Obama the Bedouin

October 30, 2008:
Nowadays things change fast, so much so that some worry we may be at the verge of bringing about our own demise as a modern civilization. That doesn’t keep me awake nights. I suspect that I may well be comfortable living in a cave. Recently I was delighted to discover a direct link, culturally and emotionally if not even genetically speaking, to some ancient folks. When I read in Wikipedia that the carob seedpod was the hieroglyphic for sweetness, I could easily identify with that at the gut level and a tender sentiment toward the Pharaohs tugged at my heart. I have a carob tree in my orchard and I know how sweet it is.

Admiringly, I was reminded of the oft-repeated Palestinian saying used in chiding fellow Arabs and the rest of the world for not daring to stand up to Israel’s aggression against them: “They asked Pharaoh who made you such a despot? He gloated: I practiced despotism and no one stopped me!” In the local slang, what makes the phrase roll off the tongue easily is its catchy repetition of one word. The two verbs ‘to make a despot’ and ‘to practice despotism’ are both direct derivatives of the name ‘Pharaoh’.
So, you see, I have a connection to the ancient Egyptian monarchs. I even have a friend named Ramsis in Hawaii .

But this is tedious stream of consciousness stuff. What I wanted to talk about is change, not continuity. This morning I woke up to the peculiar realization that we have come a long way in terms of the accessibility of world news. As soon as I made my morning cup of coffee and turned my computer on, I could instantaneously access news about the whole world. That may sound like an empty cliché. Except that for a ‘has-been’ like me where we have been matters no less than where we are now. I remember the days when a dozen or more grown relatives would be gathered at the edge of the Kanaaneh neighborhood of the village, in front of al-Zawieh –the clan’s guesthouse and gathering point, one of them with a newspaper in hand, all waiting for us school kids to come home and read the news for them. Then in 1948 refugees from the city brought a radio to the village. (I better watch out: Someone is going to claim that I said that the driving out of the Palestinians from their cities had a salubrious effect on their country kin; It could even be claimed that I implied that villagers greeted departing refugees, and especially their pursuing Zionist forces, with flowers because of the civilizing impact the process of cleansing had on them. If you think that is too much of a stretch of the imagination, let me remind you that you have swallowed equally valid fibs, spun out in your media into historical fact, for decades. Remember the ‘land without people’? That is where I lived!) Later, in 1970, when I returned from my medical studies in the USA, I found that my entrepreneurial older brother had bought a TV set and was still charging fellow villagers for watching the news or the Arab version of a chick flick, mostly inane narratives manipulated to allow Fairuz, and several other temporary competitors, to sing. She is still at it today and I worship her heavenly voice especially when she sings for Jerusalem and Palestine.

Then came personal computers and the internet and I started wallowing in its endless recesses. This morning the internet offered more news of change, not all for the better though all in the best tradition of democracy: At the height of the presidential elections mania in the USA, while my eight-year-old granddaughter is stomping with her father in rural Pennsylvania for Barak Obama, I am openly maligned for being who I am and for having been targeted for elimination by Zionism and resisting it. Good old McCain interjects with an accusation of treason directed at his opponent for having once associated with Rashid Khalidi, a recognized academician and authority on the Middle East whose undoing in McCain’s eyes is his justifying of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation. Imagine that! A Palestinian who dares not accept Israeli occupation! A terrorist by definition! No wonder Palin spins the accusation a wee bit further and has Obama ‘palling with terrorists’ though Rashid is only implied indirectly. It pays to bash Arabs and with a name like Hussain, Obama is obviously one of them. McCain tries to deflect the blow with sweet civility: “No, ma'am. He's a decent, family man!” a classic ‘uthrun aqbah min thanb – an excuse uglier than the sin itself.”

I know and respect Prof. Khalidi. He wrote a blurb for my book which is the kind of damning evidence the crazies marshal against him. His intellectual and academic clout is way above needing to be defended by the likes of me. You don’t land a position like the Edward Said endowed chair at Colombia accidentally. My daughter got her doctorate there and I am familiar with their opinionated rigor. Looking at things from that narrow perspective, I am tempted to accuse Rashid of colluding with the enemy.

