Clear and present danger

 

 

By Martin Sherman

  

String of disastrous decisions shows that government is our greatest threat

 

It is difficult to grasp. It is even difficult to accept. But it is no longer possible to deny the almost unthinkable truth.

 

Today the People of Israel and the State of Israel are facing a "clear and present danger" that is far more immediate – and arguably no less lethal – than any of the perils brewing in Tehran: The government of Israel.

 

There are doubtless those who would protest that such a harsh accusation is outrageously unreasonable. But they must confront the facts. They must not be allowed to ignore the undeniable:

 

It was the government of Israel that threw caution to the wind and – in spite of dire warning as to the consequences - initiated the Oslo process which brought carnage to the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa…

 

It was the government of Israel that – in spite of the dire warnings as to the consequences - foisted the disengagement plan on a misinformed, misled public and brought death and destruction to the civilian population in the South

 

It is the government of Israel that sits idly by while the forces of radical Islam in Gaza stockpile deadly ordnance, enhance the methods of their delivery, expand the ranks of their forces, and upgrade the level of their training - with the same indifferent impotence as it did with regard to the forces of radical Islam in the north.

 

And now, the government of Israel has, what can only be described as brazen impudence, to inform its citizens that it is planning to expose them to even more – and equally easily foreseeable - dangers by considering the transfer of the Golan to Syrian control.

 

Indeed, if even the upbeat assessments of the Israeli representatives at the renewed peace talks are accurate, the notion of withdrawing from the Golan is still unacceptably rash and wildly irresponsible. For Assad's current sincerity (or lack thereof) is entirely irrelevant in appraising the proposed evacuation.

 

What is vital is not whether he appears genuine in his intent to honor any agreement with Israel, but whether he will be able to do so over time in the future. As the Gaza experience shows, regime changes can no longer be dismissed as a mere figment of the right-wing's demented imagination, nor as nothing more than rejectionist scare tactics. They must be considered a tangible possibility and factored in the decision-making process by responsible government.

 

There is an array of crucial questions that have to be given convincing answers before the possibility of relinquishing any element of Israeli control in the Golan is even countenanced:

 

•           What would be the Israeli response should Assad's minority regime be overthrown by radical successors who repudiate the agreement with Israel? In fact, the very agreement with the "Zionist entity" may be the catalyst for such a coup d'état - especially if Assad was sincere in honoring it!

 

•           Moreover, still under the assumption of "Assadian" sincerity, if the Syrian ruler did indeed repudiate his ties with Tehran and the Hizbullah as demanded by Israel, who would keep him safe from vengeful Shi'ite wrath? The fate of Rafik Hariri in Beirut and Imad Mugniyah in Damascus demonstrate that in the Middle East neither high public office nor clandestine lifestyle can protect an intended victim from a determined assassin.

 

•           However, an actual overthrow of the current regime is not essential. If internal pressures, mounted from rejectionist elements, force Assad to retract all or some of his obligations, what is Israel's contingency plan? What would be Israel's response to a gradual renewal of support for Hizbullah and ties with Iran?

 

 •          What if more clandestine Syrian "strategic" installations were uncovered? Could they be attacked - or only politely protested?

 

•           What if "militants" established a presence in the demilitarized Golan – with or without the tacit collusion of Damascus - and rained rockets down on the north as happened in the south?

 

•           How does Israel plan to operate the national water system should the Syrians expropriate the water resources of the Golan and prevent them from reaching the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee,) or pollute them before they do? Water experts have consistently warned that this would have catastrophic effects for the country's water supply.

 

•           Media reports indicate that nearly all senior security officials - apart from the head of the Mossad - support the evacuation of the Golan, allegedly because otherwise the Syrians would be compelled to initiate hostilities. This leaves one to wonder why if the IDF cannot deter Syrian aggression with their capital Damascus in easy striking distance, how on earth will it do so when it is not?! Is there seriously any IDF general who believes that Israel's military position would be improved if the IDF deployed in the Galilee and the Hula valley rather than on Mt. Hermon and commanding ridges that control the approaches to Damascus?

