Reflections on CAMERA’s Efforts to Silence Critics of Israel
Credit Image: Samuel Dowell
Editor’s Note : Unfortunately, dissenters confuse hammering the policies of the State of Israel with being anti-Jewish or mistakenly call us ‘anti-semitic”.
The uneducated, ignorant and dangerous are hard to speak with because they don’t acknowledge that all Arabs including Palestinians are SEMITES and that to be anti-Semite is to be anti-Arab; and anti-Palestinian.
Such types, sadly, cannot criticize the racist policies of Israel that they pay for with their tax dollars because their right wing Christian American-propagandized religion does NOT allow them that latitude.
It’s been our experience that these brainwashed folks are the enemy of the USA, Israel and Palestine because they are racist and disrespectful to all peoples of the Holy Land.
Our time is better spent educating those who don’t support torture, hate, and killing in the name of…. We have many young people to educate and bring them into the light to respect ALL HUMAN BEINGS!
“Anyone who can be so critical of James Wall is obviously out of touch with reality. He knows the truth and tells it how it is. That’s why James Wall is so well regarded, admired and has a strong following, deservedly so. More strength to him.” — Rex Williams (A frequent contributor to these pages.)
by William A. Cook
[The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) is an American non-profit pro-Israel] ”media-monitoring, research and membership organization devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East” Wikipedia]
James Wall — Wall Writings
Since January of this year, CAMERA has launched a no holds barred campaign to discredit, denigrate and damn those who criticize the beleaguered state of Israel, including British MPs David Ward and Robert Russell, and most recently James Wall, former Editor of The Christian Century. Dexter Van Zile, Christian media analyst, chastised The Christian Century for retaining Wall’s name on its masthead and demanded its removal claiming “It is a disgrace that can no longer be tolerated by the board of directors.” Thus speaks the pro-Israel Committee on fair and balanced reporting. “It must be removed.” Wall’s sin as determined by this righteous committee: “Wall, an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church, began serving as associate editor for Veterans News Now, an online magazine that traffics in ugly anti-Semitic tropes and imagery that depict Israel and its Jewish (and non-Jewish) supporters as the enemy within the American body politic and as perpetrators of a global conspiracy to imprison humanity.”
It is the slight of hand that bothered me, letting Wall’s articles, the comments made by Ward and Russell, and the accuracy in them slide into the murky generalizations of many writers that present their opinions in Veterans News Now or before their peers in Parliament. It is the wrapping of images and figures of speech that create an unacceptable image of Israel, like “enemies within the American body politic and perpetrators of a global conspiracy,” images that over exaggerate a reality and present Israel in a negative way that is used to label writers anti-Semitic and allows CAMERA to shame readers into a sympathy for the plight of the beleaguered Israeli while avoiding the facts and perceptions presented by the writer. Oddly enough Van Zile allows himself a bit of a “trope” with this passage:
“Wall’s obsession with the Arab-Israeli conflict became especially evident when he became a regular columnist for the magazine after retiring as editor in 1999. Apparently, retiring from the top slot at the magazine freed Wall to target Israel with harsher and harsher polemics in his regular columns. Between May 2003 and mid-June 2004, a period in which more than 100 Israeli civilians were murdered by Palestinian terrorists, Wall wrote 15 commentaries, eight of which dealt with or mentioned the Arab-Israeli conflict. All of these commentaries were critical of Israel.”
What Van Zile omits is the fact that 3000 Palestinians died between 2003-2004; a slight oversight when compared to 100 Israeli dead. But the real problem is in referencing numbers at all. When is a massacre a massacre, when is a holocaust a holocaust, when is genocide a genocide? The concern is why is it happening and how can it be stopped?
Condemn the writer that condemns Israel but ignore the reality of what Israel has done. Since I have spent the better part of 12 years writing about the mid-east and the Israeli/Palestinian crisis, I thought I should interrupt my vacation to New England to address these matters. (See Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy, The Rape Of Palestine: Hope Destroyed, Justice Denied, and The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction and Decade of Deceit, 2002-2012, all dealing with the crisis in Israel/Palestine).
