There’s Nothing Idealistic About the One-State Solution
A Response to Michael Neumann
By JONATHAN COOK | November 08, 2011
This is at least the third time in the past four years that philosophy professor Michael Neumann has used these pages to lambast the supporters of a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. On each occasion he has offered a little more insight into why he so vehemently objects to what he terms the “delusions” of those who oppose – or, at least, gave up on – the two-state solution.
In his most recent essay, Neumann suggests that his previous reluctance to be more forthright was motivated by “politeness”. Well, I for one wish the professor had been franker from the outset. It might have saved us a lot of time and effort.
Even though I have identified myself as a supporter of the one-state solution, I find much to agree with in what Neumann writes on this occasion. Like him, I do not believe that a particular solution, or resolution, will occur simply because the Palestinians or their wellwishers make a good moral case for it. Success for the Palestinians will come when a wide array of regional developments force Israel to conclude that its current behaviour is untenable.
There are plenty of signs that just such a power shift is starting to take place in the Middle East: Iran’s possible development of a nuclear warhead; an awakening of democratic forces in Egypt and elsewhere; the fraying of the long and vital military alliance between Israel and Turkey; the exasperation of Saudi Arabia at Israel’s intransigence; the growing military sophistication of Hizbullah; and the complete discrediting of the US role in the region.
Neumann is wrong to assume that one has to be an idealist – believing in the political equivalent of fairies – to conclude that a one-state solution is on the cards. It does not have to be simply a case of wishful thinking. Rather, I will argue, it is likely to prove a realistic description of the turn of events over the next decade or more.
While Neumann and I agree on the causes of an Israeli change of direction, his and my analyses diverge sharply on what will follow from Israel’s realisation that its occupation is too costly to maintain.
Neumann proposes that, once cornered by regional forces it can no longer intimidate or bully, Israel will have to concede what he terms the “real” two-state solution.
He does not set out what such a solution would entail, but he is adamant that it – and only it – must take place. So let me help with an outline of the apparent minimal requirements for a real two-state solution:
* Israel agrees to pull out its half a million settlers from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, presumably assisted by lavish compensation from the international community;
* Israel hands over all of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians, while the city’s holy places, including the Western Wall, pass to a caretaker body representing the international community;
* The Palestinians get a state on 22 per cent of historic Palestine, with their capital in East Jerusalem;
* The Palestinians are free to establish an army – with Iran and Saudi Arabia presumably competing over who gets to sponsor it;
* The Palestinians have control over their airspace and the electro-magnetic spectrum. If they have any sense, they quickly turn to Hizbullah for advice on how to neutralise Israel’s extensive spying operations, its overhead drones and listening posts currently sited all over the West Bank;
* The Palestinians get unfettered access to their new border with Jordan and beyond to other Arab states;
* The Palestinians are entitled to an equitable division of water resources from the main West Bank acquifers, currently supplying Israel with most of its water;
* And the Palestinians have, as promised under the Oslo accords, a passageway through Israel to connect the West Bank and Gaza.
Let us leave aside the social problems for Israel caused by this arrangement: the huge disruption created by an angry and newly homeless half a million settlers returning to Israel, as well as the dramatic aggravation of the already severe housing crisis in Israel and the rapid deterioration in relations with the large Palestinian minority living there.
Let us also not dwell on the problems faced by the Palestinians, including the potentially hundreds of thousands of refugees who will have to be absorbed into the limited space of the resource-poor West Bank and Gaza, or their likely anger at what they will see as betrayal, or the inevitable economic troubles of this micro-state.
Doubtless, all these issues can be addressed in a peace agreement.
In his essays, Neumann only factors in what Israelis are prepared to accept from a solution. So let us ignore too the “idealism” of those critics who are concerned about whether a “real two-state solution” can actually be made to work for ordinary Palestinians.
The assumption by Neumann is that, faced with a rapid escalation in the political and financial costs of holding on to the Palestinian territories, Israel will one day understand that it has no choice but to jettison the occupation.
He offers nine reasons for why the one-state solution is “blatantly nonsensical”. Though numerically impressive, most of his arguments – such as his discussion of the right of return, or the representativeness of a Palestinian government, or the nature of legal and moral rights – appear to have little or no bearing on the practical case either for or against one state. The same can be said of his ascription of the sin of idealism to those he lumps together as one-staters, and his allusion, yet again, to the vague formula of a “real two-state solution”.
His other three arguments – the first he lists – are no more revelatory. In fact, they are variations of the same idea, one that can best be summarised by an analogy he offers in one: “If I’m making 50,000 dollars, I might demand 70,000, but not 70 million. It is not clever to demand the whole of Israel when Israel won’t yield even the half that almost the whole world says it must surrender – the occupied territories.”
I am no professor of logic but something about this analogy rings hollow. Let us try another that seems closer to the reality of our case.
One day you arrive at my home and take over most of the building using force. A short time later you drive me out of the house completely, and, in what you consider a generous concession, allow me to live in the shed at the end of the garden. Over the years we become bitter enemies. The neighbours, my former friends, can no longer turn a blind eye to my miserable condition and decide to side with me against you. One day they come to your door and threaten to use violence against you if you do not let me back into the house.
What happens next?
Well, as Neumann implies, it may all end happily with you agreeing to let me live in the box room. But then again, it might not.
Sensing that the shoe is finally on the other foot, I might decide to make your life unbearable in the main part of the house in order to win more space or to drive you out. Or you might decide that, given your precarious new situation in the neighbourhood, you would be better off abandoning your ill-gotten gains and looking for somewhere else to live.
I am not a fan of such analogies. I resort to it simply to highlight that, if one wants to make use of these kinds of devices, then it is at least preferable to use an apposite one.
(Interestingly, if we pursue this analogy, it also questions Neumann’s preferred comparison of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories with France’s occupation of Algeria. In this case, Algeria appears to be the garden rather than the main house.)
The larger point is that there is no reason to assume that, just because the occupation gets too costly, Israel can simply amputate it like a rotting limb.
Part of the weakness in Neumann’s argument can be seen in his repeated references to the settlers as a group of troublesome misfits rather than a substantial chunk both of the Israeli cabinet, including the foreign minister, and of the high command of the Israeli army and security services, including the current head of the National Security Council.
Likewise, he caricatures Western support for Israel as “Zionist hysteria” in the US Congress, backed by “ridiculous” fellow travellers such as the Canadian government. If only the support for Israel among Western governments were this trivial.
Such misrepresentations make his argument that the occupation is vulnerable appear far stronger than it really is. In fact, the occupation is much more than the settlements.
It is the Messianism industry, run by the settlers, that took over Israel decades ago. Its hold extends far beyond the West Bank to the now-dominant religious education stream feeding poison to young minds, as well as to the seminaries where young religious men training to become army officers are tutored daily in their Chosenness and their divine right to exterminate Palestinians.
