A midnight rant

When I read what the media says or listen to the radio or watch television where the subject is the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and/or the Peace Process, they seem to be discussing different countries than the countries I recently visited. If there is 8% left of historic Palestine that would be a miracle. It is closer to 6% in terms of what the Palestinians have control over (though during curfew you are targeted for death if you so much as look out a window, and we know these curfews go on for days and weeks and sometime a month or more). Each day that passes there is less and less available to Palestinians�all they have of what little remains is taken from them.

Is this also happening in Israel to the Jews? Are their buildings being blown up by Palestinians? Are they being starved and denied water? Do attack helicopters and fighter jets bomb and strafe them? Do tanks fire into their schools? Do Palestinian soldiers blow the brains out of little Jewish children sitting at their desks in school? Is a walk down the street a nightmare, never knowing who will arrest you for looking the wrong way? Or kill you because of your ethnicity? Must Israeli Jews stop and wait at checkpoints for hours at a time and are they told to turn around and go home even when there is a medical emergency such as a heart attack or childbirth? Are Jewish Israelis subjected to having their property taken out from under them? Have their banks been robbed and their bank accounts been taken over by Palestine?

The only way to stop what is happening is to acknowledge it�not cover it up even further! It started in 1948 and continues day in and day out in a never-ending horror story.

There is no peace process. There never was. It has all been a fraud, as the building of Jewish settlements and the killing and the maiming of Palestinians has continued non-stop since Al-Nakba in 1948. (Think Lebanon in 1982�Sharon�s massacre at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.) Yes, there are lulls, periods of "relative calm," which is when the worse damage occurs�kind of like the child's game of �red light.� You close your eyes for a few moments and see how things creep up on you. Israel is in a game called ethnic cleansing. Slow, deliberate, steady�the pressure on the Palestinians is relentless and barbaric. There are millions of Palestinians in refugee camps living in utter squalor both in and out of Palestine.

By the term Israel I mean the Zionist-controlled government.

But on the whole, the Jewish community is in denial and insists that Holocaust program are aired constantly. It is a mantra used to deflect criticism from their practices in Israel. It is entirely appropriate to counter this with what has been done to the Palestinians.

We should make a pact�a political pact. If a Holocaust program is aired, Palestinians are automatically asked to show a program about the Nakba atrocities of 1948�uncut, unedited photos of children with their guts showing and teens and moms and dads and grandmothers and grandfathers lying in a ditch and in open fields with limbs missing, some decapitated.

Yes, I am criticizing the Jewish community�those that do not look squarely at what their support of Israel is really about�with one set of laws granting rights and privileges for Jews-only while brutish military rule is enforced for the others. Many Arab Israelis�though they are Israeli citizens and pay taxes�are not permitted running water, electricity, schools, medical facilities, roads, though they may in fact put up facilities, but these are �un-permitted� as they say and so are destroyed at the whim of Israel. For the Bedouins, they�ve developed the fine art of aerial spraying of insecticides, in particular Monsanto�s Roundup. It�s a very effective chemical at killing crops, livestock and people who end up with cancer if they can�t find shelter fast enough.

And yes, I recognize (though some claim I don�t) that there are Palestinian suicide bombings, and I deeply regret the loss of any life. But Israel occupies Palestine, Palestine does not occupy Israel. This is not a fair fight. It is a 36 billion dollar military against sticks and stones and stolen weapons. And yes our government in America is also becoming rabid with a belief in our superiority over all else. Preemptive strikes are against international law�that is what Adolph Hitler did. That is why one popular poster in Europe is that of George Bush with a mustache like Hitler's because that is what the world increasingly thinks of the United States and the renewal of a Bush presidency�the slow march to Nazism.

Come on! Let�s tell it like it is! Israel�s independence was not grounded in righteousness and law but rather on a preemptive strike on the native population who (according to resolution 181, which did pass despite Arab opposition) were not to be transferred. Yet 80% of the population was driven off of 78% of their land. That is the kind of thing Hitler did, and the freshly minted Israelis said, �never again� as they inflicted a similar atrocity on an innocent people. Ethnic cleansing was justified because of their supposed rights to a land which had been Jewish when Jews were what today would be called Arabs. Abraham came out of what today is called Iraq. By today�s standards, Abraham would be called an Arab. Jesus Christ spoke Aramaic and today would be called an Arab Jew. Yet the problem with Jewish-controlled Israel is that it is �Arab-phobic.� Go figure!

But make no mistake, Palestine is the victim. When an occasional Israeli is killed, it is blow-back�the result of increased anger and frustration. Even the so-called Palestinian rockets are glorified college experiments, not guided missiles like what the Israeli military uses. Israel systematically has tortured and dispossessed the Palestinians. Under international law, as an occupied people, Palestinians have a right to resist�just as Jews had a right to resist during the Second World War, and if an occasional German civilian or Nazi got in the way, injury and death were the result. I do not like or condone any of it, but I see who is doing what to whom and refuse to blame the victim. Palestinians have also learned that Israel only respects violence. It is what has brought them to this latest so-called truce.

Under American law, I believe it is both morally and legally wrong that a State �for� Jews should be handed any U.S. money except for humanitarian purposes. There is a constitutional prohibition�the separation of church and State. If Israel encourages Jews to migrate to Israel, fine, but it is a State FOR Jews where Jews have rights and others do not. Israel is NOT a democracy. That claim is a PR ploy developed to cover-up what Israel actually does to its non-Jewish citizenry. I have seen about a dozen documentaries on this issue and gone to conference after conference and heard this discussed by many Israeli scholars and NGOs�the ones who would like to change things but never will because they are essentially without power. The government of Israel does what it will and is devoid of humanistic considerations.

Many Israelis I have listened to or spoken with have come to believe that only an external force, such as United Nations peacekeepers, or a worldwide boycott, will bring about the needed change. Many in Europe�s academic world are boycotting Israeli academia and the best of Israeli scholars are begging them to do so because conditions in the country are so bad.

They blame the problems of the country not only on Jewish elitism but extreme Arab-phobia with the white European Ashkenazi (WASPS�White Ashkenazi Sons of Pioneers) still very much calling the shots. Sure, there are a few windows of opportunity here and there and some tokenism to shut the others up. I have been told by these brave people that if there is to be peace with the Palestinians, Israel must change from within. Israel is a country out of control, with rising poverty, violence and long-standing issues of racism and discrimination that are tearing the fabric of the society apart. If Israel can heal itself, and adopt a more humanitarian attitude that the Jewish community was once upon a time respected for, then and only then will peace be possible, because Israel will be at peace with itself.

http://www.palestinetimes.net/

Agreed. It actually sounds like the _real_, painful, sad, dreadful story and the writing much easier to take seriously. _This_ is the real situation that we need to fix, the real problem that needs to be solved. There's a lot of dreadful stuff going on in that region and it needs to be stopped.

Kim...