Commentary
An open letter to Israel
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor


Jan 8, 2009, 00:20

Like Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, you, Israel, have proved once more what ruthless schmucks you are for Tuesday hitting Palestinians near a U.N. School in Gaza. Only there’s nothing funny about this. It wasn’t a comedy in any way, which like Zohan trivializes the tragedy and brutality, in bad jokes, mindless entertainment for the mindless. L’chaim.

Your glorious Israeli army, as the NY Times reported, killed as many as 40 people among hundreds who had sought refuge at the school from the fighting in the beleaguered territory.

Gaza residents took refuge in a United Nations school as Israel’s offensive continued with artillery, helicopter and tank fire.

“The officials said those killed included men, women and children. The Israeli military, in a statement, confirmed it had carried out a mortar attack on the school, saying an initial investigation suggested its forces had responded to mortar fire coming from the school . . .”

You are still proving why from the 1900s on the Palestinians feared and fought your presence, knowing in their bones that you would not only take their land but their lives and their country, and even engage in their Holocaust. The 1920 riots, the 1929 riots, the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, were all fierce expressions of that underlying Arab dread of your ruthless ambition to exterminate these people.

Your terrorist wrath culminated in the King David Hotel bombing on July 22, 1946, when Jewish terrorists dressed as Arabs planted six bombs in the hotel basement. The blast killed 91 and injured 46

If the notion sounds vaguely 9/11, it’s not all that far off. Think cui bono. Then and now, who stood to profit by demonizing Muslim culture and Arabs if not these old school terrorists?

But no more Mr. Nice Guys, right? Or so you see yourselves, having had the chutzpah to actually blame the mass murder on the British administration Chief Secretary John Shaw, claiming that he said “I give orders here. I don’t take orders from Jews,” subsequently disproved in court in a libel suit he brought against you. In other words, your concept of fair warning, “three calls in 9 minutes,” made it all okay to bomb the English quarters housed in it, killing many of your own people as well -- though Menachim Begin argued to make it all right that the British had 25 to 27 minutes to respond. That would be so different.

And England whose Lord Balfour in his Declaration originally invited Jewish settlers into Palestine in 1917 ultimately became your target because England reneged on its invitation of more Jews to Palestine in its White Paper of 1939, seeing what a disaster it had on its hands. So, then as today, you took the other route: terror, the road on which you so often, so self-righteously place the Palestinians, with an I.E.D., terror bomb, or homemade rocket.

Is it any wonder that your terror has been met by their resistance? Is it any wonder that you have pursued your terror since 1946, and actually celebrated the 60^th anniversary of the catastrophe at the suggestion of your former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Perhaps my article Zionist terror 1946 to 2001 can remind you of some details, even of your early involvement in the development of nuclear weapons. See Israel’s 60 years of nuclear proliferation.

Yes, Sylvia, they had a nuclear plant built in Dimona, in 1958, with the help of the French. Yes, the US provided Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir with the paradigm of violence to use for worldwide intimidation: NUCLEAR TERROR.

Yes, Sylvia, they had 200 to 300 nuclear missiles by 1986. Just ask whistle-blower, former orthodox Jew, Mordechai Vanunu, who took pictures of them, and the plant and reactor where he worked at Dimona. And gave the pictures and the story to the London Times in 1986 and the world knew, or some piece of the world. And Mordechai sat in an Israeli prison, in solitary confinement, for 20 years after that, and subsequently was under house arrest for talking to several reporters. Today he is a Palestinian Christian, and free at last, I hope.

And so, what comes of the US now handing $3 billion for arms to Israel each year, plus non-secured loans, plus whatever is lying around our arsenal which could do harm to Israel’s “dangerous enemies.” Plus whatever the many American Jewish organizations hand to their poster nation, hundreds of millions of dollars, to “defend” itself.” Have another piece of babka, ladies. It’s delicious. Some more coffee?

So is it any wonder you end up with the well-publicized, historically disenfranchised “chosen people,” chosen as one of the major nuclear terrorists of our day?

