Samirah Alkassim:
We’re happy to share with you today a recently published nonfiction novel by Charles Sutherland called Prisoners of History: The Story of Dalia, A Palestinian, which is about a Palestinian girl who, like over 100,000 Palestinian children, are trapped as prisoners in the military occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank and who struggle for food, electricity, education, and freedom. This short, disturbing, fact-based narrative is based on official Israeli policies, secret police tactics, real-life events, and authentic episodes experienced by actual people. In this story, Dalia explains the oppression and obstacles she and her little brother endure, and their efforts to become educated under Israeli military rule. Through the telling, disturbing details are revealed about the thousands of Palestinian children physically harmed, killed, arrested, and imprisoned, including a special Israeli military court for children. The interviews of Dalia are conducted by three composite journalists from the U.S., the UK, and Israel, who provide an ongoing analysis and fascinating new insights of a biblical history, philosophy, and politics of the military theocracy of Israel.
I will tell you a little bit about our speaker, the author, Charles Sutherland. He comes to this subject from his own independent research and lived experience. He was educated at schools and universities in the U.S. and Europe, including the University of Vienna and the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has been an international businessman for over 30 years with travel to over 67 countries and has launched a variety of corporations and philanthropic organizations in the U.S., Europe including the Soviet Union, and the Middle East. He has also been Director of Development of the Washington Times and author of numerous articles and several books including Disciples of Destruction: The Religious Origins of War and Terrorism, Character for Champions, Red Tape: Adventure Capitalism in the New Russia, Clash of the Gods, The Poison Planters: Sowing the Seeds of Global Genetic Genocide, and many other books including Reflections of a Boy Growing Up in Nebraska in the 1950s with an Irish-Catholic Father. Let’s welcome our speaker, but before that I’d like you to know that we’re selling copies of the book over there, and they’ll be available for purchase and signing after the talk. Thank you very much, and let’s welcome our speaker.
Charles Sutherland:
Thank you, Samirah. So, ladies and gentlemen, friends and any AIPAC people who are listening, after that introduction I can hardly wait to hear what I have to say. Because of a problem I had when I was a child, it’s difficult for me to project my voice. If you can’t hear me just raise your hand. It’s been a long time since I’ve given any remarks in public, but if I remember the ground rules, my job is to talk and yours is to listen, so if you happen to finish before I do just leave quietly. I have to make sure I can read my notes here, because my eyesight is less than my insight.
My book, Prisoners of History: The Story of Dalia, A Palestinian, looks through the eyes of a Palestinian girl who described the official policy of Israel which is to destroy the children of Palestine. The book derives its name “Prisoners” from the Israeli-British author Ilan Pappe, the historian, who wrote a book called The Biggest Prison on Earth because of the Israeli military machine which is keeping five million Palestinians prisoner on their own land. To make the disturbing facts in the book easier to an audience, there’s wit and humor throughout the course of the book. Part of it is because of my nature, we’re Scotch-Irish which means we laugh, cry, and fight, though not necessarily in that order, and part of it is because I wanted to give the readers a respite from the horrible details that are in the book itself. However, because of the unpleasant nature of what I’m going to talk about today, I won’t use any wit or humor in the book itself.
I’m neither Palestinian nor Jewish, and therefore I have no inherent wisdom from osmosis, from being part of an ethnicity or religion, but I tell people over the years that those who observe the fishbowl can have a broader perspective than the fish who live inside. In the past, I’ve also been a student of history for many, many years. Since 1975, I’ve been to Israel about twenty or thirty times, and to Palestine about ten times, and I’ve met people and have befriended people on all levels of the society, including private meetings with the former mayor of Jerusalem and former Prime Minister. I had private meetings with the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem. I had private meetings with Yasser Arafat, the former president of Palestine, and many private meetings with Hana Nasser, the mayor of Bethlehem, so I’ve known a lot of these people.
