This ought to be a rule in American politics: Statements celebrating Israel’s independence are bigoted if they fail to address what happened to Palestinians when Israel was born.
Today is the day Israel declared itself a state, and we are seeing the usual flood of U.S. politicians congratulating Israel. (Ritchie Torres, of course. Bob Menendez. Carolyn Maloney too )
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s statement is particularly egregious. It five times describes Israel’s creation as a “Jewish” achievement. Israel is the Jewish homeland “in the land of their ancestors.” A thriving democracy…
Today, we celebrate the birth of the Jewish state, forged into being through extraordinary courage and faith to become one of the greatest political achievements of the 20th century. With a vibrant culture and innovative economy, Israel has flourished in the face of enormous challenges and existential threats as an anchor of democracy in the seven decades since its founding. Every day, Israel defies the long odds to realize its founding promise: to serve as a homeland for the Jewish people in the land of their ancestors.
Steny Hoyer also went overboard on the Jewish state stuff.
That day marked the culmination of a generations-long struggle to see the ancient dream fulfilled of a free and independent Jewish state in the ancient homeland of the Jewish nation.
These statements are appalling in their anti-Palestinianism. They fail to say a word about the fact that 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled in Israel’s creation and were not allowed to return to their homes by the “Jewish state.” And today Palestinian leaders in Israel are effectively barred from being part of the government.
The young Jewish group IfNotNow sets an example for Americans when it tweeted today about the Deir Yassin massacre, which took place in the days leading up to Israeli independence– the Palestinian village outside Jerusalem ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias, including one under the command of Menachem Begin. More than 100 were killed.
The Israel lobby is of course one-sided in its treatment of the day. But it ought to be unacceptable to do what Michael Koplow at the Israel Policy Forum does in his commentary about how great life is in Israel today.
Over the past year, only three Israelis were killed in combat or terror attacks, which is the lowest number in Israel’s history; the previous low was eleven. That Israelis are literally safer and more secure than at any previous point in the country’s history
Yes and many more Palestinians have died in that time. This one-sidedness includes pieties about the Israeli fallen from J Street on Israel’s memorial day yesterday. Shouldn’t American organizations also address how many Palestinians have “fallen”– when it was their country and that’s why many of these Israelis died?
Secretary of State Tony Blinken avoided any discussion of the Jewish state in his birthday card, but his celebration of Israel’s “hard-won security” and new Arab friends leaves out the condition of millions of Palestinians living under Israeli rule right now.
Palestinian history was simply erased by Israel during the ethnic cleansing of the new state. That’s not a tradition Americans ought to perpetuate.
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“… survivor, Safiyeh Attiyah, saw one man open his pants & leap on her. `I screamed’ she said, ‘but around me the other women were being raped, too. Some of the men were so anxious to get our earrings they ripped our ears to pull them off faster’.” (Dr. Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, p. 154)
“’Whole families were riddled with bullets… men, women, & children were mowed down as they emerged from houses; individuals were taken aside & shot. Haganah intelligence reported ‘there were piles of dead. Some of the prisoners moved to places of incarceration, including women & children, were murdered viciously by their captors…’ (Israeli historian Benny Morris, quoted by Ramzy Baroud in “A Hundred Deir Yassins & Counting,” Dissident Voice, 17 April 2013.
“The commander of the Haganah, Zvi Ankori described what he witnessed: ‘…Parents begged commanders to stop the slaughter, to please stop shooting.’ (Lenni Brenner, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revolutions From Jabotinsky to Shamir, Zed Books, Ltd. 1984. P. 97. & Ralph Schoenman, The Hidden History of Zionism, (Veritas Press, Santa Barbara, California, 1988, p. 33.)
“The women & children who survived the slaughter ‘were stripped & with their hands above their heads, paraded in three open trucks up & down King George V Avenue in Jewish Jerusalem, where spectators spat on them & stoned them.’ (Quoted by George W. Ball & Douglas B. Ball, The Passionate Attachment, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London, 1992, p. 29)
“More is still being learned about the Deir Yassin massacre. The 25 April 1993 issue of Haaretz quotes the recollections of a former Stern Gang intelligence officer who was there. He divulged how many of the bodies were disposed of after Dr. de Reynier had left: ‘I saw terrible things taking place, I cannot tell everything….[One soldier] took two Arabs, tied them back to back, and placed a dynamite ‘finger’ [stick] between their heads, then shot at the dynamite and their heads exploded…..” (Quoted by Dr. Norman Finkelstein, Image & Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, p. 189)
“Many survivors of Deir Yassin fled to the nearby village of Silwan where on 14 April, they were visited and interviewed by a British officer accompanied by a doctor, a nurse and a translator. The investigators were very patient and understanding…”
Her statement is pure Zionist propaganda.
