Let’s be specific, Sir; you know that the United States has illegally invaded Iraq, has slaughtered thousands of its civilians, perpetrated war crimes in its devastation of Falujah and its indiscriminate use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus, and continues to defy the universally accepted conventions against torture inflicted on prisoners of war; you know that the U.S. prepares for an invasion of Iranian air space and intended destruction of its nuclear facilities, and you know that Israel has similar intent and would work with the United States to this end should it be able to convince the U.S. to undertake this mission on its behalf; you know that Israel continues its genocidal actions against the Palestinians in full defiance of UN provisions that define genocide and as recorded in detail in an article I wrote in Counterpunch titled, “Hope Destroyed, Justice Denied, the Rape of Palestine”; and you know that Israel intends to confiscate, to steal outright, unilaterally as the world stands by silently, the vast majority of the remaining land that belongs to the Palestinians condemning the Palestinians as the cause of its actions since they intend to “wipe Israel off the map,” an assertion laughable on its face and packed with lies as I’ve indicated in yet another article titled “The True State of Terrorism: Justice or Genocide.” These are the sins being committed by the United States and Israel against the peoples of the world. These are the actions that the UN must condemn and reverse if at all possible, even if only in the expressed opinion of the United Nations in international assembly.

There should be no need to deliberate on the sins committed by this administration; they are the staples of today’s news: torture and rendition have been thoroughly aired even now in the main stream press; the investigations of the massacres in Iraq and those reviewing the demolition of Falujah continue; and the on-going threats against Iran cover our front pages. What is less visible are the genocidal actions by the IDF and the Olmert government against the Palestinians. These receive virtually no coverage in the American press; rather the press echoes the cries of the Israeli lobbies that Israel is in immanent danger of being obliterated, that some fearsome army of militants threatens its very existence when the reality is that Israel can determine that a shipment of arms can go to Mahmoud Abbas while it denies the Palestinians even the tax money they pay to stay alive. Let me try to personalize that reality lest you too have been victimized by the Israeli propaganda.

Yesterday, Uri Avnery described the route of the Sharon Wall of Fear that continues uninterrupted as it slithers through 400 miles of Palestinian land in full defiance of the ICJ and the UN . “When it was decided to build the Separation Wall around Jerusalem, the plan was to cut a-Ram off from the city. Worse: the path of the Wall passes right down the middle of the main street – so that it does not separate between Palestinians and Israelis, but mostly between Palestinians and Palestinians. … It cuts off the holders of Israeli identity cards from the city where their businesses and places of employment are located. It cuts off the pupils from their schools, which are only 100 meters away … Not to mention the students who are separated from their universities; the sick , separated from their hospitals; even the dead from their cemeteries.”

Avnery goes on to describe how peace activists were greeted by a “large contingent of soldiers and policemen … rows of soldiers heavily armed from head to foot, in front of them mounted police and behind them army humvees.” All this to prevent children and Israeli and Palestinian peace activists from demonstrating. Tear gas was used and stun guns and waves of soldiers. This is what Israel fears, the truth of their occupation that denies even the right to protest in what is purportedly a democracy. Such hypocrisy. 

Two days before, at least nine Palestinians, including two children, were killed in two Israeli air strikes over central Gaza City. “The second missile, which killed two other people, came two minutes later, after a crowd had begun to gather around the scene of the attack,” a calculated killing of civilians. (MWCnews.net). The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights reports in No. 23/2006, June 8-14, that 28 Palestinians, including 7 children, were killed by the IOF, seven of the victims were from the same family. An additional 76 civilians, including at least 20 children, were wounded by IOF gunfire. 40 times the IOF made incursions into Palestinian communities; they continue to impose a total siege on the occupied territories, to close borders into the Gaza Strip, to divide the West Bank into two Bantustans, to raze agricultural areas near Azzoun Atma village and Qalqilya, and to allow settlers to attack civilians. And the construction of the Wall continues. This is the action of a terrorist state. Israel does not adhere to or abide by any international law and is not beholden to any conventions of the UN or its Charter. Why does the UN allow a rogue state that defies 160 of its resolutions to go unpunished or, at least, be castigated for its defiance?

Finally, may I refer you to an article by Jonathan Cook in Counterpunch, June 14, “Israeli Law and Order.” Once you’ve read this piece you cannot but be impressed by how immune Israel is to civilized law that is imposed on all other countries of the world. Why is this, Sir? Why does the United Nations allow such inhumane treatment of a people who live under the boots of an occupying force? Read this account of just some of the Israeli atrocities. “Enforcing the law has never been a major consideration when the offenders are Jewish and the victims are Arabs, even when the killings happen in Israel. Arab citizens have not forgotten the massacre of 49 men, women and children by a unit of soldiers who enforced a last-minute curfew on the Israeli village of Kfar Qassem in 1956, executing the villagers – Arabs of course – at the checkpoint one by one as they innocently returned home from a day’s work in the fields. During their trial, the Haaretz newspaper reported that the soldiers received a 50 percent pay increase and that it was obvious the men were ‘not treated as criminals but as heroes’. Found guilty of an ‘administrative error,’ the commander was given a one penny fine.” That’s Israeli justice, Sir.   

Considering that the UN has already acted in 1947 and 1967 in resolutions 181 and 242 to provide the Palestinians with a state of their own, realizing now that Olmert with the complicity of the United States intends to unilaterally draw its own borders confiscating approximately all but 14% of the land that should belong to the Palestinians, and considering that Mahmoud Abbas and the Hamas leadership have called for a peace proposal, Abbas at the Nobel Institute in Norway two months ago and Hamas in the last two months as they gave serious thought to the Saudi Prince’s 2002 plan, it would appear that justice could at last proceed if you, acting on their behalf, called together an international assembly to ensure that equity might prevail. Unless the UN acts immediately, the instability that has characterized Palestine for the past 60 years will continue. Unless the UN places a peace keeping force in Palestine, arranges for the Israelis to withdraw from the occupied territories, and creates a Palestinian state on the borders of the green line, only continued terror by Israel and terror by militant Palestinians will be the future of the mid-east. Only you, Sir, have the position that can navigate the mine fields that the silver headed right wing representatives in the U.S. House have laid before the world, a desire to ensure an unending war in the mid-east dragging everyone into that dark ditch of moral corruption that characterizes the governments of the United States and Israel. Lacking action by you through the UN, the world can expect to sink further into the slough of despond in which it is now mired.

=================
 
William Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of Tracking Depception: Bush's Mideast Policy

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