Topic 1 (of 2): "False Confession". I do not recall, in my 61+ years on this planet, another occasion on which the media have been so insistent on not believing a confession as in the current media circus surrounding John Mark Karr, who appears to have confessed that he was involved in the murder (tho he says accidental death) of JonBenet Ramsey 10 years ago in Boulder, Colorado. At the time of the child's death, the media were keen to convict the parents, and particularly the father. Now they seem unwilling to consider the possibility that they were woefully quick to judge, and that someone far from the family might have done the deed. Media are trying to prove that Karr wasn't even in Colorado at the time; his former wife, 'who has no reason to lie', says he was with her far away when the child was killed, etc., etc.
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I don't much care about that particular murder, and am indignant, again, that so much attention is focused on one murder of a white person while thousands of murders of blacks and Hispanics get absolutely no attention from the media, and scant attention from the police. But I am struck by how skeptically the media are approaching an apparent confession in the Ramsey case. Is this out of concern that justice be done, or that the media's rush to judgment against the father 10 years ago not be seen as just plain wrong, factually and morally?
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(2) Desperate Times for Israel. Speaking of morally wrong, the American Jewish Committee is now showing an anti-Hezbollah commercial, apparently fearful that Hezbollah has made huge gains in esteem among Americans. They've heard the jokes about Hezbollah rushing aid to Lebanon, quickly handing out $12,000 in hundred-dollar bills to people whose house was destroyed, such that some Americans have joked aloud that they'd prefer Hezbollah to FEMA!
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Having lost their first war to Arabs, the Israelis are terrified that Arabs, once armed with and trained in advanced weaponry, will succeed not just in defending themselves, as Hezbollah did so brilliantly, but even in taking the war to Israel, in an actual mass invasion — and that the American people will let it happen, by simply abandoning Israelis to fite their own damned wars and accept their own richly deserved fate. To preempt all such possibilities, Israel's agents in media and the military are now openly talking up war plans against Iran, trying to prepare the American people for the next war they want us to fite for them.
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CNN Headline News this morning had an analysis of what a war against Iran would entail. The Republican Right Wing is eager to get us into another shooting war before the November election so that "patriotism" (jingoism) and militarism will seize control of the electorate, whereupon Republicans can portray themselves as national heroes and Democrats as traitors. Never mind that the country to which Democrats are to be thought disloyal is Israel, which is not their country, nor the electorate's. We're not to think of that. We're supposed to feel that the "State" of Israel is one of the "States" of our Union, the very same thing as the United States, so any enemy of Israel is an enemy of ours. Israel = the United States. The United States = Israel. So if Hezbollah or Iran is an enemy of Israel, it must be an enemy of the United States. If Israel can't defend itself, it is our job, our duty — no, our sacred duty — to fite that war for Israel, and save the Jews from their own stupidity.
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Make no mistake: Israel lost the war against Hezbollah big-time. It was a catastrophe for Israel, not so much in terms of actual physical damage to Israeli territory and loss of Israeli military and civilian life, as in the utter failure to accomplish any of the war's goals. The Israelis did not crush Hezbollah; they did not stop Hezbollah from raining rockets down deep inside Israel's borders, even once the Israeli "Defense" Forces reached the Litani River; they did not get their two kidnapped soldiers back. The people of Israel saw their once-invincible army utterly fail in everything it tried to do, and saw rockets land in areas they once thought unreachably safe from attack. There will almost surely be a massive 'exodus', you should pardon the expression, of people who now finally see that Israel is a death trap, a failed experiment that could well get them and their entire family killed.
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Already the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published an opinion piece (undated, but sometime since the war against Hezbollah started) by an Arab who suggested that the costs of sustaining Israel are getting too high, and Israelis really ought to think seriously about just giving up and going away.

Israel should pack up and go

By Nadim Shehadi

What is the logic that will emerge from this war? If Israel can exist only by destroying the neighborhood, then it's time to declare it a failed state. The Zionist dream has turned into a nightmare and is not viable. If the future holds more of the same, then the time has come to reconsider the whole project. Every state has a duty to defend its citizens, but also it has a duty to provide them with security and the two are different. The prospects are for more destruction, fanaticism, violence and hatred. No unilateral separation can isolate Israel from this, nor can the region or the world live with the consequences. This seems to be the only choice, and Israel must do itself and others a favor and go away.

The writer speaks to the viciousness of Israel against Arabs, but that seems not to bother Jews, not in Palestine, not here.

The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza shows a country deprived of all humanity. The West Bank is unliveable, the population strangled into three prison clusters. Concrete barriers, barbed wires, bypass roads, human beings emerging like rats from underground tunnels, daily humiliation from hundreds of checkpoints. Gaza has been under siege since the population dared to elect Hamas, its infrastructure has been obliterated and its population has been driven to despair in what now seems like a dress rehearsal for what was to come in Lebanon. * * *

There is a doctrine that says Arabs need to be crushed, that they can be bombed into submission, that they will eventually fall on their knees. It is the doctrine, not its application, that is flawed. It says that by terrorizing the population, they will respect us and make peace; it says that those who dare resist need to be eradicated through targeted assassination and their supporters annihilated no matter what the cost. The only lessons Israel learned is that it should do it better next time.

