O Secretário-Geral das Nações Unidas (ONU), Ban Ki-Moon colaborou em
segredo com Israel e os Estados Unidos para enfraquecer os efeitos de um
relatório da Comissão de Inquérito acusando Israel de violações de direitos humanos em Gaza, em Dezembro 2008 - Janeiro 2009, de acordo com um artigo da TeleSUR (ver link), baseado em informações da Wikileaks.
"O relatório demonstrou que as Forças de Defesa de Israel (IDF) teve um
papel directo em sete dos nove ataques contra edifícios da ONU na Faixa
de Gaza, e acusou Isreal de não ter cumprido a inviolabilidade e a
imunidade das instalações da ONU." De todas as formas fica-me
uma questão em aberto. Dissesse o que dissesse a carta do Ki-moon que capeou o relatório, nenhum dos membros do Conselho de Segurança, tendo
tido conhecimento do relatório, nada disse ou fez?
THIS
TUESDAY will be the 64th anniversary of a fateful day for our lives.
A
day in November. A day to remember.
On
November 29, 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted, by 33
votes against 13 (with 10 abstentions), the Palestine Partition Plan.
This
event has become a subject of endless debates, misinterpretations and outright
falsifications. It may be worthwhile to peel away the myths and see it as it
was.
BY
THE end of 1947, there were in the country – then officially named Palestine -
about 1.2 million Arabs and 635 thousand Jews. The gap between the two
population groups had turned into an abyss. Though geographically intertwined,
they lived on two different planets. With very few exceptions, they considered
each other as mortal enemies.
This
was the reality that the UN commission, charged with proposing a solution,
found on the ground when it visited the country.
One
of the great moments of my life is connected with this UNSCOP (“United Nations
Special Committee on Palestine”). On the Carmel mountain chain, near kibbutz
Daliah, I was attending the annual folk dance festival. Folk dances played a
major role in the new Hebrew culture we were consciously striving to create.
Most of these dances were somewhat contrived, even artificial, like many of our
efforts, but they reflected the will to create something new, fresh, rooted in
the country, entirely different from the Jewish culture of our parents. Some of
us spoke about a new “Hebrew nation”.
In
a huge natural amphitheater, under a canopy of twinkling summer stars, tens of
thousands of young people, boys and girls, had gathered to cheer on the many
amateur groups performing on the stage. It was a joyous affair, imbued with
camaraderie, radiating feelings of strength and self-confidence.
No
one of us could have guessed that within a few months we would meet again in
the fields of a deadly war.
In
the middle of the performance, an excited voice announced on the loudspeaker
that several members of UNSCOP had come to visit. As one, the huge crowd stood
up and started to sing the national anthem, Hatikvah (“the Hope”). I never
liked this song very much, but at that moment it sounded like a fervent prayer,
filling the space, rebounding from the hills of the Carmel. I suppose that
almost all of the 6000 Jewish youngsters who gave their lives in the war were
assembled for the last time on that evening, singing with profound emotion.
IT
WAS in this atmosphere that the members of UNSCOP, representing many different
nations, had to find a solution.
As
everybody knows, the commission adopted a plan to partition Palestine between
an independent “Arab” and an independent “Jewish” state. But that is not the
whole story.
Looking
at the map of the 1947 partition resolution, one must wonder at the borders.
They resemble a puzzle, with Arab pieces and Jewish pieces put together in an
impossible patchwork, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem as a separate unit. The
borders look crazy. Both states would have been totally indefensible.
The
explanation is that the committee did not really envision two totally
independent and separate states. The plan explicitly included an economic
union. That would have necessitated a very close relationship between the two
political entities, something akin to a federation, with open borders and free
movement of people and goods. Without it, the borders would have been
impossible.
That
was a very optimistic scenario. Immediately after the committee’s plan was
adopted by the General Assembly, after much cajoling by the Zionist leadership,
war broke out with sporadic Arab attacks on Jewish traffic on the vital roads.
When
the first shot was fired, the partition plan was dead. The foundation, on which
the whole edifice rested, broke apart. No open borders, no economic union, no
chance for a union of any kind. Only abyssal, deadly, enmity.
