Biased
Peter Panania (Write On, GLW #677) complains that GLW's coverage of events in the Middle East is "biased" and "pro-Islam and anti-Jewish".
As an Israel-born, dual Israeli-Australian citizen who helps produce GLW, I am proud of the fact that GLW is unashamedly biased in favour of the world's oppressed people, including the dispossessed Palestinian people who are waging a just struggle against the Zionist colonisation of their national homeland.
GLW is also unashamedly biased in favour of those among the poor and oppressed of neighbouring Lebanon who are resisting the Israeli state's aggression against their country.
This stance has nothing to do with the religious views of any of those involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict. While most of the victims of the Israeli rulers' policies in the Middle East are Muslims, Panania forgets that 39% of Lebanon's population are Christians, as are 10% of Palestinians.
GLW is not "anti-Jewish", i.e., against people who adhere to Judaism, but anti-Zionist. Zionism is the political ideology and movement that has created a "Jewish" state in Palestine — at the expense of the non-Jewish indigenous inhabitants of Palestine.
At the time of the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, Zionist doctrine held that Palestine was "a land without a people for a people without a land" — ignoring the fact that of the 1.9 million inhabitants of Palestine only 32% were Jews.
The Israeli state was founded and is maintained on a myriad of injustices against the Arabic-speaking Palestinian nation — injustices backed up by the US imperialist rulers' annual US$3 billion in military aid to Israel.
As is typical of apologists for Israel, Panania claims that anyone who criticises the Israeli state's actions is "anti-Jewish". I guess Panania would regard Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of the Neturei Karta, an organisation of Orthodox Jews, as being rabidly "anti-Jewish".
Rabbi Weiss, whose his grandparents were exterminated by the Nazis at Auschwitz, told the July 17 anti-war protest outside the UN building in New York: "What is happening now is another link in a long chain of tragedies that have taken place since the inception of Zionism — not with the creation of the State of Israel, but starting in the beginning of the 20th century with the creation of Zionism, which made their nationalism in an occupied land.
"The creation of the State of Israel came about through the theft from, subjugation and oppression of, the Palestinian people...
"The brutal and indiscriminate attack upon the people and infrastructure of Lebanon by the Zionist state is a crime against all basic standards of decency and humanity...
"We pray to God every day for the speedy and peaceful dismantlement of the [Israeli] state and the transformation to the self-rule of the indigenous people [the Palestinians] so we may live in harmony."
Zoe Kenny, Glebe, NSW
Lebanon I
Recently many letters to the corporate media have expressed surprise at Israel's targeting of the UN's observation posts and Red Cross ambulances in Lebanon. Some letter writers have gone as far as claiming the photos of these atrocities are Hezbollah fabrications.
Well, I'm not surprised and they're not fabrications. In 2004, I worked in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and on at least three occasions I witnessed the deliberate targeting of Red Crescent ambulances by the Israeli military.
On one occasion, at a non-violent demonstration against the illegal apartheid wall and the bulldozing of Palestinian crops in the village of Budrus, an Israeli peace activist was injured by a concussion grenade fired directly at her by Israeli soldiers.
As we put her into the ambulance, the soldiers continued to fire on us. I and two other international observers were hit at close range by high velocity, red-hot, nine-centimetre diameter teargas canisters, while another Israeli peace activist was hit by a rubber-coated bullet (which often are as lethal as live bullets).
In the village of Kufr Thulth, where illegal Israeli settlers were destroying Palestinian olive groves, the Israeli military deliberately fired a teargas canister at the 73-year-old Palestinian farmer who owned the land. As the old man was taken to an ambulance, the Israeli soldiers continued firing on the ambulance.
The Israeli military regularly attacks ambulances/medical personnel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories — a fact that's been well documented by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (< http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/Reports/English/pdf_medical/mediA href="mailto:cal_reports.htm"><cal_reports.htm>), so it comes as no surprise that Israeli has used the same tactics in its aggression against Lebanon.
Kim Bullimore
Brunswick, Vic
Lebanon II
I write in response to the report of the Israeli attack on a hospital in Baalbek, Lebanon. In this "daring" night raid, the "brave" Israeli commandos apparently tried to capture a Hezbollah leader. They instead captured five suspected guerrillas and killed 19 people, including at least eleven civilians, among them four children and a pregnant woman.
Israeli chief of staff Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz said the raid was a great success, a morale booster for Israel and was "to prove that we can hit everywhere in Lebanon". Israeli PM Ehud Olmert has also boasted that Israeli bombing and shelling have displaced the entire population of southern Lebanon.
I can only describe these as military "successes" in that they further reveal, if anyone still needs convincing, that Israel is a terrorist rogue state with a ruthless, immoral leadership intoxicated on military power.
Israel's indiscriminate slaughter and destruction will not defeat the Lebanese resistance or make the Lebanese turn on this resistance, as the resistance fighters are the sons and fathers of the Lebanese people, are part of the community and are fighting a just cause against the Israeli occupation and oppression.
Steven Katsineris
Hurstbridge, Vic
Lebanon III
It is difficult to watch the unfolding carnage in Lebanon without feeling a deep sense of sadness and frustration. Lebanon has been set back a generation due to the destruction of its infrastructure and its fledgling democratic system has been deeply wounded.
Israel's attack is radicalising the Lebanese population and swelling support for Hezbollah. It is madness to suggest that the bombing campaign will make ordinary Lebanese come to see Hezbollah as a liability. When under attack, people always rally around those who will defend them.
Israel's strategic logic here is deeply flawed and has ensured that Lebanon will become a major breeding ground of anti-Israeli extremism for generations to come, such that Israel will never again know peace on its northern frontier.
This sorry affair highlights the danger to any society of allowing the military to become the most important decision-making body of a government, as the IDF has become in Israel. Military commanders continually prove themselves to be extremely poor political decision makers. The only tool in their kit is the use of violence.
The Israeli military is by far the preponderant war machine in the region. Israel is not a weak nation under siege in a sea of hostile Arabs. Strategic realities have changed and the balance of military power now heavily favours Israel, as the body counts in Lebanon and in the Palestinian intifada suggest.
Israel's overwhelming military dominance should allow it the luxury of pursuing non-military solutions to its security problems. But by resorting to violence to manage every security issue, Israel has helped to fuel retaliatory violence from Hezbollah and Hamas. Through its own actions, Israel will again find itself in a sea of hostile Arabs. This is not to condone the violence of Hezbollah and Hamas, but to acknowledge the structural reality feeding the flames of death and destruction in Palestine and Lebanon.
As a loving human being, I plead to the Israeli government: end this madness now.
Benjamin Habib
Plympton, SA [Abridged]