[Bluestar]

Johann Hari: Israel is suppressing a secret it must face

How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago end up throwing filth at cowering Palestinians?


When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will guzzle down your hormone replacement therapy with a glass of champagne and wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to have that hangover.

She will look in the mirror and think – I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I'm still standing. Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old secret she has to face. I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer's, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes.

She has provided the one lonely spot in the Middle East where gay people are not hounded and hanged, and where women can approach equality.

But I can't do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of ****. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer, Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: "Recently there were very heavy rains, and the **** started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn't act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time..." He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six per cent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage.

Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting "the wrong way", the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing "a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions".

So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago with a promise to be "a light unto the nations" end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population?

The beginnings of an answer lie in the secret Israel has known, and suppressed, all these years. Even now, can we describe what happened 60 years ago honestly and unhysterically? The Jews who arrived in Palestine throughout the twentieth century did not come because they were cruel people who wanted to snuffle out Arabs to persecute. No: they came because they were running for their lives from a genocidal European anti-Semitism that was soon to slaughter six million of their sisters and their sons.

They convinced themselves that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land". I desperately wish this dream had been true. You can see traces of what might have been in Tel Aviv, a city that really was built on empty sand dunes. But most of Palestine was not empty. It was already inhabited by people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs. They were completely innocent of the long, hellish crimes against the Jews.

When it became clear these Palestinians would not welcome becoming a minority in somebody else's country, darker plans were drawn up. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1937: "The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war."

So, for when the moment arrived, he helped draw up Plan Dalit. It was – as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it – "a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; and laying siege to and bombarding population centres". In 1948, before the Arab armies invaded, this began to be implemented: some 800,000 people were ethnically cleansed, and Israel was built on the ruins. The people who ask angrily why the Palestinians keep longing for their old land should imagine an English version of this story. How would we react if the 30m stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled? Wouldn't we long forever for our children to return to Cornwall and Devon and London? Would it take us only 40 years to compromise and offer to settle for just 22 per cent of what we had?

If we are not going to be endlessly banging our heads against history, the Middle East needs to excavate 1948, and seek a solution. Any peace deal – even one where Israel dismantled the wall and agreed to return to the 1967 borders – tends to crumple on this issue. The Israelis say: if we let all three million come back, we will be outnumbered by Palestinians even within the 1967 borders, so Israel would be voted out of existence. But the Palestinians reply: if we don't have an acknowledgement of the Naqba (catastrophe), and our right under international law to the land our grandfathers fled, how can we move on?

It seemed like an intractable problem – until, two years ago, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted the first study of the Palestinian Diaspora's desires. They found that only 10 per cent – around 300,000 people – want to return to Israel proper. Israel can accept that many (and compensate the rest) without even enduring much pain. But there has always been a strain of Israeli society that preferred violently setting its own borders, on its own terms, to talk and compromise. This weekend, the elected Hamas government offered a six-month truce that could have led to talks. The Israeli government responded within hours by blowing up a senior Hamas leader and killing a 14-year-old girl.

Perhaps Hamas' proposals are a con; perhaps all the Arab states are lying too when they offer Israel full recognition in exchange for a roll-back to the 1967 borders; but isn't it a good idea to find out? Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale **** pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years.

Johann Hari: Israel is suppressing a secret it must face - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

[TheQueen]

Very well-written article.

Israel is a big symbol of hypocrisy which for some reason all the Western countries support in spite of its blatant breach and violation of human rights and its military occupation of Palestinian land.

[Hanbali]

May Allah [s] liberate Palestine!

[Bluestar]

Originally Posted by TheQueen

Very well-written article.

Israel is a big symbol of hypocrisy which for some reason all the Western countries support in spite of its blatant breach and violation of human rights and its military occupation of Palestinian land.

It is, i'm a huge fan of Johann Hari, he's recently won an Orwell Prize for making political writings seem like an art form and i think he deserved that prize for sure. All of his articles are well researched and he does insert his opinion and passion into it as well, which most people would argue isn't objective but i think, it's real.

