Beautiful dream of Israel has become a nightmare

[n2doc]

By: Gabor Maté

As a Jewish youngster growing up in Budapest, an infant survivor of the Nazi genocide, I was for years haunted by a question resounding in my brain with such force that sometimes my head would spin: “How was it possible? How could the world have let such horrors happen?”

It was a naïve question, that of a child. I know better now: such is reality. Whether in Vietnam or Rwanda or Syria, humanity stands by either complicitly or unconsciously or helplessly, as it always does. In Gaza today we find ways of justifying the bombing of hospitals, the annihilation of families at dinner, the killing of pre-adolescents playing soccer on a beach.

In Israel-Palestine the powerful party has succeeded in painting itself as the victim, while the ones being killed and maimed become the perpetrators. “They don’t care about life,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, abetted by the Obamas and Harpers of this world, “we do.” Netanyahu, you who with surgical precision slaughter innocents, the young and the old, you who have cruelly blockaded Gaza for years, starving it of necessities, you who deprive Palestinians of more and more of their land, their water, their crops, their trees — you care about life?

There is no understanding Gaza out of context — Hamas rockets or unjustifiable terrorist attacks on civilians — and that context is the longest ongoing ethnic cleansing operation in the recent and present centuries, the ongoing attempt to destroy Palestinian nationhood.

more

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2014/07/22/beautiful_dream_of_israel_has_become_a_nightmare.html

[Smarmie Doofus]

1. Good article. Best sentence:

"This issue is far too charged with emotion."



>>>>One could debate details, historical and current, back and forth. Since my days as a young Zionist and, later, as a member of Jews for a Just Peace, I have often done so. I used to believe that if people knew the facts, they would open to the truth. That, too, was naïve. This issue is far too charged with emotion. As the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle has pointed out, the accumulated mutual pain in the Middle East is so acute, “a significant part of the population finds itself forced to act it out in an endless cycle of perpetration and retribution.”>>>>

[snagglepuss]

2. Gabor Mate is a phenomenal person. Anyone who wants more insight into

him should look into his views on addiction.

[n2doc]

3. Agreed.

When I saw the author of this piece, I went "woah!".

His work on children is also amazing.

[locks]

4. Thank you

for this poignant and sad cry written to us all, Jew, Muslim, Christian, we of little faith. Can we not grieve deaths of innocents (and all our brothers and sisters); can we not at least mourn together?

[Stevepol]

5. I think it's just a fact that illustrates the stage of human spiritual evolution.

I thought sometimes growing up that the US would never fall for the same lies and two-bit emotions as the Nazis, that the US would never get involved in such an obviously immoral war as World War II, would never go thru anything like the wholesale loss of democratic and cultural and religious ideals as Nazi Germany did.

Then came the Iraq War. The other wars we've had, many of them had elements of evil, but the Iraq war had all of them to my mind in spades. I heard a report of a study, I think done in England using a medical organization and a professional research group, to determine the number of deaths that happened in Iraq as a direct and indirect result of the invasion and occupation, and the estimate was somewhere between 900,000 and 1,100,000, in other words about a million Iraqi deaths that came about as a result of the invasion and occupation. That estimate would have to be raised if it were done again today. The death toll is still rising. And that's not even taking account of the 2 million or so refugees who were dispossessed or left the country. And propaganda. The GWB administration would have made Goebbels proud if he had been alive to see the most recent incarnation of shock and awe. The almost complete abandonment of journalistic objectivity and fairness or even just elementary research and investigation. Not just the use of torture, but the justification of it. The lying, the constant lying about the reasons for war. The firing or refusal to listen to or give a stage to the opponents of the rush to war.

Israelis are just human. When humans base their actions on their own egos and their own worst instincts for violence for self-justification at all costs, when people begin to see "us" and "them" whether it's based on race or religion or wealth or anything, the result is always the same. And no race or religion is immune. Given the right breeding ground very few human beings can resist the drum beat of war and violence as the best answer to what are really just problems in human relations.

Until all humans whether Hottentots or Burmese or Anglo-Saxons or Muslims or Christians or Jews or whatever come to realize that they, that we, are all the same and that I AM MY BROTHER'S KEEPER, there will always be these terrible tragedies. Eventually perhaps,
tho I think it's probably thousands of years in the future, there will be sustained peace and understanding between countries and people.

It would be nice if some group of people or some country could claim superiority over any other, but I don't see it. For now, at least, this is about the only way that we will admit to being brothers and equal. You think you're bad, wait till you see what I can do!

[locks]

6. So well said stevepol

and I'm afraid you are right. After WW2 and Vietnam we had some real hope that our brothers and sisters would give peace a chance but we were wrong. Our only hope now is that our grandchildren will find a better way.

[Uncle Joe]

7. Kicked and recommended, that's a good read.

Thanks for the thread, n2doc.