It is the ultra-Orthodox with their ambivalence to Zionism but their now-savage sense of entitlement to handouts from the state. They have several large urban communities in the West Bank tailor-made for their separatist religious way of life. The people who riot over a parking lot opening on Shabbat will not easily walk away from their homes, schools and synagogues.
It is a large and profitable Israeli real estate industry that has plundered and pillaged Palestinian land for decades, and which seems to implicate every new Israeli prime minister in a fresh corruption scandal.
It is Israel’s farming industries that depend for their survival on the theft of both Palestinian land and water sources.
It is ordinary Israelis, already spoiling for a fight after an unprecedented summer of social unrest over the exorbitant cost of living in Israel, who have yet to find out the true price of fruit and vegetables – and running water – should they lose these water “subsidies”.
It is Israel’s extensive and lucrative military hi-tech industries that rely on the occupied territories as a laboratory for developing and testing new weapons systems and surveillance techniques for export both to the global homeland security industries and to tech-hungry modern armies.
It is Israel’s security and intelligence services, abundantly staffed with the same Ashkenazis who will go on to become the country’s political leaders, pursuing careers surveilling and controlling Palestinians under occupation.
And it is the profligate military – Israel’s version of the West’s prodigal bankers – whose jobs and lethal toys depend on endless US taxpayers’ munificence.
None of this will be given up lightly, or at a cost that won’t make America’s current $3 billion annual handouts to Israel look like peanuts. And that is before we factor in the huge payouts needed to compensate the Palestinian refugees and to build a Palestinian state.
But these problems only hint at the argument for a one-state solution. The reality is that the elites that run Israel have everything to lose should the occupation fall. That is why they have invested every effort in integrating the occupied territories into Israel and making a “real” peace deal impossible. The occupation and its related industries are the source of their moral legitimacy, their political survival and their daily enrichment.
That is also why they are twisting in agony at the prospect of Iran acquiring a nuclear arsenal to rival their own. At that point, the occupation begins to expire and their rule is finished.
Were the regional conditions to come about that Neumann believes necessary to evict Israel from the occupied territories, these elites and their Ashkenazi hangers-on will face a stark choice: bring down the house or scatter to whatever countries their second passports entitle them to.
They may go for the doomsday scenario, as some currently predict. But my guess is that, once the money-laundering opportunities enjoyed by the politicians and generals are over, it will simply be easier – and safer – for them to export their skills elsewhere.
Left behind will be ordinary Israelis – the Russians, the Palestinian minority, the ultra-Orthodox, the Mizrahim – who never tasted the real fruits of the occupation and whose commitment to Zionism has no real depth.
These groups – isolated, largely antagonistic and without a diaspora occupying the US Congress to assist them – have not the experience, desire or legitimacy to run the military fortress that Israel has become. With the glue gone that holds the Zionist project together, both the Palestinians and the Israelis who remain will have every interest to come up with real solutions to the problem of living as neighbours.
The strangest aspect to Neumann’s claims against the one-staters – repeated in all his essays on this subject – is the argument that they are not only deluded but propagating an idea that is somehow dangerous, though quite how is never explained.
If as Neumann argues, correctly in my view, Israel will only change course when faced with significant pressure from its neighbours, then the worst crime the one-staters can be accused of committing is an abiding attachment to an irrelevant idealism.
Iran will not discard its supposed nuclear ambitions simply because the one-state crowd start to make a compelling moral case for their cause, any more than Hizbullah will stop amassing its rockets. So why should Neumann get so exercised by the one-state argument? By his reckoning, it should have zero impact on progress towards a resolution of the conflict.
Nonetheless, even on Neumann’s limited terms, one can also make a serious case that advocacy of a single state might produce benefits for the Palestinians.
If nothing else, were a growing number of Palestinians and international supporters persuaded that demanding an absolutely just solution (one state) was the best path, would this not add an additional pressure to the other, material ones facing Israel to concede a real two-state solution – if only to avoid the worse fate of a single state being imposed by its neighbours?
But I think we can go further in making the practical case for a one-state solution.
Although the main cause of Israel changing tack will be the alignment of regional forces against it, an additional but important factor will be the emergence of a political climate in which western states and their publics are increasingly disillusioned with Israel’s bad faith. Congress’ support is not paid in the currency of hysteria but in hard cash. And that support won’t dry up until Israel and its “mad dog” policies are widely seen as illegitimate or a liability.
One of the key ways Israel will discredit itself, following it and Washington’s recent decision to block any Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations, is by cracking down – probably violently – on any political aspirations expressed by ordinary Palestinians under occupation.
History, including Palestinian history, suggests that populations denied their rights rarely remain passive indefinitely. Palestinians who see no hope that their leaders can secure for them a state will be increasingly motivated to claim back their cause.
Ordinary Palestinians have no power, as Neumann notes, to force Israel to establish a state for them. But they do have the power to demand from Israel a say in their future, and press for it through civil disobedience, campaigns for voting rights, and the establishment of an anti-apartheid movement. Such a struggle will take place within – and implicitly accept – the one-state reality already created by Israel. If Palestinians march for the vote, it will be for a vote in Knesset elections.
None of this will win them either a state or the vote, of course. But the repression needed from Israel to contain these forces will serve to rapidly erode whatever international sympathy remains and to further galvanise the regional forces lining up against Israel into action.
In short, however one assesses it, the promotion of a one-state solution can serve only to hasten the demise of the Israeli elites who oppress the Palestinians. So why waste so much breath opposing it?
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
Related articles
- In Palestine, Peace is Not Just Absence of Violence, But Presence of Justice (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Collective Punishment: Israel may cut off electricity supply to West Bank (occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com)
Trees before humans: Bedouins in the Negev
By Silvia Boarini | The Palestine Monitor | October 26, 2011
When David Ben Gurion, from the southern Kibbutz of Sde Boker, declared: “It is in the Negev that the creativity and pioneer vigor of Israel shall be tested,” the first settlers rose to the challenge and a transfigured desert became a post-war reality.
Today, driving through southern Israel on the wide motorway that cuts through the barren landscape, what stands out is not the camels. It is the forests.
Out of nowhere, hundreds of trees planted thick—within straight, geometrical borders—come into view, only to be replaced by the dry and mono-color scenery moments later.
A forest in the desert is an awe-inspiring sight, but here it serves the same purpose–and has the same consequence–as an eight-meter high wall erected in the West Bank.
More and more, the Negev and other Palestinian sections of Israel seem to share a fate disturbingly similar to that of Area C in the West Bank.
