Volume CXXXIII, Number 4 October 3, 2003 f

Anything but the "crux"
GILMAN BARNDOLLAR
CONTRIBUTOR

I usually can't help but laugh when I read an article by Bowdoin's own Israeli Information Minister, Yaron Eisenberg, in the Orient. I may not be the most unbiased person in the world, but even I find it funny when I see unabashed propaganda in our school paper.

Take last spring, for example, when he wrote that the Israeli Defense Forces (as their own website states!) are not waging a war against any race or creed,but are taking the greatest care to root out terrorists while not harming Palestinian civilians.

Never mind that these impartial defenders of Israel have begun "the systematic conversion of non-Jewish immigrant soldiers from the former Soviet Union," as the Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported six months ago. Overlook the fact that over a quarter of all Palestinian deaths in a given six month period are children and that the largest single cause of death is "gunfire to the head." Perhaps most importantly, try to ignore that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is an all but indicted war criminal. As defense minister in 1982, he ordered the "impartial" IDF to let the brutal Lebanese Phalangist militia into the Sabra and Shatilla Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. In an orgy of rape, torture, and murder, between 800 and 2,000 unarmed refugees were slaughtered,while the IDF locked the gates and watched from observation towers. Nonetheless, I'm sure that, as we were told in the Orient in April, "The IDF's primary concern is to protect its own citizens (Jews and Arabs)."

Last week's latest round of disinformation really strained credulity, however. "The crux of the problem in the Middle East," we were told, "neither begins with the Palestinian-Israeli issue, nor ends with the solution to that problem."

"Israel and its place in the Middle East is a complex and multi-layered matrix," whatever the hell that means. Anti-Semitism, it seems, is the real problem.

I'll give you the real "crux of the problem in the Middle East:" reality. Our propagandist tells us that there must be "a general acceptance-a genuine and sincere acceptanc-of Israel existing as a Jewish, democratic state."

There's your problem right there. "A Jewish, democratic state." Israel is the former, but it can hardly be termed the latter. There are three and a half million Palestinian Muslims and Christians in the occupied territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank who lack the most basic of human rights, let alone civil rights. Israel is an apartheid state, just as surely as South Africa ever was.

As Baruch Kimmerling, professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote a year ago, "Israel has ceased to be a democratic state and has become a Herrenvolk democracy-a regime in which citizens enjoy full rights and non-citizens have none. The laws of Israel have become the laws of a master people and Israeli morality the morality of lords of the land."

"Herrenvolk," it warrants mentioning, was a Nazi term for the master race. They were to be the rulers of the Untermensch: the Slav, the gypsy, the Jew.

The demographic reality is what scares Israel the most. All estimates agree that by 2020, the combined Palestinians in the occupied territories and Israel itself will outnumber the Jews. The Arabs living in Israel alone will comprise a third of its population. Israel will have three options: creating a true, independent Palestinian state, accepting Palestinians into a multi-ethnic Israeli democracy, which would be the death knell for the idea of a Jewish state, or enacting the forcible "transfer" (sounds a little nicer than ethnic cleansing, doesn't it?) of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Israel will face a final choice between being a democratic nation or a Jewish one.

No one will deny that the Arab media often features the most grotesque, Naziesque anti-Semitism. The old blood libel of Purim is as prominent in the Middle East today as it once was in medieval Europe. Muslim clerics, from Shiite Iran to Sunni Saudi Arabia, issue calls for jihad against the Jewish state.

Yet this is only a symptom of the real problems in the Middle East. From Saladin to the Ottoman Empire, Islam was always far more tolerant of Judaism than Christianity ever was. Arab anti-Semitism of the last 50 to 100 years must be viewed in the context of the sudden and artificial creation of a Jewish state on Palestinian land. This is not to excuse the vicious bigotry of some Arabs. But a Qatari cartoonist and a long-dead Grand Mufti of Jerusalem are not the problem. It is the Palestinians who are doing the dying and the killing. To pretend that their problem is not the fundamental one in the Middle East is the height of either foolishness or self-deception.

since 11/01/02 FastCounter by bCentral