Gaza: The bombed open air prison

I want to thank my daughter  Lydia for imploring me to watch a Netflix documentary, “The Devil Next Door.” It has just been released and I ask all of my readers to watch this 3 part horror depiction of Ivan Demjanjuk, a brutal murderer and torturer of Jews in Treblinka. This man who lived quietly in Cleveland, a church going, Ukranian, father, was  deported to Israel and tried. The devastating testimony of former camp survivors adds to the horror. It is riveting and left me to wonder once again how I escaped from being gassed when I would have been 7 years old.

My connection to Palestinians is our refugee experience, mine and the Palestinians. It is my awareness of man’s inhumanity to man. As a much younger woman, I believed the lies from the Israeli side. My awareness, the eye  opener took a long time because  there was such a strong propaganda system that continues to prevent the reality, the truth, from being seen and understood.  I became motivated in my late sixties to really look, with the help of a member of my family who had Palestinian friends and who was a peacemaker. One had to  to go to the West Bank to observe, to see the land taken over by the settlers and the Palestinian houses invaded and destroyed.  One had to talk with Palestinians who live in Beir Zeit to hear and see the truth. One had to learn about the prisons and to finally understand that Palestinians were seen as evil terrorists.  One had to understand Sabra and Shatilla and to read Ilan Pappe’s work, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.” Israelis learned to kill and developed their own reasons to always defend themselves. It became  an illusion to justify their goals, a Jewish state only for Jews.What a disaster. In order to accomplish this, Israel had to be an apartheid state and  attempted to keep this  hidden. For those who recognized apartheid, they became an enemy of the Jews. This deeply flawed paradigm became Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.

Zionists have given up everything that has to do with humanity. Empathy for  the “state,”  Zionism created by Theodore Herzel  at the end of the 19th century, was colonialist, racist and super nationalist. Nation States became the ideal then and so a “nation state”, was the goal of Zionism in Israel. 

Critics of Israel  are accused of anti-Semitism and labeled as self  hating Jews. Formerly an anti-Semite was someone who hated Jews because they were Jews. Now an anti-Semite is somebody hated by the Zionists. How hateful and racist, how deprecating the Israeli school books that present Palestinians as aggressive terrorists, when it is the Zionists who are the violent  aggressors. How dehumanized the Zionists  that can  see no  human aspects of Palestinians. The Zionist ideology sees “us” and “them”. Isn’t this similar to the  1930’s and 40’s in Fascist Germany?

And now  at the end  of Ramadan,  just over 3 weeks ago, there is a constant thud of airstrikes and missiles over Gaza. Hamas unleashed 200 rockets over  Sderot with 4 dead after Israelis killed and maimed hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza.  Missiles and bombs in densely populated areas destroy buildings, young Palestinian families try to flee with just the clothes on their back.Most of them, very young and children. The old have died. The Israeli army is strong and powerful attacking Gaza that is an open air prison. The Gaza rockets have killed few. They are symbolic  A horrible humanitarian crisis continues. The situation is desperate. It is endless and horrendous. Is the goal to take out all of Gaza? Why don’t I see articles in the papers? Why isn’t this discussed on news programs?  When will then US open its eyes?  When will the reality be seen and stopped ?

Salam,

Lillian

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JEW AGAINST JEW

The 80 year old rabbi attacked by the settlers a few short weeks ago is horrific. I cannot help but equate the Zionists and settlers as intertwined with Nazi ideology as seen through their racism and hate.

Jew against Jew is present in the German political climate. People like myself and other political activists, many former German Jews whose families died in the camps are now called anti-Semites for their political beliefs. Insanity is what comes to mind.

Jews living in Germany are  closely aligned to the Israeli “nation state.” a country that lacks reason and empathy. I believe nationalism in any form is dangerous. It means exceptionalism, and attitudes of moral superiority, a hotbed for racism that is heightened by propaganda. What is real here?  Zionism has taken the German hatred of Jews in the 1930’s and transformed it to a hatred of Palestinians. It is virulent . It has also served a purpose to destroy Palestinian land and culture as it embraces the lies of Germans towards  Jews who stood in the way of so-called racial purity. It is for me an obsession with racial purity, that has  a frightening connection with Naziism. So many decades later, the Zionist desire for an ethnic Jewish state only reeks of perversion and sickness.

I have evidence to exemplify a cruel component of Jew against Jew. As my readers know, I along with 6 other elderly Jews set out to sail to Gaza. We were human rights activists who believe in justice. It was clear to us that without justice there could be no peace.Our mission was to show we were Jews who did not support the Zionist agenda. but embraced Palestinians who had no freedom. We wanted their freedom. Instead, we were taken over by the  Israeli navy in international waters. From the moment our beloved Jonathan Shapiro , now a combatant for peace, was tasered around his heart, from the moment we were towed to Ashdot by the navy who wore high boots and held rifles that could kill, I wondered how Jews could do this to Jews.We were not criminals but dissenters who spoke out against Israel-Zionist apartheid and their dehumanizing policies. Instead we were considered terrorists and enemies of the state. It remains an ongoing  nightmarish horror.

Why is it anti-Semitic to shout against such abuses? If there were in Israel a separation of church and state, the boundaries that are now so blurred might be less likely to justify silencing dissenters on charges of anti-Semitism. Dissent against Israel is not anti-Semitic for it is not a statement against Jews. It is a statement against a nationalist Zionist movement that is guilty of gross human rights abuses. Incongruous as it sounds, it is the actions of the Zionist government against its Palestinian neighbors that has shaped a world response. How can this not create anti Jewish sentiments.

What blindness prevails that propels Zionist Israel to detach itself from the humanity of Palestinians as people just like them? This is why it is so important to make a distinction between Jews and the gross nationalism of the government of Israel. One must be awake to the painful intermarriage of religion and politics that has deepened the Israeli crisis and created a distortion of who is a Jew. How can there be a democracy while Israel continues to hold Palestinians hostage in order to fulfill the fantasy of a Jewish State, a dream that explodes into a nightmare on the backs of the cruel occupation and the murder of Palestinians.

Salam, Lillian

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MY BALI MY PALESTINE

I wrote this poem while spending several weeks in Bali to finish my book

Here in Bali trees are ‘living beings’ for nature, religion and man are one. Frogs and dragonflies live in harmony with all creatures and man. A reddish sun rises on the mountain slope and brings life to all elements of nature. Light in Bali, like no other in the world reveals the forces of nature. The magic of Bali is the night time encounter of the divine in the form of  moon, mountain, sea and trees with the worshipping faithful. It is the magic of Bali at it’s highest.

As light turns from red to orange to deepest blue, as mountain fades into darkness, I think of my Palestine imprisoned in the paranoid face of Israel starved of life and dragon flies. Olive groves and orchards once bloomed on your land, fishermen now dead. Sunlight hides behind Israeli shells No creature to soothe your piercing screams your tortured souls. There is no oneness here, the divine imprisoned by beasts of the night. Creatures have turned into vultures, they eat the flesh of their brothers.

Why this spiritual hell, this soulless occupation and punishment? My Palestine, your suffering is my suffering and I am you. We are the homeless wanderers defiled by our oppressors. Let me hold you in my golden twilight, sweep you into my tree. Under the dying sun we become one with the moon. Lie with me in my stillness, shine light into our darkness To awaken in the purest light of Palestine. 

Salam,

Lillian

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