The HyperTexts

Israeli Racism and its Cost to the United States and American Taxpayers

by Michael R. Burch, an editor and publisher of Holocaust poetry

In this article I intend to demonstrate that:

(1) The root cause of 9-11 and the subsequent wars was Israeli racial injustices against Palestinians.

(2) Israel is stealing land it doesn’t even need, because it is driven by a fanatical racist ideology. Ironically, Israel has become the most anti-Semitic nation on the planet (the Palestinians are Semites, like the Jews).

(3) The situation for Palestinians today is like that of Native Americans who walked the Trail of Tears because white supremacists like Andrew Jackson held the reins of power and used that power to inflict massive suffering on innocent women and children. This drove men like Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Geronimo to defend them, leading to massacre after massacre on both sides of the conflict.

(4) The continuing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their native land has cost thousands of American lives, the health and mental well-being of tens of thousands of American soldiers, and trillions of wasted taxpayer dollars. In effect, the American taxpayer is funding and supporting a new Holocaust that threatens to leave the United States insolvent.

(5) All the death, mayhem and money could have been saved if only the U.S. had required Israel to treat the Palestinians as human beings with equal rights, and had simply paid the going price for oil, rather than trying to "secure" Middle Eastern oil fields (which only drove the price of oil sky-high).

I also believe that if the U.S. doesn’t act to end this madness, the result may well be World War III — a completely unnecessary war against more than a billion Muslims which the U.S. cannot hope to win without using nuclear weapons. Such a war would be sheer insanity, because the U.S. has everything to lose and nothing to gain by supporting the racial injustices of Israel. The war might be triggered by a large-scale plague or epidemic in Gaza. If large numbers of Palestinian women and children die in Gaza while they are wards of a Jewish state that cares nothing about them, and while Israel remains a client state funded and supported by the U.S. government, it seems obvious that the Muslim world will hold Israel and the U.S. responsible for those deaths (and with good cause). So the fates of Palestinian children and American children are closely linked. But the U.S. government, American politicians and the American public seem blind to the obvious. This should probably not surprise us, because the U.S. has already created two Holocausts — those of Native Americans and African Americans. This third American-produced Holocaust should come as no surprise, as it seems the American public has learned nothing from its past racial injustices.

First, let’s examine the cost to date. In a June 2003 special report by Thomas R. Stauffer, who has taught the economics of energy and the Middle East at Harvard University and Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, it was estimated that the U.S. had spent three trillion dollars in the Middle East. Obviously even that enormous sum has been wildly eclipsed after two decade-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The main beneficiary of U.S. largesse is Israel, which receives billions of American taxpayer dollars every year in advanced weapons, loan guarantees, various other "discounts" and "incentives," and cold hard cash. In an article published by the Christian Science Monitor in 2002, Stauffer figured that Israel had cost the U.S. approximately 1.6 trillion dollars, or $5,700 per American citizen.

But that money is only the tip of the iceberg and doesn’t take into account the many indirect costs of Israeli and U.S. government injustices in the Middle East. These indirect costs include the soaring price of oil and its negative impact on the U.S. and world economies. No one can accurately gauge such costs, but in all likelihood they would make 1.6 trillion dollars seem like a drop in the proverbial bucket.

Is all that money being used for "defense" or for a land grab, with people of one race (Jews) using American money to steal the land of other people (Palestinians)? If the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their native land led to 9-11 and the current wars, what might the real cost be? If we factored in the cost of the wars and homeland security, the soaring price of oil, and the loss of American jobs, freedoms and lives, it might be a number too high for the human brain to compute.

Why should American soldiers die and hardworking American taxpayers go bankrupt, so that Jewish robber barons can steal land they don’t even need (84% of Israeli Jews live on 17% of the land, while much of the rest of the land stolen from Palestinians lies fallow) from under the feet of completely innocent Palestinian women and children? To steal land from farmers is to steal the bread of life from the mouths of their loved ones. Ethnic cleansing is a terrible crime because it leaves people homeless and unable to provide for their children. This leads to massive suffering and premature deaths. To cause the premature death of an innocent person is, in a word, murder. To murder large numbers of people because they were "born wrong" is, in a word, genocide. Americans have opposed ethnic cleansing and genocide everywhere else in the world – for instance, when Nazi Germany ethnically cleansed its Jews to terrible walled ghettoes and concentration camps. But that is exactly what Israel is doing to its Palestinians today, at the expense of American lives, security and solvency.

How did this insane state of affairs come to pass? In a word, racism. Or to be more specific, anti-Semitism. Like the Jews, Palestinians are Semites. Ironically, Israel has become the most anti-Semitic nation since Nazi Germany.

