Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.

I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush administration), has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.

Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division. In an interview in Ha’aretz on 22 December, he accused Israel’s government of having made a ‘central error’ during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing ‘to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip . . . When you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,’ General Zakai said, ‘it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.’

The truce, which began in June last year and was due for renewal in December, required both parties to refrain from violent action against the other. Hamas had to cease its rocket assaults and prevent the firing of rockets by other groups such as Islamic Jihad (even Israel’s intelligence agencies acknowledged this had been implemented with surprising effectiveness), and Israel had to put a stop to its targeted assassinations and military incursions. This understanding was seriously violated on 4 November, when the IDF entered Gaza and killed six members of Hamas. Hamas responded by launching Qassam rockets and Grad missiles. Even so, it offered to extend the truce, but only on condition that Israel ended its blockade. Israel refused. It could have met its obligation to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the blockade, but it didn’t even try. It cannot be said that Israel launched its assault to protect its citizens from rockets. It did so to protect its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza’s population.

Everyone seems to have forgotten that Hamas declared an end to suicide bombings and rocket fire when it decided to join the Palestinian political process, and largely stuck to it for more than a year. Bush publicly welcomed that decision, citing it as an example of the success of his campaign for democracy in the Middle East. (He had no other success to point to.) When Hamas unexpectedly won the election, Israel and the US immediately sought to delegitimise the result and embraced Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Fatah, who until then had been dismissed by Israel’s leaders as a ‘plucked chicken’. They armed and trained his security forces to overthrow Hamas; and when Hamas – brutally, to be sure – pre-empted this violent attempt to reverse the result of the first honest democratic election in the modern Middle East, Israel and the Bush administration imposed the blockade.

Israel seeks to counter these indisputable facts by maintaining that in withdrawing Israeli settlements from Gaza in 2005, Ariel Sharon gave Hamas the chance to set out on the path to statehood, a chance it refused to take; instead, it transformed Gaza into a launching-pad for firing missiles at Israel’s civilian population. The charge is a lie twice over. First, for all its failings, Hamas brought to Gaza a level of law and order unknown in recent years, and did so without the large sums of money that donors showered on the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. It eliminated the violent gangs and warlords who terrorised Gaza under Fatah’s rule. Non-observant Muslims, Christians and other minorities have more religious freedom under Hamas rule than they would have in Saudi Arabia, for example, or under many other Arab regimes.

The greater lie is that Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza was intended as a prelude to further withdrawals and a peace agreement. This is how Sharon’s senior adviser Dov Weisglass, who was also his chief negotiator with the Americans, described the withdrawal from Gaza, in an interview with Ha’aretz in August 2004:

What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements [i.e. the major settlement blocks on the West Bank] would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns . . . The significance [of the agreement with the US] is the freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with [President Bush’s] authority and permission . . . and the ratification of both houses of Congress.

Do the Israelis and Americans think that Palestinians don’t read the Israeli papers, or that when they saw what was happening on the West Bank they couldn’t figure out for themselves what Sharon was up to?

Israel’s government would like the world to believe that Hamas launched its Qassam rockets because that is what terrorists do and Hamas is a generic terrorist group. In fact, Hamas is no more a ‘terror organisation’ (Israel’s preferred term) than the Zionist movement was during its struggle for a Jewish homeland. In the late 1930s and 1940s, parties within the Zionist movement resorted to terrorist activities for strategic reasons. According to Benny Morris, it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. He writes in Righteous Victims that an upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 ‘triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict’. He also documents atrocities committed during the 1948-49 war by the IDF, admitting in a 2004 interview, published in Ha’aretz, that material released by Israel’s Ministry of Defence showed that ‘there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought . . . In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them, and destroy the villages themselves.’ In a number of Palestinian villages and towns the IDF carried out organised executions of civilians. Asked by Ha’aretz whether he condemned the ethnic cleansing, Morris replied that he did not:

A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

In other words, when Jews target and kill innocent civilians to advance their national struggle, they are patriots. When their adversaries do so, they are terrorists.