THE
PARTITION plan would never have been adopted in the first place if it had not
been preceded by a historical event that seemed at the time beyond belief.
The
Soviet delegate to the UN, Andrei Gromyko, suddenly made what can only be
described as a fiery Zionist speech. He contended that after the terrible
suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust, they deserved a state of their own.
To
appreciate the utter amazement with which this speech was received, one must
remember that until that very moment, Communists and Zionists had been
irreconcilable foes. It was not only a clash of ideologies, but also a family
affair. In Tzarist Russia, Jews were persecuted by an anti-Semitic government,
and young Jews, both male and female, were in the vanguard of all the
revolutionary movements.
An
idealistic young Jew had the choice between joining the Bolsheviks, the
social-democratic Jewish Bund or the Zionists. The competition was fierce and
engendered intense mutual hatred. Later, in the Soviet Union, Zionists were
mercilessly persecuted. In Palestine, local Communists, Jewish and Arab, were
accused of collaborating with the Arab militants who attacked Jewish
neighborhoods.
What
had brought about this sudden change in Soviet policy? Stalin did not turn from
an anti-Semite into a philo-Semite. Far from it. But he was a pragmatist. It
was the era of medium-range missiles, which threatened Soviet territory from
all sides. Palestine was in practice a British colony and could easily have
become a Western missile base, threatening Odessa and beyond. Better a Jewish
and an Arab state, than that.
In
the following war, almost all my weapons came from the Soviet bloc, mainly from
Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union recognized Israel de jure long before
the United States.
The
end of this unnatural honeymoon came in the early fifties, when David
Ben-Gurion decided to turn Israel into an inseparable part of the Western bloc.
At the same time, Stalin recognized the importance of the new pan-Arab
nationalism of Gamal Abd-al-Nasser and decided to ride on that wave. His
paranoid anti-Semitism came again to the fore. All over Eastern EuropeCommunist veterans were executed as
Zionist-imperialist-Trotskyite spies, and his Jewish doctors were accused of
attempting to poison him. (Luckily for them, Stalin died just in time and they
were saved.)
TODAY,
THE partition resolution is remembered in Israel mainly because of two words:
“Jewish state”.
No
one in Israel wants to be reminded of the borders of 1947, which gave the
Jewish minority in Palestine “only” 55% of the country. (Though half of this
consisted of the Negev desert, most of which is almost empty even now.) Nor do
Jewish Israelis like to be reminded that almost half the population of the
territory allotted to them was Arab.
At
the time, the UN resolution was accepted by the Jewish population with
overflowing enthusiasm. The photos of the people dancing in the streets of Tel
Aviv belong to this day, and not – as is often falsely claimed, to the day the
State of Israel was officially founded. (At that time we were in middle of a
bloody war and nobody was in the mood for dancing.)
We
know now that Ben-Gurion did not dream of accepting the partition plan borders,
and even less the Arab population within them. The famous army “Plan Dalet”
early in the war was a strategic necessity, but it was also a solution to the
two problems: it added to Israel another 22% of the country and it drove the
Arab population out. Only a small remnant of the Arab population remained – and
by now it has grown to 1.5 million.
But
all that is history. What concerned the future are the words “Jewish state”.
Israeli rightists, who abhor the partition resolution in any other context,
insist that it provides the legal basis to Israel’s right to be recognized as a
“Jewish state” – meaning in practice, that the state belongs to all the Jews
around the world, but not to its Arab citizens, whose families have been living
here for at least 13 centuries, if not far longer (depends who does the
counting).
But
the UN used the word “Jewish” only for lack of any other definition. During the
British Mandate, the two peoples in the country were called in English “Jews”
and “Arabs”. But we ourselves spoke about a “Hebrew” State (medina Ivrit).
In newspaper clippings of the time, only this term can be seen. People of my
age-group remember dozens of demonstrations in which we invariably chanted
“Free Immigration – Hebrew State”. The sound of it still rings in our ears.
The
UN did not deal with the ideological makeup of the future states. It certainly
assumed that they would be democratic, belonging to all their inhabitants.
Otherwise they would hardly have drawn borders that left a substantial Arab
population in the “Jewish” state.
