Palestinian members of the Samouni family are seen in a tent next to the remnants of their house that was destroyed during Israeli’s January offensive, in Gaza City.
Photo: AP
Rattling the Cage: A taboo question for Israelis
However, I think it’s time we start asking it, privately and in public. If we don’t, I think there’s going to be Operation Cast Lead II, then Operation Cast Lead III, and each one is going to be worse than the last, and the consequences for Palestinians and Israelis are going to be unimaginable.
The question we have to ask ourselves is this: If anybody treated us like we’re treating the people in Gaza, what would we do?
We don’t want to go there, do we? And because we don’t, we make it our business not to see, hear or think about how, indeed, we are treating the people in Gaza.
All these shocked dignitaries, all these reports, these details, these numbers – thousands of destroyed this and tens of thousands of destroyed that. Rubble, sewage, malnutrition, crying babies, humanitarian crises – who can keep up? Who cares? They did it to themselves. Where to for lunch?
IT’S NOT that we can’t imagine life in Gaza. It’s that we are determined not to try to imagine. If we did, we might not stop there. Next we might try to imagine what it would be like if our country were in the condition in which we left Gaza. And sooner or later we might try to imagine what we would do if we were living over here like they’re living over there.
Or not even what we would do, just what we would think – about the people, about the country, that did that to us and that wouldn’t even allow us to begin to recover after the war was over. That blockaded our borders and allowed in only enough supplies to keep us at subsistence level, to prevent starvation and mass epidemics.
What would we think, what would we do, if somebody, some country, did that to us?
A lot of people here, I’m sure, would reply angrily: So why won’t the Gazans try making peace?
But is that how we would react? Is that what Israelis would do if a foreign army did to this country what the IDF did to that one a year ago? If another country sent F-16s, Apache helicopters, white phosphorous, drones, tanks and battalions into Israel, if any nation bombed and killed over here like we bombed and killed in Gaza, then rubbed our noses in it afterward, would we want to make peace with them?
Forget we; does anyone know a single Israeli who would?
I’M SURE a lot of people would argue: What about Sderot? Didn’t the terrorists in Gaza bomb and kill in Sderot? Let’s the turn the question around: What would the Gazans have done if another country did to them what they did to the people in Sderot?
Fair enough. Yes, they would have hit back, too. They’re not pacifists, either, to say the least. In fact, their elected leaders are fanatical, murderous Jew-haters sworn to Israel’s destruction. That’s extremely important to remember, and we do. But what we don’t want to remember, what we make 100 percent sure to forget, is that we do all sorts of hateful things to Gaza that they don’t do to us, and that this is the way it’s been since 1967.
Aside from choking the flow of goods to Gaza by land, we blockade their entire coast. We don’t allow ships to sail into Gaza or out. Does anyone stop ships from coming and going at the ports of Eilat, Ashdod or Haifa? What would Israel do if anyone tried? (Think of what Israel did two weeks after Egypt blockaded the port of Eilat in May 1967.)
We also blockade Gaza’s airspace, preventing planes from flying in or out. Does anybody stop planes from flying in and out of Israel? Would we stand for it if someone did?
For 37 years, between 1967 and 2005, our soldiers and settlers were the overlords of the Gaza Strip. If foreign soldiers and settlers tried to come in and take over Israel, what would we do?
And regarding the years of rocket attacks on the people in Sderot, I’ve never been through such an ordeal, but I imagine it’s hell. However, I’ve also never been through the ordeal that people in Gaza have gone through, and are still going through, yet I know – as everyone in the world knows, except Israelis – that life in Gaza is incomparably worse than life in Sderot ever was.
DURING THE 2008 US presidential campaign, Barack Obama visited Sderot, saying, “If missiles were falling where my two daughters sleep, I would do everything in order to stop that.”
Absolutely right. I wonder, though, what sort of empathetic reaction he might have had if he’d also visited the Jabalya refugee camp that summer. I wonder how he’d react if he visited Jabalya now.
And how would we react? If we Israelis could go to Gaza and see in person what we’ve done to that place and its people, would we be capable of empathy? If we thought of our children living in a country that was just like postwar Gaza, would we allow ourselves to think what we might do?
