JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

The United States in vetoing this resolution abuses shamefully its power on the Security Council.

The rightness and the decency of this resolution are apparent to everyone except the same Israelis who do business with the likes of Mubarak or apartheid South Africa.

Also blind to its rightness and decency are the apologists for Israel who fill our media with a biased point of view on everything concerning the Middle East and who keep the American Congress sheepishly following Israel’s narrow and most selfish interests through the corrupt American system of political finance and campaign contributions.

Please ask yourself, what is Israel’s purpose in opposing such reasonable demands?

There is only one: Israel wants all of the Palestinian land and wants it without Palestinians.

There is a slow-motion process of ethnic-cleansing which has been going on before our eyes since the end of the 1967 war.

The occupation serves only to make Palestinians miserable so they want to leave.

Israel stands in contempt of dozens of past resolutions, and it treats the United Nations with contempt always and everywhere.

Indeed, America has gone to war in other places citing such reasons, yet here everything is just fine.

Yet our governments say nothing, our press says nothing, and indeed America’s government acts like this for fear of its political weakness in 2012.

Where is the justice, where is the humanity, where is the acceptance of democratic principles in any of this?

There is none.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Obama’s speech was an extraordinarily sensitive one. Americans and others are used to hearing only clap-trap on this topic.

He actually said something, and what he said is correct.

But I have to say where is any evidence that sensitivity or truth carry any weight in American politics? And that is especially true in all matters touching on the Middle East.

America’s Right Wing has already attacked Obama’s words, as has the mob of professional apologists for Israel’s bloody excesses.

But even the great mass of Americans who take little interest in world affairs and know only the mantra lines the mainline press repeats endlessly.

Doing anything that at all conflicts with those lines earns you some hard looks.

Israel’s supporters in America will use this to their benefit to prevent a genuine settlement in the Middle East, something we have every reason to believe Israel does not want.

After all, the constant, go-nowhere “peace process” serves simply to gain the decades of time for much of the rest of Palestine to be absorbed without its unwanted residents, for D-9 bulldozers to continue flattening homes and olive groves centuries old on the most specious of excuses.

Israel just ignores all agreements and documentation going into its modern re-creation from the Sykes-Picot Agreement to the Balfour Declaration and the UN maps for partition. All of them saw two states, somewhat equal in extent.

Ignored too are the UN Resolutions concerning the aftermath of the Six Day War.

Indeed, there is every reason to believe Israel engineered the Six Day War knowing full well it could handily win and make a great new land grab. We have the testimony of important historical figures on this matter, including President de Gaulle.

It was the same kind of dark-ops project as so many others, including the vicious attack on the USS Liberty in an effort to drag the U.S. into that war. The U.S. kept a massive silence over the attack on one of its ships, allowing the feeble excuse of a mistake to stand, a ridiculous claim in view of the facts the ship was extremely well marked and the attack lasted two hours.

Just as Israel’s illicit nuclear arsenal is ignored regularly in all the noise about North Korea or Iran. Ignored too was Israel’s help in proliferation by helping apartheid South Africa to briefly become a nuclear power.

The most damaging spy in American history, Jonathon Pollard, remains in prison, but there is a constant flow of intense pressure to release him.

Israeli spies were on to the perpetrators of 9/11, but the several spy groups – a phony moving company and a bunch of “art students” – were arrested afterward and sent home with no public statements about what it was that they had been doing.

If all these many events have not altered American public opinion and Israel’s place of unwarranted privilege in Washington, how will Obama ever succeeed?

I find it difficult to believe that Obama can turn around the momentum that has continued decade after decade, a momentum of slow-motion ethnic-cleansing in Palestine and America’s subsidizing the state doing it.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

Netanyahu isn’t determined to go slowly, he is completely against a Palestinian state.

He has made this clear many, many times.

Indeed, from Netanyahu’s past statements, it seems very clear he has contempt for Palestinians, an attitude not uncommon in Israel.

If you want peace, you embrace it. Full stop.

If you want what Netanyahu wants, you behave as he does.

What does he want?

The rest of the Palestinian territory without the people.

Going slowly in this way is properly called slow-motion ethnic cleansing.

___________

“What you have in the Holy Land is a clash of ethnic nationalisms infused with religious ideas.”

I do not think that is accurate.

The Jews – at least the non-European ones – and the Palestinians are closely related people, indeed it is an Israeli scholar who recently told us that the Palestinians are pretty much the remains of the ancient Israelis left after the Roman conquest.

As far as religion, Israel is one of the most secular societies on earth. Only the ultra-orthodox segment gives it any religious color.

___________

“There will be peace when your friends in the Arab and Muslim world agree to recognize Israel’s right to exist.”

The writer above may be sincere in believing that, but Israel is completely disingenuous when it repeats this tired bromide over and over.

One of the few negotiating levers Palestinians have ever had is withholding recognition. Israel otherwise holds about all the power levers.

Any person who reads the world’s news should know the artificiality of that notion.

It is common practice among states to withhold recognition as a negotiating position. The United States has done it many, many times.

The US waited decades to recognize the Soviet Union.

It has gone the best part of half a century without recognizing Cuba’s government.

Further, how do you recognize a state with no clearly defined borders?

One, moreover, intent on expanding its de facto borders?

Further still, the formulation Israel always insists on is recognizing Israel as the Jewish state. What about the million and a half Arabs who supposedly hold citizenship?

Asking people to certify you as a Jewish state is exactly akin to asking people to certify you as a Muslim state or any other “ism” you care to name.

The above points make clear just how complex the Israeli/Palestinian matter is, and there are many other matters of international law involved.

It is anything but a simple fight between religions.

_____________

“…the two state concept is as much a contributor to peace as was the splitting on Korea into north and south…”

That is wrong and poorly informed.

The entire history of the creation of the state of Israel, going back to agreements with the British government through the UN mandate, assumed and mapped out two states.

It is only since Israel became a reality that the two-state concept has virtually disappeared.

The Six Day War itself, and we have the testimony of some very important historical figures including President de Gaulle, that Israel contrived with deliberate provocations and black-ops to get the Arab states to attack, knowing full well that with its serious advantage of front-line US weapons it would easily win.

Israel knew it could count on the US too. Indeed, with the USS Liberty incident – the deliberate two hour attack on a well-marked American spy ship in the Mediterranean – Israel tried to pull the US in from the beginning.

We see the result. More than forty years later, occupation continues along with a constant bureaucratic pressure to remove Arabs, take land, bulldoze homes and olive groves.