Bloodbath in Jerusalem
"I Came, I Saw, I Destroyed"
by Uri Avnery
March 15, 2008
Mike Ghouse: Until the silent majority of Jews in America and Israel speak up against injustices, and until the majority of the Palestinians speak up. Peace will be difficult to come by. The extremists on both sides will keep killing the people, while shamelessly each majority engages in blaming the other. It is not the other, it is the extremists who are a blockade to peace. Their ideas have not worked in 60 years, why should it work now? They are destructive! People, take over the leadership and let peace makers bring real peace.
What happened this week is so infuriating, so impertinent, that it stands out even in our familiar landscape of governmental irresponsibility.
On the near horizon, a de facto suspension of hostilities was taking shape. The Egyptians had made great efforts to turn it into an official cease-fire. The flame was already burning visibly lower. The launching of Qassams and Grads from the Gaza Strip into Israel had fallen from dozens a day to two or three.
And then something happened that turned the flame up high again: undercover soldiers of the Israeli army killed four Palestinians militants in Bethlehem. A fifth was killed in a village near Tulkarm.
THE MODUS OPERANDI left no doubt about the intention.
As usual, the official version was mendacious. (When the army spokesman speaks the truth, he is ashamed and immediately hurries on to the next lie.) The four, it was said, drew their weapons and endangered the life of the soldiers, who only wanted to arrest them, so they were compelled to open fire.
Anyone with half a brain knows that this is a lie. The four were in a small car on the main street of Bethlehem, the road that has joined Jerusalem and Hebron since British (or Turkish) times. They were indeed armed, but they had no chance at all of drawing their weapons. The car was simply sprayed with dozens of bullets.
That was not an attempt to make an arrest. That was an execution, pure and simple, one of those summary executions in which the Shin Bet fulfils the roles of prosecutor, judge and executioner.
This time no effort was even made to pretend that the four were about to carry out a murderous attack. It was not claimed, for example, that they had anything to do with last week's attack on the Mercaz Harav seminary, the flagship of the settlers' fleet. Actually, no such pretense could be put forward, because the most important of the four had recently given interviews to the Israeli media and announced that he was availing himself of the Israeli "pardon scheme" - a Shin Bet program under which "wanted" militants give up their arms and undertake to cease resistance to the occupation. He was also a candidate in the last Palestinian elections.
If so, why where they killed? The Shin Bet did not hide the reason: two of the four had participated in attacks in 2001 in which Israelis were killed.
"Our long arm will get them even years later," Ehud Barak boasted on TV, "we shall get everyone with Jewish blood on his hands."
SIMPLY PUT: The Defense Minister and his men endangered today's cease-fire in order to avenge something that happened seven years ago.
It was obvious to all that the killing of Islamic Jihad militants in Bethlehem would cause the renewal of the Qassam launchings on Sderot. And so it happened.
The effect of a Qassam rocket is completely unpredictable. For the residents of Sderot, this is a kind of Israeli Roulette - the rocket may fall in an empty field, it may fall on a building, sometimes it kills people.
In other words, according to Barak himself, he was ready to risk Jewish lives today in order to take revenge on persons who may perhaps have shed blood years ago and have since given up their armed activity.
The emphasis is on the word "Jewish". In his statement, Barak took care not to speak about persons "with blood on their hands", but about those "with Jewish blood on their hands". Jewish blood, of course, is quite different from any other blood. And indeed, there is no person in the Israeli leadership with so much blood on his hands as him. Not abstract blood, not metaphorical blood, but very real red blood. In the course of his military service, Barak has personally killed quite a number of Arabs. Whoever shakes his hand - from Condoleezza Rice to this week's honored guest, Angela Merkel - is shaking a hand with blood on it.
THE BETHLEHEM killing raises a number of hard questions, but with very few exceptions, the media did not voice them. They shirk their duty, as usual when it concerns "security" problems.
Real journalists in a real democratic state would have asked the following questions:
Who was it who decided on the executions in Bethlehem - Ehud Olmert? Ehud Barak? The Shin Bet? All of them? None of them?
Did the decision-makers understand that by condemning the militants in Bethlehem to death, they were also condemning to death any residents of Sderot or Ashkelon who might be killed by the rockets launched in revenge?
Did they understand that they were also boxing the ears of Mahmoud Abbas, whose security forces, which in theory are in charge of Bethlehem, would be accused of collaborating with the Israeli death-squad?
Was the real aim of the action to undermine the cease-fire that had come about in practice in the Gaza Strip (and the reality of which was official denied both by Olmert and Barak, even while the number of rockets launched fell from dozens a day to just two or three?)
Does the Israeli government generally object to a cease-fire that would free Sderot and Ashkelon from the threat of the rockets?
If so, why?
The media did not demand that Olmert and Barak expose to the public the considerations that led them to adopt this decision, which concerns every person in Israel. And no wonder. These are, after all, the same media that danced for joy when the same government started an ill-considered and superfluous war in Lebanon. They are also the same media that kept silent, this week, when the government decided to hit the freedom of the press and to boycott the Aljazeera TV network, as punishment for showing babies killed during the Israeli army's recent incursion in Gaza.
But for two or three courageous journalists with an independent mind, all our written and broadcast media march in lockstep, like a Prussian regiment on parade, when the word "security" is mentioned.
(This phenomenon was exposed this week in CounterPunch by a journalist named Yonatan Mendel, a former employee of the popular Israeli web-site Walla. He pointed out that all the media, from the Channel 1 news program to the Haaretz news pages, as if by order, voluntarily use exactly the same slanted terminology: the Israeli army confirms and the Palestinians claim, Jews are murdered while Palestinians are killed or find their death, Jews are abducted while Arabs are arrested, the Israeli army always responds while the Palestinians always attack, the Jews are soldiers while Arabs are terrorists or just murderers, the Israeli army always hits high-ranking terrorists and never low-ranking terrorists, men and women suffering from shock are always Jews, never Arabs. And, as we said, people with blood on their hands are always Arabs, never-ever Jews. This, by the way, also goes for much of the foreign coverage of events here.)
WHEN THE GOVERNMENT does not disclose its intentions, we have no choice but to deduce its intentions from its actions. That is a judicial rule: when a person does something with a foreseeable result, it is assumed that he did it in order to obtain this result.
The government which decided on the killing in Bethlehem undoubtedly intended to torpedo the cease-fire.
Why does it want to do so?
There are several possible kinds of cease-fire. The most simple is the cessation of hostilities on the Gaza Strip border. No Qassams, Grads and mortar shells on the one side, no targeted assassinations, bombardments, shelling and incursion on the other side.
It is known that the army objects to that. They want to be free to "liquidate" from the air and raid on the ground. They want a one-sided cease-fire.
A limited cease-fire is impossible. Hamas cannot agree to it, as long as the blockade cuts the Strip off on all sides and turn life there into hell - not enough medicines, not enough food, the seriously ill cannot reach appropriate hospitals, the movement of cars has come to an almost complete standstill, no imports or exports, no production or commercial activity. The opening of all border crossings for the movement of goods is, therefore, an essential component of a cease-fire.
Our government is not willing to do that, because it would mean the consolidation of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. Government sources hint that Abbas and his people in Ramallah also object to the lifting of the blockade - a malicious rumor, because it would mean that Abbas is conducting a war against his own people. President Bush also rejects a cease-fire, even while his people pretend the opposite. Europe, as usual, is trailing along behind the US.
Can Hamas agree to a cease-fire that would apply only to the Gaza Strip but not to the West Bank? That is doubtful. This week it was proven that the Islamic Jihad organization in Gaza cannot stand idly by while its members are killed in Bethlehem. Hamas could not stand by in Gaza and enjoy the fruits of government if the Israeli army were to kill Hamas militants in Nablus or Jenin. And, of course, no Palestinian would agree that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are two separate entities.
A Gaza-only cease-fire would allow Barak to blow it to pieces at any moment by a Bethlehem-style provocation. This is how it could go: Hamas agrees to a Gaza-only cease-fire, the Israeli army kills a dozen Hamas members in Hebron, Hamas responds by launching Grad missiles at Ashkelon, Olmert tells the world: You see? The terrorist Hamas is violating the cease-fire, which proves that we have no partner!
This means that a real and durable cease-fire, which would create the necessary atmosphere for real peace negotiations, must include the West Bank, too. Olmert-Barak would not dream of agreeing to that. And as long as George Bush is around, there will be no effective pressure on our government.
APROPOS: who is really in charge in Israel at this time?
This week's events point to the answer: the man who makes the decisions is Ehud Barak, the most dangerous person in Israel, the very same Barak who blew up the Camp David conference and persuaded the entire Israeli public that "we have no partner for peace".
2052 years ago today, on the Ides of March, Julius Caesar was assassinated. Ehud Barak sees himself as a latter-day local replica of the Roman general. He, too, would dearly want to report: "I came, I saw, I conquered."
But the reality is rather different: He came, he saw, he destroyed.
Uri Avneri, is a German-born Israeli journalist, peace activist, and former three-term Knesset member, who was originally a member of the right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement. He is a founding member, Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace and a founding member, "Gush Shalom" (Peace Bloc), Independent Peace Mevement.
This column can be found online at: http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/
Posted by Profile of Mike Ghouse at 9:48 AM 0 comments
Labels: injustice, Israel, Jerusalem, Neocons, Palestine, zionists
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Monday, March 10, 2008
Kill 100 Turks and Rest
"Kill 100 Turks and Rest"
The Five-Day War in Gaza
By URI AVNERY
I was reminded this week of the old tale about a Jewish mother taking leave of her son, who has been called up to serve in the Czar's army against the Turks.
"Don't exert yourself too much," she admonishes him, "Kill a Turk and rest. Kill another Turk and rest again…"
"But mother," he exclaims, "What if the Turk kills me?"
"Kill you?" she cries out, "Why? What have you done to him?"
This is not a joke (and this is not a week for jokes). It is a lesson in psychology. I was reminded of it when I read Ehud Olmert's statement that more than anything else he was furious about the outburst of joy in Gaza after the attack in Jerusalem, in which eight yeshiva students were killed.
Before that, last weekend, the Israeli army killed 120 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, half of them civilians, among them dozens of children. That was not "kill a Turk and rest". That was "kill a hundred Turks and rest". But Olmert does not understand.
The Five-Day war in Gaza (as a Hamas leader called it) was but another short chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. This bloody monster is never satisfied; its appetite just grows with the eating.
This chapter started with the "targeted liquidation" of five senior militants inside the Gaza Strip. The "response" was a salvo of rockets, and this time not only on Sderot, but also on Ashkelon and Netivot. The "response" to the "response" was the army's incursion and the wholesale killing.
The stated aim was, as always, to stop the launching of the rockets. The means: killing a maximum of Palestinians, in order to teach them a lesson. The decision was based on the traditional Israeli concept: hit the civilian population again and again, until it overthrows its leaders. This has been tried hundreds of times and has failed hundreds of times.
