No, Mr. Halper and Mr. Lendman, the Reality Is as follows..

No, Mr. Kouchner, Mideast Reality is Not What You Think

By Mr. Salomon Benzimra

[ISRAEL/PALESTINIAN AFFAIRS] During the visit of French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Israel last June, his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Bernard Kouchner, was interviewed by Guysen News International, a francophone online network based in Jerusalem. On the issue of the Middle East peace process, Mr. Kouchner’s observations can be summarized as follows:


Everyone knows that a viable Palestinian state must be created side by side with Israel, and it must be done urgently. To this effect, Israel must put an end to the colonization, remove a few tens of thousands of settlers, compensate them to return to Israel and hand over their homes to the Palestinians, without destroying them, as was the case in Gaza. Of course, Hamas continues to fire rockets, but Israel must stop the confrontation that feeds extremism. Later, the return of the refugees and the issue of Jerusalem must also be discussed. (Note 1)


This hodge-podge of worn out ideas, dogmatic pronouncements and mendacious terminology must first be confronted with factual truths.

First, the destruction of Jewish owned houses in Gaza was not only coordinated but encouraged at the highest levels of the Palestinian Authority (PA). On May 5, 2005, Mr. Saeb Erekat, chief Palestinian negotiator, declared in an interview to Voice of Peace: “I will tell the Israelis to demolish all [the houses] and even take all the rubble with you, because this is our firm position - to demolish these houses because we do not want to live in them." This decision was later confirmed on May 26, 2005, by Mr. Mohamed Shtayyeh, the Palestinian Minister of Public Works: "If Israel does not destroy the settlers' homes, we will destroy them" (Note 2). Destruction was not limited to buildings and housing units. Most greenhouses, highly efficient productive centers, were vandalized by the Palestinians in spite of a $14 million private fund raised by James Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank.

Second, Hamas is not the only group to fire rockets from the Gaza Strip. Ignoring the recent cease-fire agreement, the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade claimed responsibility for the latest round of rockets. Let us not forget that these Brigades are part of Fatah and under the authority of President Mahmoud Abbas with whom, according to Mr. Kouchner, negotiations are possible.

But beyond these “details”, Mr. Kouchner’s position must be challenged on more fundamental grounds. While everyone is entitled to his opinion on the “Palestinian cause”, no one should be allowed to distort the facts. It is high time that this “urgent necessity to create a viable Palestinian state” (in Judea & Samaria, of all places, and after uprooting all its Jewish communities) be assessed rationally.

Neither international law, nor historical facts, nor geo-strategic considerations could support the creation of a new Arab state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Even though Mr. Kouchner tells us that “everyone knows...,” here is what everyone should really know.

On legal grounds: The 1922 Mandate for Palestine (Note 3) recognized the region known as “Palestine” as the historic, national and exclusive heritage of the Jewish people. This key document of international law – which has never been abrogated, and the spirit of which was entrenched in Article 80 of the Charter of the United Nations – should be the basis of any resolution of the Israeli-Arab conflict. When this document was approved by the Council of the League of Nations in July 1922, Palestine had already been carved out of its eastern region (Transjordan), as shown in Article 25. This partition resulted in “postponing or withholding” all Jewish settlements east of the Jordan River and, to this day, there are no Jews living in that area.

How many times must Palestine be partitioned? Was it not a violation of the provisions of the Mandate (Article 5) to envisage a further partition of Palestine, as recommended by the Peel Commission in 1937 (Note 4) or by UN Resolution 181 in 1947 (Note 5)? Even though Israeli jurists Meir Shamgar and Theodor Meron, in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967, wrongly advised their government to view Judea & Samaria (the “West Bank”) as “territories regulated by the Geneva Conventions”, the validity of the provisions of the Mandate remains intact. So, how many more transgressions of international law are Mr. Kouchner and his western colleagues prepared to suggest, even to support, in order to appease the real transgressors whose final objective is the destruction of Israel?

The Mandate is also very clear with regard to the establishment of Jewish communities in Palestine. Article 6 encourages the development of these communities in all the lands located west of the Jordan River, which makes their status perfectly legal. When Mr. Kouchner refers to these communities as colonies and urges Israel to put an end to the colonization – a most derogatory term – he shows his ignorance of the facts. Dismantling these Jewish communities would be tantamount to condoning the ethnic cleansing that Arabs have practiced in the region up to 1967.