Israel’s
declaration of independence bases itself on the UN resolution. The relevant
sentence reads: “…AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF
THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, (WE) HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A
JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.”
The
ultra-rightists who now dominate the Knesset want to use these words as a
pretext for replacing democracy with a doctrine of Jewish nationalist-religious
supremacy. A former Shin-Bet chief and present Kadima party MK has submitted a
bill that would abolish the equality of the two terms “Jewish” and “democratic”
in the official legal doctrine, and state clearly that the “Jewishness” of the
state has precedence over its “democratic” character. This would deprive the
Arab citizens of any remnant of equality. (At the last moment, in face of the
public reaction, the Kadima party compelled him to withdraw the bill.)
THE
1947 partition plan was an exceptionally intelligent document. Its details are
obsolete now, but its basic idea is as relevant today as it was 64 years ago:
two nations are living in this country, they cannot live together in one state
without a continuous civil war, they can live together in two states, the two
states must establish close ties between each other.
Ben-Gurion was determined to prevent
the founding of the Arab Palestinian state, and with the help of King Abdallah
of Transjordan he succeeded in this. All his successors, with the possible
exception of Yitzhak Rabin, have followed this line, now more than ever. We
have paid – and are still paying – a heavy price for this folly.
On
the 64th anniversary of this historic event, we must go back to its
basic principle: Israel and Palestine, Two States for Two Peoples.
THIS IS a story right out of "1001 Nights". The genie escaped from the bottle, and no power on earth can put it back.
When it happened in Tunisia, it could have been said: OK, an Arab country, but a minor one. It was always a bit more progressive than the others. Just an isolated incident.
And then it happened in Egypt. A pivotal country. The heart of the Arab world. The spiritual center of Sunni Islam. But it could have been said: Egypt is a special case. The land of the Pharaohs. Thousands of years of history before the Arabs even got there.
But now it has spread all over the Arab world. To Algeria, Bahrain, Yemen. Jordan, Libya, even Morocco. And to non-Arab, non-Sunni Iran, too.
The genie of revolution, of renewal, of rejuvenation, is now haunting all the regimes in the Region. The inhabitants of the "Villa in the Jungle" are liable to wake up one morning and discover that the jungle is gone, that we are surrounded by a new landscape.
WHEN OUR Zionist fathers decided to set up a safe haven in Palestine, they had the choice between two options:
They could appear in West Asia as European conquerors, who see themselves as a bridgehead of the "white" man and as masters of the "natives", like the Spanish conquistadores and the Anglo-Saxon colonialists in America. That is what the crusaders did in their time.
The second way was to see themselves as an Asian people returning to their homeland, the heirs to the political and cultural traditions of the Semitic world, ready to take part, with the other peoples of the region, in the war of liberation from European exploitation.
I wrote these words 64 years ago, in a brochure that appeared just two months before the outbreak of the 1948 war.
I stand by these words today.
These days I have a growing feeling that we are once again standing at a historic crossroads. The direction we choose in the coming days will determine the destiny of the State of Israel for years to come, perhaps irreversibly. If we choose the wrong road, we will have "weeping for generations", as the Hebrew saying goes.
And perhaps the greatest danger is that we make no choice at all, that we are not even aware of the need to make a decision, that we just continue on the road that has brought us to where we are today. That we are occupied with trivialities – the battle between the Minister of Defense and the departing Chief of Staff, the struggle between Netanyahu and Lieberman about the appointment of an ambassador, the non-events of "Big Brother" and similar TV inanities – that we do not even notice that history is passing us by, leaving us behind.
WHEN OUR politicians and pundits found enough time – amid all the daily distractions – to deal with the events around us, it was in the old and (sadly) familiar way.
Even in the few halfway intelligent talk shows, there was much hilarity about the idea that "Arabs" could establish democracies. Learned professors and media commentators "proved" that such a thing just could not happen – Islam was "by nature" anti-democratic and backward, Arab societies lacked the Protestant Christian ethic necessary for democracy, or the capitalist foundations for a sound middle class, etc. At best, one kind of despotism would be replaced by another.
The most common conclusion was that democratic elections would inevitably lead to the victory of "Islamist" fanatics, who would set up brutal Taliban-style theocracies, or worse.
