Its the Same Story

May 15, 1948 is a day to remember. To the Jew, it is a day to celebrate the Declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel. To the Arab, it is a day to lament as “The Nakba”, the greatest catastrophe in Palestinian history.  To Israel, it was a time when God finally stepped in and declared Jews as his favorite people, perhaps his only people. And gave them, yet again, someone else’s land

This Thursday, May 15, synagogues, movie houses, newspapers and TV screens will be filled with ceremonies and celebrations of the goodness of God to the Jews and the bravery of those first pioneers who established the State of Israel, the “only democracy in the Middle East.”

At the same time, very little will be mentioned concerning the plight of the Palestinians who lost their land and freedom. More than 750,000 driven from their homes, many raped, robbed and massacred to make room for a Jewish state.  Over 500 Arab villages destroyed, bulldozed down and covered up, creating the largest refugee problem in modern history.  

Someone said, “Kill one person and it’s a crime. Kill a thousand and it just a statistic.”

However, the Nakba has flesh on it. I received a reply to one of my earlier blogs:

Tom, this is when my wife Aida and her family fled Palestine with only the clothes on their backs, leaving their three story home and her father’s two stores. They lost it all.  For the first 25-30 years of her life, she would wake up screaming, 4-5 times a month, that the Jews were after her to kill her and her family When I met Aida in 1956, she and her three brothers, her mom and dad, were living in one room, with a small cooking area and a bathroom. There were four small beds around the room which were used to sit on in the day time and for them to sleep on at night. This room was about 12 X 16!!!   Your Friend, TONY

Multiply that story by a thousand times and it is easy to understand why Israel’s Declaration of Statehood is so difficult to be seen as something to celebrate.

I think of Elias Chacour, whom I met about 30 years ago.

When Elias Chacour was about nine years old, his father called the family together. “There was a monster up in Europe who persecuted and killed Jews.  He is dead now, but the Jews still do not feel safe there.  So, they are going to come and live with us for a while.”  Chacour remembers being excited to move out of his bedroom to make room for their guests. After all, Jews were also the children of Abraham. They were blood brothers. 

Only they did not come as guests. They came with guns.  In one day Chacour and his  family were driven from the home up into the hills at gun point “ One soldier growled, “This land is ours. Get out now. Move.”

What they did not know was that all over the Galilee, Palestinians were being driven from their homes. In the struggle, parents were separated from their children, some never saw them again.  Some older folks did not make it. Little Elias and the other people of Biram tried to climb up to a little cross road village called Gish. Surely their neighbors would help them. But, the strangest thing. When they finally arrived in Gish, there was no one there.  The homes and shops were empty. Everyone wondered what had happened to the people of Gish.

Several days later, the children of Biram were playing in a near-by field. Their ball rolled down a ravine. Elias went to retrieve it. As he reached down he saw the hand of a small child sticking up out of the sand.  He had just discovered what had happened to the people of Gish.  They had been rounded up and executed. [1]

This was not an isolated case. It reflected the official goals of Zionism. Historians list at least 33 massacres of Palestinians villages. Israeli historian Tom Segev writes:

Israel was born: of terror, war and revolution and its creation required a measure of fanaticism and  cruelty.[2]

In 1940, Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department,  said:

Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries – all of them. Not one village, not one tribe, should be left.[3]

Raphael Eytan, IDF Chief of Staff said:

We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel… Force is all they do or ever will understand… When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.[4]

It is amazing that Israel has managed to sell to the Western world, (meaning the US,) the smoke and mirrors that, in spite of the facts, Israel really is the victim that needs an enormous amount of money to be protected from the bad Arabs.

I have known Elias Chacour for almost three decades and in spite of having been savagely beaten by Jewish soldiers who accused him of being a nine year old terrorist, he says only, “I cannot hate them. They are my blood brothers. Perhaps confused and afraid. but never the less, my brothers.”

So, this Thursday, May 15^th, as Israel celebrates its day with pride, I will fly a Palestinian flag in the front of my house to declare solidarity with Elias Chacour, Tony Rukab and many others who have suffered 64 years of Nakba.   I cannot fathom anyone looking back over Israel’s history of military domination of a weaker people and find anything of which to be proud.

