The Silence is Deafening - Part 2

Some of the comments about my submission need further clarification or rebuttal, in the spirit of dialogue, and correcting misconceptions.

The nationality of the victims, all 120 of them, was Palestinian, not Bosnian for example. So why not mention that simple fact? In the same breath, the responder had no hesitation mentioning Israelis, and then proceeded to accuse all "Arabs" of responsibilty for "death and suffering of Israelis"! The Sudanese, Syrians, Saudis, Moroccans, Yemenis and Egyptians?

It would be very convenient, for the Occupier, to ignore the "body count". What if it was the other way round? Let us see: 120 to 3. So to reverse the ratio, we need to have 4800 Israeli casualties! Should we still "get right away from things like comparative body counts"? Or do we Greens subcribe to what Dov Lior, Rabbi of Kiryat Arba, said: “A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail”?

I totally agree that we should "point out unbalanced language, misperceptions, misreadings", and I undertake to do so every time I find such on these pages. This is only part 2 (2600 words)!

For example there was a reference to the "staged al-Dura incident". This was the murder of a little child that I saw cowering behind a rock, with his father, on TV several years ago, as did millions of people. Muhammad Al-Durrah was his name. The facts are out there.

The issue was raised that we "Canadians to be too busy puzzling about Israeli-Palestinian strife.." But were we not puzzling over strife in East Timor, Tibet, Cyprus and Darfur? We are even sending our boys (and girls) to die in Afghanistan, a la Manley. It would be even more convenient for the Occupier if we were convinced that there was "indeed no way to resolve a problem". Let us just watch them fight it out, some would advocate, one side with Apaches and nuclear weapons (when the time comes) and the other with rifles. After all, "we do not appear to get anywhere in taking sides on who hit whom first, last, or hardest. When there is war, war is always unjust".

Greens will need to make up their minds: are we with human rights for ALL or are we not? Do we pick and choose when it comes to human rights? One we answer that question, then perhaps we could listen to the following wisdom:

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor" - Archbishop Desmond Tutu

"The Palestinians are resisting an occupation army just as the French, Dutch and others did during World War II." Gregg Felton

"The Palestinian problem is instead primarily one of colonisation and occupation - and the denial of self-determination and refugee rights. Those are the issues, rather than democracy, that the US and its allies have to address if they want to draw the poison of the conflict" Seumas Milne

"By failing to call an insurgency an insurgency, we have clung to a misreading of the situation that represents all violence by Muslims as criminal The west uses the pejorative tag "terrorist" to close off critical thought"- Alastair Crooke is a former British intelligence officer.
"Remember, one nation's terrorist is another nation's freedom fighter" -Antonia ZERBISIAS.

"How can actions designed to preserve the occupation regime be termed
defensive? Terrorism is a reaction. It is the responsibility of the world, and primarily of Europe,to stop the government of Israel. The world has the
means to do so, and it's time to show some will as well. A few months of economic embargo would suffice to convince the majority of Israelis of the wisdom of international intervention. Silence under the present circumstances means acquiescence" - Lev Grinberg

"New Genocide can be facilitated by economic sanctions. It means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people." - Arundhati Roy

"managing the media is an important way of getting your message across to a Western public that sympathises when Israelis are killed by Palestinian suicide bombers, while Palestinians are portrayed as a barbaric people who hate Israel and do not want peace." - Judith Brown

"The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.” - Gwynne Dyer

"If Israel is to remain democratic and Jewish, she must either let the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem go—or annex them all and grant Palestinians full rights as citizens in a binational state. Are Israeli Jews willing to practice in their country what American Jews preach in ours, equality and multiculturalism? Israel is free to choose her course. But America needs a Middle East policy Made in the USA, not in Tel Aviv" The American Conservative

"Now a Palestinian awakens in the morning, every morning, and sees the
monstrous wall that separates him from members of his family, from his
fields and orchards, from his business dealings; separates his children from
their school, sees his destitute piece of land robbed from him, his world
closed up, dark and devastated, and he certainly blames us, as well, who
were a party to the despicable undertaking of building the fence" Yossi Sarid

"The war that Sharon is waging is not aimed at the defeat of Palestinian terrorism but at the defeat of the Palestinian people and their aspirations for national self-determination" Henry Siegman

"Hope comes from heroic Palestinian parents who still, despite the occupation, do not bring their children up to hate, do not allow their children to see all Israelis as demons" Leah Tsemel is an Israeli lawyer

"The Zionist revolution has always rested on two pillars: a just path and an ethical leadership. Neither of these is operative any longer...A state lacking justice cannot survive. ... The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun." Avraham Burg — until recently Speaker of the Knesset.

