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Article 49, paragraph 6,
Fourth Geneva Convention, 1949

Palestine on my mind
Jeff Marck
20 November 2007 - plus addenda

 
A little boy picks up a piece of wood and smashes his younger sister on the head just as their mother walks into the room. The boy sees he is in trouble and cries out, “But I cleaned my room this morning.”

I won’t tell you what happened to the little boy but we can observe that America is like the little boy. The good things it does do not rescue it from the bad things that it does.

Ninety-three percent of Egyptians are glad the Yanks are having so much trouble in Iraq.

I’m happy when I’m in Egypt.

I’m happy to be surrounded by people who understand where Middle Eastern problems lie.

Various people deal with their personal journeys to the pro-Palestinian camp from American and Australian backgrounds in various ways. They may join pro-Palestinian organisations. They may speak publically about recognising Palestinian rights. They may write about it. This should not be surprising in Australia where numbers of people who are pro-Palestinian are equal to numbers of people who are pro-Israeli. Most famously, one book is by a Jewish man from Melbourne, Antony Loewenstein’s My Israel Question.

Here I relate my experiences as an American-Australia.

mail.bigpond.net.au

At about the time Dvorak wrote his New World Symphony in 1893 and then took respite in a Czech village in Iowa, Muslims began arriving to Iowa. They eventually established the Mother Mosque of North America in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. North America’s first mosque. I grew up around a very few Jewish people about 100 miles away in the state’s capital, Bill Bryson’s Des Moines of the 1950s and 1960s.

I was born in 1949 to Danish American parents. With all my uncles who were old enough, my parents had served in World War II. My relatives took pride in the successful evacuation of Danish Jews upon the Nazi occupation.

Peace came and they went to university and started their families. My father was a social worker who closed the orphanages in our little state, finding homes for all those younger and older children.

I grew up hearing the occasional news of Israel. At the time, I accepted their 1967 war as necessarily pre-emptive in the face of an impending attack by Egypt and perhaps others.

But in 1968 I visited Western Europe and North Africa. The backpacker hotels were abuzz with word of Israel’s initial settlements on the West Bank and we swore oaths not to go to Israel or buy anything from Israel until the settlements were withdrawn, an oath from which I have never strayed.

I was in Tunis in 1968, years before Arafat. I was in Eritrea, Yemen and Egypt in 1971. My girlfriend and I stopped at the PLO office in Cairo and got a Yassar Arafat poster. We were then in Turkey and Greece where we left the Arafat poster in the back of some Jewish boys’ jeep. They were in the process of returning to New York from an Israeli kibbutz.

I wasn’t without Israeli sympathies. Gideon’s Sword and Rescue at Entebbe remain two of my favourite movies. But I was becoming occasionally aware of the conduct of the occupation and the growth of the settlements.

News came rarely to us in the United States. Even by September 11^th 2001 the New York Times was the only American news entity capable of reporting on the Middle East with any breadth or depth.

Most of the news was bad for a very long time. It seemed to me through the 1970s that Israeli and American policies required the Palestinians and other Arabs to roll over and play dead even as the theft of Palestinian land and other depravities of the occupation continued.

There were the Camp David Accords of Jimmy Carter, Anwar El Sadat and Menachem Begin in 1978.

But any hope soon faded that the wmail.bigpond.net.auithdrawal of Israel’s Sinai settlements would be followed by withdrawals of the West Bank and Gaza settlements. Reagan’s America was doing nothing to prevent Israel from making new settlements. This became the pattern through the George Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

I wondered, in 1982, what the United States thought it could be doing to clarify issues in Lebanon when it sent troops to Beirut. We were, after all, the Great Satan. Those kinds of words were not used at the time but the United States was solidifying its reputation as the great facilitator of the West Bank and Gaza occupation, the bank that paid for the settlements and the arms salesman that defended them. I was not surprised by the suicide bombing of the United States Marine barracks in 1983. What did they expect?

I was relieved when Syria took charge of the Lebanon situation in 1985 and forced the various Lebanese groups to the peace table. I remember the television footage of the various Lebanese leaders arriving to the peace table and the stories recounting the assassinations of the leading members of the various leading families by the various other leading families. I remember clearly that it all stopped when Syria took charge. I prayed that the Syrian peace would hold and it did – for twenty years.

I was back in the United States in the late 1980s and read the New York Times regularly. Nearly everything reported was distressing. I remember Israel “creating reality” and America “agreeing to disagree”.

I was in Australia during the 1990s, a polite guest who stayed out of politics until becoming a citizen in 1999. Upon doing so I returned to the United States for what would be another five years.

