Arabic Language, Solar Power, Lessons from Zionism for Americans in the Southwest. (A long entry; read at your leisure, when you have 10 or 15 minutes free.) My colleague in Durham, England, emailed me this observation on my comment yesterday about using Iraq to teach Americans Arabic.

One major cause of difficulty with the Arabic language is its extensive regional variation. Imagine that all the Romance-speaking regions of the world claimed to speak "Latin" and indeed wrote all their newspapers and books in Latin, while still speaking in French/Italian/Spanish/Portuguese, and you'd have a rough analogy to the Arab world. The main reason why Arabic still claims to be one language is because it is the language of the Qur'an.

I replied:

Perhaps regional variation in Arabic will diminish as Arab countries modernize and become more prosperous, such that the bulk of people gain access to television more than just (battery-operated) radio, films, records, etc., and travel more. One of the difficulties of modernization may be electrification, but if ever there were an area of the world where solar power would be workable, surely it is the Arab world. Not only does it have the money to install arrays, especially of the cheaper kind pioneered in Kenya (Tanzania?), but oil-rich Arab countries would have major incentives to install solar systems. First, a one-time investment would reap long-term rewards, with minimal upkeep. Second, instead of having to ship oil charity without end, each barrel of which is oil they can't sell on the world market, they would keep a large portion of that oil (and gas) for profitable export, while solar panels provide electricity and hot water, and solar ovens do much of the cooking. Solar ovens and battery-operated heaters for nitetime heating charged each day by the sun would make reforestation possible, once trees are no longer destroyed for firewood. Third, tens of millions of individual village- or house-based electric systems are immune from devastation by the kinds of airstrikes that Israel and the U.S. have inflicted upon Arab countries. A single airstrike can devastate a grid-based electrical system or a multi-megawatt generating station. It could make no significant impact upon the electrical functioning of a society in which a grid plays small part. All those things of the modern world that depend on electricity could continue to operate, from small appliances to the pumps in sewage-treatment plants. I don't know why they haven't done this already.
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As for dialects, I am sometimes surprised how far the eradication of local dialects has progressed in the United States. We hear a lot of people in different parts of the country interviewed after tornados, other natural disasters, fires, crimes, and the like, and standard English marked by only a flavor of regionalism is more often the case than not. Even a significant proportion of people from places like Mississippi and Georgia are now speaking standard American English.
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Part of that standardization, of course, is due to there being a single national standard to which people can aspire. Where a local dialect is entrenched by a nationalist government, it will be harder for people to aspire to a transnational standard. Of course, were "the Arab Nation" able to federate economically and/or politically, one could expect a national standard to arise.

I would very much like to see a Common Market / Arab Union (à la the EU) emerge to join together the entire Arab world in a progressive free-trade area that promotes wide transnational exchanges both economic and cultural. Indeed, it distresses me to see that whereas the U.S. has promoted free-trade areas in Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and elsewhere, the U.S. Government has not only not suggested that the Arab world establish such a bloc but has almost certainly set itself against such a project, lest Arabs become prosperous and free — but still militantly anti-Zionist, and empowered by new wealth to build up their armed forces to crush Zionism and create Palestine into a multiethnic and multireligious unitary state in which Jews would have no special rights.
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Perhaps U.S. reticence in promoting federal union of the Arab Nation proceeds from believing the ridiculous idea endlessly propagandized by Zionists that Arabs want to kill all the Jews of Palestine, not just disestablish the State of Israel. The rhetoric we hear is that Arabs want to "push the Jews into the sea". But is that what Arabs really say? What does it mean?
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When the only way people can achieve justice is thru war, you have to expect the passions of war to turn ugly. And maybe in the heat of war people would want to "push the Jews into the sea". But that would hold only if Jews fought to retain tyrannical special rights and thus against liberation of Arabs to equality within a diverse population. Here, as so often elsewhere, a comparison to Nazism is instructive.
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The Allies of World War II destroyed Nazi Germany. They did not destroy Germany. They eradicated the Nazi state. They did not exterminate the German people.
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We demanded "unconditional surrender". If the German people had arrested Hitler and his entire leadership, surrendered early to Eisenhower, and turned over every Nazi the Allies wished to prosecute for war crimes, the war would have ended years before it did, and at least hundreds of thousands and perhaps even millions of lives, on both sides, would have been saved. That did not happen, because the German people could not overthrow Hitler's government. The only way the Allies could get to Hitler was thru the German people.
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Israel, we are told endlessly, is a democracy (for Jews). The people of Israel can overthrow their fascist government any time they want. They don't even have to wait for an election year, because they have a parliamentary form of government that can turn out an administration any day of any year by a simple vote of no-confidence. But instead of voting for justice, the Israeli people have again and again, endlessly, voted for injustice to Arabs. They have thus rendered themselves far more legitimate targets of military destruction than the people of Nazi Germany ever were, and if Arabs have to kill hundreds of thousands of Israelis to end the Zionazi state, so be it.
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But who said the Arabs want to "drive the Jews into the sea", and what does it really mean?
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One website claims that no Arab leader has said any such thing but that David Ben Gurion, first Prime Minister of Israel, projected onto Arabs that wish in a speech of October 11, 1961:

