EIRNS, July 6, 2002
This is the title of a hard-hitting commentary appearing in the July 4 Guardian, by Shlomi Segall, who is an Israeli reserve staff sergeant and a member of Courage to Refuse, which is the organization of 468 Israeli reservist who are refusing to serve in the occupied territories.
Segall charges that "Sharon and his cronies are fighting a colonial war to keep their pet settlement project in place...." He charges that "any suicide attack within Israel, deplorable as it is, is used by Sharon as a pretext for inflicting ever-increasing misery on the 3.5 million inhabitants of Palestine. And if suicide attacks are not forthcoming, you can count on Sharon to provoke them with his so-called targeted killings.... In this so-called war, any pretext is used to inflict the second Nakba (Catastrophe of 1948) on the Palestinians." Segall then details how Sharon policy is not the destruction of the so-called "terrorist infrastructure but at the basic foundations of a society struggling to attain independence and develop its future from under the Israeli army boot."
Segal then attacks the notion that criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic. Sharon "and his generals do not represent the basic values that Israelis, Jews and Arabs stand for. So to criticise the current government of Israel is not to attack the people of Israel, and it is definitely not anti-Semitic. It is not up to Sharon, the 'hero' of such human catastrophes as Kibya (1953), Sabra and Charila (1982), and Jenin (2002), to tell anyone what it is and is not to be Jewish.
"By branding any criticism of the suffering he inflicts on the Palestinians as anti-Semitic, Sharon is enlisting something sacred for the vile colonial and expansionist ends he pursues. People in Britain, Jews and non-Jews alike, should not lend a hand to such a despicable attempt to desecrate the memory of Jewish suffering, and to use it to justify the oppression of another people."
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