"Never Again" Gone Mad In Israel
Sandy Tolan | 13.07.2006 17:18 | Anti-militarism | World
Keep in mind that this most recent offensive in Zionism's decades-long War was called for and planned months ago.
"Never Again" Gone Mad In Israel
by Sandy Tolan
In the name of forcing the release of a single soldier, Israel has seized members of a democratically elected government; bombed its interior ministry, the prime minister's offices and a school; threatened another sovereign state (Syria) with a menacing overflight; dropped leaflets from the air, warning of harm to the civilian population if it does not "follow all orders" of the Israel Defense Forces; loosed nocturnal "sound bombs" under orders from the Israeli prime minister to "make sure no one sleeps at night in Gaza"; fired missiles into residential areas, killing children; and demolished a power station that was the sole generator of electricity and running water for hundreds of thousands of Gazans.
Besieged Palestinian families, trapped in a locked-down Gaza, are down to one meal a day, eaten in candlelight. Yet their desperate conditions go largely ignored by a world accustomed to extreme Israeli measures in the name of security.
"Wake up!" shouted the young Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer from Gaza on San Francisco's "Arab Talk" radio in late June. "The Gaza people are starving. There is a real humanitarian crisis. Our children are born to live. Don't these people have any heart? No feelings at all? The world is silent!"
For the Palestinians, Omer's cry speaks to a collective understanding: That the world sees the life of an Arab as infinitely less valuable than an Israeli's; that no amount of suffering by innocent Palestinians is too much to justify the return of a single Jewish soldier. This understanding, and the rage and humiliation it fuels, has been driven home endlessly through decades of shellings, wars and uprisings past.
Indeed Omert's plaintive words form a mantra, echoing all the way back to the first war between the Arabs and the Jews.
The Arab-Israeli war of 1948, known in Israel as the War of Independence, is called al-Nakba, or the Catastrophe, by Palestinians. During the 1948 conflict, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled the violence or were driven from their homes. In the middle of July, when temperatures exceeded 100 degrees, more than 30,000 Arabs marched into exile, some for more than 20 miles. Many never made it; those who did were certain they would be coming back in a matter of days or weeks. Fifty-eight years later, they remain in exile.
Some refugees wear the keys to their homes around their neck; others tell stories of golden fields, or of a lemon tree whose fruit grows larger in the memory with each passing year.
Fifty-eight summers after the Nabka, as U.S.-made weapons pound Gaza from Israel, a déjà vu settles on the old men and women of the refugee camps, and in the vast diaspora beyond, reminding them of yet another bitter anniversary.
The latest attacks by Israel in Gaza, ostensibly on behalf of a single soldier, recall the comments by extremist Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, in his eulogy for U.S. Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 massacred 27 Palestinians praying in the Hebron mosque. "One million Arabs," Perrin declared, "are not worth a Jewish fingernail."
Israelis, too, are a traumatized people, and their nation's current actions are driven in part by a hard determination, born of the Holocaust, to "never again go like sheep to the slaughter." But if "never again" drives the politics of reprisal, few seem to notice that the reprisals themselves are obscenely out of scale to the provocation: For every crude Qassam rocket falling harmlessly, far from its target, dozens, sometimes hundreds of shells rain down on the Palestinians. For one missing soldier, a million and a half Gazans are made to suffer. In Israel, today, it is "never again" gone mad.
The irony is that, contrary to making themselves more safe, the Israelis, just like the Americans in Iraq, are only sowing the seeds of more hatred and rage.
Sandy Tolan is author of "The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East" and a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley. He will be reading from his book at 7 p.m. Thursday at University Temple United Methodist Church in Seattle.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0712-25.htm
by Sandy Tolan
In the name of forcing the release of a single soldier, Israel has seized members of a democratically elected government; bombed its interior ministry, the prime minister's offices and a school; threatened another sovereign state (Syria) with a menacing overflight; dropped leaflets from the air, warning of harm to the civilian population if it does not "follow all orders" of the Israel Defense Forces; loosed nocturnal "sound bombs" under orders from the Israeli prime minister to "make sure no one sleeps at night in Gaza"; fired missiles into residential areas, killing children; and demolished a power station that was the sole generator of electricity and running water for hundreds of thousands of Gazans.
Besieged Palestinian families, trapped in a locked-down Gaza, are down to one meal a day, eaten in candlelight. Yet their desperate conditions go largely ignored by a world accustomed to extreme Israeli measures in the name of security.
"Wake up!" shouted the young Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer from Gaza on San Francisco's "Arab Talk" radio in late June. "The Gaza people are starving. There is a real humanitarian crisis. Our children are born to live. Don't these people have any heart? No feelings at all? The world is silent!"
For the Palestinians, Omer's cry speaks to a collective understanding: That the world sees the life of an Arab as infinitely less valuable than an Israeli's; that no amount of suffering by innocent Palestinians is too much to justify the return of a single Jewish soldier. This understanding, and the rage and humiliation it fuels, has been driven home endlessly through decades of shellings, wars and uprisings past.
