The more vicious Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians, the more Jews around the world will find themselves in a twenty-first century version of Hitler’s Germany; hated and despised and targetted, Israel is effectively recreating the conditions which led to their 6-year plight in the first place (I say ‘plight’ because the 6 years of what they call the ‘holocaust’ is nothing compared to the 60 years they have spent cleansing the Palestinians). We know they’re intelligent people, we know they have the education, the brains, the capacity and the money to understand what a monster they are creating by alienating the billion or so muslims who aren’t living off American doggy bags. For every Palestinian child they kill, another child from a country far away straps on a gun and sets out to defeat the ‘infidels’. As David Bromwich says:
“Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.” In every culture and every civilization, to kill the innocent is evil. Fifty civilians who live in a neighborhood where one terrorist has built a hidden sniper’s nest are understood to be innocent. If you kill the fifty, you have done something worse than not killing the one.
The Israelis know this. Perhaps they’ve planned for it. Perhaps creating a billion ‘terrorists’ is their ultimate aim and they have a plan to defeat them (draw them all to Gaza and nuke them all at once, maybe?). With this latest act of aggression, however, chinks are beginning to show in their armor. It seems to me, from the little browsing I’ve done recently, that the great Israeli propaganda machine is looking a little worn, a little jaded and tired. The arguments from the ‘Israel apologists’ have gotten thin, their voices more shrill, their information weak, even though Israel’s Hasbara or Foreign Affairs Ministry has been hyperactive as usual in their efforts. The Ministry recently sent out this email in an effort to recruit ‘media volunteers’ for its propaganda war:
Dear friends,
We hold the [sic] military supremacy, yet fail the battle over the international media. We need to buy time for the IDF to succeed, and the least we can do is spare some (additional) minutes on the net. The ministry of foreign affairs is putting great efforts in balancing the media, but we all know it’s a battle of numbers. The more we post, blog, talkback, vote – the more likely we gain positive sentiment.
I was asked by the ministry of foreign affairs to arrange a network of volunteers, who are willing to contribute to this effort. If you’re up to it you will receive a daily messages & media package as well as targets.
If you wish to participate, please respond to this email.
People who responded were given target sites that included The Times, The Guardian, BBC, Huffington Post and various european sites considered critical of the invasion. It’s telling that CNN was not on the list!
For the first time that I can recall (can’t go further back than 15 years or so, so anything before then has definitely escaped my notice) voices against Israel are no longer classed as Muslim extremists, or ‘Islamic apologists’. I’ve finally seen and read (scroll down to read the comments on this page) voices that don’t think of themselves in terms of a religion, but as simply human. And for many, that has been the call: Take religion out of the equation. Yet the voices that will actually effect change, ironically, will be those that identify themselves by their religion, most importantly, Jewish voices.
On a website called Tikun Olam (Repair the World), I spotted this comment from a former IDF (Israeli Death Forces) member:
I was lucky to serve at the time when there was very little friction with the Palestinians and in non-combat role in the territories, while spending most of the time in Lebanon where there was almost no contact with the local population except for the collaborators that supplied our outposts. Still, I am totally aware that a lot of people I served with indeed see [the Palestinians] as human beings worthy of respect or dignity (someone once mentioned to me that IDF is so humane that there are practically no rape cases in the territories, to which I replied that this is, first and foremost, because of ingrained squeamishness that the typical Jewish IDF soldier feels towards the Palestinians) and I am ashamed to be the one who not only ignored it at the time, but also accepted it. For example, I remember meeting somebody from my former battalion in my university and him bragging about shooting a Palestinian boy (who, supposedly, threw a Molotoff bottle at him) during his reserve duty and me, while uncomfortable with the his bragging and callousness, never saying anything. Another example is a doctor(!) in my reserve duty battalion saying that the fact that IDF killed a thousand Palestinians in Jenin in 2002 (it was during the events and the real numbers were unknown) was very good since this meant a 1000 less terrorists. Same thing, I would have never thought or said anything like that myself but I said nothing at the time.
I wonder how many blogs, how many websites, how many videos and emails the Hasbara brigade can counter?