E. Bogado Tabacman

Jürgen Habermas: The Hamas massacre with the declared intention of eliminating Jewish life in general has prompted Israel to strike back.(...) Despite all the concern (...), the standards of judgement slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.

@MouinRabbani Great Hamas Symphony Orchestra!!

Israel has never claimed that Egypt launched the 1956 war, which is known as the Tripartite Aggression for a reason. Israel did initially claim that it was responding to an armed Egyptian attack in June 1967, but its propaganda was quickly debunked and shortly thereafter abandoned. As is recognised by anyone who has examined that war, the reason Israel achieved a strategic victory in 1967 is that it launched an extraordinarily successful surprise attack against Egypt, destroying the latter's air force as it sat on the ground. The above notwithstanding, it has now become an article of faith for the Hasbara Symphony Orchestra that in both wars Israel was responding to Arab invasion, and that its own aggression was therefore in reality an act of self-defense.

@_ZachFoster @RabbiPoupko What was the purpose of rejecting the partition and starting the war?

Hi Rabbi, I'm a historian of Palestine. This tweet is a lie. The idea that the "Arabs wanted to push the Jews into the sea" during the 1948 War was a myth invented and spread by Zionist propagandists. The most authoritative source here is Professor Shai Hazkani, who writes: "In 15 years of searching, during which I read hundreds of propaganda documents from 1947 to 1949, I encountered only one case in which an Arab leader mentioned “sea” and “Jews” in the same sentence. That was the Egyptian Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, in a call to expel the Jews from Egypt. The more familiar quotes (like the one attributed to the Arab League’s secretary general at the time, Azzam Pasha) aren’t backed up by reliable Arabic sources, and it’s not clear whether they were ever actually said. In any event, I found no calls for murdering Jews just because they were Jews in either the propaganda or the educational material aimed at Palestinians and Arab fighters in 1948. Judging by the documents I collected for my latest book, the claims about an Arab plan to “throw the Jews into the sea” are actually rooted in official Zionist propaganda. This propaganda began during the war, perhaps to encourage Jewish fighters to leave as few Palestinians as possible in the areas that would become part of Israel. (Incidentally, a comparison of Arab and Jewish propaganda in 1948 reveals that the propaganda of the Israel Defense Forces and its precursor, the Haganah, was much more violent.)" Source: haaretz.com/opinion/2022-1… If you'd like to learn more about the 1948 Palestine War, I offer courses on the history of the Palestine question and the history of Zionism here: palestinenexus.com/courses

In 1948, the Haganah operated 3 Arabic-language radio stations called "Kol Yisrael". In the broadcast, they called on Palestinians to remain and live side by side in peace with the Jewish population. Palestinian nationalists urged Palestinians to leave "just for a few weeks" and wait in neighboring countries "until we push the Jews into the sea." Palestinians left, and that is what they call the Nakba. That is the simple truth.

@megynkelly Yes, it is antisemitic. You never claimed that Epstein had ties to the United States as a Estate. You mentioned that Epstein had links to Clinton, Trump, etc., without any intention of demonizing the United States. You don’t act the same way when it comes to Israel.

So I guess it’s not antisemitic to ask if Epstein as an asset for Israeli intel and we shouldn’t just take Ehud Barak’s word for it that he wasn’t? Got it. Netanyahu posting an article that argues: “[New emails b/tw Ehud Barak & Epstein] should mean, at minimum, an end to the widespread taboo of even asking questions about the billionaire sex offender’s links to the Israeli state. Epstein brokered security deals for Israel, had a close friendship with one of its former prime ministers and military officials, and, apparently, even secretly involved himself in the country’s elections. If it were any other country, it would not be remotely scandalous to wonder out loud what it could all mean.”

Human beings are 99.9% identical. We all share as ancestors the first human beings who emerged in Ethiopia. Palestinians also descend from other human beings—I’ve never heard that they are Martians. And logically, if we trace their family tree, we will find that they have some ancestors who lived in that region 3,000 years ago, just as Jews have ancestors from that region. We will also find that they have mixed with other peoples. But that does not grant rights as people. The right to national self-determination applies to peoples, not to genes. The Arab Muslim people emerged in the 7th century CE, and the Palestinians, as a national identity distinct from Arab Muslims, emerged in the 20th century.

@EBogadoTabacman @adam_louis52328 I don’t think it’s relevant, but I’ll address this to get out of the way. Genetic studies have shown that Palestinians are majority Canaanite and have resided in Palestine since before the Bronze Age, while Jews were majority European. They were not “conquered” by anybody.

