BS: Tutu's message on Israelli Occupation

Subject: Tutu's message on Israelli Occupation
From: GUEST
Date: 14 Apr 02 - 09:55 AM

Tutu calls US soft on Israel

Nobelist speaks to Boston group on Mideast crisis

By Steven Wilmsen, Globe Staff, 4/14/2002

Likening Israel's treatment of Palestinians to the oppression of blacks by the white apartheid government in South Africa, Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu yesterday chided the Bush administration for being too soft on prime minister Ariel Sharon.

''I can't believe the United States really believes in its impotence'' to halt Israel's military reprisals, Tutu told reporters at Boston's Old South Church, where the retired archbishop spoke at a conference aimed at ending the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

''They have leverage, and they know they have leverage,'' he said. ''Any administration knows it has the capacity. Whether they have the will is another thing.''

Tutu said the Bush administration should demand Israel withdraw from the Gaza and the West Bank, adding that Israel's isolation of Yasir Arafat was ''bizarre and humiliating.''

Speaking earlier to a gathering of about 500 peace activists and members of the pro-Palestinian group Sabeel at the church, he urged a movement in the United States to ''put out a clarion call to the people and the government of Israel.''

''An unjust Israeli government - no matter how powerful - will ultimately fall,'' he said.

Jewish leaders reacted strongly to Tutu's remarks.

''It's tragic that a person of his moral credentials would sacrifice them with such an ugly slur,'' said Rob Leikind, director of the New England chapter of the Anti-Defamation League. ''Israel is in a simple fight for survival. It's a sad day for all of us when people engage in that kind of hyperbole.''

Tutu said that he opposes Palestinian suicide bombings, but that the only way to achieve peace is for Israel to make the first move.

With a crowd of pro-Palestinian protesters lining the sidewalks outside, Tutu said he also is ''saddened'' by the apparent lack of sympathy for the Palestinian cause in America and by the Bush administration's apparent unwillingness to rebuff Israeli interests at home.

''Somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal, where to criticize them is to be immediately dubbed as anti-Semitic,'' he said. ''The Jewish lobby is powerful. Very powerful. So what? This is God's world.''

Tutu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his role in dismantling the white government of South Africa, in part by inspiring a peaceful black uprising and focusing world attention on the region - said the movement was inspired ''on a deep level'' by Jewish traditions and by Israeli Jews themselves.

But on a recent visit to Palestinian towns, he said he viewed Israeli destruction with a Palestinian villager.

''He pointed out in the distance and said, `That used to be my home, but Jews live there now,''' Tutu said. ''I then recalled how in South Africa, people of color would point in much the same way at their homes that were now occupied by whites.

''I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at roadblocks. It reminded me of what happened to us in South Africa, where they battered us and heckled us, and they took joy in humiliating us. My heart aches. Have my Jewish friends forgotten their own history? Have they turned their backs on their own profound religious traditions?''

Tutu urged college students to protest Israel's action as they protested apartheid in the 1980s and said the fact that blacks are free now should give people hope for peace in the Middle East.

''We are free today in South Africa because of people like yourselves, people who - when it looked like they were trying to make hell freeze over - you went on. And look at us now. We are free.''

Meanwhile, protesters outside displayed banners and signs reading ''Palestinians are People Too'' and ''No more US $$ to Israel.''

''Why is there so much hate?'' asked Husam Hamdam, who lives in Boston but grew up in the Palestinian town of Jenin, where Israeli bulldozers have wreaked havoc in recent days. ''My parents went there to start a new life, and now it is taken away again. These people, they have been crucified twice.''

This story ran on page B3 of the Boston Globe on 4/14/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

Subject: RE: BS: Tutu's message on Israelli Occupation
From: GUEST
Date: 14 Apr 02 - 10:07 AM

Bishop Tutu is not the only Nobel Prize winner who has gone to the Occupied Territories and spoken out against the Israeli occupation and usurpation of the Palestinian Authority in the past 18 months.

Jose Saramago, the Portugese Nobelist of 1998 also recently travelled to Palestine to see the effects of the Israeli invasion first hand. Here is a excerpt of a recent article on ZNet, mentioning his visit:

http://www.zmag.org/content/Mideast/barghoutijenin.cfm

This April 9th, Palestinians everywhere commemorated the 54th anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre, when Zionist terror groups murdered 254 innocent Palestinian Arabs in cold blood, as documented by several historians, including some of the "new historians" in Israel. In an authoritative account of the massacre, the British interrogating officer then, Assistant Inspector-General Richard Catling, confirmed that: "Many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered … Many infants were also butchered and killed."3 Deir Yassin was meant to set an example, a particularly shocking precedent, to terrorize the Palestinians off their lands and into exile. It was no accident, no aberration, no extreme vengeance, simply a calculated act of terror in a well-thought-out plan to depopulate Palestine, and create in the resulting space a Jewish homeland for the victims of the Nazi genocide. Those victims also observed "Holocaust Day" this April 9th.

This coincidence stirs up a bitter irony: the victims of one of history's worst crimes against humanity are increasingly resorting to some of the same tools of racist hatred and collective punishment to complete the job that the founders of Zionism had envisioned: a "pure" Jewish state.

Last month, during a visit by a delegation from the International Parliament of Writers, the famous Portuguese Nobel Prize winner, Jose Saramago, dreaded the "spirit of Auschwitz" in Ramallah and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories. Many Israeli intellectuals hypocritically condemned the remark, some implicitly accusing Saramago of anti-Semitism. Ironically, just this past January, Ha'aretz reported that "one of the Israeli officers in the [occupied] territories" found it justified to "internalize the lessons of earlier battles even, however shocking it may sound, even how the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto."4

Indeed, several Israeli policies have evoked analogies with the Nazis, despite the unquestionable disparity in the magnitude of criminality between the two cases. Some of the wicked practices of the Nazis in concentration camps were even imported unabashedly by Israeli army officers. During the last army incursion into Palestinian towns and refugee camps towards the end of February of this year, the Washington Post reported: "The [Israeli] army's mass roundups of Palestinian refugees has been a public relations disaster for Israel, as images have been broadcast and printed around the world of blindfolded captives including teenage boys and graying middle-aged-men held at gunpoint. Some Israelis were also incensed that [Israeli] troops were writing [identification] numbers on some of the prisoners' arms and foreheads …."5 One of those who expressed "outrage" over this practice was the right-wing Israeli lawmaker, Tommy Lapid, who declared in the Knesset, "As a refugee from the Holocaust I find such an act insufferable."6

In the current Israeli offensive against the Palestinians under its occupation, implementing Sharon's promise to "batter them into submission," the Israeli army has systematically committed several serious violations of international humanitarian law and the Fourth Geneva Convention which amounted to war crimes, as described by UN agencies, Israeli human rights organizations and by Israel's best friend in the region, the Turkish Prime Minister, Bulent Ecevit7.