Dear Roger,
Over the past few months I have saluted your courage in seeking to open the eyes of New York Times’ readers to some of the differences between Zionist propaganda and what the facts on the ground in Israel/Palestine are telling us.
Your latest column, Hard Mideast Truths, published on 12 February and which I tweeted, was, I think, your most explicit to date. (I imagine you got a bucket load of organised hate mail for it).
This article was written as one in a series with other authors under the title ZIONISM UNMASKED. I will be tweeting the contributions of others in due course.
Most Jews of the world (and probably many Gentiles) believe that Zionism is the return of Jews to the land promised to them by God. At the risk of offending some readers of all faiths for saying so, I must confess, and do so cheerfully, that I don’t buy this concept because the Gentile me does not believe in the God of organized, institutional religions. So, I say to myself, no God, no promise to Jews (or anybody else). In my perception of the scheme of things, God is the potential for good inside each and every one of us. God so defined is a prisoner within each of us and our prime task is to liberate this prisoner. But let’s put that to one side.
At a town hall meeting in Tampa, Florida on 28 January, President Obama explained what in his view had to happen if there is to be a two-state solution which would see Israel and the Palestinians living side by side in peace and security. He said, “Both sides are going to have to make concessions“.
My own view is that Israel’s still on-going colonization of the occupied West Bank has destroyed the prospect of a two-state solution on any basis the Palestinians could accept. But for the sake of discussion I’ll pretend that is not necessarily so.
With thanks to ITN and the BBC’s Gavin Esler, I simply can’t resist giving this little story wider circulation. It came to me in ITN’s 1955 Club Newsletter. (I receive it monthly as a member of the club).
The story as told by Gavin Esler and reported by the newsletter:
Putting Tony Blair on trial would be much too cruel. The man is ill, delusional, quite possibly to the point of madness. What he needs most of all is psychiatric help. Any doubts I might have had about that diagnosis were removed by his six-hour presentation to the Chilcot Inquiry of his reasons for joining the neo-conned “Dubya” Bush in the war on Iraq.