Nearly twenty years ago, with the signing of the Oslo Accords I and II, the land in the West Bank was divided into three categories: Area A, B and C. Each category came with a varying degree of Palestinian autonomy from the Israeli occupation. Area A is nominally under full Palestinian Authority control and Area C is under full Israeli control, and represents 60% of the West Bank; Area B is somewhere in the middle. While the Accords intended for all of the land to eventually become Area A, it never did. Instead, Israel has made life in Area C and in some cases Area B nearly impossible, impelling many Palestinians to resettle in Areas A.
In the Negev, Israeli authorities have pushed Bedouins (Israeli citizens) off their ancestral land with the justification that they are squatting on state land.
The creation of Palestinian enclaves through means of forcible or coerced relocation—be it to Area A in the occupied Palestinian territories or Arab townships in Israel—appears to be Israel’s chosen means to appropriate land.
The JNF’s flagship program, “Blueprint Negev,” is—in their own words–“a major initiative to revitalize Israel’s southern region” by means of planting trees and settling half a million people.
Both the taming of the wild frontier and the creation of “man-made wilderness,” play into the pioneer narrative typical of settler societies the world over. The largest of which happens to be Israel’s biggest donor.
The JNF claims to have planted 240 million trees in the land of Israel over the past 107 years. Thousands of these trees have ended up on top of the ruins of Palestinian villages.
Israel’s New Historians, among them professor Ilan Pappe, call this erasure of any Palestinian life dating before 1948, a rewriting of Zionist history. This revision identifies the beginning of life in Israel as the arrival of the first Jewish settlers, who were helped by agencies like the JNF.
From forestation to human settlement in the Negev, the JNF focuses its donors’ attention on its eco-friendly credentials, so much so that today it actively promotes what it calls ‘Green Zionism’.
Instead of building checkpoints, the JNF builds a “green future.” Nevertheless, this future stems out of the destruction of Palestinian villages and generally directly benefits the Jewish section of Israel’s population.
The JNF owns 13% of the land in Israel. A small portion of this was acquired by the first settlers, but the majority consists of confiscated Palestinian land, sold to JNF by the Israeli government after the 1948 war.
Oren Yiftachel, professor of geopolitics at Ben Gurion University, likens the transferal of land from state to agency to “a black hole.” Once lands are confiscated from Arabs and passed on to a private agency they can never be recovered, he says.
In fact, as custodian of the lands of Israel, the JNF does not lease land to non-Jews. … Full article
The above is the second installment of a two-part series on al-Araqib and Israel’s dispossession of Bedouin land in the Negev. The first part can be read here.
The Real Story of How Israel Was Created [Stolen]
By ALISON WEIR | October 11, 2011
To better understand the Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations, it is important to understand the original 1947 UN action on Israel-Palestine.
The common representation of Israel’s birth is that the UN created Israel, that the world was in favor of this move, and that the US governmental establishment supported it. All these assumptions are demonstrably incorrect.
In reality, while the UN General Assembly recommended the creation of a Jewish state in part of Palestine, that recommendation was non-binding and never implemented by the Security Council.
Second, the General Assembly passed that recommendation only after Israel proponents threatened and bribed numerous countries in order to gain a required two-thirds of votes.
Third, the US administration supported the recommendation out of domestic electoral considerations, and took this position over the strenuous objections of the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon.
The passage of the General Assembly recommendation sparked increased violence in the region. Over the following months the armed wing of the pro-Israel movement, which had long been preparing for war, perpetrated a series of massacres and expulsions throughout Palestine, implementing a plan to clear the way for a majority-Jewish state.
It was this armed aggression, and the ethnic cleansing of at least three-quarters of a million indigenous Palestinians, that created the Jewish state on land that had been 95 per cent non-Jewish prior to Zionist immigration and that even after years of immigration remained 70 per cent non-Jewish. And despite the shallow patina of legality its partisans extracted from the General Assembly, Israel was born over the opposition of American experts and of governments around the world, who opposed it on both pragmatic and moral grounds.
Let us look at the specifics.
Background of the UN partition recommendation
In 1947 the UN took up the question of Palestine, a territory that was then administered by the British.
Approximately 50 years before, a movement called political Zionism had begun in Europe. Its intention was to create a Jewish state in Palestine through pushing out the Christian and Muslim inhabitants who made up over 95 per cent of its population and replacing them with Jewish immigrants.
As this colonial project grew through subsequent years, the indigenous Palestinians reacted with occasional bouts of violence; Zionists had anticipated this since people usually resist being expelled from their land. In various written documents cited by numerous Palestinian and Israeli historians, they discussed their strategy: they would buy up the land until all the previous inhabitants had emigrated, or, failing this, use violence to force them out.
When the buy-out effort was able to obtain only a few per cent of the land, Zionists created a number of terrorist groups to fight against both the Palestinians and the British. Terrorist and future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin later bragged that Zionists had brought terrorism both to the Middle East and to the world at large.
Finally, in 1947 the British announced that they would be ending their control of Palestine, which had been created through the League of Nations following World War One, and turned the question of Palestine over to the United Nations.
At this time, the Zionist immigration and buyout project had increased the Jewish population of Palestine to 30 per cent and land ownership from 1 per cent to approximately 6 per cent.
Since a founding principle of the UN was “self-determination of peoples,” one would have expected to the UN to support fair, democratic elections in which inhabitants could create their own independent country.
Instead, Zionists pushed for a General Assembly resolution in which they would be given a disproportionate 55 per cent of Palestine. (While they rarely announced this publicly, their stated plan was to later take the rest of Palestine.)
U.S. Officials Oppose Partition Plan
The U.S. State Department opposed this partition plan strenuously, considering Zionism contrary to both fundamental American principles and US interests.
Author Donald Neff reports that Loy Henderson, Director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, wrote a memo to the Secretary of State warning:
“….support by the Government of the United States of a policy favoring the setting up of a Jewish State in Palestine would be contrary to the wishes of a large majority of the local inhabitants with respect to their form of government. Furthermore, it would have a strongly adverse effect upon American interests throughout the Near and Middle East…”
Henderson went on to emphasize:
“At the present time the United States has a moral prestige in the Near and Middle East unequaled by that of any other great power. We would lose that prestige and would be likely for many years to be considered as a betrayer of the high principles which we ourselves have enunciated during the period of the war.”
When Zionists began pushing for a partition plan through the UN, Henderson recommended strongly against supporting their proposal. He warned that such a partition would have to be implemented by force and emphasized that it was “not based on any principle.” He went on to write:
“…[partition] would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future…”
Henderson went on to emphasize:
….[proposals for partition] are in definite contravention to various principles laid down in the [UN] Charter as well as to principles on which American concepts of Government are based. These proposals, for instance, ignore such principles as self-determination and majority rule. They recognize the principle of a theocratic racial state and even go so far in several instances as to discriminate on grounds of religion and race…”
Henderson was far from alone in making his recommendations. He wrote that his views were not only those of the entire Near East Division but were shared by “nearly every member of the Foreign Service or of the Department who has worked to any appreciable extent on Near Eastern problems.”