I should point out at the beginning of my remarks that most Israelis are not Zionists, in fact, they’re very sympathetic to the Palestinians [sic]. In fact, several of the leading pro-Palestinian organizations like Peace Now, for example, have been set up by former Israeli military officers who were appalled by what they had to do or what they had to observe. Also, many Christians would be shocked to realize that over 40 percent of Jewish Israelis are secular, even agnostic or atheist. They are only Jewish by cultural tradition, not by religion. However, for ideological and financial reasons, many of them are also Zionists. Being agnostics and atheists, they are particularly enjoyable of the irony of receiving billions of dollars every year from American Christians [sic].
To provide an overall perspective of the book, I’ll just give you one philosophical note from the author’s note of the book. Samirah told me I should occasionally refer to the book to make sure that you know I wrote the book, and I always do what women tell me to do, so:
“In a book in the 1980s, I wrote, ‘In humanity’s early struggle to comprehend its existence, it was easier to invent sin than to invent science.’ There’s a corollary in modern geopolitics that it is still much easier to conceive every word as justification for violence and oppression than to provide a secular explanation. Religious justifications merely require blind believers who are willing to suspend thought and sympathy. Secular explanations involve the effort of rational evaluation and the impulse of compassion. Religious enemies can always be portrayed as evil, deserving no mercy. Once in a secular society, however, you’d only be brought to justice. Believers have always vastly outnumbered thinkers. In the West, the history of belief has always been a history of brutality, usually against the weak, the ignorant, and the innocent. In the names of their gods, some Middle Eastern desert religions are now committing atrocities against the next generation of Palestinian children. Some were sitting on their sand dunes, as the ancient deities of the desert were laughing.”
The central theme of the book is that Israel’s policy is to systematically destroy each generation of Palestinian children. The purpose, as part of Zionism, is to destroy the Palestinian culture and force the Palestinians into exile in order to create Eretz Israel, the biblical Israel. The secondary theme is that the American financial and military support of Israel’s national policy of child abuse is because of religion. We all know from the last three thousand years of history that the forcible spread of religion always involves mass murder and it involves crushing or converting the next generation. In the thirteenth century, the Muslims put a pause on the jihads. In the nineteenth century, the Christians halted their global efforts to add religious wars. However, in the mid-twentieth century, religious expansionism began once again in the hot deserts of the Middle East, the cradle of religion, the most violent place in human history, which for some curious reason is called the Holy Land.
First, some background, and for those who are here who are familiar with this, because many of those watching may not be. The philosophy of Zionism is stated clearly by David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel. He said, “It must be very clear that there is no room in this country for both people. There is no room for compromises, there’s no room and no way to transfer all Arabs to the neighboring countries.” Following his direction, in 1948, to create Israel, the Zionists destroyed over 500 Palestinian towns and villages, drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians off their lands. Sometimes the Zionists took over Palestinian homes that were fully furnished, including dishes and sheets and beds. Of course, the Palestinians call this event the Nakba, the Catastrophe. On the other hand, the Zionists called it Tahur, the Hebrew word for “the Cleansing,” as in ethnic cleansing. However, since the Zionists did not succeed in cleansing all the people from the land, the constant removal process has been continuous, unrelenting, and violent.
As pointed out by historians, World War II ended European colonialism, but there was one final orgasm. After World War II, the final seeds of colonialist ideology were ejaculated from Europe as victims from the war began to populate Palestinian territory, and through a violent cesarean section created the newborn child that is the State of Israel. However, the newborn child was born with religious rage and uncontrollable oppressiveness. In 1956, Israel, less than a decade old, invaded Egypt and tried to seize the Suez Canal. In 1967, less than two decades old, the adolescent child continued its religious rage and seized the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank from Jordan. Then in 1982, the adult Israel invaded Lebanon. Except for 1956, when President Eisenhower stopped them, the Americans have continued to permit or to rationalize Israel’s aggression, which has obviously led to justifiable animosity for many in the Muslim world. But there is a reason why Israel knew it could always rely on American support. During the 1967 war, the USS Liberty, an American spy ship, was off the coast of Gaza monitoring the communications of the war. Israel realized that the Americans would soon learn of its intention to invade Jordan. So what did Israel do? Israel attacked the American ship, tried to sink it, and tried to blame it on the Egyptians. In the process, Israel killed 34 Americans and wounded 174 more. How did the U.S. react? President Johnson was a Christian and did not want to embarrass Israel. When he was alerted, he tried to stop any U.S. naval help from coming to the rescue of the fellow sailors, but members of the U.S. Navy are brothers, not politicians, so they came anyway, several of whom jeopardized their careers to do so. Then afterwards, LBJ covered up the entire matter. The man in charge of the cover-up was Admiral John S. McCain Jr., the father of Senator John McCain, who continues to cover up. This is all documented in many books and will soon be made into a movie, and I know a number of the people involved.
