Zahir
Ebrahim
February
28, 2007
Footnotes
March 23, 2007
(reformatted
September 20, 2010, no updates)
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In reference to the
interestingly titled and revealing commentary by Israeli peace
activist Uri Avnery, "Facing Mecca" published by Media
Monitors Network
(http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/40967)
and picked up by several others including The Baltimore Chronicle on
February 19, 2007, I wanted to pen my own humble thoughts down to
suggest that the trail of red herrings is long, endless, and quite
distinguished.
"Impracticality"
due to the "existent reality on the ground" is often
used as a fait accompli argument for any other resolution to the long
festering Israel-Palestine blot on humanity for the suffering that it
is needlessly inducing upon the indigenous peoples, except the much
articulated two state abstract solution as theoretically dictated by
the Israeli government and the key power brokers and vested interests
allied to it. And even in this constricted solutions space, it is
frequently used to nuance what is practicably realizable given the
"existent reality on the ground", and what isn't.
While the world silently
spectates the immense suffering that the occupation continues to
bring upon an innocent peoples, the Israelis keep seeding the land
with new reality on the ground which too then becomes "impractical"
to undo and becomes new leveraging points in any subsequent peace
talks - take 10 and give back 1 if the Palestinians behave, then
repeat! This reality formally got constructed in 1948 and is
continually being constructed as we speak, at each turn becoming
impractical to undo requiring the victims to continually having to
accommodate to the new reality for peace settlement, because true
justice is now deemed "impractical".
An interesting argument,
this "impracticality".
Or is it indeed also a
deliberate deception and red herring of the kind related by the
"Israeli Patriot" in "Facing
Mecca"?
' The British call
this a "red herring" - a smelly fish that a fugitive drags
across the path in order to put the pursuing dogs off the trail.
WHEN I was young,
Jewish people in Palestine used to talk about our secret weapon: the
Arab refusal. Every time somebody proposed some peace plan, we relied
on the Arab side to say "no". True, the Zionist leadership
was against any compromise that would have frozen the existing
situation and halted the momentum of the Zionist enterprise of
expansion and settlement. But the Zionist leaders used to say "yes"
and "we extend our hand for peace" - and rely on the Arabs
to scuttle the proposal.
That was successful
for a hundred years, until Yasser Arafat changed the rules,
recognized Israel and signed the Oslo Accords, which stipulated that
the negotiations for the final borders between Israel and Palestine
must be concluded not later than 1999. To this very day, those
negotiations have not even started. Successive Israeli governments
have prevented it because they were not ready under any circumstances
to fix final borders. (The 2000 Camp David meeting was not a real
negotiation - Ehud Barak convened it without any preparation,
dictated his terms to the Palestinians and broke the dialogue off
when they were refused.) [...]
The panic had
immediate results: "political circles" in Jerusalem
announced that they rejected the Mecca agreement out of hand. Then
second thoughts set in. Shimon Peres, long established master of the
"yes-but-no" method, convinced Olmert that the brazen "no"
must be replaced with a more subtle "no". For this purpose,
the red herring was again taken out of the freezer. '
But while Uri Avnery
exposes some red herrings very eloquently and quite courageously in
this article, he does not explain how the same concept was still at
play even at Oslo - an unacceptable proposal in reality that no
self-respecting people would have willing accepted - and that despite
its unacceptability, Yasser Arafat had indeed accepted it, leading to
the detachment of the late Edward Said from it eventually as the
realization dawned regarding the true nature of the peace plan and he
insisted that no justice could be had in peace talks between unequals
(see his own words here,
here,
here,
here).
However, the observation
of "yes-but-no" method of the disingenuous Israeli
peace making overtures is indeed based on empirical reality. Should I
applaud this courageous activist for outright admitting it for the
benefit of the American and Western audience? This reality of
duplicity is quite known to the recipients of its largess, but
unfortunately quite unknown to those who innocently ally themselves
to the cause of Israel in the West and wonder why the Palestinians
are so moronically recalcitrant to all the generous overtures by
Israel and don't want peace!
Are the arguments of
"impracticality" also similar red herrings that continually
defy justice being brought to bear on the issue?
This is the purpose of my
essay, to explore "impracticality" to achieving justice and
its concomitant harvest of peace, as opposed to the continual mantra
of peace with "impracticality" as impediments to reaching
fair and just solutions that are as obvious and as ignored by the
power brokers and their allied vested interests as a black African
elephant in the ivory white bridal suite sitting right in the middle
of the newlywed's bed.
Indeed, why not apply
"impracticality" to all issues of injustices? It's indeed
highly "impractical" to bring about a change in any status
quo! That did not stop South Africa to be abolished as an apartheid
state, nor did it stop severe punitive sanctions and boycotts and
divestments to be imposed on it, with South Africa perennially being
highlighted before the world in the press and media and by the
outspoken commentators and intellectuals as a pariah state, before
the abhorrent apartheid was forced to end there through the
courageous struggle of its own indigenous peoples directly supported
by the international community (with few exceptions, the most notable
being some in the United States - see incumbent US Vice President
Dick Cheney's voting record when he was in Congress on the resolution
to free Nelson Mandela); and nor did it prevent the tea from being
thrown overboard by a handful of patriots who are today venerated as
the founders of a superpower nation. All very impractical acts as
seen from the comfortable living rooms of the pundits. That is not to
say that ending Apartheid has ended poverty in South Africa, or
automatically created economic equity. The struggle still continues
on, as it even does in the United States of America itself to create
a fairer society, as one can glean from all the movements of the
preceding century, Civil Rights, Labor Rights, Women's Rights, etc.
But the key enabler is the tumultuous axiomatic construction of the
state which must precede any incremental changes in realizing
economic and social benefits. Such an axiomatic construction
transpired for the United States of America by the writing of its
seeding Constitution after the tea was thrown overboard, and for
South Africa by outright abolishing apartheid after a long struggle
where the calls for its dismantling preceded its abolishment by many
decades, and most vociferously by the first Statesman of the New
South Africa, Nelson Mandela.
One could argue that
while one waits for the justice based "impractical"
solution to transpire, should one allow those suffering the
injustices of oppression and inhuman subjugation, to continue doing
so in the interim, or should one aim for any quick compromised
"practical" solution that alleviates their misery? One of
the finest red herrings thrown on the "fugitive .. trail"
yet! When the question is posited in this way, it wonderfully co-opts
the preeminence of morality over "impracticality" in
intellectual thought by artificially constructing a false either or
choice in the best mold of "either you are with us, or
against us".
In reality, there are two
rather straightforward truism responses to this that must coexist
concurrently. The first is the moral response of the intellectual
that is independent of the efficacy of its realization. This moral
response is essential for identifying 'the right thing to do' space
for the society as its moral compass.
The second is the
"policy" response, so to speak. This is concerned with the
efficacy of the measures required to bring injustices to a halt in
any practical measure, while being cognizant of the path shown by the
moral compass of the nation, and perhaps also being influenced by it
rather than by some other distorted compass of the "high
priests" of the ruling elite. Bringing "policies" to
bear upon the problem space is a political advocacy process, a social
activism process, a grass-roots mobilization process, a revolutionary
process, and in a democratic country like the United States of
America, it is entirely a lobbying process, a seeding of the "right"
thoughts in "Foreign
Affairs"
process, getting hands and feet and souls dirty process, and even
waging an all out war on WMD pretexts to eradicate oppression and
injustices of ones' own vested interests process!
The twain, "moral
compassing" and "policy making", are not mutually
exclusive. Indeed, the former must precede the latter in order to
create the desired "policy advocacy" in society in the
first place that can eventually seed the desired "policy
making". Let me just refer to this bit of rational commonsense
that derives from a moral sense of justice and fair play, as the
principle of Moral-Activism.
And the same persons
don't necessarily have to be doing both at the same time, i.e. "moral
compassing" and "policy making". For instance, the
abolitionists clamored largely theoretically in their intellectual
writings and speeches for the abolition of slavery a good thirty
years before an advocacy policy got crafted (due to whatever reasons
of expediency and political forces), and the latter drew upon the
former for the doctrinal motivations to create the momentum that
launched the American Civil War against slavery. The example of South
Africa cited earlier on the other hand is a more virtuous example of
the principle of Moral-Activism. It is one where "moral
compassing" and the ground-floor activism and protest manifested
in many of the same peoples simultaneously. Among them, Bishop
Desmond Tutu, and the incredibly famous and respected world
Statesman, Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for his
unequivocal advocacy on the firm moral principles to end apartheid.
During this tenure in the "Gulag", he did not compromise
because his people were suffering. Indeed, he was offered many such
compromises, and shown many "practical" alternatives for
being let out of Jail and for the temporary band aid relief of his
peoples if he'd only give up his unequivocal moral call to end
apartheid. Had he been co-opted at the time by this red-herring of
"practical", and had he not had firm moorings in the
moral-compassing of his own conscience that was the impetus behind
his Moral-Activism, there'd be no new South Africa today.
Knowing the 'right thing
to do space' in order to pursue an advocacy that is principled, even
when the struggle may be long and arduous, is a simple
straightforward truism that somehow seems to get lost when it comes
to Israel-Palestine. I am sorry if the principle of Moral-Activism
escapes all the "dissenting priests" in the entire Western
Hemisphere. The red herrings they strew about with what's "practical"
without any moral foundations - perhaps unwittingly for having
followed their own compromised "super dissenting priests"
who never laid out the "moral compass" on this issue for
their flock due to their own reprehensible self-interests - has been
the death of an innocent peoples. Literally speaking. And I am sure
they still sleep soundly at night!
So why am I not
enthusiastically applauding Uri Avnery, the prominent and respected
leader of Gush Shalom, Israel's peace activists, for exposing
Israel's hypocrisy before the West? The answer depends on why is a
similar argument for abolishing Israel as an apartheid state, as was
made for South Africa, conclusively ending its Zionist reign of
monumental terror and obscurantism (see here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
and here),
and making that country one uniform nation with equal rights for all
its inhabitants (and keeping any name, even Israel, or in fairness
and acceptance of a genuinely contrite mea culpa, calling it
Israel-Palestine or Palestine-Israel, or indeed Palestine), not being
brought up by Uri Avnery? Where is the principled Moral-Activism in
his advocacy?
The most à
propos model for the reconstruction
of this anachronistic apartheid-racist Zionist state in the holy
lands is indeed South Africa. The incredible parallels have been
discussed by many over the years as cited above in the long reading
list for those unfamiliar with the subject matter, and need not be
rehearsed again. Had these moral calls been vociferously made 50
years ago, 40 years ago, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago,
after 911, and had the "dissenting priests" seeded the
moral compass of the peoples by unequivocally demanding divestment,
demanding sanctions, and demanding an end to the apartheid and racism
ingrained in Zionism and hence in its Zionist state, this moral
compassing would have surely seeded an activism that was principled,
and we may have already seen the Palestinian tragedy very
pragmatically reversed.
Were it not for the
vested interests of the high priests and their various incantations
that stayed mum, and are still mum on the subject. It is one thing to
expect the "high priests" of the ruling elite to take these
conscionable moralistic positions and be disappointed. It is quite
another to have the "dissenting priests" also lead their
flock to the same pastures, albeit through a more curious route!
These vested-interests from influence peddlers have to be shoved
aside to seed the roots of justice in any system of injustices, as
the history of the world informs us to this day!
Here are some additional
counter perspectives to the two-state solution from another Israeli
Jew (turned Christian), Israel Shamir, who does not buy the
"impracticality" red herring, nor Ben Gurion's disingenuous
"It is true God promised it to us" nonsense, and
argues a moral position unequivocally, at
http://www.israelshamir.net/.
I once met Israel Shamir,
curious to learn if he was for real or just another red-herring for
clever deflection of conscionable peoples' efforts. What little I
discovered from his autobiographical and very personal public speech
that I attended at a local university a few years ago where he noted
"Jews need a homeland [in Palestine] as much as fish need
bicycles", made me realize that not all Israelis are blind
sighted - that moral traditions are still alive among them! Just that
there are too few of these outspoken precious gems (here
is another whose family even gave up their Israeli citizenship by
choice as victims of their own conscience when they woke up from
their Zionist slumber, once again demonstrating that actions speak
louder than laments)! Each of them often tends to acquire the magic
instantly affixing label of "self-hating Jew", and their
political positions conveniently labeled anti-Semitic. See here
and here
on how this label is dexterously manufactured and deployed to
discredit anyone who disagrees with either the official position of
Zionism, or presents other milder variants of it, apportioning for
themselves the vehemence of the Zionists in commensurate amounts!
Why does Uri Avnery
indeed stop short of suggesting dismantling of the Israeli Zionist
Apartheid state and making it one democratic equitable state for all
its inhabitants? Indeed, by the admission of Israel's own founding
patriots:
“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.” Moshe Dayan: Haaretz, April 4, 1969.
