June 11, 2005

Montreal Planet Magazine: Letter challenging Montreal MP Marlene Jennings' support for Israel

The Hon. Marlene Jennings
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

Dear Ms. Jennings,

Ron Saba has been sharing his dialogue with you regarding your extravagant praise of Israel, and this exchange is certainly a salutary exercise in raising public awareness. Personally, I feel impelled to address your rather casual dismissal of Mr. Saba's substantive points in view of the painful reality to which they refer. I think it's important for you to know that these points are acknowledged by a growing number of Jews, including myself, who are beginning to give public voice to deep concerns about the State of Israel and its behaviour.

Might I presume to bring the dialog down from the level of lofty generality to "facts on the ground" - like leadership. Could I ask you what other country you would offer such glowing tribute to, if that country were led by someone with the same kind of half-century political and military track record as Ariel Sharon? Unfortunately, wide segments of the public are woefully uninformed about that record. You've probably heard of Sabra and Shatila, for which he remains an un-indicted war criminal. In 1982, he opened up those two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon to his Falangist allies, allowing the predictable butchery of over a thousand Palestinians. (I hope you are familiar with the details; they are truly shattering.) Do you know about his war-provoking rogue military initiatives in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s? Are you aware of the reputation he acquired while serving as Gaza "enforcer", expelling families from refugee camps into the desert because one of their kids had the chutzpah to throw a rock? Are you familiar with Qibya, the setting for his debut on the public stage in 1953, when paratroops under his command trapped and massacred dozens of suddenly awakened villagers, provoking the harshest rebuke ever leveled against Israel by the United States?

In the present Middle East circumstances, Sharon's longstanding internal reputation for mendacity and duplicity should make you pause, significantly, before giving his professions and commitments the benefit of credibility. Can you ignore the fact that before the election by which he came to power, he deliberately created his preferred campaign issue by setting off the latest intifada with a provocative walkabout on the Temple Mount, in defiance of military and police wishes? No reasonable and informed human being could ever take such an individual seriously as a peacemaker.

And no country led by someone like that (not to mention others by whom it has previously been led, e.g. Itzhak Shamir, who ordered the 1948 assassination of UN Mediator Folke Bernadotte ) can be taken seriously as a beacon of freedom and human rights. Indeed, many Jews like me believe that any national, ethnic or religious group is disgraced and degraded by allowing such a thuggish brute to speak in their name. And the offense is not limited to their honor; it casts a shadow over their wellbeing around the world.

As in Cote St-Luc's current attempt to censor the photographic vision of an authentic hero, there is an underlying issue here of suppressing unwelcometruths concerning the Middle East conflict. The high water mark of denial in Montreal may have occurred a few years ago when the late Izzy Asper, an adherent to the extremist Jabotinsky faction within Zionism, still presided over CanWest, including the Gazette. One chilly Friday in March, two demonstrations in support of Palestinian rights drew a total of 10,000 participants - but failed to earn a line or an inch of space in the next day's Gazette.

Until very recently, a glossy and idealized perception of Israel's history held public sway in North America, but that is changing fast, along with Israel's benevolent image. In the United States, the FBI is investigating the passing of a secret Pentagon document on Iraq to Israel via AIPAC, the ubiquitous, supposedly "independent" lobby group for Israel.

This should prompt Canadians to take a close look at the nature, function and levels of official involvement (acknowledged or unacknowledged) in pro-Israel friendship-and-support groups. The era of wink-wink, nudge-nudge in these matters is coming to an end.

If you want to see any light at the end of the Middle East tunnel, I'm afraid you'll have to restore at least a measure of binocular vision. Israel's behaviour throughout the 38-year Occupation is starting to come under the same sort of microscopic examination that "respectable" people usually reserve for Palestinian schoolbooks. Inevitably, this attention rewinds to the circumstances surrounding the creation of the State of Israel. And should the Holocaust be invoked to justify the Nakba (the 1948 uprooting of three quarters of a million Palestinians), you should not hesitate to inform yourself about the deeply troubling aspects of the relations between Zionists and Nazis under Hitler.

My point is simply that making a balanced assessment requires binocular, not monocular, vision. There is a whole other world and worldview to be taken into account, a mass of embarrassing fact which is routinely ignored or trivialized by the mainstream media. Sadly, Palestinian human rights is the great unmentionable - the cause that dare not speak its
name.

But, as Cote St-Luc is now discovering, you can't screen out reality forever. And taken-for-granted assumptions about the drift of Jewish opinion also need to be re-examined.

I will end this letter with the same words I ended a message to the mother of Rachel Corrie (the young American volunteer bulldozed to death while trying to protect a Palestinian home from demolition): It isn't good for the Jews when Israel gets away with murder.

Sincerely,

David Himmelstein
Montreal

See Jennings letter at http://www.canpalnet-ottawa.org/Jennings_May20.pdf

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