 

•           And then of course there's the cost: With Washington openly unenthusiastic about dealings with Damascus and burdened by huge military costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, where will Israel find the tens of billions of dollars that such a measure would require? For example, for evacuation of towns, villages, and farms; for the relocation, rehabilitation and compensation of their residents; for the evacuation of the military camps and installations etc.

 

•           What sacrifices should be made to allow such huge allocations of resources? Social welfare cuts? Slashes in university budgets? Cancellation of infrastructure projects? Withdrawal of medical services? How would the huge diversion of funds be possible with out siphoning off resources needed to deal with the Iranian threat?

 The Israeli public must insist on convincing answers to all these questions before any negotiations on the Golan are even contemplated; it must demand they be provided before even considering disturbing the status quo on the most tranquil border the country has had for three and a half decades.

 

In a democracy, the citizenry is ultimately responsible for its own fate - and the citizens of this country have learnt, by bitter experience, that they can no longer unconditionally entrust their security to their government's judgment. It has been found too faulty too often.

 

Martin Sherman

 

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

The Mystery of Hate.

by Yair Lapid

 

Hundreds of years of fighting, six and a half wars, billions of  dollars gone with the wind, tens of thousands of victims, not including  the boy who laid down next to me on the rocky beach of lake Karon in  1982 and we both watched his guts spilling out. The helicopter took him  and until this day I do not know whether he is dead or survived. All  this, and one cannot figure it out.

 

And its not only what happened but all that did not happen -  hospitals that were never built, universities that were never opened,  roads that were never paved, the three years that were taken from  millions of teenagers for the sake of the army. And despite all the 

above, we still do not have the beginning of a clue to the mystery of  where it all started:

 

Why do they hate us so much?

 

I am not talking about the Palestinians this time. Their dispute with  us is intimate, focused, and it has a direct effect on their lives. Without getting into the "which side is right" question, it is obvious  that they have very personal reasons not to stand our presence here. We all know that eventually this is how it will be solved: in a personal  way, between them and us, with blood sweat and tears that will stain 

the pages of the agreement. Until then, it is a war that could at least  be understood, even if no sane person is willing to accept the means that are used to run it by.

 

It is the others. Those I cannot understand. Why does Hassan  Nasralla, along with tens of thousands of his supporters, dedicate his life, his visible talents, his country's destiny, to fight a country he  has never even seen, people he has never really met and an army that he  has no reason to fight?

 

Why do children in Iran, who can not even locate Israel on the map  (especially because it is so small), burn its flag in the city center and offer to commit suicide for its elimination? Why do Egyptian and  Jordanian intellectuals agitate the innocent and helpless against the peace agreements, even though they know that their failure will push  their countries 20 years back? Why are the Syrians willing to stay a pathetic and depressed third world country, for the dubious right to  finance terror organizations that will eventually threaten their own country's existence? Why do they hate us so much in Saudi-Arabia? In  Iraq? In Sudan? What have we done to them? How are we even relevant to  their lives? What do they know about us? Why do they hate us so much in  Afghanistan? They don't have anything to eat there, where do they get  the energy to hate?

 

This question has so many answers and yet it is a mystery. It is true  that it is a religious matter but even religious people make their choices. The Koran (along with the Shariaa - the Muslim parallel to the  Jewish Halacha) consists of thousands of laws, why is it that we occupy  them so much?

 

There are so many countries who gave them much better reasons to be  angry. We did not start the crusades, we did not rule them during the  colonial period, we never tried to convert them. The Mongolians, the  Seljuk, the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, the  British, they all conquered, ruined and plundered the whole region. We  did not even try, so how come we are the enemy?

 

And if it is identification with their Palestinians brothers then  where are the Saudi Arabian tractors building up the territories that  were evacuated? What happened to the Indonesian delegation building a  school in Gaza strip? Where are the Kuwaiti doctors with their modern  surgical equipment? There are so many ways to love your brothers, why  do they all prefer to help their brothers with hating?

