Double Standard Israel-Palestine Trashes America's Own Values

It's been like this for decades: What America preaches about around the world does not hold for Israel. All charters, laws, treaties, norms, resolutions, and regulations have been violated with total impunity by Israel.

Why? Because white anti-semitic America and Europe - the perpetrators of the Holocaust -  have rid  themselves of their Jewish "problem" by dumping it on Palestine and the Arab world. Hence, they are determined to continue colluding with the Israeli project of deporting most (since they keep some as a cheap labor minority) Palestinians out of their country, erasing Palestine from the map, and establishing their biblical-vintage, purely Jewish, supremacist colony. It began in the 1920s, continued throughout the 1930s and 1940s, with a first installement of ethnic cleansing in 1948, followed by another one in 1967, and now on the verge of completion in 2023. The Al-Aqsa Mosque will be demolished and a third Jewish temple erected in its place. Then the real Messiah will come in fulfillment of biblical garbage from the Bronze Age of humanity.

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America: Live Up to Your Own Principles When Dealing with Palestine

Daoud Kuttab

Tue, October 24, 2023

I have always believed and preached throughout the Middle East America’s principles of the rule of law, equality, freedom of expression, and the universality of human rights. I set up a media NGO, Community Media Network, that both trains and gives airtime on Radio al Balad and the AmmanNet website for journalists, youth, women, and marginalized groups to express themselves in an independent and professional way. CMN is the only media outlet in the entire Middle East and North Africa that has received the prestigious Journalism Trust Initiative stamp from Reporters Without Borders.

As an American Palestinian working in the Middle East and the proud executive director of the Palestinian version of Sesame Street, I have, in my years teaching at Al Quds University and as board chair of the investigative journalism group Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, trained and supervised many Palestinian and Arab journalists in the basics of professional journalism. I have proudly used the American First Amendment as an example of a masterful statement in defense of a core civil right.

This is why I am sad to report that I have seen every one of these principles shattered over the past week by American officials as they take Israel’s side so aggressively. Without necessarily cheering it on, they have been implicitly green-lighting acts of violence against Palestinian civilians and refraining, at least in public, from calling for de-escalation and the need to break the cycle of violence. These are not the ideals I have been preaching.

What we are seeing today coming from Washington is administration officials encouraging a four-times criminally charged prime minister whose defense minister publicly said they will cut off water, electricity, and food from an entire people. President Joe Biden’s visit to reassure Israelis is one thing, but his refusal to call for a de-escalation or a ceasefire (his U.N. representative vetoed such a resolution) has produced deep concern and an anti-American feeling throughout the region. Many worry that his visit and the continuing unreserved support for Israel he expressed in his Thursday night speech will give Israeli hawks the green light to continue brutalizing an already terrified civilian population that has no place to go.

While Palestinians, like all people under occupation, have an internationally legitimate right to resist their occupiers, the atrocities, whether by Palestinian fighters or others, are wrong, and they need to be called out and condemned. I add my voice without reservation in condemning war crimes against civilians. All humans are created in God’s image, and we are called by our maker to preserve life, not to end it.

Fairness and equality, however, require that everyone who has demanded the condemnation of acts by nonstate actors like Hamas must also be willing to demand the same from state actors.

Hamas committed war crimes, according to Amnesty International Secretary-General Agnès Callamard. But experts say that Israel’s blockade of Gaza and ordered evacuation violate international law as well. “Collective punishment is a war crime. Israel is doing that by cutting electricity, water, food, blocking aid from entering the Gaza Strip,” said Human Rights Watch’s Omar Shakir.

Even the “‘moderate”’ Israeli President Isaac Herzog has arrogantly said there are no innocent Palestinians thus denying Palestinian humanity and justifying killing noncombatants. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said during a press conference. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It is absolutely not true. They could have risen. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”

Both Hamas are Israel are guilty of human rights violations, and everyone must be careful not to treat Palestinians as children of a lesser God. Human rights are inviolate, and all violators must be held accountable.

America cannot wash its hands of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. When an American Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in May 2022, the United States did little to bring the culprits to account. Shireen, who like me was born in the Biblical town of Bethlehem, had become a popular reporter because of her effort to convey the news as impartially as possible. Washington, with the exception of principled senators like Chris Van Hollen, who insisted on the investigation and accountability for Shireen, allowed the Israelis to get away literally with murder without even holding a proper investigation. This gave the world the signal that Israel will be treated differently even when it comes to the killing of an American journalist.

Another recent example of U.S. policy that Palestinians see as hypocritical but is probably little known to most Americans involves the decision by the Biden administration to allow Israel into the visa waiver program. This program, run by the Department of Homeland Security, permits most nationals of other nations to travel to the United States for 90 days without obtaining a visa. Israel had sought inclusion into this program for many years.

But the waiver comes with a catchall: Americans visiting participating countries must be granted reciprocity and treated with equal respect. Four Democratic senators warned that Israel was not meeting this condition. Haaretz recently reported on a Palestinian American man traveling in Israel with his children being blindfolded and handcuffed for 11 hours. An Arab American civil rights organization is suing over Israel’s inclusion.

