SPEAK TRUTH TO ISRAELI POWER

SPEAK TRUTH TO ISRAELI POWER.

INTRODUCTION: AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Israel itself have spread an immense fog of misinformation, myths and lies about Israel’s acts policies and true objectives. We have been brainwashed. This is not simply a case of our psychological denial. AIPAC is the cause of our brainwashing, our failing to get accurate information from all main-stream sources. One of AIPAC’s functions through its CAMERA is to ridicule statements like this one, and falsely to label the authors and statements as “anti-Semitic.” With this awareness,, we choose to Speak Truth to Israeli Power, AIPAC power, US power and particularly to Jews and Liberals in the United States.

1. Because of the Holocaust, 1000 years of pogroms and anti-Semitism that continue to this day in Christian liturgy, and because of the shame of the world in refusing refuge to Holocaust victims, Israel and Jews everywhere have a legal and moral right to the State of Israel as granted in 1947 by the United Nations, with the boundaries existing until the 1967 War.

2. Israel has no legal, moral or historical right to a single square foot beyond the 1967 boundaries granted Israel by the UN.

3. Israel did not capture the West Bank and Gaza “fair and square” from Palestine. The Palestinians did not start the 1967 War and the War was not with them. Jordan Syria and Egypt were the nations involved in the 1967 War. Israel simply seized the opportunity provided by the War to capture and occupy the West Bank and Gaza in violation of International Law and the UN Charter in order to implement its Greater Vision of Israel. That vision was to capture all of Palestine for Israel as soon as possible.

4. Israel, for the last 39 years has been an imperialist military occupier of the West Bank and Gaza forcing 3.5 million of Palestinians to live under cruel military control, exploitation, poverty, humiliation and squalor. After 1967, Israel captured and occupied the West Bank and Gaza not for reasons of military security, but as a part of Israel’s “Greater Vision of Israel.” Israel did not simply establish military bases in the West Bank and Gaza so as better to defend itself from future attacks. Israel immediately destroyed 140 Palestinian water wells. Israel established Jewish civilian settlements in the West Bank, seized control of the available water, allocated 83% of the water to settlers and to Israel and provided a mere 17% to the millions of Palestinians. Israel destroyed many thousands of olive trees, 10,000 homes, and villages. Israel established dozens of civilian settlements which it then guarded with the IDF in order to “create conditions on the ground” implementing its Greater Vision in defiance of all negotiations and International Law. Israel has never agreed to accept the pre-1967 borders and has never accepted the right of Palestinians to have a state of their own. Israel has not sought peace at every turn and has not shown restraint when provoked. Israel has always attached preconditions to negotiations with Palestine and provided for endless negotiating sessions thereafter to insure that its future complete occupation of West Bank and Gaza would never really be impaired. Israel has never been concerned with the plight of the Palestinians.

5. Israel regularly imposes “collective punishment” and “targeted assassinations” on Palestinian men women and children. This can in no way be justified as “defensive” or “justified” retaliation because of the evil of a despairing, hopeless, humiliated, young male or female suicide bomber who kills himself or her self and a few Israelis. This is something like balancing the evil of a rebellious Black Slave in the Pre-Civil War South with the evil of the Institution of slavery implemented with the whips, guns and Ku Klux Klan lynching carried out by the White plantation owners. It is an attempt to “spin” the realities of immense Israeli military power and Israel’s covert objective of gaining ever more territory and control

6. The right wing neo-cons have seized control of Israel as they have of the United States with identical results. Israel is no longer a land of socialism, kibbutzim, and state owned businesses. The neo-cons have privatized Israel’s state owned businesses, reduced taxes for corporations and the rich, opened Israel to Western investors, abolished the kibbutzim, slashed social service benefits, raised the pension age, and enacted laws making it more difficult for employees to strike. As a consequence things have gotten worse for the average Israeli:

1. 28% of Israeli Children do not have health care.
2. Israel has spent $14 Billion on the rich settlements in the West Bank while 24% of the Israeli citizens live below the poverty line.
3. The neo-cons in the US and Israel eagerly support the Israeli occupation of the West Bank as a part of the US Plan to dominate and control the planet as outlined in the September, 2002 document The National Security Strategy of the United States of America..
4. These neo-con acts and policies foster anti-Semitic rage in millions of Arabs, threaten us all with a War of Armageddon proportions, and impoverish the citizens of Israel. Far from bringing peace and security to Israel, they portend disaster and suffering for us all.

7. Israel is no longer weak and threatened with extinction. Israel has become a military superpower in its own right. Its army and air force rival those England and France. Israel has become the world’s fourth largest nuclear power. It has an extremely effective Mossad, its “CIA.” Israel has a huge armaments industry and has become a major arms supplier to the world.

8. Arabs and Palestinians are not terrorists by nature any more than any other group of humans. Irgun, a Jewish terrorist organization, first established the practice of murdering innocent Arab women and children in 1937. This practice of Irgun soon found Arab and Palestinian imitators. It is, of course, continued today by Israel’s “collective punishment” policies and acts of the IDF in the West Bank.