 

Is it something that we do? Fifteen hundreds years of anti-Semitism  taught us - in the most painful way possible - that there is something  about us that irritates the world. So, we did the thing everyone  wanted: we got up and left. We have established our own tiny little  country, where we can irritate ourselves without interrupting others.  We didn't even ask a lot for it. Israel is spread on a smaller  territory than 2% of the territory of Saudi-Arabia, with no oil, no  minerals, without settling on another existing state's territory. Most  of the cities that were bombed this week were not plundered from  anyone. Nahariya, Afula, and Karmiel did not even exist until we  established them. The other katyusas landed on territories over which  no one ever questioned our right with regards to them. In Haifa there  were Jews already in the 3rd century BC and Tiberias was the place where the last Sanhedrin sat, so no one can claim we plundered them  from anyone.

 

However, the hatred continues. As if no other destiny is possible.  Active hatred, poisoned, unstoppable. Last Saturday the president of  Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called again "to act for the vanishing of  Israel"' as if we were bacteria. We got used to it so much that we  don't even ask why.

 

Israel does not hope and never did for Iran to vanish. As long as  they wanted, we had diplomatic relations with them. We do not have a  common border with them or even any bad memories. And still, the y are  willing to confront the whole western world, to risk a commercial  boycott, to hurt their own quality of life, to crush what's left of  their economy and all that for the right to passionately hate us.

 

I am trying to remember and cannot: have we ever done something to  them? When? How? Why did he say in his speech that "Israel is the main  problem of the Muslim world"? more than a billion people living in the  Muslim world, most of them in horrible conditions. They suffer from  hunger, poverty, ignorance, bloodshed that spreads from Kashmir to  Kurdistan, from dying Darfur to injured Bangladesh. How come we are the  main problem? How exactly are we in their way?

 

 I refuse to accept the argument that claims "that is just the way  they are". They said it about us so many times that we have learned to  accept this expression. There must be another reason, some dark secret  that because of it, the citizens of South Lebanon allow to rouse the  quiet border, to kidnap the soldiers of an army that has already  retreated from their territory, to turn their country into a wasteland  exactly at the time they finally escaped twenty years of disasters.

 

We got used to telling ourselves worn expressions - "it's the Iranian  influence", or "Syria is stirring behind the scenes" - but it is just  too easy explanation. Because what about them?

 

What about their thoughts?   What about their hopes, loves, ambitions and their dreams?  What about their children?

 

When they send their children to die, does it seem enough for them to  say that it was all worth while just because they hate us so much?

 

                       

Yair Lapid

 

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

 

Syrian Arab Republic

 

Syria officially the Syrian Arab Republic, is a country in Southwest Asia, bordering Lebanon, the Mediterranean Sea and the island of Cyprus to the west, Israel to the southwest, Jordan to the south, Iraq to the east, and Turkey to the north. The modern state of Syria was formerly a French mandate and attained independence in 1946, but can trace its roots to the fourth millennium BC. Its capital city, Damascus, was the seat of the Umayyad Empire and a provincial capital of the Mamluk Empire.

Since 1963 the country has been governed by the Baath Party; the head of state since 1970 has been a member of the Assad family. Syria's current president is Bashar al-Assad, son of Hafez al-Assad, who held office from 1970 until his death in 2000.

Modern Syria - the twenthieth century

Fighting on the side of Germany during World War I, plans by the Entente powers to dissolve the great Ottoman territory could now begin. Two allied diplomats (Frenchman François Georges-Picot and Briton Mark Sykes) secretly agreed, long before the end of the war, how to split the Ottoman Empire into several zones of influence. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 set the fate of modern Southwest Asia for the coming century; providing France with the northern zone (Syria, with later the upcoming Lebanon), and the United Kingdom with the southern one (Jordan, Iraq and later, after renegotiations in 1917, Palestine - 'to secure daily transportation of troops from Haifa to Baghdad' - agreement n° 7). The two territories were only separated with a straight border line from Jordan to Iran. But early discoveries of oil in the region of Mosul just before to end of the war led to yet another negotiation with France in 1918 to cede this region to 'Zone B', or the British zone of influence. The borders between the 'Zone A' and 'Zone B' have not changed from 1918 to this date. In 1920, the two sides have been recognized internationally under mandate of the League of Nations by the two dominant countries; France and the United Kingdom.