The Plight of the Palestinians, a book I edited, appeared in the summer of 2010. It contains an Introduction that touches meaningfully on the question raised by Russell when he asked if the British curriculum would address the Nakba, the Catastrophe that befell the Palestinians upon the arrival of the Jews in Mandate Palestine. He didn’t get an answer; he got fear of an answer from the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, lest he face the wrath of those who support Israel. That Introduction points to the British involvement in the crisis as it was reported in documents classified as Top Secret by Sir Richard C. Catling, Deputy Director of the Criminal Investigation Division of the British Mandate Government in Palestine in the 1940s. I came upon these files at the Rhodes House archives and received permission to use them for the Introduction. They are important if only because they testify to the abuse suffered by the British mandate police and soldiers as the terrorism of the Jewish Agency and its aligned military forces committed mayhem against the legitimate government of Palestine while the British government in Westminster ignored their plight. This reflects the problems that impact a country when another group uses its resources to gain its end at the expense of the citizens and the military that defends them. That is the consequence of a note written by a Secretary called The Balfour Declaration. It is what Robert Fisk called the “forgotten holocaust” in an article that is published in the book. The purpose of the volume is simple: the Jewish Agency and its affiliates in the late 1930s through 1948 intended to “cleanse,” eradicate the Arab population of Palestine to establish “their” state in “their” land. This is evidenced by Catling’s files which were seized documents by the Mandate Police and thus expose in their own words that intention. The Plight of the Palestinians is a collection of articles from 20 renowned writers from around the world that describe and document that the intention has not changed, that in the first ten years of this century the Israeli governments have maintained that stance and are effectively carrying out a genocide in Palestine as described and defined by the United Nations of which Israel is a signatory. These facts, the truth as opposed to the propaganda disseminated by CAMERA, one would think, belongs in the curriculum of British education.
Needless to say, what David Ward wrote in the comment book provided by the Holocaust Museum states a legitimate and accurate concern that should, let me use the word used by Van Zile, “must” be confronted not only by the children of Britain but by those in the United States as well since we have been that state’s “unquestioned” supporter in all that they have inflicted on the people of the mid-east. This is what Ward wrote and if the truth were told his words stand as just:
“Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools – I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.
“The Holocaust was one of the worst examples in history of man’s inhumanity to man. When faced with examples of atrocious behaviour, we must learn from them. It appears that the suffering by the Jews has not transformed their views on how others should be treated.”
British MP David Ward
Critics (like Toby Young in his article “Lib Dem MP David Ward’s grotesque caricature of Israel…”, 1/25/13) have damned Ward for the use of the word “Jews.” Why? Were those killed not Jews? Is not the Holocaust understood by the state of Israel to refer only to the holocaust against the Jews? Doesn’t the self- proclaimed critics of those who use the term in other contexts like Armenian Holocaust or the American Holocaust against the Native Americans denigrated for misuse of the term? In what way then is the use of “Jews” to refer to those who died at the hands of the Nazi regime not appropriate? Ward’s second reference has also been condemned because he references the Jews in Israel as a term that defines the Israeli State, a Jewish State, as one might refer to Americans as a collective to describe the citizens of America.
The question is rhetorical; it anticipates a reality that has existed over the past 63 years and questions why it has happened. To question the question is to pretend that what it questions didn’t happen. But it did and the facts are irrefutable.
Bob Russell – British MP
To prevent criticism of any country, to make a single country immune from criticism is absolute ignorance intended to create ignorance. It is the inverse of sense and satisfies only those who fear truth. Civilized people must confront such insidious control with all the intelligent strength they can: light the candles that all may see and judge for themselves.
I offer here an article that appeared in Counterpunch in 2007; its purpose then was to enlighten the truth about the events that now cause CAMERA to erupt with such explosive damnation of Israeli critics. Time erodes the lies that slide over the thin ice of propaganda opening cracks, softening the gleam that seemed to shine as truth, until, in time, the sun melts the lies and truth is exposed.
This article addresses both the facts as they happened and the consequences of the imposed ignorance that resulted from omission of these facts. There is no need to repeat history with another article if this one responds to the arguments made against the critics in Parliament or in The Christian Century as they dissemble the fog of propaganda spread by CAMERA.