It is too easy to describe Hamas simply as a ‘terror organisation’. It is a religious nationalist movement that resorts to terrorism, as the Zionist movement did during its struggle for statehood, in the mistaken belief that it is the only way to end an oppressive occupation and bring about a Palestinian state. While Hamas’s ideology formally calls for that state to be established on the ruins of the state of Israel, this doesn’t determine Hamas’s actual policies today any more than the same declaration in the PLO charter determined Fatah’s actions.

These are not the conclusions of an apologist for Hamas but the opinions of the former head of Mossad and Sharon’s national security adviser, Ephraim Halevy. The Hamas leadership has undergone a change ‘right under our very noses’, Halevy wrote recently in Yedioth Ahronoth, by recognising that ‘its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future.’ It is now ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state within the temporary borders of 1967. Halevy noted that while Hamas has not said how ‘temporary’ those borders would be, ‘they know that the moment a Palestinian state is established with their co-operation, they will be obligated to change the rules of the game: they will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original ideological goals.’ In an earlier article, Halevy also pointed out the absurdity of linking Hamas to al-Qaida.

In the eyes of al-Qaida, the members of Hamas are perceived as heretics due to their stated desire to participate, even indirectly, in processes of any understandings or agreements with Israel. [The Hamas political bureau chief, Khaled] Mashal’s declaration diametrically contradicts al-Qaida’s approach, and provides Israel with an opportunity, perhaps a historic one, to leverage it for the better.

Why then are Israel’s leaders so determined to destroy Hamas? Because they believe that its leadership, unlike that of Fatah, cannot be intimidated into accepting a peace accord that establishes a Palestinian ‘state’ made up of territorially disconnected entities over which Israel would be able to retain permanent control. Control of the West Bank has been the unwavering objective of Israel’s military, intelligence and political elites since the end of the Six-Day War.[*] They believe that Hamas would not permit such a cantonisation of Palestinian territory, no matter how long the occupation continues. They may be wrong about Abbas and his superannuated cohorts, but they are entirely right about Hamas.

Middle East observers wonder whether Israel’s assault on Hamas will succeed in destroying the organisation or expelling it from Gaza. This is an irrelevant question. If Israel plans to keep control over any future Palestinian entity, it will never find a Palestinian partner, and even if it succeeds in dismantling Hamas, the movement will in time be replaced by a far more radical Palestinian opposition.

If Barack Obama picks a seasoned Middle East envoy who clings to the idea that outsiders should not present their own proposals for a just and sustainable peace agreement, much less press the parties to accept it, but instead leave them to work out their differences, he will assure a future Palestinian resistance far more extreme than Hamas – one likely to be allied with al-Qaida. For the US, Europe and most of the rest of the world, this would be the worst possible outcome. Perhaps some Israelis, including the settler leadership, believe it would serve their purposes, since it would provide the government with a compelling pretext to hold on to all of Palestine. But this is a delusion that would bring about the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

Anthony Cordesman, one of the most reliable military analysts of the Middle East, and a friend of Israel, argued in a 9 January report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the tactical advantages of continuing the operation in Gaza were outweighed by the strategic cost – and were probably no greater than any gains Israel may have made early in the war in selective strikes on key Hamas facilities. ‘Has Israel somehow blundered into a steadily escalating war without a clear strategic goal, or at least one it can credibly achieve?’ he asks. ‘Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms? Will Israel’s actions seriously damage the US position in the region, any hope of peace, as well as moderate Arab regimes and voices in the process? To be blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes.’ Cordesman concludes that ‘any leader can take a tough stand and claim that tactical gains are a meaningful victory. If this is all that Olmert, Livni and Barak have for an answer, then they have disgraced themselves and damaged their country and their friends.’

Source: London Review of Books

To anyone with an ounce of objectivity and common sense (and of course, humanity), what is happening in Gaza is without question, a spree of war crimes. You have a country using tanks, F-18s, naval gunships, artillery and helicopter guns – with complete control of the borders, airspace and sea coast – pounding what is considered to be the most overcrowded slum on Earth into oblivion. All because of Hamas’s rocket attacks into southern Israel. Or so they say.

