[THS] Cutting Through the Confusion About Israel/Palestine

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25788.htm



Commit Yourself To The Truth

Cutting Through the Confusion About Israel/Palestine

By Richard Forer

June 22, 2010 "Information Clearing House" --  I was a member of a group that put
up a billboard criticizing Israel’s lethal use of force during Operation Cast Lead. A
college student wrote to us to tell us that he disagreed with our assessment of Israel’s
behavior. He asked that we remove the billboard. I replied to the student with the
following letter, some of which contains passages from my book.

Hi J,
Thank you for your letter. First, I assume you are Jewish. Is that correct? Before I get
into the specifics of your letter I want to talk about a few things you might find
interesting. I do so because everyone involved in the Israel-Palestine issue has the
potential to change the world from an arena of Us against Them into one of peace
and respect. But that requires undeviating self-honesty, which leads to compassion,
clarity and understanding. Most people do not take up the challenge of looking
deeply within for fear of what they might find. They revert to the safety of their
presumed identity and the beliefs and images that make up and reinforce their
identity. Attachment to a limited or exclusive identity always carries with it the
consciousness of Us against Them. The consciousness of Us against Them requires
that there be unending conflict.

Perhaps you have it within yourself to look beyond what you currently see as all sides
of the issue. I hope so because the lives of those who suffer on either side of the
conflict depend upon people like you. Peace is only possible when we care for people
on both sides equally. We do not have to like the other but we have to recognize that
he is just as entitled to self-determination as us, that he has the same human needs
for respect and dignity as do we. We also have to begin to understand and ask why
the other acts as he does. Does his motivation arise in a vacuum or does it arise in
relationship to our own behavior. Have we played roles in inciting his behavior? Until
we take responsibility for the parts we play in the drama of human suffering and as it
relates to the Israel-Palestine conflict, peace has no chance; and the people we claim
to care about will continue to suffer and die, now and into the bloody future, in
Israel, in Palestine and throughout the world. They will die and suffer because our
true goal is not their well being; our true goal is to maintain our presumed identity; it
is to confirm the beliefs and images that we incorrectly associate with our personal
and collective identity.

As long as we believe in a world of Us against Them we will see a world of Us against
Them. Our emotions, our attitudes toward others, the way we interpret events, what
we notice and what we don’t notice will mirror our world view, thereby confirming
and reinforcing it. In short, individually and collectively, we create the world we live
in. Thus, the great struggle all of us must take on, if we truly want peace and respect
between peoples, is to transform our consciousness from Us against Them to one of
tolerance and understanding.

To be honest your letter can only fully be answered with a comprehensive look at the
history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The book I have completed would be a good
reply but that is beyond the scope of our discussion for now. Obviously you are very
passionate and concerned about this situation. With that in mind I have included at
the end of this letter a list of some well-researched books on the subject. Most of
these writers have come to similar conclusions. Most of them are Jewish. Cypel and
Hirst are famous journalists from France and England respectively. Cypel lived in
Israel for ten years and his father was a Zionist leader. Ben-Ami, a historian and
former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Internal Security, was Barak’s chief negotiator
at Camp David. Pappe, Shlaim, Segev and Morris are all famous Israeli historians and
among the group known as “new” or “revisionist” historians because of their access
to the primary archives and their refutation of common Zionist myths. Reinhart and
Kimmerling were two of the most renowned and courageous sociologist/historians in
Israeli academia. King is an expert on collective non-violent action who has worked
with Martin Luther King (no relation) and Jimmy Carter. Swisher was a VIP security
guard at the Camp David talks in 2000. He interviewed many of the participants.
Baltzer, an American, is one of the most compassionate people I have ever had the
honor to meet. She is brilliant, fair and honest. She cares about Israelis as well as
Palestinians.

And even though he is particularly controversial, Norman Finkelstein, despite his
blunt critique of Israel’s defenders, is included because of his genius and meticulous
research. You can watch him on YouTube. I researched a great deal of the claims he
makes by reviewing his sources. In every case he checks out perfectly. I saw no
distortion, obfuscation or deceit. Additionally, one cannot ignore the sources he cites.
Truthfully, if one wants to criticize Israel, deceit is unnecessary. The words and
confessions of Israeli leaders are more than enough.