My own family members have been caught up in this. They were among some Palestinian Americans who found themselves trapped and unable to get out of their homes in Jerusalem, while Jewish American settlers literally within meters of them were allowed free access to Israeli airports and crossing points. It was hard for my pregnant daughter, who had an extremely sick child, to be trapped like that. She chose to go back to the United States to give birth and ensure that her sick child was treated well.

Is it any wonder that Palestinians see the United States standing properly for its principles in Ukraine but see a blatant double standard when it comes to us?

Palestinian nonviolent efforts over the years have also been thwarted. My cousin, a nonviolent activist and Jerusalem native named Mubarak Awad, was deported by the Yitzhak Shamir government in 1996. I know the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement is controversial in the United States, but it should not be. Boycott efforts are nonviolent. And yet, boycott efforts internationally are fought with false claims of boycott calls being antisemitic. Various U.S. states have passed anti-American laws (possibly violative of the First Amendment guarantees) that ban boycotts and punish those who support the BDS movement. This Palestinian civil society’s nonviolent response was inspired by the South African resistance to apartheid. There are many more instances of Palestinian attempts at nonviolence, including some of my heroes like Issa Amro from Hebron and Sami Awad from Bethlehem. They are regularly harassed by Jewish settlers and at times by Israeli security.

Peter Beinart has cited examples of nonviolence in a detailed article in The New York Times. Both political and nonviolent activities are restricted by Israel which has refused to deal with a 75-year-old refugee crisis it has caused, a 56-year occupation its troops are maintaining, and a 16-year unauthorized siege of Gaza. In the meantime, the Israeli army’s almost daily shooting of Palestinians and protecting Jewish settler pogroms have become unbearable including to many Israelis and American Jews.

Even attempting to follow the international legal remedies has failed to produce any tangible results. The United States has even opposed the International Criminal Court in the Hague from addressing legitimate documented Palestinian charges of apartheid and the illegal Jewish-only colonial settlement enterprise while speeding up cases against Russian crimes in Ukraine.

But for right now, the most urgent call is for the respect of the law of war as set out by international treaties and entrusted to the International Committee for the Red Cross and U.N. member states. The United States must call for an end to indiscriminate attacks (an Israeli army spokesman admitted that their attacks are aimed at damage not accuracy) avoid civilians and provide the provision of a humanitarian corridor. The Internationally banned white phosphorus should not be allowed to be used by Israel, as has been documented and condemned by Human Rights Watch. Hamas should be strongly encouraged to release noncombatant hostages immediately and to refrain from its own indiscriminate rockets even though over a thousand Palestinian civilians are held without charge or trial.

Once a ceasefire is reached, the sooner the better for saving lives and reasserting hope in international law, serious efforts must be exerted to find a political solution that can lead to the end of occupation and the creation of a democratic and independent Palestinian state alongside a safe Israel. In this regard, the U.S. president (whose rights in this area are exclusive) should instruct his representative at the U.N. not to oppose a call for recognizing Palestine as a full member of the U.N. with the goal of pushing representatives of the state of Palestine—President Mahmoud Abbas and his team—to negotiate with their Israeli counterparts on all issues of becoming good neighbors. There is no issue more in sync with America’s principles than that.

When a Holocaust Survivor Speaks the Truth about Israel

 

Jewish Settlers = Muslim Hamas. NO DIFFERENCE

Ibrahim Wadi, 62, and his son Ahmad, 24, were on their way to a funeral for four Palestinians shot dead by Israeli settlers in their occupied West Bank community, when their car came under attack.

The father and son were driving through the small village of Qusra, just south of Nablus, which has become a focal point of violence over recent days, when they themselves were fired upon by armed settlers on Thursday. The men were transferred to a nearby hospital and died of their wounds soon after.

They are among at least 61 people, including children, to be killed in the occupied West Bank since the October 7 Hamas attacks. More than 1,250 have been injured. Hamas says it is killing innocent Israelis out of revenge for 75 years of dispossession and Jewish brutality. Jewish Settlers say they are killing innocent Palestinians out of revenge for Hamas's terrorism. I wonder who is a terrorist and who is not.

Jewish settlers believe they are God's chosen people and that Palestine was theirs some 3,000 years ago (IMHO: biblical Bullshit). Muslim radicals believe theirs is the final prophecy and that Palestine has always been Muslim (IMHO: Islamic bullshit). Palestine was ruled by Jews for only some 300 years during the two Jewish enemy kingdoms Judah and Israel long long time ago (1100 BC-800 BC) during the Bronze Age. Palestine was under Muslim rule for several centuries between 640 AD and 1099 AD (Arab rule), then again between 1289 AD and 1918 AD (under successive Seljuk, Mamluk, and Ottoman rule).

While Israel is wantonly and deliberately killing civilian Palestinians in the concentration camp of Gaza, supposedly in revenge for Hamas's attack of October 7, terrorist settlers are also killing civilian Palestinians in the West Bank.

