30

Palestine is Still the Issue

by John Pilger


When I first went to Palestine as a young reporter in the 1960s, I stayed on a kibbutz. The people I met were hard-working, spirited and called themselves socialists. I liked them. One evening at dinner, I asked about the silhouettes of people in the far distance, beyond our perimeter.
“Arabs”, they said, “nomads”. The words were almost spat out. Israel, they said, meaning Palestine, had been mostly wasteland and one of the great feats of the Zionist enterprise was to turn the desert green.
They gave as an example their crop of Jaffa oranges, which was exported to the rest of the world. What a triumph against the odds of nature and humanity’s neglect.
It was the first lie. Most of the orange groves and vineyards belonged to Palestinians who had been tilling the soil and exporting oranges and grapes to Europe since the eighteenth century. The former Palestinian town of Jaffa was known by its previous inhabitants as “the place of sad oranges”.
On the kibbutz, the word “Palestinian” was never used. Why, I asked. The answer was a troubled silence.
All over the colonised world, the true sovereignty of indigenous people is feared by those who can never quite cover the fact, and the crime, that they live on stolen land.
Denying people’s humanity is the next step – as the Jewish people know only too well. Defiling people’s dignity and culture and pride follows as logically as violence.
In Ramallah, following an invasion of the West Bank by the late Ariel Sharon in 2002, I walked through streets of crushed cars and demolished houses, to the Palestinian Cultural Centre. Until that morning, Israeli soldiers had camped there. I was met by the centre’s director, the novelist, Liana Badr, whose original manuscripts lay scattered and torn across the floor. The hard-drive containing her fiction, and a library of plays and poetry had been taken by Israeli soldiers. Almost everything was smashed, and defiled.
Not a single book survived with all its pages; not a single master tape from one of the best collections of Palestinian cinema.
The soldiers had urinated and defecated on the floors, on desks, on embroideries and works of art. They had smeared faeces on children’s paintings and written – in shit – “Born to kill”. Liana Badr had tears in her eyes, but she was unbowed. She said, “We will make it right again.”
What enrages those who colonise and occupy, steal and oppress, vandalise and defile is the victims’ refusal to comply. And this is the tribute we all should pay the Palestinians. They refuse to comply. They go on. They wait – until they fight again. And they do so even when those governing them collaborate with their oppressors.
In the midst of the 2014 Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer never stopped reporting. He and his family were stricken; he queued for food and water and carried it through the rubble. When I phoned him, I could hear the bombs outside his door. He refused to comply.
Mohammed’s reports, illustrated by his graphic photographs, were a model of professional journalism that shamed the compliant and craven reporting of the so-called mainstream in Britain and the United States. The BBC notion of objectivity – amplifying the myths and lies of authority, a practice of which it is proud – is shamed every day by the likes of Mohamed Omer.
For more than 40 years, I have recorded the refusal of the people of Palestine to comply with their oppressors: Israel, the United States, Britain, the European Union.
Since 2008, Britain alone has granted licences for export to Israel of arms and missiles, drones and sniper rifles, worth £434 million.
Those who have stood up to this, without weapons, those who have refused to comply, are among Palestinians I have been privileged to know:
My friend, the late Mohammed Jarella, who toiled for the United Nations agency UNRWA, in 1967 showed me a Palestinian refugee camp for the first time. It was a bitter winter’s day and schoolchildren shook with the cold. “One day …” he would say. “One day …”
Mustafa Barghouti, whose eloquence remains undimmed, who described the tolerance that existed in Palestine among Jews, Muslims and Christians until, as he told me, “the Zionists wanted a state at the expense of the Palestinians.”
Dr. Mona El-Farra, a physician in Gaza, whose passion was raising money for plastic surgery for children disfigured by Israeli bullets and shrapnel. Her hospital was flattened by Israeli bombs in 2014.
Dr. Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist, whose clinics for children in Gaza – children sent almost mad by Israeli violence – were oases of civilization.