Again, before I respond to the points you make about Gaza, let me tell you a little
about me. I was born a few months before Israel declared its statehood. Both of my
parents were first generation Americans. My mother lost 17 relatives in the Holocaust.
My father and his family never discussed anything about that horror. My younger
brother is president of one of the largest Jewish congregations on the east coast. My
identical twin brother is an ultra-Orthodox Jew who lived for a few years in Israel.
Both of his daughters are married with children and live in Jerusalem. Some of their
friends are militant Jews from Hebron and other messianic communities, who believe
that the sixth commandment, which they translate as “Thou shalt not commit
murder,” cannot be violated by killing any Arab, since Arabs are inherently
predisposed to want to murder Jews; and Arabs are not human anyway. One of my
brother’s sons recently served in the IDF. I have a friend who lives in Ma'ale Adumim,
in occupied territory outside of Jerusalem. She was a member of Kach (Meir Kahane's
group) for 15 years. She now holds Palestinian-Israeli dialogue groups and prefers a
one-state solution.

I was extremely "pro-Israel" my entire lifetime. I was utterly supportive of Israel's
invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006. I joined AIPAC and donated to the
Jewish Federation. Midway through the war in Lebanon, after arguments with close
friends who were critical of Israel, I decided to actually engage myself in a real study
of the Israel-Arab conflict. My purpose was to alleviate my suffering and to find more
historical arguments to refute the claims my friends were making. Up to that point in
time I had only read Joan Peters’ highly influential book From Time Immemorial, a
book that I learned has been universally debunked and called a “hoax,” “phony,”
“worthless,” “recycled Zionist propaganda,” “previously modified and discredited
Zionist propaganda,” etc. by scholars from Israel, Europe, the U.S. and the Jewish
World Congress. I had used Peters’ research to justify my claim that there never were
a Palestinian people; that Israel had always treated the so-called Palestinians kindly
and had always bent over backwards for peace.

During my research that began in the midst of the Second Lebanon War I chose to
study Jewish scholars only, knowing that if I studied the subject from the perspective
of any Arab or Muslim scholar I would suspect bias. My study became a full-time and
daily practice to this very day. As mentioned above, many of the scholars I studied
had access to the most primary of sources, among them the Israeli state, IDF, Ben-
Gurion, Haganah, Palmach, and Central Zionist archives. I read the arguments of
many Israeli officials, including a number of heads of Shin Bet (Israel’s Internal
Security Agency) and I read numerous respected international publications (none
Arab) including the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz and Yediot Aharonoth. I also studied the
websites of the Israeli ministries of Defense, Internal Security, Foreign Affairs and
Health as well as respected Human Rights organizations such as B'Tselem, HaMoked
(Center for the Defense of the individual), Human Rights Watch, Amnesty
International, OCHA (The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs),
UNICEF, the International Red Cross, National Lawyers Guild, Goldstone Report, etc.,
all of which (including the two Israeli NGO’s) at one time I would have suspected of
being anti-Semitic. I read from both sides of the divide including Alan Dershowitz,
Aaron David Miller, Dennis Ross, Shlomo Ben-Ami, New York Times, Wall Street
Journal and more. If I wasn't sure who a source was I checked it out. I discarded
anyone whose claims I could not verify through further research and I discarded
anyone who appeared anti-Semitic and/or seemed to be promoting their own
prejudices without, at the very least, solid proof from reputable sources. I also
randomly checked the sources of virtually all of the articles, books and publications I
examined to make sure the author was not taking quotes out of context, was not
distorting the real message his source was conveying or was not simply lying. All of
the actual historians checked out well; and the human rights organizations,
independent of each other, are of a very similar mind. I doubt there has ever been a
more solidly documented conflict in world history than the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Other than Peters the one author who was clearly distorting history for his own
purposes is Alan Dershowitz. Anybody can debunk The Case for Israel. At one time
Dershowitz was someone I admired but his spiteful and slanderous participation in
the Israel-Palestine issue has only inflamed Zionists and given them apparent
justification for their unjustified verbal attacks against not only Palestinians but honest
and courageous scholars as well as Jimmy Carter, who is committed to a fair peace
between both sides and without whose help in brilliantly brokering the Camp David
Accords Israel would not exist in its present form. Remember, Dershowitz is not a
historian; he is an attorney and his book is written with the mind of an attorney. He
ignores and distorts evidence that could convict his client; and he obfuscates where
obfuscation clouds any issue that could also convict his client. Unlike historians who
start out with a hypothesis and do research to confirm, modify or deny the
hypothesis, and who allow the facts to determine their conclusions, Dershowitz
decides on the conclusions and then researches (or not) accordingly. To cite only two
examples out of many, on page 184 he quotes Raji Sourani:

