Archive for June, 2001

Why Israel Says No to Peacekeepers?

June 30th, 2001 by ktula


“Has Nazism become the sole norm by which Jews judge evil, so that anything that is not its exact duplicate is considered by us morally acceptable? Is that what the Holocaust has done to Jewish moral sensibility?”

– Irena Klepfisz, author of Dreams of an Insomniac

Since the beginning of the current Al-Aqsa Intifada in last September, Palestinians have been demanding an international peacekeeping force be sent to the occupied territories of West Bank and Gaza. During the same time, Israel adamantly rejected any international peacekeeping force. Israel’s permanent Ambassador to the United Nations said that a U.N. force was unacceptable and it “had not been envisaged in earlier peace accords”. Former U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke said the U.S. would oppose any force as long as Israel rejects it. Since then, the Clinton administration and the current Bush administration have helped Israel to defeat Palestinian attempts at the United Nations to win Security Council approval for the idea.
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A Nation that Cries Wolf

June 21st, 2001 by ktula


‘If Jews can’t criticize Israel for fear of being called “self-hating,” and if non-Jews can’t criticize Israel for fear of being called “anti-Semitic,” then Israel gets off scot-free.’

– Irena Klepfisz, a child survivor of the Holocaust and a poet.

A recent event reminded me of a story about the shephard boy who cries wolf. BBC’s flagship current affair program “Panorama” investigated the role played by Ariel Sharon, the recently elected Prime Minister of Israel, in the infamous massacre of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatilla (Beirut) about 20 years ago. The broadcast of this program on June 17th generated a lot of criticism about the nature and the timing of the broadcast, including a comment made by the spokesman for the Israeli department for foreign affairs accusing the program and its producers as “anti-Semitic”.
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