But enough of the silly pander! Prof. Khalidi is secure enough in his convictions not to argue back with his detractors. He is dismissive of the humdrum revile and I accept and honor his decision. What I am dealing with here is my own dilemma: how am I to keep my focus and balance in the topsy-turvy world in which I find myself? Not only that I keep observing solid basic facts turned on their head but also that it is happening at a dizzying speed. It was only yesterday when liberation movements, the PLO included, were glorified as inspirational standard bearers of the struggle for human dignity and freedom. Then a certain CIA trainee splits off from the pack and hits his masters hard in the stomach and in the pocketbook. And his family’s friend and business partner gets angry and lashes out at all those with the same shade of color, style of dress, and form of worship. He, the world’s only remaining heavyweight, refuses to define his terms, or perhaps he doesn’t comprehend the terms formulated by his neoconservative Zionist and fundamentalist Christian operators. Then Sharon , the Israeli nationally and internationally acclaimed war criminal, Mr. Bush’s own ‘man of peace’, sees an opportunity and sneaks into the command tent with the declared goal of maligning the Palestinians. Overnight we all become terrorists. Even I, a chicken-hearted Americophile, get caught in the net as a potential terrorist and am interrogated for hours at airports.

Like shit, rapid change happens, sometimes in undesired directions. It was only yesterday when a famed actor played his bit part shouting at an opponent “Mr. President, tear that wall” and biblical Jericho -like the wall shook and came tumbling down. The whole world fell in line and a new ice age of unipolar magnetism ensued. Then a Hebrew-speaking Georgian leader and his Israeli trained top general decided to play hardball with their former oppressors. Russia hit back hard and overnight the world was jolted into its former bipolar self. Hooray for Saakashvili!

And it is not only time that has contracted down, time-lapse-photography-like. Space has also collapsed down on itself as well: I travel to the far corners of the earth, from Brazil to China, and am greeted and regaled as another welcome member of the species, albeit with money, to return home and face biblical-era tribal exclusionism. The looks on the faces of immigration officials at the airport as they peer into my passport and recognize my Arab name tell me that I am still considered a threat to the peace of the only country in which I ever had citizenship, simply for being racially different. ‘My’ country’s policy-makers, most of them born abroad, consider me a ticking time-bomb, an undesirable contaminant of their Zionist-inspired racially pure dream society, a Jewish state, pure and simple. Their inspired leaders have bickered for decades over what limit to set for my demographic proportions, anywhere from the zealot’s zero tolerance preference to Rabin’s liberal 20%, tops, which we are rapidly approaching. Professors theorize, civic leaders hold public debates, and the media goes into a tizzy over my un-abating natural increase rate.
“We should have stayed in China ,” I tell my half-Chinese wife.

The debate dominates the ether waves and all public discourse except when other existential threats, such as Iran secretly seeking nuclear parity with us, take hold of our attention. How can we stop ‘our Arabs’ from naturally expanding their numbers without taking the drastic measures expounded by extremist proponents of forced mass castration? Educate their girls; differentially promote family planning to their women; annul their family unification rights; encourage their youth to seek a better life abroad? We have done all of that and they are still outpacing us demographically. Better yet, work on your side of the equation; increase your own people to beat them in the numbers game; bring in the Jewish masses from Russia and Ethiopia, even if admixed with Christian impurities.

07 November 2008
Change happens in the USA as well. The Obama mania is global. He caught all of us off guard and in a mood to celebrate; we all needed an excuse for a party, ‘siba limisiba’ as we say here in Hebrew. My daughter in New York had a party at her home with some sixty celebrants, mostly expats without the right to vote in the first place. But Malaika, my eight year-old granddaughter and her father had volunteered in the Obama election campaign and they deserved to celebrate the success of their efforts.