Even Raji Sourani, the director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza
and a strident critic of Israel, says that he remains “constantly amazed by the high
standards of the legal system [sic].” [Dershowitz cites Greg Myre, “Trial of Palestinian
Leader Focuses Attention on Israeli Courts,” NY Times, May 5, 2003].

Here is the actual quote from the NY Times:

Despite his many frustrations with the Israeli courts, Mr. Sourani says he remains
“constantly amazed by the high standards of the legal system.” “On many issues,” he
said, “when the courts are dealing with purely Israeli questions, like gay rights, I
admire their rulings. But when it comes to the Palestinians, these same people seem
to be totally schizophrenic’” (emphases added).

On page 42 Dershowitz says the following without citing source material:

The developing clash between the Jews of Palestine, led by David Ben Gurion, and
the Muslims, led by the uncompromising Jew-hater, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, was not
over whether the Jews or Muslims would control all of Palestine . . . . Instead, it was
– realistically viewed – whether the remainder of Palestine was to be given exclusively
to the Muslims of Palestine or whether it would be fairly divided between the Jews
and the Muslims of Palestine, each of whom effectively controlled certain areas.

What is particularly egregious about this quote, which is nothing more than
Dershowitz’s own made-up version of history, is that his primary source, Benny
Morris, shows that Ben-Gurion’s intention was the opposite of what Dershowitz
attempts to deceive his reader into believing. Dershowitz quotes Morris’s Righteous
Victims 59 times in the first 83 pages of his book. He quotes Morris a total of 87 times
within the 244 pages of the book. Here is what Morris (who is a Zionist and believes
that Palestinians are “psychopaths” and “serial killers”) says in Righteous Victims, p.
138:

[Weizmann and Ben-Gurion] saw partition as a stepping stone to further expansion
and the eventual takeover of the whole of Palestine . . . . [Ben-Gurion] wrote to his
son, Amos: ‘[A] Jewish state in part [of Palestine] is not an end, but a beginning. . . .
Our possession is important not only for itself . . . through this we increase our
power, and every increase in power facilitates getting hold of the country in its
entirety. Establishing a [small] state . . . will serve as a very potent lever in our efforts
to redeem the whole country.

The above passage by Ben-Gurion expresses a common intention that he and the
majority of Zionists shared for more than a decade before 1948. Confirmation of this
can be found in many books on the subject.

Even though I am going to disagree with you I appreciate the fact that you are doing
your own research. One bit of advice that I think is important for everyone is: Do not
believe a thing anyone tells you about this issue. Find out for yourself through the
most objective research possible, as I did, and be sure to do it out of a sense of
integrity. Do not demean yourself by selectively researching the subject in order to
prove to yourself that what you believe is accurate. Otherwise you will never discover
your role in the suffering of others, nor will you discover how to alleviate that
suffering. And you will never resolve your own anxiety and suffering. As a Jew you
will always be left with the dilemma of victimization: Why does the world not
understand my people and why is the world anti-Semitic juxtaposed against
compelling evidence that is impossible for all but the willfully deaf and blind to ignore.