Fatima and Nasser are a couple whose home stood in a village near Jerusalem designated “Zone A and B”, meaning that the land was declared for Jews only. Their parents had lived there; their grandparents had lived there. Today, the bulldozers are laying roads for Jews only, protected by laws for Jews only.
It was past midnight when Fatima went into labour with their second child. The baby was premature; and when they arrived at a checkpoint with the hospital in view, the young Israeli soldier said they needed another document.
Fatima was bleeding badly. The soldier laughed and imitated her moans and told them, “Go home”. The baby was born there in a truck. It was blue with cold and soon, without care, died from exposure. The baby’s name was Sultan.
For Palestinians, these will be familiar stories. The question is: why are they not familiar in London and Washington, Brussels and Sydney?
In Syria, a recent liberal cause – a George Clooney cause – is bankrolled handsomely in Britain and the United States, even though the beneficiaries, the so-called rebels, are dominated by jihadist fanatics, the product of the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the destruction of modern Libya.
And yet, the longest occupation and resistance in modern times is not recognised. When the United Nations suddenly stirs and defines Israel as an apartheid state, as it did this year, there is outrage – not against a state whose “core purpose” is racism but against a UN commission that dared break the silence.
“Palestine,” said Nelson Mandela, “is the greatest moral issue of our time.”
Why is this truth suppressed, day after day, month after month, year after year?
In Israel – the apartheid state, guilty of a crime against humanity and of more international law-breaking than any other – the silence persists among those who know and whose job it is to keep the record straight.
In Israel, so much journalism is intimidated and controlled by a groupthink that demands silence on Palestine while honourable journalism has become dissidence: a metaphoric underground.
A single word – “conflict” – enables this silence. “The Arab-Israeli conflict”, intone the robots at their tele-prompters. When a veteran BBC reporter, a man who knows the truth, refers to “two narratives”, the moral contortion is complete.
There is no conflict, no two narratives, with their moral fulcrum. There is a military occupation enforced by a nuclear-armed power backed by the greatest military power on earth; and there is an epic injustice.
The word “occupation” may be banned, deleted from the dictionary. But the memory of historical truth cannot be banned: of the systemic expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. “Plan D” the Israelis called it in 1948.
The Israeli historian Benny Morris describes how David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was asked by one of his generals: “What shall we do with the Arabs?” The prime minister, wrote Morris, “made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand”. “Expel them!” he said.
Seventy years later, this crime is suppressed in the intellectual and political culture of the West. Or it is debatable, or merely controversial. Highly-paid journalists and eagerly accept Israeli government trips, hospitality and flattery, then are truculent in their protestations of independence. The term, “useful idiots”, was coined for them.
In 2011, I was struck by the ease with which one of Britain’s most acclaimed novelists, Ian McEwan, a man bathed in the glow of bourgeois enlightenment, accepted the Jerusalem Prize for literature in the apartheid state.
Would McEwan have gone to Sun City in apartheid South Africa? They gave prizes there, too, all expenses paid. McEwan justified his action with weasel words about the independence of “civil society”.
Propaganda – of the kind McEwan delivered, with its token slap on the wrists for his delighted hosts – is a weapon for the oppressors of Palestine. Like sugar, it insinuates almost everything today.
Understanding and deconstructing state and cultural propaganda is our most critical task. We are being frog-marched into a second cold war, whose eventual aim is to subdue and balkanise Russia and intimidate China.
When Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin spoke privately for more than two hours at the G20 meeting in Hamburg, apparently about the need not to go to war with each other, the most vociferous objectors were those who have commandeered liberalism, such as the Zionist political writer of the Guardian.