The point of affirming Jewish indigeneity is not to claim fashionable victim status. It’s to reassert something more basic: that Jews are a people. The erasure of Jewish indigeneity is simply one expression of the deeper project—the erasure of Jewish peoplehood. To say Jews are indigenous is to state the obvious: that Israel is what makes Jews a people and that Jews are one. That’s precisely what antizionist thought has always denied—from the PLO Charters of the 1960s, to Soviet propaganda that condemned Zionism for asserting Jewish unity and “undermining class struggle,” to Jewish Voice for Peace’s claim that Jews are merely a religion, not a nation. At bottom, antizionism is a colonial construct, one that seeks to forcibly redefine, and thereby erase, who Jews are.

@ProfessorDyl @adam_louis52328 Please read the original Peel proposal unispal.un.org/pdfs/Cmd5479.p… Jews also purchased land legally, and the refugee problem was caused by the war the Arabs initiated.

@EBogadoTabacman @adam_louis52328 The Peel commission proposed to give Jews 50% of non-desert areas and coast. Now you’re getting into the “Palestinians came 1500 years ago” argument. It’s not true, and even if it were, it has no relevance. They made up more than 90%, owned their houses, and had legal title.

There was no Palestinian state in 1897. There was an Ottoman Muslim caliphate. The Palestinians are part of the Muslims who invaded and conquered that territory, but that does not exclude other peoples within the Ottoman Empire from being able to claim their right to self-determination. The Jews always had a permanent presence in the Land of Israel and were conquered and ruled by invaders, including Muslims. An indigenous people do not lose their rights because they were conquered. Moreover, Jews around the world are Jews living in the diaspora; they come from the Levant and have the right to claim a state in their ancestral land—not exclusively, but they do have the right to part of the territory for their own state. The correct comparison is not with Italians in Argentina, but with the people of Tyrol or Sicily, where there were independence movements that fought for self-determination. They did not achieve an independent state, but they did obtain autonomous status.

@EBogadoTabacman @adam_louis52328 European Jews had no right to define anything in Palestine. Palestinians who lived there did not want Zionism. You’re arguing that a 20% Italian-descent man in Buenos Aires can define rules for Italy, and if Italians don’t like it, go and kill them.

@LaochDubholtach @adam_louis52328 How would you characterize the Islamic empires that erased the identity, language, and culture of entire peoples through the conquest of vast territories, if they are not considered imperialist or colonialist? Were they like Jehovah's Witnesses, knocking on doors on Sundays?

@EBogadoTabacman @adam_louis52328 No, because I understand the difference between colonialism and imperialism. I'm so tired of ignorant bigots trying to distort history to promote their sick modern ideologies.

Italy has its own rules for defining who belongs and who doesn't belong to the Italian nation. For example, the 20th-century descendants of a man born in Buenos Aires in the 18th century can be considered Italian if they comply with certain requirements. Jews have defined who is and is not a Jew for millennia. The existence of a nation or and ethnicity doesn´t depend on your opinion.

@EBogadoTabacman @adam_louis52328 No. There are 30 million Italian descent people in Argentina. You think they can just move to Italy and establish a state?

Nations can´t emerge out of nothing. Anthony Smith argued that modern nations are built upon pre-existing, enduring cultural communities he called ethnies. The Jewish ethnie serves as the ultimate proof of historical continuity, maintaining its cohesive identity for millennia without a unified state.   How did this identity persist in stateless dispersal? Through symbolic power: Law as State Substitute: The religious legal framework, Halakha, functioned as a supra-territorial constitution and bureaucracy, maintaining social order and boundaries across vast distances.   Myth of Chosenness: The belief in a divine election provided a “supremely potent catalyst for social solidarity,” giving the community an essential sense of mission and ensuring resistance to assimilation.   Sacred Geography: An "intense nostalgia and spiritual attachment" to the sacred homeland (Zion) persisted, keeping the political aspiration of return alive for centuries and defying the modernist requirement for continuous territorial control.   For Smith, this demonstrates that the emotional depth and cultural roots of national loyalty are ancient, providing the necessary content for modern political nationalism, Zionism, to later reappropriate and succeed.