And celebrations are everywhere. This morning I received a call from Ibrahim, my Bedouin colleague, seeking an expert opinion on a minor public health issue he faced. He opened with a reproachful tone of voice:
“Why haven’t you come to congratulate me?”
“What is up? Another promotion or a new child?”
“Noooo! Haven’t you heard? The Americans have elected a Bedouin to the White House!”
He then proceeded to explain that the Hujirat tribe in the village of Beir el-Maksour has thrown a big party, feasting on rice and mutton, celebrating all night with songs and Dabkeh dance, and distributing sweets to well-wishers for the past two days. Obama’s great grandmother on his father’s side, they claim, was a daughter of the tribe. My informer reports that one of Obama’s acclaimed tribal granduncles was interviewed on the Israeli Arab language TV news. When asked why he didn’t divulge his kinship secret earlier, he replied in Hebrew: “I didn’t want to influence the outcome of the elections in a foreign country,” implying somehow that it would have worked to the disadvantage of McCain, Israel’s favorite.

I am not sure how much trust to put in this far-fetched story, and who in the tribe invented it. Manipulation and hidden scheming is a well-known Bedouin trait, if not a trait of Palestinians in general and perhaps of all Arabs. (Stretch that out another notch and it becomes a basic human trait, which is not far from the truth!) Some member of the Hujirat tribe stands to benefit from the rumor.

Early in the first decade of Israel’s existence, the movement of this semi-nomadic group with their extensive goat and cow herds in their traditional grazing lands in lower Galilee Mountains was curtailed and they were concentrated in the newly created village of Beir el-Maksour. Quickly their men were recruited into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF, years before Palestinians coined the alternative term IOF = Israeli Occupying Forces) serving mainly in the Border Police as trackers, a cushy job by Bedouin standards. One of their tribal leaders was catapulted by Ben Gurion’s labor party, (Mapai) into big time politics as an ‘elected’ parliament member. It worked to the benefit of all concerned: He and his likes collected fat salaries and were regaled with accolades and gifts by fellow members of the Palestinian minority seeking protection from the excesses of the Israeli military government and tax collectors; the Mapai party could count on their illiteracy and uninformed automatic support in close parliament votes even when dealing with extending the mandate of the military rule over the Arab minority or with expropriating their land; and Israel could brag in international circles about its liberal democracy and egalitarian treatment of its ‘Moslem, Druze and Christian’ (never Arab or Palestinian) minorities, witness their representation in the Knesset (parliament).

What I tried to understand from my colleague was who stands to benefit from this rumor? It has to be the twisted connivance of a sick mind for some imagined personal gain. Does one of their current chiefs aspire to become Obama’s advisor on Bedouin affairs, or perhaps even on tribal affairs including those of Native Americans? If I am not mistaken such a position exists at the prime minister’s office in Israel. And Israel sets the standard for the USA and trains its emissaries to the Middle East, especially armed ones. The place is full of Bedouins and the USA is not about to abandon Arabia’s resource-rich deserts. So why not create such a post for the US president?

I am reminded of the claim made by the sheikh in one of the Palestinian villages in the Triangle region of Israel back in the nineteen fifties when I was still in high school. It was rumored then that the great Italian actress, Sophia Loren, had been raised as an orphan in an Italian monastery. The sheikh claimed that he also grew up as an orphan though he was raised by relatives. His younger sister, Safyieh, was taken in as an orphan by a charitable order of nuns from Italy and he had never heard from her since. This was long before DNA testing was developed. But the clever man could prove his claim beyond doubt: “Let me meet her once and I can prove it to you. My sister Safyieh had a distinctive birthmark on the inner aspect of her right thigh.”
To us in high-school, sexually deprived teenagers bubbling with excess testosterone, the sheikh’s motives were obvious.

Benny Morris to the Rescue

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/opinion/18morris.html?th&emc=th

It is one thing to have the renegade father of Israel’s new historians spouting off standard war-mongering rhetoric; It is another thing to read his delirious thoughts on the op-ed page of the New York Times. And I have a theory about that, one nurtured by my own firmly established paranoia and conspiracy-based frame of analysis.

