“It would be in the long-term interests of peace in the Middle East for there to be a state of Palestine, a modern functioning state that is on the same footing as other states.”
-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, First Lady of the United States, 1998
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (“King Bibi”) is a literal fountain of hypocrisy. The dictionary definition of the noun “hypocrisy” is “a pretense [or stance] of having desirable or publicly approved attitudes, beliefs, principals, etc. that one does not actually possess.”
A hypocrite most often says one thing and does the opposite. A favorite Bibi claim is “the Palestinians want to wipe Israel off the map.” Meanwhile, for the past forty years, Israel has been intent on wiping Palestine off the map.
The Palestinians are one thorn; Iran is another. Netanyahu resumed his campaign to get the United States to attack Iran soon after he was re-elected as prime minister. In his speech to the United Nations in September, 2009 he repeatedly invoked comparisons between Nazi Germany and Iran, Al Qaeda (which has nothing to do with Iran) and Iran, and global terrorism. Thus Netanyahu teased out the overused yet mildly effective propaganda thread to his US audience:
“It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death,” he said.
The “21st century” reference is to Israel’s civility as a nation compared to the barbarism that had befallen the world in the 9th century.
Interesting, no? It is Israel that shamelessly and gratuitously ends innocent human life as a matter of routine, via the country’s most esteemed institution, its army. Modern barbarism on a weekly basis from a regime living in a perpetual state of pompous exceptionalism where anything and everything is justified.
Meanwhile Persia, a.k.a. Iran, has arguably the deepest cultural development in human history, while the work ethic, the intellectual drive and capacity of its modern citizens is comparable to those of any country anywhere. As is the case in the United States and Israel, its people are simply the victims of its leadership, and in the case of Iran, of previous foreign overlords. The Iranian and Israeli regimes have one thing in common, for propaganda purposes they’d both like us to believe that almost all Iranians are devoutly Islamic. Not true, based on multiple demographic sources, most Iranians are outwardly or covertly secular (non-religious).
As of 2017, due to an executive order from an obedient Donald Trump, Iran’s scholars aren’t allowed to visit the US of I. He banned visitors from seven Muslim countries from entering the US, creating great indirect publicity for Israel while reinforcing a misleading or purely false stigma.
Jewish columnist Roger Cohen, who has spent extended periods of time in Israel, Germany, and Iran, points out the realities in his piece in the New York Times on March 2, 2009 called “Iran, the Jews and Germany.” He often receives correspondence from outraged American Jews who are “unable to resist some analogy between Iran and Nazi Germany”:
I was based in Berlin for three years; Germany’s confrontation with the Holocaust inhabited me. Let’s be clear: Iran’s Islamic Republic is no Third Reich redux. Nor is it a totalitarian state. Munich allowed Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. Iran has not waged an expansionary war in more than two centuries.
He points to the Jewish community in Iran, who were about 25,000-strong at the time, and who worship in relative tranquility.
Yes, the morality police are strict, and yes, there are fanatics. What country discussed within these pages doesn’t have them?
Its streets at dusk hum with life—not a monochrome male-only form of it, or one inhabited by fear—but the vibrancy of a changing, highly educated society.
We often hear the Islamaphobes and pro-Israel commentators ranting about the fanaticism of Muslims and Arabs, which by the way are not necessarily the same thing. In fact, the majority of Arabs who live in the United States are Christian.
Sexism is one of the popular topics, particularly when referring to the archaic (old, ancient) and misogynistic (strongly prejudiced against women) rules that apply to the two genders, particularly in the more fundamentalist countries. But they’re not alone. Try Israel. This passage is from Shahar Ilan’s article “An Ultra-Orthodox Woman Who Refuses to Sit at the Back of the Bus” in Haaretz on July 15, 2015:
The segregated buses only stop at stops in Haredi [orthodox] areas, even some out-of-the- way stops, and skip over stops in non-Haredi areas, even major stops. They expect secular [non-religious] and religious-Zionist women not to get on and cause problems. The proliferation [growing number] of segregated bus lines in certain areas is badly damaging the quality of service to non-Haredi people.
The article points to a private 2010 report that found there were sixty-three official segregated bus lines in Israel and ten unofficial ones. The same practice has occurred on New York City bus lines in heavily populated Jewish orthodox areas in Brooklyn.
Women to the back of the bus.
The late Rosa Parks became a civil rights icon for refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was sitting in the “colored section” and the “white section” was full. That was in 1955.