Hani Odeh, Qusra’s mayor says that Jewish terrorist settlers roam freely in the village under the protection of Israeli police. Odeh contacted Israeli officials beforehand who told him to take a different route than the one they would usually take, to avoid settlers in the area. But to Odeh’s surprise, the road to which they were diverted was filled with settlers, who eventually shot and killed Ahmad and Ibrahim in their car.

Odeh witnessed the terrorist settler attack happen from his own vehicle while Israeli soldiers patrolled the street. He went up to one officer, urging him to disperse the settlers, but no one did anything. He said it felt like a trap.

In other words, Jewish terrorism is just as bad as Muslim terrorism. They both argue they are acting out of anger and seek revenge. Just like the barbarity they both inherited from the biblical and koranic bullshit.

West Bank residents say they are fearful of a wave of violence from the Israeli military and security forces, as well as revenge attacks by the estimated 700,000 Jewish terrorist settlers living in the area. An Israeli military commander called what Jewish terrorist settlers had been doing as a “pogrom.”

Since Israel took control and occupied the West Bank in 1967 from Jordan following the six-day war, the West Bank territory, which residents hope will form part of a future Palestinian state, has been settled by ultra-religious fundamentalist extremists, often under official Israeli military protection.

As of mid-September this year, the United Nations has reported 798 settler-related terrorist incidents in the occupied territory, leading to 216 Palestinians injured. In the same period, Israeli forces killed 179 Palestinians in the West Bank.

Settler terrorists have long been accused of carrying out acts of violence against Palestinians. As well as killings, these attacks have included incidents of physical assault, property damage and harassment. Mayor Odeh insisted the aim of both "moderate" Israelis and the Jewish terrorist settlers is to drive Palestinians from their home and ultimately from the occupied West Bank.

Gaza Scene: How Israel Got its "Independence"

As you watch what Israel is doing to Gaza, note that is the exact same process that Jewish Zionist invaders used to gain their so-called "Independence". Nothing has changed since the 1930s and 1940s.

As Europeans coming from a continent at war, Jewish Zionists had money, weapons, and military institutions to back them. They had plenty of experience with Nazi brutality and methods of ethnic cleansing.

They entered illegally into Palestine and proceeded to evict Palestinians from their homes, villages and towns - EXCATLY AS THEY ARE DOING TODAY IN GAZA: Ordering the Palestinians to leave under threat of violence, bombing and killing them at will, herding people into refugee camps where they have stayed ever since.

Then to add insult to injury, the Zionists propagated the lie that the "Arabs" left of their own will - they called the Palestinians "arab" because to call them "Palestinians" would affirm a specific identity which the Zionists wanted to eradicate. To this day, Zionists say that, as "Arabs", Palestinians could just as well go to any Arab country and don't really have claims to Palestine, their country of birth. Perhaps, the "civilized" world that loves the Jews so much that it is letting them commit mass genocide should take them back: The "Israelis" are "European" and they can just leave Palestine alone and live happy lives in their countries of origin in Europe. Europeans have become so civilized that they no longer systematically massacre their Jews and discriminate against them. At the very least, they do not herd them into concentration camps. But Israel has specialized in herding the native Palestinians into refugee camps. Life in a Europe at peace and in the warmth of human rights and democracy is much much better than a life in constant state of war just to protect the colony these victims of racist Europe built in the Near East by raping and burning and looting historic Palestine.

Just like the Gazans of today, the Palestinians of the 1930s and 1940s were in large part rural villagers and farmers without any experience with war. Watching the Palestinians head to the south of Gaza, you will note that every other transportation means they use is a donkey or a mule. The Palestinians were "unsophisticated" according to western definitons of the term. They were not poor, but self-sufficient people living off their own work as artisans, farmers, middle class townspeople and a small urban elite, just like in neighboring Lebanon. Yet the fate of Lebanon under the French mandate, and without Zionists invading, raping and seizing land, was to build a state with institutions that prospered throughout the the 1940s-1970s period, until the Israelis decided to wipe out the Palestinian resistance sheltering in Lebanon's refugee camps. But the fate of Palestine under the British mandate was sealed long before, in 1917, when the crooks of the malevolent British empire decided to gift Palestine to its wealthy British Jewish elite of bankers. And the rest is a history of heartache, the colonial rape of the colonized, the displacement from happy vibrant lives in ancient millennial villages and towns to a life of misery in squalid refugee camps.

The barbrarity unleashed on Gaza by the "civilized" - and "civilizing" - Jewish occupiers of a land not theirs could be an explanation for why there is anti-semitism in the world. Hubris, arrogance, self-declared God's chosen people....Ever since the Hebrews began writing their desert hallucinations about God splitting oceans for them and giving them other people's lands in the fucking bible, the heartache began and continues to this moment, 3,000 years later. How can anyone still believe this shit and, worse yet, use it to annihilate an entire people who had done nothing to deserve this fate?