Bombard the media and your elected representatives NOW, before Israel is again let off the hook for a military operation which will slaughter a large number of Palestinian civilians.
I guess Opertaion First Rain is over, and the escalation Israel hoped it would achieve has allowed them to move into into Phase II of the Zionist plan to 'pacify' and annex Gaza.
War is War, and Captured Soldiers are Captured Soldiers
I don't pretend to be an expert on the Israel/Palestine conflict, but I do know biased reporting when I see it, and the reporting here in the U.S. on that ongoing bloodletting in Palestine is certainly biased in the extreme.
Just look at the latest story, about the capture of an Israeli soldier. Palestinian fighters, allegedly linked to Hamas, in a daring raid, attacked a group of Israeli soldiers near the border of Gaza, killing two and capturing one.
This incident came after a period when the Israeli military has been shelling and rocketing Gaza, quite likely killing a whole family of beachgoers (though the Israeli military claims rather improbably that this was the result of a Hamas mine, not of a shell), and a number of other civilians.
Almost universally in the U.S. media, including on National Public Radio, the captured Israeli soldier is being referred to as a hostage and his capture is referred to as a "kidnapping."
Note that Israeli jails are brimming with captured Palestinian fighters, but this is not called kidnapping, nor are they called "hostages," though they often end up getting their freedom in in exchange for the return of captured Israeli soldiers who are referred to as "hostages," not prisoners.
Take this story in the June 27 issue the New York Times, which states:
"The Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, ordered his security services on Monday to find a kidnapped Israeli soldier in the Gaza Strip...
"...The groups holding him said that before any information would be disclosed, israel must release all Palestinian women in its jails and all Palestinian prisoners under the age of 18."
The same linguistic bias occurs with regularity in the coverage of the Iraq War and occupation, with resistance fighters in Iraq routinely referred to in the U.S. media as "terrorists." On the rare occasions when those "terrorists" have managed to capture a U.S. soldier, those incidents are referred to as "kidnappings," too.
Meanwhile, captured Iraqi fighters are often referred to as criminals when caught, not as prisoners of war.
It is no accident that this perversion of language is occurring. The Pentagon and the Israeli government both use this biased language in their briefings to reporters, and the U.S. media lap it up and recite it uncritically.
The problem with this is that the average American then has a warped perspective on two important conflicts that are profoundly affecting the political and economic situation here at home in the United States. These readers and viewers, by uncritically accepting the abased terminology that is presented to them, end up assuming that the U.S. and Israel are fighting crime and terror in Palestine and Iraq, when in fact both nations are fighting wars against people who, far from being criminals, are for the most part committed fighters who believe they are fighting in defense of their own nations. That is why they fight so hard and so courageously against such overwhelming odds.
How are Americans going to understand the depth and passion of the resistance to U.S. aggression in Iraq, if they are led by the media's misuse of language to believe that our troops are simply fighting bandits and criminals? How are we to understand the interminable horrors of the Israel/Palestine conflict if we are told that it is simply a battle between the good guys (the Israeli Defense Force), and the bad guys (a bunch of Palestinian hoodlums)?
The media should at least be forced to be even-handed. If Palestinians are "kidnapping" Israeli soldiers when they capture them, then the Israelis are "kidnapping" Palestinians when they do the same. Otherwise, let's concede that both are capturing their opponents and holding them prisoner.
And while we're at it, let's start calling Iraqi fighters what they are: resistance fighters, not terrorists.
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/
Israeli "Retaliation" and Double Standards
By JONATHAN COOK
The killing by Palestinian militants of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third from an army post close to the Gaza Strip set the scene for Israeli "reprisals" and "retaliation", according to the reports of BBC correspondents in Israel and Gaza yesterday.
The attack by the Palestinians, who sneaked through tunnels under the electronic fence surrounding Gaza, marked a "major escalation in cross-border tension" (Alan Johnston) that threatened to overturn "a week of progress on two fronts" (John Lyon): namely, the recent talks between Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in Jordan, and between rival Palestinian groups Fatah and Hamas.
Thus, according to the BBC's analysis, this attack ends the immediate chances for "peace" negotiations and provides the context for the next round of the conflict between the Israeli army and the Palestinians of Gaza. We are left to infer that all the suffering the army inflicts in the coming days and weeks should be attributed to this moment of "escalation" by the Palestinians.
We can ignore the weeks of shelling by the Israeli army of Gaza, the firing of hundreds of missiles into the crowded Strip that have destroyed Palestinian lives and property, while spreading terror among the civilian population and deepening the psychological trauma suffered by a generation of children.
We can ignore the deaths of more than 30 civilians, and dozens of horrific injuries, in the past few weeks at the hands of the Israeli military, including three children hit in a botched air strike last week, and a heavily pregnant woman and her doctor brother killed a day later as a missile slammed into the room where they were eating dinner.
We can ignore the blockade of Gaza's "borders" by the Israeli army for months on end, which has prevented Palestinians in the Strip from trading goods at crossing points with Israel and from receiving vital supplies of food and medicines. As a captive population besieged by Israeli soldiers, Gazans are facing a humanitarian catastrophe sanctioned by Israeli government policy and implemented by the Israeli army.
We can ignore Israel's bullying of the international community to connive in the starving of the Hamas-led government of funds and diplomatic room for manoeuvre, thereby preventing the elected Palestinian leadership from running Gaza. So desperate is the situation there that Hamas officials are being forced to smuggle in millions of dollars of cash stuffed in suitcases to pay salaries.
And finally we can ignore the violation of Palestinian territory by Israeli commandos who infiltrated Gaza a day before the Palestinian attack to kidnap two Palestinians Israel claims are terrorists. They have been "disappeared", doubtless to be be held in administrative detention, where they can denied access to lawyers, the courts and, of course, justice.
None of this provides the context for the Palestinian attack on the army post -- any more than, in the BBC's worldview, do the previous four decades of occupation. None is apparently relevant to understanding the Palestinian attack, or for judging the legitimacy of Israel's imminent military "reprisals".
In short, according to the BBC, we can ignore Israel's long-standing policy of unilateralism -- a refusal to negotiate meaningfully with the Palestinians, either the old guard of Fatah or the new one of Hamas -- with its resort to a strategy of collective punishment of Gaza's population to make it submit to the continuing occupation.
In the skewed moral and news priorities of the BBC, the killing of two Israeli soldiers by Palestinian militants -- the "escalation" -- provides a justification for "fierce retaliation" against Gaza, with the inevitable toll on Palestinian civilians and militants alike. The earlier killing of tens of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military, however, is not presented as justification for yesterday's Palestinian retaliation against the army.
In other words, on the scale of moral outrage the BBC ranks the deaths of Israeli soldiers enforcing an illegal occupation far above those of Palestinian civilians enduring the illegal occupation.
There is another notable asymmetry in the BBC's assessment of the "escalation". Participation by the military wing of Hamas in the attack is evidence, suggest the reporters, of the role of the Palestinian leadership in "escalating tension". But the killing by the Israeli army of a Palestinian family of seven on a Gaza beach on June 9, and many more civilians since, was apparently not an "escalation", even though it provoked Hamas to renounce a ceasefire it had maintained for 16 months in the face of continuous Israeli military assaults.
So how is the ordinary viewer to make sense of these events -- the endless "cycle of violence" -- with the BBC as guide. (And the BBC is no worse, and possibly better, than most of other Western broadcasters. At least its reporter Alan Johnston is based in Gaza.)
Not only do its reporters exhibit the biases associated with its institutional racism -- as an organisation, the BBC chooses to identify with Israeli concerns before Palestinian ones -- but they then compound this distortion by repeating uncritically Israel's own misrepresentation of events.
The reporters, like so many of their colleagues, fall into the trap of presenting the conflict through the eyes of the Israeli government, the same government whose prime minister, Ehud Olmert, last week proudly displayed his ethnic chauvinism by setting the suffering of the Jewish residents of Sderot, who face a mostly non-lethal smattering of Palestinian home-made Qassam rockets, far above the rising death toll of Gaza's civilians from the army's constant aerial and artillery bombardment. "I am sorry with all my heart for the residents of Gaza," Olmert said, "but the lives and well-being of Sderot's residents are more important than those of Gaza residents." In other words, a potential threat to a single Jew is more important than the deaths of dozens of Palestinian innocents.
Thus we learn without comment from the BBC that Olmert has denounced the killing of the two soldiers as "terrorism", even though the word cannot describe an attack by an occupied people on an occupying army. How is it possible for a few men with light arms to terrorise one of the most powerful armies in the world? What next: are we to listen sympathetically to claims by the US that its soldiers are being "terrorised" by Iraqi insurgents?