I am an American and there is much about my country of which I can be proud, but our celebration of Israeli atrocities is not one of them.

Thomas Are

May 14, 2014

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[1] Read Elias Chacour, Blood Brothers, (Fleming Revell Company. 1984) p 20, 36-53.

[2] Cited by Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment, (If Americans Knew.org, 1914) p.58

[3] Alan Hart, Zionism, The Real Enemy of the Jews.  Volume One.,  (Clarity Press, 2009) p. 122.

[4] Idid.,  p.123.

Apartheid is Apartheid

I grew up in an apartheid system. My small South Carolina town was surrounded by African Americans in the 1930s and 40s, and I never knew them.  I had no black friends. Where would I have ever met one?  We were citizens of the same country but we lived in separate communities.  I went to the new high school on the highway while “they” attended class in a fire trap out of sight.  It was apartheid, only we did not call it that.  The appropriate term was “segregation,” or “Our way of life.”

It wasn’t even total segregation. Whites and blacks worked in the same mill, spent our money in the same stores and took the same drivers license test.  It was more like “sitting down segregation.”  We stood in the same lines in the bank, the Post Office and checking out at the grocers.   All that was OK, but our version of apartheid forbid our sitting down together in the same room. Doctors had separate waiting rooms. Restaurants served either blacks or whites, but never both. And never would “they” have come to “our” church.  Race separated us far more than our faith united us.

Apartheid has many faces.  We did not have twenty five foot walls or white only roads, but the people with power did create legal and social systems that favored the powerful and discriminated against those who were under our control.

Today, Israel screams when any hint of the word apartheid is mentioned, pointing out  small differences between its apartheid practice and that of South Carolina in the 30s and South Africa in  the 80s. However, Israel destroys Palestinian homes to build Jewish only homes in their place. They have Jewish only schools and spend $1,100 a year to educate a Jewish child and $190 for each Palestinian.[1]  Israel builds Jewish only roads on which a Palestinian is not allowed to drive or even cross and builds Jewish only cities that shrive on water taken from Palestinian aquifers.  So, what do you call it when a state strips a vast number of its population of their human rights solely on the basis that they are not Jewish?

Jimmy Carter called it apartheid.  Former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak    called it apartheid as did Israel’s chief negotiator, Tzipi Livni  Even John Kerry used the “A” word, until the Jewish lobby put the squeeze on him.  In fact, probably only those responsible for apartheid and benefiting from it refuse to call it what it is and they will punish anyone who does.

Still, the most charitable word to describe what is happening to the Palestinians under Israeli control today is apartheid.

Thomas Are

May 5, 2014

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[1] Nada Elia, The Brian of the Monster, Cited in, The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, Edited by Audrea Lim  p. 58.

Don't Talk About It and It Doesn't Exist

It’s OK to talk about the weather but do not mention climate change, seems to be the program of many politicians. Just don’t talk about it and it won’t exist, in spite of the evidence.

Keep the poor out of sight and there are no consequences to balancing the budget on their backs. Never mind that there are five applicants for every job.  Cut their safety net and they no longer exist on the welfare rolls. Never admit that, except for when, where and to whom we were born, any one of us could very well be one of those homeless men lined up for a hand out on main street. Don’t talk about it and we never have to think about it.

Millions now, for the first time, have health insurance due to what is called Obamacare.  But, don’t talk about the benefit to them. Rather focus on one part of the budget which may be strained by universal compassion. After all, it’s not my dad waiting in pain until someone gets him to an emergency room.

And most blatant of all, don’t refer to the occupied territories as “occupied territories.”   Israel’s ruthless military moves into Palestine with brutal force, plants over half a million settlers in West Bank, steals land, labor and resources for the benefit of Jews only, forces local inhabitants through hundreds of checkpoints, imprisons thousands without charge or trial, humiliates and even tortures children. But if it’s not talked about, it doesn’t exist. Israeli leaders and their supporters can walk around as though they are proud of who they are and what they are doing. 