That Israel can make such a ridiculous claim and get away with it highlights the psychosis fueling the nation since its founding: Rob land, kill and oppress people; and when they fight back, sound the alarm of victimhood and label the perpetrators anti-Semites. Hence, the narrative states, Israel is a brave democracy in the middle of theocratic lunacy that is trying to drive it into the sea. How ironic. That the Palestinians who are now launching rockets into Ashkelon and Beersheba once inhabited that very land. They were driven to Gaza in 1948 and now say that Israel is trying to drive them into the sea.

And so it continues. Every time Israel cries out to the world about the constant fear that it lives in or the imminent destruction that awaits it at the hands of Hamas, it flips the narrative and leaves out the entire truth. You would think Hamas was the most powerful army in the region or that it was Hamas sending tanks into Tel Aviv and using F-18s to drop bombs in Sderot or it was Hamas that was controlling the borders of Israel and, literally, choking the life out of its citizens.

Alas, it’s clear that the Israelis simply don’t want peace with a people who have no real way of defending themselves. Why negotiate and give up land when you can continue killing and terrorizing until the Palestinians decide to throw in the towel and accept their miserable fate? As Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff back in 2002 said: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.” No wonder they have the support of the Americans. The US tried the same tactics back in the 80s when it terrorized Nicaragua. A conference then in San Salvador of Jesuits reviewing the consequences of the terror concluded that it is important “to explore…what weight the culture of terror has had in domesticating the expectations of the majority,” to consider “alternatives to the demands of the powerful.” Fortunately, it seems the Palestinians never got the memo and after almost 60 years, the struggle continues. And so does the carnage.

As the latest bloodshed enters its second week, the “Israel is the victim” narrative is coming apart at the seams. In spite of the ban on journalists, the stories are leaking out. War crimes are being uncovered. Pictures of murdered women and children, bombed schools, hospitals and ambulances are being shown around the world and not being forgotten. It’s in Israel’s interests to come to its senses, stop pretending to be the victim and negotiate a just settlement with the Palestinians. Otherwise, it can expect to live in terror forever because unlike the poor Nicaraguans, the Arabs and Muslims of this world will not be easily domesticated.

The new mission, of course, is to do all that while simultaneously building up a prosperous and stable Afghanistan so that it becomes the next Germany or Japan – where consumerism takes hold and people don’t care about things like history or culture or tribal warfare, instead, they care about buying stuff. There was some logic to that, but it lacked historical insight, says Klein:

“The Taliban and al-Qaeda can’t base themselves in Afghanistan if something resembling a stable, secure nation-state exists there. But the mission was also historically implausible: Afghanistan has never had a strong central government. It has been governed for thousands of years by local and regional tribal coalitions. The tribes have often been at one another’s throats – a good part of the current “Taliban” uprising is nothing more than standard tribal rivalries juiced by Western arms and opium profits – except when foreigners have invaded the area, in which case the Afghans have united and slowly humiliated conquerors from Alexander the Great to the Soviets.”

So now Afghanistan, after seven years of intervention, is a failed state. The “Taliban,” which Klein correctly describes as “an array of mostly indigenous narco-jihadi-tribal guerrilla forces,” are now in control of about three-quarters of the country, the drug trade continues to thrive providing 90% of the world’s opium, and most importantly, citizens continue to distrust the government given its rampant corruption and the lack of basic services outside Kabul. So what is Obama to do when he takes over?

Beside agreeing with the President-elect’s premise that he should send more troops into Afghanistan, Klein goes off and takes a dive into the same murky and bellicose waters that got America into this mess in the first place. He says: “President-elect Obama needs to deliver the blunt message to the leaders of Pakistan and Afghanistan that we will no longer tolerate their complicity in the deaths of Americans and our allies, a slaughter that began on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and continues to this day.” How does Obama put a stop to this “slaughter?” Bring on Richard Holbrooke as a special envoy to the region and “lay down the law” in Islamabad and Kabul. Tell the two countries that America will no longer tolerate the Afghan corruption or the Pakistani support for the Jihadis. Of course. When nothing else works, continue with the course.