On June 29, 2018, the Times of Israel’s staff wrote a story under “Ultra-Orthodox Men again Hold Up Plane, Refusing to Sit beside Women.” The subtext ran “Captain of Austrian Airlines flight to Vienna forced to intervene, asks women to move; plane arrives over an hour late; MK [member of legislature] Lapid calls to remove such passengers immediately.” The flight left forty minutes late and arrived an hour behind schedule, causing many passengers to miss connections. The legislator Yair Lapid was quoted in the story:
“Once again a primitive group of Haredis moved and humiliated women on a flight. If for once they’re removed [the Haredis’s] from the flight without hesitation or recompense, this disgrace will end.”
A similar event had occurred the previous week on an El Al flight from New York to Israel. The CEO of the airline said that in the future that men who refused to take their seat would be immediately removed from the flight. In dramatic fashion, and in contrast to Yair Lapid, an orthodox member of the Israeli parliament, Yisrael Eichler, responded by saying their community would boycott:
"I'm telling El Al that if you give in to the terrorism of Haredi-hating groups and remove a passenger who behaved properly and asked nicely to sit next to a man, we will remove hunreds of thousands of your passengers every year. Terror against terror."
Just to clarify, he’s suggesting that making men sit next to women is a form of terror.
The threat of violence from within Israel’s borders was the focus of Linda Gradstein’s special column in the Washington Post on November 3, 2008 under the headline “Security Chief Cites Threat to Top Israelis”:
The director of Israel’s domestic security service told a cabinet meeting Sunday that he is very concerned that Jewish extremists could attempt to assassinate Israeli leaders who seek peace with the Palestinians, according to meeting participants.
It had happened before:
Diskin’s warning came two days before Israel marks the anniversary of the killing of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was slain in 1995 by a young Israeli angered by Rabin’s concessions to Palestinians under the Oslo peace accords. The assassin, Yigal Amir, approached Rabin as he left the stage at a peace rally in Tel Aviv and fired three shots into his back. The shots killed Rabin almost instantly.
The story says Amir showed no remorse and that he has said he was influenced by Israeli military leaders.
Terrorism is a flammable word conveniently thrown around to justify many of the US of I’s policies, procedures and expenditures. How ironic.
“Jewish Arsonists Suspected in West Bank Fire That Killed Toddler” by Diaa Hadid and Jodi Rudoren made the front page of the international section of the New York Times on August 1, 2015:
Residents of this Palestinian hamlet still awake on a hot summer night heard the screams and rushed to the Dawabsheh home. Outside, Saad, 32, lay writhing on the ground. Nearby, his wife, Riham, 27, was still on fire. Their 4-year-old son, Ahmad, could be heard crying inside the burning hose, and his brother, 18-month-old Ali, was already dead.
It took place in the village of Duma in the West Bank.
Two witnesses said they saw two masked men outside the house watching as the family burned. ... Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, called the arson attack a “brutal assassination” and said it was a direct consequence of decades of impunity [free will] given by the Israeli government to settler terrorism.”
American media commentators often like to single out Israel as America’s dear friend in the Middle East, a “lone democracy” that’s open-minded, accepting, and free in a sea of fanatical Arab intolerance.
On Friday July 31, 2015 on page A4, the New York Times published “Ultra-Orthodox Israeli Stabs 6 at a Gay Pride Parade” by Isabel Kershner:
[The assailant] Mr. Schlissel wounded three marchers a decade ago and was convicted of attempted murder. He was said to have told the police that he had come “to kill in the name of God.” The Israeli news media reported that he was released from prison three weeks ago.”
Regardless of affiliation or denomination, Christian, Muslim or Jewish; a fanatic, is a fanatic, is a fanatic.
Interestingly, on the same page of the New York Times, just below the stabbing story, was the following headline: “Israel Allows Hunger-Striking Prisoners to Be Force-Fed.” Diaa Hadid wrote the story:
Israel legislators voted Thursday to allow the force-feeding of hunger-striking prisoners in extreme cases, a move that appeared to be aimed at preventing Palestinian inmates from using fasts to win their release, particularly from indefinite incarceration.
Rights groups condemned the move, and the Israeli Medical Association called it torture and vowed to appeal the legislation.
For those who may think “indefinite incarceration” means the person was guilty of some heinous crime and deserves to be there and treated however necessary, think again.