Anderson argues that nationalism creates the nation. Consequently, from his perspective, the Jewish nation as a modern political entity began to be "imagined" with the rise of Zionism in the 19th century. Key components of this vision included an imagined homeland, the aspiration for a state, and a vision of people-based sovereignty. Anthony D. Smith challenges Anderson´s idea that nations are purely recent inventions.   As the founder of Ethno-symbolism, Smith argued that modern nations are built upon pre-existing, enduring cultural communities he called ethnies. The Jewish ethnie serves as the ultimate proof of historical continuity, maintaining its cohesive identity for millennia without a unified state.   How did this identity persist in stateless dispersal? Through symbolic power: Law as State Substitute: The religious legal framework, Halakha, functioned as a supra-territorial constitution and bureaucracy, maintaining social order and boundaries across vast distances.   Myth of Chosenness: The belief in a divine election provided a “supremely potent catalyst for social solidarity,” giving the community an essential sense of mission and ensuring resistance to assimilation.   Sacred Geography: An "intense nostalgia and spiritual attachment" to the sacred homeland (Zion) persisted, keeping the political aspiration of return alive for centuries and defying the modernist requirement for continuous territorial control.   For Smith, this demonstrates that the emotional depth and cultural roots of national loyalty are ancient, providing the necessary content for modern political nationalism, Zionism, to later reappropriate and succeed.

@EBogadoTabacman @adam_louis52328 I never said it didn’t. I said Israel doesn’t make Jews a people. Unless you believe they were not a people prior to 1948. I’d also point out that Palestinans have the same right to self determination.

@ProfessorDyl @adam_louis52328 Italians can’t return to Italy?

@EBogadoTabacman @adam_louis52328 No. They can’t show up at the colosseum or a random house in Rome and claim it was promised to them 3000 years ago. They'd be punched in the face. So either Zionism is colonialism, or Jews are socially-retarded. Take your pick.

@LaochDubholtach @adam_louis52328 Don’t you think that Muslim Arabs that governed from Spain to Pakistan were colonizers?

@EBogadoTabacman @adam_louis52328 More cheap racist scripts from someone who knows nothing about history or the concept of "indigeneity". I've heard this from hundreds of bigots more competent than you. Israeli Jews were colonists. This is objective fact. Only the Old Yishuv have claim to being "indigenous".

@TommyCarullo @adam_louis52328 A nation has a right to self-determination in its territory.

@EBogadoTabacman @adam_louis52328 I’d agree with that definition. Notice that definition makes no reference to a land/state or geography. I reject the OP vision that Israel made/makes Jews a people .

@Elmwoodpolo @adam_louis52328 It’s the ethnic group that set its boundaries with other nations according to Fredrik. Barth and Benedict Anderson. Not an outsider.

@EBogadoTabacman @adam_louis52328 No, they are not. AshkeNazis are one ethnicity amoung Jews. Sephardics are quite different culturally. Those are the groups I know well. Ethiopian Jews are more like Ethiopians and so on.

Jewish nation fully comply with Anderson definition that inspired Schlomo: “I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” 1- The nation is Imagined because the reality of mass society prohibits universal knowledge of co-members; 2- Limited because it is inherently boundary-bound and cannot encompass mankind; 3- Sovereign because it replaced the divinely-ordained dynastic system; 4- and a Community characterized by a powerful "deep, horizontal comradeship" capable of commanding ultimate sacrifice despite endemic internal inequalities.

According to Fredrik Barth: “The critical feature of ethnic groups is the preservation of boundaries: ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete categories are maintained.” Jews are an ethnicity according to this definition. According to Benedic Anderson: “I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”

According to Fredrik Barth: “The critical feature of ethnic groups is the preservation of boundaries: ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete categories are maintained.” Jews are an ethnicity according to this definition.

@adam_louis52328 Are Kurds or Druze a people? Were Jews a people before 1948? Are the indigenous people of Peru a people? Saying that it’s Israel as a Jewish state which makes Jews a people is everything wrong with Zionism In this frame of thinking equal rights means denying nationhood. Wild

Jewish nation fully comply with Anderson definition: “I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” 1- The nation is Imagined because the reality of mass society prohibits universal knowledge of co-members; 2- Limited because it is inherently boundary-bound and cannot encompass mankind; 3- Sovereign because it replaced the divinely-ordained dynastic system; 4- and a Community characterized by a powerful "deep, horizontal comradeship" capable of commanding ultimate sacrifice despite endemic internal inequalities.

@adam_louis52328 Read Schlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People. Read Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. All ethnic/national identities are constructs. You can't build any identity on perpetual victimhood.Yes, Zionalism is settler colonialism.

@ProfessorDyl @adam_louis52328 Jews made up 9% of the population in 1897, before Zionism. And people in exile have the right to return to their homeland. Aren’t Italians and Irish people able to return to Italy or Ireland?

@adam_louis52328 Millions of people with full or partial Italian, Irish, etc descent live all over the world yet don’t claim any divine right to colonize Italy or Ireland and kill people who live there today. Only Jews have this problem.