June 21, 2004 issue
Copyright © 2004 The American Conservative
My Dinner With Pamela Gross-Finkelstein
By Taki
At a sugar magnate's posh dinner party in New York City last week, the lady on my right had just called Ariel Sharon a war criminal and a terrorist. I looked at her place card: Pamela Gross-Finkelstein. "You're not German, by any chance?" I asked her. "No, I'm New York Jewish-and not a self-loathing one either," came the answer. Pamela and I hit it off after that, as I did with the rest of the table-most of them very rich and Jewish-who happened to agree. Now I don't usually report on private dinner conversations, but this was a breakthrough. It's not everyday that someone, Jewish or otherwise, can criticize Likud and stay standing.
The fact that a few educated people in New York are starting to see the light gives me hope, however slight. Israel is acting in an outrageous, illegal, and criminal manner. Sharon is a disgrace, and the only thing he has managed to accomplish is to scare both Bush and Kerry into keeping their mouths shut, until Nov. 2, that is. Then he will begin his blackmailing all over again. At the American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention in the nation's capital a couple of weeks ago, both Tom DeLay and George W. Bush made it very clear: as goes Israel, so goes America. New York's Mayor Bloomberg repeated the mantra during the Israel parade on Fifth Avenue a few days later.
If one had been asleep for the last 56 years and had just woken up, a-la-Rip Van Winkle, you'd think Colorado was under attack. The only trouble is that Israel is not America's 51st state, AIPAC or no AIPAC. Israeli soldiers, backed by tanks and helicopter gunships, fired on a peaceful demonstration killing 40 people and injuring hundreds, most of them teenagers and children, and Bush called the massacre "troubling," a telling reaction. I have not heard Bush's response to the killing of a 3-year-old Palestinian girl the day after the demonstration, and it's just as well. He most likely would have asked for a clarification. Was the 3-year-old playing with her pigtails, or was she crawling on all fours?
However you cut it-and believe me, the Israeli lobby and the neocons are spinning like they've never spun before -this was an unprovoked attack against unarmed and peaceful demonstrators. Raanan Gissin, spokesman for Sharon, expressed regret at the deaths but denied that Israeli forces had planned to shoot into crowds. So there you have it. Shoot first, express your regrets, deny meaning to do it, and everything is hunky-dory.
The name of the raid into Gaza speaks volumes: Operation Rainbow. Some rainbow for the Palestinian mothers who lost their children. When Bob Novak expressed outrage about this on his "Capital Gang" program, National Review's Kate O'Beirne countered with the story of an Israeli mother who was murdered along with her three children in cold blood a week before. It was a good response but had nothing to do with an army, mostly financed by Uncle Sam, shooting tank shells and missiles from a gunship against unarmed demonstrators. One was a cold-blooded murder committed by a terrorist, the other was cold-blooded multi-murder committed by a terrorist regime.
Therein lies the difference. One party kills with impunity in the name of self-defense; the others are all terrorists. Sharon and his fellow Likudniks, Begin and Shamir-terrorists too, it should be said-have been playing this card since the birth of Israel. Accidents do happen during civil unrest, but no army shoots unarmed demonstrators. During the German occupation of Greece, when the hunger marches would take place, children and wounded soldiers in wheelchairs were in the front of the demonstrations. No German trooper ever fired. In Gaza, the Israelis even managed to kill some 70 animals, including a parrot, a couple of jaguars, and a few ostriches. 'Twas a famous victory against a zoo.
Some 2,018 houses in Gaza have been bulldozed by the Israelis, and 18,382 people are now homeless. The Israeli Defense Force plans to demolish hundreds more homes. And this is in Gaza, where Sharon has decided to pull out. I wonder what it would be like if he had stayed?
In his poignant review of Richard Ben Cramer's wonderful book How Israel Lost in these pages two issues ago, Scott McConnell explained how Israel went from a noble experiment to an oppressor of three million mostly innocent Palestinians. The state of Israel was established by an act of international brigandage with America and Europe assuaging their guilt by forcing their will upon an innocent Palestinian people. Instead of Israel now pulling back and compensating the Palestinians for their suffering and for their loss of dignity and humanity, the settlers and their right-wing extremists want more. Time to pull the plug, Uncle Sam.
June 21, 2004 issue
Copyright © 2004 The American Conservative
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