Is it any wonder that the Zionist Israeli governments never had any real desire for sharing Palestine with the Palestinians? It’s a historic clown show from Theodor Herzl, Zionist patriarch, for the world’s befuddlement, including how the media have managed making the masses to believe Hamas’ homemade rockets were a serious threat to the cluster bombs, bunker-busters and all hell that has been let loose from American-gifted F-16’s to kill an inordinate amount of Palestinian civilians, in everything from schools, places of worship, to markets, hospitals and the sealed-off Gaza Concentration Camp and air-space itself.

Are we to take these Israelis seriously? They want to disappear the Palestinians, not make peace with them. All the holy books and laws of their heritage have been burned in the fires of their ongoing, untrammeled rage and political greed. You can’t have 90 to 1 body counts, double or triple that and beat them into silence, too. Those souls are on you, my Israeli bubbees. You have spun the Wheel of Fortune one more time. And now the question is when does the violence stop at your doors? When does what you’ve done come home to roost still one more time?

Consider how fluid world opinion is. Consider your own history. How many times you’ve been up then down, here/there then tossed out, victor then the defeated. Consider how he who does not learn the lessons of history is doomed to repeat them. How this life, human life, is not a Hollywood comedy. It’s the real deal. And even the dumb movie Zohan had enough of death and wanted peace, to come to New York and be a faygelah hairdresser. Better that than a killer, darling.

Better he meets a super-slinky salon owner, the only one who’ll give him a shot at being a hairdresser, and he falls in love with her, a Palestinian no less, and she with him. Consider how even his equally cartooned Palestinian activist nemesis, the Phantom, wanted really to be just a shoe salesman after all. Funny, yes, but it gets under the skin, this simple idea that even warriors, like those of Homer’s epics, wanted peace at last, to rest, to have families, not to live in perpetual violence.

But, unfortunately, your role, Israel, as David with USA paid-for slingshot, has become very engaging. It gives you such a sense of Zohan power. The possibilities are endless. Today Palestine, tomorrow the world? Sound familiar? Yes, but it is the way of all tyrannies. So back to reality, off the silver screen, to the hard newsprint of the Times, those frightened faces, the dead babies bundled in white, faces, bellies, limbs punctured by big bullet holes, the grieving parents bearing them, the lost child in a doctor’s white-coated arms, the blood-splattered faces, the fear, the horror of it all.

This is what a Jewish comedian born in Brooklyn in the ’60s and a so-called serious Italo-American writer grown up in Brooklyn in the ’40s and ’50s are trying to show you, oh mighty Israel. These are not special effects, not made-up dummies. They are the future’s mummies, more of the Middle East’s archaeology of bones thanks in part to its Western “brothers.” So get your rocks off some other way. Call off the dogs. Turn the tanks around. Fly the F-16’s back. My tax bucks are in them. And everyone else’s who reads this.

Whether you know it or not, my Zohans, you are lost again -- millions of people in the desert for far more than 40 days, running on 60 years and more. And when and how will you find yourselves? Or is this it? The Goats of Wrath. The dealmakers, the dancing Israelis, the spies, the Robert Maxwells, the Jonathan Pollards, the AMDOCS, the COMVERSES, the Huntleigh USA’s, the Larry Silverstein, the greatest spy operation on earth, mightier than the mighty NSA, faster than a speeding bullet, trapped in its matrix of paranoia, with its computer geniuses putting backdoors in every computer in the world.

Oh, I have read of your sufferings, your beatings, imprisonments, murders, thrashings, hangings, your humiliations personal and as a race. And once I felt for you, felt deeply for you. And part of me may still now. But I abandon compassion for you. I condemn you, unequivocally. You mock, not honor, the dead of your own Holocaust, committing another. Sleep on that, like the cold hard sand of a desert night, surrounded by tarantulas, dinosaurs flying overhead. Is that Moses coming towards you, tablets in hand, with some awful judgment from the sky above? Shalom. L’chaim. This is how the world goes out. Not with a whisper but with an awful bang.