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.

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 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. Sneh 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 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 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 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 wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and 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.

Tags: Christianity, Israel, Middle East, Politics, Zionism
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Guarantee Healthcare for All

By Malinda Markowitz

A sobering report from the Commonwealth Fund released July 17 says a lot about the shameful state of our healthcare system and the abysmal failure of our elected leaders to enact meaningful reform.

The United States spends more than twice as much per person on healthcare as most other industrialized countries — but it has plunged to last among those nations in preventing deaths through timely and effective medical care.

How many families does this touch? A shocking 101,000 fewer Americans would die prematurely if we matched the benchmarks of 18 other industrialized nations, 25 times the number who have died in Iraq.

No long waits

Remember all those horror stories about the long waits for care in countries like Canada and Britain? Less than half of Americans with health problems were able to get a rapid appointment with a physician when sick and were the least likely, among seven nations that measured it, to get after-hours medical care without going to the emergency room.

Notably, the Commonwealth study appeared one day after an NPR/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health survey of two key election battleground states, Florida and Ohio.

That survey found that 28 percent of Floridians and one-fourth of Ohioans say they or a family member had problems paying medical bills the past year. Among that group, more than half self-ration care — delaying or foregoing needed medical treatment or dental care, not filling prescriptions, cutting pills in half or skipping doses.

There’s also a direct convergence of the healthcare and economic crisis. The same survey found 17 percent of Floridians and 14 percent of Ohioans have used up all or most of their savings in the past year to pay medical bills. One in 10 stopped paying other bills as a result.

Residents of both states ranked the economy as their No. 1 concern, and healthcare third (with the Iraq war in between).

But Sen. John McCain’s health plan won’t come close to solving the problem. Echoing the Bush administration, under whose watch the crisis has spun out of control, McCain favors tax credits of $2,500 per individual or $5,000 for families to encourage the uninsured to buy insurance. But that’s less than half the cost of average premiums now, not counting all the co-pays, deductibles, and other ATM style fees.

Florida’s ‘high-risk pools’

For those with preexisting medical conditions whom the insurance companies won’t touch, McCain proposes expanding federal support for state ”high-risk pools.” But, in a devastating recent critique, The New York Times noted that the state plans are largely a failure. Almost all impose long waiting periods, up to a year, before allowing you to enroll, and all have very high costs for getting in. Florida closed its pool in 1991, and the current membership is just 313 people, rather a small percentage of the state’s population. Moreover, McCain has no proposal to pay for a federal expansion of this train wreck.

Further, McCain wants more deregulation of the insurance industry with the dubious notion that would spur more competition to lower costs. But insurers compete by lowering their own costs, through denial of care, reducing services, or price gouging.

Sen. Barack Obama’s plan would have more impact, with more subsidies for low and middle income families and tougher oversight of the insurers. He also says everyone should get the same coverage available to members of Congress. But Obama’s plan, like McCain’s, still gives the insurers too much control over our health.

Approve HR 676

There’s a better way. All the industrial countries in the Commonwealth study — except ours — have a national or single payer healthcare system, one reason they can have better quality at half the cost. U.S. administrative costs, for example, are 30 percent to 70 percent higher — all to feed the private insurers.

The public has figured it out. More than half of those questioned in Florida and Ohio in the NPR/Kaiser/Harvard survey say the government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans. HR 676 in Congress, which would strengthen and expand Medicare to everyone would do just that. That should be at the top of the agenda for the next president.

Malinda Markowitz is co-president of the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association.

Copyright 2008 Miami Herald Media Co.

Tags: Health, Politics, US
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