“No wonder Putin was smiling in Hamburg,” wrote Jonathan Freedland. “He knows he has succeeded in his chief objective: he has made America weak again.” Cue the hissing for Evil Vlad.
These propagandists have never known war but they love the imperial game of war. What Ian McEwan calls “civil society” has become a rich source of related propaganda. Take a term often used by the guardians of civil society – “human rights”. Like another noble concept, “democracy”, “human rights” has been all but emptied of its meaning and purpose.
Like “peace process” and “road map”, human rights in Palestine have been hijacked by Western governments and the corporate NGOs they fund and which claim a quixotic moral authority.
So when Israel is called upon by governments and NGOs to “respect human rights” in Palestine, nothing happens, because they all know there is nothing to fear; nothing will change.
Mark the silence of the European Union, which accommodates Israel while refusing to maintain its commitments to the people of Gaza – such as keeping the lifeline of the Rafah border crossing open: a measure it agreed to as part of its role in the cessation of fighting in 2014. A seaport for Gaza – agreed by Brussels in 2014 – has been abandoned.
The UN commission I have referred to – its full name is the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia – described Israel as, and I quote, “designed for the core purpose” of racial discrimination.
Millions understand this. What the governments in London, Washington, Brussels and Tel Aviv cannot control is that humanity at street level is changing perhaps as never before.
People everywhere are stirring and are more aware, in my view, than ever before. Some are already in open revolt. The atrocity of Grenfell Tower in London has brought communities together in a vibrant almost national resistance.
Thanks to a people’s campaign, the judiciary is today examining the evidence of a possible prosecution of Tony Blair for war crimes. Even if this fails, it is a crucial development, dismantling yet another barrier between the public and its recognition of the voracious nature of the crimes of state power – the systemic disregard for humanity perpetrated in Iraq, in Grenfell Tower, in Palestine. Those are the dots waiting to be joined.
For most of the 21st century, the fraud of corporate power posing as democracy has depended on the propaganda of distraction: largely on a cult of “me-ism” designed to disorientate our sense of looking out for others, of acting together, of social justice and internationalism.
Class, gender and race were wrenched apart. The personal became the political and the media the message. The promotion of bourgeois privilege was presented as “progressive” politics. It wasn’t. It never is. It is the promotion of privilege, and power.
Among young people, internationalism has found a vast new audience. Look at the support for Jeremy Corbyn and the reception the G20 circus in Hamburg received. By understanding the truth and imperatives of internationalism, and rejecting colonialism, we understand the struggle of Palestine.
Mandela put it this way: “We know only too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
At the heart of the Middle East is the historic injustice in Palestine. Until that is resolved, and Palestinians have their freedom and homeland, and Israelis are Palestinians equality before the law, there will be no peace in the region, or perhaps anywhere.
What Mandela was saying is that freedom itself is precarious while powerful governments can deny justice to others, terrorise others, imprison and kill others, in our name. Israel certainly understands the threat that one day it might have to be normal.
That is why its ambassador to Britain is Mark Regev, well known to journalists as a professional propagandist, and why the “huge bluff” of charges of anti-Semitism, as Ilan Pappe called it, was allowed to contort the Labour Party and undermine Jeremy Corbyn as leader. The point is, it did not succeed.
Events are moving quickly now. The remarkable Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions campaign (BDS) is succeeding, day by day; cities and towns, trade unions and student bodies are endorsing it. The British government’s attempt to restrict local councils from enforcing BDS has failed in the courts.
These are not straws in the wind. When the Palestinians rise again, as they will, they may not succeed at first – but they will eventually if we understand that they are us, and we are them.