J, all that I am going to say here can be found in the many sources I list above or in
sources available in my forthcoming book. I cannot divulge these readily available
sources at this time because I want to protect the integrity of my book. I also want
you to know that I have provided more than twenty Jewish supporters of Israel with
evidence similar to what I provide in this letter. I have asked them to examine my
evidence and to read one book to either confirm or deny the beliefs they take for
granted. Not one has been willing to read a book. Not one was willing to challenge
his beliefs. All claim concern for their Jewish brethren, yet none have compassion for
the Palestinians. I try to impress upon them that as long as people continue to distort
the history of the Israel-Palestine problem and character assassinate the Palestinian
people – as has been going on for over sixty years – peace will not be possible. Their
response is to ignore me or accuse me of being anti-Israeli. Denying reality,
perpetuating an illegal and brutal occupation, character assassinating the people you
need to make peace with is a road to more suffering, not just for the weak but also
for the strong. Acknowledging the truth and working to restore integrity is indeed a
road to peace. Who really cares about Israel and who really cares more about
holding onto false and unexamined beliefs?

You start your letter with the statement that “we must look at both the Palestinian
side and the Israeli side.” I agree but you have not really looked at the Palestinian
side. Take, for example, the letter you quote from Tom Adam of Sderot. Yes, he has
had to deal with fear of rocket attacks but why? Without condoning these rocket
attacks we have to ask: Why have Palestinian groups launched these rockets? Has
Israel incited them? Is the launching of these primitive rockets the only way they
know to let the world know that their parents, grandparents and children are being
oppressed from birth to death? What about Palestinian children, whose lives are at
the mercy of the Israeli military? Many of these kids have seen their father’s beaten
by Israeli soldiers, their mothers humiliated and called “whores,” have seen violence
committed by Israeli soldiers or settlers on a regular basis, yearn for a glass of
uncontaminated drinking water, are malnourished, maimed, deaf, blind, paraplegic,
amputees, have endured Israeli sonic booms that cause all kinds of trauma including
bedwetting, nausea, miscarriages, nosebleeds, anxiety, muscle spasms, temporary
loss of hearing, heart and breathing problems. These Palestinian children are the
lucky ones because they are not dead, the victims of rockets, bullets, white
phosphorus and Israel’s common refusal to allow medical supplies into Gaza. Also,
you should know that Israel fortified public buildings and constructed shelters to
protect its Jewish population in the line of rocket attacks. You should also know that
Israel did nothing to protect its Palestinian-Israeli citizens in their villages in the line of
these same attacks.

You say the $30 Billion Coalition “depicts Israel as the perpetrator and sole cause of
the atrocities committed during Operation Cast Lead.” I do not agree that the
Coalition depicts Israel as the “sole cause of the atrocities,” the vast majority of which
were in fact perpetrated by Israel. Rather they see Israel as the primary cause.
Israel, as military and civil and illegal occupier, whose force is thousands of time more
powerful than the Palestinians,’ is the party that has the power to make peace. What
is particularly counter-productive is Israel’s refusal to abide by international
conventions and laws, which are designed to bring about a degree of civility between
peoples.

Speaking of peace I will mention only one example of Israel’s continual sabotage or
ignoring of peace proposals since 1948. That is the 2002 Roadmap for Peace that the
Palestinians accepted in full. Israel “accepted” but with fourteen prerequisites.
Among them:

[C]essation of incitement against Israel, but the Roadmap cannot state that Israel
must cease violence and incitement against the Palestinians.” “The waiver of any
right of return of refugees to Israel; No discussion of Israeli settlement in Judea,
Samaria, and Gaza or the status of the Palestinian Authority and its institutions in
Jerusalem; No reference to the key provisions of U.N. Resolution 242.

Any objective research leads to the inescapable conclusion that Israel has never
wanted peace; what Israel has always wanted is more territory. Israel’s greed has
necessitated the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in order to grab their
territory.

You may not be aware, for example, that Israel conspired with the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood in 1987 to create Hamas. Israel also armed Hamas. It wanted an
alternative to the PLO. The First Intifada began in 1987. It was primarily nonviolent
on the part of Palestinians (not Israelis). Israel arrested or deported most of the
nonviolent leaders while allowing Sheik Yassin, Hamas’s spiritual leader, to distribute
anti-Jewish hate literature calling for the violent overthrow of the Zionist government.
It is far easier for Israel to portray the Palestinians as psychotic killers in order to
divert the world’s attention from its strategy of land theft and ethnic cleansing and
thereby deceive the world into believing the Israeli army is merely defending itself
than it is to justify land theft and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians when their
resistance is nonviolent.

