Jews for Justice for Palestinians
Tikkun Daily
Mondoweiss
Occasionally, I have adapted or edited blog posts for these sites. I will link to that writing from this page and add other non blog pieces..
July 15 2014 Rescuing the Hebrew Covenant - for Tikkun Daily
May 22 2014 UK's Jewish leadership sacrifices all relevance with 'Jewish manifesto' for EU elections - for Mondoweiss
Robert: Below I have pasted something that I would like you to read, if you will--and comment on. You may not agree with my views, but I still want your reaction to this if you have time and energy.
ReplyDeleteThanks,
Bob Tripp Reston, Virginia
Zionism and me 18 April 2018
Bob Tripp, Reston, VA.: berkeleybob50@gmail.com.; 703-742-0929
I am an 86 year old American Jew. I was 15 years old in 1947 when the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states. I was 16 when Israel declared its independence in May 1948.
At the time I did not even think of questioning either of these actions. My adult Jewish relatives were ecstatic. There were no newspaper or radio stories providing any kind of narrative opposing or even questioning these actions. It was as if the Palestinians did not exist. Whatever stories I read and heard or saw in movie house newsreels were all about Israel and how wonderful it all was, a desperately needed refuge for European Jews after the Holocaust. And of course at the time this seemed to make complete sense. The Palestinians? Who were they?
When I was at UC Berkeley in the early 1950s, I even helped establish a chapter of IZFA [The Intercollegiate Zionist Federation of America], which had been set up in the 1930s to lobby among Jewish American youth for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
From 1947 to the early 1980s no one I knew - Jewish or non-Jewish - ever so much as mentioned Palestinians - even after the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians simply were not on most folks' radar screens.
But beginning in the mid-1980s I started listening to, reading and watching various alternative news sources and meeting people much more knowledgeable than I about the Middle East. I was beginning to learn about the reality of Israel/Palestine. It was very disturbing to me that I had not known about that reality until then. But as I learned, that was no accident.
Starting with the Zionist movement’s founding conference in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, Zionists have very successfully waged a campaign of disinformation and no information to cover the truth. The campaign, waged in Europe and America, has been especially effective in the U.S.
Since 1951 the campaign in this country has been led by AIPAC [the American Israel Political Action Committee]--with help from the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish organizations. Virtually all of the mainstream American media have caved into AIPAC. One example: Palestinians who attack Israel are frequently called ‘terrorists’ attacking ‘innocent’ Israelis – rarely if ever does the mainstream media point out that Palestinian attacks on Israel are the only thing they can do against the overwhelming power of and tight control by Israel.
But even if there were any seriousness on Israel's part for a two-state solution, it has become impossible: the 500,000+ Jewish "settlers" now living in communities scattered all over the West Bank make such a solution impossible--unless the settlers were forced to leave and return to Israel. Fat chance!
So what do I think is the answer to Palestine/Israel? One state is the only possibility, I think...that's all I have room for.