Tikvah ASF JIMENA “Jewish Nakba” Grift
David Shasha
Give Me the HASBARAH Gelt: The Tikvah ASF JIMENA “Jewish Nakba” Grift
Introduction: JIMENA Leads The David Project “Jewish Nakba” Way
I had already prepared the following article in honor of the Tikvah ASF and its racist Anti-Sephardi conference led by veteran Arab-hater Norman Stillman, working in the service of the Israeli government, designed to support Ashkenazi Zionist HASBARAH and erase the Sephardic heritage and the few of us who still have the guts to support it.
But then I received an e-mail newsletter from our Ashkenazi friends at JIMENA, which perfectly encapsulates the entire White Jewish Supremacy problem and the Neo-Con Tikvah Intersectionality, which can serve as a précis of the event:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lm2eMTm-K0LM4swipbRSCozf4aM1705z/edit
Like the Tikvah ASF, JIMENA’s e-mail newsletters are not posted on-line, so I was forced to do something I rarely, if ever, do – cut and paste the entire thing into a WORD document so that you can all read the whole thing in its full CHUTZPAH-dik.
If you have the stomach for it!
Monetizing the Israeli Government’s “Jewish Nakba”
I did this because I thought it was important to see, in real time, how the so-called “Jewish Nakba” is monetized in an institutional HASBARAH Intersectionality.
All these programs are designed to raise funds for the Ashkenazi-run “Sephardi” organizations, and do so by ignoring the debilitating reality of Anti-Sephardi racism, White Jewish Supremacy, the removal of classical Sephardic culture from the Adult Jewish Table, all in the name of fighting the Palestine conflict.
As has been the case with the Ashkenazi-run occasional group Justice for Jews from Arab Countries:
http://www.justiceforjews.com/mission.html
Which prominently features our friend Rabbi Elie Abadie, devoted servant of the Gulf Ashkenazim:
http://www.justiceforjews.com/leadership.html
And led by White Jewish Supremacist Stanley Urman, who is a featured speaker at the Tikvah ASF conference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_fcFGVljEM
https://www.jimena.org/justice-for-jews-from-arab-countries-with-dr-stanley-urman-6-18-20/
The following post from Lyn Julius reminds us that the Tikvah ASF conference and JIMENA fundraising e-mail have both been timed to coincide with the Israeli government’s “Jewish Nakba Day”:
https://www.jewishrefugees.org.uk/2022/12/israel-exposes-real-nakba-with-un-exhibit.html
It links to the following JNS article:
https://www.jns.org/israels-un-ambassador-mideast-jews-were-victims-of-the-real-nakba/
The complete article follows below.
The HASBARAH could not be any clearer: Palestinians are not the ones who experienced the “Nakba,” it was the Arab Jews – never to be called by that name! – who underwent an “expulsion” in their countries of origin.
“Spineless Bookkeeping”
I have continually deployed Yehouda Shenhav’s classic article “Spineless Bookkeeping” to understand the process, and how Israel has used it to attack legitimate Palestinian claims for restitution, while at the same time making the Mizrahi Jews complicit in their own demise, turning them into Arab-haters and ultimately Self-haters:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oPTvRhqbBnxzvVPmur-VIVRhI4uPt2oe/edit
The complete article also follows below.
Shenhav counters the HASBARAH claim in the following passages from the article, citing yet another Ashkenazi-in-Charge-of-Sephardim, the Orientalist Ya’akov Meron:
The thinker behind the idea of “Jewish refugees” in WOJAC was Ya’akov Meron, the head of the department for Arab legal affairs in the Justice Ministry. Meron formulated the link in the most extreme thesis regarding the history of the Jews of the Arab world. He claimed that the Jews were expelled from the Arab countries in an act coordinated with Palestinian leaders, and called it “ethnic cleansing.” Meron sharply diverged from the Zionist epos, which he said produced romantic terms like “Magic Carpet” [the operation that brought Yemeni Jews to Israel] or “Operation Ezra and Nehemiah” [the airlift that brought Iraqi Jews], suppressing the “fact” that the departure of the Jews was the fruit of an “Arab policy of expulsion.” In order to complete the analogy between Palestinians and Mizrahis, WOJAC’s people even claimed that the Mizrahis lived in refugee camps during the 1950s (referring to transit camps for Jewish immigrants), just like the Palestinian refugees. This claim sparked angry complaints on the part of figures in the state’s founding institutions, which termed it “treason.”
