Killing Gentiles

March 12, 2002 Ariel Sharon has finally gone too far. Israel’s thuggish prime minister thought he could crush the Palestinian revolt with a policy of violence, killing Palestinians until they begged for mercy. But the policy has backfired by getting lots of Jews killed too, and the violence on both sides is escalating dangerously. Even Sharon’s indulgent American patrons, George W. Bush and Colin Powell, have called for a halt to the madness.

Sharon is acting according to his lights. He has never concealed his contempt for “the goy” — the gentile. Israel is based on the principle that Jews have rights “goyim” don’t have. Hence its abuse of Arab gentiles and its defiance of Western gentiles.

Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review has summed up the situation in one pithy sentence: “The truth is that if we held Israel to the same standards that we apply to Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, U.S. bombers and missiles would be blasting Tel Aviv, and we’d be putting Israeli prime minister Sharon behind bars for war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Unless I’ve missed something, even such alleged “anti-Semites” as David Duke and Louis Farrakhan don’t advocate treating Jews as Israel treats gentiles. Anyone with a spark of decency would be ashamed to treat Jews that way. Yet a gentile can be accused of anti-Semitism even for the purely verbal sin of criticizing Israel, whereas a Jew who supports Sharon’s physical cruelty is accused of ... well, nothing. We have no handy word for even the most brutal Jewish treatment of gentiles.

To challenge the Jews’ right to oppress Palestinians is called “denying Israel’s right to exist.” Apparently its “right to exist” includes the right to oppress, and is indeed inseparable from it. Even the “peace plans” that call for separate Jewish and Palestinian states seem to take for granted the right of the Jewish state to treat Arabs within its borders as inferiors.

Perish the thought that Jews and gentiles should be equal! That would be anti-Semitism.

According to Israel’s “amen corner” in this country, Israel can do no wrong, except to concede too much to the Palestinians. Israel is a heroic “democracy” even when it treats its minority like dirt, and a “reliable ally” of the United States even when it steals American military secrets and sells them to Communist countries.

It’s an article of faith among the Amen Corner that the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard — a national hero in Israel, by the way — has been punished far too harshly for his crimes, since the United States should have shared those secrets with Israel anyway. And far from recoiling from Sharon’s brutality, the Amen Corner defends him at every turn, just as Stalin’s fellow travelers in this country used to justify Uncle Joe — except that some in the Amen Corner think Sharon isn’t going far enough.

Not all the members of the Amen Corner are Jewish. Many are Christians — a shameful fact, since they never raise their voices in defense of Palestinian Christians. “See how these Christians love one another!” This kind of loyalty might make Judas Iscariot queasy.

The obvious danger is that the United States will once more be drawn into war with Israel’s enemies, chiefly Iraq. If that happens, we probably won’t be as lucky as in the 1991 Gulf War, which ended with an easy American victory and little cost until last September 11. This time the whole Middle East could erupt in war and revolution, leaving us with countless millions of bitter enemies on top of those we already have. It will be a boon to al-Qaeda recruitment.

The U.S. Government is toying with the possibility of using nuclear weapons in the war ahead — the war that the “war on terrorism” may morph into. We can be sure that the fanatical Sharon won’t object, and some of his American apologists are sounding rather interested in the idea of nuking Arabs. If the United States does it, Israel won’t have to.

We can only hope that Bush, Powell, and the rest of the top echelon of the government — which may or may not include Congress these days — will come to their senses before they decide to strike Iraq. U.S. support for Israel has already cost us far too much, and it may yet cost us far more. Ariel Sharon leaves no excuse for blindness about what we are dealing with.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

However, only the Arabs compensated the Jews for their properties, NOT the Israelis, the Arabs.

That's just so much nonsense! What planet are you on?

TIME EUROPE
August 14, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 7

http://www.time.com/time/europe/
magazine/2000/0814/refugees.html

The Other Side of the Refugee Coin
Jews driven from their homes in Arab countries gain hope of compensation
By MATTHEW REES Jerusalem

The last time Munira Mussafe saw her elegant house on the banks of the Tigris, it was through her tears. She and her family had to flee Iraq in 1951, leaving a spice warehouse burned out in anti-Jewish riots, a safe full of banknotes and jewels, and dozens of expensive, handmade Persian carpets. From prosperity in Baghdad, Mussafe and husband Salim brought their six children to a life of miserable poverty in the new state of Israel. Every day, Mussafe lamented the riches she left behind, even as Salim struggled to run a small dairy farm in the coastal town of Herzliya. Her daughter Judith, who fought decades of depression over the decline in her parents' status, hanged herself in 1988. Mussafe, 78, knows she can never recover the house or her daughter, but she believes new moves in the peace process with the Palestinians may help her win back the $2 million in cash and assets she left behind. "It's coming to me, just like it's coming to the Palestinians," she says. "Every refugee should be compensated."