I had not wanted to return to the United States without Australian citizenship. It didn’t seem to me that America was a country that was solving its most pressing problems – either foreign or domesmail.bigpond.net.autic. Everybody loves America Inc. and wants to do business with it. Egyptians have an entirely higher opinion, for instance, of the American University in Cairo than their low opinion of the American government. But America was doing nothing to develop a brighter day for the Palestinians, and was profoundly culpable in its unconditional support of Israel's theft of Palestinian land, life and liberty. I remember the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassy bombings. I remember being happy I would be doing my traveling on an Australian passport  in the future.

I wasn’t happy, in 1999, to be going back to America in the sense that I would again be paying taxes that would help fund Israel’s theft of Palestinian land, life and liberty. I wasn’t happy to be going back to a country which was so unselfconsciously pro-Israeli.

I wasn’t surprised to hear in the early years of the present decade that most Europeans surveyed considered Israel the biggest threat to world peace, due, presumably, to its theft of Palestinian land, life and liberty. I wasn’t surprised to hear that the people of the United Kingdom returned a slightly different verdict – naming the United States as the biggest threat to world peace, presumably due to its unconditional support for Israel’s theft of Palestinian land, life and liberty.

I rather more agreed with the UK people than the continental Europeans. Israel was drunk with power and America kept Israel constantly intoxicated. Whatever Israel wanted, Israel got.

America was serving the Palestinians and the Muslim world a “dog’s breakfast”, to use an Australian expression. The only UN vote that counted was America’s. Never was there any government introspection in America on the wisdom of its Middle Eastern policies. The Middle East was divided into “pro-Western” and “fanatic” countries and populations. The definition of “pro-Western” was to be defined by America alone. To the Yanks, "pro-Western" meant being pro-Israel in their ownmail.bigpond.net.au narrow, destructive sense of what that should mean. It certainly didn't mean doing anything for the Palestinians. The world stood by and waited until 2007 before America finally called the Annapolis meetings.

It was in this context of a complete lack of American momentum on Palestinian rights issues that Bush invaded Iraq. I began to plot my escape to Australia.

From the 1970s to the present decade I had seen the growth of hatred towards Muslims on the American street and in the national consciousness.

Any blockbuster movie that wanted could gleefully kill off as many Muslims as it wanted. I remember the 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, True Lies. Living in Australia at the time, I remember thinking what a useless, insular world so many Yanks lived in.

Schwarzenegger killed off dozens of Muslims who had guns but apparently didn’t know how to aim them, swelling the breasts of America’s youth with the notion that military options are without consequences to them. Such cultural imagery would later pave the way for beliefs that the 2003 invasion of Iraq would go well and quickly solve regional problems. It would bring a “blossoming of democracy to the Middle East.” I bought web space and began to complain.

I remember watching True Lies and wondering what kind of Muslims they thought they needed to be killing  – the eight year old who helped me find a nice hotel in Tangiers in 1968 – the Algerian concierge who was massively dismayed when he saw my American passport but let me stay anyway – the Cairo hotel owner who brought in his own doctor to take care of my sick girlfriend?

I remember watching a movie on Tmail.bigpond.net.auV at the home of a friend in the United States in about 1999 or 2000. Like True Lies, dozens of Muslims were being killed by a bullet proof American. There was an eleven or twelve year old child in the room and I really didn’t want the moment to pass without saying something. “Kill the Muslims!” I called out. “Kill the Muslims. It’s the American way.” The child’s paternal grandparents are Muslim and her father, I think, was glad to hear me complain in front of the child.

The United States was spending a lot of time trying to decide which Muslims to control while doing nothing to force the withdrawal of the Israeli settlements on the West Bank or Gaza. It was doing nothing to limit the depravities of Israel’s occupation of Palestine at all.

So the main experience many Muslim peoples are having with democracy is that it is unscrupulous. Might makes right. The United States can use Israel to steal land for Jesus if it wants to.

Americans commonly see it as a religious problem where “They’ve been fighting about it over there for a thousands years.” They aren’t aware of the centuries of peace for Muslim, Jew and Christian under the Ottomans or of the Christian crusader depravities before. They don’t understand that it’s most basically a civil, peacetime legal problem: a people’s lands are being stolen and they have nowhere else to go - nor should they.

Charles de Gaulle said in 1967:

[ Israel ] ... is organising, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsions - and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called “terrorism".

If I went back to the United States I wouldn’t resist an opportunity to have a wee on the grave of the right reverend Jerry Falwell. Jerry Falwell, High Priest of the Republican National Convention during the Reagan years who raised money for the expansion of the West Bank settlements until his death in the last year or so. Jesus will come back if we help Israel steal more land and chase out the Palestinians.

