Chris Hedges: Why Israel Lies

[truedelphi]

91. You are speaking as though the foundation of what I am talking about was a moral foundation.

The United Nations stating that legally the Jewish displaced persons could enter Israel and set the nation up as their nation, this "legal decision" was at its very essence an immoral allowing of an immoral taking. And from that "legal decision" came the immoral taking of lives, the immoral taking of property, and the immoral taking of an entire way of life.

When property, lives and right to governance are taken from a people, irregardless of whom those people are (Be they American Native Peoples, Jewish people living in Europe during the Third Reich, or the Palestinians) what needs to happen is a restitution. Period.

And of course restitution cannot come about because so many Israelis are in denial that anything immoral happened. The attitude of most Jewish people, at least the friends i have in the USA whoa re Jewish, seems to be: of course, it was totally immoral that Jewish people suffered the Holocaust in Europe, but since Palestinians are not Jews, too bad for them!

The takings are at its most basic a most willful ignoring of realities: the most important of which was how the territory was already inhabited by a plethora of people, such as Muslims, Christians, Sufis, and others, all of whom had to accept that a religious nation state now was stripping away the existence, in total, of Palestine.

Anyway, I can't think of how Jewish people here in the USA can justify just exactly how it was okay for the Jewish displaced people to land in Israel, and re-claim the homes and land, lives and entire nation state of Palestine. Meanwhile they are very liberal in terms of their expressing sympathy for the Native Peoples here in the Americas and how awful it was that the takings of property and life, in terms of the various Indian tribes, occurred.

But as someone who has spent over five hundred hours of my life dealing with the Holocaust, I clearly remember how when Albert Speer asked Hitler about the Third Reich's subjugation of the Jewish people (a question that was asked in the very early days of Hitler's reign) Hitler replied that the precedent for his doing what he was doing to the Jewish people happened to be the American government's treatment of the American Indians.

If what happened to the American Indians from 1620 on to Wounded Knee, and if what happened to the Jewish people during the Third Reich until the Allies' victory in 1945, were indeed immoral activities, then what has happened to the Palestinians, from 1948 on until this moment right now, can certainly be viewed as immoral activities.