The Foreign Ministry, which became alarmed by WOJAC’s tenacity, proposed to put an end to the campaign, claiming that classifying the Mizrahi Jews as refugees was a double-edged sword. At the time, Israel insisted upon maintaining a policy of ambiguity regarding this complex issue. In 1949, the state rejected a joint proposal by Britain and Iraq for a population swap (Iraqi Jews for Palestinian refugees), out of fear that it would have to be responsible for settling “surplus refugees” in Israel. The Foreign Ministry called WOJAC divisive and separatist, asking the organization to cease acting independently in opposition to state interests. In the end, the Foreign Ministry cut off funding to the organization. Justice Minister Yossi Beilin even fired Ya’akov Meron from the Justice Ministry’s department for Arab legal affairs.
It must be stated that there is no serious researcher in Israel or outside it that adopted the organization’s extreme rhetoric. Moreover, in its attempt to strengthen the Zionist thesis and assist the state in its war against Palestinian nationalists, WOJAC achieved the exact opposite. It presented a confused Zionist stance vis-a-vis the conflict, angered many Mizrahi Jews across the world – as it presented them as lacking motivation to move to Israel – and enslaved the interests of the Mizrahi Jews (especially over the issue of Jewish property in Arab countries) to what he accidentally termed “national interests.” He failed to understand that categorizing Mizrahi Jews as refugees opens a Pandora’s box that hurts both Jews and Arab.
With Ashkenazim forcing their way to the leadership of putatively Sephardic institutions, the path is clear for them to do the bidding of the Israeli government, a government which has always been helmed by Ashkenazi ethnocentrists whose antagonism towards the Sephardic heritage is often camouflaged when election time comes around.
JIMENA and the Tikvah ASF have taken the lead in this “Jewish Refugee” issue, as the Ashkenazim who run these organizations pretend to care about Sephardim, when in fact they are overseeing the historic erasure of our past and our rich culture of Jewish Humanism in the context of Arab-Andalusian Convivencia.
Erasing the Sephardic Heritage
We have seen a perfect example of this problem in my post on Marc Angel and David De Sola Pool:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/4sgyA6BOz14
While the Israeli government is busy Mizrahi-washing to suit its nefarious Anti-Palestinian and Anti-Arab purposes, the actual Jewish world is erasing Sephardim from the discourse.
It is hard to overstate the important of figures like Sabato Morais, Henry Pereira Mendes, De Sola Pool, and Mair Jose Benardete – who I refer to in my Sephardic Resources and Special Newsletter – not only to parochial Sephardic culture and history, but to America Jewish culture and history as a whole.
Here are the additional resources I posted along with the Pool article:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/9P30Jg1w0Zw
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/43h7ZG-xxNI
It has become quite clear that Sephardim are deployed as needed by the Ashkenazi Zionist HASBARAH, but when it comes to our cultural dignity and intellectual-religious autonomy, we have been replaced by Ashkenazim who have no respect for us and our heritage.
Our children know nothing of their own culture and intellectual history, as understood in the tradition of Jewish Humanism and Convivencia.
In order to understand this institutional process, I am also re-posting my Tikvah White Jewish Supremacy article which deals with putatively Sephardic institutions that are run by Ashkenazim, which includes Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish Congregation in America.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fLA2M8VEO_7XB0jEZ8Ge_yRITR5eKu3K/edit
As has become obvious to anyone paying attention, the Sephardic heritage is now effectively non-existent, while the “Jewish Nakba” has become a widespread HASBARAH talking point.
Arab Darkness to Ashkenazi Zionist Light: The Tikvah ASF Conference “From MENA Jewish Refugees to Israeli Cultural Renaissance”
In that article I highlighted the Tikvah ASF conference “From MENA Jewish Refugees to Israeli Cultural Renaissance”:
The Tikvah ASF is led by two Neo-Con Straussian Ashkenazim, Jason Guberman and Aryeh Tepper, whose aim is to suppress authentic Sephardic voices, and control the discourse by cherry-picking self-haters who will accommodate their Anti-Sephardi racism.