In September of 2000, Ariel Sharon visited Temple Mount under armed guard, symbolically proclaiming that there would never be an end to the settlements, that there would never be an end to the occupation, that there would never be a Palestinian state and that its capital would never be East Jerusalem.

The moment’s significance escaped the average Yank. Even their president and his inner circle. Immediately the al-Aqsa Intifada had begun. Immediately the average Yank forgot why.

I then watched as Sharon, who promail.bigpond.net.auvoked the Intifada, was then elected on a platform of being the best person to suppress it.

The American security agencies expressed surprise at the youth and promise of some of the eventual suicide bombers. I was saddened but not surprised. After all, the occupation was in its 34^th and 35^th year and achieving its objectives of strangling Palestinian civil and economic life. If one could get an education, there weren’t any jobs anyway. And Palestinians were once the most highly educated Arab population.

It was no use talking to the Yanks about the demolition of Palestinian homes. They thought it was all about the suicide attacks when of course most demolitions were of homes built after waiting 10 and 20 years for a building permit that Israeli’s occupation apparatus declined to issue.

Nothing Israel or the United States have done since September 2000 suggests that Mr Sharon is not having his way. Israel goes on stealing Palestinian land, life and liberty. America goes on paying for it.

The roadmap through Annapolis will require magicians to make water flow upstream if it does not see America force withdrawal of the West Bank settlements. And Bush has promised that America will force Israel to do precisely nothing that it does not want to do.

It was specifically Carter’s persuasion of Begin to withdraw Israel’s Sinai settlements that allowed peace with Egypt most of 30 years ago and the continuation of that peace up to the present time. Annapolis is doomed if America goes on, de-facto, to recognize the settlements' right to exist. The Arab League renounces any notion that the settlements are acceptable. This is the virtually unanimous opinion of the United Nations as well. And on go the Yanks. Wanting the world to listen to them.

In late 2000 I noticed a wonderful pro-Palestinian newspaper advertisement concerning the Intifada by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and immediately joined that organisation.

After 32 years as an incredulous spectator, I had finally joined something.

In August of 2001 I finally decided to say something. After 33 years of watching America get up every morning and shoot itself in the foot on the Palestine issue, I finally decided to say something. I did so with the expectation that saying anything would be useless but I could no longer go on without trying and try I did.

That took the form of letters to Iowmail.bigpond.net.aua’s United States Senators Tom Harkin and Charles Grassley. I pointed out the significance of Sharon’s assault on Temple Mount and complained about the utter inadequacy of America’s response.

Grassley sent back a useless six or eight page form letter which I marked with red ink and returned to him.

Then, a week later, came September 11.

I was one of the 14% of Americans at the time who believed we had brought it on ourselves. Maybe the others of that 14% are like me. Maybe they also believe the biggest threat to American security is its own racism. The Yanks hear of these 200-2 votes in the United Nations and immediately forget about them.

Very few Americans have any knowledge of the misery of the Palestinian people under the Israeli occupation. They are unaware that the settlement process goes on and on… yesterday, today and tomorrow as it has for four decades… creating misery for millions of Palestinians, trying to make them go away, regardless of changes in the Israeli government. They don't understand that the settlements have their own well funded expansion bureaucracies and timetables and theft of yet more land and that the occupation of West Bank Palestinian territories includes what are presently 650 roadblocks where Palestinian commerce is nitpicked to death along circuitous crumbling detours that link their remaining lands.

The Muslim nations and Europe patiently await a new American vision of Palestinian humanity but the only news the Americans hear is the complaints of Israel. This has, for the most part, sustained  the convenient fiction that a Palestinian government should be more successful at suppressing all terror attacks against Israel than what Israel has achieved with its own occupation. What was Oslo’s bottom line? Arafat was supposed to go back to Palestine and have a civil war with Hamas and the others before the West Bank and Gaza squatter settlements came onto the negotiating table. Bill Clinton was surprised when Arafat did nothing. I was not.

I was to stay in the United States 1999-2004, travelling in my work. I began mocking Bush on the CB radio about a year after the Iraq invasion:

“I remember it well.
It was the spring of ’03 and our Mediterranean fleet was on its way to the Persian Gulf because it had been denied access to the NATO ports in Turkey.
Talk about dumb project!
El Presidente was on his way to the Azores to meet the last two people in the outside world still talking to him.
And then…
… he did it.
He invaded Iraq.

“Boy George!
The Great Connector of Dots!
The Wacko from Waco!
Conqueror of Baghdad and Fallujah!
Instrument of the Messiah!”