This is an abridged version of John Pilger’s address to the Palestinian Expo 2017 in London. John Pilger’s film, ‘Palestine Is Still the Issue’, can be viewed on this website.
Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger

SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN

If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.

For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.

5 1 vote
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

30 Comments
newest
oldest most voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
seelistenunderstand
seelistenunderstand
Jul 24, 2017 3:50 PM

Post July 24th 2017
1. The relations between Israel and Jordan are deteriorating due to yesterday’s event. According to the Jordanian official news agency the story is as following: The Israeli embassy in Jordan ordered some furniture. The Jordanian supplier brought it. It should be explained that nobody can enter the embassy without a prior confirmation. One of the porters took out a screwdriver, which is his tool to assemble the new bought furniture, and hit one of the Israeli security guards. This man was slightly injured, but, in order to eliminate more stabbings by the porter, he took out his gun and shot the porter to death. A 2nd man that came to stab the guard was injured and died later on in hospital. According to all international laws/regulations and agreements the Israeli guard is in diplomatic status so the Jordanian can’t investigate him without the permission of the Israeli side. The Jordanians blocked the Israeli embassy area and does not allow the Israelis to do their daily job-going in and out.
2. This story is just follow up of the last time when Israeli policemen were shot and/or stabbed by Palestinians. It should be mentioned that 80% of the Jordanian population is Palestinians and the King must take into consideration his steps when Palestine and/or Israeli- Arab conflict is involved.
3. The Arab world that supposes to have its spring is in a dark corridor The spring of the middle east was changed and the matter the fact is that instead a peace and understanding will be set among/within the (Arab) world, the wars and fights takes place/are initiated by the Arabs.
4. Following the described in #3, the Arabs try to pull Israel into their chaos. Israel is doing everything available to eliminate wars. But the Arab side does the opposite. They follow the written in the Quran that all people, in the world, other than the Muslims, must convert or die. This is the fact. This means that the Muslim side is looking for wars instead of peace.
5. One of the way that they try to ignite flames is by launching rockets into Israel in order to kill/injure people and to cause damages. In the last 2 days they launched 2 rockets, but, to the luck of Israel or they are not professional in operating them or the rockets are of such a quality that explodes in the air. For both cases we blessed the Arabs. This is just one example of the Arab’s desire for fights/wars.
6. Following events like the one on Friday when a young Arab stabbed 3 Israelis to death and was caught live, there is a debate in Israel whether to sentence him to jail or to death. The bible says that whoever comes to kill you kill him first. This sentence/command must be the projector for the future, in case more events like this will happen.
7. Some people say that the stabber, when he decided to go stabbing, he knew that his chance to get out of it alive, are very limited. So, according to them, he is ready to die and he is not afraid of it. Well, my opinion why to let him suffer in jail let honor with his will and help him to die. This way both sides will be happy. He will die we will get rid of another potential stabber in the future.
8. What is your opinion to the following: A stabbing event happened, couple of minutes ago, in Israeli city, Petah Tiqva. The funny thing is that one was from the village of Ararara. The other one was from Kalkilia. The interesting thing is that both of them are Arabs. This is the result of the Quran’s education (Actually lack of education) with the Muslims. A knife can be used against Arabs by Arabs the way it is used against Jews, by Arabs, once a stabber has a knife and he sees something that he dislikes, he will use the knife as it is his language. Stabbing, no matter who is the victim. Please do understand it. The police announces, now, that it was a terror attack, but the stabber’s mistake was that he stabbed his brother.
9. Following the last events in our region, Abu Mazen, the Palestinian president, suspended all arrangements between Israel and Palestine. But, they immediately cancelled some the new bans, the security arrangements. The reason is that Abu Mazen needs it more than Israel. The relations help/cause Abu Mazen to Palestine. If he was not listening to Israeli advices, he would have been long ago in some other place. I don’t know where.
10. But not just the Palestinian Abu Mazen needs Israeli help. The Jordanian king is in the same boat. So, he decided to bring to an end this crisis. An high rank Israeli person is going to Jordan to discuss how to solve the problem.
11. Like in #8, it happens also all over the Arab/Muslim world. When Daesh started its war and conquer of Arab states, many Arab/Muslims from all over the world joined them. But now, after it is over and Daesh lose its force/face many of the volunteers, that stayed alive, want to go back home. Actually they escape. If you ask from who? From their own friends till just lately. But their friends, another volunteers to Daesh, refrain them of returning back to their homes. The loyal soldiers stand as a wall to stop them of escaping. In order to ease the escape the escapers, dress women dresses, These that were caught dressed like this are sentenced to beheading without trial. Some of the men, that wanted to escape forgot/did not have shavers, and they were caught because of their stupidity/rush/beard.
12. A cartoon in Israeli newspaper show a bearded youngster, looks like a stabber, looking, in a mirror shop, at a mirror, that have knife shape. The salesman in the shop say to him: “Yes, this mirror is the most common/bought in the last time”. This is the Muslim education.
13. Another cartoon, in another newspaper, show a big snack, Hamas, open big mouth and going to eat Abu Mazen (The Palestinian president) While Abu Mazen runs after Israel and warn them that Palestine will call more Unesco meetings to blame Israel. What a stupid people are these Palestinians.
14. If we check the situation in the Arab world we will notice the following: The wave of hatred is gathering power. But the power is not just against Israel. It is more between the Radical Muslims and the Sunnis. Actually co existence in peace was never implemented between Arab countries. The daily schedule, in the Arab world, is dictated by minorities, small groups, that got somehow into power, dictates their will to the majority. The Palestinians and the Arabs imitate/cooperated with governments like Nazi Germany, the soviet bloc, the Iranian Ayatollahs, Sadam Husein and his group, N. Korea. All, of the used to train terrorists. This is exactly where the Arab world is standing today. They copy 1:1 what all these dictators used to do in the past. The only hope that we can have is that they will sometime see/learn that their way is/was wrong and the will make a switch. This includes also the Quran/Islam. If this will not change the world will carry on deteriorating.
15. In Israel we live and we build instead to ruin. For example: Gal Gadot, the successful wonder woman is scheduled for the 2nd part. Congratulations Gal.
16. Two successful operations in Israeli hospital: In the 1st a dangerous cancer was removed from a blood vessel. The doctors removed the vessel and installed a new kind of “Gortex” which is textile. The man left hospital and he is is a process of recovery. In the other case a young, 22 years old, girl suffered continuous headache. She was rushed to hospital where a brain aneurysm was found. She was operated and she feels much better. This is what Israel is dealing with in parallel to the fight against the Arabs that look to cause problems.
Please help Israel economy. Buy Israeli products.
Please share this post. The more you do the better.
In friendship
Amir