Benny Morris made his name on the strength of daring to expose the falsity of Israel’s previously internationally accepted claims of innocence in the 1948 creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. From the very beginning he faltered a bit and fell short on the honesty component of interpreting his fresh historical account, still allowing an escape route for Ben-Gurion et. al. by devolving responsibility for the war atrocities that drove the Palestinians out of their homes to the field commanders’ level. In recent years, as he saw the fanatical rightists’ light, he started to blame Ben-Gurion for not doing a thorough job. He ought to have completed the ethnic cleansing job, Benny now thinks, and driven out all Palestinians between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. That includes the disorganized group of near 150,000 mainly rural Palestinians who in 1948 became Israeli citizens. True, one quarter to one third of this minority was internal refugees who lost their homes, land and other property. And true the remaining two thirds have lost over 80% of their land to the holy mission of the ingathering of the Jews. Still their demographics are disturbing; they have managed to maintain their relative proportion of the total population of the ‘Jewish and democratic state’ and have even increased some. It is not too late, Benny and his elk now think; ways can be found to fix up the fateful mistake by population exchange, border adjustments and forceful persuasion. When the opportunity presents itself, the entire Palestinian population west of the Jordan River should be transferred out of what Benny thinks should be the minimal natural area of Israel.

Still the man is a recognized authority who has worldwide name recognition. So why not use him now to address the troublesome issue of Iran’s refusal to accept the American-Israeli hegemony in its neighborhood. A message has to be conveyed to the world, whither for short term tactical bluffing or as an actual warning of things to come. Iran has to believe that Israel will attack it and destroy its nuclear facilities even if that means unleashing a nuclear catastrophe on the world. That kind of message is too hard to swallow. So how does one go about getting it across with its full ferocity but without the expected world opinion backlash?

There is a well-tried method. It even has a physiological basis in nature. The good lord, evolution, or whoever designed the cow, has given it the ability to deal with the indigestible-on-the-first-round foods by regurgitation and chewing the cod over and over again till it becomes truly digestible. And that is exactly the way Israeli liberal intellectuals and media stars have dealt with another difficult-to-swallow agenda item that its policy makers decided on: transfer. It is a precedent in which Benny himself has taken a part, though it has been mainly a national level debate with limited international concern or participation. Yet it sets the style of how to go about making the unconscionable sound familiar and less resistible if not less repulsive. In my book of memoirs, A Doctor in Galilee, there is a brief account of this:

“September 5, 2005:

Things do change in this country, but not always for the better. By now, ‘transfer’ in its various forms – whether ‘population exchange’, ‘demographic security’, or even ‘development of the Galilee and the Negev’ – is an accepted part of the political discourse of all the Zionist parties and their leaders. It is part of the current political consensus, neither denounced by civilized people nor denied a central place in ‘normal’ news by the Israeli media. Recently a Palestinian child was shot dead by the occupying Israeli forces. His parents donated his organs to five different patients, including a religious Israeli Jew who declared that, had he known in advance, he would not have accepted an Arab heart in his body. The media presented the item as mildly humorous news, with barely a word of condemnation. A country that has elected Sharon, a veritable war criminal, as its leader and promoted him to the point where the most powerful man on earth, George W Bush, pronounces him ‘a man of peace’, does not have to shy away from policies that are crimes against human rights. Spin-doctoring – known locally as hasbara – is a highly developed art in this country, especially when dealing with Palestinians or when reporting to ‘our American allies’.

