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by Peter A. Belmont / 2013-03-03
© 2013 Peter Belmont
Israel and the Catholic Church have the same problems. Really.
First, each has a history of insisting that it is “right” (or “has a right”) to do something which, today, is widely seen as either stupid or evil. Each is stuck in a more and more unworkable past, showing no signs of changing.
The Church, even today, is stuck with its rules of an unmarried, and celibate, and all-male priesthood. None of this makes sense today. Most Protestant churches have given these rules up. They can be justified, if at all, only by “tradition”. This is the way things were 2000 years ago and so this is the way things must be today. It does not appear that the Bible has anything to do with it. There is no recognition that times and circumstances change.
The Church sticks to it (as it once punished Galileo for telling his truth about the solar system) because it confuses “being right” with being consistent over time. But, as we know, being right over time means changing.
Israel, for its part, made two enormous mistakes (worse than mere crimes—blunders): in 1948 it expelled 85% of the Palestinian Arab people from the territory it captured in its war of self-creation—expelled them and, in my view even more important, refused to allow them to return to their homeland after the war was over.
This was despite the fact that all the evidence of international support for a Jewish homeland (or state) in Palestine explicitly denied them the right to abuse the Palestinian Arab people. The Balfour Declaration required that the rights of the non-Jews be protected. The League of Nations’s Mandate did the same. And the 1947 UNGA partition resolution (UNGA 181) similarly proposed two states, one Jewish and one Arab, but without discrimination by the new states against anyone already living there.
To cap all this off, Israel performed its terrorism- and military-fuelled auto-explosion into new and racists existence just as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was being agreed to, a declaration which promised to every person the right to leave any country and to return to his own country—a “right” that the Israelis demanded be fulfilled (at least as to “leaving any country”) as to Soviet Jews who wished to leave the USSR and move to Israel, but has continued to deny to the Palestinian exiles of 1948 for the next 65 years (and counting).
Next, in the war of 1967, having captured and occupied a great deal of neighboring territory, Israel decided to settle those territories, despite the fact (or the “legal fact” if you will) that international law and agreements, to which Israel was a party (the Fourth Geneva Convention) made settlement of occupied territory a violation, an illegality. In this connection, please see ”what UNSC 465 and ICJ 2004 actually say”.
The adverse human rights consequences of Israel’s settlement regime for Palestinians living under occupation are so clear that only the USA’s near-total Zionist-imposed media blackout on reporting them prevents the American people from boiling over in anger at Israel’s atrocious behavior.
And—like the Catholic Church with its almost universally rejected priesthood rules—Israel, having embarked on a course of action that flew in the face of the entire international community, has continued to brazen it out, acting as if a decision once taken must continue to be the governing decision—unwilling to change its policy just as, so far, the Catholic Church has not changed its mind on women priests, married priests, birth control in our over-crowded world, and homosexual practice.
Israel acts as if its very existence depends upon the discomfort, dispossession, repression, and oppression of the Palestinian people.
It is almost as if Israel does not exist for any discernible “Jewish” purpose at all—unless to create a larger, more comfortable ghetto for all the world’s Jews to come to if they please, as some do, but many do not— but only for the abundantly discernible anti-Palestinian purpose, a purpose that the world is rapidly growing tired of.
If oppression of Palestinians is not a major purpose of Zionism, then it is such a deeply-ingrained consequence of governing Zionist purpose as to be—apparently—inseparable.
If Israel were interested in existing merely to provide a safe haven for oppressed Jews world-wide, and had no purpose at all to oppress the Palestinians, and in fact desired to reduce its oppression of Palestinians to an irreducible minimum, it would retreat from the occupied territories (Gaza, West Bank, and Golan) into a territory no larger than the territory it occupied before 1967, would offer to all Palestinian refugees (the exiles of 1948 and their progeny) the right to return to that smaller Israel if that were their country of origin, and would make a stab at living like a proper, law-abiding country of the 21st century, instead of acting like the settler-colonial, oppressive, totalitarian, apartheid state that it presently is.
If Israel wanted to be a state with a large proportion of Jewish citizens, it would withdraw into an even smaller territory so that the large number of Jews would not be “thinned out” by the relatively smaller number of Palestinians for whom that (smaller) territory was home.
But—at the moment and for the foreseeable future—Israel does nothing to reform itself, preferring to oppress Palestinians, violate international law and many human rights norms, and continue an existence apparently having no other purpose than territorial aggrandizement and oppression.
The Catholic Church oppresses no-one other than the world’s Catholics, who are more-or-less free to escape.
Israel (a country of about 5 million Jews and another million or so Palestinians) chooses to oppress the Palestinian people (also about 5 million people) in the occupied territories, in exile, and living as third-class citizens of Israel (below Israel’s second-class citizens, the Ethiopian Jews and the Jews from Arab homelands).
And, for the moment—the very long moment since 1967—the USA supports this illicit behavior by Israel.
High time for the USA and Israel to take another look and form a new policy. The world wants to see an Israel and a Palestine side by side and at peace, and a solution of the refugee problem. It is tired of the Israeli-imposed oppressive alternative.
The times they are a-changing. I wonder who will change first, the Catholic Church, which is now considering its choice of a new Pope, or Israel, which is digging in its heels, evidently intent on remaining an oppressor now, tomorrow, and forever
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