We can’t go to Gaza, but we have to start using our imagination. We have to dare to put ourselves in those people’s place. And we have to stop doing to them what we would never allow anyone to do to us. Otherwise, we Israelis have no conscience, and little by little we become capable of anything.
Kahane Grandson, Son of Terror Victims, Arrested for Mosque Bombing
By JTA VIA
A teen whose parents and grandparents were killed in terror attacks has been arrested in connection with the torching of a West Bank mosque.
The teen, arrested by Israeli police on Thursday at the Tapuach Junction in the West Bank, is reportedly the grandson of Kach founder Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was assassinated in New York in November 1990 by Egyptian-born American citizen El Sayyid Nosair. His parents, Binyamin Ze’ev and Talia Kahane were killed by Palestinian gunmen in December 2000 while driving near the West Bank settlement of Ofra.
Rabbi Meir Kahane publicly advocated transferring Arabs out of the land of Israel.
Early on Dec. 11, vandals raided a mosque in the village of Yasuf, burning furniture, prayer rugs and holy texts and defacing the mosque’s walls, according to reports. One graffiti read “Price tag – greetings from Effi.” Effi is a Hebrew name and “price tag” refers to the strategy extremist settlers have adopted to exact a price in attacks on Palestinians in retribution for settlement freezes.
Officials had believed the torching was in response to the construction freeze in West Bank settlements announced last month.
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Firebird7478 said,
January 1, 2010 at 17:00
The author makes valid points, but he already knows the answers, and the Israelis CAN imagine if it were them. They shove it down our throats at every turn. They call it the holocaust. It’s the reason Israel exists. It’s the reason why Israel gets away with what it does to the people of Gaza. This man knows this. But he never brings it out for public consumption.
James B said,
January 1, 2010 at 17:08
A question any self-respecting human being would ask himself.
James B said,
January 1, 2010 at 17:08
or herself
Jake Adelman said,
January 2, 2010 at 00:00
Excellent point in dire need of making over and over again. I think the main problem with Israeli opinion is the fact that the Palestinian plight is unknown and/or a non-issue to most Israelis. Actually it’s worse than that. Much worse. They seem to think that the Palestinians are sub-human species in need of discipline. Polls showed the majority of Israelis supported Operation Cast Lead, a butchery which left 1500 Palestinians dead and another 3000 wounded.
This would change I’m sure if these Israelis were taken on a tour of the utter squalor in which Israel forces Palestinians to live, particularly in Gaza. Coming to terms visually, first hand, with what their government has done to the Palestinians would shake them (I hope) out of their ignorance and barbaric prejudices.
As former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson said after touring Gaza:
“Their whole civilisation has been destroyed, I’m not exaggerating,”
She said people in Gaza were the responsibility of Israel and suggested that ordinary Israelis did not understand the situation as they “couldn’t possibly support it if they really did”.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7708670.stm
hangreid said,
January 2, 2010 at 01:27
Look, after Gaza,Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, etc and any other place with THOSE Goyim is dead. Our Goyim country may just be next. They hate us. Dosen’t that make them Anti-Christhetic and Anti Muslimatic?
Truthteller said,
January 5, 2010 at 07:39
Amerika, this is 2010 and your shit has gotta stop. I make no apologies for speaking in the vernacular because you don’t understand the language of civilized peoples. Your continued and unwinnnable war on terror has got to stop. Because you are feeding the terror you are attempting to fight against. You are trying to put out a fire by throwing fuel on it. What dumb ass would do that?
We are angry as hell.
You’ve had the false flag Crotch Bomber prepare the way for yet another country to incubate terrorists to fight you. (A guy who can transit countries without a passport can only do it with the complicity of the authorities; and underpants that are only singed, when eye witnesses said that there were flames that rose above the back rest, must have been made of asbestos – think about it). That’s a further 20 million + potential terrorists. You’ve also now pissed off Nigeria which means another 125 million people who are gonna hate your guts. You are planning to blitzkrieg Iran together with that smirking, evil little middle eastern parasite that feeds off you and who has got you by the balls, and ignite a further 72 million people to take their revenge on you.