French Mandate

In 1920, an independent Arab Kingdom of Syria was established under Faisal I of the Hashemite family, who later became the King of Iraq. However, his rule over Syria ended after only a few months, following the clash between his Syrian Arab forces and regular French forces at the Battle of Maysalun. French troops occupied Syria later that year after the League of Nations put Syria under French mandate. Syria and France negotiated a treaty of independence in September of 1936, and Hashim al-Atassi, who was Prime Minister under King Faisal's brief reign, was the first president to be elected under a new constitution, effectively the first incarnation of the modern republic of Syria. However, the treaty never came into force because the French Legislature refused to ratify it. With the fall of France in 1940 during World War II, Syria came under the control of the Vichy Government until the British and Free French occupied the country in July 1941. Syria proclaimed its independence again in 1941 but it wasn't until January 1, 1944 that it was recognised as an independent republic. Continuing pressure from Syrian nationalist groups and British pressure forced the French to evacuate their troops in April 1946, leaving the country in the hands of a republican government that had been formed during the mandate.

Instability and foreign relations: independence to 1967

Although rapid economic development followed the declaration of independence, Syrian politics from independence through the late 1960s were marked by upheaval. Between 1946 and 1956, Syria had 20 different cabinets and drafted four separate constitutions. In 1948, Syria was involved in the Arab-Israeli War, intervening on the side of the Arab invading armies who attempted to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel. The Syrian army was pressed out of most of the Israel area, but fortified their strongholds on the Golan Heights and managed to keep their old borders and some additional territory. However, the economy was strained by the influx of more than 100,000 Palestinian refugees.

The humiliating defeat suffered by the army was one of several trigger factors for Col. Husni al-Za'im's seizure of power in 1949, in what has been described as the first military coup d'état of the Arab world. This was soon followed by a new coup, by Col. Sami al-Hinnawi, who was then himself quickly deposed by Col. Adib Shishakli, all within the same year. After exercising influence behind the scenes for some time, dominating the ravaged parliamentary scene, Shishakli launched a second coup in 1951, entrenching his rule and eventually abolishing multipartyism altogether. Only when president Shishakli was himself overthrown in a 1954 coup, was the parliamentary system restored, but it was fundamentally undermined by continued political maneuvering supported by competing factions in the military. By this time, civilian politics had been largely gutted of meaning, and power was increasingly concentrated in the military and security establishment, which had now proven itself to be the only force capable of seizing and -- perhaps -- keeping power. Parliamentary institutions remained weak and ineffectual, dominated by competing parties representing the landowning elites and various Sunni urban notables, while economy and politics were mismanaged, and little done to better the role of Syria's peasant majority. This, as well as the influence of Nasserism and other anti-colonial ideologies, created fertile ground for various Arab nationalist, Syrian nationalist and socialist movements, who represented disaffected elements of society, notably including the religious minorities, and demanded radical reform

During the Suez Crisis of 1956, after the invasion of the Sinai Peninsula by Israeli troops, and the intervention of British and French troops, martial law was declared in Syria. The November 1956 attacks on Iraqi pipelines were in retaliation for Iraq's acceptance into the Baghdad Pact. In early 1957 Iraq advised Egypt and Syria against a conceivable takeover of Jordan.

 In November 1956 Syria signed a pact with the Soviet Union, providing a foothold for Communist influence within the government in exchange for planes, tanks, and other military equipment being sent to Syria. With this increase in the strength of Syrian military technology worried Turkey, as it seemed feasible that Syria might attempt to retake Iskenderun, a matter of dispute between Syria and Turkey. On the other hand, Syria and the U.S.S.R. accused Turkey of massing its troops at the Syrian border. During this standoff, Communists gained more control over the Syrian government and military. Only heated debates in the United Nations (of which Syria was an original member) lessened the threat of war.

