Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
We can live in truth or lie in death
Today, 58 years ago, the United Nations partition plan for Palestine was officially enacted, despite the opposition of every country in the region, and the first major Arab-Israel war began. Webdiary columnist Roslyn Ross marks the event with this sobering review. Roslyn's last Webdiary piece was There can be no tolerance of torture.
by Roslyn Ross
I remember growing up during the Cold War years, wondering, more often than one would wish, just when the radio-active cloud would roll across the horizon. In those days the likelihood of World War Three seemed very real when probably it wasn’t.
In these days the likelihood of World War Three may not seem so real when probably it is. Not only do we have the bloody mess of our own making which is Iraq but we have George Bush threatening to ‘nuke’ the Iranians.
Now, there’s no denying that the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may sound a little crazy, but then so does George W and unlike the Americans and the Israelis, the Iranians have not actually attacked, let alone bombed anyone, for over a century, without being attacked first, as they were by Iraq, in a war backed by the Americans. But who is going to let the ‘facts’ get in the way of a good story let alone anything approximating truth as more recently published translations of what Ahmadinejad actually said suggest?
It was interesting to spend a couple of months in Russia last year and to discover that what Russians believed about the West during those chilly years of stand-off, was exactly what we were led to believe about Russia. Each side was convinced of its rightness and innocence and each side was convinced about the aggression of the other. Both sides were being told lies.
Interestingly, the ‘lies’ remain, only the names have been changed. The charges levelled against the Russians, are now being made against Muslim/Arab terrorists and movie bad guys are now Islamic extremists instead of evil Russians. Not only are we being lied to now, as we were then, but the lies of today sit upon a dangerous pool of ignorance. If, in the near future, we found ourselves caught up in the nuclear nightmare of World War Three, how many people would know the underlying causes?
Some ‘causes’ are recent; the injustice of invasion, occupation and economic ‘colonisation’ of Iraq with reports showing some 200,000 Iraqis dead and counting three years into the conflict, and taking into account the Gilbert and Burnham report published in the Lancet in 2004 which estimated 100,000 Iraqis dead after just 18 months of war and occupation. And then there are the tens of thousands dead and maimed in Afghanistan because of American ‘retaliation’ for 9/11... an act, committed, not by Afghans but by Saudis!
But one of those ‘causes’, fertile with potential, has been with us for more than half a century; The Great Catastrophe. May 15 marks the 58th anniversary of the dispossession of the Palestinian people and the beginning of their suffering under occupation and colonisation by Israel. In all instances many people are woefully ignorant about what is going on although in the case of the Palestinians, most are completely ignorant about the original injustice of partition and the ongoing human rights abuses the Palestinians have suffered and continue to suffer to this day.
And one major reason for that ignorance is the lack of information provided by the media and our political leaders. The Palestinians, more than any other occupied people, have been buried under a deadly weight of political correctness. In other words, you can’t talk about the human rights abuses, and war crimes, that Israel has carried out and continues to carry out against Palestinians because the anti-semitic ‘flag’ might get waved and we can’t have that. Or can we?
It has long been said that truth is the first casualty of war, perhaps even more so when the war is one of invasion and occupation. The Greek tragic dramatist, Aeschylus (525BC-456BC) is reputed to have been one of the first to say it, and it was probably hardly original even then, but truth has always been a flexible medium in the hands of the powerful. The controversial journalist John Pilger, would argue it is even more so today because of what he calls ‘journalistic censorship,’ which is both imposed from above and by journalists on themselves.
It is not truth, but journalism, which is the first casualty of war, said Pilger, in his address, ‘Reporting War and Empire, at Columbia University, New York.
It is, he says, censorship by omission, whose power is such, that in war, it can mean the difference between life and death for people in faraway countries such as Iraq.
Or Palestine, I would add, a country whose own suffering has been generally ignored because the public is, in the main, ignorant as to why Palestinians are fighting against the State of Israel.
It is this ‘weeping sore’ of injustice which has for so long fuelled anger in the Arab and Islamic world. The success of Israeli and Jewish lobbyists in their bid to gain egregiously biased support from the United States for their continued occupation and colonisation of Palestine has turned this anger into rage.
