by John-Paul Leonard

There is a story going around that the Clintons had to drop plans for a live Nativity scene this Christmas. They just couldn't find three wise men or a virgin anywhere around the White House. 

Wise men seem to be in short supply everywhere, what with the cancellation of Christ's 2000th birthday celebration in Bethlehem itself. 

In fact, the bloodshed of the last few months convince me that our Near East policy has been tragically unwise for a very long time. We have been blindly trampling our most cherished values underfoot. 

Of course, it is not so easy to tell right from wrong. Viewed close up, without the hindsight of history, the actors on the human stage do not have the comic-book simplicity of good and bad guys. The greatest war crimes were committed by moralists who believed they were doing right. In their own minds, the Spanish Inquisitors were defenders of the true faith, Buffalo Bill was a civilizing influence, and Truman was saving American lives when he unleashed A-bombs on a quarter million noncombatant women and children. Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan were each engaged in creating their new man. And Christendom turned the other cheek to them at first, too. 

For decades the Holocaust has made criticism of Israel a taboo in our society. Support for Israel-right-or-wrong is a main pillar of our foreign policy. But the incessant expropriation of land by violence, and above all the massacres of mere children on television, have brought world public opinion to the breaking point. 

Whether you are Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, the breaking point of taboos means thinking the unthinkable about Zionism. Jewish intellectuals in Israel and the USA are torn by a cruel paradox: the Zionist state does almost the same thing to the Palestinians as the Nazis did to the Jews.... 

Yet America is spectacularly insensitive to this irony. How could our American media become more Zionist than Israel's? It is the strange algebra of guilt. 

Palestinians may exist in the American media vocabulary, perhaps as a nasty rabble, but deep in America’s heart, Palestine must always be a nonexistent zero. Once we cease to negate them, the unthinkable horror happens - we must admit to usurping the laurels of humanitarianism while really being accomplices to double mass murder! 

America shirked her share of responsibility for the Holocaust and the Jewish refugees and dumped it on Palestine - all the while fraudulently claiming to be saviors of the Jews. Thus America’s shrillness - we are not defending Israel, but our own Big Lie. This awful secret is so deeply buried and hidden in the American subconscious that it takes an effort even to think about it. For the Israelis it is obviously convenient to ignore Palestine, too - Golda Meir once said, ”There are no Palestinians”. But their "new historians” dig much deeper than the ritual, self-complacent hypocrisy of our media. Even Britain, it seems, half-remembers... 

Stand Accused: America's Genocidal Realpolitik 

The way Britain and America finessed the problem of European Jewry was the most stunning exploit of Machiavellian hypocrisy of the last century. That facade of self-righteousness is finally being smashed by the stones of youth, crying Liberty or Death, going to their deaths by their hundreds. 

Just connect the following well-established basic facts. 

Fact 1. The Allies had complete information on the genocide in the Nazi death camps and had every opportunity to save millions of Jews by allowing mass emigration to America or other colonies. 

Fact 2. Saving Jews was no part of the Allied war strategy. They refused the Jews asylum because of anti-Semitic sentiment and resistance to immigration at home. Britain even halted Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1939. 

Fact 3. After the war, the Allies still did not want large-scale Jewish immigration. 

Fact 4. The Zionist preference for colonizing the Holy Land helped to get Jews out of Europe and the Arabs out of a strategic spot, so could divide the Arab world in two, for a double "ethnic cleansing". 

Fact 5. The Allied Powers, by their control of the UN Security Council, proposed to give the greater part of Palestine to the Zionist minority there, without any shred of basis in law - a wanton act of expropriation. 

Fact 6. Britain withdrew from its Palestine mandate in 1948 under conditions that assured a Zionist terrorist victory. 

Fact 7. Zionist settlers and terrorists meted out on the innocent population of Palestine the revenge for centuries of oppression suffered by Jews in Europe, complete with Gestapo-style massacres of civilians. 

Fact 8. Violence begets violence. The "natives" of Palestine have been expropriated, expelled, treated as sub humans and confined to concentration camps for two generations, since 1948 to this day. 

Fact 9. Such actions are defined as crimes against humanity or genocide, the systematic destruction of a people, under the terms of the Nuremburg war tribunal. 

Fact 10. Carrying out this kind of genocide under a banner of moral superiority over a number of generations was a black art American colonists had already perfected in stealing a continent from the Indians. 

Fact 11. Since 1948 the United States has economically, militarily and politically underwritten the ongoing genocide of Palestine. 

Fact 12. In the 20th century the US has settled substantial reparations claims for some of its acts of genocidal expropriation of the original inhabitants. 