When Chris Christie “slips up” and refers to the West Bank as “Occupied territory,” he immediately apologizes to Jewish money saying that he misspoke. What he really meant to talk about was the “disputed territory.”  Of course, that which is disputed sounds like  two legitimate claims to the same land. The only people who see this as a dispute are Israeli occupiers, those who think the writers of the early part of the Jewish Bible speak for God and a few million Christian Zionist who choose not to talk about the rest of the Old Testament which speaks of love, justice and compassion. The requirement of being a blessing to others is not binding if you don’t talk about it.

Columbia College Professor, Lymen Chehade,  had his class canceled by the school administration because he did talk about it. He showed the Oscar nominated film 5 Broken Cameras which focused on the peaceful demonstrations of Arab Christians and Muslims against the pain of Israel’s apartheid wall cutting through their village. The most frightening part for Israel was the pictures showing violence, terrorism and settler brutality.  It’s hard to keep actions invisible when there are pictures.

And heaven forbid that Mahmoud Abbas, representing the Palestinian people, would apply for recognition as a state by the United Nations. That which strikes fear in the heart of Benjamin Netanyahu, is not the word “state,” or even “United Nations,” but, the thought of “recognition.”  When your legitimacy depends upon your actions being unrecognized, any little crack in the door threatens to being down the whole house. So, to hell with academic freedom, an independent media and the open debate among politicians.  Such things just cannot be talked about or they might very well be seen to exist and need addressing.

                                                                                    Thomas Are    

                                                                                    April, 5, 2014

Christie's Bridge, Netanyahu's diet

It’s been a half a year and Chris Christie is still in the news. At least his administration is in trouble because they shut down two of three access lanes to the George Washington Bridge. Last August, a deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, emailed David Wildstein, the governor’s appointee to the Port Authority, saying, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”  Wildstein responded, “Got it.” And, “it” caused a huge traffic jam for days and the question remains, “Did Christie know about it?” 

Americans just won’t put up with dirty tricks like deliberately causing people to wait in lines for hours to get to New York and if Christie knew about it, he is not fit to be president of the United States.  We have high standards.

On the other hand, people in Gaza wait in their cars all day, every day, or stand in line for six to twelve hours, holding a jug, hoping to get enough fuel oil to cook supper for their children.  Standing in line is a deliberate tactic in Gaza and everyone, including Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, and Barack Obama, President of the United States knows who is responsible. We just don’t care enough to discuss it.  Our standards for Israel are pretty low.

The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs tells us:

Fuel shortages are a chronic problem for Gaza’s 1.7 million imprisoned residents. Israel controls the entry of all fuel supplies into the Gaza strip. Israelis living just a few miles away enjoy plentiful supplies and easy access to fuel, while in Gaza fuel for heating, emergency generators, vehicles and cooking are dependent on infrequent deliveries.  Often only smuggled fuel is available --- and fuel coming through Israel is unaffordable.[1]

While every necessity in Gaza requires waiting in long lines, whether for fuel, getting to school or trying to see a doctor, the worst of it is seeking food.

Food shortage is a policy of Israel and it has been for years.  Not unlike the administrative powers of the Christie administration, five years ago, the administrative powers of Israel described Israel’s plan for Gaza.  “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”[2]  Of course, Israel puts the spin on it that its goal is to prevent starvation.  But cutting food trucks allowed into Gaza from 400 trucks a day to 67 exposes its true purpose. Netanyahu’s health ministry has determined that Gazans need only 2,276 calories a day to keep from starving. Thus, that is all they get, except of course, when Israel closed the crossing completely for ten days to celebrate Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), when no trucks were allowed in. Israel’s “diet” program simply does not express benevolence to anyone … except those who deliberately choose to be blind to the everyday crimes against the people of Gaza.

Targeting fertilizer plants and chicken farms in the bombing of 2008-09 caused massive food insecurity, but raised little ire in the US media, our halls of government or even in our churches.

On the first day of the Gaza offensive, Yoav Galant, the commander in charge, explained the aim succinctly: it was to “send Gaza decades into the past.” Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai may have been thinking in similar terms when months before Operation Cast Lead, he warned that Israel was preparing in inflict on Gaza a Holocaust.”[3]

Eighteen year olds with machine guns holding trucks at crossing points until milk, fruit and vegetables spoil in the hot sun has little to do with security.  The International Committee of the Red Cross reports: “Chronic malnutrition in Gaza.” No surprise.  What is surprising is that good Americans who would not tolerate the government of New Jersey shutting down two lanes of a bridge, which caused a traffic jam, will sit by silently while the government of Israel shuts down Gaza’s only supply of fuel, food, seed, water, medicines and electricity and has done so for years. Christie gets boos at the Super Bowl and Netanyahu gets standing ovations at the joint meeting of congress.