On historical grounds: There is no doubt about which territories Israel should purportedly abandon in order to create a Palestinian state. They include mainly the “West Bank” – a misnomer widely used by all those who favor a new partition, to actually designate Judea and Samaria. It just happens that Judea and Samaria hold over 90% of the historic patrimony of the Jewish people. Withdrawing from these territories would not only be a national suicide but an invitation to any number of further territorial demands made by the Arabs (Galilee, coastal zone, etc.), where Jews could not possibly claim as strong historical links as in Judea & Samaria. And let us not even mention the partition of Jerusalem, and its supposed holiness to Islam, so recently touted!

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, contemporary history never ceases to remind us of a reality that the world persists to ignore. For reasons that escape reason, the armistice line of 1949 (the “Green Line”) has acquired the status of an “internationally recognized boundary.” Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who seldom misses an opportunity to distort the reality of the Middle East, repeats this nonsense in an article published in USA Today in May, 2006 (Note 6). In 1967, the Green Line vanished but the error persists. It is useful to recall the parallel between the War of Independence of 1948 and the Six- Day War of 1967. In both events,

Notes to the above article by Salomon Benzimra

To read notes to the article by Salomon Benzimra above, please go to:  

http://www.infoisrael.net/cgi-local/text.pl?source=4/b/viii/210720081

where it was first published. Thank you,

by Rachel Neuwirth (16 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 14 comments) on Friday, July 25, 2008 at 3:35:44 PM
 

Well, there is more to the story

In the following link, is more to digest on this very complex issue.  As usual, depending on the filter with which you perceive duality, whether you live in labels and fear, or in the clarity that comes with the release of personal hurts that make our filters so airtight, which filter defines you?...because after all, life is personal.  If you are a Christian and have only followed televangelists and have not taken the time to know the risen Christ's mandate to love your enemies and do good to those who use you, and release through forgiveness and not abide by a "spirit of fear" but of love power and a sound mind.  So with that said, Jeff Halper, Anna Balzer and other American Jews for peace and conscience have put their lives and words on the line for the good of everyone, not just a faction of politics, religion, race or ideology.  They have gone past the personality of their group and speak for the priniciple of peace through justice.  Shouldn't American Christians do the same?  (And according to our local Rabbi and some reps from Jews for Jesus, they have assured me that the 10 commandments doesn't say "thou shalt not kill", only "thou shalt not murder" which you need to know to fully understand the word kill in this context, and in the context of condaleeza rice addressing aipac).

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07252008.html

Note:  Rev. Thomas Are is at Village Presbyterian Church, Prairie
Village, KS (greater Kansas City area), where a Friends of Sabeel
Conference was held Oct. 20-21, 2006.


Counterpunch.org
also at antiwar.com

July 25, 2008

The Epiphany of Rev. Thomas Are
Are You Ready to Face the Facts About Israel?

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

     “On October 21 (1948) the Government of Israel took a decision that
was to have a lasting and divisive effect on the rights and status of
those Arabs who lived within its borders: the official establishment of
military government in the areas where most of the inhabitants were Arabs.”

     -Martin Gilbert, Israel: a History

I had given up on finding an American with a moral conscience and the
courage to go with it and was on the verge of retiring my keyboard when
I met the Rev. Thomas L. Are.

Rev. Are is a Presbyterian pastor who used to tell his Atlanta, Georgia,
congregation: “I am a Sionist.” Like most Americans, Rev. Are had been
seduced by Israeli propaganda and helped to spread the propaganda among
his congregation.

Around 1990 Rev. Are had an awakening for which he credits the Christian
Canon of St. George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem and author Marc Ellis,
co-editor of the book, Beyond Occupation.

Realizing that his ignorance of the situation on the ground had made him
complicit in great crimes, Rev. Are wrote a book hoping to save others
from his mistake and perhaps in part to make amends, Israeli Peace
Palestinian Justice, published in Canada in 1994.

Rev. Are researched his subject and wrote a brave book. Keep in mind
that 1994 was long prior to Walt and Mearsheimer’s recent book, which
exposed the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to control the
explanation Americans receive about the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Rev. Are begins with an account of Israel’s opening attack on the
Palestinians, an event which took place before most Americans alive
today were born. He quotes the distinguished British historian, Arnold
J. Toynbee: “The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 (and 1948)
was as morally indefensible as the slaughter of six million Jews by the
N---s. Though nor comparable in quantity to the crimes of the N---s, it
was comparable in quality.”