'The Arabs' exit from Palestine [in 1948, in advance of warfare on their territory, proceeded from the understanding that] ... the invasion of the Arab armies at the expiration of the [British] Mandate [over united Palestine] will destroy the Jewish state and push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive.

That March 11, 2005 article, by one William Martin in Counterpunch, a California-based newsletter and website edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, says that Ben Gurion was lying when he said that the Arabs withdrew of their own volition. Documents that have come to lite only since the mid-1980's show that much if not all of the Arab flite in 1948 was the result of military and paramilitary / terrorist operations by Jews to drive Arabs off 'their land'. They didn't drive them "into the sea" but onto their neighbors' lands.
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Researchers who have tried to find the provocative phrase "push the Jews into the sea" in the formal statements and public speeches of major Arab figures of the day have been unable to find it anywhere.

Mr Ben Gurion gives no attribution for this phrase, nor does he [even] claim that it is a quote from an Arab source. It is expressed here as if it is his personal surmise as to the Arab army's intentions.

The phrase has been variously attributed by Zionist supporters to Yasser Arafat, Gamel Abdul Nasser, or any other of Israel's enemies, but none [of these Zionist accusers] whom I have challenged, including U S Congressman Henry Waxman who made the claim in a letter to me, attributing the phrase to Nasser, have been able to provide any documentation of support for their claim. This 1961 [Ben Gurion] speech certainly predates Arafat's 1968 ascension to the head of the PLO. The phrase is very much entrenched in the thinking of Israel supporters and is taken as a factual basis for an Arab intent of Genocide and of their own potential for peril.

The speech by Mr. Ben Gurion appears to be the origin of the phrase. A search of the speeches of Gamel Abdul Nasser fails to reveal it, nor does it reveal any other than a pragmatic[ ] approach to his dealing with Israel. This phrase is sufficiently dramatic and threatening so that if it was in fact uttered by a significant Arab leader, it would be prominent and easily found in any competent historical treatment, which it is not. The phrase, thus, has a Jewish origin and not an Arab origin. Mr Ben Gurion is the originator of the phrase, in all likelihood.

It may be that Ben Gurion was projecting onto Arabs the animus he felt toward Arabs. Or he might just have been lying to fool ignorant Westerners. But this much is sure: when Ben Gurion asserted that Arabs left the area of Palestine designated for the Jews of their own accord, documents now show not only that what he said was false, but that he knew it to be false when he said it.

Mr Ben Gurion was lying through his teeth, to put it plainly.

Long before Partition in 1948, leading Zionists made plain that they intended to force Arabs off 'Jewish land'. No less than Theodor Herzl, whose crazy idea Zionism was to begin with, is quoted as saying forthritely:

[We shall] spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the frontier by denying it employment. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.

It is precisely because it became plain that the Radical Zionist program contemplated the dispossession of the Arabs that the King-Crane Commission in 1919 recommended that the U.S. Government not assist Zionism.
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Ben Gurion is quoted as saying in 1937, eleven years before the establishment of the State of Israel:

We must expel the Arabs and take their places and if we have to use force, to guarantee our own right to settle in those places — then we have force at our disposal.

Americans have bought the lie that Jews were the innocent victims of Arab aggression, when the exact opposite is true. But they have gotten away with this because of the dynamics of the Big Lie. Adolf Hitler is credited as the creator of this concept, in this form: "The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one." Wikipedia contains this fuller explication:

Hitler wrote in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf (James Murphy translation, page 134):

All this was inspired by the principle - which is quite true in itself - that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

In short, the general run of people will think, "Maybe not everything the Zionists say against the Arabs wanting to push the Jews into the sea is true, but surely some of it must be, right?" Wrong.
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What do Arabs really intend when they speak of "destroying" Israel? Martin quotes the PLO (emphasis added, here and in the other quotes in this blog entry):

[Important] in engendering what Arafat called an Israeli "Masada complex" is the common pro-Zionist interpretation of the 1968 PLO Charter as calling for the destruction of the state of Israel in which the term "destruction" is interpreted as "pushing all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive."

