Less than a week ago, a Palestinian suicide bomber walked into an Israeli pizzeria and blew himself up, leaving the hall strewn with more than a hundred dead and wounded, almost all of them young Israeli children.
What follows is a horror story in 10 parts. It is one of the most difficult ZGram series I have ever compiled.
I am on several e-mail lists that cover the intifada. I get hundreds of letters a day just on that topic alone. Most of the information I use in this ZGram series has apparently been sent to me from the offices of one George N. Rishmawi, Projects' Coordinator of the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement Between People, Star Street No. 64 P.O.Box 24, Beit Sahour - Palestine.
These e-mails include several articles by Robert Fisk writing for the British daily, the Independent. Fisk is, in my opinion, one of the most gifted, courageous and honest English-language journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy, and the world owes him a lot to understand and be informed of the non-Israel side to this tragedy. We don't get any of that information from traditional lapdog media beholden to the Zionists.
I start this ZGram series called "Orient House" with an Open Letter to the Israelis by Khalid Amayreh, a Palestinian:
[START]
To begin with, I 'd like to state in unequivocal terms that I genuinely sympathize with the victims of the human-bomb attack on the Pizza restaurant in West Jerusalem on 9 August.
At the personal level, the pain and tears of the families and friends of the victims are no less genuine than the pain and tears of hundreds of Palestinian families who have fallen victim to the bloody showdown since it broke out ten months ago.
Humans are humans; they react similarly when calamity strikes. A bereaved Jewish mother's pain is no less and no more real than that of a bereaved Palestinian mother's pain.
Our dear neighbors: I fully agree with you that the bombing was horrible, shocking, and extremely ugly, but it was also inevitable and inescapable, thanks to your government's and army's equally horrible, shocking and extremely ugly actions against our people, including children.
These actions, needless to say, made the mayhem inevitable and inescapable.
Let us be honest about this, the human-bomb attack on the King George Street , was gruesome and even barbaric in a textual sense, (you can justifiably use all the nasty labels in all the lexicons to describe the tragedy), but it was also of your making.
When your army so impetuously, so callously, and so brazenly created a calamity (or two) in every Palestinian household, a boomerang effect was inevitable, and only imbeciles (and you are not reputed, God forbid, for stupidity) would have calculated that the tormented Palestinians would turn the other cheek. They wouldn't and they won't.
You, the people of Israel, have narrowed our horizons, so much that you have made us feel that only two "choices" are awaiting us, either to die as suicidal bombers or be slaughtered as sheep.
Therefore, I can dare say that blood of the "personally-innocent victims" of the bombing is primarily on the hands of Sharon, Benalizer, Peres and other members of your diabolic government of assassins and war criminals.
Open your eyes! A government that sends its murderers, whether humans or machines, to murder people, without charge, without trial, without arrest, without questioning, without nothing, is not a "government," but a gang, for it is the mafia gangs that liquidate opponents through assassinations.
And, honestly, how, do you think, the Palestinians should have reacted to your unabated rampage of murder and terror, especially after you used the F-16s and the Apaches against a defenseless and essentially unarmed people?
Shame on you for tormenting and terrorizing and seeking to enslave a small nation, already decimated by decades of demonizing military occupation, an occupation which all the languages of the world can't communicate its evils.
Your behavior in the last ten months have been an affront to civilization and an insult to many of the lofty principles that you falsely claim to be part of your value system.
Your brutality, savagery, criminality, impetuousness, hypocrisy, mendacity and insolence defy linguistic description.
You, as Harry Truman once said, are like all underdogs, when you get on the top, you become as merciless and brutal to your new victims as your former oppressors were to you when you were underneath.
Our dear neighbors, Why wasn't there any uproar in Israel when your criminal soldiers murdered Muhammed Durra before the eyes of the world? And, now, we have hundreds of Muhammed Durras!
You even didn't have the moral courage to say sorry. When will you ever say "sorry?" Perhaps when Kosher pigs fly!
Your eyes didn't blink at the daily funerals in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank, your hearts didn't ache, nor did your minds experience any compunctions, because the poor kids belonged to the wrong tribe, they were children of a lesser God. Or, as your former Prime Minister, Barak, said "their dead are mere numbers, ours are stories." Numbers and stories!..And snakes, ants, cockroaches, and what have you!
Our dear neighbors: you are condemned, first and foremost, for electing a war criminal to be your prime minister, whose hands are drenched in the blood of the innocent. Could it be that you elected him on that account?
Your are also condemned for your gleeful support for the killing, maiming, and wounding of tens of thousands of Palestinians whose only "crime" is their desire to be free from your slavery. (Is desiring freedom from slavery so a great crime in your thinking that the desirees ought to be put to death?).
And all these homes that you destroyed and the people you made homeless - and all the trees and habitats you obliterated with your satanic bulldozers! Don't you know that your holy book, the Torah, contains clear injunctions against destroying trees even in time of war..?
You once prided yourself, rightly or falsely, on having turned the desert into a verdant bloom, now, after the shame you have done, you can boast of having turned the previously-blooming Palestinian orchards, vineyards and fields into a desert.
Maybe, just maybe, you will start to have some "hishbon nefesh" or soul searching, maybe you start to view your neighbors as full human beings created by the same God, maybe, just maybe, you begin to respect the life and property of the non-Jew as you do those of Jews.
Maybe, just maybe, your start to understand that occupation is wrong, apartheid is wrong, oppression is wrong, and, yes, Zionism is wrong.
I won't give you the benefit of the doubt, I would be [an] idiot if I did. But remember this, the ball is in your court, and until you begin to view us as humans, with equal human and legal rights, I'm absolutely sure that much more young blood, on our side (and yours) will still be spilled. What else can moral blindness lead to?
To sign Al-Awda's petition to terminate US aid to Israel go to:
http://al-awda.org/terminate_aid_petition.htm
Do it TODAY!
[END]