As if an example for the folly of the propagators of this concept had been lacking, it was provided on TV by ex-general Matan Vilnai, when he said that the Palestinians are "bringing a Shoah on themselves". The Hebrew word Shoah is known all over the world, where it has one clear meaning: the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis against the Jews. Vilnai's utterance spread like a bushfire throughout the Arab world and set off a shock wave. I, too, received dozens of phone calls and e-mail messages from all over the world. How to convince people that in day-to-day Hebrew usage, Shoah means "only" a great disaster, and that General Vilnai, a former candidate for Chief of Staff, is not the most intelligent of people?
Some years ago, President Bush called for a "Crusade" against terrorism. He had no idea that for hundreds of millions of Arabs, the word "Crusade" brings to mind one of the biggest crimes in human history, the appalling massacre committed by the original crusaders against the Muslims (and Jews) in the alleys of Jerusalem. In an intelligence contest between Bush and Vilnai, the outcome, if any, would be in doubt.
Vilnai does not understand what the word "Shoah" means to others, and Olmert does not understand why there is rejoicing in Gaza after the attack on the yeshiva in Jerusalem. Wise men like these direct the state, the government and the army. Wise men like these control public opinion through the media. What is common to all of them: blunted sensibilities to the feelings of anybody who is not Jewish/Israeli. From this springs their inability to understand the psychology of the other side, and hence the consequences of their own words and actions.
This is also expressed in the inability to understand why the Hamas people claimed victory in the Five-Day War. What victory? After all, only two Israeli soldiers and one Israeli civilian were killed, as against 120 Palestinian dead, both fighters and civilians.
But this battle was fought between one of the strongest armies in the world, equipped with the most modern arms on earth, and a few thousand irregulars with primitive arms. If the battle ended in a draw - and such a battle always ends in a draw - this is a great victory for the weak side. In Lebanon War II and in the Gaza war.
(Binyamin Netanyahu made one of the most stupid statements this week, when he demanded that "the Israeli army must move from attrition to decision". In a struggle like this, there never is a decision.)
The real effect of such an operation is not expressed in material and quantitative facts: so-and-so many dead, so-and-so many injured, so-and-so much destroyed. It is expressed in psychological results that cannot be measured, and therefore are inaccessible to the minds of generals: how much hatred has been added to the seething pool, how many new potential suicide bombers were produced, how many people vowed revenge and became ticking bombs - like the Jerusalem youngster, who woke up one bright morning this week, got himself a weapon, went to the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, the mother of all settlements, and killed as many as he could.
Now the political and military leadership of Israel sits down to discuss what to do, how to "respond". No new idea has come up or will come up, because not one of these politicians and generals is able to bring up a new idea. They can only go back to the hundred things they have already done, and that have failed a hundred times.
The first step on the way out of this madness is the readiness to question all our concepts and methods of the last 60 years and start thinking again, right from the beginning.
That is always hard. That is even harder for us, because our leadership has no freedom of thought - its thinking is very closely tied to the thinking of the American leadership.
This week, a shocking document was published: David Rose's article in Vanity Fair. It describes how US officials have in recent years dictated every single step of the Palestinian leadership, down to the most minute detail. Though the article does not touch the Israeli-American relationship (in itself a surprising omission) it goes without saying that the American course, including the smallest items, is coordinated with the Israeli government.
Why shocking? These things were already known, in general terms. In this respect, that article held no surprises: (a) The Americans ordered Mahmoud Abbas to hold parliamentary elections, in order to present Bush as bringing democracy to the Middle East. (b) Hamas won a surprise victory. (c) The Americans imposed a boycott on the Palestinians, in order to nullify the election results. (d) Abbas diverted for a moment from the policy dictated to him and, under Saudi auspices (and pressure), made an agreement with Hamas, (e) The Americans put an end to this and compelled Abbas to turn over all security services to Muhammad Dahlan, whom they had chosen for the role of strongman in Palestine, (f) The Americans provided plenty of money and arms to Dahlan, trained his men and ordered him to carry out a military coup against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, (g) The elected Hamas government forestalled the move and itself carried out an armed counter-coup.
All this was known before. What is new is that the mixture of news, rumors and intelligent guesses has now condensed into an authoritative, well substantiated report, based on official US documents. It testifies to the abysmal American ignorance, which trumps even Israeli ignorance, of the internal Palestinian processes.
George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, the Zionist neocon Elliott Abrams and the assortment of American generals innocent of any knowledge are competing with Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barak and our own assorted generals, whose understanding reaches as far as the end of the gun barrels of their tanks.
The Americans have in the meantime destroyed Dahlan by exposing him publicly as their agent, on the lines of "he's a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son-of-a-bitch". This week Condoleezza dealt a mortal blow to Abbas, too. He had announced in the morning that he was suspending the (meaningless) peace negotiations with Israel, the very minimum he could do in response to the Gaza atrocities. Rice, who received the news while she was having breakfast in the exciting company of Livni, immediately called Abbas and ordered him to cancel his announcement. Abbas gave in, thus exposing himself to his people in all his nakedness.
Logic was not given to the People of Israel on Mount Sinai, but handed down from Mount Olympus to the ancient Greeks. In spite of this drawback, let us try to apply it.
What is our government trying to achieve in Gaza? It wants to topple Hamas rule (and incidentally also put an end to the launching of rockets against Israel).
It tried to achieve this by imposing a total blockade on the population, hoping that they would rise up and overthrow Hamas. This failed. The alternative course is to re-occupy the entire Strip. That would carry a high price in lives of soldiers, perhaps more than the Israeli public is ready to pay. Also, it will not help, because Hamas will return the moment the Israeli troops withdraw. (In accordance with Mao Zedong's first rule for guerrillas: "When the enemy advances, withdraw. When the enemy withdraws, advance.")
The only result of the Five-Day War is the strengthening of Hamas and the rallying of the Palestinian people behind it - not just in the Gaza Strip, but in the West Bank and Jerusalem, too. Their victory celebration was justified. The launching of rockets did not stop. The range of the rockets is increasing.
But let us assume that this policy had succeeded and that Hamas had been broken. What then? Abbas and Dahlan could return only on top of Israeli tanks, as subcontractors of the occupation. No insurance company would cover their lives. And if they did not come back, there would be chaos, out of which extreme forces would emerge the like of which we cannot even imagine.
Conclusion: Hamas is there. It cannot be ignored. We have to reach a cease-fire with it. Not a sham offer of "if they stop shooting first, then we will stop shooting". A cease-fire, like a tango, needs two participants. It must come out of a detailed agreement that will include the cessation of all hostilities, armed and otherwise, in all the territories.
The cease-fire will not hold if it is not accompanied by speeded-up negotiations for a long-term armistice (hudna) and peace. Such negotiations cannot be held with Fatah and not Hamas, nor with Hamas and not Fatah. Therefore, what is needed is a Palestinian government that includes both movements. It must bring in personalities who enjoy the confidence of the entire Palestinian people, such as Marwan Barghouti.
That is the very opposite of the present Israeli-American policy, which forbids Abbas even to talk with Hamas. In all the Israeli leadership, as in all the American leadership, there is no one who dares to spell this out openly. Therefore, what has been is what will be.
We will kill a hundred Turks and rest. And from time to time, a Turk will come and kill some of us.
Why, for God's sake? What have we done to them?
Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to The Politics of Anti-Semitism.
The Five-Day War in Gaza
By URI AVNERY
I was reminded this week of the old tale about a Jewish mother taking leave of her son, who has been called up to serve in the Czar's army against the Turks.
"Don't exert yourself too much," she admonishes him, "Kill a Turk and rest. Kill another Turk and rest again…"
"But mother," he exclaims, "What if the Turk kills me?"
"Kill you?" she cries out, "Why? What have you done to him?"
This is not a joke (and this is not a week for jokes). It is a lesson in psychology. I was reminded of it when I read Ehud Olmert's statement that more than anything else he was furious about the outburst of joy in Gaza after the attack in Jerusalem, in which eight yeshiva students were killed.
Before that, last weekend, the Israeli army killed 120 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, half of them civilians, among them dozens of children. That was not "kill a Turk and rest". That was "kill a hundred Turks and rest". But Olmert does not understand.
The Five-Day war in Gaza (as a Hamas leader called it) was but another short chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. This bloody monster is never satisfied; its appetite just grows with the eating.
This chapter started with the "targeted liquidation" of five senior militants inside the Gaza Strip. The "response" was a salvo of rockets, and this time not only on Sderot, but also on Ashkelon and Netivot. The "response" to the "response" was the army's incursion and the wholesale killing.
The stated aim was, as always, to stop the launching of the rockets. The means: killing a maximum of Palestinians, in order to teach them a lesson. The decision was based on the traditional Israeli concept: hit the civilian population again and again, until it overthrows its leaders. This has been tried hundreds of times and has failed hundreds of times.
As if an example for the folly of the propagators of this concept had been lacking, it was provided on TV by ex-general Matan Vilnai, when he said that the Palestinians are "bringing a Shoah on themselves". The Hebrew word Shoah is known all over the world, where it has one clear meaning: the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis against the Jews. Vilnai's utterance spread like a bushfire throughout the Arab world and set off a shock wave. I, too, received dozens of phone calls and e-mail messages from all over the world. How to convince people that in day-to-day Hebrew usage, Shoah means "only" a great disaster, and that General Vilnai, a former candidate for Chief of Staff, is not the most intelligent of people?
Some years ago, President Bush called for a "Crusade" against terrorism. He had no idea that for hundreds of millions of Arabs, the word "Crusade" brings to mind one of the biggest crimes in human history, the appalling massacre committed by the original crusaders against the Muslims (and Jews) in the alleys of Jerusalem. In an intelligence contest between Bush and Vilnai, the outcome, if any, would be in doubt.
Vilnai does not understand what the word "Shoah" means to others, and Olmert does not understand why there is rejoicing in Gaza after the attack on the yeshiva in Jerusalem. Wise men like these direct the state, the government and the army. Wise men like these control public opinion through the media. What is common to all of them: blunted sensibilities to the feelings of anybody who is not Jewish/Israeli. From this springs their inability to understand the psychology of the other side, and hence the consequences of their own words and actions.
This is also expressed in the inability to understand why the Hamas people claimed victory in the Five-Day War. What victory? After all, only two Israeli soldiers and one Israeli civilian were killed, as against 120 Palestinian dead, both fighters and civilians.
But this battle was fought between one of the strongest armies in the world, equipped with the most modern arms on earth, and a few thousand irregulars with primitive arms. If the battle ended in a draw - and such a battle always ends in a draw - this is a great victory for the weak side. In Lebanon War II and in the Gaza war.
(Binyamin Netanyahu made one of the most stupid statements this week, when he demanded that "the Israeli army must move from attrition to decision". In a struggle like this, there never is a decision.)
The real effect of such an operation is not expressed in material and quantitative facts: so-and-so many dead, so-and-so many injured, so-and-so much destroyed. It is expressed in psychological results that cannot be measured, and therefore are inaccessible to the minds of generals: how much hatred has been added to the seething pool, how many new potential suicide bombers were produced, how many people vowed revenge and became ticking bombs - like the Jerusalem youngster, who woke up one bright morning this week, got himself a weapon, went to the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, the mother of all settlements, and killed as many as he could.