Part of this, of course, is deliberate propaganda, designed to convince the naïve Americans and Europeans that they must shore up the Mubaraks of the region or alternative military strongmen. But most of it was quite sincere: most Israelis really believe that the Arabs, left to their own devices, will set up murderous "Islamist" regimes, whose main aim would be to wipe Israel off the map.
Ordinary Israelis know next to nothing about Islam and the Arab world. As a (left-wing) Israeli general answered 65 years ago, when asked how he viewed the Arab world: "though the sights of my rifle." Everything is reduced to "security", and insecurity prevents, of course, any serious reflection.
THIS ATTITUDE goes back to the beginnings of the Zionist movement.
Its founder – Theodor Herzl – famously wrote in his historic treatise that the future Jewish State would constitute "a part of the wall of civilization" against Asiatic (meaning Arab) barbarism. Herzl admired Cecil Rhodes, the standard-bearer of British imperialism, He and his followers shared the cultural attitude then common in Europe, which Eduard Said latter labeled "Orientalism".
Viewed in retrospect, that was perhaps natural, considering that the Zionist movement was born in Europe towards the end of the imperialist era, and that it was planning to create a Jewish homeland in a country in which another people – an Arab people – was living.
The tragedy is that this attitude has not changed in 120 years, and that it is stronger today than ever. Those of us who propose a different course – and there have always been some – remain voices in the wilderness.
This is evident these days in the Israeli attitude to the events shaking the Arab world and beyond. Among ordinary Israelis, there was quite a lot of spontaneous sympathy for the Egyptians confronting their tormentors in Tahrir Square - but everything was viewed from the outside, from afar, as if it were happening on the moon.
The only practical question raised was: will the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty hold? Or do we need to raise new army divisions for a possible war with Egypt? When almost all "security experts" assured us that the treaty was safe, people lost interest in the whole matter.
BUT THE treaty – actually an armistice between regimes and armies – should only be of secondary concern for us. The most important question is: how will the new Arab world look? Will the transition to democracy be relatively smooth and peaceful, or not? Will it happen at all, and will it mean that a more radical Islamic region emerges - which is a distinct possibility? Can we have any influence on the course of events?
Of course, none of today's Arab movements is eager for an Israeli embrace. It would be a bear hug. Israel is viewed today by practically all Arabs as a colonialist, anti-Arab state that oppresses the Palestinians and is out to dispossess as many Arabs as possible – though there is, I believe, also a lot of silent admiration for Israel's technological and other achievements.
But when entire peoples rise up and revolution upsets all entrenched attitudes, there is the possibility of changing old ideas. If Israeli political and intellectual leaders were to stand up today and openly declare their solidarity with the Arab masses in their struggle for freedom, justice and dignity, they could plant a seed that would bear fruit in coming years.
Of course, such statements must really come from the heart. As a superficial political ploy, they would be rightly despised. They must be accompanied by a profound change in our attitude towards the Palestinian people. That's why peace with the Palestinians now, at once, is a vital necessity for Israel.
Our future is not with Europe or America. Our future is in this region, to which our state belongs, for better or for worse. It's not just our policies that must change, but our basic outlook, our geographical orientation. We must understand that we are not a bridgehead from somewhere distant, but a part of a region that is now – at long last – joining the human march towards freedom.
The Arab Awakening is not a matter of months or a few years. It may well be a prolonged struggle, with many failures and defeats, but the genie will not return to the bottle. The images of the 18 days in Tahrir Square will be kept alive in the hearts of an entire new generation from Marakksh to Mosul, and any new dictatorship that emerges here or there will not be able to erase them.
In my fondest dreams I could not imagine a wiser and more attractive course for us Israelis, than to join this march in body and spirit.
Entre certas e digo certas "fatãw" e as "pulsa denura"… glosando o dito popular, "venha o diabo e escolha".
Já agora fica-me a questão. Como é que a Shabat, a polícia do pensamento israelita, - tipo Gestapo - é tão célere em "descobrir inimigos do Estado de Israel”, entre judeus e árabes israelitas, dirigentes e membros de organizações de direitos humanos e pacifistas e não consegue controlar os grupos terroristas dos grupos radicais e extremistas do nacional-“sionismo”?
