From: ghassoun@augean.eleceng.adelaide.edu.AU (George Hassoun)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.lebanon
Subject: U.S. Aid to Israel????
Date: 9 Apr 92 02:11:33 GMT
Organization: Electrical & Electronic Eng., The University of Adelaide

In article <204359@unix.cis.pitt.edu>
abas@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Jasem Alhumoud) writes:



>           Discovering the Victims of the U.S. Aid to Israel
>
>                  " By Eleni Katsoulakis"
>
>
>When I was a little girl with a serious illness, my mother made a pledge
>to Jesus that if I survived, I had to visit the Holy Land where He was born
>and light a candle in the Church of the Nativity. So, to keep my mother's
>sacred promise, I set out a few weeks ago to visit the path of Jesus and
>feel His agony.
>
>  Even before entering the Holy Land, I was startled by Israeli security.
>At John F. Kennedy Airport in New York I was detained in a private room
>and interrogated for four full hours! This was followed by a humiliating
>body search, while 400 Jewish passengers went through relatively quickly.
>All this was still on American soil.
>
>  Israeli security precautions in New York seemed minuscule, however, in
>comparison with the massive military and police presence on every street
>corner in Tel Aviv. Perhaps I would have become accustomed to it if I had
>not traveled to the West Bank.
>
>  There, despite warnings from local Palestinians that, after 6 pm, no one
>was safe outside except the Israeli army, I walked one evening to a Christian
>church. Suddenly, a young Palestinian boy around 12 years old darted into the
>empty street and started to spray paint an Arabic word on a wall. Later I was
>told that the word he tried to write was "Palestine."
>
>  He had not even finished one word, however, when armed Israeli soldiers
>appeared. The boy started to run away from them, but other soldiers appeared
>in front of him. Surrounded, he raised his hands in surrender, shaking
>terribly with fear.
>
>  As the soldiers shouted angrily at him, one of them came closer and then
>said something loudly to the other soldiers. In the next moment, before I
>could comprehend what was happening, the solider shot the boy in the face,
>not once, but two or three times.
>
>  The defenseless Palestinian boy fell on the street, bleeding heavily from
>his face and screaming like a wounded animal. Several other soldiers then
>started to beat him savagely with clubs and fists, taking turns, for a long
>time, until the boy fainted. Then the soldiers pulled him to his feet, and
>held him as they continued beating him with extraordinary rage and hatred.
>When they let the unconscious boy fall again to the street, his tiny, bleeding
>body lay there, motionless.
>
>  Then a young solider noticed me for the first time. I was standing only
>a few feet from the boy, but behind a building. I was too panic-stricken
>to move, but the solider heard my uncontrollable sobbing. Pointing his
>automatic weapon at me, he yelled furiously, in a language which I did
>not understand. Then he pushed me violently against the wall. I was sure
>that, since I had just witnessed a horrible crime, he would kill me in order
>to seal my lips.
>
>  "I am American, I speak English," I said desperately.
>
>  "You are an American whore," he replied in an English accent made sinister
>by his hatred. "Only prostitutes feel sorry for Palestinians!" When he didn't
>shoot I fled, expecting a bullet in the back to bring me crashing down on
>the street next to the bleeding boy.
>
>  The next day, I heard that, in the hour that elapsed before an ambulance
>arrived, the soldiers pulled the wounded boy by his feet around the streets
>in order to terrorize the neighborhood. Torn between relief that I was alive
>and guilt that I had not been able to save the boy, I decided to stop visiting
>monasteries and churches. Instead I would go to the refugee camps of the
>West Bank and Gaza to see with my own eyes the reality of this unholy
>terror in the Holy Land. So the remainder of my visit was spent in the homes
>of families from among the more than one million Palestinians living today
>in the humiliating refugee camps of the Isreali-occupied territories.
>
>  In open disregard of international Law, the Israeli authorities collect
>heavy taxes from some 1,800,000 Palestinians living under military
>occupation. These Palestinians, in turn, must seek but seldom get Israeli
>permission to dig a well, plant an olive tree, sell fruit in the streets,
>repair a roof, or build an addition to a home or business. The Israeli
>government does not provide even such rudimentary services as garbage
>collection in occupied areas, and restricts the sale or lease of land to
>Palestinians while half of the West Bank and most of its water has been
>confiscated by Housing Minister Ariel Sharon for the eventual use of
>Jewish settlements!
>
>  Every Palestinian I met had his own tragic tale to tell. A Christian
>Palestinian shepherd told me that in 1988, early in the intifada, he
>witnessed Israeli soldiers ordering three young Palestinian men to dig
>their own graves, in a bare field a few kilometers outside of his village.
>After a ruthless beating, the Palestinians were ordered to lie down in
>the graves. Then a bulldozer buried them alive. As the soldiers left, the
>shepherd, who had watched from a nearby hill, alerted nearby villagers
