Why are Jews hated by so many people?

Column Left | posted April 16, 2002 (web only)
Sharon Wears Oppressor's Cloak
Robert Scheer


What is the fundamental difference between Slobodan Milosevic and Ariel Sharon? The former is on trial for war crimes, while the latter still leads an occupying army.

For those already loosing angry e-mails from their quivers, I ask you to take a few minutes to consider the comparison before rushing to defend Sharon's scorched-earth march through the West Bank as a necessary response to the terrorists that Yasser Arafat either condones or has been too gutless to stop.

Milosevic, like Sharon, cited the terror tactics of neighboring peoples--Croatians, Bosnians and ethnic Albanians who stood in the way of his vision of a secure Yugoslavia--as a rationale for preemptive use of massive military force against them. An occupied people can get ugly in their resistance, unless a near-saint such as Mohandas Gandhi or Nelson Mandela leads the movement away from mayhem while winning political victories. Arafat is anything but a saint, and there is much blood on his hands. But it is always the occupier, with the big guns and control of the real estate, that holds the real keys to reconciliation.





Rarely does such an occupation end voluntarily; land is exchanged for peace only when the occupiers feel there is no other choice. Both the plan laid out by former US Senator George Mitchell and the recent Saudi-inspired Arab League peace proposal offered such an option, but Sharon would not accept it anymore than Milosevic would the compromises presented to him up to the end of the Yugoslavia wars.

Instead, both have sought to destroy any momentum toward peace by waging war.

Sharon has humiliated President Bush, not only by ignoring his demand for a withdrawal but by co-opting the president's war-on-terrorism code phrases as cover for his drive to prevent--forever, if possible--a Palestinian state. How simple it would be if only the "axis of evil" targeted civilians, but from Saddam Hussein to Hamas to Sharon, nobody in the Mideast conflagration has a monopoly on such cruelty.

By blasting through West Bank towns, possibly burying children in their wake, the once-proud Israel Defense Forces is heading down toward the moral level of suicide bombers.

Whatever is ultimately discovered about the carnage committed by Israel's forces, enough is known to implicate Sharon for a form of ethnic cleansing--purposefully destroying the Palestinians' ability to govern themselves. The systematic destruction of the signposts of nascent Palestinian statehood--statistics bureaus, education ministries, electricity and water supplies--is aimed at further uprooting a refugee population.

Despite stereotypes, Serbs did not start out as oppressive occupiers any more than did Israelis; both their peoples suffered terribly during World War II and sought peace within secure borders. However, the historical insecurity of both peoples has led them into the role of oppressor, feeding a cycle of resistance and repression.

This is the opposite of what the idealistic Zionists who founded Israel had in mind. They always knew that the ultimate test of the new state would not be merely its ability to survive but rather its ability to survive with democratic values intact.

Almost 70% of Israel's officer corps in the 1967 Six-Day War had been raised in the idealism of the kibbutz movement. They deemed justice a universal right--even for Palestinians.

Of course, an Arab world that long refused to accept and guarantee Israel's right to exist did much to kill that idealism. Yet Israel's decision to keep the captured territories has ultimately boomeranged, drastically undermining its democracy and stability.

"If Israel does not find the way to disengage from the Palestinians, its future might resemble the experience of Belfast or Bosnia--two communities bleeding each other to death for generations," said former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak this week in an op-ed article. "Alternatively, if we do not disengage from the Palestinians, Israel might drift toward an apartheid state."

Unfortunately, under the heavy hand of Barak's successor Israel already is an apartheid state. This may be what Sharon and Arafat prefer to the Camp David compromise, but it represents the deepest betrayal of the interests of both the Palestinians and Jews.


I've been to Israel and witnessed the oppression of the Palestinians. Where do you get your information?

What bullshit am I advocating?

cicerone imposter wrote:

What bullshit am I advocating?

The viewpoint you presented in the above screed.
It is prejudicially slanderous and inaccurate, to say the least.

A solution to the problem might to restructure the nuclear family to embrace a world without borders.

It can be argued that technology has produced the global-village and that technologies will continue to fray Man's 'pack-mentality'.

In specificity: if all Palestinian were well educated and had good access to the Internet, there well might be a sea change in Middle Eastern dynamics.

Given the exorbitant costs of ignorance and given the deadly implications of a myopic nuclear family mind-set, my solution is imminently practical however unlikely it might appear.

Column Left | posted April 16, 2002 (web only)
Sharon Wears Oppressor's Cloak
Robert Scheer


What is the fundamental difference between Slobodan Milosevic and Ariel Sharon? The former is on trial for war crimes, while the latter still leads an occupying army.

For those already loosing angry e-mails from their quivers, I ask you to take a few minutes to consider the comparison before rushing to defend Sharon's scorched-earth march through the West Bank as a necessary response to the terrorists that Yasser Arafat either condones or has been too gutless to stop.

