With friends like this, Israel needs no enemies
gerald caplan
Globe and Mail Update
There will be no Israeli-Palestinian spring. At the United Nations,
Israel’s closest, most reliable allies are once again assuring the
nation a future of isolation, insecurity, irreconcilable internal
division, international condemnation and endless conflict. For the
people of Israel, a life of perpetual anxiety is assured. As my family
used to put it, is this good for the Jews? More related to this story
* Harper to Palestinians: Talk to Israel, not UN, about sovereignty
* John Baird bares teeth in offering Canada's defence of Israel at UN
* On Palestine, Harper and Nov. 4
Video
John Baird attacks Israel's opponents
Timeline
Mideast discord has roots 130 years in the past
Video
Video: West Bank settlers remain resolute
The Palestinian initiative to seek recognition by the UN
offered a people without hope a few precious days of pride and dignity.
But I fear their life of constant humiliation will return. Now, if there is any
chance at all for Palestinians to end this degrading status,
their only realistic alternative is to escalate peaceful civil
disobedience. (A remarkable look at the use of non-violent resistance by
Palestinians in the West Bank, and Israel’s response, can be found in
the New York Review of Books, Feb. 24, 2011, “Israel and Palestine: Breaking
the Silence,” by David Shulman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
For outsiders who demand natural justice for Palestinians, the only
practical strategy must be an escalation of efforts to expose and
embarrass Israel’s reactionary government. What other choices are there? It is
an insult to common sense to consider the United States an honest broker
between Israel and the Palestinians.
It is ludicrous to
demand negotiations with the Netanyahu government, which will never ever agree
to a viable Palestinian state. And it requires willful blindness
to expect the Israeli government to stop building more illegal
settlements, as was demonstrated again just this week. The very raison d’etre
of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is to steal the Palestinians’
land. In any event, it is far too late. There are already half a million Jews
living illegally in the West Bank and Jerusalem and many, perhaps
most, will never leave peacefully.
This was not the Zionist ideal
of Eretz Yisrael as a light unto the nations that was bred into my soul
as I was growing up. Nor is an Israel controlled by ultra-nationalist
politicians, Arab baiters, ethnic cleansers, violent settlers, and
Taliban-like religious fundamentalists. Nor is an Israeli army that
increasingly reflects these hate-filled extremists.
Nor is the
unholy alliance that supports Israel the kind of allies we hoped a just
and humane Israel would attract. To be adopted by American Christian
evangelicals whose ultimate goal is either the conversion or
annihilation of all Jews; by far-right European political parties of
Muslim-haters who only yesterday demonized Jews; by American Republicans who
want to roll back the modern world; by Conservatives in Canada who
flagrantly exploit and exaggerate anti-Semitism for their own political
purposes; by bogus friends everywhere who insist that criticism of
Israel equals anti-Semitism; by the violence-prone Jewish Defence League in
Canada, who befriended the English Defence League, a violently
anti-Muslim group embraced by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik; by
politicians too craven and opportunistic to stand up for the real
well-being of Israel, led by the man who used to be Barack Obama. Can
such friends really help assure Israel of a secure future?
With
champions like these, who else does beleaguered Israel need? Who needs
the Arab League’s peace initiative, offering a potentially genuine route to
peace and regional normalization that Benjamin Netanyahu and his
gang dismiss with contempt? Who needs the world’s moderate Muslims? Who
needs Egypt or Turkey, the latter recklessly lost as an ally by Mr.
Netanyahu? Who needs the overwhelming majority of UN members that
enthusiastically back Palestine? Who needs the majority of American Jews who do
not share the Jewish establishment’s blind support for
everything Israeli.
Who needs virtually all
progressive Jews in the world who want justice for Palestinians as well
as security for Israel? Who needs that multitude of non-Jewish Western
liberals who once were ardent supporters of another Israel, an Israel
committed, or so it appeared, to justice for all, an Israel that might
not quite have existed but that certainly has now disappeared,
apparently forever.
Who needs all those Israelis who bitterly
repudiate Mr. Netanyahu and his government and demand serious peace
efforts leading to statehood for the Palestinians? We’re not talking
here about that well-known invention, the self-hating Jew. The
vociferous critics include the newly-retired head of Israel’s fabled spy
agency, the Mossad; the outspoken Israeli generals and soldiers; the 17 winners
of the coveted Israel Prize (the nation’s highest honor);
hundreds of Israeli intellectuals; Israeli Holocaust scholars; Israeli
human-rights activists; and moderate right-wing Israeli opposition
members of parliament. All Jews. All Israelis.
Who needs the 70
per cent of Israelis who would accept a UN vote in favour of a
Palestinian state? Who needs distinguished Holocaust historian and Yad
Vashem advisor, Yehuda Bauer, who like so many others fears the violence of the
orthodox and the settlers more than he fears Palestinians? Who
needs Israelis who want Israel to live up to its own ideals of equality
and justice for all, ideals sabotaged by some 130,000 fanatical settlers who
are prepared to kill as many Palestinians as might be necessary to
maintain their illegal settlements. (See Patrick Martin’s August 6, 2011 Globe
and Mail feature on this chilling phenomenon.)
Earlier this year a book appeared documenting life in the occupied West Bank by
over 100 Israeli soldiers who served there. Here’s a very brief summary of what
Occupation of the Territories: 2000-2010 reveals to
those who demand the truth, a category that excludes such heedless
friends of Israel as Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Immigration
Minister, Jason Kenney:
“The routine use of terror against the
Palestinian population as a principle of control; the beatings and
shootings and arbitrary arrests; the inventive and pervasive forms of
humiliation inflicted on innocents; the expulsions from homes and
grazing grounds and fields; the occasional acts of pure sadism on the
part of senior officers as well as ordinary soldiers and in particular
by settlers; the violent suppression of nearly all forms of protest,
including especially nonviolent civil disobedience and peaceful
demonstrations.”
All this from Israeli soldiers. Jewish soldiers.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/gerald-caplan/with-friends-like-this-israel-needs-no-enemies/article2186896/singlepage/#articlecontent
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