Like the people of Jersey waiting to get across the bridge, the people of Gaza wait. They have been waiting for 65 years.

                                                                                                Thomas Are

                                                                                                March 3  2014

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[1] Mohammed Omar, Gaza’s Paralysis of Lines, The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December , 2013, p.14.

[2] Dov Weisglass, advisor to Ehud Olmart,  Reported in  Israel’s Starvation Diet for Gaza. The Electronic Intifada, January 12, 2014.

[3] Israel’s Starvation Diet for Gaza. The Electronic Intifada, January 12, 2014.

Ecumenical Deal in Action

This is not the blog I had hoped to be writing tonight. I attended a Presbytery

meeting today.  The Presbytery was asked to concur in an overture to our General

Assembly requesting that the Presbyterian Church divest from Caterpillar, Motorola and
Hewlett-Packard, all companies making a profit by selling equipment for Israel’s brutal
military occupation of Palestine  The motion lost by one vote; 105 to 104. The good
news is that in all of the debate, no one sought to justify Israel’s conduct. The most
passionate argument seems to be,  “We must not offend our Jewish brothers and sisters.”

Jewish scholar Marc Ellis calls this the “ecumenical deal.”  In order for Christians to have dialogue with Jews, we must first agree to never put the conduct of Israel on the table.  To criticize Israel is offensive and anti-Semitic.  Nevertheless, speaker after speaker placed his or her friendship with the Jewish community above taking steps to call Israel into accountability.  (If my neighbor is abusing his children, it might be time for me to re-evaluate my relationship with my neighbor).

We heard, I don’t like what Israel is doing but this is not the way to address it.  Of course, divestment worked in 1985 in South Africa. That government cleaned up its act without a shot being fired.  The value of divestment is not to make Caterpillar or Israel go broke, but exposure.  Most Americans and most Christians sitting in our pews don’t have the foggiest idea of what is happening in Israel/Palestine, not only in our name but with our money. Boycott and divestment is publicity.

Some insisted on a “better way”.  I kept waiting for that better way to be suggested but after defeating the motion to divest, the better way no longer seemed important.  The message we sent to the Palestinians today was,  Sorry about your pain, wish we could do something to help, but you must understand that we do not want to offend our Jewish neighbors.

I remember the story of someone asking a mother if she loved all her children the same.  “Oh no,” she cried. “I love most the one who is sick until she gets well, the one who is injured until he is healed, the one who is afraid until she feels secure and the one who is hungry until he has been fed. Sounds more like Jesus than our presbytery.

Our Jewish neighbors are no longer suffering. They live in comfortable houses, are well fed and enjoy the benefits of civilized life.

On the other hand, Palestinians are suffering. They are sick and injured, afraid and hungry. I venture that none of the objections to divestment would have made sense if presented before a child whose father had been killed by an Israeli sniper or his brother locked up in an Israeli prison or his home demolished by a Caterpillar bulldozer, his school and hospital locked up on the other side of a wall and whose baby brother died at a check point because his mother was forced to give birth in the back seat of a car.  

So, what do we say to our Christian brothers and sisters of Palestinian who are asking for divestment? Possibly we want to send them a message that, “We know better what is good for you than you do.” Or, “You just don’t understand how important our comfort is to us.”  “We do not like what those bull dozers do to you, but we have a church in Peoria that depend upon the money donated by Caterpillar employees. After all, we have to look out for the church.”  

One debater said, “The timing is off.  John Kerry is in the midst of peace talks.”   I want to say,   My God, we have been in peace talks for decades. As long as the US supports building settlements, walls and check points, talking will not produce peace.  The two state solution is dead. It is buried beneath deceptions, broken agreements, and a one sided “honest broker.” Israel has sworn against any state of Palestine unless Israel controls its borders, freedom of movement, water and labor.  As it stands now, what Israel wants is impossible and what is possible is unacceptable to Israel or the Palestinians Someone has to take a stand.  I wish it had been our Presbytery.

