Suresh,
> > The broader "Arab world" hasn't conveniently forgotten that Egypt
> > kept its border closed to the sick and dying in Palestine as Israel
> > cluster bombed Gaza -- not for a moment. Memories are very long
>
> Hah, yes - but you also forget the factor of indoctrination on
> both sides (all the way from rabble rousing preachers +
> politicians on either side, to textbooks that provide anything
> from biased retellings of past history to vituperative hatred
> of the other side)
Arabs are rightfully anti-Zionist.
It takes no indoctrination.
Many Jews were too, in the beginning.
You might be interested in seeing what Albert Einstein had to say
about the nature of political Zionism. Here's a copy a letter he
signed, published on December 14, 1948 in the New York Times:
http://www.globalwebpost.com/farooqm/study_res/einstein/nyt_letter.html
Here's an excerpt:
The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by
Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in
Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party.
This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom
terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and
misrepresentation are means, and a 'Leader State' is the
goal.
In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is
imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement
be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic
that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to
campaign against Begin's efforts, or even to expose to its
own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to
Begin.
The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly
presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his
party; and of urging all concerned not to support this
latest manifestation of fascism.
This is the Albert Einstein that the Israeli Zionist war-hawks would
like you to forget about. It is the inconvenient Albert Einstein.
He is far too precious as a cultural icon for vilification, so
instead, he is merely edited.
Political Zionism has done its utmost to conflate Zionism with
Jewishness. It presents a false choice between another Jewish
Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
The Palestinians have been much more welcoming of Jews than
Europeans. This nonsense about "clash of civilizations"
is all too convenient for the Israel lobby, because it
presents the problem as unsolvable. It neglects the fact
that Jews and Arabs *have* lived in peace for centuries
in many parts of the world, including Palestine. It neglects
the fact that while the concentration camps in Germany and
Poland sent Jews to their deaths, America turned Jews away
while Palestine took them in. How many bombing runs did the
Allies fly in World War II, in order to impede the trains
taking Jews to the camps? Not one. Where was that in my
high school history class? Nowhere to be found. Prejudice
and hatred directed against Jews is very real, but it's
not a problem without a solution; today, Jews can and do
join country clubs that would have excluded them years ago.
Jews are a well-accepted part of New York City. Try and
see how waving a Nazi flag would go over there. Jews are
about as safe as anybody ever gets in Manhattan. Therefore,
I reject the idea that "Jew hatred" is somehow unique to
Arabs, or that when it's present it cannot be managed.
Further, it's just plain absurd to think that Jew hatred
is at the core of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It's not.
Unfortunately, anti-Zionism spills over into a hatred of Jews
more generally, but this effect isn't particular to Jews or Israel.
We see hatred of Americans promoted by the actions of those who
claim to represent them. It's a terrible thing, but it's
predicable enough. Historical facts bring the issues well
beyond a matter of simple "indoctrination".
To illustrate this, let's review some statements made by
Israel's Zionist leadership:
"We must expel Arabs and take their places."
-- David Ben Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs,
Oxford University Press, 1985.
"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically
we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country
is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here
and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from
them their country."
-- David Ben Gurion, quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky's Fateful Triangle,
which appears in Simha Flapan's "Zionism and the Palestinians"
pp 141-2, citing a 1938 speech
"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his
question: 'What is to be done with the Palestinian population?'
Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!"
-- Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs,
published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.
"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations
in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry
out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories."
-- Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister,
former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking to students at
Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli journal Hotam,
November 24, 1989.
"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly
and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time.
The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or
Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation
of their lands."
-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister,
addressing a meeting of militants from the
extreme right-wing Tsomet Party,
Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.
"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they
can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will
stay ours...Everything we don't grab will go to them."
-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister,
addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party,
Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.
"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even
know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because
geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab
villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz
Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and
Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place
built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
-- David Ben Gurion, quoted in The Jewish Paradox, by Nahum Goldmann,
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978, p. 99
"Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has
the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial."
-- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon,
25 March, 2001 quoted in BBC News Online
The long-term agenda of Israel is not peace or accommodation;
it is land. As Moshe Dayan (4th Chief of Staff of Israel Defense
Forces) once said to his cabinet:
We should tell the Palestinians that we have no solution
for you, that you will live like dogs, and whoever will
leave will leave, and we'll see where that leads.
During the Holocaust, Theodor Herzl (the founder of modern
political Zionism) said:
It is essential that the sufferings of Jews... become worse...
this will assist in realization of our plans... I have an
excellent idea... I shall induce anti-Semites to liquidate
Jewish wealth.... The anti-Semite will assist us thereby in
that they will strengthen the persecution and oppression of Jews.
The anti-Semite shall be our best friends
(From his Diary, Part I, pp. 16)
In 1938, David Ben-Gurion (the first Prime Minister of Israel) said:
If I knew it was possible to save all the children in Germany
by taking them to England, and only half of the children by
taking them to Eretz Israel, I would choose the second solution.
For we must take into account not only the lives of these
children but also the history of the people of Israel.
> And the arab world cordially detests each other .. only they
> detest israel and "world jewry's plot to control America and
> the American media" even more. The late unlamented Saddam
> Hussein was famously quoted as saying that God should never
> have created "Jews, Flies and Persians (that is, iranians)"
Here's a worthwhile experiment: contrast how you feel
when you hear the phrase "conspiracy theory" with
"collusion theory" or "organised crime theory".
