The only way to achieve true and lasting peace is to admit the crimes of the past, committed by the Zionist Extremists controlling Israel, take their power and prominence away, and honestly seek to make amends with Israel's neighbouring human beings.
Here's hoping the shifting tides will enable the People of the world to denounce the Extremists & Neo-Fascists who have brought us to the brink, before they decide to attack us again, in order to Rule By Fear and regain their military support.
Here's hoping the shifting tides will enable the People of the world to denounce the Extremists & Neo-Fascists who have brought us to the brink, before they decide to attack us again, in order to Rule By Fear and regain their military support.
The State without Shame/Olmert Extremists Nix End Of W. Bank Occupation
The State without Shame
William A. Cook
August 18, 2006
As I watched Ambassador Daniel Gillerman of Israel at the final proceedings of the United Nations Security Council last week, I remembered how Henry David Thoreau described meeting his government: "I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year – no more – in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it…" Today, ordinary citizens meet their representative via generalized statements issued on their behalf: "The Congress today issued …," or "The White House today announced …," or "White House spokesman, Tony Snow, announced…," or Representative _______ met today with Tim Russert on 'Meet the Press’." In general, the ordinary citizen no longer meets a representative "face to face." But I did meet Israel’s government "face to screen" as he enunciated Israel’s position before the Security Council, and I could not help but be repulsed by this state that bears no shame for its atrocities against innocent people.
How does one describe Daniel Gillerman? He images the manicured, impeccably attired diplomat of sophisticated demeanor, calm in facial expression and gesture as he looks attentively at each member of the Security Council assuring them of his sincerity and empathy for the difficult situation that has necessitated this gathering. He speaks in a deliberative manner with soft, sensitive, but modulated tones as he encapsulates his statements in words that obfuscate the reality of their purported meaning.
One might say with Joseph Conrad as he describes Kurtz, who in another era of colonization represented to another world the "civilized" nations of Europe, "He is a prodigy. He is an emissary of pity, and science, and progress …" And Conrad continues as he puts Kurtz’ mission in perspective, "We want for the guidance of the cause intrusted (sic) to us by Europe ( with Gillerman it is the 'West’), higher intelligence, wide sympathies, a singleness of purpose." If "all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz," Europe and America contributed to the making of Gillerman. For Gillerman like Kurtz argued that whites, "from the point of development we had arrived at, 'must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings – we might approach them with the might as of deity’, … By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded." Gillerman’s words, like those of Kurtz, sing of possibilities made inevitable by the gratuitous favor of a beneficent neighbor: "The choice that faces the people of Lebanon is clear. It is a choice between those who would develop agriculture and make the deserts bloom, and those who turn towns into bases of terror and barren land. It is a choice between those who work to advance medicine and bring health to body and limb, and those who manufacture only weapons of destruction to tear limb from limb. It is a choice between those who invest (sic) industry and trade, and those whose only product and export is terror."
Marlow, speaking perhaps for Conrad, makes this caustic and cynical observation on the eloquent words written by Kurtz, an observation I would suggest is even more appropriate when applied to Gillerman’s tinted and florid language: "It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightening in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!’" Buried beneath the implied progress of Israel’s cultivated state that "makes the desert bloom" lies its opposite, the devastated landscape of Palestine where Israel has turned "towns (called settlements) into bases of terror" hidden behind a 'wall of horrors,’ as Chris Hedges so clearly observes, a landscape that Israel has "cultivated" and "civilized" for the past 60 years, a landscape carved into a chiaroscuro of shadows and filtered light where rage now roams unleashed, a landscape America built and a rage America helped create, a landscape Hedges notes "is the Africanization of Palestinian land." Gillerman might have been honest and told the assembly of the world, "Exterminate the brutes!", for that seems to be the promise the Lebanese can expect as their current devastated landscape suggests.