Thomas Are

February 8, 2014

 

Sharon Truly Did Represent Israel

I like Thomas Friedman. When I read his book, That Used To Be Us, I was ready to nominate him for president.  However, when it comes to anything critical of Israel, he struggles. Thomas Friedman recently referred to Arial Sharon as representing the stages of Israel.[1]  I think he is right about Sharon representing the mindset of Israel, I just don’t see the progression Friedman seems to suggest in his opinion piece.

Sharon was a “warrior” for what Friedman calls:

the enduring struggle for survival ... there is a Jewish state today because of hard men, like Ariel Sharon, who were ready to play by the local rules … and had contempt for those in Israel or abroad who he believed did not understand the kill or be killed nature of their neighborhood.

The results of Israel’s war of Independence left over 500 Palestinian villages totally destroyed, 750,000 driven from their homes and crowded into refugee camps to live more like caged animals than as fellow human beings for the rest of their lives. Ariel Sharon was the heart of Israel. I am surprised that Friedman is willing to admit it.

When Palestinian farmers, still clutching land deeds and holding keys to their homes, were forced to live on about 11 cents a day, slipped back into the new State of Israel to “steal” a little of the crops they themselves had planted, Sharon called them thieves and drove them back by force. When a Jewish mother and her two children were killed, Sharon was called upon to retaliate.

As commander of Unit 101, a newly formed reprisal and sabotage group, this “warrior without restraints,” ordered his men to cause maximum damage to the village of Qibia. With great pride, these defenders of Israel locked frightened Palestinians in their homes and massacred sixty-nine, mostly women and children, to teach them a lesson about Israel.

During his second stage, in which Friedman said Sharon, “embodied a fantasy that, with enough power, the Israelis could rid themselves of the Palestinian threat, that they could have it all.”  Sharon proudly announced his plans:

                We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlement,

                in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements, right across the

                West Bank, so that in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations, nor the United States,

                nobody, will be able to tear it apart.[2]

 

Twenty five years later he was still saying:

              Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements

              because everything we take now will be ours. Everything we don’t grab will go to them. [3]

 

Sharon vigorously expanded the settlements enterprise on Palestinian land, invaded Lebanon and was responsible for the massacre of as many as 2,000 helpless refugees, again, mostly women and children, in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, with countless others raped and brutalized.   

Perhaps I am being unfair. Prime Minister Sharon did pull the Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, which was proclaimed as a great sacrifice by Israel for peace. However, Friedman fails to mention that at the same time, Israel was building 13,000 units for Jews only on Palestinian land in the West Bank, and those moving from Gaza were offered $227,000 to relocate. Palestinians driven from their homes in 1948 and 1967 were given no compensation for the lives and land taken from them by force. Sharon’s disengagement was hardly a liberation. It’s hard to feel liberated when surrounded by a hostile army.  Israel maintained control of all crossing points, sea and air space. Gaza remained alive only as an outdoor prison.  Israel walled in Gaza, continued to control all access in and out of Gaza, cut off fuel, electricity and restricted the flow of humanitarian aid including medical supplies. Gaza may have been evacuated but remained under Sharon’s total control

I fail to see the evidence of a more peace minded Sharon as Friedman writes, “having, orchestrated a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza,  he (Sharon) surely would have tried something similar in the West Bank if he had not had a stroke.”  This is the man who, “ on the day that Rabin shook hands with Arafat, vowed that he would destroy the Oslo Peace process.”[4] 

And, if he did pull out of West Bank, what would be left?  A land checkered with Jewish only roads, checkpoints, walls and military regulations that keep Palestinians locked up in isolated bantustans.

But, what could you expect from a man  who, back in 1980, convened a meeting with some of his top generals and other top military and security people and had them sign a blood oath which committed them to fight to the death to prevent any government of Israel withdrawing from the West Bank.[5]

Friedman references a biography of Sharon entitled, “He doesn’t Stop at Red Lights.” I guess not. The cross street is packed with slow moving compacts and he is driving a tank. He goes to war when he is the only one with an army.