Like conference participant Ben-Dror Yemini, who is all in with the “Jewish Nakba” construct:
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4597344,00.html
Yemini is a prime HASBARAH mouthpiece:
He is all about defending the West from attacks over Imperialism:
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4828895,00.html
The article was included in SHU 750:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/09xi_ldDF_Q/m/zPDV9iX2AQAJ
Only the “right” Sephardim are for the Tikvah ASF!
An indication of this White Jewish Supremacy control of the institution is the choice of Bernard “Clash of Civilizations” Lewis Arab-hating Islamophobic disciple Norman Stillman as Keynote Speaker for the conference.
For those not familiar with Lewis and the damage he has done to us:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nSdrjtm-qKwYxEkewoX5ZNQpx28lJZs1no8hOmZrVKY/edit
As I have said, it is all about Sephardi Representation and who controls it.
Hen Mazzig and Lyn Julius: Super Self-Haters!
Which leads us to Hen Mazzig and Lyn Julius:
https://www.jewishrefugees.org.uk/2022/11/all-jews-count-not-just-some.html
Mazzig is apparently very upset about British comedian David Baddiel:
https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/opinion-baddiels-harmful-stereotypes-about-jewish-people-count/
Baddiel just released a documentary on Anti-Semitism:
For those not familiar with Mazzig, he is very Ben-Dror Yemini HASBARAH radical:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/F56-YejvG8E/m/jHKC17y3BAAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/uuYUx4AGMd4/m/GSbO1xjeBwAJ
And though he is not going to appear at the Tikvah ASF conference, he is their kind of Sephardi:
https://www.jw3.org.uk/whats-on/evening-mark-departure-and-expulsion-jews-arab-countries-and-iran
As the Ashkenazi-run JIMENA knows well:
https://www.jimena.org/hen-mazzig-my-fight-for-mizrahi-and-lgbtq-recognition-rights/
https://www.jimena.org/a-celebration-of-mizrahi-heritage/
So, why is it that Mazzig is upset with Baddiel, but not with the Tikvah ASF?
We can answer that question with another question:
Why is it that the Tikvah ASF is controlled by Ashkenazim, and not Sephardim?
The answer is that the Tikvah ASF supports Arab-hatred in the White Jewish Supremacy HASBARAH manner.
The David Project Promotes the “Jewish Nakba”
Mazzig and Yemini are thus all in with The David Project:
https://www.jimena.org/resources/forgotten-refugees/
Whose work we will recall from our discussions of David Project Bernstein and Bari Weiss:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gZkhXF2Qrwo24nIGCsPJk0O3vWR--BQ4/edit
As the Tikvah ASF conference title indicates, “From MENA
Jewish Refugees to Israeli Cultural Renaissance,” Arab Jews were oppressed in the
Arab-Muslim world, having no culture until they were “saved” by the Ashkenazi
Zionists and attained a true
Renaissance”!
Naftali Bennett and the “Biton Committee”
Sadly, things for the Sephardim in Israel are so bad that White Jewish Supremacist – and former Israeli PM – Naftali Bennett, sought to create a special committee to restore Sephardic culture, called “The Biton Committee”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wMx-oym3rT1kUCphAbxYT0DK2SodTA1ufn2fC6dnNJo/edit
We don’t hear much about that committee anymore, though it seems to have worked out well for Bennett’s political ambitions.
A recent Ynet article excoriates Israeli school curricula in a more comprehensive manner:
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/syezr3qls
It is difficult to prove a negative, and I do not live in Israel, but the article makes the Israeli school curriculum seem like it not only ignores the Humanities, but that it ignores Sephardic History and Culture in toto.
HASBARAH Glory: Erasing Sephardim
This is what happens when Sephardim have no representation and allow Ashkenazi HASBARAH racists control the discourse.
As the Tikvah ASF and JIMENA bask in HASBARAH glory, dutifully serving the Israeli government, the Sephardim continue to find themselves erased from the Jewish discourse and removed from the Adult Jewish Table.
