As we bade farewell to 2010, I kept an article published by the online newspaper The Huffington Post. Its title “How Can You Defend Israel?” had caught my attention. The question was raised on the sidelines of a lecture given at a British university, and the answer to it involved a veiled Muslim woman taking driving lessons in Jerusalem, with the teacher being a religious Israeli with a skullcap, and two gay men walking hand-in-hand in Tel Aviv. The article then reminds us of the challenges facing Israel, and concludes with young Israelis joining the army to defend ‘their country', and stating after the killing of 21 Israelis at a discotheque: “They won't stop us from dancing.” They dance on the graves of the Palestinians. They stole the country from its native inhabitants after killing or expelling them. As for the article author David Harris, he is the Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee, an organization that defends Israel and subsequently, enables it to murder five thousand Palestinian civilians, mostly civilians, in the past decade alone, compared to 1500 Israelis. These figures include 1500 dead Palestinian children compared to 135 Israeli children. However, David Harris does not see in these numbers anything other than a suicide attack on a discotheque, which would not have taken place had it not been for the ongoing barbaric Israeli occupation, the murder of people and the destruction of their homes to make way for foreign settlers, who are all Nazi-like war criminals. In the clearest possible terms, the Jewish organizations that advocate for Israel are accomplices in its crimes. But when I read an arrogant article that infuriates me, I recall that for every David Harris, Avigdor Lieberman and Eli Yishai, there are ten like Ilan Pappé, Uri Avnery, and Amira Hass. Since I read the vile article, there has been every day an Israeli ‘Crime of the Day'. I read that Israeli soldiers killed a 65 year old Palestinian in Hebron as he was asleep in his house. They raided his bedroom and shot him without checking his identity, and it turned out that they killed him by mistake as they were pursuing another man. Furthermore, the Israeli soldiers had started the New Year by killing a protestor with toxic gas. On the night of April 9-10, 1973 in Beirut, I witnessed the murder of three Palestinian leaders, a well-known terrorist crime. I wrote in the Daily Star, of which I was the Chief Editor, a witness account of the Israeli terrorist assassination given by Maha Jayyousi, the wife of the Palestinian activist Kamal Adwan. A garden, where now a residential building stands, separated the Adwan family home from my old house between Verdun and Madame Curie Streets, in Ras Beirut. I climbed the stairs up from Kamal Adwan's flat on the first floor with a photographer working for Al-Nahar, to the eighth floor (the top floor) to look for Kamal Nasser, while the blood on the stairs gave me an idea of what fate he had met with. However, I was surprised to learn that the Israeli terrorists (including Ehud Barak who was disguised as a woman) had raided a flat on the seventh floor and killed a foreign flight attendant, also by mistake, since they kill first and check identities later. I wrote the details of that crime in The Daily Star and Al-Hayat at the time, and brought it up again each time a similar Israeli crime was perpetrated, as I did today. Al-Nahar published the picture of Kamal Nasser lying on his back with open hands and drowning in his blood, and I recall that the headline was “They Killed Him Then Crucified Him”. Four decades ago, they murdered a foreign young woman and a poet along with Kamal Adwan and Abu Youssef, and a few days ago, they killed a pensioner, and a week ago a woman. Before the terrorism on Verdun Street, [the Israelis] destroyed civilian aircraft in Beirut Airport near the end of 1968, as a Christmas gift to the Lebanese (the terrorist Benjamin Netanyahu participated in that attack as a draftee). I write this as the American Jewish billionaire Irving Moskowitz is funding the demolition of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, and we shall no doubt see further Israeli terrorism tomorrow. Amira Hass reminded us this week in Haaretz of the murder of Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh, when 14 civilians including 8 children were also killed along with him. (She published a testimony by a pilot who participated in the operation/crime on July 22, 2002.) The original crime is Israel itself, which was established on the land of Palestine on the basis of biblical myths that are uncorroborated by any historical or geographical facts. As I write too, there is an article in front of me about how Israeli archaeologists excavating a cave found teeth that are about 400,000 years old, which they said could upset theories of the origin of humans. They discovered 400,000 year old teeth, but still cannot find any traces of their alleged kingdoms in Palestine, or traces of the Temple of Solomon and the myth of its destruction in 70 AD, i.e. 1941 years ago only, or of Solomon himself or David, not to mention any Jewish traces in Egypt or Sinai. Israel was the lie and the crime of the twentieth century, and it seems that the crime and the lie are here to stay in the new century as well. [email protected]
