PALESTINE: Middle East Truth Watch

The book Sharon: an Israeli Caesar by Uzi Benziman is apparently out of print but here is a link to a very good review of the book by Donald Neff --

from the

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs -- a realistic & truthful look at the Middle East.

from the A.D.C. website

Click on the above graphic to see why A.D.C. calls "Arabs & Israel for Beginners"

"the one book to read in order to understand the ongoing conflict between Israelis & Palestinians"

The Reality of the Palestinian People

It was probably dumb of me to divide Palestine and Israel into separate chapters. I'll keep it going this way for awhile to see if it works. (The partition of Palestine into two separate countries isn't working worth a damn, so why should I expect this website to be any different?)

In the chapter on Israel, I boiled Israel's situation down to this: How do you live in peace next door to people from whom you have stolen EVERYTHING?

The reality of the Palestinian people is simply the other side of the coin:

How do you live in peace next door to the people

who have stolen EVERYTHING from you?

If I killed your family, stole your house and ran you out of your own country, could I really blame you if you did everything in your power to take back what I stole from you?

If you come into "my" city -- a city that I stole from you -- can I really blame you if you tie bombs to yourself and blow up whatever you find living in the city that I stole from you?

If I killed your family to get this land, can I blame you for killing my family to take it back?

If Americans, who can go anywhere in the world -- and who give me billions of dollars every year to kill more of you, to rob more land from you, to demonize and slander you -- should I expect you to greet those Americans with figs and flowers or with the same terminal disgust with which you "greet" me?

What in God's name do I expect after I stole your land and killed your family? Do I expect you to send me fucking picture postcards?

To state the obvious, there cannot be peace between Israel and the Palestinians until Israelis and American Jews face the simple truth that they stole Palestine from the Palestinians.

Israel is not the primary obstruction to peace in the Middle East, it's the ONLY obstruction.

There is nothing that the Palestinian people could do to entice the Israelis to peace short of self-immolation or leaving the Middle East by the millions. There is nothing Arafat could do short of dying to pacify the Israelis (and even then, they'd probably throw his corpse out of Palestine).

That is relatively easy to prove to any open minded person. For the time being, I will share with you a plain, simple, unequivocal fact from the highly respected Harper's Index:

Number of times Israel has formally recognized the right of a Palestinian state to exist anywhere: ZERO (Harper's Index, June 2002)

Because of a book I wrote—let me start over. I wrote a book called Arabs & Israel for Beginners which some people consider the clearest, fairest and most honest non-scholarly book on the Middle East. Because of that book, I have met dozens of young Palestinians. They write me or phone me or invite me to conferences or ask me to give talks.

I listen more than I talk but at some point I get around to asking the one question that must be answered: “I will do my best to help you get a Palestinian state if you can answer one question: What would it take for you to live alongside Israel with no violence of any kind? No killing, no plans of revenge, no attempt to take back any part of Palestine except through democratic or diplomatic means? What would it take?”

There is no single answer to that question that satisfies every Palestinian I’ve talked to.

But there is one answer that, by far, satisfies more Palestinians than any other. It is shocking in its simplicity and it asks nothing of Israel except the truth:

“Make them admit that they stole our country.”

The admission of that simple truth and the importance it holds to a brutally oppressed people should resonate, above all, with the Jewish people. Before they could even begin to move beyond the horrors of WWII, they wanted an admission of guilt from their oppressors.

What is so hard to understand about that?

An open Letter to the People of Palestine

Dear People of Palestine: I am one of the clueless, powerless, damn near useless group of people known as American Arabs. So far, our attempts to help you haven’t accomplished much. I beg you to stop dying for your country and give us another chance. I beg you.

Every sane person in the world understands and respects your courage. But realize this one thing: Ariel Sharon wants you to kill Israeli citizens. Sharon is like the old redneck sheriff who did his best to goad American civil rights marchers into reacting violently to Sheriff Redneck's violence so that he could then slaughter them -- and "justify" it because they are so violent. Provoking Arabs to violence and then slaughtering them has been Israel's strategy since its inception. In the immortal words of former Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan:

"Israel must INVENT dangers and adopt the method

of PROVOCATION-and-REVENGE."

