Most of us formed conclusions about 9/11, and /or have
images burned into our brain that will never leave us.
The most striking of those images and moments for me was
the sight of a terrified woman running from the World Trade Centre asking “Why
us? Why us?”
How is it that the United States has become the focus of
so much extremist Islamic hate and a symbol of so much evil?
Two significant issues spring to mind:
The first is simply one of size. The United States is a
Christian superpower, not just in terms of population, wealth, and military
strength but also in terms of media reach. Inevitably, as extremist Muslims
despise everything western, the United States makes the best target for hate
propaganda.
The second is that the USA has a significant Jewish
population, and a great deal of Jewish money has made its way from the USA to
Israel over the years.
Israel is the enemy and so, by extension, is the USA.
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A recent edition of Q&A – Protests and Palestine –
contained some interesting moments.
A question from an
audience member
JENNINE ABDUL KHALIK:
… I am of
Palestinian descent. My parents were refugees, my grandparents refugees, my
great grandparents refugees. The state of Israel was established on the ethnic
cleansing of Palestine and the displacement of three quarters of the
Palestinian population. Palestinians have since been subjected to apartheid and
a military occupation and the continued confiscation of their land and
resources. How can we confront the popular pro Israel narrative that Israel is
a democracy?
Israeli born historian
and panellist
ILAN PAPPE
…The Jewish
establishment before the creation of the State of Israel has prepared a file on
every Palestinian village and neighbourhood in Palestine so as to prepare the
Jewish forces when the opportunity would come for taking over these villages
and the files had a map and aerial photography and a very detailed explanation
of what to expect once the village would become Jewish property in terms of
wealth, in terms of number of people and what to accept in terms of resistance.
… every Jewish
settlement in Israel is built on the ruins of a Palestine settlement.
Panellist, Sydney Barrister, and a board member of a fund-raising organisation for
Israeli civil rights and social justice organisations.
IRVING WALLACH:
… the real tragedy of
1947 and 1948 was that there was no Palestinian state established.
… The United Nations
proposed a partition plan which there'd be a Palestinian State established
alongside a Jewish State.
… the Palestinian
people announced forcefully and without reservation that they rejected the
plan. They rejected the concept of having a Jewish state next to a Palestinian
state. Had they accepted the plan, had they accepted the two State solution
then, then the opportunity for the war and for what happened afterwards would
never have arisen and what happened was that on December the 2nd, 1947 there
was a general strike proclaimed in Jerusalem. There were riots. Jewish shops,
people were attacked.
The Palestinian leader
at the time, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, was a man who had spent the war years, and
don't forget this is 1947, this is two and a half years after the end of World
War II, the Palestinian leader, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, was a man who had spent
the war years in Berlin being photographed shaking hands with Hitler
ILAN PAPPE:
Stupid behaviour by a
Palestine leader does not justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. A
Palestinian refusal - a Palestinian refusal to accept the partition claim may
be justified, may be not be justified. What is not justified is punishing the
Palestinians by depopulating half of that ... we have to understand what
happened in 1948. Imagine half of the population of a country were forcefully
expelled. Half of the villages of the country were destroyed. Half of the towns
were demolished. Now is this the right punishment for the wrong vote in the
United Nations? Is this the right punishment for a leader who made a stupid
mistake during the Second World War? This is not a tragedy. 1948 is a crime
against humanity.
Audience Member
MARIANNE FRASER:
After all the pogroms
throughout the centuries with Jews never being able to own land in any country
they lived in and being forced from their homes time and time again as
portrayed so well in my favourite musical Fiddler on the Roof and after the
horrors of the Holocaust, isn't it just for Jews to have been given a place to
call their own?
ILAN PAPPE:
…Of course the Jews
were entitled to have a safe place and in many ways the Palestinians were
willing to give them a safe place. What they were not willing to give them is
the right to take over their homeland.
… imagine if these
boat people today would have knocked on the door of Australia and said "My
dear people of Australia, 2,000 years ago, it used to be my homeland. You have
to give me half of it now and a third of it later on". This would never be
accepted by anyone in Australia and rightly so.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yeah. In light of what
the lady ahead said, why is it that other people and nations like the Kurds,
Assyrians and Gypsies were not given their right place of a homeland and why
was there a special privilege to the people of the Jewish land? …
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Whatever we think about the way empires were
dismantled or people resettled after World War II, we would be silly to ignore
a widespread perception that the United States, The West, or even the United
Nations will never side with an Arab nation in a conflict with a non-Arab
Nation.
We might conveniently forget the involvement
of the British in a great number of conflicts, or that the US rarely acts
alone, but will easily remember Americans have recently been involved in
wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in the Persian Gulf.
It took a while for the US to become involved
in WWI, but the war itself was partly a war of The West v the Ottoman Empire.
I find it intriguing Irving Wallach thinks an
alliance with Hitler is somehow justification for the dispossession of
Palestinians. Military alliances are often nothing more than empty posturing or
tactical measures, and an awful lot of people lined up to shake hands with
Hitler.
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The bottom line is that many of us have been born on soil
that was once occupied by different peoples. We are also often born where we
are born because one or more of our forebears were themselves dispossessed or
devalued. Quite frankly, if there is an afterlife and I qualify for a spot in
heaven, I’ll be keeping an eye out for Oliver Cromwell.
Behind every category of race, nationality or religion
there are real people with real family histories, all struggling to find or
keep a place for themselves within a welcoming community.
Those who feel most despairing of ever finding what they
need will often settle for what they think they can have.