According to Max Blumenthal in his 2013 book Goliath, at page 151 we learn more of Israel’s judicial “democracy”:
Since 1967, the State of Israel has detained at least 750,000 Palestinians in is prisons, including 10,000 women. According to the Palestinian prisoner rights group, Adameer, Israel currently holds 4,500 political prisoners, including more than 200 children and 322 jailed without charges—those it has labeled as “administrative detainees.” In its prosecutions of so-called security prisoners like Makhoul, the state boasts a 99.74 percent conviction rate. Many of the magistrate judges who rule in such cases gained their initial legal experience presiding over the military justice system that rules the occupied West Bank, learning through a day-to-day routine of show trials to accept Shin Bet [Israel’s FBI] and army’s arguments as gospel.
Makhoul refers to Ameer Makhoul. In the book, Blumenthal tells his story.
Makhoul is a Palestinian human rights activist and environmentalist who was the former president of the Arab delegation at the United Nations Durban Conference Against Racism in 2001, where Israel was first indicted for apartheid. They must not have taken too kindly to it.
In June 2010, fifteen or sixteen Israeli law enforcement agents showed up to raid his house in Haifa, West Bank, in the middle of the night and drag him away in front of his wife and two daughters. He was jailed and tortured on falsified charges. The government’s domestic spy and law enforcement agency, Shin Bet, issued a gag-order to the Israeli media, as in, no reporting on the case or Makhoul’s arrest, which for a “democracy” shouldn’t be standard operating procedure.
Blumenthal explains how the nation’s mainstream media complied, and despite some exposure from international human rights’ bloggers, rigged justice was carried out as usual. If he took a plea bargain, admitted guilt, Makhoul would get nine years. Failing to admit guilt, he’d go to trial for “assisting an enemy in war” and live the rest of his life in prison. Blackmailed and helpless, he chose the nine years so he could see his family again. He never came close to assisting any enemy in war.
It should come as no surprise that the plea-bargain-to-avoid-trial scenario is common in the US, particularly for minorities. And once the “guilty” tag is placed, employment becomes difficult and the hamster wheel of injustice, with probation, fines, and re-arrests, starts spinning. In an action paper dated April 13, 2020, the Defense for Children International—Palestine (DCIP) issued the demand “Israel must release all Palestinian child detainees amid Covid-19 pandemic.” Here is an excerpt:
Makhoul refers to Ameer Makhoul. In the book, Blumenthal tells his story Israel has the dubious distinction of being the only country in the world that automatically and systematically detains and prosecutes children in military courts that lack fundamental fair trial rights and protections. Israel detains and prosecutes between 500 and 700 Palestinian children in military courts each year. Nearly three out of four children detained by Israeli forces experiences some form of physical violence, according to documentation collected by DCIP. Since 1967, Israel has operated two separate legal systems in the same territory. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers are subject to the civilian and criminal legal system whereas Palestinians live under military law. No Israeli child comes into contact with the military courts.
Yet we’ll often hear some form of this: “We are not an apartheid state, and it’s anti- Semitic to say that we are.”
Presumably it would be considered anti-Semitic to compare Israel to Nazi Germany as well, but it happens. The religious purity laws in the Jewish state are unmatched in the modern world. The Washington Post article by Griff Witte August 30, 2008 was called “In Israel, A Clash over Who Is a Jew”:
Yael converted to Judaism in 1992, and for the next 15 years she lived in Israel, celebrating the major holidays and teaching her children about the Jewish faith.
But when her and her husband sought a divorce last year, she said, the ultra-Orthodox rabbis in charge of the process had some questions. Among them: Did Yael observe the Sabbath? Did she obey the prohibition on sex during and after menstruation? Dissatisfied with the answers, the rabbis nullified her conversion. Yael did not need a divorce, they ruled, because she had never been married. She had never been married because she had
never been Jewish. And because she had never been Jewish, her children were not, either.
The universal rule is, if your mother is Jewish, then you’re Jewish. Unless of course you’re a convert, then maybe that’s not good enough.
“I was in shock, I couldn’t believe it,” Yael said in the article. “My kids grew up Jewish. They don’t know anything else.”
Doesn’t matter. They’re not pure. It’s not in your blood.
There is a different level of fanaticism, with conflicting motives, as it relates to devotion to Judaism and Israel from some in America’s fundamentalist Christian community. An embrace that comes with built-in hypocrisy.
In the Washington Post on January 8, 2006, Alan Cooperman wrote a story under “Among Evangelicals, A Kinship with Jews—Some Skeptical of Growing Phenomenon”:
Julie Galambush, a former American Baptist minister who converted to Judaism 11 years ago, has seen both sides of the divide. She said many Jews suspect that evangelical’s support for Israel is rooted in belief that the return of Jews to the Promised Land will trigger the Second Coming of Jesus, the battle of Armageddon and mass conversion. “This hope is felt and expressed by Christians as a kind, benevolent hope,” said Galambush, author of The Reluctant Parting, a new book on the Jewish roots of Christianity. “But believing that someday Jews will stop being Jews and become Christians is still a form of hoping that someday there will be no more Jews.”