Now this history is essential to know, because the massacre of American military personnel with impunity had serious long-term implications. Israel observed that American Christians [sic] were willing to overlook the slaughter of fellow American citizens by Israel on the high seas in international waters. Thus, Israel correctly concluded they could do anything to anyone else at any time anywhere in the world, and the U.S. government would not object. The Israelis have done anything — they ignore United Nations resolutions, invade neighbors, bomb foreign countries, conduct assassinations all over the world including in Europe — and despite international objections, with American government and financial support, Israel implemented a national policy of child abuse to destroy the children of Palestine.
Let me pause to put the American religious theme in perspective. Most of the founding fathers of the United States were agnostics or deists, which is why they created a government which separated church and state, to protect the new country’s citizens from the religious tyranny of the various branches of Christianity in Europe. After the founding of the United States, Christian power in Europe began to decline. After the eighteenth century American revolution, the French revolution destroyed the power of the church in France, and in 1870 the nation-state of Italy arose and the Vatican lost its army. The Christians lost a military power which they had possessed for fourteen centuries. In the United States, that sublimated missionary zeal manifested itself in a global policy to spread democracy around the world.
However, after World War II, the Christians were blessed with another opportunity to flex their religious muscles. In 1948, European religious colonialism spread its divine wings again, seized land from the peaceful native people of Palestine, and created the ethnic, religious theocracy of Israel. It should be noted that in the 1950s, despite the agnostic founding fathers, American Christians had begun to gain political power, so they had begun to call the United States at that time a Christian nation. Congress then added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and added the words “In God We Trust” to the paper money. American Christians then began to regard Zionist Judaism as a twentieth century continuation of the Christian Crusades into the Muslim world of non-believers and began to channel their messianic Christian spirit into financing and arming the new pseudo-religious nation of Israel. Thus, the Zionists became the military proxies and divinely sanctioned gladiators of the discontented American Christians who now finally had an opportunity to use military power to embark upon their own crusade.
Now back to the principal thing — removing all Palestinians. Israel achieved military domination of the territories that it invaded, but it now had a problem with what some people in history would call the Palestinian problem. In 1948, ethnic cleansing was still a political practice, however in 1967, the civil rights movement was blossoming in the United States, so past practices were off limits. Israel could not legally annex the conquered territories or call the people prisoners of war. That would have created too many official violations of the United Nations Charter, which even the United States could not ignore. So what was Israel to do? Israel called the conquered areas the Occupied Territories and called the people inhabitants. Occupied Territories is a vague legal term, and as inhabitants, the Palestinian people have no rights. They are merely the residue of primitive non-white natives on a colonized territory. We know from recent events with the Ethiopian Jews that the Israeli government does not like black people very much.
The issue then became how to remove these troublesome inhabitants, so Israel fell back on David Ben-Gurion’s policy of transferring, even though transferring itself was now declared illegal in 1949 by the Fourth Geneva Convention — ironically, relating to the Nazis transferring Jews in Europe. Nevertheless, Israel removed tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, put them in busses and trucks, and transferred them to the border of their neighbors like Ben-Gurion had ordered, mainly to Jordan, and simply dropped them off like cattle. As expected, LBJ and the United States did not object to this blatant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, or to the United Nations Human Rights Charter. Indeed, for decades, the U.S. would tacitly sanction Israel’s violation of UN resolutions 242 and 338, and never compel Israel to return to its original borders, and never require the return of Palestinian refugees to their home.
