Israel at 60; a Land of Hope

Happy birthday Israel!

The following article on the subject is the the first article I have read in 16 days.... (due to: http://mikeghouseforamerica.blogspot.com/2008/05/gods-grace-for-najma-ghouse.html ) because my friend Joe asked, I read it, and I am glad I read it.

It is one of the best pieces I have seen to project the Jewish side of the human experience and endurance. I have written quite a few comments along the same lines.

I just wrote http://mikeghouseforamerica.blogspot.com/2008/05/clinton-stoking-anti-semitism.html and I hope you can see some sense in the piece I wrote last November http://peace-palestine-israel.blogspot.com/2007/11/peace-in-israel-palestine.html . I have to complete a full presentation on the subject of Peace for Israel and Palestine and it touches along the same lines Joe has written below. And this

There is a dire need for the Palestinians to understand the trauma the Jewish people have endured and the Israelis to understand the hopelessness, pain and anguish of the Palestinians. The leadership on both sides has focused on bullying each other and cowing each other down.... that is inhuman and has failed, yet they don't get it. We need a human approach - to step forward. I hope to write that piece some time this year.

The one sentence that I need to understand is the "the armies of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, attacked Israel. Five countries, with combined populations of 25 million, declared war on the State of Israel , with population of 600,000." I need to understand the background on this particular aspect and hope to learn it from both sides of the issue.

Sadly, we the Americans cannot bring peace to the Middle east because we do not have the genuine disposition to see another point of view nor do we have the emapthy for the Palestinians or truly understand the security needs of the Jews. Yet we talk about peace without meaning it. It is time we focus on justice to bring about sustainable peace to the Jews and the Palestinians.

Mike Ghouse
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Israel at 60 - A Land of Hope

Joe Samuels

May 14, 1948. Tears of joy mixed with tears of fear. After the longest exile ever endured by any people, the Jews now had their own State. Then the war broke out. Oops? The war broke out? How does a war break out? Is it lightening from the sky that starts a forest fire? Someone must start a war. On that day, May 14, 1948 while the Israelis were dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv and rejoicing the birth of their nation, the armies of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, attacked Israel. Five countries, with combined populations of 25 million, declared war on the State of Israel, with population of 600,000. That was a traumatic time that changed my life forever. I was 18 years old in Baghdad. The tears of fear drowned the tears of joy. A year later I was smuggled safely out of Iraq. I was lucky.

For centuries, Jews were dispersed all over the world, wandering from one place to another in search of safety and a place to live, always a minority. It was a history of suffering, adding new words to a lexicon of tragedy: expulsion, disputation, forced conversion, inquisition, ghetto, Dthimitude, and pogrom. Jews were suspended between memory and hope, sustained by the promise that God will bring them back. Although they no longer lived in the land, the land lived in them.

Throughout the years, they returned to the Promised Land. In the 15th and the 16th centuries, Jews came from Spain and Portugal. In the 17th century, they came from Ukraine after the massacre of 1648.

In 1879, a disturbing phenomenon appeared. It was given a new name: anti-Semitism. After the Russian Pogrom of 1881 and the Dreyfus trial in 1895 in France, Jewish leaders such as Theodor Herzl, warned that Europe was becoming unsafe.

Then came 1933 and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Anti-Semitism was at the heart of his campaign and laws against the Jews were enacted. Gradually Jews were deprived of their rights, jobs and their freedom. They were spoken of as lice, vermin, and a cancer to be surgically removed from the body of the German nation. Millions of Jews were in danger. Nation after nation shut its doors. On the vast surface of the earth there was not one inch of land Jews could call home.

As the smoke of war cleared in 1945, as the Russians entered Auschwitz and the British Bergen Belsen, people began to understand the enormity of what had happened. A third of the world Jewry had gone up in flames. One and a half million children had been murdered.

When the war was over, Jewish refugees couldn’t enter the land. On November 29, 1947 the UN voted to partition the land between its Jewish and Arab population. While the Jews accepted, the Arabs refused. After 2000 years of wandering the State of Israel came into being. Was this the hand of God or the work of human beings? Surely it was both. The tears of joy drowned the tears of fear.