And yet, if the press and politicians are to be believed it is only the Israelis who have a right to be enraged. It is the suicide bombers that we hear about and the suffering of Israelis, not the constant murder, misery and suffering of the Palestinians.
We all heard about the nine Israelis who died in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv last month, but how many heard about the 66 Palestinians killed by the Israeli Army in the past three months? Most of them were civilians and many were women and children. For more than a month Israel has been bombing Gaza with some 200 shells a day.
Yes, this is in ‘retaliation’ for some feeble home-made rockets which the Palestinians fire at their occupiers in a pitiful fight for freedom, and which do little or no damage, but the Israeli over-kill, literally, is considered acceptable when the Palestinian resistance to occupation is not! Hardly fair one would have thought unless you belong to the ‘might is right’ school.
And to make matters worse, in between bombing the Israelis collectively punish the imprisoned population with sonic booms which doctors say cause miscarriages and which terrify adults and completely traumatise children.
One in five Palestinian dead is a child. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights says at least 408 Palestinian children have been killed since the beginning of the intifada in 2000. Many of these children, one as young as four, had been shot in the head by Israeli Army snipers.
Gaza is surrounded by an electric fence and is a huge prison, ‘with a million inmates,’ as described by Israeli film-maker, Ram Loevy. It is a place of collective punishment, and in the purest sense, a ‘concentration camp.’ It may have been one of the first in Palestine but it is not the last.
With the Israeli Apartheid Wall, an enormous rise of concrete where land-grab masquerades as security, snaking through the occupied territories, more and more Palestinians are finding themselves ‘concentrated’ into ‘camps’ controlled by Israeli Army checkpoints.
The wall divides families from each other, farmers from land, people from jobs, children from schools, the sick from hospitals and the occupier from the occupied. And the colonisation continues apace. In the weeks following the pullout of 8,000 illegal settlers from Gaza, about 23,000 Israelis moved to the West Bank.
The Palestinians live under constant harassment from settlers and the Israeli Defence Force. On April 10 Israeli army forces distributed fresh demolition orders in Agaba, a village in the west of the Jordan Valley. They come on top of sixteen previous demolition orders which threaten to destroy the social, economic and cultural institutions of the village. The village is located on a hilltop and therefore of strategic ‘value’ to the occupation forces. During the Oslo period, when colonisation of the Occupied Territories became Israeli Government policy, this area was designated a C zone and slated for more settlement expansion.
The villagers of Agaba, like so many others, continue to fight to hold on to their land. On April 17 IDF forces attacked a school in Anata and injured five children. Since August the Apartheid Wall has run through the middle of the schoolyard. Anata has always been a part of Jerusalem’s urban area, but the Wall and a settler bypass have turned it into a ghetto. There are plans to expand settlements further making life even more of a living hell for the Palestinian community as Israel pursues, what a UN report has termed, its unilateral approach to a ‘solution’.
From the moment that the United Nations and the international community made the decision to partition Palestine, against the will of the majority of the people living there, in order to allow the creation of the State of Israel, the scene was set for bloodshed.
Whatever one may believe about Jewish ‘rights’, whether because of their suffering at the hands of the Nazis, or because thousands of years before, some followers of their religion had lived in this part of the world, the simple fact remains that to dispossess people in order to set up your own State is morally and legally wrong.
The international community and the United Nations simply did not have the right to partition Palestine even though, at the time, the proposal ‘supported’ by the UN amidst accusations of diplomatic intimidation by the Americans, to force the vote, was very different to what the Zionists had in mind and what has come to pass.
Let’s say it was discovered that the Gypsies (Romany), another Stateless people, and equally persecuted as Jews were by the Nazis and others, had once had a homeland in say Australia, and the international community decided they should be allowed to create a new one here... Would Australians support it? Should they support it? Could they be criticised for fighting against it if they opposed it and it was done anyway? That is the reality for the Palestinians.