This is great business for the military-industrial complex and your leaders who have shares in them but is not going to win your fight against the so-called terrorists – or the mythical al Qaeda as you creatively call them. It will, however, inspire terror in your dumb zombie-people now cowering even more frightened within the prison you have created of your own country – and this is part of your plan right? Keep the sheep cowed so the better to control them. I heard one of these dupes say today on tv from an airport crowded with people who had to go through security twice because some dumb ass went the wrong way on an elevator, “I’m always in favor of more security if it keeps me safe”. My god, these people love it don’t they. Dump more shit on them and they beg for more.
Those of us who still have a few brain cells that can tell the difference between right and wrong, between truth and lies, between good and evil, are appalled that so-called intelligent political, military leaders and right-wing cheer leaders of the US, the UK and other western countries cannot see the folly of their actions.
Or do they know their folly but only carry out their violence against black and brown peoples to get some sort of masturbatory orgasm? Do they bring out the lubricant when they are planning their ‘missions’ to kill innocent non-white men, women and children and destroy what few comfort structures they have with the most fiendish weapons that the criminal minds of their scientists can devise? Or is there a more sinister plan? Slow genocide of non-white people, as in the concentration camp of Gaza, in order to cull the world’s population so there is more for you?
Don’t you people, you Christians of a gentle god, have any morality in you? If your wars are really to get the oil and water and land resources of other countries, why don’t you just make deals for them like the Chinese and Russians do? Why do you have to bomb the crap out of those deprived countries and by so doing bleed your countries’ economies and the blood of your young men and women when there is an intelligent and easy and less costly way of getting what you want? And don’t give me that crap that the Chinese and Russians do not care about human rights or lack of them in the countries they do business with. And you warmongers care about human rights? You who said that you were suspending the Human Rights Act and Geneva Conventions in order to destroy Iraq – a country that was never any threat to you? Pass me the sick bag.
Your voters saw the futility of your criminal wars and voted in a black guy who promised to bring change, to bring the troops home, to close that black hole of a prison in Guantanamo – on land that not even belongs to you – and to heal that running, pus-filled sore in that ‘shitty little country’ in the middle east. But the poor dumb asses were fooled again. What they got was an Uncle Tom or more correctly, an Uncle Moshe, who places the interests of a foreign ‘country’ above his own. A man who reads grandiose speeches written for him from a teleprompter to fool the suckers. Fine words don’t butter parsnips. Does anyone believe Uncle Moshe’s words anymore? Only the delusional.
Uncle Moshe has to show that he has bigger cojones than his white predecessors, and the thrill-loving military ‘dumb stupid animals’ (Kissinger’s description) jerked off on this ready assent from their commander-in-chief to plan even more cruel methods of punishment on the ‘ragheads’.
Uncle Moshe now says that terrorism threatens global security. So, why don’t you just bomb the whole fucking world and be done with it because you never know where these terrorists will pop up? Think of the CIA guy who blew up himself and his 6 colleagues in Pakistan. Hoist by their own petard, you might say. There might be one behind your desk. Fire up a drone and be done with it.
Bringing democracy to these people, you say and then bomb the shit out of them if they don’t want it. Have you paused to think that there are many people in the world who are not enamoured of your brand of democracy? That they don’t want your version of freedom (you guys who have shredded your admirable Constitution and call it a ‘goddamn piece of paper’), who elect your leaders by rigging your voting machines, where you effectively censor your press, plan to muzzle the internet, embed your pressmen so they give only your version of war events, spy on your people, have nazi-like troopers patrol your cities and harass your citizens? That they don’t want your culture of junk food and mind numbing tv and movies? That they don’t want your type of religion preached by raving-eyed loonies who wouldn’t invite the brown-skinned Jesus into their parlors if he showed up? They’ve got religious loonies of their own, thank you very much.
Even your Supreme Court and your judiciary are now corrupted by the depravity of your policies, evidence of which is shown by their decision that torture is acceptable and that indiscriminate murder of innocent brown people by mercenaries is just hunky dory.
This is evidence of the rotting of an empire. Historians have seen it before in other empires. Emperors unfortunately for their empires do not recognise that the rot starts within them. They blame it on others, the barbarians, al Qaeda, whoever is a convenient boogie man to scare their people shitless while they steal their wealth. Empires crumble when they run out of money. Amerika, you are now trying to get the last coins from your piggy back with a butter knife.
