THE ROAD TO NOWHERE by Ismail Shammout
"The main difference between Bosnia and Palestine is that ethnic cleansing in the former took place in the form of dramatic massacres and slaughters which caught the world's attention, whereas in Palestine what is taking place is a drop-by-drop tactic in which one or two houses are demolished daily, a few acres are taken here and there every day, a few people are forced to leave" ~ Edward Said
By Miko Peled
January 4, 2012
Mostafa Tamimi from Nabi Saleh, Bahjat Zaalan and his son Ramdan
from Gaza died on my fiftieth birthday and just a few days after Newt Gingrich
declared them an invented people. They were murdered by the Israeli terrorist
organization, the IDF, an organization that is supported and funded by the
US.
One Israeli terrorist shot the invented Tamimi in the head with
a tear gas canister, and another Israeli terrorist fired a rocket that murdered
the invented Zaalan and his boy Ramadan.
Both terrorists were educated and trained by Israel, and armed
by the US. The Israeli terrorists are not invented but quite real, and
they are safe, protected by the apartheid regime that trained and sent them on
their missions, and the Israeli court system will make sure that they are never
brought to justice. This is how Israel’s well-oiled ethnic cleansing machine
operates.
The Zionist ethnic
cleansing of Palestine is not a thing of the past but an ongoing campaign that
is executed by three arms of the State of Israel:
The education system,a dedicated bureaucracyand the security forces.
The education system is dedicated to indoctrinating and producing soldiers and bureaucrats who will execute and enforce the ethnic cleansing.The bureaucracy is charged with making rules that make life unlivable for Palestinians.Rules that restrict Palestinian access to their lands, and restrict their ability to travel freely to work and school.
This same bureaucracy
then demands that Palestinians pay for permits to be allowed do these very same
basic things that they were denied.
The security forces, the
most obvious of which is the IDF, are charged with enforcing the restrictions,
fighting off the resistance, armed or peaceful, and terrorizing the “invented”
people of Palestine.
Since my father was a
general and I served as a soldier in the IDF terrorist organization, people
often ask me how is it that Israeli children who are raised in a Western style
democracy become such monsters once they are in uniform.
The detailed answer can
be found in my book, The General’s Son due out in February 2012, but the short
answer is this: Education ~ Racism requires a mindset that is fashioned by
education. In order to rationalize and justify the ethnic cleansing the
Israeli education system portrays Palestinians as culturally inferior, violent
and bent on the annihilation of the Jews, and at the same time, void of a true
national identity. Palestinian national identity is but a figment of some
anti-Semitic imagination.
Israeli children are
educated to see the Palestinians as a problem that must be solved and as a
threat that must be eliminated. They can go through life, as I did growing up
in Jerusalem, without ever meeting a Palestinian child. They know nothing of
the life or culture of Palestinians who quite often live only several hundred
meters from them.
Palestinians are
portrayed as an existential threat through absurd comparisons like that of
Yasser Arafat to Hitler, the Palestinians to Nazis, and the Palestinian
resistance to Al Qaeda.
Since Israeli kids never
meet Palestinians what they learn in school, particularly in the school
textbooks, is all that they know. In fact it is remarkable that even though
they live so close to one another, much if not all of what Israelis know about
their Palestinian neighbors comes from high school text books and popular
racist stereotypes.
Israelis don’t know that
Palestinians never had an army, that they do not possess a single tank, a
single warship or fighter jet, that they don’t have a single artillery battery
and do not in fact pose a military threat at all.
According to a new book
by Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, not a single photo of a person who is a Palestinian
exists in Israeli textbooks and there are millions of Palestinians in and
around Israel. Israelis don’t learn about Palestinian doctors and
teachers, engineers and writers. They don’t learn Palestinian poetry or prose
and they don’t read the works of Palestinian historians.
At a recent lecture I
mentioned the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and someone called out: “What
ethnic cleansing?”
People are unaware of the
ethnic cleansing taking place in Palestine because Israel hides it well and the
mainstream media doesn’t care enough to ask. In mainstream peace groups and
dialogue groups that discuss Palestine/Israel, a basic Israeli condition is not
to bring up issues like the ethnic cleansing because Israel doesn’t like to
talk about it.
