Holocaust - an alibi for occupation
Editor's note: The author of the following is with Peace Now, a Zionist, Jewish, Israeli, "peace group". I have peace group in quotation marks as they intially supported the war on Lebanon.
That proved to be a PR fiasco and they changed their tune almost as the war was ending. Since then they have made up a bit for their mistake by publishing a report proving at least 40% of settlements are built on Palestinian owned land (the truth is that it's a helluva lot more).
I must admit surprise at this new report, although it illegitimately makes fun of Iran's Holcaust review conference, points out one thing among many that Iran is right about:
By Dror Etkes
Haaretz
The curtain has dropped on the Theater of the Absurd directed by the Iranian regime last week - an event that convened figures from the margins of the Holocaust-denial scene and its "alternative" researchers. In Israel the conference was covered with an emphasis on the statements by the participants and the reactions of Israeli politicians. True, this was an international conference behind which was a country that declares its desire to bring about the fall of the "Zionist regime" - but beyond that hides a deeper factor, which is indicative of the connection between contemporary Israeli identity and the Holocaust.
"If the occurrence of the event (the Holocaust) is cast into doubt, the identity of the Zionist regime will also be cast into doubt." From these words, spoken at the opening session by Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, it emerges that the Iranian regime has correctly identified the connections that exist in Israel between the Holocaust and local politics. One of the formative historical events of the West today, whose significance is relevant to all of humanity, the Holocaust is continuing more than 60 years later to provide Israel with an alibi for the deviancy of its political choices.
An Israel with no real distinction between the establishment political left and the right with all its offshoots, continues to make use of the Holocaust in a way that combines cynicism and boorishness. Even though there is indeed a considerable and complex connection between the Holocaust and Israeli political culture, there isn't - nor has there ever been - any justification for harnessing its memory for the sake of preserving the continuing occupation project that Israel has been conducting for 40 years now in the territories.
Israel's attitude toward the Holocaust is not really derived from the way in which the leadership is responding to the incendiary declarations of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his propagandists, which above all testify to the speakers themselves. It is possible to learn about this attitude from, among other things, the way in which it relates to the tens of thousands of survivors in whose flesh and minds the Nazis' crimes are etched, who live here in disgraceful conditions and below the poverty line.
However, the real treatment of the survivors is apparently a lot less glamorous than the cult of the worship surrounding those who were murdered, which provides a stage for every politician who is seeking his way to the center of the consensus. Thus, as was recently published again in Haaretz, the state is continuing to nationalize the reparations monies that are transferred to it for the benefit of those hundreds of thousands of survivors - while criminally neglecting many of them.
The primitive instrumentalist use that Iranian politics is making of the Holocaust is nothing but a mirror image of the way the memory of the Holocaust is exploited in political life in Israel. One of the aims of the Iranian campaign to "research the historical truth" surrounding the Holocaust is to unravel the system of justifications that Israeli politics has been accustomed to using in its all-too-frequent definition of the criticism of those politics, expressed both domestically and abroad as being tainted with anti-Semitism. Thus the role of the Holocaust as the sole justification for the existence of Israel has been sharpened, instead of focusing on the fact that today more than 7 million people of varied origins and nationalities are living in this country - a place which in most cases is their only possible home.
If indeed the Iranian foreign minister is correct and this is the sole source of legitimacy from which the Zionist project derives today, then apparently the time has indeed come for a radical revision of the concept of Zionism. And it would be a good thing if this is done before Ahmadinejad and his ultra-Orthodox partners from Brooklyn launch a new production.
The author coordinates the settlement follow-up in the Peace Now movement.
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Using the holocaust as an alibi for war crimes against Lebanon and the Palestinians will eventually backfire against the Zionists. Their doing so causes more and more people, especially those who have been victims of the Israelis, to question whether it is (at least partly) a hoax, fabricated for the purpose of creating unjustified sympathy for Jews.
http://www.american-reporter.com/3%2C055/12.html
ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR WEAPONS MUST BE ON THE TABLE
by Joe Parko
Special to The American Reporter
Atlanta, Ga.
Printable version of this story
JERUSALEM -- Ever since Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear technician, confirmed the existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons program with his photographs of the secret underground bomb facility published in the London Sunday Times in 1986, the world has known Israel has been making nuclear bombs but has pretended they do not exist.
Vanunu was released from prison in April 2004 but was prohibited from leaving Israel. The Israeli government continues to keep him in Israel against his will. Criminal action is pending against him for speaking to journalists and foreigners.
'If we want to stop the arms race in the Middle East, Israel must open its nuclear weapons program to inspection.... .'
I talked with Mordechai Vanunu last year in Jerusalem.
"I worked from 1976 to 1985 at the Israeli secret underground nuclear weapons production facility at the Dimona nuclear plant in the Negev desert," Vanunu said in the interview.
"During my time there, I was involved in processing plutonium for 10 nuclear bombs per year," Vanunu said.
"I realized my country had already processed enough plutonium for 200 nuclear weapons. I became really afraid when we started processing Lithium 6 which is only used for the hydrogen bomb," Vanunu recalled.
"I felt I had to prevent a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East, so I took 60 pictures of the underground nuclear weapons processing plant some 75 meters under the Dimona plant," Vanunu told me.
"I resigned my post and left Israel in 1986. I first went to Australia and then made a connection with The Times in London. After a group of nuclear scientists verified my photos as proving Israeli nuclear weapons production, my story was published in England," Vanunu said.
"A few months later, I was kidnapped by the Israelis in Rome and sent secretly by ship to Israel where I was subjected to a closed military trial without counsel. I was sentenced to 18 years in prison. I spent 12 years in solitary confinement," Vanunu said.
"I think my whistleblowing on Israel's secret nuclear weapons program helped to bring down South Africa's apartheid government. When the world's governments learned Israel was helping South Africa to develop nuclear weapons, this was the end of apartheid. Mandela's first act was to shut down South Africa's nuclear weapons program and to send the nuclear materials to the U.S.," Vanunu said.
"Now, I am trapped inside Israel and I’m being threatened with more prison time for speaking to people like you. I want to leave Israel and come to America, where I can live as a free human being," Vanunu said.
At his recent meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister, U.S. President Bush called for worldwide isolation of Iran until it gives up its nuclear ambitions.
When it comes to the issue of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, there is an elephant in the room nobody wants to acknowledge, and that elephant is Israel's large nuclear bomb arsenal.
First, the U.S. allegedly went after non-existent nuclear weapons in Iraq and now Bush is consumed with the possibility Iran might develop nuclear weapons in the future. But the fact is, Israel has had a secret nuclear weapons program for over 30 years that has produced well over 200 nuclear bombs.
If we truly want to stop the nuclear arms race in the Middle East, Israel must be required to open its nuclear weapons program to inspection.
Israel is not a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refuses to officially confirm or deny having a nuclear arsenal, or to having developed nuclear weapons, or even to having a nuclear weapons program.
If we want Iran to renounce nuclear weapons, we must also get Israel to stop building bombs in secret and begin dismantling its large nuclear arsenal. Our goal must be a nuclear-free Middle East and this must include Israel.
Joe Parko is a special contributor to Atlanta Progressive News. This article was produced as part of the Middle East Peace Education Program of the American Friends Service Committee. Reach him at parkoj@bellsouth.net