(noted from the web, Dayan was probably quoting Ben Gurion from the
'The Jewish Paradox')
Where are his moral
stances? Is he confused about the "right thing to do" as
well? Doesn't seem likely, as unlike the American and other European
audience, he sees the reality and history on the ground from ground
zero itself. Perhaps he may be reminded that if he claims his Jewish
religion as a race, he may well be the inheritor of King Solomon the
wise! And if he claims it as his faith (and is not an atheist like
the majority of the European culturally Jewish immigrant inhabitants
of Israel, see confessional writings such as "My
Holiday, Their Tragedy"),
then he is indeed the inheritor of the moral Ten Commandments of his
lofty faith. But if he is only informed by cultural affiliation to
the Jewish traditions, he is still a human being first and still the
inheritor of the genuine wisdom of all the sages of the ages! Why
this blind-sight, especially being an
activist for peace? Is it not also activist for justice? If he can
forget about the crimes of his own founding fathers "I am
prepared to leave the history, ideology and theology of the matter to
the theologians, ideologues and historians.", and "If
somebody is ready to make peace with me, within borders and on
conditions agreed upon in negotiations, that is quite enough for
me.", why stop short of full restitution and all live in
peace within the same borders within which they all rightfully belong
- Jews, Christians, and Muslims?
Indeed, if it were the
victims who had made these conciliatory statements, these lofty
proclamations would surely have elevated humanity to a new level of
compassion and forgiveness in putting the past behind them - a mighty
indomitable peoples indeed, as resolute in their suffering, as
magnanimous in their victory. These statements coming from the
victimizers however, while to many in the West may be commendable, to
me, for a conscionable activist of peace whom I also admire for his
immense courage to continually speak out against the crimes of his
own peoples, are quite indefensible, and downright disingenuous!
Perhaps I may have missed something here, but it strikes me as rather
odd that the occupier is claiming he is prepared to live amicably
with the victims under secure borders. It is almost as if a thief
broke into my house, locked me up in the bathroom, then when I made
too much racket, he said he was willing to live peacefully in some
well defined rooms in the house! I am sorry if no one sees the irony
of this!
Uri Avnery's confessional
"I am an Israeli patriot," explains this enigma in
as much clarity as the following gem from Baruch Kimmerling, another
Israeli Patriot who calls Israel his land when he wasn't born there,
and identifies himself in the oxymoronic category of "Jew,
atheist, and Zionist" where the latter two may be consistent,
but how does that pertain to being a Jew?
“As a Jew, an
atheist and a Zionist, I have two memorial days in my country,
Israel. One for the Holocaust and one for soldiers who fell in wars.
I also have one day of celebration, the anniversary of the day Israel
declared its statehood. [...] Independence Day is a holiday for me,
but also an opportunity for intense self-introspection. A person
needs a state and land, and this is my land, my homeland, despite the
fact that I was not born here. I am proud of the unprecedented
accomplishments of this country, and feel personally responsible for
its failures, foolishness, injustice, evil, and its oppression of its
citizens and residents (Jewish, Arab, and others) as well as of those
who are defined and defined themselves as her enemies. I know that my
holiday, a day of joy and pride for me, is a day of mourning and
tragedy for some of Israel's citizens and, more so, for members of
the Palestinian people everywhere. I know that as long as we, all
Jews everywhere, do not acknowledge this, we will not be able to live
here in safety, every man and woman under their vine and under their
fig tree. Happy holidays, Israel.” (My Holiday, Their Tragedy,
2002.)
Disingenuous self
interest once again? Neither calling unequivocally for abolishing the
apartheid state (as far as I am aware, and if they have already done
so elsewhere, I eat crow with pleasure). And neither extending to the
displaced Palestinians the privileges they apportion for themselves
in Israel - making it their home when not being born there (although
Uri Avnery may well have been I don't know, I have never met him)
when they don't accord it to those who indeed were and were kicked
out by the very founding of the state which Kimmerling is so proudly
calling his independence day. He does indeed magnanimously calls for
Jews acknowledging the suffering of the Palestinians so that he can
live in peace in Israel, but not for remedying the injustice in the
only just and moral way - but then, being an atheist, whence the
source of morality? God is dead, Nietzsche is alive, and so are his
mantle-bearing ubermensch! Witness it in his own essay the vacuous
words without the concomitant unequivocal call to abolish apartheid
and make it one homeland for those forcibly displaced by his
independence day:
"The
transformation of the Holocaust into a solely Jewish tragedy, as
opposed to a universal event, only weakens its significance and its
legitimacy, tarnishing us and the memory of the victims. Likewise,
its unnecessary overuse by Jews in Israel and the rest of the world,
particularly political bodies, has made the Holocaust banal. Above
all, a provocative and dangerous approach has bought a place in our
hearts: that Jews, as the victims of the Holocaust, are permitted to
treat goyim however they want. Forceful and condescending,
"anti-gentile-ism" is identical to criminal anti-Semitism.
... What can I do? A person is closer to his own friends, tribe, and
people. Along with that, however, I cannot forget or refrain from
mourning the victims of this bloody conflict and feel deep empathy
with those who have suffered and still suffer as a result of the
fatal encounter between Jews and Arabs in this land. I hope that the
day will come when we will commemorate together and mourn together,
Jews and Arabs alike, for all of the victims of the conflict. Only
then will we be able to live together in this place in safety.
... I know that as long as we, all Jews everywhere, do not
acknowledge this, we will not be able to live here in safety, every
man and woman under their vine and under their fig tree."
I am sorry that I am less
than impressed, despite the self-flagellation. "What can I
do?" Kimmerling asks? Here are three immediate things a
conscionable Israeli can do if he is a Moral-Activist (see example
here):
1) Start a campaign to demand genuine justice - not mere words
of contrition - by requiring the apartheid nature of the state and
the "Berlin Wall" to be simultaneously demolished. 2)
Stop paying taxes that contributes to the maintenance of the
apartheid state. 3) As a conscionable person, leave Israel
until such time that others who have more right to be there, on
account of having being born there, and were forcibly evicted, are
also allowed to return! To me, it appears that without any of the
concomitant actions for Moral-Activism, the only reason Kimmerling
calls for the recognition of the plight of the Palestinians is so
that he and Zionist Jews like him can live in peace.
Thus, what might any
conscionable self-respecting Palestinian conclude from this? Apart
from the cynicism that is now ingrained in the Middle East of this
stereotype: they will first plan to kill you with a design most
brutal, and then come to your funeral lamenting "We can forgive
them for killing our children, we cannot forgive them for making us
kill theirs" as was noted by Israeli Prime Minister Golda
Meir, in order to win back their rights as human beings first from
their monstrous oppressors who only think of themselves first and not
of the abject suffering that is being unfolded right down the
Jews-only highway from them, and who continue to maintain that "A
person is closer to his own friends, tribe, and people."
rather than demonstrate any genuine sympathy towards the sufferings
of others at their own hands, they (the Palestinians) have to make
the cost of occupation so exorbitant, that the next clarion call from
people like Kimmerling would indeed have to be a demand for full
restitution of the Palestinians so that he could indeed live in
peace!
Also, let's not be fooled
either that simply declaring Israel as a non-apartheid state with a
change in its laws as well as national flag will solve all the
problems for the Palestinians, but it will be an amazing welcoming
start from the present day inhuman oppression that the world silently
spectates. The economic hegemony of the European transplants into
Israel and its high tech economy all in the hands of the Jews, will
likely stay the same - rights do not equate prosperity, but is indeed
an axiomatic start. Witness South Africa - its economy and its lands
are still largely in the hands of the tiny white minority, and the
majority black indigenous population still lives in abject poverty.
But one has to begin somewhere - the place to begin is the laws on
the books, the constitution, and the philosophy of equal rights for
all its citizens regardless of caste, creed, sex, religion, and
ethnicity. How can any nation, founded on these lofty principles
itself, befriend and support a nation that is its exact opposite?
Only politics and self-interests of its ruling elite - as in the case
of all cases of injustices in society since the very inception of
society!
It is indeed interesting
to identify all those "intellectuals", "moralists",
"historians", "scholars", and high profile
pundits and prolific exponents who argue either "impracticality"
or "Palestinian intransigence" or offer vacuous sympathy,
to either continue to propose the severely compromised for one side,
the two-state theoretical solution along 1967 borders as their
gesture of "fairness" and "compassion", or
continue to argue for the occupation because of docile
unacceptability of occupation to those being occupied.
Identify all of these
exponents of Israel, not very hard to do at all in this information
age, and examine their own vested interests and/or affiliations
because of which they shirk from taking the only genuinely moral and
just position of dismantling the apartheid state of Israel into an
equal state for all its denizens born there. If they support open
immigration based only on the Jewish "race" or "faith"
cards, and deny right of return, fair compensation (ask the Holocaust
survivors for a quote of what that might be and what Israel extracts
each year from Germany), and rehabilitation in their own ancestral
lands for the displaced and dispossessed indigenous Palestinians and
their children and grandchildren, and present themselves as
"objective" erudite observers of the matter, the question
must be asked by conscionable peoples on the morality and vested self
interests of this doublespeak that seems to be gathering roaring
applause in the liberal Left! It continually escapes everyone's
imagination to keep the diabolical game of Zionism in perspective -
buy time to seed the land with birth rights, and continual small
incremental encroachments, and systematic depopulation through
intense oppression such that the victims would give up, die away, or
become abject slaves!
And similarly identify
all those who prominently accept the 1967 border solution - crafted
any which horrendous way as inhabitable bantustans forming no
semblance of an independent nation-state with all the same rights and
privileges as any other independent nation-state, including having a
well equipped modern army, navy, air force, marines for self-defense,
and own commerce and independent ingress and egress trade and
movement points in and out of their nation-state for an independent
economy and freedom of travel, just to point out two major gaping
holes in all two-state solution proposals that have been put on the
table - from the beleaguered side and ask whether they do so because
by choice, or because of having had no choice in the matter and only
wanting to just get to any peaceable solution, justice or not, so
that some beleaguered peoples may live in some kind of semblance of
peace as human beings first, and not as trampled sub-species of some
"cockroaches" under the watchful gun turrets of
Israeli sharp shooters mounted atop the 14-ft high apartheid wall
that runs through their bedrooms and backyards! This sub-species
classification for the Palestinians was created by the Israelis
themselves - shocking? Read for yourselves [1]:
“We declare openly
that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of
Eretz Israel ... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We
shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to
us on all fours.” and “When we have settled the land, all the
Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like
drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff
of the IDF: “New York Times 14 April 1983”. (noted from the web)
Unless the vested
interests are clearly and unmistakably disambiguated, the red
herrings will continue to be strewn along all paths - deliberately or
unwittingly makes no difference to one on the "fugitive"
trail - to constrict the solution space to the exclusive benefit
of one party and to the severe handicap of the other, until either
Ben Gurion's call is realized: "We must do everything to
insure they (the Palestinians) never do return ... The old will die
and the young will forget.", or General Shlomo Lahat's: "We
have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live
here as slaves". And that is indeed the reality of
Israel-Palestine today as it has always been since its bloody and
brutal inception 60 years ago, and intensely accelerated after the
1967 military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip.
Even the commonsensical
proposition of why the Palestinians would ever accept an occupier was
echoed by the very founding father of this Nakba for the victims
(except at the barrel of a gun continuously held to their lives to
slowly wear them down while continually playing the diabolical game
of "yes but no" to mitigate international pressures
as the systematic task of squeezing the victims goes on in the
background seeding new realities daily that perforce must
subsequently be articulated as axiomatic "The Palestinians'
return could be implemented in ways that minimize, rather than
exacerbate, the disruption for Israelis living in the areas."):
"If I were an
Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is
normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to
us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There
has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that
their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen
their country. Why would they accept that?" (Ben Gurion in
"The Jewish Paradox")
"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." (Ben Gurion, presumably quoted by Noam Chomsky in
Fateful Triangle, noted from the web)
From the very conception
of founding of Israel by Herzl in 1896 on the banks of the river
Rhine “In Basle I founded the Jewish state ... Maybe in five
years, certainly in fifty, everyone will realize it.”, to this
very day, the battle cry of anti-Semitism has been diabolically
harvested (see here),
and sometimes even criminally (see here
and here),
to justify Zionism and its offspring 'Der Judenstaat'.
But in the reality of today, the Jewish state is an anachronism of
history, a perception that legitimized it in the minds of the
followers of this Zionist idea when indeed anti-Semitism was rampant
in Christian Europe. Today, never mind European anti-Semitism, there
are now laws appearing on the books in Europe that even criminalizes
the mere questioning of the history as related by the Zionists to the
world's public. Thus, the Zionist Jews are now pretty safe from any
further persecution from Christian Europe, and there is little reason
to maintain the Zionist character of the state in Palestine when it
comes at the expense of intense suffering and injustice to another
innocent peoples already living there. It would hardly matter to
anyone if 'Der Judenstaat' was moved to Europe somewhere,
compensation that it was for the pain and suffering imposed on the
innocent Jews by the fanatic Christians of the previous century -
unfortunately, the compensation was offered them at another's
expense.