The Italians (Romans) invaded England and established London (Londinium) and yet few would argue that they had a ‘right’ to reclaim any of it. And yet this was the argument put forward for the establishment of Israel where the ancient Hebrews had invaded Canaan (Palestine) and established Jerusalem. How do we know that the Palestinians who were dispossessed by the creation of Israel were not descendants of the original Canaanites and therefore with far greater right to the land? We don’t!
And, as the Palestinians point out, why should their country be divided to create a homeland for Jews because they had suffered at the hands of the Nazis? Surely if justice were done it would have been Germany that was divided?
The ‘war’ to establish the State of Israel was based on lies. Just as the English said Australia was ‘terra nullius’ to justify colonisation, so the Zionist catchcry was: ‘A land without people for a people without a land.’
The Jewish writer, Ahad ha-Am, otherwise known as Asher Ginsberg, who became the central figure in the movement for Cultural or Spiritual Zionism, in 1891, voiced opposition to the political Zionist agenda of settlement in Palestine and said: "From abroad, we are accustomed to believe that Eretz Israel is presently almost totally desolate, an uncultivated desert, and that anyone wishing to buy land there can come and buy all he wants. But in truth this is not so. In the entire land, it is hard to find a tillable land that is not already tilled."
The establishment of the State of Israel involved mass ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, mass transfer resulting in the depopulation of nearly 85 percent of the native indigenous Arab population resident in the territories that came under Israeli control. They were dispossessed of their vast rural and urban real estate and financial properties and some three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs (today numbering over four million) were stripped of their right to citizenship in Israel.
Joseph Weitz, "one of the architects of the Zionist settlement’ said: ‘Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no place in the country for both peoples together ... The only solution is Eretz Israel, at least the west part of Eretz Israel, without Arabs ... and there is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, transfer all of them, not one village or tribe should remain..."
Not surprisingly, the Palestinians, having had their protests and their rights unilaterally dismissed, and had their people dispossessed, if not killed, at the hands of Zionist gangs using the sorts of tactics we now classify as ‘terrorist’ decided, with the help of their allies to fight back. The irony is that people who cannot find justification for the Palestinian fight against occupation and colonisation would give full support to French partisans for instance, in their fight against occupation. Or, one might add, to the British, if Hitler had succeeded in his invasion plan.
During the 1948-49 war and throughout the 1950’s some 500 Arab villages and cities were destroyed and almost all were razed to the ground by the Israeli Army. One of the worst massacres of Arabs took place at Deir Yasin in April 1948 and it is on this land that the official State of Israel holocaust memorial, Yad va-Shem, now stands as well as the City of Jerusalem cemetery. There’s something seriously tasteless, or sublimely arrogant, about building a memorial to the suffering of your own people on land where you have committed a war crime!
Moshe Dayan, the Israeli military leader and politician said in a speech in 1969, "You even do not know the names of these (Arab) villages and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist. Not only the books, but also the villages no longer exist. There is not a single settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab village."
When the Palestinians and their allies lost the war of 67, Israel became the occupier of all of Palestine. Not only has Israel become increasingly brutal as an occupying force over the past decades, it has instituted a colonisation plan which makes a viable Palestinian State impossible, and given the malicious cruelty involved in its application, a plan which, one can only assume, seeks to make life so impossible for any remaining Palestinians that they will leave.
That colonisation ‘plan’ has involved dispossession, demolition of homes and destruction of orchards and vineyards, (many of them ancient although there are now accusations that some of those removed are sold to Israelis.) Israel’s response to the Palestinian fight for freedom has been bombs, bullets, wilful destruction of schools, hospitals and government infrastructure, assassination, imprisonment without trial, torture and collective punishment. Since the latest intifada began more than three times as many Palestinians than Israelis have been killed including large numbers of children.
And all the while Israeli settlers, living illegally on Palestinian land, look down from the well-watered lawns and their neat streets, or travel on their Israeli-only roads which cut through the heart and hearth of Palestine, far removed from the carnage which is carried out in their name. But one thing which the Israelis have overlooked in their colonisation plan is the fact that when people have nothing left to lose but their lives, then they will choose to ‘lose’ their life willingly in the fight for freedom.
