- Support your Christian Brethren in
Bethlehem this Christmas.
Opinion published in
The Mountain Democrat,
Placerville, CA
December 25, 2002
By Albert E. Hazbun
As many of us go on with our lives merrily
preparing for the most joyous date of the year, the birth of Jesus Christ,
maybe we should pause for a moment and consider Baby Jesus and His birthplace.
The Mayor of Bethlehem, a Christian, has declared that there will be no
Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem this year because the town has been under
constant Israeli Army harsh occupation and curfew for over a month.
I received a number of e-mail messages from
Palestinian residents of Bethlehem wondering whether the curfew would be
lifted to allow them to attend mass and visit family members. The previous
week the Israeli occupying forces did not allow the Muslim Palestinians to
celebrate their Eid Al Fitr.
The British newspaper The Independent on
December 16 carried an article by Emma Willams, an American from New York. Her
son was born in Bethlehem last year at the Catholic Holy Family Hospital. She
visited Bethlehem this year and described her experience and the present
conditions: "A large number of women have had to give birth at Israeli
checkpoints, under the humiliating gaze of Israeli soldiers. Some babies, and
some mothers, have died in the process."
She talked to one family about the
cancellation of Christmas celebrations and got the following answer:
"Canceling Christmas! That's no big deal; we're just trying to feed our
families and keep the kids from going crazy locked in our homes. The Israelis
do whatever they want -- who in the world is going to stop them?"
This is the fate of the Palestinian
Christian community, the descendants of the original Christians. They are
slowly disappearing. Christians now make about 30% of Bethlehem’s population.
In 1948 they were about 90%. Do we really care? Can and are we doing anything
about it?
Maybe we should take a few minutes and think
about the descendants of the original Christians in the Holy Land, Do we wait
until they are extinct. A prayer might do, sending assistance would be more
effective, and contacting your elected officials up to the President will have
the most impact in the long run.
Hoping your Christmas is happy and blessed.
Albert E. Hazbun
Bethlehem Association
- Response to angry letter attacking
above appeal.
The Mountain Democrat
January 9, 2003
Not much I can do about Mr. Chrisman’s angry
letter (1/3/03) regarding my letter to the Democrat (12/25/02), but maybe I
can help him learn some facts to modify the total far right Zionist and
fundamentalist misinformation he presented in his letter. The facts, if he
wants them, can be obtained from dozens of Israeli and American sources. After
all there are many honest Israelis, who investigated the facts and published
them and are seeking peace and fairness to all. I will attempt to give Mr.
Chrisman very briefly some historical facts derived from these sources:
1- The original Christians were Jews. But
other tribes in the Holy Land, and eventually in the whole Middle East,
converted to Christianity in the next 400 years. The Byzantine Emperor
Constantine accepted Christianity and his mother Helen built the original
Christian shrines in the Holy Land in the 4th century.
2- Two Christian monks traveled throughout
the Middle East in 578 A.D. and recorded the fact that the majority of the
whole area was completely Christian. One of them, John Moscos, recorded this
in his travelogue The Spiritual Meadow. Fourteen years ago, William Dalrymple,
an English prizewinning writer, traced their steps and recorded his trip in
From The Holy Mountain. He explained how few Christians remained and
particularly how Israel was trying to obliterate artifacts of the historical
Christian presence.
3- In 638 A.D. Islam came to the Holy Land.
They brought a new religion and the Arabic language. Some of the Christians
converted but many kept their religion and paid taxes. But the whole
population accepted Arabic as their language and created a new culture. These
are the Arabs. Their descendants are the Palestinians of today. It is a fact
that many Palestinian Muslims and Christians come from a Jewish origin.
4- The Christian, and some Jewish, presence
remained in the Holy Land. Many Arab tribes remained Christian until today.
Many leading scientists and philosophers in the great Arab civilization were
Christians and Jews.
5- The Zionist movement was created in 1897
in Basle, Switzerland. As Avi Shlaim, an Israeli professor at Oxford explains
in The Iron Wall", the conference sent two rabbis to check out Palestine.
Their cryptic telegram back said: "The bride is very beautiful but she is
already married". Palestine had lots of people living in it. At the time the
people of Palestine were about 2% Jewish, 25% Christian and 73% Muslim.
6- In 1917 the British promised the Zionist
movement the Balfour Declaration, "to look with favour at the establishment of
a home for Jews in Palestine." Jewish immigration mostly from Europe, opposed
by the Palestinians, resulted in the Holy Land’s population in 1947 of about
30% Jewish and 70% Palestinian. By then the Jews had legitimately purchased
and owned 6% of Palestine. The UN partition of Palestine gave the Jews 55% of
Palestine, 44% to the Palestinians and about 1% was for Jerusalem as an
international city.
7- A war followed in Palestine. The result
was Israel occupied 78% of Palestine and forced out 700,000 Palestinians from
their homes and took over their land. This was the beginning of the
Palestinian refugee problem. No one was allowed back and no person received
compensation for their property. The Israeli government has assumed ownership
of these stolen lands and settled it with Jewish immigrant.
8- In 1967, in a "pre-emptive" invasion, Israel
occupied the remainder of Palestine, the Egyptian Sinai and the Syrian Golan
Heights. UN resolution 242 required Israel to withdraw from all occupied
territory. Instead, Israel has colonized more land, and using US taxpayer
money built settlements in the occupied territory. The West Bank and Gaza
strip have been under military occupation for the past 35 years, except for a
short period when the Palestinian Authority controlled some Bantustans.
I have little respect for Arafat and his
failure to lead the Palestinian people. If I were to talk about the terrorism
attributed to him, I would have to talk about the Israeli terrorism, not just
of today, but the past, such as blowing up the King David and Semiramis
hotels, the assassination of the UN representative Count Bernadotte, the
killing of British soldiers and booby_trapping their hanging bodies, the
massacre at Deir Yassin and the killing of 37 American sailors on the USS
Liberty.
Regarding the facts about deaths at Israeli
manned checkpoints that I am accused of inventing, Mr. Chrisman should read
the detailed reports by Amira Haas and Gideon Levy in the Israeli daily
Ha’aretz, as well as the many Israeli peace movement web pages. The Israeli
press is far more honest about these events than the US media, with some
exception. The Washington Post on 1/3/03 had a fair editorial regarding the
brutality of the Israel army in killing Palestinian children.
The present Israeli government appears to
have two solutions in mind: To allow a Palestinian state made up of about 9
separate Bantustans completely surrounded by Israeli settlers and army, or
force out an additional 3.5 million Palestinians from their remaining land
under the cover of a war with Iraq.
Mr., Chrisman I strongly recommend you get
your facts straight and turn your energy to help support a fair solution that
would allow Israel to live peacefully on their 78% of Palestine with secure
borders and the Palestinians in peace and dignity on the remaining 22%. It
might help you to read the recently published The Other Israel. It includes
short articles by 28 Israeli writers. Their point is that "…the occupation of
Palestinian territory, with its settlement construction and colonial policing,
has undermined Israel’s ideals and liberal values. The occupation has
distorted the achievements of Zionism in the name of territorial expansion and
military conquest and has deeply compromised the security and moral authority
of the State of Israel." For the plight of the of the indigenous Christians,
the Palestinians, please read the Boston Globe’s correspondent Charles
Sennott’s The Body and The Blood.
Mr. Chrisman let us both call for a just
peace in the land where the King of Peace was born.
Albert E. Hazbun
Bethlehem Association
Dear Mr. Hazbun,
I read your letter published in the Jan 9,
2003 issue of the Mountain Democrat responding to a hysterical letter from Mr.