Syria's political instability during the years after the 1954 coup, the parallelism of Syrian and Egyptian policies, and the appeal of Egyptian President Gamal Abdal Nasser's leadership in the wake of the Suez crisis created support in Syria for union with Egypt. On February 1, 1958, Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli and Nasser announced the merging of the two countries, creating the United Arab Republic, and all Syrian political parties, as well as the Communists therein, ceased overt activities.

 The union was not a success, however. Following a military coup on September 28, 1961, Syria seceded, reestablishing itself as the Syrian Arab Republic. Instability characterised the next 18 months, with various coups culminating on March 8, 1963, in the installation by leftist Syrian Army officers of the National Council of the Revolutionary Command (NCRC), a group of military and civilian officials who assumed control of all executive and legislative authority. The takeover was engineered by members of the Arab Socialist Resurrection Party (Baath Party), which had been active in Syria and other Arab countries since the late 1940s. The new cabinet was dominated by Baath members.

The Baath takeover in Syria followed a Baath coup in Iraq the previous month. The new Syrian Government explored the possibility of federation with Egypt and with Baath-controlled Iraq. An agreement was concluded in Cairo on April 17, 1963, for a referendum on unity to be held in September 1963. However, serious disagreements among the parties soon developed, and the tripartite federation failed to materialize. Thereafter, the Baath regimes in Syria and Iraq began to work for bilateral unity. These plans foundered in November 1963, when the Baath regime in Iraq was overthrown. In May 1964, President Amin Hafiz of the NCRC promulgated a provisional constitution providing for a National Council of the Revolution (NCR), an appointed legislature composed of representatives of mass organizations—labour, peasant, and professional unions—a presidential council, in which executive power was vested, and a cabinet. On February 23, 1966, a group of army officers carried out a successful, intra-party coup, imprisoned President Hafiz, dissolved the cabinet and the NCR, abrogated the provisional constitution, and designated a regionalist, civilian Baath government on March 1. The coup leaders described it as a "rectification" of Baath Party principles.

Six Day War and Aftermath

The new government generally aligned itself with the hawkish Nasser in intra-Arab conflicts over how hard of a line to take against Israel. When Nasser closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Eilat-bound ships, the Baath regime supported the Egyptian leader, amassed troops in the strategic Golan Heights, and joined the clamor for the elimination of the Jewish state.

 

The Golan Heights are located in the southwestern part of the Syrian Arab Republic. The region is 1,850 square kilometres (714 sq mi), and includes mountains reaching an altitude of 2,880 metres (9,449 ft) above sea level. The heights dominate the plains below: The Jordan River, Lake Tiberias and the Hula Valley border the region on the west. [In 1920, the San Remo Conference of the Allied Powers (WWI) assigned to Great Britain a mandate to establish the Jewish national home on a territory covering Israel, Jordan and part of the Golan Heights.]

In the final days of the war, after having captured the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Israel turned its attention to Syria. Israel invaded and captured the entire Golan Heights in under 48 hours. The war was widely viewed as a humiliating defeat for the radical socialist regime established by the 1966 coup.

Conflict developed between an extremist military wing and a more moderate civilian wing of the Baath Party. The 1970 retreat of Syrian forces sent to aid the PLO during the "Black September" hostilities with Jordan reflected this political disagreement within the ruling Baath leadership. By November 13, 1970, Minister of Defense Hafez al-Assad was solidly established as the strongman of the regime, when he effected a bloodless military coup ("The Corrective Movement") which ousted his rival, Salah Jadid.

Baath Party rule under Hafez al-Assad, 1970–2000

Upon assuming power, Hafez al-Assad moved quickly to create an organizational infrastructure for his government and to consolidate control. The Provisional Regional Command of Assad's Arab Baath Socialist Party nominated a 173-member legislature, the People's Council, in which the Baath Party took 87 seats. The remaining seats were divided among "popular organizations" and other minor parties. In March 1971, the party held its regional congress and elected a new 21-member Regional Command headed by Assad. In the same month, a national referendum was held to confirm Assad as President for a 7-year term. In March 1972, to broaden the base of his government, Assad formed the National Progressive Front, a coalition of parties led by the Baath Party, and elections were held to establish local councils in each of Syria's 14 governorates. In March 1973, a new Syrian constitution went into effect followed shortly thereafter by parliamentary elections for the People's Council, the first such elections since 1962.