Earlier, Klein seemed to be on to something when he mentioned that Afghans have been living the way they do for thousands of years and that it would be wise of America to learn from the historical lessons left behind by empires of the past: Afghans don’t take kindly to belligerent foreigners trying to impose their will on Afghanistan. But then Klein, not wanting to sound like a defeatist, offers the exact opposite advice and tells the next President to be even more forceful! That’ll get it done. After all, coming back with our tails between our legs isn’t an option. Besides, we don’t negotiate with terrorists.

Needless to say, the market is in a panic now after hearing about the chiefs of the big three Detroit automakers go to Nancy Pelosi and warn her of the impending bankruptcy if the $25 billion loan they seek isn’t coughed up as soon as possible. (Bear in mind that they’ve already received $25 billion earlier this year to help them build more fuel-efficient cars.) Bankruptcy would entail massive job losses not just for the automakers but also for the supporting businesses, and most importantly, eliminate the possibility of ever emerging out of bankruptcy as no one in their right mind would buy a car from a company in such dire financial condition.

That said, Barack Obama seems to be for some sort of bailout (judging by his speech today): “I have made it a high priority for my transition team to work on additional policy options to help the auto industry adjust, weather the financial crisis and succeed in producing fuel-efficient cars here in the United States of America,” he said. This seems disturbingly wrong on several levels.

First, the problem isn’t just that GM can’t produce better cars, it’s that people aren’t buying cars and trucks right now because of the economic downturn, and the Detroit Three are so big that they simply can’t adjust to what the market is telling them. Helping these behemoths make more fuel efficient cars would’ve made sense three years ago when Toyota started its climb to the top of the industry, but now is the time to let them become small, efficient and more competitive. Simply put: let them close factories, get rid of models that don’t sell, lay off people and figure out what size works.

Second, these companies suffer from terrible deals struck with their unions. By all estimates, the crippling costs of health care, pension plans and other benefits would continue to harm them in the long run even if the market was to turn around and their factories were to start churning out more fuel-efficient vehicles. They need to renegotiate these benefits with their unions and now seems like the perfect time to do so. The workers can either accept a reduction in their benefits or risk losing their livelihoods forever – chances are they’ll cave in.

To conclude, the Detroit Three are simply not competitive any more. They’ve been making mediocre cars and trucks for years, and now, because of the economic downturn, must scale back operations. Unfortunately, scaling back isn’t something that can occur at the flick of a switch when it comes to giant factories employing thousands of people (well, it probably can, just look at how quickly entire manufacturing companies moved across the border), and because of that, factories are still up and running, cars are still being produced, people are still employed (although 100,000 jobs have been cut in the industry since 2006), and money is being spent.

It would make sense to let nature take its course on these companies and for the government to provide assistance to all those who would become unemployed as a result. The kind of assistance that would help these people get an education and learn another trade. This should probably go hand-in-hand with other assistance that keeps them (not the automakers) from falling into complete financial collapse, although that may be unavoidable.

There simply is no other sensible strategy. What Obama is suggesting will simply lead to more begging by these companies six months from now. And then what? We move on to bailing out the airlines? Smarter economists have said recovering from this recession could take up to five years. The employees at these factories need to be told that their companies are about to die and they have to move on – find another job; all those who were employed in manufacturing did exactly that when their jobs moved away to the Third World. Sure, the pace of change is much faster this time, but people have to adjust. Times have changed. Obama promised change. Now’s the time for him to step up and deliver it, even if it’s not the kind he had in mind.

This sad story reminded me of Gary Younge‘s take on the new xenophobia sweeping Europe and the West:

To believe in a European utopia before Muslims arrived is delusional

It is pernicious to regard prejudiced views within migrant communities as exclusive to either them or their cultures

In October, a promising young Iranian-German footballer, Ashkan Dejagah, refused to go to Israel to play for the German under-21 team in a European qualifier. Dejagah, who was born in Iran and came to Germany as a child, claimed if he went to Israel he might be denied entry into Iran. His decision not to go sparked accusations of antisemitism from German Jewish groups alongside calls from some politicians that he be dropped from the team (after some deliberation, German officials decided to keep him on the team).