Now the political and military leadership of Israel sits down to discuss what to do, how to "respond". No new idea has come up or will come up, because not one of these politicians and generals is able to bring up a new idea. They can only go back to the hundred things they have already done, and that have failed a hundred times.
The first step on the way out of this madness is the readiness to question all our concepts and methods of the last 60 years and start thinking again, right from the beginning.
That is always hard. That is even harder for us, because our leadership has no freedom of thought - its thinking is very closely tied to the thinking of the American leadership.
This week, a shocking document was published: David Rose's article in Vanity Fair. It describes how US officials have in recent years dictated every single step of the Palestinian leadership, down to the most minute detail. Though the article does not touch the Israeli-American relationship (in itself a surprising omission) it goes without saying that the American course, including the smallest items, is coordinated with the Israeli government.
Why shocking? These things were already known, in general terms. In this respect, that article held no surprises: (a) The Americans ordered Mahmoud Abbas to hold parliamentary elections, in order to present Bush as bringing democracy to the Middle East. (b) Hamas won a surprise victory. (c) The Americans imposed a boycott on the Palestinians, in order to nullify the election results. (d) Abbas diverted for a moment from the policy dictated to him and, under Saudi auspices (and pressure), made an agreement with Hamas, (e) The Americans put an end to this and compelled Abbas to turn over all security services to Muhammad Dahlan, whom they had chosen for the role of strongman in Palestine, (f) The Americans provided plenty of money and arms to Dahlan, trained his men and ordered him to carry out a military coup against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, (g) The elected Hamas government forestalled the move and itself carried out an armed counter-coup.
All this was known before. What is new is that the mixture of news, rumors and intelligent guesses has now condensed into an authoritative, well substantiated report, based on official US documents. It testifies to the abysmal American ignorance, which trumps even Israeli ignorance, of the internal Palestinian processes.
George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, the Zionist neocon Elliott Abrams and the assortment of American generals innocent of any knowledge are competing with Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barak and our own assorted generals, whose understanding reaches as far as the end of the gun barrels of their tanks.
The Americans have in the meantime destroyed Dahlan by exposing him publicly as their agent, on the lines of "he's a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son-of-a-bitch". This week Condoleezza dealt a mortal blow to Abbas, too. He had announced in the morning that he was suspending the (meaningless) peace negotiations with Israel, the very minimum he could do in response to the Gaza atrocities. Rice, who received the news while she was having breakfast in the exciting company of Livni, immediately called Abbas and ordered him to cancel his announcement. Abbas gave in, thus exposing himself to his people in all his nakedness.
Logic was not given to the People of Israel on Mount Sinai, but handed down from Mount Olympus to the ancient Greeks. In spite of this drawback, let us try to apply it.
What is our government trying to achieve in Gaza? It wants to topple Hamas rule (and incidentally also put an end to the launching of rockets against Israel).
It tried to achieve this by imposing a total blockade on the population, hoping that they would rise up and overthrow Hamas. This failed. The alternative course is to re-occupy the entire Strip. That would carry a high price in lives of soldiers, perhaps more than the Israeli public is ready to pay. Also, it will not help, because Hamas will return the moment the Israeli troops withdraw. (In accordance with Mao Zedong's first rule for guerrillas: "When the enemy advances, withdraw. When the enemy withdraws, advance.")
The only result of the Five-Day War is the strengthening of Hamas and the rallying of the Palestinian people behind it - not just in the Gaza Strip, but in the West Bank and Jerusalem, too. Their victory celebration was justified. The launching of rockets did not stop. The range of the rockets is increasing.
But let us assume that this policy had succeeded and that Hamas had been broken. What then? Abbas and Dahlan could return only on top of Israeli tanks, as subcontractors of the occupation. No insurance company would cover their lives. And if they did not come back, there would be chaos, out of which extreme forces would emerge the like of which we cannot even imagine.
Conclusion: Hamas is there. It cannot be ignored. We have to reach a cease-fire with it. Not a sham offer of "if they stop shooting first, then we will stop shooting". A cease-fire, like a tango, needs two participants. It must come out of a detailed agreement that will include the cessation of all hostilities, armed and otherwise, in all the territories.
The cease-fire will not hold if it is not accompanied by speeded-up negotiations for a long-term armistice (hudna) and peace. Such negotiations cannot be held with Fatah and not Hamas, nor with Hamas and not Fatah. Therefore, what is needed is a Palestinian government that includes both movements. It must bring in personalities who enjoy the confidence of the entire Palestinian people, such as Marwan Barghouti.
That is the very opposite of the present Israeli-American policy, which forbids Abbas even to talk with Hamas. In all the Israeli leadership, as in all the American leadership, there is no one who dares to spell this out openly. Therefore, what has been is what will be.
We will kill a hundred Turks and rest. And from time to time, a Turk will come and kill some of us.
Why, for God's sake? What have we done to them?
Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to The Politics of Anti-Semitism.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Yes we can, peace to Gaza
YES WE CAN BRING PEACE TO GAZA
Mike Ghouse, March 8, 2008
Justice is the basis for peace, and the responsibility to bring justice falls squarely on the powerful shoulders of the al-mighty nations.
Israel owes peace and security to her citizens and it is directly dependent on the security and peace needs of the Palestinians. You cannot live in peace, when your neighbor's aren't. Finding a balance is the most difficult thing to do and both the nations are trying and failing. No wonder the phrase "love thy neighbor" plays such a crucial role in every society.
When Hamas does not rein in those who are shelling the rockets into Israeli territory, Israel finds tempting to avenge it out and the world takes a back step as well.
Hamas can earn the moral high grounds by holding the shelling, and if Israel continues the attacks, then the world will empathize with the Palestinians and most likely the peace process gets a chance. The unfortunate reality is that every time Israelis and Palestinians are inclined to talk, we mess it up badly with a veto against the consensus of the world, and shamelessly it is against the long term interests of Israel. Neither the Hawks in Israel, nor our administration is willing to refresh their thinking. Ultimately, the parties have to figure out how to co-exist.
Mother Teresa said, "If you want peace, go talk with your enemies, you don't make peace with your friends". I do hope the state department genuinely attempts to assess the policies that would work. Right now, they are chasing their own tails.
A few basics need to be addressed and understood by all the parties.
Jews have a need to be understood and be acknowledged for their eternal security needs, not the military, but mental security where they can put their guards down and live their life in peace.
Palestinians have suffered immeasurably; no human should be stripped of his or her hope and dignity; hopes to have a family, work and own a house and call a place their homeland and live a life of dignity.
The end game of our policy should be peace. Our Presidents need to seriously look at what works and develop a vision for peace. They must understand that it may be going against the general opinion and perhaps against their very supporters; AIPAC. We need to take bold steps and produce peace for the people of Israel and Palestine.
Our foreign policy has relied on our gun powder and our ability to dole out alms to shove nations around the World to achieve our goals. The state department has forgotten that 'lasting relationships' hinge on a dialogue based on treating all parties on an equal footing.
If protection of Israel is based on injustice to either Palestinians or the Jews, our integrity has become questionable. We need to be above reproach. Mighty empires can crush the weak for a short term; in the long run every one goes down the tube. We cannot rob anyone and live with a good conscience.
The ways adopted by Israel and Hamas leaders has not worked and most likely will not produce the desired results; peace. We need to listen to average Israelis and Palestinians, we need to encourage the peace makers on both sides and give peace a chance.
I urge both the Moderate Jews and Palestinians to speak up; they need to put justice above the fear of repercussion from the neighbors and members of their communities. Right now, the shots are called by extremists on both sides, it needs to change. It is the fear of what the next Muslim or next Jew will tell them that frightens the moderates. They need to speak up and rein in, they are the absolute majority on both sides, otherwise the evil will persist, if the good people do nothing about it.
Write your comments to: CommentstoMike@Gmail.com
In the subject line please write :: Yes we can bring peace to Gaza
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike Ghouse is a Speaker, Thinker, Writer and a Moderator. He is a frequent guest on talk radio and local television network discussing Pluralism, politics, Islam, Religion, Terrorism, India and civic issues. His comments, news analysis, opinions and columns can be found on the Websites and Blogs listed at his personal website www.MikeGhouse.net. He can be reached at MikeGhouse@gmail.com or (214) 325-1916
© MIKE GHOUSE 2001- 2008 :: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Mike Ghouse, March 8, 2008
Justice is the basis for peace, and the responsibility to bring justice falls squarely on the powerful shoulders of the al-mighty nations.
Israel owes peace and security to her citizens and it is directly dependent on the security and peace needs of the Palestinians. You cannot live in peace, when your neighbor's aren't. Finding a balance is the most difficult thing to do and both the nations are trying and failing. No wonder the phrase "love thy neighbor" plays such a crucial role in every society.
When Hamas does not rein in those who are shelling the rockets into Israeli territory, Israel finds tempting to avenge it out and the world takes a back step as well.
Hamas can earn the moral high grounds by holding the shelling, and if Israel continues the attacks, then the world will empathize with the Palestinians and most likely the peace process gets a chance. The unfortunate reality is that every time Israelis and Palestinians are inclined to talk, we mess it up badly with a veto against the consensus of the world, and shamelessly it is against the long term interests of Israel. Neither the Hawks in Israel, nor our administration is willing to refresh their thinking. Ultimately, the parties have to figure out how to co-exist.
Mother Teresa said, "If you want peace, go talk with your enemies, you don't make peace with your friends". I do hope the state department genuinely attempts to assess the policies that would work. Right now, they are chasing their own tails.
A few basics need to be addressed and understood by all the parties.
Jews have a need to be understood and be acknowledged for their eternal security needs, not the military, but mental security where they can put their guards down and live their life in peace.
Palestinians have suffered immeasurably; no human should be stripped of his or her hope and dignity; hopes to have a family, work and own a house and call a place their homeland and live a life of dignity.
The end game of our policy should be peace. Our Presidents need to seriously look at what works and develop a vision for peace. They must understand that it may be going against the general opinion and perhaps against their very supporters; AIPAC. We need to take bold steps and produce peace for the people of Israel and Palestine.
Our foreign policy has relied on our gun powder and our ability to dole out alms to shove nations around the World to achieve our goals. The state department has forgotten that 'lasting relationships' hinge on a dialogue based on treating all parties on an equal footing.
If protection of Israel is based on injustice to either Palestinians or the Jews, our integrity has become questionable. We need to be above reproach. Mighty empires can crush the weak for a short term; in the long run every one goes down the tube. We cannot rob anyone and live with a good conscience.
The ways adopted by Israel and Hamas leaders has not worked and most likely will not produce the desired results; peace. We need to listen to average Israelis and Palestinians, we need to encourage the peace makers on both sides and give peace a chance.
I urge both the Moderate Jews and Palestinians to speak up; they need to put justice above the fear of repercussion from the neighbors and members of their communities. Right now, the shots are called by extremists on both sides, it needs to change. It is the fear of what the next Muslim or next Jew will tell them that frightens the moderates. They need to speak up and rein in, they are the absolute majority on both sides, otherwise the evil will persist, if the good people do nothing about it.
