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

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

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

Return to Outreach

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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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