“Rich, your family is from Lebanon originally, isn’t it? This must be killing you,” a friend asked in church this morning. “Yes, all my grandparents are from there[1]. And yes, it is difficult.”
Israel’s invasion is very problematic for me, and not nearly because Lebanon/Syria is the land of my forebears and where relatives still live. In fact, just as I was sitting down to write this my paternal cousin called, and then she initiated a three-way call with her daughter who is now in Beirut. I just spoke to her and her fiancé, who by coincidence is a distant cousin on my mother’s side.
But Israel’s terrorism on the Lebanese is troubling regardless of any personal connection I may have, for injustice is injustice no matter on whom it is visited. And while the perception may be that one with such ties can never be objective I should not let the potential charge “oh he’s just a homer” prevent my search for the highest truth and my standing upon that lofty perch.
On the contrary, I shudder to speak contrarily about Israel. I have longed believed in the necessity of some kind of Jewish homeland, especially in view of the Holocaust. Yet the roots of today’s conflict were sewn in the very creation of Israel by the eviction of nearly 1,000,000 Palestinians from lands they called home for over 2000 years.
Indeed, a review of today’s headlines show that Israel is using nearly identical methods to those in 1947-48 by attacking defenseless Lebanon, where Israel has driven 500,000 from their homes. 500,000. FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND. And why? Because, Israel says, Hezbollah captured 2 Israeli officers.
Is Israel really serious that their reason for killing innocent Lebanese children and destroying its infrastructure—bridges, airports, water, power, communications systems-- is that Hezbollah arrested a couple of their soldiers, when Israel has arrested many hundred times more in a tit-for-tat exercise that has been going on for years?
Not a chance. Israel has long planned this invasion, and typical of “might makes right” military machines, they have used lies, and politically appealing cover to justify this outrage.
What’s at play is much more sinister. Naseer Aruri, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Massuchusetts, Dartmouth and author of Dishonest Broker, America’s Role in Israel and Palestine, said that by its invasion Israel seeks “…to forestall a diplomatic solution based on two states, for which Hamas has been more than ready.”
Professor Aruri cited Hamas’ Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh’s recent peace initiative that appeared in a Washington Post op-ed piece. “And it seems whenever Israel is threatened with a ceasefire or a peace offensive, it bombs its way out of a diplomatic settlement.”
And this is the nut. For all their stated desire for a Palestinian state Israel has sabotaged its creation by building settlements, conducting terror raids, building walls, depriving Palestinians of power, water and economic livelihood and laying down such a thick carpet of anti-Palestinian propaganda that American’s continue to support the billions we give Israel each and every year.
Of course Israel has the right to exist. Palestinians readily accept this, yet they insist on the same for them. As Haniyeh said, “We want what Americans enjoy—democratic rights, economic sovereignty and justice.” And until now, and ever since 1948 this has been denied to them by Israel’s defiance of not only International law but Judaism’s historic moral code.
The world does not need my protestations of Israeli intransigence. It can get all it would ever need from Jewish leaders themselves, who see in Israel a state acting ostensibly on their behalf, yet behaving so contrarily to their ancient moral code:
1) “How tragic that in our own time the very state established by Jews in the aftermath of this evil (the Nazi Holocaust) has become a place where racialism, religious discrimination, militarism and injustice prevail; and that Israel itself has become a pariah state within the world community. Events taking place today are all too reminiscent of the pogroms from which our own forefathers fled two and three generations ago -- but this time those in authority are Jews and the victims are Moslems and Christian Palestinians.”[2] [18 prominent Jews endorsed this ad in The Nation, calling for American Jews to “dissociate from Israel.” They expressed concern that "the close identification in the public mind between Israel and Jews -- an equation vigorously fostered by both the Zionist movement and the American Jewish lobby, which has come under its control -- threatens to stigmatize Jews everywhere."