Write your comments to: CommentstoMike@Gmail.com
In the subject line please write :: Yes we can bring peace to Gaza
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike Ghouse is a Speaker, Thinker, Writer and a Moderator. He is a frequent guest on talk radio and local television network discussing Pluralism, politics, Islam, Religion, Terrorism, India and civic issues. His comments, news analysis, opinions and columns can be found on the Websites and Blogs listed at his personal website www.MikeGhouse.net. He can be reached at MikeGhouse@gmail.com or (214) 325-1916
© MIKE GHOUSE 2001- 2008 :: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Friday, February 1, 2008
A Rabbi speaks the truth!
Hear O Israel.. A Rabbi speaks the truth!
Rabbi Brant Rosen
http://shalomrav.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/gaza-crisis-letter/
Here’s a letter I recently sent off to the editor of the Chicago Sun-Times:
To the editor,
I recently traveled with a Brit Tzedek v’Shalom (Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace) delegation to Israel and the Palestinian territories. We met with academics, peace activists, and politicians, including Israeli Prime Minister Olmert and Palestinian Prime Minister Fayad. Among other things, we learned much about the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, circumstances reflected in the 1/22/08 article, “Tens of thousands of Palestinians flood into Egypt through breached Gaza wall.”
Critics of Gaza’s Hamas-led government blame the destitution on the firing of Qassam rockets into southern Israel and clearly, such attacks are intolerable. No country should be expected to remain passive under attack.
But are Israel’s economic blockade and military incursions providing the answer? Currently 860,000 Gazans – more than half the population – now rely on the UN for food. In recent military operations, some twenty Palestinians were killed, including a three-year-old girl. Israel may hope its tactics will turn Gazans against Hamas, but given the choice to hate Hamas or hate Israel, Palestinians will most certainly choose the latter.
Economic deprivation is clearly not working, and we know that there’s no military solution. As always, the only answer is negotiation, as President Bush indicated at the Annapolis peace conference. In the short term this means a negotiated ceasefire between Israel and Hamas; long term, it means a two-state solution.
This won’t be easy. It won’t happen in one step, and more blood may be shed. Bush’s path is far from clear, but those who support Israel must support his efforts towards peace and encourage him to follow up his words with strong actions.
Clearly, war and collective punishment aren’t the answer. If Israel and the Palestinians want true peace and security, the only solution will occur across a table.
Sincerely,
Rabbi Brant Rosen
Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation, Evanston
Brit Tzedek v’Shalom Rabbinic Cabinet
January 24, 2008 - Posted by Rabbi Brant
Rabbi Brant Rosen
http://shalomrav.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/gaza-crisis-letter/
Here’s a letter I recently sent off to the editor of the Chicago Sun-Times:
To the editor,
I recently traveled with a Brit Tzedek v’Shalom (Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace) delegation to Israel and the Palestinian territories. We met with academics, peace activists, and politicians, including Israeli Prime Minister Olmert and Palestinian Prime Minister Fayad. Among other things, we learned much about the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, circumstances reflected in the 1/22/08 article, “Tens of thousands of Palestinians flood into Egypt through breached Gaza wall.”
Critics of Gaza’s Hamas-led government blame the destitution on the firing of Qassam rockets into southern Israel and clearly, such attacks are intolerable. No country should be expected to remain passive under attack.
But are Israel’s economic blockade and military incursions providing the answer? Currently 860,000 Gazans – more than half the population – now rely on the UN for food. In recent military operations, some twenty Palestinians were killed, including a three-year-old girl. Israel may hope its tactics will turn Gazans against Hamas, but given the choice to hate Hamas or hate Israel, Palestinians will most certainly choose the latter.
Economic deprivation is clearly not working, and we know that there’s no military solution. As always, the only answer is negotiation, as President Bush indicated at the Annapolis peace conference. In the short term this means a negotiated ceasefire between Israel and Hamas; long term, it means a two-state solution.
This won’t be easy. It won’t happen in one step, and more blood may be shed. Bush’s path is far from clear, but those who support Israel must support his efforts towards peace and encourage him to follow up his words with strong actions.
Clearly, war and collective punishment aren’t the answer. If Israel and the Palestinians want true peace and security, the only solution will occur across a table.
Sincerely,
Rabbi Brant Rosen
Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation, Evanston
Brit Tzedek v’Shalom Rabbinic Cabinet
January 24, 2008 - Posted by Rabbi Brant
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Israel's false friends
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/suncommentary/la-op-mearsheimer6jan06,1,7071372.story?coll=la-headlines-suncomment&ctrack=1&cset=true
Moderator: If Israeli population can press hard with their government to adopt a justness posture in dealing with the Palestinians, Americans or any one in the world, their security will become sustainable. Right now, they are constantly on the mercy of the men and women of no-conscience in the US Senate and the house.
Israel's false friends
U.S. presidential candidates aren't doing the Jewish state any favors by offering unconditional support.
By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
January 6, 2008
Once again, as the presidential campaign season gets underway, the leading candidates are going to enormous lengths to demonstrate their devotion to the state of Israel and their steadfast commitment to its "special relationship" with the United States.
Each of the main contenders emphatically favors giving Israel extraordinary material and diplomatic support -- continuing the more than $3 billion in foreign aid each year to a country whose per capita income is now 29th in the world. They also believe that this aid should be given unconditionally. None of them criticizes Israel's conduct, even when its actions threaten U.S. interests, are at odds with American values or even when they are harmful to Israel itself. In short, the candidates believe that the U.S. should support Israel no matter what it does.
Such pandering is hardly surprising, because contenders for high office routinely court special interest groups, and Israel's staunchest supporters -- the Israel lobby, as we have termed it -- expect it. Politicians do not want to offend Jewish Americans or "Christian Zionists," two groups that are deeply engaged in the political process. Candidates fear, with some justification, that even well-intentioned criticism of Israel's policies may lead these groups to turn against them and back their opponents instead.
If this happened, trouble would arise on many fronts. Israel's friends in the media would take aim at the candidate, and campaign contributions from pro-Israel individuals and political action committees would go elsewhere. Moreover, most Jewish voters live in states with many electoral votes, which increases their weight in close elections (remember Florida in 2000?), and a candidate seen as insufficiently committed to Israel would lose some of their support. And no Republican would want to alienate the pro-Israel subset of the Christian evangelical movement, which is a significant part of the GOP base.
Indeed, even suggesting that the U.S. adopt a more impartial stance toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can get a candidate into serious trouble. When Howard Dean proposed during the 2004 campaign that the United States take a more "evenhanded" role in the peace process, he was severely criticized by prominent Democrats, and a rival for the nomination, Sen. Joe Lieberman, accused him of "selling Israel down the river" and said Dean's comments were "irresponsible."
Word quickly spread in the American Jewish community that Dean was hostile to Israel, even though his campaign co-chair was a former president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Dean had been strongly pro-Israel throughout his career. The candidates in the 2008 election surely want to avoid Dean's fate, so they are all trying to prove that they are Israel's best friend.
These candidates, however, are no friends of Israel. They are facilitating its pursuit of self-destructive policies that no true friend would favor.
The key issue here is the future of Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel conquered in 1967 and still controls. Israel faces a stark choice regarding these territories, which are home to roughly 3.8 million Palestinians. It can opt for a two-state solution, turning over almost all of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians and allowing them to create a viable state on those lands in return for a comprehensive peace agreement designed to allow Israel to live securely within its pre-1967 borders (with some minor modifications). Or it can retain control of the territories it occupies or surrounds, building more settlements and bypass roads and confining the Palestinians to a handful of impoverished enclaves in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel would control the borders around those enclaves and the air above them, thus severely restricting the Palestinians' freedom of movement.
But if Israel chooses this second option, it will lead to an apartheid state. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said as much when he recently proclaimed that if "the two-state solution collapses," Israel will "face a South African-style struggle." He went so far as to argue that "as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished." Similarly, Israel's deputy prime minister, Haim Ramon, said earlier this month that "the occupation is a threat to the existence of the state of Israel." Other Israelis, as well as Jimmy Carter and Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have warned that continuing the occupation will turn Israel into an apartheid state. Nevertheless, Israel continues to expand its settlements on the West Bank while the plight of the Palestinians worsens.
Given this grim situation, one would expect the presidential candidates, who claim to care deeply about Israel, to be sounding the alarm and energetically championing a two-state solution. One would expect them to have encouraged President Bush to put significant pressure on both the Israelis and the Palestinians at the recent Annapolis conference and to keep the pressure on when he visits the region this week. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently observed, settling this conflict is also in America's interest, not to mention the Palestinians'.
One would certainly expect Hillary Clinton to be leading the charge here. After all, she wisely and bravely called for establishing a Palestinian state "that is on the same footing as other states" in 1998, when it was still politically incorrect to use the words "Palestinian state" openly. Moreover, her husband not only championed a two-state solution as president but he laid out the famous "Clinton parameters" in December 2000, which outline the only realistic deal for ending the conflict.
But what is Clinton saying now that she is a candidate? She said hardly anything about pushing the peace process forward at Annapolis, and remained silent when Rice criticized Israel's subsequent announcement that it planned to build more than 300 new housing units in East Jerusalem. More important, both she and GOP aspirant Rudy Giuliani recently proclaimed that Jerusalem must remain undivided, a position that is at odds with the Clinton parameters and virtually guarantees that there will be no Palestinian state.
Sen. Clinton's behavior is hardly unusual among the candidates for president. Barack Obama, who expressed some sympathy for the Palestinians before he set his sights on the White House, now has little to say about their plight, and he too said little about what should have been done at Annapolis to facilitate peace. The other major contenders are ardent in their declarations of support for Israel, and none of them apparently sees a two-state solution as so urgent that they should press both sides to reach an agreement. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. national security advisor and now a senior advisor to Obama, noted, "The presidential candidates don't see any payoff in addressing the Israel-Palestinian issue." But they do see a significant political payoff in backing Israel to the hilt, even when it is pursuing a policy -- colonizing the West Bank -- that is morally and strategically bankrupt.
In short, the presidential candidates are no friends of Israel. They are like most U.S. politicians, who reflexively mouth pro-Israel platitudes while continuing to endorse and subsidize policies that are in fact harmful to the Jewish state. A genuine friend would tell Israel that it was acting foolishly, and would do whatever he or she could to get Israel to change its misguided behavior. And that will require challenging the special interest groups whose hard-line views have been obstacles to peace for many years.
As former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami argued in 2006, the American presidents who have made the greatest contribution to peace -- Carter and George H.W. Bush -- succeeded because they were "ready to confront Israel head-on and overlook the sensibilities of her friends in America." If the Democratic and Republican contenders were true friends of Israel, they would be warning it about the danger of becoming an apartheid state, just as Carter did.
Moreover, they would be calling for an end to the occupation and the creation of a viable Palestinian state. And they would be calling for the United States to act as an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians so that Washington could pressure both sides to accept a solution based on the Clinton parameters. Implementing a final-status agreement will be difficult and take a number of years, but it is imperative that the two sides formally agree on the solution and then implement it in ways that protect each side.
But Israel's false friends cannot say any of these things, or even discuss the issue honestly. Why? Because they fear that speaking the truth would incur the wrath of the hard-liners who dominate the main organizations in the Israel lobby. So Israel will end up controlling Gaza and the West Bank for the foreseeable future, turning itself into an apartheid state in the process. And all of this will be done with the backing of its so-called friends, including the current presidential candidates. With friends like them, who needs enemies?