Embedded in Gillerman’s prose resides the "idea" that gives justification to the wanton and illegal slaughter inflicted upon the Lebanese, the idea of superiority in intellect, morality and military might that comes with the efficiency of Capitalistic enlightenment. Condescendingly, Gillerman creates a dehumanized scenario of insane Arabs from Teheran, Damascus, Gaza and "parts of Lebanon" dancing in joy as planes fall from the sky, the result of "terror" tactics planted in London, a rejoicing comparable to that witnessed when the Twin Towers fell. He does not mention the five Israelis dancing on the panel truck in a Jersey parking lot as they filmed the planes slamming into the Towers. There is much that Gillerman does not mention.
Having fictionalized the non-existent suicidal destruction of the planes, he provides a seamless rationale that binds these fanatical Arabs together, a "genocidal ideology inspired it." Now we have a dehumanized enemy working together to destroy not just "our region" but "the world at large." And Israel alone has entered the fray to stop this "vile phenomenon" with its "gruesome record of heinous innovations" that uses "hostage taking," "suicide bombers," and "hijackings" to carry out its insidious ends. All countries of the west and good, moderate regimes in "our region" "which offer hope of progress and prosperity" can await the impending "campaign of terror." Thus does Gillerman compress multiple organizations and nation states into one conglomerate of power intent on the destruction of the West providing no evidence of his contentions but unsubstantiated assertions, negating in the process the distinctions between states and insurgent groups that are created and designed for specific response to occupying forces like Hezbollah Shias fighting against Israeli occupation of Lebanon and Syrian land and Hamas Sunnies and Fatah PLO that fight on behalf of those suffering Israeli occupation in Palestine.
But Gillerman goes further than this. He has the unmitigated gall to yoke the people of Israel with the people of Lebanon as victims of these fanatical Arabs with the "genocidal ideology." As Israel pounds the people of Lebanon and their civilized state into the dark ages, Gillerman, the visible representative of Israel, decries the "heavy price" "the peoples of Israel and Lebanon" have had to pay at the hands of Hezbollah, as if by some miraculous act of God, Hezbollah’s rockets had ricocheted like boomerangs off the homes of Israelis to return and devastate those of Lebanese. Thus does Gillerman make the thousands upon thousands of Israeli bombs and missiles hurled into Lebanon, weapons of mass destruction caused by Hezbollah. Unfortunately, as Gillerman sympathetically proclaims, Israel had "no choice" but to destroy Lebanese roads, bridges, utility plants, gas stations, sea ports, oil tanks, coastal waters, shipping, irrigation systems, hospitals, businesses and homes in order to recapture two of its soldiers "kidnapped" on Israeli land, a decided act of aggression taken by Hezbollah. Now, as he asserts the innocence of Israel in the devastation of Lebanon, Gillerman fails to mention that the cost of this "no choice" has been the death of more than 900 Lebanese, near a million made homeless, suffering untold hardships as they wander the demolished landscape of their country, and a country ravaged and decimated. But, as Yitzhak Laor notes lamentably, "Israelis long ago ceased to be distressed by images of sobbing women in white scarves, searching for the remains of their homes in the rubble left by our soldiers. We think of them much as we think of chicken or cats." (Yitzhak Laor, "You are terrorists, we are virtuous.").
Perhaps now we must account for the most serious omissions in Gillerman’s text, the reality behind what he appears to say. What is not said when he asserts "The tragedy of the past month, could – and would – have been avoided if the previous resolutions of this Council had been heeded…"? What is not said when he claims desperately that "Israel has the right and duty to defend its citizens from Hezbollah’s unprovoked attacks…"? What is not said when he states poetically "There is nothing more beautiful, holier or more eternal than a child able to grow up in region (sic) living in security and at peace."? Image
Gillerman’s focus on UN Resolution 1559 places full responsibility for Israel’s need to invade Lebanon on the government of Lebanon because it did not disarm Hezbollah. What Gillerman does not mention is Israel’s defiance of more than 60 UNSC resolutions, especially Resolution 242 demanding that Israel withdraw to the 1967 borders returning occupied land to Palestine, and including Resolution 520 that calls for Israel to withdraw from occupied lands belonging to Syria, the Golan Heights, and Lebanon, the Shaba Farms. Should the UNSC have acted to force Israel to comply with these resolutions, the very need for Hezbollah and Hamas to exist would have been removed. It is Israel’s illegal occupation of the lands of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria that has caused the growth of organizations that fight against Israel and its supplier of weapons, the United States. Indeed, Iraq’s failure to comply with Resolution 687 in 1982 was one of the reasons UNSC Res. 1441 passed giving the US its rationale for attacking Iraq since it continued to violate that Resolution. However, that same resolution stipulated that there must be a nuclear weapons free Middle East, a provision that Israel continues to defy.