"The first years of this 21st century have seen a systematic assault on Arab sovereignty and independence. Britain and France were the major powers which conspired to subdue and reorder the region to suit their interests. Today, they have been replaced by a new imperial partnership of the United States and Israel" Partick Seale

"Was it not the essence of the American Revolution to demand that British occupiers withdraw from the colonies, to reject partial and provisional agreements and insist that only a final peace agreement would do, and to hold high the right to fight against the occupying British army?" KATHLEEN CHRISTISON in Patronizing the Palestinians

"The threat, we are told, is existential - "they want to destroy us". Therefore our only response can be to destroy them. Anyone who disagrees is either naive, an enemy, or guilty of legitimising the use of violence.
Never have I seen insurgencies defeated by bombing" - Alastair Crooke

"If Israel makes a deal with the Arabs while it still has the upper hand and creates trade and personal ties throughout the region, it could become an established part of the neighbourhood and last a very long time. If not, then sooner or later it faces the fate of the Crusader states" - Gwynnne Dyer

"Without a doubt, on the basis of the concepts that I know and accept, Sharon's fence is a crime against humanity. There is no other way to define it" Yossi Sarid

"Jews like us must speak out. Remaining silent is no longer an option. We can no longer let our trauma, our deep fear of anti-Jewish hatred implanted in us through generations of persecution, make us remain quiet at the expense of truth" - Cecilie Surasky

"I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state" - Einstein

"The slogan 'Jewish state' (or commonwealth) is equivalent, in effect, to a declaration of war by the Jews on the Arabs." - Judah Magnus, the first Chancellor of Israel's Hebrew University

"Therefore, the claim by Zionists that the Holocaust required them to take over Palestine for the Jews to survive is just not true. Americans have been led to believe that the choice is a Jewish state or seeing Jews "driven into the sea." This is nonsense" - John Spritzler

"Israel's birth was in sin." Tanya Reinhart

"If apartheid ended, so can the occupation. But the MORAL FORCE and international pressure will have to be just as determined" Bishop Desmond Tutu

"Whatever form a Palestinian state takes, it must be viable as well as sovereign. It must control its borders and its basic resources (such
as water). It must possess territorial contiguity and, above all, the
ability to develop a viable economy. Palestinian failures aside, it is Israel that is the strong party, Israel that is the occupying power, Israel that seeks hegemony and control of the entire country. There is no symmetry here, not of power and not of responsibility under international law" - Jeff Halper

"What I do know is that a lot of decent people, without any anti- Semitic
baggage, are furious with Israel because of its oppression of the
Palestinians. There is simply no getting away from the fact that attitudes
toward Israel are changing as a result of its own shift towards the Zionism
of the extreme right and of the radical rabbis. In this sense, Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews. It is a tragedy that a state that was built as a haven for the Jewish people after the Holocaust is now one of the least safe places on earth for Jews to live in. Israel ought to withdraw from the occupied territories not as a favor to the Palestinians but as a favor to itself and to world Jewry for, as Karl Marx noted, a people that oppresses another cannot itself remain free" Avi Shlaim

"The most important lesson that Israel can learn from South Africa is that, in bringing an end to a violent conflict, you cannot choose your interlocutor. For a long time in South Africa, my predecessors and my party tried to pick those among the black African leaders with whom to negotiate. We made the mistake of negotiating with very good people, but who could not bring the majority of blacks into a negotiated agreement" - F W De Klerk

"It was not until the Apartheid government -- the side with the power -- gave up the dream of perpetuating white rule that the negotiations moved forward, and therefore it is up to Israel -- the side with the power -- to decide to end its occupation" Roelf Meyer

"Liberation must challenge the countries of the Western world so they reject the awful melange created by Israel - occupation, colonialization and ethnic discrimination. That kind of rejection would also be real support for peace and for the future of the Jewish people in the region" Amira Haas