The Myth of Middle East Peace
Deception as Truth
by WILLIAM A. COOK
“A voice was heard upon the high places, weeping and supplications of the children of Israel; for they have perverted their way, and they have forgotten the Lord their God.” Jeremiah 2:21
This week the forces of good will assemble in the city of Ann, the Queen who presided over her colonies, an apt gesture as the Israeli colonialist state meets to consider the fate of its Palestine colony, the one carefully preserved behind its apartheid wall of infamy, to attempt once again the fraud perpetrated on the American people and the United Nations that Israel is sincere in wanting peace. The moguls that control our press and TV channels sing the praises of Ehud Olmert and the Israeli Knesset as custodians of peace seeking to bring justice to the war weary peoples of Palestine. Thus are sown the seeds of discord that will reap the whirlwind of bitter disappointment, followed by the weeping and gnashing of teeth by these perpetrators of deceit.
How can any serious person consider the probability of peace in Palestine when the Olmert government includes the racist party of Avigdor Lieberman who advocates the expulsion of Palestinians from their land, and has, in effect, achieved a “Targeted assassination” of the summit before the invitations went out (Ha’aretz, Yossi Verter, “Assassinating Annapolis,” 15/11/07)? How can any serious person consider the probability of peace when the broker of record is the United States, the erstwhile Godfather of the Neo-con Zionists that control both Israel and the multitude of AIPACs that own our Congress? And even now, as the world waits with baited breathe the possibility of peace, the racist government of Olmert cuts off electricity to the already decimated people of Gaza because he does not accede to international law but only to his own.
In brutally blunt terms, the peace process overseen by Condoleeza Rice is a joke. The United States is not an honest broker. It has colluded with the Olmert government to negate the democratically elected government of Palestine, and then, in all brazen chutzpas, has engaged a previously discarded politician, Ahmud Abbas, as a straw man to circumvent the duly elected government. In this process our government and that of Israel has decimated the Palestinian people making their lives a living hell, and they have done it in full contravention of international law that prohibits collective punishment and demands of the occupier that they care for the people under their control. Concurrent with these deplorable actions, the “broker,” the fair and balanced broker, has not only continued its normal welfare to the state of Israel in the form of 5 billion in aid, but has doubled that this year while adding an additional 15 billion over the next ten years. How can the world blind itself to the hypocrisy of these actions?
But the picture painted above does not reveal the real reason why peace is impossible in Palestine. The real reason is imbedded in the reality of Zionism and the forces that now control and have controlled the rise of the Israeli state from the very beginning. It is that story that must be told for in it resides the curse of Jeremiah condemning the Jews who have “perverted their way, and they have forgotten the Lord their God.”
In a heretofore unreleased file housed in the Rhodes archives of the Bodleian Library at Oxford (MSS.Medit. S. 20 (1), the Palestine Government (the British Mandate government) submitted a most secret report to the British Secretary of State through its High Commissioner, Harold MacMichael. The document labeled “Jewish Approaches to the Question of Jewish-Arab Co-Operation during the period 1919-1941″ covers the early attempts by Jewish leaders, before the takeover of the Jewish population by the Zionists from Europe, to find accommodation through agreements and assimilation with the much larger Arab population. The report outlines two “schools of thought” among the Jews: a majority opinion that regarded Jewish Agency co-operation as an “instrument, which can be picked up and set aside as needed, for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine,” and a minority opinion that regarded co-operation with Arabs as essential to the continued existence of the Jews in Palestine. A side note states that intellectuals, professionals and socialists belonged to this second group. The report mentions three phases of co-operation.
a. Phase one began in 1919 with the Feisal-Weizman agreement, based on idealism and liberal principles for fruitful partnership with the Arabs, an agreement built on the assumption that the two peoples had much in common and could be mutually supportive in the development of a state beneficial to both. The French occupation of Damascus in the following year brought a halt to the continuation of this agreement since Feisal lost his throne and was no longer in a position to affect it.
b. The second phase directed its attention towards a political compromise, i.e. to establish a modus vivendi in Palestine from 1929 until the promulgation of the British “White Paper” in 1939.
c. The third phase, as the report was being written, referred to what existed in 1941-1947 between the Arab Federation and the Jews in Palestine.