But today, it is high
time to rectify and redress that blot on humanity by the very
European and Western nations who now proclaim themselves as the
emblem of civilization and morality and beacon of human progress and
learning. Perhaps they can spotlight this beacon onto their own first
sins and help redress the calamitous suffering that is transpiring
right under their very noses on an entirely innocent peoples as a
result of their own creation - both the first innocent victims, and
then as a result of their shoddy compensation for their monumental
crimes to those victims, the new innocent victims. Some luminous
civilization out to teach the rest of the world how to live in
civilized modernity as it continually constructs new victims!
And it is indeed
instructional to learn of the sorrows and calamitous suffering from
the perspective of the victims themselves, an oft neglected sin in
the West which prides itself in its own articulate description of the
World's victims and in unfurling the crimes of their own hegemonic
emperors by writing prolific books and touting their much wonted
freedom of speech - to absolutely zero degree of efficacy except more
books sold and more prominence gained - rather than listen to the
victims themselves with as much credibility lent to their own
suffering voices.
Somehow, the victim
screaming in pain is considered biased, but their victimizers'
description of their plight is academic honesty and intellectual
brilliance! I don't think I really need to hear it from Noam Chomsky
to know how Palestinians are suffering, although his conscionable
exposure of their plight in the West is certainly very important, and
has been so for many years - but his half baked two-state proposals
for their solution-space ain't.
When we give higher
currency to conscionable dissent makers whose prime cultural
affiliations are with the victim makers themselves, over those voices
of anguish of the victims and those with cultural and civilizational
affiliations to the victims as their extended family, we do both the
victims and other well intentioned bystanders longing to figure out
how to make peace with justice, a great disservice!
Here is another example
of this twisted view of justice even by well intentioned exponents of
the Palestinians' rights but civilizationally
and culturally allied with the victimizers: "Palestinians
Have A Right To Go Home"
by the erstwhile, vocal, and conscionable Phyllis Bennis of the
Institute
of Policy Studies.
After passionately arguing the Right of Return for the Palestinians
in the abstract:
"Palestinians
today make up one of every four refugees in the world. Their right to
return to their homes, despite more than a 52-year delay in realizing
that right, is no less compelling than the right to return home of
any other refugees from any other war. International law is very
clear: It doesn't matter which side wins or which side loses, after a
war, refugees have the right to go home. The United Nations passed
Resolution 194 (which the U.S. and every other U.N. member state
except Israel voted to reaffirm each year from 1949 till 1994)
specifically to make sure that those made refugees by the creation of
Israel would be protected. And yet Israel specifically rejects that
right of return because of concern that allowing the Palestinian
refugees to come home would change the demographic balance of the
Jewish state."
But now look at the
disingenuousness of the solution space. An
absence to any call to eliminate the main reason why the Right of
Return is not being implemented by Israel - it's apartheid nature of
the Jewish state which has been diabolically constructed on another
peoples' land where the indigenous population was predominantly
non-Jewish! The "just" solution escapes Phyllis Bennis even
when she acknowledges the cause of the problem in this case.
And she also surveys the
various implementation attempts by others:
"Is compromise
possible? Absolutely. But only if it is based on recognition of the
right of return as a real, fundamental right - not if it is based on
Israel's superior power. Israel's proposal during the recent Camp
David summit for a "humanitarian" family reunification
program that would benefit only a few tens of thousands, out of the
millions of stateless Palestinians, is one compromise that will
surely not work. Another sure-to-fail compromise is the proposal
being quietly bandied about in Washington and a variety of Middle
Eastern capitals. This plan envisions a quid pro quo in which Baghdad
would resettle many of the Palestinians (with or without their
consent) from refugee camps in Lebanon to Kurdish areas of Iraq (from
which equally unconsenting Kurds are
already being expelled), in exchange for lifting the crippling
economic sanctions against Iraq. Publicly denied by the relevant
governments, the plan has in fact been discussed with Iraqi officials
by the representative of at least one member of the U.S. Congress,
and a number of Arab leaders are known to privately support the idea.
This is a non-starter too."
But then makes this
statement as her own suggestion:
"Real compromise
is possible in determining how, not whether, the right of return will
be realized. The Palestinians' return could be implemented in ways
that minimize, rather than exacerbate, the disruption for Israelis
living in the areas."
Why this axiomatic
preference to minimize "the disruption for Israelis living in
the areas" - they are the victimizers to start with, aren't
they? [2]
Instead, why does the
erstwhile author not make the only conscionable call of
Moral-Activism to abolish the apartheid state as the only just first
step in the right direction?
The same is true of Noam
Chomsky - while he supported the sanctions on Apartheid South Africa,
he is against sanctions for Israel. Why should the vested interests
of those civilizationally, culturally, and religio-historically
allied with the victimizers, despite being courageously vocal in
bringing the plight of the innocent victims to the attention of their
own nations, be allowed to dictate, and dominate the articulation of
the solution space on behalf of the victims? I am sorry if no one
sees the irony in this!
Indeed, Chomsky has
himself informed many victims themselves, as well as the Western
audience, of the pragmatic underpinnings of the terror that was
ruthlessly employed in creating the Jewish State. In his "Western
State Terrorism", in Chapter 2, Chomsky writes:
' In 1943, current
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir wrote an article entitled “Terror”
for the journal of the terrorist organization he headed (Lehi) in
which he proposed to “dismiss all the 'phobia' and babble against
terror with simple, obvious arguments.” “Neither Jewish morality
nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of
war,” he wrote, and “We are very far from any moral hesitations
when concerned with the national struggle.” “First and foremost,
terror is for us a part of the political war appropriate for the
circumstances of today, and its task is a major one: it demonstrates
in the clearest language, heard throughout the world, including by
our unfortunate brethren outside the gates of this country, our war
against the occupier.” '
Where the "occupier"
was either the British, or the indigenous Palestinian population, or
both, I am not sure. Neither were however spared the wrath of Jewish
terror in the creation of the Jewish State, and the Palestinians
bearing the biggest brunt of it. So Chomsky is not a stranger to the
monumental crimes of Zionist Jews visiting the Nakba upon the
innocent local peoples of Palestine, that Kimmerling proudly calls
his "independence day". Neither is Chomsky any stranger to
how anti-Semitism was deftly harvested to populate the new Jewish
State, with the escaping Jews from Europe being cleverly diverted to
the intended Jewish State in Palestine all throughout the 1940s even
before the state was founded. As he has himself noted it somewhere in
his prolific writings, the affluent ones and the techno-scientists
and the Jewish social elite escaping from the Nazis were allowed onto
the shores of the United States, the rest were deliberately diverted
to Palestine.
And Chomsky's "pragmatic"
response to this genocide and mayhem of the local population during
the founding of the Jewish State? All modern nations are formed on
the unfortunate bloodshed of millions, the United States itself was
formed on the blood of 10 million natives, and so on. This is all
faits accomplis. So we have to move on and live among our
internationally recognized secure borders according to international
norms. (Précis of private
communication from a while back)
Great. And here is where
the red herring begins. Higher the priesthood, more tortuous the red
herrings.
Chomsky does not
distinguish between a crime that happened in the distant past that we
can do little about today in rectification, and one that is occurring
concurrently in our present epoch for which we can most assuredly do
something in rectification, and for which a just and moral solution
does indeed exist. It has not receded into dusty pages of history far
enough yet to have become a fait accompli that cannot be practicably
undone - such as returning California to Mexico.
Today, Israel is the only
nation on earth as far as I know, with no self-recognized borders
except the entire 'land of Canaan', and where the writ of this
apartheid state is continually extending over amorphous boundaries
with new 14 ft walls being continually constructed to create giant
prisons to enclose the indigenous population who refuse to "die",
and whose "young" refuse to "forget",
and who refuse to be "resigned to live here as slaves",
and who miraculously escape "We have to kill all the
Palestinians" call to ethnically cleanse the beleaguered
Palestinians from their own homeland. Is there any other evidence of
monumental terrorism even possible in the present epoch? While all
eyes have been diverted to the "Islamic terrorists" and the
"Bin Ladens" and "Orange
alert" and strip search at airports, the big monstrous Jewish
elephant in the Zionist state is blithely ignored - even as I write
this today in February 2007 - permitting them the ubermensch
prerogative for Eretz Yisrael, which according to Zionism's overtly
stated ideological underpinnings that entirely drives the political
aspirations and its execution in the apartheid state, is "from
the Nile to the Euphrates". Or it may be the other way
around. It doesn't matter since it's a scalar and an all encompassing
open secret that no one wishes to say out loud for some reason in the
West, but surely, like Uri Avnery mentions the "Arab refusal"
premising all facades of peace talks, and when that failing, the "yes
but no" taking over, it is also much openly discussed in the
Hebrew society as the premise upon which Israeli policies, its laws,
and its visitation of brutal oppression upon the indigenous peoples,
are made. But the Western intellectual exercising claims to "dissent
chief priesthood" dare not base any advocacy based upon these
facts of the oppressive regime. That this irony fails to strike the
commonsense of many, is not surprising. For priesthood in any domain,
is merely the shepherd tending to his respective sheep.
So why am I not
enthusiastically applauding Noam Chomsky for his courageous
"dissent"? The answer entirely depends on why is a similar
argument for abolishing Israel as an apartheid state, as was made for
South Africa, and conclusively ending its Zionist reign of monumental
terror and obscurantism in the modernity of the 21st century, not
being courageously made by him. Where is the principled
Moral-Activism in his advocacy of a negotiated two-state solution? It
isn't that the distinguished professor isn't familiar with the
diabolical plans of the Zionist state - he is no ordinary
intellectual - in the face of Israel's "existent reality"
of take 10 give back 1, "yes but no", and the "Arab
refusal" that has been their not so "secret weapon",
nor is he unfamiliar with the Machiavellian motto of the Zionist
state "wage war by way of deception" as its guiding
principle, and nor is he unaware of the underlying implementation
philosophy that has underscored the Zionist state's pragmatism of
incremental faits accomplis by initiating new crises starting from
its very birth pangs as was openly admitted by Ben Gurion himself:
"what is inconceivable in normal times is possible in
revolutionary times"!
What indeed are the
underlying reasons for his abstaining from making the moral calls for
a unified democratic Israel-Palestine for all the inhabitants of
Palestine? What restrains him from articulating an unequivocal
principled stance against the very root cause celebra of apartheid
and the "ubermensch" racism ingrained in Zionism itself
that makes Israel such a misconstruction of West's own cherished
values of democracy and equal rights for all? Just to refresh ones'
failing memory, for the 'Democratic' racism see here,
the UN Anti-Zionist Resolution 3379 see here
here,
and its timed revocation in 1991 to officially assert 'Zionism is no
longer racism' with the emerging new world order see here
and here
as the "high priests" tell it, and here
as the "dissenting priest" tells it, and see here
for how 3379 was originally spinned by the "highest priest"
in the land in the influential Foreign Affairs magazine.
I do not hesitate to ask
the following of such a distinguished intellectual, for I gave up
following "priests" when I woke up to the presence of
unexamined axioms in all "priestdom", and instead decided
to think for myself thus absolving all "priests" of being
responsible for either saving me from perdition or consigning me to
it! But that does not absolve the "priests" of their own
greater responsibilities of priesthood towards the rest of their
flock who glibly accept anything from "high pulpits".
Higher the "pulpit", higher their credibility, and greater
the consequent responsibility. Has Noam Chomsky relinquished his
claims to moral imperatives and moral high grounds of honest
intellectualism that he previously asserted was the responsibility of
intellectuals (see here,
here,
and here):
"It is the
responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose
lies" and "the responsibility of a writer as a moral
agent is to try to bring the truth about matters of human
significance to an audience that can do something about them."?
It is inconceivable that
Chomsky would not recognize that by not providing this unequivocal
moral compassing for his nation in blanket uncompromising terms when
it comes to Israel-Palestine, he unwittingly lends his own
intellectual support to the hegemonistic aspirations of world's sole
superpower nation which he fearlessly and uncompromisingly calls the
"rogue state" (see here,
here,
here,
here)
every chance he gets. By inexplicably ignoring this "rogue
state" conveniently using (and abusing) a minority among the
Jews themselves to further its own hegemonistic interest of sustained
indomitable preeminence in the affairs of the world (see here)
by financially and politically maintaining Israel in its current
abominable Zionist construction as its private little Nuclear armed
proxy hegemon in the Middle East (see here,
here,
here,
and here),
and staying silent about the role that Zionists themselves are
currently playing in the construction of his own nation's imperial
foreign policies in a tortuous collaboration of self-interests (see
here
and here
and compare authors here)
which seems to be visible to all and sundry in the world, except
inexplicably to the "arguably the most important intellectual
alive", Chomsky is willingly co-opting himself to the
interests of the "ruling elite" that he has spent his
entire life sanity-checking. Indeed, Moral-Activism from intellectual
supremos, demands uncompromising moral compassing, as he had himself
noted during his earlier years of an idealist's dissent:
"Intellectuals
are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze
actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden
intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that
comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom
of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides
the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying
hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology
and class interest, through which the events of current history are
presented to us...." (Responsibility of Intellectuals)
In these "revolutionary
times", I am unfortunately less than impressed by Chomsky's
supposed raison d'être of
Palestinians suffering under the 'jackboots' of the Israelis being
the basis of his "practical" two-states "policy
advocacy" and the legitimization of the forced separation of an
indigenous peoples from their own lands. The beleaguered Palestinians
have already been suffering for more than 40 years under the same
'jackboots' and continually losing their lives and property to
diabolically constructed faits accomplis that Chomsky knows all too
well about. This rationale of 'any tactic for alleviating the misery
of a defenseless peoples' for pushing various and sundry advocacy
plans by the well intentioned, in the absence of Moral-Activism that
is firmly seeded by a moral compass, ends up being another gigantic
stinking red-herring in the long term, bigger and more deflecting,
than all the obvious ones pointed out by Uri Avnery.