Consider now Gillerman’s use of the Israeli and United States mantra that "Israel has a right to defend itself" or, as Gillerman notes, "Israel, like any other state, has the right to defend itself." Does it? The fighting this month has taken place in southern Lebanon and in northern Israel, we are told. But the reality behind that statement does not hold. What we call northern Israel is stolen land, the land of Galilee. In 1948, "According to the New York Times, the sixty hour campaign was designed to 'eliminate the Arab-held bulge descending into Galilee from Lebanon …’ This was the last pocket of Arab resistance in Galilee. Within three days the whole of Upper Galilee was occupied; the population was either expelled or fled out of fear. Some villages captured during the operation were emptied of their inhabitants immediately, but other villagers were expelled in the following weeks, on the pretext of 'clearing’ the border." This ethnic cleansing came as a direct result of Israeli intention as expressed by David Ben-Gurion that the Galilee would become "clean" and "empty" of Arabs. (All That Remains, p.5).
The 1947 map that divided the Palestinian lands into Jewish and Palestinian gave northern Palestine from Acre (Akka) north of Haifa to the Lebanon border to Palestine going east to Dayshun. That section of northern Palestine made possible a connected Palestinian state since it reached south to the West Bank. Israel took the land by force and it has defied UN resolutions that demand its return. Therefore, the Israeli claim that it has a right to defend itself is disingenuous on the surface and outright deceit proclaimed before the United Nations. The very reason that Hamas exists is to regain land stolen by Israel and, since Hezbollah exists in full sympathy with its cause, the insurgents attack against the occupiers’ forces is a legitimate act of war.
What, finally, is not said when Gillerman waxes poetic about that lovely child who simply wants to grow up in peace? Let me offer two polarized perspectives, the first eloquently, yea indelibly marked by Chris Hedges: "Israel’s security wall has ripped a mortal gash in the lives of Palestinians living in its shadow. The rage and extremism of the Islamic militants in Lebanon and the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza appear incomprehensible to the outside world. … But this branding of these militants as something less than human, as something that reasonable people cannot hope to understand, is possible only because we have ignored and disregarded the decades of repression, the crushing weight of occupation, the abject humiliation and violence, unleashed on Lebanese and Palestinians by Israel because of our silence and indifference. It is Israel’s penchant for violence and occupation that slowly created and formed these frightening groups." This reality brands not only Israel but the United States. It is perhaps the most single telling cause of terrorism against America, one that Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton have just acknowledged in their book, Without Precedent: the Truth Behind the 9/11 Commission Report. Israel is the principle cause of terror against America.
Let me return to Conrad to understand how the same deviance, the inability for people to control their actions, to restrain behavior corrodes both the oppressed and the oppressor. Our civilized culture assumes that those who act without restraint are savages, but, as Conrad notes, "No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don’t you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its somber and brooding ferocity?" Not understanding such internal and, to our ignorant citizens, ignorant because they have been denied the truth of such oppression, inscrutable anguish, we instinctively condemn those who strike back with force.
But the truth is more terrible. When the civilized state falls into a state of emotional and psychological oblivion, when it fosters in its people a cold withdrawal from its violence against others, when it divorces its citizens from the pain and suffering inflicted on the weak and helpless, when it negates the humiliation it imposes on others and finds itself not just accepting such behavior but enjoying it, and when it fosters silence and indifference about its inhumane acts, it has reached a nadir of human behavior that permeates each soul so that it knows no faith, no fear, and, thereby, knows no restraint freeing itself to commit barbaric acts in the name of progress and the advancement of civilization.
