From: Zak )

Charley Reese: US Complicity in Israel’s Misdeeds
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Friday, April 09 2004 @ 06:46 AM EDT

"Sharon doesn't want peace, because he knows that any peace settlement
would involve returning nearly all of the occupied territories.."

By Charley Reese

The murder of Hamas' spiritual leader, Sheik Yassin, makes perfect
sense as long as you understand Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's
strategy.

That strategy is to make peace impossible.

For three years, Sharon has done everything to prevent peace. He
himself provoked the new uprising, re-invaded the occupied
territories, destroyed the Palestinian Authority, forced Yasser Arafat
into house arrest and launched an unprecedented, brutal campaign of
assassinations, curfews, fences, destruction of property and random
killing of Palestinians. The Israelis have killed about 2,700
Palestinians in the past three years, in contrast to about 700
Israelis killed in the same period.

At the same time, Sharon has refused all offers to negotiate, and
whenever the Palestinians arranged a cease-fire on their side, Sharon
broke it with a provocative raid or assassination. No other rogue
state or rogue leader would have been allowed to get away with such
behavior, but Israel has the U.S. government in its pocket. That's the
answer to the question posed by the French ambassador to Great Britain
as to why the world allows "this (expletive deleted) little country to
cause the world so much trouble."

Sharon doesn't want peace, because he knows that any peace settlement
would involve returning nearly all of the occupied territories to the
Palestinians. Israel's goal has always been Palestine without
Palestinians. He is greatly afraid that the world will lose patience
and impose a settlement on Israel. Hence, his strategy is to make
peace impossible so that he can impose unilaterally his own settlement
– a settlement, of course, that will condemn the Palestinians to
unlivable conditions.

Now, that's all well and good if you are an Israeli and don't mind
condemning future generations to perpetual conflict, but what about
Americans? This is, after all, not legitimately our conflict. I've
traveled in Palestine and the Middle East, and while it's interesting,
it's not high on my list of vacation spots. We would be much better
off if the only Americans who ever went there were the crews of oil
tankers.

Unfortunately, our politicians, by cravenly obeying the wishes of
Israel and its powerful U.S. lobby, have made us a part of the
conflict. We've already paid in blood and treasure. Anybody who
doesn't understand that the attack on 9/11 was directly related to the
Palestinian and Israeli conflict hasn't been paying attention.

The Arab world sees us – correctly – as an accessory before and after
the fact to all the crimes Israel commits against the Palestinians and
other Arabs in the area. We cannot load Israel down with modern
weapons, with gifts of more than $90 billion of American tax dollars,
with absolute protection from all attempts to hold it accountable
under international law, and then pretend we are innocent. We are
guilty by proxy of murder, land theft, destruction of property and all
the other human misery that Israel has caused in the region.

So, if you're one of those rah-rah Israel First supporters, don't
complain when the terrorists come looking for you. You've allowed your
politicians to enlist you in somebody else's war, and in war there are
always casualties on both sides.

America has become a nation of pathological irresponsibility. Nobody
wants to take responsibility for his or her own actions, which is the
basic cause of the litigation flood. Least of all do American
politicians wish to do so. They would rather heap on the manure that
the terrorism directed at us has nothing whatsoever to do with the
policies they have followed for the past 30 years or more. In truth,
it has everything to do with those policies.

So, if you or your loved ones get bloodied by terrorists, then blame
your Christian Zionists, your Israel First crowd and your corrupt
politicians who have their tongues in the ears and their hands in the
pockets of the Israeli lobby.

-Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years, reporting on
everything from sports to politics. From 1969-71, he worked as a
campaign staffer for gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional races
in several states. He was an editor, assistant to the publisher, and
columnist for the Orlando Sentinel from 1971 to 2001. He now writes a
syndicated column three times a week for King Features