Cooperman writes that many Jews are distrustful of this “Philo-Semitism,” the opposite
of anti-Semitism, because of its motives and to the fact the two religions disagree on many or most other issues.
Reverend John Hagee of Texas founded Christians United for Israel, a pro-Israel evangelical lobby begun in 2006. During Israel’s war with Lebanon that year, the group’s message was delivered straight to George W. Bush’s White House, “to let Israel do their job” in destroying the Lebanese militia.
The quote is from a story by David D. Kirkpatrick in the Washington Post on November 13, 2006 called “For Evangelicals, Supporting Israel Is ‘God’s Foreign Policy”:
Many conservative Christians say they believe that the president’s support for Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect the Jewish state, which some of them think will play a pivotal role in the second coming. Many on the left, in turn, fear that such theology may influence decisions the administration makes toward Israel and the Middle East.
A new dynamic in the ongoing concern for separation of church and state.
As for hypocritical foreign policy moves or statements, one of the greatest of all time came from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The article in the New York Times on February 24, 2012 by Steven Lee Myers, called “Nations Press Halt in Attacks to Allow Aid to Syrian Cities,” documented the Syrian government’s relentless attacks on civilians in areas held by anti- government reformists, protestors, and militants. President Obama was quoted as saying “It’s time to stop the killing of Syrian citizens by their own government,” while backpedaling on providing arms to the opposition because the administration said it didn’t want to further “militarize” the situation.
Russia and China, supporters of the perpetrator, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, blocked efforts by the UN Security Council to make moves against him and in support of the opposition. Cue Hillary:
“It’s quite distressing to see two permanent members of the Security Council using their veto when people are being murdered: women, children, brave young men,” Mrs. Clinton said Friday at the close of the conference, referring to last month’s veto of a United Nations resolution calling for a political solution along the lines proposed by the Arab League. “It’s just despicable,” she went on.
Oh the painful irony—with a dash of Israeli-style gall. This, after years, decades of the US of I vetoing otherwise unanimous Security Council resolutions condemning Israel and offering aide and support to innocent Palestinians during or after multiple slaughters. Or even after Israel used cluster bombs in its war against civilians in Lebanon.
In the New York Times on August 11, 2006, David S. Cloud wrote under “Hostilities in the Mideast: Weapons; Israel Asks US to Ship Rockets with Wide Blast”:
During much of the 1980s, the United States maintained a moratorium on selling cluster munitions to Israel, following disclosures that civilians in Lebanon had been killed with the weapons during the 1982 Israeli invasion. But the moratorium was lifted late in the Reagan administration, and since then, the United States has sold Israel some types of cluster munitions, the senior official said.
Which leads to the inevitable story also by David Cloud in the New York Times two weeks later, on August 25, 2006: “Inquiry Opened into Israeli Use of US Bombs”:
The State Department is investigating whether Israel’s use of American-made cluster bombs in southern Lebanon violated secret agreements with the United States that restrict when it can employ such weapons, two officials said. The investigation by the department’s Office of Defense Trade Controls began this week, after reports that three types of American cluster munitions, anti-personnel weapons that spray bomblets over a wide area, have been found in many areas of southern Lebanon and were responsible for civilian casualties.
Like giving a pyromaniac a large gas can and a book of matches and saying “now remember, we don’t want you to burn down that school.”
And of course it only gets much worse.
Two stories printed the day before, on August 24, 2006, directly reported on different Israel atrocities. The first in the New York Times entitled “Human Rights Group Accuses Israel of War Crimes” was by John Kifner:
“Many of the violations examined in this report are war crimes that give rise to individual criminal responsibility,” Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group, said in a report on the Israeli campaign. “They include directly attacking civilian objects and carrying out indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks.” “During more than four weeks of ground and aerial bombardment by the Israeli armed forces, the country’s infrastructure suffered destruction on a catastrophic scale,” the report said, contending this was “an integral part of the military strategy.” “Israeli forces pounded buildings into the ground,” the report went on, “reducing entire neighborhoods to rubble and turning villages and towns into ghost towns as their inhabitants fled the bombardments.”
