Lifted from which page?Took a bit of light reading on holiday. A book I haven't read in over twenty years, the majority of which was written in 1983. Two pages in and still on the runway I'm in familiar territory.
1. Fanning the Flames
In the war of words that has been waged since Israel invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, critics of Israeli actions have frequently been accused of hypocrisy. 1 While the reasons advanced are spurious,* the charge itself has some merit. It is surely hypocritical to condemn Israel for establishing settlements in the occupied territories while we pay for establishing and expanding them. Or to condemn Israel for attacking civilian targets with cluster and phosphorus bombs "to get the maximum kills per hit", when we provide them gratis or at bargain rates, knowing that they will be used for just this purpose. Or to criticize Israel's "indiscriminate" bombardment of heavily-settled civilian areas or its other military adventures while we not only provide the means in abundance but welcome Israel's assistance in testing the latest weaponry under live battlefield conditions - to be sure, against a vastly outmatched enemy, including completely undefended targets, always the safest way to carry out experiments of this sort. In general, it is pure hypocrisy to criticize the exercise of Israeli power while welcoming Israel's contributions towards realizing the U.S. aim of eliminating possible threats, largely indigenous, to American domination of the Middle East region.
That said it was the accompanying note to the spurious reasons that struck me. Substitute Hamas for PLO for the same playbook.
‘Through the summer of 1982, the media were flooded with letters of a strikingly similar format, typically asking of critics: Where were you when...?,” where the gap is filled by the writer’s favorite Palestinian atrocity, often invented. Another typical format was the accusation that it is hypocritical to criticize Israeli atrocities unless one goes on to condemn the Russians in Afghanistan, the Syrians for the terrible massacre in Hama, etc. No similar requirements were imposed when the PLO was bitterly condemned for terrorist atrocities. In fact, it has been a common pretense that the media and others had not condemned PLO atrocities or even that the media have been “pro-PLO" (e.g. , Leon Wieseltier: “There is a scandal, and it is the moral and political prestige of the PLO [in media] coverage of the Middle East”). Entering still further into the world of fantasy, we even find the charge (Robert Tucker) that “numerous public figures in the West, even a number of Western governments” (all unnamed) have “encouraged the PLO in its maximalist course" of “winnertake-all,” i.e., destruction of Israel. When the intellectual history of this period is someday written, it will scarcely be believable.
I suppose the point here is that it has never been written which goes a long way to explaining why we are where we are, i.e this from 1956 that sounds like a report from 2025.
The Israeli occupying army carried out bloody atrocities in the Gaza Strip, killing “at least 275 Palestinians immediately after capturing the Strip during a brutal house-to-house search for weapons and fedayeen in Khan Yunis" and killing 111 Palestinians in “another massive bloodletting” at the Rafah refugee camp in “disorders" after “Israeli troops stormed through the hovels, rounding up refugees for intelligence screenings." General E. L. M. Burns, Commander of the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), commented that this furnished “very sad proof of the fact that the spirit that inspired the notorious Deir Yassin massacre of 1948 is not dead among some of the Israeli armed forces." The head of the Gaza observer force, Lt.-Col. R. F. Bayard of the U.S. Army, reported that treatment of civilians was “unwarrantedly rough” and that “a good number of persons have been shot down in cold blood for no apparent reason." Fie also reported that many UN relief officials were missing and presumed executed by the Israelis and that there had been extensive looting and wanton destruction of property.
Lifted the text from here ...
Fateful Triangle : The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians : Noam Chomsky : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
world politics:politcs:political science:current affairs:archive.org
It makes nonsense of the idea that October 7th was the "start" of something.
