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Confirmed User
Join Date: Nov 2001
Posts: 711
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An Open Letter To The People Commonly Called "Palestinians"
Here is someting that i read on the net, 100% TRUE ! :
Speaking Truth to the Powerless:
An Open Letter To The People Commonly Called "Palestinians"
by David White - May 26, 2002
Greetings to any Palestinian who may be reading this. My name is David White. I am a citizen of New Zealand, a small, Western, nominally Christian country in the South Pacific Ocean. I am not Jewish, or Christian, I guess I'm vaguely agnostic.
Writing this letter is a good way for me to discuss the horrible mess in the Middle East, spell out as many relevant points as possible concerning the state of the Palestinian people, and to see what can be made of them. I don't speak Arabic, so I can only communicate with English-speaking Palestinians. There aren't many here in NZ, though, and I haven't yet met any. I don't know how many will ever see these words, but, here's hoping someone does.
I have a post-graduate university education, and I suppose I could be called an intellectual. Unfortunately, many such people have supported abhorrent ideologies such as Nazism, and continue to support Communism, so I refuse to describe myself in this way. I don't want to considered as just another "trendy leftie" academic, as we would say in NZ. So, unlike many university-educated types, I am anti-totalitarian, pro-peace up to a point,pro-democracy, pro-capitalism (except the capitalists running Enron), and skeptical about the "cult of victimhood." I'm quite safe here in New Zealand, and no-one I know has been killed by a Palestinian.
My perspective of Palestinians is something like this - you're Arabs (of course), mostly Muslim, but with a Christian minority. Many of you live outside Gaza/West Bank, mostly in Jordan and other Muslim countries, with some groups living in Western countries as well. You feel that you have been wronged by Israel and are fighting to destroy them.
As for my perspective on Israel, I see them like this. They are a mainly Jewish, small, free-market democracy with a large Arab minority surrounded by hostile Arab dictatorships. They have an ancestral claim to Israel, their state was created as a refuge from persecution, they have a right to exist, and, having survived a holocaust in Europe, they should not have to sit still and wait for another one in the Middle East.
A Down Under Overview.
Over the last few months, the conflict in the disputed territories of Gaza and the West Bank has turned into a war between the Palestinian people and Israel. (I will not apologise for using the term "disputed", as I believe it reflects a rather complicated situation more accurately than "occupied").
Your interpretation, as far as I can tell, seems to be something like this: You have no state of your own, and you are fighting a war against those you call "Zionist oppressors" and "colonial imperialists", in order to create a Palestinian state. Accusations of massacre and human rights violations by the Israeli Army are being tossed around like confetti. Your leader, Yasser Arafat, vows to "martyr" himself rather than "surrender", and that bungling and incompetent organization, the United Nations (again, no apologies for venting personal opinions), is trying to do what it is constitutionally incapable of doing, i.e. "saving future generations from the scourge of war".
The Israelis see things differently, of course. For them, it's a simple battle for survival. They offered you a state, and you attacked them instead. They have occupied Palestinian towns, have fought it out with various armed groups, and desperate attempts are being made by the US, other Arab countries and the UN to break the so-called "cycle of violence". As a result, the Palestinian situation at the moment generally, can be explained by putting it into New Zealand idiom.
Put bluntly, the Palestinian people are buggered. Munted. Stuffed. Rooted. (American equivalent=screwed. British equivalent: done over). It's like this: Yasser Arafat turned down the Israeli offer of a Palestinian homeland in Gaza and the West Bank. You want, or Arafat claims that you want, a Palestine "from the river to the sea;" in other words, "all or nothing".
There is one insuperable obstacle to this- Israel. No matter how eloquent your arguments or numerous your martyrs, no matter how many European diplomats are angered by, or UN resolutions are passed against, Israel, the Israelis are not going to pack up and leave. The only way you will get the Palestinian state you want is to destroy Israel.
This is what you have been trying to do since 1948, and the current "intifada" launched in 2000 is your latest effort. However, the Israelis are not standing there and letting you kill them. They are fighting back, and if they have to choose between their own survival and yours, guess which choice they'll make.
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