You need to do a lot more research if you want to discover, as close as possible, the
truth. Your research looks like it comes from either public Israeli government sources,
which are notoriously unreliable, or Israeli apologists who have a record of justifying
virtually anything Israel does. You also need to more carefully review the Goldstone
Report. Israel committed terrible atrocities against civilians. Just because Hamas is
also guilty of terror (to a significantly less extent than Israel) does not exonerate
Israel of anything.

Israel has a National Information Directorate whose purpose is to coordinate the
various sectors of the government apparatus into disseminating self-serving messages
(propaganda) to the public. I do not trust the Israeli government to publicly admit to
their crimes. To do so would hurt their image to Jewish supporters around the world
who still believe in Israel’s “purity of arms” and it would implicate its leaders in war
crimes for which they could eventually be prosecuted. Israel has always lied about its
actions. Its history of lies is astonishing. I prefer to rely on sources that have nothing
to gain and everything to lose with their admissions of honesty. Benny Morris:

For decades Ben-Gurion, and successive administrations after his, lied to the Israeli
public about the post-1948 peace overtures and about Arab interest in a deal. The
Arab leaders (with the possible exception of Abdullah) were presented, one and all,
as a recalcitrant collection of warmongers, hell-bent on Israel’s destruction. The
recent opening of the Israeli archives offers a far more complex picture.?

Akiva Eldar:

Without lies, it would be impossible to talk about peace with the Palestinians for 36
years while at the same time seizing more and more Palestinian land. Without lies, it
would be impossible to claim that there is no partner for the road map, while at the
same time injecting more and more money into outposts that the road map calls for
dismantling. Without lies, it would be impossible to promise “painful concessions” in
exchange for peace, while at the same time terming people who concluded such an
agreement “traitors.”

Former Israeli Chief of Military Intelligence, General Yehoshafat Harkabi:

We must define our position and lay down basic principles for a settlement. Our
demands should be moderate and balanced, and appear to be reasonable. But in
fact they must involve such conditions as to ensure that the enemy rejects them.
Then we should manoeuvre and allow him to define his own position, and reject a
settlement on the basis of a compromise position. We should then publish his
demands as embodying unreasonable extremism.

Moshe Dayan:

[The state of Israel] must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with
which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may,
no – it must - invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of
provocation-and-revenge. . . . And above all - let us hope for a new war with the
Arab countries, so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space.

You say that the “fundamental truth is that this is a two-way conflict.” The
Palestinians could end the conflict by lying down and allowing Jewish settlers, with
the support of their government, to overrun them, allow them to take the remainder
of their agricultural lands, their villages and their homes, and drive them out of the
country into generations of poverty and homelessness. Is that a real peace? The
fundamental truth is that Zionism, and the lies perpetrated by its founders, leaders
and supporters from the days of Theodore Herzl on, has initiated and perpetuated
this conflict. If someone attacks you, tries to steal everything you own, abuses and
humiliates your children and then tells the world that you are a liar who never owned
the land in the first place would you accept that?” I do not know any person or
country in the world who would passively accept the theft of their land. In 1948 Jews
owned about 6% of the land of Palestine. They now control 78% of the land outright,
which both the PLO and Hamas have de facto accepted as irreversible. Additionally
Israel has illegally seized or controls about half of the West Bank. And Israel
maintains land, sea and air control over the Gaza Strip. In short the Palestinians
subsist on about 10% of their indigenous homeland.

Mostly Ashkenazi Jews fought the British and the Arabs for a Jewish National Home.
Their connection to the land called Palestine was far less than the connection
Palestinians had and still have to that same land. Yet I know of no Jewish supporter
of Israel who does not applaud the acts of the Haganah, Irgun and even Stern Gang
for their roles in establishing Israel. I know of no Jewish supporter of Israel who
resents the uprising of Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto against their Nazi
oppressors. In order to dissociate Palestinian resistance from Jewish resistance Israel
supporters have to make up myths to portray the Palestinians as not a real people, as
inherently anti-Semitic, as murderous and hateful, as not the real owners of the land,
as a psychotic society etc., etc. These myths are designed to deceive all of us. They
deprive Jews and others of their natural intelligence and compassion. Palestinian
resistance, while mostly nonviolent, is similar to the resistance of any occupied people
throughout history.