It is indeed but a truism
that in every society there are always only a tiny handful who are
the illustrious vanguards of morality and social justice. These
handful tend to attract to themselves a majority of the well
intentioned and conscionable peoples from the larger society to learn
what is the 'right thing to do' space for their activism to redress
social and political injustices. They supposedly rip apart the red
herrings cleverly disseminated by the "high priests" of the
ruling elite, dexterously guiding their flock to see the burdensome
truth behind the lies and distortions inherent in incantations of
power, and thus apportion for themselves credit for guiding their
flock that is commensurate with their ranking in priesthood, as
commonsense might dictate. And this credit for Western intellectuals
on many issues of contemporary geopolitical concern is surely
overwhelmingly positive, which is why the New York Times cited Noam
Chomsky as "arguably the most important intellectual alive".
All likely à propos for sanity-checking
his own nation's hegemonistic foreign policies, including eloquently
highlighting the fait accompli of long past crimes (history) of
Jewish terrorism while founding the state of Israel upon the blood of
the Palestinians. Except when it comes to resolving a just solution
space (contemporaneously) for his already recognized Zionism's
usurpation and coercive resettling of Palestine, then this epithet
suddenly and inexplicably fails to deliver, in my humble
(mis)perception.
It's almost as if unless
the issue is already fait accompli, Chomsky won't touch it when it's
so close to his heart. But once fait accompli, many books about it
will be written delineating the monstrosity of the crimes and the
mendacity of power that enabled the construction of such crimes,
attracting a great following and great prestige for speaking up on
the crimes of his emperors. If I was an emperor, I wouldn't mind
having Chomsky on my tail either because he will only be chasing
faits accomplis leaving me free to create new ones! And thus the New
York Times epithet fails miserably on the contemporaneousness of this
matter, and only on account of Chomsky's uncourageous silence in
unequivocally articulating a moral compass on this issue when
something can actually be done about it rather than courageously
lament in history books after the fact. His undistinguished silence
has likely misled, or indeed not been the prime mover of, many a
movements that might have effectively called for an end to the
Israeli racism and apartheid, and thus postponed the harbinger of
justice to a suffering peoples. As the reality of faits accomplis on
the ground might suggest, justice delayed, is justice denied, thus
necessitating increasingly greater and more tumultuous radical
transformation in bringing it about. Can the increased bloodshed be
laid at the footsteps of the silently spectating world, and in
commensurate measure, upon the silence of their ranking priest who
claims "the responsibility of a writer as a moral agent is to
try to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an
audience that can do something about them"?
So we have the "high
priests" of officialdom spinning their doctrines in manifest
truism to serving the interests of their ruling elite, and we have
the "dissenting priests" ostensibly sanity-checking and
unraveling their spin. But who sanity checks and unravels the
self-interests of the "dissenting priests" and the
concomitant red herrings?
Their inexplicable
failure in providing a moral compass on this single most momentous
issue of our time, only succeeds in carving out the entire solution
space on Israel-Palestine in the West, between the "high
priests" of the ruling elite and the "dissenting priests"
of the conscionable flock, to the rather limited two-state axiomatic
paradigm forcing the beleaguered peoples to choose between the
reality of a brutal occupation, and the reality of continually
shrinking buntustans that has no parallel
to statehood anywhere else on Earth today.
So let's tepidly examine
Noam Chomsky's own objectivity in the light of his own self
proclaimed self-interests that might coherently explain this odd
blind-sight in the most profound
intellectual in the West. Having openly declared himself a Zionist,
and a Zionist youth leader, albeit of the 1940s variety, whatever
that might mean, I must ask why the profound intellectual of the
dissent space would not conscionably recuse himself from bringing to
bear his own Zionist-aspiration driven personal advocacy on the
Israel-Palestine solution space due to his obvious conflict of
interest, and focused instead, as a conscionable intellectual must,
on what the suffering Palestinian victims themselves advocate as
their desired solution space? Just as he conscionably brings their
miserable plight to the attention of his Western audience by
courageously setting aside his personal Jewish affiliations when
highlighting the monumental crimes of the cruel Zionists upon the
Palestinians, why would he not also conscionably set aside his
personal self-interests of his nuanced "Labor-Zionism"
aspirations, and bring the Palestinian victims' own solutions - as
the victims' natural right to demand their own redressing - to the
attention of the same audience?
This is a rather clear
and unambiguous litmus test of objectivity for anyone who claims to
speaks out on behalf of any suffering peoples. And it also provides a
rational mechanism to anyone to enable them to set aside their own
self-interests. Just allow the victims to speak for themselves and
propagate their own claims before the world! In the pungent stink of
the gigantic red herring of what's "practical", as in the
"two-state solution", we see the "practical"
slowly becoming faits accomplis, as the good peoples in the West are
continually deflected from demanding the moral compass towards the
'right thing to do' space by their prominent intellectuals co-opted
by their own self-interests.
And this red herring of
disingenuousness doesn't just end here. There is even a finer shade
that must still be unraveled. For an intellectual laying claims to
high morality of intellectualism, and oft publicly teaching the
Biblical Golden Rule "Do unto others as you have others do
unto you", indeed, even creating logical corollaries to it
which go something like this: "if it is good for me to do to
you, it should be good for you to do to me, and if it is bad for you
to do to me, it should be bad for me to do to you too", and
continually teaching the public how to disambiguate on complex
emotional matters that are typically steeped in hypocrisy due to
self-interests, by looking at the issues from the point of view of a
detached being sitting on Mars looking down upon the earthlings and
employing the (Biblical) Golden Rule of Morality, what does it mean
to be a Zionist? Chomsky has already recognized that nation states
are formed on the bloodshed of the innocent native peoples as the
natural consequence of the latter resisting the usurpation and
resettling of their land by invaders, which even Ben Gurion
recognized, as noted above, as why would the Palestinians ever accept
the Zionist invaders peaceably thus necessitating (in Gurion's own
words) "We must expel Arabs and take their places"
and "We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians)
never do return"!
Thus knowing full well
that any Zionist aspiration for a land that is already continuously
inhabited by an indigenous population for centuries will most
assuredly continually lead to, and has already led to, their
displacement and bloodshed, upon what "ubermensch"
principle of morality is Chomsky's aspiration of Zionism based?
Is it what Golda Meir
uttered:
"This country
exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would
be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy."
(Golda Meir, Le Monde, 15 October 1971,
noted from the web here).
Or is it what Menachem
Begin uttered the day after the U.N. vote to Partition Palestine:
"The Partition of
Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was
and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to
the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever." (Menachem
Begin, noted from the web here)
Or is it based on the
spirit, which for the nth time was candidly asserted by
Yitzhak Shamir in his own straightforward diction, and Ariel Sharon
in his characteristic bulldozing speak (and which is
un-apologetically repeated ad nauseam by all Israeli statesmen and
Zionist protagonists in their own choicest diction with the
spectating world pretending to not notice):
"The settlement
of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement,
we will not fulfill Zionism. It's that simple." (Yitzhak
Shamir, Maariv, 02/21/1997, noted from the web here)
"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, noted from the web here)
While one is surely
entitled to fantasize whatever one's mind may conjure up, but when it
becomes the unstated underpinning of one's advocacy of a solution
space that drowns out the echoes and aspirations of the victims
themselves, there are a lot of red herrings on the ground. In any
case, this is how I (mis)perceive Chomsky's advocacy of the
"practical". The best way to demonstrate that these are
indeed misperceptions and there are no vested self-interests at play,
is to loudly condemn Zionism in all its abhorrent nuanced shades [3],
to unequivocally call for an end to apartheid and "ubermensch"
racism in Israel [4] that is entirely seeded from the "ubermensch"
racism in Zionism itself, to designate Israel as a rogue state in
one's writings and to call for its boycott and for sanctions to be
imposed on it, and to actively engage in echoing the victims' own
demands for justice and not put forth ones' own (tainted) solutions
[5]. The little guy on Mars is still awaiting an unequivocal moral
compassing from "priestdom" on Israel-Palestine!
Indeed, I would be much
more impressed if distinguished and prominent intellectual dissenters
and Jewish moralists like Noam Chomsky outright condemned modern
Zionism and its racist apartheid structure on the principled position
of Moral-Activism, as much as they condemned Nazism and its National
Socialist State that was also based on the same Nietzscheian
"ubermensch" philosophy and which once engulfed the entire
world in a world war to eradicate. Perhaps in the present "World
War IV"
against "Islamic terrorism" - with the amazing new
doctrinal name of "Islamofascism" synthesized to seed all
the "doctrinal motivations" needed to sustain this
new "policy" of "perpetual war" mobilization - he
can, faithful to his own intellectual positions taken earlier on the
responsibility of intellectuals, himself being one, and not just a
mere ordinary one, but "arguably the most important
intellectual alive" in the entire Western Hemisphere,
advocate its moral extension, or its real moral commencement, against
the "Jewish Fundamentalism" and "Jewish Terrorism"
and "Zionofascism" of his own peoples in Israel-Palestine
whose crimes he has amply documented himself (see here,
here,
here,
and here
for a recap of what's already been shown conclusively above).
As a polite courtesy to
the prominent intellectuals and peace activists whose positions are
illustratively dissected here to demonstrate the endless trail of red
herrings inherent in the very premise of any allowable discourse on
this subject in the West, even in the so called dissent space, I sent
them an earlier version of this article for comment. Only the
erstwhile Noam Chomsky responded. We went back and forth a few times.
I remained unconvinced of his continued tortuous "practicality"
arguments and suggested to him that he might voice them publicly in
response to my article vastly opening up the discourse space. But he
did put me in a temporary quandary by suggesting that I would be
doing a grave disservice to the cause of the Palestinian peoples by
making my views known in public as it will unwittingly give the
Israelis and their Zionist exponents further excuse to increase their
oppression as a pretext that 'see - they want to dismantle us'. He
also disconcerted me by saying why was I bringing the illustrious
name of Edward Said into this (by the fact of having quoted Edward
Said). That threw me off balance for several sleepless nights and
days delaying the publication of this article in much angst fighting
with my own conscience. Until I realized (yet once again) that if I
was right there under the 'jackboots' of the butchers, any butchers,
in any place, even as a Jew under the Nazis, I would want some
conscionable person on the outside to yell out my message loud and
clear to the world for me: 'I am a human being under the jackboots of
the Nazis - do the right thing for at least my children'. By not
honoring that call of anguish of the innocent victims when I perceive
the reality of their immeasurable suffering which is a "mystery
whose parallel may only be the one of Sinai when something was
revealed", I would not like to become the recipient of their
curse:
“and I still curse
the killers, their accomplices, the indifferent spectators who knew
and kept silent” (Elie Wiesel in All Rivers Run to the Sea)
That clinched it for me.
The tyrants will do what the tyrants will do in any case, and as they
have been doing for decades. And the people of conscience must do
what the people of conscience must do, regardless, to end despots
reigns.
Moving right along
disambiguating and dismantling the constricted solution space of
swiss cheese bantustans being offered the Palestinians as new faits
accomplis are carried out right before our eyes as we stay wrapped up
in the Ezra Pound's paradigm of deception with multiple red herrings
(invent two lies and have the public energetically embroiled in
which one of them might be true), the question arises that why
should the dialog, when it comes to the Palestinians, begin with the
1948 construction of Israel through superpower politics? As for
instance, in Phyllis Bennis' article where she passionately advocates
justice for the refugees, she makes the following statement:
"The United
Nations welcomed Israel as its newest member with Resolution 273,
passed on May 11, 1949. The membership resolution stated specifically
that entry to the world body was based on Israel's statements
regarding its ability and willingness to implement the earlier
Resolution 194 of December 1948, and the rights it granted to the
Palestinians. Those were the right to return home and compensation
for their losses during the war."
Sounds great, except that
when it is applied to the more fundamental first cause question of
why 'Der Judenstaat' was created in Palestine in the first place on
another indigenous peoples' continuously inhabited land, three
thousand year old history is drawn upon to show the aspirations of
the victimizers and what transpired in Europe through the Holocaust
as the final justification for its creation through the victimizers'
own official instrument of adjudication. Why should that become so
automatically axiomatic in one case, but the history and real lives
of the peoples continuously living there before 1948 who are
innocently victimized not be equally axiomatic? Does this have
anything at all to do with attempting to bring justice in the best
way possible to the tragedy unfolding on the ground, or the mere
preservation of self-interests by arguing "impracticality"?