The defence that the BBC is simply reporting Israel's position does not stand up to scrutiny. Is it even conceivable that we might hear a BBC reporter neutrally repeat a Hamas statement that the Israeli army is terrorising Palestinians by reckless shelling civilians in Gaza, even though the word's usage in this case would better satisfy the dictionary definition? The shells most certainly do spread terror among Gaza's civilian population.
We hear too without comment that Olmert is holding both Hamas and the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas responsible for the attack. The BBC dutily repeats Israeli claims that Abbas has the resources to fight "terror" even as the money to pay Palestinian security forces is held by foreign banks unwilling, at Israeli and American behest, to hand it over, and as Hamas and Abbas are locked in battle for control of the Palestinians' shrinking government.
Does common sense not recoil from the suggestion that both Hamas and Abbas can be equally blamed for the attack when the two are bitter rivals for power? Or that either can be held accountable when Israel has refused to negotiate with them or treat them as the genuine representatives of the Palestinian people?
Again, would the BBC report with due solemnity claims by the Palestinians that they hold Olmert and Peretz personally guilty for the civilian deaths in Gaza over the past fortnight, even though in an enlightened world both should be standing trial for war crimes?
Instead, however implausible the Israeli version of reality, the BBC happily sows confusion on behalf of the Israeli army. Like other broadcasters, it credulously reports preposterous arguments seeking to exonerate the Israeli army of responsibility for the shelling of the beach in Gaza that killed a Palestinian family of seven. It treats as equally credible the army's belated version in which Palestinian militants are said to have laid a single mine at a favourite seaside picnic spot in the futile hope of preventing the Israeli navy landing along the Strip's miles of coastline. (In consequence, the BBC excludes the seven dead and dozens of Palestinian injured in that Israeli attack from its list of recent civilian casualties in Gaza).
And both BBC reporters note gravely Israel's concerns that this is the first time Palestinian militants have broken out of the fenced-off Strip since Israel withdrew from Gaza nearly a year ago. Somehow the fact that the Palestinians have briefly escaped from their cage appears to make the attack all the more shocking not only for Israel but for the two reporters.
This attack in Israel, they tell us, is the most serious to date, with the implication that it is therefore illegitimate and part of the same "escalation". Even ignoring the fact that this attack was against Israeli soldiers besieging, imprisoning and shelling the Palestinians of Gaza, does the BBC not to pause to consider the double standard it is applying?
Was the Israeli army's incursion into Gaza a day earlier to capture two alleged Palestinian militants not an equal escalation? Was it not an equal violation of Palestinian sovereignty? Of course not. The BBC knows, as do the rest of us, that the army never really left Gaza and the occupation never really ended. But you won't hear that from any of its reporters.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
http://www.counterpunch.org/cook06262006.html
Israel won't let Abbas out of Gaza Strip
27/06/2006 - 18:02:10 Israel will not allow Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to leave the Gaza Strip, part of the closure clamped on the territory after the abduction of an Israeli soldier, military officials said today.
Israel will not allow Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to leave the Gaza Strip, part of the closure clamped on the territory after the abduction of an Israeli soldier, military officials said today.
Abbas is in Gaza for talks with the ruling Islamic Hamas over a document that implicitly recognises Israel. The two sides announced an agreement today, but it was overshadowed by the fallout from the Sunday abduction.
http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=187250262&p=y87z5x968
Israeli troops roll into Gaza
Strikes hit bridges, power plant as military seeks soldier's rescue
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/06/27/israel.soldier/index.html
So, Israel plays the same game they have always played. They shell the beach at Gaza, killing innocent people, pretend it didn't happen, then when the Palestinians (so we are told; nobody really knows who carried out this kidnapping) capture an occupying soldier, Israel acts like THIS is the provocation and starts killing everyone and destroying what is left of Gaza.
1. "There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy." Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001
2. "The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".... Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000
3. " [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs." Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982.
4. "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." " Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988
5. "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.
6. "How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.
7. "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969
8. "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war." Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972.
9. David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.
10. Ben Gurion also warned in 1948 : "We must do everything to insure they ( the Palestinians) never do return." Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. "The old will die and the young will forget."
11. "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.
12. "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it." - Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio. (Certainly the FBI's cover-up of the Israeli spy ring/phone tap scandal suggests that Mr. Sharon may not have been joking.)
13. "We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours." Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces - Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.
14. "We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return" David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.
15. "We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai." David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.
16. "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum"
17. "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.
18. "We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.
19. Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters" Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas.
20. "There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish...with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary." Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5.
21. "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them." Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.
22. "It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism,colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of 14 July 1972.
23. "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine,Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.
24. "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." -- Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 [Source: N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1]
25. "We Jews, we are the destroyers and will remain the destroyers. Nothing you can do will meet our demands and needs. We will forever destroy because we want a world of our own." (You Gentiles, by Jewish Author Maurice Samuels, p. 155).
26. "We will have a world government whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that government will be achieved by conquest or consent." (Jewish Banker Paul Warburg, February 17, 1950, as he testified before the U.S. Senate).
27. "We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not...You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world." (Chaim Weizmann, Published in "Judische Rundschau," No. 4, 1920)
War is War, and Captured Soldiers are Captured Soldiers
I don't pretend to be an expert on the Israel/Palestine conflict, but I do know biased reporting when I see it, and the reporting here in the U.S. on that ongoing bloodletting in Palestine is certainly biased in the extreme.
Just look at the latest story, about the capture of an Israeli soldier. Palestinian fighters, allegedly linked to Hamas, in a daring raid, attacked a group of Israeli soldiers near the border of Gaza, killing two and capturing one.
This incident came after a period when the Israeli military has been shelling and rocketing Gaza, quite likely killing a whole family of beachgoers (though the Israeli military claims rather improbably that this was the result of a Hamas mine, not of a shell), and a number of other civilians.
Almost universally in the U.S. media, including on National Public Radio, the captured Israeli soldier is being referred to as a hostage and his capture is referred to as a "kidnapping."
Note that Israeli jails are brimming with captured Palestinian fighters, but this is not called kidnapping, nor are they called "hostages," though they often end up getting their freedom in in exchange for the return of captured Israeli soldiers who are referred to as "hostages," not prisoners.
Take this story in the June 27 issue the New York Times, which states:
"The Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, ordered his security services on Monday to find a kidnapped Israeli soldier in the Gaza Strip...
"...The groups holding him said that before any information would be disclosed, israel must release all Palestinian women in its jails and all Palestinian prisoners under the age of 18."
The same linguistic bias occurs with regularity in the coverage of the Iraq War and occupation, with resistance fighters in Iraq routinely referred to in the U.S. media as "terrorists." On the rare occasions when those "terrorists" have managed to capture a U.S. soldier, those incidents are referred to as "kidnappings," too.
Meanwhile, captured Iraqi fighters are often referred to as criminals when caught, not as prisoners of war.
It is no accident that this perversion of language is occurring. The Pentagon and the Israeli government both use this biased language in their briefings to reporters, and the U.S. media lap it up and recite it uncritically.
The problem with this is that the average American then has a warped perspective on two important conflicts that are profoundly affecting the political and economic situation here at home in the United States. These readers and viewers, by uncritically accepting the abased terminology that is presented to them, end up assuming that the U.S. and Israel are fighting crime and terror in Palestine and Iraq, when in fact both nations are fighting wars against people who, far from being criminals, are for the most part committed fighters who believe they are fighting in defense of their own nations. That is why they fight so hard and so courageously against such overwhelming odds.
How are Americans going to understand the depth and passion of the resistance to U.S. aggression in Iraq, if they are led by the media's misuse of language to believe that our troops are simply fighting bandits and criminals? How are we to understand the interminable horrors of the Israel/Palestine conflict if we are told that it is simply a battle between the good guys (the Israeli Defense Force), and the bad guys (a bunch of Palestinian hoodlums)?
The media should at least be forced to be even-handed. If Palestinians are "kidnapping" Israeli soldiers when they capture them, then the Israelis are "kidnapping" Palestinians when they do the same. Otherwise, let's concede that both are capturing their opponents and holding them prisoner.
And while we're at it, let's start calling Iraqi fighters what they are: resistance fighters, not terrorists.
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/ Israeli "Retaliation" and Double Standards
By JONATHAN COOK
The killing by Palestinian militants of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third from an army post close to the Gaza Strip set the scene for Israeli "reprisals" and "retaliation", according to the reports of BBC correspondents in Israel and Gaza yesterday.