How can we be sure that what I suggest is true? Well, Israel has clearly advertised its racism to the rest of the world, by publicly calling itself a "Jewish State." What does this mean, exactly?

What would happen if the United States became a "white Christian state" where only white Christians had full citizenship? Obviously, that would set the clock back to the Dark Ages when white supremacists caused so much suffering for Native Americans, African Americans and other minorities. The obvious result would be racial violence, and we would soon see the rebirth of militant groups like the Black Panthers.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that when Israel calls itself a "Jewish state" and grants Jews vastly superior rights to non-Jews, it ends up with militant groups like Hamas. It goes without saying that victims of racial oppression who are denied the protection of fair laws and courts will invariably resort to violence as a form of protest. As Nelson Mandela pointed out during his trial for sabotage, the African National Congress had tried nonviolent methods for decades without success, because the white supremacist government of South Africa had no intention of granting blacks equal rights. In the end, the ANC resorted to violence, not out of "hatred," but simply because it had no other choice. Nonviolent methods only worked for Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. because British and American societies, governments and courts ultimately chose to side with the victims of racism rather than their oppressors. Nonviolent methods did not work against South Africa or Nazi Germany because the racists in power had established courts which turned blind eyes to horrendous racial injustices. Thus the victims had no choice but to resist or perish.

If you want to understand the "reality on the ground" in Israel/Palestine today, please watch the movie Judgment at Nuremberg. It paints a vivid, startling picture of what happens when people of a "superior" race deprive the people of "inferior" races of the protections of fair laws and courts. Suddenly ruthless men are free to steal the land, homes, property and businesses of people they despise. The moral foundations of human civilization quickly vanish, and women and children who were "born wrong" are suddenly the helpless prey of men without consciences. While Americans do not want to believe such things are possible, they have only to consider the plights of Native American women and children, black women and children, and Jewish women and children during the Nazi Holocaust, to understand the terrible truth.

When racists area allowed to deny the protections of fair laws and courts to people they despise, all hell breaks loose here on earth. Unfortunately, this is the case in Israel today. We have this from the horse’s mouth, Haim Cohen, a former judge of the Supreme Court of Israel, who said: "The bitter irony of fate decreed that the same biological and racist argument extended by the Nazis, and which inspired the inflammatory laws of Nuremberg, serve as the basis for the official definition of Jewishness in the bosom of the state of Israel" (quoted in Joseph Badi, Fundamental Laws of the State of Israel NY, 1960, P.156)

Israel has created Jim Crow laws and kangaroo courts which are clearly designed to keep non-Jews under the thumb of Jews, just as Jim Crow laws and kangaroo courts were used to keep blacks under the thumb of whites in South Africa and the American Deep South.

Here are some examples of Israel’s "legal" racial injustices, which turn Jewish babies into princes and princesses and Palestinian babies into pariahs on their native soil:

Civil matters of marriage and family life are decided by religious courts which do not recognize marriage between Jews and Palestinians. Race and religion are used to keep non-Jews from marrying citizens of Israel; this means a woman cannot choose the man she wants to marry. If she marries someone the government disapproves of, she may be separated from her husband and even her own children. The Israeli government pays the salary of rabbis and the employee's of municipal rabbinates and religious councils.

The Israeli Ministry of the Interior ruled that new immigrants who have converted to Judaism will not be allowed to bring non-Jewish family members into the country. The decision is expected to cut the number of eligible immigrants to Israel in half.

In Israel Citizenship and nationality are two different things. Citizenship (I) may be held by Arabs or Jews. Nationality (le'um), which bestows much greater rights than citizenship, is for Jews alone. In 1972 the Supreme Court that non-Jews cannot qualify for nationality rights in the state of Israel because there is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people.

All articles in Israel dealing with security issues must be submitted to a military censor whose decision cannot be appealed. (Security issues in Israel cover vast areas of public policy.) Jews have recourse to civil laws and due process, while non-Jews in Occupied Palestine are denied due process and subjected to military jurisdiction.

To demonstrate the madness, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA) was allowed to set up illegal roadblocks in Arab areas (staffed by police), where only Arab drivers were stopped and required to pay fines for not having TV licenses. They are threatened with having their cars impounded and/or not having their identity papers returned.

Arab pupils make up a third of the total school population in Israel but Arab schools receive just seven per cent of the Israeli education ministry's budget. Arab municipalities which also contribute to school budgets receive a much lower allocation.