Milosevic, like Sharon, cited the terror tactics of neighboring peoples--Croatians, Bosnians and ethnic Albanians who stood in the way of his vision of a secure Yugoslavia--as a rationale for preemptive use of massive military force against them. An occupied people can get ugly in their resistance, unless a near-saint such as Mohandas Gandhi or Nelson Mandela leads the movement away from mayhem while winning political victories. Arafat is anything but a saint, and there is much blood on his hands. But it is always the occupier, with the big guns and control of the real estate, that holds the real keys to reconciliation.

Rarely does such an occupation end voluntarily; land is exchanged for peace only when the occupiers feel there is no other choice. Both the plan laid out by former US Senator George Mitchell and the recent Saudi-inspired Arab League peace proposal offered such an option, but Sharon would not accept it anymore than Milosevic would the compromises presented to him up to the end of the Yugoslavia wars.

Instead, both have sought to destroy any momentum toward peace by waging war.

Sharon has humiliated President Bush,

not only by ignoring his demand for a withdrawal but by co-opting the president's war-on-terrorism code phrases as cover for his drive to prevent--forever, if possible--a Palestinian state.

How simple it would be if only the "axis of evil" targeted civilians, but from Saddam Hussein to Hamas to Sharon, nobody in the Mideast conflagration has a monopoly on such cruelty.

By blasting through West Bank towns, possibly burying children in their wake, the once-proud Israel Defense Forces is heading down toward the moral level of suicide bombers.

Whatever is ultimately discovered about the carnage committed by Israel's forces, enough is known to implicate Sharon for a form of ethnic cleansing--purposefully destroying the Palestinians' ability to govern themselves. The systematic destruction of the signposts of nascent Palestinian statehood--statistics bureaus, education ministries, electricity and water supplies--is aimed at further uprooting a refugee population.

Despite stereotypes, Serbs did not start out as oppressive occupiers any more than did Israelis; both their peoples suffered terribly during World War II and sought peace within secure borders. However, the historical insecurity of both peoples has led them into the role of oppressor, feeding a cycle of resistance and repression.

This is the opposite of what the idealistic Zionists who founded Israel had in mind. They always knew that the ultimate test of the new state would not be merely its ability to survive but rather its ability to survive with democratic values intact.

Almost 70% of Israel's officer corps in the 1967 Six-Day War had been raised in the idealism of the kibbutz movement. They deemed justice a universal right--even for Palestinians.

Of course, an Arab world that long refused to accept and guarantee Israel's right to exist did much to kill that idealism. Yet Israel's decision to keep the captured territories has ultimately boomeranged, drastically undermining its democracy and stability.

"If Israel does not find the way to disengage from the Palestinians, its future might resemble the experience of Belfast or Bosnia--two communities bleeding each other to death for generations," said former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak this week in an op-ed article. "Alternatively, if we do not disengage from the Palestinians, Israel might drift toward an apartheid state."

Unfortunately, under the heavy hand of Barak's successor Israel already is an apartheid state. This may be what Sharon and Arafat prefer to the Camp David compromise, but it represents the deepest betrayal of the interests of both the Palestinians and Jews.

I've been to Israel and witnessed the oppression of the Palestinians. Where do you get your information?

I'll only respond to your first challenge about Ariel Sharon. There's no adhominem there; only your imagination.

From CounterPunch: (This is only a partial list. It's up to you to find it false.)

February 7, 2001
Return of the Terrorist
The Crimes
of Ariel Sharon
Some incorrigible optimists have suggested that only a right-wing extremist of the notoriety of Likud leader Ariel Sharon will have the credentials to broker any sort of lasting settlement with the Palestinians. Maybe so. History is not devoid of such examples. But Sharon?

Sharon's history offers a monochromatic record of moral corruption, with a documented record of war crimes going back to the early 1950s. He was born in 1928 and as a young man joined the Haganah, the underground military organization of Israel in its pre-state days. In 1953 he
was given command of Unit 101, whose mission is often described as that of retaliation against Arab attacks on Jewish villages. In fact, as can be seen from two terrible onslaughts, one of them very well known, Unit 101's purpose was that of instilling terror by the infliction of discriminate, murderous violence not only on able bodied fighters but on the young, the old, the helpless.

Sharon's first documented sortie in this role was in August of 1953 on the refugee camp of El-Bureig, south of Gaza. An Israeli history of the 101 unit records 50 refugees as having been killed; other sources allege 15 or 20. Major-General Vagn Bennike, the UN commander, reported that "bombs were thrown" by Sharon's men "through the windows of huts in which the refugees were sleeping and, as they fled, they were attacked by small arms and automatic weapons".

In October of 1953 came the attack by Sharon's unit 101 on the Jordanian village of Qibya, whose "stain" Israel's foreign minister at the time, Moshe Sharett, confided to his diary "would stick to us and not be washed away for many years". He was wrong. Though even strongly pro-Israel commentators in the West compared it to Lidice, Qibya and Sharon's role are scarcely evoked in the West today, least of all by journalists such as Deborah Sontag of the New York Times who recently wrote a whitewash of Sharon, describing him as "feisty", or the
Washington Post's man in Jerusalem who fondly invoked him after his fateful excursion to the Holy Places in Jerusalem as "the portly old warrior".

