    Do not equate the suffering of the oppressor and the oppressed!

    	Lies of the Israeli Peace Movement

    	By Richard Hugus August 8, 2004

    	How clever the oppressor is, learning the language and ways of the
    	oppressed and insinuating himself among them. "Yes, yes" he says, "I too
    	am oppressed - can we sit side by side and declare our common cause?"
    	The US "peace and justice" group, Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, recently sent an
    	announcement to a listing of peace events in Massachusetts for a meeting
    	to do just this. In the announcement, the public is invited to hear from
    	"bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families supporting peace,
    	reconciliation and tolerance."

    	By this means an 'equals' sign is put between Zionists and the people of
    	the land they occupy, in the country which is the sole source of support
    	for that occupation. This is propaganda of the most insidious kind. Now
    	the Zionist must show "tolerance" for the Palestinian whose land he
    	stole, whose homes he moved into, whose people he began attacking 56
    	years ago, and continues to attack. Now the Palestinian must accept,
    	must renounce his right to resist this attack, his fight against
    	occupation, his right to return, his rights as a human being - all
    	because "both sides" have engaged in violence.

    	Imagine those who rule the US holding sessions with the Vietnamese on
    	the harm the Vietnamese did to them in the Vietnam War. Imagine the
    	white plantation owner having public meetings in which injustices done
    	to him by his slaves could be fully and sensitively aired. Imagine the
    	US majority - the colonial settlers of what the natives once called
    	Turtle Island -- sitting down with the Sioux or Apache or Ojibwa, saying
    	it was time "both sides" admitted to wrongdoing.

    	Betrayals of history such as this are only organized by the victor when
    	some members of its polity have a pang of conscience, or as a way to
    	further the ongoing project of colonization. The "peace" being sought
    	here is just another kind of war. On its web site, Brit Tzedek says
    	unabashedly that it is "deeply committed to Israel's well-being." Thus,
    	it wants an end to violence in Palestine, but it supports the source of
    	that violence - namely, the state of Israel. It claims to be for
    	justice, but in fact it isn't. Justice would mean the right of
    	Palestinians to return to the land stolen from them. It would mean
    	restitution for past crimes. It would mean an end to the idea of a state
    	for Jewish people only. Such things are not on Brit Tzedek's agenda. The
    	idea that "Israel" is an illegitimate state to be done away with, just
    	as Apartheid South Africa was, is not on the agenda of the Israeli peace
    	movement. In all cases the legitimacy of the current state is assumed,
    	and its preservation sought.

    	Last November, Brit Tzedek held a conference at the Park Plaza Hotel in
    	Boston to which it invited Knesset Minister Avram Mitzna. As commander
    	of the West Bank Israeli occupation forces in the late 80's, this star
    	of the so-called "Israeli peace camp" was directly responsible for
    	implementing Yitzhak Rabin's "breaking bones" policy during the first
    	Intifada. He did so with his own "iron fist" policy. Breaking bones
    	meant Israeli soldiers taking large rocks and butts of guns and
    	shattering the hands and arms and legs of any Palestinian thought to be
    	resisting. Mitzna was a featured speaker at the Brit Tzedek conference.

    	At this conference, one Brit Tzedek activist came out to speak to
    	supporters of Palestine protesting outside. She broke into tears and
    	asked for the sympathy of one protestor because, as she admitted, she
    	had just come to the conclusion, after wrestling with the question for
    	many years, that the Palestinian right of return was just not going to
    	be possible. Other progressives, like Noam Chomsky, have said the same.
    	They speak of what is "realistic, " as if it's "realistic" to by remove
    	an entire people from their country by massacre and attrition, to jail
    	inside 24 foot high walls any who remain, to shoot children in the
    	street, to destroy farm land and water supplies, to drive people to
    	starvation, to wage war on rock-throwers with F-16's, tanks, and attack
    	helicopters, and to never acknowledge that "facts created" and gains
    	made by Ariel Sharon and all his predecessors were atrocious crimes. To
    	the double-talking liberal, it is not "realistic" to stop any of this,
    	and give Palestinians back what was stolen. Genocide is realistic;
    	justice is not. The progressive "realist" is finally no different than
    	the right wing Zionist. Like the Democrats and Republicans in the US who
    	both support the basic goals of US empire, both sides are the same.

    	Not surprisingly, Brit Tzedek is also for a "two-state solution"-a
    	position no one can take seriously anymore, as the Wall guarantees that
    	any "state" Palestinians might have at this point would actually be a
    	collection of separate prisons.

    	It is necessary for people who actually are progressives today to beware
    	the corruption of language and values which the oppressor spews out on a
    	daily basis. He has air-conditioned offices with well-paid staff to do
    	this work. He has well-meaning NGO workers fulfilling grants. He has
    	intellectuals in the academy, the media, and government to do this work.

    	It is time to respond to the pacifist progressive in particular who
    	collaborates with the oppressor by equating and condemning all violence.
    	The language of resistance must be clearly spoken: It is right for
    	Palestinians to resist the occupation, not just the occupation of the
    	West Bank and Gaza, but of all of Palestine, by whatever means possible.
    	It is right for the Iraqi resistance to resist the similar vicious US
    	occupation of Iraq. It was right for the Sioux to resist, it was right
    	for the African slave to resist, it was right for the Vietnamese to
    	resist. In no way can the minor losses of the oppressor be equated with
    	or compensate for the original crime of his aggression. It is time for
    	progressives in the US to openly and clearly support resistance to the
    	monster that the US has become, and the proxies it supports, like
    	Israel, and increasingly this means rejecting the false language of the
    	pacifist. The conflict in Palestine is not morally ambiguous. It is not
    	a battle between two sides who are equally guilty. Zionists attacked,
    	Palestinians defended. There is a right and a wrong.