Antisemitism And Anti-Zionism

Any anti-Zionist position that does not base itself on the general application of a rule or principle held to be valid for all states, and which rejects the existence of Israel and no other state is necessarily antisemitic. Israel is the product and realization of Jewish nationalism, no more and no less a logical, justifiable or legitimate nationalism than that of the Armenians, the Turks or the Moroccans. One cannot regard Jews as truly equal to the rest of humanity while granting them all rights but one, that of national self-determination, or, if allowing them the right to self-determination, demanding that it be realized to a higher standard than that demanded of other groups. The latter point is especially true if attempts are made to justify it on the basis of certain cultural characteristics alleged to be typical of Jews or the history of persecution suffered by Jews.

The rest, here

Greece, Turkey and Israel

The Telegraph reports here that the much bruited Israeli air force rehersal for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was carried with the cooperation of Greece.

Sources in the Greek air force have confirmed their participation in joint aerial manoeuvres off the island of Crete on May 28 and June 12.

If the story is true then it’s interesting to note how the Israelis have managed to get on very good terms both with Turkey and its oldest and bitterest rival.

Goodbye…

to the worst football team to have disgraced major championships for a long time.

Settlers

Here’s a detail of which I wasn’t aware relevant to matters I have previously written about here and here

Finally, the Annan Plan. Anderson might have noted that not only were the illegal Turkish settlers allowed to vote on it: so were the occupying troops of the Turkish army.

You can find it towards the end of the first letter here.

Greece, Cyprus, Turkey

In a long article about the history of Cyprus, written with his customary verve, Perry Anderson makes a very good point when he says,

More fundamentally, whatever might be said of the Turkish state – no small subject, certainly – it was the completely independent creation of Kemalism, a nationalist movement that owed nothing to any outside power. The postwar Greek state, by contrast, started out as a British protectorate and continued as an American dependency, culturally and politically incapable of crossing the will of its progenitors.

Perhaps Mustafa Kemal Atatürk has not been given his due by history as an anti-colonial leader. Of course the Turkish War of Independence and the Treaty of Lausanne resulted in the shafting of the Anatolian Greeks and the repression of Turkey’s various other national minorities but it sure made Turkey into an independent country and the creation of a new nation is very often done over the ruins of some other people’s desire for one.

Anderson also says,

It is enough to compare the fate of Rhodes, still closer to Turkey and with a comparable Turkish minority, which in 1945 peacefully reverted to Greece, because it was an Italian not a British colony. In the modern history of the Empire, the peculiar malignity of the British record in Cyprus stands apart.

It peacefully reverted to Greece alright but I wonder if the Turkish minority were happy with that given that there is only a handful of them left today and that they are denied the right to educate their children in Turkish.

Nobody comes too well out of the history of Cyprus but I find it hard to blame the Turkish minority for not being keen to be part of a unified political entity with their Greek neighbours when they consider the fate of the Turkish minority in Greece proper.