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Cookie Points
Not that I agree with everything Carter says. There obviously is apartheid within Israel too, not only in the occupied territories.
But anyhow, I’ll give him a serious bunch of cookie points for speaking some truth in his new book: Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
Carter via Democracy Now:
The alternative to peace is apartheid, not inside Israel, to repeat myself, but in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, the Palestinian territory. And there, apartheid exists in its more despicable forms, that Palestinians are deprived of basic human rights. Their land has been occupied and then confiscated and then colonized by the Israeli settlers. And they have now more than 205 settlements in the West Bank itself. And what has happened is, over a period of years, the Israelis have connected settlements with highways, and those highways make the West Bank look like a honeycomb and maybe a spider web. You can envision it. And in many cases, most cases, the Palestinians are prevented from using the highways at all, and in many cases, even from crossing the highways.
[..]
[I]n Israel and in Europe, these kind of issues are debated every day, in a most vehement way, particularly in Israel. Pros and cons, arguing back and forth, in the news media, television, radio, the major newspapers. Never, in this country, do you hear any of these issues proposed
publicly by an elected member of the House or the Senate or in the
White House or NBC or ABC or CBS, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times. Never. And I think it’s time for Americans to start looking at the facts about the Mid-East situation.
Most Americans hear only one side. The Israeli side. Until the issue of Palestinian rights is settled, nothing will change.”
and
I do not agree that these issues cannot be found in the mainstream media, at least in the good mainstream media
Many Americans are truly ignorant and are reduced to parroting something heard from a friend or the TV, true enough. Nevertheless, in my limited RL experience in the US, a surprising proportion are quite aware, of some aspects at least, as real news does percolate, or for other reasons – education, travel, books, gut feeling, sometimes, just a picture seen, etc. And I’m not referring to university graduates who jet about, not that they in fact are special or different.
What is disconcerting is the reaction to the topic. Many adopt a sorry, sighing pose, and say it is all horrible, we need peace, or alternatively, they need peace, while obviously being very uncomfortable with discussion of how peace might be achieved. The treat the Isr/Pal question as if it was a natural disaster, divorced from the scope of human affairs, and something you can’t insure against!
The Zionists, or the pro-Israeli people (as that is how they see it) evidence their knowledge as soon as they start to argue, which they willingly do, as they hold, they feel, the high ground of majority opinion and moral rightness.
All these people know not only what happens at checkpoints, but about repression, lack of rights, and so on, or if they don’t know precisely, they guess, and guess good, as my American X puts it. One picture of the Wall is ample material to provoke some understanding.
The nitty gritty is that critisizing Israel (except in the tired ‘strategic mistake’ or ‘incompetence’ line…) is un-American. In the conventional, politically correct, damped down world, the foreign policy of leaders is an accepted credo, as America is the most glorious, the freest, and the brightest place ever, how could her Leaders be wrong on this crucial matter? Bush may be an idiot, a liar, or a coke-head, or just a g-d Republican (and even 9/11 is gathering steam!) but the fact that Israel is a plucky little democracy resisting the Arab hordes to ensure its very existence is not really open to examination, although bickering around the edges is allowed. (Europeans are different but at heart no better, I’m not just bashing the US.)
Yet, the taboo is slowly breaking. All those signs!
Posted by: Noirette | Dec 3 2006 15:30 utc | 24
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