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Politics : Israel to U.S. : Now Deal with Syria and Iran -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (4977)	5/11/2004 2:30:45 PM
From: Crimson Ghost	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 22250

A lot of the neo-cons got their start working for the American Jewish Committee -- one of the most rabid war-mongering Zionist outfits

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (4977)	5/11/2004 3:26:40 PM
From: Emile Vidrine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 22250

EVEN SOME JEWS ARE DISGUSTED WITH SHARON'S POLICIES (The Ziochristians and Ziojews in the Bush administration by their subservience to theological Zionism.) Henry Siegman, senior fellow and director of the U.S./Middle East Project of the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as executive director of the American Jewish Congress from l978 to l994, argues that, “In the real world, Sharon’s government will never offer an alternative to its policy of ever-escalating revenge killings. It is therefore the U.S. that should declare its vigorous support for such an alternative. To be sure, the U.S. cannot make Israeli policy. But if the U.S. is clear about what it believes is the right and necessary thing to do, Israel will eventually do it. When U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared, without equivocation, that the l956 invasion of Egypt by Israel, Great Britain and France was wrong and needed to be reversed, all three countries pulled out promptly.” In Siegman’s view, “A great power, particularly one that has become the world’s only great power, does not need to send planes and troops to make its point. It is time for Washington to deal with the fundamentals of the conflict, and not to avoid them by focusing instead on so-called ‘confidence-building’ strategies; that is a cop out. The only way to build confidence is to give Palestinians reasons to believe they can achieve their goal without resorting to violence. This requires far more than the U.S. entertaining a ‘vision’ of a ‘State of Palestine’ in an indeterminate future. Without an explicit and credible non-violent alternative that would lead to statehood, the very term ‘confidence-building’ is quite meaningless. What is it we expect Palestinians to have confidence in? Sharon’s goodwill?...Israel’s insistence on a continuation of measures that have bred only increased terrorism in the past, in the belief that more of the same will somehow yield different results, is madness. The last thing the U.S. should be doing is encouraging such madness.” A similar view is expressed in a new book, The Fate of Zionism (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003) by Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, Bronfman Visiting Professor of Humanities at New York University and professor emeritus of religion at Dartmouth College. Rabbi Hertzberg, a former president of the American Jewish Policy Foundation and the American Jewish Congress and a vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, writes: “I am persuaded after 50 years of involvement in the problems of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, that the hope that the two parties can find ways of settling the quarrel between them is a myth that needs to be retired. They never have been able to, not from the very beginning. Other powers have always brokered the arrangement that have stopped hostilities.” U.S. aid, Hertzberg believes, can and should be used as a way to move Israel toward peace: “We can force a reduction of violence on both sides. A first principle of economics is that money is fungible. The U.S. finances about $4 billion a year, on average, of Israel’s national budget. The continuing effort to support and increase settlements in the West Bank and Gaza costs at least a billion dollars a year. The money spent outright as subvention of the settlements was estimated most recently, in the year 2001, as amounting to some $400 million a year, but there is also the cost of defending these settlements and of absolving them and their inhabitants of much of Israeli taxation. An American government that resolved to stop the settlements would not need to keep sending the secretary of state and other emissaries again and again to Jerusalem...We could prove it by deducting the total cost of the settlements each year from America’s annual allocation to Israel.”