Is there no hope for you? None, if you continue to listen to the ‘bomb, bomb, bomb’ lunatic fringe of your talking heads. A) You will never win your so-called war on terror but create more of it, unless this is your objective all along, and B) you will bleed your country to death both economically and in lives.
But it’s still not too late to save yourself. And I will tell you how in very simple words. No jargon, here, my good Amerika. No words such as full spectrum domination, new world order, fulfilling the mission, targets of opportunity, tooth to tail ratios, shock and awe and all those other warmongering terms of people who think of the non-white people they want to kill as digital images in a computer war game. This is what computer-simulated war games fed to kids do to their minds as they grow up. Killing the ‘raggies’ is just pressing the zap button on a pc game stick. Their minds have been deadened. But I digress.
Here are the magic words, Amerika. Be nice. They are easy to learn, easy to remember, and easy to apply.
Now let me develop this magic formula for peace if you are not imaginative or clever enough to understand it. I’m afraid I will have to use some old Anglo Saxon words to make myself very clear. I bet the Pope used one of them the other day when he fell on his kisser with a woman on his back. My mind wanders so easily these days. Maybe they’ve put something in the water.
1. Stop empire building. Your Founding Fathers were dead against it. Ask that wise man, Ron Paul. You may think he is a buffoon but in my view is one of the few intelligent and enlightened men in your country which for some time has been run by men with money for brains. Men who will sell your Constitution for a few bucks.
2. Stop funding that little grinch you created in that ‘country’ you gave genesis to in the middle east that is named after three pagan gods – Isis, Ra, and El. Get them to give back the land they stole from Jesus’s real relatives. Tell them that if they want to live in peace there will have to be one land for both them and Jesus’s relatives and that all its citizens will have to live in a free and democratic society. Fergeddabout the two-state solution. This is utter bullshit. Will never happen. Will never work.
The grinch will stomp their feet and wave their nuclear weapons and threaten all kinds of merry hell, even Armageddon. They love this word. They will threaten to reveal the incriminating pictures and the movies and the documents, even who committed 9/11, but call their bluff. Also, they won’t tell you who did 9/11 because, well, talk about ‘vanishing from the pages of time’. We won’t think any less of you if they showed you jacking off a rabbit. If they wave the nukes, say ‘gotcha’ and stop funding them, siting the Symington Amendment – you know the 1976 Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (subsequently contained, as amended, in the Arms Export Control Act) that banned US economic, and military assistance, and export credits to countries that deliver or receive, acquire or transfer nuclear enrichment technology when they do not comply with IAEA regulations and inspections. (Thanks, Wikipedia).
You then will have them by the proverbials. Close the faucet and the flooding will stop.
I guess you realise why they will not declare their possession of nukes or sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Ironically. they are quick to point the finger at those signatories who allegedly transgress the Treaty. But hypocrisy is a genetic trait in these Zionists. Call me an anti-Semite and I’ll call you an anti-Gentile.
This problem in the middle east is a running sore and a cancerous one that cannot be healed without some drastic action. Only you, Amerika, have the surgical equipment to perform the operation. It will be painful but it will sure as Ra made little apples bring peace not only to the middle east but to the rest of the world. Those terrorists you helped create will disappear from whence they came to fight wars against their repressive and undemocratic governments – a cause that you will no doubt support enthusiastically.
3. Close your military bases around the world. You will not need them if you do what I tell you in item 2 above. Also, dissolve NATO. They are NFG. Always hitting the wrong targets and pissing off the natives. But I guess they learned from you. They are now known as the North Atlantic Terrorist Organisation. It would also plug a drain in the resources of the countries who are members of this organisation that no longer has any purpose for which it was originally created.
4. Use the billions saved from shutting down the war machine or putting it into hibernation to reconstruct and rehabilitate your crumbling infrastructures, fund your healthcare program, bring the 37+ million of your citizens out of poverty, educate your children, sort your social ills, help those poor browns and blacks whose countries you’ve eviscerated and left polluted for a billion years with your weapons of mass destruction and radiation, and make your country one to be envied and emulated – not hated, feared and pitied as now.
You know, once upon a time, your country was looked up to with reverence and awe and whose founding ideals were a standard to which most of the rest of the world aspired. But you forgot the warnings of your Founding Fathers and more recently, Ike, and you let the military-industrial complex and the grinch take over.