John J. Mearsheimer is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Stephen M. Walt is a professor of international affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. They are the authors of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Moderator: If Israeli population can press hard with their government to adopt a justness posture in dealing with the Palestinians, Americans or any one in the world, their security will become sustainable. Right now, they are constantly on the mercy of the men and women of no-conscience in the US Senate and the house.
Israel's false friends
U.S. presidential candidates aren't doing the Jewish state any favors by offering unconditional support.
By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
January 6, 2008
Once again, as the presidential campaign season gets underway, the leading candidates are going to enormous lengths to demonstrate their devotion to the state of Israel and their steadfast commitment to its "special relationship" with the United States.
Each of the main contenders emphatically favors giving Israel extraordinary material and diplomatic support -- continuing the more than $3 billion in foreign aid each year to a country whose per capita income is now 29th in the world. They also believe that this aid should be given unconditionally. None of them criticizes Israel's conduct, even when its actions threaten U.S. interests, are at odds with American values or even when they are harmful to Israel itself. In short, the candidates believe that the U.S. should support Israel no matter what it does.
Such pandering is hardly surprising, because contenders for high office routinely court special interest groups, and Israel's staunchest supporters -- the Israel lobby, as we have termed it -- expect it. Politicians do not want to offend Jewish Americans or "Christian Zionists," two groups that are deeply engaged in the political process. Candidates fear, with some justification, that even well-intentioned criticism of Israel's policies may lead these groups to turn against them and back their opponents instead.
If this happened, trouble would arise on many fronts. Israel's friends in the media would take aim at the candidate, and campaign contributions from pro-Israel individuals and political action committees would go elsewhere. Moreover, most Jewish voters live in states with many electoral votes, which increases their weight in close elections (remember Florida in 2000?), and a candidate seen as insufficiently committed to Israel would lose some of their support. And no Republican would want to alienate the pro-Israel subset of the Christian evangelical movement, which is a significant part of the GOP base.
Indeed, even suggesting that the U.S. adopt a more impartial stance toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can get a candidate into serious trouble. When Howard Dean proposed during the 2004 campaign that the United States take a more "evenhanded" role in the peace process, he was severely criticized by prominent Democrats, and a rival for the nomination, Sen. Joe Lieberman, accused him of "selling Israel down the river" and said Dean's comments were "irresponsible."
Word quickly spread in the American Jewish community that Dean was hostile to Israel, even though his campaign co-chair was a former president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Dean had been strongly pro-Israel throughout his career. The candidates in the 2008 election surely want to avoid Dean's fate, so they are all trying to prove that they are Israel's best friend.
These candidates, however, are no friends of Israel. They are facilitating its pursuit of self-destructive policies that no true friend would favor.
The key issue here is the future of Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel conquered in 1967 and still controls. Israel faces a stark choice regarding these territories, which are home to roughly 3.8 million Palestinians. It can opt for a two-state solution, turning over almost all of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians and allowing them to create a viable state on those lands in return for a comprehensive peace agreement designed to allow Israel to live securely within its pre-1967 borders (with some minor modifications). Or it can retain control of the territories it occupies or surrounds, building more settlements and bypass roads and confining the Palestinians to a handful of impoverished enclaves in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel would control the borders around those enclaves and the air above them, thus severely restricting the Palestinians' freedom of movement.
But if Israel chooses this second option, it will lead to an apartheid state. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said as much when he recently proclaimed that if "the two-state solution collapses," Israel will "face a South African-style struggle." He went so far as to argue that "as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished." Similarly, Israel's deputy prime minister, Haim Ramon, said earlier this month that "the occupation is a threat to the existence of the state of Israel." Other Israelis, as well as Jimmy Carter and Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have warned that continuing the occupation will turn Israel into an apartheid state. Nevertheless, Israel continues to expand its settlements on the West Bank while the plight of the Palestinians worsens.
Given this grim situation, one would expect the presidential candidates, who claim to care deeply about Israel, to be sounding the alarm and energetically championing a two-state solution. One would expect them to have encouraged President Bush to put significant pressure on both the Israelis and the Palestinians at the recent Annapolis conference and to keep the pressure on when he visits the region this week. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently observed, settling this conflict is also in America's interest, not to mention the Palestinians'.
One would certainly expect Hillary Clinton to be leading the charge here. After all, she wisely and bravely called for establishing a Palestinian state "that is on the same footing as other states" in 1998, when it was still politically incorrect to use the words "Palestinian state" openly. Moreover, her husband not only championed a two-state solution as president but he laid out the famous "Clinton parameters" in December 2000, which outline the only realistic deal for ending the conflict.
But what is Clinton saying now that she is a candidate? She said hardly anything about pushing the peace process forward at Annapolis, and remained silent when Rice criticized Israel's subsequent announcement that it planned to build more than 300 new housing units in East Jerusalem. More important, both she and GOP aspirant Rudy Giuliani recently proclaimed that Jerusalem must remain undivided, a position that is at odds with the Clinton parameters and virtually guarantees that there will be no Palestinian state.
Sen. Clinton's behavior is hardly unusual among the candidates for president. Barack Obama, who expressed some sympathy for the Palestinians before he set his sights on the White House, now has little to say about their plight, and he too said little about what should have been done at Annapolis to facilitate peace. The other major contenders are ardent in their declarations of support for Israel, and none of them apparently sees a two-state solution as so urgent that they should press both sides to reach an agreement. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. national security advisor and now a senior advisor to Obama, noted, "The presidential candidates don't see any payoff in addressing the Israel-Palestinian issue." But they do see a significant political payoff in backing Israel to the hilt, even when it is pursuing a policy -- colonizing the West Bank -- that is morally and strategically bankrupt.
In short, the presidential candidates are no friends of Israel. They are like most U.S. politicians, who reflexively mouth pro-Israel platitudes while continuing to endorse and subsidize policies that are in fact harmful to the Jewish state. A genuine friend would tell Israel that it was acting foolishly, and would do whatever he or she could to get Israel to change its misguided behavior. And that will require challenging the special interest groups whose hard-line views have been obstacles to peace for many years.
As former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami argued in 2006, the American presidents who have made the greatest contribution to peace -- Carter and George H.W. Bush -- succeeded because they were "ready to confront Israel head-on and overlook the sensibilities of her friends in America." If the Democratic and Republican contenders were true friends of Israel, they would be warning it about the danger of becoming an apartheid state, just as Carter did.
Moreover, they would be calling for an end to the occupation and the creation of a viable Palestinian state. And they would be calling for the United States to act as an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians so that Washington could pressure both sides to accept a solution based on the Clinton parameters. Implementing a final-status agreement will be difficult and take a number of years, but it is imperative that the two sides formally agree on the solution and then implement it in ways that protect each side.
But Israel's false friends cannot say any of these things, or even discuss the issue honestly. Why? Because they fear that speaking the truth would incur the wrath of the hard-liners who dominate the main organizations in the Israel lobby. So Israel will end up controlling Gaza and the West Bank for the foreseeable future, turning itself into an apartheid state in the process. And all of this will be done with the backing of its so-called friends, including the current presidential candidates. With friends like them, who needs enemies?
John J. Mearsheimer is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Stephen M. Walt is a professor of international affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. They are the authors of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
If Americans Knew Israel
If Americans Knew
Palestinians, Israeli’s, and Americans Would be Free
Mohamed Khodr
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2008/01/01/if_americans_knew_palestinians_israeli_s
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has”. –-Margaret Mead
“Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander”. --Holocaust Museum, Washington D.C.
“Her name was Itemad Ismail Abu Mo'ammar. Israeli soldiers had been beating her husband because he wasn't answering their questions. Foolishly or valiantly, how is one to say, the 35-year-old woman had interfered. She tried to explain that her husband was deaf, screamed at the soldiers that her husband couldn't hear them and attempted to stop them from hitting him. So they shot her. Several times…she didn’t die …after five hours an ambulance took her. She was pronounced dead; a few days before Ramadan…She left 11 children... All together, five Palestinians were killed that day…None of this was reported in most of America's news media, and so the American public never learned about a mother bleeding to death in front of her children, or young shepherds being blown to pieces. Apparently, it just wasn't newsworthy…..There was nothing on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, NPR, Fox News”. -Alison Weir; “Just Another Mother Murdered, Counterpunch, October 6, 2006
But one American woman, Alison Weir, the author of the above narrative, did not let this young innocent Palestinian woman’s death go unreported. This courageous, dedicated, and compassionate journalist abandoned a successful career to become a voice for the voiceless Palestinians, a people who lost their land, continue to lose their lives, limbs, and property; a people imprisoned as refugees in concentration camps, who’ve lost all their freedom to a western imposed artificially created state—ISRAEL---a nation founded and established through the deliberate forceful expulsion and ethnic cleansing of an indigenous population, Christian and Muslim Palestinians. This Zionist entity, a “Jewish” only land is the world’s last colonial Apartheid state, a term many Israelis and Diaspora Jews use to describe Israel’s prejudicial discriminatory policies toward Israeli Arabs and occupied Palestinians.
Out of political, economic, military expediency, pandering and fear, the world has turned a blind eye to Israel’s brutal, and yes, evil treatment of millions of Palestinians, the world’s largest refugee population, scattered as refugees within their own land and in exile for 60 years. The primary supporter of this Zionist, Apartheid “Jewish” is our government, a government beholden to the power, money, and media intimidation of the Israel Lobby.
It’s not a coincidence that Pro-Israel Jewish Americans, like Eliot Abrams, Dennis Ross, and Martin Indyk, are usually appointed in charge of Middle East policy, especially the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
Our media’s reporting on the Israeli Palestinian issue is incredulously biased regularly accentuating Israel’s alleged positives and eliminating its negatives. To our media, Israeli lives and psychological stress are worthy of countless front page stories while the lives of Israel’s victims, the Palestinians, are faceless, nameless, and unworthy of media reporting.
Is it any wonder that Americans are uninformed as to our “democratic” ally’s daily brutality against the Palestinians? Many American politicians, diplomats, academicians, and military officers have repeatedly written and spoken about the power and influence the Israel Lobby has over Congress and the White House easily manipulating our foreign policy to serve Israel’s interests, not America’s.
Yet, such patriots are seldom, if ever, invited to appear on television to present their argument and ask for an honest national debate on Israel’s role in our foreign policy. In fact, the great majority of “experts” who appear on television to discuss the MidEast are Pro-Israel pundits.
BUT, there is one voice, among others, that tirelessly works to inform Americans of our complicity on Israel’s injustice and brutality against the Palestinians. That humanitarian voice is Alison Weir’s.
"The news and truth are not the same thing”. --Walter Lippmann
Based on historical research and extensive travel through the Palestinian occupied territories Ms. Weir decided to dedicate her life to justice and freedom from occupation for the Palestinians.