A homeless, penniless refugee, I arrived in Israel, like others from Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Morocco, and Afghanistan. Holocaust survivors and refugees came from over 100 countries and spoke 80 languages. They came from Russia when it opened its doors. They came home to the land of hope, Israel. In few short weeks, after my arrival in Israel, I found work; and a place to stay. I was free and equal citizen. I was no more a refugee.

The Jews accepted every partition proposal, the Balfour Declaration in 1917, the Peel Commission in 1937, and the UN in 1947. After Israel victory in the 6 Day War in 1967, Israel again proposed land for peace. The Arab countries gathered in Khartoum declared: no negotiation, no recognition and no peace. Only two countries have since made peace treaties with Israel, Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994. The peace treaty on the lawn of the white House, in September 1993 lasted less than a year. A wave of suicide bombers struck in restaurants, buses, parks, schools, shopping malls and busy streets.

Had the Arab leaders accepted the UN partition plan instead of launching a war, to seize all the land, an independent Palestinian-Arab state would now exist alongside Israel. There would have been no Palestinian refugees. If Arab countries had not expelled their Jewish citizens, there would have been no Jewish refugees from Arab countries either. Israel was never far from war, or the threat of war, terror, or the threat of terror. It fought wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982. Israel is a tiny country home to a tiny group of people. It is the size of the Belize or the State of New Jersey and is one sixth of 1% that of the Arab lands.

Judaism is the oldest western religion. It is twice as old as Christianity, three times as old as Islam, yet there are 82 Christian countries, 56 Muslim countries but only one Jewish State.

How do Israelis live with the constant threat of violence and war, and create a thriving democracy, that excels in agriculture, science, medicine and technology? How did the Jews survive for a hundred generations to build a country from the ashes of the Holocaust? The answer is faith, hope and the refusal to believe or act as victims.

Israel’s National Anthem Hatikvah, means the Hope. Israel is the land of hope. At 60, Israel’s journey is not yet over, and will not be, until peace, Shalom, Salam will come. Peace is a duet and can’t be done solo by Israel alone. Until the Palestinians accept the existence of Israel, the chance for peace is slim. So, for the sake of the Israelis, for the sake of the Palestinians, for the sake of God, humanity and the future generations let us all pray and hope for peace.

Carter Peace initiatives

Article follows my comments;

Why can't the US listen to its wiser statesmen? Why do we have to stand against the world and make enemies instead of friends?

The Bush and Olmert adminstrations continue with their thoughtless dirty games. They want to talk about peace, but not with the party who the peace is going to affect? That is downright chicanery.

The acts of both these administrations are not reflective of majority of their population. The few extremists are shoving it down the throats of the people.

I wrote a similar note way back in November, prior to the Annapolis conference. http://peace-palestine-israel.blogspot.com/2007/11/peace-in-israel-palestine.html
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Jimmy Carter Was Right to Meet with Hamas

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on April 21, 2008, Printed on April 22, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/82936/
Former President Jimmy Carter, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for what the prize committee described as his "untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts," is touring the Middle East, as a private citizen, in a bid to revive interest in a moribund peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. He's doing so at a time when their decades-long conflict is growing in intensity and distrust on both sides is running high.

As a result, Carter is once again under fire from conservatives. Last week, Republican Rep. Sue Myrick (NC) went so far as to call for the former president's passport to be revoked on Fox News.

Carter's crime was to sit-down with leaders of Hamas last week to explore the possibility of waging peace in the Middle East. For many Israel-hawks, it wasn't a first offense; Carter is guilty of viewing the Palestinians as human beings and for condemning human rights abuses on both sides of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. "Any side that kills innocent people is guilty of terrorism," he told an audience at Cairo's American University after his sit-down with members of Hamas.

Carter rejects the short-sighted idea that negotiating with one's enemies legitimizes or rewards them for their actions. According to the same logic, when a police department sends a hostage negotiator to talk down a gun-toting lunatic who's barricaded himself in a house somewhere, that department would be guilty of "legitimizing" armed lunatics. It's a ludicrous idea on its face, but one that's essentially embraced by much of the American foreign policy establishment when it comes to the international arena.

It's an ideological construct that defies both common sense and the "best practices" that have been developed in the field of conflict resolution -- best practices that were borne of hard experience. What Carter seems to understand, and his detractors appear unable to grasp, is that there is absolutely no chance of establishing and implementing a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians without offering Hamas a seat at the negotiating table.

