Israel is continuing on a path which has afforded it enormous success in defeating its enemies, primarily the Palestinian people, and establishing it as a major military power, with a prosperous economy and a leading edge in prominent technological fields. But like other successful powers in history, it has been unable to veer off a path that is rife with dangerous uncertainties.
These observations crystallized in my mind as a result of a 10-day visit that I recently completed with an American interfaith delegation to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories .
We visited Yad Vashem and saw the horrors that Jews endured in Europe as well as the heroism with which many of them fought back. For many generations, anti-Semitism prevented Jews from owning land in some European countries and forced them away from many sectors of the economy. Accordingly, Jews often turned to academic and intellectual fields as a way forward. Reacting to anti-Semitism, Zionism called for the "normalization" of the Jewish people, safely away from a Europe which had treated them with unimaginable cruelty. This was to take place in Palestine , where Jews would have their own state, farm the land, and constitute a nation like any other. To some extent, this normalization did happen, but few would deny that it was at the expense of the Palestinians.
On our delegation's bus ride from Israel 's Ben Gurion Airport to our hotel in Jerusalem , we saw the ruins of several Palestinian villages. Over 500 such villages and urban communities were destroyed or depopulated -- including one within eyesight of Yad Vashem -- during Israel 's formative years through the early 1950s. Without the accompanying flight of the Palestinians from their ruined communities, Israel would not have become a majority Jewish State.
Our delegation heard from Palestinians inside Israel about oppressive laws, such as the Orwellian Law of Present Absentees, which facilitated the transfer of the vast majority of the land from Palestinian Arabs to Jewish Israelis. Palestinians inside Israel (excluding the occupied territories) now constitute roughly 20 percent of the population, and they continue to face discriminatory laws and practices that govern where they live, the type of education they receive, and their place in the economy.
Israel 's dominance over its neighbors was consecrated thanks to its overwhelming technological advantage, enormous economic and military support from western powers, and the vast reservoir of sympathy from international public opinion due to the horrors of the Holocaust. Israel was generally very successful in pacifying the Palestinian minority within its borders, not only through the use of force, but also with the help of a process of fragmentation. Druze and Bedouin Palestinians were treated differently from other Palestinians, and Jewish "developmental" communities were established in areas where the remaining Palestinians constituted regional majorities.
Our delegation also learned, especially from Israeli human rights activists, that the original Zionist vision of "normalizing" the Jewish people was marred by a militaristic culture built on maintaining dominance over the Palestinians within and outside its borders. The occupation of the remainder of historical Palestine in 1967 has greatly compounded Israel 's problems of dealing with a now much larger vanquished population that deeply resents, and more actively resists, the expropriation of its land and a plethora of severe restrictions on every aspect of its life.
We saw for ourselves how, under the Netanyahu government, Israeli illegal settlements, the so-called security fence, and West Bank roads that are off limits to West Bank Palestinian drivers are reproducing Israel 's past -- transferring resources away from their rightful owners and pauperizing the Palestinians for the benefit of highly subsidized and militarized Jewish settlements. We saw entire Palestinian cities, like Bethlehem, that have become open-air prisons surrounded by the "security fence." We passed through checkpoints which fragment the Palestinians, cripple their economy, and tear their social fabric.
Another mass population transfer of the Palestinians like the one in 1948 cannot happen today, so the end-game for Israel 's leaders seems to be to confine them to isolated ghettos crisscrossed by Israeli settlement blocs and military reserves. This time, however, these Palestinian ghettos will contain far more than 20 percent of the population under Israel 's control before 1967. Now the Palestinian Arab population is not far behind the Jewish population in the land under Israel's control.
This is another "march of folly," to use the phrase coined by the American historian Barbara Tuchman to describe the relationship of powerful countries towards weaker interlocutors. Such was the case for Britain vis-à-vis the American colonies and the U.S. vis-à-vis Vietnam .
Palestinian and Israeli human rights activists told us that, because American tax dollars support more military aid to Israel than to any other country, we have an important role in helping to stop this march of folly. They also told us that the best way to signal to the Israeli government our displeasure is by boycotting Israeli goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements and by divesting from companies that profit from the occupation of Palestinian land.
Discrimination, intolerance, and racism in the Arab world persist in many forms: they affect women; all non-Muslims; dark skinned people, Blacks, would-be refugees, and migrants. Among those groups and peoples who have been denied political and civil rights are Kurds, the non-Arab people whose language belongs to the Iranian group; Berbers, the pre-Arab native people of North Africa; Turkmen who speak their own language; the Christian Copts in Egypt; the Assyrians or Assyro-Chaldeans in Iraq subject to both ethnic and religious persecution; and Jews. Christians and Jews are still regarded as dhimmis ["tolerated" people], defined in different ways but always as second-class citizens. Extreme Islamists, regarding them as infidels, have used violence against many, including the Copts and the Bahais, as well as against Jews.
