It is amazing how little was said in US mainstream
media about the decision by Israel’s supreme court recognizing some
non-Orthodox conversion to Judaism. Israeli and European papers
debated this issue clearly revealing that Israel is the only country in
the world that recognizes members of a particular religion as nationals
of the state entitled to automatic citizenship regardless of where they
live and what their current citizenship happens to be (or even if they
want such ‘right’).
Despite a concerted propaganda campaign with
billions spent, most Jews chose to live outside Israel and most are
non-Zionist or even anti-Zionist. Zionists thus made sure on many
occasions that persecuted Jews have only one place to migrate (e.g. by
pressuring the US Congress and the German government not to increase
Soviet Jewish migration to the West but to insist on migration to
Israel).
This issue, poorly understood by many because of a
media blackout on open discussion is at the core of the failure of US
foreign policy. Prior to Truman (who was pressured by an emerging
Zionist lobby), no US president supported Zionism. Such support
is actually contrary to US constitutional mandates separation of Church
and state and not promoting religion. Yet, even Truman and those
who came after him to support Israel because of the cold war,
understood that such a state was created based on a deep injustice to
the native Palestinians(Christians and Muslims).
The West Bank and Gaza together comprise 22% of
historic Palestine but even here, some 450,000 Jewish colonial settlers
control over half the land while 3.5 million Palestinians are squeezed
into smaller and smaller areas not different from Indian reservations
(now being surrounded by walls and fences). The other 78% of Palestine
is now home to 4.5 million Jews and 1.2 million remaining Palestinians.
But those Palestinians are by no means equal Israeli citizens (even if
they have a right to vote). Even excluding the continuous racist
paranoia about their “demographic threatâ€Â, nearly one quarter of them
are considered by law ‘present absentees’ meaning that they did not
join their relative in Lebanon or Gaza as refugees but their land is
confiscated and turned over for Jewish National Fund use under the
‘absentee property’ basic law. Over 100 of these remaining Palestinian
towns and villages are ‘unrecognized’ by the state and thus receive no
governmental services (water, roads, schools, electricity etc.).
As for Palestinian refugees, over 500 of their
villages and towns were destroyed (see PalestineRemembered.com) and now
they constitute two-thirds of the 9 million Palestinians in the
world. This process, while accelerated under the fog of five
wars, never stopped. In the past four years alone, over 16,000
Palestinians lost their homes by Israeli army demolitions (per the
Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, ICAHD.org), a process now
going unchecked and unreported since the Palestinians declared a
cease-fire and the myth of “peace process†resumed. How is it
fair that any Jew, including converts to Judaism (now adding
non-orthodox conversions), can come live on Palestinian land while
Palestinian Christians and Muslims are denied their basic right to
return? Studies show that such return of native people is possible and
desirable without displacing Israelis and
even improving standard of living for all.
This basic injustice of political Zionism is the
reason for continued instability in the Middle East. It is why a
Zionist like Henry Kissinger would state that under his leadership, the
policy was to get Iranians and Iraqis “to kill each other†(the
Iran-Iraq war took one million lives and the US give aid to both
parties!). It is why Zionists like Richard Perle and Paul
Wolfowitz were instrumental in violating the UN charter by invading
Iraq. In 1996-1997, these same folks explained the benefit to
Israel. In one of their studies, they said it would be difficult
to sell this program of ‘preemption’ and hegemony ‘save for a Pearl
Harbor like event’ (Project for the New American Century). These
words uttered before 9/11/01 are chilling when one combines them with
the fact that so far we spent $250 billion to support Israel’s
destruction of Palestine and $160 billion for the occupation and
destruction of Iraq (not counting the 11 years of destruction before
the last invasion that took one million Iraqi lives due to US led
sanctions and infrastructure destruction). The costs have been
staggering in terms of lives lost and destroyed: thousands of Israelis
and Americans and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Iraqis.
All for what? Is it so that the ‘only democracy in
the Middle East’ can decide in its Knesset and Courts whether Reform
Jews are equivalent to Orthodox Jews in their conversion and thus
“rights†to settle on Palestinian land? Is it so that we can
continue to prop up undemocratic regimes like Egypt and Jordan so long
as they have signed peace treaties with Israel or if they keep the oil
flowing at cheap prices while propping rich US military and other
corporations (e.g. Saudi Arabia)? Is it not time for everyone to
demand a rational US foreign policy that recognizes native rights and
puts people rigst ahead of corporate greed? And for those of us
(Palestinian or otherwise) who are not part of the elite, is it not
time we recognize that this is an existential struggle shared by all
humans?