However, at that time, in 1967, modern television was expanding globally, and reporters were now everywhere with cameras. Thus, there was not time to forcibly remove several million people from their land without publicly tarnishing Israel’s phony humanistic image of being history’s helpless victim. So, Israel had to develop another policy. The new policy became the policy of self-deporting. Israel would make life so miserable for Palestinians that they would self-deport and leave the country forever. Israel has employed many methods to achieve this goal. The most pernicious and brutal was to torment the children of Palestine, so their parents would protect them by taking them out of the country forever. This leads me to the strategies of the book, as seen through the eyes of Dalia, a Palestinian, in a series of interviews with three composite journalists: one American, one Brit, and one Israeli, all of whom provide their own journalistic perspective on the issues.
Israel’s national policy of child abuse. The first step to destroy a generation of children is to prevent their education. In 1967, when Israel seized Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the education system had been run by Egypt. Once Israel controlled it, it was a combination of Egyptian and Israeli policies. Israel kept it so confused that no student could possibly ever achieve an education, similarly with the West Bank [sic]. Before the 1967 war, the education system was controlled by Jordan. Once Israel controlled the land, the education was a combination of Jordanian and Israeli policies, with a deliberate scheme to prevent any viable educational system. Then, over the next 25 years, despite the natural growth of the Palestinian population—hundreds of thousands of children being born—Israel would not permit any new schools to be built. There are statistics on this, and I’m quoting from the book now, because Samirah told me to quote from the book. These are actual facts, [and] there are three journalists. One is Sean, the American journalist. One is Eliana, the Israeli journalist. One is Alicia, the British journalist. Dalia, of course, is the Palestinian. “Were there any statistics on education?” Sean asked. “Not until 1991, when the Tamer Institute of Community Education conducted a study,” Eliana responded. “It showed young Palestinians knew almost no arithmetic, only 24 percent of the students in fourth grade could even measure with a ruler, only 73 percent of them could even add one-half and one-fourth. The study also revealed that sixth-grade reading comprehension in Palestinian schools was only 30 percent. By 2004 the United Nations Relief Words agency for Palestine, UNRWA, worked with the Palestinian Authority to enroll almost 400,000 students in schools. About one-fourth of them in schools provided by the United Nations, half of them in schools provided by the Palestinian Authority, and the other fourth in private schools, mainly Christian schools.”
Since Israel no longer controlled the school system, because the United Nations was now involved, they had to develop a different plan. One to interfere and disrupt education, even the schools of the United Nations and the Christians. Thus, Israel decided to close school whenever it chooses, including the Ramallah Friends School of the Quakers and even Bethlehem University, a Catholic college established by the Vatican in 1973. These closings can last days, months, and even years, and they have. Israel also arrests teachers routinely. During the [first] intifada, when Israel closed Palestinian schools, teachers invited their students to their homes for classes. Then the Israeli military and secret police, claiming teachers were creating terrorist cells in their homes, invaded the homes, arrested the teachers and some of the students, and confiscated all the teaching materials and books. Israel also requires Palestinians to have travel passes to go anywhere. To enforce these passes, it sets up military checkpoints, now hundreds of them. Apart from disrupting Palestinian lives, these checkpoints prevent or delay students, teachers, and professors from getting to school on time or at all, and disrupting classes including college. Israel also censors books and literature, intercepts reading material, and destroys libraries. Israeli policy also prohibits students from forming clubs on campuses of any kind, arguing that such clubs could become terrorist cells. To the Israelis, for a Palestinian to still be alive and studying is itself an act of terrorism.