StAug
StAug
Jul 20, 2017 10:18 AM

In case no one has posted this yet:

BigB
BigB
Jul 14, 2017 1:48 PM

100 years on from the Balfour Declaration: should we, in the UK, celebrate with “pride” (like Treason May ): or hang our heads in shame and try and force our criminally complicit “leaders” to apologize – and make restitution and reconciliation to those who suffer to this day for the crimes against humanity of our predecessors?
We promised to maintain the rights of the Palestinians: but utterly betrayed and brutalized them instead. After 30 years of “strong and stable” misrule: we enforced Partition: knowing exactly what would come next – “Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in” (statement of Attlee’s Labour Government ) – ethnic cleansing. We also inflamed Jewish passions, by blockading the forced immigration of those fleeing the Holocaust – such as the murder of those aboard the MV Struma. In short, we “lit the blue touch paper” of ethnic tension, then retired. Ever since, we’ve supported the Zionists over the Palestinian “unpeople” we helped create.
You can celebrate if you want, Theresa. On your behalf, I’m too ashamed.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Jul 14, 2017 8:40 PM
Reply to  BigB

Why should you be ashamed, BigB? Were you yourself knowingly complicit in the rape of Palestine?
Instead of hanging your head in shame, why not proudly stand up on the basis of what you now know, and in solidarity with all of the oppressed of Palestine and the world, decry the establishment that was complicit and call for its final and utter dissolution?
The only “British” guilty of crimes against humanity in the Middle East or anywhere else are the upper echelons of the military and attendant government bureaucracies and ministries, and the ‘corporate rich’ who activekt participate in and are served by the entire apparatus of power and privilege.
Ordinary Brits, like ordinary Israelis, or ordinary people everywhere, to the degree that they have been brainwashed by their education and the constant din of the propaganda to which they are constantly being subjected, and consequently do not know their true interests, are but pawns in the great game of elite capitalist rule.
To anyone who thinks that I myself should partake in any feelings or admissions of responsibility for the consciously perpetrated crimes against humanity of those who rule my country of origin, Canada — PFFT!