I spent time in Israel and Palestine a few years back and was struck by not only how little Israelis know about their neighbours but how racist they are in regard to Palestinians in particular and Arabs in general. It may be a defensive mechanism but it is a dangerous one. So too are the myths or lies which Israelis believe about the founding of their State. Most believe there were no Palestinians when Jewish settlers arrived in the 19th century and that at partition the Palestinians left voluntarily. This is despite more recent evidence presented by historians, many of them Israeli, like Dr Ilan Pappe, to the contrary. They believe that the Palestinians came later, which rather makes the fact that countless Palestinian refugees have keys to homes in Israel, all the more remarkable.
They also believe that a Palestinian and an Arab are the same thing and Palestinians should just go to an Arab country because there are so many of them and they have so much more land than Israel. One doubts that an Italian or German would happily give up their homeland because, after all, they are European and there are lots of European countries in which they can live.
Israel, in so many ways, has become what South Africa was in the worst years of apartheid when denial was the ‘drug’ of the day and ignorance may not have been bliss but it was truly comforting.
But there are Israelis who are prepared to not only seek the truth but to talk about it despite being villified. Dr Pappe is a member of a group called the ‘New Historians,’ which revises and challenges the main Israeli version of 1948 and debunks several of the myths surrounding the foundation of Israel.
One other Israeli who does not do the drug of denial is scholar and author, Uri Davis, who believes that Israel is an apartheid and racist state, but in less visible form than South Africa was.
In South Africa, he says, some 87 percent of the territory was reserved under law for white citizens only. In Israel, some 93 percent of the territory (not including the West Bank and Gaza) is reserved under law for Jewish citizens only. Where the distinction in South Africa was between white and non-white, the apartheid distinction in Israel is between Jew and non-Jew.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he says, is essentially a conflict between a settler-colonial state and an indigenous population dispossessed by the colonial project. Where it differs from South Africa is that visitors to South Africa in the apartheid era would have seen it immediately; benches, toilets, parks and transport divided into white and non-white. In Israel the core apartheid is veiled.
Davis says consistent efforts are also made to ‘remove’ any evidence of non-Jewish inhabitants. The Jewish National Fund, for instance, which appears to be an environmentally friendly organisation concerned with ecology is instrumental in planting forests and establishing recreation facilities.
“Well, it is the case,” says Davis “that JNF forests and facilities are open to all, but it is equally the case that most, almost without exception all, of these forests are planted on the ruins of Palestinian Arab villages ethnically cleansed in the 1948-49 war.
The wall today, he says, represents an attempt by the Government of the State of Israel to cap the expulsion of Palestinians with a Bantustan solution for the rest of the country.
“The question of terrorism and the casualties inflicted by terrorism on an innocent civilian population is a very serious question, but the wall is not there to alleviate this crisis of terrorism – the wall is there in the first instance as an attempt to Bantustanise Palestine and to isolate the indigenous population in what are effectively huge concentrations camps,” said Davis.
The media and political ‘silence’ surrounding the original and ongoing injustice suffered by the Palestinian people is said to be sourced in fear. Fear of being thought anti-Israel, of licensing the expression of anti-Semitism and of legitimizing talk of a Jewish ‘conspiracy’ in terms of the power Israel wields in the United States, the one nation which could, if it chose, bring justice, resolution and peace to this ghastly and potentially internationally catastrophic conflict.
Even if the occupation of Iraq ended tomorrow, if America makes peace with Iran and puts its ‘nukes’ back on the shelf and if Israel builds its apartheid wall all the way around its State, puts a roof on top and concretes the country from one end to the other, the occupation and colonisation of Palestine, if not justly resolved, will remain the one ‘match’ which can ignite the region and make the nuclear nightmare of World War Three a hideous reality.