The attack by the Palestinians, who sneaked through tunnels under the electronic fence surrounding Gaza, marked a "major escalation in cross-border tension" (Alan Johnston) that threatened to overturn "a week of progress on two fronts" (John Lyon): namely, the recent talks between Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in Jordan, and between rival Palestinian groups Fatah and Hamas.
Thus, according to the BBC's analysis, this attack ends the immediate chances for "peace" negotiations and provides the context for the next round of the conflict between the Israeli army and the Palestinians of Gaza. We are left to infer that all the suffering the army inflicts in the coming days and weeks should be attributed to this moment of "escalation" by the Palestinians.
We can ignore the weeks of shelling by the Israeli army of Gaza, the firing of hundreds of missiles into the crowded Strip that have destroyed Palestinian lives and property, while spreading terror among the civilian population and deepening the psychological trauma suffered by a generation of children.
We can ignore the deaths of more than 30 civilians, and dozens of horrific injuries, in the past few weeks at the hands of the Israeli military, including three children hit in a botched air strike last week, and a heavily pregnant woman and her doctor brother killed a day later as a missile slammed into the room where they were eating dinner.
We can ignore the blockade of Gaza's "borders" by the Israeli army for months on end, which has prevented Palestinians in the Strip from trading goods at crossing points with Israel and from receiving vital supplies of food and medicines. As a captive population besieged by Israeli soldiers, Gazans are facing a humanitarian catastrophe sanctioned by Israeli government policy and implemented by the Israeli army.
We can ignore Israel's bullying of the international community to connive in the starving of the Hamas-led government of funds and diplomatic room for manoeuvre, thereby preventing the elected Palestinian leadership from running Gaza. So desperate is the situation there that Hamas officials are being forced to smuggle in millions of dollars of cash stuffed in suitcases to pay salaries.
And finally we can ignore the violation of Palestinian territory by Israeli commandos who infiltrated Gaza a day before the Palestinian attack to kidnap two Palestinians Israel claims are terrorists. They have been "disappeared", doubtless to be be held in administrative detention, where they can denied access to lawyers, the courts and, of course, justice.
None of this provides the context for the Palestinian attack on the army post -- any more than, in the BBC's worldview, do the previous four decades of occupation. None is apparently relevant to understanding the Palestinian attack, or for judging the legitimacy of Israel's imminent military "reprisals".
In short, according to the BBC, we can ignore Israel's long-standing policy of unilateralism -- a refusal to negotiate meaningfully with the Palestinians, either the old guard of Fatah or the new one of Hamas -- with its resort to a strategy of collective punishment of Gaza's population to make it submit to the continuing occupation.
In the skewed moral and news priorities of the BBC, the killing of two Israeli soldiers by Palestinian militants -- the "escalation" -- provides a justification for "fierce retaliation" against Gaza, with the inevitable toll on Palestinian civilians and militants alike. The earlier killing of tens of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military, however, is not presented as justification for yesterday's Palestinian retaliation against the army.
In other words, on the scale of moral outrage the BBC ranks the deaths of Israeli soldiers enforcing an illegal occupation far above those of Palestinian civilians enduring the illegal occupation.
There is another notable asymmetry in the BBC's assessment of the "escalation". Participation by the military wing of Hamas in the attack is evidence, suggest the reporters, of the role of the Palestinian leadership in "escalating tension". But the killing by the Israeli army of a Palestinian family of seven on a Gaza beach on June 9, and many more civilians since, was apparently not an "escalation", even though it provoked Hamas to renounce a ceasefire it had maintained for 16 months in the face of continuous Israeli military assaults.
So how is the ordinary viewer to make sense of these events -- the endless "cycle of violence" -- with the BBC as guide. (And the BBC is no worse, and possibly better, than most of other Western broadcasters. At least its reporter Alan Johnston is based in Gaza.)
Not only do its reporters exhibit the biases associated with its institutional racism -- as an organisation, the BBC chooses to identify with Israeli concerns before Palestinian ones -- but they then compound this distortion by repeating uncritically Israel's own misrepresentation of events.
The reporters, like so many of their colleagues, fall into the trap of presenting the conflict through the eyes of the Israeli government, the same government whose prime minister, Ehud Olmert, last week proudly displayed his ethnic chauvinism by setting the suffering of the Jewish residents of Sderot, who face a mostly non-lethal smattering of Palestinian home-made Qassam rockets, far above the rising death toll of Gaza's civilians from the army's constant aerial and artillery bombardment. "I am sorry with all my heart for the residents of Gaza," Olmert said, "but the lives and well-being of Sderot's residents are more important than those of Gaza residents." In other words, a potential threat to a single Jew is more important than the deaths of dozens of Palestinian innocents.
Thus we learn without comment from the BBC that Olmert has denounced the killing of the two soldiers as "terrorism", even though the word cannot describe an attack by an occupied people on an occupying army. How is it possible for a few men with light arms to terrorise one of the most powerful armies in the world? What next: are we to listen sympathetically to claims by the US that its soldiers are being "terrorised" by Iraqi insurgents?
The defence that the BBC is simply reporting Israel's position does not stand up to scrutiny. Is it even conceivable that we might hear a BBC reporter neutrally repeat a Hamas statement that the Israeli army is terrorising Palestinians by reckless shelling civilians in Gaza, even though the word's usage in this case would better satisfy the dictionary definition? The shells most certainly do spread terror among Gaza's civilian population.
We hear too without comment that Olmert is holding both Hamas and the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas responsible for the attack. The BBC dutily repeats Israeli claims that Abbas has the resources to fight "terror" even as the money to pay Palestinian security forces is held by foreign banks unwilling, at Israeli and American behest, to hand it over, and as Hamas and Abbas are locked in battle for control of the Palestinians' shrinking government.
Does common sense not recoil from the suggestion that both Hamas and Abbas can be equally blamed for the attack when the two are bitter rivals for power? Or that either can be held accountable when Israel has refused to negotiate with them or treat them as the genuine representatives of the Palestinian people?
Again, would the BBC report with due solemnity claims by the Palestinians that they hold Olmert and Peretz personally guilty for the civilian deaths in Gaza over the past fortnight, even though in an enlightened world both should be standing trial for war crimes?
Instead, however implausible the Israeli version of reality, the BBC happily sows confusion on behalf of the Israeli army. Like other broadcasters, it credulously reports preposterous arguments seeking to exonerate the Israeli army of responsibility for the shelling of the beach in Gaza that killed a Palestinian family of seven. It treats as equally credible the army's belated version in which Palestinian militants are said to have laid a single mine at a favourite seaside picnic spot in the futile hope of preventing the Israeli navy landing along the Strip's miles of coastline. (In consequence, the BBC excludes the seven dead and dozens of Palestinian injured in that Israeli attack from its list of recent civilian casualties in Gaza).
And both BBC reporters note gravely Israel's concerns that this is the first time Palestinian militants have broken out of the fenced-off Strip since Israel withdrew from Gaza nearly a year ago. Somehow the fact that the Palestinians have briefly escaped from their cage appears to make the attack all the more shocking not only for Israel but for the two reporters.
This attack in Israel, they tell us, is the most serious to date, with the implication that it is therefore illegitimate and part of the same "escalation". Even ignoring the fact that this attack was against Israeli soldiers besieging, imprisoning and shelling the Palestinians of Gaza, does the BBC not to pause to consider the double standard it is applying?
Was the Israeli army's incursion into Gaza a day earlier to capture two alleged Palestinian militants not an equal escalation? Was it not an equal violation of Palestinian sovereignty? Of course not. The BBC knows, as do the rest of us, that the army never really left Gaza and the occupation never really ended. But you won't hear that from any of its reporters.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
http://www.counterpunch.org/cook06262006.html Israel won't let Abbas out of Gaza Strip
27/06/2006 - 18:02:10 Israel will not allow Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to leave the Gaza Strip, part of the closure clamped on the territory after the abduction of an Israeli soldier, military officials said today.
Israel will not allow Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to leave the Gaza Strip, part of the closure clamped on the territory after the abduction of an Israeli soldier, military officials said today.
Abbas is in Gaza for talks with the ruling Islamic Hamas over a document that implicitly recognises Israel. The two sides announced an agreement today, but it was overshadowed by the fallout from the Sunday abduction.
http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=187250262&p=y87z5x968 Israeli troops roll into Gaza
Strikes hit bridges, power plant as military seeks soldier's rescue
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/06/27/israel.soldier/index.html So, Israel plays the same game they have always played. They shell the beach at Gaza, killing innocent people, pretend it didn't happen, then when the Palestinians (so we are told; nobody really knows who carried out this kidnapping) capture an occupying soldier, Israel acts like THIS is the provocation and starts killing everyone and destroying what is left of Gaza.
