Reparations Would Have Been Paid Long Ago
By B. R. GOWANI
Imagine if the Blacks, 13 per cent of the population, had the wealth and the power of the Lobby?
They would have got their reparations for slavery long ago, the prison population would reflect a true color spectrum, their image in the media wouldn’t be a distorted one, Haitian refugees wouldn’t be turned back, Africa would get some real aid and attention, Hollywood and TV networks would be churning out movies and programs on the inhumanity of the slave trade (instead of holocaust), and so on and so forth.
Or think about the original inhabitants of the US — now only 1 per cent of the population —had the wealth and the power of the Lobby? Many indigenous people in North and South Americas would benefit greatly.
Or the Hispanics had the wealth and the power of the Lobby? The undocumented workers would have been legalized long ago.
Every year, Israel receives about $3 billion aid from the US government, or 20 per cent of the US foreign aid budget.
(In 2003 dollars, the total amount the US gave to Israel was $140 billion.) Add in all the other government subventions and the total almost doubles.
The private contributions are separate.
If a poor family of four is given $1,000 a month for mortgage payments so that it can have its own house, it will come to $12,000 a year. $3,000,000,000 ÷ $12,000 = 250,000. Imagine a quarter of a million poorest families (white, black, and brown) of four can have their own houses.
There are beggars like Pakistan, Egypt, Columbia, and Turkey who get aid but Israel is the only beggar on this planet which also gets interest on the alms it receives from the people of the US.
The Israeli and Jewish leaders in the US must be laughing at the United States:
“No doubt you have the power to mess up the world and you do; but when it comes to us, it’s we who screw you.”
And the irony is that Israel is not a poor country. On the United Nations HDI or Human Development Index, out of the 177 countries listed, it is number 23; the first 22 countries are all whites (Europeans, Canada, US, Australia, and New Zealand), except Japan and Hong Kong.
There is a South Asian saying: “You are making a hole in the platter, the one you’re eating the food from.”
Why? What can be the reason?
Adolf Hitler was impressed by the United States’ barbaric handling of its Native Indians.
Can it be some kind of a revenge of the subconscious?
Father Freud is not around. But someone should think about it.
Nevertheless, there is a bright aspect to all this:
Israel is doing a favor to the developing countries by weakening the United States.
They Have the Power and Wealth to Rebuild
The enormous wealth and the power the Jewish community has in the US could be aligned with Gulf petrodollars and be harnessed towards rebuilding the broken Middle East. There are many Jews, such as George Soros, who are not part of the Lobby; they should make serious efforts to bring about some decent solution to the plight of the Palestinians.
Mortimer Zuckerman, a billionaire publisher and editor of U.S. News & World Report, can do so much for peace with his money and magazine; but as usual, in 2003, he screamed for war:
“The only way to force Iraq to get rid of its terrible weapons is to rid the country of the regime that builds them. Washington must not pause... in its push to depose Saddam... We are in a war against terrorism, and we must fight that war in a time and place of our choosing. The war’s next phase, clearly, is Iraq.”
Which can only create more animosity, destruction, and misery, and that’s what people like Mortimer wants.
Mortimer and others are well aware of the following facts:
Israel, a Jewish State, was built on the Palestinian land.
The West Bank and Gaza which Israel is returning back is still occupied by the Israeli forces.
Gaza is virtually strangled by the Israeli economic embargo.
Back in 2005 the children’s condition in Gaza in the words of a Jewish activist, Jennifer Loewenstein, founder of the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project:
“Fifty-five percent of children in Gaza's war zones suffer from acute post-traumatic stress disorder whose symptoms include bed-wetting, nightmares, aggressiveness, emotional numbness, the inability to concentrate or learn, panic attacks, crying spells and deep depression. Some children speak about wanting death because life offers them nothing. Their behavior indicates an abnormal fearlessness towards danger and a despair that is incongruent with their young age...”
West Bank has plenty of Israeli settlements where Jews reside and are protected by the Israeli army. And they are still taking over the land.
The ratio of people killed in 2007, according to former president Jimmy Carter, is 1 Israeli to 40 Palestinians. And among children it is 1 Israeli to 8 Palestinians.
Back in the early 1980s, when Jesse Jackson met Yasser Arafat and saw the terrible condition of Palestinians in Lebanon he described them as “the niggers of the Middle East.” The condition hasn’t changed.
The words of Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion seem appropriate at this juncture. It will give the reader a historical perspective.
In 1956, Nahum Goldman, President of the World Zionist Organization, pleaded with Ben-Gurion to work out some peaceful solution with the Arabs. Ben-Gurion replied:
“I don't understand your optimism. Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural. We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to me, but what does it matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it is true, but two thousand years ago, and what is it to them? There have been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, and Auschwitz but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.”
In this situation, it is the moral and political duty of influential Jews to find some solution to the Israeli/Palestinian problem by talking with the Palestinian leaders—not the US/Israel imposed. Also pull in Jewish and Arab intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, Rashid Khalidi, and others. Either Israelis or Palestinians can live together as part of one country or can opt for the two-state solution.
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com
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