Are you ready?
The Epiphany of Rev. Thomas Are You Ready to Face the Facts About Israel?
“On October 21 (1948) the Government of Israel took a decision
that was to have a lasting and divisive effect on the rights and
status of those Arabs who lived within its borders: the official
establishment of military government in the areas where most of the
inhabitants were Arabs.”
Martin Gilbert, Israel: a History
I had given up on finding an American with a moral conscience and the
courage to go with it and was on the verge of retiring my keyboard
when I met the Rev. Thomas L. Are.
Rev. Are is a Presbyterian pastor who used to tell his Atlanta,
Georgia, congregation: “I am a Zionist.” Like most Americans, Rev. Are
had been seduced by Israeli propaganda and helped to spread the
propaganda among his congregation.
Around 1990 Rev. Are had an awakening for which he credits the
Christian Canon of St. George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem and author Marc
Ellis, co-editor of the book, Beyond Occupation.
Realizing that his ignorance of the situation on the ground had made
him complicit in great crimes, Rev. Are wrote a book hoping to save
others from his mistake and perhaps in part to make amends, Israeli
Peace Palestinian Justice, published in Canada in 1994.
Rev. Are researched his subject and wrote a brave book. Keep in mind
that 1994 was long prior to Walt and Mearsheimer’s recent book, which
exposed the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to control the
explanation Americans receive about the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Rev. Are begins with an account of Israel’s opening attack on the
Palestinians, an event which took place before most Americans alive
today were born. He quotes the distinguished British historian, Arnold
J. Toynbee: “The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 (and 1948)
was as morally indefensible as the slaughter of six million Jews by
the Nazis. Though nor comparable in quantity to the crimes of the
Nazis, it was comparable in quality.”
Golda Meir, considered by Israelis as a great leader and by others as
one of history’s great killers, disputed the facts: “It was not as
though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and
threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”
Golda Meir’s apology for Israel’s great crimes is so counter-factual
that it blows the mind. Palestinian refugee camps still exist outside
Palestine filled with Palestinians and their descendants whose towns,
villages, homes and lands were seized by the Israelis in 1948. Rev.
Are provides the reader with Na’im Ateek’s description of what
happened to him, an 11-year old, when the Jews came to take Beisan on
May 12, 1948. Entire Palestinian communities simply disappeared.
In 1949 the United Nations counted 711,000 Palestinian refugees.
[United Nations General Assembly Appendix 4, No. 15 ]
In 2005 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency estimated 4.25
million Palestinians and their descendants were refugees from their
homeland.
The Israeli policy of evicting non-Jews has continued for six decades.
On June 19, 2008, the Laity Committee in the Holy Land reported in
Window Into Palestine that the Israeli Ministry of Interior is taking
away the residency rights of Jerusalem Christians who have been
reclassified as “visitors in their own city.”
On December 10, 2007, MK Ephraim Sneh boasted in the Jerusalem Post
that Israel had achieved “a true Zionist victory” over the UN
partition plan “which sought to establish two nations in the land of
Israel.” The partition plan had assigned Israel 56 percent of
Palestine, leaving the inhabitants with only 44 percent. But Israel
had altered this over time. Sneb proudly declared: “When we complete
the permanent agreement, we will hold 78 percent of the land while the
Palestinians will control 22 percent.”
Sneb could have added that the 22 percent is essentially a collection
of unconnected ghettos cut off from one another and from roads, water,
medical care, and jobs.
Rev. Are documents that the abuse of Palestinians’ human rights is
official Israeli policy. Killings, torture, and beatings are routine.
On May 17, 1990, the Washington Post reported that Save the Children
“documented indiscriminate beating, tear-gassing and shooting of
children at home or just outside the house playing in the street, who
were sitting in the classroom or going to the store for groceries.”
On January 19, 1988, Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, later
Prime Minister, announced the policy of “punitive beating” of
Palestinians. The Israelis described the purpose of punitive beating:
“Our task is to recreate a barrier and once again put the fear of
death into the Arabs of the area.”
According to Save the Children, beatings of children and women are
common. Rev. Are, citing the report in the Washington Post, writes:
“Save the Children concluded that one-third of beaten children were
under ten years old, and one-fifth under the age of five. Nearly a
third of the children beaten suffered broken bones.”
On February 8, 1988, Newsweek magazine quoted an Israeli soldier: ” We
got orders to knock on every door, enter and take out all the males.
The younger ones we lined up with their faces against the wall, and
soldiers beat them with billy clubs. This was no private initiative,
these were orders from our company commander. . . . After one soldier
finished beating a detainee, another soldier called him `you Nazi,’
and the first man shot back: `You bleeding heart.’ When one soldier
tried to stop another from beating an Arab for no reason, a fist fight
broke out.”
These were the old days before conscience was eliminated from the
ranks of the Israeli military.
In the London Sunday Times, June 19, 1977, Ralph Schoenman, executive
director of the Bertrand Russell Foundation, wrote: “Israeli
interrogators routinely ill-treat and torture Arab prisoners.