For Gillerman to sit impassively before the eyes of the world, for him to assume that no one watching his performance would recognize his deceit, for this frozen specter of the nation of Israel to raise the picture of a lovely girl desiring peace as his closing remarks, pointedly made to the Lebanese ambassador, is a stark illustration of how far Israel has fallen from its inherent roots that found sustenance in the soil of morality. Certainly, as he sat there he knew of the pictures that could be placed before the whole world of the atrocities that Israel has perpetrated on the Palestinians in the dead silence behind its detestable Wall of Fear, that monument to the inhumanity of Ariel Sharon. What he did know is that Israel had killed 176 residents of Gaza since June 27th, 40 of them children like the young girl he uses as a poster girl of Israel’s love for humanity. What he did know is that Israel had wounded 872 in Gaza including 272 children during that same period and shot and injured another 172 in the West Bank. (Eliza Ernshire, "No Lights in Gaza").What he did know is that the world would not see these dead because Israel controls what goes in and what comes out of Gaza and the West Bank and it determines what the world will know and what it will not. What hubris. What hypocrisy.
What he did know for certain is that the world watched the slaughter played out before the TV cameras in Lebanon and was repelled by it. What he knew was that the mangled body of a child, unrecognizable as boy or girl, held up before the camera by a United Nations medic, a body charred after an Israeli missile hit a van carrying passengers in southern Lebanon on July 15, a body lacking a portion of the head, the left arm a stub, the stomach ripped from its socket and left hanging, a body caked in blood and dirt, a body seen by hundreds of thousands around the world, would never grow up to go to school and enjoy the morning sun as it beckoned her to a new day. What he knew and hid from the Security Council members and the people of the world is that Israel has hurled new and barbarous weapons at the civilians of Lebanon, weapons that leave "the bodies with dead tissues and no apparent wounds; shrunken corpses; civilians with heavy damage to lower limbs that require amputation, which is nevertheless followed by unstoppable necrosis and death … corpses blackened but not burnt." (Prof. Paola Manduca, Global Research, 7/8/06). What he knew is that he sat there in full civilian dress, pin striped suit and lapel pin shining beneath the TV lights,, and he condemned the "diabolical inventions" of the "genocidal ideology" that used these "heinous innovations" against the innocent Israelis when in fact it is the Israelis that unleash with full malevolence violence of a kind never seen before in the world. That he knew, yet he played out his role as spokesperson for all Israelis, speaking in their name whether or not they could find it in their hearts to support this state that has arrived at a point where its government knows no faith, knows no fear, and drives forward knowing no restraint, the indelible mark of a nature that has returned to its savage base.
=================
William Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of Tracking Depception: Bush's Mideast Policy
mwcnews.net/content/view/8847/42/
Olmert 'suspends' withdrawal plan
Israeli PM Ehud Olmert
Olmert was elected on a platform of leaving parts of the West Bank
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has suspended his plans for a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank, a government minister says.
Housing minister Meir Shetreet said the plan had not been abandoned entirely.
He was commenting on media reports press that the pullout was no longer at the top of Mr Olmert's agenda.
Mr Olmert was elected on a platform of withdrawal from some of the West Bank, while tightening Israel's hold on large settlements and the Jordan Valley.
The BBC's Bethany Bell in Jerusalem says the development comes at a time when support in Israel both for the withdrawal and for Mr Olmert's government appears to be slipping.
Growing criticism
Fighting and violence in Lebanon and in Gaza this summer has caused many Israelis to question the plans.
Speaking on Israel army radio the housing minister Meir Shetreet confirmed the report in the Haaretz newspaper that the pullout is now no longer at the top of Mr Olmert's agenda.
"It is my assessment the prime minister will not deal with this [the West Bank pullout] in the coming period, because it's really not on the agenda," Mr Shetreet said.