For that reason, if for no other, this is one fight for justice that involves us all.
 |
 |
 |
| © 2006 - 2008, Webdiary Pty Ltd |
| Disclaimer: | This site is home to many debates, and the views expressed on this site are not necessarily those of Webdiary Pty Ltd. Contributors submit comments on their own responsibility: if you believe that a comment is incorrect or offensive in any way, please submit a comment to that effect and we will make corrections or deletions as necessary. |
We're all cowards
Hamish, we're all cowards. That's why acts of bravery are so admired. In truth, there are no heroes, merely heroic acts.
Shucks
I am not the brave one
Daniel, I am not the brave one. The true bravery lies in those people who are behind sites like Webdiary. They are the ones who take a risk. Not me. I am comfortable with my beliefs and happy to express them, accepting that I must be able to support any position I take.
I do not seek to offend people but recognise that this can and does happen. I believe in honesty of expression and like you, that the more information we have, the better able we are to process information and reach sound decisions.
I do not need agreement nor affirmation. If I have a goal it is to provoke thought, debate and the dissemination of information. But I do appreciate your support.
Absolutely right
Roger, you are absolutely right. This is not just about Palestine, this is about the principle of justice and the right of human beings to live in freedom. Palestine, Tibet, Chechnya, Kashmir, West Papua are all injustices which must be set to right.
However, it is Palestine, I believe, which has the greatest potential to spark a conflict that will be catastrophic for the world in a way that the others may not.
As to the Palestinians being paid to go away. I do not think that would work. It might have once, but the fact is this ongoing injustice has confirmed, if not created, a sense of Palestinian nationhood.
Ironically, Israel's brutal aggression has created exactly what it did not want... a cohesive nationality for Palestinians whether they live in the prisons of Palestine or the refugee camps of the Middle East.
I do agree with you though in terms of the profit motive. It has ever been thus. But that too is something we can change. The power of the new century will be the power of the people instead of some hegemonic State. I for one choose to believe in and work for that.
Peaceful and powerful
John, one of the most powerful and peaceful forms of protest is boycott. This is something all of us can do. Just as the world stopped buying South African goods so we can stop buying Israeli goods. Unlike the Palestinians the Israelis will not starve but their hip pocket will be in pain.
The South Africans really suffered when the international community blacklisted their sportsmen. Israelis like to consider themselves academic 'stars' as opposed to sports stars and there is a move to boycott Israeli academics which has been supported by academics in the UK. Things like this can be very effective.
http://www.academicsforjustice.org/petition/
It is difficult, I know, to do things like this because there is a sense of collective punishment but then the Palestinians are being collectively punished in a far more deadly way.
This punishment of Israel will not maim or murder anything but ego and profit. And, like South Africans, once pushed to a place of justice and reason they will be eternally grateful.
Fundamentalist Jews aside, most Israelis want nothing more than a reasonable life lived in peace and while they may be ignorant of what they are doing to the Palestinians, at the end of the day, they would settle for either one state or two separate ones.
Where is the global outcry at this continuing cruelty?
Thanks to Sol Salbe for sending me Where is the global outcry at this continuing cruelty? by Ghada Karmi (Guardian). Here's an extract:
Israel is 58 years old today. Israelis have already celebrated with barbecues and parties. And so they should, for they've pulled off an amazing stunt: the creation of a state for one people on the land of another - and at their massive expense - without incurring effective sanction. Some of those not celebrating, the Arab citizens of Israel, were also there, demonstrating to remind the world that Israel displaced 250,000 to take their land without compensation. Millions more Palestinians will demonstrate today in the refugee camps of Gaza, the West Bank and neighbouring Arab states against their expulsion by Israel. The world, however, is not listening, any more than it did in 1948, when most of Palestine's inhabitants were expelled to make way for Jewish immigrants.
My family was among those displaced and, though a child, I vividly remember the panic and misery of that flight from our home in Jerusalem on an April morning in 1948, with the scent of spring in the air. Palestine by then had become a raging battleground as Jews fought to seize our land in the wake of the 1947 UN partition resolution. My parents decided to evacuate us temporarily. "We will return," they insisted, "the world will not let such injustice happen!" They were wrong: the world let it happen and we never returned. Little comfort in knowing that we were among many others, that we did not end up in tents, that conflicts do such things. Our lives, our history and our future had been traduced. In those early days, I would wonder with anguish how the Jewish incomers who took over our house could sleep at night, seeing our belongings, family photos, children's toys. Subsequently, Israelis made much of the danger they faced from five Arab armies in the 1948-49 war, but in reality their forces were greater than all their opponents' combined, and the latter ill equipped and poorly trained.
