Israel Without Apology

snip

Three decades ago, I was a Berkeley New Leftist with a political and personal problem. I had been born in Israel, and, though I didn’t consider myself a Zionist, I certainly didn’t want to see the Jewish state disappear. Yet my comrades on the Left were starting on a long march whose ultimate objective was to demonize Israel and turn it into a pariah among the nations. At Bay Area meetings, I heard Israel denounced as an imperialist aggressor that had “ripped off” the land from the native population and had aligned itself with the most reactionary forces in the world. The Arabs, on the other hand, were the truly victimized, the wretched of the earth, right up there in the pantheon of our movement’s other heroes, the Cubans and the Vietnamese.

None of this made much sense to me. All you needed was a map to see that Israel was a little sliver of a country, surrounded by more than a dozen retrograde, tyrannical Arab regimes. In June 1967, Egypt’s dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had thrown the U.N. force out of Sinai, sent his army to Israel’s border, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and called on his brother Arabs to join in a war to exterminate the Jews. Israel had no international support after its only ally, France, abruptly switched sides. Even President Lyndon Johnson offered only the mildest protest to Egypt’s aggression. After standing alone and routing three Arab armies, Israel had immediately offered to trade “land for peace.” But the Arabs, gathered at a summit in Khartoum, emphatically announced three noes: “no recognition, no negotiations, no peace.”

snip

Things didn’t turn out exactly as the neoconservatives predicted—with, first, the creation of a Palestinian state, which would then become a springboard for another assault on Israel by the Arab states—but they correctly assessed the pathological nature of the Palestinian liberation movement. Like the premature anti-fascists of the 1930s, who understood the radical evil faced by the democracies of those days, the neoconservatives have had the bad taste to show us what we wanted to avoid admitting—that this conflict is not about disputed territories. It is about Israel’s right to survive as a democratic Jewish state. And after September 11, it’s clear that it is also about whether the Islamo-fascist movement that is at war with our civilization will succeed in making the Middle East safe for obscurantism and tyranny.

snip

At a now-famous Town Hall forum in the 1970s, Susan Sontag stunned her largely leftist audience by conceding that Reader’s Digest readers would have learned more about what happened in the Soviet Union under Stalin than readers of The Nation would have learned. Because Sontag was one of America’s leading radical intellectuals, many took her comments to mark the end of the American Left’s romance with communism. How ironic, then, that Sontag has recently taken to the pages of The Nation to express her solidarity with—no, not the innocent Israelis blown up in discos and pizza parlors—but with Israeli draft resisters and Rachel Corrie, the young American “pacifist” accidentally run over by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza. Corrie and her comrades in the Palestine Solidarity Movement had come to the Holy Land to be human shields. They didn’t stand guard at Israeli supermarkets or malls, or ride Israeli buses. Instead, they chose to interpose themselves between Palestinian terrorists and the Israeli soldiers courageously trying to break the suicide-bomber apparatus. Sontag offered aid and comfort to the suicide bombers by charging that Corrie was “killed by the forces of violence and oppression”—that is, Israel. To Sontag, all the courage rested with those who, like Corrie and the Israeli draft resisters, “fall out of step with one’s tribe.”



http://frontpagemag.com/articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9253

I actually think Horowitz has a standard for articles he runs: there must be at least one smear on Chomsky. More is preferable, but without one you won't get published.

This is the usual "I've converted and I see the light, you damn leftists!" type of BS.

I doubt that large parts of it were even written by the bylined author.

ya a little leftist bashing is always good for a laugh!

This author, although unknown to me, is stating the facts as he lived them and saw them. I see you object to eloquence and the right to respond to opponents, such as Chomsky, who is well known in his academic field (linguistics). The politics can't be taken nearly as seriously, as his recognition as a linguist.

I agree with this article. Knowing the actual historical situation is much superior to taking facts and isolating them to twist the picture after the fact. It is known as revisionism, I believe.

What, every single word?

If you say so. Rational people might take a different view.

The autobiographical content of the article, over several decades of journalistic work, leave little doubt as to the autheticity of the author's experience.

