The Time Has Come Today

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the US Congress this week. President Obama gave a major speech regarding the Middle East and also addressed AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). Netanyahu rejected Obama's suggestion to abide by UN Resolution 242. Congressional leadership and the President should have clearly conveyed that the time has come for Israeli intransigence against peaceful resolution to the Palestinian crisis be ended once and for all. Sadly, they did not.

Why? Because we have been indoctrinated with a singular History of the Jews In Palestine; that Palestine is the Jews' rightful home. We have learned by rote and repetition, that Israel, as the region's sole democracy, is beset by 22 hostile Arab states with cultures of death to infidels. We do not protest, even in these harsh economic times, when $3 Billion of our tax dollars (not counting back-channel and black ops expenditures which some estimate as high as an additional $6 Billion) per year, are funneled to Israel, that money used to build illegal settlements in the West Bank and to repress Palestinians daily. We completely understand the clear difference of Hamas "terrorism" (firing small, ineffective rockets into Israel accounting for 16 deaths from 2001 to 2008) and the "defensive" Israeli assaults on civilian populations; for example, Operation Cast Lead which, in just three weeks, resulted in 1400 Palestinian people killed, most of them women and children, or Operation Peace for Galilee which resulted in the destruction of Beirut and 18,000 civilian deaths in just the first days of the 1982 Lebanon invasion. We never think to question Israel's use of state-of-the-art weaponry/tools of repression (courtesy of the US) to commit daily acts of murder, humiliation and illegal occupation of the Palestinian people. Nor do we wonder at the pre-emptive invasions of sovereign nations that Israel carries out at will and whim.

We all believe that Israel is acting in self-defense. That notion is fiction. In fact, Israel is guilty of crimes against humanity. A crime of gigantic proportions perpetrated upon some ten million human beings.

Historical truth: Jews claim that Israel/Palestine is their rightful home. Yet, the Semitic peoples whom were to become the Jews, originally came to Palestine as invaders. The only time in 4000 years of history that the Jews actually ruled in the region was under King David and son Solomon, again under the Maccabbees and currently under the Israeli government; a span of time constituting less than 4 percent of the region's history. There is no evidence that Jews ever comprised a majority in Palestine.

Palestinian Arabs' roots go back thousands of years, generation upon generation operating under tribal laws despite whatever absent authority claimed to have control there. These Palestinians have lived upon the land of Palestine, as nomads, as tillers of its soil, all having harvested its bounty for most of Palestine's existence.

And then came Zionism. Theodor Herzl's plan to have Jews from all over the world return to Zion and build a state. The first wave of illegal Jewish immigration (First Aliyah, 1882 - 1903) found a Palestine with less than 25,000 Jews living there, mostly in Jerusalem; constituting less than 5 percent of the population. The second wave of illegal immigration (Second Aliyah, 1904 – 1914) brought the number of Jews in Palestine to 85,000 or just 10.6 percent of the population.

We often hear how the Mandatory for Palestine, Great Britain, "promised" Eastern European Jews by way of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the whole of Palestine as the home of Jews. That view is clearly refuted by the Churchill White Paper of 1922 which maintained that the Balfour Declaration did not mean "the imposition of a Jewish nationality upon the inhabitants of Palestine as a whole." Nor did it mean that Palestine, "as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be found in Palestine." It should also be understood that the Balfour Declaration stated, "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

The Mandate document (Council of the League of Nations, 24 July 1922) outlined the responsibilities of the Mandatory. Great Britain was to guarantee that Zionist immigration would be allowed only "under suitable conditions" (Article 6) and that the Arab majority's civil and religious rights would be protected (Article 2). Further, Article 17 of the British Mandate document prohibited armed defense groups ― like the Zionist underground group Ha-Shomer started in 1907 which burgeoned into Haganah in 1920 which split into Irgun, LEHI, and the Stern Gang ― unless such groups operated under the "supervision of the Mandatory." Despite this proscription these groups operated on their own perpetrating terrorist acts until Israel was proclaimed a State in 1948.

The illegal immigration of Eastern European Jews continued unabated until, at the close of the Third Aliyah (1919 – 1923), Jews comprised 18.7 percent of the population in Palestine.