Boycotts are growing
Rob, you are right, people are ignorant, not only of the history but of the current facts on the ground.
And yes, the people in the region do consider us to be hypocrites, which of course we are. Sadly, it has ever been thus.
I don't think there is any chance the West will 'leave' if only because of the oil, but I do think that people power can push for resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and so lessen the chance of future conflagration.
Quite simply, the Palestinians deserve justice. Quite simply Israel has only two options: either they annex all of the Occupied Territories officially and give full citizenship to the Palestinians, or, they withdraw to original borders and negotiate for two separate, functional States.
Israel will do neither of these things until it is forced to do so. That's where public opinion and people power can make a difference. Sanctions and boycotts worked for South Africa and, having spent a couple of years living there, I would say my impression was, in the main, all South Africans are eternally grateful now that they were pushed to resolution.
The boycott movement is growing. Do a search and you will find plenty of links. The only way to stop this bloodshed is to pull Israel into line. Starving the Palestinians and trying to oust their legally elected Government will just entrench their position. Israel as the occupier has all the power and that is where change begins.
You are right
Geoff, you are right, I can look after myself but I suspect Hamish was seeking to protect the integrity of the site rather than any writer.
And while you may up the abuse ante as you say, depending upon the 'assessment' of the writer, be assured that I do not take any of this personally. It reflects on you, not on me. Abuse merely suggests you have no argument and when you cannot reason your way through something you resort to bullying.
I for one hold to the maxim: I may not like what you say but I defend to the death your right to say it.
Abuse is no substitute
Geoff, Abuse is no substitute for informed debate and reflects only on you, not upon me, nor the article in question. I realise you care deeply about this and I appreciate the level of passion from which you speak, but neither passion nor caring diminish or dismiss any of the realities which I have raised.
In fact, the more passionate we are about something the more certain it is that the place, person or issue reflects an unconscious part of ourselves. Outrage only ever manifests when it can draw upon 'inrage'. By the way, this applies to everyone, including me.
As to evidence that those criticising Israel are labelled anti-semite (I assume you are not referring to this site) you might like to look at some of the following links and there are lots more:
http://www.redress.btinternet.co.uk/omedicks2.htm
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/adams10302003.html
Let's just say that 'where there is smoke there is fire.' Many critics of Israel, whether Israeli, Australian, American, British or whatever, have had to defend themselves against charges of anti-semitism following their statements.
Logic suggests that criticism of Israel is countered with accusations of anti-semitism. Most people would suggest this is a given. Anyone who spends time on forums debating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict knows that any criticism of Israel draws abuse and charges of anti-semitism.
The other side of this coin is the accusation of 'self hating Jew' which is levelled at Jews who criticise Israel.
http://www.masada2000.org/selfhate.html
This includes the courageous dissenting IDF reservists who have chosen to refuse to fight because they have seen exactly the human rights abuses of which I write.
http://www.seruv.org.il/defaulteng.asp
You do not clarify what you mean by a 'serious person' making these charges but the fact remains there has long been discussion, and it is intensifying, on this very issue. It exists, that is why it is discussed.
If the only position you can take is a stance of denying that criticism of Israel brings charges of anti-semitism then one presumes you have no argument or evidence to refute the others.
And you clearly do not understand the meaning of literal as opposed to metaphorical. There is no literal blood on my hands, nor that of any other writer who takes such a position, but there is certainly blood on my hands in a metaphorical sense because there is blood on all of our hands ... including yours.
This conflict has become as bloody as it has and lasted as long as it has because we have not cared enough. Yes, the Americans have most of the power and Israel has most of the responsibility but the world at large has done nothing to push for resolution of this conflict. Our Governments, by omission perhaps even more than comission, have allowed this conflict to remain unresolved. Those of us who live in democracies are responsible for what our governments do and do not do.