Chrisman.
I want to thank you for writing the kind of
letter I've wanted many times to write,
but have not had the stomach for the kind of response you probably will get. I
wrote a brief letter to the Saratoga [California] News (a weekly newspaper)
when I lived there about 12 years ago that was critical of Israel's treatment
of Palestinians, and there were about 6 hysterical and lengthy letters
published in the next issue attacking me while throwing red herrings all over
the place.
Mr. Chrisman's letter is typical of replies
that anyone with the nerve to criticize Israel gets. The replies use all kinds
of ways to distort the truth, including outright lies. Criticism of Israel is
ominously almost nil in the U.S. The quick and vitriolic responses that
invariably result make most people keep quiet. Another result is that most
people in the U.S. haven't a clue as to the true history of Palestine,
especially since 1947. Most adult Americans probably don't realize that the
Israeli army has occupied Palestine since 1967, that Palestine has been pretty
much a concentration camp since then.
I wish your letter could be published in as
many U.S. papers as possible.
Thanks again.
Tim Milne
Camino, CA
- The United States of America has gone
mad
Opinion (LONDON TIMES)
January 15, 2003
John le Carré
America has entered one of its periods
of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than
McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more
disastrous than the Vietnam War. The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama
bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times,
the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being
systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested
corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing
out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast
press.
The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden
struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta
would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be
elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the
already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world’’s poor, the ecology
and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also
have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for
UN resolutions.
But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the
carpet. The Bushies are riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americans want the
war, we are told. The US defence budget has been raised by another $60 billion
to around $360 billion. A splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the
pipeline, so we can all breathe easy. Quite what war 88 per cent of
Americans think they are supporting is a lot less clear. A war for how long,
please? At what cost in American lives? At what cost to the American
taxpayer’’s pocket? At what cost —— because most of those 88 per cent are
thoroughly decent and humane people —— in Iraqi lives?
How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting
America’’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public
relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells
us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack
on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled.
It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The
carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators
nicely into the next election.
Those who are not with Mr Bush are against him.
Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I’’m dead against
Bush, but I would love to see Saddam’’s downfall —— just not on Bush’s terms
and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.
The religious cant that will send American troops
into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be.
Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions.
God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God
appointed Israel to be the nexus of America’s Middle Eastern policy, and
anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American,
c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.
God also has pretty scary connections. In America,
where all men are equal in His sight, if not in one another’s, the Bush family
numbers one President, one ex-President, one ex-head of the CIA, the Governor
of Florida and the ex-Governor of Texas. Care for a few pointers? George W.
Bush, 1978-84: senior executive, Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration, an oil
company; 1986-90: senior executive of the Harken oil company. Dick Cheney,
1995-2000: chief executive of the Halliburton oil company. Condoleezza Rice,
1991-2000: senior executive with the Chevron oil company, which named an oil
tanker after her. And so on. But none of these trifling associations affects
the integrity of God’’s work.
In 1993, while ex-President George Bush was visiting
the ever-democratic Kingdom of Kuwait to receive thanks for liberating them,
somebody tried to kill him. The CIA believes that "somebody" was Saddam. Hence
Bush Jr’’s cry: "That man tried to kill my Daddy." But it’’s still not
personal, this war. It’’s still necessary. It’s still God’’s work. It’s still
about bringing freedom and democracy to oppressed Iraqi people.
To be a member of the team you must also believe in
Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, and Bush, with a lot of help from his
friends, family and God, is there to tell us which is which. What Bush won’t
tell us is the truth about why we’re going to war. What is at stake is not an
Axis of Evil —— but oil, money and people’s lives. Saddam’’s misfortune is to
sit on the second biggest oilfield in the world. Bush wants it, and who helps
him get it will receive a piece of the cake. And who doesn’t, won’’t. If
Saddam didn’t have the oil, he could torture his citizens to his heart’s
content. Other leaders do it every day —— think Saudi Arabia, think Pakistan,
think Turkey, think Syria, think Egypt.
Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its
neighbours, and none to the US or Britain. Saddam’s weapons of mass
destruction, if he’s still got them, will be peanuts by comparison with the
stuff Israel or America could hurl at him at five minutes’ notice. What is at
stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic
imperative of US growth. What is at stake is America’s need to demonstrate its
military power to all of us —— to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad
little North Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at
home, and who is to be ruled by America abroad.
The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair’s
part in all this is that he believed that, by riding the tiger, he could steer
it. He can’t. Instead, he gave it a phoney legitimacy, and a smooth voice. Now
I fear, the same tiger has him penned into a corner, and he can’t get out. It
is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blair has talked himself against the
ropes, neither of Britain’s opposition leaders can lay a glove on him. But
that’s Britain’s tragedy, as it is America’s: as our Governments spin, lie and
lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way.
Blair’s best chance of personal survival must be that, at the eleventh hour,
world protest and an improbably emboldened UN will force Bush to put his gun
back in his holster unfired. But what happens when the world’s greatest cowboy
rides back into town without a tyrant’s head to wave at the boys?
Blair’s worst chance is that, with or without the UN,
he will drag us into a war that, if the will to negotiate energetically had
ever been there, could have been avoided; a war that has been no more
democratically debated in Britain than it has in America or at the UN. By
doing so, Blair will have set back our relations with Europe and the Middle
East for decades to come. He will have helped to provoke unforeseeable
retaliation, great domestic unrest, and regional chaos in the Middle East.
Welcome to the party of the ethical foreign policy.
There is a middle way, but it’s a tough one: Bush
dives in without UN approval and Blair stays on the bank. Goodbye to the
special relationship. I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his head
prefect’s sophistries to this colonialist adventure. His very real anxieties
about terror are shared by all sane men. What he can’’t explain is how he
reconciles a global assault on al-Qaeda with a territorial assault on Iraq. We
are in this war, if it takes place, to secure the fig leaf of our special
relationship, to grab our share of the oil pot, and because, after all the
public hand-holding in Washington and Camp David, Blair has to show up at the
altar.
"But will we win, Daddy?" "Of course, child. It will
all be over while you’’re still in bed." "Why?" "Because otherwise Mr Bush’’s
voters will get terribly impatient and may decide not to vote for him." "But
will people be killed, Daddy?" "Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign
people." "Can I watch it on television?" "Only if Mr Bush says you can." "And
afterwards, will everything be normal again? Nobody will do anything horrid
any more?" "Hush child, and go to sleep." Last Friday a friend of mine in
California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying:
"Peace is also Patriotic". It was gone by the time he’d finished shopping.
The author has also contributed to an open
Democracy debate on Iraq at
www.openDemocracy.net
- False witnesses
The Guardian,
January 16, 2003
By: Tim Llewellyn
Since the creation of Israel in 1948, its supporters
have been highly successful in ensuring that Israel's version of its and its
neighbours' histories has been accepted as received truth. Dents have been
made, notably by Israel's own historians as they have had greater access to
official documents, in the Zionist myths. But they have usually been hammered
out with alacrity, both by Israel and our domestic broadcasters.
Whenever Israel has been exposed as an aggressor - in
Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, or during the first intifada of the late 1980s - its
media doldrums have been temporary. The efforts of its spin doctors, the US
government and media, in conjunction with a weak Arab communications
operation, have usually combined to make Israel's broad version of events
prevail.