On the face of it, all of these phrases could all mean
the same thing; however, the first phrase implies that
the theory couldn't possibly be true. Only crackpots
believe in conspiracy theories, right? Therefore, it's
safe to discount all evidence before even hearing it.
Why listen to a crackpot?
On the other hand, it's common knowledge that nefarious
organizations sometimes really *do* collude in order to
achieve their goals. That's why it's called "organized crime".
Zionist movement tries its best to prevent any real discussion
by using loaded phrases like "Jewish Plot". The corporate media
in the United States does not seem to express any revulsion at
all when it repeats the Zionist slogan: "A Land Without People
for a People Without Land". Nor does it dwell upon the 500,000
children that died in Iraq as a result of 12 years of sanctions
(and having destroyed the water supply), or of the estimated
600,000 civilians killed in Iraq as a result of the war.
Do Zionists have to get into the same "smoky room" in order
to make this happen? Clearly not. Like any other racist
world-view, it has an internal logic. People can act in
concert to deny a black person a job without ever meeting
or explicitly agreeing to do so. It's the net effect of
world-view that has been actively promoted at various moments
in history to justify slavery, and other atrocities. Those
who give themselves a divine right seldom let anything on a
human scale stand in their way. Decency and fairness be damned.
Israel's crimes are invisible as far as the public policy goes
in the United States. They cannot be spoken of in polite company,
or in the mass media. Offense might be taken. This is the nature
of hegemony. Slogans like "A War to End All Wars", or "Never Again"
ring hollow because illusion of self-hood takes most people the
better part of their lives to glimpse, if they ever do.
You can show people this map of Israel's expansion all you want,
if someone is psychologically unable to see it, they won't.
Instead, they'll just get angry, and claim you hate the Jews as
a way to short-circuit the conversation (or perhaps to avoid the
cognitive dissonance that a real conversation about human lives
dignity might produce).
Israel can eject all the western journalists from Gaza before the
phosphorus drops, and there's no great outcry. Israel can cluster
bomb wide areas of Lebanon, create a massive oil slick in the
Mediterranean, ram boats filled with doctors & medical supplies, and
it cannot be questioned. They can even bomb UN hospitals and schools.
It must be for "Israel's Security". A terrorist must have been hiding
there. Israel has a right to exist, we're told over and over, yet nobody
talks about the Palestinians right to exist. What about that? Nobody
talks about Israel recognizing Palestine, just the other way around.
> So while the Palestinians and the rest of the Arabs might
> hate Egypt for not opening their borders to Palestinian
> refugees, and while the Palestinians might detest Syria and
> Jordan they certainly do hate Israel even more for bombing
> them and sending in troops.
You would too. Not because they're Jews, but because they're
the ones dropping the bombs (not merely an accomplice).
No indoctrination is required to feel that way. Its a human
reaction, and one directed against their worst and most immediate
oppressor: the country that took their land at gunpoint, then denied it,
then created a massive outdoor prison out of what was left of the
Palestinian homeland. Every time one of these victims lashes
back, the memory of the Holocaust is invoked, despite the fact
that this was a European crime, and it's the number of Palestinians
civilians killed by Israel dwarfs the random killings of Israelis.
Most of the world sees how disproportional the slaughter of
innocents is. It takes indoctrination not to see it.
> And the history behind this is not just for what took place during the
> 1940s - that's simply the culmination of a much broader split along
> tribal lines, with rival families propped up by the British to form
> petty countries all over the Persian gulf. Typical divide et impera in
> action there, and a remarkable illustration of how successful it can be
> .. not that it needed the Brits to do all that much division, among
> warlike people for whom blood feuds have a long and honorable tradition.
I'm well aware of this history.
Winston Churchill was fond of referring to Palestinians as sub-human,
and was unabashed in his support for ethnic cleansing. He said:
I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to
the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long
time...I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these
people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race,
or at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way,
has come in and taken their place.
This is pure racism and hate speech. It's the language of colonizers
and oppressors throughout history. Political Zionism is predicated on
idea of "divine rights", not human rights, justice, or peace.
> And likewise, the Israelis are the least likely to forget a
> generation of suicide bombings, night raids across the border so
> that towns became armed camps, and random terrorism directed at
> them.
Why would you think an Israeli that has to take shelter in
a well-stocked house with clean water would have a ***better***
memory than a Palestinian shivering outside their demolished
home, grieving the fact that their entire family has been killed?
Israel's organized terror campaign is against the Palestinian
population itself. Check a map, and see for yourself.
> And so there's no shortage of hate crazed rabble (aka cannon
> fodder) for the next mad mullah, mad rabbi or power crazy
> politician / general to recruit as either a soldier willing to
> go into a situation guaranteed to put civilians in harm's way,
> or a suicide bomber solely focused on putting as many civilians
> in harm's way as possible.
If a Palestinian child's parents have been killed, his home
demolished, land stolen, and history whitewashed, what do
you expect?
People fight back with the weapons that they have.
The Israel lobby would have you believe that their
motive is having sex with virgins in Paradise.
If possible, try to get to know some of these people.
They're human beings. Some are very good, some are
very bad, but most of them are a lot like the person
you see in the mirror every day (without the mirror
or the home to put that mirror in).
Sincerely,
-Jon