Mussafe has a powerful ally in President Bill Clinton. In an interview with Israeli television, Clinton said the failed Camp David summit, which ended two weeks ago, at least brought good news for the more than 580,000 Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries. Palestinian negotiators agreed that these Jewish refugees should be compensated for the property they left behind or were forced to give up, he said. The President's comments reopened a little-noted but highly nettlesome area of dispute between Israel and the Palestinians which is sure to take on even greater urgency as the two sides move toward a final settlement. As the Palestinians negotiate for billions of dollars in compensation for their refugees, Israel will press for billions more to be paid to the Jews from Arab countries, probably by the kind of international fund suggested in Clinton's remarks. If the compensation is forthcoming, it could help the Israeli government sell an entire peace deal to voters of Middle Eastern and North African origin, who are a slight majority among Israelis. They're also largely right-wing and usually suspicious of prospective agreements with Arabs. "It will be very important," says Justice Minister Yossi Beilin. "It could help people accept the agreement. It would be something tangible."

Jews all over the Arab world faced persecution, fear and anti-Semitic attacks after the establishment of Israel in 1948. Communities that were 2,000 years old packed up en masse in the following few years and moved to Israel. Some of the expulsions were accompanied by government seizures of property, from the Iraqi regime in 1951 to Muammar Gaddafi's Libya in 1972. The Jews left behind them small goldsmiths stores on the Street Called Straight in Damascus and rich Italianate villas in Alexandria. According to Mordechai Ben-Porat, a former parliamentarian who, as a Mossad agent, helped bring refugees out of Iraq, the value today of the property abandoned or confiscated would be about $15 billion. That would dwarf the $1.25 billion compensation pledged by Swiss banks to Holocaust victims. Unlike the Palestinian refugees who were often kept in poverty by their Arab hosts and in some cases denied the right to find jobs outside their squalid camps, Jews from Arab countries were given citizenship in their new land. Still, these Jews, known as Mizrahis from the Hebrew word for east, faced discrimination from the European élite in Israel and lived in rough camps of tents and tin shacks. The towns that grew around those camps remain Israel's poorest neighborhoods. "We struggled to convince the world that there is another side to the refugee coin in this region," says Oved Ben-Ozair, chairman of the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries, a group based in Tel Aviv. "With Clinton's statement, we succeeded."

The Palestinians argue it's the other side of a completely different coin and that most of the Jews came to Israel out of Zionist conviction, rather than as true refugees. Adel Dajani left his father's home in West Jerusalem's German Colony in 1948 when he was 17, fleeing the battle that raged then for the city. Now a retired banker who lives in Amman, Jordan, Dajani recently took his wife and daughter to the ornate sandstone house on a leafy street renamed Zvi Graetz, after a nineteenth century biblical scholar. The Israeli woman who lives there today had herself fled from Iraq. Briefly, she let Dajani inside. "I was taken by the shivers," he says. Despite the efforts of Yasser Arafat's negotiators, Dajani expects to receive little compensation for the 16 houses his family left in Jerusalem, and he believes the Jews who fled Arab lands should get nothing either. "A lot of them left of their own free will, not under the gun like us." Palestinian officials at the peace talks agreed to the idea of compensation for the Mizrahi Jews only on condition, they say, that the money comes out of an international fund. They fear Israel will try to cancel out at least some of what it owes the Palestinian refugees by netting it against payments due their Jewish counterparts. They are suspicious, too, that Israel will cite the estimated $11 billion it spent over four decades integrating the Jewish refugees to further cut the cash it will hand over to the Palestinians.

Many of the Mizrahi Jews harbor the same suspicion. They believe they may never see their compensation and that the Israeli government only floated the idea to trim its potential obligations to the Palestinians. "It's an elegant stunt by the Israeli government," says Yehouda Shenhav, a Tel Aviv University professor. They'd better hope Clinton isn't in on the trick.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.