2) Rabbi Reuben Slonim: “Today we Jews are losing [the] humanism and universalism of Judaism, all for the sake of Jewish statehood. We love Israel, and so we should, but we are so blinded by that love that we are willing to pay a prohibitive price for it. We condone acts we would declare unconscionable anywhere else in the world: nuclear weapons are wrong but necessary for Israel; apartheid is wrong, but for the sake of Israel's survival we will tolerate it; human rights are critical, but not for the Palestinians; we have a right to a state but Palestinians do not. Our racism towards Arabs would be regarded as anti-Semitism if others spoke of us in the same light. In all things we need to remember that the Jewish people and the Jewish state are but instruments, not ends in themselves; that what is good for the world is good for the Jews, not what is good for the Jews is good for the world; that the ultimate goal of the Jew, if he be truly Jewish, is to serve humanity.”[3]
3) Reb Binyomin, a prominent writer, strongly criticized actions that occurred during the creation of the Jewish state. In 1953 he wrote: "After the State of Israel was established, I began receiving news about the terrible things perpetrated both during and after the Israeli-Arab war. I did not recognize my own people for the changes which had occurred in their spirit. The acts of brutality were not the worst because those might have been explained somehow . . . Far more terrible was the benevolent attitude towards these acts on the part of public opinion. I had never imagined that such could be the spiritual and moral countenance of Israel. . .”[4]
4) Nathan Chofshi A Jewish settler who witnessed the birth of the Jewish state and did not like what he saw. In a 1959 reply to a rabbi who "parroted" the official version of the Palestinian exodus from Israel, he bore witness to the campaign to expel the Palestinian population: "We came and turned the Arabs into tragic refugees. And still we dare slander and malign them, to besmirch their name; instead of being deeply ashamed of what we did, and trying to undo some of the evil we committed, we justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them.”[5]
5) One of the leading Israeli anti-Zionists today is concentration-camp survivor Israel Shahak, who currently heads the Israeli League for Civil and Human Rights. Shahak believes that "the State of Israel is a racist state: “In this state people are discriminated against, in the most permanent and legal way and in the most important areas of life, only because of their origin.”[6]
6) Israel Shahak again: “I would say the only human response to Holocaust is to try not to be like Nazis, in word or in deed. What brought the Holocaust was the racist attitude towards Jews, the division of German society into Jews and non-Jews on grounds of race. This is exactly the same thing that is happening in Israel.”[7]
7) Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other Jewish leaders in a letter to the NY Times: “The public avowals of Begin’s party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.”[8]
8) “A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (The New York Times), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem.Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party. Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model. During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.”[9]
We should not be surprised at a reality that is so different from that which our government and media present to us. Every reference by Israel, by our government and our media to the Palestinians calls them “terrorists.”
Lost in our media’s constant referral to Palestinians as “terrorists” lays the true nature of Israel, long buried in the dead sea of propaganda. This nature was first described by none other than Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other Jewish leaders in a December 4, 1948 letter to the New York Times. They condemned the emergence of what was to become the dominant political force in Israeli politics, the “freedom party,” led by Menachem Begin.
They said Begin’s party was “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization.”
Then, a warning that has tragically been ignored ever since: “Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin’s behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement.”
Instead of heeding this advice America has given $160 BILLION over the last 50 years to the Israeli war machine. Every failure of peace is automatically blamed on the Palestinians. All events are sold from the perspective of an Israel built upon the corrupt foundation Dr. Einstein and others so courageously warned about.
The problems in the Middle East are primarily of Israel’s own making. To achieve peace they must:
1) END THE OCCUPATION;
2) Follow UN Resolution 242[10], and the more than 70 others that condemn Israeli behavior, its unlawful land grabs and their oppression of the Palestinian “refugees”;
3) Follow The Commission on Human Rights[11] directive to “desist from all forms of violation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and other occupied Arab territories; to respect the bases of international law, the principles of international humanitarian law, its international commitments and the agreements it signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization; to withdraw from the Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem as a basic condition for achieving a just, lasting and comprehensive peace in the Middle East.”
Remove the thorn to calm the lion.
Respectfully, Richard F. Dawahare 7/23/06
PS Many of the quotations are from an article by Edward C. Corrigan, Jewish Criticism of Zionism, http://libaware.economads.com/jewcritzion.php
[1] My maternal grandparents were Lebanese (although I remember my grandmother saying she was born in Bethlehem) and my paternal grandparents from Syria. But prior to WWI this was all “Syria” and was controlled by the Turkish Ottoman Empire. My paternal great-grandfather was the Christian mayor of a small Syrian village. The Turks were killing all such non-Muslim leaders and killed him. My great-grandmother hid my grandfather in a well, as the Turks were looking for his oldest son to kill as well. He got out and emigrated to the US as a young teenager, meeting his wife in NY and settling in Jenkins, Ky. My maternal great-grandfather and others were conscripted in the Ottoman army. Many of the next generation came to America to avoid reaching a similar fate.
[2] "Time to Dissociate from Israel," The Nation, February 13, 1988, p. 19.
[3] Reuben Slonim, Grand to be an Orphan (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company, 1983), p. 175.
[4] Hans Kohn, "Zion and the Jewish National Idea," The Menorah Journal, Autumn-Winter 1958, p. 42.
[5] Jewish Newsletter, 9 February 1959, cited in Gilmour, p. 74.
[6] Israel Shahak, "The Racist Nature of Zionism and the Zionistic State of Israel," The Link, Winter 1975-1976, p. 10. For an example of the work of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights see Report on the Violation of Human Rights in the Territories during the Uprising, 1988 (Tel Aviv: The Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, 1988).
[7] Charles Glass, "Jews Against Zionism: Israeli Jewish Anti-Zionism," Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 1975/ Winter 1976, p. 77.
[8] Isadore Abramowitz, Albert Einstein et al, “New Palestine Party,” New York Times, Dec. 4, 1948; ProQuest Historical newspapers the New York Times (1851-2003) pg. 12.
[9] Albert Einstein, et al ibid.
[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN_Security_Council_Resolution_242
[11] http://www.hri.ca/fortherecord2001/vol3/israelchr.htm
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