But for the past 64 years
ethnic cleansing of Palestine is what drives the Zionist policies towards
Palestinians. All Zionist governments and all Zionist political parties left
right and center support the ethnic cleansing.
The Israeli judicial
system lets the Israeli authorities get away with abuse, theft and murder as
long as they are perpetuated against Palestinians. Had these same crimes been
committed against Israeli Jews they would have been prosecuted to the full
extent of the law.
Zionist supporters like
to bring up the fact that on November 29, 1947 the United Nations voted to
partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. What is left
out of the Zionist story is that within one year of the vote Israeli forces had
managed to capture close to 80% of Palestine, destroy close to 500 Palestinian
towns and villages, kill scores of unarmed civilians and force the exile of
some 800,000 Palestinians.
Then, when the UN passed
resolution194 in December of 1948, calling for the refugees to be allowed to
return to their homes, Israel proceeded to build cities and towns, parks and
highways for the use of Jewish Israelis on Palestinian land. Then the Knesset
began passing laws that prohibit the return of the refugees and allow the new
state to confiscate their lands.
After the war was over,
the Palestinians who remained within the newly created Jewish state were forced
to become citizens of a state that despised them and saw them as a “problem”
and a “threat.” They were designated as “The Arabs of Israel” a designation
that stripped them of a national identity and denied them any rights to the
land and provided them very limited rights as citizens.
From being the rightful
owners of their lands and their country they now existed at the pleasure of the
new owner of the land, the state of Israel. Palestinian refugees were forced
into concentration camps, conveniently called refugee camps, and those that
tried to return were shot.
A military unit was
created for the purpose of punishing Palestinian refugee who “infiltrated” back
into their homeland, now called Israel. It was called Unit 101, the
notorious Ariel Sharon led it and it made a name for itself as a murderous gang
with a license to kill Palestinians.
So regardless of the myth,
now perpetuated by Newt Gingrich among others, that says there was no forced
ethnic cleansing, we know today that the creation of Israel was made possible
through a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, conducted by the Jewish
militia, involving massacres, terrorism, and the wholesale looting of an entire
nation.
Newt Gingrich, being the
history buff that he is, might be interested in a story I mention in my book
The General’s Son, about my mother. She was born and raised in Jerusalem and
she remembers the homes of Palestinians families in neighborhoods in West
Jerusalem. She told me that when she was a child, on Saturday afternoons she
would go for walks through these neighborhoods, admiring the beauty of the
homes, watching families sit together in their beautiful gardens.
In 1948 when the
Palestinian families were forced out of West Jerusalem, my mother was offered
one of those beautiful, spacious homes but she refused. At age 22, the wife of
a young army officer with little means and with two small children, she refused
a beautiful spacious home, offered to her completely free because she could not
bear the thought of living in the home of a family that was forced out and now
lives in a refugee camp.
“The coffee was still
warm on the tables as the soldiers came in and began the looting” she told
me. “Can you imagine how much those families, those mothers must miss
their homes.”
She would ask and she
continued, “I remember seeing the truckloads of loot, taken by the Israeli
soldiers from these homes. How were they not ashamed of themselves?” there are
thousands upon thousands of homes in cities all over the country that were
taken.
Moving forward now to
1967 and the myth that Israel was fighting for its existence as it was attacked
by Arab armies from all directions. Much was written about this but
nothing is more revealing than the minutes of the meetings of the IDF general
staff from June 1967, just prior to the war.
According to the
generals, one of whom was my father, Matti Peled, not only was there no
existential threat but the generals clearly state that the Egyptian army needed
at least a year and a half before it would be ready for war and therefore this
was an opportune time to attack and destroy it.
The army pressured the
cabinet to authorize an attack and indeed the cabinet approved an attack
against Egypt. The IDF destroyed the Egyptian army and then went on to
attack Jordan and Syria. It took the IDF six days and 700 casualties to kill an
estimated 15,000 Arab forces. take the West Bank, the Golan Heights and The
Sinai Peninsula.
