The Conscience
of Honest Israelis
By
Rev. Ted Pike
1 February 2010
If anti-Semitism is “strong criticism
of Israel,” as the Anti-Defamation League and the government
of Israel now insist, then some of the world’s most outspoken
anti-Semites exist where one would least expect them—in Israel.
Increasingly, Jewish writers for Israel’s largest dailies,
the Jerusalem Post and Ha’aretz, vilify
Israel’s inhuman treatment of Palestinians. They use language
which would arouse a chorus of outrage as “anti-Semitic”
in any American church, university or legislative body. Christian
evangelicals, it’s time to listen.
 For
the past century, relations between Jews and Arabs in the war-torn
Mideast have not been governed by the golden rule. If they had,
the Mideast would be unrecognizable for its calm and cooperation.
But in a refreshing article in the Jerusalem Post, Larry
Derfner does what he claims is unthinkable for most Israelis. He
requests Israelis to consider how they would feel if the inhabitants
of Gaza treated them as despicably as Israel treats the Palestinians.
“The
question we have to ask ourselves is this: If anybody treated
us like we’re treating the people in Gaza, what would we
do? We don’t want to go there, do we? And because we don’t,
we make it our business not to see, hear or think about how, indeed,
we are treating the people in Gaza. All these shocked dignitaries,
all these reports, these details, these numbers—thousands
of destroyed this and tens of thousands of destroyed that, rubble,
sewage, malnutrition, crying babies, humanitarian crises—who
can keep up? Who cares? They did it to themselves. Where to for
lunch?
But
is that how we would react? Is that what Israelis would do if
a foreign army did to this country what the IDF did to that one
a year ago? If another country sent F-16s, Apache helicopters,
white phosphorus, drones, tanks and battalions into Israel, if
any nation bombed and killed over here like we bombed and killed
in Gaza, then rubbed our noses in it afterward, would we want
to make peace with them?...what we make 100% sure to forget is
that we do all sorts of hateful things to Gaza that they don’t
do to us, and that this is the way it’s been since 1967…We
have to dare to put ourselves in those people’s place. And
we have to stop doing to them what we would never allow anyone
to do to us. Otherwise, we Israelis have no conscience, and little
by little we become capable of anything.” (Rattling
the Cage: A taboo question for Israelis, Dec. 30, 2009)
In
Haaretz’s article, “Israel’s 10 Worst
Errors of the Decade,” Bradley Burston lists “The siege
of Gaza” as number one through number ten. He says,
It
was a decade framed by a fundamentalist Palestinian belief in
salvation through suicide and a fundamentalist Israeli belief
in salvation through brutality. The decade ends as it began, clueless,
hopeless, exhausted. For having lived through this, we are, all
of us, somehow much more than ten years older, yet none the wiser…The
effect of this siege has been to focus and intensify Palestinian
anger against Israel…In the eyes of the world community,
the overwhelming collective punishment—and the relative
silence of Israelis in response—has gutted Israel’s
claim to the moral high ground…The fact that the siege has
failed so completely in achieving its stated aims reinforces the
impression that its real purpose is punitive…The siege corrupts
the moral values of all Israelis, who, whether or not they are
aware of what is being done to the people of Gaza, bear ultimate
responsibility for all acts being carried out in their name.”
(Israel’s
10 Worst Errors of the Decade, Jan. 6, 2010)
The
title of Akiva Eldar’s Ha’aretz article asks,
“Is
an Israeli Jewish sense of victimization perpetuating the conflict
with Palestinians?” He cites a study by Daniel Bar-Tal,
“one of the world’s leading political psychologists
and Rafi Nets-Zehngut, a doctoral student, which alleges,
Israeli
Jews’ consciousness is characterized by a sense of victimization,
a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness,
dehumanization of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their
sufferings…the public practices self-censorship and accepts
the establishment version, out of an unwillingness to open up
to all alternative information—they don’t want to
be confused with the facts. We are a nation that lives in the
past, suffused with anxiety and suffering from chronic closed-mindedness.
(Is an Israeli Jewish sense of victimization perpetuating the
conflict with Palestinians?, Jan. 30, 2009)
Gideon
Levy, in Ha’aretz, takes the occasion of Holocaust
Remembrance Day to preach, not against a hostile world but against
increasing Israeli oppression of the Gazans, which he alleges fans
the flames of anti-Semitism.
Wednesday
was international Holocaust Remembrance Day, and an Israeli public
relations drive like this hasn’t been seen for ages…It
won’t help much. International Holocaust Remembrance Day
has passed, the speeches will soon be forgotten and the depressing
everyday reality will remain. Israel will not come out looking
good, even after the PR campaign….Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu spoke at Yad Vashem. ‘There is evil in the world,’
he said. ‘Evil must be stamped out at the beginning.’”
No
remembrance speech will obliterate the xenophobia that has reared
its head in Israel…We have a prime minister… who speaks
about evil but shares the crime of the Gaza blockade now in its
fourth year, leaving 1.5 million people in disgraceful conditions…a
prime minister in whose country people perpetuate pogroms against
innocent Palestinians…against whom the state does nothing…How
beautiful it would have been if on this international day of remembrance
Israel had taken the time to examine itself, look inward and ask,
for example, how it is that anti-Semitism has reared its head
in the world precisely in the past year, the year after we dropped
white-phosphorus bombs on Gaza…A thousand speeches against
anti-Semitism will not extinguish the flames ignited by Cast Lead,
flames that threaten not only Israel but the entire Jewish world.
