An Incredible Country
My host-mother in Israel, Zehava, is an absolutely incredible women, even beyond the incredible warmth and kindness she and her family have extended to me on my first day in Haifa. To begin, her children are seventh generation Israelis on one side of her family (the other side is from Lebanon). That is so far back that they don't even know where the family originally came from.
Second, she worked as an engineer for the Israeli Military Industry. She helped design the cannisters that launch Tomahawk missiles used by the US military in the first gulf war (Israel doesn't use Tomahawks because they are launched from aircraft carriers, battleships or submarines, which Israel doesn't need so much). She was also involved in constructing larger fuel tanks for American made F-16 bombers, used by Israel to, among other things, bomb the Osiraq nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981. I still believe that that was one of, if not the greatest thing the IDF has ever done, that the world still owes Israel tremendous gratitude, and it is amazing to meet someone who played a part in that.
posted by Dave @ 12:54 AM
1 Comments:
Seventh generation Israeli? Ha! Murderous genocidal racist Eastern European Ashkenazim stole Palestine from the native population in 1947-8.
Why I Am Anti-Israel
I used to do business in Israel. Now I support the abolition of the Zionist state. Here's why.
In 1992-3, I was enthusiastic that the ongoing negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership would lead to peace. Because I had been raised in America, I had never even heard or read a challenge to the Zionist narrative of the creation of the State of Israel. Before my first visit to that country, I even attended Israeli advocacy sessions at my local synagogue and Jewish community center.
I truly believed that the creation of the State of Israel was the final just conclusion of a long trail of tears that began with the expulsion of Jews from Palestine in Roman times and continued right through the Nazi Holocaust. If only Palestinians forswore irrational anti-Semitism, they could make peace with Israel.
Shortly after the signing of the Oslo agreement, I became involved in several EU funded infrastructure improvement projects in the Occupied Territories. The Israeli government used the Oslo agreement as license to establish a system of checkpoints. When I traveled from one Palestinian village to a close neighbor, I almost invariably had to cross a checkpoint, where I would witness IDF soldiers beating Palestinians for no reason. I had to wonder if the Israeli government was serious about peace.
I was in Jerusalem when Goldstein massacred the Muslim worshippers at the al-Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. I realized Rabin was lying about wanting peace when instead of removing the settler fanatics from Kiryat Arba, he punished the Arabs of Hebron with a curfew. After the massacre, the settlers resumed spitting on Palestinians, throwing stones, breaking windows, pushing down old people and numerous other petty and more serious forms of abuse.
Did the Israeli army in Hebron try to stop this behavior? No, they helped. Several times I watched IDF soldiers threaten rape and murder while they exposed themselves to 10-12 year old girls attending the local parochial schools. The soldiers typically used Russian, Hebrew, and broken Arabic, which the girls probably did not understand.
Nothing that I was seeing and experiencing in Israel and the Occupied Territories conformed to the depiction of Israel in our media. As I began to understand written and spoken Hebrew, I realized that Zionist culture was intensely racist. I attended the bris (circumcision) of the son of an Israeli business associate. After completing the operation, the Mohel (circumciser), made his own blessing, "Barukh attah adonai, eloheinu, melekh haolam, asher natan leam yisrael hayal hadash laharog ulehashmid et haaravim." It means, "Blessed art thou Lord, our God, King of the Universe, that has given to the people of Israel a new soldier to kill and to destroy the Arabs."
In other words, Zionists begin murderous militarist indoctrination of their children at eight days of age. Were these really people with whom America should be so closely allied? When I started working on Gaza projects and watched IDF soldiers shoot children for no reason, I knew the answer could only be "No."
How could I have been so wrong about the State of Israel? I researched the issue intensely and concluded that Palestinians are the native population of Palestine. Zionists from Eastern Europe colonized Palestine and stole it by means of force, terrorism, aggression, murder and violence.
Zionists justify their crimes in the same way that German Nazis justified their crimes by mythological primordialist nonsense -- they claim they are descended from Galileans and Judeans that lived in Palestine during Biblical times. There is absolutely no evidence to support such a claim, and if there were, so what? Vienna was founded 2000 years ago by Celts. Do the modern Irish have the right to expel the current population of Vienna?
In 2001-2002, I ordered American-made Cisco routers for an EU-funded project to improve the Internet infrastructure in the Occupied Territories. The Israeli government held the devices up at customs with the ridiculous assertion that they could be used for terrorism. In my experience, the Israeli government attempted to interfere with any technology that made it possible for Palestinians to communicate with the outside world without Israeli government control. I complained to the American government to put pressure on the Israeli government to release my equipment with no luck. Then I changed my tactics. I shipped the Cisco routers back to the US and specified inferior more expensive Israeli routers made by RAD, an Israeli government subsidized military electronics firm. Suddenly all the problems in putting the routers in place vanished. In one fell swoop, the Israeli government ripped off the EU and the Palestinians while it helped RAD steal a business contract from an American company. I take it as typical of the rapacious nature of Israeli relations with the rest of the world. In the end my efforts went for naught because by the end of 2002, the Israeli army had destroyed practically all the infrastructure projects on which I had worked.
After working in Israel and the Occupied Territories for ten years and then calculating the political damage that alliance with Zionism is inflicting on America, I feel ethically compelled to stop doing business with Israel both for the sake of innocent Palestinians and also out of basic human decency.
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