Corey Robin April 30th on his own site.

Yousef Mounayyer wonders why, in the recent media debate over whether Israel is an apartheid state, Palestinian voices have been so conspicuously absent. In his history of the slave market in the antebellum South, Harvard historian Walter Johnson provides an answer. “One of the most durable paradoxes of white supremacy,” writes Johnson, is “the idea that those who are closest to an experience of oppression (in this case, former slaves) are its least credible witnesses.” 

Update (11:50 pm) 

Or perhaps it’s that Palestinians are only useful insofar as they provide “personal testimony.” The larger questions—Is this apartheid?—have to be left to the (non-Arab) experts. “Give us the facts,” as Frederick Douglass’s white patrons told him, “we will take care of the philosophy.”

Today, cross posted at CT

"A Gaza Breviary"

1. One benefit of the carnage in Gaza is that it has given people who’ve never said a word about the carnage in Syria an impetus to say a word about the carnage in Syria.

2. On Friday night, there was a fundraiser for “Friends of the IDF" at a synagogue on the Upper West Side. On Shabbat. Which means cessation, stopping. 

3. “It’s all but inevitable…that civilians will die. A law professor defends Israel’s actions in Gaza.

The list goes to 25. I'd said it included no Palestinian voice, but that's not true; the law professor in the third link above is debating Noura Erakat. The link's to Jadaliyya, probably the first time anyone at CT has linked there, and neither Erakat nor the site are acknowledged.

Another post by Robin answer's an openly fascist argument in The New Republic, written by a 23 year old, but responds to the fascism as such, not the concrete history. To do that takes too much work and grants less credit to the righteousness of the author. Robin argues from ideas about ideas to ideas, all mostly about himself.

The facade of reason and reasonableness in polite, optimistic, self-important left-liberalism, the liberalism of "serious" Anglo-American intellectual life, is falling.  Questions of the Iraq war and ME policy and Israel were treated as distinct, and they still are amongst those choosing now not to focus on Gaza. In the future they are going to be asked why they made that choice.

A stupid post by Jonathan Freedland at the NYR Blog.
note taking/ record keeping. My two comments made it in

Israel could have had peace a long time ago, but liberals have always covered for the actions of those who were less so. Israel was founded on the moral logic of the BNP but closer to the German: Blut und Boden. Zionism is ethnic bigotry.

Liberal Zionism is an oxymoron. If liberals had admitted this to themselves decades ago -admitted that in fact they were not and had no interest in being liberal- they would have been able to think rationally about how to make peace. But they didn't.

I've read the same angry question a dozen times in the past weeks about the rockets out of Gaza: "What country would put up with this!?" Rocks thrown over the prison walls by prisoners whose only crime is being native to their land. And the response comes by way of guided missile systems and F16s. Demands are made that the Palestinians abide by all the restrictions of law but they're offered none of the benefits. The deaths of Palestinians are called "heartbreaking." The deaths of Israelis are called crimes.

"A single state in all of historic Palestine, dominated by Jews but in which Palestinians are deprived of the vote, might be Zionist but it certainly would not be liberal." That is what exists now. Don't pretend otherwise. Half the population of Israel is ruled over by the other, and you worry for the right to self-determination for the rulers. Did you worry this way about the rights of Afrikaners?

This is the last great battle of the era of decolonization; it's not an after-effect or a continuation. And the arguments in the respectable white press haven't changed a bit, It's a pity they didn't have the phrase "concern troll" in 1956

The second just repeats what I repeat, with a new links to Rabbani, and an old link to Helena Cobban.

But as I know– because I was the conduit of one of these threats– threats of lethal violence were sent by the Israelis to any Palestinian “independents” who might be even considering joining a Haniyeh-led government. As a result, none of them did; and the government that Haniyeh ended up forming was 100% Hamas.

A Quaker woman tasked by as messenger of a threat of assassination.

Meshaal is going to be on Charlie Rose again

"We are not fanatics, we are not fundamentalists. We are not actually fighting the Jews because they are Jews per se. We do not fight any other races. We fight the occupiers," he said.
"I'm ready to coexist with the Jews, with the Christians and the Arabs and non-Arabs," he said. "However, I do not coexist with the occupiers."
Pressed on whether Palestinians could recognize the state of Israel as a Jewish state, Meshaal reiterated Hamas' position -- the group does not recognize Israel.
"When we have a Palestinian state then the Palestinian state will decide on its policies. You cannot actually ask me about the future. I answered you," he said.
"But Palestinian people can have their say when they have their own state without occupation."

Hamas changed its charter in 2006. It offered a 10 year truce in 2004, 2006 and again now, rejected every time and ignored.