In 2001 the Human Rights Watch Report identified systematic discrimination in education resources that disadvantages Palestinian children. The discrimination includes much larger class sizes; fewer textbooks, and many of them inadequate; buildings in far worse condition; and a widespread lack of kindergartens, vocational programs and remedial classes. The standard of special education for disabled children is also harshly criticized in the report.

The Shin Bet (a quasi-military intelligence/security agency) determines who teaches Palestinian children. "Political" people, those who teach about factual Palestinian history, are not allowed in the schools. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted a Shin Bet official as saying, "The Shin Bet not only determined and intervened in the appointment of principals and teachers, but even decided who the custodians and janitors that clean the bathrooms in the Arab schools would be."

In May 2005, according to Haaretz, a former deputy director of the Shin Bet, Nachman Tal, said state discrimination was rife: "I recently checked and found that out of the 13,000 permanent employees in the Israel Electric Corporation, only six are Arabs."

Also in May 2005 the governor of the Bank of Israel, David Klein, admitted that there was not a single Arab among his staff of 800. In the bank's 50-year history they only employed two Arabs, both of whom oversaw the bank's operation in the occupied Palestinian territories. When the territories were handed over to the Palestinian Authority the Arab employees were let go.

The "national priority areas", which give extra benefits to residents and businesses, are almost completely for the Jews, even though the Central Bureau of Statistics showed 70 per cent of the poorest areas in Israel are Arab. Currently 492 Jewish communities have priority. There are four small Arab villages on the list.

The Nazareth Human Rights Association said in 2002 in its report "Silencing Dissent" that the security services assaulted all the Arab Knesset members in that parliament, a few of them several times, at peaceful demonstrations. All but one of the Arab legislators had to be hospitalized.

The Israeli parliament rejected a proposed bill that would ban any party trying to incite the expulsion of Palestinians or Arab Israelis from the assembly.

Recent polls have shown that 20 to 30% of the Israelis favor some sort of transfer of the original inhabitants of the land.

Chris Hedges, a member of the New York Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism, wrote of his experience in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza in his 2002 book War is a Force that gives us Meaning:

On a recent trip to the region, I visited the Khan Younis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. As the searing afternoon heat and swirling eddies of dust enveloped the camp, I sought cover, slumping under the shade of a palm-roofed hut on the edge of the dunes. I was momentarily defeated by the grit that covered my face and hair, the jostling crowds, the stench of the open sewers and rotting garbage.

Barefoot boys, clutching ragged soccer balls and kites made out of scraps of paper, squatted a few feet away under scrub trees. Men, in flowing white or gray galabias-homespun robes-smoked cigarettes outside their doorways. They fingered prayer beads and spoke in hushed tones as they boiled tea or coffee on sooty coals in small iron braziers in the shade of the eaves. Two emaciated donkeys, their ribs outlined on their flanks, were tethered to wooden carts with rubber wheels.

It was still. The camp waited, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air a disembodied voice crackled over a loudspeaker from the Israeli side of the camp's perimeter fence.

"Come on, dogs," the voice boomed in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!"

I stood up and walked outside the hut. The invective spewed out in a bitter torrent. "Son of a bitch!" "Son of a whore!" ''Your mother's cunt!"

The boys darted in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separated the camp from the Jewish settlement abutting it. They lobbed rocks towards a jeep, mounted with a loudspeaker and protected by bulletproof armor plates and metal grating, that sat parked on the top of a hill known as Gani Tal. The soldier inside the jeep ridiculed and derided them. Three ambulances-which had pulled up in anticipation of what was to come-lined the road below the dunes..

There was the boom of a percussion grenade. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scattered, running clumsily through the heavy sand. They descended out of sight behind the dune in front of me. There were no sounds of gun-fire. The soldiers shot with silencers. The bullets from M-I6 rifles, unseen by me, tumbled end-over-end through their slight bodies. I would see the destruction, the way their stomachs were ripped out, the gaping holes in their limbs and torsos, later in the hospital.

I had seen children shot in other conflicts I have covered--death squads gunned them down in EI Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo--but I had never watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.

Kevin MacDonald, from Understanding Jewish Influence:

The members of Gush Emunim constitute a significant percentage of the elite units of the Israeli army, and, as expected on the hypothesis that they are extremely ethnocentric, they are much more willing to treat the Palestinians in a savage and brutal manner than are other Israeli soldiers.

Israel's latest land grab is part of an old strategy: The latest legal maneuvers by the Israeli government to confiscate Palestinian land in East Jerusalem have rightly caused outrage, even among senior Israeli officials.

The HyperTexts