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May 10, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Snitch Envy: Hitchens, Brock and
Whitaker Chambers
John Jonik
Tobacco
and Teens: Criminalizing the Victiims
Vijay Prashad
Fettered Histories:
Tariq Ali and Ahmed Rashid
on Islam
Bill Christison
A
Former CIA Analyst Details
The Disastrous Foreign
Policies of the United States
Omar Barghouti
Israel's Best Interest
May 9, 2002
Alex Lynch
American
Mainstream Media:
Institutionalized Subjectivity
Alexander Cockburn
The Armey Plan:
Palestine to Ft. Worth?
May 8, 2002
James
Masterson
Hysteria
and Panic
About France
Robert Fisk
The Solution to this Filthy War: Foreign
Occupation
Edward
Hammond
and Jan van Aken
Pentagon
Pushed for Offensive BioWeapons Development
David Vest
From Ground Zero to the Bronx
May 7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Bone
Apart:
The Graveyard of Napoleon's Defeated Army
Philip
Farruggio
Muffler
Shop Medicine
Norman
Madarasz
French
Elections:
Pandora's Ballot
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
May 6, 2002
Fran Schor
Invasion
of Iraq:
Coming Soon
Dave Marsh
Love Hurts
John Chuckman
The
Paradoxes of Israel
Rep. Ron Paul
End Corporate Welfare, Pull
the Plug on the Ex-Im Bank
Hussein
Ibish
Devastation
Only Feeds Resistance to Israeli Rule
May 5, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
High and Dry in the Mojave
May 4, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Sharon
the Merciless
and Arafat the Corrupt
Sam Bahour
New United States of Israel
Alexander
Cockburn
Extreme
Solutions:
Priests and Palestinians
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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May 11, 2002
"Nobody
Should Preach to Us Ethics, Nobody!"
Israel, a Light unto
Nations?
By Kathleen Christison
Former
CIA political analyst
In the never-ending propaganda show designed to
depict Israel as a moral nation victimized by immoral terrorists
and anti-Semites, CNN recently ran a film clip of the late Israeli
Prime Minister Menachem Begin declaiming, as only he could, "Nobody
should preach to us ethics, nobody!"
And, of course, few do.
It's the general assumption among the
vast majority of Americans that no on can preach ethics
to Israel, that light unto nations. No nation is more ethical
or more innocent--or so we are told.
But I can't get something I recently
saw off my mind. Every so often in the midst of a deluge of
information something leaps out at you as unique--utterly electrifying,
utterly horrifying, almost mind-altering in a way. One's senses
become dulled after months, years, of reading about and seeing
images on  television of innocents dead
from Palestinian terrorist attacks, of other innocents dead from
Israeli tank or sniper fire, of cities and refugee camps devastated,
in recent weeks of the entire civilian infrastructure of Palestinian
society destroyed. But one searing article leapt out the other
day that has stuck in my craw, and I cannot let go of it.
In an article in the May 6 issue of the
Israeli newspaper Haaretz entitled "Someone Even
Managed to Defecate into the Photocopier," Amira Hass--an
honest, courageous Israeli woman who has spent years living among
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza--described the
scenes of destruction at the Palestinian Ministry of Culture
left behind after Israeli military forces lifted their siege
of the towns of Ramallah and its suburb al-Birah, where the ministry
is located.
Entering the building after its month-long
occupation by an Israeli military unit, ministry officials, foreign
cultural attaches, and reporters found a scene of grotesque vandalism.
Equipment from the local radio and television station had been
hurled from windows in the multi-story building, electronic equipment
was destroyed or had been stolen, furniture was broken and piled
up on heaps of papers, books, computer disks, and broken glass.
Children's paintings had been destroyed.
And then there was this, as described
by Hass: "There are two toilets on every floor, but the
soldiers urinated and defecated everywhere else in the building,
in several rooms of which they had lived for about a month.
They did their business on the floors, in emptied flowerpots,
even in drawers they had pulled out of desks. They defecated
into plastic bags, and these were scattered in several places.
Some of them had burst. Someone even managed to defecate into
a photocopier. The soldiers urinated into empty mineral water
bottles. These were scattered by the dozen in all the rooms
of the building, in cardboard boxes, among the piles of rubbish
and rubble, on desks, under desks, next to the furniture the
soldiers had smashed, among the children's books that had been
thrown down. Some of the bottles had opened and the yellow liquid
had spilled and left its stain.
"It was especially difficult to
enter two floors of the building because of the pungent stench
of feces and urine. Soiled toilet paper was also scattered everywhere.
In some of the rooms, not far from the heaps of feces and the
toilet paper, remains of rotting food were scattered. In one
corner, in the room in which someone had defecated into a drawer,
full cartons of fruits and vegetables had been left behind. The
toilets were left overflowing with bottles filled with urine,
feces and toilet paper. Relative to other places, the soldiers
did not leave behind them many sayings scrawled on the walls.
Here and there were the candelabrum symbols of Israel, stars
of David, praises for the Jerusalem Betar soccer team."
This is not a tale we are ever likely
to see in the American press, so the vast majority of Americans
who think with Menachem Begin that nobody can preach to Israel
about ethics, that Israel's army is the only moral army in the
world and always employs the doctrine of "purity of arms,"
will go on thinking that way.
But I cannot.
I am forced to ask some questions that
that American majority will no doubt never hear: Can it, for
instance, be called terrorism if an entire unit of the Israeli
army forsakes purity of arms and spends a month crapping on floors,
on piles of children's artwork, in desk drawers, on photocopiers?
Is this self-defense, or "rooting
out the terrorist infrastructure"?
Is it anti-Semitic to wonder what happened
to the moral compass of a society that spawns a group of young
men who will intermingle their own religious and national symbols
with feces and urine, as if the drawings and the excrement both
constitute valued autographs?
Do they think Israeli shit is cleaner,
holier than anyone else's?
Why are my taxes paying for this army?
How can Palestinians ever make peace
in the face of filth and disrespect like this?
Kathleen Christison worked for 16 years as a political analyst with
the CIA, dealing first with Vietnam and then with the Middle
East for her last seven years with the Agency before resigning
in 1979. Since leaving the CIA, she has been a free-lance writer,
dealing primarily with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her
book, "Perceptions
of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy,"
was published by the University of California Press and reissued
in paperback with an update in October 2001. A second book,
"The
Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story,"
was published in March 2002. Both Kathy and her husband Bill,
also a former CIA analyst, are regular contributors to the CounterPunch
website.
Other CounterPunch articles by Bill and
Kathleen Christison:
Bill Christison: The Disastrous Foreign
Policies of the United States,
May 10, 2002
Kathleen Christison: Before There
Was Terrorism, May 2, 2002
Bill
Christison: Oil and the Middle East, April
6, 2002
Bill
Christison:
Why
the War on Terror Won't Work,
March 5, 2002
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