The Feisal-Weizman agreement detailed how the Balfour Declaration could be affected and guaranteed, how continuation of Jewish immigration on a larger scale could be accommodated while maintaining the rights of the indigenous population, and how freedom of worship, Moslem control of their holy places, economic assistance by the newly arrived Zionist groups could be achieved, with the understanding, that the agreement would be implemented, contingent upon the claim submitted to the Peace Conference for Arab independence in Palestine. The parties did not contemplate Palestine as either a Jewish or an Arab state but rather a bi-national state associated with other Arab states.
1918. Emir Faisal I and Chaim Weizmann (left, wearing Arab headdress as a sign of friendship)
The Feisal-Weizman agreement did not die altogether. Dr. Chaim Kalvarisky, working on behalf of the Brith Shalom, the Kidma Mizrahi, and the Jewish Arab Co-operation groups, and at the invitation of a Feisal advisor, outlined a plan based on the historical affinity of the two peoples that could serve as a foundation for collaboration, that both groups would have opportunities to administer the country, and practical measures for education based on the ideal of close co-operation and freedom of immigration into Palestine by Jews could work. The Zionists wanted a National Home supported, not by the Arab Federation, but by Europe and the United States. This plan was submitted to the Zionist Council in 1936 and was rejected out of hand. That rejection doomed the dreams of Dr. Kalvarisky for a state where Jewish and Arab cultures could develop “side by side in perfect and undisturbed harmony.”
The British report notes the Royal Commission had determined by 1937 that Jewish Arab co-operation was not possible, indeed, that the two sides were irreconcilable. “The Jewish desire for a National Home in fact excluded Arabs and this was the main objection of Arabs to further co-operation.” It’s important to realize that the conclusion arrived at in this report comes after the Zionist organization had taken absolute control of the Jews in Palestine. “The Zionist organization, the whole social structure which it has created in Palestine, has the trappings but none of the essentials of democracy. The community is under the closed oligarchy of the Jewish official organizations which control Zionist policy and circumscribe the lives of the Jewish community in all directions The reality of power is in the Agency, with the Hagana, the illegal military organization, always in the background.” (MacMichael, 2).
The report itself, accompanied as it is with documentary evidence from the Jewish organizations detailing their activities, demonstrates that the Zionists had created “(1) a secret army and espionage system, (2) utilized smuggling, theft and the manufacture of arms (3) illegal immigration, (4) violence and civil disobedience, (5) seditious and hostile propaganda, and (6) encroachment upon the civil rights of Jewish citizens to force their will upon the Jewish people and undermine the legitimate government in Palestine.” This last item is perhaps the most telling and the least known or understood. The Zionists controlled the Jewish communities by intimidation, coercion, physical harm and even death. (Evidence, based on seized documents from the Jewish organizations, presented in the appendices of the report (see appendices XXXVII, XLb and B among others) reveal these methods of handling uncooperative Jews.
No one can help but see the irony of the conditions now faced by the Israeli government as it occupies Palestine and is confronted by “terrorists” fighting for their own homeland. Thus does the wolf in its uncontrollable viciousness bite its own tail.
We must not overlook the initial impetus of the Jews, the real Jews, to further their condition by full co-operation with the Arabs that inhabited Palestine when the British were in charge of the Mandate. “Since authentic Jewish people are opposed to the notion of a State altogether, there would be no problem whatsoever in Jews living in the area of Israel and Palestine. For hundreds of years there were Jewish communities of Prayer and study in the area that the State of Israel rules today. These communities lived in complete peace with the surrounding Arabs. The hatred between Jews and Arabs in Palestine was caused by Zionism.” “The true definition of a Jew is faith and Torah. Zionism says it is nationalism.” (Pat Harrington interview with Rabi Beck of Neturei Karta, 1991).