The debate that followed shed light on how much you have to know, and how much you have to forget, to become German in some eyes, and laid some ground rules for Dejagah’s inclusion and integration. “Whoever represents Germany, whether a native German or an immigrant, has to identify with the history and culture of our society,” said Ronald Pofalla, the general secretary of the conservative Christian Democrats. “If he does not want to do so out of personal political reasons, then that national jersey should be removed.”

There are at least six million reasons why Dejagah would be better off not identifying with German history and culture when it comes to contemplating a visit to Israel. But, for the time being, here are just two. First, he will find a far less murderous recent history of antisemitism in his Iranian heritage than he will in his German. Second, if any nation exemplifies the limits of integration without a vigorous culture of anti-racism it is Germany – the European nation where Jews were most assimilated and almost found themselves wiped out.

The point is not to handcuff the likes of Pofalla to their history but to liberate them from self-delusion. No competition between Iran and Germany to see who has hated Jews least can produce a winner anyone can be proud of. But in Pofalla’s case it illustrates that when you live in a street full of glass houses everybody should think twice about what they throw and who they throw it at.

This is not a lesson confined to Germany. It has become a Europe-wide habit to refer to Muslims in particular and migrants in general as though they are barbarians who must either be civilised or banished, before they pollute the egalitarian societies in which they were either born or now live. Lacking all sense of humility, self-awareness and historical literacy, Europe’s political class acts as though these communities not only manifest homophobia, sexism, antisemitism, political violence and social unrest, but also as though they invented them and introduced them to an otherwise utopian continent.

Take France. Following the recent riots there, Jacques Myard, a nationalist deputy, explained the disturbances thus. “The problem is not economic. The reality is not economic. The reality is that an anti-French ethno-cultural bias from a foreign society has taken root on French soil and it is feeding on basic anti-French racism even if the rioters have French nationality.”

The French may need to import many things – from trashy popular films to fast food – but the one thing they have long produced themselves is a culture of riotous assembly. I have seen farmers hurl livestock at police, and ducked as students converted street furniture into missiles. There is nothing foreign about rioting in France.

In Britain, the emergence of “home-grown bombers” is mentioned as though this is a new development, when in fact we have been growing our own bombers for years. We have a whole evening dedicated to burning one – it’s called Guy Fawkes night.

Then there was the late gay Dutch anti-immigration activist, Pim Fortuyn. “I have gay friends who have been beaten up by young Moroccans in Rotterdam,” he said. “In Rotterdam we have third-generation Moroccans who still don’t speak Dutch, oppress women and won’t live by our values.” There was, it seems, no gay-bashing or sexism in Rotterdam before the Moroccans came.

One need not be in denial about the existence of prejudice in migrant and Muslim communities to grasp how pernicious it is to regard those views as exclusive to those communities or to be the result of their cultures. Nor need we be squeamish about challenging prejudice, regardless of where it comes from. The notion that bigotry in Muslim and migrant communities presents a multicultural conundrum is just one more straw man among many. You enforce the law, without fear or favour. You promote equality to all and for all. There is no conflict between this and racial equality – it is a prerequisite for it. If an imam doesn’t like women walking past his mosque in a bikini, that’s too bad for him. If an MP doesn’t like women walking into his surgery in a niqab, that’s too bad for him, too. Both have the right to say what they think – provided it doesn’t promote violence – but women have the right to wear what they like.

Nor should we be in denial about the idea that certain prejudices may be more prevalent in certain communities. The issue is what we make of that and whether we are prepared to apply those conclusions with equal rigour across the board. The prevalence of child sex abuse in the Catholic church was not, primarily, about Catholicism but single men having exclusive authority over and access to young children and taking advantage of it. No one who wants to be taken seriously has tried to hold each Catholic collectively responsible for these abuses or claim Catholics are inherently predisposed to child abuse, or that the abuse was essentially religious. Even as these scandals have run parallel with the war on terror, no one is claiming that Catholicism represents a threat to our civilisation.

On February 15 last year, the European commission president, José Manuel Barroso, said Europe had to stand up for its core values and express its solidarity with the Danish people after widespread unrest over the cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. “If not, we are accepting fear in our society,” he said. “I understand that it offended many people in the Muslim world, but is it better to have a system where some excesses are allowed or be in some countries where they don’t even have the right to say this?”