On October 6 1973, Syria and Egypt began the Yom Kippur War by staging a surprise attack against Israel (Arabs call it the "Ramadan War" or "October War" because Syria and Egypt attacked during Ramadan in the month of October). But despite the element of surprise, the war was first undecided , and then ended by a crushing Israeli victory. Israel continued to hold the Golan Heights. In early 1976, the Lebanese civil war was going poorly for the Maronite Christians. Syria sent 40,000 troops into the country to prevent them from being overrun, but soon became embroiled in the Lebanese Civil War, beginning the 30 year Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Many crimes in Lebanon were associated to the Syrians forces and intelligences: Kamal Jumblat, Bachir Gemayel, Moufti Hassan Khaled, Rene Mouawad,... Over the following 15 years of civil war, Syria fought both for control over Lebanon, and as an attempt to undermine Israel in southern Lebanon, through extensive use of Lebanese allies as proxy fighters. Many see the Syrian Army's presence in Lebanon as an occupation, especially following the end of the civil war in 1990, after the Syrian-sponsored Taif Agreement. Syria then remained in Lebanon until 2005, exerting a heavy-handed influence over Lebanese politics, that was deeply resented by many.

About one million Syrian workers came into Lebanon after the war ended to find jobs in the reconstruction of the country. Syrian workers were preferred over Palestinian and Lebanese workers because they could be paid lower wages, but some have argued that the Syrian government's encouragement of citizens entering its small and militarily dominated neighbour in search of work, was in fact an attempt at Syrian colonization of Lebanon. Now, the economies of Syria and Lebanon are completely interdependent. In 1994, under pressure from Damascus, the Lebanese government controversially granted citizenship to over 200,000 Syrian residents in the country.

 The authoritarian regime was not without its critics, though most were quickly murdered. A serious challenge arose in the late 1970s, however, from fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, who reject the basic values of the secular Baath program and object to rule by the Alawis, whom they consider heretical. From 1976 until its suppression in 1982, the arch-conservative Muslim Brotherhood led an armed insurgency against the regime. In response to an attempted uprising by the brotherhood in February 1982, the government crushed the fundamentalist opposition centered in the city of Hama, leveling parts of the city with artillery fire and causing between 10.000 and 25.000 of dead and wounded. Since then, public manifestations of anti-regime activity have been very limited.

Hafiz al-Assad died on June 10, 2000, after 30 years in power. Immediately following al-Assad's death, the Parliament amended the constitution, reducing the mandatory minimum age of the President from 40 to 34. This allowed his son, Bashar al-Assad, to become legally eligible for nomination by the ruling Baath party. On July 10, 2000, Bashar al-Assad was elected President by referendum in which he ran unopposed, garnering 97.29% of the vote, according to Syrian Government statistics. He was inaugurated into office on July 17, 2000 for a 7-year term.

 

2008 Israeli Peace Talks

In April, 2008, President Assad told a Qatari newspaper that Syria and Israel had been discussing a peace treaty for a year, with Turkey as a go-between. This was confirmed in May, 2008, by a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. As well as a peace treaty, the future of the Golan Heights is being discussed. President Assad was quoted in the The Guardian as telling the Qatari paper:

...there would be no direct negotiations with Israel until a new US president takes office. The US was the only party qualified to sponsor any direct talks, [President Assad] told the paper, but added that the Bush administration "does not have the vision or will for the peace process. It does not have anything."

 

To learn more about Syria:   Truth About Syria. (30-12-2007)

 

Jewish Voice for Peace and the New Blood Libel

 

 

by DrMike

 

Jewish Voice for Peace needs a new motto, something like "We're not really anti-Zionist, but we always act that way." Their latest screed about the Palestinian Nakba reads like a textbook produced by the Palestinian Authority, full of allegations designed to incite hatred and prevent peace. It levels charges of atrocities allegedly committed against Arab civilians by the Jews of 1948 Palestine, who had the temerity to try to defend themselves not only against 5 invading Arab armies, but also against local villages that had long been launching attacks against Jewish civilians and besieging Jewish Jerusalem.