Let me explain again: Not long ago transfer was a highly negative term imbued with connotations of war crimes and gross human rights violations. It ranked in most people’s minds with such indecencies as ethnic cleansing and genocide. Till some of Israel’s leaders decided to agitate for removing the major impurity that had sullied the Jewishness of the ‘Jewish and democratic state’ since its establishment, the Palestinian Arab minority that has climbed to near the 20% limit that those leaders and their predecessors, including Yitzhak Rabin, have set for it. Suddenly ‘transfer’ appeared on election platforms of right-of-center Zionist parties. The left was outraged and the media, both private and state owned, made noises of objection. But they all engaged those ‘outrageous transfer-minded rightists’ in active civilized dialogue. They were invited to none-stop academic symposia and to open-ended debate forums on and off the air. Transfer proponent’s views were patiently listened to, analyzed and duly refuted by opponents. Soon you started to hear less convinced middle-of-the-road politicians, and even some of those counted as leftists, declare their objections in more understanding tones. Refutations were prefaced by such half-accepting phrases as ‘granted … but …’ or ‘assuming you are right, still …’. And soon the transfer parties were gaining high approval rates in public polls and doing well in local and national elections. The most outspoken ‘transfer’ party leader, Avigdor Lieberman, was invited into the coalition government and became a minister then a deputy prime minster. And the same transfer objectors continued to participate in the same government.

To fully appreciate the racist flavor of the Israeli mainstream’s cooptation by transfer politicians one has only to remember the loud cries of foul play and the louder denials of the taint flung at liberal leaders accused of consulting with Arab parties about the latter’s possible support of a coalition; not inclusion in it mind you! Just support from the outside. And every last one of them had to come clean on this one and show how distant he or she is from all local Arab politicians.

In no time we found the term ‘transfer’ entering the Israeli parlance as part of the daily verbiage of reporters, newscasters and commentators. It started to be window-dressed into something innocuous and acceptable such as ‘population exchange’, ‘border adjustments’, ‘assisted outmigration’, ‘the socio-economic push and pull factors of population dynamics’, ‘demographic balance’, … etc. etc. Hardly a decade after it all started, the storm was over and ‘transfer’ in Israeli media became a casual innocent term that raises no eyebrows. It is discussed in most circles only as a question of when and how, never if.

The well-tried method is a combination of two basic components: smooth spin-doctoring to camouflage the evil core of what is being said in such a way that it sounds vaguely desirable, and repetitively impinging the senses with it till it becomes familiar and you stop thinking about it when you hear it.

The current topic for obfuscation has added advantages in that the concerned audience is the general American public, the automatic guarantor of Israel’s superior moral rectitude. How many members of the masses in the west and especially in the USA, have the time for the luxury of giving Iran the benefit of the doubt or of engaging in some deep thinking about its affairs! The average middleclass folks can’t be bothered. They will not be easily sidetracked from the daily barrage of mind-gripping minutia from the sex scandals and financial embezzlements in Washington to the little infidelities or wardrobe secrets of superstars in Hollywood. And many are too busy making a living. So it is much more practical to leave worrying about the world to the better informed leaders who are elected and paid to do the job and to those suave experts at all the think tanks and their media conduits that never tire of picking their brains. All in all deep thinking about strange happenings in faraway places is best left for politicians and the media. The fact that groups with money and well-formulated political agendas can buy both genres and turn them into propaganda mouthpieces is too much of an insult for most to consider seriously. A vicious circle ensues whereby the bigger the lie the deeper the ignorance and the insult of facing up to it and the stronger the denial.

That is where Benny Morris’s services come handy. He is an automatic shoo-in, an already well-established credible member of the inner circle of Academia and Middle East expertise; he has name Recognition; like the great majority of Israeli academicians he must have done few stints in service to the Israeli defense forces; And he has what it takes in terms of deep mistrust, if not total contempt of Islam and Muslims. So why not have him pave the road in mainstreaming the idea of a nuclear attack against Iran? It has already been bandied around by Israeli top generals and politicians. It is time to air it out as part of the common secondhand ware on the media market; let people handle it, smell it, fumble it, and get familiar with it even if they were not to buy into it right away.