All conscionable peoples'
voices of protest must be brought to bear on the plight of any
innocent victims, for we are indeed one family in humanity, and when
we collectively stand up against tyranny, we are at our finest in
demonstrating that we have come a long ways from our humble
Neanderthal beginning. However, in principled Moral-Activism, our
conscionable voices can never be allowed to drown out the victims'
own anguished voices themselves, the victims' own notion of what
crimes are being heaped upon them, and the victims' own demands for
what is fair and just restitution! Especially since the victims are
still contemporaneous, and justice can still be afforded them. The
crimes invoked upon them have not become fodder for erudite works of
historical research as yet, as some like to pretend. The victims are
still howling and writhing in insufferable pain!
The voices of the victims
themselves describing their own fate are as potent, and as
legitimate, as the Jewish moralist and Holocaust survivor Elie
Wiesel's description of what the Jewish victims faced at the hands of
another monumentally criminal oppressors. Just as the victims' own
description of their Holocaust outweighs any detractors and
revisionist historians claims to the contrary - indeed even laws are
being constructed in many Western nations to make it illegal to
challenge the victims stories and the victims suffering and the
victims version of what calamity befell them - so must the systematic
genocide and depopulation, terrorizing, and inhuman subjugation of an
innocent peoples in their own words must now replace the many Diaries
of Anne Frank. The past monumental crime is over but its memory is
now being devilishly employed to diabolically mask a new monumental
crime in progress by the former victims themselves - see here,
here,
and here
for how that's done, and here,
here,
and here
to catch a glimpse of it in action to quell any criticism of Israel
by constantly drawing upon allusions to the Holocaust "a
hate-fest against Jews akin to a Hitler rally in Nazi Germany"
and "Islamic
Mein Kampf"
- one might have thought that they may have known better, having
suffered themselves and being gods chosen people and all!
Denying any genuine
victims' indescribable calamity is monumentally shameful. The clarion
call of "never again" however is not reserved to only one
class of victims as some have tried to do. And when those who were
once victims themselves create new victims of their own, and in a
manner of oppression and deception learnt from their past
victimizers, I tend to lose much sympathy for them. It is a factual
statement that one can even observe in themselves, and in any court
room for similar behavior exhibited by a past victim becoming the
victimizer of a new innocent victims. Indeed, in a rational and fair
court, they would be imperatively disarmed and locked up - for
leaving weapons and power in the hands of the criminally insane would
be an even greater monumental crime of any court!
Watching the Zionist
operate, any Jewish person of conscience must surely be upset at what
"great name" (sic!) some of their brethren have bestowed on
the entire peoples of a high and moral tradition by the mere
association with the word Jew. But that does not appear to be the
case at all with rare exceptions (see here
and
here
for some examples of such rare and genuine human beings who are so
offended that they put their own lives on the line but remain largely
unknown and unmourned in the victimizers' own civilizations but are
idolized and immortalized as heroes by the victims themselves, and
here
for fair justice). Israel seems to continue to enjoy widespread
support from the World Jewry, and most vocally from within the United
States of America. Indeed a lot of support for Zionist Israel comes
from this superpower nation's ordinary Christian Zionist ideological
supporters (see here
and here),
of which the mighty President of this "Roman Nation" is
himself an exponent.
And here comes the
fundamental dichotomy in dialogs with the victims. To the victims,
the Zionists are monumental barbarians to be seen in the same dock
someday as Eichmann in Jerusalem, with the front rows occupied by the
new innocent victims who have as much right to succor and restitution
as their victimizers were for their own Holocaust! And surely the new
victims repeatedly, daily, hourly, every moment of their breadth,
invoke the same curse uttered by the former victims "and I
still curse the killers, their accomplices, the indifferent
spectators who knew and kept silent". To them too, their
plight must surely be an equal "mystery whose parallel may
only be the one of Sinai when something was revealed". And
despite this daily inhuman subjugation, they continue to make every
attempt at civilized existence despite burying their children daily,
barely escaping from under the roofs of demolished homes and the
wrath of D9 bulldozers and F16s, and having to kiss their beloved
child with his or her eyes precisely blown out by an Israeli 25 year
old sharp shooter as if he was "cockroach picking" and not
go insane! In much vain and hollow rings the call of the Jewish
moralists themselves:
"Although the
Holocaust inflicted horrible injustice upon us, it did not grant us
certificate of everlasting righteousness. The murderers where amoral;
the victims were not made moral. To be moral you must behave
ethically. The test of that is daily and constant."
One can read, hear, and
see the Palestinian victims' scream in anguish and call for justice
from the bespectating world in their own voices here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
... just as few randomly chosen samples of how the Palestinians
themselves view their own calamity and how the victims themselves
perceive justice, but for the convenient ear plugs in well
intentioned peoples' ears. Compare the victims own call for
restitution to this articulation by Israeli Statesman Shimon Peres
(the master of the art of "yes but no") here,
and examine the vested interests of all those who echo it in all its
nuanced shades!
And one can further watch
how these screams are continually dismissed in the West, especially
in the United States of America, by well organized shills for the
Apartheid State continuing to strew their own B grade quality of red
herrings, considerably less abstruse in disguising their obviousness
in their on going attempt to continually sew obfuscation any which
way possible in order to continue to buy time for 'Der Judenstaat' in
seeding new "impracticalities" to justice for their
innocent victims. The following is only a random sample. The very
first comment for this book on Amazon.com "Refugees
in Our Own Land : Chronicles from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in
Bethlehem"
by a commentator whose well known affiliations are noted here,
and other generous red herring droppings noted here,
says the following:
" ... Had those
things actually been perpetrated by Israel, I would be first in line
to condemn them. But even the United Nations has concluded that
Israel has not committed genocide, in Jenin, or anywhere else. As for
murder, it seems that the only murder is taking place by Palestinians
against Israeli civilians, and that whosoever amongst Palestinians
has been killed has died either in battle, in the line of fire, or by
accident, for which Israel has apologized. When, on the other hand,
was the last time a Palestinian leader actually sought an end to
suicide bombings, because they are evil, not because they are
inexpedient. "
And concludes by saying:
"My biggest
problem with this book is that for most of the events that Hamzeh
reports, she relies on hearsay. There has been no scientific or
objective attempt to verify the information, much less the veracity
of the sources. Even that might be all right, had the reporter not
assumed an hysterical tone. But Hamzeh is so willing to believe
everything nasty she hears about Israel or Israelis, or Jews for that
matter, that nothing escapes unscathed. I want peace, but books like
this one--filled with blame and outright hatred--do nothing to
promote it."
Perhaps this commentator
needs to be introduced to the "scientific or objective
attempt to verify the information" standards adopted by the
incumbent victimizers themselves to bring to the attention of the
world what monumental crimes were once heaped upon them, or
mandatorily be made to read the anguished words of Elie Wiesel in his
own highly acclaimed "hysterical tone" of the
calamity that is now a "mystery whose parallel may only be
the one of Sinai when something was revealed" for their own
innocent victims. A conscionable reader may perhaps inform the
commentator, as well as all those allied with her (begin here
and here,
then progress to here,
here,
here,
here,
here)
of this fact so that we may all endeavor together - for none of us is
perfect and many of us are easily misled, sometimes by blind passion,
sometimes by disinformation - to become human beings first!
It may be à
propos to bring the late Edward W. Said's own rational words -
one who was indeed from among the victims and deeply affiliated with
their culture and civilization as both a spokesperson and an
anguished exponent of his peoples cause - for summation away from my
more emotional ones that synchronizes to the beat of Elie Wiesel
perfectly but perhaps not as eloquently or credibly. Excerpted from
Edward Said's essay "The Mirage of Peace", October 16, 1995
in The Nation:
"The deep tragedy
of Palestine is that a whole people, their history and aspirations
have been under comprehensive assault--not only by Israel (with the
United States) but also by the Arab governments and, since Oslo, by
Arafat....
I do not pretend to
have any quick solutions for the situation now referred to as "the
peace process," but I do know that for the vast majority of
Palestinian refugees, day laborers, peasants and town and camp
dwellers, those who cannot make a quick deal and those whose voices
are never heard, for them the process has made matters far worse.
Above all, they may have lost hope....
I have been
particularly disheartened by the role played in all this by liberal
Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. Silence is not a response,
and neither is some fairly tepid endorsement of a Palestinian state,
with Israeli settlements and the army more or less still there, still
in charge. The peace process must be demystified and spoken about
plainly. Palestine/Israel is no ordinary bit of geography; it is more
saturated in religious, historical and cultural significance than any
place on earth. It is also now the place where two peoples, whether
they like it or not, live together tied by history, war, daily
contact and suffering. To speak only in geopolitical clichés
(as the Clinton Administration does) or to speak about "separating"
them (as Rabin does) is to call forth more violence and degradation.
These two communities must be seen as equal to each other in rights
and expectations; only from such a beginning can justice then
proceed."
And perhaps I may be
allowed to offer my own much more modest rational conclusions, as
seen from the eyes of an ordinary person, with my own personal biases
and self-interests. Not being an intellectual, I am mercifully spared
their burden of claims to deep thoughts, and can speak
straightforwardly in ordinary human being first sense, the common
man's sense, or commonsense. It is but a concatenation of obvious
moral truisms for there isn't a whole lot to this summation beyond
that.
All of the discussion in
this article is the view from the victims, and/or from the
civilizations sympathetic to the victims, and/or from the courageous
conscionable peoples in all civilizations who are human beings first
and can genuinely commiserate with the misery of other suffering
human beings without putting their own self-interests above those of
imperatives of morality, and what is fair and what is just, as
amazingly and quintessentially delineated in the Biblical Golden Rule
"do unto others as you have others do unto you". The
victimizers' and their exponents' view obviously is incongruent with
this - another wholly truism! But can there be no objectivity?
How does a judge ever make a ruling in any case? Is it only with
victors' justice? No, not among civilized conscionable peoples, and
among rational and moral civilizations. In these times of ease of
access to information, amazing search engines and document archives
at finger tips, it may indeed be deemed a moral crime, by the victims
at the very least, to feign ignorance of the state of the world, or
to disingenuously claim a different world view. But then it does
require considerable skills to disambiguate the spin doctoring and
vested interests that surround the information, especially for well
intentioned bespectating peoples removed from the conflicts
themselves. How is one to discern fact from fiction? Unless one is
the victim of course - then one needs no discernment! The victims
know with certainty what crimes are visited upon them and what is
their demand for restitution and compensation. Perhaps others might
just ask the victims themselves? But that might just be too much
commonsense, the good lord of hypocrisy, the ubermensch, forbid!
Do we need to define some
standard agreed upon usage of words, i.e. definitions, that are then
applied to all sides of the arguments, ab initio, in order to discern
them unhypocritically? How important is it to know the "first
cause", and how appropriate is the principle of "all
the evil that follow" to apportion the blame for all crimes
stemming from the first cause? How far in history may one go? One
year? Ten Years? Fifty Years? 100 Years? Three Thousand Years? Ten
Thousand Years? To Adam? To Devil? To God? (To Big Bang in case one
is atheistic)? What key principle standard was employed at the
conclusion of World War II at the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials to
apportion blame for the heinous war crimes committed by both sides of
bombing civilian centers and causing the deaths of up to 50 million
peoples - irrespective of whatever may have been the weaknesses in
the execution of these standards due to self-interests of the victors
as some have argued? (And we don't want to use these possible
weaknesses in the execution of these standards as arguments to
deflect our attention from the actual moral principles behind them
which is the point of discussion - but do watch for it as some will
surely try to distract attention from the actual moral principles
themselves by bringing up various compromises and poor implementation
of moral principles in the past as evidence for not following moral
principles or not advocating justice based on moral principles -
wonderfully smelly things, these red herrings, for some fishermen I
am sure!)
Does the passage of time
in the current epoch, as it blends into history, favor the status
quo? Are we doomed to remain caught in this plight of the House of
Zeus? Or is there a way to discern rationally, logically, fairly, to
understand the "right thing to do" space? Once knowing
that, it is always "impractical" to bring it about as the
odds are always against the underdogs - the victims, and in favor of
the topdogs - a truism. Arguing truisms like the 'impracticality"
argument to justify not articulating 'the right thing to do' is
called what?
(In case one does not
know how to answer this question, one may try any of these for size
and see which ones may fit: "hectoring hegemons",
"self-interest", "sophistry", "hypocrisy",
"double standards", "superpower's uncle tom", "a
red herring manufacturing factory that supplies whole sale to the
consciousness of their nation using the credibility of the power of
their name", "intellectually aiding and abetting in the
conspiracy to perpetuate a monumental crime through advocacy speech
and actions not rooted in Moral-Activism and thus deliberately
enabling the continued perpetuation of the crime and its concomitant
new faits accomplis", et. al)
And the most obvious
moral truism summation for last - the now visible elephant dancing on
the newlywed's bed.