Henderson wasn’t exaggerating. Official after official and agency after agency opposed Zionism.
In 1947 the CIA reported that Zionist leadership was pursuing objectives that would endanger both Jews and “the strategic interests of the Western powers in the Near and Middle East.”
Truman Accedes to Pro-Israel Lobby
President Harry Truman, however, ignored this advice. Truman’s political advisor, Clark Clifford, believed that the Jewish vote and contributions were essential to winning the upcoming presidential election, and that supporting the partition plan would garner that support. (Truman’s opponent, Dewey, took similar stands for similar reasons.)
Truman’s Secretary of State George Marshall, the renowned World War II General and author of the Marshall Plan, was furious to see electoral considerations taking precedence over policies based on national interest. He condemned what he called a “transparent dodge to win a few votes,” which would cause “[t]he great dignity of the office of President [to be] seriously diminished.”
Marshall wrote that the counsel offered by Clifford “was based on domestic political considerations, while the problem which confronted us was international. I said bluntly that if the President were to follow Mr. Clifford’s advice and if in the elections I were to vote, I would vote against the President…”
Henry F. Grady, who has been called “America’s top diplomatic soldier for a critical period of the Cold War,” headed a 1946 commission aimed at coming up with a solution for Palestine. Grady later wrote about the Zionist lobby and its damaging effect on US national interests.
Grady argued that without Zionist pressure, the U.S. would not have had “the ill-will with the Arab states, which are of such strategic importance in our ‘cold war’ with the soviets.” He also described the decisive power of the lobby:
“I have had a good deal of experience with lobbies but this group started where those of my experience had ended….. I have headed a number of government missions but in no other have I ever experienced so much disloyalty”…… “in the United States, since there is no political force to counterbalance Zionism, its campaigns are apt to be decisive.”
Former Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson also opposed Zionism. Acheson’s biographer writes that Acheson “worried that the West would pay a high price for Israel.” Another Author, John Mulhall, records Acheson’s warning:
“…to transform [Palestine] into a Jewish State capable of receiving a million or more immigrants would vastly exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all Western interests in the Near East.”
Secretary of Defense James Forrestal also tried, unsuccessfully, to oppose the Zionists. He was outraged that Truman’s Mideast policy was based on what he called “squalid political purposes,” asserting that “United States policy should be based on United States national interests and not on domestic political considerations.”
Forrestal represented the general Pentagon view when he said that “no group in this country should be permitted to influence our policy to the point where it could endanger our national security.”
A report by the National Security Council warned that the Palestine turmoil was acutely endangering the security of the United States. A CIA report stressed the strategic importance of the Middle East and its oil resources.
Similarly, George F. Kennan, the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning, issued a top-secret document on January 19, 1947 that outlined the enormous damage done to the US by the partition plan (“Report by the Policy Planning Staff on Position of the United States with Respect to Palestine”).
Kennan cautioned that “important U.S. oil concessions and air base rights” could be lost through US support for partition and warned that the USSR stood to gain by the partition plan.
Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s nephew and a legendary intelligence agent, was another who was deeply disturbed by events, noting:
“The process by which Zionist Jews have been able to promote American support for the partition of Palestine demonstrates the vital need of a foreign policy based on national rather than partisan interests… Only when the national interests of the United States, in their highest terms, take precedence over all other considerations, can a logical, farseeing foreign policy be evolved. No American political leader has the right to compromise American interests to gain partisan votes…”
He went on:
“The present course of world crisis will increasingly force upon Americans the realization that their national interests and those of the proposed Jewish state in Palestine are going to conflict. It is to be hoped that American Zionists and non-Zionists alike will come to grips with the realities of the problem.”
The head of the State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Gordon P. Merriam, warned against the partition plan on moral grounds:
“U.S. support for partition of Palestine as a solution to that problem can be justified only on the basis of Arab and Jewish consent. Otherwise we should violate the principle of self-determination which has been written into the Atlantic Charter, the declaration of the United Nations, and the United Nations Charter–a principle that is deeply embedded in our foreign policy. Even a United Nations determination in favor of partition would be, in the absence of such consent, a stultification and violation of UN’s own charter.”
Merriam added that without consent, “bloodshed and chaos” would follow, a tragically accurate prediction.
An internal State Department memorandum accurately predicted how Israel would be born through armed aggression masked as defense:
“…the Jews will be the actual aggressors against the Arabs. However, the Jews will claim that they are merely defending the boundaries of a state which were traced by the UN…In the event of such Arab outside aid the Jews will come running to the Security Council with the claim that their state is the object of armed aggression and will use every means to obscure the fact that it is their own armed aggression against the Arabs inside which is the cause of Arab counter-attack.”
And American Vice Consul William J. Porter foresaw another outcome of the partition plan: that no Arab State would actually ever come to be in Palestine.
Pro-Israel Pressure on General Assembly Members
When it was clear that the Partition recommendation did not have the required two-thirds of the UN General Assembly to pass, Zionists pushed through a delay in the vote. They then used this period to pressure numerous nations into voting for the recommendation. A number of people later described this campaign.
Robert Nathan, a Zionist who had worked for the US government and who was particularly active in the Jewish Agency, wrote afterward, “We used any tools at hand,” such as telling certain delegations that the Zionists would use their influence to block economic aid to any countries that did not vote the right way.
Another Zionist proudly stated:
“Every clue was meticulously checked and pursued. Not the smallest or the remotest of nations, but was contacted and wooed. Nothing was left to chance.”
Financier and longtime presidential advisor Bernard Baruch told France it would lose U.S. aid if it voted against partition. Top White House executive assistant David Niles organized pressure on Liberia; rubber magnate Harvey Firestone pressured Liberia.
Latin American delegates were told that the Pan-American highway construction project would be more likely if they voted yes. Delegates’ wives received mink coats (the wife of the Cuban delegate returned hers); Costa Rica’s President Jose Figueres reportedly received a blank checkbook. Haiti was promised economic aid if it would change its original vote opposing partition.
Longtime Zionist Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, along with ten senators and Truman domestic advisor Clark Clifford, threatened the Philippines (seven bills were pending on the Philippines in Congress).
Before the vote on the plan, the Philippine delegate had given a passionate speech against partition, defending the inviolable “primordial rights of a people to determine their political future and to preserve the territorial integrity of their native land…”
He went on to say that he could not believe that the General Assembly would sanction a move that would place the world “back on the road to the dangerous principles of racial exclusiveness and to the archaic documents of theocratic governments.”
Twenty-four hours later, after intense Zionist pressure, the delegate voted in favor of partition.
The U.S. delegation to the U.N. was so outraged when Truman insisted that they support partition that the State Department director of U.N. Affairs was sent to New York to prevent the delegates from resigning en masse.
