(from my e-mail)
Both President Bush and Senator John Kerry pledge to preserve the US-Israel special relationship. What has it meant for the Palestinians? And is that relationship really good for either Israel or the United States? Some say that US military aid to Israel is essential to Israel’s survival. Others say that military aid to Israel is simply another form of corporate welfare. Can a country funding a brutal occupation really claim to be an honest broker? One man can find the truth…
Sign our petition to ask Michael Moore to take the case!
What you call a brutal occupier ils a country that took some land from Jordan and Egypt when they and other nations tried to knock them out of existence and they now hold that land till there is a settlement–nations do not filght to preserve themselves and then just hand back land they wil in warfare without a settlement…check your history books. Ps: Moore has said he does not care for Israel so we know thus in advance what his film would be like….odd you don’t mention the millions we also send to Egypt, second only to Israel in payouts from your country.
Odd you don’t mention the illegal settlements, the wall that encroaches upon Palestinian lands and takes from them their livelihoods, or the systematic racism endemic within the state of Israel that makes it impossible to sustain life there unless you are Jewish.
I was hesitant to post this because I’m not confident that Moore has the stuff to do this topic justice. I went ahead because he does have the potential and the following to bring a greater awareness to the plight of Palestinians and it is an acute and dire situation filled with great suffering that is long due the sort of attention his work can generate.
Have you seen “Hitler’s Pawn” yet?
http://www.hbo.com/hitlerspawn/
Gretel Bergmann (Margaret Lambert) was set-up by the Nazis and used as an example of tolerance so they could retain the right to host the ’36 Olympic Games. A few weeks before she was to compete they quietly dismissed her.
She returns to Germany in her later years and visits the athletic grounds where she used to train. There’s a sign there now commemorating her and it brought her to tears. She commented, apologies for paraphrasing, that what moved her the most about the experience is that today all children are allowed to compete on those fields. Finally, discrimination is a thing of the past.
Israel is keeping the worst of Margaret Lambert’s memories alive.
Speaking of history:
(Excerpted)
The Arab states did not sponsor Palestinian terrorism early on. As Israeli historians Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris have demonstrated based on extensive archival research, Jordan has almost always tried to prevent Palestinian infiltration into Israel. Egypt did so until a massive Israeli raid on the police headquarters of Gaza in February 1955. Many consider this to be the event that initiated the countdown to the 1956 Suez/Sinai war. After that war, Egypt again sought and largely succeeded in preventing Palestinian infiltration into Israel until the 1967 war. Syria began to promote Palestinian attacks on Israel in the mid-1960s in response to Israel’s construction of a National Water Carrier, which diverted waters from the Sea of Galilee without Syria’s agreement. Israel initiated many provocative retaliation raids on Jordan and Egypt, but rarely Syria, even when there was no evidence of their responsibility for acts of terror. Morris suggests that military figures like Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon were looking for an opportunity to launch a second war after 1948.[1]
[1] See Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) and Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/int0704beinin.html