Michelle Cohen Corasanti: "... 'never again' should mean never again for anyone ..."

[Karmadillo]

http://www.thehypertexts.com/Michelle%20Cohen%20Corasanti.htm

A letter to the President from Michelle Cohen Corasanti:

Dear Mr. President,

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These are the lessons the Holocaust taught me: We must never be bystanders to human suffering. “Never again” means never again for any people ever again. When the horrors of the Holocaust were uncovered, there was a need to find a place for the survivors to go. The west, didn’t want us so they were happy to give us Palestine. And they were happy to buy the fallacy that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land”, and that we made the desert bloom. Let’s be honest, Palestine already had a people, the Palestinians, and the vast majority of whom were not Jewish. Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Acre, Haifa, Nazareth, Jaffa and many more cities were already well-developed. These cities were made of stone and contained universities, hospitals, schools tea houses and hotels. There were trains, sea ports and international trade and travel. The desert we brought to bloom was the land on which we built Tel Aviv in 1909, and that’s it. In 1947, when the UN proposed to partition Palestine into a Jewish and a Palestinian state, the Palestinians objected to the partition plan and instead argued for the creation of a secular democracy where Jews, Christians and Muslims would live together with equal rights. As you know, the west rejected their proposal for democracy.

In November, 1947 we began to execute our Plan Dalet to ethnically cleanse Palestine of the non-Jewish majority. We took, by force of arms, the cities of Haifa and Jaffa, creating hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the process. Having seen the devastation and injustice caused by Plan Dalet, five Arab countries decided on military intervention, but the 60,000 poorly armed and trained Arab soldiers were no match for the 90,000 heavily armed and well trained Zionist soldiers. When we won the war and took even more Palestinian land than the UN gave us, we told the world that David beat Goliath and the west was happy to believe it.

But we need to be honest. The Palestinians have paid the price for the Holocaust. We ethnically cleansed as many as we could, which is well-documented by Israeli historians, including from the left Ilan Pappe to the right Benny Morris. We kicked them out and refused to let them back in. We looted their houses, we took the beautiful ones for ourselves and then we razed 500 of their villages so they wouldn’t have a place to come home to. We were once made refugees in Europe and now we have immigrated to Palestine and made the Palestinians refugees. When we wouldn’t let them return, they resorted to violence, so we called them terrorists and made it stick.

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I know that our government has the power to help the Israeli government to do the right thing. You will remember that not long ago the United States had a similar relationship with South Africa. The Reagan administration considered Nelson Mandela a dangerous terrorist, and the white Afrikaner government a close ally. The Apartheid government of South Africa knew that they would never have to dismantle their Apartheid system of control and discrimination unless the United States told them to do so. For South Africa, it didn’t matter that the rest of the world condemned apartheid and called for democratic reforms to take place because as long as the United States didn’t complain, South Africa felt empowered to ignore the rest of the world. Democracy and equality for all came to South Africa when we changed our policy. If we change our policy now, we can help Israel revisit its core Jewish values and do the right thing for everyone.

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[TexasProgresive]

1. K&R

I'm surprised that your OP is being allowed to stand.

Somebody that knows her story needs to create a wikipedia article for Michelle Cohen Corasanti. The only thing that comes up in doing a search is the above article and sites about her book, The Almond Tree.