"The decision on selective divestment is an incredibly brave one. It is a strong statement that Americans will no longer continue to fund the humiliation and brutality that Palestinians suffer every day" Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP)

"Israel's expansion includes ethnic cleansing. Palestinians who had lived in that land for centuries were driven out by systematic violence and terror aimed at ethnically cleansing what became a large part of the Israeli state." Livingston, Mayor of London

"The people who live there can see the results of 56 years of continuous ethnic cleansing, discrimination, a whole legal and practical apparatus that is the definition of apartheid. And yet within the media, the academy, and even the public consciousness, Israel is "the only democracy in the Middle East". In the original ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that took place in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled, the names of towns were changed. Towns were physically wiped out and reduced to rubble, and then planted over with European pine trees. The idea was at once to wipe out the past, to make it like it never existed, and simultaneously to change a Mediterrenean, Arab village into a European forest. It was the Jewish National Fund (JNF) that planted these pine trees, to wipe out the memory of the place and Europeanize it. For the sake of Jews and Arabs, the world has to play a role in dismantling apartheid. The world has to help. And the only way short of violence, which I am against, is pressure. To send a message that there is a price tag attached to apartheid. So the Arab Jews had to shed their Arab accents, and much worse and more painful, they had to accept that Arab culture is inferior to all other cultures" - Ilan Pappe

"We must do everything to ensure they never return, the old will die and the young will forget." attributed to Ben Gurion

"The occupation policy is immoral and contrary to the principles of democracy. We will not be part of this illegitimate policy. By our conscience and our sense of civic duty, we are bound to refuse. The occupation policy tramples upon Palestinians' basic human rights. It leads to the killing of Israelis and Palestinians, and turns our society into an impoverished, violent and terrorized society. We believe that there is another way" 250 Refusniks

"As the history of more than 50 years proves it, no just and lasting peaceful agreement can be made with an expansionist Israeli establishment. Therefore, there is no way out other than toppling that establishment. 700.000 Palestinians were cleansed out of Palestine by the Israeli forces. Those 700.000 were not given the right to stay were they were born. The massacre of Dir Yassin occurred before the dead line for accepting the UN partition. What do we do when an abandoned child is found? Social workers take care of it. The Palestinians were an abandoned people without the like of a Jewish Agency to lead it. It was the duty of the United Nation to recognize the fact and to take care of the abandoned people and protect them from the Israeli and
Jordanian predators. The Palestinian land, beyond the partition line was not for Israel to annex. However, exploiting the world trauma when the Holocaust horror was discovered, the Israeli government felt it was a propitious time to
exert its predator policies. Palestinians were abandoned and became "legitimate" target for Israel." Clement Leibovitz

"For decades, Israel has crushed the 3.5 million Palestinians living under military domination, beating them into submission while taking away their civil rights and their land. From 1986 to 1991 I served in the Israeli army in the occupied territories. During this period I was shocked and disgusted at what my comrades and I were repeatedly ordered to do to Palestinian civilians. To crush the uprising for independence and statehood, we were ordered to brutalize them. In one of our army bases in the West Bank, there was a mysterious room. Every day we watched Palestinians being led into it. After a couple of days our commanders would lead the Palestinians out, black and blue from bruises and their faces swollen. They resembled sacks of potatoes more than human beings. We later realized this room was a torture chamber" - Shamai Leibowitz

"The Palestinians do not need the world’s tears – they need people in organizations to stand up to the government and corporate leaders oiling the Zionist machine that violates Palestinians’ human right to self-determination in an independent, viable, Palestinian state. Remaining silent is a disservice to humanity…half the battle is just showing up." - Sonia Nettin

"The time has come to turn the memory of the Holocaust from an exclusively Jewish property into a world-wide human possession. The mourning, the anger and the shame must be turned into a universal message against all forms of genocide. The struggle against anti-Semitism must become a part of the fight against all kinds of racism, whether directed against Muslims in Europe or Blacks in America, Kurds in Turkey or Palestinians in Israel, or foreign workers everywhere." - Uri Avnery

"It doesn't take much to get yourself called an anti-Semite these days. A few years ago I wrote a play that questioned some cherished notions about Israel. My "self-hating Jew" badge arrived in the next edition of the Canadian Jewish News" Jason Sherman