Op-Ed by Cliff Jackson
Albert Einstein said 75 years ago ” It is great sadness that the zionists are doing to the Palestinians what the third reich did to the jews”. A Jewish philosopher in 1895 said” If we keep treating arabs like this we will be bringing a lot of trouble to the world”.
More than a few Israeli Defense officials have denounced the persecution of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine, including Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi, Shin Bet Chief Ronen Bar and Police Commissioner Kobi Shabati, who denounced the daily attacks by Israeli settler colonists on Palestinian Villages. Ariel Sheron, ‘the butcher of Beirut”, said ” what we have done to the Palestinians is a bad thing”.
Yet we are seeing an unprecented attack on the Palestinian people in this country because of the Hamas invasion of the occupied territory that the corporate media as well as many organizations private and public have called a terrorist attack, and yet ignore the daily terrorism and savage brutality that israeli’s inflict upon Palestinians that the aforementioned Jewish Philosophers and Israeli defense officials have recognized. The Palestinians have been victims since the Balfour Declaration of 1917 unleashing a brutal white western policy that has led to more than 700,000 Palestinians being forcibly removed from their home with the illegal partitioning of Palestine in 1947. The United Nations Charter specifically says that you ” cannot assign land without a majority of the inhabitants consenting”. A majority of Palestinians did not consent to this partitioning of Palestine.
The racism and violence against Palestinians has been incessant and going on for 75 years under the evil auspices of David Ben Gurion in 1948. He unleashed a level of racism and apartheid treatment of Palestinians that is no different than what Black south Africans including Steven Biko and Nelson Mandela experienced at the hands of White South Africans and Afrikaners in South Africa. Palestinians have been subjected to 75 years of ethnic cleansing (an attempt at genocide), 15 years of a blockade keeping Palestinians in a virtual prison in Gaza, and the confiscation of Palestinian Lands, as well as pogroms in Palestinian towns for decades. The desecration of Palestinian sacred sites and the daily raiding of Palestinian homes by Israeli’s, and constant humiliation by Israelis with chants of ” death to Arabs”. Then should we wonder why Hamas did what it did??
9/11 had the same consequence in this country for America’s brutally racist, barbaric and Jingoistic foreign policy. As Dr. King said,” America is the biggest purveyor of violence” and “America is going to hell for all of the violence it has committed on this continent and exported around the world”. That is one of a thousand reasons why 9/11 happened.
10/7/23 is the consequence of all of the evil and inhumane treatment that Palestinians have received that the white western world and their colonized allies have ignored. Tens of thousands of Palestinian men women and children have been slaughtered by the Israeli’s going back to the regime of Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo Accords. So, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin showed himself, as Malcolm X would say, “to be the ultimate ” House Negro” when he shows is utter disgust and contempt at the Israeli victims of Hamas and yet he has not said one word on all of the violence, death and misery that Palestinians have experienced for decades by Israeli’s. His boss President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr is the ultimate hypocrite as well as a war criminal when he calls what Hamas did ” pure evil with no excuse” and yet patronized the Palestinians by referring to ” their aspirations for dignity and self-determination” while ignoring the unbridled carnage and death and destruction that they have been subjected to. That lack of acknowledgement by Biden makes his Catholicism a categorical fraud! He is a war criminal like his predecessors because this evil committed by the occupiers of Palestine could not happen without the United States.
There are holocaust survivors around the world that have denounced this evil apartheid occupation, including Gabor Mate, whose grandparents were killed in Auschwitz. He said,” say the worst thing about Hamas and multiply that a thousand times and it will not equal the murder, repression and subjugation of the Palestinians by the Israelis for years”.
This racism as I mentioned earlier goes back to the period of David Ben Gurion who said ” we must do everything we can to make sure the Palestinians never return”. Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan were just as virulently racist. Meir Kehane, a rabid racist Rabbi said” we need to exterminate the arabs as soon a possible”. His hate led to his assassination in 1990.
He is a progenitor of the racism and evil of war criminals like Naftali Bennett who said, ” I have killed many Arabs before and do not have a problem continuing to do that”. Benjamin Netanyahu another criminal many times over said, ” Continue to beat up the Palestinians until it is unbearable”. IDF Deputy Defense Minister Rabbi Eli Een Dahan said,” Palestinians are beasts, they are not human”.
You will not see or hear any of this on the corporate media, or any of the major news stations. The rest of the world is aware, but this goes to show how ignorant and myopic Americans are, especially their lack of understanding of history. To be clear there are Jews and Hasidim in this country and in the occupied territory who have condemned this evil against the Palestinians. Anyone who claims that the condemnation of this evil is ” antisemitism” is not only ignorant and racist but bring disgrace to people like Abraham Heschel, who said ” No religion has a monopoly on the truth”.
Malcolm X met with the Palestinian authority in 1964 and he stood with the Palestinian People. In the words of the great Paul Robeson, ” my name is Cliff Jackson and here I stand ” with the Palestinian People as well as millions of other people around the world who are white, black, Latino, Asian, Judaic, Muslim, Hindu and otherwise.
Cliff Jackson, Larchmont