Every word rings true to me. My agreement is with the overall conclusions that are drawn. For example:

No nation in the world has taken so many mortal risks for a putative peace with its most implacable enemies. Even after the first Oslo agreement blew up in Israel’s face in the form of exploding commuter buses and pizza parlors, Ehud Barak’s government went back to Camp David and offered the Palestinians yet another agreement—same terms, no problem. Once again, the Palestinian leadership rejected the best deal they are ever likely to get short of Israel’s elimination (a far better deal, incidentally, than Jordan and Egypt offered the Palestinians when those Arab regimes controlled the West Bank and Gaza). Instead, Yasser Arafat went home to launch yet another savage war of extermination against Israel’s civilian population, with the guns that Israel had given him.

http://frontpagemag.com/articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9253

Chomsky twists and misrepresents all the time. I have studied many areas of foreign policy both at school and on my own time, and chomsky clearly misrepresents and bends the truth to conform to his own ideology.
For example, in 1948 he says we aided 'neo-fascists' in the Italian elections because the workers would win. Actually we aided the Christian Democrat Party Candidate (who had been staunchly anti-Mussolini) against a Comintern controlled party, who was recieving large sums of money from Moscow. The elections were never tampered, but The CIA sent several hundred thousand dollars to the candidates campaign fund.
Reading Chomsky is like reading Hannity to me: they are both like pulling teeth.

Why don't you run that talking point by Chomsky himself?

I love the part where it sits around and tries to talk about how nice and reasonable Israel is because Moshe Dyan said “Better Sharm al-Sheikh without peace, than peace without Sharm al-Sheikh.” and then things changed without mentioning the shit your pants fear that the 1973 war brought out.

. THE SHAME OF THE PLO

The Massacre and Destruction of Damour

Damour lay across the Sidon - Beirut highway about 20 km south of Beirut on the slopes of a foothill of the Lebanon range. On the other side of the road, beyond a flat stretch of coast, is the sea. It was a town of some 25,000 people, containing five churches, three chapels, seven schools, private and public, and one public hospital where Muslims from near by villages were treated along with the Christians, at the expense of the town.

On 9 January 1976, three days after Epiphany, the priest of Damour Father Mansour Labaky, was carrying out a Maronite custom of blessing the houses with holy water. As he stood in front of a house on the side of the town next to the Muslim village of Harat Na’ami, a bullet whistled past his ear and hit the house. Then he heard the rattle of machine-guns. He went inside the house, and soon learned that the town was surrounded. Later he found out by whom and how many — the forces of Sa’iqa, consisting of 16,000 Palestinians and Syrians, and units of the Mourabitoun and some fifteen other militias, reinforced by mercenaries from Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and a contingent of Libyans.

Father Labaky telephoned the Muslim sheikh of the district and asked him, as a fellow religious leader, what he could do to help the people of the town. ‘I can do nothing,’ he was told ‘They want to harm you. It is the Palestinians. I cannot stop them.'

While the shooting and some shelling went on all day, Father Labaky telephoned a long list of people, politicians of both the Left and the Right, asking for help. They all said with apologies and commiserations that they could do nothing. Then he telephoned Kamal Jumblatt, in whose parliamentary constituency Damour lay. ‘Father,’ Jumblatt said, ‘I can do nothing for you, because it depends on Yasser Arafat.’ He gave Arafat’s phone number to the priest.

An aide answered, and when he would not call Arafat himself, Father Labaky told him, ‘The Palestinians are shelling and shooting at my town. I can assure you as a religious leader, we do not want the war, we do not believe in violence.’ He added that nearly half the people of Damour had voted for Kamal Jumblatt, ‘who is backing you,’ he reminded the PLO man. The reply was, ‘Father, don’t worry. We don’t want to harm you. If we are destroying you it is for strategical reasons.’
Father Labaky did not feel that there was any less cause for worry because the destruction was for strategical reasons, and he persisted in asking for Arafat to call off his fighters. In the end the aide said that they, PLO headquarters, would ‘tell them to stop shooting’.

By then it was eleven o’clock in the evening. As the minutes passed and the shooting still went on, Father Labaky called Jumblatt again on the telephone and told him what Arafat’s aide had said. Jumblatt’s advice was that the priest should keep trying to make contact with Arafat, and call other friends of his, ‘because’, he said, ‘I do not trust him’.