Numerous pronouncements from Zionist leaders (Herzl, Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion, etc) made clear that Zionists wanted all of Palestine (Eretz Yisrael). More and more land was confiscated from Arab Palestinians until in 1936 an Arab revolt erupted. Outlawed Jewish terrorist organizations indiscriminately murdered thousands of Arab Palestinians. As the British cracked down on the illegal immigration and fought the Jewish terrorists, the various illegal armed groups targeted the British military. A protracted round of murderous terrorism convinced the Brits to turn the Mandate over to the United Nations. In 1947, a special committee was convened (UNSCOP) to study the situation. Its recommendation was to divide Palestine into two separate states. At this juncture, Zionists comprised 33 percent of the population yet were offered 55 percent of Biblical Palestine. Of course, the Arab Palestinians refused the offer, much as any humans would if their home had been thieved and then offered only the attic and basement in which to live.

Then, in 1948, Israel self-declared statehood and conducted the Nakba (Catastrophe) which was the forceful expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. All that was left behind was confiscated by the nascent nation of Israel; "80 percent of the entire land area of Israel is land abandoned by the Arab Refugees. Nearly a quarter of all the standing buildings in Israel had been occupied by those Arabs. Ten thousand shops, stores and other firms inside new Israel had been Arab. Half of all the citrus fruit holdings in the new State had belonged to the Arabs now made refugees. By 1954, more than one-third of the entire Jewish population of Israel was living on 'absentee property' ― most of it now 'absorbed' into the Israeli economy, and unilaterally sequestered by Israeli legislation against a 'global' compensation offer." [The Other Exodus; Erskine Childers; The Spectator Limited; 12 May 1961]. Those refugees are still refugees. In fact, one third of the world's refugees are Palestinian.

Israel started the 1956 Suez war and confiscated the entire Sinai. Israel proceeded to start the "Six Days War" (1967) and grabbed more land, Gaza and the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). The UN passed a Resolution (242) demanding Israel return the occupied territories. Israel has refused ever since.

Today: Israel is in daily violation of article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids population transfer into territory occupied in war. Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, such population transfer is also a war crime. The illegality of the settlements was reaffirmed by the International Court of Justice in July 2004. Israel's "Wall of Separation" was determined to be illegal by the International Court. Israel continues to build that wall and continues to send religious zealots into the territories to make "facts on the ground" nullify any two-state agreement.

Israel points its finger at Iran as to nuclear proliferation although Israel has engaged in its own illegal (non-signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty) nuclear weapons program with missile delivery capability of warheads and has done so without joining the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency; Iran has). The United States supports this criminality and, in fact, champions sanctions against Iran for merely enriching uranium for its peaceful nuclear energy program but says nothing about Israel's 200 plus weapons of mass destruction.

The current situation in Israel is one of apartheid, of brutal repression of an entire people. Days ago, 12 Palestinians commemorating the Nakba were shot and killed by Israeli Occupation Forces, another two dozen wounded. Imagine the worldwide outcry and rush to action if Jews commemorating the Holocaust were indiscriminately murdered.

Amidst democratic aspirations of the "Arab Spring" and 63 years of ruthless Israeli tactics to deny the Palestinians their own rightful home, the President of the United States should have stood up to Israel and issued an ultimatum: Justice for the Palestinian people (a two-state solution along the lines of the 2003 Arab Peace Initiative and UN Resolution 242: A Palestinian state based upon pre-1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital) or Israel loses its "special relationship" with the US, including the end of weapons transfers and billions in foreign aid. President Obama chose not to so. That act of choice makes America complicit in Israel's continuing crimes against humanity; a complicity for which Americans shall surely pay.