The most commonsensical
solution that seems to be continually eluding the luminous West that
supports the misconstruction of Israel as an apartheid state with
various and sundry Western intellectuals sheepishly apologizing for
it by cleverly not talking about it in all their fancy and refined
punditry of high morality and responsibilities of intellectuals, is
the one nation state for all its inhabitants. In that tight
geography, two nations just cannot be constructed justly, the one
with the guns will always dictate the terms. And it is truly no
ordinary piece of geography. It is so steeped in the history and
intermingling cultures of all three Abrahamic religions that try as
the European Zionists may, to obliterate the vestiges of the other
two, the history and its affiliations cannot be divorced from that
geography. Abolishing apartheid and eliminating the racist Zionist
philosophy and replacing it with a civil society and civil laws for
all, is the only just solution. It is also the solution that the
Palestinian peoples themselves demand.
One nation of Muslims,
Christians, and Jews, or stating it in another rational order, of
Jews, Christians, and Muslims, living amicably together in the holy
lands that all covet, equitably sharing the Land of Canaan. With the
passage of time, in a peace seeded with justice, all wounds of the
victims - the ones throwing the rocks and the stones at the tanks
besieging their homes, and the ones going berserk
in blowing themselves up in a last ditched attempt to get back to
their tormentors responsible for their insanity and their shattered
tabula rasa - may be healed. The innocent Jewish victims of the
Palestinians' struggle to live as free human beings on their own
continuously inhabited ancestral lands against their inhuman
oppressors, I hope will heal too - an innocent people traumatized by
the first Holocaust, and then by the struggles against their own
criminal oppression by another innocent peoples whom they
gratuitously victimized, have a long and arduous self-healing process
in front of them. It's time both sides were allowed to start the
process by vehemently and righteously rejecting the insanely criminal
and largely unexamined axioms, the anachronistic first cause celebra
of their entire modern misery and the root cause of war mongering and
suffering in the entire Middle East, from their midst. There is no
reason, in the modernity of the 21st century, to have an Apartheid
pariah state in our midst that has co-opted
the very definition of justice from the lexicon of Western languages,
and continues to create new innocent victims on a daily basis and has
been doing so since its very inception in 1896, when its founder
claimed along the banks of the Swiss Rhine: "In Basle I
founded the Jewish state ... Maybe in five years, certainly in fifty,
everyone will realize it".
And most assuredly, there
is no reason for any people, be they well intentioned, or
ideological, who may have supported it in the past, to continue doing
so in the present, except with monumentally criminal intent of
perpetuating crimes against a beleaguered humanity.
If an EU can transpire
after killing each other for centuries and upon the ashes of 50
million dead just in the 20th century, with the determined will and
singular focus to do so, a unified Palestine-Israel is a far more
natural and historical reconstitution except for the relative
newcomer European Zionism parasite that has hijacked the region, and
continually prevents and distorts its reseeding with red herrings up
the wazoo. It's time to finally endeavor creating the long cherished
and elusive dream of a peaceful and fairer future for all of our
children by the construction of a non-Apartheid equal and just state
for all its inhabitants in Israel-Palestine.
Indeed a true "Zion
that will light up all the world", one that can finally
claim to be the genuine moral inheritor of the Ten Commandments, and
of the noble Prophet - whom all three faiths in the region honor and
respect, sharing in the same Abrahamic moral traditions - who
identified his flock as God's chosen peoples!
Thank you
The
author, an ordinary researcher and writer on contemporary
geopolitics, a minor justice activist, grew up in Pakistan, studied
EECS at MIT, engineered for a while in high-tech Silicon Valley
(patents here),
and retired early to pursue other responsible interests. His maiden
2003 book was rejected by six publishers and can be read on the web
at http://PrisonersoftheCave.org.
He may be reached at http://Humanbeingsfirst.org.
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[1] An editor of
the website "Dissident Voice" challenged this quote with
the following comment: "i submit that you need a first-hand
sourcing here; see
http://ngo-monitor.org/archives/news/122304-1.htm".
The full quote, that I checked on the microfiche in a local public
library, where only the afternoon edition of the New York Times of 14
April 1983 was on the roll of microfiche, is as follows:
'Jerusalem, April 13 -
... There is a widespread conviction among Palestinian Arabs that the
Israelis want to make life miserable for them and thereby drive them
out of the territories.
This was reinforced by
reported remarks Tuesday by the outgoing Chief of Staff of the
Israeli Army, Lieut. Gen. Rafael Eytan. Israeli radio, television and
newspapers quoted him as telling the Parliament's Foreign Affairs and
Defense Committee that for every incident of stone-throwing by Arab
youths, 10 settlements should be built. "When we have settled
the land," he was quoted as saying, "all the Arabs
will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged
roaches in a bottle." ' (Emphasis added. New York Times,
late edition, Thursday 14 April 1983, page A3, story by David K.
Shipler, titled "Most West Bank Arabs Blaming U.S. for Impasse")
It is possible that the
quote I have cited in the main text of the essay from the web, was
originally from the morning edition, or was assembled from multiple
stories as that edition contained many stories on Israel-Palestine.
Also see Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Eitan,
and the image at http://uploaded.fresh.co.il/2004/11/28/27740072.jpg
for presumably a citation in original Hebrew. The similarity of
wording and sentiments expressed in both, only prove the main theme
of this essay - the endless trail of red herrings.
The "cockroach"
peddler met his verminous fate of the
Pharaoh as noted at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4034765.stm.
The BBC itself reported the quote in question in their own story as
follows:
'Mr Eitan was
politically right-wing and opposed the handing over of land to
Palestinians as part of peace talks.
He often used blunt
language. He once said: "When we have settled the land, all
the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like
drugged cockroaches in a bottle."
Mr Eitan was also
criticised by the Kahan Commission, which investigated the massacre
of Palestinian refugees by an Israeli-allied Christian militia during
Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
The Commission said he
should have anticipated the danger and opposed sending the Christians
into the camp.' (Emphasis added. BBC News, Tuesday, 23 November,
2004, 10:07 GMT, "Former Israeli army chief drowns")
It made me intensely
depressed to read-back to 24 years ago and to reflect that the goodly
American nation has continually permitted a most monumental crime
under its own watchful eyes with its full budgetary support, while
its supposedly democratic peoples busily pursue their own "American
Dreams". A genocide that can be so easily averted by the world
is allowed to continue, it seems, only for the pleasure of future
historians and moralists to make a good living peddling history books
and pontificating morality. Here is an interesting quote from the
same A3 page, just underneath the above article, that shows that the
only thing that's changed on the playing field of fait accompli, is
more faits accomplis, bigger holes in the swiss cheese Buntustans,
and a generation further besieged, through the direct funding of a
great populace democracy:
"Washington,
April 13 - A House Foreign Affairs subcommittee has quietly increased
the amount of military and economic grants for Israel by $365 million
over the amount request by the Reagan Administration for the 1984
fiscal year, committee members said today.
They said the
Administration had requested $785 million in economic grants and this
was raised by $65 million to $850 million.
The Administration
also had requested $1.7 billion in military aid, of which $550
million would be in the form of grants and the rest in loans. The
committee, which is headed by Representative Lee H. Hamilton,
Democrat of Indiana, decided to allow $850 million to be in the form
of grants - an increase of $300 million - leaving just $850 million
to be repaid, instead of more than $1.1 billion." (New York
Times, late edition, Thursday 14 April 1983, page A3, story titled
"Panel increases Grants for Israel")
[2] The
distinguished Phyllis Bennis is in equally distinguished company
here. Let's witness former American President Jimmy Carter
selectively exercise his tender conscience with his serendipitous
book "Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid". In his speech at
George Washington University, as reported by the Associated Press and
carried by Israeli newspaper Haaretz at
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/834962.html,
he noted:
'He said he was not
accusing Israel of racism nor referring to its treatment of Arabs
within the country. "I defined apartheid very carefully as the
forced segregation by one people of another on their own land,"
he said. ...
On the West Bank,
Carter said, Palestinians were victims of oppression, their homes and
land confiscated to make way for subsidized Israeli settlers.
"The life of
Palestinians is almost intolerable," he said. "And even
though Israel agreed to give up Gaza and remove Jewish settlers from
the territory, there is no freedom for the people of Gaza and no
access to the outside world."
"They have no
real freedom of all," Carter said.
By apartheid, Carter
said he meant the forced segregation of one people by another. He
said Israel's policies in the territories are contrary to the tenets
of the Jewish faith.
"There will be no
peace until Israel agrees to withdraw from all occupied Palestinian
territory," he said, while leaving room for some land swaps that
would permit Jews to remain on part of the West Bank in exchange for
other Israeli-held land to be taken over by Palestinians.
"Withdrawal would
dramatically reduce any threat to Israel," he said.'
The distinguished
President Carter noted the definition of "all occupied
Palestinian territory" very carefully suggesting that 'he
was not accusing Israel of racism nor referring to its treatment of
Arabs within the country. "I defined apartheid very carefully as
the forced segregation by one people of another on their own land,"
he said'. This might be forgivable oversight of memory or lack of
geography knowledge for an ordinary mortal, but for a 39th former
president of a superpower nation who is also a Nobel Peace Prize
laureate, and who dares to speak out serendipitously in favor of a
beleaguered peoples, but only goes part of the way as if some
enormous invisible barrier is blocking him, it is entirely
inexplicable.
Perhaps despite being a
president who once had all the secrets of the State (and the world)
at his finger tips, he hadn't rightly been informed by the '14
members of the Carter Center's advisory board' who resigned to
protest his book, or by the 'Jewish groups and some fellow
Democrats' from whom he 'drew fire', of the Jews own
history of laments of the type disclosed in this essay, including
this very poignant one:
"The state of
Israel founded in 1948 following a war which the Israelis call the
War of Independence, and the Palestinians call the Nakba - the
catastrophe. A haunted, persecuted people sought to find a shelter
and a state for itself, and did so at a horrible price to another
people. During the war of 1948, more than half of the Palestinian
population at the time - 1,380,000 people - were driven off their
homeland by the Israeli army. Though Israel officially claimed that a
majority of refugees fled and were not expelled, it still refused to
allow them to return, as a UN resolution demanded shortly after 1948
war. Thus, the Israeli land was obtained through ethnic cleansing of
the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. This is not a process
unfamiliar in history. Israel's actions remain incomparable to the
massive ethnic cleansing of Native Americans by the settlers and
government of the United states. Had Israel stopped there, in 1948, I
could probably live with it. As an Israeli, I grew up believing that
this primal sin our state was founded on may be forgiven one day,
because the founder's generation was driven by the faith that this
was the only way to save the Jewish people from the danger of another
holocaust." (Tanya Reinhart: “Israel/Palestine - How to
End the War of 1948”, excerpt from very first page)
[3] There are
obviously a minuscule number of "Kibbutz Zionists" living
in Israel, perhaps less than 1% as I am advised, who love to live the
Kibbutzim life style, toiling and soiling in a cooperative whereby
the community helps raise each others' children. A vast majority of
them supposedly are irreligious and "Leftist" by
inclination, and are also largely portrayed by their exponents as
non-violent peaceable peoples who settled in Palestine before 1948
(albeit the ones I know who have lived this life arrived in Galilee
much after the construction of the Apartheid state). Noam Chomsky
himself once noted on the public airwaves to Amy Goodman on her radio
talk show Democracy Now, that he too lived there in the 1950s for a
short period, and every time he would look out over the horizon, he
would feel immensely saddened that another peoples had been forcibly
and inhumanly deprived of their land in order to achieve Zion. He had
noted on the airwaves, as I recall, that he couldn't morally take the
incongruence of the situation and decided to return back to the
United States. To this humble plebeian, it appears that these
intellectual idealists, and others like them including those
self-proclaimed "dissenters" who continually express deep
remorse and anguish at what the Zionist founders perpetuated to
create 'Der Judenstaat' in the midst of an already continuously
inhabited peoples living there for millennia, must concede, if they
indeed do not espouse a Nietzscheian morality, that they should be
able to live together in equitably sharing the land of Canaan with
all its indigenous peoples. Thus the word "Zionism",
without any qualification, predominantly refers to the glaring
monstrous elephant dancing on the newlywed's bed of racist murderous
Zionism that was unleashed by Theodor Herzl in 1896 when he
proclaimed “In Basle I founded the Jewish state ... Maybe in
five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will realize it.”, and
which was subsequently orchestrated to create an exclusive
"Jews-Only" state with
"Jews-Only-roads-and-suburbs-and-rights" in the heartland
of Palestine. See Lenni Brenner's incredible online book "Zionism
in the Age of Dictators" at
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupid?key=olbp12752.
Given the manifest
reality of deliberate and endless red herrings on the ground, anyone
not coming out loudly against Zionism itself as the world silently
spectates its global power-play, and not demanding its immediate and
outright dismantling and full restitution to its victims, is
complicit in the on going murder and genocide of an innocent peoples,
all their self-flagellation and words of remorse not withstanding.
Thus see for instance, "The complete text of The Origin of
the Palestine-Israel Conflict Published by Jews for Justice in the
Middle East" at:
http://www.wrmea.com/jews_for_justice/index.html.