And of course, the final coup-de-grace is that Israel continually demolishes the school buildings themselves. European governments often finance the construction of Palestinian schools. Israel often waits until the schools are built, then claiming the school did not have a proper building permit, the military shows up with bulldozers and trucks and demolishes the schools, hauls away the computer equipment, software, laboratory equipment, desks, chairs, and books. As you may be aware from last year in a very publicized event, the military waited until the first day of school, when a new school was built in the West Bank by the government and people of Belgium. The military demolished the school and hauled away everything in their trucks. The only thing that remained was the concrete floor, and of course hopeful little children who watched the soldiers destroy their new school on the first day of class. Israel also closes colleges, destroys laboratory equipment, libraries and hauls away equipment from colleges. The military also damages the plumbing and toilets, to make it impossible to have sanitary conditions whenever they allow the schools to reopen. And if a student wants to attend a college in a different town, even if [it is] a short drive away, the student must obtain additional travel permits, which are required of all Palestinians to travel anywhere, even short distances.
Another approach to destroy the future of Palestinian children is to totally dismantle the family structure, both immediate and extended families. The objective is to totally eradicate the Palestinian culture. There are many methods involved. The first is to destroy the children’s respect for their parents. This is done by humiliating parents in any way possible. Sometimes it is at military checkpoints, where parents are ridiculed and physically abused in front of their children. It is also by stopping cars in the road and making everyone get out and stand for hours in the heat, while arrogant young Israeli soldiers, particularly young female soldiers, ridicule Palestinian fathers in front of their children. Another way to violate the sanctity of […] is to violate the sanctity of Palestinian homes themselves. The military or secret police, the Shin Bet, can go into any Palestinian homes at any time, day or night. Often when they enter the homes, they ask for customs receipts and other receipts for their merchandise. They maintain the official pretense that they are checking to see if these items were smuggled in from abroad. If a receipt is not produced which satisfies the soldiers or police, they confiscate the items. If they are new items, instead of destroying them, the Israeli soldiers take them to their own homes to supplement the low salaries paid by the army. And when children see the impotence of the parents and are deprived of televisions, radios, and electronic items in this age of iPads, they are obviously upset and of course are […] to their parents.
Of course, the most effective way to violate the sanctity of the home is to demolish the homes themselves, with bulldozers and dynamite. These include homes of parents whose children or even relatives are accused—not tried and convicted, but accused-of anti-Israeli activities. To the Israeli government, any anti-Israeli act is an act of terrorism requiring the entire family to be punished, their home demolished, and have them put on the street to become a burden to their other relatives. The Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolitions, an Israeli group, has reported that there have been over 43,000 Palestinian homes destroyed by the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces. This also makes it difficult for children to attend school on a regular basis, because they are now moving around from place to place, trying to find a place to live. And of course, often those parents and relatives are arrested and put in administrative detention.
Administrative detention, as you surely know, is when Palestinians and even Israelis are arrested and put into camps in the desert for as long as Israel chooses, without any trial and without even being charged with a crime. They commonly serve for days, weeks, months, or years. If the persons arrested and imprisoned are the wage earners of the family, the family can starve, which is obviously part of the purpose for doing it. The hope is that the families will abandon their relatives in prison and leave the country. To prevent mass starvation of the children and the family, the Palestinian Authority tries to provide financial assistance to these families. Of course, the Israelis then tell the press and the world that the Palestinian Authority is rewarding terrorists and financing terrorism. These policies are all to totally dismantle and disrupt and eradicate the Palestinian family and culture, and make all relatives outcasts in their own extended family circles, to discourage anyone giving any relative any support or help of any kind, lest their own home be demolished and they go to prison themselves. The hope is that, to protect the children, the parents will leave and take the children out of Palestine.
There’s one other thing the students must fear, and that is internet activism. If a Palestinian or a liberal Israeli, posts something on the internet which is offensive to Israel, that person can be arrested and sent to prison or administrative detention for internet activism, without a trial, and of course, computers and laptops and software confiscated. Israel claims that these students are cooperating with international terrorists on Facebook and Twitter, by saying something critical of Israel on a public forum, and therefore, it must be stopped. Using this rationale, Israeli authorities also seize the computers and software of the Palestinian colleges, and even prevent college professors from going online to do research. These internet activism arrests occur almost daily, [and] there are over 400 per year.
