EXPANDED FROM A POSTED RESPONSE TO A
COLUMN BY EINAT WILF AND NOAH SLEPKOV IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
This piece is a set of words strung together almost without
meaning and certainly without logic. Its only intention is to plant certain
suggestions in readers’ minds, one of the key purposes of any propaganda. According
to the authors, John Baird, Canada’s current foreign minister, was not guilty
of provocation in blundering into East Jerusalem as a guest of Israeli
politicians, rather he was being “brave” in the cause of peace.
Brave? John Baird?
Baird has always been a coward because only a coward acts
aggressively towards the weak, as he does regularly in both domestic politics
and in trips abroad, and certainly the Palestinians are weak, living at the
mercy of Israel’s brutal and dishonest behavior.
The leaders of Israel do not want what any normal person
calls peace. Their behaviors over decades make that abundantly clear to all but
biased observers.
Israel has always followed the policy advocated by early
Zionists called "the iron wall" in its attitude towards the
Palestinians.
How much better would have been a policy of generosity
towards its neighbors, but no, generosity in Israel’s attitude has never
received the slightest consideration. The one prime minister who came just a
little closer to altering the county’s brutal policies was assassinated, as it
happened by an Israeli.
Israel holds all the cards - armaments, economic power,
American influence, and absolute rule over millions of people - but it has
never made a truly honest effort for genuine peace. Words, words, and more
words combined with arrogant and impossible preconditions set even for
discussions.
What we see is a garrison state, armed to the teeth, threatening
its neighbors constantly, ready at the smallest provocation to kill thousands,
and we see that state rule over 4.5 million conquered people with a
heavy-handed system of apartheid, a system recognized as apartheid by every
sensible and decent observer in the world from Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu
to Jimmy Carter.
And, week by week, Israel slowly steals the land on which
those 4.5 million people live, stealing it through all kinds of cynical and dishonest
laws – an ongoing, slow-motion practice of ethnic-cleansing in every sense of
the term.
What other state could accurately claim as its national
symbol a D-9 armored bulldozer used to destroy the homes of others and
sometimes simply to crush opponents?
Canada’s arrogant and ill-informed foreign minister, John
Baird - and Canadians all know that he is arrogant and ill-informed owing to
his everyday behavior at home - steps in to validate Israel's ghastly behavior
in East Jerusalem, never once saying anything about human or democratic rights.
And why does John Baird choose to behave in this obtuse
fashion?
Because he is a creature of the Harper government which has
as its goal, by its leader’s own admission, the elimination of the Liberal
Party in Canada, a party which was always been even-handed in the Middle East,
reflecting the attitude of a majority of Canadians.
Harper’s strategy includes having ended state support for
political parties, using every disagreeable parliamentary dodge he can think
of, being an enemy of transparency in government, suppressing the voices of
experts in the civil service, and actively seeking a new and substantial flow
of private financing, as it happens, from apologists for Israel eager to fund a
turn in Canada’s historic and fair-minded policies.
In the United States, this pattern of funding is now an
integral part of its foreign affairs. In just one example - and there are
countless examples - the unpleasant Newt Gingrich received the best part of $20
million from just one wealthy American heavily involved in Israel’s affairs to
run his presidential bid.
The price for that money? Newt's peppering his speeches with
ignorant assertions like "There's no such thing as a Palestinian.” In
another notorious example, Dick Armey, former House Majority Leader, once
openly suggested that Israel just go ahead and run all the Palestinians out of
the occupied territories – surely the kind of assertion that does not come
naturally from an ultra-conservative economics major for whom property rights are
virtually religious dogma.
And just so, John Baird's bull-in-a-china-shop behavior in East
Jerusalem and at the UN or Peter Kent's sudden outbursts, almost like someone
given to speaking in tongues, about Canada defending Israel or Harper's regular
speeches claiming credit as a warrior against (virtually non-existent)
anti-Semitism and deliberately conflating legitimate criticism of Israel with
anti-Semitism.
In the normal world, we know peace in any violent
disagreement is often only obtained by outside intervention and patient talks
and mutual respect, but somehow when it comes to Israel, this common understanding
just disappears. Israel is never pressured to treat its neighbors with respect,
and it is never pressured to talk to them without arrogant preconditions.
Never.
No one dares say a word about the decades of abusing 4.5
million people, of Israel’s endless torture and assassinations. Nor do the
“brave” John Bairds of this world raise their voices when Israel kills 400
children as it did in its invasion of Gaza or when it commits piracy on the
high seas or when it murders a Canadian officer serving as a UN observer or
when it drops a million hideous cluster bombs on civilians as it did in Lebanon.
No condemnation over the theft of farms and homes is ever heard. Not a word
about endless illegal arrests and the imprisonment of thousands. Nor a word
about the seizure of taxes and foreign aid moneys from their rightful owners.
Of course, there is never a word about the Six Day War so
many decades ago, the very event which put all those people at Israel’s mercy,
a war which Israel cynically started knowing it could win, aiming ultimately to
create what is known as Greater Israel. Nor was a word said about Israel’s
attacking a well-marked American intelligence ship, of which they had been
advised in advance, during that war to silence signals informing Washington
that Israel was turning around its armor to seize all of what it controls
today. And there was not a word about the mass murder of hundreds of Egyptian
prisoners in the Sinai to expedite that turnaround.
Does anyone in his right mind believe peace is obtained the
way Israel has claimed to pursue it? Only if your definition of peace is
Israel’s taking all the additional land it covets without any of the people who
own it and live there, which is pretty much what the concept of Greater Israel
involves. I suppose that is a kind of peace, the kind of peace brutal American
soldiers achieved in My Lai, Vietnam, or in Fallujah, Iraq.