Golda Meir, considered by Israelis as a great leader and by others as
one of history’s great killers, disputed the facts: “It was not as
though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw
them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”

Golda Meir’s apology for Israel’s great crimes is so counter-factual
that it blows the mind. Palestinian refugee camps still exist outside
Palestine filled with Palestinians and their descendants whose towns,
villages, homes and lands were seized by the Israelis in 1948. Rev. Are
provides the reader with Na’im Ateek’s description of what happened to
him, an 11-year old, when the Jews came to take Beisan on May 12, 1948.
Entire Palestinian communities simply disappeared.

In 1949 the United Nations counted 711,000 Palestinian refugees. [United
Nations General Assembly Appendix 4, No. 15 ]

In 2005 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency estimated 4.25
million Palestinians and their descendants were refugees from their
homeland.

The Israeli policy of evicting non-Jews has continued for six decades.
On June 19, 2008, the Laity Committee in the Holy Land reported in
Window Into Palestine that the Israeli Ministry of Interior is taking
away the residency rights of Jerusalem Christians who have been
reclassified as “visitors in their own city.”

On December 10, 2007, MK Ephraim Sneh (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/sneh.html)   

boasted in the Jerusalem Post that Israel had achieved “a true Zionist victory” over the UN partition plan
“which sought to establish two nations in the land of Israel.” The
partition plan had assigned Israel 56 percent of Palestine, leaving the
inhabitants with only 44 percent. But Israel had altered this over time.
Sneb proudly declared: “When we complete the permanent agreement, we
will hold 78 percent of the land while the Palestinians will control 22
percent.”

Sneb could have added that the 22 percent is essentially a collection of
unconnected ghettos cut off from one another and from roads, water,
medical care, and jobs.

Rev. Are documents that the abuse of Palestinians’ human rights is
official Israeli policy. Killings, torture, and beatings are routine. On
May 17, 1990, the Washington Post reported that Save the Children
“documented indiscriminate beating, tear-gassing and shooting of
children at home or just outside the house playing in the street, who
were sitting in the classroom or going to the store for groceries.”

On January 19, 1988, Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, later Prime
Minister, announced the policy of “punitive beating” of Palestinians.
The Israelis described the purpose of punitive beating: “Our task is to
recreate a barrier and once again put the fear of death into the Arabs
of the area.”

According to Save the Children, beatings of children and women are
common. Rev. Are, citing the report in the Washington Post, writes:
“Save the Children concluded that one-third of beaten children were
under ten years old, and one-fifth under the age of five. Nearly a third
of the children beaten suffered broken bones.”

On February 8, 1988, Newsweek magazine quoted an Israeli soldier: “ We
got orders to knock on every door, enter and take out all the males. The
younger ones we lined up with their faces against the wall, and soldiers
beat them with billy clubs. This was no private initiative, these were
orders from our company commander. . . . After one soldier finished
beating a detainee, another soldier called him ‘you N---,’ and the first
man shot back: ‘You bleeding heart.’ When one soldier tried to stop
another from beating an Arab for no reason, a fist fight broke out.”

These were the old days before conscience was eliminated from the ranks
of the Israeli military.

In the London Sunday Times, June 19, 1977, Ralph Schoenman, executive
director of the Bertrand Russell Foundation, wrote: “Israeli
interrogators routinely ill-treat and torture Arab prisoners. Prisoners
are hooded or blindfolded and are hung by their wrists for long periods.
Most are struck in the genitals or in other ways sexually abused. Most
are sexually assaulted. Others are administered electric shock.”

Amnesty International concluded that “there is no country in the world
in which the use of official and sustained torture is as well
established and documented as in the case of Israel.”

Even the pro-Israeli Washington Post reported: “Upon arrest, a detainee
undergoes a period of starvation, deprivation of sleep by organized
methods and prolonged periods during which the prisoner is made to stand
with his hands cuffed and raised, a filthy sack covering the head.
Prisoners are dragged on the ground, beaten with objects, kicked,
stripped and placed under ice-cold showers.”