The Final Solution

Worldwide, Jews shiver at any mention of the phrase Final Solution. They intimately understand what it means for a government to exterminate a people based upon ignorant stereotyping and hatred. That is why Israelis are so good at it. They have been usurping Palestinian land for over a hundred and twenty years; in earnest after Nazism flourished. In order to "justify" such thievery a fiction was developed summed up in the now famous phrase, "A land with no people for a people with no land." Also nurtured during that time has been a brooding hatred of Arabs for fighting back against the theft of their homeland. Now, the push is on to take it all; to rid Palestine of Palestinians. Israelis see Arab Palestinians as mere placeholders on a land bequeathed to "God's Chosen." Extreme fundamentalists are settling Judea and Samaria. These are some of the most radicalized religionists in the world, operating on the imprimatur of a Jewish theocracy. These "devout" Jews have no doubts that the land is theirs. Never mind that many, if not most, of these Jews are recent transplants from Brooklyn and other parts of America. When questioned as to how they could possibly feel Palestine is theirs, when they had never lived there a day in their lives, they reply that the Arabs were simply taking care of the Jewish land and now it is time for them to move on and let the rightful owners take over. The rightful owners being American and European Jews; not the Palestinians who have lived uninterrupted on those lands for thousands of years.

What most Americans do not understand is that the "inherent right" to Palestine claimed by Jews is not based upon reality but a fiction of Zionist creation. You see, Palestine/Canaan was not the Jews' region of origin. Jews invaded Palestine. They then wrote the Pentateuch (first five books of the Old Testament; Torah) after returning from their Babylonian Captivity. Thus was the Old Testament compiled and personalized by once-exiled Judeans who no doubt maintained a great sense of resentment at having been so unceremoniously expulsed and dispersed and, therefore possessed not only the modus operandi (scholarship/political awareness) and the opportunity (time and wherewithal), but also a motive to ensure the Old Testament contained Yahweh's proclamation that Palestine belonged to the Israelites.

In short, the claim that Jews have a "special" relationship with Palestine is by way of Jews writing a book that states a god of their own conjuring gives the land of Palestine (that Jews invaded but never wholly conquered and never populated a majority) to Jews. Convenient isn't it? That Jews only controlled Palestine under David and Solomon for a period of 125 years out of the 6010 years since creation (dated 4000 BCE according to Old Testament) means Jews premise their claim on partially controlling a region for less than 4 percent of its existence while Palestinians have lived there for 100 percent of the time.

To review: It is upon this above mentioned substrate of God's "promise" and a minute percentage of so-called sovereignty (so-called because even during the reign of David, the Kingdom of Israel was a contentious, multi-faceted, sectarian conglomeration of tribes that had banded together primarily to defeat the Philistines) that present-day Zionists build their arguments of justification.

Just days ago, as the whole world was watching with hope for a true peace process to get underway, Israelis lifted the settlement moratorium. Notice, in the preceding blog, the reference to the Bedouin village that had all its buildings destroyed by the Israeli military claiming said buildings were "illegal." That the Arab inhabitants of Palestine lived uninterrupted on the land for thousands of years means nothing. Israelis, yet again, attempted to claim the high moral ground by claiming they were not being prejudicial against Arabs, per se, but rather, upholding the rule of law that states a governing entity has authority to demand residential development proceed via permit. What Israel doesn't do, however, is issue building permits to Arabs that want to build residential housing. Once again, convenient, yes? This semantic game-playing is reminiscent of the Gaza Flotilla Massacre incident when Israeli military executed nine peaceniks while in International waters and then claimed these unarmed peace lovers were brutal thugs against which Israeli troops had to defend themselves.

Even though the entire world knows for a fact that Israelis have thieved Palestine, even though the United Nations has time and again denounced Israeli confiscation and occupation of Palestine to be illegal under International Law, Israel claims the moral high-ground. As they currently are even though the lifting of the settlement "freeze" has put a hold on peace talks and could very likely force the Palestinian contingent to break off talks until the settlements stop. This action by Israel is just another in a long, long line of such actions meant to destroy any chance for peace, for a two-state solution. Here's an IDF Official's view of such peaceful solution, "We must define our position and lay down basic principles for a settlement. Our demands should be moderate and balanced, and appear to be reasonable. But in fact they must involve such conditions as to ensure that the enemy rejects them. Then we should maneuver and allow him to define his own position, and reject a settlement on the basis of a compromise solution. We should then publish his demands as embodying unreasonable extremism." [General Yehoshafat Harkabi, chief of military intelligence, as quoted in Ma'ariv, 2 November 1973.]