I have no problem at all with taking responsibility as a citizen of this country.
And that is the position I take with Israel, that it should take responsibility. I do not recall saying it was all Israel's fault. I said the problem began with partition and that 'fault' lies more in the hands of the international community than with Jews. The violence used to establish the State of Israel lies completely in the hands of Israelis and Jews and the violence used to maintain the occupation and colonisation also lies completely with Israelis and their supporters.
Which Part Of The Essay Is True?
Thank you Hamish. I do my best to make my abuse elaborate. And to be frank old mate. If at times I didn't push things to just this side of the limit where you don't publish, I would consider I was not doing my job. [Hamish: of course.]
As I alluded to in the speech, there is a point beyond which I will not attempt a reply based on a fact by fact, point by point refutation. I think we have a right to assume a certain level of knowledge about the subject and good faith by article writers in particular here. That level need not be high. But if it doesn't even get close to it, such as in this case, I will not be confining any reply I could be bothered writing to a direct recitation of basic facts which really anyone who decides to enter this debate should already know. Especially when we are confronted with a warp in the fabric that is offensive. If it sounds like abuse, well I do attempt to adjust the tone of what I write based on an assessment of the writer involved; and Roslyn strikes me as a person who can look after herself.
If that means you do not publish my piece, well let's face it, it would hardly be the first time. And as I have had occasion to say in the past more than once, that is entirely your prerogative. It's your site and I know the rules.
Before you tell me I could submit an article myself - yes I know. I agree. Soon.
Hamish: cool.
We should leave the Middle East
Robyn, congratulations on such a well written piece. Few people seem to enunciate the problem so clearly.
The scary aspect of this whole situation in the Middle East is most westerners have such a lack of understanding of the historical realties of why there is such animosity.
Of course the real question is how to bring this volatile region back from the precipice of sparking a global conflagration.
From the eyes of the average Middle-Easterner and indeed the Islamic world the West’s continuing involvement in their affairs and the military support of Israel must stink of partisanship no matter what the explanation offered for our involvement.
If the west was to leave it would at least reduce the increasingly likely global ramifications of our involvement.
Thanks for an alternate view
Roslyn, thank you for providing us with an alternative view on the Israeli Palestinian issue. I don’t have answers to this very complicated problem. Until more people on both sides decide that they want peace I am sure the war will go on. I also thank Webdiary for providing a platform for alternate views. I think Geoff Pahoff’s reply is way over the top. The only way we can work our way through these terrible situations is by open discussion realising that there are two sides to every story. We can only reach a peaceful outcome when we are prepared to value each other.
We must examine alternative non violent ways of resolving conflict and assisting communities to respond to change and rebuild. By learning and becoming aware of alternative methods, skills, tactics and strategies.
There Is No Limit
Rosslyn, I thank you for your courageous article. It reverberates everywhere. In West Papua, in East Timor, in Chechnya, in Iraq and, in fact, everywhere where an ethnic minority with a history of cultural self-identity is denied their own place.
It also raises the wider issues of nationhood that is so deeply embedded in self-serving legal fictions. There are 20 million of us in this country with effectively nowhere else to go. 15 million were born here which in most countries conveys the legal right of belonging. It was not our country but others took it from the poorly armed and tribally-separated inhabitants in the name of future generations and we now benefit. The faint cries of the more enlightened English Establishment were ignored and we Palestinised this land and disenfranchised the rightful owners up until 34 years ago.
The answer lies in a magnanimous response which is beyond the capacity of all 20 million. Some will respond while others hearts will never soften. The problems is intractable and injustice and genocide will live with us until we become a cooperative species which is probably never.
As to the future of Palestine, I believe the real stumbling block is that no Palestinians, who are more realist than idealist in spite of the current view of them, can see a real future in the modern world especially for their children. The problem would significantly solve itself if every Palestinian man, woman and child was given a million dollars and the opportunity to live anywhere of their own choosing, even in Israel. The cost would be significantly cheaper than the current expenditure of billions of dollars on arms to ensure Israel's security.