5. Train your military and your young people to be ambassadors for peace. You know, like the Peace Corps. Train them to save the world rather than destroy it. Train them to give their skills and talents to help raise the standards of living in the deprived parts of the world. Raise their standards and you create more potential customers to sell to. Win-win as they say in management-speak.
Young people want to make a difference. They want to change the world for the better. Give them the tools to make this happen. You won’t and we won’t regret it.
6. Stop bailing out the people who created the financial mess we are in. If they’ve got to go under because of their fraudulent or incompetent actions, so be it. Don’t worry, the world won’t go under. Ask the Icelanders. OK, we might have to tighten our belts a little bit but we are having to do it anyway, so what’s the problem?
7. Give the bailout money direct to the people who have lost it and to the people who have been made jobless. If you followed my recommendations so far, you will have plenty of money to hand around, even to reducing taxes to benefit all your citizens. They will get the economy going as they will want things to buy and people will start making things to satisfy this demand. This is how a robust economy works, right? Not by creating and selling pieces of paper with fake values for people to gamble for with real money. This is what the people you gave the bailout money did and continue to do in some form or another and give themselves obscene bonuses.
OK, all this has been said before by others more cogently and intelligently but has fallen on deaf ears. I hope my own reminder may have some effect on convincing you, Amerika, that you continue on your present path at your peril. You are already building your own prison, like the middle eastern grinch, and your people tremble at the slightest whisper of terror. This is exactly what your leaders want you to do. The greatest kick that leaders get is not the opportunity to siphon the nation’s wealth into their own pockets but to control its citizens.
People, the only terrorists are those we create. If we stop fucking around with their countries, stealing their resources, disrespecting their cultures and their religions, some of them are going to try to hurt us. We would do the same if the situation was reversed. The alternative is that our so-called security minions (who couldn’t prevent 9/11, and the Crotch Bomber) are going to continue to poke us, prod us, look in our pants and shoes, squeeze our tits, shove their fingers in where the sun don’t shine, bombard us with xrays and terraherz rays that probably adversely interfere with our cell structures, and eventually tattoo us and implant an RFID chip in our arms, if not in our heads, to reassure us that they are making us safe from the terrorists that we helped create by our indifference to the deprived lives of others. So, Amerika, don’t fuck up in this new year. (I love this AngloSaxon word, it conveys such a great deal of meaning that no other word does.)
Happy New Year. Amerika, Gaza and the Rest of the World.
Truthteller said,
January 5, 2010 at 07:51
Readers, I inadvertently omitted a couple of words in the second sentence of the penultimate para. above. The sentence should read “If we do not stop…”
Truthteller said,
January 5, 2010 at 09:25
Jake Adelman, good comments but I’m afraid I disagree that exposing the utter hoplessness of the much-maligned people of Gaza and the Palestinians generally will cause the Israelis to be sympathetic.
You are correct in saying that the Israelis (with exceptions, of course) think of the Palestinians as sub-human. I’m sure you must know that they think this of all non-Jews. It is what all this misery and devastation inflicted on the Palestinians is about. They, as they continually trumpet, are the Chosen People of God so how can they feel sympathy for the non-chosen? This self-awarded distinction removes the need to feel any shred of human emotion for God’s rejects.
What is needed is to shock them out of their delusion. This can be done by its financial umbilical cord to the US being cut.
So far as the Palestinians are concerned, they must give up their demand for a two-state solution. Their lands are now a series of more or less non-contiguous areas which makes the objective of a two-state solution non-viable and non-attainable. Israel just uses it as a negotiating tactic knowing fully well that it will never happen.
They should be working for a one-state solution where they and the Israelis are equal citizens whose rights are guaranteed by the constitution. It will be difficult to attain but one that can be a more viable proposition and conjoin both Semitic tribes to a stable and brighter future. But I always was a dreamer.
Jake Adelman said,
January 5, 2010 at 23:13
Truthteller you’re disagreement is well taken. My assessment is in some ways contradictory and overly optimistic. You’re quite right in pointing out that if (most) Israelis already believe the Palestinians are sub-human then it doesn’t follow that they would be in any way moved by witnessing the plight of the Palestinians first hand.