Speaking of fleeing inhabitants, the Washington Post story on the same day was even more disturbing. Edward Cody wrote with the headline, “Negotiations Preceded Attack on Convoy of Fleeing Lebanese”:
Darkness had descended on the Bekaa Valley when the long convoy of cars snaked up a gentle slope toward Kefraya. In better times, the little town was celebrated for its wine. But to the Lebanese fleeing the war that night, it was a way station on the road to safety. Or so they thought. A dry boom rang out without warning shortly before 10 p.m., and the second car in the convoy exploded in flames, witnesses recounted. In the blackness, no one understood at first. People alighted from their cars to see what was the matter. The buzz of an Israeli drone was heard overhead—some recalled hearing two drones—and the awful realization settled over the travelers that they were under attack. “I could never have imagined that there could be an attack on this convoy of 3,000 civilians, men, women and children,” said Karamallah Daher, who was driving to Beirut that night with his 80-year-old mother, Neifeh.
The story says a half a dozen missiles were fired, seven people were killed, including a Red Cross volunteer, and thirty-six people wounded. Other details make it worse:
The Israeli military issued a statement early the next morning saying the column was attacked because of suspicions—which the military later acknowledged were baseless— that the cars were smuggling arms for Hezbollah fighters. In the same statement, the military said it had received a request for safe passage for the convoy from the United Nations but that it had been turned down.
Another miraculously disturbing detail comes in the subtext, “Israeli Military Places Blame for Killings on UN Force.”
What was that Hillary said again?
America has invaded a lot of countries over the decades, has overthrown regimes around the world, including a democratic one in Iran in 1953, and conducted destabilizing operations across the planet, usually, sometimes ironically, in the name of democracy.
The two biggest “hypocrisy elephants” in the room involving Israel is that it’s an “open democracy” and the fact they’re the only country in the world with a nuclear program that can openly lie about it. Start with the latter.
In a Reuters article published by Haaretz on September 18, 2009, the headline read “UN Body Urges Israel to Allow Nuclear Inspection”:
Arab states in the United Nations nuclear assembly on Friday won narrow approval of a resolution urging Israel to put all its atomic sites under the world body’s inspection and join the Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT]. Israel deplored the measure for singling it out while many of its neighbors remained hostile to its existence, and said it would not cooperate with it.
As it often does, Israel struck the victim pose. They’re actually being singled out because they’re the only Middle Eastern country with a nuclear weapons program:
Israel is one of only three countries worldwide along with India and Pakistan outside the nuclear NPT and is widely assumed to have the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal, though it has never confirmed or denied this.
Nothing to see here. The US of I fully plays along with this and the notion that Israel is an open democracy. It’s open until it comes across anything that contradicts or threatens its public relations.
The Associated Press briefly told this story on August 10, 2009 under “Israel: Court Blocks Rights Activist from Traveling”:
The Supreme Court barred a Palestinian activist on Tuesday from traveling to Amsterdam to receive a human rights prize. The activist, Shawan Jabarin, the director of the Palestinian organization Al Haq, had hoped to travel to the Netherlands to receive the Geuzen Medal on Friday on behalf of his group. A court spokeswoman, Ayelet Filo, said the court ruled that he was involved with terrorist organizations.
The New York Times published an example by Jodi Rudoren on August 5, 2012 entitled “Israel Bars Foreign Envoys from West Bank Meeting”:
Israel on Sunday barred the delegations of five countries from attending a diplomatic conference in Ramallah, in the West Bank, upending plans by the Palestinian president to announce his intention to renew the Palestinians’ bid this September for enhanced status in the United Nations. A senior Israeli official said the delegations—from Algeria, Bangladesh, Cuba, Indonesia, and Malaysia—were denied permission to use Israeli border crossings because their governments do not recognize the state of Israel. Palestinian officials said the delegations had planned to enter on a helicopter from Jordan, and called the decision “childish”, “crude”, irresponsible” and “blackmail,” saying it symbolized the larger problem with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank territories it seized in 1967.
Palestine knew that it wouldn’t be recognized by the United Nations Security Council for statehood or even “observer state” status, because any attempt would be vetoed by the United States. So the Palestinians were attempting to garner support for observer state status via the UN General Assembly, a vote it would very likely win:
Observer-state status, akin to the Vatican’s status, is less than what the Palestinians requested from the Security Council, but would allow them access to institutions like the International Criminal Court, where they could, for example, pursue legal cases against Israeli settlers and officials for actions in the West Bank.
Whoa. Israel getting sued. Now we can’t have that, can we? And of course, both Israel and the US of I both denounced the Palestinians going through the UN for recognition, claiming of course, again, “only direct negotiations can resolve the long-running conflict.”
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