Humiliation and Collective Punishment in Israel

With a title like the one I chose, I will probably get "googled" along with a deluge of anti-Israeli hate articles. Sorry (in advance) to disappoint you....

In the latest issue of TIME Magazine the article, "No Room for Civility at the Checkpoint", "journalist" Jamil Hamad, bends the truth, and in doing so, keeps the fire of anti-Israelism going. TIME doesn't have anyone around to tell the full story, and, the way it looks, even if they had, they wouldn't tell it.

To be FAIR, I will allow Jamil to begin first (the link of the full article is at the bottom):

"Every day at the Israeli checkpoint going from my home in Bethlehem to visit TIME's Jerusalem Bureau, I see a sign that makes me laugh. Written in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, it says: "Peace Be With You."

It's a pretty sentiment, suitable for the birthplace of Jesus Christ. The sign, put up by the Israeli Tourism Ministry, may be written in Arabic script, but its message of peace is clearly not meant for Arabs - not for me, not for the hundreds of Palestinian laborers, school kids, businessmen, teachers, people going to see doctors, who must run the daily gauntlet of Israeli security checks. A tourist who wants to go from Bethlehem to Jerusalem can make the journey by car in 15 minutes. I must go on foot and, depending on the mood of the young Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint, the trip can take an hour, two, three. Or sometimes, if there's a security alert, they simply close down the checkpoint to all Palestinians. Peace Be With You.

It's humiliating, and hard not to interpret this as a collective punishment against Palestinians."

Needless to say, Jamil does not dare mention why Israel would want to do such a terrible deed as to keep people hours at checkpoints.

He doesn't mention years of terror inside Israel that left close to 1,000 (that is ONE THOUSAND for all those who don't like to read numbers) Israeli citizens murdered and TENS of thousands wounded and traumatized for life by the only modern Arab/Muslim invention known worldwide - suicide bombing.

TIME journalist Hamad does not mention how Israelis fear to get on public buses or enter a cafe, or have to look each passer-by up and down to make sure he wouldn't blow up next to him.

Jamil Hamad doesn't mention how IDF soldiers on the front would call home each day to find out if their families were ok and hadn't become a number that no one in the world seems to care about...

As I wrote, this is NEEDLESS to say. Why should Jamil say this? The question is not "why" he would write an article as if the Israelis woke up one sunny day and decided to build a wall keeping Palestinians out, just because Israelis love the hardships this brought on them.

The question is WHY such a prestigious magazine as TIME should want to publish it. Let him build a blog and write whatever he feels like!

Before I move on to the main reason for this article, I will ask Jamil/TIME one more question that nobody seems to ask: Why should Israel have to allow Jamil, who lives in a PLO/Hamas run autonomous region, in a 100% Arab city (Bethlehem) with an Arab mayor he voted for, enter Israel in the first place? Can Israelis go to Syria? Iran, Saudi Arabia? They can go to Jordan, but Jordan has a law against selling land to Jews....

But - all that above would be "old hat" if not for the following admission (left wing haters of Israel: Attention!):

There is humiliation and collective punishment in Israel!!!

Should harsh treatment of terrorists and a public that supports their actions against anyone who is a Jew be called "humiliation"? Of course not! The Arabs know that if they renounce terror, their lives will go back to what they were pre-2000. This treatment is something that they chose to take on themselves!

But true humiation does exist, but it is aimed solely at the Jewish Israeli public. I will now describe a typical Israeli day which anyone who has been here can attest to (and that TIME wishes to hide from YOU!):

I cannot just go to have a coffee with a friend. He/she and I have to be body checked. The guards take special care with me since I have gotten thick around the waste in the last couple of years...

I have to take out the things in my pocket. If I have a brief case, the contents are hand checked. I don't have to explain the dirty socks, but that is humiliating. If my friend is a woman, it takes longer (they have more things in their bags, I guess...