"I cannot say that the prime minister has dropped the plan. I don't think he has reached such a conclusion."
Our correspondent says there has been growing criticism of Israel's political and military leadership in recent days, with many Israelis are asking what was actually achieved in the weeks of fighting Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.
The defence ministry has appointed a commission to investigate how the military campaign in Lebanon was conducted.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5262334.stm
The State without Shame
William A. Cook
August 18, 2006
As I watched Ambassador Daniel Gillerman of Israel at the final proceedings of the United Nations Security Council last week, I remembered how Henry David Thoreau described meeting his government: "I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year – no more – in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it…" Today, ordinary citizens meet their representative via generalized statements issued on their behalf: "The Congress today issued …," or "The White House today announced …," or "White House spokesman, Tony Snow, announced…," or Representative _______ met today with Tim Russert on 'Meet the Press’." In general, the ordinary citizen no longer meets a representative "face to face." But I did meet Israel’s government "face to screen" as he enunciated Israel’s position before the Security Council, and I could not help but be repulsed by this state that bears no shame for its atrocities against innocent people.
How does one describe Daniel Gillerman? He images the manicured, impeccably attired diplomat of sophisticated demeanor, calm in facial expression and gesture as he looks attentively at each member of the Security Council assuring them of his sincerity and empathy for the difficult situation that has necessitated this gathering. He speaks in a deliberative manner with soft, sensitive, but modulated tones as he encapsulates his statements in words that obfuscate the reality of their purported meaning.
One might say with Joseph Conrad as he describes Kurtz, who in another era of colonization represented to another world the "civilized" nations of Europe, "He is a prodigy. He is an emissary of pity, and science, and progress …" And Conrad continues as he puts Kurtz’ mission in perspective, "We want for the guidance of the cause intrusted (sic) to us by Europe ( with Gillerman it is the 'West’), higher intelligence, wide sympathies, a singleness of purpose." If "all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz," Europe and America contributed to the making of Gillerman. For Gillerman like Kurtz argued that whites, "from the point of development we had arrived at, 'must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings – we might approach them with the might as of deity’, … By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded." Gillerman’s words, like those of Kurtz, sing of possibilities made inevitable by the gratuitous favor of a beneficent neighbor: "The choice that faces the people of Lebanon is clear. It is a choice between those who would develop agriculture and make the deserts bloom, and those who turn towns into bases of terror and barren land. It is a choice between those who work to advance medicine and bring health to body and limb, and those who manufacture only weapons of destruction to tear limb from limb. It is a choice between those who invest (sic) industry and trade, and those whose only product and export is terror."
Marlow, speaking perhaps for Conrad, makes this caustic and cynical observation on the eloquent words written by Kurtz, an observation I would suggest is even more appropriate when applied to Gillerman’s tinted and florid language: "It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightening in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!’" Buried beneath the implied progress of Israel’s cultivated state that "makes the desert bloom" lies its opposite, the devastated landscape of Palestine where Israel has turned "towns (called settlements) into bases of terror" hidden behind a 'wall of horrors,’ as Chris Hedges so clearly observes, a landscape that Israel has "cultivated" and "civilized" for the past 60 years, a landscape carved into a chiaroscuro of shadows and filtered light where rage now roams unleashed, a landscape America built and a rage America helped create, a landscape Hedges notes "is the Africanization of Palestinian land." Gillerman might have been honest and told the assembly of the world, "Exterminate the brutes!", for that seems to be the promise the Lebanese can expect as their current devastated landscape suggests.
Embedded in Gillerman’s prose resides the "idea" that gives justification to the wanton and illegal slaughter inflicted upon the Lebanese, the idea of superiority in intellect, morality and military might that comes with the efficiency of Capitalistic enlightenment. Condescendingly, Gillerman creates a dehumanized scenario of insane Arabs from Teheran, Damascus, Gaza and "parts of Lebanon" dancing in joy as planes fall from the sky, the result of "terror" tactics planted in London, a rejoicing comparable to that witnessed when the Twin Towers fell. He does not mention the five Israelis dancing on the panel truck in a Jersey parking lot as they filmed the planes slamming into the Towers. There is much that Gillerman does not mention.