Israel did kill almost 400 children in Operation Cast Lead. I am not saying that Israel’s
leaders said “let’s go kill Palestinian children” but there is no question that Israel’s
leaders knew perfectly well that hundreds of Palestinian children and other civilians
would die. Gaza is, after all, the third most densely populated place on earth, with
50% of its inhabitants less than sixteen years of age. Gaza has been a closed military
area since 1967. Its citizens have nowhere to go to flee Israeli bombs and rockets. I
suggest you look up Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine (or Strategy), which is designed to
punish a civilian society for the actions of its leaders (a war crime). As General Gadi
Eisenkot said after Lebanon:

We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired
on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these
are military bases. This isn’t a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been
authorized.

Israel’s most eminent military strategist, Zeev Schiff said: “the Israeli Army has always
struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously... the Army . . . has never
distinguished civilian [from military] targets ... [but] purposely attacked civilian
targets.”

Former chief-of-staff Mordecai Gur, a moderate, admitted that Israel always targeted
civilians (see Hirst). Rafael Eitan, chief-of-staff during Israel’s destruction of Lebanese
society in the early 1980s, was an extreme hawk who served for years as Ariel
Sharon’s second-in-command. He was responsible for the murders of hundreds of
Egyptian POWs at the end of the Suez War. He proposed that for every incident of
stone throwing Israel should build ten settlements. He said “the only good Arab is a
dead Arab.” He was founder of the extreme right ultra-nationalist Tzomet party
(Movement for Zionist Renewal). Later in life he admitted to ordering his troops to
brutalize prisoners and impose collective punishment upon Palestinians (both war
crimes). He said: “I don’t believe in peace, because if they had done to us what we
did to them we’d never agree to make peace.” Think of the implications of that
statement. Yitzhak Rabin admitted that “ruling over another people has corrupted
us.”

Operation Cast Lead was not “a reaction due to the Islamic Resistance Movement.” It
was collective punishment designed to intimidate a people into rejecting Hamas; and
it was a reestablishment of the deterrent force Israel relinquished to a certain extent
in Lebanon. Ephraim Halevy, former head of Mossad and former National Security
Director said: “If Israel’s goal were to remove the threat of rockets from the residents
of southern Israel, opening the border crossings would have ensured such quiet for a
generation.”

Yuval Diskin, head of Shin Bet, acknowledged that Hamas is willing to accept a long-
term ceasefire on the 1967 borders.

Amira Hass reported in Haaretz: “The Hamas leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, said on
Saturday his government was willing to accept a Palestinian state within the 1967
borders.”

Jimmy Carter:

But one of the things that they [Hamas] committed to me that was very significant,
and they announced it publicly, by the way, to Al Jazeera and others, was that they
would accept any agreement that's negotiated between the Israelis and the
Palestinians if it's submitted to a referendum in the West Bank and Gaza, and the
Palestinians approve it. That means they would accept Israel’s right to exist if that’s in
the agreement and so forth.

Roger Cohen of the New York Times:

Henry Siegman, the president of the U.S./Middle East Project, whose chairman is
[Brent] Scowcroft . . . told me that he met recently with Khaled Meshal, the political
director of Hamas in Damascus. Meshal told him, and put in writing, that although
Hamas would not recognize Israel, it would remain in a Palestinian national unity
government that reached a referendum-endorsed peace settlement with Israel.

Regarding Hamas’s use of hospitals the Goldstone report states: “The Mission did not
find any evidence to support the allegations that hospital facilities were used by the
Gaza authorities or by Palestinian armed groups to shield military activities and that
ambulances were used to transport combatants or for other military purposes.”

In 2006 Israel made a similar claim that Hezbollah embedded their forces within
civilian areas in order to attract Israeli firepower. That claim was debunked by
Human Rights Watch which clarified that most of Hezbollah’s rockets were “stored in
bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields and valleys.”