To what extent will Zionists go to attain their predetermined ends? Theodore Herzl in 1895, founder of the Zionist movement, made clear the original intent:
“We should try to spirit the penniless Arab population across the borders by procuring employment for it in transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
Thus begins the deception that has characterized the ethnic cleansing and genocidal actions of the Zionists ever since. “In 1921, Dr. Eder, a member of the Zionist Commission in Jerusalem, told the British court of enquiry appointed to investigate the causes of the first riots to break out between Arabs and Jews that
“There can be only one national home in Palestine, and that a Jewish one, and no equity in the partnership between the Jews and Arabs, but a Jewish preponderance as soon as the numbers of the (Jewish) race are sufficiently increased.” (Sami Hadawi, Journal of Historical Review). “One National Home without equity,” so has it been ever since.
Let us not forget that beneath these pronouncements resides an insidious set of assumptions, never enunciated lest the truth of their horrific consequences be unveiled, that the right of a National Home in Palestine to exist must remain unquestioned because the Jews were given that real estate by their God in a covenant almost 4000 years ago. How do we know this? Because a group of Jewish Rabbis over an extended period of years, estimated as between 400 BCE to 90 BCE, determined which books composed the Old Testament, and those books alone represented the word of God to His chosen people. In those books the covenant resides. Who wrote the books? On whose authority do the claims stated in the Bible rest? Since only a miniscule percent of the world’s population believes in this book, must the world accept the confiscation of Palestinian land as just?
Who is this God? Does the international community and International Law acknowledge the right of a small religious group to assert that their belief in a God who dispensed real estate to their fore bears centuries ago gives them a right to confiscate that land from people who have lived on it and worked it for over two thousand years? Should that right be acknowledged, then the Native American population, asserting the sacredness of the land they occupied for thousands of years before the arrival of the Europeans, could claim the return of the United States to its rightful owners. Indeed, they would have a more valid claim since they never left the land that was stolen from them while over 90% of the Jews now in Israel are immigrants and most had never been to Palestine. Without this assertion of land rights from centuries ago, the Zionists have no claim to the lands of Palestine.
So this “nationalist” and secular group uses the religious beliefs of the Jews to force into existence the state of Israel. In the process two horrific consequences emerge: the true nature of the Jews as represented by Rabbi Beck above is destroyed as they become complicit in the genocide taking place in Palestine, and the Palestinian people are destroyed, their lands and homes confiscated or demolished, and those with rights under International Law portrayed as terrorists. Hope destroyed, justice denied.
With these consequences in mind, let’s continue the march of Zionism over the years. In 1943, General Patrick Hurley, Personal Representative of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt disclosed the Zionist plans for expulsion and dispossession of the Moslem and Christian inhabitants of Palestine and beyond. This reference comes from pages 776-777 in Foreign Relations of the United States: Near East and Africa, Washington D.C., 1960 as reported by Sami Hadawi in the Journal of Historical Review:
The Zionist Organizations in Palestine has committed itself to an enlarged program which would include: (1) a sovereign Jewish state which would embrace Palestine and probably eventually Trans-Jordan; (2) an eventual transfer of the Arab population from Palestine to Iraq; (3) Jewish leadership for the whole Middle-East in the fields of economic development and control.
The Rhodes papers referred to above contain seized documents from the Jewish Agency and the Hagana papers among others that describe details of Plans A and B covering the period from 1941 on as the illegal Zionist military imposed its will on the Jewish communities in Palestine. Indeed, every 18 year old was conscripted into the Hagana army and sworn to allegiance by an oath that culminated with this statement:
“I hereby swear to devote all my strength, and even to sacrifice my life, to defence (sic) and battle for my people and my Homeland, for the freedom of Israel and for the redemption of Zion.”
In this personal commitment lies the true deceit since no individual had freedom to not serve and thus all Jews were immersed in the intentions of the Zionist Organization whether they understood the totality of its illegal goals, as outlined by General Hurley to President Roosevelt, or not. The full implications of their intent are present in the first of the program goals Hurley presented, the “redemption of Zion” means in reality a “sovereign Jewish state which would embrace Palestine and probably eventually Trans-Jordan,” in short, a plan to steal lands already occupied by other people.
To maintain this secret and illegal army, the Zionist Organization needed funds. It created a levy system that was imposed on all Jews, a taxation on top of that imposed by the British Mandate government. Some objected. A letter in Hebrew dated 5/4/46 from Y. Gesundheit in Tel Aviv to D. Ben Gurion of the Jewish Agency decries both the levy of this tax to fund the military and the need to use violence to establish the National Home.