One notable example is Dareen Tatour, who’s also mentioned in the book. […] “‘Oh yes,’ Dalia reacted quickly. ‘The poet Dareen’”—this is all true, by the way—’‘The poet Dareen Tatour was accused of incitement to violence because had posted a poem critical of Israel’s occupation on YouTube, and […] a poem on Women’s Day in Nazareth.’ ‘But what happened to her?’ ‘Well, she spent three months in three different prisons: Kishon, Damon, and HaSharon,’ Dalia answered. ‘She was released from prison, but then she was forbidden to come within 40 kilometers of her own home. Israel claimed that she was now a danger to her own community, due to her opposition to Israel’s occupation.’ ‘Well, if she couldn’t go home, what did she do?’ ‘Well her parents were forced to rent an apartment for her in Tel Aviv for six months to live. Later the judge allowed her to be under house arrest in the family home in Nazareth.’ ‘Well does the world know about her?’ ‘Sure,’ Dalia snapped back.’ ‘Ten Pulitzer Prize winners and dozens of American literary people, including many recipients of the Guggenheim Fellowship, openly protested. Noam Chomsky and 250 other writers, intellectuals, and artists wrote an open letter. Almost 7,000 people later signed the letter, but Israel doesn’t care.’” By the way, if a student is convicted of internet activism, he or she can be banned from going to college, forcing them to leave the country.
Also, what people don’t know is that hundreds of Palestinian children are arrested every year, or simply picked up and kidnapped, when they are unaccompanied or outside playing in different neighborhoods. Their parents are then forced to go look for them. Israel claims that children walking in other neighborhoods are on scouting missions for would-be terrorists, so they are picked up. Under Israeli law, children twelve years and older are criminally responsible. The Palestinian Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees recorded that, in 2016, 1,384 children were arrested and 505 detained, scores of whom were under the age of 16. On average, between 500 and 700 children are detained every year, 86 percent of whom experience some form of violence while in custody, including being shackled during interrogation while forced to sit or stand in awkward positions, kept in solitary confinement, or being physically and verbally abused. So many children have been kidnapped, arrested, or incarcerated, that in 2009 the Israelis set up a special military court just for children. Note it’s a military court, often behind closed doors, where the judge and the prosecutors all wear military uniforms to dispense the Israeli version of justice, and apply Israeli military law, which is often in violation of international law. The success rate of the Israeli military court is 99.73 percent, according to the United Nations.
Obviously, all this violence toward children creates permanent psychological damage. Of course, in the West Bank, the Jewish settlers often poison the wells of Palestinian families, and the children must walk to distant neighbors to obtain water for cooking or other uses. Along the route, the Jewish settlers call them vile names and throw stones at them. En route, the children must also pass olives groves, the trees of which were uprooted by Jewish settlers or by the Israeli military, olive trees which have been on this land for centuries providing food and income for Palestinians. Tens of thousands of olive trees have been destroyed, in a further attempt to eradicate the Palestinian culture of their grandparents. Of course, most people are not even aware that there are hundreds of towns, villages, and streets which have had their names changed from Arabic names to Hebrew names, to totally obliterate any Palestinian history.