:insert thumb up thingy here:

[Hussain87]

Damn the Israeli lobby

Israel's 60th anniversary will undoubtedly produce many negative opinion pieces in the UK press. In the latest assault, Johann Hari sums up his feelings towards Israel in The Independent: "Whenever I try to mouth these words [of reassurance for Israel], a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of EDITED."

In his opinion piece, Hari's use of an invented quotation is enough to bring the rest of the content and his own judgement into disrepute:

Hari relies upon the notorious anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe, who openly acknowledges that he is not objective and cares little about factual accuracy, readily admitting that ideology drives his historical writings and statements.
Using Pappe's accusations of a systematic plan of "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians to create the Israeli state, Hari quotes Israeli PM David Ben-Gurion: "The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war."

Having previously employed this particular quote in a November 2006 op-ed, it is surprising that Hari has repeated it as "revisionist" historian and critic of Israel, Benny Morris, wrote in a letter at the time to The Independent, addressing the charge of "ethnic cleansing" and referring to the above quote as:

an invention, pure and simple, either by Hari or by whomever he is quoting (Ilan Pappe?)....

Neither Ben-Gurion nor the Zionist movement 'planned' the displacement of the 700,000-odd Arabs who moved or were removed from their homes in 1948. There was no such plan or blanket policy. Transfer was never adopted by the Zionist movement as part of its platform; on the contrary, the movement always accepted that the Jewish state that arose would contain a sizeable Arab minority.

Hari questions Israel's very legitimacy through the lens of historical revisionism. Ignoring 3000 years of Jewish history and legitimate rights to the land, Hari claims that "It [Palestine] was already inhabited by people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs." In fact, it was the Arabs who attempted to expel the Jews during Israel's 1947-48 War of Independence as Palestinian Arabs mounted attacks on Jewish communities followed by the invasion of five Arab armies from surrounding states.
To reinforce his belief that Jews have no connection to the land, Hari employs a ridiculous analogy: "How would we react if the 30m stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled?" Thus Hari compares non-existent Kurdish historical links to Britain with proven and legitimate Jewish links to the land of Israel.
(See here for a detailed rebuttal of the charges against Israel's legitimate historical roots.)

In a modern day "poisoning the wells" libel, Hari accuses Israel of sole responsibility for polluting West Bank groundwater supplies. It is no secret that Israel has a chronic water problem and lags behind many other developed nations in environmental protection. However, the Palestinians are equally to blame for polluting the environment in the West Bank, which has, in turn, also caused damage to Israel's own water supplies. The West Bank mountain aquifer is one of the largest freshwater sources supplying both Israelis and Palestinians. Indeed, Israelis and Palestinians have jointly tackled such pollution and Israel has used its own expertise to provide Palestinian population centres with sewage treatment facilities. Why would Israel purposely destroy its own limited water supply?
Continuing his sewage analogy, Hari simplisticly accuses Israel of punishing Gaza's population for voting "the wrong way". Has Hari forgotten the continuing terrorism and missile attacks on Israeli population centres such as Sderot? Or the refusal of Hamas to conform to the international community's demands to renounce terror, recognise Israel and adhere to previously signed agreements?
Hari claims that "the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working." In fact, the IDF is restricting the entry of materials such as pipes into Gaza as Hamas has preferred to use these for the manufacture of Qassam rockets rather than dealing with the repair of the sewage system.
Hari's opinion piece concludes: "Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale EDITED pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years."

Perhaps Hari needs to ask what kind of columnist writes such one-sided, biased and inflammatory material with enough holes to drive a horse and cart through, including the use of a doctored quote.

Hari has a track record of misguided and anti-Israel opinion pieces, once tastelessly describing the Virgin Mary as a "Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem", and present-day pregnant Palestinian women as "21st century Marys" who "have been giving birth in startlingly similar conditions to those suffered by Mary 2,000 years ago."

Hari has also previously attacked HonestReporting UK, preferring to abuse us rather than addressing the issues raised. Then, as now, we stand by the materials we have provided our readers to respond to Hari's latest screed.

There are almost too many areas that a letter to the editor could focus on. Please pick one or two and send your considered comments to The Independent - letters@independent.co.uk