The Promised Land

For many years, when I lived in the Boston area, I was an activist for Palestinian rights. I haven't been involved in that work for some years now, and I don't really have the time or bandwidth to invest in it these days. But the recent confrontation -- sparked by efforts by the Israeli government to evict Palestinians from their homes in Jerusalem -- does compel me to bring it up. Here in the U.S., the corporate media presents an entirely one-sided and distorted story, about an imperiled Israel beleaguered by irrationally hateful terrorists, motivated solely by bigotry. Quite the contrary, it is the project of the Israel government to drive the Palestinians from the last of their land, and they use terrorism as a principal means. Yes, it is legitimate to label Hamas a terrorist organization: they do attack innocent civilians. But so do many Israeli extremists, and the Palestinians suffer vastly more civilian casualties than do the Jewish Israelis. Note that there are many Israeli Arab citizens, so the distinction is not actually one of nationality.

Anyway, as I say I don't have the bandwidth to argue about this right now, so I'll outsource to David Shulman. Please read the whole thing, I'll just pull a couple of quotes to get the basic idea across.

As several astute commentators have suggested in the last weeks, Benjamin Netanyahu’s grand strategic plan, shared, implicitly, with sections of the Israeli right, was to keep Hamas alive as a constant threat to Israel. Ensuring that the Palestinians remain divided between the ineffectual remnants of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and the extreme Islamicists of Gaza is one way, possibly the only way, to allow the Israeli program of annexation, domination, and expulsion on the West Bank to go forward. . . .

I experience the ever more intrusive tentacles of the occupation, in the form of vicious settlers and mostly hostile soldiers and police, nearly every week when my fellow activists and I are in the Palestinian territories to protect, as best we can, Bedouin shepherds and the small-scale farmers and herders of the South Hebron hills. Levels of settler violence against Palestinians and human rights activists have increased exponentially over the last several months.In the occupation system, settlers are above the law.

 

This is the true situation. Israel is not threatened existentially, or even with anything more than the sort of low level violence experienced in most of the world. But Palestine is indeed threatened with extinction. That is the goal of the Israeli government. And the U.S. condones it. It's a damn good thing I moderate comments -- in the U.S., most people do not dare to say what I just did, for fear of being called antisemites, and even losing their jobs. But it is the truth.