One of the most obvious lessons from the international community's efforts at conflict resolution is that getting signatures on a peace deal is only half the battle (if that much). Implementing peace treaties is much more difficult, and recent history is littered with wreckage of agreements that didn't hold.

One of the ways to almost guarantee that a peace agreement will be impossible to implement is to negotiate it without bringing all of the combatants to the table. Israel and Fatah (the faction of Mahmoud Abbas, Chairman of the Palestinian Authority) can negotiate a deal, but if Hamas isn't invested in it, then they'll have no incentive to comply with its terms.

One doesn't need to have warm feelings towards Hamas to recognize this reality. The idea that one can choose one's negotiating partner, as opposed to negotiating with all of the parties to a conflict, is a fantasy. The fact that Hamas won a decisive victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections and is the legitimate voice of a majority of the Palestinian people reduces the notion to a bit of right-wing idealism that's thoroughly divorced from historic experience.

Carter, whose recent book Palestine: Peace not Apartheidbrokered a lasting peace deal between Israel and an Arab state. His work at Camp David in the 1970s not only led to a sustainable peace deal between Israel and Egypt, it set a precedent that was followed by other Arab states and eventually an offer by all of the Arab states for full recognition of Israeli sovereignty in exchange for Israel's return to its pre-1967 borders. In other words, not only has Carter contributed to the region's stability, he's also done more to improve Israel's security than all of his neoconservative naysayers combined. ruffled many right-wing feathers, remains the only American president to have actually

A common refrain among American and Israeli hawks is that Hamas must recognize Israel's legitimacy before they can get a seat at the table. While that sounds reasonable on its face, in reality it's asking Hamas to accept a key Israeli demand before negotiations begin. Meanwhile, Israel continues to build new settlements in the Occupied Territories, and continues its brutal siege of the Gaza strip. In other words, the position held by much of the Washington establishment is that Palestinians must make concessions before negotiations begin, but Israel is free to continue creating "facts on the ground," even when it's in violation of international law. It's a pipedream to believe such a position can lead to anything more than extended bloodshed.

Of course, what separates Carter from his detractors may be that he has a genuine desire for establishing peace in the Middle East, while many "pro-Israel" hawks favor (an impossible) military solution to the conflict, with Israel crushing the Palestinians into oblivion.

If that is their position, they should be upfront about it and admit that they oppose a negotiated settlement to the conflict rather than lashing out blindly at anyone who is serious about making peace.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/82936/

Palestinians versus Tibetans

Palestinians versus Tibetans - a double standard
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/974170.html
By Gideon Levy

Tags: Israel

Israelis have no moral right to fight the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The president of the Israeli Friends of the Tibetan People, the psychologist Nahi Alon, who was involved in the murder of two Palestinians in Gaza in 1967 - as was revealed in Haaretz Magazine last weekend - chose to make his private "atonement" by fighting to free Tibet, of all places. He is not alone among Israelis calling to stop the occupation - but not ours. No small number of other good Israelis have recently joined the wave of global protest that broke out over the Olympics, set to take place in Beijing this summer. It is easy; it engenders no controversy - who would not be in favor of liberating Tibet? But that is not the fight that Israeli human rights supporters should be waging.

To fight for Tibet, Israel needs no courage, because there is no price to pay. On the contrary, this is part of a fashionable global trend, almost as much as the fight against global warming or the poaching of sea lions.

These fights are just, and must be undertaken. But in Israel they are deluxe fights, which are unthinkable. When one comes to the fight with hands that are collectively, and sometimes individually, so unclean, it is impossible to protest a Chinese occupation.

Citizens of a country that maintains a military subjugation in its backyard that is no less cruel than that of the Chinese, and by some parameters even more so, and against which there is practically no more protest here, have no justification in denouncing another occupation. Citizens of a country that is entirely tainted by the occupation - a national, ongoing project that involves all sectors of the population to some extent, directly or indirectly - cannot wash their hands and fight another occupation, when a half-hour from their homes, horrors no less terrible are taking place for which they have much greater responsibility.

The world has fallen in love with Tibet. How easy it is to do so. The picturesque figure of the Dalai Lama and the non-violent struggle he leads with his scarlet-robed monks is truly captivating. Indeed, the world has smothered the leader with awards and recognition, from the Nobel Peace Prize to an honorary doctorate at Ben-Gurion University.