1. "There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy." Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001
2. "The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".... Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000
3. " [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs." Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982.
4. "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." " Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988
5. "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.
6. "How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.
7. "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969
8. "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war." Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972.
9. David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.
10. Ben Gurion also warned in 1948 : "We must do everything to insure they ( the Palestinians) never do return." Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. "The old will die and the young will forget."
11. "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.
12. "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it." - Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio. (Certainly the FBI's cover-up of the Israeli spy ring/phone tap scandal suggests that Mr. Sharon may not have been joking.)
13. "We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours." Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces - Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.
14. "We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return" David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.
15. "We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai." David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.
16. "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum"
17. "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.
18. "We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.
19. Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters" Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas.
20. "There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish...with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary." Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5.
21. "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them." Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.
22. "It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism,colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of 14 July 1972.
23. "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine,Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.
24. "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." -- Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 [Source: N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1]
25. "We Jews, we are the destroyers and will remain the destroyers. Nothing you can do will meet our demands and needs. We will forever destroy because we want a world of our own." (You Gentiles, by Jewish Author Maurice Samuels, p. 155).
26. "We will have a world government whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that government will be achieved by conquest or consent." (Jewish Banker Paul Warburg, February 17, 1950, as he testified before the U.S. Senate).
27. "We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not...You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world." (Chaim Weizmann, Published in "Judische Rundschau," No. 4, 1920)
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Jack Straw was Blair's racist psychopath monster that made this possible
28.06.2006 11:00
Jack Straw (not his real name, of course, members of the tribe prefer NOT to show their real face when implanting themselves for political advantage), a racist monster beyond all comparison, was tasked with creating the best possible situation for Israel in Europe. It was Straw that worked to ensure that all effective political representation of the Palestinian people was called TERRORIST by the EU, thus allowing the siege and starvation of the Palestinian people when they elected their most recent government.
Earlier in his career, of course, Mandelson was seen in London glorifying EVERY act of Israeli terrorism, and don't forget Goldsmith signed into law Blair's supreme crime, AGGRESSIVE WAR AGAINST IRAQ, that has been responsible for exterminating 500,000+ humans there (mostly muslim).
Straw ensured that the EU matched the US (which may as well be called Greater Israel) in declaring every powerful Palestinian political and social movement a 'terrorist organisation'.
ISRAEL HAS STATED THAT IT WILL MASS MURDER THE POPULATION OF ***ANY*** NATION THAT TAKES ANY OF ITS WAR-CRIMINAL SOLDIERS PRISONER.
ISRAEL HAS STATED THAT IT WILL MASS MURDER THE POPULATION OF ANY NATION THAT ATTEMPTS TO CONFRONT ISRAEL'S PROGRAM OF DEVELOPING WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, INCLUDING NUCLEAR WEAPONS (PROUDLY TARGETED AT CAPITAL CITIES WITHING EUROPE ITSELF), AND GENETIC WEAPONS DESIGNED TO SELECTIVELY MURDER MUSLIM AND ASIAN PEOPLES.
ISRAEL HAS STATED THAT IT WILL MASS MURDER ALL THOSE IN THE VICINITY OF ANY LEADER THAT ATTEMPTS TO BRING ISRAEL TO JUSTICE FOR ITS CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.
ISRAEL HAS STATED THAT ITS TRIBE IS A ***MASTER-RACE***, AND THAT AS A CONSEQUENCE, IT MAY MURDER ANYONE AT ANYTIME THAT IS NOT PART OF THE TRIBE WITH NO PENALTY, BUT THAT ANYONE WHO KILLS A MEMBER OF ITS TRIBE, NO MATTER HOW JUSTIFIED IN LAW, WILL SUFFER MASS MURDER AND DESTRUCTION.
These statements of pure race-hate not only have the full support of Jack Straw, but Jack Straw has made every act humanly possible to ensure that they can be carried out.
Even Hitler did not act the way Israel is acting today in Gaza (in the sense that Hitler's forces killed far fewer in revenge for the death of nazi soldiers than the Israelis do in revenge for their soldiers), and has acted in the past. Israel has hundreds of women and kids in its rape and torture camps. It states that it will MURDER PALESTINIANS WITHOUT LIMIT in order to prevent palestinians from successfully holding EVEN ONE Israeli terrorist criminal in a Palestinian prison.
The laws of the Earth state that an occupied people may fight against the invaders of their land. Straw's success in having Hamas and other organisations fighting Israel terror declared outlaw is OBSCENE PROOF of the power of zionist monsters in Europe.
Did you know that the racist scum that are the EU monitors that are used to ALLOW Palestinain humans to cross their own border in Egypt attacked Palestinian leaders for taking cash into their own land in order to pay their people. THESE SICK PERVERTED RACIST BASTARDS FROM THE EU STATED THAT PALESTINIANS HAVE NO RIGHT TO BYPASS ISRAELI CONTROLLED EUROPEAN AND US BANKS.
The world is in a state far far sicker than when the nazis rose to power. The racism put in place by the tribal supporters of Israel is vastly more powerful and all encompassing than anything seen in nazi times. Leaders of pure evil, like Blair, are able to rise to positions of extraordinary power on the back of this activity, and exploit it in ways no different form Adolf Hitler.
We can have a good world, or we can have an evil world. A good world REQUIRES THE DISMANTLING OF THE RACIST STATE OF ISRAEL, AND COMPENSATION PAID AT LOCKERBIE LEVELS TO EVERY VICTIM OF ISRAELI CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY. The compensation should be extracted from those individuals and companies that have worked to make Israel's crimes possible.
A good world would outlaw the Israeli 'master-race' doctrine, and make it an automatic CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY to state that the life of a member of the 'Israeli tribe' is worth more than any other Human. A good world would make racist regimes like Israel illegal, and ensure that race-hate laws that form the constitution of 'states' like Israel are never again permitted on the planet.
British racists that offer support for Israel are never able to explain why the terrorists of Israel are allowed to carry out such vile crimes against humanity, when the British government did no such similar thing against the Irish people during the conflict there.
Israel entering Gaza is NO DIFFERENT from Saddam entering Kuwait. The consequence of Israel actions should be the total elimination of ALL potential aggressive aspects of Israeli armed forces, including the immediate destruction of Israeli biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons producing facilities. The actual consequences will be the EU and US providing Israel with greater funds, and weapons tech.
What happens when people this sick and twisted rule our world? What happens when any 'master-race' evil, nazis or Israelis and their supporters, are allowed to pervert the rules we live by?
THE BBC SMIRKINGLY REPORTS THAT ISRAEL HAS KILLED GUNMEN OR MILITANTS WHENEVER A EU/US FUNDED ISREAL TERRORIST BOMB BLOWS UP PALESTINIAN KIDDIES, WOMEN, AND DOCTORS.
THE BBC REPORTS WITH LOOKS OF HORROR, WHEN PALESTINIANS 'KIDNAP A YOUNG ISREALI SOLDIER'.
The newspapers of Israel itself do not report the news in such a sick racist fashion as the BBC.
What happened recently when a terrorist Israel operation, co-ordinated with the British at the highest level, invaded Palestinian territory, in order to attack a prison, slaughter the innocent guards working there (under an agreement with the EU) and kidnap Palestinians?
AS RACISTS, THE ISRAELIS AND THEIR SUPPORTERS DON'T JUST TALK TRASH, LIKE THE BNP, THEY DAILY ACT TO PROVE THEIR RACIST DOMINANCE, AND SLAUGHTER, TERRORISE, STARVE AND HURT OTHER HUMANS, JUST FOR BEING OUTSIDE THE TRIBE.
As Israel indulges in EVERY form of racist crime, they do so in the knowledge that their is a near 100% certainty that their people will be in a position of power to censor comment such as mine. Hitler, and the nazis used the same trick, using a network of nazi supporters far beyond formal nazi territory to eliminate the public profile of all anti-nazi comment.
When comment such has mine has then been successfully censored by pro-Israeli terrorists, the same people then ensure that comment appears suggesting that Straw should be invited to lead anti-Iran war activities.
Straw, Mandelson, and Goldsmith are a small part of Blair's own Neocons, tireless workers in the cause of racist genocide. Hitler wanted a solution to the 'jewish problem' but it was his Neocons, not him, that were left to create the practical systems of genocide. The same relationship exists between Blair, and racist horrors like Straw, and those that control Israel.