Prisoners are hooded or blindfolded and are hung by their wrists for
long periods. Most are struck in the genitals or in other ways
sexually abused. Most are sexually assaulted. Others are administered
electric shock.”
Amnesty International concluded that “there is no country in the world
in which the use of official and sustained torture is as well
established and documented as in the case of Israel.”
Even the pro-Israeli Washington Post reported: “Upon arrest, a
detainee undergoes a period of starvation, deprivation of sleep by
organized methods and prolonged periods during which the prisoner is
made to stand with his hands cuffed and raised, a filthy sack covering
the head. Prisoners are dragged on the ground, beaten with objects,
kicked, stripped and placed under ice-cold showers.”
Sounds like Abu Gharib. There are news reports that Israeli torture
experts participated in the torture of the detainees assembled by the
American military as part of the Bush Regime’s propaganda onslaught to
convince Americans that Iraq was overflowing with al Qaeda terrorists.
On July 23, 2008, Antiwar.com posted an Iraqi news report that the
Iraqi government had released a total of 109,087 Iraqis that the
Americans had “detained.” Obviously, these “terrorist detainees” had
been used for the needs of Bush Regime propaganda. No one will ever
know how many of them were abused by Israeli torturers imported by the
CIA.
Rev. Are’s book makes sensible suggestions for resolving the conflict
that Israel began. However, the problem is that Israeli governments
believe only in force. The policy of the Israeli government has always
been to beat, kill, and brutalize Palestinians into submission and
flight. Anyone who doubts this can read the book of Israel’s finest
historian Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).
Americans are a gullible and naive people. They have been complicit
for 60 years in crimes that in Arnold Toynbee’s words “are comparable
in quality” to the crimes of Nazi Germany. As Toynbee was writing
decades ago, the accumulated Israeli crimes might now be comparable
also in quantity.
The US routinely vetoes United Nations condemnations of Israel for its
brutal crimes against the Palestinians. Insouciant American taxpayers
have been bled for a half century to provide the Israelis with
superior military weapons with which Israelis assault their neighbors,
all the while convincing America–essentially a captive nation–that
Israel is the victim.
John F. Mahoney wrote: “Thomas Are reminds me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
an active pastor who comes to the unsettling realization that he and
his people have been fed a terrible lie that is killing and torturing
thousands of innocent men, women and children. Not without ample
research and prayer does such a pastor, in turn, risk unsettling his
congregation. The Reverend Are has done his homework and, I suspect,
has prayed often and long during the writing of this courageous book.”
Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian and pastor who was executed for
his active participation in the German Resistance against Nazism.
Professor Benjamin M. Weir, San Francisco Theological Seminary, wrote:
” This book will make the reader squirm. It asks you to lend your
voice in behalf of the voiceless.”
Americans who can no longer think for themselves and who are terrified
of disapproval by their peer group are incapable of lending their
voices to anyone except those who control the world of propaganda in
which they live.
The ignorance and unconcern of Americans is a great frustration to my
friends in the Israeli peace movement. Without outside support those
Israelis, who believe in good will and do not share their government’s
belief in Lenin’s doctrine that violence is the only effective force
in history, are deprived, by America’s support for their government’s
policy of violence, of any peaceful resolution of a conflict began in
1947 by Israeli aggression against unsuspecting Palestinian villages.
Rev. Are wrote his book with the hope that the pen is mightier than
the sword and that facts can crowd out propaganda and create a
framework for a just resolution of the Palestinian issue. In his
concluding chapter, “What Christians Can Do,” Rev. Are writes: “We
cannot allow others to dictate our thinking on any subject, especially
on anything as important as Christian faithfulness, which is tested by
an attitude towards seeking justice for the oppressed. It’s a
Christian’s duty to know.”
Duty, of course, has costs. Rev. Are writes: “Speak up for the
Palestinians and you will make enemies. Yet, as Christians, we must be
willing to raise issues that until now we have chosen to dodge.”
More than a decade later, President Jimmy Carter, a true friend of
Israel, tried again to awaken Americans’ moral conscience with his
book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
Carter was instantly demonized by the Israel Lobby.
Sixty years of efforts by good and humane people to hold Israel
accountable have so far failed, but they are more important today than
ever before. Israel has its captive American nation on the verge of
attacking Iran, the consequences of which could be catastrophic for
all concerned. The alleged purpose of the attack is to eliminate
nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons. The real reason is to eliminate
all support for Hamas and Hezbollah so that Israel can seize the
entire West Bank and southern Lebanon. The Bush regime is eager to do
Israel’s bidding, and the media and evangelical “christian” churches
have been preparing the American people for the event.
It is paradoxical that Israel is demonstrating that veracity lies not
in the Christian belief in good will but in Lenin’s doctrine that
violence is the effective force in history and that the evangelical
Christian Zionist churches agree.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the
Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street
Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He
is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at:
paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
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