2006-01-16

by Genevieve Cora Fraser

Avnery's "With Friends Like These"... denies the fundamental truth about Israel

Dear Uri - I am typically delighted by your articles, but "With Friends Like These" misses an understanding of what is going on inside America. AIPAC and the American NeoCons are profoundly linked to Israel and the Zionist agenda to divide and conquer the Middle East. They, despite all rational arguments to the contrary, forged lies to hide the truth - that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction that could harm America. Israel's involvement was also tipped-off when the alleged "New Iraq" produced a so-called Iraqi flag that was a duplicate of the Israeli flag except for the substitution of the Star of David with a pale-blue crescent. If you look back, that's when all hell broke loose. The Iraqi insurgency was handed direct evidence that if they didn't fight like hell they too would suffer the fate of the Palestinians. But of course, oil is also at the heart of the mix for America as well as for Israel as it is for the insurgency who believe that Iraqi resources belong to Iraqis. Uri, Iraqis want their country back.

People who have observed AIPAC and other like-minded organizations and the growing NeoCon and Christian Zionist phenomena through the years and are alarmed are not anti-Semitic as you suggest but merely intelligent. Many also have Ashkenazi blood coursing through their veins. Some are members of local synagogues. That does not make them self-loathing but astute.

Uri, we Americans want our country back. We have a constitution (unlike Israel) and the majority of us actually believe that All Men Are Created Equal - that no race or creed or sex is superior to the other. Israel, lets face it, is as racist as any nation on earth. The white European Caucasian Zionists that rule your country hate the Semites they pretend to be.

America also espouses the "separation of church and state" as fundamental to the maintenance of basic human rights and Israel does not, nor do the NeoCons or their Christian Zionist sympathizers, nor does the Bush Administration. Many of us, at one time, were true believers in Israel but our eyes have been opened and frankly your country's antics turn our stomachs. Many of us fear that as our leaders genuflect before Israeli leaders, that we too are increasingly fascist in our foreign policy in a way that duplicates the incarceration and victimization of all of Palestine. It is frightening to observe the thin line that separates the Nazis and the Zionist agendas.

Some of us have visited Palestine and witnessed first hand what is being done. Yes, I have stood in the blood soaked apartment of a peace activists that was brutally murdered by a mob of IDF. I wish this level of bestiality were unusual but unfortunately it is common. Too many moderate Palestinians have been jailed, tortured and killed by Israeli forces - and let us not forget the legion of children that have been gunned down and the snipers and tanks that have wrecked havoc on grammar schools, etc. etc. etc. These methods are used to destabilize a country, to create constant unprovoked havoc.

Palestinian so-called terrorists are created in response to the unceasing victimization of Palestine by Israel. Yet Israel uses the smoke-screen of the "eternal victim" as it proceeds full-throttle with attack helicopters and fighter jets and guided missiles and sound bombs and bulldozed horror and the Racist Apartheid Wall and the stealing of Palestinian farm lands and water supplies. Israel desecrates and scars the land that was maintained for thousands of years by its indigenous people. Residential, industrial and military waste poison soil and bleed into aquifers, as the curative powers of the Terra Sancta and its spiritual legacy - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - are defiled.

Uri, I know that you protest and speak out and write wonderful, thought-provoking articles about Israel's horrific activities. But please do not tell us that we are anti-Semites if we also notice the non-stop crimes against humanity that is today and has always been Israeli policy. We are cognizant of the fact that the real stories taking place in Palestine and to Arabs within Israel are rarely mentioned in the American, predominantly Jewish owned and controlled press unless somehow the words, Palestinian Terrorists, are highlighted in the article. Today, we watch media icons such as Charlie Rose agreeing that Sharon is a Man of Peace (excuse me while I barf) and stating pejoratively that the "Palestinians will never change." That is a lie. The Palestinians have changed. They have changed from a prosperous, highly educated society that treasured the Holy Land that they farmed and the holy sites they preserved to one that is under Israel's boot - raped, robbed, tortured, ethnically cleansed and massacred at Israel's will.

How long did the holocaust last? Twelve - maybe thirteen years? Please do not speak of thousands of years. My Ashkenazi family in Europe were highly educated and prospered, but fortunately left long before the Nazi crack-down began. As for the Roman Catholic legacy of despotic cruelty - the Jews were not unique, Popes tortured and burned and drove out Christian "Heretics" and Muslims too. But that was centuries ago - during the Middle Ages. Most folks have moved past the trauma.

So why have the Palestinians been singled out to suffer? Hasn't six decades of torture been long enough to atone for Europe's sins? Israel is notorious in its desire to destabilize the Middle East - fearing that a healthy and united region might destroy it. Please do not scold me or my friends or the millions I have not met who recognize this. This is not anti-Semitism, but facing facts. If you come into a region as an enemy, people respond to you as an enemy. This is not rocket-science.

The Partition Plan of 1947, from which Israel stakes its claim of legitimacy, did not allow for the transfer of populations from the fledgling states. Yet Palestinians have been tortured, evicted and killed for nearly 60 years - racist laws such as the Absentee Laws in 1948 declared all Arabs absent from their lands and property even if they were home in their beds. Such is the claim that Israel has on the land - a lawyer's trick of a claim - as they DROVE PALESTINIANS INTO THE SEA in Jaffa, in Haifa and other seaport towns. You see, Hamas talks tough but has no ability to execute its threat - to drive Israelis into the sea. Hamas' threat is a mirror, an image, reflecting back what Israel has done to the people Hamas has sworn to protect. Is that why Israel is so afraid?

Israel fears retribution because Israel knows in its heart and soul what it has done. If Israel wants peace then it must embrace fundamental human rights - espouse the best and brightest in Judaism and all other respectable and responsible religions - righteousness, civility and pursuit of the common good, not horror.

If Israel wants security then it must become a "Constitutional Democracy" that roots out all its demeaning racist laws. Israel must recognize and abide by international law and state proudly and clearly what it stands for - including restitution to the dispossessed of Palestine. Israel must also offer a sincere apology for its crimes. Until such time, Palestine will never have a partner in peace and reconciliation is not possible. Today, the facts on the ground in Israel and Palestine are all to obvious. Israel's not-so-hidden agenda, backed by American money, is to swallow Palestine whole and ethnically cleanse those they can, while maintaining the rest of the population in the holding cells of the Racist Apartheid Wall - to be tortured and brutalized, starved and dehydrated until they rot - like the millions of Diaspora Palestinians left to rot in refugee camps so near, yet so far away.