Having fictionalized the non-existent suicidal destruction of the planes, he provides a seamless rationale that binds these fanatical Arabs together, a "genocidal ideology inspired it." Now we have a dehumanized enemy working together to destroy not just "our region" but "the world at large." And Israel alone has entered the fray to stop this "vile phenomenon" with its "gruesome record of heinous innovations" that uses "hostage taking," "suicide bombers," and "hijackings" to carry out its insidious ends. All countries of the west and good, moderate regimes in "our region" "which offer hope of progress and prosperity" can await the impending "campaign of terror." Thus does Gillerman compress multiple organizations and nation states into one conglomerate of power intent on the destruction of the West providing no evidence of his contentions but unsubstantiated assertions, negating in the process the distinctions between states and insurgent groups that are created and designed for specific response to occupying forces like Hezbollah Shias fighting against Israeli occupation of Lebanon and Syrian land and Hamas Sunnies and Fatah PLO that fight on behalf of those suffering Israeli occupation in Palestine.
But Gillerman goes further than this. He has the unmitigated gall to yoke the people of Israel with the people of Lebanon as victims of these fanatical Arabs with the "genocidal ideology." As Israel pounds the people of Lebanon and their civilized state into the dark ages, Gillerman, the visible representative of Israel, decries the "heavy price" "the peoples of Israel and Lebanon" have had to pay at the hands of Hezbollah, as if by some miraculous act of God, Hezbollah’s rockets had ricocheted like boomerangs off the homes of Israelis to return and devastate those of Lebanese. Thus does Gillerman make the thousands upon thousands of Israeli bombs and missiles hurled into Lebanon, weapons of mass destruction caused by Hezbollah. Unfortunately, as Gillerman sympathetically proclaims, Israel had "no choice" but to destroy Lebanese roads, bridges, utility plants, gas stations, sea ports, oil tanks, coastal waters, shipping, irrigation systems, hospitals, businesses and homes in order to recapture two of its soldiers "kidnapped" on Israeli land, a decided act of aggression taken by Hezbollah. Now, as he asserts the innocence of Israel in the devastation of Lebanon, Gillerman fails to mention that the cost of this "no choice" has been the death of more than 900 Lebanese, near a million made homeless, suffering untold hardships as they wander the demolished landscape of their country, and a country ravaged and decimated. But, as Yitzhak Laor notes lamentably, "Israelis long ago ceased to be distressed by images of sobbing women in white scarves, searching for the remains of their homes in the rubble left by our soldiers. We think of them much as we think of chicken or cats." (Yitzhak Laor, "You are terrorists, we are virtuous.").
Perhaps now we must account for the most serious omissions in Gillerman’s text, the reality behind what he appears to say. What is not said when he asserts "The tragedy of the past month, could – and would – have been avoided if the previous resolutions of this Council had been heeded…"? What is not said when he claims desperately that "Israel has the right and duty to defend its citizens from Hezbollah’s unprovoked attacks…"? What is not said when he states poetically "There is nothing more beautiful, holier or more eternal than a child able to grow up in region (sic) living in security and at peace."? Image
Gillerman’s focus on UN Resolution 1559 places full responsibility for Israel’s need to invade Lebanon on the government of Lebanon because it did not disarm Hezbollah. What Gillerman does not mention is Israel’s defiance of more than 60 UNSC resolutions, especially Resolution 242 demanding that Israel withdraw to the 1967 borders returning occupied land to Palestine, and including Resolution 520 that calls for Israel to withdraw from occupied lands belonging to Syria, the Golan Heights, and Lebanon, the Shaba Farms. Should the UNSC have acted to force Israel to comply with these resolutions, the very need for Hezbollah and Hamas to exist would have been removed. It is Israel’s illegal occupation of the lands of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria that has caused the growth of organizations that fight against Israel and its supplier of weapons, the United States. Indeed, Iraq’s failure to comply with Resolution 687 in 1982 was one of the reasons UNSC Res. 1441 passed giving the US its rationale for attacking Iraq since it continued to violate that Resolution. However, that same resolution stipulated that there must be a nuclear weapons free Middle East, a provision that Israel continues to defy.
