Are You Ready to Face the Facts about Israel?
VTR
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
Zionist." 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 Nazis. Though nor
comparable in quantity to the crimes of the Nazis, 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. [PDF ]
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 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 Nazi,’ 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 Ghraib. 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 Nazi 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 Zionist churches agree.
Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President
Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous
academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and
International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution,
Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois
Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking
in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and
is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors
and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter
Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial
misconduct.