At about half-past eleven the telephone, water and electricity were all cut off. The first invasion of the town came in the hour after midnight, from the side where the priest had been shot at earlier in the day. The Sa’iqa men stormed into the houses. They massacred some fifty people in the one night. Father Labaky heard screaming and went out into the street. Women came running to him in their nightdresses, ‘tearing their hair, and shouting “They are slaughtering us!” The survivors, deserting that end of the town, moved into the area round the next church. The invaders then occupied the part of the town they had taken. Father Labaky describes the scene:
'In the morning I managed to get to the one house despite the shelling to bring out some of the corpses. And I remember something which still frightens me. An entire family had been killed, the Can’an family, four children all dead, and the mother, the father, and the grandfather. The mother was still hugging one of the children. And she was pregnant. The eyes of the children were gone and their limbs were cut off. No legs and no arms. It was awful. We took them away in a banana truck. And who carried the corpses with me? The only survivor, the brother ofthe man. His name is Samir Can’an. He carried with me the remains of his brother, his father, his sister-in-law and the poor children. We buried them in the cemetery, under the shells of the PLO. And while I was burying them, more corpses were found in the street.' The town tried to defend itself. Two hundred and twenty-five young men, most of them about sixteen years old, armed with hunting guns and none with military training, held out for twelve days. The citizens huddled in basements, with sandbags piled in front of their doors and ground-floor windows. Father Labaky moved from shelter to shelter to visit the families and take them bread and milk. He went often ‘to encourage the young men defending the town’. The relentless pounding the town received resulted in massive damage. In the siege that had been established on 9 January the Palestinians cut off food and water supplies and refused to allow the Red Cross to take out the wounded. Infants and children died of dehydration. Only three more townspeople were killed as a result of PLO fire between the first night and the last day, 23 January. But on that day, when the final onslaught came, hundreds of the Christians were killed. Father Labaky goes on:
'The attack took place from the mountain behind. It was an apocalypse. They were coming, thousands and thousands, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar! God is great! Let us attack them for the Arabs, let us offer a holocaust to Mohammad ‘And they were slaughtering everyone in their path, men, women and children.'

SNIP
For the entire story
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Parliament/2587/damour.html

anyone talking about the poor oppressed Christians and how they were abused by the PLO needs to take a long look in that direction before starting at Damour.

Also Damour has been used by Israeli propagandists since it happened with absolutely no regard for accuracy at all, at least when it happened the death toll from Israeli clusterbombing of Damour was included and it was painted as more or less what it was: a civilian populace caught in the crossfire instead of some wholesale massacre. Google it up and check out the differing body counts. After awhile I think people just started making numbers up and others copied them.

While you're digesting the idea that Susan Sontag gives "aid and comfort" to suicide bombers, you might want to go to the web site referenced (frontpagemag) and sign the petition on the homepage:

"My friend, there is a Fifth Column in America, an enemy within. It's the so-called "peace movement." Sign the e-petition to EXPOSE THE ENEMY WITHIN"

Are you a member of the "peace movement in America"? Did you dare question the wisdom of the current catastrophe in Iraq?
Then sign the petition! Horowitz is eager to report you for arrest and deportation.

I thought it was a semi interesting article (although I don't agree with it). I thought it was one of those "I used to be like you but now I've been exposed to the truth (or parts of the truth more like it), and now I'm right and your wrong" type articles. Then I scrolled back up and saw this:

My friend, there is a Fifth Column in America, an enemy within. It's the so-called "peace movement." Sign the e-petition to EXPOSE THE ENEMY WITHIN to editors and producers of the nation's largest newspapers, news magazines, and network newsrooms

...and then I knew the article didn't make much sense for a reason!

;-)

which maybe an insight into what the neo-cons are thinking:

"Indeed, I found myself wishing that George W. Bush could magically be there, because this president understands what many of his supposedly enlightened and articulate critics find so difficult to admit: that there can be political movements, like Islamic terrorism—in which the jihad and the intifada merge—that are so pathological in their hatreds that we can solve the problems they purport to care about only after they are defeated."

...makes one wonder, eh?