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Page 2 of 2 Perhaps now we must account for the most serious omissions in Gillerman’s text, the reality behind what he appears to say. What is not said when he asserts “The tragedy of the past month, could – and would – have been avoided if the previous resolutions of this Council had been heeded…”? What is not said when he claims desperately that “Israel has the right and duty to defend its citizens from Hezbollah’s unprovoked attacks…”? What is not said when he states poetically “There is nothing more beautiful, holier or more eternal than a child able to grow up in region (sic) living in security and at peace.”?  Gillerman’s focus on UN Resolution 1559 places full responsibility for Israel’s need to invade Lebanon on the government of Lebanon because it did not disarm Hezbollah. What Gillerman does not mention is Israel’s defiance of more than 60 UNSC resolutions, especially Resolution 242 demanding that Israel withdraw to the 1967 borders returning occupied land to Palestine, and including Resolution 520 that calls for Israel to withdraw from occupied lands belonging to Syria, the Golan Heights, and Lebanon, the Shaba Farms. Should the UNSC have acted to force Israel to comply with these resolutions, the very need for Hezbollah and Hamas to exist would have been removed. It is Israel’s illegal occupation of the lands of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria that has caused the growth of organizations that fight against Israel and its supplier of weapons, the United States. Indeed, Iraq’s failure to comply with Resolution 687 in 1982 was one of the reasons UNSC Res. 1441 passed giving the US its rationale for attacking Iraq since it continued to violate that Resolution. However, that same resolution stipulated that there must be a nuclear weapons free Middle East, a provision that Israel continues to defy. Consider now Gillerman’s use of the Israeli and United States mantra that “Israel has a right to defend itself” or, as Gillerman notes, “Israel, like any other state, has the right to defend itself.” Does it? The fighting this month has taken place in southern Lebanon and in northern Israel, we are told. But the reality behind that statement does not hold. What we call northern Israel is stolen land, the land of Galilee. In 1948, “According to the New York Times, the sixty hour campaign was designed to ‘eliminate the Arab-held bulge descending into Galilee from Lebanon …’ This was the last pocket of Arab resistance in Galilee. Within three days the whole of Upper Galilee was occupied; the population was either expelled or fled out of fear. Some villages captured during the operation were emptied of their inhabitants immediately, but other villagers were expelled in the following weeks, on the pretext of ‘clearing’ the border.” This ethnic cleansing came as a direct result of Israeli intention as expressed by David Ben-Gurion that the Galilee would become “clean” and “empty” of Arabs. (All That Remains, p.5). The 1947 map that divided the Palestinian lands into Jewish and Palestinian gave northern Palestine from Acre (Akka) north of Haifa to the Lebanon border to Palestine going east to Dayshun. That section of northern Palestine made possible a connected Palestinian state since it reached south to the West Bank. Israel took the land by force and it has defied UN resolutions that demand its return. Therefore, the Israeli claim that it has a right to defend itself is disingenuous on the surface and outright deceit proclaimed before the United Nations. The very reason that Hamas exists is to regain land stolen by Israel and, since Hezbollah exists in full sympathy with its cause, the insurgents attack against the occupiers’ forces is a legitimate act of war. What, finally, is not said when Gillerman waxes poetic about that lovely child who simply wants to grow up in peace? Let me offer two polarized perspectives, the first eloquently, yea indelibly marked by Chris Hedges: “Israel’s security wall has ripped a mortal gash in the lives of Palestinians living in its shadow. The rage and extremism of the Islamic militants in Lebanon and the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza appear incomprehensible to the outside world. … But this branding of these militants as something less than human, as something that reasonable people cannot hope to understand, is possible only because we have ignored and disregarded the decades of repression, the crushing weight of occupation, the abject humiliation and violence, unleashed on Lebanese and Palestinians by Israel because of our silence and indifference. It is Israel’s penchant for violence and occupation that slowly created and formed these frightening groups.” This reality brands not only Israel but the United States. It is perhaps the most single telling cause of terrorism against America, one that Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton have just acknowledged in their book, Without Precedent: the Truth Behind the 9/11 Commission Report. Israel is the principle cause of terror against America. Let me return to Conrad to understand how the same deviance, the inability for people to control their actions, to restrain behavior corrodes both the oppressed and the oppressor. Our civilized culture assumes that those who act without restraint are savages, but, as Conrad notes, “No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don’t you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its somber and brooding ferocity?” Not understanding such internal and, to our ignorant citizens, ignorant because they have been denied the truth of such oppression, inscrutable anguish, we instinctively condemn those who strike back with force. But the truth is more terrible. When the civilized state falls into a state of emotional and psychological oblivion, when it fosters in its people a cold withdrawal from its violence against others, when it divorces its citizens from the pain and suffering inflicted on the weak and helpless, when it negates the humiliation it imposes on others and finds itself not just accepting such behavior but enjoying it, and when it fosters silence and indifference about its inhumane acts, it has reached a nadir of human behavior that permeates each soul so that it knows no faith, no fear, and, thereby, knows no restraint freeing itself to commit barbaric acts in the name of progress and the advancement of civilization. For Gillerman to sit impassively before the eyes of the world, for him to assume that no one watching his performance would recognize his deceit, for this frozen specter of the nation of Israel to raise the picture of a lovely girl desiring peace as his closing remarks, pointedly made to the Lebanese ambassador, is a stark illustration of how far Israel has fallen from its inherent roots that found sustenance in the soil of morality. Certainly, as he sat there he knew of the pictures that could be placed before the whole world of the atrocities that Israel has perpetrated on the Palestinians in the dead silence behind its detestable Wall of Fear, that monument to the inhumanity of Ariel Sharon. What he did know is that Israel had killed 176 residents of Gaza since June 27th, 40 of them children like the young girl he uses as a poster girl of Israel’s love for humanity. What he did know is that Israel had wounded 872 in Gaza including 272 children during that same period and shot and injured another 172 in the West Bank. (Eliza Ernshire, “No Lights in Gaza”).What he did know is that the world would not see these dead because Israel controls what goes in and what comes out of Gaza and the West Bank and it determines what the world will know and what it will not. What hubris. What hypocrisy. What he did know for certain is that the world watched the slaughter played out before the TV cameras in Lebanon and was repelled by it. What he knew was that the mangled body of a child, unrecognizable as boy or girl, held up before the camera by a United Nations medic, a body charred after an Israeli missile hit a van carrying passengers in southern Lebanon on July 15, a body lacking a portion of the head, the left arm a stub, the stomach ripped from its socket and left hanging, a body caked in blood and dirt, a body seen by hundreds of thousands around the world, would never grow up to go to school and enjoy the morning sun as it beckoned her to a new day. What he knew and hid from the Security Council members and the people of the world is that Israel has hurled new and barbarous weapons at the civilians of Lebanon, weapons that leave “the bodies with dead tissues and no apparent wounds; shrunken corpses; civilians with heavy damage to lower limbs that require amputation, which is nevertheless followed by unstoppable necrosis and death … corpses blackened but not burnt.” (Prof. Paola Manduca, Global Research, 7/8/06). What he knew is that he sat there in full civilian dress, pin striped suit and lapel pin shining beneath the TV lights,, and he condemned the “diabolical inventions” of the “genocidal ideology” that used these “heinous innovations” against the innocent Israelis when in fact it is the Israelis that unleash with full malevolence violence of a kind never seen before in the world. That he knew, yet he played out his role as spokesperson for all Israelis, speaking in their name whether or not they could find it in their hearts to support this state that has arrived at a point where its government knows no faith, knows no fear, and drives forward knowing no restraint, the indelible mark of a nature that has returned to its savage base. =================
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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