Opinion Editorials, May, 2016

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By Khalid Amayreh

Like apartheid South Africa did to justify its repulsive approach toward its majority black citizens, Israel is making all sorts of similarly despicable arguments to justify its decades-old evil occupation and systematic persecution of Palestinians.
 
As some of us remember, the apartheid South African regime had argued that black South Africans ought to be grateful to the White regime for giving them employment and enabling them to have a semblance of decent life.
 
The White regime’s PR machine would shamelessly argue that “Our black citizens have a higher standard of living than other fellow black people anywhere in the continent.”
 
When I was studying in the states in the 1980s, I remember a visiting high ranking official from the apartheid regime boasting about the high living conditions enjoyed by blacks in South Africa in comparison to the rest of the continent.
 
“Ask them (South African black majority): would they prefer to live in South Africa or in Zimbabwe,” the official said.
 
What is wrong with this argument is that it doesn’t really distinguish between humans and animals. In the final analysis, humans, unlike animals, don’t live by bread alone. They are also entitled to freedom and dignity. This is the crux of the matter which fascist and racist regimes love to ignore.
 
Today, apartheid Israel is making virtually the same arguments to justify and defend its manifestly criminal treatment of the Palestinians.
 
Thus, whenever Israel’s sinister occupation is criticized, we see that big-mouthed Israeli officials and professional hasbara liars try to make black look white and the white look black by claiming that Palestinians are better off than most other Arabs.
 
Now, as the BDS movement is gaining momentum to the chagrin of the Israeli establishment, Israeli officials and other hasbara mouthpieces are becoming more brazen in their defensive but mendacious discourse.
 
And, yes, as usual, lying is their modus operandi.
 
They are saying the Palestinians ought to be thankful to Israel for not treating them like Bashar Assad or Abdul Fattah Sissi are treating their own peoples.
 
One Zionist pundit wrote recently that were Israel to follow Arab rules, all Palestinians would have been expelled from “the Land of Israel a long time ago.”
 
Needless to say, this is a classic example of “going beyond Chutzpah”
 
After all, since when the  Hitler of Damascus, who murdered half a million of his own people, and the virulent tyrant of Cairo, who usurped power from the only truly democratically elected regime  in Egypt’s history, were role models for the world to be followed or emulated?
 
So, Israel, “the purported light upon humanity” wants the Palestinians to thank Israel for murdering their children on the spot in the West Bank, and not burning them alive by way of dropping barrel bombs on their homes and schools as Assad is doing in Syria.
 
Yes, Israel would like to see the Palestinians “thank” her for conducting slow-motion genocide whereas “human-rights unfriendly states” would pursue fast-motion genocide” and get rid of the problem once and for all.
 
But it is only sick and depraved minds that are capable of making such nefarious arguments.
 
Otherwise, we should thank the Iberians Catholics for not playing by the rules of Old Testament and exterminating every Jewish man, woman and child during the inquisition!! Israelis are embarrassed when explaining the Tsfarad Geroush (the Spanish inquisition) because it reminds them of something they don’t like to remember, namely the golden age Jews had undergone in Islamic Spain!!!
 
According to the morbid logic we hear from some Israeli officials, we should also thank the Nazis for building the concentration camps relatively later in the course of the Second World War, because had these death camps been established earlier, a greater number of Jews would have perished.
 
Yes, sickening arguments are only the product of sick minds.
 
Today, in its rabid reaction to the non-violent BDS movement, Israel and its hasbara shipyard dogs, from Sydney to California, are arguing that it is the BDS campaign, not the malignant occupation, that is hurting the Palestinians. That it is the BDS movement that is impeding the establishment of a viable Palestinian state, not the ubiquitous  proliferation of  settlements, inhabited by fanatic cutthroats who believe spilling more innocent blood would expedite and accelerate redemption and salvation!!
 
I don’t know what sort of Torah are those people reading and following: The Torah of Moses or the Torah of Satan?
 
Well, in the Torah of Moses, Jeremiah 7:6, the God of Israel equated oppressing strangers living amongst Israelites with the greatest sin ever in Judaism, namely the unforgivable sin associating gods with God.
 
And in Exodus 22:21: The Almighty commands the Israelites, telling them in straightforward manner "Do not mistreat or oppress a stranger, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”
 
Don’t tell me I am being selective or quoting things out of context. For even the Talmud, who Orthodox Jews consider the verbal Torah, states that  true Jews are not supposed to oppress non-Jews living in their midst.
 
Let us consider the following Talmudic story which sums up the point I am trying to make: A heathen came to Shammai with the request to be accepted as a convert to Judaism on condition that he would be taught the whole of the Torah while he stood on one foot. The Rabbi drove him away with a yard-stick he was holding. The heathen then went to Hillel with the same request. Hillel said to the man what is hateful to yourself, don’t do to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah and the remainder is but commentary. “Go, learn it.” 
 

Khalid Amayreh is a veteran Palestinian journalist and current affairs commentator living in Dura in the West Bank

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