Ah! Dizem-me aqui do lado, que desde há muito estão profundamente infiltrados, nos escalões de comando das Forças A rmadas de Israel.
NB: Coloquei o termo sionismo entre aspas porque há escolas do pensamento sionista que defendem um regime democrático e inclusivo e sionistas que são pessoas de Bem. Que querem a paz e que são solidários com os seus compatriotas de origem árabe, que estão contra o bloqueio a Gaza e que são pela desocupação da Palestina, o desmantelamento dos colonatos e postos-avançados ilegais e pela criação de um Estado Palestino, soberano e independente.
Mas terá sido apenas pelo desabafo de quem já está farta de tantas estórias, de tantas promessas não cumpridas, de tanta hipocrisia e violência desnecessária, onde os presidentes do seu país, que acompanha há mais de 58 anos, fazem o papel de autores de co-autores ou no mínimo de cúmplices, salvo honrosas excepções, que a decana dos correspondentes de imprensa na Casa Branca, Helen Thomas foi despedida, desculpe, se "reformou com efeitos imediatos" segundo a Hearst News Service para quem trabalhava?
Ou foi por ter feito a pergunta incómoda que poderá ouvir nesta entrevista realizada por Paul Jay para The Real News Network, na 1.ª conferência de imprensa de Obama?
Nela pediu ao presidente Obama para que nomeasse todos os países do Médio Oriente que possuíssem armas nucleares.
A pergunta foi evitada por Obama, que afirmou não querer "especular".
Thomas afirma que o conhecimento das armas nucleares de Israel é público em Washington e que a resposta de Obama demonstra falta de credibilidade, explicando a importância desta questão para a política dos E.U. na região.
Finalmente, confessa que nunca mais foi chamada pelo Presidente, desde aquele dia, mas que se isso voltar a acontecer, vai perguntar-lhe se encontrou ou não, mais informações sobre armas nucleares no Médio Oriente, desde o seu último encontro.
Transcrição
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay at our studio in Washington, DC. Our special guest today is Helen Thomas. Helen Thomas has been a member of the White House press corps for over 58 years. She's covered every president since John F. Kennedy. She was the first member of the—. [...] She was the first female officer of the National Press Club, first female member and president of the White House Correspondents Association, and in 1975 she was the first female member and later became the president of the Gridiron Club. She's written five books. Her latest, with co-author Craig Crawford, is Listen up, Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted to Know Your President to Know and Do. [...] Listen up, Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President to Know and Do. So you've been telling presidents what to do for, like, a long time.
HELEN THOMAS, WHITE HOUSE PRESS CORPS, HEARST NEWSPAPERS: They don't take my advice.
JAY: Well, here's an example. President Obama—. First of all, welcome.
THOMAS: Thank you.
JAY: Thanks for joining us. So President Obama had his inaugural Helen Thomas question at his first press conference. And here's a little clip we're going to play from the press conference. [...] You asked the question. He avoids it, ducks. And then the microphone's there, and you're about to say, yeah, but what about an answer, and they take the mic away.
THOMAS: That's correct.
JAY: So President Obama really never answered your question about nuclear weapons in the Middle East, and obviously you were asking—.
THOMAS: It would be pitiful if we took his answer truthfully, because he said, "I didn't want to speculate." Well, the president is not supposed to speculate as to who has nuclear arms or not. He's supposed to know.
JAY: Well, obviously, we know he knows, and it's—this is this great "we know, and he knows we know we know."
THOMAS: I was testing his credibility.
JAY: So that's the—it's actually quite a profound question, because it goes to the whole US policy in the Middle East. Not only does the US have a kind of a double standard on nuclear weapons when it comes to Iran and such, but what do you make of Obama's whole Middle East policy? Is there a break with Bush here or not?
THOMAS: Too one-sided in favor of Israel. Ignores all the horrors that have happened to Palestinians—their country's taken away, thousands imprisoned for many, many years. We give them arms, we give the aid to Israel, as it continues to occupy and just treat the Palestinians like they're newcomers—and these are Europeans who come there who have no ties to Israel, to Palestine.