You would think that the editors of the New York Times would have the common sense to spot such foul intrigue and the decency to nip it in the bud. Here is a well-respected historian who dared to expose the lies expounded by his own national heroes. So committed he is to airing and documented the facts that he didn’t back down on consolidating impressive new evidence confirming the Palestinian narrative regarding their Nakba or catastrophe. Yet he espouses an immoral stand in full contradiction of the lessons his expose teaches. To any one with a minimum of logic this should have raised a red flag. It should have signaled either schizophrenia or the onset of senile dementia.

Yet neither is likely judging by the man’s cold logic; he is not totally off his rocker. Accepting his premises, which the New York Times seems to allow for if not to subscribe to, the conclusions he reaches are not ‘crazy’. Building on patently false premises he proceeds to speak approvingly of a nuclear strike against Iran as a preemptive option. Among other concepts, he mentions quite casually the prospect of “a ratcheting up of the Iranian-Israeli conflict to a nuclear level”, “an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland” and “a Middle Eastern nuclear holocaust” with “radioactive pollution of the earth's atmosphere and water” being “in the cards”.

If the man is not ‘crazy’, then what explanation can there be for his delirium-like spouting off? That is where I revert to my well-entrenched intrigue and subversion theory: The man has been obviously put up to the job; someone is setting him up as an academician to chew the nuclear cod. People may object to what he says and will sound off their objections. But in doing so, they will be repeating his nuclear mantras, just as I have been forced to do here. Slowly but surely, the terms loose their abhorrent first-encounter effect; a disconnect sets in between the sound of the words and their deeper meaning. People all over the world, but especially in the West, get hypnotized by the repetitive sound-bites, especially as the concepts get sanitized into less offensive sounding terms, though that may come only after the fact. Whoever invented ‘collateral damage’ and ‘targeted elimination’ is capable of whitewashing nuclear terminology into innocent sounding alternative phrases.

It remains to be asked: Who may have put Benny up to this task? My guess is whoever put Bush up to invading Iraq.

So get ready for ‘Operation Maximum Middle East Peace’.

What Palestinians and Hawaiians Have in Common

What Palestinians and Hawaiians Have in Common

My wife and I have spent the better part of our lives accommodating the two sets of dissimilar realities of our roots in Palestine and Hawaii, our birthplaces being nearly a pair of antipodes on the globe. Yet every once in a while I come across a reminder of how similar certain socio-political aspects of our two backgrounds are.

Spin-doctoring, as a journalistic art form and a political tool, came of age only in recent years with the advent of neo-conservative dominance in US politics. Neo-cons have used this tool masterfully in the promotion and justification of the war on Iraq. In the process they have also succeeded in demonizing Islam, Arabs, and Muslims in general, portraying them as the twenty first century enemies of humanity, rationality and God. The trend has been nurtured by the rising tide of born-again Christian Zionism and cynically manipulated by the pro-Israel lobby for its own gain. As a Palestinian citizen of Israel who is also familiar with the American scene, I couldn’t help but recognize these propaganda tactics as the very same ones that have been regularly practiced by my country against my minority community and against other Palestinians, especially those in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. The recipe is quite simple; it is comprised of two components: First you dehumanize the other; then you look in the mirror and ascribe all the negative attributes you see to that enemy. What remains is to keep hammering at it with all the media tools at your disposal till it sticks to the now clearly evil other as his innate nature. Especially if this other is handicapped by the lack of media access to your audience, then you have it made.

