John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

I find this no surprise at all, although in any important matter, it’s nice to have confirmation.

Israel has had slow-motion ethnic cleansing going on for years.

And someone as important as former House Majority Leader, Dick Armey – a long time recipient of pro-Israel money and a rather crass man in general – said a few years back it would be fine with him if Israel just removed all Palestinians.

Israel, I believe, faces its collapse in not many years, and the collapse will come because this utterly failed enterprise resembles in many of its characteristics the old Soviet Union.

It builds walls, it limits who can come and go, its military is a Frankenstein for the size of the place, its security forces are the equivalent in every way of the KBG or Stasi, it holds millions against their will, it steals private property regularly, it has more than one class of citizen, its economy is terrible and it only keeps up appearances by huge subsidies from outside, it claims to be a democracy but behaves as anything but one, it is a place seething with hatreds and discontent, and many of its acts break all international law and convention.

Founding the new Israel was a great historical mistake, especially founding it on someone else’s property, a sure way to create endless conflict.

Moreover this modern effort at reconstruction of Israel is by a people with almost no connection to the Middle East other than sentimental associations through religion. The Ashkenazi people are a European people largely, indeed, a Germanic people.

The whole thing has become pretty much a disaster for human rights and rule of law, much as the Soviet Union.

COMMENT ON A PIECE BY DANIEL HALPER IN THE WEEKLY STANDARD

John Chuckman

 

It really does not get more uninformed and deliberately provocative than “U.S. Threatens Sanctions Against Israel, Makes Excuses for Iran.”

This stuff reads like an official news release from the old Politburo.

There is no need for excuses for Iran. It has done absolutely nothing requiring excuses.

It hasn’t attacked anyone in its modern history, is a member of the international treaty on nuclear weapons permitting inspections, and every intelligence service, including Israel’s, knows it has not been trying to build a bomb.

The genuine madman running Israel, on the other hand, has yelled for years that Iran is building a bomb, going against his own intelligence service. The madman just won re-election by promising no state for the Palestinians, so presumably five million people will be kept without any rights or votes forever? Or perhaps expelled in a future massive ethnic cleansing?

Without outside pressure on Israel, clearly nothing will happen to correct this shameful, longstanding, and potentially deadly situation.

Israel, in contrast to Iran, has attacked every neighbor that it has, some more than once. The madman himself killed 2,200 people only recently in a senselessly brutal assault. The madman’s yelling about Iran is about nothing other than wanting complete dominance of the region and as a distraction against the very bad economic conditions in Israel for ordinary people and against the tremendous tensions he has created in Jerusalem with his regular theft of property and mistreatment of ancient residents.

Israel, again in contrast to Iran, does not belong to the international nuclear arms treaty and does not allow inspections of nuclear facilities, and it does have a stockpile of thermonuclear bombs. Moreover, it participated in a deadly serious secret proliferation of nuclear arms with the former apartheid South Africa, then a good friend and trading partner.

Does it feel good to go to bed each night knowing you’re making every effort as a writer to promote war with a peaceful country, Iran, and continued mass slavery in Israel?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

 

It cannot come too soon.

Abbas is a pathetic figure, representing a Palestinian version what in the United States used to be called a Step’n Fetchit, indeed there was a minor black comic actor who went by that name in early American films.

He has never served his people well, not through any bad intent on his part, but through a complete lack of the skills needed for his position.

It has at times been genuinely embarrassing watching him quietly swallow the garbage Israel regularly pitches in public, claiming it is working on the “peace process” while stealing more of other people’s land almost daily.

But, of course, one must also take account of the long line of assassinations of Palestinian leaders by Israel, including quite likely Arafat, who was probably poisoned in the same secretive way as an early attempt on Sheikh Yassin before he was finally blown up in his wheelchair by a Hellfire missile.

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stpnlll,

I applaud your sentiments, but they are just that sentiments, and sentiments have no role in the ugly game of power politics being played by Israel.

Israel has made it abundantly clear that it will never accept this outcome. Many prominent Israelis are on record as saying not only is a one-state solution unacceptable but also a two-state solution whether federated or not.

The continuous march of settlements and slow-motion ethnic-cleansing taking place in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem is in keeping with long-held beliefs by Israeli leaders that all of the parts of Israel from 2,500 years ago must be Jewish, and that certainly includes the West Bank.

As long ago as the Camp David talks with President Carter, Begin, an old Irgun terrorist, kept telling Carter that Israel must have Judea and Sumaria, ancient names for areas where millions of Arabs live.

That idea is such a fixation for many Israelis that indeed there can never be meaningful peace without U.S. intercession against it.

And what are the prospects for that?