They are appalling in their blatant and hypocritical support for the injustice and immorality of Jewish / “Jewish State” supremacism.
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Deir Yassin, April 9/48
“Jamil Ahmed, who lived near the edge of the village, remembered the day his village died. During the battle he watched in horror as first his cousin Youssif, & then his brother, Issa, along with several friends were killed. ‘They took them as prisoners, raised their hands, & took them to the edge of the village near my house & sprayed them with gunfire. A blind man was also shot like that. A child, seven years old, was also killed that way. Women were taken prisoner & put into trucks. I was in my house carrying a gun, defending the village.’ (“Assault & Massacre,” by Sheila Cassidy in Remembering Deir Yassin: The Future of Israel & Palestine, edited by Daniel A. McGowan & Marc H. Ellis, Olive Branch Press, p. 48.)
“Mohammed Aref Sammour managed to escape, but not before he witnessed the murder of many of his relatives & neighbors. In a house near his own ‘[t]here were twenty-five people, twenty-four were killed & only one escaped through a window. They used grenades & after they stormed the house using machine guns. In another house they captured a boy who was holding the knee of his mother. They slaughtered him in front of her.’ (Michael Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe, p. 50) He then saw a family of eleven that included a woman of 80 & a young boy attempting to surrender only to be shot & killed by the terrorists. They purposely murdered even the unborn: ‘They ripped open the bellies of all the women they found straight away with bayonets.’ (ibid) The dead were robbed of their jewelry and if necessary, ‘they would cut off the arm to take the bracelet or cut the finger to get the ring.’ (ibid)
Twelve-year old Fahimi Zidan survived a mass killing of about 36 villagers, including most of her family: ‘The Jews ordered all our family to line up against the wall & they started shooting us. I was hit in the side, but most of us children were saved because we hid behind our parents. The bullets hit my sister Kadri (four) in the head, my sister Sameh (eight) in the cheek, my brother Mohammed (seven) in the chest. But all the others with us against the wall were killed; my father, my mother my grandfather & grandmother, my uncles & aunts & some of their children.” (David Hirst, The Gun & The Olive Branch, p. 125)
Perpetuating these messianic myths is what they excel at. They’re are all but happy to pretend that no one else but Jews have ever lived in or conquered the region before 1948.
The standard that Zionists have set for their creation of a Jewish state and homeland, means that their right to the region in not unique and can be challenged by using the same metric but Egypt, Greece, Italy, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and even Great Britain. Name a great empire and it has probably either conquered or ruled the region at some point.
Which brings us to the 21 century. Israel literally exists and is allowed to be an independent and sovereign because of the American Empire. Period. Why? Because millions upon millions of fundamentalist Christian Zionists in America have their sights firmly set on that tiny little strip of land and large happy to have the Jewish population as custodians…. for now. Israeli’s wrap themselves in a cozy little blanket of political, strategic, and military protection from the very giant that covets their land, knowing full well that at some point the religious right in the US are going to take steps to conquer, convert, and or kill every single one of them in the name of Jesus Christ.
Enjoy it while you can…
Pelosi is one of the most pompous, arrogant politicians out there. Swept up in power and anyone who has it. She has ALWAYS ignored the plight of the Palestinians. She has never cared about the Palestinian people, ..it is so clear.
We know who she is. When she was Speaker of the House in 2006 she had the power and the responsibility to enforce congressional oversight responsibilities to those who had lied millions of Americans into believing that Iraq had WMD’s. She had a responsibility to conduct hearings, putting the Iraq war hawks under oath and asking them about all of their efforts to create, cherry pick and disseminate those lies to a mostly complicit main stream media . Instead she abdicated those congressional oversight responsibilities and did NOTHING. She essentially aided and abetted war criminals. She did not care that hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq had been injured, killed, millions turned into refugees.
She has and continues to do the same with her unbridled support of Israel no matter what they do. Pelosi has and continues to aide and abet Israeli war criminals without question or hesitations. She is practiced at this.
When she feigns tears for children at the border, yet has never shed a tear for Palestinian children or the children of Iraq, she proves her cold, calculated mind is at work. I find her repulsive…she is such a hypocrite