John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

I’m glad the Independent’s headline put “anti-Semitic” in quotes.

I think The Guardian would not have.

What I saw quoted from Labour MP, Naz Shah, from Facebook could only be called anti-Semitic by extremists of the Israel Lobby.

Critical, yes. Anti-Semitic, no.

____________________________

 A reader comment:  “There has never , ever , in history been a “Palestinian state ” . Israel wasnt “recognised” is was created by United Nations decree in a free vote.

“You clearly dont know what you are talking about.”

 

I know very well the history of Israel’s “creation,” and it is a pretty sordid story, full of deception, pressure, terror, and unfulfilled promises.

As just one example, Israel accepted the Right of Return, a UN principle, when it was given membership and has always ignored it, just as it has ignored more than twenty UN Resolutions condemning its acts for decades.

Israel is simply a lawless state by any definition.

And today’s re-created state got its start by wheedling a British official, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour in 1917, during the Great War to make a rather vague promise in a brief note to Britain’s Zionist Federation. This was later elevated into a “founding document” for Israel.

And later, in 1948, as the people who were to become Israelis were busy shooting up and terrifying the native Palestinians, Israel’s lobbyists abroad won crucial American recognition from President Truman by intense lobbying and the promise of substantial support in the form of media and cash for his election campaign. Truman was in serious political trouble in the 1948 election and grabbed the offer of help much as a drowning man grabs a life preserver thrown to him. Yet he believed sincerely that recognizing Israel was a bad idea, and he left us some sharp comments on the whole matter.

Imagine the pride you could feel in a state based on a vague promise from an imperial power which itself had no business being in Palestine and which had even less business making the suggestion of offering it to a third party as though it were a load of used furniture?

But Israel hides behind the skirts of the United States to carry on safely with its lawlessness. And it keeps that position behind the skirts with a powerful American Lobby which takes full advantage of America’s ill-considered campaign finance laws, allowing money to run elections. What Truman started continues to this day.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN ASSOCIATED PRESS STORY

“Major escalation“?

Talk about bias in reporting!

This is it, big time.

Israel has pounded Gaza for three days, and it has killed 28 people at last count.

It also ruthlessly assassinated a leader of the government, and did so right as he was negotiating a long-term ceasefire with them.

Netanyahu is simply a madman for whom the lives of Palestinians mean nothing.

All of this savagery by Israel is really for two purposes, neither of which is ethical or honorable.

One, Netanyahu faces election, and he uses the blood of the people of Gaza to fire up support.

Two, Netanyahu clearly is getting ready to steal more land from the Palestinians by annexation. This kind of activity acts a screen and preparation.

Israel’s behavior is completely unacceptable to all fair-minded people.

Please understand, those who know no history, Gaza is essentially a giant refugee camp dating to the 1948 days when Israel’s army and terror squads – the Irgun and Stern and Lehi – fanned out through Palestine to murder many people, hoping to frighten them away.

It is densely populated, and its population is about half children. Every Israeli Prime Minister has hoped to put end to its existence one way or another.

No one but a madman or psychopath would bomb such a place.

Remember too, the last time Israel invaded, it killed 400 children plus about 1400 others.

Ever since that atrocity it has kept a blockade to prevent normal life, and it has murdered unarmed people on the high seas to enforce its bully behavior.

At first, it even calculated what starvation calories would be and only allowed enough food to enter to just barely prevent starvation, not even chocolate bars were let in, nor were the building materials needed to repair the damage from Israel’s ruthless bombing.

After quiet diplomacy from outside, there has been a slight let-up in calories.

Just ask yourself what you would do if treated in this way? I know what most gun-owning Americans would feel like doing against repression, savagery, and abuse.

What are the poor people of Gaza to do? Just all leave? If so, for where? Or are they to lie down and just accept virtual slavery from Israel?

Meanwhile, Israel steals the homes and farms of others week after week in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

American politicians, cowards all, say nothing for fear of being smeared and losing valuable campaign contributions from the Israel Lobby.

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

A truly uninformative and self-serving article, as it was intended to be – that is, after all the nature of propaganda. It deals with none of the genuine issues, only with Israel’s demands.

You can never make progress with any problem by pretending its reality is only what exists in your mind, and that is precisely what this ridiculous article does. The reality includes the perceptions and feelings of all the parties affected.

Negotiations are about different views compromising, but Israel compromises on nothing. It just makes demands and preconditions, endlessly while it continues to take what it wants to take.

The article begs a gigantic question: how does one – anyone – recognize a “Jewish state”?

Apart from the fact that such an entity is no different in concept to a Muslim state or a Hindu state or a Christian state – all of which are formulations Western minds reject as backward and unhelpful to progress.

Israel – in addition to the more than four million who live under seemingly endless occupation and abuse in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank – has about a million non-Jews who technically are citizens, Israeli passport holders.

It wasn’t that Israel wanted them, far from it: they were the Palestinians who refused to run from the waves of terror in 1948 when Irgun, the Stern Gang, the Lehi, and the rag-tag Israeli army of that day worked to terrorize and kill Arabs, chasing them off the land their families owned for centuries.