BigB
BigB
Jul 15, 2017 12:50 PM
Reply to  Norman Pilon

@Norm: the point I was trying to make was symbolic, and a bit tongue in cheek. Treason May knows no shame, and is both Islamophobic and a Zionist to boot. According to Gilad Atzmon – she is our first Israeli Prime Minister. Our Government (occasionally) pays lip service to a solution to the “Palestinian Problem” – which I’m sure they would like to be the same as another countries historic solution to the “Jewish Problem”… 😉
As Mohandeer and I have touched on (on the ‘Hungary’ forum): beyond the historic intransigence; the biggest drawback to any future solution is 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Levant Basin – that Israel want to recover with Cyprus and Greece – but not Syria or Palestine. And definitely NOT Russia. The energy companies involved include British concerns: and the profits will go to the City. That is why Treason May covers what should be shame, with national “pride”. It’s good for business.
After 100 years: the rape goes on… Children still die: for profit.

BigB
BigB
Jul 16, 2017 10:28 AM
Reply to  BigB

Erratum: Gilad Atzmon said May was our first Jewish PM (Benjamin Disraeli?): not Israeli. Doh!!!

John
John
Jul 16, 2017 3:25 PM
Reply to  BigB

First UK WOMAN Israeli PM?

CF
CF
Jul 13, 2017 10:14 PM

Thank you very much for publishing this brilliant piece; Mr Pilger is an sensitive and perceptive journalist and they are few and far between.

Dead World Walking
Dead World Walking
Jul 13, 2017 9:56 PM

John Pilger.
A beacon in this dark world.

labrebisgalloise
labrebisgalloise
Jul 13, 2017 7:04 PM

Reblogged this on The Prophet Motif.

Alan
Alan
Jul 13, 2017 6:08 PM

Whilst Zionism continues to be equated with Judaism and not the intolerant, political ideology of hate it is, then the terror of Zionism will claim more victims.

archie1954
archie1954
Jul 13, 2017 5:42 PM

Zionists stole Palestinian lands and the US was complicit in the theft!

BigB
BigB
Jul 14, 2017 12:10 AM
Reply to  archie1954

You’ll have to explain that one to me archie? From the Balfour Declaration, through Mandated Palestine, the brutal quashing of the Arab Uprising, collective punishment, creating and training the Haganah, the “special night squads”, collusion in the Nakba – I thought it was a quintessentially British Colonial affair. Wasn’t Truman opposed to the creation of a Jewish State?

John
John
Jul 16, 2017 3:33 PM
Reply to  BigB

If Truman was opposed to the creation of Israel he could have exercised his UN veto to stop it.
He didn’t – primarily because the US zionists helped him to get elected as US President.
The process began under the British with the Balfour Declaration but by the 1940s it was apparent that the US was the emerging world superpower and they took over the UK role.
In 1947, Britain was broke and needing US loans to keep financially float.
In the US, zionists pressurised the Truman administration not to grant loans to the UK.
To avoid unfavourable US publicity, the UK largely allowed the zionists free reign in Palestine.
As a result, the zionists waged an all-out guerrilla war against British forces in Palestine.
The kinds of measures adopted against the Palestinians were never used against the zionists.
If they had been, the illegal terrorist zionist state would never have come into existence.

Greg Bacon
Greg Bacon
Jul 19, 2017 4:25 PM
Reply to  BigB

Nope, Truman was for creating ‘Stolenland,’ AKA Israel, it was his Joint Chiefs of Staff that were against it because it would make for endless troubles and wars that would drag in the USA.

John
John
Jul 19, 2017 4:37 PM
Reply to  Greg Bacon

I believe the Truman State Department was also strongly opposed to recognising the illegal zionist state.
This may explain why Truman let McCarthy run his “red scare” campaign against the State Department?

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Jul 13, 2017 5:08 PM

Reblogged this on Taking Sides.

leruscino
leruscino
Jul 13, 2017 4:47 PM

Reblogged this on leruscino.

rehmat1
rehmat1
Jul 13, 2017 4:44 PM

“Remember the solidarity shown to Palestine here and everywhere and remember also that there is a cause to which many people have committed themselves, difficulties and terrible obstacles notwithstanding. Why? Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights,”Professor Edward Wadie Said (1935-2003).
We all agree about one state – which is the only ethical, universal and viable solution. However, the universalism is very foreign to Jewish culture. The world “Shalom” doesn’t mean “peace” – in Jewish culture it mean “security of the Jewish people”. The “loving your neighbor” is quite foreign to Jewish culture,”Israeli-British author and Jazz-player Gilad Atzmon in a speech he delivered at the Stuttgart Conference on Palestine held in Germany on November 26-28, 2010.
https://rehmat1.com/2010/12/11/gilad-atzmon-israelis-are-subject-to-palestinians-kindness/

