How Long Are We Going to Pretend Palestinians Aren't People?

By Robert Fisk, The Independent

26 May 18

Remember how they were to blame for their own exodus seven decades ago, because they followed the instructions of radio stations to leave their homes until the Jews of Israel were ‘driven into the sea’. Only, of course, the radio broadcasts never existed

onstrous. Frightful. Wicked. It’s strange how the words just run out in the Middle East today. Sixty Palestinians dead. In one day. Two-thousand-four-hundred wounded, more than half by live fire. In one day. The figures are an outrage, a turning away from morality, a disgrace for any army to create.

And we are supposed to believe that the Israeli army is one of “purity of arms”? And we have to ask another question. If it’s 60 Palestinians dead in a day this week, what if it’s 600 next week? Or 6,000 next month? Israel’s bleak excuses – and America’s crude response – raise this very question. If we can now accept a massacre on this scale, how far can our immune system go in the days and weeks and months to come?

Yes, we know all the excuses. Hamas – corrupt, cynical, no “purity” there – was behind the Gaza demonstrations. Some of the protesters were violent, sent burning kites – kites, for heaven’s sake – across the border, others threw stones; though since when has stone-throwing been a capital offence in any civilised country? If an eight-month-old baby dies after tear gas inhalation, what were her parents doing bringing their infant child to the Gaza border? And so it goes on. Why complain about dead Palestinians when we have the Sisis in Egypt and the Assads in Syria and the Saudis in Yemen to contend with? But no, the Palestinians must always be guilty.

The victims are themselves the culprits. This is exactly what the Palestinians have had to endure for 70 years. Remember how they were to blame for their own exodus seven decades ago, because they followed the instructions of radio stations to leave their homes until the Jews of Israel were “driven into the sea”. Only, of course, the radio broadcasts never existed. We still must thank Israel’s “new historians” for proving this. The broadcasts were a myth, part of Israel’s foundational national history invented to ensure that the new state – far from being founded on the ruins of other’s homes – was a land without people.

And it was a marvel to behold the way in which the same old reporting cowardice began to infect the media’s account of what happened in Gaza. CNN called the Israeli killings a “crackdown”. 

References to the tragedy of the Palestinians in many news media referred to their “displacement” 70 years ago, as if they happened to be on holiday at the time of the “Nakba”, the catastrophe, as it’s known, and just couldn’t make it home again. The word to use should have been perfectly clear: dispossession. Because that is what happened to the Palestinians all those years ago and what is still happening in the West Bank – today, as you read this – courtesy of men like Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, a supporter of these wretched and illegal colonies built on Arab lands and appropriated from Arabs who have owned and lived on the land for generations.

And so we come to the most ghastly of all fateful events last week: the simultaneous bloodbath in Gaza and the glorious opening of the new US embassy in Jerusalem.

“It’s a great day for peace,” Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced. When I heard that, I wondered if my hearing was defective. Did he actually say those words? Alas, he did. At times like this, it is an immense relief to find that journals like the Israeli daily Haaretz maintain their sense of honour. And the most remarkable piece of reportage came in The New York Times where Michelle Goldberg caught perfectly the horror of both Gaza and the embassy opening in Jerusalem.

The latter, she wrote, was “grotesque… a consummation of the cynical alliance between hawkish Jews and Zionist evangelicals who believe that the return of Jews to Israel will usher in the apocalypse and the return of Christ, after which Jews who don’t convert will burn forever.” Goldberg pointed out that Robert Jeffress, a Dallas pastor, gave the opening prayer at the embassy ceremony. 

Jeffress, who once claimed that religions like “Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism” lead people “to an eternity of separation from God in hell”. The closing benediction came from John Hagee, an end-times preacher who, Goldberg recalled, once said that Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jews to their ancestral homeland. 

Of Gaza, she added: “Even if you completely dismiss the Palestinian right of return – which I find harder to do now that Israel has all but abandoned the possibility of a Palestinian state – it hardly excuses the Israeli military’s disproportionate violence.” I’m not so sure, though, that Democrats have become more emboldened to discuss Israeli occupation as she thinks. But I think she’s right when she says that as long as Trump is president “it may be that Israel can kill Palestinians, demolish their homes and appropriate their land with impunity”.

Rarely in modern times have we come across an entire people – the Palestinians – treated as a non-people. Amid the trash and rats of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon – oh fateful names they remain – there is a hut museum of items brought into Lebanon from Galilee by those first refugees of the late 1940s: coffee pots and front door keys to houses long destroyed. They locked up their houses, many of them, planning to return in a few days. 

