Palestine, Settlements and Outposts

Now, I wish to make a few things clear at the start…

Growing up, I was one of the “outcasts”. At the time and in the place I grew up, those with “funny names” were not as acceptable as those with nice WASP names. My family had “crossed the tracks, literally. The only other kids in a similar situation were the Jewish kids. So we linked together and established long term friendships.

As they did, I supported Israel in everything it did. The family bought – or had donated – trees in Israel. We watched “Exodus” and cheered. Later, we recoiled at the horrible attacks on Israeli athletes and aircraft hijackings. The Arabs, later to be called Palestinians, were terrible!

Time passed, I grew older and perhaps – just perhaps mind – wiser. Looking back, the watershed that caused me to think more carefully about my unquestioned support for Israel was the establishment of the settlements in both Gaza and the West Bank, coupled with the arguments voiced for “Greater Israel” by both Israelis and Zionist Christians. Not being a Christian, none of this made much sense. What did start to make a lot of sense was the simply humanity of the Palestinian cause.

At some time, I wondered late into the night how I might feel if I had been born in East Jerusalem instead of the Canadian prairies. So in 1948, as a two-year old, I might have been bundled up and taken from my home by my fear-struck mother and father. We would have fled to a “refugee camp”, a tent city. Now, over 50 years later, we might well be in that same tent city or perhaps, with luck, in a hovel in the West Bank. Subject to military actions constantly over all those years, watching our neighbour’s homes being bulldozed, hearing from new arrivals of the demolition of their former villages, seeing our friends suffer daily. So at my old age, a son or daughter comes to me and says he or she wants to be a suicide bomber.

After fifty years of hell and seeing no future save more of the same, might I not be tempted to say, “Go with my blessings”? Might fifty years of hell not made me so bitter that even the death of a child would represent a small victory?

Along these lines, I started to see that a bomb was a bomb, the purpose of which was to kill people. Deliver a bomb by a Skyhawk jet and it kills people. Deliver a bomb by a suicide bomber and it kills people. The only difference is the means of delivery. As to targets, an aircraft can drop a bomb anywhere it pleases, given total control of the skies. A suicide bomber has a harder time getting close to military targets. If you have a bomb and are at war, I supposed that you might explode it wherever you could.

Now, the start of this was the establishment of the settlements and “outposts” on the lands captured after the 67 War and more especially, the grounds advanced by Israeli leaders for permitting such to start and continue.

Now, I knew better than to voice these opinions. Why? When I asked myself that question, the answer came quickly. Looking around, I saw that anyone who voiced any negative opinion about what Israel was or had done was quickly labeled an “anti-Semite”. So fear led to self-censorship.

So I kept this opinion to myself. Little by little, I gave voice to it in very private conversations. In Calgary, I tried to explain just a little to a long time friend who happened to be a very devout Jew. The reaction was extreme and I backed quickly off the topic. My fear was certainly justified.

Yet the thoughts would simply not go away. ‘In the age of the Internet, I started to explore more outside the boundaries of North American media.

As each peace proposal and meeting was hung up over the issue of captured lands and the Palestinians, I dug into some issues. One key find was a site prepared by an Israeli peace group. They provided astounding information on the settlements and outposts:

http://www.peacenow.org.il/site/en/peace.asp?pi=43

Yes, there were lots of fanatical sites on the issue, but this seemed not only informative but also reliable. More questionable was a site that seemed “real” but… Could all these stories be true? Frankly, my prior bias in favour of Israel kept me from full acceptance. Leery of propaganda, I read article after article, discounting the more obvious hate rants – of which in truth there were very few:

http://www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org/

It seemed to me, after 9/11, that the root cause of the terrorism against the United States by fundamentalist Muslims was all based on the Israeli/Palestine conflict. Currently 450,000 Israelis live in settlemetns and outposts on the West Bank - Palestinian territory. No Israeli government has stopped this takover of Palestinian provate lands. That was certainly the cause advanced. My digging got deeper.