Also examine the former American President, Jimmy Carter's anemic
condemnation of Israel, and his restricting the critique in
"Palestine Peace not Apartheid" to the still
ill-conceived two-state solution space. A just and more forthright
person might have produced a work titled "Palestine, Justice
not Apartheid"!
[4] It is rather
bizarre that President Carter in the spirited defense of his book
against the Zionist exponents of Israel, should so circumspectly
state that 'He said he was not accusing Israel of racism nor
referring to its treatment of Arabs within the country.' Not
possessing the distinguished credentials of being a former President
of the lone superpower country in the universe, and not having won
any Nobel Peace prizes either, I must confess I cannot understand the
tepidity or wisdom of President Carter. As a mere plebeian, I must
rather straightforwardly ask him and the reader, why? Why is Jimmy
Carter not accusing Israel of racism, nor referring to her treatment
of Arabs within the country?
What is a courageous
former President - guarded 24x7 by the Secret Service, and possessing
all that he may ever desire in the world already in the back pockets
of his accomplished and full life - so fearful of, that he should go
out of his way to assert his definition of "Apartheid" in
the title of his book to: "I defined apartheid very carefully
as the forced segregation by one people of another on their own
land", and deliberately restrain himself from not seeing the
direct and immediate parallels with South Africa? Did he come by this
arbitrary definition through whim, fear, or through some "ubermensch"
principle of morality?
Please permit this rather
plebeian scribe to have the chutzpah to remind a distinguished
luminary-scholar-humanitarian-extraordinaire of the modern political
world of the words of Haim Cohen, former judge of the Supreme Court
of Israel (as noted by Tariq Ali in “To be Intimidated is to be
an Accomplice” http://www.counterpunch.org/ali03042004.html):
‘ “The bitter
irony of fate decreed that the same biological and racist argument
extended by the Nazis, and which inspired the inflammatory laws of
Nuremberg, serve as the basis for the official definition of
Jewishness in the bosom of the state of Israel” (quoted in
Joseph Badi, Fundamental Laws of the State of Israel NY, 1960,
P.156)’
And all can easily glean
the expansion of this statement by the former judge of the Supreme
Court of Israel, in “Zionism as Jewish National Socialism”:
"According to
Halachah, classic Judaism's laws and customs, for example "compassion
towards others" extends to Jews only. Murder or manslaughter is
judged mildly when the perpetrator is Jewish and the victim a
non-Jew. Also according to Halachah, it is accepted for a Jew to kill
a non-Jew if he is laying claim to "eternal Jewish land".
This is what the settlers' religious organisations are alleging.
There is no corresponding law in Israel's judicial system but in
effect it influences the system as punishment of such crimes is very
mild. Israel's state terrorism, theft of land and occupation,
demolition of houses, the building of the Wall etc including the so
called 'extra-judicial killings' (assassinations), are seen by
Zionists as legitimate defence of the Nation and therefore fall under
international law - which Israel ignores [..] Buber critisised Nazism
while commending the Jewish Religion (Hassidism) but keeping quiet
about its dehumanising of non-Jews (goyim). These double standards
act to increase Israel's chauvinism and hatred of all non-Jews."
(Lasse Wilhelmson “Zionism as Jewish National Socialism”
http://www.israelshamir.net/Contributors/wilhelmson.htm)
And we can trivially see
empirical evidence of "These double standards act to increase
Israel's chauvinism and hatred of all non-Jews" in
despicable racist "ubermensch" statements like the
following one by Moshe Katsav, former President of Israel, that
inexplicably seem to remain incognizant
among the powerful and distinguished critics' of Israel-Palestine
blot on humanity, including the author of "Palestine, Peace not
Apartheid":
"There is a huge
gap between us (Jews) and our enemies not just in ability but in
morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our
neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred
meters away, they are people who do not belong to our continent, to
our world, but actually belong to different galaxy." (Moshe
Katsav, President of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001)
It is incredible how
powerful the lapses of some short term memories can be – perhaps
Moshe Katsav has forgotten the Jewish Ghettos from New York to Poland
that the Jews inhabited not too long ago themselves. Furthermore,
this was their unfortunate 'state of being' when they were free and
no military occupying power was constricting them to death. The
beleaguered peoples whom the erstwhile former President of Israel
finds so easy to belittle as "not belong to our continent, to
our world, but actually belong to different galaxy" on the
other hand are living under a brutal Israeli military occupation
after they were already once evicted from their own lands when the
Zionist state was first constructed in their peaceful midst and
forced into the subsequently second whammy of military occupation of
even that small parcel of land – generations have been wasted under
the murderous occupiers watchful gun turrets. Shame! What has
happened to the humanity of these Israelis? Why should the world take
any sympathy on these peoples anymore for their holocaust? They are
handing the same systematic genocide to another innocent peoples –
only spread out across generations and in plain sight of the silently
spectating world. Witness the following comments of an American
President Harry S. Truman from his Diary July 21, 1947. Every word of
it is reflected in the Zionist Jews’ own merciless actions in
Palestine since the founding of Israel in 1948:
“The Jews, I find
are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians,
Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as
D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet
when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler
not Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the
under dog.”
So upon which
"ubermensch" principle of morality has the distinguished
President Carter come up with his definition of Apartheid? Hasn't he
even bothered to read the late Daniel Pearl's wife, Marriane Pearl's
touching autobiographical book in memory of her murdered husband "A
Mighty Heart", in which on page 15 she writes of the newest
and latest DNA technologies being employed in Israel for the ultimate
in racism and Apartheid that even far surpasses South Africa:
"Last October, at
a film festival in Montreal, I won an award for a controversial
documentary I made for French and German public television about
Israel's use of genetic screening. Under Israel's Law of Return,
almost any Jew has the right to return to the ancient homeland. But
how do you make sure someone is actually Jewish? To determine who
qualifies, Israeli authorities have used DNA testing to examine
applicants' genetic makeup. My film explored the political and
sociological implications of this process, which are confusing and
disturbing." (Marriane Pearl "A Mighty Heart" page
15)
I am only assuming that
the former President Carter does not receive his daily briefings from
the White House anymore, and therefore may not have kept up with the
latest news in racism of Israel's innate makeup! Can some courageous
reader put the afore asked questions before the former American
President publicly where he is compelled to respond as the world
continually fawns their oohs and aahs at just the thought of a former
President of the United States of America even thinking of
criticizing Israel?
I am sorry that I am less
than impressed, credentials or no credentials. One does not need to
be in possession of the title of "President" to see the
difference between "good and evil" or to be "beyond"
it, or indeed, does one? Seems like all the moralist thinking of
people like Hannah Arendth in profound
lamentary books such as "Eichmann
in Jerusalem - A Report on the Banality of Evil" is mainly
confined to the crimes committed against the mighty "ubermensch"
themselves! Also see comment (the first one) on Time Magazine's 'The
Middle East' blog in response to an amazing article by Phil Zabriskie
titled "Reading Between, Over, Around the Lines..."
March 8, 2007, at
http://time-blog.com/middle_east/2007/03/between_over_around_the_lines.html,
comment reproduced below:
' "There might
well be a fair number of people who think that a state of conflict,
marked often by violence and at times death, is the natural state of
things here, that endless cycles of mutual antagonism, persecution,
and victimization is how its supposed to be, a kind of prophecy
foretold."
I am not an expert on
prophesy, but certainly commonsense suggests that evil flourishes
because many good people choose to remain silent, and those who
perpetuate it ["state of conflict"] are usually
ordinary peoples - as noted by Hannah Arendth in "Eichmann in
Jerusalem - A Report on the Banality of Evil". And when she
observed the "ordinariness" of
Adolph Eichmann, she was "reprimanded", putting it
charitably. Because we always like to perceive that horrible crimes
are only committed by super horrible peoples, and ordinary peoples
have no role in being "good Germans".
I would like to draw your
kind attention to "the endless trail of red herrings" on
this topic that even conscionable and distinguished writers, in
mainstream, as well as dissent-stream, keep
perpetuating, unable to see past the mythologies and red herrings
with their own good commonsense.
I hope you do publish my
comment - it is very difficult to have an ordinary person, a
plebeian, have his voice heard - it's always the special interests
who get the airwaves/mainstream to themselves. Perhaps Time can be
courageous enough to change that - and run my article as their cover
story? A plebeian can dream of a time when their own voices can
inform the peoples, can't he?
Thank you
Zahir Ebrahim
Founder Project
HumanbeingsfirstTM
c/o humanbeingsfirst at
gmail com '
[5] Noam Chomsky
had written to me 'Furthermore, you are apparently unaware that I
have, since childhood, been a very vocal advocate of a binational
state as part of a broader federation. But I stress the word
"advocate."' while he continued to justify the
two-state solution with "impracticality" and what appeared
to me to be specious political expediency arguments. Thus I had
informed him that I was going to let him respond publicly, and I
eagerly look forward to him cogently explaining his positions "loud
and clear" in the light of this essay in which I have, as a
non-scholar, rather an ordinary plebeian, challenged his profound
wisdom based upon the moral imperatives that I am compelled to humbly
spell out in my essay "Responsibility of Intellectuals –
Redux".
I have to admit here of
my own close sense of affinity to Noam Chomsky as his lifelong
student once upon a time, and as his nondescript student at MIT while
studying EECS, where I first learned about the "real" US
Foreign Policies. And as one who has benefited from Chomsky's moral
teachings and analytical techniques of news deconstruction
tremendously, some of the lessons learned I hope are also exhibited
in this essay. As I wrote to Chomsky, and which I excerpt below, my
humble effort to critically examine his positions in public is as
much a matter of my own conscience as that which compels him to stand
up to the tyranny of his own nation. I also have to admit that I
remained a covetous reader of Noam Chomsky's books and essays
throughout my life, until 2003, when new realizations dawned upon me
and I stopped being impressed by other peoples' ideas, including
Chomsky, and decided to start thinking for myself ab initio. Some of
these realizations are also mentioned in my very detailed essay
"Dialog Among Civilizations: Whytalksfail? - Part1"
in the context of 911, wondering why, the two most notorious gadflies
on the planet, Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk, suddenly found new trust
and faith in the Government's version of it. These essays are
available at http://www.humanbeingsfirst.org,
in a feeble plebeian effort once again to speak out against the new
unprovoked impending war of "shock and awe" upon another
defenseless nation - “and I still curse the killers, their
accomplices, the indifferent spectators who knew [or now know] and
kept silent”.
"First let me
genuinely once again acknowledge the debt of gratitude that I have
for you being my teacher most of my adult life. We have a saying in
Urdu, loosely translated, it says - 'the cat is the auntie of the
lion'. It means the cat taught everything to the lion, except to
climb the tree. Obviously to save its own skin. In our culture, as
well as I am sure in other cultures, we often refer to experts and
teachers and other specialists who hold things back from their
students and under-studies, with similar phrases. Such a phrase, is
entirely unjust for you. You have indeed never held anything back as
far as teaching your mind to anyone and everyone who has wanted to
learn. And for this, I am most grateful. And to some tiny extent, I
am applying the skills learnt from you, to attempt to disarm you, and
other Zionists like you, intellectually speaking. I am not an
intellectual, nor an erudite scholar, but a mere ordinary person who
is now a minor social worker [..] and a small time grass-roots
justice activist. To the extent I succeed in checking you, it must
surely make you happy that you taught well. To the extent I fail, it
is my own shortcomings and a limitation of my own small mind."
