{"id":3162,"date":"2008-05-18T15:08:41","date_gmt":"2008-05-18T20:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=3162"},"modified":"2008-05-18T15:08:41","modified_gmt":"2008-05-18T20:08:41","slug":"sam-bahour-refugees-are-the-key","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=3162","title":{"rendered":"Sam Bahour: Refugees are the Key"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Sam Bahour, Counterpunch, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.com\/bahour05172008.html\">17\/18 May 2008<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201c[When David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel&#8217;s independence it] was the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David: a homeland for the chosen people Eretz Yisrael.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou have welcomed immigrants from the four corners of the Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; President George Bush, May 15, 2008<\/p>\n<p>President Bush addressed the Israeli Knesset to mark Israel\u2019s sixtieth anniversary. The President\u2019s speech was absent of any real insight or policy. Instead of addressing the politics of a region that can only be equated to a powder keg about to explode, he assumed the other worldly role of bestowing on Israel a religious right, one dangerously terrifying because it represents the views of the most rabidly extremist Jews, similar to the Jewish law student that assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the gun-toting Israeli settlers (many holding dual U.S.\/Israeli citizenship) that populate Israel\u2019s Jewish-only settlements across the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.<\/p>\n<p>President Bush used the out-dated words \u201cEretz Yisrael\u201d [biblical Land of Israel] to depict the Israeli state.  This sort of usage was, and is, exactly what most right-wing Jewish fundamentalists use to refer to an Israel that reaches from the Euphrates River, in what\u2019s left of today\u2019s Iraq, to the Mediterranean Sea.<\/p>\n<p><strong>[<a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.com\/bahour05172008.html\">Read the commentary<\/a>]<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Sam Bahour, Counterpunch, 17\/18 May 2008 \u201c[When David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel&#8217;s independence it] was the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David: a homeland for the chosen people Eretz Yisrael.\u201d \u201cYou have welcomed immigrants &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=3162\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-P0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}