Some of you are trained by Israeli propagandists (ie., everyone that speaks loudly in the British media, especially the BBC and ITN) to say "what could the EU do anyway". Here's a suggestion. ANYONE INVOLVED IN THE INVASION OF GAZA, INCLUDING THOSE IN POSITIONS OF PLANNING, MILITARY SUPPORT, OR OF ANY RANK IN THE iSRAELI GOVERNMENT, SHOULD BE DECLARED TERRORIST, AND SUBJECT TO IMMEDIATE ARREST IF THEY ATTEMPT TO ENTER ANY PART OF THE EU. Why would this work? Because Israel doesn't, in the true sense, have a population. Those that run Israel are actually EU and US citizens, and Israel merely serves as a tribal meeting ground. The so-called 'soldier' taken prisoner in Gaza is a french citizen whose very presence in the Israel 'army' is a terrorist act against the displaced population of Palestine.
The EU nations daily arrest those muslims that, with every moral justification, seek to travel to Iraq to help the Iraq people defeat the terrorist invaders. However, EU citizens can, and do, travel to Israel for the purpose of rape, torture and murder, and suffer no penalty whatsoever.
The situation with Israel is as black-and-white as it was with nazi Germany. Blair loves this distant evil, for its continued existence corrupts all of us, and allows Blair to use the hyprocrisy to inject pure evil into the heart of our nation. For Blair, the racist evil of Israel is a means to an end. If the BBC spews such vile propaganda in support of every Israeli crime, it will be well practised to do the same for Blair's crimes. It is a neat trade-off. Blair supports the atrocities of Israel, and in gratitude, members of Israel's tribe give Blair every useful service from the Mass Media that they control so ruthlessly in the West. In reality, only Blair will benefit in the end, for the racists of Israel are too few in numbers to survive the armageddon they help Blair bring to this planet.
Oh, and by the way, time to look at the racist comment excreted by your favourite media outlet. Time to be honest with yourself, allow the racists to identify themselves once and for all, and give up on the mass media. JUSTICE IS BALANCE. Where there is no balance, there is no justice. The attack by Israel into Gaza is 100% evil, and any person that fails to say this when commenting on the situation reveals themselves to racists that glory in the idea of a 'master-race' and 'inferior' humans that can be slaughtered like cattle.
THERE IS ONLY ONE NON-RACIST POSITION. IF THE ISRAELIS CAN HOLD PALESTINIANS PRISONER, THE PALESTINIANS CAN HOLD ISRAELIS PRISONER. IF THE ISRAELIS WANT NONE OF THEIR PEOPLE TO BE HELD BY PALESTINIANS, THEY MUST RELEASE ***ALL*** PALESTINIAN PRISONERS THAT THEY HOLD.
Any other position stated by anyone is racist, and thus against the rules of Indymedia UK. This is not a matter of opinion, mine or anyone elses. This is a simple matter of logic, when applied to the concept of non-racist justice.
I want a non-racist world. My words are frequently censored by those that actively work on behalf of racist criminals, so that members of a so-called 'master-race' may exclude themselves from all Human standards of decency. Support of Israel in its current political form is infinitely worse than support of the BNP or any other overtly racist organisation. The BNP is simply 99.9999% hot air, as nothing more than a Blair controlled front to manipulate UK politics. Israel daily proves the sickening racist nature of the state, by indulging in the worst crimes of race hate seen since the days of nazi power.
Blair glorifies Israeli race hate whenever he can. One of the excuses Blair gave for genociding Iraq was that Iraq gave money to the widow and family of Palestinian fighters murdered by Israel. BLAIR STATED THAT IF ISRAEL IDENTIFIED A FALLEN PALESTINIAN FIGHTER, IT WAS ENTITLED TO DESTROY THOSE BUILDINGS THAT THE FIGHTER HAD ONCE LIVED IN, AND DESTROY THE POSSESSIONS OF THOSE FAMILIES FOUND WITHIN THAT BUILDING. ISRAEL WAS ENTITLED TO MURDER ANY AND ALL PALESTINIANS THAT ATTEMPTED TO PROTECT THEIR HOME. BLAIR WENT ON TO SAY THAT ANY MUSLIM THAT GAVE MONEY TO THE SURVIVORS OF THIS ISRAELI CRIME-AGAINST-HUMANITY (FOR THAT IS HOW INTERNATIONAL LAW DESCRIBES SUCH HOME DEMOLITION) WOULD BE A TERRORIST.
It is a fact that Blair has directly caused the murder of 500,000+ humans in Iraq in direct support of Israel's right to carry out war-crimes by demolishing the former homes of fallen Palestinian fighters.
Where did Blair state this? In a f**king speech in the House of Commons. Saddam giving money to those that had had their homes destroyed by an Israeli war crime was justification for Blair's genocide of Iraq. And for pointing this out, there are those screaming CENSOR HIM, CENSOR HIM, FOR GOD SAKE DO NOT ALLOW HIM TO CLEARLY IDENTIFY THE LINK BETWEEN BLAIR, THE RACIST WAR-CRIMES OF ISRAEL, AND THE MASS MURDER OF MUSLIMS IN CHECHNYA, AFGHANISTAN, AND SOON IRAN.
Why was Hitler not stopped in time. Was he too sneaky, or too good at hiding his intents and his actions? Hitler was as 'in your face' as it is possible to imagine with respect to his plans and crimes. Yes, like Israel, his propaganda masters daily stated "we are a master-race, and thus allowed to act as we please against those we identify as inferior". But Hitler's main trick was to be bold and out-spoken.
Likewise, there is no attempt to fool any of you over the racist crimes of Israel. These crimes are carried out with the same pride and publicity as any crime of Hitler. Power in the service of true evil is never retiring or hidden. It challenges us, laughing knowing that we will make every excuse to back down, or turn away. Of course, the longer we fail to act, the more unpleasant it will be when we final do confront the evil.
JUSTICE IS BALANCE. Unlike the Israeli cowards, who terror bomb muslim civilian city streets from safe flying machines provided and paid for by US racists, or who only attack palestinians when Israeli forces have a military advantage thousands to one in their favour (why are those that call themselves 'master-races' always such moral degenerates and cowards), the palestinian attack against the Israeli military was a pure example of balance. Now Israeli terrorists are engaged in a program of terrorising hundreds of thousands of civilians in Gaza, in a BLAIR-BACKED act of pure state terrorism.
This reminds me of when Israeli armed and supported Serb terrorists were on the verge of genocide in Srebrenica, while EU forces, that had previously kept the muslims population of that town prisoner, and had stripped them of all their arms, sat back and laughed. YES, ISRAEL WAS THE NUMBER ONE POLITICAL FRIEND OF SERBIA AT THAT MOMENT IN HISTORY. Just as Israel provided apartheid South Africa with nuclear tech so that they were able to build nuclear weapons in readiness to genocide the black majority if they so wished. Just as Israel armed and trained the forces of Idi Amin before they fell out with him.
Will Israel mass murder thousands in Gaza. Well, they'd certain love to, but an accurate consideration of all current events suggests that events are being manipulated to allow a mock settlement for the Palestinians, in readiness for Blair seeking general muslim support for his genocide of Iran. Blair would love to say to his Israel friends "murder them all", but getting ready for the Iran war is all that matters at the moment. Attacking the Hamas government of Palestine is starting to look seriously counter-productive, and wider political activity suggests an imminent settlement between the EU, US, Israel, and the Palestinian authorities.
Thus, Israel gets to flex its military muscles, Blair gets to pat these racist mass-murders on the back, and the Palestinians get to be treated like third-rate crap, and told to thank us for this. Where is gets real nasty is that Blair is constantly telling the Israelis to have just a little more patience, for soon they will be able to apply their chosen 'final solution' to the Palestinian problem. You see, 'master-race' sickness will ALWAYS end up with the same final consequences- GENOCIDE. Support the nazis and Adolf Hitler, and you supported genocide. Support Blair and the Israelis, and you support genocide.
twilight
MODERATOR!!!!!!!
28.06.2006 12:35
Oh Dear - Members of the Tribe - surely, even by Indymedia's standards, this must be removed, Twilight has again shown himself for the Jew-hater he is.
Smash Racism - Ban Twilight from Indymedia
Twilight Is Quite Right
28.06.2006 13:27
September 6, 2004
Dual Loyalties
The Bush Neocons and Israel
By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
Former CIA political analysts
[Editors' Note: This is a slightly revised version of essay that originally appeared in CounterPunch in December 2002. The piece also appeared in The Politics of Anti-Semitism.]