David Shasha
Israel’s UN ambassador: Mideast Jews were victims of the ‘real Nakba’
By: JNS Briefs
Gilad Erdan inaugurated an exhibition highlighting the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries in the wake of the U.N.'s decision to partition British-controlled Mandatory Palestine.
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan inaugurated an exhibit on Tuesday highlighting the expulsion of Jews from Middle East countries, calling the story of these Jewish refugees the “real Nakba.”
The Palestinians have long used the Arabic term “Nakba,” or catastrophe, to describe Israel’s creation and the resulting displacement of some 700,000 of Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 war initiated by Arab nations to destroy the nascent Jewish state.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of a resolution to create Israel, Erdan said that “those who really suffered from ‘Nakba’ following the decision were Jews—almost a million were expelled from Arab countries and Iran. Since the vote [on Nov. 29, 1947,] which the Arabs rejected, the United Nations has been telling a completely false story about the ‘disaster’ the Palestinians brought upon themselves,” he added.
While the vast majority of Jewish refugees from Arab countries were absorbed into Israel, the United Nations, by contrast, created the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to tend uniquely to Palestinian refugees. Today, the organization recognizes some 5 million Palestinians as “refugees,” having effectively transformed the status into a hereditary trait applicable only to Palestinians.
“A day after the [partition] decision, Jews were violently and cruelly expelled from Arab countries and Iran. This year, after a long struggle, we managed to place an exhibition with photos that document the story of the real Nakba. I will continue to fight for the truth and against the false narrative that the Palestinians and their supporters spread,” said Erdan.
The exhibit, whose launch also coincides with Wednesday’s Day to Mark the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from Arab Countries, which has been marked annually in Israel since 2014, will run at the U.N. headquarters in New York City for one week.
From JNS, November 30, 2022
Spineless Bookkeeping: The Use of Mizrahi Jews as Pawns against Palestinian Refugees
By: Yehouda Shenhav
In the last three years, we have witnessed an intensive campaign aimed at winning political and legal recognition of Arab Jews as “refugees.” The aim of this campaign is to create symmetry in public opinion between the Palestinian refugees and the “Oriental” Jews who arrived to Israeli in the 50s and 60s, presenting both populations as victims of the 1948 war. The Foreign Ministry, under the leadership of Deputy Minister Danny Ayalon, is intensively collecting evidence which would offset – as if it were an algebra equation – the testimonies of Palestinians regarding expulsion, looting and killings.
A couple of years ago, the Knesset passed a law ordering every Israeli government that deals with Arab representatives (i.e. Palestinians) to treat the Jews of Arab origin as refugees. Several weeks ago, the National Security Council published a paper recommending the government “create a linkage between the Palestinian refugees and the Jews of Arab origin.” Former head of the NSC Uzi Arad decided upon his appointment to lead a special team that would come up with the official Israeli policy on “the Jewish refugees of Arab counties.”
Arad has received Prime Minister Netanyahu’s blessing for his initiative. He set up a special body inside the NSC and had representatives from the Ministry of Justice, the Finance Ministry and the Foreign Ministry join the discussions. Historians, economists and representatives of Jewish organizations such as WOJAC (World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries) and JJAC (Justice for Jews from Arab Countries) were invited as well. The council recommended that the prime minister make the “Jewish refugees” and their compensations claims an inseparable part of the negotiations over the issue of Palestinian refugees.
Calls to define Jews from Arab countries as refugees were made in the past, but back then, they were silenced by Israeli governments. Why the change of policy? Partly due to a relatively new recognition that Israel will no longer be able to hide its responsibility for the Nakba.
The Foreign Ministry’s bookkeeper’s trick betrays the fear of the Palestinian claim of compensation and return – a central tenet of Palestinian demands. It proves that Israeli recognizes that the ’67 paradigm will not bring an end to the conflict, due to its denial of the Nakba. As a result of this recognition, the leaders of the new campaign hope to use the Mizrahi Jews to block the Palestinians from carrying out their “right of return,” and offset the compensation claims might be forced to pay for the Palestinian property that was expropriated by the Custodian of Absentee Property (the Israeli authority that confiscates and manages Palestinian property, most notably real estate). It is an idea that is historically twisted, unwise from a policy perspective and unjust from a moral point of view – as its history demonstrates.