One may like to think
this was a miracle but it was a well-planned, well-executed attack against
countries that had no viable military force.
The Israeli army had thus
fulfilled its goal of conquering the entire Land of Israel, and the
De-Arabizing of Palestine could now proceed into the West Bank and Gaza.
Since the early days of
the State of Israel the IDF made it its mission to be the most brutal bully in
the region. Today the IDF has one purpose: to conduct an all out war
against Palestinians by terrorizing Palestinian civilians, kidnapping children
from their homes and using brutal force against protesters.
We are reminded of the
intensity of IDF cruelty every so often, the latest major display being the
three-week bloodbath in Gaza that began on December 27, 2008. Hundreds of tons
of bombs were dropped by Israeli pilots on Gaza, followed by a massive invasion
of land forces. All this for the purpose of terrorizing a defenseless
civilian population that includes 800,000 children.
Now that Israel has been
in control of the West Bank for over four decades it had built and invested
there heavily. But all of the investment and construction in the West
Bank was made to bring Jews into the West Bank.
Palestinian lands are
being taken at an alarming pace, their homes are destroyed and thousands are
incarcerated, while industry, roads, malls, schools and gated communities with
swimming pools are being built for Jews only.
Water, which is the
scarcest resource of all, is controlled and distributed by the Israeli water
authority, as follows: Per capita, Israelis receive 300 cubic meters of water
per year.
In comparison, per capita
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza receive 35-85 cubic meters per year,
while the World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 100 cubic meter of
water per person per year.
But what is even worse is
that per capita, Israeli settlers in the West Bank are allocated 1500 cubic
meters of water per year. Jews in the West Bank live with green lawns and
swimming pools while Palestinians quite often get no water at all.
Perhaps invented people have no need for water.
De-Arabizing the history
of Palestine is another crucial element of the ethnic cleansing. 1500 years of
Arab and Muslim rule and culture in Palestine are trivialized, evidence of its
existence is being destroyed and all this is done to make the absurd connection
between the ancient Hebrew civilization and today’s Israel. The most glaring
example of this today is in Silwan, (Wadi Hilwe) a town adjacent to the Old
City of Jerusalem with some 50,000 residents.
Israel is expelling
families from Silwan and destroying their homes because it claims that king
David built a city there some 3000 years ago.
Thousands of families
will be made homeless so that Israel can build a park to commemorate a king
that may or may not have lived 3000 years ago.
Not a shred of historical
evidence exists that can prove King David ever lived yet Palestinian men,
women, children and the elderly along with their schools and mosques, churches
and ancient cemeteries and any evidence of their existence must be destroyed
and then denied so that Zionist claims to exclusive rights to the land may be
substantiated.
Once we connect the dots
it is not hard to see that the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is only a
small part of the Israeli Palestinian issue. The greater issue is the ongoing
ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the Zionist state.
The way forward for
Israelis and Palestinians alike is to oppose the ethnic cleansing by opposing
all its manifestations. This means supporting the movement to boycott, divest
and place sanctions on Israel, or BDS for short, it means actively
participating in the popular non-violent struggle in Palestine and it means
challenging the racist laws that govern Israel by defying them.
There has to be a clear
and unequivocal call to recognize that the IDF is a terrorist organization and
its officers are war criminals. Furthermore, the reprehensible discrimination
against Palestinians, whether they live in Israel/Palestine or not, practiced
by the security officials at Ben Gurion airport and other points of entry to
Israel/Palestine must be challenged. The struggle for a democracy in our shared
homeland is no different than the struggle at Tahrir square and can in fact be
seen as part of the Arab Spring.
“Miko Peled is a peace
activist who dares to say in public what others still choose to deny. He has
credibility, so when he debunks myths that Jews around the world hold with
blind loyalty, people listen. Miko was born in Jerusalem in 1961 into a well
known Zionist family. His grandfather, Dr. Avraham Katsnelson was a
Zionist leader and signer on the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
His father, Matti Peled was a young officer in the war of 1948 and a general in
the war of 1967 when Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and
the Sinai. http://mikopeled.wordpress.com/
Nothing here that we didn't know, but it can't be said too often.
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