What happens to that million – who already under Israeli law are treated in many ways as second-class citizens – if Israel is formally recognized as “the Jewish state”?

I think we can all guess, something pretty unpleasant. Just listen to the words of Israel’s Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, a nasty piece of work who indeed is rather moderate compared to the extremists who burn down homes, destroy orchards, and deface mosques.

And what are the borders of “the Jewish state”? Israel has changed its borders continuously since 1948. How do you recognize a state with no borders? Isn’t that one of the main points of negotiation, to settle borders?

Indeed, while Israel’s leaders never openly talk to the Western press about the matter, Israel has pursued a constant policy of expansion and ethnic-cleansing, its only mercy being that it is done in slow motion so that there is never too much trouble at any one time.

Israel’s aims come hidden under the obscure references to Eretz Israel and Judea and Samaria – terms not ten percent of Western readers understand. They are the words which cover Israel’s expectation of eventually seizing all the land of the Palestinians and even other bits like Southern Lebanon, and they are the words which ipso facto mean endless hostilities.

The entire 1967 war was engineered by Israel to achieve the occupation – and gradual theft of property and expulsion of people – we see now.

Since 1948 and especially since 1967, Israel has broken every international law and convention we have, including those of the UN and Geneva Conventions.

If you have no respect for the laws and rights of others, how can you ever expect others to respect your laws and rights? It’s simply insane to believe otherwise. We have here a lawless state, lawless in all its external relations, demanding that others respect not just its laws, but its every wish.

Israel steals whatever it desires and it pretty much kills any opponent it doesn’t like.

Israel has utter contempt for all of its neighbors, as it has shown on countless occasions.

Israel attacks everyone who does not accept its self-proclaimed truths.

Yet it is somehow Palestinians who prevent their own statehood by denying “the Jewish state”? If ever there was a case of an illogical vicious circle this is it.

The poor Palestinians are told they must achieve statehood only by dealing with their oppressors – not by negotiating, although that word is used as a euphemism, because Israel in fact never negotiates, it only makes preconditions and demands.

Imagine blacks in apartheid South African being told they must deal only with their the apartheid government? Imagine Ukrainians or Byelorussians being told they must only deal with the Soviet Union?

It is itself a laughable demand, laughable because it is so completely irrational and arbitrary.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

EXPANDED VERSION OF POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MICHAEL WEISS IN THE TELEGRAPH

What a nonsense column.

First, Judge Goldstone has not retracted what he wrote, rather he has made some very qualified statements about aspects of it a long time afterward.

Even in Goldstone’s original report he went out of his way to portray the event as less of a one-sided slaughter than it in fact was, knowing full well he would be subjected to god-awful treatment afterward.

But even his qualified words come after Judge Goldstone’s life having been made a living hell by Israeli apologists with accusations, sneers, shunning, and violent threats.

Israel and its apologists are known for the intense and ugly pressure they can bring to bear on anyone who fails to follow the official script.

After all, that’s how Israel got itself recognized by the United States in the first place.

President Truman was not inclined to recognize the terrorists who declared themselves a state in 1948.

But he was given the full treatment – he was hounded by apologists and lobbyists in a way he never before experienced.

Moreover, he was running for re-election and the situation looked grim, so the last thing he needed was a howling mob chasing him around the country.

And by finally relenting and granting recognition, he got the kind of campaign contributions he badly needed.

Nothing has changed since 1948.

The truth is we do not really need a report although it is always a good thing to have documentation of terrible events.

Everyone except the howling Israeli apologists knows what happened. We saw it. We heard it. We felt the people’s misery.

And it should make no difference to Israel since Israel has never had any respect for the UN. It stands in contempt of a whole list of resolutions, and, in another of its recent atrocities, the invasion of Southern Lebanon, it deliberately targeted and killed four UN workers bravely doing their job of observation.

When Israel invaded Gaza, it shut down a giant, fenced-in refugee camp, and attacked the occupants as though they were going to war with an army. It attacked civilians with tanks and planes and modern weapons, even employing horrors like white phosphorus.

Israel killed 300 to 400 children alone (plus a thousand others), and we have testimony that Israeli soldiers used children as human shields.

The streets ran red with blood, and the pictures were on the Internet.

And for what? Israel and its apologists insisted on calling it a war, insisted it was justified because some Palestinians, frustrated beyond endurance by Israel’s ill treatment, had been shooting into Israel home-made fireworks called Qassam rockets. Thinking people knew, despite a wall of words over these toy rockets, that that was not what Israel’s atrocity was about.

Well, only the other day Ehud Olmert, prime minister at the time and surely a war criminal now, said the army didn’t do its job in Operation Cast Lead. The job was killing all the members and leaders of a cleanly elected government which Israel hates.

Some respect for democracy and human rights.

And as for the mad pack, well, nothing on earth you could say or do would ever convince them that Israel is the nasty piece of work that it truly is, a brutal garrison state with no respect for any of its neighbors or anyone else who doesn’t agree with its views and demands.

According to the pack, we are all supposed to pretend the plainly naked emperor actually is wearing clothes. We are all supposed to drop our precious and hard-won values regarding human rights and just say Israel must be right whenever it starts slaughtering people.

Cloudcuckooland, only stinking of human gore.