These continue to give the impression of a struggle
between equal forces: a beleaguered and misunderstood Israel, occasionally
forced into excessive measures to clamp down on "terror", versus hordes of
recalcitrant Palestinians careless of "western" values and endemically
suicidal for obscure religious reasons. "Equivalence" is at the heart of
Britain's misreporting of the crisis.
The fact of Palestinian resistance against a foreign
occupying power is rarely emphasised. TV news viewers would have been unaware
that last month Israeli soldiers killed 75 Palestinians, 14 of them children
under 18. Then, two suicide bombers attacked Tel Aviv - the first such attack
for six weeks. It was only when it had this "peg" that the BBC reported the
rate of Palestinian casualties. Thus, suicide bombs are made to appear as the
beginning of a new "cycle of violence", rather than an outcome of the
occupation.
It was not until late one Monday night last year,
when the ITV company Carlton put out John Pilger's Palestine Is Still the
Issue, that TV viewers were presented with an unalloyed account of the
savagery and misery that informs the daily life of the Palestinians in
Israeli-occupied territory. Pilger is known as an opinionated journalist with
an appetite for upsetting authority. But this programme was not "campaigning"
journalism. It was a painstaking portrayal of the humiliation Israel's
soldiers and politicians visit daily on the Palestinians: not just the deaths,
injuries and arrests, but the intrusions of the military into every aspect of
a Palestinian's life.
In response, Israel and its supporters went into over
drive. Hundreds of complaints flowed in to Carlton and ITV. Carlton's
chairman, Michael Green, took the unprecedented step of condemning his own
company's output, calling the Pilger documentary "a tragedy for Israel as far
as accuracy is concerned". An official complaint was made to the Independent
Television Commission.
The ITC's ruling this week that the programme "was
not in breach of the ITC programme code ... Adequate opportunity was given to
a pro-Israeli government perspective" is a serious setback for Israel's
struggle to present itself as the victim of violence rather than its
progenitor.
Most significantly the ITC found that "due
impartiality", as dictated by the 1990 Broadcasting Act, is not the same as
"absolute neutrality". The ITC said: "Programme makers can come at subject
matter from particular directions so long as facts are respected and opposing
viewpoints represented." They were in Pilger's documentary. He used a long and
revealing interview with Dore Gold, one of Ariel Sharon's leading spokesmen.
The BBC will try to find vindication in the phrase
"particular directions" for a misleading film it put out last June, The Siege
of Bethlehem. An Israeli TV team gained access to the army negotiators at the
siege of the Church of the Nativity, and the BBC ran the film without caveat,
context, explanation or the necessary distancing that an insider project of
this nature demands. The Palestinians in the film were under-represented and
inarticulate. The general effect was to suggest that Israeli soldiers were
doing everything they could to make life easier for terrorists inside the
church. The fact that military occupation of a Palestinian-controlled area had
detonated the Bethlehem affair went unremarked.
(See insider account of this siege by Franciscan Parish Priest in article
below)
So the ITC ruling is a shot across the bows of both
the BBC and ITN news managers, approving a reporter's account of a violation
of human rights that mainstream bulletins and current affairs discussions
routinely duck.
The Glasgow University Media Group, which is to
publish later this year a highly critical analysis of BBC and ITN
Israel/Palestine coverage, has already found reporting so short on explanation
that many viewers were not sure whether it was the Palestinians or the
Israelis who were the settlers or the refugees.
The vociferousness of the Israeli embassy, charges of
anti-semitism, dithering by the Blair government in its attitude to Israel's
violations of international law, cultural "drift" in newsrooms that encourages
editors to buy the idea that Israelis, unlike Palestinians, are western
"people like us", so more deserving of sympathy, all of these militate against
the willingness of journalists to present the issue for what it is: desperate
resistance against a military occupation.
Tim Llewellyn
is a former BBC Middle East correspondent and is an executive member of the
Council for the Advancement of Arab British Understanding CAABU).timllew@aol.com
- The Bethlehem Siege: An Insider's
Account
By Fr. Amjad Sabarra, O.F.M., as told to Fr. Peter Vasko, O.F.M.
The Franciscan pastor of the Basilica of
the Nativity explains what happened last spring when friars, nuns and Orthodox
monks were trapped in the basilica compound with 208 Palestinians.
I Amjad Sabarra am a Palestinian from
Jerusalem's Old City and a member of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land.
Ordained to the priesthood in June 1992, I serve as the Roman Catholic pastor
of the world's oldest parish: Bethlehem's Basilica of the Nativity of Our
Lord.
Thirty other friars, four Catholic nuns, nine Greek Orthodox monks, five
Armenian monks and I were caught by surprise last spring during the 39-day
siege of the basilica and its adjoining buildings.
On the morning of April 2, 2002, 10 armed Palestinian men wandered into the
basilica. Father Ibrahim Faltas, O.F.M., and I approached them and explained
that we do not allow arms in the basilica and that they would have to leave.
They did so quietly and politely. We then bolted the front door of the church.
Around 3 p.m. we heard a lot of gunfire, and yelling in and near the basilica.
We quickly entered the church to find several hundred Palestinians running
into the nave of the basilica with several dozen men carrying guns and
semi-automatics. Apparently, they had broken the front door of the church.
There was absolutely no way that we could have stopped them or even tried to
persuade them to leave. Israeli soldiers were shooting outside, and the
Palestinians were inside. We had no choice but to give them sanctuary and
protection.
Two hundred and eight Palestinians entered:
police and security officers,
Hamas members and civilians-about one third from each
group.
Buildings Nearby
The Basilica of the Nativity is surrounded by several buildings, including our
Franciscan friary/convent, St. Catherine Church (a parish church for Roman
Catholics), the Casa Nova (pilgrim hospice) and monasteries for monks from the
Greek Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox Churches. The 257 people under siege were
in several of these buildings.
The Franciscan part of this compound includes a school for our young friars
studying philosophy, our parish offices and center, plus a high school run by
the Franciscans. Besides being the pastor of St. Catherine Church, with its
youth ministry, social ministry and school, I lead the Franciscans ministering
to pilgrims in the Basilica of the Nativity of Our Lord.
Siege Unfolds
On April 4, Israeli soldiers cut off the electricity to the basilica and to
the Franciscan friary, plus the Greek Orthodox and the Armenian monasteries.
Luckily, we had a backup generator, which for a short time gave the friars
electricity. When the pumps failed two days later, we used candles in the
church and the friary in the evenings.
Our phone lines were first cut off on April 6. For two weeks we conserved our
cell phones but, when those batteries were exhausted, we had no communication
for a few days. Then a Greek Orthodox monk discovered a still-functioning
electrical line in their monastery, enabling us to recharge our cell-phone
batteries.
On April 8, the Israeli military shot firebombs into our parish offices,
causing massive destruction. At the end of the first week, we sent five older
friars to Jerusalem; the Greek Orthodox did the same for five elderly monks
while the Armenians sent two for better medical care.
On April 10, water for the entire compound was shut off. Fortunately, we have
a well within the friary and were able to provide water to the Palestinians
inside as well as to the Greek Orthodox and Armenian monks.
On April 19, the Israelis permanently severed the telephone lines.
On May 2, 11 foreign relief workers from Denmark, Switzerland and the United
States courageously ran into the basilica, risking their lives to bring us
food and supplies.
On May 10, the siege of the Basilica of the Nativity ended.
We provided those confined to the basilica with makeshift mattresses, blankets
and pillows, as well as food and water. We were very blessed by having a
Franciscan nun who is also a nurse. She provided much-needed medical
assistance to the wounded. When the Palestinians entered, they had seven
wounded; during the siege, another 17 were wounded. Eight Palestinians were
killed in skirmishes outside the basilica but within the larger area under
siege. Most of the friars were in our house. The Palestinians could have
broken in there but did not; they did look for food in the Casa Nova, our
hospice for pilgrims.