That, at least, was what I had assumed until I read David E. Stannard’s book Honor Killing depicting race relations in Hawaii in the early part of the twentieth century. It turns out to be a tale of full-fledged spin-doctoring before I thought the genre had been discovered. A mentally unstable young navy wife invents a story about being abducted, beaten and raped by a gang of Hawaiian young men. A jury fails to find in her favor and her high-society mother arrives from the mainland USA. The outraged mother takes matters in her own hands and murders one of the accused. The cause of the two white women is championed by the interlinked triumvirate of military commanders, business moguls and media bosses, all of whom happen to be white newcomers to Hawaii. The meeting of their sick mindsets and political interests prompts the three circles of influence to act in unison in actively pursuing the elevation of this local vendetta to the level of a national emergency that invites the interference of the US congress and the president himself. Lurking in the background, there is always the less than godly legacy and influence of Christian missionaries to Hawaii. The sick accuser, her drunken navy husband and her manipulative mother become national heroes defending white women’s honor against the savages. Sympathy and generous donations enable them to secure the services of the most prominent US criminal defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow. He fails to secure them and their two navy accomplices in the murder of the young Hawaiian man a verdict of innocence. Still he manages to obtain a commutation of their sentence from ten years of imprisonment with hard labor to one hour in the custody of the Honolulu sheriff. In the process Hawaii’s native and immigrant oriental population is vilified beyond redemption.

As I started reading this book it all seemed vaguely familiar. The more the author exposed the factual information with the benefit of some seven decades of hindsight the more I found its essence similar to the parallel narrative of what happened in Palestine, though without the intriguing plot surrounding a specific single event. Rather, it was the meeting of minds and interests of aggressive foreign forces and the circumstances that maximize the magical powers of spin doctoring that were similar in the two narratives.

In Hawaii, even before WW II, and long before president Eisenhower coined the term, the military-industrial complex was in full swing, its leaders clamoring for imposing a military dictatorial system to govern the Islands. The media, at the time mainly the print form and the nascent radio and wire services, acting as hand in glove, picks up the banner of the national interest and runs with it. The white population of Hawaii has to be protected from the transgressions of the unruly savage natives and the oriental rabble before these bring ruination upon the nation’s moral fiber and endanger America’s military superiority in the Pacific. Newscasters and editorial writers across the nation fall in line and follow the chorus of bigoted and racist agitation, turning fables into facts and creating new ones at will.

In Palestine too, there was and still is a meeting of military, business and media interests, to the detriment of the native population. And in Palestine too there is a strong negative role for religion, even a decisive one. A three thousand year old legend is revived by the master race, the Christian Zionists of Europe. It is brought to life as the absolute and holy truth. With that the natives are not only disenfranchised but also demonized as the aggressors against God’s chosen people. ["Talk about the 'promised land' and the 'chosen people' adds a religious dimension to racism which we did not have," declared a veteran South African human rights leader recently.] As the European self-soothing dream of ridding itself of Jews matures and is concretized with the Belfour declaration and a three decade-long colonial rule actively implementing it, the same dream starts to take hold across the oceans in the minds of evangelical Christians in American. This is no small matter: In America business is king and it has a massive vested interest in the Middle East; in America the media has been well honed as a mind-controlling tool serving and reinforcing business of which it is an integral part; and in America by now the military-industrial complex is an accepted fact of life and a central player in the ME which serves both as a laboratory for the testing of its ware and as a major consumer of its new products. And the circle is finally closed with the meeting of minds between the mighty American Christian right and the no-less-mighty Zionist pro-Israel lobby.

The two histories, of the Hawaiians and of the Palestinians, are quite dissimilar in their details. Yet the basic operative mode and motivation of the aggressors are highly similar despite the disparity in the level of sophistication of the tools used. The Hawaiians were a demoralized and conquered native minority imposed upon by the openly racist, crudely oppressive self-serving haoles (Hawaiian for foreigner or white). The Palestinians face a much more refined and infinitely more powerful circle of interests with the added advantage and veneer of self-righteous liberal intellectualism. Yet, step by step and feature by feature the tale of demonization, land theft, and adding blame to injury is the same. In both cases facts are turned on their heads and the victim is fully guilty in the eyes of the wider world. And in both cases the local truth is of no significance; it is the media that has the voice to sound off its falsity to an attentive world that is not only happy to swallow the lies whole but is willing to give of its sympathy, energy and financial means to further establish it as the final operative reality.

I should read about other indigenous peoples’ tales of dispossession: Native Americans, Native Canadians, Maoris, Aborigines and more. I bet you the story repeats itself.