And so Israel descends ever further, year by year, into barbarism. Every year the dream becomes starker and starker a nitemare. As long as it is only Arabs who lived that nitemare, Israelis didn't care. But now Israelis cannot sleep secure in the knowledge that they are safe from rockets raining down on them in that sleep, and Moslem armies armed with the best weapons that Chinese, North Korean, and Russian technology can build and Iranian oil money can buy might sweep across the borders of their tiny 'state' and push their backs to the sea. Sooner or later, the Arabs will get tank-killer weapons, and those now-invincible heavy tanks will become death traps for Israel's sons.
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With little fanfare, the evacuation has already begun. In 1993, Alon Ben-Meir, then a professor at NYU, wrote in Middle East Policy:

A major factor which limits the potential growth of Jewish population and which constitutes a serious national demographic concern is the emigration of Jews from Israel. Because many Israelis leave Israel under different categories such as students and visitors, and still others leave for limited, job-related periods, no official hard data exist for the number of Israelis who have left permanently. It is estimated by numerous Israeli sources, however, that, during the last twenty-five years, 500,000-800,000 Israelis (13-20 percent of the total population) left the country for extended stays abroad. The majority have become citizens or permanent residents of their host countries. * * *

Israeli emigres were stigmatized as yordim (Israelis who left Israel). When he was prime minister between 1974 and 1977, Yitzhak Rabin referred to yordim as dreck (roughly translated as dirt).

A February 2002 article in The Village Voice says:

It is no longer unmentionable, but people are still careful. Young mothers at the playground whisper about it so the kids won't hear. People test their friends at dinner parties by casually mentioning the "worrying" trend. Many Israelis are "preoccupied with a subject no one likes to talk about . . . ways to get the hell out of here," columnist Yoel Marcus wrote in Ha'Aretz the other day. * * *

Some 20 percent of adult Israelis say they have recently considered living in a different country, according to a January poll conducted by Market Watch for Ma'ariv newspaper.

More surprising, the survey found that 12 percent of Israeli parents would like their children to grow up outside Israel.

An earlier poll by the Mutagim Agency for Ha'Aretz said only 37 percent of Israelis held negative feelings toward those who left, and 16 percent actually viewed them positively.

Those are startling statistics in a country where the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin once described emigrants as the "lowliest of parasites." * * *

No one knows how many Israelis are in the diaspora, but two years ago it was estimated that there were 500,000 of them, or 8.3 percent of the Israeli population. It has to be more now. * * *

[Said one Israeli woman] it is not the Arabs we are running away from — it is the kind of people Israelis have become after living for 50 years with this pressure."

That article is titled, "Escaping the Hell of the Holy Land: Israelis Contemplate the Unthinkable — Moving Out". If this was happening when Israel seemed militarily invincible, what will happen now that Hezbollah has fought the IDF to a standstill?
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That some 500,000 Israelis have already left is well understood. Perhaps 350,000 have moved to the United States. A writer in the Jewish Post addresses the issue of these "Yordim" (people who "go down", as opposed to those who go on aliyah, migration to Israel, which is "going up".

There is no special agency in the government to deal with this 500,000 ‘Yordim.’ No one is willing to find facts or data. No one is willing to produce a policy. The leaders are indifferent. Why? The Israeli leadership is still originated in the 19th century romantic Zionism, the East-Europeans style. The moral is, “If you leave Israel, you are a deserter from the battle, get lost!” In the Knesset they, the members, always tend to preach Zionism to the ‘Yordim.’ One can think that the ‘Yordim’ are a new tribe of monsters with horns. It is very hard to speak about them in a realistic positive, pragmatic way. The ‘Yordim’ are the scapegoats of the failure of Zionism in Israel. In the eyes of many Israelis, even Arabs who want to destroy Israel’s Jewishness, its identity, are better, morally, than the ‘Yordim.’ Recently, the attitude of the leaders to the ‘Yordim’ has improved but their indifference is still the standard behavior.

Interestingly, that writer, Gad Nahshon, also says:

Israeli society is over-Americanized. Israeli life is based on the dollar. People even say that Israel should ask to be the 51st state of the USA. Why not?

Why not? Because you can't have a "Jewish State" of the Union. You can have a predominantly Jewish state, but no state can discriminate on the basis of religion, ethnicity, race, etc. So if you're going to admit any area from that region, there's no reason not to admit all of Palestine and use our laws to secure equality for everyone, and the economic resources of the Nation to give all the people a great quality of life. To do that, however, would end the Zionist experiment, by admitting it has failed, and replace Zionism with a different conception: appreciative presence in the land of the prophets, not domination over it.
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Why wouldn't that be good enuf?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,611 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:42 AM