The endless trail of red herrings

Zahir Ebrahim
February 28, 2007
Footnotes added, March 11, 2007.

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Footnotes

[2] ... Let's witness former American President Jimmy Carter selectively exercise his tender conscience with his serendipitous book "Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid". In his speech at George Washington University, as reported by the Associated Press and carried by Israeli newspaper Haaretz at  http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/834962.html, he noted:

'He said he was not accusing Israel of racism nor referring to its treatment of Arabs within the country. "I defined apartheid very carefully as the forced segregation by one people of another on their own land," he said. ...

On the West Bank, Carter said, Palestinians were victims of oppression, their homes and land confiscated to make way for subsidized Israeli settlers.

"The life of Palestinians is almost intolerable," he said. "And even though Israel agreed to give up Gaza and remove Jewish settlers from the territory, there is no freedom for the people of Gaza and no access to the outside world."

"They have no real freedom of all," Carter said.

By apartheid, Carter said he meant the forced segregation of one people by another. He said Israel's policies in the territories are contrary to the tenets of the Jewish faith.

"There will be no peace until Israel agrees to withdraw from all occupied Palestinian territory," he said, while leaving room for some land swaps that would permit Jews to remain on part of the West Bank in exchange for other Israeli-held land to be taken over by Palestinians.

"Withdrawal would dramatically reduce any threat to Israel," he said.'


The distinguished President Carter noted the definition of "all occupied Palestinian territory" very carefully suggesting that 'he was not accusing Israel of racism nor referring to its treatment of Arabs within the country. "I defined apartheid very carefully as the forced segregation by one people of another on their own land," he said'. This might be forgivable oversight of memory or lack of geography knowledge for an ordinary mortal, but for a 39th former president of a superpower nation who is also a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and who dares to speak out serendipitously in favor of a beleaguered peoples, but only goes part of the way as if some enormous invisible barrier is blocking him, it is entirely inexplicable.

Perhaps despite being a president who once had all the secrets of the State (and the world) at his finger tips, he hadn't rightly been informed by the '14 members of the Carter Center's advisory board' who resigned to protest his book, or by the 'Jewish groups and some fellow Democrats' from whom he 'drew fire', of the Jews own history of laments of the type disclosed in this essay, including this very poignant one:

"The state of Israel founded in 1948 following a war which the Israelis call the War of Independence, and the Palestinians call the Nakba - the catastrophe. A haunted, persecuted people sought to find a shelter and a state for itself, and did so at a horrible price to another people. During the war of 1948, more than half of the Palestinian population at the time - 1,380,000 people - were driven off their homeland by the Israeli army. Though Israel officially claimed that a majority of refugees fled and were not expelled, it still refused to allow them to return, as a UN resolution demanded shortly after 1948 war. Thus, the Israeli land was obtained through ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. This is not a process unfamiliar in history. Israel's actions remain incomparable to the massive ethnic cleansing of Native Americans by the settlers and government of the United states. Had Israel stopped there, in 1948, I could probably live with it. As an Israeli, I grew up believing that this primal sin our state was founded on may be forgiven one day, because the founder's generation was driven by the faith that this was the only way to save the Jewish people from the danger of another holocaust." (Tanya Reinhart: “Israel/Palestine - How to End the War of 1948”, excerpt from very first page)


Please continue by reading the entire essay "The endless trail of red herrings" in its full context, at  http://www.humanbeingsfirst.org

If you feel this speech might have been at an unbirthday party in wonderland, such frivilous parties are exacting their toll upon an entire peoples while we watch!

Thank you.

Zahir.