Ethnic Cleansing – Israel vs. Palestine – History vs.
Propaganda
What a sad but important post this is.
Israel – victims of the millennia. Horrors beyond reason. Birthers of a lost nation.
We in the west grew up on the horror and the mystery and the wonder of it.
We thought we knew. But we didn’t.
Some of us traveled a decades long, disillusioning, disheartening path, achingly disappointed in the way Israel dealt with their Palestinian co-residents. And we thought we knew.
But we didn’t.
Ilan Pape, an Israeli Jew wrote The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine in 2006. Few of us here in the west, especially in the United States, have heard of it. But we need to. And we need to read it.
Mr. Pape points out with vivid clarity and deep emotion how, just three years after the end of the Second World War - and the horror of the Holocaust - the fledgling Israeli government carried out a program of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. It's a sad book to read. The evidence Mr. Pape presents is overwhelming. Under direction from, and in complicity with the entire Israeli leadership, Israeli armed forces executed men, women, and children, and banished hundreds of thousands of resident Arabs. Mr. Pape presents verifiable evidence - complete with pictures.
One example –
…On 9 April 1948, Jewish forces occupied the village of Deir Yassin. It lay on a hill west of Jerusalem, eight hundred metres above sea level and close to the Jewish neighbourhood of Givat Shaul.
The old village school serves today as a mental hospital for the western Jewish neighbourhood that expanded over the destroyed village. As they burst into the village, the Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed.6 Fahim Zaydan, who was twelve years old at the time, recalled how he saw his family murdered in front of his eyes: They took us out one after the other; shot an old man and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him in front us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him – carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her – they shot her too.7
Zaydan himself was shot, too, while standing in a row of children the Jewish soldiers had lined up against a wall, which they had then sprayed with bullets, ‘just for the fun of it’, before they left. He was lucky to survive his wounds. Recent research has brought down the accepted number of people massacred at Deir Yassin from 170 to ninety-three. Of course, apart from the victims of the massacre itself, dozens of others were killed in the fighting, and hence were not included in the official list of victims…
Pappe, Ilan (2007-09-07). The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Kindle Locations 2062-2066). Oneworld Publications (academic). Kindle Edition.
This is one example only. The book is 295 pages long. It will share with you each sordid detail.
The skewed historical version of the birth of the Jewish state that has been accepted by the non Arabic world is one of the great lies of the twentieth century. The fact that Mr. Pape is an Israeli Jew, not Arabic, should make it easier for folks in the west to take an unflinching look at one of the great historical lies of our time.
So often in both the media and in our personal interactions we find that anyone who seems to give credence to the grievances of the Arabs is accused of being anti-Semitic. "Why do the Arabs hate the Jews so?" This book can help us understand.
“Why do they hate us here in the west?” Maybe this book will help us understand why Arabs judge us by our allies.
Please understand. What is being shared here, what Mr. Pape illuminates for us, doesn’t suggest an endorsement of the excesses of Arab extremists.
But –
Mr. Pape suggests that peace in the Middle East is dependent on Israel taking responsibility for what they inflicted on the Palestinian people. He's right.
What's done can't be changed. But if both sides will take responsibility for their actions perhaps they will have the courage and compassion to approach healing in the way the South Africans did after the end of Apartheid.
If Quicksilver Times is to begin the long, monumentally difficult process of identifying the denial/greed based dysfunctional patterns of our social, political, economic, and spiritual institutions we have be clear about what the real history of the last century has been. Creating what is an evolutionary/revolutionary movement requires us to be clear about the point from which we start.
So it’s imperative that we take the blinders off, look clearly at the true state of affairs – and understand the history that has brought us to this point.
If we are clear about our situation then the task of designing new equitable institutions based on justice, equality, and true spiritual values, while formidable in the extreme, begins with clarity and a solid foundation.
It’s time to TALK ABOUT IT. Doncha’ think?
love,
bill
love,
bill
