Probably the best analysis of the madness in the Middle East I've seen so far, from a radically different perspective.
The Black Commentator
ISRAELI APARTHEID
by Bruce Dixon
http://www.blackcommentator.com/192/192_cover_Israeli_apartheid_dixon_pf html
Imagine, if you will, a modern apartheid state with first, second and eleventh class citizens, all required to carry identification specifying their ethnic origin. First class citizens are obliged to serve in the armed forces, kept on ready reserve status until in their forties, and accorded an impressive array of housing, medical, social security, educational and related benefits denied all others.
Second class citizens are exempted from military service and from a number of the benefits accorded citizens of the first class. They are issued identity documents and license plates that allow them to be profiled by police at a distance. Second class citizens may not own land in much of the country and marriages between them and first class citizens are not recognized by the state. Second class citizens are sometimes arrested without trial and police torture, while frowned upon and occasionally apologized for, commonly occurs.
Citizens of the eleventh class, really not citizens at all, have no rights citizens of the first class or their government are bound to respect. Their residence is forbidden in nearly nine-tenths of the country, all of which they used to own. The areas left to them are cut up into smaller and smaller portions weekly, by high walls, free fire zones and hundreds of checkpoints manned by the army of the first class citizens, so that none can travel a dozen miles in any direction to work, school, shopping, a job, a farm, a business or a hospital without several long waits, humiliating searches and often arbitrary denials of the right to pass or to return. Posh residential settlements for the first class citizens with protecting gun towers and military bases are built with government funds and foreign aid on what used to be the villages and farms and pastures of the eleventh class citizens. The settlers are allotted generous additional housing and other subsidies, allowed to carry weapons and use deadly force with impunity against the former inhabitants, and are connected with the rest of first class territory by a network of of first-class citizen only roads.
Citizens of the eleventh class are routinely arrested, tortured, and held indefinitely without trial. Political activism among them is equated to “terrorism” and the state discourages such activity by means including but not limited to the kidnapping of suspects and relatives of suspects, demolition of their family homes, and extralegal assassination, sometimes at the hands of a death squad, or at others times by lobbing missiles or five hundred pound bombs into sleeping apartment blocks or noonday traffic. Passports are not issued to these citizens, and those who take advantage of scarce opportunities to study or work abroad are denied re-entry.
The apartheid state in question is, of course, Israel. Its first class citizens are Israeli Jews, the majority of them of European or sometimes American origin. The second class citizens are Israeli Arabs, who enjoy significant but limited rights under the law including token representation in the Knesset. The eleventh class citizens are not citizens at all. They are Palestinians. One expects to be able to say that Palestinians live in Palestine and are governed by Palestinians, but the truth is something different. The areas in which Palestinians may inhabit have shrunk nearly every year since the Nakba, their name for the wave of mass deportations, murders, the dispossession, destruction and exile of whole Arab towns, cities and regions that attended the 1948 founding of the state of Israel. As the whole world, except for the US public knows, Palestinians have lived under military occupation, without land, without rights, without hope, for nearly sixty years now.
[The full essay can be found at The Black Commentator website; the address is listed at the top of this post.]
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In my view, this current madness is the logical results of the lack of an effective secular radical Left which could have united decent people (Arab and Jewish and all others) against the ravages of the right-wing savages on BOTH sides (both the Likudnik/Zionists on the Jewish/US side and the fundamentalist Islamicists (Hamas, Hezballah, and the bin Laden wannabes on the other). But while I have no quarter whatsoever for the tactics of Hamas or Hezballah or their support of suicide bombings as a means of "liberation"
the policy of Israel's collective punishment of ALL Arabs and Muslims, and its aggressive campaign for the glory of "Greater Israel" is, to me, far, far, far worse and the ultimate overreaction...and becoming dangerously close to Nazi-grade genocide and ethnic cleansing, if not there already.
And the fact that "this shit" (as our benelovent dictator so aptly refer to it) has gotten the universal support of the US political establishment and the media (apparantly, the values of Baruch Goldstein, the assassin of praying Muslim Arabs, that "1 million Arab lives aren't worth a Jewish fingernail", have become the political "mainstream"), even the enthusiastic support of "progressive Democrats", says a lot about the morality of our political system these days.
As saddening that I find that I have to say this...but it seems that the government in Israel has become a cross between the old Nazi Germany and the old South Africa...apparantly you can forget about your past and assume the role of your old enemies. For the sake of the world, I pray for the best, and hope that saner minds can prevail.
Anthony