I would then laugh hysterically and call out again:

“Muslims!!!
Bleed when they’re cut!
Cry when their babies die!
And fight back when someone steals their land!
A strange and mysterious people!!!” 

No one ever interrupted. No one ever complained. No one ever said I was wrong. And most of the listeners were, over time, thousands of American truck drivers.

On September 11^th the vile Zionist land thief, Jerry Falwell came flying out of his door and blamed the attacks on ­­­America’s homosexuals, pagans and others. God would not abandon us and allow the attack to happen if we had all been living like him. Which is a refrain heard from the occasional Muslim fundamentalist - and jihadist terror group. A fundamentalist state is required to achieve God's blessings.

Europeans take a more secular view: there is terror simply because Israel is stealing land and engaged in other abominations in the course of its occupation of Palestine. But on went the Yanks, invading Iraq before getting a settlements freeze out of Israel and slugging away at insurrection in Iraq for four and a half years before calling Israel to the bargaining table at Annapolis.

I grew sick of it. I grew sick of paying taxes for it. I left. Not as soon as I would have liked, but I left. In 2004.

What I saw in America was ignorance, racism and power. Its very own formula for disaster. And such was especially true of its leadership, whether Bush or Clinton.

I joined Australians for Justice and Peace in Palestine, a small group in Canberra Australia, in 2006. I had been back in Australia briefly in 2004-2005 and was gone, mainly to Egypt, 2005-2006.

As I talk to some of the Middle Eastern guests of Australians for Justice and Peace in Palestine, I first explain that there is no momentum on the Palestinian rights issue either in Australia or the United States. Those guests might deal with the issue as authors, academics, diplomats or politicians and are often surprised. They are accustomed to European populations more familiar with the depravities of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the need to restrain Israel.

While the Australian governments have been lopsidedly pro-Israel the Australian population is not. 25% are pro-Israel, 25% are pro-Palestine, 30% are equally sympathetic to both and 20% have no opinion. While the pro-Palestine segment of the population has little voice on the issue, the Australian pro-Israel lobby is organised in some ways similar to that in America and feeds Israeli government positions directly to Parliament and Congress where they are eaten up and acted favourably upon. Australia’s Antonmail.bigpond.net.auy Loewenstein has summed it up clearly in his book My Israel Question.

There has been a change in government in Australia in recent weeks. The former government was led by John Howard, who has a forest named after him in the Negev on land stolen from Palestinian Bedouins. And now we have a prime minister who flatly told the Palestinian ambassador well before the election that he was a strong supporter of Israel. But he is withdrawing from Iraq, staying the course in Afghanistan and contributed to the $7.4 billion for Palestine immediately post-Annapolis so we shall see.

The Muslim population in Australia is mainly new and fragmented, just as it is in the United States. The 55% of the Australian population that is pro-Palestinian - or equally sympathetic to both Palestine and Israel - is rudderless.

In Egypt I will be paying taxes to a pro-Palestinian government. I will be happier to pay them.

In the days leading up to the Annapolis meetings President Bush assured Israel it will not have to do anything it doesn't want to do. Another recipe for failure. I wonder if Bush is offering $25 billion to start moving West Bank settlers to the Negev. I wonder if he even thought of it.

Ultimately some force will get Israel and its settlements off the West Bank. It probably won't be the government of the United States. It lacks an interest in the law and it lacks sufficient imagination. It is lost in its own ignorance, racism and power. More probably it will be a twenty year multinational effort along the lines of the divestment, sanctions and embargoes that conquered Apartheid in South Africa. There is already some momentum along those lines in the United States in the form of church and university divestment of holdings in corporations with the wrong kinds of relationships with Israel. Similar preliminary initiatives are under way in Australia. University and church divestment in America were a significant source of momentum in the South Africa Apartheid fight. Hopefully, they will pick up speed as time goes on.

Otherwise, there is no light on this southern horizon but there is the happy story of our neighbour New Zealand's experience in 1981 when Apartheid South Africa's Springbok rugby team came to play. Anti-Apartheid activists thoroughly disrupted the South African tour and made flash headlines around the world. Possibly pro-Palestinian Australians or New Zealanders will someday find a similar way to withdraw Israel's welcome mat in this part of the world.

For myself, I am studying Arabic and learning to fly radio controlled airplanes. I dream of taking my planes to Palestine, flying them over the Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and parachuting onto them little rotting blobs of pork.

Jeff Marck
Australian Capital Territory – 20 November 2007 - plus addenda

Born in Nebraska 1949
North High School, Class of 1968, Des Moines

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