Dealing With the Israeli
Military and Palestinians
We were very unsure what was going to happen. We did not know how badly the
Israeli forces wanted the Palestinians who were inside. During the second week
of the siege and after hearing news reports about the pressure put on the
Israeli government by many governments and organizations, we felt that the
Israelis would honor and respect the sanctity of one of the holiest sites of
Christendom.
Never did we consider ourselves as hostages to
the Palestinians in the basilica. This holy compound is where we live out our
daily lives as religious. There was absolutely no force or coercion toward us
on the part of the Palestinians inside the church. We had complete freedom to
move about, and the Palestinians were very thankful for the basic humanitarian
supplies we provided.
At one point, an Armenian Orthodox monk held up a sign that said, "Help me."
The man has a diabetic condition and desperately needed insulin. The Israeli
papers portrayed the monk as trying to escape, as if he were being held
hostage. He simply wanted to get the needed insulin, and in fact the Israeli
military provided him with it.
A Strange Kind of
Normalcy
For the most part, the friars carried on with their normal routine during the
siege. But because there was so much noise during the night because of
shootings, flares and tank movement, we slept in during the morning hours and
had community Mass and liturgy in the afternoon. Needless to say, our food was
being rationed and classes for the student friars were cancelled.
The Israeli soldiers bombed some of our parish
offices, destroying several rooms in the Greek Orthodox section and damaging
part of the facade of the Casa Nova, our hospice for pilgrims. The statue of
the Virgin Mary above our friary courtyard was damaged by rifle fire, as were
some sixth-century mosaics in the Armenian Orthodox section of the basilica.
Bethlehem's Christian
Minority
Bethlehem proper has a population of 28,000, roughly 18,000 Muslims and 10,000
Christians, including 5,000 Roman Catholics. Another 150,000 people live in
refugee camps outside Bethlehem. About 35 years ago, 80 percent of Bethlehem's
residents were Christian; now Christians are 5.6 percent of the 178,000
residents.
Most of Bethlehem's Christian Palestinians make their living by working in the
hospitality industry; approximately 70 percent of them were working before the
second intifada began in September 2000. Because of the political turmoil,
hotels are now closed, travel agencies have closed and many stores selling
local products, such as handmade olive-wood manger sets, local jewelry and
other olive-wood artifacts, have closed their doors due to the lack of
pilgrims and tourists. Hence, income has disappeared. Families are either
emigrating or seeking help from international aid organizations.
The Siege's Aftermath
In many ways, this whole experience demonstrates how fragile peace can be here
in the Holy Land. Peace can come only when there is security for both sides,
and I would encourage all parties to continue to dialogue, to continue with
negotiations-no matter how dismal that may seem. Are we not all brothers and
sisters, mothers and fathers, all creatures of God, all trying to live our
lives in peace?
No one can really win this "war." There will never be any winners in this
conflict-only losers. Violence begets violence, and whoever lives by the sword
will die by the sword. Perhaps this standoff took place where it did, at the
birthplace of Jesus Christ, as a sign of divine protection for all concerned.
Perhaps it saved us from a greater disaster.
I think that, if another siege happened,
we would act in the very same way that we did. We did what Christians are
supposed to do-to love. These people could have been Israelis and we would
have embraced them and sheltered them just as we did for the Palestinians.
Father Giacomo Bini, O.F.M., the minister general of the worldwide Franciscan
Order, stated during the early part of the siege that our friars are bound by
charity and love. Just as we protected hundreds of Jews in our friaries
throughout Europe from the insidious Nazi regime, so we become a sanctuary and
shield for all those who are in need.
The fact that we willingly and freely remained at our posts, at our sanctuary,
with the exception of several infirm friars, simply reflects our commitment as
the faithful custodians of the Holy Places.
In another sense, our Franciscan vocation calls us to love, to pardon, to give
hope, to have faith and to exult in God. This is what our founder, St. Francis
of Assisi, asked his friars to do. We are simply his poor instruments trying
to effect that change.
Franciscan Foundation for the Holy Land, Inc.
2003©
- Special
report: Israel and the Middle East
The Guardian
by: Dilip Hiro
Tuesday May 22, 2001
Land
is the issue. Land is confiscated, stolen, kept.
Israel rejects the Mitchell report call for a freeze on growth of
settlements.
Behind the drama of shootings, stone throwing,
fighter attacks, tank incursions, and razing of houses and orchards - that
have attracted the world's attention in the eight-month low-intensity
Israeli-Palestinian warfare - lies something undramatic: land.
That is, the unceasing, illegal seizure of Palestinian land by Israel in
train for the past 34 years, which has created 200 Jewish settlements,
including 13 in Arab East Jerusalem, with 400,000 residents.
It is to the credit of the George
Mitchell report on the Israeli-Palestinian violence, published yesterday,
that it has focused on Jewish settlements. "Beyond the obvious confidence-building qualities of a
settlement freeze, we note that many of the confrontations during this
conflict have occurred at points where Palestinians, settlers and [Israeli]
security forces protecting the settlers meet," says the Mitchell
report. "Keeping both the peace and these friction points will be very
difficult."
The report by the US-appointed committee, which includes two former American
senators, the European Union's chief foreign affairs representative,
Norway's foreign minister and a former Turkish president, is the first
official, non-partisan assessment of the events in late September and
October. So it should be treated seriously.
In Gaza, the Jewish colonies break
up the tiny strip into three parts. Elsewhere they form a barrier between
Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and between numerous Palestinian
towns and villages on the West Bank. They and the interconnecting roads slice up the territorial
continuity of what Palestinians hope will be an independent sovereign
Palestine.
Such a state - should it emerge - would cover only 22% of the Palestine
under British mandate during 1922-48. It would be less than half of what the
Arab inhabitants of Palestine were offered by the United Nations partition
plan of 1947.
Taking a long view, therefore, the battle between the inhabitants of
Palestine since 691 (when the Dome of the Rock was built in Jerusalem), and
the post-1922 Zionist colonisers from Europe has always been about
land.
Though Israel has existed as a sovereign state since 1948 on 78% of British
Palestine, its top leaders, be they rightwing or left, have yet to declare a
whittling down of the original Zionist aim of all of Palestine as the Jewish
homeland.
After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, it was the Labour government which
initiated the policy of Jewish settlements in the occupied
territories. The example of Kiryat Arba, a settlement near Hebron, is
illustrative. After its 1967 victory, the Israeli military set up its camp
on 40 hectares (100 acres) of Palestinian agricultural land, something it
was entitled to do as the occupation army. What it was not entitled to do
was to increase the confiscated land 10-fold, to 400 hectares (1,000) acres,
over the next two decades and create a complex of four Jewish settlements
inhabited by some 6,000 civilians. In the process the Israeli army deprived
Palestinians of two-thirds of their cultivated land in the area.
In its various resolutions,
starting with 252 in 1967, the United Nations security council has
repeatedly affirmed that the fourth Geneva convention relative to the
protection of civilian persons in time of war (August 1949) is applicable to
the Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967. This convention
expressly forbids the occupying power to change the demography of the
territory under its occupation through such means as deportation or transfer
of "parts of its own civilian population into the territory it
occupies".
"The transfer, the installation of the occupying power into the
occupied territories is considered as an illegal move and qualified as a
'grave breach'," said Rene Kosirnik, head of the International
Committee of the Red Cross delegation to Israel and the Palestinian
territories, last week. "It's a grave breach, formally speaking, but
grave breaches are equal in principle to war crimes."