Israeli historian Avi Shlaim describes the massacre thus: "Sharon's order was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses and inflict heavy casualties on its inhabitants. His success in carrying out the order surpassed all expectations. The full and macabre story of what happened at Qibya was
revealed only during the morning after the attack. The village had been reduced to rubble: forty-five houses had been blown up, and sixty-nine civilians, two thirds of them women and children, had been killed. Sharon and his men claimed that they believed that all the inhabitants had run away and that they had no idea that anyone was hiding inside the houses."

The UN observer on the scene reached a different conclusion: "One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshhold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them." The slaughter in Qibya was described contemporaneously in a letter to the president of the United Nations Security Council dated 16 October 1953 (S/3113) from the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Jordan to the United States. On 14 October 1953 at 9:30 at night, he wrote, Israeli troops launched a battalion-scale attack on the village of Qibya in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (at the time the West Bank was annexed to Jordan).

According to the diplomat's account, Israeli forces had entered the village and systematically murdered all occupants of houses, using automatic weapons, grenades and incendiaries. On 14 October, the bodies of 42 Arab civilians had been recovered; several more bodies were still under the wreckage. Forty houses, the village school and a reservoir had been destroyed. Quantities of unused explosives, bearing Israel army markings in Hebrew, had been found in the village. At about 3 a.m., to cover their withdrawal, Israeli support troops had begun shelling the
neighbouring villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel.

And what of Sharon's conduct when he was head of the Southern Command of Israel's Defense Forces in the early 1970s? The Gaza "clearances" were vividly described by Phil Reeves in a piece in The London Independent on January 21 of this year.

"Thirty years have elapsed since Ariel Sharon, favourite to win Israel's forthcoming election, was the head of the Israel Defence Forces' southern command, charged with the task of 'pacifying' the recalcitrant Gaza Strip after the 1967 war. But the old men still remember it well. Especially the old men on Wreckage Street. Until late 1970, Wreckage, or Had'd, Street wasn't a street, just one of scores of narrow, nameless alleys weaving through Gaza City's Beach Camp, a shantytown cluttered with low, two-roomed houses, built with UN aid for refugees from the 1948 war who then, as now, were waiting for the international community to settle their future. The street acquired its name after an unusually prolonged visit from Mr Sharon's soldiers. Their orders were to bulldoze hundreds of homes to carve a wide, straight street. This would allow Israeli troops and their heavy armored vehicles to move easily through the camp, to exert control and hunt down men from the Palestinian Liberation Army.

"'They came at night and began marking the houses they wanted to demolish with red paint,' said Ibrahim Ghanim, 70, a retired labourer. 'In the morning they came back, and ordered everyone to leave. I remember all the soldiers shouting at people, Yalla, yalla, yalla, yalla! They threw everyone's belongings into the street. Then Sharon brought in bulldozers and started flattening the street. He did the whole lot, almost in one day. And the soldiers would beat people, can you imagine? Soldiers with guns, beating little kids!' By the time the Israeli army's work was done, hundreds of homes were destroyed, not only on Wreckage Street but throughout the camp, as Sharon ploughed out a grid of wide security roads. Many of the refugees took shelter in schools, or squeezed into the already badly over-crowded homes of relatives. Other families, usually those with a Palestinian political activist, were loaded into trucks and taken to exile in a town in the heart of the Sinai Desert, then controlled by Israel."

As Reeves reported, the devastation of Beach Camp was far from the exception. "In August 1971 alone, troops under Mr Sharon's command destroyed some 2,000 homes in the Gaza Strip, uprooting 16,000 people for the second time in their lives. Hundreds of young Palestinian men were arrested and deported to Jordan and Lebanon. Six hundred relatives of suspected guerrillas were exiled to Sinai. In the second half of 1971, 104 guerrillas were assassinated. 'The policy at that time was not to arrest suspects, but to assassinate them', said Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza City".

If you like, I can provide other sources concerning Ariel Sharon's past.

Moishe, You really don't understand the fundamentals of debate do you; you challenged what the writer wrote about Sharon, and you called it an ad hominem. I showed you why you were wrong. You than expanded your argument to include other cultures and races.

Stick with the initial issue/article that you challenged. I posted rebuttals to your challenge. You're the one using ad hominems. You probably fail to understand the meaning of the word.

FYI, I do not hate Jews even though many may perceive it that way. I hate the people who would treat other humans with disdain and cruelty, and that includes the Japanese before and during WWII. Get it, yet?

Please explain your "slanderous and inaccurate." That's a good start.

Moishe wrote: Or that Sharon or Israel actually committed any of the crimes delineated.


If you refuse to acknowledge the articles written by both Jews and non-Jews about Sharon's atrocities and crimes against humanity, I find it hopeless to even present more "evidence."
I do not wish to waste my time trying to convince somebody who refuses the facts presented; for which there are many more sources.