Consider now Gillerman’s use of the Israeli and United States mantra that "Israel has a right to defend itself" or, as Gillerman notes, "Israel, like any other state, has the right to defend itself." Does it? The fighting this month has taken place in southern Lebanon and in northern Israel, we are told. But the reality behind that statement does not hold. What we call northern Israel is stolen land, the land of Galilee. In 1948, "According to the New York Times, the sixty hour campaign was designed to 'eliminate the Arab-held bulge descending into Galilee from Lebanon …’ This was the last pocket of Arab resistance in Galilee. Within three days the whole of Upper Galilee was occupied; the population was either expelled or fled out of fear. Some villages captured during the operation were emptied of their inhabitants immediately, but other villagers were expelled in the following weeks, on the pretext of 'clearing’ the border." This ethnic cleansing came as a direct result of Israeli intention as expressed by David Ben-Gurion that the Galilee would become "clean" and "empty" of Arabs. (All That Remains, p.5).
The 1947 map that divided the Palestinian lands into Jewish and Palestinian gave northern Palestine from Acre (Akka) north of Haifa to the Lebanon border to Palestine going east to Dayshun. That section of northern Palestine made possible a connected Palestinian state since it reached south to the West Bank. Israel took the land by force and it has defied UN resolutions that demand its return. Therefore, the Israeli claim that it has a right to defend itself is disingenuous on the surface and outright deceit proclaimed before the United Nations. The very reason that Hamas exists is to regain land stolen by Israel and, since Hezbollah exists in full sympathy with its cause, the insurgents attack against the occupiers’ forces is a legitimate act of war.
What, finally, is not said when Gillerman waxes poetic about that lovely child who simply wants to grow up in peace? Let me offer two polarized perspectives, the first eloquently, yea indelibly marked by Chris Hedges: "Israel’s security wall has ripped a mortal gash in the lives of Palestinians living in its shadow. The rage and extremism of the Islamic militants in Lebanon and the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza appear incomprehensible to the outside world. … But this branding of these militants as something less than human, as something that reasonable people cannot hope to understand, is possible only because we have ignored and disregarded the decades of repression, the crushing weight of occupation, the abject humiliation and violence, unleashed on Lebanese and Palestinians by Israel because of our silence and indifference. It is Israel’s penchant for violence and occupation that slowly created and formed these frightening groups." This reality brands not only Israel but the United States. It is perhaps the most single telling cause of terrorism against America, one that Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton have just acknowledged in their book, Without Precedent: the Truth Behind the 9/11 Commission Report. Israel is the principle cause of terror against America.
Let me return to Conrad to understand how the same deviance, the inability for people to control their actions, to restrain behavior corrodes both the oppressed and the oppressor. Our civilized culture assumes that those who act without restraint are savages, but, as Conrad notes, "No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don’t you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its somber and brooding ferocity?" Not understanding such internal and, to our ignorant citizens, ignorant because they have been denied the truth of such oppression, inscrutable anguish, we instinctively condemn those who strike back with force.
But the truth is more terrible. When the civilized state falls into a state of emotional and psychological oblivion, when it fosters in its people a cold withdrawal from its violence against others, when it divorces its citizens from the pain and suffering inflicted on the weak and helpless, when it negates the humiliation it imposes on others and finds itself not just accepting such behavior but enjoying it, and when it fosters silence and indifference about its inhumane acts, it has reached a nadir of human behavior that permeates each soul so that it knows no faith, no fear, and, thereby, knows no restraint freeing itself to commit barbaric acts in the name of progress and the advancement of civilization.