The Palestinians are not as nice as the Tibetans in the eyes of the world. But the Palestinian people deserve exactly the same rights as the occupied Tibetan people, even if their leaders are less enchanting, they have no scarlet robes and their fight is more violent. There is absolutely no connection between rights and the means of protest, and from that perspective, there is no difference between a Tibetan and a Palestinian - they both deserve the exact same freedom.

Moreover, in the first years of the Israeli occupation, most Palestinians accepted it submissively, with practically no violence. What did they get as a result? Nothing. The world and Israel cloaked themselves in apathy and callousness. Only when planes started being hijacked in the 1970s did the world begin to notice that a Palestinian problem even existed. In contrast, the Tibetan struggle also was tainted with violence in the past, and it is reasonable to assume that violence will increase if the Tibetans do not attain their goal.

There is also no point in asking which occupation is crueler, the Chinese or the Israeli. The competition is harsh and bitter. The Chinese killed and imprisoned more Tibetans, in Lhasa there is less freedom of expression than in Nablus, but in general, the extent of Israeli repression in the territories is much greater today than Chinese repression in Tibet.

Nowhere in the world today is there a region more besieged and confined than Gaza. And what is the result? The world calls to boycott the occupier in the case of China, while absurdly, with regard to the Palestinians, the world is boycotting the occupied entity, or at least its elected leadership, and not the occupier. This, it seems, has no parallel in history.

Internationally speaking, the situation of the Palestinians is ostensibly better, since while all governments recognize Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, no government in the world recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Palestinian territories. Practically speaking, this does not help the Palestinians much: Contemporary bon ton is to support the struggle for Tibet, only Tibet. The Palestinians have not even one Richard Gere to serve as a mouthpiece. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is boycotting the Olympic games but paid an official visit to Israel, where she spoke not one word about the shameful conditions in Gaza under Israeli occupation. Is there any other way to describe this, except a double standard?

In a more just world, no occupation would exist - neither the Chinese nor the Israeli. But until that time, the Israelis have to look inward at their own home and protest what is being done there in front of the Israeli Defense Ministry, before they present themselves with colorful signs outside the Chinese Embassy.

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JPN: Palestinians versus Tibetans

2008-04-16 Recent world-wide protests have drawn critical media attention to the Chinese occupation of Tibet. While such attention is both important and overdue, it does raise questions about moral responsibility and political double standards.

We can put it this way: if the media were genuinely concerned to report on human right violations, they would show the Palestinians, Chechnyans, etc the same sort of sympathy they show for Tibet. The fact that their sympathy is so systematically selective suggests that it is not human rights violations that provoke their concern - and leads naturally to the question of what does. In the second article below, Uri Avnery explores the question of selective sympathy, and the factors that lead the media to fall in love with the Tibetans (who have also resorted to terrorism on occasion) while condemning the Palestinians.

Clearly, Avnery argues, the protests against Tibet accord with Washington's diplomatic interests in the region, its desire - driven largely by economic rivalry - to keep China at arm's length. In this climate, the US media is encouraged (or allowed) to be sympathetic to China's victims in a way that is not permissible in the case of the victims of America's steadfast ally, Israel.

This is by no means to detract from the urgency and justice of the cause of the Tibetan people under occupation, or the motives of the activists working to publicize their plight. It is only to say that human rights are universal and we should be wary of who is driving some of these bandwagons.

On the other hand, there are good reasons for concerned citizens to pay more attention to some causes. Clearly, we have a greater responsibility to protest policies carried on by our own governments - policies that we stand a chance of being able to change. For this reason, both Israelis and Americans (and particularly American Jews) have a special responsibility to protest the occupation of Palestine. Since our governments are conducting (and in the case of Americans, bankrolling) this occupation, we are the ones who can force our elected leaders to stop. We have a privileged position in these issues that we do not have in the case, for instance, of the Tibetan struggle. In the first article below, Gideon Levy explores the question of Israelis who are silent on Palestine but vocal on Tibet. The same questions can be extended to Americans in the cases of both Palestine and Iraq.

Again and by all means: free Tibet! But this outpouring of selective outrage rings false in countries supporting human rights violations elsewhere.

Judith Norman
Jewish Peace News http://www.jewishpeacenews.net