If you’ve ever looked through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars you know that objects appear smaller and more distant than they really are. For a government involved in an illegal war, especially a genocidal war against a civilian population, this is the perspective on the violence it expects the media to present for domestic consumption.
Whereas the media gets exorcised if a single Jew gets his hair mussed, the suffering of Arabs is portrayed to be distant, indiscernible yet morally justifiable and eternally “winnable.”
Until relatively recently, this had been the standard North American perspective on Palestine. The Maginot Line of media filters and disinformers dutifully ensured that we all sympathized with “democratic” [sic] Israel and looked upon Arabs as uncivilized, bent on violence for its own sake.
Anyone who dared turn the binoculars the right way around to perceive Arabs as victims of an illegal occupation and Israelis as genocidal colonizers was instantly assailed. After Palestinian Hanna Kawas began his radio show “Voice of Palestine” on local Co-op radio in Vancouver, the Lobby went after the station, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and the media to have it shut down. That was in September 1987, nearly 20 years ago, and Kawas is still on the air.
At the time, Kawas’s victory was conspicuously rare, but with the advent of the world wide web in 1993 news about what is really going on in Occupied Palestine is as close as a computer.
Yet, for all the advances in electronic communication, images and reports of Israeli repression are still heavily censored, whereas anti-Muslim stereotypes and tendentious reporting abound, which is why recent events in Washington D.C. are so significant.
Since the middle of May, to coincide with the 59th anniversary of al-Naqba–the Palestinian holocaust by which means the state of Israel was created–20 posters each measuring 46 x 60 inches calling for an end to the occupation have been placed in downtown subway stations.
The campaign culminates June 10-11 with a rally in Washington D.C. to mark the 40th anniversary of Israel’s illegal occupation of East Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza Strip. According to endtheoccupation.org, the posters will be seen 9 million times, and the rally and march are expected to attract tens of thousands of supporters from across the country. Included in the campaign is a massive lobbying effort of legislators.
Such overt pro-Palestinian advocacy in the belly of the zionist beast must be seen as a major defeat for the Lobby and the cult of absolute Israeli virtue.
It brings to mind, somewhat, the attack on the U.S. embassy in Saigon during 1968 Tet Offensive, which proved to the U.S. it could not bomb its way to victory in Vietnam. Although the North Vietnamese/Viet Cong operation was turned back didn’t achieve its political objectives, the sight of the enemy bring the war to the doorstep of the U.S. was psychologically devastating.
The Palestinian campaign, of course, doesn’t possess the shock and awe of the offensive, and like Tet will not achieve a political victory, but it shows that the ability of the Lobby to marginalize informed dissent has failed.
Even though Christian sociopath John Hagee will lead a rally for Israel the next month, neither he nor any other zionist can breathe life into the corpse of pro-Israel propaganda.
Isramerica can only grow more isolated as the rest of the world reacts to the suffering of Palestinians and condemns Israeli cruelty. The World Bank, for example, has condemned Israel for its repressive rule over the Gaza Strip and obstruction of free movement to and from the West Bank because it is hobbling the Palestinian economy and preventing investment. (Of course, that’s the whole idea.)
Elsewhere, the European Union refused to partake in propaganda celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary of Israel’s theft of Arab East Jerusalem.
When combined with the recent overt condemnation of Israeli apartheid and exposure of the corrupting political control of the Israeli Lobby, the June 10-11 rally merely confirms what people who know how to use binoculars already know–”Israel is committing genocide, and the U.S. is complicit.
Unreported or underreported stories on the occupation that underscore this point include:
- Israel announced 20,000 more colonists homes will be built in Arab East Jerusalem;
- Amnesty International reported that Israeli troops killed more than 650 Palestinians last year, half of them unarmed civilians including some 120 children. Since 2000, 934 Arab children have been murdered.
- A pregnant women in Nablus lost her baby after being shot by an Israeli soldier.
- B’Tselem and the Centre for the Defence of the Individual reported that Israel routinely tortures prisoners.
- Israel announced it will destroy the Al-Ansari Library, one of Jerusalem’s most important libraries, which contains more than 45,000 books including archival documents that precede 1967.
- The Israeli occupation army bulldozed a U.S.-funded public park, including a children’s playground and swimming pool, in the West Bank village of Azzun,
- Israel’s re-affirmed its right to assassinate Palestinians at will.
- Norway, Sweden and South Africa recognized the elected Hamas-led Palestinian government, and France and Russia have called for sanctions to be lifted.
- More than half of Jews in Israel support a divided Jerusalem.
The occupation has been brought to the doorstep of Washingtelaviv. It will doubtless not be the last time.
Nov. 29, 2007, marks the 60th anniversary of the illegal and unratified Partition Plan that made possible the zionist holocaust against Palestine.
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My book The Host and the Parasite – How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America is now available from Dandelion Books ($US30, 532 pages, incl. footnotes).
For Canadian orders or for a signed copy please refer to the address on my website GregFelton.com