On Nov 29, 1947 the partition resolution, 181, passed. While this resolution is frequently cited, it was of limited (if any) legal impact. General Assembly resolutions, unlike Security Council resolutions, are not binding on member states. For this reason, the resolution requested that “[t]he Security Council take the necessary measures as provided for in the plan for its implementation,” which the Security Council never did. Legally, the General Assembly Resolution was a “recommendation” and did not create any states.
What it did do, however, was increase the fighting in Palestine. Within months (and before Israel dates the beginning of its founding war) the Zionists had forced out 413,794 people. Zionist military units had stealthily been preparing for war before the UN vote and had acquired massive weaponry, some of it through a widespread network of illicit gunrunning operations in the US under a number of front groups.
The UN eventually managed to create a temporary and very partial ceasefire. A Swedish UN mediator who had previously rescued thousands of Jews from the Nazis was dispatched to negotiate an end to the violence. Israeli assassins killed him and Israel continued what it was to call its “war of independence.”
At the end of this war, through a larger military force than that of its adversaries and the ruthless implementation of plans to push out as many non-Jews as possible, Israel came into existence on 78 per cent of Palestine.
At least 33 massacres of Palestinian civilians were perpetrated, half of them before a single Arab army had entered the conflict, hundreds of villages were depopulated and razed, and a team of cartographers was sent out to give every town, village, river, and hillock a new, Hebrew name. All vestiges of Palestinian habitation, history, and culture were to be erased from history, an effort that almost succeeded.
Israel, which claims to be the “only democracy in the Middle East,’ decided not to declare official borders or to write a constitution, a situation which continues to this day. In 1967 it took still more Palestinian and Syrian land, which is now illegally occupied territory, since the annexation of land through military conquest is outlawed by modern international law. It has continued this campaign of growth through armed acquisition and illegal confiscation of land ever since.
Individual Israelis, like Palestinians and all people, are legally and morally entitled to an array of human rights.
On the other hand, the state of Israel’s vaunted “right to exist” is based on an alleged “right” derived from might, an outmoded concept that international legal conventions do not recognize, and in fact specifically prohibit.
~
Alison Weir is president of the Council for the National Interest and executive director of If Americans Knew. See the “History of US-Israel Relations” on both the IAK and the CNI websites for detailed citations for the above information. Additional references can be found in “How Palestine Became Israel.”
Why Obama’s “new thinking” initiative on Middle East peace is doomed to fail
By Lawrence Davidson | January 22, 2011
According to Laura Rozen, a journalist specializing in foreign policy matters and writing in Politico (13 January 2011), the Obama administration is seeking “new ideas from outside experts on how to advance the peace process” in the Middle East. This is because the president and his counsellors are “utterly stuck” following the failure of last year’s efforts to strong-arm Mahmoud Abbas and bribe Binyamin Netanyahu into negotiations. Quoting an administration consultant, Rozen tells us “there is no pretence of progress. With the State of the Union coming up and the new GOP [Grand Old Party – the Republican Party] Congress, they [the administration] are taking a few weeks to regroup and solicit ideas to push forward and … to give a real jump-start” to the negotiation process”.
On the surface this would appear to be welcome news. The White House entourages having this revelation that their process, and that of their predecessors too, have all failed and so we need some new, progressive thinking about peace in the Holy Land. Maybe there should be a new approach that would play to the leverage the US can bring to bear on both parties (and not just the Palestinians). But then Rozen proceeds (in a completely dead pan style) to explain to us how the administration is going about its search for “new ideas from outside experts”.
Two separate efforts have been set up to brainstorm these new ideas:
1. “One task force has been convened by Sandy Berger and Stephen Hadley”. Who are they? Berger was national security adviser to Bill Clinton. He was a “prominent actor at the Camp David 2000 Summit”. What about Hadley? He was assistant to Undersecretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz during George W. Bush’s first term of office and then national security adviser to the president during Bush’s second term. In these positions he worked closely and comfortably not only with Wolfowitz, but also with men like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
2. “A second effort [is] led by Martin Indyk.” And who is Martin Indyk? Indyk served twice as US ambassador to Israel as well as being a member of the National Security Council (NSC) under Clinton. Before that he was deputy research director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and served eight years as the executive director of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), which he helped co-found. WINEP is supported by AIPAC. According to Rozen’s report, one of the first things Indyk has done in his search for “new ideas” is to seek out, among others, “senior NSC Middle East/Iran adviser Dennis Ross”. And who is Dennis Ross? Ross was Bill Clinton’s Middle East envoy in the 1990s. Before that he was on Ronald Reagan’s NSC and, along with Indyk, helped co-found WINEP.
These are the people who the Obama administration is looking to for new thinking about the peace process. One is left simply amazed at this development. Almost, but not quite, speechless. For all these men – Berger, Hadley, Indyk and Ross – are strongly biased in favour of Israel, and among the folks who have been running the US side of the peace process at least since the 1980s. They are not “outside experts” at all. They are retreaded inside “experts” whose records, with very minor exceptions, in regard to the peace process, are ones of failure. Going to these people for “new ideas” that will “jump-start” peace talks in the Middle East is like going to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia for a forward-looking and progressive take on the US Constitution. Such an effort is a standing contradiction. It is a rigged game designed to get you the opposite of what you claim to seek.
The unavoidable question is why is the Obama administration wasting its time and our money doing this? The answer has to be first and foremost domestic politics. Although Barack Obama would, understandably, still like to make a positive impact on the Palestinian-Israeli impasse, he is convinced that any effort in this regard must conform to the wishes of domestic political forces led by the Zionist lobby. For instance, what would happen if he decided that all those listed above were hopeless failures and, instead of going to back to them, he was going to turn to, say, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University? Khalidi is undoubtedly an expert on the Middle East and the Palestinian-Israeli question. However, he is also very much in favour of justice for the Palestinians. If President Obama was to consult Khalidi there would be an immediate knee-jerk reaction in Congress consisting of quite literal screaming and yelling. AIPAC would call Obama a man seriously lacking in judgment and Khalidi a friend of terrorists. The president’s possibilities for re-election would, allegedly, recede dramatically. On the other hand, there is no doubt that he would get “new ideas” from an “outside expert”.
The political pragmatist might argue, what good are “new ideas” if they cannot be implemented? But this position accepts the same assumption noted above, that any US president must be tied down by the political power of the Zionist lobby. It is, in fact, an assumption that must be challenged if any future progress is to be made. Thus, the president should take a chance. He should consider making a new and forceful initiative and demand Israeli compliance like Eisenhower did at the end of the Sinai Crisis of 1956. He should go to the American people and explain what he is doing and why. He should use every presidential prerogative there is, including the negative ones, to assure Israeli cooperation, etc. Oh, this is political suicide, answers the political pragmatist; it will never work. But, as is obvious, nothing else has worked to date. We are spending enormous sums to subsidize Israeli obstinacy and, according to General David Petraeus, the man who leads the American effort in Afghanistan, doing so is helping to kill American soldiers. So, go ahead Mr President, take the bull by the horns already.
