Henry Siegman, the author of this article in the Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, is a distinguished Jewish American. He has written some of the most thoughtful and cogent criticisms of Israel's occupation policies, prominent among these are Israel's Lies and The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam, both published in the London Review of Books.
If a people who so recently experienced such unspeakable inhumanities cannot understand the injustice and suffering its territorial ambitions are inflicting, what hope is there for the rest of us?
By Henry Siegman, Ha’aretz, 11 June 2010
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/israel-s-greatest-loss-its-moral-imagination-1.295600
Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a former Senior Fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations and, before that, was national director of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994.
Following Israel’s bloody interdiction of the Gaza Flotilla, I called a life-long friend in Israel to inquire about the mood of the country. My friend, an intellectual and a kind and generous man, has nevertheless long sided with Israeli hardliners. Still, I was entirely unprepared for his response. He told me—in a voice trembling with emotion—that the world’s outpouring of condemnation of Israel is reminiscent of the dark period of the Hitler era.
He told me most everyone in Israel felt that way, with the exception of Meretz, a small Israeli pro-peace party. “But for all practical purposes,” he said, “they are Arabs.”
Phi Beta Iota: Ha’aretz is our favorite Jewish publication, consistently both honest and intelligent, which one cannot say about any of the mainstream Israel or US (including CNN) media “sources.” The USA has been infected by Israel, the neo-conservatives being the primary conduit for this fatal disease of moral and mental incapacitation, and the liberal Democrats in turn infected by their counterparts within the two-party tyranny that does not represent 70% of the eligible voters of America, 43% (and growing) of whom have declared their independence from the corrupt and despicable tragic farce called “democratic government” in America. It is neither democratic, nor a government in the proper sense of the word.
