Israel’s Ambassador to the UK and his deception

Comment by Khalid Amayreh in Occupid Jerusalem Israeli ambassador to Britain Ron Prosor has once again claimed that the United Kingdom is becoming a “hotbed” of anti-Israeli propaganda. In an opinion piece published in Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph, Prosor alleged out that Israel was facing an intensified campaign of delegitimization, demonization and double standards. “Britain has become a hotbed for radical anti-Israeli views and a haven for disingenuous calls for a one-state solution,” he ranted. Ignoring the criminal role Israeli universities and academic institutions are playing in consolidating the Israeli occupation and tormenting Palestinians, Prosor criticized efforts by the British University and College Union to sever links with Israeli universities. Finally, Prosor castigated “disingenuous calls” for a one-state solution, which he called “a euphemism for the destruction of Israel.” Liar Well, does this man really think that the people of the UK, indeed the people of the world, are not aware of what Israel has been and is doing to the Palestinians? Shouldn’t he realize that Israeli criminality transcends reality and that the utter depravity of Israeli behavior has already gone beyond the pale of what is humanly acceptable? Let us consider some of Israel’s criminal behavior in the academic field vis-à-vis her Palestinian victims. Israel is barring thousands of Palestinian college students from furthering their university studies and higher education by preventing them from traveling abroad. Even students from the Gaza Strip are not allowed to attend college in the West Bank and vice versa. Israel claims that the draconian measure is taken for “security reasons.” However, almost everyone realizes that the real reason for Israel’s silent war on Palestinian academia and education is to keep the Palestinian society in a perpetual state of inferiority vis-à-vis Israel. Last week, when Israel barred several students from the Gaza Strip who had won Fulbright grants, from reaching their colleges in the US, one Israeli official argued, “why should we allow more Arab students on US campuses to attack Israel?” But what is it that Israel is worried about in terms of allowing Palestinian students to travel abroad and have a brief respite from Israel’s “bastion of democracy and human rights”?! Indeed, a state that has a clean record in terms of human rights, civil liberties and justice for all should have nothing to fear. However, it is amply clear that Israel is sinking from head to toe in its own filth and racism and is trying to conceal or blur this fact through lying and more lying and still more lying, which is what people like Prosor are doing. This is why the terrorist state dreads the prospects of people around the world knowing the truth about its manifestly criminal behavior against the Palestinian people. Israel is also detaining hundreds of Palestinian students, lecturers, professors and academics in internment camps in southern Israel, such as the notorious Kitziot concentration camp in the Negev desert, mainly because of their non-violent opposition to the Israeli occupation. The vast bulk of these detainees are kept in jail, often in solitary confinement, without charge or trial. A few years ago, Mustafa Shawar, a detainee at Kitziot, informed this writer that on several occasions he had appealed to the Jewish military “judge” at the Treblinka-like facility to tell him why he was being incarcerated so that he wouldn’t commit the same violation again once he was released. Shawar, a senior lecturer at the University of Hebron, said the judge paid no attention to his just request. “He told me that he wouldn’t grant me the privilege of knowing why I was in jail because, as he said, the Jews are the masters and non-Jews are the slaves and the chosen people are under no moral or legal obligation to explain to the inferiors why they are being mistreated.” Today, Shawar is still languishing at Kitziot for the fourth successive year, not knowing why he is being tormented by a state that claims to be a light upon the nations and the only true democracy in the Middle East. Shawar is not an exceptional case. He only epitomizes the fate of thousands of Palestinian detainees and hostages languishing in Israeli detention camps for harboring ideas and thoughts that the Ashkenazi establishment deems too dangerous. And how about Azzam Salhab, Professor of Comparative Religion, also at Hebron University, who has been languishing in the same desert concentration camp for eight years on vague and amorphous charges such “constituting a danger to the safety and security of Israel and the Jewish people”? Is this despicable conduct compatible with true democracy and the rule of law? Well, if the acquisition of physical power justifies oppression of the helpless and the weak, then why on earth should the world demonize Nazi Germany for doing what it did several decades ago? In addition to tormenting and torturing Palestinian academics, Israel is also barring dozens of Palestinian journalists from traveling abroad, ostensibly in order to prevent them from exposing Israeli crimes more directly to the outside world. Last week, I was barred by the Israeli occupation authorities from traveling to Berlin to participate in a media conference, although I’ve never been arrested or accused of any wrongdoing apart from work as a journalist. So, how does Prosor suggest people in the UK and the rest of Europe and the world should relate to these gross violations of human rights by Israel? Should the people of the UK march in the streets of London, Manchester and Liverpool in order to glorify Israel for isolating and starving Palestinians civilians in Gaza and shooting Palestinian school children in the West Bank? Should the people of the UK praise Israel for encouraging the Gestapo-like Jewish settlers to poison Palestinian waters, beat Palestinian shepherds near Tuwwani, and take over Palestinian homes, farms and orchards in the West Bank? Should they take to the streets in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to thank Israel for ganging up on and ransacking orphanages and boarding schools in downtown Hebron and throwing thousands of orphaned children onto the streets? Even the Nazis refrained from targeting orphanages. So how is the world, including the people of the UK, supposed to view crack Jewish soldiers who are raiding and terrorizing sleeping children and stealing their food and clothes under the false rubric of fighting “terror”? Surely, a state that indulges in such acts is a Nazi state par excellence that deserves the harshest condemnation. Indeed, it would be utterly immoral not to condemn this manifestly criminal behavior in the strongest terms. Finally, in his article, Prosor protested calls for the one-state solution, whereby Jews and Arabs live equally in a unitary civil state in all of mandatory Palestine extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan. He called the idea a euphemism for the destruction of Israel, but utterly ignored the fact that it was Israel, not the Palestinians, that decapitated the two-state solution by building hundreds of Jewish-only colonies in the heart of the West Bank, especially in Arab East Jerusalem. So what are the Palestinians supposed to do, having seen Jewish colonies mushrooming in every valley and on every hill of their ancestral country and homeland? Are they supposed to commit collective national suicide by accepting to live in depressing scattered enclaves surrounded by Jewish-only settlements, Jewish-only bypass roads, apartheid walls and Nazi-like barbed fences, enforced by watchtowers manned by trigger-happy Jewish soldiers indoctrinated in Jewish supremacy? And a last word to the brave men and women in the UK and across Europe who have chosen to expose Israeli mendacity. Keep up the good work. Don’t let the emissaries of lies, such as Prosor, get away with their malicious disinformation. Confront them with the naked facts, which are readily available. Don’t let them deceive and mislead the public. Give them a hard time. For sure, as the world defeated Aryan Nazism 65 years ago, the world can and must defeat Zionism, which represents the Nazism of our time.