Anglo-American Realpolitik - a word that translates roughly as might (plus cunning) equals right - considers occupation of land paramount. Peoples that stand or sit in the way are dispensable. They can most effectively be removed by masking the "ethnic cleansing" as the Manifest Destiny of a "superior people", along with a heavy dose of hypocrisy. This policy considers it quicker and more profitable to extend the frontier with superior weapons than to share land and integrate refugees or native peoples. 

In plain English, mass murder makes money. While for domestic comfort, we adopt a sensitive standard of political correctness and pluralistic democracy at home, we support any repressive regime abroad that is helps to maintain our world dominance. 

Following the example of the genocide of its aborigines in the 19th century, the USA is again guilty of double genocide in the current era. 

First count: the US tacitly assented in the entrapment and extermination of Jews in Europe by a do-nothing policy up until 1942, and by restricting their escape to America as refugees. Second count, she and Britain were instrumental in preparing the ground for the Zionist massacre of Palestine, which was in great part the inevitable reaction to the Holocaust she did nothing to prevent. Third count, she continually ratifies her assent to those massacres by unstinting economic, military and diplomatic support of the long-term Zionist policy of extinguishing Palestine. 

The Middle East conflict is not age-old, it was simply manufactured by the Allied imposition of Zionist colonialism on Palestine, as colonialism was dying everywhere else. Those who manufactured the catastrophe should pay for it. Palestine can hardly obtain redress itself from the very Jews who invaded and occupied it, they who in turn claim redress for the Holocaust, nor from Arab neighbors who have also been disadvantaged by the invasion of Palestine and their ensuing geopolitical isolation. 

Legal conclusion: Propose to file a CLASS ACTION SUIT 

The United States, Britain and Israel are liable for enormous damages and reparations to the people of Palestine. 

This claim may be based on their own laws, which uphold religious and racial tolerance, the sanctity of private property (an Englishman's home is his castle), highly sophisticated concepts of legal liability, and special sanctions against crimes of racism and hatred. 

Suits could be filed in local courts e.g.. by Palestinians who have suffered or whose relatives are victims of genocide. In local jurisdictions also file personal damage suits against pro-Israeli elected public officials - presidents, senators, congressmen - suing to remove their immunity for complicity in war crimes. 

It is an accepted principle in law (eg. Pinochet, Milosevic) that sovereign immunity does not apply to this class of crimes. Citizens of countries outside the US should support the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court with jurisdiction over war crimes in their countries. Even if the US tries again to veto such a court, it would still have jurisdiction over American and Israeli officials traveling abroad, a valuable sanction in itself. File suit on behalf of: specific injured parties and the people of Palestine against: - the governments of the USA, Britain and France (Security Council members that illegally partitioned Palestine in 1947); against the US government in particular, as continual sponsor and accomplice to fifty-three years of crimes of aggression, oppression and genocide - against the government of Israel, and other beneficiaries and perpetrators of war crimes in the name of Zionism - for indirect damages against Germany, which has made reparations to the Jews but not the Palestinians, who have now paid in Europe's stead more for the crimes of Nazism than the rest of the world put together. 

Damage Claim: One Trillion US Dollars minimum. 

This claim is far from being excessive. It is not even $1000 for every Moslem in the world, or just compensation for the desecration of the Dome of the Rock - the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Count also the lives of innocent murdered families, two lost generations of a million people imprisoned in refugee camps, expropriated property, and so on. This is a MINIMUM figure. 

A Solution for Zion should also be part of the proposed legal remedy: A unified secular state with a pluralist democracy covering the whole area of Palestine (Israel, West Bank, and Gaza), with constitutional and security guarantees for Jews in areas that they have purchased fairly (the "Belgian solution"). Municipal autonomy for Jerusalem. Restitution proceedings according to generally accepted legal standards. 

Experiences teaches that a mistake and a fraud must be faced and corrected, not perpetuated in endless compromises. The Jews have a right to live in peace and security like every people, and not to go from the Holocaust to a hell of eternal enmity. 

ISRAEL IS A LIE. Built on the colonization of Semitic Arabs by European Jews, the State of Israel is the greatest anti-Semitic force seen since Hitler. It should be revoked. 

The American public's self-complacency has remained utterly impervious to the injustice in Palestine over five decades, if not a century. Appeals to public opinion alone will not be enough. The guilty parties must be pursued in the law courts. Now, and not a century after Palestine's extinction, like with the American Indians.

Mr. John-Paul Leonard is a free-lance writer and a regular contributor to Media Monitors Network (MMN)

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