March 27, 2008 at 05:39:20

Jonathan Cook's "Blood and Religion"

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By Stephen Lendman (about the author) Page 3 of 8 page(s)

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-- a determined effort to separate Arabs from Jews.

Cook contends the following - Israel wants a "phantom state" in the Territories and intends to unilaterally transfer Israeli Arabs' citizenship rights to the new entity. It's a grave breach of international law and a risky strategy, so why do it. Most likely to create an illusion of a Palestinian state, remove Israel's glass wall and transfer it to the Territories. With no Palestinians inside Israel, Jewish democracy will be affirmed and the Jewish State preserved.

For their part, Palestinians will be marginalized, and enclosed behind walls and barricades in "little more than open-air prisons, guarded by the Israeli army." It's been the scheme since the early 1990s, and the idea is similar to South Africa's Bantustan solution under apartheid. Israel wants the same type homelands for Palestinians, and policy has been moving that way for years. Cook is dubious and states: "It is futile to believe such an arrangement - rigid ethnic separation on Israel's terms - will bring peace to the region." It's hard to disagree as Palestinians continue to resist.

Israel's Fifth Column

Israel used the second Intifada politically - presenting it as a well-planned assault on the Jewish State and blaming it on Arafat. He was unfairly scapegoated for rejecting Camp David in 2000 even though Israel designed talks to fail. Ehud Barak insisted Arafat sign a "final agreement," declare an "end of conflict," and give up any legal basis for additional land in the Territories. Nothing was in writing, and no documents or maps were presented. The deal was so duplicitous that had Arafat accepted it any hope for peace would have been dashed. He didn't, was unfairly blamed, and "government spin-doctors" went further.

They claimed Arafat wanted Camp David as a demographic weapon against Israel:

-- to demand the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees; and

-- use his demographic advantage to destroy Israel's Jewishness and make the entire area "Greater Palestine."

Israeli officials jumped on him with wild accusations - that he unleashed the Intifada in retaliation. Initially the notion was accepted, but years later it was "finally and irreversibly discredited" as a politically-concocted lie. Israel's own intelligence exposed it when a senior army officer broke the silence. He revealed no evidence existed and available intelligence suggested that Arafat wanted compromise, not conflict, but not on one-way terms. Israel's duplicity spawned the Intifada, and it sprang from the grassroots. People felt betrayed and reacted after Ariel Sharon's provocative al-Aqsa Mosque visit in September 2000.

Thereafter, violence erupted and a police-led onslaught ensued. In the first week of October, 12 unarmed Palestinian civilians and a Gaza laborer were killed and hundreds more seriously injured. Arab Israelis began demonstrating and were also targeted. Their citizenship offered no protection.

Israeli police react like the army as both security forces are connected. How so? National military service is compulsory for non-Orthodox Jews. They're conscripted after leaving school at age 18 and required to serve for three years. Police have completed the requirement, are familiar with military weapons, and have absorbed the security-conscious culture, including a profound distrust of Arabs. The result - their mindset is hard line and racist, and it shows on Arab streets.

Months after demonstrations subsided, Arabs were still targeted, and hundreds continued to be arrested. Deaths occurred, cover-ups followed, and when Israeli unrest reacted to Arab protests, police responded much differently, avoided violence, no Jews were killed and few, if any, were injured.

Arabs, in contrast, were accused of orchestrating large-scale violence. Some called it a second front or a fifth column, Arafat was blamed, and it was claimed he schemed to overthrow Israel "through a mix of demographic war and armed Intifada." It was ludicrous, yet the idea took hold. It spread through the media and became permanently fixed in the public mind even after later evidence disproved it. It suggested no armed insurrection occurred, Arab protesters were unarmed, and no Jewish community was threatened or invaded. The very notion stretches credulity and proves the truth about Goebbels' maxim: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually....believe it." Or the Churchill one about "a lie get(ting) halfway around the world before the truth (gets) its pants on."

It makes Arabs easy targets when leaders are profoundly racist, and it shows in Ehud Barak's comments. In a summer 2002 interview, he called Palestinians "products of a culture in which to tell a lie....creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth (for them) is seen as an irrelevant category."

In the same interview, Barak repeated the second front accusation many other Jews believe - that Israeli Arabs want to transform Israel from a Jewish state to one for all its citizens. "This is their vision," and Barak and Sharon were convinced (or said they were) that Arafat was behind it since the early post-Oslo days. He was offered an illusion of a future Palestinian state but "wanted to keep a strategic foot in Israel," promote the right of return, and demographically destroy Israel. It led to Arafat's downfall. He was imprisoned in his Ramallah compound in 2001, became ill and died suspiciously in November 2004 in a Paris hospital. His personal physician claimed he was poisoned and evidence seemed to confirm it.

A False Reckoning

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