You are correct that “Eighty percent of the weapons used were precision guided, and
99% of all strikes hit their targets.” Yes, these precision guided rockets destroyed or
killed civilians, whole neighborhoods, minarets where there was no room for any
fighter to hide and launch rockets, and UN buildings. B’Tselem reported: “Whole
families were killed; parents saw their children shot before their very eyes; relatives
watched their loved ones bleed to death; and entire neighborhoods were
obliterated.”

A United Nations General Assembly report quoted the ICRC (International Committee
of the Red Cross): “The Israeli military ‘failed to meet its obligation under
international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded.’ Israel made
no effort to allow civilians to escape the fighting.”

The Goldstone report is particularly damning. Again, please read through it.
Goldstone rejected the HRC’s request to investigate possible war crimes by Israel until
they altered the wording to include Hamas as a possible perpetrator. The Israeli
government acknowledged his “record of impartiality.” His findings are in line with
the numerous human rights groups I mentioned earlier in the letter. IDF soldiers
have testified to deliberately killing civilians, just as they have testified to similar
brutalities in Hebron. The evidence is overwhelming. If Goldstone had not been head
of the Mission there is a high likelihood that the Report would have been even more
critical of Israel.

Goldstone, as any reasonable person knows, is not an anti-Semite. Eliyahu Yishai was
Deputy Prime Minister during Operation Cast Lead. At the beginning of the invasion
he urged the IDF to “bomb thousands of houses, to destroy Gaza.” Nine months
later, as Minister of the Interior, Yishai slandered Goldstone as an “abominable anti-
Semite” for heading a mission that concluded that the IDF did exactly what Yishai
wanted them to do. Yishai is not a reasonable person.

Israel’s internal investigations were designed to cover up their atrocities. Chief-of-
Staff Gabi Ashkenazi is not going to implicate himself or other Israeli officials in
possible war crimes and crimes against humanity. Amnesty International responded
to the IDF “internal investigation:”

The information made public only refers to a handful of cases and lacks crucial
details. It mostly repeats claims made by the army and the authorities many times
since the early days of Operation “Cast Lead . . . . It does not even attempt to explain
the overwhelming majority of civilian deaths nor the massive destruction caused to
civilian buildings in Gaza. . . . [T]he army’s claims appear to be more an attempt to
shirk its responsibilities than a genuine process to establish the truth. Such an
approach lacks credibility.

Regarding rocket and mortar fire, from 2000 through 2008 Palestinian groups
launched 8,088 unsophisticated rockets and mortars against Israel. From 2001
through 2008 eighteen Israelis were killed as a result of these attacks. Contrast those
figures with the 7,700 sophisticated rockets that Israel launched against Gaza in nine
months, between September 2005 and June 2006. From 2005–2007, 1,290 Gazans,
including 222 children, were killed as a result of these kinds of attacks. Who is the
perpetrator and who is the victim?

Your statement that “Israel warned the Palestinian people that election of Hamas to
the head of the Palestinian Authority (PA) would only cause more conflict” is a
reflection of an authoritarian mentality that places one party in control over the lives
of another. It is the same mentality that is at the root of this conflict. Hamas was
elected in a fair election that the U.S. pushed for. Who is Israel to decide for the
Palestinians who their leaders should be? Hamas is not monolithic, is not particularly
corrupt as is Fatah, and is not a collaborator with the Israeli government. That is why
they were elected and that is why Israel wants them removed. Hamas makes the
continued dispossession of the Palestinian people more difficult. What you call Israel’s
warning was actually a threat. Hamas has repeatedly stated its willingness to
establish a long term truce. Ephraim Halevy and American strategists said that Israel
and the U.S. have the ability to strengthen Hamas’s moderate wing and engage
them in a peace process. But, as Moshe Dayan states above, Israel is not interested
in a peace process.

If you honestly are looking for the truth your study of Operation Cast Lead is simply
not thorough or objective enough. With regard to the ceasefire, if you read the
analysis of The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israel
Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center (IICC) you will learn that “The lull
was sporadically violated by rocket and mortar shell fire, carried out by rogue terrorist
organizations, in some instance in defiance of Hamas (especially by Fatah and Al-
Qaeda supporters). Hamas was careful to maintain the ceasefire.”