The old woman in front of me is checked also. Amazing! She looks like anyone of our sweet Grandmas, but she has to be checked. If a "Palestinian" terrorist would give his pregnant Irish girlfriend a box with a bomb in it just before her flight on El-Al (he promised to meet her in Ireland later ...) in the 70's, this grandma could have gotten the same...

After coffee, I walk to a meeting across the street. Again checked. This time it is taking a bit longer since a man came in a wheel chair which has to be checked. The man tells the guard he was wounded in the 1973 war... the guard tries to be polite while checking him...

After the meeting, we go on to lunch, and the five people I am with who all look exactly like the man who is doing the searching, but, he's got to do his job.

And so on.

This humiliation is daily. We Israelis have gotten "used" to it and don't like to talk about it. Not just to this direct humiliation, but to humiliation that is so much subtler:

The humiliation of a world always expecting Israel to come up with some "solution" to a problem that only the Arabs can solve.

The humiliation of signing treaties that we all know will never be held up by the other side.

The humiliation of knowing that even if we give back all of the land of Judea and Samaria, the Arabs will just find another excuse to continue fighting us.

The humiliation of the Chutzpah where we are told that Jews have no RIGHT to live in Judea (yes, look on the Roman maps... it was never called The West Bank) - the cradle of our people, named after our people! (1)

The humiliation of a world in which Spanish girls in Madrid (who probably would call ETA "terrorists"...) wore bikini bomb belts in an anti-Israel demonstration. (If you don't believe me... click here...)

The humiliation of kids with piercing around the world supporting people who, if they could, would make those punks live different lives whether they wanted to or not.

The humectation of a man like Richard Gere who comes here to get his picture taken with a beaming Shimon Peres and a poor Palestinian child telling us to make "peace" (what - do I tell him which movie to make???) The humiliation that after 6 million Jews were slaughtered in Europe, anti-Semitism, in its most basic form still survives.

The humiliation of having to feel embarrassed when yet another Israeli or Jewish person receives a Nobel prize for developing....

The humiliation of having to open the New York Times (or any other mainstream media form) and hearing yet another Jew write lies and half truths against his own people, just so he can make money/get an Oscar/make himself feel "better than "those Jews"...

The humiliation of knowing the truth that the whole story of a "Palestinian People" is nothing but another form of a subtle Arab propaganda weapon, and not being able to say it aloud, unless you have the naivety of that little boy who asked why the king was naked.

The humiliation of the UN allowing Yasser Arafat to give his speech in the UN with a pistol at his hip.

The humiliation of a UN member state vowing to "wipe Israel off the map", and not to be kicked out as the by-laws state.

The humiliation of men like James Baker who make so much money in Arab oil tell the world that it is Israel's fault.

The humiliation of a TIME article, written by Jamil Hamad that doesn't even have the intelligence to say the simple truth:

Before 2000, before Arafat unleashed his glorious war (against civilians), there was no wall. There were no checkpoints. Arabs drove with minimal interference all over Israel. Again, we know why he didn't say this, this is simply intelligent use of Arab propaganda. The question is why TIME didn't.

The Hebrew prophets were a special people. They all used a very important way of teaching. No matter what they said, no matter how terrible their criticism was of the Jewish people, they always ended their books with words of hope, to put things into perspective. I will follow in their footsteps.

Sometimes I think that Israelis don't talk about this humiliation because they've gotten used to it. That they don't really care. But (and Jamil! listen carefully!) maybe, just maybe, there is a different reason:

Sometimes I think it is because the truth is so self evident to us. We do not have to make up stories. We don't need the lies and propaganda that the Nazis, the Communists in Russia and the Arabs need.

We know that we aren't the purest people we might like to be. We make mistakes. On the other hand, we don't hide them, we talk them over, again and again. We try to fix them.

Maybe the Israelis don't mind these humiliations because: we know the truth.

Maybe we also know that in struggles like this, as terrible as they may be, just like with the Nazis and the Soviet Union, the truth is the most powerful weapon.

* NOTE: If you don't know what I have written here, please either learn or stop talking about the "Palestinians" and "Israelis" - you don't have a clue.

Time Article: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1596087,00.html

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