>who rescued the buried Palestinians. Later, when Isreal's Shin Bet secret
>police learned the identity of the shepherd who had organized the rescue,
>they attacked him in the mountains and brutally broke his bones with stones!
>
>  A priest who was teaching in a church sponsored school in the Old City
>of Jerusalem described for me another incident that took place in 1973,
>14 years before the outbreak of the intifada. A little Arab boy of six or
>seven years wearing a green T-shirt and holding a tiny stone taunted some
>Israeli soldiers on patrol in East Jerusalem. The soldiers went after him,
>but the little boy disappeared in the side streets. The angry soldiers started
>searching nearby homes and stores, and stormed into the school.
>
>  In one classroom they saw a student wearing a green shirt. Although the
>student was 11 years old and had nothing to do with the little boy in the
>Old City, the soldiers grabbed the boy and smashed his head against the wall
>several times. Another unit of soldiers arrived and systematically began
>to beat the students in one classroom after another. Two hundred students
>were beaten, and three were critically injured.
>
>  When the priest tried to stop the frenzied soldiers, they seized him by his
>hair and pushed him down the stairs. He was seriously injured and hospitalized
>for more than a month. Later in the same day, the soldiers returned to the
>school and ordered all the students to kneel on the floor. They were
>terrorized for hours with guns pointed at their heads while the soldiers
>photographed them
>
>  Such experiences, the priest told me, explain why hundreds of Palestinian
>children are suffering such post-traumatic pathological and mental problems
>as haunting fears, anxiety, phopias, insmnia, frustration, insecurity,
>prolonged depression, helplessness and aggressive antisocial behavior.
>
>  An 84-year old West Bank villager showed me deeds to land he has occupied
>for his entire life, and which he says has been in his family for more than
>1,200 years. Now Israeli authorities have informed him that his property is
>being confiscated for a Jewish settlement.
>
>  I saw with my own eyes the bus stops at gas stations where desperate
>Palestinians gather looking for work. Israeli businessmen hire them for
>day labor at one-third of the wages paid to Jewish workers. When a job
>is completed, some unscrupuous Israeli employers, instead of paying
>pre-agreed wages, report to the police that these workers have been working
>without permits, and have slept overnight on Israeli soil. As a result, the
>Palestinians lose their wages and may be jailed and fined.
>
>  I met a pretty little Palestinian girl, blinded by an Israeli plastic
>bullet. Some years earlier, a Jewish settler had attacked her father with
>a knife and gravely wounded him as he was returning from work. Israeli law
>provides little protection from such attacks. Foe example, if a Jewish
>settler kills a Palestinian, he may get less than six months in prison.
>A Palestinian killing a Jew can expect a life sentence.
>
>  These are just a few of the things I saw before returning to the United
>States, my mother's pledge redeemed. But now I've made a vow of my own.
>Paralyzed by fear, I failed to act when I might have saved a child.
>I won't fail again, while there are so many more lives still to be saved.
>
>  I ask, in God's name, is there any possibility that our government will
>guarantee $10 billion in loans to Israel to enable it to steal more lands
>from their owners, and destroy and Muslim, Christian or Jew who opposes
>the building of the Jewish settlements our own government calls
>"obstacles to peace"? ten billion dollars from the taxes of decent Americans
>to carry out a morally reprehensible program in violation of every single
>human right and every tenet of my Christian beliefs?
>
>  No, there is no such possibility, if I and the millions who share my
>beliefs have the courage to express them openly and not turn our backs
>on the oppression of our fellow human beings. There will be no more subsidies
>from moral  American taxpayers for immoral Israeli purposes. That is my
>pledge to my God.
>
>  "Eleni Katsoulakis, a journalist in her native Greece, is a free-lance
>   writer presently living in New Jersey."
>
>
>    Jasem (Dr. J.)
>

Special thanks to Dr. Jasem for posting the article above. Awareness is what
we need in this question that is affecting most of us.
The Israeli practices, starting from beating Palestinian boys, to
diverting the waters of the Lebanese Litani river towards the Israeli territory,
to discrediting the objections and complaints of arab people, to assassinating
religeous and political leaders, to damaging the image of arabs by labeling
most of them as terrorists, nondemocratic and crime lovers, all these practices
should not go unnoticed.

Let us take every opportunity to point out the wrong and ugly.

At the same time, let us raise the level of this struggle to a civilised and
human one, by taking a look at our own systems, our own attitudes and
try to rectify the numerous injustices in them, without letting this
question consume a lot of our efforts to catch up with the rest of the
world.

-- 
George Hassoun
University of Adelaide, EEE Dpt.
Adelaide, South Australia
email: ghassoun@eleceng.adelaide.edu.au      Phone:(08) 228 5468