Thirty years later, as detailed in Jimmy Carter's book, "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid" [Appendix 7] Israelis were hailed as peacemakers because they "accepted" the International Quartet's [Russia, United Nations, European Union, United States] Roadmap for Peace of 2003. In reality, however, the Israelis issued a 14-point "caveat" that effectively placed intolerable preconditions on the process. For instance, with the very first "caveat" the Palestinians would be required to end ALL acts of violence and/or provocation, dismantle ALL groups opposed to Israeli occupation, disarm ALL Palestinians, even as Israel would be exempt from the same condition: "…the Roadmap will not state that Israel must cease violence and incitement against the Palestinians." The second "caveat" states, "Full performance will be a condition for progress between phases and for progress within phrases." Meaning, ANY violation by Palestinians would render the agreement null and void. However, should Israelis continue to confiscate Palestinian lands and further provoke via expanding or creating new settlements, should settlers continue to harass, beat, humiliate and/or murder Palestinian men, women and children, the peace process would remain on track. The Israelis then went on to demand that Palestinians elect leaders that were acceptable to Israel, that whatever land may constitute Palestine would be discussed at some indeterminate future date (as would the all-important water rights issue). Further, the Israelis demanded that once a Palestinian state was established, Israel would control all points of entrance and exit by persons and/or cargo, would station IDF troops along both the Jordanian and Israeli borders, would not allow an armed Palestine and would control "its airspace and electromagnetic spectrum." Also, the final settlement could not include reparations (for the tens of billions of dollars worth of land and buildings confiscated by Israel since 1948) nor would Israel allow for the "right of return" by nearly a million Palestinians expulsed from their homes during 1948 Nakba.

But, surely Israelis are appalled at members of their Knesset currently offering up resolutions to expel all Arab citizens from Israel proper (pre-1967 borders). Nope. For the majority of Israelis are in favor of "getting rid of" Arabs. Thus, with Israel's lifting of the settlement freeze, once again it demonstrates there is no intention of peaceful resolution, complying with UN Resolutions 242 and 338 in any of their parts, treating Arabs with anything but animosity and asymmetric brutality. Though Arab Palestinians have the right under International Law to fight for their occupied homeland, even Palestinians peacefully protesting the occupation are now determined to be too "provocative" and therefore requiring more violence and brutality at the hands of the IDF. And, of course, there is repeated the ever present untruth that Israel cannot find a "peace partner."

The peace talks are on hold because Israel has resumed building more housing units in the occupied territories, yet Israel chastises the Palestinians for having "wasted" nine months of the ten month freeze. As it stands, unless Israel agrees to remove the settlers (leaving the settlements as reparations) from the occupied territories of West Bank and Gaza, agrees to a fair agreement of water rights (which exist primarily in the Palestinian West Bank), agrees to dismantling the wall deemed illegal by the World Court, cedes the entire West Bank and Gaza vis-à-vis pre-1967 borders, there will be no solution. Israelis understand that to allow for a one state solution will be to end their dream of a theocratic Jewish nation. Which begs the question: How can a Jewish theocracy be democratic UNLESS there are no Arab Palestinians within its borders?

That the Obama Administration could only manage to utter its "disappointment" over Israel's latest example of intransigence, is a condemnation of its sense of fairness even as it is an affirmation of its shared criminality. The United States allows Zionism to continue its crime against millions of human beings. Any attempt by America to otherwise excise itself from the crime is futile. Granted, the Israeli government is fully behind efforts to propagandize the world with its fictive narrative and most Americans have bought the lie lock, stock and barrel. True, the AIPAC lobby along with all major media have nurtured the perception of Israel as the victim; always the victim and never the brutalizers. True, Americans don't hear about how MOSSAD [Israeli equivalent to the CIA] is spying on citizens here in the United States. True, not many citizens even know that our US Central Command commander, General David Patraeus, made a case in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee for Israel ending the Palestinian conflict via two-state solution as "Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR (Area Of Responsibility) and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas."

President Obama needs to put Israel's feet to the fire and demand that the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative be accepted in all its parts by Israel or the United States will stop all aid/funding/weapons transfers to Israel (as it's American funding that goes to building settlements). It is time Americans see Zionist Israel for what it is and has always been: a liar, a thief, a murderer, a psychopath that cares nothing of the lives of "goyim" only of Jews.

Rest assured, there will be no Final Solution until justice is served and Palestinians get their due: To live with human rights in their own homeland. If that does not happen, however, there will be a final reckoning.