But Israel has ignored this. For a long time Jewish Israeli leaders refused
to accept the fact that Palestinians were as much a nation as Israeli Jews.
It was the eruption of the intifada in 1987 and its longevity that broke
that myth. The signing of the Oslo accord in 1993 signified Israel's
official recognition of Palestinians as a nation represented by the
Palestine Liberation Organisation.
But that had no impact on the
colonization program. Since the Oslo accord, the number of settlements has
risen from 157 to 200, and nearly 40,000 new houses have been constructed.
The number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza has shot up from
125,000 to 200,000, and in Arab East Jerusalem, from 150,000 to
200,000.
T he Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has refused to accept the
Mitchell report's recommendation of an immediate freeze on settlement
activity, arguing that the enlargement of settlements is the result of the
"natural growth" of the population. It is hard to attribute a 70%
rise in seven years in the West Bank colonies to "natural
growth".
Sharon forgets that when his Likud predecessor, Binyamin Netanyahu, aired
the same reasoning it was shot down by the Clinton administration which
leaked the information gathered by US satellites that a quarter of the
houses in West Bank settlements were empty.
The source of Sharon's obduracy lies elsewhere. "Many Israeli people
today are not much excited by the idea of gaining a hectare and then another
hectare [of Palestinian land] for Israel - but for me, that's still
exciting," he told Ha'aretz (The Land), an Israeli daily, recently.
That is the view of a 73-year-old Zionist pioneer, who grew up on a Jewish
kibbutz during the British mandate; committed to colonising all of the
British Palestine.
It is out of line with a majority of Israeli Jews. The latest poll shows 62%
favouring a freeze on Jewish settlements in exchange for a Palestinian
ceasefire while 36% oppose it. An editorial in the Yediot Aharonot (Latest
News), a Hebrew daily accounting for two-thirds of total newspaper
circulation in Israel, summed up the situation aptly. "According to
updated polls, most Israelis - in contrast to their elderly military leader
[Sharon] - support a settlement freeze," said a recent editorial.
"A decisive majority also supports diplomatic activity and not just
military pressure, and sees Arafat as a partner."
Given this, the Mitchell report is likely to spur those Israelis who
disapprove of the ultra-hawkish stance of Sharon on the issue of Jewish
settlements.
• Dilip Hiro is the author of Sharing
the Promised Land (Hodder).
His forthcoming book is Neighbours, Not Friends: Iraq and Iran After
the Gulf Wars (Routledge)
- Reporting
on the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict.
Letter
to CNN,
by Albert E. Hazbun
April 13, 2001
As I watched
recent CNN reporting on Palestinian/Israeli events, such as your most recent
"Palestinian, Israeli security officials meet," of 11 April 2001,
I became very concerned about disturbing statements to the effect that it is
the Palestinians "point of view" that they are occupied. The Gaza
Strip and the West Bank are occupied territory as stated in more UN
resolutions than I can count.
I do realize that pro-Israeli groups in the US have been very critical of
CNN recently for reporting accurately events in the occupied territories.
This seems to have resulted in basic changes in reporting by CNN and a very
strong tilt to the Israeli point of view. I certainly hope that CNN
reconsiders this new inaccurate reporting and go back to honest reporting
like CNN is supposed to do. Reporting accurately on the occupation and
actions of the occupiers is very essential in presenting an accurate story
to your audience.
Albert E.
Hazbun,
California.
- Voices on Mideast
Article in The
Philadelphia Inquirer,
by Joan C. Hazboun,
April 22, 2001
Israel should
take the next step in the current conflict to enable a return to peace talks. She must stop expanding Jewish settlements on occupied Arab
land and leave those already built. She could
give them as restitution to Palestinians for the misery and loss of property
she has brought upon them!
Just last week according to Ha'aretz newspaper (3/23/01), Israel announced the
building of 2000 homes in a new settlement for religious Jews to be called
Giva'ot on occupied West Bank land near Bethlehem. This is the first
installment of a plan for 6,000 units which has been planned for three years
under that so-called compromiser Ehud Barak, despite the 1993 Oslo agreement.
Israel has been expanding settlements and
Israeli-only roads at a faster pace than ever during the past seven years and
has completely flaunted the basic premise of the Oslo Accords - UN resolution
242 calling for the return of land occupied since 1967 in exchange for peace
and security. It shows a fundamental lack
of good faith.
Palestinians will calm down if they feel they have a future and they are not
increasingly being deprived of their land, water and agriculture. Israel
can give up settlements gradually, conditional on Palestinian cooperation but
the intention must be clear.
America should be outspoken in its condemnation of settlement expansion.
We should all be telling these settlers, often ironically from vast
countries such as Russia and the US, that their religious beliefs do not
justify displacing a population which has lived in this tiny piece of land for
centuries.
Joan C. Hazboun,
Media, Pennsylvania
- Truth has only one
face.
Article in Bucks County
Courier Times,
By: Edward A. Hazboun,
January 23, 2001
It is ironic that Rabbi Elliot
Strom (Jan 9) proclaims that the "first casualty in the Mideast is
Truth" For him truth is two-sided so that the Israelis can be stating one
side of the truth and the Palestininians the other side. But then he
admonishes Mr. Cook for presenting a Palestininian side of the the truth.
Real truth has only one face,
one that is based on universally recognized moral, ethical and legal
standards. Rabbi Strom refuses to be bound by the most fundamental Jewish and
Christian moral codes "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not
covet thy neighbor’s house nor field".
The basic truth is that the
conflict in the Middle East was created by Israel’s occupation by force of
Palestinian land, its colonization of those lands and its ethnic cleansing of
those lands by forcing their inhabitants out into a handful of tiny enclaves
each surrounded by barbed wire, road blocks, tanks, and the fourth best army
in the world.
Rabbi Strom seems very cavalier
in his dismissal of the United Nations. After all, Israel owes its initial
existence in 1948 to a United Nations vote that partitioned Palestine into two
states, one Jewish and one Palestinian. The United Nations legitimized Israel.
It was an extremely close vote much closer than the many later resolutions
calling for Palestinian repatriation and return of land to the Palestinians.
Of course, Rabbi Strom should
be proud of Moshe Dayan when he told the truth to students at the Technion in
Haifa " 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 --- and the Arab villages
are not there either... There is not a single place in this country that did
not have a former Arab population". It seems that Rabbi Strom has not heard all the protests and
laments of the Palestinians telling him the truth before Moshe Dayan admitted
it and long before these brave and decent Israeli historians set the record
straight.
- THE PALESTINIANS HAVE RIGHTS
TOO.
By Joan
Hazboun,
The Philadelphia Inquirer,
December 29, 2000
Trudy Rubin claims that the Palestinians have a psychological problem and are
unwilling to be realistic about giving up land to Israel and claiming the
right to return to Israel itself.
The whole history of Israel is one of implausible
and unrealistic things happening. A group of
people comes to a land already inhabited by Palestinians and claims possession
of it based on a bible written by them over two thousand years ago. They force
the owners of the land out and claim (as Ms. Rubin repeats) that the
inhabitants left. Most importantly, they have never allowed them back. Because
they say, this would interfere with their notion of a Jewish state.
In 1948 Israel gains legitimacy by being recognized by a slim margin at the
United Nations. After that, they ignore all UN
resolutions that are still in force today telling them to allow Palestinian
refugees to return and to give back Palestinian land.
