In the Oct. 2 edition of the Northeastern News, Josh Parker wrote an opinion piece overflowing with hatred and contempt for the four million expropriated Palestinian refugees suffering under the heel of Israeli military occupation. He brazenly asserts, without factual backing, that the Palestinian people all “want to kill Jews,” and utterly ignores Israel’s own brutality. Let us unravel this packaged myth with the views of Israel’s own experts.
Mr. Parker conveniently castrates the historical context of this conflict, and with good reason. It turns out “the most basic fact about Israel,” wrote Israeli scholar Benjamin Beit-Hallahami, is “the dispossession and exclusion of non-Jews’, the original sin against the native Arabs.” We could already predict this sin by 1925, the year in which Jabotinsky, a leading Zionist, wrote, “Zionist colonization must be carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.” In 1938, Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, spoke of the need to “remove the Arabs from our midst.” Thus in 1948, 750,000 native Palestinians were terrorized, looted, and expropriated. Israeli historian Benny Morris has found that, even before war, “Palestinian Arabs were the target of a series of concrete expulsions.”
Parker ignores all this. His sole reference to history is the British Mandate which he says “proves” Arafat’s evilness, which is most intriguing since the Mandate ended over 50 years ago. He then rambles on about “the free world,” without considering that Palestinians for the last 36 years have themselves been robbed of freedom by the Israeli military, which refers to the natives as a “cancer” and imposes what Israel’s former attorney general, Ben-Yair, labeled “apartheid.” Similarly, Parker notes the tragic loss of five Israeli civilians but of course ignores the killings of 39 Palestinian civilians in the preceding weeks, noted by Israeli press (Haaretz, Sept. 2).
Blaming Arafat for everything is infantile. Here is a man who was until recently hiding in one room of a crumbling compound, surrounded by Israeli armor, cowering before the might of a nation armed with 200 nuclear warheads. Parker naturally leaves out the fact that Israel’s own leader, an indicted war criminal, was held “personally responsible” in a report issued by his own government for the massacre of 1,800 civilians in Lebanon in 1982.
Mr. Parker, in essence, monopolizes the word “terror” to suit his own purposes. If Israeli soldiers mimic the moans of a pregnant woman and deny her aid, as reported by British journalist John Pilger on Sept. 16, this is not terror. If Israeli tanks fire shells at a home without provocation and kill an infant, as reported by Israeli human rights group BTSelem on April 30, this is not terror. Indeed, these daily tragedies must be hidden from public view and denied.
Is this not racism? Parker himself admits in a rare moment of honesty that his “sympathy” for the Palestinians “is only skin-deep.” No one can doubt this, since his hatred towards the colonized Palestinians runs to the very marrow of the bone.