StAug
StAug
Jul 13, 2017 4:17 PM

“In 2011, I was struck by the ease with which one of Britain’s most acclaimed novelists, Ian McEwan, a man bathed in the glow of bourgeois enlightenment, accepted the Jerusalem Prize for literature in the apartheid state.”
Not just any acclaimed novelist. mind you: an acclaimed novelist who wrote a pro-invasion-of-Iraq novel (Saturday). Key set piece: all those “well-meaning-but-naive folks” who marched against the (wholly illegal) blitzkrieg/ invasion. Key metaphor: the doctor-protag’s surgical removal of bad, bad cells in the name of a better, longer life for the body in question! And, dare I say it, history has proven McEwan to be… uh…. well…. a total fucking shit-eating Dupe. There’s no Useful Idiot quite like a Useful Idiot of Talent.

StAug
StAug
Jul 13, 2017 4:08 PM

I can not wait to watch the flood of trolls that will come in on this one…

mohandeer
mohandeer
Jul 13, 2017 3:38 PM

Reblogged this on Worldtruth and commented:
John Pilger is still one of the most credible and honest journalists to be able to proclaim his integrity intact.

binra
binra
Jul 13, 2017 3:14 PM

A compulsive liar is of the belief that one’s own deceit cannot be defined or accepted to be a lie when used to protect a self-image, a special identity, against attack. Attack that is innately ascribed to ‘other-self and other-people regardless anything they say of do. National Security is such a liar. Narrative control operates the same way for the personal as for the collective.
The ‘right to defend’ is power issuing from a cultivated sense of victimhood and vengeance. The idol of self-specialness in victim and in victory, is the father of the lie that projects its worthless ‘self’ onto a hated other – so as to invalidate them, take power over life and lord it over them.
Though these traits may be exemplified in some more than others, the core pattern is something to be vigilant against in ourselves – for it resides in the foundations of the human personality structure as the nature of power-struggle arising from the wish to assert and impose it rather than live the power of our true creative choices.
Exactly who in the ‘Zionist’, US and UK/EU operates the transgenerational ‘will to power’ may not be answerable – for subservience to power-worship is the hollowing out of the individuality to serve as a tool. That they know this is evidenced by making tools of useful idiots – but the idiot looks downstream to feel self-important, while upstream is opaque to the power that makes or breaks according to its own dictate. Give due sacrifice then, that you may be favoured when others are singled out!
The will to power is a purpose that embodies a ‘power class’ who recognize and resonate in life as defined by hatred of powerlessness – given power. Who worships vengeance has accepted a blind god of hate in return for private fantasy gratifications acted out over and over in defiance and denial of true.
Empire in the old sense is obsolete as a result of the technology to capture and condition the mind. Everything is thus considered for its use in ‘psychological operations’ of a full spectrum dominance over what is allowed to be thought, said or done. If mind-control via fear, division and framed outcomes is revealed as the foundation of the ‘power structure’ – then the waking and reclaiming of true Consciousness from the robotic sleep of golem reaction is the undoing of a reversal in consciousness.