For Gillerman to sit impassively before the eyes of the world, for him to assume that no one watching his performance would recognize his deceit, for this frozen specter of the nation of Israel to raise the picture of a lovely girl desiring peace as his closing remarks, pointedly made to the Lebanese ambassador, is a stark illustration of how far Israel has fallen from its inherent roots that found sustenance in the soil of morality. Certainly, as he sat there he knew of the pictures that could be placed before the whole world of the atrocities that Israel has perpetrated on the Palestinians in the dead silence behind its detestable Wall of Fear, that monument to the inhumanity of Ariel Sharon. What he did know is that Israel had killed 176 residents of Gaza since June 27th, 40 of them children like the young girl he uses as a poster girl of Israel’s love for humanity. What he did know is that Israel had wounded 872 in Gaza including 272 children during that same period and shot and injured another 172 in the West Bank. (Eliza Ernshire, "No Lights in Gaza").What he did know is that the world would not see these dead because Israel controls what goes in and what comes out of Gaza and the West Bank and it determines what the world will know and what it will not. What hubris. What hypocrisy.
What he did know for certain is that the world watched the slaughter played out before the TV cameras in Lebanon and was repelled by it. What he knew was that the mangled body of a child, unrecognizable as boy or girl, held up before the camera by a United Nations medic, a body charred after an Israeli missile hit a van carrying passengers in southern Lebanon on July 15, a body lacking a portion of the head, the left arm a stub, the stomach ripped from its socket and left hanging, a body caked in blood and dirt, a body seen by hundreds of thousands around the world, would never grow up to go to school and enjoy the morning sun as it beckoned her to a new day. What he knew and hid from the Security Council members and the people of the world is that Israel has hurled new and barbarous weapons at the civilians of Lebanon, weapons that leave "the bodies with dead tissues and no apparent wounds; shrunken corpses; civilians with heavy damage to lower limbs that require amputation, which is nevertheless followed by unstoppable necrosis and death … corpses blackened but not burnt." (Prof. Paola Manduca, Global Research, 7/8/06). What he knew is that he sat there in full civilian dress, pin striped suit and lapel pin shining beneath the TV lights,, and he condemned the "diabolical inventions" of the "genocidal ideology" that used these "heinous innovations" against the innocent Israelis when in fact it is the Israelis that unleash with full malevolence violence of a kind never seen before in the world. That he knew, yet he played out his role as spokesperson for all Israelis, speaking in their name whether or not they could find it in their hearts to support this state that has arrived at a point where its government knows no faith, knows no fear, and drives forward knowing no restraint, the indelible mark of a nature that has returned to its savage base.
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William Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of Tracking Depception: Bush's Mideast Policy
mwcnews.net/content/view/8847/42/
Olmert 'suspends' withdrawal plan
Israeli PM Ehud Olmert
Olmert was elected on a platform of leaving parts of the West Bank
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has suspended his plans for a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank, a government minister says.
Housing minister Meir Shetreet said the plan had not been abandoned entirely.
He was commenting on media reports press that the pullout was no longer at the top of Mr Olmert's agenda.
Mr Olmert was elected on a platform of withdrawal from some of the West Bank, while tightening Israel's hold on large settlements and the Jordan Valley.
The BBC's Bethany Bell in Jerusalem says the development comes at a time when support in Israel both for the withdrawal and for Mr Olmert's government appears to be slipping.
Growing criticism
Fighting and violence in Lebanon and in Gaza this summer has caused many Israelis to question the plans.
Speaking on Israel army radio the housing minister Meir Shetreet confirmed the report in the Haaretz newspaper that the pullout is now no longer at the top of Mr Olmert's agenda.
"It is my assessment the prime minister will not deal with this [the West Bank pullout] in the coming period, because it's really not on the agenda," Mr Shetreet said.
"I cannot say that the prime minister has dropped the plan. I don't think he has reached such a conclusion."
Our correspondent says there has been growing criticism of Israel's political and military leadership in recent days, with many Israelis are asking what was actually achieved in the weeks of fighting Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.
The defence ministry has appointed a commission to investigate how the military campaign in Lebanon was conducted.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5262334.stm
