Freedom Next Time
Book Rview - Part Two: Israel and Zionism - The Last Taboo

‘The Last Taboo' is a phrase coined by the Palestinian writer Edward Said in the last essay composed before his death in 2001. ‘The extermination of the Native Americans can be admitted, the morality of Hiroshima attacked, the national flag of the United States publicly committed to the flames. But the systematic continuity of Israel 's 52-year oppression and maltreatment of the Palestinians is virtually unmentionable, a narrative that has no permission to appear'.

Israel , states Amnesty International, ‘is the only country on earth where torture and ill-treatment are legally sanctioned'. Its Zionist regime represents the negation of humanistic Judaic values. In place of the ideas of peaceful co-existence Zionism substitutes militarism and conquest.

According to an article, Israel; All You Wanted to Know , appearing in New Statesman November 7, 2005, ‘ Israel has defied 246 Security Council resolutions and more than twice that number of UN General resolutions.' Another study by Dr Salman H. Abu Sitta, From Refugees to Citizens at Home, 2002 states: ‘The right of Palestinians to return to their homeland, enshrined in UN Resolution 194 has been reaffirmed by the international community 135 times in the period 1948-2000.'

Pilger reveals a litany of persecution of the Palestinian population by Zionists that commenced before the inception of the State of Israel in 1948. Like the Australian Aborigines the Palestinians ‘were deemed not to exist'. To the Zionists, Israel beckoned as ‘An Empty Land For a People Without a Land'.

Pilger describes how, on his 1968 visit to Israel , he felt a ‘natural empathy ‘even admiration', for a Jewish generation who remained prisoners of their myths and fears.

Some had fought in a people's army, the Haganah, inspired by a humanism that was the ‘stuff of legend' in European countries only too eager to project their collective guilt concerning the Jews onto the Middle East .

He had even spent some months on a ‘socialist' Kibbutz, listening to stories about this empty land inhabited by only a few nomads, and the great struggle against the odds to make the desert bloom. The Jaffa orange was symbolic of this struggle when in truth Pilger writes, ‘it confirmed the opposite'. The settlers occupied land made fertile by generations of Palestinian farmers, who, for over two hundred years, had cultivated their vineyards and orange groves and exported the products of their labour.

The squalid conditions in the Qalandiya refugee camp contrasted strongly with comfortable settler dwellings. In 1968 Pilger visited he camp on a cold windy Easter Sunday. Shelter for three thousand Palestinians consisted of tents, primitive dwellings constructed from mud, hessian and scrap corrugated iron. On the same day that thousands of tourists were besieging the holy sites of Jerusalem Qalandiya camp was mired in the stench of an overflowing open sewer, its residents abandoned and forgotten except for a Canadian Lutheran couple who arrived in a Land Rover to distribute blankets to the inhabitants.

The main meal for the day consisted of a bowl of thin gruel, a brick of bread plus a vitamin pill. Rations supplied by the grievously under funded United Nations Relief and Works Agency were precisely calculated as the amount a human being needed to survive, no more and no less, and reflected precisely the amount the agency could afford on its miniscule handout from the ‘international community'.

Qalandiyah camp today is the main Israeli checkpoint on the road from Jerusalem to Ramullah. It is ‘surrounded by trenches fortified with coil upon coil of barbed wire. Another generation of young boys are kicking a punctured football around in the dust'. People stand patiently jammed in line at the checkpoint, just one day like any other in the Occupied Territories . Palestinians are the Jews now, and like the original Jews, they will not allow the world to forget.

Amira Hass is one of a small group of remarkable Israelis who maintain the visibility of Palestinians. She reports daily from her home in Ramullah in the Israeli Occupied Territories , offering her newspaper Ha'aretz news from a Palestinian perspective. She reveals the world of ordinary Palestinians denied personal and economic freedoms, information that is taboo in Israel .

The day in 2002 in which Pilger interviewed Hass was only the tenth following Israelis withdrawal from its three-week occupation of Ramullah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority. Pilger describes the destruction as ‘selective', aimed not at ‘destroying the infrastructure of terror, but the infrastructure of organised society'. Places like the girls' school, the education ministry, the cultural centre; all had been systematically trashed and vandalized. At the Peace and Love Radio Station the soldiers had destroyed the transmitter, tapes, mini discs; everything. At the education ministry they had stripped computers of their hard drives, destroying data for courses, examinations, graduation lists.

The soldiers, acting from motives of racism and sheer spite, had defecated and urinated in every available receptacle apart from the toilets. A woman told Pilger: ‘This was the holy war of (President) Sharon against the memory and culture of the Palestinian. We have been raped and all the while the perpetrators are crying that they are victims, demanding the world's sorrow and perpetual silence about us while their powerful army demolishes our culture; our lives.'

Amira Hass is driven to report honestly by her personal dread of becoming a mere bystander in cases of systematic violations of human rights. She described the moment her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle train to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen on a summer's day in 1944.

‘She and the other women had been ten days in train from Yugoslavia . They were sick and some were dying. Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners - just looking. This was a formative image in my upbringing; this despicable - “looking from the side”. For speaking the truth some of Amira's readers regard her as a traitor or worse, a ‘Kapo' (A Jewish camp overseer).

Ilan Pappe, a senior lecturer in the University of Haifa Department of Political Science is another Israeli determined not ‘to look from the side'. He writes of Gaza being a hermetically sealed prison camp, following a series of phony removals of Israeli settlers relocated at Government expense. The usual Israeli tactic of ethnic cleansing cannot be employed here because Egypt has no interest in annexing Gaza , which is seen as a liability.'

‘Eight people a day, most of them children, are killed in Israeli bombing raids. There are no politicians able or willing to stop the generals.' Pappe is fearful that if the rate of killing increases it could soon result in a ‘horrific death tally, with the possibility of a mass eviction if only as a desperate ploy by the residents to escape the inferno.'

Pappe appeals to people in the west to lobby their governments and businesses. “Nothing apart from sanctions, boycotts and divestment will stop the murdering of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip. There is nothing anyone here in Israel can do about it. Brave pilots refused to participate in the operations. Two journalists - out of 150 - do not cease to write about it - but this is it. In the name of the holocaust memory let us hope the world would not allow the genocide of Gaza to continue.”

The heirs of the fanatical extremist Arial Sharon must not be permitted to realise his objective of an Israel reaching from the Nile to the Euphrates River .

USEFUL WEBSITES:

http://gush-shalom.org

(Israeli Peace Movement)

www.haaretz.com

Independent Israeli News source

http://www.ajds.org.au

AUSTRALIAN JEWISH DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY

Click here to read Part 1 of Margaret Setter's Review