9. Israel and Palestine will never have peace and security unless it is imposed upon them by the United States. Unfortunately the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, (AIPAC) has silenced those Jewish and liberal voters and office holders in the US who might normally push for justice. AIPAC fully implements this neo-con policy of capturing and controlling all of the West Bank and Gaza. AIPAC has political control of, and has silenced, every Congressperson and Senator, even those who would normally champion the cause of truth, justice, and peace. No elected person in the United States dares to support the Palestinians or to criticize Israel. So the one nation that could impose peace has been rendered powerless and impotent.

10. AIPAC has its “Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting,” a PR and propaganda arm which seeks to maintain the ongoing support of American Jews and non-Jews for neo-con right wing policies and complete control of the West Bank and Gaza. CAMERA does this by falsely labeling all criticism of Israel or support for Palestine as “anti-Semitic” by exploiting the memories of the Holocaust and by outright lies, “spin” about Israel’s true objectives and by repeating Israel’s own myths and falsehoods. AIPAC is enormously effective and is thought by Congress persons to be the most powerful lobby in Washington in the area of foreign affairs.

11. .Israel, Jews everywhere, all Nations and all of us owe the Palestinians massive, generous reparations, rebuilding, and apologies. We owe the Palestinians a viable modern state of their own, free of military incursions and Israeli control. We should all help to fund these reparations. We should seek their forgiveness. This is the only possible plan for peace and security for us all. The Palestinians today are paying the price of the Holocaust.

These are the truths that we must speak to power, to Israeli power, AIPAC power, U.S. Power, and to American Jewish and Liberal power.

Dated: April 20, 2005 Tucson, AZ

Douglas R. Page dougpage2@earthlink.net

Sources

AIPAC’s own website: www.aipac.org

For a scholarly documented comprehensive study of AIPAC and its power see The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt at

http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011

See also The Israel Lobby and The Peace Process by Marshall Windmiller, Professor Emeritus of International Relations San Francisco State University at

http://www.middleeast.org/marshall1.htm

Regarding the rich West Bank settlements and poverty in Israel, my source is Michael Walzer Ph.D, Harvard University, 1961 and formerly Assistant Professor of Politics Princeton University and now an activist for Americans for Peace Now and Shalom Achshav. Contact him at apndc@peacenow.org

On neo-con privatizing in Israel see an article by Leila Khaled Moummar entitled: Privatizing Apartheid in Israel found at

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-12/08

See an article Death of Kibbuz by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Guardian Unlimited for May 14, 2001 found at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,490493,00.html

For an analysis of the real objectives of Israel, and the current need and opportunity for negotiating with Hamas, see the article by Henry Siegman, a Senior Fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a former head of the American Jewish Congress and the Synagogue Council of America. He has served as general secretary of the American Association for Middle East Studies. His article is Hamas: The Last Chance for Peace in the New York Review of Books, April 27, 2006, page 42.

For a current example of the power and control of AIPAC over Congresspersons and Senators, simply examine the amazing array of Democratic and liberal sponsors of HR

a resolution opposing any negotiation with Hamas that was put forth by AIPAC. Lined up by AIPAC and listed as sponsors are such Congress persons as Waxman, Berman, Pelousi, and Rangel. See also see an article by Joshua Frank entitled Hillary Clinton, AIPAC and Iran in Counterpunch for January 3, 2006

For a typical example of AIPAC’s influence on the media and on journalists, a number of articles and letters to the press have been printed calling the Mearsheimer-Walt study cited above anti-Semitic. See for example the opinion article in the Washington Post on April 5, 2006 by Eliot A. Cohen entitled: Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic.

See also Robert Fisk’s article entitled The United States of Israel?

in Counterpunch on April 27, 2006 reporting on an interview with Walt and listing the intemperate, false charges made against Walt and Mearsheimer by such inviduals as Alan Dershowitz. http://www.counterpunch.org/

The late Edward W. Said in his 1979 book, Orientalism, surveyed the literature and culture of England, France, and Germany for the last 200 years for attitudes and beliefs of Westerners about Middle Eastern Arabs. Here is a collection of the racist attitudes that he found, common to all 3 of the nations: Arabs as a people are lazy, backward, dirty, crooked, devious, cruel, perverted, illogical, irrational, unreliable, incapable of being logical, and tending toward pedophilia. They need and benefit from instruction, guidance, and control from Western man although they can never learn enough to be his equal. On the other hand, Western man is bright, logical, kind, generous, orderly, clean, moral, capable of leadership, and a more evolved human. Said believed that these attitudes were an unconscious and automatic result of attitudes of a Western oppressor against the oppressed Arab. Since Israelis and many Jews in the US, a part of Western man, have a similar collection of beliefs and attitudes about Arabs and Palestinian Arabs, it may be that Israeli oppression and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, is a cause of Israeli attitudes toward Palestinians.

Date: April 27, 2006 Douglas R. Page dougpage2@earthlink.net