JAY: When President Obama was elected and was first discussing foreign policy, there was a suggestion from him there would be a new approach to the Middle East. He made his speech in Cairo. He suggested—not suggested. He said that Israel should stop any settlement expansion. What's happened since all of that?
THOMAS: He took the easy way out, which is to go along with Israel, which most countries do. They have the power, propaganda, and everything else to sell their point of view. Palestinians have no voice.
JAY: So in terms of understanding—what President Obama's done is nothing new. This has been the White House approach for a long time.
THOMAS: Well, he was accused of being a Muslim, which is, you know, the worst thing that can happen to you, apparently. And I think he was afraid of that kind of tie.
JAY: But you've been covering the White House, as we said, for, like, 58 years. Is there—talk about the whole history of the US approach to Israel and the Palestinian conflict.
THOMAS: I think that we had—when Israel was created and they declared themselves in 1948, I mean, Truman went along. They knocked on his door at three o'clock in the morning. He did the unheard-of thing to get out and recognize the state of Israel—and while we were still debating the whole situation at the UN. Left our own representatives high and dry. Well, every president has been confronted with that. Eisenhower tried to be a little bit more evenhanded. Nixon sent a man, an envoy, to the Middle East as soon as he took office. It was former governor Bill Scranton. And he came back after a fact-finding trip for about one month. He told President Nixon we should be evenhanded in the Middle East. Zionists went out of their mind, saying, what do you mean evenhanded? It's like I'm telling you, why don't you try to be fair? That report has gathered that much dust [inaudible] but it never saw the real light of day. And every president has been confronted with this issue. And it is an issue. People have the right to defend their own country. Two thousand years.
JAY: Now, Jimmy Carter, in the last few years, has actually—he was, I guess, the first person at that level to actually acknowledge Israel has nuclear weapons. He visited Gaza, he's talked to Hamas, and he's been saying there should be negotiation.
THOMAS: Hamas won the election. But if you read the news stories, they will say, oh, the Hamas took over Gaza, without ever saying it won an election. And former President Bush said that we would observe democratic elections. As soon as the Hamas won in Gaza, they shut down all aid, closed the doors, and so forth.
JAY: But did Carter—in terms of his policy towards Israel and Palestine, was he any different than all the other American presidents? When Carter was in power?
THOMAS: Yes. He got the first accord in the Camp David Accords, and Begin promised him a lot of things, a letter that will acquiesce to concessions. Never got the letter.
JAY: So President Obama comes to power with what seems like intent to do something different. What are the forces at play here? 'Cause we're winding up, as far as—I mean, you've said, and it seems rather obvious, that it's the same policies we've always seen.
THOMAS: That's right. I think American politics, pro-Israel. If you take a vote in Congress, maybe you might get five people vote against any further aid to Israel as it continues its occupation. That's about it. They control—they have fast power.
JAY: Who's "they"?
THOMAS: The Zionists.
JAY: And Obama went to AIPAC, the main lobby organization of the kind of right wing of the pro-Israel lobby, when he was running for president, and he said to AIPAC more or less what they wanted to hear, with the exception maybe of the no expansion of settlements. So he's actually following through on what he campaigned on. He's never really suggested a different policy, has he?
THOMAS: No, not really. He's following through, that's true. I don't think he's ever made any real commitments to the Palestinians.
JAY: In terms of what you understand about the inner workings of the White House and how decisions are made, are there any forces behind the scenes at play here to try to put pressure on Israel to have a different kind of policy? Or have they kind of given up on it?
THOMAS: I think President Obama gave up totally, early on. I don't think even tried. He realized he's going up against a stone wall. Why take that on when he has so many other problems?
JAY: So do you think that's it for his administration in terms of the policy towards the Middle East?
THOMAS: I think he'd just as soon forget it if he could. But more and more I think you can never escape the Middle East problem, as no modern president has been able to. At some point it'll come back to him.
JAY: At the next press conference with President Obama, assuming he calls on you—I don't know if he liked your first question very much.
THOMAS: I'm sure he didn't.
JAY: What do you want to ask him?
