In May, Jewish organisations will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. This is understandable in the context of centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, we are Jews who will not be celebrating. Surely it is now time to acknowledge the narrative of the other, the price paid by another people for European anti-semitism and Hitler's genocidal policies. As Edward Said emphasised, what the Holocaust is to the Jews, the Naqba is to the Palestinians.
In April 1948, the same month as the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin and the mortar attack on Palestinian civilians in Haifa's market square, Plan Dalet was put into operation. This authorised the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of the indigenous population outside the borders of the state. We will not be celebrating.
In July 1948, 70,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in Lydda and Ramleh in the heat of the summer with no food or water. Hundreds died. It was known as the Death March. We will not be celebrating.
In all, 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. Some 400 villages were wiped off the map. That did not end the ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Palestinians (Israeli citizens) were expelled from the Galilee in 1956. Many thousands more when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Under international law and sanctioned by UN resolution 194, refugees from war have a right to return or compensation. Israel has never accepted that right. We will not be celebrating.
We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations.
We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.
Jimmy Carter The Guardian, Thursday May 8 2008 Article historyAbout this articleClose This article appeared in the Guardian on Thursday May 08 2008 on p28 of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00:13 on May 08 2008. The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world. An entire population is being brutally punished.
This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006. The election was unanimously judged to be honest and fair by all international observers.
Israel and the US refused to accept the right of Palestinians to form a unity government with Hamas and Fatah and now, after internal strife, Hamas alone controls Gaza. Forty-one of the 43 victorious Hamas candidates who lived in the West Bank have been imprisoned by Israel, plus an additional 10 who assumed positions in the short-lived coalition cabinet.
Regardless of one's choice in the partisan struggle between Fatah and Hamas within occupied Palestine, we must remember that economic sanctions and restrictions on the supply of water, food, electricity and fuel are causing extreme hardship among the innocent people in Gaza, about one million of whom are refugees.
Israeli bombs and missiles periodically strike the area, causing high casualties among both militants and innocent women and children. Prior to the highly publicised killing of a woman and her four children last week, this pattern had been illustrated by a report from B'Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights organisation, which stated that 106 Palestinians were killed between February 27 and March 3. Fifty-four of them were civilians, and 25 were under 18 years of age.
On a recent trip through the Middle East, I attempted to gain a better understanding of the crisis. One of my visits was to Sderot, a community of about 20,000 in southern Israel that is frequently struck by rockets fired from nearby Gaza. I condemned these attacks as abominable acts of terrorism, since most of the 13 victims during the past seven years have been non-combatants.
Subsequently, I met with leaders of Hamas - a delegation from Gaza and the top officials in Damascus. I made the same condemnation to them, and urged that they declare a unilateral ceasefire or orchestrate with Israel a mutual agreement to terminate all military action in and around Gaza for an extended period.
They responded that such action by them in the past had not been reciprocated, and they reminded me that Hamas had previously insisted on a ceasefire throughout Palestine, including Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel had refused. Hamas then made a public proposal of a mutual ceasefire restricted to Gaza, which the Israelis also rejected.
There are fervent arguments heard on both sides concerning blame for a lack of peace in the Holy Land. Israel has occupied and colonised the Palestinian West Bank, which is approximately a quarter the size of the nation of Israel as recognised by the international community. Some Israeli religious factions claim a right to the land on both sides of the Jordan river, others that their 205 settlements of some 500,000 people are necessary for "security".
All Arab nations have agreed to recognise Israel fully if it will comply with key United Nations resolutions. Hamas has agreed to accept any negotiated peace settlement between the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, provided it is approved in a referendum of the Palestinian people.
This holds promise of progress, but despite the brief fanfare and positive statements at the peace conference last November in Annapolis, the process has gone backwards. Nine thousand new Israeli housing units have been announced in Palestine; the number of roadblocks within the West Bank has increased; and the stranglehold on Gaza has been tightened.
It is one thing for other leaders to defer to the US in the crucial peace negotiations, but the world must not stand idle while innocent people are treated cruelly. It is time for strong voices in Europe, the US, Israel and elsewhere to speak out and condemn the human rights tragedy that has befallen the Palestinian people.
Jimmy Carter is a former president of the United States (1976-1980)
In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.
My own case isn't especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me "a Jew-lover", "a Zionist-homo pig" and more.
Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn't controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.
The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile "pro-Israel" writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and Camera – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.
Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, "Honest Reporting" claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews "poisoning the wells." If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained – in labour – by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, "Honest Reporting" will say you didn't explain "the real cause": the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.
The former editor of Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups "nascent McCarthyism". Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: "Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary ... It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal." If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.
The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: "Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and security." Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them "Jews For Genocide", and said they "encourage" the "killers" of Jews. Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an "artificial" people who can be collectively punished because they are "a terrorist population". She believes that while "individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project". Honest Reporting quotes Phillips as a model of reliable reporting.
These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter's decision to speak to the elected Hamas government "border[ed] on anti-Semitism." A Ha'aretz poll last month found that 64 per cent of Israelis want their government to do just that.
As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it – so last year he wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports. There is nothing there you can't read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter's comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B'tselem says this "bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime". Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called "a racist". Several universities have even refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.
These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters' hoax for his book The Case For Israel, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that Finkelstein's mother – who made it through Maidenek and two slave-labour camps – had collaborated with the Nazis. The campaign worked. Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the truth.
Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Reporting becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews – the majority – are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.
We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
I am probably as tired of writing about Israel as you are hearing about it. However, today is supposed to be the big day when Ben Gurion declared Israel’s independence. I thought the link was appropriate. I don’t know why he declared independence because there was no Israel to liberate from whatever forces of darkness they conjured out of their manipulated histories. But declare he did and today we celebrate 60 years of genocide against the Palestinian people who were living on the land- and had been for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years- and whom they murdered, exiled and slandered without pause until this day. In the process they wiped out all signs of Palestinian occupancy and changed the names of all of the towns.