Alas, he will not. And Rozen’s report is proof positive that the president will not do this. He is first and foremost a domestically-oriented politician cut out of a very standard mould. Politically, then, it has been judged safer to resurrect the dead in the form of Berger, Hadley, Indyk and Ross. So, there you have it. What is necessary for success in the peace process is always assumed to equal political failure at home. On the other hand, political success at home (which entails letting the Zionist lobby set the criteria for what is possible) equals continued failure of the peace process. It also equals ever increasing danger for US interests in the Middle East and the Muslim world. This latter equation is not based on an assumption. It is a historically demonstrated fact.
This is why we fail. No one wants to seriously test the old standing assumptions. Our political system is ossified. It is trapped in a lobby-driven, financially-corrupt rut. And until we find a way out of it we are doomed to go round in circles. That is what the administration’s pseudo effort at seeking “new ideas from outside experts” amounts to, going in a circle. Round and round and round and round.
British Zionists’ hypocritical view of suffering and the Holocaust
January 10, 2011 by Gilad Atzmon
For years Israelis and Zionists have been pumping ‘Shoah’ into our veins by using every possible propaganda outlet: media, education, Hollywood, music, literature, billboards and so on.
Seemingly they have been very successful: We are all properly ‘Holocausted’. We accept the suffering of the Jewish people — and we have even managed to draw a universal message from it all.
We do accept that a real Shoah is taking place in front of our eyes in Palestine, where the Jewish state locks millions of Palestinians behind bars: it starves them, it stops medical supplies, food, cement, and educational materials from getting in. But it does not stop there — when the Jewish state feels like it, it also kills Palestinians indiscriminately. It either blitzes them with white phosphorous, or sends in its tank battalions to drive over Gaza.
In preparation for Holocaust Memorial Day (1), London Zionist mouthpiece The Jewish Chronicle is very disturbed by a UK-based pro Palestinian web site named shoah.org.uk. The site is obviously dedicated to the Palestinian Holocaust.
The Jewish paper insists that the Shoah — like Israel — is a ‘Jews only club’. They do not want to ‘let anyone else in’.
Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust told the Jewish paper, “Using the word ‘Shoah’ in this context is done with the sole intention of causing offence to Holocaust survivors, their families and the wider Jewish community and shows the greatest possible disrespect to the tragedy of the Holocaust.”
I would fiercely argue that Pollock is wrong. Using the word ‘Shoah’ in this very context is there to awaken the world, the Jews, and holocaust victims in particular, to the fact that the biggest current perpetrator of crimes against humanity — is actually the Jewish state.
Mark Gardner, of the Community Security Trust, said: “This website is yet another sickening example of how the Holocaust is perverted by anti-Zionists in order to attack Israel and Zionism.”
Mark Gardner is almost correct; anti Zionists do indeed use the Shoah as a means of mirroring. And it is now an accepted fact that the Palestinians are the last victims of Hitler. It is also becoming accepted that the Israelis are the Nazis of our time. And tragically enough, the crimes in Palestine carried out by the Jewish state are also being committed in the name of the Jewish people. As if this is not enough, it is Jewish pilots who drop white phosphorus from planes which are decorated with Jewish symbols.
These facts are disturbing and demand the immediate attention of world Jewry.
Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies ( another morbid institute that claims to represent British Jews ) told the Jewish Chronicle that “even without delving into what is clearly a one-sided and skewed narrative, by virtue of its title, this website is extremely provocative and any trivialisation of the Holocaust in which over six million Jewish men, women, and children were systematically murdered is completely abhorrent.”
Benjamin is probably too lame to grasp that what we see here is the total opposite — We are actually witnessing an acceptance of an astute universalising of the holocaust as carrying a humanist message for all of us. We can see a deeper understanding of the true moral meaning of that historical event.
Surely we need to stand up against all forms of ethno-centric homicidal policies. And it seems clear that Israel is no different from Nazi Germany in that regard. In fact Israel is far worse, because Israel acts under the guise of being a democracy, and its merciless policies are a reflection of the majority Israeli population’s yearning to live in a ‘Jews only’ state.
However, a few questions are still left open — Why exactly do the aforementioned Jews from the Jewish Chronicle and the Board of Deputies want to maintain the notion and reality of historical suffering as being exclusively Jewish property? Why don’t they want anyone else to use the word ‘Shoah’? Why do they demand a total control over the usage of words and applications of meanings ?
Can you imagine a Ukrainian protesting against the word ‘famine’ being applied to the situation in Ethiopia?
I really wonder why so many Jews insist on grounding their identity politics on suffering and being hated by others?
For clearly, one must admit that being loathed is not exactly something to brag about.
I am bewildered.
(1) It is interesting to read the definition of the Holocaust Memorial Day on the official HMD’s site:
“HMD is about remembering the victims and those whose lives have been changed beyond recognition of the Holocaust, Nazi persecution and subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and the ongoing atrocities today in Darfur.”
Basically everywhere except in Palestine.
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Students for Justice in Palestine condemns US government witch hunt
Students for Justice in Palestine | 29 December 2010
“For if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”
– James Baldwin, in an open letter to Angela Davis, 19 November 1970
As students at over fifty American universities, we unequivocally condemn the abuse of grand jury subpoenas to chill the exercise of First Amendment rights by university students and anti-war activists speaking and organizing against Israel’s continued oppression of the Palestinian people. Since 24 September 2010, the FBI has served at least 24 grand jury subpoenas on students and activists in a secret investigation that many have called a witch hunt. We call upon Attorney General Eric Holder and United States Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to respect the civil rights and free speech of all those who support the Palestinian struggle for freedom by immediately withdrawing grand jury subpoenas which threaten the First Amendment rights of students and activists around the country.
The government’s assault on organizations and individuals who support the Palestinian struggle for freedom has become increasingly authoritarian. The abuse of laws criminalizing “material support for terrorism” is unprecedented and, had they been implemented at the time of South African apartheid, would have effectively criminalized broad American support for the anti-apartheid movement. At the apparent behest of US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, the government today has cast a net so wide that it has entangled journalists, college students, and peace activists. We know that a campaign so indiscriminate will seriously impinge on the First Amendment and other civil rights of people living in the United States. This will, in particular, affect active and outspoken students on university campuses, especially those of Palestinian descent.
It is not only our right but also our moral duty to speak and act against American foreign policy and its destructive impact on innocent people around the world. Today, America unfortunately stands behind Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people with money, weaponry, and diplomatic support. We seek to reverse this situation so that American foreign policy stands on the side of people who work towards justice. We reject the government’s efforts to isolate the Palestinian people by severing them from their non-violent supporters abroad. Therefore we stand in solidarity with the victims of our government’s campaign both in America and around the globe.