However, that would not be allowed by the US military/industrial complex who view the Israeli/Palestinian conflict not as a problem or a matter of world shame but as an opportunity to continue making fabulously exorbitant profits. And there in a nutshell is the continuing root cause of the insolubility of so many problems in every continent, no solution is possible until the profit is removed.
Death, Life, Truth, Lies, And This ...
Boring. I am not going to dignify this rotting filthy stew of ancient lies, propaganda, moral equivalence, moral inversion and truly profoundly ignorant historical revisionism or worse with a detailed reply. There is nothing new here. Nothing. The Israel bashers and haters have the art of the "One Big Lie" told over and over again refined to the point where this disgusting stuff could have been poured out by a machine. They learnt the lesson from the Master well. No doubt about.
To respond to this stuff at its level would be both futile and giving it a status it does not deserve.
This muck of course adds to the suffering of the Palestinian people. Western urgers of the crooks, gangsters, fascists and mystical lunatics who have utterly controlled their lives (other than of course the lives of the million or so Arabs who had the good sense and good fortune to live in Israel as full and free citizens) strengthen the grip they have. They weaken or undermine Palestinians and other Arabs who seek to break the chains of the tyrants and find peace. This muck could so easily have been written over the corpse of the Palestinian President. He was the target of a murder attempt by Hamas only a week ago. Saved by the Israelis. I wonder how he feels about this muck pouring out of the West from people who should know better. He at least understands how destructive this is to efforts to achieve a Palestinian state and peace.
But naturally he is deeply concerned for the Palestinian people. As are the majority of Israelis and Jews around the world. It is difficult to imagine that any author of this piece could possibly be. I do not believe this piece was writen in good faith. In my experience there is nearly always another agenda.
Just about everything is here. The complaints about censorship. (Translation: "I am free to say what I like. But any critical reply from you is censorship"). The whinging that the "truth" never gets out because someone controls the media or political correctness or whatever. (Never mind this stuff is everywhere. Everywhere. It is impossible to avoid). The allegation that you can't complain about human rights abuses or Israeli policies without being labelled an antisemite. (The classic "pre-emptive offensive denial"). The same old prattling sources. Fisk. Pilger. Pappe. Davis. Some of them have been missed. I could name them for you.
I will once again issue a challenge I first made here over six months ago and renewed several time since. This ubiquitous and perennial complaint that you can't criticise Israel without being called an antisemite.
An example please. From anyone. An example of someone serious, seriously suggesting that any criticism of Israeli Government or military policies is ipso facto anti-semitism. Just one will do.
And if you can't find one, all I request is you ask yourself the question: Why is it that so many people feel so compelled to so incessantly deny an allegation that no serious person has ever made?
I am going to make one last allegation about this piece. I'm afraid I must give notice now that it is not a pretty one. This hysterical stuff helps not at all. It sickens and repells one side and gives aid and comfort only to the hate mongers and killers of the other side. It is partly because there has been so much of this stuff that the problems have proved so intractable. Even the most fervent of Israel's critics should know that it can hardly be all Israel's fault. To not acknowledge even that is to go way beyond the role of an opinion writer and to become a combatant in the war. On the side that has quite deliberately provoked and continued the war, and all the suffering, to a point where if it wasn't true, it would be a parody of the grotesque.
As such the writers of this type of material have blood on their hands. The blood of children. And I mean that, the kids' blood at least, quite literally.
Hamish: that's a fine speech Geoff, but you haven't said which part of the essay is not true, let alone why. I feel obliged to make this note because your comment is mostly elaborate abuse with no content - I considered not publishing it at all for that reason.
Such Bravery!
Roslyn, to present this opposing view to that which we, the public, have been presented with for decades, is truly an act of bravery.
I can only hope that people on both sides of the 'fence' will read it, and think about it carefully, before, in some cases, they launch into the usual tirade of boring, predictable attacks on you and others who don't accept the falacious, unprincipled Israeli/American propaganda line.
The more facts that are known about the Palestine issue, the better chance for justice to prevail.