While they justly receive compensation from
Germany for the Holocaust fifty years ago, it doesn't seem to occur to them or
Ms. Rubin that they might owe the Palestinians something for what they stole a
few years later. Instead she seems to think it
quite reasonable that the international community should foot whatever bill
there is for resettling Palestinians in other countries or compensating them.
The UN has already been supporting Palestinian refugees for fifty years. Since
historically America financed about a quarter of the UN budget we are in the
ridiculous position of giving Israel the largest share of our foreign aid
while at the same time sharing in the Palestinian refugee relief effort.
Meanwhile, Israel manages to talk about peace for seven years after the Oslo
accords in 1993 while doubling the number of Jewish settlers on occupied
Palestinian land and calling any Palestinian resistance "terrorism".
All of this is pretty amazing but the most astonishing aspect is that
mainstream columnists such as Ms. Rubin seem to think it's perfectly O.K. and
resort to blaming the victim.
Did we tell Russian and Eastern bloc dissidents that fighting the ruthless
might of the Soviet empire was unrealistic? Did
we tell the African National Congress to put up with Apartheid and white
supremacy? Did we tell Northern Ireland that it
would always be only British? Did we tell Jewish families that they couldn't
expect compensation from German corporations and Swiss banks for property lost
or ill treatment received during World War II? There were times when none of
the actual outcomes of these issues seemed realistic. I can't see why we shouldn't support Palestinian rights to a
contiguous viable state, compensation, and apologies from Israel for past
wrongs.
Joan Hazboun
Executive Secretary,
Bethlehem Association
- ISRAEL’S CO-CONSPIRATORS’
By William
Kelley
Letter in the Austin American Statesman, 12/13/00
The Dec. 4 letter,
"It isn't just Israel," requires a response. As an aging American
who volunteered for Army service in World War II to do my part to bring down
Adolf Hitler for his murderous efforts against Christians, Jews, Gypsies and
others who opposed his racial policies, I think
I can recognize racism and aggression.
Hitler's aggression
lasted hardly 13 years. One would have to be in
deep denial to dismiss Zionist aggression against the Arab people, mainly the
Palestinians, from 1948 to the present. Israel's murderous aggression has gone
on for more than 50 years.
No, ``it isn't just Israel.''
It is the U.S. Congresses and administrations, corrupted since Truman's time
by pro-Zionist bribes or threats to do Israel's bidding, which maintain this
criminal enterprise. We U.S. taxpayers, unwittingly in most cases, foot the
bill for our ``special commitment'' to Israel and become co-conspirators in
the violations of human rights of the Palestinian people.
William V. Kelly
Austin, Texas
 |
A Palestinian
youth uses his slingshot to hurl a stone towards Israeli occupation
soldiers during clashes in the West Bank town of Ramallah after Israeli
helicopters bombed parts of Ramallah on Friday. Palestinians want
Israelis out their country. They are willing to fight tanks and bombs
with sling shots. (photo by Lefteris Pitarakis/AP) |
- THE MEDIA HAVE
SHOWN BIAS AGAINST PALESTINIANS.
By
Victor J. Lama,
Westchester Journal News,
December 1, 2000.
The opinions
expressed by columnists George Will, Cal Thomas, Charles Krauthammer and other
syndicated Arab-bashers simply offend and boggle the mind. With slavish
deference to Israel, comprehensive suppression of historical facts,
misinformation and bizarre misrepresentations of reality characterize their
rhetoric -- the victims become the aggressors and the
occupied are called upon to ensure the safety of their occupiers. The insulting Israeli offer at Camp
David, which fell far short of compliance with international law and United
Nations resolutions, is considered a "generous offer", while the
Palestinian refusal to succumb to Israeli dictates that they waive their
rights and the recognition granted to them by international legal precedence
is viewed as intransigence.
The informed reader can only
wince at their hypocrisy in defense of Israel. As they see it, Palestinian
resistance to over 50 years of dispossession, murder, ethnic cleansing and
occupation by Zionist Jews is nothing more than a manifestation of Arab
"anti-Semitism" and Islamic zealotry - which, of course, Israel must crush decisively. On the other
hand, Israel's usurpation of occupied Palestinian land -- prohibited by United
Nations resolution 242 and the 4th Geneva Convention, but nonetheless openly
legitimized by the Israeli "right" of Jewish manifest destiny,
having been bestowed upon them by divine providence -- is wholly within the
confines of western secular, democratic sensibilities.
In an attempt at obfuscation, the divisive accusation is made that "the
Arabs" simply hate Israel because it's Jewish. In Professor Norman
Finkelsteins book, The Holocaust Industry, he remarks: "The Holocaust
dogma of eternal Gentile hatred has served both to justify the necessity of a
Jewish state and to account for the hostility directed at Israel…This dogma
has also conferred total license on Israel. Whatever expedient Jews resort to, even aggression
and torture, constitutes legitimate self-defense... It precludes the possibility that animus toward Jews might be
grounded in a real conflict of interests." For the Palestinians, the
"conflict of interest" is their aversion to being further
dispossessed and slaughtered by their Jewish occupiers.
Another commonly used contrivance when defending Israeli atrocities against
the Palestinians is to accuse them of having sympathized with the Nazis. To
that, just refer back to Professor Finkelstein who observes: "The
prevailing mythology is that all people collaborated with the Nazis in the
destruction of Jewry. This mentality condones, in advance, any inhuman
treatment of non-Jews, hence everything is permissible to Jews in their
relationship to other peoples."
Clearly, besides murder and dispossession, fanatical Jewish fundamentalism is
also "permissible". The Israeli Law of Return extends to any Jew,
regardless of nationality, the "right of return" - 2,000 years
later- to the "biblical land of Israel", including the Occupied
Territories (Israeli "Judea and Samaria"). But the 700,00
Palestinian Gentiles (now over 3 million), who were driven out of their
homeland by Israel only 52 years ago, do not have that right!
If the realities of Palestinian suffering and Israeli terror are not bad
enough, the American media's shameless peddling of Zionist wares serves to
endow Israel with moral righteousness in their onslaught against the
Palestinians. Never have the Zionized media inverted reality as
comprehensively as they have during the latest conflict.
The Palestinians "attack", but the
Israelis only "retaliate". Ariel Sharon is a "hard-liner",
never a war criminal. Jewish settlers who kill Palestinians are
"extremists", never terrorists. The Palestinians are "laying
siege to Israel" (as the ghastly Madeleine Albright commented), even
though Israeli tanks and helicopter gun-ships are slaughtering Palestinian
civilians on their own land. The rock-throwing Palestinians must "end the
violence", not the rampaging, tank-firing, missile launching Israeli
occupation army. How bizarre!
Thanks to the Zionist-enslaved media, there is simply no other people whose
daily killing on our television screens can be seemingly viewed by most
Americans as acceptable, well deserved punishment. The taboo of discussing
Israel's horrific treatment of the Palestinians -their dispossession, torture
and murder is preserved by the looming vilification of "anti-Semite"
for anyone who dares.
Amazingly, the fact that Israel's 33-year occupation of the West Bank, Gaza
and Arab East Jerusalem is a flagrant violation of UN resolutions 242 and 338,
supposedly the bases for the "peace process", is left completely
unspoken. Ironically, the Israeli Likud and Labor parties alike have made it
no secret --but the Zionized media have-- that Oslo was meant to create a
marginalized Palestinian statelet consisting of a hodgepodge of isolated
enclaves surrounded by Israeli-controlled borders with Jewish settlements and
Israeli army encampments violating the territories' contiguity. Land
expropriations, illegal settlement activity, the solidification of an Israeli
apartheid system, the Judaization of Jerusalem and its closure to West Bank
and Gaza Palestinians have proceeded inexorably throughout the 8-year process.