Since the long-forgotten days when the State Department's Middle East policy was run by a group of so-called Arabists, U.S. policy on Israel and the Arab world has increasingly become the purview of officials well known for tilting toward Israel. From the 1920s roughly to 1990, Arabists, who had a personal history and an educational background in the Arab world and were accused by supporters of Israel of being totally biased toward Arab interests, held sway at the State Department and, despite having limited power in the policymaking circles of any administration, helped maintain some semblance of U.S. balance by keeping policy from tipping over totally toward Israel. But Arabists have been steadily replaced by their exact opposites, what some observers are calling Israelists, and policymaking circles throughout government now no longer even make a pretense of exhibiting balance between Israeli and Arab, particularly Palestinian, interests.
In the Clinton administration, the three most senior State Department officials dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli peace process were all partisans of Israel to one degree or another. All had lived at least for brief periods in Israel and maintained ties with Israel while in office, occasionally vacationing there. One of these officials had worked both as a pro-Israel lobbyist and as director of a pro-Israel think tank in Washington before taking a position in the Clinton administration from which he helped make policy on Palestinian-Israeli issues. Another has headed the pro-Israel think tank since leaving government.
The link between active promoters of Israeli interests and policymaking circles is stronger by several orders of magnitude in the Bush administration, which is peppered with people who have long records of activism on behalf of Israel in the United States, of policy advocacy in Israel, and of promoting an agenda for Israel often at odds with existing U.S. policy. These people, who can fairly be called Israeli loyalists, are now at all levels of government, from desk officers at the Defense Department to the deputy secretary level at both State and Defense, as well as on the National Security Council staff and in the vice president's office.
We still tiptoe around putting a name to this phenomenon. We write articles about the neo-conservatives' agenda on U.S.-Israeli relations and imply that in the neo-con universe there is little light between the two countries. We talk openly about the Israeli bias in the U.S. media. We make wry jokes about Congress being "Israeli-occupied territory." Jason Vest in The Nation magazine reported forthrightly that some of the think tanks that hold sway over Bush administration thinking see no difference between U.S. and Israeli national security interests. But we never pronounce the particular words that best describe the real meaning of those observations and wry remarks. It's time, however, that we say the words out loud and deal with what they really signify.
Dual loyalties. The issue we are dealing with in the Bush administration is dual loyalties -- the double allegiance of those myriad officials at high and middle levels who cannot distinguish U.S. interests from Israeli interests, who baldly promote the supposed identity of interests between the United States and Israel, who spent their early careers giving policy advice to right-wing Israeli governments and now give the identical advice to a right-wing U.S. government, and who, one suspects, are so wrapped up in their concern for the fate of Israel that they honestly do not know whether their own passion about advancing the U.S. imperium is motivated primarily by America-first patriotism or is governed first and foremost by a desire to secure Israel's safety and predominance in the Middle East through the advancement of the U.S. imperium.
"Dual loyalties" has always been one of those red flags posted around the subject of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, something that induces horrified gasps and rapid heartbeats because of its implication of Jewish disloyalty to the United States and the common assumption that anyone who would speak such a canard is ipso facto an anti-Semite. (We have a Jewish friend who is not bothered by the term in the least, who believes that U.S. and Israeli interests should be identical and sees it as perfectly natural for American Jews to feel as much loyalty to Israel as they do to the United States. But this is clearly not the usual reaction when the subject of dual loyalties arises.)
Although much has been written about the neo-cons who dot the Bush administration, the treatment of the their ties to Israel has generally been very gingerly. Although much has come to light recently about the fact that ridding Iraq both of its leader and of its weapons inventory has been on the neo-con agenda since long before there was a Bush administration, little has been said about the link between this goal and the neo-cons' overriding desire to provide greater security for Israel. But an examination of the cast of characters in Bush administration policymaking circles reveals a startlingly pervasive network of pro-Israel activists, and an examination of the neo-cons' voluminous written record shows that Israel comes up constantly as a neo-con reference point, always mentioned with the United States as the beneficiary of a recommended policy, always linked with the United States when national interests are at issue.
The Begats
First to the cast of characters. Beneath cabinet level, the list of pro-Israel neo-cons who are either policy functionaries themselves or advise policymakers from perches just on the edges of government reads like the old biblical "begats." Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz leads the pack. He was a protégé of Richard Perle, who heads the prominent Pentagon advisory body, the Defense Policy Board. Many of today's neo-cons, including Perle, are the intellectual progeny of the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a strong defense hawk and one of Israel's most strident congressional supporters in the 1970s.
Wolfowitz in turn is the mentor of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, now Vice President Cheney's chief of staff who was first a student of Wolfowitz and later a subordinate during the 1980s in both the State and the Defense Departments. Another Perle protégé is Douglas Feith, who is currently undersecretary of defense for policy, the department's number-three man, and has worked closely with Perle both as a lobbyist for Turkey and in co-authoring strategy papers for right-wing Israeli governments. Assistant Secretaries Peter Rodman and Dov Zackheim, old hands from the Reagan administration when the neo-cons first flourished, fill out the subcabinet ranks at Defense. At lower levels, the Israel and the Syria/Lebanon desk officers at Defense are imports from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank spun off from the pro-Israel lobby organization, AIPAC.
Neo-cons have not made many inroads at the State Department, except for John Bolton, an American Enterprise Institute hawk and Israeli proponent who is said to have been forced on a reluctant Colin Powell as undersecretary for arms control. Bolton's special assistant is David Wurmser, who wrote and/or co-authored with Perle and Feith at least two strategy papers for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1996. Wurmser's wife, Meyrav Wurmser, is a co-founder of the media-watch website MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), which is run by retired Israeli military and intelligence officers and specializes in translating and widely circulating Arab media and statements by Arab leaders. A recent investigation by the Guardian of London found that MEMRI's translations are skewed by being highly selective. Although it inevitably translates and circulates the most extreme of Arab statements, it ignores moderate Arab commentary and extremist Hebrew statements.
In the vice president's office, Cheney has established his own personal national security staff, run by aides known to be very pro-Israel. The deputy director of the staff, John Hannah, is a former fellow of the Israeli-oriented Washington Institute. On the National Security Council staff, the newly appointed director of Middle East affairs is Elliott Abrams, who came to prominence after pleading guilty to withholding information from Congress during the Iran-contra scandal (and was pardoned by President Bush the elder) and who has long been a vocal proponent of right-wing Israeli positions. Putting him in a key policymaking position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is like entrusting the henhouse to a fox.
Pro-Israel activists with close links to the administration are also busy in the information arena inside and outside government. The head of Radio Liberty, a Cold War propaganda holdover now converted to service in the "war on terror," is Thomas Dine, who was the very active head of AIPAC throughout most of the Reagan and the Bush-41 administrations. Elsewhere on the periphery, William Kristol, son of neo-con originals Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, is closely linked to the administration's pro-Israel coterie and serves as its cheerleader through the Rupert Murdoch-owned magazine that he edits, The Weekly Standard. Some of Bush's speechwriters -- including David Frum, who coined the term "axis of evil" for Bush's state-of-the-union address but was forced to resign when his wife publicly bragged about his linguistic prowess -- have come from The Weekly Standard. Frank Gaffney, another Jackson and Perle protégé and Reagan administration defense official, puts his pro-Israel oar in from his think tank, the Center for Security Policy, and through frequent media appearances and regular columns in the Washington Times.
The incestuous nature of the proliferating boards and think tanks, whose membership lists are more or less identical and totally interchangeable, is frighteningly insidious. Several scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, including former Reagan UN ambassador and long-time supporter of the Israeli right wing Jeane Kirkpatrick, make their pro-Israel views known vocally from the sidelines and occupy positions on other boards. Probably the most important organization, in terms of its influence on Bush administration policy formulation, is the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Formed after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war specifically to bring Israel's security concerns to the attention of U.S. policymakers and concentrating also on broad defense issues, the extremely hawkish, right-wing JINSA has always had a high-powered board able to place its members inside conservative U.S. administrations. Cheney, Bolton, and Feith were members until they entered the Bush administration. Several lower level JINSA functionaries are now working in the Defense Department. Perle is still a member, as are Kirkpatrick, former CIA director and leading Iraq-war hawk James Woolsey, and old-time rabid pro-Israel types like Eugene Rostow and Michael Ledeen. Both JINSA and Gaffney's Center for Security Policy are heavily underwritten by Irving Moskowitz, a right-wing American Zionist, California business magnate (his money comes from bingo parlors), and JINSA board member who has lavishly financed the establishment of several religious settlements in Arab East Jerusalem.