Recent years have seen even stronger examples of discrimination than is customary: the slaughter in Darfur; the massacre of Kurds by Saddam Hussein and their persecution by Syria and Turkey; the Algerian government repression of the Kaybles, and the maintenance of apartheid of the Zaghawa people in the Sudan, especially in Darfur. A reasonable calculation is that over the last twenty years more than 1,500,000 African Christians have been killed or expelled from Southern Sudan, or enslaved by the Islamist regime in Khartoum.
Where are the Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups on the apartheid policies of the Arab states including their policies against the so-called Palestinian refugees?
"The Foreign Office revealed last night that it would be challenging the Israelis over their treatment of Palestinian children after a report by a delegation of senior British lawyers revealed unconscionable practices, such as hooding and the use of leg irons.
In the first investigation of its kind, a team of nine senior legal figures examined how Palestinians as young as 12 were treated when arrested. Their shocking report Children in Military Custody details claims that youngsters are dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, have their wrists bound behind their backs, and are blindfolded and made to kneel or lie face down in military vehicles.
Children from the West Bank are held in conditions that could amount to torture, such as solitary confinement, with little or no access to their parents. They can be forced to stay awake before being verbally as well as physically abused and coerced into signing confessions they cannot read."
Thank you for the article. Be prepared to be condemned and character assassinated now with accusations of bias or anti-semitism. Such is the price that is paid when someone dares to inform Americans what our assistance to Israel does.
As this and other articles demonstrate, people are starting to see through the myths that make up the Zionist narrative, and its exclusive focus upon the good intentions in creating Israel, without any mention whatsoever of the indigenous population displaced in order to create it.
This intentional amnesia about the displacement that is the very crux of the issue involves one of Zionism's most pernicious myths: in this instance, a subconscious reaffirmation of their myth about "a people without a land, a land without a people."
This historical amnesia is a major theme of the Zionist narrative, for to accept that they might actually have forcibly imposed upon a people against their will seriously undermines the “righteousness” of such narrative.
But more importantly, when decades of frustration boil over into rage, the Zionist narrative's blindness to such displacement conveniently allows them to play the victim. As a direct result of such blindness, the rage can then be reflexively (but erroneously) dismissed as "anti-semitism."
People are no longer willing to ignore the injustice visited upon Palestine's indigenous population by the Zionist Project notwithstanding its good intentions in providing Jews a safe haven and escaping horrible persecution.
What people now realize is that past persecution does not provide a blank check to forcibly take and/or "partition" other people's land, and that obscuring such displacement with myths is not conducive to finding a just and lasting peace.
Yeah, that'll work!!! :-0 :-0 :-0 :-0 :-0 Hey Phil, I've got a rainforest to sell you right outside the Negev! Interested? No! No! I know! You know what you do? You march on Washington! Yeah! That'll do it! :-0 :-0 :-0 :-0 :-0 Ah, you chimps crack me up, love it. By the way, that's not "Palestinkian land," that's OUR land, it was, long before you 'rabs ever moved into the neighborhood, and it will continue to be... you're just living on it. For now.
There was nothing inevitable about this process. The Arab world might have developed differently in the wake of 1948. Had Arab leaders accepted the presence of a Jewish state alongside so many of their own states—most of them not much older than Israel, and many of them much more artificial—the Middle East could have seen peoples living side by side in relative amity.
By the way, leading Jewish thinkers like Albert Einstein, Judah Magnes, and Martin Buber bitterly criticized the mainstream Zionist leadership for insisting on creating a majority Jewish State, an outcome that could only be achieved through forceful expulsion of Palestinians.
This isn’t Palestinian propaganda; it is well-establishedfact consistent with the accounts of leading Israeli historian, like Beni Morris, Tom Segev, and Simha Flapan.
Binational states do not exist in the ME. Arabs/Muslims cannot live in peace with any minority religions. it does not work. Under shariah law non-Muslims must live as second or third class citizens. Muslims would just as soon kill Jews than live with them.
There are 56 Muslim states and only one Jewish state. The UN and its international affiliates show favoritism to the 1.5 billion Muslims over the 20 million Jews. I can understand that. There is power in numbers. There is power in oil reserves. But do not for one second believe anything that anyone from the UN or its affiliates say about Israel is somewhat fair to Israel and has anything to do with the fair application of international law.
There are many Israelis who seek peace with the Arabs. I don't know of many Arabs who truly seek peace with Israel.