That the American media would
prostitute themselves like this notwithstanding the heartrending scenes of
freedom-yearning Palestinian civilians being slaughtered daily is the epitome
of immorality.
Victor J. Lama.
- AMERICAN MEDIA ON THE MIDDLE
EAST
IN SEARCH OF TRUTH, NOT DOGMA.
By Amy Pagnozzi
The Hartford Courant
December 19, 2000
Dear Readers,
You may have noticed that in the weeks that
have passed since I began writing about Intifada 2000, I've been under a great
deal of fire from critics. Flamed? Charbroiled is more like it.
Outraged readers wrote the letters to the
editor. Lists of corrections ran - so long, they should have had my byline on
them. The paper's reader representative, Elissa Papirno, not satisfied with
trashing my reputation in her Sunday column, took shots at the talented,
decent man who edited my copy. A declaration of war, and my first instinct was
to strike out (or rather, meet her aggression with Israeli-style
"resolve").
But perhaps Papirno's attack was a reflex -
the conditioned response of a person programmed to believe that Israel does no
wrong. I used to be one of them. Whatever Israel says, the United States
swears to. Then the palace court press duly records the sophistry, turning it
into "fact."
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR),
a media watchdog group, has fired off one action alert after another,
lambasting the American media for biased coverage of the current conflict, but
it's been to no avail. Watchdog groups are as easily ignored by the print
media as the U.N. consensus to draft a resolution condemning Israel's
"excessive use of force against Palestinians." As for the networks,
they are more biased - and even less accountable. "Occupied territories
are no longer `occupied' on TV news," states FAIR.
FAIR says that a typical 90-second
story on "Palestinian violence (as it is routinely called) neglects to
mention that Palestinians are "fighting
against a [foreign] military occupation." ... Their right "to use
force ...universally recognized and enshrined in international law." That's a concept we understand when it's anti-Milosevic Serbs
in Yugoslavia throwing bricks and bottle bombs, "taking their struggle
... for democracy into the streets," as a Fox News promo put it. But
Palestinians tossing rocks or Molotov cocktails in the occupied territories
are thugs, rioters - anything but freedom fighters. Substitute the word
"terrorists," and the slaughter of what fact-finding groups estimate
is approaching 300 Palestinians and the wounding of thousands more (most
unarmed, according to humanitarian groups) seem almost good deeds.
That's right. Organizations including the
Israeli peace group B'Tselem and the international Physicians for Human Rights
have, in recent weeks, released reports that support the fundamental
assertions of my columns.
On Oct. 24, Physicians for Human Rights
members were on the outskirts of Ramallah as a demonstration took place.
Doctors from the organization "saw [Israeli Defense Forces] soldiers fire
live and rubber ammunition at Palestinian civilians," yet saw "no
evidence of Palestinians using firearms," a statement said.
The physicians' group concluded that: 1)
Israeli soldiers are not firing in only life-threatening situations; and 2)
they are firing at heads and thighs to injure and kill, not to avoid loss of
life and injury. Military brutality comes as no surprise to Israelis who have
witnessed it first-hand, whose level of denial is but a fraction of ours - and
whose newspapers print more of the truth.
The Independent of London's Robert Fisk -
dean of the Middle East correspondents, with 24 years in the region - calls
the American media "supine." In particular, coverage in the Israel
newspaper Ha'aretz "outshines anything" reported in the States, says
Fisk. The Israeli paper's Gaza correspondent, Amira Hass, recently reported on
an Israeli Defense Forces sniper whose orders were to shoot anyone over 12 as
fair game.
We have as many peace groups trying to tell
us the truth as Israel does, but fewer here care to listen. As
Palestinian-born intellectual Edward Said puts it, Zionism is "literally
the last taboo in American discourse. Abortion, homosexuality, the death
penalty, even the sacrosanct military budget have been talked about with some
freedom. "The American flag can be burned in public, whereas ... Israel's
52-year-old treatment of the Palestinians is ... a narrative with no
permission to appear," Said says.
Israelis may freely criticize Israel in
Israel, not so American Jews here. Remarks made by Ami Ayalon - former chief
of Israel's secret service, Shin Bet - were front page news in Israel, but
they didn't even get reported in America, and no wonder. Tossing around the
word "apartheid" as if it were Israel's acknowledged system of
governing the occupied territories, Ayalon blamed Israel for habitually
bolting from negotiations - and refusing to honor what concessions were
already made.
"We ... returned to [the peace process]
only under threat of violence," giving "only when there was a gun to
our heads," Ayalon said at an economics meeting on Dec. 4. The
Palestinians riot at the Western Wall, Israel cedes part of Hebron to them;
they kidnap or kill soldiers - and only then does Israel comply with
Palestinian demands for the release of political prisoners, he said.
"What should the Palestinians and Hezbollah understand from this?"
Ayalon asked. "The Palestinians learned that Israel only understands
force."
It was natural they should rebel, confined
by the tens of thousands to impoverished, isolated "bantustans"
whose borders were defined by their military occupiers. "The things a
Palestinian has to endure, simply coming to work in the morning, is a long and
continuous nightmare that includes humiliation bordering on despair,"
said Ayalon. "Is the option of Jewish democracy with apartheid
acceptable? I think not."
Any hope for true democracy in Israel
depends on the ability of Jews and Palestinians to have a joint dialogue of
their joined futures, Ayalon said. Imagine, attempting to float the idea of an
open dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis about how Israel should be run
- as if the two groups were equals.
You'll peddle that soft stuff elsewhere if
you know what's good for you. Here in America, we take our Zionism straight
up. Skip the truth, ma'am, and just give us the facts. We'll correct them for
you.
-
VILLIFIED
FOR TELLING THE TRUTH
By
Robert Fisk
The Independent (UK),
13 December 2000
'The abuse being directed at anyone who dares to criticise Israel is
reaching McCarthyite proportions'
In the Middle East
jungle, a journalist has to expect a few sticks and stones. A Bahrain
newspaper cartoonist once depicted me as a rabid dog (fit, of course, for
extermination), and Cairo's most lickspittle columnist called me "a crow
pecking at the corpse of Egypt". But the degree of abuse and outright
threats now being directed at anyone - academic, analyst, reporter - who dares
to criticise Israel (or dares to tell the truth about the Palestinian
uprising) is fast reaching McCarthyite proportions.
Take Edward Said, the brilliant
Palestinian academic who is a professor at Columbia University. He has been
facing unprecedented abuse from the Zionist Organisation of America, which
last year demanded that he be fired from the Modern Language Association and
which now demands on an almost daily basis his dismissal from his
professorship at Columbia - solely because he points out, with clinical
ferocity and painful accuracy, the historical tragedy of Palestinian
dispossession, the brutality of Israel's continued occupation and the
bankruptcy of the Oslo "peace" agreement. Columbia University has
issued an unprecedented public defence of Said and "the fundamental
values of a great university", quoting John Stuart Mill and adding that
to give way to the Jewish lobby's demand would be "a threat to us all and
to academic freedom".
Too true. Noam Chomsky -
himself Jewish - is one of the most profound philosophers of our age, but his
scathing reviews of the Israeli occupation and America's blind, unquestioning
support for Israel now earn him ever more ruthless abuse. In the United
States, he wrote recently, a whole population is kept in ignorance of the
facts because "the economic and military programmes (of Israel) rely
crucially on US support, which is domestically unpopular and would be far more
so if its purposes were known."