tutisicecream
tutisicecream
Jul 13, 2017 3:10 PM

I remember reading John Pilger’s book of Essays Hidden Agendas when it was published some 20 years ago and realised what a powerful writer he really was of contemporary hidden history, being able to write from such a personal perspective about crucial political issues. This piece has all those characteristics.
It is clear when you understand the Palestinian’s plight, thanks the the likes of Pilger, how cowardly the Zionist ideology really is, hiding as it does behind the anti-Semitic persecution of the Jewish people while carrying out similar atrocities on the Palestinian people.
He rightly homes in on the author Ian McEwan and the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland as people who as he says “have never known war but they love the imperial game of war”
We can add to that the politically weak arguments proffered by Thom Yorke of Radiohead with the Guardian’s support, seemingly mocking Ken Loach for questioning why they were playing in Tel Aviv? https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jul/12/thom-yorke-radiohead-ken-loach-criticises-israel-gig.
Sickening really when you compare Yorke’s justification to someone like Roger Waters who not only refuses to profit from the Israel state but actively campaigns and speaks out against Israel’s persecution of Palestinians with the help of their US enablers. https://youtu.be/Gej7TMjwja4
In an appeal to Radiohead, who have campaigned for freedom for the Tibetans, Waters said, ” In asking you not to perform in Israel, Palestinians have appealed to you to take one small step to help pressure Israel to end its violation of basic rights and international law. Surely if making a stand against the politics of division, of discrimination and of hate means anything at all, it means standing against it everywhere — and that has to include what happens to Palestinians every day.”
Despite the eloquent appeal the concert goes ahead seemingly with the Guardian’s full support. They even offer a plug for the date of the concert at the end of their report…

BigB
BigB
Jul 13, 2017 6:15 PM
Reply to  tutisicecream

Damn Thom Yorke: and Johnie Greenwood’s Palestinian wife… What are they thinking? Don’t they realise that Israel’s behaviour is not going to change through normalising it… They are a terrorist supremacist rogue state that shoots children on a daily basis. One of the latest was a boy blinded in one eye by a ‘non-lethal’ sponge tipped round… Now I’ve got to BDS one of my favourite bands… I respect Radiohead’s right to make up their own minds… So I can make up mine… Fuck ’em.

Greg Bacon
Greg Bacon
Jul 13, 2017 2:31 PM

The road to ME peace goes thru Palestine, but you won’t hear that from the corrupt, lying MSM.
Americans and Palestinians have something in common; they are both living under Israeli occupation, the difference being that Palestinians bravely resist the iron boot hell of Zionist terrorists while Americans cheer on their subjugation, never tiring of giving free money and weapons to that Apartheid nightmare while being told by Congress that there’s no money to repair our broken infrastructure. Call this what it is; Tribute to the occupying power, Apartheid Israel.

tutisicecream
tutisicecream
Jul 13, 2017 3:16 PM
Reply to  Greg Bacon

I’ve posted a comment but apparently it’s waiting moderation.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Jul 13, 2017 4:36 PM
Reply to  Greg Bacon

I would argue that both Israelis and Americans are living under the same occupation, a racist, white supremacist capitalist (or oligarchical) occupation.
In essence, Israel and the U.S. — as are all of the American vassals the world over (i.e., Japan, the U.K., France, Germany, etc.) — are but a single state entitiy, something that some call an Empire.
As an anologue of what I take to be a misconceived conflation of categories, Dr. T. P. Wilkinson’s clarification of what in ethno-religious terms the states of Israel and the U.S. really are:
“Israel is not a “Jewish” state any more than the US is a Christian state– it is first and foremost a white supremacist state with an ideology concocted in Jewish religious jargon. The US is also a white supremacist state concocted with Christian religious jargon. In both cases the purpose of jargon is to sustain ideological control – it is advertizing language. [my emphasis.]
Don’g fall for that particular advertizing. But one should also be as careful to try to resist the temptation to embarce the equally ersatz and manipulative jargon of “national identity.”
It, too, conflates categories that should be kept conceptually distinct in one’s mind.
Just as the religious jargon serves as cover for a (white) supremacist ideology, so the lingo of “statehood” serves to foster irrational divisions and animosities between people inculcated with an ideology of national pride or patriotism.
The “real” divisions in the American Empire, but not only in that Empire, but now the world over since the entire earth is now in the grips of “capital,” are between, on the hand, ordinary people everywhere and, on the other, the oligarchical classes organized in their rule at various levels and intensities of integration, whether internationally, nationally, regionally or locally.

Brutally Remastered
Brutally Remastered
Jul 13, 2017 10:49 PM
Reply to  Greg Bacon

Ouch! You nailed it.

Seamus Padraig
Seamus Padraig
Jul 14, 2017 8:09 PM
Reply to  Greg Bacon

Preach it, brother! We are all Palestinians now.