The people of Palestine know better than anyone on earth that Ariel Sharon's entire career has been based on following Moshe Dayan's advice, "inventing dangers"... "provoking" you into violence and then taking "revenge" on you for doing exactly what he goaded you into doing. A few undisputed facts about Ariel Sharon:

= Sharon made his reputation by organizing phony “reprisal” raids against neighboring Palestinian Arabs

= Sharon planned those phony reprisal raids to kill as many civilians as possible

= Sharon personally slit the throats of Egyptian soldiers as they slept

= Sharon's men killed so many Syrians that Ben Gurion, speaking out of both sides of his mouth, called the action “too successful”

= Sharon attacked the Jordanian town of Kibya, massacring 69 people, mostly women and children

= Sharon bitched out one of his officers for not killing two old Arabs

= Sharon laughed as one of his men tormented an old Arab, then shot him

= Sharon ordered his men to kill two Jordanian women on their way to a well

from Sharon: an Israeli Caesar by Uzi Benziman

You know better than I that Sharon used the same strategy to be elected Israel's Prime Minister.

"The present Palestinian uprising was triggered by Ariel Sharon's provocative September 28, 2000 visit to Haram al Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem accompanied by hundreds of soldiers."

from ISRAEL/PALESTINE: How to End the War of 1948 by Tanya Reinhart

Sharon was elected Prime Minister to end the violence that he himself had caused. As always, Ariel Sharon provokes you. As always, you fall into his trap.

Don't fall into Sharon's trap. Don't die for Palestine. Live for Palestine.

Let us talk for a moment about the half-nekked gentleman below

The brother on the left, as everyone in the universe knows is Yasir Arafat. Occasionally, one of my Muslim brothers takes offense at Mr. Arafat's semi-nudity. I am amazed at how many well educated Westerners don't recognize the fact that what we

have here is Brother Arafat's head on the body of Michelangelo's statue of David. So perhaps those of you who are offended by the nudity don't realize that what my wife Susan (the artist who drew Arafat and everything else in our book) is "saying": Arafat is David. The David that slew Goliath.

Any Arab who is offended by that is ... let's just say that I can't imagine going through life

with a sense of humor that impaired.

The Least He Could Do

Donald Neff, the gentleman who wrote the review of the book about Ariel Sharon (referred to in the left-hand column, a few inches above Mr. Arafat's head) is a smart man who knows the Middle East; and the periodical in which Mr. Neff's review appears (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs) is as thorough and unbiased as any publication in America. So if Mr. Neff, writing in WRMEA, can be a bit confused about the ethnicity of certain fat individuals, you can be sure that nearly everyone is confused. In his review of the Sharon biography, Donald Neff refers to Ariel Sharon as "a native born Israeli."

Unfortunately, that is not quite true.

Ariel Sharon’s parents emigrated to Palestine in 1922 to escape the hopelessness of a Jew’s life in Russia and Europe (...and, if you must know the truth, to escape the authorities).

Their son Ariel was born in 1928, in the village of Kfar Malal. The Palestinian village of Kfar Malal.

In 1928, and for two thousand years preceding it, there was no such place as Israel.

So, no matter how little it pleases Sharon, or the Palestinian people, Ariel Sharon is Palestinian by birth. Sharon's family came to Palestine with nothing. Now, if I'm not mistaken, Ariel Sharon has the largest farm in Palestine.

The least he could do is admit that he stole it.

“Make them admit that they stole our country.”

That is the plain, simple truth behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It is the truth behind the Arab-Israeli conflict in-general.

It is the truth behind America's recent dehumanization of Arabs & Muslims.

It is the truth behind America's sudden demonizing of "radical Islam."

... and if the September 11 terrorist attacks were the work of Arabs/Muslims (and I am not sure they were), it is the truth behind 9/11 and any subsequent attack on the U.S. by Arabs or Muslims.