A response to Jason...

Jason commented on my last blog posting writing...

"Would you care to explain how it is wrong to be pro-Israel when the position includes support for an independent and free Palestine? The only requirement is that the Palestinian government stops attacks against Israel."

8:22 AM

I thought it would be better if I brought this discussion (which I think will quickly turn back into a monologue) out into the open and not relegate it to the comments section of my posts.

For Jason:

Before I say what I’m going to say I want to thank you Jason in all sincerity for commenting on my last blog post. You’ve explained a few questions I had in my head, but have also left me wondering about others.

What troubles me so deeply about your callous moral equivocations is that you’re making them on a day when two Palestinian children were shot dead by the IOF in Gaza while they played with kites. Now I’m sure that you’ll suggest that maybe the whole story isn’t being told, that the kite may have held some sort of sophisticated weapon, or that Human Rights groups are notoriously biased. But as a small “l” liberal – as I assume you purport to be – I’m sure human rights play SOMEWHERE in your consciousness. An Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published their report this year and stated that 141 Palestinian children were murdered by the Israeli military, while Palestinian terrorists murdered one Israeli child. Now you can accuse me of moral equivocations but a 141:1 ratio of child deaths may be relativism, but its also mass murder. Its ethnic cleansing.

So you can pretend that marching with the UJA – who’s slogans on the giant billboard just down the street from my office here reads: “Together with Israel”, and who’s inclusion of the Canadian flag in said ad attempts to suggest that Canada “stands” with a habitual human rights abuser – isn’t necessarily standing “against” a Palestinian State. But you and I and anyone who knows anything about this issue knows that such a position is bullshit. Which is why I now have nothing but contempt for the Liberal Party. At least the Conservatives are honest about their position.

Do I want to see Israel “not exist”? Actually no. I would love to see it as an actual democracy (but we know this is increasingly less-likely). Instead I want Israel to give back the thousands of dunams of land that the State of Israel (the one you marched together with last weekend) it STOLE from the Palestinian farmers who have lived there for decades if not centuries and millennia. The Apartheid Wall – and that’s what it is – is a tool of annexation. So I would love an Israeli State whose borders were faithful to the 1967 green-line, or international law, or even their own!

But what about you? You’re an active member of the Liberal Party of Canada. I assume that you are also a small “l” liberal. Your brilliant runner-up leader argues that wars should be started against chronic Human Rights Abusers, and yet he marches in togetherness with a government that includes a man who advocates the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Israel? How do you feel about Avigdor Lieberman?

I work on issue related to the Occupation with Jewish women here in Toronto who have been spat upon by people walking in your UJA march. Brave women who protest the Occupation every week and who, under taunts of the most fascist sort, continue to testify to the brutality of the Occupation . You can hate me for calling you out on your fake liberalism, but why don’t you try and seek these people out? Or have you?

Maybe I’m attacking you too personally. I think its your last statement that really got me – that “The only requirement is that the Palestinian government stops attacks against Israel”. The homemade rocket attacks that kill some and frighten so many are hardly a pre-condition for peace. The Israeli state, in terms of violence, is totally unmatched when it comes to "Palestinian Terrorism". Bombings in Tel Aviv, or the launching of homemade projectiles against Sderot, are abhorrent, but luckily for my position, the latter is almost unheard of now, and the former is hardly the military workings of a powerful "government" as you would suggest. On the other hand, the "precision targeting" of civilian areas by one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world has resulted in mass civilian deaths. The economic boycott and theft of millions of Palestinian tax dollars by the Israelis has promoted lawlessness in Gaza - much to the benefit of Israel.

The abject poverty (as reported by such bastions of socialism – the UN, the World Bank) that has been inflicted upon 1.4 million people in Gaza is collective punishment. The rockets fired at Sderot are shot by how many people? How many terrorists would it take for you to justify breaking the Geneva Conventions and punishing all of the people of Gaza? Tell me what’s the number of terrorist that justifies the destruction of the Gazan infrastructure to the point where people literally drown in pools of flowing human shit? 1000 Terrorists? What’s the number?

Tell me then Jason what have YOU done to alter Israel's policies towards the Palestinians? You march with the UJA and hide behind the rhetoric of "I support a Palestinian State", but how? In the Bantustans of Barack's proposal? Will you and the Liberal leaders you associate with make an appearance this weekend at nation-wide protests in front of Chapters-Indigo stores, in solidarity with the Palestinians murdered by the Israeli army?

Tell me - what have you done that is "pro-Palestinian"? I would genuinely like to know. Maybe it will keep me from thinking that the Liberal party is populated with people who are just deeply confused and not morally bankrupt politicians pandering for votes.