If Attorney Fitzgerald’s campaign marks the morning of a new day, then we are certain of what awaits us in the night. Like Baldwin before us, we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal — we shall, therefore, make as much noise as we can.
Signed:
* American University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Arizona State University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Bard College, International Solidarity Movement
* Benedictine University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Boston University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Brandeis University, Brandeis SJP
* Brooklyn College CUNY, The Palestinian Club
* Columbia University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Cornell University, United for Peace and Justice in Palestine
* DePaul University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Eastern Washington University, SLAC
* Florida International University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* George Mason University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* George Washington University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Georgetown University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Hampshire College, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Harvard Law School, Middle East Law Students Association
* Harvard University, Alliance for Justice in the Middle East
* Harvard University, Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee
* Harvard University, Harvard Law School Justice for Palestine
* Hunter College, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Loyola University, Middle Eastern Student Association
* Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Palestine@MIT
* New York University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Northeastern Illinois University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Northwestern University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Ohio State University, Committee for Justice in Palestine
* Pennsylvania State University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Rutgers University – New Brunswick, BAKA: Students United for Middle Eastern Justice
* San Diego State University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Temple University, Temple Students for Justice in Palestine
* Tufts University, Students for Justice in Palestine
* University of Arizona, Students for Justice in Palestine
* University of California, Berkeley, Students for Justice in Palestine
* University of California, Berkeley Law, Law Students for Justice in Palestine
* University of California, Davis, Students for Justice in Palestine
* University of California, Irvine, Students for Justice in Palestine
* University of California, Los Angeles, Students for Justice in Palestine
* University of California, Riverside, Students for Justice in Palestine
* University of California, San Diego, Students for Justice in Palestine
* University of Chicago, Students for Justice in Palestine
* University of Florida, Students for Justice In Palestine
* University of Illinois at Chicago, Students for Justice in Palestine
* University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Students for Justice in Palestine
* University of Michigan, Students Allied for Freedom & Equality
* University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Palestine Solidarity Committee
* University of Pittsburgh, Pitt Students for Justice in Palestine
* University of South Florida, Students for Justice in Palestine
* University of Southern California, Students for Justice in Palestine
* University of Texas at Austin, Palestine Solidarity Committee
* University of Washington, Students for Justice in Palestine
* Vermont Law School, Law Students for Justice in Palestine
* Wellesley College, Justice for Palestine
* Yale University, Yale Students for Justice and Peace in Palestine
Honoring Helen Thomas
By JAMES ABOUREZK | November 22, 2010
These remarks were delivered at a tribute for Helen Thomas, Thursday, November 18, at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington DC D.C., sponsored by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).
I’m very proud to be asked to speak at a tribute to one of the great journalists in the history of this country – Helen Thomas. I say she is a great journalist because she was never cuddled up in the lap of the President – any president – when she was doing her job. She is someone my old friend, I.F. Stone, would be very proud of if he were still alive.
To say that she made a long succession of Presidents uncomfortable with her sharp questioning would be an understatement. Even Barack Obama, who has been advertised as a tolerant man, had to join in the denunciations of Helen. He, along with the others in the press corps, acted very much like children in a school yard. When one of the children falls down, the rest start kicking.
Helen was not necessarily done in by her statement about Israel. What she said is what I’ve been saying for years – the Zionists should get the hell out of Palestine.
Where they go when they leave there is not my concern, just as it is not the Zionists’ concern where the Palestinians went when they were driven out of Palestine. She was done in because she embarrassed the group of lap dogs who call themselves White House reporters. She has been doing what each and every one of them wishes they had the temerity to do – find out what the government is doing to us on a day by day basis.
She has consistently posed serious questions to each administration in turn – questions that affect the financial and emotional and security health of our country. She refused to go along with the game played by the national press – that is, to be very, very polite to the President during his press conferences so that they may stay in the good graces of the government they are supposed to be reporting on.
I’m especially proud because now ADC has been called anti-semitic by the Director of the Bnai Brith Defamation League, Abe Foxman. You remember Dr Johnson’s saying, that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel? Well, anti-semitism has become the last gasp of the worn-out old Zionists who, instead of trying to make America a better place in which to live, make their living snarling at anyone who might criticize what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and to the Lebanese, and to the Syrians.
I once called Alan Dershowitz a snake on Al Manar television. Al Manar is Hezbollah’s news channel in Lebanon. When he found out what I had said, he wrote a column in the Jerusalem post, calling me an anti-Semite. My response has been – to him and to anyone else – that an anti-Semite is synonymous with disliking Jews, and that I do not dislike Jews, I only dislike Alan Dershowitz, and Abe Foxman, and Bibi Netanyahu.
I also know now that I should have apologized to the snakes.
As for Abe Foxman, he is the head of the B’Nai Brith, whose stated mission is to promote tolerance and to fight against racism. He demonstrated that tolerance when he came out bleating that he was opposed to a mosque being built near the World Trade Center site. And he has made a living equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, which, so far as tolerance goes, promotes only hatred and racism.
The truth is, that Israel has very little to do with Judaism, but it has a lot to do with fascism.
For the Zionist supporters of Israel, it’s OK for Israel to kill on the average of at least one Palestinian a day during its illegal occupation;.
It’s OK for Israel to use the million and a half people in Gaza as living targets in a shooting gallery.
It’s OK to bomb Syria and Lebanon any time such an attack is needed to bolster the military credentials of Israel=s politicians.
It’s OK to invade Lebanon whenever they feel like it. In my memory, Israel’s military has killed at least 30,000 civilians in their Lebanon invasions. But lately, with Hezbollah standing up to them, it=s happening on fewer and fewer occasions, and fewer and fewer Lebanese are being slaughtered by Israel.
It’s OK to destroy the olive groves of Palestinian farmers. It’s OK to move them off their land to make room for Jewish settlements.
It’s OK for Israel to send agents to spy on the United States, and it’s OK for the Obama Administration to dismiss charges against those of Israel’s spies who have been caught red-handed.
It’s OK for Israel to commit an act of criminal piracy on the high seas by boarding a ship full of people and food and medicine on their way to help stem the starvation brought on by Israel’s policy in Gaza, and to outright murder 9 people, including an American citizen out on the high seas. Have you heard much lately about the American boy who was assassinated by the Israeli military on board one of those aid ships? Have you wondered why you haven’t heard anything about it from those great American journalists who so bravely ganged up on Helen Thomas?
It’s OK to do all of those things I’ve listed, but it’s not OK to send money and food to Palestinian refugees to help them survive.
And it’s not OK for Helen Thomas to tell Israel to get the hell out of Palestine.
And it’s not OK for anyone else to say that Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine is wrong and against the law, and that American taxpayers’ money is being used to help Israel commit these crimes against humanity. That kind of criticism brings down calls of “anti-Semitism” from the likes of Foxman and Dershowitz.