That same day, in the Commons, the government voted to expand counterterrorism laws by making “glorification” of terrorism a criminal offence. Speaking after the vote, Tony Blair said the new law “will allow us to deal with those people and say: look, we have free speech in this country, but don’t abuse it”.

Herein lies the problem with Enlightenment values, as they have been promoted in recent years. The values are fine. But those who champion them most fervently also do so most selectively. They embrace Muslim women campaigning against sexism, but ignore those fighting racism, Islamophobia or war. They attack Muslim fundamentalist homophobes on housing estates, but align themselves with Christian fundamentalist homophobes in the White House. They demand secularism and assimilation, but view every action by Muslims and immigrants as essentially foreign or religious. In short, they see their own attributes and others’ flaws through a magnifying glass. No wonder their vision of the world is so distorted.

To my surprise, he did neither. Instead, he came off as an intelligent, self-aware, highly-educated, soft-spoken black man who neither disavowed those carefully selected sound bites or projected the bitterness and hate that has been leveled against him and his church the past few weeks.

When asked if his comments were miscommunicated, he replied, absolutely not. Those who went and publicized those sound bites knew exactly what they were trying to communicate. They were trying to paint me as an uneducated, un-patriotic, un-American racist hate-monger, he explained. Uneducated? He has a PhD from the University of Chicago. Un-patriotic? Rev. Wright served several years in the military (Marines and Navy). Un-American? He leads a vibrant congregation on the South Side of Chicago which has several charitable programs serving the less fortunate, troubled or at-risk teenagers and senior citizens. Racist hate-monger? His inter-racial church was actively involved in opposing South Africa’s apartheid back in the 70s when our government maintained strong diplomatic and military ties to the racist country.

So why did his comments, which were six or seven years old (some of them took place the Sunday after 9/11 with church members in the audience who had lost loved ones in the attacks), elicit such a passionate and hateful response? It’s the miseducation of America, he said.

The fact that we can start wars and support policies that kill and maim millions around the world, and not flinch an eye. The fact that we will withhold humanitarian aid to nations because their leaders will simply not do everything that we demand. The fact that this nation clings to the words of its forefathers – We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights – yet does not see the contradiction in enslaving or discriminating against its own people. To not recognize, no, to deliberately ignore these facts from the days we begin to teach our kids in elementary school to the time we become adults – that, is the miseducation of America. Rev. Wright went on to explain that these shared American values are simply not consistent with the words of God, so he preaches on regardless of who thinks what.

What Rev. Wright didn’t touch upon, and what I think says a lot about the discourse, is that this is a problem for white America and white America only. (Mind you that when I say “white America” here I mean those who had the harsh words for Rev. Wright.) I have yet to find one Black, or Latino, or Asian or African American who disagrees with anything that he said. What if Obama came out and revealed to white America, which is either delusional or stupid about racism – a topic too long to cover here, that minorities would agree with just about everything Rev. Wright said. Look at how we’re handling the illegal immigration issue, or the racial disparity in our prison population, or the countries we’re invading and bombing to the stone age, or the state of our inner city schools, or who doesn’t have access to health care, or the lack of minorities in our government, etc. etc. etc….

In conclusion, if there’s anyone who needs to have a conversation about race relations in this country it is white people. Correction, delusional white people who think America is simply perfect in everything it does and stands for. They remain incredulous of ideas and opinions that reflect reality or shake the foundation of their vision of Americana which goes through life unquestioned. Needless to say, America isn’t perfect nor do I think anyone expects it to be, but there are many out there who are now re-considering Obama because of what Rev. Wright said. If we continue to apologetically brush this issue aside or pretend like Rev. Wright was in the wrong here, then this discourse goes nowhere and the only thing that comes out of it is yet another opening for the neocons to pander to “patriotism” like they did with evangelicals four years back with the gay marriage issue.

