Settlers Torch Olive Orchard In Hebron while the Israeli army did not attempt to intervene or stop them.
In an age they claim to be the age of the ‘free world’, people wait for real news from wikilileaks which has leaked documents telling the real story of the conditions in Afghanistan and the enormous problems NATO and US forces are encountering in Afghanistan in facing Taliban’s scaled up attacks, which is the opposite of what we read in the ‘free’ press. It also reports the despair Afghani people feel regarding attempts by NATO armies to reach a solution, while these armies have brought nothing but destruction and killing to Afghani civilians. Instead of treating the documents as new indicators which merit serious consideration and maybe an unfamiliar and unexpected response to save what can be saved, most political and media interest focused on how the leak was made, the individuals involved and the objectives behind it in an attempt to frame everyone resisting the American military approach as suspect and possibly a terrorist.
Nevertheless, and despite the leaks and artificial official noise they provoked, the Congress decided to give $ 37 billion to continuing the war on Afghanistan and Iraq, despite the fact that this coincided with news that tens of billions of dollars went unaccounted for in Iraq, and despite the fact that the money was not spent for the objectives designed for it in Washington. This issue has a direct impact on the United States security and economy because of its direct involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. How would this compare with the news published in the west about Palestine, the Gaza blockade, judaizing Jerusalem, displacing Palestinians in the territories occupied in 1948 and building settlements in the West Bank? For the settlers, who are in control in Israel now, are the only source of the news about this part of the world. Human rights groups do not have access to the scene of events where Israeli forces, assisted by extremist settlers, carry out a sort of ethnic cleansing unparalleled in the 21st century. Yet, there is not a single news story carried by international news agencies about this ethnic cleansing, let alone condemning it.
A few days ago Israeli occupation forces completely erased the village of al-Araqib and did not allow the villagers even to take their family belongings. 320 villagers, whose fathers and grandfathers – as their tombs show – lived in the village before the creation of Israel, stood watching their history reduced to rubble by a racist military machine which deprived them of their humanity for no other reason except being Palestinians living in a land coveted by Zionist settlers who are stealing this land piece by piece with Western support and disgraceful international silence.
Eye witnesses speak of racist measures nobody knows except those who live under them. Racist settlers set boars free every night in West-Bank villages and towns to make noises and terrorize the population and mess up their property in order to force people to leave their land.
Nevertheless, you find the White House taking measures to freeze funds belonging to Syrians who “threaten Lebanon’s stability”! In his letter to the Congress, President Obama writes that “Syria’s actions in support of Hizbollah undermine Lebanon’s sovereignty, contributes to the region’s political and economic instability and still constitutes a threat to US national security and foreign policy”. The fact is that the US administration’s acceptance of Israel’s racist crimes, and support and funding to Israeli ethnic cleansing policies is the real and essential threat to US national security and foreign policy because, on the one hand, it makes the Arabs lose any confidence in the credibility and neutrality of the United States and, on the other, unleashes the demon of racism, sectarianism and ethnic cleansing in Israel. This will bring destruction and disaster not only to our region, but to the whole world.
If the American president or any member of his team thinks that this is far removed from the truth, I refer them to Gideon Levy’s article “The public wants a police that kills, but only Arabs” (Haaretz, 25 July, 2010). In this article Levy writes about the killing of innocent Palestinians by Israeli police and then exonerating the police in Israeli courts. He cites the example of police officer Shahar Mizrahi who killed a Palestinian man trying to escape. The popular sympathy with Mizrahi turned him from a murderer into a hero. He also wrote about Shmuel Yehezkel who shot dead Palestinian Samir Dari in 2005. Levy adds “not a week goes by in which a civilian is not battered by violent police officers. Instead of halting this dangerous trend, we accept the backing of the police criminal receives, which is accompanied by shameful silence on the part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman and Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein. The Supreme Court is again alone against this whole wave of violence, which receives a tailwind in the media”. He concludes: “Yesterday they needlessly killed Mahmoud Ganaim. Tomorrow they are liable to kill Jewish civilians, too. And then we are sure to protest”.
If this is not racism, what is racism? And in whose interest is this dubious international silence in the face of this rising tide of racism in Israel? In an article, “The tragedy of arrogance,” Amnon Shmosh writes about another kind of racism in Israel between an Ashkenazi mother and a Moroccan or Ethiopian Jewish one. He adds: “the Arab perception is the opposite of our own, that their wisdom is lesser, that their freedom fighters are despicable terrorists wholly different from the Jewish terrorists we admired during British rule, that life is not sanctified by them as it is by us, and that if they won’t get coriander and sweets they would topple Hamas’ rule, which they stupidly elected”. (Yediot Ahronot, 23 July, 2010). If these views and analyses do not constitute important leaks for the American Administration and Western governments, let them read Neve Gordon’s article in The Guardian, “Ethnic cleansing in the Israeli Negev” (although the Negev is Palestinian because all its villages are Palestinian”. He writes: “I suddenly understood how far the state is ready to go to accomplish its objective of Judaising the Negev region; what I witnessed was, after all, an act of ethnic cleansing”.
What leaks do the Americans and the West need to know for sure that their silence regarding the most dangerous crime of ethnic cleansing and genocide committed in the twenty first century will be a devastating threat, not only to American national security, but to the security of our region and the world at large.
Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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