By Their Own Testimony
Most of the neo-cons now in government have left a long paper trail giving clear evidence of their fervently right-wing pro-Israel, and fervently anti-Palestinian, sentiments. Whether being pro-Israel, even pro right-wing Israel, constitutes having dual loyalties -- that is, a desire to further Israel's interests that equals or exceeds the desire to further U.S. interests -- is obviously not easy to determine, but the record gives some clues.
Wolfowitz himself has been circumspect in public, writing primarily about broader strategic issues rather than about Israel specifically or even the Middle East, but it is clear that at bottom Israel is a major interest and may be the principal reason for his near obsession with the effort, of which he is the primary spearhead, to dump Saddam Hussein, remake the Iraqi government in an American image, and then further redraw the Middle East map by accomplishing the same goals in Syria, Iran, and perhaps other countries. Profiles of Wolfowitz paint him as having two distinct aspects: one obessively bent on advancing U.S. dominance throughout the world, ruthless and uncompromising, seriously prepared to "end states," as he once put it, that support terrorism in any way, a velociraptor in the words of one former colleague cited in the Economist; the other a softer aspect, which shows him to be a soft-spoken political moralist, an ardent democrat, even a bleeding heart on social issues, and desirous for purely moral and humanitarian reasons of modernizing and democratizing the Islamic world.
But his interest in Israel always crops up. Even profiles that downplay his attachment to Israel nonetheless always mention the influence the Holocaust, in which several of his family perished, has had on his thinking. One source inside the administration has described him frankly as "over-the-top crazy when it comes to Israel." Although this probably accurately describes most of the rest of the neo-con coterie, and Wolfowitz is guilty at least by association, he is actually more complex and nuanced than this. A recent New York Times Magazine profile by the Times' Bill Keller cites critics who say that "Israel exercises a powerful gravitational pull on the man" and notes that as a teenager Wolfowitz lived in Israel during his mathematician father's sabbatical semester there. His sister is married to an Israeli. Keller even somewhat reluctantly acknowledges the accuracy of one characterization of Wolfowitz as "Israel-centric." But Keller goes through considerable contortions to shun what he calls "the offensive suggestion of dual loyalty" and in the process makes one wonder if he is protesting too much. Keller concludes that Wolfowitz is less animated by the security of Israel than by the promise of a more moderate Islam. He cites as evidence Wolfowitz's admiration for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel and also draws on a former Wolfowitz subordinate who says that "as a moral man, he might have found Israel the heart of the Middle East story. But as a policy maker, Turkey and the gulf and Egypt didn't loom any less large for him."
These remarks are revealing. Anyone not so fearful of broaching the issue of dual loyalties might at least have raised the suggestion that Wolfowitz's real concern may indeed be to ensure Israel's security. Otherwise, why do his overriding interests seem to be reinventing Anwar Sadats throughout the Middle East by transforming the Arab and Muslim worlds and thereby making life safer for Israel, and a passion for fighting a pre-emptive war against Iraq -- when there are critical areas totally apart from the Middle East and myriad other broad strategic issues that any deputy secretary of defense should be thinking about just as much? His current interest in Turkey, which is shared by the other neo-cons, some of whom have served as lobbyists for Turkey, seems also to be directed at securing Israel's place in the region; there seems little reason for particular interest in this moderate Islamic, non-Arab country, other than that it is a moderate Islamic but non-Arab neighbor of Israel. Furthermore, the notion suggested by the Wolfowitz subordinate that any moral man would obviously look to Israel as the "heart of the Middle East story" is itself an Israel-centered idea: the assumption that Israel is a moral state, always pursuing moral policies, and that any moral person would naturally attach himself to Israel automatically presumes that there is an identity of interests between the United States and Israel; only those who assume such a complete coincidence of interests accept the notion that Israel is, across the board, a moral state.
Others among the neo-con policymakers have been more direct and open in expressing their pro-Israel views. Douglas Feith has been the most prolific of the group, with a two-decade-long record of policy papers, many co-authored with Perle, propounding a strongly anti-Palestinian, pro-Likud view. He views the Palestinians as not constituting a legitimate national group, believes that the West Bank and Gaza belong to Israel by right, and has long advocated that the U.S. abandon any mediating effort altogether and particularly foreswear the land-for-peace formula.
In 1996, Feith, Perle, and both David and Meyrav Wurmser were among the authors of a policy paper issued by an Israeli think tank and written for newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that urged Israel to make a "clean break" from pursuit of the peace process, particularly its land-for-peace aspects, which the authors regarded as a prescription for Israel's annihilation. Arabs must rather accept a "peace-for-peace" formula through unconditional acceptance of Israel's rights, including its territorial rights in the occupied territories. The paper advocated that Israel "engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism" by disengaging from economic and political dependence on the U.S. while maintaining a more "mature," self-reliant partnership with the U.S. not focused "narrowly on territorial disputes." Greater self-reliance would, these freelance policymakers told Netanyahu, give Israel "greater freedom of action and remove a significant lever of pressure [i.e., U.S. pressure] used against it in the past."
The paper advocated, even as far back as 1996, containment of the threat against Israel by working closely with -- guess who? -- Turkey, as well as with Jordan, apparently regarded as the only reliably moderate Arab regime. Jordan had become attractive for these strategists because it was at the time working with opposition elements in Iraq to reestablish a Hashemite monarchy there that would have been allied by blood lines and political leanings to the Hashemite throne in Jordan. The paper's authors saw the principal threat to Israel coming, we should not be surprised to discover now, from Iraq and Syria and advised that focusing on the removal of Saddam Hussein would kill two birds with one stone by also thwarting Syria's regional ambitions. In what amounts to a prelude to the neo-cons' principal policy thrust in the Bush administration, the paper spoke frankly of Israel's interest in overturning the Iraqi leadership and replacing it with a malleable monarchy. Referring to Saddam Hussein's ouster as "an important Israeli strategic objective," the paper observed that "Iraq's future could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly" -- meaning give Israel unquestioned predominance in the region. The authors urged therefore that Israel support the Hashemites in their "efforts to redefine Iraq."
In a much longer policy document written at about the same time for the same Israeli think tank, David Wurmser repeatedly linked the U.S. and Israel when talking about national interests in the Middle East. The "battle to dominate and define Iraq," he wrote "is, by extension, the battle to dominate the balance of power in the Levant over the long run," and "the United States and Israel" can fight this battle together. Repeated references to U.S. and Israeli strategic policy, pitted against a "Saudi-Iraqi-Syrian-Iranian-PLO axis," and to strategic moves that establish a balance of power in which the United States and Israel are ascendant, in alliance with Turkey and Jordan, betray a thought process that cannot separate U.S. from Israeli interests.
Perle gave further impetus to this thrust when six years later, in September 2002, he gave a briefing for Pentagon officials that included a slide depicting a recommended strategic goal for the U.S. in the Middle East: all of Palestine as Israel, Jordan as Palestine, and Iraq as the Hashemite kingdom. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld seems to have taken this aboard, since he spoke at about the same time of the West Bank and Gaza as the "so-called occupied territories" -- effectively turning all of Palestine into Israel.
Elliott Abrams is another unabashed supporter of the Israeli right, now bringing his links with Israel into the service of U.S. policymaking on Palestinian-Israeli issues. The neo-con community is crowing about Abrams' appointment as Middle East director on the NSC staff (where this Iran-contra criminal has already been working since mid-2001, badly miscast as the director for, of all things, democracy and human rights). The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes has hailed his appointment as a decisive move that neatly cocks a snook at the pro-Palestinian wimps at the State Department. Accurately characterizing Abrams as "more pro-Israel, less solicitous of Palestinians" than the State Department and strongly opposed to the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, Barnes gloats that the Abrams triumph signals that the White House will not cede control of Middle East policy to Colin Powell and the "foreign service bureaucrats." Abrams comes to the post after a year in which it had effectively been left vacant. His predecessor, Zalmay Khalilzad, has been serving concurrently as Bush's personal representative to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban and has devoted little time to the NSC job, but several attempts to appoint a successor early this year were vetoed by neo-con hawks who felt the appointees were not devoted enough to Israel.