Thus, this special American woman founded an organization, “If Americans Knew”, with one purpose—to tell the American people the truth about Palestinian suffering and to oppose and correct our media’s Pro Israel bias with the noble belief that if Americans knew the truth about Israel, its Lobby’s power and influence upon our government that ensures Israel annually receives billions of our tax dollars despite its being one of the world’s richest nations, our latest military weaponry used to attack Palestinian civilians, villages, and infrastructure, while providing political cover against any international criticism or condemnation of Israel’s contemptible brutality against Palestinians, then they would demand that our government stop all support for Israel until it ends its occupation and accepts the generous peaceful offer made by the Arab League since 1982 that entails peace, recognition of Israel, and full political, economic, and diplomatic relations in exchange for total withdrawal from all occupied Arab lands. However, peace is anathema to Israel, a Zionist entity with a lust for military expansionism and land annexation.
Today the world watches in silence as 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza are besieged and blocked from receiving life’s basic sustenance of food, water, medicines, electricity, and any financial help from anywhere in the world. Only Israel can commit such war crimes and yet be supported by the west in its claim that it’s the besieged victim fearing for its very existence. If this is the civilization, freedom, and democracy the west claims to be exporting to the Muslim world, Muslims have the absolute right to reject such generosity by any means necessary.
Given that our own government and media are the supporters, facilitators, and appeasers of Israel, right or wrong, Ms. Weir felt it was her duty as an American and human being to bring to light the enormous suffering of the Palestinians who daily lose their lives, limbs, and freedom to work, speak, pray, get an education, or travel. Israel at will has bombed Palestinian infrastructure, schools (even a school for the blind), hospitals, farms, demolishing homes, stealing drinking water to fill illegal settler’s swimming pools, uproot olive trees, surround villages and cities with concrete walls, barbed wires, and an Apartheid Wall deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice that snakes through the West Bank annexing more Palestinian land and cutting through the heart of Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
People’s lives and death in the Holy Land are simply acceptable “collateral damage” to the west given its historical guilt over the Holocaust, a guilt that has killed western consciousness and compassion to the suffering of the Palestinians, a people innocent of the Holocaust.
While Israel’s deathly siege of Gaza is slowly extinguishing its life and livelihood, America, Europe, the U.N., and Arab world are hypocritically feigning a peace process that leads nowhere except allowing Israel more time to solidify its theft of Palestinian land and further expulsion of its inhabitants, including the possibility of expelling Israel’s Arab citizens. The world’s conscience, humanity, and outrage lies dormant at the entrance of Auschwitz. In time, even the Christian and Muslim faiths themselves will be ethnically cleansed from their Holy Land.
How can such a “democratic” nation live with its conscience knowing that its very existence meant the expulsion, murder, persecution, oppression, and occupation of another people? How can our nation support such inhumanity? How can the world be ultra-sensitive to Jewish concerns while in silence damn the lives of the Palestinians, today’s “Unpeople”, a termed coined by the British historian Mark Curtis to describe the unknown millions of British colonial victims around the world, the same colonialism that dispossessed Palestinians to resolve Europe’s “Jewish Problem?”. How can Arab and Muslim leaders surrender their lands, resources, and freedom of fellow Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land? Not even the wise men of today can enter Bethlehem without Jewish permission, the Romans of today.
Israel, America’s only “democratic ally”, has made killing Palestinian children an acceptable policy for its soldiers, a crime for which they’re never found guilty despite irrefutable evidence.
Chris Hedges, a former New York Times MidEast Bureau reporter, wrote a tragically moving article for Harper’s Magazine titled: “A Gaza Diary”, (Harper's Magazine, October 2001) in which he recounts the cold blooded murder of Palestinian children, often for sport.
"Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight ..., six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve.... Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered -- death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo -- but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”
If Americans only knew that the root of Muslim animosity, shared by the majority of the world, toward our foreign policy is primarily due to our unbridled support of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people in direct defiance of international law and world opinion.
Many prominent American Jews formed the “Jewish Committee on the Middle East” (JCOME) to oppose Israel’s occupation and oppression of millions of Palestinians as well as America’s pandering support of Israel’s policies, especially by Congress that Out-Israel’s Israel.
JCOME published an Ad in “The Nation” on February 3, 1988, a part of which is quoted below.
“How tragic that in our own time the very state established by Jews in the aftermath of this evil (Holocaust) has become a place where racialism, religious discrimination, militarism and injustice prevail; and that Israel itself has become a pariah state within the world community. Events taking place today are all too reminiscent of the pogroms from which our own forefathers fled two and three generations ago -- but this time those in authority are Jews and the victims are Moslems and Christian Palestinians”.
The famed British historian Arnold Toynbee captured such immoral bias when he said:
"Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims."
Ms. Weir’s devotion to truth and accurate media reporting on the Israeli Palestinian conflict has subjected her, like others around the globe, to death threats and intimidation. Pro-Israel groups and individuals have used intimidation, boycotts, and character assassinations to silence those who dare to speak out against Israel’s brutal policies, people such as President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmund Tutu, Nelson Mandela, George Galloway, Clare Short, Uri Avnery, many U.N. officials, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Professors Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe, and many others, simply for their opposition to Israel’s inhumanity toward the Palestinians. Many courageous Israeli journalists like Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Ari Shavit, and others, also risk their lives to expose Israel’s brutal occupation.
Yet Alison Weir did not and will not surrender to fear and intimidation. In response to such tactics to silence her, she said: “We will not be silenced. I hope others will join us.”
For her tireless advocacy for truth and justice Ms. Weir was inducted into honorary membership of Phi Alpha Literary Society, founded in 1845 at Illinois College. The award cited her as a: “Courageous journalist-lecturer on behalf of human rights. The first woman to receive an honorary membership in Phi Alpha history.”
It’s the foreign media, especially in Israel, that has the integrity and courage to inform the world about Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinians that has turned their lives into a hell whose fire is unseen by the majority of Israelis and westerners alike.
Here are some editorial and op-ed headlines from Israeli, British, and other newspapers that none of our mainstream media would dare print.
“The "summer rains" we are showering on Gaza are not only pointless, but are first and foremost blatantly illegitimate. It is not legitimate to cut off 750,000 people from electricity. It is not legitimate to call on 20,000 people to run from their homes and turn their towns into ghost towns. It is not legitimate to penetrate Syria's airspace. It is not legitimate to kidnap half a government and a quarter of a parliament. A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a terror organization”. --Gideon Levy, “A Black Flag”, Ha’aretz, July 3, 2006
“We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one - progressive, liberal - in Israel; and the other - cruel, injurious - in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an APARTHEID REGIME in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day” --Michael Ben Yair, “The War’s Seventh Days”, Haaretz March 3, 2002 (The author was Israel’s Attorney General from 1993-96)
“Livni (Israel’s Foreign Minister) Behind Closed Doors: Iran Nukes Pose Little Threat to Israel”;
“Jewish terrorist kills four on bus in Arab town” (Washington Post uses “settler”);”A Racist Jewish state”;; “Ethnic Cleansing Returns to Israel’s Agenda”; “Americans Tortured in Israeli Jails”; “Legitimization of Land Theft”; “Israeli Rabbi Calls on God to Annihilate Arabs”; “Hezbollah “did not use civilians as cover”; “Does Israel Want Peace”; “Christians In Jerusalem Want Jews to Stop Spitting on Them”; “ Pro-'surge' group is almost all Jewish”; “Apartheid in the Holy Land (Archbishop Desmund Tutu, Guardian, April 29, 2002); “Zionists Using Holocaust to Silence People, Chief Rabbi” (Moishe Arye of Austria);
“Poll: 50% in U.K. Think Jews More Loyal to Israel than Home Nation”;
“Civil Rights Group: Israel Has Reached New Heights of Racism”; “Colored Tags for Arabs’ Luggage at Ben Gurion Airport Discontinued”;”Defense Minister: Israel Now World’s Fourth Largest Weapons Exporter”
One of the most shocking examples of Pro-Israel bias in our government is the use of the official website of the State Department to advertise the movie “A Mighty Heart” that recounts the murder of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. Never before has the federal government served as an ad agency for a private movie. Neither the White House, nor the Justice Department, nor Congress deemed this illegal or an abuse of precious tax dollars.
Compare this official endorsement and free advertisement of a movie on Daniel Pearl (along with enormous media exposure) to our government’s total silence and neglect of the murder of a young idealistic American woman, Rachel Corrie, by an Israeli bulldozer as she bravely tried to protect a Palestinian home from demolition. According to our government and media the murder of these two Americans is not “morally equivalent” since one was killed by Muslims and the other by Israel. The message is quite clear---Israel can get away with murder even if the victims are Americans, the very taxpayers who unknowingly support and protect it.
"Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you're stupid. Did you hear that? - stupid." --Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, 1965
From Alison Weir’s website: “IfAmericansKnew.org”
“In a democracy, the ultimate responsibility for a nation’s actions rests with its citizens. The top rung of government – the entity with the ultimate power of governance – is the asserted will of the people. Therefore, in any democracy, it is essential that its citizens be fully and accurately informed.
It is our belief that when Americans know the facts on a subject, they will, in the final analysis, act in accordance with morality, justice, and the best interests of their nation, and of the world. With insufficient information, or distorted information, they may do the precise opposite”.
In today’s inflamed world where terror, death, and violence are the tools of diplomacy none of us can afford to remain silent. No greater regional conflict than the Israeli Palestinian issue has the capacity to engulf our nation in a worldwide conflict unless we all join the struggle for peace and justice for the Palestinians and Israelis. Our government out of ideology or fear has chosen to ignore this conflict and give Israel the means and protection to abuse the Palestinians at will in total defiance of international law.
Thank God for Alison Weir, a noble American woman, willing to risk her very life to bring to light the suffering and persecution of Palestinians, a suffering covered up our media. Israel, our ally, shamelessly glorified by our politicians for a few dollars and positive media exposure, has easy access to our treasury and weapons; even to our youth who die fighting its regional wars; offering America nothing in return but turmoil and hatred around the world.
“All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing”. --Edmund Burke
Only when Palestinians are free can America be free from fear and terror, a fact our media and bought politicians will never admit.
I will let Alison Weir’s words; far more eloquent than mine, to spark our conscience and humanity to do what’s right.
“As Americans - and as human beings - we must oppose such dismissal of another's tragedy with every fiber of our being. We must speak out against the view that some people matter, and that others don't; that the "right" orphans are to be helped, the "wrong" ones ignored; that suffering within powerful populations is to be shared, while sufferers without power must weep alone and unseen”.
Alison and her organization, If Americans Knew, are most worthy of our financial support in her noble cause, a cause few of us are informed about or heretofore have been involved in. For whatever reason, if we can’t be personally involved in this cause for peace and justice, than at least let’s give those willing to speak on our behalf and on behalf of the oppressed the resources they sorely need to continue the good fight.
Please seize this opportunity and every opportunity to make a difference in our world. So far our foreign policy has been “Bombs R Us”, let it be “Peace R Us” this coming year.
God bless all who seek peace and justice for their fellow man and woman.