He expresses concern that he has paid out LP 1000 “more than I can afford, to the Resque Committee for the express provision that it was only to be used for the rescue of refugees from Europe and not for volunteering purposes or for Hagana and weapons.” He expands on this point to drive home his real feelings as a Jew. “I am opposed to the use of arms except in self-defense I do not believe in conquering the country by violence, be it directed against the British or against the Arabs.” And he goes one step further by referring to Ben Gurion’s answers to the Enquiry Commission Hearing, telling him, ” it is impossible to rebuild the country and to found a Jewish State by resort to obvious lies.” But conscientious objection carried no weight with the Zionist Organization. In the document that lays out how these funds were to be assessed and collected there is this item: “Everyone who assists a shirker or who refuses to comply with the directions of the disciplinary committee will have all the requisite steps taken against him.” The steps mentioned can culminate in death. (appendix XLb).
The systemization of the expulsion process adopted by the Zionist Organization as the critical years of 1946 and 1947 approached are detailed in yet another set of Plans C and D. The nature of these plans does not appear in the MacMichael/Catling files at Rhodes, but they are presented by Professor Ilan Pappe in his carefully documented and authoritative work, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. “It was this Plan (D Dalet) that sealed the fate of the Palestinians within the territory the Zionist Leaders had set their eyes on for their future Jewish State. Indifferent as to whether these Palestinians might decide to collaborate with or oppose their Jewish State, Plan Dalet called for their systematic and total expulsion from their homeland.” (28).
It must be understood that these secret plans of the Organization required the Zionists to operate illegally against the British Mandate government. Yet that government was essentially pro-Israel in that it was the Balfour Declaration that gave hope to and actually followed through with the establishment of a Jewish state. However, to the Zionists, any action that ran counter to the Zionist positions was anathema and could not be tolerated. “We regard it as our duty to caution you against any attempt to decide on an anti-Zionist solution. We shall not accept the status of a minority in our own land, whether the minority be 33% or 49%.” This arrogance against the legitimate government of Palestine, a government required to protect both populations, Arab and Jew, meant nothing to the Zionists and they so informed the British authorities. “The Jews are a nation. The land of Israel belongs to the People of Israel. The Jewish State will be established. It is better that it should be established with your help and for your benefit, than against you.”(25th March, 1946, The Jewish Resistance Movement, continuation sheet 9, appendix VIII).
Let me close this section with this quote from the British GSO 1 resulting from an interview with Dr. Weizman in Appendix XXB.
“If further action was taken or if the Jews really believed that Britain meant to destroy Zionism, then there would be a ‘blood bath.’ Nothing could prevent it. Not only would we be forced to fight the 80,000 of the Hagana but the 200,000 reserves that stood behind them as well, for all these would shoot. Nobody would be safe in Palestine.” (12/7/1946).
It’s important to recognize just how strong the Jewish forces were at this time. They were without question, both in their own minds and that of the British occupying forces, the superior military in the mid-east. The cries of the Zionists that this small group of innocent Jews were at the mercy of the Arab forces that desired to drive them out is nothing short of deception and a calculated plea to exact sympathy from the American people and its politicians. Thus does deception masquerade as truth.
There followed, of course, the UN’s partition of Palestine in 1947 with full implementation to take place May 14 of 1948. Between March and May the world failed to notice one of the most vicious, ruthless, calculated slaughters ever undertaken by a purported civilized group of people. The Zionist army went on the march as the Mandate forces looked on, unable to stop the rampage, the destruction, the rape and carnage. I need not detail this period, it’s available to those who would want to know in the recent history of the period by the Israeli historian, Benny Morris who has identified 34 Arab communities whose inhabitants were expelled or killed or, better yet, the very recent study done by Dr. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
The instruments of expulsion were many, psychological, economic, and military. The Huns had swords, horses and bad temperaments. The Zionists had cold, heartless intelligence and a trained and superior military force that could surround a town on three sides, drive the inhabitants out the fourth, kill any who resisted, rape women, pillage houses, dynamite homes while the residents were inside, unable to get out, their home becoming both their tomb and their headstone, and force those who fled to walk long miles to another Arab area or another country to become refugees for the next 60 years while Israel brazenly goes to the international courts to get redress for Jews expelled from Arab countries years ago, indifferent to the anguish they inflicted on the impoverished natives of the land they stole. All of this forced on those true Jews who did not accept the nationalist tenets of the Zionists or the methods they employed to carry out their designs.
