POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Israel plays this prisoner-release game every time the U.S.
manages to push it, once again, into negotiations. I’m amazed people don’t yawn
en masse at the announcements.
Each time they play the game, mainline news media gives
Israel endless positive coverage, as though something significant or hopeful
were happening.
But Israel holds many thousands of Palestinians in prisons,
including some very young people and people guilty of no crime, so the release
of a couple of dozen is virtually meaningless.
And since these particular prisoners are ones convicted of
crimes but nearing the end of long sentences, a slightly early release is truly
meaningless: it is what happens in the prison system of every Western nation.
The amount of publicity garnered by this paltry act - day
after day in all the big-name papers - couldn't be bought for a billion
dollars.
So why do we hear endlessly about nothing as though it were
something?
It is only one more stark proof of the inordinate influence
of Israel and its apologists have over our sources of information.
These "peace talks" will go nowhere, just as
countless others in the past have gone nowhere.
Why is that?
The obvious harsh truth is that Israel does not want, and
never has wanted, peace as anyone outside Israel understands it.
Israel wants more land, minus its undesirable Arabic people,
and it has had a long, slow process of ethnic-cleansing going on for decades.
Just look at the announcement of still more settlements in the West Bank and
the ugly manipulations underway in East Jerusalem to separate people from
property they’ve owned for centuries. None of it anything less than legalized
theft of the property of others who are forced to live under Israeli rule with
absolutely no rights.
There is a fundamental truth to human history, and that is
that tyranny and abuse ultimately fail. They succeed for a while – the Soviet
Union had a run of ninety years – but it is impossible to maintain such a
repressive regime indefinitely.
Here is Israel going through the motions yet again of
negotiating, only this time it negotiates with an unelected Palestinian, Abbas,
the U.S. has propped up in office because of his compliant nature, one moreover
who does not even pretend to rule the Palestinians of Gaza.
Peace will come only when the U.S. gets tough with Israel
and stops subsidizing and protecting its brutality, and I suspect that will
never happen.
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Note that a new law has been proposed in Israel. This law
would allow Israel to seize the property of all "non-resident"
Palestinians who own land in East Jerusalem (Arabic in population for
centuries), Palestinians who happen to have their primary residence in the West
Bank or Gaza.
It is the equivalent of the state of Florida proposing a law
to seize all the condos and vacation properties of people who live in the other
forty-nine states. It is actually worse than that because Israel as illegal
occupier has no right in international law to legislate such matters over the
heads of Palestinians.
Apart from the bitter irony of such a law - after all, Jews
are supposed to have left what was Israel two thousand years ago, and you
cannot get more "absentee" than that - it is extremely difficult to
understand how property-worshipping Americans can stomach such rigged
legislation.
Of course, the American mainline press carries virtually no
mention of the proposal.