SOURCES:
http://ifamericansknew.org/ (Alison Weir’s website replete with articles, media studies, statistics, available DVD’s, books, brochures, and handouts: Alison is also available for speaking engagements)
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3260.shtml (A MUST READ account of Israeli soldiers deliberately killing innocent Palestinian children in cold blood, plus an excellent website)
http://video.state.gov/?fr_story=76f8b258b7e94570724d6c80beb79413de5a76bb (State Department Website with Daniel Pearl Movie, an Interview meant to advertise the movie)
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/ (Please visit Rachel Corrie’s memorial website and read her emails from Palestine to her parents: an American woman killed by Israel, the very nation our taxes, weapons, and dozens of U.N. Vetoes support)
http://www.ncccusa.org/ (National Council of Churches)
http://www.cactus48.com/truth.html (Brief Overview of Israeli Palestinian Conflict written by U.S. Jews: a must read)
http://www.jfjfp.org.uk/background1_generalhist.htm (Jews for Justice in Palestine)
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/index_en.html (Israeli Peace Movement led by Uri Avnery)
http://www.alnakba.org/ (History, Chronology, Photos of Israel’s Founding and Palestinian Refugees)
http://www.btselem.org/English/ (Israel Human Rights Organization in Occupied Palestine)
http://www.peacenow.org/index1.asp (Americans for Peace Now)
http://www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org/taxonomy/term/102?page=2 (Great Articles/Resources)
http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/
http://www.nimn.org/Resources/wall_landing_page/000025.php (Not in My name: Jewish Voice)
http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Famous-Zionist-Quotes/Story637.html
Http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/ (International Solidarity Movement)
http://www.vtjp.org/background/wallreport11.htm (Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel)
Palestinians, Israeli’s, and Americans Would be Free
Mohamed Khodr
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2008/01/01/if_americans_knew_palestinians_israeli_s
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has”. –-Margaret Mead
“Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander”. --Holocaust Museum, Washington D.C.
“Her name was Itemad Ismail Abu Mo'ammar. Israeli soldiers had been beating her husband because he wasn't answering their questions. Foolishly or valiantly, how is one to say, the 35-year-old woman had interfered. She tried to explain that her husband was deaf, screamed at the soldiers that her husband couldn't hear them and attempted to stop them from hitting him. So they shot her. Several times…she didn’t die …after five hours an ambulance took her. She was pronounced dead; a few days before Ramadan…She left 11 children... All together, five Palestinians were killed that day…None of this was reported in most of America's news media, and so the American public never learned about a mother bleeding to death in front of her children, or young shepherds being blown to pieces. Apparently, it just wasn't newsworthy…..There was nothing on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, NPR, Fox News”. -Alison Weir; “Just Another Mother Murdered, Counterpunch, October 6, 2006
But one American woman, Alison Weir, the author of the above narrative, did not let this young innocent Palestinian woman’s death go unreported. This courageous, dedicated, and compassionate journalist abandoned a successful career to become a voice for the voiceless Palestinians, a people who lost their land, continue to lose their lives, limbs, and property; a people imprisoned as refugees in concentration camps, who’ve lost all their freedom to a western imposed artificially created state—ISRAEL---a nation founded and established through the deliberate forceful expulsion and ethnic cleansing of an indigenous population, Christian and Muslim Palestinians. This Zionist entity, a “Jewish” only land is the world’s last colonial Apartheid state, a term many Israelis and Diaspora Jews use to describe Israel’s prejudicial discriminatory policies toward Israeli Arabs and occupied Palestinians.
Out of political, economic, military expediency, pandering and fear, the world has turned a blind eye to Israel’s brutal, and yes, evil treatment of millions of Palestinians, the world’s largest refugee population, scattered as refugees within their own land and in exile for 60 years. The primary supporter of this Zionist, Apartheid “Jewish” is our government, a government beholden to the power, money, and media intimidation of the Israel Lobby.
It’s not a coincidence that Pro-Israel Jewish Americans, like Eliot Abrams, Dennis Ross, and Martin Indyk, are usually appointed in charge of Middle East policy, especially the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
Our media’s reporting on the Israeli Palestinian issue is incredulously biased regularly accentuating Israel’s alleged positives and eliminating its negatives. To our media, Israeli lives and psychological stress are worthy of countless front page stories while the lives of Israel’s victims, the Palestinians, are faceless, nameless, and unworthy of media reporting.
Is it any wonder that Americans are uninformed as to our “democratic” ally’s daily brutality against the Palestinians? Many American politicians, diplomats, academicians, and military officers have repeatedly written and spoken about the power and influence the Israel Lobby has over Congress and the White House easily manipulating our foreign policy to serve Israel’s interests, not America’s.
Yet, such patriots are seldom, if ever, invited to appear on television to present their argument and ask for an honest national debate on Israel’s role in our foreign policy. In fact, the great majority of “experts” who appear on television to discuss the MidEast are Pro-Israel pundits.
BUT, there is one voice, among others, that tirelessly works to inform Americans of our complicity on Israel’s injustice and brutality against the Palestinians. That humanitarian voice is Alison Weir’s.
"The news and truth are not the same thing”. --Walter Lippmann
Based on historical research and extensive travel through the Palestinian occupied territories Ms. Weir decided to dedicate her life to justice and freedom from occupation for the Palestinians.
Thus, this special American woman founded an organization, “If Americans Knew”, with one purpose—to tell the American people the truth about Palestinian suffering and to oppose and correct our media’s Pro Israel bias with the noble belief that if Americans knew the truth about Israel, its Lobby’s power and influence upon our government that ensures Israel annually receives billions of our tax dollars despite its being one of the world’s richest nations, our latest military weaponry used to attack Palestinian civilians, villages, and infrastructure, while providing political cover against any international criticism or condemnation of Israel’s contemptible brutality against Palestinians, then they would demand that our government stop all support for Israel until it ends its occupation and accepts the generous peaceful offer made by the Arab League since 1982 that entails peace, recognition of Israel, and full political, economic, and diplomatic relations in exchange for total withdrawal from all occupied Arab lands. However, peace is anathema to Israel, a Zionist entity with a lust for military expansionism and land annexation.
Today the world watches in silence as 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza are besieged and blocked from receiving life’s basic sustenance of food, water, medicines, electricity, and any financial help from anywhere in the world. Only Israel can commit such war crimes and yet be supported by the west in its claim that it’s the besieged victim fearing for its very existence. If this is the civilization, freedom, and democracy the west claims to be exporting to the Muslim world, Muslims have the absolute right to reject such generosity by any means necessary.
Given that our own government and media are the supporters, facilitators, and appeasers of Israel, right or wrong, Ms. Weir felt it was her duty as an American and human being to bring to light the enormous suffering of the Palestinians who daily lose their lives, limbs, and freedom to work, speak, pray, get an education, or travel. Israel at will has bombed Palestinian infrastructure, schools (even a school for the blind), hospitals, farms, demolishing homes, stealing drinking water to fill illegal settler’s swimming pools, uproot olive trees, surround villages and cities with concrete walls, barbed wires, and an Apartheid Wall deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice that snakes through the West Bank annexing more Palestinian land and cutting through the heart of Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
People’s lives and death in the Holy Land are simply acceptable “collateral damage” to the west given its historical guilt over the Holocaust, a guilt that has killed western consciousness and compassion to the suffering of the Palestinians, a people innocent of the Holocaust.
While Israel’s deathly siege of Gaza is slowly extinguishing its life and livelihood, America, Europe, the U.N., and Arab world are hypocritically feigning a peace process that leads nowhere except allowing Israel more time to solidify its theft of Palestinian land and further expulsion of its inhabitants, including the possibility of expelling Israel’s Arab citizens. The world’s conscience, humanity, and outrage lies dormant at the entrance of Auschwitz. In time, even the Christian and Muslim faiths themselves will be ethnically cleansed from their Holy Land.
How can such a “democratic” nation live with its conscience knowing that its very existence meant the expulsion, murder, persecution, oppression, and occupation of another people? How can our nation support such inhumanity? How can the world be ultra-sensitive to Jewish concerns while in silence damn the lives of the Palestinians, today’s “Unpeople”, a termed coined by the British historian Mark Curtis to describe the unknown millions of British colonial victims around the world, the same colonialism that dispossessed Palestinians to resolve Europe’s “Jewish Problem?”. How can Arab and Muslim leaders surrender their lands, resources, and freedom of fellow Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land? Not even the wise men of today can enter Bethlehem without Jewish permission, the Romans of today.
Israel, America’s only “democratic ally”, has made killing Palestinian children an acceptable policy for its soldiers, a crime for which they’re never found guilty despite irrefutable evidence.
Chris Hedges, a former New York Times MidEast Bureau reporter, wrote a tragically moving article for Harper’s Magazine titled: “A Gaza Diary”, (Harper's Magazine, October 2001) in which he recounts the cold blooded murder of Palestinian children, often for sport.
"Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight ..., six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve.... Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered -- death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo -- but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”
If Americans only knew that the root of Muslim animosity, shared by the majority of the world, toward our foreign policy is primarily due to our unbridled support of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people in direct defiance of international law and world opinion.
Many prominent American Jews formed the “Jewish Committee on the Middle East” (JCOME) to oppose Israel’s occupation and oppression of millions of Palestinians as well as America’s pandering support of Israel’s policies, especially by Congress that Out-Israel’s Israel.
JCOME published an Ad in “The Nation” on February 3, 1988, a part of which is quoted below.
“How tragic that in our own time the very state established by Jews in the aftermath of this evil (Holocaust) has become a place where racialism, religious discrimination, militarism and injustice prevail; and that Israel itself has become a pariah state within the world community. Events taking place today are all too reminiscent of the pogroms from which our own forefathers fled two and three generations ago -- but this time those in authority are Jews and the victims are Moslems and Christian Palestinians”.
The famed British historian Arnold Toynbee captured such immoral bias when he said:
"Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims."
Ms. Weir’s devotion to truth and accurate media reporting on the Israeli Palestinian conflict has subjected her, like others around the globe, to death threats and intimidation. Pro-Israel groups and individuals have used intimidation, boycotts, and character assassinations to silence those who dare to speak out against Israel’s brutal policies, people such as President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmund Tutu, Nelson Mandela, George Galloway, Clare Short, Uri Avnery, many U.N. officials, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Professors Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe, and many others, simply for their opposition to Israel’s inhumanity toward the Palestinians. Many courageous Israeli journalists like Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Ari Shavit, and others, also risk their lives to expose Israel’s brutal occupation.
Yet Alison Weir did not and will not surrender to fear and intimidation. In response to such tactics to silence her, she said: “We will not be silenced. I hope others will join us.”
For her tireless advocacy for truth and justice Ms. Weir was inducted into honorary membership of Phi Alpha Literary Society, founded in 1845 at Illinois College. The award cited her as a: “Courageous journalist-lecturer on behalf of human rights. The first woman to receive an honorary membership in Phi Alpha history.”
It’s the foreign media, especially in Israel, that has the integrity and courage to inform the world about Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinians that has turned their lives into a hell whose fire is unseen by the majority of Israelis and westerners alike.
Here are some editorial and op-ed headlines from Israeli, British, and other newspapers that none of our mainstream media would dare print.
