ZGram - 10/24/2001 - "Six months ago - and now!"

[Ingrid Rimland]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

October 24, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

In a Charley Reese column, published May 8, 2001, titled "Americans are
accessories to Israeli  aggression,"  the following was outlined:

 [START]

The key to peace in the Middle East is in Washington, not  Jerusalem. It is
our government  that empowers the Israeli government. It is vain for
people to keep saying, "Renew the  peace talks." (...)       

If (Israelis had) wanted peace, they wouldn't have killed more than 400
Palestinians,  wounded more than 13,000, destroyed God knows how many
homes, businesses and  orchards. They would not have continued to expand
settlements. They would not  have continued to violate the Fourth Geneva
Convention and defy some  60-plus United Nations resolutions. (...)
    
This will go on until  Sharon's need for enemies provokes a regional war or
until  the conscience of individual  Americans is aroused. The key to peace
in  the Middle East is in Washington,  not Jerusalem. It is our government
that empowers the Israeli  government to defy international law and  human
decency. The Israelis  wouldn't last six months without American backing,
and they know  that.        

 The old canard that the  Israelis and Palestinians must settle their
differences themselves is just an  Israeli-dictated ploy to make sure
nobody interferes with their  treatment of the Palestinians. It's the same
as  if the police told a child rape  victim, "Go work it out with your
rapist."

[END]

Today, six months later, the journalistic language has become much sharper,
the tone more urgent.  Read what was published today in the Guardian:

[START]

Say it loud: no more support until Israel agrees to pull out

 Afghanistan may not be resolved unless Palestine also gets justice

 By Polly Toynbee

  The little town of Bethlehem does not lie still in deep or dreamless
sleep.  Instead a Palestinian altar boy was machine-gunned to death in
Manger Square  when Israeli tanks stormed in and occupied six Palestinian
towns, leaving  many others dead in their wake. Israeli hit-squad
assassinations of suspected  Palestinian terrorist leaders have now reached
over 40 dead.

 But six days into Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, there is still
no  response from George Bush. A state department spokesman did call for
Israeli  withdrawal and behind the scenes pressure is being applied. But
what is  needed urgently is the same thunderous and threatening language
the president  applies to the war in Afghanistan.

Spell it out - no more money, no more  support, no sympathy for future
attacks until Israel withdraws and talks  start at once on building the
promised independent Palestinian state.

 Israel does not get the new global message, does not see how little
patience  its old friends have for Sharon's dangerous hard line. That is
partly because  the message has still not been delivered by presidential
megaphone so that  the whole world hears, announcing an end to the double
standards of the  west's treatment of Palestinians.

As the war progresses in Afghanistan, the  quid pro quo must come for
Palestine. It will not wait: Afghanistan may not  be resolved unless
Palestine gets justice at the same time.

 When I wrote recently about the need for Israel to withdraw back to its
1967  borders and dismantle its aggressive settlements, a sea of email
accusations  of anti-semitism swept in from all the over the world. Anyone
calling for  Israeli withdrawal gets these - and if they have a
Jewish-sounding name it  sometimes comes with the added insult that they
must be "self-hating Jews".

 Confident that they could always twist the arm of any president or
Congress  by threatening the Jewish vote, Israel has not needed to confront
the way the  world sees it until now. But the moment of truth came when
Israel stopped  being a lone victim of Islamic terrorism - all the west are
victims or  potential victims now. It is in danger of finding itself as
alone as South  Africa after the fall of communism.

Ugly Israel is the Middle Eastern  representative of ugly America - and
though it is not the sole cause,  Palestine is the rallying cry for the
terrorism that hurled itself at the  World Trade Centre. Once secure as the
west's best friend, overnight Israel's  failure to make peace has turned
into a lethal liability.

 Why, the Israelis ask angrily, should the world turn against them -
victims  acting in self-defence - instead of directing all anger at the
perpetrators  of suicide bombings and deliberate massacres of innocent
Israeli civilians?

 Because, as Israel itself keeps pointing out, they remain one of us, ours,
our people, partly our creation. The west that sustained and protected it
in  its fragility for all these years is also morally responsible for its
behaviour and must take the blame for its abuses.

