Friday, September 30, 2011

Mythbusting Israel 101

 

So I'll cut to the chase. These are the biggest myths about the apartheid state of Modern Israel and what you can do to disarm those myths...


Myth #1: Israel Grew Out Of A Glorious And Noble Struggle of David Versus Goliath

Israel's claim is that in a roughly 20-year armed struggle they defeated the British Empire and sent the Arabs packing in a noble war against persecution.

Truth:
  • From the late thirties onward, Jewish people fleeing Nazi genocide flooded into what was the British Mandate of Palestine. Through the Irgun terrorist organisation they resorted to massacring BOTH the British troops in Palestine who had fought to free them from 1939-45 and the native Arab population
  • At the Deir Yassin Massacre up to 600 Palestinian men, women and children were murdered in a single village in a single day.
  • At the King David Hotel bombing of 1946 the Irgun committed the single largest terorist atrocity the world had ever seen, an event condemned by the New York Post and every other western media outlet and government in existence. 
  • Cinemas, police stations, wedding parties, post offices, and schools were attacked by a hidden enemy who refused to fight in the open unless with massive advantage against an unarmed population. 
  • Add to that the bombing of the British Embassy in Rome and the parcel bombs sent to British personnel at home in England long after they had left their posts in Palestine.

Myth #2: Tens of Thousands of Hamas Rockets Have Caused Annihilation and Destruction In Israel

  • Just as many EU and other western governments still refuse to label Hezbollah a "terrorist organisation" (it's part of the government in Lebanon and is a legitimate, democratic party), so there is virtually no substantial support for claims of "tens of thousands of rockets" falling on Israel. 
  • Israeli death toll from this hail of rockets? Less than 10 Israelis in four years. 
  • Meanwhile, the number of Palestinians and Lebanese have died in the same period? Over 1,600 men, women and children along with the wholesale destruction of Red Cross hospitals, the killing of over 20 UN staff, the shelling of residential streets by Israel. And the deliberate policy of preventing the Red Cross from reaching victims in Gaza - The official statement of the Red Cross itself, not of any Palestinian organisation.
  • The "rockets" falling on Israel are landing in the desert, are mostly duds and do not constitute a serious threat to Israeli security.
  • Just as no one checks the source of the claim "Iran has funded Hamas to the tune of $200mm", so it is that few western journalists have bothered to challenge Israeli Defense Force claims of "tens of thousands of rockets" beyond a few pointless photos of shrapnel that hardly amounts to a mound.

Myth #3: Israel is an economic miracle, a nation of unparalleled financial genius

Truth:
  • Israel's burst of economic success in the 1980s was based on outsourcing from the US tech industry in contracts designed to reward Israel for being a CIA partner.
  • Israeli claims to be at the centre of technological brilliance are further propaganda nonsense; Israeli tech firms are merely expanding on European and American breakthroughs. 
  • When the UK government recently refused to export optical equipment to Israel (out of fear of its military use) the Israeli government almost choked in apoplexy. That isn't a definition of a technological leader.
  • Israeli propagandists will tell you that Israel invented everything from the wheel to sliced bread. It didn't. 
  • There is virtually nothing Israel owns that we in the west can't make ourselves or buy elsewhere. 
  • Israel is heavily reliant on exports to the tune of over three times the average of industrialised nations. In other words, if people abroad decide to boycott Israeli goods, the Israeli economy will fall apart. Bringing me to my next point...

Myth #4: Israel Can Survive an Economic Boycott.

Truth:
  • At this very moment, agricultural produce is sitting in shops from London to New York marked "Palestine" or "West Bank". These goods are virtually always in direct contravention of international law: they have mostly been produced on land stolen by Israeli settlers.
  • Both Tesco and Sainsbury's have finally agreed to stop stocking goods produced on occupied lands in the West Bank - a massive blow to the settler economy.
  • The "settlers" continue to walk onto Palestinian farmland in the Palestinian zone and violently remove families who have farmed the land for a thousand years. They hack down the centuries old olive trees nurtured to provide a mean living, they shoot those who refuse to go, and then call in the army to "protect" Jewish settlers. 
  • Go to YouTube and type "Jewish settler violence" and see for yourself.
  • When South Africa was boycotted by the west it brought substantial economic and political strain on the white Apartheid regime to such an extent that political change was the only option. 
  • Israel, as a nation dependent on trade to survive, is already feeling the pinch.
  • Our governments may ignore our intentions, but they cannot break international law and they cannot tell us where to buy our food from. YOU can change this, just as we helped bring down the racists in South Africa.

Educate yourself here: http://www.bigcampaign.org/ Tell everyone you know about it; email it to your entire contacts list and get your family on the move. If you buy goods from the Israeli economy you are directly contributing to the purchase of guns and bullets which kill Palestinian civilians, it is that simple.

Want to know how successful it's been so far? Try this: the Israeli government recently enacted a law making it a criminal offense for a citizen of Israel to boycott settler goods! Guess who did exactly that? Yes - the Apartheid Regime in South Africa. Think about it, if you exercise your political right to campaign against settler theft in Israel you can be sent to prison! Does that sound like a government which isn't afraid of the boycott?

Major Israeli firms operating in the west are now losing huge contracts granted to them under false pretenses. Go to the website, sign up, join in changing the world and believe in your small action...a thousand small ripples create a tidal wave. Stand up, be counted. If our governments won't sanction genocide then we will do it for them and stop buying Israel's goods. Then we'll see how long the killing goes on.

Myth #5: All Jews Support Israel.

