Credibility of Zionist Israel unravels

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12 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 2012 Tony Savino / Socialist Action When 15 national leaders of U.S. Christian churches call on the U.S. Congress to reconsider giving aid to Is­ rael because of human rights violations as well as the continued expansion of Israel settlements, including “claiming territory that under international law and U.S. policy should belong to a future Palestinian state,” and when this appeal is covered in The New York Times (Oct. 21, 2012), it’s clear that the credibility of the racist, Zionist colonial settler state of Israel is at an all time low—as is the myth of a beleaguered Israel threatened by “terrorist” Palestinians.

The statement’s signers included representatives of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Methodist Church, the National Council of Churches, the United Church of Christ, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the American Friends Service Committee, the Mennonite Central Committee, the, Orthodox Peace Fellowship, American Baptist Churches USA, the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, and the Confer­ ence of Major Superiors of Men.

The letter called for Congressional investigation into Israel’s activities only, although it stated that both Is­ raelis and Palestinians had “suffered.” Nevertheless, The Times article’s title, “Church Appeal on Israel Angers Jewish Groups,” missed the point altogether. It is not the “anger” of Jewish leaders that is relevant to the present discussion questioning the atrocities committed by the Zionist state, if not the legitimacy of the state itself, but the outrage of millions around the world concerning the ongoing dispossession, persecu­ tion, and starvation of the Palestinian masses, includ­ ing the reduction of their historic homeland to some 17 percent of pre-partition 1947 Palestine.

Jewish leaders protesting the Christian leadership statement, including Rabbi Steven Wernick of the Unit­ ed Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, responded, “When Israel is the only one called to account, that’s when it becomes problematic.” Wernick’s view that since both Israel and the Palestinian Authority receive U.S. aid, both should be investigated, is, in this writer’s view, the moral equivalent of demanding that World War II Jewish resistance to Nazi atrocities be placed on the same plane as the Holocaust, in which the Hit­ ler regime murdered six million Jews across Europe.

Jewish leaders criticized the appeal by essentially mainline Christian churches, as “a momentous be­ trayal.” Announcing their intention to withdraw from a scheduled Oct. 22 meeting for a Jewish-Christian Tony Savino / Socialist Action dialogue, they characterized the appeal as “a step too far” and an indication of “the vicious anti-Zionism that has gone virtually unchecked in several of these de­ nominations.” Ethan Felson, vice president and gen­ eral counsel of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, stated, according to The Times, “Something is deeply broken, badly broken. … We’re certainly not getting anywhere now.”

The choice of the term “anti-Zionism” above is note­ worthy. The traditional response to criticisms of the Israeli apartheid state has been accusations of “antiSemitism.” But putting that label on mainline Christian churches, several of which have adopted positions in favor of BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel), is no longer tenable or sufficient to re­ but charges that the whole world knows to be true.

The myth of a democratic, peace-loving Israel has in­ creasingly been shattered by events past and present. In September 1982, for example, the Israeli-abetted massacre of some 800 helpless Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon was vigorously denied by Zionist state leaders. Today, evi­ dence from Israeli archives has exposed yet another myth perpetrated by Israel with the aid of the U.S. corporate media. A September 2012 on-line New York Times article entitled, “A Preventable Massacre,” in­ forms us that outright denial of reality is no longer vi­ able when it undermines the capacity of the U.S. state power to maintain a semblance of credibility:

“On the night of Sept. 16, 1982” [during the period when Israel invaded Lebanon during a civil war], The Times reports, “the Israeli military allowed a rightwing Lebanese militia to enter two Palestinian refu­ Tony Savino / Socialist Action gee camps in Beirut. In the ensuing three-day rampage, the militia, linked to the Ma­ ronite Christian Phalange Party [similar to the classical 1930s fascist parties of Italy and Spain], raped, killed and dismembered at least 800 civilians, while Israeli flares il­ luminated the camps’ narrow and darkened alleyways. Nearly all of the dead were wom­ en, children and elderly men.” ... “The verbatim transcripts [from the Is­ raeli State Archives] reveal that the Israelis misled American diplomats about events in Beirut and bullied them into accepting the spurious claim that thousands of ‘terrorists’ were in the camps. Most troubling, when the United States was in a position to exert strong diplomatic pressure on Israel that could have ended the atrocities, it failed to do so. As a result, Phalange militiamen were able to murder Palestinian civilians, whom America had pledged to protect just weeks earlier.”

There have been several other recent inci­ dents that point to Israeli’s isolation. For ex­ ample, the University of Connecticut-based UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) center had sched­ uled an Oct. 23 forum in which family mem­ bers and associates were to honor several key human rights activists. When four invited speakers learned that Israeli President Shimon Peres was among those to be honored, they cancelled. Peres’ son-in-law was the only speaker.

Two years ago, at the founding conference of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), attended by 800 activists from 25 states, a resolution demand­ ing that the U.S. government “End All Aid To Israel: Military, Economic and Diplomatic,” was approved by a 90 percent margin. The UNAC conference was a first for the U.S. antiwar movement, a major departure from the view that criticism of Israel must be a “split issue.” Since then, UNAC’s influence has grown, with new supporters from a broad range of groups sup­ porting Palestinian self-determination.

Israel, the world’s largest recipient of U.S. military aid, is increasingly seen by a wide spectrum of social and political activists as the major ally, if not instru­ ment, of U.S. neo-colonial policy in the Middle East. Most recently, Israel’s repeated threats to bomb Iran’s nuclear research facilities, risking a wider war in the Middle East and beyond, as well as its repeated mili­ tary moves to enforce its illegal blockade of humani­ tarian aid to the Palestinians of Gaza, has deepened its isolation and lent increasing credibility to the demand for a democratic and secular Palestine with the right of return to the forcibly exiled Palestinian millions.

For decades the so-called two-state solution, in which a new Palestinian state was to be created to re­ (continued on page 5, in “Workers confront abusive practices at Walmart”)

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Israel is increasingly seen as the major instrument of U.S. neo-colonial policy in the Middle East.