A miserable history worth reciting
The campaign for the recognition of Jews from Arab countries as refugees was launched by no other than President Bill Clinton, during an interview he gave to Israeli Channel 1 in July, 2000. Ehud Barak, then the prime minister, declared this “achievement” in an interview to Israeli journalist Dan Margalit a month later.
Until then, Israeli governments had avoided recognizing Jews from Arab countries as refugees. They did so because (a) of the fear that such a declaration would reawaken what Israel had tried to erase and forget – the right of return; (b) a concern that Jews might submit compensation claims to Arab countries, and as a result – bring about lawsuits by Palestinians against Israel; and (c) because such a decision would have forced the state to update all of its history books, forming a new narrative according to which Mizrahi Jews didn’t come to Israel due to Zionism, but against their will. Any historian raising such a claim would have been labeled a “post-Zionist.”
The idea to equate Mizrahi Jews with Palestinian refugees was first cooked up by Bobby Brown, government advisor for diaspora affairs, and members of his office, along with representatives of organizations like the World Jewish Congress, the World Sephardi Federation, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Avi Beker, the secretary general of the Jewish Congress, and Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents, convinced Professor Ervin Cotler, a Canadian member of parliament and expert in international law, to join the campaign. An umbrella organization was established, called “Justice for Jews from Arab Countries.” However, it did not manage to garner much excitement for the campaign, including from among the Jewish world. The campaign failed to enlist a notable declaration from central Israeli politicians until recently. That’s not surprising. This campaign has a miserable history that should be internatlized, because history can come in very handy.
In the 1980s, the World Organization for Jews from Arab Countries – WOJAC – was established. Yigal Alon, then foreign minister, feared that WOJAC would serve as a greenhouse for what he called “sectorial organizing.” Again, WOJAC wasn’t established in order to help Mizrahi Jews but rather to create a deterrent to block demands from the national Palestinian movement – primarily the demand to compensate refugees, and the right of return. The use of the term “refugees” wasn’t unreasonable, as the term had become central in the historical discourse and in international law, following World War II. UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed in 1967, referred to a “just settlement of the refugee problem” in the Middle East. In the 1970s, Arab states asked to specifically refer to “Arab refugees in the Middle East,” but the U.S. government, through Ambassador to the UN Arthur Goldberg, opposed it.
In a working paper prepared in 1977 by Cyrus Vance, then the secretary of state, ahead of a possible Geneva Conference meeting, he wrote about the pressure to find a solution to the “refugee problem,” without mentioning which refugees he was referring to. WOJAC, which had tried to put into use the term “Jewish refugees,” had failed. In addition to Arabs, many Zionist Jews all over the world were opposed to the initiative. I recommend that the organizers of the current campaign examine the anatomy of the organization that went from Zionist to post-Zionist in the course of its activities, and to take a page from the laws of political action’s unintended consequences.
The thinker behind the idea of “Jewish refugees” in WOJAC was Ya’akov Meron, the head of the department for Arab legal affairs in the Justice Ministry. Meron formulated the link in the most extreme thesis regarding the history of the Jews of the Arab world. He claimed that the Jews were expelled from the Arab countries in an act coordinated with Palestinian leaders, and called it “ethnic cleansing.” Meron sharply diverged from the Zionist epos, which he said produced romantic terms like “Magic Carpet” [the operation that brought Yemeni Jews to Israel] or “Operation Ezra and Nehemiah” [the airlift that brought Iraqi Jews], suppressing the “fact” that the departure of the Jews was the fruit of an “Arab policy of expulsion.” In order to complete the analogy between Palestinians and Mizrahis, WOJAC’s people even claimed that the Mizrahis lived in refugee camps during the 1950s (referring to transit camps for Jewish immigrants), just like the Palestinian refugees. This claim sparked angry complaints on the part of figures in the state’s founding institutions, which termed it “treason.”
