BSNEWS

No words…

Joel Northam explores the question: What happens when you condense 500 years of conquest and colonial expansion into 65 years, possess the latest high tech weaponry, sprinkle a little bit of imperialist patronage of the United States to the tune of 30 billion dollars a year in military aid, possess a vast nuclear arsenal, and gift wrap it all in a nationalist ideology that would make every fascist dictatorial regime in history proud?

Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that rivals the brutality and racism of apartheid South Africa. Its democracy—which was always exclusively for Jews—has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country toward fascism. Many of Israel’s most enlightened and educated citizens—1 million of them—have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns.

All indications are that these talks, like their predecessors, are doomed to fail. The question is whether the Palestinians have the nerve to unmask the charade. If not, Israel will use the peace process as cover while its settlements devour yet more of the Palestinian state-in-waiting.

“Within 5 to 10 minutes after the Israeli helicopter approached the ship, I ran into Cevdet Kiliclar’s dead body on the deck, before any Israeli commando had boarded the vessel,” O’Keefe said, referring to one of the Turkish activists. “He must have been shot from the air. After seeing Kiliclar’s dead body, I went upstairs to the top of the deck and saw several people lying on the ground, wounded or dead.”

This Friday will mark 20 years to the day since Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chair Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, signing an agreement that established the Palestinian Authority (PA) and a framework for negotiations that has lasted to this day.