THOMAS: I want to ask him if he ever found out whether anyone in the Middle East has nuclear weapons.
JAY: Well, we'll see if you ever get a chance to ask that again.
THOMAS: I doubt it.
JAY: Thanks for joining us. And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network. This is the beginning of a series of interviews with Helen Thomas, but they'll be kind of interspersed, not one right after the other. We'll let you know when the next one is.
NB: Na impossibilidade de traduzir, partilho tal e qual. Usem o Google Tramslate sempre é uma ajuda.
Paul Jay is the CEO and Senior Editor of The Real News Network. He is an award-winning filmmaker, founder of Hot Docs! International Film Festival and was for ten years the Executive Producer of the CBC Newsworld show counterSpin.
IN DEFENSE OF HELEN THOMAS - on apologizing to apologists
Helen Thomas was the dean of the White House Press corp. She has a fifty-year history of tough-minded journalism and is one of the very, very few journalists in the mainstream press who has had the guts to question US policy towards Israel. On Monday she was pressured into resigning, "effective immediately".
On Friday she was asked by a guy who stuck a video camera in her face, for any comments on Israel and she said, "Tell them to get the get the hell out of Palestine. Remember, these people [the Palestinians] are occupied and it's their land. It's not Germany, it's not Poland." She was asked where they should go and she answered, "They should go home, to Poland, Germany and America". The video has been making its way around the Internet.
This was said days after the Israeli attack on the aid flotilla that killed at least nine activists as their boat sailed in international waters.
She later apologized in a short statement on her website ""I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon."
Her apology was not enough to stop calls for her head from those who have wanted to shut Thomas up for years.
Ari Fleischer, President George W. Bush's press secretary, led the call in an e-mail Friday to the Huffington Post saying Thomas' comments amount to "religious cleansing."
"She should lose her job over this," Fleischer wrote. "As someone who is Jewish, and as someone who worked with her and used to like her, I find this appalling."
Perhaps Fleishcher should also add that he is someone who knows something about apologies . . . being the leading apologist for the Bush administration as their war led to the deaths of at least one million Iraqis.
But Lanny Davis, former special counsel to and White House spokesman for President Bill Clinton, went even further than Fleischer. He issued a statement on Sunday saying Thomas, "has showed herself to be an anti-Semitic bigot."
Now, Davis should know something about apologies and apologists as well. TheHill.com reported that Davis led a lobbying effort against deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya on behalf of Honduran business leaders. This is in defense of a regime that came to power in an illegal coup and is killing journalists and activists. Hmmm . . . defending those that kill activists . . .
Davis went on, "Her [Thomas] statement that Jews in Israel should leave Israel and go back to Poland or Germany is an ancient and well-known anti-Semitic stereotype of the Alien Jew not belonging in the 'land of Israel' -- one that began 2,600 years with the first tragic and violent diaspora of the Jews at the hands of the Romans," said Davis.
Thomas was not talking about Jews that lived in the region from Roman times. If she had been given more of a chance to explain herself, rather than the 30-second sound bite traveling around the web, she might have made it clear that she also wasn't referring to the thousands of Jews who lived in Palestine prior to 1948.
What Thomas clearly did say she was talking about was Jews that had come from Germany, Poland and America. Now it's likely that most of the Jewish refugees that came to Palestine from Europe just after the War, did so not because they "belong to the land of Israel", but due to fact that the American, Canadian and British governments wouldn't drop their anti-Jewish quotas even after the horrors of the genocide were fully exposed (let's talk about some real anti-Semites).
I don't know of any opinion polls taken at the time, but if those refugees had a real choice to go to some impoverished potentially war-filled land in the Middle East or join the Jewish community in New York, I know what I would have chosen.
The American Zionist organizations at the time did not fight for a more open immigration policy to allow Jews into America; they lobbied furiously for the Jewish refugees to go to Palestine as part of a move towards the founding of a Jewish state.
As is well known, this state was created in the process of expelling thousands of Palestinians from their lands, people who had nothing to do with the European genocide against the Jews. You cannot say the same about the Anglo-American countries that for much of the '30s were quite happy to equip Hitler with cars and machinery. Quite content to shut their mouths as Hitler began an ethnic cleansing that would end in barbaric genocide.