But they are dying fast, that generation, like the dead of the Second World War. Even in the oral archives of the Palestinian expulsion (at least 800 survivors are recorded), organised in the American University of Beirut, they are finding that many whose voices were recorded in the late 1990s have since died.

So will they go home? Will they “return”? That, I suspect, is Israel’s greatest fear, not because there are homes to “return” to but because there are millions of Palestinians who claim their right – under UN resolutions – and who might turn up in their tens of thousands at the border fence in Gaza next time. 

How many snipers will Israel need then? And, of course, there are the pitiful ironies. For there are families in Gaza whose grandfathers and grandmothers were driven from their homes less than a mile from Gaza itself, from two villages which existed precisely where today stands the Israeli town of Sderot, so often rocketed by Hamas. They can still see their lands. And when you can see your land, you want to go home.

In Support of the First Step Act

By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News

26 May 18

he House of Representatives this week passed a bipartisan criminal justice reform measure called the First Step Act by an overwhelming majority of 360-59. The bill was sponsored by Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Doug Collins (R-Ga.) It has the support of the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice, the activist group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, and even presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), however, has already said that the bill is “dead on arrival” in the Senate.

What we need right now is real sentencing reform. We don’t need half measures. We need reforms that will bring us in line with other “progressive” democracies. I’m a realist. I know that’s not going to happen. There will never be a consensus in Congress over true reform. Maybe if we’re really lucky — someday — we’ll be able to do away with the draconian sentences that we have for nonviolent drug crimes. That’ll be a start. But we’re not there yet.

The First Step Act is not sentencing reform. It is, however, a giant leap in the right direction. It earmarks $250 million to be spent over five years on education and vocational training and on mental health care in federal prisons, in an effort to reduce recidivism. It expands the number of days that a prisoner would be eligible to spend in a halfway house or home confinement near the end of his prison sentence. It would ban the shackling of female prisoners during childbirth. And it would require that the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) place prisoners in facilities within 500 miles of their families. These aren’t radical perks. These at least ought to be basic human rights. But they’re not. And the bill would be in stark contrast to the realities of federal prison today.

First, there is simply no educational or vocational training in federal prisons. Once upon a time, a prisoner might be trained to do electrical work, plumbing, small engine repair, or even factory work, but today there is literally no money in the federal budget for such a program, despite the fact that the BOP accounts for fully one-quarter of the Justice Department’s budget.

Second, although federal law calls for prisoners to earn 15 percent of the length of their sentence off for good behavior, the BOP has always calculated “good behavior time” differently. In the end, prisoners actually get 13.5 percent good behavior time. Furthermore, prisoners are technically eligible for up to 12 months of halfway house time and either 10 percent of the length of their sentence or 90 days, whichever is shorter, for home confinement or house arrest. In reality, though, you could count on one hand the number of federal prisoners who are given more than six months of halfway house time.

That’s a shame. There’s an institutional desire for punishment at the Justice Department and in Congress. There is little stomach or tolerance for “rehabilitation” or anything else that meets the Republican definition of being “soft on crime.” What halfway house time is supposed to do is to give a prisoner nearing the end of his sentence the opportunity to find a job, transition back into society, and become a contributing member of that society. The prisoner pays 25 percent of his gross pay as “rent” for his halfway house bed, and he is then (theoretically) able to put food on the table and care financially for his family.

But it doesn’t work that way. Halfway house time is somehow seen in Washington as a “reward.” And why should criminals get a reward? It’s not a reward, though. It is what an enlightened government ought to do to help put a citizen on his feet and to help ensure that he doesn’t return to a life of crime. There’s no downside.

The House’s work on the First Step Act is done. President Trump has said that he would sign the bill into law. Mitch McConnell, though, doesn’t have control of his own caucus. Senate Democrats are united in their support for the bill. The Republican caucus is split. In raw numbers, there are more than enough votes to pass the bill into law. But Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), one of the most extreme right-wing members of that body, is having none of it. Because of Cotton’s opposition, and the opposition of several other southern conservatives, McConnell can’t call the bill to a vote. Cotton won’t even allow a vote in the Judiciary Committee. And because of that, the bill is dead. It’s the third time in the past six years that a popular bipartisan prison reform bill will die in the Senate.

There’s no good news here. Because our elected officials can’t get their collective act together, no incarcerated Americans will catch a break. More importantly, recidivism will remain at one of the highest rates in the industrialized world. If a person goes to prison, does his entire stretch with little chance of meaningful time off for good behavior, has no education or job skills, and no hope for a job when he’s released, what does he do? He goes right back into a life of crime.

Congressional inaction makes the country less safe. And that’s on Tom Cotton.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.