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36: "Israel's Sacred Terrorism: A study based on Moshe Sharett's Personal Diary and other documents. Forward by Noam Chomsky - Livia Rokach" http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/essays/rokach.html
37: "The Jews of Iraq - Naeim Giladi, Interview March 16, 1998" http://www.bintjbeil.com/E/occupation/ameu_iraqjews.html
38: "Palestinians Have A Right To Go Home - Phyllis Bennis, Sept 03, 2000" http://www.commondreams.org/views/090300-101.htm
39: "Institute for Policy Studies 'An Institute for the rest of us - I.F. Stone' Website" http://www.ips-dc.org/
40: "UN Resolution 3379" http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF
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48: "Rogue States - Noam Chomsky" http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/z9804-rogue.html
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52: "The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) report on Rebuilding America's Defenses, Sept 2000" http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
53: "Nancy Pelosi Gives a Pep Talk to AIPAC - Mark Gaffney, March 27, 2005" http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0527-23.htm
54: "Pelosi Speaking to AIPAC, America-Israel Public Affairs Committee April 2003" http://www.tomjoad.org/PelosiAIPAC.htm#2003
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77: "Jerusalemites 'Children of Ibda'a' - A Documentary by S. Smith Patrick, Palestinian voices" http://www.jerusalemites.org/book&film/film22.htm
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84: "Sharing the Land of Cannan - Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle, Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, Pluto Press, Palestinian voices" http://qumsiyeh.org/sharingthelandofcanaan/
85: "Films @ Palestine Online Store - Palestinian voices" http://www.palestineonlinestore.com/films/index.html
86: "Forced Migration Review26: Palestinian displacement: a case apart? Refugee Studies Center, University of Oxford, Palestinian voices" http://www.fmreview.org/palestine.htm
87: "Refugees In Our Own Land, Chronicles from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem - Muna Hamzeh, Palestinian voices" http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=114709
88: "The United Jerusalem Foundation, Palestinian voices" http://www.unitedjerusalem.org/index2.asp?id=520390
89: "Refugees In Our Own Land, Chronicles from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem - Muna Hamzeh, Palestinian voices" http://www.amazon.com/Refugees-Our-Own-Land-Palestinian/dp/0745316522
90: "SourceWatch: Alyssa A. Lappen" http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alyssa_A._Lappen
91: "Columbia U's Radical Middle East Faculty - Alyssa A. Lappen and Jonathan Calt Harris, FrontPageMagazine, March 18, 2003" http://www.meforum.org/article/526
92: "Daniel Pipes' Website" http://www.danielpipes.org/
93: "AIPAC's Website" http://www.aipac.org/
94: "American Enterprise Institute Website" http://www.aei.org/
95: "Alan Dershowitz Website" http://www.alandershowitz.com/
96: "Anti-Defamation League Website" http://www.adl.org/
97: "Copyright Law of the United States of America, Chapter 5, Copyright Infringement and Remedies" http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html
98: "US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use" http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
99: "A Summary of United Nations Agreements on Human Rights" http://www.hrweb.org/legal/undocs.html
100: "The Patriot Acts: Sneak Attack on Civil Liberties - Patriot Act II Fact Sheet" http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=10786
101: "The Constitution of the United States of America" http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.overview.html
02: "Project Humanbeingsfirst" http://www.humanbeingsfirst.org/
03: "Discussion Space" http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/
04: "Facing Mecca - Uri Avnery" http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/40967
05: "Facing Mecca - Uri Avnery" http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17112.htm
06: "What Price Oslo? - Edward Said" http://www.counterpunch.org/saidoslo2.html
07: "End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After- Edward Said" http://www.amazon.com/End-Peace-Process-Oslo-After/dp/0375725741/
08: "Peace And Its Discontents - Edward Said" http://www.amazon.com/Peace-Its-Discontents-Palestine-Process/dp/0679767258/
09: "From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap - Edward Said" http://www.amazon.com/Oslo-Iraq-Road-Map-Essays/dp/1400076714/
10: "Bernard Lewis in Foreign Affairs" http://www.foreignaffairs.org/author/bernard-lewis/index.html
11: "Can you really not see - Amira Hass" http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/756413.html
12: "When Will Our Turn Come? - Israel Shahak" http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0491/9104064.htm
13: "Worlds Apart - Feb 6, 2006" http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1703245,00.html
14: "Brothers in arms: Israel's secret pact with Pretoria - Feb 7, 2006" http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1704037,00.html
15: "Apartheid in the Holy Land - Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Apr 29, 2002" http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0429-04.htm
16: "Israel is not comparable to advanced western democracies - Human Rights Report, May 1990" http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0590/9005014.htm
17: "Israel's Discriminatory Practices Are Rooted in Jewish Religious Law - Dr. Israel Shahak" http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0795/9507018.htm
18: "Zionism Mandates Official Discrimination Against Non Jews - Sheldon Richman, Jan 1992" http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/1291/9112022.htm
19: "'Who is a Jew' Matters in Israel - Sheldon Richman, March 1990" http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0390/9003010.htm
20: "Unrecognised villages in the Negev expose Israel's apartheid policies - Dec 21, 2005" http://electronicintifada.net/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/11/4358
21: "Israeli Apartheid - Bruce Dixon, July 20, 2006" http://www.blackcommentator.com/192/192_cover_Israeli_apartheid_dixon.html
22: "'Democratic' racism (1) - Johnathan Cook, July 14, 2004" http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/698/op11.htm
23: "'Democratic' racism (2) - Johnathan Cook, July 14, 2004" http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/699/op11.htm
24: "Arab spouses face Israeli legal purge - Ben Lynfield, May 15, 2006" http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=721352006
25: "SECOND CLASS Discrimination Against Palestinian Arab Children in Israel's Schools - Human Rights Watch, 2001" http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/israel2/ISRAEL0901-01.htm#TopOfPage
26: "Is Israel an Apartheid State?" http://www.muhajabah.com/apartheid.htm
27: "The history of Israeli Zionism, Apartheid and racism - World History Archives" http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51a/index-j.html
28: "Jewish History Jewish Religion The Weight of Three Thousand Years - Israel Shahak" http://www.geocities.com/alabasters_archive/jewish_history.html
29: "Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel - Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinski" http://www.geocities.com/alabasters_archive/jewish_fundamentalism.html
30: "Carter: Israeli apartheid 'worse' - Dec 11, 2006" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6169107.stm
31: "The Writings of Israel Shamir For One Democratic State In The Whole of Palestine (Israel)" http://www.israelshamir.net/
32: "Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History - Norman Finkelstein" http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Chutzpah-Misuse-Anti-Semitism-History/dp/0520245989/
33: "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering - Norman Finkelstein" http://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-Industry-Reflections-Exploitation-Suffering/dp/185984488X/
34: "My Holiday, Their Tragedy - Baruch Kimmerling, April 17, 2002" http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles/KimmerlingHoliday.htm
35: "To Be Intimidated is to be an Accomplice: Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and Palestine - Tariq Ali, March 4, 2004" http://www.counterpunch.org/ali03042004.html
36: "Israel's Sacred Terrorism: A study based on Moshe Sharett's Personal Diary and other documents. Forward by Noam Chomsky - Livia Rokach" http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/essays/rokach.html
37: "The Jews of Iraq - Naeim Giladi, Interview March 16, 1998" http://www.bintjbeil.com/E/occupation/ameu_iraqjews.html
38: "Palestinians Have A Right To Go Home - Phyllis Bennis, Sept 03, 2000" http://www.commondreams.org/views/090300-101.htm
39: "Institute for Policy Studies 'An Institute for the rest of us - I.F. Stone' Website" http://www.ips-dc.org/
40: "UN Resolution 3379" http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF
41: "UN Resolutions and maps - Women's International League for Peace and Freedom" http://www.wilpf.org/campaigns/WCUSP/ME%20peace%20UN%20res%20maps.htm
42: "Rethinking the Middle East - Bernard Lewis in Foreign Affairs, Fall 1992" http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19920901faessay5893/bernard-lewis/rethinking-the-middle-east.html
43: "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives - Zbigniew Brzezinski" http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Chessboard-American-Geostrategic-Imperatives/dp/0465027261/
44: "The Anti-Zionist Resolution - Bernard Lewis in Foreign Affairs, Oct 1976" http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19761001faessay10204/bernard-lewis/the-anti-zionist-resolution.html
45: "Intellectuals and the Responsibilities of Public Life - Interview with Noam Chomsky, May 27, 2001" http://www.publicanthropology.org/Journals/Engaging-Ideas/chomsky.htm
46: "An Exchange on 'The Responsibility of Intellectuals' - Noam Chomsky debates.. April 20, 1967" http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19670420.htm
47: "The Responsibility of Intellectuals - Noam Chomsky, Feb 23, 1967" http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19670223.htm
48: "Rogue States - Noam Chomsky" http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/z9804-rogue.html
49: "Rogue States Draw the Usual Line - Interview with Noam Chomsky, May 2001" http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200105--.htm
50: "Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs - Noam Chomsky" http://www.amazon.com/Rogue-States-Force-World-Affairs/dp/0896086119
51: "World Orders Old and New - Noam Chomsky" http://www.amazon.com/World-Orders-Old-Noam-Chomsky/dp/0231101570/
52: "The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) report on Rebuilding America's Defenses, Sept 2000" http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
53: "Nancy Pelosi Gives a Pep Talk to AIPAC - Mark Gaffney, March 27, 2005" http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0527-23.htm
54: "Pelosi Speaking to AIPAC, America-Israel Public Affairs Committee April 2003" http://www.tomjoad.org/PelosiAIPAC.htm#2003
55: "The Storm over the Israel Lobby - Michael Massing, June 8, 2006" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19062
56: "American lawmakers swarm to Israel during August recess - Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Nov 1, 2003" http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-110928794.html
57: "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm - 1996 recommendations to Israeli PM Netanyahu" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strategy_for_Securing_the_Realm
58: "Project for the New American Century" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
59: "The Middle East Conflict: Zionist Quotes" http://www.monabaker.com/quotes.htm
60: "Ex-CIA director: U.S. faces 'World War IV' - CNN" http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/04/03/sprj.irq.woolsey.world.war/
61: "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering - Norman Finkelstein's Website" http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/content.php?pg=3
62: "Is there a holocaust 'industry'? by the BBC's Andre Vornic, Jan 26, 2000" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/619610.stm
63: "Controversial Jewish Professor takes on 'Holocaust Industry' April 30, 2002" http://www.rense.com/general24/kud.htm
64: "Terrorist speech threatens, and U-M shouldn't permit it - Debbie Schlussel, Oct 21, 2002" http://www.politicalusa.com/columnists/schlussel/schlussel_011.htm
65: "Campus-Watch: A project of the Middle East Forum - Website" http://www.campus-watch.org/
66: "David Horowitz's Website" http://www.frontpagemag.com/
67: "Islamic Mein Kampf - A production by David Horowitz" http://www.terrorismawareness.org/islamic-mein-kampf/
68: "Rachel Corrie's Memorial Website 1979-2003" http://www.rachelcorrie.org/
69: "International Solidarity Movement archive for Tom Hurndall" http://www.tomhurndall.co.uk/
70: "We Cannot Allow These Murders to Go Unpunished - Gerald Kaufman, April 12, 2006" http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0412-26.htm
71: "The Theology of Christian Zionism - PBS NOW" http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/czionism.html
72: "Christian Zionism" http://www.muhajabah.com/christianzion.htm
73: "From Occupied Palestine - Palestinian voices" http://www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org/
74: "Middle East Window - Samia Nasir Khoury, Palestinian voices" http://middleeastwindow.com/index.php?q=taxonomy/term/67
75: "Justice and Liberation - Samia Nasir Khoury, Palestinian voices" http://www.thewitness.org/agw/agw-khoury.html
76: "Raising Yousuf Unplugged: diary of a Palestinian mother, Palestinian voices" http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com/
77: "Jerusalemites 'Children of Ibda'a' - A Documentary by S. Smith Patrick, Palestinian voices" http://www.jerusalemites.org/book&film/film22.htm
78: "ZNET Middle East Watch: Hannan Ashrawi Essays - Palestinian voices" http://www.zmag.org/meastwatch/hannan_ashrawi.htm
79: "Eye on Palestine - The Applied Research Institute, Jerusalem, Palestinian voices" http://www.arij.org
80: "The Palestinian Right to Return Group Website - Palestinian voices" http://www.al-awda.ca/
81: "Call to Action: Building the Platform for a Pan Arab Consensus - June 2003, Palestinian voices" http://www.arab-american.net/pdffiles/Call_for_Pan-Arab_Consensus.pdf
82: "Sharing the Land of Cannan - Post Arafat One state, Palestinian voices" http://qumsiyeh.org/postarafatonesate/
83: "Two-State Solution Again Sells Palestinians Short - George Bisharat, Jan 25, 2004, Palestinian voices" http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0125-03.htm
84: "Sharing the Land of Cannan - Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle, Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, Pluto Press, Palestinian voices" http://qumsiyeh.org/sharingthelandofcanaan/
85: "Films @ Palestine Online Store - Palestinian voices" http://www.palestineonlinestore.com/films/index.html
86: "Forced Migration Review26: Palestinian displacement: a case apart? Refugee Studies Center, University of Oxford, Palestinian voices" http://www.fmreview.org/palestine.htm
87: "Refugees In Our Own Land, Chronicles from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem - Muna Hamzeh, Palestinian voices" http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=114709
88: "The United Jerusalem Foundation, Palestinian voices" http://www.unitedjerusalem.org/index2.asp?id=520390
89: "Refugees In Our Own Land, Chronicles from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem - Muna Hamzeh, Palestinian voices" http://www.amazon.com/Refugees-Our-Own-Land-Palestinian/dp/0745316522
90: "SourceWatch: Alyssa A. Lappen" http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alyssa_A._Lappen
91: "Columbia U's Radical Middle East Faculty - Alyssa A. Lappen and Jonathan Calt Harris, FrontPageMagazine, March 18, 2003" http://www.meforum.org/article/526
92: "Daniel Pipes' Website" http://www.danielpipes.org/
93: "AIPAC's Website" http://www.aipac.org/
94: "American Enterprise Institute Website" http://www.aei.org/
95: "Alan Dershowitz Website" http://www.alandershowitz.com/
96: "Anti-Defamation League Website" http://www.adl.org/
97: "Copyright Law of the United States of America, Chapter 5, Copyright Infringement and Remedies" http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html
98: "US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use" http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
99: "A Summary of United Nations Agreements on Human Rights" http://www.hrweb.org/legal/undocs.html
100: "The Patriot Acts: Sneak Attack on Civil Liberties - Patriot Act II Fact Sheet" http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=10786
101: "The Constitution of the United States of America" http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.overview.html
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