Cut Israel Off

[TBC: The following excerpts are from antiwar.com. It is riddled with unsupported accusations, generalizations, and distortions of truth. We have made a few [bracketed] comments below.]

Cut Israel Off [Excerpts]

It is long past time for American politicians to quit carrying water for the state of Israel and its powerful U.S. lobby. Congress' craven obedience to the lobby is a disgrace.

America's strategic interests in the Middle East lie with the Arab countries. Israel is a strategic and economic liability. The U.S. government's slavish support of Israel brands us as a hypocrite and is responsible for most of the hostility toward the U.S.

[It is to be concluded that "America's strategic interests" would therefore include abandoning the only democratic form of government in the Middle East and aligning further with countries with grievous records of human rights violations.]

Americans have been brainwashed into believing that it's the Arabs, and the Palestinians in particular, who don't want peace. That is a big lie. The Palestinians made an enormous concession when they agreed to settle for a state on 18 percent of Palestine. Saudi Arabia proposed several years ago a peace plan in which all of the Arab countries would recognize Israel in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. The Israelis rejected it out of hand, just as they reject Arab efforts to have the Middle East a nuclear-free zone.

[The author either ignores the facts of history or is content to swallow the half truths and outright lies of his premise. Had the "Palestinians" accepted the 1948 partition (they did not and by their own admission, they never will), they would now be living in their own country. Israel accepted the partiition in 1948. Further, the alleged concession made was admitted to be incrementalism. "We’ll accept this before we take the rest." It can be demonstrated that on those treaties signed by Israel, they kept the provisions of the same. The Arabs, on the other hand, did not.]

Israel's goal is and always has been to take all of Palestine and to get rid of the Palestinians. The Israelis employed ethnic cleansing in 1948 and again in 1967 to make hundreds of thousands of Palestinians refugees. For 40 years, the Israelis have refused to give back the Palestinian and Syrian lands they seized in war. They have blatantly violated international law by building settlements on occupied land, and by violating the airspace of other sovereign countries.

[It is convenient to forget that many of the so called Palestinian refugees left Israel at the urging of the surrounding Arab states. Forgotten in the alleged rush to justice is something another commentator notes: "On May 16, 1948, a New York Times Headline read ‘Jews in Grave Danger in all Muslim Lands: Nine Hundred Thousand in Africa and Asia face wrath of their foes.’ The story reported of a law drafted by the Arab League Political Committee ‘which was intended to govern the legal status of Jewish residents of Arab League countries. Their bank accounts would be frozen and used to finance resistance to Zionist ambitions in Palestine.' Jews believed to be active Zionists would be interned and their assets confiscated.“ Pogroms and persecutions, and grave fears for their future, regularly preceded the mass expulsions and exoduses of the Jews, whose ancestors had inhabited these regions from time immemorial. Beginning in 1948, more than 650,000 Jews left their homes in the Arab world to become refugees, and were eventually integrated into Israel, even as the country was being threatened with annihilation by neighboring Arab League states" (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/jewref.html).]

Palestinians are the victims, not the villains, in this case. The Israelis make their lives miserable in the hope they will give up and leave. At the same time, the Israelis, in cahoots with the American government, maintain a charade of proposed peace talks. They of course never come to fruition. The Israeli government is not about to allow the Palestinians to have a viable state. If they give the Palestinians anything, it will be a patchwork of enclaves completely surrounded and controlled by Israel. Having created 700,000 Palestinian refugees, the Israelis have from the beginning refused to allow them to return to their homes, farms and businesses, all of which Israel confiscated on the specious grounds that they were "abandoned property."

[To this day the residents of Gaza and other enclaves continue launching unguided missiles into Jewish population areas. Interestingly enough, the premise of the author is an accurate assessment of what the Arabs seek to do. Finally, the alleged "specious grounds" was often simply the truth.]

http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=11920