As Meron Benvenisti once remarked, “the Israeli erasure of Palestinian history was consciously as complete as possible.” One of the most insidious methods of creating insecurity in young children and eradicating the Palestinian society is to disrupt electricity and sanitation services. This causes health problems, problems in cooking and preserving food, plumbing problems in the home, raw sewage in the streets, and contaminates the water supply. Another method is to isolate people by cutting telephone services so that people in need cannot contact each other. Children then know that if they need help, they will not be able to call anyone. One can only imagine what it’s like to grow up as a child in the West Bank. Israel has created a monster, a population of angry, uneducated, psychologically damaged young people. The only wonder is why there are not more terrorists. Of course, one rebellion of the youth is against their parents with the [first] intifada, the uprising, when they young people openly shouted that they would not become Israel’s slaves like their parents and so they rose up to protest and to throw stones. We know that resulted in Prime Minister Rabin’s Iron Fist policy, ordering the army to break the arms and legs of thousands of Palestinian children so they could not protest or throw stones again. Then, once convicted of being a terrorist for throwing stones, the Palestinians were considered to be dangerous, therefore they could not be allowed to go to school again. This meant that, of course, they have to grow up uneducated or try to leave the country and never return. Other traumas which children must observe are when Israel makes a relative, even in ambulances, wait for hours at military checkpoints to bring injured family members or pregnant mothers to the hospital, many of whom die while waiting, including the unborn babies and the mothers.
And we all know that if someone is wounded, if a Palestinian is wounded by an Israeli bullet and taken to the hospital by relatives, that those relatives can be arrested for aiding a terrorist. Often, when there is a tragic death, the Israelis won’t allow the families to have the corpse for a funeral, because they feel the funeral will become an occasion for an anti-Israeli demonstration. Since the policy of self-deporting has not been fully effective for the Israeli government, Israel has now embarked on another domestic policy, the policy of self-destruction. We’re all aware of the psychological studies with the rats who are by […] in a confined area with limited food and every few days an additional rat is added, until they finally turn on each other and try to eat each other. The analogy is appropriate for Israel, since many Israelis regard Palestinians as animals. Prime Minister Golda Meir famously referred to Palestinians as dogs, and the current Israeli Minister of Justice, Aleyet Shaked, once posted on her Facebook page that Palestinian children are little snakes, and she’s the minister of justice. The point is that, like confined animals, Palestinians are being made to fight with each other.
The broad policy is to create tension between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Internal fighting between Palestinian politicians has become so vicious that what happened is the Palestinian Authority joined with the government of Israel to reduce the electricity in Gaza to only four hours a day; that happened last year. The hope is that the people of Gaza will then abandon Hamas as their political leaders and throw their political support behind the Palestinian Authority, which, despite the public perception and press, has a very close working relationship with the government of Israel. After all, the Palestinian Authority was set up with Israel’s cooperation, as a consequence of the phony Oslo Accords. Many people don’t know it, and when I mention it you will see how obvious it is for a police state: for decades Shin Bet has had various Palestinian leaders on their payroll in one way or another. Also, the relationship between leading Palestinian politicians and the Israeli government is close, because Israel allows and even assists the financial corruption of Palestinian political leaders by helping them […] away money in foreign bank accounts that they collect from abroad. The objective is to co-opt and contaminate the political leadership of Palestine, and destroy any possibility that these corrupt politicians will in any way represent the Palestinian people.
I’ll conclude with two final points. One is that the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem estimates that the cost to the Palestinian economy of Israel’s military oppression is ten billion dollars per year. Without the oppression, Palestine would become a thriving economy, which of course is exactly what Israel is trying to prevent. It is also estimated that the cost to Israel of maintaining their military and secret police oppression is over one billion dollars per year. Of course, the annual money to finance this oppression is coming directly from the U.S. Congress, money that could be used to rebuild American cities instead of destroying Palestinian ones. It should be noted that the U.S. Congress, dominated by Christians, is borrowing billions of dollars from China, dominated by atheists, to support the Jewish religion in Israel to oppress Palestinian Muslims. Talk about a screwed-up world.