“The "summer rains" we are showering on Gaza are not only pointless, but are first and foremost blatantly illegitimate. It is not legitimate to cut off 750,000 people from electricity. It is not legitimate to call on 20,000 people to run from their homes and turn their towns into ghost towns. It is not legitimate to penetrate Syria's airspace. It is not legitimate to kidnap half a government and a quarter of a parliament. A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a terror organization”. --Gideon Levy, “A Black Flag”, Ha’aretz, July 3, 2006
“We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one - progressive, liberal - in Israel; and the other - cruel, injurious - in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an APARTHEID REGIME in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day” --Michael Ben Yair, “The War’s Seventh Days”, Haaretz March 3, 2002 (The author was Israel’s Attorney General from 1993-96)
“Livni (Israel’s Foreign Minister) Behind Closed Doors: Iran Nukes Pose Little Threat to Israel”;
“Jewish terrorist kills four on bus in Arab town” (Washington Post uses “settler”);”A Racist Jewish state”;; “Ethnic Cleansing Returns to Israel’s Agenda”; “Americans Tortured in Israeli Jails”; “Legitimization of Land Theft”; “Israeli Rabbi Calls on God to Annihilate Arabs”; “Hezbollah “did not use civilians as cover”; “Does Israel Want Peace”; “Christians In Jerusalem Want Jews to Stop Spitting on Them”; “ Pro-'surge' group is almost all Jewish”; “Apartheid in the Holy Land (Archbishop Desmund Tutu, Guardian, April 29, 2002); “Zionists Using Holocaust to Silence People, Chief Rabbi” (Moishe Arye of Austria);
“Poll: 50% in U.K. Think Jews More Loyal to Israel than Home Nation”;
“Civil Rights Group: Israel Has Reached New Heights of Racism”; “Colored Tags for Arabs’ Luggage at Ben Gurion Airport Discontinued”;”Defense Minister: Israel Now World’s Fourth Largest Weapons Exporter”
One of the most shocking examples of Pro-Israel bias in our government is the use of the official website of the State Department to advertise the movie “A Mighty Heart” that recounts the murder of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. Never before has the federal government served as an ad agency for a private movie. Neither the White House, nor the Justice Department, nor Congress deemed this illegal or an abuse of precious tax dollars.
Compare this official endorsement and free advertisement of a movie on Daniel Pearl (along with enormous media exposure) to our government’s total silence and neglect of the murder of a young idealistic American woman, Rachel Corrie, by an Israeli bulldozer as she bravely tried to protect a Palestinian home from demolition. According to our government and media the murder of these two Americans is not “morally equivalent” since one was killed by Muslims and the other by Israel. The message is quite clear---Israel can get away with murder even if the victims are Americans, the very taxpayers who unknowingly support and protect it.
"Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you're stupid. Did you hear that? - stupid." --Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, 1965
From Alison Weir’s website: “IfAmericansKnew.org”
“In a democracy, the ultimate responsibility for a nation’s actions rests with its citizens. The top rung of government – the entity with the ultimate power of governance – is the asserted will of the people. Therefore, in any democracy, it is essential that its citizens be fully and accurately informed.
It is our belief that when Americans know the facts on a subject, they will, in the final analysis, act in accordance with morality, justice, and the best interests of their nation, and of the world. With insufficient information, or distorted information, they may do the precise opposite”.
In today’s inflamed world where terror, death, and violence are the tools of diplomacy none of us can afford to remain silent. No greater regional conflict than the Israeli Palestinian issue has the capacity to engulf our nation in a worldwide conflict unless we all join the struggle for peace and justice for the Palestinians and Israelis. Our government out of ideology or fear has chosen to ignore this conflict and give Israel the means and protection to abuse the Palestinians at will in total defiance of international law.
Thank God for Alison Weir, a noble American woman, willing to risk her very life to bring to light the suffering and persecution of Palestinians, a suffering covered up our media. Israel, our ally, shamelessly glorified by our politicians for a few dollars and positive media exposure, has easy access to our treasury and weapons; even to our youth who die fighting its regional wars; offering America nothing in return but turmoil and hatred around the world.
“All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing”. --Edmund Burke
Only when Palestinians are free can America be free from fear and terror, a fact our media and bought politicians will never admit.
I will let Alison Weir’s words; far more eloquent than mine, to spark our conscience and humanity to do what’s right.
“As Americans - and as human beings - we must oppose such dismissal of another's tragedy with every fiber of our being. We must speak out against the view that some people matter, and that others don't; that the "right" orphans are to be helped, the "wrong" ones ignored; that suffering within powerful populations is to be shared, while sufferers without power must weep alone and unseen”.
Alison and her organization, If Americans Knew, are most worthy of our financial support in her noble cause, a cause few of us are informed about or heretofore have been involved in. For whatever reason, if we can’t be personally involved in this cause for peace and justice, than at least let’s give those willing to speak on our behalf and on behalf of the oppressed the resources they sorely need to continue the good fight.
Please seize this opportunity and every opportunity to make a difference in our world. So far our foreign policy has been “Bombs R Us”, let it be “Peace R Us” this coming year.
God bless all who seek peace and justice for their fellow man and woman.
SOURCES:
http://ifamericansknew.org/ (Alison Weir’s website replete with articles, media studies, statistics, available DVD’s, books, brochures, and handouts: Alison is also available for speaking engagements)
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3260.shtml (A MUST READ account of Israeli soldiers deliberately killing innocent Palestinian children in cold blood, plus an excellent website)
http://video.state.gov/?fr_story=76f8b258b7e94570724d6c80beb79413de5a76bb (State Department Website with Daniel Pearl Movie, an Interview meant to advertise the movie)
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/ (Please visit Rachel Corrie’s memorial website and read her emails from Palestine to her parents: an American woman killed by Israel, the very nation our taxes, weapons, and dozens of U.N. Vetoes support)
http://www.ncccusa.org/ (National Council of Churches)
http://www.cactus48.com/truth.html (Brief Overview of Israeli Palestinian Conflict written by U.S. Jews: a must read)
http://www.jfjfp.org.uk/background1_generalhist.htm (Jews for Justice in Palestine)
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/index_en.html (Israeli Peace Movement led by Uri Avnery)
http://www.alnakba.org/ (History, Chronology, Photos of Israel’s Founding and Palestinian Refugees)
http://www.btselem.org/English/ (Israel Human Rights Organization in Occupied Palestine)
http://www.peacenow.org/index1.asp (Americans for Peace Now)
http://www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org/taxonomy/term/102?page=2 (Great Articles/Resources)
http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/
http://www.nimn.org/Resources/wall_landing_page/000025.php (Not in My name: Jewish Voice)
http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Famous-Zionist-Quotes/Story637.html
Http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/ (International Solidarity Movement)
http://www.vtjp.org/background/wallreport11.htm (Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel)
Monday, December 31, 2007
Happiness for Sale
A sale transaction requires consideration for exchange of products and services. The consideration in buying happiness is your effort. Happiness is on Sale, it is on sale, because the effort required is minimal against the gain. Though a lopsided transaction, the supply is plentiful and does not take away anything from anyone but enrich every one with a heart felt smile.
Remember the last time you helped someone? You got some one up when he or she fell and you were thanked profusely for that act of kindness, do you recall that joy? You were beaming and your fellow workers and friends wanted to know what it was; you humbly shared the small experience.
Do you recall the twinkle in your eyes and wanted to praise those two that made the national news recently? When a man fell on the tract in New York subway, the other man jumped to save his life risking his own. Then a Bangladeshi student stood up against the bullies who beat up the subway passengers who wished Happy Hanukkah to that bully.
Life becomes meaningful and powerful when you do things for others; it is the anecdote against sorrow that surrounds us from time to time. That is the wisdom in Bahai, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islam, Jain, Jewish, Native religions, Shinto, Sikh, Wicca, Zoroastrian and other faiths – living for the sake of others, a proven formula for happiness.
Way back in 1978, my Peugeot 504 failed me on a Saudi Freeway to Dhahran, I stood there in 116 degrees heat waving at every vehicle that drove on a full throttle going over 140 MPH. I was dying with thirst and blisters were all over my lips and my face, I looked like some one from the western movies. The drivers, who wanted to stop, could not do so within a walking range. After nearly five hours of eternity, a man finally stopped and drove his Toyota truck the full half mile in reverse. His Burqa Clad wife was with him on the passenger’s side and in the back were a couple of goats and sheep. I was imagining sitting with the goats and started feeling faintly, but he pulled his wife closer to him and asked me to hop in that little Toyota. I was too tired to worry where I was going. He gave me the life giving water and drove.
We barely communicated with my minimal Arabic and his English, we went to his home some where in the outer rim of the town of Abqaiq. His family brought in the tea and other refreshments followed by a huge dinner with several of his friends. He had one of his friends haul off my car and was getting it fixed; the fuel injection vehicles don’t work very well in that kind of heat. I had purchased that Car from Nick Gruev, an Albanian American friend out of Houston.
The Sheikh’s friends came were fixing the Hubbly Bubbly (Huqqa) and passing it between their friends, I was dreading to put that thing in my mouth should it come to me, sure enough it did and reluctantly I pretended puffing it. Around 8 PM, his mechanic friend drove up with my car.
As I was ready to leave, I thanked Shaikh Ahmed Al-Sabah profusely and pulled my wallet to pay, he pushed my hand and said “Aqhi, you are my guest and don’t even think of it.” I pleaded, it was the greatest favor a stranger has done to me and I asked, how I can pay.
He looked at me intently and asked, would you promise me something? In gratitude I said yes, but shuddered what now? He took time and looked at me again and said these life changing words to me “Next time, if you see some one needing help, would you stop and help?” I eagerly said Yes, satisfied; he asked again, are you sure? I gave an emphatic yes, to which he said, “Alhamdu Lillah (praise the lord) that is my reward.
I buy happiness at every nook and corner; it is very satisfying to see other people in their full human form when they give their beautiful smile. A genuine smile is the most beautiful thing on the earth, nothing compares to it.
Every day, you have those opportunities. Make an effort in doing things for others and see how easy it is to be happy.
Here are a few thoughts for you to ponder:
Push yourselves to be prejudice free against people from every meeting, incident, TV shows, and work or news items that you come across.
Find excuses to greet other people and wish them well, don’t worry what they think of you, just do it and see the response and counter response.
Work on bringing humility and fight off every thought and action that gives you the idea that your race, faith, nation, culture, language or life style is superior to others.
Commit to yourselves that your words and actions do not flare up conflicts, but mitigate them.
Commit yourselves that you are going to do your share of living for others, for starters one hour a week will enrich you with joy.
It does not take any money; it is your goodwill that brings you the joy. It is yours to keep and is on sale.
Best wishes for 2008
CommentstoMike@Gmail.com
© MIKE GHOUSE 2007- ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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Mike Ghouse is a Speaker, Thinker, Writer and a Moderator. He is president of the Foundation for Pluralism and is a frequent guest on talk radio and local television network discussing Pluralism, politics, Islam, Religion and civic issues. He is the founding president of World Muslim Congress with a simple theme: Good for Muslims and good for the world. His comments, news analysis, opinions and columns can be found on the Websites and Blogs listed at his personal website www.MikeGhouse.net. Mike is a Dallasite for nearly three decades and Carrollton is his home town. He can be reached at MikeGhouse@gmail.com or (214) 325-1916
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