Posted on 12 January 2009 by Will O' in Politics
The Right Wing is the scourge of humanity.
The Pro-Israel lobby worldwide is amazingly powerful. Grown men and women in democratic parliaments are afraid to speak out at the atrocities of the current Gaza invasion. Why? Because they would be attacked relentlessly.
Any Jew who criticizes Israel’s policies regarding Palestinians is immediately labeled a self-hating Jew.
Any non-Jew who criticizes Israel’s policies regarding Palestinians is immediately labeled an anti-Semite.
The result is that sane debate is no longer possible.
George W. Bush squandered the sympathies of the world after 9/11 by illegally invading Iraq with disdain for international law. Worse, goaded by rabid right wingers, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, he did it with the greatest of hubris.
The present Israeli government is squandering any and all remaining sympathy remaining from the holocaust they suffered under the Nazis.
People are calling the Gazan invasion a holocaust, comparing it to the Nazis’ treatment of the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Jews are being forced to swallow their pride and honour by condoning the slaughter of women and children in the name of defending their country against a people they have persecuted for decades.
Perhaps Israel’s problem is that it has been led by right wing hardliners since one of their own assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. With Yasser Arafat, Rabin had signed the Oslo agreement the previous year, heralding unprecedented peace along the border. Following Rabin’s assassination, Shimon Peres led the govenment for a mere six months before the election of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli Government has never looked back. Netanyahu was replaced by Ehud Barack, the current Defense Minister and architect of the Gazan invasion, then Ariel Sharon, often referred to as the “Butcher of Beirut”, and finally Ehud Olmert, often referred to as the “Butcher of Lebanon”.
In a sane world, Olmert, Sharon and Barack, along with George W. Bush, would be classified as war criminals. Their combined efforts have caused the needless deaths of thousands upon thousands.
It is now sixty years since Israel was founded. It still exists and thrives. Yet successive governments have continued to frighten otherwise reasonable and compassionate Jews with the imminent destruction of their nation. It is true that Israel was founded by a people paranoid in the extreme, and justifiably so. But somewhere in these six decades was there not the opportunity to treat the indigenous population, the Palestinians, with enough generosity and compassion so that extremist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas could never have gained strength?
In short, was Yitzhak Rabin Israel’s last chance for peace?
If the Palestinians, under Hamas, have called for the destruction of Israel, it is now apparent that Israel has harboured the same intentions for the Palestinians. As the representative of Goliath, Israel appears to be determined to wipe out the Davids across the border.
Yet another example of the state of our world: this situation is too broke to fix.
Links:
How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