Sounds like Abu Gharib. There are news reports that Israeli torture
experts participated in the torture of the detainees assembled by the
American military as part of the Bush Regime’s propaganda onslaught to
convince Americans that Iraq was overflowing with al Qaeda terrorists.
On July 23, 2008, Antiwar.com posted an Iraqi news report that the Iraqi
government had released a total of 109,087 Iraqis that the Americans had
“detained.” Obviously, these “terrorist detainees” had been used for the
needs of Bush Regime propaganda. No one will ever know how many of them were abused by Israeli torturers imported by the CIA.

Rev. Are’s book makes sensible suggestions for resolving the conflict
that Israel began. However, the problem is that Israeli governments
believe only in force. The policy of the Israeli government has always
been to beat, kill, and brutalize Palestinians into submission and
flight. Anyone who doubts this can read the book of Israel’s finest
historian Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).

Americans are a gullible and naive people. They have been complicit for
60 years in crimes that in Arnold Toynbee’s words “are comparable in
quality” to the crimes of N--- Germany. As Toynbee was writing decades
ago, the accumulated Israeli crimes might now be comparable also in
quantity.

The US routinely vetoes United Nations condemnations of Israel for its
brutal crimes against the Palestinians. Insouciant American taxpayers
have been bled for a half century to provide the Israelis with superior
military weapons with which Israelis assault their neighbors, all the
while convincing America--essentially a captive nation--that Israel is
the victim.

John F. Mahoney wrote: “Thomas Are reminds me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: an
active pastor who comes to the unsettling realization that he and his
people have been fed a terrible lie that is killing and torturing
thousands of innocent men, women and children. Not without ample
research and prayer does such a pastor, in turn, risk unsettling his
congregation. The Reverend Are has done his homework and, I suspect, has
prayed often and long during the writing of this courageous book.”

Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian and pastor who was executed for his
active participation in the German Resistance against Nazism.

Professor Benjamin M. Weir, San Francisco Theological Seminary, wrote: “
This book will make the reader squirm. It asks you to lend your voice in
behalf of the voiceless.”

Americans who can no longer think for themselves and who are terrified
of disapproval by their peer group are incapable of lending their voices
to anyone except those who control the world of propaganda in which they
live.

The ignorance and unconcern of Americans is a great frustration to my
friends in the Israeli peace movement. Without outside support those
Israelis, who believe in good will and do not share their government’s
belief in Lenin’s doctrine that violence is the only effective force in
history, are deprived, by America’s support for their government’s
policy of violence, of any peaceful resolution of a conflict began in
1947 by Israeli aggression against unsuspecting Palestinian villages.

Rev. Are wrote his book with the hope that the pen is mightier than the
sword and that facts can crowd out propaganda and create a framework for
a just resolution of the Palestinian issue. In his concluding chapter,
“What Christians Can Do,” Rev. Are writes: “We cannot allow others to
dictate our thinking on any subject, especially on anything as important
as Christian faithfulness, which is tested by an attitude towards
seeking justice for the oppressed. It’s a Christian’s duty to know.”

Duty, of course, has costs. Rev. Are writes: “Speak up for the
Palestinians and you will make enemies. Yet, as Christians, we must be
willing to raise issues that until now we have chosen to dodge.”

More than a decade later, President Jimmy Carter, a true friend of
Israel, tried again to awaken Americans’ moral conscience with his book,
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
Carter was instantly demonized by the Israel Lobby.

Sixty years of efforts by good and humane people to hold Israel
accountable have so far failed, but they are more important today than
ever before. Israel has its captive American nation on the verge of
attacking Iran, the consequences of which could be catastrophic for all
concerned. The alleged purpose of the attack is to eliminate nonexistent
Iranian nuclear weapons. The real reason is to eliminate all support for
Hamas and Hezbollah so that Israel can seize the entire West Bank and
southern Lebanon. The Bush regime is eager to do Israel’s bidding, and
the media and evangelical “christian” churches have been preparing the
American people for the event.

It is paradoxical that Israel is demonstrating that veracity lies not in
the Christian belief in good will but in Lenin’s doctrine that violence
is the effective force in history and that the evangelical Christian
Sionist churches agree.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan
administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal
editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is
coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at:
paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

by karmacounselor (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 6 diaries, 70 comments) on Sunday, July 27, 2008 at 10:22:25 AM