But the American press carried none of this. Americans still believe that the Jews were attacked and defended themselves against the bloodthirsty Arabs, Arabs that had been defeated by the Brits in the 1936 uprising, leaving that people leaderless and without a viable military to defend themselves. But these facts are not given to the American people nor to our Congress that caters totally to the ruthless regimes that have plundered the people of Palestine.
How ironic, no, how unjust the hypocrisy that grows with arrogance.
How ironic that “Right of return” as a principle of human rights to protect those forced from their homes and land, a guarantee that they can have redress and return, becomes twisted in the Israeli, Zionist state to protect those who had never been to the land of Palestine because they belong to a religion while preventing the return of those expelled from their homes and livelihoods. How ironic to proclaim that a state created on the assumption that only those of a particular religion can be members of the citizenry is a democracy and repeat it over and over so those who do not know the truth accept it as true.
How ironic to cry to the world that Jews are victims of terrorists, heartless terrorists who blow themselves up killing in the process innocent people while they are the children of such slaughter, as the blowing up of the King David Hotel attests and as the Hagana admit they executed, only they had the means to blow up the innocent without killing themselves, and for that one becomes a terrorist and the other a defender of his country.
How ironic that Israel goes before the UN to decry Iran’s proclamation by its President that “Israel will be wiped off the map,” when that translation is not correct but serves their purpose, calling on the UN to condemn Iran for intended genocide while they have been in the slow, agonizing process of ethnically cleansing the people of Palestine for 60 years.
How ironic that our American main stream press touts the new peace initiative as one proffered by Israel attempting to provide yet once more peace in Palestine when Olmert’s government can remain in place only if he denies the very premise of peace, the just return of Palestinian land to its owners and full recognition of a contiguous Palestinian state capable of managing its own affairs independent of Israel, something comparable to the Saudi Prince’s plan, rejected out of hand by Sharon in 2002.
Indeed a voice was heard in the high places, a voice decrying the hypocrisy of our government and that of Israel for putting forth yet one more time a faux peace plan that will do nothing but provide the Israeli dominated think tanks with fodder to show how ungrateful the Palestinians are for not accepting the remnants of the land left to them as Israel locks them into Bantustans where millions have to survive on pittance, dependent on the world for basic necessities since Israel has stolen their water, their crops, their access to waterways on the east and west, and requires that they recognize the legitimacy of the state that devastated their culture while that state has yet to recognize the right of Palestine to exist; and worse, that they stop their legitimate defense of their occupied country in full compliance with international law while Israel cries wolf becoming in their turn the Mandate government they, as terrorists, fought against, asking the world body to condemn the just and protect the criminal; and, finally, as a feeling world reacts with weeping and supplications to the international community that justice might at last come to the Palestinians, we hear the Zionist’s cry heralded from the temple mount by Menachem Begin “a Jew will not bow to anybody except God,” a God whose will is determined by Zionists and Zionists alone, and is that not the greatest deception of all, that God speaks through the mouths of those who slaughter God’s creatures. Thus are we among the perverted and have forgotten the Lord our God.
Images courtesy My Catbird Seat
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William A. Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. His most recent book is Decade of Deceit: 2002-2012 Reflections on Palestine. His other works include Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy, The Rape Of Palestine: Hope Destroyed, Justice Denied, and The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction all dealing with the crisis in Israel/Palestine. His fiction works include The Chronicles Of Nefaria, a morality tale, The Agony of Colin Powell, a one act play, and a co-authored tragedy written with his wife Darcy, The Unreasoning Mask. He also has a Book of Psalms published by Mellon Poetry Press, Psalms for the 21st Century. He can be reached at wcook@laverne.edu or through his web site: www.drwilliamacook.com.
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