As long as Gaza is under blockade and Israel sinks into its institutionalized
xenophobia, Holocaust speeches remain hollow. As long as evil
is rampant here at home, neither the world nor we will be able
to accept our preaching against others, even if they deserve it.”
(Holocaust
remembrance is a boon for Israeli propaganda, Jan. 28, 2010)
Antony
Loewenstein, in Ha’aretz, underscores that:
The
decades-old ability of Zionist groups to manage the public narrative
of Israeli victimhood is breaking down. Damning [Israel's] critics
has therefore become a key method of control.
‘But,’
writes Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, a leading Jewish-American
blogger, ‘whereas the smear tactics once inspired fear in
many people, now they just inspire pity. They no longer work.’
“Defining
a humane Judaism in the 21st century means condemning the brutal
Israeli occupation in the West Bank and resisting the ongoing
siege of Gaza.
“Mainstream
Zionism wants to completely shield Jews from the uncomfortable
facts of the Israeli occupation and Palestinian self-determination.
“But
facts have an uncomfortable way of seeping back into view. Colonel
Itai Virob, an IDF brigade commander in the West Bank, recently
told an Israeli court that, “a slap, sometimes a punch to
the scruff of the neck or the chest, sometimes a knee jab or strangulation
to calm somebody [a Palestinian] down is reasonable.” (Why
aren't Jews outraged by Israeli occupation?, June 17, 2009)*
*Virob’s admission barely scratches the surface of the fact
that the most widespread and fiendish Israeli tortures of thousands
of Palestinians have occurred over at least the last 40 years and
are still being inflicted in Israel’s prisons today. An average
of 10,000 Palestinians, including women and minors, largely arrested
and incarcerated without due process, are vulnerable to unspeakable
cruelties at the hands of IDF and Bet Shin, Israel’s secret
police every year. Such inhumanity, worthy of a Nazi concentration
camp, is blacked out by the Israeli military, police, and media
and Western media (including Christian). But it is extensively documented
in my six-page article, Torture
in Israeli Prisons at www.truthtellers.org.
It is well known that Israeli torture experts were on the scene
during American torture of Iraqis at Abu-Ghraib. There can also
be little doubt that the same Israeli influence, as partners with
the US in the “War on Terror” during the George W. Bush
administration, led to very un-American and shocking incorporation
of Israeli-style torture into US interrogation of Muslim prisoners.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
TALK
SHOW HOSTS: Interview Rev. Ted Pike on this topic. Call
(503) 631-3808.
 The
freedom-saving outreach of Rev. Ted Pike and the National Prayer
Network is solely supported by the sale of books, videos, and your
financial. All gifts are tax-deductable.
NATIONAL
PRAYER NETWORK,
P.O. Box 828, Clackamas, OR 97015
America First Books Editor's
Note
For
those new to the hate bill controversy that is the topic of most
of Rev. Pike's work, please link to the following articles:
 Alert
to Congress Regarding Hate Bills and the False Flag Attack Threat
by America First Books publisher William B. Fox. Two-thirds
down the web page please find the essay "The
Hate Crime Law Concept: It is all very sinister for at least nine
major reasons."
Also,
earlier on this same page I comment:
Although
Rev Ted Pike is completely independent from Captain May and myself
in terms of his political and religious views, the threats we
address all stem from the same corrupt power elite. I mention
in my concluding remarks below that this elite “would mobilize
us into domestic tyranny and foreign wars, while distracting us
from economic depression and the groups that brought it about.”
This
is the real problem, not the lack of more “hate crime”
laws. If anything, we need even more freedom of speech to speak
truth to power, sort out our problems, and develop peaceful strategies
to handle high level malefactors. This is why we urgently need
for members of Congress to not only take a principled stand and
stop all hate crime legislative initiatives, but to also roll
back all the existing hate crime laws currently on the books.
Hate
crime laws actually pose a major national security threat. They
condition Americans to feel that certain types of thought are inherently
immoral or illegal, even if they do not result in any form of violence
or infringement on the rights of others.
In
our articles related to false flag attacks, Capt.
Eric H. May and I have discussed strong evidence that Mossad-CIA
was behind 9-11, the mere "thought" of which would some
day be outlawed once hate crime oversight bureaucracies become firmly
implanted in America. We can expect government hate crime overwatch
entities to experience the usual cancerous growth and abuse of power
that libertarian writer and Presidential candidate Harry Browne
described in his classic book Why
Government Doesn't Work.
Please
find out more about the hate crime issue in the Rev
Ted Pike archive.
Please discover important
alternative religious and secular viewpoints on freedom of speech
issues at America First Books:
a) The
Rev Ted Pike archive
b) The
Religious Crisis page
These web pages address not only conservative
Christian and Christian Zionist viewpoints, but also secular, anarcho-libertarian,
atheist, pagan/natural religion (particularly Asatru/Odinist), racial
nationalist, and "miscellaneous other" perspectives.
|
at
the Battle of Cowpens, S. Carolina, 1781