Israel never really adhered to the ceasefire. They only allowed the average number
of trucks entering Gaza to increase from seventy per day to ninety, not the five
hundred per day that crossed before Israel instituted its blockade. On November 4,
2008 IDF troops entered Gaza and killed six or seven Hamas soldiers because they
were allegedly digging a tunnel for the purpose of kidnapping Israeli soldiers. Hamas
said its members had been digging the tunnel for defensive purposes. On November
5 Israel sealed all crossing points into Gaza. Yossi Alpher, former Mossad official and
former adviser to then Prime Minister Ehud Barak:

[The blockade is] collective punishment, humanitarian suffering. It has not caused
Palestinians in Gaza to behave the way we want them to, so why do it. . . . I think
people really believed that, if you starved Gazans, they will get Hamas to stop the
attacks. It’s repeating a failed policy, mindlessly.

On December 14 a high-level Hamas delegation met with Egyptian Minister of
Intelligence Omar Suleiman who, as mediator, had helped negotiate the June to
December ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Hamas offered to end all rocket
attacks in return for Israel ending its raids into Gaza and re-opening the border
crossings. Suleiman conveyed Hamas’s proposal to Israeli authorities. On December
19, Robert Pastor, a senior adviser at the Carter Center, met with Khaled Mashaal,
who made the same offer. The next day Pastor passed Mashaal’s offer on to a “senior
official” in the IDF, who told Pastor he would get back to him. He never did. As for
the Egyptian offer, it is unclear whether Israel ignored the offer or rejected it
outright. At an Israeli cabinet meeting on December 21, Yuval Diskin, said: “Make no
mistake, Hamas is interested in maintaining the truce.” Diskin said that if Israel ended
the blockade, Hamas would restore the ceasefire.

If you’ve gotten this far, I can tell you the billboard you object to was taken down by
Lamar Advertising on April 28, 2009. It was designed to provoke reaction from a
mostly apathetic public in the wake of a brutal invasion. Calls from AIPAC supporters
influenced Lamar’s decision. Rather than seeing themselves and Israel as victims
these AIPAC people would be far more effective if they took the time to actually look
at the evidence. None whom I have met have any intelligent knowledge of the actual
history. For them, the childhood myths they were raised with supersede years of
honest and objective research. Their attitude is identical to fundamentalist Christians
who believe non-Christians will go to Hell for their failure to accept Jesus Christ into
their lives. They claim to care about Israelis but their continued support of a brutal
occupation only demeans an entire people and perpetuates conflict for both sides of
the issue. It also paints Judaism, once known for its commitment to ethics and
justice, as a religion and culture of hypocrisy and bigotry.

Please do not fall into the trap that so many who remain unconscious of their
participation in the suffering of others have fallen into. Please do not allow bigotry to
influence you as it has influenced them. I urge you to avoid losing your humanity.
Commit yourself to the truth. It is the only path that will free you of your own
suffering and free others less fortunate than you of the suffering imposed on them
by others.

Sincerely, Rich Forer

BOOK LIST

Anna Baltzer, Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied
Territories

Anna Baltzer, DVD: Life in Occupied Palestine: Eyewitness Stories and Photos

available at www.AnnaintheMiddleEast.com . Excerpts on YouTube.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy

Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

Sylvain Cypel, Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse

David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East

Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the
Abuse of History

Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War Against the Palestinians

Mary Elizabeth King, A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent
Resistance

Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999

Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Tanya Reinhart, The Road Map To Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003

Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948

Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust

Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis

Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall

Clayton Swisher, The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story about the Collapse
of the Middle East Peace Process

Richard Forer is a former member of AIPAC. His identical twin brother is a prominent
member of an Ultra-Orthodox sect of Judaism. His younger brother is an attorney
and President of one of the largest Reform synagogues on the East coast. Forer is a
practitioner of the Meir Schneider Self-Healing Method, a unique system of healing
developed by an Israeli. His book, Breakthrough: Transforming Fear into Compassion
– A New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict will be available in the Fall. He
can be reached at rich_forer at yahoo.com.

?? Abdullah was king of Jordan.