First, an excerpt from Democracy Now:
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is accusing Israel of creating an apartheid system in the West Bank and Gaza. The charge comes in his new book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid."
The Nobel Peace Prize winner has been deeply involved in Middle East policies for the past three decades. As president he negotiated the Camp David Accords - which secured a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt.
[...] Jimmy Carter writes, "Israel's continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land."
Carter criticizes Israel for building what he describes as an imprisonment wall through the West Bank. He accuses Israel of strangling the residents of Gaza where the poverty rate has reached 70 percent and where the malnutrition rate mirrors countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. And Carter is critical of Washington's role. He writes, "The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories." - Full text
This is kind of a "patch-work" blog to illustrate what President Jimmy Carter is alluding to in his new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid but also to explore the reasons why it will most certainly be totally ignored not only by the American public but most importantly by the so-called "progressive" key bloggers who could, should they so wish, make a difference.
And now this real-life account from Laila El-Haddad of Palestinians waiting for the Rafah Crossing to open, some more desperately than others:
We stood and we waited and we cried and we returned back to Egypt yesterday, and again today. Us and thousands of others.
It was anguish. Anguish and misery and desperation personified in every woman, man and child.
One hour turned into two, then three, then five, as we stood shielding our eyes from the piercing midday sun on Wednesday, when we were told the Crossing would be opening for a few hours.
Some wailed in exhaustion, others fainted, still others cracked dry humour, trying to pass the time. We stood, thousands of us, packed together elbow to elbow like cattle, penned in between steel barriers on one end, and riot-geared Egyptian security guards on the perimeter, who were given orders not to allow anyone through until they hear otherwise from the Israelis-and to respond with force if anyone dared.
Many of the people had been waiting for more than two weeks to cross back into Gaza, sometimes making the trip to the crossing several times a day upon receiving word of its imminent opening.
"We have been waiting for 15 days now. Only god knows when it will open-today, tomorrow, the day after?" said 57-year-old Abu Yousuf Barghut, his shrapnel-riddled arm trembling by his side.
His tearful wife, Aisha, added: "God knows we only went to seek treatment for him and to come right back. And now we are stuck and waiting us in Gaza are my four children. This is the most basic of rights-to be able to return to our homes, and we are even denied that."
"The only way anyone will actually pay attention to our plight is if one of us dies here, and even then, I’m not sure the world will care," stammered one young man, Isam Shaksu, his eye heavily bandaged after having received an corneal implantation in Jordan.
In July, seven Palestinians waiting to be let into Gaza from Egypt died waiting to cross Rafah. - Humanity Lost
More from her diaries here
In a testimony from Avichai and Noam of Breaking the Silence, we learn how cruelty and total disregard for human suffering seem to be the order of the day among the soldiers manning the checkpoints (some though, as Avichai and Noam point out, feeling that they have no choice because they are acting under orders.)
The tragedy in all of this is that many so-called "progressive" bloggers (Firedoglake, MyDD, Americablog, etc) will fail to take up this issue. Just as yesterday they completely ignored the Iranian President's letter to the Americans, one blog in particular going as far as saying there were "no news" yesterday! Sometimes it boggles the mind to see how totally and absolutely clueless America is!
Then again, perhaps I am wrong. It is not so much about being "clueless" as about "not wanting to go there". Yesterday, in the UK, a poor British baroness was chastised for daring to criticize the 'pro-Israel lobby' there! I have read here at DKos and at MyDD critics of US Israel policies "pleading" with the readers not to be "cruel and offensive" in their comments! Understandable when one reads some of the vicious and personally abusive comments that follow blogs (like MondoWeiss, for example) who dare criticize America’s blind support for Israel’s expansionism in the Occupied Territories and the resulting inhumanity. That is when such blogs are not totally ignored in the first place, which is yet another well-known tactic to silence dissenters. It comes as a very big surprise when one realizes that the only voices who could take America towards a saner and safer future are just not there. They were there for Vietnam but not for Iraq, and even less so for Palestine: the Israel connection forbids thought and speech.
In a recent interview with SF_IMC, Jewish-American anti-Zionist journalist Jeffrey Blankfort states how his concerns for the plight of Palestinians were received:
In '71, I came back, and I started speaking to former friends of my parents, people who were on the Left, and who said that I was "the man from Standard Oil." Palestinians!?! They thought I had joined the Nazis. This was a major contradiction, and remains a contradiction, within the American Left, which is very heavily Jewish and Jewish dominated. And this is one of the reasons that there is no movement here today, thirty-five years later, because most American Jews, even those on the Left who sympathize with the Palestinians, carry around so much baggage that they can't come out and say, "Israel is wrong, was wrong from the beginning, and the way to solve the problem now, since there is no military solution, is to sanction Israel. (my emphasis) - Source
End of story ...
One last observation: Before asking whether Obama, Clinton, McCain, ... will run in 2008, one needs to know where they stand on Israel. Unless this crucial relationship between the US and Israel is well debated and understood, it is quite useless to blog about that in terms of what the future holds. It will all be just noise, multiple cases of the blind leading the blind!
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Update: This is an excerpt from a recent article by Gary Kamiya published at Salon (November 28, 2006) that adds greatly to this discussion:
The Israeli-Palestinian crisis has long been the elephant in the room of Bush's entire Mideast policy, a subject too fraught to bring up. It is incorrect to say, as some on the left have done, that Bush's Iraq war was fought "for Israel." But it is true that the war was dreamed up by strongly pro-Israel officials and ideologues and that Israel's interests were a significant factor in their decisions. And in a larger sense, the ideology behind Iraq, and Bush's entire "war on terror," is identical to Israel's "iron wall" approach to its Arab enemies -- a fact that has gone largely unremarked upon in the United States. - Full text