Friends, watch this video below of the astounding Dr Norman Finkelstein and you will not regret it:


  • Jewish people are at the heart of global civil rights movements and have always been part of man's struggle for justice for the underdog. Don't kid yourself it's been any other way.
  • The most vehement and outraged support for Palestinian liberty is today coming from Jewish academics, Jewish human rights organisations, and Jewish citizens who have had enough of their name being used to kill innocent people. 
  • From Primo Levi to Finkelstein to the founders of Occupation 101 to Noam Chomsky: don't be fooled that Jewish people have some blanket support for a failed state that most of them have never been to nor never will. 

Myth #5: To Condmen Israel Is To Be An Anti-Semite.


  • Modern Israel is not Judaism, Judaism is not modern Israel. 
  • Go check these amazing guys out: http://www.nkusa.org/ - Neturei Karta is part of a far larger Hassidic Jewish movement comprising millions of religious Jews who condemn Zionism as an evil, in direct contravention of the Jewish faith. 
  • Orthodox Jews in Israel are now being attacked by the Israeli forces and recently a video was shown on Israeli news outlets of these righteous Jews being stabbed for protesting about Palestine. 
  • See the video at the very top of this page.


Myth #6; A Good Jewish Person Must Support Israel

The myth here is simple: we've suffered so much that if you as a Jew fail to support Israel you're stabbing your people in the back. Well, to quote Bobby Kennedy:
                      "Dissent is often the greatest form of patriotism".

  • Again, check the Neturei Karta link above and YouTube that organisation to hear what ultra-Orthodox Jews think of the state calling itself "Israel".
  • Ultra-religious Judaism, and the Torah itself, condemns the creation of a modern "Israel" which appears through violence. 
  • Even the use of the name "Israel" by Zionist Israelis causes intense anger among religious Jews. Israel can only appear by God's blessing.
  • A good Jew is no different to a good Christian or a good Muslim or even a good atheist: he or she supports justice, peace, integrity, and compassion. That is both universal moral law and the wisdom of the Abrahamic faiths


Myth #7: Israel Can Withstand Another pan-Arab Uprising

Let's get this clear from the start, the Arab-Israeli conflicts of the 1960s were fought with American tax payers' dollars.

  • Israel would have been defeated by a collective Arab uprising 40 years ago but for the constant interference by the United States government. 
  • It's easy to destroy Egyptian warplanes on the ground when the US government supplies you the intelligence and the arms to do so.
  • Just read this excellent post by a JEWISH peace organisation on this topic: http://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/content/us-military-aid-and-israel

Myth #8: There Won't Be Another pan-Arab Conflict against Israel

When the Iranian Navy was recently permitted by Egypt (post-Mubarak) to sail two ships into the Mediterranean sea through the Suez Canal for the first time in
decades it became apparent the world has changed.

  • Iran has invited an attack from the US and Israel. It has openly laughed at the idea of being attacked. Why?
  • Here's why: Both North Korea and Syria have already made it very clear that any further military intervention in the Syria-Iran zone would lead to war. Nuclear war. 
  • In Operation Orchard (have you ever heard of it?), the North Korean team building Syria's nuclear facilities was killed in its entirety by Israel. It was a direct military attack on a sovereign power which received no condemnation from the west even given that Israel has been armed to the teeth with nukes for over two decades.
  • The Arab world has finally found its courage and integrity; after a century of foreign exploitation, both Arabs and Iranians have had enough. 
  • Palestine matters to the Arab world and it always has. It matters intensely to Iran but for quite different reasons. Yet it matters to Iran, a non-Arab nation because Iran itself suffered from a century of US and British corruption in Persia's national life.
  • A Last Arab-Israeli War would drag Iran into the field for the first time, along with the unlikely aid of North Korea. China would not stand idly by and watch North Korea attacked by US retaliation. 
  • Russia cannot afford to lose Syrian and Iranian oil...so the whole thing will, frankly, put Israel off the map. Netanyahu and the IDF know it and they have said it publicly.
  • The US can't afford any more wars.


And fiiiiinally....

Myth #9: We Need Israel in the War With Islamic Terror.

The pointless "war" with an unknown enemy that Fox News calls "fundamentalist Islam" is not a war that had anything to do with us until we ripped a hole in the life of the Arabic and Iranian world in order to steal their oil. This is a conflict invented by extremists in the tiny Islamic extremist zone and within the US State Department dominated by neo-conservatives obsessed with Israel.

  • Al Qaeda and the Islamic regime in Iran (a truly nasty collection of men, I'd add) made it quite clear from the beginning that if the west did not bring peace and freedom to Palestine they would attack us.
  • Israel has had a finger in every coup and intervention in the region for 70 years through Mossad, its murderous intelligence service.
  • Israel continues to not only exaggerate the non-existent "divide" between East and West but to actively seek a position where our security and intelligence communities feed into a conflict whereby Israel becomes a lynchpin justifying America's billions of dollars in aid to that nation.
  • Over 4 million Arabs and Iranians have now died in the last 60 years of western colonialism in their lands. A few thousand westerners have died in a terrorist wave which shows no sign of having the slightest impact on western policy. 
  • Islamic terrorism is statistically one of the most irrelevant armed conflicts occuring in the world today- the drug wars in Latin America alone have killed more people than the supposed "Axis of Evil" has.
  • Just as the Irish resorted to armed conflict to remove British rule, so the Palestinians have resorted to the deplorable acts of violence as the only effective form of self-defense they have left. By all means call it "terror" if you wish, but don't be fooled that Israel has done any better or that the IDF won't slaughter again.

As Bobby Kennedy once said to his eleven children after a week of campaigning for the US presidency; "There are people suffering in this world. DO something!"

Pax vobiscum.

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