In 2007 came the invasion of south Lebanon by the Israelis. Daily the television showed tanks and planes blasting apartment buildings and houses. Over this, the announcer would state that these places were embedded with terrorists, giving cause for destruction. But during that war, refugees trying to flee were prevented from even that by Israeli military. And the cause for such a heavy hand? The kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. That seemed way out of proportion.

By then, of course, the United States had invaded Iraq and the quagmire has started. So, why Iraq? The more I read, the more it seemed to be part of a plan by a group of “neo-Conservatives”, including vice-president Cheney and more. While the reasons for the war emerged as lies (Weapons of Mass Destruction), my reading disclosed that there were in fact two distinct factions within the new-con group. One had predominantly non-Jewish backgrounds. The other was totally Jewish (Pearl, Wolfowitz, Firth and many, many more). Further, these same individuals were on record as advising the Israeli government while purportedly serving as American officials. They supported a party known as Likud, the party that had pushed the settlements and more. The picture emerging was horrible. Not only, in my opinion, was the war wrong, but many of those who supported it had been serving two masters. Was this an American war, I wondered, or a war on behalf of Israel interests? As I read more, the picture emerged of all new-cons wanting a war, but the selection of Iraq as the target seemed to be more the result of the Likudnike faction.

And I hated the answers I was finding. All the time, I was battling myself for the more I read, form writers who were well informed, the more it seemed that there was what I had always denied – a very strong pro-Israeli lobby that had overstepped the bounds of good conduct to push the United States into a war – a war that even Gwynne Dyer wrote seemed to have no real reason for being.

I admit, I became rather obsessed about the Iraq War. As is my custom, shared with Sonia, books arrived to help me understand this strange conflict. I tried to read both sides, those supporting the war and those opposed, but in candor those opposed became predominant. I even read Laurie Mylroie’s book, which was helped by Wolfowitz and his wife. The blatant bias of this screed, which tries to link Saddam Hussein to both World Trade Center bombings, was extreme. Knowing it had been pushed by a major American policy-maker was shocking. And Wolfowitz was clearly a Likudnite. By now, it was clear that not only were there no WMD but that Hussein played no role in the WTC attacks.

One line from Dyer’s last book on the War, THE MESS THEY MADE, struck in my mind. He writes (p. 246):

“Before the invasion, Israel has seriously pushed the United States as hard as it could to invade Iraq. Israel has seriously overplayed its hand in terms of exploiting its U.S. relationship in recent years, taking advantage of the Bush administration’s chronic inability to distinguish between American and Israeli interests, and it may eventually pay a high price if the American public comes to believe that U.S. troops are dying to serve Israel’s purpose”

Yes, that could come to pass. With the reasons for going to war so clouded with uncertainty (and certainly not to bring democracy to the poor Iraqis) many will start to wonder about “Why?” I have long believed that oil is the root, and that certainly seems a strong reason (Dyer disagrees).

Now, more war clouds gather. Iran is on the target list and if one watches, the same tactics are at work. The “demonization” of Iran is easy, following many years of separation following 1979. Next to Cuba, Iran is the nasty and many commentators and others are now comparing its president, who has few powers under Iranian laws, to Hitler. Remember the same type of comparison a few years ago - when–Hussien was compared to … Hitler? Once again, the drums beat based on rumours and not facts. Inspectors found no WMD; new inspectors find no nuclear weapons programs. And then, Iran has no way of bombing the Unites States, but it could bomb Israel, not that such is likely confronted with Israel’s 200 nuclear bombs. The comparison to Bush and Cheney in the wind up to Iraq is repeated, yet it seems the same Passion play resonates with many Americans. “When will they ever learn…”

I must add that everyone should read Jimmy Carter’s book “Peace or Apartheid”. No American president has so clearly set out the reasons for the conflict and the potential ways of solving it – the one-country solution, the two-country solution, the transportation of Palestinians or?

Think of a world where the Palestinian “question” had been solved. At one stroke, the reasons for much of the terrorism, at least those advanced by all but a fanatical fringe are gone. Perhaps the new-con need to create a new-con state might have been better served by using the Palestinians as subjects instead of Iraq.