Although Abrams has no particular Middle East expertise, he has managed to insert himself in the Middle East debate repeatedly over the years. He has a family interest in propounding a pro-Israel view; he is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, one of the original neo-cons and a long-time strident supporter of right-wing Israeli causes as editor of Commentary magazine, and Midge Decter, a frequent right-wing commentator. Abrams has written a good deal on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, opposing U.S. mediation and any effort to press for Israeli concessions. In an article published in advance of the 2000 elections, he propounded a rationale for a U.S. missile defense system, and a foreign policy agenda in general, geared almost entirely toward ensuring Israel's security. "It is a simple fact," he wrote, that the possession of missiles and weapons of mass destruction by Iraq and Iran vastly increases Israel's vulnerability, and this threat would be greatly diminished if the U.S. provided a missile shield and brought about the demise of Saddam Hussein. He concluded with a wholehearted assertion of the identity of U.S. and Israeli interests: "The next decade will present enormous opportunities to advance American interests in the Middle East [by] boldly asserting our support of our friends" -- that is, of course, Israel. Many of the fundamental negotiating issues critical to Israel, he said, are also critical to U.S. policy in the region and "require the United States to defend its interests and allies" rather than giving in to Palestinian demands.
Neo-cons in the Henhouse
The neo-con strategy papers half a dozen years ago were dotted with concepts like "redefining Iraq," "redrawing the map of the Middle East," "nurturing alternatives to Arafat," all of which have in recent months become familiar parts of the Bush administration's diplomatic lingo. Objectives laid out in these papers as important strategic goals for Israel -- including the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the strategic transformation of the entire Middle East, the death of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, regime change wherever the U.S. and Israel don't happen to like the existing government, the abandonment of any effort to forge a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace or even a narrower Palestinian-Israeli peace -- have now become, under the guidance of this group of pro-Israel neo-cons, important strategic goals for the United States. The enthusiasm with which senior administration officials like Bush himself, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have adopted strategic themes originally defined for Israel's guidance -- and did so in many cases well before September 11 and the so-called war on terror -- testifies to the persuasiveness of a neo-con philosophy focused narrowly on Israel and the pervasiveness of the network throughout policymaking councils.
Does all this add up to dual loyalties to Israel and the United States? Many would still contend indignantly that it does not, and that it is anti-Semitic to suggest such a thing. In fact, zealous advocacy of Israel's causes may be just that -- zealotry, an emotional connection to Israel that still leaves room for primary loyalty to the United States -- and affection for Israel is not in any case a sentiment limited to Jews. But passion and emotion -- and, as George Washington wisely advised, a passionate attachment to any country -- have no place in foreign policy formulation, and it is mere hair-splitting to suggest that a passionate attachment to another country is not loyalty to that country. Zealotry clouds judgment, and emotion should never be the basis for policymaking.
Zealotry can lead to extreme actions to sustain policies, as is apparently occurring in the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith Defense Department. People knowledgeable of the intelligence community have said, according to a recent article in The American Prospect, that the CIA is under tremendous pressure to produce intelligence more supportive of war with Iraq -- as one former CIA official put it, "to support policies that have already been adopted." Key Defense Department officials, including Feith, are said to be attempting to make the case for pre-emptive war by producing their own unverified intelligence. Wolfowitz betrayed his lack of concern for real evidence when, in answer to a recent question about where the evidence is for Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, he replied, "It's like the judge said about pornography. I can't define it, but I will know it when I see it."
Zealotry can also lead to a myopic focus on the wrong issues in a conflict or crisis, as is occurring among all Bush policymakers with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The administration's obsessive focus on deposing Yasir Arafat, a policy suggested by the neo-cons years before Bush came to office, is a dodge and a diversion that merely perpetuates the conflict by failing to address its real roots. Advocates of this policy fail or refuse to see that, however unappealing the Palestinian leadership, it is not the cause of the conflict, and "regime change" among the Palestinians will do nothing to end the violence. The administration's utter refusal to engage in any mediation process that might produce a stable, equitable peace, also a neo-con strategy based on the paranoid belief that any peace involving territorial compromise will spell the annihilation of Israel, will also merely prolong the violence. Zealotry produces blindness: the zealous effort to pursue Israel's right-wing agenda has blinded the dual loyalists in the administration to the true face of Israel as occupier, to any concern for justice or equity and any consideration that interests other than Israel's are involved, and indeed to any pragmatic consideration that continued unquestioning accommodation of Israel, far from bringing an end to violence, will actually lead to its tragic escalation and to increased terrorism against both the United States and Israel.
What does it matter, in the end, if these men split their loyalties between the United States and Israel? Apart from the evidence of the policy distortions that arise from zealotry, one need only ask whether it can be mere coincidence that those in the Bush administration who most strongly promote "regime change" in Iraq are also those who most strongly support the policies of the Israeli right wing. And would it bother most Americans to know that the United States is planning a war against Iraq for the benefit of Israel? Can it be mere coincidence, for example, that Vice President Cheney, now the leading senior-level proponent of war with Iraq, repudiated just this option for all the right reasons in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War in 1991? He was defense secretary at the time, and in an interview with the New York Times on April 13, 1991, he said:
"If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you will do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Ba'athists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists. How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for the government, and what happens to it once we leave?"
Since Cheney clearly changed his mind between 1991 and today, is it not legitimate to ask why, and whether Israel might have a greater influence over U.S. foreign policy now than it had in 1991? After all, notwithstanding his wisdom in rejecting an expansion of the war on Iraq a decade ago, Cheney was just as interested in promoting U.S. imperialism and was at that same moment in the early 1990s outlining a plan for world domination by the United States, one that did not include conquering Iraq at any point along the way. The only new ingredient in the mix today that is inducing Cheney to begin the march to U.S. world domination by conquering Iraq is the presence in the Bush-Cheney administration of a bevy of aggressive right-wing neo-con hawks who have long backed the Jewish fundamentalists of Israel's own right wing and who have been advocating some move on Iraq for at least the last half dozen years.
The suggestion that the war with Iraq is being planned at Israel's behest, or at the instigation of policymakers whose main motivation is trying to create a secure environment for Israel, is strong. Many Israeli analysts believe this. The Israeli commentator Akiva Eldar recently observed frankly in a Ha'aretz column that Perle, Feith, and their fellow strategists "are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments and Israeli interests." The suggestion of dual loyalties is not a verboten subject in the Israeli press, as it is in the United States. Peace activist Uri Avnery, who knows Israeli Prime Minister Sharon well, has written that Sharon has long planned grandiose schemes for restructuring the Middle East and that "the winds blowing now in Washington remind me of Sharon. I have absolutely no proof that the Bushies got their ideas from him . But the style is the same."
The dual loyalists in the Bush administration have given added impetus to the growth of a messianic strain of Christian fundamentalism that has allied itself with Israel in preparation for the so-called End of Days. These crazed fundamentalists see Israel's domination over all of Palestine as a necessary step toward fulfillment of the biblical Millennium, consider any Israeli relinquishment of territory in Palestine as a sacrilege, and view warfare between Jews and Arabs as a divinely ordained prelude to Armageddon. These right-wing Christian extremists have a profound influence on Bush and his administration, with the result that the Jewish fundamentalists working for the perpetuation of Israel's domination in Palestine and the Christian fundamentalists working for the Millennium strengthen and reinforce each other's policies in administration councils. The Armageddon that Christian Zionists seem to be actively promoting and that Israeli loyalists inside the administration have tactically allied themselves with raises the horrifying but very real prospect of an apocalyptic Christian-Islamic war. The neo-cons seem unconcerned, and Bush's occasional pro forma remonstrations against blaming all Islam for the sins of Islamic extremists do nothing to make this prospect less likely.
These two strains of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism have dovetailed into an agenda for a vast imperial project to restructure the Middle East, all further reinforced by the happy coincidence of great oil resources up for grabs and a president and vice president heavily invested in oil. All of these factors -- the dual loyalties of an extensive network of policymakers allied with Israel, the influence of a fanatical wing of Christian fundamentalists, and oil -- probably factor in more or less equally to the administration's calculations on the Palestinian-Israeli situation and on war with Iraq. But the most critical factor directing U.S. policymaking is the group of Israeli loyalists: neither Christian fundamentalist support for Israel nor oil calculations would carry the weight in administration councils that they do without the pivotal input of those loyalists, who clearly know how to play to the Christian fanatics and undoubtedly also know that their own and Israel's bread is buttered by the oil interests of people like Bush and Cheney. This is where loyalty to Israel by government officials colors and influences U.S. policymaking in ways that are extremely dangerous.
Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades, CounterPunch's new history of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kathleen Christison, a former CIA political analyst, is the author of Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy and Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story.
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