Indeed Omert's plaintive words form a mantra, echoing all the way back to the first war between the Arabs and the Jews.
The Arab-Israeli war of 1948, known in Israel as the War of Independence, is called al-Nakba, or the Catastrophe, by Palestinians. During the 1948 conflict, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled the violence or were driven from their homes. In the middle of July, when temperatures exceeded 100 degrees, more than 30,000 Arabs marched into exile, some for more than 20 miles. Many never made it; those who did were certain they would be coming back in a matter of days or weeks. Fifty-eight years later, they remain in exile.
Some refugees wear the keys to their homes around their neck; others tell stories of golden fields, or of a lemon tree whose fruit grows larger in the memory with each passing year.
Fifty-eight summers after the Nabka, as U.S.-made weapons pound Gaza from Israel, a déjà vu settles on the old men and women of the refugee camps, and in the vast diaspora beyond, reminding them of yet another bitter anniversary.
The latest attacks by Israel in Gaza, ostensibly on behalf of a single soldier, recall the comments by extremist Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, in his eulogy for U.S. Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 massacred 27 Palestinians praying in the Hebron mosque. "One million Arabs," Perrin declared, "are not worth a Jewish fingernail."
Israelis, too, are a traumatized people, and their nation's current actions are driven in part by a hard determination, born of the Holocaust, to "never again go like sheep to the slaughter." But if "never again" drives the politics of reprisal, few seem to notice that the reprisals themselves are obscenely out of scale to the provocation: For every crude Qassam rocket falling harmlessly, far from its target, dozens, sometimes hundreds of shells rain down on the Palestinians. For one missing soldier, a million and a half Gazans are made to suffer. In Israel, today, it is "never again" gone mad.
The irony is that, contrary to making themselves more safe, the Israelis, just like the Americans in Iraq, are only sowing the seeds of more hatred and rage.
Sandy Tolan is author of "The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East" and a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley. He will be reading from his book at 7 p.m. Thursday at University Temple United Methodist Church in Seattle.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0712-25.htm
Sandy Tolan
Comments
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Indymedia scrubbed clean of anti-Israeli-atrocity comment once again
13.07.2006 21:48
Hundreds of civilians murdered under the exact same excuses Adolf Hitler used ever time the nazi war machine went into action, millions terrified of imminent destruction of everything they own, and Idymedia UK's little knot of 'friends of Israel' get to gag ANYONE that attempts to discuss the genocidal actions of a group of people that, once again, proudly call themselves a 'master-race'.
Now we get to see what certain people meant by 'activism' here. The 'active' extermination of all opinion that could help save the people of Gaza and Lebanon from the fate of the Polish Ghettoes of WW2.
What is true evil? George Orwell had much first hand experience with the people that went on rape/torture and murder the Palestinians from their land, and placed others at the top of the Russian, French, US and UK government, so that the so-called nation of Israel could be created by a never punished act of vast atrocity. Because of this experience, Orwell describes in detail the actions of people like the Indymedia censors that eliminate opinions against the crimes of their tribe, using technology designed for that purpose.
At the time of Israel's depraved mass murder of holiday-makers on Gaza beach, Blair stated the the UK stood with Israel. One could hear the cheer from key Indymedia censor from where I sit. At that moment Blair gave public voice to the purpose of his meetings with top Israeli terrorists. Blair and Israel had set their nazi-style muslim-extermination plan in motion.
Now naive I am not. The other player in this is Iran. Iran may as well have its centre of government in London, given how closely Blair and Iran work. Iran sees the sickening depravity of Israeli military actions as helping to protect Iran from attack by the US. Blair plays both sides against the middle. Iran may gain a short term advantage, but Blair ramps up the level of military violence in the world, increaing the historic momentum that will one day soon smash through all barriers protecting us against World War.
During the build up to WW2, many hoped that the depravity of early nazi actions would also force the World to act in good time against the nazis. Instead, the abuse of military power by the nazis and others merely created the circumstances for greater wars.
WHEN MIGHT IS RIGHT, THE EVIL POWERFUL NATIONS SMASH THEIR WEAKER NEIGHBOURS. The lesson of one depraved nation, like Israel, soon spreads to others.
Our genocidal maniac, Blair, simply keeps upping the pressure, and destroying ever more of the moral foundation of the Human Race. He doesn't know exactly when his breakthrough will occur. However, he does know that our strength is finite, and has actually been diminishing across recent years, while his power grows by the day, and now encompasses the vast majority of Europe, the whole of North America, along with the usual smaller nations like Australia and Israel. If we are a wall, Blair is pounding us with sledge-hammers wielded by an ever growing team. Indymedia UK censorship in the name of Israeli depravity is just one more hammer blow.
twilight