[A-List] The Unmentionable Source Of Terrorism

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by John Pilger

New Statesman (March 19 2004)

The current threat of attacks in countries whose governments have close
alliances with Washington is the latest stage in a long struggle against
the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination. The
motivation of those who plant bombs in railway carriages derives
directly from this truth. What is different today is that the weak have
learned how to attack the strong, and the western crusaders' most recent
colonial terrorism (as many as 55,000 Iraqis killed) exposes "us" to
retaliation.

The source of much of this danger is Israel. A creation, then guardian
of the west's empire in the Middle East, the Zionist state remains the
cause of more regional grievance and sheer terror than all the Muslim
states combined. Read the melancholy Palestinian Monitor on the
internet; it chronicles the equivalent of Madrid's horror week after
week, month after month, in occupied Palestine. No front pages in the
west acknowledge this enduring bloodbath, let alone mourn its victims.
Moreover, the Israeli army, a terrorist organisation by any reasonable
measure, is protected and rewarded in the west.

In its current human rights report, the Foreign Office criticises Israel
for its "worrying disregard for human rights" and "the impact that the
continuing Israeli occupation and the associated military occupations
have had on the lives of ordinary Palestinians".

Yet the Blair government has secretly authorised the sale of vast
quantities of arms and terror equipment to Israel. These include
leg-irons, electric shock belts and chemical and biological agents. No
matter that Israel has defied more United Nations resolutions than any
other state since the founding of the world body. Last October, the UN
General Assembly voted by 144 to four to condemn the wall that Israel
has cut through the heart of the West Bank, annexing the best
agricultural land, including the aquifer system that provides most of
the Palestinians' water. Israel, as usual, ignored the world.

Israel is the guard dog of America's plans for the Middle East. The
former CIA analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison have described how "two
strains of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism have dovetailed into an
agenda for a vast imperial project to restructure the Middle East, all
further reinforced by the happy coincidence of great oil resources up
for grabs and a president and vice-president heavily invested in oil".

The "neoconservatives" who run the Bush regime all have close ties with
the Likud government in Tel Aviv and the Zionist lobby groups in
Washington. In 1997, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
(Jinsa) declared: "Jinsa has been working closely with Iraqi National
Council leader Dr Ahmad Chalabi to promote Saddam Hussein's removal from
office..."  Chalabi is the CIA-backed stooge and convicted embezzler at
present organising the next "democratic" government in Baghdad.

Until recently, a group of Zionists ran their own intelligence service
inside the Pentagon. This was known as the Office of Special Plans, and
was overseen by Douglas Feith, an under-secretary of defence, extreme
Zionist and opponent of any negotiated peace with the Palestinians. It
was the Office of Special Plans that supplied Downing Street with much
of its scuttlebutt about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; more often
than not, the original source was Israel.

Israel can also claim responsibility for the law passed by Congress that
imposes sanctions on Syria and in effect threatens it with the same fate
as Iraq unless it agrees to the demands of Tel Aviv. Israel is the
guiding hand behind Bush's bellicose campaign against the "nuclear
threat" posed by Iran. Today, in occupied Iraq, Israeli special forces
are teaching the Americans how to "wall in" a hostile population, in the
same way that Israel has walled in the Palestinians in pursuit of the
Zionist dream of an apartheid state. The author David Hirst describes
the "Israelisation of US foreign policy" as being "now operational as
well as ideological".

In understanding Israel's enduring colonial role in the Middle East, it
is too simple to see the outrages of Ariel Sharon as an aberrant version
of a democracy that lost its way. The myths that abound in middle-class
Jewish homes in Britain about Israel's heroic, noble birth have long
been reinforced by a "liberal" or "left-wing" Zionism as virulent and
essentially destructive as the Likud strain.

In recent years, the truth has come from Israel's own "new historians",
who have revealed that the Zionist "idealists" of 1948 had no intention
of treating justly or even humanely the Palestinians, who instead were
systematically and often murderously driven from their homes. The most
courageous of these historians is Ilan Pappe, an Israeli-born professor
at Haifa University, who, with the publication of each of his
ground-breaking books, has been both acclaimed and smeared. The latest
is A History of Modern Palestine, in which he documents the expulsion of
Palestinians as an orchestrated crime of ethnic cleansing that tore
apart Jews and Arabs coexisting peacefully. As for the modern "peace
process", he describes the Oslo Accords of 1993 as a plan by liberal
Zionists in the Israeli Labour Party to corral Palestinians in South
African-style bantustans. That they were aided by a desperate
Palestinian leadership made the "peace" and its "failure" (blamed on the
Palestinians) no less counterfeit. During the years of negotiation and
raised hopes, governments in Tel Aviv secretly doubled the number of
illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, intensified the military
occupation and completed the fragmentation of the 22 per cent of
historic Palestine that the Palestine Liberation Organisation had agreed
to accept in return for recognising the state of Israel.

Along with the late Edward Said, Ilan Pappe is the most eloquent writer
of Palestinian history. He is also one of the most scholarly. This
combination has brought him many admirers, but also enemies among
Israel's academic liberal mythologists in Britain, one of whom, Stephen
Howe, was given the Pappe book to review in the New Statesman of 8 March.
Howe often appears in these pages; his style is to damn with faint
praise and to set carefully the limits of debate about empire, be it
Irish history, the Middle East or the "war on terror". In Pappe's case,
what the reader doesn't know is Howe's personal link to the Israeli
establishment; and what Howe does not say in his review is that here for
the first time is a textbook on Palestine that narrates the real story
as it happened: a non-Zionist version of Zionism.

He accuses Pappe of "factual mistakes", but gives no evidence, then
denigrates the book by dismissing it as a footnote to another book by
the Israeli historian Benny Morris, who has long atoned for his own
revisionist work. To its credit, Cambridge University Press has
published Pappe's pioneering and highly accessible work as an
authoritative history. This means that the "debate" over Israel's
origins is ending, regardless of what the empire's apologists say.

http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=5169&sectionID=40