As far as the American Jews that went to live in Israel after 1948, it's difficult to believe they went to escape persecution, as many of the Jews from other places that went to Israel, in fact did. So, one can understand a certain specific resentment against American Jews who decided that it was ok, at someone else's expense, to work out their identity crisis and pick up some free airline tickets to boot.
Lanny Davis statement continued, "If she had asked all blacks to go back to Africa, what would White House Correspondents Association position be as to whether she deserved White House press room credentials -- much less a privileged honorary seat?"
Our defender of illegal coups knows very well this is not analogous. The obvious comparison is asking all European Americans to "get the hell out", and leave the land to its rightful owners, Native Americans. One could argue Mexican Americans might have an argument to stay in certain parts of the country.
The European migration to America isn't such a stretch if one thinks about it. Colonialism makes use of people fleeing religious persecution to populate their new possession . . .
At any rate, we all know what's going on here. The hyper-pro-Israel lobby, in both parties, hasn't much liked the fact that Helen Thomas dares to speak up and question that most sacred of topics, and right from the front row of the White House Press Gallery. Heck, she had the gall to ask President Obama about Israel's "secret" nuclear weapons. She even asked the current White House spokesman why the US had not condemned the Israeli attacks on the aid flotilla. No wonder they want her the hell out.
Do I think all Jews (that came after 1948) should get out of Palestine? Well, no more or less than Europeans should get out of North America, or the Portuguese should get out of Brazil, or the British should get the hell out of Australia. There does come a point where such things are simply not possible.
There's really no need anyway, there's plenty of land and resources. The only issue is, are the rights of the people who owned the land before colonization going to be respected now; is there proper compensation; do they have the right to self-determination and so on.
In the case of the Palestinians, what Israel needs to do has been made very clear in UN resolutions and in the demands of the Palestinians. In spite of the illegal blockade of Gaza, almost no one, including the Hamas representative I interviewed a few weeks ago, says the Jews have to get out. Ok there are some that say it, people get very angry after 62 years in a refugee camp, but what most Palestinians want is to live as equals with Jews in a truly democratic state.
It's way past time that we can discuss Israel and Palestine without the McCarthyite witch hunt atmosphere that has ruled for sixty years.
I said in my last blog, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism - but some is.
Cerca de 2.000 pessoas de todo o país participaram numa manifestação de esquerda perto da Praça de Zion, em Jerusalém, na noite de sábado.
A manifestação, organizada por membros do chamado "Campo da esquerda Sionista", foi realizada sob a bandeira: "Os sionistas não colonizam."
A manifestação foi organizada pelo Movimento da Esquerda Nacional, pelo Peace Now, pela Iniciativa de Genebra, pelo Meretz, pela Ofek, célula de estudantes da Universidade Hebraica, e por activistas do Partido Trabalhista. Muitos dos participantes empunharam bandeiras de Israel durante a manifestação.
Os manifestantes foram confrontados por alguns activistas de direita segurando cartazes dizendo: "Jerusalém - apenas para os judeus."
Falando no evento, Dr. Gadi Taub afirmou:
"Nós precisamos ter certeza de que o argumento nacional e o argumento dos direitos humanos não se contradizem. Ambos os argumentos conduzem à saída do território."
"Ser sionista significa sair dos territórios e não o domínio sobre outro povo", afirmou. "O partido nacional não é a Direita. A Direita é o partido bi-nacional."
Taub acrescentou que o Sionismo: não era sobre a terra, mas sim, sobre a libertação do povo.
"Esta é a visão de Ben-Gurion e a visão de Herzl", afirmou. "Se nós não deixarmos os territórios, perderemos a realização do sionismo - um Estado judeu e democrático".
A cantora Achinoam Nini, que actuou no comício, referiu o assassinato do primeiro-ministro Yitzhak Rabin, dizendo que "hoje, 15 anos após aquela terrível assassinato, tomamos o nosso destino nas nossas próprias mãos."
"Nós escolhemos o diálogo constante até que a paz seja alcançada. Jerusalém deve ser uma cidade de paz - uma capital para duas nações.", afirmou.