Refugees and free will
The Foreign Ministry, which became alarmed by WOJAC’s tenacity, proposed to put an end to the campaign, claiming that classifying the Mizrahi Jews as refugees was a double-edged sword. At the time, Israel insisted upon maintaining a policy of ambiguity regarding this complex issue. In 1949, the state rejected a joint proposal by Britain and Iraq for a population swap (Iraqi Jews for Palestinian refugees), out of fear that it would have to be responsible for settling “surplus refugees” in Israel. The Foreign Ministry called WOJAC divisive and separatist, asking the organization to cease acting independently in opposition to state interests. In the end, the Foreign Ministry cut off funding to the organization. Justice Minister Yossi Beilin even fired Ya’akov Meron from the Justice Ministry’s department for Arab legal affairs.
It must be stated that there is no serious researcher in Israel or outside it that adopted the organization’s extreme rhetoric. Moreover, in its attempt to strengthen the Zionist thesis and assist the state in its war against Palestinian nationalists, WOJAC achieved the exact opposite. It presented a confused Zionist stance vis-a-vis the conflict, angered many Mizrahi Jews across the world – as it presented them as lacking motivation to move to Israel – and enslaved the interests of the Mizrahi Jews (especially over the issue of Jewish property in Arab countries) to what he accidentally termed “national interests.” He failed to understand that categorizing Mizrahi Jews as refugees opens a Pandora’s box that hurts both Jews and Arab.
Out of a desire to find a magic solution to the question of the refugees, the state readopted the formula, and is now promoting it with great enthusiasm all over the world. It will be interesting to hear the position of the Minister of Education regarding the narrative that the Jewish organizations present as part of the campaign. Will he immediately establish a ministerial committee to change the history textbooks so that they match the new post-Zionist genre? Every honest person, whether Zionist or not, must admit that the analogy between the Palestinians and the Mizrahi Jews is baseless. The Palestinian refugees did not ask to leave Palestine. In 1948, many Palestinian villages were destroyed, and nearly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from the borders of historic Palestine. Those who fled did not leave out of their own free will.
On the other hand, Jews from Arab countries arrived here through the initiative of the State of Israel, as well as Jewish organizations. Some of them arrived out of free will, some against their will. Some of them lived comfortably in Arab countries, and some lived in fear and under oppression. The history of the Mizrahi immigration is complex and cannot be resigned to one simplistic explanation. Many lost a great deal of property, and there is no doubt that they should be allowed to submit individual property claims against Arab countries, something Israel and WOJAC have rejected until today. For instance, the peace agreement with Egypt does not allow individual property claims against the Egyptian government. Jewish property is seen as the property of the State of Israel, and as important leverage to offset the future claims of Palestinian refugees.
Another example: During the Gulf War, the property of a Jewish-Iraqi family in Ramat Gan suffered damages. In their compensation claim, a seasoned attorney advised the family to include a house that had been confiscated by the Iraqi government in 1952. Israel’s Foreign Ministry forbade the move, due to the state’s policy of holding onto such property as leverage for future negotiations with the Palestinians.
The analogy between the Palestinian refugees and the Jewish Mizrahis is thus baseless, not to mention offensive and immoral. It serves to cause friction between Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians, it is an insult to a great number of Mizrahim and harms chances for real reconciliation. More than that: the analogy points to a clear lack of understanding regarding the meaning of the Nakba. The Nakba does not only refer to the events of the war. The Nakba is, at its core, the prevention of those who were expelled from returning to their homes, lands and families after the establishment of the State of Israel. The Nakba is an active and clear policy of the State of Israel – not just the chaos of war.
The temptation to use this concept of offsetting claims is understandable, but we cannot use scarecrows in order to refute the moral and political demands of the Palestinians. Such manipulation only worsens the crime and increases the psychological gap between Jews and Palestinians. Even if some of the Palestinians give up on realizing the right of return (as, for example, Dr. Khalil Shikaki claims), such tricks are not the way to achieve this end. Every peace agreement must be based on Israeli acknowledgement of past injustices and finding a fair solution. These accounting tricks turn Israel into a morally and politically spineless bookkeeper.
Prof. Yehouda Shenhav teaches sociology at Tel Aviv University. He was the editor of Theory & Criticism for 10 years, and is currently the senior editor for Organization Studies. Shenhav was a co-founder of The Mizrahi Rainbow Coalition in 1996. This post was originally published in Hebrew in Haoketz.
From +972 Blog, September 25, 2012, re-posted to SHU 557, November 28, 2012