The Palestinians' dire need for help is indisputable: the PA is virtually bankrupt and has asked for an immediate injection of $200m, just for basic services, between now and next February.Ghada Karmi/Guardian UK 31.12.05
[...]
According to the 2004 World Bank report, they are suffering "the worst economic depression in modern history": 75% are impoverished, and unemployment rates are 60-70% in Gaza and 30-40% in the West Bank. Without external support, the Palestinian infrastructure and basic services would not survive. The Palestinians have been robbed of their agricultural land and industry and had their trade devastated by Israel's closure regime. They have fewer jobs in Israel, which plans to stop using Palestinian labour in 2008. They have virtually no independent sources of livelihood left.
[...]
for every dollar produced in the occupied territories, 45 cents flows back to Israel
[...]
Foreign funded projects for "democratisation", "reform", "capacity building" and other imported buzz words have doubled. In the absence of a Palestinian state or any hope of one, this becomes an exercise in cynicism. The donors' efforts to ensure the Palestinian security services can fight "terrorism" (ie resistance to occupation), while Israel's army freely assassinates Palestinians, bombs them and demolishes their homes, is immoral.
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Virtually identified with Arab terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism is anathema throughout the non-Muslim world. Virtually identified with ignorance, superstition, intolerance and racism, Christian fundamentalism is anathema to the cultural and intellectual elite in the United States. The recent significant increase in its number of adherents, combined with its widening political influence, nevertheless, make Christian fundamentalism a real threat to democracy in the United States. Although possessing nearly all the important social scientific properties of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, Jewish fundamentalism is practically unknown outside of Israel and certain sections of a few other places. When its existence is acknowledged, its significance is minimized or limited to arcane religious practices and quaint middle European dress, most often by those same non-Israeli elite commentators who see so uncompromisingly the evils inherent in Jewish fundamentalism's Islamic and/or Christian cousins.Jews Against Zionism 01.12.05
from Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel
Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky
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Haaretz: Holocaust survivors go hungry in Israel
...some 40 percent of Holocaust survivors in Israel are living below the poverty line.
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And tempering the Spielberg post below, the Angry Arab reviews Munich:
"Before Munich, NOT AFTER - did you get that, Israel placed a bomb under the car seat of Palestinian writer/artist, Ghassan Kanafani and killed him and killed his niece (14). The niece was not plotting the Munich operation when she was murdered by the Israelis; nor was her uncle. That was BEFORE Munich. Kanafani was best friends with my uncle; they both used to write in Al-Hurriyyah magazine during their days at the Movement of Arab Nationalists. Israel also - BEFORE Munich - sent a letter bomb to Bassam Abu Sharif (a writer and journalist with the PFLP), and left him with life-long scars and bodily damage, and they also sent a letter bomb to Anis Sayigh, a scholar and researcher, who was not a member of any group. But he was a really diligent researcher, and Israel did not appreciate it--I am assuming. This is not easy for me; I have shaken the hands--or what was left of their hands--of both of those men, and Abu Sharif never had a military role - I say this although I never liked Abu Sharif or respected him (read my review of his memoir in Journal of Palestine Studies a few years ago). But those were innocent victims of Israeli killing. They never held guns..."
When I read Foxman's praise and defense of it I almost didn't post anything about the movie. Foxman, without some kind of public acknowledgement of a change of heart, isn't someone I'd listen to about anything, except as a kind of negative compass.
But you can't talk to children with the expectations of adults. And right now the power for all this madness is coming from a vast pool of the infantilized. Spielberg has their attention. The sudden confrontational shock of what's really happening would send them into catatonia, or a kind of disillusioned helplessness, and if they didn't give up completely they'd be more than likely to turn even more desperately to the comforting lies and the hands that feed them those lies.
The naked truth is still taboo, but the remedy isn't as simple as a slap in the face.
You could snigger about the hypocrisy of me saying that given the volumes of negative material that's shown up here but the mistake you'd be mistaking is that this is not a Spielberg movie. Life is not a Spielberg movie, and neither is this.
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all above links save one Jews Sans Frontieres