Ignorance of the Middle East is
now so firmly adhered to in the US that only a few tiny newspapers report
anything other than Israel's point of view. You won't find Chomsky in The New
York Times. It was put very well by Charlie Reese in a recent issue of the
Orlando Sentinel - note the boondocks location - when he wrote that
"Palestinians won't get their independence until Americans get
theirs".
But the attempt to force the
media to obey Israel's rules is now international. We must say that Israel is
under siege by Palestinians (rather than occupying Palestinian land), that
Palestinians are responsible for the violence (even though Palestinians are
the principal victims), that Arafat turned down a good deal at Camp David
(though he was offered just over 60 per cent of his land, not 94 per cent),
and that Palestinians indulge in child sacrifice (rather than question why the
Israeli troops have shot so many Palestinian children).
Israeli ambassadors and
Israel's lobbyists have never been such frequent visitors to European
newspaper offices, to complain about reports or reporters, sometimes in a
quite disgraceful manner. The Johannesburg Star - a sister paper of The
Independent which carries my own Middle East reports - was confronted by one
pro-Israeli group this year which claimed that I was in some way assisting the
right-wing historian David Irving - someone I have never met and never wish to
meet. They subsequently withdrew their allegation.
Then an odd thing happened in
Ireland - at a prize-giving ceremony in memory of a Belfast journalist. Mark
Sofer, Israel's ambassador in Dublin, had been invited to talk about reporting
in conflict zones to journalism students under the auspices of Co- operation
Ireland, a charitable
movement dedicated to
North-South relations. But at one point he chose to use the opportunity to
attack my own reporting of the Middle East, to suggest that it should not be
read or believed. Mr Sofer is, of course, entitled to his views - but not to
air his prejudices in a charitable forum
without allowing a right of
reply. The charity has since announced that it "totally dissociates
itself" from the ambassador's remarks. So it should.
And yet it goes on. In South
Africa, in Europe, in Australia - I still treasure the five pages of abuse in
an Australian lobby group's magazine headlined "The Ignoble Scribe"
and accusing me of a "stupor of self-deception". Oddly, you can now
learn more from the Israeli press than the American media. The brutality of
Israeli soldiers is fully covered in Ha'aretz, which also reports on the large
number of US negotiators who are Jewish. Four years ago, a former Israeli
soldier described in an Israeli newspaper how his men had looted a village in
southern Lebanon; when the piece was reprinted in The New York Times, the
looting episode was censored out of the text.
So here's just one final question. If
Arab ambassadors and lobbyists behaved like their Israeli opposite numbers,
would we listen to them? Would we respect them? Would we run for cover and
print only one side of the story? Would we hell.
Robert Fisk.
(c) 2000 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.
- BETHLEHEM UNDER SIEGE.
By Ray Hanania
November 1, 2000
Ariel
Sharon's incursion onto the courtyard of the Al Aqsa Mosque the al-Haram
Al-Ash-Sharif to Muslims and the Temple Mount to Jews) has wrongly cast the
current Middle East violence as being between Jews and Muslims. The fact is
that nearly a third of the victims of the violence are Christian
Palestinians. As American Christians ready themselves for the Millennium
Christmas, I am surprised that this fact does not seem to be more important
to them.
Shocking must be the contrast between Bethlehem's Biblical images Americans
will display in their homes and the reality of this little town embattled
night and day by Israel's military assault. Bethlehem, this most powerful
Icon of Christianity, is literally being ripped to pieces. And so are the
neighboring Christian towns of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala. And there is not a
protest from the Christian world.
More than half of Chicago's Arabs are Christians, worshipping in five
churches that offer services in the Arabic language. My mother's family
hails from Bethlehem. Her cousin presides over the Church of the Nativity in
Manger Square. During a recent visit to Bethlehem, I spoke with Father
Samour who told me that the church has always survived even the most brutal
attacks. His words are little comfort as I watch the raw footage of Israeli
tanks and helicopter gunships blasting into the heart of this tiny, little
town on satellite TV, my only remedy to one-sided media coverage.
Each day, the death toll of Christians and
Muslims rises. More and more Palestinian homes and buildings in Bethlehem
are being destroyed.
Many of Chicago's Christian Palestinian community will observe the
Millennium Christmas by keeping the lights on their Christmas trees and
season decorations turned off.
For Christians who trace their roots directly to this little town of
Bethlehem, nothing can compete with the glow that shines in the courage
heroism that we see in the faces of our families back home. This Christmas
belongs to them.
Ray Hanania is a Palestinian American writer.)
While we're over here, stewing about our
election, the Israeli government continues to kill Palestinians and to
strangle the rest economically simply because the Palestinians have the
audacity to demand an end to 33 years of illegal and military occupation.
Let me tell you something else that's interesting: The United Nations has
condemned Israel for using excessive force. The United Nations Commissioner of
Human Rights has condemned Israel for using excessive force. The Physicians
for Human Rights, an independent human-rights organization, after examining
wounds in Palestinian hospitals, has condemned Israel for using excessive
force. Amnesty International has condemned Israel for using excessive force.
The United States secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, says, however, that
Israel is a victim of aggression and is only defending itself. Now that lady
is either nutty or evil. If she's so disconnected from reality that she thinks
that people with no army, whose dead number 286 and whose wounded exceed
10,000, are a threat to the most powerful military state in the Middle East,
she's nutty. If she's deliberately lying, she's evil. Furthermore, if the
United States government treated American Indians or blacks in precisely the
same way in every detail that the Israeli government treats Palestinians,
people would be screaming to high heaven.
I confess I'm mystified how decent Americans can condone the brutality and
abuse that Israel inflicts on innocent Palestinians. If you're thinking that
you don't have the right to criticize a foreign government, let me set you
straight: Your government has given a cumulative total of 85 billion of your
tax dollars through the years to the Israeli government. I think that buys you
a right to criticize. The truth is, I fear, that Palestinians won't get their
independence until Americans get theirs.
The Israeli occupation forces
hold down the Palestinians, and our government appears to be the captive of
the Israeli lobby. You might write your congressman and senators and remind
them that they ran for office in the United States, not in Israel, and that
they took an oath to defend America, not Israel. You might also tell them that
it is not in our national interest to be seen the world over as a flaming
hypocrite, nor is it in our national interest to alienate 1.1 billion Muslims
who happen to control more than 60 percent of the world's oil reserves.
As an aside, let me clear up a matter. In reprimanding a politician for a
racist slur against Palestinians who had killed two Israeli undercover agents,
I suggested that he use the same slur against Israeli killers of Palestinians.
The case I cited was a man whom people in Ramallah believe was kidnapped and
beaten to death either by settlers or Israeli soldiers. The Physicians for
Human Rights, at the request of an Israeli human-rights group, examined the
X-rays and pictures, talked with doctors and family, and came to the
conclusion that his injuries were caused by an automobile accident. All of the
Palestinian doctors involved in the case, however, disagree with the report
and say they plan to issue their own report. So there you have it: a medical
disagreement.
At any rate, examples of Israelis killing Palestinians are plentiful enough.
There are the children shot to death, not to mention the 28 Palestinian men
and women killed by a Jewish settler in Hebron a few years ago. When the
Israeli terrorist paused to change magazines in his weapon, surviving
Palestinians overpowered him and beat him to death with his own rifle. The
other Israeli settlers who were mighty proud of their mass killer turned his
grave into a shrine.
Charley Reese,
Orlando, Florida,
December 7, 2000
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