 For the left, Israel was once Jerusalem the Golden, Zionist banners
fluttered  on Aldermaston peace marches, young idealists worked in summers
on socialist  kibbutzim, full of all the earnest hopes described in Linda
Grant's excellent  novel about early Israel, When I Lived in Modern Times.
Now the left feels  all the more betrayed by Ariel Sharon, war criminal,
igniting the intifada by  striding into the al-Aqsa mosque and using the
trouble he caused to seize  power.

 The race-biased, them-and-us reporting of Israel/Palestine conflict works
both ways. Consider the media coverage of death - how western audiences are
invited to feel the agony of Israeli teenagers slaughtered in a disco or
two  poor 14-year-old Israeli boys bludgeoned to death in a cave, as if
they were  our own children. Palestinian deaths are rarely made so graphic
or memorable:  they are anonymous people, counted as numbers, bodies aloft
among  depersonalised funeral crowds.

 Obituaries of murdered Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi described a
real man - obnoxious, rabid, but a rounded man with a history, a
hinterland,  a family. In comparison obituaries of Abu Ali Mustafa, the
63-year-old head  of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
blown apart at his desk  (for whom Zeevi was shot in revenge), mainly
concerned the politics of his  movement and what his death might presage,
with no humanising idiosyncrasies.

 If Israel succeeds in annexing our emotions, it also means Israelis reap a
fiercer indignation when they do wrong - because the west feels angrily
implicated in their crimes. The Palestinians may be the prime perpetrators,
Hamas might be relentless in its wicked fantasy of sweeping Israel into the
sea, but maybe our innate racism regards their alien sins as a political
problem while emotionally demanding far better behaviour of our Israeli
cousins. Palestinian terrorists are not right, but the miserable history of
mutual blame and victimhood has to end now.

 The map of Palestine is pock-marked with new Israeli settlements. The
provocative concrete occupying the desert shocks the eye, while the
frontline  danger to which settlers deliberately expose their children
horrifies.

In  1998 Sharon urged them on: "Everyone has to move, run and grab as many
hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take
now will stay ours... everything we don't grab will go to them."

Peace Now,  the Israeli protest movement, says 25 new settlements have been
established  since Sharon's February election. Israel seems not to
understand the fury  these cause, not just among Muslims (though that must
be decibels greater)  but among Europeans who feel implicated in this
mortgaging of future peace.

 Once there, how are they ever to be removed? By fighting? By Massada-type
suicide protests? The festering Palestinian refugee camps must close too.

 After Zeevi's death Ariel Sharon declared war on Arafat. Toppling the one
faction that at least recognises Israel and seeks peace (and who would be
certainly replaced by Hamas), is a revolutionary strategy designed to
create  a hyper-crisis to drag in the west. Hamas is as intent as Sharon on
cataclysm. Sharon calls Zeevi's murder "our September 11", which it was
not.

 He calls Arafat "our Bin Laden", which he is certainly not. But since the
will to peace is not there, only the US can force its indebted client to
see  sense in time.

 Indignation about injustice only flares up when the searchlight of public
events falls upon that particular seething corner. Why care about Palestine
now and not last year? Because it matters now, like the Taliban matters
now.

 There is a right time for dealing with long-running oppressions - Serbia
and  Kosovo, or East Timor. Whatever the reason, when the chance comes it
has to  be seized and Tony Blair must urge the president to act loudly and
decisively  now, so all can see some good come of this.

  (Source:   http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,579744,00.html
e-mail:  p.toynbee@guardian.co.uk)

[END]

Charley Reese was right in his column of May 8th:

  "There can never be  negotiations between a strong party and a powerless
party.  To pretend otherwise is to engage  in public deception. (...) You
may not like  this, but the lives of 2 million Palestinians, many of  them
children, depend on us. Their  deaths will be on our conscience.  They do
not have the power to stop  the Israelis from occupying their land  and
brutalizing them. Our  president and our Congress do."

=====

Thought for the Day:

"Sharon and his clique do not seem to realize that more people were killed
on Sept. 11 than in all of Israel's wars since independence in 1948."

(Taki)