As far as I can tell, Sharon’s life remained dedicated to Zionism. He seemed to believe that Jews were God’s chosen people to be privileged above all others. To him, there were only two kinds of people: Jews and everybody else. He did not want a Jewish state, at least not one with all the restrictions imposed by the Hebrew prophets. He wanted a Zionist state.  I never saw evidence to indicate otherwise.  Friedman is right about one thing. Sharon truly did represent Israel.

Thomas Are

January 30, 2014

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[1] The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 17, 2014. p. A-11.

[2] Max Blumenthal, How Ariel Sharon Shaped Israel’s Destiny, The Nation, January 11, 2014.

[3] Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

[4] Alan Hart, Zionism, The Real Enemy of the Jews, (Clarity Press, Atlanta, 2009) Volume One., p. 40.

[5] Alan Hart, Zionism, The Real Enemy of the Jews, (Clarity Press, Atlanta, 2009) Volume Three., p. 228.

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Kerry's Peace Plan

   

I like John Kerry. Voted for him and sent a little money for his presidential run against George W. Bush.  But if he were to ask me what I thought about his performance as Secretary of State, I would give him and A and an F.

 

I would say yes to his leadership with Iran. After years of no talking and saber-rattling, Iran has come to the table and said let’s work together to avoid another war in the Middle East.  Against those in Congress who side with Netanyahu and against their own president and in spite of AIPAC’s crying wolf, Kerry has brought about an agreement with Iran to greatly limit its nuclear program and open its facilities to regular inspections. For the first time in decades, the streets no longer rumble with shouts of  “Death to America”.  Some say Kerry deserved the Nobel Peace prize. In spite of Israel-firsters in Congress and no let up from AIPAC, to sabotage his efforts, most people in the world agree that Kerry has brought us to the closest point of peaceful relations with Iran in years.

 

However, I would give him an F on his so called “Peace Talks” when it comes to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. He talks borders when Israel announces plans to destroy 2,000 more Arab homes in order to construct 828 Jewish only homes in East Jerusalem plus 20,000 more in the West Bank.[1]

 

The issue is still the Israeli occupation. Israel’s separation wall has turned Palestinian towns and villages into prisons. Gaza continues to live in inhuman conditions, under permanent blockade. Settlements gobble up homes and land. Military checkpoints and road blocks by the hundreds humiliate Palestinians trying to get to work or home and hundreds of thousands of refugees still live in camps.

 

Also part of the reality is Israeli disregard of international law and Palestinian citizens

living within Israel suffering from discriminatory policies.

 

Israel justifies its actions as self-defense. It is true that some Palestinians have followed

the way of armed resistance which Israel uses as a pretext to accuse all Palestinians of

being terrorist. However, as many have pointed out, if there was no occupation, there

would be no resistance.

                     

Rachelle Marshall responds to Netanyahu’s saying, “pressure must be put upon the Palestinians” to bring them to a point of peace.

           

It’s hard to imagine what additional pressure could be imposed on the Palestinians as they watch their land disappearing under Israeli homes and golf courses, and their economy remain shackled by Israeli restrictions.[2]

 

And Kerry is talking about borders, movable borders.

 

Does he not know that Gaza has borders.  Yet, because of Israel’s air, sea and land blockade:

 

Hardships steadily increase for the nearly two million Gazans who are being deliberately kept cold and hungry by the blockade Israel imposed seven years ago… Gaza’s only remaining power plant was shut down in early November for lack of affordable fuel… Sewage stations unable to operate their electric pumps are overflowing, and in late November a neighborhood in Gaza was  flooded with 3.5 million cubic feet of raw sewage.[3]

 

With winter in full blast and no electricity for 12 hours a day, no fuel for heat and sewage flooding through your home, with settlers destroying your olive trees, it’s ludicrous to talk about Israeli security.

 

What needs to be put on the table is not a discussion of borders, but Israel’s theft of Palestinian land and resources and Israel’s humiliating treatment of the Palestinian people.   Until that is addressed, borders are irrelevant.

 

 

                                                Thomas Are

                                                January 19, 2014

 

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[1] Rachelle Marshall, Kerry faces Down Israel and its Lobby to Achieve Agreement with Iran,  The Washington Report on Middle east Affairs. January 2014. p. 9.

[2] Ibid. p.9

[3] Ibid.  p.9.