Though the document calls for armed struggle, there is nothing in it incompatible with the establishment of a secular democratic state which recognizes and respects the three major religions.

Indeed, article 16 of the document states:

The liberation of Palestine, from a spiritual viewpoint, will prepare an atmosphere of tranquility and peace for the Holy Land in the shade of which all the Holy Places will be safeguarded, and freedom of worship and visitation to all will be guaranteed, without distinction or discrimination of race, colour, language or religion.

The suggestion that the PLO is concealing a will to genocide behind nice words about tolerance is belied by the fact that there are many Palestinian Christians who suffer no discrimination by the Palestinian Authority, and Yasser Arafat himself regularly attended Christmas and Easter services with Christian Palestinians — until Israel stopped him.
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So, as the Counterpunch article asks, in its headline, "Who is Pushing Whom into the Sea?"
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What if someone were able, finally, to find some obscure quotation from some Arab leader that does speak of "pushing the Jews into the sea"? Does that necessarily mean "kill them"? The phrase conjures an image from Biblical epics, of foot soldiers with swords and shields being backed into the ocean by sword-swinging masses of enemy fiters until they struggle to keep their heads above water, then sink beneath the waves under the weight of their armor, to drown to death. That is not the only interpretation.
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You've heard of ships?
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Ships have been used for millennia to move people from one place to another over water. Alive. What if the phrase "push the Jews into the sea" means only "force them onto ships departing for other shores"? That is, "Go back where you came from. You came from the sea [on ships]. Go back to the sea [on your ships]"? That's quite another matter from genocide, isn't it?
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Expulsion of alien invaders has occurred innumerable times throughout history. After World War II, 8 million Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe, where their families had lived for generations, and moved "back" to Germany proper. Of course, they weren't really going "back" to Germany, because they had never lived there, but the Poles, Czechs, and others who expelled them didn't care. They just wanted them off "their" land. Eastern Europe "ethnically cleansed" away Germans, but those Germans were merely relocated. They were not exterminated (tho I'm sure some did die prior to or during the relocation).
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Compare the situation of Palestinians to that of Germans in 1946 or Americans in the Southwest today, who are being inundated under a wave of mass immigration from Mexico. Conservatives have expressed alarm that some of those migrants speak of that region as "Aztlan".

In Chicano folklore, Aztlan is often appropriated as the name for that portion of Mexico that was taken over by the United States after the Mexican-American War of 1846, on the belief that this greater area represents the point of parting of the Aztec migrations. In broad interpretation, there is some truth to this in the sense that all of the groups that would subsequently become the various Nahuatl-speaking peoples of central Mexico passed through this region in a prehistoric epoch, as attested by the existence of linguistically related groups of people distributed throughout the US Pacific Intermountain region, the US southwest and northern Mexico, known as the Uto-Aztecan-Tanoan group, and including such peoples as the Paiute, Shoshoni, Hopi, Pima, Yaqui, Tepehuan, Rarámuri (Tarahumara), Kiowas and Mayas.

Some Chicanos conceive of Aztlan in cultural terms, racial solidarity, ethnic pride, that sort of thing. Others openly advocate that the present Southwest of the U.S. be detached from the United States and reattached to Mexico, from which it was taken ("stolen" according to Chicano militants). That would, of course, entail serious cultural problems for Mexico, inasmuch as those areas contain tens of millions of Anglos. Do the advocates of territorial Aztlan advocate expulsion of Anglos from the territory to be annexed to Mexico thru "reconquista" (reconquest)?
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What if the Mexicans pouring across the border were intent on retaking 'their lost land' the way the Jews 'retook their lost land' in Palestine? What if they took up arms — in concert with the American Indian tribes listed above, who also may feel that their land was stolen from them — first in terrorist violence against small American towns, then in guerrilla war against even major population centers, then in full military conflict, backed by the governments of Mexico, China, and Russia? Would we like that?
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That is pretty much what we have done to Palestine. Palestinians don't like it any more than we would. Do Americans empathize with the Palestinians whose immigrants rose in violent revolt and took their country right out from under them? Or identify with the invaders? Oddly, grotesquely, this "nation of immigrants" has not just taken the stance that immigrants have the right to steal away all or a substantial part of the land they move to, and kill anybody who gets in their way, but we have also poured over $100 billion of taxpayer money, over decades, into carrying off that theft, and imposing ethnic cleansing and religious discrimination on the (re)conquered Palestinian people.
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That is not the American way, and is insanely inconsistent with our own national purposes. It brands us as hypocrites when we assert a right to control our own borders against peaceful invaders. American support for Zionism is crazy. But if we praise Jewish "reconquista", let's be consistent and support Mexican and Indian "reconquista" of the Southwest.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,376.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:08 PM