As I resource “Visible’s Compendium of Rules for War and Legal Engagement”, I see on page 364, paragraph 2; “It is understood that when a people are attacked and driven from their country, they have the right to engage the aggressor by any means necessary in order to regain their homeland. This can be considered a universally agreed upon constant similar to the right to self defense and a space cushion.”
Until Palestine has been restored, Palestinians have the right to use what weapons they may possess to drive the invader out. If all they have are rocks and sticks and suicide belts, then that is perfectly legitimate as well as an indication of a courage that the invader does not possess. It is the commonly shared and oft-repeated belief of the mad-dog settlers and large body of neo-con Israelis that there is no such thing as a Palestinian or Palestine. However, believing something doesn’t make it so. One might ask Galileo. And… one needs to keep in mind that the truth is no defense against those who like to ask how many divisions The Pope might have.
There is one big and incessant, brain-rogering monkey that screams and throws dung from the trees upon one and all. That is that the Jewish people suffered the worst and only holocaust in history and therefore they shall be allowed to practice bloody murder for perpetuity. This was the intention of the Zionists who aided and abetted this holocaust to just this end.
No one knows how many native peoples died in the Americas during the several hundreds of years of plunder and genocide. I cannot remember where I got this from now but since it refers to published documents it can be checked; apologies to the source for not remembering who you are (if I ever knew).
“Coe, Snow and Benson, Atlas of Ancient America (1986). Total pre-Columbian population: 40M. Mexico: Original population of 11M to 25M ("lower figure commands more support") fell to 1.25M (1625). Peru: Pop. fell from 9M (1533) to 500,000 (early 17th C). Brazil: Original population of 2.5M to 5.0M ("recent commentators favoring the higher") fell to 1M.Massimo Livi-Bacci, Concise History of World Population History 2d (1996).Mexico: Population fell from 6.3M (1548) to 1.9M (1580) to 1M (1605). Peru: Pop. fell from 1.3M (1572) to 600,000 (1620). Canada: from 300,000 to 100,000 (ca. 1800), USA: from 5M (1500) to 60,000 (ca. 1800) [sic. Probably means 600,000 because he cites Thornton]. R.J. Rummel estimates that 13,778,000 American Indians died of democide in the 16th through 19th Centuries: Total dead among native Americans in colonial era: 49.5M out of pre-contact population of 55M. Democides in this: 5M. Democides among Indians, post-colonial era: 8,763,000. Democides in US: 15,000.Skidmore & Smith, Modern Latin America (1997). Mexico: Population fell from 25M (1519) to 16.8M (1523) to 1.9M (1580) to 1M (1605). Peru: from 1.3M (1570, forty years after Conquest) to 600,000, Panama 1514-1530: 2M Indians killed. Mexico. Central: Population fell from 25.0M (1519) to 1.3M (1595). SE: fell from 1,700,000 to 240,000.North: fell from 2,500,000 to 320,000.Peru, 16th C.: between 8.5M and 13.5M people destroyed. Fredric Wertham, A Sign For Cain : An Exploration of Human Violence (1966): South American death toll of 15,000,000.”
Between ten and twenty eight million blacks were transported to the New World to be slaves. One can use any of several mathematical disciplines to calculate the added number of those born into and killed in captivity. I need add no further examples (although there are many) except to mention that in The Congo the number of dead is now approaching six million.
Given the irrefutable proof that connects Israel to the 9/11 attacks as well as various circumstantial connections to the attacks in the London Tube and Madrid and watching the terrible march of the numbers of dead and maimed and displaced from Afghanistan to Iraq and Lebanon, one would have to say that Israel is unique in the degree of suffering caused across the span of its existence. Given that all of the conflicts mentioned were engineered by Zionist neo-cons in the US and Israel one can only stare in dreadful awe at this terrible engine of death and destruction that is called Israel.
Everything I have said here is based on a great deal more than opinion. Much of it is incontrovertible fact that has been published in the very media controlled by this sinister force.
I grow weary of talking about this inhuman nation of thugs. I grow weary of reading the thousands of news items that add further weight to the things I have said. I cannot be amused at public pronouncements by the catamite troll in the White House who declares that Olmert is an honest man; who has given up golf as his personal sacrifice for the war and who wishes he could be fighting alongside the troops because it looks so damn video game exciting. It’s the thought that counts.
How the American people can continue to endure and even support their criminal government makes me wonder whether there are actually any limits to servility and stupidity. How allegedly intelligent and informed men and women can ignore the 800 pound stinking armpit of their continuous hypocrisy and willful distortion of the truth, as they serve the interests of a foreign power against the interests of their own nation, is incomprehensible to me. How people can turn away from what the reasonable mind and all inquiry shows to be true is unfathomable. What is this psychopathic disconnect between the murderous activity of their leaders and their own shameful conspiracy of silence?
Today I celebrate the ongoing evidence of Palestinian courage and their capacity to endure against all odds. Today my heart joins with the heart of Palestine in the fervent hope that one day these things will not be. Today I cry out, “For shame!!!” to the merciless annihilators of life and human decency; a decency they long ago murdered in themselves. Today I cry, “J’accuse”, just as history will when this horror is summed up by those with enough distance from it that the fear of censure and loss will no longer silence their pens and their tongues.
As a human being with open eyes I condemn you Israel. As a human being I stand as one more witness to your awful crimes against humanity. The abomination which you are shall not forever endure. All tyrants have their date with destiny and yours will come apace. Those who celebrate and support this travesty of the human estate are welcome to their share of what awaits. Palestine, your day will come.
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