• Globalization and immigration – The movement of farmers into crowded cities and of slum-dwellers to Western capitals. How globalization is setting worker against worker, fueling xenophobia around the world, forcing developed countries to close their borders and letting corporations get away with anything. Explore Adam Smith’s ideas on mobility of labor.
• The future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – How long can this go on given the renewed turmoil in the Middle East (like that’s actually new)? Explore the rise of Hizbullah and Iran, the collapse of Iraq and the obstinacy of Hamas to do what the West wants.
• The rise of radical Islam – Is it really a radical ideology that is fueling senseless violence and unrest or is it being utilized in the tradition of liberation theology to bring change in countries where people have no voice. Explore Palestine, Iraq, Algeria and of course, the future of Al Qaeda.

The people of Palestine have done it again, taking their own fate in their hands after being let down by their own “moderate” political leadership and, indeed, the entire international community in their struggle for freedom. Early this morning they simply blew up the wall separating Gaza from Egypt, breaking a siege imposed on them by an Arab government in collaboration with Israel.

We, the peoples of the world, should take great pride and encouragement in this quintessentially civil society refusal to accept subjugation, to abandon their fate to governments, including their own, for whom the lives of ordinary people are simply grist for their political charades — Annapolis and its subsequent “peace process” being but the last cynical expression. For the Palestinians represent far more than just themselves. Their refusal to submit to the dictates of governments, or to governments’ lack of interest in the well-being of people in general, reflects the desire of billions of oppressed people for identity, freedom, a decent life and actualization of their collective and individual rights and potentials. Most of the oppressed, the “wretched of the earth” as Franz Fanon called them a half-century ago, are too preoccupied with the daunting daily struggle for survival to organize and resist. Others do resist in a myriad of ways, but are most often repressed by their own political and economic “leaders,” disappearing anonymously from view. In a few cases they have managed to mount effective resistance to oppression, even to prevail — though the billions spent on “counterinsurgency” warfare by the US, Europe, Russia, Israel and many “developing” nations augur ill for peoples attempting to overthrow oppressive regimes.

In this the Palestinians stand at the forefront, in the front lines of peoples’ insistence everywhere that their rights, well-being and fundamental values as human beings be respected by governments. And they do so (and I write this as an Israeli with great sorrow and shame) against one of the world’s strongest and most ruthless military powers — a power that has dispossessed them from 85% of their land, which is trying to transform its occupation into a permanent regime of apartheid, which has spent decades impoverishing and disenfranchising them; the fourth largest nuclear power which nevertheless casts itself as the victim. Not only have the Palestinians experienced the dehumanization all oppressed and colonized peoples experience, not only have they been made into the embodiment of the rich and powerful’s greatest fear, evil “terrorists” who may tear down their privileged “civilization,” but they have been turned into guinea pigs. Israel is able to gain an edge in the counterinsurgency industry and win entree into the heart of the American military/hi tech complex by turning the Occupied Territories into a laboratory for the development of fiendish weaponry and tactics intended for use against people.

And yet the Palestinian people — and in particular those who remain sumud, steadfast, in Palestine — continue not only to resist but to surprise and confound its would-be Israeli master at every turn. Despite unlimited control, a complete monopoly over the use of force, utter callousness and a vaunted Shin Beit, Israel’s military intelligence, Palestinians vote as they want, resist, carry on their daily lives with dignity — and blow huge holes in the walls and policies constructed in order to imprison and defeat them.

All this is not on the minds of those desperate people who surged into Egypt today. They may not have the “Big Picture.” Yet they deserve the respect and gratefulness of every person who cherishes a better world based on human rights and dignity, a world that is inclusive. As an Israeli Jew, I have been saddened and mortified that my own people, after all they have experienced, cannot see what they are doing to others. But on a larger scale, not as an Israeli Jew but as a human being, I take heart in the Palestinians’ active refusal to be ground under a global system that is producing unimaginable wealth and power for a few at the expense of the growing ranks of the wretched.

I am not a Palestinian; I am not one of the oppressed. I only hope I can use my privilege in an effective way in order to redeem the gift the people of Gaza have given all of us: the realization that the people do have power and can prevail even in the face of overwhelming power. We may each express our responsibility towards the people of Gaza in whatever way most suits us, but as the privileged we must do something. We owe the Palestinians and the Palestinians writ large at least that.

Jeff Halper is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a candidate, with the Palestinian peace activist Ghassan Andoni, for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. He can be reached at jeff@icahd.org.