I saw in the Western press the picture of an Israeli mother weeping over the coffin of her son. Miriam Peretz was mourning her son, the officer who was killed during an [Israeli] incursion into Gaza. No one can take joy in the sight of a mother crying her son unless he or she is a member in the Nazi coalition leading the Israeli government today - and if the one killed was yet another Palestinian child. I quickly looked away from the picture of the weeping Israeli mother, closed my eyes and thought about a Palestinian mother who cried just like her. Since 29/9/2000 alone, five thousand Palestinian mothers cried, of whom only a few were mourning fighters as the majority of these victims were civilians, including 1500 minors , i.e., less than 15 years of age (compared to 135 Israeli minors in the same period). I could have even thought of tens of thousands of Iraqi mothers whose sons were the casualties of a war motivated by oil and Israeli calculations. Should I add to those the American peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was deliberately murdered when an Israeli bulldozer ran over her body as she was trying to stop the demolition of homes in Gaza seven years ago? How many other peace activists did Israel kill and how many mothers wept as a result? Those who live by the sword die by the sword. Perhaps Miriam Peretz would not have been bereaved over her son Aliazer had he not entered the Gaza Strip, which the Israelis have turned into an open-air Nazi concentration camp. Perhaps she would have not cried either, had the European Jews remained where they were and did not come to Palestine to steal its lands from its original owners under the guise of religious myths and lies that have no corroboration in actual history. Israel is a criminal occupation state that should have not been established in the first place. However, it was indeed set up by force, and it has only endured by force; and when the Palestinians accepted 22 percent of their own land, the neo-Nazis in Israel did not. How can someone fighting to liberate his or her land that was occupied for 62 years ago and has been so for the past 43 years be accused of being a terrorist, while the murderous occupation alleges that it is the world's most moral army? The exploitation of the holocaust, the deeds of the Christian West against the Jews, and the stereotype of the Jewish victim in a racist world are all now a thing of the past. Israel's image today is that of a racist apartheid state, along the lines of the former South African apartheid. Even the U.S administration (if not the Congress) has begun backtracking from that ‘special bond' that destroyed America's reputation around the world and damaged its interests in the Middle East and beyond. We all heard how Barack Obama insulted his guest Benjamin Netanyahu and left him to finish lying to the White House aides instead, and I do not need to write about that incident again today. Instead, I will choose some excerpts from a testimony given by General David Petraeus, the commander of the U.S Central Command, who said literally before the Armed Services Committee in the Senate: “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbours present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests...Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, because of a perception of US favouritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples in the region and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hezbollah and Hamas” General Petraeus left Iraq ‘victorious', and his name is often brought up as a U.S presidential candidate, although he denies any bids in this regard. He and Obama both agree in the assessment that the U.S blind support damages the United States' interests in the Middle East and with 1.2 billion Muslims, and even with the rest of the peoples of the world: When Scandinavian foreign ministers and the president of Brazil (I will not say Cuba or Hugo Chavez) come out in support of the Palestinians, then the image of Israel has indeed changed from that of a victim to that of a murderer. (This is not to mention the weakening of Arab moderates, all for the sake of the state of thieves). The entire world is echoing today what we, the Arabs, have been saying about Israel for some time now. While Petraeus was speaking from the standpoint of his concerns for his country's interests, he was also expressing the opinion of the rest of the world, or even my very own. In my opinion, Major Aliazer Peretz would not have been killed had Israel worked for peace following its establishment on Palestinian lands. While the bullet was indeed fired by a Palestinian, the real killer is Israeli policy. When this policy does not translate into murder, it translates into criminal settlements, which hide behind religious myths that even the Jews no longer believe, as we have seen in books written by many contemporary Israeli historians. Perhaps the day will come when peace will reign (but it will not be fair to the Palestinians); however, it will not happen with the present government in Israel, as the blood of all those killed on both sides stains its hands. [email protected]