As an American citizen, I am deeply worried, among other things, about the direction our government has taken and is taking with respect to its financing of Israel’s crimes. There is no one left in the press corps to ask such questions now that they’ve drummed Helen out of journalism.
Helen’s fatal, and final, sin was, during a discussion of Iran’s nuclear program during a press conference, to ask President Obama if anyone else in the Middle East -beside Iran – has nuclear weapons. Of course, he didn’t answer the question, which probably explains why he joined the chorus of denouncers to drum Helen Thomas out of the White House press room. He simply didn’t want the question coming up again at a future press conference.
But you can easily see the service Helen performed by asking that question. As the Zionists and the Israelis are working very hard to get our country into a war with Iran, there remains almost no voice in the press or in the Congress to call a halt to this madness.
That is why we are all paying tribute to Helen tonight, and I hope, for a long time after this night. We pay tribute to all soldiers who act with bravery, and tonight, we add Helen Thomas to that company. She deserves our thanks, and she deserves the thanks of our nation.
Thank you.
James Abourezk is a former U.S. Senator, who practices law in Sioux Falls. He can be reached at georgepatton45@gmail.com.
Teaching The Oppressed How To Fight Oppression
By Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle | 23 October, 2010
An American activist once gave me a book she wrote detailing her experiences in Palestine. The largely visual volume documented her journey of the occupied West Bank, rife with barbed wires, checkpoints, soldiers and tanks. It also highlighted how Palestinians resisted the occupation peacefully, in contrast to the prevalent media depictions linking Palestinian resistance to violence.
More recently, I received a book glorifying non-violent resistance, and which referred to self-proclaimed Palestinian fighters who renounced violence as “converts”. The book elaborated on several wondrous examples of how these “conversions” came about. Apparently a key factor was the discovery that not all Israelis supported the military occupation. The fighters realized that an environment that allowed both Israelis and Palestinians to work together would be best for Palestinians seeking other, more effective means of liberation.
An American priest also explained to me how non-violent resistance is happening on an impressive scale. He showed me brochures he had obtained during a visit to a Bethlehem organization which teaches youth the perils of violence and the wisdom of non-violence. The organization and its founders run seminars and workshops and invite speakers from Europe and the United States to share their knowledge on the subject with the (mostly refugee) students.
Every so often, an article, video or book surfaces with a similar message: Palestinians are being taught non-violence; Palestinians are responding positively to the teachings of non-violence.
As for progressive and Leftist media and audiences, stories praising non-violence are electrifying, for they ignite a sense of hope that a less violent way is possible, that the teachings of Gandhi are not only relevant to India, in a specific time and space, but throughout the world, anytime.
These depictions repeatedly invite the question: where is the Palestinian Gandhi? Then, they invite the answer: a Palestinian Gandhi already exists, in numerous West Bank villages bordering the Israeli Apartheid Wall, which peacefully confront carnivorous Israeli bulldozers as they eat up Palestinian land.
In a statement marking a recent visit announcement by the group of Elders to the Middle East, India’s Ela Bhatt, a ‘Gandhian advocate of non-violence’, explained her role in The Elders’ latest mission: “I will be pleased to return to the Middle East to show the Elders’ support for all those engaged in creative, non-violent resistance to the occupation – both Israelis and Palestinians.”
For some, the emphasis on non-violent resistance is a successful media strategy. You will certainly be far more likely to get Charlie Rose’s attention by discussing how Palestinians and Israelis organize joint sit-ins than by talking about the armed resistance of some militant groups ferociously fighting the Israeli army.
For others, ideological and spiritual convictions are the driving forces behind their involvement in the non-violence campaign, which is reportedly raging in the West Bank. These realizations seem to be largely lead by Western advocates.
On the Palestinian side, the non-violent brand is also useful. It has provided an outlet for many who were engaged in armed resistance, especially during the Second Palestinian Intifada. Some fighters, affiliated with the Fatah movement, for example, have become involved in art and theater, after hauling automatic rifles and topping Israel’s most wanted list for years.
Politically, the term is used by the West Bank government as a platform that would allow for the continued use of the word moqawama, Arabic for resistance, but without committing to a costly armed struggle, which would certainly not go down well if adopted by the non-elected government deemed ‘moderate’ by both Israel and the United States.
Whether in subtle or overt ways, armed resistance in Palestine is always condemned. Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah government repeatedly referred to it as ‘futile’. Some insist it is a counterproductive strategy. Others find it morally indefensible.
The problem with the non-violence bandwagon is that it is grossly misrepresentative of the reality on the ground. It also takes the focus away from the violence imparted by the Israeli occupation – in its routine and lethal use in the West Bank, and the untold savagery in Gaza – and places it solely on the shoulders of the Palestinians.
As for the gross misrepresentation of reality, Palestinians have used mass non-violent resistance for generations – as early as the long strike of 1936. Non-violent resistance has been and continues to be the bread and butter of Palestinian moqawama, from the time of British colonialism to the Israeli occupation. At the same time, some Palestinians fought violently as well, compelled by a great sense of urgency and the extreme violence applied against them by their oppressors. It is similar to the way many Indians fought violently, even during the time that Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas were in full bloom.
Those who reduce and simplify India’s history of anti-colonial struggle are doing the same to Palestinians.
Misreading history often leads to an erroneous assessment of the present, and thus a flawed prescription for the future. For some, Palestinians cannot possibly get it right, whether they respond to oppression non-violently, violently, with political defiance or with utter submissiveness. The onus will always be on them to come up with the solution, and do so creatively and in ways that suit our Western sensibilities and our often selective interpretations of Gandhi’s teachings.
Violence and non-violence are mostly collective decisions that are shaped and driven by specific political and socio-economic conditions and contexts. Unfortunately, the violence of the occupier has a tremendous role in creating and manipulating these conditions. It is unsurprising that the Second Palestinian Uprising was much more violent than the first, and that violent resistance in Palestine gained a huge boost after the victory scored by the Lebanese resistance in 2000, and again in 2006.
These factors must be contemplated seriously and with humility, and their complexity should be taken into account before any judgments are made. No oppressed nation should be faced with the demands that Palestinians constantly face. There may well be a thousand Palestinian Gandhis. There may be none. Frankly, it shouldn’t matter. Only the unique experience of the Palestinian people and their genuine struggle for freedom could yield what Palestinians as a collective deem appropriate for their own. This is what happened with the people of India, France, Algeria and South Africa, and many other nations that sought and eventually attained their freedom.
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By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 29.11.2017
The United States Air Force’s 59th Medical Wing’s molecular biology branch recently was revealed to have been collecting specifically Russian RNA and synovial (connective) tissue samples, prompting fears in Russia of a possible US directed ethnic-specific bioweapons program. … continue
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