Their "fact sheet" accuses Israel of war crimes, in blood-curdling detail that brings to mind accounts of the horrors of the Holocaust. This of course is not by accident. There are three themes that anti-Zionists use to try to relate the Palestinian narrative to the Holocaust. First, they attempt to present the Arabs as nothing more than peaceful innocent bystanders who became secondary victims of the Holocaust (ignoring the fact that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al Husseini spent the war years in Berlin where he encouraged the Nazis to commit full scale genocide against the Jews, recruited Muslims for the Nazis, and toured Auschwitz with Eichmann, probably to help plan a similar facility should the Germans have overrun Palestine). Secondly, they insist on the false equation of the mass industrial-scale extermination of European Jewry based on a horrific racist ideology, and the dislocation of Palestinian Arabs caused by another war of extermination against the Jews—this one started by their fellow Arabs. Finally, and most outrageously, they claim that current Israeli self-defense actions against the terrorist organizations Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad are morally or legally on a plane with Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews.

The descriptions used by JVP are almost all credited to one source: Ilan Pappe's book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Pappe, for those unfamiliar with him, is a former Israeli lecturer at the University of Haifa who has since relocated to the University of Exeter in the UK. A doctrinaire Marxist who once ran for Knesset with the Communist-led Hadash party, he opposes the existence of Israel as a Jewish state but nonetheless supports "resistance" by Hamas, a radical Islamist movement that seeks to impose sharia law and at least tolerates, if not incites, violence against Christian "infidels" . Most tellingly, he also frankly admits that he is not really interested in facts: "'We do [historiography] because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth seekers... 'there is no such thing as truth, only a collection of narratives'." This philosophy was exposed when one of Pappe's graduate students, Teddy Katz, was shown to have falsified evidence about an alleged massacre at Tantura in 1948 by claiming that his interview subjects said one thing while the tapes of the interviews proved otherwise.

There are historians such as Benny Morris who have indeed documented incidents of expulsion and even murder of Arabs during Israel's War of Independence, when the Jews were fighting for their lives and the Arabs were fighting to kill Jews. Israel, no more and no less than other countries, was not born without violence, without wrongs being committed, without people being displaced. All Americans who are not part of the original Native American population live on their land by virtue of military conquest, much of it involving acts worse than anything Israel is accused of by its worst enemies-- and Americans are not returning to a homeland for which we have pined and prayed for centuries. The same holds true for Canadians and Australians. So by what moral right do those who point the finger at Israel and bellow "J'accuse!" continue to reside in their own comfortable homes?

The blood libel is an old staple of anti-Semitism. Jews through the centuries have been slaughtered because of the now-rejected Catholic teaching that the Jews were responsible for killing Jesus, then for the myth that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood for matzah. Now we have the new blood libels against Israel. The most prominent has been the al-Dura affair, used as a bloody shirt to create a jihadist frenzy during the Arafat's terror war—and now that the entirety of the filmed evidence has been aired in a French courtroom, the questions about what might have been a fully staged hoax are larger than ever. Other examples of media gullibility to Arab manipulation abound—the "Jenin massacre" in 2002 during which world media eagerly swallowed Palestinian claims of hundreds of deaths during Operation Defensive Shield, the doctored pictures from Lebanon , blame placed on Israel for the deaths of civilians killed by Hamas mines on a Gaza beach. Of course, while the sensationalist false reporting of these incidents makes headlines, the "corrections" are always buried in small type at the bottom of page 10.

JVP has chosen to perpetuate the tradition of the blood libel, hiding behind anti-Zionism as a politically correct shield. As self-described experts on anti-Semitism, their leadership can't claim to be ignorant of what they are doing. So one can only conclude that they agree with Pappe: facts aren't important, advancing the ideology is. And the ideology, sadly, is not one of peace, but of fanning the flames of anti-Israel hatred.

  

Original content copyright by DrMike 2008. 

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