Next, while publicly opposing the possibility of a two-state solution, behind the scenes, Israel is fostering that political mirage. Why? Because they know it will never happen. Over thirty years, they will admit privately with Meron Benvenisti, who personally told me that a two-state solution was just a political fiction promoted by Israel. While the politically corrupt Palestinian politicians are arguing for [a] fictive two-state solution, Israel has turned the ghetto of Gaza into a complete garbage dump, which the United Nations now says in a few years will be uninhabitable. And while these decades-long phony peace conferences are played up for the public and the press, Israel has totally fragmented the West Bank, with hundreds of Jewish settlements and Jewish outposts, military checkpoints, Jewish roads that Palestinians cannot use or even cross except at certain locations, as well as the Apartheid wall and of course the prisons. Because of these territorial fragmentations, Palestinians cannot even go meet each other, let alone create a viable government. The West Bank has become so shredded, into so many parcels of real estate, that it is now impossible to have a contiguous Palestinian nation. The corrupt politicians of Palestine are well-aware of this, but they enjoy their personal power and the money and fame they get to obtain from it.
So, what’s the answer? In my view, the Palestinians long ago have rejected this two-state solution nonsense and demand citizenship in the state of Israel, with the right to vote and to participate in the social welfare programs that the United States pays Israel billions of dollars per year to maintain. If this were to happen, the Muslim nations would be pressing to make this a peaceful reality and might even finance it, since they already finance certain things in Palestine anyway. If that were to happen, the American Christians would then have a dilemma. They would have to decide whether they want to promote American democracy or to finance and militarize the religion of Moses.
One final parenthetical point: It’s not just the Palestinians who are involved in self-destruction. When you’re in Israel, you often hear the joke that any time you have three Israelis together you get five opinions. And years ago, when I walked the streets of Caesarea with an Israeli general, he pointed at the Roman aqueducts and he reflected that Hebrews have had five or six commonwealths in their history, and that the Hebrews always self-destruct. “If these aqueducts could talk,” he would say, “as an Israeli general I can tell you: The Hebrews just screwed it up again.” I will say that, in my view, for various reasons including the corruption which you have all witnessed, Israel is imploding. To summarize the book, Israel openly acknowledges that the objective of its military democracy of National Socialism and Zionism is to remove all Palestinians and to create an ethnic theocracy. That […] is why it’s called the Jewish State of Israel. To do this, for decades they’ve openly committed brutal atrocities against Palestinian children. This cruel inhumanity seemed to be acceptable to what we’ll euphemistically refer to as the civilized world, because these brutalities are perpetrated under the guise of religion, which we know from history always justifies brutality in the name of some divine wish.
Let me close with a brief perspective: Everyone knows that anyone who criticizes Israel is labeled an anti-Semite, in order to silence them. Obscured by boisterous name-calling is the fact that Semites are people from the biblical Shem, those who speak the Semitic languages. There are currently over 250 million Semites in the world, so to be a true bona-fide anti-Semite, you have to be very educated, since it requires the knowledge and capacity to hate a lot of different people for different reasons. On the other hand, the worldwide Jewish population is fewer than 15 million people, less than six percent of the world’s Semites. However, you will be surprised to learn that the vast majority of that six percent are not even Semites. Professor Shlomo Sand, the famous historian at Tel Aviv University, wrote a book entitled The Invention of the Jewish People, in which he points out that the entire Hebrew narrative is just a literary invention to create a unified history and political entity. He explains that at its beginning of the 20th century, nearly 80 percent of the Jewish population had no Semite blood since they were descendants of the converts from the Jewish kingdom of Khazar, in the region that is now Southern Russia, which existed from the seventh until the tenth century, and from where most of the Jews of Europe emigrated. These were all religious converts and were not a continuous people; they had no bloodline. Israel itself was founded by non-Semite Jewish populations from Europe. In addition, since the creation of Israel in 1948, there have been hundreds of thousands of Sabras, children born in Israel, born to these non-Semitic people. Therefore, when you add the original non-Semitic population and their non-Semitic offspring, probably over 90 percent of the Jewish population of Israel is not even Semitic. On the other hand, Palestinians are all descendants of the Phoenicians, all of whom are Semites. Therefore, since the non-Semite European population of Israel is oppressing the Semitic Palestinians, ironically it is the Jewish population of Israel who are the world’s largest group of anti-Semites.
So, my job is finished. Thank you.
